Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  "Ask Ol' Ones," she said softly.

  "Who?"

  Th' Ol' Ones. As' them wha' for."

  "The Old Ones? Where do they live?"

  She shrugged, her shoulders moving volcanically. "In th' ol'est place."

  He frowned. "What about you, Julia?"

  "Baas?"

  "What do you want?"

  "Home," she said immediately.

  "Home? Where is home?"

  She pointed into the sky. "Gray Earth."

  "Does Mr. McCann know you want to go home?"

  She shrugged again. "Born here."

  "What?"

  She pointed to herself. "Born here. Mother. Moth' born here."

  "Then this is your home, with Mr. McCann."

  She shook her head, a very human gesture. She pointed again to the forest, and the sky.

  Then she said, "You, Baas? What you wan'?"

  He hesitated. "I came looking for my wife."

  Her face remained expressionless. But she said, "Fam'ly."

  "Yes. I guess so. Emma is my family. I came here looking for her."

  "Lon' way."

  "Yes. Yes, it was a long way. And I ain't there yet."

  She walked towards him, rummaging in the pouch of her skirt. "Thomas," she said.

  "I know him. He found me."

  "Took off of Runner in fores'." She held out something in the dark, something small and jewel-like that glittered in her palm.

  He took it, held it up to the light of the window. It was a hand-lens, badly scuffed, snapped off at its mount. It was marked with the monogram of the South African air force.

  "Emma," he breathed. He was electrified. So there were indeed things McCann didn't know, even about the Hams of his own household. "Julia, where –"

  But she had gone.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  "I have three wives and six children. That is how it is done in my new home..." Babo was talking fast, nervously, and his knuckles rattled as he walked with her through the tall dark halls of the building. His body hair was plaited and colored in a fashion that repelled Mane's simple Poka tastes. "The Farm is fine, Mane, and bigger than that of the Poka Lineage, but its design is based on the triangle: plane-covering, of course, but cramped and cluttered compared to Poka's clean-lined hexagons."

  "You always were an aesthete," she said dryly.

  This whole building, she realized slowly, was a store of records piled up high from the lowest room to the highest. Physically, some of the records were stored in twinkling cubes that held bits of the quantum foam, minuscule wormholes frozen into patterns of meaning; and some were scraped onto parchment and animal skin.

  "Some of these pieces are very ancient indeed," Babo said. "Dating back half a million years or more. And the Air Wall, you know, is a controlled storm. It is like a hurricane, but trapped in one place by subtle forces. It has raged here, impotent, for fifty thousand years – so that for all that time the Market has been in the eye of the storm – an eye that reveals the sky beyond the clouds, a sky opened for the study of the Astrologers..."

  She stopped and glared at him. "Oh, Babo, I don't want to know about Air Walls or records! I never thought I would see you again – I didn't know you had become an Astrologer."

  He sighed, ruminatively picking his nose. "I am no Astrologer. But the Astrologers sent for me. When I was younger I did spend some time here, working informally, before I reached the home of my wives. Many boys do, Mane. You matriarchs run the world, but there is much you do not know, even about those who sire your children!"

  "Why are you here, Babo?"

  He wrapped his big hands over his head. "Because the Astrologers thought it would be kinder that way. Kinder if your brother told you the news, rather than a stranger..."

  "What news?"

  He grabbed her hand, pulling her. "Come see the sky with me. Then I'll tell you everything."

  Reluctantly, she followed.

  The building was tall, and they had a long way to ascend. At first they used simple short-range isomorphic Mappers, but soon they came to more primitive parts of the building, and they had to climb, using rungs stapled to walls of crude bricks.

  Babo led the way. "A remarkable thing," he called down to her. "We find climbing easy; our arms are strong, our feet well adapted to grasping. But it appears that our climbing ancestors evolved into creatures that, for a time, walked upright, on their hind feet. You can see certain features of the position of the pelvis – well. But we have given that up too; now, once more, we walk on all fours, using our knuckles, clinging to the ground."

  "If you tried to walk upright you would be knocked over by the Wind."

  "Of course, of course – but then why is it we carry traces of a bipedal ancestry? We are creatures of anomaly, Mane. We are not closely related to any of the animals on this Earth of ours – not one, not above a certain basic biochemical equivalence of course, without which we could not eat our food and would quickly starve to death. We can trace evolutionary relationships among all the world's creatures, one related to the other in a hierarchy of families and phyla – except us. We seem to be unique, as if we fell out of the sky. We have no evolutionary forebears, no bones in the ground that might mark the passing of those who came before us.

  "Is it possible we evolved somewhere else? – a place where the Wind did not blow so strongly, where it was possible to walk upright?"

  "What sort of place? And how could we have got here from there?"

  "I don't know. Nobody knows. But the pattern of the bones, the biochemistry, is unmistakable."

  "Idle speculation, Babo, won't germinate a single seed."

  "A Farmer's practical reply," he said sadly. "But we are surrounded by mystery, Manekato. The Astrologers hope that your mission will settle some of these fundamental quandaries. Oh, please keep climbing, dear Mane! We are soon there, and I will tell you everything."

