Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  All save one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.

  The final time he woke that night, he found Julia looming over him. She was a vast silhouette whose disturbing scent of other was enough to kick Malenfant's hind brain into wakefulness. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. His chute-silk blanket fell away, and all his warmth was lost to the cool, moist air. It was a little after dawn, and the world was drenched with a blue-gray light that turned the crimson sand purple.

  The Runners had gone. He could just make them out, slim dark figures against the purple-gray desert, running easily and silently, far away into the desert.

  He hadn't even gotten to show them his lens.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  There was a call from Babo, who was standing beneath his beautiful spinning globe. Manekato hurried to her brother, and Nemoto jogged after her.

  The great rotating Moon-projection had been rendered semi-transparent. And there was a hole in its very heart.

  Something lurked there, blocky, enclosed – clearly artificial, very large. It was connected to the surface by a long, thread-like tube: not entirely straight, bending like a reed as it passed through the Moon's layers of core, thick mantle and deep, hard lithosphere, so much thicker on this small cold world than the crustal layers of the Earth. The tube terminated in what looked like a small, compact crater, not far from the eastern shore of the world-spanning continent – not far from the location of the compound, in fact.

  Manekato reached inside the Map. The misty layers of mantle and core resisted her gently, as if her fingers were pushing through some viscous liquid. She wrapped her fingers around the knot of machinery at the Map's center. It was dense and complex and well-anchored.

  Nemoto watched her carefully.

  "It is the world engine," said Babo.

  Studying the globe as a whole, Manekato saw that the surface crater was diametrically opposite the summit of the great volcanic mountain, at the peak of the huge region of uplift that so distorted the figure of the world. Looking more closely she could see detail in the Map's misty outer layers: a disturbance in the core, a great plume in the deep-buried mantle, hot magmatic material working its way up through cracks in the mighty lithosphere towards that antipodal bulge.

  "I cannot believe that such asymmetry is deliberate," Babo said.

  "No," Manekato said. "The internal disturbances must be a result of the poor control of the Moon as it lurches from universe to universe. Perhaps the Moon is not meant to plummet about the cosmic manifold like this. The mechanism is poorly designed..."

  "Or faulty. If it has been sweeping up hominids since early in our evolution, Mane, it must have been operating for millions of years."

  "Perhaps even the great machines of the Old Ones are subject to failure."

  "Quantum tunneling," said Babo. "That's how they do it. That's how this thing in the core sends this Moon from universe to universe."

  Manekato said, "Tell me what you mean, brother."

  "You understand the concept. An electron, say, does not have a precise position or velocity; rather it is embedded in a spreading cloud of probability. Given a measurement of its position, there is a small but finite chance that the electron will next be found – not close to the last position – but far away, outside any cage you care to throw around it – or at the heart of the sun – or in orbit around a distant star..."

  "Yes, yes. Or even another universe. Is that your point?"

  He scratched his head absently. "Well, we know that quantum tunneling can cause the nucleation of a new universe. The vacuum sustains a series of energy levels. A bubble of 'our' vacuum can tunnel to an otherwise empty spacetime at a lower energy state, and there expand and become causally disconnected from our own..."

  "We are talking of moving not an electron, but a world."

  Babo shrugged. "I think we have the pieces of the puzzle now, at least; perhaps understanding will follow."

  "In any case, our next object is clear," Manekato said. She pressed a finger into the crater at the top of the tube from the core; she could barely feel the feather-touch of its tiny rim. "We must go to this strange crater, learn all we can – and, perhaps, seek a way to direct the future course of this rogue Moon."

  "The manifold is a sheaf of possible universes," Nemoto said.

  Babo grimaced. "What did she say?"

  Nemoto went on, "I understand some of what you say. Perhaps the manifold universes were nucleated from a single primal universe by some such mechanism as quantum tunneling. Perhaps the nucleation of the universes was deliberate. Perhaps the Old Ones lived in the primal universe..."

  Babo bared his teeth at her, and Nemoto fell silent.

  Manekato said dryly, "What's wrong?"

  "She sees so much," Babo said. "Much further than I imagined. If she sees so much, will she not see that the achievements of the Old Ones are as far beyond us as..."

  "As our Farms and our Maps are beyond her poor grasp?" She touched his shoulder, mock-grooming, seeking to calm him. "But would that be so bad? Would it hurt us to learn some of her humility?"

  "I don't think she is so humble, Mane. Look at the defiance in that small face. It is unnatural. It is like being challenged by a Worker."

  A cry rent the air.

  Nemoto turned sharply. Manekato felt her ears swivel. It had been a cry of pain and despair – an animal's cry, but desolating none the less.

  Nemoto began to run towards the place the cry had come from.

  After a moment's hesitation, Manekato hurried after her pet.

  "Oh, let me up; I beg you. Madam Daemon, by the blood of Christ, let me up!"

