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

by Stephen Baxter

  And yet away from the great temples of government, as the city woke, it must, I sensed, have felt like any other morning – the carts and drays rumbling over the cobbles, the news men and milk men yelling their wares, the water wagons spraying the streets to keep the dust down - even though Bonaparte was already charging up from the coast, and by nightfall none of this might be the same.

  At last we reached Albemarle Street, where, Collingwood’s main home being in a northern town, he kept a house that had been bequeathed him by Nelson himself. Little was made of it while I was there, but in the days that followed, detail by detail, I deduced something of the relationship of the two famous sailors – Collingwood the senior by ten years, grave and competent, physically stronger and less prone to illness and heat, and Nelson the vain one, the glorious and imaginative one, who had had to be saved by his brother in arms more than once. How Collingwood missed him! [I have separately published a full account of my father’s life and achievements, including his relationship with Nelson. – A.C.]

  Collingwood led us to a spacious drawing room where more military men waited, and the air was laden with wig powder and cigar smoke, and empty decanters stood about, for they had evidently worked through the night. A table was covered in maps, and Collingwood made straight for it with his bits of news garnered from the ministries, and he and his fellows immediately began to draw bold charcoal lines on the charts. They spoke gravely, these men of privilege and power – and every so often they would lapse into French, for many of them shared an education in a country now their enemy. As they worked runners would come bearing more messages, and Collingwood and the others would scribble notes, orders and requests, to be taken away.

  One oddity in this company was an older woman, plainly dressed and plain of face, perhaps in her fifties, who sat quietly by a window, her hands folded on her lap. I scarcely noticed her at the time. She was, I would learn, Miss Caroline Herschel, sister of the famous astronomer.

  And in the middle of all this a dog bounded in, a big loose-boned mongrel who made straight for Collingwood, to be greeted by a tickle from that stern admiral. This was Bounce, and much beloved.

  There were a few domestics hovering, and Anne snapped out orders for breakfast, coffee and a replenishment of the whisky decanters. Then she turned to me. ‘You will be a guest here – at least for now; I don’t know how long we will stay. Make sure Parsons serves you with an adequate breakfast. If you need to sleep, a change of clothes … I myself will bathe, I think, while I have the chance.’ She glanced at her father, his reading glasses on his nose and leaning on the table as if bringing relief to rheumatic joints. ‘As for asking him to rest I know it’s futile. If you will excuse me, sir -’

  I nodded, too weary to cheek her, and she withdrew.

  Clavell was at my side. ‘Can you read a map, Yankee?’

  At the table, I recognised a detailed plan of the south of England, but I waved a hand. ‘Not with all this scribble. What’s the news?’

  ‘That the Corsican has landed. Well, you knew that.’ He pointed to blocks of scrawl at the Channel ports. ‘Seven army corps, all more or less deployed around London. Each corps comprises infantry, cavalry, artillery. The first under Bernadotte is at Chatham. The fourth and fifth under Soult and Lannes came in via Dover and Folkestone, the second and third under Marmont and Davout came through Portsmouth, and the sixth and seventh under Ney and Augereau landed at Plymouth. We believe all of these are bound for London, save Ney, who is driving north, probably intent on Bristol.’

  ‘And what of your defences?’

  He pointed to more scribbled blocks. ‘Here are our army groups, as of a few hours ago, at least. You have Sir Hew Dalrymple facing west, Sir John Moore in the east, and in the centre Colonel Wellesley waiting for the second and third corps.’

  ‘A colonel?’

  ‘Probably a battlefield general by now, I shouldn’t wonder. A good man, from Irish nobility. Made a name for himself out in India – though his brother was governor-general there. Well, we’ll know the wisdom of that appointment soon, for I expect battle to be closed within hours, if not already. The French like to march without a baggage train; they provision themselves from the country, and it makes for a rapid push.’

  And, I knew from experience in America, it was hellish to have your family and your home in the way of such a locust-like advance. ‘What are your prospects?’

