Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma found a piece of wall that seemed unoccupied. She dumped her pack and sat down in the dirt.

  A woman approached the travellers. Bent, her hair streaked with white, a tracery of scars covering her bare arms, she looked around eighty, but was probably no older than thirty-five or forty. She began to jabber in a guttural language Emma did not understand, with no discernible traces of English or any other human language. Julia seemed uncertain how to reply, but Mary and Joshua answered confidently. Neither party seemed ill at ease or even surprised to see the other.

  Julia came to Emma.

  Emma said, “So can we stay?”

  Julia nodded, a Homo sap gesture Emma knew she affected for her benefit. “Stay.”

  With relief Emma leaned back against the creamy, cool wall of the cave. She opened her pack and dug out her parachute silk blanket and a bundle of underwear to use as a pillow. The ground here, just crimson dust, much trodden and no doubt stuffed with the bones of Ham grandmothers, was soft by comparison with what she had become used to; soon she felt herself sliding towards sleep.

  But she could hear the howl of that tame whirlwind, relentless, unnatural, profoundly disturbing.

  She spent a full day doing nothing but letting her body recover, her head become used to the sights and sounds and smells of this new place.

  Right outside the cave entrance, a stream of clear water worked its way through rocky crevices towards the impact-broken plain below. Its course was heavily eroded, so that it cascaded between lichen-crusted, round-bottomed pools. The people used the pools for washing and preparing food, though they drank from the higher, cleaner streams.

  Emma waited until she wasn’t in anybody’s way. Then she drank her fill of the stream, and washed out her underwear, and spread it out to dry over the sunlit rocks.

  As she tended her blistered feet and ulcerated legs, and made small repairs to her boots and underwear, she watched the hominids around her.

  Her Ham companions seemed to settle in quickly, according to their nature. Mary, strong and powerful, spent happy hours wrestling with the younger men, besting them more often than not. By the end of the day she was hardening spear points in a hearth, apparently preparing for a hunt.

  Julia seemed to make friends with a group of women and children who spent much of their time clustered around one hearth — she blended in so well, in fact, that Emma soon had trouble distinguishing her from her companions, as if she had been here all her life.

  Joshua, a loner in his own community, was a loner here. He settled into a small, solitary cave, and Emma saw little of him. But the Hams here seemed to tolerate his eccentricities, as had his own people.

  As for Emma, she was largely ignored, much as she been with her other communities of Hams. Unable to shake off a feeling of sufferance — after all, how would a Neandertal stray be treated if she wandered into a human community? — she did her best to keep out of everybody’s way.

  There was one old man who seemed to take a liking to her, however — old, meaning maybe ten years younger than she was. He was badly disfigured by a swathe of scar tissue that lapped up from where his right ear should have been to the crown of his head. She didn’t have a word in common with this guy, and she couldn’t ask him about his injury. But this wounded, smiling man seemed vaguely curious about her: curious enough, anyhow, to offer her meat. The meat was a prime cut, apparently from the shoulder of some animal — an antelope, maybe, but it could have been a rhino for all she knew. It was a groaning bloody slab two fingers thick and twice the size of a dinner plate. Her benefactor watched with absent interest as she rigged up a frame of sticks to cook it over the nearest fire.

  It seemed he had no English name. She took to thinking of him as Scarhead.

  The meat was frankly delicious, though she longed for green vegetables, gravy and a mellow Bordeaux to go with it.

  The Hams worked hard, of course. But it struck her how happy they all seemed or if not that, content. Evidently the game was bountiful here, the living easy; all these guys had to do was sit around and wait for the meat to come wandering past, season after season. They even had fresh running water, day and night, right outside the cave. She remembered fantasies as a child of finding Candy land, where all the trees were chocolate and the streams lemonade, where you didn’t have to work for anything, where you could take as much as you liked, just by reaching out. Was the way these people lived so different from that?

  But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?

  Well, they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candy-land. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.

  Then would come the famines and the wars.

  So much for Candy-land. Maybe these Hams weren’t just as smart as humans, she mused; maybe they were actually smarter.

  On the third day she walked out of the caves, alone, and set off up the eroded hillside.

  The rocks were broken and worn, and cut deeply by gullies, in some of which water still flowed. She found that the easiest way to make progress was to lower herself into one of the gullies and clamber up its smooth, sloping sides, taking care not to slip on moss or lichen, until the channel petered out and she had to transfer to another.

  Though she was soon panting hard and sweating into her coverall, she could feel her heart and lungs pump, the muscles of her newly powerful legs tingling. You’re in the best shape you’ve been in for years, girl.

  The noise of the tame whirlwind howled ever louder. She resolutely ignored it.

  Just below the summit she sat on a patch of bare rock, gathering her breath, getting the hassles of the climb out of her head. The eroded hillside, deeply punctured by its limestone gullies and caves, swept away beneath her. The sun was still low; it was maybe ten in the morning local time.

  She stood and turned away from the plain. She walked up the last few paces to the crater’s summit plateau, and faced the wind.

