Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  Other gaps. If they weren't interested in something – a type of plant, for instance, which had no use for food or medicine or tools, nor carried any threat as a poison – they simply ignored it. If it didn't matter, it was as if it didn't even exist; as far as she could tell there were whole categories of such "useless" objects and phenomena which had no names.

  There were no books here, of course – there was nothing like writing of any kind. And no art: no paintings on animal skins, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child's face.

  Indeed, the Hams seemed to loathe symbology of any kind. The Hams tolerated the odd colors of Emma's skin and hair, her slimness of build, the way she spoke, even the garish blue of her clothes – but they could not bear the South African air force logo that adorned the breast of her flight suit, and she had to cut it out with a stone knife. (Loath to throw away anything that had come from home, she had tucked the patch into a pocket on her sleeve.)

  She came to suspect that what disturbed them wasn't the symbols themselves as much as the response of herself to them – and other Skinny-folk, a class which seemed to include herself and the mysterious "Zealots" and "En'lish". The Hams would jabber about how Skinnies saw people in the rock, as if the symbols themselves were somehow sentient.

  As a result, the Hams' world was a startlingly drab place, lacking art and religion and story – save, of course, for their one great central myth of the Gray Earth, where they had come from. They didn't tell jokes. The children played only as baby chimps might, exercising their muscles and testing their animal reactions against each other.

  And to them, death appeared to be a genuine termination, a singularity beyond which an individual, leaving no trace, had no meaning. To the Hams, today was everything, yesterday a minor issue – and if you weren't here tomorrow, you wouldn't matter.

  In many ways, they were like the Runners, then. But, unlike the Runners, they talked and talked and talked. They seemed to have a wide vocabulary, much of it English, and they would hold long, complex conversations around their fires.

  But it was only gossip. They never talked about how to make a better tool. Just about each other.

  Emma thought she had gotten used to the Runners, who were a strange mixture of human and animal. If these Hams were still not quite human as she was, nevertheless they had their own gaps in their heads, barriers between the rooms. As she watched them jabbering of who was screwing whom while their hands worked at one tool or another, apparently independently, she found it hard to imagine how it must be to be a Ham.

  Sometimes she envied them, however.

  To her, a beautiful sunset was a comforting reminder of home, a symbol of renewal, of hope for a better day tomorrow. The Hams would watch such displays as intently as she did. But to them, she believed, a sunset was just a sunset, like the sound of some instrument lacking any overtones, a simple pure tone but a tone with a beauty and purity which they experienced directly and without complication, as if it was the first sunset they had ever seen.

  Day succeeded empty day.

  At first, on arriving here, she dreamed of physical luxuries: running hot water, clean, well-prepared food, a soft bed. But as time wore on, it was as if her soul had been eroded down. She had simpler needs now: to sleep in the open on a bower of leaves no longer troubled her; to have her skin coated in slippery grime was barely noticeable.

  But she longed for security, to be able to settle down to sleep without wondering if she would be alive to see the morning, to live without the brutality and death that permeated the forest.

  And she longed for the sight of another human face. It didn't have to be Malenfant. Anybody.

  One day her wish was granted.

  They had been men, pushing their way through the forest, pursuing some project of their own. They wore clothing of animal skin, but it was carefully stitched a long way beyond the crude wraps the Hams tied around their bodies – and they spoke English, with a strong, twisted accent.

  Emma was electrified. She gazed on their thin, somewhat pinched faces with longing, as intently as one Ham might gaze at another. Were they the source of the Hams' and Runners' language? Her impulse was to call out to them, approach them.

  But she saw that the Hams cowered from these Zealots, as they called them, a label Emma found less than encouraging. So she, too, slipped back into the forest with her Hams.

  Sometimes she raged inwardly. Or she worked through imaginary conversations with Malenfant – who had, after all, been flying the plane when she got stuck here, and so was the only person she could think of to blame.

