Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

“All right,” Bisesa said. “Josh, think about this. When I look at you, I don’t see you as you are now . I see you as you were a little way in the past, a few fractions of a second ago, the time it took starlight reflecting from your face to reach my eye.”

Josh nodded. “So far so clear.”

Bisesa said, “Suppose I chased the light from your face, going faster and faster. What would I see?”

Josh frowned. “It would be like two fast trains, one overtaking the other—both fast, but from the point of view of the one, the other seems to move slowly.” He smiled. “You would see my cheeks and mouth moving like a glacier when I smiled to greet you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Good, you’ve got the idea. Now, Einstein—ah, he was a physicist of the early twentieth century, an important one—Einstein taught us this isn’t just an optical effect. It’s not just that I see your face move more slowly, Josh. Light is the most fundamental way we have of measuring time—and so, the faster I travel, the slower I see time pass for you. ”

Ruddy pulled at his mustache. “Why?”

Abdikadir laughed. “Five generations of schoolteachers since Einstein have failed to come up with a good answer to that, Ruddy. It’s just the way the universe is built.”

Josh grinned. “How wonderful—that light should be forever young, forever ageless—perhaps it’s true that God’s angels are creatures of light itself!”

Ruddy shook his head. “Angels or no angels, this is damned fishy. And what does it have to do with our present situation?”

“Because,” Bisesa said, “in a universe where time itself adjusts around you depending on how fast you travel, the concept of simultaneity is a little tricky. What is simultaneous for Josh and Ruddy, say, may not be simultaneous for me. It depends on how we move, how the light passes between us.”

Josh nodded, but he was evidently uncertain. “And this isn’t simply an effect of timing—”

“Not timing, but physics,” Bisesa said.

“I think I see,” Josh said. “And if that can happen, it may be possible to take two events that were not simultaneous—let’s say, a moment in my life in 1885, and a moment in Bisesa’s in 2037—and bring them together so that they touch, so closely we can even …”

“Kiss?” said Ruddy, mock-solemnly.

Poor Josh actually blushed.

Ruddy said, “But all this is described from the point of view of one person or another. From what mighty point of view, then, is our new world to be seen? That of God—or of the Eye of Time itself?”

“I don’t know,” Bisesa said.

“We need to learn more,” Josh said decisively. “If we’re ever to have a chance of fixing things—”

“Oh, yes.” Ruddy laughed hollowly. “There is that. Fixing things!”

Abdikadir said, “In our age we’ve grown used to our seas and rivers and air being fouled. Now time is no longer a steady, remorseless stream, but churned up, full of turbulence and eddies.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it’s just something we will have to get used to.”

“Perhaps the truth is simpler,” Ruddy said brutally. “Perhaps your noisy flapping machines have shattered the cathedral calm of eternity. The whizzes and bangs of the terrible wars of your age have shocked the walls of that cathedral beyond their capacity to heal.”

Josh looked from one to the other. “You’re saying all this might not be natural—it might not even be the actions of some superior beings—it might be our fault ?”

“Maybe,” said Bisesa. “But maybe not. We only know a little more science than you, Josh—we really don’t know.”

Ruddy was still brooding on relativity. “Who was this fellow—did you say Einstein? Sounds German to me.”

Abdikadir said, “He was a German Jew. In your time he was, umm, a six-year-old schoolboy in Munich.”

Ruddy was muttering, “Space and time themselves can be warped—there is no certainty, even in physics—how Einstein’s opinions must have helped the world toward flux and disintegration—and now you say he was Hebrew, and a German—it’s so inevitable it makes one laugh!”

The phone said quietly, “Bisesa, there’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“Tau Ceti.”

Josh said, “What is that? Oh. A star.”

“A star like the sun, about twelve light-years away. I saw it nova. It was faint, and by the time I noticed it the light was already fading, already past its peak—it lasted only a few nights—but …”

Abdikadir pulled his beard. “What’s so remarkable about that?”

“Just that it’s impossible,” said the phone.

“How so?”

“Only binary systems nova—a companion has to add inert material to the star, which is eventually blown off in an explosion.”

“And Tau Ceti is solitary,” Bisesa said. “So how can it have gone nova?”

“You can check my records,” the phone said tetchily.

Bisesa looked at the sky uncertainly.

Ruddy grumbled, “In the circumstances that seems a rather remote and abstract puzzle to me. Perhaps we should concern ourselves with more immediate matters. Yon phone has been working on its Babylonian date-calculating for days already. How long will it take to deliver its marvelous news?”

“That’s up to the phone. It’s always had a mind of its own.”

He laughed. “Sir Gadget! Tell me what you have surmised—as best you can, incomplete as it may be. I order it!”

The phone said, “Bisesa—”

She had set up nanny safeguards to ensure the phone didn’t say too much to the British. But now she shrugged. “It’s okay, phone.”

“The thirteenth century,” the phone whispered.

Ruddy leaned closer. “When?”

“It’s hard to be more exact. The changes in the stars’ positions are slight—my cameras are designed for daylight, and I have to take long-exposure images—the clouds are a pain in the ass … There are a number of lunar eclipses in the period; if I observe one of those I may be able to pin it down to the exact day.”

“The thirteenth century, though,” Ruddy breathed, and he peered up at a cloud-littered sky. “Six centuries from home!”

“For us, eight,” Bisesa said grimly. “But what does that mean? It might be a thirteenth-century sky, but for sure the world we are standing on isn’t thirteenth-century Earth. Jamrud doesn’t belong there, for instance.”

Josh said, “Perhaps the thirteenth century is a—a foundation. Like the underlying fabric onto which the other fragments of time, making up this great chronological counterpane of a world, have been stitched.”

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” the phone said.

Bisesa shrugged. “I think it’s more complex than bad.”

Ruddy lay back against the rock, hands clasped behind his broad head, the clouds reflected in his thick glasses. “The thirteenth century,” he said wistfully. “What a marvelous journey this is turning out to be. I thought I was coming to the North—West Frontier, and that was adventure enough, but to be whisked to the Middle Ages! … But I admit it isn’t wonder I feel at the moment. Nor even fear, over the fact that we are lost.”

Josh sipped his lemonade.

“What, then?”

Ruddy said, “When I was five years old I was sent to stay with foster parents in Southsea. It’s a common practice, of course, for if you’re an é parent you want your children to be grounded in Blighty. But at five I knew nothing of that. I hated that place as soon as I set foot in it—Lorne Lodge, the House of Desolation!—I was punished regularly, in truth, for the dreadful crime simply of being me. My sister and I would comfort ourselves by playing at Robinson Crusoe, never dreaming I would one day become a Robinson Crusoe in time! I wonder where poor Trix is now … But what hurt most about my situation, I see now, was that I had been abandoned—as I saw it then—betrayed by my parents, and left in that desolate place of misery and pain.”