Time's Eye

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 Six: 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 vigorous, 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 Bises
a 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 love 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.

  But the breeze changed, coming from the north, and she tasted ice. She quailed. Suddenly she longed for the smells of cooking, the clattering of machines, the high, gull-like voices of the soldiers. She had spent too long in her cage; she missed it.

  Grasper, though, shared none of her mother's hesitation. She knuckle-walked forward, chimp-like, exploring the rocky ground. It seemed rich in texture compared to the swept-bare, stamped-down dirt floor of the cage. Here was a rock that fit neatly in her hand, there a dry reed that folded and bent and twisted with ease.

  Clutching the rock, Grasper unfolded her legs and stood upright. She peered across the broken ground toward the mountains, and the ice.

  In the north the cold was gathering. The new volcanic island in the Atlantic had deflected the Gulf Stream, the flow of southern water that had kept northern Europe anomalously warm for millennia. The Gulf Stream's loss had already had impacts on agriculture as far south as Babylonia. Now it was going to get worse. This year, autumn would come early, and by midwinter, massive Arctic superstorms would erupt with fury over the continents, depositing more snow in a few days than would once have been seen in five or ten years.

  For two million years before the Discontinuity, the ice had come and gone from its fastnesses at the poles, its complex cycles governed by subtleties of Earth's passage around the sun. This new world, Mir, thrown together from fragments of the old, had at first oscillated unsteadily, but as that first motion damped it was settling down to a new pattern of cycles: a pattern that, in the short term, promoted the spreading of the ice. It would take only a decade for the ice caps to form, a decade more for them to extend as far south as the sites of London, Berlin, Manhattan.

  Further ahead, even more drastic changes were to come. Since its formation the planet had been steadily cooling, and the flow of heat from its interior had driven the mantle currents on which the continents rode. Now the Discontinuity had caused disturbances in the deep strange weather of Mir's liquid interior. Eventually a new pattern of currents would settle into place—but for now it was as if a vast lid had been clamped on a boiling pan.

  Beneath the hearts of the continents the mantle material had begun to swell and rise. Earth had never been perfectly spherical anyhow. Now Mir was growing bulges, like lumps of mud stuck to the side of a spinning top. In time the crust and upper mantle would shear off the planet's core, and the deformed planet would seek a new stability by shifting the lumps away from the axis of rotation. As the major continents slid to the equator, ocean currents would be altered again, sea levels raised or lowered by hundreds of meters, dramatic climate changes induced.

  In Mir's long chthonic annealing there would be difficult times for the planet's cargo of life. But people were mobile. The citizens of Chicago were already preparing for a vast migration south. Many humans would survive.

  As would the man-apes.

  Grasper was not as she had been before her inspection by the Eye. The probing of her body and mind had been meant only to record her capabilities, to note her place in the great spectrum of possibilities that was life on this blue world. But Grasper was very young, and the machinery that had studied her was very old, and no longer quite so perfect as it had once been. The probing had been clumsy. Grasper's half-formed mind had been stirred.

  This patched-together world would be dominated for a long time by the humans, there could be no doubt about that. But even they could not defy the ice. On a shifting, dangerous world there was plenty of empty space to explore. Plenty of room for a creature with potential. And there was no particular reason why that potential had to be realized exactly as it had been before. There was room on Mir for something different. Something better, perhaps.

  Grasper hefted the heavy stone in her hand, and dimly imagined what might be done with it. She was quite without fear. Now she was master of the world, and she was not quite sure what to do next.

  But she would think of something.

  47. Return

  BISESA GASPED, STAGGERED. She was standing.

  Music was playing.

&nb
sp; She stared at a wall, which showed the magnified image of an impossibly beautiful young man crooning into an old-fashioned microphone. Impossible, yes; he was a synth star, a distillation of the inchoate longings of pre-teen girls. "My God, he looks like Alexander the Great." Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall's moving colors, its brightness. She had never realized how drab and dun-colored Mir had been.

  The softwall said, "Good morning, Bisesa. This is your regular alarm call. Breakfast is waiting downstairs. The news headlines today are—"

  "Shut up." Her voice was a dusty desert croak.

  "Of course." The synthetic boy sang on softly.

  She glanced around. This was her bedroom, in her London apartment. It seemed small, cluttered. The bed was big, soft, not slept in.

  She walked to the window. Her military-issue boots were heavy on the carpet, and left footprints of crimson dust. The sky was gray, on the cusp of sunrise, and the skyline of London was emerging from the flatness of silhouette.

  "Wall."

  "Bisesa?"

  "What's the date?"

  "Tuesday."

  "The date."

  "Ah. The ninth of June, 2037."

  The day after the chopper crash. "I should be in Afghanistan."

  The softwall coughed. "I've grown used to your sudden changes of plans, Bisesa. I remember once—"