They talked on for a while, of disrupted histories, of the deteriorating climate of Mir, of a new Troy and a global empire. Grove asked Bisesa if she had found Myra, her daughter. Bisesa said she had, and in fact she now had a granddaughter too. But her mood seemed wistful, complicated. It seemed not much of this had made her happy.
Emeline had little to say. She tried to gauge the mood of the people around her as they talked, adjusting to this new strangeness. Abdi and Ben, born after the Discontinuity, were curious, wide-eyed with wonder. But Grove and Emeline herself, and perhaps Bisesa, were fundamentally fearful. The youngsters didn’t understand, as did the older folk who had lived through the Discontinuity, that nothing in the world was permanent, not if time could be torn apart and knitted back together again at a whim. If you lived through such an event you never got over it.
There was a commotion at the door.
Abdikadir, attuned to life at Alexander’s court, got to his feet quickly.
A man walked briskly into the room, accompanied by two lesser-looking attendants. Abdikadir prostrated himself before this man; he threw himself to the floor, arms outstretched, head down.
Wearing a flowing robe of some expensive purple-dyed fabric the newcomer was shorter than anybody else in the room, but he had a manner of command. He was bald save for a frosting of silver hair. He might have been seventy, Emeline thought, but his lined skin glistened, well treated with oils.
Bisesa’s eyes widened. “Secretary Eumenes.”
The man smiled, his expression cold, calculated. “My title is now ‘chiliarch,’ and has been for twenty years or more.” His English was fluent but stilted, and tinged with a British accent.
Bisesa said, “Chiliarch. Which was Hephaistion’s position, once. You have risen higher than any man save the King, Eumenes of Cardia.”
“Not bad for a foreigner.”
“I suppose I should have expected you,” Bisesa said. “You of all people.”
“As I have always expected you.”
From his prone position on the floor, Abdikadir stammered, “Lord Chiliarch. I summoned you, I sent runners the moment it happened—the Eye—the return of Bisesa Dutt—it was just as you ordered—if there were delays I apologize, and—”
“Oh, be quiet, boy. And stand up. I came when I was ready. Believe it or not there are matters in this worldwide empire of ours even more pressing than enigmatic spheres and mysterious revenants. Now. Why are you here, Bisesa Dutt?”
It was a direct question none of the others had asked her. Bisesa said, “Because of a new Firstborn threat.”
In a few words she sketched a storm on the sun, and how mankind in a future century had labored to survive it. And she spoke of a new weapon, called the “Q-bomb,” which was gliding through space toward Earth—Bisesa’s Earth.
“I myself traveled between planets, in search of answers to this challenge. And then I was brought—here.”
“Why? Who by?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the same agency who took me home in the first place. The Firstborn, or not the Firstborn. Perhaps some agency who defies them.”
“The King knows of your return.”
Grove asked, “How do you know that?”
Eumenes smiled. “Alexander knows everything I know—and generally before me. At least, that is the safest assumption to make. I will speak to you later, Bisesa Dutt, in the palace. The King may attend.”
“It’s a date.”
Eumenes grimaced. “I had forgotten your irreverence. It is interesting to have you back, Bisesa Dutt.” He turned on his heel and walked out, to more bowing and scraping from Abdikadir.
Bisesa glanced at Emeline and Grove. “So you know why I’m here. A bomb in the solar system, an Eye on Mars. Why are you here?”
“Because,” Abdikadir said, “I summoned them when your telephone rang.”
Bisesa stared at him. “My phone?”
They hurried back to the Eye chamber.
Abdikadir extracted the phone from its shrine, and handed it to Bisesa reverently.
It lay in her palm, scuffed, familiar. She couldn’t believe it; her eyes misted over. She tried to explain to Abdikadir. “It’s just a phone. I was given it when I was twelve years old. Every child on Earth got a phone at that age. A communications and education program by the old United Nations. Well, it came here with me through the Discontinuity, and it was a great help—a true companion. But then its power failed.”
Abdikadir listened to this rambling, his face expressionless. “It rang. Chirp, chirp.”
“It will respond to an incoming call, but that’s all. When the power went I had no way of recharging it. Still haven’t, in fact. Wait—”
She turned to her spacesuit, which still lay splayed open on the floor. Nobody had dared touch it. “Suit Five?”
Its voice, from the helmet speakers, was very small. “I have always strived to serve your needs during your extravehicular activity.”
“Can you give me one of your power packs?”
It seemed to think that over. Then a compartment on the suit’s belt flipped open to reveal a compact slab of plastic, bright green like the rest of the suit. Bisesa pulled this out of its socket.
“Is there anything else I can do for you today, Bisesa?”
“No. Thank you.”
“I will need refurbishment before I can serve you again.”
“I’ll see you get it.” She feared that was a lie. “Rest now.”
The suit fell silent with a kind of sigh.
She took the battery pack, flipped open the phone’s interface panel, and jammed the phone onto the cell’s docking port. Male and female connectors joined smoothly. “What was it Alexei said? Thank Sol for universal docking protocols.”
