Time's Eye

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Time's Eye Page 29

by Arthur C. Clarke


  "But for all his wisdom, Alexander has the heart of a warrior, and there is a tension between his warmongering instincts and his will to build an empire. I don't think he always understands that himself. He was born to fight men, not locusts in a field, or silt in a canal. Let's face it, there are few men to be found out there to fight!" The Greek leaned toward Abdikadir. "The truth is, the running of Babylonia has devolved to a handful of those close to him. There is myself, Perdiccas, and Captain Grove." Perdiccas was one of Alexander's long-serving officers, and among his closest associates; Perdiccas, a commander of the Foot Companion infantrymen, had been formally given the title Hephaistion had enjoyed before his death, which meant something like "Vizier." Eumenes winked. "They need my Greek cleverness, you see, but I need Macedonians to work through. Of course we each have our own followers—especially Perdiccas! There are cliques and conspiracies, as there always have been. But as long as Alexander towers over us, we work together well enough. We all need Alexander; New Babylon needs its King. But—"

  "It doesn't need him hanging around here with nothing to do, soaking up manpower on monuments while there are fields to be tilled." Abdikadir grinned. "You want me to distract him?"

  Eumenes said smoothly, "I wouldn't put it like that. But Alexander has expressed curiosity to know if the greater world you described to us is still there to be had. And I think he wants to visit his father."

  "His father?"

  "His divine father, Ammon, who is also Zeus, at his shrine in the desert."

  Abdikadir whistled. "That would be quite a tour."

  Eumenes smiled. "All the better. There is the question of Bisesa, too."

  "I know. She's still locked away with that damn Eye."

  "I'm sure it's invaluable work. But we don't want to lose her to it: you moderns are too few to spare. Take her with you." Eumenes smiled. "I hear that Josh is back from Judea. Perhaps he might distract her..."

  "You're a wily devil, Secretary Eumenes."

  "One does what one must," said Eumenes. "Come. I'll show you round the shipyards."

  * * *

  The temple chamber was a rat's nest of cables and wires and bits of kit from the crashed chopper, some of them scarred where they had been crudely cut from the wreck, or even scorched by the fires that had followed the crash. This tangle enclosed the Eye, as if Bisesa had been seeking to trap it, not study it. But she knew that Abdikadir thought it was she who had become trapped.

  "The Discontinuity was a physical event," Bisesa said firmly. "No matter how mighty the power behind it. Physical, not magical or supernatural. And so it's explicable in terms of physics."

  "But," said Abdikadir, "not necessarily our physics."

  She glanced vaguely about the temple chamber, wishing she still had the phone to help her explain.

  Abdikadir, and a wide-eyed, scared-looking Josh, had settled down in a corner of the chamber. She knew Josh hated this place—not just for the awesome presence of the Eye, but because it had taken her away from him. Now Josh cracked a flask of hot tea with milk, English-style, as Bisesa tried to explain her current theories about the Eye, and the Discontinuity.

  Bisesa said, "Space and time were ruptured during the Discontinuity—ruptured and put back together again. We know that much, and in a way we can understand it. Space and time are in some senses real. You can bend space-time, for instance, with a strong enough gravity field. It's as stiff as steel, but you can do it...

  "But if space-time is stuff, what's it made of? If you look really closely—or if you subject it to enough bending and folding—well, you can see the grain. Our best idea is that space and time are a kind of tapestry. The fundamental units of the tapestry are strings, minuscule strings. The strings vibrate—and the modes of the vibration, the tones of the strings, are the particles and energy fields we observe, and their properties, such as their masses. There are many ways the strings can vibrate—many notes they can play—but some of them, the highest energy modes, have not been seen since the birth of the universe.

  "All right. Now, the strings need a space to vibrate in—not our own space-time, which is the music of the strings, but a kind of abstraction, a stratum. In many dimensions."

  Josh frowned, visibly struggling to keep up. "Go on."

