Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

But as the journey continued such dreams, of building empires and taming worlds, came to seem petty indeed.

Greece was empty. No matter how hard Alexander’s explorers probed the dense tangle of forest that coated much of the mainland, there were no signs of the great cities, no Athens, no Sparta, no Thebes. There were barely signs of humans at all: a few rough-looking tribesmen, said the explorers, and what they described as “sub-men.” More in hope than anticipation Alexander sent a party north to Macedon, to see what might have survived of his homeland. It took weeks for the scouts to return, with negative news.

“It seems,” Alexander said with a dry wistfulness, “there are more lions in Greece now than philosophers.”

But even the lions weren’t doing too well, Bisesa noted sadly.

Everywhere they traveled they saw signs of ecological damage and collapse. The Greek forests were wilted and fringed by scrubby grassland. In Turkey, the inland areas had been baked clean of life altogether, leaving the ground an exposed rust brown—“Red as Mars,” Abdikadir said after taking part in one jaunt. And as they explored the island that had once been called Crete, Josh asked, “Have you noticed how few birds there are?”

It was hard to be sure about the extent of what was being lost, as there was no way of knowing what had crossed through the Discontinuity in the first place. But Bisesa suspected there was a major dieback underway. They could only guess at the causes.

“Just mixing everything up must have done a great deal of damage,” Bisesa said.

Josh protested, “But—mammoths in Paris! Saber-toothed cats in the Colosseum of Rome! Mir is a bringing-together of fragments, but so is a kaleidoscope, and its effect is beautiful.”

“Yeah, but whenever you get mixing of populations you get extinctions: when the land bridge between North and South America was joined, when humans carried rats and goats and such around the world to devastate native wildlife. So it must be here. You have creatures from the depth of the Ice Age side by side with rodents from modern cities, in a climate suited to neither. Whatever survived the Discontinuity is wiping out its neighbor, or being wiped out in turn.”

“Just like us,” Abdikadir said blackly. “We couldn’t stand being mixed up either, could we?”

Bisesa said, “There must be booms and crashes: maybe that explains our plagues of insects, a symptom of an out-of-kilter ecology. Diseases must be transmitted across the old boundaries too. I’m a little surprised that we’ve had no real epidemics.”

Abdikadir said, “We humans are too thinly scattered. Even so, perhaps we’ve been lucky …”

“But no birds trill from the trees!” Josh complained.

“Birds are bell-wethers, Josh,” Bisesa said. “Birds are vulnerable—their habitats, like wetlands and beaches, are easily damaged in climate shifts. The loss of the birds is a bad sign.”

“Then if things are so difficult for the animals—” Josh pounded his bunched fist onto a rail. “We must do something about it.”

Abdikadir laughed, then stopped himself. “What, exactly?”

“You mock me,” said Josh, red-faced. He waved his hands, grasping at ideas. “We should gather the animals in zoos, or reserves. The same with the vegetation, the trees and plants. The birds and insects too—especially the birds! And then, when things settle down we can release the beasts into the wild—”

“And let a new Eden build itself?” Bisesa said. “Dear Josh, we’re not mocking you. And we should put your idea of gathering zoo specimens to Alexander: if the mammoth and the cave bear have been brought back to life, let’s keep a few. But it’s just that we’ve learned it’s more complicated than that—learned the hard way. Conserving ecospheres, let alone repairing them, isn’t so easy, especially as we never understood how they worked anyhow. They aren’t even static; they are dynamic, undergoing great cycles … Extinctions are inevitable; they happen at the best of times. No matter what we try, we can’t keep it all. ”

Josh said, “Then what are we to do? Simply throw up our hands and accept whatever fate has decreed?”

“No,” said Bisesa. “But we have to accept our limits. There are only a handful of us. We can’t save the world, Josh. We don’t even know how to. We will do well to save ourselves. We must be patient.”

Abdikadir said grimly, “Patience, yes. But it took only a fraction of a second for the great wounds of the Discontinuity to be inflicted. It will take millions of years for them to heal …”

“And it had nothing to do with fate,” Josh said. “If the gods of the Eye were wise enough to rip apart space and time, could they not have foreseen what would become of our ecologies?”

They fell silent, and the jungles of Greece, dense, wilting, menacing, slid by.

Italy seemed as deserted as Greece. They found no sign of the city-states the Macedonians remembered, or the modern cities of Bisesa’s time. Even at the mouth of the Tiber there was no trace of the extensive harbor workings that the imperial Romans had constructed, to service the great grain fleets that had kept their bloated city alive.

Alexander was intrigued by accounts of how Rome, just an ambitious city-state in his day, would one day have built an empire to rival his own. So he put together a handful of riverboats and, reclining under a brilliant purple canopy, led a party up the river.

The seven hills of Rome were immediately recognizable. But the site was uninhabited, save for a few ugly hill forts sitting squat on the Palatine, where the palaces of the Caesars would have been built. Alexander thought this was a great joke, and decided graciously to spare the lives of his historical rivals.

They spent a night camped close in the marshy lowland that should have become the Forum of Rome. There was another startling aurora, which brought gasps from the Macedonians.

Bisesa was no geologist, but she wondered what must have happened deep in the core of the world when the new planet had been assembled from its disparate fragments. Earth’s core had been a spinning worldlet of iron as big as the Moon. If the stitching-together of Mir went to the very center of the world, that great sub-planet, crudely reassembled, must be thrashing and roiling. The currents in the outer layers, the mantle, would be disturbed too, with plumes of molten rock, fountains hundreds of kilometers tall, breaking and crashing against each other. Maybe the effects of such deep storms were now being felt on the surface of the planet.

The planet’s magnetic field, generated by the great iron dynamo of the spinning core, must have collapsed. Maybe that explained the auroras, and the continuing failure of their compasses. In normal times this magnetic shield protected fragile life-forms from a hard rain from space: heavy particles from the sun, sleeting remnants from supernova explosions. Before the magnetic field restored itself there would be radiation damage—cancers, a flood of mutations, almost all of them harmful. And if the battered ozone layer had collapsed too, the flood of ultraviolet would explain the intensified sunlight, and would do even more damage to the living creatures exposed on Earth’s surface.

But there were other domains of life. She thought of the deep hot biosphere, the ancient heat-loving creatures that had survived from Earth’s earliest days, lingering around ocean vents and deep in the rocks. They wouldn’t be troubled by a little surface ultraviolet—but if the world had been sliced to its core their ancient empire must have been partitioned, just as on the surface. Was there some slow extinction event unfolding deep in the rocks, as on the surface? And were there Eyes buried in the body of the world to watch that too?