A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  “Certainly his son thought so,” Eumenes said dryly. “And that is why—look out!” He pulled Bisesa back.

  A squad of soldiers came charging past, their long sarissae lowered. In the middle of the room there was a knot of commotion. Shouting began, and screaming.

  And Alexander had fallen.

  Alexander, isolated on the floor, cried out in his thick Macedonian Greek. His courtiers and even his guards were backing away from him, as if fearful of blame. A vivid red stain spread over his belly. Bisesa thought it was wine.

  But then she saw the little Neanderthal page standing over him, his expression slack, a knife in his massive hand.

  “I was afraid of this,” Eumenes snapped. “It is the anniversary of the War with the Son—and you and your Eye have everybody stirred up, Bisesa Dutt. Captain Grove, get them out of here, and out of the city, as fast as you can. Either that or risk them getting swept up in the purges that will follow.”

  “Understood,” Grove said quietly. “Come, ladies.”

  As Grove shepherded them away, Bisesa looked back over her shoulder. She saw the Neanderthal boy raise his blade again, and step toward Alexander. He moved dully, as if completing a chore. Alexander roared in rage and fear, but still none of the guards moved. In the end it was Eumenes, stiff old Eumenes, who charged through the crowd and barreled the little boy off his feet.

  Outside the city was alight; smoke curled up from torched buildings as news of the assassination attempt spread.

  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 couldn’t 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. “I’ll take you to Michigan Avenue and we’ll 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 Chicago’s 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 mother’s, not mine. Anyhow I’m sticking. Just don’t let them forget I’m here, back home. All right? Don’t 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. He taught them that to do their work as perfectly as possible is to offer worship to the gods—just as a farmer offers a tithe of his crops. So as they work they worship; and as they worship they work.”

  “So the train driver’s a monk,” Bisesa said. “Oh, Casey, what have you done?”

  Ben Batson grinned. “Actually it’s a way of keeping them focused on the job. You have to do your work exactly right, said Mr. Othic, for your homage to be acceptable to the gods. But the trouble is they do things by rote; they don’t like change, which they fear is heretical.”

  “So there’s no innovation,” Bisesa said. “And as Casey’s locos break down one by one—”

  Emeline said, “It is just as in Alexander’s court. Despite their exposure to modernity, these ancient Greeks are slipping back into superstition.”

  Abdi said, “My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.”

  Bisesa studied him. “You’ll have to tell me about your father.”

  Emeline said dryly, “Well, we’ll certainly have time for that.”

  There was no pursuit from Babylon, a capital city in turmoil. But an hour out from Babylon they saw a pitched battle going on, somewhere in the middle of the Arabian desert, only a couple of kilometers from the rail track.

  Bisesa had lived through Alexander’s war with the Mongols, and she recognized the characteristic formations of the Macedonians. There were the phalanxes of infantry with their bristling sarissae, blocks of men trained to maneuver with such compactness and flexibility that they seemed to flow over the ground without a break in their ranks. The famous cavalry units, the Companions, were wedge-shaped formations driving into the field with their thrusting lances and shields. But this time Macedonian was fighting Macedonian.

  “It’s a serious rebellion then,” Ben Batson murmured. “Of course somebody or other has been trying to bump off Alexander since even before the Discontinuity. Never saw it go this far before. And, look, can you see that stolid-looking bunch over there? Neanderthals. The Macedonians have been using them since their campaigns in Europe. Their handlers say they won’t fight unless you force them. Good for shocking the enemy though.”

  The battle remained fortunately distant from the rail line, and the loco plowed on noisily into the gathering light, leaving the battle behind. But they hadn’t traveled much further before another threat loomed.

  “My word,” Emeline said, pointing. “Man-apes. Look, Bisesa!”

  Looking ahead of the train, Bisesa saw hunched figures on a low dune, silhouetted against the morning sky.

  Abdi said, “Sometimes they attack the trains for food. But they’re getting bolder. Following the tracks toward the city.”

  Purposefully, steadily, the man-apes descended the dune. They walked with a squat gait, their human-like legs under heavy gorilla-like torsos. Their movements were imbued with determination and menace.

  From the rattling, wheezing, slow-moving train, Bisesa watched uneasily. And then she thought she recognized the man-ape who led the advance. An animal with a memorable face, she was one of a pair, mother and infant, captured by Grove’s Tommies in the early days after the Discontinuity. Was this that same child? What had the men called her—Grasper? Well, if it was her, she was older, and scarred, and changed. Bisesa remembered how the captive man-apes, left alone with an Eye, had been subject to a Firstborn interaction of their own. Perhaps this was the result.