  "The way the stratum is set up, its topology, governs the way the strings behave. It's like the sounding board of a violin. It's a beautiful image if you think about it. The topology is a property of the universe on the largest scale, but it determines the behavior of matter on the very smallest scales.

  "But imagine you cut a hole in the sounding board—make a change to the structure of the underlying stratum. Then you would get a transition in the way the strings vibrate."

  Abdikadir said, "And the effect of such a transition in the world we observe—"

  "The strings' vibrations govern the existence of the particles and fields that make up our world, and their properties. So if you go through a transition, those properties change." She shrugged. "The speed of light might change, for instance." She described her measurements of Doppler shifts in the reflections from the Eye of Marduk; perhaps that was something to do with stratum-level transitions.

  Josh leaned forward, his small face serious. "But, Bisesa—what about causality? You have the Buddhist monk, who Kolya described, living with his own younger self! Now, what if that old man were to strangle the boy—would the lama pop out of existence? And then there is poor Ruddy—dead, now, and so forever incapable of writing the novels and poems that you claimed, Bisesa, to have stored in your phone! What does your physics of strings and sounding-boards say about that?"

  She sighed and rubbed her face. "We're talking about a ripped-apart space-time. The rules are different. Josh, do you know what a black hole is...? Imagine a star collapsing, becoming so dense that its gravity field deepens hugely—in the end, not even the most powerful rocket could escape from its grasp—in the end, even light itself can't escape. Josh, a black hole is a tear in the orderly tapestry of space-time. And it eats information. If I throw an object into a black hole—a rock, or the last copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, it doesn't matter—almost all the information about it is lost, beyond retrieval, nothing but its mass, charge and spin.

  "Now, the interfaces between the chunks of Mir, drawn from different eras, were surely not like the event horizons of black holes. But they were space-time rips. And perhaps information is lost in the same way. And that's why causality has broken down. I think our new reality, here on Mir, is—knitting up. New causal chains are forming. But the new chains are part of this world, this reality, and have nothing to do with the old..." She rubbed tired eyes. "That's the best I can do. Depressing, isn't it? Our most advanced physics offers us nothing but metaphors."

  Abdikadir said gently, "You must write this down. Have Eumenes assign you a secretary to record it all."

  "In Greek?" Bisesa laughed hollowly.

  Josh said, "We are talking of the how of the Discontinuity. I am no closer to understanding the why."

  "Oh, there was a purpose," said Bisesa. She glared up at the Eye resentfully. "We just haven't figured it out yet. But they are up there, somewhere—beyond the Eye, beyond all the Eyes—watching us. Playing with us, maybe."

  "Playing?"

  She said, "Have you seen the way the Eye in the cage has been experimenting with the man-apes? They run around that damn net like rats with wires in their heads."

  Josh said, "Perhaps the Eye is trying to—" He spread his hands. "Stimulate the man-apes. Uplift them to greater intelligence."

  "Look in their eyes," said Bisesa coldly. "This has nothing to do with uplift. They are draining those wretched creatures. The Eyes aren't here to give. They are here to take."

  "We are no man-apes," said Abdikadir.

  "No. But maybe the tests they are running on us are just more subtle. Maybe the peculiar features of the Eye, like its non-Euclidean geometry, are there solely as a puzzle-box for us. And you think it was a
coincidence that Alexander and Genghis Khan were both brought here? The two greatest warlords in Eurasian history, knocking their heads together, by chance? They are laughing at us. Maybe that's all there is to this whole damn thing."

  "Bisesa." Josh took her hands in his. "You believe the Eye is the key to everything that is happening. Well, so do I. But you are letting the work destroy you. And what good will that do?"

  She looked at him and Abdikadir, alarmed. "What are you two cooking up?"

  Abdikadir told her about Alexander's planned European expedition. "Come away with us, Bisesa. What an adventure!"

  "But the Eye—"

  "Will still be here when you get back," Josh said. "We can delegate somebody else to continue your monitoring."

  Abdikadir said, "The man-apes can't leave their cage. You are a human. Show this thing it can't control you, Bisesa. Walk out."

