Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  Nemoto said now, "That was the purpose, the design of the Red Moon. But now the machinery is failing."

  "It is?"

  "The sudden, frequent and irregular jumps. The instabilities, the tides, the volcanism. It shouldn't be happening that way."

  Emma turned back to Manekato. "Let me get this straight. The Red Moon has been the driver of human evolution. But now it is breaking down. So what happens next?"

  "We will be on our own," said Nemoto. She raised her thin hands, turned them over, spread the fingers. "Our evolutionary destiny, in hominid hands. Does that frighten you?"

  "It frightens me," Manekato said softly.

  For a moment they sat silently. Emma was aware of the dampness of the breeze, the harsh breathing of the big Daemon. On impulse she put her hand on Manekato's arm. Her fur was thick and dense, and her skin hot – hotter than a human's, perhaps a result of her faster metabolism.

  "...Wait," Manekato said softly, peering into the trees.

  Shadows moved there: shadows of bulky, powerful forms. They paused, listening. There were at least three adults, possibly more. Emma could make out the characteristic prow-shaped silhouettes of their skulls.

  The Nutcracker infant roused from her sleep. Bleary-eyed, she peered into the trees and yowled softly.

  The shadows moved closer, sliding past the trees, at last resolving into recognizable fragments: curling fingers, watchful eyes, the unmistakable morphology of hominids. One of them, perhaps a woman, extended a hand.

  The infant clambered off Manekato's lap and stood facing the Nutcracker-woman, nervous, uncertain.

  The Nutcracker-woman took a single step into the clearing, her eyes fixed on the infant. The child whimpered, and took a hesitant step forward.

  Nemoto hissed to Emma, "Listen to me. I have a further theory. The Old Ones did not disappear into some theoretical universe-spanning abstraction. They are still here. Wouldn't they want to be immersed in the world they made, to eat its fruit, to drink its water? Maybe they have become these Nutcrackers, the most content, pacific, unthreatened, mindless of all the hominid species. They shed everything they knew to live the way hominids are supposed to, the way we never learned, or forgot. What do you think?..."

  The infant glanced back at Emma, knowing. Then, with a liquid motion, the Nutcracker-woman scooped up the child and melted into green shadows.

  Back in the Daemons' yellow-plastic compound, Emma luxuriated in a hot shower, a toweling robe, and a breakfast of citrus fruit.

  Luxuriate, yes. Because you know you aren't going to enjoy this much longer, are you, Emma? And maybe you'll never live like this again, not ever, not for the rest of your life.

  You will miss the coffee, though.

  She dressed and emerged from her little chalet. The sky was littered with cloud, the breeze capricious and laden with moisture. Storm coming.

  She saw Nemoto arguing with Manekato. Nemoto looked, in fact, as if she still wasn't getting a great deal of sleep; black smudges made neat hyperbolae around her eyes. By contrast, Manekato was leaning easily on her knuckles, her swiveling ears facing Nemoto, her great black-haired body a calming slab of stillness. And Julia, the Ham girl, was standing close by, listening gravely.

  When Emma approached, Mane turned to her, smooth and massive as a swiveling gun-turret. "Good morning, Em-ma."

  "And to you. Nemoto, you look like shit."

  Nemoto glowered at her.

  "What's the hot topic?"

  "Future plans." Nemoto's foot was characteristically tapping the plastic-feel floor like a trapped animal, about the nearest she got to expressing a true emotion.

  "Gray Earth," Julia said.

  "...Oh. The deal we made."

  "The deal you made," Nemoto said. "Over and over again. You said you would take the Hams back to their home world, if they helped you."

  "I know what I said."

  "Well, now it is payback time."

  Emma sighed. She stepped forward and took Julia's great hands; her own fingers, even hardened by weeks of rough living, were pale white streaks compared to Julia's muscular digits. "Julia, I meant what I said. If I could find a way I would get you people home." She waved towards the latest Earth in the sky, a peculiarly shrunken world with a second Moon orbiting close to it. "But you can see the situation for yourself. Your world is gone. It's lost. You see –"

  Nemoto said, "Emma, you have made enough mistakes already. It would pay you, pay us both, not to patronize this woman."

  Emma said, "I'm sorry." So I am, she thought. But I made a promise I couldn't keep, and I knew it when I made it, and now I just have to get out of this situation as gracefully as I can. That's life. "The point is the Gray Earth isn't coming back. Not in any predictable way." She looked up at Mane. "Is it?"

  The great Daemon rubbed her face. "We are studying the world engine. It is ancient and faulty." She grunted. "Like a bad-tempered old hominid, it needs love and attention."

  Emma frowned. "But you think you might get it to work again?"

  Mane patted Emma's head. "Nemoto frequently accuses me of underestimating you. I am guilty. But you are symmetrically guilty of overestimating me. We cannot repair the world engine. We cannot understand its workings. Perhaps in a thousand years of study... For now we can barely see it."

  Nemoto shuddered. "We are all on very low rungs of a very tall ladder."

