Time’s Eye

She set up her equipment in the temple chamber. She improvised scaffolding around the Eye, and fixed the Bird’s amputated sensors to gaze at the alien object from all angles, twenty-four hours a day. In the end she filled this ancient Babylonian temple chamber with a tangle of cables and infrared comms beams, all leading to an interface box on which her phone patiently sat. She had little electrical power, though, only the batteries from the Bird and smaller cells in the gear itself. So her twenty-first-century sensors peered at this impossibly advanced alien artifact by the smoky light of animal-fat lamps.

She got some answers.

The Bird’s radiation sensors, souped-up Geiger counters designed to sniff out illicit nukes, detected traces of high frequency X-rays and very high energy particles emanating from the Eye. These results were tantalizing and elusive, and she guessed this was just leakage, that there was a whole spectrum of exotic high-energy radiation products flowing from the Eye, beyond the capacity of the Bird’s crude Geigers to pick up. The radiation must be traces of some immense expenditure of energy—the great straining required to keep this Eye in existence in an inimical reality, perhaps.

And then there was the question of time.

She used the Bird’s altimeter to bounce laser beams off the Eye’s hide. The laser light was reflected with 100 percent efficiency; the surface of the Eye acted like a perfect mirror. But the beams came back with a measurable Doppler shift. It was as if the surface of the Eye was receding, fast, at more than a hundred kilometers per hour. Every point on the surface she tested gave the same result. According to these results the Eye was imploding.

To her naked eye, of course, the Eye sat fat and immovable, hovering complacently in the air as it always did. Nevertheless, in some direction she couldn’t perceive, that slick surface was moving. She suspected that in some sense the Eye’s existence escalated up in directions beyond her power to see, or her instruments to measure.

And if that was possible, she mused, perhaps there was only one Eye, projecting down from some higher dimension into the world, like fingers from a single hand pushing through the surface of a pond.

But sometimes she thought that all this experimentation was just to divert herself from the main issue, which was her intuition about the Eye.

“Maybe I’m just being anthropomorphic,” she said to the phone. “Why should there be mind, anything like my mind, involved in this at all?”

“David Hume wondered about that,” the phone murmured. “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion … Hume asked why we should look for ‘mind’ as the organizing principle of the universe. He was talking about traditional constructs of God, of course. Maybe the order we perceive just emerges. ‘For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the source, or spring, of order originating within itself, as well as the mind does.’ He wrote that down a full century before Darwin proved it was possible for organization to emerge from mindless matter.”

“So you do think I’m anthropomorphizing?”

“No,” said the phone. “We don’t know any way for an object like this to be formed except by intelligent action. Assuming a mind is responsible is probably the simplest hypothesis. And anyhow, perhaps these feelings you have are based in some physical reality, even if they don’t come through your senses. Your body, your brain, are complicated instruments in their own right. Perhaps the subtle electrochemistry that underpins your mind is being influenced, somehow, by that. It’s not telepathy—but it may be real.”

“Do you sense there’s something here?”

“No. But then I’m not human,” the phone sighed.

Sometimes she suspected the Eye was feeding her these insights, deliberately. “It’s as if it is downloading information into me, bit by bit. But my mind, my brain, is just incapable of taking it all. It’s as if I tried to download modern virtual reality software onto a Babbage difference engine …”

“That’s a simile I can sympathize with,” said the phone dryly.

“No offense.”

Sometimes she would simply sit in the ponderous company of the Eye, and let her mind roam where it would.

She kept thinking of Myra. As time passed, as the months turned into years, and the Discontinuity, that single extraordinary event, receded into the past, she felt herself embedding more deeply into this new world. Sometimes, in this drab antique place, her memories of twenty-first-century Earth seemed absurd, impossibly gaudy, like a false dream. But her feelings of loss about Myra didn’t fade.

It wasn’t even as if Myra had been taken from her somehow, to continue her life in some other part of the world. It was no comfort to her to imagine how old Myra would be now, how she must look, where she would be in her school career, what they might have been doing together if they had been reunited. None of those comprehensible human situations applied, because she couldn’t know if she and Myra had a timeline in common. It was even possible that there were many copies of Myra on multiple fragmented worlds, some of them even with copies of herself, and how was she supposed to feel about that? The Discontinuity had been a superhuman event, and the loss she had suffered was superhuman too, and she had no human way of coping with it.

As she lay on her pallet, brooding through the night, she sensed the Eye watching her, drawing up her baffled grief. She sensed that mind, but there was no compassion there, no pity, nothing but a vast Olympian watchfulness.

She would get to her feet and beat on the Eye’s impassive hide with her fist, or hurl bits of Babylonian rubble at it. “Is this what you wanted? Is this why you came here, why you ripped apart our world and our lives? Did you come here to break my heart? Why won’t you just send me home ? …”

There was a certain receptivity, she felt. Mostly it felt like the reverberant receptivity of a vast cathedral dome, in which her tiny cries were lost and meaningless.

But sometimes she thought someone was listening to her.

And just occasionally, compassionless or not, she felt they might respond to her pleas.

One day the phone whispered to her, “It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“I have to go to safe mode.”

She had been expecting this. The phone’s memory contained a cache of invaluable and irreplaceable data—not just her observations of the Eye, and a record of the Discontinuity events, but the last of the treasures of the old vanished world, not least the works of poor Ruddy Kipling. But there was nowhere to download the data, not even a way to print it out. During her sleep times she had given up the phone to a team of British clerks, under the supervision of Abdikadir, who had copied out by hand various documents and diagrams and maps. It was better than nothing, but the phone’s capacious memory had barely been scratched.

Anyhow Bisesa and the phone had agreed that when the phone’s batteries dropped to a certain critical level it should make itself inert. It would only take a trickle of power to preserve its data almost indefinitely, until such time as Mir’s new civilization advanced enough to access the phone’s invaluable memories. “And bring you back to life,” she had promised the phone.

It was all quite logical. But now the moment was here, Bisesa was bereft. After all this phone had been her companion since she was twelve.

“You have to press the buttons to shut me down,” the phone said.

“I know.” She held the little instrument before her, and found the right key combination through eyes embarrassingly blurred with tears. She paused before hitting the final key.

“I’m sorry,” said the phone.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Bisesa, I’m frightened.”

“You don’t have to be. I’ll wall you up if I have to and leave you to the archaeologists.”