  It was Without-Name, of course. She had caught another hominid. She had him sprawled on the smooth floor of the compound with her massive foot in the small of the back, so that he could do little but flop like a fish. He was wearing clothes of a cruder design than Nemoto's – scraps of skin sewn together with bits of hide, as if he had clambered inside the gruesome reconstruction of a dead animal. It seemed his capture had not been without incident. Blood leaked from a filthy wound on his forehead, and his right foot was dangling at an awkward angle, just a mass of blood, badly pulped. His blood and snot and sweat, even his urine, had spilled over the floor of Adjusted Spacetime.

  Others stood around the gruesome little tableau. Manekato was dismayed to see fascination on several faces, as if the blood-soaked allure of this world was seeping into more than one soul.

  She rested a hand on Nemoto's shoulder. "He is a member of your troupe? That is why you are distressed."

  "No. I have never seen him before. And we don't have 'troupes'. But he is human, and he is suffering."

  Babo challenged Without-Name. "What new savagery is this, Renemenagota of Rano?"

  "Am I the savage? Then what is this under my foot? We are not at home now, Manekato – we are not even on Earth. And if we wish to progress our inquiries we must abandon the techniques we would apply on the Earth."

  "I don't understand."

  "You gaze at a pretty Map while the real world is all around you – vibrant, primal." She slapped at the floor of Adjusted Space. "You even separate yourselves from the dirt. Have you stepped off this platform, Manekato, even once? I tell you, this is not a place for logic and Maps. It is a place of red and green, of life and blood and death – a place for the heart, not the head."

  "And your heart tells you to torment this helpless wretch," Babo said.

  "But not without a purpose," Without-Name said. "He comes from a troupe of hominids to the north of here. They live in crude shelters of wood and mud, and they call themselves Zealots. They are as intelligent as your pet, Manekato but they are utterly insane, driven by dreams of a God they cannot see." She bellowed laughter, and applied more pressure with her heel to the Zealot's back; he groaned, his eyes rolling, as bones cracked. "These Zealots have been here for centuries. With their feeble eyes, their dim brains, they have seen this worl
d which you are too frightened to touch. They have seen the workings of the Old Ones, for they have been dragged from one cosmos to the next by their meddling. And they have formulated their own ambition in response: to spit in the face of the sky itself." She looked down at the sprawled, twitching hominid. "It is absurd. But in its way, it is magnificent. Hah! These are the creatures of this world. I want to see what they see, know what they know. That way I will learn the truth about the Old Ones – and what must be done to defeat them."

  Others growled assent behind her.

  Manekato, deeply disturbed, stepped closer to Without-Name. "We did not come here to inflict pain."

  "There is no pain here," Without-Name said easily. "For there is no sentience. You see only reflex, as a leaf follows the sunlight."

  "No." It was Nemoto. She stepped forward, evading the clutching hand of Manekato.

  The nameless one gaped at her, briefly too startled to react.

  "I know that you understand me. I believe your species has superior cognition to my own. But nevertheless we have cognition. This man is aware of himself, of his pain. And he is terrified, for he is aware that you plan to kill him, Renemenagota."

  Without-Name reared up on her hind legs, and the man in the dust howled. "You will not use my name."

  "Let him go." Nemoto held out her arms, her hands empty.

  The moment stretched. Without-Name towered over the slim form of the hominid.

  Then Without-Name stepped off the fallen man and pushed him away with her foot. She dropped to her knuckles and laughed. "Your pet has an amusing defiance, Manekato. Nevertheless I tell you that these creatures of the Moon are the key to our strategy here. The key!" And she knuckle-walked away towards the forest, where she blended into the shadows of the trees.

  Where she had shoved him, the fallen Zealot had left a trail of urine and blood. Workers hurried forward to tend him, and to clean the mess he had made.

  Manekato approached the trembling hominid. "Nemoto – I am sorry –"

  Nemoto shrugged off her touch. "So you understand, at last. Let me reward you with a banana." And she stalked away, her anger visible in every step, every gesture.

  Reid Malenfant

  "About the desert," McCann said. He took a half-burned twig and started to scrape at the red dust, sketching out a map. "Here is the Congo – I mean, the great river which rises in the foothills of the great volcano you call the Bullseye, the river that winds its way through the interior of the continent to debouche into the ocean beyond the forests. For much of its length the river's flow is confined to a series of ancient canyons, where the stream is fed by a series of underground tributaries. The north bank is very arid. But on its south bank – here, for example – there are flood plains where the vegetation grows a little more thickly.

  "Here is what I propose. We will cut across the plain, meeting the river valley at this point, where there is a crossing place to the south bank, which is the greener. We will follow the river, heading steadily west, following it upstream as it works its way through the mountains, and using the vegetation and its inhabitants as our base resource. Thus we will seek out these shy Runner bands of yours. And if we fail to find your Emma before the character of the country changes – well, we will think of something else."

  Malenfant felt tempted to argue with this strategy. But he had no better ideas of how to explore a continent-wide desert, in search of a single person. And there might be a logic to it: whatever she was doing, whoever she was with, Emma surely couldn't be anywhere else but close to water.

  The river, then. He nodded curtly. McCann grinned and scuffed over his map with the sole of his boot.

  They heard a cry.

  It was Julia. She was hunting a lame deer. She had stripped naked and was running flat out towards it; baffled by a rock outcropping, the animal turned the wrong way, and Julia fell on the animal's neck and wrestled it to the ground.

