Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  But she remembered the last glimpse of all.

  …It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.

  But even now there was something rather than nothing.

  The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth…

  That ultimate, dismal vision was slow to dispel, like three-in-the-morning fears of her own death. She knew she didn’t have the mental toughness to confront all this, special effects or not. Unlike Nemoto, perhaps.

  Or perhaps not. To Nemoto, the whole thing seemed to have been more like a traumatic shock than an imparting of information. She had come out of the experience needing human company, in her reticent way, and needing to talk. But when she talked it was about Charles Darwin and the Red Moon, or even Malenfant and the politics of NASA, anything but the central issue of the Old Ones.

  Emma concentrated on the leafy smell of the child, the crackle of dead leaves, the prickle of sunlight on her neck, even the itch of the ulcers on her legs. This was reality, of life and breath and senses.

  Manekato had stopped, abruptly. Nemoto fell silent. They were in a small scrap of clearing, by the side of the lichen-covered corpse of a huge fallen tree. Manekato lifted herself up on her hind legs, sniffed the air and swivelled her ears, and belched with satisfaction. “Here,” she said. “The Nutcrackers will come.” With a massive thump she sat on the ground, and began exploring the bushes around her for berries.

  Emma, gratefully, put down the infant Nutcracker and sat beside her. The leaves were slippery and damp; the morning was not long advanced. She considered giving the infant some more milk, but the child had already discovered Manekato’s fruit, and was clambering up the Daemon’s impassive back.

  Nemoto sat beside Emma. Her posture was stiff, her arms wrapped around her chest, her right heel drumming on the ground. Emma laid one hand on Nemoto’s knee. Gradually the drumming stopped.

  And, suddenly, Nemoto began to talk.

  “They made the manifold.”

  “Who did?”

  “The Old Ones. They constructed a manifold of universes — an infinite number of universes. They made it all.” Nemoto shook her head. “Even framing the thought, conceiving of such ambition, is overwhelming. But they did it.”

  Manekato was watching them, her large eyes thoughtful.

  Emma said carefully, “How did they do this, Nemoto?”

  “The branching of universes, deep into the hyperpast,” Manekato murmured.

  Emma shook her head, irritated. “What does that mean?”

  Nemoto said, “Universes are born. They die. We know two ways a universe can be born. The most primitive cosmos can give birth to another through a Big Crunch, the mirror-image of a Big Bang suffered by a collapsing universe at the end of its history. Or else a new universe can be budded from the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Black holes are the key, Emma, you see. A universe which cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. But a universe which is complex enough to make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters, baby universes connected to the mother by spacetime umbilicals through the singularities.”

  “And so when the Old Ones tinkered with the machinery—”

  “We don’t know how they did it. But they changed the rules,” Nemoto said.

  Emma said hesitantly, “So they found a way to create a lot more universes.”

  Manekato said, “We believe the Old Ones created, not just a multiplicity of daughter universes, but an infinite number.” The bulky Daemon studied Emma’s face, seeking understanding.

  “Infinity is significant, you see,” Nemoto said, too rapidly. “There is, umm, a qualitative difference between a mere large number, however large, and infinity. In the infinite manifold, in that infinite ensemble, all logically possible universes must exist. And therefore all logically possible destinies must unfold. Everything that is possible will happen, somewhere out there. They created a grand stage, you see, Emma: a stage for endless possibilities of life and mind.”

  “Why did they do this?”

  “Because they were lonely. The Old Ones were the first sentient species in their universe. They survived their crises of immaturity. And they went on, to walk on the planets, to touch the stars. But everywhere they went — though perhaps they found life — they found no sign of mind, save for themselves.”

  “And then the stars went out.”

  “And the stars went out. There are ways to survive the darkness, Emma. You can mine energy from the gravity wells of black holes, for instance… But as the universe expanded relentlessly, and the available energy dwindled, the iron logic of entropy held sway. Existence became harsh, straitened, in an energy starved universe that was like a prison. Some of the Old Ones looked back over their lonely destiny, which had turned into nothing but a long, desolating struggle to survive, and — well, some of them rebelled.”

