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ogy. Diseases must be transmitted across the old boundaries too.
I m a little surprised that we ve had no real epidemics.
Abdikadir said,  We humans are too thinly scattered. Even so,
perhaps we ve been lucky . . .
 But no birds trill from the trees! Josh complained.
 Birds are bell-wethers, Josh, Bisesa said.  Birds are
vulnerable their 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 too especially 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,
we re 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, let s keep a few. But it s just that
we ve learned it s more complicated than that learned the hard
way. Conserving ecospheres, let alone repairing them, isn t so easy,
especially as we never understood how they worked anyhow. They
aren t even static; they are dynamic, undergoing great cycles . . .
Extinctions are inevitable; they happen at the best of times. No mat-
ter what we try, we can t keep it all.
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T I M E  S E Y E " 3 0 5
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 can t save the world, Josh. We don t 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 frac-
tion 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, men-
acing, slid by.
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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
Bisesa s time. Even at the mouth of the Tiber there was no trace of
the extensive harbor workings that the imperial Romans had con-
structed, 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 gra-
ciously 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 star-
tling aurora, which brought gasps from the Macedonians.
Bisesa was no geologist, but she wondered what must have hap-
pened deep in the core of the world when the new planet had been
assembled from its disparate fragments. Earth s 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
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T I M E  S E Y E " 3 0 7
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 planet s 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 com-
passes. 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 damage cancers, 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 Earth s surface.
But there were other domains of life. She thought of the deep
hot biosphere, the ancient heat-loving creatures that had survived
from Earth s earliest days, lingering around ocean vents and deep in
the rocks. They wouldn t be troubled by a little surface ultraviolet
but 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 Alexander s generation. Two centuries
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3 0 8 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
before Alexander the Carthaginian Hanno had sailed boldly south [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]