Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Tomorrow, this child-man would have to take part in a concerted assault.

  Not for the first time Emma wondered what the hell she was doing here. How have I come so far? I’m an accountant, for God’s sake…

  She had spent the days waiting for the Zealots” expedition trying to raise a fighting force from among the Hams. But she had quickly learned that it was impossible to turn these huge, powerful, oddly gentle creatures into anything resembling soldiers — not in a short time, probably not if she kept at it for ever. She had hit at last on the notion of making the assault a hunt, the one activity where the Hams did appear to show something resembling guile.

  But even now she didn’t know how many of them she could count on. She, and Joshua, had managed to enthuse a few of the younger men to join the battle. But when she approached them the next day even the most ardent would-be warriors would have forgotten all about the project.

  Another problem was that the Hams” only notion of actual combat was hand-to hand: just yesterday she had seen three of the men wrestle an overgrown buck antelope to the ground with their bare hands. It was a strategy that had worked for them so far, evidently, or the cold hand of natural selection would long ago have eliminated them — even if they paid the price in severe injuries and shortened lifespans. But it wasn’t a strategy that would work well in a war, even against the disorganized and weakened rabble she hoped the Zealots would prove to be.

  In the end, she realized, the Hams would fight (or not) according to their instinct and impulse, and they would fight the way they always had, come what may. She would just have to accept that, and deal with the consequences.

  Joshua turned the rock over in his hands, running his scarred fingertips over the planes he had exposed, gazing intently at it. Unlike her, he wasn’t fretting about tomorrow. She sensed a stillness about his mind, as if it were a clear pool, clear right to the bottom, and in its depths all she could see was the rock. It was as if Joshua and the rock blurred together, becoming a single entity, as if his self-awareness were dimming, as if he were more aware of the microstructure of the rock even than of himself.

  With her head echoing as ever with hopes and fears and schemes, Emma couldn’t begin to imagine how that might feel. But she knew she envied him. Since starting to live with the Hams she had often wished she could simply switch off the clamour in her head, the way they seemed to.

  Now Joshua lifted his worn bone hammer — the only possession he cherished — and, with the precision of a surgeon, tapped the rock. A flake fell away. It was a scraper, she saw, an almost perfect oval.

  He lifted his head and grinned at her, his scarred tongue protruding.

  The Zealots” attacking army had drawn up in rough order outside the stockade, armed with their crossbows and knives and pikes. There looked to be fifty men and boys, and they had been followed by about as many Runner bearers, all of them limping, their arms full of bundles of weapons and provisions.

  Emma watched the soldiers prepare, curious. The pikemen, in addition to their immensely long pikes, had leather armour: breastplates and backplates, what they called gorgets to protect their throats, and helmets that they called pots. They carried provisions in leather packs they called snapsacks. There was even a cavalry, of sorts; but the soldiers rode the shoulders of men, of Runners. They were marshalled by an insane-looking cleric type, in a long robe of charcoal blackened skin — and by a hominid, a vast, hulking gorilla-like creature with rapid, jerky movements and swivelling ears. Was it a Daemon? At least eight feet tall, it looked smart, purposeful; Emma hadn’t seen its like before.

  Not your problem, Emma.

  The army, its preparations nearly done, sang hymns and psalms. Then a man they called Constable Sprigge stood on a rock before them, and began to pray. “Lord, you know how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me…” Emma found the wry soldiers” prayer oddly moving.

  And with that the army marched off through the forest. The Zealot fortress was as weakened as it would ever be.

  She crouched by the stockade gate, her heart beating like a hammer drill, clutching the shortest, sharpest thrusting spear she could find. She surveyed her own motley army. In the end, only the big man, Abel — Joshua’s brother — and the oddly adventurous girl Mary had elected to join her and Joshua on this expedition. Three Hams counted physically for a lot more than twice as many Zealots. And she was planning nothing more than a smash-and-grab raid, a commando operation, a mission with a single goal. But still, there were only four of them — three child-people and herself, and she was certainly no soldier.

