Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “Indeed. But when my companions withdrew into themselves, I sought out the company of the lesser folk: the Hams, even the Runners at times. My companions took to calling me Mowgli. Perhaps you know the reference. I have attempted to civilize them, teach them skills — more advanced tool-making, even reading. With little success, I am afraid. Your bar-bar is smarter than your Runner, and these pre-sapients are smarter in turn than the pongid species, the Elves and Nutcrackers. Your bar-bar can be taught to use a new tool, you know — to use it but never to make it. They can make things work but never understand how they work, rather like human infants. And, like your Kaffir, your bar-bar can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more.

  “And that, of course, is the difference between man and pre-sapient. Wherever there are sub-men, who live only for the day and their own bellies, we must rule. But the work shapes one. The responsibility. It has made me pitiful and kindly, I would say, as I have learned something of their strange, twisted reasoning.” He leaned towards them. “They have no chins, you see, none of them. And everybody knows that a weak chin generally denotes a weak race.”

  When evening came again, fires were built within the palm-thatched huts, and smoke rose through the roofs and the crude chimneys that pierced them. Malenfant saw a pair of bats, flapping uncertainly between the turbulent columns of smoke. They were big, as big as crows, with broad, rounded wings.

  “Leaf-nose bats,” Nemoto murmured.

  “Don’t tell me. Prehistoric bats.”

  Nemoto shrugged. “Perhaps. There are many bats here. They have occupied some of the niches never taken by the birds.”

  Malenfant watched the bats” slow, ungainly flapping. “They sure look unevolved.”

  “Ah, but they were the peak of aerial engineering when they hunted flies and mosquitoes over lakes full of dinosaurs, Malenfant. You should have a little more respect.”

  “I guess I should.”

  Nemoto whispered conspiratorially, “It all hangs together, Malenfant.”

  “What does?”

  “McCann’s account of his alternate Earth. A much larger Moon would raise immense tides. The oceans would not be navigable. McCann’s America must once have been linked to Eurasia by land bridges, as ours was, for otherwise the Hams presumably couldn’t have reached it. But when the land bridges were submerged, the Americas were effectively cut off — until iron-hulled ships and aeroplanes emerged, in the equivalent of our own twentieth century. Malenfant, it may have been easier to fly to the Moon than to reach America. Think of that.”

  “What does all this mean, Nemoto?”

  “I am working on it,” she said seriously. “Consider this, though. We are alone on our Earth, our closest relatives terribly distant. But McCann’s world has a spectrum of hominid types — as it was on our own Earth, long ago. McCann’s Earth may in some senses be more typical than ours.”

  A party of Runners, supervised by a Ham, brought in a couple of deer, slung between them, half-butchered.

  “Look at that,” muttered Nemoto. “I think that one is a mouse deer.” It was small, the size of a dog, its coat yellow-brown spotted with white, and it had tusks in its upper jaw. “You see them in Africa. Actually it isn’t really a deer at all. It is midway between pigs and deer, and more primitive than either. It climbs trees. It catches fish in the streams. Probably unchanged across thirty million years. Older than grass, Malenfant.”

  “And the other?”

  This was a little larger than the mouse deer, with a black stripe down its back, and powerful hind legs: a creature evolved for the undergrowth, Malenfant thought.

  “A duiker, I think,” Nemoto said. “Another primitive form, the oldest of the antelopes. Sometimes hunts birds and feeds on carrion. Maybe here it eats bats. Everything is ancient here.” Now she seemed agitated. “Perhaps these forms were brought here by the same mechanism that imported hominids. What do you think?”

  “Take it easy.”

  Her small, thin face worked in the gathering gloom. “This is wrong, Malenfant.”

  “Wrong? What’s wrong with it?”

  “The ecology is — out of tune. Like a misfiring engine. It is a jumble of species and micro-ecologies, a mixed-up place, fragments thrown together. Though many of the fragments are very ancient, there has been no time for these plants and animals to evolve together, to find an equilibrium. Periodically something disturbs this world, Malenfant, over and over, stirring it up.”

  Malenfant grunted. “Guess you can’t go wandering across the reality lines without a little confusion.”

