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

by Stephen Baxter

  He said angrily, ‘It’s the best we can do, and what’s the best you can do, Hobbes? Have you ever explored that limit? Anyhow you have served your purpose, or so future ages will believe. You have been the instrument of Providence in bringing Isaac Newton safely to this place.’

  I resented that. ‘I’m nobody’s instrument. I’m not a bit part player in your drama, sir. Anyhow, who’s to say there will be future ages to make a judgement one way or the other? Perhaps the world ends here tonight at the feet of the Phoebeans.’

  ‘No. The battle may be won or lost, but humanity will go on.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He tapped the Bible. ‘I have spent my life learning to read God’s truth, boy, which is coded in the motion of the planets, in the colours of a rainbow – in the fall of an apple from a tree. And it is likewise coded in the holy books, which are similarly God’s creation. I have deduced that without a shadow of a doubt the world has three more centuries to run at least, for the Second Coming of Christ can be no earlier.’

  I was awed by his words, yet I have always been repelled by holy fools. I stood, grabbing the decanter. ‘You are an old man. The Phoebeans will kill you before the sun rises again, as they will kill all of us here.’

  He looked at me closely. ‘What is it you fear so bad, man? The pain of death, or God’s justice thereafter?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said bitterly, ‘but oblivion.’ And I treated Newton to a précis of my own theological journey. ‘My father’s pious beatings taught me to dread God and His punishment – but at least He was there, present in the pain! But then at college I encountered your new breed of Natural Philosophers with their Natural Religion, who speak of God as having created the world and then stepped out of it. Thus they removed Him from the fabric of life altogether. And they quoted you, sir, saying that your equations revealed a bonfire of Immanence.’

  Newton nodded. ‘They misquoted me, then. The Natural Religionists use my Mathematick to prop up their dubious French Philosophies.’ He tapped his Bible. ‘I do not believe in the primacy of reason over revelation, man, though I do believe we have been given our reason to riddle out God’s truth, as He has inscribed it in scripture and in nature alike. But I have grown old seeing this argument unfold. You, though, are of the first generation to grow up being taught that God has abandoned you. No wonder you are afraid – terrified of oblivion! But you need not fear. God is grander than you or I, Jack, and He is not gone.’

  ‘You know no more about Him than I do, you old fraud.’

  ‘Go to the vallum, boy,’ he said tiredly. ‘Add your strength to the shovels and the pitch bearers. Perhaps you will be the instrument of Providence in saving the world.’

  ‘I will go to laugh at the fools who toil like ants there, and who will soon die. There is no Providence, Newton. There is no God, or He has abandoned us. Write that in your Philosophy.’

  And with that I stormed out, the brandy steaming in my head, taking the decanter with me.

  Chapter VIII

  The vallum might indeed have been dwarfed by the Romans’ mightier works, but it was an impressive enough sight as I approached. It was a great brown gouge that sliced through the fields and copses to either side of the Great North Road, sore disrupting the farmers’ tillage, and stretched off to either horizon.

  All along its length people toiled, supervised by a few soldiers, churchmen, merchants and other dignitaries. Already wood was being piled up in the gully, and waiting by the lip were queues of carts bearing barrels of pitch and oil and camphor and fat. Looking further afield I saw that woodsmen were at work in the patches of forest nearby, and more carts brought fresh-cut timber to add to the construction. I began to see the design. This was to be, not a mere ditch, a vast linear bonfire.

  It was about noon as I came upon the vallum and saw this, all of it thrown up in a few hours. And on the northern horizon I could see the mobile city of the Phoebeans, their animate structures both tall and short, motionless now but waiting for the night.

  I asked a clerk for Defoe, and soon found him. He had a sort of command tent set up for him, with the mayor, the captain of the city garrison, and other officials. Within was a large-scale map of the works, and runners came to and fro bearing messages to the workers and the surveyors who guided them. But Defoe himself was not in the tent but down in the vallum, wielding a shovel with the rest.

  When he saw me he clambered out and sat with me on the lip of the vallum. I offered him a swig of Newton’s brandy. He was stripped to his shirt, and was sweating with the work. He said, ‘I will swear the day is a tad warmer than it has been. Perhaps the winter is loosing its grip at last – eh?’

