Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  "It is a new Earth," Babo said thinly. "So we have completed a transition, riding this rogue Red Moon. How interesting."

  "Yes." She clutched her brother's hands. Despite his cool words, he was trembling. "And now we are truly of this world, Babo."

  It was true. For Banded Earth, Manekato's Earth, had gone.

  Emma Stoney

  With Joshua, Mary and Julia, Emma walked south, towards the place where – as the Hams put it – the wind touched the ground.

  Emma was pretty much toughened up by now. So long as she avoided leg ulcers, or getting tangled up in lianas or bramble, and the snakes and the multitude of insects that seemed to target any bare flesh like heat-seeking missiles, she was able to maintain a steady plod, covering miles and miles each day, across desert or semi-scrub or savannah or even through denser forest.

  The Hams had more trouble. Their sheer strength vastly exceeded her own, but long-distance walking was alien to their physiques. They looked awkward as they barrelled along, and after a couple of days she could see how they suffered aches in the hips and knees of their bow legs, and the low arches of their great flat feet. Also, she suspected, such sedentary creatures as these must suffer a deeper disturbance as they dragged themselves across the landscape, far from any settled community. But, though they moaned wordlessly and rubbed at the offending parts of their anatomies, they never complained, not to her or each other.

  The days were long and hot, and the nights, spent under the crudest of lean-tos, cold and cruelly uncomfortable. The Hams seemed capable of sleeping wherever they lay down, their great muscled bodies tensed and hard even in their sleep, like marble sculptures. But Emma had to work hard to get settled, with bits of parachute silk wrapped around her, and socks and vests bundled into a ball under her head.

  Much of this stuff was Malenfant's.

  She had forced herself to take everything from him that might prove useful, even the little lens that had found its way from her hands to his. It wasn't sentiment – sentiment would have driven her to bury the stuff with him – but a question of seeking advantages that might prolong her own survival. Not that there was much left, even though Malenfant had come to this Red Moon as part of a purposeful expedition, unlike her own helpless tumble through the Wheel. Idiot, Malenfant.

  Anyhow, each night she immersed her face in the ragged bits of Malenfant's clothing, seeking the last traces of his scent.

  Day after day, they walked. The Hams never wavered in their course, each clumsy step directed by a wordless navigation.

  It occurred to Emma to wonder how people who moved house less often than empires rose and fell on Earth were able to find their way across such challenging distances. She tried to discuss this with Julia. But Julia was unforthcoming. She shrugged her mighty shoulders. "Lon' time. People come, people go. This way, tha'. See?"

  No, Emma didn't see. But maybe it was something to do with their long Neandertal timescales – far longer than any human.

  The Hams, squatting in their caves and huts, made nothing like the seasonal or annual congregations associated with human communities. But there had to be occasional contacts even so, for example when outlying hunting parties crossed each other's paths, or maybe when a group was forced to move by some natural disaster, a cave flood or a land slip.

  And such was the static nature of the Ham world that even very occasional contacts – not even once a generation – would suffice to keep you up to date. Once you knew that Uncle Fred and Aunt Wilma lived in those limestone caves two days' hike west of here, you could be absolutely sure that they would always be there. And so, over generations, bit by bit, from one small clue after another, the Hams and their forefathers built up a kind of map of the world around them. The Ham world was a place of geological solidity, the locations of their communities as anchored as the positions of mountains and rocks and streams, shifting only with the slow adjustments of climate.

  It was an oddly comforting world-view, filled with a certain calm and order: where nothing ever changed much, but where each person had her own place in the sun, along with every rock and stream. But it wasn't a human world-view. People rooted like trees... Though she struggled to understand, it was beyond her imagination.

  And of course she might be quite wrong. Maybe the Hams worked on infra-sound like the elephants, or on telepathy, or astral projection. She didn't know, and as Julia was unable to answer questions Emma was barely able to frame, she guessed she never was going to know.

  And anyhow, after the first few days' walk, the direction they were all traveling became obvious even to her. Far to the south a column of darkness reached up to the sky: not quite straight, with a sinuous, almost graceful curve. It was a permanent storm, tamed, presumably, by some advanced technology she couldn't even guess at.

  It was, of course, the fortress of Homo superior, whoever and whatever they were.

  The Hams plodded on, apparently unaffected by this vision. But when the twister's howling began to be audible, banishing the deep silences of the night, Emma found it hard to keep up her courage.

  The weeping came to her in the night.

  Or in the morning when she woke, sometimes from dreams in which she fled to an alternate universe where she still had him with her.

  Or, unexpectedly, during the day as they walked or rested, as something – the slither of a reptile, the chirp of an insect, the way the sunlight fell on a leaf – reminded her unaccountably of him.

  She knew was grieving. She had seen it in others; she knew the symptoms. It wasn't so much that she was managing to function despite her grief; rather, she thought, this unlikely project to go challenge Homo superior was something to occupy the surface of her mind, while the darker currents mixed and merged beneath. Therapy, self-prescribed.

