But the breeze changed, coming from the north, and she tasted ice. She quailed. Suddenly she longed for the smells of cooking, the clattering of machines, the high, gull-like voices of the soldiers. She had spent too long in her cage; she missed it.
Grasper, though, shared none of her mother’s hesitation. She knuckle-walked forward, chimp-like, exploring the rocky ground. It seemed rich in texture compared to the swept-bare, stamped-down dirt floor of the cage. Here was a rock that fit neatly in her hand, there a dry reed that folded and bent and twisted with ease.
Clutching the rock, Grasper unfolded her legs and stood upright. She peered across the broken ground toward the mountains, and the ice.
In the north the cold was gathering. The new volcanic island in the Atlantic had deflected the Gulf Stream, the flow of southern water that had kept northern Europe anomalously warm for millennia. The Gulf Stream’s loss had already had impacts on agriculture as far south as Babylonia. Now it was going to get worse. This year, autumn would come early, and by midwinter, massive Arctic superstorms would erupt with fury over the continents, depositing more snow in a few days than would once have been seen in five or ten years.
For two million years before the Discontinuity, the ice had come and gone from its fastnesses at the poles, its complex cycles governed by subtleties of Earth’s passage around the sun. This new world, Mir, thrown together from fragments of the old, had at first oscillated unsteadily, but as that first motion damped it was settling down to a new pattern of cycles: a pattern that, in the short term, promoted the spreading of the ice. It would take only a decade for the ice caps to form, a decade more for them to extend as far south as the sites of London, Berlin, Manhattan.
Further ahead, even more drastic changes were to come. Since its formation the planet had been steadily cooling, and the flow of heat from its interior had driven the mantle currents on which the continents rode. Now the Discontinuity had caused disturbances in the deep strange weather of Mir’s liquid interior. Eventually a new pattern of currents would settle into place—but for now it was as if a vast lid had been clamped on a boiling pan.
Beneath the hearts of the continents the mantle material had begun to swell and rise. Earth had never been perfectly spherical anyhow. Now Mir was growing bulges, like lumps of mud stuck to the side of a spinning top. In time the crust and upper mantle would shear off the planet’s core, and the deformed planet would seek a new stability by shifting the lumps away from the axis of rotation. As the major continents slid to the equator, ocean currents would be altered again, sea levels raised or lowered by hundreds of meters, dramatic climate changes induced.
In Mir’s long chthonic annealing there would be difficult times for the planet’s cargo of life. But people were mobile. The citizens of Chicago were already preparing for a vast migration south. Many humans would survive.
As would the man-apes.
Grasper was not as she had been before her inspection by the Eye. The probing of her body and mind had been meant only to record her capabilities, to note her place in the great spectrum of possibilities that was life on this blue world. But Grasper was very young, and the machinery that had studied her was very old, and no longer quite so perfect as it had once been. The probing had been clumsy. Grasper’s half-formed mind had been stirred.
This patched-together world would be dominated for a long time by the humans, there could be no doubt about that. But even they could not defy the ice. On a shifting, dangerous world there was plenty of empty space to explore. Plenty of room for a creature with potential. And there was no particular reason why that potential had to be realized exactly as it had been before. There was room on Mir for something different. Something better, perhaps.
Grasper hefted the heavy stone in her hand, and dimly imagined what might be done with it. She was quite without fear. Now she was master of the world, and she was not quite sure what to do next.
But she would think of something.
47: RETURN
Bisesa gasped, staggered. She was standing.
Music was playing.
She stared at a wall, which showed the magnified image of an impossibly beautiful young man crooning into an old-fashioned microphone. Impossible, yes; he was a synth star, a distillation of the inchoate longings of pre-teen girls. “My God, he looks like Alexander the Great.” Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall’s moving colors, its brightness. She had never realized how drab and dun-colored Mir had been.
The softwall said, “Good morning, Bisesa. This is your regular alarm call. Breakfast is waiting downstairs. The news headlines today are—”
“Shut up.” Her voice was a dusty desert croak.
“Of course.” The synthetic boy sang on softly.
She glanced around. This was her bedroom, in her London apartment. It seemed small, cluttered. The bed was big, soft, not slept in.
She walked to the window. Her military-issue boots were heavy on the carpet, and left footprints of crimson dust. The sky was gray, on the cusp of sunrise, and the skyline of London was emerging from the flatness of silhouette.
“Wall.”
“Bisesa?”
“What’s the date?”
“Tuesday.”
“The date”
“Ah. The ninth of June, 2037.”
The day after the chopper crash. “I should be in Afghanistan.”
The softwall coughed. “I’ve grown used to your sudden changes of plans, Bisesa. I remember once—”
“Mum?”
The voice was small, sleepy. Bisesa turned.
She was barefoot, her tummy stuck out, fist rubbing at one eye, hair tousled, a barely awake eight-year-old. She was wearing her favorite pajamas, the ones across which cartoon characters gamboled, even though they were now about two sizes too small for her. “You didn’t say you were coming home.”
Something broke inside Bisesa. She reached out. “Oh, Myra—”
Myra recoiled. “You smell funny.”
