Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  He was perhaps twenty-five years old, as much as she was any judge of the ages of these people. His body bore the marks of savage heatings, and his tongue seemed to be damaged, making his speech even more impenetrable than the rest.

  No Hams lived alone. But Joshua lived alone, in his cave beyond the communal space around the hut. Hams did not go naked — but Joshua did, wearing not so much as a scrap of skin to cover his filth-encrusted genitals. Hams cut their hair and, crudely, shaved their beards with stone knives. Joshua did not, and his hair was a mane of black streaked with grey, his beard long but rather comically wispy under that huge jaw. Hams joined in the activities of the community, making tools, gathering and preparing food, repairing clothes and the hut. Joshua did none of this.

  Hams did not make markings, or symbols of any kind — in fact they showed loathing of such things. Joshua covered the walls of his cave with markings made by stone scrapers and bits of bone. They might have been faces; he sketched rough ovals and rectangles, criss-crossed by interior lines — noses, mouths? over and over. The marks were crude scratches, as if made by a small child — but still, they were more than she had ever observed any other Ham to make.

  The other Hams tolerated him. In fact, since he did no gathering or hunting, by providing him with food they were keeping him alive, as she had seen other groups sustain badly injured, sickly or elderly individuals. Perhaps they thought he was ill, beyond his body’s slowly healing wounds.

  Certainly, by the standards of his kind, he was surely insane. Studying this Ham hermit from afar, Emma concluded that whatever his story, she had best avoid him.

  But when Joshua spotted her, the matter was taken out of her hands.

  She was walking up the beach from the sea. Her catch of fish had been good that day, and she had used a scrap of blue “chute cloth from her pack to carry it all.

  Joshua was sitting outside his cave, muttering to himself. When he saw her blue cloth, he got to his feet, hooted loudly, and came running.

  Other Hams, close to the hut, watched dully.

  Joshua capered before her, muttering, his accent thicker than any she had heard before. He was gaunt, and his back was still red with half-healed welts. But he might have been three times her weight.

  Emma reached for the stone knife she kept tucked in her belt. “Keep back, now.”

  He grabbed the blue cloth, spilling the fish on the sand. He sniffed the cloth with his giant, snot-crusted nostrils, and wiped it over his face. “This,” he shouted. “This!”

  She frowned. “What is it? What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Th” door in the sky,” he said. “Th” door in Heaven. Th” wings of th” seed.” His voice was horribly indistinct — and when he opened his mouth to yell these things at her, she saw a great notch had been cut out of his tongue.

  She should get out of here, flee to the sanctuary of the hut, get away from his deranged grasp. But she stayed. For no other Ham had used phrases like “the door in the sky’.

  She asked cautiously, “What door?”

  “Th” sky seed. Th” Grey Earth. Th” seed fell th” sky.”

  She understood it in a flash. She whirled and pointed to the lander, stranded on the cliff face. “Is that what you’re talking about? The lander — the thing that fell from the sky?” She grabbed back the bit of cloth. “Under a parachute. A blue “chute, wings, like this.”

  For answer he bellowed, “Sky seed!” And he turned away and ran full tilt towards the foot of the cliff, beneath the lander.

  Emma watched him go, her heart thumping.

  She could stay here her whole life and never persuade the Hams to help her get to the lander. Maybe it took an insane Ham even to conceive of such a project. A Ham like Joshua.

  Now or never, Emma.

  She grabbed her pack and ran after Joshua.

  There was a trail, of sorts, that led from the beach to the top of the cliff. At least Joshua showed her the way; she couldn’t have managed at all otherwise. But it was a trail for Hams — or maybe goats — certainly not for humans. The scrambling and climbing was a major challenge for Emma, never super-fit, never any kind of climber. Nevertheless, by sheer force of will, she kept up.

  At the top of the cliff she fell back, exhausted, her heart pumping and her lungs scratching for air. It was like her first few days after the portal, when she had struggled to acclimatize to this strange mountain-top world.

  Joshua immediately plunged into the cliff-top forest. Emma forced herself to her feet and followed.

