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

by Stephen Baxter

  For a chap who believes he is so clever, it took me a while to recognise there was one tap in that barn that might run for me, and that was the udder of the one surviving cow, who remained ignored by Fred and his boys. I hurried over to the poor animal, found a knocked-over bucket, and rummaged around for her teats. I am no farmer’s hind, and my only knowledge of milking was acquired through observing one or two farmers’ daughters or maids whose own pretty udders I had my eye on at the time. Still I laboured at my task, grateful for a bit of warmth, and the cow mooed her relief, and thus we were united in our physical needs. Mammals, the lot of us! It is only hubris that makes us think we are better than the beasts of the field, so like us in every particular.

  After I had drunk of her lactation, warmed and refreshed, I stuffed my coat and hat with straw and huddled in a corner to endure the night. It was as uncomfortable an evening as any I have spent.

  I am city bred, having been born in Bristol, and had lived my life mostly in London and Edinburgh, capitals both. I was schooled in London and went up to university there at age fourteen, but was dismayed by the cold modern teachings of the Natural Philosophers with their Systems of the World and their Natural Religion: ‘Reason, not Revelation, boys!’ This may be the new fashion of the day, but I was as repelled by a vision of a God who is absent from the Universe as by one who clouted me daily through my father’s fists. I almost missed the old Tyrant!

  Well, though my brain is fine enough I became a poor sort of scholar in that place, and at nineteen was forced to flee London through scandals of my own making, which I will not test the reader’s patience by listing here. As for Edinburgh, I soon discovered a certain facility for teaching, but I fell into my former sorry habits, and the old Presbyterian whose daughter I tupped there had gone one better than Fred in holding me to account, and after a thrashing I was stood up to marry the girl. We had some months of contentment, I would say, when we could get away from the father, and I think we both felt it in our hearts when she lost the bairn before its birth. After that I went to the bad once more, and was close to gambling away the last of my dowry when the latest Jacobite rebellion erupted and it became prudent to decant Jack Hobbes to somewhere less full of men with steel and muskets, and I fled for the border country.

  In short, in all my complicated career I had never been a farmer, and huddled in that barn that night I envied old Fred’s hinds not one jot. Those fellows held to their duty, however. All night I heard their conversation continue, ever more drunken.

  And during that long night I watched what became of the bit of heaven that had fallen into Fred Partridge’s barn.

  For a start I saw where those eggs came from.

  They were propelled out of the soot-covered ice kernel itself! One by one the eggs sailed through the air like dried peas spat out by a boy. It took a bit of watching to observe this, for it was not a frequent event. Stranger yet, the eggs underwent their own evolution. They would burst open with a snap like melting ice and scatter fragments onto the earth. And then – so I surmise, for I did not observe this directly – those fragments gathered themselves up again into a sort of dome, perhaps the width of a man’s hand, shallow as an upturned saucer. You could see that the dome incorporated bits of the earth, from the way the ice was streaked and dirty.

  A curiosity it was, but I am no nature-watcher; my intelligence is earthier than that. I fancy I slept a little.

  I was disturbed by a tickle, an awareness of something moving before my face, small and furtive. A rat, perhaps. Without opening my eyes I swept my arm around, fancying I might make a snack of him in the hinds’ bonfire. But my reward was not the squeaking I had expected but a kind of tinkle, like a falling icicle. Startled by that, I sat up. I found a little heap of icy fragments before me: a thing like a lens, perhaps six inches across, and fine rods no wider than straws, broken, splintered and piled up on the ground. It had not been there when I fell asleep.

  I looked about. Outside the ruined barn the sky was brightening, the sun’s light seeping behind the Comet tail. The bonfire had burned down, and Fred’s two hinds lay sleeping, one snoring loudly. At last, I saw, I had a chance to make a run for it.

  But I was distracted by motion in the pit before me.

