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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘A cold one,’ I suggested.

  ‘And what of their philosophies? The younger set today are in a ferment over liberty and rights and whatnot, and I suppose they have a point. But what can our observations of Phoebean society tell us of the nature of liberty, eh? Can a Phoebean ever be free – any more than an ant can?’

  ‘Interesting questions though these may be for future generations,’ I said gently, ‘perhaps we should turn to the more urgent matter of the launch of the Cylinder - in two days! There are a number of issues -’

  ‘The foremost of which,’ he said gently, ‘is the crew.’ He really was an impressive man when he turned those glass-blue eyes on you. ‘As you know, I will travel myself. I could scarce delegate such a mission to any other commander – though it will be the smallest crew I ever ran! I am in far from perfect health, but my rheumatism should not be a hindrance when floating around in the air, and I dare say my intellect and my eyesight are as keen as ever they were. After so long at sea I can double on most tasks – I could even serve as surgeon if there’s a toothache or two …’

  ‘Perhaps that is the easier part of the selection.’

  He permitted himself a small smile. ‘Indeed.’ He turned to Caroline Herschel. ‘Madam, there is the question of your brother – for he, Hobbes, was scheduled to serve as our Inter-planetary navigator. Oh, I can certainly take the readings, for the Cylinder will be a steadier ship than most I’ve served on. But the calculations are a matter of geometry in three dimensions which would tax my brain; it is more akin to evaluating planetary orbits than courses on the ocean. We need an astronomer! And who better than William Herschel, discoverer of a planet? That was the plan. Indeed the navigation table was designed for his use.’

  ‘Let us be more precise,’ said Caroline. ‘I designed it for his use. As I compiled the various astronomical, mathematical and other tables he would need to carry out the task.’

  ‘Herschel should have been here, you know, Hobbes. That was the plan. He knew it! Oh, I’ve heard there have been sightings of the man in Birmingham, where he met with his Lunar Society friends. I have sent missive after missive -’

  ‘Won’t come,’ Caroline said, and she sat plump in her chair, a cheerless bonnet on her head, her rather delicate hands folded in her lap. ‘My brother will wait until the Cylinder is launched, or exploded. Then he will emerge from nowhere and claim all the credit. Well, let him have it. For he will soon discover that without me to make his observations for him, his fame will evaporate like dew.’ [I cannot tell if this is a calumny on William by a frustrated sister, or a valid reflection on his character. I am inclined to the former view, and to guess at a similarity with the Hobbes-Fulton relationship. I leave the question to other biographers. In any case, as the author records, my father proceeded quickly to the nub of the lady’s remarks. – A.C.]

  ‘And why, madam,’ Collingwood asked, ‘is he to lose your support so suddenly?’

  She snorted. ‘Do not be coy, Admiral. It does not suit. This meeting of yours is a press-gang, is it not?’ She cackled. ‘I will serve as your navigator. I am younger than William, and will eat less, and am more able than him, and more to the point I am here.’

  ‘It will be a mission of the most extraordinary danger -’

  ‘I am in danger is this world, with the Ogre on the loose. Decision made. Discussion over. Proceed to the next item.’ And she looked starkly at me.

  Suddenly I understood why I was here. I held up my hands and made to stand. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Hear me out, Benjamin,’ says Cuddy. ‘Please! Sit and listen. I would not set to sea without a ship’s carpenter, and a blacksmith and a sailmaker … There’s not a ship been built yet that doesn’t need running repairs, and that’s even if she doesn’t run into a war. And yon Cylinder is as experimental a vessel as has been launched since Moses took to the Nile in a bulrush crib. I need an engineer, Ben.’

  ‘Then take Watt. Or Trevithick, or Wilkinson -’

  ‘Once we are aloft – if we get aloft – their work will be done, the anti-ice expended. No, Ben, I need a man to run the inner systems of the ship. To keep the air contained and fresh, to keep us warm or cool -’

  ‘It would have been Fulton.’

