Time's Eye

by Arthur C. Clarke

  And then there were the Eyes—or rather, the lack of them. As they walked west, the Eyes were fewer, more spaced out, until at last Bisesa realized she had marched through a whole day without seeing a single one. Nobody had any idea what to make of this.

  At last they approached another transition. The advance party came to a line of green that stretched, dead straight, from the northern horizon to the south. The party hesitated on the desiccated side of the border.

  To the west, beyond the line, the land was split up into polygonal fields, and striped by glistening canals. Here and there crude-looking wattle-and-daub shacks sat amid the fields, squat and ugly, like lumps of shaped mud. The shacks were clearly occupied, for Bisesa could see traces of smoke rising from some of them. A few goats and bullocks, tethered to posts, patiently chewed on grass or stubble. But there were no people.

  Abdikadir stood with Bisesa. "Babylon's famous irrigation canals."

  "I suppose they must be." Some of the canals were extensions of the dry, worn-out ditches she had noticed before: the same bits of ancient engineering, severed by centuries. But this crude coupling of the eras obviously caused practical problems; the sections from later eras, ditches silted up by erosion, blocked off the canals from their riverside sources, and some of the farmers' channels were drying up.

  Abdikadir said, "Let's show the way." He took a deliberate step forward and crossed the invisible, intangible line between the two world slices.

  The party crossed the disjunction and moved on.

  The richness of the land was obvious. Most of the fields seemed to be stocked with wheat, of a tall, fat-headed variety farmer's daughter Bisesa didn't recognize. But there was also millet and barley, and, here and there, rich stands of date palms. Once, Cecil de Morgan said, the Babylonians would sing songs about these palms, listing their three hundred and sixty uses, one for every day of their year.

  Whether the farmers were hiding or not, this obviously wasn't an empty landscape—and it was on the produce of these fields that Alexander's army was going to depend. There would have to be some gentle diplomacy here, Bisesa realized. The King had the manpower to take whatever he wanted, but the natives knew the land, and this vast and hungry army couldn't afford a single failed crop. Perhaps the first priority ought to be to get Alexander's soldiers and engineers to rebuild the irrigation system...

  Abdikadir said, "You know, it's impossible to believe this is Iraq—that we're only a hundred kilometers or so southwest of Baghdad. The agricultural wealth of this place fueled empires for millennia."

  "But where is everybody?"

  Abdi said, "Can you blame these farmers for hiding? Their rich farmland is sliced in half and replaced by semidesert. Their canals fail. A stinging rain withers their crops. And then, what looms over the horizon? Only the greatest army the ancient world ever saw... Ah," he said. "There." He stopped and pointed.

  On the western horizon she saw buildings, a complicated wall, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance.

  "Babylon," Abdikadir whispered.

  Josh said, "And that is the Tower of Babel."

  "Holy crap," said Casey.

  * * *

  The army and its baggage train caught up with its head, and spread out into a camp over the mudflats near the banks of the Euphrates.

  Alexander chose to wait a day before entering the city itself. He wanted to see if the dignitaries of the city would come out to greet him. Nobody came. He sent out scouts to survey the city walls and its surroundings. They returned safe but, Bisesa thought, they looked shocked.

  Time slices or not, Alexander was going to enter the ancient city in the grand style. So, early in the morning, wearing his gold-embroidered cloak and his royal diadem on his head, he rode ahead toward the city walls, with Hephaistion walking at his side, and a phalanx of a hundred Shield Bearers around him, a rectangle of ferocious muscle and iron. The King showed no sign of the pain the effort to ride must be causing him; once again Bisesa was astounded by his strength of will.

  Eumenes and other close companions walked in a loose formation behind the King. Among this party were Captain Grove and his senior officers, a number of British troops, and Bisesa and the Birdcrew. Bisesa felt oddly self-conscious in the middle of this grand procession, for she and the other moderns towered over the Macedonians, despite the finery of their dress uniforms.

  The city's walls were impressive enough in themselves, a triple circuit of baked brick and rubble that must have stretched twenty kilometers around, all surrounded by a moat. But there were no signs of life—no smoke from fires, no soldiers watching vigilantly from the towers—and the great gates hung open.

  Eumenes muttered, "It was different last time, on Alexander's first entry to the city. The satrap rode out to meet us. The road was strewn with flowers, and soldiers came out with tame lions and leopards in cages, and priests and prophets danced to the sound of harps. It was magnificent! It was fitting! But this..."

  This, conceded Bisesa, was scary.

  Alexander, per his reputation, led by example. Without hesitating he walked his horse over the wooden bridge that spanned the moat, and approached the grandest of the gates. This was a high-arched passage set between two heavy square towers.

  The procession followed. Even to reach the gate they had to walk up a ramp to a platform perhaps fifteen meters above ground level. As Bisesa walked through it, the gate itself towered twenty meters or more above her head. Every square centimeter of its walls was covered in glazed brickwork, a haunting royal blue surface across which dragons and bulls danced.

  Ruddy walked with his head tilted back, his mouth gaping open. Still a little "seedy" from his illness, he walked uncertainly, and Josh kindly took his arm to lead him. "Can this be the Ishtar Gate? Who would have thought—who would have thought..."

