Time's Eye

  Eumenes said, “The Babylonian astronomers have decided that the Discontinuity should be considered the start of a new calendar, a new year—indeed, the start of one of their mighty cycles, their Great Years. Everything began afresh that day. And the first babies to be conceived on Mir have already been born. They did not exist in whatever world we came from—they could not have, for some of their parents came from different eras—but their past is not fractured like ours; they only exist here. I wonder what they will do when they grow up?”

  She studied his face, its tanned plains shadowed in the uncertain light. “You understand so much,” she said.

  He grinned, disarmingly. “As Casey says, like all ancient Greeks I’m smart as a tack, and smug with it. What do you expect? . . .”

  They embraced, stiffly. Then they walked back to the city.

  43: THE EYE OF MARDUK

  When Bisesa arrived in the Temple of Marduk the following morning, Abdikadir was waiting, and Casey was already working, checking out sensor equipment. They were here for her; she was touched by their faith in her, and reassured by their competence.

  The Eye floated impassively, as it always did.

  Josh was here. While Bisesa was wearing her flight suit, much patched, Josh wore a rumpled flannel suit and shirt, and, absurdly enough, a tie. But, she thought, they had no idea what they would face today; why not look your best?

  But his face was white, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. “Into infinity with a sore head!—at least I can’t be made to feel any worse, whatever happens.”

  Bisesa felt oddly impatient, irritable. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. “Here.” She held out a small backpack.

  He looked at it dubiously. “What’s in it?”

  “Water. Dried rations. Some medical supplies.”

  “You think we will need this? Bisesa, we are entering the Eye of Marduk, not hiking across the desert.”

  “But she’s right,” Abdikadir snapped. “Why not anticipate what we can?” He took the bag and thrust it at Josh. “Take it.”

  Bisesa said to Josh, “And if you’re going to grouse all the way, I’ll leave you behind.”

  Josh’s pained face crumpled into a smile. “I’ll be good.”

  Bisesa looked around. “I told Eumenes and Grove to keep everybody else away. I’d have preferred them to evacuate the damn city, but I suppose that wasn’t practical . . . Is there anything we’ve forgotten?” She had used the bathroom, cleaned her teeth: simple human actions, but she wondered where, when she would next have time to groom herself. “Abdi, take care of my phone.”

  Abdikadir said gently, “As I promised. And—one more thing.” He held out two pieces of paper, Babylonian parchment, neatly folded and sealed. “If you don’t mind—”

  “From you?”

  “Me and Casey. If it’s possible—if you can find our families—”

  Bisesa took the papers and tucked them inside her jumpsuit. “I’ll make sure they get them.”

  Casey nodded. Then he called, “Something’s happening.” He adjusted his headset and tapped an electromagnetic sensor lashed up from the guts of the chopper’s ruined radio. He glanced up at the Eye. “I don’t see any change in that thing. But the signal’s intensifying. It seems somebody is expecting you, Bisesa.”

  Bisesa took Josh’s hand. “We’d better take our positions.”

  “Where?” A lock of hair on his forehead was ruffled by a breeze.

  “Damned if I know,” she said. Fondly she tucked back his hair. But the breeze came again, washing over Josh’s face, a breeze that blew in from no apparent source, toward the center of the chamber.

  “It’s the Eye,” Abdikadir said. Bits of paper and loose cabling fluttered around him. “It is breathing in. Bisesa, get ready.”

  The breeze had become a wind, flowing toward the center of the room, strong enough to buffet Bisesa’s back. She pulled Josh with her, and stumbled toward the Eye. It hung there as still as ever, returning her own distorted voodoo-doll reflection, but bits of paper and straw flew up and clung to its surface.

  Casey threw his headphones aside. “Shit! There was a shriek—an electromagnetic chirp—it’s blown the circuits. Whoever that thing is signaling, it isn’t me . . .”

  “It’s time,” Josh said.

  So it was, she thought. On some deep level she hadn’t believed it herself. But now it was happening. Her stomach fluttered, her heart pounded; she was profoundly grateful for the feel of Josh’s strong hand.

  “Look up,” Abdikadir said.

  For the first time since they had found it, the Eye was changing.

  The reflective sheen was still there. But now it oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.

  Then the surface collapsed, like the skin of a suddenly deflated balloon.

  Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. She could still see reflections of herself, with Josh at her side, but their images were broken up, as if scattered from the shards of a smashed mirror. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face—but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.

  This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.

  She looked over her shoulder. The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye. Abdikadir was still there, though he seemed to be drawing more distant, and he was oddly blurred: he was clinging to the door frame, and he was on the ground, and he turned away and turned back—not sequentially, but all at the same time, like the frames of a movie reel cut out and reassembled in a random order. “Go with Allah,” he called. “Go, go . . .” But his voice was lost on the wind. And then the storm of light grew to a blizzard, and she could see him no more.

