A new draft operation order was transmitted to
“We’re to shadow the Q-bomb,” Edna said, scanning the order.
“How far?” John Metternes asked.
“All the way to Earth, if we have to.”
“Christ on a bike, that might be twenty months!”
“Libby, can we do it?”
The AI said, “We will be coasting, like the bomb. So propellant and reaction mass won’t be a problem. If the recycling efficiency stays nominal the life shell will be able to sustain crew functions.”
“Nicely put,” John said sourly.
“You’re the engineer,” Edna snapped. “Do you think she’s right?”
“I guess. But what’s the point, Captain? Our weapons are useless.”
“Best to have somebody on point than nobody. Something might turn up. John, Libby, start drawing up a schedule. I’ll go through the draft order, and if we’re sure it’s feasible from a resources point of view we’ll send our revision back to Earth.”
“Bonza trip
Edna glanced at her softscreen. There was the bomb, silent, gliding ever deeper into the solar system, visible only by the stars it reflected. Edna tried to work out what she was going to say to Thea — how to explain she wasn’t coming home any time soon.
32: Alexander
Bisesa was given a room of her own in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, which Alexander had, inevitably, taken over. Eumenes’s staff provided clothes in the elaborate Persian style that had been adopted by the Macedonian court.
And Emeline called in and gave her some toiletries: a comb, creams for her face and hands, a tiny bottle of perfume, even some archaic-looking sanitary towels. They were a selection from the travel kit of a nineteenth- century lady. “You looked as if you didn’t arrive with much,” she said.
The gesture, of one woman far from home to another, made Bisesa feel like crying.
She slept a while. She was weighed down by the sudden return to Earth gravity, three times that of Mars. And her body clock was all over the place; as before, this new Discontinuity, her own personal time slip, left her with a kind of jet lag.
And then she did cry, for herself, the shock of it all, and for the loss of Myra. But these last few extraordinary weeks in which they had been traveling together across space had probably been as long as she had spent alone with Myra since the days of the sunstorm.
That was some consolation, she told herself, even though it seemed they had hardly spoken, hardly got to know each other.
She longed to know more about Charlie. She hadn’t even seen a photo of her granddaughter.
She tried to sleep again.
She was woken by a diffident serving girl, maybe a slave. It was early evening. Time for her reception with Eumenes, and perhaps Alexander.
She bathed and dressed; she had worn Babylonian robes before, but she still felt ridiculous dressed up like this.
The grand chamber to which she was led was a pocket of ob-scene wealth, plastered with tapestries and fine carpets and exquisite furniture. Even the pewter mug a servant gave her for her wine was studded with precious stones. But there were guards everywhere, at the doorways, moving through the hall, armed with long
Amid the soldiers’ iron and the silver and gilt of the decora-tions, courtiers walked, chatting, dismissive. They wore exotic clothes, predominantly purple and white. Their faces were painted so heavily, men and women, it was hard to tell how old they were.
They noticed Bisesa and they were curious, but they were far more interested in each other and their own web of rivalries.
And moving through the crowd were Neanderthals. Bisesa recognized them from distant ice-fringe glimpses during her last time on Mir. Now here they were in court. Mostly very young, they walked with their great heads bowed, their eyes empty, their powerful farmers’ hands carrying delicate trays. They wore purple robes every bit as fine as the courtiers’, as if for a joke.
Bisesa stood before one extraordinary tapestry. Covering a whole wall, it was a map of the world, but inverted, with south at the top. A great swath of southern Europe, North Africa, and central Asia reaching down into India was colored red and bordered in gold.
“Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai,” said Captain Grove.
Accompanying Emeline, he wore his British army uniform, and she a sensible-looking white blouse and long skirt with black shoes. They both looked solidly nineteenth-century amid all the gaudiness of Alexander’s court.
“I envy you your outfit,” Bisesa said to Emeline, self-conscious in her Babylonian gear.
“I carry my own steam iron,” Emeline said primly.
Grove asked Bisesa, “How was my pronunciation?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Bisesa confessed. “Yeh-lu?…”
Grove sipped his wine, lifting his mustache out of the way.
“Perhaps you never met him. He was Genghis Khan’s most senior advisor, before Alexander’s Mongol War. A Chinese prisoner-of-war made good. After the war — you’ll recall Genghis was assassinated — his star waned. But he came here, to Babylon, to work with Alexander’s scholars. The result was maps like that.” He indicated the giant tapestry. “All a bit unnecessarily expensive, of course, but pretty accurate as far as we could see. Helped Alexander no end in planning his campaigns of conquest — and in marking its extent later.
“Alexander’s campaigns were remarkable, Bisesa — an astounding feat of logistics and motivation. He built a whole fleet in the great harbor here at Babylon, and then had to engineer the whole length of the Euphrates to make the river navigable. He had his fleet circumnavigate Africa, raiding the shore to survive. Meanwhile from Babylon his troops drove east and west, laying rail tracks and military roads, and planting cities everywhere. Took him five years to make ready, then another ten years of campaign-ing before he had taken it all, from Spain to India. Of course he drained the strength of his people in the process…”
Emeline touched Bisesa’s arm. “Where is your telephone?”
Bisesa sighed. “It insisted on being taken back to the temple so that Abdi could download as much of his astronomy observations as possible. It is curious.”
Emeline frowned. “I admit I struggle to follow your words.
What is strangest of all is the obvious affection you feel for this phone. But it is a machine. A thing!”
Captain Grove smiled. “Oh, it’s not so unusual. Many of my men have fallen in love with their guns.”
“And in my time,” Bisesa said, “many of our machines are sentient, like the phone. As conscious as you or me. It’s hard not to feel empathy for them.”
Eumenes approached, a rather chill figure who scattered the flimsy courtiers, though he was as gaudily dressed as they were.
“You speak of astronomy. I hope the astronomy we perform here is of a quality to be useful to you,” he said. “The Babylonian priest-hood had a tradition of observing long before we came here. And the telescopes designed by the engineers of the Othic School are as fine as we could make them. But who knows what one may read in a sky
