Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  The ground is growing gray. The people are gray. The trees are gray. Some of the people are afraid. Their fingers wipe gray from their eyes and scalps. The children with no names whimper. Their faces hide in their mothers' bellies.

  Fire is not afraid. The gray is ash. Fire sees himself in the morning light. He sees his hands sweeping through ash, gathering embers. Now everything is ash. His head tips back. Ash falls into his mouth. His tongue tastes it. Fire is happy in this ash world. His legs run, and his mouth gibbers and hoots.

  But now his head is wet.

  His legs stop running. He lifts his head. He sees big fat raindrops fall from the sky, slowly sliding towards his face. They hit his mouth and his cheeks and his nose and his eyes. His eyes sting.

  The rain makes little pits in the ash. His toes explore the pits. The wet ash turns to gray mud.

  The other people trudge around him. Their hair is flat. The mud sticks to their feet in great heavy cakes. The rain turns the ash on their bodies to gray streaks.

  The people reach a bank of trees. They stand there, baffled.

  Stone steps forward. His great nostrils flare. "River river river!" he cries. His legs march him into the trees. His arms push aside the foliage with great cracks and snaps.

  Fire's legs carry him hurrying after Stone, into the forest.

  The forest is green and dark and moist. Leaves and twigs clutch at Fire. His eyes look around fearfully, for Elf-folk, or worse. He sees nothing but people, like muddy shadows sliding through the bank of trees. He hears nothing but the crush of foliage by feet and hands, the soft breathing of the people.

  Fire pushes out of the other side of the bank of trees.

  The ground slopes down. There is rock here, purple-red, sticking out of the grass. Fire's feet carry him carefully over the slippery rocks.

  He reaches water. The water is brown, and slides slowly past his feet. It is the river.

  The people come down to the bank. Their hands splash water on their faces, washing away mud.

  Fire does not touch the water. Fire's hands still hold the embers. Fire stands tall, and his eyes watch the river. To his left the river has scooped holes out from under the bank. A great lip of grass dangles towards the water. Fire sees that there is a gravel beach below the undercut, and deep dark openings behind it, caves.

  "Fire Fire!" he cries. "Fire Fire!"

  Fire walks towards the caves, cupping the embers. Grass and Wood, the women, follow him. They build a pile of the branches they have carried. They find the driest moss they can.

  Inside the cave, Fire lowers his embers reverently into the moss. It smokes, but soon a flame is there, licking at the moss. Fire blows on it carefully.

  When the fire is rising, Emma and Sally and Maxie come into the cave. Things cling to their backs, things of blue skin. Emma and Sally make the clinging things slide to the floor. They come to the fire and hold up their hands to its warmth. Sally rubs Maxie's wet hair.

  Fire grins. Emma grins back.

  The flames are bright. Fire has a shadow. It stretches into the back of the cave, across a bumpy, mottled floor of rock. Fire follows his shadow. It grows longer, leading deeper into the dark.

  There are animals at the back of the cave. Fire's eyes open wide. Fire's legs prepare to run.

  His nose cannot smell animals. His nose smells people. He makes his legs walk forward.

  The animals are sprawled flat against the wall. He makes his hand touch an animal. The fur is ragged and loose. He grabs it and pulls. The skin of the animal comes away from the wall.

  There is no animal. There is only the skin of the animal. It was stretched out over branches. He pushes. The whole frame falls over with a clatter.

  Behind the fallen frame he sees spears. He picks up a spear. Its tip is a different color from the wood. His finger touches the tip. The tip is stone. It is an axe. No matter how hard he pulls, the stone wants to cling to its spear.

  He drops the spear. He walks back along the cave, towards the light of the fire, the gray daylight.

  People are gathered around the fire. Some children are sleeping. One woman sits in another's lap, gently cupping her breasts. A man and a woman are coupling noisily.

  Emma and Sally and Maxie sit against a wall. Their eyes gaze at the fire, or out into the grayness beyond.