  But Nemoto would not take the matter lightly. “This is not right, Malenfant. All this mixing. There is a reason the primitive hominids became extinct, a reason why the mouse deer’s descendants evolved new forms. An ecology is like a machine, where all parts work together, interlocking. You see?”

  Malenfant said, amused, “These deer and antelopes seem to have been prospering before they ran into some hunter’s crossbow bolt.”

  “It shouldn’t be this way, Malenfant. To meddle with ecologies, to short-circuit them, is irresponsible.”

  Malenfant shrugged. “Sure. And we cut down the forests to build shopping malls.” He was feeling restless; maybe his first shock was wearing off. He’d had enough of McCann; he was eager to get out of here, get back to the lander — and progress his primary mission, which was to find Emma.

  But when he expressed this to Nemoto she laughed harshly. “Malenfant, we barely managed to survive our first few minutes after landing. Here we are safe. Have patience.”

  He seethed. But without her support, he didn’t see what he could do about it.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  When she was Mapped to the Market — when the information that comprised her had been squeezed through cracks in the quantum foam that underlay all space and time — she was no longer, quite, herself, and that disturbed her greatly.

  Manekato was used to Mapping. The Farm was large enough that walking, or transport by Workers, was not always rapid enough. But Mappings covering such a short distance were brief and isomorphic: she felt the same coming out of the destination station as entering it (just as, of course, principles of the identity of indiscernible objects predicted she should).

  A Mapping spanning continents was altogether more challenging. To compensate for differences in latitude and altitude and seasons — early summer there, falling into autumn here — and to adjust for momentum differences — people on the far side of the spinning Earth were moving in the opposite direction to her — such a Mapping could be no more than homomorphic. What came out looked like her, felt like her. But it was not indiscernible from the original; it could not be her.

  Still, despite these philosophical drawbacks, the process was painless, and when she walked off the Mapping platform, her knuckles tentatively touching new ground, she found herself comfortable. The air was hot, humid, but caused her no distress, and even its thinness at this higher altitude did not give her any discomfort.

  And the air was still. There was no Wind. Thanks to the Air Wall wrapped around it, the Market was the only place on Earth from which the perpetual Wind was excluded. She had been prepared for this intellectually, of course. But to stand here in this pond of still air — not to feel the caressing shove of the Wind on her back — was utterly strange.

  This crowded Mapping station was full of strangers. She peered around, feeling conspicuous, bewildered. Some of the people here were small, some tall, some squat, some thin; some were coated with hair that was red or black or brown, and some had no hair at all;

  some crawled close to the ground, and some almost walked upright, like their most distant ancestors, their hands barely brushing the ground. Manekato, who had spent her whole life on a Farm where everybody looked alike, tried to mask her shock and revulsion at so much difference.

  She was met outside the station by a Worker, a runner from the Astrologers. She slid easily onto its broad back, wrapping h
er long arms around its chest, and allowed herself to be carried away.

  Her first impression of the Market was of waste. The streets were broad, the buildings an inefficient variety of designs, and she could spot immediately places where heat would leak or dust gather, or where the layout must prevent optimally short journeys from being concluded.

  All of this jarred with her instinct. The goal for every Farmer was to squeeze the maximum effectiveness and efficiency from every last atom — and beyond, to the infinitesimal. The mastery of matter at the subatomic level, resulting in such everyday wonders as Mapping and Workers, had brought that ultimate dream a little closer.

  But, she reminded herself, this was the Market, not a Farm.

  In the deepest past there had been a multitude of markets, where Farmers traded goods and information and wisdom. The transient population of the markets had always been predominantly male. Women were more tightly bound to the land, locked into the matriarchal Lineages that had owned the land since the times almost before history; men were itinerant, sent to other Farms for the purpose of trade, and marriage.

  But as technology had advanced and the Farms had become increasingly self sufficient, the primary function of the markets had dwindled. One by one they had fallen into disuse. But the role of the markets as centres of innovation had been recognized — and, perhaps, their purpose in providing an alternate destiny for rootless men and boys. So some of the markets had been preserved.

