Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Mtesa, it turned out, knew all about the Gaijin, and Saddle Point gateways, and, roughly speaking, the dispersal of humanity over the last thousand years. He wasn't uncomfortable with the idea of Malenfant having been born a millennium ago. But these were abstractions to him, since the Gaijin didn't intervene in affairs on Earth – not overtly anyhow – and Mtesa was more interested in what profit he could make out of this windfall.

  Malenfant reminded himself that people were most preoccupied by their own slice of history; Mtesa was a man of his time, which had nothing to do with Malenfant's. Still, Malenfant wondered how many more generations would pass before only the kings and courtiers knew the true story of mankind, while everyone else subsided to flat-Earth ignorance and started worshiping Gaijin flower-ships as gods in the sky.

  Mtesa offered Malenfant various gifts and an invitation to stay as long as he wished, then dismissed him.

  Nemoto got away from Malenfant as soon as she could.

  That evening, alone in his villa, Malenfant started to feel ill.

  He couldn't keep down his food. He felt as if he was running a temperature. And his hand hurt: there was a burning sensation, deep in the flesh, where the fountain water had splashed him.

  In the bubble helmet of his EMU, he studied his reflection. He didn't look so bad. A little glassy about the eyes, perhaps. Maybe it was the food.

  He went to bed early and tried to forget about it.

  He pursued Nemoto. He tried everything he could think of to break through to her.

  Eventually, with every evidence of reluctance, Nemoto agreed to spend a little time with Malenfant. She came to his hut, and they sat on the broad, wood-floored veranda, by the light of a small oil lamp and of the blue Moon.

  She brought with her a Buddha, a squat, ugly carving. It was made, she said, of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii: Moon rock, worn smooth by time. The wizened little Japanese looked up at the blue-green Moon. "And now the regolith is buried under meters of dirt, with fat lunar-gravity-evolved earthworms crawling through it. We have survived to see strange times, Malenfant."

  "Yeah."

  They talked, but Nemoto was no cicerone. The only way he could get any information out of her was to let her rehearse her obsession with the Gaijin – not to mention her former employers, Nishizaki Heavy Industries, whom she thought had betrayed the human species.

  He was astonished to find she'd traveled here, through a thousand years of history, the long way around: not by skipping from era to era as he and the other Saddle Point travelers had done, but simply by not dying. She gave him no indication of what technology she had used to exceed so greatly the usual human life span.

  A thousand years of consciousness: no doubt this was dwarfed by Cassiopeia and her mechanical sisters, but such a span seemed unbearable on a human scale. He wondered how well Nemoto could retrieve the memories of her own deep past, of her first meeting with him on the Moon, for instance; perhaps she had been forced to resort to technology to reorder and optimize her immense recollections. And, listening to Nemoto, he wondered how much of her sanity, her personality, had survived this long ordeal of life. She hinted at dark periods, slumps into poverty and powerlessness, even a period – centuries long – when she had lived as a recluse on the Farside of the Moon.

  However she had been damaged by time, though, she had retained one thing: her crystal-clear enmity of the Gaijin, and the ETs who were following them.

  "When I found the Gaijin I imagined we were destined for a thousand-year war. But now a thousand years have elapsed, and the war continues. Malenfant, when I still had influence, I struggled to restrict the Gaijin. I recruited the people called the Yolgnu. I established Kasyapa Township –"

  "On Triton."

  "Yes. It was a beachhead, to keep the Gaijin from expanding their industrial activities in the outer system. I failed in that purpose. Now there are only a handful of human settlements beyond the Earth. There is a colony on Mercury, huddling close to the Sun beyond the reach of the Gaijin... If it survives, perhaps that will be our final home. For the Gaijin are here."

  A moth was beating against the lamp. She reached up and grabbed the insect in one gnarled hand. She showed the crushed fragments to Malenfant.

  Flakes of mica wing. The sparkle of plastic. A smear of what looked like fine engine oil.

  "Gaijin," Nemoto said. "They are here, Malenfant. They are everywhere, meddling, building. And worse are following." She pointed up to the stars, in a sky made muddy with light by the low Moon. He could pick out Orion, just. "You must have seen the novae."

