The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter

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      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 who 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 rat-like, 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!

       10

       A DIALOGUE WITH A MORLOCK

      ‘You say you travelled 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?’

      Those huge curtain-eyelashes blinked slowly. ‘There are a number of alternatives: most of them more plausible than time travel.’

      ‘Such as?’ I challenged him.

      ‘Genetic resequencing.’

      ‘Genetic?’ Nebogipfel explained further, and I got the general drift. ‘You’re talking of the mechanism by which heredity operates – by which characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation.’

      ‘It is not impossible to generate simulacra of archaic forms by unravelling subsequent mutations.’

      ‘So you think I am no more than a simulacrum – reconstructed like the fossil skeleton of some Megatherium in a museum? Yes?’

      ‘There are precedents, though not of human forms of your vintage. Yes. It is possible.’

      I felt insulted. ‘And to what purpose might I have been cobbled together in this way?’ I resumed my pacing around the Cage. The most disconcerting aspect of that bleak place was its lack of walls, and my constant, primeval sense that my back was unguarded. I would rather have been hurled in some prison cell of my own era – primitive and squalid, no doubt, but enclosed. ‘I’ll not rise to any such bait. That’s a lot of nonsense. I designed and built a Time Machine, and travelled here on it; and let that be an end to it!’

      ‘We will use your explanation as a working hypothesis,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘Now, please describe to me the machine’s operating principles.’

      I continued my pacing, caught in a dilemma. As soon as I had realized that Nebogipfel was articulate and intelligent, unlike those Morlocks of my previous acquaintance, I had expected some such interrogation; after all, if a Time Traveller from Ancient Egypt had turned up in nineteenth century London I would have fought to be on the committee which СКАЧАТЬ