Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  She tried crawling in, all the way. That didn't work.

  The Hams watched all this, bemused.

  She considered schemes with ropes and pitons and rock-hammers, where she would make a kind of ladder that she could "climb", across the face of the barren windswept rock, all the way to the center. But she had no rope or pitons or rock-hammers, and couldn't come up with any way of making them.

  She explored the cave system, but found no way through that way.

  And if she couldn't go under the twister wall, she surely couldn't go over it; it looked to her as if that tunnel of tortured air stretched all the way out of the atmosphere. (She did toy with insane schemes of retrieving Malenfant's lander and firing it up into some kind of Alan Shepard sub-orbital trajectory that would take her up and over the wall of air, and re-enter right into the eye of the storm. But – despite her various rash promises to Joshua to pilot him and the lander all the way to his mythical Gray Earth – she didn't know how to fly the lander, still less how to rig it for such a flight, still less how to land it.)

  On the tenth day of trying, as she lay clinging to the rock, sucking air from dust through a sheet of muslin, somebody walked past her.

  Mouth gaping, bits of chute silk flapping around her, she watched as a Ham man and child walked hand in hand into the teeth of the storm, blurring. Granted the Hams were stronger than she was – both of them probably, even the boy – but they weren't that strong. They weren't even leaning into the damn wind.

  Then she noticed, just before they disappeared into gray-red dust, that their skin wraps were hanging loose around them. The churning air wasn't touching them.

  She spent more days watching.

  The Hams had always used the other side of the crater as part of their domain for hunting and gathering. They had trails leading that way, so ancient they were actually worn into the rock. When a Ham walked such a trail, heading for the crater's interior, she just carried on through the wall of wind and dust.

  The Hams weren't the only ones.

  A flock of bats flapped clumsily into the crimson mist one day, their fragile wings unaffected by the tearing air. She spotted a young deer, apparently lost, that stumbled out of the dust, gazed around with wide eyes at the world beyond, then bolted back into the wind storm. Even other hominids could make it through: notably Runners, and one Nutcracker she spotted.

  But not herself – and, for some reason, not the chimp-like Elves, an association she found insulting.

  She tried to interrogate the Hams. "Julia, how come you can get through the wind and I can't?"

  An intense frown creased that powerful face. "Hams live here." She waved her arm. "Still live here."

  "All right. But why am I kept out?"

  A shrug.

  "What is it I'm not allowed to see? Is there some kind of installation in there, a base? Are the Hams allowed to go up to it? Do you have any, umm, trade with whoever built it?"

  None of this meant much to Julia. "Funny stuff." She waved her fingers before her face. "Hard to see."

  Emma sighed. So the Hams might be wandering around or through some kind of fabulous Homo superior base without even looking at it, interested only in their perennial pursuits, perhaps not even capable of seeing it from out of their bony cages of conservatism.

  And that, presumably, was why the Daemons let the Hams wander at will past their meteorological moat. The Hams would restrict themselves, going where they had always gone inside the crater, doing what they had always done, taking not a step beyond their self-imposed boundaries; they would not interfere with whatever projects and designs the Daemons were developing in there. Whereas noisy, curious, destructive Homo sap types like herself would not rest until they had barged their way into the Daemons' shining city.

  Breaking this demeaning exclusion became an obsession with her.

  She focused on the Hams. She kept trying their trails. She carried Ham tools and weapons as if intent on some Ham-type gathering and hunting. She tried walking in with a party of Hams, her slim form tucked into a line of their great hulking bodies. But the wind seemed to whip through their immense muscular forms, to grab at her and push her aside.

  She pushed the deception further. She purloined some skins and wrapped herself up like a Ham. Slouching, bending her legs, she practiced the Hams' powerful, clumsy gait. She let her hair grow ragged and filthy, and even smeared clay on her face, letting it dry in a hopeful imitation of a Ham's bulky facial morphology, the high cheekbones and the bony crest over the eyes.

  Then, joining another foraging party, she slouched towards the wind, her gait rolling, keeping her distinctive Homo sap chin tucked into her chest.

