Newton's Aliens: Tales From the Anti-Ice Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Midnight will come soon enough,’ Verity said gently. ‘Even kings have to obey the clock.’

  Cedric looked up at the moon, the true, ancient moon. In its shadowed areas you could just make out the brilliant sparks of the British colonies.

  ‘No doubt they’ll be celebrating New Year up there too,’ Merrell said absently. ‘All the clocks are set to Greenwich, of course. And half of the moon men are Scots, and they celebrate Hogmanay well enough. The plans they have! I’ll tell you the most remarkable thing I was shown up there. They want to mount big anti-ice engines around the equator of the moon, and spin it up. Some of the geologists think there are lodes of anti-ice all over the moon’s surface, and perhaps by shortening the lunar day you could get them to break out.’

  ‘Spinning the moon!’ breathed Cedric.

  ‘The idea terrifies me,’ Verity said simply.

  ‘Hush,’ somebody called. ‘Here he is, here is the King!’

  Led by the Reverend Cook, who looked pleased as Punch, King Edward VII marched to the stage. The King-Emperor was a stout man of about sixty, balding, with a trim beard; his face looked blotchy, perhaps a result of his legendary excesses. But he walked with an easy command, as befitted a man who had been on the throne since the abdication of his mother more than thirty years before.

  When Edward took his place on the stage he faced a bank of lenses; there were photographers here as well as operators of Edison kinetographs and phonographs, keen to capture the images and sounds of this unique moment for history. Meanwhile the boys had been told that even as he spoke Edward’s words would be transcribed and sent by telegraph to all corners of the country, the empire, and the world. This moment, the birth of a new century, was the platform for a King-Emperor to set out his vision of the future.

  And what a vision it was!

  Edward spoke of the British triumphs of the dying century: the wars won or suppressed, the territories conquered, the populations subdued. He spoke of Britain’s successful intervention in the last war between France and Prussia, and how British stewardship had delivered a generation of peace in Europe since then. He spoke of the new transport networks on land, sea and in the air, powered by God’s gift of anti-ice but developed by British ingenuity, which united the nations of the old world from Paris to Moscow, Oslo to Rome, and across Africa, India and even China. However he made no mention of the chafing some peoples felt within that robust embrace, such as the rebellions underway even now in South Africa and China, where old boys of the Academy were fighting and dying.

  And he spoke of grand schemes for the coming century: even of a tunnel under the Atlantic or a bridge thrown over its choppy surface, to bring the New World into the embrace of the Old.

  ‘That will please the Americans,’ Merrell murmured.

  ‘Pah,’ said Fitz. ‘The Americans have it coming. We should have intervened in their Civil War, on one side or the other. That was when they were weakest, when we could have won back the colonies. But we hesitated. Well, it’s a detail of unfinished business …’

  Now the King was coming to the climax of his peroration. He spoke not just of the challenges of the coming century but of the ages after that: ages to be shaped by the young men of the Academy before him, and the generations to follow. He sketched the might of Britain imposing a Pax Britannica, the shadow of the Union Flag stretching across the centuries: a thousand years of unchallenged British power. This moment, the dawn of a new century, was a turning point in human affairs, said the King.

  Cedric felt chilled, imagining how these words would play in the halls of Europe.

  And, said the King, he would now demonstrate that might. As the Academy bell rang the stroke of midnight, Edward raised his arm.

  The ground shook. There was a roar like a clap of thunder, and a burst of light. Every head turned towards the Hole.

  The anti-ice missile bearing its Gladstone Shell rose up, bright as a rising sun, sliding smoothly into the sky on a pillar of steam. The noise was tremendous, a kind of crackling roar like thunder. The wire fence was blown flat, and Cedric saw rabbits fleeing terrified from the smoke and glare.

  The Academy boys cried, ‘Huzza! Huzza!’

  And Cedric could not help but join in. He imagined the scene as a hundred such rockets rose from the British ground, all set to arc west across the Atlantic to splash harmlessly in the useless jungles of the Amazon forest.

  But even as the missile rose, he was aware of agitation on the stage as the staff peered up at the diminishing rocket – which seemed, even now, to be arrowing straight for the pale potato shape of the Little Moon.

