Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  The Runner kneeled in front of Malenfant, his hands making a stirrup. Malenfant stared stupidly.

  McCann said, "Use him, Malenfant." Now Malenfant saw that McCann was sitting on the shoulders of another huge Runner, like a child riding on its father. The Runner's head was bowed, his eyes fixed on the dirt. McCann seemed relaxed, almost comfortable. "Follow my lead, Malenfant. One must keep up the front."

  "...I."

  Julia walked up to Malenfant. Her head was bowed, and her wraps of skin had been ripped away, leaving her naked. But her hands were unbound.

  Sprigge touched his belt, where a whip was coiled.

  Julia kept her gaze directed at the dirt, not looking the humans in the face. She said, "Carry Mal'fan'."

  Sprigge barked a laugh. "So you use a Ham's quim, Sir Malenfant. Your punishment will sting if you let Praisegod Michael witness such iniquity." But he stepped back.

  Julia slid her arms under Malenfant's body and lifted him effortlessly, like a child.

  The party formed up and began to move off over the dirt.

  The party was made up of perhaps a dozen Runners. Most were naked, though some wore loincloths. Some of them bore heavy packs, or loads on their heads and shoulders. Two of them were dragging the carcass of an immense bull antelope on a crude travois. The rest of the Runners had passengers: buckskin-clothed men sitting on their shoulders, stubby whips in their hands. All the Runners walked silently, just waiting for instruction. Several of them had scars striped on their shoulders and bellies.

  There was one other hominid: a Ham, dressed in clothes as comparatively well stitched as those of the humans. He carried a whip; perhaps he was a supervisor, a boss.

  Malenfant saw that Julia's breasts were scratched, as if by fingernails, or teeth. "Did they hurt you?"

  She did not answer.

  McCann's Runner came trotting alongside. "She shouldn't speak to you, Malenfant," McCann said urgently. "It will be a whipping for her if she does, and perhaps for you. She knows how to behave with these types; you must learn, and fast. These brutes had a little gruesome fun with her, but yon Constable Sprigge stopped them. I sense there is a core of decency in that man, under the dirt and violence. Perhaps that will assist us as we deal with these Zealots..."

  "Zealots," Malenfant growled.

  McCann said grimly, "I did not expect to encounter them here. They are clearly expanding their area of operations – which is all the worse for us. Listen to me, Malenfant. Your romantic quest for Emma is going to have to wait. It's vital to keep up a front. All that keeps us from doing the carrying rather than being carried is that these fellows accept us as human beings. So you must act as if it is your privilege, no, your right, to use the muscles of these poor creatures as if they belonged to you. And don't forget, you're English." He eyed Malenfant. "A colonial type like you might take it as a great indignity to have to impersonate a Britisher. But I believe any of these ruffians would run you through if they suspected you were a French or a Spaniard or a Portugoose..."

  Malenfant said bitterly, "You know what? I miss America. In America you can travel more than a couple of miles without getting robbed, attacked, kidnapped or trussed up."

  "Chin up, sir. Chin up."

  Malenfant's thinking dissolved. Lulled by the stink of the dust, his weakness, and Julia's steady warmth, he dozed.

  Somewhere thunder cracked, and when he looked up he saw more fat clouds scudding across the sky.

  Half a day after the capture of Malenfant and the others, the party reached the fringes of the Zealot empire.

  They crossed a plain scattered with broken rock fragments. The rim of a broad young crater loomed over the horizon; perhaps they were in the crater's debris field. In any event it was slow, difficult going, as the Runners had to pick their way past huge sharp-edged boulders.

  They came to a place where a thin, sluggish stream ran, and green growing things clustered close to its banks. The land had been cleared. Malenfant saw how the rocks had been piled up into waist-high dry stone walls, mile after mile of them. The rocks must have been broken up before they were moved, a hell of a labor – but then labor was cheap here.

  In a field close to the river, a team of Runners was drawing a wooden plow. The four of them were bound together by a thick leather harness, and wooden yokes lay over their shoulders. The Runners were followed by a Ham, a stocky man who carried a long whip.

