Time's Eye

by Arthur C. Clarke

  And then a fourth set of lines appeared—Seeker tried to follow where they went—but suddenly something inside her head hurt badly. She cried out.

  Again those unseen hands released her, and she collapsed to the ground. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her weeping eyes. For the first time she was aware of a warmth along her inner thighs. She had urinated where she stood, and never been aware of it.

  Grasper was still standing, trembling but upright, gazing up at the washing lights, which cast complex patterns of shadows across her small face. A fifth set of lines—a sixth set, disappearing in impossible directions—

  Grasper went rigid, her head locked back, her fingers grabbing at nothing, and then she fell, rigid as a block of wood. Seeker grabbed her child and cradled her on her own piss-soaked lap. The stiffness went out of Grasper, and she became a bundle of limp fur. Seeker stroked her and let her suckle, though her flaccid breast had been dry for years.

  Even now the Eye watched them, recording the bond between mother and child, draining the man-apes of every sensation. It was all part of the test.

  The respite was only brief. Soon the Eye resumed its steady, pearly glow, and it was as if unseen hands poked and prodded at Seeker's limbs. She pushed aside her child and stood once more, her face lifted to the unearthly light.

  38. The Eye of Marduk

  BISESA MOVED INTO THE Temple of Marduk. She brought in a pallet and blankets and had her food delivered; she even set up a chemical toilet that had come from the Bird. She spent most of her time here now, alone save for the small company of the phone—and the brooding mass of the Eye.

  She could feel there was something there, a presence behind that impenetrable hide. It was a feeling beyond the immediate senses, like the feeling she would get if she was blindfolded and thrust through a door, and still able to tell if the space she was in was open, or confined.

  But it wasn't like being with a person. Sometimes all she felt was watchfulness, as if the Eye was no more than a huge camera. But sometimes she felt she glimpsed something behind the Eye. Was there a Watcher who stood, metaphorically, behind all the Eyes in the world? Sometimes she sensed there was a whole hierarchy of intelligences, in fact, escalating up from the simple constructs of Watchers and Eyes that she could imagine, up in some impossible direction, filtering and classifying the distillation of her actions, her reactions, her very self.

  She spent more and more of her time exploring these sensations. She avoided everybody, her twenty-first-century companions—even poor Josh. She would turn to him for comfort, though, when she felt cold, and too desolately lonely. But afterward, though she felt genuine affection for him, she would be guilty, as if she had used him.

  She tried not to examine these feelings, tried not even to decide if she loved Josh or not. She had the Eye, and that was the center of her world. It had to be. And she wouldn't share herself with anybody or anything else, not even Josh.

  * * *

  She tried to apply physics to the Eye.

  She began with simple geometric measurements, like those Abdikadir had tried on the smaller Eyes in the North-West Frontier. She used laser instruments to prove that for this bauble too the famous ratio pi was not about three and one-seventh, as Euclid, schoolbook geometry and the rest of the world demanded, but simply three. Like all the Eyes, this was an intruder from somewhere else.

  She went beyond geometry. With a party of Macedonians and British she went back to the North-West Frontier and the crash site of the Little Bird. Months of acid rain hadn't helped to preserve what was left. Still, there were usable electromagnetic sensors, working in visible light, infrared and ultraviolet—twenty-first-century spy-in-the-sky electronic eyes—and various chemical sensors, "noses" designed to sniff out explosives and the like. She dug out instrumentation, components, cabling, any usable gear—including that small chemical toilet.

  She set up her equipment in the temple chamber. She improvised scaffolding around the Eye, and fixed the Bird's amputated sensors to gaze at the alien object from all angles, twenty-four hours a day. In the end she filled this ancient Babylonian temple chamber with a tangle of cables and infrared comms beams, all leading to an interface box on which her phone patiently sat. She had little electrical power, though, only the batteries from the Bird and smaller cells in the gear itself. So her twenty-first-century sensors peered at this impossibly advanced alien artifact by the smoky light of animal-fat lamps.

  She got some answers.

  The Bird's radiation sensors, souped-up Geiger counters designed to sniff out illicit nukes, detected traces of high frequency X-rays and very high energy particles emanating from the Eye. These results were tantalizing and elusive, and she guessed this was just leakage, that there was a whole spectrum of exotic high-energy radiation products flowing from the Eye, beyond the capacity of the Bird's crude Geigers to pick up. The radiation must be traces of some immense expenditure of energy—the great straining required to keep this Eye in existence in an inimical reality, perhaps.

  And then there was the question of time.

  She used the Bird's altimeter to bounce laser beams off the Eye's hide. The laser light was reflected with 100 percent efficiency; the surface of the Eye acted like a perfect mirror. But the beams came back with a measurable Doppler shift. It was as if the surface of the Eye was receding, fast, at more than a hundred kilometers per hour. Every point on the surface she tested gave the same result. According to these results the Eye was imploding.

  To her naked eye, of course, the Eye sat fat and immovable, hovering complacently in the air as it always did. Nevertheless, in some direction she couldn't perceive, that slick surface was moving. She suspected that in some sense the Eye's existence escalated up in directions beyond her power to see, or her instruments to measure.

