Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  The men listened. The Gray Earth lay two thousand generations in the past, and now it made the people's only legend, relayed from one generation to the next, utterly unchanging and unembroidered; they were a people conservative even in their story-telling.

  But Joshua looked up into the sky. The sun was fading now, and the earth shone brightly. This earth was not the Gray Earth, for it was not gray, but a bright, watery blue.

  The Hams lived in an unchanging present. Joshua's sense of his life was of a series of days more or less-like today, stretching ahead of and behind him like images in a hall of mirrors, reaching from his dimly recalled days as a toddler begging scraps from his mother, all the way to no-longer-remote times when he would become as toothless and broken-down as old Jacob, back in the hut, again helpless and dependent on the kindness of others. The Hams knew of life and death and the cycle of their lives. But of the world beyond themselves they knew of no change.

  ...No change but one, Joshua reflected: in the past, they had lived on the Gray Earth, and now they did not.

  Joshua looked at his companions as they rested, lolling against the ground, licking marrow from their fingertips, listening amiably to Abel's loose legends. He knew that not one of them would share his thoughts, of past and future and change, of knives buried in rocks. Joshua kept silent, and peered up at the earth's cool loveliness.

  The hut was in the overhang of the cliff, close to the lake. It was built of beech saplings stuck in the ground, bent over and tied at the top. Skins of horses and antelopes had been laid loosely over the frame, weighted down with rocks. More massive rocks had been dragged to the rim of the hut. The area around was scattered with debris, animal bones, abandoned tools, cobbles scooped from the hut floor, and handfuls of ashes.

  As the hunters returned with their haul of meat, Joshua saw that smoke was already rising from rents in the roof. Only a few children were outside, playing with the scattered cobbles and bits of skin. Joshua saw bats pecking hopefully at the abandoned bones.

  The children ran to the hunters, and playfully grabbed at their meat.

  Inside the hut the air was smoky, but the fires in their shallow hearths gave off a yellow-red glow that sent long flickering shadows over the dome of skin above. Beside the hearths, many of the women and children were already eating. The women had been hunting too. Impeded by their children and infants, women mostly did not tackle the huge game taken on by the men, but the steady flow of smaller game they returned, like beavers and rabbits and bats, provided more than half the group's provisions.

  Joshua began to shuck off his skins, loosening or cutting rawhide ropes and letting the skins fall where they might. In the hot, stuffy air of the hut he began to scrape dirt and sweat from his skin with a bit of antelope jaw bone.

  Soon everybody was naked. Men and women alike were muscular and stocky, as were all but the very youngest children, so that the hut was filled with brawny, glistening bodies, moving to and fro with slabs of meat and bits of stone and bone and skin, comparing fresh injuries and wounds. The Hams lived lives of constant exertion and physical stress, and injuries were common.

  Nobody knew their fathers here. But people were tied by loyalty to their mothers and siblings, and couples were more or less monogamous while they stayed together. So the horse meat was distributed through the group, fairly evenly.

  Joshua, with his own slab of meat, found a place on the fringe of the hearth built by Ruth, who coupled with Abel. The low fire was surrounded by heaps of dried seaweed, to be used as bedding. Abel sat with Ruth, and two small children settled down before them, noisily tearing at rabbit legs, blood running down their chins.

  One of the younger men approached the pubescent girl Mary, but she huddled close to her mother.

  Joshua ate his meat raw, tearing at it with his shovel-shaped teeth and cutting it with a flake knife; every so often he scraped his teeth with the knife. And as his powerful jaw ground at the meat, great muscles worked in his cheeks.

  On the fringe of the firelight he sat alone, speaking to nobody.

  He had had only brief relationships with some of the women. Abel, by comparison, had shared a hearth with this one woman, Ruth, for many seasons. Like the men and even some of the children, the women saw too much strangeness in Joshua.

  In one corner of the hut sat old Jacob. He was sitting on a patch of cobbles, flat sides up, laid over a damp place on the floor. He watched the others, waiting without complaint.