  When Sprigge's party came alongside, the Ham overseer stared at Julia. Then he turned back to his charges and lashed them, a single stroke that cut across all four backs. The Runners, their faces empty, did not look up from the dirt they tilled.

  "Good God," Malenfant said, disgusted.

  "It would pay you not to blaspheme in this company," McCann said evenly. "And besides, is it any less cruel to use an ox or a horse for such a purpose?"

  "Those draft animals aren't oxen, McCann. They are hominids."

  "Hominids, but not people, Malenfant," McCann said sadly. "If they have no conception of pain – if even their Ham boss does not – then what harm is done?"

  "You can't believe that's true."

  McCann said stiffly, "I would sooner believe it than join those poor Runner gentlemen behind their plow."

  They passed a small farmhouse, just a rough sod hut. In a yard of red mud, children were playing – they looked like human children, a boy and a girl. They gazed at the approaching party, then ran into the hut. A man emerged from the hut, stripped to the waist, bare-headed. He looked apprehensive.

  From his Runner mount, Sprigge nodded to him. "No tithes to collect today, George."

  "Aye, Master Sprigge." The man George nodded back, cordially enough, but his eyes were wary, fixed on Sprigge as if he were a predator.

  They moved on, following the river as it worked its way towards the Beltway forest. As the land became less arid, the cultivation spread away from the river bank. Soon Malenfant was surrounded by fields, toiling hominids, an occasional human. It might have been a scene from some vision of the old west, or maybe the European Middle Ages, if not for the humanoid forms of the beasts of burden here, the unmistakably Neandertal features of their supervisors, and the unremitting crimson glower of the land itself.

  But this was a genuine colony, he thought, a growing community, for all its ugliness – unlike the dying, etiolated English camp.

  Rain began to fall. The rough path by the river bank soon turned to mud, and the party trudged on in miserable silence. Malenfant tucked his head closer to Julia's chest. With remarkable kindness she leaned over him and sheltered him from the rain with her own bare back, and Malenfant could not find the strength to protest.

  Again he dozed.

  When he woke, he was dumped on his feet. They had reached the Zealot fortress, it seemed.

  They were in a clearing, surrounded by dense wood; Malenfant hadn't even noticed they had come back to the forest. Ditches, ramparts, gates and drawbridges stretched all the way around the township. Sharpened stakes were stuck in the sides of the ramparts, so that the compound bristled, like some great hedgehog of wood and mud.

  A big gate was opened. They were pushed inside.

  The encampment was a place of rambling muddy paths and ugly, low-tech buildings placed haphazardly. There was one central building that looked more sturdily built, mud brick on a wooden frame, like a chapel. Aside from that, the huts were so rough they seemed to have grown out of the debris that littered the muddy ground. They were built of stripped saplings and wattles, and laid over with palm fronds. Everything showed signs of much use and recycling; here was half of what looked like a dugout canoe, for example, serving as a chicken-coop.

  There were no straight lines anywhere, no squares or rectangles, no hard edges; everything was sloppy, all the lines blurred. It was as if the first arrivals here had just marked out trails where they wandered and put up their wattle and daub huts where they felt like. There was none of the regularity and discipline of the British compound.

  M
alenfant sensed McCann's impatience at this disorderliness.

  Malenfant's arms were untied. He could barely move them because of cramp, and he could feel where the cord had cut into his wrists.

  With McCann, he was pushed into a dark, stinking sod hut. He couldn't see what had become of Julia. The hut was dark, the floor was just mud, uneven. A door of saplings bound together by liana twine blocked the door.

  Malenfant limped to a dark corner and slumped there. The floor was greasy and black; when he lifted his hand a great slick sheen came away with it. The whole place stank like a toilet.

  Termite passageways, like the stems of some dead plant, curled up the walls and disappeared into the wooden beams and the thatch. A gecko clambered across the ceiling, incurious.

  He hadn't eaten or drunk anything since being hit over the head by the Zealots. He felt as if he had been systematically pummelled, all over his body, with a baseball bat. And here he was in some quasi-medieval prison block, lying in filth. The world he had come from – of NASA and Houston and Washington, of computers and phones and cars and planes – seemed utterly unreal, evanescent as the shining surface of a bubble, a dream.

