Newton's Aliens: Tales From the Anti-Ice Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  But he quickly found that his skill on the ball wasn’t half as valuable as it had been when playing with the village lads in Ulgham. Here he was quickly berated for playing with his head down; he missed passes, or didn’t play them when he should have; and his running off the ball lacked insight. Of course the skill level varied, but the intent was clear; at the Academy, even a ragged, unsupervised game of soccer was played with keenness and intelligence.

  After a half-hour’s play the referee called a break by waving his handkerchief. Cedric, breathing hard, went to find his coat. He was distracted by a clattering, clanking sound, and laughter – and by the serious tones of Verity Fletcher.

  A kind of machine was approaching across the field. It was a low, self-propelled wagon whose back bristled with gadgets attached to jointed metal arms: shears, spades, rakes, hoes. As the thing progressed it swept a scythe back and forth over the muddy ground. The grass was much too short to be cut, but this was evidently a demonstration of principle. A group of smaller boys chased after, laughing at the spectacle.

  And Verity Fletcher, with an expression of strained patience, walked ahead of the thing. Evidently the machine wasn’t too intelligent; Verity summoned it with claps and whistles, as if calling for a dog.

  At last the machine bumped against an old gate post, swung its scythe so viciously it nearly took the legs off one small boy, and went clattering into a wall, and a pneumatic line gave with a hiss of escaping gas. The smaller boys threw conkers at the wreck.

  Cedric hurried to join Verity.

  ‘Master Stubbs. You look well this afternoon.’

  ‘All the better for a bit of fresh air after all that travelling. Odd sort of assignment you’ve got there.’

  ‘You get to do all sorts in the Academy, sir …’ She stopped and stood listening.

  ‘What is it, Verity?’

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  It was a deep rumbling that he felt through the soles of his feet.

  One of the little boys pointed at the sports field. ‘’Ware! ’Ware!’

  A mound of black earth pushed up out of the ground, not twenty paces from Cedric. Sticky dirt flew everywhere. At last whirling mechanical arms lurched up into daylight, followed by a kind of broad-bladed screw, and then a cylindrical body thrust out of the earth. The arms and screw blades slowed to a halt, and the last of the displaced soil fell back.

  A hatch opened in the machine’s side, and, with a bit of a wriggle, out stepped Harry Merrell, his uniform pristine down to his straw hat. He looked inordinately pleased with himself. But then he looked around at the desecrated playing field, and said, ‘Oops.’

  Cedric and Verity approached. ‘Quite a gadget, Master Merrell,’ Verity said.

  ‘The Stoat? I like to think so. Certainly knocks old Simmel’s garden-hog into a cocked hat, doesn’t it? As my Stoat is self-propelled – can you see, it has its own power supply, and pushes the dirt behind it as it goes – it can be used even where a major tunnelling project would be infeasible.’

  Cedric asked, ‘You intend this as a commercial proposition?’

  ‘Well, of course. You’re encouraged to patent your ideas if they are worthwhile. The beaks will help with the paperwork. The Rev says it’s an incentive to use our noggins. Some old boys have made themselves rich before they left here, Stubbs. It’s my intention to follow them.’

  ‘Then why “oops”?’

  Merrell grinned, self-deprecating. ‘I actually meant to dig out to the boundary over there by the gate. Thought a tunnel would be handy for sneaking out to the pie shops in Llanrhidian. I suppose my chthonic navigation mechanism needs a bit of a tweak. Dead reckoning, you know, based on a system of gyroscopes – you can’t exactly navigate by the stars when you’re five fathoms down under the earth! Maybe I’ll ask old Fitz for a bit of a hand with the analysis.’

  Verity pointed. ‘I think Mister Godwin is about to apply another sort of tweak for the mess you’ve made of his playing field, sir.’

  Merrell turned and saw the master stomping across the turf. ‘Ah. Time for a demonstration of the Stoat’s reverse gear.’ He clambered back through the small hatchway.

  The Stoat’s mechanisms coughed into life, and the whirling blade and grabber arms sank back beneath the earth. By the time Godwin had reached the site there was nothing to be seen but a mound of earth, and none of the boys present would admit to any idea about what had happened here.

