Time’s Eye

As the days wore on the men beyond the netting seemed to be growing more agitated, but they never failed to bring the man-apes their food and water. Grasper would come clambering up the net walls and try to reach out to them, and the men would reward her with extra bits of food. Seeker, though, grew withdrawn. She hated this prison, and the strange creatures who had trapped her. Nobody praised her, or gave her extra bits of fruit; there was nothing cute about Seeker’s sullen hostility.

It got worse when the rains started.

The rains were sometimes so hard that the heavy drops pounded against your skin like a hundred tiny fists. The man-apes were always cold and sodden, and even Grasper’s bright curiosity was subdued. Sometimes the rain stung when it hit your bare flesh, your hands or feet or lips, and if it got in your eyes it could be very painful indeed.

The rain was full of acid because of events half a world away.

The new world had been stitched together from fragments of the old—but those fragments had been plucked from many different eras, across two million years. The mixing of air masses had caused the unstable weather that plagued those first days after the Discontinuity. In the oceans, too, the invisible Amazons of the great currents sought a new equilibrium.

And the land had been rent apart. In the Atlantic, a belt of volcanic mountains, stretching south from Iceland, marked the position of a mid-ocean ridge, a place where seabed was born, molten material welling up from the planet’s interior. This birthing zone had been ripped open by the Discontinuity. The Gulf Stream, which for millennia had delivered warm southern water to Europe, now faced a fresh obstacle, a new volcanic island that would eventually dwarf even Iceland, thrusting its way out of the ridge.

Meanwhile the “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific, where great tectonic plates jostled each other, lived up to its name. There was turmoil all down the western seaboard of North America, from Alaska to Washington State: most of the twenty-seven volcanoes in the Cascades were triggered.

Mount Rainier’s explosion was the worst. Its noise was a great shout that spread right around the planet. In India it sounded like distant artillery, and the survivors of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries stirred uneasily in their sleep. A vast mushroom cloud of ash and debris lifted high into the air’s upper layers, spreading at hurricane-force speeds. Most of the debris washed out quickly, but the thin stuff lingered, blotting out the sun. Temperatures dropped. As the air cooled, it could hold less water.

All over the world it rained. And rained, and rained.

In a sense, all of this was beneficial. A Frankenstein’s-monster of a world was trying to knit itself together, and a new equilibrium, in the air, the sea and the rocks, would eventually emerge. But the painful thrashing of that healing process was devastating for anything, plant or animal, struggling to survive.

Seeker had no long-term perspective. For her there was only the present, and her present was drenched in misery, confined in the humans’ cruel cage, and by the acid rain that lanced down at her from the sky. When the rain was at its worst Grasper huddled under her mother, and Seeker curled over her baby, taking the scalding downpour on her own back.

Part 3 Encounters and Alliances

18. Emissaries of Heaven

Still wielding his sword, the Mongol yelled over his shoulder. More armed men came running out of the tents—no, Kolya thought, the yurts. Women and children followed. The children were little bundles in felt coats, wide-eyed with curiosity.

The men had classic Asiatic features, Kolya thought, with broad faces and small dark eyes, and jet-black hair that they wore tied back. Some had bands of cloth around their heads. They wore baggy dun-colored trousers, and went barefoot, or wore boots into which the trousers were tucked. If they weren’t bare-chested they wore simple light tunics, heavily mended.

They looked mean, and strong. And they gathered threateningly around the gravity-laden cosmonauts. Kolya tried to hold his ground. He was shaking; Musa’s headless corpse still lay against the side of the Soyuz, the last blood trickling from its neck.

Musa’s killer walked up to Sable, who glared back at him. Uncompromisingly he grabbed her breast and compressed it.

Sable did not flinch. “Holy crap, but this guy stinks. “Kolya could hear the brittleness in her voice, sense the fear under her resolve. But the warrior backed away.

The men talked rapidly, eyeing the cosmonauts and their spacecraft, and the parachute silk that lay sprawled across the dusty steppe.

“You know what I think they’re saying?” Sable whispered. “That they’re going to kill you. Me they’ll rape, then kill.”

“Try not to react,” Kolya said.