Suited up, he scrambled back down into the descent compartment. The three of them strapped in. Musa had them don their helmets and gloves, and ran a pressure check on the suits.
For the last time the Soyuz passed over India, and their radio footprint reached Jamrud. The little speaker Sable had rigged to her ham radio gear crackled to life.
“ …Othic calling Soyuz, come in. Soyuz, Othic, come in …”
Musa called, “Soyuz here, Casey. How is our trusty capcom today?”
“The rain is pissing on me. More important, how are you?”
Musa glanced at his crew. “We are strapped in, tight as three bugs in a rug. Our systems check out, despite the additional time we have spent in orbit. We are ready for the descent.”
“That Soyuz is a tough old bird.”
“That she is. I will be sorry to say good-bye to her.”
“Musa, you understand we have no way of tracking you. We won’t know where you come down.”
“We know where you are,” Musa said. “We will find you, my friend.”
“God and Karl Marx willing.”
Kolya, suddenly, urgently, didn’t want this contact to be lost. They were all aware that Casey and his people were just another handful of castaways, as lost and helpless as they were. But at least Casey’s was a twenty-first century voice, reaching them from the ground; it was almost as if they had touched home again.
“I must say something.” Musa put his hand to his wraparound headset. “Casey, Bisesa, Abdikadir—and Sable and Kolya—all of you. We are far from home. We have come on a journey whose nature we can’t even grasp. And I think it’s clear that this new world, made of patches snipped from space and time, is not ours: it is made from pieces of Earth, but it is not Earth. So I think we should not call this new world, our world, ‘Earth.’ We need a new name.”
Casey said, “Like what?”
“I have thought about this,” Musa said. “Mir. We should call this new planet Mir.”
Sable guffawed. “You want to call a planet after an antique Russian space station?”
But Kolya said, “I understand. In our language the word Mir can mean both ‘world’ and ‘peace.’ ”
“We like the idea down here,” Casey said.
“Then Mir it is,” said Musa.
Sable shrugged. “Whatever,” she said cruelly. “So you got to name a world, Musa. But what does a name matter?”
Kolya murmured, “You know, I wonder where we would all be if we hadn’t happened to be in just that bit of the sky, just at that moment.”
Casey said, “Too much double dome horseshit for a jock like me. I can’t even keep … rain out … neck.”
Musa glanced at Kolya. “Your signal is breaking up.”
“Yeah … likewise … losing you …”
“Yes. Good-bye for now, Casey—”
“… won’t be a welcome back. Welcome to your new home—welcome to Mir! …”
The signal faded out.
15. New World
Not long after dawn, Bisesa and Abdikadir made for the wreck of the chopper. The overnight rain continued unrelenting, stippling the muddy parade ground with tiny craters. Abdikadir briefly pulled back the hood of his poncho and lifted up his face to the rain, tasting it. “Salty,” he said. “Big storms out there.”
A lean-to had been set up against the side of the downed chopper. Huddled under the canvas, Casey and the British were all so splashed with mud they looked as if they had been molded out of the earth themselves. But Cecil de Morgan wore his customary suit, and was almost dapper despite a few splashes. Bisesa would never like the man, but she admired his defiance of nature.
Captain Grove had requested a briefing from Casey on what had been discovered so far. SoCasey, propping himself up on a crutch, had used a bit of chalk to sketch an outline Mercator-projection world map onto the chopper’s hull, and he had set up a softscreen on a trestle chair before it. “Okay,” Casey said briskly. “First the big picture.” The dozen officers and civilians, standing in the uncertain shelter of the lean-to, clustered to see, as images of a changed world flickered by.
The shapes of the continents were familiar enough. But within their coastlines the land was a jigsaw of irregular slices, of browning green or melting white, showing how the peculiar fragmentation of time had occurred all across the planet. Few people seemed to have made it through the Discontinuity. The night side of the world was almost complete darkness, broken only by a scattered handful of brave, defiant man-made lights. And then there was the weather. Great storm systems boiled out of the oceans, or the poles, or the hearts of the continents, and thunderstorms spanned continents with branching purple-gray pyrotechnics.
Casey tapped the world map. “We think we’re looking at landmasses that have been replaced, in patches, by bits of themselves from earlier eras. But so far as we can tell—given the Soyuz wasn’t properly equipped, and all—there’s only a slight shift in the overall position of the landmasses. That limits us in time, even though we think the small shifts that do exist might be enough to trigger volcanism, later on.”
Already Ruddy had his hand up. “Of course the landmasses haven’t shifted, as you put it. Why should they? …”
Casey growled, “For you, Alfred Wegener is a five-year-old boy. Tectonic plates. Drifting continents. Long story. Take my word.”
Bisesa asked, “How deep in time, Casey?”
“We don’t think there can be any scrap that’s more than two million years old.”
Ruddy laughed, a little wildly. “Only two million years—that’s a comfort, is it?”
Casey said, “The time slices presumably extend up from the surface of the Earth, and down at least some distance to its center—maybe all the way. Maybe each slice is a great spiky wedge of core, mantle, crust and sky.”
Grove said, “And each patch brought its own vegetation, inhabitants, a column of air above it?”
“Looks like it. It’s the mixing of the patches that we think is stirring up the weather.” He tapped the softscreen. It displayed images of massive tropical storms, creamy-white swirls pouring up from the southern Atlantic to batter the eastern American seaboard, and fronts of bubbling black cloud laced across Asia. Casey said, “Some of the slices must be from summer, some from winter. And the Earth’s climate fluctuates on longer cycles—Ice Ages come and go—and that’s all mixed in too.” He showed images of a slab of icebound land, a neat near-rectangle set square over the site of Paris in France. “Hot air rises above cold, and that causes the winds; hot air holds more water vapor than cold air, and over cool land it dumps it out, and that’s your rain. And so on. As all that works itself out, we get this screwed-up weather.”
Abdikadir said, “How far do these slices extend upward?”
“We don’t know,” Casey said.
“Not as far as the Moon, surely,” piped up Corporal Batson. “Or that body would have vanished, or be scattered about its orbit.”
Casey raised his eyebrows. “Good point. Hadn’t thought of that. But we do know it reaches out at least as far as low Earth orbit.”
“The Soyuz ,” Bisesa said.
“Yeah. Bis, their clocks agree with ours, to the second. They must have been flying overhead—pure chance—when the Discontinuity hit, and they were brought along with us.” He rubbed his fleshy nose. “We’ve tried to map the time slices, and in some places we can. Here’s the Sahara …” He showed patches of greenery in the desert, mostly irregularly shaped, but some were bounded by geometrically pure arcs and straight lines. “One patch of desert looks much the same as another, even if they’re half a million years apart in time. Still, it’s possible to date some of the patches, roughly, from geological changes.”
He turned and drew a big chalk asterisk on central Africa. “This seems to be the oldest area of all. You can tell by the width of the Rift Valley … And look; the Sahara doesn’t extend nearly so far south, and there are lakes, patches of green. That’s just an average, though; on the ground it’s all mixed up.” More images blurred by. “We think much of Asia is from the last couple of thousand years or so. You see scattered human habitations out on those steppes, but nothing advanced—streaks of smoke from campfires, no electric lights. The biggest concentration of people looks to be here. “He tapped an area north of China, in eastern Asia. “We don’t know who they are.”