  She was frightened for the Hams, already guilty for the harm they would surely suffer today — and, of course, profoundly frightened for herself, middle-aged accountant turned soldier. But this was the only way she could see to get to Malenfant. And getting to him was the only way she was ever going to get out of this dismal, bizarre place — if he really was here, if he was still alive, if she hadn’t somehow misunderstood Joshua, fooled by his damaged tongue and her own aching heart. And so she put aside her fears and doubts and guilt, for there was no choice.

  She kept her Hams quiet until she was sure the ragged Zealot army was out of hearing.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  The compound was calm, quiet, orderly. Workers trundled to and fro over the bright yellow floor of Adjusted Space, pursuing their unending chores.

  But not a person moved. They stood or sat or lay in a variety of poses, like statues, or corpses, arrayed beneath the huge turning Map of the world. The core activity here was internal, as each person contemplated the vast conundrum of the Red Moon.

  After two million years of continuous civilization, nobody rushed.

  But to Manekato, after her vivid experiences in the forest, it was like being in a mausoleum. She found a place of shade and threw herself to the ground. A Worker came over and offered her therapeutic grooming, but Manekato waved it away.

  Nemoto came to her. She carried her block of paper, much scribbled-on. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and regarded Manekato gravely. “Renemenagota of Rano represents a great danger.”

  Manekato snapped her teeth angrily. “What do you know of the hearts of people? You are not even a person. You are like a Worker…”

  But Nemoto showed no distress. “Person or not, I may perceive certain truths more clearly than you. I see, for instance, that you are troubled on a deep level. You are human, but you are still animal too, Manekato. And your animal side is repelled by the cold efficiency of this place you have built, and is drawn to the dark mysteries of the forest. Perhaps my lesser kind have a better understanding of the shadows of our hearts.” But there was defiance in her pronunciation of that word lesser.

  Manekato felt shamed. Hadn’t she just taken out her own distress and confusion on a weaker creature — this Nemoto — just as Without-Name had punished the hominids she had captured? She propped herself up on her elbows. “What is it you want?”

  “I have a hypothesis,” said the little hominid.

  Manekato sighed. More of Nemoto’s theories: partial, immature, expressed badly and at the pace of a creeping glacier — and yet suffused by an earnest need to be understood, listened to, approved. She nodded, a gesture she had learned from Nemoto herself.

  Nemoto began to spread pages of her paper block over the floor. The paper bore columns labelled Earth, Banded Earth, Grey Earth (Hams), and so on, though some columns were headed by nothing but query marks. And the paper was covered with a tangle of lines and arrows that linked the columns one to the other.

  “I have elaborated my views,” Nemoto said. “I have come to believe that this Red Moon has played a key role in human evolution. Consider. How do new species arise, of hominids or any organism? Isolation is the key. If mutations arise in a large and freely mixing population, any new characteristic is diluted and will disappear within a few generations. But when a segment of the population becomes isolated from the rest, dilution through int
erbreeding is prevented. Then, when a new characteristic appears within the group — and provided it is beneficial to the survival of the group and the individuals within it — it will be reinforced. Thus the isolated group may, quite rapidly, diverge from the base population.

  “And when those barriers to isolation are removed, the new species finds itself in competition with its predecessors. If it is better adapted to the prevailing conditions, it will survive by out-competing the parent stock. If not, it declines.

  “When our scientists believed there was only one Earth, they suspected the evolution of humanity had been the consequence of a number of speciation steps. The ape-like bipedal Australopithecines gave rise to tool users, who in turn produced erect hairless creatures capable of walking on the open plain, who in turn gave rise to various species of Homo sapiens — the family that includes myself. It is believed that at some points in history there were many hominid species, all derived from the base Australopithecine stock, living together on the Earth. But my kind — Homo sapiens sapiens — proved the fittest of them all. By out-competition, the variant species were removed.

