Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

But we were not abandoned by our own, patient Constructor, however. From my accelerated point of view I saw how he seemed to rest here, a few yards from us — a squat pyramid, the writhing of his cilia smoothed over by our time passage — and then he would jump, abruptly, to there, to linger for a few seconds — and so on. Since a mere second for us lasted centuries in the world beyond the Time-Car, I could calculate that the Constructor was remaining close to our site, all but immobile, for as much as a thousand years at a time.

I remarked on this to Nebogipfel. “Imagine that, if you can! To be Immortal is one thing, but to be so devoted to a single task… He is like a solitary Knight guarding his Grail, while historical ages, and the mayfly concerns of ordinary men, flutter away.”

As I have described, the buildings which neighbored ours were towers, standing two to three miles apart, all across the Thames valley. In the several weeks we had spent in our apartment I had seen no evidence of change about these towers — not even the opening of a door. Now, though, with the benefit of my accelerated perceptions, I saw how slow evolutions crept over the buildings’ surfaces. One cylindrical affair in Hammersmith had its mirror-smooth face swell up, as if raddled by some metallic disease, before settling into a new pattern of angular bumps and channels. Another tower, in the vicinity of Fulham, disappeared altogether! — One moment it was there, the next not, without even the shadow of foundations on the ground to show where it had been, for the ice closed over the exposed earth more rapidly than I could follow.

This sort of flowing evolution went on all the time. The pace of change in this new London must be measured in centuries, I realized — rather than the years within which sections of my own London had been transformed — but change there was, nevertheless.

I pointed this out to Nebogipfel.

“We can only speculate as to the purpose of this rebuilding,” he said. “Perhaps the change in outer appearance signifies a change in inner utilization. But the slow processes of decay are working even here. And perhaps there are, occasionally, more spectacular incidents, such as the fall of a meteorite.”

“Surely intelligences so vast as these Constructors could plan for such accidents as the fall of a meteor! — by tracking the falling rocks with their telescopes, perhaps using their Ships with rockets and sails to knock the things away.”

“To some extent. But the solar system is a random and chaotic place,” Nebogipfel said. “One could never be sure of eliminating all calamities, no matter what resources were available, and no matter what planning and watching was performed… And so, even the Constructors must sometimes rebuild — even the tower we inhabit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think it out,” Nebogipfel said. “Are you warm? Do you feel comfortable?”

As I have noted, my apparent exposure to the wastes of White Earth, sheltered only by this invisible dome of the Constructors, had left me feeling chilled; but I knew this could only be an internal reaction. “I’m quite satisfactory.”

“Of course. So am I. And — since we have now been traveling perhaps a quarter-hour — we know that equable conditions have persisted in this building for more than half a million years.”

“But,” I said, following his thinking, “this tower of ours is just as prone to the predations of time as any other… therefore our Constructor must be repairing the place, continually, to allow it to continue to serve us.”

“Yes. Otherwise this dome which shelters us would surely have splintered and fallen away a long time ago.”

Nebogipfel was right, of course — it was another facet of the extraordinary steadiness of purpose of the Constructors — but it scarcely made me feel more comfortable! I glanced about, studying the floor beneath us; I felt as if the tower had become as insubstantial as a termite hill, being endlessly burrowed through and rebuilt by the Universal Constructors, and I was filled with vertigo!

Now I became aware of a change in the quality of light. The glaciated landscape stretched around us, apparently unchanged; but it seemed to me that the ice was rather more darkly lit than before.

The bands of sun and moon, rendered diffuse and indistinct by their precessional motions, still rocked through the sky; but — though the moon still seemed to be shining with the violent green of its transplanted vegetation — the sun appeared to be undergoing a cycle of change.

“It seems,” I observed, “that the sun is flickering — varying in brightness, on a scale covering centuries or more.”

“I think you are right.”

It was this uncertainty of light, I was sure now, which was casting that odd, disorienting illusion of a shadow over the icy landscape. If you will stand by a window, hold your hand before your face with fingers outspread, and rattle your hand to and fro before your eyes — then, perhaps, you will get some impression of what I mean.

“Confound that flickering,” I protested, “it has a way of getting under the surface of the eye — of disturbing the rhythms of the mind, perhaps…”

“But watch the light,” Nebogipfel said. “Follow its quality. It is changing again.”

I stuck to my task, and presently I was rewarded by glimpses of a new aspect of the sun’s peculiar behavior. There was a greenness about it — only at odd moments, when I would see a sort of pale verdancy streak along the sun’s celestial path — but real, nevertheless.

Now that I knew this green behavior was present, I was able to detect an emerald flashing over the frozen hills and stark buildings of London. It was a poignant sight, like a memory of the life that had vanished from these hills.

Nebogipfel said, “I suspect that the flickering and the green flashes are connected…” The sun, he pointed out, is the solar system’s greatest source of energy and matter. His Morlocks had themselves exploited this, to construct their Sphere about the sun. “Now, I think,” he said, “the Universal Constructors too are delving into that great body: they are mining the sun, for the raw materials they need…”

“Plattnerite,” I said, excitement growing within me. “That’s the meaning of the green flashes, isn’t it? The Constructors are extracting Plattnerite from the sun.”

“Or using their alchemical skills to turn solar matter and energy into the substance of Plattnerite, which amounts to the same thing.”

For the glow of the Plattnerite to be visible to us, Nebogipfel argued, the Constructors must be building great shells of the stuff about the star. When completed, these shells would then be shipped off, in immense convoys, to construction sites elsewhere in the solar system; and the accretion of a fresh shell begun. The flickering we saw must represent the accelerated assembly and dismantling of these great Plattnerite dumps.

“It is extraordinary,” I breathed. “The Constructors must be lifting the stuff out of the sun in batches that compare with the mass of the greatest of the planets! This overshadows even the building of your great Sphere, Nebogipfel.”

“We know that the Constructors are not without ambition.”

Now, it seemed to me, the flickering of the patient sun grew rather less marked, as if the Constructors were nearing the end of their mining. I could see more patches of Plattnerite’s characteristic green about the sky, but these were separate from the sun-band: rather, they hurtled across the sky rather in the manner of false moons. These were Plattnerite structures, I realized — huge, space-spanning buildings of the stuff which were settling into some slow orbit about the earth.