Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

When she got the chance, Bisesa studied the King.

Seated on a gloriously heavy-looking golden throne, being hauled across India by animal-power, Alexander was dressed in a girdle and striped tunic, with a golden diadem around the purple Macedonian hat on his head, and held a golden scepter. There wasn’t much of the Greek to be seen about Alexander. Perhaps his adoption of Persian ways was more than just diplomatic; perhaps he had been seduced by the grandeur and wealth of that empire.

As he traveled his tame prophet Aristander sat at his side, a bearded old man in a grimy white tunic and with sharp, calculating eyes. Bisesa speculated that this hand-waver might be concerned about the impact of people from the future on his position as the King’s official seer. Meanwhile the Persian eunuch called Bagoas leaned nonchalantly against the back of the throne. He was a pretty, heavily made-up young man in a kind of diaphanous toga, who from time to time stroked the back of the King’s head. Bisesa was amused by the weary glares Hephaistion shot at this creature.

Alexander, though, slumped on his throne. It hadn’t been hard for Bisesa to figure out, with the help of the phone, just when in his career she had encountered him. So she knew he was thirty-two, and though his body was powerful, he looked exhausted. After years of campaigning, in which he led his men into the thick of it with a self-sacrificing bravery that must have sometimes bordered on folly, Alexander bore the results of several major injuries. He even seemed to have difficulty breathing, and when he stood it was only through extraordinary willpower.

It was strange to think that this still-young man had already come to rule more than two million square kilometers, and that history was a matter of his whim—and stranger yet to remember that in the timeline of Earth his campaign had already passed its high-water mark. His death would have been only months away, and the proud, loyal officers who followed him now would have begun the process of tearing apart Alexander’s domains. Bisesa wondered what new destiny awaited him now.

In the middle of the afternoon the march broke, and the traveling army quickly organized itself into a suburb of the sprawling tent city of the Indus delta.

Cooking, it seemed, was a slow and complicated process, and it took some time before the fires were lit, the cauldrons and pots bubbling. But in the meantime there was plenty of drinking, music, dancing, even impromptu theatrical performances. Traders set up their stalls, and a few prostitutes shimmered through the camp before disappearing into the soldiers’ tents. Most of the women here, though, were the wives or mistresses of the soldiers. As well as Indians, there were Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians—even a few exotic souls whose origin Bisesa barely knew, like Scythians and Bactrians. Many of them had children, some as old as five or six, their complexions and hair colors betraying their complicated origins, and the camp was filled with the incongruous noise of wailing babies.

In the night Bisesa lay in her tent trying to sleep, listening to the crying of babies, the laughing of lovers, and the mournful, drunken wailing of homesick Macedonians. Bisesa had been trained for missions where you were flown in over a few hours, and that usually didn’t last more than a day away from base. But Alexander’s soldiers had walked out of Macedonia and across Eurasia, traveling as far as the North—West Frontier. She tried to imagine how it must have been to have followed Alexander for years , to have walked to places so remote and unexplored that his city-army might as well have been campaigning on the Moon.

After a few days of the march, there were complaints of peculiar sicknesses among the Macedonians and their followers. These infections hit hard, and there were some deaths, but the crude field medicine of Bisesa and the British was able to diagnose them and to some extent treat them. It was obvious to Bisesa that the British, and she, had brought bugs from the future to which the Macedonians had no immunity: the Macedonians had been subject to many novel plagues during their odyssey, but the far future was a place even they hadn’t breached. It was probably lucky for all concerned that these infections quickly died out. There was no sign of reverse infections, of the British by bugs carried by the Macedonians; Bisesa imagined an epidemiologist could work up an academic paper about that chronological asymmetry.

Day by day the march went on. Guided by Alexander’s own scouts, and the careful surveys he had had made of the Indus valley, they followed a different route back to Jamrud than that taken by Bisesa on the way down.

One day, no more than a couple of days out of Jamrud, they came to a city that none of them recognized. The march halted, and Alexander sent a party of scouts to investigate, accompanied by Bisesa and some of the British.

The city was well laid out. About the size of a large shopping mall, it was based on two earth mounds, each walled by massive ramparts of hard-baked mud brick. It was a well-planned place, with broad, straight avenues set out according to a grid system, and it looked to have been recently inhabited. But when the scouts passed cautiously through its gates, they found nobody within, no people at all.

It wasn’t old enough to be a ruin; it was too well preserved for that. Such features as wooden roofs were still intact. But the abandonment was not recent. The few remaining bits of furniture and pottery were broken, if any food had been left behind the birds and dogs had long taken it away, and everything was covered by rust-brown, drifting dust.

De Morgan pointed out a complicated system of sewers and wells. “We’ll have to tell Kipling,” he said with dry humor. “A big fan of sewers, is Ruddy. The mark of civilization, he says.”

The ground was heavily trampled and rutted. When Bisesa dug her hand into the dust she found it was full of flotsam: bits of broken pottery, terra-cotta bangles, clay marbles, figurine fragments, bits of metal that looked like a trader’s weights, tablets inscribed in a script unknown to her. Every square centimeter of the ground seemed to have been heavily trodden, and she walked on layers of detritus, the detritus of centuries. This place must be old, a relic of a time deeper than the British, deeper even than Alexander’s foray, old enough to have been covered by the drifting dirt by her own day. It was a reminder that this bit of the world had been inhabited, indeed civilized, for a long, long time—and that the depths of time, dredged by the Discontinuity, contained many unknowns.

But the town had been emptied out, as if the population had just packed up and marched away across the stony plain. Eumenes wondered if the rivers had changed their courses because of the Discontinuity, and the people had gone in search of water. But the abandonment looked too far in the past for that.

No answers were forthcoming. The soldiers, Macedonian and British alike, were spooked by the empty, echoing place, this Marie Celeste of a town. They didn’t even stay the night before moving on.

After several days’ march, Alexander’s train arrived at Jamrud, to astonishment and consternation on all sides.

Still on crutches, Casey hobbled out to meet Bisesa and embraced her. “I wouldn’t have believed it. And Jeez, the stink.”

She grinned. “That’s what a fortnight eating curry under a leather tent does for you. Strange—Jamrud seems almost like home to me now, Rudyard Kipling and all.”

Casey grunted. “Well, something tells me it’s all the home you and I are going to have for a while, for I don’t see any sign of a way back yet. Come on up to the fort. Guess what Abdikadir managed to set up? A shower . Goes to show heathens have their uses—the smart ones anyhow …”