Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Nothing this King did was modest. He was, after all, Alexander the Great. And his jaunt around the Mediterranean, which his advisors had, wryly, taken to calling “Alexander’s Boating Lake,” was no exception.

Alexander had been terribly disappointed to find that the city he had planted at the mouth of the Nile, his Alexandria-on-the-Nile, had been obliterated by the Discontinuity. But, undeterred, he ordered units of his army to begin the construction of a new city there, on the plan of the vanished old. And he set his engineers the task of building a new canal between the Gulf of Suez and the Nile. In the meantime he ordered the hasty construction of a temporary harbor at Alexandria, and had many of the ships he had constructed in India sailed up the Gulf of Suez, broken down into sections, and hauled overland.

To Bisesa’s amazement it took only a couple of months before the fleet was reassembled at the site of Alexandria and ready to sail. After a two-day festival of sacrifices and merriment in the tent compound that housed the city’s workers, the fleet set off.

At first Bisesa, separated from the Eye of Marduk for the first time in five years, found the voyage strangely relaxing. She spent a lot of time on deck, watching the land unravel past her, or listening to complicated cross-cultural discussions. Even the ocean was a curiosity. In her time the Mediterranean, recovering from decades of pollution, had become a mixture of game reserve and park, fenced off with great invisible barriers of electricity and sound. Now it was wild again, and she glimpsed dolphins and whales. Once she thought she saw the torpedo shape of an immense shark, bigger than anything from her day, she was sure.

It was never warm, though. Often in the mornings she would smell frost in the air. Every year it seemed a little colder, though it was hard to be sure; she wished they had thought to keep climate records from the beginning. But despite the chill she found she had to keep out of the sun. The British took to wearing knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, and even the nutmeg-brown Macedonians seemed to burn. On the royal boats thick awnings were erected, and Alexander’s doctors experimented with ointments of ass’s butter and palm sap to block the suddenly intense rays of the sun. The storms of the early days after the Discontinuity had long passed, but clearly the climate remained screwed up.

At night there was more strangeness too. Under the tented canopies Alexander and his companions drank the night away. But Bisesa would sit in the darkened quiet of the deck, watching land go by on which there was generally not a single light to be seen. She would peer up, if the sky was clear, at subtly altered constellations. But often she would see auroras, great walls and sheets and curtains of light, visibly three-dimensional structures towering over the darkened world. She had never known of auroras visible at such low latitudes, and she had an uneasy feeling about what they might portend; the Discontinuity wasn’t cosmetic, and might have cut deep indeed into the fabric of the world.

Sometimes Josh would sit with her. And sometimes, if the Macedonians were quiet, they would find a dark corner, and make love, or perhaps just huddle together.

But most of the time she kept to herself. She suspected her friends were right, that she had been in danger of losing herself in the Eye. She needed to ground herself in the world once more, and even Josh was a distraction. But she knew she was hurting him, once again.

The ostensible point of the trip was to survey the new world, and every few days Alexander sent parties inland. He had selected a small force of Iranians, colonial Greeks and Agrarians to carry out these missions: highly mobile, flexible troops, brimming with initiative and daring. Some British were attached to each party, and each foray was accompanied by surveyors and mapmakers.

The first reports were desolating, though. From the beginning the explorers reported wonders—strange rock formations, islands of extraordinary vegetation, even more extraordinary animals. But these marvels were all aspects of the natural world; of the works of mankind barely a trace survived. The ancient civilization of Egypt, for example, had vanished completely. The great blocks of its monumental buildings were uncut from their sandstone beds, and in the Valley of the Kings there was no sign of anything like humanity save a few of the cautious chimp-like creatures the British called man-apes, clinging to patches of forest.

It was a relief to sail up the coast of Judea. Of Nazareth and Bethlehem there wasn’t a trace—and no sign of Christ or His Passion. But close to the site of Jerusalem, under the command of British engineers, a small industrial revolution was being kick-started. Josh and Bisesa toured foundries and yards where cheerful British engineers and sweating Macedonian laborers, and a few bright Greek apprentices, constructed pressure vessels like giant kettles, and experimented with prototype steamship screws and lengths of railway track. The engineers were learning to communicate in an archaic Greek studded with English words like crankshaft and head of steam.

As everywhere, there was a rush to build quickly, before the memories and capabilities of the first generation, transmitted across the Discontinuity, were lost. But Alexander himself, a lead-from-the-front warrior king, had turned out to be something of a skeptic when it came to technology. It had taken the construction of a prototype to impress him. This had been something like the famous aeolipile of Hero—in a lost timeline, a manufacturer of mechanical novelties in Alexandria—just a pressure vessel with two canted nozzles that would vent steam and spin around like a lawn sprinkler. But Eumenes had immediately seen the potential of this new form of power.

It was a difficult job, though. The British had only a handful of the necessary tools, and the industry’s infrastructure would have to be built literally from the ground up, including establishing mines for coal and iron ore. Bisesa thought it might be twenty years before it was possible to manufacture engines as efficient and powerful as James Watt’s, say.

“But it begins again,” Abdikadir said. “Soon, all across Alexander’s domain, there will be pumps laboring in mines dug deeper and deeper, and steamships cruising a shrinking Mediterranean, and great rail networks spreading east across Asia toward the capital of the Mongols. This new Jerusalem will be the workshop of the world.”

“Ruddy would have loved it,” Josh said. “He was always very impressed with machines. Like a new breed of being in the world, he said. And Ruddy said that transport is civilization. If the continents can be united by steamships and railway trains, perhaps this new world need see no more war, no more nations, indeed, save the single marvelous nation of mankind!”

Abdikadir said, “I thought he said sewage was the basis of civilization.”

“That too!”

Bisesa fondly took Josh’s hand. “Your optimism is like a caffeine hit, Josh.”

He frowned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Abdikadir said, “But the new world is going to be nothing like ours. There are overwhelmingly more of them, the Macedonians, than us. If a new world-state does come into existence, it will be speaking Greek—if not Mongol. And it’s likely to be Buddhist …”

In a world stripped of its messiahs, the strange time-twin Buddhists in their temple deep in Asia had been gathering interest from both Macedonians and Mongols. The lama’s circular life seemed a perfect metaphor for both the Discontinuity and the strange condition of the world it had left behind, as well as for the religion the lama gently espoused.

“Oh,” said Josh wistfully, “I wish I could spring forward through two or three centuries and see what grows from the seeds we are planting today! …”