So the sailors would vary their rations with the contents of tidal pools: razor clams, oysters and sometimes mussels. Once, as Bisesa took part in one of these enjoyable scavenging expeditions, a whale broke the surface of the water, its blowhole plume erupting perilously close to some of the anchored ships. At first the Macedonians were terrified, though the Indians laughed. A troop of foot soldiers ran into the sea, yelling and hammering at the water with their shields and spears and the flats of their swords. The next time the whale surfaced it was a hundred meters further away from shore, and it was not seen again.
Where the army passed, its scouts surveyed the land and made maps, as Alexander’s army had always done. Mapmaking had also been a crucial tool for the British in establishing and holding their own empire, and now the Greek and Macedonian scouts were joined by British cartographers armed with theodolites. Everywhere they went they drew new maps and compared them with the old, from before the Discontinuity.
They encountered few people, however.
Once the army scouts found a crowd of around a hundred, men, women and children, they said, dressed in strange, bright clothes that were nevertheless falling to rags. They were dying of thirst, and they spoke in a tongue none of the Macedonians could recognize. None of the British or Bisesa’s party got a firsthand glimpse of this crowd. Abdikadir speculated that they could have come from a hotel from the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries. Cut off when their home vanished into the corridors of time, left to wander, such refugees were like negative-image ruins, Bisesa thought. In a normally flowing history the people would vanish and leave their city slowly to decay into the sand; here it was the other way round … Alexander’s troops, ordered to protect the baggage train, had killed a couple of refugees as an example, and driven the rest off.
If people were rare, the Eyes were a continual presence. As they worked along the coast, they found Eyes hovering like lamps along the shoreline, one every few kilometers, and in a loose array covering the interior.
Most people ignored them, but Bisesa remained queasily fascinated by the Eyes. If an Eye had popped into existence in the old world—if it had come to hover over that old favorite of UFO dreamers, the White House lawn—it would have been an extraordinary event, the sensation of the century. But most people didn’t even want to talk about it. Eumenes was a notable exception; he would stare at the Eyes, hands on hips, as if challenging them to respond.
Despite the attrition of the march, Ruddy’s spirits seemed to rise as the days passed. He wrote when he could, in a tiny, crabbed, paper-preserving hand. And he speculated on the state of the world, expounding to whoever would listen.
“We should not stop at Babylon,” he said. He, Bisesa, Abdikadir, Josh, Casey and Cecil de Morgan were sitting under the awning of an officers’ ship; the rain rattled on the awning, and hissed on the surface of the sea. “We should go on—explore Judea, for example. Think about it, Bisesa! The ethereal eye of your space boat could make out only scattered settlements there, a few threads of smoke. What if, in one of those mean huts, even now the Nazarene is taking His first lusty breath? Why, we would be like ten thousand magi, following a strange star.”
“And then there is Mecca,” Abdikadir said dryly.
Ruddy spread his hands expansively. “Let’s be ecumenical about it!”
Bisesa asked, “So, after your complicated origins, you’ve ended up a Christian, Ruddy?”
He stroked his mustache. “Put it this way. Believe in God. Not sure about the Trinity. Can’t accept eternal damnation—but there must be some retribution.” He smiled. “I sound like a Methodist! My father would be pleased. Anyhow I’d be delighted to meet the chap who started it all.”
But Josh said, “Be careful what you wish for, Ruddy. This is not some vast museum through which we travel. Perhaps you would find Christ in Judea. But what if not? It’s unlikely after all—in fact it’s far more likely that all of the Judea we find here has been ripped out of a time before Christ’s birth.”
“I was born after the Incarnation,” Ruddy said firmly. “There is no doubt about that. And if I could summon up one grandfather after another in a great chain of predecessors I could have them attest to that fact.”
“Yes,” said Josh. “But you are not in the history of your grandfathers any more, Ruddy. What if there has been no Incarnation here? Then you are a saved man in a pagan world. Are you Virgil, or Dante?”
“I—ah.” Ruddy fell silent, his broad brow furrowed. “It would take a better theologian than I to puzzle that out. Let’s add it to the itinerary—we must seek Augustine, or Aquinas, and ask them what they think. And what about you, Abdikadir? What if there is no Mecca—what if Muhammad has yet to be born?”
Abdikadir said, “Islam is not time-bound, as Christianity is. Tawhid, unicity, remains true: on Mir as on Earth, in the past as in the future, there is no god but God, and every particle of the universe, every leaf on every tree, is an expression of His immanence. And the Quran is the unmediated word of God, in this world as in any other, whether His prophet exists here to speak it or not.”
Josh nodded. “It’s a comforting point of view.”
“As salaam alaikum,”said Abdikadir.
“Anyhow it may be even more complicated than that,” Bisesa said. “Mir didn’t come from one time-frame, remember. It is a patchwork, and that surely applies in Mecca and Judea. Perhaps there are bits of Judea dating from before Christ’s birth—but bits later, where He once walked. So does the Incarnation apply to this universe, or not?”
Ruddy said, “How strange it is! We are each granted twenty-five thousand days of our lives, say. Is it possible that we too are fragmented—that each day has been cut out of our lives like a square from a quilt?” He waved a hand at the ash-gray sky. “Is it possible there are twenty-five thousand other Ruddys out there somewhere, each picking up his life where he can?”
“One of you mouthy assholes is enough for me,” Casey growled, his first contribution to the debate, and he took a pull from his skin of watered-down wine.
Cecil de Morgan listened to such talk, mostly silently. Bisesa knew he had formed a loose alliance with Alexander’s Greek Secretary, Eumenes, and de Morgan reported back such speculations to his new partner. They were both in it for themselves, of course: Eumenes’ priority was his own jostling with Alexander’s other courtiers, notably Hephaistion; and Cecil was, as always, playing both ends against the middle. But everybody knew that. And Bisesa saw no harm in information flowing through Cecil to Eumenes. They were all in this together, after all.
The fleet sailed on.