Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Little Boss remained motionless for a time. Then, uttering faint screams, he sat up. He had great gashes on his face, legs and back. He could not move one leg. The ground where he had lain was stained by blood and panic shit. He looked back at his assailants, who were capering and howling their rage. He opened his mouth, as if to cry defiance. But a great bubble of bloody mucus formed there, and his voice was a strangle. When the bubble broke, Little Boss fell back, rigid as a falling tree.

  Shadow fell on the body immediately. She pulled it by its ankles out into the clearing, sat on its chest, and immediately began to slice away its flesh with a new stone cobble.

  With degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm, the others joined her. Soon they were all feeding.

  The miniature war was brief but savage.

  Shadow’s only tactic was to isolate her targets and destroy them. But it was a tactic beyond the grasp of her opponents, and it worked over and over. The women, especially if burdened by infants, were easy prey. The men were picked off one by one, always by overwhelming force.

  And as Shadow’s group fed day after day on fresh meat, they grew stronger, and hungrier.

  It finished as Shadow watched her acolytes fall on the body of her mother. In her last moments, before they opened her chest. Termite reached out a bloody hand to Shadow, who stayed unmoved.

  And then Shadow went alone into the forest to hunt down the last free man, her brother. Claw. When Shadow returned to her warmongering group, the object she clutched in her hand was his heart.

  But when the opponents were annihilated, the group, filled with a rage for blood and murder, anxious for more meat, began to fall, on each other.

  Reid Malenfant:

  He remembered how his father, on learning of his inoperable tumour, had suddenly rediscovered the Episcopalian faith of his youth. Somehow that had hurt Malenfant — as if his father, in these last months, had chosen to draw away from him. But he hadn’t been about to deny his dad the comfort he sought.

  It had always seemed to him that religion was a kind of bargain. You gave over your whole life, a portion of your income and half your intellect, in return for a freedom from the fear of death. Maybe, it wasn’t such a bad bargain at that.

  But look at the Hams: Julia and the rest, these Moon-bound Neandertals, as rational and smart as any human being, just as aware of the human tragedy of death and pain and loss — and yet, it seemed, quite without the consolation of religion. But they seemed able to cope with the dreadful truth of life without hiding from it.

  Well, maybe they were tougher than humans.

  And what about you, Malenfant, now the black meteor is approaching at last? Don’t you need comfort — forgiveness — the prospect of continued existence beyond the grave of crimson dust that will soon welcome your bones?

  Too late for me now, he thought. But it doesn’t seem to trouble me. Maybe I’m more like a damn Neandertal than a human.

  Or maybe Emma was right: that nothing mattered so much to him about where he was going, compared to what he was escaping from.

  Julia was here, her concerned, Moon-like face swimming in the gloom before his eyes. He wondered absently if it was night or day.

  After a time, Emma was here. She frowned, wiped at his mouth with a scrap of leaf, and tried to give him water.

  “Things to tell you.”

  “You need to save your strength for drinking. Eating. All that good stuff.”

  “No time.”

  “If you’re going to start lecturing me about Fermi again—”

  “I did my best, Emma.”

  “I know you did.”

  “I came all the way to this damn Moon to find you. I went to the White House. I built a rocket ship.”

  “That always was the kind of stuff you were good at, Malenfant.”

  “Looking out for you?”

  “No,” she said sadly. “The grand gesture.”

  “I found you. But I can’t do anything for you.”

  She looked at him, her eyes blank, oddly narrowed. “But was that ever the idea?”

  “What else?”

  “You’re a complicated man, Reid Malenfant. Your motives aren’t simple.”

  “Your mother thinks I’ve been trying to kill you for years.”

  “Oh, it’s not that, Malenfant. It’s not me you’re trying to destroy. It’s you. It’s just that I’m sometimes in the way…”

  He frowned, deeply disturbed, remembering fragments of conversations with McCann, Nemoto. “What are you talking about?”

  “What about Praisegod Michael?”

