Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.

  …The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.

  Fire’s hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.

  People laugh and hoot at the fire.

  Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.

  Emma Stoney:

  The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural land beyond showing as patches of greyish green and brown. On the eastern horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon, almost full, its small grey face peering back at the sun’s harsh glare.

  Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.

  Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten per cent of the time on his two spaceflights throwing up.

  Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon to left. As they headed towards the interior of the continent, the land turned brown, parched, flat.

  “What a shithole,” Malenfant said, his voice a whisper over the jet’s roar. “Africa. Cradle of mankind my ass.”

  “Malenfant—”

  He hurled the T-38 forward with a powerful afterburner surge.

  Within seconds they had reached 45,000 feet and had gone through a bone-shaking Mach 1. The vibrations damped away and the noise of the jets dwindled — for, of course, they were outstripping most of the sound they made — and the plane seemed to hang in shining stillness.

  Emma, as she had before, felt a surge of exhilaration. It was at such paradoxical moments of stillness and speed that she felt closest to Malenfant.

  But Malenfant was consumed by his gripes.

  “Two years. I can’t fucking believe it. Two years of training, two years of meetings and planning sessions, and paddling around in hydro labs and spinning around in centrifuges. All of it for nothing.”

  “Come on, Malenfant. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not as if Station work was ever such a prize anyhow. Looking at stars, pissing in Jars. That’s what you used to say—”

  “Nobody was flying to fucking Mars. Station was all that was available, so I took it. Two flights, two lousy flights. I never even got to command a mission, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You got washed out this time. That doesn’t mean you won’t fly again. A lot of crew are flying past your age.” That was true, of course, partly because NASA was having such difficulty finding willing applicants from younger generations.

  But Malenfant growled, “It’s that asshole Bridges. He even called me into the JSC director’s office to explain the shafting. That fucking horse holder has always had it in for me. This will be the excuse he needs to send me to purgatory.”

  Emma knew whom he meant. Joe Bridges was the director of flight operations — in effect, in NASA’s Byzantine, smothering internal bureaucracy, in charge of astronaut selection for missions.

  Malenfant was still muttering. “You know what Bridges offered me? ASP.”

  Emma riffled through her mental file of NASA acronyms. ASP: Astronaut Support Personnel, a non-flying astronaut assigned to support the crew of a mission.

  “I’d have been point man on STS-194,” Malenfant spat. The Caped Crusader. Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole into my seat on the flight deck.”

  “I gather you didn’t take the job,” Emma said dryly.

  “I took it okay,” he snapped. “I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil pusher’s fat ass.”

  “Oh, Malenfant,” she sighed.

  She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to ceiling office window with its view of the park-like JSC campus, complete with the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crashlanded beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for too many eager crew-persons, so — in what seemed to Emma his own very small world — Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.

  She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat, the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role; perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in NASA’s sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.

  Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long, complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.

  But to Malenfant — Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human behaviour, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy, barely engaged with the complexities of the world — to Malenfant, Joe Bridges, controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me, she thought) could be nothing but a monster.

  She stared out the window at the baked African plain. It was huge and ancient, she thought, a place that would endure all but unchanged long after the little white moth that buzzed over it today was corroded to dust, long after the participants in this tiny domestic drama were mouldering bones.

  Now she heard a whisper from the ground-to-air radio. It sounded like Bill London, good old bullshitter Bill from Annapolis, with some garbled report about UFOs over central Africa.

  The plane veered to the right, and the rising sun wheeled around the cockpit, sparking from scuffs in the Plexiglas around her.

  “Let’s go UFO-hunting,” Malenfant snapped. “We got nothing better to do today, right?”

  She wasn’t about to argue; as so often in her relationship with Malenfant she was, literally, powerless.

  Fire:

  Stone and Blue put branches into the fire. Leaves and twigs bum. Stone and Blue pull out the burning branches. Their legs carry them into the wood. Small animals squeal and run before the fire. Stone and Blue pursue, their eyes darting, their hands hurling rocks and bits of wood.

  Fire’s hands are very red and raw.

  Dig comes to him. Water is in her mouth. The water spills on his hands. The water is cool. Dig has leaves. Her hands rub them on his burns.

  Fire has no name. Sing is huge and smiling. Sing’s hands rub his palms with leaves.

  Fire has his name again. It is Dig who tends his burned hands, smiling.

  “Blue light!” he shouts, suddenly.

  Dig looks at him. Her eyes narrow. She tends his hands.

  Fire’s hand reaches out. It cups one conical breast. The breast is hot in his hand.

  The fire is hot in his hand. A captured bat is hot in his hand.

  His member does not rise. Dig tends his hands.

