The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  The door-way led to another chamber, about the size and shape of my own. But here there were no false window-frames, no clumsy attempts at decoration, no sand on the floor; instead the walls were bare, a plain metallic gray, and there were several windows, covered by screens, and a door with a simple handle. There was no furniture here, and the room was dominated by a single, immense artifact: it was the pyramid-machine (or one identical to it) which I had last seen as it began its slow, painful crawl over my body. I have said that it was the height of a man, and was correspondingly broad at the base; its surface was metallic, by and large, but of a complex, shifting texture. If you will picture a great pyramidal frame, six feet tall, and covered with a blur of busy, metallic soldier-ants, then you will have the essence of it.

  But this monstrosity barely attracted my attention; for — standing primly before it, and apparently peering into the pyramid’s hide with some kind of eye-scope device — there was Nebogipfel.

  I stumbled forward, and I held out my arms with pleasure. But the Morlock merely stood, patiently, and did not react to my presence.

  “Nebogipfel,” I said, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to have found you. I think I was going crazy in there — crazy with isolation!”

  I saw now that one of his eyes — the wounded right was covered by the eye-scope device; this tube extended to the pyramid, merging with the body of that object, and the whole affair crawled with the miniature ant-motion that plastered the pyramid. I looked at this with some revulsion, for I should not have liked to have inserted such a device into my eye-socket.

  Nebogipfel’s other, naked eye swiveled towards me, huge and gray-red. “Actually it was I who found you, and asked to see you. And whatever your mental state, I see you are healthy, at least,” he said. “How is your frostbite?”

  I was confused by this. “What frost-bite?” I pawed at my skin, but I knew well enough that it was unmarked.

  “Then they have done a good job,” Nebogipfel said.

  “Who?”

  “The Universal Constructors.” By this I took it he meant the pyramid-machine and its cousins.

  I noticed how straight was his bearing, how neat and well-groomed his pelt of hair. I realized that in this moonlight glow he needed no goggles here, as I did, to aid his vision; evidently these chambers of ours had been designed more with his needs in mind than mine. “You’re looking fine, Morlock,” I said warmly. “Your leg’s been straightened out — and that bad arm too.”

  “The Constructors have managed to repair my most ancient of injuries — frankly, I am now as healthy as when I first climbed aboard your Time Machine.”

  “All save that eye of yours,” I said with some regret, for I referred to the eye I had all but destroyed in my fear and rage. “I take it they — these Constructors of yours — were unable to save it.

  “My eye?” He sounded puzzled. He pulled his face from the eye-scope; the tube came away from his face with a soft, pulpy noise, and dangled from the pyramid-thing, retracting into its metallic hide. “Not at all,” he said. “I chose to have it rebuilt this way. It has certain conveniences, although I admit I had some difficulty explaining my wishes to the Constructors…”

  He turned to me now. His socket was a bare hole. The ruin of his eye had been scooped out, and it looked as if the bone had been opened up, the hole deepened — and the socket glistened throughout with moist, squirming metal.

  [3]

  The Universal Constructor

  In contrast to my sparse cell, Nebogipfel, it turned out, had been provided with a veritable suite. There were four rooms, each as large as mine and roughly conical in form, and fitted with doors and windows, which our hosts had not thought fit to provide for me: it was evident that they had a higher view of his intellect than mine!

  There was the same lack of furniture that I had suffered, although Morlocks have sample needs, and it was not such an incongruity for Nebogipfel. In one room, though, I found a bizarre object: a table-like affair perhaps twelve feet long and six wide, topped with a soft orange covering. There were pockets arranged around the rim of this table, all edged with a hard substance that glowed green. The table was an approximate rectangle, although its edges were irregularly shaped; and a single ball — white, of some dense material — sat on the table-top. When I pushed the ball across the table-top it ran well enough, although, without a covering of baize, its speed was a little free, and it caromed off cushions at the rim with a satisfying solidity.

  I tried to discern some deeper meaning of this device; but, for all the world — as you will have guessed from my description — it was like nothing so much as a billiards table! I wondered at first if this was some other distorted echo of a nineteenth-century hotel room — but a rather bizarre selection if so, and, lacking anything in the way of cues, and only a single ball, it was not likely to give me much sport.

  Baffled, I abandoned the table, and tested the doors and windows. The doors worked by simple handles, to be grasped and turned, but the doors led only to other rooms within the suite, or to my original chamber; there were no ways out to the world beyond. I found, though, that the panels covering the transparent windows could be lifted up, and for the first time I was able to inspect this new 1891, this White Earth.

  My viewpoint was raised some thousand feet or more from the ground! we seemed to be at the apex of some immense cylindrical tower, whose flanks I could see sweeping down below me. Everything I saw reinforced the first impression I had gained when I had obtained that last glimpse over the rim of the Time-Car, just before the cold overcame me: that this was a world forever sunk into the Ice. The sky was the color of gunmetal, and the icebound land a gray-white like exposed bone, with none of that attractive blueness one sees sometimes about prettier snow-fields. Looking out now, I could see quite clearly how dreadfully stable this world-state truly was, just as Nebogipfel had described: the daylight glinted fiercely from the mantle of scarred Ice which sheathed the earth, and the whiteness of that world-wide carapace hurled the warmth of the sun back into the sink of space. The poor earth was dead, caught at the bottom of this pit of icy, climatic stability, for evermore — it was the ultimate Stability of Death.

