Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  A reflection peered back out at her.

  She leapt back, jabbering in alarm. Her infant, feebly crawling in the leaves, fell on her belly and mewled.

  Cautiously Shadow crept back to the pond. A face peered out at her, a face made grotesque with a bulbous nose and lumpy protrusions on its cheekbones and brow. The face was alarming and threatening — but of course it was her own face.

  Screeching, she dug her fingernails into her face, the swellings there, and tried to rip it off, longing to throw it far away from her. But she succeeded only in making her face bleed, and great crimson drops splashed into the little pool that had betrayed her.

  By now, Shadow had no memory of the infected stream from which she had drunk when she crossed the plain, and had no understanding of the fungus infection she had contracted.

  She lay down in the leaves, thumb jammed in her mouth. Her child began to sneeze, loudly and liquidly.

  Shadow uncurled. She rolled over and picked up her infant. She inspected the child’s dribbling nose, then she plucked some leaves and wiped away the snot and dirt. Then she took the softly weeping child to her breast.

  Far away she heard a hooting. It was the cry of One-eye, seeking to use her body once more. She curled tighter around her child.

  The infant’s cold grew steadily worse, developing into a fever that kept him awake during the night.

  Shadow quickly grew exhausted, without energy enough even to feed herself, or keep herself properly clean. The swellings on her face now itched constantly. They hurt badly when struck. And they continued to grow, to the point where she could see the fleshy masses framing her eye sockets and cheekbones.

  Even in the midst of all this, she was not spared One-eye’s voracious demands.

  She never resisted him. But out of his sight she would place her sickly infant down carefully on a bed of leaves or a nest of branches. If the coupling permitted it, she would look across that way, and even reach out to touch or stroke the child.

  Eventually One-eye noticed this.

  It enraged him. He was already lying on top of her. He pinched her chin in his right hand, making her face him, and he punched her hard on the lumps in her brow, making her scream. Then he grabbed her ankles and pushed them back towards her head, and entered her savagely.

  When he was done he pushed her away and began to beat her, aiming precise blows at her belly and kidneys. When she curled in on herself he grabbed her arms and pulled her open, making her lie unprotected on her back, and rammed his fist over and over into her solar plexus.

  The world dissolved into fragments, red as blood, white as bone.

  When she came to she could barely move. Her belly and back were a mass of pain, and one eye was covered with a film of drying blood.

  Silverneck had taken her baby. The older woman cradled him on her lap, and was even allowing him to suck on her cracked, dry nipples.

  With a groan, Shadow let the world fall away again.

  After a time, she was aware of a looming shape before her. Her child was sleeping uneasily at her breast. She cringed, trying to curl tighter.

  But a gentle hand touched her shoulder, and pushed her gently back. It was Silverneck. She was carrying a pepper. Its stem had been pulled out, and it was full of water. Shadow drank greedily. But her lips were cracked and swollen, and she felt the water dribble down her chin.

  It was dark before she found the strength to clamber a little way up into a tree, and construct a rough nest.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Malenfant was bent double. His arms were pinned behind his back. Something was jolting him, over and over. His head felt like it would explode. It was like the feeling you got after a few days on orbit, when your body fluid balance hadn’t yet adjusted to microgravity, and blood pooled in your head.

  But when he forced his eyes open — the light stabbed bright, making him squint he saw, in glimpsed shards, a ground of rust-red dust, powerful bare legs pumping.

  Not on orbit, it appears, Malenfant. He was being carried over somebody’s shoulder, in a fireman’s lift. But his head was upside down, and with every step his cheek crashed into the back of his carrier.

  He threw up. It was a spasm of gut and throat; suddenly hot yellow-green fluid was spilling down the naked back before his eyes.

  There was a loud hoot of protest. With a shrug he was thrown off the shoulder, as if he were as light as a feather, with a good two yards to fall to the ground.

  The fall seemed long, slow-motion. He couldn’t raise his bound arms to protect himself. He landed head-first.

