Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  "And you believe you can achieve that by staying here, with McCann?"

  "We need a base, Malenfant. We need resources. We can't spend our whole lives looking over our shoulders for the next stone axe to fall, or grubbing around in the forest for food. These British have all that."

  "And what of Emma?"

  Nemoto said nothing, but McCann said smoothly, "Our scouts and hunters range far and wide, Malenfant. If she is here, we will find her for you."

  If your Ham scouts tell you everything they see, Malenfant thought. He fingered the little lens in his pocket.

  "Let's look at the matter in a sensible light," McCann said now. "I know you think little of me, Malenfant. But once again I assure you I am not a fool. I desire more than a chess partner; I desire escape from this place – what man wouldn't? Now you have fallen from the sky into my lap, and only a fool would let you go, for surely your Americans will come looking for you from that blue Earth of yours. And when they do, they will find me."

  "My world isn't your world," Malenfant snarled.

  "But my world is lost," McCann said wistfully. "And I know you have an England. Perhaps I will find a place there." His face hardened, and Malenfant perceived a new toughness. This was, Malenfant remembered, a representative of a breed who had carved out a global empire – and on a much more hostile planet than Earth. "Providence has given me my chance and I must take it. I believe that in keeping you now, in following the promptings of my own infallible heart, I see the workings of Omnipotence. Is this moral arrogance? But without such beliefs man would never have left the trees and the caves, and remained like our pre-sapient and pongid cousins." He glanced at Nemoto. "As for your companion's slight treachery – perhaps she is destined to betray you, over and over, on all Anaxarchus's infinity of worlds. What do you think?" And he brayed laughter.

  The little column formed up for the homeward journey. The big Ham called Thomas took his place beside Malenfant. And he winked broadly.

  Emma Stoney

  A day after leaving the first troupe, Emma found another group of Hams, women and a few infants foraging for berries and fruit. They had regarded her blankly, but then, seeing she was no threat – and, as not one of them, of no conceivable interest – they had turned away and continued their gathering.

  Emma waited patiently until they were done. Then she followed them back to their encampment.

  She stayed here a couple of days, and then moved on, seeking another troupe.

  And then on again.

  Hams were basically the same, wherever she found them. Their tool-making, for instance. Though each group varied its kit a little according to circumstances, like the availability of different types of stone – and perhaps, she speculated, some slight cultural tradition – still, if something was not in their tool making repertoire, which was evidently very ancient and fixed, no Ham was interested.

  They didn't even talk about their tool-making, even while they jabbered endlessly about their intricate social lives. It was as if they were conscious while they were interacting with each other, but not while they were making tools, or even hunting.

  After a time Emma began to get used to it. She reasoned that she did many things she wasn't aware of, like breathing, and keeping her heart pumping. And she could think of times when she had performed quite complex tasks requiring skill, judgment and the focus on a specific goal without knowing about it – such as driving all the way to work with her mind on some stunt of Malenfant's, only to "wake up" when she found herself in the car lot. Or she thought of her father, able to carve fine furniture from wood in his hobby workshop, but never able to tell her how it was done; all he could do was show her.

  With the Hams, that circle of unawareness spread a little further, that was all. Or maybe it was just that you could get used to anything, given time.

  Anyhow it didn't matter. She wasn't here to run experiments in hominid cognition. It was enough that she was able to use her fish and rabbits and other hunting produce as subtle bribes to gain favor – or at least as a hedge against exclusion.

  Thus she worked her way through the forest, moving from one Ham group to the next, using them as stepping stones of comparative safety, one way or another traveling steadily east, day after day, seeking Malenfant.

  But sometimes she glimpsed faces in the forest, just at the limit of her vision: hominid faces, watchful, like no species she had yet encountered. It seemed she had barely glimpsed the extent of her kin, on this strange world.

