Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  In the back of her mind she had rehearsed for this, from the first day here. Don't resist, she told herself. Don't cry out. She had seen the Runners copulate, every day. It would be fast, brutal, and over.

  For a moment her assailant was still, his breath hot. She stiffened, expecting hands to claw at her clothing. But that didn't come. Instead a head, heavy, topped by tight curls, descended to her breast. She felt shuddering, a low moan.

  Gingerly she reached up. She explored a flat skull, those extraordinary brow ridges like motorcycle goggles. And she touched a swollen mass on one temple. Her assailant flinched away.

  It was Fire.

  He was weeping. She remembered how he used to go to the old woman, Sing, for comfort, before she died. She wrapped one arm around his back. His muscles were hard sheets, his skin slick with dirt and sweat.

  He reached up and grabbed her fingers. With a sharpness that made her yelp, he pulled her hand down towards his crotch. She found an erection as stiff as a piece of wood. She tried to pull away, but he pushed her hand back.

  Gently, hesitantly, she wrapped her fingers around his hot penis. His hand took her wrist and pushed it back and forth.

  She rubbed him once, twice. He came quickly, in a rapid gush against her leg. He sighed, released her wrist, and lay more heavily against her.

  Half-crushed, barely able to breathe, she waited until his breathing was regular. Then, gingerly, she pushed at his shoulder. To her intense relief, he rolled away.

  In the morning. Fire scooped up his embers and ash, and the Runners dispersed for their walk. It was as if none of the previous evening's events had ever happened.

  Reid Malenfant

  In the last hours he had to endure a visit from an Apollo astronaut: a walker on a now-vanished Moon, eighty-five years old, ramrod straight and tanned like a movie star. "You know, just before my flight we had a visit from Charles Lindbergh and his wife. He had figured that in the first second of my Saturn's flight, it would burn ten times more fuel than he had all the way to Paris. We laughed about that, I can tell you. Well, Lindbergh came to see me before I flew, and here I am come to see you before your flight. Passing on the torch, if you will..."

  And so Malenfant, with a mixture of humility and embarrassment, shook the hand of a man who had shaken the hand of Lindbergh.

  It was, at last, the night before launch.

  At Vandenberg, he stood in the crisp Californian night air. The BDB's service structure was like an unfinished building, a steel cage containing catwalks and steps and elevators and enclosures. A dense tangle of pipes and ducts and tubing snaked through the metalwork. The slim booster itself was brilliantly lit, the sponsors' logos and NASA meatballs encrusting its hide shining brightly. Its main tanks were full of cryogenic propellants, and they spewed plumes of vapor into the air. No doubt in violation of a dozen safety rules, hard-hatted technicians, NASA and contractor grunts, scurried to and fro at the booster's base, and electric carts whirred by. It was a scene of industry, of competence, of achievement.

  Malenfant stepped into an elevator and pushed the button for the service structure's crew level, three hundred feet high. He was escorted by a single tech, a Cape ape in clean-room regalia of a white one-piece coverall, latex gloves and puffy plastic hat. Malenfant had met the guy before, and they nodded, grinning; he was a somewhat grizzled veteran, long laid off by NASA but rehired for this project.

  They rose vertically in the clanking, swaying steel cage. Beyond the cage flashed steel beams, cables and work platforms, mostly unattended now. And beyond that was the hide of the main tank itself: sleek, smooth, coated with ice where the cryogenic fuels had frozen the moisture out of the night air. It was such an immense cold mass that Malenfant felt the heat being drawn out of his own body, as if he were some speck of moisture that might end up glued to that glistening skin.

  The elevator came to a stop. He stepped out, turned right, and walked over the access-arm catwalk. The walk was just a flimsy rail that spanned the rectilinear gulf between the tangled, rusted gantry, and the sleek hide of the booster. An ocean breeze picked up, laden with salt, and the catwalk creaked and swayed as if the gantry were mounted on springs. He grabbed a handrail for support. Through the chain-link fence he could see the lights of the base scattered in rectangles and straight lines over the darkened ground, and the more diffuse lights of the inland communities. The coast was black, of course, swept clean of habitation by the Tide.

