The Time Ships (43 page)

But Nebogipfel was to disappoint me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. The table utilizes the Nonlinear effect, but only to – ah – to
highlight
particular Histories. At least some selection, some control, over the processes is displayed, but … The effects are so small, you see. And the Nonlinearities are suppressed by time evolution.’

‘Yes,’ I said with impatience, ‘but what is your guess? By placing this table here, is our Constructor
trying to tell us that all this stuff – Nonlinearity, and communication between Histories – that it’s all important to us?’

‘Perhaps,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘But it is certainly important to
him
.’

N
ebogipfel reconstructed something of the history of Humanity, across fifty million years. Much of this picture was tentative, he warned me – an edifice of speculation, founded on the few unambiguous facts he had been able to retrieve from the Information Sea.

There had probably been several waves of star colonization by man and his descendants, said Nebogipfel. During our journey through time in the car, we had seen the launch of one generation of such ships, from the Orbital City.

‘It is not difficult to build an interstellar craft,’ he said, ‘if one is
patient
. I imagine your 1944 friends in the Palaeocene could have devised such a vessel a mere century or two after we left them. One would need a propulsion unit, of course – a chemical, ion or laser rocket; or perhaps a solar sail of the type we have observed. And there are strategies to use the resources of the solar system to escape from the sun. You could, for instance, swing past Jupiter, and use that planet’s bulk to hurl your star-ship in towards the sun. With a boost at perihelion, you could very easily reach solar escape velocity.’

‘And then one would be free of the solar system?’

‘At the other end a reverse of the process, the exploitation of the gravity wells of stars and planets,
would be necessary, to settle into the new system. It might take ten, a hundred
thousand
years to complete such a journey, so great are the gulfs between the stars …’

‘A thousand centuries? But who could survive so long? What ship – the supply question alone –’

‘You miss the point,’ he said. ‘One would not send
humans
. The ship would be an automaton. A
machine
, with manipulative skills, and intelligence at least equivalent to a human’s. The task of the machine would be to exploit the resources of the destination stellar system – using planets, comets, asteroids, dust, whatever it could find – to construct a colony.’

‘Your “automatons”,’ I remarked, ‘sound rather like our friends, the Universal Constructors.’

He did not reply.

‘I can see the use of sending a machine to gather information. But other than that – what is the point? What is the
meaning
of a colony without humans?’

‘But such a machine could construct
anything
, given the resources and sufficient time,’ the Morlock said. ‘With cell synthesis and artificial womb technology, it could even construct humans, to inhabit the new colony. Do you see?’

I protested at this – for the prospect seemed unnatural and abhorrent to me – until I remembered, with reluctance, that I had once watched the ‘construction’ of a Morlock, in just such a fashion!

Nebogipfel went on, ‘But the probe’s most important task would be to construct
more copies of itself
. These would be fuelled up – for example, with gases mined from the stars – and sent on, to further star systems.

‘And so, slow but steady, the colonization of the Galaxy would proceed.’

‘But,’ I protested, ‘even so, it would take so much
time
. Ten thousand years to reach the nearest star, which is some light years away –’

‘Four.’

‘And the Galaxy itself –’

‘Is a hundred thousand light years across. It would be slow. The migration across the Galaxy would be like the expansion of gas molecules into a vacuum,’ he said. ‘At least at first. But then the colonies would begin to interact with each other. Do you see? Empires could form, straddling the stars. Other groups would oppose the empires. The diffusion would slow further … but it would proceed, inexorably. By such techniques as I have described, it would take tens of millions of years to complete the colonization of the Galaxy –
but it could be done
. And, since it would be impossible to recall or redirect the mechanical probes, once launched, it
would
be done. It
must
have been done by now, fifty million years after the founding of First London.’

He went on, ‘The first few generations of Constructors were, I think, built with anthropocentric constraints incorporated into their awareness. They were built to serve man. But these Constructors were not simple mechanical devices – these were conscious entities. And when they went out into the Galaxy, exploring worlds undreamed of by man and redesigning themselves, they soon passed far beyond the understanding of Humanity, and broke the constraints of their authors … The machines broke free.’

‘Great Scott,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine the military chaps of that remote Age taking to that idea very kindly.’

‘Yes. There were wars … The data is fragmented. In any event, there could be only one victor in such a conflict.’

