The little column turned single-file and spread out. The going was easy over the dust-strewn rock, and Emma, hardened by her weeks of living rough, found it easy to keep up with Manekato's knuckle-gallop. But when she looked back she saw that Nemoto was laboring, lagging behind Emma by a hundred yards. Julia walked at her side, stolid, slow, patient, her own awkward gait endearingly clumsy.
Emma waited until Nemoto caught up. Nemoto did not look her in the eye; she plodded on, her gait showing a trace of a limp. Emma clapped her on the shoulder. "I guess the human species isn't going to conquer the stars if we can't even walk a couple of miles, Nemoto."
"I am not as acclimatized as you," Nemoto said.
"Despite all that astronaut training you must have had. Whereas I was just thrown here on my ass from out of the blue sky – "
"Punish me if you like. Your misfortunes are not my fault."
"Right. You came here to rescue me. Or was it just to give me somebody even worse off than I am?"
Julia moved between them. "No' worry, Emma. I help."
Emma grinned. "Just throw her over your shoulder if she gives any trouble. Nemoto – even if they can't Map there, I don't understand why the Daemons haven't been to this center before."
"They have been studying it. They can be remarkably patient. And – "
"Yes?"
"I think they have been waiting for us."
Emma observed, "Nobody's carrying anything."
Julia shrugged. "Fores' has food. Fores' has water."
"You see?" Nemoto glared. "These others do not think as we do. Julia knows that the land will provide everything she needs: food, water, even raw materials for tools. It is a different set of assumptions, Emma Stoney. Just as Manekato said. They see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous mother land. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered."
"So we're inferior in every way," Emma grumbled, resentful.
"Not that," Nemoto said. "But we are different. The Daemons' intellectual capacity is obvious – the rapidity of their comprehension, the richness and precision of their thinking. But they come from a world where hunters, indeed predators of any kind, cannot prosper. Even their games are cooperative, all concerned with building things."
"What about religion? What do they believe?"
Nemoto shrugged. "If they have a religion it is buried well, in their minds and their culture. They need not worship sublimated mothers or seeds as we do, because they control nature – at least, below the Red Moon. And without the metaphor of the seed, of renewal, they have no urge to believe in a life beyond the grave."
"Like the Hams."
"Yes. The Hams, Neandertals, have much more in common with the Daemons than we do. And remember this, Emma Stoney. Mane's people regard us as less intelligent than them. Save for academic interest or sentimentality, they have no more interest in talking to us than you would have in chatting to a Colobus monkey. This is the framework within which we must operate, no matter how hurtful to your Homo sapiens ego."
They reached a patch of forest. Manekato plunged into it, seeking fruit. The others followed more slowly.
Keeping Manekato's broad back in sight, Emma stepped cautiously over a muddy, leaf-strewn ground. Roots snaked everywhere, as if put there to trip her. In some places the trees towered high. She could see the canopy, where the thick branches of each tree spread out, making an almost horizontal roof of greenery. The trunks themselves were dense with life, with lianas that looped and sagged, and ferns and orchids sprouting like underarm hair from every crevice and fork. Though it was humid and still, the moist air felt almost cool on her cheeks, as if this was fall. There was a mild, pervading stench of decaying vegetation.
A shadow flitted between the tree trunks, a round, uncertain form dimly glimpsed among the shadowy verticals.
Emma stopped dead, heart hammering.
Manekato was a massive, reassuring form at her side. "It is a Nutcracker. A vegetarian hominid which – "
"I know about Nutcrackers."
Manekato peered curiously into her face. "I sense fear."
Emma found her breath was shallow; she tried to control it. "Does that surprise you?"
"You are already far from home. Without prior preparation, without aid, you have survived in this place for many weeks. What more is there for you to fear now?"
"Humans aren't creatures of the forest, like the Elves or the Nutcrackers. We are creatures of the open. Like the Runners."
"Ah." Apologetically Manekato reached for her and, with thick, gentle, leather skinned fingers, she probed at Emma's shoulders, elbows, hips. "It is true. You are designed for steady walking, for running, over long distances. You sweat unlike me – so that you can control your heat loss efficiently in the open sunlight. Yes, your link with the forest is lost deep in the past. And so you see it, not as a place of bounty and safety, but of threat."
"We have tales. Fictions. Many of them are scary. They involve dense forests, being lost in the woods."
Manekato showed ferocious teeth. "And if an Elf were able, it would frighten its companions with tales of being trapped in the open, with no forest cover in sight, at sunset, as the predators begin to feed... But that hominid appeared to be fleeing. Little threatens the Nutcrackers, here in their forest domain; they are strong and smart. Curious." Mane loped forward, more slowly than before, her massive form moving with barely a rustle through the crowded foliage. Emma followed in her tracks.
Then Mane slowed, peering down at something on the ground.
Emma heard the buzzing of flies. Then came the stench, the rotting-meat stench: sanitized out of the world she had come from, a smell she would not get used to no matter how long she lasted on this strange, mixed-up Moon.
The smell of death.
