Time’s Eye

She was a captive. That was all she was. But at least she had Grasper.

Then, one morning, something changed.

It was Grasper who saw it first.

Seeker woke up slowly, as always clinging to her ragged dreams of the trees .She yawned hugely and stretched her long arms. The sun was already high, and she could see bright glimmers pushing through the gaps in the netting.

Grasper was staring up into the tent’s apex. There was light on her face. Seeker looked up.

The Eye was shining. It was like a miniature sun, caught in the net.

Seeker stood up. Side by side, their gazes fixed on the Eye, mother and child walked forward, fully upright. Seeker raised a hand toward the Eye. It was out of reach, but it cast shadows of the two of them, on their floor of trampled dirt. It gave off no heat, only light.

Seeker had only just woken up. She badly needed to urinate, to defecate, to groom to get rid of the night’s ticks, to get some food and water. But she couldn’t move. She just stood there, eyes wide, one arm raised. Her eyes began to prickle with dust and cold, but she couldn’t so much as blink.

She heard a soft whimpering. Seeker couldn’t even turn to look at Grasper. She had no idea how much time went by.

Her hand was before her face. She hadn’t consciously raised it; it was like looking at somebody else’s hand. The fingers clenched, opened; the thumb worked back and forth.

She was made to raise her arms and twist them at shoulders, elbows and wrists; she bent and flexed her legs. She walked up and down, as far as the netting would let her, first upright, then knuckle-walking. She probed with her fingers at every orifice in her body. She fingered her high rib cage, the shape of her skull, even her pelvis. It was as if somebody else was doing this to her, exploring her in a cruel grooming.

The man-apes were released, just for a heartbeat. Panting, hungry, thirsty, they reached for each other. But then the invisible grip closed around them again.

This time, as patterns of light pulsed over their heads, Grasper got down on her haunches and began to examine the floor, digging in the dirt. She found twigs, bits of reed. She rubbed the twigs against each other, split and folded the reed, banged pebbles together.

Meanwhile Seeker marched to the netting wall. She took hold of the net and began to climb. Her body proportions were like those of her ape-like ancestors, and she could climb better than any of her human captors. But as she clambered up the net, fear gathered, for she knew she wasn’t supposed to do this.

Sure enough, one of the soldiers came ru

A rifle butt smashed into her face. She couldn’t even scream. Despite the grip of the Eye she fell back from the netting and clattered on her back to the ground. Her mouth full of coppery blood, she tried to raise her head.

She could see Grasper, sitting on the gritty ground. Grasper held up a reed, tied into a knot. Seeker had never seen such a thing.

Again she was forced to stand, despite the blood that dripped from her mouth, and stared up at the Eye.

There was something new again, she realized dimly. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddled an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eye’s “equator,” dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.

And then a fourth set of lines appeared—Seeker tried to follow where they went—but suddenly something inside her head hurt badly. She cried out.

Again those unseen hands released her, and she collapsed to the ground. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her weeping eyes. For the first time she was aware of a warmth along her i

Grasper was still standing, trembling but upright, gazing up at the washing lights, which cast complex patterns of shadows across her small face. A fifth set of lines—a sixth set, disappearing in impossible directions—

Grasper went rigid, her head locked back, her fingers grabbing at nothing, and then she fell, rigid as a block of wood. Seeker grabbed her child and cradled her on her own piss-soaked lap. The stiffness went out of Grasper, and she became a bundle of limp fur. Seeker stroked her and let her suckle, though her flaccid breast had been dry for years.

Even now the Eye watched them, recording the bond between mother and child, draining the man-apes of every sensation. It was all part of the test.

The respite was only brief. Soon the Eye resumed its steady, pearly glow, and it was as if unseen hands poked and prodded at Seeker’s limbs. She pushed aside her child and stood once more, her face lifted to the unearthly light.

38. The Eye of Marduk

Bisesa moved into the Temple of Marduk. She brought in a pallet and blankets and had her food delivered; she even set up a chemical toilet that had come from the Bird. She spent most of her time here now, alone save for the small company of the phone—and the brooding mass of the Eye.

She could feel there was something there, a presence behind that impenetrable hide. It was a feeling beyond the immediate senses, like the feeling she would get if she was blindfolded and thrust through a door, and still able to tell if the space she was in was open, or confined.

But it wasn’t like being with a person. Sometimes all she felt was watchfulness, as if the Eye was no more than a huge camera. But sometimes she felt she glimpsed something behind the Eye. Was there a Watcher who stood, metaphorically, behind all the Eyes in the world? Sometimes she sensed there was a whole hierarchy of intelligences, in fact, escalating up from the simple constructs of Watchers and Eyes that she could imagine, up in some impossible direction, filtering and classifying the distillation of her actions, her reactions, her very self.

She spent more and more of her time exploring these sensations. She avoided everybody, her twenty-first-century companions—even poor Josh. She would turn to him for comfort, though, when she felt cold, and too desolately lonely. But afterward, though she felt genuine affection for him, she would be guilty, as if she had used him.

She tried not to examine these feelings, tried not even to decide if she loved Josh or not. She had the Eye, and that was the center of her world. It had to be. And she wouldn’t share herself with anybody or anything else, not even Josh.

She tried to apply physics to the Eye.

She began with simple geometric measurements, like those Abdikadir had tried on the smaller Eyes in the North—West Frontier. She used laser instruments to prove that for this bauble too the famous ratio pi was not about three and one-seventh, as Euclid, schoolbook geometry and the rest of the world demanded, but simply three. Like all the Eyes, this was an intruder from somewhere else.

She went beyond geometry. With a party of Macedonians and British she went back to the North—West Frontier and the crash site of the Little Bird. Months of acid rain hadn’t helped to preserve what was left. Still, there were usable electromagnetic sensors, working in visible light, infrared and ultraviolet—twenty-first-century spy-in-the-sky electronic eyes—and various chemical sensors, “noses” designed to sniff out explosives and the like. She dug out instrumentation, components, cabling, any usable gear—including that small chemical toilet.