Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  The others joined in, whooping with rage. Their hair was suddenly erect, which made them look twice the size, and they stamped and shook branches in a frenzy. It was quite a display, Malenfant thought, a mass of noise and movement.

  Then the man in the tree turned, bent over and let out an explosion of feces that showered over Malenfant and McCann.

  Malenfant brushed gloopy shit off his head. "Jesus. What a situation."

  McCann was laughing.

  Now McCann's Hams stood up. They yelled and banged their spears together, or against-logs and tree trunks.

  The Elves turned and ran, melting into the green shadows as fast as they had appeared.

  Malenfant was relieved when they broke out of the forest, just as McCann had promised, and he found himself walking through a more open country, a kind of parkland of grass and scattered clumps of trees.

  Nemoto trudged sourly beside him, her small face hidden by a broad straw hat.

  There were herbs in the grass, and when they were crushed by bare Neandertal feet they sent up a rich aroma. The sun was strong on Malenfant's face, and the blue Earth rode high in the sky. Malenfant felt lifted, exhilarated – even giddy, he thought, anoxic perhaps, and he made sure he kept his breathing deep and even, making the most of the thin air.

  McCann noticed Malenfant's mood. With a touch of the stubby whip he called a sjambok, he directed his Ham bearers to carry him closer to Malenfant. "Quite a day, isn't it, Malenfant? You know, I believe that with a knight's move of that mopani tree over here one might take that kopje, with the thicket of wild banana, over there."

  Malenfant forced a laugh. "Remember, I'm a checkers man."

  McCann was clutching a battered Gladstone bag on his lap, from which he extracted water and ointments to dab on his face, neck and wrists. He looked sideways at Malenfant, as if apologetically. "I fear I may have come across as something less than a man to you, on our first meetings."

  "Not at all."

  "It's just that one is so desperate for company. But you mustn't think that I am protesting my lot. I draw strength from the teachings of my father – I grew up in a kirk on the Scottish borders – which took a grip on my mind from early days. My father made me a fatalist in creed: man is but a playing-piece in the hands of the Maker. Chess again, eh? And so it was foreordained that I should be brought to this distant shore. But I admit to a great deal of pleasure in my new home on a day like today. Much of it is familiar. In my time here I've spotted wildebeest, kudu, impala. There are few birds in flight, but you'll find flightless, clucking versions of quail, partridge, pheasant..."

  "But it isn't your true home," Malenfant said gently. "Nor mine. It's not even from the right universe. Just as it isn't home for these Hams, is it?"

  McCann eyed him sharply. "You've been talking to the fragrant Julia – their legend of the Gray Earth, the place in the sky from which they stumbled. Yes?" He laughed. "Well, it might even be true. Perhaps a party of bar-bars did fall through a shining portal, just as you say your wife did. But it was a blooming long time ago, Malenfant.

  "Listen. Once upon a time old Crawford got it into his head that there might be something of value in the ground here – gold, diamonds, even hidden treasure of obscure origin, perhaps laid down by some race of supermen. And he went digging – especially in the hearths and caves of the bar-bars. He had to turf out a few of them to do that, for they will cling to their domiciles. He found no treasure. But what he did find was more bar-bars, or anyhow traces of them, their buried bones mixed in with those peculiar knobkerries and assegais they favor in the wild. There was layer upon layer of bone, said old Crawford, in every place he dug.

  "Well, the meaning is obvious. These bar-bars have endured a long stretch on this exotic little world: they must surely have been here for hundreds of generations, thousands of years, or more. And in all that time they have clung to their dreams of home." He considered Malenfant. "You may think I am harsh with the bar-bars, Malenfant, or uncaring. I am not. Inferior they may be. But what memory lies buried in those deep skulls of theirs! – don't you think?"

  The country began to rise. The little party grew strung out. The grass grew thinner, the underlying crimson soil more densely packed.

  They reached the crest of a ridge and took a break. The ground was hard-packed here, covered thinly by bracken and little bushes like hazels. The party, drinking water from a pannikin handed around by a Ham, was surrounded by a thin, subsiding cloud of red dust.

