Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “No.” Praisegod was almost crooning, and he rocked Joshua back and forth. “No, you poor innocent. You are alive. And when you die, you will be alive again in Christ — if His mercy extends to your kind…”

  “Dead,” said Joshua. “Dead. Gone. Like Jacob.”

  “Dead but not gone! The corpse in the ground is the seed that is planted in the earth. So we will all bloom in the spring of the Lord. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. But I am talking in symbols again, ain’t I? A man is not a seed. But a man is like a seed.”

  Suddenly he pushed Joshua away. The Ham’s head clattered on the floor, jarring his aching tooth.

  “You can know nothing of what I speak, for your head is empty of symbols… Ah, but what if my religion is nothing but symbols — is that what you are thinking? — the symbol of the seed, the Mother and Child — a dream concocted by words rattling in my empty head?” Now Joshua felt kicks, hard, frantic, aimed at his back and buttocks. “0 you witness to the Flood, 0 you underman! See how you have planted doubts in my mind! How clever you are, how cunning! You and that Daemon of the forest, Renemenagota, she of the ape build and mocking, wise eyes… The Daemons make me promises. They can take my vision and make it real, make this antediluvian island a godly place. So they say. So she says. Ah, but in her dark eyes I sense mockery, Joshua! Do you know her? Did she send you?… How you madden me! Are you agents of Satan, sent to confuse me with your whispers of God’s work?…”

  But now Praisegod leaned over Joshua again and grabbed his face. Joshua saw how his eyes were red and brimming with tears, his face swollen as if by weeping. “Can sin exist here? The brutes who serve me have their Runner women, their whores with the bodies of angels and the heads of apes. I, I am not of that kind… But now, here! Here!” He grabbed Joshua’s bound hands and pushed them into his crotch; Joshua could feel a skinny erection. “You are destroying me!”

  And the beatings went on.

  Joshua lay on the floor, his own blood sticky under his face. Pieces moved around in his head, just as they had before: when he saw the sky seed fall from the sky, when he put together the cobble from the bits of shattered stone.

  The kind Skinny’s face peered through a cloud of pain and black-edged exhaustion.

  He whispered, “Fore me was door standin” open Heaven.”

  Praisegod Michael was here. Panting, he gazed into Joshua’s eyes. “What did you say?”

  But Joshua was, for now, immersed in his own head, where the pieces were orbiting one another, the flakes sticking to the core of the cobble one by one. The Grey Earth. The seed that fell from the air. The door in the sky.

  Joshua was, in his way, a genius. Certainly none of his kind had experienced such a revelation before.

  “Heav’n,” he said at last.

  Praisegod Michael pushed his ear close to his mouth to hear.

  “Heav’n is th” Grey Earth. Th” seed. Th” seed takes th” people. Th” people pass through th” door. Door to heaven. To Grey Earth.”

  “By God’s eyes.” Praisegod Michael stumbled back. “Is it possible you believe?”

  Joshua tried to raise his head. “Believe,” he said, for he did, suddenly, deeply and truly. “Th” door in th” sky. Th” Grey Earth.”

  Praisegod Michael stalked around the cell, muttering. “I have never heard an ape-thing like yourself utter such words. Is it possible you have faith? And if so, must you therefore have a soul?” Again he stroked the heavy ridges over Joshua’s eyes, and he pressed his gaunt body close to the Ham’s. “You intrigue me. You madden me. I love you. I despise you.” He leaned closer to the Ham, and kissed him full on the lips. Joshua tasted sourness, a rank staleness.

  “Graah—” Praisegod rolled away, lying sprawled on the floor, and vomited, so that thin bile spread across the shining floor.

  Then he stood, trembling, striving for composure. “I would kill you. But if you have the soul of a man — I will not risk damnation for you — if you have not damned me already!” He smiled, suddenly cold, still. “I will send you out. You will spread the Word to your kind. You will be a Saul of the apes.” He raised his pale eyes to the light from the window. “A mission, yes, with you as my acolyte — you, a pre-Adamite man-ape.”

  Joshua stared at him, understanding nothing, thinking of a door in the sky.