  And if that was possible, she mused, perhaps there was only one Eye, projecting down from some higher dimension into the world, like fingers from a single hand pushing through the surface of a pond.

  But sometimes she thought that all this experimentation was just to divert herself from the main issue, which was her intuition about the Eye.

  "Maybe I'm just being anthropomorphic," she said to the phone. "Why should there be mind, anything like my mind, involved in this at all?"

  "David Hume wondered about that," the phone murmured. "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion... Hume asked why we should look for 'mind' as the organizing principle of the universe. He was talking about traditional constructs of God, of course. Maybe the order we perceive just emerges. 'For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the source, or spring, of order originating within itself, as well as the mind does.' He wrote that down a full century before Darwin proved it was possible for organization to emerge from mindless matter."

  "So you do think I'm anthropomorphizing?"

  "No," said the phone. "We don't know any way for an object like this to be formed except by intelligent action. Assuming a mind is responsible is probably the simplest hypothesis. And anyhow, perhaps these feelings you have are based in some physical reality, even if they don't come through your senses. Your body, your brain, are complicated instruments in their own right. Perhaps the subtle electrochemistry that underpins your mind is being influenced, somehow, by that. It's not telepathy—but it may be real."

  "Do you sense there's something here?"

  "No. But then I'm not human," the phone sighed.

  Sometimes she suspected the Eye was feeding her these insights, deliberately. "It's as if it is downloading information into me, bit by bit. But my mind, my brain, is just incapable of taking it all. It's as if I tried to download modern virtual reality software onto a Babbage difference engine..."

  "That's a simile I can sympathize with," said the phone dryly.

  "No offense."

  Sometimes she would simply sit in the ponderous company of the Eye, and let her mind roam where it would.

  She kept thinking of Myra. As time passed, as the months turned into
years, and the Discontinuity, that single extraordinary event, receded into the past, she felt herself embedding more deeply into this new world. Sometimes, in this drab antique place, her memories of twenty-first-century Earth seemed absurd, impossibly gaudy, like a false dream. But her feelings of loss about Myra didn't fade.

  It wasn't even as if Myra had been taken from her somehow, to continue her life in some other part of the world. It was no comfort to her to imagine how old Myra would be now, how she must look, where she would be in her school career, what they might have been doing together if they had been reunited. None of those comprehensible human situations applied, because she couldn't know if she and Myra had a timeline in common. It was even possible that there were many copies of Myra on multiple fragmented worlds, some of them even with copies of herself, and how was she supposed to feel about that? The Discontinuity had been a superhuman event, and the loss she had suffered was superhuman too, and she had no human way of coping with it.

  As she lay on her pallet, brooding through the night, she sensed the Eye watching her, drawing up her baffled grief. She sensed that mind, but there was no compassion there, no pity, nothing but a vast Olympian watchfulness.

  She would get to her feet and beat on the Eye's impassive hide with her fist, or hurl bits of Babylonian rubble at it. "Is this what you wanted? Is this why you came here, why you ripped apart our world and our lives? Did you come here to break my heart? Why won't you just send me home...?"

  There was a certain receptivity, she felt. Mostly it felt like the reverberant receptivity of a vast cathedral dome, in which her tiny cries were lost and meaningless.

  But sometimes she thought someone was listening to her.

  And just occasionally, compassionless or not, she felt they might respond to her pleas.

  * * *

  One day the phone whispered to her, "It's time."

  "Time for what?"

  "I have to go to safe mode."

  She had been expecting this. The phone's memory contained a cache of invaluable and irreplaceable data—not just her observations of the Eye, and a record of the Discontinuity events, but the last of the treasures of the old vanished world, not least the works of poor Ruddy Kipling. But there was nowhere to download the data, not even a way to print it out. During her sleep times she had given up the phone to a team of British clerks, under the supervision of Abdikadir, who had copied out by hand various documents and diagrams and maps. It was better than nothing, but the phone's capacious memory had barely been scratched.

  Anyhow Bisesa and the phone had agreed that when the phone's batteries dropped to a certain critical level it should make itself inert. It would only take a trickle of power to preserve its data almost indefinitely, until such time as Mir's new civilization advanced enough to access the phone's invaluable memories. "And bring you back to life," she had promised the phone.

  It was all quite logical. But now the moment was here, Bisesa was bereft. After all this phone had been her companion since she was twelve.

  "You have to press the buttons to shut me down," the phone said.

  "I know." She held the little instrument before her, and found the right key combination through eyes embarrassingly blurred with tears. She paused before hitting the final key.

  "I'm sorry," said the phone.

  "It's not your fault."

  "Bisesa, I'm frightened."

  "You don't have to be. I'll wall you up if I have to and leave you to the archaeologists."

  "I don't mean that. I've never been switched off before. Do you think I will dream?"

  "I don't know," she whispered. She pressed the key, and the phone's surface, glowing green in the gloom of the chamber, turned dark.

  39. Explorations

  AFTER A SIX-MONTH EXPLORATORY jaunt into southern India, Abdikadir returned to Babylon.

