Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

It was as if he had known this odd, quiet girl for a long time. In some other life, perhaps.

  After eighteen hours awake, they prepared for sleep.

  Malenfant had always had trouble sleeping on orbit. Every time his thoughts softened he seemed to drift up out of his couch, no matter how well he strapped himself down, and jerk himself to wakefulness, fearful of falling.

  And on this trip it was even worse. He was acutely aware that he had travelled far from home this time — in particular, far beyond the invisible ceiling of Earth’s magnetic field, which sheltered the world’s inhabitants from the lethal radiation which permeated interplanetary space. When Malenfant closed his eyes he would see flashes and sparks — trails left in the fluid of his eyeballs by bits of flying cosmic debris that had come fizzing out of some supernova a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps — and he folded over on himself, imagining what that cold rain was doing to his vulnerable human body.

  After a couple of hours he prescribed himself a sleeping pill.

  On the couch next to his, Nemoto lay very still, and didn’t react when he moved; he couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake.

  When he woke up, the pure oxygen of the cabin’s atmosphere had made his nose irritable and runny, and his skin was starting to flake off, bits of it floating around him in the gentle breezes.

  The nearest thing to navigation in space Malenfant had performed before had been the not-inconsiderable task of sliding a Shuttle orbiter into its correct low Earth orbit, and then nudging two giant spacecraft, Space Station and orbiter, into a hair’s-width precise docking and capture.

  Flying to the Red Moon was a whole different ball game. The X-38 had left a planet whose surface was moving at around 1,000 miles per hour. The craft was aiming to encounter a Moon moving at some 2,300 miles per hour relative to the Earth, with an orbital plane that differed from the spacecraft’s. Furthermore the X-38 had to aim, not at where the Moon was at time of launch, but where it would be three days later. For the sake of the air-to-ground public-consumption transmissions they were forced to endure, Malenfant sought metaphors for what they were trying to achieve. “It’s like jumping from one moving train to another — and landing precisely in a top-price seat. No, more than that. Imagine jumping from a roller coaster car, and catching a bullet in your teeth as you fall…”

  And the various computations had to be accurate to within one part in four million, or the X-38 would slam too steeply into the Red Moon’s atmosphere and burn up, or else go flying past the Moon and become lost, irretrievably, in interplanetary space. If they got the navigation wrong, they were both dead. It was as simple as that.

  It didn’t console Malenfant at all to consider that this feat of translunar navigation had been achieved by manned missions before — nine times, in fact, if you included Apollo 13 — since here he was in an untried, utterly untested spacecraft, heading for an alien Moon, and everybody who had worked on those ancient missions was retired or dead.

  So he laboured at his astronomical sightings, in-situ position recordings which backed up tracking from the ground. He had a navigational telescope and sextant, and he used these to peer through the grimy windows of the lander to take sightings of the Earth, the sun and the brighter stars. He kept checking the figures until he had “all balls’, nothing but zeroes in his discrepancy analysis.

  Oddly, it was this work, when he was forced to concentrate on what lay beyond the cabin’s cosy walls, that gave him his deepest sense of the vastness he had entered. There was Earth, for example, the stage for (almost) all of human history, now reduced to a tiny blue marble in all that blackness. Sometimes it was simply impossible to believe that this wasn’t just another sim, that the darkness beyond wasn’t just blacked-out walls, a few feet away, close enough for him to touch if he reached out a hand.

  But sometimes he got it, and the animal inside him quailed.

  Fire:

  It is morning. The rain has stopped. The sky is grey.

  Fire’s eyes watch a branch drift down the river.

  Blue wades into the water, waist-deep. He catches the branch. It is heavy. He sets his shoulders and pushes until the branch is resting against the bank.

  Another branch comes. Blue grabs it, and hauls and pushes it against the first.

  More people come, men and women. Some of them remember the river. Some of them don’t, and are startled to see it. They wade into the water. They catch branches and shove them against Blue’s crude, growing raft.

  Children play, running up and down the bank, jabbering.

  A crocodile sits in the deeper water. Fire sees the ridges on his back, his yellow eyes. The crocodile’s eyes watch the people. Its teeth want the children.

