Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Chest swells, big big big. Round. Mouth of Kintu here. Navel of Kintu there. Breathe in, big big big, blow in, all that nothing.

  Skin pops, pop pop pop. Worlds. Stars. People. Popping out of skin, pop pop pop. Still breathes in, in in in, big big big.

  Here. Now. The Face of Kintu. Here. See how skin pops, pop pop pop, new baby worlds, new life, things to eat. We live where, on Face of Kintu.

  The Staff of Kintu. People die, people don't die. Inside the Staff of Kintu. Happy happy happy. Live how long, long time, long long time, forever.

  In future, long long time. Kintu throw Staff, long long way. Throw Staff where, to Navel of Kintu. People live on belly of Kintu, long long time, long long way, how happy, happy happy happy.

  Everyone else what? Dead.

  The transition pain dissipated, like frost evaporating. He felt the hard bulge of the arms that carried him, the iron strength of biceps.

  His head was tipped back. He saw the white fleshy underside of a tiny beardless chin. Beyond that, all he could see was black sky. Some kind of wispy high cloud, greenish. A rippling aurora.

  His weight had changed. He was light as an infant, as a dried-up twig.

  Not Earth, then.

  He could be anywhere. Encoded as a stream of bits, he could have been sent a thousand light-years from home. And because Saddle Point signals traveled at mere light speed, he could be a thousand years away from a return. Even the enigmatic Earth he'd returned to, the Earth of 3265, might be as remote as the Dark Ages from the year of his birth.

  Or not.

  Now a face loomed over him, as broad and smooth as the Moon, encased in a crude pressure-suit helmet that was not much more than a translucent sack. The face was obviously hominid, but it had big heavy eye ridges, and a huge flat nose that thrust forward, and a low hairline. Thick black eyebrows, like a Slav, wide dark eyes. Those eye ridges gave her a perpetually surprised look.

  Her. It was a female. Young? The skin looked smooth, but he had no reference.

  She smiled down at him. She was a Neandertal girl.

  There was black around the edge of his vision.

  He was running out of air. His suit was a nonfunctioning antique. It was all he had. But now it was going to kill him.

  The girl's face creased with obvious concern. She lifted up her hand – now she was holding him with one arm, for God's sake – and she started waving her right hand up and down in front of her body. Those thick Russian eyebrows came down, so she looked quizzical.

  She was miming, he thought. Pain?

  "Yes, it hurts." His radio wasn't working, and she didn't look to have any kind of receiver. She probably couldn't speak English, of course, which would be a problem for him. He was an American, and in his day, Americans hadn't needed to learn other languages. Maybe he, too, could mime. "Help me. I can't breathe." He kept this up for a few seconds, until her expression dissolved into bafflement.

  With big moonwalk strides she began to carry him forward. Inside his bubble helmet his head rattled around, thumping against the glass.

  Now, in swaying glimpses, he could see the landscape.

  A plain, broken by fresh-looking craters. The ground was red, but overlaid by streaks of yellow, brown, orange, green, deep black. It looked muddy and crusted, like an old pizza. Much of it was frosted. From beyond the close horizon, he could see a plume of gas that turned blue as it rose, sparkling in the flat light of some distant Sun. The plume fell straight back to the ground, like a garden sprinkler.

  And there was something in the sky, big and bright. It was a dish of muddy light, down there close to the horizon, a big plateful of cloudy bands, pink and purple and brown. Where the bands met, he could see fine lines of turbulence, swoops and swirls, a crazy watercolor. Maybe it was a moon. But if so it was a hell of a size, thirty or forty times the size of the Moon in Earth's sky.

  His lungs were straining at the fouling air. There was a hot stink, of fear and carbon dioxide and condensation. He tried to control himself, but he couldn't help but struggle, feebly.

  ...Jupiter. Think, Malenfant. That big "moon" had to be Jupiter.

  And if that was a volcanic plume he'd seen, he was on Io.

  He felt a huge, illogical relief, despite the claustrophobic pain. He was still in the Solar System, then. Maybe he was going to die here. But at least he wasn't so impossibly far from home. It was an obscure comfort.

