Without-Name stalked around the perimeter of the ash pit, her knuckles pressing disrespectfully into the sealed-in dirt, leaving impressions of her hands and feet. A Worker followed this ill-mannered guest, restoring the pit’s smoothness. “Destroy the pit,” Without-Name told Manekato. “Fill it in. Delete it. It serves no purpose.”
“The pit is the memory of my Lineage,” said Manekato evenly.
Without-Name bared her teeth and growled. “This pit is not a memory. It is a hole filled with dust.”
Babo protested, “The practice of adding oneself to the Farm’s ground at the end of one’s life is as old as our species. It derives from the sensible desire to use every resource to enrich the ground for one’s descendants. Today the practice is symbolic, of course, but—”
“Symbolism. Pah! Symbolism is for fools.”
Babo looked shocked.
If Without-Name enjoyed goading Manekato, she positively relished taunting Babo. “Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.”
Babo said defiantly, “I have visited the Rano Lineage and I saw the pit of your ancestors. You are a hypocrite. You say one thing and practise the other.”
She raised herself to her hind feet and towered over him. She wore her body hair plucked clean in great patches over her body, and where hair remained it had been stiffened into great bristling spikes. It was a fashion from the other side of the world that made her seem oddly savage to Manekato. “Not any more,” she hissed. “I salute death. I salute the cleansing it brings. There is only life all that matters is the here and the now — and what can be achieved in the moment.”
Manekato held back her emotions.
This Without-Name’s preferred diminutive actually was — had been — Renemenagota. But she insisted she had abandoned her true name. “My land is to be destroyed,” she had said. “And so is my Lineage. What purpose does a fossilized name serve?” Even the contradiction in her position — for Without-Name was itself a name, of course, so that she was trapped in an oxymoron — seemed only to please her perversely. Manekato knew she must work with this woman, who was a refugee as she was, to study the rogue Moon and its fabricators; that had been the directive of the Astrologers. But Manekato felt that she had been the target of Without-Name’s bitterness and discourtesy from the moment they had been thrown together…
There was a dazzling electric-blue flash, gone in an instant.
A shift in the Wind touched Manekato’s face. She looked into the tunnel of stars.
“If you embrace experience,” she said, “then you must embrace that.”
Without-Name lifted her head awkwardly, and fell forward onto her knuckles.
Babo was already gazing at the sky, open-mouthed. Even the Workers were backing away, small visual sensors protruding from their hides, peering up at the dangerous sky.
Suddenly the Red Moon swam there, complete, huge.
Reid Malenfant:
Nemoto said in a monotone, “We are dealing with multiple universes. That much is clear. We have seen for ourselves multiple Moons. And we have hints of multiple Earths. The Earth of Hugh McCann is clearly quite different from our Earth even if his history is interestingly convergent with ours. And the Hams talk of a Grey Earth, a third place where conditions may be different again…”
In the hut Malenfant had come to think of as the dining hall, Nemoto and Malenfant faced each other at either end of the long table. The table’s wooden surface, polished to darkness by decades of use, was bare. An elderly Ham woman was preparing lunch.
It had taken days before Malenfant had been able to face Nemoto, such was his anger at her betrayal. But she was his only companion from home, and if he was ever going to get out of here he might need her help. As for Nemoto, it was as if the incident of the betrayal had simply been a step in some grand plan, which any rational person would accept as justified.
But she was changing, Malenfant saw: becoming more withdrawn, hollow-eyed dangerously detached from the texture of the world around her, obsessed instead with huge ideas of origins and destinies.
So Malenfant listened coldly, as Nemoto described alternate realities.
“Malenfant, perhaps there are a cluster of alternate universes with identical histories up to the moment of some key event in the evolution of humanity — and differing after that only in the details of that event, and its consequences.” Nemoto waved her hands vaguely, as if trying to indicate three-dimensional space around her. “Imagine the possible universes arrayed around us in a kind of probability space, Malenfant. Do you see that universes differing only in the details of the evolution of mankind must somehow be close to ours in that graph?”
“And you’re saying this is what we’re experiencing — a crossover between possible universes? Well, maybe. But it’s just talk. What I don’t see is how you can hop from one cosmos to the next.”
Nemoto smiled coldly. “I do not know how that is possible, Malenfant. And what is more important is that I do not know why anybody should wish to make it happen.”
“Why… You think all of this is deliberate — somehow artificial?”
“Your Wheel in Africa looked artificial to me, Malenfant. Perhaps the Hams” Old Ones, if they exist, will be able to tell us what they intended.”
“And you’re going to ask them, I suppose.”
“If they exist. If I can find them. What else is there to do? Malenfant, there is something else. I have raised with McCann the question of whether other life forms exist beyond the Earth — his Earth, I mean. His scientists have looked for evidence, as ours have. They have found none. Philosophers there have propounded something similar to our Fermi Paradox to crystallize this observation.”
“Why is this important?”
“I don’t know yet. But it does appear odd that such a profound contradiction is to be found in both universes…”
Light flickered, startlingly blue, beyond the door frame. Malenfant gasped. The colour had tugged at his heart — for it was the colour of the flash from within the Wheel that had consumed Emma.
