Time’s Eye

The Macedonians did not seem as awestruck as Bisesa had naively imagined. They had absolutely no doubt that the time slips were the work of the gods, following their own inscrutable purposes: their worldview, which had nothing to do with science, was alien to Bisesa’s, but it was easily flexible enough to accommodate such mysteries as this. They were tough-minded warriors who had marched thousands of kilometers into strangeness, and they, and their Greek advisors, were intellectually tough too.

Alexander himself seemed entranced by the philosophical aspects. “Can the dead live again?” he murmured in his throaty baritone. “For I am long dead to you … And can the past be restored—old wrongs undone, regrets wiped away?”

Abdikadir murmured to Bisesa, “A man with as much blood on his hands as this King must find the notion of correcting the past appealing … ”

Hephaistion was saying, “Most philosophers view time as a cycle. Like the beating of a heart, the passing of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the Moon. In Babylon the astronomers assembled a cosmic calendar based on the motions of the planets, with a Great Year that lasts, I believe, more than four hundred thousand years. When the planets congregate in one particular constellation, there is a huge fire, and the ‘winter,’ marked by a planetary gathering elsewhere, marked by a flood … Some even argue that past events repeat exactly from one cycle to the next.”

“But that notion troubled Aristotle,” said Alexander—who, Bisesa recalled, had actually studied under that philosopher. “If I live as much before the fall of Troy as after it, then what caused that war?”

“But still,” Hephaistion said, “if there is something in the notion of cycles, then many strange things can be justified. For instance, oracles and prophets: if time cycles, perhaps prophecy is as much a question of a memory of the deep past as it is a vision of the future. And the strange mixing of times we endure now seems much less inexplicable. Do you agree, Aristander?”

The old seer bowed his head.

So the conversation continued, rattling between Alexander, Hephaistion and Aristander, often too rapidly for the creaky chain of translators to keep up.

Ruddy was entranced. “How marvelous these men are,” he whispered.

“Enough philosophy,” said Eumenes, practical as ever. He challenged the meeting about what they should do next.

Captain Grove replied that he had a proposal. The British officer had brought along an atlas—a rather antiquated thing, even by his standards, from a Victorian schoolroom—and he now displayed it.

The Macedonians were familiar with maps and mapmaking. Indeed, throughout his campaigns Alexander had brought along Greek surveyors and draftsmen to map the lands he explored and conquered many of them barely known to the ancient Greek world he came from. So the Macedonians were intrigued by the atlas, and crowded around the little book excitedly. They were intrigued by the quality of the printing, the regularity of the type and the pages’ bright coloring. The Macedonians seemed to have little trouble accepting that the Mediterranean-centered world they knew was only a section of the planet, and that the planet was a sphere, as predicted by Pythagoras centuries before Alexander’s time. In fact Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, had written a whole book about the notion. For her part Bisesa was amused by the great swaths inked in pink, to show the territories of the British Empire at its zenith.

At last Alexander, in some exasperation, demanded that the atlas be brought up to his throne. But he was dismayed when the outline of his empire was sketched on a whole-Earth map. “I thought I had made a mighty footprint on the world—but there is so much I never even saw,” he said.

Using the atlas, Captain Grove said that his proposal was that the forces, combined, should make for Babylon.

Abdikadir tried to explain about the radio signals picked up by the Soyuz. This was predictably baffling, until Ruddy and Josh hit on happy metaphors. “Like the sound of inaudible trumpets,” Ruddy said. “Or the flash of invisible mirrors …”

Abdikadir said, “And the only signal we have found came from here. “He pointed to Babylon. “There is surely our best chance of determining what has happened to us, and to the world.” All this was transmitted to Alexander.

Babylon struck chords with the Macedonians too. There had been no news from Macedon or anywhere else beyond the Indus valley for many days now—and nor had the British received any messages from their own time. There was the question of where they should settle, if no news was forthcoming. Alexander had always planned to make Babylon a capital of an empire that might have stretched from the Mediterranean to India, united by sea and river routes. Perhaps even now that dream might be achievable, even with the resources the King had at hand, even if the rest of the world he had known had vanished.