The Time Pit

A Tale of Old Earth

Stephen Baxter

Analog, October 2005

Even the most alien situations may be an application of familiar principles…

(Author's note: This story is set a few centuries after the events of "Climbing the Blue" [Analog, July/August 2005].)

The Mechanist balloons, fast and gray, drifted over the ruins of Old Foro. Belo couldn't even see the crude bombs they dropped until they came streaking down out of the blueshifted air to splash fire.

But the Mechanists' advance was driving Belo and the last of his troopers towards the Shelf's edge, where the river Foo, running with blood, plunged into the abyss. And all across the battlefield, Creationist soldiers were dying. Belo could see their Effigies rising up like smoke, spectral distortions of the human form that twisted and spun away.

All this for the sake of an idea, Belo thought. No, not an idea—the truth. He must cling to that, even as the blueshifted fire from the sky blossomed around him.

"Captain?"

Tira, his most trusted lieutenant, was shaking his shoulder. In his exhaustion he had drifted into abstraction, as he so often did. He was, after all, trained as a Natural Philosopher, and his senior officers had never let him forget that intellectuals with their long perspective didn't necessarily make for good soldiers. But if not for intellectuals, this war wouldn't be fought anyhow.

"I'm sorry, Tira. It's just that you have to admire them."

"Sir?" Her small face, smeared with blood and dirt, was creased with concern.

"The Mechs. We think of them as stupid, you know, backward. After all, the reason we fight is because they will cling to their absurd, primitive idea that the world is a product of natural forces, acting blindly in the absence of mind. But now they have come up with this."

This was Old Earth, where time came in layers: the higher you climbed, the more rapidly time passed. This basic truth about the world shaped everything about the lives of the people who inhabited it—including the way they made war. For a soldier of Old Earth, gaining the high ground was everything. If you were higher than your enemy you had the benefit of accelerated time; you could think faster, prepare your strategy and aim your weapons, while he stumbled, slow-moving, trapped in glutinous, red-shifted slow time.

So, in this campaign, the Creationists of Puul had taken the Attic, the long-abandoned community on the cliff face above the town of Foro itself, where rich Forons had once kept time-accelerated slaves. The campaign had gone well, and Belo had started to believe that the Forons and their hated Mechanist notions might soon be purged from the world.

But then the Forons had produced their balloons, which wafted on wings of heat even higher than the Attic, and the Creationists' advantage was lost.

"A stunning idea," Belo said. "So simple! Nothing but bags of hot air. But look at that formation. You've got to give them credit." Belo had a flask of gin in his coat pocket, meant to comfort battlefield wounded. Perhaps he should crack it now, and spend his last moments watching the wondrous spectacle of fighting soldiers and flying machines working in tandem to snuff out his life.

But Tira was almost screaming in his face. "Sir! We have to get out of here. Dane has found a way."

"Dane?"

Stumbling towards them through the rubble came a trooper, blood-soaked, a small, squat man. Dane's bayonet had been snapped in two, and he was dragging one leg: both weapon and man damaged, Belo thought bleakly. Grimacing with pain, Dane showed Belo what he had found: a shaft in the ground, no wider than Belo's own shoulders, covered by a heavy stone slab. "I think it's a well," he said.

"Or a larder," Tira said. A place where you could store meat, preserved in the slower time of depth.

"No," Belo said grimly. "See the lock on this hatch, broken now. This is a time pit. A place you would throw down thieves and murderers and forget about them."

"So where does it come out?"

"Who knows? But where scarcely matters. It just needs to be deep enough, deep into slow time. A neat way to dispose of your criminals—to hurl them one-way into the future!"

Tira peered into the time pit, her face twisted with fear. "It's this or nothing," she said. Belo said, "Do you love your Effigy so much, Tira? Shall we not stand and fight?" Dane said, "Dying like this won’t do any good." His accent was coarse; he had been a farm worker before the war. He was wheezing, exhausted. "I say we live to fight another day."

"Even if that day is far in the future?"

"Even so," Dane said.

Firebombs bloomed ever closer. Looking around, Belo saw that the three of them were alone, beyond help.

Belo grinned. "Another day."

"Another day," they mumbled. Belo lifted his legs into the shaft, raised himself over a tunnel of darkness, and fell into the future.

"I’ll have your boots."

Belo was reluctant to wake. Even half-asleep he remembered the endless fall down the tight, filthy shaft, as if he was being swallowed into some terrible stomach. And now here was this ugly voice, dragging him back into the world.

"I said, I’ll have your boots. I know you can hear me, soldier boy."

Reluctantly he opened his eyes. He was dazzled by a glaring blue sky, by stars that wheeled above his head. And a face loomed over him, a man’s face, broad, dead-eyed, roughly shaven, surrounded by a mass of dirty black hair.

Belo tried to speak. His throat was bone dry. "What’s your name?"

"I am Teeg. And you’re in my world now."

"Really?" Belo had no idea where he was, and he wondered where Dane and Tira were—if they were still alive. All that would have to wait. First he had to deal with this grubby buffoon. "You want my boots?"

The face cracked in a grin, showing blackened teeth. "That’s right, soldier boy."

"Try taking them."

The grin disappeared. Then Teeg’s face twisted, and he roared, and he raised two huge scarred hands. Belo aimed a kick at where he guessed the man’s crotch would be, but his legs felt feeble, heavy, as if the muscles had been drained of energy. Besides, this Teeg was so massively built, a hulk of muscle and bone dressed in filthy rags, that the kick only enraged him. Teeg got his hands around Belo’s throat, and pressed him back into the dirt. Belo flailed and struggled, but he was like a child battling an adult.

He had been conscious here only a few heartbeats, yet already he had given his life away. Quite a miscalculation, he thought, weakening.

"Get off him!" A squat mass came hurtling from Belo's left side and slammed into Teeg.

Belo, the pressure on his throat gone, coughed for breath. He sat up, clinging to consciousness.

He was sitting in the dirt, on a plain of sand. Beside him a cliff face rose up into the blue. He was close to a ragged cave, perhaps the chute down which he had tumbled. People huddled, a few paces away. Four women, five kids, no men. Scrawny, filthy, dressed in rags, they stared at him fearfully.

He couldn't see an end to this scrubby plain. Perhaps it was another Shelf—or perhaps he had fallen all the way into the Lowland itself, he thought with a stab of despair.

And beyond the people he glimpsed something moving over the ground—not on it, over it—at about waist height, almost like a balloon. It was a rough sphere of some silvery metal that gleamed in the blueshifted light of the sky. Was it a machine? But it was like no machine he had ever seen, no pump or elevator or cannon. And what could possibly support such a mass of metal in the air? He longed to see more, but details were blurred by heat haze—

"Soldier boy" Teeg’s ugly voice snapped him back to the here and now.

Teeg had hold of Dane, by an arm locked around his throat. It was obviously Dane who had knocked Teeg away and saved Belo's life. Dane wasn't struggling. His injured leg was twisted back at an impossible angle. But his eyes were locked on his commanding officer, and he made no sound.

"Let him go."

Teeg looked mock-puzzled. "How did you put it? Try taking him."

Belo took a step forward, but the world grayed.

"No." It was Tira. She was sitting on the ground, the remnants of her bloodstained uniform in disarray. "Don’t fight him," she said. "Not now. He’s too strong. Not yet."

Belo looked at Teeg, and he knew she was right. But still Teeg was squeezing the life out of Dane. "Let him go," he said again. "We didn’t come here to do you harm."

"I don’t care why you came here," Teeg said. "I told you. You’re in my world now. And you will do what I say. You know why? Because of the Weapon." He held Dane at arm’s length, with one mighty fist locked on Dane’s collar, as if he was holding up a doll. Dane bit his lip, and his leg trailed beneath him, but still he made no sound.

And then Teeg turned and hurled Dane at the floating machine. A window opened in the side of the machine. Fire, purple and bright, snaked into Dane’s belly and simply blew him apart. Then the window closed, like an eyelid shutting, and the machine continued its serene patrol around the huddling people.

Teeg grinned, cocksure in his ragged robes. He stood over Tira, who was still sprawled the ground. "Now where were we before soldier boy woke up?"

Despite everything he had seen, Belo stepped forward again. "Touch her and I will kill you, I swear."

Tira said grimly, "I already made the same promise."

Even in this moment of power, Teeg looked from one to the other, and something in their determined stare seemed to put him off. "You’ll keep. But you," he said, stabbing a finger at Belo. "Your boots."

Belo sat down and began to work at his laces.

Teeg walked over to the group of huddled women. "You." The woman he had selected cowered from him, but he grabbed her by the shoulder, threw her to the ground, and began to fumble at her rags. She lay passively; the children watched empty-eyed.

"You’re right to give him a victory," Tira whispered. "There's nothing to be done as long as he controls that machine. We must play for time. Wait for an opportunity..." She was staring at a charred fragment of Dane’s corpse, and her composure cracked. "Oh, Belo, what horror have we fallen into?"

He said grimly, "We are soldiers. We have been trained to survive. We will survive this, together."

"But how long has this monster kept these women as his slaves? Can you see the faces of the children? They look like him."

"It won’t happen to you."

"Oh, you can be sure of that," said Tira, her voice full of hate.

Life in Teeg's nasty little kingdom turned out to be simple.

They lived outdoors, on the arid plain. For the first couple of days they stayed close to the cliff where the time chute had decanted, huddling at night in caves or under rocky overhangs. But then they were led away by Teeg and the enigmatic hovering machine, the "Weapon". After that, they just slept out in the open. They ate berries they gathered from the sparse bushes, or they chewed on strips of dried meat—Belo wasn't sure yet where the meat came from. Their clothes were rags, replaced if they came across a handy corpse, like poor Dane's. But it appeared Teeg always got the best pick, like Belo's own boots.

So, by default, Belo was exploring the Lowland, the greatest mystery of all to Shelf philosophers of all persuasions. If it hadn't been so brutally hard, it would almost have been interesting.

While they walked, they carried the bits of Dane's stripped corpse with them. The women of Teeg's grim harem seemed used to this. Even the blank-eyed children stumbled along with grisly butchered remnants. Belo had no clear idea why they did this.

Indeed, his own continued existence puzzled Belo. It was obvious what Teeg wanted of Tira—but why keep Belo alive? Another man could only be competition, a threat; why tolerate him taking another breath?

And towering over all these personal issues was the deeper mystery of the Weapon: where it had come from, how and why it had been made—and what its true purpose was, for he was beginning to suspect that it had nothing to do with Teeg and his petty lording. Belo couldn't even see how Teeg communicated with it; he never spoke to it directly, never touched it. Sometimes, Belo thought, it was almost as if Teeg was following the Weapon, rather than the other way around. Belo longed to examine the Weapon, but he dared not approach it, not until he understood more.

Belo tried to talk to Teeg as they walked. In his military service, he had learned that any knowledge could be a lever. But he had to bury his resentment as Teeg marched along in his own spindling-leather boots, while Belo's feet bled on the rough ground.

"You are a victim of the time pit," he essayed.

"As are you," Teeg snapped, as if Belo had tried to insult him.

"We are soldiers. We fled a lost battlefield."

Teeg listened, his massive face closed up. For all his brutish behavior, Belo sensed that this man was no fool. But Belo's talk of his times clearly meant nothing to Teeg.

Belo tried again. "You were cast in the pit by your enemies. Perhaps it was unjust—"

"Unjust? More than that. I was born in the Attic, over Foro."

"I know it."

"I was a bastard, sired by some red-tinged Foron who raped a servant—my mother. Nobody accepted me, neither the Forons nor their slaves. In the end, they stuck me down the pit and stranded me in the future. But not before I got to my father." Teeg grinned, remembering; Belo could see that this moment of patricide had been the peak of his life.

"Teeg, the Forons are my enemies. But they no longer keep time-accelerated servants. It hasn't been so for a long time."

Teeg twisted his face. "How long?"

"I'm not sure." It was history to Belo. "Several generations."