  But... Io, for God's sake. In the year A.D. 3265, it seemed, there were Neandertals, reconstructed from genetic residue in modern humans, living on Io. Why the hell, he still had to figure.

  The blackness closed around his vision, like theater curtains.

  He drifted back to consciousness.

  He was in a tent of some kind. It stretched above him, cone shaped, like a teepee. He couldn't see through the walls. The light came from glow lamps – relics of the high-tech past, perhaps.

  He was lying there naked. He didn't even have the simple coverall the Bad Hair Day twins had given him in Earth orbit. Feebly he put his hands over his crotch. He'd come a thousand years and traveled tens of light-years, but he couldn't shake off that Presbyterian upbringing.

  People moved around him. Neandertals. In the tent they shucked off their pressure suits, which they just piled up in a corner, and went naked.

  He drifted to sleep.

  Later, the girl who'd pulled him through the Saddle Point gateway, pulled him through to Io itself, nursed him. Or anyhow she gave him water and some kind of sludgy food, like hot yogurt, and a thin broth, like very weak chicken soup.

  He knew how ill he was.

  He'd gotten radiation poisoning at the heart of that radioactive pile. He'd taken punishment in the mucous membranes of his mouth, esophagus, and stomach, where the membrane surfaces were coming off in layers; it was all he could do to eat the yogurt stuff. He got the squirts all the time, twenty-five or thirty times a day; his Neandertal nurse patiently cleaned him up, but he could see there was blood in the liquid mess. His right shin swelled up until it was rigid and painful; the skin was bluish-purple, swollen, shiny and smooth to the touch. He got soft blisters on his backside. He could feel that his body hair was falling out, at his eyebrows, his groin, his chest.

  He was sensitive to sounds, and if the Neandertals made much noise it set off his diarrhea. Not that they often did; they made occasional high-pitched grunts, but they seemed to talk mostly with mime, pulling their faces and fluttering their fingers at each other.

  He drifted through periods of uneasy sleep. Maybe he was delirious. He supposed he was going to die.

  His Neandertal nurse's physique was not huge, but her body gave off an impression of density. Her midsection and chest were large – flat breasts – and the muscles of her forearm looked as thick as Malenfant's thigh muscles. Her aura of strength was palpable; she was much more physical than any human Malenfant had ever met.

  But what immediately stood out was her face.

  It was outsized, with her eyes too far apart, nose flattened, and features spread too wide, as if the whole face had been pulled wide. Her jaw was thick, but her chin was shallow and sliced back, as if it had been snipped off. Bulging out of her forehead was an immense brow, a bony swelling like a tumor. It pushed down the face beneath it and made the eyes sunken in their huge hard-boned sockets, giving her the effect of a distorted reflection, like an embryo in a jar. A swelling at the back of her head offset the weight of that huge brow, but it tilted her head downward, so that her chin almost rested on her chest, her massive neck snaking forward.

  But those eyes were clear and human.

  He christened his nurse Valentina, because of her Russian eyebrows: Valentina after Tereshkova, first woman in space, whom he had met once at an air show in Paris.

  Valentina was more human than any ape, and yet she was not human. And it was that closeness-yet-difference that disturbed Malenfant.

  He slept, he woke. Days passed, perhaps; he had no way to mark the passage of time.

>   He got depressed.

  He got frightened. He cursed Nemoto for his renewed exile.

  He clutched his ruined old space suit to his chest, running his aching hands over his mission patch and the Stars and Stripes, faded by harsh Alpha Centauri light. He stared at his fragment of Emma, the only human face here, and wept like a baby.

  Valentina tolerated all this.

  And, slowly, to his surprise, he started getting better. After a time he was even able to sit up, to feed himself.

  Valentina, a dirt-caked bare-assed Neandertal, was curing him of radiation poisoning. He couldn't figure it, grateful as he was for the phenomenon. Maybe there was some kind of nanomachinery at work here, repairing the damage he had suffered at the cellular, even molecular level. He'd already seen evidence of how the Earth was suffused by ancient machinery from beyond the Saddle Points, from the stars.

  Or maybe it was just the soup.

  Soon Malenfant was able to walk, stiffly.

  Most of the Neandertals ignored him. They stepped over and around him as if they couldn't even see him.

