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

by Stephen Baxter

  On he went, dissecting the flaws in the Dean’s complicated character, while the Phoebeans built their city in the dirt, and I wondered whether such rivalries as Defoe’s and Swift’s ever raged in a termite hill before a human boot came along to crush it.

  We returned to the ditch, where Newton and Swift had made a merry nest before the fire with blankets and coats spread over them, while Defoe and I had been shivering on the road.

  Defoe eagerly reported our observations, stressing the evidence of Electrick, but Newton seemed unimpressed. ‘It might be so. Electrick is related to an effluvium in the body, which may be removed by friction. If there is an opportunity to dissect one of these Phoebeans, small or large, we may detect the flow of that effluvium in its veins. Perhaps there is some analogy of the circulation of the blood in a man, which Harvey mapped. And indeed perhaps heat induces some calenture in them that impedes that flow.’

  I said, ‘Sir, I do not understand why you refer to the beasts as “Phoebeans”. What have they to do with the moon?’

  ‘Nothing!’ Swift declared for him. ‘But the head of the Comet which brought the Phoebeans to the earth sailed past the moon. Some ignorant astronomers believed it originated there and labelled it accordingly, and that is the name that reached the court of King George – and stuck.’

  Defoe shook his head. ‘If only its course had differed by a few degrees, and it had struck the moon and not come to the earth!’

  I said, ‘But if the Comet did not come from the moon, then where did it arise?’

  ‘That we do not know,’ Newton said. ‘But the Astronomer Royal sent me observations which, before I was rudely turfed out of London, enabled me to use Halley’s methods to figure the Comet’s path as a hyperbola; it has come in from the trans-Saturnian dark, and will sail around the sun and return there. I determined that it passed close to the planet Mars; and I consulted recent observations of that planet. You may know that in the Plague Year the Italian Cassini observed caps of white close to the dynamical poles on that world …’

  ‘Really?’ I was intrigued; I had not known that the surface of any other world had been mapped.

  ‘In the years since, his nephew Maraldi has seen how these caps wax and wane with the seasons. Maraldi speculates that the caps are made of ice or frost, which congeals in the winter of Mars and melts in the summer. And last year, when Maraldi watched yon Comet sail by Mars, he saw a prickling of light over the north polar cap of that world.’

  I was stunned by this. ‘So perhaps this Italian saw icefalls on Mars, just as here!’

  ‘It is clear that the Phoebeans are creatures of the cold realm beyond the sun, who have come sailing on their Comet to plant their crab-like seeds on the inner worlds.’

  Swift was agitated by this talk of the Phoebeans coming from the heights of heaven. ‘But surely the Phoebeans could be some atmospheric phenomenon – spawned in high clouds of ice, could they not? Surely they cannot have a heavenly origin. For as Aristotle himself observed, “Order and definiteness are much more plainly manifest in the celestial bodies than in our own frame; while change and chance are characteristic of the perishable things of earth.”’

  Defoe snorted.

  But Newton regarded Swift gravely. ‘It is disturbing indeed to imagine that such disorder as this can rain down on our poor earth from that celestial realm, the seat of order I myself have figured in my work. And yet it seems to be so; Maraldi’s observations prove it.’

  ‘No, no.’ Swift stood up in the ditch, trying to glimpse the Phoebeans and their works through the debris on the road. ‘No, I won’t have it. Such giant, beautiful creatures as agents of chaos? A heavenly origin for demons of destruction? Rather they may be an example of the truly rational being, Sir Isaac, that which we degraded creatures only imagine ourselves to be.’

  Defoe said, ‘And what “truly rational beings” go around digging holes in the earth and blowing up carthorses?’

  Swift waved an arm. ‘This may all be a part of a grand design which we cannot discern, any more than a worm comprehends meaning in the casually destructive footfall of the contemplative philosopher.’

  Defoe laughed at him. ‘So you dance in your thinking like a maiden at a gavotte, Swift. If they are chaotic they cannot be from heaven; if Newton proves they are from heaven, they cannot be chaotic – despite the evidence of your eyes. Well, if they are so superior as all that, you had better hope that they treat us better than you English in Ireland treat the natives there.’

