Abdikadir said, “You know, we are fortunate in having the Soyuz, and so much data. But we’ve lots of unanswered questions. That two-million-year frame is interesting, for instance.”

“How so?”

“Because two million years is about the date of the emergence of Homo erectus —the first hominid. Some predecessor species, like the pithecines the British captured, overlapped for a time, but—”

“You think the time frame has something to do with us ?”

“It may be just a coincidence—but why not one million years, why not twenty, or two hundred million? And the oldest parts of this world-quilt seem to be where we are oldest, and the youngest, like the Americas, where we reached last … Perhaps this new world is somehow a representative sampling of human, and hominid, history.”

She shuddered. “But so much of the world is empty.”

“The history of Homo sapiens is just the last chapter of the long, slow story of hominid evolution. We are mere dust, floating on the surface of history, Bisesa. Perhaps that’s what the state of this world shows us. It’s a fair sample across time.”

Josh tugged at Bisesa’s sleeve. “Something has occurred to me—it may not have struck you or the others—but then my perspective, as a man of the nineteenth century, is different …”

“Spit it out, Josh.”

“You look out at this new world, and you see scraps of your past. But I see a little of my future, too, in you. Why should you be the last—why, Bisesa, is there nothing of your own future?”

The thought struck her all at once, fully formed; she felt shocked it hadn’t occurred to her. She had no reply.

“Captain Grove! Over here!” Corporal Batson, on the edge of the parade ground, was waving. Grove hurried over; Bisesa and the others followed.

Batson was with a small group of soldiers, a British corporal and a number of sepoys, who were holding two men. These strangers had their hands tied behind their back. They were shorter, stockier than the sepoys, and more muscular. They both wore knee-length smocks of faded purple, tied at the waist with bits of rope, and strapped-up leather sandals. Their faces were broad and swarthy and roughly shaved, their black hair curly and cropped short. They were crusted with dried blood, and they were evidently terrified of the sepoys ’ guns; when a soldier playfully lifted his rifle, one of the pair cried out and tumbled to his knees.

Grove stood before this pair, fists on his hips. “Leave them alone, man, for God’s sake. Can’t you see they’re terrified?”

The sepoy backed off sheepishly. Ruddy stared at the newcomers gleefully.

Grove snapped, “Well, Mitchell, what have you brought home? What kind of Pashtuns are these?”

“Dunno, sir,” said the corporal. His accent was broad West Country English. “Not Pashtuns, I don’t think. Was patrolling down southwest …” Mitchell’s party had been sent by Grove to scout out the “army” they had spied down there; it seemed that the strangers were scouts sent the other way with the same idea in mind. “Actually there was three of ’em, on pudgy little horses like pit ponies. They had spears that they chucked and then they came at us with knives—three against half a dozen! We had to shoot the horses out from under them, and then one of the three dead, before these two would give up. Even when their horses went down they just rolled off and started tugging at ’em to get them up again, like they couldn’t understand they had been shot.”

Ruddy said dryly to Grove, “If you’d never seen a gun, Captain, you’d be dumbfounded if your horse just went down from under you like that.”

Captain Grove said, “What’s your point, sir?”

“That these men may come from a different time, a time more remote than any Pashtun.”

The two strangers listened to this conversation, mouths open. Then they jabbered excitedly, wide-eyed with fear, unable to drag their gaze from the sepoys’ guns.

“That sounds like Greek,” Ruddy muttered.

Josh said, “Greeks? In India?”

Bisesa held her phone up to the strangers. “Phone, can you—”

“I’m smart technology, but not that smart,” the phone said. “I think it’s some archaic dialect.”

Cecil de Morgan stepped out of the crowd, adjusting his mud-spattered morning jacket with an easy self-awareness. “A rather fine education was once wasted on me. I still recall a little of my Euripides …” He spoke rapidly to the strangers. They jabbered back. De Morgan held his hands up, obviously telling them to slow down, and spoke again.

After a minute of this de Morgan turned to Grove. “I think we’re getting through, Captain, if imperfectly.”

Grove said, “Ask them where they’re from. And when. ”

Ruddy said, “They wouldn’t understand the question, Captain. And we probably wouldn’t understand the answer.”

Grove nodded; Bisesa admired his imperturbability. “Then ask them who commands them.”

It took de Morgan a couple of tries to get that across. But Bisesa could understand the answer without interpretation.

“Al-e-han-dreh! Al-e-han-dreh! …”

Abdikadir stepped forward, his eyes alive with a wild surmise. “He did come this way. Is it possible? Is it possible ? …”

16. Reentry

The retro-rocket burn was brief, a push in the back. But it was enough to knock them out of orbit.

So it was done, the decision made, and whatever remained of Kolya’s life—minutes or years—was irrevocably shaped as a consequence.

After launch, reentry was the most dangerous part of a space mission, for the great energies expended to inject them into orbit now had to be dissipated in friction against the air. The only in-flight casualties of Kolya’s country’s space program had occurred at reentry, and he remembered those poor cosmonauts in his heart now, as he remembered the crew of the lost space shuttle Columbia. But there was nothing to do but wait. The Soyuz was designed to bring itself home without support from the ground, or instructions from its crew. Kolya, who had been trained as a pilot, longed to be less a passenger, to be more in control of events—to have a joystick in front of him, to do something to bring the ship home.

He glanced out of his window. The tangled jungles of South America, laced by cloud, passed for the last time beneath the prow of the spaceship. He wondered if anybody would ever see such a sight again—and how soon it would be before even the existence of such a place as this remote continent was forgotten. But as the Soyuz passed over the Americas toward the Atlantic he saw a storm, a creamy-white spiral, that sat like an immense spider across the Gulf of Mexico. Minor storms spun off across the Caribbean islands, Florida, Texas and Mexico. These children of the monster in the Gulf were themselves devastatingly powerful, and had scratched deep gouges into the forest that covered central America. Worse, the central mother storm system was itself edging north, and surely little would be spared from Houston to New Orleans. This was the second superstorm system they had seen in the last few days—the remnants of the first were still coursing across the eastern United States and the western Atlantic. But there was nothing the cosmonauts could do for anybody on the ground, not even warn them.

Right on time there was a series of bangs from above and below. The craft shuddered, feeling subtly lighter. Explosive bolts had detonated, jettisoning the descent compartment from the other two sections of the Soyuz: the rocket engines and their garbage would now burn up like meteors, to baffle whoever was down there on the ground.

They endured the next few minutes in a silence broken only by the ticking of their instruments, the humming of the air supply. But the small noises of the various gadgets were almost cozy, like being in a home workshop, Kolya thought. He knew he was going to miss this environment.