  The people are not here, though their bodies are here. Emma and Sally and Maxie are here. They are always here.

  Fire's body, warm and dry, wants to couple with Dig. His member stiffens quickly. He looks for Dig.

  Dig is lying under Stone, on the floor. His hips thrust at her. Her eyes are closed.

  Fire finds a rock on the floor. His fist closes around the rock and raises it, over Stone's head.

  Fire thinks of Stone's anger, his fists and feet.

  He drops the rock.

  He walks out of the cave, to the river.

  The rain is less now. It makes little gray pits on the surface of the water that come and go, come and go. He watches the pits.

  For a time he is not there. There is only his body, only the water at his toes, the rain on his head, the pits on the water.

  He squats down. The water is a cloudy, muddy brown. A fine gray scum floats on its surface. His eyes cannot see fish. But the water pools here, quietly. And he sees bubbles, bursting on the water.

  He slides his hands into the water. His hands like the water. It is cool and soothes his scarred palms. He waits, knees on the ground, hands in the water, the last rain pattering on the back of his neck.

  He is not there.

  A cold softness brushes his hands.

  His hands grab and lift. A fish flies over his head, wriggling, silvery. His ears hear it land with a thump on the grass behind him. He slides his hands back into the water. He is not there.

  Reid Malenfant

  So here was Malenfant, for better or worse in space once again, flying ass backwards towards the Moon – a Moon, anyhow.

  Nemoto and Malenfant sat upright, side by side, in a rounded bulge at the rear of the cramped, coffin-like, gear-crammed capsule. They were each encased in the heavy folds of their garish orange launch-and-entry suits, and a rubbery wet raincoat stink filled the air.

  Malenfant gazed into the tiny, scuffed, oil-smeared rectangle of glass before his face, trying to make out the greater universe into which he had been thrust. There was no sense of space, of openness; surrounded by the womb-like ticking and purring of fans and pumps, immersed in the stench of rubber and metal, peering out through these tiny windows, it was like being stuck in a miniature submarine.

  ...But now Earth swam into view.

  From the Station's low orbit Earth had always been immense to Malenfant, a vast glowing roof or floor to his world, ever present, dwarfing his petty craft. But now Earth was receding. First one precisely curved horizon slid into his window frame, and then the other, so that soon he could see the whole Earth, hanging like a Christmas-tree bauble in the velvet black, blue patches peeking out from beneath the white swirl of clouds, painted with the familiar continent-shapes. Malenfant could see Florida, Africa, Gibraltar and even much of South America, his single glance spanning the Atlantic Ocean. The planet slowly shifted position, drifting from the top of his window to the bottom, so he had to crane forward to see it. Even from here he could see the damage done by the Tide: smoke was smeared over a dozen coastal cities, and he saw the cold gleam of white-tops as angry waves continued to pound the land.

  Malenfant had been somewhat relieved that the launch had gone through without significant hitches.

  He had lain in his couch listening to the flexing of the tanks as they were laden with cryos, then the roar of propellants like a distant locomotive, the whine of the pumps, the waterfall shout of the pad's huge deluge system – and then the bursting roar of the engines. And he could think of nothing but the fact that this BDB booster stack on which he perched had never before flown in test, not even once – no time for that.

  Anyhow they had go
tten off the pad. The acceleration had been low at first. But as the engines far below had swiveled from side to side to adjust the direction of thrust, the two astronauts, stuck at the top of the stack, had been thrown back and forth, like ants clinging to the tip of a car antenna.

  Then had come the violence of staging, as first the solid rocket boosters and then the big main engine cluster had cut out. Malenfant had been thrown forward against his harness, crashing his helmeted head against the curving bulkhead before him. After a heart-stopping moment of drift, the second stage had cut in, thrusting him back into his seat once more.

  That second-stage burn had seemed to go on and on – six, seven, eight minutes, their craft growing lighter as fuel burned off, their velocity piling on. Not for Malenfant and Nemoto the old Apollo luxury of taking a couple of swings around the Earth to check out the systems; the BDB's last contribution had been to hurl them on a direct-ascent trajectory all the way out of Earth's gravity well without pausing.

