Time’s Eye

Then the surface collapsed, like the skin of a suddenly deflated balloon.

Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. She could still see reflections of herself, with Josh at her side, but their images were broken up, as if scattered from the shards of a smashed mirror. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face—but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.

This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.

She looked over her shoulder. The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye. Abdikadir was still there, though he seemed to be drawing more distant, and he was oddly blurred: he was clinging to the door frame, and he was on the ground, and he turned away and turned back—not sequentially, but all at the same time, like the frames of a movie reel cut out and reassembled in a random order. “Go with Allah,” he called. “Go, go …” But his voice was lost on the wind. And then the storm of light grew to a blizzard, and she could see him no more.

The wind tugged at her, nearly knocking her off her feet. She tried to be analytical. She tried to count her breaths. But her thoughts seemed to fragment, the inner sentences she formed breaking into words, and syllables, and letters, jumbling into nonsense. It was the Discontinuity, she thought. It had worked on the scale of a planet, cutting adrift great slabs of landscape. But it had broken into this room, cutting Abdikadir’s life into pieces, and now, at last, it was pushing into her own head, for, after all, even her consciousness was embedded in space-time …

She looked into the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity—but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.

It was her last conscious thought before the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of her body. Space was gone, time itself suspended, and she became a mote, nothing but an animal’s bright, stubborn, mindless soul. But through it all she was aware of Josh’s warm hand in hers.

***

There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

One of those was to serve as a gate.

The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

Then the Eye vanished. The temple chamber was left empty save for a tangle of ruined electronic gear, and two men with memories of what they had seen and heard, memories they could neither believe nor understand.

Part 6 Time’s Eye

44. Firstborn

The long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle.

Those who had watched Earth for so long had never been remotely human. But they had once been flesh and blood.

They had been born on a planet of one of the first stars of all, a roaring hydrogen-fat monster, a beacon in a universe still dark. These first ones were vigorous, in a young and energy-fat universe. But planets, the crucibles of life, were scarce, for the heavy elements that comprised them had yet to be manufactured in the hearts of stars. When they looked out across the depths of space, they saw nothing like themselves, no Mind to mirror their own.

The early stars blazed gloriously but died quickly. Their thin debris enriched the pooled gases of the Galaxy, and soon a new generation of long-lived stars would emerge. But to those left stranded between the dying protostars, it was a terrible abandonment.

And as they looked ahead, they saw only a slow darkening, as each generation of stars was built with increasing difficulty from the debris of the last. There would come a day when there wasn’t enough fuel in the Galaxy to manufacture a single new star, and the last light flickered and died. Even after that it would go on, the terrible clamp of entropy strangling the cosmos and all its processes.

Despite all their powers, they were not beyond the reach of time.

This desolating realization caused an age of madness. Strange and beautiful empires rose and fell, and terrible wars were fought between beings of metal and of flesh, children of the same forgotten world. The wars expended an unforgivable proportion of the Galaxy’s usable energy reserve, and had no resolution but exhaustion.

Saddened but wiser, the survivors began to plan for an inevitable future, an endless future of cold and dark.