Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

“And so it is here,” Josh mused.

“Once I was abandoned by my parents,” Ruddy said bitterly. “Now we are abandoned by God Himself.”

That silenced them for a while. The night seemed huge, under a sky populated even by alien stars. Bisesa hadn’t felt quite so stranded since the moment of the Discontinuity, and she ached for Myra.

Abdikadir said gently, “Ruddy, your parents meant the best, didn’t they? It’s just that you didn’t understand how you felt.”

Josh said, “Are you suggesting that whoever is responsible for what has happened to the world—God or not—actually means well?”

Abdikadir shrugged.

“We are human, and the world has been transformed by forces that are clearly superhuman. Why should we expect to understand the motives behind such forces?”

Ruddy said, “All right. But do any of us actually believe there can be benevolence behind this meddling?”

Nobody replied.

Suddenly it was their last orbit: perhaps the last orbit of Earth ever to be traveled by humans, Kolya thought wistfully. But the necessary preparation was unchanged, and once their training kicked in, the three of them began to work together as effectively as they had since the start of this strange adventure. In fact Kolya suspected they were all comforted by the familiar routine.

The first task was to pack the living compartment with their garbage—including most of the contents of their post-landing survival kit, already consumed. Sable stowed her scavenged ham radio gear in the descent compartment, however, for it could still be useful after landing.

Now it was time to suit up. They took turns in the living compartment. First Kolya pulled on his elasticized trousers, tight enough to squeeze body fluids up toward his head, which ought to help him avoid fainting after the landing—invaluable but grossly uncomfortable. Next he pulled himself into the suit itself. He had to climb in legs first through a hole in the stomach area. The inner layer, of a tough rubbery material, was airtight, and the outer layer, of a hardy man-made fabric, was equipped with pockets, zippers and flaps. Under gravity this assembly would have been all but impossible to don without the support of the ground crew. But here he thrashed around until he got his legs in place, his arms in the sleeves, the back fitting snugly. He was used to his suit; it even smelled like him, and in case of disaster it would save his life. But after the freedom of weightlessness he felt as if he had been locked up inside a tractor tire.

Suited up, he scrambled back down into the descent compartment. The three of them strapped in. Musa had them don their helmets and gloves, and ran a pressure check on the suits.

For the last time the Soyuz passed over India, and their radio footprint reached Jamrud. The little speaker Sable had rigged to her ham radio gear crackled to life.

“ …Othic calling Soyuz , come in. Soyuz , Othic, come in …”

Musa called, “ Soyuz here, Casey. How is our trusty capcom today?”

“The rain is pissing on me. More important, how are you?”

Musa glanced at his crew. “We are strapped in, tight as three bugs in a rug. Our systems check out, despite the additional time we have spent in orbit. We are ready for the descent.”

“That Soyuz is a tough old bird.”

“That she is. I will be sorry to say good-bye to her.”

“Musa, you understand we have no way of tracking you. We won’t know where you come down.”

“We know where you are,” Musa said. “We will find you, my friend.”

“God and Karl Marx willing.”

Kolya, suddenly, urgently, didn’t want this contact to be lost. They were all aware that Casey and his people were just another handful of castaways, as lost and helpless as they were. But at least Casey’s was a twenty-first century voice, reaching them from the ground; it was almost as if they had touched home again.

“I must say something.” Musa put his hand to his wraparound headset. “Casey, Bisesa, Abdikadir—and Sable and Kolya—all of you. We are far from home. We have come on a journey whose nature we can’t even grasp. And I think it’s clear that this new world, made of patches snipped from space and time, is not ours : it is made from pieces of Earth, but it is not Earth. So I think we should not call this new world, our world, ‘Earth.’ We need a new name.”

Casey said, “Like what?”

“I have thought about this,” Musa said. “ Mir. We should call this new planet Mir.”

Sable guffawed. “You want to call a planet after an antique Russian space station?”

But Kolya said, “I understand. In our language the word Mir can mean both ‘world’ and ‘peace.’ ”

“We like the idea down here,” Casey said.

“Then Mir it is,” said Musa.

Sable shrugged. “Whatever,” she said cruelly. “So you got to name a world, Musa. But what does a name matter?”

Kolya murmured, “You know, I wonder where we would all be if we hadn’t happened to be in just that bit of the sky, just at that moment.”

Casey said, “Too much double dome horseshit for a jock like me. I can’t even keep … rain out … neck.”

Musa glanced at Kolya. “Your signal is breaking up.”

“Yeah … likewise … losing you …”

“Yes. Good-bye for now, Casey—”

“… won’t be a welcome back. Welcome to your new home—welcome to Mir! …”

The signal faded out.

Not long after dawn, Bisesa and Abdikadir made for the wreck of the chopper. The overnight rain continued unrelenting, stippling the muddy parade ground with tiny craters. Abdikadir briefly pulled back the hood of his poncho and lifted up his face to the rain, tasting it. “Salty,” he said. “ Big storms out there.”

A lean-to had been set up against the side of the downed chopper. Huddled under the canvas, Casey and the British were all so splashed with mud they looked as if they had been molded out of the earth themselves. But Cecil de Morgan wore his customary suit, and was almost dapper despite a few splashes. Bisesa would never like the man, but she admired his defiance of nature.

Captain Grove had requested a briefing from Casey on what had been discovered so far. SoCasey, propping himself up on a crutch, had used a bit of chalk to sketch an outline Mercator-projection world map onto the chopper’s hull, and he had set up a softscreen on a trestle chair before it. “Okay,” Casey said briskly. “First the big picture.” The dozen officers and civilians, standing in the uncertain shelter of the lean-to, clustered to see, as images of a changed world flickered by.

The shapes of the continents were familiar enough. But within their coastlines the land was a jigsaw of irregular slices, of browning green or melting white, showing how the peculiar fragmentation of time had occurred all across the planet. Few people seemed to have made it through the Discontinuity. The night side of the world was almost complete darkness, broken only by a scattered handful of brave, defiant man-made lights. And then there was the weather. Great storm systems boiled out of the oceans, or the poles, or the hearts of the continents, and thunderstorms spanned continents with branching purple-gray pyrotechnics.

Casey tapped the world map. “We think we’re looking at landmasses that have been replaced, in patches, by bits of themselves from earlier eras. But so far as we can tell—given the Soyuz wasn’t properly equipped, and all—there’s only a slight shift in the overall position of the landmasses. That limits us in time, even though we think the small shifts that do exist might be enough to trigger volcanism, later on.”