  "Is that what they are?"

  "Yes. There has been a rash of novae, of minor stellar explosions, like an infection spreading along the spiral arm. It has been proceeding for centuries."

  "My God."

  She smiled grimly. "I've missed you, Malenfant. You immediately see implications. This is deliberate, of course, a strategy of some intelligence. Somebody is setting off the stars, exploding them like firecrackers. The stars selected are like the Sun – more or less. We have seen the disruption of Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Castor is a binary of two A-class stars some forty-five light-years away, Pollux a K-class thirty-five light-years away. Then came Procyon, an F-class eleven light-years away, and, more recently Sirius –"

  "Just nine light-years away."

  "Yes."

  "Why would anybody blow up stars?"

  She shrugged. "To mine them of raw materials. Perhaps to launch a fleet of solar-sail starships. Who knows? I call them the Crackers," she said darkly. "Appropriate, don't you think? The spread seems to have been patchy, diffuse."

  "But they are coming this way."

  "Yes. They are coming this way."

  "Perhaps the Gaijin will defend us."

  She snorted. "The Gaijin pursue their own interest. We are incidental, just another victim species a few decades or centuries behind the general development, about to be burned up in an interstellar war between rapacious colonists."

  Just as Malenfant had seen among the stars, over and over. And now it was happening here.

  But there was still much mystery, he thought. There was still the question of the reboot, the greater cataclysm that seemed poised to sweep over the Galaxy and all its squabbling species.

  What were the Gaijin really up to, here in the Solar System? Nemoto's blunt antagonism seemed simplistic to Malenfant, who had come to know the Gaijin better. They were hardly humanity's friends, but neither were they mortal enemies. They were just Gaijin, following their own star.

  But Nemoto was still talking, resigned, fatalistic. "I am an old woman. I was already an old woman a thousand years ago. All I can do now is survive, here, in this absurd little kingdom..."

  Maybe. But, he reflected, if she'd chosen to retire, she could have done that anywhere. She didn't have to come here, to this dismal feudal empire, and serve its puffed-up ruler. The grassy metropolis – and the radiation signature, that trace of technology – had drawn her here, just like himself.

  Testing her, he said, "I have a functioning pressure suit."

  She scarcely moved, as if trying to mask her reaction to that. She was like a statue, some greater Moon-rock Buddha herself.

  There is, he realized, something she isn't telling me – something significant.

  He was woken before dawn.

  De Bonneville's ruined face loomed over him like a black moon, the sweet stink of pombe on his breath. "Malenfant. Come. They're hunting."

  "Who?"

  "You'll see."

  A sticky, moist heat hit Malenfant as soon as he left his hut. He walked down the broad hill, after de Bonneville, working through a hierarchy of smaller and more sinuous paths until there was savannah grass under his feet, long and damp with dew. Wagandans were following them, men and women alike, talking softly, some laughing.

  The blue Moon had long set. There were still stars above. Malenfant saw a diffuse light, clearly green, tracking across the southern sky: it was a Tre
e, a living satellite populated by posthumans, floating above this primeval African landscape.

  De Bonneville cast about and pointed. "There's a track – see, where the grass has been beaten down? It leads toward the lake. Come. We will walk." And, without waiting for acquiescence, he turned and led the way, limping and wheezing, his pains evidently forgotten in his eagerness for the spectacle.

  Malenfant followed, tracking through the long damp grass. They passed a herd of the elephant analogs, the deinotherium. They seemed unaware of the humans. From a stand of trees, Malenfant saw the scowl of a cat – perhaps a lion – with long saber teeth protruding over its lower jaw. De Bonneville said it was a megantereon. And he almost tripped over a lizard hiding in the undergrowth at his feet; it was half a meter long, with three sharp horns protruding from its crest. It scampered away from him and then sat in the grass, its huge eyes fixed on him.

  They passed a skull, perhaps of an antelope, bleached of flesh. It had been cracked open by a stone flake – little more than a shaped pebble – embedded in a pit in the bone. Malenfant bent down and prised out the flake with his fingers. Was it made by the Uprights? It seemed too primitive.