  Chapter VI

  The Phoebean Egg

  That evening Merrell invited Cedric to join himself and a boy called Simmel in the study they shared. This small room, with table, chairs and its own fireplace, was cosy and homely, made personal by the boys’ photographs, engineering sketches and sports trophies, and Cedric had not been so warm since arriving in Wales. There was work to do, the boys’ own projects, the daily chore of prep.

  But a fag brought a note from Verity Fletcher politely suggesting they come to the cold store.

  It was chill in the corner of the store where Merrell had broken the floor, and dimly lit. Verity had hung a single electric lantern from a high beam, meaning it to be far enough away that it would cast no heat, and she insisted they sit a good way back from the egg so that the heat of their bodies would likewise do no harm.

  But of the Phoebean egg, when Verity had carefully cleared away the straw on the floor, there was no sign. In its place was a kind of shallow dome, perhaps six inches across. It was made of ice, streaked and veiny and with bits of rubble incorporated into its substance.

  Verity said, ‘I thought I should look in on it. I grew up on a farm, you know. You don’t leave a chick alone, not if it’s away from its mother.’

  Merrell asked, ‘And how do you know this beast has such a thing as a mother? … Never mind.’

  Cedric said, ‘If that egg has hatched, I see no sign of its shell.’

  Verity said, ‘I don’t think it has so much hatched as made itself into something different. Can you see, there are bits of concrete incorporated into its body?’

  ‘So there are,’ Merrell said, shivering. ‘Perhaps the availability of this raw material stimulated its growth. But I admit I’m a tad disappointed. An egg turned into a dome is hardly a spectacle to draw the crowds.’

  Verity smiled. ‘But watch what happens when it thinks the night comes on.’ She took her beret off her head, and lifted it so she cast the dome into shadow.

  For long seconds the dome sat silently. Then it seemed to quiver, and a dusting of frost was shaken off. The three watched, rapt.

  A ring of fine pillars shot up out of the floor, all around the rim of the dome, each perhaps a foot long.

  Merrell and Cedric flinched back; Verity smiled.

  ‘My word,’ said Cedric. ‘Those pillars are quite vertical, and thin as knitting needles. And are they made of ice, or stone, or both?’

  The ring of pillars trembled.

  Merrell was growing excited. ‘I’ve read George Holden’s account of what he and Sir Josiah Traveller found on the moon - Phoebean beasts of rock and ice. And if so, then what comes next -’

  That dome of ice lifted bodily off the ground, sliding up the pillar ring until it settled on the top to make a structure like a stool. It quivered with potential, as if alive.

  Merrell clapped his hand, delighted. ‘Just as Holden described. Oh, how marvellous!’

  Cedric said, ‘But Holden’s beasts on the moon were the size of hills. I could step on this little ice-crab and crush it at once.’

  Verity flared, ‘Don’t you dare.’

  Cedric recoiled. ‘I would not – I did not mean it, Verity.’

  ‘Have a care, sir. Just watch.’

  Those slim vertical limbs were sliding, now, under the base of the larger mass, which was, Cedric saw now, as convex underneath as it was in top, so the whole had the effect of a lens carved of ice.

  And the crab of ice – for of all the earth’s creatures that was what it most resembled, Cedric thought - began to move. That
lenticular body slid sideways on the vertical pillars, which themselves shifted about beneath the body, finding new positions to support it. The limbs did not articulate in any way; they stayed quite vertical, and it was hard to make out how they were attached to the main body, and how they chose their positions as the crab moved. But move it did, probing the disc of shadow, moving this way and that, its limbs rustling as they slid over the frosty ground.

  Then, suddenly, the crab shot towards Merrell, bowling out into the lantern light. He held up gloved hands. ‘Whoa, little fellow!’

  ‘No!’ Verity snapped. ‘Don’t touch it, sir. You will surely kill it with your body heat. Just leave it be, and it will return.’

  And indeed the ice beast soon scuttled back into the shadow.

  ‘It is just as Holden observed,’ Merrell said. ‘The Phoebean creatures adhere to the shade, and shun the light.’

  Verity nodded. ‘It is natural if they are built of anti-ice in some way.’

