The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter
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I discussed the construction of the Sphere with Nebogipfel. ‘I imagine great engineering schemes which broke up the giant planets – Jupiter and Saturn – and –’
‘No,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘There was no such scheme; the primal planets – from the earth outward – still orbit the sun’s heart. There would not have been sufficient material in all the planets combined even to begin the construction of such an entity as this Sphere.’
‘Then how –?’
Nebogipfel described how the sun had been encircled by a great fleet of space-faring craft, which bore immense magnets of a design – involving electrical circuits whose resistance was somehow reduced to zero – I could not fathom. The craft circled the sun with increasing speed, and a belt of magnetism tightened around the sun’s million-mile midriff. And – as if that great star were no more than a soft fruit, held in a crushing fist – great founts of the sun’s material, which is itself magnetized, were forced away from the equator to gush from the star’s poles.
More fleets of space-craft then manipulated this huge cloud of lifted material, forming it at last into an enclosing shell; and the shell was then compressed, using shaped magnetic fields once more, and transmuted into the solid structures I saw around me.
The enclosed sun still shone, for even the immense detached masses required to construct this great artefact were but an invisible fraction of the sun’s total bulk; and within the Sphere, sunlight shone perpetually over giant continents, each of which could have swallowed millions of splayed-out earths.
Nebogipfel said, ‘A planet like the earth can intercept only an invisible fraction of the sun’s output, with the rest disappearing, wasted, into the sink of space. Now, all of the sun’s energy is captured by the enclosing Sphere. And that is the central justification for constructing the Sphere: we have harnessed a star …’
In a million years, Nebogipfel told me, the Sphere would capture enough additional solar material to permit its thickening by one-twenty-fifth of an inch – an invisibly small layer, but covering a stupendous area! The solar material, transformed, was used to further the construction of the Sphere. Meanwhile, some solar energy was harnessed to sustain the Interior of the Sphere and to power the Morlocks’ various projects.
With some excitement, I described what I had witnessed during my journey through futurity: the brightening of the sun, and that jetting at the poles – and then how the sun had disappeared into blackness, as the Sphere was thrown around it.
Nebogipfel regarded me, I fancied with some envy. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you did indeed watch the construction of the Sphere. It took ten thousand years …’
‘But to me on my machine, no more than heartbeats passed.’
‘You have told me that this is your second voyage into the future. And that during your first, you saw differences.’
‘Yes.’ Now I confronted that perplexing mystery once more. ‘Differences in the unfolding of History … Nebogipfel, when I first journeyed to the future, your Sphere was never built.’
I summarized to Nebogipfel how I had formerly travelled far beyond this year of A.D. 657,208. During that first voyage, I had watched the colonization of the land by a tide of rich green, as winter was abolished from the earth and the sun grew unaccountably brighter. But – unlike my second trip – I saw no signs of the regulation of the earth’s axial tilt, nor did I witness anything of the slowing of its rotation. And, most dramatic, without the construction of the sun-shielding Sphere, the earth had remained fair, and had not been banished into the Morlocks’ Stygian darkness.
‘And so,’ I told Nebogipfel, ‘I arrived in the year A.D. 802,701 – a hundred and fifty thousand years into your future – yet I cannot believe, if I had travelled on so far this time, that I should find the same world again!’
I summarized to Nebogipfel what I had seen of Weena’s world, with its Eloi and degraded Morlocks. Nebogipfel thought this over. ‘There has been no such state of affairs in the evolution of Humanity, in all of recorded History – my History,’ he said. ‘And since the Sphere, once constructed, is self-sustaining, it is difficult to imagine that such a descent into barbarism is possible in our future.’
‘So there you have it,’ I agreed. ‘I have journeyed through two, quite exclusive, versions of History. Can History be like unfired clay, able to be remade?’
‘Perhaps it can,’ Nebogipfel murmured. ‘When you returned to your own era – to 1891 – did you bring any evidence of your travels?’
‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘But I did bring back some flowers, pretty white things like mallows, which Weena – which an Eloi had placed in my pocket. My friends examined them. The flowers were of an order they couldn’t recognize, and I remember how they remarked on the gynoecium …’
‘Friends?’ Nebogipfel said sharply. ‘You left an account of your journey, before embarking once more?’
‘Nothing written. But I did give some friends a fullish account of the affair, over dinner.’ I smiled. ‘And if I know one of that circle, the whole thing was no doubt written up in the end in some popularized and sensational form – perhaps presented as fiction …’
Nebogipfel approached me. ‘Then there,’ he said to me, his quiet voice queerly dramatic, ‘there is your explanation.’
‘Explanation?’
‘For the Divergence of Histories.’
I faced him, horrified by a dawning comprehension. ‘You mean that with my account – my prophecy – I changed History?’
‘Yes. Armed with that warning, Humanity managed to avoid the degradation and conflict that resulted in the primitive, cruel world of Eloi and Morlock. Instead, we continued to grow; instead, we have harnessed the sun.’
I felt quite unable to face the consequences of this hypothesis – although its truth and clarity struck me immediately. I shouted, ‘But some things have stayed the same. Still you Morlocks skulk in the dark!’
‘We are not Morlocks,’ Nebogipfel said softly. ‘Not as you remember them. And as for the dark – what need have we of a flood of light? We choose the dark. Our eyes are fine instruments, capable of revealing much beauty. Without the brutal glare of the sun, the full subtlety of the sky can be discerned …’
I could find no distraction in goading Nebogipfel, and I had to face the truth. I stared down at my hands – great battered things, scarred with decades of labour. My sole aim, to which I had devoted the efforts of these hands, had been to explore time! – to determine how things would come out on the cosmological scale, beyond my own few mayfly decades of life. But, it seemed, I had succeeded in far more.
My invention was much more powerful than a mere time-travelling machine: it was a History Machine, a destroyer of worlds!
I was a murderer of the future: I had taken on, I realized, more powers than God himself (if Aquinas is to be believed). By my twisting-up of the workings of History, I had wiped over billions of unborn lives – lives that would now never come to be.
I could hardly bear to live with the knowledge of this presumption. I have always been distrustful of personal power – for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it – but now, I had taken to myself more power than any man who had ever lived!
If I should ever recover my Time Machine – I promised myself then – I would return into the past, to make one final, conclusive adjustment to History, and abolish