Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma wondered what problems those narrow hips caused during childbirth. The heads of the Runners weren’t that much smaller than her own. But there were no midwives here, and no epidurals either. Maybe the women helped each other.

  Certainly each of them clearly knew her own children — unlike the men, who seemed to regard the children as small, irritating competitors.

  The women even seemed to use sex to bond. Sometimes in the night, two women would lie together, touching and stroking, sharing gentle pleasures that would last much longer than the short, somewhat brutal physical encounters they had with the men.

  By comparison, the men had no real community at all, just a brutish ladder of competition: they bickered and snapped amongst themselves, endlessly working out their pecking order. At that, Emma thought, this bunch of guys had a lot of common with every human mostly-male preserve she had ever come across, up to and including the NASA Astronaut Office.

  Stone was the boss man; he used his fists and feet and teeth and hand-axes to keep the other men in their place, and to win access to the women. But he, and the other men, did not seek to injure or kill his own kind. It was all just a dominance game.

  And Stone was not running a harem here. With all that fist-fighting he won himself more rolls in the hay than the other men, but the others got plenty too; all they had to do was wait until Stone was asleep, or looking the other way, or was off hunting, or just otherwise engaged. Emma had no idea why this should be so. Maybe you just couldn’t run a harem in a highly mobile group like this; maybe you needed a place to hold your female quasi-prisoners, a fortress to defend your “property” from other men.

  It was what these people lacked that struck Emma most strongly. They had no art, no music, no song. They didn’t even have language; their verbless jabber conveyed basic emotions — anger, fear, demands — but little information. They only “talked” anyhow in social encounters, mating or grooming or fighting, never when they were working, making tools or hunting or even eating. She thought their “talk” had more in common with the purring and yowling of cats than information-rich human conversation.

  Certainly the Runners never discussed where they were going. It was clear, though, from the way they studied animal tracks, and fingered shrubs, and sniffed the wind, that they had a deep understanding of this land on which they lived, and knew how to find their way across it.

  …Yes, but how did that knowledge get there, if not through talking, learning? Maybe a facility for tracking was hard-wired into their heads at birth, she speculated, as the ability to pick up language seemed to be born with human infants.

  Whatever, it was a peculiar example of how the Runners could be as smart as any human in one domain — say, tracking — and yet be dumber than the smallest child in another — such as playing Maxie’s games of hide-and-seek and catch. It was as if their minds were chambered, some rooms fully stocked, some empty, all of the chambers walled off from each other.

  When the Runners stopped for the night, they would scavenge for rocks and bits of wood and quickly make any tools they needed: hand-axes, spears. But they carried nothing with them except chunks of food. In the morning, when it was time to move on, they would just drop their hand-axes in the dirt and walk away, sometimes leaving the tools in the mounds of spill they had made during their creation.

  Emma saw it made sense. It only took a quarter-hour or so to make a reasonable hand-axe, and the Runners were smart at finding the raw materials they needed; they presumably wouldn’t stop in a place that couldn’t provide them in that way. To invest fifteen minutes in making a new axe was a lot better than spending all day carrying a lethally sharp blade in your bare hands.

  All this shaped their lifestyle, in a way she found oddly pleasing. The Runners had no possessions. If they wanted to move to some new place they just abandoned everything they had, like walking out of a house full of furniture leaving the doors unlocked. When they got to where they were going they would just make more of whatever they needed, and within half a day they were probably as well equipped as they had been before the move. There must be a deep satisfaction in this way of life, never weighed down by possessions and souvenirs and memories. A clean self-sufficiency.

  But Sally was dismissive. “Lions don’t own anything either. Elephants don’t. Chimps don’t. Emma, these ape-men are animals, even if they are built like basketball players. The notion of possessing anything that doesn’t go straight in their mouths has no more meaning to them than it would to my pet cat.”

  Emma shook her head, troubled. The truth, she suspected, was deeper than that.

  Anyhow, people or animals, the Runners walked, and walked, and walked. They were black shadows that glided over bright red ground, hooting and calling to each other, nude walking machines.

  Soon Emma’s socks were a ragged bloody mess, and where her boots didn’t fit quite right they chafed at her skin. A major part of each new day was the foot ritual, as Emma and Sally lanced blisters and stuffed their battered boots with leaves and grass. And if she rolled up her trousers wet sores, pink on black, speckled her shins; Sally suffered similarly. They took turns carrying Maxie, but they were laden down with their parachute silk bundles, and a lot of the time he just had to walk as best he could, clinging to their hands, wailing protests.

  During the long days of walking, Emma found herself inevitably spending more time than she liked with Sally.

  Emma and Sally didn’t much like each other. That was the blunt truth.

  There was no reason why they should; they had after all been scooped at random from out of the sky, and just thrown together. At times, hungry or thirsty or frightened or bewildered, they would take it out on each other, bitching and arguing. But that would always pass. They were both smart enough to recognize how much they needed each other.

  Still, Emma found herself looking down on Sally somewhat. Riding on her husband’s high-flying career, Sally had gotten used to a grander style of life than Emma had ever enjoyed, or wanted. Emma had often berated herself for sacrificing her own aspirations to follow her husband’s star, but it seemed to her that Sally had given up a lot more than she had ever been prepared to.