The phone lit up and spoke hesitantly. “Bisesa?”
“It’s me.”
“You took your time.”
31: OPERATION ORDER
A new draft operation order was transmitted to Liberator from Bella’s office in Washington.
“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 this is going to be,” Metternes muttered.
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, thre
e 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 obscene 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 sarissa pikes and short stabbing-swords. They wore no solid armor, but had helmets of what looked like ox-hide, corselets of linen, leather boots. They looked like the infantry soldiers Bisesa remembered from her earlier time here.
Amid the soldiers’ iron and the silver and gilt of the decorations, 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 campaigning 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 that is presumably as manufactured as the earth we walk on?”
Emeline said, “We have astronomers back in Chicago. Telescopes too, that made it through the Freeze—I mean, the Discontinuity. I know they’ve been observing the planets. Which are all changed, they say, from what they were before—you know. Lights on Mars. Cities! I don’t know much about it. Just what I read in the newspapers.”
Bisesa and Grove stared at her.
Bisesa said, “Cities on Mars?”
And Captain Grove said, “You have newspapers?”
The chiliarch considered. “There are other—” He hunted for the word. “Scientists. Other scientists in Chicago?”
“Oh, all sorts,” Emeline said brightly. “Physicists, chemists, doctors, philosophers. The university kept working, after a fashion, and they are establishing a new campus in New Chicago, south of the ice, so they can keep working after we close down the old city.”
Eumenes turned to Bisesa. “It seems to me you must travel to this Chicago, a place of science and learning from an age more than twenty centuries removed from the days of Alexander. It is there, perhaps, that you will have the best chance of addressing the great question that has propelled you here.”
Grove warned, “It will take the devil of a time to get there. Months—”
“Nevertheless it is clearly necessary. I will arrange your transport.”
Emeline raised an eyebrow. “It looks as if we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other, Bisesa.”
Bisesa felt bewildered by the suddenness of Eumenes’s decision-making. “You always did understand,” she said. “More than any other of Alexander’s people, you always saw that the key to this whole situation is the Firstborn, the Eyes. Everything else, empires and wars, is a distraction.”
He grunted. “If I had lacked perceptiveness I should not have survived long at Alexander’s court, Bisesa. You’ll see few others you’ll remember from those days three decades ago. All dispatched in the purges.”
“All save you,” she said.
“Not least because I ensured that it was I who organized those purges…”
There was a peal of trumpets, and a great shouting.
A troop of soldiers entered the room, sarissae held high. Following them came a grotesque figure in a transparent toga, stick-thin, trembling a little, his brilliantly painted face twisted into a grin. Bisesa remembered: this was Bagoas, a Persian eunuch and favorite of Alexander’s.
“No longer so pretty as he was,” Eumenes said sternly. “And yet he survives, as I do.” He raised his wine cup in mock salute.
And then came the King himself. He was surrounded by a group of tough-looking young men in expensive purple robes.
Waddling as if already drunk, he staggered and might have fallen if not for the way he leaned on a stocky little p
age who walked beside him. He wore lurid purple robes, and a headdress of ram’s horns rising from a circlet of gold. His face was a memory of the beauty that Bisesa remembered, with that full mouth, and a strong nose that rose straight to a slightly bulging forehead, from which his hair in ringlets had been swept back. His skin, always ruddy, was blotchy and scarred, his cheeks and jowls heavy, and his powerful frame swaddled in fat. Bisesa felt shocked at the change in him.
The courtiers threw themselves to the floor in obeisance. The soldiers and some of the senior figures stood their ground, gesturing elaborately. The little page who supported him was a Neanderthal boy, his brutish face shining with cream, the thick hair on his head twisted into tight curls. And as the King passed her, Bisesa smelled a stink of piss.
“Thus the ruler of the world,” Emeline whispered as he passed, sounding rather nineteenth-century frosty to Bisesa.
“But so he is,” Grove said.
“He had no choice but to conquer the world again,” Eumenes murmured. “Alexander believes he is a god—the son of Zeus incarnated at Ammon, which is why he wears the robes of Ammon, and the horns. But he was born a man, and only achieved godhood by his conquests. After the Discontinuity all that was wiped away, and so what was Alexander then? It was not to be tolerated. So he began it all over again; he had to.”
Bisesa said, “But it isn’t as it was before. You say there are steam trains here. Maybe this is a new start for civilization. A unified empire, under Alexander and his successors, fueled by technology.”
Grove smiled, wistful. “Do you remember poor old Ruddy Kipling used to say the same sort of thing?”
“I do not think Alexander shares your ‘modern’ dreams,” Eumenes said. “Why should he? There are more of us than you, far more; perhaps our beliefs, overwhelming yours, will shape reality.”
“According to my history books,” Emeline said a bit primly, “in the old world Alexander died in his thirties. It’s an un-Christian thing to say. But maybe it would have been better if he had died here, instead of living on and on.”
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