  ‘As long as we had supremacy of the sea, we were protected by the Channel. And if Nelson had been at sea yesterday, perhaps Napoleon would have launched his armies east, not west, for one day there will be a reckoning between this “usurper” who killed a Bourbon prince, and the crowns of Prussia and Austria and Russia … But he is not in Germany; here he is in England, for he evidently means to settle his western flank before he confronts the east. Do you Americans still call our soldiers “lobster backs”? England’s a lobster with a tough shell – but it’s damn thin, and once breached what’s inside is pretty soft.’

  ‘You ain’t hopeful.’

  He shrugged. ‘Look at their faces – look at Collingwood’s. I am confident England will survive this brutal assault in the long run. I am less confident about the course of this day.’

  Now Anne rejoined us. She was out of her mannish jacket and leggings, and wore a sober but flattering dress of rich purple velvet, and with her blonde hair up and powder on her face I was struck by her attractiveness – I don’t say beauty, for she was no Venus, but she had a strength and composure in her regular features, and a light in her eyes not unlike her father’s icy blue that quite caught the breath.

  Clavell bowed to her and asked after her health – but she took my arm, and I felt a quite unreasonable surge of pleasure. ‘Now I’m refreshed we have much to discuss,’ she said.

  I ventured, ‘You’re the first English girl I ever met, you know, and not at all what I expected.’

  ‘Am I to be flattered or insulted?’

  I glanced at her boldly. ‘Right now, in this fancy room, in that dress, you look the part. But not twenty-four hours past you were hauling me from the wreck of my Nautilus.’

  ‘You can blame my father for that,’ she said. ‘The Admiral never wanted his daughters to embrace the life of a gentlewoman – a round of elegance, housekeeping, dress, of neighbours and dance and music and the season – a life of nothingness. He encouraged us to study geometry and languages and the philosophies, and the practical arts – he wanted us to learn how to survive, he said.’

  ‘If the Ogre is loose in England, he was wise. Well, I find it blasted attractive.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Be careful, sir. This is an English drawing room, and you are very forward.’ She glanced at John Clavell. ‘You don’t want to be duelling over my honour, do you?’ I had a reply ready, but she cut me off.

  [I may remark that this is an abbreviated account, turned to the author’s favour, of the rather more coarse conversation that took place. – A.C.]

  ‘Ben, you must pay attention. I suspect we have little time before the Napoleonic storm hits, and it is important you begin to learn what is asked of you. Come – meet Miss Herschel.’

  I was brought to the middle-aged lady who sat by the window, and she stood, grave, composed, her rheumy eyes very sharp. After we were introduced, she said with a sharp Teutonic accent, ‘You have never heard of me, but you have heard of my brother William.’

  I gathered this was a standard opening salvo from the old battleaxe. I could not fail to know of the astronomer, immersed as I had been in engineering circles all my adult life – and you know him too, he is the man who discovered the planet Uranus, a globe beyond Saturn that is the first new world to have been found since the ancients first counted the wandering stars - which is a remarkable thing. ‘Odd. I always imagined he was English!’

  ‘We are from Hanover,’ she said. ‘Refugees of French aggression, under the old regime. My brother found work as a musician first, actually. But gradually he developed his inter
ests in astronomy. And when I joined him we began to make significant observations, and discoveries.’

  Anne said, ‘Mr Herschel’s most recent telescopic observations have a bearing on the case of the Phoebeans. Indeed they were mandated by the Grand Council.’

  I nodded. ‘Very well. So why am I meeting the sister rather than the brother? Where is he, at this time of crisis?’

  Anne and Caroline shared a glance. ‘Not here,’ Caroline said. ‘Fled to the north, where the Cylinder is being built.’ Which was the first mention I had heard of this device! ‘But it is of no matter. I can explain the Martian observations to you as well as he could have. After all, it was I who made the bulk of them, and analysed the rest.’

  I got a whiff of the sibling rivalry which dominated the household of the famous astronomer. With my own experience of Fulton, I sympathised; this Miss Caroline wasn’t the only junior to have had her credit stolen by a more glamorous partner. But I was growing impatient, and picked on the key word. ‘“Martian”?’