  The infant crawled over Manekato’s stolid head and down her chest, clutching great handfuls of hair. Then she curled up in the Daemon’s lap, defecated efficiently, and quickly fell asleep. Emma suppressed a pang of jealousy that it was not her lap.

  “So they rebelled. How?”

  Nemoto sighed. “It’s all to do with quantum mechanics, Emma.”

  “I was afraid it might be.”

  Manekato said, “Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future. Handshakes across time. The story of the universe is like a tapestry, stitched together by uncountable trillions of such tiny handshakes. If you create an artificial timelike loop to some point in spacetime within the negative light cone of the present—”

  “Woah. In English.”

  Manekato looked puzzled.

  Nemoto said, “If you were to go back in time and try to change the past, you would damage the universe, erasing a whole series of consequential events. Yes? So the universe starts over, from the first point where the forbidden loop would have begun to exist. As the effects of your change propagate through space and time, the universe knits itself into a new form, transaction by transaction, handshake by handshake. The wounded universe heals itself with a new set of handshakes, working forward in time, until it is complete and self-consistent once more.”

  Emma tried to think that through. “What you’re telling me is that changing history is possible.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Nemoto. “The Old Ones must have come to believe they had lived through the wrong history. So they reached back, to the deepest past, and made the change — and the manifold was born.”

  Emma thought she understood. So this had been the purpose the Old Ones had found. Not a saga of meaningless survival in a dismal future of decay and shadows. The Old Ones had reached back, back in time, back to the deepest past, and put it right, by creating infinite possibilities for life, for mind.

  She said carefully, “I always wondered if life had any meaning. Now I know. The purpose of the first intelligence of all was to reshape the universe, in order to create a storm of mind.”

  “Yes,” Manekato said. “That is a partial understanding, but — yes.”

  “Whew,” Emma said.

  Nemoto seemed to be shivering, exhausted. “I feel as if I have been gazing through a pinhole at the sun; I have stared so long that I have burned a hole in my retina. And yet there is still so much more to see.”

  “You have done well,” Manekato said gently.

  Nemoto snapped, “Do I get another banana?”

  “We must all do the best we can.” Manekato’s massive hand absently stroked the Nutcracker; the child purred like a cat.

  “But,” Emma said, “the Old Ones must have wiped out their own history in
the process. Didn’t they? They created a time paradox. Everybody knows about time paradoxes. If you kill your grandmother, the universe repairs itself so you never existed…”

  “Perhaps not,” Manekato murmured. “It seems that conscious minds may, in some form, survive the transition.”

  “Do not ask how,” Nemoto said dryly. “Suffice it to say that the Old Ones seem to have been able to look on their handiwork, and see that it was good… mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  Nemoto said, “We think that we, unwilling passengers on this Red Moon, are, umm, exploring a corner of the manifold, of that infinite ensemble of universes the Old Ones created. Remember the Big Whack. Remember how we glimpsed many possible outcomes, many possible Earths and Moons, depending on the details of the impact.”

  “It is clear,” Manekato said, “that within the manifold there must be a sheaf of universes, closely related, all of them deriving from that primal Earth-shaping event and its different outcomes.”

  Nemoto said, “Many Earths. Many realities.”

  “And in some of those realities,” Manekato said, “what you call the Fermi Paradox was resolved a different way.”

  “You mean, alien intelligences arose.”

  “Yes.” Nemoto rubbed her nose and glanced uneasily at the sky. “But in every one of those alien-inhabited realities, humans got wiped out — or never evolved in the first place. Every single time.”

  “How come?”