  Now Grasper raised her arms high in the air, and revealed the burden that had b
een concealed by her hirsute body. She carried a stout branch, and impaled upon it was the bloody head of a man. The mouth had been jammed open with a stick, and broken teeth gleamed white in the rays of the setting sun.

  Bisesa felt fear stab her heart. “I think I asked for that lead man-ape to be let loose, once I was gone into the Eye. What a mistake that was.”

  As the train came on them, the man-apes charged. They were met by a volley of arrows from the carriages, but the moving targets were hard to hit, and few man-apes fell. They hadn’t got their timing quite right, however. As the locomotive’s whistle shrieked, hairy bodies hurled themselves at wooden carriages to be met by fists and clubs, and they couldn’t get purchase. One by one the man-apes fell away, capering and hooting in their frustration.

  Abdi said, “Well, we’re seeing it all today…”

  As the train left the man-ape troop behind, Bisesa’s phone beeped gently. She took it from her pocket, watched curiously by the others.

  “Good morning, Bisesa.”

  “So you’re talking to me now.”

  “I have some bad news, and good news.”

  She considered that. “Bad news first.”

  “I have been analyzing the astronomical data collected by Abdikadir and his predecessors at Babylon. Incidentally I would appreciate the chance to study the sky myself.”

  “And?”

  “This universe is dying.”

  She gazed out at the dusty plain, the rising sun, the capering man-apes by the rail track. “And the good news?”

  “I have a call. From Mars, Wells Station. It’s for you,” it added laconically.

  34: ELLIE

  September 2069

  At the Martian north pole, in the unending night of winter, time wore away slowly. Myra read, cooked, cleaned, worked her way through the station’s library of virtuals, and downloaded movies from Earth.

  And she explored Wells Station.

  There were in fact seven pie-on-stilts modules. Each of them was a roomy space divided by a honeycomb floor, built around a central axial cylinder. They had all been landed by rocket and parachute, folding up around their cores, then towed into place by a rover and inflated, the internal honeycomb flooring folded down. All this was powered by a big nuclear reactor, cooled by Martian carbon dioxide and buried in the ice a kilometer away, its waste heat slowly digging out a cavern.

  She’d been brought in through Can Six, the EVA unit, and Five, science and medical, through the disused Three, to Two, the galley cum sleeping area everybody just called “the house.” Can Four, the hub of the base, was a garden area, with trays of green plants growing under racks of fluorescents. Can Seven contained the central life-support system. Here Hanse proudly showed her his bioreactor, a big translucent tire-shaped tube containing a greenish, sludgy fluid, where blue-green algae, spirula plantensis, busily produced oxygen. And she was shown a water extraction plant; grimy Martian ice was melted and pumped through a series of filters to remove the dust that could comprise as much as forty percent of its volume.

  Cans One and Three were sleeping quarters, roomy enough for a crew of ten. Both these modules had been abandoned by the crew, but there were some neat bits of equipment. Everything was inflatable, the bed, the chairs, with partition walls filled with Mars-ice water to provide some soundproofing. And there were bioluminescent light panels that you could just peel off the wall and fold up. Myra took some of these away, to brighten up her cave in the ice.

  Under the panels the design schemes of the modules were exposed: where Two was a city landscape, Five mountains and Six the sea, Can One was a pine forest and Three a prairie. With a bit of experimentation she found you could animate these virtual landscapes. But these fancy features had evidently been quickly abandoned, as the crew had moved into “the house,” Can Two, where they lived together in the round.

  Yuri grinned about this. “They spent a lot of money on this place,” he said. “Various Earth governments and organizations, in the days after the sunstorm when money flowed into space. Some kind of spasm of guilt, I guess. They knew this is an extreme environment. So they tried to make it as much like Earth as possible. You can be an ‘internal tourist.’ That’s what they told me in training. Ha!”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Look, you need a few pictures of your family, and some blue-green paintwork to soothe the eyes—although remind me to show you Mars through a wavelength-shift filter sometime; there are colors here, deep reds, we don’t even have names for. But all these pictures of places that I’ve never been to, put up by city types who’ve probably never been there either—nah. You can keep it.”

  She thought there was a pattern emerging here, spanning Lowell and now Wells Station, expensive facilities misconceived on Earth, and now half-abandoned by the Spacer generations who had to use them.

