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.
41: ZEUS-AMMON
Italy seemed as deserted as Greece. They found no sign of the city-states the Macedonians remembered, or the modern cities of Bisesa’s time. Even at the mouth of the Tiber there was no trace of the extensive harbor workings that the imperial Romans had constructed, to service the great grain fleets that had kept their bloated city alive.
Alexander was intrigued by accounts of how Rome, just an ambitious city-state in his day, would one day have built an empire to rival his own. So he put together a handful of riverboats and, reclining under a brilliant purple canopy, led a party up the river.
The seven hills of Rome were immediately recognizable. But the site was uninhabited, save for a few ugly hill forts sitting squat on the Palatine, where the palaces of the Caesars would have been built. Alexander thought this was a great joke, and decided graciously to spare the lives of his historical rivals.
They spent a night camped close in the marshy lowland that should have become the Forum of Rome. There was another startling aurora, which brought gasps from the Macedonians.
Bisesa was no geologist, but she wondered what must have happened deep in the core of the world when the new planet had been assembled from its disparate fragments. Earth’s core had been a spinning worldlet of iron as big as the Moon. If the stitching-together of Mir went to the very center of the world, that great sub-planet, crudely reassembled, must be thrashing and roiling. The currents in the outer layers, the mantle, would be disturbed too, with plumes of molten rock, fountains hundreds of kilometers tall, breaking and crashing against each other. Maybe the effects of such deep storms were now being felt on the surface of the planet.
The planet’s magnetic field, generated by the great iron dynamo of the spinning core, must have collapsed. Maybe that explained the auroras, and the continuing failure of their compasses. In normal times this magnetic shield protected fragile life-forms from a hard rain from space: heavy particles from the sun, sleeting remnants from supernova explosions. Before the magnetic field restored itself there would be radiation damage—cancers, a flood of mutations, almost all of them harmful. And if the battered ozone layer had collapsed too, the flood of ultraviolet would explain the intensified sunlight, and would do even more damage to the living creatures exposed on Earth’s surface.
But there were other domains of life. She thought of the deep hot biosphere, the ancient heat-loving creatures that had survived from Earth’s earliest days, lingering around ocean vents and deep in the rocks. They wouldn’t be troubled by a little surface ultraviolet—but if the world had been sliced to its core their ancient empire must have been partitioned, just as on the surface. Was there some slow extinction event unfolding deep in the rocks, as on the surface? And were there Eyes buried in the body of the world to watch that too?
The fleet sailed on, tracking the southern coast of France, and then along eastern and southern Spain, making toward Gibraltar.
There were few signs of humans, but in the rocky landscape of southern Spain the scouts found a stocky kind of people with beetling brows and great strength, who would flee at the first sight of the Macedonians. Bisesa knew this area had been one of the last holdouts of the Neanderthals as Homo sapiens had advanced west through Europe. If these were late Neanderthals, they were well advised to be wary of modern humans.
Alexander was much more intrigued by the Straits themselves, which he called the Pillars of Heracles. The ocean beyond these gates was not quite unknown to Alexander’s generation. Two centuries before Alexander the Carthaginian Hanno had sailed boldly south along the Atlantic coast of Africa. There were less well-documented reports, too, of explorers who had turned to the north, and found strange, chill lands, where ice formed in the summer and the sun would not set even at midnight. Alexander now seized on his new understanding of the shape of the world: such strangeness was easy to explain if you believed you were sailing over the surface of a sphere.
Alexander longed to brave the wider ocean beyond the Straits. Josh was all for this, eager to get in touch with the community at Chicago that might not be far removed from his own time. But Alexander himself was more interested in reaching the new mid-Atlantic island the Soyuz had reported: he had been stirred by Bisesa’s descriptions of voyages to the Moon, and he said that to conquer a land was one thing, but to be the first ever to set foot there quite another.
But even a King had constraints. For one thing his small ships weren’t capable of surviving at sea for more than a few days without putting into shore. The quiet words of his counselors persuaded him that the new world of the west would wait for other days. So, with reluctance mixed with anticipation, Alexander agreed to turn back.
The fleet sailed back along the Mediterranean’s southern shore, the coast of Africa. The journey was unremarkable, the coast apparently uninhabited.
Bisesa withdrew into herself once more. Her weeks on Alexander’s expedition had taken her away from the vivid intensity of her time with the Eye itself, and had given her time to reflect on what she had learned. Now, something of the blankness of both sea and land made the mysteries of the Eye revive in her mind.
Abdikadir, and especially Josh, tried to draw her out of herself. One night, as they sat on the deck, Josh whispered, “I still don’t understand how you know. When I look up at the Eye, I feel nothing. I am prepared to believe that each of us has an inner sense of others—that minds, lonely bits of spindrift in the great dark ocean of time, have a way of seeking each other out. To me the Eye is a vast and ponderous mystery, and clearly a center of awesome power—but it is the power of a machine, not a mind.”
Bisesa said, “It is not a mind, but it is a conduit to minds. They’re like shadows at the end of a darkened corridor. But they are there.” There were no human words for such perceptions, for, she suspected, no human being had experienced such things before. “You have to trust me, Josh.”
He wrapped his arms tighter around her. “I trust you and I believe you. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here . . .”
“You know, sometimes I think all these time slices we visit are just—bits of a fantasy. Fragments of a dream.”
Abdikadir frowned, his blue eyes bright in the light of the lamps. “What do you mean by that?”
She struggled to explain her impressions. “I think in some sense we’re contained in the Eye.” She retreated to the safety of physics. “Think of it this way. The fundamental units of our reality—”
“The tiny strings,” Josh said.
“That’s right. They aren’t really like strings on a violin. There are different ways they can be wrapped around their underlying stratum, their sounding board. Imagine loops of string floating free on the board’s surface, and others wrapped right around the board. If you change the dimensions of the stratum—if you make it thicke
r—the winding energy of the wrapped strings will increase, but the vibrational energy of the loops will decrease. And that will have an effect in the observable universe. If you keep that up long enough, the two dimensions, long and short, exchange places . . . They have an inverse relationship . . .”
Josh shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”
“I think she’s telling us,” Abdikadir said, “that in this model of physics, very large distances and very small are somehow equivalent.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. The cosmos and the sub-atom—one is just an inverse of the other, if you look at them the right way.”
“And the Eye—”
“The Eye contains an image of me,” she said, “just as my retina has on it a projected image of you, Josh. But I think in the case of the Eye the reality of the image of me, and of the world, is more than a mere projection.”
Abdikadir frowned. “Then the distorted images in the Eye are not just a shadow of our reality. And by manipulating these images the Eye is somehow able to control what goes on in the outside world. Perhaps that is how it managed to induce the Discontinuity. Is that what you think?”
“Like voodoo dolls,” Josh said, enraptured by the notion. “The Eye contains a voodoo world . . . But Abdikadir isn’t quite right—is he, Bisesa? The Eye doesn’t do anything. You have said that the Eye, marvelous as it is, is only a tool. And that you have sensed—presences—beyond the Eye, which control it. So the Eye is not some demonic controlling entity. It is merely a—a—”
“A control panel,” she whispered. “I always knew you were smart, Josh.”
“Ah,” said Abdikadir slowly. “I start to understand. You believe that you have some access to this control panel. That you can influence the Eye. And that is what scares you.”
She couldn’t meet his bright eyes.
Josh said, bewildered, “But if you can influence the Eye—what have you asked it to do?”