Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  And she quickly made out a characteristic continent shape on that brightly lit quadrant, almost bare of cloud, baked brown, familiar from schoolbook studies and CNN reports and Malenfant’s schoolkid slideshows. It was Africa, quite unmistakably, the place she had come from.

  That was no “Moon’. That was Earth.

  And if she was looking at Earth, up in the sky, her relentlessly logical mind told her, then she couldn’t be on Earth any more. “Stands to reason,” she murmured.

  It made sense, of course: the different air, the lightness of walking, these alien not-quite humans running around everywhere. She had known it the whole time, on some level, but she hadn’t wanted to face it.

  But, if not on Earth, where was she? How had she got here? How was she ever going to get home again? All the time she had been here, she realized, she had got not one whit closer to answering these most basic questions.

  Now a shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. A new cloud was driving overhead, flat, thick, dark.

  Sally was standing beside her. “They talk English.”

  “What?”

  “The flat-heads. They talk English. Just a handful of words, but it is English. Remember that. They surely didn’t evolve it for themselves.”

  “Somebody must have taught it to them.”

  “Yes.” She turned to Emma, her eyes hard. “Wherever we are, we aren’t the first to get here. We aren’t alone here, with these apes.”

  She’s right, Emma realized. It wasn’t much, but it was a hope to cling to, a shred of evidence that there was more to this bizarre experience than the plains and the forests and the hominids.

  Emma peered into the sky, where Earth was starting to set.

  Malenfant, where are you?

  Reid Malenfant:

  Malenfant parked at the Beachhouse car park. Close to the Kennedy Space Center, this was an ancient astronaut party house that NASA had converted into a conference centre.

  Malenfant, in his disreputable track suit, found the path behind the house. He came to a couple of wooden steps and trotted down to the beach itself. The beach, facing the Atlantic to the east, was empty, as far as he could see. This was a private reserve, a six-mile stretch of untouched coastline NASA held back for use by astronauts and their families and other agency personnel.

  It wasn’t yet dawn.

  He stripped off his shoes and socks and felt the cool, moist sand between his toes. Tiny crabs scuttled across the sand at his feet, dimly visible. He wondered whether they had been disturbed by the new Moonlight, like so many of the world’s animals. He stretched his hams, leaning forward on one leg, then the other. Too old to skip your stretching, Malenfant, no matter what else is on your mind.

  The Red Moon was almost full — the first full Moon since its appearance, and Emma’s departure. A month already. The light cast by the Red Moon was much brighter than the light of vanished silvery Luna, bright enough to wash out all but the brightest stars, bright enough to turn the sky a rich deep blue — but it was an eerie glow, neither day nor night. It was like being in a movie set, Malenfant thought, some corny old 1940s musical with a Moon painted on a canvas sky.

  Malenfant hated it all: the light, the big bowl of mystery up there in the sky. To him the Red Moon was like a glowing symbol of his loss, of Emma.

  Breathing deep of the salty ocean air, he jogged through gentle dunes, brushing past thickets of palmetto. It wasn’t as comfortable a jog as it used to be: the beach had been heavily eroded by the Tide, and it was littered with swathes of sea-bottom mud, respectably large rocks, seaweed and other washed-up marine creatures — not to mention a large amount of oil smears and garbage, some of it probably emanating from the many Atlantic wrecks. But to Malenfant the solitude here was worth the effort of finding a path through the detritus.

  It had been another sleepless night. He was consumed with his desire to reach the Red Moon.

  Frustrated by the reception his proposals were receiving at NASA Headquarters in Washington, he had decided to take his schemes, his blueprints and models and Barco shows, around the NASA centres, to Ames and Marshall and Kennedy and Johnson, trying to drum up grass-roots support, and put pressure on the senior brass.

