The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  I turned, studying the landscape.

  Grass — a featureless plain of it — grass grew everywhere, all the way to the horizon — except that there was no horizon, here on this flattened-out world. I looked up, expecting to see the world curve upwards: for I was, after all, no longer glued to the outer surface of a little ball of rock like the earth, but standing on the inside of an immense, hollow shell. But there was no such optical effect; I saw only more grass, and perhaps some clumps of trees or bushes, far in the distance. The sky was a blue-tinged plain of high, light cloud, which merged with the land at a flat seam of mist and dust.

  “I feel as if I’m standing on some immense table-top,” I said to Nebogipfel. “I thought it would be like some huge bowl of landscape. What a paradox it is that I cannot tell if I am inside a great Sphere, or on the outside of a gigantic planet!”

  “There are ways to tell,” Nebogipfel replied from beneath his parasol. “Look up.”

  I craned my neck backwards. At first I could see only the sky and the sun — it could have been any sky of earth. Then, gradually, I began to make out something beyond the clouds. It was that blotchiness of texture about the sky which I had observed as we ascended, and attributed to some defect of the goggles. The blotches were something like a distant water-coloring, done in blue and gray and green, but finely detailed, so that the largest of the patches was dwarfed by the tiniest scrap of cloud. It looked rather like a map — or several maps, jammed up together and viewed from a great distance.

  And it was that analogy which led me to the truth.

  “It is the far side of the Sphere, beyond the sun… I suppose the colors I can see are oceans, and continents, and mountain ranges and prairies — perhaps even cities!” It was a remarkable sight — as if the rocky coats of thousands of flayed earths had been hung up like so many rabbit furs. There was no sense of curvature, such was the immense scale of the Sphere. Rather, it was as if I was sandwiched between layers, between this flattened prairie of grass and the lid of textured sky, with the sun suspended like a lantern in between — and with the depths of space a mere mile or two beneath my feet!

  “Remember that when you look at the Interior’s far side you are looking across the width of the orbit of Venus,” Nebogipfel cautioned me. “From such a distance, the earth itself would be reduced to a mere point of light. Many of the topographic features here are built on a much larger scale than the earth itself.”

  “There must be oceans that could swallow the earth!” I mused. “I suppose that the geological forces in a structure like this are—”

  “There is no geology here,” Nebogipfel cut in. “The Interior, and its landscapes, is artificial. Everything you see was, in essence, designed to be as it is — and it is maintained that way, quite consciously.” He seemed unusually reflective. “Much is different in this History, from that other you have described. But some things are constant: this is a world of perpetual day — in contrast to my own world, of night. We have indeed split into species of extremes, of Dark and Light, just as in that other History.”

  Nebogipfel led me now to the edge of our glass disc. He stayed on the platform, his parasol cocked over his head; but I stepped boldly out onto the surrounding grass. The ground was hard under my feet, but I was pleased to have the sensation of a different surface beneath me, after days of that bland, yielding Floor. Though short, the grass was tough, wiry stuff, of the kind commonly encountered close to sea shores; and when I reached down and dug my fingers into the ground, I found that the soil was quite sandy and dry. I unearthed one small beetle, there in the row of little pits I had dug with my fingers; it scuttled out of sight, deeper into the sand.

  A breeze hissed across the grass. There was no bird song, I noticed; I heard no animal’s call.

  “The soil’s none too rich,” I called back to Nebogipfel.

  “No,” he said. “But the” — a liquid word I could not recognize — “is recovering.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I mean the complex of plants and insects and animals which function together, interdependent. It is only forty thousand years since the war.”

  “What war?”

  Now Nebogipfel shrugged — his shoulders lurched, causing his body hair to rustle — a gesture he could only have copied from me! “Who knows? Its causes are forgotten, the combatants — the nations and their children — all dead.”

  “You told me there was no warfare here,” I accused him.

  “Not among the Morlocks,” he said. “But within the Interior… This one was very destructive. Great bombs fell. The land here was destroyed — all life obliterated.”

  “But surely the plants, the smaller animals—”

  “Everything. You do not understand. Everything died, save the grass and the insects, across a million square miles. And it is only now that the land has become safe.”

  “Nebogipfel, what kind of people live here? Are they like me?”

  He paused. “Some mimic your archaic variant. But there are even some older forms; I know of a colony of reconstructed Neandertalers, who have reinvented the religions of that vanished folk… And there are some who have developed beyond you: who diverge from you as much as I do, though in different ways. The Sphere is large. If you wish I will take you to a colony of those who approximate your own kind…”

  “Oh — I’m not sure what I want!” I said. “I think I’m overwhelmed by this place, this world of worlds, Nebogipfel. I want to see what I can make of it all, before I choose where I will spend my life. Can you understand that?”

  He did not debate the proposal; he seemed eager to get out of the sunlight. “Very well. When you wish to see me again, return to the platform and call my name.”

  And so began my solitary sojourn in the Interior of the Sphere.

