The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  What kind of species is it, I wondered, that inflicts such damage on its own offspring?

  When the game was done, we retired from our pitch, laughing and exhausted. Stubbins thanked me for joining in.

  “Not at all,” I said. “You’re a fair old player, Stubbins. Maybe you should have taken it up as a professional.”

  “Aye, well, I did, as a matter of fact,” he said wistfully. “I signed on as an apprentice with Newcastle United… but that was in the early days of the War. Pretty soon that put a stop to the football. Oh, there’s been some competition since — regional leagues, and the League War Cups — but in the last five or six years, even that has been closed down.”

  “Well, I think it’s a shame,” I said. “You’ve a talent there, Stubbins.”

  He shrugged, his evident disappointment mingling with his natural modesty. “It wasn’t to be.”

  “But now you’ve done something much more important,” I consoled him. “You’ve played in the first football match on the earth — and got a hat-trick of goals.” I slapped him on the back. “Now, that’s a feather fit for any cap, Albert!”

  As time wore on, it became increasingly apparent — I mean, at that level of the spirit below the intellectual where true knowledge resides — that we should, truly, never return home. Slowly — inevitably, I suppose — partnerships and ties in the twentieth century became remote, and the colonists formed themselves into couples. This pairing off showed no respect for rank, class or race: sepoy, gurkha and English alike joined in new liaisons. Only Hilary Bond, with her residual air of command, remained aloof from it all.

  I remarked to Hilary that she might use her rank as a vehicle for performing marriage ceremonies — much as a sea-captain will join passengers in wedlock. She greeted this suggestion with polite thanks, but I caught skepticism in her voice, and we did not pursue the matter.

  A little pattern of dwellings spread along the coast and up the river valley from our sea-shore node. Hilary viewed all this with a liberal eye; her only rule was that — for now — no dwelling should be out of sight of at least one other, and none should be more than a mile’s distance from the site of the Hall. The colonists accepted these strictures with good grace.

  Hilary’s wisdom regarding the business of marriage — and my converse folly — soon became obvious, for one day I saw Stubbins strolling along the beach with his arms around two young women. I greeted them all cheerfully but it was not until they had passed that I realized that I did not know which of the women was Stubbins’s “wife"!

  I challenged Hilary, and I could tell she was suppressing amusement.

  “But,” I protested, “I’ve seen Stubbins with Sarah at the barn dance — but then, when I called at his but that morning last week, there was the other girl—”

  Now she laughed, and laid her scarred hands on my arms. “My dear friend,” she said, “you have sailed the seas of Space and Time — you have changed History many times; you are a genius beyond doubt — and yet, how little you know of people!”

  I was embarrassed. “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it.” She ran her hand over her ravaged scalp, where tufts of grayed hair clung. “We are thirteen — not counting your friend Nebogipfel. And that thirteen is eight women and five men.” She eyed me. “And that’s what we’re stuck with. There’s no island over the horizon, from whence might come more young men to marry off our girls…

  “If we all made stable marriages — if we settled into monogamy, as you suggest then our little society would soon tear itself apart. For, you see, eight and five don’t match. And so I think a certain looseness in our arrangements is appropriate. For the good of all. Don’t you think? And besides, it’s good for this ’genetic diversity’ that Nebogipfel lectures us about.”

  I was shocked; not (I fondly believed) by any moral difficulties, but by the calculation behind all this!

  Troubled, I made to leave her — and then a thought struck me. I turned back. “But — Hilary — I am one of the five men you speak of.”

  “Of course.” I could see she was making fun of me.

  “But I don’t — I mean, I haven’t—”

  She grinned. “Then perhaps it’s time you did. You’re only making things worse, you know.”

  I left in confusion. Evidently, between 1891 and 1944, society had evolved in ways of which I had never dreamed!

  Work on the great Hall proceeded quickly, and within no more than a few months of the Bombing, the bulk of the construction was done. Hilary Bond announced that a service of dedication would be held to commemorate the completion. At first Nebogipfel demurred — with characteristic Morlock over-analysis, he could see no purpose to such an exercise — but I persuaded him that it would be politic, as regards future relations with the colonists, to attend.

  I washed and shaved, and got myself as smart as it is possible to be when dressed only in a ragged pair of trousers. Nebogipfel combed and trimmed his mane of flaxen hair. Given the practicalities of our situation, many of the colonists went around pretty much nude by now, with little more than strips of cloth or animal skin to cover their modesty. Today, however, they donned the remnants of their uniforms, cleaned up and repaired as far as possible, and, while it was a parade which would have scarce passed muster at Aldershot, we were able to present ourselves with a display of smartness and discipline which I, for one, found touching.

  We walked up a shallow, uneven flight of steps and into the new Hall’s dark interior. The floor though uneven was laid and swept, and the morning sunlight slanted through the glass less windows. I felt rather awed: despite the crudeness of its architecture and construction, the place had a feeling of solidity, of intent to stay.