  The wind tugged at her, nearly knocking her off her feet. She tried to be analytical. She tried to count her breaths. But her thoughts seemed to fragment, the inner sentences she formed breaking into words, and syllables, and letters, jumbling into nonsense. It was the Discontinuity, she thought. It had worked on the scale of a planet, cutting adrift great slabs of landscape. But it had broken into this room, cutting Abdikadir’s life into pieces, and now, at last, it was pushing into her own head, for, after all, even her consciousness was embedded in space-time . . .

  She looked into the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity—but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.

  It was her last conscious thought before the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of her body. Space was gone, time itself suspended, and she became a mote, nothing but an animal’s bright, stubborn, mindless soul. But through it all she was aware of Josh’s warm hand in hers.

  There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

  One of those was to serve as a gate.

  The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

  Then the Eye vanished. The temple chamber was left empty save for a tangle of ruined electronic gear, and two men with memories of what they had seen and heard, memories they could neither believe nor understand.

  PART 6

  TIME’S EYE

  44: FIRSTBORN

  The long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle.

  Those who had watched Earth for so long had never been remotely human. But they had once been flesh and blood.

  They had been born on a planet of one of the first stars of all, a roaring hydrogen-fat monster, a beacon in a universe still dark. These first ones were vigorou
s, in a young and energy-fat universe. But planets, the crucibles of life, were scarce, for the heavy elements that comprised them had yet to be manufactured in the hearts of stars. When they looked out across the depths of space, they saw nothing like themselves, no Mind to mirror their own.

  The early stars blazed gloriously but died quickly. Their thin debris enriched the pooled gases of the Galaxy, and soon a new generation of long-lived stars would emerge. But to those left stranded between the dying protostars, it was a terrible abandonment.

  And as they looked ahead, they saw only a slow darkening, as each generation of stars was built with increasing difficulty from the debris of the last. There would come a day when there wasn’t enough fuel in the Galaxy to manufacture a single new star, and the last light flickered and died. Even after that it would go on, the terrible clamp of entropy strangling the cosmos and all its processes.

  Despite all their powers, they were not beyond the reach of time.

  This desolating realization caused an age of madness. Strange and beautiful empires rose and fell, and terrible wars were fought between beings of metal and of flesh, children of the same forgotten world. The wars expended an unforgivable proportion of the Galaxy’s usable energy reserve, and had no resolution but exhaustion.

  Saddened but wiser, the survivors began to plan for an inevitable future, an endless future of cold and dark.

  They returned to their abandoned machines of war. The ancient machines were directed to a new objective: to the elimination of waste—to cauterization, if necessary. Their makers saw now that if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest future, there must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.

  The machines had been honed by a million years of war. They fulfilled their task perfectly, and would do so forever. They waited, unchanging, dedicated to a single purpose, as new worlds, and new life, congealed from the rubble of the old.

  It was all for the best of intentions. The first ones, born into an empty universe, cherished life above all else. But to preserve life, life must sometimes be destroyed.

  45: THROUGH THE EYE

  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 scrabbled at the ground, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.

  She was on her back. There was something enormously bright above her—the sun, yes, the sun, she was outdoors. Her arms were spread out wide, away from her body, and her fingers were digging into the dirt.

  She threw herself over onto her belly. Sensations returned to her legs, arms, chest. Dazzled by the sun, she could barely see.

  A plain. Red sand. Eroded hills in the distance. Even the sky looked red, though the sun was high.

  Josh was beside her. He was lying on his back, gasping for air, like an ungainly fish stranded on this strange beach. She scrabbled over to him, crawling through loose sand.

  “Where are we?” he gasped. “Is this the twenty-first century?”

  “I hope not.” When she tried to speak her throat was dry, scratchy. She pulled her pack off her back and dug out a flask of water. “Drink this.”

  He gulped at the water gratefully. Sweat was already standing out on his brow and soaking into his collar.

  She dug her hands into the dirt. It crumbled, pale, lifeless and dry. But something shone in it, fragments that glittered when exposed to the overhead sun. She dug them out and laid them on her palm. They were coin-sized fragments of glass, opaque, their edges ragged. She shook the fragments out of her palm and let them fall to the ground. But when she brushed away more dirt, she found more glass bits everywhere, a layer of the stuff beneath the ground.

  Experimentally she pushed herself to her knees, straightened up—her ears rang with dizziness, but she wasn’t going to faint—and then, one foot, two, she stood up. Now she could see the landscape better. It was just a plain, a plain of this glass-ridden sand, that marched away to the horizon, where worn hills waited out eternity. She and Josh were at the base of a shallow depression; the land subtly rose all around them to a rim, no more than a few meters high, perhaps a kilometer away.

  She was standing in a crater.

  A nuke would do this, she thought. The glass fragments could have been formed in the explosion of a small nuclear weapon, bits of concrete and soil fused to glass. If that was so, nothing else was left—if there had been a city here there were no concrete foundations, no bones, not even the ashes of the final fires, only the fragments of nuclear glass. This crater looked old, worn, the bits of glass buried deep. If war had come by here, it must have been long ago.