  In that world of perpetual noon there was no cycle of days and nights to count the passage of time. However, I had my pocket watch: the time it displayed was, of course, meaningless, thanks to my transfers across time and space; but it served to map out twenty-four-hour periods.

  Nebogipfel had evoked a shelter from the platform — a plain, square but with one small window and a door of the dilating kind I have described before. He left me a tray of food and water, and showed me how I could obtain more: I would push the tray back into the surface of the platform — this was an odd sensation — and after a few seconds a new tray would rise out of the surface, fully laden. This unnatural process made me queasy, but I had no other source of food, and I mastered my qualms. Nebogipfel also demonstrated how to push objects into the platform to have them cleaned, as he cleansed even his own fingers. I used this feature to clean my clothes and boots — although my trousers were returned without a crease! — but I could never bring myself to insert a part of my body in this way. The thought of pushing a hand or foot — or worse, my face — into that bland surface was more than I could bear, and I continued to wash in water.

  I was still without shaving equipment, incidentally; my beard had grown long and luxuriant but it was a depressingly solid mass of iron gray.

  Nebogipfel showed me how I could extend the use of my goggles. By touching the surface in a certain way, I could make them magnify the images of remote objects, bringing them as close, and as sharp, as life. I donned the goggles immediately and focused it on a distant shadow which I had thought was a clump of trees; but it turned out to be no more than an outcropping of rock, which looked rather worn away, or melted.

  For the first few days, it was enough for me simply to be there, in that bruised meadow. I took to going for long walks; I would take my boots off, enjoying the feeling of grass and sand between my toes, and I would often strip to my pants in the hot sunlight. Soon I got as brown as a berry though the prow of my balding forehead got rather burned — it was like a rest cure in Bognor!

  In the evenings I retired to my hut. It was quite cozy in there with the door closed, and I slept well, with my jacket for a pillow and with the warm softness
of the platform beneath me.

  The bulk of my time was spent in the inspection of the Interior with my magnifying goggles. I would sit at the rim of my platform, or lie in a soft patch of grass with my head propped on my jacket, and gaze around the complex sky.

  That part of the Interior opposite my position, beyond the sun, must lie on the Sphere’s equator; and so I anticipated that this region would be the most earth-like — where gravity was strongest, and the air was compressed. That central band was comparatively narrow — no more than some tens of millions of miles wide. (I say “no more” easily enough, but I knew of course that the whole of the earth would be lost, a mere mote, against that titanic background!) Beyond this central band, the surface appeared a dull grey, difficult to distinguish through the sky’s blue filter, and I could make out few details. In one of those high-latitude regions there was a splash of silver-white, with sea-shapes of fine gray embedded in it, that reminded me somewhat of the moon; and in another a vivid patch of orange — quite neatly elliptical — whose nature I could not comprehend at all. I remembered the attenuated Morlocks I had met, who had come from the lower-gravity regions of the outer shells, away from the equator; and I wondered if there were perhaps distorted humans living in those remote, low gravity world-maps of the Interior’s higher latitudes.

  When I considered that inner, earth-like central belt, much of that, even, appeared to be unpopulated; I could see immense oceans, and deserts that could swallow worlds, shining in the endless sunlight. These wastes of land or water separated island-worlds: regions little larger than the earth might have been, if skinned and spread out across that surface, and rich with detail.

  Here I saw a world of grass and forest; with cities of sparkling buildings rising above the trees. There I made out a world locked in ice, whose inhabitants must be surviving as my forebears had in Europe’s glacial periods: perhaps it was cooled by being mounted on some immense platform, I wondered, to lift it out of the atmosphere. On some of the worlds I saw the mark of industry: a complex texture of cities, the misty smoke of factories, bays threaded by bridges, the plume-like wakes of ships on land-locked seas — and, sometimes, a tracing of vapor across the upper atmosphere which I imagined must be generated by some flying vessel.

  So much was familiar enough — but some worlds were quite beyond my comprehension.

  I caught glimpses of cities which floated in the air, above their own shadows; and immense buildings which must have dwarfed China’s Wall, sprawling across engineered landscapes… I could not begin to imagine the sort of men which must live in such places.

  Some days I awoke to comparative darkness. A great sheet of cloud would clamp down on the land, and before long a heavy rain start to fall. It occurred to me that the weather inside that Interior must have been regulated — as, no doubt, were all other aspects of its fabric — for I could readily imagine the immense cyclonic energies which could be generated by that huge world’s rapid spin. I would walk about in the weather a bit, relishing the tang of the fresh water. On such days, the place would become much more earth-like, with the Interior’s bewildering far side and its dubious horizon hidden by rain and cloud.