  ‘And Fulton longed to go - to become one of the immortals, Ben! But Fulton is dead. And so I turn to you. What choice do I have? But I have seen your work, this last week. You’re a better engineer than Fulton I daresay -’

  ‘There’s not much doubt about that!’

  ‘- and a better man than you yourself believe. There’s none I’d sooner have travel with me to Mars than thee. No,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Don’t speak now. Let it stew the night. Think of all you have to gain – the wonders you will see, the unending fame attached to your name – you’ll probably get a knighthood like your ancestor, if it’s legal!’

  ‘And you will offer me the hand of Anne, I suppose?’

  But he was a gentleman, and he recoiled at that unseemly remark. ‘That would be Anne’s choice, not mine.’ [Thank you, Papa. – A.C.]

  ‘You try to recruit me. Yet you have not told me the full truth of the mission, have you?’

  He inclined his head. ‘Indeed not. Ask your questions, sir.’

  ‘I have concerns about the breathing. You have read my reports. I have ordered the loading of bombs of compressed air. But I cannot see how a practical cargo of bombs, without filling up the hull and stringing ‘em along behind, could get you more than halfway to Mars and back! I have worked the numbers. I am sorry to return a negative report, but that’s how it is.’

  Collingwood glanced at Caroline, and I thought she smiled. He asked, ‘And your other issues?’

  I had them and I listed them, and I won’t bore you with them here – save one, the most critical, which was my inability to discern any apparatus which would return the crew to the safety of the ground of earth after its scouting mission among the planets. ‘Is there to be a Montgolfier balloon stuffed in that cone on the nose, perhaps?’

  He said gravely, ‘Good questions. And certainly you deserve to know the true nature of the mission – and I haven’t told it yet, even though I’ve asked for your commitment. Then you will understand why a ship half-full of your air bombs will be quite enough, and why a means of landing on the earth again is scarce relevant … But you must give me your word that whether you come with us or stay on the ground, you will not breathe a word of it to Anne until after the launch, for she knows nothing of it. Is that clear?’

  Confused, disturbed, I nodded. ‘My word.’

  ‘Very well.’ And there, in that shabby office, on a cold Christmas Eve, he revealed to me at last the full truth.

  Miss Caroline Herschel was apparently dozing in her chair. But when he was done she started awake. ‘A press-ganging! Hee hee!’

  [I cannot recall my father so distrusting me before. O Papa, you could have told me! – A.C.]

  Chapter XV

  It is Christmas Day – today! And I never spent a stranger one, and I daresay I never will.

  ‘We must give her a name,’ says Anne, and the roaring fire in Watt’s office gives her cheeks a pretty glow. ‘Papa, you can’t send a ship off into the sea of Space with no better name than the Cylinder!’

  We are making a Christmas of it, as best we can; here am I, Anne, Collingwood, Miss Herschel - and Watt and Trevithick and Wilkinson and Denham, and a host of other fellows, and the young women from the offices and draughting rooms, and the dog begs for scraps from the table. Yes, today we are a sort of family, and Anne has organised the chattering girls to deck the room with cut-up silk and gold paper, and big tables meant for the inspection of blueprints groan under the weight of cold pies and hunks of brawn and chicken, and there is port too and sherry. When I ask her how she acquired all this provision she says she went and robbed it from the French at Housesteads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.

  And if I look through the windows I can see down into the Phoebean pit
, where the crabs scuttle and the anti-ice eggs lie dormant in the straw, and you could almost think it a Bethlehem scene.

  ‘A name?’ says Collingwood. ‘I had rather thought of calling her after the Badger, my first command.’

  ‘Oh, Papa, what a dull choice!’

  ‘And what would you suggest, my dear?’

  ‘How about the Ogre?’ Watt says in his Edinburgh brogue, and his friends laugh, raucous.

  ‘Or the Wellesley?’ ventures Trevithick.

  ‘Well, that would do,’ says Anne, ‘but there are other sorts of hero. How about the Tom Paine?’

  And Collingwood sputters into his cup. ‘That rabble-rouser?’