  “He was a psychopath. I had to—”

  “You had to what? Malenfant, it wasn’t your fight. What does Praisegod Michael matter to you, or me? If you really had been devoted to the cause of getting to me, you’d have said anything he wanted to hear, to keep your skin intact. But not you. You walked into his guns, Malenfant. Deliberately. And you must have known you couldn’t win. On some level you wanted him to do this to you.”

  “I was looking for you,” he said stubbornly. “That’s why I came to the Moon.”

  “I’m sorry, Malenfant. I see what I see.”

  He licked his lips with a tongue that felt like a piece of wood.

  “Tell me this,” she said now. “When we were in that damn T-38 over Africa, when the Wheel appeared in the sky—”

  “Yeah.”

  “You could have turned away.”

  He closed his eyes. He thought back to those moments, the glittering sky-bright seconds of the crash, when he and Emma had been suspended in the deep African light, before the enigmatic alien artefact.

  …Yes. He remembered how the aerosurfaces had bit, just for a second. He had felt the stick respond. He knew he could turn the nose of the plane away from the Wheel. It was a chance. He didn’t take it.

  “Yes,” he rasped. “And then—”

  And then there had been that instant of exuberance — the sense of relief, of freedom, as the T-38 hurtled at the Wheel, as he felt the little jet slide out of his control, as the great blue circle had rushed towards him, and he had reached the point where he could do no more.

  “How did you know? The slaved instruments—”

  “I didn’t need to watch instruments, Malenfant. I know you. It’s just — the way you are, the kind of person you are. You could no more help it than you could stop breathing, or keep from farting in your sleep.”

  “I do that?”

  “I never knew when would be a good time to tell you.”

  “You picked a doozy.”

  “Poor Malenfant. The universe never has made much sense to you, has it? — not from the grandness of the Fermi Paradox, not yourself, on down to your relationship with your first grade teacher.”

  “She really was an asshole.”

  “I’ve always known all about you, what you are, what you could not help but become. Right from the beginning, I’ve known. And I went along with you anyway. What does that say about me?… Maybe we’re alike, you and I.” She reached up and passed her hands over his eyes. “Sleep now.”

  But sleep eluded him, though regret lingered.

  “Listen, Malenfant. I’ve decided. You’re right. I’m going to go on, to track down the Daemons — Homo superior, whatever they are. Every time this damn Moon shifts, people suffer and die, right here on the Moon, and on all the Earths. What gives those guys the right to screw up so many lives — so many billions of lives?”

  “And you intend to stop them.”

  “Malenfant, I don’t know what I intend. I haven’t had a plan since the day I fell through that blue Wheel and found myself here, covered in shit. I’ll do what you always did. I’ll improvise.”

  “Take care.”

  “Because you won’t be around to look out for me? Malenfant, if it escaped your notice, I rescued you. All you did was lose your spacecraft, your sole companion and all your gear, and get yourself thrown in jail. Twice.”

  “Anger can make you feel good.�
��

  “…Yes. Maybe that’s what I need. An enemy. Somebody to be mad at. Other than you, that is.”

  “Why here?”

  “What?”

  “Why is it finishing like this, here, now, so far from home?”

  “You always did ask big questions, Malenfant. Big, unanswerable questions. Why are there no aliens? Why is there something, rather than nothing?…”

  “I mean it. Why did I have to run into a petty thug like Praisegod? Why couldn’t it have been more—”

  “More meaningful? But it is meaningful, Malenfant. There’s a logic. And it has nothing to do with the Red Moon or the Fermi Paradox, or any of that. It’s you, Malenfant. It’s us. Your whole life has a logic leading up to this place and time. It just had to be this way.”

  “The universe is irrelevant. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I guess so… But there are other universes. We know that now. We’ve seen them. Are there other destinies for us, Malenfant?… Malenfant!”

  The tunnel was long now, and filling with an oily darkness. Her face was like a distant beacon, a point of light like a star in a telescope, and he struggled to see her. There was a dim awareness of hands working his body, hands pounding at his chest, heavy hands, not human.

