They reached a pit in the ground, twenty or thirty paces across.
She sat Sun Eyes down, propping him up against a wall.
She lay on her stomach. The pit was pitch dark. It was the first time in her life she’d seen a breach in the floor. Her imagination raced.
She reached down into the pit.
At first she could feel nothing but the smooth flooring. But that came to an end quickly, and below it she could feel beneath, to some much rougher, looser material. It felt damp and cold. There were even algae here, clinging to the walls in clumps.
She could hear Workers doing something, perhaps chewing at the loose rubble down there. Building the pit, onwards and outwards.
She straightened up stiffly. She tried to see deeper into the Head – there were suggestions of vast, sleeping forms there, perhaps an immense face – but there was no light, no free water. She couldn’t go any further.
She went back to Sun Eyes. He seemed to be sleeping.
She told him what she’d found.
‘Maybe there are worlds beyond this one.’ Her imagination faltered. ‘If we are crawling through the body of some human form, maybe there is another, still greater form beyond. And perhaps another beyond that – an endless nesting …’
He slumped against her shoulder.
She laid his light, wizened body down against the floor. In the darkness she could feel his ribs, the lumps of his joints.
Her anger flared up, like the light of a new sun.
I know I’m still lying here in the regolith, on this dumb little misshapen asteroid, inside my fubar suit. I know nobody’s come to save me. Because I’m still here, right? But I can’t see, hear, feel a damn thing.
Although I sometimes think I can.
I’m going stir-crazy, inside my own head.
I know they’re coming, though. The little guys. The nems told me that much.
They aren’t supposed to be smart, damn it!
But the nems will stop them, if I tell them.
So I have a decision to make. I could stop them.
After all, it’s them or me.
She got to her feet. She picked up her battered Worker limb, and stumbled out of the Neck, towards the light of the Stomach lake.
She started to batter at the feeder pipes with the Worker limb, her only tool.
The pipes were broad, as thick as her waist, but they punctured easily. Soon she had ripped fist-sized holes in the first pipe, and algae-rich water spilled down over the flooring, and flowed steadily back into the lake. She kept it up until she’d severed the pipe completely.
Then she started on the next pipe.
The Workers didn’t react. They just swam around in their complacent circles, piling up the net hopper with algae that wasn’t going anywhere any more.
She worked until all the pipes were broken.
She threw away her Worker limb, and lay down where she was, in the slimy, brackish water she’d spilled. She licked at the floor, sucking in a little algal paste, and let herself sleep.
Sometimes I think humans aren’t supposed to be out here at all. Look at me, I’m grotesque. These little guys, on the other hand, might be able to survive.
Even prosper.
A hell of a shock for those smug Chinese in the asteroid belt, when a swarm of little Americans comes barrelling in from the orbit of Jupiter.
What the hell. It didn’t look as if anyone was coming for me anyhow.
Funny thing is, I feel cold. Now, that’s not supposed to happen, according to the Owner’s Manual.
It was hard to wake up. Her eyes didn’t open properly. And when they did, they wouldn’t focus.
She lifted up her hand, and held it close so she could see. Her skin was brown and sagging and covered in liver spots.
She got to her feet, and stumbled down the slope.
She stood at the edge of the water, peering at the Workers, until her rheumy, ruined eyes made out one which didn’t look quite right. One that was missing a limb.
She struggled through water that seemed thick and resistant, until she had caught hold of the Worker’s net, and it was pulling her away from the shore.
With any luck this creature would, unwitting, take her home. She’d be a sack of bones by then, of course, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that someone would see, and maybe connect her with the enriching of the water, and wonder what she’d found.
More would come, next time. Children, too.
They would find that pit, up in the Neck, the way out of the world.
She smiled.
The water was warm around her.
She wondered what had happened to Sun Eyes. Maybe he was somewhere beneath her now, fizzing in the light of those underwater suns.
She closed her eyes. She drifted in blue warmth, her thoughts dissolving.
GREY EARTH
She was old now. The cold dug into her joints and her scars, and the leg she had fractured long ago, more than it used to.
She still called herself Mary. But she was one of the last to use the old names. And the people no longer called themselves Hams – for there were no Skinnies here who could call them that, none save Nemoto – and they were no longer called the People of the Grey Earth, for they had come home to the Grey Earth, and had no need to remember it.
There came a day, when they put old Saul in the ground, when Mary found herself the last to remember the old place, the Red Moon where she had been born.
Outside the cave that day there was only darkness, the still darkness of the Long Night, broken by the stars that sprinkled the cloudless black sky. Mary’s deep past was a place of dark green warmth. But her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, Saul, even one of her own children.