  Reid Malenfant

  The details of the regime that would govern Malenfant's life coalesced with startling speed and efficiency – such speed, in fact, that Malenfant wondered who else McCann or the others had had cause to imprison.

  Malenfant was free to come and go, within the stockade. But there was always a burly male Ham at his elbow, even sleeping outside his hut during the night.

  He took to prowling around the perimeter fence. It was tall, and its ferocious spikes were daubed with a sticky, tar-like substance. For the first time it struck him that the fence was just as effective at keeping him in as keeping out the undesirables of the wilds beyond. And anyhow every time Malenfant tried to approach the fence too closely, he was immobilized by his Ham guard – as simple as that; one of those massive hands would clamp on his shoulder or elbow or even his head, exerting a strength he couldn't hope to match.

  He tested his cage in other ways.

  He spoke to Thomas, asking for his help. But Thomas would say nothing, giving no hint that he was prepared to follow up on that reassuring wink in the forest.

  One night Malenfant tried climbing out of his hut's window. But though it was unglazed the window was small and high. By the time he had dropped clumsily to the ground his Ham keeper was standing over him, silhouetted by blue Earthlight, solid and silent as a rock.

  He considered making other protests – going on a hunger strike, maybe. But he sensed McCann might simply let him starve; the steel he had glimpsed in the soul of this other-world Brit did not encourage him to seek for weakness or pity. Alternatively McCann might have his Ham servants force-feed Malenfant, not a prospect he relished, since the Hams were muscled a little too heavily to be good nurses.

  Anyhow he needed to build his strength for the days to come, and the search for Emma he confidently expected to be progressing sooner rather than later.

  So, after a couple of days, Malenfant began to engage with McCann once more: eating with him, even walking around the compound, conversing. It was a peculiar arrangement, in which both of them clearly knew their relative positions of power and yet did not speak of it, as if they were engaged in some formal game.

  Malenfant tried to find out as much as he could about this world from McCann. But the British had done little exploring more than a few days' travel away from their stockade. Their main business here had, after all, been ensuring their survival. And McCann's mind seemed peculiarly closed to Malenfant. The purpose of McCann's original mission had not been exploration, and still less science, but economic and political gain for his Empire; he was more like a prospector than a surveyor. But sometimes he spoke again of the deeper mission he felt he had taken on: to bring the word of his God, and his Christ-figure John, to the barbarian hominids of the Red Moon.

  McCann was a man with a head full of agendas. It seemed to Malenfant he was barely able to see the Red Moon and its exotic inhabitants for what they were just as the Hams had seemed unable to look directly at the wreckage of the Redoubtable.

  Maybe every hominid species had such blind spots, mused Malenfant. He wondered what his own were.

  For his part McCann pressed Malenfant about rescue.

  Malenfant tried to describe the politics and economics of his home world. He knew it was extremely unlikely that the will to mount a further mission could be assembled on Tide-ravaged Earth – even though the NASA support teams knew where the lander had come down, and had received those few minutes of footage to show he and Nemoto had survived,
at least for a time.

  McCann showed Malenfant the transceiver gear he and his companions had scavenged from the wreck of the Redoubtable. It was a formidable array of antique-type parts, huge glass valves and mica capacitors and big clattering relays. For years the British had nursed it, for instance keeping it continually powered to save the valves from the thermal shock of being switched on and off. But at last too many of the valves had failed, and other parts were corroded and damaged from prolonged exposure to the damp air. Malenfant tinkered with the gear, but he had less idea than McCann how to fix it.

  In his own mind Malenfant's primary mission remained clear: to find Emma, and get the hell off this Moon. If he could help McCann on the way, fine; if Nemoto wanted to come home or stay here, it was up to her. But they were side issues. To Malenfant, only home and Emma mattered.

  So they worked through their days. But as time passed it seemed to Malenfant that McCann grew steadily more anxious. Periodically he would peer up into the sky, as if seeking to reassure himself that Earth was still there.