  The wind wasn't fooled.

  Furious, she stamped back to the caves, and sought out Joshua.

  "You have to help me."

  Joshua stared at her. He was ragged, filthy, sitting in a debris-strewn cave that managed to be remarkably ill-appointed, even by the Paleolithic standards of this Red Moon.

  "Wha' for?"

  She sighed, forgiving him his squalor, and kneeled in the dirt before him. "I want to know," she said. "I want to know what they are doing in there – and who they are. If they are responsible for dragging this Moon around the realities I mean, for changing the sky – I want to know why they are doing it. And to make them understand the damage they are causing, the suffering. Do you see?"

  He frowned at her. "Deal," he said simply.

  "Yes," she said wearily. "Yes, we had a deal. We still have a deal. You help me, and I'll try to help you get to the Gray Earth. Just as I promised." God forgive me for lying, she thought.

  But his eyes narrowed, almost calculating. "Fin' a way."

  "Yes, I'll find a way. We'll go back to the lander and – "

  His massive hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. The grip was painful, but she knew that he was using only a fraction of his strength, that if he chose he could probably crush her bone.

  "No lies."

  He means it, she thought. He knows my kind too well. "Okay. No lies. I'll find a way. Get me through the wind wall and I'll work on it, I'll find a way. I promise, Joshua. Please, my arm..."

  He squeezed harder – just a little – but it was like a vice closing over her flesh. Then he released her. He sat back, baring his teeth in a wide grin. "How?"

  "How can I get through the wind wall? I've been thinking about that. Whatever controls the wind is too smart to be fooled by appearance. It's not enough that I look like a Ham. But maybe if I can learn to think like a Ham..."

  Scarhead dragged a couple of haunches of meat from the back of the cave. For one brief moment the old guy looked the image of the cartoon caveman. He threw the meat down on the trampled ground, then went back into the cave to fetch tools.

  Emma had once more donned her best-effort Neandertal disguise. She got to the ground gingerly, conscious of the need to keep her face rigid so as not to crack her mask of clay.

  As usual, nobody showed the slightest interest in her – by now, not even the children.

  The meat was, gruesomely, a couple of legs, intact from hoof to shoulder, perhaps from a horse. The limbs were already skinned, fresh, bloody, steaming slightly. Flies buzzed languidly around the exposed flesh.

  Scarhead returned. He threw his handfuls of tools on the ground and sat cross legged. He grinned, and the low morning sun made his scar tissue glisten.

  She inspected the tools with absent interest. There were limestone pebbles gathered from the beds of rivers, used as chopping tools, and dark basalt blocks shaped into bi-faced hand-axes and cleavers. These were working tools, each of them heavily worn and blood-splashed.

  Before she left the Earth she'd known nothing of technology like this, and if she had been confronted with this collection of pebbles and rocks she would have dismissed them as nothing but random debris. Now she knew differently. Tools like this, or the still more primitive artifacts of the Runners, had kept her alive for months.

  Scarhead held o
ut a hand-axe to her.

  She took the rock, feeling its rough texture. She turned it over in her hands, testing its weight, feeling how it fit perfectly into her small human hand for, of course, Scarhead had chosen it to suit her grip.

  Now Scarhead held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He said bluntly, "Copy." He grabbed one of the horse legs, and began to saw at the joint between the scapula and humerus, between shoulder and leg. His stone blade rasped as he cut through tough tendons and ligaments.

  She tried. Just manhandling the heavy limb proved a challenge to her; the joints were gruesomely stiff, the meat slippery and cold in her hands.

  She sighed. "Could I see the vegetarian menu?"

  Scarhead just stared at her.

  No smart-ass H. sap jokes, Emma; today you're a Neandertal, remember?

  She kept trying. She worked the knife into the meat until she had exposed the tendons beneath the shoulder. The meat, cold and slippery against her legs, was purple-red and marbled with fat; it was coldly dead, and yet so obviously, recently attached to something alive.

