Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  But the other beckoned, an unmistakably human gesture.

  Still Emma hesitated. Somewhere on this brutal world were the people who had taught the Runners to speak English. If she couldn’t get back to Earth, then if her destiny lay anywhere, it was there — and not with this Ham.

  But now she glanced back at the Elves. They had pulled open the boy’s rib cage, and the child gave a final, exhausted moan as his heart was torn out.

  You’re kind of short of choices, Emma.

  She followed the Ham.

  The Ham glided away through the forest, pointing to the footsteps she made in the dead brush on the ground. When Emma stepped there, she made no sound.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Nemoto said laconically, “Three, two, one.”

  The booster pack fired, and Malenfant was pushed deep into his seat.

  The light of their rockets illuminated the deserts and forests of the Red Moon. All over the little world, eyes were raised to the sky, curious and incurious.

  — III —

  HOMINIDS

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  Manekato lingered on the threshold of the room, held back by a mixture of respect and dread.

  Her mother, Nekatopo, was dying.

  Nekatopo, breathing evenly, gazed at the soft-glowing ceiling. A slim Worker waited beside the bed for her commands, as still as a polished rock.

  Nekatopo’s room was a hexagonal chamber whose form was the basis of the design of the House, indeed of the Farm itself. This room had been occupied by matriarchs throughout the deep history of the Lineage, and so it was Nekatopo’s now — and would be Manekato’s soon. But the room was stark. The ceiling was tall and the walls bare panels, glowing softly pink. The only piece of furniture was the bed on which Nekatopo lay, itself hexagonal.

  Manekato remembered how her grandmother had decorated these same walls with exuberant fruits. But her daughter had stripped away all of that. “I honour my mother’s memory,” she had said. “But these walls are of Adjusted Space; they are not material. They do not tarnish or erode. They have a beauty beyond space and time, as our ancestors intended. Why deface them with transience?…”

  But Manekato found the unreal simplicity as overwhelming, in its way, as the happy clutter of her grandmother. When this room was hers, Manekato would find a middle way: her own way, as all the matriarchs had done — and she felt a sudden flush of shame, for her mother was not yet dead, and here she was calculating how she would use her room.

  Now she saw that salty tears leaked over Nekatopo’s cheeks, soaking the sparse hair, and trickled into her flat nose.

  Manekato was troubled to her core. Her mother had never cried — not even on hearing the news of her imminent death — not even on the day when she had had to send away her only son, Babo, Mapping him to his marriage on a Farm on the other side of the world.

  Manekato fled, hoping her mother had not noticed she had been here.

  She walked alone, along the path that led to the ocean. The Wind was gentle today, comparatively; she was barely aware of the way it ruffled the thick black hair on her back, and shivered over the trees that clung to the ground nearby.

  To a human she would have looked something like a gorilla: stocky, powerful, all of eight feet tall, she knuckle-walked elegantly. She pressed her knuckles into the crushed gravel of the path with gentleness, even reverence. Every speck of land on the Farm was precious to her, like an extension of her own heart. Even this humble path served its purpose with quiet dignity, and had borne the weight of her mother and her mother’s mother, deep into the roots of time, as it bore her weight now.

  Quiet dignity, she thought. That is what I must strive for, in the difficult days ahead.

  The path ended at a shallow cliff top that overlooked the sea. The sea was grey and cloudy, laden with silt, and tall waves, generated by a storm raging far over the horizon, crashed with exorbitant violence on the heavily eroded shore. Manekato glimpsed the rectangular gridwork that covered the ocean floor — the boundary of the undersea Farms — a shining mesh that disappeared into the murk of the cloudy water.

  The tides were shallow on this moonless Earth, so the beach was narrow and battered by waves. But still huge birds plummeted from the sky, their muscular wings folded, stabbing after the unwary fish and crabs who clung to life at this thin, inhospitable margin. Manekato swivelled her ears to hear the calls of the birds, deep-pitched and throaty to penetrate the unceasing roar of the Wind.

