Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Sable grinned, showing gleaming teeth. “An American,” she whooped. “I knew it!” She began to adjust the tangled equipment, eager to reply before the radio footprint of the Soyuz drifted too far.

On the day Bisesa’s scouting party was to set off, the reveille was sounded by a trumpeter at fiveA.M. Bisesa woke blearily, her body still not quite accustomed to this new time zone, and went to look for her companions.

After a quick breakfast, the party formed up, lightly loaded with gear. A unit of twenty troopers, mostly sepoys , under the command of newly minted Corporal Batson, had been assigned to escort Bisesa—and here were Josh and Ruddy, both of whom insisted they couldn’t possibly miss this jaunt. They were all on foot; Captain Grove, reasonably enough, didn’t want to risk any of his dwindling population of mules. Grove was also uneasy about allowing the journalists to go. But there had been no sightings of Pashtuns to the north and west, not a single sniper’s bullet. Even their villages seemed to have disappeared, as if apart from Jamrud humanity had been scraped off the planet. Grove relented about Ruddy and Josh, but he insisted that the party was to keep to tight military discipline at all times.

Off they marched. Soon Jamrud had disappeared over the horizon, and the world seemed empty, save for themselves. It was the tenth day since Bisesa’s stranding.

The going was tough. They were clambering over country that was little more than a mountainous desert. At noon the heat climbed ferociously, though it was March—if this actually was still a slice of March 1885, of course—and at night, Bisesa was given to understand, the temperature would drop below freezing. Still, Bisesa expected to be comfortable enough in her flight suit, which was made of all-weather fabric manufactured in 2037. The British soldiers were much more poorly equipped, with their serge jackets and pith helmets, and laden down with heavy-duty kit, arms, ammunition, bedding, rations and water. But the men didn’t complain. They were evidently used to their gear, and knowledgeable about ways around its shortcomings, such as using urine to soften boot leather.

As they advanced, following military drill, Batson sent picketing troops out ahead. In a country crowded by hillocks and ridges, three or four of them would clamber up the next commanding feature, covered by the rifles of their comrades, to be sure there were no Pashtuns hiding there. As they made their way further north, some of the hills rose as high as three hundred meters or so above the track, and it could be forty minutes or more before the pickets had reached the high point, but even so the rest of the column would not be moved forward until they were in position and had confirmed the way ahead was clear. It was frustrating, but the routine enforced plenty of rest halts, and they still made respectable progress.

As they marched they found more Eyes. There would be one every few kilometers or so, hovering silently, all apparently identical to the one at Jamrud. Batson marked their positions on a map. But soon these became as familiar as the first Eye, and nobody seemed to notice them—nobody save Bisesa. She found it hard to turn her back on an Eye, as if they really were eyes, watching her pass.

“What a place,” Ruddy announced to Bisesa as they plodded across one particularly barren stretch. He gestured at the file of sepoys ahead. “Scraps of raw humanity, crushed between the empty sky and the used-up earth underfoot. All of India is like this, one way or another, you know. It’s just that the Frontier is even more so than the rest—a sort of gritty quintessence. One finds it hard to retain one’s dogmatism here.”

“You’re a strange mix of young and old, Ruddy,” she said.

“Why, thank you. I suppose all this footslogging seems primitive to you, with your flying machines and thinking boxes, the marvelous warmaking devilry of futurity!”

“Not at all,” she said. “I’m a soldier myself, remember, and I’ve done my share of footslogging. Armies are all about discipline and focus, regardless of the technology. And anyhow British forces were—sorry, are— technologically advanced for their time. The telegraph can get a message from India to London in a few hours, you have the most advanced ships in the world, and your railways make inland journeys fast. You have what we’d call a rapid-reaction capability.”

He nodded. “A capability that has enabled the inhabitants of a small island to build and hold a global empire, madam.”

As a walking companion Ruddy was always interesting, if not always exactly likeable. He was certainly no soldier. Something of a hypochondriac, he complained continually about his feet, his eyes, his headaches, his back, and other ways in which he felt “seedy.” But he got on with it. During breaks he would sit in the shade of a boulder or a tree, and jot down notes or scraps of poetry in a battered notebook. When he was composing poetry he would sing a little melody, over and over, to serve as the basis of his meter. He was an untidy writer, and with his impulsive, jerky movements he blunted his pencils and tore his paper.

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 …”