  Just ten minutes after leaving the pad at Vandenberg, the second stage finally cut out. Malenfant and Nemoto had listened to the clunk of the burnt-out stage disengaging itself from the lander, and the bull-snorts of nose-mounted attitude thrusters turning their little craft so it pointed nose-first to the Earth – ten minutes gone, and already Malenfant was bound irrevocably for the Moon.

  Still the Earth shrank.

  "There she goes," he murmured. "I feel as if I'm driving a car into a long, dark tunnel..."

  It struck him that Nemoto hadn't said a single word since the pad rats had strapped them into their couches. Now, as they watched the Earth fall away, her small hand crept into his.

  And then they broke. They began to work from panel to panel, throwing switches and checking dials, working through their post-insertion checklist, configuring the software that would run the craft's life support systems. Necessary work without which they would not survive, not even for an hour.

  New Moon or old, Earth's satellite orbited just as far from the mother planet, and so it was going to take them three days to get there, just as it always had. But because they were flying backwards, they weren't going to be able to see the Red Moon itself. Not until they got there.

  For the first few hours the abandoned BDB second stage trailed after them, following its own independent path. It was scheduled to sail past the Moon and fly into interplanetary space. The stage was a lumpy cylinder, shining bright in the intense sunlight. Malenfant could clearly see the details of the attachment mechanisms at its upper face, and how its thin walls had crumpled during the launch. But it was venting unburnt fuel from three or four places. The small thrust of the fuel vents was making it tumble, like a garden sprinkler, and it was surrounded by a cloud of frozen fuel droplets that glimmered like stars.

  The stage's subtly modified path was bringing it closer to the lander than Malenfant would have liked, at one point no more than a few hundred feet away. He stayed strapped into his seat, watching this potential hazard, and weighing up options. But after a couple more hours the stage began to drift away of its own accord.

  When the lander was alone in the emptiness, Malenfant felt an odd pang of loneliness, and almost wished the booster stage would come swimming back, like some great metal whale.

  After six hours in space, twelve since they had been woken before the launch, they unbuckled.

  Malenfant felt a surge of validating freedom as he found himself floating up from his couch. His treacherous stomach gave a warning growl, however. Throwing up in this confined space would be even more of a catastrophe than on Shuttle. He turned his back and popped a couple of tabs, trusting that the queasiness would pass.

  Awkwardly, helping each other, they stripped out of their launch suits. Now they would wear lightweight jumpsuits and cloth bootees, all the way to the Red Moon.

  The X-38, hastily modified from a Space Station bail-out craft, was just thirty feet long, an ungainly shape the pilots likened to a potato with fins. Malenfant and Nemoto had been given couches in the rounded bulge at the craft's rear. The craft, designed for a couple of hours' flight down to Earth from low orbit, had been crammed with gear to keep them alive for ten, eleven, twelve days, the time it would take to reach the Red Moon, and come straight back again, if the natives didn't look friendly. Much of its interior was too cramped for the crew even to sit upright – but then, in its primary bail-out mode carrying injured or even unconscious crew back to Earth, reclining couches would have sufficed.

  To the rear end of the lander was fixed a liquid-rocket pack. The engine and propellants were based on the simple, reliable systems of the old Apollo Lunar Module. This engine would be used to decelerate them into lunar orbit, and then, if they chose to commit, to slow them further, until the lander began its long glide down into the atmosphere, shedding its heat of descent in a long series of aerodynamic maneuvers, much like the Shuttle orbiter's entry to Earth's atmosphere.

  During the last stages of the descent, a big blue and white parafoil, a steerable parachute a hundred and fifty feet wide, would blossom from the lander's rear compartment. That would be quite a ride. The parafoil, the largest steerable chute ever made, would be controlled by warping its wings, which was just the way the Wright brothers had steered their first ever manned flying machine. That seemed somehow appropriate. Anyhow, thus they would steer their way to a final descent, landing gently on skids.