  There was a stirring in the broken earth around one of those domed forms. Then, to my surprise, thin pipes scraped up out of the ground like fast-growing flowers, standing quite vertically, making a sort of crown all around the lip of the dome. These icicles were perhaps a foot long; I had never seen the like before. Then, stranger yet, the dome itself quivered and shook, and with an icy grind it rose up from the ground, rising through its cage of icicles to the top. Now I saw that the ‘dome’ was as convex beneath as above, and that this ice artefact was in effect a lens, opaque and streaked with the dirt of old Fred’s floor.

  The lens settled for a moment, and then the icicles themselves began to move. They slid under the carapace of the lens, remaining dead straight, clustered, moved again. And as they did so the lens itself began to shift to and fro, the whole assemblage migrating across the pit, inch by inch. The thing was something like a toy of a Greek temple on the move, those upright pillars sliding around beneath the lenticular roof. It was a strange manner of movement quite unlike anything I had ever heard of, though I have read plenty of travellers’ tales. And yet it had the semblance of life, like an ungainly crab made of ice. I realised that such a beast had disturbed me as I slept, and I had thoughtlessly smashed it up.

  And now that I knew how to see them, I realised that more of the creatures were shifting about their pit, those odd lenticular bodies sliding up and down the ice pipes, and shimmying to and fro with that odd, disturbing movement that would become so familiar across all of England in the days to come. Some of them, indeed, seemed to me to be venturing away from the pit, and even out of the barn. I could not count them; there might have been hundreds.

  And I heard voices coming from outside the barn, old Fred’s gravelly tones as he rebuked his drunken hinds, and the shouting of men and the barking of dogs. Distracted by the ice novelties I had let slip my only chance of a fast escape from that wretched place. Trapped, still! Steadily cursing my own foolish curiosity, I slithered through the shadows to see what was what.

  This time Fred had gathered a veritable army, armed with staves and half-pikes and even a few fusees, fowling pieces and the like. I observed this with a sinking heart, imagining Fred was setting off a hunt after me, his fox. But the men were heading not for the barn but in the direction of Fred’s farmhouse, and I shook off my funk, for now I observed that the farmhouse too was damaged.

  The house was always a rude affair, built largely of stone robbed from the abbey in Jedburgh. Now one end of it, where the kitchen was built, was crumpled up and dishevelled, the brick wall cracked, the chimney stack askew. I wondered if some fresh piece of Comet had come tumbling to earth, but I had heard nothing in the night. But I saw that what had damaged the house had come from not from above the earth but from beneath it. The kitchen had been nudged up by a great dome of dirty ice that had pushed its way rudely out of the ground, quite regular, the cousin of one of the tiny domes I had observed in my pit – but huge, as I could tell from the perspective of the men who walked around it and even over it. All this had erupted from the earth overnight.

  And as I framed that thought I felt the ground shudder like the slope of Etna, rattling the barn and alarming the cow. I thought I knew what was to come next, and that if I were one of those hinds around the big dome I would run fast.

  I did not have long to wait. Needles of ice shot out of the ground all around the hillock of ice, no splinters this time but pillars each a yard wide. Earth was scattered, the ground shook, and those hinds ran like mice. The pillars grew like weeds until they were perhaps a hundred feet tall.

  And then came the second act as that mountain of ice shuddered and clean ripped itself out of the frozen turf, and rose to the top of its circle of pillars with a deafening sc
rape. It was astounding; save perhaps for waterfalls and floods, I had never seen such a mass in motion. And if I was startled by all this, imagine how it was for the hinds, men whose minds were a void of ignorance broken only by the pious babblings of their ministers. Fred Partridge, meanwhile, was hopping about furiously, because the rise of the ice lens had toppled over his farmhouse as easily as a man kicks over an ant hill.

  Already those great limbs broke from their circular stations and slid back and forth beneath the belly of the lens, and gradually began to carry that ice carcass across the countryside, like legs bearing an animated tabletop. Fred and his men fled without looking back, and I was free at last.

