THE UNBLINKING EYE.

Stephen Baxter

Under an empty night sky, the Inca ship stood proud before the old Roman bridge of Londres.

Jenny and Alphonse, both sixteen years old, pressed their way through grimy mobs of Londres. As night closed in, they had slipped away from the dreary ceremonial rehearsals at Saint Paul's. They couldn't resist escaping to mingle with the excited Festival crowds.

And, of course, they had been drawn here, to the Viracocha Viracocha, the most spectacular sight of all.

Beside the Inca ship's dazzling lines, even the domes, spires and pylons of the Festival, erected to mark the anniversary of the Frankish Conquest in this year of Our Lord Christus Ra 1966, looked shabby indeed. Her towering hull was made entirely of metal, clinkered in some seamless way that gave it flexibility, and the sails were llama wool, colored as brilliantly as the Inca clothes that had been the talk of the Paris fashion houses this season.

Jenny Cook was from a family of shipowners, and the very sight excited her. "Looking at her, you can believe she has sailed from the other side of the world, even from the south-"

"That's blasphemy," Alphonse snapped. But he remembered himself and shrugged. What had been blasphemy a year ago, before the first Inca ships had come sailing north around the west coast of Africa, was common knowledge now, and the old reflexes did not apply.

Jenny said, "Surely on such a craft those sails are only for show, or for trim. There must be some mighty engine buried in her guts-but where are the smoke stacks?"

The prince said gloomily, "Well, you and I are going to have months to find that out, Jenny. And where you see a pretty ship," he said darkly, "I see a statement of power." Jenny was to be among the party of friends and tutors who would accompany sixteen-year-old Prince Alphonse during his years-long stay in Cuzco, capital of the Inca. Alphonse had a sense of adventure, even of fun. But as the second son of the Emperor Charlemagne x.x.xII, he saw the world differently from Jenny.

She protested, "Oh, you're too suspicious, Alphonse. Why, they say there are whole continents out there we know nothing about! Why should the Inca care about the Frankish empire?"

"Perhaps they have conceived an ambition to own us as we own you Anglais."

Jenny p.r.i.c.kled. However, she had learned some diplomacy in her time at court. "Well, I can't agree with you, and that's that," she said.

Suddenly a flight of Inca air machines swept over like soaring silver birds, following the line of the river, their lights blazing against the darkling night. The crowds ducked and gasped, some of them crossing themselves in awe. After all, the Viracocha Viracocha was only a ship, and the empires of Europe had ships. But none of them, not even the Ottomans, had machines that could fly. was only a ship, and the empires of Europe had ships. But none of them, not even the Ottomans, had machines that could fly.

"You see?" Alphonse muttered. "What is that but a naked demonstration of Inca might? And I'll tell you something, those metal birds don't scare me half as much as other tools I've seen. Such as a box that can talk to other boxes a world away-they call it a farspeaker-I don't pretend to understand how it works. They gave one to my father's office so I can talk to him from Cuzco. What else have they got that they haven't shown us? . . . Well, come on," he said, plucking her arm. "We're going to be late for Atahualpa's ceremony."

Jenny followed reluctantly.

She watched the flying machines until they had pa.s.sed out of sight, heading west up the river. When their lights had gone the night sky was revealed, cloudless and moonless, utterly dark, with no planets visible, an infinite emptiness. As if in response, the gas lanterns of Londres burned brighter, defiant.

The Inca caravan was drawn up before the face of Saint Paul's. As grandees pa.s.sed into the building, attendants fed the llamas that had borne the colorful litters. You never saw the Inca use a wheel; they relied entirely on these haughty, exotic beasts.

Inside the cathedral, Jenny and Alphonse found their places hurriedly.

The procession pa.s.sed grandly through the cramped candlelit aisles, led by servants who carried the Orb of the Unblinking Eye. These were followed by George Darwin, archbishop of Londres, who chattered nervously to Atahualpa, commander of the Viracocha Viracocha and emissary of Huayna Capac XIII, Emperor of the Inca. In the long tail of the procession were representatives from all the great empires of Europe: the Danes, the Germans, the Muscovites, even the Ottomans, grandly bejeweled Muslims in this Christian church. They marched to the gentle playing of Galilean lutes, an ensemble supplied by the Germans. It was remarkable to think, Jenny reflected, that if the Inca had come sailing out of the south three hundred years ago, they would have been met by amba.s.sadors from much the same combination of powers. Though there had always been border disputes and even wars, the political map of Europe had changed little since the Ottoman capture of Vienna had marked the westernmost march of Islam. and emissary of Huayna Capac XIII, Emperor of the Inca. In the long tail of the procession were representatives from all the great empires of Europe: the Danes, the Germans, the Muscovites, even the Ottomans, grandly bejeweled Muslims in this Christian church. They marched to the gentle playing of Galilean lutes, an ensemble supplied by the Germans. It was remarkable to think, Jenny reflected, that if the Inca had come sailing out of the south three hundred years ago, they would have been met by amba.s.sadors from much the same combination of powers. Though there had always been border disputes and even wars, the political map of Europe had changed little since the Ottoman capture of Vienna had marked the westernmost march of Islam.

