After the Dome, he told her, Bud had joined a movement called the Oikumens, a grassroots network of people who were trying, mostly under the radar, to find a way to bring the world’s great faiths to some kind of coexistence, mainly by appealing to their deep common roots. In that way, perhaps, the positive qualities of the faiths—their moral teachings, their various contemplations of humankind’s place in the universe—might be promoted. If humans could not be rid of religion, it was argued, then let them at least not be harmed by it.
“So,” Siobhan said, marveling, “you’re a career soldier, living on the Moon, who spends his spare time studying theology.”
He laughed, a clipped sound like a rifle being cocked. “I guess I’m an authentic product of the twenty-first century, aren’t I?” He glanced at her, suddenly almost shy. “But I’ve seen a lot. You know, it seems to me that over my lifetime we’ve been slowly groping our way out of the fog. We’re killing each other off a bit less enthusiastically than a hundred years ago. Even though Earth itself has gone to hell in a handbasket while we weren’t looking, we’re starting to fix those problems, too. But now this, the business with the sun. Won’t it be ironic that just as we’re growing up, the star that birthed us decides to cream us?”
Ironic, yes, she thought uneasily. And an odd coincidence that just as we move off the Earth, just as we’re capable of all this, of living on the Moon, the sun reaches out to burn us … Scientists were suspicious of coincidences; they usually meant you were missing some underlying cause.
Or you’re just getting paranoid, Siobhan, she told herself.
Bud said, “I’ll fix you breakfast after I show you one more sight—our museum. We’ve even got Apollo Moon rocks in there! Did you know that three of the core drillings made by the Apollo 17 astronauts were never opened? People are already making quite an impact on the Moon. And so we went to the trouble of ferrying unopened Apollo rocks back to the Moon, so that the double domes can use those old samples as reference points, bits of a pristine Moon before we got our hands on it …”
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 thought—and, 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: Time’s Eye
As the months passed, and London slowly recovered from June 9, Bisesa sensed the city’s mood souring.
In the few hours of the storm itself there had been genuine deprivation and fear—and 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 London’s 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 Bisesa’s 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 couldn’t shop for herself, couldn’t take the Underground, couldn’t even buy her kid an ice cream.
She knew she couldn’t 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 didn’t feel able to move on, however. It wasn’t 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 Myra’s 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 down—and the sun had lurched across the sky—and 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 North—West 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 Bisesa’s 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 why—and 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.