  When he came to again his head ached even worse than before. He was lying on his side. All he could see was red dust, and a pair of grimy buckskin boots. His legs were free. But his arms, still pinned behind his back, felt like they were half-wrenched out of their sockets.

  A buckskin boot dug into his stomach to tip him over, none too gently. He finished up on his back, as helpless as a landed fish. It felt as if his neck was in his own warm vomit.

  Faces loomed over him. One pushed closer. It was a bearded man, aged perhaps forty; his face was round, greasy, suspicious.

  Malenfant tried to speak. “Let me up,” he gasped.

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “English? But no argot I ever heard. What are you, a Frenchie?” His accent was thick, the vowels twisted, almost incomprehensible.

  Somebody said, “He’s sick. Leave him. We ain’t here for this.”

  Beyond the bearded man Malenfant saw McCann; he seemed composed, though his arms were bound. “Sprigge. In the bowels of Christ I beseech you. He is an Englishman.”

  The bearded man — Sprigge — glared at McCann. Then he turned back to Malenfant. “Get him up.”

  Ungentle hands dug into Malenfant’s armpits and hauled him off the dirt. He managed to get his feet on the ground. But he couldn’t keep his eyes targeted; they slid sideways in their sockets as if he were drunk, and when he was let go he fell back into the dirt.

  His NASA boots were gone. His feet were bare, grimy and bleeding. They even took my socks, he thought. He wondered what had happened to his pack.

  Sprigge stood over Malenfant again. “Get up or I leave you for the Elves.”

  Malenfant slumped forward. He managed to get up onto one knee, got one foot on the ground, and pushed himself up. This time he staggered, and his head still spun, but he stayed upright.

  McCann said, “You can’t expect the man to walk.”

  Sprigge nodded, and snapped a finger.

  A huge Runner stepped up to Malenfant. He was naked, dust-encrusted — and his head was small, like a child’s, though his face was weather-beaten and scarred. From the look of the dribble of vomit down his back, this had been Malenfant’s reluctant mount.

  The Runner kneeled in front of Malenfant, his hands making a stirrup. Malenfant stared stupidly.

  McCann said, “Use him, Malenfant.” Now Malenfant saw that McCann was sitting on the shoulders of another huge Runner, like a child riding on its father. The Runner’s head was bowed, his eyes fixed on the dirt. McCann seemed relaxed, almost comfortable. “Follow my lead, Malenfant. One must keep up the front.”

  “…I.”

  Julia walked up to Malenfant. Her head was bowed, and her wraps of skin had been ripped away, leaving her naked. But her hands were unbound.

  Sprigge touched his belt, where a whip was coiled.

  Julia kept her gaze directed at the dirt, not looking the humans in the face. She said, “Carry Mal’fan’.”

  Sprigge barked a laugh. “So you use a Ham’s quim, Sir Malenfant. Your punishment will sting if you let Praisegod Michael witness such iniquity.” But he stepped back.

  Julia slid her arms under Malenfant’s body and lifted him effortlessly, like a child.

  The party formed up and began to move off over the dirt.

  The party was made up of perhaps a dozen Runners. Most were naked, though some wore loincloths. Some of them bore heavy packs, or loads on their heads and shoulders
. Two of them were dragging the carcass of an immense bull antelope on a crude travois. The rest of the Runners had passengers: buckskin-clothed men sitting on their shoulders, stubby whips in their hands. All the Runners walked silently, just waiting for instruction. Several of them had scars striped on their shoulders and bellies.

  There was one other hominid: a Ham, dressed in clothes as comparatively well stitched as those of the humans. He carried a whip; perhaps he was a supervisor, a boss.

  Malenfant saw that Julia’s breasts were scratched, as if by fingernails, or teeth. “Did they hurt you?”

  She did not answer.

  McCann’s Runner came trotting alongside. “She shouldn’t speak to you, Malenfant,” McCann said urgently. “It will be a whipping for her if she does, and perhaps for you. She knows how to behave with these types; you must learn, and fast. These brutes had a little gruesome fun with her, but yon Constable Sprigge stopped them. I sense there is a core of decency in that man, under the dirt and violence. Perhaps that will assist us as we deal with these Zealots…”

  “Zealots,” Malenfant growled.

