The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  “All of it.” His eyes were black. “You do not?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It all seems a sort of a dream, now — especially here, in this cold English rain.”

  “But the Optimal History is the reality,” he whispered. “All of this” — he waved his hands about at innocent Richmond — “these partial, sub-Optimal Histories — this is the dream.”

  I hoisted the jar of Plattnerite in my hand. It was a commonplace medicine bottle, plugged with rubber; needless to say, I had no idea of where it had come from, nor how it had got in amongst the struts of my machine. “Well, this is real enough,” I said. “It’s really quite a pretty solution, isn’t it? Like the closing of a circle.” I stepped towards the door. “I think you’d better get back — out of sight — before I ring.”

  He stepped backwards, into the shadow of the porch, and soon he was quite invisible.

  I tugged at the bell-pull.

  From within the house, I heard the opening of a door, a soft shout — “I’ll go!” — and then a heavy, impatient tread on the stair.

  A key rattled in the lock, and the door creaked open.

  A candle, sputtering in a brass holder, was thrust through the doorway at me; the face of a young man, broad and round, peered out, his eyes puffed up with sleep. He was twenty-three or twenty-four, and he wore a battered, thread-bare gown, thrown over a crumpled night-shirt; his hair, a mousy brown, stuck out from the sides of his odd, broad head. “Yes?” he snapped. “It’s after three in the morning, you know…”

  I’d not been sure what I had intended to say, but now that the moment was here, words fled from me altogether. Once again I suffered that queer, uncomfortable shock of recognition. I don’t think a man of my century could ever have grown accustomed to meeting himself, no matter how many times he’d practiced it and now that whole raft of feeling was overlaid with an extra sort of poignancy. For this was no longer just a younger version of me: it was also a direct ancestor of Moses. It was like coming face to face with a younger brother I had thought lost.

  He studied my face again, suspicious now. “What the devil do you want? I make a point of having no truck with hawkers, you know — even if this was the appropriate time of day.”

  “No,” I said gently. “No, I know you don’t.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” He began to push closed the door, but he had seen something in my face — I could see the look some ghost of recognition. “I think you’d better tell me what you want.”

  Clumsily, I produced the medicine jar of Plattnerite from behind my back. “I have this for you.”

  His eyebrows went up at the bottle’s odd green glow. “What is it?”

  “It’s—” How could I explain? “It’s a sort of sample. For you.”

  “A sample of what?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “I’d like you to find out.”

  He looked curious, but still hesitant; and now a certain stubbornness was settling over his features. “Find out what?”

  I started to become irritated at these dull questions. “Confound it, man — do you not have any initiative? Run some tests…”

  “I’m not sure I like your tone,” he said stuffily. “What sort of tests?”

  “Oh!” I ran a hand through my soaked hair; such pomposity did not sit well on such a young man, I thought. “It’s a new mineral — you can see that much!”

  He frowned, his suspicion redoubled.

  I bent and set the jar down on the step. “I’ll leave it here. You can look at it when you’re ready — and I know you’ll be ready — I don’t want to waste your time.” I turned and began to make my way down the path, my footsteps on the gravel loud through the rainfall.

  When I looked back I saw that he had picked up the jar, and its green glow softened the shadows of the candle on his face. He called: “But your name—”

  I had an impulse. “It is Plattner,” I said.

  “Plattner? Do I know you?”

  “Plattner,” I repeated in some desperation, and I sought a more detailed lie in the dim recesses of my brain. “Gottfried Plattner…”

  It was as if I had heard someone else say it — but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they had had a sort of inevitability.

  It was done; the circle was closed!

  He continued to call, but I walked resolutely, away from the gate and down the Hill.

  Nebogipfel was waiting for me at the rear of the house, close to the Time Machine. “It’s done,” I told him. A first touch of dawn had filtered into the overcast sky, and I could see the Morlock as a grainy sort of silhouette: he had his hands clasped behind him, and his hair was plastered flat against his back. His eyes were huge, blood-red pools.

  “You’re a little the worse for wear,” I said kindly. “This rain—”

  “It hardly matters.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “What will you do?”

  For answer, I bent over and hauled at the Time Machine. It twisted up, clattering like an old bed, and settled to the lawn with a heavy thump. I ran a hand along the battered frame of the machine; moss and bits of grass clung to the quartz rods and the saddle, and one rail was bent, quite out of shape.

  “You can go home, you know,” he said. “To 1891. We have clearly been brought back, by the Watchers, to your original History — to the Primal version of things. You need only travel forward through a few years.”

  I considered that prospect. In some ways it would have been comfortable to return to that cozy Age, and to my shell of belongings, companions and achievements. And I should have enjoyed the company of some of those old chums of mine again — Filby and the rest. But…

  “I had a friend, in 1891,” I said to Nebogipfel. (I was thinking of the Writer.) “Only a young fellow. An odd chap in some ways — very intense — and yet with a way of looking at things…

  “He seemed to see beyond the surface of it all — beyond the Here and Now which so obsesses us all — and to the quick of it: to the trends, the deeper currents which connect us to both past and future. He had a view of the littleness of Humanity, I think, against the great sweep of evolutionary time; and I think it made him impatient with the world he found himself stuck in, with the endless, slow processes of society — even with his own, sickly human nature.

