As far as the Army knew Bisesa had simply disappeared from her posting on June 8, before the solar storm, and her five-years-too-old ident chip making her untraceable, she had not been heard of since. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the Army, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had had other things to think about. But now the service’s bureaucratic patience was running out.
Her bank accounts hadn’t been frozen, not yet, but her salary had been stopped. Linda was still able to draw on the funds for shopping and bills, but Bisesa’s level of savings, never high, was quickly dropping.
Then, still unable to find her, the Army switched its assessment of the cause of her vanishing from “possibly AWOL” to “missing in action.” Letters were hand-delivered to her next of kin: her own parents in Cheshire, and Myra’s paternal grandmother and father, parents of the child’s deceased father.
Bisesa was lucky that the grandparents reacted first, and called her flat in a great flurry of concern. Their call gave Bisesa the chance to contact her parents before they opened their own letter. She wasn’t close to her parents; the family had fallen out when her father had sold off the farm where Bisesa had grown up. She hadn’t even contacted them since June 9, though she felt a little guilty about that. But they certainly didn’t deserve the shock of opening such a letter, with its grave Ministry of Defense language about how all efforts were being made to trace her, and her effects would be returned to them, with deepest sympathies expressed … et cetera, et cetera.
She was able to spare her parents that. But she’d had to give away her location, and when the authorities came looking for her seriously she wouldn’t be hard to find.
So she braced herself, and asked Aristotle to put her through to her commanding officer, in the UN base in Afghanistan.
While she waited for a reply, she continued to worry at her peculiar memories.
Of course there was one obvious explanation for it all. She did have scraps of physical evidence for her adventures on Mir—her own apparent aging, the scrambling of her ident chip. But all she really had to rely on were her own recollections of the event. And it didn’t need the construction of a whole new Earth to explain that. Perhaps she had gone through some kind of episode that had scrambled her mind, impelled her to go AWOL, and brought her home to London. She might, after all, be crazy. She didn’t think so, but it was a simpler explanation, and in the mundane calm of London it was a hard possibility to discount.
So she looked for verification.
She had known Abdikadir Omar and Casey Othic, her companions on Mir, before the Discontinuity, of course. Now she used Aristotle, and a not-yet-canceled password, to hack into Army databases and check out their service records.
She found that Abdi and Casey were still out there in Afghanistan. After June 9 they had been pulled off their peacekeeping duties to help out with civil emergencies in the nearby town of Peshawar, Pakistan. They were still there now, quietly doing their duties. There was no sign that they had gone through anything resembling Bisesa’s experience.
She tried to make sense of all this. Abdi and Casey had undoubtedly followed her to Mir—but it seemed that those “versions” of Abdi and Casey on Mir had been extrapolated from a slice of time, the moment of Discontinuity as they had called it on Mir, while the “originals,” oblivious, lived out their lives here on Earth.
She didn’t speak to either of them directly. She had grown very close to them in the course of their shared experiences on Mir. It would be hard to bear if they were distant now.
She began to dig into the characters she remembered from 1885.
Kipling’s life of course had been covered by many biographers. As a young journalist, he had indeed been in the area of Jamrud in 1885, and had gone on, apparently unperturbed by his passage through the Discontinuity, to international fame later. She couldn’t trace any of the Empire-period British officers she had encountered, but that was no surprise; time and subsequent wars had taken a heavy toll on such records. Of the more remarkable historical figures whose paths had crossed hers she could learn little new; they were so remote in time that she could only confirm that nothing in their accepted biographies was contradicted by her experience.
There was another, less famous name for her to check, though. It took her some digging: most of the world’s genealogical databases were now online, but after June 9 many electronic memory stores were still more or less scrambled.
There had indeed been a Joshua White, she found. Born in 1862 in Boston, his father had been a journalist who had covered the War Between the States, just as Josh had told her, and Josh himself had become a war correspondent in his father’s footsteps. It gave her quite a start when she found a grainy photograph of Josh, aged just a few years older than when she had known him, proudly displaying a book based on his reportage of the British Empire’s military escapades on the North—West Frontier, and later in South Africa.
It was eerie to page forward through the sparse accounts of a life lived on to ages much older than when she had known him. He had fallen in love, she saw with a pang of loss: aged thirty-five, he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons. But he was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, as he sought to cover yet another war.
This was a man who, on a different world, had fallen in love with her—an unconditional love she had clung to, but sadly had been unable to return. And yet this Joshua was the original, and the lost boy who loved her had been a mere copy. His had been a love she had never even wanted—and that had never, in some real sense, even happened at all. But the historical existence of Josh was surely proof that all this was real; there was no plausible way she could have heard of this obscure nineteenth-century journalist and built a delusion around him.
Of course there was one more record to check. Deeply uneasy, she went back to the military service records and extended her search.
She discovered that unlike Abdi and Casey, no “original” of herself was to be found in Afghanistan, serving the Army, living on oblivious. Of course she hadn’t expected to find “herself” out there, for otherwise the Army wouldn’t have been looking for her. It was still an eerie confirmation, however.
She tried to absorb this. If she was the only one who had vanished altogether from this version of Earth, then she had somehow, and for some reason, been treated differently by the Firstborn, who had been responsible for all this in the first place. That was disturbing enough.
But how much stranger it might have been if she had discovered a version of herself living on in Afghanistan …
15: Bottleneck
Miriam Grec tried to focus on what Siobhan McGorran was telling her.
It wasn’t easy. This briefing room was on the fortieth floor of the Livingstone Tower—or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner called it, including Miriam when off camera. The windows were broad sheets of toughened glass, and the October sky was a shade of blue that reminded her of childhood visits to Provence with her French-born father. What color would Papa have called that sky? Cerulean? Powder blue?
On such a day, under such a sky, with London spread out like a shining tapestry before her, it was hard for Miriam to remember that she was no longer a small child but Prime Minister of all Eurasia, with grave responsibilities. And it was hard to accept such bad news as Siobhan’s.
Siobhan sat calmly, waiting for her words to sink in.
Nicolaus Korombel, Miriam’s press secretary, was the only other person in the room for this sensitive meeting. Polish-born, he had a habit of wearing shirts a couple of sizes too small for his spreading desk-job girth, and Miriam could actually see belly hair curl past its straining buttons. But he was the inner-circle advisor on whom she relied most heavily, and his assessment of Siobhan would be important in her final judgment of what she had to say.