Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  As he pushed the pieces around the board McCann bombarded Malenfant with anecdotes and memories, of his time here on the Red Moon and on his own lost version of Earth.

  But the talk was unsatisfactory. They were exiles from different versions of parallel Earths. They could compare notes on geography and the broad sweep of history, but they had no detail in common. None of the historical figures in. their worlds seemed to map across to each other. Although McCann seemed to follow a variant of Christianity — something like Calvinism, so far as Malenfant could determine — his “Christ” was not Jesus, but a man called John; “Christian” translated, roughly, to “Johannen’.

  No doubt all this was fascinating as a study of historical inevitability. But it made for lousy small talk. McCann strove to mask his profound disappointment that Malenfant was not from the home where he had left a wife and child, a family from whom he had not heard since their world had disappeared from the sky.

  Conversely Malenfant told McCann what he could of Emma, and asked if anyone like her had shown up, here on the Red Moon. But McCann seemed to know little of what went on beyond the limits of the stockade, and the scrap of Red Moon he and his colleagues controlled. Malenfant, frustrated, realized afresh he was going to have to find Emma alone.

  McCann said now, “Solitary, seeking diversion, I discovered the intricate delights of the knight’s tour.” He swept the board empty of pieces, save for a solitary knight, which he made hop in its disturbingly asymmetrical fashion from square to square. “The knight must move from square to square over an empty board, touching all the cells, but each only once. An old schoolboy puzzle… I quickly discovered that a three-by-four board is the smallest on which such a tour can be made. I have discovered many tours on the standard chessboard, many of which have fascinating properties. A closed tour, for example, starts and ends at the same cell.” The knight moved around the board with bewildering rapidity. “I do not know how many tours are possible. I suspect the number may be infinite.” He became aware of Malenfant’s uncomfortable silence.

  Malenfant tried to soften his look — how sane would you be after so many decades alone on Neandertal Planet, Malenfant?

  Embarrassed, McCann swept the pieces into a wooden box. “Rather like our situation here, don’t you think?” he said, forcing a smile. “We move from world to world with knight’s hops, forward a bit and sideways. We must hope our tours are closed too, eh?”

  After the first night McCann gave the two of them separate huts. In this dwindling colony there was plenty of room.

  Malenfant found it impossible to sleep. Lying in his battered sod hut, he gazed through his window as the night progressed.

  He heard the calls of the predators as the last light faded. Then there was an utter stillness, as if the world were holding its breath — and then a breath of wind and a coolness that marked the approaching dawn.

  Malenfant wasn’t used to living so close to nature. He felt as if he were trapped within some vast machine.

  His head rattled with one abortive scheme after another. He was a man who was used to taking control of a situation, of bulling his way through, of pushing until something gave. This wasn’t his world, and he had arrived here woefully ill-equipped; he still couldn’t see any way forward more promising than just pushing into the forest on foot, at random. He had to wait, to figure out the situation, to find an option with a reasonable chance of success. But still his enforced passivity was burning him up.

  The door opened.

  The Neandertal girl came into his hut. She was carrying a bowl of water that steamed softly, a fresh towel, a jug that might hold nettle tea.

  He said softly, “Julia.”

  She stood still in the grey dawn light, the glow from the window picking out the powerful contours of her face. “Here, Baas.”

  “Do you know what’s going on here?”

  She waited.

  He waved a hand. “All of this. The Red Moon. Different worlds.”

  “Ask Ol” Ones,” she said softly.

  “Who?”

  Th” Ol” Ones. As” them wha” for.”

  “The Old Ones? Where do they live?”

  She shrugged, her shoulders moving volcanically. “In th” ol’est place.”

  He frowned. “What about you, Julia?”

  “Baas?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Home,” she said immediately.

  “Home? Where is home?”

  She pointed into the sky. “Grey Earth.”

  “Does Mr McCann know you want to go home?”

  She shrugged again. “Born here.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to herself. “Born here. Mother. Moth” born here.”

  “Then this is your home, with Mr McCann.”

  She shook her head, a very human gesture. She pointed again to the forest, and the sky.

  Then she said, “You, Baas? What you wan’?”

  He hesitated. “I came looking for my wife.”

  Her face remained expressionless. But she said, “Fam’ly.”

  “Yes. I guess so. Emma is my family. I came here looking for her.”

  “Lon” way.”

  “Yes. Yes, it was a long way. And I ain’t there yet.”

  She walked towards him, rummaging in the pouch of her skirt. “Thomas,” she said.

  “I know him. He found me.”

  “Took off of Runner in fores’.” She held out something in the dark, something small and jewel-like that glittered in her palm.

  He took it, held it up to the light of the window. It was a hand-lens, badly scuffed, snapped off at its mount. It was marked with the monogram of the South African air force.