Shocked, Bisesa glanced down at herself. In her orange jumpsuit, scuffed and torn and coated with sweat-soaked sand, she was as out of place in this twenty-first-century flat as if she had been wearing a spacesuit.
She forced a smile. “I guess I need a shower. Then we’ll have breakfast, and I’ll tell you all about it…”
The light changed, subtly. She turned to the window. There was an Eye over the city, floating like a barrage balloon. She couldn’t tell how far away it was, or how big.
And over the rooftops of London, a baleful sun was rising.
A Conversation
with Stephen Baxter
and Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Question: Time’s Eye, book one of A Time Odyssey, is billed as an “orthoquel” to Sir Arthur Clarke’s seminal Space Odyssey series. How do you see the relationship between the old and new series? And would it be fair to say that A Time Odyssey is also an “orthoquel” to your acclaimed Manifold trilogy?
Stephen Baxter: The original Odyssey concerned a benevolent, if clumsy, alien intervention in human affairs; humans had to learn to deal with a universe in which such aliens exist, and in the end humans opposed the Monoliths. This time we’re taking the same premise but assuming an intervention that’s hostile from the beginning, and we want to show how humanity has to grow up fast in such a case. But I think the tone is essentially similar to the original Odyssey. essentially hopeful. As Manifold was all about the Fermi Paradox—why don’t we see the aliens if they exist?—and as one answer is dearly that they are all being strangled in the nest, I suppose, yes, it’s an “orthoquel” to that, too! No great surprise; writers keep on returning to their key obsessions. And I would count Odyssey as an influence on Manifold and the rest of my work anyhow; it all feeds back.
Q: How did your collaboration with Sir Arthur come about?
SB: As with our first collaboration, Light of Other Days. it started with two outlines by Sir Arthur; one tentatively called Chronfrontations, about time slips on the No
rth–West Frontier, and the second called Nova, about trouble with the sun. These were originally conceived as separate projects, but as we talked around how the plots should develop, we realized they could have a common rationale, in alien intervention. We drew on one of Sir Arthur’s stories, “All the Time in the World,” for that. The Odyssey angle came, as I recall, when at one point I borrowed “Firstborn” as our working name for our aliens from the 2001 series. That triggered more discussion about the relationship with Odyssey, and we went from there. We also had some input for the second book, which is in progress, from a very helpful NASA scientist. All this was by e-mail, with me in England, Sir Arthur in Sri Lanka. Given Sir Arthur’s situation, I took more of the brunt in the latter stages. But the vision was his, the discussions voluminous.
Q: Who is responsible for which parts of the novel? The beginning section, for example, set far in the prehistoric, prehuman past, seems to owe as much to your recent novel, Evolution, as to Clarke’s 2001.
SB: Yes, I borrowed some of the techniques I’d developed for depicting prehumans in Evolution. But again, that was influenced by 2001 in the first place! It’s nice to think this book is a kind of crossing of both our tracks.
Q: The actions of the mysterious entities of Time’s Eye are godlike. They carve up bits and pieces of the earth from different epochs of time, carrying along willy-nilly the humans and other creatures who happen to be living there, then stitch everything back together to create a kind of Frankenstein’s planet. One result, among many, is that the armies of Ghengis Khan wind up facing those of Alexander the Great. This must have been a fun book to write!
SB: Yes, it was a lot of fun working out the battle, pitching Alexander against Genghis. As one of the characters says, you’d pay serious money to see that on pay-per-view. I don’t think you’d call this a militaristic book, though; I don’t think either of us see anything glorious in war itself. Even Alexander despairs that all we do, having survived such a miracle as the time slips, is attack one another.
Q: The novel explores different notions of empire—the Greeks, the Mongols, the British, the United Nations. Why these particular empires and not others?
SB: When we conceived this book, this part of the world, post 9/11, was very much in the news. It’s been a cockpit of conflict between empires from Alexander through to the British against the Russians. It was interesting to overlay all that; it sets our present troubles in perspective, I think … though I wouldn’t call the UN an empire! For all its faults, its purpose is to find a way to run international affairs without war. It’s like the European Union in that way. It’s right to be suspicious of such entities, but they may be the best hope for our future.
Q: The novel carries as its epigraph a quote from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, who also happens to be a major character in the book. Why Kipling? Does he have anything to say to modern audiences?
SB: Kipling was a key eyewitness of the later stages of the British Empire, especially in this region. He’s rightly considered jingoistic at times, but he never lost sight of the need to let his imagination loose. He was an Anglo-Indian, and in his early days he wrote very well about culture clashes, and he always had a great sense of history. Yes, I think he has a lot to say to us.
Q: The physics surrounding the extra-dimensional Eyes of the novel’s title make for fascinating and provocative reading. Can you talk a little bit about these mysterious Eyes and what or who might lie behind them? Are they artificial intelligences, similar to, but far more advanced than, the wonderful phone carried by the character Bisesa? Or are they merely machines used by other intelligences to inscrutable ends?
SB: The Eyes are the Monoliths of this series. I don’t think we should say any more for now!