  "Dinner is served," McCann said dryly.

  "There must be an easier way to make a living," Malenfant said.

  McCann shrugged. "You don't find much to admire about these non-human humans, do you, Malenfant? Don't you envy Julia her brutal strength, her immersion in the bloody moment, her uncomplicated heart?"

  "No," Malenfant said quietly.

  They entered the desert.

  Malenfant sacrificed more parafoil silk to make a hat and a scarf for his neck, and he added a little of a silvered survival blanket to the top of his hat to deflect the sunlight. After the first couple of days his eyes hurt badly in the powerful light. In his pack was a small chemical-film camera; he broke this open with a rock, and tied the fogged film over his eyes with a length of chute cord.

  McCann fared a little better. His ancient suit of skin, well-worn and much-used, had a hood he could pull over his head, and various ingenious flaps he could open to make the suit more or less porous.

  Julia's squat bow-legged frame was made for short bursts of extreme energy, not for the steady slog of a desert hike. She struggled as her feet sank into the soft, stingingly hot sand. But she kept on, grinning, self-deprecating, her tongue lolling from her open mouth, her sparse hair plastered to the top of her head.

  Anyhow it wasn't a desert, Malenfant supposed; not strictly. Life flourished, after a fashion. In the red dust shrubs and cacti battled for space with the ubiquitous stands of spiky spinifex grass. Lizards of species he couldn't identify scuttled after insects. He spotted a kind of mouse hopping by like a tiny kangaroo. He had no idea how such a creature could survive here; maybe it had some way of manufacturing its own water from the plants it chewed on.

  Not a desert, then. Probably a climatologist would call it a temperate semi desert. But it was dry as toast, and hot enough for Malenfant.

  It was a relief to them all when they reached the river.

  Malenfant and Julia pulled off their clothes and ran with howls of relief into the sluggish water. McCann was a little more decorous, but he stripped down to his trousers and paddled cautiously. Malenfant splashed silty-brown liquid into his face, and watched improbably large droplets hover around him; he felt as if his skin were sucking in the water directly through his pores.

  Great islands floated past, natural rafts of reed and water-hyacinth, emissaries from the continent's far interior, a startling procession of vegetation on its way to the sea. It was a reminder that this single mighty stream drained an area the size of India.

  The river flowed sluggishly between yellow sandstone cliffs streaked with white and black. Here and there he saw sandbars strewn with black or brown boulders mudstones and shales, said McCann, laid down in ancient swamps. The sedimentary strata here were all but horizontal, undisturbed: these were rocks that had remained stable for a great length of time, for a thousand million years and more. This Moon was a small, static world.

  Life flourished close to the river. The bank was crowded with plants that craved the direct sunlight, bushes and lianas competing for space. Even behind them the first rank of trees was draped with lianas, ferns and orchids, overshadowed only by the occasional climbing palm. Wispy manioc shrubs grew on the lower slopes. Speckled toads croaked all along the river bank, and fireflies the size of earwigs, each of them making a spark of green light, danced and darted in the tangled shadows of the trees.

  A vast spider-web stretched between two relatively bare tree trunks. It was heavy with moisture, and glistened silver-white, like strings of pearls. Looking closer, Malenfant saw that many spiders, maybe a hundred or more, inhabited the web. A social species of spider?

  Objects hung from the higher branches of the palms, like pendulous fruit, leathery and dark brown, each maybe a foot long.

  "They are bats," McCann murmured. "They have wing spans of a yard or more. Those are males. At night they call for the attention of females." He rammed his fingers into his nostrils, and cried, "Kwok! Kwok! And the females fly up and down the line for hours, selecting the male who sings the most sweetly..."

  After a time
Julia clambered out of the water. She took a handful of palm oil from a wooden gourd in McCann's pack, and worked it into her skin, paying attention to every crease and the spaces between her fingers and toes. When she stood, her skin shone, lustrous. She was silent, beautiful.

  McCann went fishing. He found a spot where the bank curved, cupping a still, shallow patch of water, thick with reeds. He took leaves from a pretty little bush with white flowers shaped like bells. He scattered the flowers in the river, over the still spot.

  Above the shallower water, by the reed-beds, dragonflies hovered and zigzagged, big scarlet creatures the size of small birds. Sometimes they dipped their abdomens into the river, breaking the sluggish, oily surface of the water. Perhaps they were laying eggs, Malenfant mused, wishing he knew more natural history; when you got down to it he knew very little about his own world, let alone this exotic new one.

  To Malenfant's surprise, fish started coming to the surface in front of McCann, their fins breaking the oily meniscus, their mouths popping. Evidently they couldn't breathe. McCann, stocky, determined, splashed into the water and started grabbing the fish, holding their tails and slamming their heads against rocks on the bank.

  Malenfant thought he saw something move through the water. He scrambled out fast.

  It had been bigger than any fish, but not the distinctive shape of a croc or an alligator – something that must have been at least his size, and covered with sleek hair, like a seal. But neither of the others noticed anything, so he didn't mention it.

  They spent a day at the side of the river, and replenished their stock of fish, then moved on, heading steadily west.