  Now Abel, his own hunger sated, sat beside the older man. He gossiped to him gently of the day, of who had said and done what to whom, and he tore at meat, cutting off strips with a small knife. But the old man had trouble chewing; he complained loudly about the pain of the pulpy stumps of his smashed teeth. So Abel chewed the meat himself, pulling at it until it was soft, and pushed it into Jacob's mouth as if feeding an infant. Jacob accepted it without comment or shame.

  Jacob's body showed the traces of a long life's relentless work. A charge by an enraged horse had left him with smashed teeth, a shattered arm, a crushed left side and a sprained leg that stubbornly refused to heal. The suite of injuries had left him incapable of participating in the hunt, or even joining in the easier tasks of the hut, like building the fires or making tools.

  Joshua recalled how a healthier Jacob had once helped Joshua tend Miriam, Joshua's mother, when she lay dying of an illness that had made her belly swell and caused her to cough blood. And now Abel tended Jacob. It was the way of things, accepted without question.

  Jacob was the oldest individual in the group, at thirty-nine years old.

  As the evening drew in the adults gathered in loose knots. Joshua joined a loose circle, saying little, cutting at a stick of fire-hardened wood to make a new thrusting spear. Ruth scraped at the skin of the horse to remove its fur, and dragged it through her teeth. Others settled into similar quiet chores.

  Like the others Joshua listened intently to the talk, absorbing every detail of rumors, of promises made, romances broken, children praised or disciplined, injuries healed or acquired. His hands worked at the stick, but it was a simple, ancient task, so deeply ingrained by generations of practice that it was almost as unconscious as breathing. It was as if all that existed in the world was the circle of faces, orbiting the light of the fires. All they talked of was each other, never of the tools they made; those were things of doing, not talking.

  As the last of the daylight seeped out of the bits of sky visible through the smoke vents, people drifted apart. Abel took Ruth's hand and led her to a dark corner of the hut, close to where toothless Jacob snored noisily.

  Joshua lay down alone, close to the fire Ruth had built, on a rough pallet of seaweed. He stared into the fire, and he thought he saw creatures capering in the flames. Skinny-people like the Zealots or the English. But though the dancing creatures amused him, they disturbed him too, for there were only flames, no people or animals here.

  It seemed to Joshua that he woke to hear a soft gasp, like surprise, from Jacob, and then silence. But Joshua ignored this, and fell deeper into sleep.

  In the morning they found Jacob lying dead, slumped over on his damaged arm.

  They would bury Jacob just outside the hut's main entrance.

  Joshua swept away rubbish, picked-over animal bones and flakes of worked rock, and began to dig, using bare hands and stone scrapers, powerful muscles working.

  When the grave was done it was about half Joshua's height in length, and so shallow that when he stood in it, its lip barely came up to his knees. Even so the diggers had disturbed other bones, yellow and brown from their immersion in the ground, the bones of people long forgotten.

  Abel carried Jacob's corpse in his arms. The ruined body, toothless mouth gaping, was light, for it had been some time since Jacob could eat properly. Abel was weeping, for he had been fond of Jacob, who was now gone. Abel put the body on the ground. He tried to fold it up into a fetal position, knees tucked against the chest, head resting on a forearm. But th
e body was already too stiff. So Abel and others were forced to haul at the body until its joints cracked, and it folded as required. Then Abel bound up the wrists and ankles with rawhide thong.

  Children watched wide-eyed.

  Abel set the body into the grave among the yellowed bones of deeper, nameless ancestors. Then he used his broad feet to scuff dirt back into the hole.

  Others joined in, with hands and feet, kicking at the piles of dirt around the grave. When the grave was roughly filled, Abel stamped on it to level it, and allowed the children to run over it.

  People wept openly. Many of them had loved Jacob. But now Jacob was gone.