  The Hams seemed to understand grief. So they should, she thought bleakly; their lives were harder than any human's she had known, brief lives immersed in loss and pain. But they did not try to soothe her or, God forbid, cheer her up.

  There is no consolation, they seemed to be telling her. The Hams had no illusion of afterlife or redemption or hope. It was as if they were vastly mature, ancient, calm, compared to self-deluding mayfly humans, and they seemed to give her something of their great stolid strength.

  And so she endured, day by day, step by step, approaching the base of that snake of twisting air.

  It didn't surprise Emma at all when the Hams, with the accuracy of expert map readers, walked out of the desert and straight into an inhabited community.

  It was a system of caves, carved in what looked like limestone, in the eroded rim wall of what appeared to be a broad crater. The upper slopes were coated thinly by tough grass or heather, but the sheltered lower valleys were wooded. And the crater was at the very bottom of that huge captive twister, which howled continually, as if seeking to be free.

  As she approached she made out the bulky forms of Hams, wrapped in their typical skin sheets, coming and going from scattered cave mouths that spread high up the hillsides.

  Emma could see the advantages of the site. The cave mouths were mostly north facing, which would maximize the sunlight they captured and shelter them from the prevailing winds. She suspected the elevated position of the caves was a plus too. Maybe the migration paths of herd animals came this way. Hams preferred not to have to go too far to find their food; sitting in their caves, gazing out over the broken landscape around the crater, all they would have to do was wait for their food supply to come their way.

  ...But that wind snake curled into the air above their heads, strange, inexplicable, filling the air with its noise – even if it didn't disturb so much as a dust grain. You'd think it would bother the Hams. She saw no sign that it did.

  Emma and her companions walked to the foot of the crater wall, and began to clamber up. The adults glanced down at their approach, but turned away, incurious.

  The first person who showed any interest in them was a child: stark naked, a greasy bundle of muscle and
fat no more than three years old, with one finger lodged in his cavernous nostril. This little boy stared relentlessly at Emma and followed her, but at a safe distance of a yard or so; if she tried to get closer he backed away rapidly until his buffer of safety was restored. Ham children were much more like human children than their adult counterparts. But Ham kids grew fast; soon they lost the open wonder of youth, and settled into the comfortable, stultifying conservatism of adulthood.

  She stepped into the mouth of the largest cave. The noise of the whirlwind was diminished. The sun was bright behind them, and Emma, dazzled, peered into the gloom.

  The walls were softened and eroded, as if streaked with butter. There was a powerful stink of meat, coming from haunches and skins stacked at the back of the cave. The place was not designed for the convenience of people, she saw; the roof was so low in places that the Hams had to duck to pass, and crude lumps of rock stuck out awkwardly from the walls and floor. She recognized the usual pattern of Ham occupation: a floor strewn thick with trampled-down debris, an irregular patchwork of hearths. The roof was coated with soot from innumerable fires, and the walls at head height and below were worn away and blackened by the touch of bodies, generation on generation of them. This place had been lived in a long time.

  Emma found a piece of wall that seemed unoccupied. She dumped her pack and sat down in the dirt.

  A woman approached the travelers. Bent, her hair streaked with white, a tracery of scars covering her bare arms, she looked around eighty, but was probably no older than thirty-five or forty. She began to jabber in a guttural language Emma did not understand, with no discernible traces of English or any other human language. Julia seemed uncertain how to reply, but Mary and Joshua answered confidently. Neither party seemed ill at ease or even surprised to see the other.

  Julia came to Emma.

  Emma said, "So can we stay?"

  Julia nodded, a Homo sap gesture Emma knew she affected for her benefit. "Stay."

  With relief Emma leaned back against the creamy, cool wall of the cave. She opened her pack and dug out her parachute silk blanket and a bundle of underwear to use as a pillow. The ground here, just crimson dust, much trodden and no doubt stuffed with the bones of Ham grandmothers, was soft by comparison with what she had become used to; soon she felt herself sliding towards sleep.

  But she could hear the howl of that tame whirlwind, relentless, unnatural, profoundly disturbing.

  She spent a full day doing nothing but letting her body recover, her head become used to the sights and sounds and smells of this new place.

  Right outside the cave entrance, a stream of clear water worked its way through rocky crevices towards the impact-broken plain below. Its course was heavily eroded, so that it cascaded between lichen-crusted, round-bottomed pools. The people used the pools for washing and preparing food, though they drank from the higher, cleaner streams.

  Emma waited until she wasn't in anybody's way. Then she drank her fill of the stream, and washed out her underwear, and spread it out to dry over the sunlit rocks.

  As she tended her blistered feet and ulcerated legs, and made small repairs to her boots and underwear, she watched the hominids around her.

  Her Ham companions seemed to settle in quickly, according to their nature. Mary, strong and powerful, spent happy hours wrestling with the younger men, besting them more often than not. By the end of the day she was hardening spear points in a hearth, apparently preparing for a hunt.

  Julia seemed to make friends with a group of women and children who spent much of their time clustered around one hearth – she blended in so well, in fact, that Emma soon had trouble distinguishing her from her companions, as if she had been here all her life.

