Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  It hadn’t worked so far, and Malenfant, despite his own grim determination, was gradually losing hope. But he didn’t have any better ideas.

  As Julia sat quietly with the Runners, the light leaked out of the sky. The predators began to call, their eerie howls carrying far on the still evening air.

  Briskly, without speaking, Malenfant and McCann built a fire. They used dry grass for tinder, and had brought bundles of wood from the Beltway for fuel.

  Malenfant’s supper was a few mouthfuls of raw fish. The Runners used their fires primarily for warmth, not cooking. If McCann or Malenfant were to throw this tough, salty fish onto the fire, the smell of burned flesh would spook the Runners and quickly drive them away.

  After that it was foot-maintenance time. Malenfant eased off his boots and inspected the latest damage. There was a kind of flea that laid eggs under your toenail, and naturally it was Malenfant who was infected. When the critters started to grow in the soft flesh under there, feeding off his damn toe cheese, McCann said Julia would dig them out with her stone knives. Malenfant backed off from that, sterilized his pocket knife in the fire, and did it himself. But, Christ, it hurt, unreasonably so, and it made a bloody mess of his toes; for the next few days he had had a lot of trouble walking.

  When he was done with his feet, Malenfant started making pem-mican. It was one of his long-term projects. You took congealed fat from cooked fish, and softened it in your hands. Then you used one of Julia’s stone knives to grate the cooked flesh into powdery pieces and mixed it with the fat. You added some salt and berries and maybe a little grated nutmeg from McCann’s pack, and then pulled the mess apart into lumps the size of a golf ball. You rolled the balls into cocktail-sausage shapes, and put them in the sun, to set hard.

  He had already done the same with a haunch of antelope. It was simple stuff, dredged up from his memories of his astronaut survival training. But the treatment ought to make these bits of fish and meat last months.

  McCann sat and watched him. He was nursing a wooden bowl filled with a tea made of crushed green needles from a spruce tree. Malenfant had been sceptical of what he saw as an English affectation, but the tea was oddly refreshing; Malenfant suspected the needles were full of Vitamin C. But the tea was strongly flavoured and full of sharp bits of needle (which he had learned to strain out through a sock).

  McCann said, “Malenfant, you are a man of silence and unswerving intent. Your preparations are admirable and thorough. But to enter the desert is foolhardy, no matter how many pemmican cakes you make. Even if you could find your way through the mountains, there is only aridity beyond.”

  Malenfant growled, “We have this conversation roughly once a day, Hugh. We must have found all the Runner groups who work this area, and have come up blank. On the other hand, we know a lot of them work deeper into the desert.” He squinted, peering into the harsh flat light of the arid western lands. “There could be dozens more tribes out there. We have to go find them.”

  McCann pulled a face and sipped his tea. “And seek out traces of your Emma.”

  Malenfant kept kneading his pemmican. “You’ve come this far, and I’m grateful. But if you don’t want to follow me any further that’s okay by me.”

  McCann smiled, tired. “I suppose I have attached myself to you — become a squire to your chessboard knight. On this desolate Red Moon we are all lost, you see, Malenfant — not just your Emma. And we all seek purpose.”

  Malenfant grunted, uncomfortable. “I’m grateful for your company. But why the hell you’re doing it is your business, not mine. I never cared much for psychoanalysis.”

  McCann frowned at the term, but seemed to puzzle out its meaning. “You always look outward, don’t you? — but perhaps it would serve you to look inward, from time to time.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “For a man with such a powerful drive — a drive to a goal for which he is clearly prepared to give his life — you seem little interested in the origin of that drive.” McCann raised a finger. “I predict you will puzzle it out in the end — though it may require you to find Emma herself before you do so.”

  They would take turns to stand watch: McCann first, then Malenfant.

  Malenfant cleaned his teeth with a bit of twig. Then he settled down for his first sleep.

  The nights here were always cold. Malenfant zipped up his jumpsuit, placed a bag of underwear under his hips to soften the hardness of the ground, and pulled a couple of layers of “chute cloth over his body. He set his head on the pack in which he carried the remnant of his NASA coverall, his real-world underwear and the rest of his few luxuries, and he put spare underwear under his hip for a mattress. Though he had gotten used to his suit of deerskin — it had softened with use, and after the first few days he suspected it stank more of him than its original owner — he clung to the few items he had salvaged from the ludicrous wreck of his mission as a kind of message to himself, a reminder that he hadn’t been born in these circumstances, and maybe he wouldn’t have to die in them either.

  As usual he had trouble settling.

  “I don’t like to complain,” he said at length.

  “Of course not.”

  “This ground is like rock. I can’t turn over without dislocating a hip.”

  “Then don’t turn over.”

  So it went.

  After three hours it was Malenfant’s turn to stand watch. McCann shook Malenfant awake, pitching him into a cold, star-littered night. Malenfant shook out his blanket and went to take a leak. Sign of age, Malenfant.

  Beyond the circle of light from their hearth, the desert was deep and dark, its emptiness broken only by the ragged glow of the Runners” fire.

