Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  From McCann’s descriptions, it sounded as if that had been the downfall of the Redoubtable.

  “She was a veteran,” McCann said softly. “She had done the Earth-Moon round trip a dozen times or more. But now we were dealing with a new Moon, you see. Well, we hastily modified her for her new mission. She landed on her fins well enough on the fields at Cosford, but this crater floor is no tarmacadam strip in Shropshire. She was top-heavy, and—” He fell silent, studying the ruined carcass of the ship. “I was navigator; I must share responsibility for the disaster that followed. Most of us got out, by the Mercy of God.” He clapped Malenfant on the back, forcing a laugh. “And since then our lovely ship has been scavenged to make cooking pots.”

  “Erasmus Darwin,” Nemoto called.

  Malenfant looked down.

  Nemoto was standing in the ruins of the habitable compartment, peering up at him. Her face was like a brown coin in the gloom. “The Darwin drive,” she said. “Grandfather of Charles, who is probably the Darwin you’re thinking of, Malenfant. In the 1770s he sketched a simple liquid-fuel rocket engine, along with a ramjet. In our world, the sketch languished unnoticed in his notebooks until the 1990s. But in Mr McCann’s world—”

  McCann nodded. “The design was the seed around which a new generation of rockets and missiles grew. After the pioneering work of Congreve, the Brunels, father and son, became involved in the development of craft capable of carrying heavy loads into the atmosphere. The first dummy load was orbited around the Earth before the death of Victoria, Empress of the Moon, and the first manned flight beyond the atmosphere was launched from Ceylon in 1920… Ah, but none of this happened in your world, did it, Malenfant? It is a divergence of history. In your world Darwin was ignored or forgotten, his ideas no doubt rediscovered by some other, more vigorous nation.”

  “Something like that.”

  Nemoto moved on, working her way through the ship’s gloomy interior.

  McCann watched her, then leaned closer to Malenfant. “Always watching, thinking, recording, your little Oriental friend — eh, Malenfant?”

  “That’s her way,” Malenfant said cautiously. “And it’s our mission. Part of it, anyhow.”

  “And quite the fount of knowledge about obscure British philosophers two centuries dead.” McCann’s eyes narrowed. “I have observed the gadget she carries.”

  Malenfant saw no point in lying. “It’s called a softscreen.”

  “Its working is no doubt beyond my comprehension, but its purpose is clear enough. It is a repository of knowledge, from which Madam Nemoto sips as she requires. I am a man of this dismal jungle now, Malenfant, but you need not think me a fool.”

  “Take it easy, McCann.”

  McCann frowned, as if decoding the colloquialism. “Without my shelter you would both surely be ‘taking it easy’ beneath the crimson dust by now. Remember that.” When Malenfant did not answer, McCann clapped him on the shoulder again. “Enough of one beached vessel; let us seek another. Come.” McCann began to clamber down to the ground, into the helpful arms of the Ham who served him.

  It took another two hours to reach the clearing dug out by the lander on its way down.

  The lander was gone.

  This was the place he remembered: the Gagarin avenue cut through | the trees, the scattered bushes and branches — and even bits of blue ! parafoil, grimy, damp, still clinging to the damaged foliage. But the | lander was gone.

  McCann stalked over the grass, inspecting ripped-up bushes, scattered trees. “You’re sure this is the place?”

  “It can’t be.”

  Nemoto approached him. “Malenfant, you are not a man who has trouble remembering where he parked the car.”

  Malenfant wanted to believe the lander was sitting someplace else, where it had fallen, as battered and crumpled and precious as when he and Nemoto had so foolishly become parted from it — a key part of the technological ladder that would take him, and Emma, home. But there could be no doubt.

  “We’re stranded, Nemoto,” he blurted. “As stranded as these damn English.”

  “Perhaps we always were,” she said evenly.

  He hitched his pack of tied-up skin, containing all his belongings, all that was left of Earth. “We’re a pretty pathetic expeditionary force.”