  We can do this. We’ve been to the Moon before — a Moon, anyhow — and this new mother is a lot more forgiving than old Luna. Now we have an atmosphere to exploit. No need to stand on your rockets all the way from orbit; you can glide to the ground… We can throw together a heavy-lift booster from Shuttle components in months. That one the challenge for Marshall, where von Braun had built his Moon rockets. For Kennedy and Johnson, where the astronauts worked: We have whole cadres of trained, experienced and willing pilots, specialists and mission controllers itching to take up the challenge of a new Moon. Hell, I’ll go myself if you’ll let me… He had appealed to the scientists, too: the geologists and meteorologists and even the biologists who suddenly had a whole new world to study: It will be a whole new challenge in human spaceflight, a world with oceans and an atmosphere — an oxygen atmosphere, by God — just three days away. It’s the kind of world we were hoping we might find when we sent our first fragile ships out on the ocean of space half a century ago. And who knows what we’ll discover there…

  And then there were the groups he had come to think of as the xeno-ologists: the biologists and philosophers and astronomers and others who, long before the sudden irruption of the Red Moon, had considered the deeper mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Even if not, why does it seem that we are alone? If we were to meet others — what would they be like?

  Come on, people. Our Moon disappeared, and was replaced by another. How the hell? Can this possibly be some natural phenomenon? If not, who’s responsible? Not us, that’s for sure. The greatest mystery of this or any other age is hanging up there like some huge Chinese lantern. Shouldn’t we go take a look?

  But, to his dismay and surprise, he had gotten no significant support from anybody — save the wacko UFO-hunting fringe types, who did him more harm than good. NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was working on a couple of unmanned orbital probes and a lander to go visit the Red Moon. But that was it. The notion of sending humans to Earth’s new companion was definitively out of the question.

  So he had been told, gently but firmly, by Joe Bridges.

  “In these road shows of yours you underestimate the magnitude of the task, Malenfant. Whether you’re doing that deliberately or not isn’t for me to say. We know diddley about the structure of the Red Moon’s atmosphere, which is somewhat essential data before you even begin to develop your gliding lander. And then what about the cost and schedule implications of putting together your ‘Big Dumb Booster’ — a brand-new man-rated heavy-lift launcher, for God’s sake? Our analysis predicts a schedule of years and a cost of maybe a hundred billion bucks. We just don’t have that kind of money, Malenfant. And NASA can’t go asking for it right now. Get your head out of your ass and take a look around. The Tide. The human race has other priorities…”

  The first sunlight began to seep into the Atlantic horizon, smears of orange and pink banishing the Red Moon’s unnatural light. Malenfant’s calves were beginning to tingle, and he could feel his breathing deepening, his heart starting to pound.

  Too long since I did this.

  He had gotten hooked on running in the dawn light during the preparation for his first spaceflight. Emma had complained that he was spending even less time with her, but as long as he crept out of bed without waking her she had seemed to forgive him. But then there always had been a lot she had had to forgive him for. Is that why I want to reach her — just so I can say I’m sorry? Well, is that so bad? Or is it selfish — do I just want to get to her so I can project even more of my own shit onto her?…

  Emma!

  He pounded on, the moist sand cold under every footstep. As his blood pumped he felt the structure of his thoughts dissolve, his obsessive night-time round of planning and worrying and agonizing
over I-should-have-said and I-should-have done, all of it washing away. The main reason to exercise, he thought: it stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal.

  It was the only respite he got from being himself.

  He’d meant to run a couple of miles before doubling back. But when he reached his turn-back point he spotted something on the beach, maybe a mile further south: blocky, silhouetted, very large, returning crumpled orange highlights to the approaching sun. A beached whale? The Tide had played hell with migration patterns. No, too angular for that. A wreck, then?

  On impulse he continued on down the beach.

  The washed-up object was the size of a small house, twenty-five or thirty feet high. It was heavily eroded, its walls sculpted by wind and water into pits and pillars. When Malenfant stood at its foot the sea breeze that washed over it was distinctly colder.

  He ran his hand over its surface. Under stringy seaweed he found a grey, pitted surface, cold and slick under his palm. Ice, of course. The dawn light was still dim, but he could make out the cold clean blue-white shine of the harder ice beneath. He wondered how long the berg would sit here before it melted into the sand.

