The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  …And then — more mysterious by far! — I found myself there again — I cannot put it more plainly than that — it was less like a waking than a switching-on, as one operates an electric bulb. One moment — nothing; the next — a full, shuddering awareness.

  I could see again. I had a clear view of the world — of the green-glowing hull of the Time Ship all around me, of the earth’s bone-gleam beyond.

  I was existent once again! and a deep panic — a horror — of that interval of Absence pumped through my system. I have feared no Hell so much as nonexistence — indeed, I had long resolved that I should welcome whatever agonies Lucifer reserves for the intelligent Non-Believer; if those pains served as proof that my consciousness still endured!

  But I was not permitted to brood on my disquietude, for now came the most extraordinary sensation of being lifted. I realized a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge magnet was drawing me upward. The stress grew — I seemed a mote over which huge forces were fighting — and then of a sudden, that tension was resolved. I flew up, feeling exactly as if I was a small child again, being picked up by the strong, safe hands of my father; I had that same lightness of being, the sensation of flying. The substance of the Time Ship arose with me, so that it was like being at the center of an immense, open, green-glowing balloon, lifting from the ground.

  I looked down — or at least I tried to; I could not feel my head or neck, but the sweep of my panoramic vision swiveled downwards. You must imagine that the Ship about me had something of the shape of a steam liner, but hugely blown up — its lenticular keel was miles long — and yet it floated above the landscape with the ease of a cloud. I could see through the open, web-like substance of the Ship to the land beyond, and now I was looking down at our Time-Car, from directly above. Although my view was obscured by the complex, evolving sparkle of the Ship, I thought I saw two bodies in the car, a man and a slighter figure, who slid to the car’s floor, their motions already stiff from the invading cold.

  My view had an odd sensation about it. It was without focus: or rather, it lacked a central point of observation. When you look at something, say a tea-cup, you see it, and that’s pretty much the center of your world, with everything else relegated to a sort of side-show around the periphery of your vision. But now I found that my world had no center, or periphery. I saw it all — Ice, Ships, Time-Car — it was as if it were all central, or all peripheral, all at once! It was disorienting and very confusing.

  My belly and head seemed to have been numbed, gone quite beyond feeling. I could see, all right; but I could feel nothing of my face, my neck, the posture of my body — nothing, in fact, save a light, almost ghostly touch: the fingers of Nebogipfel, still wrapped around my own. I took some comfort in that, for it was good to know that he was here with me at least!

  I thought I was dead — but I recalled I had thought that before, when I had been absorbed and remade by the Universal Constructor. What would become of me now I could not tell.

  The Ship began to rise again, and now much more rapidly. The Time-Car and the tower on which it sat were swept away from under me. I was raised a mile, two miles, ten miles above the surface; the whole sparse map of this remote London was laid out beneath me, visible through the sparkle of the Time Ship.

  Still we rose — we must have been traveling faster than a cannon-ball — and yet I heard no rush of air, felt no wind on my face: I felt secure, with that childlike sense of lightness I have mentioned. The circle of scenery beneath me grew wider, and the details of the buildings and ice-fields grew faint, and a luminous gray mixed more and more with the cold white of the ice. As the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner, the nighttime sky, which had been an iron gray in color, grew deeper in tone.

  Now our height was so great that the curving away of the planet became apparent — it was as if London was the highest point of some immense hill — and I could make out the shape of poor Britain, locked within its frozen Sea of Ice.

  I remained without hands or feet, without belly or mouth. I seemed to have been cut loose of matter, quite suddenly, and I saw things with a sort of serenity.

  And still we climbed — I knew we were already far beyond the atmosphere — and the frozen plains mutated from a landscape into the surface of a spherical world, which turned, white and serene — and quite dead — beneath me. Beyond the earth’s gleaming limb there were more Time Ships — hundreds of them, I saw now, great, green-glowing, lenticular boats miles long; they made up a loose armada which sailed across the face of space, and their light reflected from the wrinkled ice which coated the earth.

  I heard my name called: or rather, it was not hearing, but an awareness, by some means I would be loath to try to explain. I tried to turn, but I found my point of view twisting about.

  Nebogipfel? Is that you?

  Yes. I am here. Are you all right?

  Nebogipfel… I can’t see you.

  Nor I you. But that does not matter. Can you feel my hand?

  Yes.

  Now the earth drifted off to one side, and our Ship moved into formation with its fellows. Soon the Time Ships were all about us, in an array that filled the inter-planetary void for many miles about; it was like being in the middle of a school of great, glowing whales. The light of Plattnerite was brilliant and yet there was a surface of unreality about it, as if it was reflecting from some invisible plane; again I had that feeling of contingency about the Ships, as if they did not belong quite in this Reality, or any other.

  Nebogipfel, what is happening to us? Where are we being taken?

  Gently, he replied, You know the answer to that. We are to travel back through time… back to its Boundary, to its deepest, hidden heart.

  Will we start soon?

  We have already started, he said. Look at the stars.

  I turned — or felt as if I did — so that I looked away from White Earth, and I saw:

  All over the sky, the stars were coming out.