  Malenfant stepped forward. The ground fell away before him, and he saw that this ridge curved around, making a neat circle. It was a bowl of greenery. A few improbably tall trees sprouted, but much of the basin was covered by grass that was littered with color, the yellow and white of marigolds and lilies. Pools glistened on the uneven floor, ringed by lush primeval-looking ferns.

  It was a crater, a classic impact formation a couple of miles across. Standing here, Malenfant heard distant calls and hoots. They were the cries of hominids, cousins to mankind, patrolling this forested crater. It was a startling, uplifting, utterly alien prospect.

  McCann was standing beside him. "Here we stand, men born on different worlds, confronting a third. Do you know your Plutarch, Malenfant? 'Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds... "Do you not think it lamentable that with such a vast multitude of worlds, we have not yet conquered one?" ' " He pointed with imperious confidence into the bowl of the crater. "There lies our Redoubtable – or at least her corpse. Come, you men."

  Brushing a walking stick before him, he strode off down the flank of the crater. Malenfant and Nemoto, and the Hams with their litter, hurried to follow.

  Malenfant came first on a rib of metal, heavily corroded, that arched into the air above him. Its smooth circular shape was a startling contrast to the fractal profusion of the greenery all around. He stepped under the rib, onto twisted and rusted metallic remnants that groaned under his weight. He found he was in a long cylindrical chamber, its walls extensively broken and corroded, open to the sky. When it was intact this tank must have been six or seven yards in diameter.

  Thorn bushes pushed through the base of the cylinder, and creepers curled over its sides; above, a thick canopy turned the light dim, moist and green. The ship had been a long time dead, and the vegetation had grown over and through it, concealing its remains.

  McCann walked in alongside him, followed by Nemoto. The Hams lingered on the fringe of the deeper forest, leaning on the litter and sipping water. Thomas kept an eye on McCann, but his gaze slid over the lines of the ship, as if it were a thing of mists and shadows, not really there.

  "This was the propellant tank," McCann said. He pointed with his stick. "You can see the bulkheads to either end, or what's left of 'em." McCann pushed on through mazes of piping and cables. Malenfant and Nemoto followed more cautiously, taking care of the sharp edges of twisted metal under their feet.

  McCann's figure was stocky and competent, and swathed in his treated animal skins he looked somehow right against the background of the fallen, smashed-open ship; Malenfant wondered how often he visited this relic of home.

  They passed through a ripped-open dome into another cylindrical tank. "Here we stored oxidants. Though of course much of the oxidant was drawn from the air."

  "A ramjet," Malenfant said to Nemoto.

  McCann came to a tangle of what looked like crude electrical equipment, valves and relays, so badly corroded it was an inseparable mass. "Control gear," he said. "For the pumps and valves and so forth." They passed through a more solid bulkhead, supported by heavy ribs, and arrived in what appeared to have been habitable quarters. There had been several decks, separated by two or three yards – but now tipped over, so the floors and ceilings had become walls. A fireman's pole ran along the length of this section, passing neatly through holes in the floors, horizontal now.

  McCann pointed out highlights with his stick. "Stores." Malenfant saw the crumpled remnants of bulk
y machines, perhaps recycling and cleansing devices for air and water, and refrigerated stores for food, but damaged by fire and gutted; they lay in the dark of the rocket's hull like fetuses in unhatched dinosaur eggs. "Infirmary, galley, sleeping quarters and such." Little was left here save a bare frame that might have held bunk beds, a heavy table bolted to the tilted over floor and fitted with leather restraints, perhaps intended for surgery, and the nubs of pipes and flues showed where galley equipment had been ripped out or salvaged.

  "And the bridge." At the nub of the ship, this had been lined with polished oak panels, now scuffed, broken and covered by lichen and moss. Brass portholes bore only fragments of the thick glass that had once lined them. There were heavy couch frames bolted to the floor, long since stripped of their soft coverings. Malenfant could make little of what must once have been instrument panels; now they were just rectangular hollows in the fascia, though he glimpsed tangles of wires behind.

