Stephen Baxter - Arthur C Clarke - Time's Eye

TIME’S EYE

A TIME ODYSSEY: 1

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

AND STEPHEN BAXTER

v1.0

Cities and Thrones and Powers

Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth

The Cities rise again.

—Rudyard Kipling

TIME’S EYE

AUTHORS’ NOTE

This book, and the series that it opens, neither follows nor precedes the books of the

earlierOdyssey , but is at right angles to them: not a sequel or prequel, but an “orthoquel,”

taking similar premises in a different direction.

The quotation from Rudyard Kipling’s “Cities and Thrones and Powers,” fromPuck of

Pook’s Hill (1906), is used by kind permission of AP Watt Ltd., on behalf of the National

Trust for Places of Historical Interest or Natural Beauty.

PART 1

DISCONTINUITY

1: SEEKER

For thirty million years the planet had cooled and dried, until, in the north, ice sheets

gouged at the continents. The belt of forest that had once stretched across Africa and

Eurasia, nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Far East, had broken into

dwindling pockets. The creatures who had once inhabited that timeless green had been

forced to adapt, or move.

Seeker’s kind had done both.

Her infant clinging to her chest, Seeker crouched in the shadows at the fringe of the scrap

of forest. Her deep eyes, under their bony hood of brow, peered out into brightness. The

land beyond the forest was a plain, drenched in light and heat. It was a place of terrible

simplicity, where death came swiftly. But it was a place of opportunity. This place would

one day be the border country between Pakistan and Afghanistan, called by some the

North–West Frontier.

Today, not far from the ragged fringe of the forest, an antelope carcass lay on the ground.

The animal was not long dead—its wounds still oozed sticky blood—but the lions had

already eaten their fill, and the other scavengers of the plain, the hyenas and the birds,

had yet to discover it.

Seeker stood upright, unfolding her long legs, and peered around.

Seeker was an ape. Her body, thickly covered with dense black hair, was little more than

a meter tall. Carrying little fat, her skin was slack. Her face was pulled forward into a

muzzle, and her limbs were relics of an arboreal past: she had long arms, short legs. She

looked very like a chimpanzee, in fact, but the split of her kind from those cousins of the

deeper forest already lay some three million years in the past. Seeker stood comfortably

upright, a true biped, her hips and pelvis more human than any chimp’s.

Seeker’s kind were scavengers, and not particularly effective ones. But they had

advantages that no other animal in the world possessed. Cocooned in the unchanging

forest, no chimp would ever make a tool as complex as the crude but laboriously crafted

axe Seeker held in her fingers. And there was something in her eyes, a spark, beyond any

other ape.

There was no sign of immediate danger. She stepped boldly out into the sun, her child

clinging to her chest. One by one, timidly, walking upright or knuckle-walking, the rest

of the troop followed her.

The infant squealed and pinched her mother’s fur painfully. Seeker’s kind had no

names—these creatures’ language was still little more sophisticated than the songs of

birds—but since she had been born, this baby, Seeker’s second, had been ferociously

strong in the way she clung onto her mother, and Seeker thought of her as something like

“Grasper.”

Burdened by the child, Seeker was among the last of the troop to reach the fallen

antelope, and the others were already hacking with their chipped stones at the cartilage

and skin that connected the animal’s limbs to its body. This butchery was a way to get a

fast return of meat; the limbs could be hauled quickly back to the relative safety of the

forest, and consumed at leisure. Seeker joined in the work with a will. The harsh sunlight

was uncomfortable, though. It would be another million years before Seeker’s remote

descendants, much more human in form, could stay out in the light, in bodies able to

sweat and store moisture in fatty reserves, bodies like spacesuits built to survive the

savannah.

The shrinking of the world forest had been a catastrophe for the apes that had once

inhabited it. Already the evolutionary zenith of this great family of animals lay deep in

the past. But some had adapted. Seeker’s kind still needed the forest’s shade, still crept

into treetop nests each night, but by day they would dart out into the open to exploit easy

scavenging opportunities like this. It was a hazardous way to make a living, but it was

better than starving. As the forest fragmented further, moreedge became available, and

the living space for fringe-dwellers actually expanded. And as they scuttled perilously

between two worlds, the blind scalpels of variation and selection shaped these desperate

apes.