  De Bonneville grabbed his arm. "There," he whispered.

  Perhaps half a kilometer away, a group of what looked like big apes – muscular, hairy, big-brained – was gathered around a carcass. Malenfant could see curved horns; maybe it was another antelope. In the dawn light the hominids were working together with what looked like handheld stone tools, butchering the carcass. A number of them were keeping watch at the fringe of the group, throwing rocks at circling hyenas.

  "Are these the hunters you brought me to see?" Malenfant asked.

  De Bonneville snorted with contempt. "These? No. They are not even hunters. They waited for the hyenas or jackals to kill that sivatherium, and now they steal it for themselves... Ah. Look, Malenfant."

  To Malenfant's left, crouching figures were moving forward through the grass. In the gray light, Malenfant could make out golden skin, flashes of white cloth. It was Magassa, and more of his people, moving toward the apelike scavengers.

  "Now," de Bonneville hissed. "Now the sport begins."

  "What are these creatures, de Bonneville?"

  He grinned. "When the ice was rolled back, the Earth was left empty. Various... experiments... were performed to repopulate it. But not as it had been before."

  "With older forms."

  "Of animals and even hominids, us. Yes."

  "So Magassa –"

  "– is a once-extinct hominid, recreated here, in the year A.D. 3265. Magassa is Homo Erectus. And there are tigers once more in India, and mammoths in the north of Europe, and roaming the prairies of North America once more are many of the megafauna species destroyed by the Stone Age settlers there... Quite something, isn't it, Malenfant? I'm sure you didn't expect to find this on your return to Earth: the lost species of the past, restored to roam the empty planet, here at the end of time."

  It sounded, to Malenfant, like characteristic Gaijin tinkering. Just as they had poked around with Earth's climate and biosphere and geophysical cycles, so, it seemed, they were determined to explore the possibilities inherent in DNA, life's treasury of the past. Endless questing, as they sought answers to their unspoken questions. But still, here was a hunting party of Homo Erectus, by God, stalking easily across the plains of Africa in this year A.D. 3265. "Is anyone studying this?"

  De Bonneville looked at him curiously. "Perhaps you don't understand. Science is dead, Malenfant. These are only Uprights. But..." He looked more thoughtful. "I sometimes wonder if Magassa has a soul. Magassa can speak, you know, to some extent. His speech mechanism is closer to nonhuman primates. Still, he can make himself understood. Look into Magassa's eyes, Malenfant, and you will see a true consciousness – far more developed than any animal's – but a consciousness lacking much of the complexity and darkness and confusion of our own. Is there still a Pope or a mullah, somewhere on Earth or the Moon, concerned with such issues, perhaps declaring Magassa an abomination even now? But Magassa himself would not frame such questions; without our full inner awareness, he would lack the ability to impute consciousness in other beings, and so could not envisage consciousness in nonhuman animals and objects. That is to say, he would not be able to imagine God."

  "You envy him," Malenfant said.

  "Yes. Yes, I envy Magassa his calm sanity. Well. They make good laborers. And the women – Wait. Watch this."

  Magassa stood suddenly, whooped, and brandished a torch, which burst into flame. The other Uprights stood with him and hollered. Their high, clear voices carried across the grassy plain to Malenfant, like the cries of gulls.

  At the noise, the primitive scavenging hominids jumped up, startled. With bleating cries they ran away from the Uprights and their fire, abandoning the antelope. One of the hominids – a female – was a little more courageous; she reached back and tore a final strip of flesh from the carcass before fleeing with the others, flat breasts flapping.

  But now more Uprights burst out of the grass before the fleeing hominids. It was a simple trap, but obviously beyond the more primitive hominids' mental grasp.

  At this new obstacle the scavengers hesitated for a second, like startled sheep. Then they bunched together and kept on running. They forced their way right through the cluster of Uprights, who hailed stones and bone spears at them. Some of the weapons struck home, with a crunching violence that startled Malenfant. But as far as he could see all the hominids got through.

  All, that is, except one: the female who had hung back, and who was now a few dozen meters behind the rest.

