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

by Stephen Baxter

  That’s not to say, of course, that we were not among the more fortunate on that route. Even now the refugee flood was gathering, with the main arteries like our own fast becoming clogged with carriages and carts, and folk on foot and loaded with goods – even rolls of carpet and couches on their backs, or their servants’, so they were like bipedal snails. I wondered what the Phoebeans’ strange telescopes might make of London if they saw it that day, a city of millions of souls like an ants’ nest stirred by a burning stick.

  And we saw worse, even on that first afternoon of travelling. In towns like Watford and Tring and Leighton Buzzard and Bletchley [spellings have been corrected. – A.C.] I saw the signs of plundering and looting, even whole districts burning, and in places the roadside was strewn with dead horses, broken carts, scrapped ammunition boxes, and the silent mounds of corpses. Yet no French soldier had yet penetrated this far. This depredation had surely been inflicted by English soldiers, reeling from their defeat and now fleeing north, a mob of armed savages driven by lust, drunkenness and hunger.

  I saw it in America, and I was not surprised to see it again. Clavell, though, looked shocked, and I felt a stab of mean pleasure at his shame.

  We travelled through the night and for much of the next day, at the end of which we came to a bridge across the river Nene and entered into Northampton, where we would stop the night. This town was populous enough to have deterred the retreating English units, and far enough from London that the lurid news from the south seemed not yet to be believed. Again I had come to a town still pretty much at ease with itself. It would learn; it would learn.

  Clavell arranged for lodgings, supplies and fresh horses, and Miss Herschel was requisitioned a room in a hotel. Collingwood went off to consult at an army field headquarters which had been established in a cattle market, just north of the river. As Anne accompanied him, I went along. The Admiral walked with a terrible stiffness, his rheumatism not helped by the hours on the road.

  Somewhat to my surprise Wellesley was here. Having been given a promotion by the Duke of York to some generalship or other and made field commander of whatever forces the British could still assemble, he was falling back in anticipation of making a fresh stand somewhere in the north, his sappers blowing up every bridge and mining every road behind him. But the French were pursuing him, whole army corps having bypassed London, and it was a lethal chase that could end only in battle.

  I actually saw Wellesley, briefly, though I was not introduced to the man, as he greeted Collingwood. A good-looking fellow in his late forties, with reddish-brown hair and a prominent nose, he wore a plain-looking uniform that was all the more impressive for its lack of ostentation. I did not hear him utter a word. Of course the whole world will know Wellesley by the time this war is won [more familiarly as the Duke of Wellington. – A.C.]; I wish I had cut a lock of his hair!

  While Collingwood met with the general and his staff, Anne and I walked around the camp. For the journey Anne had changed back into her mannish gear, of trousers and boots and jacket, and with her fair hair done up in a bun under her hat. The men were setting themselves up under canvas. A brigade of riflemen arrived as we watched, weary from the road, each man laden with a heavy pack and his weapon, either a Brown Bass musket or a Baker rifle. A cart drew up loaded with their wounded, and as a surgeon unwrapped one man’s bandaged leg you could see the files buzzing, and I turned away before Anne did.

  ‘I suppose you think we are all cowards, we English,’ she said suddenly.

  The remark startled me. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because since Worthing you have seen our armies fold and our citizenry flee and our towns burn. Even Wellesley, our best soldier, plots a retreat.’

  I shook my head. ‘I sense Wellesley knows what he’s doing; he will pick a fight with the Ogre on his ground and his terms. And you’re no coward to flee a hurricane. I saw the French armies at work in America, remember – you Europeans have yet to have a real taste of it.’

  She frowned. ‘The French campaign in America was not much mentioned here, in the newspapers. There was little respect for the American show of arms, and I suspect the French effort was belittled because of it.’

  ‘And so you underestimated us, and Napoleon.’

  I had seen some of it, as I had been in New Orleans when Napoleon’s army descended there in the summer of the Year Three, a sneak landing of a force supposedly sent over to subdue a rebellious French colony on Santo Domingo - this at a time when some in our government hoped that Napoleon would cede all his remaining possessions in America to Washington! I was working for Fulton then, and doing some business for him in that French territory to progress his steam engine projects, there being little enthusiasm for his technologies in America, and little cash.

