We came heartbreakingly 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 labored all night and labored still, a work for which he was too old. But he yelled, “We're not dead yet!” He ran toward the tent and swung his pickaxe against a Phoebean leg, and the delicate limb smashed into pieces. Of course the beast had many other limbs that slid around to take the weight, but Defoe laid about him like a madman, smashing limbs until the air was filled with tinkling ice fragments. And the great lenticular body began to tip, a 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 it, 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 clamor 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 defense 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 colors, 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 into 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 toward land. It rose 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 staves and lumps of masonry from the castle to smash at that Phoebean's limbs until it fell to the ground.
* * * *
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 center.
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 inward as far as Mars, which is a small, chill world and so ripe for a Phoebean colony. 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.
The Phoebeans have a foothold on our Earth, but no more. But they wait for us out there in the cold and the dark, as beasts of Norse myth lurk in the chill beyond the glow of the hall's fire.
There are some, in fact, who dream of just such encounters. The study of the Electrick blood of the captured Phoebeans is making a revolution of our Philosophies. Just as Newton theorized, there are paths in those icy carcasses where curren
ts of Electrick effluvium may run forever without friction, generating powerful Magnetick attractions in the process. It is this that gives the Phoebeans their extraordinary strength. A new generation of scholars is bending Newton's Calculus to explain it all, and they dream of harnessing such energies to drive Engines far more powerful than a water-wheel—they dream of building Comets of their own that might sail out among the planets, so we can go and see for ourselves.
And they will be comets with Jesuits aboard! Some pious codheads argue that Phoebeans must have souls, and dream of saving them with God's word, as Saint Augustine saved the Saxons. Missionaries to the moons of Jupiter! But fools they are, for I saw for myself how the Phoebeans dashed themselves over and over on our fires in the vallum that night, all instinct and no wit, like stampeding cattle.
All this for the future, which I am glad I will not see, for I will be dead like the others. Dead, yes, like Newton, and Defoe whom I betrayed with his best book probably behind him, and poor Swift with his best book not yet written, for I am assured by those wiser than me that the satirical traveler's tale Defoe so feared would have been a masterpiece.
It was my fortune, though, that Defoe and Swift took the secret of my final cowardice to the grave, with Newton too addled to speak of it, so that for my part in the adventure, especially the saving of Newton, I was rewarded by the King himself, with a knighthood and, more importantly, with a handsome payment. Sir Jack Hobbes! What an injustice. At least I did not disappoint the shade of Defoe in what followed, for within a year I had lost the lot in a speculative South Sea stock venture, and I was upon the Parish once more. No matter! I do not expect to die rich.
I did not deserve such rewards, of course. Newton called me an instrument of Providence, just as some claim the thaw that defeated the Phoebeans was a miracle. But the truth of the matter was that humanity was threatened by one insensate force in the Phoebeans, and saved by another in the turning of the seasons. All our struggling made not a bit of difference to any of it, and where's the Providence in that? In a universe like a purposeless machine there is nothing before us, nothing after us, nothing for us to do but make the most of our moments in the light. I need have no shame in my clinging to life.
And yet I am haunted by my last vision of Defoe under the Phoebean carcass, and how he hurled his curses at me even with his dying breath.
Copyright (c) 2008 Stephen Baxter
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Department: ON BOOKS
by Paul Di Filippo
Where No Dog Has Gone Before
he excitement stirred up by the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik last year occasioned quite a few new books on the dawn of the Space Age. But perhaps none was more unique and touching, detailed, rich and evocative than Nick Abad-zis's Laika (First Second, trade paperback, $17.95, 205 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-101-0).
This accomplished graphic novel is the definitively researched story—with some artistic interpolations—of the poor little critter inside Sputnik II, a test animal sacrificed to politics, science, and “man's ambitions.” In assessing the accomplishments of Abadzis, we'll naturally have to kowtow to the medium itself and talk separately about both story and artwork, always acknowledging that they work hand in hand.
The narrative is divided into a mere four chapters, with the last one being a full eighty pages. In the first division, we meet Korolev, ex-prisoner of the gulag and now Chief Designer of the Sputnik program. He and his crew celebrate the milestone launch of Sputnik I, and shortly thereafter receive orders from Khrushchev himself mandating another launch as soon as possible—a launch with some kind of special upgrade to command the world's attention. The scientists hit upon the notion of lofting an animal into orbit. But unfortunately the trip will be one-way.
Chapter 2 flashes back to the birth of Laika—originally named Kudryavka for her curly tail—and follows her rough-and-tumble life before she is purchased by the government labs.
In Chapter 3 we're introduced to Laika's human handlers, most notably Yelena Dubrovsky, and to the training regimen the dogs undergo. Chapter 4 finally hooks up again with the realtime narrative. Laika is chosen as the first living organism to attain orbit, transported to the launch facility, and rockets to her sad fate.
