The man-apes were released, just for a heartbeat. Panting, hungry, thirsty, they reached for each other. But then the invisible grip closed around them again.
This time, as patterns of light pulsed over their heads, Grasper got down on her haunches and began to examine the floor, digging in the dirt. She found twigs, bits of reed. She rubbed the twigs against each other, split and folded the reed, banged pebbles together.
Meanwhile Seeker marched to the netting wall. She took hold of the net and began to climb. Her body proportions were like those of her ape-like ancestors, and she could climb better than any of her human captors. But as she clambered up the net, fear gathered, for she knew she wasnt supposed to do this.
Sure enough, one of the soldiers came running. Here, you! Get down from there!
A rifle butt smashed into her face. She couldnt even scream. Despite the grip of the Eye she fell back from the netting and clattered on her back to the ground. Her mouth full of coppery blood, she tried to raise her head.
She could see Grasper, sitting on the gritty ground. Grasper held up a reed, tied into a knot. Seeker had never seen such a thing.
Again she was forced to stand, despite the blood that dripped from her mouth, and stared up at the Eye.
There was something new again, she realized dimly. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddled an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eyes equator, dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.
And then a fourth set of lines appearedSeeker tried to follow where they wentbut suddenly something inside her head hurt badly. She cried out.
Again those unseen hands released her, and she collapsed to the ground. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her weeping eyes. For the first time she was aware of a warmth along her inner thighs. She had urinated where she stood, and never been aware of it.
Grasper was still standing, trembling but upright, gazing up at the washing lights, which cast complex patterns of shadows across her small face. A fifth set of linesa sixth set, disappearing in impossible directions
Grasper went rigid, her head locked back, her fingers grabbing at nothing, and then she fell, rigid as a block of wood. Seeker grabbed her child and cradled her on her own piss-soaked lap. The stiffness went out of Grasper, and she became a bundle of limp fur. Seeker stroked her and let her suckle, though her flaccid breast had been dry for years.
Even now the Eye watched them, recording the bond between mother and child, draining the man-apes of every sensation. It was all part of the test.
The respite was only brief. Soon the Eye resumed its steady, pearly glow, and it was as if unseen hands poked and prodded at Seekers limbs. She pushed aside her child and stood once more, her face lifted to the unearthly light.
38. The Eye of Marduk
Bisesa moved into the Temple of Marduk. She brought in a pallet and blankets and had her food delivered; she even set up a chemical toilet that had come from the Bird. She spent most of her time here now, alone save for the small company of the phoneand the brooding mass of the Eye.
She could feel there was something there, a presence behind that impenetrable hide. It was a feeling beyond the immediate senses, like the feeling she would get if she was blindfolded and thrust through a door, and still able to tell if the space she was in was open, or confined.
But it wasnt like being with a person. Sometimes all she felt was watchfulness, as if the Eye was no more than a huge camera. But sometimes she felt she glimpsed something behind the Eye. Was there a Watcher who stood, metaphorically, behind all the Eyes in the world? Sometimes she sensed there was a whole hierarchy of intelligences, in fact, escalating up from the simple constructs of Watchers and Eyes that she could imagine, up in some impossible direction, filtering and classifying the distillation of her actions, her reactions, her very self.
She spent more and more of her time exploring these sensations. She avoided everybody, her twenty-first-century companionseven poor Josh. She would turn to him for comfort, though, when she felt cold, and too desolately lonely. But afterward, though she felt genuine affection for him, she would be guilty, as if she had used him.
She tried not to examine these feelings, tried not even to decide if she loved Josh or not. She had the Eye, and that was the center of her world. It had to be. And she wouldnt share herself with anybody or anything else, not even Josh.
She tried to apply physics to the Eye.
She began with simple geometric measurements, like those Abdikadir had tried on the smaller Eyes in the NorthWest Frontier. She used laser instruments to prove that for this bauble too the famous ratio pi was not about three and one-seventh, as Euclid, schoolbook geometry and the rest of the world demanded, but simply three. Like all the Eyes, this was an intruder from somewhere else.
She went beyond geometry. With a party of Macedonians and British she went back to the NorthWest Frontier and the crash site of the Little Bird. Months of acid rain hadnt helped to preserve what was left. Still, there were usable electromagnetic sensors, working in visible light, infrared and ultraviolettwenty-first-century spy-in-the-sky electronic eyesand various chemical sensors, noses designed to sniff out explosives and the like. She dug out instrumentation, components, cabling, any usable gearincluding that small chemical toilet.
She set up her equipment in the temple chamber. She improvised scaffolding around the Eye, and fixed the Birds 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 Birds 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 Birds crude Geigers to pick up. The radiation must be traces of some immense expenditure of energythe 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 Birds altimeter to bounce laser beams off the Eyes 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 couldnt perceive, that slick surface was moving. She suspected that in some sense the Eyes existence escalated up in directions beyond her power to see, or her instruments to measure.