Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  Praisegod's manner seemed distracted to Malenfant, almost confused. He said rapidly, "I have been forced to punish Sir McCann. You see why – you witnessed his blasphemous disrespect. His soul is hard, set in a mold of iniquity. But you – you are different. You seek the woman you love; you are moved by a chivalrous zeal. In you I see a soul that could be turned to higher goals."

  "Don't count on it," Malenfant said.

  Praisegod's eyes narrowed. "You should not presume on God's grace."

  "This place has nothing to do with God," Malenfant said evenly, staring hard at Praisegod. "You play with human lives, but you don't even see that much, do you? Praisegod, this place – this Moon – is an artifact. Not made by God. Humans. Men, Praisegod. Men as different from you or me as we are different from the Elves, maybe, but men nevertheless. They are moving this whole damn Moon from one reality strand to the next, from Earth to Earth. And everything you see here, the mixing up of uncounted possibilities, is because of that moving. Because of people. Do you get it? God has nothing to do with it."

  Praisegod closed his eyes. "This is a time of confusion. Of change... I think you may yet serve my purpose, and therefore God's. But I must shape you, like clay on the wheel. But there is much bile in you that must be driven out." He nodded to Sprigge. "A hundred stripes to start with."

  Malenfant was dragged out of the room. "You're a savage, Praisegod. And you run a jerkwater dump. If this is some holy crusade, why do you allow your men to run a forced brothel?"

  But Praisegod wasn't listening. He had turned to his Ham boy, and stroked his misshapen head.

  Malenfant was taken to a room further down the dismal corridor.

  He found himself stretched out over an open wooden frame, set at forty-five degrees above the horizontal. His feet were bound to the base of the frame. Sprigge wrapped rope around his wrists and pulled Malenfant's arms above his head until his joints ached.

  Sprigge looked Malenfant in the eye. "I have to make it hard," he said. "It'll be the worse for me if I spare you."

  "Just do your job," Malenfant said sourly.

  "I know Praisegod well enough. That fat Englishman just riled him. He thinks you might be useful to him. But you must play a canny game. If you go badly with him, he'll ill use you, Malenfant. I've seen that before too. He has a lot of devices more clever than my old whip, I'll tell you. He has gadgets that crush your thumbs or fingers until they are as flat as a gutted fish. Or he will put a leg-clamp on you, a thing he'll use on recalcitrant Runner folk, and every day we have to turn it a little tighter, until the bones are crushed and the very marrow is leaking into your boots."

  Malenfant tried to lift his head. "I don't have any boots."

  "Boots will be provided."

  A joke? He could dimly make out Sprigge's face, and it bore an expression of something like compassion – compassion, under a layer of dirt and weathered scars and tangled beard, the mask of a hard life. "Why do you follow him, Sprigge? He's a madman."

  Sprigge tested the bonds and stepped back. "Sometimes the lads go off into the bush. They think life is easier there, that they can have their pick of the bush women, not like the bleeding whores they keep here. Well, the bush folk kill them, if the animals or the bugs don't first. As simple as that. Without Praisegod we'd all be prey, see. He organizes us, Sir Malenfant. We're housed and we're fed and nobody harms us. And now that he's taken up with the Daemons well, he has big ideas. You have to admire a man for that."

  Malenfant thought, What the hell is a Daemon? He felt his jacket being pulled off his back. The air was damp and cold.

  "Now, a hundred stripes is a feeler, Sir Malenfant. I know how you'll bear it. But you'll live; remember that." He stepped away, into the dark.

  Malenfant heard running footsteps.

  And then he heard the lash of the whip, an instant before the pain shot through his nervous system. It was like a burn, a sudden, savage burn. He felt blood trickling over his sides and falling to the floor, and he understood why the frame under him had to be open.

  More of Sprigge's "stripes" rained down, and the pain cascaded. There seemed to be no cut-off in Malenfant's head, each stroke seemingly doubling the agony that went before, a strange calculus of suffering.

  He didn't try to keep from crying out.

  Maybe he lost consciousness before the hundred were done.

