Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

“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.

Bisesa’s radio bleeped. She pulled her headset out of her pocket and wrapped it around her head. It was a shortwave message from Casey. One of Grove’s scouting expeditions had spotted what appeared to be an army, a massive one, in the valley of the Indus. And Casey had received a signal on his lashed-up receiving station, he said. A signal from space. Her heart beat faster.

Time to go, then.

Before she turned away Bisesa ran her field of view along that crumbling base of ice, one last time. No wonder the weather was screwed up, she thought. This big chunk of ice wasn’t meant to be here. The cold winds pouring off it would mess up the climate for kilometers around, and when it melted there would be swollen rivers, floods. That was, of course, if things remained stable, and there wasn’t more unraveling of time to come …

She glimpsed movement. She scanned back, upping the magnification. Two, three, four figures walked through the chill blue shadow of the glaciers. They were upright, and wore something dark and heavy, skins perhaps. They carried sticks, or spears. But they were squat, broad, their shoulders massive and rounded, their muscles immense. They were like pumped-up American footballers, she thought; Casey, eat your heart out. Tiny sparks of light, well-spaced, hovered over them: a string of Eyes.

One of the figures stopped and turned in her direction. Had he glimpsed a reflection off her goggles? She tapped the controls, and the magnification zoomed to its limit. The image grew blurred and shaky, but she could make out a face. It was broad, almost chinless, with powerful cheekbones, a forehead that sloped back from a thick brow into a mass of black hair, and a great protruding nose from which steam snorted, white and regular, as if from some hidden engine. Not human—not quite—but still, something atavistic in her felt a shock of recognition. Then the image broke down into a blur of color, white and blue.

Things didn’t get any easier. It was a rare day now when the sky didn’t bubble with cloud. Jamrud began to be plagued by rainstorms, and sometimes hail, that would boil up out of nowhere. The sepoys said they had never known such weather.

The British officers, though, had more on their minds than the weather. They were increasingly distracted by the sketchy reports their scouts brought back of an army of some kind to the southwest, and they were scrambling for ways to bring back more complete information.

But for all their difficulties the castaways of Jamrud were learning a great deal more about their new world, for as the crew of the Soyuz followed their lonely cycles around the planet, they downloaded images and other data to Casey’s improvised receiving station. Casey used what was left of the Little Bird’s avionics to store, process and display the data.

The Soyuz ’s storm-streaked images of a transformed world were bewildering, but they captivated all who studied them, in different ways. Bisesa thought that for Casey and Abdikadir, even though the images in themselves were disturbing, they were a reassuring reminder of home, where they had been used to having the ability to call up images like this whenever they chose. But soon the Soyuz must fall to earth, and their sole eye in the sky would close.

As for the men of 1885, Ruddy, Josh, Captain Grove and the rest were at first simply gosh-wowed by the display softscreens and other gadgets: while Casey and Abdi were comforted by familiarity, Ruddy and the others were distracted by novelty. Then, once they got used to the technology, the British were struck by the marvel of looking at images of a world from space. Even though the Soyuz was only a few hundred kilometers up, a glimpse of a curved horizon, of cloud banks sailing on layers of air, or of familiar, recognizable features, like India’s teardrop shape or Britain’s fractal coastlines, would send them into paroxysms of wonder.

“I had never imagined such a godlike perspective was possible,” Ruddy said. “Oh, you know how big the world is, in round, fat numbers.” He thumped his belly. “But I had never felt it, not in here. How small and scattered are the works of man—how petty his pretensions and passions—how like ants we are!”

But the nineteenth-century crowd soon got past that and learned to interpret what they were seeing; even the stiffer military types like Grove surprised Bisesa with their flexibility. It took only a couple of days after the first download before the chattering, awestruck crowds around Casey’s softscreen began to grow more somber. For, no matter how marvelous the images and the technology that had produced them, the world they revealed was sobering indeed.

Bisesa took copies of all this to store in their only significant portable electronic device, her phone. The data was precious, she saw. For a long time these images would be all they would have to tell them what was on the other side of the horizon. And besides, she agreed with cosmonaut Kolya that there should be a record of where they had come from. Otherwise people would eventually forget, and believe that this was all there ever had been.

But the phone had its own agenda. “Show me the stars,” it said, in its small whisper.

So, each evening, she would set it up on a convenient rock, where it sat like a patient metallic insect, its small camera peering into the sky. Bisesa put up little screens of waterproofed canvas to protect it. These observation sessions could last hours as the phone waited for a glimpse of some key part of the sky through the scudding clouds.

One evening, as Bisesa sat with her phone, Abdikadir, Josh and Ruddy walked out of the fort to join her. Abdikadir brought a tray of drinks, fresh lemonade and sugar water.

Ruddy grasped the nature of the phone’s project readily enough. By mapping the sky, and comparing the stars’ positions to the astronomical maps stored in its database, the phone could determine the date. “Just like astronomers at the Babylonian court,” he said.

Josh sat close to Bisesa, and his eyes were huge in the gathering dark of the evening. He could not be called handsome. He had a small face, with protruding ears, and cheeks pushed up by smiling; his chin was weak, but his lips were full, and oddly sensual. He was an endearing package, she admitted to herself—and, though she felt obscurely guilty about it, as if she was somehow betraying Myra, his obvious affection for her was coming to matter to her.

He said, “Do you think that even the stars have been washed around the sky?”

“I don’t know, Josh,” she said. “Perhaps that’s my sky up there; perhaps it’s yours; perhaps it’s nobody’s. I want to find out.”

Ruddy said, “Surely by the twenty-first century you have a much deeper understanding of the nature of the cosmos, even of time and space themselves, than we poor souls.”

“Yes,” said Josh eagerly. “We may not know why all this has happened to us—but surely, Bisesa, armed with your advanced science, you can speculate on how the world has been turned upside down …”

Abdikadir put in, “Maybe. But it’s going to be a little difficult to talk about spacetime, as you wouldn’t have even heard of special relativity for another couple of decades.”

Ruddy looked blank. “Of special what?”

The phone whispered dryly, “Start with chasing a light beam. If it was good enough for Einstein—”