Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  By noon the following day they had come to a place which showed signs of habitation. A small beach close to the river was littered with blackened scars, perhaps the marks of hearths, and neat rings of holes showed in the ground. When Malenfant walked here his boots crunched over a litter of stone tools. Julia cowered, her huge arms wrapped around her torso. Malenfant asked, "What is it? A Runners' camp?"

  McCann's face was grim. "Runners are not so permanent as this – and nor do they make such structures. See these holes? They are for the wooden supports of tents and the like... But see the scattering of the fires, the heaps of discarded tools. Men do not conduct themselves so, Malenfant; we would build a single fire; we would take our tools with us. This is a Ham settlement – or was. And, look, the great thickness of the debris tells of a long occupation, which is of course typical of these dogged, infinitely patient Hams. But it was an occupation that was ended bloodily. Here, and here..." Stains on rocks, that might have been dried blood. "They are recent. It is the Zealots, Malenfant. We must be alert for their scouts."

  Julia was clearly distressed here. They moved on quickly.

  After that, another day's hike took them to the spot McCann had picked out as a possible crossing place. On the far side of the river, just as he had promised, the land was flatter and less rocky, and there was more life: a few shrubs, some straggling trees, even patches of green grass.

  And, stretched between the banks, tied firmly to a rock on either side, there was a rope.

  Malenfant and McCann inspected the rope dubiously. It seemed to be of vegetable fiber, woven tightly together into a thick cord.

  McCann picked at the rope. "Look at this. I think this material has been worked by teeth."

  "It isn't human, is it?"

  McCann smiled. "Certainly this is not what our hands would make – but we have never observed the Hams or the Runners use ropes on such a scale, or to have the imaginative intellect to make a bridge – and still less the Elves or Nutcrackers." He looked around coolly. "Perhaps there are others here, other pre-sapient types we have yet to encounter."

  Malenfant grunted. "Well, whoever they are, I'm glad they came this way."

  Malenfant crossed first. He went naked. He probed at the river bed with a wooden pole as he inched forward, and he dragged another rope, a length of chute cord, tied around his waist. The water never came higher than his ribs.

  Once he was across, he and McCann started to transfer their packs of clothes and food. They used a karabiner clip from Malenfant's NASA jumpsuit to attach each pack to the ropes, then pulled at the chute cord to jiggle the packs across.

  Julia came next. She entered the water with a dogged determination that overcame her obvious reluctance – which wasn't surprising, as her stocky frame was too densely packed for her to float; whatever else they were capable of, Neandertals couldn't swim. McCann fixed a loop of cord around her waist and clipped her to the chute line with the karabiner clip. Then he and Malenfant kept a tight hold of the chute line as she crossed – though whether they could have retrieved her great weight from the water if something had gone wrong Malenfant wasn't sure.

  It took no more than an hour for them all to get across. They spread out their gear to dry, and rested. Cleansed by the water, lying on warm rocks, Malenfant found he enjoyed the touch of the sun on his face, the arid breeze that blew off the desert.

  Julia grunted, pointing at the river. There were creatures in the water.

  They were sleek swimmers, their hair long and slicked down, their bodies streamlined. Their hands and feet were clearly webbed – but those hands had five fingers, and the small-brained heads had recognizable eyes and noses and mouths. They were churning in the water, clambering over each other like mackerel in a net. Oblivious of Malenfant and the others, they seemed to be lunging at the sky, their round eyes shining.

  They were hominids.

  "Swimmers," said McCann morosely. "Sometimes they'll steal fish off your line... The Hams have stories of how a Swimmer will aid you if you get yourself into trouble in the water, but I've never observed such a thing. And, do you know, they appear to sleep with only one eye shut at a time; perhaps they need to keep conscious enough to control their breathing..."

  Malenfant imagined a troupe of Australopithecines, perhaps, scooped from some quasi-African plain a couple of million years ago, and dumped by the merciless working of the electric-blue portals on an isolated outcrop of rock on some watery Earth. Ninety-nine out of a hundred such colonies would surely have starved quickly – even if they hadn't drowned first. But a few survived, and learned to use the water, seeking fish and vegetation – and, in time, they left the land behind altogether...