  McCann said grimly, “I did not expect to encounter them here. They are clearly expanding their area of operations — which is all the worse for us. Listen to me, Malenfant. Your romantic quest for Emma is going to have to wait. It’s vital to keep up a front. All that keeps us from doing the carrying rather than being carried is that these fellows accept us as human beings. So you must act as if it is your privilege, no, your right, to use the muscles of these poor creatures as if they belonged to you. And don’t forget, you’re English.” He eyed Malenfant. “A colonial type like you might take it as a great indignity to have to impersonate a Britisher. But I believe any of these ruffians would run you through if they suspected you were a French or a Spaniard or a Portugoose…”

  Malenfant said bitterly, “You know what? I miss America. In America you can travel more than a couple of miles without getting robbed, attacked, kidnapped or trussed up.”

  “Chin up, sir. Chin up.”

  Malenfant’s thinking dissolved. Lulled by the stink of the dust, his weakness, and Julia’s steady warmth, he dozed.

  Somewhere thunder cracked, and when he looked up he saw more fat clouds scudding across the sky.

  Half a day after the capture of Malenfant and the others, the party reached the fringes of the Zealot empire.

  They crossed a plain scattered with broken rock fragments. The rim of a broad young crater loomed over the horizon; perhaps they were in the crater’s debris field. In any event it was slow, difficult going, as the Runners had to pick their way past huge sharp-edged boulders.

  They came to a place where a thin, sluggish stream ran, and green growing things clustered close to its banks. The land had been cleared. Malenfant saw how the rocks had been piled up into waist-high dry stone walls, mile after mile of them. The rocks must have been broken up before they were moved, a hell of a labour — but then labour was cheap here.

  In a field close to the river, a team of Runners was drawing a wooden plough. The four of them were bound together by a thick leather harness, and wooden yokes lay over their shoulders. The Runners were followed by a Ham, a stocky man who carried a long whip.

  When Sprigge’s party came alongside, the Ham overseer stared at Julia. Then he turned back to his charges and lashed them, a single stroke that cut across all four backs. The Runners, their faces empty, did not look up from the dirt they tilled.

  “Good God,” Malenfant said, disgusted.

  “It would pay you not to blaspheme in this company,” McCann said evenly. “And besides, is it any less cruel to use an ox or a horse for such a purpose?”

  “Those draught animals aren’t oxen, McCann. They are hominids.”

  “Hominids, but not people, Malenfant,” McCann said sadly. “If they have no conception of pain — if even their Ham boss does not — then what harm is done?”

  “You can’t believe that’s true.”

  McCann said stiffly, “I would sooner believe it than join those poor Runner gentlemen behind their plough.”

  They passed a small farmhouse, just a rough sod hut. In a yard of red mud, children were playing — they looked like human children, a boy and a girl. They gazed at the approaching party, then ran into the hut. A man emerged from the hut, stripped to the waist, bare-headed. He looked apprehensive.

  From his Runner mount, Sprigge nodded to him. “No tithes to collect today, George.”

  “Aye, Master Sprigge.” The man George nodded back, cordially enough, but his eyes were wary, fixed on Sprigge as if he were a predator.

  They moved on, following the river as it worked its way towards the Beltway forest. As the land became less arid, the cultivation spread away from the river bank. Soon Malenfant was surrounded by fields, toiling hominids, an occasional human. It might have been a scene from some vision of the old west, or maybe the European Middle Ages, if not for the humanoid forms of the beasts of burden here, the unmistakably Neandertal features of their supervisors, and the unremitting crimson glower of the land itself.

  But this was a genuine colony, he thought, a growing community, for all its ugliness — unlike the dying, etiolated English camp.

  Rain began to fall. The rough path by the river bank soon turned to mud, and the party trudged on in miserable silence. Malenfant tucked his head closer to Julia’s chest. With remarkable kindness she leaned over him and sheltered him from the rain with her own bare back, and Malenfant could not find the strength to protest.

