Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

“And in the meantime,” I said with some strength, “you keep me in this — this Cage of Light. As if I were a beast, not a man! You give me a floor to sleep on, and a pail for my toilet—”

The Morlock said nothing; he observed me, impassive.

The frustration and embarrassment which had assailed me since my arrival in this place welled up, now that I was able to express them, and I decided that sufficient pleasantries had been exchanged. I said, “Now that we can speak to each other, you’re going to tell me where on earth I am. And where you’ve hidden my machine. Do you understand that, fellow, or do I have to translate it for you?” And I reached for him, meaning to grab at the hair clumps on his chest.

When I came within two paces of him, he raised his hand. That was all. I remember a queer green flash — I never saw the device he must have held, all the time he was near me — and then I fell to the Floor, quite insensible.

I came to, spread-eagled on the Floor once more, and staring up into that confounded light.

I hoisted myself up onto my elbows, and rubbed my dazzled eyes. My Morlock friend was still there, standing just outside the circle of light. I got to my feet, rueful. These New Morlocks were going to be a handful for me, I realized.

The Morlock stepped into the light, its blue goggles glinting. As if nothing had interrupted our dialogue, he said, “My name is” — his pronunciation reverted to the usual shapeless Morlock pattern — “Nebogipfel.”

“Nebogipfel. Very well.” In turn, I told him my name; within a few minutes he could repeat it with clarity and precision.

This, I realized, was the first Morlock whose name I had learned — the first who stood out from the masses of them I had encountered, and fought; the first to have the attributes of a distinguishable person.

“So, Nebogipfel,” I said. I sat cross-legged beside my trays, and rubbed at the rash of bruises my latest fall had inflicted on my upper arm. “You have been assigned as my keeper, here in this zoo.”

“Zoo.” He stumbled over that word. “No. I was not assigned. I volunteered to work with you.”

“Work with me?”

“I — we — want to understand how you came to be here.”

“Do you, by Jove?” I got to my feet and paced around my Cage of Light. “What if I told you that I came here in a machine that can carry a man through time?” I held up my hands. “That I built such a machine, with these brutish hands? What then, eh?”

He seemed to think that over. “Your era, as dated from your speech and physique, is very remote from ours. You are capable of achievements of high technology — witness your machine, whether or not it carries you through time as you claim. And the clothes you wear, the state of your hands, and the wear patterns of your teeth — all of these are indicative of a high state of civilization.”

“I’m flattered,” I said with some heat, “but if you believe I’m capable of such things — that I am a man, not an ape — why am I caged up in this way?”

“Because,” he said evenly, “you have already tried to attack me, with every intent of doing me harm. And on the earth, you did great damage to—”

I felt fury burning anew. I stepped towards him. “Your monkeys were pawing at my machine,” I shouted. “What did you expect? I was defending myself. I—”

He said: “ They were children.”

His words pierced my rage. I tried to cling to the remnants of my self-justifying anger, but they were already receding from me. “What did you say?”

“Children. They were children. Since the completion of the Sphere, the earth is become a… nursery, a place for children to roam. They were curious about your machine. That is all. They would not have done you, or it, any conscious harm. Yet you attacked them, with great savagery.”

I stepped back from him. I remembered now I let myself think about it — that the Morlocks capering ineffectually around my machine had struck me as smaller than those I’d encountered before. And they had made no attempt to hurt me… save only the poor creature I had captured, and who had then nipped my hand — before I clubbed its face!

“The one I struck. Did he — it — survive?”

“The physical injuries were reparable. But—”

“Yes?”

“The inner scars, the scars of the mind — these may never heal.”

I dropped my head. Could it be true? Had I been so blinded by my loathing of Morlocks that I had been unable to see those creatures around the machine for what they were: not the catlike, vicious creatures of Weena’s world — but harmless infants? “I don’t suppose you know what I’m talking about but I feel as if I’m trapped in another one of those ’Dissolving Views’…”

“You are expressing shame,” Nebogipfel said.

Shame… I never thought I should hear, and accept, such remonstrance from a Morlock! I looked at him, defiant. “Yes. Very well! And does that make me more than a beast, in your view, or less of one?”

He said nothing.

Even while I was confronting this personal horror, some calculating part of my mind was running over something Nebogipfel had said. Since the completion of the Sphere, the earth is become a nursery…

“What Sphere?”

“You have much to learn of us.”

“Tell me about the Sphere!”

“It is a Sphere around the sun.”

Those seven simple words — startling! — and yet… Of course! The solar evolution I had watched in the time-accelerated sky, the exclusion of the sunlight from the earth — “I understand,” I said to Nebogipfel. “I watched the Sphere’s construction.”

The Morlock’s eyes seemed to widen, in a very human mannerism, as he considered this unexpected news.

And now, for me, other aspects of my situation were becoming clear.

“You said,” I essayed to Nebogipfel, “ ’On the earth, you did great damage — ’ Something on those lines.” It was an odd thing to say, I thought now — if I was still on the earth. I lifted my face and let the light beat down on me. “Nebogipfel — beneath my feet. What is visible, through this clear Floor?”

“Stars.”

“Not representations, not some kind of planetarium—”

“Stars.”

I nodded. “And this light from above—”

“It is sunlight.”

Somehow, I think I had known it. I stood in the light of a sun, which was overhead for twenty-four hours of every day; I stood on a Floor above the stars…

I felt as if the world were shifting about me; I felt light headed, and there was a remote ringing in my ears. My adventures had already taken me across the deserts of time, but now — thanks to my capture by these astonishing Morlocks — I had been lifted across space. I was no longer on the earth — I had been transported to the Morlocks’ solar Sphere!

“You say you traveled here on a Time Machine.”

I paced across my little disc of light, caged, restless. “The term is precise. It is a machine which can travel indifferently in any direction in time, and at any relative rate, as the driver determines.”

“So you claim that you have journeyed here, from the remote past, on this machine — the machine found with you on the earth.”

“Precisely,” I snapped. The Morlock seemed content to stand, almost immobile, for long hours, as he developed his interrogation. But I am a man of a modern cut, and our moods did not coincide. “Confound it, fellow,” I said, “you have observed yourself that I myself am of an archaic design. How else, but through time travel, can you explain my presence, here in the Year A.D. 657,208?”