The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  Soon, I began to make out an odd sort of regularity about this foam. On one side, for instance, my void was marked off by a flat plane of galaxies. This plane, of matter gathered together so densely that it glowed significantly more brilliant than the general background, was so marked and clearly defined — so flat and extensive — that the thought popped into my fecund mind that it might not be a natural arrangement.

  Now I looked about more carefully. Over here, I thought, I could see another plane — clean and well-defined — and there I made out a sort of lance of light, utterly rectilinear, which seemed to span space from side to side — and there again I saw a void, but in the shape of a cylinder, quite clearly delineated…

  The Watcher was rolling about before me now, his tentacle-clumps bathed in star-light, and his eyes were wide and fixed on me.

  Artificial. The word was inescapable — the conclusion so clear that I should have drawn it long before, I realized, had it not been for the monstrous scale of all this!

  This Optimal History was engineered — and this artifice must be what the Watcher had brought me on this immense journey to understand.

  I recalled old predictions that an infinite universe would be prone to disastrous gravitational collapse — it was another reason why our own cosmos could not, logically, be infinite. For, just as the earth and other planets had coalesced from knots in that turbulent cloud of debris around the infant sun, so there would be eddies in this greater cloud of galaxies which populated the Optimal History — eddies into which stars and galaxies should tumble, on an immense scale.

  But the Watchers were evidently managing the evolution of their cosmos to avoid such catastrophes: I had learned how Space and Time are themselves dynamic, adjustable entities. The Watchers were manipulating the bending, collapsing, twisting and shearing of Space and Time themselves, in order to achieve their objective of a stable cosmos.

  Of course there could be no end to this careful engineering, if this universe were to remain viable — and, I thought, if the universe was eternal, there could have been no beginning to it either. That reflection troubled me, briefly: for it was a paradox, a causal circle. Life would be required to exist, in order to engineer the conditions which were prerequisite to the existence of Life here…

  But I soon dismissed such confusions! I was, I realized, being much too parochial in my thinking: I was not allowing for the Infinitude of things. Since this universe was infinitely old — and Life had existed here for an infinitely long time — there was no beginning to the benign cycle of Life’s maintenance of the conditions for its own survival. Life existed here because the universe was viable; and the universe was viable because Life existed here to manage it… and on, an infinite regression, without beginning — and without paradox!

  I felt loftily amused at my own confusion. It was clearly going to take me some time to come to terms with the meaning of Infinity and Eternity!

  [6]

  The Triumph of Mind

  My Watcher halted and rotated in space like some fleshy balloon. Those huge eyes came towards me, dark, immense, the glare of the light-drenched sky reflected in pupils the size of saucers; at last, it seemed, my world was filled by that immense, compelling gaze, to the exclusion of all else — even the fiery sky…

  But then the Watcher seemed to melt away. The scattering of distant constellations, the foamy galactic structure — even the glare of the burning sky — I saw them no more — or rather, I was aware of these things as an aspect of reality, but only as a surface. If you imagine focusing on a pane of glass before you — and then deliberately relaxing the muscles of your eye, to fix on a landscape beyond, so that the dust on that pane disappears from your awareness — then you will have something of the effect I am describing.

  But, of course, my change in perception was caused by nothing so physical as a tug of eye muscles, and the shift in perspective I endured involved rather more than depth of focus.

  I saw — I thought — into the structure of Nature.

  I saw atoms: points of light, like little stars, filling space in a sort of array which stretched off around me, unending — I saw it all as clearly as a doctor might study a pattern of ribs beneath the skin of a chest. The atoms fizzed and sparkled; they spun on their little axes, and they were connected by a complex mesh of threads of light — or so it seemed to me; I realized that I must be seeing some graphical presentation of electrical, magnetic, gravitational and other forces. It was as if the universe was filled with a sort of atomic clockwork — and, I saw, the whole of it was dynamic, with the patterns of links and atoms constantly shifting.

  The meaning of this bizarre vision was immediately clear to me, for I saw more of the regularity here which I had observed among the galaxies and stars. I could see — suffused in every wisp of gas, in every stray atom — meaning and structure. There was a purpose to the orientation of each atom, the direction of its spin, and the linkages between it and its neighbors. It was as if the universe, the whole of it, had become a sort of Library, to store the collective wisdom of this ancient variant of Humanity; every scrap of matter, down to the last stray wisp, was evidently catalogued and exploited… Just as Nebogipfel had predicted as the final goal of Intelligence!

  But this arrangement was more than a Library — more than a passive collection of dusty data — for there was a sense of life, of urgency, all about me. It was as if consciousness was distributed across these vast assemblages of matter.

  Mind filled this universe, seeping down into its very fabric! — I seemed to see thought and awareness wash across this universal array of fact in great waves. I was astonished by the scale of all this — I could not grasp its boundless nature — by comparison, my own species had been limited to the manipulation of the outer skin of an insignificant planet, the Morlocks to their Sphere; and even the Constructors had only had a Galaxy — a single star-system, out of millions…

  Here, though, Mind had it all — an Infinitude.