  At last he was hit by a rush of water – it felt ice-cold – and then more pain reached him, sinking into every gash on his back, like cold fire.

  Sprigge appeared before him. "The salty back," he said, cutting Malenfant's wrists free. "It'll help you heal."

  Malenfant fell to the floor, which stank of his own blood, like the iron scent of the crimson dust of this rusted Red Moon.

  A heavy form moved around him in the dark. He cowered, expecting more punishment.

  But there was a hand on his brow, water at his lips. He could smell the dense scent of a Ham – perhaps it was Julia. The Ham helped him lie flat on his belly, with his ripped jacket under his face. His back was bathed – the wounds stung with every drop – and then something soft and light was laid over his back, leaves that rustled.

  The square window in the ceiling above showed diffuse gray-blue. It was evening, or very early morning.

  He was left alone after that, and he slept, falling into a deeper slumber.

  When he woke again that square of sky was bright blue. By its light he saw that the leaves on his back were from a banana tree. His pain seemed soothed.

  "...Malenfant. Malenfant, are you there?"

  The voice was just a whisper, coming from the direction of the door.

  Malenfant got his hands under his chest, pushed himself up to a crawling position. He felt the leaves fall away from his back. His bare chest was sticky with his own dried blood, and with every move he felt scabs crack, wounds ache.

  He crawled to the wall by the door, kneeling there in the mud and blood.

  "McCann?"

  "Malenfant! By God it's good to hear the voice of a civilized man. Have they hurt you?"

  Malenfant grimaced. "A 'feeler', Sprigge called it."

  "It could get worse, Malenfant."

  "I know that."

  McCann's voice sounded odd – thick, indistinct, as if he were talking around something in his mouth. Flogging, branding, tongue-boring, Malenfant recalled. The penalty for blasphemy.

  "What have they done to you, Hugh?"

  "My punishment was enthusiastically delivered," McCann lisped.

  "One must admire their godly zeal... And the beatings are not the half of it. Malenfant, he has me laboring in the fields: pulling plows, along with the Runner slaves. It is not the physical trial – I can barely add an ounce to the mighty power of my Runner companions – but the indignity, you see. Praisegod has made me one with the sub-men, and his brutish serfs mock me as I toil."

  "You can stand a little mockery."

  "Would that were true! Praisegod understands how to hurt beyond the crude infliction of blows and cuts and burns; and the shame of this casting-down has hurt me grievously – and he knows it. But his punishment will not last long, Malenfant. I am not so young nor as fit as I was; soon, I think, I will evade Praisegod's monstrous clutches once and for all... But it need not be so for you. Malenfant, I think Praisegod has some sympathy for you – or purpose, at least. Tell him whatever it is you think he wants to hear. That way you will be spared his wrath."

  Malenfant said softly, "You were the one who said you could do business with him."

  "Do as I say, not as I do," McCann hissed. "It is my faith, Malenfant, my faith. Praisegod arouses in me a righteous rage which I cannot contain, whatever the cost to myself. But he is an intelligent man, a cunning man. I suspect his grasp of his ugly crew here was slipping. I have heard the men mutter. They tell fortunes, you know, with cowry shells – much handled, shining like old ivory... Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion. He was on his uppers, M
alenfant, until quite recently. But now his inchoate ambitions have found a new clarity, a plausibility. He has found new allies: these Daemons, whoever or whatever they are. He has suddenly become a much more credible, and dangerous, figure... If I had half a brain I would stay in his fold.

  "But you are different, Malenfant. Without faith – a paradoxically enviable condition! – you have no moral foundation to inhibit you; you must lie and cheat and steal; you must kowtow to Praisegod; you must do everything you can, everything you must, to survive."

  "I'll try," Malenfant gasped.

  "Will you, my friend? Will you truly? There is a darkness in you, Malenfant. I saw it from the beginning. You may choose, without knowing it, to use Praisegod as the final instrument of your own destruction."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "You must look into your heart, Malenfant. Think about the logic of your life... The day advances. Soon I will be called to my work in the fields, and I must sleep if I can."

  "Take care of yourself, Hugh."

  "Yes... God be with you, my friend."

