The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  “Do you know,” I said to Nebogipfel, “if I didn’t know better, I would swear this ball, that has just emerged from nowhere, is the same as the first.” He came a little closer, and I pointed out that distinctive long scratch. “See that? I’d recognize this scar in the dark… The balls are like identical twins.”

  “Then,” the Morlock said calmly, “perhaps they are the same ball.”

  Now my ball, knocked aside, had collided with a cushion on the far side of the table and had rebounded; such was the nonregular geometry of the table that it was now heading back in the direction of the pocket from which the second ball had emerged.

  “But how can that be? I mean, I suppose a Time Machine could deliver two copies of the same object to the same place — think of myself and Moses! — but I see no time travel devices here. And what would be the purpose?”

  The original ball had lost much momentum with these various impacts, and it was fairly creeping by the time it reached the pocket; but it slid into the pocket, and disappeared.

  We were left with the copy of the ball which had emerged so mysteriously from the pocket. I picked it up and examined it. As far as I could tell it was an identical copy of our ball. And when I checked the cache beneath the pocket — it was empty! Our original ball had gone, as if it had never existed. “Well!” I said to Nebogipfel. “This table is trickier than I imagined. What do you suppose happened there? Is this the sort of thing which goes on, do you think, during the disturbed paths — all that rattling — which I’ve pointed out to you before?”

  Nebogipfel did not reply immediately, but — after that — he took to devoting a substantial fraction of his time, with me, to the puzzles of that strange billiards table. As for me, I tried inspecting the table itself, hoping to find some concealed device, but I found nothing — no trickery, no concealed traps which could swallow and disgorge balls. Besides, even if there had been such crude illusion-machinery, I would still have to find an explanation for the apparent identity of “old” and “new” balls!

  The thing which caught my mind — though I had no explanation for it at the time — was the odd, greenish glow of the pocket rims. For all the world, that glow reminded me of Plattnerite.

  Nebogipfel told me of what he had learned of the Constructors. Our silent friend in Nebogipfel’s living-room was, it seemed, one of a widespread species: the Constructors inhabited the earth, the transformed planets — and even the stars.

  He told me, “You must put aside your preconceptions and look at these creatures with an open mind. They are not like humans.”

  “That much I can accept.”

  “No,” he insisted, “I do not think you can. To begin with, you must not imagine that these Constructors are individual personalities — after the fashion of you, or me. They are not men in cloaks of metal! They are something qualitatively different.”

  “Why? Because they are composed of interchangeable parts?”

  “Partly. Two Constructors could flow into one another — merging like two drops of liquid, forming one being — and then part as easily, forming two again. It would be all but impossible — and futile — to trace the origins of this component or that.”

  Hearing that, I could understand how it was that I never saw the Constructors moving about the ice-coated landscape outside. There was no need for them to lug the weight of their great, clumsy bodies about (unless for a special need, as when Nebogipfel and I had been repaired). It would be enough for the Constructor to disassemble himself, into these molecular components Nebogipfel described. The components could wiggle across the ice, like so many worms!

  Nebogipfel went on, “But there is more to the Constructors’ consciousness than that. The Constructors live in a world we can barely imagine — they inhabit a Sea, if you like, a Sea of Information.”

  Nebogipfel described how, by phonograph and other links, the Universal Constructors were linked to each other, and they used those links to chatter to each other constantly. Information — and awareness, and a deepening understanding — flowed out of the mechanical mind of each Constructor, and each received news and interpretation from every one of his brothers: even those on the most remote stars.

  So rapid and all-encompassing was the Constructors’ mode of communication, in fact, that it was not really analogous to human speech, said Nebogipfel.

  “But you’ve spoken to them. You’ve managed to get Information out of them. How so?”

  “By mimicking their own ways of interacting,” Nebogipfel said. He fingered his eye-socket, gingerly. “I had to make this sacrifice.” His natural eye gleamed.

  Nebogipfel had sought a way, as it were, to immerse his brain into the Information Sea of which he’d spoken. Through the eyesocket, he was able to absorb Information directly from the Sea — without its passing through the conventional medium of speech.

  I found myself shuddering, at the thought of such an invasion of the comfortable darkness of my own skull! “And do you think it was worth it?” I asked him. “This sacrifice of an eye?”

  “Oh, yes. And more… Look — can you see how it is for the Constructors?” he asked me. “They are a different order of life — united, not just by this sharing at the gross physical level, but by this pooling of their experiences. Can you imagine how it is to exist in such a medium of Information as their Sea?”

  I reflected. I thought of seminars at the Royal Society — those rich discussions when some new idea has been tossed into the pool, and three dozen agile minds battled over it, reshaping and refining it as they go — or even some of my old Thursday night dinner parties, when, with the help of liberal quantities of wine, the rattle of ideas could come so thick and fast it was hard to tell where one man had stopped speaking and the next resumed.

  “Yes,” Nebogipfel cut in when I related this last. “Yes, that is exactly it. Do you see? But with these Universal Constructors, such conversations proceed continuously — and at the speed of light, with thoughts passing directly from the mind of one to another.

