Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  She splashed out of the water. Briskly she inspected her harpoon, considering whether it was worth keeping; she had learned to conserve her energy and time, never throwing away anything that might be used again. But the barbs were broken. She stripped off the hide string and stuffed it back into her pack, and let the bits of the harpoon fall, abandoning this thing she had made that would have been beyond her imagining a few months ago, forgetting it as carelessly as any every-day-a-new-day Ham craftsman.

  With her hand-axe she skinned and gutted the fish. You had to avoid the guts, and the skin could be coated by toxic mucus or dangerous spines: tricks she remembered from her childhood camping-in-the-woods days.

  Then she pulled on her coverall and boots, picked up the skate meat and her pack, and walked steadily up the beach towards the Ham encampment.

  These Hams accepted her silent presence in the corner of their hut, as readily as every other group she had encountered. They predictably turned away from her first offer of skate meat. But she continued to bring home gifts from the sea, until they had, one by one, experimentally, begun to taste the pale, sharp flesh.

  So she settled into her corner of the communal hut, wrapping herself each night in grimy bits of parachute canvas, watching the Hams, waiting for some opportunity to find a way up the cliff to the lander.

  She learned their names – Abel and Ruth and Saul and Mary – odd quasi-Biblical names, presumably bequeathed to them, like their fractured English, by some ancient contact with humans, Zealots or other "Skinny-folk". She tried to follow their complex social interactions, much of it centering on speculative gossip about the vigorous child-woman Mary.

  They were typical Hams. Come to that, all Hams were typical Hams.

  Their English was broken – mispronounced, with missing or softened G and K and th sounds and vowels that blurred to sameness. The language had tenses past, future – and there were even conditionals, used for instance by gossiping women as they speculated what would follow if Mary gave herself to Saul, or if she fell for Abraham's clumsy wooing first. But their language was elemental, with a simple vocabulary focusing on each other, their bodies, the hut.

  As for Mary herself, she was clearly at the center of a storm of hormonal change, relishing and fearing all the attention she got at the same time. But she never teased, Emma observed, never led any of the men on. Deceit seemed utterly unknown to these people. They were clever in many ways, but whatever they used those big brains for it wasn't for lying to each other, as humans did.

  All this dubious anthropological speculation served to occupy her mind. But it was all spectacularly useless when it came to bringing her closer to her central goal of reaching the big black and white moth suspended on the cliff over their heads, in which none of the Hams showed the slightest interest.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  Manekato pushed into the forest. The foliage was dense, dark green, damp, cold, and it seemed to clutch at her face and limbs. The shadows stretched deep all around her, concealing subtle, elusive forms, as if wild creatures were Mapping themselves into and out of existence all around her.

  Briefly she considered going back to the compound and seeking a new symmorph perhaps with better dark-adapting vision. But as she worked deeper into the wood her body moved increasingly easily, her feet and hands clutching at branches and roots, and a clear sense of direction worked with her powerful hearing to guide each footfall. She dismissed her fears; she even felt a certain deep exhilaration. We came from the forest, she thought, and it is to the forest that I now return.

  She was seeking Without-Name, who had left the encampment of exiles.

  Even before her final departure Without-Name had taken to spending increasingly long times away from the compound. After her challenge by Nemoto over the captured Zealot, she had not brought back further "specimens", but at times Manekato thought she had glimpsed blood on her dirt-matted fur, and even on her lips.

  To her surprise the little hominid Nemoto had expressed sympathy with Without-Name. "Without-Name is out of control. But she is right. You are too slow, too cerebral, Mane. Perhaps your minds have grown over-ornate, and are strangled by their own complexity. It is time to confront the Old Ones, not to theorize over them..."

  It had been deeply shocking for Manekato to hear such critical sentiments expressed by a mere lower hominid.