  “Emma,” he breathed. He was electrified. So there were indeed things McCann didn’t know, even about the Hams of his own household. “Julia, where—”

  But she had gone.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  “I have three wives and six children. That is how it is done in my new home…” Babo was talking fast, nervously, and his knuckles rattled as he walked with her through the tall dark halls of the building. His body hair was plaited and coloured in a fashion that repelled Mane’s simple Poka tastes. “The Farm is fine, Mane, and bigger than that of the Poka Lineage, but its design is based on the triangle: plane-covering, of course, but cramped and cluttered compared to Poka’s clean-lined hexagons.”

  “You always were an aesthete,” she said dryly.

  This whole building, she realized slowly, was a store of records piled up high from the lowest room to the highest. Physically, some of the records were stored in twinkling cubes that held bits of the quantum foam, minuscule wormholes frozen into patterns of meaning; and some were scraped onto parchment and animal skin.

  “Some of these pieces are very ancient indeed,” Babo said. “Dating back half a million years or more. And the Air Wall, you know, is a controlled storm. It is like a hurricane, but trapped in one place by subtle forces. It has raged here, impotent, for fifty thousand years — so that for all that time the Market has been in the eye of the storm — an eye that reveals the sky beyond the clouds, a sky opened for the study of the Astrologers…”

  She stopped and glared at him. “Oh, Babo, I don’t want to know about Air Walls or records! I never thought I would see you again — I didn’t know you had become an Astrologer.”

  He sighed, ruminatively picking his nose. “I am no Astrologer. But the Astrologers sent for me. When I was younger I did spend some time here, working informally, before I reached the home of my wives. Many boys do, Mane. You matriarchs run the world, but there is much you do not know, even about those who sire your children!”

  “Why are you here, Babo?”

  He wrapped his big hands over his head. “Because the Astrologers thought it would be kinder that way. Kinder if your brother told you the news, rather than a stranger…”

  “What news?”

  He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Come see t
he sky with me. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

  Reluctantly, she followed.

  The building was tall, and they had a long way to ascend. At first they used simple short-range isomorphic Mappers, but soon they came to more primitive parts of the building, and they had to climb, using rungs stapled to walls of crude bricks.

  Babo led the way. “A remarkable thing,” he called down to her. “We find climbing easy; our arms are strong, our feet well adapted to grasping. But it appears that our climbing ancestors evolved into creatures that, for a time, walked upright, on their hind feet. You can see certain features of the position of the pelvis — well. But we have given that up too; now, once more, we walk on all fours, using our knuckles, clinging to the ground.”

  “If you tried to walk upright you would be knocked over by the Wind.”

  “Of course, of course — but then why is it we carry traces of a bipedal ancestry? We are creatures of anomaly, Mane. We are not closely related to any of the animals on this Earth of ours — not one, not above a certain basic biochemical equivalence of course, without which we could not eat our food and would quickly starve to death. We can trace evolutionary relationships among all the world’s creatures, one related to the other in a hierarchy of families and phyla — except us. We seem to be unique, as if we fell out of the sky. We have no evolutionary forebears, no bones in the ground that might mark the passing of those who came before us.

  “Is it possible we evolved somewhere else? — a place where the Wind did not blow so strongly, where it was possible to walk upright?”

  “What sort of place? And how could we have got here from there?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the pattern of the bones, the biochemistry, is unmistakable.”

  “Idle speculation, Babo, won’t germinate a single seed.”

  “A Farmer’s practical reply,” he said sadly. “But we are surrounded by mystery, Manekato. The Astrologers hope that your mission will settle some of these fundamental quandaries. Oh, please keep climbing, dear Mane! We are soon there, and I will tell you everything.”

  With bad grace, clinging to the rungs with feet and hands, she continued her ascent.

  They reached a platform, open to the sky. But there was no breeze, and the air felt as warm as it had inside the tower.

  Babo walked around nervously, peering into the sky. “It is darkling already. Our days are short, because the planet spins quickly — did you ever reflect on that. Mane? It didn’t have to be so. Earth could spin more slowly, and we would have leisurely days, and — oh, look!” He pointed with a long stabbing finger. “Look, a star!”

  She peered up awkwardly. There was a single bright star, close to the zenith, set against the deepening blue of the sky.

  “How strange,” Babo breathed, “that before the first tentative Mappings no human eye saw a star.”

  Manekato grunted. “What of it? Stars are trivial. You don’t need to see them.”

  That was true, of course. Every child was expected to figure out the stars.

  When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of objects: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other things. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.

  Of course the results of such trials varied — in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind. But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.

  Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.

  “Ah, but the detail is everything,” Babo said, “and that you can never predict, of course. That and the beauty. That was quite unexpected, to me. Oh, and one other thing. The emptiness of the universe…”

  Manekato’s childhood cohort, like most others, had concluded — groping with an intuition of uniformity — that if this world was inhabited, and the universe was large — well, then, there must be many inhabited planets. She recalled what a great and unwelcome surprise it had been to learn that that was not true: that, as far as could be discerned, the universe was empty of the organization that would have marked the work of intelligence.

