Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The day felt hot already. Thin air, Malenfant: hot days, cold nights, like living at altitude.

  Nemoto’s pallet was empty.

  When he tried to sit up, pushing back the blankets of crudely woven fibre, his shoulder twinged sharply: injured, he was reminded, where a Homo erectus had thrown a stone at him, prior to trying to eat him.

  He swung his legs out of bed. He was in his underwear, including his socks, and his boots were set neatly behind the hut’s small door. He could feel the ache of a faint hangover, and his mouth felt leathery. He remembered the beer he had consumed the night before, a rough, chewy ferment of some local vegetation, sluiced down from wooden cups.

  The door opened, creaking on rope hinges. A woman walked in.

  Malenfant snatched back the blankets, covering himself. She was short, squat, dressed in a blouse and skirt dyed a bright, almost comical yellow. Her face protruded beneath a heavy brow, but her hair was tied back neatly and adorned with flowers. She looked like a pro wrestler in drag. She curtsied neatly. She was carrying Malenfant’s coverall, which had been cleaned and patched at the shoulder. She put the coverall on his bed, and crossed to a small dresser, evidently home-made. There was a wooden bowl of dried flowers on top of the dresser. She scooped out the flowers and replaced them with a handful of pressed yellow blooms — marigolds, perhaps — that she drew from a pouch in her skirt. Her feet were bare, he saw, great spade-shaped toes protruding from under the skirt.

  She curtsied again. “Breakfas’, Baas,” she said, her voice a gruff rasp. She had not once met his eyes. She turned to go out the door.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She stopped. He thought he saw apprehension in her stance, though she must have been twice his weight, and certainly had nothing to fear from him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Julia.” It was difficult for her to make the “J” sound; it came out as a harsh squirt. Choo-li-a.

  “Thanks for looking after me.”

  She curtsied once again and walked stolidly out of the room, her big feet padding on the wooden floor.

  The settlement consisted of a dozen huts, of cut sod or stacked logs, with roofs of thick green blankets of turf. The huts were a uniform size and laid out like a miniature suburban street. The central roadway was crimson dust beaten flat by the passage of many feet, and lined with heavy rocks. Around each of the huts a small area was cordoned off by more lines of rocks. Some of the rocks were painted white. In the “gardens” plants grew, vegetables and flowers, in orderly rows.

  Crude-looking carts were parked in the shadow of one wall, and other bits of equipment — what looked like spades, hoes, crossbows — were stacked in neat piles under bits of treated skin. There was even a neat, orderly latrine system: trenches topped by little cubicles and wooden seats.

  The effect was oddly formal, like a barracks, a small piece of a peculiarly ordered civilization carved out of the jungle, which proliferated beyond the tall stockade that surrounded the huts. Last night McCann had been apologetic about the settlement’s crudity, but with its vegetable-fibre clothing and carts and tools of wood and stone, it struck Malenfant as a remarkable effort by a group of stranded survivors to carve out of this unpromising jungle something of the civilization they had left behind.

  But the huts” sod walls were eroded and heavily patched by mud. And several of the huts appeared abandoned, their walls in disrepair, their tiny gardens desiccated back to crimson dust.

  There was nobody about — no humans, anyhow.

  A man dressed in skins crossed the compound’s little street, barefoot, passing from one hut to another. He was broad, stocky, like Julia. A Neandertal, perhaps.

  In one corner of the compound two men worked at a pile of rocks, steadily smashing them one against the other, as if trying to reduce them to gravel. The men were naked, powerful. Malenfant could immediately see they were the Homo erectus types. They were restrained by heavy ropes on their ankles, and they didn’t seem aware of his presence. The display of their strength, unaccompanied by the control of minds, disturbed him.

  But he could still smell bacon. Comparative anthropology could wait.

  He followed his nose to a hut at the centre of the compound. Within, a table had been set with wooden plates and cups and cutlery, and in a small kitchen area another Neandertal-type woman, older then Julia, was frying bacon on slabs of rock heated by a fire. In the circumstances, it seemed incredibly domesticated.