Throughout this tale we spend equal time among the human sphere as we do with Laika's POV. Emotional and intellectual themes, both small and subtle and large and bold, are explored. The domestic life of Laika's original family; Korolev's desire to triumph over past adversity; Yelena's love for the animals in her charge; her co-worker Dr. Gazenko's unrequited love for Yelena—all these quintessential human concerns are conveyed with insight and drama by the artist/author. For instance, when Laika was a wild dog of the streets, she was fed by a merchant. Taken away, she leaves a hole in the merchant's heart, depicted eloquently in a single wordless panel that has the man gazing down bereft at the place in the street where Laika used to rest.
In telling any naturalistic story involving an animal “protagonist,” the two main things to avoid are anthropomorphism and sentimentality. Abadzis is scrupulous in steering clear of these twin shoals. True, we get to hear Laika “talk” and “think” and “dream,” but we are never sure if these are not just the interpretations of her actions put upon her by humans. As for undue bathos, Abad-zis earns any heart-tugs with his clear-eyed portrayals of both human and canine behavior.
As for his art, I find it to be alluring without being show-offy, almost a “clear line” style. His page compositions are inventive yet easy to follow. I believe I encountered only two full-page spreads in the whole book. One is of Laika flying, and it's a brilliant tribute to Russian painter Marc Chagall. The other is of Laika's enormous rocket on the launch pad, and it looks like a Soviet Realist poster. Very clever, both times.
Non-ideological, objective yet empathetic, this book shows how fiction holds all the trump cards over mere journalism when it comes to penetrating to the essence of historical moments and the human heart. It deserves to stand next to Clifford Simak's classic story “Desertion,” which features its own noble canine.
* * * *
I Like Ike
We often hear a writer touted as working in a Heinleinian mode. And again, the name of Clarke is frequently trotted out for purposes of literary comparison and influence attribution. But much less often do we encounter plaudits invoking the name of Isaac Asimov. I'm not quite certain why this is, given Asimov's stature as one of the seminal SF writers of the Golden Age and onward, one of the Big Three as compiled above. Perhaps it's because Asimov's style of SF was the least dramatic, most ratiocinative, least garish of the three. The emphasis today and forever has always been on zippy style and big concepts: flash, in other words. And Asimov was the opposite of flashy.
Still, he mined a certain definable and admirable vein of intellectually thrilling, somewhat demure story-telling, a branch of SF with its own tactics and accomplishments. And it's a vein that's on display even yet, notably in James P. Hogan's Echoes of an Alien Sky (Baen, hardcover, $24.00, 317 pages, ISBN 978-1-4165-2108-2). This is as close to a new novel by the Asimov of Pebble in the Sky (1950) as anyone is going to get.
Hogan starts with a classic premise that writers such as Clarke and van Vogt and scores of others have employed before. Visitors arrive at an Earth that is devoid of human life, filled with the ruins of our civilization. This time, there's a bizarre twist. The explorers are from a habitable Venus—not a terraformed world, but one seemingly in its naturally evolved state: the apparent birthplace of their species. They are outwardly human, yet regard themselves as having no connection with the extinct humans of Earth. Moreover, they possess fundamentally different concepts of physics and biology and geology than the ones familiar to us—concepts that work!
Our protagonist is one Kyal Reen, an expert in “electrogravitics.” His stolid, dogged investigations, both on Earth and Luna, will eventually unravel enigmas both cosmic and mortal.
From the naming conventions of the Venusians through the social satire (the Venusians find our civilization totally “psychotic") to the emphasis on scientific reasoning, Hogan hews to an absolutely Asimovian path. He builds up a good portrait at a distant remove of the Venusian society, creates believable social interactions among the Venusians on Earth, and charts out the steps of the solution of his mystery in a tidy manner. The low-key romance between Kyal and biologist Lorili Hilivar is chaste yet affecting (although Hogan has them separated plotwise too much for my taste). The only villain of the piece, Jenyn Thorgan, is hardly a megalomaniac, but rather someone with deluded beliefs. And the one moment of physical violence he triggers is over with quickly, leaving the characters free to return to their rational ways.
Hogan adds a few flashback chapters to the human-dominated Earth that I found superfluous. He tries for some John Campbell-style contrarian wisdom that's a tad clunky: “Trapped in deductive logic.... It can't tell you what's true, only what has to follow from your assumptions.” But then again, Campbell and Asimov were inseparable for a long time, so it's all of a piece.
A book like this one will never garner wild praise or awards, but it lies at the core of our genre like neutrons adding weight to an atom.
* * * *
Yesterday's Tomorrows—Not So Much
David Pringle, founder and ex-editor of Interzone, has an interesting theory about the ongoing series of anthologies edited by Martin H. Greenberg and company, and published by DAW. Messr. Pringle calls them “the new pulps.” After all, they appear monthly or even more often; draw from a certain constrained stable of writers (many of them DAW authors), with some interlopers to flesh out the TOCs; and tend to favor commercialism over high art. (Exceptions abound, such as any title edited by Pete Crowther.)
I tend to buy into this theory. Just like the pulps, these volumes generally offer robust, professional storytelling of an entertaining variety that never descends to lousiness or aspires to greatness. Their thematic centeredness offers easy-to-grasp hooks and lures for the audience. And they are mass-market originals, inexpensive like pulps.
Asimov's SF, September 2008 Page 21