  For the sake of good relations, she tried to keep such thoughts buried.

  And Emma had to concede Sally’s inner toughness. She had after all lost her husband, brutally slain before her eyes. Once she was through the shock of that dreadful arrival, Sally had shown herself to be a survivor, in this situation where a lot of people would surely have folded quickly.

  Besides, she had achieved a lot of things Emma had never done. Not least raising kids. Maxie was as happy and healthy and sane as any kid his age Emma had ever encountered. And there turned out to be a girl, Sarah, twelve years old, left at home in Boston for the sake of her schooling while her parents enjoyed their extended African adventure.

  Now, of course, this kid Sarah was left effectively orphaned. Sally told Emma that she knew that even if she didn’t make it home her sister would take care of the girl, and that her husband’s will and insurance cover would provide for the rest of her education and beyond. But it clearly broke her up to think that she couldn’t tell Sarah what had become of her family.

  It seemed odd to Emma to talk of wills and grieving relatives — as if they were corpses walking round up here on this unfamiliar Moon, too dumb to know they were dead — but she supposed the same thing must be happening in her family. Her will would have handed over all her assets to Malenfant, who must be dealing with her mother and sister and family, and her employers would probably by now be recruiting to fill an Emma-shaped hole in their personnel roster.

  But somehow she never imagined Malenfant grieving for her. She pictured him working flat-out on some scheme, hare-brained or otherwise, to figure out what had happened to her, to send her a message, even get her home.

  Don’t give up, Malenfant; I’m right here waiting for you. And it is, after all, your fault that I’m stuck here.

  One day
at around noon, with the sun high in the south, the group stopped at a water hole.

  The three humans sat in the shade of a broad oak-like tree, while the Runners ate, drank, worked at tools, played, screwed, slept, all uncoordinated, all in their random way. Maxie was playing with one child, a bubbly little girl with a mess of pale brown hair and a cute, disturbingly chimp-like face.

  All around the Runners, a fine snow of volcano ash fell, peppering their dark skins white and grey.

  The woman called Wood approached Emma and Sally shyly, her hand on her lower belly. Emma had noticed she had some kind of injury just above her pubis. She would cover it with her hand, and at night curl up around it, mewling softly.

  Emma sat up. “Do you think she wants us to help?” Maybe the Runners had taken notice of her treatment of the child with yaws after all.

  “Even if she does, ignore her. We aren’t the Red Cross.”

  Emma stood and approached the woman cautiously. Wood backed away, startled. Emma made soothing noises. She got hold of the woman’s arm, and, gently, pulled her hand away.

  “Oh God,” she said softly.

  She had exposed a raised, black mound of infection, as large as her palm. At its centre was a pit, deep enough for her to have put her fingertip inside, pink rimmed. As Wood breathed the sides of the pit moved slightly.

  Sally came to stand by her. “That’s an open ulcer. She’s had it.”

  Emma rummaged in their minuscule medical kit.

  “Don’t do it,” Sally said. “We need that stuff.”

  “We’re out of dressings,” Emma murmured.

  “That’s because we already used them all up,” Sally said tightly.

  Emma found a tube of Savlon. She got her penknife and cut off a strip of “chute fabric. The ulcer stank, like bad fish. She squeezed Savlon into the hole, and wrapped the strip of fabric around the woman’s waist.

  Wood walked away, picking at the fabric, amazed, somehow pleased with herself. Emma found she had used up almost all the Savlon.

  Sally glowered. “Listen to me. While you play medicine woman with these flat heads…” She made a visible effort to control her temper. “I don’t know how long I can keep this up. My feet are a bloody mass. Every joint aches.” She held up a wrist that protruded out of her grimy sleeve. “We must be covering fifteen, twenty miles a day. It was bad enough living off raw meat and insects while we stayed in one place. Now we’re burning ourselves up.”

  Emma nodded. “I know. But I don’t see we have any choice. It’s obvious the Runners are fleeing something: the volcanism maybe. We have to assume they know, on some level anyhow, a lot more than we do.”

  Sally glared at the hominids. “They killed my husband. Every day I wake up wondering if today is the day they will kill and butcher me, and my kid. Yes, we have to stick with these flat-heads. But I don’t have to be comfortable with it. I don’t have to like it.”

  A Runner hunting party came striding across the plain. They brought chunks of some animal: limbs covered in orange hair, a bulky torso. Emma saw a paw on one of those limbs: not a paw, a hand, hairless, its skin pink and black, every bit as human as her own.

  Nobody offered them a share of the meat, and she was grateful.

  That night her sleep, out in the open, was disturbed by dreams of flashing teeth and the stink of raw red meat.

  She thought she heard a soft padding, smelled a bloody breath. But when she opened her eyes she saw nothing but Fire’s small blaze, and the bodies of the Runners, huddled together close to the fire’s warmth.

  She closed her eyes, cringing against the ground.

  In the morning she was woken by a dreadful howl. She sat up, startled, her joints and muscles aching from the ground’s hardness.

