Time's Eye (28 page)

PART 5

MIR

37: LABORATORY

You could hardly call it a cage.

Five years after the Discontinuity and their capture, the man-apes were still trapped under a bit of camouflage net, thrown loosely over a conveniently hovering Eye, and weighted down with boulders. Nobody had given any thought to putting together anything better—though some quirk of the military mind had ordered the boulders to be painted white; there was always somebody who needed his attitude adjusted with a bit of pointless work.

It was under this net that Seeker spent her days, alone save for the fast-growing Grasper. Grasper was nearly six years old now. Her young mind still forming, she had adjusted to the reality of their confinement. Seeker couldn’t adjust. But she had to accept it.

The soldiers came in once a day to give her food and water and scrape out her dung. Sometimes they held her down and pushed their fat penises into her body. Seeker didn’t care about that. She wasn’t hurt, and she had learned to let her captors do what they want, while she kept an eye on Grasper. She had no idea why the soldiers did what they did. But whether she knew or not didn’t matter, of course, for she had no power to stop them.

She could break out of here. On some level she still knew that. She was stronger than any of the soldiers. She could rip open that netting with her teeth and hands or even her feet. But she hadn’t seen a single other of her kind, save Grasper, since the day of her capture. Through the holes in the net she could see no trees, no welcoming green shade. If she did break out there was nowhere for her to go, nothing waiting for her but clubs, fists and rifle butts. She had had to be taught that brutal lesson.

Suspended between animal and human, she had only a dim grasp of future and past. Her memory was like a gallery hung with vivid images—her mother’s face, the warmth of her nest, the overwhelming scent of the male who first took her, the sweet agony of childbearing, the dreadful limpness of her first child. And her sense of the future was dominated by an inchoate vision of her own death, a fear of the blackness that lurked behind the yellow eyes of cats. But there was no sense of narrative about her memories, no logic or order: like most animals she lived in the present, for if the present could not be survived the past and future meant nothing anyhow. And her present, this helpless captivity, had expanded to encompass her whole consciousness.

She was a captive. That was all she was. But at least she had Grasper.

Then, one morning, something changed.

It was Grasper who saw it first.

Seeker woke up slowly, as always clinging to her ragged dreams of the trees
.
She yawned hugely and stretched her long arms. The sun was already high, and she could see bright glimmers pushing through the gaps in the netting.

Grasper was staring up into the tent’s apex. There was light on her face. Seeker looked up.

The Eye was shining. It was like a miniature sun, caught in the net.

Seeker stood up. Side by side, their gazes fixed on the Eye, mother and child walked forward, fully upright. Seeker raised a hand toward the Eye. It was out of reach, but it cast shadows of the two of them, on their floor of trampled dirt. It gave off no heat, only light.

Seeker had only just woken up. She badly needed to urinate, to defecate, to groom to get rid of the night’s ticks, to get some food and water. But she couldn’t move. She just stood there, eyes wide, one arm raised. Her eyes began to prickle with dust and cold, but she couldn’t so much as blink.

She heard a soft whimpering. Seeker couldn’t even turn to look at Grasper. She had no idea how much time went by.

Her hand was before her face. She hadn’t consciously raised it; it was like looking at somebody else’s hand. The fingers clenched, opened; the thumb worked back and forth.

She was made to raise her arms and twist them at shoulders, elbows and wrists; she bent and flexed her legs. She walked up and down, as far as the netting would let her, first upright, then knuckle-walking. She probed with her fingers at every orifice in her body. She fingered her high rib cage, the shape of her skull, even her pelvis. It was as if somebody else was doing this to her, exploring her in a cruel grooming.

The man-apes were released, just for a heartbeat. Panting, hungry, thirsty, they reached for each other. But then the invisible grip closed around them again.

This time, as patterns of light pulsed over their heads, Grasper got down on her haunches and began to examine the floor, digging in the dirt. She found twigs, bits of reed. She rubbed the twigs against each other, split and folded the reed, banged pebbles together.

Meanwhile Seeker marched to the netting wall. She took hold of the net and began to climb. Her body proportions were like those of her ape-like ancestors, and she could climb better than any of her human captors. But as she clambered up the net, fear gathered, for she knew she wasn’t supposed to do this.

Sure enough, one of the soldiers came running.
“Here, you! Get down from there!”

A rifle butt smashed into her face. She couldn’t even scream. Despite the grip of the Eye she fell back from the netting and clattered on her back to the ground. Her mouth full of coppery blood, she tried to raise her head.

She could see Grasper, sitting on the gritty ground. Grasper held up a reed, tied into a knot. Seeker had never seen such a thing.

Again she was forced to stand, despite the blood that dripped from her mouth, and stared up at the Eye.

There was something new again, she realized dimly. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddled an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eye’s “equator,” dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.

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.