Now there was a concerted yapping, a patter of swift paws on the ground. Hyenas had

belatedly scented the blood of the antelope, and were approaching in a great cloud of

dust.

The upright apes had hacked off only three of the antelope’s limbs. But there was no

more time. Clutching her child to her chest, Seeker raced after her troop toward the cool

ancestral dark of the forest.

That night, as Seeker lay in her treetop nest of folded branches, something woke her.

Grasper, curled up beside her mother, snored softly.

There was something in the air, a faint scent in her nostrils, that tasted of change.

Seeker was an animal fully dependent on the ecology in which she was embedded, and

she was very sensitive to change. But there was more than an animal’s sensibility in her:

as she peered at the stars with eyes still adapted for narrow forest spaces, she felt an

inchoate curiosity.

If she had needed a name, it might have been Seeker.

It was that spark of curiosity, a kind of dim ancestor of wanderlust, that had guided her

kind so far out of Africa. As the Ice Ages bit, the remnant forest pockets dwindled further

or vanished. To survive, the forest-fringe apes would rush across the hazard of the open

plain to a new forest clump, the imagined safety of a new home. Even those who survived

would rarely make more than one such journey in a lifetime, a single odyssey of a

kilometer or so. But some did survive, and flourish; and some of their children passed on

farther.

In this way, as thousands of generations ticked by, the forest-fringe apes had slowly

diffused out of Africa, reaching as far as Central Asia, and crossing the Gibraltar land

bridge into Spain. It was a forward echo of more purposeful migrations in the future. But

the apes were always sparse, and left few traces; no human paleontologist would ever

suspect they had come so far out of Africa as this place, northwest India, or that they had

gone farther still.

And now, as Seeker peered up at the sky, a single star slid across her field of view, slow,

steady, purposeful as a cat. It was bright enough to cast a shadow, she saw. Wonder and

fear warred in her. She raised a hand, but the sliding star was beyond the reach of her

fingers.

This far into the night, India was deep in the shadow of Earth. But where the surface of

the turning planet was bathed in sunlight, there was a shimmering—rippling color, brown

and blue and green, flickering in patches like tiny doors opening. The tide of subtle

changes washed around the planet like a second terminator.

The world shivered around Seeker, and she clutched her child close.

In the morning, the troop was agitated. The air was cooler today, somehow sharper, and

laden with a tang a human might have called electric. The light was strange, bright and

washed-out. Even here, in the depths of the forest, a breeze stirred, rustling the leaves of

the trees. Something was different, something had changed, and the animals were

disturbed.

Boldly Seeker walked into the breeze. Grasper, chattering, knuckle-walked after her.

Seeker reached the edge of the forest. On a plain already bright with morning, nothing

stirred. Seeker peered around, a faint spark of puzzlement lodging in her mind. Her

forest-adapted mind was poor at analyzing landscapes, but it seemed to her that the land

wasdifferent . Surely there had been more green yesterday; surely there had been forest

scraps in the lee of those worn hills, and surely water had run along that arid gully. But it

was difficult to be sure. Her memories, always incoherent, were already fading.

But there was an object in the sky.

It was not a bird, for it did not move or fly, and not a cloud, for it was hard and definite

and round. And it shone, almost as bright as the sun itself.

Drawn, she walked out of the forest’s shadows and into the open.

She walked back and forth, underneath the thing, inspecting it. It was about the size of

her head, and it swam with light—or rather the light of the sun rippled from it, as it would

flash from the surface of a stream. It had no smell. It was like a piece of fruit, hanging

from a branch, and yet there was no tree. Four billion years of adaptation to Earth’s

unvarying gravity field had instilled in her the instinct that nothing so small and hard

could hover unsupported in the air: this was something new, and therefore to be feared.

But it did not fall on her or attack her in any way.