  “It was as if he was a stranger in his own time, you see,” I concluded. “And, if I went back, that’s how I should feel. Out of time. For, no matter how solid this world seems, I should always know that a thousand universes, different to a small or a great degree, lie all around it just out of reach.

  “I am become a monster, I suppose… My friends will have to think me lost in time, and mourn me as they will.”

  Even as we had been speaking my resolution had formed. “I still have a vocation. I have not yet completed the task I set myself, when I returned into time after that first visit. A circle has been closed here — but another remains open, dangling like a fractured bone, far into futurity…”

  “I understand,” the Morlock said.

  I climbed into the saddle of the machine.

  “But what of you, Nebogipfel? Will you come with me? I can imagine a role for you there — and I don’t want to leave you stranded here.”

  “Thank you — but no. I will not remain here for long.”

  “Where will you go?”

  He raised his face. The rain was slowing now, but a thin mist of drops still seeped out of the lightening sky and fell against the great corneas of his eyes. “I, too, am aware of the closure of circles,” he said. “But I remain curious as to what lies beyond the circles…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you had returned here and shot your younger self well, there would be no causal contradiction: instead, you would create a new History, a fresh variant in the Multiplicity, in which you died young at the hand of a stranger.”

  “That’s all clear enough to me, now. There is no paradox possible within a singl
e History, because of the existence of the Multiplicity.”

  “But,” the Morlock went on calmly, “the Watchers have brought you here, so that you could deliver the Plattnerite to yourself that you could initiate the sequence of events which led to the development of the first Time Machine, and the creation of the Multiplicity. So there is a greater closure — of the Multiplicity on itself.”

  I saw what he was driving at. “There is a sort of closed loop of causality, after all,” I said, “a worm eating its own tail… The Multiplicity could not have been brought into existence, if not for the existence of the Multiplicity in the first place!”

  Nebogipfel said that the Watchers believed that the resolution of this Final Paradox required the existence of more Multiplicities: a Multiplicity of Multiplicities! “The higher order is logically necessary to resolve the causal loop,” Nebogipfel said, “just as our Multiplicity was required to exist to resolve the paradoxes of a single History.”

  “But — confound it, Nebogipfel! My mind is reeling at the thought. Parallel ensembles of universes — is it possible?”

  “More than possible,” he said. “And the Watchers intend to travel there.” He lowered his head from the sky. The dawn was growing quite bright now, and I could see the pasty flesh around his eyes wrinkle up in discomfort. “And they will take me with them. I can think of no greater adventure… can you?”

  Sitting there on the saddle of my machine, I took one last look around, at that plain, soggy dawn somewhere in the nineteenth century. The houses, full of sleeping people, were silhouetted, all the way along the Petersham Road; I smelled the moisture on the grass, and somewhere a door slammed, as some milkman or postman began his day.

  I should never come this way again, I knew.

  “Nebogipfel — when you reach this greater Multiplicity — what then?”

  “There are many orders of Infinity,” Nebogipfel said calmly, the light rain trickling down the contours of his face. “It is like a hierarchy: of universal structures — and of ambitions.” His voice retained that soft Morlock gurgle — its intonations quite alien — and yet it was suffused with wonder. “The Constructors could have owned a universe; but it was not enough. So they challenged Finitude, and touched the Boundary of Time, and reached through that, and enabled Mind to colonize and inhabit all the many universes of the Multiplicity. But, for the Watchers of the Optimal History, even this is not sufficient; and they are seeking ways of reaching beyond, to further Orders of Infinity…”

  “And if they succeed? Will they rest?”

  “There is no rest. No limit. No end to the Beyond — no Boundaries which Life, and Mind, cannot challenge, and breach.”

  My hand tensed on the levers of my machine, and the whole, squat tangle shivered. “Nebogipfel, I—”

  He held up his hand. “Go,” he said.

  I drew a breath, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.

  [BOOK SEVEN]

  Day 292,495,940

  [1]

  The Vale of Thames

  The hands of my chronometric dials whirled around. The sun became a streak of fire, then merged into a brilliant arch, with the moon a whirling, fluctuating band. Trees shivered through their seasons, almost too fast for me to follow. The sky assumed a wonderful deepness of blue, like a midsummer twilight, with the clouds rendered happily invisible.

  The looming, translucent shape of my house soon fell away from me. The landscape grew vague, and once more the splendid architecture of the Age of Buildings washed over Richmond Hill like a tide. I saw nothing of the peculiarities which had characterized the construction of Nebogipfel’s History: the stilling of the earth’s rotation, the building of the Sphere about the sun, and so forth. Presently I watched that tide of deeper green cover the hill-side and remain there without the interruption of winter; and I knew I had reached that happier future age in which warmer climes have returned to Britain — it was once more like the Palaeocene, I thought with a stab of nostalgia.

