Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Shadow sat her little sister on her lap. Tumble squirmed and wriggled — but with an edge of irritation, for she had picked up bloodsucking ticks some days before. Shadow found some of the tiny, purplish creatures in the child’s scalp now. She plucked them away between delicate fingernails and popped them in her mouth, relishing the sharp tang of blood when they burst beneath her teeth.

  All around her people walked, groomed, fed, locked into an intricate geometry of lust, loyalty, envy, power. The people were the most vivid thing in Shadow’s world; everything else was a blur, barely more noticed than the steady swell of her own breathing.

  At eleven years old, Shadow was three feet tall. She had long legs under narrow hips, long, graceful arms, a slim torso, a narrow neck and shoulders. She walked upright. But her legs were a little splayed, her gait clumsy, and her long, strong arms were capable of carrying her high in the trees. Her rib cage was high and conical, and her skull was small, her mouth with its red lips prominent. And over pink-black skin, her body was covered with long black fur.

  Her eyes were clear, light brown, curious.

  A few days before. Shadow had begun the bleeding, for the first time in her life. Several of the men and boys, smelling this, had begun to pursue her. Even now a cluster of the boys pressed close to her, dragging clumsy fingers through her hair, their eyes bright. But Shadow desired none of them, and when they got too persistent she approached her mother, who growled deeply.

  Termite herself was surrounded by a group of attentive men and adolescent boys, some of them displaying spindly erections. Termite submitted to the gentle probing of their fingers. Though she was growing old now, and some of her fur was shot through with silver, Termite was the most popular woman in the group, as far as the men were concerned. On some patches of her head and shoulders her fur had been worn away by the constant grooming; her small skull was all but hairless, her black ears prominent.

  That allure, of course, made her one of the most powerful women. Just as the weaker men would compete for the friendship of Big Boss, so the women were ambitious to be part of Termite’s loose circle. Shadow — and Tumble, and even Claw — had special privileges, as Termite’s children, arising from that power.

  And it was real power, the only power, even if the women had to endure the blows and bites of the powerful men. Everybody knew her mother and her siblings, and that was where loyalty lay; for nobody knew her father. No man, not even Big Boss, would have achieved his status without the backing of a powerful mother and aunts.

  At last it was time to move on. Little Boss — the brother of Big Boss, his closest lieutenant — led off, working his way down the hillside towards the river. He paused frequently, watching nervously to be sure that Big Boss followed.

  The people gave up their grooming and wandered after them.

  The Elf-folk entered thicker swathes of forest. The day grew hot, the air oppressive in the greenery. The people walked easily, save where the vines and brambles grew too dense, and then they would use their powerful arms to climb into the trees. They moved slowly, stopping to feed wherever the opportunity arose.

  Even at its most dense the forest was sparse. Many of the trees” leaves were yellow, shrivelled and sickly, and some of the trees themselves were dead, no more than gaunt stumps with broken-off branches at their roots. There was much space between the big trees, and the gaps in the forest canopy allowed the sunlight to reach the ground, where shoots and bushes grew thickly.

  Shadow, like the others, kept away from the more open clearings. Though her long slim legs carried her easily over the clear ground, the denser green of the forest pulled at her, while the blue-white open sky and green-brown undergrowth repelled her.

  They came to a knot of low shrubs.

  Termite lowered Tumble to the ground. This was a bush Termite knew well, and her experienced eyes had spotted that some of the leaves had been rolled into tubes, held together by sticky threads. When Shadow opened up such a tube she was rewarded by a wriggling caterpillar, which she popped into her mouth.

  The three of them rested on the ground, relishing the treat.

  Little Tumble snuggled up to her mother, seeking her nipples. Gently Termite pushed the child away. At first Tumble whimpered, but soon her pleading turned to a tantrum, and the little ball of fur ran in circles and thumped the ground. Her mother held her close, subduing her struggles, until she was calm. Tumble took some of the caterpillars her mother unpacked for her. But later, Tumble made a pretence of having eaten her fill, and began to groom her mother with clumsy attentiveness. Termite submitted to this as she fed — and pretended not to notice as Tumble worked her way ever closer to her nipple, at last stealing a quick suck.

