Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  It was a Nutcracker-man. Joshua relaxed.

  Mary stumbled closer to Joshua, making a cracking noise.

  The Nutcracker-man turned his great head with its sculpted skull ridge and giant cheekbones. Perhaps he saw them; if he did he showed no concern. He pulled his bamboo towards his mouth and bit sideways at the trunk, seeking the pithy interior. As he chewed, the heavy muscles that worked his jaw expanded and contracted, making his entire head move.

  Though slow and foolish and easily trapped, the Nutcrackers' muscles made them formidable opponents. But the Nutcrackers rarely ventured from their forests, and when they did they showed no instinct for aggression against the Hams. Likewise the Hams did not eat people. The two kinds of people had little in common and nothing to fight about, and simply avoided each other.

  After a short time the Nutcracker-man finished his bamboo. He slid effortlessly away into the green, placing his hands and feet slowly and methodically, but he moved rapidly and almost noiselessly, soon outstripping any effort Joshua might have made to catch him.

  Out of curiosity Joshua and Mary tried the bamboo. It took both of them to crack a trunk as thick as the one the Nutcracker had pulled over with one hand, and when he tried to bite into it Joshua's teeth slid off the trunk's glossy casing.

  They moved deeper into the forest. The sun, showing in glittering fragments through the dense canopy, was now high. But Joshua caught occasional glimpses of the sea, and he kept it to his right, so that he knew he was working roughly the way the floating black and white seed had fallen. Mary kept close behind him. Her biceps showed, hard and massive, beneath the tight skins wrapped around her arms.

  And now there was another shadow passing through the forest ahead. But this time there was much more noise. Maybe it was a bear, careless of who or what heard it. They both crouched down in a dense patch of tangled branches, and peered out fearfully.

  The shadow was small, even slender.

  It was just a man, and a feeble-looking man at that, with nothing like the bulk of a Ham, still less a Nutcracker. He was a Skinny: surely a Zealot. He wore skins wrapped closely around his limbs and torso, and he carried a length of bamboo tube. His face was covered by an ugly mass of black beard, and he was muttering to himself as he blundered noisily through the forest.

  With some care he selected a broad-trunked tree. He sat down beneath it. He reached into his trousers to scratch his testicles, and emitted a long, luxurious fart. Then he raised the bamboo to his lips. To Joshua's astonishment, a foamy liquid gushed from the bamboo into the man's mouth. "Up your arse, Praisegod Michael." He raised the flask, and drank again. Soon he began to wail. "There is a lady, sweet and kind..."

  Mary clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. The Zealot was squealing like a sickly child.

  Joshua was fascinated by the bamboo flask, by the way the murky liquid poured out into the man's mouth and down his bearded chin.

  The Zealot finished off the contents of his flask. He settled further back against his tree trunk, tucking his arms into his sleeves. He had a broad-rimmed hat on his head, and as he reclined it tipped down over his eyes, hiding his face. His mouth popped open, and soon rattling snores issued from it.

  Joshua and Mary crept forward until they stood over the sleeping Zealot. Joshua bent to pick up the bamboo. He tipped it upside down. A little foamy fluid dripped onto his palm. He licked it curiously. The taste was sour, but seemed to fill his head with sharpness.

  He inspected the bamboo more closely. Its end had been stopped by a plug of wood, and a loop of leather attached another plug that, with some experimentation, Joshua managed to fit into the open end of the tube, sealing it. Joshua's people carried their water in their hands, or sometimes plaited leaves or hollowed-out fruit. Though they would have been capable of it, it had never occurred to them to make anything like the Zealot's bamboo flask.

  Mary, meanwhile, was crouching over the Zealot. She was studying his clothing. Joshua saw that it had been cut from finely treated skin. The skin had been heavily modified, with whorls and zigzag lines and crosses scratched into it and colored with some white mineral. The edges of the various pieces of skin had been punctured. Then a length of vegetable twine had been pushed through the puncture holes, to hold the bits of skin together. Mary picked at the seams and hems with her blunt fingers; she had never seen anything like it.

