“Yes.” He stopped and faced her, and his expression showed the grim anger she had seen in him before. “And where you are going, as you face an enemy even Alexander could not challenge, you must call on those same qualities again. On behalf of us all.”

A nursing mother, the wife of a soldier, sat on a low stool outside one of the tents, her baby at her breast. The baby’s face was a pale disc, like the Moon. The mother saw Bisesa watching, and smiled.

Eumenes said, “The Babylonian astronomers have decided that the Discontinuity should be considered the start of a new calendar, a new year—indeed, the start of one of their mighty cycles, their Great Years. Everything began afresh that day. And the first babies to be conceived on Mir have already been born. They did not exist in whatever world we came from— they could not have, for some of their parents came from different eras—but their past is not fractured like ours; they only exist here. I wonder what they will do when they grow up?”

She studied his face, its tanned plains shadowed in the uncertain light. “You understand so much,” she said.

He grinned, disarmingly. “As Casey says, like all ancient Greeks I’m smart as a tack, and smug with it. What do you expect? …”

They embraced, stiffly. Then they walked back to the city.

43. The Eye of Marduk

When Bisesa arrived in the Temple of Marduk the following morning, Abdikadir was waiting, and Casey was already working, checking out sensor equipment. They were here for her; she was touched by their faith in her, and reassured by their competence.

The Eye floated impassively, as it always did.

Josh was here. While Bisesa was wearing her flight suit, much patched, Josh wore a rumpled flannel suit and shirt, and, absurdly enough, a tie. But, she thought, they had no idea what they would face today; why not look your best?

But his face was white, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. “Into infinity with a sore head!—at least I can’t be made to feel any worse, whatever happens.”

Bisesa felt oddly impatient, irritable. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. “Here.” She held out a small backpack.

He looked at it dubiously. “What’s in it?”

“Water. Dried rations. Some medical supplies.”

“You think we will need this? Bisesa, we are entering the Eye of Marduk, not hiking across the desert.”

“But she’s right,” Abdikadir snapped. “Why not anticipate what we can?” He took the bag and thrust it at Josh. “Take it.”

Bisesa said to Josh, “And if you’re going to grouse all the way, I’ll leave you behind.”

Josh’s pained face crumpled into a smile. “I’ll be good.”

Bisesa looked around. “I told Eumenes and Grove to keep everybody else away. I’d have preferred them to evacuate the damn city, but I suppose that wasn’t practical … Is there anything we’ve forgotten?” She had used the bathroom, cleaned her teeth: simple human actions, but she wondered where, when she would next have time to groom herself. “Abdi, take care of my phone.”

Abdikadir said gently, “As I promised. And—one more thing.” He held out two pieces of paper, Babylonian parchment, neatly folded and sealed. “If you don’t mind—”

“From you?”

“Me and Casey. If it’s possible—if you can find our families—”

Bisesa took the papers and tucked them inside her jumpsuit. “I’ll make sure they get them.”

Casey nodded. Then he called, “Something’s happening.” He adjusted his headset and tapped an electromagnetic sensor lashed up from the guts of the chopper’s ruined radio. He glanced up at the Eye. “I don’t see any change in that thing. But the signal’s intensifying. It seems somebody is expecting you, Bisesa.”

Bisesa took Josh’s hand. “We’d 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 Josh’s face, a breeze that blew in from no apparent source, toward the center of the chamber.

“It’s 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 Bisesa’s 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 shriek—an electromagnetic chirp—it’s blown the circuits. Whoever that thing is signaling, it isn’t me …”

“It’s time,” Josh said.

So it was, she thought. On some deep level she hadn’t believed it herself. But now it was happening. Her stomach fluttered, her heart pounded; she was profoundly grateful for the feel of Josh’s 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 face—but 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 back—not 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 Abdikadir’s 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 infinity—but 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 animal’s bright, stubborn, mindless soul. But through it all she was aware of Josh’s 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.