But when she thought about it Bisesa was astonished even to be considering such issues, culture clashes spanning the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The whole business was surreal; she felt as if she was walking around in a bubble. And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps across a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.
Abdikadir said, “I don’t think the British understand all this at all, and maybe we understand too well. When H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895—ten years ahead in this time zone!—he had to spend twenty or thirty pages explaining what a time machine does. Not how it works, you see, but just what it is. For us there has been a process of acculturation. After a century of science fiction you and I are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of time travel, and can immediately accept its implications—strange though the experience is to actually live through.”
“But that doesn’t apply to these Victorian-age Brits. To them a Model T Ford would be a fabulous vehicle from the future.”
“Sure. I think for them, the time slips and their implications are simply beyond their imaginations … But if H. G. Wells was here—did he ever visit India?—of all thinkers, his mind might explode with the implications of what is happening …”
None of this rationalization seemed to help Bisesa. Maybe the truth was that Abdikadir and everybody else felt just as peculiar as she did, but they were just better at hiding it.
Ruddy, though, sympathized with her disorientation. He told her he was occasionally afflicted by hallucinations.
“When I was a child, stranded in an unhappy foster home in England, I once began to punch a tree. Odd behavior I grant you, but nobody understood that I was trying to see if it was my grandmother! More recently in Lahore I came down with a fever that may have been malaria, and since then, on occasion, my ‘blue devils’ have returned. So I know how it is to be plagued by the unreal.” As he spoke to her he leaned forward, intent, his eyes distorted by the thick spectacles Josh called “gig-lamps.” “But you are real enough for me. I’ll tell you what to do about it—work!” He held up stubby fingers stained black with ink. “Sixteen hours a day I put in sometimes. Work, the best bulwark for reality …”
So it went, a therapy session on the nature of reality with nineteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling. She walked away more dazed than before it had begun.
***
As time passed and both parties, the Victorian-age British and Bisesa’s crew, continued to lack communications with their respective outside worlds, Grove grew very concerned.
There were very practical reasons for this; the stores here at the fort would not last long. But Grove was also disconnected from the vast apparatus of the imperial administration, which Bisesa glimpsed in the rapid talk of Ruddy and Josh. Even on the civilian side there were local Commissioners, with staffs of Deputies and Assistants, who reported to a Lieutenant Governor, who reported to a Viceroy, who reported to a Secretary of State, who reported, at last, to the Empress herself, Queen Victoria herself, in far-off London. The British were encouraged to think of themselves as locked into a unified social structure—wherever you served you were a soldier of the Queen, part of her global empire. For Grove to be isolated from this was as disturbing, Bisesa saw, as it was for her to be cut off from the global telecommunications nets of the twenty-first century.
So Grove began to send out scouting patrols, particularly using his sowars, his Indian cavalry troopers, who seemed able to cover impressive distances quickly. They reached Peshawar, where the local army cantonment and military command center should have been found—but Peshawar was gone. There was no evidence of destruction, not even of the hideous erasing of a nuclear blast that Bisesa had trained the British to recognize. There was only bare rock, a river bank, scrubby vegetation and the spoor of creatures that might have been lions: it was as if Peshawar had never existed at all. It was a similar story, the sowar scouts reported, when they went out to find Clavius, Bisesa’s UN encampment. Not a trace, not even of destruction.
So Grove determined to explore further: down the valley of the Indus, deep into India—and to the north.
Meanwhile Casey, still pretty much immobilized, likewise took on the challenge of making contact with the rest of the world. With the help of a couple of privates from a signal corps assigned by Grove, he scavenged comms gear from the fallen Bird, and improvised a sending and receiving station in a small room in the fort. But no matter how long he spent calling into the dark, there was no reply.
Abdikadir, meanwhile, had his own projects, which concerned the peculiar floating sphere. Bisesa was envious that both Casey and Abdi quickly found useful work to occupy their time, as if they somehow fit in better than she did.
On the fourth morning, Bisesa emerged from the fort to find Abdikadir standing on a stool, holding a battered tin bucket up in the air. Casey and Cecil de Morgan sat on fold-out camp chairs, their faces bathed in the morning sun as they watched the show. Casey waved at Bisesa. “Hey, Bis! Come see the cabaret.” Though de Morgan immediately offered her his chair, Bisesa sat in the dirt beside Casey. She didn’t like de Morgan, and she wasn’t about to give him any kind of leverage over her, however trivial.