  And now here were their descendants, scooped up by another Wheel, stranded once again on the Red Moon.

  Hominids like dolphins. How strange, Malenfant thought.

  Something immense collided with the back of his head.

  He was on the ground. He felt something pushing down on his back. A foot, maybe. One eye was pressed into the ground, but the other was exposed, and could see.

  That fat new Earth still swam in the sky.

  He heard a commotion. Maybe Julia was putting up a fight. A face – runtish, filthy – eclipsed the Banded Earth.

  Once again the back of his head was struck, very hard, and he could think no more.

  Shadow

  Shadow learned day by day how to live with these new people, here on the slope of the crater wall.

  One morning she brought a bundle of ginger leaves she had collected from the forest. She approached the group of women that was, as usual, centered on Silverneck. She sat next to Silverneck, offering the leaves.

  A woman called Hairless – left almost totally bald in her upper body by over grooming – immediately grabbed all the leaves. She passed some to Silverneck and the others. When Shadow tried to get back some of her leaves, Hairless slapped her away.

  So Shadow came up behind Hairless and began to groom her. Though Hairless flinched away at first, she submitted.

  But now Hairless spotted the baby, clinging to Shadow's neck. She reached out and plucked the baby off Shadow, as if picking a fruit off a branch. Shadow did not resist. Hairless poked her finger in the baby's mouth and fingered his genitals. The baby squirmed, his huge head lolling.

  While Hairless probed at her baby, Shadow stole back some leaves.

  But Hairless developed a sudden disgust for the malformed infant. She thrust the child back at Shadow, jabbering.

  Shadow retreated to the fringe of the group, chewing quietly on her prize.

  Shadow was the lowest of the women here. She made her nests on the periphery of the group, and she kept as quiet as possible. Though she clung to Silverneck as much as she could, she was subject to abuse, violence, and theft of her food from men and women alike.

  But this community was different from that of Termite and Big Boss. Here, sex was everything.

  During some rough-and-tumble play between older infants, a chase and wrestle involved a boy taking the penis of another in his mouth. Soon the wrestling had dissolved into a bout of oral sex and other erotic games, after which the chasing began again.

  One day two of the more powerful men came into conflict. One of them was Stripe, the dominant man, a tall, robust man with a stripe of gray hair down one side of his head. The other was One-eye, the shorter, more manic man who had taken it on himself to attack the pack of hyenas with a stick on the day Shadow had joined this new group. The fight, caused when One-eye didn't respond submissively enough to an early-morning show of power by Stripe, escalated from yelling and hair-bristling to a show of shoving and punching. At last one firm kick from Stripe put One-eye on his back.

  The smaller man got up, confronting Stripe again. Both men's fur bristled, as if full of electricity – and both had erections. After another bout of shouting, they grew quieter, and One-eye, hesitantly, reached out and took Stripe's erection, rubbing it gently. After a time Stripe's bristling h
air subsided, and he briskly cupped One-eye's scrotum.

  The contact was quickly over. Neither man reached an orgasm, but orgasms were usually not the point.

  Sex was everything. Couplings between men and women, and the older children, were frequent, both belly-to-back and belly-to-belly. Infants became excited during couplings, jumping over the adults involved and sometimes pressing their own genitals against the adults'. But contact between members of the same sex was common too.

  It was a lesson Shadow learned quickly. She learned how to avert a male fist by grasping a penis or scrotum, or taking it in her mouth, or allowing a brief copulation. She earned toleration by groups of women as they fed or groomed by rubbing breasts and genitals, or allowing herself to be touched in turn.

  But still, things went badly for her, no matter how hard she worked. She was surrounded by hostility and disgust. The women would push her and her baby away, the men would hit her, and children would stare, wrinkle their noses at her and throw stones or sticks.

