Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

Shifting Plattnerite light glistened from the hide of our patient Constructor, who stood by us while the sky went through these extraordinary evolutions!

Nebogipfel consulted his chronometric gauges. “We have traveled through nearly eight hundred thousand years… time enough, I think.” He hauled on his levers — and the Time-Car lurched, displaying that clumsiness so characteristic of time travel — and I had nausea to contend with in addition to my awe and fear.

Immediately our Constructor disappeared from my view. I cried out — I could not help it! — and gripped the bench of the Time-Car. I think I had never felt so lost and alone, as at that moment when our faithful companion of eight thousand centuries suddenly — or so it seemed — abandoned us to strangeness.

The precessional juddering of the sun-band slowed, smoothed out and disappeared; within seconds, I perceived that disconcerting rattling of light which marks the passage of night and day, and the sky lost its washed-over, luminous-gray quality.

And now the green light of Plattnerite filled the air about me; it was all around our dome, and obscured the impassive plains of White Earth with its milky flickering.

The flapping of day and night slowed, to a beat slower than my pulse. Just in that last instant, I caught a vision — no more than a flash — of a field of stars breaking through the surface of things, dazzling and close; and I caught shadowy glimpses of several wide skulls, and huge, human eyes. Then Nebogipfel pushed his levers to their furthest extreme — the car stopped — and we emerged into History, and the crowd of Watchers vanished; and we were immersed in a flood of green light.

We were embedded in a Ship of Plattnerite!

Myself, the Morlock, the workings and apparel of our little Time-Car — all was bathed in the emerald glow of Plattnerite, which was all about us. I had no idea of the true size of the Ship; indeed, I had some difficulty in finding my orientation within its bulk. It was not like a craft of my century, for it lacked a well-defined sub-structure, with walls and panels to fence off internal sections, engine compartments, and the like. Instead, you must imagine a net: a thing of threads and nodes all glowing with that green Plattnerite tinge, thrown about us as if by some invisible fisherman, so that Nebogipfel and I were encased in an immense mesh of rods and curves of light.

This net did not extend inwards all the way to our Time-Car: it seemed to halt at about the distance at which our dome had been resting. I was still breathing easily, and felt no colder than before. The environmental protection of the dome must still be afforded us, by some means; and I thought that the dome itself was still present, for I saw the faintest of reflections in a surface above, but so uncertain and shifting was the Plattnerite light that I could not be sure.

Nor could I make out the floor beneath the Time-Car. The netting seemed to extend below us, on and deep into the fabric of the building I remembered. I could not see how that flimsy webbing could support a mass as great as our Time-Car’s, however, and I felt a sudden, and unwelcome, stab of vertigo. I put such primitive reactions aside with determination. My situation was extraordinary, but I wished to behave well — especially if these were to be the last moments of my life! — and I did not care to waste any energy on salving the discomfiture of the frightened ape within me, who thought he might fall out of this green-glowing tree.

I studied the net around us. Its main threads appeared to be about as thick as my index finger, although they glowed so bright it was hard to be sure if that thickness was merely some artifact of my own optical sensitivity. These threads surrounded cells perhaps a foot across, of irregular shapes: as far as I could see, no two of these cells shared a similar form. Finer threads were cast across and between these main cells, forming a complex pattern of sub-cells; and these sub-cells were themselves divided by finer threads, and so forth, right to the limit of my vision. I was reminded of the branching cilia which coated the outer layer of a Constructor.

At the nodes where the primary threads joined, points of light glowed, as defiantly green as the rest; these lumps did not stay at rest, but would migrate across threads, or would explode, in tiny, soundless flashes. You must imagine these little motions going on, all throughout the extent of the net, so that the whole thing was illuminated by a gentle, shifting glow, and a continuous evolution of structure and light.

I had a sense of fragility — it was like being cocooned in layers of spider-silk — but the whole thing had an organic quality to it, and I had the impression that if I were to reach up, clumsily, and tear great holes in this complex structure, it should soon repair itself.

And about the whole Ship, you must imagine, there was that odd, contingent quality induced by the Plattnerite: a sense that the Ship was not embedded solidly in the world of things, a sense that it was all insubstantial and temporary.

The fabric was open enough for me to be able to see through the filmy outer hull of “our” craft and to the world beyond. The hills and anonymous buildings of the Constructors’ London were still there, and the eternal ice showed no signs of disturbance. It was night-time, and the sky was clear; the moon, a silver crescent, sailed high amid the absence of stars…

And, sliding across the desolate sky of this abandoned earth, I saw more of the Plattnerite Ships. They were lenticular in form, immense, with the suggestion of the same net-structure exhibited by the one which encased me and Nebogipfel; smaller lights, like captive stars, gleamed and rustled through their complex interiors. The ice of White Earth was universally bathed with the glow of Plattnerite; the Ships were like immense, silent clouds, sailing unnaturally close to the land.

Nebogipfel studied me, the Plattnerite lending a rich green luster to the hair coating his body. “Are you well? You seem a little discomposed.”

I had to laugh at that. “You’ve a talent for understating, Morlock. Discomposed? I should say so…” I twisted in my seat, reached behind me, and found a bowl filled with the unidentifiable nuts and fruit with which the Constructor had supplied me. I buried my fingers in the food and stuffed it into my mouth; I found the simple, animal actions of eating a welcome distraction from the astonishing, barely comprehensible matters about me. I wondered, in fact, if this should be the last meal I should take the last supper on earth! “I think I expected our Constructor to be here to greet us.”

“But I think he is here,” Nebogipfel said. He raised his hand, and emerald light gleamed from his pale fingers. “This Ship is clearly designed along the same architectural principles as the Constructors themselves. I think we could say that ’our’ Constructor is still here: but now his consciousness is represented by some set of those sliding points of light, within this net of Plattnerite. And the Ship is surely connected to the Information Sea — indeed, perhaps one could say this is a new Universal Constructor itself. The Ship is alive… as alive as the Constructors.

“And yet, since it is composed of Plattnerite, this craft must be so much more.” He studied me, his single eye deep and dark behind his goggles. “Do you see? If this is life, it is a new sort of life — Plattnerite life — the first sort which is not bound, as the rest of us are, to the slow turning of History’s cogs. And it was constructed here, with ourselves as its focus… The Ship is here for us — to carry us back just as the Constructor promised. He is here, you see.”