  “And in such a miasma of communication, who can say where the consciousness of one finishes, and that of another begins? Is this my thought, my memory — or yours? Do you see? Do you follow the implications?”

  On the earth — perhaps on each inhabited world — there must be immense central Minds, composed of millions of the Constructors, fused together into great, God-like entities, which maintained the awareness of the race. In a sense, Nebogipfel said, the race itself was conscious.

  Again I had the feeling that we were straying too far into metaphysics. “All of that is fascinating stuff,” I said, “and it’s all as may be; but perhaps we should return to the practicalities of our own situation. What does it all have to do with you and me?” I turned to our own patient Constructor, who sat there, shimmering, in the middle of the floor. “What of this fellow?” I said. “All of this stuff about consciousness and so forth is all very well — but what does he want? Why is he here? Why did he save our lives? And — what does he want with us now? Or is it a case of these mechanical men all working together — like bees in a hive, united by these common Minds you speak of — so that we are faced with a species with common aims?”

  Nebogipfel rubbed his face. He walked up to the Constructor, peered into his eye-scope, and was rewarded, within a few minutes, by the extrusion, from within the Constructor’s glistening body, of a plate of that bland, cheese-like food of which I had seen so much in Nebogipfel’s home century. I watched with disgust, as Nebogipfel took the plate and bit into his regurgitated food. It was no more horrible, truthfully, than the extrusion of materials from the Floor of the Morlocks’ Sphere, but there was something about the Constructor’s liquid mixture of Life and Machine which repelled me. I averted my thoughts, with determination, from speculations as to the source of my own food and water!

  “We cannot talk of these Constructors as united,” Nebogipfel was saying. “They are linked. But they do not share a common purpose — in the fashion, let u
s say, of the various components of your own personality.”

  “But why not? That would seem eminently sensible. With perfect, continuous communication there need be no understanding — no conflict.”

  “But it is not like that. The totality of the Constructors’ mental universe is too big.” He referred to the Information Sea again, and described how structures of thought and speculation — complex, evolving, evanescent — came and went, emerging from the raw materials of that ocean of mentation. “These structures are analogous to the scientific theories of your own day — constantly under stress, from new discoveries and the insights of new thinkers. The world of understanding does not stay still, you see…

  “And besides, remember your friend Kurt Gödel, who taught us that no body of knowledge can be codified and made complete.

  “The Information Sea is unstable. The hypotheses and intentions which emerge from it are complex and multi-faceted; there is rarely complete unanimity among the Constructors about any point. It is like a continuing, emerging debate; and within that debate, factions may emerge: groupings of quasi-individuals, coalescing around some scheme. One might say that the Constructors are united in their drive to advance the understanding of their species, but not so as regards the means by which this might be achieved. In fact, one might hypothesize in general, the more advanced the mentation, the more factions appear to emerge, because the more complex the world appears…

  “And thus, the race progresses.”

  I remembered what Barnes Wallis had told me of the new order of Parliamentary debate, in 1938, where Opposition had essentially been banned as a criminal activity — a divergence of energy from the one, selfevidently correct approach to things! — But if what Nebogipfel was saying was correct, there can be no universally correct answer to any given question: as these Constructors had learned, multifarious views are a necessary feature of the universe in which we find ourselves!

  Nebogipfel chewed patiently on his cheese stuff; when he was done, he pushed the plate back into the substance of the Constructor, where it was absorbed — it was comforting for him, I thought, for it was a process so like the extruding Floor of his own home Sphere.

  [5]

  White Earth

  I spent many hours alone, or with Nebogipfel, at the windows of our apartment.

  I saw no evidence of animal or vegetable life on the surface of White Earth. As far as I could tell, we were isolated in our little bubble of light and warmth, atop that immense tower; and we never left that bubble, in all the time we were there.

  At night the sky beyond our windows was generally clear, with only a light frosting of cirrus cloud high in the depleted, lethal atmosphere. But, despite this clarity — I still could not understand it — there were no stars — or rather, very few, a handful compared to the multitude which had once blazed down on the earth. I had made this observation on our first arrival here, but I think I had dismissed it as some artifact of the cold, or my disorientation. To have it confirmed, now that I was warm and clear-headed, was disturbing — perhaps the strangest single thing in this new world.

  The moon — that patient companion planet — still turned about the earth, going through its phases with its immemorial regularity; but its ancient plains remained stained green. Moonlight was no longer a thing of cool silver, but washed the landscape of White Earth with the gentlest verdant glow, returning to the earth an echo of that green-ness she had once enjoyed, and which was now locked under the unforgiving ice.

  I saw again that gleam, as if of a captive star, that shone steadily at us from the moon’s extreme easterly limb. My first speculation had been that I was seeing the reflection of the sun from some lunar lake, but the glare was so steady that eventually I decided that it must be purposeful. I imagined a mirror — an artificial construct — perhaps fixed to some lunar mountain-top, and designed so that its reflection always falls on the earth. As to the purpose of such a device, I speculated that it might date from a time when the degradation of atmospheric conditions, here on the Mother Planet, had not yet become so bad as to drive men off the earth, but, perhaps, were so severe that they had caused the collapse of whatever culture had survived.