It looked like a chimp that had been hit by a truck. Its hairy skin was broken by wounds and lesions, and a watery fluid leaked from gaping mouth and empty eye sockets. Maggots squirmed in the lesions, giving the corpse a semblance of life. The body seemed to be deliquescing, in fact, its flesh and bones dissolving right out from within its skin and pouring into the ground.
There was an infant sitting on the ground beside the adult, presumably its mother, a round bundle of misery.
"Now we know why that Nutcracker was fleeing," Emma said.
Nemoto, panting hard, joined Emma. "I have seen this before. Do not touch anything."
"What is it?"
"Something like the Ebola virus, I think. It starts with a headache, a fever. As your cells fill with the replicating virus your immune system collapses. Your skin turns to pulp; you hemorrhage; your gut fills with blood; blood leaks from your eyes, mouth, nose, ears, anus. When you die your body turns to slime. If somebody picks up the corpse, they contract it too, and die in turn. There is no vaccine or cure. I guess that is why the others of this one's troupe have abandoned it, and its child."
"I have made this one safe," Mane murmured. "There is no infection here." Emma hadn't seen her do anything.
The baby raised its head and studied Emma. The little Nutcracker, surely no more than a year old, was surrounded by scrapings of thin white infant scut.
Emma said to Mane, "It's safe to pick it up?"
"Yes."
Emma pulled a piece of cloth over her mouth and nose and stepped forward, towards the infant. The infant cowered back, but it was weak and hungry and scared, and let Emma tuck her hands under its armpits.
She lifted it easily, though it was heavier than she had thought, a boulder of hair and bone. "Well, it's a girl; I can tell that much." The infant had brown black eyes, creamy white at the edges. Her skin beneath the hair was black, and wrinkles ran across her brow, between her eyes and over her stubby ape nose, giving her a troubled expression. Her mouth was open, and was a startlingly bright pink inside. The hair on her body was thick and coarse, but on her head, over that improbable crest of bone, the hair was sparser.
Emma held the baby against her chest.
The little body was very warm. The sad, small black face tucked into a fold of Emma's coverall, and Emma bent to kiss the bony crest on the top of her head. She smelled leaves.
Then the infant hugged her tight with legs and arms, tensed, and defecated in a stream that spilled down Emma's trouser-legs.
Julia made claw hands. "Leopards. Hyenas. Chomp baby Nu'cracker."
"Right," Emma said. "Smart baby. You only take a dump when your mother is holding you."
Nemoto was watching her. "Emma Stoney, I hope you're not considering bringing that infant with you."
Emma hadn't thought that far ahead. "Why not?"
"Because you do not know how to look after it."
"Her. I don't know how to look after her."
"You know nothing of the ecology of these creatures. You are sentimental."
"She is right," Mane said mournfully. The big Daemon loomed over the little tableau, like an adult standing over a child with her doll. "This infant has been abandoned by its kind. It will shortly die, of starvation, predation, disease. Death is commonplace for all hominid species, Em-ma. Among the Nutcrackers, in fact, the men compete for access to groups of women and children. And sometimes if one man displaces another, he will destroy the children of his defeated opponent."
"All very evolutionarily sound," Emma said coldly. "But I'm keeping her."
She felt a massive hand on her back: Julia's. "Lonely," said the Ham.
"Yes. Yes, I'm lonely, Julia. I lost my husband, my world, my life. For all your kindness, of course I'm lonely."
"All," Julia said softly. "Lonely."
Nemoto prowled about the little clearing, agitated, avoiding the corpse. "We are the lonely hominids. On Earth it is thirty-five thousand years since we last encountered another hominid species. Maybe it was our relentless expansion that drove the last of the Neandertals to extinction; maybe it was our fault – but whatever the cause it was surely the last contact. And when we look out into the sky, we see nothing but emptiness. An empty world in an empty universe. No wonder we have been at war with our planet since before records began. Earth had betrayed us, orphaned us: what else was there to do? Yes, we are lonely, all of us. Lonely and frightened. But do you really think making a pet of an orphaned Australopithecine is going to make any difference?..."
Emma felt Mane's heavy, gentle hand touch the top of her head, distant, comforting.
They approached the center.
People moved over the rocky ground. They were Daemons, little clusters of them walking to and fro, bearing incomprehensible pieces of equipment, occasionally flickering into and out of existence in that baffling, utterly disturbing way of theirs.
Beyond the Daemons, Emma thought she could see light shining up from the ground, caught by swirling dust motes. She shivered.
Nemoto was silent, tense.
They reached the center of the clearing. Emma stepped forward gingerly.
There was a hole in the ground, a few yards wide, like a well. Light shone from it, up into the dusty air, like an inverted sunbeam.
Emma felt cold with awe.
She sat on the grass with the Nutcracker infant and reached for a flask of milk from her pack. She opened up the yellow plastic-feel flask, exposing a nipple, and tipped it towards the infant's head, making soothing noises. The infant grabbed the yellow flask with hands and feet, and she began to suck at the nipple, very hard. Milk splashed into her mouth and over her face, and over Emma.
Emma wiped milk from her lap and eyes. "I should do this with an apron."
"You shouldn't do it at all," Nemoto said sourly. "You should give her back to her kind."
