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What a place, Ruddy announced to Bisesa as they plodded across one particularly barren stretch. He gestured at the file ofsepoysahead. Scraps of raw humanity, crushed between the empty sky and the used-up earth underfoot. All of India is like this, one way or another, you know. It s just that the Frontier is even more so than the rest a sort of gritty quintessence. One finds it hard to retain one s dogmatism here. You re a strange mix of young and old, Ruddy, she said. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Why, thank you. I suppose all this footslogging seems primitive to you, with your flying machines and thinking boxes, the marvelous warmaking devilry of futurity! Not at all, she said. I m a soldier myself, remember, and I ve done my share of footslogging. Armies are all about discipline and focus, regardless of the technology. And anyhow British forces were sorry, are technologically advanced for their time. The telegraph can get a message from India to London in a few hours, you have the most advanced ships in the world, and your railways make inland journeys fast. You have what we d call a rapid-reaction capability. He nodded. A capability that has enabled the inhabitants of a small island to build and hold a global empire, madam. As a walking companion Ruddy was always interesting, if not always exactly likeable. He was certainly no soldier. Something of a hypochondriac, he complained continually about his feet, his eyes, his headaches, his back, and other ways in which he felt seedy. But he got on with it. During breaks he would sit in the shade of a boulder or a tree, and jot down notes or scraps of poetry in a battered notebook. When he was composing poetry he would sing a little melody, over and over, to serve as the basis of his meter. He was an untidy writer, and with his impulsive, jerky movements he blunted his pencils and tore his paper. Bisesa still couldn t believe it washim.And for his part, he kept trying to get her to tell him his future. We ve been through this, she said steadily. I don t know that I have the right. And I don t think you see how strange this experience is for me. How so? To me you are Ruddy, here and now, alive, vivid. And yet there is a shadow from the future over you, a shadow cast by the Kipling you will become. Good Lord, Josh muttered. I hadn t thought of that. And besides She waved a hand at the empty land. Things have changed, to say the least. Who knows if all the stuff in your biographies is still your true destiny? Ah, Ruddy said quickly. But if not if my lost future has become a phantasm, a teasing dream of a blue devil then what harm can there be in my hearing about it? Bisesa shook her head. Ruddy, isn t it enough that I ve heard your name, a hundred and fifty years from now? Ruddy nodded, sagely enough. You re right that bit of news is more than most men could ever know, and I should be grateful to whichever many-limbed deity is responsible for delivering it to me. Josh teased him. Ruddy, how can you be so equable about this? I think you re the most vain man I ever met. You know, Bisesa, he was convinced he was destined for greatness long before you appeared in our lives. Now he wants you to tell him in person a correspondent from the future I think he imagines all this dislocation has been arranged just for him! Ruddy s composure wasn t disturbed by this at all. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html They faced one more bit of strangeness on that first day s walk. They came to a disjunction in the ground. It was like a step, cut into the rubble-strewn ground, no more than half a meter high. The exposed wall of the cut was vertical and polished smooth, and the cut marched in a dead straight line from one horizon to another. It would be easy enough to jump up and over it, but the soldiers milled before it, uncertainly. Josh stood with Bisesa. Well, he said, what do you make of that? It looks to me like a place where somebody has stitched two bits of the world together. I think that s exactly what it is, Josh, she murmured. She squatted down and touched the sheer rock surface. This is a tectonically active region India crashing into Asia if you took two chunks of land, separated in time by a few hundred thousand years or more, this is the kind of shift in level you d expect . . . I scarcely understand you, Josh admitted. She stood up, brushing the dirt from her trousers. She reached forward, tentatively, until she had pushed her fingers over the line of disjunction, then she snatched her hand back. She muttered, What were you expecting, Bisesa a force field? Without further hesitation she leapt up to the upper layer, and walked a few paces ahead into the future, or the past. Josh and the others scrambled to follow, and they walked on. At the next rest stop, she took a look at the weal on Ruddy s cheek, what he called his Lahore sore. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |