The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter Page A

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.

12

THE MORLOCKS OF THE SPHERE
    Y ou must imagine that place: a single immense room , with a carpet of stars and a complex, engineered ceiling, and all of it going on forever, without walls. It was a place of black and silver, without any other colour. The Floor was marked out by partitions that came up to chest-height, though there were no dividing walls: there were no enclosed areas, nothing resembling our offices or homes, anywhere.
    And there were Morlocks , a pale scattering of them, all across that transparent Floor; their faces were like grey flakes of snow sprinkled over the starry carpet. The place was filled with their voices: their constant, liquid babbling washed over me, oceanic in itself, and remote from the sounds of the human palate – and removed, too, from the dry voice Nebogipfel had become accustomed to using in my company.
    There was a line at infinity, utterly straight and a little blurred by dust and mist, where the Roof met the Floor. And that line showed none of the bowing effect that one sometimes sees as one studies an ocean. It is hard to describe – it may seem that such things are beyond one’s intuition until they are experienced – but at that moment, standing there, I knew I was not on the surface of any planet . There was no far horizon beyond which rows of Morlocks were hidden, like receding sea-going ships; instead I knew that the earth’s tight,