Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

The phone, peeking out of her pocket, tried to help. “The complex to your right is probably the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon’s greatest ruler, who—”

“Shut up, phone.”

Casey was hobbling along. “If this is Babylon, where are the Hanging Gardens?”

“In Nineveh,” said the phone dryly.

“No people,” said Josh uncertainly. “I see some damage—signs of fires, looting, perhaps even earthquake destruction—but still no people. It’s getting eerie.”

“Yeah,” growled Casey. “All the lights on but nobody at home.”

“Have you noticed,” said Abdikadir quietly, “that the Macedonians seem overwhelmed too? And yet they were here so recently …”

It was true. Even wily Eumenes peered around at the city’s immense buildings with awe.

“It’s possible this isn’t their Babylon either,” said Bisesa.

The party began to break up. Alexander and Hephaistion, with most of the guard, made for the royal palace, back toward the gate. Other parties of troops were instructed to spread out through the city and search for inhabitants. The officers’ cries rang out peremptorily, echoing from the glazed walls of the temples; de Morgan said they were warning their men of the consequences of looting. “But I can’t imagine anybody will dare touch a thing in this haunted place!”

Bisesa and the others continued on down the processional way, accompanied by Eumenes and a handful of his advisors and guards. The way led them through a series of walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Bisesa had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred meters on a side. To Bisesa’s eyes, conditioned by images of Egyptian pyramids, it looked like something she might have expected to find looming above a lost Mayan city. South of the ziggurat was a temple that the phone said must be the Esagila— the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia.

The phone said, “The Babylonians called this ziggurat the Etemenanki—which meant ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.’ It was Nebuchadnezzar who brought the Jews here as slave labor; by bad-mouthing Babylon in the Bible the Jews took a long revenge …”

Josh grabbed Bisesa’s hand. “Come on. I want to climb that blooming heap.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the Tower of Babel! Look, there’s a staircase on the south side.” He was right; it must have been ten paces wide. “Race you!” And, dragging her hand, he was off.

She was intrinsically fitter than he was; she had trained as a soldier, and had come from a century far better provided for with food and health care. But he was younger and had been hardened by the relentless marching. It was a fair race, and they kept holding hands until, after a hundred steps or so, they took a break and collapsed on the steps.

From up here the Euphrates was a broad silver ribbon, bright even in the ashen light, that cut through the heart of the city. She couldn’t make out clearly the western side of the city, but on this eastern side grand buildings clustered closely—temples, palaces, presumably government departments. The city plan was very orderly. The main roads were all straight, all met at right angles, and all began and ended in one of the many gates in the walls. The palaces were riots of color, every surface covered with polychrome tiles on which dragons and other fantastic creatures gamboled.

She asked, “Where are we in time?”

Her phone said, “If this is the age of Nebuchadnezzar, then perhaps the sixth centuryB.C. The Persians took Babylonia two centuries before Alexander’s time, and they bled the area dry. When Alexander arrived it was still a vibrant city, but its best days were already far in the past. We, however, are seeing it at something close to its best.”

Josh studied her. “You look wistful, Bisesa.”

“I was just thinking.”

“About Myra—”

“I’d love her to be here—to be able to show her this.”

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to tell her about it.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ruddy, Abdikadir, Eumenes and de Morgan had followed more slowly up the ziggurat. Ruddy was wheezing, but he made it, and as he sat down Josh clapped him on the back. Eumenes stayed standing, apparently not winded at all, and gazed out at Babylon.

Abdikadir borrowed Bisesa’s night goggles and looked around. “Take a look at the western side of the river …”

The line of the walls crossed the river, to complete the city’s bisected rectangle. But on the far side of the river, though Bisesa thought she could make out the lines of the streets, there was no color but the orange-brown of mudstone, and the walls were reduced to ridges of broken rubble, the gates and watchtowers just mounds of core.

Josh said, “It looks as if half the city has been melted.”

“Or nuked,” said Abdikadir grimly.

Eumenes spoke. “It was not like this,” de Morgan translated. “Not like this …” While the eastern half of the city had been ceremonial and administrative, the western half had been residential, crowded with houses, tenement blocks, plazas and markets. Eumenes had seen it that way only a few years before, a vibrant, crowded human city. Now it was all reduced to nothing.

“Another interface,” Abdikadir said grimly. “The heart of a young Babylon, transplanted into the corpse of the old.”

Eumenes said, “I believed I was coming to terms with the strangeness of the faults in time which afflict us. But to see this— the face of a city rubbed away into sand, the weight of a thousand years descended in a heartbeat—”

“Yes,” Ruddy said. “The terrible cruelty of time.”

“More than cruelty,” Eumenes said. “Arrogance.” Bisesa was insulated from the Secretary’s emotions by translation and two millennia of different body language. But again she thought she detected a growing, cold anger in him.

A voice floated up from the ground, a Macedonian officer calling for Eumenes. A search party had found somebody, a Babylonian, hiding in the Temple of Marduk.

The Macedonians’ captive was brought to Eumenes. He was clearly terrified, his eyes wide in a grimy face, and two burly troopers had to drag him. The man was dressed in fine robes, rich blue cloth inlaid with threads of gold. But the robes, ragged and dirty, hung off his frame, as if he hadn’t eaten for days. He might once have been clean-shaven and his scalp scoured bare, but now a stubble of black hair was growing back, and his skin was filthy. As he was brought close, Bisesa shrank from a stink of stale urine.

Prodded with a Macedonian stabbing sword, he gabbled freely, but in an antique tongue that none of the moderns recognized. The officer who had found him had had the presence of mind to find a Persian soldier who could understand this language, and so the Babylonian’s words were translated into archaic Greek for Eumenes, and then English for the moderns.

De Morgan, frowning, translated uncertainly. “He says he was a priest of a goddess—I can’t make out the name. He was abandoned when the others finally left the temple complex. He has been too frightened to leave the temple. He has been here for six days and nights—he has had no food—no water but that which he drank from the sacred font of the goddess—”

Eumenes snapped his fingers impatiently. “Give him food and water. And make him tell us what happened here.”

Bit by bit, between ravenous mouthfuls, the priest told his story. It had begun, of course, with the Discontinuity.

One night the priests and other temple staff had been woken by a dreadful wailing. Some of them ran outside. It was dark— but the stars were in the wrong place.The wailing came from a temple astronomer, who had been making observations of the “planets,” the wandering stars, as he had every night since he was a small boy. But suddenly his planet had disappeared, and the very constellations had swum around the sky. It had been the astronomer’s shock and despair that had begun to rouse the temple, and the rest of the city.