  Shadow stretched out on the grass, legs comfortably crossed. She plucked caterpillar leaves from the bushes with one hand, holding the other crooked behind her head.

  The sky was a washed-out blue, but clouds were tumbling across it. She had a dim sense of the future: soon it would be dark, and it would rain, and she would get wet and cold. But she saw little further than that, little further than the bright sunny warmth of the sun and the softness of this patch of grass, and she relaxed, her thoughts warm and yellow.

  She raised her free hand before her eyes. She stretched her fingers, making slats through which the sun peeked. She moved her hand back and forth, rapidly, making the sun flicker and dance.

  Now, with a single graceful movement, she turned over and got to her knees. She gazed at the sharp shadow the sun cast on the leaf-strewn ground before her. She raised her hands, making the shadow do the same, and then she spread her fingers, making light shine through the hands of her shadow.

  She got to her feet and began to whirl and dance, and the shadow, this other self, capered in response, its movements distorted and comical. Her dance was eerily beautiful.

  The wind shifted, bringing a scent of smoke. Smoke, and meat.

  Big Boss stood tall and peered into the green. His nostrils flared.

  He rooted around on the ground until he found a cobble the size of his fist. He hurled the cobble against a large rock embedded in the ground, smashing it. Then, with some care, he fingered the debris, searching for flakes of the right size and sharpness.

  He stood tall, hands full of sharp flakes, a small trickle of blood oozing from one finger. He issued his summoning cry — “Ai, ee!” — and, without looking back, he began to stalk off to the west, the way the smoke had come from. His brother Little Boss and another senior man, Hurler, scurried to follow him, keeping a submissive few paces back.

  Claw had been crouching in the grass. He stood up now, and took a few steps after the men, uncertainly.

  Little Boss slapped him so hard in the back that Claw was sent sprawling on his chest.

  But Hurler helped him get back to his feet with a fast, savage yank. Hurler, a big man with powerful hands and a deadly accuracy with thrown rocks, was Termite’s brother — Claw’s uncle — and so favoured him, more than the other men anyhow. The two of them trotted after Big and Little Boss.

  As the men receded. Termite shrugged her slim shoulders and returned to her inspection of the shrubs.

  Emma Stoney:

  Emma clung to sleep as long as possible. When she could sleep no longer, she rolled on her back, stiff and cold. There was sky above her, an ugly lid of cloud.

  Still here, she thought. Shit. And there was an unwelcome ache in her lower bowels.

  Nothing for it.

  She went behind a couple of trees — close enough that she could still see her parachute canopy tent — and stripped to her underwear. She took a dump, her Swiss Army knife dangling absurdly around her neck. The problem after that was finding a suitable wipe; the dried leaves she tried to use just crumbled in her hands.

  Where am I? Answer came there none.

  Maybe some kind of adrenaline rush had gotten her through yesterday. Today was going to be even worse, she thought. This morning she felt cold, stiff, dirty, lost, miserable —
and with a fear that had sunk deep into her gut.

  She got dressed and kicked leaves over the, umm, deposit she’d left. We have got to build a latrine today.

  Sally and Maxie, waking slowly, showed no desire to leave the forest. But Emma decided she ought to go say hello to the neighbours.

  She stepped out of the forest.

  It had stopped raining, but the sky was grey and solid and the grassy plain before her was bleak, uninviting. If she had not known otherwise she would have guessed it was uninhabited; the heapings of branches and stones seemed scarcely more than random.

  And yet hominids — people — sat and walked, jabbered and argued, from a distance just as human as she was, every one of them as naked as a newborn. And they were talking English. The utter strangeness of that struck her anew.

  I don’t want to be here, facing this bizarreness, she thought. I want to be at home, with the net, and coffee and newspapers, and clean clothes and a warm bathroom.