  I looked up at a sky that was a shield of grey, and the frost on the broken ground, and felt the chill in my own bones. ‘You are warm because you are sixty years old and working like a navvie.’

  ‘Ah, but I’m alive. Alive, eh! Just like my Crusoe, and determined to stay so. You saw Newton, then?’

  ‘He believes we will survive because it says so in the Book of Daniel.’

  Defoe grunted. ‘He sees further than the rest of us, Jack. And if there are forces at work in the world for whose purposes we are mere instruments – well, then, it is up to us to behave as if it were not so. Eh? Come now, be a sport. Grab a shovel and a bucket of pitch, and help build this wall of fire to keep out those Phoebean monsters. What do you say?’

  ‘I say it’s a waste of time.’ I pointed out the obvious flaw, that even if the Phoebeans were repelled by this improvised barrier, there was nothing to stop them flanking us by simply walking around it, and then on into Newcastle, and that would be that.

  ‘Ah, but at least digging it will pass the time until nightfall, when we will see what’s what. And what else are you going to do – read a book? Never find another like my Crusoe, you know.’

  ‘Your ebullience is unbearable,’ I said. But I stood and stripped down to my jerkin. ‘Give me a shovel; I would banish the cold.’

  So we laboured through the rest of the day, the two of us side by side. We made hasty meals of army tack, and I fortified myself with swigs from my brandy decanter. And, if you want to know, I took some care to save my strength. If all failed I wanted to have the wind to do a bit of running. Defoe noted my slacking without comment.

  Dark fell too soon, and we worked still as the Phoebeans started to move, revived by the night and its deepening cold. You could hear them, a dreadful grinding as if one of Defoe’s northern ice rivers were pouring down on us. The captain sent runners out to illuminate their position with torches, but it was scarce necessary as you could see the Electrick fire crackle around their limbs, eerie flashes in the dark. I made out that Queen, a quarter mile tall, with acolytes monstrous in themselves scuttling around the ground at her feet, and dancing on her back. Still we kept digging, though some lost their nerve and fled back to the city; still Defoe and the other commanders held off ordering the lighting of the great bonfire until the Phoebean army should be close enough, lest we waste our fuel.

  Towards the end I heard a kind of singing in the air, and something clattered to the frozen ground beside me. I bent and picked it up. It was an egg of ice, spat out by the Queen or one of her attendants. I dropped it and crushed it under my heel.

  ‘That’s it, lads,’ Defoe called. ‘If they start to seed the ground we’re standing on we’re in trouble. We can’t leave it any longer – light the fires! Light, light!’

  The word was echoed by calls all along the length of our vallum. ‘Light, light!’ Workers scrabbled to get out of the ditch, and I saw wheeling sparks as torches were hurled into the works. A wall of fire raised itself up before us, and the thousands who had laboured here cheered.

  As they neared our fire the lead Phoebeans slowed, moving jerkily as Newton’s calenture afflicted them, heat congealing their strange Electrick blood. Some of them suffered more directly, their limbs softening before the flame; they were after all creatures of ice. But they would soon ha
ve overwhelmed our line if simple melting were their only weakness; it was the calenture that stalled the lead units and blocked their passage before they could reach us.

  Now the army’s guns spoke, sending balls and shells raining into the crowd of Phoebeans. It was like firing into an ice grotto; delicate limbs smashed with tinkles like broken windows, and those fat lenticular bodies fell to their ruin. But the shells were few, their aim erratic, and the Phoebeans many, and there were always more to take their place.

  And even now ice eggs were landing behind the line of the vallum. They were met with boots and spades and thrown into the fire. Here and there, however, ice crabs emerged, their lenticular bodies sliding up their temples of limbs; we knew from experience that before the night was done such seedlings could grow into mighty trees of ice and Electrick, and we smashed and stamped them down. But many more eggs sailed over our heads into the dark, and I knew we could not get them all, and that new monsters were already birthing in the dark behind us.

