41: ZEUS-AMMON

Italy seemed as deserted as Greece. They found no sign of the city-states the Macedonians remembered, or the modern cities of Bisesa’s time. Even at the mouth of the Tiber there was no trace of the extensive harbor workings that the imperial Romans had constructed, to service the great grain fleets that had kept their bloated city alive.

Alexander was intrigued by accounts of how Rome, just an ambitious city-state in his day, would one day have built an empire to rival his own. So he put together a handful of riverboats and, reclining under a brilliant purple canopy, led a party up the river.

The seven hills of Rome were immediately recognizable. But the site was uninhabited, save for a few ugly hill forts sitting squat on the Palatine, where the palaces of the Caesars would have been built. Alexander thought this was a great joke, and decided graciously to spare the lives of his historical rivals.

They spent a night camped close in the marshy lowland that should have become the Forum of Rome. There was another startling aurora, which brought gasps from the Macedonians.

Bisesa was no geologist, but she wondered what must have happened deep in the core of the world when the new planet had been assembled from its disparate fragments. Earth’s core had been a spinning worldlet of iron as big as the Moon. If the stitching-together of Mir went to the very center of the world, that great sub-planet, crudely reassembled, must be thrashing and roiling. The currents in the outer layers, the mantle, would be disturbed too, with plumes of molten rock, fountains hundreds of kilometers tall, breaking and crashing against each other. Maybe the effects of such deep storms were now being felt on the surface of the planet.

The planet’s magnetic field, generated by the great iron dynamo of the spinning core, must have collapsed. Maybe that explained the auroras, and the continuing failure of their compasses. In normal times this magnetic shield protected fragile life-forms from a hard rain from space: heavy particles from the sun, sleeting remnants from supernova explosions. Before the magnetic field restored itself there would be radiation damage—cancers, a flood of mutations, almost all of them harmful. And if the battered ozone layer had collapsed too, the flood of ultraviolet would explain the intensified sunlight, and would do even more damage to the living creatures exposed on Earth’s surface.

But there were other domains of life. She thought of the deep hot biosphere, the ancient heat-loving creatures that had survived from Earth’s earliest days, lingering around ocean vents and deep in the rocks. They wouldn’t be troubled by a little surface ultraviolet—but if the world had been sliced to its core their ancient empire must have been partitioned, just as on the surface. Was there some slow extinction event unfolding deep in the rocks, as on the surface? And were there Eyes buried in the body of the world to watch that too?

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.

At last they reached a small oasis. There were palm trees and even some birds, quail and falcon, preserved in a desolate landscape of salt flats. The place was dominated by a gaunt, ruined citadel, and small shrines stood coyly half-hidden by vegetation among the springs. There were no people here, no sign of habitation, nothing but picturesque ruin.

Alexander stepped forward, shadowed by his guards. He walked past the eroded foundations of vanished buildings, and reached a set of steps that led up to what had once been a temple. Alexander was visibly shaking as he climbed these worn steps. He reached a bare, dusty platform, and knelt down, his head bowed.

Eumenes murmured, “When we were here this place was ancient, but not ruined. The god Ammon came riding out in his sacred boat, borne aloft by purified bearers, and virgins sang songs of divinity. The King went through to the holiest shrine of all, a tiny room roofed by palm trunks, where he consulted the oracle. He never revealed the questions he asked, not even to me, not even to Hephaistion. And it was here that Alexander realized his divinity.”

Bisesa knew the story. During Alexander’s first pilgrimage the Macedonians had identified the ram-headed Libyan god Ammon with the Greek Zeus, and Alexander had learned that Zeus-Ammon was his true father, not King Philip of Macedon. From this point he would take Ammon to his heart for the rest of his life.

The King seemed crushed. Perhaps he had hoped to find that the shrine had somehow survived the Discontinuity, that this place, most sacred of all to him, might have been spared. But it was not so, and he had found nothing here but the dead weight of time.

Bisesa murmured to Eumenes, “Tell him it wasn’t always like this. Tell him that nine centuries later, when this place was part of the Roman Empire, and Christianity was the Empire’s official religion, there would still be a group of adherents, here at this oasis, still worshipping Zeus-Ammon, and Alexander himself.”

Eumenes nodded gravely, and in measured tones delivered this news from the future. The King replied, and Eumenes returned to Bisesa. “He says that even a god cannot conquer time, but nine hundred years should be enough for anybody.”

The party stayed a day at the oasis to recuperate and water the camels, and then returned to the shore.