  Here and there I saw a Constructor — in form just like our own, here in Nebogipfel’s apartment — standing on the frozen landscape. Each Constructor was always alone, standing there like some ill-wrought monument, a splash of steel gray against the bone white of the ice. I never saw any of them move! It was as if they simply appeared in the sites where they stood, reassembling themselves, perhaps, from the air. (Indeed, as I found later, this first assessment of mine was not so far from the truth.)

  Dead the land was, but not without the evidence of intelligence. There were more great buildings — like our own — puncturing the landscape. They took simple geometric forms: cylinders, cones and cubes. My vantage point showed me the south and west, and from my aerie I could see these great buildings scattered as far afield as Battersea, Fulham, Mitcham and beyond. They were spaced perhaps a mile apart on average, as far as I could see; and the whole prospect — the fields of Ice, the mute Constructors, the sparse, anonymous buildings — combined to make up a bleak, inhuman London.

  I returned to Nebogipfel, who still stood before his Constructor. The metal pelt of the thing rippled and shone, as if it were the surface of some tilted pond with metal fish moving beneath, and then a protuberance — a tube a few inches wide — thrust out of the surface, glistening with the silvery metal texture of the pyramid, and pressed towards Nebogipfel’s waiting face.

  I recognized this arrangement, of course; it was the return of the eye-scope device I had seen earlier. In a moment it would be fitted to Nebogipfel’s skull.

  I prowled around the rim of the Constructor. As I have described, in appearance the Constructor was like a heap of melted slag; it was animate to some degree — and mobile, for I had seen this object, or one similar, crawl over my own body — but I could not begin to guess as to its
purpose. Inspecting closely, I saw how the surface was covered by a series of metal hairs: cilia, like iron filings, which waved about in the air, quite active and intelligent. And I had the infuriating, eye-hurting sensation that there were further levels of detail to all this, beyond the grasp of my aging vision. The texture of this mobile surface was at the same time fascinating and repulsive: mechanical, but with something of the quality of life. I was not tempted to touch it — I could not bear the thought of those squirming cilia latching onto my skin — and I had no instruments with which to probe. Without any means of making a closer examination, I was unable to undertake a study of the pyramid’s internal structure.

  I noticed a certain degree of activity about the lowest rim of the pyramid. Crouching down, I saw how tiny communities of metal cilia — the size of ants, or smaller — were continually breaking away from the Constructor. Generally these fallen pieces seemed to dissolve as they fell against the floor, doubtless breaking up into components too small for me to see; but at times I saw how these discarded bits of Constructor trekked hither and thither across the floor, again after the fashion of ants, to unknown destinations. In a similar fashion — I observed now — more clumps of the cilia emerged from the floor, clambered up the skirts of the Constructor, and merged into its substance, as if they had always been a part of it!

  I remarked on this to Nebogipfel. “It is astonishing,” I said, “but it is not hard to surmise what is going on. The components of the Constructor attach and detach themselves. They squirm off over the floor — or even fly away through the air, for all I know, or can see. The discarded pieces must either die off, in some fashion, if they are defective — or else join the glistening carcass of some other unfortunate Constructor.

  “Confound it,” I said, “the planet must be covered with a thin slime of these detached cilia, squirming this way and that! And, in some interval of time — perhaps a century — there must be nothing left of the original body of this beast we see here. All its bits, its analogues of hair and teeth and eyes, have trekked off for a visit to its neighbors!”

  “It is not a unique design,” Nebogipfel said. “In your body — and mine — cells die and are replaced continually.”

  “Perhaps, but even so — what does it mean to say that this Constructor, here, is — an individual? I mean: if I buy a brush — and then replace the handle, and then the head — do I have the same brush?”

  The Morlock’s red-gray eye turned back to the pyramid, and that tube of extruded metal sank into the hole in his face with a liquid noise.

  “This Constructor is not a single machine, like a motor-car,” he retorted. “It is a composite, made up of many millions of submachines — limbs, if you like. These are arranged in a hierarchical form, radiating out from a central trunk along branches and twigs, after the manner of a bush. The smallest limbs, at the periphery, are too small for you to see: they work at the molecular or atomic levels.”

  “But what use,” I asked, “are these insectile limbs? One may push atoms about, and molecules — but why? What a tedious and unproductive business.”

  “On the contrary,” he said wearily. “If you can do your engineering at the most fundamental level of matter — and if you have enough time, and sufficient patience — you can achieve anything.” He looked up at me. “Why, without the Constructors’ molecular engineering, you — and I — would not even have survived our first exposure to White Earth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ’surgery’ performed on you,” Nebogipfel said, “was at the level of the cell — the level where the frost damage occurred…”

  Nebogipfel described, in some grisly detail, how, in the severe cold we had encountered, the walls of my very cells (and his) had been burst open by the freezing and expansion of their contents — and no surgery, of the type I was familiar with, could have saved my life.