  Turning the stone tool in her hand, she sought to find the sharpest edge. She managed to insert her blade into the joint and sawed at the tough ligaments, scraping them until they gave, like tough bits of rope.

  Scarhead grunted.

  Surprised, she raised her hand. The tool's edge had cut into her flesh, causing long straight-line gashes that neatly paralleled the lifeline on her palm. She hadn't even felt the cuts happen – but then the blade on a stone knife could be sharper than a metal scalpel; it could slide right into you and you'd never know it. She saw belatedly that Scarhead's working hand was wrapped in a hunk of thick, toughened animal skin, and a kind of apron was draped over his lap.

  ...And now the pain hit, sharp and deep like a series of paper cuts, and she yowled. She went to a stream to drench her cut palm in cold water until the slow bleeding had stopped.

  Scarhead waited patiently for her, no expression she could read on his broad, battered face.

  You aren't doing too well here, Emma.

  She tried again. She spread a skin apron over her lap, and improvised a protective binding for her hand from a bit of tough leather. Then she resumed her work at the ligaments and tendons.

  Think about the work, Emma. Think about the feel of the stone, listen to the rasp of the tendons, smell the coagulated blood; feel the sun on your head, listen to the steady breathing of Scarhead...

  She reached bone. Her axe scraped against the hard surface, almost jarring from her hand. She pulled the axe back and turned it over, exposing fresh edge, and began to dig deeper into the joint, seeking more tendon to cut.

  A last tough bit of gristle gave way, and the leg disarticulated.

  She stared, oddly fascinated, at the bone joints. Even Malenfant, who had never shown the slightest interest in biology, might have been interested at this bit of natural engineering, if he had gotten to take it apart in his own hands.

  And she was still analyzing. Wrong.

  She glanced up at Scarhead. Not watching her, apparently immersed in the work, he had begun to fillet the meat from the shoulder joint he was holding. Emulating his actions, she did the same. She dug her blade into the gap between meat and bone, cutting the muscle that was attached to the bone surface. She soon found the easiest way was to prop the scapula on the ground between her legs, and pull at the muscle with one hand to expose the joint, which she cut with the other hand. She got into a rhythm of turning the axe in her hand, to keep exposing fresh edge.

  She tried not to think about anything – not Earth, Malenfant, the wind wall, the destiny of mankind, her own fate – nothing but the feel of the sun, the meat in her hand, the scrape of stone on bone.

  For brief moments, as the hypnotic rhythms of the butchery tugged at her mind, she got it.

  It was as if she was no longer the little viewpoint camera stuck behind her eyes; it was as if her consciousness had dispersed, so that she was her working hands, or spread even further to her tool, the flesh and bone she worked, and the trails and bits of forest and scrub and the crater walls and the migrating herds and all the other details of this scrap of the world, a scrap inhabited by the Hams, unchanging, for generation upon generation upon generation.

  ...Her hands had finished the butchery. On one side of her, a flensed shoulder bone; on the other, a neat stack of filleted meat.

  She looked into cavernous eyes, feeling the sun's heat, feeling the pleasurable ache of her arms and hands. She forgot the name she had given him, forgot her own name, forgot herself in his deep stare.

  Shadows beside her. It was Joshua, and Julia... No, no names; these people simply were who they were, everybody in their world knew them, without the need for labels. She took their hands and let herself be raised to her feet.

  The Hams led her up the hillside, away from the caves, towards the place where the unnatural wind moaned.

  It was not like a dream; it was too detailed for that. She felt the sharpness of every grain of red dust under her feet, the lick of the air on her cheeks, the salty prickle of sweat on her brow and neck, the sharp, almost pleasant ache of her cut palm. It was as if a veil had been removed from her eyes, stops from her ears and nose, so that the colors were vivid and alive – red earth, green vegetation, blue sky – and the sounds were clear, grainy, loud, their footsteps crunching into the earth, the hiss of wind over the scrubby grass that clung to these upper slopes. It was like being a child again, she thought, a child on a crisp summer's Saturday morning, when the day was too long for its end to be imagined, the world too absorbing to be analyzed.

