Bisesa still couldn’t believe it was him. And for his part, he kept trying to get her to tell him his future.
“We’ve been through this,” she said steadily. “I don’t know that I have the right. And I don’t think you see how strange this experience is for me.”
“How so?”
“To me you are Ruddy, here and now, alive, vivid. And yet there is a shadow from the future over you, a shadow cast by the Kipling you will become.”
“Good Lord,” Josh muttered. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“And besides—” She waved a hand at the empty land. “Things have changed, to say the least. Who knows if all the stuff in your biographies is still your true destiny?”
“Ah,” Ruddy said quickly. “But if not—if my lost future has become a phantasm, a teasing dream of a blue devil—then what harm can there be in my hearing about it?”
Bisesa shook her head. “Ruddy, isn’t it enough that I’ve heard your name, a hundred and fifty years from now?”
Ruddy nodded, sagely enough. “You’re right—that bit of news is more than most men could ever know, and I should be grateful to whichever many-limbed deity is responsible for delivering it to me.”
Josh teased him. “Ruddy, how can you be so equable about this? I think you’re the most vain man I ever met. You know, Bisesa, he was convinced he was destined for greatness long before you appeared in our lives. Now he wants you to tell him in person—a correspondent from the future—I think he imagines all this dislocation has been arranged just for him!”
Ruddy’s composure wasn’t disturbed by this at all.
They faced one more bit of strangeness on that first day’s walk.
They came to a disjunction in the ground. It was like a step, cut into the rubble-strewn ground, no more than half a meter high. The exposed wall of the cut was vertical and polished smooth, and the cut marched in a dead straight line from one horizon to another. It would be easy enough to jump up and over it, but the soldiers milled before it, uncertainly.
Josh stood with Bisesa. “Well,” he said, “what do you make of that? It looks to me like a place where somebody has stitched two bits of the world together.”
“I think that’s exactly what it is, Josh,” she murmured. She squatted down and touched the sheer rock surface. “This is a tectonically active region—India crashing into Asia—if you took two chunks of land, separated in time by a few hundred thousand years or more, this is the kind of shift in level you’d expect …”
“I scarcely understand you,” Josh admitted.
She stood up, brushing the dirt from her trousers. She reached forward, tentatively, until she had pushed her fingers over the line of disjunction, then she snatched her hand back. She muttered, “What were you expecting, Bisesa—a force field?” Without further hesitation she leapt up to the upper layer, and walked a few paces ahead—into the future, or the past.
Josh and the others scrambled to follow, and they walked on.
At the next rest stop, she took a look at the weal on Ruddy’s cheek, what he called his “Lahore sore.” He thought it had been caused by an ant bite, and it had not responded to his doctor’s prescription of cocaine. Bisesa knew only a little field medicine, but she thought this looked like Leishmania, an affliction caused by a parasite transmitted by sandflies. She treated it with the contents of her med kit. It soon began to clear up. Ruddy would say later that this small incident had convinced him more than anything else, even Bisesa’s spectacular arrival in a crashing helicopter, that she really was from the future.
***
About four o’clock, Batson called a halt.
In the lee of a hill the troops began assembling the evening’s campsite. They piled up their weapons, took off their equipment and boots, and pulled on the chaplies— sandals—they had been carrying in their packs. They passed out small shovels, and everybody, including Josh, Bisesa and Ruddy, set to building a low perimeter wall from loose rubble, and digging out sleeping pits. All of this was for protection against opportunistic attacks by Pashtuns, though they had still seen no Pashtuns that day. It was hard work after a day’s march, but after about an hour it was done. Bisesa volunteered for “stag,” which, Josh worked out, meant sentry duty. Batson was polite enough, but refused.
They settled down for some food: just boiled meat and rice, but appetizing to them all after the long day. Josh made sure he was close to Bisesa. She added little tablets to her food and “Puritabs” to her water, which she said should protect her from infections from the water and the like; her supply of these twenty-first-century miracles wouldn’t last forever, but perhaps long enough to let her system acclimatize—or so she hoped.
She curled up in her pit under her own lightweight poncho, with her belt kit wrapped up as a pillow. She took out a little sky-blue device she called her “phone,” and set it up on the ground before her. Somehow it didn’t seem surprising when the little toy spoke to her. “Music, Bisesa?”
“Something distracting.”
Music poured out of the little machine, loud and vibrant. The troops stared, and Batson snapped, “For God’s sake turn it down!” Bisesa complied, but let the music play on quietly.
Ruddy had theatrically clamped his hands over his ears. “By all the gods! What barbarity is that?”
Bisesa laughed. “Come on, Ruddy. It’s an orchestral reworking of a few classic gangsta rap anthems. It’s decades old—grandmother music!”
Ruddy harrumphed like a fifty-year-old. “I find it impossible to believe that Europeans will ever be seduced by such rhythms.” And, pointedly, he picked up his blanket and made for the furthest corner of the little compound.
Josh was left alone with Bisesa. “Of course he likes you, you know.”
“Ruddy?”
“It’s happened before—he is drawn to strong older women—there’s a pattern to it. Perhaps he will select you as one of his muses, as he calls them. And perhaps, even if his destiny is now in flux, this startling experience will provide such an imaginative man with new creative directions.”