  Nemoto was sitting at the table, chewing her way steadily through a slab of meat. She looked at him as he entered, and raised an eyebrow.

  “…Malenfant. Good morning.”

  Malenfant turned at the voice, and his hand was grasped firmly.

  Hugh McCann was wearing a suit, Malenfant was startled to see, with a collared shirt and even a tie. But the suit and shirt were threadbare, and Malenfant saw how McCann’s belt dug into his belly.

  McCann saw him looking. He said ruefully, “I never was much of a hand with the needle. And our bar-bar friends make fine cooks, but they don’t have much instinct for tailoring, I fear.”

  Malenfant was fuddled by the scent of the food. “Bar-bars?”

  “For barbarians,” Nemoto said, her mouth full. “The Neandertals.”

  “They call themselves Hams,” McCann said. “A Biblical reference, of course. But bar-bars they were to me as a boy, and bar-bars they will always remain, I fear.” His accent was clearly British, but of a peculiarly strangulated type Malenfant hadn’t encountered outside of World War II movies. And he gave Malenfant’s name a strong French pronunciation. He took Malenfant’s elbow and guided him towards the kitchen area. “What can we offer you? The bacon comes from the local breed of hog, and is fairly authentic, but the bird who laid those eggs was no barnyard chicken: rather some dreadful flightless thing like a bush turkey. Still, the eggs are pretty tasty.” He flashed a smile at the Ham cook, showing decayed teeth.

  First things first. Malenfant grabbed a plate and began to ladle it full of food. The wooden utensils were crude, but easy to use. He took his plate to the table, and sat with Nemoto, who was still eating silently. Malenfant sliced into his bacon. The well-cooked meat fell apart easily.

  After a moment McCann joined them. “I expect last night is all a bit of a blur. You did rather go on a bust, Malenfant.”

  “Body fluid redistribution,” Nemoto said dryly. “Low oxygen content. You just could not take it, Malenfant.”

  “I’ll know better next time.”

  “Runners,” Nemoto said.

  “What?”

  “The Erectus/Ergaster breed. Mr McCann calls them Runners — Running Men, Running-folk.”

  “Quite a danger in the wild,” McCann said around a mouthful of bacon. “That scrog of wood where we found you was hotching with them. But once broken they are harmless enough. And useful. A body strong enough for labour, hands deft enough to handle tools, and yet without the will or wit to oppose a man’s commands — if backed up by a light touch of the sjambok from time to time…”

  Nemoto leaned forward. “Mr McCann. You said that when you were a boy you called the Neandertals — that is, the Hams — bar-bars. So were there Hams in, umm, in the world you came from?”

  McCann dug a fork into his scrambled egg, considering the question. He seemed more comfortable talking to Malenfant than to Nemoto, and he directed his remarks to him. “Look here,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, not yet. But I’m going to be honest with you from the start. I don’t mind telling you that yours are the first white faces we’ve seen since we’ve come here. Aside from those dreadful Zealot types, of course, but they’re no help to us, and beyond the pale anyhow… Yes,” he said. “Yes, there are Hams where I come from. There. That’s a straight answer to a straight question, and I trust you’ll treat me with the same courtesy.”

  “Where?” Nemoto pressed. “Where are your Hams? In Europe, Asia—”

  “Yes. Well, they are n
ow. But not by origin, of course. The Hams came originally from the New World.”

  Nemoto asked, “America?”

  McCann frowned. “I don’t know that name.”

  Malenfant eyed Nemoto. “What are you thinking?”

  “An alternate Earth,” Nemoto said simply.

  Yes, he thought. McCann had come from an Earth, a different Earth, a world where Neandertals had survived to the present — a world where pre-European America had been in the occupation, not of a branch of Homo sapiens, but of another species of humankind altogether, a different flesh… What an adventure that must have been, Malenfant thought, for a different Columbus.

  Nemoto said softly, “I think we may be dealing with a whole sheaf of worlds here, Malenfant. And all linked by this peculiar wandering Red Moon.”

