Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Once again she was changing the trajectory of history, Bisesa thought. If they survived—a big if—she wondered what new medical synthesis, two thousand years early, might develop from the rough-and-ready education she was struggling to impart: perhaps a whole new body of knowledge, functionally equivalent to the mechanical Newtonian models of the twenty-first century, but couched in the language of Macedonian gods.

Ruddy Kipling insisted on “joining up,” as he called it. “Here I stand at the confluence of history, as mankind’s two greatest generals join in combat, with the prize the destiny of a new world. My blood is up, Bisesa!” He had, he claimed, trained with the First Punjab Volunteer Rifles, part of an Anglo-Indian initiative to fend off the threats emanating from the rebellious North—West Frontier. “Granted I didn’t last very long,” he admitted, “after mocking my fellow recruits’ shooting skills in a little poem about having my carcass peppered with bullets while walking down a neighboring street …”

The British took one look at this broad-faced, pudgy, somewhat pompous young man, still pale from his lingering illness, and laughed at him. The Macedonians were simply baffled by Ruddy, but wouldn’t have him either.

After these rebuffs, and somewhat against Bisesa’s better judgment, Ruddy insisted on joining her makeshift medical corps. “I once had some ambition to be a doctor, you know …” Perhaps, but he turned out to be astoundingly squeamish, fainting dead away the first time he glimpsed a goat’s fresh blood.

But, determined to play his part in the great struggle, he stuck with it. Gradually he became inured to the atmosphere of a hospital, the stink of blood, and the bleating of wounded and frightened animals. Eventually he was able to apply a bandage to a goat’s hacked-open leg, all but finishing the job before fainting.

Then came his greatest triumph, when a Tommy came in with a gashed-open hand from a training accident. Ruddy was able to clean it out and bind it up without referring to Bisesa, although he threw up later, as he cheerfully admitted.

After that, Bisesa took his shoulders, ignoring the faint stink of vomit. “Ruddy, courage on the battlefield is one thing—but no less is the courage to face one’s inner demons, as you have done.”

“I will persuade myself to believe you,” he said, but he blushed through his pallor.

Though Ruddy became able to stand the sight of blood, suffering and death, he was still greatly moved by the spectacle—even by the death of a goat. Over dinner he said, “What is life that it is so precious, and yet so easily destroyed? Perhaps that wretched kid we shot to bits today thought himself the center of the universe. And now he is snuffed out, evanescent as a dewdrop. Why would God give us something so precious as life, only to hack it short with the brutality of death?”

“But,” de Morgan said, “it isn’t just God that we can ask now. We can no longer regard ourselves as the pinnacle of Creation, below God Himself—for now we have in our world these creatures whom Bisesa senses inside the Eyes, perhaps below God but higher than us, as we are higher than the kid goats we slaughter. Why should God listen to our prayers when they stand over us to call to Him?”

Ruddy looked at him with disgust. “That’s typical of you, de Morgan, to belittle your fellow man.”

De Morgan just laughed.

Josh said, “Or maybe there is no god of the Discontinuity.” He sounded unusually troubled. “You know, this whole experience, everything since the Discontinuity, is so like a terrible dream, a fever dream. Bisesa, you have taught me about the great extinctions of the past. You say this was understood in my time, but barely accepted. And you say that in all the fossil record there is no trace of mind—nothing until man, and his immediate precursors. Perhaps, then, if we are to die ourselves, it will be the first time an intelligent species has succumbed to extinction.” He flexed his hand, studying his fingers. “Abdikadir says that according to the scientists of the twenty-first century, mind is bound up with the structure of the universe—that mind somehow makes things real. ”

“The collapse of quantum functions—yes. Perhaps.”

“If that is so, and if our kind of minds are about to be snuffed out, then perhaps this is the consequence. They say that when you face death your past life flickers before your eyes. Perhaps we as a race are undergoing a final psychic shock as we succumb to darkness—shards of our bloody history have come bubbling to the surface in the last instants—and perhaps in falling, we are smashing apart the structure of space and time itself …” He was talking rapidly now, disturbed.

Ruddy just laughed. “Not like you to brood so, Josh!”

Bisesa reached out and took Josh’s hand. “Shut up, Ruddy. Listen to me, Josh. This is no death dream. I think the Eyes are artifacts, the Discontinuity a purposeful act. I think there are minds involved—minds greater than ours, but like ours.”

“But,” de Morgan said grimly, “your creatures of the Eye can shuffle space and time themselves. What is that but the preserve of a god?”

“Oh, I don’t think they are gods,” Bisesa said. “Powerful, yes, far beyond us—but not gods.”

Josh said, “Why do you say that?”

“Because they have no compassion.”

They had four days’ grace. Then Alexander’s envoys returned.

Of the thousand men who rode out, only a dozen came back. Corporal Batson lived, but his ears and nose had been sliced off. And, in a bag on his saddle, he carried the severed head of Ptolemy.

When she heard the news, Bisesa shuddered, both at the imminent prospect of war, and the loss of another thread from history’s unraveling fabric. The news about Batson, the competent Geordie soldier, broke her heart. She heard that Alexander simply mourned the loss of his friend.

The next day, the Macedonian scouts reported much activity in the Mongol camp. The assault, it seemed, was close.

That afternoon, Josh found Bisesa in the Temple of Marduk. She was sitting against one scorched and blackened wall, a British blanket over her legs to keep out the gathering cold. She stared up at the Eye, which they had labeled the Eye of Marduk—although some of the Tommies called it “God’s Bollock.” Bisesa had taken to spending much of her spare time in here.

Josh sat down beside her, arms wrapped around his thin torso. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I am resting. Resting and watching.”

“Watching the watchers?”

She smiled. “Somebody has to. I don’t want them to think—”

“What?”

“That we don’t know. About them, and what they’ve done to us, our history. And besides, I think there is power here. There must be, to have created this Eye and its siblings across the planet, to have melted twenty tonnes of gold to a puddle … I don’t want Sable, or Genghis Khan come to that, to get her hands on it. If it all goes pear-shaped when the Mongols come I’ll be standing in that doorway with my pistol.”

“Oh, Bisesa, you are so strong! I wish I was like you.”

“No, you don’t.” He was holding her hand, very tightly, but she didn’t try to pull away. “Here.” She fumbled under the blanket and produced a metallic flask. “Have some tea.”

He opened the flask and sipped. “It’s good. The milk is a little, umm—not authentic.”

“From my survival pack. Condensed and irradiated. In the American army they give you suicide pills; in the British, tea. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. What more special than this?”

He sipped the tea. He seemed turned in on himself.

Bisesa wondered if the shock of the Discontinuity was at last working its way through Josh. It had hit them all, she suspected, in different ways. She asked, “Are you okay?”