Time’s Eye

“Geometry,” she said. “The Earth-Moon system … It changes with time.” As the Moon dragged tides through Earth’s ocean, so Earth likewise tugged at the Moon’s rocky substrate. Since their formation the twin worlds had slowly separated—only a few centimeters per year, but over enough time that took the Moon ever farther from the Earth.

Josh understood the essence of what had happened. “This is the future. Not the twenty-first century—the very far future … Millions of years hence, perhaps.”

She walked around the plain, peering up at the complex sky. “You’re trying to tell us something, aren’t you? This desolate, war-shattered ground—where am I, London? New York, Moscow, Beijing? Lahore? And why bring us to this precise place and time to show us an eclipse? … Has all this got something to do with the sun?” Hot, dusty, thirsty, disoriented, she was suddenly filled with rage. “Don’t give me special-effect riddles. Talk to me, damn you. What’s going to happen? ”

As if in reply an Eye, at least as large as the Eye of Marduk, snapped into existence above her head. She actually felt the wash of the air it displaced as it forced its way into her reality.

She took Josh’s hand. “Here we go again … Keep your hands inside the car at all times.”

But his eyes were wide; sand clung to his sweat-streaked face. “Bisesa?”

She understood immediately. He couldn’t see the Eye. This time it had come for her—her alone, not for Josh.

“No!” She grabbed Josh’s arm. “You can’t do this, you cruel bastards!”

Josh understood. “Bisesa, it’s all right.” He touched her chin, turned her face toward him, kissed her mouth. “We’ve already come further than I could have dreamed possible. Perhaps our love will live on, in some other world—and perhaps when all possibilities are drawn together at the end of time we will be reunited …” He smiled. “It’s enough.”

In the sky the Eye flipped into a funnel shape, and then a corridor in the sky. Already sparks of light were rushing across the plain, gathering around her, hurtling upward.

She clung to Josh and closed her eyes. Listen to me. I’ve done everything you asked. Give me this one thing. Don’t leave him here, to die alone. Send him home—send him back to Abdi. This one thing, I beg you …

A hot wind gathered, rushing up from the ground into the mouth of the shining shaft overhead. Something tugged at her, pulling her from Josh’s arms. She struggled, but Josh let go.

She was lifted off the ground. She was actually looking down at him.

He was still smiling. “You are an angel ascending. Good-bye, good-bye …” The searing, beautiful light gathered around her again. In the last instant she saw him stagger back into a room crowded with wires and bits of electronic gear, where a dark man rushed forward to catch him.

Thank you.

A clash of cymbals.

46. Grasper

With the coming of the morning, Seeker woke with a start, eyes snapping open.

For the first time in years there was no net sheltering her from the sky. She cried out and curled over her daughter.

She forced open one eye. There was still no net, nothing but bare ground around her, a few scuff marks and tracks. The soldiers had gone. They had taken away the cage.

She was free.

She sat up. Grasper woke up with a grumble and rubbed her eyes. Seeker looked around. The rocky plain swept away, bare of life save for a few tussocks of grass. In the distance, snow-capped mountains loomed over the horizon, blue and floating in the morning mist. Near the base of the mountains she made out a stripe of green. Her old spirit stirred. Forest: if they could make it that far, perhaps she would find others like herself.

But the breeze changed, coming from the north, and she tasted ice. She quailed. Suddenly she longed for the smells of cooking, the clattering of machines, the high, gull-like voices of the soldiers. She had spent too long in her cage; she missed it.

Grasper, though, shared none of her mother’s hesitation. She knuckle-walked forward, chimp-like, exploring the rocky ground. It seemed rich in texture compared to the swept-bare, stamped-down dirt floor of the cage. Here was a rock that fit neatly in her hand, there a dry reed that folded and bent and twisted with ease.

Clutching the rock, Grasper unfolded her legs and stood upright. She peered across the broken ground toward the mountains, and the ice.

In the north the cold was gathering. The new volcanic island in the Atlantic had deflected the Gulf Stream, the flow of southern water that had kept northern Europe anomalously warm for millennia. The Gulf Stream’s loss had already had impacts on agriculture as far south as Babylonia. Now it was going to get worse. This year, autumn would come early, and by midwinter, massive Arctic superstorms would erupt with fury over the continents, depositing more snow in a few days than would once have been seen in five or ten years.