The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  The rest of the day passed in a joyous blur. My liqueur proved more than popular — although for my part I should have much preferred to have been able to improvise a pipeful of tobacco! There was much dancing to the sound of inexpert singing and hand-clapping, which impersonated a jolly sort of 1944 music Stubbins called “swing,” that I would like, I think, to have heard more of. I had them sing “The Land of the Leal” for me, and I performed, with my usual solemnity, one of my patent improvised dances; it evoked great admiration and mirth. The Diatryma was roasted on a spit — the cooking of it took most of the day — and the evening saw us sprawled on the scuffed sand, our plates laden with succulent meat.

  Once the sun slipped below the tree-line, the party thinned rapidly; for most of us had become accustomed to a dawn-to-dusk existence. I hailed good night one final time, and retired to the ruins of my improvised still. I sat in the entrance to the lean-to, sipping at the last of my liqueur, and I watched the shadow of the forest sweep across the Palaeocene Sea. Dark shapes slid through the water: rays, perhaps, or sharks.

  I thought over my conversation with Nebogipfel, and tried to come to terms with the decision I must make.

  After a time, there was a soft, uneven footstep on the sand.

  I turned. It was Hilary Bond — I could barely make out her face in the last of the day-light — and yet, somehow, I was not surprised to see her.

  She smiled. “Can I join you? Do you have any of that moonshine left?”

  I waved her to a place in the sand beside me, and I passed her my shell. She drank with some grace. “It’s been a good day,” she said.

  “Thanks to you.”

  “No. Thanks to all of us.” She reached out and took my hand — quite without warning — the touch of her skin was like an electric jolt. She said, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for us. You and Nebogipfel.”

  “We haven’t—?”

  “I doubt if we’d have survived those first few days, without you.” Her voice, soft and level, was nevertheless quite compelling. “And now, with all you’ve shown us, and all Nebogipfel’s taught us — well, I think we’ve every chance of building a new world here.”

  Her fingers were delicate and long against my palm, and yet I could feel the scarring from her burns. “Thank you for the eulogy. But you speak as if we are going away…”

  “But you are,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  “You know about Nebogipfel’s plans?”

  She shrugged. “In principle.”

  “Then you know more than I do. If he has built a Time-Car — where did he get the Plattnerite, for example? The Juggernauts were destroyed.”

  “From the wreck of die Zeitmaschine, of course.” She sounded amused. “Didn’t you think of that?” She paused. “And you want to go with Nebogipfel. Don’t you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. You know, sometimes I feel old — and tired — as if I have seen quite enough already!”

  She snorted her contempt for that. “Baloney. Look: you started it—” She waved a hand. “All of this. Time traveling — and all the changes it’s brought about.” She gazed around at the placid Sea. “And now, this is the biggest Change of all. Isn’t it?” She shook her head. “You know, I’ve had a certain amount of dealing with the strategic planners at the DChronW, and I’ve come away downcast every time at the smallness of the thinking of such types. To adjust the course of a battle here, to assassinate some tin-pot figure there… If you have such a tool as a Chronic Displacement Vehicle, and if you know that History can be changed, as we do, then would you, should you, restrict yourself to such footling goals as that? Why restrict yourself to a few decades, and to fiddling with the boyhood of Bismarck or the Kaiser, when you can go back millions of years — as we have? Now, our children will have fifty million years to remake the world… We’re even going to rebuild the human species — aren’t we?” She turned to me. “But you haven’t reached the end of it yet. What’s the Ultimate Change, do you think? Can you go back all the way to the Creation, and start things all over again from there? How far can this — Changing — go?”

  I remembered Gödel, and his dreams of the Final World. “I don’t know how far it can go,” I said truthfully. “I can’t even imagine it.”

  Her face was huge before me, her eyes wells of darkness in the deepening twilight. “Then,” she said, “you must travel on and find out. Mustn’t you?” She moved closer, and I felt my hand tighten around hers, and her breath was warm against my cheek.

  I sensed a stiffness about her — a reticence, which she seemed determined to overcome, if only by force of will. I touched her arm, and I found scarred flesh, and she shuddered, as if my fingers were made of ice. But then she clasped her hand around mine and held it against her arm. “You must forgive me,” she said. “It is not easy for me to be close.”

  “Why? Because of the responsibilities of your command?”

  “No,” she said, and her tone made me feel foolish and clumsy. “Because of the War. Do you see? Because of all of those who are gone… It’s hard to sleep, sometimes. You suffer now, not then — and that’s the tragedy of the thing, for those who survive. You feel you can’t forget — and that it’s wrong of you to go on living, even. If you break faith with us who died/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders field…”

  I pulled her closer, and she softened against me, a fragile, wounded creature.

  At the last moment, I whispered: “Why, Hilary? Why now?”

  “Genetic diversity,” she said, her breath growing shallow.

  “Genetic diversity…”

  And soon we traveled on — not to the ends of time — but to the limits of our Humanity, there beside the shore of that primeval Sea.

  When I awoke it was still dark, and Hilary had gone.

  I came to our old encampment in full daylight. Nebogipfel barely glanced at me through his slit-mask as I entered; evidently he was as unsurprised by my decision as Hilary had been.