  This was a noisy place. The Pacific wind moaned through the complex, and the huge propellant pipes groaned and cracked as rivers of the super-cold fluids surged through them. Fuel and wind: it was a noise of power, of gathering strength, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

  He reached the end of the walk. He stepped through the white room, the cramped enclosure where he would be inspected one last time before the launch, and he faced the streamlined fairing that would protect the Moon lander during launch. There was a hatchway cut into the fairing. A small wooden step led up to the hatch, a touch of home-workshop mundanity amid all this shining hardware.

  From here he could see into the cabin of the lander itself: small, crammed with supplies, and with two canvas-frame couches side by side. The light was a subdued green. Instrument panels on the wall glowed with softscreen displays and telltale lights. It was like looking into a small cave, he thought, an undersea cave crusted with jewels.

  Malenfant had been through it all before. Every space project, as it developed, became entangled and complex beyond the understanding of any single human. But from the astronaut's point of view that proliferating tangle reached a certain maximum, until, after some indefinable point – as the booster stack crept forward through its integration schedule, as launch day approached – the whole thing began to simplify, to focus.

  In the end, he thought, every mission reduces to this: human beings climbing into the mouth of a monster, to be hurled away from the Earth. And all the technicians and managers and fundraisers and cheerleaders and paper-chasers in the world can do nothing but watch.

  Emma's mother and her sister's family were staying in apartments on the ASFB. They had invited Malenfant to join them for Mass, celebrated by the base's Catholic chaplain.

  Blanche Stoney, the mother, was an intimidating seventy-year-old. She offered Malenfant her hand without getting out of her chair. The sister, Joan, a little younger than Emma, had raised four kids alone, and had looked exhausted every time Malenfant had met her. But the kids were all now young teenagers and, it seemed to Malenfant, remarkably well behaved.

  The priest said Mass for the family in a cramped living room.

  Malenfant, upright in his civilian suit, tanned walnut brown by the desert sun, felt as out of place as a spanner in a sewing basket. But he endured the ceremony, and took his bread and wine with the others. He tried to find some meaning and comfort in the young priest's familiar words, and the play of light on the scraps of ornate cloth, the small chalices and the ruby-red wine.

  The priest had asked Joan's two eldest boys to serve as altar boys. They did fine except during the communion service, when the younger boy held the chalice upside down so that the hosts slid out and fell to the carpet, fluttering down one by one. In the background a softscreen showed live images of the preparation of the BDB. There were a lot of holds. Malenfant tried not to watch the whole time.

  When it was done, the priest packed up and went home with promises to call during the mission.

  Joan brought Malenfant a beer. "I think we owe you this."

  Blanche, the mother, snapped, "But you owed us your presence here tonight."

  "I don't deny that, Blanche."

  Malenfant spent some time trying to explain the technicalities of the mission to them – the countdown, the launch, the flight profile. Joan listened politely. At first the children seemed interested, but they drifted away.

  In the end Malenfant was left alone with Blanche.

  She skewered him with her gaze. "You wish you
were anywhere but here, don't you?"

  "Either that or I had another beer."

  She laughed, clambered stiffly out of her chair, and, somewhat to his surprise, brought him a fresh can.

  "I know you try," she said. "But you never really had much time for religion, did you? To you we're all just ants on a log, aren't we? I heard you say that on some 'cast or other."

  He winced at the over-familiar words. "I think my wisdom has been spread a little thin recently."

  She leaned forward. "Why are you going to the Red Moon? Is it really to find my daughter – or just vainglory? To prove you're not too old? I know what you flyboys are like. I know what really drives you. You have nobody here, do you? Nobody but Emma. So it's easy for you to leave."

  "That's what the Vice-President thinks."

  "Don't name-drop with me. What do you say?"

  "Blanche, I'm going up there for Emma. I really and truly am."