  It was a wall of churning air: a cylinder, laden with dust, that must have been a couple of miles wide. It looked flat on her puny human scale, like the wall of a vast building. But it snaked into the sky, diminishing as her gaze followed it, and at its highest extremity it curled in the air, thread-like. The whole thing was streaked horizontally, like the clouds of Jupiter, by billows of crimson dust. The flow of the air seemed smooth, though here and there she saw bits of rock and vegetation, even a few snapped-off trees. But the rock at the wind’s shimmering foot was worn bare.

  The violence, the energy, were startling; it was like a waterfall, a rocket launch. A deep part of her mind couldn’t accept that it was controlled by anything: the animal in her, conditioned by a million years of experience, knew that this lethal expression of nature’s power was unpredictable, beyond propitiation.

  Nevertheless she walked forward. After a few paces, she felt the first breath of wind, and a speckle of dust on her cheek.

  When she got to within maybe a hundred paces of that dense wall of dust the air grew turbulent. She staggered but kept on, leaning into the wind to keep to a rough straight line, and the dust bit harder, stinging her mouth and eyes.

  She shielded her eyes. Only maybe fifty paces to the dust. Forty-nine, forty eight… The air was a powerful physical presence, battering at her torso and face, whipping her hair, snatching the breath from her lungs.

  And now she was inside the dust, suddenly, as if walking into a sandstorm. The dust was’a thick glowing cloud around her, obscuring the sky, the rock, even the twister itself; and when she looked downwind she saw how she cast a kind of shadow in the streaming particles.

  A fresh surge hit her, unexpectedly violent. She fell sideways, rolled a couple of times, and hit her head on a rock.


  She lay there for a moment. Then she got to all fours on the worn-bare rock and tried crawling.

  She fell again, rolled back, tried again. Her hands and the skin of her cheeks were streaked with tiny cuts, where sharp bits of rock had bitten into her. Still she kept trying.

  Lacking a plan B, she tried again the next day. And the next.

  She tried wrapping herself in her parachute silk, to keep out the dust and bits of rock. She just got blown away faster. So she tied the silk tightly around herself, an outer-body garment with slits for her hands, a mask over her face. She managed to get further into that central wall of dust, maybe ten paces deep, before the sheer strength of the wind stopped her progress.

  She tried crawling in, all the way. That didn’t work.

  The Hams watched all this, bemused.

  She considered schemes with ropes and pitons and rock-hammers, where she would make a kind of ladder that she could “climb’, across the face of the barren windswept rock, all the way to the centre. But she had no rope or pitons or rock-hammers, and couldn’t come up with any way of making them.

  She explored the cave system, but found no way through that way.

  And if she couldn’t go under the twister wall, she surely couldn’t go over it; it looked to her as if that tunnel of tortured air stretched all the way out of the atmosphere. (She did toy with insane schemes of retrieving Malenfant’s lander and firing it up into some kind of Alan Shepard sub-orbital trajectory that would take her up and over the wall of air, and re-enter right into the eye of the storm. But — despite her various rash promises to Joshua to pilot him and the lander all the way to his mythical Grey Earth — she didn’t know how to fly the lander, still less how to rig it for such a flight, still less how to land it.)

  On the tenth day of trying, as she lay clinging to the rock, sucking air from dust through a sheet of muslin, somebody walked past her.

  Mouth gaping, bits of “chute silk flapping around her, she watched as a Ham man and child walked hand in hand into the teeth of the storm, blurring. Granted the Hams were stronger than she was — both of them probably, even the boy — but they weren’t that strong. They weren’t even leaning into the damn wind.

  Then she noticed, just before they disappeared into grey-red dust, that their skin wraps were hanging loose around them. The churning air wasn’t touching them.

  She spent more days watching.

  The Hams had always used the other side of the crater as part of their domain for hunting and gathering. They had trails leading that way, so ancient they were actually worn into the rock. When a Ham walked such a trail, heading for the crater’s interior, she just carried on through the wall of wind and dust.

  The Hams weren’t the only ones.

  A flock of bats flapped clumsily into the crimson mist one day, their fragile wings unaffected by the tearing air. She spotted a young deer, apparently lost, that stumbled out of the dust, gazed around with wide eyes at the world beyond, then bolted back into the wind storm. Even other hominids could make it through: notably Runners, and one Nutcracker she spotted.

  But not herself — and, for some reason, not the chimp-like Elves, an association she found insulting.

  She tried to interrogate the Hams. “Julia, how come you can get through the wind and I can’t?”

  An intense frown creased that powerful face. “Hams live here.” She waved her arm. “Still live here.”

  “All right. But why am I kept out?”

  A shrug.

  “What is it I’m not allowed to see? Is there some kind of installation in there, a base? Are the Hams allowed to go up to it? Do you have any, umm, trade with whoever built it?”

  None of this meant much to Julia. “Funny stuff.” She waved her fingers before her face. “Hard to see.”