  But the spectacle wasn’t done yet. I saw another beast, even bigger, erupt from Fred’s turnip field beyond. And then came another up from beneath the riverbed that shattered a water-mill into flying splinters, and another beyond that, so far off it was misted by distance, huger even than its Titanic brothers. As soon as they emerged all these beasts began the purposeful movement of the first, those limbs moving back and forth like sunbeams cast through a cloud.

  It did not take me long to deduce that the beasts were converging on Jedburgh.

  In the turmoil of the ‘Nineteen, as the Stuart-led mob of hairy-arsed highlanders had come down from the hills, Jack Hobbes had scarpered quick. Likewise now as those ice monsters bore down on the unfortunate town I ran the other way, heading south-east down the rutted old Roman road, ran until my lungs were fit to burst!

  Chapter III

  When I was sure there was no chance of pursuit from Fred Partridge and his men, I slowed my pace to a walk, and began at last the purposeful part of my journey, heading down the Roman road towards Otterburn. The day was just as cold as those before, the ice holding fast to the land. But I was young enough and fit, and soon walked off the effects of my narrow squeak with the ice meteor and my night in the barn. I had my purse and had every intention of making a comfortable journey of it, lodging in inns and farmhouses with perhaps the bonus of a plump innkeeper’s wife or two to keep me interested, and if I was lucky I might catch a coach to London.

  But these plans came to naught.

  It was soon apparent that the icefall on Jedburgh had not been an isolated event. The country hereabouts, and even as I walked over Carter Bar into England, was pocked with craters, many of them tremendous pits that dwarfed the one that had almost killed me in Jedburgh. Too, I observed a multiplicity of the little ice crabs scuttling about the countryside, which would get under your feet when you were walking, particularly when the evening came on. I took no particular care about crushing the little pests. But I saw their greater brethren loom on the horizon, those lenticular bodies horizontal and their legs always dead straight and shuffling back and forth, and gleaming a cold blue when the rare sunlight caught their carcasses. And though I could not see them at it, I suspected they too moved about more at night, from the icy grinding that echoed across the dark country as I huddled for shelter in ditches or in woods.

  In response to this invasion the villages on my route, Campdown and Byrness and Rochester, were abandoned like plague towns. It seemed the people had fled in panic, though where they had imagined to go I could not fathom, for the whole country was assailed by the beasts. It seemed to me that the monsters might not be interested in humanity at all, and that the damage they did to our communities might be as incidental to their purpose as the flattening of a mole hill under the boot of a marching soldier. Still, there was often an empty cottage or two that offered me a bed, and a bit of bread or hanging meat or mouldy cheese, and I got myself warmed up regularly.

  When I came on Otterburn I had a choice to make. I could continue on Dere Street to the south and east making across the fell for Newcastle, or I could cut east and follow the valley of the Coquet towards Alnwick. Though I would come on the Great North Road further north than Newcastle, this latter course I decided on. I was not the only footsore traveller, and the villages were becoming increasingly emptied out, and I fancied I might provision myself with the fishing on the Coquet. And I fretted how things might be in the south if the vast population of England was taking flight from its cities. It might be better to make for the north and Edinburgh, where I would have to deal with an irate Presbyterian father-in-law, but better that than a mob of starving Londoners.

  So I followed the Coquet as far as Rothbury, provisioning myself with fish from the frozen river, and then cut across the moor towards Alnwick. I repeatedly saw the ice monsters march in the distance, and saw more ice meteors crash to the earth.

  Before I reached the town itself I came at last upon the Great North Road, that great old artery of ours. I had travelled this way with my father from London to Edinburgh some years before; it and the rest of the Romans’ old routes are still the best roads in the country. We live in the shadow of a better past, and I have often believed myself born into a wrong age! The North Road, in fact, at the time of the Ice War of which I speak was being improved for the first time since a legionary last trod on this island thirteen centuries ago, these enhancements being paid for by a system of tolls and turnpikes as legislated by Parliament. This system of maintenance I thoroughly approved of, and I had intended to tip my cap at each of the turnpike gates that I jumped over with my purse unopened.

