13. Lights in the Sky

Things didn’t get any easier. It was a rare day now when the sky didn’t bubble with cloud. Jamrud began to be plagued by rainstorms, and sometimes hail, that would boil up out of nowhere. The sepoys said they had never known such weather.

The British officers, though, had more on their minds than the weather. They were increasingly distracted by the sketchy reports their scouts brought back of an army of some kind to the southwest, and they were scrambling for ways to bring back more complete information.

But for all their difficulties the castaways of Jamrud were learning a great deal more about their new world, for as the crew of the Soyuz followed their lonely cycles around the planet, they downloaded images and other data to Casey’s improvised receiving station. Casey used what was left of the Little Bird’s avionics to store, process and display the data.

The Soyuz ’s storm-streaked images of a transformed world were bewildering, but they captivated all who studied them, in different ways. Bisesa thought that for Casey and Abdikadir, even though the images in themselves were disturbing, they were a reassuring reminder of home, where they had been used to having the ability to call up images like this whenever they chose. But soon the Soyuz must fall to earth, and their sole eye in the sky would close.

As for the men of 1885, Ruddy, Josh, Captain Grove and the rest were at first simply gosh-wowed by the display softscreens and other gadgets: while Casey and Abdi were comforted by familiarity, Ruddy and the others were distracted by novelty. Then, once they got used to the technology, the British were struck by the marvel of looking at images of a world from space. Even though the Soyuz was only a few hundred kilometers up, a glimpse of a curved horizon, of cloud banks sailing on layers of air, or of familiar, recognizable features, like India’s teardrop shape or Britain’s fractal coastlines, would send them into paroxysms of wonder.

“I had never imagined such a godlike perspective was possible,” Ruddy said. “Oh, you know how big the world is, in round, fat numbers.” He thumped his belly. “But I had never felt it, not in here. How small and scattered are the works of man—how petty his pretensions and passions—how like ants we are!”

But the nineteenth-century crowd soon got past that and learned to interpret what they were seeing; even the stiffer military types like Grove surprised Bisesa with their flexibility. It took only a couple of days after the first download before the chattering, awestruck crowds around Casey’s softscreen began to grow more somber. For, no matter how marvelous the images and the technology that had produced them, the world they revealed was sobering indeed.

Bisesa took copies of all this to store in their only significant portable electronic device, her phone. The data was precious, she saw. For a long time these images would be all they would have to tell them what was on the other side of the horizon. And besides, she agreed with cosmonaut Kolya that there should be a record of where they had come from. Otherwise people would eventually forget, and believe that this was all there ever had been.

But the phone had its own agenda. “Show me the stars,” it said, in its small whisper.

So, each evening, she would set it up on a convenient rock, where it sat like a patient metallic insect, its small camera peering into the sky. Bisesa put up little screens of waterproofed canvas to protect it. These observation sessions could last hours as the phone waited for a glimpse of some key part of the sky through the scudding clouds.

One evening, as Bisesa sat with her phone, Abdikadir, Josh and Ruddy walked out of the fort to join her. Abdikadir brought a tray of drinks, fresh lemonade and sugar water.

Ruddy grasped the nature of the phone’s project readily enough. By mapping the sky, and comparing the stars’ positions to the astronomical maps stored in its database, the phone could determine the date. “Just like astronomers at the Babylonian court,” he said.

Josh sat close to Bisesa, and his eyes were huge in the gathering dark of the evening. He could not be called handsome. He had a small face, with protruding ears, and cheeks pushed up by smiling; his chin was weak, but his lips were full, and oddly sensual. He was an endearing package, she admitted to herself—and, though she felt obscurely guilty about it, as if she was somehow betraying Myra, his obvious affection for her was coming to matter to her.

He said, “Do you think that even the stars have been washed around the sky?”

“I don’t know, Josh,” she said. “Perhaps that’s my sky up there; perhaps it’s yours; perhaps it’s nobody’s. I want to find out.”

Ruddy said, “Surely by the twenty-first century you have a much deeper understanding of the nature of the cosmos, even of time and space themselves, than we poor souls.”

“Yes,” said Josh eagerly. “We may not know why all this has happened to us—but surely, Bisesa, armed with your advanced science, you can speculate on how the world has been turned upside down …”

Abdikadir put in, “Maybe. But it’s going to be a little difficult to talk about spacetime, as you wouldn’t have even heard of special relativity for another couple of decades.”

Ruddy looked blank. “Of special what?”

The phone whispered dryly, “Start with chasing a light beam. If it was good enough for Einstein—”

“All right,” Bisesa said. “Josh, think about this. When I look at you, I don’t see you as you are now. I see you as you were a little way in the past, a few fractions of a second ago, the time it took starlight reflecting from your face to reach my eye.”

Josh nodded. “So far so clear.”

Bisesa said, “Suppose I chased the light from your face, going faster and faster. What would I see?”

Josh frowned. “It would be like two fast trains, one overtaking the other—both fast, but from the point of view of the one, the other seems to move slowly.” He smiled. “You would see my cheeks and mouth moving like a glacier when I smiled to greet you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Good, you’ve got the idea. Now, Einstein—ah, he was a physicist of the early twentieth century, an important one—Einstein taught us this isn’t just an optical effect. It’s not just that I see your face move more slowly, Josh. Light is the most fundamental way we have of measuring time—and so, the faster I travel, the slower I see time pass for you. ”

Ruddy pulled at his mustache. “Why?”

Abdikadir laughed. “Five generations of schoolteachers since Einstein have failed to come up with a good answer to that, Ruddy. It’s just the way the universe is built.”

Josh grinned. “How wonderful—that light should be forever young, forever ageless—perhaps it’s true that God’s angels are creatures of light itself!”

Ruddy shook his head. “Angels or no angels, this is damned fishy. And what does it have to do with our present situation?”

“Because,” Bisesa said, “in a universe where time itself adjusts around you depending on how fast you travel, the concept of simultaneity is a little tricky. What is simultaneous for Josh and Ruddy, say, may not be simultaneous for me. It depends on how we move, how the light passes between us.”

Josh nodded, but he was evidently uncertain. “And this isn’t simply an effect of timing—”

“Not timing, but physics,” Bisesa said.

“I think I see,” Josh said. “And if that can happen, it may be possible to take two events that were not simultaneous—let’s say, a moment in my life in 1885, and a moment in Bisesa’s in 2037—and bring them together so that they touch, so closely we can even …”

“Kiss?” said Ruddy, mock-solemnly.

Poor Josh actually blushed.