  Now, at last, I understood — I saw for myself — the meaning and purpose of infinite and eternal Life.

  The universe was infinitely old, and infinite in extent; and Mind, too, was infinitely old. Mind had gained control of all Matter and Forces, and had stored an infinite amount of Information.

  Mind here was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Constructors, by means of their bold challenge to the beginnings of time, had achieved their ideal. They had transcended the finite, and colonized the infinite.

  The atoms and forces faded to the background of my immediate attention, and my eyes were filled once more with the unending light and star-patterns of this cosmos. My Watcher companion had gone now, and I was suspended alone, a sort of disembodied point of view, slowly rotating.

  The star-light was all about me, deep, unending. I had a sense of the smallness of things, of myself, the irrelevance of my petty concerns. In an infinite and eternal universe, I saw, there is no Center; there can be no Beginning, no End. Each event, each point, is rendered identical to every other by the endless setting within which it is placed… In an infinite universe, I had become infinitesimal.

  I have never been much of a poetry buff, but I remembered a verse of Shelley’s: on how life, like a dome of many-colored glass/ stains the white radiance of Eternity… and so forth. Well, I was done with life now; the covering of the body, the shallow illusion of matter itself — all that had been torn from me, and I was immersed, perhaps forever, in that white radiance of which Shelley spoke.

  For a while I felt a peculiar sort of peace. When I had first witnessed the impact of my Time Machine on the unraveling of History, I had come to believe that my invention was a device of unparalleled evil, for its arbitrary destruction and distortion of Histories: for the elimination of millions of unborn human souls, with the barest flicker of my control levers. But now, at last, I saw that the Time Machine had not destroyed Histories: rather, it had created them. All possible Histories exist in the greater Multiplicity, lying agai
nst one another in an endless catalogue of What-Can-Be. Every History which was possible, with all its cargo of Mind, Love and Hope, had an existence somewhere in the Multiplicity.

  But it was not so much the reality of the Multiplicity but what it signified for the destiny of man which moved me now.

  Man — it had always seemed to me since I first read Darwin — had been caught in a conflict: between the aspirations of his soul, which were lofty without limit, and the baseness of his physical nature, which, in the end, might floor him. I thought I had seen, in the Eloi, how the dead hand of Evolution — the legacy of the beast in us — would in the end destroy man’s dreams, and turn his tenure of the earth into nothing but a brief, glorious glow of intellect.

  That conflict, implicit in the human form, had, I think, worked itself into me as a conflict in my own mind. If Nebogipfel had been right that I had a sort of loathing for the Body — well, perhaps my over-awareness of this million-year conflict was its root! I had veered, in my views and arguments, between a sort of bleak despair, a loathing of our minds’ bestial casings, and a fond, rather foolish Utopianism — a dream that one day our heads would become clear, as if from a mass delirium, and we would settle on a society founded on principles of logic, self-evident justice, and science.

  But now, the discovery — or construction — and colonization of this final History had changed all that. Here, man had at last overcome his origins and the degradation of Natural Selection; here, there would be no return to the oblivion of that primal, mindless sea from which we had emerged: rather, the future had become infinite, a climbing into an air of endless Histories.

  I felt I had emerged, at last, from out of the Darkness of evolutionary despair, and into the Light of infinite wisdom.

  [7]

  Emergence

  But, you may not be surprised to read if you have followed me so far, this mood — it was a sort of elegiac acceptance — did not persist with me for long!

  I took to peering about. I strained myself to hear, to see any detail, the slightest mottling in that shell of illumination that surrounded me; but for a while — there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable brightness.

  I had become a disembodied mote, presumably immortal, and embedded in this greatest of artifices: a universe whose forces and particles were entirely given over to Mind. It was magnificent — but it was terrible, inhuman, chilling — and a sort of crushing dismay fell on me.

  Had I passed out of being, into something that was neither being nor not being? Well, if I had — I was discovering — I did not yet have the peace of the Eternal. I still had the soul of a man, with all the freight of inquisitiveness and thirst for action which has always been part of human nature. There is too much of the Occidental about me, and soon I had had my fill of this interval of disembodied Contemplation!…

  Then, after an unmeasured interval, I realized that the brilliancy of the sky was not absolute. There was a sort of hazing at the edge of my vision — the slightest darkening.

  I watched for geological ages, it seemed to me, and through that long waiting the hazing grew more distinct: it was a sort of circle about my vision, as if I was peering out through the mouth of a cave. And then, in the middle of that spectral cave-mouth, I made out an irregular cloud, a mottling against the general glare; I saw a collection of rough rods and discs, all indistinct, arranged like phantoms over the stars. In one corner of this view there was a cylinder colored pure green.

  I felt a passionate impatience. What was this irruption of shadows into the interminable Noon of this Optimal History?