  But that day I did not have the road to myself. I was dismayed, if not surprised, by the volume of traffic hereupon as I came upon the road.

  I stood on a slight rise by the side of the track and considered the spectacle. There were stagecoaches and broughams and farmers’ carts, and people on foot and dragging barrows and the like which bore bundles of victuals, clothing, barrels of water, even furniture, tables and chairs and carpets. Some of these walkers looked as if they had never set foot upon a road in their lives, and yet were now as cold and mud-spattered as the rest.

  The odd thing was that while the bulk of this stream of people and horses and vehicles came from the south, perhaps originating in Newcastle and the southern cities, there was a counter-stream of it coming from the north. Standing there watching this great purposeless to-and-froing, I had to laugh.

  ‘Sir, I’m glad in all this distress somebody manages to find something funny.’

  I turned. A fellow had come to stand beside me. He was perhaps sixty and well enough dressed, though his coat was torn open at the back, his gaiters mud-splashed and his wig askew. He had a long nose and heavy eyebrows, and eyes that could pierce but which rarely met your gaze. Behind him, as I noticed now, was a coach toppled over in the ditch, and boxes and cases tumbled in the road. By the side of the coach another man was crouching, and talking softly to somebody within.

  I said, ‘By the look of you, you’ve come out of that spill.’

  He brushed at his grimy coat. ‘So I have and I’m grateful for no more than a knock or two.’ He had the thin tones of the Londoner. ‘And you, sir, laughing your head off!’

  ‘Oh, not at your upturning – I did not witness it, I assure you.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘At all this.’ I indicated the crowd. ‘People fleeing this way and that like ants from a broken-open nest.’

  ‘Ants, eh? You have a lofty view of humanity, sir. It’s worse in the south, I can tell you – we’ve come from London, and even the capital is in a ferment as the Phoebeans burst from the Thames clay. The road is a river of suffering! Can you not see that?’

  ‘Ants,’ I repeated. ‘If the ice monsters are everywhere, what earthly use is fleeing?’

  His eyes narrowed as he studied me. ‘That’s just as Swift says.’

  ‘Swift?’

  ‘The Dean, my companion.’ He indicated the man by the coach. ‘You must have a heart as cold as his. Your name, sir?’

  I bridled a bit at his peremptory tone, but I gave him my ‘Jack Hobbes’ readily enough. ‘And you?’

  He extended a hand. ‘Defoe. Daniel Defoe.’

  I shook his hand in something of a daze. ‘Really? Then that’s a re
markable coincidence, for I read a book by a namesake of yours not six months back: “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of –”’

  ‘That was one of mine,’ he said, and he nodded, adopting a rather superior expression.

  I was quite enthused, for I had enjoyed the book. ‘A rattling tale, sir. Although I never quite believed that a man as self-reliant as your Crusoe would start bleating about Providence. What Providence need he but his own hands?’

  ‘Ah, but my purpose in writing the yarn was wider than moral fabulating. I am greatly taken by the tales the travellers bring back from the unexplored corners of our world. It seemed to me that such an adventure as Crusoe’s might never have happened to any man before in the whole history of the world, for never have explorers sailed so far and into such unknown domains, not even the Phoenicians. My story is a new genre that explores novel possibilities: what if this were so?’

  I nodded. ‘I enjoyed the passages of his endurance. He changed his island forever, as the Romans made Britain.’

  Defoe gestured at the road. ‘And we live in their shadow yet. But no Roman ever saw the Americas, man! We live in an age of a great unfreezing of the mind, of the transforming of the fortunes of man –’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t let him debate his vulgar scribblings.’ This was the fellow called Swift, who came clambering up to join us. He was a bulkier man with a rather clipped accent, perhaps a few years younger than Defoe.