  But now Praisegod stood over him again, and again he spoke tenderly. “I will help you.” He reached into his clothing and produced a knife. It was not of stone; it glittered like ice, though Joshua could see how worn and scuffed it was. “No beast should speak the Word of God. Here.” He put his fingers inside Joshua’s mouth. The fingers tasted of burning. He pushed down, until Joshua’s mighty jaw dropped.

  Then, without warning, he grabbed Joshua’s tongue and dragged it out of his mouth. Joshua felt the slash, a stab of pain.

  Blood sprayed over Praisegod Michael.

  Shadow:

  The next morning the women surrounded Silverneck, as usual. With their infants clambering over them, they munched on figs.

  With a crash, One-eye fell from his tree. His hands and feet left a smear of blood where they touched bark or leaves, for several of his fingers and toes had been nipped off. White bone showed in a huge deep wound on the side of his head. And his penis was almost severed, dangling by a thread of skin. His fur was matted by blood and piss and panic shit.

  The women stared.

  He looked about vaguely, as if blinded, and he mewled like an infant. Then he stumbled away, alone, into the deeper forest.

  Shadow walked out of the tree cover.

  Silverneck moved aside for her. One of the younger women growled, but Shadow punched her in the side of the head, so hard she was knocked sideways. Shadow sat with the group, and clawed figs into her mouth. But nobody looked at her, nobody groomed her, and even the children avoided her.

  That night, when the roosting calls went out. One-eye did not return.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Malenfant was kept chained up in a dark, filthy cell. It was just a brick-lined pit, its damp mud floor lined with packed-down filth. The only light came from a grilled window high in the ceiling. The door was heavy with a massive wooden bolt on the outside.

  He reached out to touch the walls. The bricks were rotten. Maybe he could dig out handholds and climb up to that window.

  And then what? What then, after you climb out into the middle of Praisegod’s courtyard?…

  You are not dealing with rational people, Malenfant.

  It was true Praisegod had built a place of relative order here. But this was an island of rigidity in a world of fluidity and madness, a world where mind itself was at a premium, a world where the very stars regularly swam around the sky, for all Praisegod’s zeal and discipline — just as, Malenfant suspected, Praisegod’s own inner core of horror constantly threatened to break through his surface of control.

  There was nothing he could do, nothing to occupy his mind.

  Sometimes the most courageous thing was doing nothing. Do-nothing heroics: was that a phrase from Conrad? If there was really, truly no way you could change your situation, the last thing you wanted to do was to pour so much energy into fighting your fear that you burned yourself up before the chance came for a break.

  As he sat in the dark and the filth, utterly alone, Malenfant wondered how long his own do-nothing heroics would sustain him.

  At last he was brought before Praisegod Michael.

  At Praisegod’s chapel-residence Malenfant was kept waiting, standing before Praisegod’s empty desk bound hand and foot, for maybe an hour.

  Finally Praisegod walked in, slowly, contemplative, his Ham boy at his side. Praisegod didn’t look at Malenfant. He sat at his desk, and a Ham girl brought in a tray of chopped fish set on slabs of hard, dark bread, with a bowl of what looked like mustard and a wooden goblet of wine. Praisegod ate a little of the fish, dipping it in the mustard, and then he passed the rest to the Ham bo
y, who sat on the floor and ate ravenously.

  Praisegod’s manner seemed distracted to Malenfant, almost confused. He said rapidly, “I have been forced to punish Sir McCann. You see why — you witnessed his blasphemous disrespect. His soul is hard, set in a mould of iniquity. But you — you are different. You seek the woman you love; you are moved by a chivalrous zeal. In you I see a soul that could be turned to higher goals.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Malenfant said.

  Praisegod’s eyes narrowed. “You should not presume on God’s grace.”

  “This place has nothing to do with God,” Malenfant said evenly, staring hard at Praisegod. “You play with human lives, but you don’t even see that much, do you? Praisegod, this place — this Moon — is an artefact. Not made by God. Humans. Men, Praisegod. Men as different from you or me as we are different from the Elves, maybe, but men nevertheless. They are moving this whole damn Moon from one reality strand to the next, from Earth to Earth. And everything you see here, the mixing up of uncounted possibilities, is because of that moving. Because of people. Do you get it? God has nothing to do with it.”