  What a mess, he thought.

  McCann was waxing enthusiastic. "I see the pattern, Malenfant. The Hams and Runners surely do not have the wit to be rebellious or to long for escape; unlike human slaves it is unlikely they can conceive of freedom. Besides, if you get them young enough, you can quite easily break their spirits, as with a young horse. If each man controls, say, ten of the Ham bosses, and then each Ham in turn controls ten Runners, you have a formidable army of workers. And at the top of it you have this fellow Praisegod Michael of whom Sprigge has spoken, who creams off the tithes. It is like a vast, spreading, self-sustaining –"

  "Prison camp," Malenfant said sourly.

  "Oh, much more than that, Malenfant. Think how carefully the strata of this little society are defined. You have the humans, with of course their own ranks and order. Beneath them you have your Hams, who in turn lord it over the Runners. And since in this case each lower rank is clearly the intellectual inferior of that above, you have a social order that reflects the natural order. It is a hierarchy as stable as a cathedral."

  Malenfant growled, "I thought you despised the Zealots. You wouldn't tell me a damn word about them."

  "I think I am beginning to see I have underestimated them, Malenfant. Oh, this is a place of repellent squalor, of blood and mud. It is cruel, Malenfant. I don't deny it. But those subject to the greatest cruelty, as far as I can see, are those least capable of perceiving it. And as a social arrangement it is intricate and marvelous. One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one's moral qualms."

  He sounded brittle, almost feverish, Malenfant thought dully. This bizarre mood of his, this fan-worship of the Zealots, could probably evaporate as fast as it had come.

  The hell with it. Malenfant closed his eyes.

  But still, he saw Emma's face in his mind's eye, bright and clear, as if she stood before him. He probed a pocket on his sleeve. The spyglass lens still nestled there, hard and round under his fingers, comforting.

  McCann went to a window – just a hole in the wall, unglazed. He called, "We need water and food. And tell him, Sprigge! Tell your Praisegod Michael we are Englishmen! It will go worse for you if you fail!"

  McCann shook him awake. "We have an invitation to dinner, Malenfant! How jolly exciting."

  A sullen Zealot had brought them a wooden pail of water. They both inspected this suspiciously; they were ferociously thirsty, but in the dim light diffusing from the window, the water looked cloudy.

  McCann shrugged. "Needs must." He plunged his hands into the water and scooped up mouthfuls, which he gulped down.

  Malenfant followed suit. The water tasted sour, but it had no odor.

  When they were done they used the rest of the water to wash themselves. Malenfant cleaned dried blood and grit out of wounds on his bare feet, wrists and neck.

  McCann used the water to slick down his hair. He even produced a tie from one jacket pocket and knotted it around his neck. "Impression is everything," he said to Malenfant. "Outer form. Get that right and the rest follows. Eh?"

  The door was pushed open, its leather hinges creaking. Sprigge walked in, looking as dusty as when they had all walked in from the plains. "You have your wish, gentlemen." He raised his fist. "But any defiance or dissimulation and you'll know my wrath."

  McCann and Malenfant nodded silently.

  They were led out of the hut, into a broad compound. It was raining, and the evening was drawing in. The ground was just red dirt, hard-packed by the passage of human feet. But it was heavily rain-soaked, and Malenfant felt the mud seep between his naked toes.

  People moved between the huts, carrying food and tools or leading children by the hand. They seemed to be humans, but they were small, skinny, stunted folk, dressed in filthy skin rags. There were no lanterns, and the only light inside the huts came from fire hearths.

  McCann murmured to him like a tour guide. "They do not approach us; the authority of this Praisegod Michael of theirs is binding. Look there. I think that hut yonder is a house of ill-fame."

  "A what?... Oh. A brothel."

  "Yes, but a brothel stocked with Runners – women and boys, so far as I can tell. There are contradictions here, Malenfant. We have a community run by this Praisegod fellow, seemingly on rigid religious lines. And yet here is a bordello operating openly."