  Merrell sat back. ‘So this creature is just as was observed on the moon – only this beast came from the Little Moon, not the old moon. Perhaps there the creatures in the Little Moon are smaller, as if dwarfed … Or perhaps they have a common origin.’ He was growing excited, his brain evidently racing. ‘Yes, yes!’

  Cedric asked, ‘What is it, old man?’

  ‘There’s something I read, a scientific romance by Verne or Wells or Griffith or Conan Doyle, one of those fellows. Its premise was as follows. The scientists argue that anti-ice was delivered to the earth by a comet, the main body of which splashed into the moon. Bits of the comet flew to earth, one entering orbit to become the Little Moon, and the other landing in Antarctica to be discovered by Ross and his boys, and mined by the British ever since. Now the author of this romance, which I believe was called The Ice War, imagined what might have happened if that comet had missed the moon altogether and simply fallen to the earth. Do you see?’

  ‘It would have made a mighty bang,’ Cedric said.

  ‘Well, true. But more to the point, the author argued that Traveller’s Phoebeans, which were motivated by anti-ice phenomena, must have originated, not on the moon, but on that comet of anti-ice. Truthfully, “Phoebean” is a misnomer. And if that comet had hit the earth we would have suffered an invasion of its inhabitants. Do you see? It was a good yarn, if implausible.’

  Cedric said, ‘So here we have a comet-dweller, preserved in the Little Moon fragment orbiting the earth. When the bulk of the comet splashed on the moon, that’s where its fellows ended up -’

  ‘And where they had the chance to grow huge,’ Merrell said. ‘Perhaps following some accelerated evolution of the sort of which Professor Darwin teaches us. That old boy once spoke at the Academy, you know, Stubbs. Darwin, I mean. Terrific beard, it’s said.’

  Verity leaned down to the ice crab, keeping it in the shade. ‘What an adventure you’ve had! And you’re a long way from home, you poor little fellow.’

  Cedric thought this motherly response was touching.

  But Merrell was more cynical. ‘Well, he won’t be alone for long. You know of the plans they are hatching up on the moon to bring down Phoebeans to the earth, and to put them to work on canal excavation and the like? Herculean Phoebean navvies! The civil engineers and construction companies are very keen, if the practical problems can be solved.’

  Looking at the ice crab’s odd, unnatural movements, Cedric found that an uncomfortable thought. He remembered the displacement of his family from their home, and imagined such a feat being performed on a vaster scale by immense alien limbs and trunks. ‘Maybe the author of your romance intuited a truth, Merrell. Do we really want to share our world with alien life?’

  ‘We would remain entirely in control,’ Merrell said. ‘We humans, I mean. All that is required is a little heat to melt these cold beasts’ sinews of Enhanced Conductance, and they would be stopped.’

  ‘But they might get away,’ Verity said. ‘They could live where it is always cold – at the poles, or in high mountains where there are glaciers. Life has a way of spreading to fill every niche – that’s what Professor Darwin said, isn’t it?’

  Cedric marvelled. ‘I’m impressed how much you know, Verity! Good for you.’

  But it was the wrong thing to say; evidently irritated, she looked away.

  Merrell shook his head at Cedric. ‘You ass, Stubbs. Haven’t you worked out the truth about Verity? That the greatest mystery of all in this Academy of ours is not Enhanced Conductance or Latin irregulars, or even how an oaf like Fitz can combine an ape’s body with Newton’s mind, but how it is that a girl like Verity who’s brighter than ten of us together is given nothing more constructive to do than bring our washing water in the mornings, just because of where she was born and the gender she was born with. But of these matters we must not speak. Well then – what shall we do with this little critter?’

  ‘Give him to the Natural History Museum in Kensington, perhaps,’ Cedric said. But the thought was unattractive even as he expressed it; Academy boys seemed instinctively to recoil from any notion involving authority.

  ‘What I’d like to do is send him home,’ Verity said. ‘Back to the Little Moon, where whatever family he has must reside. But I can’t think of a way to do that.’

  ‘Nor I, off hand,’ admitted Merrell.

