Time Odyssey 3 - Firstborn by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

Time Odyssey 3 - Firstborn

33: FLIGHT

In the pale dawn light of the next morning, Bisesa and the others left the city, accompanied by a unit of Eumenes personal troops assigned to travel with them all the way to Gibraltar. A scared-looking Abdikadir was assigned too, to go on to America with Bisesa.

So, only twelve hours after falling out of the Eye, Bisesa was on the move again. She couldnt even bring her spacesuit with her. All she had of the twenty-first century was her phone, and the power packs from the suit.

Surprisingly, Emeline comforted her. Wait until we get to Chicago, she soothed. Ill take you to Michigan Avenue and well go shopping.

Shopping!

Even the first leg of the journey was astonishing.

Bisesa found herself in an open cart drawn by four beefy Neanderthals, naked as the day they were born, while Macedonian troopers jogged alongside. These Stone Men were the property of a man called Ilicius Bloom, who called himself Chicagos consul at Babylon. He was a shifty type Bisesa immediately distrusted.

They came to a railway terminus at a place called the Midden, a strange heaped-up little town of

houses and ladders and greasy smoke. The terminus itself was a confluence of narrow tracks, a place of huge sheds and brooding locomotives.

Their carriage was just a crude covered cart with wooden benches, and Emeline made a spiky comment about the contrast with Pullman class. But the locomotive was extraordinary. It looked like a huge animal, an immense black tank that sprawled over the narrow tracks and emitted belches of filthy smoke. Ben Batson said the locos ran on oil, which the trains hauled along in great tanker-cars; oil from Persia was more accessible to Alexander than coal, and Casey Othic had drawn up his designs that way.

In this unlikely train Bisesa was going to ride to the Atlantic coast. First they would head through Arabia to the great engine yards at Jerusalem, then south and west across the Nile delta where the King had reestablished Alexandria. And then they would journey all the way along the coast of North Africa, through what would have been Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, to the port of the small oceangoing fleet at the Pillars of Hercules.

Ilicius Bloom said the Midden was as far as he would go with them. He was nervous. Never known a night like it in Babylon in all these years, he said. Not since the War with the Son himself. Bloody Greeks. But I got my job to do; I got my contacts.

And you have a child, Emeline said sternly.

Not my responsibility, he said. The mothers, not mine. Anyhow Im sticking. Just dont let them forget Im here, back home. All right? Dont forget me!

Grove parted from them here too; he was catching a train back to New Troy. But he assigned Ben Batson to escort them to Gibraltar.

As the train pulled out, Bisesa thought she heard chanting coming from the loco.

The engineers are from the School of Othic, Abdikadir said. Casey Othic taught them well.

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