  Joshua found the patterns on the skins deeply disturbing. He had seen their like before, on other Zealot artifacts. To Joshua the patterns made by the markings were at the limit of his awareness, neither there nor not there, flickering like ghosts between the rooms of his mind.

  Now Mary's searching fingers found something dangling around the man's neck on a piece of thread. It was a bit of bone, that was all, but it had been shaped, more finely than Abel's best tools.

  Joshua studied the bone. Suddenly a man surged out of the carving: his face contorted, his hands outstretched, and his chest ripped open to reveal his heart.

  Joshua screamed. He grabbed the bit of bone and yanked it so the thread around the Skinny's neck broke, and he hurled it away into the forest.

  The Skinny woke with a gulping snore. He sat up abruptly, and his hat fell off his head. Seeing the two hulking Hams, he raised his hands to the sky and began to yell. "Oh, Heaven help me! By God's wounds, help me!"

  Mary looked up into the sky, trying to see who he was speaking to. But of course there was nobody there. The Skinny-folk were immersed in madness: they would talk to the sky, the trees, the patterns on their clothes or ornaments, as if those things were people, but they were not.

  So Mary sat on the Zealot's chest, crushing him to the ground; he gasped under her weight. "Stop talkin' sky! Stop!" The bearded Zealot howled. She slapped him across the face. The Zealot's head was jerked sideways, and he instantly became limp. Mary backed away. "Dead?"

  Joshua, reluctantly, bent closer. The Zealot had fouled himself, perhaps when Mary had leapt on him; a thin slime of filthy piss trickled from his trouser legs. But his chest rose and fell steadily. "No' dead."

  Mary, her eyes wide under her lowering brow ridges, said, "Kill?"

  Joshua grimaced. "Bad meat. Leave for th' bears."

  "Yes," Mary said doubtfully. "Leave for th' bears."

  They wiped their hands clean of the Zealot's filth on handfuls of leaves. Then they turned and pushed on, heading steadily north.

  After a time, Joshua stepped cautiously into a clearing.

  The trees here were battered and twisted. When he looked to the west, he saw how they had been smashed down and broken back to make a great gully through the forest.

  And to the east, at the tip of this gully, was the seed from the sky.

  He gazed at the blocky shape at the end of the huge trench, excitement warring with apprehension. It was a mound of black and white, half-concealed by smashed foliage. It was surrounded by bits of blue skin – or not skin; a bit of it fluttered against his leg, a membrane finer than any skin he had ever seen.

  It was so strange he could barely even make it out.

  Mary, nervous, had stayed back in the fringe of the forest.

  "Ware," she said. "Zealots."

  Joshua knew it was true. He could smell the smoke of their hearths, their burned meat. They were now very close to the Zealots' camp.

  But the lure of the sky seed was irresistible. He began to work his way around the edge of the clearing, stepping over fallen tree trunks, shoving aside smashed branches, ready to duck back into the forest's green shadows.

  The sky seed was big, bigger than any animal, perhaps as big as the hut where the people lived. He saw that the thing had fallen here after crashing through the trees, almost reaching the point where the forest gave out at the edge of the cliff itself.

  But that was all the sense he could make of it.

  He had no words to describe it, no experience against which to map it. Even the touch of it was unfamiliar: glossy black or white, the patches separated by clear
straight lines, the soft surface neither hot nor cold, neither skin nor stone nor wood. It was difficult for him even to see the thing. He would study some part of it – like the small neat puncture-holes on one part of its hide, surrounded by scorch-marks – but then his gaze would slide away from the strangeness, seeking some point of familiarity and finding none.

  "Back," Mary hissed to Joshua.

  He made out the telltale signs that Skinny-folk had been here: the narrow footmarks in the raw dirt, the remains of the burnt rolls of leaves they liked to carry in their mouths. The Zealots had indeed been here too, inspecting the sky seed, just as he was.

  But, despite the imminence of danger, he could not abandon this sky seed. It repelled him – yet it attracted him, like the carving on a Skinny-folk spear. Drawn close, driven away, he hovered.

  He came to a sudden decision.

