Siobhan found herself warming to this blunt character. It was probably inevitable that you would find a strong military flavor to a base like this: the military, with their submarines and missile silos, had more experience of survival in cramped, unnatural, confined conditions than anybody else. And it had to be American-led. The Europeans, Japanese, and the rest had put up much of the money for this place, but when it came to opening up virgin continents like the Moon, the Americans provided the muscle and the strength of character. But in Colonel Bud Tooke she saw something of the best in the American character: tough, obviously competent, experienced, determined, and yet with a vision that far transcended his own lifetime. She was going to be able to do business with him, she thoughtand, a corner of her hoped, maybe they could build something more.
As they walked on, the artificial lights of the dome began to glow brighter, heralding the start of another human day on the Moon.
11: Times Eye
As the months passed, and London slowly recovered from June 9, Bisesa sensed the citys mood souring.
In the few hours of the storm itself there had been genuine deprivation and fearand casualties, including more than a thousand deaths in the inner city. And yet it was a time of heroism. There was still no official estimate of how many lives had been saved from fires, or stranding in Underground tunnels, or road pileups, or the lethal mundanity of being trapped in stuck elevators.
In the days that immediately followed, too, Londoners had pulled together. Shops had opened up, displaying the hand-drawn signs that usually defied terrorist outrages. There had been cheers when the first 1950s-vintage Green Goddess fire engines had gone clanging through the streets of the city, museum-piece equipment that was too stupid to fail, proclaimed the Mayor. It was a time of resilience, of the spirit of the Blitz, people said, harking back to a time of even greater challenge now almost a century past.
But that mood was quickly dispelled.
The world had continued to turn, and June 9 had begun to fade in the memory. People tried to get back to work, schools were reopening, and the great electronic-commerce channels began to function at something like their old capacity again. But Londons recovery remained patchy: there was still no water supply in Hammersmith, no power in Battersea, no functioning traffic management system in Westminster. Soon patience was running out, and people were looking for somebody to blame.
By October both Bisesa and her daughter had got a little stir-crazy. They had ventured out of the flat a few times, to the river and the parks, walking through a fractious city. But their freedom of movement was limited. The credit chip implanted in Bisesas arm was more than five years old, and its internal data were long since scrambled: in a time of global electronic tagging she was a nonperson. Without a functioning chip she couldnt shop for herself, couldnt take the Underground, couldnt even buy her kid an ice cream.
She knew she couldnt go on like this forever. At least with her fritzed chip she was invisible, from the Army and everybody else. But it was only the fact that she had long ago given her cousin Linda access to her savings that kept her from starving.
She still didnt feel able to move on, however. It wasnt just her need to be with Myra. She was still failing to get her head around her extraordinary experiences.
She tried to figure it all out by writing down her story. She dictated to Aristotle, but her murmuring disturbed Myra. So in the end she wrote it all out longhand, and let Aristotle scan it into electronic memory. She tried to get it right; she went back through successive drafts, emptying her memory of as much as she could remember, the spectacular and the trivial alike.
But as she stared at the words on the softscreen before her, in the mundanity of her flat with Myras cartoons and synth-soaps babbling in the background, she believed it less and less herself.
On June 8, 2037, Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt had been on peacekeeping patrol in a corner of Afghanistan. With her was another British officer, Abdikadir Omar, and an American, Casey Othic. In that troubled part of the world they were all wearing the blue helmets of the UN. It had been a routine patrol, just another day.
Then some kid had tried to shoot their chopper downand the sun had lurched across the skyand when they had emerged from the crashed machine, they had found themselves somewhere different entirely. Not another place, but another time.
They had fallen to earth in the year 1885: a time when the area was called the NorthWest Frontier by the imperial British who controlled it. They had been taken to a fort called Jamrud, where Bisesa had met a young Bostonian journalist called Josh White. Born in 1862, long dust in Bisesas world, Josh was aged only twenty-three here. And here too, astonishingly, was Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the British tommies, miraculously restored from the dead. But these romantic Victorians were themselves castaways in time.
Bisesa had tried to piece together the story. They had all been projected into another world, a world of scraps and patches torn from the fabric of time. They called this new world Mir, a Russian word for both world and peace. In places you could see the stitching, as ground levels suddenly changed by a meter or more, or where a slab of ancient greenery had been dumped into the middle of a desert.
Nobody knew how this had happened, and still less whyand soon, as the patchwork world knitted together and a turbulent new history swept over them all, they had all been caught up in a battle for personal survival, and such questions had become irrelevant.
But the questions remained. The new world had been peppered by Eyessilvery spheres with elusive geometries, silent and watchful and utterly immobile, scattered over the landscape like so many closed-circuit television cameras. What could these Eyes be but artificial? Did they represent the aloof agency that had taken the world apart, then so roughly reassembled it?
And then there was the question of the span of time. Mir seemed to be constructed as a kind of sampling of humankind and its development, all the way from chimp-like australopithecines from two million years deep, up through variants of prehuman hominids, and all the ages of human history. But this great collating ended, as far as anybody could tell, on June 8, 2037, in the time slice that had carried Bisesa and her colleagues there. Why was there nothing from the farther future? Bisesa had wondered if that was because that date marked some kind of ending to human historybecause there was no future to sample.
And then she, and she alone, had been brought home by the Eyes, or perhaps by the remote minds behind themand found herself on the very next day, June 9, watching a lethal sun rise over London.
Bisesa was convinced that the construction of Mir hadnt been some stupendous natural accident, but deliberate, the act of some terrible intelligence for its own purposes. But why had Earths history been taken apart? Why were the Eyes there to watch and listen? Was it all, as she feared, connected to the misbehavior of the sun?
And why had she been brought back home? To be returned to Myra had been what she had wanted, of course. On Mir, in the depths of her loneliness and despair she had even begged an Eye to save her. But she was sure her desires were irrelevant. The correct question was: what purpose did her return serve them?
Bisesa, stuck in her flat, toiled over her account, sifted through the news, obsessed over her memories and her fragmentary understanding, and tried to decide what to do.