Time's Eye (30 page)

“We are no man-apes,” said Abdikadir.

“No. But maybe the tests they are running on us are just more subtle. Maybe the peculiar features of the Eye, like its non-Euclidean geometry, are there solely as a puzzle-box for us. And you think it was a
coincidence
that Alexander and Genghis Khan were both brought here? The two greatest warlords in Eurasian history, knocking their heads together, by
chance
? They are laughing at us. Maybe that’s all there is to this whole damn thing.”

“Bisesa
.
” Josh took her hands in his. “You believe the Eye is the key to everything that is happening. Well, so do I. But you are letting the work destroy you. And what good will that do?”

She looked at him and Abdikadir, alarmed. “What are you two cooking up?”

Abdikadir told her about Alexander’s planned European expedition. “Come away with us, Bisesa. What an adventure!”

“But the Eye—”

“Will still be here when you get back,” Josh said. “We can delegate somebody else to continue your monitoring.”

Abdikadir said, “The man-apes can’t leave their cage. You are a human. Show this thing it can’t control you, Bisesa. Walk out.”

“Bullshit,” she said tiredly. Then she added, “Casey.”

“What?”

“Casey’s got to run this shop. Not some Macedonian. And not some British, who would be worse, because he’d think he understands.”

Abdikadir and Josh exchanged a glance. “As long as I don’t tell him he’s got to do it,” said Josh quickly.

Bisesa glared up at the Eye. “I’ll be back, you bastards. And be nice to Casey. Remember I know more about you than I’ve told them yet . . .”

Abdikadir frowned. “Bisesa? What do you mean by that?”

That I might know a way home.
But she couldn’t tell them that, not yet. She stood up. “When do we leave?”

40: THE BOATING LAKE

The journey would begin at Alexandria. They were to sail counterclockwise around the complicated shore of the Mediterranean: starting from Egypt, they would travel north and then west along the southern coast of Europe, all the way to the Straits of Gibraltar, and back along the northern coast of Africa.

Nothing this King did was modest. He was, after all, Alexander the Great. And his jaunt around the Mediterranean, which his advisors had, wryly, taken to calling “Alexander’s Boating Lake,” was no exception.

Alexander had been terribly disappointed to find that the city he had planted at the mouth of the Nile, his Alexandria-on-the-Nile, had been obliterated by the Discontinuity. But, undeterred, he ordered units of his army to begin the construction of a new city there, on the plan of the vanished old. And he set his engineers the task of building a new canal between the Gulf of Suez and the Nile. In the meantime he ordered the hasty construction of a temporary harbor at Alexandria, and had many of the ships he had constructed in India sailed up the Gulf of Suez, broken down into sections, and hauled overland.

To Bisesa’s amazement it took only a couple of months before the fleet was reassembled at the site of Alexandria and ready to sail. After a two-day festival of sacrifices and merriment in the tent compound that housed the city’s workers, the fleet set off.

At first Bisesa, separated from the Eye of Marduk for the first time in five years, found the voyage strangely relaxing. She spent a lot of time on deck, watching the land unravel past her, or listening to complicated cross-cultural discussions. Even the ocean was a curiosity. In her time the Mediterranean, recovering from decades of pollution, had become a mixture of game reserve and park, fenced off with great invisible barriers of electricity and sound. Now it was wild again, and she glimpsed dolphins and whales. Once she thought she saw the torpedo shape of an immense shark, bigger than anything from her day, she was sure.

It was never warm, though. Often in the mornings she would smell frost in the air. Every year it seemed a little colder, though it was hard to be sure; she wished they had thought to keep climate records from the beginning. But despite the chill she found she had to keep out of the sun. The British took to wearing knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, and even the nutmeg-brown Macedonians seemed to burn. On the royal boats thick awnings were erected, and Alexander’s doctors experimented with ointments of ass’s butter and palm sap to block the suddenly intense rays of the sun. The storms of the early days after the Discontinuity had long passed, but clearly the climate remained screwed up.

At night there was more strangeness too. Under the tented canopies Alexander and his companions drank the night away. But Bisesa would sit in the darkened quiet of the deck, watching land go by on which there was generally not a single light to be seen. She would peer up, if the sky was clear, at subtly altered constellations. But often she would see auroras, great walls and sheets and curtains of light, visibly three-dimensional structures towering over the darkened world. She had never known of auroras visible at such low latitudes, and she had an uneasy feeling about what they might portend; the Discontinuity wasn’t cosmetic, and might have cut deep indeed into the fabric of the world.