She craned up on tiptoes, peering at the sphere. She saw two eyes gazing back at her.

She grunted and dropped to the ground. But the floating sphere did not react, and when

she looked up again she understood. The sphere was returning her reflection, though

twisted and distorted; the eyes had been her own, just as she had seen them before in the

smooth surface of still water. Of all Earth’s animals only her kind could have recognized

herself in such a reflection, for only her kind had any true sense of self. But it seemed to

her, dimly, that by holding such an image the floating sphere was looking at her just as

she looked at it, as if it was a vast Eye itself.

She reached up, but even on tiptoe, with her long tree-climbers’ arms extended, she could

not reach it. With more time, it might have occurred to her to find something to stand on

to reach the sphere, a rock or a heap of branches.

But Grasper screamed.

Seeker fell to all fours and was knuckle-running before she had even realized it. When

she saw what was happening to her child she was terrified.

Two creatures stood over Grasper. They were like apes, but they were upright and tall.

They had bright red torsos, as if their bodies were soaked in blood, and their faces were

flat and hairless.And they had Grasper. They had dropped something, like lianas or vines,

over the infant. Grasper struggled, yelled and bit, but the two tall creatures easily held

down the lianas to trap her.

Seeker leapt, screaming, her teeth bared.

One of the red-breasted creatures saw her. His eyes widened with shock. He brought

around a stick, and whirled it through the air. Something impossibly hard slammed

against the side of her head. Seeker was heavy and fast enough that her momentum

brought her crashing into the creature, knocking him to the ground. But her head was full

of stars, her mouth full of the taste of blood.

To the east a blanket of black, boiling cloud erupted out of the horizon. There was a

remote rumble of thunder, and lightning flared.

2: LITTLE BIRD

At the moment of Discontinuity, Bisesa Dutt was in the air.

From her position in the back of the helicopter cockpit, Bisesa’s visibility was limited—

which was ironic, since the whole point of the mission was her observation of the ground.

But as the Little Bird rose, and her view opened up, she could see the base’s neat rows of

prefabricated hangars, all lined up with the spurious regularity of the military mind. This

UN base had been here for three decades already, and these “temporary” structures had

acquired a certain shabby grandeur, and the dirt roads that led away across the plain were

hard-packed.

As the Bird swooped higher, the base blurred to a smear of whitewash and camouflage

canvas, lost in the huge palm of the land. The ground was desolate, with here and there a

splash of gray-green where a stand of trees or scrubby grass struggled for life. But in the

distance mountains shouldered over the horizon, white-topped, magnificent.

The Bird lurched sideways, and Bisesa was thrown against the curving wall.

Casey Othic, the prime pilot, hauled on his stick, and soon the flight leveled out again,

with the Bird swooping a little lower over the rock-strewn ground. He turned and grinned

at Bisesa. “Sorry about that. Gusts like that sure weren’t in the forecasts. But what do

those double domes know? You okay back there?”

His voice was overloud in Bisesa’s headset. “I feel like I’m on the back shelf of a

Corvette.”

His grin widened, showing perfect teeth. “No need to shout. I can hear you on the radio.”

He tapped his helmet. “Ra-di-o. You have those in the Brit army yet?”

In the seat beside Casey, Abdikadir Omar, the backup pilot, glanced at the American,

shaking his head disapprovingly.

The Little Bird was a bubble-front observation chopper. It was derived from an attack

helicopter that had been flying since the end of the twentieth century. In this calmer year

of 2037, this Bird was dedicated to more peaceful tasks: observation, search and rescue.

Its bubble cockpit had been expanded to take a crew of three, the two pilots up front and

Bisesa crammed on her bench in the back.

Casey flew his veteran machine casually, one-handed. Casey Othic’s rank was chief

warrant officer, and he had been seconded from the US Air and Space Force to this UN

detachment. He was a squat, bulky man. His helmet was UN sky blue, but he had adorned

it with a strictly nonregulation Stars and Stripes, an animated flag rippling in a simulated

breeze. His HUD, head-up display, was a thick visor that covered most of his face above

the nose, black to Bisesa’s view, so that she could only see his broad, chomping jaw.

