The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter
of this activity, you must imagine, was immersed in a constant flow of the Morlocks’ liquid, guttural tongue.
Now we passed a place where a fresh partition was emerging from the Floor below. It rose up complete and finished like something emerging from a vat of mercury; when its growth was done it had become a thin slab about four feet high featuring three of the omnipresent blue windows. When I crouched down to peer through the transparent Floor, I could see nothing beneath the surface: no box, or uplifting machinery. It was as if the partition had appeared out of nothing. ‘Where does it come from?’ I asked Nebogipfel.
He said, after some thought – evidently he had to choose his words: ‘The Sphere has a Memory. It has machines which enable it to store that Memory. And the form of the data blocks –’ he meant the partitions ‘– is held in the Sphere’s Memory, to be retrieved in this material form as desired.’
For my entertainment, Nebogipfel caused more extrusions: on one pillar I saw a tray of foodstuffs and water rising out of the floor, as if prepared by some invisible butler!
I was struck by this idea of extrusions from the uniform and featureless Floor. It reminded me of the Platonist theory of thought expounded by some philosophers: that to every object there exists, in some realm, an ideal Form – an essence of Chair, the summation of Table-ness, and so on – and when an object is manufactured in our world, templates stored in the Platonic over-world are consulted.
Well, here I was in a Platonic universe made real: the whole of this mighty, sun-girdling Sphere was suffused by an artificial, god-like Memory – a Memory within whose rooms I walked even as we spoke. And within the Memory was stored the Ideal of every object the heart could desire – or at least, as desired by a Morlock heart.
How very convenient it would be to be able to manufacture and dissolve equipment and apparatus as one required! My great, draughty house in Richmond could be reduced to a single Room, I realized. In the morning, the bedroom furniture could be commanded to fade back into the carpet, to be replaced by the bathroom suite, and next the kitchen table. Like magic, the various apparatuses of my laboratory could be made to flow from the walls and ceiling, until I was ready to work. And at last, of an evening, I could summon up my dinner table, with its comfortable surrounds of fireplace and wallpaper; and perhaps the table could be manufactured already replete with food!
All our professions of builders, plumbers, carpenters and the like would disappear in a trice, I realized. The householder – the owner of such an Intelligent Room – would need to engage no more than a peripatetic cleaner (though perhaps the Room could take care of that too!), and perhaps there would be occasional boosts to the Room’s mechanical memory, to keep pace with the latest vogues …
So my fecund imagination ran on, quite out of my control.
I soon began to feel fatigued. Nebogipfel took me to a clear space – though there were Morlocks in the distance, all about me – and he tapped his foot on the Floor. A sort of shelter was extruded; it was perhaps four feet high, and little more than a roof set on four fat pillars: something like a substantial table, perhaps. Within the table there arose a bundle of blankets and a food-stand. I climbed into the hut gratefully – it was the first enclosure I had enjoyed since my arrival on the Sphere – and I acknowledged Nebogipfel’s consideration at providing it. I made a meal of water and some of the greenish cheese stuff, and I took off my goggles – I was immersed in the endless darkness of that Morlock world – and was able to sleep, with my head settled on a rolled-up blanket.
This odd little shelter was my home for the next few days, as I continued my tour of the Morlock’s city-chamber with Nebogipfel. Each time I arose, Nebogipfel had the Floor absorb the shelter once again, and he evoked it afresh in whatever place we stopped – so we had no luggage to carry! I have noted that the Morlocks did not sleep, and I think my antics in my hut were the source of considerable fascination to the natives of the Sphere – just as those of an orang-utan catch the eye of the civilized man, I suppose – and they would have crowded around me as I tried to sleep, pressing their little round faces in on me, and rest would have been impossible, had not Nebogipfel stayed by me, and deterred such sightseeing.
In all the days Nebogipfel led me through that Morlock world, we never encountered a wall, door or other significant barrier. As near as I could make it out, we were restricted – the whole time – to a single chamber: but it was a chamber of a stupendous size. And it was, in its general details, homogenous, for everywhere I found this same carpet of Morlocks pursuing their obscure tasks. The simplest practicalities of such arrangements were startling enough; I considered, for example, the prosaic problems of maintaining a consistent and stable atmosphere, at an even temperature, pressure and humidity, over such scales of length. And yet, Nebogipfel gave me to understand, this was but one chamber in a sort of mosaic of them, that tiled the Sphere from Pole to Pole.
I soon came to understand that there were no cities on this Sphere, in the modern sense. The Morlock population was spread over these immense chambers, and there were no fixed sites for any given activity. If the Morlocks wished to assemble a work area – or clear it for some other purpose – the relevant apparatuses could be extruded directly from the Floor, or else absorbed back. Thus, rather than cities, there were to be found nodes of population of higher density – nodes which shifted and migrated, according to purpose.
After one sleep I had clambered out of the shelter and was sitting cross-legged on the Floor, sipping water. Nebogipfel remained standing, seemingly without fatigue. Then I saw approaching us a brace of Morlocks, the sight of which made me swallow a mouthful of water too hastily; I sputtered, and droplets of water sprayed across my jacket and trousers.
I supposed the pair were indeed Morlocks – but they were like no Morlocks I had seen before: whereas Nebogipfel was a little under five feet tall, these were like cartoon caricatures, extended to a height of perhaps twelve feet! One of the long creatures noticed me, and he came loping over, metal splints on his legs clattering as he walked; he stepped over the intervening partitions like some huge gazelle.
He bent down and peered at me. His red-grey eyes were the size of dinner-plates, and I quailed away from him. His odour was sharp, like burned almonds. His limbs were long and fragile-looking, and his skin seemed stretched over that extended skeleton: I was able to see, embedded in one shin and quite visible through drum-tight skin, the profile of a tibia no less than four feet long. Splints of some soft metal were attached to those long leg-bones, evidently to help strengthen them against snapping. This attenuated beast seemed to have no greater number of follicles than your average Morlock, so that his hair was scattered over that stretched-out frame, in a very ugly fashion.
He exchanged a few liquid syllables with Nebogipfel, then rejoined his companion and – with many a backward glance at me – went on his way.
I turned to Nebogipfel, stunned; even he seemed an oasis of normality after that vision.
Nebogipfel said, ‘They are –’ a liquid word I could not repeat ‘– from the higher latitudes.’ He glanced after our two visitors. ‘You can see that they are unsuited to this equatorial region. Splints are required to help them walk, and –’
‘I don’t see it at all,’ I broke in. ‘What’s so different about the higher latitudes?’
‘Gravity,’ he said.
Dimly, I began to understand.
The Morlocks’ Sphere was, as I have recorded, a titanic construction which filled up the orbit once occupied by Venus. And – Nebogipfel told me now – the whole thing rotated, about an axis. Once, Venus’s year had been two hundred and twenty-five days. Now – said Nebogipfel – the great Sphere turned in just seven days and thirteen hours!
‘And so the rotation –’