Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  The world was elemental: nothing but sand, sky and gnarled Joshua trees, over which their chutes were draped.

  This was the Mojave desert. He and Nemoto had been dumped here as a survival training exercise. During the day the heat was flat and crushing; they could do nothing but lie in their tent of chutes. And at night they foraged for food.

  Nemoto was crouched over a low fire. She was heating some kind of thin broth in a pan she'd made out of aluminium foil. She had a spare T-shirt wrapped around her head. To survive you don't need equipment, the instructor had said. All you need to pack is strength and ingenuity and determination. That, and a willingness to eat insects and lizards.

  Nemoto had proved ingenious at setting traps.

  "I wonder – " His throat was so dry he had to start again. "I wonder what's in the soup this time."

  Nemoto glanced up at him, and then looked back to her cooking. "Your speech is slurred. Drink some water, Malenfant."

  He walked around their little campsite, stretching his legs. He could feel a tingling in his limbs, and the air felt thin. The horizon seemed blurred, perhaps by dust.

  "I mean, why the hell are we here?" He lifted his arms and turned around. "Whatever we find on the Red Moon, it won't be like this."

  "But on returning to Earth we might land in a desert area, and –"

  He barked laughter, hurting his throat. "Let's face it, Nemoto. The chances of our returning healthy enough to play wild man in the desert are too remote to think about."

  "Drink some water."

  He stalked away, vainly seeking cooler air.

  As the project had grown, as all such projects did, it had acquired its own logic, much of it loaned from NASA – to Malenfant's chagrin, and against his better judgment. While the ship was being prepared, the booster assembled and tested, nobody seemed to know what to do with the astronauts, except train them to death and send them on goodwill tours, just as NASA always had.

  Some of the training Malenfant could swallow. He had, after all, flown in space twice before, and Nemoto, on her single trip to Station, had logged up an impressive number of days on orbit. So they endured hours in classrooms and in hastily mocked-up simulators going over every aspect of their unlikely craft's systems, and the procedures they would have to follow at their mission's major stages.

  The major problem with that turned out to be the very volatility of the design. As teams of engineers struggled to cram in everything they thought they needed, key systems went through major redesigns daily – and all of it impacted in the crew's interface with their craft. In the end Malenfant had grown tired of the simulation programmers' laboring efforts. He had shut down the sims, had a dummy cabin mocked up from plywood, and had blown-up layouts of their instrument panels cut out of paper and pasted over the wood. It wasn't too interactive, but it familiarized them with systems and procedures – and it was easy to upgrade each morning with bits of tape and sticky paper, as news of each redesign came through.

  But the spacecraft-specific training was the easy stuff. The rest was more problematic. How, after all, do you train to face a completely unknown world?

  Malenfant and Nemoto had undergone a lot of altitude training, for it was clear that the Red Moon's air would be thinner than Earth's. Likewise they had been taken to tropical jungles, for it was planned to bring them down in a vegetated region close to the Moon's equator.

  But beyond that, all was uncertain. Nobody knew if they would find water fresh enough to drink. Nobody knew if they would be able to eat the vegetation always assuming the gray-green swathes visible through telescopes were vegetation at all. Nobody knew if there would be animals to hunt – or if there were animals that might hunt two human astronauts. It wasn't even clear if the air could be breathed unfiltered.

  The ship would be packed with three days' ground supplies, including air filters and water and compressed food. If the makeshift explorers found they couldn't live off the land in that time, they were just going to have to climb back in their lander and depart (always supposing they could find the return-journey rocket pack that was supposed to follow them to the Moon).

  And then there was the mystery of the hominids who had come tumbling through the Wheel in the sky.

  Malenfant and Nemoto had sat through hours of lectures by Julia Corneille and others, trying to absorb the best understanding of the evolution of mankind, watching one species after another parade through dimly realized computer animations – Australopithecus, Homo habilis. Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens. Homo heidelbergensis. Homo neandertalensis…. It was a plethora of speculation as fragmentary, it seemed to Malenfant, as the bone scraps on which it was based. He had vaguely imagined that the newer evidence based on DNA variation might have cleared the picture, but it seemed only to have confused everybody further. Nobody knew where humanity was going, of course. It had startled Malenfant to find that if you dug deeper than pop science simplifications, nobody really knew where man had come from either.

