They settled down for some food: just boiled meat and rice, but appetizing to them all after the long day. Josh made sure he was close to Bisesa. She added little tablets to her food and “Puritabs” to her water, which she said should protect her from infections from the water and the like; her supply of these twenty-first-century miracles wouldn’t last forever, but perhaps long enough to let her system acclimatize—or so she hoped.

She curled up in her pit under her own lightweight poncho, with her belt kit wrapped up as a pillow. She took out a little sky-blue device she called her “phone,” and set it up on the ground before her. Somehow it didn’t seem surprising when the little toy spoke to her. “Music, Bisesa?”

“Something distracting.”

Music poured out of the little machine, loud and vibrant. The troops stared, and Batson snapped, “For God’s sake turn it down!” Bisesa complied, but let the music play on quietly.

Ruddy had theatrically clamped his hands over his ears. “By all the gods! What barbarity is that?”

Bisesa laughed. “Come on, Ruddy. It’s an orchestral reworking of a few classic gangsta rap anthems. It’s decades old—grandmother music!”

Ruddy harrumphed like a fifty-year-old. “I find it impossible to believe that Europeans will ever be seduced by such rhythms.” And, pointedly, he picked up his blanket and made for the furthest corner of the little compound.

Josh was left alone with Bisesa. “Of course he likes you, you know.”

“Ruddy?”

“It’s happened before—he is drawn to strong older women—there’s a pattern to it. Perhaps he will select you as one of his muses, as he calls them. And perhaps, even if his destiny is now in flux, this startling experience will provide such an imaginative man with new creative directions.”

“I think he did write some futuristic fiction, in his old history.”

“More might be gained than is lost, then …”

She toyed with her phone, listening to her strange music, with an expression softened by what he took to be a kind of reverse nostalgia, a nostalgia for the future. He essayed, “Does your daughter like this music?”

“When she was small,” Bisesa said. “We’d dance to it together. But she’s too grown up for it now, all of eight years old. She likes the new synth stars—entirely generated by computer, ah, by machines. Little girls like their idols to be safe, you see, and what’s safer than a simulation?”

He understood little of this, but he was charmed by another glimpse of a culture he could barely understand. He said cautiously, “There must be somebody else you miss—back on the other side.”

She looked at him directly, her eyes shadowed, and he realized to his chagrin that she knew exactly what he was fishing for. “I’ve been single for a while, Josh. Myra’s father died, and there’s been nobody else.” She rested her head on her arm. “You know, apart from Myra it’s not people I’m missing so much as the texture. This little phone should connect me to the world, the whole planet. On every surface there is animation—ads, news, music, color—twenty-four hours a day. It’s a constant rush of information.”

“It sounds clamorous.”

“Perhaps it is. But I’m used to it.”

“There are pleasures to be had here. Breathe … Can you smell it? The touch of frost already in the air … The burning of the fire—you’ll soon learn to tell one wood from another purely by the scent of its smoke, you know …”

“Something else too,” she murmured. “A musk. Like a zoo. There are animals out here. Animals that shouldn’t be here, even in your time.”

He reached out impulsively and took her hand. “We’re safe here,” he said. She neither responded nor drew back, and after a while, unsure, he pulled his hand away. “I’m a city boy,” he said. “Boston-born. So all this—the openness—is new to me too.”

“What brought you here?”

“Nothing planned. I was always curious, you know—always wanted to see what was around the corner, on the next block. I kept volunteering for one crazy assignment after another, until I landed up here, at the ends of the earth.”

“Oh, you’ve gone rather farther than that, Josh. But I think you’re just the type to cope with our strange adventure.” She was watching him, a hint of humor in her eyes—toying with him, perhaps.

He continued doggedly, “You don’t seem much like the soldiers I know.”

She yawned. “My parents were farmers. They owned a big eco-friendly spread in Cheshire. I was an only child. The farm was going to be mine to work and develop—I loved that place. But when I was sixteen my father sold it out from under me. I suppose he thought I was never serious about running it.”

“But you were.”

“Yes. I’d even applied for a place at agricultural college. It caused a rift, or maybe showed one up. I wanted to get away. I moved to London. Then, as soon as I was old enough, I joined up. Of course I had no idea what the army would be like—the PT, the drill, the weapons, the field craft—but I took to it.”

“I don’t see you as a killer,” he said. “But that’s what soldiers do.”

“Not in my day,” she said. “Not in the British army anyhow. Peacekeeping: that’s what we go out in the world for. Of course sometimes you have to kill—or even wage war to keep the peace—and that’s a whole other set of issues.”

He lay back, staring at the stars. “It’s strange to hear you speak of your troubles with your family, failed communication, lost ambitions. I tend to imagine, when I think of it, that the people of a hundred and fifty years hence will be too wise for that—too evolved, as Professor Darwin would say!”

“Oh, I don’t think we’re very evolved, Josh. But we’re getting smarter about some things. Religion, for instance. Take Abdikadir and Casey. Devout Muslim and jock Christian, you’d think they are as far apart as can be. But they are both Oikumens.”

“That word is from the Greek—like ecumenical?”

“Yes. Over the last few decades we’ve been close to an all-out conflict between Christianity and Islam. If you take a long view, it’s absurd; both religions have deep common roots, and both are basically creeds of peace. But all the high-level attempts at reconciliation, conferences of bishops and mullahs, came to nothing. The Oikumens are a grassroots movement trying to achieve what all the top-level contact has failed to do. They are so low-profile they are almost underground, but they’re there, burrowing away.”

This talk made him realize how remote in time her age was, and how little he could understand of it. He said cautiously, “And has God been banished in your day, as some thinkers would predict?”

She hesitated. “Not banished, Josh. But we understand ourselves better than we used to. We understand why we need gods. There are some in my time who see all religion as a psychopathology. They point to those who are prepared to torture and kill their coreligionists, for the sake of a few percent difference in obscure ideology. But there are others who say that for all their flaws the religions are attempts to address the most basic questions about existence. Even if they tell us nothing about God, they’re surely telling us a great deal about what it means to be human. The Oikumens hope that by unifying religions, the result won’t be a dilution but an enrichment—like the ability to study a precious gem from many angles. And maybe these tentative steps are our best hope of a true enlightenment in the future.”

“It sounds utopian. And is it working?”

“Slowly, like the peacekeeping. If we’re building a utopia we’re doing it in the dark. But we’re trying, I guess.”

“It’s a beautiful vision,” he breathed. “The future must be a marvelous place.” He turned to her. “How strange all this is. How exhilarating—to be here with you—to be castaways in time, together! …”

She reached out and touched his lips with one fingertip. “Goodnight, Josh.” She rolled away, pulled her poncho over her body, and curled up.