“I can tell you’re checking me out, despite that stupid visor,” Bisesa said laconically.

Abdikadir, a handsome Pashtun, glanced back and grinned. “Spend enough time around

apes like Casey and you’ll get used to it.”

Casey said, “I’m the perfect gentleman.” He leaned a bit so he could see her name tag.

“Bisesa Dutt.What’s that, a Pakistani name?”

“Indian.”

“So you’re from India? But your accent is—what, Australian?”

She suppressed a sigh; Americans never recognized regional accents. “I’m a Mancunian.

From Manchester, England. I’m British—third generation.”

Casey started to talk like Cary Grant. “Welcome aboard, Lady Dutt.”

Abdikadir punched Casey’s arm. “Man, you’re such a cliché, you just go from one

stereotype to another. Bisesa, this is your first mission?”

“Second,” said Bisesa.

“I’ve flown with this asshole a dozen times and he’s always the same, whoever’s in the

back. Don’t let him bug you.”

“He doesn’t,” she said equably. “He’s just bored.”

Casey laughed coarsely. “It is kind of dull here at Clavius Base. But you ought to be at

home, Lady Dutt, out here on the North–West Frontier. We’ll have to see if we can find

you some fuzzy-wuzzies to pick off with your elephant gun.”

Abdikadir grinned at Bisesa. “What can you expect from a jock Christian?”

“And you’re a beak-nosed mujahideen,” Casey growled back.

Abdikadir seemed to sense alarm in Bisesa’s expression. “Oh, don’t worry. I really am a

mujahideen, or was, and he really is a jock. We’re the best of friends, really. We’re both

Oikumens. But don’t tell anybody—”

They ran into turbulence, quite suddenly. It was as if the chopper just dropped a few

meters through a hole in the air. The pilots became attentive to their instruments, and fell

silent.

With the same nominal rank as Casey, Abdikadir, an Afghan citizen, was a Pashtun, a

native of the area. Bisesa had got to know him a little, in her short time at the post. He

had a strong, open face, a proud nose that might have been called Roman, and he wore a

fringe of beard. His eyes were a surprising blue, and his hair a kind of strawberry blond.

He said he inherited his coloring from the armies of Alexander the Great, which had once

passed this way. A gentle man, approachable and civilized, he accepted his place in the

informal pecking order here: although he was prized as one of the few Pashtuns to have

come over to the UN’s side, as an Afghan he had to defer to the Americans, and he spent

a lot more time copiloting than piloting. The other British troops called him “Ginger.”

The ride continued. It wasn’t comfortable. The Bird was elderly: the cabin reeked of

engine oil and hydraulic fluid, every metal surface was scuffed with use, and there was

actually duct tape holding together splits on the cover of Bisesa’s inadequately padded

bench. And the noise of the rotors, just meters above her head, was shattering, despite her

heavily padded helmet. But then, she thought, it had always been the way that

governments spent more on war than peace.

When he heard the chopper approach, Moallim knew what he had to do.

Most of the adult villagers ran to ensure their stashes of weaponry and hemp were hidden.

But Moallim had different ideas. He picked up his gear, and ran to the foxhole he had dug

weeks ago, in preparation for a day like this.

Within seconds he was lying against the wall of the hole with the RPG tube at his

shoulder. The hole had taken hours to dig, before it was deep enough for him to get his

body out of the way of the back blast, and to get the elevation he needed with the RPG.

But when he was in the hole and had pulled a little dirt and loose vegetation over his

body, he was really quite well hidden. The grenade launcher was an antique, actually a

relic of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but, well maintained and

cleaned, it still worked, was still lethal. As long as the chopper came close enough to his

position, he would surely succeed.

Moallim was fifteen years old.