  At last only one Market remained: the grandest and most famous, perched here on the eroded peak of its equatorial mountain, supported now by tithes from Farms around the world. Here men, and a few women, dreamed their dreams of how differently things might be — and enough of those innovative dreams bore fruit that it was worth preserving.

  It had been this way for two hundred thousand years.

  The Worker carried her away from the Market’s crowded centre towards its fringe. The crowds thinned out, and Manekato felt a calming relief to be alone. Alongside an impossibly tall building the Worker paused and hunched down, letting her slip to the ground.

  A door dilated in the side of the building. She glanced into the interior; it was filled with darkness.

  Reluctant to enter immediately, she loped further along the gleaming, dust-free road. Not far beyond the building the ground fell away. She was approaching the rim of the summit plateau, worn smooth by the feet and hands of visitors. She leaned forward curiously. The mountain’s shallow flanks fell away into thicker, murky air; far below she glimpsed green growing things.

  And she saw the Air Wall.

  It was like a bank of windblown cloud, moving swiftly, grey and boiling. But this cloud bank hung vertically from the sky, and the clouds streamed horizontally past her. Now that it was not masked. by the buildings she could see how the great Wall curved around the mountain-top, enclosing it neatly. It stretched down like a curtain to the ground below, where dust storms perpetually beat against the struggling vegetation, and it stretched up towards the sky.

  It was not easy for her to look up, for her back tilted forward, and her neck was thick, heavily muscled, adapted to fight the Wind. Besides, at home there was generally nothing to see but a lid of streaked, scudding cloud. But now she tipped back awkwardly, raising her chinless jaw.

  It was like peering up into a tunnel, lined by scraps of hurrying cloud. And at the very end of the tunnel there was a patch of clear blue.

  She had never before seen the sky beyond the clouds.

  She shuddered. She hurried inside the building.

  And there she met her brother.

  Reid Malenfant:

  While he waited for an opportunity to progress his mission, Malenfant ate and drank as much as he could, and after the first day put his body through some gentle exercise. He stretched and pushed up and pounded around the red dust of the neat little stockade in his vest and shorts, while Ham servants watched with a kind of absent curiosity, and Runners hooted and shook their shackling ropes. The low gravity made him feel stronger, but conversely the reduced oxygen content of the low-pressure air weakened him. If he over-exerted himself he would soon run out of air; his chest would ache, and, in the worst cases, black spots would gather around his vision.

  But he would adapt. And for now, it did no harm to test his limits.

  McCann took him for tourist-guide jaunts around the compound, and even beyond. He seemed childishly eager to show off what he and his companions had built here.

  McCann said the English had tried to mine mudstone — a kind of natural brick so as to build better houses. “We have the raw muscle, among the Runners and the Hams,” McCann said. “That’s fine for hauling, lifting and dragging. But they can’t be set to fine work, Malenfant; not without a man’s constant supervision. You certainly can’t send off a party even of the Hams to a mudstone seam and expect them to return with anything but a jumble of gouged-out, misshapen rocks — nothing like bricks, you see — that’s if they bring back anything at all.”

  There were a lot of pleasurable knick-knacks to inspect, constructed over long hours by the ingenious hands of these bored Englishmen. Malenfant, a gadget fan, pored over wooden locks, clocks and slide rules, all made entirely of wood.

  McCann had even maintained a crude calendar system — though it was little more than marks on wood. “Like a rune staff,” McCann said, grimacing. “How far we have fallen. But we haven’t quite mastered the knack of paper-making, you see; needs must. And besides this wandering world has a damnably irregular sky. Even the stars swim about sometimes, you know. But we try to impose order. We do try.”

  Everything was made of wood, or stone, or bone, or material manufactured from vegetable products. You could make rope, for instance, from birch bark, pine roots or willow. Ham women baked pine bread made from phloem, the soft white flesh just inside the tree’s bark. You could drink the sap of birch trees, if you had to. And there were medicinal products: spruce resin to ease gut ache. And so on.