  The Uprights closed around her. She fought – she seemed to have a rock in her clenched fist – but she was overwhelmed. The Uprights fell on her, and she went down in a forest of flailing arms.

  Her fleeing companions didn't look back.

  De Bonneville stood up, his blackened face slick with sweat, breathing hard.

  The Upright Magassa came stalking out of the pack with a corpse slung over his shoulder. He had blood on his teeth and on the golden fur of his chest.

  The body he carried was about the size of a twelve-year-old child's, Malenfant guessed, coated with fine dark hair. The arms were long, but the hands and feet were like a modern human's. The brainpan was crushed, a bloody mess, but the face was prominent: a brow ridge, a flat apelike nose, the jaw protruding, big front teeth. That tool was still clutched in the female's hand; it was a lava rock, crudely shaped.

  The head, in life, had been held up. This was a creature that had walked upright.

  Magassa dumped the corpse at de Bonneville's feet and howled his triumph.

  "And what is this, de Bonneville?"

  "Another reconstruction: Handy Man, some two million years vanished. Even less conscious, less self-aware, than our Upright friends."

  "Homo Habilis."

  "Malenfant, every species of extinct hominid is represented on this big roomy land of ours. I was pleased to see the prey were habilines, this morning – the Australopithecines can run, but are too stupid for good sport –"

  "Get me out of here, de Bonneville."

  De Bonneville's ruined eyes narrowed. "So squeamish. So hypocritical. Listen to me, Malenfant. This is how we lived. Sometimes they rape before the kill. Think of it, Malenfant! You and I have traveled to the stars. And yet, all the time, we carried the Old Men with us, asleep in our bones, waiting to be recalled..."

  The Upright took a rock from his belt and started to hammer at the back of the dead habiline's skull. He dug his fingers into the hole he had made, pulled out gray material, blood-soaked, and crammed it into his mouth.

  Reid Malenfant knew, at last, that he had truly come home. He turned away from the habiline corpse.

  Chapter 26

  Kimera's Breath

  Soon after the Upright hunt, de Bonneville disappeared. Nemoto warned Malenfant not to ask too many questions.

  On his own, Malenfant wandered ar
ound the court, the streets outside, even out into the country. But he learned little.

  He found it hard to make any human contact. The Waganda were incurious – even of his sleek biocomposite coverall, a gift from the Bad Hair Day space twins, an artifact centuries of technological advancement ahead of anything here.

  Most definitely, he did not fit in here. Madeleine Meacher had warned him it would be like this.

  Anyhow, he tired quickly, and his hand still ached. Maybe those Bad Hair Day twins hadn't done as good a job on him as they thought.

  The days wore on, and his mind kept returning to de Bonneville. When he thought about it, Pierre de Bonneville – for all he was an asshole – was the only person in all this dead-end world who had tried to help him, to give him information. And besides, de Bonneville was a fellow star traveler who was maybe in trouble in this alien time.

  So he started campaigning, with the Kabaka and Nemoto in her role as the katekiro, to be allowed to see de Bonneville.

  After a few days of this, Nemoto summoned Malenfant from his villa. Impatient and reluctant, she said she had been ordered to escort Malenfant to de Bonneville. It turned out he was being held in Kimera's Engine, the mysterious construct buried in the hillside at the heart of this grass-hut capital.

  "I do not advise this, Malenfant."

  "Why? Because it's dangerous? I've seen de Bonneville. I know how ill he is –"

  "Not just that. What do you hope to achieve?" She looked at him out of eyes like splinters of lava; she seemed sunk in bitterness and despair. "I survive, as best I can. That's what you must do. Find a place here, a niche you can defend. What else is there? Hasn't your hop-and-skip tour of a thousand years taught you that much?"

  "If that's what you believe, why do you want my pressure suit?"

  She coughed into a handkerchief; he saw the cloth was speckled by blood. "Malenfant –"

  "Take me to de Bonneville."

  Accompanied by a couple of guards, Nemoto led Malenfant from the palace compound, and out into Rubaga. They followed streets, little more than tracks of dust, that wound between the grass huts.