  I imagined moon-men: Selenites, as we might call them, themselves descended from Humanity. The Selenites must have watched the lethal progress of the great fires which broke across the crust of the oxygen-choked earth. The Selenites had known that men still lived on the earth — but they were men fallen from civilization, men living as savages, even as animals once more, sliding back into some pre-rational state. Perhaps the collapse of the earth impacted them too — for it may be that Selenite society could not survive without provision from Mother Earth.

  The Selenites could grieve for their cousins on the Mother World, but could not reach them… and so they attempted to signal. They built their immense mirror — it must have been half a mile across, or more, to be visible across inter-planetary distances.

  The Selenites may even have had some more ambitious aim in mind than simple inspiration from the sky. For example, they may have sent — by making the mirror flicker, using some equivalent of Morse — instructions on crop-rearing, or engineering — the lost secrets of the steam engine, perhaps — something, at any rate, rather more useful than mere good-luck messages.

  But in the end it was to no avail. In the end, the fist of Glaciation closed about the land. And the great lunar mirror was abandoned, as men disappeared from the earth.

  Such, at any rate, was my speculation, as I stood gazing through the windows of my tower; I have no means of knowing if I was right — for Nebogipfel was unable to read this new History of Humanity in such detail — but in any event the gleam of that isolated mirror on the moon became, for me, a most eloquent symbol of the collapse of Humanity.

  The most striking feature of our night sky was not the moon, however, nor even that absence of stars: it was the great, weblike disc, a dozen times Luna’s width, that I had noticed on our first arrival. This structure was extraordinarily complex and alive with motion. Think of a spider-web, perhaps lit from behind, with drops of dew glistening and rolling over its surface; now envisage a hundred tiny spiders crawling over that surface, their motion slow but quite visible, evidently working to strengthen and extend the structure — and then cast your vision across many miles of inter-planetary space! — and you will have something of what I saw.

  I made out the web-disc most clearly in the early hours of the morning — perhaps around three o’clock — and at such times I was able to make out ghostly threads of light — tenuous and thin — which reached up, from the far side of the earth, and out through the atmosphere towards the disc.

  I discussed these features with Nebogipfel. “It’s quite extraordinary… it’s as if those beams make up a kind of rigging of light, which attach the disc to the earth; so that the whole affair is like a sail, towing the earth through space on some spectral wind!”

  “Your language is picturesque,” he said, “but it captures something of the flavor of that enterprise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That it is a sail,” he said. “But it is not towing the earth: rather, the earth is providing a base for the wind which drives the sail.”

  Nebogipfel described this new type of space yacht. It would be constructed in space, he said, for it would be much too fragile to haul upwards from the earth. Its sail consisted, essentially, of a mirror; and the ’wind’ which filled the sail was light: for particles of light falling on a mirrored surface deliver a pushing force, just as do the molecules of air which make up a breeze.

  “The ’wind’ comes from beams of coherent light, generated by earthbound projectors as wide as a city,” he said. “It is these beams which you have observed as ’threads’ joining planet to sail. The pressure of the light is small but insistent, and it is extraordinarily efficient in transferring momentum — especially as light speed is approached.”

  He imagined that the Constructors would
not sail upon such a ship as discrete entities, as had the passengers of the great ships of my day. Rather, the Constructors might have disassembled themselves, and allowed their components to run off and knit themselves into the ship. At the destination, they would reassemble as individual Constructors, in whatever form was most efficient for the worlds they found there.

  “But where is the space yacht’s destination, do you think? The moon, or one of the planets — or—”

  In his flat, undramatic Morlock way, Nebogipfel said: “No. The stars.”

  [6]

  The Multiplicity Generator

  Nebogipfel continued his experiments with the billiards table. Repeatedly the ball would encounter that peculiar clattering I had observed about the middle of the table, and several times I thought I saw billiard balls — more copies of our original — appearing from nowhere and interfering with the trajectory of our ball. Sometimes the ball emerged from these collisions and continued along the path it might have followed regardless of the clattering-about; sometimes, though, it was knocked onto quite a different path, and — once or twice — we observed the type of incident I described earlier, in which a stationary ball was knocked out of its place, without my, or Nebogipfel’s, intervention.

  This all made for an entertaining game — and clearly something fishy was going on — but for the life of me I could not see it, despite that hint of Plattnerite glow about the pockets. My only observation was that the slower the ball traveled, the more likely it was to be diverted from its path.

  The Morlock, though, grew gradually more excited about all this. He would immerse himself in the hide of the patient Constructor, delving once more into the Information Sea, and emerge with some new fragment of knowledge he’d fished up — he mumbled to himself in that obscure, liquid dialect of his kind — and then he would hurry straight to the billiards table, there to test his new understanding.