  We laboured on through the night. I stayed close to Defoe, so I could hear the reports brought by the runners. The line was holding everywhere, the citizens of Newcastle showing a courage I for one would not have anticipated.

  And likewise I did not anticipate that the Phoebeans made no attempt to flank us; instead they simply came onto our fire in waves, one replacing another when it fell, and the great crowd bunching up being the barrier. It was this that finally convinced me that the Phoebeans are animals, not sentient in any degree; we were fighting a plague, or a stampede, not an army.

  ‘Ha!’ I said bitterly to Defoe, swigging at my brandy as I remarked on this. ‘Swift should have stayed alive to learn that.’

  He eyed me with some disgust. ‘You might chuck that brandy on the fire. It would do more good than in your belly.’

  I laughed at him and walked away.

  After that the night became a simple race between the turning of the world and the exhaustion of our fuel, and the growth of the new beasts behind us. If we could hold out to the dawn we might have a chance, and to that end we worked flat out to bring more fuel to the fires. We even had carts coming up from the city piled high with roof timbers from broken houses, and bits of furniture – anything that would burn.

  In the small hours the skies cleared, and the Comet’s tail stretched. It was a pretty sight by the vallum, that wall of flame sending sparks high up into a star-strewn sky. But none of us had eyes for beauty, not that night, for the cold helped the Phoebeans.

  We came heartbreaking close to winning it.

  I could actually see the first roseate glow in the eastern sky when our lumber ran out, and then the pitch, and we fell exhausted from the hauling of it. And as our fires died at last the Phoebeans closest to the flames began to stir, the strange calenture leaving their limbs, and they probed ever closer to the vallum.

  We fell back. People slipped away, returning to their homes to face the end.

  It was when a brute of a Phoebean burst out of the ground not ten feet from me, smashing up Defoe’s command tent in the process, that I decided enough was enough.

  ‘That’s it for me, Defoe.’

  Defoe looked done in, for he had laboured all night and laboured still, a work for which he was too old. But he yelled, ‘We’re not dead yet!’ He ran towards the tent and swung his pickaxe against a Phoebean leg, and the delicate limb smashed into pieces. Of course the beast had other limbs which slid around to take the weight, but Defoe laid about him like a madman, smashing limbs until the air was filled with tinkling fragments.

  And the great lenticular body began to tip, a falling roof over Defoe’s head.

  I scrabbled out of the way. ‘Get out of there, man!’

  But even if he were not exhausted he could not have reached safety. He ran and he fell, and the sharp rim of the Phoebean’s carcass came down and fair pinned his right leg. Yet he lived. He lifted his head, his face contorted with pain, and looked me in the eye. ‘For God’s sake, Jack!’ He reached out his hand.

  I did not run, not yet. I might have freed him, even if I had to chop off his trapped foot with an axe. But another Phoebean burst up not yards away, sending a squad of soldiers wheeling in the air. And another beyond him, and another. We were overrun, and it was not a place for Jack Hobbes to linger.

  Defoe saw the intent in my face before I moved a muscle. He roared, ‘So you are a coward at heart after all.’

  ‘Save your breath for God, Dan, for you will meet Him in a minute.’ I threw the brandy decanter down before him, and turned and ran.

  Amid the clamour of the battle, the huge creaking of the Phoebeans as they overwhelmed the vallum, and the roar of the guns that were still manned, I heard Defoe’s voice calling, ‘Damn you, Jack Hobbes! Damn you to hell!’

  I ran back down the Great North Road, pushing my way through a fleeing crowd of soldiers and citizens alike. As I have said, I had conserved my strength for the trials to come, and now that stratagem paid off as I outran the exhausted.

  Newcastle’s walls were manned by soldiers and citizens preparing to mount a last defence of the city with half-pikes and muskets that must have been old in the time of King Charles. Antients taken from the ships on the Tyne fluttered over their heads, and it was a brave sight. But I laughed at them all as I shoved my way through the crowds at the New Gate.

  I ran on down Newgate Street. The cathedral was packed to the gills with weeping penitents. I kept running for I knew sanctuary was to be found only to the south, far from the Phoebeans, not within the flimsy walls of any church.

