Time’s Eye

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?”