Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma held the baby against her chest. The little body was very warm. The sad, small black face tucked into a fold of Emma’s coverall, and Emma bent to kiss the bony crest on the top of her head. She smelled leaves.

  Then the infant hugged her tight with legs and arms, tensed, and defecated in a stream that spilled down Emma’s trouser-legs.

  Julia made claw hands. “Leopards. Hyenas. Chomp baby Nu’cracker.”

  “Right,” Emma said. “Smart baby. You only take a dump when your mother is holding you.”

  Nemoto was watching her. “Emma Stoney, I hope you’re not considering bringing that infant with you.”

  Emma hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Why not?”

  “Because you do not know how to look after it.”

  “Her. I don’t know how to look after her.”

  “You know nothing of the ecology of these creatures. You are sentimental.”

  “She is right,” Mane said mournfully. The big Daemon loomed over the little tableau, like an adult standing over a child with her doll. “This infant has been abandoned by its kind. It will shortly die, of starvation, predation, disease. Death is commonplace for all hominid species, Em-ma. Among the Nutcrackers, in fact, the men compete for access to groups of women and children. And sometimes if one man displaces another, he will destroy the children of his defeated opponent.”

  “All very evolutionarily sound,” Emma said coldly. “But I’m keeping her.”

  She felt a massive hand on her back: Julia’s. “Lonely,” said the Ham.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m lonely, Julia. I lost my husband, my world, my life. For all your kindness, of course I’m lonely.”

  “All,” Julia said softly. “Lonely.”

  Nemoto prowled about the little clearing, agitated, avoiding the corpse. “We are the lonely hominids. On Earth it is thirty-five thousand years since we last encountered another hominid species. Maybe it was our relentless expansion that drove the last of the Neandertals to extinction; maybe it was our fault — but whatever the cause it was surely the last contact. And when we look out into the sky, we see nothing but emptiness. An empty world in an empty universe. No wonder we have been at war with our planet since before records began. Earth had betrayed us, orphaned us: what else was there to do? Yes, we are lonely, all of us. Lonely and frightened. But do you really think making a pet of an orphaned Australopithecine is going to make any difference?…”

  Emma felt Mane’s heavy, gentle hand touch the top of her head, distant, comforting.

  They approached the centre.

  People moved over the rocky ground. They were Daemons, little clusters of them walking to and fro, bearing incomprehensible pieces of equipment, occasionally flickering into and out of existence in that baffling, utterly disturbing way of theirs.

  Beyond the Daemons, Emma thought she could see light shining up from the ground, caught by swirling dust motes. She shivered.

  Nemoto was silent, tense.

  They reached the centre of the clearing. Emma stepped forward gingerly.

  There was a hole in the ground, a few yards wide, like a well. Light shone from it, up into the dusty air, like an inverted sunbeam.

  Emma felt cold with awe.

  She sat on the grass with the Nutcracker infant and reached for a flask of milk from her pack. She opened up the yellow plastic-feel flask, exposing a nipple, and tipped it towards the infant’s head, making soothing noises. The infant grabbed the yellow flask with hands and feet, and she began to suck at the nipple, very hard. Milk splashed into her mouth and over her face, and over Emma.

  Emma wiped milk from her lap and eyes. “I should do this with an apron.”

  “You shouldn’t do it at all,” Nemoto said sourly. “You should give her back to her kind.”

  “Nutcrackers don’t adopt orphans. You know that.”

  Mane stood over them like a block of granite. “We could make the infant acceptable to a troupe of its kind.”

  Emma scowled. “How?”

  Nemoto said, “Emma, if they can travel between worlds just by thinking about it, the Daemons can surely fool some half-evolved ape.”

  Mane reproached her, “Nutcrackers are fully evolved. Just differently evolved.”

  The infant finished the milk, or at any rate lost patience with the bottle. She threw it over her head. Then she touched the milk that had pooled on Emma’s chin, and opened her mouth to make fast, rasping cries. “Hah hah hah!”

  “She’s laughing at me,” Emma said.

  “I am not surprised,” Nemoto said.

  “I’ll find some running water and wash us both up.”

  Julia, watching, grinned. “Nutcracker don” wash!”

  Nemoto grimaced. “This is not a toy, still less a human child! Soon you will be stinking as badly as her! Emma, give up this sentimentality. Give her back to her own kind.” She seemed obsessed with the issue of the infant.

  Emma looked up at Manekato, and she looked into her own heart. “Not yet,” she said.

  There was a moment of stillness. In this open space the sun was warm on her face, invigorating, its light making the dusty air shine. The infant Nutcracker gurgled and plucked at Emma’s sleeve.

  Manekato walked to the lip of the tunnel. She stood silently, on crimson earth, peering into the well in the Moon, its diffuse light picking out the folds in her blue-black skin. Emma wondered what she was thinking, what the tunnel was saying to her.

  Mane turned. “It is time.” She held out her hands.

  Yes, Emma thought. Somehow she knew it too. She stood up, brushing dust off her coveralls. The Nutcracker child clambered up into her arms. She settled her distorted head against Emma’s chest and promptly fell asleep.

