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

Time’s 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 wasn’t 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 Galaxy’s 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 waste—to 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 wasn’t 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 her—the 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.”

He gulped at the water gratefully. Sweat was already standing out on his brow and soaking into his collar.

She dug her hands into the dirt. It crumbled, pale, lifeless and dry. But something shone in it, fragments that glittered when exposed to the overhead sun. She dug them out and laid them on her palm. They were coin-sized fragments of glass, opaque, their edges ragged. She shook the fragments out of her palm and let them fall to the ground. But when she brushed away more dirt, she found more glass bits everywhere, a layer of the stuff beneath the ground.

Experimentally she pushed herself to her knees, straightened up—her ears rang with dizziness, but she wasn’t going to faint—and then, one foot, two, she stood up. Now she could see the landscape better. It was just a plain, a plain of this glass-ridden sand, that marched away to the horizon, where worn hills waited out eternity. She and Josh were at the base of a shallow depression; the land subtly rose all around them to a rim, no more than a few meters high, perhaps a kilometer away.

She was standing in a crater.

A nuke would do this, she thought. The glass fragments could have been formed in the explosion of a small nuclear weapon, bits of concrete and soil fused to glass. If that was so, nothing else was left—if there had been a city here there were no concrete foundations, no bones, not even the ashes of the final fires, only the fragments of nuclear glass. This crater looked old, worn, the bits of glass buried deep. If war had come by here, it must have been long ago.

She wondered if radioactivity lingered. But if the Firstborn had meant her any harm they could have simply killed her—and if not, surely they would protect her from such an elementary hazard.

Her chest ached as she breathed. Was the air thin? Was there too little oxygen, or too much?

Suddenly it got a little darker, though there was no cloud in the ruddy sky. She peered up. There was something wrong with the sun. Its disc was deformed. It looked like a leaf out of which a great bite had been taken.

Josh was standing beside her. “My God,” he said.

The eclipse progressed quickly. It began to feel colder, and in the last moments Bisesa glimpsed bands of shadow rushing across the eroded ground. She felt her breathing slow, her heart pump more gently. Her body, responding even now to ancient primal rhythms, was reacting to the darkness, readying itself for night.

The darkness reached its greatest depth. There was a moment of profound stillness.

The sun turned to a ring of brightness. The central disc of shadow had a serrated edge, and sunlight twinkled through those irregularities. That disc was surely the Moon, still traveling between Earth and sun, its shadow sliding across the face of the sun. The sun’s glare was reduced enough for Bisesa to make out the corona, the sun’s higher atmosphere, easily visible as a wispy sculpture around that complex double disc.

But this eclipse was not total. The Moon was not big enough to obscure that glowing face. The fat ring of light in the sky was a baffling, terrifying sight.

“Something’s wrong,” Josh murmured.

“Geometry,” she said. “The Earth-Moon system … It changes with time.” As the Moon dragged tides through Earth’s ocean, so Earth likewise tugged at the Moon’s rocky substrate. Since their formation the twin worlds had slowly separated—only a few centimeters per year, but over enough time that took the Moon ever farther from the Earth.

Josh understood the essence of what had happened. “This is the future. Not the twenty-first century—the very far future … Millions of years hence, perhaps.”

She walked around the plain, peering up at the complex sky. “You’re trying to tell us something, aren’t you? This desolate, war-shattered ground—where am I, London? New York, Moscow, Beijing? Lahore? And why bring us to this precise place and time to show us an eclipse? … Has all this got something to do with the sun?” Hot, dusty, thirsty, disoriented, she was suddenly filled with rage. “Don’t give me special-effect riddles. Talk to me, damn you. What’s going to happen? ”