But the Inca towered over the European n.o.bility. They wore woollen suits dyed scarlet and electric blue, colors brighter than the cathedral's stained gla.s.s. And they all wore facemasks as defense against the "herd diseases" they insultingly claimed infested Europe. The effect was to make these imposing figures even more enigmatic, for the only expression you could see was in their black eyes.

Jenny, at Alphonse's side and mixed in with some of the Inca party, was only a few rows back from Atahualpa and Darwin, and she could clearly hear every word they said.

"My own family has a long a.s.sociation with this old church," the bishop said. "My ancestor Charles Darwin was a country parson who, dedicated to his theology, rose to become dean here. The Anglais built the first Christian church on this site in the year of Christus Ra 604. After the Conquest the emperors were most generous in endowing this magnificent building in our humble, remote city . . ."

As the interpreter translated this, Atahualpa murmured some reply in Quechua, and the two of them laughed softly.

One of the Inca party walking beside Jenny was a boy about her age. He wore an Inca costume like the rest but without a face mask. He whispered in pa.s.sable Frankish, "The emissary's being a bit rude about your church. He says it's a sandstone heap he wouldn't use to stable his llamas."

"Charming," Jenny whispered back.

"Well, you haven't seen his llamas."

Jenny had to cover her face to keep from giggling. She got a glare from Alphonse and recovered her composure.

"Sorry," said the boy. He was dark skinned, with a mop of short-cut, tightly curled black hair. The spiral tattoo on his left cheek made him look a little severe, until he smiled, showing bright teeth. "My name's-well, it's complicated, and the Inca never get it right. You can call me Dreamer."

"h.e.l.lo, Dreamer," she whispered. "I'm Jenny Cook."

"Pretty name."

Jenny raised her eyebrows. "Oh, is it really? You're not Inca, are you?"

"No, I just travel with them. They like to move us around, their subject peoples. I'm from the South Land . . ."

But she didn't know where that was, and the party had paused before the great altar where the emissary and the archbishop were talking again, and Jenny and Dreamer fell silent.

Atahualpa said to Darwin, "I am intrigued by the G.o.d of this church. Christus Ra? He is a G.o.d who is two G.o.ds."

"In a sense." Darwin spoke rapidly of the career of Christ. The Romans had conquered Egypt but had suffered a sort of reverse religious takeover; their pantheon had seemed flimsy before the power and sheer logic of the Egyptians' faith in their sun G.o.d. The sun was the only point of stability in a sky populated by chaotic planets, mankind's only defense against the infinite dark. Who could argue against its worship? Centuries after Christ's execution His cult was adopted as the empire's official religion, and the bishops and theologians had made a formal identification of Christ with Ra, a unity that had outlasted the empire itself.

Atahualpa expressed mild interest in this. He said the worship of the sun was a global phenomenon. The Incas' own sun G.o.d was called Inti. Perhaps Inti and Christ-Ra were mere manifestations of the same primal figure.

The procession moved on.

" 'Cook'," Dreamer whispered. He was more interested in Jenny than in theology. "That's a funny sort of name. Not Frankish, is it?"

"I don't know. I think it has an Anglais root. My family are Anglais, from the north of Grand Bretagne."

"You must be rich. You've got to be either royal or rich to be in this procession, right?"

She smiled. "Rich enough. I'm at court as part of my education. My grandfathers have been in the coal trade since our ancestor founded the business two hundred years ago. He was called James Cook. My father's called James too. It's a mucky business but lucrative."

"I'll bet. Those Watt engines I see everywhere eat enough coal, don't they?"

"So what do your family do?"

He said simply, "We serve the Inca."

The procession reached a chapel dedicated to Isaac Newton, the renowned alchemist and theologian who had developed a conclusive proof of the age of the Earth. Here they prayed to their G.o.ds, the Inca prostrating themselves before Inti, and the Christians kneeling to Christ.

And the Inca servants came forward with their Orb of the Unblinking Eye. It was a sphere of some translucent white material, half as tall as a man; the servants carried it in a rope netting and set it down on a wooden cradle before the statue of Newton himself.