  Again he dozed.

  When he woke, he was dumped on his feet. They had reached the Zealot fortress, it seemed.

  They were in a clearing, surrounded by dense wood; Malenfant hadn’t even noticed they had come back to the forest. Ditches, ramparts, gates and drawbridges stretched all the way around the township. Sharpened stakes were stuck in the sides of the ramparts, so that the compound bristled, like some great hedgehog of wood and mud.

  A big gate was opened. They were pushed inside.

  The encampment was a place of rambling muddy paths and ugly, low-tech buildings placed haphazardly. There was one central building that looked more sturdily built, mud brick on a wooden frame, like a chapel. Aside from that, the huts were so rough they seemed to have grown out of the debris that littered the muddy ground. They were built of stripped saplings and wattles, and laid over with palm fronds. Everything showed signs of much use and recycling; here was half of what looked like a dugout canoe, for example, serving as a chicken-coop.

  There were no straight lines anywhere, no squares or rectangles, no hard edges; everything was sloppy, all the lines blurred. It was as if the first arrivals here had just marked out trails where they wandered and put up their wattle-and daub huts where they felt like. There was none of the regularity and discipline of the British compound:

  Malenfant sensed McCann’s impatience at this disorderliness.

  Malenfant’s arms were untied. He could barely move them because of cramp, and he could feel where the cord had cut into his wrists.

  With McCann, he was pushed into a dark, stinking sod hut. He couldn’t see what had become of Julia. The hut was dark, the floor was just mud, uneven. A door of saplings bound together by liana twine blocked the door.

  Malenfant limped to a dark corner and slumped there. The floor was greasy and black; when he lifted his hand a great slick sheen came away with it. The whole place stank like a toilet.

  Termite passageways, like the stems of some dead plant, curled up the walls and disappeared into the wooden beams and the thatch. A gecko clambered across the ceiling, incurious.

  He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since being hit over the head by the Zealots. He felt as if he had been systematically pummelled, all over his body, with a baseball bat. And here he was in some quasi-medieval prison block, lying in filth. The world he had come from — of NASA and Houston and Washington, of computers and phones and cars and planes — seemed utterly unreal, evanescent a
s the shining surface of a bubble, a dream.

  What a mess, he thought.

  McCann was waxing enthusiastic. “I see the pattern, Malenfant. The Hams and Runners surely do not have the wit to be rebellious or to long for escape; unlike human slaves it is unlikely they can conceive of freedom. Besides, if you get them young enough, you can quite easily break their spirits, as with a young horse. If each man controls, say, ten of the Ham bosses, and then each Ham in turn controls ten Runners, you have a formidable army of workers. And at the top of it you have this fellow Praisegod Michael of whom Sprigge has spoken, who creams off the tithes. It is like a vast, spreading, self-sustaining—”

  “Prison camp,” Malenfant said sourly.

  “Oh, much more than that, Malenfant. Think how carefully the strata of this little society are defined. You have the humans, with of course their own ranks and order. Beneath them you have your Hams, who in turn lord it over the Runners. And since in this case each lower rank is clearly the intellectual inferior of that above, you have a social order that reflects the natural order. It is a hierarchy as stable as a cathedral.”

  Malenfant growled, “I thought you despised the Zealots. You wouldn’t tell me a damn word about them.”

  “I think I am beginning to see I have underestimated them, Malenfant. Oh, this is a place of repellent squalor, of blood and mud. It is cruel, Malenfant. I don’t deny it. But those subject to the greatest cruelty, as far as I can see, are those least capable of perceiving it. And as a social arrangement it is intricate and marvellous. One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.”

  He sounded brittle, almost feverish, Malenfant thought dully. This bizarre mood of his, this fan-worship of the Zealots, could probably evaporate as fast as it had come.

  The hell with it. Malenfant closed his eyes.

  But still, he saw Emma’s face in his mind’s eye, bright and clear, as if she stood before him. He probed a pocket on his sleeve. The spyglass lens still nestled there, hard and round under his fingers, comforting.