  Chapter VII

  It had all begun with the first descent of the Phoebeans.

  I learned that far from being inviolate since the Norman landing in 1066, England had suffered an invasion as recently as 1720, and not by the French or any human enemy, but by Phoebeans, foe from beyond the sky. The key truth of these creatures is that they are animals of the cold, not the warm; they can barely stand our earthly temperatures, and it was the thaw of a spring day that year that halted their advance, not any human action. Still, after the Ice War, they persisted in the cold fastnesses of northern lands where the ice never melts.

  In that first year the Phoebeans had fallen in a shower across the world’s northern latitudes, and other battles were fought, though England took the brunt of it. In other lands, across intervening decades full of the usual famine, war, pestilence and revolt, the strange episode of the Phoebeans was large forgotten – not in England, though. And even here their great splashing across the north was made a secret - the destruction in and around Newcastle was ascribed instead to the fall of a comet - because it was hoped that the Phoebeans could be harnessed to Britain’s national interest. Typical English! – I thought.

  Anne said, ‘Even as that first assault ran its course, the government established a Grand Council of philosophers to study the issue – Isaac Newton was its first president. Ben, your own ancestor, Sir Jack Hobbes, was involved in the ‘20. Accounts vary, but it seems he saved Newton’s life! And that was why he was knighted. He became a rich man, but briefly …’

  ‘Ah! That explains some of my family’s murkier secrets.’ Sir Jack, having dissipated one fortune in England, came to the colonies in search of another in the tobacco plantations of the southern states. He disgraced himself even by the standards of that rough and ready region, and disappeared, but the family did inherit his native cunning. I was lucky enough to convert a certain mechanical and mathematical aptitude into employment as an apprentice engineer in the dockyards of the north-east states – where, eventually, I fell into the company of Robert Fulton, with his dreams of installing modern steam engines in American boats and mines. ‘But I am not a “sir”,’ I said regretfully. ‘The title vanished along with my father’s older brother, and the family silver. And so I am to face the foe once matched by my ancestor, eh?’

  I learned that the Phoebeans themselves had caused little problem on earth since 1720. In ’45 the Jacobite rebels had tried to use wild Phoebeans from the Highlands to support their assault on English towns – an experiment that cost more Scottish lives than English. Captain Cook, probing the northern latitudes, had spotted signs of Phoebean activity in the Canadian Arctic. The philosophers of successive generations had pondered on the nature of the Phoebeans, where they had come from, what manner of souls those icy carcasses might host.

  But meanwhile, it seemed, a new threat from the Phoebeans was gradually discerned – not on the earth, but in the sky.

  ‘It is believed that the inner worlds are rock, predominantly, like the earth, like the dead moon,’ Caroline said to me. ‘This is because they are warmed by the sun. But the sun’s heat falls off with distance by an inverse square law, as a Newtonian analysis shows. And there is an imaginary frontier in the solar system, called the ice line, beyond which the worlds – like Jupiter’s moons, perhaps, or my brother’s discovery Uranus – must be dominated by ice. It is cold out there, Mister Hobbes. Cold enough for the Phoebeans to prosper.’

  ‘Then let them have those icy worlds, for no human could live there, and thank God for that!’

  ‘But,’ Anne said, ‘there is a world on the border, as you might say -’

  ‘Mars,’ I guessed.

  I learned now, to my surprise, that the surface of the planet Mars can be seen from earth through the great telescopes, and for more than a hundred years banks of what may be snow and ice have been observed at that world’s poles, to wax and wane with Mars’s own seasons.

  Caroline said, ‘Where there is ice, the Phoebeans may play. Even before the Ice War the Italian astronomer Maraldi observed a strange sparking of light at the Martian ice banks – which, it was retrospectively determined, coincided with the passage by Mars of the very Comet that brought the Phoebeans to the earth.’

  ‘Good Lord! Phoebeans landing on Mars, do you think?’