  “Presumably, each speciation episode was instigated by the isolation of a group of the parent stock. We had generally assumed that the key isolating events were caused by climate changes: rising or falling sea levels, the birth or death of forests, the coming and going of glaciation. It was a plausible picture. Before we knew of the Red Moon.”

  “And now your radical hypothesis—”

  Nemoto tapped her papers. “What if the vagaries of the Red Moon were involved, in all this? Look here. This central column sketches the history of the Earth.”

  “Your Earth.”

  Nemoto smiled, her small naked face pinched. “Assume that the base Australopithecine stock evolved on Earth. Imagine that the Red Moon with its blue Wheel portals scooped up handfuls of undifferentiated Australopithecines and, perhaps some generations later, deposited them on a variety of subtly different Earths.”

  “It is hard to imagine a more complete isolation.”

  “Yes. And the environments in which they were placed might have had no resemblance to those from which they were taken. In that case our Australopithecines would have had to adapt or die. Perhaps one group was stranded on a world of savannah and open desert—”

  “Ah. You are suggesting that the hairless, long-legged Runners might have evolved on such a world.”

  “Homo erectus — yes. Other worlds produced different results. And later, the Red Moon returned and swept up samples of those new populations, and handed them on to other Earths — or perhaps returned them where they had come from, to compete with the parent stock, successfully or otherwise.

  “My species shares a comparatively recent common ancestor with creatures like the Hams — which are of the type we call Neandertals, I think. Perhaps a group of that ancestral stock was taken to the world the Hams call the Grey World, where they evolved the robust form we see now. And, later, a sample of Hams was returned to the Earth. Later still, groups of Homo sapiens sapiens — that is, my kind — were swept here from the Earths of the groups called the English and the Zealots, and no doubt others.” She gazed at her diagrams. “Perhaps even my own kind evolved on some other Earth, and were brought back by the Moon in some ancient accident.”

  Manekato picked her nose thoughtfully. “Very well. And my Earth — which you have labelled ‘Banded Earth’ ?”

  Somewhat hesitantly, Nemoto said, “It seems that your Earth may have been seeded by Australopithecine stock from my Earth. You seem to have much in common, morphologically, with the robust variant of Australopithecines to be seen in the forests here, called Nutcrackers.”

  Manekato lay back and sighed, her mind racing pleasurably. “You fear you have offended me by delegating my world to a mere off-shoot. You have not. And your scheme is consistent with the somewhat mysterious appearance of my forebears on Earth — my Earth.” She glanced at Nemoto’s sketches. “It is a promising suggestion. This strange Moon might prove to be the crucible of our evolution; certainly it is unlikely that hominid forms could not have evolved independently on so many diverse Earths. But such is the depth of time involved, and such is the complexity of the mixing achieved by our wandering Moon, the full picture is surely more complicated than your sketch — and it is hard to believe that your Earth just happens to be the primary home of the lineage… And how is it that so many of these other Earths share, not just hominid cousins, but a shared history, even shared languages? Your own divergence from the Zealot type must be quite ancient — their peculiar tails attest to that — and yet your history evidently shares much in common with them.”

  Nemoto frowned, her small face comically serious. “That is a difficulty. Perhaps there is such a thing as historical convergence. Or perhaps the wandering of the Moon has induced mixing even in historical times. Cultural, linguistic transmission—”

  It was a simplistic suggestion, but Manekato did not want to discourage her. “Perhaps. But the truth may be more subtle. Perhaps the manifold of universes is larger than you suppose. If it were arbitrarily large, then there would be an arbitrarily close match to any given universe.”

  Nemoto puzzled through that. “Just as I would find my identical twin, in a large enough population of people.”

  “That’s the idea. The closer the match you seek, the more unlikely it would be, and the larger the population of, umm, candidate twins you would need to search.”

  “But the degree of convergence between, say, the Zealot universe and my own language, culture, even historical figures — is so unlikely that the manifold of possibilities would have to be very large indeed.”