  Sometimes it scared him to think of what a wilderness it was that had claimed him. There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him — no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature.

  And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain — but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, was a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives. And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it.

  All save one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.

  The final time he woke that night, he found Julia looming over him. She was a vast silhouette whose disturbing scent of other was enough to kick Malenfant’s hind brain into wakefulness. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. His “chute-silk blanket fell away, and all his warmth was lost to the cool, moist air. It was a little after dawn, and the world was drenched with a blue-grey light that turned the crimson sand purple.

  The Runners had gone. He could just make them out, slim dark figures against the purple-grey desert, running easily and silently, far away into the desert.

  He hadn’t even gotten to show them his lens.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  There was a call from Babo, who was standing beneath his beautiful spinning globe. Manekato hurried to her brother, and Nemoto jogged after her.

  The great rotating Moon-projection had been rendered semi-transparent. And there was a hole in its very heart.

  Something lurked there, blocky, enclosed — clearly artificial, very large. It was connected to the surface by a long, thread-like tube: not entirely straight, bending like a reed as it passed through the Moon’s layers of core, thick mantle and deep, hard lithosphere, so much thicker on this small cold world than the crustal layers of the Earth. The tube terminated in what looked like a small, compact crater, not far from the eastern shore of the world-spanning continent not far from the location of the compound, in fact.

  Manekato rea
ched inside the Map. The misty layers of mantle and core resisted her gently, as if her fingers were pushing through some viscous liquid. She wrapped her fingers around the knot of machinery at the Map’s centre. It was dense and complex and well-anchored.

  Nemoto watched her carefully.

  “It is the world engine,” said Babo.

  Studying the globe as a whole, Manekato saw that the surface crater was diametrically opposite the summit of the great volcanic mountain, at the peak of the huge region of uplift that so distorted the figure of the world. Looking more closely she could see detail in the Map’s misty outer layers: a disturbance in the core, a great plume in the deep-buried mantle, hot magmatic material working its way up through cracks in the mighty lithosphere towards that antipodal bulge.

  “I cannot believe that such asymmetry is deliberate,” Babo said.

  “No,” Manekato said. “The internal disturbances must be a result of the poor control of the Moon as it lurches from universe to universe. Perhaps the Moon is not meant to plummet about the cosmic manifold like this. The mechanism is poorly designed…”

  “Or faulty. If it has been sweeping up hominids since early in our evolution, Mane, it must have been operating for millions of years.”

  “Perhaps even the great machines of the Old Ones are subject to failure.”

  “Quantum tunnelling,” said Babo. “That’s how they do it. That’s how this thing in the core sends this Moon from universe to universe.”

  Manekato said, “Tell me what you mean, brother.”

  “You understand the concept. An electron, say, does not have a precise position or velocity; rather it is embedded in a spreading cloud of probability. Given a measurement of its position, there is a small but finite chance that the electron will next be found — not close to the last position — but far away, outside any cage you care to throw around it — or at the heart of the sun — or in orbit around a distant star…”

  “Yes, yes. Or even another universe. Is that your point?”

  He scratched his head absently. “Well, we know that quantum tunnelling can cause the nucleation of a new universe. The vacuum sustains a series of energy levels. A bubble of ‘our’ vacuum can tunnel to an otherwise empty spacetime at a lower energy state, and there expand and become causally disconnected from our own…”

  “We are talking of moving not an electron, but a world.”

  Babo shrugged. “I think we have the pieces of the puzzle now, at least; perhaps understanding will follow.”

  “In any case, our next object is clear,” Manekato said. She pressed a finger into the crater at the top of the tube from the core; she could barely feel the feather-touch of its tiny rim. “We must go to this strange crater, learn all we can — and, perhaps, seek a way to direct the future course of this rogue Moon.”

  “The manifold is a sheaf of possible universes,” Nemoto said.

  Babo grimaced. “What did she say?”

  Nemoto went on, “I understand some of what you say. Perhaps the manifold universes were nucleated from a single primal universe by some such mechanism as quantum tunnelling. Perhaps the nucleation of the universes was deliberate. Perhaps the Old Ones lived in the primal universe…”

  Babo bared his teeth at her, and Nemoto fell silent.

  Manekato said dryly, “What’s wrong?”

  “She sees so much,” Babo said. “Much further than I imagined. If she sees so much, will she not see that the achievements of the Old Ones are as far beyond us as…”

  “As our Farms and our Maps are beyond her poor grasp?” She touched his shoulder, mock-grooming, seeking to calm him. “But would that be so bad? Would it hurt us to learn some of her humility?”

  “I don’t think she is so humble, Mane. Look at the defiance in that small face. It is unnatural. It is like being challenged by a Worker.”

  A cry rent the air.

  Nemoto turned sharply. Manekato felt her ears swivel. It had been a cry of pain and despair — an animal’s cry, but desolating none the less.

  Nemoto began to run towards the place the cry had come from.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Manekato hurried after her pet.