Teeg shrugged. "Then that's how long I've been down here, isn't it?"

And here was the cruel reality of the time pit. Even if you survived, to be cast down here was to be sent into the future, to live out a futile life adrift from family, friends, cut out even from the context of your crime.

It was this that distressed Tira more than anything. After all, she and Belo had devoted their very lives to a cause.

Foro had long been a center of the "Mechanistic" philosophy, that the world was a product of blind natural processes, while the community of Puul, further along the Shelf, had become a haven for heretics, "Creationists," who clung to the idea that everything about the world had been shaped by mind—perhaps human mind. The sharp intellectual content of these ideas had burned away the last of the old animist religions to emerge after the last Formidable Caress, among the tribes that huddled in the ruins of civilization. But these contrasting world systems, sharpened by incompatibility, had become a banner of identity, as such theologies do, and hostility had deepened. At last border friction between the growing trading empires of Foro and Puul had provided the excuse everybody wanted for a cathartic war. It was a war which Belo had eagerly signed up for—a war which the Creationists of Puul had managed to carry all the way into the heart of Old Foro itself—but which, at the last, the Mechs had turned, thanks to their stunning bit of inventiveness with the balloons.

And now he and Tira had been ripped out of their time, out of the very context of their war.

Tira said grimly, "We don't even know how slowly time passes here, compared to home. We are surely already stranded far from our time. Everybody we knew must be dead. The war must be over, one way or another—perhaps even forgotten. And every day we are stuck here we are further removed from home.

Belo took her hand. "As long as we are alive our time is not dead—and the war is not over, for the truth burns in our hearts."

"As long as we are alive," Tira echoed. They clung to each other's hands in a silent pact.

Some of Belo's questions were answered perhaps a week after their stranding on this doleful plain, when Teeg's group of captives, shepherded by the patrolling Weapon, encountered others.

It was a convocation of several groups, eight or ten of them, coming together across the emptiness of the plain. There were no more than a dozen people in each subdued little flock—and each was patrolled by a circling Weapon. These machines seemed more or less similar to the one associated with Teeg, but some showed wear, their carapaces patched with dull materials.

Belo was surprised to see a herd of spindlings, six-legged, nervous and skittish, briskly controlled by a Weapon. While most of the machines were content to patrol, this Weapon spat fire into the dirt; perhaps the spindlings needed reminding. And Belo spied another class of machines altogether, squat, ugly machines that ran along the ground like carts. These devices gathered together heaps of dirt which they circled jealously. Belo had no idea what their purpose could be.

As the groups converged, Belo expected Teeg to call out to the other slave-keepers and Weapon-masters, perhaps even to go socialize. But he stayed as silent and sullen as the rest, as the machines swept busily over the dusty ground.

Their group was brought to a central place, marked out by the Weapons' patrols. And here a very strange trade began to take place.

Under Teeg's direction, Belo, Tira and the others began to hurl the rotting scraps of Dane's corpse into the rough arena marked out by the toiling wheel-based machines. Belo saw that similar corpses, some heartbreakingly tiny, were thrown out by other groups.

Meanwhile a Weapon peremptorily isolated a spindling and sliced it up with brisk slashes of its sword of fire. The other animals bucked and mewled, their long necks twisting. The people took their chance to grab slices of meat, bloody, still warm.

But the Weapons were circulating too. Some of them settled on the mounds of rusty dirt gathered by the wheeled machines. Others took chunks of meat, spindling or human, charred it black with their belly-fires, and absorbed it within their metal carapaces.

"It is a kind of market," Belo whispered to Tira. "Meat is exchanged for meat, or for the heaped-up dirt."

"So this is how Teeg keeps his people alive, "Tira said grimly, "by trading with other slave runners."

But Belo, watching closely, suspected this strange process had little to do with Teeg. After all, it was the machines that took the dirt, and absorbed much of the meat into their bodies." Perhaps these Weapons need meat as we do, for fuel," he mused.

Tira said, "But why the dirt?"