  There was something wrong, with herself and her baby. The wrongness began to be embedded in her, so that she accepted it as part of her life.

  That was why she submitted to the attentions of One-eye without resisting.

  Many of the men, at one time or another, initiated sexual contact with Shadow. She was young, and, save for the lingering wrongness, healthy and attractive. But the contacts rarely led to ejaculation; the man, after being lost briefly in pleasure, would look at her, and his face would change, and he would push her away. After a time most of her contacts came from boys, eager to experiment with a mature woman, and men who for some reason were frustrated elsewhere; she learned to submit to their immature or angry fumblings, and the blows that came with them.

  But One-eye was different. Of all the men, One-eye alone developed an obsession with Shadow.

  At first his approaches to her were conventional. He would come to her with legs splayed and erection showing, sometimes shaking branches and leaves. She would submit, as she had learned to submit to any demand made of her, and he would take her into the shade of a tree.

  But from the beginning his coupling was rough, leaving her breasts pinched and bitten, her thighs scratched and bruised.

  After a time his demands became cruder. He would drop the formalities of the invitation and simply take her, wherever and whenever he felt like it – even if she was feeding, or suckling her child, or sleeping in her nest. He seemed to find her exciting and would quickly reach orgasm. But the speed of the couplings did not reduce their violence.

  The other women rejected One-eye. If he approached them they would turn away, or run to the protection of the powerful women. His intent, manic strength repelled the women. And so he was forced to prey on the very old and young and weak, who were unable to defend themselves – them, and Shadow, for Shadow got no protection from the other women, not even Silverneck.

  Bruised and bloodied, she submitted to his attentions, over and again, and the sex became harsher.

  One day Shadow caught a glimpse of one reason why she continued to be shunned.

  One-eye had used her particularly hard that day, and some old wounds had been opened by his roughness; she wanted to clear the dirt and blood from the injuries before they began to stink. Deep in the forest, high on the wall of the crater, she found a small, still pool. She leaned over the pool, reaching for the water.

  A reflection peered back out at her.

  She leapt back, jabbering in alarm. Her infant, feebly crawling in the leaves, fell on her belly and mewled.

  Cautiously Shadow crept back to the pond. A face peered out at her, a face made grotesque with a bulbous nose and lumpy protrusions on its cheekbones and brow. The face was alarming and threatening – but of course it was her own face.

  Screeching, she dug her fingernails into her face, the swellings there, and tried to rip it off, longing to throw it far away from her. But she succeeded only in making her face bleed, and great crimson drops splashed into the little pool that had betrayed her.

  By now, Shadow had no memory of the infected stream from which she had drunk when she crossed the plain, and had no understanding of the fungus infection she had contracted.

  She lay down in the leaves, thumb jammed in her mouth. Her child began to sneeze, loudly and liquidly.

  Shadow uncurled. She rolled over and picked up her infant. She inspected the child's dribbling nose, then she plucked some leaves and wiped away the snot and dirt. Then she took the softly weeping child to her breast.

  Far away she heard a hooting. It was the cry of One-eye, seeking to use her body once more. She curled tighter around her child.

  The infant's cold grew steadily worse, developing into a fever that kept him awake during the night.

  Shadow quickly grew exhausted, without energy enough even to feed herself, or keep herself properly clean. The swellings on her face now itched constantly. They hurt badly when struck. And they continued to grow, to the point where she could see the fleshy masses framing her eye sockets and cheekbones.

  Even in the midst of all this, she was not spared One-eye's voracious demands.

  She never resisted him. But out of his sight she would place her sickly infant down carefully on a bed of leaves or a nest of branches. If the coupling permitted it, she would look across that way, and even reach out to touch or stroke the child.

  Eventually One-eye noticed this.

  It enraged him. He was already lying on top of her. He pinched her chin in his right hand, making her face him, and he punched her hard on the lumps in her brow, making her scream. Then he grabbed her ankles and pushed them back towards her head, and entered her savagely.