  McCann saw him looking. "Once we realized the old lady wasn't serviceable we stripped out what we could. We built a succession of radio transmitters and heliographs. We got replies, of course, as long as the Earth – I mean, my Earth – still hovered in the sky. That, and promises of rescue, which assurances I have no doubt would have been fulfilled. We kept on trying even after Earth had gone, until the last generator seized up. Powered by a bicycling Runner, incidentally."

  "I'm sorry," Malenfant said. "She must have been a beautiful ship."

  "Oh, she was. Help me." Leaning on Malenfant's arm, he clambered stiffly up the hull wall, using gaping porthole sockets as hand- and footholds.

  Malenfant followed him. Soon the two of them stood side by side on the outer hull of the habitable section, surrounded by gashes and treacherous-looking rents. But McCann was confident in his step.

  From here Malenfant could make out the full sweep of the ship's length, a slim spear that must have been two hundred yards long. Its lovely back was broken; and green tendrils clutched at the ship, as if pulling it into the belly of the Moon that had killed it. But still a solitary fin poked out of the greenery, crumpled but defiant. The fin bore a faded roundel that reminded Malenfant of the logo of the Royal Air Force.

  The Ham man, Thomas, walked beside the ship close to McCann, keeping his eyes on the Englishman.

  "He is loyal," said Malenfant. "He looks out for you all the time."

  "He knows I have done my best to improve the lot of his people."

  Even if it didn't need improving, Malenfant thought. "But he seems to be having trouble looking at the rocket."

  "The bar-bar mind is rigid, Malenfant. Conservative beyond imagining, they are utterly resistant to the new. At the beginning we had a devil of a battle to keep them from destroying our gear – even when tamed, a bar-bar still harbors destructive tendencies."

  Malenfant recalled the fate of his shoulder camera. He said, "That almost seems superstitious."

  "Oh, not that. There is no superstition among the bar-bars: there is no magic in their world, no sense of the numinous. To them the surface of the world is everything; they do not see hidden meanings, nor seek deeper explanations."

  "They have no gods, then."

  "Nor can they even conceive of the possibility." McCann smiled. "And what a loss that is. I am sure they are well spared propitiations to the savage and bloody gods of the jungle. But they cannot know the Mercy of the one true God. You understand, it is not merely that they do not know Him – they cannot. And without God, there is no order to their lives, no meaning – save what we provide." He tapped Malenfant on the chest with the worn head of his walking stick. "I know you are uncomfortable with our relationship to these barbarians, Malenfant. I see it in your eyes. I've seen it in Africa, when men of conscience go among the Kaffirs there. But can't you see it is our duty to provide them with a Johannen way of life – even if they can't comprehend its meaning? – just as the philosophers and theologians have been proposing since the first steel clippers found these bar-bars' cousins running wild in the New World."

  Malenfant studied Thomas's face, but could see no hint of reaction to McCann's sermonizing.

  McCann began to talk briskly about the horsepower generated by the "Darwin engines" that had once powered the ship. "I know your little tub came gliding in like a bat. We applied a little more brute force. In the last stages of its descent the redoubtable was intended to land upright on Earth or Moon, standing on its rocket exhaust. And it should have taken off in the same manner."

  "Direct ascent," Malenfant said. It was a mode that had been considered for Apollo's lunar landings, a whole ship traversing back and forth between Earth and Moon. But aside from the greater expense compared to the final Lunar Module design, landing such a giant ship with rockets would have posed stability problems, like an ICBM landing on its tail.

  From McCann's descriptions, it sounded as if that had been the downfall of the Redoubtable.

  "She was a veteran," McCann said softly. "She had done the Earth-Moon round trip a dozen times or more. But now we were dealing with a new Moon, you see. Well, we hastily modified her for her new mission. She landed on her fins well enough on the fields at Cosford, but this crater floor is no tarmacadam strip in Shropshire. She was top-heavy, and – " He fell silent, studying the ruined carcass of the ship. "I was navigator; I must share responsibility for the disaster that followed. Most of us got out, by the Mercy of God." He clapped Malenfant on the back, forcing a laugh. "And since then our lovely ship has been scavenged to make cooking pots."

  "Erasmus Darwin," Nemoto called.

  Malenfant looked down.