  Still, Without-Name had become an increasing distraction, a wild blood-stained rogue planet crashing through the orderly solar system of purpose and knowledge acquisition which Manekato had sought to establish. Babo and others had expressed relief when Without-Name had finally failed to return from one of her ambiguous jaunts. But Manekato had sensed that Without-Name would cause them all severe and unwelcome problems yet.

  Finally Manekato had been disturbed by a cacophony of cries, coming from deep in the nearby belt of forest. Something there had died, in great pain and anguish; and Manekato had had a powerful intuition that it was time for her to seek out Without-Name and meet her on her own terms.

  And so here she was, just another hominid picking her way through the forest.

  She emerged from the bank of trees. Beyond a stretch of rock-strewn ground, a low cliff rose: broken and eroded, perhaps limestone, pocked with hollows and low caves, overgrown with moss and struggling trees. Somewhere water trickled.

  The sky was clouded over. The place was claustrophobic, enclosing. She could smell blood, and dread gathered in her heart.

  A hominid walked out of one of the caves. To judge by the sewn skins he wore, he was a Zealot, like the specimen Without-Name had brought back to the camp. He carried a crossbow, and his tunic and leggings were splashed with dirt and blood. He saw Manekato, standing alone at the edge of the forest. His eyes widened. He dropped his bow and ran back into the cave. "Daemons! Strange Daemons!"

  Manekato gathered her courage. She stepped forward, crossing the rock-strewn floor.

  She paused in the cave's entrance, giving her eyes time to adapt to this deeper dark. The cave's roof was a layer of rock just above her head. It was worn smooth, as if by the touching of many fingers; perhaps this place had been inhabited for many generations. The cave stank of hominid, of crudely prepared food, of stale urine and feces and sweat – and of blood.

  A shadow moved before her. As it approached the light, it coalesced into the form of Without-Name. Her fur was splashed with blood, and a gouge had been cut into her arm.

  "I suppose I have been expecting you," she growled. "Are you aware what a target you provide, silhouetted against the light? We have not fought a war for a million years, Manekato; we have lost our instincts for survival."

  "What have you done, Renemenagota?" Manekato reached out and touched the wound in the other's arm. It was a deep slice over the bicep, still leaking blood – it had not even been cleaned. "I see your victims did not submit quietly."

  Without-Name barked laughter. "It was glorious. Come."

  She turned and led the way deeper into the cave, and Manekato followed reluctantly.

  At the back of the cave a lamp of what looked like burning animal fat flickered in a hollow on one wall; the rock above was streaked with black grease. By its light Manekato saw she was walking over scorched patches of dirt – hearths, perhaps, all cold and disused. Bits of stone and bone and wood were scattered everywhere. At the rear of the cave, animal skins had been stretched over rough frames of wood.

  There were hominids here. They were Zealots, dressed in their characteristic garb of crudely sewn skin. When Manekato knuckle-walked towards them they yelled and grabbed their weapons.

  Without-Name held up her hands. "She is weak. She will not harm you."

  The Zealots hurried out of her way, jabbering their alarm to each other.

  Beyond the Zealots there was a mound of slumped forms.

  They were hominids, all dead. They were the powerful squat creatures Nemoto called Hams. They had been slaughtered by crossbow bolts and spear thrusts. They had not died easily: ripped
throats and gouged eyes and severed limbs testified to that, as did the injuries nursed by the Zealots. Blood soaked through the grisly heap, and spilled guts glistened on the floor beneath.

  Without-Name's eyes glittered. "You cannot engage these fellows hand-to-hand; the power of these stocky bodies is simply too great. But they work strictly short range. And so they fell to our bows and throwing spears as they tried to close with us, one after the other. Once they were down it was a case of moving in to finish them off. But they fought on even with their bellies torn open, their throats cut. Well, this was their home for uncounted generations – you can see that – they were fighting as we would for our Farms..."

  Manekato discerned a smaller bundle, laid on top of the heap of corpses. It was an infant, its age impossible to tell, one leg bent back at an impossible angle. "Did this little one give you a good spectacle, Renemenagota?"

