Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  For the first time since that dreadful moment of mid-air disintegration, she had time to think.

  It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant's final scream over the intercom, her sudden ejection – without warning, she had been thrust into the cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat's rockets slammed into the small of her back – and then, even as her chute had begun to open, she saw the wheel opening like a mouth all around her – and she had realized that for better or worse she was going to fall through it...

  Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.

  And then, this.

  She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the breath knocked out of her. Lying on the ground, an instant after being forty thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: that was the first shock.

  She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal, foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that, stranding her here.

  Yes, but where was here?

  She had cut the chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.

  Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall with swimming slowness.

  Low gravity. As if she was on the Moon.

  That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, where?

  Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are going to do about it – specifically, how you plan to stay alive, long enough for Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.

  ...Malenfant.

  Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn't anywhere near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other side of the great blue portal?

  But he'd been through the crash too. Was he alive at all?

  She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her haunches. She remembered how he had been in those last instants before the destruction of the plane, the reckless way he had hurled them both at the unknown.

  Malenfant, Malenfant, what have you done?

  A scream tore from the forest.

  Emma bundled up her parachute cloth and ran back the way she had come.

  On her bed of dead leaves, Sally was sitting up. With her good arm she held her kid to her chest. Maxie was crying again, but Sally's face was empty, her eyes dry.

  Uneasy, Emma dumped the parachute cloth. In the seeping rain, she got to her knees and embraced them both. "It's all right."

  The kid seemed to calm, sandwiched between the two women.

  But Sally pushed her away. "How can you say that? Nothing's right." Her voice was eerily level.

  Emma said carefully, "I don't think they mean us any harm... Not any more."

  "Who?"

  "The hominids."

  "I saw them," Sally insisted.

  "Who?"

  "Ape-men. They were here. I just opened my eyes and there was this face over me. It was squat, hairy. Like a chimp."

  Then not like the hominids out on the plain, Emma thought, wondering. Was there more than one kind of human-ape, running around this strange, dreamy forest?

  "It was going through my pockets," Sally said. "I just opened my eyes and looked right in its face. I yelled. It stood up and ran away."

  "It stood up? Chimps don't stand upright. Not habitually... Do they?"

  "What do I know about chimps?"

  "Look, the – creatures – out there on the plain don't sound like that description."

  "They are ape-men."

  "But they aren't squat and hairy." Emma said hesitantly, "We've been through a lot. You're entitled to a nightmare or two."

  Doubt and hostility crossed Sally's face. "I know what I saw."

  The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.

  At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outré concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn't a flat, infinite, unchanging stage... To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.

  And then there was the small matter of Sally's husband.

  Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally's reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.

  She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.

  As she worked she said hesitantly, "My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you –"

  "I'm Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg." Is? "I guess you've met Maxie. We're from Boston."

  "Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK."

  "Yes..." Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was in her early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn't as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. "We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg... Where are we, do you think?"

  "I don't know any more than you do. I'm sorry."

  Sally's smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. "Well, it sure isn't your fault. What do you think we ought to do?"

  Stay alive. "Keep warm. Keep out of trouble."

  "Do you think they know we are missing yet?"

  What "they"? "That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet."

  Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn't scared out of his wits. "I'm hungry."

  Emma squeezed his shoulder. "Me too." She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.

  She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colorful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.

  Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of crackers before he gobbled up the handful of boiled sweets he had spotted immediately.

  Emma kept back one of the sweets for herself, however. She sucked the cherry flavor sweet until the last sliver of it dissolved on her tongue. Anything to get rid of the lingering taste of that damn caterpillar.

  Caterpillar, for God's sake. Her resentful anger flared. She felt like throwing away the petty scraps of supplies, rampaging out to the hominids, demanding attention. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn't supposed to be here. She didn't want anything to do with this. She didn't want any responsibility for this damaged woman and her wretched kid – and she didn't want her head cluttered up with the memories of what had become of the woman's husband.

  But nobody was asking what she wanted. And now the food was finished, and the others were staring at her, as if they expected her to supply them.

  If not you, Emma, who else?

  Emma took the foil box and went looking for water.

  She found a stream a few minutes deeper into the forest. She clambered down into a shallow gully and scooped up muddy water. She sniffed at it doubtfully. It was from a stream of running water, so not stagnant. But it was covered with scummy algae, and plenty of green things grew in it. Was that good or bad?

  She carried back as much water as she could to their improvised campsite, where
Sally and Maxie were waiting. She set the water down and started going through her pockets again.