They hurried outside. There was something in the sky.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
In her first stunned glance Manekato made out a single vast continent, scorched red, and a blue-grey ocean from which the sun cast a single blunt highlight. The disc, almost full, was surrounded by a thin layer of blurred softness. An atmosphere, then. But no lights shone in the darkened, shadowed crescent.
The Wind buffeted Manekato, turbulent, suddenly uneven. Already it begins, she thought.
Small Workers, no larger than insects, hovered around Babo’s head, defying the shifting breeze; she saw their light play over his face, dense with information. “Its gross parameters are as we anticipated,” he said. “A Moon, a world, two thirds of Earth’s diameter, a quarter of its mass. It has an atmosphere—”
“It is not Farmed,” Without-Name hissed. “Your jabber of numbers is meaningless, you fool. Look at it: it is not Farmed. This Moon is primordial.”
Without-Name was right. Even without magnification Manekato could see great expanses where nothing lived: that ugly red scar of a continent, the naked oceans, those crude caps of ice. It was a world of waste, of unawakened resources.
Wild.
“Wild, yes,” growled Without-Name. “Consider the comparison with our Earth. For two million years we have cherished every atom. We have carefully sustained the diversity of species. We have even sacrificed ourselves — billions of years of lost lives — refusing longevity in order to maintain the balance of the world.”
Mane murmured, “An ecology consisting of a single species would not be sustainable.”
Without-Name laughed. “You quote childish slogans. Think, Manekato! Our species has been shaped, even as we have shaped our world. But nothing about that ugly Moon has been managed. We will
have no place. We will have to fight to achieve our purposes, perhaps even to survive.”
Mane was troubled by that perception, though she acknowledged it might contain a grain of truth.
“But,” Babo said, an edge in his voice, “the Red Moon cannot be primordial — it must contain mind — for it would not be here otherwise.”
Yes, Mane thought. Yes. And for that she was afraid of this monstrous Moon. It was a deep fear, of a type she had never suffered before, a fear suffused by a sense of powerlessness. She had to search deep into the recesses of her memory, poring through the most ancient roots of the million-year-old language with which all children were born, to find an ancient, obsolete word that suited what she felt: Superstition.
Babo rattled more statistics of the Moon’s composition, describing a ball of silicate rock and a small iron core. But as his courage grew his thinking seemed to clear. “Earth,” he said. “That wandering Moon is made of the same material as Earth’s outer layers. How can that be?”
The three of them began to talk rapidly, their minds developing and sharing hypotheses.
“Given the identity of substances this body cannot have formed elsewhere in the Solar System.”
“Could it have budded off an Earth while the planet was accreting from the primordial cloud of dust and ice?”
“No, for then its proportions should resemble Earth’s global composition, and this body shows a deficiency of iron and other heavy elements. It is more like a piece of the Earth’s mantle, its outer layers, ripped up and wadded together and thrown into the sky.”
“Then an Earth must have formed, differentiated so the iron-rich rocks sank to the core, before the material to assemble this Moon was detached from the outer layers. But how would it happen?”
“A vast volcanic event? But surely that would not be sufficiently violent—”
“A collision. A rogue planetesimal, a giant, or even a planet. Such a collision might cause a splash of ejecta which could accrete into this Moon…”
Within seconds, then, they had unravelled the mystery of the Moon’s origin, a deduction that had taken humans two centuries of geological science.
All around the Earth, other witnesses must be coming to a similar conclusion, and Manekato imagined a growing consensus of understanding whispering in Babo’s ear.
“But,” Manekato said, “if this Red Moon was born from Earth, it was not our Earth.”
“No,” Babo said sombrely. “For our Earth never suffered a catastrophic collision of that magnitude. We would see the results today, for example in the composition of the planet’s core. And if our world had enjoyed the company of such a Moon everything would have been different in its evolution: much of the primordial atmosphere would have been stripped off in the collision, leaving thinner air less rich in carbon dioxide; there would have been many subtle effects on tides and the world’s spin…”
“On such a world,” Manekato said, “one would not need a Mapping to see the stars. And in such a sky a Moon like this would ride. But such is not our world.”
“Not our universe,” said Without-Name bluntly. “Tell me then, Babo: what do your Astrologers have to say of a power which can Map a Moon, not merely from planet to planet, but between universes?”
“They have little to say,” he said evenly. “That is why we must go there… There is something more.” He uttered a soft command to his Workers.
A new Mapping was made, showing them a vision from a large Farm that straddled the equator of the planet.
A giant blue circle, hovering above the ground, was sweeping over the Farm’s cultivated ground, upright and improbably tall. People stood and watched as it passed. Workers backed away before it. Children ran alongside it, laughing, levering themselves forward on their knuckles in their excitement.
And there were people falling out of the circle’s empty disc.
No, not people, Manekato saw: like people, naked hominids, some tall and hairless, some short and squat and covered in fine black hair. They flopped and gasped for breath like stranded fish, and their flimsy bodies were buffeted this way and that by the Wind.
“What does it mean, Babo?”