  I kept my eyes wide for any hint of the Watchers, but I could see nothing of them. The Watchers — those immense, unimaginable minds, outcroppings of the great reefs of intellect which inhabit the Optimal History — had done with me now, and my destiny was in my own hands. I felt a grim satisfaction at that, and — with the day-count on my dials passing Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand — I hauled carefully at the stopping-lever.

  I caught a last glimpse of the moon as it spun through its phases, waning to darkness. I remembered that I had set off, with Weena, on that last jaunt to the Palace of Green Porcelain just before the time the little Eloi called the Dark Nights: that rayless obscurity during the dark of the moon, when the Morlocks emerged, and worked their will on the Eloi. How foolish I had been! I thought now; how impetuous, unthinking — how careless I had been of poor Weena — to have set off on such an expedition, at such a time of danger.

  Well, I thought with a certain grimness, now I had returned; and I was determined to put right the mistakes of my past, or die in the attempt.

  With a lurch, the machine dropped out of the gray tumult, and sunlight broke over me, heavy and warm and immediate. The chronometric dials rattled to a stop: it was Day 292,495,940 — the precise day, in the Year A.D. 802,701, on which I had lost Weena.

  I sat on the familiar hill-side. The light of the sun was brilliant, and I had to shade my eyes. Because I had launched the machine from the garden at the rear of the house rather than the laboratory, I was perhaps twenty yards further down that little rhododendron lawn than when I had first arrived here. Behind me, a little higher up the Hill, I saw the familiar profile of the White Sphinx, with its inscrutable half-smile fixed forever. The bronze base remained thick with verdigris, although here and there I could see where the molded inlays had been flattened by my futile attempts to break into the chamber within, and to retrieve the stolen Time Machine; and the grass was scarred and cut, showing where the Morlocks had dragged my machine off into the pedestal.

  The stolen machine was in there now, I realized with a jolt. It was odd to think of that other machine sitting mere yards from me in the obscurity of that chamber, while I sat on this copy, perfect in every way, which glittered on the grass!

  I detached and pocketed my control levers, and stepped onto the ground. From the angle of the sun, I judged it to be perhaps three in the afternoon, and the air was warm and moist.

  To get a better view of things, I walked perhaps a half-mile to the southeast, to the brow of what had been Richmond Hill. In my day the Terrace had stood here, with its expensive frontage and wide views of the river and the country beyond to the west; now, a loose stand of trees had climbed over the Hill’s crest — there was no sign of the Terrace, and I imagined that even the founds of the houses must have been obliterated by the action of tree-roots — but still, just as it had in 1891, the countryside fell away to the south and west, most attractively.

  There was a bench set here, of that yellow metal I had seen before; it was corroded with a red rust, and its arm-rests were filed into the semblance of the creatures of some forgotten myth. A nettle, with large leaves tinted beautifully brown, had climbed over the chair, but I pulled this away — it was without stings — and I sat down, for I was already warm and perspiring.

  The sun lay quite low in the sky, to the west, and its light glimmered from the scattered architecture and the bodies of water which punctuated the verdant landscape. The haze of heat lay everywhere on the land. Time, and the patient evolutions of geology, had metamorphosed this landscape from my day; but I could recognize several features, reshaped though they were, and there was still a dreamy beauty about the poet’s “matchless vale of Thames.” The silver ribbon of the river was some distance removed from me; as I have noted elsewhere, the Thames had cut through a bow in its course and now progressed direct from Hampton to Kew. And it had deepened its valley; thus Richmond was now set high on the side of a broad valley, perhaps a mile from the water. I thought I recogniz
ed what had been Glover’s Island as a sort of wooded knoll in the center of the old bed. Petersham Meadows retained much of its modern profile; but it was raised far above the level of the river now, and I imagined the area to be much less marshy than in my day.

  The great buildings of this Age were dotted about, with their intricate parapets and tall columns, elegant and abandoned: they were spikes of architectural bone protruding from the hill-side’s green-clad flank. Perhaps a mile from me I saw that large building, a mass of granite and aluminum, to which I had climbed on my first evening. Here and there huge figures, as beautiful and enigmatic as my Sphinx, lifted their heads from the general greenery, and everywhere I saw the cupolas and chimneys that were the signatures of the Morlocks. The huge flowers of this latter day were everywhere, with their gleaming white petals and shining leaves. Not for the first time, this landscape, with its extraordinary and beautiful blooms, its pagodas and cupolas nestling among the green, reminded me of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in my day; but it was a Kew that had covered all of England, and had grown wild and neglected.

  On the horizon there was a large building I had not noticed before. It was almost lost in the mists of the north-west, in the direction of modern Windsor; but it was too remote and faint for me to make out details. I promised myself that some day I should make the trek out to Windsor, for surely, if anything of my day had survived the evolution and neglect of the intervening millennia, it would be a relic of the massive Norman keep there.

  I turned now and saw how the countryside fell away in the direction of modern Banstead, and I made out that pattern of copses and hills, with here and there the glint of water, which had become familiar to me during my earlier explorations. And it was in that direction — perhaps eighteen or twenty miles distant — that the Palace of Green Porcelain lay. Peering that way now I thought I could make out a hint of that structure’s pinnacles; but my eyes were not what they were, and I was not sure.