  Was this how it was to be a Neandertal? If so, how – enviable.

  They had reached the crest of the crater-rim hill. They began to walk forward, in a line, hand in hand.

  That wall of air spread across the land before her, a cylinder so wide it looked flat. She felt a lick of wind, touching her cheek, disturbing her hair, the first prickle of dust on her skin. She dropped her head, concealing her Homo sap protruding chin, and walked steadily on. She concentrated on the sun, the texture of the ground, the bloody iron scent of the dusty air.

  Anything but the wind.

  They went into the dust. She walked steadily, between her Ham friends, immersed in crimson light. She was ten paces inside the dust. Then fifteen, past her previous record. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two...

  Maybe it was the counting. Hams did not count.

  The wind hit her like a train.

  Her hands were wrenched from the Hams' grip. She was lifted up off the ground, flipped on her back, and slammed down again.

  The light dimmed to a dull Venusian red. Suddenly she couldn't see Julia or Joshua, nothing but a horizontal hail of dust particles and bits of rock, looming out of infinity as if she were looking into a tunnel. If she turned her head into the wind she could barely breathe.

  Another gust – she was rolled over – she scrabbled at the ground. And then she was lifted up, up into the air, limbs flailing, like a cow caught by a Midwest tornado. She was immersed in a shell of whirling dust; she couldn't see ground or sky, couldn't tell how far away the ground was, couldn't even tell which way up she was. But she could tell she was falling.

  She screamed, but her cry was snatched away. "Malenfant!"

  She was on her back. She could feel that much. But there was no wind: no hot buffeting gusts at her face, no sting of grit on her exposed skin. Nothing but a remote howl.

  She opened her eyes.

  She was looking up into a dark tunnel, like gazing up from the depths of a well, towards a circle of cloud-scattered blue sky. The light was odd, grayish-red, as if shadowed. Was she back in the caves? She tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her back and stomach.

  A face loomed above her, silhouetted by the patch of bright sky, backlit by diffuse gray light. "Take it easy. We don't think any bones are broken. But you are cut and bruised and badly winded. You may be concussed." The face was thin, capped b
y a splash of untidy black hair. Emma stared at an oddly jutting chin, weak cheekbones, an absurd bubble skull with loose scraps of hair. It was a woman's face.

  It came into focus. A human woman.

  The woman frowned. "Do you understand me?"

  When she tried to speak Emma found her mouth full of dust. She coughed, spat, and tried again. "Yes."

  "You must be Emma Malenfant."

  "Stoney," Emma corrected automatically. "As if it makes a difference now." She saw the woman was wearing a faded blue coverall, scuffed and much-repaired, with a NASA meatball logo on her chest. "You're Nemoto. Malenfant's companion."

  Nemoto regarded her gravely, and with a start Emma recognized for the first time the Oriental cast of her features. A lesson, she thought wryly. Compared to the distance between humans and other hominids, the gap between our races really is so small as to be unnoticeable.

  "...Malenfant is dead," she said hesitantly. "I'm sorry."

  She thought she saw hope die, just a little, in Nemoto's blank, narrowing eyes.

  "I don't know how well you knew him. I – "

  "We have much to discuss, Emma Stoney."

  "Yes. Yes, we do."

  Nemoto slid an arm under Emma's back and helped Emma sit up. Everything worked, more or less. But her belly and back felt like one immense bruise, and she was having trouble breathing.

  She was sitting on crimson dirt. A few paces away from her, waiting patiently, she saw Joshua and Julia. She grinned at them, and Julia gave her an oddly human wave back.

  Beyond them was strangeness.

  A yellow floor sprawled over the ground – seamless and smooth, obviously artificial. There were buildings on this floor, rounded structures the same color and apparently made of the same material, as if they had grown seamlessly from out of the floor, as if the whole thing was a sculpture of half-melted Cheddar cheese.

  Hominids were moving among the structures. They walked on feet and knuckles, big and bulky, too remote for her to make out details. Like gorillas, she thought, like the creature she had seen leaving the Zealot stockade with the ragtag army. Could they be Daemons?