  ‘Looks like we’ve done it,’ Merrell said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Verity breathed. ‘We’ve sent the chick home!’

  ‘They’ll throw us out for sure if they find out we were responsible for fooling with the missile,’ Cedric said.

  ‘What of it?’ Verity asked. ‘They train you young gentlemen to think, to be independent – to be ready to shape the future. They can hardly complain if the future you choose to build is not the one the King described.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Merrell said exuberantly. ‘England itself will be ours, come to that, given a bit of time. It’s up to us to decide if we want it filled up with Phoebean monsters and demolished like an old house – or not. And it’s up to us to decide if we want war, or even a warlike peace. The future is in our hands, lads. It always was, wasn’t it?’

  As the Academy’s bells rang, the Reverend bellowed out the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. With the rest of the boys, Cedric joined in, and he linked his arms with Merrell and Verity. He felt the girl’s warm presence close to him, and he watched her face shine in the light as the spark of the anti-ice missile soared up to the Little Moon.

  The Ice War

  Chapter I

  The historians have painted March 5th 1720 as a day of infamy, for that was the day the Ice War was declared upon Britain by monsters from the sky. But my own poor life might have ended that ominous morn even before the war’s tremendous events began to unfold.

  As I lay in my narrow bed in that dawn, Fred Partridge’s voice drifted up to me from the chill road outside. ‘Jack Hobbes! I know you are up there, you blackguard. If you’re alone in your pit or if you’re not, come down and face your justice like a man!’ All this to a counterpoint of a hammering on the tavern door by mighty agricultural fists.

  My immediate stratagem was to follow that course which has served me so well throughout my life, that is to hide until the danger had passed. So I burrowed under the coarse sheets, pulling my jerkin tighter around me and my battered old felt hat down upon my ears, for in that bitter spring the cold would freeze the marrow in your bones, and I kept on layers of clothes even during the night. I could guess why Fred was there, but even in that moment of peril I wished I had his daughter in the bed beside me again: full-breasted, empty-headed, sixteen years old, what a bedwarmer Constance had made!

  The banging and shouting went on, and for a moment I thought I might get away with it. But then I heard old Mary, wife of the innkeeper, come to the door and demand of Partridge in querulous tones what he was at, frightening her pigs and splintering her woodwork. The crux of it was that she opened the door and old Fred got in, and he lumbered up the stairs sounding like a great horse loose in the house.

  Well, I sprang out of bed. As I have said I was already dressed, and had only to pull on my woollen overcoat and my boots and I was ready for the road. I glanced around my room one last time, this mean hovel that had been my home for a year. I snatched up my purse and my pocket knife, and my father-in-law’s Perspective, stolen by me as I fled Edinburgh in not dissimilar circumstances to this, all that and a bit of bread from last night’s supper which I crammed into the pockets of my coat. I considered my school books and my heaps of teaching notes, but even if I survived the morn I would not be going back to the Grammar School in Jedburgh. That was that and time to leave, Jack.

  I hurried to the window and
snatched back the curtain – and just for a heartbeat, despite my own peril, I was taken aback by the spectacle before me. From my elevation on this first storey I saw the town of Jedburgh set out before me in the dawn. Winter ice lay everywhere, months old and cracked and brown with mud. And the Comet sprawled over a grey dawn sky, that astounding tail sparkling as if flecked with gunpowder. And as I watched I thought I saw a bit of that tail, a sparkling fragment, come loose and slide over the sky.

  But a fleshier peril than any Comet was closing on me, and I was maundering. I fumbled with the window but it was frozen in its socket, and my heart pounded.

  The door slammed open and Fred Partridge filled the frame, more like one of his bulls than a man. His face was bright with his temper as with the cold, and his grey hair stuck up around his bald pate. ‘Hobbes, you black-hearted coward!’

  In that moment the window flew up, ice cracking around its frame, and my mood switched to reckless cheer. ‘That’s me, Fred!’

  He strode towards me. He had the biggest hands I have ever seen, even among farmers, and his fists looked like sides of beef. ‘Stand and take what’s coming to you.’