Atahualpa turned and faced the procession. He may have smiled; his facemask creased. He said through his interpreter: "Once it was our practice to plant our temples in the chapels of those we sought to vanquish. Now I place this gift from my emperor, this symbol of our greatest G.o.d, in the finest church in this province." And, Jenny knew, other Inca parties were handing over similar orbs in all the great capitals of Europe. "Once we would move peoples about, whole populations, to cut them away from their roots and so control them. Now we welcome the children of your princes and merchants, while leaving our own children in your cities, so that we may each learn the culture and the ways of the other." He gestured to Alphonse.

The prince bowed, but he muttered through his teeth, "And get hold of a nice set of hostages." get hold of a nice set of hostages."

"Hush," Jenny murmured.

Atahualpa said, "Let this globe shine for all eternity as a symbol of our friendship, united under the Unblinking Eye of the One Sun." He clapped his hands.

And the orb lit up, casting a steady pearl-like glow over the grimy statuary of the chapel. The Europeans applauded helplessly.

Jenny stared, amazed. She could see no power supply, no tank of gas; and the light didn't flicker like the flame of a candle or a lamp but burned as steady as the sun itself.

With the ceremony over, the procession began to break up. Jenny turned to the boy, Dreamer. "Are you sailing on the Viracocha Viracocha?"

"Oh, yes. You'll be seeing a lot more of me. The emissary has one more appointment, a ride on a Watt-engine train to some place called Bataille-"

"That's where the Frankish army defeated the Anglais back in 1066."

"Yes. And then we sail."

"And then we sail," Jenny said, fearful, excited, gazing into the dark, playful eyes of this boy from the other side of the world, a boy whose land didn't even exist in her imagination.

Alphonse glared at them, brooding.

The dignitaries were still talking, with stiff politeness. Atahualpa seemed intrigued by Newton's determination of the Earth's age. "And how did this Newton achieve his result? A study of the rocks, of living things, of the sky? I did not know such sciences were so advanced here."

But when Archbishop Darwin explained that Newton's calculations had been based on records of births and deaths in a holy book, and that his conclusion was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, Atahualpa's laughter was gusty, echoing from the walls of the cramped chapel.

Alphonse's party, with Jenny and other companions and with Archbishop Darwin attached as a moral guardian, boarded the Inca ship.

The Viracocha Viracocha, Jenny learned, was named after a creator G.o.d and cultural hero of the Inca. It was as extraordinary inside as out, a floating palace of wide corridors and vast staterooms that glowed with a steady pearl light. Jenny was quite surprised when crew members went barreling up and down the corridors on wheeled carts. The Inca embraced the wheel's obvious advantages, but for ceremonial occasions they walked or rode their animals, as their ancestors had done long before their age of exploration. The wheeled carts, like the ubiquitous lights, had no obvious power source, no boiler or steam stack.

The Frankish and Anglais were allowed to stay on deck as the great woollen sails were unfurled and the ship pulled away from Londres, which sprawled over its banks in heaps of smoky industry. Jenny looked for her family's ships in the docks; she was going to be away from home for years, and the parting from her mother had been tearful.

But before the ship had left the Thames estuary the guests were ordered below deck, and the hatches were locked and sealed. There weren't even any windows in the ship's sleek hull. Their Inca hosts wanted to save a remarkable surprise for them, they said, a surprise revealed to every crew who crossed the equator, but not until then.

And they were all, even Alphonse, put through a program of inoculation, injected with various potions and their bodies bathed with a p.r.i.c.kly light. The Inca doctors said this was to weed out their "herd diseases." All the Europeans resented this, though Darwin marveled at the medical technology on display.

At least you could see the Incas' faces, however, now that they had discarded their masks. They were a proud-looking people with jet black hair, dark skin, and noses that would have been called Roman in Europe. None of the crew was particularly friendly. They wouldn't speak Frankish or Anglais, and they looked on the Europeans with a kind of amused contempt. This infuriated Alphonse, for he was used to looking on others in precisely that way.

Still, the ship's sights were spectacular. Jenny was shown the great smelly hold where the llamas were kept during the journey. And she was shown around an engine room. Jenny's family ran steam scows, and she had expected Watt engines, heavy, clunky, soot-coated iron monsters. The Viracocha Viracocha's engine room was a pristine white-walled hall inhabited by sleek metal shapes. The air was filled with a soft humming, and there was a sharp smell in the air that reminded her of the seash.o.r.e. These smooth sculptures didn't even look like engines to Jenny, and whatever principle they worked on had nothing to do with steam, evidently. So much for her father's fond hopes of selling coal to the mighty Inca empire!

Despite such marvels, Jenny chafed at her confinement below decks. What made it worse was that she saw little of her friends. Alphonse was whisked off to a program of study of Inca culture and science, mediated by Darwin. And in his free time he monopolized Dreamer for private language cla.s.ses; he wanted to learn as much Quechua as he could manage, for he did not trust the Inca.