  McCann was listening intently Malenfant saw how deeply cut were the lines in his face, he might have been fifty, but he looked older, careworn, intense, lit by a kind of desperation. He said, “You believe we come from different worlds.”

  “Different versions of Earth,” Nemoto said.

  He nodded. “And in this Earth of yours, there are no Hams?”

  “No,” Nemoto said steadily.

  “Well, we have no Runners. The Runners may be native to this place, perhaps.” He eyed them sharply. “And what about the others, the Elf-folk and the Nutcrackers…”

  Malenfant said, “If you mean other breeds of hominids, or pre-homimds — no. Nothing between us and the chimps. The chimpanzees.”

  McCann’s eyes opened wider. “How remarkable. How — lonely.”

  The Neandertal woman, with a bulky grace, came to the table and began to gather up their dishes.

  They walked around the compound.

  There was very little metal here: a few knives, bowls, shears. These tools, it seemed, had been cut from the wreck of the ship that had brought McCann and his colleagues here: like Nemoto and Malenfant, the English had got here under their own power. So the tools were irreplaceable and priceless — and they were a target for steady theft, by Hams within and without the compound. McCann said the Hams did not use the tools; they seemed to destroy them or bury them, removing this trace of novelty from the world.

  There were many Hams, working as servants. And there appeared to be several of the so-called Runners, kept under control at all times, apparently domiciled outside the main stockade. He tried to put aside judgement. He was not the one who had battled to survive here for so long; and it was evident that this McCann and his companions came from a very different world from his.

  And besides, McCann appeared to believe that he treated “his” hominids well.

  They met one other of the English, a bloated-looking red-faced man with a Santa Claus beard and an immense pot belly that protruded from the grimy, much-patched remnant of a shirt. He was riding in a cart drawn by two of the Runners, harnessed with strips of leather like pack animals. Santa Claus glared at Malenfant and Nemoto as he passed them, and then went riding out of the stockade through gates smoothly pulled back by Hams.

  “There goes Crawford in his Cape cart,” whispered McCann conspiratonally. “Something of an oddball, between you and me. Well, we all are, I suppose, after all this time. I fear he’s too much set in his ways to deal with you. Of course if he suspected you were French he’d shoot you where you stand!… Martyr to his lumbago, poor chap. And I fear he may have a touch of the black-water.”

  McCann talked quickly and fluently, as if he had been too long alone.

  There had been twelve of them, it seemed — all men, all British, from an Empire that had thrived longer than in Malenfant’s world. Their rocket ship had been driven by something called a Darwin engine.

  McCann struggled to describe the history of his world, his nation. After bombarding them with a lot of detail, names of wars and kings and generals and politicians that meant nothing to Malenfant, he settled on a blunt summary.

  “We are engaged in a sort of global war,” McCann said. “That’s been the shape of it for a couple of centuries now. Our forefathers struck out for new lands, in Asia and Africa and Australia — even the New World — as much out of rivalry as for expectations of gain.”

  But the ultimate “new land” had always hovered in the sky. Before the Red Moon had appeared in McCann’s sky, a Moon had sailed there — not tiny Luna, but a much fatter world, a world of water-carved canyons and aquifers and dust storms, a world that sounded oddly like Mars. Drawn by that Moon, the great nations of this other Earth had launched themselves into a space race as soon as the technology was available, decades before Malenfant’s history had caught up.

  Malenfant, battered by strangeness, found room for a twinge of nostalgia. He’d have exchanged McCann’s fat Moon for Luna any time. If only a world like Mars had been found to orbit the Earth, instead of poor desiccated Luna — a world with ice and air, just waiting for an explorer’s tread! With such a world as a lure, just three days away from Earth, how different history might have been. And how differently his own life, and Emma’s, might have turned out.