  His Time-Car was completed. It was a box about five feet square, and around it I saw fragments of an unfamiliar metal: bits, I presumed, of the Messerschmitt, salvaged by the Morlock. There was a bench, lashed up from the wood of the dipterocarps, and a small control panel — a crude thing of switches and buttons — that featured the blue toggle switch which Nebogipfel had salvaged from our first Time-Car.

  “I have some clothes for you,” Nebogipfel said. He held up boots, a twill shirt, and trousers, all in reasonable order. “I doubt our colonists will miss them now.”

  “Thank you.” I had been wearing shorts made of animal skin; I dressed rapidly.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  I shrugged. “Home. 1891.”

  He distorted his face. “It is lost in the Multiplicity.”

  “I know.” I climbed into the frame. “Let us travel forward anyway, and see what we find.”

  I glanced, one last time, at the Palaeocene Sea. I thought of Stubbins, and the tame Diatryma, and the light off the Sea in the morning. I knew that I had come close to happiness here — to a contentment that had eluded me all my life. But Hilary was right: it was not enough.

  I still felt that great desire for home; it was a call in me along the River of Time, as strong, I thought, as the instinct which returns a salmon to its breeding-ground. But I knew, as Nebogipfel had said, that my 1891, that cozy world of Richmond Hill, was lost in the fractured Multiplicity.

  Well: if I could not go home, I decided, I would go on: I would follow this road of Changing, until it could take me no further!

  Nebogipfel looked at me. “Are you ready?”

  I thought of Hilary. But I am not a man to be doing with goodbyes.

  “I’m ready.”

  Nebogipfel climbed stiffly into the frame, favoring his badly set leg. Without ceremony, he reached for his panel of controls and closed the blue toggle.

  [19]

  Lights In the Sky

  I caught one last glimpse of two p
eople — a man and a woman, both naked — who seemed to hurtle across the beach. A shadow fell briefly over the car, perhaps cast by one of the immense animals of this Age; but soon we were moving too rapidly for such details to be discernible, and we fell into the colorless tumult of time travel.

  The heavy Palaeocene sun leapt across the Sea, and I imagined how from the point of view of our transition through time the earth spun like a top on its axis, and rocketed around its star. The moon, too, was visible as a hurtling disc, rendered shadowy by the flickering of its phases. Soon the sun’s daily passage merged into the band of silver light which dipped between equinoctial limits, and day and night melted into the uniform blue-gray glow I have described before.

  The dipterocarps trees of the forest shivered with growth and death, and were shouldered aside by the vigorous growth of younger plants; but the scene around us — the forest, the Sea smoothed by our time-passage to a glassy plain — remained static in its essentials, and I wondered if, despite all my and Nebogipfel’s efforts, men had after all failed to survive, here in the Palaeocene.

  Then — quite without warning — the forest withered and vanished. It was as if a blanket of greenery had been ripped back from the soil. But the land was scarcely left bare; as soon as the forest was cleared, a melange of blocky brown and gray — the buildings of an expanding First London — swept over the earth. The buildings flowed over the denuded hills and down, past us, to the Sea, there to sprout into docks and harbors. The individual constructions shivered and expired, almost too fast for us to follow, though one or two persisted long enough — I suppose for several centuries — to become almost opaque, like crude sketches. The Sea lost its blue tinge and mutated into a sheet of dirty gray, its waves and tides made into a blur by our passage; the air seemed to take on a brown tinge, like an 1890s London fog, which gave the scene something of a dirty, twilit glow, and the air about us felt warmer.

  It was striking that as the centuries fell away, regardless of the fate of individual buildings, the general outlines of the city persisted. I could see how the ribbon of the central river — the proto-Thames — and the scars of major road routes remained, in their essentials, unchanged by time; it was a striking demonstration of how geomorphology, the shape of the landscape, dominates human geography.

  “Evidently our colonists have survived,” I said to Nebogipfel. “They have become a race of New Humans, and they are changing their world.”

  “Yes.” He adjusted his skin slit-mask. “But remember we are traveling at several centuries per second; we are in the midst of a city which has already persisted for some thousands of years. I doubt that little is left of the First London we saw established.”

  I peered around, my curiosity strong. Already my little band of exiles must be as remote to these New Humans as had been the Sumerians, say, from 1891. Had any memory persisted, in all this wide and bustling civilization, of the fragile origins of the human species in this antique era?

  I became aware of a change in the sky: an odd, green-tinged flickering about the light. I soon realized it was the moon, which still sailed around the earth, waxing and waning through its ancient cycle too fast for me to follow — but the face of that patient companion was now stained green and blue — the colors of earth, and life.

