Newton's Aliens by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roadswell Editions
Published: 2015-03-02T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

The vallum might indeed have been dwarfed by the Romans’ mightier works, but it was an impressive enough sight as I approached. It was a great brown gouge that sliced through the fields and copses to either side of the Great North Road, sore disrupting the farmers’ tillage, and stretched off to either horizon.

All along its length people toiled, supervised by a few soldiers, churchmen, merchants and other dignitaries. Already wood was being piled up in the gully, and waiting by the lip were queues of carts bearing barrels of pitch and oil and camphor and fat. Looking further afield I saw that woodsmen were at work in the patches of forest nearby, and more carts brought fresh-cut timber to add to the construction. I began to see the design. This was to be, not a mere ditch, a vast linear bonfire.

It was about noon as I came upon the vallum and saw this, all of it thrown up in a few hours. And on the northern horizon I could see the mobile city of the Phoebeans, their animate structures both tall and short, motionless now but waiting for the night.

I asked a clerk for Defoe, and soon found him. He had a sort of command tent set up for him, with the mayor, the captain of the city garrison, and other officials. Within was a large-scale map of the works, and runners came to and fro bearing messages to the workers and the surveyors who guided them. But Defoe himself was not in the tent but down in the vallum, wielding a shovel with the rest.

When he saw me he clambered out and sat with me on the lip of the vallum. I offered him a swig of Newton’s brandy. He was stripped to his shirt, and was sweating with the work. He said, ‘I will swear the day is a tad warmer than it has been. Perhaps the winter is loosing its grip at last – eh?’

I looked up at a sky that was a shield of grey, and the frost on the broken ground, and felt the chill in my own bones. ‘You are warm because you are sixty years old and working like a navvie.’

‘Ah, but I’m alive. Alive, eh! Just like my Crusoe, and determined to stay so. You saw Newton, then?’

‘He believes we will survive because it says so in the Book of Daniel.’

Defoe grunted. ‘He sees further than the rest of us, Jack. And if there are forces at work in the world for whose purposes we are mere instruments – well, then, it is up to us to behave as if it were not so. Eh? Come now, be a sport. Grab a shovel and a bucket of pitch, and help build this wall of fire to keep out those Phoebean monsters. What do you say?’

‘I say it’s a waste of time.’ I pointed out the obvious flaw, that even if the Phoebeans were repelled by this improvised barrier, there was

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