  With bad grace, clinging to the rungs with feet and hands, she continued her ascent.

  They reached a platform, open to the sky. But there was no breeze, and the air felt as warm as it had inside the tower.

  Babo walked around nervously, peering into the sky. "It is darkling already. Our days are short, because the planet spins quickly – did you ever reflect on that. Mane? It didn't have to be so. Earth could spin more slowly, and we would have leisurely days, and – oh, look!" He pointed with a long stabbing finger. "Look, a star!"

  She peered up awkwardly. There was a single bright star, close to the zenith, set against the deepening blue of the sky.

  "How strange," Babo breathed, "that before the first tentative Mappings no human eye saw a star."

  Manekato grunted. "What of it? Stars are trivial. You don't need to see them."

  That was true, of course. Every child was expected to figure out the stars.

  When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of objects: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other things. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.

  Of course the results of such trials varied – in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind. But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.

  Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.

  "Ah, but the detail is everything," Babo said, "and that you can never predict, of course. That and the beauty. That was quite unexpected, to me. Oh, and one other thing. The emptiness of the universe..."

  Manekato's childhood cohort, like most others, had concluded – groping with an intuition of uniformity – that if this world was inhabited, and the universe was large – well, then, there must be many inhabited planets. She recalled what a great and unwelcome surprise i
t had been to learn that that was not true: that, as far as could be discerned, the universe was empty of the organization that would have marked the work of intelligence.

  "It is a deep, ancient mystery," Babo said. "Why do we see no Farms in the sky? Of course we are a sedentary species, content to cultivate our Farms. But not every species need have the same imperatives as us. Imagine an acquisitive species, that covets the territory of others."

  She thought it through quickly. "That is outlandish and unlikely. Such a species would surely destroy itself in fratricidal battles, as the illogic of its nature worked itself out."

  "Perhaps. But wouldn't we see the flaring of the wars, the mighty ruins they left behind? We should see them, Mane."

  She snapped, "Babo, get to the point."

  He sighed and came to squat before her. Gently he groomed her, picking imaginary insects from her coat, as he had when they were children. "Mane, dear Mane, the Astrologers have read the stars..."

  The word "astrology", in Manekato's ancient, rich language, derived from older roots meaning "the word of the stars". Here astrology had absorbed astronomy and physics and other disciplines; here astrology was no superstition, no foolishness, but one of the fundamental sciences. For if the universe was empty of mind save for humans, then the courses of the stars could have no meaning save for their role in the affairs of humanity.

  And now, Babo said, the Astrologers, peering into the sky and poring over records dozens of millennia deep, had discerned a looming threat.

  Joshua

  Mary was in estrus. The scent of her seemed to fill the air of the hut, and the head of every man.

  Joshua longed for the time of her blood to pass, and she and the other women could recede to the gray periphery of his awareness. For the deep ache aroused by Mary distracted him from the great conundrum which plagued him.

  Over and over he thought of the great blue wings he had seen falling from the sky, bearing that fat black and white seed to its unknown fate in the forest at the top of the cliff. He had never seen such a thing before. What was it?

  Joshua's was a world that did not countenance change. And yet, a stubborn awareness told him, there was change. Once the people had lived on the Gray Earth. Now they lived here. So the past contained a change. And now the black and white seed had fallen from the sky, and whatever grew from it surely marked change to come in the future as well.

  Change in the past, change in the future.

  Joshua, helplessly conservative himself, had an instinctive grasp of parsimony: his world contained two extraordinary events – Gray Earth and sky seed – and surely they must be linked. But how? The elements of the conundrum revolved in his head.

  Joshua had solved puzzles before.

  Once, as a boy, he had found a place where Abel, his older brother, had knapped out a burin. It was just a patch of dune where stone flakes were scattered, in a rough triangle that showed where Abel had sat. Joshua had picked over the debris, curious. Later, in the hut, he had found the discarded burin itself. It was a fine piece of work, slender and sharp, and yet fitting easily into Joshua's small hand. And he remembered the spall outside.

  He sat where his brother had sat – one leg outstretched, the other tucked underneath. He reached for bits of the spall, and tried to fit them back onto the finished tool. One after another he found flakes that nestled closely into the hollows and valleys of the tool, and then more flakes which clustered around them.

  Soon there were more flakes than he could hold in his hands, so he put down his assemblage carefully, and climbed a little way up the cliff behind the hut. He found a young tree sprouting from a hollow, and bled it of sap. With the sticky stuff cradled in his hands he ran back to his workplace, and began to fix the flakes to the tool with dabs of the sap. The sap clung to his fingers, and soon the whole thing was a sticky mess. But he persisted, ignoring the sun that climbed steadily into the sky.

  At last he had used up almost all the large flakes he could find on the ground, and there was nothing left there but a little dust. And he had almost reassembled the cobble from which the burin had been carved.

  Shouting with excitement he ran into the hut, cradling his reconstruction. But he had received a baffled response. Abel had picked at the sticky assemblage of flakes, saying, "What, what?"

  A cobble was a cobble, until it was turned into a tool, and then the cobble no longer existed. Just as Jacob had been a man until he died, and then there was only a mass of meat and bones, soon to be devoured by the worms. To turn a tool back into a cobble was almost as strange to the people as if Joshua had tried to turn Jacob's bones back into the man himself.