This irritated Jenny more than she was prepared to admit, for the times she relished most of all were the s.n.a.t.c.hed moments she spent with Dreamer.

One free evening Dreamer took her to the navigation bay. The walls were covered with charts, curves that might have shown the trajectory of the sun and moon across the sky, and other diagrams showing various aspects of a misty-gold spiral shape that meant nothing to Jenny. There was a globe that drew her eye; glowing, painted, it was covered with unfamiliar shapes, but one strip of blue looked just like a map of the Mediterranean.

The most wondrous object in the room was a kind of loom, rank upon rank of knotted string that stretched from floor to ceiling and wall to wall-but unlike a loom it was extended in depth as well. As she peered into this array, she saw metal fingers pluck blindly at the strings, making the knots slide this way and that.

Dreamer watched her, as she watched the string. "I'm starting to think Alphonse is using the language cla.s.ses as an excuse to keep me away from you. Perhaps the prince wants you for himself. Who wouldn't desire such beauty?"

Jenny pulled her face at this gross flattery. "Tell me what this loom is for."

"The Inca have always represented their numbers and words on quipus, bits of knotted string. Even after they learned writing from their Aztec neighbors, whom they encountered at the start of the Sunrise."

"The Sunrise?"

"That is their modest name for their program of expansion across the world. Jenny, this is a machine for figuring numbers. The Inca use it to calculate their journeys across the world's oceans. But it can perform any sum you like."

"My father would like one of these to figure his tax return."

Dreamer laughed.

She said, "But everybody knows that you can't navigate at night, when the sun goes down, and the only beacons in the sky are the moon and planets, which career unpredictably all over the place. How, then, do the Inca find their way?" For the Europeans this was the greatest mystery about the Inca. Even the greatest seamen of the past, the Vikings, had barely had the courage to probe away from the sh.o.r.e.

Dreamer glanced at the strange charts on the wall. "Look, they made us promise not to tell any of you about-well, certain matters, before the Inca deem you ready. But there's something here I do want to show you." He led her across the room to the globe.

That blue shape was undoubtedly the Mediterranean. "It's the world," she breathed.

"Yes." He smiled. "The Inca have marked what they know of the European empires. Look, here is Grand Bretagne."

"Why, even Europe is only a peninsula dangling from the carca.s.s of Asia."

"You know, your sense of wonder is the most attractive thing about you."

She snorted. "Really? More than my eyes and teeth and neck, and the other bits of me you've been praising? I'll believe that when a second sun rises in the sky. Show me where you come from-and the Inca."

Pa.s.sing his hand over the globe, he made the world spin and dip.

He showed her what lay beyond the Ottoman empire, the solemn Islamic unity that had blocked Christendom from the east for centuries: the vast expanses of Asia, India, the sprawling empire of China, Nippon, the Spice Islands. And he showed how Africa extended far beyond the arid northern regions held by the Ottomans, a great pendulous continent in its own right that sprawled, thrillingly, right across the equator.

"You can in fact reach India and the east by sailing south around the cape of southern Africa," Dreamer said. "Without losing sight of land, even. A man called Columbus was the first to attempt this in 1492. But he lacked the courage to cross the equator. Columbus went back to the family business of trouser-making, and Christian Europe stayed locked in."

Now he spun the globe to show her even stranger sights: a double continent, far to the west of Europe across the ocean, lands wholly unknown to any European. The Inca had come from a high country that ran north to south along the spine of the southernmost of the twin continents. "It is a place of mountains and coast, of long, long roads, and bridges centuries old, woven from vines, still in use . . ."

Around the year 1500, according to the Christian calendar, the Inca's greatest emperor Huayna Capac I, had emerged from a savage succession dispute to take sole control of the mountain empire. And under him, as the Inca consolidated, the great expansion called the Sunrise had begun. At first the Inca had used their woollen-sailed ships for trade and military expeditions up and down their long coastlines. But gradually they crept away from the sh.o.r.e.

At last, on an island that turned out to be the tip of a grand volcanic mountain that stuck out of the sea, they found people. "These were a primitive sort, who sailed the oceans in canoes dug out of logs. Nevertheless, they had come out of the southeast of Asia and sailed right to the middle of the ocean, colonizing island chains as they went." The Inca, emboldened by the geographical knowledge they took from their new island subjects, set off west once more, following island chains until they reached southeast Asia. All this sparked intellectual ferment, as exploration and conquest led to a revolution in sky watching, mathematics, and the sciences of life and language.

The Inca, probing westward, at last reached Africa. And when in the early twentieth century they acquired lodestone compa.s.ses from Chinese traders, they found the courage to venture north.

Jenny stared at the South Land. There was no real detail, just a few Inca towns dotted around the coast, an interior like a blank red canvas. "Tell me about your home."