  "Bullshit," she said tiredly. Then she added, "Casey."

  "What?"

  "Casey's got to run this shop. Not some Macedonian. And not some British, who would be worse, because he'd think he understands."

  Abdikadir and Josh exchanged a glance. "As long as I don't tell him he's got to do it," said Josh quickly.

  Bisesa glared up at the Eye. "I'll be back, you bastards. And be nice to Casey. Remember I know more about you than I've told them yet..."

  Abdikadir frowned. "Bisesa? What do you mean by that?"

  That I might know a way home. But she couldn't tell them that, not yet. She stood up. "When do we leave?"

  40. The Boating Lake

  THE JOURNEY WOULD BEGIN at Alexandria. They were to sail counterclockwise around the complicated shore of the Mediterranean: starting from Egypt, they would travel north and then west along the southern coast of Europe, all the way to the Straits of Gibraltar, and back along the northern coast of Africa.

  Nothing this King did was modest. He was, after all, Alexander the Great. And his jaunt around the Mediterranean, which his advisors had, wryly, taken to calling "Alexander's Boating Lake," was no exception.

  Alexander had been terribly disappointed to find that the city he had planted at the mouth of the Nile, his Alexandria-on-the-Nile, had been obliterated by the Discontinuity. But, undeterred, he ordered units of his army to begin the construction of a new city there, on the plan of the vanished old. And he set his engineers the task of building a new canal between the Gulf of Suez and the Nile. In the meantime he ordered the hasty construction of a temporary harbor at Alexandria, and had many of the ships he had constructed in India sailed up the Gulf of Suez, broken down into sections, and hauled overland.

  To Bisesa's amazement it took only a couple of months before the fleet was reassembled at the site of Alexandria and ready to sail. After a two-day festival of sacrifices and merriment in the tent compound that housed the city's workers, the fleet set off.

  At first Bisesa, separated from the Eye of Marduk for the first time in five years, found the voyage strangely relaxing. She spent a lot of time on deck, watching the land unravel past her, or listening to complicated cross-cultural discussions. Even the ocean was a curiosity. In her time the Mediterranean, recovering from decades of pollution, had become a mixture of game reserve and park, fenced off with great invisible barriers of electricity and sound. Now it was wild again, and she glimpsed dolphins and whales. Once she thought she saw the torpedo shape of an immense shark, bigger than anything from her day, she was sure.

  It was never warm, though. Often in the mornings she would smell frost in the air. Every year it seemed a little colder, though it was hard to be sure; she wished they had thought to keep climate records from the beginning. But despite the chill she found she had to keep out of the sun. The British took to wearing knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, and even the nutmeg-brown Macedonians seemed to burn. On the royal boats thick awnings were erected, and Alexander's doctors experimented with ointments of ass's butter and palm sap to block the suddenly intense rays of the sun. The storms of the early days after the Discontinuity had long passed, but clearly the climate remained screwed up.

  At night there was more strangeness too. Under the tented canopies Alexander and his companions drank the night away. But Bisesa would sit in the darkened quiet of the deck, watching land go by on which there was generally not a single light to be seen. She would peer up, if the sky was clear, at subtly altered constellations. But often she would see auroras, great walls and sheets and curtains of light, visibly three-dimensional structures towering over the darkened world. She had never known of auroras visible at such low latitudes, and she had an uneasy feeling about what they might portend; the Discontinuity wasn't cosmetic, and might have cut deep indeed into the fabric of the world.

  Sometimes Josh would sit with her. And sometimes, if the Macedonians were quiet, they would find a dark corner, and make love, or perhaps just huddle together.

  But most of the time she kept to herself. She suspected her friends were right, that she had been in danger of losing herself in the Eye. She needed to ground herself in the world once more, and even Josh was a distraction. But she knew she was hurting him, once again.

  * * *

  The ostensible point of the trip was to survey the new world, and every few days Alexander sent parties inland. He had selected a small force of Iranians, colonial Greeks and Agrarians to carry out these missions: highly mobile, flexible troops, brimming with initiative and daring. Some British were attached to each party, and each foray was accompanied by surveyors and mapmakers.