  In theory.

  In fact they wouldn't be steering the craft anywhere. The whole descent was automated. This was something against which Malenfant had fought hard. To give up control of the rudders and flaps to some virus-ridden computer program went against every instinct he'd built up in thirty years of flying. But it was much easier and simpler for the engineers to devise a lander that could fly itself all the way down than to figure out how to give a pilot control. Trust us, Malenfant. Trust the machine.

  The facilities were not glamorous, even compared to the Station and the Shuttle. To wash Malenfant had to strip to the buff and give himself a sponge-bath. It took longer to chase down floating droplets of water and soap than to bathe in the first place.

  The toilet arrangements were even more basic. There was no lavatory compartment, as in the Shuttle and Station, so they were thrown back to arrangements no more advanced than those used on Apollo, and earlier. There were receptacles for their urine, which wasn't so bad as long as you avoided spillage, but for anything more serious you had to strip to the buff again and try to dump your load into plastic bags you clamped over your ass with your hands.

  In this cramped environment they had, of course, absolutely no privacy from each other. But it never became a problem. Nemoto was twenty-five years old, with a fine, lithe figure; but Malenfant never found her distracting – and vice versa applied, so far as he could tell. Their relationship was prickly, but they were easy together, even intimate, but like siblings.

  It was as if he had known this odd, quiet girl for a long time. In some other life, perhaps.

  After eighteen hours awake, they prepared for sleep.

  Malenfant had always had trouble sleeping on orbit. Every time his thoughts softened he seemed to drift up out of his couch, no matter how well he strapped himself down, and jerk himself to wakefulness, fearful of falling.

  And on this trip it was even worse. He was acutely aware that he had traveled far from home this time – in particular, far beyond the invisible ceiling of Earth's magnetic field, which sheltered the world's inhabitants from the lethal radiation which permeated interplanetary space. When Malenfant closed his eyes he would see flashes and sparks – trails left in the fluid of his eyeballs by bits of flying cosmic debris that had come fizzing out of some supernova a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps – and he folded over on himself, imagining what that cold rain was doing to his vulnerable human body.

  After a couple of hours he prescribed himself a sleeping pill.

  On the couch next to his, Nemoto lay very still, and didn't react when he moved; he couldn't
tell if she was asleep or awake.

  When he woke up, the pure oxygen of the cabin's atmosphere had made his nose irritable and runny, and his skin was starting to flake off, bits of it floating around him in the gentle breezes.

  The nearest thing to navigation in space Malenfant had performed before had been the not-inconsiderable task of sliding a Shuttle orbiter into its correct low Earth orbit, and then nudging two giant spacecraft, Space Station and orbiter, into a hair's-width precise docking and capture.

  Flying to the Red Moon was a whole different ball game. The X-38 had left a planet whose surface was moving at around 1,000 miles per hour. The craft was aiming to encounter a Moon moving at some 2,300 miles per hour relative to the Earth, with an orbital plane that differed from the spacecraft's. Furthermore the X-38 had to aim, not at where the Moon was at time of launch, but where it would be three days later. For the sake of the air-to-ground public-consumption transmissions they were forced to endure, Malenfant sought metaphors for what they were trying to achieve. "It's like jumping from one moving train to another – and landing precisely in a top-price seat. No, more than that. Imagine jumping from a roller coaster car, and catching a bullet in your teeth as you fall..."

  And the various computations had to be accurate to within one part in four million, or the X-38 would slam too steeply into the Red Moon's atmosphere and burn up, or else go flying past the Moon and become lost, irretrievably, in interplanetary space. If they got the navigation wrong, they were both dead. It was as simple as that.

  It didn't console Malenfant at all to consider that this feat of translunar navigation had been achieved by manned missions before – nine times, in fact, if you included Apollo 13 – since here he was in an untried, utterly untested spacecraft, heading for an alien Moon, and everybody who had worked on those ancient missions was retired or dead.