Time’s Eye

“Because of what I might learn. About why this has happened. About them. About what we might do about all this in the future.”

“Ah.” He smiled wistfully. “I should have known. I can argue with a mother about her love for her child, but I can’t stand in the way of a soldier’s duty.”

“Oh, Josh—”

“Take me with you.”

She sat back, shocked. “I wasn’t expecting that. ”

“Bisesa, you are everything to me. I don’t want to stay here without you. I want to follow you, wherever you go.”

“But I may be killed,” she said softly.

“If I die by your side I will die happy. What else is life for?”

“Josh—I don’t know what to say. All I do is hurt you.”

“No,” he said gently. “Myra is always there—if not between us, then at your side. I understand that.”

“Well, even so, nobody loved me this way before.”

They embraced again, and were silent for a while.

Then he said, “You know, they don’t have a name.”

“Who?”

“The baleful intelligences who engineered all this. They are not God, or any gods—”

“No,” she said. She closed her eyes. She could feel them even now, like a breeze from the heart of an old, dying wood, dry and rustling and laden with decay. “They are not gods. They are of this universe—they were born of it, as we were. But they are old—terribly old, old beyond our imagining.”

“They have lived too long.”

“Perhaps.”

“Then that is what we will call them.” He looked up at the Eye, chin jutting, defiant. “The Firstborn. And may they rot in hell.”

***

To celebrate Bisesa’s peculiar departure, Alexander ordered an immense feast. It lasted three days and three nights. There were athletic contests, horse races, dances and music—and even an immense battue in the Mongol style, the tales of which had impressed even Alexander the Great.

On the last night Bisesa and Josh were guests of honor at a lavish banquet in Alexander’s commandeered palace. The King himself did her the honor of dressing like Ammon, his father-god, in slippers, horns and purple cloak. It was a violent, noisy, drunken affair, like the ultimate rugby club outing. By threeA.M. the booze had polished off poor Josh, who had to be carried out to a bedroom by Alexander’s chamberlains.

Illuminated by a single oil lamp, Bisesa, Abdikadir and Casey sat close to each other on expensive couches, a small fire burning in a hearth between them.

Casey was drinking from a tall glass beaker. He held it out to Bisesa. “Babylonian wine. Better than that Macedonian rotgut. You want some?”

She smiled and passed. “I think I ought to be sober tomorrow.”

Casey grunted. “From what I hear of Josh, one of you needs to be.”

Abdikadir said, “So here we are, the last survivors of the twenty-first century. I can’t remember the last time the three of us were alone.”

Casey said, “Not since the day of the chopper crash.”

“That’s how you think of it?” Bisesa asked. “Not the day the world came apart at the seams, but the day we lost the Bird!”

Casey shrugged. “I’m a professional. I lost my ship.”

She nodded. “You’re a good man, Casey. Give me that stuff.” She grabbed the beaker from him and took a draft of wine. It was rich, tasting very old, almost stale, the produce of a mature vineyard.

Abdikadir was watching her, his blue eyes bright. “Josh spoke to me this evening, before he got too drunk to speak at all. He thinks you are keeping back something from him—even now—something about the Eye.”

“I don’t always know what to tell him,” she said. “He’s a man of the nineteenth century. Christ, he’s so young .”

“But he’s not a child, Bis,” Casey said. “Men no older than him died for us facing the Mongols. And you know he is prepared to give up his life for you.”

“I know.”

“So,” Abdikadir said, “what is it you won’t tell him?”

“My worst suspicions.”

“About what?”

“About facts that have been staring us in the face since day one. Guys, our little bit of Afghanistan—and the slab of sky above it, that preserved the Soyuz —is all that came through the Discontinuity from our own time. And, hard as we’ve looked, we’ve found nothing from any era later than our own. We were the last to be sampled. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Why would a two-million-year history project end with us?”

Abdikadir nodded. “Ah. Because we are the last. After us there is nothing to be sampled. Ours was the last year, the last month—even the last day.”

“I think,” Bisesa said slowly, “that something terrible must happen on that final day—terrible for humanity, or the world. Maybe that’s why we shouldn’t worry about time paradoxes. Going back and changing history. Because after us, Earth has run out of history to change …”

Abdikadir said, “And perhaps this answers a question that occurred to me when you described your ideas on space-time rips. It would surely take a stupendous amount of energy to take space-time apart like that. Is that what faces the Earth?” He waved his hands. “Some immense catastrophe: a great outpouring of energy, in the face of which Earth is like a snowflake in a furnace—an energy storm that disrupts space and time itself …”