He had been just four when he had first encountered the helicopters of the west. They had

come at night, a pack of them. They flew very low over your head, black on black, like

angry black crows. Their noise hammered at your ears while their wind plucked at you

and tore at your clothing. Market stalls were blown over, cattle and goats were terrified,

and tin roofs were torn right off the houses. Moallim heard, though he did not see it for

himself, that one woman’s infant was torn right out of her arms and sent whirling up into

the air, never to come down again.

And then the shooting had started.

Later, more choppers had come, dropping leaflets that explained the “purpose” of the

raid: there had been an increase in arms smuggling in the area, there was some suspicion

of uranium shipments passing through the village, and so on. The “necessary” strike had

been “surgical,” applying “minimum force.” The leaflets had been torn up and used to

wipe asses. Everybody hated the helicopters, for their remoteness and arrogance. At four,

Moallim did not have a word to describe how he felt.

And still the choppers came. The latest UN helicopters were supposed to be here to

enforce peace, but everybody knew that this was somebody else’s peace, and these

“surveillance” ships carried plenty of weaponry.

These problems had a single solution, so Moallim had been taught.

The elders had trained Moallim to handle the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. It was

always hard to hit a moving target. So the detonators had been replaced with timing

devices, so that they would explode in midair. As long as you fired close enough, you

didn’t even need a hit to bring down an aircraft—especially a chopper, and especially if

you aimed for the tail rotor, which was its most vulnerable element.

RPG launchers were big and bulky and obvious. They were difficult to handle, awkward

to lift and aim—and you were finished if you showed yourself aiming one from the open

or a rooftop. So you hid away, and let the chopper come to you. If they came this way the

chopper crew, trained to avoid buildings for fear of traps, would see nothing more than a

bit of pipe sticking out of the ground. Perhaps they would assume it was just a broken

drain, from one of the many failed “humanitarian” schemes imposed on the area over the

decades. Flying over open ground they would think they were safe. Moallim smiled.

The sky ahead looked odd to Bisesa. Clouds, thick and black, were boiling up out of

nowhere and gathering into a dense band that striped along the horizon, masking the

mountains. Even the sky looked somehow washed-out.

Discreetly she dug her phone out of a pocket of her flight suit. Holding it nestling in her

hand, she whispered to it, “I don’t recall storm formations in the weather forecasts.”

“Neither do I,” said the phone. It was tuned to the civilian broadcast nets; now its little

screen began to cycle through the hundreds of channels washing invisibly over this bit of

the Earth, seeking updated forecasts.

The date was June 8, 2037. Or so Bisesa believed. The chopper flew on.

3: EVIL EYE

The first hint Josh White had of the strange events unfolding in the world was a rude

awakening: a rough hand on his shoulder, an excitable clamor, a wide face looming over

him.

“I say, Josh—wake up, man! You won’t believe it—it’s quite the thing—if it isn’t the

Russians, I’ll eat your puttees—”

It was Ruddy, of course. The young journalist’s shirt was unbuttoned and he wore no

jacket; he looked as if he had just got out of bed himself. But his broad face, dominated

by that great brow, was flecked with sweat, and his eyes, made small by his thick gig-

lamp spectacles, danced and gleamed.

Josh, blinking, sat up. Sunlight was streaming into the room through the open window. It

was late afternoon; he had been napping for an hour. “Giggers, what on earth can be so

vital it deprives me of my shut-eye? Especially after last night . . . Let me wash my face

first!”

Ruddy backed off. “All right. But ten minutes, Josh. You won’t forgive yourself if you

miss this. Ten minutes!” And he bustled out of the room.

Josh, bowing to the inevitable, pulled himself out of bed and moved sleepily around the

room.

Like Ruddy, Josh was a journalist, a special correspondent of theBoston Globe , sent to

file color reports from the North–West Frontier, this remote corner of the British

Empire—remote, yes, but possibly crucial for Europe’s future, and so of interest even in

Massachusetts. The room was just a cramped little hole in the corner of the fort, and he

had to share it with Ruddy, thanks to whom it was cluttered with clothes, half-emptied

trunks, books, papers, and a little foldaway desk on which Ruddy penned his dispatches

for theCivil and Military Gazette and Pioneer , his newspaper in Lahore. At that, though,

Josh knew he was lucky to have a room at all; most of the troops stationed here at

Jamrud, European and Indian alike, spent their nights in tents.