  Nemoto shrugged. “Lots of possible ways. Interstellar colonists from ancient cultures overwhelmed Earth before life got beyond the single-cell stage. Humankind was destroyed by a swarm of killer robots. Whatever. The Old Ones seem to have selected a bundle of universes — all of them deriving from the Big Whack — in which there was no life beyond the Earth. And they sent this Moon spinning between those empty realities, from one to the other—”

  “So that explains Fermi,” Emma said.

  “Yes,” said Nemoto. “We see no aliens because we have been inserted into an empty universe. Or universes. For our safety. To allow us to flourish.”

  “But why the Red Moon, why link the realities?”

  “To express humanity,” Manekato said simply. “There are many different ways to be a hominid, Em-ma. We conjecture the Old Ones sought to explore those different ways: to promote evolutionary pulses, to preserve differing forms, to make room for different types of human consciousness.”

  Emma frowned. “You make us sound like pets. Toys.”

  Manekato growled; Emma wondered if that was a laugh. “Perhaps. Or it may be that we have yet to glimpse the true purpose of this wandering world.”

  Emma said, “But I still don’t get it. Why would these super-being Old Ones care so much about humanity?”

  Nemoto frowned. “You haven’t understood anything, Emma. They were us. They were our descendants, our future. Homo sapiens sapiens, Emma. And their universe spanning story is our own lost future history. We built the manifold. We — our children — are the Old Ones.”

  Emma was stunned. Somehow it was harder to take, to accept that these universe making meddlers might have been — not godlike, unimaginable aliens — but the descendants of humans like herself. What hubris, she thought.

  Nemoto said now, “That was the purpose, the design of the Red Moon. But now the machinery is failing.”

  “It is?”

  “The sudden, frequent and irregular jumps. The instabilities, the tides, the volcanism. It shouldn’t be happening that way.”

  Emma turned back to Manekato. “Let me get this straight. The Red Moon has been the driver of human evolution. But now it is breaking down. So what happens next?”

  “We will be on our own,” said Nemoto. She raised her thin hands, turned them over, spread the fingers. “Our evolutionary destiny, in hominid hands. Does that frighten you?”

  “It frightens me,” Manekato said softly.

  For a moment they sat silently. Emma was aware of the dampness of the breeze, the harsh breathing of the big Daemon. On impulse she put her hand on Manekato’s arm. Her fur was thick and dense, and her skin hot — hotter than a human’s, perhaps a result of her faster metabolism.

  “…Wait,” Manekato said softly, peering into the trees.

  Shadows moved there: shadows of bulky, powerful forms. They paused, listening. There were at least three adults, possibly more. Emma could make out the characteristic prow-shaped silhouettes of their skulls.

  The Nutcracker infant roused from her sleep. Bleary-eyed, she peered into the trees and yowled softly.

  The shadows moved closer, sliding past the trees, at last resolving into recognizable fragments: curling fingers, watchful eyes, the unmistakable morphology of hominids. One of them, perhaps a woman, extended a hand.

  The infant clambered off Manekato’s lap and stood facing the Nutcracker-woman, nervous, uncertain.

  The Nutcracker-woman took a single step into the clearing, her eyes fixed on the infant. The child whimpered, and took a hesitant step forward.

  Nemoto hissed to Emma, “Listen to me. I have a further theory. The Old Ones did not disappear into some theoretical universe-spanning abstraction. They are still here. Wouldn’t they want to be immersed in the world they made, to eat its fruit, to drink its water? Maybe they have become these Nutcrackers, the most content, pacific, unthreatened, mindless of all the hominid species. They shed everything they knew to live the way hominids are supposed to, the way we never learned, or forgot. What do you think?…”

  The infant glanced back at Emma, knowing. Then, with a liquid motion, the Nutcracker-woman scooped up the child and melted into green shadows.

  Back in the Daemons” yellow-plastic compound, Emma luxuriated in a hot shower, a towelling robe, and a breakfast of citrus fruit.

  Luxuriate, yes. Because you know you aren’t going to enjoy this much longer, are you, Emma? And maybe you’ll never live like this again, not ever, not for the rest of your life.