  ‘You will understand that since ‘20 Mars has been examined intensively for evidence of Phoebean activity, by astronomers under the direction of the Council.’

  ‘Ah. And now you believe you have found such evidence?’

  ‘Over the last few years my brother and I have observed the clear growth of a patch of ice far from Mars’s poles, quite an anomaly. I can show you the drawings. Some observers believe they see movement – I cannot be sure, but I do not dismiss such observations – and Phoebeans on Mars could surely grow to a mighty size.’

  I saw the drift. ‘You fear that Mars is the Phoebeans’ Boulogne! That they are massing forces to jump to earth!’ I tried not to laugh, but failed; the grave figures gathered around the campaign maps looked on me as if I had giggled at a funeral. ‘The Phoebeans have Jupiter and Uranus! What would they want of little earth, where they cannot live anyhow?’

  Caroline shrugged. ‘What does Napoleon want of England? Yet he is here.’

  ‘We can’t take the chance, Ben,’ Anne said. ‘That’s what the Grand Council believes, and the Minister of War concurs – and the Prime Minister. Even as we face the French, we must deal with this incipient threat from the sky. We must ensure the Phoebeans do not cross the ice line.’

  ‘Deal with it? How? By blockading Mars, as your father and his navy buddies blockaded France for a decade? Oh, this is all – fantastic!’

  Caroline said gravely, ‘You must absorb what has been said to you, younker. For there is a responsibility for you to bear, and much for you to learn.’

  Maybe so, but now wasn’t the time to learn it, for Collingwood himself came stalking over from his map table, a fresh note in his hand, his face like thunder. ‘We must leave,’ he said. ‘We must reach the Cylinder site at Ulgham before it is overrun by the French - and complete the mission.’

  Anne gasped. ‘It is confirmed?’

  He held up his missive. ‘I have Pitt’s final orders to proceed.’

  Anne hesitated one breath, then nodded. ‘We’re ready, father.’ She was a brave spirit, and a sturdy support for the Admiral! ‘But I thought we would have a little longer.’

  ‘So did we all.’ He drew us to the table, and showed us a big summary map. ‘Our defences have folded more rapidly even than we feared. Of the army groups, two out of three buckled under the Ogre’s usual tactics, the concentrated artillery fire and the rapid infantry advances. Two of three! Only Wellesley holds out, to the south. Refugees from Kent and Sussex are already in the capital, streaming over the bridges and clogging up the movement of men and materiel. And French advance units have been seen as far forward as Richmond and Greenwich. Their drums and trumpets can
be heard in the city - damn them! Wellesley must fall back, and regroup, for he is England’s last hope now.’ He grasped his letter from Pitt. ‘And we have our own mission. Come! You too, Clavell – Hobbes – Miss Herschel … I pray it is not too late already. Bounce! Here, boy! …’

  Chapter VIII

  So we hurried from a household that was already decanting into a series of broughams, each driven by tough marines. But there were not enough vehicles, and I found myself jammed into a requisitioned London cab with Lieutenant Clavell.

  As we rolled away I peered out of my cab, fascinated by London in the full daylight. Above a carpet of houses rose the threadlike spires of Wren churches, and to the east floated the dome of St Paul’s. On this dull December morning, a pall of yellow-orange smoke from the night’s fires hung over it all. But already I could see new smoke plumes rising up, all around the skyline. This, I learned from Clavell, was the work of the Londoners themselves, or their government; the city would be burned to the ground rather than afford Bonaparte any succour.

  We galloped north, through St Pancras and Islington and Highbury, and out of town. My cab, an affair of lacquered black wood with padded button-leather seats and a wooden knee protector that you swung into place, was a comfortable enough vehicle for rolling half a mile down the Mall, perhaps, but Collingwood meant to make for Newcastle and beyond at a cracking pace of fifty miles per day [a pace we bettered in the event – A.C.], and though England’s turnpikes are better than most you’ll find in America, for me with my poor face blasted by the north wind it was a damn uncomfortable trip – and made worse by the fact that for most of it I had the company of the spiky Clavell.