Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

The fleet sailed on, tracking the southern coast of France, and then along eastern and southern Spain, making toward Gibraltar.

There were few signs of humans, but in the rocky landscape of southern Spain the scouts found a stocky kind of people with beetling brows and great strength, who would flee at the first sight of the Macedonians. Bisesa knew this area had been one of the last holdouts of the Neanderthals as Homo sapiens had advanced west through Europe. If these were late Neanderthals, they were well advised to be wary of modern humans.

Alexander was much more intrigued by the Straits themselves, which he called the Pillars of Heracles. The ocean beyond these gates was not quite unknown to Alexander’s generation. Two centuries before Alexander the Carthaginian Hanno had sailed boldly south along the Atlantic coast of Africa. There were less well-documented reports, too, of explorers who had turned to the north, and found strange, chill lands, where ice formed in the summer and the sun would not set even at midnight. Alexander now seized on his new understanding of the shape of the world: such strangeness was easy to explain if you believed you were sailing over the surface of a sphere.

Alexander longed to brave the wider ocean beyond the Straits. Josh was all for this, eager to get in touch with the community at Chicago that might not be far removed from his own time. But Alexander himself was more interested in reaching the new mid-Atlantic island the Soyuz had reported: he had been stirred by Bisesa’s descriptions of voyages to the Moon, and he said that to conquer a land was one thing, but to be the first ever to set foot there quite another.

But even a King had constraints. For one thing his small ships weren’t capable of surviving at sea for more than a few days without putting into shore. The quiet words of his counselors persuaded him that the new world of the west would wait for other days. So, with reluctance mixed with anticipation, Alexander agreed to turn back.

The fleet sailed back along the Mediterranean’s southern shore, the coast of Africa. The journey was unremarkable, the coast apparently uninhabited.

Bisesa withdrew into herself once more. Her weeks on Alexander’s expedition had taken her away from the vivid intensity of her time with the Eye itself, and had given her time to reflect on what she had learned. Now, something of the blankness of both sea and land made the mysteries of the Eye revive in her mind.

Abdikadir, and especially Josh, tried to draw her out of herself. One night, as they sat on the deck, Josh whispered, “I still don’t understand how you know. When I look up at the Eye, I feel nothing. I am prepared to believe that each of us has an inner sense of others—that minds, lonely bits of spindrift in the great dark ocean of time, have a way of seeking each other out. To me the Eye is a vast and ponderous mystery, and clearly a center of awesome power—but it is the power of a machine, not a mind.”

Bisesa said, “It is not a mind, but it is a conduit to minds. They’re like shadows at the end of a darkened corridor. But they are there. ”There were no human words for such perceptions, for, she suspected, no human being had experienced such things before. “You have to trust me, Josh.”

He wrapped his arms tighter around her. “I trust you and I believe you. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here …”

“You know, sometimes I think all these time slices we visit are just—bits of a fantasy. Fragments of a dream.”

Abdikadir frowned, his blue eyes bright in the light of the lamps. “What do you mean by that?”

She struggled to explain her impressions. “I think in some sense we’re contained in the Eye.” She retreated to the safety of physics. “Think of it this way. The fundamental units of our reality—”

“The tiny strings,” Josh said.

“That’s right. They aren’t really like strings on a violin. There are different ways they can be wrapped around their underlying stratum, their sounding board. Imagine loops of string floating free on the board’s surface, and others wrapped right around the board. If you change the dimensions of the stratum—if you make it thicker—the winding energy of the wrapped strings will increase, but the vibrational energy of the loops will decrease. And that will have an effect in the observable universe. If you keep that up long enough, the two dimensions, long and short, exchange places … They have an inverse relationship …”

Josh shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”

“I think she’s telling us,” Abdikadir said, “that in this model of physics, very large distances and very small are somehow equivalent .”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. The cosmos and the sub-atom—one is just an inverse of the other, if you look at them the right way.”

“And the Eye—”

“The Eye contains an image of me,” she said, “just as my retina has on it a projected image of you, Josh. But I think in the case of the Eye the reality of the image of me, and of the world, is more than a mere projection.”

Abdikadir frowned. “Then the distorted images in the Eye are not just a shadow of our reality. And by manipulating these images the Eye is somehow able to control what goes on in the outside world. Perhaps that is how it managed to induce the Discontinuity. Is that what you think?”

“Like voodoo dolls,” Josh said, enraptured by the notion. “The Eye contains a voodoo world … But Abdikadir isn’t quite right—is he, Bisesa? The Eye doesn’t do anything. You have said that the Eye, marvelous as it is, is only a tool. And that you have sensed—presences—beyond the Eye, which control it. So the Eye is not some demonic controlling entity. It is merely a—a—”

“A control panel,” she whispered. “I always knew you were smart, Josh.”

“Ah,” said Abdikadir slowly. “I start to understand. You believe that you have some access to this control panel. That you can influence the Eye. And that is what scares you.”

She couldn’t meet his bright eyes.

Josh said, bewildered, “But if you can influence the Eye—what have you asked it to do?”

She hid her face. “To let me go home,” she whispered. “And I think—”

“What?”

“I think it might.”

The others fell silent, shocked. But she had said it, at last, and she knew now that as soon as this jaunt was over she must confront the Eye once more, challenge it again—or die trying.

Some days short of Alexandria, the fleet put to shore. This, Alexander’s surveyors assured him, was the site of Paraetonium, a city he had once visited, although there was no trace of it now. Eumenes met them here. He said he wished to accompany his King as he retraced the most significant pilgrimage of his life.

Alexander sent out scouts to round up camels, which were laden with water for five days’ journey. A small party of no more than a dozen, including Alexander, Eumenes, Josh and Bisesa, with a few close bodyguards, quickly formed up. The Macedonians wrapped themselves up in long Bedouin-style winding cloths: they had been here before, and knew what to expect. The moderns followed their lead.

They set off south, inland from the sea. The journey would last several days. Tracing the border of Egypt and Libya, they followed a chain of eroded hills. As her stiffness wore off, and her muscles and lungs began to respond to the exercise, Bisesa found herself losing her thoughts in the simple physical repetition of the walk. More therapy, she thought dryly. Overnight they slept in tents and their Bedouin wraps. But on the second day they were hit by a sandstorm, a hot blizzard of coarse grit. After that they ventured through a ravine oddly carpeted by seashells, and through landscapes of wind-sculpted rock, and across a grueling gravel plateau.