  “Oh, let me up; I beg you. Madam Daemon, by the blood of Christ, let me up!”

  It was Without-Name, of course. She had caught another hominid. She had him sprawled on the smooth floor of the compound with her massive foot in the small of the back, so that he could do little but flop like a fish. He was wearing clothes of a cruder design than Nemoto’s — scraps of skin sewn together with bits of hide, as if he had clambered inside the gruesome reconstruction of a dead animal. It seemed his capture had not been without incident. Blood leaked from a filthy wound on his forehead, and his right foot was dangling at an awkward angle, just a mass of blood, badly pulped. His blood and snot and sweat, even his urine, had spilled over the floor of Adjusted Spacetime.

  Others stood around the gruesome little tableau. Manekato was dismayed to see fascination on several faces, as if the blood-soaked allure of this world was seeping into more than one soul.

  She rested a hand on Nemoto’s shoulder. “He is a member of your troupe? That is why you are distressed.”

  “No. I have never seen him before. And we don’t have ‘troupes’. But he is human, and he is suffering.”

  Babo challenged Without-Name. “What new savagery is this, Renemenagota of Rano?”

  “Am I the savage? Then what is this under my foot? We are not at home now, Manekato — we are not even on Earth. And if we wish to progress our inquiries we must abandon the techniques we would apply on the Earth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You gaze at a pretty Map while the real world is all around you — vibrant, primal.” She slapped at the floor of Adjusted Space. “You even separate yourselves from the dirt. Have you stepped off this platform, Manekato, even once? I tell you, this is not a place for logic and Maps. It is a place of red and green, of life and blood and death — a place for the heart, not the head.”

  “And your heart tells you to torment this helpless wretch,” Babo said.

  “But not without a purpose,” Without-Name said. “He comes from a troupe of hominids to the north of here. They live in crude shelters of wood and mud, and they call themselves Zealots. They are as intelligent as your pet, Manekato but they are utterly insane, driven by dreams of a God they cannot see.” She bellowed laughter, and applied more pressure with her heel to the Zealot’s back; he groaned, his eyes rolling, as bones cracked. “These Zealots have been here for centuries. With their feeble eyes, their dim brains, they have seen this world which you are too frightened to touch. They have seen the workings of the Old Ones, for they have been dragged from one cosmos to the next by their meddling. And they have formulated their own ambition in response: to spit in the face of the sky itself.” She looked down at the sprawled, twitching hominid. “It is absurd. But in its way, it is magnificent. Hah! These are the creatures of this world. I want to see what they see, know what they know. That way I will learn the truth about the Old Ones — and what must be done to defeat them.”

  Others growled assent behind her.

  Manekato, deeply disturbed, stepped closer to Without-Name. “We did not come here to inflict pain.”

  “There is no pain here,” Without-Name said easily. “For there is no sentience. You see only reflex, as a leaf follows the sunlight.”

  “No.” It was Nemoto. She stepped forward, evading the clutching hand of Manekato.

  The nameless one gaped at her, briefly too startled to react.

  “I know that you understand me. I believe your species has superior cognition to my own. But nevertheless we have cognition. This man is aware of himself, of his pain. And he is terrified, for he is aware that you plan to kill him, Renemenagota.”

  Without-Name reared up on her hind legs, and the man in the dust howled. “You will not use my name.”

  “Let him go.” Nemoto held out her arms, her hands empty
.

  The moment stretched. Without-Name towered over the slim form of the hominid.

  Then Without-Name stepped off the fallen man and pushed him away with her foot. She dropped to her knuckles and laughed. “Your pet has an amusing defiance, Manekato. Nevertheless I tell you that these creatures of the Moon are the key to our strategy here. The key!” And she knuckle-walked away towards the forest, where she blended into the shadows of the trees.

  Where she had shoved him, the fallen Zealot had left a trail of urine and blood. Workers hurried forward to tend him, and to clean the mess he had made.

  Manekato approached the trembling hominid. “Nemoto — I am sorry—”

  Nemoto shrugged off her touch. “So you understand, at last. Let me reward you with a banana.” And she stalked away, her anger visible in every step, every gesture.

  Reid Malenfant:

  “About the desert,” McCann said. He took a half-burned twig and started to scrape at the red dust, sketching out a map. “Here is the Congo — I mean, the great river which rises in the foothills of the great volcano you call the Bullseye, the river that winds its way through the interior of the continent to debouche into the ocean beyond the forests. For much of its length the river’s flow is confined to a series of ancient canyons, where the stream is fed by a series of underground tributaries. The north bank is very arid. But on its south bank — here, for example — there are flood plains where the vegetation grows a little more thickly.

  “Here is what I propose. We will cut across the plain, meeting the river valley at this point, where there is a crossing place to the south bank, which is the greener. We will follow the river, heading steadily west, following it upstream as it works its way through the mountains, and using the vegetation and its inhabitants as our base resource. Thus we will seek out these shy Runner bands of yours. And if we fail to find your Emma before the character of the country changes — well, we will think of something else.”