“I think he did write some futuristic fiction, in his old history.”
“More might be gained than is lost, then …”
She toyed with her phone, listening to her strange music, with an expression softened by what he took to be a kind of reverse nostalgia, a nostalgia for the future. He essayed, “Does your daughter like this music?”
“When she was small,” Bisesa said. “We’d dance to it together. But she’s too grown up for it now, all of eight years old. She likes the new synth stars—entirely generated by computer, ah, by machines. Little girls like their idols to be safe, you see, and what’s safer than a simulation?”
He understood little of this, but he was charmed by another glimpse of a culture he could barely understand. He said cautiously, “There must be somebody else you miss—back on the other side.”
She looked at him directly, her eyes shadowed, and he realized to his chagrin that she knew exactly what he was fishing for. “I’ve been single for a while, Josh. Myra’s father died, and there’s been nobody else.” She rested her head on her arm. “You know, apart from Myra it’s not people I’m missing so much as the texture. This little phone should connect me to the world, the whole planet. On every surface there is animation—ads, news, music, color—twenty-four hours a day. It’s a constant rush of information.”
“It sounds clamorous.”
“Perhaps it is. But I’m used to it.”
“There are pleasures to be had here. Breathe … Can you smell it? The touch of frost already in the air … The burning of the fire—you’ll soon learn to tell one wood from another purely by the scent of its smoke, you know …”
“Something else too,” she murmured. “A musk. Like a zoo. There are animals out here. Animals that shouldn’t be here, even in your time.”
He reached out impulsively and took her hand. “We’re safe here,” he said. She neither responded nor drew back, and af
ter a while, unsure, he pulled his hand away. “I’m a city boy,” he said. “Boston-born. So all this—the openness—is new to me too.”
“What brought you here?”
“Nothing planned. I was always curious, you know—always wanted to see what was around the corner, on the next block. I kept volunteering for one crazy assignment after another, until I landed up here, at the ends of the earth.”
“Oh, you’ve gone rather farther than that, Josh. But I think you’re just the type to cope with our strange adventure.” She was watching him, a hint of humor in her eyes—toying with him, perhaps.
He continued doggedly, “You don’t seem much like the soldiers I know.”
She yawned. “My parents were farmers. They owned a big eco-friendly spread in Cheshire. I was an only child. The farm was going to be mine to work and develop—I loved that place. But when I was sixteen my father sold it out from under me. I suppose he thought I was never serious about running it.”
“But you were.”
“Yes. I’d even applied for a place at agricultural college. It caused a rift, or maybe showed one up. I wanted to get away. I moved to London. Then, as soon as I was old enough, I joined up. Of course I had no idea what the army would be like—the PT, the drill, the weapons, the field craft—but I took to it.”
“I don’t see you as a killer,” he said. “But that’s what soldiers do.”
“Not in my day,” she said. “Not in the British army anyhow. Peacekeeping: that’s what we go out in the world for. Of course sometimes you have to kill—or even wage war to keep the peace—and that’s a whole other set of issues.”
He lay back, staring at the stars. “It’s strange to hear you speak of your troubles with your family, failed communication, lost ambitions. I tend to imagine, when I think of it, that the people of a hundred and fifty years hence will be too wise for that—too evolved, as Professor Darwin would say!”
“Oh, I don’t think we’re very evolved, Josh. But we’re getting smarter about some things. Religion, for instance. Take Abdikadir and Casey. Devout Muslim and jock Christian, you’d think they are as far apart as can be. But they are both Oikumens.”
“That word is from the Greek—like ecumenical?”
“Yes. Over the last few decades we’ve been close to an all-out conflict between Christianity and Islam. If you take a long view, it’s absurd; both religions have deep common roots, and both are basically creeds of peace. But all the high-level attempts at reconciliation, conferences of bishops and mullahs, came to nothing. The Oikumens are a grassroots movement trying to achieve what all the top-level contact has failed to do. They are so low-profile they are almost underground, but they’re there, burrowing away.”
This talk made him realize how remote in time her age was, and how little he could understand of it. He said cautiously, “And has God been banished in your day, as some thinkers would predict?”
She hesitated. “Not banished, Josh. But we understand ourselves better than we used to. We understand why we need gods. There are some in my time who see all religion as a psychopathology. They point to those who are prepared to torture and kill their coreligionists, for the sake of a few percent difference in obscure ideology. But there are others who say that for all their flaws the religions are attempts to address the most basic questions about existence. Even if they tell us nothing about God, they’re surely telling us a great deal about what it means to be human. The Oikumens hope that by unifying religions, the result won’t be a dilution but an enrichment—like the ability to study a precious gem from many angles. And maybe these tentative steps are our best hope of a true enlightenment in the future.”
“It sounds utopian. And is it working?”
“Slowly, like the peacekeeping. If we’re building a utopia we’re doing it in the dark. But we’re trying, I guess.”
“It’s a beautiful vision,” he breathed. “The future must be a marvelous place.” He turned to her. “How strange all this is. How exhilarating—to be here with you—to be castaways in time, together! …”
She reached out and touched his lips with one fingertip. “Goodnight, Josh.” She rolled away, pulled her poncho over her body, and curled up.