Abdikadir’s bucket was full of water, so it must have been heavy. Nevertheless he propped it on his shoulder one-handed, and marked the water’s level with a grease pencil. Then he lowered the bucket, and revealed the floating sphere, the Evil Eye, with water running off its surface; Abdi made sure he caught every drop. The tent containing the two “man-apes” had been set up a few dozen yards away, with some kind of pole at its center.
Casey snickered. “He’s been dunking that damn thing for half an hour already.”
“Why, Abdi?”
“I’m measuring its volume,” Abdikadir murmured. “And I’m repeating it for accuracy. It’s called science. Thanks for your support.” And he lifted the bucket up around the sphere again.
Bisesa said to Casey, “I thought the Surgeon-Captain said you shouldn’t get out of bed.”
Casey blew a raspberry, and thrust his heavily bandaged leg out in front of him. “Ah, bull. It was a clean break and they set it well.” Though without anesthetic, Bisesa knew. “I don’t like sitting around with my thumb up my ass.”
“And you, Mr. de Morgan,” Bisesa said. “What’s your interest in this?”
The factor spread his hands. “I am a businessman, ma’am. That’s why I’m here in the first place. And I am constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Naturally I am intrigued by your downed flying machine! I accept that both you and Captain Grove want to keep that particular item under wraps. But this, this floating orb of perfection, is neither yours nor Grove’s—and, in these days of strangeness, how strange it remains, though we have quickly become accustomed to it! There it floats, supported by nothing we can see. No matter how hard you hit it—even with bullets, and that’s been tried, somewhat perilously given the ricochets—you can neither knock a chip out of its perfect surface, nor even move it from its station by so much as a fraction of an inch. Who made it? What holds it up? What lies inside it?”
“And how much is it worth?” Casey growled.
De Morgan laughed easily. “You can’t blame a man for trying.”
Josh had told Bisesa something of de Morgan’s background. His family were failed aristocracy, who could trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror’s first assault on England, more than eight hundred years before, and who had carved a rich estate out of the defeated Saxon kingdoms. In the intervening centuries a “trait of greed and foolishness that transcends the generations,” in de Morgan’s own disarming words, had left the family penniless, though still with a kind of race memory of wealth and power. Ruddy said that in his experience the Raj was plagued by “chancers” like de Morgan. As far as Bisesa was concerned there was n
othing to be trusted in de Morgan’s slicked-back black hair, and his darting, questing eyes.
Abdikadir clambered down from his stool. Dark, serious, focused, he switched his watch to calculator mode, and punched in the numbers he had recorded.
“So, Brainiac,” Casey called mockingly, “tell us what you’ve learned.”
Abdikadir settled to the dirt before Bisesa. “The Eye resists our probing, but there are things to measure nonetheless. First of all, the Eye is surrounded by a magnetic anomaly. I checked that with a compass from my survival kit.”
Casey grunted. “My compass has been haywire since we hit the dirt.”
Abdikadir shook his head. “It’s true you can’t find magnetic north; something peculiar seems to be happening to Earth’s magnetic field. But there’s nothing wrong with our compasses themselves.” He glanced up at the Eye. “The flux lines around that thing are packed together. A diagram of it would look like a knot in a piece of wood.”
“How come?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Bisesa leaned forward. “What else, Abdi?”
“I’ve been doing some high school geometry.” He grinned. “Dipping the thing in water was the only way I could think of to measure its volume—seeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.”
“Eureka!” de Morgan cried playfully. “Sir, you are the Archimedes de nos jours … ”
Abdikadir ignored him. “I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still won’t be too hot. I can’t think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius and circumference are pretty good, I think.” He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. “I adapted a laser sight from the chopper …”
“I don’t get it,” said Casey. “It’s just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared …”
“You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere you’ve encountered before,” Abdi said mildly. “But here it is floating in the air, like nothing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.”
Bisesa nodded. “And you found—”
“For a start, it is a perfect sphere.” He glanced up again. “And I mean perfect, within the tolerances even of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldn’t shape any material to such a fantastic degree of precision.”
De Morgan nodded soberly. “An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.”
“Yes. But that’s just the start.” Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. “Your high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is … ?”
“Pi,” rumbled Casey. “Even a jock Christian knows that much.”
“Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye is three. Not about three, or a bit more than three—three, to laser precision. My error bars are so small it’s quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to be. Your formulae don’t work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for ‘pi’ from the volume. Although of course my reliability is way down; you can’t compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water …”
Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about it. “That’s impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.”
“ Our universe, yes,” Abdikadir said.
“What do you mean?”
Abdikadir shrugged. “It seems that this sphere—though it is evidently here— is not quite of our universe. We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.”
“If that’s so,” Casey rumbled, “who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?”