Q: Bisesa invokes superstring theory to explain the Eyes. What does this theory have to say about time?
SB: Depends on which version you believe! Some versions seem to predict an “arrow of time” in a natural way. But it’s all early days; we tried to give an impression of how thinking about time travel, etc., will develop in this century.
Q: How historically accurate did you try to make the portraits of Kipling, Alexander, and Ghengis Khan?
SB: As accurate as we could. It was interesting to try to explore how these figures would cope with time slips and the like. We tend to imagine figures from the past would envy us; I liked having Alexander think of the moderns as peripheral, gaudy figures, not much use compared to his soldiers!
Q: One character, the African-American astronaut Sable, states: “You’re either with me or against me.” Reading this, I couldn’t help thinking of President George W. Bush’s almost identical statement about his war on terror. Was that echo intentional on your part?
SB: No. Lines like that aren’t original to Bush!
Q: In the near future of 2037 inhabited by some of the characters in the novel, the Middle East continues to be a hot spot, with UN patrols in Afghanistan and a brief but horrific nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India. Do you think we’re heading toward this particular future, or an equally grim one?
SB: This all seems very likely to me, especially with the pull of Caspian oil. But it’s actually a hopeful vision, with the UN in there stabilizing things; the future could surely be a lot grimmer.
Q: Will the next volume of A Time Odyssey continue the story of Bisesa, Alexander the Great, and the other characters introduced here, or will it branch off in a new direction?
SB: Bisesa’s story will continue, back on the original Earth, as she tries to deal with a more direct alien intervention. Trouble with the sun…
Q: We’re now joined by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, from Sri Lanka. Welcome, Sir Arthur! China has joined the United States and Russia in the exclusive club of spacefaring nations. What implications do you think this achievement will have for the US space program, and for space exploration in general? Are we on the verge of a new space race?
Arthur C. Clarke: I hope so—the recent discovery of Mars life, and the Spaceguard scenario, make it imperative…
SB: I think it’s wonderful. When you think the first two members of the “club” joined within weeks of each other back in 1961, and we’ve waited all this time for a third! And the Chinese seem keen on building sensibly and incrementally, with proven techniques. They will go far. I would love this to prompt a new space race with the US—or better yet, cooperation. The Chinese ships are actually capable of docking with the Space Station. It’s up to the US to let them on board!
Q: But will they? Responding to the Chinese success, Lieutenant General Edward Anderson, deputy commander of the US Northern Command, was quoted as saying, “In my view, it will not be long before space becomes a battleground” Your reaction?
SB: Gung-ho types in the Pentagon have been saying this kind of thing since the 1960s, maybe even earlier, in the endless quest for More Funding. In fact, the most effective military use of space has been reconnaissance satellites—Eisenhower’s idea—which, if you think about it, promote peace, not war. Personally, I continue to hope that in the future we will find ways to conduct our affairs without the cruelty and hideous waste of war, and maybe space will be such an arena.
AC: I’m afraid General Anderson may be right—and going back to Stephen’s mention of the Fermi Paradox, I also fear that some novae and GRBs (gamma-ray bursts) may be proof of interstellar warfare. I hope I’m wrong…
Q: At one point in the novel, Kipling states that, “Men will always go to war, because men will always be men, and war will always be fun.” Do you agree?
AC: No—though this may be wishful thinking! War is no longer “fun”—and men can change. Two hundred years ago, gentlemen carried swords—and used them! (There’s an SF story by Heinlein or de Camp about a future in which this happens again.) As for change—see Kipling’s “Cities and Thrones and Powers,” which serves as the epigraph for the novel.
SB: I would say war seems to be a deep part of our character as a species. Indeed, the chimps wage wars, s
o we probably did before we were even humans. But I would hope that we can rise above this one day. So I’d probably disagree with Kipling (the fictional one), in hope.
Q: Sir Arthur, the New York Times recently ran a long article about an idea near and dear to your heart: the space elevator. When do you think we’ll see this dream, the subject of your 1980 Hugo Award-winning novel The Fountains of Paradise, become a reality?
AC: About fifteen years after everyone stops laughing!
Q: Sir Arthur, Dr. Baxter, thank you for your time.
Other Alexanders
by Stephen Baxter
In most possible timelines, I’m fascinated by alternate history. In Time’s Eye, we take a look back at a different destiny for Alexander the Great.
Alexander remains a fascinating figure—Oliver Stone just made a movie about him—and his early death has always been popular with fans of alternate history as a classic historical “turning point.” (See Schmunk’s Uchronia website, www.uchronia.net, for more examples.) In fact Alexander was even the subject of counterfactual speculation by a Roman historian. As early as 35 B.C. Livy speculated on what might have happened if Alexander had lived on and turned west to take on Rome—he would have lost, of course, said good Roman Livy. Genre explorations of Alexander’s impact on history include Melissa Scott’s A Choice of Destinies (1986) and Greg Bear’s Eon (1985) and its sequels.
But Alexander is also an example of a strange lesson of alternate history—that our world· seems to be the best of all conceivable alternatives.
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