  But Mane said, "There is no ladder. We are all different. Difference is to be cherished."

  "And that's what we humans must learn," Emma said.

  "You will not learn it," Manekato said cheerfully, "for you will not survive long enough." She sighed, a noise like a steam train in a tunnel. "However, to return to the point, we believe we may be able to direct the wandering of the Red Moon, to a limited extent. Prior to shutting down the world engine altogether."

  "Gray Earth come," Julia said again, and her face relaxed from its mock-human smile into the gentle, beatific expression Emma had come to associate with happiness.

  Emma held her breath. "And Earth," she said. "My Earth; our Earth. Can you reach that too?..."

  "The Daemons can make one directed transition," said Nemoto gravely. "And they are going to use it to take us to the universe of the Gray Earth."

  "Because of me?"

  "Because of you."

  Emma studied Nemoto. "I sense you're pissed at me," she said dryly.

  Nemoto glowered. "Emma, these are not humans. They don't lie, the Hams and the Daemons. It's all part of the rule-set with which they have managed to achieve such longevity as species. A bargain, once struck, is absolutely rigid."

  "But what's the big deal? Even if the Daemons manage to bring us back to the Gray Earth universe, they can just send the Hams home. As many as want to go. They can just Map them there."

  Nemoto shook her head. "You aren't thinking right. The deal was with us, not the Daemons. We have to get them home. Whichever way we can."

  "The lander?"

  Nemoto just glared. Then she walked away, muttering, scheming, her whole body tense, her gait rigid, like a machine.

  PART V

  MANIFOLD

  Emma Stoney

  Hello, Malenfant. I want to tell you I'm all right.

  I know that's not what you'd want to hear. The notion that I'm alive, I'm prospering without you, is anathema. Right?

  But then you probably aren't listening at all.

  You never did listen to me. If you had you wouldn't have screwed up our entire relationship, from beginning to end. You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself. Or me.

  But I miss you even so.

  I guess you know I'm alone here. Even Nemoto has gone, off to a different fate, in some corner of the manifold or other...

  Mary

  There were more yesterdays than tomorrows. Her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, even one of her own children.

  A
nd there came a day when they put old Saul in the ground, and Mary found herself the last to remember the old place, the Red Moon where she had been born.

  It didn't matter. There was only today.

  Nemoto was not so content, of course.

  Even in the deepest times of the Long Night, Nemoto would bustle about the cave, agitated, endlessly making her incomprehensible objects. Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, not really a person, and so of no significance.

  But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto. Mary understood. Nemoto had brought them here, home to the Gray Earth. Now it was Nemoto who was stranded far from her home.

  And so Mary made space for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when she fell ill, or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat, softening the deep frozen meat with her own strong jaws, chewing it as she would to feed a child.

  But one day, Nemoto spat out her mouthful of meat on the floor of the cave. She raged and shouted in her jabbering Skinny tongue, and pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.

  She returned staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. It was a bat, dormant, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. Nemoto jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.

  Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm tidbits to the children. But when she offered them the bloated, pink-gray internal organs of the bat, mothers pulled the children away.

  After that, Nemoto would never be healthy again.

  There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, but it was the first time it had shown at all for sixty-eight days. There was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals – birds and a few large rats – were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting in their torpor.

  The people capered and threw off their furs.

  Nemoto was growing more ill. She suffered severe bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. She lost weight. And her skin grew flaky and sore.

  Mary tried to treat the diarrhea. She brought salt water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto's system.

  The days lengthened rapidly. The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, life swarmed. The people gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations.

  And soon a distant thunder boomed across the land. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds. The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed towards the sea.

  It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes: long-legged, the bucks sporting huge unwieldy antlers. The animals were slim and streamlined, and the muscles of their legs and haunches were huge and taut. And they ran like the wind. Since most of this tipped-up world was, at any given moment, either freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of miles, spanning continents in their search for food, water and temperate climes.

  But predators came too, streamlined hyenas and cats, stalking the vast herds. Those predators included the people, who inhabited a neck of land between two continents, a funnel down which the migrant herds were forced to swarm.

  The antelope herd was huge. But it passed so rapidly that it was gone in a couple of days, a great river of flesh that had run its course.

  The people ate their meat and sucked rich marrow, and waited for their next provision to come to them, delivered up by the tides of the world.

  The air grew hotter yet. Soon the fast-growing grass and herbs were dying back, and the migrant animals and birds had fled, seeking the temperate climes.

  The season's last rain fell. Mary closed her eyes and raised her open mouth to the sky, for she knew it would be a long time before she felt rain on her face again.

  The ground became a plain of baked and cracked mud.

  The people retreated to their cave. Just as its thick rock walls had sheltered them from the most ferocious cold of the winter, so now the walls gave them coolness.

  Nemoto's relentless illness drove her to her pallet, where she lay with a strip of skin tied across her eyes.

  At length there came a day when the sun failed even to brush the horizon at its lowest point. For sixty-eight days it would not rise or set, but would simply complete endless, meaningless circles in the sky, circles that would gradually grow smaller and more elevated.

