Bisesa said, There must be booms and crashes: maybe that explains our plagues of insects, a symptom of an out-of-kilter ecology. Diseases must be transmitted across the old boundaries too. Im a little surprised that weve had no real epidemics.
Abdikadir said, We humans are too thinly scattered. Even so, perhaps weve been lucky
But no birds trill from the trees! Josh complained.
Birds are bell-wethers, Josh, Bisesa said. Birds are vulnerabletheir habitats, like wetlands and beaches, are easily damaged in climate shifts. The loss of the birds is a bad sign.
Then if things are so difficult for the animals Josh pounded his bunched fist onto a rail. We must do something about it.
Abdikadir laughed, then stopped himself. What, exactly?
You mock me, said Josh, red-faced. He waved his hands, grasping at ideas. We should gather the animals in zoos, or reserves. The same with the vegetation, the trees and plants. The birds and insects tooespecially the birds! And then, when things settle down we can release the beasts into the wild
And let a new Eden build itself? Bisesa said. Dear Josh, were not mocking you. And we should put your idea of gathering zoo specimens to Alexander: if the mammoth and the cave bear have been brought back to life, lets keep a few. But its just that weve learned its more complicated than thatlearned the hard way. Conserving ecospheres, let alone repairing them, isnt so easy, especially as we never understood how they worked anyhow. They arent even static; they are dynamic, undergoing great cycles Extinctions are inevitable; they happen at the best of times. No matter what we try, we cant keep it all.
Josh said, Then what are we to do? Simply throw up our hands and accept whatever fate has decreed?
No, said Bisesa. But we have to accept our limits. There are only a handful of us. We cant save the world, Josh. We dont even know how to. We will do well to save ourselves. We must be patient.
Abdikadir said grimly, Patience, yes. But it took only a fraction of a second for the great wounds of the Discontinuity to be inflicted. It will take millions of years for them to heal
And it had nothing to do with fate, Josh said. If the gods of the Eye were wise enough to rip apart space and time, could they not have foreseen what would become of our ecologies?
They fell silent, and the jungles of Greece, dense, wilting, menacing, slid by.
41. Zeus-Ammon
Italy seemed as deserted as Greece. They found no sign of the city-states the Macedonians remembered, or the modern cities of Bisesas time. Even at the mouth of the Tiber there was no trace of the extensive harbor workings that the imperial Romans had constructed, to service the great grain fleets that had kept their bloated city alive.
Alexander was intrigued by accounts of how Rome, just an ambitious city-state in his day, would one day have built an empire to rival his own. So he put together a handful of riverboats and, reclining under a brilliant purple canopy, led a party up the river.
The seven hills of Rome were immediately recognizable. But the site was uninhabited, save for a few ugly hill forts sitting squat on the Palatine, where the palaces of the Caesars would have been built. Alexander thought this was a great joke, and decided graciously to spare the lives of his historical rivals.
They spent a night camped close in the marshy lowland that should have become the Forum of Rome. There was another startling aurora, which brought gasps from the Macedonians.
Bisesa was no geologist, but she wondered what must have happened deep in the core of the world when the new planet had been assembled from its disparate fragments. Earths core had been a spinning worldlet of iron as big as the Moon. If the stitching-together of Mir went to the very center of the world, that great sub-planet, crudely reassembled, must be thrashing and roiling. The currents in the outer layers, the mantle, would be disturbed too, with plumes of molten rock, fountains hundreds of kilometers tall, breaking and crashing against each other. Maybe the effects of such deep storms were now being felt on the surface of the planet.
The planets magnetic field, generated by the great iron dynamo of the spinning core, must have collapsed. Maybe that explained the auroras, and the continuing failure of their compasses. In normal times this magnetic shield protected fragile life-forms from a hard rain from space: heavy particles from the sun, sleeting remnants from supernova explosions. Before the magnetic field restored itself there would be radiation damagecancers, a flood of mutations, almost all of them harmful. And if the battered ozone layer had collapsed too, the flood of ultraviolet would explain the intensified sunlight, and would do even more damage to the living creatures exposed on Earths surface.
But there were other domains of life. She thought of the deep hot biosphere, the ancient heat-loving creatures that had survived from Earths earliest days, lingering around ocean vents and deep in the rocks. They wouldnt be troubled by a little surface ultravioletbut if the world had been sliced to its core their ancient empire must have been partitioned, just as on the surface. Was there some slow extinction event unfolding deep in the rocks, as on the surface? And were there Eyes buried in the body of the world to watch that too?
The fleet sailed on, tracking the southern coast of France, and then along eastern and southern Spain, making toward Gibraltar.
There were few signs of humans, but in the rocky landscape of southern Spain the scouts found a stocky kind of people with beetling brows and great strength, who would flee at the first sight of the Macedonians. Bisesa knew this area had been one of the last holdouts of the Neanderthals as Homo sapiens had advanced west through Europe. If these were late Neanderthals, they were well advised to be wary of modern humans.
Alexander was much more intrigued by the Straits themselves, which he called the Pillars of Heracles. The ocean beyond these gates was not quite unknown to Alexanders generation. Two centuries before Alexander the Carthaginian Hanno had sailed boldly south along the Atlantic coast of Africa. There were less well-documented reports, too, of explorers who had turned to the north, and found strange, chill lands, where ice formed in the summer and the sun would not set even at midnight. Alexander now seized on his new understanding of the shape of the world: such strangeness was easy to explain if you believed you were sailing over the surface of a sphere.
Alexander longed to brave the wider ocean beyond the Straits. Josh was all for this, eager to get in touch with the community at Chicago that might not be far removed from his own time. But Alexander himself was more interested in reaching the new mid-Atlantic island the Soyuz had reported: he had been stirred by Bisesas descriptions of voyages to the Moon, and he said that to conquer a land was one thing, but to be the first ever to set foot there quite another.
But even a King had constraints. For one thing his small ships werent capable of surviving at sea for more than a few days without putting into shore. The quiet words of his counselors persuaded him that the new world of the west would wait for other days. So, with reluctance mixed with anticipation, Alexander agreed to turn back.
The fleet sailed back along the Mediterraneans southern shore, the coast of Africa. The journey was unremarkable, the coast apparently uninhabited.
Bisesa withdrew into herself once more. Her weeks on Alexanders expedition had taken her away from the vivid intensity of her time with the Eye itself, and had given her time to reflect on what she had learned. Now, something of the blankness of both sea and land made the mysteries of the Eye revive in her mind.
Abdikadir, and especially Josh, tried to draw her out of herself. One night, as they sat on the deck, Josh whispered, I still dont understand how you know. When I look up at the Eye, I feel nothing. I am prepared to believe that each of us has an inner sense of othersthat minds, lonely bits of spindrift in the great dark ocean of time, have a way of seeking each other out. To me the Eye is a vast and ponderous mystery, and clearly a center of awesome powerbut it is the power of a machine, not a mind.