But Belo had an idea about that, too. He knew a little of the lore of iron smelting—his mind was bright and acquisitive, and he knew a little about a great many things. Perhaps the Weapons needed this rusty dirt for its iron, or other minerals, to repair their gleaming bodies. And so these toiling wheeled beasts gathered iron-rich dirt, or dug it out of the ground as ore, and exchanged it for the organic material, the meat shepherded here by their hovering cousins.

There was a kind of economy operating here, Belo saw. But the trade wasn't really about the people and their needs. It was about the Weapons.

When the strange trade was done, the various groups moved apart, shepherded by the Weapons. The toiling wheel-machines scurried away over the ground, in search of more iron-rich soil to exchange for meat.

That night Teeg's group ate comparatively well. Spindling flesh was tough and unsatisfying, but better than nothing. Belo believed that was because spindlings weren't even native to the Earth, as humans were. Teeg muttered that sometimes the Weapons brought more palatable meat, rodents or birds.

Day and night on Old Earth were controlled by the rhythmic cycling of silent light storms across the face of the deepest Lowland. In the midst of a landscape of mysteries, even this simple pattern baffled Belo. For if time was stratified, how could the days and nights down here on the Lowland itself have the same duration as up on the Shelf?—for so it felt to him. Belo was a slave who ate roots and raw meat and slept in the dirt, a situation hardly conducive to theorizing, and slowly his thinking had grown puddled. But even so, as he watched Teeg and his machine, he thought he began to see certain truths about their situation.

That night, in the dark, Tira came to Belo. "I think things are coming to a head," she whispered.

"Teeg?"

"He's been looking at me... I think my grace period is up." "And mine," said Belo.

"What do you mean?"

"He doesn't need another male around. But as long as he had Dane's flesh to trade, it was in his interests to keep me alive."

Tira grimaced. "As a walking larder."

"Yes. But now he needs my meat."

Tira said, “I’ll fight to the last. But while he has that machine of his—"

"Oh, I don't think the Weapon is 'his' at all."

"You don't?" She turned to him, her face grimy and drawn. "What's going on here, Belo?"

"I'll explain it all," he whispered. “But first we need to deal with Teeg. This is what you must do..."

As the light of day began to gather, Belo sought out Teeg. The big man sat at the edge of the rough perimeter patrolled by the hovering Weapon, peering out at the other groups scattered over the plain. He watched Belo suspiciously.

Belo was careful to keep his hands in sight at all times. "I have something for you. "Two things, actually. Gifts."

Teeg pointed. "The Weapon is just over there."

Belo held his hands up. "I won't try anything; I know it's pointless. And I know what you intend to do to me."

"Oh, yes?"

"I won't fight. What's the point? I'm sick of fighting. I'm sick of it all. I was sick of it before I fell down that chute to this hellhole. Just make it quick, all right?"

"So what do you want?"

"I told you. I have gifts for you. Can I reach inside my jacket?"

Teeg hesitated. "Slow as you like."

Belo reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his military-issue flask of gin. "It's meant for the battlefield, to comfort the dying. An anaesthetic, you know?" He unscrewed the cap and smelled the liquor. "Ah, the memories—"

"Give me that." Teeg swiped the flask out of his hand and raised it to his lips. His small eyes closed; it was the nearest Belo had seen him come to showing pleasure.

"When was the last time you had a real drink?"

Teeg grunted. "When my father's blood was still wet under my fingernails."

"Lovely image. Well, have it all. You'd have taken it anyhow once I was dead."

"That and your boots." Teeg laughed, an ugly noise, and he wiped his watering eyes with the back of a filthy hand.

The powerful drink was having the effect on a long-abstinent Teeg Belo had hoped for. He just had to wait for the alcohol to work its way through the man's curdled bloodstream.

Teeg raised the bottle again. "So what's your other gift?" "What? Oh—Tira. The woman. Take her."

Teeg eyed him blearily "You serious?" "She turned me down once too often."

"She turned you down?"

"I mean, I got her out of the battle, and protected her from you, and she still won't open her legs. I've had enough of her." Belo forced a smile. "Take her now, if you want. Have a party."

"Where is she?"

"When I tried it, she got away."