  “The lure of the Moon was everything, of course,” McCann said. “From times before memory it has floated in the sky, fat and round and huge, with storms and ice caps and even, perhaps, traces of vegetation, visible with the naked eye. You could see it was another world in the sky, waiting for the tread of man, for the flag of empire, the ploughs of farmers… It was quite a chase. Got to stop the other chap getting there first, you see.”

  Malenfant was getting confused again. “Other chap? You mean the Americans?”

  Nemoto said gently, “There are no Americans in his world, Malenfant.”

  “The French, of course,” said McCann. “The blooming French!”

  Colonies on this bounteous Moon had been founded in what sounded like the equivalent of the first half of the twentieth century. Since then wars had already been fought, wars on the Moon waged between spreading mini-empires of Brits and French and Germans.

  But then, in McCann’s universe, the Mars-Moon had disappeared, to be replaced by this peculiar, wandering Red Moon, with its own cargo of oceans and life. Once the world had gotten over its bewilderment — once the last hope of contacting the lost colonies on Mars-Moon was gone — a new race had begun to plant a flag in the Red Moon.

  “…Or Lemuria, as we call it,” McCann said.

  Nemoto said, “A lost continent beneath the Indian Ocean, once thought to have been the cradle of mankind.”

  McCann talked on: of how the dozen men had travelled here; of a disastrous landing that had wrecked their ship and killed three of them; of how they had sent heliograph and radio signals home and waited for rescue — and of how their Earth had flickered out of the sky, to be replaced by another, and another.

  “A sheaf of worlds,” murmured Nemoto, gazing at McCann.

  When it was clear that no rescue was to come, some of the exploratory party had submitted to despair. One committed suicide. Another handed himself over to a party of Elf-folk for a hideous and protracted death.

  The survivors had recruited local Hams, and used their muscles and Runner labour to construct this little township. They had found no others of their kind, save for the sinister-sounding Zealots, of whom McCann was reluctant to speak, who lived some distance from the compound.

  It seemed that it had been the mysterious Zealots who had taught the indigenes their broken English — if inadvertently, through escaped slaves returning to their host populations. The Zealots had been here for centuries, McCann seemed to believe.

  “Not much of a life,” McCann said grimly. “No women, you see. Some of us sought relief with the Hams, even with Runners. But they aren’t women. And there were certainly no children to follow.” He smiled stoically. “Without women and children, you can’t make a colony, can you? After a time you wonder why you bother to shave every day.”

  One by one the Englishmen had died, their neat little huts falling into disrepair.

  McCann showed the
m a row of graves, outside the stockade gate, marked by bits of stone. The last to die had been a man called Jordan— ‘dead of paralytic shock’, McCann said. McCann appeared especially moved to be at Jordan’s grave side. Malenfant wondered if these withdrawn, lonely men, locked in civility and their memories of a forever lost home, had in the end sought consolation in each other.

  But McCann, in a gruesome effort to play the good host, talked brightly of better times. “We had a life of sorts. We played cards — until they wore out and we made chess sets, carving pieces from bits of balsa. We had no books, but we would spin each other yarns, recounting the contents of novels as best we remembered them. I dare say the shades of a few authors are restless at the liberties we took. Once or twice we even put on a play or two. Marlowe comedies mostly: Much Ado About Nothing, that kind of thing. Just to amuse ourselves, of course.

  “We used to play sports. Your average Ham can’t kick a soccer ball to save his life, but he’s a formidable rugby player. As for the Runners, they can’t grasp the simplest principle of rules or sportsmanship. But, my, can they run! We would organize races. The record we got was under six seconds for the hundred yard dash. That fellow was rewarded with plenty of bananas and beer…”

  McCann spoke of how the survivors, just four of them, had become withdrawn, even one from the other, as they waited gloomily for death. Crawford would disappear into the forest for days on end with squads of Hams, “fossicking around’, as McCann put it. The others would rarely even leave their huts.

  “And you?” Nemoto asked. “What is your eccentricity, Mr McCann?”

  “A longing for company,” he said immediately, smiling with self-deprecation. “That’s always been my weakness, I’m afraid.”

  “Then it must have been hard for you here,” Malenfant said.