  Nemoto was standing in the ruins of the habitable compartment, peering up at him. Her face was like a brown coin in the gloom. "The Darwin drive," she said. "Grandfather of Charles, who is probably the Darwin you're thinking of, Malenfant. In the 1770s he sketched a simple liquid-fuel rocket engine, along with a ramjet. In our world, the sketch languished unnoticed in his notebooks until the 1990s. But in Mr. McCann's world – "

  McCann nodded. "The design was the seed around which a new generation of rockets and missiles grew. After the pioneering work of Congreve, the Brunels, father and son, became involved in the development of craft capable of carrying heavy loads into the atmosphere. The first dummy load was orbited around the Earth before the death of Victoria, Empress of the Moon, and the first manned flight beyond the atmosphere was launched from Ceylon in 1920... Ah, but none of this happened in your world, did it, Malenfant? It is a divergence of history. In your world Darwin was ignored or forgotten, his ideas no doubt rediscovered by some other, more vigorous nation."

  "Something like that."

  Nemoto moved on, working her way through the ship's gloomy interior.

  McCann watched her, then leaned closer to Malenfant. "Always watching, thinking, recording, your little Oriental friend – eh, Malenfant?"

  "That's her way," Malenfant said cautiously. "And it's our mission. Part of it, anyhow."

  "And quite the fount of knowledge about obscure British philosophers two centuries dead." McCann's eyes narrowed. "I have observed the gadget she carries."

  Malenfant saw no point in lying. "It's called a softscreen."

  "Its working is no doubt beyond my comprehension, but its purpose is clear enough. It is a repository of knowledge, from which Madam Nemoto sips as she requires. I am a man of this dismal jungle now, Malenfant, but you need not think me a fool."

  "Take it easy, McCann."

  McCann frowned, as if decoding the colloquialism. "Without my shelter you would both surely be 'taking it easy' beneath the crimson dust by now. Remember that." When Malenfant did not answer, McCann clapped him on the shoulder again. "Enough of one beached vessel; let us seek another. Come." McCann began to clamber down to the ground, into the helpful arms of the Ham who served him.

  It took another two hours to reach the clearing dug out by the lander on its way down.

  The lander was gone.

  This was the place he remembered:
the Gagarin avenue

  cut through the trees, the scattered bushes and branches – and even bits of blue parafoil, grimy, damp, still clinging to the damaged foliage. But the lander was gone.

  McCann stalked over the grass, inspecting ripped-up bushes, scattered trees. "You're sure this is the place?"

  "It can't be."

  Nemoto approached him. "Malenfant, you are not a man who has trouble remembering where he parked the car."

  Malenfant wanted to believe the lander was sitting someplace else, where it had fallen, as battered and crumpled and precious as when he and Nemoto had so foolishly become parted from it – a key part of the technological ladder that would take him, and Emma, home. But there could be no doubt.

  "We're stranded, Nemoto," he blurted. "As stranded as these damn English."

  "Perhaps we always were," she said evenly.

  He hitched his pack of tied-up skin, containing all his belongings, all that was left of Earth. "We're a pretty pathetic expeditionary force."

  She shrugged. "We still have the most important tools: our minds, and our hands, and our knowledge." She eyed him. "What do you intend to do now?"

  "Let's get out of here. We have to find the lander. There's nothing more we can achieve with these English. I hate to be a bad guest, but I'm not sure how well McCann will take our leaving."

  "Not well, I fear," Nemoto said dryly. And she stepped back.

  A hand clamped on Malenfant's arm. It was a Ham, not Thomas.

  McCann came walking up, leaning on his stick, his broad face red and grim. "Thank you, Madam Nemoto," he said. "He has behaved just as you predicted."

  "Malenfant glared at Nemoto, disbelieving. "You betrayed me. You warned him I'd try something."

  "You are very predictable, Malenfant." She sighed, impatient, her face expressionless. "You should not make the mistake of believing we share the same agenda, Malenfant. This new Moon, this Red Moon, is the greatest mystery in recorded history – a mystery that deepens with every day that passes, everything we learn. Unless we discover the truth behind it, we will have accomplished nothing."