  The truth was that the sessions had been of little use. Malenfant had learned more than he wanted to know about archeological techniques and dating methods and anatomical signifiers and all the rest. What he needed to know was how to handle a tribe of Homo habilis, alive, fighting and breeding, should he crest a hillside on the Red Moon and discover them – or vice versa. But NASA's experts, curators of fragments all, simply weren't tuned to thinking that way. It was as if they could only see the bits of bone, and not the people that must once have lived to yield up these ancient treasures.

  The only real consensus was that Malenfant and Nemoto should pack guns.

  ...He had lost his hat. He saw it on the ground.

  There was a ringing in his ears. He ought to get his hat. He bent to reach it.

  Next thing he knew, he was on his side. He lay there fuming.

  The hat was too far away to reach, so he wriggled that way. Like a snake, he thought, cackling. When he had his hat he stuck it on the side of his head, so it shielded his face.

  At least the paleo training had been relevant, he thought. Too much of the rest of his time had been filled up with pointless exercises like this. They had even threatened to put him back in a centrifuge. "I told them to stick the fucking centrifuge where the sun don't shine," he muttered.

  The sand was hot and soft. Its pressure seemed to ease the pain in his head. Maybe he would sleep awhile.

  There were hands under his hips and shoulders, pushing him onto his back. A face above him blocked out the sky. It, she, was saying something. Nemoto, of course.

  He said, "Leave me alone."

  She leaned closer. "Open your mouth." She lifted a flask and poured in water.

  He made to spit it out, but that would be even more stupid. He swallowed it. "Stop that. We have to save it."

  "You're dehydrated, Malenfant. You know the drill. You drink what you have until it's gone, and if you have not been found by then, you die of thirst. Simple logic. Either way it does no good to ration your water."

  "Horse feathers," he said. But he let her pour more water into his mouth. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.

  Emma Stoney

  They continued to work their way east. A range of mountains, low and eroded almost to shapelessness, began to loom above the horizon. Though their outlines and colors were softened to blurs by the murky air, Emma thought she made out bands of vegetation, forest perhaps, on their lower slopes.

  After another day's walking, the Runners paused by a shallow, slow-running stream.

  Sally threw herself flat on the ground. She seemed to go to sleep at once. Maxie, as ever full of life at precisely the wrong time, ran off to play with the Runner children.

  Emma sat on dusty grass and eased off her boots. Maybe her feet were toughening up; at least she didn't have to pour any blood out of her boots today. She limped to the stream to drink, wash her face, bathe her feet. She found a stand of root plants, a little like potatoes, small enough to dig out of the ground. It
was a pleasure for once to be able to provide for herself.

  Emma watched the Runners. The descending sun had turned the western sky a tall orange-pink – volcano sunset, she thought – and peering through the dusty air was like looking into a tank of shining water, through which exotic creatures swam.

  The stream had washed down a rich supply of volcanic pebbles, and many of the adults were knapping tools. They squatted on their haunches in the stream, their lithe bodies folded up like penknives, tapping one stone against another. The axes they made were flattened slabs of stone, easy to grip, with clean sharp edges. Stone axes and wooden spears: the only tools the Runners ever made, over and over, tools they turned to every task from butchering carcasses to shaving even though their hands were clearly just as capable of fine manipulation as Emma's.

  There were a lot of oddities, if you watched carefully.

  The toolmakers worked in silence and isolation, as if the others didn't exist. Emma never saw a Runner pick up a tool dropped by somebody else and use it, not once. A few children and young adults sat beside their elders, watching, trying to copy them. Mostly the adults ignored their apprentices; only very rarely did Emma see examples of coaching, such as when one woman picked a rock from out of a boy's hand and turned it around so it served to flake the anvil stone better.