Sometimes Josh would sit with her. And sometimes, if the Macedonians were quiet, they would find a dark corner, and make love, or perhaps just huddle together.

But most of the time she kept to herself. She suspected her friends were right, that she had been in danger of losing herself in the Eye. She needed to ground herself in the world once more, and even Josh was a distraction. But she knew she was hurting him, once again.

The ostensible point of the trip was to survey the new world, and every few days Alexander sent parties inland. He had selected a small force of Iranians, colonial Greeks and Agrarians to carry out these missions: highly mobile, flexible troops, brimming with initiative and daring. Some British were attached to each party, and each foray was accompanied by surveyors and mapmakers.

The first reports were desolating, though. From the beginning the explorers reported wonders—strange rock formations, islands of extraordinary vegetation, even more extraordinary animals. But these marvels were all aspects of the natural world; of the works of mankind barely a trace survived. The ancient civilization of Egypt, for example, had vanished completely. The great blocks of its monumental buildings were uncut from their sandstone beds, and in the Valley of the Kings there was no sign of anything like humanity save a few of the cautious chimp-like creatures the British called man-apes, clinging to patches of forest.

It was a relief to sail up the coast of Judea. Of Nazareth and Bethlehem there wasn’t a trace—and no sign of Christ or His Passion. But close to the site of Jerusalem, under the command of British engineers, a small industrial revolution was being kick-started. Josh and Bisesa toured foundries and yards where cheerful British engineers and sweating Macedonian laborers, and a few bright Greek apprentices, constructed pressure vessels like giant kettles, and experimented with prototype steamship screws and lengths of railway track. The engineers were learning to communicate in an archaic Greek studded with English words like
crankshaft
and
head of steam.

As everywhere, there was a rush to build quickly, before the memories and capabilities of the first generation, transmitted across the Discontinuity, were lost. But Alexander himself, a lead-from-the-front warrior king, had turned out to be something of a skeptic when it came to technology. It had taken the construction of a prototype to impress him. This had been something like the famous
aeolipile
of Hero—in a lost timeline, a manufacturer of mechanical novelties in Alexandria—just a pressure vessel with two canted nozzles that would vent steam and spin around like a lawn sprinkler. But Eumenes had immediately seen the potential of this new form of power.

It was a difficult job, though. The British had only a handful of the necessary tools, and the industry’s infrastructure would have to be built literally from the ground up, including establishing mines for coal and iron ore. Bisesa thought it might be twenty years before it was possible to manufacture engines as efficient and powerful as James Watt’s, say.

“But it begins again,” Abdikadir said. “Soon, all across Alexander’s domain, there will be pumps laboring in mines dug deeper and deeper, and steamships cruising a shrinking Mediterranean, and great rail networks spreading east across Asia toward the capital of the Mongols. This new Jerusalem will be the workshop of the world.”

“Ruddy would have loved it,” Josh said. “He was always very impressed with machines. Like a new breed of being in the world, he said. And Ruddy said that transport
is
civilization. If the continents can be united by steamships and railway trains, perhaps this new world need see no more war, no more nations, indeed, save the single marvelous nation of mankind!”

Abdikadir said, “I thought he said sewage was the basis of civilization.”

“That too!”

Bisesa fondly took Josh’s hand. “Your optimism is like a caffeine hit, Josh.”

He frowned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Abdikadir said, “But the new world is going to be nothing like ours. There are overwhelmingly more of
them
, the Macedonians, than
us
. If a new world-state does come into existence, it will be speaking Greek—if not Mongol. And it’s likely to be Buddhist . . .”

In a world stripped of its messiahs, the strange time-twin Buddhists in their temple deep in Asia had been gathering interest from both Macedonians and Mongols. The lama’s circular life seemed a perfect metaphor for both the Discontinuity and the strange condition of the world it had left behind, as well as for the religion the lama gently espoused.

“Oh,” said Josh wistfully, “I wish I could spring forward through two or three centuries and see what grows from the seeds we are planting today! . . .”