  She wondered if radioactivity lingered. But if the Firstborn had meant her any harm they could have simply killed her—and if not, surely they would protect her from such an elementary hazard.

  Her chest ached as she breathed. Was the air thin? Was there too little oxygen, or too much?

  Suddenly it got a little darker, though there was no cloud in the ruddy sky. She peered up. There was something wrong with the sun. Its disc was deformed. It looked like a leaf out of which a great bite had been taken.

  Josh was standing beside her. “My God,” he said.

  The eclipse progressed quickly. It began to feel colder, and in the last moments Bisesa glimpsed bands of shadow rushing across the eroded ground. She felt her breathing slow, her heart pump more gently. Her body, responding even now to ancient primal rhythms, was reacting to the darkness, readying itself for night.

  The darkness reached its greatest depth. There was a moment of profound stillness.

  The sun turned to a ring of brightness. The central disc of shadow had a serrated edge, and sunlight twinkled through those irregularities. That disc was surely the Moon, still traveling between Earth and sun, its shadow sliding across the face of the sun. The sun’s glare was reduced enough for Bisesa to make out the corona, the sun’s higher atmosphere, easily visible as a wispy sculpture around that complex double disc.

  But this eclipse was not total. The Moon was not big enough to obscure that glowing face. The fat ring of light in the sky was a baffling, terrifying sight.

  “Something’s wrong,” Josh murmured.

  “Geometry,” she said. “The Earth-Moon system . . . It changes with time.” As the Moon dragged tides through Earth’s ocean, so Earth likewise tugged at the Moon’s rocky substrate. Since their formation the twin worlds had slowly separated—only a few centimeters per year, but over enough time that took the Moon ever farther from the Earth.

  Josh understood the essence of what had happened. “This is the future. Not the twenty-first century—the very far future . . . Millions of years hence, perhaps.”

  She walked around the plain, peering up at the complex sky. “You’re trying to tell us something, aren’t you? This desolate, war-shattered ground—where am I, London? New York, Moscow, Beijing? Lahore? And why bring us to this precise place and time to show us an eclipse? . . . Has all this got something to do with the sun?” Hot, dusty, thirsty, disoriented, she was suddenly filled with rage. “Don’t give me special-effect riddles. Talk to me, damn you. What’s going to happen?”

  As if in reply an Eye, at least as large as the Eye of Marduk, snapped into existence above her head. She actually felt the wash of the air it displaced as it forced its way into her reality.

  She took Josh’s hand. “Here we go again . . . Keep your hands inside the car at all times.”

  But his eyes were wide; sand clung to his sweat-streaked face. “Bisesa?”

  She understood immediately. He couldn’t see the Eye. This time it had come for her—her alone, not for Josh.

  “No!” She grabbed Josh’s arm. “You can’t do this, you cruel bastards!”

  Josh understood. “Bisesa, it’s all right.” He touched her chin, turned her face toward him, kissed her mouth. “We’ve already come further than I could have dreamed possible. Perhaps our lo
ve will live on, in some other world—and perhaps when all possibilities are drawn together at the end of time we will be reunited . . .” He smiled. “It’s enough.”

  In the sky the Eye flipped into a funnel shape, and then a corridor in the sky. Already sparks of light were rushing across the plain, gathering around her, hurtling upward.

  She clung to Josh and closed her eyes. Listen to me. I’ve done everything you asked. Give me this one thing. Don’t leave him here, to die alone. Send him home—send him back to Abdi. This one thing, I beg you . . .

  A hot wind gathered, rushing up from the ground into the mouth of the shining shaft overhead. Something tugged at her, pulling her from Josh’s arms. She struggled, but Josh let go.

  She was lifted off the ground. She was actually looking down at him.

  He was still smiling. “You are an angel ascending. Good-bye, good-bye . . .” The searing, beautiful light gathered around her again. In the last instant she saw him stagger back into a room crowded with wires and bits of electronic gear, where a dark man rushed forward to catch him.

  Thank you.

  A clash of cymbals.

  46: GRASPER

  With the coming of the morning, Seeker woke with a start, eyes snapping open.

  For the first time in years there was no net sheltering her from the sky. She cried out and curled over her daughter.

  She forced open one eye. There was still no net, nothing but bare ground around her, a few scuff marks and tracks. The soldiers had gone. They had taken away the cage.

  She was free.

  She sat up. Grasper woke up with a grumble and rubbed her eyes. Seeker looked around. The rocky plain swept away, bare of life save for a few tussocks of grass. In the distance, snow-capped mountains loomed over the horizon, blue and floating in the morning mist. Near the base of the mountains she made out a stripe of green. Her old spirit stirred. Forest: if they could make it that far, perhaps she would find others like herself.