  ‘Not likely,’ says I. And with a skip I got my legs over the window sill and wriggled around so I was dangling down the wall of the house, and then it was a question of dropping a few feet to the ground. I finished up in the inn’s yard, not a pace from old Mary, who stood glaring in her doorway.

  Fred got his head and one huge fist out of the window. ‘You nimble beggar!’

  I laughed. ‘Yes, Fred, and at the ripe old age of twenty-four years it’s ploughing your daughter that has kept me so.’

  His face turned from red to purple. ‘I’ll wring your neck! My girl’s with child, ruined by your stinking seed. Why, to think I paid for you to stand in front of my own son in that school, with your Mathematicks and your Philosophies -’

  I stood up straighter, for I do have some professional pride. ‘You got the teaching you paid for, Fred, and if it was good enough for a kirk school in Edinburgh, it was more than good enough for your jug-brained offspring. I’m sorry about Constance for she’s a good girl and no wanton, but I won’t have you pointing fingers at me.’ And to bring that home I grinned at Mary. ‘I know how loose your own breeches are, Fred!’

  Old Mary gasped at that, and to my shock she went for me herself. She had muscles from hauling kegs of ale all her life, and she gripped my shoulders hard and shook me. Meanwhile Fred roared like a stag and disappeared from the window, on his way down. Trapped, my skull rattling from the shaking, I began to think that last thrust had been a bit too bold.

  But I have never been one for hypocrites. I had a breed of Christianity beaten into me as a boy by my high churchman of a father, whose whippings seemed to demonstrate to me the non-existence of God rather than the opposite, for if He lives why would He permit those struggling to believe to suffer so? Catch me if you can, punish me as you will, but spare me your cant and your piety!

  Little enough of this flashed through my head as I loosened the grip of the innkeeper’s wife on my shoulders and scarpered.

  And even as I ran I saw that bit of the Comet slide down through the air, sparking and brightening, dropping towards the south-east and so descending ahead of me in my flight, a Star of Bethlehem guiding a man who was anything but wise.

  I soon got through the heart of Jedburgh, which is pretty beside its river but has been battered by centuries of war between English and Scots, its poor abbey burned and looted over and over, leaving it a stunted and fearful sort of place, and I wasn’t sorry to shake its dust from my boots. From Jedburgh town I meant to head off down Dere Street, the Romans’ old track, cutting across the country to join the Great North Road at Newcastle. With any luck I would find a bit of transport before I had worn out my poor feet with too many miles.

  I had long mapped out various routes for the day when escape from Jedburgh should become necessary. My final goal was to return to London, full of opportunities for a fellow like me, and I hoped that by now the various misdemeanours that had caused my father to curtail my Philosophical studies at the university there and haul me off to teach in Edinburgh would have been forgotten, if not forgiven – although the likely existence of a few young Hobbeses running around among the Cockneys were a counter to that argument. My return from Scottish exile so far had got me only to this border town, where, lazy to a fault, I had got stuck for a year. But now at last I would resume my southward route towards the metropolis.

  As it happened the road passed Fred Partridge’s own farm, and I remembered how I had trod this track many times in search of the delights of young Constance – damnable bad luck she had got with child! But the circumstances were less happy now. Still fearful of Fred’s fists I was cautious as I walked a field boundary, eyeing the rude farmhouse and the tumbled stables and the big barn that Fred liked to boast he had built himself with his father. The sun was up by now, a pale ghost that shed no heat. I stumbled a bit on soil frozen hard as Roman concrete, and the winter cabbages in the field glistened with frost.

  And suddenly my shadow sprawled over the ground afore me, cast not from the sun, which lay ahead of me, but from behind, and it shifted as I watched, quite unnatural. I whirled around, afeared that some lout of Fred’s had after all come after me with a torch or a lantern.

  But it was nothing human that cast that shadow. It was that bit of the Comet, the fragment of the tail that was falling out of the sky. It had been a mere spark of light, a star, but now I could see it had grown into a lump, irregular, a glowing potato that tumbled as it fell. It sparked and flashed all over. I heard a kind of roaring too, like a distant storm approaching.

