Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships

“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 single 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.

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.