All right. Now, the strings need a space to vibrate innot our own space-time, which is the music of the strings, but a kind of abstraction, a stratum. In many dimensions.
Josh frowned, visibly struggling to keep up. Go on.
The way the stratum is set up, its topology, governs the way the strings behave. Its like the sounding board of a violin. Its a beautiful image if you think about it. The topology is a property of the universe on the largest scale, but it determines the behavior of matter on the very smallest scales.
But imagine you cut a hole in the sounding boardmake a change to the structure of the underlying stratum. Then you would get a transition in the way the strings vibrate.
Abdikadir said, And the effect of such a transition in the world we observe
The strings vibrations govern the existence of the particles and fields that make up our world, and their properties. So if you go through a transition, those properties change. She shrugged. The speed of light might change, for instance. She described her measurements of Doppler shifts in the reflections from the Eye of Marduk; perhaps that was something to do with stratum-level transitions.
Josh leaned forward, his small face serious. But, Bisesawhat about causality? You have the Buddhist monk, who Kolya described, living with his own younger self! Now, what if that old man were to strangle the boywould the lama pop out of existence? And then there is poor Ruddydead, now, and so forever incapable of writing the novels and poems that you claimed, Bisesa, to have stored in your phone! What does your physics of strings and sounding-boards say about that?
She sighed and rubbed her face. Were talking about a ripped-apart space-time. The rules are different. Josh, do you know what a black hole is? Imagine a star collapsing, becoming so dense that its gravity field deepens hugelyin the end, not even the most powerful rocket could escape from its graspin the end, even light itself cant escape. Josh, a black hole is a tear in the orderly tapestry of space-time. And it eats information. If I throw an object into a black holea rock, or the last copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, it doesnt matteralmost all the information about it is lost, beyond retrieval, nothing but its mass, charge and spin.
Now, the interfaces between the chunks of Mir, drawn from different eras, were surely not like the event horizons of black holes. But they were space-time rips. And perhaps information is lost in the same way. And thats why causality has broken down. I think our new reality, here on Mir, isknitting up. New causal chains are forming. But the new chains are part of this world, this reality, and have nothing to do with the old She rubbed tired eyes. Thats the best I can do. Depressing, isnt it? Our most advanced physics offers us nothing but metaphors.
Abdikadir said gently, You must write this down. Have Eumenes assign you a secretary to record it all.
In Greek? Bisesa laughed hollowly.
Josh said, We are talking of the how of the Discontinuity. I am no closer to understanding the why .
Oh, there was a purpose, said Bisesa. She glared up at the Eye resentfully. We just havent figured it out yet. But they are up there, somewherebeyond the Eye, beyond all the Eyeswatching us. Playing with us, maybe.
Playing?
She said, Have you seen the way the Eye in the cage has been experimenting with the man-apes? They run around that damn net like rats with wires in their heads.
Josh said, Perhaps the Eye is trying to He spread his hands. Stimulate the man-apes. Uplift them to greater intelligence.
Look in their eyes, said Bisesa coldly. This has nothing to do with uplift. They are draining those wretched creatures. The Eyes arent here to give. They are here to take.
We are no man-apes, said Abdikadir.
No. But maybe the tests they are running on us are just more subtle. Maybe the peculiar features of the Eye, like its non-Euclidean geometry, are there solely as a puzzle-box for us. And you think it was a coincidence that Alexander and Genghis Khan were both brought here? The two greatest warlords in Eurasian history, knocking their heads together, by chance? They are laughing at us. Maybe thats all there is to this whole damn thing.
Bisesa . Josh took her hands in his. You believe the Eye is the key to everything that is happening. Well, so do I. But you are letting the work destroy you. And what good will that do?
She looked at him and Abdikadir, alarmed. What are you two cooking up?
Abdikadir told her about Alexanders planned European expedition. Come away with us, Bisesa. What an adventure!
But the Eye
Will still be here when you get back, Josh said. We can delegate somebody else to continue your monitoring.
Abdikadir said, The man-apes cant leave their cage. You are a human. Show this thing it cant control you, Bisesa. Walk out.
Bullshit, she said tiredly. Then she added, Casey.
What?
Caseys got to run this shop. Not some Macedonian. And not some British, who would be worse, because hed think he understands.
Abdikadir and Josh exchanged a glance. As long as I dont tell him hes got to do it, said Josh quickly.
Bisesa glared up at the Eye. Ill be back, you bastards. And be nice to Casey. Remember I know more about you than Ive told them yet
Abdikadir frowned. Bisesa? What do you mean by that?
That I might know a way home.But she couldnt tell them that, not yet. She stood up. When do we leave?
40. The Boating Lake
The journey would begin at Alexandria. They were to sail counterclockwise around the complicated shore of the Mediterranean: starting from Egypt, they would travel north and then west along the southern coast of Europe, all the way to the Straits of Gibraltar, and back along the northern coast of Africa.
Nothing this King did was modest. He was, after all, Alexander the Great. And his jaunt around the Mediterranean, which his advisors had, wryly, taken to calling Alexanders Boating Lake, was no exception.
Alexander had been terribly disappointed to find that the city he had planted at the mouth of the Nile, his Alexandria-on-the-Nile, had been obliterated by the Discontinuity. But, undeterred, he ordered units of his army to begin the construction of a new city there, on the plan of the vanished old. And he set his engineers the task of building a new canal between the Gulf of Suez and the Nile. In the meantime he ordered the hasty construction of a temporary harbor at Alexandria, and had many of the ships he had constructed in India sailed up the Gulf of Suez, broken down into sections, and hauled overland.
To Bisesas amazement it took only a couple of months before the fleet was reassembled at the site of Alexandria and ready to sail. After a two-day festival of sacrifices and merriment in the tent compound that housed the citys workers, the fleet set off.
At first Bisesa, separated from the Eye of Marduk for the first time in five years, found the voyage strangely relaxing. She spent a lot of time on deck, watching the land unravel past her, or listening to complicated cross-cultural discussions. Even the ocean was a curiosity. In her time the Mediterranean, recovering from decades of pollution, had become a mixture of game reserve and park, fenced off with great invisible barriers of electricity and sound. Now it was wild again, and she glimpsed dolphins and whales. Once she thought she saw the torpedo shape of an immense shark, bigger than anything from her day, she was sure.
It was never warm, though. Often in the mornings she would smell frost in the air. Every year it seemed a little colder, though it was hard to be sure; she wished they had thought to keep climate records from the beginning. But despite the chill she found she had to keep out of the sun. The British took to wearing knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, and even the nutmeg-brown Macedonians seemed to burn. On the royal boats thick awnings were erected, and Alexanders doctors experimented with ointments of asss butter and palm sap to block the suddenly intense rays of the sun. The storms of the early days after the Discontinuity had long passed, but clearly the climate remained screwed up.