  Swift, growing enraged, would have responded again, but I held up a hand. ‘It is growing dark. The Phoebeans are more active at night, have we not observed? Listen.’

  The scholars fell silent and duly listened. And after a moment they all heard, as I had, a groaning of ice, a crackle like the crushing of an autumn leaf. I risked a slither out of the ditch to see.

  That groan was the sound of stressed ice, the crackle the sparking of the Electrick effluvium that might be Phoebean blood. The Phoebeans were on the march.

  Chapter VI

  A great convoy of them, pale in the fading light, slid down the Great North Road and the ground around it, heading south towards us.

  And then, behind this marching city, I saw a still more tremendous sight. From the latest crater gigantic pillars shot into the air, mountainous; I had not seen the like before; they might have been a thousand feet high. And a tremendous ice lens of similar dimensions soared up the column of pillars to tower over even the marchers before it; indeed on the back of this new ice behemoth rode more Phoebeans, structures the size of cathedrals themselves, like fleas on a dog’s back.

  As the twilight gathered and the Comet unfurled its spectral sail across the sky, this behemoth ground into motion. It was like a mountain on the move. Where its mighty limbs scraped the ground, ramparts of turf and soil the height of a man were casually thrown up. And from its sharp circular rim ice eggs flew out to arc to the ground all around, each the birth of yet another Phoebean.

  I scurried back into the ditch and described what I saw. ‘It is like a tremendous mother. The Queen of the Phoebean hive, come to lay her eggs.’

  Newton nodded his great head. ‘I fear you have it. The Phoebeans want the rocks of England for their cold nests, not her people. And we have happened on the heart of the invasion – the Queen herself, as you say, Hobbes.’

  But Swift was growing agitated again. ‘I won’t believe it! If the Phoebeans are here to smash up the old human order of corruption, greed and stupidity, then good! But they will replace it, not with chaos, but a new world order of reason. They need only be convinced that we lowly beasts are capable of reason too, and we will be spared.’ And with that he jumped to his feet, and staggered; later I learned that the man was an habitual sufferer of vertigo and hearing loss. But he jumped readily enough out of the ditch, and he strode towards the Phoebean procession, arms uplifted. ‘Master Phoebean! Hear me!’

  Defoe called after him, ‘Don’t be a fool, man! Jack – we must bring him back.’

  ‘Not I. If you want to emulate Swift in being squashed like a bug, please do so.’

  He glared at me. ‘Showing your true colours at last, Jack? Despite all you said I thought better of you.’

  ‘Then you’re to be disappointed, aren’t you? And nor do I believe you will get yourself killed trying to save a clear enemy.’

  ‘Then you don’t know me,’ Defoe said. And to my great surprise he hopped up and out of the ditch, and was gone after Swift.

  Newton eyed me, but did not speak. As we waited in silence, I was brutally glad I had not gone with the others, and stretched out my miserable life a few more minutes.

  Defoe returned, alone. He would not meet my eye.

  He told us how Swift had approached the Phoebean caravan, arms aloft like a preacher, calling out in English, French, and High and Low Dutch. Defoe tried to pull him away, but Swift would not respond. Finally he settled on Latin, the tongue of better men than us, and stuck to it - stuck to it,
Defoe said, as the lead monster in that walking city loomed over him, and its sliding limb erased him in an instant.

  That was that for Jonathan Swift. I have never known a man so disappointed in the world he found himself in, and we low humans with whom he had to share it, and it was that disappointment that killed him in the end, for it blinded him to the realities.

  We three sat stunned by this turn. I offered Defoe some of the beer; he did not respond. The rumble of the Phoebean caravan was loud, a grinding of ice that made your teeth ache, and it went on and on.

  It was Newton who stirred first, a grave figure, huge in his mound of coats and blankets. ‘We must fight back,’ he said. ‘If not, and if they continue on their course and that behemoth Queen reaches London, the whole country will be seeded with their eggs.’