  And Malenfant barely saw Nemoto.

  One morning, maybe a week into his captivity, he was woken as usual by Julia, with her wooden bowl of hot water and a fresh stone blade for him to shave. Dressed in her blouse and long skirt of sewn skin, with her muscled body moving powerfully, she looked absurd, like a chimpanzee in a child's dress.

  She picked up his covered slop bucket, curtsied at him – "Baas" – and made to leave.

  "Help me," Malenfant blurted.

  She stopped by the door. Malenfant could see the shadow of a burly Ham male outside the door.

  "Baas?"

  "You know I'm being kept here against my will – umm, Boss McCann won't let me go. You helped me before. You gave me the lens – the clear stone. You know it came from Emma. I want to get out of here and find her, Julia. I don't want to hurt anybody, not Boss McCann, not anybody. I just want to get to Emma."

  She shrugged, her mountainous shoulders rippling. "Breakfas'," she said.

  Frustrated, he snapped, "Why do you stay here? Any one of you could take on McCann and his cronies. Even their crossbows couldn't hold you back if you put your mind to it."

  She looked at him reproachfully. "Tired ol' men," she said, as if that was explanation enough. Then she turned and walked out, the slop pail carried effortlessly in one huge hand.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  The great Mapping, across a distance unprecedented in recorded history, could be regarded as a technological triumph. But to Manekato it had been like the working out of an intricate mathematical theorem, a theorem that proved the identity of certain points of space and time with certain other points. The fact that those other points were placed close to the surface of a world which had not even existed as the proof was developed scarcely added to the complexity of the procedure. And once the proof was established, the journey itself would be a mere corollary, of little interest save as an exercise for the young.

  The proof had not been trivial, but it had not been over-demanding. Most adults, with a little effort, could have achieved the same result. Manekato had worked at the Mapping with part of her mind, with the rest consumed by her grief for her mother and her concerns over her own future.

  On Mane's Earth, anybody could develop a space program in their spare time.

  With her brother Babo and the woman who called herself Without-Name, Manekato stood on the crushed bones of her ancestors. The eternal Wind blasted over the rock, unnoticed. Above her hovered a great rippling lens of star-filled sky, as if a hole had been cut in the clouds: thanks to simple Mapping techniques it was as if she was suspended in orbit, far above the clouds of Earth. But the three of them barely glanced up; it was a minor, uninteresting miracle.

  This eroded volcanic core, once the heart of the Farm, was bare now. After her mother had died, Manekato had ordered the deletion of the great House. The walls of Adjusted Space had disappeared like a bursting bubble, as if fifty millennia of sturdy existence had been but a dream. Manekato had welcomed the simple geologic clarity of the mountain's eroded summit: she knew she could never live in the House, and it served no purpose save to preserve memories of unhappiness.

  But she had retained the pit containing the ashes of her grandmothers, and to it she had added the last remains of Nekatopo.

  Without-Name stalked around the perimeter of the ash pit, her knuckles pressing disrespectfully into the sealed-in dirt, leaving impressions of her hands and feet. A Worker followed this ill-mannered guest, restoring the pit's smoothness. "Destroy the pit," Without-Name told Manekato. "Fill it in. Delete it. It serves no purpose."

  "The pit is the memory of my Lineage," said Manekato evenly.

  Without-Name bared her teeth and growled. "This pit is not a memory. It is a hole filled with dust."

  Babo protested, "The practice of adding oneself to the Farm's ground at the end of one's life is as old as our species. It derives from the sensible desire to use every resource to enrich the ground for one's descendants. Today the practice is symbolic, of course, but –"

  "Symbolism. Pah! Symbolism is for fools."

  Babo looked shocked.

  If Without-Name enjoyed goading Manekato, she positively relished taunting Babo. "Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone."

  Babo said defiantly, "I have visited the Rano Lineage and I saw the pit of your ancestors. You are a hypocrite. You say one thing and practice the other."