"Nutcrackers don't adopt orphans. You know that."
Mane stood over them like a block of granite. "We could make the infant acceptable to a troupe of its kind."
Emma scowled. "How?"
Nemoto said, "Emma, if they can travel between worlds just by thinking about it, the Daemons can surely fool some half-evolved ape."
Mane reproached her, "Nutcrackers are fully evolved. Just differently evolved."
The infant finished the milk, or at any rate lost patience with the bottle. She threw it over her head. Then she touched the milk that had pooled on Emma's chin, and opened her mouth to make fast, rasping cries. "Hah hah hah!"
"She's laughing at me," Emma said.
"I am not surprised," Nemoto said.
"I'll find some running water and wash us both up."
Julia, watching, grinned. "Nutcracker don' wash!"
Nemoto grimaced. "This is not a toy, still less a human child! Soon you will be stinking as badly as her! Emma, give up this sentimentality. Give her back to her own kind." She seemed obsessed with the issue of the infant.
Emma looked up at Manekato, and she looked into her own heart. "Not yet," she said.
There was a moment of stillness. In this open space the sun was warm on her face, invigorating, its light making the dusty air shine. The infant Nutcracker gurgled and plucked at Emma's sleeve.
Manekato walked to the lip of the tunnel. She stood silently, on crimson earth, peering into the well in the Moon, its diffuse light picking out the folds in her blue-black skin. Emma wondered what she was thinking, what the tunnel was saying to her.
Mane turned. "It is time." She held out her hands.
Yes, Emma thought. Somehow she knew it too. She stood up, brushing dust off her coveralls. The Nutcracker child clambered up into her arms. She settled her distorted head against Emma's chest and promptly fell asleep.
Nemoto stood reluctantly. Emma could see she was trembling, utterly afraid.
Mane took Emma's hand, and Nemoto's, and Julia took Nemoto's other hand. Cradling the infant, Emma walked up to the lip of the well.
The shaft at her feet was a cylinder, walled by what looked like sparkling glass, a wall that receded downwards to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few yards, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Conduits snaked along the tunnel, their purpose unclear. The shaft was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.
Momentarily dizzy, Emma stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Red Moon.
Nemoto said, "What is this?"
Mane said evenly, "It is a tunnel in the Moon."
"But what is it for?"
"We don't know."
Emma said, "How deep is it?"
"We don't know that either," Manekato said. "We have tried sending – " she hesitated " – radio signals and other emissions into the well. No echo has returned."
"But," said Emma, "it can't be longer than the width of the Moon. Even if it came out the other side... It can't be longer than that."
"We don't know," Mane said. "We did not put it here."
Nemoto said tightly, "What do we have to do?"
Mane regarded her with her large eyes, pupils black, the whites flecked with yellow. "I think you know."
Yes, Emma knew – though she didn't understand how she knew. A prickly wave of vertigo swept over her. Malenfant, she thought desperately, you should be here to see this. You would love it. But me...
There was no more time, no time for thinking, for doubt. Without a word, the five of them stepped off the lip of the tunnel, into the air.
For a moment they floated there in space, bathed in the light from the heart of the world, like cartoon characters for whom the laws of physics are momentarily suspended.
And then they began to sink, gently.
There was nothing beneath her feet. The air was full of light.
Slow as a snowflake, tugged by a force that felt like gravity – and yet it could not be gravity – Emma fell towards the heart of the Moon. There was no noise save the rustle of clothing, their soft breathing, no smell save the lingering iron-and-blood stink of the crimson dust of the Red Moon.
She could tell she was falling. Lines in the wall, like depth
markers, were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But it was as if she were suspended here, in the glowing air; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.
She could hear her own heart pound.
Nemoto was laughing, manic.
Emma held the black bundle of fur closer to her chest, drawing comfort from the Nutcracker's solid animal warmth. "I don't know what the hell is so funny."
Nemoto's face was twisted, a mask of fear and denial. "We are not in the hands of some omnipotent, infallible god. This is no more than a gadget, Emma. More ancient than our species, more ancient than worlds perhaps, very advanced – but very old, and cranky, and probably failing as well. And we are relying on it for our lives. That is what strikes me as funny."
Their speed picked up quickly.
In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine layers of the Red Moon's outer geology. Now they sailed past giant chunks of rock that crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.
"The megaregolith," Nemoto murmured. "In the later stages of its formation this little world must have been just as bombarded as our own Luna. Under the surface geology, the craters and cracks, this is what you get. Pulverization, shattered rock, mile upon mile of it. We are already far beyond the reach of any human mining, Emma. We are truly sinking deep into the carcass of this world."
Mane regarded her, curious, judgmental. "You are analytical. You like to find names for what you see."
"It helps me cope," Nemoto said tightly.
The material beyond the walls turned smooth and gray. This must be bedrock, Emma thought, buried beyond even the probing and pulverizing of the great primordial impactors. Unlike Earth, on this small world there had been no tectonic churning, no cycling of rocks from surface to interior; these rock layers had probably lain here undisturbed since the formation of the Red Moon.
Manifold: Origin Page 49