  She shrugged. “We still have the most important tools: our minds, and our hands, and our knowledge.” She eyed him. “What do you intend to do now?”

  “Let’s get out of here. We have to find the lander. There’s nothing more we can achieve with these English. I hate to be a bad guest, but I’m not sure how well McCann will take our leaving.”

  “Not well, I fear,” Nemoto said dryly. And she stepped back.

  A hand clamped on Malenfant’s arm. It was a Ham, not Thomas.

  McCann came walking up, leaning on his stick, his broad face red and grim. “Thank you, Madam Nemoto,” he said. “He has behaved just as you predicted.”

  “Malenfant glared at Nemoto, disbelieving. “You betrayed me. You warned him I’d try something.”

  “You are very predictable, Malenfant.” She sighed, impatient, her face expressionless. “You should not make the mistake of believing we share the same agenda, Malenfant. This new Moon, this Red Moon, is the greatest mystery in recorded history — a mystery that deepens with every day that passes, everything we learn. Unless we discover the truth behind it, we will have accomplished nothing.”

  “And you believe you can achieve that by staying here, with McCann?”

  “We need a base, Malenfant. We need resources. We can’t spend our whole lives looking over our shoulders for the next stone axe to fall, or grubbing around in the forest for food. These British have all that.”

  “And what of Emma?”

  Nemoto said nothing, but McCann said smoothly, “Our scouts and hunters range far and wide, Malenfant. If she is here, we will find her for you.”

  If your Ham scouts tell you everything they see, Malenfant thought. He fingered the little lens in his pocket.

  “Let’s look at the matter in a sensible light,” McCann said now. “I know you think little of me, Malenfant. But once again I assure you I am not a fool. I desire more than a chess partner; I desire escape from this place — what man wouldn’t? Now you have fallen from the sky into my lap, and only a fool would let you go, for surely your Americans will come looking for you from that blue Earth of yours. And when they do, they will find me.”

  “My world isn’t your world,” Malenfant snarled.

  “But my world is lost,” McCann said wistfully. “And I know you have an England. Perhaps I will find a place there.” His face hardened, and Malenfant perceived a new toughness. This was, Malenfant remembered, a representative of a breed who had carved out a global empire — and on a much more hostile planet than Earth. “Providence has given me my chance and I must take it. I believe that in keeping you now, in following the promptings of my own infallible heart, I see the workings of Omnipotence. Is this moral arrogance? But without such beliefs man would never have left the trees and the caves, and remained like our pre-sapient and pongid cousins.” He glanced at Nemoto. “As for your companion’s slight treachery — perhaps she is destined to betray you, over and over, on all Anaxarchus’s infinity of worlds. What do you think?” And he brayed laughter.

  The little column formed up for the homeward journey. The big Ham called Thomas took his place beside Malenfant. And he winked broadly.

  Emma Stoney:

  A day after leaving the first troupe, Emma found another group of Hams, women and a few infants foraging for berries and fruit. They had regarded her blankly, but then, seeing she was no threat — and, as not one of them, of no conceivable interest — they had turned away and continued their gathering.

  Emma waited patiently until they were done. Then she followed them back to their encampment.

  She stayed here a couple of days, and then moved on, seeking another troupe.

  And then on again.


  Hams were basically the same, wherever she found them. Their tool-making, for instance. Though each group varied its kit a little according to circumstances, like the availability of different types of stone — and perhaps, she speculated, some slight cultural tradition — still, if something was not in their tool making repertoire, which was evidently very ancient and fixed, no Ham was interested.

  They didn’t even talk about their tool-making, even while they jabbered endlessly about their intricate social lives. It was as if they were conscious while they were interacting with each other, but not while they were making tools, or even hunting.