  Hilary Bond stood on a podium improvised from the car’s petrol tank, and rested her hand for support on Stubbins’s broad shoulder. Her ruined face, topped by those bizarre tufts of hair, held a simple dignity.

  Our new colony, she announced, was now founded, and ready to be named: she proposed to call it First London. Then she asked us all to join her in a prayer. I dropped my head with the rest and clasped my hands before me. I was brought up in a strict High Church household, and Hilary’s words now worked nostalgically on me, transporting me back to a simpler part of my life, a time of certainty and surety.

  And at length, as Hilary spoke on, simply and effectively, I gave up my attempts at analysis and allowed myself to join in this simple, communal celebration.

  [17]

  Children and Descendants

  The first fruits of the new unions arrived within the year, under Nebogipfel’s supervision.

  Nebogipfel inspected our first new colonist carefully — I heard that the mother was most uncertain about allowing a Morlock to handle her baby, and protested; but Hilary Bond was there to calm her fears — and at last Nebogipfel announced that the baby was a perfect girl, and returned her to her parents.

  Quite quickly — or so it seemed to me — there were several of the children about the place. It was a common sight to see Stubbins bouncing his baby boy on has shoulders, to the little chap’s evident delight; and I knew it should not be long before Stubbins would have the boy kicking bivalve shells for footballs about the beach.

  The children were a source of immense joy to the colonists. Before the first births, several of the colonists had been prone to severe bouts of depression, brought on by homesickness and loneliness. Now, though, there were the children to think about: children who would know only First London as their home, and whose future prosperity provided a goal — the greatest goal of all — for their parents.

  As for me, as I watched the soft, unmarked limbs of the children, cradled in the scarred flesh of parents who were still young themselves, it was as if I saw the shadow of that dreadful War lifting from these people at last — a shadow banished by the abundant light of the Palaeocene.

  Still, though, Nebogipfel inspected each new-born arrival.

  The day came, at last, when he wo
uld not return a child to its new mother: That birth turned into an occasion of private grief, into which the rest of us did not intrude; and afterwards Nebogipfel disappeared into the forest, following his secret pursuits, for long days.

  Nebogipfel spent a good deal of his time running what he called “study groups.” These were open to any and all of the colonists, though in practice three or four at a time would turn up, depending on interest and other commitments. Nebogipfel held forth on practicalities of life in the conditions of the Palaeocene, such as the manufacture of candles and cloth from the local ingredients; he even devised a sort of soap, a coarse, gritty paste concocted of soda and animal fat. But he also expounded on subjects of broader significance: medicine, physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, the principles of time travel…

  I sat in on a number of these sessions. Despite the unearthly nature of his voice and manner the Morlock’s exposition was always admirably clear, and he had a knack of asking questions to test the understanding of his audience. Listening to him, I realized that he could have taught the lecturers of the average British university a thing or two!

  As for the content, he was careful to restrict himself to the language of his audience — to the vocabulary, if not the jargon, of 1944 — but he summarized for them the main developments in each field in the decades which followed that date. He worked demonstrations where he could, with bits of metal and wood, or produced diagrams sketched in the sand with sticks; he had his “students” cover every scrap of paper we had been able to retrieve with a codification of his knowledge.

  I discussed all this with him around midnight, one dark and moonless night. He had discarded his latest slit-mask, and his gray-red eyes seemed luminescent; he was working with a crude mortar and pestle, in which he was mashing up palm fronds in some liquid. “Paper,” he said. “Or at least, an experiment in that direction… We must have more paper! Your human verbal memory is not of sufficient fidelity — they will lose everything when I am gone, within a few years…”

  I took it — wrongly, as it turned out — that he was referring to a fear, or expectation at any rate, of death. I sat down beside him and took the mortar and pestle. “But is there a point to all this? Nebogipfel, we’re still barely subsisting. And you talk to them of Quantum Mechanics, and the Unified Theory of Physics! What need have they of this material?”

  “None,” he said. “But their children will — if they are to survive. Look: by accepted theory, one needs a population of several hundred, of any of the large mammalian species, for sufficient genetic diversity to ensure long-term survival.”

  “Genetic diversity — Hilary mentioned that.”

  “Clearly, the available stock of humankind here is far too small for the viability of the colony — even if all the potential genetic material is placed in the pool.”

  “And so?” I prompted.

  “And so, the only prospect for survival beyond two or three generations is for these people rapidly to attain an advanced grasp of technology. That way, they can become the masters of their own genetic destiny: they need not tolerate the consequences of inbreeding, or the lingering genetic damage inflicted by the Carolinum’s radio-activity. So you see, they do need Quantum Mechanics and the rest.”

  I pushed at the pestle. “Yes. But there’s an implied question here — should the human race survive, here in the Palaeocene? I mean, we’re not meant to be here — not for another fifty million years.”

  He studied me. “But what is the alternative? Do you want these people to die out?”

  I remembered my determination to eradicate the existence of the Time Machine before it was ever launched — to put a stop to this endless splintering of Histories. Now, thanks to my blundering about, I had indirectly induced the establishment of this human colony deep in the past, an establishment which would surely cause the most significant Historical fracturing yet! I had a sudden feeling of falling — it was a little like the vertiginous plummeting one feels when Traveling into time — and I felt that this diverging of History must already be far beyond my control.

