Time’s Eye

“Looks like it. It’s the mixing of the patches that we think is stirring up the weather.” He tapped the softscreen. It displayed images of massive tropical storms, creamy-white swirls pouring up from the southern Atlantic to batter the eastern American seaboard, and fronts of bubbling black cloud laced across Asia. Casey said, “Some of the slices must be from summer, some from winter. And the Earth’s climate fluctuates on longer cycles—Ice Ages come and go—and that’s all mixed in too.” He showed images of a slab of icebound land, a neat near-rectangle set square over the site of Paris in France. “Hot air rises above cold, and that causes the winds; hot air holds more water vapor than cold air, and over cool land it dumps it out, and that’s your rain. And so on. As all that works itself out, we get this screwed-up weather.”

Abdikadir said, “How far do these slices extend upward?”

“We don’t know,” Casey said.

“Not as far as the Moon, surely,” piped up Corporal Batson. “Or that body would have vanished, or be scattered about its orbit.”

Casey raised his eyebrows. “Good point. Hadn’t thought of that. But we do know it reaches out at least as far as low Earth orbit.”

“The Soyuz ,” Bisesa said.

“Yeah. Bis, their clocks agree with ours, to the second. They must have been flying overhead—pure chance—when the Discontinuity hit, and they were brought along with us.” He rubbed his fleshy nose. “We’ve tried to map the time slices, and in some places we can. Here’s the Sahara …” He showed patches of greenery in the desert, mostly irregularly shaped, but some were bounded by geometrically pure arcs and straight lines. “One patch of desert looks much the same as another, even if they’re half a million years apart in time. Still, it’s possible to date some of the patches, roughly, from geological changes.”

He turned and drew a big chalk asterisk on central Africa. “This seems to be the oldest area of all. You can tell by the width of the Rift Valley … And look; the Sahara doesn’t extend nearly so far south, and there are lakes, patches of green. That’s just an average, though; on the ground it’s all mixed up.” More images blurred by. “We think much of Asia is from the last couple of thousand years or so. You see scattered human habitations out on those steppes, but nothing advanced—streaks of smoke from campfires, no electric lights. The biggest concentration of people looks to be here. “He tapped an area north of China, in eastern Asia. “We don’t know who they are.”

He continued his show-and-tell, guiding his reluctant audience around a transformed world. Australia looked exotic. Though much of its center was burned red raw, just as in Bisesa’s time, around the coasts and in the river valleys the greenery was thick and luxurious. A few high-magnification shots were detailed enough to show animals. Bisesa made out a thing like a hippo, browsing at greenery at the edge of a forest scrap—and, in a short animated sequence, a herd of some huge upright creature came leaping out of cover, perhaps fleeing some predator. They were giant kangaroos, Bisesa thought; Australia seemed to have reverted to its virgin state before the arrival of humans. South America meanwhile was a bank of solid green: the rain forest, decimated and dying in Bisesa’s time, restored to its antique glory here.

In North America a great slab of ice lay sprawled across the north and east, extending up to the pole and down to the latitude of the Great Lakes. Casey said, “The ice in this area comes from different ages. You can see that by the gaps, and the ragged edges.” He showed close-ups of the southern edge of the cap, which looked like a piece of paper, ripped across roughly. Bisesa could see glaciers pouring off that ragged edge, great ice-dammed lakes of floodwater building up—and ferocious storm systems pooling, presumably where cold Ice Age air spilled off the cap and ran over warmer land. To the south of the ice the land was a bare green-brown: tundra, locked in by permafrost, scoured by the winds off the ice cap. At first glance she could see no sign of people; but then, she recalled, people were a recent addition to America’s fauna.

Abdikadir said, “What about Alaska? The shape looks odd to me.”

Casey said, “It’s extending toward Beringia—you know, the land bridge that once stretched from Asia to America across the Bering Straits—the way the first humans walked into North America. But it’s been cut off; the sea has broken through …”

The tour continued, relentlessly; they watched the flickering images uneasily.

“And Europe?” Ruddy asked, his voice tight. “England?”