  If the world of the Hams was unchanging, it was also a world of limits. If too many children were born, then they would starve, for the land afforded only so much food. No animal could be hunted save those small or old or weak enough to be brought down by the strength of a combination of hunters at close quarters. Every person went through life limited by their strength and their health and the richness of the land and the vagaries of the weather. Nobody, not even Joshua, could make a new tool, of a type that had not been made before.

  And here was the ultimate limit, the limit of death. Jacob was gone, no more existent than in the days before he was born, beyond hope and pain and love. For now the people grieved, and they would speak of him as if he were alive. But soon those who remembered him would die in their turn, and even his name would fade from the world.

  Absently Joshua looked up to the sky, his thick neck stiff, seeking the Blue Earth.

  And that was when he saw it: a thing like a bat that sailed across the sky, black and white like a gull – and yet it was not a bat. Its wings were stiff, and it was huge and fat, and it drifted beneath a huge blue and white skin, suspended there by threads.

  It sailed out of Joshua's sight, beyond the line of the cliffs. He watched, open-mouthed, noting where the extraordinary bat-creature fell.

  Shadow

  Shadow didn't want to wake up. In her sleep she was warm and cushioned by the woven branches, dreaming arboreal dreams five million years old.

  It was the baby that dispelled her dreams, with a bout of savage kicking that led to a stabbing stomach cramp.

  Her green mood shattered in a hail of red. She rolled over, groaning, and her gullet flexed, as if she were about to vomit. But it was a dry retch; her stomach was empty.

  She sat up, rubbing the base of her belly. Slowly the cramps eased. The sun was already above the horizon, the sky tinged subtly pink by the air's dust.

  She inspected this tree to which she had fled in the dark. Elf-folk had been here. The branches were twisted and torn where they had been pulled together for nests, and much of the green fruit of the tree was missing.

  She had not come far. She was still within the range of the people. The sun was already high, glimmering down through the canopy. The people woke with the dawn. They might be close already.

  She grabbed a handful of fruit and pushed it into her mouth.

  The people. As she did every time she woke, she remembered in grim red shards what had happened to her. Claw and Big Boss and Little Boss and the rejection by her mother. The fragmentary, terrified images broke up into a wash of green and red and blue. She hooted in alarm, as if some predator had come wheeling out of her own head to threaten her.

  She abandoned her nest and scurried down the tree to the ground. She crashed through the undergrowth, twisting aside small branches and shrubs without a thought for the noise she was making. She saw no people, and did not hear them.

  And she did not stop until she was in a place she did not know.

  For the first time in her life, she was in a place without the guidance of her elders, who had known the position of every fruiting tree, every bubbling stream. Everything was new: the trees, the rocks, the subtle crimson shades of the dust, even the way the sun lanced down through the canopy. She had no way to figure out a path through this new landscape, a way to survive. Her kind did not see patterns in the natural world; they learned the features of the environment around them – the dangers, the sources of food and water – by rote.

  Panic struck her. She longed to run back the way she had come.

  She thought of Claw.

  One of the trees had a hole in its trunk, a little above her eye level. Suddenly she was thirsty. She probed at the hole with one finger. She was rewarded with cool dampness. She pulled out her finger and licked it. Hastily she gathered leaves, chewed them to a spongy mass, and stuck them in the hole. When she pulled out the leaf mass it was dripping wet, and she sucked the water gratefully.

  Her stomach clenched abruptly. She squatted on her haunches and briskly, painfully, passed watery shit. She took some soft, crumbling wood from a rotting tree trunk, mashed it up to a wool, and used it to wipe her backside clean of the sour-smelling stuff.

  She heard a distant hooting, an answering scream. It was the Elf-folk.

  As soon as she was able, she got to her feet and walked on, feeding on whatever fruit and shoots she found, heading resolutely away from the noises of her people.

  But soon, very soon, she ran out of forest. She stood on the fringe of the open savannah, clinging to the forest's green shade.

