Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

Nebogipfel, what am I? Am I still a man?

You are still yourself, he said firmly. The only difference now is that the machinery which sustains you is not made up of bone and flesh, but of constructs within the Information Sea… You have limbs, not of sinew and blood, but of Understanding.

His voice seemed to float about in space, somewhere around me; I had lost that comforting sensation of his hand in mine, and I could no longer tell if he was near — but I had the feeling that “nearness” was no longer a relevant idea, for I had no clear idea even where “I” was. Whatever I had become, I knew that I was no longer a point of awareness, looking out from a cave of bone.

The air of earth cleared. All over the planet, with startling abruptness, the city-lights dimmed and winked out, and soon the hand of man made no mark on the earth.

There were flurries of volcanism, great flashing spurts which threw up ash clouds that flickered over the world — or, rather, as we receded in time, the clouds drained away into those volcanic punctures — and it seemed to me that the continents were drifting away from their school-room neap positions. Across the great plains of the northern hemisphere, there seemed to be a sort of struggle — slow, millennial — progressing between two classes of vegetation: on the one hand, the pale green-brown grasslands and deciduous forests which lined the continents at the rim of the ice-cap; and on the other, the virulent green of the tropical jungles. For a moment, the jungles won, and in a great flourish, they swept north from the Equator, until they coated the lands from the Tropics, all the way up through Europe and North America. Even Greenland became, briefly, verdant. Then, as fast as they had conquered the earth, the great jungles retreated to their equatorial fastnesses once more, and paler shades of green and brown chased across the faces of the northern continents.

The sliding-about and spinning of the continents became more marked. And as the continents were brought into different climatic regions, their life-colors changed accordingly, so that great bands of green and brown swept across the hapless lands. Huge, devastating spasms of volcanism punctuated these geological waltz-steps.

Now the continents slid together — it was like watching a jigsaw assemble — to form a single, immense land-mass which straddled half the globe. The interior of this great country immediately shriveled to desert.

Nebogipfel said, We have already descended three hundred million years into the past… There are no mammals, no birds, and even the reptiles are barely born.

I replied, I had no idea it was all so graceful, like some rocky ballet — the geologists of my day have so much to understand! It is as if the whole planet is alive, and evolving.

Now the great continent split into three huge masses. I could no longer make out the familiar shapes of the lands of my own time, for the continents spun like dinner-plates on a polished table top. As that immense central desert was broken up the climate became much more variegated; and I could see a series of shallow seas fringing the lands.

Nebogipfel said, Now the amphibians are sliding back to the seas, their prototypical limbs melting away. But there are insects and other invertebrates still on the land: millipedes, mites, spiders and scorpions…

Not a very hospitable place, I remarked.

There are giant dragonflies too, and other wonders — the world is not without beauty.

Now the land began to lose its greenness — a kind of bony brown poked through the receding tide of life — and I surmised that we were passing beyond the appearance of the first leafed plants on land. Soon, the surface of the earth had become a sort of featureless mask of brown and a muddy blue. I knew that life persisted in the seas, but it was simplifying there too, with whole phyla disappearing into History’s womb: first the fish, now the mollusca, now the sponges and jellyfish and worms… At last, I realized, only a thin, green algae — laboring to convert the beating sunlight into oxygen — must remain in the darkened seas. The land was barren and rocky, and the atmosphere had turned thick, stained yellow and brown by noxious gases. Great fires erupted over the earth, all at once. Thick clouds masked the globe, and the seas retreated like drying puddles. But the clouds did not persist for long. The atmosphere became thin, then quite wispy, until at last it vanished altogether. The exposed crust glowed a uniform, dull red, save where great orange scars opened and closed like mouths. There were no seas, no distinction between the ocean and the land: only this endless, battered crust, over which the Time Ships soared, observant and graceful.

And next the glowing of the crust grew brighter — intolerably bright and, with an explosion of glowing fragments, the young earth shook on its axis, shuddered, and flew into bits!

It was as if some of those fragments had hurtled through me. The glowing rock battered its way through my awareness, and dwindling off into space.

And then it was done! Now there was only the sun… and a disc of rubble and gas, formless, eddying, which spun about the shining star.

A sort of ripple passed through our cloud of Time Ships, as if the reversed coalescence of the earth had sent a physical shock through that loose armada.

This is a strange Age, Nebogipfel, I said.

Look around you…

I did so, and saw that, from all around the sky, there were several stars — perhaps a dozen — which were growing in brightness. Now the stars had reached a sort of formation, an array scattered over the sky, though still so distant they showed only as points. Gas wisps seemed to be collecting into a cloud, scattered over the sky and wrapped about this collection of stars.

These are the sun’s true companions, Nebogipfel said. Its siblings, if you like: the stars which shared the sun’s nursery-cloud. Once, they formed a cluster as bright and as close as the Pleiades… but gravity will not hold them together, and before the birth of life on earth they will drift apart.

One of the young stars, directly over my head, flared. It expanded, soon becoming large enough to show a disc, but growing more red, and fainter… until at last it expired, and the glow of that part of the cloud died.

Now another star, almost diametrically opposed in position to the first, went through the same cycle: the flare, followed by the expansion into a brilliant crimson disc, and then extinction.

All of this magnificent drama, you must imagine, was played out against a background of utter silence.

We are witnessing the birth of stars, I said, but in reverse.

Yes. The embryonic stars light up their birthing gas cloud such nebulae are a beautiful sight but after the stellar ignition, the lighter gases are made to flee the heat, leaving only heavier rubble —

A rubble which condenses into worlds, I said.

Yes.

And now — so soon! — it was the turn of the sun. There was that uncertain flaring of yellow-white light, a glare that glinted from the Time Ships’ Plattnerite prows — and the rapid swelling into an immense globe, which briefly swamped the armada of Time Ships in a cloud of crimson light… and then, at last, that final dispersal into the general void.

The Ships hung in the sudden darkness. The last of the sun’s companions flared, ballooned out, and died; and we were left in a cloud of cold, inert hydrogen, which reflected our glow of Plattnerite green.

Only the remote stars marked the sky, and I saw how they too shimmered and flared, fading in their turn. Soon the skies grew darker, and I surmised that fewer and fewer stars yet existed.