“At last we’re out of here,” Sable grunted earnestly. “Civilization here we come.”

“There is a Russian saying,” Kolya warned. “Out of the frying pan …”

“Russian my ass.”

The cosmonauts were prodded toward the cart. They had to climb aboard, hands still bound. As they sat down on the bare floor a Mongol man, strong-looking even by the standards of these people, approached them, and began to harangue them loudly. His leathery face was creased like a relief map.

Sable said, “What’s he saying?”

“No idea. But we’ve seen him before, remember. I think this is the chief. And his name is Scacatai.” The chief had come to inspect them during their first hours of captivity.

“This little asshole is going to try to make capital out of us. What were those words you used?”

“Darughachi. Tengri. ”

Sable glared at Scacatai. “Did you get that? Tengri, Tengri. We’re ambassadors from God. And I’m not about to ride off to the Pleasure Dome with my arms tied behind my back. Let us loose, or I’ll fry your sorry butt with a thunderbolt.”

Scacatai, of course, understood nothing but the fragments of Mongolian, but Sable’s tone carried the day. After more mutually incomprehensible argument, he nodded to one of his sons, who cut Sable’s and Kolya’s bonds.

“Good work,” Kolya said, rubbing his wrists.

“Piece of cake,” Sable said. “Next.” She started pointing, at the Soyuz, and at the parachute silk stacked up against one of the yurts. “I want what’s mine. Bring that silk to the cart. And the stuff you stole out of the Soyuz …” It took much gesturing to get this point across, but at length, with much bad grace, Scacatai ordered his people to load up the parachute, and bits of kit were brought out of the yurt. Soon the cart was incongruously piled high with parachute, spacesuits and other gear. Kolya checked that the emergency medical supplies and flare guns were there—and the components of the ham radio gear, their only possible line to the outside world, and Casey and the others in India.

Sable rummaged through the gear and dug out a life raft. She handed it ceremonially to Scacatai. “Here you go,” she said. “A gift from Heaven. When we’ve gone, pull this toggle like so. You dig?” She mimed the action repeatedly until it was clear that the Mongol understood. Then she bowed, and Kolya followed suit, and they clambered onto the cart.

The horsemen set off, one of them leading the cart horses by a rope, and the cart lumbered into motion. “Thanks for the mutton, buster,” Sable called back.

Kolya studied her. Bit by bit, starting from a position of utter weakness and vulnerability, she was assuming control of the situation. In the days since the landing she seemed to have burned her fear out of herself by an effort of will—but her intensity of purpose made Kolya uneasy. “You have nerve, Sable.”

Sable grinned. “A woman doesn’t get to the top of the Astronaut Office without learning to be tough. Anyhow, it’s nice to leave with a little more style than when we arrived—”

There was a loud bang, a chorus of confused cries. Scacatai had pulled the ripcord on the raft. The Mongols stared in open-mouthed astonishment at this bright orange artifact that had exploded into existence out of nowhere. Before the village had receded into the distance, the children were starting to bounce on the raft’s inflated rim.

The party made remarkably rapid progress. For hours on end the riders kept their horses moving at a trot, a pace that Kolya was sure would quickly exhaust the animals, but the horses were obviously bred for such treatment. The Mongols ate in the saddle, and expected the cosmonauts to do the same. They didn’t even stop for toilet breaks, and Sable and Kolya learned to keep out of the way when a rider’s volley of urine was caught by the wind.

As they traveled on, Kolya would sometimes glimpse sparks in the distance, floating silently above the ground. He wondered if these were examples of the “Eyes” Casey had described in India. If so, were the Eyes a worldwide phenomenon? He would have welcomed the chance to study one, but their track never brought them close, and the Mongols showed no curiosity.

Before the sun had climbed to its highest, they arrived at a waystation. It was just a huddle of yurts, lost in the middle of the emptiness of the steppe, but several horses were tied up outside, and Kolya glimpsed a herd of others, moving with the silence of distance across the steppe. As they approached, the riders rang a bell, and the keepers of the station came running out. The riders quickly negotiated with the keepers, exchanged their horses, and were on their way.

Sable grumbled, “I could have done with a break. The suspension on this thing is a little stiff.”

Kolya gazed back at the station. “I think this must be the yam .”

“The what?”

“At one time the Mongols held all of Eurasia from Hungary to the South China Sea. They kept it all unified with fast communications—a system of routes and waystations where you could change your horses. The Romans had a similar system. A courier could cross two or three hundred kilometers in a day.”

“This isn’t exactly a road. We’re just riding over empty steppe. So how did these guys know how to find this place?”

“Mongols learn to ride before they can walk,” Kolya said. “Crossing this vast plain, they have to be expert navigators. They probably don’t even have to think about it.”

Even when night came the Mongols rode on. They slept in the saddle, with one or two of them leading the others. Sable found the jolting of the cart kept her awake. But Kolya, exhausted by two sleepless nights, overstressed, overwhelmed by the oxygen-rich air of the steppe, slept from sunset to dawn.

At times, though, the riders did hesitate. They had to cross peculiar straight-line boundaries between bare, baked-dry steppe and areas of bright green grass, and other places where flowers lay scattered, wilting—and other areas, stranger yet, where banks of snow lay half-melted in pools of shadow.

It was obvious to Kolya that these suspiciously straight borders were transitions between one time slice and another, and that this steppe was stitched together from a myriad fragments drawn from different times of the year—even different eras. But just as the snow was melting in the warmth, the spring flowers were quickly wilting, and the summer grass screeds were mottled and curled. Perhaps there would be some recovery, some knitting-together, Kolya thought, after a full cycle of seasons. But he suspected that it would take more than a single year to assemble a new ecology from these timeshifted bits of the old.

The Mongol nomads could understand none of this, of course. Even the horses bucked and whinnied as they crossed these disturbing transitions.

Once the riders, evidently baffled, stopped at a site that seemed as empty and undistinguished as the rest of the steppe. Perhaps, Kolya speculated, a waystation had been sited here, and the riders couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t found it. The station was lost, not in space, but in time. The nomads, evidently a practical people, took this in their stride. After a brief discussion marked with much shoulder-shrugging, they moved on, but at a slower pace; evidently they had decided that if they couldn’t rely on the waystations they should spare the horses.

In the afternoon of the second day, the character of the country began to change, becoming more broken and hilly. Now they rode through shallow valleys, sometimes fording streams, and passed copses of larch and pine. It was a much more human landscape, and Kolya felt relieved to be away from the oppressive unchanging immensity of the steppe. Even the Mongols seemed to be happier. As they pushed through one small stand of trees, one brute-faced young man leaned down to pluck handfuls of wild geraniums that he attached to his saddle.