Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Joshua approached Abel and Saul and other men to accompany him on his jaunt up the cliff face. But there was no purpose to his mission — no game to be hunted, no useful rock, no foraging save for the huge enigmatic seeds which had slid silently over the surface of everybody else’s mind.

  And besides, everybody knew there was danger at the top of the cliff. The camp of the Zealots was there, in the centre of a great clearing hacked crudely out of the forest. The Zealots were Skinny-folk. They were easily bested if you could ever get one engaged in close quarters. But the Zealots were cunning, and their heads were full of madness: they could baffle the most powerful of the Hams. They were best avoided.

  Joshua tried to go alone. He set foot on the rough goat trail that led by gully and switchback turn up to that cliff-crest forest.

  The trail was easy enough, but he soon turned back. The isolation worked on him, soon making him feel as if he didn’t exist at all. The People of the Grey Earth needed nothing in life so much as each other.

  But word of his project permeated the gossip-ridden hut. A few days later, to his surprise, he was approached by the young girl Mary, who asked him about the cliff, and the forest, and the strange sky seed.

  And a day after that, to his greater surprise, she accompanied him on the trail.

  She gossiped all the way to the top of the cliff. “…Ruth say Abel skinny as an En’lish. An” Ruth tell tha” to Miriam. An” Miriam tell Caleb, an” Caleb tell Abel. An” Abel throw rocks and skins all over th” hut. So Abel couple Miriam, and he tell Caleb about tha’, and he tell Ruth. And Ruth say…”

  Unlike himself she was no loner. She was immersed in her little society. By comparison it was as if he couldn’t even see or hear the vibrant, engaged people she described.

  All of which made it still stranger that she should choose to accompany him on this purposeless jaunt. But Mary was at a key moment in her life, and a certain wanderlust was in her blood right now. Soon she would have to leave the security of the hearths her mother built, and share her life with the men, and with the children who would follow. To cross from one side of a skin hut to the other was an immense journey for someone like Mary. And as nervous courage empowered her for that great adventure, she seemed ready, for the time being, to take on much more outlandish quests.

  She was not in oestrus, to Joshua’s great relief. As he made his careful way up the cliff face he was pleased not to have the distraction of his own singing blood.

  They reached the top of the cliff. Here they found a shrub laden with bright yellow fruit, and they sat side by side at the cliff’s edge, plucking the fruit, their broad feet dangling in the air. They gazed out in silence towards the east, and the sea.

  The sun was still rising, and its light glimmered from the sea’s steel-grey, wrinkled hide. The distinct curve of the world was reflected in layers of scattered purple clouds which hovered over the sea. Joshua could see the grassy plain where he lived, sweeping towards the ocean, terminating in dune fields and pale sand. Near the squat brown shape of the hut itself, people moved to and fro, tiny and clear. He followed streams, shining lines of silver that led towards the sea.

  A small group of antelopes picked their way through the morning grass. One of them looked up, as if staring directly at him.

  Joshua felt himself dissolve, out from the centre of his head, to the periphery of the world. There was no barrier around him, no layer of interpretation or analogy or nostalgia; for now he was the plain and the sea and the clouds, and he was the slim doe that looked up at the cliff, just as he was the stocky, quiet man who gazed down from it. For a time he was immersed in the world’s beauty in a way no human could have shared.

  Then, by unspoken consent, Joshua and Mary folded their legs under them and stood. Side by side, they walked into the forest that crowded close to the cliff.

  The green dark was a strong contrast to the bright sea vista. It was not a comfortable place to be.

  Washed by the salty air off the sea, the forest was chill, thick with a clammy moisture that settled into Joshua’s bones. And as they penetrated deeper the ground was covered in a tangled mass of roots, branches, leaves and moss, so that in some places Joshua couldn’t see the actual surface at all. He slipped, stumbled and crashed over the undergrowth, making a huge amount of noise.

  Mary started to shiver and complain, growing increasingly fearful. But Joshua pulled his skin wraps tighter around him and shoved his way deeper into the forest.

  A shadow slid through the wood, just a little way ahead, utterly silent.

  Joshua and Mary both froze. Joshua bunched his fists. Was it a Zealot?