  The light went out, the last light.

  Soft lips brushed his brow, gentle as a butterfly’s wings, yet the most vivid event in all the collapsing universe.

  Enough, he thought, gratefully, fearfully.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  It was time for the Mapping to the crater that promised to reveal the secrets of the world engine.

  The people stood in a rough circle at the centre of the platform. The yellow floor was bare again, the temporary structures it had borne unravelled, spacetime allowed to heal. The great turning Map of the Red Moon had been folded away also, having served its purpose. There was nothing left but the platform, and its cargo of people.

  Beyond there was only the unmanaged forest, where, perhaps, curious eyes gazed out at the creatures they had learned to call Daemons.

  Manekato sought out Nemoto. The little hominid stood alone, ignored by the rest. She wore her much-repaired blue coverall, and over her shoulder she bore the bag of parachute fabric that contained her few artefacts.

  Manekato knew that it would serve no purpose to tell Nemoto that possessions were meaningless, for anything desired could be reproduced at will, over and over. Mapped out of the raw stuff of the universe itself. In this, oddly, Manekato’s kind had much in common with the more primitive hominids here. The Hams and Runners would manufacture tools for a single use and then discard them, without sentiment or longing. Perhaps Manekato shared with them some deep sense of the unstinting bounty of the universe — there would always be another rock to make a hand-axe — an intuition that Nemoto, caught between the two, coming from a culture of acquisition and limits, could never share.

  Manekato sighed, aware of the drift of her thinking. As always, just as Without Name had complained, too many philosophical ruminations! — Enough, Mane. It is time to act.

  She took Nemoto’s hand; it lay against her own, tiny and white and fragile. “Are you ready?”

  Nemoto forced a smile. “I have been fired across space by a barely controlled explosion devised by primitives. By comparison you are masters of space and time. I should feel confident in your hands.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “But I don’t.”

  Manekato said gently, “A Mapping is only a matter of logic. You are a creature of logic, Nemoto; I admire that in you. And in the working-out of logic there is nothing to fear.”

  “Yes,” Nemoto said softly. But her hand tightened in Manekato’s.

  In due course, the Mapping was expressed.

  Hand in hand, the people and their Workers — and one frightened Homo sapiens drifted upwards from the platform. The great shield of Adjusted Space folded away beneath them, leaving a disc of light-starved, barren, crushed land. But Manekato knew that the denuded patch would soon be colonized by the vigorous life forms here, and she felt no guilt.

  Then the Mapping’s deep logic worked into her bones, and she was smeared over the sky.

  She hung among the stars, suspended in a primal triumvirate of bodies: Earth, sun and Moon, the only bodies in all the universe that showed as more than a point of light to a naked human eye. But this was not Nemoto’s Earth, or her sun; and it was nobody’s Moon. How strange, she thought.

  She had no body, and yet she was aware of Nemoto’s hand in her own.

  “Nemoto?”

  “…How can I hear you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Can you see the Red Moon?”

  “I see it all at once! — but that is impossible. Oh, Mane…”

  “Try not to understand. Let the logic guide you.”

  “But it is a world. It is magnificent,” Nemoto said. “It seems absurd, grandiose, to suppose that this is a mere cog in some vast machine.”

  It took Manekato a moment to secure the translation of “cog’. “Look at the stars, Nemoto.”

  “I can’t see them. The sun dazzles me.”

  “You can see them if you choose,” Manekato said gently.

  “…Yes,” Nemoto said at length. “Yes, I see them. How wonderful.”

  “Are they the same stars as shine on your Earth?”

  “I think so. And they are just as silent. Are we alone in all the human universes, Manekato?”

  “Perhaps.” She glared at the unchanging stars. “But if we are alone, the stars have no purpose save what they can offer humanity. My people have sat in their Farms for two million years,” Manekato said, “a vast desert of time we could have spent cultivating the sky. Long enough, Nemoto. When this is over — Ah. I think—”

  And then the Mapping was done.