  But it might not be long before she was begging at these hominids” metaphorical table. She had no doubt that those tall, powerful qua-people had a much better ability to survive in this wilderness than she did; she sensed that might become very important, unless they were rescued out of here in the next few days. So she forced herself forward.

  Some of the women were tending to nursing infants. Older children were wrestling clumsily — and wordlessly, save for an occasional hoot or screech. The children seemed to her to have the least humanity; without the tall, striking, very human bodies of the adults, their low brows and flat skulls seemed more prominent, and they reminded her more of chimps.

  Listening to the hominids yesterday, she had picked up a few of their functional names. The boy who had given her the caterpillar was called Fire. Right now Fire was tending the old woman on the ground, who was called Sing. He seemed to be feeding her, or giving her water. Evidence of kinship bonds, of care for the old and weak? It somewhat surprised Emma. But it was also reassuring, she thought, considering her own situation.

  The largest man — Stone, the dominant type who had groped Sally — was sitting on the ground close to the smoking remains of the fire. He was picking through a pile of rocks. He was the leader, she figured — the leader of the men anyhow.

  She plucked up her courage and sat opposite him.

  He glowered at her. His brown eyes, under a heavy lid of brow, were pits of hostility and suspicion. He actually raised his right fist at her, a mighty paw bearing a blunt rock.

  But she sat still, her hands empty. Perhaps he remembered her. Or perhaps he was figuring out all over again that she was no threat. Anyhow, his hand lowered.

  Seeming to forget her, he started working at the rocks again. He picked out a big lump of what looked like black glass; it must be obsidian, a volcanic glass. He turned it this way and that, inspecting it. His movements were very rapid, his gaze flickering over the rock surface.

  His muscles were hard, his skin taut. His hair was tightly curled, but it was peppered with grey. His face would have passed in any city street — so long as he wore a hat, anyhow, to conceal that shrivelled skull. But an Aladdin Sane zigzag crimson scar cut right across his face.

  She thought he looked around fifty. Hard to tell in the circumstances.

  He picked out another rock from his pile, a round pebble. He began to hammer at the obsidian, hard and confident. Shards flew everywhere, and for the first time Emma noticed that he had a patch of foliage over his lap, protecting his genitals from flying rock chips. He worked fast, confident, his eyes flickering — faster than a human would have, she thought, faster and more instinctively. It was less like watching the patient practising of a human craft than a fast reaction sport, like tennis or soccer, where the body takes over.

  He may not have a wide repertoire of skills, she thought. Maybe this is the one type of tool he can make. But there was nothing limited in what she saw, nothing incomplete; it was as efficient a process as eating or breathing. The contrast with the way the people had struggled to build their heaped-up tepees couldn’t have been more striking. How was it possible to be so smart about one thing, yet so dumb about another?

  She felt her ideas adjust, her preconceptions dissolve. These people are not like me, she thought.

  After a time, Stone abruptly stood up. He dropped his hammer-stone, his lap cover, even the tool he had been making, and wandered away.

  Emma stayed put.

  Stone hunted around the grass, digging into the red dust beneath, picking out bits of rock or perhaps bone, discarding them where he found them. At last he seemed to have found what he wanted.

  But then he was distracted by an argument between two of the younger men. He dropped the bone fragment and waded into what was fast becoming a wrestling match. Pretty soon all three of them were battling hard.

  Others were gathering around, hooting and hollering. At last Stone floored one of the young men and drove off the other.

  Breathing hard, sweating heavily enough to give him a pungent stink, he came back to the pile of rocks, where Emma waited patiently. When he got there he looked around for his bit of bone — but of course it had never made it this far. He bellowed, apparently frustrated, and got up again and resumed his search.

  A human craftsman would have got all his tools together before he started, Emma supposed.

  Stone came back with a fresh bit of bone. It was red, and bits of meat clung to it; Emma shuddered as she speculated where it might have come from. He used it to chip at the edge of his obsidian axe.