  The shadow slowed to a halt, and Joshua made out a squat, stocky body, with short legs and immensely long arms, the whole covered by a dark brown layer of hair. A hand reached out and grabbed a bamboo tree. The tree was pulled down until it cracked, and drawn towards a gaping mouth.

  It was a Nutcracker-man. Joshua relaxed.

  Mary stumbled closer to Joshua, making a cracking noise.

  The Nutcracker-man turned his great head with its sculpted skull ridge and giant cheekbones. Perhaps he saw them; if he did he showed no concern. He pulled his bamboo towards his mouth and bit sideways at the trunk, seeking the pithy interior. As he chewed, the heavy muscles that worked his jaw expanded and contracted, making his entire head move.

  Though slow and foolish and easily trapped, the Nutcrackers” muscles made them formidable opponents. But the Nutcrackers rarely ventured from their forests, and when they did they showed no instinct for aggression against the Hams. Likewise the Hams did not eat people. The two kinds of people had little in common and nothing to fight about, and simply avoided each other.

  After a short time the Nutcracker-man finished his bamboo. He slid effortlessly away into the green, placing his hands and feet slowly and methodically, but he moved rapidly and almost noiselessly, soon outstripping any effort Joshua might have made to catch him.

  Out of curiosity Joshua and Mary tried the bamboo. It took both of them to crack a trunk as thick as the one the Nutcracker had pulled over with one hand, and when he tried to bite into it Joshua’s teeth slid off the trunk’s glossy casing.

  They moved deeper into the forest. The sun, showing in glittering fragments through the dense canopy, was now high. But Joshua caught occasional glimpses of the sea, and he kept it to his right, so that he knew he was working roughly the way the floating black and white seed had fallen. Mary kept close behind him. Her biceps showed, hard and massive, beneath the tight skins wrapped around her arms.

  And now there was another shadow passing through the forest ahead. But this time there was much more noise. Maybe it was a bear, careless of who or what heard it. They both crouched down in a dense patch of tangled branches, and peered out fearfully.

  The shadow was small, even slender.

  It was just a man, and a feeble-looking man at that, with nothing like the bulk of a Ham, still less a Nutcracker. He was a Skinny: surely a Zealot. He wore skins wrapped closely around his limbs and torso, and he carried a length of bamboo tube. His face was covered by an ugly mass of black beard, and he was muttering to himself as he blundered noisily through the forest.

  With some care he selected a broad-trunked tree. He sat down beneath it. He reached into his trousers to scratch his testicles, and emitted a long, luxurious fart. Then he raised the bamboo to his lips. To Joshua’s astonishment, a foamy liquid gushed from the bamboo into the man’s mouth. “Up your arse, Praisegod Michael.” He raised the flask, and drank again. Soon he began to wail. “There is a lady, sweet and kind…”

  Mary clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. The Zealot was squealing like a sickly child.

  Joshua was fascinated by the bamboo flask, by the way the murky liquid poured out into the man’s mouth and down his bearded chin.

  The Zealot finished off the contents of his flask. He settled further back against his tree trunk, tucking his arms into his sleeves. He had a br
oad-rimmed hat on his head, and as he reclined it tipped down over his eyes, hiding his face. His mouth popped open, and soon rattling snores issued from it.

  Joshua and Mary crept forward until they stood over the sleeping Zealot. Joshua bent to pick up the bamboo. He tipped it upside down. A little foamy fluid dripped onto his palm. He licked it curiously. The taste was sour, but seemed to fill his head with sharpness.

  He inspected the bamboo more closely. Its end had been stopped by a plug of wood, and a loop of leather attached another plug that, with some experimentation, Joshua managed to fit into the open end of the tube, sealing it. Joshua’s people carried their water in their hands, or sometimes plaited leaves or hollowed-out fruit. Though they would have been capable of it, it had never occurred to them to make anything like the Zealot’s bamboo flask.

  Mary, meanwhile, was crouching over the Zealot. She was studying his clothing. Joshua saw that it had been cut from finely treated skin. The skin had been heavily modified, with whorls and zigzag lines and crosses scratched into it and coloured with some white mineral. The edges of the various pieces of skin had been punctured. Then a length of vegetable twine had been pushed through the puncture holes, to hold the bits of skin together. Mary picked at the seams and hems with her blunt fingers; she had never seen anything like it.

