Asimov's SF, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Isaac? What has he to do with me?”

  “Isaac helps us understand, Jack. If not for the laws he has discerned in the sky we would not know the Comet, or where it has come from. We would cower from it, and when the Phoebeans sprout from the ground we would fall at their feet, or we would frantically sacrifice each other to appease those icy gods, as the savage Indians did as Cortez approached. We need Newton, Jack. Without him we really are as Swift saw us, as degraded animals who do not even understand what destroys them. Help me save him.”

  I sat stubborn, not wanting to face him, or the gnawing doubt that was undermining my determination. Yet I hesitated; I did not leave.

  “I'll do you a deal,” Defoe said, wheedling once more in that damnable way of his. “Come out with me now, in the night, and help me bring the horses back from Shilbottle. Only that. Then you can do as you like. Will you consider that?”

  And so it went! You will not be surprised if you have followed me this far to learn that my indecision almost matches my cowardice, and that by the end of that day I was driving a purloined trap with a precious scholarly cargo through the New Gate in Newcastle's city walls.

  * * * *

  VII

  Newcastle is a lumpy sort of a city, built on the hills that surround the mouth of the Tyne. It is one terminus of Hadrian's Wall, Carlisle being the other on the west coast of England. So this was the end of civilization even in those better days, and the Romans had the right idea, if you ask me, in leaving as their most enduring legacy a bridge across the river to take their Great North Road on to more congenial realms in the south. That bridge has gone, but another has been built in its place, itself elderly, a crowded gangway crammed with shops and houses.

  The city itself is skirted, just as Newton said, by a curtain of walls, a semi-circle complete with turrets and towers and gates that abuts onto the north bank of the river. The walls were built by the English to keep out the Scots, and then built up again by one lot of Englishmen to keep out another lot during the Civil War.

  If you pass inside the walls you will find a city cut in two by a stream they call the Lort Burn, and dominated by a spectacularly ugly Norman castle on its keep, and a cathedral and a handsome church or two. And that is pretty much it. If you like twisting clutter, backyards full of sheep and goats and cows and pigs, streets full of sailors and traders and the riff-raff who prey on ‘em, and all spiced by a pall of smoke and the dust of the coal they ship out of here to all parts of the realm, Newcastle's your town.

  We arrived in the evening. As we sought a house to lodge, Defoe commandeered a few boys and paid them a penny piece each to find the mayor, the army captain, the bishop, the guild presidents—anybody who could be of use in putting Newton's program in place.

  But the city was in a ferment.

  The Phoebean caravan had slowed during that day, coming to rest near Morpeth. By now the Phoebeans had formed a front a mile wide, sprawling to either side of the Roman road as the ice crabs proliferated and grew into fresh monsters. The icy force was only a few miles away, a tide that would surely overwhelm the city when night came, or the next, and the Phoebeans marched again.

  And all we had to fight off the monsters was a thin line of troops who manned the walls. The town's garrison had been stripped on orders from London, for there were panicky rumors abroad that with England prostrate beneath the heel of the Phoebeans, the Scots were once more rebelling under their Stuart Pretender in the north, and to the south the French, smarting after the War of the Spanish Succession, were crossing the Channel to have another go.

  And so people fled. All through that night, even as Defoe and Newton labored to put a bit of backbone into the city's governors, the townsfolk packed up their goods and streamed south over that crowded old bridge, the richer folk taking to broughams or coaches and the poor going on foot and suffering as the poor usually do. Only a few ships left the port, packed to the gunwales.

  As for me, I walked down through the old center of the town until I came upon the river, which as every winter was frozen solid, save where the ice had been broken to allow the ships to escape. I made for the quayside, and through that night I spent the last of my money in the taverns and whorehouses that line that fine boulevard.

  You may wonder why I didn't run, as I had threatened to do since Shilbottle. The simple answer is that Defoe and Newton had between them gotten under my skin. I was more afraid of the blackness in my soul that would close on me if I ran than of the ice monsters if I did not run. So there you are; my integrity as a coward is intact.

  By the time the sun came up I was flat broke and had a head that felt as if it had been stamped on by a Phoebean, and I cared nothing of it. For we had all survived the night; the Phoebeans had not fallen on us, not yet.

  * * * *

  In daylight that seemed brighter than for some days—though that might have been the liquor working in me—a boy came to find me, sent by Defoe. He would escort me to the rather grand house close to the New Gate that Defoe had secured for himself and Newton.

  On the way, I noticed a change in the town. The criers were out this morning, ringing their bells and working their leather lungs, announcing that on the orders of King George all able-bodied men and women should report to the gates in the wall's north curtain. Firewood was to be carried, and oil and fat, anything flammable, and spades and picks. Those ships’ companies in port were ordered to lend their efforts to the common cause. Hastily printed bills bearing much the same proclamation were pasted to the walls all through the town, and riders went out into the countryside with a similar command.

  Well, just as it had been the day before, I saw plenty of people making ready to flee, some of them indeed alarmed by the very call to arms. But as I headed north with the lad, out of the old town center and up Newgate Street, a few sturdier folk gathered, armed with shovels and buckets of pitch and so forth, men and women and a few older children. That determined, grim-faced throng swelled, and a few pastors joined us and led the singing of psalms, so it was quite a band of Christian heroes that approached the New Gate.

  The lad brought me to Defoe's house without difficulty; he asked me for a penny, and his reward was a clip around the ear. Defoe was gone from the house, supervising works outside the city.

  But here was old Newton, sitting in a huge armchair beside a blazing fire, wrapped so thick in blankets that only his face showed, and his mane of hair, and the withered hands that held his Bible. Bottles of physicals stood on the mantle by him. He looked like a great toad squatting there, but after the ditch at Shilbottle I did not begrudge him this bit of warmth.

  I sat beside the fire myself. There was a decanter of brandy and I helped myself to a snort; it helped clear the fumes of my indulgence.

  Newton eyed me and my stained clothing. “Out all night, were thee?”

  “What's it to you?”

  “Would have been better to get your sleep. It's a long day and night we face. And while you drank and whored we worked.” There was an occasional table before him; he kicked this.

  The table bore a map, a printed-up image of the city and its surrounds, neatly lettered. A coarse slash had been marked in charcoal across the country a mile or so to the north of the walls. “What's this?”

  “Our defense against the Phoebeans. An earthwork—one of the greatest since the Romans, I dare say—a trench like the vallum that the Romans strung along behind their Wall.”

  I snorted. “How long is this, three, four miles? You wouldn't impress the Caesars.” I felt embittered, and took another slug of brandy, perhaps unwisely. “And this is your defense of mankind—a scrape in the ground, to stop a species that has traveled between worlds?”

  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 th
at. “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 judgment 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 colors 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 revealed it in scripture and in nature. 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, but 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.

  * * * *

  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 not a mere ditch, but 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 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.

  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 navvy.”

  “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 labored 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 of a 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.

  At last 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 labored 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 have 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 windo
ws, 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 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 labored 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. “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.