Time’s Eye

“I don’t mean that. I’ve never been switched off before. Do you think I will dream?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She pressed the key, and the phone’s surface, glowing green in the gloom of the chamber, turned dark.

39. Explorations

After a six-month exploratory jaunt into southern India, Abdikadir returned to Babylon.

Eumenes took him on a tour of the recovering city. It was a cold day. Though it was midsummer—according to the Babylonian astronomers, who patiently tracked the motion of stars and sun through a new sky—the wind was chill, and Abdikadir wrapped his arms around his body.

After months away, Abdikadir was impressed with the latest developments; the inhabitants of the city had been hard at work. Alexander had repopulated the depleted city with some of his own officers and veterans, and had installed one of his generals in a joint governorship of the city with one of Babylon’s pre-Discontinuity officials. The experiment seemed to be working; the new population, a mixture of Macedonian warriors and Babylonian grandees, seemed to be getting along tolerably well.

There was much debate about what to do with the region on the western bank, reduced to rubble by time. To the Macedonians it was a wasteland; to the moderns it was an archaeological site that could perhaps one day offer up some clues about the great displacement in time that had split this city in two. To leave it alone for now was the obvious compromise.

But downstream of the city walls, Alexander’s army had dug out a huge natural harbor, deep enough to take oceangoing ships, which were being constructed from local timber in hastily assembled dry docks. There was even a small lighthouse, illuminated by oil lamps with polished shields as mirrors behind them.

“This is magnificent,” Abdikadir said. They were standing on the new harbor’s wall, which towered over the small vessels that already ventured onto the water beneath it.

Eumenes said that Alexander knew that fast transport and effective communications were the key to holding together an empire. “The King learned that lesson the hard way,” Eumenes said dryly. In five years he had learned some halting English, Abdikadir some uncertain Greek; with a little cooperation they could communicate without interpreters now. Eumenes went on, “Alexander’s progress through Persia owed much to the quality of the imperial roads. When we reached the end of the Persian roads, far to the east, his infantrymen knew they could go no further, no matter what his vaulting ambition desired. And so we had to stop. But the ocean is the road of the gods, and requires no labor to lay it.”

“Even so, I can’t believe you’ve achieved so much so quickly …” Abdikadir, viewing all this industry, felt faintly guilty. Perhaps he had been away too long.

He had enjoyed his explorations. In India Abdikadir and his party had hacked a path through dense jungle, encountering all ma

He turned away from the city and gazed toward the south, where the glistening tracks of irrigation canals lanced across fields of green. Here was the real work of the world: growing food. This was the Fertile Crescent, after all, the birthplace of organized agriculture, and once its artificially irrigated fields had provided a third of the food supply for the Persian empire. There surely couldn’t have been a better place to start farming again. But Abdikadir had already inspected the fields, and he knew that things weren’t going well.

“It is this wretched cold,” Eumenes complained. “The astronomers may call this midsummer, but I have known no summer like it … And then there are the locusts, and other plagues of insects.”

The recovery program was indeed impressive, even if it had been slow starting. The quest to save Babylon from the Mongols was long over, and there seemed no real prospect of a revival of the Mongol threat in the near future. Alexander’s ambassadors reported that the Mongols seem stu

It had taken some time for them to discover a new purpose: to build a new world. And Alexander, with his energy and indomitable will, had been central to establishing that sense of purpose.

“And what is the King working on himself?”

“That.” Eumenes pointed grandly to the ceremonial heart of the city.

Abdikadir saw that a broad area had been cleared, and the lower levels of what looked like a new ziggurat had been laid out. He whistled. “That looks like it will rival Babel itself.”

“Perhaps it will. Nominally, it is a monument for Hephaistion; its deeper purpose will be to commemorate the world we have lost. These Macedonians always did treasure their funerary arts! And Alexander, I think, has an ambition to rival the massive tombs he once saw in Egypt. But with things as they are in the fields, it is hard for us to afford the manpower for such a venture, no matter how magnificent.”

Abdikadir studied the Greek’s finely chiseled face. “I have a feeling you’re asking me for something.”

Eumenes smiled. “And I have a feeling you have a little Greek in you too. Abdikadir, although the King’s wife Roxana delivered a son—a boy who is now four years old—so that we have an heir, Alexander’s continued well-being over the next few years is essential to us all.”

“Of course.”

“But this ,” Eumenes said, meaning the dockyards and fields, “is not enough for him. The King is a complex man, Abdikadir. I should know. He is a Macedonian, of course—and he drinks like one. But he is capable of cold calculation, like a Persian; and he can be a statesman of startling insight—he is like a Greek of the cities!

“But for all his wisdom, Alexander has the heart of a warrior, and there is a tension between his warmongering instincts and his will to build an empire. I don’t think he always understands that himself. He was born to fight men, not locusts in a field, or silt in a canal. Let’s face it, there are few men to be found out there to fight!” The Greek leaned toward Abdikadir. “The truth is, the ru

“It doesn’t need him hanging around here with nothing to do, soaking up manpower on monuments while there are fields to be tilled.” Abdikadir gri

Eumenes said smoothly, “I wouldn’t put it like that. But Alexander has expressed curiosity to know if the greater world you described to us is still there to be had. And I think he wants to visit his father.”