The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter

THE NEW ELOI

      Some days after this, I emerged from my hut after a sleep, and became aware that the light was a little brighter than usual. I glanced up, and saw that the extra illumination came from a fierce point of light a few degrees of arc from the static sun. I snatched up my goggles and inspected that new star.

      It was a burning island-world. As I watched, great explosions shattered the surface, sending up clouds which blossomed like lovely, deadly flowers. Already, I thought, the island-world must be devoid of life, for nothing could live through the conflagration I witnessed, but still the explosions rained across the surface – and all in eerie silence!

      The island-world flared brighter than the sun, for several hours, and I knew that I was watching a titanic tragedy, made by man – or descendants of man.

      Everywhere in my rocky sky – now I started looking for it – I saw the mark of War.

      Here was a world in which great strips of land appeared to have been given over to a debilitating and destructive siege warfare: I saw brown lanes of churned-up countryside, immense trenches, hundreds of miles wide, in which, I imagined, men were fighting and dying, for year after year. Here was a city burning, with white vapour arcs scored over it; and I wondered if some aerial weapon was being exploited there. And here I found a world devastated by the aftermath of war, the continents blackened and barren, with the outlines of cities barely visible through a shifting pile of black cloud.

      I wondered how many of these joys had visited my own earth, in the years after my departure!

      After some days of this, I took to leaving off my goggles for long periods. I began to find that skyroof, painted everywhere with warfare, unbearably oppressive.

      Some men of my time have argued for war – would have welcomed it, I think, as, for example, a release of the tension between the great Powers. Men thought of war – the next one, at least! – as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.

      I imagined how it would be if Great Britain and Germany were projected somewhere here, as two more splashes of colour against the rocky sky. I thought of those two nations which seemed to me now, from my elevated perspective, in a state of aimless economic and moral muddle. And I doubted if there had been a man alive in 1891 in either country who could have told me the benefits of a war, whatever the outcome! – And how ludicrous and futile such a conflict would seem if Britain and Germany were indeed projected up into the Interior of this monstrous Sphere.

      All across the Sphere, millions of irreplaceable human lives were being lost to such conflicts – which were as remote and meaningless to me as the paintings on the ceiling of a cathedral – and you would think that men living in that Sphere – and able to see a million island-worlds like their own – would have abandoned their petty little ambitions, and discovered the sort of perspective I now understood. But, it seemed, it was not so; the base parts of human instincts dominated still, even in the Year A.D. 657,208. Here in the Sphere, even the daily education of a thousand, a million wars going on all across the iron sky was not enough, apparently, to make men see the futility and cruelty of it all!

      I found my mind turning, for contrast, to Nebogipfel and his people, and their Rational society. I will not pretend that a certain revulsion did not still tinge my mind at the thought of the Morlocks and their unnatural practices, but I understood now that this arose from my own primitive prejudices, and my unfortunate experiences in Weena’s world, which were quite irrelevant to an assessment of Nebogipfel.

      I was able, given time to contemplate, to work out how the falling-away of Morlock gender differences might have come about. I considered how, among humans, circles of loyalty spread out around an individual. First of all one must fight to preserve oneself and one’s direct children. Next, one will fight for siblings – but perhaps with only a reduced intensity, since the common inheritance must be halved. In next priority one would fight for the children of siblings, and more remote relations, in diminishing bands of intensity.

      Thus, with depressing reliability, men’s actions and loyalties may be predicted; for only with such a hierarchy of allegiance – in a world of shortage and instability – can one’s inheritance be preserved for future generations.

      But the Morlocks’ inheritance was secured – and not through an individual child or family, but through the great common resource that was the Sphere. And so the differentiation and specialization of the sexes became irrelevant – even harmful, to the orderly progress of things.

      It was a pretty irony, I thought, that it was precisely this diagnosis – of the vanishing of sexes from a world made stable, abundant and peaceful – that I had once applied to the exquisite, and decadent, Eloi; and now here I was coming to see that it was their ugly cousins the Morlocks, who, in this version of things, had actually achieved that remote goal!

      All this worked its way through my thinking. And slowly – it took some days – I came to a decision about my future.

      I could not remain inside this Interior; after the god-like perspective loaned me by Nebogipfel, I could not bear to immerse my life and energies in any one of the meaningless conflicts sweeping like brush fires across these huge plains. Nor could I remain with Nebogipfel and his Morlocks; for I am not a Morlock, and my essential human needs would make it unbearable to live as Nebogipfel did.

      Furthermore – as I have said – I could not live with the knowledge that my Time Machine still existed, an engine so capable of damaging History!

      I began to formulate a plan to resolve all this, and I summoned Nebogipfel.

      ‘When the Sphere was constructed,’ Nebogipfel said, ‘there was a schism. Those who wished to live much as men had always lived came into the Interior. And those who wished to put aside the ancient domination of the gene –’

      ‘– became Morlocks. And so the wars – meaningless and eternal – wash like waves across this unbounded Interior surface.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Nebogipfel, is the purpose of the Sphere to sustain these quasi-humans – these new Eloi – to give them room to wage their wars, without destroying Humanity?’

      ‘No.’ He held up his parasol, in a dignified pose I no longer found comical. ‘Of course not. The purpose of the Sphere is for the Morlocks, as you call us: to make the energies of a star available for the acquisition of knowledge.’ He blinked his huge eyes. ‘For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?’

      The mechanical Memory of the Sphere, he said, was like an immense Library, which stored the wisdom of the race, accumulated across half a million years; and much of the patient toil of the Morlocks I had seen was devoted to the further gathering of information, or to the classification and reinterpretation of the data already collected.

      These New Morlocks were a race of scholars! – and the whole energy of the sun was given over to the patient, coral-like growth of that great Library.

      I rubbed my beard. ‘I understand that – the motive at least. I suppose it is not so far from the impulses which have dominated my own life. But don’t you fear that one day you will finish this quest? What will you do when mathematics is perfected, for instance, and the final Theory of the physical universe is demonstrated?’

      He shook his head, in another gesture he had acquired from me. ‘That is not possible. A man of your own time – Kurt Gödel – was the first to demonstrate that.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Kurt Gödel: a mathematician who was born some ten years after your departure in time …’

      This Gödel – I was astonished to learn, as Nebogipfel again displayed his deep study of my age – would, in the 1930s, demonstrate that mathematics can never be