  The rain grew heavier. The Zealot compound was turning to a muddy swamp. The buildings seemed to slump in defeat, as if sliding back down into the earth from which they had been dragged. And the people, humans, Runners and Hams alike were wan figures, all the same dun color, images of misery.

  McCann stamped through puddles contemptuously. "These people don't know what they are doing," he barked. "We coped rather better. Culverts! Storm drains!" And with broad sweeps of his arms he sketched an ambitious drainage system.

  They were brought to the compound's central structure, the solid-looking chapel. Well, maybe it really was a chapel; now Malenfant saw it had a narrow spire.

  Sprigge led the two of them along a short, dark hallway. Grilles of tightly interwoven wooden laths were set in the floor. Malenfant glanced down. He thought he saw movement, eyes peering up at him. But the light was uncertain.

  They arrived at a large, bright room. It had neat rectangular windows unglazed, but covered with sheets of what looked like woven and scraped palm leaves, so that they admitted a cool yellow light. Lanterns burned on the walls, each just a stone bowl cupping oil within which a wick floated, burning smokily. At the head of the room was a stone fireplace, impressively constructed from heavy red blocks – perhaps ejecta from the crater field they had crossed. No fire burned beneath the blackened chimney stack, but there was a large, impressive crucifix set over the fireplace. At the other end of the room was a plain altar, set with goblets and plates, all of it carved from wood.

  At the center of the room was a small, unevenly made, polished wooden table. A man sat behind the table, eating steadily. There were no plates; the man ate bits of fish and meat off what looked like slabs of thick bread.

  The man wore a black robe that swept to the ground, with a napkin thrown over his shoulder. A band of silver-gray hair surrounding a crown that looked shaved, like a tonsure. His narrow face was disfigured by warts.

  This was, presumably, Praisegod Michael. He ignored Malenfant and McCann.

  Behind Praisegod two Ham women stood, backed up against the wall. They were both dressed in modest, all-covering dresses of soft leather, and they kept their eyes on the floor.

  Sprigge nudged McCann, and indicated they should sit on the floor before the table. McCann complied readily enough. Malenfant followed his lead. Sprigge stepped back, and took a station at the corner of the room.

  As Praisegod Michael ate, everybody in the room waited in silence.

  Malenfant couldn't take his eyes off th
e food.

  There was a puree of what looked like chicken mixed in with rice and some kind of nuts. An animal like a young piglet, roasted, had been carved and set before Michael, and he picked at its white flesh. Other side dishes included some kind of beans cooked in what smelled like meat stock, and mushrooms in a kind of cream, and a green salad. There was even wine – or anyhow it looked like wine, served in a delicately carved wooden goblet.

  At length Praisegod Michael slowed down. More than half the piglet was left on its serving plate. Michael belched, and mopped his lip with a scrap of cloth.

  Then he looked up, directly into Malenfant's eyes. Malenfant was jolted by the intensity of his gaze.

  One of the Ham women behind him stepped forward. Malenfant was startled to recognize Julia. With heavy grace she took the unfinished dishes from Michael, and set them on the floor before McCann and Malenfant.

  Malenfant reached straight for the pork, but McCann touched his arm.

  McCann closed his eyes. "For this blessing. Lord, we thank you."

  Michael watched coldly. Now McCann began to eat, using his fingers to tear at the pork.

  Malenfant followed suit.

  Michael spoke. "Your Ham girl is well-tempered," he said to Malenfant. His voice was deep, commanding, but his accent was powerfully strange.

  Malenfant said, "She isn't my anything."

  McCann said quickly, "She has an even nature, and is wise for a Ham."

  Michael's gaze swiveled to McCann. "I know of you, or at least men who speak like you. Once one was brought here."

  McCann blanched. "Russell. Is he –"

  "He died for his sins."

  There was a long silence. McCann's eyes were closed, even as he chewed steadily on the meat. Then he said carefully, "There are only a handful of us – a handful, and Hams and Runners. We have no women, no children. We are weak old men," he said, looking directly at Michael. "We are no threat to your – umm, your expansion."

  Michael got out of his chair. Tall, cadaverously thin, his arms clasped before his belly, he walked around the table and studied McCann and Malenfant. "My soldiers will spare them."