  After long inspections with the telescopic goggles, I found that the grassy plain around me was just as featureless as it had looked at first sight. One day — it was bright and hot — I decided to try to make for the rocky outcrop I have mentioned, which was the only distinguishable feature within the mist-delineated horizon, even on the clearest day. I bundled up some food and water in a bag I improvised from my longsuffering jacket, and off I set; I got as far as I could before I tired, and then I lay down to attempt to sleep. But I could not settle, not in the open sunlight, and after a few hours I gave up. I walked on a little further, but the rocky outcrop seemed to be getting no nearer, and I began to grow fearful, so far from the platform. What if I were to grow fatigued, or somehow become injured? I should never be able to call Nebogipfel, and I should forfeit any prospect of returning to my own time: in fact, I should die in the grass like some wounded gazelle. And all for a walk to an anonymous clump of rock!

  Feeling foolish, I turned and hiked back to my platform.

  [18]

  The New Eloi

  Some days after this, I emerged from my hut after a sleep, and became aware that the light was a little brighter than usual. I glanced up, and saw that the extra illumination came from a fierce point of light a few degrees of arc from the static sun. I snatched up my goggles and inspected that new star.

  It was a burning island-world. As I watched, great explosions shattered the surface, sending up clouds which blossomed like lovely, deadly flowers. Already, I thought, the island-world must be devoid of life, for nothing could live through the conflagration I witnessed, but still the explosions rained across the surface — and all in eerie silence!

  The island-world flared brighter than the sun, for several hours, and I knew that I was watching a titanic tragedy, made by man — or descendants of man.

  Everywhere in my rocky sky — now I started looking for it — I saw the mark of War.

  Here was a world in which great strips of land appeared to have been given over to a debilitating and destructive siege warfare: I saw brown lanes of churned-up countryside, immense trenches, hundreds of miles wide, in which, I imagined, men were fighting and dying, for year after year. Here was a city burning, with white vapor arcs scored over it; and I wondered if some aerial weapon was being exploited there. And here I found a world devastated by the aftermath of War, the continents blackened and barren, with the outlines of cities barely visible through a shifting pile of black cloud.

  I wondered how many of these joys had visited my own earth, in the years after my departure!

  After some days of this, I took to leaving off my goggles for long periods. I began to find that sky-roof, painted everywhere with warfare, unbearably oppressive.

  Some men of my time have argued for war — would have welcomed it, I think, as, for example, a release of the tension between the great Powers. Men thought of war — always the next one — as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.

  I imagined how it would be if Great Britain and Germany were projected somewhere here, as two more splashes of color against the rocky sky. I thought of those two nations which seemed to me now, from my elevated perspective, in a state of aimless economic and moral muddle. And I doubted if there had been a man alive in 1891 in either country who could have told me the benefits of a war, whatever the outcome! — and how ludicrous and futile such a conflict would seem if Britain and Germany were indeed projected up into the Interior of this monstrous Sphere.

  All across the Sphere, millions of irreplaceable human lives were being lost to such conflicts — which were as remote and meaningless to me as the paintings on the ceiling of a cathedral — and you would think that men living in that Sphere — and able to see a thousand island-worlds like their own — would have abandoned their petty little ambitions, and discovered the sort of perspective I now understood. But, it seemed, it was not so; the base parts of human instincts dominated still, even in the Year A.D. 657,208. Here in the Sphere, even the daily education of a thousand, a million wars going on all across the iron sky was not enough, apparently, to make men see the futility and cruelty of it all!

  I found my mind turning, for contrast, to Nebogipfel and his people, and their Rational society. I will not pretend that a certain revulsion did not still tinge my mind at the thought of the Morlocks and their unnatural practices, but I understood now that this arose from my own primitive prejudices, and my unfortunate experiences in Weena’s world, which were quite irrelevant to an assessment of Nebogipfel.

  I was able, given time to contemplate, to work out how the falling-away of Morlock gender differences might have come about. I consid
ered how, among humans, circles of loyalty spread out around an individual. First of all one must fight to preserve oneself and one’s direct children. Next, one will fight for siblings — but perhaps with only a reduced intensity, since the common inheritance must be halved. In next priority one would fight for the children of siblings, and more remote relations, in diminishing bands of intensity.

  Thus, with depressing reliability, men’s actions and loyalties may be predicted; for only with such a hierarchy of allegiance — in a world of shortage and instability — can one’s inheritance be preserved for future generations.

  But the Morlocks’ inheritance was secured — and not through an individual child or family, but through the great common resource that was the Sphere. And so the differentiation and specialization of the sexes became irrelevant — even harmful, to the orderly progress of things.

  It was a pretty irony, I thought, that it was precisely this diagnosis — of the vanishing of sexes from a world made stable, abundant and peaceful — that I had once applied to the exquisite, and decadent, Eloi; and now here I was coming to see that it was their ugly cousins the Morlocks, who, in this version of things, had actually achieved that remote goal!

  All this worked its way through my thinking. And slowly — it took some days — I came to a decision about my future.

  I could not remain inside this Interior; after the God-like perspective loaned me by Nebogipfel, I could not bear to immerse my life and energies in any one of the meaningless conflicts sweeping like brush fires across these huge plains. Nor could I remain with Nebogipfel and his Morlocks; for I am not a Morlock, and my essential human needs would make it unbearable to live as Nebogipfel did.