Bisesa took Joshs hand. Wed better take our positions.
Where? A lock of hair on his forehead was ruffled by a breeze.
Damned if I know, she said. Fondly she tucked back his hair. But the breeze came again, washing over Joshs face, a breeze that blew in from no apparent source, toward the center of the chamber.
Its the Eye, Abdikadir said. Bits of paper and loose cabling fluttered around him. It is breathing in. Bisesa, get ready.
The breeze had become a wind, flowing toward the center of the room, strong enough to buffet Bisesas back. She pulled Josh with her, and stumbled toward the Eye. It hung there as still as ever, returning her own distorted voodoo-doll reflection, but bits of paper and straw flew up and clung to its surface.
Casey threw his headphones aside. Shit! There was a shriekan electromagnetic chirpits blown the circuits. Whoever that thing is signaling, it isnt me
Its time, Josh said.
So it was, she thought. On some deep level she hadnt believed it herself. But now it was happening. Her stomach fluttered, her heart pounded; she was profoundly grateful for the feel of Joshs strong hand.
Look up, Abdikadir said.
For the first time since they had found it, the Eye was changing.
The reflective sheen was still there. But now it oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.
Then the surface collapsed, like the skin of a suddenly deflated balloon.
Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. She could still see reflections of herself, with Josh at her side, but their images were broken up, as if scattered from the shards of a smashed mirror. The funnel seemed to be directly before her facebut she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.
This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.
She looked over her shoulder. The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye. Abdikadir was still there, though he seemed to be drawing more distant, and he was oddly blurred: he was clinging to the door frame, and he was on the ground, and he turned away and turned backnot sequentially, but all at the same time, like the frames of a movie reel cut out and reassembled in a random order. Go with Allah, he called. Go, go But his voice was lost on the wind. And then the storm of light grew to a blizzard, and she could see him no more.
The wind tugged at her, nearly knocking her off her feet. She tried to be analytical. She tried to count her breaths. But her thoughts seemed to fragment, the inner sentences she formed breaking into words, and syllables, and letters, jumbling into nonsense. It was the Discontinuity, she thought. It had worked on the scale of a planet, cutting adrift great slabs of landscape. But it had broken into this room, cutting Abdikadirs life into pieces, and now, at last, it was pushing into her own head, for, after all, even her consciousness was embedded in space-time
She looked into the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinitybut it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.
It was her last conscious thought before the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of her body. Space was gone, time itself suspended, and she became a mote, nothing but an animals bright, stubborn, mindless soul. But through it all she was aware of Joshs warm hand in hers.
There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.
One of those was to serve as a gate.
The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.
Then the Eye vanished. The temple chamber was left empty save for a tangle of ruined electronic gear, and two men with memories of what they had seen and heard, memories they could neither believe nor understand.
Part 6
Times Eye
44. Firstborn
The long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle.
Those who had watched Earth for so long had never been remotely human. But they had once been flesh and blood.
They had been born on a planet of one of the first stars of all, a roaring hydrogen-fat monster, a beacon in a universe still dark. These first ones were vigorous, in a young and energy-fat universe. But planets, the crucibles of life, were scarce, for the heavy elements that comprised them had yet to be manufactured in the hearts of stars. When they looked out across the depths of space, they saw nothing like themselves, no Mind to mirror their own.
The early stars blazed gloriously but died quickly. Their thin debris enriched the pooled gases of the Galaxy, and soon a new generation of long-lived stars would emerge. But to those left stranded between the dying protostars, it was a terrible abandonment.
And as they looked ahead, they saw only a slow darkening, as each generation of stars was built with increasing difficulty from the debris of the last. There would come a day when there wasnt enough fuel in the Galaxy to manufacture a single new star, and the last light flickered and died. Even after that it would go on, the terrible clamp of entropy strangling the cosmos and all its processes.
Despite all their powers, they were not beyond the reach of time.
This desolating realization caused an age of madness. Strange and beautiful empires rose and fell, and terrible wars were fought between beings of metal and of flesh, children of the same forgotten world. The wars expended an unforgivable proportion of the Galaxys usable energy reserve, and had no resolution but exhaustion.
Saddened but wiser, the survivors began to plan for an inevitable future, an endless future of cold and dark.
They returned to their abandoned machines of war. The ancient machines were directed to a new objective: to the elimination of wasteto cauterization, if necessary. Their makers saw now that if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest future, there must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.
The machines had been honed by a million years of war. They fulfilled their task perfectly, and would do so forever. They waited, unchanging, dedicated to a single purpose, as new worlds, and new life, congealed from the rubble of the old.
It was all for the best of intentions. The first ones, born into an empty universe, cherished life above all else. But to preserve life, life must sometimes be destroyed.
45. Through the Eye
It wasnt like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and scrabbled at the ground, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.
She was on her back. There was something enormously bright above herthe sun, yes, the sun, she was outdoors. Her arms were spread out wide, away from her body, and her fingers were digging into the dirt.
She threw herself over onto her belly. Sensations returned to her legs, arms, chest. Dazzled by the sun, she could barely see.
A plain. Red sand. Eroded hills in the distance. Even the sky looked red, though the sun was high.
Josh was beside her. He was lying on his back, gasping for air, like an ungainly fish stranded on this strange beach. She scrabbled over to him, crawling through loose sand.
Where are we? he gasped. Is this the twenty-first century?
I hope not. When she tried to speak her throat was dry, scratchy. She pulled her pack off her back and dug out a flask of water. Drink this.