  The first reports were desolating, though. From the beginning the explorers reported wonders—strange rock formations, islands of extraordinary vegetation, even more extraordinary animals. But these marvels were all aspects of the natural world; of the works of mankind barely a trace survived. The ancient civilization of Egypt, for example, had vanished completely. The great blocks of its monumental buildings were uncut from their sandstone beds, and in the Valley of the Kings there was no sign of anything like humanity save a few of the cautious chimp-like creatures the British called man-apes, clinging to patches of forest.

  It was a relief to sail up the coast of Judea. Of Nazareth and Bethlehem there wasn't a trace—and no sign of Christ or His Passion. But close to the site of Jerusalem, under the command of British engineers, a small industrial revolution was being kick-started. Josh and Bisesa toured foundries and yards where cheerful British engineers and sweating Macedonian laborers, and a few bright Greek apprentices, constructed pressure vessels like giant kettles, and experimented with prototype steamship screws and lengths of railway track. The engineers were learning to communicate in an archaic Greek studded with English words like crankshaft and head of steam.

  As everywhere, there was a rush to build quickly, before the memories and capabilities of the first generation, transmitted across the Discontinuity, were lost. But Alexander himself, a lead-from-the-front warrior king, had turned out to be something of a skeptic when it came to technology. It had taken the construction of a prototype to impress him. This had been something like the famous aeolipile of Hero—in a lost timeline, a manufacturer of mechanical novelties in Alexandria—just a pressure vessel with two canted nozzles that would vent steam and spin around like a lawn sprinkler. But Eumenes had immediately seen the potential of this new form of power.

  It was a difficult job, though. The British had only a handful of the necessary tools, and the industry's infrastructure would have to be built literally from the ground up, including establishing mines for coal and iron ore. Bisesa thought it might be twenty years before it was possible to manufacture engines as efficient and powerful as James Watt's, say.

  "But it begins again," Abdikadir said. "Soon, all across Alexander's domain, there will be pumps laboring in mines dug deeper and deeper, and steamships cruising a shrinking Mediterranean, and great rail networks spreading east across Asia toward the capital of the Mongols. This new Jerusalem will be the workshop of the world."

  "Ruddy would have loved it
," Josh said. "He was always very impressed with machines. Like a new breed of being in the world, he said. And Ruddy said that transport is civilization. If the continents can be united by steamships and railway trains, perhaps this new world need see no more war, no more nations, indeed, save the single marvelous nation of mankind!"

  Abdikadir said, "I thought he said sewage was the basis of civilization."

  "That too!"

  Bisesa fondly took Josh's hand. "Your optimism is like a caffeine hit, Josh."

  He frowned. "I'll take that as a compliment."

  Abdikadir said, "But the new world is going to be nothing like ours. There are overwhelmingly more of them, the Macedonians, than us. If a new world-state does come into existence, it will be speaking Greek—if not Mongol. And it's likely to be Buddhist..."

  In a world stripped of its messiahs, the strange time-twin Buddhists in their temple deep in Asia had been gathering interest from both Macedonians and Mongols. The lama's circular life seemed a perfect metaphor for both the Discontinuity and the strange condition of the world it had left behind, as well as for the religion the lama gently espoused.

  "Oh," said Josh wistfully, "I wish I could spring forward through two or three centuries and see what grows from the seeds we are planting today...!"

  But as the journey continued such dreams, of building empires and taming worlds, came to seem petty indeed.

  * * *

  Greece was empty. No matter how hard Alexander's explorers probed the dense tangle of forest that coated much of the mainland, there were no signs of the great cities, no Athens, no Sparta, no Thebes. There were barely signs of humans at all: a few rough-looking tribesmen, said the explorers, and what they described as "sub-men." More in hope than anticipation Alexander sent a party north to Macedon, to see what might have survived of his homeland. It took weeks for the scouts to return, with negative news.

 

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