  Without-Name shrugged. "The Zealots took most of the smaller infants back to their stockade. You can't tame an adult Ham, you see; you have to get them young to break them. This one wouldn't leave its mother's side. The efforts to remove it resulted in a snapped leg." She grinned, her teeth showing bright in the gloom. "Praisegod Michael was here. Their leader, you see; the leader of the Zealots. He uttered words over the corpses, blessing them, commending their souls to the afterlife he believes awaits us – or rather awaits his sort of hominid; he isn't so sure about the rest of us. Michael said his prayers over this little creature and then cut its throat. A delicious contradiction, don't you think?

  "You should see the ambition that burns in Michael's eyes. He dreams of cleansing his world of such creatures of the Devil as this – what an ambition! but he has lacked the understanding to make it so. He was wary of me when I approached him – no, contemptuous, because for him I am less than human. But I forced him to listen to me. I made him see that by taking his captives and training them properly, he increases his resources, you see, which he can deploy for further conquest; once initiated, it is a simple exponential growth."

  "You spoke to this monster – you are working with him?" Manekato said tightly, "Whoever this Praisegod is, his reasons for wishing to destroy the Hams and the others have surely more to do with the flaws in his own heart than any ideological justification."

  Without-Name grabbed her arm and held it tight; Manekato felt moisture, blood and sweat, soaking into her fur. "Of course Praisegod Michael is mad. But it is a glorious madness."

  Manekato prised her arm away from Without-Name's grip. Regretfully she said, "Glorious or not, I have to stop you."

  Without-Name laughed. "You do not have the imagination or the courage for that, Manekato."

  The Zealots were returning to the pile of Ham corpses. They were cutting away ears and hands, perhaps as trophies. But their movements were characteristically sluggish, like pale worms moving in the dark.

  Joshua

  Joshua lay on the filth-crusted floor of his cell.

  He was left alone for days. It was worse than any beating. There was nobody to look at him.

  The People of the Gray Earth were never alone by choice. They spent their entire lives in their tight-knit communities, surrounded day and night by the same faces, change coming only through the slow tide of birth and death. Some women spent their entire lives within a hundred paces of where they were born. Even parties of hunters who ranged farther in search of big game would not mix with other groups of hominids, even other Hams; strangers were like faces in a dream, remote, not real.

  He tried to picture the hut, the people coming and going about their business. He tried to recall the faces of Abel and Saul and Mary and Ruth and the others. The life of the people was going on, even though he was not there to be looked at – just as it had continued after the death of Jacob, the endless round of days and nights, of eating and sleeping and fornicating, of birth and love and death.

  Jacob was dead. Was Joshua dead?

  Away from others, Joshua was not even fully conscious. As the light came and went, he felt himself crumble. He was the walls, the filthy floor, the patch of daylight in the roof.

  ...And yet he was not alone, for there were people in the walls.

  Faint marks had been scratched there, perhaps by fingernails, or with bits of stone. Some of them were so ancient they were crusted with dirt, and could be detected only by the touch of his fingertips. Perhaps they were made by Skinny or Nutcracker-man or Elf or Runner. But not by Ham, for no Ham made marks like these.

  Scratches on the wall. Patterns that pulled at his consciousness. Boxes and circles and lines that longed to speak to him.

  He was in a cave. But it was not a cave, for its walls were made of rocks piled one on top of the other. Sometimes the people would build walls, lines of rubble loosely piled, to help keep out the small animals that foraged at night. Joshua knew what a wall was. But these walls went up, high above Joshua's head, too high for him to reach.

  And there was a roof made of rocks too, suspended over his head. On first waking here, he had cringed, thinking a sky full of rocks was descending on him. But the roof did not fall. He learned to uncurl, even to stand – though each time he woke from sleep he forgot about the roof, and whimpered in terror and curled in a corner of the cell.