  And as I watched those few seconds I heard that roar grow louder, and the potato swelled larger, and I realised that this spitting monster was falling to the ground right on top of me!

  I ran, a healthy instinct born of a lifetime of cowardice. I made for the nearest shelter, which was Fred Partridge’s barn. Still the light brightened, still that dread roaring pounded my ears, and I felt a breath of hot wind. As I fled into the barn a pair of cows in their byre gazed at me with dull surprise.

  There was an enormous bang, a flash like a detonating sun, and a fist mightier than Fred’s slammed me in the back. I flew through the air and hit something hard and I knew no more!

  Chapter II

  It was dawn when I was knocked unconscious, night when I woke. Thus I had slept through the whole of a day.

  Night it might have been but the light was bright, a silver glow that sent shafts between the slats in the roof of the barn, and made a cow low fretfully. The light was not the moon, of course, but the Comet that still dominated the sky.

  All this I saw as I stirred in my impromptu sick bed. It turned out I had been flung across the barn to clatter against a wall; having been lucky to survive the Comet fall, I was lucky again to drop, insensible, into a heap of straw that cushioned me – and then the straw had kept me warm through the long day, for otherwise I might have perished from the cold. Lucky too was I to find, as I shifted my limbs, that I was whole in the skeleton despite my battering, and uninjured save for an aching chest and a pounding in the head. Lucky several times over then, though you might not have thought it from my self-pitying mumbling as I sat in my straw, sore, giddy, hungry, thirsty and desperately cold, and picking bits of urine-flavoured straw from my mouth. I have never been brave in the face of injury.

  But I shut up when I heard voices outside, and saw the flicker of lanterns. I was still on old Fred’s farm, I reminded myself, and had best be careful who found me there. I crept out of my shadowed corner to see what I could.

  I was amazed to find that little had survived of the barn, save the end of it where I had been thrown. Where the barn’s big doors had opened, a great pit had been dug in the earth, shallow like a saucer but as wide as fifteen or twenty paces, and perhaps five deep at its centre. Around this the roof was blown away and the doors and walls scorched and fall
en. One of those poor cows still stood in her byre, lowing softly as if she needed milking; of the other nothing remained but a splash of blood and some bits of fur. It was evident a great explosion had taken place here.

  And at the centre of the crater, sitting like a potato on a plate, was a sort of boulder, perhaps six feet high and as broad, its surface scorched and steaming, evidently still hot. Despite my concussion I immediately deduced that this object must be that piece of the Comet tail that I had seen penetrate the air. Under a coating of soot, I thought it glimmered, like ice. Oddly enough I also saw what looked like hen’s eggs nestling in the rubble of that crater, and that I could not understand; perhaps they had somehow been thrown here from a blasted hen coop.

  But I heard voices again, and ducked back into the shadows. Here came Fred Partridge with a party of his hinds, equipped with rakes and shovels. He set them to clearing away the debris of the shattered barn, and I thought that he might have been waiting out the day until the crater cooled enough for his men to approach, and get it filled in. But the ground in that pit was still too warm and the steaming lump too hot to handle, as one wretched hind learned at the cost of a scalded palm.

  Stuck in my shadows, hungry and chilled to the bone, I waited as the lads abandoned their tools and drifted off.

  Then I crept forward to spy out the land. The Comet light was bright in the night. I had hoped to find a deserted field, and a way off this wretched farm and back to Dere Street and salvation. But a bonfire had been lit not far from the barn, and two of Fred’s hinds sat huddled in blankets beside it. For all his piety old Fred was always a greedy sort as well as a hypocritical lecher, and I thought he must be guarding his barn against thieves. Cursing, I retreated into the dark.

  Gnawed by hunger and thirst I hunted through the ruin of that barn, but there was nothing to eat but the stale bread I had put in my pockets, and even the cows’ water was frozen solid in its trough. I even ventured to explore the crater for those hen’s eggs. It was too hot to walk through, but I lay on my belly and reached in to pluck out one of those scattered eggs. But I snatched my hand back, for the egg was hard and heavy and cold and slick – an egg of ice! Whatever these strange formations may have been, none of them had been near a hen, and there was nothing for me.