  [2]

  The Unraveling of Earth

  As we drew back through time, the colonizing fleets from earth were washing back to their origin, in successive waves, and the changes men had wrought to worlds and stars were dismantled. And as that tide of civilization and cultivation receded from the cosmos, the star-masking Spheres were broken apart, one by one. I gazed about in wonder as the old constellations assembled themselves like so many candelabras. Sirius and Orion shone as splendid as on any winter’s night; the Pole Star was over my head, and I could make out the familiar saucepan profile of the Great Bear. Away below me, beyond the curve of earth, were strange groupings of stars I had never seen from England: I did not know the antipodean constellations so well that I could recognize them all, but I could pick out the brutal knife-shape of the Southern Cross, the soft-glowing patches that were the Magellanic Clouds, and those brilliant twins, Alpha and Beta Centauri.

  And now, as we sank further into the past, the stars began to slide across the sky. Within moments, it seemed, the familiar constellations were obscured, as the stars’ proper motions — much too slow to be perceptible within a human’s firefly lifetime — became visible to my cosmic gaze.

  I pointed out this new phenomenon to Nebogipfel.

  Yes. And, see the earth…

  I looked. The mask of Glaciation which had disfigured that dear, exhausted globe was already falling away. I saw how the white of it receded towards the Poles, in great pulses, exposing the brown and blue of land and sea beneath.

  Abruptly the ice was gone — banished back to its fastnesses at the Poles — and the world turned slowly beneath us, its familiar continents restored. But the earth was wreathed about by clouds; and the clouds were stained with virulent, unnatural colors — browns, purples, oranges. The coasts were ringed with light, and great cities glowed at the heart of every continent. There were even huge, floating towns in the middle of the oceans, I saw. But the air was so foul that in those great cities — if anyone went about
on the surface — masks or filters would surely have to be worn, to enable humans to breathe.

  Evidently we are witnessing the final days of the modification of the earth by my New Men, I said. We must be traversing millions of years with each minute…

  Yes.

  Then, why do we not see the earth spin like a top on its axis, and hurtle around the sun?

  It is not so simple… These Ships are not like your prototype Time Machine.

  Everything we see is a reconstruction, Nebogipfel went on. It is a sort of projection, based on the observations which, as we travel, are entering the Information Sea: that part of the Sea transported by the Ships, at any rate. Such phenomena as the rotation of the earth have been suppressed.

  Nebogipfel, what am I? Am I still a man?

  You are still yourself, he said firmly. The only difference now is that the machinery which sustains you is not made up of bone and flesh, but of constructs within the Information Sea… You have limbs, not of sinew and blood, but of Understanding.

  His voice seemed to float about in space, somewhere around me; I had lost that comforting sensation of his hand in mine, and I could no longer tell if he was near — but I had the feeling that “nearness” was no longer a relevant idea, for I had no clear idea even where “I” was. Whatever I had become, I knew that I was no longer a point of awareness, looking out from a cave of bone.

  The air of earth cleared. All over the planet, with startling abruptness, the city-lights dimmed and winked out, and soon the hand of man made no mark on the earth.

  There were flurries of volcanism, great flashing spurts which threw up ash clouds that flickered over the world — or, rather, as we receded in time, the clouds drained away into those volcanic punctures — and it seemed to me that the continents were drifting away from their school-room neap positions. Across the great plains of the northern hemisphere, there seemed to be a sort of struggle — slow, millennial — progressing between two classes of vegetation: on the one hand, the pale green-brown grasslands and deciduous forests which lined the continents at the rim of the ice-cap; and on the other, the virulent green of the tropical jungles. For a moment, the jungles won, and in a great flourish, they swept north from the Equator, until they coated the lands from the Tropics, all the way up through Europe and North America. Even Greenland became, briefly, verdant. Then, as fast as they had conquered the earth, the great jungles retreated to their equatorial fastnesses once more, and paler shades of green and brown chased across the faces of the northern continents.

  The sliding-about and spinning of the continents became more marked. And as the continents were brought into different climatic regions, their life-colors changed accordingly, so that great bands of green and brown swept across the hapless lands. Huge, devastating spasms of volcanism punctuated these geological waltz-steps.

  Now the continents slid together — it was like watching a jigsaw assemble — to form a single, immense land-mass which straddled half the globe. The interior of this great country immediately shriveled to desert.

  Nebogipfel said, We have already descended three hundred million years into the past… There are no mammals, no birds, and even the reptiles are barely born.

  I replied, I had no idea it was all so graceful, like some rocky ballet — the geologists of my day have so much to understand! It is as if the whole planet is alive, and evolving.

  Now the great continent split into three huge masses. I could no longer make out the familiar shapes of the lands of my own time, for the continents spun like dinner-plates on a polished table top. As that immense central desert was broken up the climate became much more variegated; and I could see a series of shallow seas fringing the lands.

  Nebogipfel said, Now the amphibians are sliding back to the seas, their prototypical limbs melting away. But there are insects and other invertebrates still on the land: millipedes, mites, spiders and scorpions…

  Not a very hospitable place, I remarked.