‘And what of men? How did they take to all this?’

‘Some well, some badly.’ Nebogipfel twisted his face a little and swivelled his eyes. ‘What do you think? Humans are a diverse species, with multiple and fragmented goals – even in your day; imagine how much more diverse things became when people were spread across a hundred, a thousand star systems. The Constructors, too, rapidly fragmented. They are more unified as a species than man has ever been, by reason of their physical nature, but – because of the much greater Information pool to which they have access – their goals are far more complex and varied.’

But, through all this conflict, Nebogipfel said, the slow Conquest of the stars had proceeded.

The launching of the first star-ships, Nebogipfel said, had marked the greatest deviation we had yet witnessed from my original, unperturbed History. ‘Men – your friends, the New Humans – have changed everything about the world, even on a geological – a
cosmic
scale. I wonder if you can understand –’

‘What?’

‘I wonder if you understand,
really
, the meaning of a million years – or ten million – or fifty.’

‘Well, I ought to. I’ve traversed through such intervals, with you, on the way to the Palaeocene and back.’

‘But then we travelled through a History
free of intelligence
. Look – I have told you of interstellar migration. If Mind is given the chance to work on such scales –’

‘I’ve seen what can be done to the earth.’

‘More than that – more than a single planet! The patient, termite-burrowing of
Mind
can undermine even the fabric of the universe,’ he whispered, ‘if given enough time … Even
we
only had a half-million years since the plains of Africa, and
we
captured a sun …

‘Look at the sky,’ he said. ‘
Where are the stars
? There is hardly a naked star in the sky. This is 1891, or thefeabouts, remember: here can be no cosmological reason for the extinction of the stars, as compared to the sky of your own Richmond.

‘With my dark-evolved eyes, I can see a little more than you. And I tell you there is an array of dull-red pinpoints up there: it is infra-red radiation – heat.’

Then it struck me, with almost a physical force. ‘It is true,’ I said. ‘
It is true
… Your hypothesis of Galactic conquest. The proof of it is visible, in the sky itself! The stars must be cloaked about – almost all of them – by
artificial shells
, like your Morlock Sphere.’ I stared out at the empty sky. ‘Dear God, Nebogipfel; human beings – and their machines – have changed Heaven itself!’

‘It was inevitable that it would come to this, once the first Constructor was launched – do you see?

I stared into that darkened sky, oppressed by awe. It was not so much the changed nature of the sky that astonished me so, but the notion that all this –
all
of it, to the furthest end of the Galaxy – had been brought about by my shattering of History with the Time Machine!

‘I can see that men have gone from the earth,’ I said. ‘The climatic instability has done for us here. But somewhere –’ I waved a hand ‘– somewhere out
there
must be men and women, in those scattered homes!’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The Constructors see everywhere, remember; they know everything. And I have seen no evidence of men like you. Oh, here and there you may find biological creatures descended from man – but as diverse, in their way, from
your
form of human as I am. And would you count
me
a man? And the biological forms are, besides, mostly degenerated …’

‘There are
no true men
?’

‘There are descendants of man
everywhere
. But nowhere will you find a creature who is more closely related to you than – say – a whale or an elephant …’

I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: ‘“Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity …”’

‘Darwin was right,’ Nebogipfel said gently.

That idea – that, of your type, you are alone in the Galaxy! – is hard to accept, and I fell silent, gazing up at the blanked-out stars. Was each of those great globes as densely populated as Nebogipfel’s Sphere? My fertile mind began to inhabit those immense world-buildings with the descendants of true men – with fish-men, and bird-men, men of fire and ice – and I wondered what a tale might be brought back if some immortal Gulliver were able to travel from world to world, visiting all the diverse offspring of Humanity.

‘Men may have become extinct,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘Any biological species will, on a long enough timescale, become extinct. But the
Constructors
cannot become extinct. Do you see that? With the Constructors, the essence of the race is not the form, biological or otherwise – it is the
Information
the race has gathered, and stored. And that is immortal. Once a race has committed itself to such Children, of Metal and Machines and Information, it
cannot
die out. Do you see that?’

I turned to the prospect of White Earth beyond our window. I saw it, all right – I saw it all, only too well!