  All the tools turned out by the women, so far as Emma could tell, were functional. But some of the men's were different. Take Stone, for example, the bullying alpha-male. Sometimes he would sit and labor for hours at an axe, knocking off a chip here, a flake there. It was as if he pursued some impossible dream of symmetry or fineness, working at his axe far beyond the point where he could be adding any value.

  Or, more strangely, he would sit with a pile of stones and work feverishly, turning out axe after axe. But some of these "axes" were mere flakes of rock the size of Emma's thumb – and some were great monsters that she could have held only in two hands, like a book opened for reading. These pathological designs seemed no use as tools; Stone would do no more than carry them around with him for a few hours, making sure everybody saw them, before dumping them, never used, their edges as sharp as the instant they were made.

  Emma didn't know why Stone did this. Maybe it was a dim groping towards culture: hand-axe as art form. After all, the hand-axe was the only meaningful artifact they actually made, taking planning and vision and a significant skill; their other "tools", like their termite-digging sticks or even their spears, were little more than broken-off bits of wood or bone, based on serendipitous discoveries of raw materials, scarcely finished. The hand-axe was the only way the Runners had to express themselves.

  But if that was so, why didn't the women join in such "artistic" activities as well?

  Or maybe the useless hand-axes were about sex, not practicality or culture. After all to be able to make a decent axe showed a broad range of skills planning, vision, manual skills, strength – essential for survival in this unforgiving wilderness. Look at me, girls. I'm so fit and strong and full of food, I've got time to waste on these useless monsters and fingernail-sized scale models. Look at me! When everybody around you had a body as drop-dead beautiful as any athlete's she had ever seen, you needed something to stand out from the crowd.

  Could that be true? The Runners had to enjoy something like full humanity, in planning and vision and concentration, when making the axes. But could they then abandon that humanity and revert to some lower level of instinct, as the axes became a symbol of sexual prowess, as unconscious as a bird's bright plumage?

  It was all another reminder to her that no matter how human these beautiful creatures looked and sometimes behaved, they were not human. Their small heads contained shards of humanity, she thought, floating on a sea of animal drives and instincts: humans sometimes, not other times...

  Or maybe she was just being anthropomorphic. Maybe she shouldn't be comparing the Runners to herself, seeing how human they were, or weren't; the Runners were simply Runners, and they fit into their world as well as she fit into hers.

  Though it was a full hour since they had abandoned the trek for the day, Fire was still wandering around with his hands clasped together. He couldn't drop his hot burden until the others had gathered kindling and fuel for him, and as long as the sun was up and the air was warm they had no interest in doing that – in fact it didn't even seem to occur to them – and so Fire was stuck.

  But he had more than that on his mind. He was vainly pursuing one of the girls, Dig: a real knock-out, Emma thought, with crisp auburn hair, full, high breasts and hips to die for. Poor Fire seemed to have no idea how to get through to her; he just followed her around, holding out his handfuls of ash, and plaintively calling her name. "Dig! Dig!"

  Being the fire-carrier was obviously a key job, a cornerstone of this untidy little community. But as far as Emma could see his role didn't win Fire much respect from the other Runners, especially the men. Each night he would deliver his embers to the latest heap of kindling, and then would be pushed and slapped away. It was as if he was the runt of the litter. Certainly his handful of ashes just didn't get him the girls the way the hand-axes of the other boys and men did.

  But this time, for once, Fire was getting closer to the object of his desire. She backed up against a tree, and he walked towards her, hands clasped, that ridiculous, tragic erection sticking out like a divining rod.

  But a rock hit him hard in the side of the head.

  The rock had been thrown by Stone.

  Fire went down, toppling like a felled tree. He opened his hands to save himself before he hit the mud. His precious ashes scattered.

  Runners ran forward. Dig and Blue got to their knees in the mud, and tried to scrape together the ashes and embers. But the embers were hissing, quickly extinguished in the mud.