  Blue and Stone return. Their hands carry rabbits. The rabbits are skinned. There is blood on the mouths of the men. The rabbits fall to the ground.

  The children with no names fall on the rabbits. They jabber, snapping at each other. The children’s small faces are bloody. The
adults push the children aside, and growl and jostle over the rabbits. All the people work at the meat, stealing it from each other.

  Grass and Cold throw some pieces of meat on the fire. The meat sizzles. Their hands pick out the meat. Their mouths chew the burned meat, swallowing some. Fire sees that their mouths want to swallow all the meat. But their fingers take meat from their mouths. They put the meat in the mouths of their babies with no names.

  Sing groans. She is on the ground near the branches. Her nose can smell the food. Her hands can’t reach it.

  Fire is eating a twisted-off rabbit leg. His hands pluck meat off it, and put the meat in Sing’s mouth.

  Her head turns. Her mouth chews. Her eyes are closed. She chokes. Her mouth spits out meat.

  Fire’s hands pop the chewed meat in his mouth.

  Sing is shivering.

  Fire thinks of a bower.

  There are branches here, on the ground. He has forgotten that they were used to transport Sing. He keeps thinking of the bower.

  He makes his hands lay the branches on the ground. He thinks of twigs and grass and leaves. He gathers them, thinking of the bower. He makes his hands pile everything up on the branches.

  He makes his arms pick up Sing.

  It is sunny. He has no name. Sing is carrying Fire. Sing is large, Fire small.

  It is dark. His name is Fire. Fire is carrying Sing. Fire is large, Sing shrunken.

  He lays her on the crude bower. She sinks into the soft leaves and grass. The branches roll away. The grass scatters. Sing falls into the dirt, with a gasp.

  Fire hoots and howls, kicking at the branches.

  One of the branches is lodged against a rock. It did not roll away.

  Fire makes his hands gather the branches again. He puts the branches down alongside the rock he found. His hands pile up more grass. At last he lowers Sing on the bower. The branches are trapped by the rocks. They do not roll away.

  Sing sighs.

  Every day he makes a bower for Sing. Every day he forgets how he did it before. Every day he has to invent a way to fix it, from scratch. Some days he doesn’t manage it at all, and Sing has to sleep on the dirt, where insects bite her.

  She sings. Her voice is soft and broken. Fire listens. He has forgotten the rocks and the branches.

  She stops singing. She sleeps.

  People are sleeping. People are huddled around the children. People are coupling. People are making water. People are making dung. People are chattering, for comfort, through rivalry.

  Beyond the glow of the flames, the sky is dark. The land is gone. Something howls. It is far away.

  Dig is sleeping near the fire.

  Fire’s legs walk to her. His hand touches her shoulder. She rolls on her back. She opens her eyes and looks at him.

  His member is stiff.

  “Hoo! Fire!”

  It is Loud. He is on the ground. Fire’s eyes had not seen him. Fire’s eyes had seen only Dig.

  Loud’s hands throw red dirt into Fire’s eyes. Fire blinks and sneezes and hoots.

  Loud has crawled to Dig. His hands paw at her. His tongue is out, his member hard. Her hands are pushing him away. She is laughing.

  Fire’s hands grab Loud’s shoulders. Loud falls off Dig and lands on his back. He pulls Fire to the ground and they roll. Fire feels hot gritty dirt cling to his back.

  Stone roars. His scar shines in the fire light. His filth-grimed foot separates them with a shove. His axe clouts Loud on the head. Loud howls and scuttles away.

  Stone’s axe swings for Fire. Fire ducks and scrambles back.

  Stone grunts. He moves to Dig. Stone’s big hand reaches down to her, and flips her onto her belly.

  Dig gasps. She pulls her legs beneath her. Fire hears the scrape of her skin on red dust.

  Stone kneels. His hands push her legs apart. She cries out. He reaches forward. His hands cup her breasts. His member enters her. His hands clutch her shoulders, and his flabby hips thrust and thrust.

  He gives a strangled cry. His back straightens. He shudders.

  He pulls back and stands up. His member is bruised purple and moist. He turns. He kicks Fire in the thigh. Fire yells and doubles over.

  Dig is on the ground, her hands tucked between her legs. She is curled up. Loud is gone. Fire’s legs walk.

  Fire stops.

  Dig is far. The fire is far. He is in a mouth of darkness. Eyes watch him.

  He makes his legs walk him back to the fire.

  Sing is lying on a bower. He has forgotten he made the bower. Her eyes watch him. Her arm lifts.

  He kneels. His face rests on her chest. The bower rustles. Sing gasps.

  Her hand runs over his belly. Her hand finds his member. It is painfully swollen. Her hand closes around it. He shudders.

