The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter
my brief, feverish speculation as to the accomplishments of these future races of men. Now, I knew different; now I knew that regardless of these great accomplishments, Humanity would inevitably fall backwards, under the inexorable pressure of evolution, into the decadence and degradation of Eloi and Morlock.
I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are! – and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution – forces which move inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!
I soon passed beyond the Age of Great Buildings. New houses and halls, less ambitious but still huge, shimmered into existence around me, all about the vale of the Thames, and assumed a certain opacity, in the eyes of a Time Traveller, that comes with longevity. The arch of the sun, dipping across the deep blue sky between its solstice extremes, seemed to me to grow brighter, and a green flow spread across Richmond Hill and took possession of the land, banishing the browns and whites of winter. Once more, I had entered that era in which the climate of the earth had been adjusted in favour of Humanity.
I looked out over a landscape reduced by my velocity to the static; only the longest-lived phenomena clung to time long enough to register on my fleeting eye. I saw no people, no animals, not even the passage of a cloud. I was suspended in an eerie stillness. If it had not been for the oscillating sun-band, and the deep, unnatural day-night blue of the sky, I might have been sitting alone in some late summer park.
According to my dials, I was less than a third of the way through my great journey – although a quarter of a million years had already worn away since my own familiar century – and yet, it seemed, the age in which man built upon the earth was already done. The planet had been rendered into that garden within which the folk who would become the Eloi would live out their futile, petty lives; and already, I knew, proto-Morlocks must have been imprisoned beneath the earth, and must even now be tunnelling out their immense, machinery-choked caverns. Little would change over the half-million-year interval I had yet to cross, save for the further degradation of Humanity, and the identity of the victims in the millions of tiny, fearful tragedies which would from now on comprise the condition of man …
But – I observed, rousing myself from these morbid speculations – there was a change, slowly becoming apparent in the landscape. I felt disturbed, over and above the Time Machine’s customary swaying. Something was different – perhaps something about the light.
Sitting in my saddle, I peered about at the ghost-trees, the level meadows about Petersham, the shoulder of the patient Thames.
Then I lifted my face to the time-smoothed heavens, and at last I realized that the sun-band was stationary in the sky. The earth was still spinning on its axis rapidly enough to smear the movement of our star across the heavens, and to render the circling stars invisible, but that band of sunlight no longer nodded back and forth between solstices: it was as steady and unchanging as if it were a construction of concrete.
My nausea and vertigo returned with a rush. I was forced to grip hard at the rails of the machine, and I swallowed, fighting for control of my own body.
It is difficult to convey the impact this simple change in my surroundings had on me! First, I was shocked by the sheer audacity of the engineering involved in the removal of the seasonal cycle. The earth’s seasons had derived from the tilt of the planet’s spin axis compared to the plane of its orbit around the sun. On the earth, it seemed, there would be no more seasons. And that could only mean – I realized it instantly – that the axial tilt of the planet had been corrected.
I tried to envisage how this might have been done. What great machines must have been installed at the Poles? What measures had been taken to ensure that the surface of the earth did not shake itself loose in the process? – Perhaps, I speculated, some immense magnetic device had been used, which had manipulated the molten and magnetic core of the planet.
But it was not just the scale of this planetary engineering which disturbed me: more terrifying still was the fact that I had not observed this regulation of the seasons during my first jaunt into time. How was it possible that I could have missed such an immense and profound change? I am trained as a scientist, after all; my business is to observe.
I rubbed my face and stared up at the sun-band where it hung in the sky, defying me to believe in its lack of motion. Its brightness stung my eyes; and it seemed to me that the band was growing still brighter. I wondered at first if this was my imagination, or some defect of my eyes. I dropped my face, dazzled, wiping tears against my jacket sleeve and blinking to rid my eyes of stripes of bruised light-spots.
I am no primitive, and no coward – and yet, sitting there in my saddle before the evidence of the immense feats of future men, I felt as if I were a savage with painted nakedness and bones in my hair, cowering before gods in the gaudy sky. I felt a deep fear for my own sanity bubbling from the depths of my consciousness; and yet I clung to the belief that – somehow – I had failed to observe this staggering astronomical phenomenon, during my first pass through these years. For the only alternative hypothesis terrified me to the roots of my soul: it was that I had not been mistaken during my first voyage; that the regulation of the earth’s axis had not taken place there – that the course of History itself had changed.
The near-eternal shape of the hill-side was unchanged – the morphology of the ancient land was unaffected by these evolving lights in the sky – but I could see that the tide of greenery which had coated the land had now receded, under the steady glare of the brightened sun.
I became aware now of a remote flickering above my head, and I glanced up with my hand raised. The flickering came from the sun-band in the sky – or what had been the sun-band, for I realized that somehow, once again, I was able to distinguish the cannonball motion of the sun as it shot across the sky on its diurnal round; no longer was its motion too rapid for me to follow, and the passage of night and day was inducing the flickering I saw.
At first, I thought my machine must be slowing. But when I glanced down at my dials, I saw that the hands were twisting across the faces with just as much alacrity as before.
The pearl-grey uniformity of the light dissolved, and the flapping alternation of day and night became marked. The sun slid across the sky, slowing with every arcing trajectory, hot and bright and yellow; and I soon realized that the burning star was taking many centuries to complete one revolution around the sky of earth.
At last, the sun came to a halt altogether; it rested on the western horizon, hot and pitiless and unchanging. The earth’s rotation had been stilled; now, it rotated with one face turned perpetually to the sun!
The scientists of the nineteenth century had predicted that at last the tidal influences of sun and moon would cause the earth’s rotation to become locked to the sun, just as the moon was forced to keep one face turned to earth. I had witnessed this myself, during my first exploration of futurity: but it was an eventuality that should not come about for many millions of years. And yet here I was, little more than half a million years into the future, finding a stilled earth!
Once again, I realized, I had seen the hand of man at work – ape-descended fingers, reaching across centuries with the grasp of gods. Not content with tilting up his world, man had slowed the spin of the earth itself, banishing at last the ancient cycle of day and night.
I looked around at England’s new desert. The land was scoured clean of grass, leaving exposed a dried-out clay. Here and there I saw the flicker of some hardy bush – in shape, a little like an olive – which struggled to survive beneath the unrelenting sun. The mighty Thames, which had migrated across perhaps