He lay down, his pulse thumping.
***
The next day the ground rose steadily, becoming broken and lifeless. The clear air thinned and grew colder, bitterly cold when the wind from the north blew, despite the brightness of the sun. By now it was obvious there was no threat from Pashtuns or anybody else, and Batson allowed the troops to abandon the slow routine of picketing and march more briskly.
Though Bisesa’s all-weather flight suit kept her reasonably protected, the others suffered. As they struggled into the wind the soldiers wrapped themselves up in their blankets and groused about how they should have brought their winter greatcoats. Both Ruddy and Josh became subdued, locked in themselves, as if the wind was leaching the energy out of them. But nobody had expected these conditions; even old Frontier hands said they had never known such a chill in March.
Still they marched doggedly along. Most of the time even Kipling didn’t complain; he was too cold to bother, he said.
Fourteen of the twenty troopers were Indian. It seemed to Bisesa that the Europeans kept away from the sepoys, and that the Indians had poorer equipment and weapons.
Ruddy said, “Once the proportion of British troops to Indian was about one in ten. But the Mutiny shattered all that. Now there’s one European for every three Indians. The best weaponry, and all the artillery pieces, are in the hands of British troops, though the Indians may be used as muleteers. You don’t want to train up and arm potential insurgents; common sense, that. Remember that the Indian Civil Service employs only about a thousand people—brave men of the plains, all!—to administer a country of four hundred million. It is only the backing of force that enables such a bluff to be played effectively.”
“But that’s why,” she said gently, “you have to train up an Indian elite. This isn’t America, or Australia. There’s no way British colonists or their descendants will ever outnumber the Indians.”
Ruddy shook his head. “You’re talking of our growing crowd of babus— with all respect to yourself! That notion might wash in London, but not here. You must know of Lucknow, where the whites were summarily slaughtered! That’s the tinderbox we’re sitting on. We may be withholding the best guns, but by filling a babu ’s head with visions of liberty and self-determination you are handing him the most potent weapons of all—weapons he isn’t yet mature enough to use.”
Such casual patronizing set Bisesa’s teeth on edge. But she knew that Ruddy was actually representative of his class, if more articulate than most. It was some consolation to her to know that Ruddy was quite wrong about the future—even what would unravel in his own lifetime. The confrontation between Cossacks and sowars in Central Asia, so long feared in London, would never come to pass. In fact Russia and Britain came to be allies in the face of a new enemy common to both, in the person of the Kaiser. The Empire had always been about acquisition and profit, but Britain’s legacy in this region wasn’t all bad. It did leave India with a functioning civil service, and right up to Bisesa’s time India remained the second-largest democracy in the world, second only to Europe. But the well-intended partition imposed when the Raj withdrew caused tensions from the beginning, tensions that resulted in the terrible destruction of Lahore.
That was the old history, though, she reminded herself. Just in the few days they had been here, she thought she detected a change in the sepoys’ attitude. They were not quite so respectful to the whites, as if they now knew something of the future—that babus like Gandhi, and Bisesa herself, would eventually win. Even if time somehow stitched itself back together again, she couldn’t believe that this bit of history, polluted by her own present, could ever be quite the way it had been before.
Soon they found themselves clambering through high-shouldered hills, and as the northern wind was funne
led into steep-walled valleys and gorges the going got tougher still. But these were just foothills.
At last they broke through a final cluttered valley, and emerged to face a view of the mountains themselves. The peaks were clad in bright gray-white glaciers that descended from their summits and tumbled down their flanks. Even from here, still kilometers away, Bisesa could hear the groan and crack of the ice rivers as they forced their way down the gouged flanks of the mountains.
They all stopped in their tracks, quite stunned.
“Good God,” said Ruddy. “The sepoys are saying, it wasn’t like this before.”
Bisesa dug out her night-vision goggles, and set them to a binocular setting. She scanned the base of the mountains. Beyond the peaks the ice stretched away, she saw; this was the edge of an ice cap. “I think this is a piece of the Ice Age.”
Ruddy, shivering, had wrapped his arms around his bulk. “Ice Age … Yes … I have heard of the phrase. A Professor Agassiz, I think … controversial idea … Controversial no more, then!”
“Another time slip?” Josh asked.
“Look.” Bisesa pointed at the base of the mountains. The glaciers there came to an abrupt halt, making a cliff. But the glaciers continued to pour off the mountains in their slow, inexorable way, and Bisesa could see how the cliff was splintering, calving off chunks like great landlocked icebergs, revealing clefts of a piercing blue. At the base of the cliff the ice was already melting, and slow floods were seeping out toward the lower ground. “I think that’s another interface. Like the step on the plain. Could be a jump anything from ten thousand years to two million years deep.”
“Yes,” said Josh, his breath steaming. “I see it. Another boundary between worlds—eh, Ruddy?”
But poor nearsighted Kipling could see little through his frosted spectacles.
“We should head back,” Batson said, his teeth chattering. “We’ve seen what we came to see, and can go no further.” The men concurred.
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