Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships

This is a rich world, and there is no need for the remnants of humanity to feed off each other in the ghastly fashion they have evolved. The light of intellect has dimmed, in this History: but it is not extinguished. The Eloi retain their fragments of human language, and the Morlocks their evident mechanical understanding.

I dream that, before I die, I might build a new fire of rationality out of these coals.

Yes! — it is a noble dream — and a fine legacy for me.

I found these scraps of paper when exploring a vault, deep under the Palace of Green Porcelain. The pages had been preserved by their storage in a tight package, from which the air had been excluded. It has not been difficult for me to improvise a nib of bits of metal, and an ink of vegetable dyes; and to do my writing, I have returned to my favored seat of yellow metal set at the brow of Richmond Hill, not a half-mile from the site of my old home; and, as I write, I have the vale of Thames for company: that lovely land whose evolution I have watched across geological ages.

I have done with time traveling — I have long accepted that — indeed, as I have noted, I have broken up my machine, and pieces of it have served me as hoes, and other gadgets more useful than a Time Machine. (I have kept my two white control levers — they are beside me now, on the seat, as I write.) However, while I have been content enough with my projects here, my lack of opportunity to transmit to my contemporaries my discoveries and observations, and any account of my continuing adventures, has been an irritant for me. Perhaps it is just my vanity! But now, these pages have given me a chance to put that right.

To preserve these fragile pages from decay, I have chosen to seal them up in their original packet, and then I will place the whole within a container I have constructed from the Plattnerite doped quartz of my Time Machine. I will then bury the container as deeply as I can.

I have no sure way of transmitting my account either to future or past — still less to any other History — and these words may molder in the ground. But it seems to me that the cladding of Plattnerite will give my parcel its best chance of detection, by any new Traveler from across the Multiplicity; and it may be that, by some chance current of the Time Streams, my words may even find their way back to my own century.

At any rate, it is the best I can do! — and, now that I have set myself on this course, I have reached a certain contentment.

I will complete and seal up this account before my departure into the Underworld, for I recognize that my Morlock expedition is not without peril — a trip from which I may not return. But it is an assignment I cannot forestall for much longer; I am already past my fiftieth year of age, and soon I should not be able to face all that climbing in the wells!

I will commit myself, here, to attaching as an Appendix to this monograph, on my return, a summary of my subterranean adventures.

It is later. I am prepared for my descent.

How does the poet say it? “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” — something on those lines, at any rate: you will forgive any misquote, for I have no references here… I have seen the Infinite, and the Eternal. I have never lost the vision of those neighboring universes lying all about this sunlit landscape, closer than the leaves of a book; and nor have I forgotten the star-shine of the Optimal History, which I think will live in my soul forever.

But none of these grand visions count for half as much, for me, as those fleeting moments of tenderness which have illuminated the darkness of my solitary life. I have enjoyed the loyalty and patience of Nebogipfel, the friendship of Moses, and the human warmth of Hilary Bond; and none of my achievements or adventures — no visions of time, no infinite star-scapes — will live in my heart as long as the moment, on that first, bright morning after my return here, when I sat by the river and bathed Weena’s diamond face, and her chest at last lifted and she coughed, and her pretty eyes fluttered open for the first time, and I saw that she was alive; and, as she recognized me, her lips parted in a smile of gladness.