  It was here because of the Tide.

  The first few days had been the worst, when Earth’s oceans, subject to a sudden discontinuous shock, had sloshed like water in a bathtub. Millions of square miles of coastal lowland had been scoured. In some places, pushed by currents or channelled by sea bottoms, the oceans had spawned waves several hundred feet high, walls of water that had crushed everything in their paths.

  After that, with twenty times the mass of Luna, the Red Moon raised daily tides twenty times as high as before — roughly anyhow; the new Moon’s spin complicated the complex gravitational dance of the worlds.

  The coastlines of the world had been drastically reshaped. The English Channel was being widened as the soft white chalk of the lands that bordered it, including Dover’s white cliffs, was worn away. Even rocky coastlines like Maine were being eroded. The lowest tides on the planet used to be in the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere: now those tides of two feet or less had become forty feet, and around the shores of the Mediterranean many communities, with roots dating back to the dawn of civilization, had been smashed and worn away in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile the tides had forced their way into the mouths of many of the world’s rivers, making powerful bores a hundred feet high, and vast floodplains filled and drained with each ebb and flow, drowning some of the planet’s most fertile land in salt water.

  People had fled inland, a secondary tide of misery, away from the devastated coasts. Already there had been too many deaths even to count, from flooding and tsunamis and “quakes — and there were surely many more to come, as the displaced populations succumbed to disease, and flooded-out farmers failed to return a crop, and as the wars broke out over remaining stocks.

  Meanwhile, as the polar seas flexed, titanic rafts of ice broke away from the shelves of Antarctica and the glaciers of Alaska and Greenland. The larger bergs broke up in the tempestuous seas, but many of them survived to the Equator, filling the oceans, already all but impassable, with an additional hazard. And so bergs like this one were now common sights at all latitudes on the seaboards of the Atlantic and Pacific. In some places they were actually being mined to make up for the disrupted local supplies of clean fresh water. Always a silver lining, Malenfant thought sourly.

  He stripped off his sweaty track suit and ran naked into the surf. Deeply mixed by the Tide with the waters of the deep ocean, the sea was icy cold and very salty, stinging when it splashed his eyes and the scar tissue on his healing arm. He took care not to go far out of his depth; he could feel a strong undercurrent as the sea drew back.

  He swam a few strokes and then lay on his back, studying the sky, buoyant in the salty water.

  The Red Moon was fat and swollen in the sky above him. Though it had (somehow) inserted itself into the same orbit as the old, vanished Moon, it was more than twice Luna’s diameter, as large in area as five old Moons put together — and a lot more than five times as bright, because of its reflective cloud and water.

  And this morning, the Red Moon was blue. The hemisphere facing him showed a vast, island-strewn ocean, blue-black and cloud-littered, with the shining white of ice caps at the northern and southern extremes. The Red Moon’s north pole was tilted towards Earth by ten degrees or so, and Malenfant could see a huge high pressure system sitting over the pole, a creamy swirl of cloud. But dark bands streaked around the equator, clouds of soot and smoke.

  Malenfant, for all his personal animosity, admitted that the new Moon was hauntingly lovely. It even looked like a world: obviously three-dimensional, with that shading of atmosphere at the sunlit limb, and sun casting a big fat highlight on its wrinkled ocean skin, as if it were some immense bowling ball. Poor Luna had been so dust-choked that its scattered light had made it look no more spherical than a painted dinner plate.

  Malenfant, understandably obsessive, had kept up with the evolving science of the Red Moon.

  The new Moon turned on its axis relative to Earth — unlike departed, lamented Luna — with a “day” of about thirty hours, so that Earthbound watchers were treated to views of both sides. The other hemisphere was dominated by the worldlet’s main landmass: a supercontment, some called it, a roughly circular island-continent with a centre red as baked clay, and fringed by grey-green smears that might be forests. The Red Moon was hemispherically asymmetric, then: like Mars and Luna, unlike Earth and Venus.