  That night Malenfant called McCann's name. The only reply was a kind of gasping, inarticulate, and a moist slithering.

  The night after that Malenfant called for McCann, over and over, but there was no reply.

  Emma Stoney

  She had first become aware of Joshua as an absence. There was a spare place at the hearths of Ruth and others, portions of meat left set aside by the hunters. It was a pattern she had noticed before when somebody had recently died; the Hams clearly remembered their dead, and they made these subtle tributes of absence – halfway to a ritual, she supposed.

  Then, one day, Joshua came back.

  Within a couple of days it was clear Joshua was not like the other Hams.

  He was perhaps twenty-five years old, as much as she was any judge of the ages of these people. His body bore the marks of savage beatings, and his tongue seemed to be damaged, making his speech even more impenetrable than the rest.

  No Hams lived alone. But Joshua lived alone, in his cave beyond the communal space around the hut. Hams did not go naked – but Joshua did, wearing not so much as a scrap of skin to cover his filth-encrusted genitals. Hams cut their hair and, crudely, shaved their beards with stone knives. Joshua did not, and his hair was a mane of black streaked with gray, his beard long but rather comically wispy under that huge jaw. Hams joined in the activities of the community, making tools, gathering and preparing food, repairing clothes and the hut. Joshua did none of this.

  Hams did not make markings, or symbols of any kind – in fact they showed loathing of such things. Joshua covered the walls of his cave with markings made by stone scrapers and bits of bone. They might have been faces; he sketched rough ovals and rectangles, criss-crossed by interior lines – noses, mouths? over and over. The marks were crude scratches, as if made by a small child – but still, they were more than she had ever observed any other Ham to make.

  The other Hams tolerated him. In fact, since he did no gathering or hunting, by providing him with food they were keeping him alive, as she had seen other groups sustain badly injured, sickly or elderly individuals. Perhaps they thought he was ill, beyond his body's slowly healing wounds.

  Certainly, by the standards of his kind, he was surely insane. Studying this Ham hermit from afar, Emma concluded that whatever his story, she had best avoid him.

  But when Joshua spotted her, the matter was taken out of her hands.

  She was walking up the beach from the sea. Her catch of fish had been good that day, and she had used a scrap of blue chute cloth from her pack to carry it all.

  Joshua was sitting outside his cave, muttering to himself. When he saw her blue cloth, he got to his feet, hooted loudly, and came running.

  Other Hams, close to the hut, watched dully.

  Joshua capered before her, muttering, his accent thicker than any she had heard before. He was gaunt, and his back was still red with half-healed welts. But he might have been three times her weight.

  Emma reached for the stone knife she kept tucked in her belt. "Keep back, now."

  He grabbed the blue cloth, spilling the fish on the sand. He sniffed the cloth with his giant, snot-crusted nostrils, and wiped it over his face. "This," he shouted. "This!"

  She frowned. "What is it? What are you trying to tell me?"

  "Th' door in the sky," he said. "Th' door in Heaven. Th' wings of th' seed." His voice was horribly indistinct – and when he opened his mouth to yell these things at her, she saw a great notch had been cut out of his tongue.

  She should get out of here, flee to the sanctuary of the hut, get away from his deranged grasp. But she stayed. For no other Ham had used phrases like "the door in the sky".

  She asked cautiously, "What door?"

  "Th' sky seed. Th' Gray Earth. Th' seed fell th' sky."

  She understood it in a flash. She whirled and pointed to the lander, stranded on the cliff face. "Is that what you're talking about? The lander – the thing that fell from the sky?" She grabbed back the bit of cloth. "Under a parachute. A blue chute, wings, like this."

  For answer he bellowed, "Sky seed!" And he turned away and ran full tilt towards the foot of the cliff, beneath the lander.

  Emma watched him go, her heart thumping.

  She could stay here her whole life and never persuade the Hams to help her get to the lander. Maybe it took an insane Ham even to conceive of such a project. A Ham like Joshua.

  Now or never, Emma.

  She grabbed her pack and ran after Joshua.