  The only light here came from a hole in the roof. He saw the days come and go through that hole, night succeeding day. He would lie on his back staring at the little circle of light. But when it rained, the water would pour through the hole, and he would huddle in a corner, shivering.

  Sometimes a face would appear in the hole, the face of a Skinny. Stuff would be thrown down at him. Sometimes it would be food that he would scrabble to collect from the floor. The food was poor, scraps of cut-up vegetable or fruit peel or bits of gristle, some of it already chewed, sour with the saliva of Skinnies. But he devoured it all, for he was constantly hungry.

  Sometimes they would hurl down water at him, usually brackish and stinking, enough to drench him. It would drain away out of a hole in the center of the blackened, worn floor, taking much of his own shit and piss with it. When the water came he would stand with his mouth and hands open, catching as much as he could. And when it had finished he would scrape at the filth-blackened floor with his fingers, collecting as much of the water as he could, even lick the floor with his tongue.

  But sometimes all the Skinnies would throw down was their own thin shit, or they would piss in the hole, trying to hit him as he scurried from side to side.

  His memories of how he had come here were blurred.

  He remembered the clearing. After Mary had escaped he had been picked up by many Skinnies, all grunting with the effort. With every jolt his shoulder had blazed with pain. They had thrown him onto a platform made of strips of cut-up wood. And then the platform had been dragged away, along broad trails burned into the woods.

  He remembered entering the stockade. It was a great wall of sharpened tree trunks driven into the ground, many times higher than Joshua could have reached. Inside there were huts of sod and wood, dark hovels whose stink had struck him as he was dragged past. There were many animals, goats and rabbits and ducks. There were many, many Skinnies, with grimy skin and brown teeth.

  And there were Hams. They dragged at ropes and pushed bits of wood and dug at the ground. Joshua had hooted to the Hams, seeking help. Though the Hams were few, they could surely overpower these Skinny folk easily. But they had not responded, not even looked up, and he had been silenced by a slamming blow to his mouth.

  They had removed his skins, and he was naked. And he had been thrown into this darkened cell.

  The punishment had started immediately.

  There had been Skinnies around him. Some of them were grinning. One of them carried a stick whose tip glowed bright red. Joshua stared at the glowing stick; it was one of the most beautiful colors he had ever seen. For one brief instant he left his aching body, and was the fiery glow.

  But then the Skinnies shoved him on his back, trapping his limbs. T
he man with the glowing stick held it before Joshua's face – he could feel heat, like a fire – the man rammed it into the wound in his shoulder.

  Only fragments after that, dark red fragments soaked with pain. Fragments, fading into dark.

  But Joshua welcomed the presence of those who beat him. For at least, then, he was not alone.

  One day he saw faces in the scratches on the wall. Faces that peered out at him, the faces of Skinnies.

  No, not faces: one face, over and over.

  The face of a man, thin, bearded, a circle over his head. The man looked at him, but did not look at him. Sometimes Joshua yelled at him, punched the face. But the wall would return, scraping his knuckles, and the man, not replying, would disappear into his web of scratches.

  Joshua was dead. He was in a hole in the ground, like Jacob. But there were no worms here. There were only the faces, looking at him, not looking at him.

  He screamed. He cowered in the corner, as he did when his captors pissed on him.

  That was how the Skinnies found him one day, when they burst into his cell with their clubs and rocks and whips. They mocked him, kicking at his back and kidneys, and they pulled him out of the corner and stretched him.

  A leering face hovered over him. "We'll break you yet, boy, while there's still some work left in that hulking body of yours." He arched his back, trying to see the man in the wall.

  There was laughter. "He's looking for Jesus."

  Running footsteps. A boot launched at his face. He felt a tooth smash at the back of his mouth.

  "Help!" he cried. "Help me, Cheesus!"

  The jailers staggered back, open-mouthed, staring.

  A day and a night. His tooth was a pit of pain.

  Skinnies were in the cell. Joshua scuttled to his corner, expecting the usual blows.