  Manekato turned and looked back the way she had come, resting her weight easily on her knuckles. The Farm sprawled over a low hill — in fact it was the core of a volcano, Wind-eroded to a snub long before her Lineage had begun to work this land. The Farm was dominated by the low, streamlined House that sat at the crest of the hill, its prow facing the direction of the prevailing Wind like a beached ship. Around the House sprawled a glowing gridwork of light, in the hexagonal pattern that was the signature of the Poka Lineage. Each of the fields marked out by the grid bore a different crop, ranging from the most advanced self recursive Worker designs — even from here she could see nubs of heads and stubby limbs pushing out of the ground — all the way back to the Lineage’s first harvest, a fat-trunked, ground-hugging willow whose bark still provided some of the best tea available anywhere.

  But the land itself was only a cross-section of the greater Farm. There were more cultivated layers stacked deep beneath her feet, fed by light piped from the surface, and mines for the water and hydrocarbons locked in the ground’s deeper rocks, and even one mighty borehole that punched through the planet’s crust and into the mantle, sipping at Earth’s core heat. There were more ducts that pumped heat and carbon dioxide and other waste products back into the ground, of course, as the Poka Lineage contributed to the husbandry of the world.

  Even above the ground the Farm’s activities extended. Manekato could see engineered birds wheeling over the main House, snapping Wind-blown debris from the sky. The birds were restricted to the Farm’s perimeter, and Manekato could see how they flocked in a great wedge-shaped slice of sky that projected up from the ground, so high that the uppermost birds were mere dots against the banded, rippling clouds that were the province of the Sky Farmers.

  From the core of the Earth to the bellies of the clouds: that was the extent of the Poka Farm, every scrap of it worked and reworked, every speck of dirt, every molecule of air and water functional, every bacterium and insect and animal and bird with a well-designed role to play in the managed ecology.

  There was not a patch of this world that was not similarly cultivated, cherished by its Lineage.

  And the Farm would soon belong to Manekato, all of it — even though she was just eight years old: still a young adult, little more than a third of her life gone.

  Even though she didn’t want it.

  Now Manekato heard a faint cry. She swivelled her parabolic ears towards the House, and picked out the voice of her mother, calling her name.

  She hurried up the path, back sloping, powerful legs working, levering herself forward on her knuckles. As she passed, immature Workers called out to her, tinny voices piping from ill-formed mouths, already seeking to serve; and willow leaves swivelled frantically in her shadow as they strove to drink in all the light of the eight-hour day.

  She returned to her mother’s room, at the heart of the Farm. Unhappily she stepped forward, approaching the bed.

  Her mother’s bed looked like a simple hexagonal nest, woven of leafy branches. It was in fact a cluster of semi-sentient Workers, designed to mimic the nests of willow and birch branches that children learned to make for themselves from an early age. It had been manufactured to Manekato’s design by Worker artisans, twelve generations removed from the crude self-recursive creatures budding in the fields outside.

  The floor of the room was a pit filled with hard-compacted white dust. The dust was the ground-up bones of her ancestors. One day Nekatopo’s bones would be added to the pit, and, not many years af
ter that, Manekato’s too. Nobody knew how deep the dust pit extended. Manekato could feel the soft grittiness of the dust, but not a gram of it clung to her feet.

  Nekatopo opened her eyes.

  “…Mother?”

  “Oh, Mane, Mane.” It was a childish diminutive she had not used since Manekato was a baby. She reached up, her great arms withered and weak.

  Manekato embraced her, feeling the tears soak into the hairs in her own chest.

  “Oh, Mane, I’m so sorry. But you must go to the Market.”

  Manekato frowned. She knew that no woman had travelled to the Market since her grandmother’s day. Manekato herself had never left the boundary of the Farm, and the prospect of travelling so far filled her with dread. “Why?”

  Nekatopo struggled to sit up, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I don’t even know how to tell you this. We are going to lose the Farm.”