  The city was laid out in a rough rectangle, its plan spanning the Euphrates. Alexander's party had entered from the north, on the east side of the river. Inside the gate, the procession moved down a broad avenue that ran south, passing magnificent, baffling buildings, perhaps temples and palaces. Bisesa glimpsed statues, fountains, and every wall surface was decorated with dazzling glazed bricks and molded with lions and rosettes. There was so much opulence and detail she couldn't take it all in.

  The phone, peeking out of her pocket, tried to help. "The complex to your right is probably the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon's greatest ruler, who—"

  "Shut up, phone."

  Casey was hobbling along. "If this is Babylon, where are the Hanging Gardens?"

  "In Nineveh," said the phone dryly.

  "No people," said Josh uncertainly. "I see some damage—signs of fires, looting, perhaps even earthquake destruction—but still no people. It's getting eerie."

  "Yeah," growled Casey. "All the lights on but nobody at home."

  "Have you noticed," said Abdikadir quietly, "that the Macedonians seem overwhelmed too? And yet they were here so recently..."

  It was true. Even wily Eumenes peered around at the city's immense buildings with awe.

  "It's possible this isn't their Babylon either," said Bisesa.

  The party began to break up. Alexander and Hephaistion, with most of the guard, made for the royal palace, back toward the gate. Other parties of troops were instructed to spread out through the city and search for inhabitants. The officers' cries rang out peremptorily, echoing from the glazed walls of the temples; de Morgan said they were warning their men of the consequences of looting. "But I can't imagine anybody will dare touch a thing in this haunted place!"

  Bisesa and the others continued on down the processional way, accompanied by Eumenes and a handful of his advisors and guards. The way led them through a series of walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Bisesa 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 meters on a side. To Bisesa's eyes, conditioned
by images of Egyptian pyramids, it looked like something she might have expected to find looming above a lost Mayan city. South of the ziggurat was a temple that the phone said must be the Esagila—the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia.

  The phone said, "The Babylonians called this ziggurat the Etemenanki—which meant 'the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.' It was Nebuchadnezzar who brought the Jews here as slave labor; by bad-mouthing Babylon in the Bible the Jews took a long revenge..."

  Josh grabbed Bisesa's hand. "Come on. I want to climb that blooming heap."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's the Tower of Babel! Look, there's a staircase on the south side." He was right; it must have been ten paces wide. "Race you!" And, dragging her hand, he was off.

  She was intrinsically fitter than he was; she had trained as a soldier, and had come from a century far better provided for with food and health care. But he was younger and had been hardened by the relentless marching. It was a fair race, and they kept holding hands until, after a hundred steps or so, they took a break and collapsed on the steps.

  From up here the Euphrates was a broad silver ribbon, bright even in the ashen light, that cut through the heart of the city. She couldn't make out clearly the western side of the city, but on this eastern side grand buildings clustered closely—temples, palaces, presumably government departments. The city plan was very orderly. The main roads were all straight, all met at right angles, and all began and ended in one of the many gates in the walls. The palaces were riots of color, every surface covered with polychrome tiles on which dragons and other fantastic creatures gamboled.

  She asked, "Where are we in time?"

  Her phone said, "If this is the age of Nebuchadnezzar, then perhaps the sixth century B.C. The Persians took Babylonia two centuries before Alexander's time, and they bled the area dry. When Alexander arrived it was still a vibrant city, but its best days were already far in the past. We, however, are seeing it at something close to its best."

  Josh studied her. "You look wistful, Bisesa."

  "I was just thinking."

  "About Myra—"

  "I'd love her to be here—to be able to show her this."

  "Maybe someday you'll be able to tell her about it."

  "Yeah, right."

  Ruddy, Abdikadir, Eumenes and de Morgan had followed more slowly up the ziggurat. Ruddy was wheezing, but he made it, and as he sat down Josh clapped him on the back. Eumenes stayed standing, apparently not winded at all, and gazed out at Babylon.

  Abdikadir borrowed Bisesa's night goggles and looked around. "Take a look at the western side of the river..."

  The line of the walls crossed the river, to complete the city's bisected rectangle. But on the far side of the river, though Bisesa thought she could make out the lines of the streets, there was no color but the orange-brown of mudstone, and the walls were reduced to ridges of broken rubble, the gates and watchtowers just mounds of core.

  Josh said, "It looks as if half the city has been melted."

  "Or nuked," said Abdikadir grimly.

  Eumenes spoke. "It was not like this," de Morgan translated. "Not like this..." While the eastern half of the city had been ceremonial and administrative, the western half had been residential, crowded with houses, tenement blocks, plazas and markets. Eumenes had seen it that way only a few years before, a vibrant, crowded human city. Now it was all reduced to nothing.

  "Another interface," Abdikadir said grimly. "The heart of a young Babylon, transplanted into the corpse of the old."

  Eumenes said, "I believed I was coming to terms with the strangeness of the faults in time which afflict us. But to see this—the face of a city rubbed away into sand, the weight of a thousand years descended in a heartbeat—"

  "Yes," Ruddy said. "The terrible cruelty of time."