  But when the Hams saw her stalking around the forest lashing at branches and lianas, or, worse, muttering to herself, they became disturbed.

  So she learned not to look inwards.

  She watched the Hams as they shambled about their various tasks, their brute bodies wrapped up in tied-on animal skins like Christmas parcels. One day at a time: that was how the Hams lived, with no significant thought for tomorrow for they appeared simply to assume that tomorrow would be much like today, and like yesterday, and the day before that.

  She did not abandon her shining thread of hope that someday she would get out of here – without that she would have feared for her sanity – but she tried to emulate the Hams in their focus on the now. One day at a time. It was almost comforting. She tried to accept the notion that the best prospect for the rest of her life might be to dwell on the fringes of a group like this: physically safe, but excluded, utterly ignored, the only representative of a different, and uninteresting species.

  The future stretched out in front of her, a long dark hall empty of hope.

  Until she sighted the lander.

  Reid Malenfant

  Malenfant took a tentative step away from the lander. Encumbered by his escape suit, breathing canned air, he peered out of a sealed-up helmet. His heavy black boots crunched on dead leaves and sparse grass, all of it overlaid on a ruddy, dusty soil. But he could barely hear the noise of his footsteps, and could not smell the grass or the leaves.

  All around this little clearing, dense forest sprouted: a darkness through which green shadows flitted. He tipped back on his heels and peered up into a tall, washed-out sky. The Earth sailed there, fat and blue, the outline of a continent dimly visible.

  So here was Reid Malenfant walking on the surface of a new world: a boyhood dream, realized at last. But he sure hadn't expected it to be like this.

  Maybe he was unimaginative – it was something Emma had accused him of many times – maybe he had focused too much on the battle to assemble the mission in the first place, and the thrilling details of the three-day flight across space to get here. Maybe, somehow, he had been expecting this wandering Red Moon would be content to serve as no more than a passive stage for his designs. Now, for the first time, on some deep, gut level, he realized that this was a whole world he was dealing with here – complex in its own right, with its own character and issues and dangers.

  And his scheme to rescue Emma seemed as absurd and quixotic as many of his opponents at home had argued.

  But what else could he have done but come here and try?

  Nemoto was walking around the clearing experimentally, slim despite the bulky orange escape suit and the parachute pack still strapped to her back. Her gait was something like a Moonwalk, halfway between a walk and a run. "Fascinating," she said "Walking is a pendulum-like motion, an interchange between the body's gravitational potential energy and the forward kinetic energy. The body, seeking to minimize mechanical energy spent, aims for an optimal form of gait – walking or running – at any given speed. But the lower the gravity, the lower the speed at which walking breaks into running. It's all a question of scaling laws. The Froude number –"

  "Give me a break, Nemoto."

  She stopped, coming to stand beside him. And, before he could stop her, she unlocked her helmet and removed it.

  She grinned at him. She looked green about the gills, but then
she always did. And she hadn't dropped dead yet.

  Malenfant lifted his own helmet over his head. He kept his hand on the green apple pull that would activate his suit's emergency oxygen supply. His Snoopy hat comms unit felt heavy, incongruous in this back-to-nature environment.

  He took a deep breath.

  The air was thin. But he'd anticipated as much, and the altitude training he'd gone through reduced the ache in his chest to a distant nuisance. (But Emma, he remembered, had had no altitude training; this thin air must have hurt her.) The air was moist, faintly cold, what he would describe as bracing. He could smell green, growing things – the autumn smell of dead leaves, a denser green scent that came from the forest.

  And he could smell ash.

  Nemoto was inspecting a small portable analyzer. "No unanticipated toxins," she said. "Thin but breathable." She stripped off her Snoopy hat, and started to shuck off her orange pressure suit. "In fact," she said, "the air here is healthier than in most locations on Earth."

  After their three days in space cooped up in a volume no larger than the interior of a family car, Malenfant was no longer shy of Nemoto. But he felt oddly self-conscious getting naked, out here in the open, where who-knew-what eyes might be watching. But he began to unzip his suit anyhow. "I can smell ash."