  The platform coalesced, as spacetime adjusted itself for the convenience of the expedition. People moved here and there, speaking softly, trailed by Workers. Few of them showed much interest in their new environs; already the first shelters were coalescing, sprouting from the platform like great flat fungi.

  Once again Manekato found herself injected into a new part of the Red Moon.

  This place was bright, more open than the forest location. And she could smell ocean salt in the air. To the east, the way the gentle, salt-laden breeze came, the land rose, becoming greener, until it reached a crest that was crowned by a line of trees. As she studied the ridge of rock, she saw how it curved away from her. It was the rim of a crater. To the west was a broad plain of rock and crimson dust, all but barren. In the far distance, beyond a rippling curtain of heat haze, hominids ran across the plain. They moved silently and without scent, like ghosts.

  Nemoto had slumped to the ground. She peered into her bag, rummaging through its contents, as if unable to believe that a Mapping could be completed without losing some key piece of her battered and improvised equipment.

  Babo came to Manekato. “Interesting. She behaves like an infant after her first Mapping. But then we arrive in the world knowing that reality has certain properties. Deep in our hind brains, the parts we share with these sub-human hominids and even more ancient lines, we store the deep intuition that a thing is either here or there, that it either exists or it does not — it cannot spontaneously leap between the two states. And Mapping violates all that. Perhaps we should admire Nemoto for keeping her sanity.”

  “Yes.” Manekato rubbed his head fondly. “For now our companions are all too busy rebuilding their houses to have much to complain about. Shall we investigate what we have come so far to see?”

  He raised his hand, preparing to execute another short-range Mapping.

  She grabbed his arm. “No. Renemenagota was a monster. But I have come to believe that some of her intuition was sound.” Deliberately she walked forward, knuckles and feet working confidently, until she had stepped off the platform and onto the raw native ground. She scraped at the dirt, and clouds of crimson dust dr
ifted into the air. Soon her feet and lower legs were stained a pale pink.

  Babo grinned, showing white teeth. “You’re right, Mane. We are creatures designed for walking. Let us walk.” He jumped off the platform, landing with hands and feet flat, evoking more billows of dust.

  Side by side they loped away from the compound, and began to scale the wall of the crater.

  Shadow:

  The Nutcracker-woman was eating her way through a pile of figs. A child played at her feet, rolling and scrabbling in dead leaves. The woman was about the same height as one of the Elf-folk, and she was covered in similar black-brown hair. But her belly seemed swollen compared to an Elf’s — it housed a large stomach capable of fermenting her low-quality feed — and her head was a sculpture of bone, with a great crested ridge over the top of her skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were anchored.

  A rock hurtled out of the surrounding foliage. It slammed into the trunk of the fig with a rich hollow noise, then fell to the earth.

  The Nutcracker-woman screeched and scrambled back. She stared at the fallen stone. At last, cautiously, she poked it with one finger, as if it were a living thing, a bat that had stunned itself on the tree. But the stone lay still, unresponsive.

  And now a stick came spinning from another part of the foliage.

  The Nutcracker-woman got to her feet, gathered up her infant, and looked about suspiciously, sniffing the air with her broad, dirty nostrils. She took a step away from the fig tree.

  Shadow struck.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  The ground rose steadily.

  Manekato could feel a layer of hard, compact rock beneath a thin skim of dust. Green things grew here, grass and shrubs and even a few low trees, but they struggled to find purchase. It was dry; there was no sign of the springs that sometimes could be observed bubbling from the shattered walls of craters. And, though the rise of the slope was steady, it was not becoming noticeably steeper.

  The morphology of this formation was like no other impact crater or volcanic caldera she had encountered. The rim of a crater this size should be more sharply defined: a circular ridge, perhaps eroded into hillocks, with a splash plain of rubble and ejecta beyond. There was none of that here; the “crater” was just an upraised blister erupting from an empty plain.