  Nemoto stood reluctantly. Emma could see she was trembling, utterly afraid.

  Mane took Emma’s hand, and Nemoto’s, and Julia took Nemoto’s other hand. Cradling the infant, Emma walked up to the lip of the well.

  The shaft at her feet was a cylinder, walled by what looked like sparkling glass, a wall that receded downwards to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few yards, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Conduits snaked along the tunnel, their purpose unclear. The shaft was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.

  Momentarily dizzy, Emma stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Red Moon.

  Nemoto said, “What is this?”

  Mane said evenly, “It is a tunnel in the Moon.”

  “But what is it for?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Emma said, “How deep is it?”

  “We don’t know that either,” Manekato said. “We have tried sending—” she hesitated ” — radio signals and other emissions into the well. No echo has returned.”

  “But,” said Emma, “it can’t be longer than the width of the Moon. Even if it came out the other side… It can’t be longer than that.”

  “We don’t know,” Mane said. “We did not put it here.”

  Nemoto said tightly, “What do we have to do?”

  Mane regarded her with her large eyes, pupils black, the whites flecked with yellow. “I think you know.”

  Yes, Emma knew — though she didn’t understand how she knew. A prickly wave of vertigo swept over her. Malenfant, she thought desperately, you should be here to see this. You would love it. But me…

  There was no more time, no time for thinking, for doubt. Without a word, the five of them stepped off the lip of the tunnel, into the air.

  For a moment they floated there in space, bathed in the light from the heart of the world, like cartoon characters for whom the laws of physics are momentarily suspended.

  And then they began to sink, gently.

  There was nothing beneath her feet. The air was full of light.

  Slow as a snowflake, tugged by a force that felt like gravity — and yet it co
uld not be gravity — Emma fell towards the heart of the Moon. There was no noise save the rustle of clothing, their soft breathing, no smell save the lingering iron-and-blood stink of the crimson dust of the Red Moon.

  She could tell she was falling. Lines in the wall, like depth markers, were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But it was as if she were suspended here, in the glowing air; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.

  She could hear her own heart pound.

  Nemoto was laughing, manic.

  Emma held the black bundle of fur closer to her chest, drawing comfort from the Nutcracker’s solid animal warmth. “I don’t know what the hell is so funny.”

  Nemoto’s face was twisted, a mask of fear and denial. “We are not in the hands of some omnipotent, infallible god. This is no more than a gadget, Emma. More ancient than our species, more ancient than worlds perhaps, very advanced — but very old, and cranky, and probably failing as well. And we are relying on it for our lives. That is what strikes me as funny.”

  Their speed picked up quickly.

  In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine layers of the Red Moon’s outer geology. Now they sailed past giant chunks of rock that crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.

  “The megaregolith,” Nemoto murmured. “In the later stages of its formation this little world must have been just as bombarded as our own Luna. Under the surface geology, the craters and cracks, this is what you get. Pulverization, shattered rock, mile upon mile of it. We are already far beyond the reach of any human mining, Emma. We are truly sinking deep into the carcass of this world.”

  Mane regarded her, curious, judgmental. “You are analytical. You like to find names for what you see.”

  “It helps me cope,” Nemoto said tightly.

  The material beyond the walls turned smooth and grey. This must be bedrock, Emma thought, buried beyond even the probing and pulverizing of the great primordial impactors. Unlike Earth, on this small world there had been no tectonic churning, no cycling of rocks from surface to interior; these rock layers had probably lain here undisturbed since the formation of the Red Moon.

  Already they must be miles deep.

  Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.

  She had no real sense of how long she had been falling — it might have been seconds, or minutes — perhaps time flowed as deceptively here as space, as gravity. But she was reluctant to glance at a watch, or even look up to the receding disc of daylight above. She was not like Nemoto, determinedly labelling everything; rather she felt superstitious, as if she might break the spell that held her in the air if she questioned these miracles too hard.

  They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock beyond the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull grey-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.

  “The mantle,” Nemoto whispered. “Basalt. Neither solid nor liquid, a state that you don’t find on the surface of a planet, rock so soft it pulls like taffy.”

  Soon the rock brightened to a cherry-pink, rushing upwards past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Gazing at that shining pink-hot rock just yards away, Emma felt heat, but that was surely an illusion.

  The baby Nutcracker stirred, eyes closed, wiping her broad nose on Emma’s chest.

  Falling, falling. Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. She wondered what their purpose was; neither Nemoto nor Mane offered an opinion.

  For the first time she felt a lurch, like an elevator slowing. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque material that plugged the tunnel.

  She asked, “Where are we?”

  Mane said, “Thousands of miles deep. Some two-thirds of the way to the centre of the Moon.”

  They slowed, drifting to a crawl maybe a yard above the platform. Emma landed on her feet, still clutching the infant — an easy landing, even if it had reminded her of her involuntary sky-dive.

  Now she glanced at the watch Nemoto had loaned her. The fall had taken twenty minutes.

  The smooth surface was neither hot nor cold, a subdued white, stretching seamlessly from one side of the shaft to the other.