  An inhabited, earthlike moon! This New Humanity had evidently traveled to the sister world in Space Machines, and transformed it, and colonized it. Perhaps they had developed into a race of moon-men, as tall and spindly as the low-gravity Morlocks I had encountered in the Year 657,208! Of course I could not make out any detail, as the moon’s month-long orbit took it spinning across my accelerated sky; and of that I was regretful, for I would have loved to have had a telescope and to make out the waters of new oceans lapping those deep, ancient craters, and the forests spreading across the dust of the great maria. How would it be to stand on those rocky plains — to be cut loose of Mother Earth’s leading-strings? With every step in that reduced gravity one would fly through the thin, cold air, with the sun fierce and motionless overhead; it would be like the landscape of a dream, I thought, with all that glare, and plants less like earthly flora than the things I imagined among the rocks at the bottom of the sea…

  Well, it was a sight I should never witness. With an effort, I returned in imagination from the moon, and fixed my attention on our situation.

  Now there was some movement in the western sky, low against the horizon: firefly lights flickered into life, jerked across the heavens, and settled into place, there to remain for long millennia, before fading to be replaced by others. There was soon quite a crowd of these sparks, and they coalesced into a sort of bridge, which spanned the sky from horizon to horizon; at its peak, I counted several dozen lights in this city in the sky.

  I pointed this out to Nebogipfel. “Are they stars?”

  “No,” he said evenly. “The earth rotates still, and the true stars must be too obscured to be visible. The lights we see are hanging in a fixed position over the earth…”

  “Then what are they? Artificial moons?”

  “Perhaps. They are certainly placed there by the actions of men. The objects may be artificial — constructed of materials hauled up from the earth, or from the moon, whose gravity well is so much shallow. Or they may be natural objects towed into place around the earth by rockets: captured asteroids or comets, perhaps.”

  I peered at those jostling lights with as much awe as any cave-dweller might stare at the light of a comet beating over his upturned, ignorant head!

  “What would be the purpose of such stations in space?”

  “Such a satellite is like a tower, fixed over the earth, twenty thousand miles tall…”

  I grimaced. “Quite a view! One could sit in it and watch the evolution of weather patterns over a hemisphere.”

  “Or the station could serve for the transmission of telegraphic messages from one continent to another. Or, more radically, one could imagine the transfer of great industries — heavy manufacture, or the generation of power, perhaps — to the comparative safety of high earth orbit.”

  He opened his hands. “You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.

  “In orbit, though, the limits to growth are virtually infinite: witness the Sphere, constructed by my own species.”

  The temperature continued to increase, as the air grew more foul. Nebogipfel’s improvised Time-Car was functional, but poorly balanced, and it swayed and rocked; I clung to my bench miserably, for the combination of the heat, the swaying and the usual vertigo induced by time travel gave me a most nauseous feeling.

  [20]

  The Orbital City

  There was a further evolution of our equatorial Orbital City. The chaotic arrangement of those artificial lights had become significantly more regular, I saw. Now there was a band of seven or eight stations, all dazzling bright, positioned at regular intervals around the globe; I imagined that more such stations must be in position below the horizon, continuing their steady march about the waist of the planet.

  Now threads of light, fine and delicate, grew steadily down from the gleaming stations, reaching towards the earth like tentative fingers. The motion was even, and slow enough for us to follow, and I realized that I was watching stupendous engineering projects — projects spanning thousands of miles of space, and occupying whole millennia — and I was awed by the dedication and grasp of the New Humans.

  After several seconds of this, the leading threads had descended into the obscuring mist of the horizon. Then one such thread disappeared, and the station to which it had been fixed was snuffed out like a candle-flame in a breeze. Evidently the thread had fallen, or broken loose, and its anchoring station was destroyed. I watched the pale, soundless images, wondering what immense disaster — and how many deaths — they represented! Within moments,
though, a new station had been fixed into the vacant position in the equator-girdling array, and a fresh thread extended.

  “I’m not sure I believe my eyes,” I told the Morlock. “It looks to me as if they are fixing those cables from space to the earth!”

  “So I imagine is happening,” the Morlock said. “We are witnessing the construction of a Space Elevator — a link, fixed between the surface of the earth and the stations in orbit.”

  I grinned at the thought. “A Space Elevator! I should relish riding such a device: to rise up through the clouds, and into the silent grandeur of space — but, if the Elevator were glass-walled, it would not be a ride for the vertiginous.”

  “Indeed not.”

  Now I saw that more lines of light were extending between the geosynchronous stations. Soon the glowing points were linked, and the traces thickened into a glowing band, as broad and bright as the stations themselves. Again — though I had no real wish to curtail our time-traveling — I wished I could see more of this huge, world-girdling City in the sky.

  The development of earth over the same period was scarcely so spectacular, however. Indeed, it seemed to me that First London had become static, perhaps abandoned. Some of the buildings became so long-lived that they seemed almost solid to us, although they were dark, squat and ugly; while others were falling into ruin without replacement. (We saw this process as the appearance, with brutal abruptness, of gaps in the complex sky-line). It seemed to me that the air was becoming still thicker, the patient Sea a drabber gray, and I wondered if the battered earth had been abandoned at last, either for the stars or, perhaps, for more palatable havens beneath the ground.

  I raised these possibilities with the Morlock.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But you must recognize that already more than a million years have passed since the establishment of the original colony, by Hilary Bond and her people. There is more evolutionary distance between you and the New Humans of this era, than between you and me. So we can make nothing but educated guesses about the way of living of the races extant here, their motives — even their biological composition.”