Читать книгу The Time Ships - Stephen Baxter - Страница 19

This response irritated me intensely! I got out of my chair and began to pace about my Cage. I came near to Nebogipfel, but I managed to resist the impulse to lapse into threatening simian gestures. I flatly refused to answer any more questions until he showed me something of his Sphere-world.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘don’t you think you’re being a little unfair? After all, I’ve travelled across six hundred thousand years to see something of your world. And all I’ve had so far is a darkened hill-side in Richmond, and –’ I waved a hand at the encircling darkness ‘– this, and your endless questions!

‘Look at it this way, Nebogipfel. I know you will want me to give you a full account of my journey through time, and what I saw of History as it unfolded to your present. How can I tell such a tale if I have no understanding of its conclusion? – let alone of that other History which I witnessed.’

I left my speech there, hoping I had done enough to convince him.

He lifted his hand to his face; his thin, pallid fingers adjusted the goggles resting there, like any gentleman adjusting a pince-nez. ‘I will consult about this,’ he said at last. ‘We will speak again.’

And he departed. I watched him walk away, his bare soles pad-padding across the soft, starry Floor.

After I had slept once more, Nebogipfel returned. He raised his hand and beckoned; it was a stiff, unnatural gesture, as if he had learned it only recently.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

With a surge of exhilaration – tinged with not a little fear – I snatched my jacket up from the Floor.

I walked beside Nebogipfel, into the darkness which had encircled me for so many days. My shaft of sunlight receded behind me. I glanced back at the little spot which had been my inhospitable home, with its disordered trays, its heap of blankets, and my chair – perhaps the only chair in the world! I will not say I watched it go with any nostalgia, for I had been miserable and fearful during the whole of my stay in that Cage of Light, but I did wonder whether I would ever see it again.

Beneath our feet, the eternal stars hung like a million Chinese lanterns, borne on the breast of an invisible river.

As we walked, Nebogipfel held out blue goggles, very like the set he wore himself. I took these, but I protested: ‘What do I need of these? I am not dazzled, as you are –’

‘They are not for light. They are for darkness. Put them on.’

I lifted the goggles to my face. The set was built on two hoops of some pliable substance, which sandwiched the blue glass of the goggles itself; when I lifted the goggles to my face, the hoops slipped easily around my head and gripped there lightly.

I turned my head. I had no impression of blueness, despite the tint of my goggles. That shaft of sunlight seemed as bright as ever, and the image of Nebogipfel was as clear as it had been before. ‘They don’t seem to work,’ I said.

For answer, Nebogipfel tipped his head downwards.

I followed his gaze – and my step faltered. For, beneath my feet and through the soft Floor, the stars blazed. Those lights were no longer masked by the sheen of the Floor, or by my eyes’ poor dark-adaptation; it was as if I stood poised above some starry night in the mountains of Wales or Scotland! I suffered an intense stab of vertigo, as you might imagine.

I detected a trace of impatience about Nebogipfel now – he seemed anxious to proceed. We walked on in silence.

Within a very few paces, it seemed to me, Nebogipfel slowed, and I saw now, thanks to my goggles, that a wall lay a few feet from us. I reached out and touched its soot-black surface, but it had only the soft, warm texture of the Floor. I could not understand how we had reached the boundaries of this chamber so quickly. I wondered if somehow we had walked along some moving pavement which had assisted our footsteps; but Nebogipfel volunteered no information.

‘Tell me what this place is, before we leave it,’ I said.

His flaxen-haired head turned towards me. ‘An empty chamber.’

‘How wide?’

‘Approximately two thousand miles.’

I tried to conceal my reaction to this. Two thousand miles? Had I been alone, in a prison cell large enough to hold an ocean? ‘You have a great deal of room here,’ I said evenly.

‘The Sphere is large,’ he said. ‘If you are accustomed only to planetary distances, you may find it difficult to appreciate how large. The Sphere fills the orbit of the primal planet you called Venus. It has a surface area corresponding to nearly three hundred million earths –’

‘Three hundred million?’

My amazement met only with a blank stare from the Morlock, and more of that subtle impatience. I understood his restlessness, and yet I felt resentful – and a little embarrassed. To the Morlock, I was like some irritating man from the Congo come to London, who must ask the purpose and provenance of the simplest items, such as a fork or a pair of trousers!

To me, I reasoned, the Sphere was a startling construction! – but so might the Pyramids have been to some Neandertaler. For this complacent Morlock, the Sphere around the sun was part of the historic furniture of the world, no more to be remarked on than a landscape tamed by a thousand years of agriculture.

A door opened before us – it did not fold back, you understand, but rather it seemed to scissor itself away, much as does the diaphragm of a camera – and we stepped forward.

I gasped, and almost stumbled backwards. Nebogipfel watched me with his usual analytical calm.

From a room the size of a world – a room carpeted with stars – a million Morlock faces swivelled towards me.