  I pushed past the castle and made it to the bridge that led over the river to the south, but this, you may well imagine, was blocked by struggling humanity, a good few of them soldiers flying from the colours, all rendered as static by the sheer numbers as the waters of the frozen Tyne below. And in this mass my own flight came to an end, for no matter how hard I punched and kicked and trampled I could make no progress. I found myself stalled at last under the sign of a pawnbroker’s shop, long icicles dangling from the three balls; it was a type of establishment that had won much trade from me in the past, and I laughed again, this time at myself, for I wondered if those hanging icicles would be my last sight on earth.

  Then a tremendous groan came from beneath the bridge. There was a surge of the curious and the frightened, and I found myself propelled to the parapet and crushed there, looking down into the river. The ice surface, months old, littered and scarred by bonfires, was heaving and cracking in great concentric circles. I fought viciously to get away from that place, for I knew what was coming, but I was trapped.

  The Phoebean’s limbs shot into the air, scattering chunks of Tyne ice that rained down over the crowded bridge. We screamed and struggled, helpless. Then up came the lenticular body, and soon a Phoebean no less than a hundred feet tall was grinding its way through the river ice towards land. It climbed up out of the water near the abutment of the bridge, and strode easily into the streets of the city, scattering cobbles and people with effortless strength. It mounted the castle mound itself, demolishing the ancient buildings; and it stood in the ruins, monarch of all it surveyed.

  And there it stopped.

  On the bridge, still we struggled against each other, but I stared at the Phoebean, wondering why it was so motionless, and wondering why its fellows did not rise up after it out of the river.

  And I felt a splash of water on my neck.

  I looked up. I was back under those pawnbroker’s spheres once again. A shaft of sunlight, cast by the mighty solar hull rising above the eastern horizon, played on the dangling icicles - and for the first time in months the sun delivered enough heat to melt a grain of ice.

  The people around me grasped the essence of it, and a great roar went up along the bridge. Suddenly the Phoebeans could not escape their deadly calenture, and their Electrick blood congealed. Everywhere they perforce stood still.

  I saw citizens scrambling up the castle mound. They used half-pikes and sta
ves and lumps of masonry from the castle to smash at that Phoebean’s limbs until it fell to the ground.

  Chapter IX

  Ten years have gone by since that momentous morning – ten years before I could bear to put pen to paper to set down my recollections of the tumultuous times in which, all unwitting and very unwilling, I found myself at the very centre.

  It was not over when the sun rose that morning, of course, and the first breath of the belated spring halted the Phoebeans and saved us. Night fell soon enough, and the battle resumed. But as the world warmed day by day we knew we had gained an invaluable reinforcement in Nature herself.

  In temperate latitudes all over the world, the Phoebeans were driven off or destroyed. Now they lurk in the wastes of the Frozen Ocean, and are beaten back when they try to venture south. In Britain it is said that some Phoebeans haunt the Scottish Highlands, and the King has had Hadrian’s Wall built up as a firewall against any future advance – though he has named it the Geordie Wall.

  Newton lived on only a few years after the Ice War, but other Philosophers have followed in his eminent footsteps, and we have learned much of the Phoebeans since his day, though I opine that for every hard fact learned from a dissection of a Phoebean carcass there are a hundred interpretations. Still, I think we know that the Phoebeans are indeed creatures born in the cold outer halls of our system of planets; perhaps the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are balls made entirely of ice among which Phoebeans swarm and play like nymphs in a spring. They may have spread inwards as far as Mars, which is a small, chill world and so ripe for a Phoebean colony, and some of the astronomers claim to witness their works there. But to them our earth is a torrid zone, and the calenture that afflicts them is like the tropical diseases that assail Europeans who sail too close to the equator.

  The future may be more secure. Those who study the weather assure us that the world was once warmer than it is now – once the Romans grew grapes in Newcastle, which gives you some indication. Perhaps the cold age that afflicts us now will pass; perhaps there will come a day when we will no longer be able to build bonfires on the Thames and the Tyne every winter, and our fortress of heat will become stronger yet.