  Fire walks back to the cave. The fire is still burning. People have brought more wood. The damp stuff makes billows of smoke that linger under the roof of the cave.

  Maxie is standing before the fire. Maxie’s hands hold a fish. The fish is small and silver. A stick is jammed into the fish’s mouth. Maxie throws the fish on a rock at the centre of the fire. The rock is hot. The fish’s skin blisters. Its flesh spits and sizzles. There is a smell of fish and ash.

  Sally helps Maxie get the fish out of the fire. “Careful, Maxie. It’s very hot.”

  Stone is watching Sally, his eyes hard and unblinking. His member stiffens. His hand strokes it.

  Maxie blows on the fish noisily. His white teeth bite into the belly of the fish.

  Stone strides to Sally. She stumbles back, alarmed. Stone tucks his leg behind Sally’s. She falls on her back. He falls on top of her. She yells. His hand rips at her brown skin. It tears open. Fire sees her pink breast, a shadow of hair below her belly.

  Sally’s fingers scramble on the floor of the cave. They find a rock. “Keep off me, you fucking ape!” The rock slams into Stone’s temple.

  Stone grunts and slumps sideways.

  Sally pulls herself out from under him. She scrambles away across the floor.

  Stone’s fingers touch his head. They come away bloody. He looks at Sally.

  His hand locks around her ankle. She screams. He hauls at her leg. She is thrown across the floor, screaming. She slams hard against a rock wall.

  Fire’s ears hear bone snap. Sally is silent.

  Stone grabs her ankles. She lies there, limp, one arm bent above the elbow. He prises her legs apart. His strong fingers rip at brown skin.

  Maxie is pressed against the wall. His mouth is wide open.

  Emma has come into the cave. She runs to Stone. Her hand drags at his shoulder. “Leave her alone!”

  Stone ignores her. Fire knows he cannot hear Emma. Stone is not in his ears and his head, but in his penis, his balls.

  Fire thinks of Maxie, manipulating the fish in the fire. Maxie is smart. Maxie remembers. Maxie has hands to make good axes. Sally is Maxie’s mother. Stone wants more babies like Maxie.

  Stone is doing what is right for his people.

  All this shimmers in Fire’s head, like raindrop splashes on the water. But then it breaks up, like the splashes, and all he sees is an elemental logic: Stone with Sally, Fire with Dig.

  Fire smiles.

  Emma goes limp. She is sobbing. “For God’s sake.”

  A rock flies past Fire’s shoulder. It strikes Stone’s arm. Stone roars. Blood spurts. He falls away from Sally. Sally lies limp. Fire sees he has not entered her.

  Another rock flies in from the mouth of the cave. Stone drops flat. The rock flies over his head.

  Fire faces the mouth of the cave. A person is standing there.

  Not a person. Fire sees a short, stocky body draped with animal skins, a heavy, protruding face, a brow ridge as thick as a person’s, straight black hair. One hand holds an axe. The other hand holds a spear.

  It is not a person. It is a Ham. The Ham says, “My home, Runner.”

  Fire’s hands ram into the Ham’s belly.

  The Ham falls back. Fire runs out of the cave.

  People run this way and that,
making for the river, screaming from fear or anger. Shadows flicker along the top of the undercut, flicker between caves. Spears stab, stone-tipped, so fast Fire can barely see them. Voices call. “U-lu lu-lu-lu!”

  A Ham drives a spear into the chest of the woman. Wood. She is knocked onto her back. The spear breaks and twists as she falls. Her body rips and spills. She cries out.

  Fire is terrified, awed.

  “Help me. Fire, please.”

  It is Emma. She has dragged Sally to her feet. Sally is lolling, unconscious. Sally’s arm dangles, blood soaking into the brown skin over it.

  Fire remembers the river. Fire remembers the raft. Fire’s legs want to be on the raft, away from this blizzard of jabbing spears and shadows.

  Fire’s hands grab Sally by the waist. He hurls her over his shoulder. She cries out as her broken arm is jarred against his hip. He feels the cool flesh of her belly and breast against his shoulder. Emma has picked up Maxie. Her legs are running.