  She sings.

  He sleeps.

  Emma Stoney:

  If this really was the close of Malenfant’s career at NASA, Emma thought, it could be a good thing.

  She wasn’t the type of foolish ground-bound spouse who palpitated every moment Malenfant was on orbit (although she hadn’t been able to calm her stomach during those searing moments of launch, as the Shuttle passed through one of NASA’s “non-survivable windows” after another…). No, the sacrifices she had made went broader and deeper than that.

  It had started as far back as the moment when, as a new arrival at the Naval Academy, he had broken his hometown girl’s seventeen-year-old heart with a letter saying that he thought they should break off their relationship. Now he was at Annapolis, he had written, he wanted to devote himself “like a monk” to his studies. Well, that had lasted all of six months before he had started to pursue her again, with letters and calls, trying to win her back.

  That letter had, in retrospect, set the course of their lives for three decades. But maybe that course was now coming to an end.

  “You know,” she said dreamily, “maybe if it is ending, it’s fitting it should be like this. In the air, I mean. Do you remember that flight to San Francisco? You had just got accepted by the Astronaut Office…”

  It had been Malenfant’s third time of trying to join the astronaut corps, after he had applied to the recruitment rounds of 1988 — when he wasn’t even granted an interview — and 1990. Finally in 1992, aged thirty-two, he had gotten an interview at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and had gone back to his base in San Diego.

  At last the Astronaut Office had called him. But he was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement, to be made the next day. Naturally he had kept the secret strictly, even from Emma.

  So the next day they had boarded a plane for San Francisco, where they were going to spend a long weekend with friends of Emma’s (Malenfant tended not to have the type of friends you could spend weekends with, not if you wanted to come home with your liver). Malenfant had given the pilot the NASA press release. Just after they got to cruise altitude, the pilot called Emma’s name:

  Would Emma Malenfant please identify herself? Would you please stand up?

  It had taken Emma a moment to realize she was being called, for she used her maiden name, Stoney, in business and her personal life, everywhere except the closed world of the Navy. Baffled — and wary of Malenfant’s expressionless stillness — she had unbuckled her seat belt and stood up.

  I hope you like barbecue, Ms Malenfant, said the pilot, because I have a press release here that says you are going to Houston, Texas. Commander Reid Malenfant, US Navy, has been selected to be a part of the 1992 NASA astronaut class.

  “…And everybody on the plane started whooping, just as if you were John Glenn himself, and the stewards brought us those dumb little plastic bottles of champagne. Do you remember, Malenfant?” She laughed. “But you couldn’t drink because you were doubled over with air sickness.”

  Malenfant grunted sourly. “It starts in the air, so it finishes in the air. Is that what you think?”

  “It does have a certain symmetry… Maybe this isn’t the end, but th
e beginning of something new. Right? We could be at the start of a great new adventure together. Who knows?”

  She could see how the set of his shoulders was unchanged.

  She sighed. Give it time, Emma. “All right, Malenfant. What UFOs?”

  “Tanzania. Some kind of sighting over the Olduval Gorge, according to Bill.”

  “Olduval? Where the human fossils come from?”

  “I don’t know. What does that matter? It sounds more authentic than most. The local air forces are scrambling spotter planes: Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique.”

  None of those names was too reassuring to Emma. “Malenfant, are you sure we should get caught up in that? We don’t want some trigger-happy Tanzanian flyboy to mistake us for Eetie.”

  He barked laughter. “Come on, Emma. You’re showing your prejudice. We trained half those guys and sold the planes to the other half. And they’re only spotters. Bill is informing them we’re coming. There’s no threat. And, who knows? Maybe we’ll get to be involved in first contact.”

  Under his veneer of cynicism she sensed an edge of genuine excitement. From out of the blue, here was another adventure for Reid Malenfant, hero astronaut. Another adventure that had nothing to do with her.

  I was wrong, she thought. I’m never going to get him back, no matter what happens at NASA. But then I never had him anyhow.

  Losing sympathy for him, she snapped, “You really told Joe Bridges to shove his job?”

  “Sweetest moment of my life.”

  “Oh, Malenfant. Don’t you know how it works yet? If you took your punishment, if you sweated out your time, you’d be back in rotation for the next assignment, or the one after that.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the way of the world. I’ve had to go through it, in my own way. Everybody has. Everybody who wants to get on in the real world, with real people, anyhow. Everybody but you, the great hero.”

  “You sound like you’re writing my appraisal,” he said, a little ruefully. “Anyhow, ass-kissing wouldn’t have helped. It was the Russians, that fucking Grand Medical Commission of theirs.”