  Joshua, a loner in his own community, was a loner here. He settled into a small, solitary cave, and Emma saw little of him. But the Hams here seemed to tolerate his eccentricities, as had his own people.

  As for Emma, she was largely ignored, much as she been with her other communities of Hams. Unable to shake off a feeling of sufferance – after all, how would a Neandertal stray be treated if she wandered into a human community? – she did her best to keep out of everybody's way.

  There was one old man who seemed to take a liking to her, however – old, meaning maybe ten years younger than she was. He was badly disfigured by a swathe of scar tissue that lapped up from where his right ear should have been to the crown of his head. She didn't have a word in common with this guy, and she couldn't ask him about his injury. But this wounded, smiling man seemed vaguely curious about her: curious enough, anyhow, to offer her meat. The meat was a prime cut, apparently from the shoulder of some animal – an antelope, maybe, but it could have been a rhino for all she knew. It was a groaning bloody slab two fingers thick and twice the size of a dinner plate. Her benefactor watched with absent interest as she rigged up a frame of sticks to cook it over the nearest fire.

  It seemed he had no English name. She took to thinking of him as Scarhead.

  The meat was frankly delicious, though she longed for green vegetables, gravy and a mellow Bordeaux to go with it.

  The Hams worked hard, of course. But it struck her how happy they all seemed or if not that, content. Evidently the game was bountiful here, the living easy; all these guys had to do was sit around and wait for the meat to come wandering past, season after season. They even had fresh running water, day and night, right outside the cave. She remembered fantasies as a child of finding Candyland, where all the trees were chocolate and the streams lemonade, where you didn't have to work for anything, where you could take as much as you liked, just by reaching out. Was the way these people lived so different from that?

  But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?

  Well, they wouldn't be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They'd breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.

  Then would come the famines and the wars.

  So much for Candyland. Maybe these Hams weren't just as smart as humans, she mused; maybe they were actually smarter.

  On the third day she walked out of the caves, alone, and set off up the eroded hillside.

  The rocks were broken and worn, and cut deeply by gullies, in some of which water still flowed. She found that the easiest way to make progress was to lower herself into one of the gullies and clamber up its smooth, sloping sides, taking care not to slip on moss or lichen, until the channel petered out and she had to transfer to another.

  Though she was soon panting hard and sweating into her coverall, she could feel her heart and lungs pump, the muscles of her newly powerful legs tingling. You're in the best shape you've been in for years, girl.

  The noise of the tame whirlwind howled ever louder. She resolutely ignored it.

  Just below the summit she sat on a patch of bare rock, gathering her breath, getting the hassles of the climb out of her head. The eroded hillside, deeply punctured by its limestone gullies and caves, swept away beneath her. The sun was still low; it was maybe ten in the morning local time.

  She stood and turned away from the plain. She walked up the last few paces to the crater's summit plateau, and faced the wind.

  It was a wall of churning air: a cylinder, laden with dust, that must have been a couple of miles wide. It looked flat on her puny human scale, like the wall of a vast building. But it snaked into the sky, diminishing as her gaze followed it, and at its highest extremity it curled in the air, thread-like. The whole thing was streaked horizontally, like the clouds of Jupiter, by billows of crimson dust. The flow of the air seemed smooth, though here and there she saw bits of rock and vegetation, even a few snapped-off trees. But the rock at the wind's shimmering foot was worn bare.

  The
violence, the energy, were startling; it was like a waterfall, a rocket launch. A deep part of her mind couldn't accept that it was controlled by anything: the animal in her, conditioned by a million years of experience, knew that this lethal expression of nature's power was unpredictable, beyond propitiation.

  Nevertheless she walked forward. After a few paces, she felt the first breath of wind, and a speckle of dust on her cheek.

  When she got to within maybe a hundred paces of that dense wall of dust the air grew turbulent. She staggered but kept on, leaning into the wind to keep to a rough straight line, and the dust bit harder, stinging her mouth and eyes.

  She shielded her eyes. Only maybe fifty paces to the dust. Forty-nine, forty eight... The air was a powerful physical presence, battering at her torso and face, whipping her hair, snatching the breath from her lungs.

  And now she was inside the dust, suddenly, as if walking into a sandstorm. The dust was a thick glowing cloud around her, obscuring the sky, the rock, even the twister itself; and when she looked downwind she saw how she cast a kind of shadow in the streaming particles.

  A fresh surge hit her, unexpectedly violent. She fell sideways, rolled a couple of times, and hit her head on a rock.

  She lay there for a moment. Then she got to all fours on the worn-bare rock and tried crawling.

  She fell again, rolled back, tried again. Her hands and the skin of her cheeks were streaked with tiny cuts, where sharp bits of rock had bitten into her. Still she kept trying.

  Lacking a plan B, she tried again the next day. And the next.

  She tried wrapping herself in her parachute silk, to keep out the dust and bits of rock. She just got blown away faster. So she tied the silk tightly around herself, an outer-body garment with slits for her hands, a mask over her face. She managed to get further into that central wall of dust, maybe ten paces deep, before the sheer strength of the wind stopped her progress.