  Stones hail around them, sticking into the ground. The people’s legs run from the stones and the Hams” yells. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu!”

  The people run splashing into the water. There is nowhere else to go. They scramble onto the raft. It is just a mass of floating branches, roughly pushed together. The raft is too small. The people fall off, or climb on each other’s backs. As their legs and arms scrabble at the branches the raft drifts apart, in big floating chunks. The people call out and grab at each other’s hands and ankles.

  Fire runs onto the raft. His foot plunges through the soaked foliage and he falls forward. Sally falls off his shoulders and lands on a wriggling pile of children. The children push her away.

  Emma is on the raft. Her hands slap at the children. “Leave her alone!”

  Maxie sits by his mother, his hands clutching leaves and branches, wailing.

  The raft is drifting away from the bank, into the deeper river. It twists, slowly. The people yell and sprawl, their hands clinging to the branches.

  Stone comes running down the bank. His eyes are white. Hams pursue him. Stone hurls himself into the water. He goes under. His head comes up. He is coughing. Blue reaches out and grabs Stone. Stone clings to a branch, his body dangling in the water. Fire sees blood seep from Stone’s shoulder.

  The Hams run up and down the bank, yelling, hurling stones. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu!” The stones fall harmlessly into the water.

  The raft drifts towards the middle of the river, away from the bank with the undercut, the capering Hams.

  Fire’s shoulder stings. He looks around. Emma has slapped him. “Help me.”

  Emma’s small axe cuts away Sally’s brown, bloody skin. Underneath is more skin. It is pink, but it is mottled purple and black. Emma’s hands run up and down the skin.

  “Good. The skin isn’t broken. But I have no idea how to set a broken bone. Damn, damn.” She produces a small gleaming thing. Water pours out over Sally’s arm. No, not water: it stinks, like rotten fish. Her hands pull a chunk of branch from the raft. Fire can see water rippling underneath. Emma holds the branch against Sally’s arm. “Hold this,” she says. “Fire hold. Hold it, damn it.” Her hands wrap his around Sally’s arm. His hands hold the branch against the arm. Emma takes a sheet of skin from around her neck. Her hands move over Sally’s arm, very fast. When she pulls away her hands, the skin is wrapped around Sally’s arm.

  Fire stares and stares.

  Emma lifts Sally’s head and places it on her lap.

  Maxie says, “Is mommy going to be all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I hope so, Maxie.”

  “She needs a hospital.”

  Emma laughs, but it is like a sob. “Yes, Maxie. Yes, she needs a hospital.”

  The raft is in the middle of the river, slowly turning. The banks to either side are far away, just lines of green and brown. The raft is small, and the river is large.

  There is a scream.

  Fire sees ridges. Yellow eyes. Teeth.

  Stone roars. His arms lift his body. His bulk comes crashing down on the raft.

  The whole raft shakes. People scream, clinging to each other. Branches splinter and separate. A child falls into the water, wailing.

  Yellow eyes gleam. The crocodile’s vast mouth opens.

  The child’s eyes are white. They stare at the people on the raft.

  The mouth snaps shut.

  The child is gone, forgotten.

  The raft drifts down the river, slowly turning. The people cling to it in silence, locked inside their heads.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Ten minutes before lunar orbit insertion the cabin grew subtly darker. Gradually, as his eyes dark-adapted, Malenfant caught his first true view of the stars, a rich spangling carpet of them, glowing clear and steady.

  They had fallen into the shadow of the Red Moon.

  Malenfant and Nemoto were both strapped into their couches. They had a checklist to work through, and settings on their various softscreen displays to confirm, just as if they were real pilots, like Borman and Anders, Armstrong and Collins. But the insertion sequence was completely automated, it either worked or it didn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing Malenfant could do about it — nothing save slam his fist into the fat red abort button that would change the engine’s firing sequence to send them straight home again. He would do that only in the event of a catastrophic control failure. Or, he mused, if somebody down there started shooting…

  He glanced up at his window. There was a disc of darkness spreading across the stars, like an unwelcome tide.

  It was, of course, the Red Moon. His heart thumped.