  He bent and applied his shoulder to the blunt rear of the sky seed. It was lighter than it looked, and it ground forward through the dirt. But soon he was coming up against the resistance of the last battered trees at the cliff's edge.

  "Joshua!" Mary hissed.

  "Help push." And he applied himself again.

  She tried to make him give up his self-appointed task, wheedling and plucking at his skins. But when she saw he wouldn't come away, she joined him at the back of the sky seed. She was not yet fully grown, but her strength was already immense, enough to drive the sky seed forward, crunching through the spindly cliff-edge trees.

  With a screeching scrape, the sky seed pitched over the raw rock lip of the cliff and lurched out of sight. After a last tortured groan, silence fell.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  "Soon, something will appear in the sky," Babo said. "A satellite, like those of the outer planets. Earth will have a Moon, for the first time in its history."

  Manekato scratched her head. "How? By some gravitational deflection?"

  "No. Like a Mapping, I think. But not a Mapping. The truth is nobody knows, Mane. But the Astrologers can see it is approaching, in the shivers of the starlight."

  "It must be artificial, this moving of a Moon. A contrivance."

  "Yes, of course. It is a deliberate act. But we do not know the agents or their motive."

  Manekato thought through the implications. "There will be tides," she said. "Earthquakes. Great waves."

  "Yes. And that is the danger posed to our Farm, and some others."

  Suddenly she was filled with hope. "Is that why I am here? Is it possible to avert this Moon – to save the Farm?"

  "No," he said, sadly but firmly.

  She pulled away from him. "You talked of my mission. What mission, if the Farm is doomed?"

  "You must travel to the Moon," said Babo.

  "Impossible," she spanned. "No Mapping has ever been attempted over such a distance."

  "Nevertheless you must make it possible," Babo said. "You must use the resources of the Farm to achieve it."

  "And if I reach the Moon?"

  "Then you must find those responsible for sending this rogue here. You must make them remove it, and have them assure you it will not return." He forced a smile. "We are a species good at negotiation, Mane. The Lineages could not have survived otherwise. You are all but a matriarch, the matriarch of Poka Lineage. You will find a way. Go to the Moon, Mane – take this chance. I will be with you, if you wish. If you succeed, Poka will be granted new land. We have pledges..."

  "And if I fail – or refuse?"

  He stiffened. "Then our Lineage will die with us. Of course."

  "Of course – "

  There was a fizz of purple light, a stink of ozone. A Worker fell from the sky and landed in the center of the room. Semi-sentient, it raised a sketchy face and peered at them. Recognizing Manekato, it gave her the doleful news it had brought, its voice flat and unengaged.

  Orphaned, brother and sister clung to each other as they wept.

  Reid Malenfant

  After days of pressure from Malenfant, McCann agreed to lead them in an orderly expedition back to the crash site of the lander. Malenfant felt a vast relief, as if he was being let out of jail: at last, some progress.

  First, McCann inspected them critically. "I'll have Julia fit you both with buckskin. One must go cannily. You'll stand out a mile in those sky-blue nursery rompers."

  The buckskin gear turned out to be old and musty – presumably manufactured, with much labor, for deceased inhabitants of this place. And McCann loaned Malenfant and Nemoto calf-length leather boots, to keep out the snakes and the bugs. The boots were ill-fitting, and much worn. The gear was heavy, stiff and hot to wear, and its rough interior scratched Malenfant's skin. But it was substantial, feeling like a suit of armor, and was obscurely comforting.

  McCann wore a suit of sewn skin and a Davy Crocket hat; he had a crossbow on his back, and a belt of flechettes over his shoulder. He looked capable, tough and well-adapted.

  Malenfant wrapped up his coverall and other bits of gear in a skin pack that he wore on his back. He insisted Nemoto do the same; he wanted to be sure they didn't have to return here if they got the chance to get away.

  A party of six Hams was gathered in the courtyard. They were all squat, burly men. The Hams wore their peculiar wrappings of skin, tied in place by bits of thong or vegetable rope, not shaped or sewn. They carried weapons, spears and clubs on loops of rope or tucked into their belts, and their broad elliptical heads were shaded by hats of woven grass.