  Joshua found the patterns on the skins deeply disturbing. He had seen their like before, on other Zealot artefacts. To Joshua the patterns made by the markings were at the limit of his awareness, neither there nor not there, flickering like ghosts between the rooms of his mind.

  Now Mary’s searching fingers found something dangling around the man’s neck on a piece of thread. It was a bit of bone, that was all, but it had been shaped, more finely than Abel’s best tools.

  Joshua studied the bone. Suddenly a man surged out of the carving: his face contorted, his hands outstretched, and his chest ripped open to reveal his heart.

  Joshua screamed. He grabbed the bit of bone and yanked it so the thread around the Skinny’s neck broke, and he hurled it away into the forest.

  The Skinny woke with a gulping snore. He sat up abruptly, and his hat fell off his head. Seeing the two hulking Hams, he raised his hands to the sky and began to yell. “Oh, Heaven help me! By God’s wounds, help me!”

  Mary looked up into the sky, trying to see who he was speaking to. But of course there was nobody there. The Skinny-folk were immersed in madness: they would talk to the sky, the trees, the patterns on their clothes or ornaments, as if those things were people, but they were not.

  So Mary sat on the Zealot’s chest, crushing him to the ground; he gasped under her weight. “Stop talkin” sky! Stop!” The bearded Zealot howled. She slapped him across the face. The Zealot’s head was jerked sideways, and he instantly became limp. Mary backed away. “Dead?”

  Joshua, reluctantly, bent closer. The Zealot had fouled himself, perhaps when Mary had leapt on him; a thin slime of filthy piss trickled from his trouser legs. But his chest rose and fell steadily. “No” dead.”

  Mary, her eyes wide under her lowering brow ridges, said, “Kill?”

  Joshua grimaced. “Bad meat. Leave for th” bears.”

  “Yes,” Mary said doubtfully. “Leave for th” bears.”

  They wiped their hands clean of the Zealot’s filth on handfuls of leaves. Then they turned and pushed on, heading steadily north.

  After a time, Joshua stepped cautiously into a clearing.

  The trees here were battered and twisted. When he looked to the west, he saw how they had been smashed down and broken back to make a great gully through the forest.

  And to the east, at the tip of this gully, was the seed from the sky.

  He gazed at the blocky shape at the end of the huge trench, excitement warring with apprehension. It was a mound of black and white, half-concealed by smashed foliage. It was surrounded by bits of blue skin — or not skin; a bit of it fluttered against his leg, a membrane finer than any skin he had ever seen.

  It was so strange he could barely even make it out.

  Mary, nervous, had stayed back in the fringe of the forest.

  “Ware,” she said. “Zealots.”

  Joshua knew it was true. He could smell the smoke of their hearths, their burned meat. They were now very close to the Zealots” camp.

  But the lure of the sky seed was irresistible. He began to work his way around the edge of the clearing, stepping over fallen tree trunks, shoving aside smashed branches, ready to duck back into the forest’s green shadows.

  The sky seed was big, bigger than any animal, perhaps as big as the hut where the people lived. He saw that the thing had fallen here after crashing through the trees, almost reaching the point where the forest gave out at the edge of the cliff itself.

  But that was all the sense he could make of it.

  He had no words to describe it, no experience against which to map it. Even the touch of it was unfamiliar: glossy black or white, the patches separated by clear straight lines, the soft surface neither hot nor cold, neither skin nor stone nor wood. It was difficult for him even to see the thing. He would study some part of it — like the small neat puncture-holes on one part of its hide, surrounded by scorch-marks — but then his gaze would slide away from the strangeness, seeking some point of familiarity and finding none.

  “Back,” Mary hissed to Joshua.

  He made out the telltale signs that Skinny-folk had been here: the narrow footmarks in the raw dirt, the remains of the burnt rolls of leaves they liked to carry in their mouths. The Zealots had indeed been here too, inspecting the sky seed, just as he was.