  Eumenes took him on a tour of the recovering city. It was a cold day. Though it was midsummer—according to the Babylonian astronomers, who patiently tracked the motion of stars and sun through a new sky—the wind was chill, and Abdikadir wrapped his arms around his body.

  After months away, Abdikadir was impressed with the latest developments; the inhabitants of the city had been hard at work. Alexander had repopulated the depleted city with some of his own officers and veterans, and had installed one of his generals in a joint governorship of the city with one of Babylon's pre-Discontinuity officials. The experiment seemed to be working; the new population, a mixture of Macedonian warriors and Babylonian grandees, seemed to be getting along tolerably well.

  There was much debate about what to do with the region on the western bank, reduced to rubble by time. To the Macedonians it was a wasteland; to the moderns it was an archaeological site that could perhaps one day offer up some clues about the great displacement in time that had split this city in two. To leave it alone for now was the obvious compromise.

  But downstream of the city walls, Alexander's army had dug out a huge natural harbor, deep enough to take oceangoing ships, which were being constructed from local timber in hastily assembled dry docks. There was even a small lighthouse, illuminated by oil lamps with polished shields as mirrors behind them.

  "This is magnificent," Abdikadir said. They were standing on the new harbor's wall, which towered over the small vessels that already ventured onto the water beneath it.

  Eumenes said that Alexander knew that fast transport and effective communications were the key to holding together an empire. "The King learned that lesson the hard way," Eumenes said dryly. In five years he had learned some halting English, Abdikadir some uncertain Greek; with a little cooperation they could communicate without interpreters now. Eumenes went on, "Alexander's progress through Persia owed much to the quality of the imperial roads. When we reached the end of the Persian roads, far to the east, his infantrymen knew they could go no further, no matter what his vaulting ambition desired. And so we had to stop. But the ocean is the road of the gods, and requires no labor to lay it."

  "Even so, I can't believe you've achieved so much so quickly..." Abdikadir, viewing all this industry, felt faintly guilty. Perhaps he had been away too long.

  He had enjoyed his explorations. In India Abdikadir and his party had hacked a path through dense jungle, encountering all manner of exotic plants and animals—though few people. Similar expeditions were being sent out to east, west, north, south, across Europe, Asia, Africa. To map out this new and rich world seemed to fill a void in Abdikadir's heart left by the loss of his own world—and the trauma of the great killing during the Mongol assault. Perhaps he was exploring the outer world in order to distract himself from the turmoil of the inner—and perhaps he had been evading his true responsibilities too long.

  He turned away from the city and gazed toward the south, where the glistening tracks of irrigation canals lanced across fields of green. Here was the real work of the world: growing food. This was the Fertile Crescent, after all, the birthplace of organized agriculture, and once its artificially irrigated fields had provided a third of the food supply for the Persian empire. There surely couldn't have been a better place to start farming again. But Abdikadir had already inspected the fields, and he knew that things weren't going well.

  "It is this wretched cold," Eumenes complained. "The astronomers may call this midsummer, but I have known no summer like it... And then there are the locusts, and other plagues of insects."

  The recovery program was indeed impressive, even if it had been slow starting. The quest to save Babylon from the Mongols was long over, and there seemed no real prospect of a revival of the Mongol threat in the near future. Alexander's ambassadors reported that the Mongols seem stunned by the sudden emptying of China, to their south—fifty million people, vanished into thin air. The war with the Mongols had been a great adventure—but it had been a diversion. With the battle won, there had been a deep sense of anticlimax among the British, Macedonians, and Little Bird crew alike, and everyone in Babylon was suddenly left to face the
unpleasant truth that this was one campaign from which none of them was ever going home.

  It had taken some time for them to discover a new purpose: to build a new world. And Alexander, with his energy and indomitable will, had been central to establishing that sense of purpose.

  "And what is the King working on himself?"

  "That." Eumenes pointed grandly to the ceremonial heart of the city.

  Abdikadir saw that a broad area had been cleared, and the lower levels of what looked like a new ziggurat had been laid out. He whistled. "That looks like it will rival Babel itself."

  "Perhaps it will. Nominally, it is a monument for Hephaistion; its deeper purpose will be to commemorate the world we have lost. These Macedonians always did treasure their funerary arts! And Alexander, I think, has an ambition to rival the massive tombs he once saw in Egypt. But with things as they are in the fields, it is hard for us to afford the manpower for such a venture, no matter how magnificent."

  Abdikadir studied the Greek's finely chiseled face. "I have a feeling you're asking me for something."

  Eumenes smiled. "And I have a feeling you have a little Greek in you too. Abdikadir, although the King's wife Roxana delivered a son—a boy who is now four years old—so that we have an heir, Alexander's continued well-being over the next few years is essential to us all."

  "Of course."

  "But this," Eumenes said, meaning the dockyards and fields, "is not enough for him. The King is a complex man, Abdikadir. I should know. He is a Macedonian, of course—and he drinks like one. But he is capable of cold calculation, like a Persian; and he can be a statesman of startling insight—he is like a Greek of the cities!