But it didn’t matter.
All that mattered were her skins, and the warm fug of gossip and talk that filled the cave, and the warm sap that bled from the root of the blood-tree that pierced the cave roof, on its way to seek out the endless warmth that dwelled in the belly of this earth, this Grey Earth.
All that mattered was today. Comparisons with misty other times – with past and future, with a girl who had fought and laughed and loved on a different world, with the bones that would soon rot in the ground – were without meaning.
Nemoto was not so content, of course.
Day succeeds empty day.
At first, on arriving here, I dreamed of physical luxuries: running hot water, clean, well-prepared food, a soft bed. But now it is as if my soul has been eroded down to an irreducible core. To sleep in the open on a bower of leaves no longer troubles me. To have my skin coated in slippery grime is barely noticeable.
But I long for security. And I long for the sight of another human face.
Sometimes I rage inwardly. But I have no one to blame for the fact that I have become lost between worlds, between realities.
And when I become locked inside my own head, when my inner distress becomes too apparent, it disturbs the Hams, as if I am becoming a danger to them.
So I have learned not to look inward.
I watch the Hams as they shamble about their various tasks, their brute bodies wrapped up in tied-on animal skins like Christmas parcels. All I see is their strangeness, fresh every day. They will complete a tool, use it once, drop it, and move on. It is as if every day is the very first day of their lives, as if they wake up to a world created anew.
It is obvious that their minds, housed in those huge skulls, are powerful, but they are not like humans’. But then they are not human. They are Neandertal.
This is their planet. A Neandertal planet.
Still, I try to emulate them. I try to live one day at a time. It is comforting.
My name is Nemoto. If you find this diary, if you understand what I have to say, remember me.
Nemoto was never content. Even in the deepest dark of the Long Night, she would bustle about the cave, arguing with herself, agitated, endlessly making her
incomprehensible objects. Or else she would blunder out into the dark, heavily wrapped in furs, perhaps seeking her own peace in the frozen stillness beyond.
Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, a constant, unique, somewhat irritating presence.
But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto.
Mary understood. Mary was of the Grey Earth, and she had come home. But Nemoto was of the Red Moon – or perhaps of another place, a Blue Earth of which she sometimes spoke – and now it was Nemoto who had been stranded far from her home.
And so Mary made space for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when the children were too boisterous with her, or when an adult challenged her, or when she fell ill or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat. But Nemoto’s thin, pointed jaw could make no impression on the deep-frozen meat of the winter store, and nor could her shining tools. So Mary would soften the meat for her with her own strong jaws, chewing it as she would to feed a child.
But one day Nemoto spat out her mouthful of meat on the floor of the cave. She raged and shouted in her jabbering Skinny tongue, expressing disgust. She pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.
Time did not matter during the Long Night, nor during its bright twin, the Long Day. Nemoto was gone, as gone as if she had been put in the ground, and she began to soften in the memory.
But at last Nemoto returned, as if from the dead. She was staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. The children gathered around to see.
It was a bat, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. The bat had tucked itself into a tree hollow to endure the Long Night. But Nemoto had dug it out, and now she put it close to a warm root of the blood-tree to let it thaw. She jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.
The bat revived briefly, flapping its broad wings against the cave floor. But Nemoto briskly slit its throat with a stone knife, and began to butcher it.
Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm titbits to the children who clustered around to see. She sucked marrow from its thread-thin bones, and gave that to the children as well. But when she offered the children bloated, pink-grey internal organs, mothers pulled the children away.
That was the last time Nemoto was ever healthy.
Mary eats her meat raw, tearing at it with her shovel-shaped teeth and cutting it with a flake knife; every so often she scrapes her teeth with the knife. And as her powerful jaw grinds at the meat, great muscles work in her cheeks.
Mary is short, robust, heavily built. She is barrel-chested, and her arms and massive-boned legs are slightly bowed. Her feet are broad, her toes fat and bony. Her massive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, are scarred from stone chips. Her skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, is long and low with a pronounced bulge at the rear. Her face is pulled forward into a great prow fronted by her massive, fleshy nose; her cheeks sweep back as if streamlined, but her jaw, though chinless, is massive and thrust forward. From her lower forehead a great ridge of bone thrusts forward, masking her eyes. There is a pronounced dip above the ridges, before her shallow brow leads back into a tangle of hair.
She is Neandertal. There can be no doubt.
She lives – I live – in a system of caves. There is an overpowering stench of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement and burning fur, and a musty, disagreeable odour of people who don’t wash.
