Time’s Eye

Josh murmured, “What are you on about, Giggers?”

Ruddy Kipling took off his spectacles and rubbed eyes that looked small and deep. “Our English Empire has gone now, wiped away like a bridge suit in a card shuffle. Instead we have this— Mir, a new world, a blank canvas. And we, we few,might be the only source of rationality and science and civilization left in the world.”

Abdikadir smiled. “Fair enough, Ruddy, but there aren’t too many Englishmen here on Mir to translate that dream into reality.”

“But an Englishman always was a mongrel. And that’s not a bad thing. He is the sum of his influences, from the solemn might of the Romans to the fierce intelligence of democracy. Well, then, we must start to build a new England—and forge new Englishmen!—right here in the sands of Arabia. And we can found our new state from the beginning on solid English principles. Every man absolutely independent, so long as he doesn’t infringe his neighbor’s rights. Prompt and equal justice before God. Toleration of religions and creeds of any shape or form. Every man’s home his castle. That sort of thing. It’s an opportunity to clear out a lot of clutter.”

“That all sounds marvelous,” said Abdikadir. “And who’s to run the new world empire? Shall we leave it to Alexander?”

Ruddy laughed. “Alexander achieved marvelous things for his time, but he is a military despot—worse, an Iron Age savage! You saw that display of idol-bothering by the sea. Perhaps he had the right instincts, buried under his armor—he did cart along the Greeks—but he’s not the chap. For the time being we civilized folk must guide. We are few—but we have the weapons.” Ruddy lay back, arm behind his head, and closed his eyes. “I can see it now. The forges will ring out! The Sword will bring peace—and peace will bring wealth—and wealth will bring the Law. It’s as natural as the growth of a sturdy oak. And we, who have seen it all before, will be there to water the sapling.”

He meant to inspire them, but his words seemed hollow to Bisesa, and their camp seemed a small and isolated place, a speck of light in a land empty even of ghosts.

The next day, during the walk back, Ruddy took ill with a severe dose of gut infection. Bisesa and Abdikadir dug into their dwindling twenty-first-century medical packs to give him antibiotics, and made up drinks of sugar and water. Ruddy asked for his opium, insisting it was one of the oldest analgesics in the Indian pharmacopoeia. Still the diarrhea weakened him, and his broad head looked too heavy on his neck. But he talked and talked.

“We need a new set of myths to bind us,” Ruddy wheezed. “Myths and rituals; that’s what makes a nation. That’s what America lacks, you know—a young nation—no time yet to grow tradition. Well, America is gone now, and Britain too, and the old stories won’t do—not any more.”

Josh said wryly, “You’re just the man to write new ones, Ruddy.”

“We are living in a new age of heroes,” he said. “Thisis the age when the world is built. That’s our opportunity. And we must tell the future what we did, how we did it and why …” On Ruddy talked, filling the air with his dreams and plans, until dehydration and breathlessness forced him to stop, and they walked slowly on through the huge, empty desert.

28. Bishkek

The army of Genghis Khan skirted the northern edge of the Gobi desert.

The land was vast, a mirror of the dust-clogged sky. Sometimes they would see eroded, tired-looking hills, and once a herd of camels trotted by in the distance, stiff-backed and pompous. When the wind blew, a storm of yellow sand blocked out the light: sand that tasted of iron, sand that might have been formed a million years ago, Kolya thought, or a month. The Mongols, their heads wrapped in cloth, looked like Bedouins.

As the desert crossing wore on, Kolya sank within himself. His mind numbed, his senses dulled, he would sit in the back of the cart, never speaking, a cloth drawn across his face to keep out the dust. The land was so huge and still that sometimes it was as if they weren’t moving at all. He grudgingly admired the strength of spirit, the sheer bloody-minded resilience that enabled the Mongols to conquer the immense distances of their Asiatic stage. And yet he had flown in space; and once he would have spanned the distance he had traveled, so vast on the human scale, in fifteen minutes or less.

They came to a great mound of stone and earth, a barrow. It looked like some trapped chthonic beast struggling to escape the clutches of the bone-dry ground. Kolya thought this was a Scythian tomb, a relic of a people who had lived before the birth of Christ, but who had ridden horses and built yurts just like the Mongols. The mound looked fresh, the stones unworn—but the tomb had been broken open, robbed of whatever gold or other wealth it had contained.