Men had launched off these mechanical workers to the stars, to find new worlds, build colonies. I imagined that great argosy of light reaching out from an earth which had grown too small, going glittering up into the sky, smaller and smaller until the blue had swallowed them up … There were a million lost
stories, I thought, of how men had come to know how to bear the strange gravitations, the attenuated and unfamiliar gases and all the stresses of space.

It was an epochal migration – it changed the nature of the cosmos – but its launch was, perhaps, a last effort, a spasm before the collapse of civilization on the Mother World. In the face of the disintegration of the atmosphere, men on earth weakened, dwindled – we had the evidence of the pathetic mirror on the moon to show us that – and, at last,
died
.

But then, much later, to the deserted earth, back came the colony machines man had sent out – or their descendants, the Universal Constructors, enormously sophisticated. The Constructors were descended from men, in a way – and yet they had gone far beyond the boundaries of what men could achieve; for they had discarded old Adam, and all the vestiges of brutes and reptiles that had lurked in his body and spirit.

I saw it all! The earth had been repopulated; and – not by man – but by the Mechanical Heirs of Man, who had returned, changed, from the stars.

And all of this –
all
of it – had propagated out of the little colony which had been founded in the Palaeocene. Hilary had foreseen something of this, I thought: the re-engineering of the cosmos had unfolded from that little, fragile huddle of twelve people, that unremarkable seed planted fifty million years deep.

T
ime wore away slowly, in that bizarre, cocooned place.

For his part, Nebogipfel seemed quite content with our arrangements. He spent most of each day with his face pressed up against the glistening hide of the Universal Constructor, immersed in the Information Sea. He had little time, or patience, for me; it was clearly an effort – a loss – for him to break away from that rich vein of ancient wisdom, and to confront my ignorance – and even more so my primitive desire for company.

I took to mooching, aimlessly, about the apartment. I munched at my plates of food; I used the steam bath; I toyed with the Multiplicity table; I peered out of the windows at an earth which had become as inhospitable to me as the surface of Jupiter.

I had nothing to do! – and in this mood of futility, for I was now so remote from home and my own kind that I could not see how I might live, I began to plumb new depths of depression.

Then, one day, Nebogipfel came to see me, with what he called a
proposition
.

We were in the room in which our friendly Constructor sat, as squat and placid as ever. Nebogipfel, as usual, was connected to the Constructor by his tube of glistening cilia.

‘You must understand the background to all this,’ he said, and his natural eye rotated so he could watch me. ‘To begin with, you must see that the goals of the Constructors are very different from those of your species – or from mine.’

‘That’s understandable,’ I said. ‘The physical differences alone –’

‘It goes beyond that.’

Generally, when we got into this sort of debate – with myself cast in the role of the Ignoramus – Nebogipfel showed signs of impatience, of a salmon-like longing to return to the gleaming depths of his Information Sea. This time, though, his speech was patient and deliberate, and I realized that he was taking unusual care over what he had to say.

I began to feel uneasy. Clearly the Morlock felt he had to
convince
me of something!

He continued to discuss the goals of the Constructors. ‘You see, a species cannot survive for long if it continues to carry around the freight of antique motivations that
you
bear. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ I said drily.

‘I mean, of course, territoriality, aggression, the violent settlement of disputes … Imperialist designs and the like become unimaginable when technology advances past a certain point. With weapons of the power of
die Zeitmaschine
’s Carolinum Bomb – or worse – things must change. A man of your own age said that the invention of atomic weapons had changed everything – except Humanity’s way of thinking.’

‘I can’t argue with your thesis,’ I said, ‘for it does seem that – as you say – the limits of Humanity, the vestiges of old Adam, were at last enough to bring us down … But what of the goals of your metal supermen, the Constructors?’

He hesitated. ‘In a sense a species, taken as a
whole, does not
have
goals. Did men have goals in common, in your day, save to keep on breathing, eating, and reproducing?’

I grunted. ‘Goals shared with the lowest bacillus.’

‘But, despite this complexity, one can – I think –
classify
the goals of a species, depending on its state of advancement, and the resources it requires as a consequence.’

A Pre-Industrial civilization, Nebogipfel said – I thought of England in the Middle Ages – needs raw materials: for food, clothing, warmth and so forth.

But once Industry has developed, materials can be substituted for each other, to accommodate the shortage of a particular resource. And so the key requirements then are for capital and labour. Such a state would describe my own century, and I saw how one could indeed regard, in a generic sense, the activities of mankind in that benighted century as driven in the large by competition for those two key resources: labour and capital.