  They watched the ice crab a while longer, until it seemed to tire. That lenticular body slid down the needle legs, which in turn telescoped away. Verity cautiously covered the cold little body over with straw and bits of rubble, and they crept out of the store, dousing the single lantern.

  Chapter VII

  The Impatience of Harry Merrell

  As the dog days of the term wore on, the daylight hours shortened, and, on a peninsula battered by winds from the west, the cold intensified. Though there was little snow the boys trudged to the workshops or the sports fields over thick layers of frost, blowing on their fingers.

  At least, Verity said, the Phoebean chick need have no fear of a failure of the cold store’s refrigeration. But its three guardians took care that the chick could not escape, for it would thereby surely come to harm; and likewise they tried to restrict its growth by not adding to the supply of concrete fragments it had incorporated into its body.

  Meanwhile the business of the Academy continued. Excitement slowly gathered concerning the planned visit of King Edward VII on New Year’s Eve. The first visible sign of this for the boys was the arrival of an immense Norwegian fir, ripped from its native soil and planted upright by an articulated machine. The servants were set to decorating the tree with bunting, electric bulbs, streamers and glittering tokens in the Germanic style known to be favoured by the royal family.

  Fitzwilliam, meanwhile, continued with his secretive project in the Hole, as the boys had come to call it, behind its constantly guarded perimeter of wire. He clearly resented being taken away from his classes, but he would say nothing to the other boys of what he was up to in there. Perhaps this was to do with confidentiality, but more likely it simply suited Fitz’s own sour character. Why tell a truth, if you can torment your fellows by withholding it? But rumours grew among the boys that Fitz’s project might have something to do with the grand spectacle being planned for the King’s visit.

  Merrell too grew ever more resentful, of Fitz for his secret project. He even challenged him about it, but his only reward was more brutality.

  As Verity tended a split lip, the legacy of his latest spat with the bully, Merrell complained, ‘What’s he up to? Even old Kennet won’t be bribed this time! I long to know – it’s the not knowing that’s driving me crackers, you see.’

  Verity said mildly, ‘Rather than envy.’

  ‘Absolutely – ouch! Mind with that rub, Verity, it stings a fellow.’

  It all came to a head a few days before Christmas. Merrell said he couldn’t stand not knowing any more. So he summoned Verity and Cedric to the engineering workshop he used, the biggest and best-equipped in the Academy. T
hey were to arrive at seven, after supper, with the boys supposedly working in their studies, and the masters drinking away their salaries in the taverns in the town.

  As soon as they got to the workshop, Merrell’s plan was obvious.

  The workshop was one of the wonders of the Academy, which the Reverend always showed off to any visitors with a mind to contributing to the funding. It was laid out for significant engineering works; there were metal-turning machines, lathes, a sheet-metal stamp, presses, vices, and acetylene welding gear, and hooks and pulleys were suspended from chains and rails overhead. But also stacked against the walls were the Dewar bottles and thick insulated gloves that characterised the handling of anti-ice.

  And on the floor and the benches, and mounted on the walls, were fruits of the boys’ ingenuity: machines that rolled and walked and swam and flew, machines that could dig flower beds or lay bricks or blow glass – machines that could kill, equipped with guns and cannon and shells. There were healing machines too, such as a mechanical nurse with long, manipulating, spider-like fingers. But such devices were limited by the peculiar handicap of anti-ice technology, that while it was immensely strong it was also profoundly stupid. A mechanical Florence Nightingale, with her medical wisdom encoded in a stack of punched cards like a Jacquard loom, had never been allowed to practice medicine on anything more vulnerable than a waxwork dummy.

  And in the middle of the floor, mounted on a downward-sloping ramp, was Harry Merrell’s Stoat. Merrell himself stood by the open hatch of his tunnelling machine.

  ‘I should have known,’ Cedric said, peering with some dread into the maw of the machine. ‘You’re going to break into the Hole, aren’t you?’

  ‘How could I not?’ Merrell moaned. ‘They’ve been torturing me, Stubbs old man. They may as well have mounted a huge electric sign: “Harry Merrell, come and get me!”’ He slapped the flank of the Stoat. ‘I could not think of an unobtrusive way to get over or through that fence. So going under it is the only option. What say you, Stubbs? Are you up for it?’