"What?" Teeg, hot with the drink, got to his feet, swaying. Belo pointed into the dark. "Somewhere over there. I couldn't see. You can get her back. You're the boss here, aren't you?"

"Damn right." Teeg took a step forward, two.

And the Weapon came drifting up with an almost-silent whisper of displaced air.

"Wait." Teeg tried to get back inside the perimeter of its patrol. Belo braced himself to push him back—but compact bundles of rags hurtled past him and slammed into Teeg, knocking him to the ground, right in the path of the Weapon. Cold eyes gleamed in small, begrimed faces; Teeg's slaves had rebelled at last.

And the Weapon spat fire. The wounds didn't kill Teeg, not straight away. But Belo saw from the way he tried to hold his belly closed that the end wouldn't be far away.

Tira stood over him. She had been hiding among Teeg's women. "An appropriate way for you to die."

Teeg's eyes were full of pain and hatred.

"She's right," Belo said. "After all, you lied, didn't you? That Weapon was never under your control. You have been farmed by it, farmed by a machine, just as much as these others, your hapless slaves. The only difference was that you had the cunning to turn the situation to your advantage. But now it's over for you. Well, I'll have my boots back. Don't trouble to take them off. I can wait."

And he sat on the dirt while the flickering light of day gathered in the sky, and Teeg's lifeblood spilled on the ground.

For the first time the women talked and even laughed. The children, hesitantly, began to play.

And still the Weapon continued its deadly circling.

"It was all about the Weapons," Belo said to Tira. "It always was." He smiled. “I call myself a Creationist. I should be ashamed of myself for not seeing it sooner"

The Creationists believed that everything about Old Earth was made for a conscious purpose. But they also believed that the world was very ancient, and that time, too, had shaped the world and its contents—even here, where time ran like syrup.

"The Weapons are made things," he said. "And made for one thing—"

"To fight in battle."

"Yes. Imagine going to war with such gleaming beasts at your command! But when those who had made them had finished their war, they forgot the Weapons ever existed. And the Weapons, intelligent, purposeful in their own way, sought a new reason to exist."

The abandoned Weapons, programmed to survive, must have fought amongst themselves, cannibalizing each other for raw materials. But with time, a more stable "food chain" emerged, with the tolling ore-extractors at the bottom, and the most aggressive battlefield machines at the top. The Weapons needed organic material too, which they took from animals like the spindlings—and, later, humans.

So a kind of ecology had emerged, involving humans and Weapons and spindlings: an ecology composed of people, and the technology they had made, and animals which, it was believed, had been brought to this world from somewhere else entirely. It was an ecology that could not have existed without the actions of humans, far in the past. But it was the Weapons that had emerged as top predator, machines that learned to farm the remote descendants of those who first made them.

"It is a very fable of Creationism," Belo breathed, marveling. “Wait until I tell them about this back at the seminary in Puul!"

"Except," Tira said dolefully, "the seminary, and Puul itself, probably don't even exist any more."

"True, true." For a brief moment, exhilarated by new understanding, he had forgotten where they were.

"And anyhow," Tira said, "I don't see how any of this helps us. We are just as much slaves of the Weapon as these women ever were."

"Ah, but we are not like Teeg," he said. "Whatever his crime, he was a survivor of an age deep in the past, a pretechnological age. We, though, come from an age used to machines, though not so advanced as these. I am confident we will find a way to convince our Weapon to serve us, rather than the other way around."

One of Teeg's women tapped his arm. "We will help you. We have watched machine. Long, long. Know its ways." Her accent was stronger than Teeg's; he wondered from what era she had come. She smiled at him. She looked very young.

"There you are," Belo told Tira. "We can't fail!"

"And then what?"

"And then we will go home, and finish the war."

So they did. By the time they stormed back up the time chute, so many years had passed on the Shelf that the war itself was a matter of history, the theological dispute over the nature of the world was transformed by new evidence, and conquerors and conquered had interbred so much that nobody could untangle the whole mess anyhow. But none of that mattered as Belo and Tira, free and vengeful, with a Weapon of untold potential at their command, began to make their own history.