  With sudden, savage intensity, she leaned forward and grabbed his hand. "Why?"

  "Blanche, I don't – "

  "You destroyed her. You started doing that from the moment you set your sights on her. I remember what you used to say. You bake the cakes, I'll fly the planes. From the moment she met you, she had to start making sacrifices. It was the whole logic of your relationship. And in the end, you fulfilled that logic. You killed her. And now you want to kill yourself to get away from the guilt. Look me in the eyes, damn it, and deny that's true."

  For about the first time since it happened, he thought back to those final moments in the T-38, the clamor in that sun-drenched sky. He remembered the instant when he might have regained control, his sense of exhilaration as that huge disastrous Wheel approached.

  He couldn't find words. Her rheumy eyes were like searchlights.

  "I don't know, Blanche," he said honestly. "Maybe it's for me. Without her, I'm lonely. That's all."

  She snorted contempt. "Every human being I know is lonely. I don't know why, but it's so. Children are consolation. You never let Emma have children, did you?"

  "It was more complicated than that."

  "Religion is comfort for the loneliness. But you rejected that too, because we're just ants on a log."

  "Blanche – I don't know what you want me to say. I'm sorry."

  "No," she said more softly. Then she rested her hand on his head, and he bowed. "Don't say you're sorry. Just bring her back," she said.

  "Yes."

  "Where do you think she is now? What do you think she is going through?"

  "I don't know," he said, honestly.

  Shadow

  Relations among the men worsened. Every day there were increasingly savage and unpredictable fights, and many of the women and infants, not just Shadow, suffered punches and kicks and bites as a consequence.

  One day it all came to a head.

  Big Boss was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his back to a small clearing, working assiduously at a cluster of nut-palm fruit. Shadow was in shade at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden as had become her custom.

  Without warning Squat stalked into the clearing. All his hair stood on end, doubling his apparent bulk. He leaped up and grabbed branches, ripping them off the trees, shaking them and throwing them down before him. He picked up rocks and hurled them this way and that. His silence was eerie, but his lips were pursed tightly together, pulling his face into a harsh frown, his eyes fixed on Big Boss.

  Big Boss ignored him. He kept on plucking at the fruit in his lap. Squat, and the other men, had made such displays before, and nothing had resulted.

  But now Little Boss suddenly broke from the cover of the trees. Without warning or apparent provocation, he hurled himself on Big Boss.

  Big Boss roared and faced his attacker, hair bristling. But Squat screeched and joined in. The three of them dissolved into a blur of nailing fists and thrashing limbs.

  All around the clearing, other men ran to see what was happening. They circled the battlers, hooting and crying – but not one of them rushed to the aid of Big Boss.

  Big Boss broke away. His eyes were round and white, and blood leaked over the side of his head, where one ear had been bitten so savagely it dangled by a thread of gristle. He ran towards the nearest tree, and tried to clamber into it. But he was limping, and Squat and Little Boss easily caught him. They pulled him back and hurled him to the ground, and punched and kicked and bit him. Squat began to jump on Big Boss's back, slamming his heels again and again into ribs and spine.

  Now more of the men joined in, screaming and yelling. Though they concentrated their attentions on Big Boss, they squabbled and fought amongst themselves, vying for their places in the new order.

  At last Little Boss climbed up on Big Boss's back. He stood straight and roared. His mouth was bloody. He grabbed one of Big Boss's arms, as if Big Boss were no more than a monkey he had caught in the forest. Little Boss twisted the arm this way and that, and Shadow heard bones snap, muscle tear.

  The women and children huddled together beneath the trees, clutching each other or grooming tensely, shrinking from the aggression.

  The men ran off into the forest, tense and excited, hair bristling. Big Boss lay where he had fallen, a bloody heap on the ground.

  Slowly the women emerged from their sheltered places. Cautiously they fed and groomed each other and their children. None of them went near the fallen Big Boss – none save an over-inquisitive child, who was hastily retrieved by his mother.