“One can predict the broad outline of events. But chaos is in the detail…” He waved his hand, banishing the image.
A gust of Wind howled across the bare, eroded plateau, powerful enough to make Manekato stagger.
Babo stepped forward. “It is time.”
Manekato and Without-Name took his hands and each other’s so the three of them were locked together in a ring.
At the last moment Manekato asked, “Must it be so?”
Babo shrugged regretfully. “The predictions are exact, Mane. The focusing effect of the shoreline’s shape here, the gradient of the ocean floor, the precise positioning of the new Moon in the sky: all of these have conspired to doom our Farm, and the Poka line with it.”
Without-Name tipped back her head and laughed, the spikes that covered her body bristling and twisting. “And for all our vaunted power we can do nothing about it. This is a moment that separates past from future. It is a little death. My friends, welcome the cleansing!”
Manekato uttered a soft command.
The three of them rose into the air, through a body’s height. The Mapping had begun.
Mane…
Surprised to hear her name called, Manekato looked down. One of the Workers, a battered old gadget from a long-forgotten crop, was peering up at her with a glinting lens. It was clinging to the ground with long stabilizing suckers, but the Wind battered at it, and its purple-black hide glistened with rain.
Memory stirred. There had been a Worker like this when she had clambered from her mother’s womb, chattering excitedly, full of energy and curiosity. In those first days and weeks that Worker had fed her, instructed her, kept her from harm, and comforted her when she was afraid. She had not seen the old gadget for years, and had thought little of it. Could this be the same Worker? Why should it seek her now, as it was about to be destroyed?
A wall of rain swept over the mountain-top. The three of them were immediately soaked, and Manekato laboured to breathe the harshly gusting air.
When the rain gust passed, the mountain-top had been swept bare; all the Workers were gone, surely destroyed. Manekato felt an odd, distracting pang — regret, perhaps?
But this was no time to dwell on the past; the nameless one was right about that.
The three of them ascended without effort.
She was still clothed in her body, her legs dangling, her hair soaked. But of course this body was a mere symmorph: differing from her original self in form, but representing the same idea. (And in fact, as she had been through hundreds of previous Mappings, that “original” body had itself been nothing but a symmorph, a copy of a copy reworked to suit temporary needs, though one tailored to remain as close to her primary biological form as possible.)
But such a morphology was no longer appropriate. With a soundless word, she discarded the symmorph, and accepted another form.
Now she was smeared around Earth, immersing it in her awareness, as if it were a speck that floated in her eyeball.
The great Farms glittered over the planet: from pole to pole, around the equator, even on the floor and surface of the oceans, and in the clouds. It was as if the planet were encrusted with jewels of light and life and order. There were no barren red deserts, no frozen ice caps here.
But already, as the Red Moon began its subtle gravitational work, the first changes were visible. Huge ocean storms were unravelling the delicate ocean floor and water-borne Farms. A vast line of earthquakes and ugly volcanism was unstitching an eastern continent. And, from an ocean which was sloshing like water in a disturbed bath, a train of immense tsunamis marched towards the land.
Soon the Poka Farm was covered — extinguished, scoured clear, even the bedrock shattered, the bone dust of her ancestors scattered and lost, beyond memory.
The jewel-like lights were failing, al
l over the world. There was nothing for her here.
She gazed at her destination, the new, wandering Moon.
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant’s world was stratified into layers of varying incomprehensibility.
At the base of it all was the stockade, the familiar sturdy fence and the huts of mud and wood: the physical infrastructure of the world, solid, imperturbable.
And then there were the people.
Hugh McCann was standing alone at the centre of the colony’s little street, hands dangling at his sides, gazing up at a corner of the sky. His mouth was open, and his cheeks glistening, as if he was weeping. Nemoto was shielding her eyes, so that she couldn’t so much as glimpse the sky above.
He saw Julia and Thomas, close together near the gate. The Hams didn’t seem disturbed by the fiery sky. They were stripping off their neat, sewn-together garments, revealing bodies that were ungainly slabs of corded muscle. They pulled on much cruder skin wraps, of the kind Malenfant had seen Thomas wear out in the bush, tying them up with thongs. More Hams were coming in through the open gate (the gate is open, Malenfant!), and they picked up the discarded English-type clothing and started to pull it on.
A shift change, he thought, wondering. As if the settlement was a factory maintained by a pool of labour beyond the stockade walls.
And in the sky…
You can’t put off thinking about it any longer, Malenfant.
Start with the basics. There is the white sun, the yellow Earth (yellow?). There are the clouds, stringy cirrus today, littered over the sky’s dome. And beyond the clouds, in the spaces between sun and Earth -
What, Malenfant?
He saw bars, circles, lines, patterns that seemed to congeal and then disappear. If he stared fixedly at one point of the sky he would make out a fragment of texture, as if something was sliding by, something huge, beyond the roof of the world. But it never stayed stable in his vision — like an optical illusion, a form that oscillated between two interpretations, a bubble that flipped into a crater. And no matter how he tried he would find his eyes sliding away to the familiar, to the huts, the red dust of the ground.
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