Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

“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 funneled 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.”