  After a time Emma began to get used to it. She reasoned that she did many things she wasn’t aware of, like breathing, and keeping her heart pumping. And she could think of times when she had performed quite complex tasks requiring skill, judgement and the focus on a specific goal without knowing about it — such as driving all the way to work with her mind on some stunt of Malenfant’s, only to “wake up” when she found herself in the car lot. Or she thought of her father, able to carve fine furniture from wood in his hobby workshop, but never able to tell her how it was done; all he could do was show her.

  With the Hams, that circle of unawareness spread a little further, that was all. Or maybe it was just that you could get used to anything, given time.

  Anyhow it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to run experiments in hominid cognition. It was enough that she was able to use her fish and rabbits and other hunting produce as subtle bribes to gain favour — or at least as a hedge against exclusion.

  Thus she worked her way through the forest, moving from one Ham group to the next, using them as stepping stones of comparative safety, one way or another travelling steadily east, day after day, seeking Malenfant.

  But sometimes she glimpsed faces in the forest, just at the limit of her vision: hominid faces, watchful, like no species she had yet encountered. It seemed she had barely glimpsed the extent of her kin, on this strange world.

  Reid Malenfant:

  The details of the regime that would govern Malenfant’s life coalesced with startling speed and efficiency — such speed, in fact, that Malenfant wondered who else McCann or the others had had cause to imprison.

  Malenfant was free to come and go, within the stockade. But there was always a burly male Ham at his elbow, even sleeping outside his hut during the night.

  He took to prowling around the perimeter fence. It was tall, and its ferocious spikes were daubed with a sticky, tar-like substance. For the first time it struck him that the fence was just as effective at keeping him in as keeping out the undesirables of the wilds beyond. And anyhow every time Malenfant tried to approach the fence too closely, he was immobilized by his Ham guard — as simple as that; one of those massive hands would clamp on his shoulder or elbow or even his head, exerting a strength he couldn’t hope to match.

  He tested his cage in other ways.

  He spoke to Thomas, asking for his help. But Thomas would say nothing, giving no hint that he was prepared to follow up on that reassuring wink in the forest.

  One night Malenfant tried climbing out of his hut’s window. But though it was unglazed the window was small and high. By the time he had dropped clumsily to the ground his Ham keeper was standing over him, silhouetted by blue Earthlight, solid and silent as a rock.

  He considered making other protests — going on a hunger strike, maybe. But he sensed McCann might simply let him starve; the steel he had glimpsed in the soul of this other-world Brit did not encourage him to seek for weakness or pity. Alternatively McCann might have his Ham servants force-feed Malenfant, not a prospect he relished, since the Hams were muscled a little too heavily to be good nurses.

  Anyhow he needed to build his strength for the days to come, and the search for Emma he confidently expected to be progressing sooner rather than later.

  So, after a couple of days, Malenfant began to engage with McCann once more: eating with him, even walking around the compound, conversing. It was a peculiar arrangement, in which both of them clearly knew their relative positions of power and yet did not speak of it, as if they were engaged in some formal game.

  Malenfant tried to find out as much as he could about this world from McCann. But the British had done little exploring more than a few days” travel away from their stockade. Their main business here had, after all, been ensuring their survival. And McCann’s mind seemed peculiarly closed to Malenfant. The purpose of McCann’s original mission had not been exploration, and still less science, but economic and political gain for his Empire; he was more like a prospector than a surveyor. But sometimes he spoke again of the deeper mission he felt he had taken on: to bring the word of his God, and his Christ-figure John, to the barbarian hominids of the Red Moon.

  McCann was a man with a head full of agendas. It seemed to Malenfant he was barely able to see the Red Moon and its exotic inhabitants for what they were just as the Hams had seemed unable to look directly at the wreckage of the Redoubtable.

  Maybe every hominid species had such blind spots, mused Malenfant. He wondered what his own were.

  For his part McCann pressed Malenfant about rescue.

  Malenfant tried to describe the politics and economics of his home world. He knew it was extremely unlikely that the will to mount a further mission could be assembled on Tide-ravaged Earth — even though the NASA support teams knew where the lander had come down, and had received those few minutes of footage to show he and Nemoto had survived, at least for a time.