  ‘Oh, come,’ says Watt, ‘be a sport, Admiral. After all, are we not striking a blow for the freedom of all mankind from the tyranny of the Phoebeans?’

  And then begins another of their interminable discussions on the nature of the Phoebeans. Collingwood picks a ship’s biscuit from a plate. ‘Are the weevils in this biscuit free? Are they a democracy? Do they vote on the best course of action, and mount revolutions and coups, even as I -’ He takes a big gruesome bite out of it.

  They laugh, and on the talk goes.

  And I sit, my glass in hand, as close to Anne as decorum allows. I am half facing the wall of windows that fronts the office, overlooking the Phoebean nest, and so I see her twice, the girl before me, and reflected in the windows behind. She has her pretty dress on for the day, her London dress. I never saw a fairer sight – and nor will I again, if I choose to climb aboard the HMS Tom Paine with Collingwood and Caroline Herschel, for my view will be full of their old and sagging flesh, wobbling around in the strange conditions of Space!

  Yes, I am still wrestling with my decision. Wisely the Admiral is not pressing me. I have the feeling that he will go to Mars with or without me, perhaps with some poor soul such as Watt to take my place. But the Hobbes-Fulton systems [another correction, from Fulton-Hobbes! – A.C.] need running, and nobody else could do it; without me the mission will fail - and Collingwood will go anyway! Can I let him die for nothing? – and Miss Herschel, come to that. And can I allow a world to come to pass in which such as Anne must live under the ice boot of the Phoebeans? – if people survive at all. These are the issues. And yet, and yet – I want to live! As I gaze on Anne (and, to her gentle credit, she lets me) I wrestle with the rights and wrongs of it, the pros and cons.

  And it is because I look on her, and on the windows behind her, that I happen to be the first to see the assassin.

  He must have crawled along the track outside the office, under the window ledge and out of sight. Now he raises himself up – and I recognise him, for it is of course Gourdon, who has followed me all the way here from the deck of the Indomitable that night in the Channel - and he aims his rifle.

  I stand, and cover my face with my sleeve, and hurl myself at the wall.

  Falling amid splintering glass and broken frames, I collide with the Frenchman, grabbing his arms, and the two of us tumble back into the pit. I hear voices raised in alarm above me, and somebody screams. We land hard, for it must be six or seven feet deep, and I hear Phoebean crabs slither out of the way, and his rifle goes off with a crack.

  My universe, from spanning Inter-planetary Space, is suddenly reduced to the smallest of dimensions - me, and the Frenchman under me. I pin his arms back. I smell the wine on his breath, and see pox scars on his nose, and – that odd, repulsive detail! – smears of burgoo porridge and bread crumbs on the filthy ponytail. ‘You don’t give up,’ I say to him in French.

  ‘Never, you sack of shit,’ he says to me. ‘I was flogged for failing to catch you at Stockton! My mission was abandoned as we closed with Wellesley’s forces. But I am not here for France. I am here for myself, American.’ He is bigger than me, and stronger, and more determined, and now he begins to force his arms down, and I find myself being lifted, unable to hold him. He will kill me and others in the next seconds, unless I act.

  I let go one arm. He pushes back more easily now, mouth open, laughing. But I have a free hand, and I scrabble in the straw, and my fingers close on a smooth lump of ice – an egg, a Phoebean egg. I take this egg and ram it into his mouth. It is big, but it jams in there, and now I push my hand under his jaw to keep it closed, I push and push. He claws my wrist and gurgles, and his eyes bulge as he chokes.

  But it is not the suffocating that kills him. It is the detonation as the egg bursts, prompted by his body’s warmth, shattering into pieces that would later reassemble into a crab. The glass-hard shards burst from his cheeks and skewer his tongue, and lance up through his throat into his brain.

  I let him go and pull back, drenched in his gore. Now they are here, Collingwood and Denham and the rest. Collingwood pulls me off the man and to my feet, while Denham takes his rifle and checks he is dead.

