Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Josh understood the essence of what had happened. “This is the future. Not the twenty-first century—the very far future … Millions of years hence, perhaps.”

She walked around the plain, peering up at the complex sky. “You’re trying to tell us something, aren’t you? This desolate, war-shattered ground—where am I, London? New York, Moscow, Beijing? Lahore? And why bring us to this precise place and time to show us an eclipse? … Has all this got something to do with the sun?” Hot, dusty, thirsty, disoriented, she was suddenly filled with rage. “Don’t give me special-effect riddles. Talk to me, damn you. What’s going to happen? ”

As if in reply an Eye, at least as large as the Eye of Marduk, snapped into existence above her head. She actually felt the wash of the air it displaced as it forced its way into her reality.

She took Josh’s hand. “Here we go again … Keep your hands inside the car at all times.”

But his eyes were wide; sand clung to his sweat-streaked face. “Bisesa?”

She understood immediately. He couldn’t see the Eye. This time it had come for her—her alone, not for Josh.

“No!” She grabbed Josh’s arm. “You can’t do this, you cruel bastards!”

Josh understood. “Bisesa, it’s all right.” He touched her chin, turned her face toward him, kissed her mouth. “We’ve already come further than I could have dreamed possible. Perhaps our love will live on, in some other world—and perhaps when all possibilities are drawn together at the end of time we will be reunited …” He smiled. “It’s enough.”

In the sky the Eye flipped into a funnel shape, and then a corridor in the sky. Already sparks of light were rushing across the plain, gathering around her, hurtling upward.

She clung to Josh and closed her eyes. Listen to me. I’ve done everything you asked. Give me this one thing. Don’t leave him here, to die alone. Send him home—send him back to Abdi. This one thing, I beg you …

A hot wind gathered, rushing up from the ground into the mouth of the shining shaft overhead. Something tugged at her, pulling her from Josh’s arms. She struggled, but Josh let go.

She was lifted off the ground. She was actually looking down at him.

He was still smiling. “You are an angel ascending. Good-bye, good-bye …” The searing, beautiful light gathered around her again. In the last instant she saw him stagger back into a room crowded with wires and bits of electronic gear, where a dark man rushed forward to catch him.

Thank you.

A clash of cymbals.

With the coming of the morning, Seeker woke with a start, eyes snapping open.

For the first time in years there was no net sheltering her from the sky. She cried out and curled over her daughter.

She forced open one eye. There was still no net, nothing but bare ground around her, a few scuff marks and tracks. The soldiers had gone. They had taken away the cage.

She was free.

She sat up. Grasper woke up with a grumble and rubbed her eyes. Seeker looked around. The rocky plain swept away, bare of life save for a few tussocks of grass. In the distance, snow-capped mountains loomed over the horizon, blue and floating in the morning mist. Near the base of the mountains she made out a stripe of green. Her old spirit stirred. Forest: if they could make it that far, perhaps she would find others like herself.

But the breeze changed, coming from the north, and she tasted ice. She quailed. Suddenly she longed for the smells of cooking, the clattering of machines, the high, gull-like voices of the soldiers. She had spent too long in her cage; she missed it.

Grasper, though, shared none of her mother’s hesitation. She knuckle-walked forward, chimp-like, exploring the rocky ground. It seemed rich in texture compared to the swept-bare, stamped-down dirt floor of the cage. Here was a rock that fit neatly in her hand, there a dry reed that folded and bent and twisted with ease.

Clutching the rock, Grasper unfolded her legs and stood upright. She peered across the broken ground toward the mountains, and the ice.

In the north the cold was gathering. The new volcanic island in the Atlantic had deflected the Gulf Stream, the flow of southern water that had kept northern Europe anomalously warm for millennia. The Gulf Stream’s loss had already had impacts on agriculture as far south as Babylonia. Now it was going to get worse. This year, autumn would come early, and by midwinter, massive Arctic superstorms would erupt with fury over the continents, depositing more snow in a few days than would once have been seen in five or ten years.

For two million years before the Discontinuity, the ice had come and gone from its fastnesses at the poles, its complex cycles governed by subtleties of Earth’s passage around the sun. This new world, Mir, thrown together from fragments of the old, had at first oscillated unsteadily, but as that first motion damped it was settling down to a new pattern of cycles: a pattern that, in the short term, promoted the spreading of the ice. It would take only a decade for the ice caps to form, a decade more for them to extend as far south as the sites of London, Berlin, Manhattan.

Further ahead, even more drastic changes were to come. Since its formation the planet had been steadily cooling, and the flow of heat from its interior had driven the mantle currents on which the continents rode. Now the Discontinuity had caused disturbances in the deep strange weather of Mir’s liquid interior. Eventually a new pattern of currents would settle into place—but for now it was as if a vast lid had been clamped on a boiling pan.

Beneath the hearts of the continents the mantle material had begun to swell and rise. Earth had never been perfectly spherical anyhow. Now Mir was growing bulges, like lumps of mud stuck to the side of a spinning top. In time the crust and upper mantle would shear off the planet’s core, and the deformed planet would seek a new stability by shifting the lumps away from the axis of rotation. As the major continents slid to the equator, ocean currents would be altered again, sea levels raised or lowered by hundreds of meters, dramatic climate changes induced.

In Mir’s long chthonic annealing there would be difficult times for the planet’s cargo of life. But people were mobile. The citizens of Chicago were already preparing for a vast migration south. Many humans would survive.

As would the man-apes.

Grasper was not as she had been before her inspection by the Eye. The probing of her body and mind had been meant only to record her capabilities, to note her place in the great spectrum of possibilities that was life on this blue world. But Grasper was very young, and the machinery that had studied her was very old, and no longer quite so perfect as it had once been. The probing had been clumsy. Grasper’s half-formed mind had been stirred.

This patched-together world would be dominated for a long time by the humans, there could be no doubt about that. But even they could not defy the ice. On a shifting, dangerous world there was plenty of empty space to explore. Plenty of room for a creature with potential. And there was no particular reason why that potential had to be realized exactly as it had been before. There was room on Mir for something different. Something better, perhaps.

Grasper hefted the heavy stone in her hand, and dimly imagined what might be done with it. She was quite without fear. Now she was master of the world, and she was not quite sure what to do next.

But she would think of something.

Bisesa gasped, staggered. She was standing.

Music was playing.

She stared at a wall, which showed the magnified image of an impossibly beautiful young man crooning into an old-fashioned microphone. Impossible, yes; he was a synth star, a distillation of the inchoate longings of pre-teen girls. “My God, he looks like Alexander the Great.” Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall’s moving colors, its brightness. She had never realized how drab and dun-colored Mir had been.