At night there was more strangeness too. Under the tented canopies Alexander and his companions drank the night away. But Bisesa would sit in the darkened quiet of the deck, watching land go by on which there was generally not a single light to be seen. She would peer up, if the sky was clear, at subtly altered constellations. But often she would see auroras, great walls and sheets and curtains of light, visibly three-dimensional structures towering over the darkened world. She had never known of auroras visible at such low latitudes, and she had an uneasy feeling about what they might portend; the Discontinuity wasnt cosmetic, and might have cut deep indeed into the fabric of the world.
Sometimes Josh would sit with her. And sometimes, if the Macedonians were quiet, they would find a dark corner, and make love, or perhaps just huddle together.
But most of the time she kept to herself. She suspected her friends were right, that she had been in danger of losing herself in the Eye. She needed to ground herself in the world once more, and even Josh was a distraction. But she knew she was hurting him, once again.
The ostensible point of the trip was to survey the new world, and every few days Alexander sent parties inland. He had selected a small force of Iranians, colonial Greeks and Agrarians to carry out these missions: highly mobile, flexible troops, brimming with initiative and daring. Some British were attached to each party, and each foray was accompanied by surveyors and mapmakers.
The first reports were desolating, though. From the beginning the explorers reported wondersstrange rock formations, islands of extraordinary vegetation, even more extraordinary animals. But these marvels were all aspects of the natural world; of the works of mankind barely a trace survived. The ancient civilization of Egypt, for example, had vanished completely. The great blocks of its monumental buildings were uncut from their sandstone beds, and in the Valley of the Kings there was no sign of anything like humanity save a few of the cautious chimp-like creatures the British called man-apes, clinging to patches of forest.
It was a relief to sail up the coast of Judea. Of Nazareth and Bethlehem there wasnt a traceand no sign of Christ or His Passion. But close to the site of Jerusalem, under the command of British engineers, a small industrial revolution was being kick-started. Josh and Bisesa toured foundries and yards where cheerful British engineers and sweating Macedonian laborers, and a few bright Greek apprentices, constructed pressure vessels like giant kettles, and experimented with prototype steamship screws and lengths of railway track. The engineers were learning to communicate in an archaic Greek studded with English words like crankshaft and head of steam.
As everywhere, there was a rush to build quickly, before the memories and capabilities of the first generation, transmitted across the Discontinuity, were lost. But Alexander himself, a lead-from-the-front warrior king, had turned out to be something of a skeptic when it came to technology. It had taken the construction of a prototype to impress him. This had been something like the famous aeolipile of Heroin a lost timeline, a manufacturer of mechanical novelties in Alexandriajust a pressure vessel with two canted nozzles that would vent steam and spin around like a lawn sprinkler. But Eumenes had immediately seen the potential of this new form of power.
It was a difficult job, though. The British had only a handful of the necessary tools, and the industrys infrastructure would have to be built literally from the ground up, including establishing mines for coal and iron ore. Bisesa thought it might be twenty years before it was possible to manufacture engines as efficient and powerful as James Watts, say.
But it begins again, Abdikadir said. Soon, all across Alexanders domain, there will be pumps laboring in mines dug deeper and deeper, and steamships cruising a shrinking Mediterranean, and great rail networks spreading east across Asia toward the capital of the Mongols. This new Jerusalem will be the workshop of the world.
Ruddy would have loved it, Josh said. He was always very impressed with machines. Like a new breed of being in the world, he said. And Ruddy said that transport is civilization. If the continents can be united by steamships and railway trains, perhaps this new world need see no more war, no more nations, indeed, save the single marvelous nation of mankind!
Abdikadir said, I thought he said sewage was the basis of civilization.
That too!
Bisesa fondly took Joshs hand. Your optimism is like a caffeine hit, Josh.
He frowned. Ill take that as a compliment.
Abdikadir said, But the new world is going to be nothing like ours. There are overwhelmingly more of them, the Macedonians, than us. If a new world-state does come into existence, it will be speaking Greekif not Mongol. And its likely to be Buddhist
In a world stripped of its messiahs, the strange time-twin Buddhists in their temple deep in Asia had been gathering interest from both Macedonians and Mongols. The lamas circular life seemed a perfect metaphor for both the Discontinuity and the strange condition of the world it had left behind, as well as for the religion the lama gently espoused.
Oh, said Josh wistfully, I wish I could spring forward through two or three centuries and see what grows from the seeds we are planting today!
But as the journey continued such dreams, of building empires and taming worlds, came to seem petty indeed.
Greece was empty. No matter how hard Alexanders explorers probed the dense tangle of forest that coated much of the mainland, there were no signs of the great cities, no Athens, no Sparta, no Thebes. There were barely signs of humans at alclass="underline" a few rough-looking tribesmen, said the explorers, and what they described as sub-men. More in hope than anticipation Alexander sent a party north to Macedon, to see what might have survived of his homeland. It took weeks for the scouts to return, with negative news.
It seems, Alexander said with a dry wistfulness, there are more lions in Greece now than philosophers.
But even the lions werent doing too well, Bisesa noted sadly.
Everywhere they traveled they saw signs of ecological damage and collapse. The Greek forests were wilted and fringed by scrubby grassland. In Turkey, the inland areas had been baked clean of life altogether, leaving the ground an exposed rust brownRed as Mars, Abdikadir said after taking part in one jaunt. And as they explored the island that had once been called Crete, Josh asked, Have you noticed how few birds there are?
It was hard to be sure about the extent of what was being lost, as there was no way of knowing what had crossed through the Discontinuity in the first place. But Bisesa suspected there was a major dieback underway. They could only guess at the causes.
Just mixing everything up must have done a great deal of damage, Bisesa said.
Josh protested, Butmammoths in Paris! Saber-toothed cats in the Colosseum of Rome! Mir is a bringing-together of fragments, but so is a kaleidoscope, and its effect is beautiful.
Yeah, but whenever you get mixing of populations you get extinctions: when the land bridge between North and South America was joined, when humans carried rats and goats and such around the world to devastate native wildlife. So it must be here. You have creatures from the depth of the Ice Age side by side with rodents from modern cities, in a climate suited to neither. Whatever survived the Discontinuity is wiping out its neighbor, or being wiped out in turn.
Just like us, Abdikadir said blackly. We couldnt stand being mixed up either, could we?