  Defoe nodded. ‘And when England is all churned up into crawling ice bodies, where will we be?’

  ‘France!’ said I.

  Defoe looked at me blackly. Then he asked Newton, ‘How, sir? How shall we fight back?’

  ‘We must make for Newcastle. If we find a trap and horses, we might yet outrace the Queen’s caravan, which is tremendous but slow.’

  Defoe said, ‘We might find a horse or two in Shilbottle. And in Newcastle?’

  Newton said, ‘The city is walled, is it not? And it stands over the Great North Road. There we will make our stand. If we can stop the Phoebeans at Newcastle we may save England. But if we fall then all falls with us, and eternal night for mankind will follow.’

  ‘Then we must not fall.’

  ‘In the morning,’ Newton said. ‘The Phoebeans are relatively quiescent by day. In the morning we will outrace them.’ He closed his eyes, and fell into a kind of slumber. He was a very old man, I remembered, and must be exhausted.

  Defoe looked me square in the face. ‘So, Jack?’

  ‘You go to Newcastle if you want. I’m off.’

  Defoe pulled a grubby overcoat higher over the great man’s chest. ‘If you won’t help us for my sake – if not for the sake of your family, if you have ‘em, or your own unborn children – if you won’t do it for your own honour, then do it for him.’

  ‘Isaac? What has he to do with me?’

  ‘Isaac helps us understand, Jack. If not for the laws he has discerned in the sky we would not know the Comet, or where it has come from. We would cower from it, and when the Phoebeans sprout from the ground we would fall at their feet, or we would frantically sacrifice each other to appease those icy gods, as the savage Indians did as Cortez approached. We need Newton, Jack. Without him we really are as Swift saw us, as degraded animals who do not even understand what destroys them. Help me save him.’

  I sat stubborn, not wanting to face him, or the gnawing doubt that was undermining my determination. Yet I hesitated; I did not leave.

  ‘I’ll do you a deal,’ Defoe said, wheedling once more in that damnable way of his. ‘Come out with me now, in the night, and help me bring the horses back from Shilbottle. Only that. Then you can do as you like. Will you consider that?’

  And so it went! You will not be surprised if you have followed me this far to learn that my indecision almost matches my cowardice, and that by the end of the next day I was driving a purloined trap with a precious scholarly cargo through the New Gate in Newcastle’s city walls.

  Chapter VII

  Newcastle is a lumpy sort of a city, built on the hills that surround the mouth of the Tyne. It is one terminus of Hadrian’s Wall, Carlisle being the other on the west coast of England. So this was the end of civilisation even in those better days, and the Romans had the right idea, if you ask me, in leaving as their most enduring legacy a bridge across the river to take their Great North Road on to more congenial realms in the south. That bridge has gone, but another has been built in its place, itself elderly, a crowded gangway crammed with shops and houses.

  The city itself is skirted, just as Newton said, by a curtain of walls, a semi-circle complete with turrets and towers and gates that abuts onto the north bank of the river. The walls were built by the English to keep out the Scots, and then built up again by one lot of Englishmen to keep out another lot during the Civil War. If you pass inside the walls you will find a city cut in two by a stream they call the Lort Burn, and dominated by a spectacularly ugly Norman castle on its keep, and a cathedral and a handsome church or two.

  And that is pretty much it. If you like twisting clutter, back yards full of sheep and goats and cows and pigs, streets full of sailors and traders and the riff-raff who prey on ’em, and all spiced by a pall of smoke and the dust of the coal they ship out of here to all parts of the realm, Newcastle’s your town.

  We arrived in the evening. As we sought a house to lodge, Defoe commandeered a few boys and paid them a penny piece each to find the mayor, the army captain, the bishop, the guild presidents – anybody who could be of use in putting Newton’s programme in place.

  But the city was in a ferment.

  The Phoebean caravan had slowed during that day, coming to rest near Morpeth. By now the Phoebeans had formed a front a mile wide, sprawling to either side of the Roman road as the ice crabs proliferated and grew into fresh monsters. The icy force was only a few miles away, a tide that would surely overwhelm the city when night came, or the next, and the Phoebeans marched again.