  There are giant dragonflies too, and other wonders — the world is not without beauty.

  Now the land began to lose its greenness — a kind of bony brown poked through the receding tide of life — and I surmised that we were passing beyond the appearance of the first leafed plants on land. Soon, the surface of the earth had become a sort of featureless mask of brown and a muddy blue. I knew that life persisted in the seas, but it was simplifying there too, with whole phyla disappearing into History’s womb: first the fish, now the mollusca, now the sponges and jellyfish and worms… At last, I realized, only a thin, green algae — laboring to convert the beating sunlight into oxygen — must remain in the darkened seas. The land was barren and rocky, and the atmosphere had turned thick, stained yellow and brown by noxious gases. Great fires erupted over the earth, all at once. Thick clouds masked the globe, and the seas retreated like drying puddles. But the clouds did not persist for long. The atmosphere became thin, then quite wispy, until at last it vanished altogether. The exposed crust glowed a uniform, dull red, save where great orange scars opened and closed like mouths. There were no seas, no distinction between the ocean and the land: only this endless, battered crust, over which the Time Ships soared, observant and graceful.

  And next the glowing of the crust grew brighter — intolerably bright and, with an explosion of glowing fragments, the young earth shook on its axis, shuddered, and flew into bits!

  It was as if some of those fragments had hurtled through me. The glowing rock battered its way through my awareness, and dwindling off into space.

  And then it was done! Now there was only the sun… and a disc of rubble and gas, formless, eddying, which spun about the shining star.

  A sort of ripple passed through our cloud of Time Ships, as if the reversed coalescence of the earth had sent a physical shock through that loose armada.

  This is a strange Age, Nebogipfel, I said.

  Look around you…

  I did so, and saw that, from all around the sky, there were several stars — perhaps a dozen — which were growing in brightness. Now the stars had reached a sort of formation, an array scattered over the sky, though still so distant they showed only as points. Gas wisps seemed to be collecting into a cloud, scattered over the sky and wrapped about this collection of stars.

  These are the sun’s true companions, Nebogipfel said. Its siblings, if you like: the stars which shared the sun’s nursery-cloud. Once, they formed a cluster as bright and as close as the Pleiades… but gravity will not hold them together, and before the birth of life on earth they will drift apart.

  One of the young stars, directly over my head, flared. It expanded, soon becoming large enough to show a disc, but growing more red, and fainter… until at last it expired, and the glow of that part of the cloud died.

  Now another star, almost diametrically opposed in position to the first, went through the same cycle: the flare, followed by the expansion into a brilliant crimson disc, and then extinction.

  All of this magnificent drama, you must imagine, was played out against a background of utter silence.

  We are witnessing the birth of stars, I said, but in reverse.

  Yes. The embryonic stars light up their birthing gas cloud such nebulae are a beautiful sight but after the stellar ignition, the lighter gases are made to flee the heat, leaving only heavier rubble —

  A rubble which condenses into worlds, I said.

  Yes.

  And now — so soon! — it was the turn of the sun. There was that uncertain flaring of yellow-white light, a glare that glinted from the Time Ships’ Plattnerite prows — and the rapid swelling into an immense globe, which briefly swamped the armada of Time Ships in a cloud of crimson light… and then, at last, that final dispersal into the general void.

  The Ships hung in the sudden darkness. The last of the sun’s companions flared, ballooned out, and died; and we were left in a cloud of cold, inert hydrogen, which reflected our glow of Plattnerite green.

  Only the remote stars marked the
sky, and I saw how they too shimmered and flared, fading in their turn. Soon the skies grew darker, and I surmised that fewer and fewer stars yet existed.

  Then, suddenly, a new breed of stars flared across the sky. There was a whole host, it seemed: dozens of them were close enough to show a disc, and the light of these new stars was, I was sure, bright enough to read a newspaper by — not that I was in a position to try such an experiment!

  Confound it, Nebogipfel, what an astonishing sight! Astronomy should have been a little different under a sky like this — eh?

  This is the very first generation of stars. These are the only lights, anywhere in the new cosmos… Each of these stars amass a hundred thousand times as much as our sun, but they burn their fuel prodigiously — their life-spans are counted in mere millions of years.

  And indeed, even as he spoke, I saw that the stars were expanding, reddening, and dispersing, like great, overheated balloons.

  Soon it was done; and the sky was left dark again — dark, save only for the green glow of the Time Ships, which forged, steady and determined, into the past.

  [3]

  The Boundary of Space and Time

  A new, uniform glow began to permeate space around me. I wondered if some earlier generation of stars was shining in this primeval age — a generation undreamed of by Nebogipfel and the Constructors with whom he communed. But I soon saw that the glow did not come from an array of point sources, like stars; rather, it was a light which appeared to shine, all about me, as if from the structure of space itself — although here and there the glow was mottled, as, I surmised, dense clumps of embryonic star-matter shone more brightly. This light was the deepest crimson at first — it reminded me of a sunset breaking through clouds — but it brightened, and escalated through the familiar spectrum colors, through orange, yellow, blue, towards violet.