  Soon she found what she wanted. It was a small tin, about the size of the tobacco tins her grandfather used to give her to save her coins and stamps. Inside a lot of gear was crammed tight; Maxie watched wonderingly as she pulled it all out. There were safety pins, wire, fish hooks and line, matches, a sewing kit, tablets, a wire saw, even a teeny-tiny button compass. And there was a little canister of dark crystals that turned out to be potassium permanganate.

  Following the instructions on the can – to her shame she had to use her knife's lens to read them – she dropped crystals into the water until it turned a pale red.

  Maxie turned up his nose, until his mother convinced him the funny red water was a kind of cola.

  Habits from ancient camping trips came back to Emma now. For instance, you weren't supposed to lose anything. So she carefully packed all her gear back into its tobacco tin, and put it in an inside pocket she was able to zip up. She took a bit of parachute cord and tied her Swiss Army knife around her neck, and tucked it inside her flight suit, and zipped that up too.

  And while she was fiddling with her toys, Sally began shuddering.

  "Greg. My husband. Oh my God. They killed him. They just crushed his skull. The ape-men. Just like that. I saw them do it. It's true, isn't it?"

  Emma put down her bits of kit with reluctance.

  "Isn't it strange?" Sally murmured. "Greg isn't here. But I never thought to ask why he isn't here. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I knew... Do you think there's something wrong with me?"

  "No," Emma said, as soothing as she could manage. "Of course not. It's very hard, a very hard thing to take –"

  And then Sally just fell apart, as Emma had known, inevitably, she must. The three of them huddled together, in the rain, as Sally wept.

  It was dark before Sally was cried out. Maxie was already asleep, his little warm form huddled between their two bodies.

  The rain had stopped. Emma pulled down her rough canopy, and wrapped it around them.

  Now Sally wanted to talk, whispering in the dark.

  She talked of her holiday-of-a-lifetime in Africa, and how Maxie was doing at nursery school, another child, a daughter, at home, and her career and Greg's, and how they had been considering a third child or perhaps opting for a frozen embryo deferred pregnancy, pending a time when they might be less busy.

  And Emma told her about her life, her career, about Malenfant. She tried to find the gentlest, most undemanding stories she could think of.

  Like the one about their engagement, at the end of Malenfant's junior year as a midshipman at the Naval Academy. He had received his class ring, and at the strange and formal Ring Dance she had worn his ring around her neck, while he carried her miniature version in his pocket. And then at the climax of the evening the couples took their turns to go to the center of the dance floor and climb up under a giant replica of the class ring. Filled with youth and love and hope, they dipped their rings in a bowl of water from the seven seas, and exchanged the rings, and made their vows to each other...

  Oh, Malenfant, where are you now?

  Eventually they slept: the three of them, brought together by chance, lost in this strange quasi-Africa, now huddled together on the floor of a nameless forest. But Emma came to full wakefulness every time she heard a leaf rustle or a twig snap, and every time a predator howled, in the huge lands beyond this sheltering forest.

  Tomorrow we have to make a proper shelter, she thought. We can't sleep on the damn ground.

  Shadow

  She woke early.

  She turned on her back, stretching her long arms lazily. Her nest of woven branches was soft and warmed by her body heat, but where her skin was exposed to the cold, her hair prickled, standing upright. She found moist dew on her black fur, and she scooped it off with a finger and licked it.

  Scattered through the trees she could see the nests of the Elf-folk, fat masses of woven branches with sleek bodies embedded, still slumbering.

  She had no name. She had no need of names, nor capacity to invent them.

  Call her Shadow.

  The sky was growing light. She could see a stripe of dense pink, smeared along one horizon. Above her head there was a lid of cloud. In a crack in the cloud an earth swam, bright, fat, blue.

  Shadow stared at the earth. It hadn't been there last time she woke up.

  Loose associations ran through her small skull: not thoughts, not memories, just shards, but rich and intense. And they were all blue. Blue like the sky after a storm. Blue like the waters of the river when it ran fat and high. Blue, blue, blue, clean and pure, compared to the rich dark green of night thoughts.

  Blue like the light in the sky, yesterday.

  Shadow's memories were blurred and unstructured, a corridor of green and red in which a few fragments shone, like bits of a shattered sculpture: her mother's face, the lightness of her own body as a child, the sharp, mysterious pain of her first bleeding. But nowhere in that dim green hall was there a flare of blue light like that. It was strange, and therefore it was frightening.

  But memories were pallid. There was only the now, clear and bright: what came before and what would come after did not matter.