  Only Shadow stayed in her pool of shade.

  The day wore away. The shadows lengthened.

  Big Boss raised his head, then let it fall flat again.

  Then he got one arm under his body, and pushed himself upright. The other arm dangled. His flesh was ripped open, by teeth or chipped cobbles, so that flaps hung down from patches of gleaming gristle, and his skin was split by great gouges, crusted with dirt and half-dried blood. He had lost one ear completely, and one eye was a pit of blood from which a pale fluid leaked.

  He opened his mouth. Spittle and blood looped between smashed teeth, and he moaned loudly.

  The women and children ignored him.

  Big Boss pulled his legs beneath him. He began to crawl towards the trees, one leg dragging, one arm dangling. Twice he fell flat. Twice he got himself up again, and continued to drag himself forward. Where he had been lying, the blood had soaked into the ground, leaving the dirt purple. And where he passed, he left a trail of sticky blood and spit and snot, like some huge snail.

  When he got to the base of the tree, he twisted so he got his back against the bark of the trunk, and slumped back.

  He was still for a long time. The sun, intermittently obscured by cloud, slid across the sky. Shadow thought Big Boss was dead.

  But then he began to move again. Using the tree as a support, he pushed himself upright. He reached up with his less damaged arm to grab a low branch. He growled with pain. He got his chest over the branch, and felt forward, gasping. For a long time he was still once more, clinging to the branch. Then he carried on, hauling himself grimly from branch to branch, higher into the tree.

  At last he reached a high point. Clinging to the tapering trunk with his legs, he pulled down branches with grim determination. Surrounded by clusters of yellow fruit, he slumped flat in this nest, the last he would ever make.

  The women on the ground called, their panting hoots summoning each other and their children. The women climbed into the trees, infants clinging to their mothers' backs or chests. Shadow followed, keeping her distance. Soon she could see the women in their nests, clumpy shadows high in the trees, silhouetted against the deepening pink of the sky; here and there a limb stretched out, fingers working at a pelt or stroking a face.

  Shadow glanced up at Big Boss's nest. One foot dangled in the air, toes clenching and unclenching. Until a new leader emerged, the ladder of rank was broken into chaos. The days to come would be stressful and trying for everyone.

  As the last light seeped from the
sky, the men returned. They swarmed around the bases of the trees. They were still squabbling, screeching and fighting. Some of them clambered up into the trees and began to harass the women and children, smashing open their nests and chasing them across the branches; the women fought back grimly.

  Now two of the men started climbing into Shadow's own tree, peering up at her, whispering and showing their white teeth. Shadow could smell the blood on their fur.

  Forces worked in Shadow's mind: a fear of the dark unknown, a fear of further punishment at the hands of the people, a chill urge to cradle the thing in her womb. At last the forces reached a new equilibrium.

  She slid out of her nest. As silently as she could, enduring the feeble kicking of the child in her womb, she clambered from the branches of her tree into the next, and then the next.

  She slipped, alone, into the arboreal dark. Soon the sounds of the squabbling, roosting people were far behind her.

  Fire

  Here is Fire. Here are his legs walking. Here he is, keeping his hands closed together, cupping the hot embers and the ash.

  The sun is hot. The light is in his eyes. His eyes hurt him. His head hurts him.

  He remembers why. He is lying on the ground. His eyes see bits of light. Stone's feet swinging at his head and belly and chest. Once again Stone has driven him away from Dig.

  Fire wants not to be here. But it is Fire who holds the embers, not his hands. Fire must be here to make his hands hold the hot embers.

  The sky grows dark. The air grows cold. Fire looks up. The sky is covered over by cloud.

  Something falls before Fire. It is a flake. It is white and soft. There are many flakes, falling slowly, all around him.

  A flake settles on his chest. Another on his shoulders. His skin cannot feel them. More flakes settle around him, on the floor. His feet make footprints in the thickening gray cover. He stops. He looks back at the prints. He laughs. He steps backwards into the prints he has made. He steps forward into the prints.