  But, despite the imminence of danger, he could not abandon this sky seed. It repelled him — yet it attracted him, like the carving on a Skinny-folk spear. Drawn close, driven away, he hovered.

  He came to a sudden decision.

  He bent and applied his shoulder to the blunt rear of the sky seed. It was lighter than it looked, and it ground forward through the dirt. But soon he was coming up against the resistance of the last battered trees at the cliff’s edge.

  “Joshua!” Mary hissed.

  “Help push.” And he applied himself again.

  She tried to make him give up his self-appointed task, wheedling and plucking at his skins. But when she saw he wouldn’t come away, she joined him at the back of the sky seed. She was not yet fully grown, but her strength was already immense, enough to drive the sky seed forward, crunching through the spindly cliff-edge trees.

  With a screeching scrape, the sky seed pitched over the raw rock lip of the cliff and lurched out of sight. After a last tortured groan, silence fell.

  Manekatopokanemahedo:

  “Soon, something will appear in the sky,” Babo said. “A satellite, like those of the outer planets. Earth will have a Moon, for the first time in its history.”

  Manekato scratched her head. “How? By some gravitational deflection?”

  “No. Like a Mapping, I think. But not a Mapping. The truth is nobody knows, Mane. But the Astrologers can see it is approaching, in the shivers of the starlight.”

  “It must be artificial, this moving of a Moon. A contrivance.”

  “Yes, of course. It is a deliberate act. But we do not know the agents or their motive.”

  Manekato thought through the implications. “There will be tides,” she said. “Earthquakes. Great waves.”

  “Yes. And that is the danger posed to our Farm, and some others.”

  Suddenly she was filled with hope. “Is that why I am here? Is it possible to avert this Moon — to save the Farm?”

  “No,” he said, sadly but firmly.

  She pulled away from him. “You talked of my mission. What mission, if the Farm is doomed?”

  “You must travel to the Moon,” said Babo.

  “Impossible,” she spanned. “No Mapping has ever been attempted over such a distance.”

  “Nevertheless you must make it possible,” Babo said. “You must use the resources of the Farm to
achieve it.”

  “And if I reach the Moon?”

  “Then you must find those responsible for sending this rogue here. You must make them remove it, and have them assure you it will not return.” He forced a smile. “We are a species good at negotiation, Mane. The Lineages could not have survived otherwise. You are all but a matriarch, the matriarch of Poka Lineage. You will find a way. Go to the Moon, Mane — take this chance. I will be with you, if you wish. If you succeed, Poka will be granted new land. We have pledges…”

  “And if I fail — or refuse?”

  He stiffened. “Then our Lineage will die with us. Of course.”

  “Of course—”

  There was a fizz of purple light, a stink of ozone. A Worker fell from the sky and landed in the centre of the room. Semi-sentient, it raised a sketchy face and peered at them. Recognizing Manekato, it gave her the doleful news it had brought, its voice flat and unengaged.

  Orphaned, brother and sister clung to each other as they wept.

  Reid Malenfant:

  After days of pressure from Malenfant, McCann agreed to lead them in an orderly expedition back to the crash site of the lander. Malenfant felt a vast relief, as if he was being let out of gaol: at last, some progress.

  First, McCann inspected them critically. “I’ll have Julia fit you both with buckskin. One must go cannily. You’ll stand out a mile in those sky-blue nursery rompers.”

  The buckskin gear turned out to be old and musty — presumably manufactured, with much labour, for deceased inhabitants of this place. And McCann loaned Malenfant and Nemoto calf-length leather boots, to keep out the snakes and the bugs. The boots were ill-fitting, and much worn. The gear was heavy, stiff and hot to wear, and its rough interior scratched Malenfant’s skin. But it was substantial, feeling like a suit of armour, and was obscurely comforting.

  McCann wore a suit of sewn skin and a Davy Crocket hat; he had a crossbow on his back, and a belt of flechettes over his shoulder. He looked capable, tough and well-adapted.

  Malenfant wrapped up his coverall and other bits of gear in a skin pack that he wore on his back. He insisted Nemoto do the same; he wanted to be sure they didn’t have to return here if they got the chance to get away.