  Joshua crashed through the dense forest by main force, pushing aside branches, saplings and even some mature trees. He seemed careless of the noise he made and the trail he left behind — again unlike most Hams, who took care to pass silently through the dangerous twilight of the forest.

  At last they pushed into a clearing. Here the trees had been battered flat, she saw, and bits of blue cloth clung to scattered branches. Her heart thumped harder. Joshua ran across the clearing to the far side, where a last line of trees had been broken down, exposing blue-grey sky. She followed him.

  She found herself at the lip of the cliff, looking down on a trail of scraped rock and bits of cloth and “chute cord. And there, really not so far beneath the lip of the cliff, like a fat bug trapped in some huge spider-web, lay the lander.

  Joshua squatted on his haunches and pointed down at the lander. “Sky seed,” he said excitedly. “Sky seed!”

  She gazed hungrily down at the lander: crumpled, battered, stained and weathered, but intact. She saw no sign that anybody had climbed out of it since its plummet down the cliff.

  From here the lander looked very small. Specifically, she couldn’t see any sign of an engine pack, no way the thing could get itself off the ground and back to Earth.

  She sat back, forcing herself to think. Sitting here with a Neandertal the internal politics of America seemed a remote abstraction — but still she couldn’t believe that the US government would sanction any kind of one-way mission, even for someone as persuasive as Reid Malenfant. But that meant — she thought, her brain working feverishly — that the engine had to be somewhere else.

  She grabbed Joshua’s arms, and immediately regretted it; his skin was covered in filth and scabs. He flinched back from her touch, as if she intended to hurt him. She let go, and held her empty hands up before him. “I’m sorry… Listen to me. There must be another lander. I mean, another sky seed. A second one.” But Hams did not count. She held her hands up to mime two landers coming down from the west, one after the other. But Hams did not use symbols.

  She pointed, bluntly. “Sky seed. Down there. Sky seed.” She pointed into the forest, at random. “Over there.”

  He frowned. He pointed west, deeper into the forest. “Ov” there.”

  She took a deep breath. I knew it.

  But now Joshua was jabbering, pointing at the lander and the sky. “Sky seed. Praisegod. There “fore me was door standin” open Heav’n. Sky seed in Heav’n. People of th” Grey Earth. People of Heav’n.” And on and on, a long, complex, baffling diatribe.

  She peered into his ridged eye sockets, struggling to understand what was going through that mind — so alien from hers, and damaged too.

  Bit by bit she got it.

  Joshua had seen the lander come down from the sky. He had seen the second lander too. She knew that Hams believed their people came from a place in the sky, which they called the Grey Earth. Joshua, alternately, called it Heaven. As best she could make out he wanted to use the lander to take his people home, to Grey Earth, to Heaven.

  “Was it the Zealots who taught you about Heaven? Did the Zealots hurt you? Did this Praisegod hurt you?”

  “Prai’go” Michael,” he mumbled. “Mal’fan’.”

  Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She grabbed his shoulders, mindless of the filth, resisting his flinching. “What did you say?”

  “Mal’fan’. Zealots. Mal’fan’.”

  The Zealots had Malenfant.
Malenfant was here.

  She sat back on her haunches, breathing in gasps. “Do you know where Malenfant is being held? — no, you can’t tell me that. But you could show me.” She studied Joshua, who gazed back at her. “Listen to me. There is something you want. There is something I want. This is what we will do. You take me to Malenfant… If you do this, I will give you the lander. It will take you home, to Heaven, to the Grey Earth.”

  It took a long time to make him understand all of this. It might have been the first time in the history of these Hams, she thought, that anybody had tried to strike a bargain.

  And, as she had absolutely no intention of using the lander for anything else but getting herself and Malenfant out of here, it might have been the first time anybody had told a Ham a lie.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Uncounted days after his whipping, Malenfant was again dragged before Praisegod Michael.

  Malenfant stood as straight as he could, his arms tied behind his back, a new skin jacket over his upper body. He seethed with resentment at his own pain and humiliation, anger at what he suspected had become of McCann, and a kind of self-righteous disgust at Praisegod.