  That great continent was pitted by huge, heavily eroded impact craters: to Malenfant they were an oddly pleasing reminder of true, vanished Luna. And the centre of the supercontinent was marked by a single vast volcano that thrust much of the way out of the atmosphere. Its immense, shallow flanks, as seen in the telescope, were marked at successively higher altitudes by (apparent) rings of vegetation types, what appeared to be glaciers, and then by bare rock, giving it to terrestrial observers something of the look of a shooting target. (And so the commentators had called it Bullseye.)

  The Red Moon’s mightiest river rose on the flanks of the Bullseye. Perhaps that great magma upwelling had lifted and broken ancient aquifers. Or perhaps air uplifted by the great mountain was squeezed dry of its water by altitude. Anyhow the river snaked languidly across a thousand miles to the eastern coast, where it cut through a mountain chain there to reach the sea at a broad delta.

  There were mountains on both east and west coasts of the supercontment. They were presumably volcanoes. Those on the east coast appeared to be dormant; they were heavily eroded, and they seemed to cast a rain shadow over the desiccated interior of the continent. There was, however, a comparatively lush belt of vegetation between the mountains and the coast. The commentators had called it the Beltway. The greenery pushed its way into the interior of the continent in a narrow strip along the valley of that great river, which was a Nile for this small world.

  But the mountains on the west coast were definitely not dormant. Presumably prompted by rock tides induced by Earth’s gravity field, they had been observed to begin erupting a few days after the Red Moon’s arrival in orbit around Earth.

  They must have been spectacular eruptions. Thick, dense rock near the surface appeared to have blocked the magma flows, bottling up increasing pressure before yielding explosively like a champagne cork flying out of a bottle. On Earth, such stratovolcanoes — like Mount Fuji, Mount Rainier — could eject debris miles into the air. On the Moon the volcanoes had blown debris clear of the planet altogether. Meanwhile vast quantities of dust and gases had been pumped into the atmosphere, to spread in thick bands around much of the Moon’s middle latitudes.

  There was a great deal you could tell about the Red Moon, even from a quarter million miles, with telescopes and spectrometers and radar, as the two hemispheres conveniently turned themselves up for inspection. For instance, those oceans really were water. The temperature range was
right — as you’d expect since the Moon shared Earth’s orbit around the sun — and examination of the visible and infra-red spectra showed that the clouds” caps were made of water vapour, just the right amount to have evaporated off the oceans.

  The Red Moon’s surface gravity was some two-thirds Earth’s — a lot more than Luna’s, and, crucially, enough for this miniature planet to have retained all the essential ingredients of an Earthlike atmosphere: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, water vapour, carbon dioxide — unlike poor barren Luna. So the Red Moon had water oceans and a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.

  Already the study of the Red Moon had revolutionized the young science of planetology. With a quarter of Earth’s mass — but four times the mass of Mars, some twenty times the mass of Luna — the Red Moon was a planet in its own right, intermediate in size between the Solar System’s small and large denizens, and so a good test-bed for various theories of planetary formation and evolution.

  It differed in key ways from Earth. Because it was so much smaller, it must have started its formation (wherever that had occurred) with a much smaller supply of heat energy than Earth. And that inner heat had been rapidly dissipated through its surface.

  Like a shrivelled orange, the Red Moon’s rind was thick. Probably aeons ago, the tectonic plates fused, and continents no longer slid over its face. There was no continental drift, no tectonic cycling, no oceanic ridges. Unlike Earth, the Moon’s uncycled surface was very ancient; and that was why the interior of the continent bore those huge eroded craters, the scars left by immense impacts long ago.

  And that was why the Bullseye was so vast. The huge shield mountain had probably formed over a fountain of magma erupting through a flaw in the crust layers. The crust beneath it must have been held in place over the flaw for hundreds of millions of years — so it more resembled Mars’s Olympus Mons than, say, Earth’s Hawaiian islands.

  But there was more than geology up there. On the Red Moon, it appeared, there was life.