A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  The processional way led them through a series of broad walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Emeline had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred yards on a side.

  Bloom said, “The Babylonians called this the Etemenanki, which means ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth’…”

  This ziggurat was, astonishingly, the Tower of Babel.

  South of the tower was another tremendous monument, but this was very new, as Emeline could see from the gleam of its finish. It was an immense square block, perhaps two hundred yards on a side and at least seventy tall. Its base was garlanded with the gilded prows of boats that stuck out of the stone as if emerging from mist, and on the walls rows of bright friezes told a complicated story of love and war. On top of the base stood two immense, booted feet, the roots of a statue that would some day be even more monumental than the base.

  “I heard of this,” Grove said. “The Monument of the Son. It’s got nothing to do with Babylon. This is all Alexander…”

  The Son in question had been Alexander’s second-born. Through the chance of the Discontinuity the first son, by the captured wife of a defeated Persian general, had not been brought to Mir. The second was another Alexander, born to his wife Roxana, a Bactrian princess and another captive of war.

  Bloom said, “The boy was born in the first year of Mir. We celebrated, for the King had an heir. But by the twenty-fifth year that heir, grown to be a man, was chafing, as was his ambitious mother, for Alexander refused to die.” The War of Father and Son raged across the empire, consuming its stretched resources. The son’s anger was no match for his father’s experience—or for Alexander’s own calm belief in his own divinity. The outcome was never in doubt. “The final defeat is remembered annually,” Bloom said. “Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary, in fact.”

  “Here’s the way I see it, Mrs. White,” Grove said. “That war made Alexander, already a rum cove, even more complicated. It’s said Alexander had a hand in the assassination of his own father. He was definitely responsible for the death of his son and heir—and his wife Roxana come to that. Now Alexander has become even more convinced that he’s nothing less than a god, destined to reign forever.”

  “But he won’t,” Bloom murmured. “And we’ll all be heading for a mighty smash when he finally falls.”

  South of the Monument of the Son they came at last to a temple Bloom called the Esagila—the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia. Here they clambered off the phaeton. Looking up, Emeline saw a dome planted on the temple’s roof, with a cylinder protruding from it like a cannon. It was an observatory, and the “cannon” was a telescope, quite modern-looking.

  A dark young man ran up to them. He wore a drab, monkish robe, and twisted his hands together.

  “My God,” Grove said, coloring. “You must be Abdikadir Omar. You’re so like your father…”

  “So I am told, sir. You are Captain Grove.” He glanced around the party. “But where is Josh White? Mr. Bloom, I wrote for Josh White.”

  “I am his wife,” Emeline said firmly. “I’m afraid my husband died.”

  “Died?” The boy was distracted and barely seemed to take that in. “Well—oh, you must come!” He headed back toward the temple. “Please, come with me, to the chamber of Marduk.”

  “Why?” Emeline asked. “In your letter you spoke of the telephone ringing.”

  “Not that.” He said, agitated, almost distressed with his tension. “That was just the start. There has been more, more just today—you must come to see—”

  Captain Grove asked, “See what, man?”

  “She is here. The Eye—it came back—it flexed—she!” And Abdikadir broke away and sprinted back into the temple.

  Bewildered, the travelers followed.

  28: SUIT FIVE

  It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.

  She was lying on her back. Her breath was straining, her chest hurting. When she tried to move, her arms and legs were heavy. Encased. She was trapped, somehow.

  Her eyes were open, but she could see nothing.

  Her breathing grew more rapid. Panicky. She could hear it, loud in an enclosed space. She was locked up inside something.

  She forced herself to calm. She tried to speak, found her mouth crusted and dry, her voice a croak. “Myra?”

  “I’m afraid Myra can’t hear you, Bisesa.” The voice was soft, male, but very quiet, a whisper.

  Memories flooded back. “Suit Five?” The Pit on Mars. The Eye that had inverted. Her pulse thudded in her ears. “Is Myra okay?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t contact her. I can’t contact anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” the suit said miserably. “My primary power has failed. I am in minimum-functionality mode, operating on backup cells. Their expected operating life is—”

  “Never mind.”

  “I am broadcasting distress signals, of course.”

  She heard something now, a kind of scratching at the carapace of the suit. Something was out there—or somebody. She was helpless, blind, locked in the inert suit, while something explored the exterior. Panic bubbled under the surface of her mind.

  “Can I stand? I mean, can you?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve let you down, haven’t I, Bisesa?”

  “Can you let me see? Can you de-opaque my visor?”

  “That is acceptable.”

  Light washed into her field of view, dazzling her.

  Looking up, she saw an Eye, a fat silvered sphere, swollen with mystery. And she saw her own reflection pasted on its face, a Mars suit on its back, a helplessly upended green bug.

  But was this the same Eye? Was she still on Mars?

  She lifted her head within the helmet, trying to see past the Eye. Her head felt heavy, a football full of sloshing fluids. It was like pulling Gs in a chopper. Heavy gravity: not Mars, then.