‘But there is a stage beyond the Industrial,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘It is the
Post-Industrial
. My own species had entered this stage – we had been there for the best part of half a million years, on your arrival – but it is a stage without an end.’

‘Tell me what it means. If capital and labour are no longer the determinants of social evolution …’

‘They are not, because
Information
can compensate for their lack. Do you see? Thus, the transmutating Floor of the Sphere – by means of the knowledge invested in its structure – could compensate for any shortage of resource, beyond primal energy …’

‘And so you are saying that these Constructors – given their fragmentation into a myriad complex factions – are, at base, driving for more knowledge?’

‘Information – its gathering, interpretation and storage – is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.’ He
regarded me sombrely. ‘We had understood that, and had begun to translate the resources of the solar system to that goal; you men of the nineteenth century had barely begun to grope your way to that realization.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘So, we must ask, what is it that limits the gathering of Information?’ I peered out at the enclosed stars. ‘These Universal Constructors have already fenced off much of this Galaxy, it seems to me.’

‘And there are more Galaxies beyond,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘A million million star systems, as large as this one.’

‘Perhaps, then, even now, the Constructors’ great sail-ships are drifting out, like dandelion seeds, to whatever lies beyond the Galaxy … Perhaps, in the end, the Constructors can conquer
all
of this material universe, and turn it over to the storage and classification of Information which you describe. It would be a universe become a great Library – the greatest imaginable, infinite in scope and depth –’

‘It is a grand project indeed – and, yes, the bulk of the energy of the Constructors is devoted to that goal: to studies of how intelligence can survive into the far future – when Mind has encompassed the universe, and when all the stars have died, and the planets have drifted from their suns … and matter itself begins to decay.

‘But you are wrong: the universe is
not
infinite. And as such,
it is not enough
. Not for some factions of the Constructors. Do you see? This universe is bounded in Space and Time; it began a fixed period in the past, and it must finish with the final decay of matter, at the ultimate end of time …

‘Some of the Constructors – a faction – are not prepared to
accept
this finitude,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘They will not countenance
any
limits to knowledge.
A finite universe is not enough for them! – and they are preparing to do something about it.’

That sent a chill – of pure, unadulterated awe – prickling over my scalp. I looked out at the hidden stars. This was a species which was already Immortal, which had conquered a Galaxy, which would absorb a universe – how could their ambitions stretch further still?

And, I wondered grimly, how could it involve
us
?

Nebogipfel, still locked to his eye-scope, rubbed his face with the back of his hand, in the manner of a cat, removing fragments of food from the hair about his chin. ‘I do not yet have a full understanding of this scheme of theirs,’ he said. ‘It is to do with time travel, and Plattnerite; and – I think – the concept of the Multiplicity of Histories. The data is complex – so
bright
…’ I thought this was an extraordinary word to use; for the first time it occurred to me what courage and intellectual strength it must take for the Morlock to descend into the Constructors’ Information Sea – to confront that ocean of blazing Ideas.

He said, ‘A fleet of Ships is being constructed – huge Time Machines, far beyond the capabilities of your century or mine. With these, the Constructors intend – I
think
– to penetrate the past. The deep past.’

‘How far back? Beyond the Palaeocene?’

He regarded me. ‘Oh,
much
further than that.’

‘Well. And what of us, Nebogipfel? What is this “proposition” you have?’

‘Our patron – the Constructor here with us – is of this faction. He was able to detect our approach through time – I cannot give you details; they are very advanced – they were able to
sense our coming
, on our crude Time-Car, up from the Palaeocene. And so, he was here to greet us.’

Our Constructor had been able to follow our
progress, up towards the surface of time, as if we were timid deep-sea fish! ‘Well, I’m grateful he was. After all, if he
hadn’t
been on hand to meet us as he did, and treat us with his molecular surgery, we’d be dead as nails.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And now?’

He withdrew his face from the Constructor’s eye-scope; it came loose with an obscene plop. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that they understand
your
significance – the fact that
your
initial invention propagated the changes, the explosion in Multiplicity, which led to all
this
.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘
I think they know who you are
. And they want us to come with them. In their great Ships – to the Boundary at the Beginning of Time.’