  You will miss the coffee, though.

  She dressed and emerged from her little chalet. The sky was littered with cloud, the breeze capricious and laden with moisture. Storm coming.

  She saw Nemoto arguing with Manekato. Nemoto looked, in fact, as if she still wasn’t getting a great deal of sleep; black smudges made neat hyperbolae around her eyes. By contrast, Manekato was leaning easily on her knuckles, her swivelling ears facing Nemoto, her great black-haired body a calming slab of stillness. And Julia, the Ham girl, was standing close by, listening gravely.

  When Emma approached, Mane turned to her, smooth and massive as a swivelling gun-turret. “Good morning, Em-ma.”

  “And to you. Nemoto, you look like shit.”

  Nemoto glowered at her.

  “What’s the hot topic?”

  “Future plans.” Nemoto’s foot was characteristically tapping the plastic-feel floor like a trapped animal, about the nearest she got to expressing a true emotion.

  “Grey Earth,” Julia said.

  “…Oh. The deal we made.”

  “The deal you made,” Nemoto said. “Over and over again. You said you would take the Hams back to their home world, if they helped you.”

  “I know what I said.”

  “Well, now it is payback time.”

  Emma sighed. She stepped forward and took Julia’s great hands; her own fingers, even hardened by weeks of rough living, were pale white streaks compared to Julia’s muscular digits. “Julia, I meant what I said. If I could find a way I would get you people home.” She waved towards the latest Earth in the sky, a peculiarly shrunken world with a second Moon orbiting close to it. “But you can see the situation for yourself. Your world is gone. It’s lost. You see—”

  Nemoto said, “Emma, you have made enough mistakes already. It would pay you, pay us both, not to patronize this woman.”

  Emma said, “I’m sorry.” So I am, she thought. But I made a promise I couldn’t keep, and I knew it when I made it, and now I just have to get out of this situation
as gracefully as I can. That’s life. “The point is the Grey Earth isn’t coming back. Not in any predictable way.” She looked up at Mane. “Is it?”

  The great Daemon rubbed her face. “We are studying the world engine. It is ancient and faulty.” She grunted. “Like a bad-tempered old hominid, it needs love and attention.”

  Emma frowned. “But you think you might get it to work again?”

  Mane patted Emma’s head. “Nemoto frequently accuses me of underestimating you. I am guilty. But you are symmetrically guilty of overestimating me. We cannot repair the world engine. We cannot understand its workings. Perhaps in a thousand years of study… For now we can barely see it.”

  Nemoto shuddered. “We are all on very low rungs of a very tall ladder.”

  But Mane said, “There is no ladder. We are all different. Difference is to be cherished.”

  “And that’s what we humans must learn,” Emma said.

  “You will not learn it,” Manekato said cheerfully, “for you will not survive long enough.” She sighed, a noise like a steam train in a tunnel. “However, to return to the point, we believe we may be able to direct the wandering of the Red Moon, to a limited extent. Prior to shutting down the world engine altogether.”

  “Grey Earth come,” Julia said again, and her face relaxed from its mock-human smile into the gentle, beatific expression Emma had come to associate with happiness.

  Emma held her breath. “And Earth,” she said. “My Earth; our Earth. Can you reach that too?…”

  “The Daemons can make one directed transition,” said Nemoto gravely. “And they are going to use it to take us to the universe of the Grey Earth.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of you.”

  Emma studied Nemoto. “I sense you’re pissed at me,” she said dryly.

  Nemoto glowered. “Emma, these are not humans. They don’t lie, the Hams and the Daemons. It’s all part of the rule-set with which they have managed to achieve such longevity as species. A bargain, once struck, is absolutely rigid.”

  “But what’s the big deal? Even if the Daemons manage to bring us back to the Grey Earth universe, they can just send the Hams home. As many as want to go. They can just Map them there.”