  Eventually Abel crushed the little stone jigsaw. The gummy flakes stuck to his hand, and he brushed them off on the dusty ground, growling irritably.

  But in some corner of his spacious cranium Joshua had never forgotten how he had solved the puzzle of the shattered cobble. Now, as he pondered the puzzle of the multiple earths and the falling seed, Joshua found that long-ago jigsaw cobble pricking his memory.

  And when a second seed fell from the sky – another fat black and white bundle suspended under a blue canopy, landing where the first had lodged at the top of the cliffs – he knew that he could not rest until he had seen for himself what mighty tree might sprout from those strange seeds.

  Joshua approached Abel and Saul and other men to accompany him on his jaunt up the cliff face. But there was no purpose to his mission – no game to be hunted, no useful rock, no foraging save for the huge enigmatic seeds which had slid silently over the surface of everybody else's mind.

  And besides, everybody knew there was danger at the top of the cliff. The camp of the Zealots was there, in the center of a great clearing hacked crudely out of the forest. The Zealots were Skinny-folk. They were easily bested if you could ever get one engaged in close quarters. But the Zealots were cunning, and their heads were full of madness: they could baffle the most powerful of the Hams. They were best avoided.

  Joshua tried to go alone. He set foot on the rough goat trail that led by gully and switchback turn up to that cliff-crest forest.

  The trail was easy enough, but he soon turned back. The isolation worked on him, soon making him feel as if he didn't exist at all. The People of the Gray Earth needed nothing in life so much as each other.

  But word of his project permeated the gossip-ridden hut. A few days later, to his surprise, he was approached by the young girl Mary, who asked him about the cliff, and the forest, and the strange sky seed.

  And a day after that, to his greater surprise, she accompanied him on the trail.

  She gossiped all the way to the top of the cliff. "...Ruth say Abel skinny as an En'lish. An' Ruth tell tha' to Miriam. An' Miriam tell Caleb, an' Caleb tell Abel. An' Abel throw rocks and skins all over th' hut. So Abel couple Miriam, and he tell Caleb about tha', and he tell Ruth. And Ruth say..."

  Unlike himself she was no loner. She was immersed in her little society. By comparison it was as if he couldn't even see or hear the vibrant, engaged people she described.

  All of which made it still stranger that she should choose to accompany him on this purposeless jaunt. But Mary was at a key moment in her life, and a certain wanderlust was in her blood right now. Soon she would have to leave the security of the hearths her mother built, and share her life with the men, and with the children who would follow. To cross from one side of a skin hut to the other was an immense journey for someone like Mary. And as nervous courage empowered her for that great adventure, she seemed ready, for the time being, to take on much more outlandish quests.

  She was not in estrus, to Joshua's great relief. As he made his careful way up the cliff face he was pleased not to have the distraction of his own singing blood.

  They reached the top of the cliff. Here they found a shrub laden with bright yellow fruit, and they sat side by side at the cliff's edge, plucking the fruit, their broad feet dangling in the air. They gazed out in silence towards the east, and th
e sea.

  The sun was still rising, and its light glimmered from the sea's steel-gray, wrinkled hide. The distinct curve of the world was reflected in layers of scattered purple clouds which hovered over the sea. Joshua could see the grassy plain where he lived, sweeping towards the ocean, terminating in dune fields and pale sand. Near the squat brown shape of the hut itself, people moved to and fro, tiny and clear. He followed streams, shining lines of silver that led towards the sea.

  A small group of antelopes picked their way through the morning grass. One of them looked up, as if staring directly at him.

  Joshua felt himself dissolve, out from the center of his head, to the periphery of the world. There was no barrier around him, no layer of interpretation or analogy or nostalgia; for now he was the plain and the sea and the clouds, and he was the slim doe that looked up at the cliff, just as he was the stocky, quiet man who gazed down from it. For a time he was immersed in the world's beauty in a way no human could have shared.

  Then, by unspoken consent, Joshua and Mary folded their legs under them and stood. Side by side, they walked into the forest that crowded close to the cliff.

  The green dark was a strong contrast to the bright sea vista. It was not a comfortable place to be.

  Washed by the salty air off the sea, the forest was chill, thick with a clammy moisture that settled into Joshua's bones. And as they penetrated deeper the ground was covered in a tangled mass of roots, branches, leaves and moss, so that in some places Joshua couldn't see the actual surface at all. He slipped, stumbled and crashed over the undergrowth, making a huge amount of noise.

  Mary started to shiver and complain, growing increasingly fearful. But Joshua pulled his skin wraps tighter around him and shoved his way deeper into the forest.

  A shadow slid through the wood, just a little way ahead, utterly silent.

  Joshua and Mary both froze. Joshua bunched his fists. Was it a Zealot?

  The shadow slowed to a halt, and Joshua made out a squat, stocky body, with short legs and immensely long arms, the whole covered by a dark brown layer of hair. A hand reached out and grabbed a bamboo tree. The tree was pulled down until it cracked, and drawn towards a gaping mouth.