  It’s difficult to remember now, but much of the world then had high hopes of Napoleon, as a champion of liberty around the globe. Well, what he was championing was the interests of his nascent French empire against the British, and once landed in America he burned his way inland, stirring up a ferment and liberating the slaves in each state he crossed even while his soldiers plundered. His purpose was evidently to turn North America French all over – and, ultimately, to use the mighty resources of the Atlantic realm to wage his wars against England and the monarchies of Europe.

  ‘We put up a fight,’ I said to Anne, ‘and I saw some of it; but we were a young country with a small army, and officers that were either sixty-year-old veterans of the War of Independence or political appointees, and beyond that only the militia, ill-trained and worse equipped - and we had no money to fight a war anyhow.’ That was in part because of the British blockade of trade, an action I always believed would have led to war were there not bigger fish to fry. ‘There was a decisive battle at Savannah, after which the army was licked and only the militias remained, but Napoleon rejected peace overtures from both federal and state governments, and went on until he had sacked Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and at last besieged New York City itself.

  ‘Yet the country is not subdued. The militia pretty quickly dissolved into fighters for freedom – irregular soldiers if you like, cutting at the French and melting back into the woods and the mountains. But the French strike back by executing townsfolk and farmers.’ I fell silent, my head full of one image I had seen: a woodsman naked, castrated, his hands and feet cut off and his eyes put out, nailed upside down to a tree; alongside him a Frenchman in similar condition. I spared her these details. [And if he had not, for I had the stomach for it, I might have thought better of him. – A.C.]

  ‘It’s become a bitter but low-level struggle, ma’am, with atrocities on both sides. A new sort of war, not between armies, but between nations.’

  ‘If Wellesley fails, so it may be here,’ Anne said grimly.

  ‘You’d better pray not. Of course it need not have come to pass if the British government had come to America’s aid, as requested.’

  She bridled at that. ‘It is a bugbear to my father, how Jefferson’s administration railed against all things British and courted Napoleon, only to come crying for help when the Ogre turned. Anyhow the British government did send arms to the continent.’

  ‘To equip an Indian army under the Shawnee! Thus hoping to create an even bigger problem for the Americans in the future. Perhaps Pitt and his predecessors should have spent the nation’s money on the Royal Navy, rather than chasing phantoms from Mars, and if so he’d have had the muscle to stop Napoleon striking across the Atlantic at us - and indeed to have given Nelson a fighting chance at Trafalgar.’

  This irritated her, and she snapped back at me, ‘And what of you, Ben Hobbes? What’s your story? You bleat about the English, but did you fight the French on your own soil?’

  I shrugged. ‘If you must know, I was taken captive after the siege of Baltimore. I was questioned brisk – the French inquisitors refined their techniques during the Terror, you know. I would not be alive now if they had not learned I had
worked with Fulton. I was shipped off thence to Paris to work on the Nautilus and other designs.’

  But Fulton, an honourable man, had taken against his French customers the moment Napoleon set foot in New Orleans, and soon effected an escape to England. I, left behind, did whatever was asked of me, intent on staying alive.

  Anne was curious, confused, angry. Well, it was a confused and angry time, an age when the highest ideals of liberty and brotherhood had been wrested by a monster, and you weren’t sure who to fight. Yet my feelings at that moment were different. Her face, flushed with the cold and her strong feelings, her mouth softly open as her breath came rapid – it gave her a look of lust, not unlike the vibrant passion of the New Orleans whores who had once warmed my bed, and I imagined taking her there and then in that muddy English field! Dare I venture, she shared some of what I was feeling [I did not. – A.C.]. But she turned away, and the moment was past, and she walked briskly back to her father.

  A fusilier not far from me, sawing steadily at the corns on his bare feet, shrugged at me and smiled as if to say, ‘Women! War’s easy by comparison.’ But I did not dignify his familiarity.