  Instead, the microscopic outer limbs of the Constructor had become detached from the parent body, and had traveled through my damaged system, effecting repairs of my frost-bitten cells at the molecular level. When they reached the other side — crudely speaking — they had emerged from my body and rejoined their parent.

  I had been rebuilt, from the inside out, by an army of swarming metal ants — and so had Nebogipfel.

  I shuddered at this, feeling colder than at any time since my rescue. I scratched at my arms, almost involuntarily, as if seeking to scrape out this technological infection. “But such an invasion is monstrous,” I protested to Nebogipfel. “The thought of those busy little workers, passing through the substance of my body…”

  “I take it you would prefer the blunt, invasive scalpels of the surgeons of your own age.”

  “Perhaps not, but—?”

  “I remind you that, by contrast, you could not even set a broken bone without rendering me lame.”

  “But that was different. I’m no doctor!”

  “Do you imagine this creature is? In any event, if you would prefer to have died, no doubt that could be arranged.”

  “Of course not.” But I scratched at my skin, and I knew it would be a long time before I felt comfortable again in my own rebuilt body! I thought of a drop of comfort, though. “At least,” I said, “these limb-things of the Constructor are merely mechanical.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They are not alive. If they had been—”

  He pulled his face free of the Constructor and faced me, the hole in his face sparkling with metal cilia. “No. You are wrong. These structures are alive.”

  “What?”

  “By any reasonable definition of the word. They can reproduce themselves. They can manipulate the external world, creating local conditions of increased order. They have internal states which can change independently of external inputs; they have memories which can be accessed at will… All these are characteristics of Life, and Mind. The Constructors are alive, and conscious — as conscious as you or I. More so, in fact.”

  Now I was confused. “But that’s impossible.” I indicated the pyramid-device. “This is a machine. It is manufactured.”

  “I have encountered the limits of your imagination before,” he said severely. “Why should a mechanical worker be built within the limitations of the human design? With machine life—”

  “Life?”

  “ — one is free to explore other morphologies — other forms.”

  I raised an eyebrow at the Constructor. “The morphology of the privet hedge, for example!”

  “And besides,” he said, “it could manufacture you. Does that make you less than alive?”

  This was becoming far too metaphysical a debate for me! I paced around the Constructor. “But if it is alive, and conscious — is this a person? Or several people? Does it have a name? A soul?”

  Nebogipfel turned to the Constructor once more, and let the eye-scope nuzzle into his face. “A soul?” he asked. “This is your descendant. So am I, by a different History path. Do I have a soul? Do you?”

  He turned away from me, and peered into the heart of the Constructor.

  [4]

  The billiards Room

  Later, Nebogipfel joined me in the chamber I had come to think of as the Billiards Room. He ate from a plate of cheese-like fare.

  I sat, rather moodily, on the edge of the billiards table, flicking the single ball across the surface. The ball was wont to exhibit some peculiar behavior. I was aiming for a pocket on the far side of the table, and more often than not I hit it, and would trot around to retrieve it from its little net cache beneath. But sometimes the ball’s path would be disturbed. There would be a rattling in the middle of the empty table surface — the ball would jiggle about, oddly, too rapidly to follow — and then, usually, the ball would sail on to the destination I had intended. Sometimes, though, the ball would be diverted markedly from the path I had intended — and once it even returned, from that half-visible disturbance, to my hand!

  “Nebogipfel, did you see that? I
t is most peculiar,” I said. “There does not seem to be any obstruction in the middle of the table. And yet, half the time, the running of this ball is impeded.” I tried some more demonstrations for him, and he watched with an air of distraction.

  I said, “Well, I’m glad at any rate that I’m not playing a game here. I can think of one or two fellows who might come to blows over such discrepancies.” Tiring of my idle toying, I sat the ball square in the middle of the table and left it there. “I wonder what the motive of the Constructors was in placing this table in here. I mean, it’s our only substantial piece of furniture — unless you want to count our Constructor out there himself… I wonder if this is intended as a snooker or a billiards table.”

  Nebogipfel seemed bemused by the question. “Is there a difference?”

  “I’ll say! Despite its popularity, snooker is just a potting game — a fine enough pastime for the bored Army Officers in India who devised it but it has nothing like the science of billiards, to my mind…”

  And then — I was watching it as it happened — a second billiard ball popped out of one of the table’s pockets, quite spontaneously, and began to roll, square on, towards my ball at rest at the centre of the table.

  I bent closer to see. “What the devil is happening here?” The ball was progressing quite slowly, and I was able to make out details of its surface. My ball was no longer smooth and white; after my various experiments, its surface had become scarred with a series of scratches, one quite distinctive. And this new ball was just as scarred.

  The newcomer hit my stationary ball, with a solid clunk; the new ball was brought to rest by the impact, and my ball was knocked across the table.