And if that was possible, she mused, perhaps there was only one Eye, projecting down from some higher dimension into the world, like fingers from a single hand pushing through the surface of a pond.
But sometimes she thought that all this experimentation was just to divert herself from the main issue, which was her intuition about the Eye.
Maybe Im just being anthropomorphic, she said to the phone. Why should there be mind, anything like my mind, involved in this at all?
David Hume wondered about that, the phone murmured. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume asked why we should look for mind as the organizing principle of the universe. He was talking about traditional constructs of God, of course. Maybe the order we perceive just emerges. For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the source, or spring, of order originating within itself, as well as the mind does. He wrote that down a full century before Darwin proved it was possible for organization to emerge from mindless matter.
So you do think Im anthropomorphizing?
No, said the phone. We dont know any way for an object like this to be formed except by intelligent action. Assuming a mind is responsible is probably the simplest hypothesis. And anyhow, perhaps these feelings you have are based in some physical reality, even if they dont come through your senses. Your body, your brain, are complicated instruments in their own right. Perhaps the subtle electrochemistry that underpins your mind is being influenced, somehow, by that. Its not telepathybut it may be real.
Do you sense theres something here?
No. But then Im not human, the phone sighed.
Sometimes she suspected the Eye was feeding her these insights, deliberately. Its as if it is downloading information into me, bit by bit. But my mind, my brain, is just incapable of taking it all. Its as if I tried to download modern virtual reality software onto a Babbage difference engine
Thats a simile I can sympathize with, said the phone dryly.
No offense.
Sometimes she would simply sit in the ponderous company of the Eye, and let her mind roam where it would.
She kept thinking of Myra. As time passed, as the months turned into years, and the Discontinuity, that single extraordinary event, receded into the past, she felt herself embedding more deeply into this new world. Sometimes, in this drab antique place, her memories of twenty-first-century Earth seemed absurd, impossibly gaudy, like a false dream. But her feelings of loss about Myra didnt fade.
It wasnt even as if Myra had been taken from her somehow, to continue her life in some other part of the world. It was no comfort to her to imagine how old Myra would be now, how she must look, where she would be in her school career, what they might have been doing together if they had been reunited. None of those comprehensible human situations applied, because she couldnt know if she and Myra had a timeline in common. It was even possible that there were many copies of Myra on multiple fragmented worlds, some of them even with copies of herself, and how was she supposed to feel about that? The Discontinuity had been a superhuman event, and the loss she had suffered was superhuman too, and she had no human way of coping with it.
As she lay on her pallet, brooding through the night, she sensed the Eye watching her, drawing up her baffled grief. She sensed that mind, but there was no compassion there, no pity, nothing but a vast Olympian watchfulness.
She would get to her feet and beat on the Eyes impassive hide with her fist, or hurl bits of Babylonian rubble at it. Is this what you wanted? Is this why you came here, why you ripped apart our world and our lives? Did you come here to break my heart? Why wont you just send me home ?
There was a certain receptivity, she felt. Mostly it felt like the reverberant receptivity of a vast cathedral dome, in which her tiny cries were lost and meaningless.
But sometimes she thought someone was listening to her.
And just occasionally, compassionless or not, she felt they might respond to her pleas.
One day the phone whispered to her, Its time.
Time for what?
I have to go to safe mode.
She had been expecting this. The phones memory contained a cache of invaluable and irreplaceable datanot just her observations of the Eye, and a record of the Discontinuity events, but the last of the treasures of the old vanished world, not least the works of poor Ruddy Kipling. But there was nowhere to download the data, not even a way to print it out. During her sleep times she had given up the phone to a team of British clerks, under the supervision of Abdikadir, who had copied out by hand various documents and diagrams and maps. It was better than nothing, but the phones capacious memory had barely been scratched.
Anyhow Bisesa and the phone had agreed that when the phones batteries dropped to a certain critical level it should make itself inert. It would only take a trickle of power to preserve its data almost indefinitely, until such time as Mirs new civilization advanced enough to access the phones invaluable memories. And bring you back to life, she had promised the phone.
It was all quite logical. But now the moment was here, Bisesa was bereft. After all this phone had been her companion since she was twelve.
You have to press the buttons to shut me down, the phone said.
I know. She held the little instrument before her, and found the right key combination through eyes embarrassingly blurred with tears. She paused before hitting the final key.
Im sorry, said the phone.
Its not your fault.
Bisesa, Im frightened.
You dont have to be. Ill wall you up if I have to and leave you to the archaeologists.
I dont mean that. Ive never been switched off before. Do you think I will dream?
I dont know, she whispered. She pressed the key, and the phones 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 midsummeraccording to the Babylonian astronomers, who patiently tracked the motion of stars and sun through a new skythe 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 Babylons 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, Alexanders 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 harbors 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, Alexanders 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.