  McCann showed Malenfant the transceiver gear he and his companions had scavenged from the wreck of the Redoubtable. It was a formidable array of antique-type parts, huge glass valves and mica capacitors and big clattering relays. For years the British had nursed it, for instance keeping it continually powered to save the valves from the thermal shock of being switched on and off. But at last too many of the valves had failed, and other parts were corroded and damaged from prolonged exposure to the damp air. Malenfant tinkered with the gear, but he had less idea than McCann how to fix it.

  In his own mind Malenfant’s primary mission remained clear: to find Emma, and get the hell off this Moon. If he could help McCann on the way, fine; if Nemoto wanted to come home or stay here, it was up to her. But they were side issues. To Malenfant, only home and Emma mattered.

  So they worked through their days. But as time passed it seemed to Malenfant that McCann grew steadily more anxious. Periodically he would peer up into the sky, as if seeking to reassure himself that Earth was still there.

  And Malenfant barely saw Nemoto.

  One morning, maybe a week into his captivity, he was woken as usual by Julia, with her wooden bowl of hot water and a fresh stone blade for him to shave. Dressed in her blouse and long skirt of sewn skin, with her muscled body moving powerfully, she looked absurd, like a chimpanzee in a child’s dress.

  She picked up his covered slop bucket, curtsied at him — “Baas” — and made to leave.

  “Help me,” Malenfant blurted.

  She stopped by the door. Malenfant could see the shadow of a burly Ham male outside the door.

  “Baas?”

  “You know I’m being kept here against my will — umm. Boss McCann won’t let me go. You helped me before. You gave me the lens — the clear stone. You know it came from Emma. I want to get out of here and find her, Julia. I don’t want to hurt anybody, not Boss McCann, not anybody. I just want to get to Emma.”

  She shrugged, her mountainous shoulders rippling. “Breakfas’,” she said.

  Frustrated, he snapped, “Why do you stay here? Any one of you could take on McCann and his cronies. Even their crossbows couldn’t hold you back if you put your mind to it.”

  She looked at him reproachfully. “Tired ol” men,” she said, as if that was explanation enough. Then she turned and walked out, the slop pail carried effortlessly in one huge hand.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  The great Mapping, across a distance un
precedented in recorded history, could be regarded as a technological triumph. But to Manekato it had been like the working out of an intricate mathematical theorem, a theorem that proved the identity of certain points of space and time with certain other points. The fact that those other points were placed close to the surface of a world which had not even existed as the proof was developed scarcely added to the complexity of the procedure. And once the proof was established, the journey itself would be a mere corollary, of little interest save as an exercise for the young.

  The proof had not been trivial, but it had not been over-demanding. Most adults, with a little effort, could have achieved the same result. Manekato had worked at the Mapping with part of her mind, with the rest consumed by her grief for her mother and her concerns over her own future.

  On Mane’s Earth, anybody could develop a space programme in their spare time.

  With her brother Babo and the woman who called herself Without-Name, Manekato stood on the crushed bones of her ancestors. The eternal Wind blasted over the rock, unnoticed. Above her hovered a great rippling lens of star-filled sky, as if a hole had been cut in the clouds: thanks to simple Mapping techniques it was as if she was suspended in orbit, far above the clouds of Earth. But the three of them barely glanced up; it was a minor, uninteresting miracle.

  This eroded volcanic core, once the heart of the Farm, was bare now. After her mother had died, Manekato had ordered the deletion of the great House. The walls of Adjusted Space had disappeared like a bursting bubble, as if fifty millennia of sturdy existence had been but a dream. Manekato had welcomed the simple geologic clarity of the mountain’s eroded summit: she knew she could never live in the House, and it served no purpose save to preserve memories of unhappiness.

  But she had retained the pit containing the ashes of her grandmothers, and to it she had added the last remains of Nekatopo.