Unlike the soldiers Josh had a perfect right to an afternoon nap, if he needed it. But now

he could hear that something unusual was indeed afoot: raised voices, running feet. Not a

military action, surely, not another raid by the rebellious Pashtuns, or he would have

heard gunfire by now. What, then?

Josh found a bowl of clean warm water, with his shaving kit set out beside it. He washed

his face and neck, peering at a rather bleary face in the scrap of mirror fixed to the wall.

He was small-featured, with what he thought of as a pug nose, and this afternoon the bags

under his eyes weren’t doing his looks any good at all. Actually Josh’s head hadn’t been

too sore this morning, but then to survive the long nights in the Mess he’d learned to stick

to beer. Ruddy, on the other hand, had indulged his occasional passion for opium—but

the hours Ruddy had spent sucking on the hookah seemed to leave no after-effects on his

nineteen-year-old constitution. Josh, feeling like a war veteran at the age of twenty-three,

envied him.

The shaving water had been set out unobtrusively by Noor Ali, Ruddy’s bearer. It was a

level of service Bostonian Josh found uncomfortable: when Ruddy was sleeping off his

worst binges, Noor Ali was expected to shave him in bed, even asleep! And Josh found it

hard to stomach the whippings Ruddy found it necessary to administer from time to time.

But Ruddy was an “Anglo-Indian,” born in Bombay. This was Ruddy’s country, Josh

reminded himself; Josh was here to report, not to judge. And anyhow, he admitted

guiltily, it was good to wake up to warm water and a mug or two of hot tea.

He dried himself off and dressed quickly. He took one last glance in the mirror, and

finger-combed his mop of unruly black hair. As an afterthought he slipped his revolver

into his belt. Then he made for the door.

It was the afternoon of March 24, 1885. Or so Josh still believed.

Inside the fort there was a great deal of excitement. Across the deeply shadowed square,

soldiers rushed to the gate. Josh joined the cheerful crowd.

Many of the British stationed here at Jamrud were of the 72nd Highlanders, and though

some were dressed informally in loose, knee-length native trousers, others wore their

khaki jackets and red trews. But white faces were rare; Gurkhas and Sikhs outnumbered

British by three to one. Anyhow, this afternoon Europeans andsepoys alike pushed and

bustled to get out of the fort. These men, stationed in this desolate place far from their

families for months on end, would give anything for a “do,” a bit of novelty to break up

the monotony. But on the way to the gate Josh noticed Captain Grove, the fort’s

commander, making his way across the square, with a very worried expression on his

face.

As he emerged into the low afternoon sunlight outside the fort Josh was briefly dazzled.

The air had a dry chill, and he found himself shivering. The sky was eggshell blue and

empty of cloud, but close to the western horizon, he saw, there was a band of darkness,

like a storm front. Such turbulent weather was unusual for this time of year.

This was the North–West Frontier, the place where India met Asia. For the imperial

British, this great corridor, running from northeast to southwest between the mountain

ranges to the north and the Indus to the south, was the natural boundary of their Indian

dominion—but it was a raw and bleeding edge, and on its stability depended the security

of the most precious province of the British Empire. And the fort of Jamrud was stuck

smack in the middle of it.

The fort itself was a sprawling place, with a curtain of heavy stone walls and broad

corner watchtowers. Outside the walls, conical tents had been set up in rows, military

neat. Jamrud had originally been built by the Sikhs, who had long governed here and

mounted their own wars against the Afghans; by now it was thoroughly British.

Today it wasn’t the destiny of empires that was on anybody’s mind. The soldiers

streamed out over the heavily trampled patch of earth that served as the fort’s parade

ground, heading for a spot perhaps a hundred yards from the gate. There, Josh could see

what looked like a pawnbroker’s ball hovering in the air. It was silvered, and glinted

brightly in the sunlight. A crowd of perhaps fifty troopers, orderlies and noncombatants

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