Every move the Hams make, every act they complete, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air, is suffused with strength. They suffer a large number of injuries, bone fractures and crushing injuries and gouged and scarred skin. But then their favoured hunting technique is to wrestle their prey to the ground. It is like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.
The Hams barely notice me. They are utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children pluck at the remnants of my clothing with their intimidatingly strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams step around me, their eyes sliding away, as if I am a rock embedded in the ground. I sometimes theorize that they are only truly conscious in social interactions; everything else – eating, making tools, even hunting – is done in a rapid blur, as I used to drive a car without thinking. Certainly, to a Neandertal, by far the most fascinating things in the world are other Neandertals.
They are not human. But they care for their children, and for their ill and elderly. However coolly the Hams treat me, they have not expelled me, which is how I survive.
I brought them here, from the Red Moon. This tipped-up Earth is their home. They remembered it during the time of their exile on another world. Remembered it for forty thousand years, an unimaginable time.
I imagined I would be able to get away from here, to home. It did not happen that way.
There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, just for an hour, but it was the first time the sun had shown at all for sixty-eight days.
When the people saw the light they came bursting out of the cave.
They scrambled onto the low bluff over the cave, where the blood-tree stood: leafless and gaunt now, but its blood-red sap coursed with the warmth it had drawn from the Grey Earth’s belly, the warmth that had sustained the people through the Long Night. The people danced and capered and threw off their furs. Then they retreated to the warmth of the cave, where there was much chatter, much eating, much joyous sex.
Though it would be some time yet before the frozen lakes and rivers began to thaw, there was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals – birds and a few large rats – were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting. The people enjoyed the first thin fruits of the new season.
But Nemoto’s illness was worse.
She suffered severe bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. She steadily lost weight, becoming, in the uninterested eyes of the people, even more gaunt than she had seemed before. And her skin grew flaky and sore. The children would watch in horrified fascination as she shucked off her furs and her clothes, and then peeled off bits of her skin, as if she would keep on until nothing was left but a heap of bones.
Mary tried to treat the diarrhoea. She brought water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto’s system.
The key incident in the formation of the Earth was the collision of proto-Earth with a wandering planetesimal larger than Mars. This is known as the Big Whack.
It is hard to envisage such an event. The projectile that ended the Cretaceous era, sending the dinosaurs to extinction, was perhaps six miles across. The primordial impactor was some four thousand miles across. It was a fully formed planet in its own right. And the collision released two hundred million times as much energy as the Cretaceous impact.
The proto-Earth’s oceans were boiled away. About half of Earth’s crust was demolished by the impact. A tremendous spray of liquid rock was hurled into space. The impactor was stripped of its own mantle material, and its core sank into the interior of the Earth. Much of the plume fell back to Earth. Whatever was left of the atmosphere was heated to thousands of degrees.
The remnant plume settled into a ring around the Earth, glowing white hot. As it cooled it solidified into a swarm of moonlets. It was like a replay of the formation of the solar system itself. The largest of the moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and under the influence of tidal forces, rapidly receded from Earth.
Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge tides, a molten crust and savage rains as the ocean vapour fell back from space. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more.
Everything was shaped in those moments of impact: Earth’s spin, the tilt of the axis that gives us seasons, the planet’s internal composition, the Moon’s composition an
d orbit.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
Such immense collisions are probably common in the formation of any planetary system. But the impact itself was a random event: chaotic, in that small differences could have produced large, even unpredictable consequences. The impactor might have missed Earth altogether – but that would have left Earth with its original atmosphere, a crushing Venus-like blanket of carbon dioxide. Or the impactor might have hit at a subtly different angle. A single Moon isn’t necessarily the most likely outcome; many collision geometries would produce two twin Moons, or three or four, or ring systems like Saturn’s. And so on.
Many possibilities. All of which, somewhere in the infinite manifold of universes, must have come to pass.
I know this because I have visited several of those possibilities.
The days lengthened rapidly.
The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. Soon the lakes were blue, though pale cores of unmelted ice lingered in their cores.
Life swarmed. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, plants and animals alike engaged in a frenzied round of fighting, feeding, breeding, dying.
The people moved rapidly about the landscape. They gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations to seek mates and nesting places.
And soon a distant thunder sounded across the land: relentless, billowing day and night across the newly green plains, echoing from green-clad mountains. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds.
The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed towards the sea.
It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes. They were slim and streamlined, the muscles of their legs and haunches huge and taut, the bucks sporting huge folded-back antlers. And they ran like the wind. Since most of this tilted world was, at any given moment, freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of kilometres, spanning continents in their search for food, water and temperate climes. Speed and endurance were of the essence for survival.
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