  “It is a deep, ancient mystery,” Babo said. “Why do we see no Farms in the sky? Of course we are a sedentary species, content to cultivate our Farms. But not every species need have the same imperatives as us. Imagine an acquisitive species, that covets the territory of others.”

  She thought it through quickly. “That is outlandish and unlikely. Such a species would surely destroy itself in fratricidal battles, as the illogic of its nature worked itself out.”

  “Perhaps. But wouldn’t we see the flaring of the wars, the mighty ruins they left behind? We should see them. Mane.”

  She snapped, “Babo, get to the point.”

  He sighed and came to squat before her. Gently he groomed her, picking imaginary insects from her coat, as he had when they were children. “Mane, dear Mane, the Astrologers have read the stars…”

  The word “astrology’, in Manekato’s ancient, rich language, derived from older roots meaning “the word of the stars’. Here astrology had absorbed astronomy and physics and other disciplines; here astrology was no superstition, no foolishness, but one of the fundamental sciences. For if the universe was empty of mind save for humans, then the courses of the stars could have no meaning save for their role in the affairs of humanity.

  And now, Babo said, the Astrologers, peering into the sky and poring over records dozens of millennia deep, had discerned a looming threat.

  Joshua:

  Mary was in oestrus. The scent of her seemed to fill the air of the hut, and the head of every man.

  Joshua longed for the time of her blood to pass, and she and the other women could recede to the grey periphery of his awareness. For the deep ache aroused by Mary distracted him from the great conundrum which plagued him.

  Over and over he thought of the great blue wings he had seen falling from the sky, bearing that fat black and white seed to its unknown fate in the forest at the top of the cliff. He had never seen such a thing before. What was it?

  Joshua’s was a world that did not countenance change. And yet, a stubborn awareness told him, there was change. Once the people had lived on the Grey Earth. Now they lived here. So the past contained a change. And now the black and white seed had fallen from the sky, and whatever grew from it surely marked change to come in the future as well.

  Change in the past, change in the future.

  Joshua, helplessly conservative himself, had an instinctive grasp of parsimony: his world contained two extraordinary events — Grey Earth and sky seed — and surely they must be linked. But how? The elements of the conundrum revolved in his head.

  Joshua had solved puzzles before.

  Once, as a boy, he had found a place where Abel, his older brother, had knapped out a burin. It was just a patch of dune where stone flakes were scattered, in a rough triangle that showed where Abel had sat. Joshua had picked over the debris, curious. Later, in the hut, he had found the discarded burin itself. It was a fine piece of work, slender and sharp, and yet fitting easily into Joshua’s small hand. And he remembered the spall outside.

  He sat where his brother had sat — one leg outstretched, the other tucked underneath. He reached for bits of the spall, and tried to fit them back onto the finished tool. One after another he found flakes that nestled closely into the hollows and valleys of the tool, and then more flakes which clustered around them.

  Soon there were more flakes than he could hold in his hands, so he put down his assemblage carefully, and climbed a little way up the cliff behind the hut. He found a young tree sprouting from a hollow, and bled it of sap. With the sticky stuff cradled in his hands he ran back to his workplace, and began to
fix the flakes to the tool with dabs of the sap. The sap clung to his fingers, and soon the whole thing was a sticky mess. But he persisted, ignoring the sun that climbed steadily into the sky.

  At last he had used up almost all the large flakes he could find on the ground, and there was nothing left there but a little dust. And he had almost reassembled the cobble from which the burin had been carved.

  Shouting with excitement he ran into the hut, cradling his reconstruction. But he had received a baffled response. Abel had picked at the sticky assemblage of flakes, saying, “What, what?”

  A cobble was a cobble, until it was turned into a tool, and then the cobble no longer existed. Just as Jacob had been a man until he died, and then there was only a mass of meat and bones, soon to be devoured by the worms. To turn a tool back into a cobble was almost as strange to the people as if Joshua had tried to turn Jacob’s bones back into the man himself.

  Eventually Abel crushed the little stone jigsaw. The gummy flakes stuck to his hand, and he brushed them off on the dusty ground, growling irritably.

  But in some corner of his spacious cranium Joshua had never forgotten how he had solved the puzzle of the shattered cobble. Now, as he pondered the puzzle of the multiple earths and the falling seed, Joshua found that long-ago jigsaw cobble pricking his memory.

  And when a second seed fell from the sky — another fat black and white bundle suspended under a blue canopy, landing where the first had lodged at the top of the cliffs — he knew that he could not rest until he had seen for himself what mighty tree might sprout from those strange seeds.