  And here is Anne, dear Anne at my side, clutching me despite the blood that will soak her London dress. ‘Oh, Ben! I thought you had sacrificed yourself. You saved us – my father – you saved us all!’

  ‘As you have saved me,’ I say to her, and my voice is raw. Her beloved face swims before me. ‘Make me a promise,’ I say. ‘That when I bring your father safe home from Mars – you will marry me.’

  And she answers me with a kiss, into which I fall like a Phoebean Comet.

  Epilogue

  Epilogue

  To this account I might add the personal details that my father packed a bag of acorns, so that Mars might grow oak trees with which to build English warships in the future. And that his final words before he sealed the hull of the Paine, which I heard myself, were these: ‘Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world will talk of hereafter.’ And so it will.

  I need not recount the events of the mission of the Tom Paine here. Suffice to say that in the months that followed a world at war watched through the eyes of the astronomers – including William Herschel, who was remarkably ever-present once his sister had consigned herself to the dark - as that brave spark followed step by step the course my father had designed, and yet kept secret from me. Glinting in Space, its cannon sparking, the Paine arrowed at Mars - and, in a remarkable feat of navigation by Miss Herschel, plunged through the thin Martian air and rammed that crawling nest of Phoebeans. The anti-ice explosion was bright enough to be seen by the naked eye on this world, a man-made star in the sky.

  It was no scouting mission. There had never been an intention to loop around Mars and return to the earth – as I, had I been a grain more technical, should have deduced. Rather, it was a bold Nelsonian gesture that ended the life of cautious Cuddy Collingwood.

  And nor need I summarise the events of the war on earth, as they unfolded after that strange Christmas. Geordie’s Wall in England, and Manhattan in the Americas, did indeed prove the limits of Napoleon’s ambition in the Atlantic realm. Napoleon is not done; at time of writing he has raised a new ‘Grande Armee’ and has marched east, to confront the continental powers. Perhaps it will be the land that will defeat him, or the people – or the Phoebeans, for the Russians have approached the English over importing ice beasts from Canada to be loosed in their own Arctic wastes. Defeated he will be, I am sure – but his like will surely rise again in the future, as will the Phoebeans, despite my father’s brave enforcement of the ice line. The worlds turn, and bring problems for generations to come, that are the same and yet different.

  But this account is not of Napoleon or any Phoebean, but of Ben Hobbes. He must have scribbled the last pages in the dark, during that feverish, sleepless Christmas night after the French assassin was killed. Only now, with hindsight, can I understand the warmth that came into my father’s clear eyes when we announced our engagement to the company! But that dear moment was the end of our story, not the beginning.

  So I sit in our home in Morpeth, with Bounce at my feet who looks up at every footstep, pining for his master after all these long years. I wonder how it would have turned out if somehow Ben could have returned to earth
, and to my arms. If, if! Such speculations are futile, for this is the only world we have, and it is up to us to make the best of it we can – as Ben Hobbes did, and my own Papa, and it is a consolation to me that they were together at the end, for I loved them both.

  - A.C.

  Also by Stephen Baxter

  Also by Stephen Baxter

  Xeelee Sequence

  Raft

  Timelike Infinity

  Flux

  Ring

  Vacuum Diagrams (collection)

  Anti-Ice

  The Time Ships

  NASA Trilogy

  Voyage

  Titan

  Moonseed

  The Light of Other Days (with Arthur C. Clarke)

  Manifold Trilogy

  Manifold: Time

  Manifold: Space

  Manifold: Origin

  Phase Space (collection)

  Destiny’s Children Trilogy

  Coalescent

  Exultant

  Transcendent

  Resplendent (collection)

  Mammoth Trilogy

  Silverhair

  Longtusk

  Icebones

  Evolution

  A Time Odyssey (with Arthur C. Clarke)

  Time’s Eye

  Sunstorm

  Firstborn

  The H-Bomb Girl

  Time’s Tapestry

  Emperor

  Conqueror

  Navigator

  Weaver

  Flood

  Ark

  Northland Trilogy

  Stone Spring

  Bronze Summer