  Chapter IX

  We jolted over more bruising roads, doing fifty or sixty or seventy miles a day. We stopped at Nottingham and Leeds, and joined the Great North Road, and it was clear to me we were outstripping most of Wellesley’s forces and the deserters and all but the most panicky of refugees. Yet even here the country was in turmoil, for the news travelled even faster than we did, and there were ever more excited rumours of the approach of the Ogre, or of fresh French troops landing on the northern coasts.

  On the fourth night we reached Darlington, yet another small town on yet another river. And here the pattern differed, for after one night in the town our party diverged from the main trunk road and headed off east, towards Stockton. We paused before we reached the town, our broughams and carriages pulling over from the rough road surface, the marines clambering down and blowing on their mittened hands, and the dog bounding off after rabbits. Collingwood, Clavell, Anne, and a number of the senior people formed up for a walk across the desolate country - and I was summoned too, for Collingwood said I was to meet his ‘Troglodyte genius of the mines.’

  And it was a mine I was taken down into, entirely to my surprise! We were met at a hut by a site manager, black in the face with coal dust, and we descended by ladders and galleries deep into the earth – down, down we went, more than three hundred yards below the crust. Men shuffled to and from their shifts at the faces, and I saw clanking carts dragged along iron rails by boys and ponies. In that cold, dank, dark place, nobody spoke or sang. A place of dismal subterranean labour!

  And in one place I saw something that evoked unwelcome memories. Lying in a deep, shallow gallery cut into a seam was a kind of dome, shallow, downturned, its upper carapace milky. I could see no reason to encounter a Phoebean monster down here – perhaps this was a salt dome, or other geologic feature.

  At last Collingwood paused, and his men gathered around, and I saw that we were poised above a pit. Men stood about, and the place was illuminated by lanterns suspended high from a beam, as if to shed light but little heat. Down in the pit, blocks of ice stood proud of heaps of straw (I wondered from where they got the ice.) And in the straw lay lumpy rocks, pale, rather like eggs, and I thought I saw something stir – small and furtive, like a mouse, yet it had a certain mechanical grace that was like no living thing. All this glimpsed in shadows.

  It was evident we were waiting for somebody, and Collingwood grew impatient. ‘Mr Watt? Are you here in the dark? ‘Tis Cuddy Collingwood come to call!’ At last a fellow came lumbering out of the shadow, in his late sixties perhaps, short, heavy-set, and evidently not in the best of health for he wheezed and coughed throughout. Collingwood introduced him to me with a kind of flourish. ‘I am sure an engineer like you, Hobbes, will have heard of James Watt! The steam engineer par excellence.’

  But I disappointed him in my non-recognition.

  Watt, wiping oily hands, spoke with a Scotch accent so broad I could scarce comprehend it, and I offer only a rough translation here. ‘Ah, well, my days of glory with the steam are long behind me. Though, Hobbes, you may have heard of my work on the Newcomen engine – how I increased its efficiency manifold with my separated condenser, and, by applying it to steam pumps, vastly increased the depth to which mines such as this could be reached – no? But if I had not been diverted by my work on the Phoebeans -’

  As if on cue there was a sharp crack from the pit, almost like a musket shot, and everyone turned. As I looked down I saw that one of those eggs had shattered into shards, like an over-heated pot.

  Anne came to stand by me, close enough that I could smell her rosewater and powder. It was a welcome human closeness in that place of dank darkness and strangeness. She pointed. ‘I love to stand over such nurseries, and watch.’

  ‘Nurseries?’

  ‘We collect the eggs from the big queens we have caged in the Highlands. Follow it for a few hours and you can see their ontogenesis, or part of it … See, the egg fragments will recombine to form a disc, like that one.’ And I saw it, like a telescope lens of smooth white ice nestling in the straw. ‘And then, if we are lucky – oh, look in the corner!’ There was another disc. And I saw how a ring of pillars not a foot high, slim as pencils, shot up around the rim of the disc, and then the disc itself slid up, somehow supported by the pillars. And then the pillars, still upright, slid back and forth under the lens-roof, and the whole assemblage pushed around through the straw.

  ‘That’s how they’re born,’ Watt growled. ‘Let it loose in the stuff of the earth, the water and the rock, and it will grow as big as you like.’