  As the light gathered, the world began to emerge out of the dark green. Noise was growing with the light, the humming of insects and the whirring flight of bats.

  Here, in this clump of trees high on an escarpment, she was at the summit of her world. The ground fell away to the sliding black mass of the river. The trees were scattered here, the ground bare and gray, but patches of green-black gathered on the lower slopes, gradually becoming darker and thicker, merging as they tumbled down the gullies and ravines that led to the river valley itself.

  She knew every scrap of this terrain. She had no idea what lay beyond – no real conception that anything lay beyond the ground she knew.

  The others were stirring now. Her infant sister, Tumble, sat up on the belly of their mother, Termite. Termite stretched, and one shapely foot raised, silhouetted against the sky.

  Shadow slid out of her nest. The pliant branches rustled back to their natural positions. This was a fig tree, with vines festooned everywhere. Shadow found a dense cluster of ripe fruit, and began to feed.

  Soon there was a soft rain all around her, as discarded skins and seeds fell from the lips of the folk, towards the ground.

  Above her there was a sharp, sudden crack. She flinched, looking up. It was Big Boss. His teeth bared, without so much as a stretch, he leapt out of his nest and went leaping wildly through the trees, swaying the branches and swinging on the vines.

  Everywhere people abandoned their nests, scrambling to get out of the way of Big Boss. The last peace of the night was broken by grunts and screams.

  But one man wasn't fast enough. It was Claw, Shadow's brother, hindered by his need to favor his useless hand, left withered by a childhood bout of polio.

  Big Boss crashed directly into the nest of the younger male, smashing it immediately. Claw, screeching, fell crashing through the branches and down to the ground.

  Big Boss scrambled after him, down to the ground. He strutted back and forth, waving his fists. He shook the vegetation and threw rocks and bits of dead wood. Then he sat, black hair bristling thick over his hunched shoulders.

  One by one. Big Boss's acolytes approached him, weaker men he dominated with his fists and teeth and shows of anger. Big Boss welcomed them with embraces and brief moments of grooming.

  Claw was one of the last, loping clumsily, his withered hand clutched to his belly. Shadow saw how his back was scratched and bleeding, a marker of his rude awakening. He bent and kissed Big Boss's thigh. But Claw's obeisance was rewarded only by a cuff on the side of his head, hard enough to send him sprawling.

  The other men joined in, following their leader's example, kicking and punching at the howling Claw – but each of them retreated quickly after deliveri
ng his blow.

  Big Boss spread his lips in a wide grin, showing his long canines.

  Now Termite strode into the little clearing, calm and assured, her infant clinging to the thick black hair on her back. Claw ran to her and huddled at his mother's side, whimpering as if he was an infant himself.

  One of the men pursued Claw, yelling. Like most of the men he was a head taller than Termite, and easily outweighed her. But Termite cuffed him casually, and he backed away.

  Now Big Boss himself approached Termite. He slapped her, hard enough to make her stagger.

  Termite stood her ground, watching Big Boss calmly.

  With a last growl Big Boss turned away. He bent over and defecated explosively. Then he reached for leaves to wipe his backside, while his acolytes jostled to groom his long black fur.

  Termite walked away, followed by Claw and her infant, seeking food.

  The incident was over, power wielded and measured by all concerned.

  Another day had begun in the forest of the Elf-folk.

  Shadow, her long arms working easily, swung down to the ground to join her family.

  The people lingered by the trees where they had slept. They sat with legs folded and groomed each other, picking carefully through the long black hairs, seeking dirt, ticks and other insects.

  Shadow sat her little sister on her lap. Tumble squirmed and wriggled – but with an edge of irritation, for she had picked up bloodsucking ticks some days before. Shadow found some of the tiny, purplish creatures in the child's scalp now. She plucked them away between delicate fingernails and popped them in her mouth, relishing the sharp tang of blood when they burst beneath her teeth.

  All around her people walked, groomed, fed, locked into an intricate geometry of lust, loyalty, envy, power. The people were the most vivid thing in Shadow's world; everything else was a blur, barely more noticed than the steady swell of her own breathing.

  At eleven years old, Shadow was three feet tall. She had long legs under narrow hips, long, graceful arms, a slim torso, a narrow neck and shoulders. She walked upright. But her legs were a little splayed, her gait clumsy, and her long, strong arms were capable of carrying her high in the trees. Her rib cage was high and conical, and her skull was small, her mouth with its red lips prominent. And over pink-black skin, her body was covered with long black fur.