  What were you thinking, Malenfant? Are you surprised to find that this huge object, this vast new Moon, is in fact real?

  Well, maybe he was. Maybe he had spent too long in Shuttles and the Station, going around and around, boring a hole in the sky. He had become conditioned to believing that spaceflight wasn’t about going anywhere.

  Passing behind the alien Moon, they abruptly lost the signal from Houston. For the first time since launch day, they were alone.

  The cabin was warm — over eighty degrees — but his skin was cold where his clothes touched him.

  Emma Stoney:

  The river’s broad body ran from west to east, so that the setting sun glimmered above its upstream sections, making the water shine like greasy tarmac. Thick black volcanic clouds streaked the glowing sky. And when she looked downstream, she saw the Earth, nearly full, hanging low over the horizon, directly above the dark water, as if the river were a great road leading her home.

  The raft drifted over the brown, lazily swelling water, rotating slowly, heading roughly east. In fact it was scarcely a raft, Emma thought, just a jammed together collection of branches, held together by no more than the tangle of the branches and twigs, and the powerful fingers of the Runners. Every so often a chunk of foliage would come loose and drift away, diminishing the raft further, and the Runners would huddle closer together, fearful. And the raft drifted: just that, with no oars or rudder or sail, completely out of any conscious control.

  The Runners did not speak to each other, of course. Where humans would have been shouting, crying, yelling, debating what to do, comforting or blaming each other, the Runners just clung to the branches and to each other, silent, eyes wide and staring. Each Runner was locked in her own silent fear, almost as isolated as if she were physically alone. Emma was frightened too, but at least she understood the fix they were in, and her head whirred busily seeking plans and options. All the Runners could do was wait passively while fate, and the river, took them where it would.

  Emma, surrounded by naked, powerful, trembling bodies, had never been so forcefully struck by the Runners” limitations.

  And meanwhile those “Hams” had looked for all the world to her like picture-book Neandertals. What was going on here?…

  The river crowded through a section of swamp-forest. Here the trees were low, and the purple spikes of flowering water-hyacinths crowded close to the
oily black water. They passed an inlet crowded with water-lilies, their white flowers cupped half-closed. Their leaves were oval, with serrated edges bright green on top and red-brown underneath. As Emma watched dully, a red-brown body of a bird unfolded from its well-concealed place at the base of one lily-pad. Its neck and collar were white and gold, and it unfolded long legs and spindly toes, watching them suspiciously.

  …Not a bird. A bat, apparently incubating its young on nests built on these floating weeds. She had never heard of bats behaving like that. As the Runner raft passed, the bat stepped with a surgical precision across the lily-pads, its leathery wings rustling. Then it scuttled back to its nest of weed, settling with an air of irritation.

  Though the meal of the lost child seemed to have satisfied the huge creature that had first stalked them, Emma glimpsed ridges of skin and yellow eyes everywhere. The crocodiles watched as the raft eroded, inevitably approaching the point where it would dump all its hapless inhabitants in the water.

  Sally turned her head. With a cough, she threw up. Pale yellow bile splashed over Emma’s lap, stinking.

  “Shit, oh shit.” She got hold of Sally’s leg, behind the knee, and strove to pull her over on her side.

  The raft rocked, its component branches rippling, and the Runners hooted and snapped.

  Emma ignored them. At last she got Sally on her side. She pushed Sally’s good arm under her head, with her broken arm on top of her torso, and one knee bent over so she wouldn’t roll back. She tipped Sally’s head back, hoping to ensure she wouldn’t choke, and was rewarded with another gush of vomit that splashed over her hands.

  And now she became aware of another problem: a fresh stink, a spreading patch of moisture over Sally’s behind. Diarrhoea, obviously.

  Fire hooted and held his hands over his prominent nose.

  There wasn’t anything Emma could do about it, not for now. But it sure wasn’t a good sign. Perhaps it was blood poisoning: one touch of a filthy Runner finger in a wound, one splash of river water, might have done the damage. Or it might be something worse, some disease such as hepatitis or cholera or typhoid, or even some virulent nasty native to this ugly little world; she didn’t know enough about the symptoms of such things to be able to diagnose, one way or another.