The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter
– his shoulders lurched, causing his body hair to rustle – a gesture he could only have copied from me! ‘Who knows? Its causes are forgotten, the combatants – the nations and their children – all dead.’
‘You told me there was no warfare here,’ I accused him.
‘Not among the Morlocks,’ he said. ‘But within the Interior … This one was very destructive. Great bombs fell. The land here was destroyed – all life obliterated.’
‘But surely the plants, the smaller animals –’
‘Everything. You do not understand. Everything died, save the grass and the insects, across a million square miles. And it is only now that the land has become safe.’
‘Nebogipfel, what kind of people live here? Are they like me?’
He paused. ‘Some mimic your archaic variant. But there are even some older forms; I know of a colony of reconstructed Neandertalers, who have reinvented the religions of that vanished folk … And there are some who have developed beyond you: who diverge from you as much as I do, though in different ways. The Sphere is large. If you wish I will take you to a colony of an approximation of your own kind …’
‘Oh – I’m not sure what I want!’ I said. ‘I think I’m overwhelmed by this place, this world of worlds, Nebogipfel. I want to see what I can make of it all, before I choose where I will spend my life. Can you understand that?’
He did not debate the proposal; he seemed eager to get out of the sunlight. ‘Very well. When you wish to see me again, return to the platform and call my name.’
And so began my solitary sojourn in the Interior of the Sphere.
In that world of perpetual noon there was no cycle of days and nights to count the passage of time. However, I had my pocket watch: the time it displayed was, of course, meaningless, thanks to my transfers across time and space; but it served to map out twenty-four-hour periods.
Nebogipfel had evoked a shelter from the platform – a plain, square hut with one small window and a door of the dilating kind I have described before. He left me a tray of food and water, and showed me how I could obtain more: I would push the tray back into the surface of the platform – this was an odd sensation – and after a few seconds a new tray would rise out of the surface, fully laden. This unnatural process made me queasy, but I had no other source of food, and I mastered my qualms. Nebogipfel also demonstrated how to push objects into the platform to have them cleaned, as he cleansed even his own fingers. I used this feature to clean my clothes and boots – although my trousers were returned without a crease! – but I could never bring myself to insert a part of my body in this way. The thought of pushing a hand or foot – or worse, my face – into that bland surface was more than I could bear, and I continued to wash in water.
I was still without shaving equipment, incidentally; my beard had grown long and luxuriant – but it was a depressingly solid mass of iron grey.
Nebogipfel showed me how I could extend the use of my goggles. By touching the surface in a certain way, I could make them magnify the images of remote objects, bringing them as close, and as sharp, as life. I donned the goggles immediately and focused them on a distant shadow which I had thought was a clump of trees; but it turned out to be no more than an outcropping of rock, which looked rather worn away, or melted.
For the first few days, it was enough for me simply to be there, in that bruised meadow. I took to going for long walks; I would take my boots off, enjoying the feeling of grass and sand between my toes, and I would often strip to my pants in the hot sunlight. Soon I got as brown as a berry – though the prow of my balding forehead got rather burned – it was like a rest cure in Bognor!
In the evenings I retired to my hut. It was quite cosy in there with the door closed, and I slept well, with my jacket for a pillow and with the warm softness of the platform beneath me.
The bulk of my time was spent in the inspection of the Interior with my magnifying goggles. I would sit at the rim of my platform, or lie in a soft patch of grass with my head propped on my jacket, and gaze around the complex sky.
That part of the Interior opposite my position, beyond the sun, must lie on the Sphere’s equator; and so I anticipated that this region would be the most earth-like – where gravity was strongest, and the air was compressed. That central band was comparatively narrow – no more than some tens of millions of miles wide. (I say ‘no more’ easily enough, but I knew of course that the whole of the earth would be lost, a mere mote, against that Titanic background!) Beyond this central band, the surface appeared a dull grey, difficult to distinguish through the sky’s blue filter, and I could make out few details. In one of those high-latitude regions there was a splash of silver-white, with sea-shapes of fine grey embedded in it, that reminded me somewhat of the moon; and in another a vivid patch of orange – quite neatly elliptical – whose nature I could not comprehend at all. I remembered the attenuated Morlocks I had met, who had come from the lower-gravity regions of the outer shells, away from the equator; and I wondered if there were perhaps distorted humans living in those remote, low gravity world-maps of the Interior’s higher latitudes.
When I considered that inner, earth-like central belt, much of that, even, appeared to be unpopulated; I could see immense oceans, and deserts that could swallow worlds, shining in the endless sunlight. These wastes of land or water separated island-worlds: regions little larger than the earth might have been, if skinned and spread out across that surface, and rich with detail.
Here I saw a world of grass and forest, with cities of sparkling buildings rising above the trees. There I made out a world locked in ice, whose inhabitants must be surviving as my forebears had in Europe’s glacial periods: perhaps it was cooled by being mounted on some immense platform, I wondered, to lift it out of the atmosphere. On some of the worlds I saw the mark of industry: a complex texture of cities, the misty smoke of factories, bays threaded by bridges, the plume-like wakes of ships on land-locked seas – and, sometimes, a tracing of vapour across the upper atmosphere which I imagined must be generated by some flying vessel.
So much was familiar enough – but some worlds were quite beyond my comprehension.
I caught glimpses of cities which floated in the air, above their own shadows; and immense buildings which must have dwarfed China’s Wall, sprawling across engineered landscapes … I could not begin to imagine the sort of men which must live in such places.
Some days I awoke to comparative darkness. A great sheet of cloud would clamp down on the land, and before long a heavy rain start to fall. It occurred to me that the weather inside that Interior must have been regulated – as, no doubt, were all other aspects of its fabric – for I could readily imagine the immense cyclonic energies which could be generated by that huge world’s rapid spin. I would walk about in the weather a bit, relishing the tang of the fresh water. On such days, the place would become much more earth-like, with the Interior’s bewildering far side and its dubious horizon hidden by rain and cloud.
After long inspections with the telescopic goggles, I found that the grassy plain around me was just as featureless as it had looked at first sight. One day – it was bright and hot – I decided to try to make for the rocky outcrop I have mentioned, which was the only distinguishable feature within the mist-delineated horizon, even on the clearest day. I bundled up some food and water in a bag I improvised from my long-suffering jacket, and off I set; I got as far as I could before I tired, and then I lay down to attempt to sleep. But I could not settle, not in the open sunlight, and after a few hours I gave up. I walked on a little further, but the rocky outcrop seemed to be getting no nearer, and I began to grow fearful, so far from the platform. What if I were to grow fatigued, or somehow become injured? I should never be able to call Nebogipfel, and I should forfeit any prospect of returning to my own time: in fact, I should die in the grass like some wounded gazelle. And all for a walk to an anonymous clump of rock!
Feeling foolish, I turned and hiked back to my platform.