  "That is probably the Bullseye," Nemoto said. The big volcano had been observed to erupt more or less continuously since the Red Moon's arrival in Earth orbit, perhaps induced by the tides exerted by the Earth on its new Moon. "You should welcome the ash, Malenfant. This is a small world, with no tectonic activity, Weathering here is a one-way process, and without a restorative mechanism all the air would eventually get locked up in the rocks, with no way to recycle it."

  "Like Mars."

  "And yet not like Mars. We don't yet understand the geological and biological cycles on the Red Moon. Perhaps we never will. But the injection of gases into the air by the Bullseye surely serves to keep the atmosphere replenished. What else do you notice?"

  He raised his head, sniffed, listened.

  "Birdsong," Nemoto said. "An absence rather than a presence."

  "No birds? It ought to be easier for them to fly here, in the lower gravity."

  "But the air is less dense. Wings would have less lift than on Earth. The bird would require more muscle power, respiration... We may see gliders, and flightless birds. But we cannot expect the diversity we see on Earth."

  A pity, Malenfant thought.

  Malenfant donned T-shirt, shorts, a thin sweater, and a bright blue coverall, and then pulled his boots back on. He was glad of the warmth of the clothes; the air here was damp and cold, though the sun's heat was sharp. Nemoto dressed the same way. They tucked their heavy Gore-Tex escape suits back into the lander, against the time when they would be needed during the return to Earth – an eventuality Malenfant was finding increasingly hard to visualize.

  Malenfant settled his comms pack on his shoulder. This was a specialized piece of gear manufactured for them by technicians at the Johnson Space Center. On top of a small but powerful transceiver package sat a tiny, jewel-like camera. Antennae were built into their coveralls, and the signals were relayed by small comsats orbiting low around the Red Moon. The deal was that save for emergency the controllers would keep their mouths shut during the surface stay (which they insisted on calling an extra-vehicular activity, with, to Malenfant's mind, an absurd emphasis on the vehicle they had arrived in, as opposed to the place they had come to). But in return the ground had control of the cameras.

  Soon the little camera on Malenfant's shoulder was swiveling back and forth with a minute whirring noise. "Good grief," he said. "I feel like Long John Silver."

  Nemoto laughed, as she usually did when she detected one of his jokes. He wasn't sure whether she understood the reference or not.

  With her own camera working, she walked across the flattened clearing. She began to load small sample bags with fast, random selections of the vegetation and the underlying crimson soil; these were contingency samples, to be lodged in the loader against the event that they had to leave here in a hurry. She found a shallow puddle, covered with a greenish scum, and she pushed the probe of her sensor pack into it. "Water," she said. "Though I wouldn't recommend you drink it."

  Malenfant, his own camera peering here and there, turned to face the way the lander had come down, from the west. The route was somewhat easy to spot. The lander, suspended beneath its blue parafoil, had come bellying down out of the sky, crashing through the trees with abandon, and had left a clear trail of its glide-down in snapped trunks, crushed branches and ripped-up bits of parafoil. The trail terminated in this small clearing, where shattered tree trunks clustered close around the lander's incongruous black and white carcass.

  Malenfant stalked around the lander, inspecting the damage. The whole underside was scored, crushed and gouged. Heat-resistant tiles had been plucked away and scattered through the forest, and all the aerosurfaces were scarred and crumpled.

  The only good thing you could say about that landing was that it wasn't his fault.

  After scouting out the Red Moon from orbit for a few days, the crew and the mission planners on the ground had settled on the largest settlement they had spotted as a suitable target for the landing. (Not that they could tell who or what had built that settlement...) It was close to the delta where the great continental river completed its long journey to the ocean. The plan had been to come down on a reasonably flat, open plain a few miles to the west of the Beltway, the thick belt of forest at the continent's eastern coast, close enough to that big settlement for Malenfant and Nemoto to complete their journey on foot. Later, the follow-up rocket pack would rendezvous with the lander on the ground.