  Stone hadn't grasped the chain of events that led from his own hurled rock to the death of the fire, or else he just didn't want to know; either way he capered and howled, pressing the useless embers into the mud with his bare feet, and he aimed hefty kicks at Fire's ribs.

  Fire curled up, arms wrapped over his head, whimpering in misery. Emma winced, but she knew better than to try to intervene.

  After that, the daylight seemed to run out quickly. As the sun descended towards the horizon, the golden air turned to a dismal brown. The shadows of trees to the west lengthened, clutching at the cowering Runners like claws.

  In the absence of a fire the Runners gathered more closely than usual, the women clutching their children, even the usually solitary men huddling close.

  The first predators began to call.

  Sally came to Emma. "You have to use your spyglass," she said. "Make a fire. And you have to do it now, before we run out of sun."

  Emma sighed. "I'm frightened of showing them too much of what we've got."

  "They aren't going to steal your glass and start using it all over the savannah," Sally said. "They don't learn."

  "It's not that. Right now they seem to think we are like them. If they think we're too strange, they might reject us."

  The shadow of a distant tree slid across Sally's face. "Sister, I don't think it's the time for philosophical dilemmas. In a couple of hours the hyenas are going to be chomping on our bones. And anyhow these guys have attention spans that make Maxie look like Michelangelo. By the morning, they'll have forgotten it all. Come on, Emma. Just do it."

  "All right. Let's try to keep our tools out of their sight, though."

  "Agreed."

  They spent a few minutes gathering dry wood, and building a little tepee a couple of feet high. Then they scraped together dried leaves and tinder.

  Emma crouched down on the ground, folded her magnifying glass out of her knife, and angled it until she caught the crimson light of the low sun. She moved it back and forth until she had focused a tight spot of light on a few bits of dry tinder. Then she waited, the cold of the ground seeping into her, her awkwardly angled arm growing stiff. She grumbled, "I don't know why the hell
the South African air force didn't just give me a box of matches."

  Some of the Runners came to watch what they were doing. They hooted excitedly, one woman even making rubbing-hands-warm motions. But when the tinder didn't catch light immediately, they became baffled and quickly lost interest.

  Her spot of light disappeared. She looked up to see a small silhouetted figure, a grasping hand.

  "Maxie's. Maxie's!"

  Sally scooped him up. "Get away, Maxie, for heaven's sake." Maxie, denied the toy, began wailing.

  Unnoticed, the tinder had started smoking.

  Emma immediately dropped her glass. She cupped the thread of smoke with her hands and blew gently. The smoke trail billowed, nearly died.

  She sat back and beckoned to Fire. "Hey. Come over here. Come on. This is your job."

  Poor Fire sat squat on the ground, clutching his ribs, an immense lump forming on the side of his head.

  "Umm, Fire smoke Fire. Fire Fire!"

  At last he came forward, hobbling painfully. Shivering, he cupped his hands around the thread of smoke and blew, lips pursed.

  It seemed to take him mere seconds to have a small flame going. With the precise motions of a surgeon, he began to feed the tiny red-yellow spot with bits of tinder.

  When the smoke started to spread, the other Runners were drawn back. As the fire grew, they settled down around it, just as they did every night, and the men began to drag over heavy branches to make night logs.

  Sally watched the Runners with cold contempt. "Not a word, not a gesture of congratulation or apology. Or surprise. Or relief. They've already forgotten how Fire lost his embers... The fire is just here, and they accept it. They really don't think like us, do they?"

  Emma stretched stiff limbs. "Right now, I couldn't care less. Just so long as the fire keeps away the bad guys with the teeth."

  As Emma fell into sleep, a rough hand grabbed her shoulder.

  She froze. Her eyes snapped open. The sky, full of ash and smoke, retained a lingering purple-black glow, enough to show her a lithe, crouching silhouette. It, he, leaned over her. She was pushed onto her back. She could smell Runner: a thick, pungent, meaty smell of flesh that had never once been washed.