But as the journey continued such dreams, of building empires and taming worlds, came to seem petty indeed.

Greece was empty. No matter how hard Alexander’s explorers probed the dense tangle of forest that coated much of the mainland, there were no signs of the great cities, no Athens, no Sparta, no Thebes. There were barely signs of humans at all: a few rough-looking tribesmen, said the explorers, and what they described as “sub-men.” More in hope than anticipation Alexander sent a party north to Macedon, to see what might have survived of his homeland. It took weeks for the scouts to return, with negative news.

“It seems,” Alexander said with a dry wistfulness, “there are more lions in Greece now than philosophers.”

But even the lions weren’t doing too well, Bisesa noted sadly.

Everywhere they traveled they saw signs of ecological damage and collapse. The Greek forests were wilted and fringed by scrubby grassland. In Turkey, the inland areas had been baked clean of life altogether, leaving the ground an exposed rust brown—“Red as Mars,” Abdikadir said after taking part in one jaunt. And as they explored the island that had once been called Crete, Josh asked, “Have you noticed how few birds there are?”

It was hard to be sure about the extent of what was being lost, as there was no way of knowing what had crossed through the Discontinuity in the first place. But Bisesa suspected there was a major dieback underway. They could only guess at the causes.

“Just mixing everything up must have done a great deal of damage,” Bisesa said.

Josh protested, “But—mammoths in Paris! Saber-toothed cats in the Colosseum of Rome! Mir is a bringing-together of fragments, but so is a kaleidoscope, and its effect is beautiful.”

“Yeah, but whenever you get mixing of populations you get extinctions: when the land bridge between North and South America was joined, when humans carried rats and goats and such around the world to devastate native wildlife. So it must be here. You have creatures from the depth of the Ice Age side by side with rodents from modern cities, in a climate suited to neither. Whatever survived the Discontinuity is wiping out its neighbor, or being wiped out in turn.”

“Just like us,” Abdikadir said blackly. “We couldn’t stand being mixed up either, could we?”

Bisesa said, “There must be booms and crashes: maybe that explains our plagues of insects, a symptom of an out-of-kilter ecology. Diseases must be transmitted across the old boundaries too. I’m a little surprised that we’ve had no real epidemics.”

Abdikadir said, “We humans are too thinly scattered. Even so, perhaps we’ve been lucky . . .”

“But no birds trill from the trees!” Josh complained.

“Birds are bell-wethers, Josh,” Bisesa said. “Birds are vulnerable—their habitats, like wetlands and beaches, are easily damaged in climate shifts. The loss of the birds is a bad sign.”

“Then if things are so difficult for the animals—” Josh pounded his bunched fist onto a rail. “We must do something about it.”

Abdikadir laughed, then stopped himself. “What, exactly?”

“You mock me,” said Josh, red-faced. He waved his hands, grasping at ideas. “We should gather the animals in zoos, or reserves. The same with the vegetation, the trees and plants. The birds and insects too—especially the birds! And then, when things settle down we can release the beasts into the wild—”

“And let a new Eden build itself?” Bisesa said. “Dear Josh, we’re not mocking you. And we should put your idea of gathering zoo specimens to Alexander: if the mammoth and the cave bear have been brought back to life, let’s keep a few. But it’s just that we’ve learned it’s more complicated than that—learned the hard way. Conserving ecospheres, let alone repairing them, isn’t so easy, especially as we never understood how they worked anyhow. They aren’t even static; they are dynamic, undergoing great cycles . . . Extinctions are inevitable; they happen at the best of times. No matter what we try,
we can’t keep it all.
”

Josh said, “Then what are we to do? Simply throw up our hands and accept whatever fate has decreed?”

“No,” said Bisesa. “But we have to accept our limits. There are only a handful of us. We can’t save the world, Josh. We don’t even know how to. We will do well to save ourselves. We must be patient.”

Abdikadir said grimly, “Patience, yes. But it took only a fraction of a second for the great wounds of the Discontinuity to be inflicted. It will take millions of years for them to heal . . .”

“And it had nothing to do with fate,” Josh said. “If the gods of the Eye were wise enough to rip apart space and time, could they not have foreseen what would become of our ecologies?”

They fell silent, and the jungles of Greece, dense, wilting, menacing, slid by.