  "More than cruelty," Eumenes said. "Arrogance." Bisesa was insulated from the Secretary's emotions by translation and two millennia of different body language. But again she thought she detected a growing, cold anger in him.

  A voice floated up from the ground, a Macedonian officer calling for Eumenes. A search party had found somebody, a Babylonian, hiding in the Temple of Marduk.

  30. The Gate of the Gods

  THE MACEDONIANS' CAPTIVE WAS brought to Eumenes. He was clearly terrified, his eyes wide in a grimy face, and two burly troopers had to drag him. The man was dressed in fine robes, rich blue cloth inlaid with threads of gold. But the robes, ragged and dirty, hung off his frame, as if he hadn't eaten for days. He might once have been clean-shaven and his scalp scoured bare, but now a stubble of black hair was growing back, and his skin was filthy. As he was brought close, Bisesa shrank from a stink of stale urine.

  Prodded with a Macedonian stabbing sword, he gabbled freely, but in an antique tongue that none of the moderns recognized. The officer who had found him had had the presence of mind to find a Persian soldier who could understand this language, and so the Babylonian's words were translated into archaic Greek for Eumenes, and then English for the moderns.

  De Morgan, frowning, translated uncertainly. "He says he was a priest of a goddess—I can't make out the name. He was abandoned when the others finally left the temple complex. He has been too frightened to leave the temple. He has been here for six days and nights—he has had no food—no water but that which he drank from the sacred font of the goddess—"

  Eumenes snapped his fingers impatiently. "Give him food and water. And make him tell us what happened here."

  Bit by bit, between ravenous mouthfuls, the priest told his story. It had begun, of course, with the Discontinuity.

  One night the priests and other temple staff had been woken by a dreadful wailing. Some of them ran outside. It was dark—but the stars were in the wrong place. The wailing came from a temple astronomer, who had been making observations of the "planets," the wandering stars, as he had every night since he was a small boy. But suddenly his planet had disappeared, and the very constellations had swum around the sky. It had been the astronomer's shock and despair that had begun to rouse the temple, and the rest of the city.

  "Of course," Abdikadir muttered. "The Babylonians kept careful records of the sky for millennia. They based their philosophy and religion on the great cycles in the sky. It's a strange thought that a less advanced people mightn't have been so terrified..."

  But that first astronomical trauma, really perceptible only to a religious elite, was just the precursor. For at the end of that night the sun was late rising, by six hours or more. And by the time it did rise, a strange hot wind was washing over the city, and rain fell, hot salty rain of a type nobody had known before.

  The people, many still dressed in their nightclothes, fled to the religious district. Some ran to the temples and demanded to be shown that their gods had not abandoned them on this, the strangest dawn of Babylon's history. Others climbed the ziggurat, to see what other changes the night had brought. The King was away—it wasn't clear to Bisesa whether the priest meant Nebuchadnezzar himself, or perhaps a successor—and there was nobody to impose order.

  And then the first panicked reports came of the erasure of the western districts. Most of the city's population had actually lived there; for the priests, ministers, court favorites and other dignitaries left on the eastern side, the shock was overwhelming.

  The last vestiges of order quickly broke down. A mob had stormed the Temple of Marduk itself. As many as could force their way in had rushed to the innermost chamber, and when they saw what had become of Marduk himself, king of the ancient Babylonian gods—

  The priest could not complete his sentence.

  After that final shock, a rumor had swept through the city that the eastern half would be rubbed into dust as had the western. People flung open the gates and ran, screaming, out of the city and into the land beyond. Even government ministers, army commanders and the priests had gone, leaving only this poor wretch, who had huddled in his defiled temple.

  Around mou
thfuls of food the priest described the nights since, as he had heard looting, burning, drunken laughter, even screaming. But whenever he had dared to poke his head out of doors in the daylight he had seen nobody. It was clear that most of the population had vanished into the parched land beyond the cultivated fragment, there to die of thirst or starvation.

  Eumenes ordered his men to clean up the priest and present him to the King. Then he said, "This priest says the old name of the city is 'the gate of the Gods.' How appropriate, for now that gate has opened... Come." Eumenes strode forward.

  The others hurried after him. Ruddy gasped, "Where are we going now?"

  Bisesa said, "Why, to the Temple of Marduk, of course."

  * * *

  The temple, another great pyramidal pile, was like a cross between a cathedral and an office building. Hurrying down corridors and climbing from level to level, Bisesa passed through a bewildering variety of rooms, each elaborately decorated, containing altars, statues, friezes, and obscure-looking equipment like crosiers, ornate knives, headdresses, musical instruments similar to lutes and sackbuts, even small carts and chariots. In some of the deeper rooms there were no windows, and the light came from oil lamps burning smokily in little alcoves in the walls. There was a powerful smell of incense, which de Morgan told her was frankincense. There was some evidence of minor damage: a door smashed off its heavy wooden hinges, broken pottery, a tapestry ripped off one wall.

  Ruddy said, "More than one god is worshiped here, that's for sure. This is a library of worship. More gaudy polytheism!"

  De Morgan muttered, "I can barely make out the gods for the gold. Look at it—it's everywhere..."