  The surrounding cave-shape grew more clear; I wondered if this was some submerged memory of the Palaeocene. And as for that misty collection of rods and discs, I was struck by an impression that I had seen this arrangement before: it was as familiar as my own hand, I thought, and yet, in this transformed context, I could not recognize it…

  And then the realization rushed upon me. The rods and other components were my Time Machine — the lines over there, obscuring that constellation, were the bars of brass which made up the fundamental frame of the device; and those discs, wreathed about with galaxies, must be my chronometric dials. It was my original machine, which I had thought lost, dismantled and finally destroyed in that German attack on London in 1938!

  The coalescing of this vision proceeded apace. The brass rods glittered — I saw there was a sprinkling of dust over the faces of the chronometric dials, whose hands whirled about and I recognized the green glow of Plattnerite which suffused the doped quartz of the infrastructure. I looked down and made out two wide, fat, darker cylinders — they were my own legs, clothed in jungle twill! — and those pale, hairy, complex objects must be my hands, resting on the machine’s control levers.

  And now, at last, I understood the meaning of that “cavemouth” around my vision. It was the frame of my eye-sockets, nose and cheeks about my field of view: once more I was looking out from that darkest of caves — my own skull.

  I felt as if I was being lowered into my body. Fingers and legs attached themselves to my consciousness. I could feel the levers, cool and firm, in my hand, and there was a light prickling of sweat on my brow. It was a little, I suppose, like recovering from the oblivion of chloroform; slowly, subtly, I was coming into myself. And now I felt a swaying, and that plummeting sensation of time travel.

  Beyond the Time Machine there was only dark — I could make out nothing of the world — but I could feel, from its decreasing lurching, that the machine was slowing. I looked around — I was rewarded with the weight of a laden skull on a stem of a neck; after my disembodied state it felt as if I were swiveling an artillery piece — but there were only the faintest traces of the Optimal History left in my view: here a wisp of galaxy clusters, there a fragment of star-light. In that last instant, before my intangible link was finally broken, I saw again the round, solemn visage of my Watcher, with his immense, thoughtful eyes.

  Then it was gone — all of it — and I was fully in myself again; and I felt a surge of savage, primitive joy!

  The Time Machine lurched to a halt. The thing went rolling over, and I was flung headlong through the air, into pitch darkness.

  There was a crack of thunder in my ears. A hard, steady rain was pounding with a brute force against my scalp and jungle shirt. In a moment I was wet to the skin: it was a fine welcome back to corporeality, I thought!

  I had been deposited on a patch of sodden, soft turf in front of the overturned machine. It was quite dark. I seemed to be on a little lawn, surrounded by bushes whose leaves were dancing under the rain-drops. The rebounding drops shimmered about the machine. Close by I heard the bubble of a mass of water, and rain pattered into that greater mass of liquid.

  I stood up and looked about. There was a building close by, visible only as a silhouette against the charcoal-gray sky. I noticed now that there was a faint green glow, coming from beneath the tipped-over machine. I saw that it came from a vial, a cylinder of glass perhaps six inches tall: it was a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle. This had evidently been lodged in the frame of the machine, but now it had fallen to the grass.

  I reached to pick up the flask. The greenish glow came from a powder within: it was Plattnerite.

  My name was called.

  I turned, startled. The voice had been soft, almost masked by the hissing of the rain on the grass.

  There was a figure standing not ten feet from me: short, almost childlike, but with scalp and back coated by long, lank hair that had been plastered flat by the rain against pale flesh. Huge eyes, gray-red, were fixed on me.

  “Nebogipfel—?”

  And then some circuit closed in my bewildered brain.

  I turned, and inspected that building’s blocky outline once more. There was the iron balcony, over there the dining-room, the kitchen with a small window ajar, and there was the blocky form of the laboratory…

  It was my home; my machine had deposited me on the sloping lawn at the rear
, between the house and the Thames. I had returned — after all this! — to Richmond.

  [8]

  A Circle is Closed

  Once more — just as we had done before, so many cycles of History ago — Nebogipfel and I walked along the Petersham Road to my house. The rain hissed on the cobbles. It was almost completely dark — in fact, the only light came from the jar of Plattnerite, which glowed like a faint electric bulb, casting a murky glow over Nebogipfel’s face.

  I brushed my fingers over the familiar, delicate metalwork of the rail before the area. Here was a sight I had thought never to see again: this mock-elegant facade, the pillars of the porch, the darkened rectangles of my windows.

  “You have both your eyes back,” I observed to Nebogipfel in a whisper.

  He glanced down at his renewed body, spreading his palms so that the pale flesh gleamed in the light of the Plattnerite. “I have no need for prosthesis,” he said. “Not any more. Now that I have been rebuilt — as you have.”

  I rested my hands against my chest. The shirt fabric was coarse, rough under my palm, and my own breast-bone was hard beneath. It all felt solid enough. And I still felt like me — I mean, I had a continuity of consciousness, a single, shining path of memory, which led back through all that tangling-up of Histories, back to the simpler days when I was a boy. But I could not be the same man — for I had been disassembled in that Optimal History, and remade here. I wondered how much of that shining universe remained in me. “Nebogipfel, do you remember much of it all — after we broke through that Boundary at the start of time — the glowing sky, and so forth?”