  But Myra suspected there was something deeper about the way the crew shared that partition-free space in Can Two, living in the round. A few brief queries to the station’s AI brought up images of roundhouses, Iron Age structures that had once been common across Europe and Britain: big structures, cones of wood built around a central pole, with a bare circular floor and no internal walls. Here at the pole of Mars, all unconsciously, the inhabitants of Wells Station had abandoned the urban prejudices of the base architects and had reverted to much older ways of living. She found that somehow pleasing.

  Of course that seven-module structure did serve one clear purpose, which was to do with the psychology of confinement. There were always at least two ways to get from any point in the station to any other. So if Ellie felt like strangling Yuri, say, there were ways for her to avoid bumping into him until she’d got those feelings under control. People locked up together like this, kept in the dark for a full Earth year at a time and unable even to step out the door, were always going to turn on each other. All you could do was engineer the environment to defuse the tensions.

  Gradually Myra found herself work to do.

  There were always chores in the garden, in Can Four, tending the plants, the rice and spinach and potatoes and peas, and cleaning out the gear that supported the hydroponic beds. Grendel Speth happily accepted Myra’s untrained help. There was even a stand of bamboo. Previous crew members had found ways to eat the fast-growing stuff, and they had made things with it; a wind-chime mobile of scrimshaw-like carvings was suspended from one corner of the Can. The garden only provided a few percent of the base’s food supply, and if you were strictly logical about it, it would have been better to use this space and power to store more dried food from Lowell. But Myra found tending these familiar living things profoundly satisfying, which of course was its true purpose.

  No matter how she kept herself busy she was always drawn back to the Pit.

  That, after all, was the center of the mystery here; that was the place she had lost her mother. The trouble was she needed specialist help to get down there, and the station crew were busy with their own projects.

  It took weeks before she inveigled Hanse Critchfield into suiting her up and taking her down into the deep interior of the ice cap, and into the Pit once more.

  Ellie and Myra moved uncomfortably around the Pit. They were like two huge green pupae, Myra thought, bounding around these roughly melted chambers under the harsh light of the floods.

  Ellie von Devender tolerated her presence, but barely. Busy, driven, full of a sense of herself and the importance of her work, Ellie wasn’t the type to make space for nursemaiding. She was prepared to talk about her work, however, if Myra was able to ask intelligent questions.

  Ellie had set up a kind of suite of sensors around the Eye, some in the Eye chamber itself and others in bays she had had melted into the Martian ice. “High-energy particle detectors. Radiation sensors. A neutrino detection tank.” This was a chamber blown into the ice, full of liquid carbon dioxide.

  Ellie had active ways to probe the Eye too. She had set up an array of lasers and small particle guns, trained on the
Eye like the rifles of a firing squad. These could mimic the Eye’s own leakage of radiation and particles—and it was through manipulating this input to the Eye that Ellie had, remarkably, been able to send signals to Bisesa’s mobile phone, abandoned in another world.

  The neutrino work was a little coarse however, the particle-detection array standard off-the-shelf gear. Ellie was most animated by her gravity wave detector.

  She had devised this herself for the peculiar conditions of the Martian cap. She’d borrowed Hanse’s moles, smart little hot-nosed burrowers intended to explore the interior of the ice. She had had them create a network of long straight-line tunnels through which high-frequency laser light was passed back and forth. The theory was that any change in the peculiar gravity field of the Eye itself, or of the Martian containment cage, would cause the emission of gravity waves. The waves would make the polar ice shudder, and those minute disturbances would be detected as subtle shifts in the laser light.

  “It’s a tricky setup,” Ellie said with some pride. “Gravity waves are notoriously weak. Mars is geologically quiet, but you do get the odd tremor. And the polar ice itself flows, minutely. But you can factor all that out. I have secondary arrays on the surface and in orbit. The most impressive is based on a couple of stations on the moons, Phobos and Deimos; when they are in line of sight of each other you get a good long baseline…”

  “And with all this stuff you’re studying the Eye.”

  “Not just the Eye. The Martian cage as well.”

  Ellie said the Eye and the cage of folded spacetime that contained it were like two components of a mutually interlocked system, yin and yang. And it was a dynamic system; the components continually tested each other. This silent, eons-long battle spilled particles and radiation and gravity waves that Ellie was able to detect and analyze.

  “In a sense the Martian technology is more interesting to me,” she told Myra. “Because I have a feeling it’s closer to our own in development level, and therefore we’ve got a better chance of understanding it.”