  One of the women ran this way and that, pawing at the rust-red dirt. She even chased some of the children; when she caught them she inspected their faces, as if longing to recognize them.

  Sally said, “It was the little brown-haired kid. You remember? Yesterday she played with Maxie.”

  “What about her?”

  Sally pointed at the ground.

  In the dust there were footprints, the marks of round feline paws, a few spots of blood. The scene of this silent crime was no more than yards from where Emma had slept.

  After a time, in their disorganized way, the Runners prepared to resume their long march. The bereft mother walked with the others. But periodically she would run around among the people, searching, screaming, scrabbling at the ground. The others screeched back at her, or slapped and punched her.

  This lasted three or four days. After that the woman’s displays of loss became more infrequent and subdued. She seemed immersed in a mere vague unhappiness; she had lost something, but what it was, and what it had meant to her, were slipping out of her head.

  Only Emma and Sally (and, for now, Maxie) remembered who the child had been. For the others, it was as if she had never existed, gone into the dark that had swallowed up every human life before history began.

  Reid Malenfant:

  As soon as Malenfant had landed the T-38 and gotten out of his flight suit, here was Frank Paulis, running across the tarmac in the harsh Pacific sunlight, round and fat, his bald head gleaming with sweat.

  Paulis enclosed Malenfant’s hand in two soft, moist palms. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you at last. It’s a great honour to have you here.”

  Malenfant extracted his hand warily. Paulis looked thirty-five, maybe a little older. His eyes shone with what Malenfant had come to recognize as hero worship.

  That was why he was here at Vandenberg, after all: to scatter a little stardust on the overworked, underpaid legions of engineers and designers who were labouring to construct his Big Dumb Booster for him. But he hadn’t expected it of a hard-headed entrepreneur type like Frank Paulis.

  They clambered into an open-top car, Paulis and Malenfant side by side in the back. An aide, a trim young woman Paulis called Xenia, climbed into the driver’s seat and cut in the SmartDrive. The car pulled smoothly away from the short airstrip.

  They drove briskly along the empty roads here at the fringe of Vandenberg ASFB. To either side of the car there were low green shrubs speckled with bright yellow flowers. They were heading west, away from the sun and towards the ocean, and towards the launch facility.

  Paulis immediately began to chatter about the work they were doing here, and his own involvement. “I want you to meet my engine man, an old buzzard called George Hench, from out of the Air Space Force. Of course he still calls it just the Air Force. He started working on missile programmes back in the 1950s…”

  Malenfant sat back in the warm sunlight and listened to Paulis with half an ear. It was a skill he’d developed since the world’s fascinated gaze had settled on him. Everybody seemed a lot more concerned to tell him what they felt and believed, rather than listen to whatever he had to say. It was as if they all needed to pour a little bit of their souls into the cranium of the man who was going to the Red Moon on their behalf.

  Whatever. So long as they did their work.

  They rose a slight incline and headed along a rise. Now Malenfant could see the ocean for the first time since landing. This was the Pacific coast of California, some hundred miles north of Los Angeles. The ocean was a heaving grey mass, its big waves growling. The ground was hilly, with crags and valleys along the waterline and low mountains in the background.

  The area struck him as oddly beautiful. It wasn’t Big Sur, but it was a lot prettier than Canaveral.

  But the big Red Moon hung in the sky above the ocean, its parched desert face turned to the Earth, and its deep crimson colour made the water look red as blood, unnatural.

  The coastline here had not been spared by the Tide; shore communities like Surf had been comprehensively obliterated. But little harm had come to this Air Space Force base, a few miles inland. Canaveral, on the other hand, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, had been severely damaged by the Tide. So Va
ndenberg had been the default choice to construct the launch facilities for Malenfant’s unlikely steed.

  The car slowed to a halt. They were in the foothills of the Casmalia Hills here. From this elevated vantage Malenfant could see a sweep of lowland speckled with concrete splashes linked by roadways: launch pads, many of them decommissioned.

  Beyond that he made out blocky white structures. That was the Shuttle facility itself, the relic of grandiose 1970s Air Force dreams of pilots in space. The launch pad itself looked much like its siblings on the Atlantic coast: a gaunt service structure set over a vast flame pit, with gaping vents to deflect the smoke and flame of launch. The gantry was accompanied to either side by two large structures, boxy, white, open, both marked boldly with the USASF and NASA logos. The shelters were mounted on rails and could be moved in to enclose and protect the gantry itself.

  It was nothing like Cape Canaveral. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their flanks. Engineers, most of them young, moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces. There was an air of improvisation, of invention and urgency, about this pad being reborn after two decades under wraps.

  “This has been a major launch centre since 1958,” Paulis said, sounding as proud as if he’d built the place himself. “Many of them polar launches. Good site for safety: if you go south of here, the next landmass you hit is Antarctica… Slick-six — sorry, SLC-6 — is the southernmost launch facility here. It was originally built back in the 1960s to launch a spy-in-the-sky space station for the Air Force, which never flew. Then they modified it for the Air Force Shuttle programme. But Shuttle never flew from here either, and after Challenger the facility was left dormant.”