45: THROUGH THE EYE

It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and scrabbled at the ground, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.

She was on her back. There was something enormously bright above her—the sun, yes, the sun, she was outdoors. Her arms were spread out wide, away from her body, and her fingers were digging into the dirt.

She threw herself over onto her belly. Sensations returned to her legs, arms, chest. Dazzled by the sun, she could barely see.

A plain. Red sand. Eroded hills in the distance. Even the sky looked red, though the sun was high.

Josh was beside her. He was lying on his back, gasping for air, like an ungainly fish stranded on this strange beach. She scrabbled over to him, crawling through loose sand.

“Where are we?” he gasped. “Is this the twenty-first century?”

“I hope not.” When she tried to speak her throat was dry, scratchy. She pulled her pack off her back and dug out a flask of water. “Drink this.”

He gulped at the water gratefully. Sweat was already standing out on his brow and soaking into his collar.

She dug her hands into the dirt. It crumbled, pale, lifeless and dry. But something shone in it, fragments that glittered when exposed to the overhead sun. She dug them out and laid them on her palm. They were coin-sized fragments of glass, opaque, their edges ragged. She shook the fragments out of her palm and let them fall to the ground. But when she brushed away more dirt, she found more glass bits everywhere, a layer of the stuff beneath the ground.

Experimentally she pushed herself to her knees, straightened up—her ears rang with dizziness, but she wasn’t going to faint—and then, one foot, two, she stood up. Now she could see the landscape better. It was just a plain, a plain of this glass-ridden sand, that marched away to the horizon, where worn hills waited out eternity. She and Josh were at the base of a shallow depression; the land subtly rose all around them to a rim, no more than a few meters high, perhaps a kilometer away.

She was standing in a crater.

A nuke would do this, she thought. The glass fragments could have been formed in the explosion of a small nuclear weapon, bits of concrete and soil fused to glass. If that was so, nothing else was left—if there had been a city here there were no concrete foundations, no bones, not even the ashes of the final fires, only the fragments of nuclear glass. This crater looked old, worn, the bits of glass buried deep. If war had come by here, it must have been long ago.

She wondered if radioactivity lingered. But if the Firstborn had meant her any harm they could have simply killed her—and if not, surely they would protect her from such an elementary hazard.

Her chest ached as she breathed. Was the air thin? Was there too little oxygen, or too much?

Suddenly it got a little darker, though there was no cloud in the ruddy sky. She peered up. There was something wrong with the sun. Its disc was deformed. It looked like a leaf out of which a great bite had been taken.

Josh was standing beside her. “My God,” he said.

The eclipse progressed quickly. It began to feel colder, and in the last moments Bisesa glimpsed bands of shadow rushing across the eroded ground. She felt her breathing slow, her heart pump more gently. Her body, responding even now to ancient primal rhythms, was reacting to the darkness, readying itself for night.

The darkness reached its greatest depth. There was a moment of profound stillness.

The sun turned to a ring of brightness. The central disc of shadow had a serrated edge, and sunlight twinkled through those irregularities. That disc was surely the Moon, still traveling between Earth and sun, its shadow sliding across the face of the sun. The sun’s glare was reduced enough for Bisesa to make out the corona, the sun’s higher atmosphere, easily visible as a wispy sculpture around that complex double disc.

But this eclipse was not total. The Moon was not big enough to obscure that glowing face. The fat ring of light in the sky was a baffling, terrifying sight.

“Something’s wrong,” Josh murmured.

“Geometry,” she said. “The Earth-Moon system . . . It changes with time.” As the Moon dragged tides through Earth’s ocean, so Earth likewise tugged at the Moon’s rocky substrate. Since their formation the twin worlds had slowly separated—only a few centimeters per year, but over enough time that took the Moon ever farther from the Earth.

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.