  Emma put down the infant Nutcracker. With a happy grunt the infant urinated, a thin stream that pooled on the gleaming floor.

  In this place of shining geometric perfection, all the hominids looked misshapen, out of place: Julia with her heavy-browed skull, the Daemon with her looming gorilla body, her fast, jerky motions and her eerily swivelling ears, and Nemoto and Emma, the proud ambassadors of Homo sapiens, huddled close together in their dusty, much-patched coveralls. We are barely evolved, Emma thought — even Mane — unformed compared to the chill, effortless perfection of this place.

  “…Noise,” Julia said. She turned her great head, peering around. “Noise. Lights.”

  Nemoto scowled, peering around, up into the tunnel that receded into infinity over their heads. “I cannot hear anything.”

  “There is much information here,” Mane said gently. She had closed her eyes. “You must — let it in.”

  “I don’t know how,” Nemoto said miserably.

  Emma glanced down at the infant Nutcracker. She was crawling on legs and knuckles and peering into the floor, as if it were the surface of a pond. Emma, stiffly, got to her knees beside the child. She stared at the floor, looked where the infant looked.

  There was a flash of blue light, an instant of searing pain.

  The floor had turned to glass. With the Nutcracker, she was kneeling on nothingness. She gasped, pressed her hands against the hard surface. No, not glass: there was no reflection, nothing but the warm feel of the floor under her hands and knees.

  And below her, a huge chamber loomed.

  She felt Nemoto’s hand on her shoulder, gripping tight, as if for comfort.

  Emma said, “Can you see it?”

  “Yes, I see it.”

  Emma glimpsed a far wall. It was covered with lights, like stars. But these stars marked out a regular pattern of equilateral triangles. Artificial, then. She looked from side to side, trying to make out the curve of that remote wall. But it was too far away for her to make out its shape, too far beyond her puny sense of scale.

  “It’s a hole,” she said. “A chamber at the heart of the Moon.”

  “It is whatever it seems to be.”

  “The chamber looks flattened. Like a pancake.”

  “No,” Nemoto murmured. “It is probably spherical. You have the eyes of a plains ape, Emma Stoney. Evolved for distances of a few hundred miles, no more. Even the sky looks like a flat lid to you. Humans aren’t evolved to comprehend spaces like this — a cave thousands of miles across, a cave big enough to store a world.”

  “Those lights are regular. Like fake stars on a movie set.”

  “Perhaps they are the mouths of tunnels, like this one.”

  “Leading to more holes on the surface?”

  “Or leading somewhere else.” Nemoto’s voice was quavering. “I don’t know, Emma. I understand none of this.”

  But you understand more than me, Emma thought. Which is, perhaps, why you are more frightened.

  There was motion in the heart of the chamber. Blueness. Vast wheels turning. A churning, regular, like a huge machine.

  The Nutcracker child gurgled, her eyes shining. She seemed enchanted by the turning wheels, as if the whole display, surely a thousand miles across, was no more than a nursery mobile.

  “Blue rings,” Nemoto breathed.

  Emma squinted, wishing her eyes would dark-adapt faster. “Like the Wheel, the portal I fell through to come here.”

  Nemoto said, “This technology has a unifying, if unimaginative, aesthetic.”
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  “It is the world engine,” Mane said simply.

  Emma saw the turning wheels reflected in Mane’s broad, glistening eyes. “What is a world engine?”

  “Can you not see? Look deeper.”

  “…Ah,” Nemoto said.

  At the heart of the turning rings, there was a world.

  It was like Earth, but it was not Earth. Turning slowly in the light of an off stage sun, it was wrapped in a blanket of thick, ragged cloud. Emma glimpsed land that was riven by bright-glowing cracks and the pinpricks of volcanoes. Plumes of black smoke and dust streaked the air, and lightning cracked between fat purple clouds.

  “Not a trace of ocean,” Nemoto murmured. “Too hot and dry for that.”

  “Do you think it is Earth? — or any of the Earths?”

  “If it is, it is a young Earth, an Earth still pouring out the heat of its formation…”

  “The sky,” Mane said, her voice quavering, “is full of rock.”

  Emma glanced up.

  …And for an instant she saw what the Daemon saw: a different point of view, as if she were standing on that burnt, barren land, on bare rock so hot it glowed, close to a river of some sticky, coagulating lava. She looked up through rents in fat, scudding clouds — into a sky that was covered by a lid of rock, an inverted landscape of mountains and valleys and craters.

  She gasped, and the vision faded.

  Emma saw again the hot young world, and another beside it now, a Moon-like world, evidently cooler than Earth, but large, surely larger than Mars, say. The two planets sat side by side, like an orange and an apple in a still-life.

  But they were approaching each other.

  “I think we are watching the Big Whack,” Nemoto murmured. “The immense collision that devastated young Earth, but created the Earth-Moon system…”

  The planets touched, almost gently, like kissing. But where they touched a ring of fire formed, shattering the surface of both worlds, a spreading splash of destruction into which the smaller body seemed to implode, like a fruit being drained of its flesh.