  One of them was Thomas, the man who had rescued Malenfant and Nemoto from the wild Runners in the first place.

  Malenfant couldn't figure out why the Hams had gotten the lens to him (or come to that how they knew he would be interested). Maybe they just like the story, Malenfant thought, the guy who flies to another world in search of his wife. Just like the American taxpayer. Or maybe there are aspects of these quasi people none of us will ever understand.

  When Malenfant approached to thank him, Thomas shook his hand, an oddly delicate gesture he must have learned from the stranded English, taking care not to crush Malenfant's bones. But, when Malenfant questioned him away from the others, he would say nothing of where he had found Emma's lens.

  Two Hams opened the gates of the stockade, and the little party formed up. McCann was to ride in a kind of litter – "What a Portugoose would call a machila, I'm told." The litter, just a platform of wood, was to be borne by two Hams, and McCann had offered the same to Malenfant and Nemoto.

  Malenfant had refused.

  Nemoto had been skeptical. "You are sentimental, Malenfant. After a few hours you may long for a ride. And besides, the Hams are well capable of bearing our weight. They are treated well –"

  "That's not the point."

  "Survival is the point. What else?"

  Anyhow, with the sun still climbing – with McCann's litter in the van, Malenfant and Nemoto walking in the center with Hams beside and behind them – the little party set off.

  McCann said they would take a roundabout route to the lander. It would take longer, but would avoid the densest forest and so would be less problematic.

  They walked through the forest. The air was laden with moisture and without a breath of wind. The sweat was soon dripping from Malenfant's scalp into his eyes, and his buckskin was clinging to his back as if glued there.

  The Hams walked barefoot along a trail that was invisible to Malenfant, with their feet splayed at wide angles, making fast, short steps, almost delicate. Malenfant tried to keep up. But the brown sheets of dead leaves on top of wet mud made him slip, or he would walk into thorny lianas, or trip over the surface roots that splayed out from the boles of the largest trees. As the feet and legs of the Ham in front began to blur, he realized he was going to have to imitate the Ham's small movements, but he lost further ground as he tried to master the oddly precise mincing motions.

  McCann walked alongside Malenfant, musing. "Hear how quiet it is. One does miss birdsong. Africa is full of birds, of course: parrots and plovers, k
ingfishers and skimmers. How sad a world without the song of birds, Malenfant."

  Here was a canthium tree: a massive straight black trunk, branches spreading high above the palms. "Keep away from it," McCann said. "The flowers stink like corpses – to attract flies, you see, which carry its pollen. The pre-sapients keep away from it. The trunk is covered in biting ants – " He froze, and held Malenfant's arm. "Look there. An Elf." He dropped to all fours and crawled forward, hiding behind a tree.

  Malenfant followed suit. The two of them finished lying in cold mud, side by side, peering through a brush of greenery.

  A man sat on a bough, a few feet off the ground – a dwarfish, naked, hairy man with a face like a chimp's, and no forehead to speak of. He had long legs like a human, long arms like an ape. He pulled twigs towards his face and bit off leaves, with thick, active lips. His face was black, his eyes brown, sheltered by a thick brow of bone. He moved slowly, thoughtfully.

  A twig cracked.

  The Elf stopped eating. He leaned forward, rocked from side to side to see better. He urinated, a stream of acrid piss that splashed to the floor not feet from Malenfant's face.

  Then he turned away and called. "Oo-hah!"

  Suddenly there were more of them, more Elves, shadowy figures with glinting eyes and empty hands. They had black faces and palms and soles. If they had crouched like chimpanzees it would have been okay, but they didn't; they stood eerily upright, as if their bodies had been distorted in some hideous lab. They were wrong, and Malenfant shivered.

  "There are ways to trap them," McCann whispered. "Though their more robust cousins the Nutcrackers provide better meat. You hunt with special spears, twelve feet long. Then you goad the Nutcracker-man, until he charges onto your spear point..."

  The first Elf man stood up straight on his bough. He opened his mouth wide, revealing pink gums and impressive canines, and let out a series of short, piercing barks. He slapped the tree trunk and rattled a branch.