  She raised herself to her hind feet and towered over him. She wore her body hair plucked clean in great patches over her body, and where hair remained it had been stiffened into great bristling spikes. It was a fashion from the other side of the world that made her seem oddly savage to Manekato. "Not anymore," she hissed. "I salute death. I salute the cleansing it brings. There is only life; all that matters is the here and the now – and what can be achieved in the moment."

  Manekato held back her emotions.

  This Without-Name's preferred diminutive actually was – had been – Renemenagota. But she insisted she had abandoned her true name. "My land is to be destroyed," she had said. "And so is my Lineage. What purpose does a fossilized name serve?" Even the contradiction in her position – for Without-Name was itself a name, of course, so that she was trapped in an oxymoron – seemed only to please her perversely. Manekato knew she must work with this woman, who was a refugee as she was, to study the rogue Moon and its fabricators; that had been the directive of the Astrologers. But Manekato felt that she had been the target of Without-Name's bitterness and discourtesy from the moment they had been thrown together...

  There was a dazzling electric-blue flash, gone in an instant.

  A shift in the Wind touched Manekato's face. She looked into the tunnel of stars.

  "If you embrace experience," she said, "then you must embrace that."

  Without-Name lifted her head awkwardly, and fell forward onto her knuckles.

  Babo was already gazing at the sky, open-mouthed. Even the Workers were backing away, small visual sensors protruding from their hides, peering up at the dangerous sky.

  Suddenly the Red Moon swam there, complete, huge.

  Reid Malenfant

  Nemoto said in a monotone, "We are dealing with multiple universes. That much is clear. We have seen for ourselves multiple Moons. And we have hints of multiple Earths. The Earth of Hugh McCann is clearly quite different from our Earth even if his history is interestingly convergent with ours. And the Hams talk of a Gray Earth, a third place where conditions may be different again..."

  In the hut Malenfant had come to think of as the dining hall, Nemoto and Malenfant faced each other at either end of the long table. The table's wooden surface, polished to darkness by decades of use, was bare. An elderly Ham woman was preparing lunch.

  It had taken days before Malenfant had bee
n able to face Nemoto, such was his anger at her betrayal. But she was his only companion from home, and if he was ever going to get out of here he might need her help. As for Nemoto, it was as if the incident of the betrayal had simply been a step in some grand plan, which any rational person would accept as justified.

  But she was changing, Malenfant saw: becoming more withdrawn, hollow-eyed, dangerously detached from the texture of the world around her, obsessed instead with huge ideas of origins and destinies.

  So Malenfant listened coldly, as Nemoto described alternate realities.

  "Malenfant, perhaps there are a cluster of alternate universes with identical histories up to the moment of some key event in the evolution of humanity – and differing after that only in the details of that event, and its consequences." Nemoto waved her hands vaguely, as if trying to indicate three-dimensional space around her. "Imagine the possible universes arrayed around us in a kind of probability space, Malenfant. Do you see that universes differing only in the details of the evolution of mankind must somehow be close to ours in that graph?"

  "And you're saying this is what we're experiencing – a crossover between possible universes? Well, maybe. But it's just talk. What I don't see is how you can hop from one cosmos to the next."

  Nemoto smiled coldly. "I do not know how that is possible, Malenfant. And what is more important is that I do not know why anybody should wish to make it happen."

  "Why... You think all of this is deliberate – somehow artificial?"

  "Your Wheel in Africa looked artificial to me, Malenfant. Perhaps the Hams' Old Ones, if they exist, will be able to tell us what they intended."

  "And you're going to ask them, I suppose."

  "If they exist. If I can find them. What else is there to do? Malenfant, there is something else. I have raised with McCann the question of whether other life forms exist beyond the Earth – his Earth, I mean. His scientists have looked for evidence, as ours have. They have found none. Philosophers there have propounded something similar to our Fermi Paradox to crystallize this observation."