  McCann said, “This benighted world is bereft of metals, you see — of sizeable ore lodes, anyhow, so far as we could find. Of course the very dust is iron oxide — hematite, I think — but we have notably failed to establish a workable extraction regime… It was an early disappointment, and all the more severe for that. And we were reluctant to mine the only source of refined metals here — I mean our ship, of course. As long as we clung to hope that we might escape this jungle world, we were reluctant to turn our only vessel into pots and pans. All seems a little foolish now, doesn’t it? And so ours is an economy of stone and wood. We have become like our woad-wearing forebears. Amusing, isn’t it?”

  They came to a hut where a Ham woman, somewhat bent, was ladling water from a wooden bucket at her feet. Malenfant, glimpsing machinery, poked his head inside the hut, and allowed his eyes to adjust to the shade.

  A big wooden container sat on a stand above a smouldering fire. There was some kind of mash inside the container: the woman showed him, though she had to remove a lid sealed with some kind of wax to do it. Two narrow bamboo pipes led down from the container. Condenser pipes, Malenfant thought. The pipes finished in v-notches that tipped their contents neatly into gourds…

  “It’s a still,” Malenfant breathed. “Holy shit. Hillbilly stuff. Just the way Jack Daniels started. God, I love this stuff.”

  McCann preened, inordinately proud; briefly Malenfant was taken back to his pre launch inspections at Vandenberg and elsewhere.

  Immediately outside the stockade the forest seemed sparse. The leaves were a pale green, lighter than usual, and lianas tangled everywhere, irregular. Though there were sudden patches of shade, much of the ground was open to the sun; there was no solid canopy here.

  This area had been cleared, Malenfant realized — twenty, thirty years ago? — and then abandoned. And now, oblivious to the failed ambitions of the stranded English, the forest was claiming back the land. He gazed at the ground, and thought he discerned the straight-line edges of forgotten fields, l
ike Roman ruins.

  But even out here there were signs of rudimentary industry. A charcoal pile had been constructed: just a heap of logs with earth piled over the top, steadily burning. And there was a tar pit, a hole in the ground filled with pine logs, buried under a layer of earth. The logs burned steadily, and crude wooden guttering brought out the tar.

  They came to a stand of small oil-palm trees that clung to the banks of a stream. They were slim and upright with scruffy green fronds, holding onto the slope with prop-roots, like down-turned fingers curling out from the base of their pale grey trunks. Under the direction of one or two of the Hams, Runner workers gathered oil from the flesh of the nut and the kernel of the seeds, and sap from shallow cuts near the trees” bases.

  . “You cook with the oil, or you make soap with it,” McCann said. “And if you were to hang a bucket under that cut in the trunk you’d be rewarded by ready made palm wine, Malenfant. Nature is bountiful sometimes, even here. Though it takes human ingenuity to exploit it to the full, of course.”

  McCann even showed Malenfant the poignant ruin of a windmill. Crudely constructed, it was a box of wood already overgrown by vegetation and with daylight showing through cracks in its panels. Later McCann showed him elaborate drawings, crammed into the blank pages of yellowing log books. There had been ambitious schemes for different designs of mills — ‘magpie mills’ with a tail to turn into the wind, and even a water mill — none of them realized. “We never had the labour, you see. Your Ham or your Runner is strong as an ox. But you can’t teach him to build, or to maintain, anything more complex than a hand-axe or a spear. He will go where you tell him, do what you tell him, but no more; he has no initiative or advanced skill, not a scrap. One had to oversee everything, every hand turned to the work. After a time — well, and with no hope for the future — one rather became disheartened.”

  McCann was obviously desperate for company, and it was hard to blame him. He challenged Malenfant to a game of chess — which Malenfant refused, never having grasped the game. Despite this McCann set out crudely carved wooden pieces, and moved them around the board in fast, well-practised openings. “I played a lot with old Crawford before he lost his wits. I do miss the game. I even tried to teach the bar-bars to play! — but though they appear capable of remembering the moves of the pieces, not even the brightest of them, even Julia, could grasp its essence, the purpose. Still, I would have Julia or another sit where you are sitting, Malenfant, and serve as a sort of token companion as I played out solitary games…”