Time’s Eye

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.