  She saw a brick wall beyond the Eye. Bits of electronic equipment studded the wall, fixed crudely, linked up with cable. She knew that wall, that gear. She had assembled it herself, scavenged from the crashed Little Bird, when she had set up this chamber as a laboratory to study an Eye.

  This was the Temple of Marduk. She was back in Babylon. She was on Mir. “Here I am again,” she whispered.

  A face loomed over her, sudden, unexpected. She flinched back, strapped in her lobster suit. It was a man, young, dark, good-looking, his eyes clear. She knew who it was. But it couldn’t be him. “Abdi?” The last time she saw Abdikadir, her crewmate from the Little Bird, he had been worn out from the Mongol War, his face and body bearing the scars of that conflict. This smooth-faced man was too young, too untouched.

  Now another face hovered in her view, illuminated by flickering lamplight. Another familiar face, a tremendous mustache, but this time older than she remembered, grayed, lined. “Captain Grove,” she said. “The gang’s all here.”

  Grove said something she couldn’t hear.

  Her chest hurt even more. “Suit. I can’t breathe. Open up and let me out.”

  “It isn’t advisable, Bisesa. We aren’t in a controlled environment. And these people are not the crew of Wells Station,” the suit said primly. “If they exist at all.”

  “Open up,” she said as severely as she could. “I’m overriding any other standing orders you have. Your function is to protect me. So let me out before I suffocate.”

  The suit said, “I’m afraid other protocols override your instructions, Bisesa.”

  “What other protocols?”

  “Planetary protection.”

  The suit was designed to protect Mars from Bisesa as much as Bisesa from Mars. So if she were to die the suit would seal itself up, to k
eep the remains of her body from contaminating Mars’s fragile ecology. In extremis, Suit Five was programmed to become her coffin.

  “Yes, but—oh, this is—we aren’t even on Mars! Can’t you see that? There’s nothing to protect!” She strained, but her limbs were encased. Her lungs dragged at stale air. “Suit Five—for God’s sake—”

  Something slammed into her helmet, rattling her head like a walnut kernel in its shell. Her visor just popped off, and air washed over her face. The air smelled of burned oil and ozone, but it was rich in oxygen and she dragged at it gratefully.

  Grove hovered over her. He held up a hammer and chisel. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Needs must, eh? But I rather fear I’ve damaged your suit of armor.” Though he had aged, he had the same clipped Noel Coward accent she remembered from her last time on Mir, more than thirty years in the past.

  She felt inordinately glad to see him. “Be my guest,” she said. “All right, Suit, you’ve had your fun. You’ve been breached, so planetary protection is out the window, wherever we are. Now will you let me go?”

  The suit didn’t speak. It hesitated for a few seconds, silent, as if sulking. Then with a popping of seals it opened up, along her torso, legs and arms. She lay in the suit, in her tight thermal underwear, and the colder air washed over her. “I feel like a lobster in a cracked shell.”

  “Let us help you.” It was the boy who looked like Abdikadir. He and Grove reached down, got their arms under Bisesa, and lifted her out of the suit.

  29: ALEXEI

  It was an hour since Bisesa had vanished into the Eye.

  Myra, bereft and confused, sought out Alexei in his storeroom cabin. He was curled up on his bunk, facing the plastic-coated ice wall.

  “So tell me about Athena.”

  Without turning, he said, “Well, Athena singled you out. She seems to think you’re worth preserving.”

  Myra pursed her lips. “She’s the real leader of this conspiracy of yours, isn’t she? This underground group of Boy Scouts, trying to figure out the Martian Eye.”

  He shrugged, his back still turned. “We Spacers are a divided lot. The Martians don’t think of themselves as Spacers at all. Athena is different from all of us, and she’s a lot smarter. She’s someone we can unite around, at least.”

  “Let me get it straight,” she said. “Athena is the shield AI.”

  “A copy of her. The original AI was destroyed in the final stages of the sunstorm. Before the storm, this copy was squirted to the stars. Somewhere out there, that broadcast copy was picked up, activated, and transmitted back here.”

  This was the story she had picked up from the others. “You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?”

  “Nobody outside Cyclops knows the details.”

  “Cyclops. The big planet-finder telescope station.”

  “Right. Of course the echo could have been picked up anywhere in the solar system, but as far as we know it’s only on Cyclops that she’s been activated. She’s stayed locked up in the hardened data store on Cyclops. Her choice. As far as Hanse Critchfield can tell, she managed to download a subagent into your ident tattoo. Nobody knows how. It self-destructed after she gave you that message. I guess she has her electronic eye on you, Myra.”

  That was not a comforting thought. “So now my mother has gone through the Eye. What next?”

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “I guess, for whatever comes of your mother’s mission to Mir. And for Athena.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know, Myra. We have time. It’s still more than eighteen months until the Q-bomb is supposed to reach Earth.

  “Look, we’ve done what we could. We delivered your mother to the Eye, and pow, that pretty much short-circuited all the weirdness in the solar system. No offense. Now we’ve come to a kind of a lull. So, take it easy. You’ve been through a lot—we both have. The traveling alone was punishment enough. And as for that shit down in the Pit with the Eye—I can’t begin to imagine how that must have felt for you.”