There was, of course, no answer.
Captain Grove came bustling up. “Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant,” he said to Bisesa. “You’ll remember the scouting patrols I’ve been sending out—one of the sowars has reported something rather odd, to the north of here.”
“ ‘Odd,’ ” Casey said. “God love your British understatement!”
Grove was unperturbed. “You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps … I wondered if you fancied a short excursion?”
11. Stranded in Space
“Hey, asshole, I need the john.” That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment, welcoming Kolya to another day.
He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few moments to realize where he was. Oh. I am still here. Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.
He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with them—they could hardly open the hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way, stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely comfortable. He could still smell the rotting discarded underwear, the “Cossack jockstraps,” as Sable had put it.
He groaned, squirmed and pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. He made his way to the little toilet, opened it out from the wall, and activated the pumps that would draw his waste out into the emptiness of space. When they had realized they were going to be stuck on orbit, they had had to dig out this lavatory from under the heaps of garbage; their journey home had been meant to last only a few hours, and toilet breaks hadn’t been scheduled. This morning it took him a while to finish. He was dehydrated, and his urine was thick, almost painfully acidic, as if reluctant to leave his body.
Wearing only his longjohn underwear he found himself shivering. To maximize the Soyuz ’s endurance Musa had ordered that only essential systems should be run, at minimum power. So the ship had become progressively cold and damp. Black mildew was growing over the walls. The air, increasingly foul, was thick with dust, flaked-off skin, shaved-off bristle, and food debris, none of which, of course, settled out in the absence of gravity. Their eyes were gritty, and they all sneezed, all the time; yesterday Kolya had timed himself, and found he suffered twenty sneezes in a single hour.
The tenth day, he thought. Today they would complete another sixteen pointless orbits of the Earth, bringing their grand total, since the Station had winked out of existence, to perhaps a hundred and sixty.
He fixed his braslets to the tops of his legs. These elastic straps, a guard against fluid imbalances caused by microgravity, were adjusted to be tight enough to restrict the flow of fluids out of his legs, without being so tight that they stopped the flow in. Kolya pulled on his jumpsuit—actually another discard he had found in the trash piles in the living compartment.
Then he clambered down through the open hatch and into the descent compartment. Neither Musa nor Sable met his eyes; they were sick of the sight of each other. He swiveled in the air and slid into his left-side couch with a practiced ease. As soon as he was out of the way Sable pushed herself up through the hatch, and Kolya heard her banging around.
“Breakfast.” Musa pushed a tray through the air toward Kolya. On it were taped tubes and cans of food, already opened, half-eaten. They had long since finished up the small stash of food aboard the Soyuz, and had broken into the emergency rations meant to sustain them after they landed: tins of meat and fish, squeeze tubes of creamed vegetables and cheese, even a few boiled sweets. But it was hardly filling. Kolya ran his finger over every empty tin, and sucked stray crumbs out of the air.
None of them were very hungry anyhow. The strange conditions of weightlessness ensured that. He did miss hot food, though, which he had not enjoyed since leaving
the Station.
Musa had already begun his steady, determined working of the comms system. “Stereo one, Stereo one …” Of course there was no reply, no matter how many hours he spent at the task. But what choice was there but to keep trying?
Sable meanwhile was bustling around “upstairs” in the living compartment. She had discovered the components of an old ham radio rig, which the Station astronauts had once used to contact amateurs across the planet, especially schoolchildren. Public interest in the Station had long waned, and the Station’s aging gear had been disassembled, boxed up and packed into the Soyuz for destruction. Now Sable was trying to make it work. Perhaps they would pick up signals, or even be able to send broadcasts, on wavelengths the conventional gear couldn’t handle. Musa, almost routinely, had grumbled when she wanted to hook the gear up to the spacecraft’s power supply. Another blazing argument had ensued, but on this occasion Kolya had intervened. “It’s a long shot, but it might work. What harm can it do? …”
Kolya leaned forward and pressed the valve of the water tank. A globule a few centimeters across emerged and headed toward his face. Aware of Musa watching greedily—there would be a row if he wasted a single drop—Kolya opened his mouth wide. The water broke on his tongue, and he held it in his mouth, savoring its freshness, before swallowing it. Of all the rationing regimes Musa had imposed, the water was the hardest to bear. The Soyuz had none of the Station’s recycling facilities; designed for short-duration hops from Earth to orbit and back, it was equipped only with a small water tank. But Sable had characteristically argued. “Even when you’re in a desert you don’t ration your water. You drink it down when you need it. There’s no other way …” Right or wrong, the water was running out anyhow.
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