Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

The party made remarkably rapid progress. For hours on end the riders kept their horses moving at a trot, a pace that Kolya was sure would quickly exhaust the animals, but the horses were obviously bred for such treatment. The Mongols ate in the saddle, and expected the cosmonauts to do the same. They didn’t even stop for toilet breaks, and Sable and Kolya learned to keep out of the way when a rider’s volley of urine was caught by the wind.

As they traveled on, Kolya would sometimes glimpse sparks in the distance, floating silently above the ground. He wondered if these were examples of the “Eyes” Casey had described in India. If so, were the Eyes a worldwide phenomenon? He would have welcomed the chance to study one, but their track never brought them close, and the Mongols showed no curiosity.

Before the sun had climbed to its highest, they arrived at a waystation. It was just a huddle of yurts, lost in the middle of the emptiness of the steppe, but several horses were tied up outside, and Kolya glimpsed a herd of others, moving with the silence of distance across the steppe. As they approached, the riders rang a bell, and the keepers of the station came running out. The riders quickly negotiated with the keepers, exchanged their horses, and were on their way.

Sable grumbled, “I could have done with a break. The suspension on this thing is a little stiff.”

Kolya gazed back at the station. “I think this must be the yam .”

“The what?”

“At one time the Mongols held all of Eurasia from Hungary to the South China Sea. They kept it all unified with fast communications—a system of routes and waystations where you could change your horses. The Romans had a similar system. A courier could cross two or three hundred kilometers in a day.”

“This isn’t exactly a road. We’re just riding over empty steppe. So how did these guys know how to find this place?”

“Mongols learn to ride before they can walk,” Kolya said. “Crossing this vast plain, they have to be expert navigators. They probably don’t even have to think about it.”

Even when night came the Mongols rode on. They slept in the saddle, with one or two of them leading the others. Sable found the jolting of the cart kept her awake. But Kolya, exhausted by two sleepless nights, overstressed, overwhelmed by the oxygen-rich air of the steppe, slept from sunset to dawn.

At times, though, the riders did hesitate. They had to cross peculiar straight-line boundaries between bare, baked-dry steppe and areas of bright green grass, and other places where flowers lay scattered, wilting—and other areas, stranger yet, where banks of snow lay half-melted in pools of shadow.

It was obvious to Kolya that these suspiciously straight borders were transitions between one time slice and another, and that this steppe was stitched together from a myriad fragments drawn from different times of the year—even different eras. But just as the snow was melting in the warmth, the spring flowers were quickly wilting, and the summer grass screeds were mottled and curled. Perhaps there would be some recovery, some knitting-together, Kolya thought, after a full cycle of seasons. But he suspected that it would take more than a single year to assemble a new ecology from these timeshifted bits of the old.

The Mongol nomads could understand none of this, of course. Even the horses bucked and whinnied as they crossed these disturbing transitions.

Once the riders, evidently baffled, stopped at a site that seemed as empty and undistinguished as the rest of the steppe. Perhaps, Kolya speculated, a waystation had been sited here, and the riders couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t found it. The station was lost, not in space, but in time. The nomads, evidently a practical people, took this in their stride. After a brief discussion marked with much shoulder-shrugging, they moved on, but at a slower pace; evidently they had decided that if they couldn’t rely on the waystations they should spare the horses.

In the afternoon of the second day, the character of the country began to change, becoming more broken and hilly. Now they rode through shallow valleys, sometimes fording streams, and passed copses of larch and pine. It was a much more human landscape, and Kolya felt relieved to be away from the oppressive unchanging immensity of the steppe. Even the Mongols seemed to be happier. As they pushed through one small stand of trees, one brute-faced young man leaned down to pluck handfuls of wild geraniums that he attached to his saddle.

The area was relatively densely populated. They passed many yurt villages, some of them large and sprawling, with smoke rising everywhere, the fine threads leaning in the prevailing wind. There were even roads, after a fashion, or at least heavily worn and rutted trails. This part of the Mongol empire seemed to have come through the Discontinuity almost intact, even though it was studded with time-slice incongruities.

They came to a broad, sluggish river. A ferry had been set up here, a platform guided by ropes slung across the river. The platform was big enough for the riders, cosmonauts, horses and even the cart to be loaded on and transferred in one go.

On the far bank they turned south, following the river. Kolya saw that a second great river snaked across the countryside, glistening; they were heading for a mighty confluence. Clearly the nomads knew where they were going.

But at the foot of a hill, close to a big oxbow loop of one of the rivers, they came to a slab of stone, closely inscribed. The nomads slowed and stared.

Kolya said grimly, “They haven’t seen this before, that’s clear. But I have.”

“You’ve been here?”

“No. But I’ve seen pictures. If I’m right this is the confluence of the Onon and Balj rivers. And that monument was set up in the 1960s, I think.”

“So this is a little teeny time slice. No wonder these guys are staring.”

“The script is supposed to be old Mongolian. But nobody knows for sure if they got it right.”

“You think our escorts can read it?”

“Probably not. Most of the Mongols were illiterate.”

“So this is a memorial? A memorial to what?”

“To an eight-hundredth birthday …”

They rode on and climbed over a last ridge. There, set out before them on a lush green plain, was another yurt village—no, not a village, Kolya realized, a city.

There must have been thousands of tents, set out in a regular grid pattern, spanning hectares of ground. Some of the yurts seemed no more impressive than those in Scacatai’s village out on the steppe, but at the center was a much grander structure, a vast complex of interconnected pavilions. All this was enclosed by a wall, but there were outer “suburbs,” a kind of shantytown of cruder-looking yurts that huddled outside the wall. Dirt roads cut across the plain from all directions, leading to the gates in the wall. A lot of traffic moved on the roads, and inside the city itself smoke rose from the yurts, merging into a pale brown smog that hung over the city.

“Christ,” said Sable. “It’s a tent Manhattan.”

Perhaps. But on the green land beyond the city Kolya saw vast herds of sheep, goats and horses, grazing contentedly. “Just as the legends described,” he murmured. “They were never anything more than nomads. They ruled a world, yet cared only about having somewhere to graze their flocks. And when the time comes to move to the winter pastures, this whole city will be uprooted and moved south …”

Once more the horses jolted into motion, and the party rode down the shallow ridge toward the yurt city.

At the gate, a guard in a blue, star-spangled tunic and felt cap held them up.