  “Infinite,” said Mane gently. “We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wander is in fact infinite.”

  Nemoto considered that for a while. Then she said, “But no matter how large the manifold, I still have to understand why this apparatus of a reality-wandering Moon should have been devised in the first place — and who by.”

  Manekato studied Nemoto, wishing she could read the hominid’s small face better. “Why show me your schema now?”

  “Because,” Nemoto said, “I believe all of this, this grand evolutionary saga, is now under threat.”

  Manekato frowned. “Because of the failure of the world engines?”

  “No,” Nemoto said. “Because of you. And Renemenagota of Rano.”

  A shadow fell over Manekato’s face. “Your ape may be right, Mane. You should listen to it.”

  It was Without-Name. She stepped forward, carelessly scattering Nemoto’s spidery diagrams.

  Emma Stoney:

  Emma lifted her head. “Hall-oo! Hall-oo!” Her call, though pitched higher than that of the men who mostly ventured outside the stockade, was, she was sure, a pretty accurate imitation of the soft cries of returning hunters.

  Within a couple of minutes she heard an answering grunt, and the rattle of heavy wooden bolts being slid back.

  All or nothing, she thought. Malenfant — or death.

  When the heavy gate started to creak open, she yelled and threw herself at it. Her flimsy mass made no difference. But the Hams immediately copied her, making a sound like a car ramming a tree. The splintering gate was smashed back, and she heard a howl of pain.

  The Hams surged forward. There were people in the compound, women and children. As three immense Hams came roaring in amongst them, they ran screaming.

  Emma glanced around quickly. She saw a litter of crude adobe huts, that one substantial chapel-like building at the centre, a floor of dust stamped flat by feet and stained with dung and waste. She smelled shit, stale piss.

  Now the door to one of the buildings flew open. Men boiled out, pulling on clothing. Inside the building’s smoky darkness Emma glimpsed naked Runner women, some of them wearing mockeries of dresses, others on beds and tables, on their backs or their bellies, legs splayed, scarred ankles strapped down.

  Grabbing
pikes and clubs and bows, the men ran at Abel, howling. With a cry of pleasure Abel joined with them. He brushed aside their clubs as if they were twigs wielded by children. He got two of the Zealots by the neck, lifted them clean off the ground, and slammed their heads together, making a sound like eggs cracking.

  But now the bowmen had raised their weapons and let fly. Emma, despising herself, huddled behind Abel’s broad back. She heard the grisly impact of arrows in Abel’s chest. He fell to his knees, and blood spewed from his mouth.

  The archers were struggling to reload. Mary hurled herself at them, fists flailing.

  Emma grabbed Joshua’s arm. “Malenfant! Quickly, Joshua. Malenfant — where?”

  For answer he ran towards the chapel-like central building. Emma touched Abel’s back apologetically, and ran after Joshua towards the chapel. She seethed with rage and adrenaline and fear. This had better be worth the price we’re paying, Malenfant.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  Manekato stood quickly. Nemoto hurried behind her, sheltering behind her bulk. Babo came running to join them, his legs and arms levering him rapidly over the floor of Adjusted Space. Other people gathered in a loose circle around this central confrontation, watching nervously. Workers scuttled back and forth, seeking tasks, trying to discern the needs of the people, ignored.

  For the first time it struck Manekato just how physically big Without-Name was towering over a lesser hominid like Nemoto, but larger than Manekato too, larger than any of the other people on this expedition. Physical size did not matter at home, on civilized Earth. But on this savage Moon, strength and brute cunning were key survival factors; and Without-Name seemed to relish her unrestrained power.

  And now Manekato noticed a new hominid following in Without-Name’s wake. It was a male, taller than Nemoto, rake-thin, and he was dressed in a tight robe of animal skin stained black, perhaps by charcoal. He drew a Ham boy after him. The boy was dressed in elaborate clothing, and he had a collar around his neck, connected to a lead in the tall hominid’s hand.