  Get a hold of yourself, Malenfant. Do business, remember.

  “What now, Praisegod? Another beating?”

  Praisegod walked around Malenfant. Malenfant saw how his right leg spasmed, as if he wished to flee; he seemed unusually agitated. Praisegod Michael was a man of depths, all of them murky.

  Praisegod’s Ham boy sat on the edge of the desk, staring at Malenfant.

  “I do not wish to punish you, Sir Malenfant. I can tell you have twice the mentation of Sprigge, here. I would rather obtain your support.”

  “You know nothing about me.”

  Praisegod said, “Where we came from does not matter, Malenfant. For we cannot escape this place; men have spent their lives to prove that. And as your friend McCann understood, what unites men, in this world of animals, is greater than that which separates us. All that matters is that we are here, now, and we must make the best of it. Though it has the face of a work of Satan, this island is a world made by God — of course it is; to argue otherwise would be to support the heresy of Manichaeus. Therefore it is perfectible, and therefore there is good work to be done here by righteous men… There is much to be done here.”

  Malenfant eyed him. Praisegod was a shithead, yes. He wasn’t about to conquer the Red Moon. But a shithead like this could cause a lot of suffering to a lot of people, and near-people. “Perfectible? Right. I know your kind. You intend to build an empire, Praisegod. A perfect empire, soaked in blood.”

  “What is blood?” Praisegod said easily. “If men stand against us, they will be as stubble before our swords. And as for the rest, to spill the blood of an animal is not a sin, Malenfant. Indeed, given that these soulless apes show a mockery of man’s features, I am convinced that to cleanse the worlds of their obscene forms is a duty.”

  “So you will use the Hams and the Runners as a resource to build your empire on this Moon. And when the hominids” usefulness has passed, you will exterminate them.”

  Praisegod’s predator’s eyes gleamed. “It is time for your answer, Malenfant.”

  Malenfant closed his eyes.

  Stay alive, Malenfant. That’s all that matters. The creatures on this Red Moon mean nothing to you. A little while ago you didn’t even know they existed. (But some of them have helped me, even saved my life…) And they are not even human. (But they are differently human…) This Praisegod may be difficult, but he is powerful. If you can work with him he may even help you achieve your goal which is, was and always will be to find Emma. (But he’s a psychopathic monster…)

  He imagined he heard Emma’s mocking voice.

  You can’t do it, can you? You never were too good at politics, were you, Malenfant? — even in NASA — any place where the ancient primate strategies of knowing when to fight and when to groom, when to dominate and when to submit, were essential. Ah, but this is about more than politics, isn’t it, Malenfant? Are you growing a conscience? You, who lied his way to Washington and back to get his BDB off the ground, who used up people and spat them out on the way to achieving what you wanted? Now you stand here on this jungle Moon and you can’t swallow a few preachy platitudes to save your own worthless hide?…

  Or, he thought, maybe McCann was right about me. So was my mother-in-law, come to that. Maybe all I ever wanted to do was crash and burn.

  Praisegod’s foot was tapping out its nervous drumbeat. The Ham boy, seeming to sense the tension between the two men, slid off the desk and crawled behind Praisegod’s chair.

  Malenfant took a breath. He said, “Why are you really so dead set against the hominids?” He glanced at the Neandertal boy; one eye and a thatch of ragged dark hair protruded from behind the chair leg. “Does this boy warm your bed, Praisegod Michael? Is that why you have to destroy him?”

  Malenfant saw white all the way around Praisegod’s pupils, and a dribble of blood and snot was leaking from his nose. The man stood before Malenfant, close enough to smell the fishy stink of his breath. He whispered, “This time the whips will fillet the flesh off you, until the men will be flogging your neck and the soles of your feet. And I, I will prevail, in the light of His countenance.”

  Malenfant had time for an instant of satisfaction. Got through to you, you bastard. Then he was clubbed to his knees.

  Emma Stoney:

  She spent days in the cliff-top forest, spying, scouting.