  Manekato felt her mouth fall open. A change in the possession of a Farm occurred only when a Lineage became extinct, or when some member of a Lineage had committed a grave crime.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t. Oh dear, dear Mane! It is the Astrologers. They have news for us which — well, it has gone around and around in my head, like the Astrologers” own wretched stars wheeling around the world. The Farm is to be destroyed. A great catastrophe is to befall the world — so say the Astrologers.”

  Manekato could not take in any of this. “Storms can be averted, waves tamed—”

  “You must believe the Astrologers,” Nekatopo whispered, insistent. “I’m sorry, Manekato. You must go to the Market and meet them.”

  Manekato pulled away from her frail mother, frightened, resentful. “Why? If all this is true, what use is talk?”

  “Go to them,” Nekatopo sighed, subsiding back into the arms of the semi-sentient branches.

  Manekato walked to the door. Then — torn by shock, uncertainty, shame, doubt she hesitated. “Nekatopo — if the Farm dies — what will become of me?”

  Nekatopo lay on her bed, a dark brown bundle, breathing softly. She did not reply — but Manekato knew there was only one possible answer. If the Farm died, then the Lineage must die with it.

  She burned with confusion, resentment.

  But still she hesitated. It struck her that whatever the fate of the Farm, if she travelled to the Market, her mother might not be able to welcome her home again.

  So, softly, she began to recite her true name. “Manekatopokane-mahedo…”

  Manekato’s true name consisted of nearly fifty thousand syllables — one syllable more than her mother’s name, two more than her grandmother’s — one syllable added for each generation of the Lineage, back to the beginning, when members of a very different species, led by a matriarch called Ka, and her daughter called Poka, had first scratched at the unpromising slopes of the eroded hills here.

  Manekato’s people had farmed this scrap of land for fifty thousand generations, for more than a million years.

  Nekatopo listened to this child-like performance, unmoving, but Manekato sensed her wistful pleasure.

  Joshua:

  Joshua crouched by a bubbling stream. His nostrils were filled by the musky smell of the hunters” skins, the soft green scent of grass.

  The giant horse had become separated from its herd. It snorted, stamping a leg that seemed a little lame. Forgetting its peril in the foolish way of all horses, it nibbled at grass.

  The Ham hunters crept forward. Most of them were men. There was no cover, here on the open plain, but they hunkered down in the long grass, and the drab brown skins they wore helped them blend into the background. They were patient. They worked towards the horse step by silent step, staying resolutely downwind of the animal. Lame or not, the heavy old stallion could still outrun any of them-or punish them with its hooves should they fail to trap it properly.

  This small drama took place on a plain that stretched from the foot of a cliff. To the east, beyond a stretch of coarsely grassed dunes, the sea glimmered, a band of grey steel. And to the north a great river decanted into the sea via a broad, sluggish delta system. The plain was wet and scrubby, littered by pools. At the base of the cliff itself, a broad lake was fed by springs that sprouted from the cliff’s rocks.

  The coastal plain, with its caves and streams and pools and migrant herds, was the home of Joshua’s people. They called themselves the People of the Grey Earth. Others called them Hams. They had lived here for two thousand generations.

  To Joshua, the landscape was a blur, marked out by the position of the other hunters, as if they glowed brightly — and by the horse, the centre of their attention.

  A soft call came. Abel was waving his arm, indicating they should approach the horse a little closer. Abel was Joshua’s older brother.

  Joshua crouched lower and moved through the grass, towards the incurious horse.

  But now his questing fingers found something new, lying hidden in the grass. It was a stick, long and straight. No, it was a spear, with a stone tip fixed to the wood by some black, hard substance; he could see where twigs had been sheared away from it by a stone knife. He picked up the spear and hefted it, testing its weight. It was light and flimsy; it would surely break easily on a single thrust. Its shaft was oddly carved, into fine, baffling shapes.

  A bear.

  He dropped the spear, crying out, and stumbled back. Suddenly a bear had been looking at him, from out of the shaped wood in his hands.

  A massive hand clamped over his mouth and he was pushed to the ground.