  For his part, he watched the Neandertals, amazed.

  He counted around thirty people crammed into this teepee. There were adults, frail old people, children all the way down to babies in arms. But, he sensed, it would take a long time to get to know them so well that he could distinguish all the individuals. He was the archetype of the foreigner abroad, to whom everybody looked alike.

  The women seemed as strong as the men. Even the children, muscled like Olympic shot-putters, joined in the chores. They used their teeth and powerful jaws, together with their stone tools, to cut meat and scrape hides – meat he presumed must have been hauled through from Earth, through the Saddle Point gateway he'd followed himself. They would bake some of the meat in hearths, if you could call them that: just shallow pits scraped in the ground, lined with fire-heated rocks and covered by soil. But the softer meat was given to the infants – and to Malenfant, incidentally, by Valentina. The adults took their meat mostly uncooked; those big jaws would chomp away at the tough flesh, grinding and tearing, muscles working, making it swallowable.

  There was one old guy who showed some curiosity in Malenfant, a geezer who walked with a heavy limp, hunched overso that his belly drooped down over his shriveled-up penis. Malenfant decided to call him Esau. The Book of Genesis, if he remembered right: Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.

  Malenfant looked into Esau's eyes and wondered what he was thinking. He wondered how he was thinking.

  This is my cousin, but far enough removed he represents an alien species, an alien consciousness. The first thing my remote ancestors did, stumbling out of Africa, was to close-encounter the alien, these ETs of the deep past: the true first contact. And when the last of the Neandertals lay dying, in some rocky fastness in France or Spain or China, there must have been a last contact: the last we'd have for thirty thousand years, until the Gaijin showed up in the asteroid belt.

  Hell of a thing, to be alone all that time.

  The Neandertals had a portable Saddle Point gateway. When they set it up and used it, Malenfant goggled.

  It was a big blue hoop maybe three meters high. They were able to step through it, with the characteristic blue flash, thus disappearing from Io; later they would reappear with sacks of material, much of it rock and meat and metal canisters, maybe containing oxygen. This must be their link to Earth, to the Kimera mine – the way he had been brought here.

  He toyed with the idea of going back through, trying to get back to Earth. Escape. But it would only lead him to the Kimera Engine, which would kill him; or if he evaded that, back into the clutches of Mtesa.

  Maybe that was a last resort. For now he was stuck here.

  What did Malenfant know about Neandertals? Diddly-squat. But he did remember they weren't supposed to have speech. Their palates weren't formed correctly, or some such. He'd seen them miming, and they were clearly smart. But speech, so went the theories he remembered, had been the key advantage enjoyed by Homo Sap. So here he was, the speaking man in the country of the dumb.

  Maybe Reid Malenfant could teach Neandertals to talk. Maybe he could civilize them. He was fired by sudden enthusiasm.

  He pointed to Esau. "You." At himself. "Me. You. Say it. You, you, you. Me. Malenfant. My name. Mal-en-fant. You try."

  Esau studied Malenfant for a while, then slapped him, hard. It knocked him back onto the floor.

  Malenfant clambered upright. His cheek stung like hell; Esau was strong.

  Esau rattled through gestures: pointing to him, two fingers to his own forehead, then a fist to Malenfant's forehead. He didn't seem angry: more like he was trying to teach Malenfant something. Point. Fist to head. Point. Fist.

  "Oh." Malenfant pointed to himself, then made the fist sign. "I get it. This is the name you're giving me. A sign word."

  Esau slapped him again. There was no malice, but again he was knocked over.

  When Malenfant got up this time, he made the signs, point, fist, without speaking.

  So it went. If he spoke more than a couple of syllables, Esau would slap him.

  His vocabulary of signs started to grow: ten words, a dozen, two dozen.

  He observed mothers with children. The kids got the slaps too, if they made too much noise. He started to interpret the complex rattle of fingers and gestures as the adults communicated with each other, fluent and urgent. He'd pick up maybe one sign in a hundred.

  So much for the speaking man in the country of the dumb. He was like a child to these people.

  It was a long time before he found out that the fist-to-head sign, his name, meant Stupid.