  And a bat came drifting across the sky, a great black and white bat with blue wings.

  She howled and lunged back into the green mouth of the forest.

  Emma Stoney

  After getting away from Fire's Runner group, Emma had followed the beckoning Ham woman into the forest. It was an arduous trek, through increasingly dense foliage. But after perhaps a mile they came to a small clearing.

  There were shelters here, made of skins stretched out over saplings driven into the ground. There was an overpowering stench, of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement and burning fur. Even the walls of the huts stank, she found, a musty, disagreeable odor of a kind she associated with the clothing of old people who didn't wash or change enough.

  But, stench or not, it was a kind of village.

  A Ham village.

  A village of Neandertals. She approached cautiously, following the Ham who had found her.

  The Hams barely seemed to notice her. They were utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children plucked at her clothing with their intimidating, strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams stepped around her, their eyes sliding away.

  But however coolly the Hams greeted Emma, they did not expel her.

  She dug out her own hearth and built a fire.

  Nobody shared food with her that first night. But the next day she managed to catch a rabbit with a home-made snare, and she brought the meat back to the camp and cooked it, even sharing a little with the adults. They took the meat, sniffing the burned stuff gingerly, but ignored her.

  So it went on.

  There were many of them, she soon learned, perhaps eighty or ninety, in shelters that faded into the dense green forest background.

  With their hulking bodies and broad bony faces the Hams seemed like extras in some dreadful old movie to Emma, wrapped up in their animal skins, knocking their crude tools out of the rock. Everything they did, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air – was suffused with strength – they seemed much more powerful even than the Runners – and Emma quailed before their brute power. But it was apparent that such strength was not always wisely applied, for she saw evidence of a large number of injuries, bone fractures and crushing injuries and scarred skin.

  They were humans, of a sort, but humans who made a living about the hardest way she could imagine. Their favored hunting technique, for example, even for the largest prey, was to wrestle it to the ground. It was like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.

  But they cared for their children, and for their ill and elderly.

  And they spoke English, just like Fire's people, the Runners. Who could have taught them? That central mystery nagged at her – and she sensed her own destiny lay in unraveling it.

  The forest, like th
e savannah, was full of predators: cats and bears and dogs, not to mention snakes and insects, some of them giant-sized, that she didn't trust at all.

  But the most dangerous creatures of all were the people.

  There seemed to be many types of hominids wandering around this globe. She knew there were Hams and Runners and Elf-folk and Nutcracker-folk, and presumably others. The vegetarian Nutcrackers seemed content to chew on bamboo and nuts in the depths of the forest, following a sleepy, untroubled, almost mindless lifestyle that Emma sometimes envied. The Runners conversely generally stuck to the plains.

  The forest-dwelling Elf-folk – three or four feet high, like upright, savage chimps – were, for Emma, the most dangerous factor in the landscape. Having glimpsed what that troupe of Elf-folk had done to the Runner child, to finish her life as a living food source in the hands of Elf-men remained her abiding nightmare.

  But everybody pretty much left the Hams alone.

  For one thing, with their clothing and comparatively elaborate tool kit and distorted English they were a lot smarter than the rest. And they were beefy besides, even the women and children, more than a match for any Elf.

  For all the Hams jabbered their broken English, Emma knew she could never become part of this inward-looking, deeply conservative community. But she also knew she was a lot safer here than wandering around, alone in the forest.

  And so she stayed, inhabiting a rough lean-to on the edge of the community, bit by bit building up her own survival skills and recovering her strength, and waiting for something to turn up.

  The Hams' technology was more advanced than the Runners', but still, considering those big brain pans, remarkably limited. They had more advanced knapping techniques, manufacturing a range of flakes and points and burins in addition to the ubiquitous hand-axes. They fitted stone tips to their thick thrusting spears.

  But that was about it. They had no piece of technology with more than two or three components. They didn't have innovations even Emma could think of, such as spear-throwers and bows.