  Abel loomed over him. His skins, of horse and antelope, were tightly bound about his body by lengths of rawhide thread. His eyes were dark pools under his bony brow. “Th” horse,” he hissed.

  “Bear,” Joshua said, panting. “Saw bear.”

  Abel frowned and cast around, seeking the bear. Then he saw the broken spear. He picked it up, briefly fingering its dense carving, then hurled it from him with loathing. “Zealots,” he said. “Or En’lish. Skinny-folk.”

  Yes, Joshua thought uneasily. Skinnies must have made the little spear. But nevertheless there had been, briefly, a bear glaring at him from out of the carved wood.

  “Ho!” It was Saul, another of the Ham hunters. “Horse breakin’!”

  Abel and Joshua struggled to their feet. The horse, startled, was coming straight towards the brothers, a mountain of meat and muscle, a giant as large as a carthorse.

  Joshua grabbed a cobble, and Abel raised his thrusting spear. They grinned at each other in anticipation.

  Joshua ran straight into the animal’s mighty chest.

  He was knocked flying, and he landed in the dirt in a tangle of loosened furs. Winded, he got straight up, and ran back towards the fray.

  He saw that his brother had grabbed the horse around its neck. The horse was bucking, still running, and it carried Abel with it; but Abel was stabbing at the horse’s throat with his spear. The spear was a short solid pillar of wood, stained deep with the blood of many kills. It was a weapon of strength and utility, without carving or decoration of any kind.

  The slender spear of the Skinny-folk was meant to be thrown, so that an animal could be brought down from a distance, sparing such hard labour; the Hams had no such technology, and never would.

  In a moment Abel’s thrusts had reached some essential organ, and the animal crashed to the dust. The other men closed, yelling, hurling themselves on the animal to subdue it before it died. With a gleeful howl, ignoring the pain of his bruised chest and back, Joshua joined in. Before the animal was overpowered they all suffered bruises and cuts; one man broke a finger.

  When the horse was dead, the butchery began.

  Joshua found a flat cobble. He sat on the ground with one leg folded under him, tucked a flap of antelope skin over each hand, and began to work the cobble with fast, precise motions.

  With fast blows of a pebble, he knocked away bits of stone, working around the cobble until he had left a s
eries of thin ridges on a domed surface. After twenty or thirty strokes, with bits of stone littering the ground around him, he pulled a bone hammer from the cord around his waist. The hammer was a bit of antelope thigh bone, broken, discoloured, heavily worn with use. With care, he struck one of the ridges. A thin, teardrop-shaped flake fell away. He picked it up and inspected it; it was fine and sharp, good enough for use without further work. He returned to his cobble and knocked out a series of flakes, with one confident blow after another, until the core had been returned to convexity. Then he began to prepare the core to make further flakes.

  Joshua was good at working stone. It was a high art because each nodule of stone had its own unique properties; the toolmaker had to find a path through the stone to the tools he or she wanted. It was a question of seeing the tools in the raw stone. Men and women alike would watch his fast, precise movements, seeking to copy him. The women pushed their children towards him, making them watch. Nobody asked him about it, of course; people didn’t talk about tool making.

  Making such tools was the thing Joshua did best, the thing for which he was most valued, the thing for which he valued himself. And yet it set him aside from the others.

  He tucked his bone hammer back in his rawhide belt and took his flakes to the horse. He began work on a leg. With a series of swipes he cut down the skin on the inside of the limb, pulling it away from the muscle. Some of the horse’s thick brown hair stuck to the edge of the tool. Then he moved to the belly, opening up the hide. He grasped the open skin and pulled it sideways. Where membranes clung to the skin, he swiped at them gently with his flake, holding the stone at its centre between his fingers. The membranes parted easily. There was no blood, no mess.

  When the horse was skinned, it was easily dismembered. Joshua cut away the meat of the neck. It fell open and was pulled away. He turned his axe over and over, seeking to use all its edge. When he was done he moved to the rib cage, and sliced down it with a crunch.