  There was a trail, of sorts, that led from the beach to the top of the cliff. At least Joshua showed her the way; she couldn't have managed at all otherwise. But it was a trail for Hams – or maybe goats – certainly not for humans. The scrambling and climbing was a major challenge for Emma, never super-fit, never any kind of climber. Nevertheless, by sheer force of will, she kept up.

  At the top of the cliff she fell back, exhausted, her heart pumping and her lungs scratching for air. It was like her first few days after the portal, when she had struggled to acclimatize to this strange mountain-top world.

  Joshua immediately plunged into the cliff-top forest. Emma forced herself to her feet and followed.

  Joshua crashed through the dense forest by main force, pushing aside branches, saplings and even some mature trees. He seemed careless of the noise he made and the trail he left behind – again unlike most Hams, who took care to pass silently through the dangerous twilight of the forest.

  At last they pushed into a clearing. Here the trees had been battered flat, she saw, and bits of blue cloth clung to scattered branches. Her heart thumped harder. Joshua ran across the clearing to the far side, where a last line of trees had been broken down, exposing blue-gray sky. She followed him.

  She found herself at the lip of the cliff, looking down on a trail of scraped rock and bits of cloth and chute cord. And there, really not so far beneath the lip of the cliff, like a fat bug trapped in some huge spider-web, lay the lander.

  Joshua squatted on his haunches and pointed down at the lander. "Sky seed," he said excitedly. "Sky seed!"

  She gazed hungrily down at the lander: crumpled, battered, stained and weathered, but intact. She saw no sign that anybody had climbed out of it since its plummet down the cliff.

  From here the lander looked very small. Specifically, she couldn't see any sign of an engine pack, no way the thing could get itself off the ground and back to Earth.

  She sat back, forcing herself to think. Sitting here with a Neandertal the internal politics of America seemed a remote abstraction – but still she couldn't believe that the US government would sanction any kind of one-way mission, even for someone as persuasive as Reid Malenfant. But that meant – she thought, her brain working feverishly – that the engine had to be somewhere else.

  She grabbed Joshua's arms, and immediately regretted it; his skin was covered in filth and scabs. He flinched back from her touch, a
s if she intended to hurt him. She let go, and held her empty hands up before him. "I'm sorry... Listen to me. There must be another lander. I mean, another sky seed. A second one." But Hams did not count. She held her hands up to mime two landers coming down from the west, one after the other. But Hams did not use symbols.

  She pointed, bluntly. "Sky seed. Down there. Sky seed." She pointed into the forest, at random. "Over there."

  He frowned. He pointed west, deeper into the forest. "Ov' there."

  She took a deep breath. I knew it.

  But now Joshua was jabbering, pointing at the lander and the sky. "Sky seed. Praisegod. There 'fore me was door standin' open Heav'n. Sky seed in Heav'n. People of th' Gray Earth. People of Heav'n." And on and on, a long, complex, baffling diatribe.

  She peered into his ridged eye sockets, struggling to understand what was going through that mind – so alien from hers, and damaged too.

  Bit by bit she got it.

  Joshua had seen the lander come down from the sky. He had seen the second lander too. She knew that Hams believed their people came from a place in the sky, which they called the Gray Earth. Joshua, alternately, called it Heaven. As best she could make out he wanted to use the lander to take his people home, to Gray Earth, to Heaven.

  "Was it the Zealots who taught you about Heaven? Did the Zealots hurt you? Did this Praisegod hurt you?"

  "Prai'go' Michael," he mumbled. "Mal'fan'."

  Suddenly she couldn't breathe. She grabbed his shoulders, mindless of the filth, resisting his flinching. "What did you say?"

  "Mal'fan'. Zealots. Mal'fan'."

  The Zealots had Malenfant. Malenfant was here.

  She sat back on her haunches, breathing in gasps. "Do you know where Malenfant is being held? – no, you can't tell me that. But you could show me." She studied Joshua, who gazed back at her. "Listen to me. There is something you want. There is something I want. This is what we will do. You take me to Malenfant... If you do this, I will give you the lander. It will take you home, to Heaven, to the Gray Earth."