  And then, I thought of the expression on Stubbins’s face as he gazed at his first child.

  I am man, not a god! I must let myself be influenced by my human instincts, for I was surely incapable of managing the evolution of Histories with any conscious direction. Each of us, I thought, could do little to change the course of things — indeed, anything we tried was likely to — be so uncontrolled as to inflict more damage than benefit — and yet, conversely, we should not allow the huge panorama about us, the immensity of the Multiplicity of Histories, to overwhelm us. The perspective of the Multiplicity rendered each of us, and our actions, tiny — but not without meaning; and each of us must proceed with our lives with stoicism and fortitude, as if the rest of it — the final Doom of mankind, the endless Multiplicity — were not so.

  Whatever the impact on the future of fifty million years hence, there was a sense of health and rightness about this Palaeocene colony, I thought. So my reply to Nebogipfel’s question was inevitable.

  “No. No, of course we must do all we can to help the colonists, and their descendants, survive.”

  “Therefore—”

  “Yes?”

  “Therefore I must find a way to make paper.”

  I ground on with the pestle and mortar.

  [18]

  The feast, and Later

  One day, Hilary Bond announced that the first anniversary of the Bombing was one week away, and that a celebratory Feast would be held to commemorate the founding of our little village.

  The colonists fell on this scheme with a will, and preparations were soon well advanced. The Hall was decorated with lianas and immense garlands of flowers, gathered from the forest, and preparations were made to kill and cook one of the colony’s precious flock of Diatryma.

  As for me, I scavenged funnels and lengths of tubing and, in the privacy of an old lean-to, began conducting intense private experiments. The colonists were curious about this, and I was forced to resort to sleeping in the lean-to to keep the secret of my improvised apparatus. It was time, I had decided, to put my scientific understanding to good use — for once!

  The day of the Feast dawned. We gathered before the Hall in the bright morning light, and there was an air of great excitement and occasion. Once more the remains of uniforms had been cleaned and donned, and the infants-in-arms were decorated in the new fabrics Nebogipfel had devised of a type of local cotton, colored bright red and purple by vegetable dyes. I passed through the little knot of people, seeking out my closer friends -

  — when there was a crash of twigs, and a deep, creaking bellow.

  The cry went up. “Pristichampus — it is Pristichampus! Look out…”

  And indeed, the bellow had been characteristic of that great land-running crocodile. People ran around, and I cast about for a weapon, cursing myself for being so unprepared.

  Then another voice, gentler and more familiar, came floating to us. “Hi! Don’t be afraid — look!”

  The panic subsided, and a sprinkle of laughter broke out.

  Pristichampus — a proud male — stalked into the clear space in front of the Hall. We moved back to make room for it, and its hoofed feet left great pockmarks in the sand… and there on its back, grinning widely, his red hair flaming in the sunlight, sat Stubbins!

  I approached the crocodile. Its scaly hide stank of decaying meat, and one cold eye was fixed on me, swiveling as I walked. Stubbins, bare-backed, grinned down at me; in his wiry hands he held a rein made of plaited lianas, wrapped about Pristichampus’s head.

  “Stubbins,” I said, “this is quite an achievement.”

  “Aye, well, I know we’ve set the Diatryma to dragging a plow, but this creature is far more agile. Why, we’ll be able to travel miles — it’s better than a horse…”

  “Just be careful, even so,” I admonished him. “And, Stubbins, if you join me later—”

  “Yes?”

 
“I might have a surprise for you.”

  Stubbins dragged at Pristichampus’s head. It took considerable effort, but he managed to get the beast to turn. The great creature stepped its way out of the clearing and back towards the forest, the muscles of its huge legs working like pistons.

  Nebogipfel joined me, his head almost lost beneath a huge, broad-brimmed hat.

  “That’s a fine achievement,” I remarked. “But — can you see? — he barely had control of the brute…”

  “He will win,” Nebogipfel said. “Humans always do.” He stepped closer to me, his white pelt shining in the morning sunlight. “Listen to me.”

  I was startled by this sudden, incongruous whisper. “What? What is it?”

  “I have finished my construction.”

  “What construction?”

  “I leave tomorrow. If you wish to join me, you are welcome.”

  And he turned and, noiselessly, walked away towards the forest; in a moment the white of his back was lost in the darkness of the trees. I stood there with the sun at my neck, gazing after the enigmatic Morlock — and it was as if the day had been transformed. My mind was in a perfect turmoil, for his meaning was utterly clear.

  A heavy hand clapped me on the back. “So,” said Stubbins, “what’s this great secret you have for me?”

  I turned to him, but I found it difficult, for some seconds, to focus on his face. “Come with me,” I said at last, with as much vigour and good humor as I could muster.

  A few minutes later, Stubbins — and the rest of the colonists were raising shells full to the brim with my home-made nut-milk liqueur.