  One day, when he woke up, everyone was clambering into their translucent pressure suits: men, women, children, even infants in little sacklike papooses. A couple of the adults were working at the teepee, pulling at the poles that held it up, taking up the groundsheet.

  It was, it seemed, time to move on.

  Holding his bubble helmet in front of his genitals, Malenfant cowered against the wall of the collapsing teepee, naked, scared, as the smooth dismantling operation continued around him. Malenfant had no pressure suit: only the NASA antique he'd worn to come here in the first place. What if the Neandertals thought it was still functional? If he stepped out on the surface of Io, the suit would kill him, in fifteen minutes.

  Valentina came up to him. She was in her suit already, with the soft helmet closed over. She was holding out another suit; it looked like a flayed skin.

  He took it gratefully. She showed him how to step inside it, how to seal up the seams with a fingernail. It was too short and wide for him, but it seemed to stretch.

  It stank: of urine, feces, an ancient, milklike smell. It smelled like Esau, like an old Neandertal geezer.

  Somebody had died in this suit.

  When he realized that he almost lost his breakfast and tried to pull the suit off his flesh. But Valentina slapped him, harder than she'd done for a long time. There was no mistaking the commands in her peremptory signs. Put it on. Now.

  This, he thought, is not the Manned Spaceflight Operations Building, Cape Canaveral. Things are different here. Accept it, if you want to keep breathing.

  He pulled on the suit and sealed it up. Then he stood there trying not to throw up inside the suit's claustrophobic stink, as the Neandertals dismantled their camp and the light of Jupiter was revealed.

  Morning on Io:

  Auroras flapped overhead, huge writhing sheets of light.

  The Sun was a shrunken disc, low down, brighter than any star in the sky. It cast long, point-source shadows over the burnt-pizza terrain. In the sky, Jupiter hung above the horizon, just where it had before, a fat pink stripy-painted ball. But now the phase was different; Jupiter was a crescent, the terminator blurred by layers of atmosphere, and the dark side was a chunk out of the starry background, a slab of night sparking with the crackles of electrical storms bigger than Earth, like giant flas
hbulbs exploding inside pink clouds.

  In a red-green auroral glow, the Neandertals moved about, packing up their teepee and other gear, loading it all onto big sledlike vehicles, signing to each other busily. Malenfant picked up his only possession, the remnant of his NASA suit, and bundled it up on the back of a sled.

  When they were loaded, the adult Neandertals started strapping themselves into traces at the front of the sled, simple harnesses made of the ubiquitous translucent plastic. Soon everybody was saddled up except the smallest children, who would ride on the top of the loaded sleds.

  Nobody told Malenfant what to do. He looked for Valentina and made sure he got into a slot alongside her. She helped him fit a harness around his body; it tightened with simple buckles.

  And then they started hauling.

  The Neandertals just leaned into the traces, like so many squat pack horses. And by the light of Jupiter, they began to drag the sleds across the crusty Io surface. It turned out that Malenfant's sled was a little harder to move than the others, and his team had to strain harder, snapping signs at each other, until the runners came free of the clinging rock with a jerk.

  Valentina's gait, when walking, was... different. She seemed to lean forward as if her center of gravity was somewhere over her hip joints, instead of farther back like Malenfant's. And when she walked her whole weight seemed to pound down, with every stride, on her hips. It was clumsy, almost apelike, the least human of her features, as far as Malenfant could see.

  Valentina wasn't built for walking long distances, like Malenfant was. Maybe the Neandertals had evolved to be sedentary.

  Malenfant did his best to pull with the rest. It wasn't clear to him why he was being kept alive, except as some vaguely altruistic impulse of Valentina's. But he sure wanted to be seen to be working for his supper. So he added his feeble Homo Sap strength to the Neandertals'.

  Thus, hominids from Earth toiled across the face of Io.

  The ground was mostly just rock: silicates, big lumps of it under his feet, peppered by bubbles. It was basalt, volcanic rock pumped out of Io's interior. Sulphur lay in great yellow sheets over the rock, crunching under his feet. Io was a rocky world, not an ice ball like most of the other outer-system moons; sized midway between Earth's Moon and Mars, Io was a terrestrial planet, lost out here in Jupiter orbit.