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time. What a strange thought. What is happening to us? . . . She
lifted her face to the Moon. Oh. Clavius is gone.
Josh was at her side. Clavius?
Clavius Base. She pointed. Built into a big old crater in the
southern highlands.
Josh stared. You have cities on the Moon?
She smiled. I wouldn t call it a city. But you can see its light,
like a captured star, the only one in the circle of the crescent Moon.
Now it s gone. That isn t even my Moon. There is a crew on Mars,
and a second on the way or there was. I wonder what s become of
them . . .
There was a grunt of disgust. One of the soldiers had been root-
ing at the bottom of the foxhole, and now emerged with what
looked like a piece of meat, still dripping blood. The stink was
sharp.
A human arm, Ruddy said flatly. He turned away and
vomited.
Josh said, It looks to me like the work of a great cat . . . It
seems that whoever attacked you did not live long to enjoy his tri-
umph.
I suppose he was as lost as I am.
Yes. I apologize for Ruddy. He doesn t have a very strong
stomach for such sights.
No. And he never will.
Josh looked at her; her eyes were full of moonlight, her expres-
sion empty. What do you mean?
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T I M E S E Y E " 6 1
He was right. I do know who he is. You re Rudyard Kipling,
aren t you? Rudyard bloody Kipling. My God, what a day.
Ruddy didn t respond. He was hunched over, still retching, and
bile stained his chin.
At that moment the ground trembled, hard enough to raise lit-
tle clouds of dust everywhere, like invisible footfalls. And rain
began to fall, from thick black clouds that came racing across the
Moon s empty face.
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Part 2
Castaways
in Time
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10: Geometry
For Bisesa the first morning was the worst.
She suspected that some combination of adrenaline and shock
had kept her going through the day of what they were starting to
call the Discontinuity. But that night, in the room given to them by
Grove, a hastily converted storeroom, she had slept badly on her
thin down-stuffed mattress. By the next morning, when she had
reluctantly woken up to find herself still here, she had come crash-
ing down from her adrenaline high, and felt inconsolable. The sec-
ond night, at Abdi s insistence, desperate for sleep, she cracked her
survival gear. She donned earplugs and eye shades, swallowed a
Halcyon tablet what Casey called a Blue Bomber and slept
for ten hours.
But as the days passed, Bisesa, Abdikadir and Casey were still
stuck here in the Jamrud fort. They had no contact on any of their
military wavelengths, Bisesa s phone muttered about its continuing
cauterization, no SAR teams came flapping out of the UN base in
response to their patiently bleeping beacons there was no mede-
vac for Casey. And there was not a single contrail to be seen in the
sky, not one.
She spent most of her time missing Myra, her daughter. She
didn t even want to confront those feelings, as if acknowledging
them would make her separation from Myra real. She longed to
have something to do anything to stop her thinking.
Meanwhile life went on.
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6 6 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
After the first couple of days, when it was obvious the Bird
crew had no hostile intent, the British troops close military scrutiny
of them was relaxed a little, though Bisesa suspected Captain Grove
was too wary a commander not to keep a weathered eye on them.
They certainly weren t allowed anywhere near the small stash of
twenty-first-century pistols, submachine guns, flares and the like
that had been extracted from the Bird. But she thought it probably
helped these nineteenth-century British accept them that Casey was
a white American and that both Bisesa and Abdi could be regarded
as belonging to allied races. If the Bird s crew had been Russian,
German or Chinese, say and there were plenty of such troops in
Clavius there might have been more hostility.
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 hun-
dred 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 pub-
lished 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
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T I M E S E Y E " 6 7
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 grand-
mother! More recently in Lahore I came down with a fever that
may have been malaria, and since then, on occasion, my blue dev-
ils have returned. So I know how it is to be plagued by the unreal.
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