Time's Eye by Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter Page B

March—if this actually was still a slice of March 1885, of course—and at night, Bisesa was given to understand, the temperature would drop below freezing. Still, Bisesa expected to be comfortable enough in her flight suit, which was made of all-weather fabric manufactured in 2037. The British soldiers were much more poorly equipped, with their serge jackets and pith helmets, and laden down with heavy-duty kit, arms, ammunition, bedding, rations and water. But the men didn’t complain. They were evidently used to their gear, and knowledgeable about ways around its shortcomings, such as using urine to soften boot leather.
    As they advanced, following military drill, Batson sent picketing troops out ahead. In a country crowded by hillocks and ridges, three or four of them would clamber up the next commanding feature, covered by the rifles of their comrades, to be sure there were no Pashtuns hiding there. As they made their way further north, some of the hills rose as high as three hundred meters or so above the track, and it could be forty minutes or more before the pickets had reached the high point, but even so the rest of the column would not be moved forward until they were in position and had confirmed the way ahead was clear. It was frustrating, but the routine enforced plenty of rest halts, and they still made respectable progress.
    As they marched they found more Eyes. There would be one every few kilometers or so, hovering silently, all apparently identical to the one at Jamrud. Batson marked their positions on a map. But soon these became as familiar as the first Eye, and nobody seemed to notice them—nobody save Bisesa. She found it hard to turn her back on an Eye, as if they really were eyes, watching her pass.
    “What a place,” Ruddy announced to Bisesa as they plodded across one particularly barren stretch. He gestured at the file of
sepoys
ahead. “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.
    “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 was
him.
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