  And all we had to fight off the monsters was a thin line of troops who manned the walls. The town’s garrison had been stripped on orders from London, for there were panicky rumours abroad that with England prostrate beneath the heel of the Phoebeans, the Scots were once more rebelling under their Stuart Pretender in the north, and to the south the French, smarting after the War of the Spanish Succession, were crossing the Channel to have another go.

  And so people fled. All through that night, even as Defoe and Newton laboured to put a bit of backbone into the city’s governors, the townsfolk packed up their goods and streamed south over that crowded old bridge, the richer folk taking to broughams or coaches and the poor going on foot and suffering as the poor usually do. Only a few ships left the port, packed to the gunwales.

  As for me, I walked down through the old centre of the town until I came upon the river, which as every winter was frozen solid, save where the ice had been broken to allow the ships to escape. I made for the quayside, and through that night I spent the last of my money in the taverns and whore-houses that line that fine boulevard.

  You may wonder why I didn’t run, as I had threatened to do since Shilbottle. The simple answer is that Defoe and Newton had between them gotten under my skin. I was more afraid of the blackness in my soul that would close on me if I ran than of the ice monsters if I did not run. So there you are; my integrity as a coward is intact.

  By the time the sun came up I was flat broke and had a head that felt as if it had been stamped on by a Phoebean, and I cared nothing of it. For we had all survived another night; the Phoebeans had not fallen on us, not yet.

  In daylight that seemed brighter than for some days – though that might have been the liqueur working in me – a boy came to find me, sent by Defoe. He would escort me to the rather grand house close to the New Gate that Defoe had secured for himself and Newton.

  On the way I noticed a change in the town. The criers were out this morning, ringing their bells and working their leather lungs, announcing that on the orders of King George all able-bodied men and women should report to the gates in the wall’s north curtain. Firewood was to be carried, and oil and fat, anything flammable, and spades and picks. Those ships’ companies in port were ordered to lend their efforts to the common cause. Hastily printed bills bearing much the same proclamation were pasted to the walls all through the town, and riders went out into the countryside with a similar command.

  Well, just as it had been the day before, I saw plenty of people making ready to flee, some of them indeed alarmed by the very call to arms. But as I headed north with the lad, out of the old town centre and up Newgate Street, a few sturdier folk gat
hered, armed with shovels and buckets of pitch and so forth, men and women and a few older children. That determined, grim-faced throng swelled, and a few pastors joined us and led the singing of psalms, so it was quite a band of Christian heroes that approached the New Gate.

  The lad brought me to Defoe’s house without difficulty; he asked me for a penny, and his reward was a clip around the ear. Defoe was gone from the house, supervising works outside the city.

  But here was old Newton, sitting in a huge armchair beside a blazing fire, wrapped so thick in blankets that only his face showed, and his mane of hair, and the withered hands that held his Bible. Bottles of physicals stood on the mantle by him. He looked like a great toad squatting there, but after the ditch at Shilbottle I did not begrudge him this bit of warmth.

  I sat beside the fire myself. There was a decanter of brandy and I helped myself to a snort; it helped clear the fumes of my indulgence.

  Newton eyed me, and my stained clothing. ‘Out all night, were thee?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Would have been better to get your sleep. It’s a long day and night we face. And while you drank and whored, we worked.’ There was an occasional table before him; he kicked this.

  The table bore a map, a printed-up image of the city and its surrounds, neatly lettered. A coarse slash had been marked in charcoal across the country a mile or so to the north of the walls. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Our defence against the Phoebeans. An earthwork – one of the greatest since the Romans, I dare say – a trench like the vallum that the Romans strung along behind their Wall.’

  I snorted. ‘How long is this, three, four miles? You wouldn’t impress the Caesars.’ I felt embittered, and took another slug of brandy, perhaps unwisely. ‘And this is your defence of mankind – a scrape in the ground, to stop a species that has travelled between worlds?’