  Praisegod closed his eyes. “This is a time of confusion. Of change… I think you may yet serve my purpose, and therefore God’s. But I must shape you, like clay on the wheel. But there is much bile in you that must be driven out.” He nodded to Sprigge. “A hundred stripes to start with.”

  Malenfant was dragged out of the room. “You’re a savage, Praisegod. And you run a jerkwater dump. If this is some holy crusade, why do you allow your men to run a forced brothel?”

  But Praisegod wasn’t listening. He had turned to his Ham boy, and stroked his misshapen head.

  Malenfant was taken to a room further down the dismal corridor.

  He found himself stretched out over an open wooden frame, set at forty-five degrees above the horizontal. His feet were bound to the base of the frame. Sprigge wrapped rope around his wrists and pulled Malenfant’s arms above his head until his joints ached.

  Sprigge looked Malenfant in the eye. “I have to make it hard,” he said. “It’ll be the worse for me if I spare you.”

  “Just do your job,” Malenfant said sourly.

  “I know Praisegod well enough. That fat Englishman just riled him. He thinks you might be useful to him. But you must play a canny game. If you go badly with him, he’ll ill use you, Malenfant. I’ve seen that before too. He has a lot of devices more clever than my old whip, I’ll tell you. He has gadgets that crush your thumbs or fingers until they are as flat as a gutted fish. Or he will put a leg-clamp on you, a thing he’ll use on recalcitrant Runner folk, and every day we have to turn it a little tighter, until the bones are crushed and the very marrow is leaking into your boots.”

  Malenfant tried to lift his head. “I don’t have any boots.”

  “Boots will be provided.”

  A joke? He could dimly make out Sprigge’s face, and it bore an expression of something like compassion — compassion, under a layer of dirt and weathered scars and tangled beard, the mask of a hard life. “Why do you follow him, Sprigge? He’s a madman.”

  Sprigge tested the bonds and stepped back. “Sometimes the lads go off into the bush. They think life is easier there, that they can have their pick of the bush women, not like the bleeding whores they keep here. Well, the bush folk kill them, if the animals or the bugs don’t first. As simple as that. Without Praisegod we’d all be prey, see. He organizes us, Sir Malenfant. We’re housed and we’re fed and nobody harms us. And now that he’s taken up with the Daemons well, he has big ideas. You have to admire a man for that.”

  Malenfant thought, What the hell is a Daemon? He felt his jacket being pulled off his back. The air was damp and cold.

  “Now, a hundred stripes is a feeler. Sir Malenfant. I know how you’ll bear it. But you’ll live; remember that.” He stepped away, into the dark.

  Malenfant heard running footsteps.

  And then he heard the lash of the whip, an instant before the pain shot through his nervous system. It was like a burn, a sudden, savage burn. He felt blood trickling over his sides and falling to the floor, and he understood why the frame under him had to be open.

  More of Sprigge’s “stripes” rained down, and the pain cascaded. There seemed to be no cut-off in Malenfant’s head, each stroke seemingly doubling the agony that went before, a strange calculus of suffering.

  He didn’t try to keep from crying out.

  Maybe he lost consciousness before the hundred were done.

  At last he was hit by a rush of water — it felt ice-cold — and then more pain reached him, sinking into every gash on his back, like cold fire.

  Sprigge appeared before him. “The salty back,” he said, cutting Malenfant’s wrists free. “It’ll help you heal.”

  Malenfant fell to the floor, which stank of his own blood, like the iron scent of the crimson dust of this rusted Red Moon.

  A heavy form moved around him in the dark. He cowered, expecting more punishment.

  But there was a hand on his brow, water at his lips. He could smell the dense scent of a Ham — perhaps it was Julia. The Ham helped him lie flat on his belly, with his ripped jacket under his face. His back was bathed — the wounds stung with every drop — and then something soft and light was laid over his back, leaves that rustled.