  Myra sat awkwardly on the single chair in the room, and pulled at her fingers. “It’s not just a lull. This is a kind of terminus, for me. You needed me to get my mother here, to Mars. Fine, I did that. But now I’ve crashed into a wall.”

  He rolled over and faced her. “I’m sorry you feel like that. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re a good person. I’ve seen that. You love your mother, and you support her, even when it hurts you. That’s a pretty good place to be. Anyhow,” he said, “I’m not one to give you counseling. I’m spying on my father. How dysfunctional is that?”

  He turned back to the wall.

  She sat with him a while longer. When he began to snore, she crept out of the room and closed the door.

  30: CHILIARCH

  Grove and Abdi brought Bisesa to a smaller chamber, an office set out with couches and tables. This temple seemed to be full of offices, Emeline observed; she learned it was a center of administration for various cults and government departments as well as a place of worship.

  Grove sat Bisesa down and wrapped her in a blanket. Grove shouted at various parties about tea, until a servant brought Bisesa a bowl of some hot, milky drink, which she sipped gratefully.

  Two solid-looking Macedonian guards were posted at the door. They carried the long, brutal-looking pikes they called sarissae. Bisesa’s return had caused a ferment, it seemed, though whether the guards were protecting the people from Bisesa or vice versa Emeline didn’t know.

  Emeline sat, and quietly studied Bisesa Dutt.

  She looked older than Emeline, but not much more, fifty perhaps. She was just as Josh had described her—even sketched her in some of his journals. Her face was handsome and well proportioned, if not beautiful, her nose strong and her jaw square. Her eyes were clear, her cut-short hair grayed. Though she seemed drained and disoriented, she had a strength about her, Emeline sensed, a dogged enduring strength.

  Bisesa, reviving, looked around cautiously. “So,” she said. “Here we are.”

  “Here you are,” Grove said. “You’ve been back home, have you? I mean back to England. Your England.”

  “Yes, Captain. I was brought back to the time of the Discontinuity, in my future. Precisely, to within a day. Even though I had spent five years on Mir.”

  Grove shook his head. “I ought to get used to the way time flows so strangely here. I don’t suppose I ever will.”

  “Now I’m back. But when am I?”

  Emeline said, “Madam, it’s well known here that you left Mir in the year five of the new calendar established by the Babylonian astronomers. This is year thirty-two…”

  “Twenty-seven years, then.” Bisesa looked at her curiously. “You’re an American.”

  “I’m from Chicago.”

  “Of course. The Soyuz spotted you, clear of the North American ice sheet.”

  Emeline said, “I am from the year 1894.” She had got used to repeating this strange detail.

  “Nine years after Captain Grove’s time slice—that was 1885.”

  “Yes.”

  Bisesa turned to Abdikadir, who had said little since Bisesa had been retrieved. “And you are so like your father.”

  Wide-eyed, Abdi was nervous, curious, perhaps eager to impress. “I am an astronomer. I work here in the Temple—there is an observatory on the roof—”

  She smiled at him. “Your father must be proud.”

  “He isn’t here,” Abdi blurted. And he told her how Abdikadir Omar had gone south into Africa, following his own quest; if Mir was populated by a sampling of hominids from all mankind’s long evolutionary history, Abdikadir had wanted to find the very earliest, the first divergence from the other lines of apes. “But he did not return. This was some years ago.”

  Bisesa nodded, absorbing that news. “And Casey? What of him?”

  Casey Othic, the third crew member of the Little Bird, was no longer h
ere either. He had died of complications from an old injury he had suffered on Discontinuity day itself. “But,” Captain Grove said, “not before he had left quite a legacy behind. A School of Othic. Engineers to whom Casey became a god, literally! You’ll see, Bisesa.”

  Bisesa listened to this. “And the three Soyuz crew were all killed, ultimately. So there are no moderns here—I mean, nobody from my own time. That feels strange. What about Josh?”

  Captain Grove coughed into his fist, awkward, almost comically British. “Well, he survived your departure, Bisesa.”

  “He came with me halfway,” Bisesa said enigmatically. “But they sent him back.”

  “With you gone, there was nothing to keep him here in Babylon.” Grove glanced uncomfortably at Emeline. “He went to find his own people.”

  “Chicago.”

  “Yes. It took a few years before Alexander’s people, with Casey’s help, put together a sailing ship capable of taking on the Atlantic. But Josh was on the first boat.”

  “I was his wife,” Emeline said.

  “Ah,” Bisesa said. “‘Was’?”

  And Emeline told her something of Josh’s life, and how he died, and the legacy he left behind, his sons.

  Bisesa listened gravely. “I don’t know if you’d want to hear this,” she said. “Back home, I looked up Josh. I asked Aristotle—I mean, I consulted the archives. And I found Josh’s place in history.”

  The “copy” of Josh left behind on Earth had lived on past 1885. That Josh had fallen in love: aged thirty-five he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons—just as Emeline gave him sons on Mir. But Josh was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, a correspondent covering yet another war, a great world war Emeline had never heard of.

  Emeline listened to this reluctantly. It was somehow a diminishing of her Josh to hear this tale of an alternate version of him.