  Emma sighed. So the Hams might be wandering around or through some kind of fabulous Homo superior base without even looking at it, interested only in their perennial pursuits, perhaps not even capable of seeing it from out of their bony cages of conservatism.

  And that, presumably, was why the Daemons let the Hams wander at will past their meteorological moat. The Hams would restrict themselves, going where they had always gone inside the crater, doing what they had always done, taking not a step beyond their self-imposed boundaries; they would not interfere with whatever projects and designs the Daemons were developing in there. Whereas noisy, curious, destructive Homo sap types like herself would not rest until they had barged their way into the Daemons” shining city.

  Breaking this demeaning exclusion became an obsession with her.

  She focused on the Hams. She kept trying their trails. She carried Ham tools and weapons as if intent on some Ham-type gathering and hunting. She tried walking in with a party of Hams, her slim form tucked into a line of their great hulking bodies. But the wind seemed to whip through their immense muscular forms, to grab at her and push her aside.

  She pushed the deception further. She purloined some skins and wrapped herself up like a Ham. Slouching, bending her legs, she practised the Hams” powerful, clumsy gait. She let her hair grow ragged and filthy, and even smeared clay on her face, letting it dry in a hopeful imitation of a Ham’s bulky facial morphology, the high cheekbones and the bony crest over the eyes.

  Then, joining another foraging party, she slouched towards the wind, her gait rolling, keeping her distinctive Homo sap chin tucked into her chest.

  The wind wasn’t fooled.

  Furious, she stamped back to the caves, and sought out Joshua.

  “You have to help me.”

  Joshua stared at her. He was ragged, filthy, sitting in a debris-strewn cave that managed to be remarkably ill-appointed, even by the Palaeolithic standards of this Red Moon.

  “Wha” for?”

  She sighed, forgiving him his squalor, and kneeled in the dirt before him. “/ want to know,” she said. “I want to know what they are doing in there — and who they are. If they are responsible for dragging this Moon around the realities I mean, for changing the sky — I want to know why they are doing it. And to make them understand the damage they are causing, the suffering. Do you see?”

  He frowned at her. “Deal,” he said simply.

  “Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes, we had a deal. We still have a deal. You help me, and I’ll try to help you get to the Grey Earth. Just as I promised.” God forgive me for lying, she thought.

  But his eyes narrowed, almost calculating. “Fin” a way.”

  “Yes, I’ll find a way. We’ll go back to the lander and—”

  His massive hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. The grip was painful, but she knew that he was using only a fraction of his strength, that if he chose he could probably crush her bone.

  “No lies.”

  He means it, she thought. He knows my kind too well. “Okay. No lies. I’ll find a way. Get me through the wind wall and I’ll work on it, I’ll find a way. I promise, Joshua. Please, my arm…”

  He squeezed harder — just a little — but it was like a vice closing over her flesh. Then he released her. He sat back, baring his teeth in a wide grin. “How?”

  “How can I get through the wind wall? I’ve been thinking about that. Whatever controls the wind is too smart to be fooled by appearance. It’s not enough that I look like a Ham. But maybe if I can learn to think like a Ham…”

  Scarhead dragged a couple of haunches of meat from the back of the cave. For one brief moment the old guy looked the image of the cartoon caveman. He threw the meat down on the trampled ground, then went back into the cave to fetch tools.

  Emma had once more donned her best-effort Neandertal disguise. She got to the ground gingerly, conscious of the need to keep her face rigid so as not to crack her mask of clay.

  As usual, nobody showed the slightest interest in her — by now, not even the children.

  The meat was, gruesomely, a couple of legs, intact from hoof to shoulder, perhaps from a horse. The limbs were already skinned, fresh, b
loody, steaming slightly. Flies buzzed languidly around the exposed flesh.

  Scarhead returned. He threw his handfuls of tools on the ground and sat cross legged. He grinned, and the low morning sun made his scar tissue glisten.

  She inspected the tools with absent interest. There were limestone pebbles gathered from the beds of rivers, used as chopping tools, and dark basalt blocks shaped into bi-faced hand-axes and cleavers. These were working tools, each of them heavily worn and blood-splashed.

  Before she left the Earth she’d known nothing of technology like this, and if she had been confronted with this collection of pebbles and rocks she would have dismissed them as nothing but random debris. Now she knew differently. Tools like this, or the still more primitive artefacts of the Runners, had kept her alive for months.

  Scarhead held out a hand-axe to her.

  She took the rock, feeling its rough texture. She turned it over in her hands, testing its weight, feeling how it fit perfectly into her small human hand for, of course, Scarhead had chosen it to suit her grip.

  Now Scarhead held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He said bluntly, “Copy.” He grabbed one of the horse legs, and began to saw at the joint between the scapula and humerus, between shoulder and leg. His stone blade rasped as he cut through tough tendons and ligaments.

  She tried. Just manhandling the heavy limb proved a challenge to her; the joints were gruesomely stiff, the meat slippery and cold in her hands.