Time’s Eye

“But for all his wisdom, Alexander has the heart of a warrior, and there is a tension between his warmongering instincts and his will to build an empire. I don’t think he always understands that himself. He was born to fight men, not locusts in a field, or silt in a canal. Let’s face it, there are few men to be found out there to fight!” The Greek leaned toward Abdikadir. “The truth is, the running of Babylonia has devolved to a handful of those close to him. There is myself, Perdiccas, and Captain Grove.” Perdiccas was one of Alexander’s long-serving officers, and among his closest associates; Perdiccas, a commander of the Foot Companion infantrymen, had been formally given the title Hephaistion had enjoyed before his death, which meant something like “Vizier.” Eumenes winked. “They need my Greek cleverness, you see, but I need Macedonians to work through. Of course we each have our own followers—especially Perdiccas! There are cliques and conspiracies, as there always have been. But as long as Alexander towers over us, we work together well enough. We all need Alexander; New Babylon needs its King. But—”

“It doesn’t need him hanging around here with nothing to do, soaking up manpower on monuments while there are fields to be tilled.” Abdikadir grinned. “You want me to distract him?”

Eumenes said smoothly, “I wouldn’t put it like that. But Alexander has expressed curiosity to know if the greater world you described to us is still there to be had. And I think he wants to visit his father.”

“His father?”

“His divine father, Ammon, who is also Zeus, at his shrine in the desert.”

Abdikadir whistled. “That would be quite a tour.”

Eumenes smiled. “All the better. There is the question of Bisesa, too.”

“I know. She’s still locked away with that damn Eye.”

“I’m sure it’s invaluable work. But we don’t want to lose her to it: you moderns are too few to spare. Take her with you.” Eumenes smiled. “I hear that Josh is back from Judea. Perhaps he might distract her …”

“You’re a wily devil, Secretary Eumenes.”

“One does what one must,” said Eumenes. “Come. I’ll show you round the shipyards.”

***

The temple chamber was a rat’s nest of cables and wires and bits of kit from the crashed chopper, some of them scarred where they had been crudely cut from the wreck, or even scorched by the fires that had followed the crash. This tangle enclosed the Eye, as if Bisesa had been seeking to trap it, not study it. But she knew that Abdikadir thought it was she who had become trapped.

“The Discontinuity was a physical event,” Bisesa said firmly. “No matter how mighty the power behind it. Physical, not magical or supernatural. And so it’s explicable in terms of physics.”

“But,” said Abdikadir, “not necessarily our physics.”

She glanced vaguely about the temple chamber, wishing she still had the phone to help her explain.

Abdikadir, and a wide-eyed, scared-looking Josh, had settled down in a corner of the chamber. She knew Josh hated this place—not just for the awesome presence of the Eye, but because it had taken her away from him. Now Josh cracked a flask of hot tea with milk, English-style, as Bisesa tried to explain her current theories about the Eye, and the Discontinuity.

Bisesa said, “Space and time were ruptured during the Discontinuity—ruptured and put back together again. We know that much, and in a way we can understand it. Space and time are in some senses real .You can bend space-time, for instance, with a strong enough gravity field. It’s as stiff as steel, but you can do it …

“But if space-time is stuff, what’s it made of? If you look really closely—or if you subject it to enough bending and folding—well, you can see the grain. Our best idea is that space and time are a kind of tapestry. The fundamental units of the tapestry are strings, minuscule strings. The strings vibrate—and the modes of the vibration, the tones of the strings, are the particles and energy fields we observe, and their properties, such as their masses. There are many ways the strings can vibrate—many notes they can play—but some of them, the highest energy modes, have not been seen since the birth of the universe.

“All right. Now, the strings need a space to vibrate in—not our own space-time, which is the music of the strings, but a kind of abstraction, a stratum. In many dimensions.”

Josh frowned, visibly struggling to keep up. “Go on.”

“The way the stratum is set up, its topology, governs the way the strings behave. It’s like the sounding board of a violin. It’s a beautiful image if you think about it. The topology is a property of the universe on the largest scale, but it determines the behavior of matter on the very smallest scales.

“But imagine you cut a hole in the sounding board—make a change to the structure of the underlying stratum. Then you would get a transition in the way the strings vibrate.”

Abdikadir said, “And the effect of such a transition in the world we observe—”