Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

I looked down — or at least I tried to; I could not feel my head or neck, but the sweep of my panoramic vision swiveled downwards. You must imagine that the Ship about me had something of the shape of a steam liner, but hugely blown up — its lenticular keel was miles long — and yet it floated above the landscape with the ease of a cloud. I could see through the open, web-like substance of the Ship to the land beyond, and now I was looking down at our Time-Car, from directly above. Although my view was obscured by the complex, evolving sparkle of the Ship, I thought I saw two bodies in the car, a man and a slighter figure, who slid to the car’s floor, their motions already stiff from the invading cold.

My view had an odd sensation about it. It was without focus: or rather, it lacked a central point of observation. When you look at something, say a tea-cup, you see it, and that’s pretty much the center of your world, with everything else relegated to a sort of side-show around the periphery of your vision. But now I found that my world had no center, or periphery. I saw it all — Ice, Ships, Time-Car — it was as if it were all central, or all peripheral, all at once! It was disorienting and very confusing.

My belly and head seemed to have been numbed, gone quite beyond feeling. I could see, all right; but I could feel nothing of my face, my neck, the posture of my body — nothing, in fact, save a light, almost ghostly touch: the fingers of Nebogipfel, still wrapped around my own. I took some comfort in that, for it was good to know that he was here with me at least!

I thought I was dead — but I recalled I had thought that before, when I had been absorbed and remade by the Universal Constructor. What would become of me now I could not tell.

The Ship began to rise again, and now much more rapidly. The Time-Car and the tower on which it sat were swept away from under me. I was raised a mile, two miles, ten miles above the surface; the whole sparse map of this remote London was laid out beneath me, visible through the sparkle of the Time Ship.

Still we rose — we must have been traveling faster than a cannon-ball — and yet I heard no rush of air, felt no wind on my face: I felt secure, with that childlike sense of lightness I have mentioned. The circle of scenery beneath me grew wider, and the details of the buildings and ice-fields grew faint, and a luminous gray mixed more and more with the cold white of the ice. As the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner, the nighttime sky, which had been an iron gray in color, grew deeper in tone.

Now our height was so great that the curving away of the planet became apparent — it was as if London was the highest point of some immense hill — and I could make out the shape of poor Britain, locked within its frozen Sea of Ice.

I remained without hands or feet, without belly or mouth. I seemed to have been cut loose of matter, quite suddenly, and I saw things with a sort of serenity.

And still we climbed — I knew we were already far beyond the atmosphere — and the frozen plains mutated from a landscape into the surface of a spherical world, which turned, white and serene — and quite dead — beneath me. Beyond the earth’s gleaming limb there were more Time Ships — hundreds of them, I saw now, great, green-glowing, lenticular boats miles long; they made up a loose armada which sailed across the face of space, and their light reflected from the wrinkled ice which coated the earth.

I heard my name called: or rather, it was not hearing, but an awareness, by some means I would be loath to try to explain. I tried to turn, but I found my point of view twisting about.

Nebogipfel? Is that you?

Yes. I am here. Are you all right?

Nebogipfel… I can’t see you.

Nor I you. But that does not matter. Can you feel my hand?

Yes.

Now the earth drifted off to one side, and our Ship moved into formation with its fellows. Soon the Time Ships were all about us, in an array that filled the inter-planetary void for many miles about; it was like being in the middle of a school of great, glowing whales. The light of Plattnerite was brilliant and yet there was a surface of unreality about it, as if it was reflecting from some invisible plane; again I had that feeling of contingency about the Ships, as if they did not belong quite in this Reality, or any other.

Nebogipfel, what is happening to us? Where are we being taken?

Gently, he replied, You know the answer to that. We are to travel back through time… back to its Boundary, to its deepest, hidden heart.

Will we start soon?

We have already started, he said. Look at the stars.

I turned — or felt as if I did — so that I looked away from White Earth, and I saw:

All over the sky, the stars were coming out.

As we drew back through time, the colonizing fleets from earth were washing back to their origin, in successive waves, and the changes men had wrought to worlds and stars were dismantled. And as that tide of civilization and cultivation receded from the cosmos, the star-masking Spheres were broken apart, one by one. I gazed about in wonder as the old constellations assembled themselves like so many candelabras. Sirius and Orion shone as splendid as on any winter’s night; the Pole Star was over my head, and I could make out the familiar saucepan profile of the Great Bear. Away below me, beyond the curve of earth, were strange groupings of stars I had never seen from England: I did not know the antipodean constellations so well that I could recognize them all, but I could pick out the brutal knife-shape of the Southern Cross, the soft-glowing patches that were the Magellanic Clouds, and those brilliant twins, Alpha and Beta Centauri.

And now, as we sank further into the past, the stars began to slide across the sky. Within moments, it seemed, the familiar constellations were obscured, as the stars’ proper motions — much too slow to be perceptible within a human’s firefly lifetime — became visible to my cosmic gaze.

I pointed out this new phenomenon to Nebogipfel.

Yes. And, see the earth…

I looked. The mask of Glaciation which had disfigured that dear, exhausted globe was already falling away. I saw how the white of it receded towards the Poles, in great pulses, exposing the brown and blue of land and sea beneath.

Abruptly the ice was gone — banished back to its fastnesses at the Poles — and the world turned slowly beneath us, its familiar continents restored. But the earth was wreathed about by clouds; and the clouds were stained with virulent, unnatural colors — browns, purples, oranges. The coasts were ringed with light, and great cities glowed at the heart of every continent. There were even huge, floating towns in the middle of the oceans, I saw. But the air was so foul that in those great cities — if anyone went about on the surface — masks or filters would surely have to be worn, to enable humans to breathe.

Evidently we are witnessing the final days of the modification of the earth by my New Men, I said. We must be traversing millions of years with each minute…

Yes.

Then, why do we not see the earth spin like a top on its axis, and hurtle around the sun?

It is not so simple… These Ships are not like your prototype Time Machine.

Everything we see is a reconstruction, Nebogipfel went on. It is a sort of projection, based on the observations which, as we travel, are entering the Information Sea: that part of the Sea transported by the Ships, at any rate. Such phenomena as the rotation of the earth have been suppressed.