  That was the plan. The Red Moon hadn't proven quite so cooperative.

  As soon as the lander had ducked into the thicker layers of this little world's surprising deep atmosphere, strong winds had gripped it. The mission planners had expected the unexpected; there had been no time or resources to model the Red Moon's meteorology in detail. But none of that had helped ease Malenfant's mind as he lay helpless in his bucket seat, buffeted like a toy in the hands of a careless child, watching their landing ellipse whip away beneath the lander's prow.

  The lander's autonomous systems had looked actively for an alternative site suitable for a safe and controlled landing. But another gust stranded the lander over the Beltway itself. When it realized that it was running out of altitude and that soon it would reach a line of cliffs, beyond which there was only ocean – the lander had taken a metaphorical deep breath and dumped itself in the forest.

  "The trees appear to be predominantly spruce," Nemoto said. "The growths are tall, somewhat spindly. If we had come down in a forest more typical of Earth –"

  "I know," Malenfant growled. "We'd have crumpled like a cardboard box. You know, that path we cut through the trees reminds me of Star City. Moscow. Yuri Gagarin's jet trainer came down into forest, and cut its way through the trees just like that. Ever since, they have cropped the trees to preserve the path. Gagarin's last walk from the sky."

  "But our landing was not so terminal," Nemoto said dryly. "Not yet anyhow."

  The sturdy little craft could never make another descent – but that didn't matter, for it didn't need to. The plan for the return to Earth was that Malenfant and Nemoto would fit a rocket pack to the lander's rear end, raise the assembly upright, and take off vertically. And since the lander's shell, sheltering its crew, hadn't crumpled or broken or otherwise lost its integrity, the return flight might still be possible. All Malenfant had to do to get home, then, was to find the rocket pack when it came floating down from the sky after its separate journey from Earth – completing its lunar surface rendezvous, as the mission planners had called it – fit it and launch.

  Oh, and find Emma.

  Malenfant turned away from the lander and walked tentatively towards the edge of the forest. The gravity was indeed eerie, and it was hard not t
o break into a run.

  The trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with parasites. Here a single snake-like liana wound around a trunk; there a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a knot of ferns, orchids and other plants. From a bole in one aged trunk, an eye peered out at him. It was steady, unblinking, like an owl's. He backed away, cautiously.

  He found a tall, palm-like tree, with dead brown fronds piled at its base. He crouched down and rummaged in the litter until he had reached crimson dirt. It was dry and sandy, evidently poor in nutrients. When he touched it to his lips, it tasted sharply of blood, or iron. He spat out the grains. The dust seemed to drift slowly to the ground.

  He picked out yellow fruit from the debris of fronds. With a sideways glance at his shoulder camera, he said, "Here's some fruit that seems to have fallen from the tree up there. You can see it is shaped like a bent cylinder. It is yellow, and its skin is smooth and soft to the touch –"

  A small brown ball unrolled from the middle of the nest of fronds. Malenfant yelped, stumbling back. The ball sprouted four stubby legs and shot out into the clearing. Malenfant had glimpsed beady black eyes, a spiky hide, for all the world like a hedgehog.

  Nemoto walked up to him, her camera tracking the small creature.

  "The double-domes said there would be no small animals here," he grumbled. "Thin air, fast metabolism –"

  "A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis, Malenfant. Perhaps our small friend evolved greater lung surfaces through a novel strategy like folding, or even a fractal design. Perhaps she conserves energy by spending periods dormant, like some reptiles. We are here to learn, after all." She grabbed the fruit. "Your description of this banana was acute." She peeled it briskly, exposing soft white flesh, and bit into it. "But it is a banana. A little stringy, the taste thin, but definitely Musa sapientum. And, of course, the thinness of the taste might be an artifact of the body fluid redistribution we have both suffered as a result of our spaceflight."