  The square window in the ceiling above showed diffuse grey-blue. It was evening, or very early morning.

  He was left alone after that, and he slept, falling into a deeper slumber.

  When he woke again that square of sky was bright blue. By its light he saw that the leaves on his back were from a banana tree. His pain seemed soothed.

  “…Malenfant. Malenfant, are you there?”

  The voice was just a whisper, coming from the direction of the door.

  Malenfant got his hands under his chest, pushed himself up to a crawling position. He felt the leaves fall away from his back. His bare chest was sticky with his own dried blood, and with every move he felt scabs crack, wounds ache.

  He crawled to the wall by the door, kneeling there in the mud and blood.

  “McCann?”

  “Malenfant! By God it’s good to hear the voice of a civilized man. Have they hurt you?”

  Malenfant grimaced. “A ‘feeler,’ Sprigge called it.”

  “It could get worse, Malenfant.”

  “I know that.”

  McCann’s voice sounded odd — thick, indistinct, as if he were talking around something in his mouth. Flogging, branding, tongue-boring, Malenfant recalled. The penalty for blasphemy.

  “What have they done to you, Hugh?”

  “My punishment was enthusiastically delivered,” McCann lisped.

  “One must admire their godly zeal… And the beatings are not the half of it. Malenfant, he has me labouring in the fields: pulling ploughs, along with the Runner slaves. It is not the physical trial — I can barely add an ounce to the mighty power of my Runner companions — but the indignity, you see. Praisegod has made me one with the sub-men, and his brutish serfs mock me as I toil.”

  “You can stand a little mockery.”

  “Would that were true! Praisegod understands how to hurt beyond the crude infliction of blows and cuts and burns; and the shame of this casting-down has hurt me grievously — and he knows it. But his punishment will not last long, Malenfant. I am not so young nor as fit as I was; soon, I think, I will evade Praisegod’s monstrous clutches once and for all… But it need not be so for you. Malenfant, I think Praisegod has some sympathy for you — or purpose, at least. Tell him whatever it is you think he wants to hear. That way you will be spared his wrath.”

  Malenfant said softly, “You were the one who said you could do business with him.”

  “Do as I say, not as I do,” McCann hissed. “It is my faith, Malenfant, my faith. Praisegod arouses in me a righteous rage which I cannot contain, whatever the cost to myself. But he is an intelligent man, a cunning man. I suspect his grasp of his ugly crew h
ere was slipping. I have heard the men mutter. They tell fortunes, you know, with cowry shells — much handled, shining like old ivory… Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion. He was on his uppers, Malenfant, until quite recently. But now his inchoate ambitions have found a new clarity, a plausibility. He has found new allies: these Daemons, whoever or whatever they are. He has suddenly become a much more credible, and dangerous, figure… If I had half a brain I would stay in his fold.

  “But you are different, Malenfant. Without faith — a paradoxically enviable condition! — you have no moral foundation to inhibit you; you must lie and cheat and steal; you must kowtow to Praisegod; you must do everything you can, everything you must, to survive.”

  “I’ll try,” Malenfant gasped.

  “Will you, my friend? Will you truly? There is a darkness in you, Malenfant. I saw it from the beginning. You may choose, without knowing it, to use Praisegod as the final instrument of your own destruction.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You must look into your heart, Malenfant. Think about the logic of your life… The day advances. Soon I will be called to my work in the fields, and I must sleep if I can.”

  “Take care of yourself, Hugh.”

  “Yes… God be with you, my friend.”

  That night Malenfant called McCann’s name. The only reply was a kind of gasping, inarticulate, and a moist slithering.

  The night after that Malenfant called for McCann, over and over, but there was no reply.

  Emma Stoney:

  She had first become aware of Joshua as an absence. There was a spare place at the hearths of Ruth and others, portions of meat left set aside by the hunters. It was a pattern she had noticed before when somebody had recently died; the Hams clearly remembered their dead, and they made these subtle tributes of absence — halfway to a ritual, she supposed.

  Then, one day, Joshua came back.

  Within a couple of days it was clear Joshua was not like the other Hams.