  It was a nursery, I saw – a nursery of Phoebeans, there in the English ground! I demanded, ‘Why would you encourage the growth of such dangerous monsters? I thought you claimed to be at war with them, Admiral!’

  Watt answered, ‘For their energy, sir – for their sheer power. You can control ‘em, you know, with a tickle of electric. And you can always bank a fire under them and let Newton’s Calenture seize up their limbs. Use them right, use them as draught animals, and the energy they deliver far exceeds any steam engine I could dream up! And it’s to this I’ve devoted my declining years.’

  Collingwood clapped me on the back. ‘And, Hobbes, it is by using their own energies against them that I intend to thwart the Phoebeans’ empire-building. Energy and empire, my lad! Those are the words that will characterise this new century of ours.’

  Anne pouted. ‘Not “liberty”, father? Or “rights”?’

  Once more I wondered to what insane adventure I was becoming committed.

  Collingwood grasped the old engineer’s slumped shoulders. ‘And I’ve come to collect you, James. It’s time. I have Pitt’s own instructions.’ He patted his breast pocket. ‘You must come to Ulgham.’

  Watt looked troubled. ‘The Cylinder? But so much is untried … Must we do this so soon?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, for the French are on the way.’

  And that was the first a wide-eyed Watt had heard of Napoleon’s invasion of England. It’s so with many an obsessive thinker, so I’ve learned – Fulton had something of it about him – his own work fills up the world for him, until the devil comes knocking at the door.

  A runner came to find Collingwood. Lieutenant Clavell took the message, read it by lamplight, handed it to the Admiral, then gave me a tug on the sleeve. ‘Come with me, Hobbes. We’ve a little scouting to do. It’s the French. An advance party’s been spotted.’

  ‘What use will I be?’

  ‘There are naval officers among ‘em … I’ll make our apologies to the Admiral.’

  And so he led me away, and I looked back at Anne over her pit of Phoebean crab-babies, and wondered if I would see her again!

  Chapter X

  A silent marine led Clavell and me and a couple of companions across the country about a mile, and brought us to
a ridge of high ground. And here, lying on damp English grass, we gazed down upon the French party. They had been spotted by Collingwood’s scouts, for, as small a force as he commanded, each time we stopped he had his men roam the country for signs of the French. And tonight that cautious strategy had paid off.

  There might have been fifty of them, gathered around a handful of fires. Horses grazed where they had been tied beneath a copse of trees. There were no farm buildings nearby, but the field was roughly walled, and I saw they had stolen a couple of young sheep they were skinning with their bayonets. Their voices drifted on the night, coarse French jokes drifting across the north English country.

  ‘Clearly a scouting party,’ murmured Clavell, into my ear. ‘See how they’ve made ready for the night in that copse.’ They had used loose branches and dead leaves to make shelters. ‘It’s the way the French armies work, living off the land – you know that. If you’re unlucky they’ll take apart your house and your furniture to make their bonfires. It can’t be a coincidence they’ve come this far and fast. After all we’re ahead even of Wellesley’s advanced units. There are navy officers among ‘em. I hoped you might recognise them.’

  ‘It was a damn big flotilla that crossed the Channel, Lieutenant!’

  ‘Nevertheless you were with it, and now you are here, and now they are here. Take a look.’

  He handed me his glass; I peered through the eyepiece. There was indeed at least one French navy officer among the gossiping troopers – and, to my shock, I knew him. ‘Gourdon. I was under his command on board the Indomitable – from which the Nautilus was launched. I’d recognise that bloated fool anywhere, and that ugly pigtail.’

  Clavell considered this. ‘Here’s what I conclude, then. You must have been seen when you were picked up by the Terrier. The Ogre and his marshals are devils for detail, and they must have wondered why you are so important that the Royal Navy sought you out on the night England was invaded. Or perhaps they know something of Collingwood’s project, and of his employment of Fulton, and Fulton’s connection to you. There are spies everywhere! Either way they have risked this small party of men to track you down and find out what you’re up to – and why you’re so valuable.’ He glanced at me, his eyes invisible in the dark as he whispered. ‘You’re an important man, Hobbes.’