  When he was done he dropped the improvised bone tool at his feet without another thought. He turned the axe over and over in his hands; it was a disc of shaped rock four inches across, just about right to fit into his powerful hand.

  Then he hefted it and began to scrape at his neck with it.

  My God, she thought. He’s shaving.

  He saw her looking. “Stone Stone!” he yelled. He turned away deliberately, suddenly as self-conscious as a teenager.

  She got up and moved away.

  Shadow:

  The people were moving again, working deeper into the forest, seeking food. She spotted Termite and Tumble, walking hand-in-hand, and she followed them.

  There had been a shower here. The vegetation was soaking, and droplets sprayed her as she pushed past bushes and low branches. But the droplets sparkled in the sun, and the wet leaves were a bright vivid green. The people’s black hair was shot with flashes of rust brown, smelling rich and damp.

  Termite came to an ants” nest, a mound punctured by small holes. She reached out and broke a long thin branch from a nearby bush. She removed the side branches and nibbled off the bark, leaving a long, straight stick half as long as her arm. She pushed one hand into the ants” nest and scooped out dirt.

  Soon the ants began to swarm out of the nest. Termite plunged her stick into the nest, waited a few heartbeats, and then withdrew it. It was covered with squirming ants. She slid the tool through her free hand so that she was left with a palm filled with crushed and wriggling ants, which she scooped into her mouth, crunching quickly. There was a strong acid smell. Then she returned her stick to the mound and waited for a fresh helping.

  Shadow and the other women and children joined in the feast with sticks of their own. Occasionally they had to slap at their feet and thighs as the ants swarmed to repel the invaders; these were big, strong ants that could bite savagely. But Shadow’s stick was too spindly and it bent and finally snapped as she shoved it into the loose earth.

  More people crowded around. The ants” nest became a mass of jostling and poked elbows and slaps and screeching.

  Shadow quickly tired of the commotion. She straightened up, brushed dirt from her legs, and slipped further into the forest.

  She came to a tall palm. She thought she could see clusters of red fruit, high above the ground. Briskly she began to climb, her strong arms and gripping legs propelling her fast above the ground.

  She found a cluster
of fruit. She picked one, then another, stripping off the rich outer flesh, and letting the kernels fall with a whisper to the distant ground. This was one of the tallest trees in the forest. The sky seemed close here, the ground a distant place.

  There were eyes, watching her.

  She yelped and recoiled, gripping the palm’s trunk with her arms.

  She saw a face. But it was not like her own. The head was about the size of Shadow’s, but there was a thick bony crest over the top of the skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were fixed. The body, covered in pale brown fur, was squat, the belly distended. Two pink nipples protruded from the fur, and an infant clung there, peering back at Shadow with huge pale eyes. The infant might have been a twin of Tumble, but already that bony skull had started to evolve its strange, characteristic superstructure.

  Mother and child were Nutcracker-folk.

  Emma Stoney:

  All the tepee shelters had fallen down.

  One younger man was struggling, alone, to hoist branches upright. It was Fire, the teenager-type who had gifted her the caterpillar. But nobody was helping him, so his branches had nothing to lean on, and they just fell over. Still he kept trying. At one point he even ran around his construction, trying to beat gravity, hoisting more branches before the others fell. Of course he failed. It was as if he knew what he wanted to build, but couldn’t figure out how to achieve it.

  Cautiously, Emma stepped forward.

  Fire was startled. He stumbled backwards. His branches fell with a crash.

  She held her hands open and smiled. “Fire,” she said. She pointed to herself. “Emma. Remember?”

  At length he jabbered, “Fire Fire. Fire Emma.”

  “Emma, yes. Remember? You gave me the caterpillar.” She pointed to her mouth.

  His eyes widened. He ran away at startling speed, and came back with a scrap of what looked like potato. With impatient speed, he shoved it into her mouth. His fingers were strong, almost forcing her jaws open.

  She chewed, feeling bruised, tasting the dirt on his fingers. The root was heavy and starchy. “Thank you.”