Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Casey pulled up an image of the Middle East. “Here. There’s a city—small, we think ancient, not like Chicago. But what’s interesting about it is that Soyuz picked up a radio signal from there—the only one on the planet, save for ours. But it wasn’t like ours. It’s powerful, but regular, just an upward chirp through the frequencies.”

“A beacon, perhaps,” Abdikadir said.

“Maybe. It’s not one of our designs.”

Bisesa peered at the softscreen. The city was set in a broad expanse of green, apparently cultivated land, laced with suspiciously straight waterways, like shining threads. “I think this is Iraq.”

“That,” said Cecil de Morgan firmly, “is Babylon.”

Ruddy gasped. “Babylon lives again! …”

“And that’s all,” Casey said. “Just us, and this beacon in Babylon.”

They fell silent. Babylon : the very name was exotic to Bisesa, and her head buzzed with speculation about how that strange beacon had got there.

Captain Grove seized the moment. The little man stepped forward, mighty mustache bristling, and he clapped his hands briskly. “Well, thank you, Mr. Othic. Here’s the way I see it. We have to concentrate on our own position, since it’s clear that nobody is about to come to our rescue, so to speak. Not only that, I think we have to find something to do— to give ourselves a goal—it’s time we stop reacting to whatever the gods throw at us, and start taking command.”

“Here, here,” Ruddy murmured.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“We must go to Chicago,” Josh said. “With so many people, so much industry, so much potential—”

“They don’t know we’re here,” Casey said bluntly. “Oh, perhaps they saw Soyuz pass overhead, but even if they did they won’t have understood.”

“And we have no way to reach them,” Captain Grove said. “We’re scarcely in a position to mount a transatlantic crossing … Perhaps in the future. But for now we must put Chicago out of our minds.”

“Babylon,” said Abdikadir. “It’s the obvious goal. And there’s that beacon: perhaps we will learn more of what has become of us.”

Grove nodded. “Besides, I like the look of all that green. Wasn’t Babylon an early center of agriculture? The Fertile Crescent and all that? Perhaps we should consider a relocation up there. A march wouldn’t be impossible.”

Abdikadir smiled. “You’re thinking of farming, Captain?”

“It’s hardly been my lifelong ambition, but needs must, Mr. Omar.”

Bisesa pointed out, “But somebody lives there already.”

Grove’s face hardened. “We’ll deal with that when we get there.” In that moment, Bisesa glimpsed something of the steel that had enabled these British to build an empire that spanned a planet.

There was no serious alternative suggestion. Babylon it would be.

The party began to break up into smaller groups, talking, planning. Bisesa was struck by a new sense of purpose, of direction.

Josh, Ruddy and Abdikadir walked back across the mud with Bisesa. Abdikadir said, “Grove is a smart cookie.”

“What do you mean?”

“His eagerness to go to Babylon. It’s not just so we can plow fields. There will be women there .”

“Before his men start mutinying, you mean.”

Josh grinned uneasily. “Think of it: five hundred Adams and five hundred Eves …”

Ruddy said, “You’re right that Grove is a good officer. He’s very aware of the mood in the barrack-rooms and the Mess.” Many of the men who had happened to be at Jamrud during the Discontinuity were “three-year-olds,” Ruddy said, short-service troops. “Few of ’em have pipeclay in the marrow …” Pipeclay was the whitener the troops used on their belts. “They’re actually keeping their spirits up remarkably well. But that mood won’t last long, once they realize how little chance there is that any of us is going home any time soon. Babylon might be just the thing.”

Abdikadir said, “You know, we are fortunate in having the Soyuz , and so much data. But we’ve lots of unanswered questions. That two-million-year frame is interesting, for instance.”

“How so?”

“Because two million years is about the date of the emergence of Homo erectus —the first hominid. Some predecessor species, like the pithecines the British captured, overlapped for a time, but—”

“You think the time frame has something to do with us ?”

“It may be just a coincidence—but why not one million years, why not twenty, or two hundred million? And the oldest parts of this world-quilt seem to be where we are oldest, and the youngest, like the Americas, where we reached last … Perhaps this new world is somehow a representative sampling of human, and hominid, history.”

She shuddered. “But so much of the world is empty.”

“The history of Homo sapiens is just the last chapter of the long, slow story of hominid evolution. We are mere dust, floating on the surface of history, Bisesa. Perhaps that’s what the state of this world shows us. It’s a fair sample across time.”

Josh tugged at Bisesa’s sleeve. “Something has occurred to me—it may not have struck you or the others—but then my perspective, as a man of the nineteenth century, is different …”

“Spit it out, Josh.”

“You look out at this new world, and you see scraps of your past. But I see a little of my future, too, in you. Why should you be the last—why, Bisesa, is there nothing of your own future?”

The thought struck her all at once, fully formed; she felt shocked it hadn’t occurred to her. She had no reply.

“Captain Grove! Over here!” Corporal Batson, on the edge of the parade ground, was waving. Grove hurried over; Bisesa and the others followed.

Batson was with a small group of soldiers, a British corporal and a number of sepoys , who were holding two men. These strangers had their hands tied behind their back. They were shorter, stockier than the sepoys , and more muscular. They both wore knee-length smocks of faded purple, tied at the waist with bits of rope, and strapped-up leather sandals. Their faces were broad and swarthy and roughly shaved, their black hair curly and cropped short. They were crusted with dried blood, and they were evidently terrified of the sepoys ’ guns; when a soldier playfully lifted his rifle, one of the pair cried out and tumbled to his knees.

Grove stood before this pair, fists on his hips. “Leave them alone, man, for God’s sake. Can’t you see they’re terrified?”

The sepoy backed off sheepishly. Ruddy stared at the newcomers gleefully.

Grove snapped, “Well, Mitchell, what have you brought home? What kind of Pashtuns are these?”

“Dunno, sir,” said the corporal. His accent was broad West Country English. “Not Pashtuns, I don’t think. Was patrolling down southwest …” Mitchell’s party had been sent by Grove to scout out the “army” they had spied down there; it seemed that the strangers were scouts sent the other way with the same idea in mind. “Actually there was three of ’em, on pudgy little horses like pit ponies. They had spears that they chucked and then they came at us with knives—three against half a dozen! We had to shoot the horses out from under them, and then one of the three dead, before these two would give up. Even when their horses went down they just rolled off and started tugging at ’em to get them up again, like they couldn’t understand they had been shot.”

Ruddy said dryly to Grove, “If you’d never seen a gun, Captain, you’d be dumbfounded if your horse just went down from under you like that.”