  When he was done he pushed her away and began to beat her, aiming precise blows at her belly and kidneys. When she curled in on herself he grabbed her arms and pulled her open, making her lie unprotected on her back, and rammed his fist over and over into her solar plexus.

  The world dissolved into fragments, red as blood, white as bone.

  When she came to she could barely move. Her belly and back were a mass of pain, and one eye was covered with a film of drying blood.

  Silverneck had taken her baby. The older woman cradled him on her lap, and was even allowing him to suck on her cracked, dry nipples.

  With a groan, Shadow let the world fall away again.

  After a time, she was aware of a looming shape before her. Her child was sleeping uneasily at her breast. She cringed, trying to curl tighter.

  But a gentle hand touched her shoulder, and pushed her gently back. It was Silverneck. She was carrying a pepper. Its stem had been pulled out, and it was full of water. Shadow drank greedily. But her lips were cracked and swollen, and she felt the water dribble down her chin.

  It was dark before she found the strength to clamber a little way up into a tree, and construct a rough nest.

  Reid Malenfant

  Malenfant was bent double. His arms were pinned behind his back. Something was jolting him, over and over. His head felt like it would explode. It was like the feeling you got after a few days on orbit, when your body fluid balance hadn't yet adjusted to microgravity, and blood pooled in your head.

  But when he forced his eyes open – the light stabbed bright, making him squint – he saw, in glimpsed shards, a ground of rust-red dust, powerful bare legs pumping.

  Not on orbit, it appears, Malenfant. He was being carried over somebody's shoulder, in a fireman's lift. But his head was upside down, and with every step his cheek crashed into the back of his carrier.

  He threw up. It was a spasm of gut and throat; suddenly hot yellow-green fluid was spilling down the naked back before his eyes.

  There was a loud hoot of protest. With a shrug he was thrown off the shoulder, as if he were as light as a feather, with a good two yards to fall to the ground.

  The fall seemed long, slow-motion. He couldn't raise his bound arms to protect himself. He landed head-first.

  When he came to again his h
ead ached even worse than before. He was lying on his side. All he could see was red dust, and a pair of grimy buckskin boots. His legs were free. But his arms, still pinned behind his back, felt like they were half-wrenched out of their sockets.

  A buckskin boot dug into his stomach to tip him over, none too gently. He finished up on his back, as helpless as a landed fish. It felt as if his neck was in his own warm vomit.

  Faces loomed over him. One pushed closer. It was a bearded man, aged perhaps forty; his face was round, greasy, suspicious.

  Malenfant tried to speak. "Let me up," he gasped.

  The man's eyes narrowed. "English? But no argot I ever heard. What are you, a Frenchie?" His accent was thick, the vowels twisted, almost incomprehensible.

  Somebody said, "He's sick. Leave him. We ain't here for this."

  Beyond the bearded man Malenfant saw McCann; he seemed composed, though his arms were bound. "Sprigge. In the bowels of Christ I beseech you. He is an Englishman."

  The bearded man – Sprigge – glared at McCann. Then he turned back to Malenfant. "Get him up."

  Ungentle hands dug into Malenfant's armpits and hauled him off the dirt. He managed to get his feet on the ground. But he couldn't keep his eyes targeted; they slid sideways in their sockets as if he were drunk, and when he was let go he fell back into the dirt.

  His NASA boots were gone. His feet were bare, grimy and bleeding. They even took my socks, he thought. He wondered what had happened to his pack.

  Sprigge stood over Malenfant again. "Get up or I leave you for the Elves."

  Malenfant slumped forward. He managed to get up onto one knee, got one foot on the ground, and pushed himself up. This time he staggered, and his head still spun, but he stayed upright.

  McCann said, "You can't expect the man to walk."

  Sprigge nodded, and snapped a finger.

  A huge Runner stepped up to Malenfant. He was naked, dust-encrusted – and his head was small, like a child's, though his face was weather-beaten and scarred. From the look of the dribble of vomit down his back, this had been Malenfant's reluctant mount.