  The Long Day had begun.

  Nemoto said she would not go into the ground until she saw a night again. But Nemoto's skin continued to flake away, as the bat she had woken took its gruesome revenge.

  There came a day when the sun rolled along the horizon, its light shimmering through the trees which flourished there.

  Mary carried Nemoto to the mouth of the cave – she was light, like a thing of twigs and dried leaves.

  Nemoto screwed up her face. "I do not like the light," she said, her voice a husk. "I can bear the dark. But not the light. I long for tomorrow. For tomorrow I will understand a little more. Do you follow me? I have always wanted to understand. Why I am here. Why there is something, rather than nothing. Why the sky is silent."

  "Lon' for tomorrow," Mary echoed, seeking to comfort her.

  "Yes. But you care nothing for tomorrow, or yesterday. Here especially, with your Long Day and your Long Night, as if a whole year is made of a single great day."

  Overhead, a single bright star appeared, the first star since the spring.

  Nemoto gasped. She was trying to raise her arm, perhaps to point, but could not. "You have a different pole star here. It is somewhere in Leo, near the sky's equator. Your world is tipped over, you see, like Uranus, like a top lying on its side; that is how the impact shaped it. And so for six months, when your pole points at the sun, you have endless light; and for six months endless dark... Do you follow me? No, I am sure you do not."

  She coughed, and seemed to sink deeper into the skins. "All my life I have sought to understand. I believe I would have pursued the same course, whichever of our splintered worlds I had been born into. And yet, and yet – " She arched her back. "And yet I die alone."

  Mary took her hand. It was as delicate as a bundle of dried twigs. "Not alone."

  Nemoto tried to squeeze Mary's hand; it was the gentlest of touches.

  And the sun, as if apologetically, slid beneath the horizon. A crimson sunset towered into the sky.

  Mary placed her in the ground, the ground of this Gray Earth.

  The memory of Nemoto faded, as memories did. But sometimes, sparked by a scent, or the salty breeze that blew off the sea, Mary would think of Nemoto, who had not died alone.

  Emma Stoney

  Alone.

  Yes, Malenfant, I'm alone. I know I have company – various specimens of Homo superior, who you never got to meet, and the Hams, including your Julia, who didn't get to ride back to the Gray Earth. But I'm alone even so. I'm a pet of the Daemons. They are – kindly. So are the Hams. I feel like I'm drowning in chocolate.

  I've decided to leave. I'm going up-river, into the heart of the continent. I'm intending to hook up with another band of Runners. I did that before; I can do it again. They range far into the continent's interior, the desert. They know how to find water, how to eat, how to survive out there. If anybody knows a way across the red center it will be the Runners.

  I want to see the Bullseye up close, that big volcanic blister. Although maybe it won't be so spectacular. Like you used to say about Olympus Mons on Mars: too big for the human eye to take in, right? Well, those mile-deep rift canyons around its base look like they'd be worth a snapshot.

 
; But I want to go on beyond that.

  Maybe I can get past the Bullseye, all the way to the other side of the continent. There is another Beltway over there, Malenfant, another strip of greenery on the western edge of the continent. Nemoto told me you didn't see any dwellings or structures from Earth or when you orbited the Moon. But maybe there are people there even so, in the western Beltway.

  Maybe they are like me. Maybe they are like the Hams, or the Daemons, or maybe another form we haven't dreamed of before. Nobody seems to know. Not the Daemons, not even the Hams.

  I can hear your voice. I know what you're saying. I know it's dangerous. Doubly so for a person alone. But I'm going anyhow. I'm tougher than I used to be, Malenfant.

  I'll tell you what I'd like to find, in the other Beltway, or someplace else. The place the humans evolved.

  We know the Hams were shaped by conditions on the Gray Earth. We think the Daemons are descended from a bunch of Australopithecines that wandered over to the Banded Earth millions of years ago. And so on.

  Well, presumably humans came from a group of Runners, similarly isolated. Maybe there were several of Nemoto's "speciations": one to produce some archaic form, a common ancestor of humans and Neandertals – Hams – and then others to produce the Hams, and us. And maybe others. Other cousins.

  I think I'd like to find that place. To meet the others.

  Nobody knows everything there is to know about this Red Moon. It's a big place. It's full of people.

  Full of stories.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  Babo shrugged massively, as Manekato groomed him. "It may yet be possible to use the world engine, if only in a limited way..."

  "To do what?"

  "We can explore the manifold. We can Map to other realities. Other possibilities. You don't have to send a whole Moon to do that."

  Mane pondered. "But what is there to look for?"

  "In fact there is a valid goal," Babo said carefully.

  The Astrologers, he told Manekato, believed that the universe – any given universe – was a fundamentally comprehensible system. If a system was comprehensible, then an entity must exist that could comprehend it. Therefore an entity must exist that could comprehend the entire universe, arbitrarily well or rather She must exist, as Babo put it.