  This patch of forest was damp and thin. There were extensive clearings where old trees had fallen to the ground in chaotic tangles of branches. Paths wound among the trees, marked out through rotting leaves, fungus-ridden trunks, brambles and crushed saplings. Many of these paths were made no doubt by animals, or perhaps hominids, the Nutcracker-folk or the Elf-folk. But some of them were, unmistakably, the work of humans; straight, sometimes rutted by wheels.

  And the human paths converged on a township, a brooding, massive structure at the heart of the forest. It was the fortress of the Zealots.

  The great gate of the compound would open a couple of times a day to let out or admit parties, apparently for hunting and provisioning. The open gates, swinging on massive hinges of rope, revealed a shabby cluster of huts and fire-pits within. The Zealot foragers, always men, always dressed in drab green-stained skins, were armed with pikes and bows and arrows. They stayed alert as they made their way along the paths they had worn between the trees.

  The returning parties would call out informal halloos to let those inside know they wanted in. Nobody seemed to feel the need for passwords or other identifiers. But the gate openings were brief, and the forest beyond was always carefully watched by armed men. The foragers would return with sacks full of the forest’s fruits, or with bats or animals, commonly small hogs, or even grain and root vegetables brought in from the hinterland that must stretch beyond the forest.

  But they would also bring home Elves, even the occasional Nutcracker, suspended limply from poles, heads lolling. The Zealots had no taboo, it seemed, over consuming the flesh of their apparent near-relatives — which she heard them call, in their thick, strangulated accent, bush meat. The hunters seemed to prize the hands and ears of infant Elves, which they would hack off and wear around their necks as gruesome trophies.

  Also, less frequently, they brought home captured Runners. The Runners were always returned alive. The men and boys were evidently beaten into submission, their backs bearing the scars of whips and their faces misshapen from blows; they trudged through the forests with ropes around their necks and wrists, and with their long legs hobbled so they had to shuffle. She supposed the male Runners were brought back to the stockade as slave labour. Their strong, supple bodies and clever hands well qualified them for the role.

  Perhaps some of the captured women and girls were used that way too, but Emma suspected they had a darker fate in store. They were returned to the township with bite marks and scratches on th
eir breasts and blood running down their legs. Some of the boys seemed to have been similarly abused. Evidently the hunters took the breaking-in of a new captive as a perk of the job. Emma had no way of knowing how many of these victims had fought too hard, and ended their lives in the forest in uncomprehending misery beneath the grunting bodies of the Zealots.

  She was relieved her instinct had always been to keep out of sight of these people. She didn’t quite know what reaction they would have to finding a human woman alone in the forest, but she didn’t feel inclined to take a chance on their charity.

  At last her spying paid off. She overheard a group of hunters, as they lazed in the shade of a fig tree, feeding themselves on its plump fruit and talking loosely. Their gossip was of a major expedition — it almost sounded military to take on a new group the Zealots called the Daemons. The Zealots sounded alternately apprehensive and excited about the coming conflict; there was much speculation about the quality of the women among the Daemons.

  Emma knew nothing about these Daemons, and couldn’t care less. But if a large number of the township’s able bodies was going to be taken away, she sensed a window of opportunity.

  She sat in the cave before Joshua, holding his massive head with both her hands on his filthy cheeks, making him face her. “Hunting Praisegod Michael. Tomorrow. Hunting Praisegod. Do you understand?”

  “Hunt Prai’go’,” he said at last, thickly, his damaged tongue protruding. “Tomorr’.”

  “Yes. Tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow. All right?”

  He gazed back at her, his eyes containing an eerie sharpness that none of his people seemed to share. Perhaps there was madness there — but even so, it was a much more human gaze than any she had encountered since losing Sally and Maxie. But there was absolutely no guile in those eyes, none at all, and no element of calculation or planning.

  She released him.

  He picked up a rock he had been knapping, and resumed working on it, steady, patient. She sat down in the corner of the cave, her legs drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her knees, watching him. The blue-grey glow of the sky, leaching of light, reflected in his eyes as he worked; often, like most Ham knappers, he didn’t even look at the stone he was working.