Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  He had no idea how old all this equipment was. It was clear to him somebody had set up this Neandertal community on Io. Somebody. The Gaijin, of course. Who else?

  He had yet to figure out their purpose, however.

  Every time the Neandertals stopped they checked over the Staff of Kintu.

  This was a metallic rod, about the size of a relay baton. It seemed to be their most precious artifact. It was just a pipe a half meter long, of a metal that looked like aluminum, and it seemed light. Sitting in Io frost, the adults would pass the Staff from hand to gloved hand, checking its weight, fondling it, signing over it. The songs they sang, about the breath of Kintu, concerned the Staff. Maybe it was some kind of religious totem. But it was too easy to assume that anything you didn’t understand must have religious significance. Maybe there was more to it than that.

  Malenfant envied them their community. Ignored even by the children, he felt shut out, lonely. He felt eager to learn to talk.

  Malenfant observed signs, copied them, and repeated them to Valentina.

  At first he had been able to grasp only simple concrete nouns, straightforward adjectives: a hand raised to the mouth for “food,” for instance, or a rubbed stomach for “hungry.” But, more slowly, he learned to recognize representations of more abstract thoughts. Two forefingers brought together harmoniously seemed to mean “same” or “like”; two pointing fingers stabbing each other was “argument” or “fight.” There seemed to be a significance in the hand shapes, their position relative to the body, and accompanying nonmanual features like body language, posture, and facial expression. And there was a grammar, it seemed, in the order of the signs. Get any one of the elements wrong and the sign made no sense, or the wrong sense.

  It seemed to him that several signs could be transmitted at once, using fragments of multiple words. The Neandertals were not constrained to speak linearly, a word at a time, as he was. They could send across whole chunks of information simultaneously, at a much higher bit rate than humans. And, it occurred to him, these new reconstructed Neandertals must have devised their rich, complex language from scratch, in just a few generations. After all, there could be no way of retrieving the lost language of their genetic predecessors, the true Neandertals.

  It was a wonderful, rich mode of communication.

  He tried to avoid getting slapped. But he was punished if he got the signs too badly wrong.

  “You don’t know your own strength. I’m an old man, damn it!”

  Slap.

  When the Neandertals lay down to sleep, out in the open, they did it in their magic suits, out there on the bare surface of Io.

  He picked out the constellations — and the pale stripe of another comet, a huge one, its double tail sprawled over the sky. And in the direction of Orion there was something new: bright flares, like distant explosions, scattered over a shield-shaped patch of sky. It was a silent, unending firework show, as if there was a battle going on, out there at the fringe of the Solar System, a defensive fight against some besieging invader.

  War in the Oort cloud, perhaps. Were the Gaijin battling Nemoto’s star-cracking aliens out there, on the rim of the system, defending Sol? If so, why? Surely the Gaijin’s motivation had little to do with humanity. If they fought, it was to protect their own interests, their projects.

  And, of course, if there really was a comet-scrambling war going on in the Oort cloud, it had one dread implication: that the Crackers were no longer out there, at Procyon or Sirius, but here.

  Sleep came with difficulty under such a crowded, dangerous sky. In the end he burrowed under his bulky NASA pressure suit, seeking darkness.

  After maybe a week, to Malenfant’s intense relief, they set up camp once more. It was at a site that had evidently been used before: a rough circle of kicked-up soil, scarred by hearths.

  Inside the teepee the Neandertals immediately stripped off. After a week locked into the suits the stink of their bodies almost knocked Malenfant out.

  There was a great spontaneous festival of the body. The kids wrestled, the adults coupled. Malenfant saw one girl pursuing an older man — literally pursuing him around the cave, her vulva visibly swollen and bright red, until she’d pinned him down and climbed on top of him. Then they slept together, in great heaps of stinking, hairy flesh. There was no lookout; presumably there were no predators on Io, no enemies.

  Malenfant hunkered in a corner, generally ignored, though Valentina and Esau brought him food.

  Sometimes — when the light was low, when he caught a woman or child out of the corner of his eye — he thought of them as like himself, like people. But they weren’t people. They were no better or worse than humans, just different — a different form of consciousness.

  It seemed to him that the Neandertals lived closer to the world than he did. That intense physicality was the key. Their consciousness was dispersed at the periphery of their beings, in their bodies and the things and people that occupied their world. When two of them sat together — signing or working in peaceable silence — they seemed to move as one, in a slow, clumsy choreography, as if their blurred identities had merged into one, in the ultimate intimacy. Malenfant felt he could see the flow of their consciousness like deep streams, untroubled by the turbulence and reflectiveness of his own nature.

  Every day was like the first day of their lives, and a vivid delight.

  Malenfant wondered how it was possible for such people as these — intelligent, complex, vibrant — to have become extinct.

  Extinct: a brutal, uncompromising word. Extinction made death even more of a hard cold wall, because it was the death of the species. It no longer mattered, truthfully, how sophisticated the Neandertals’ sign language had been, whether they had been capable of true humanlike speech, how rich was their deep-embedded consciousness. Because it was all gone.

  The Neandertals had been brought back for this short Indian summer to serve the Gaijin’s purposes. But this had not cheated the extinction, because these Neandertals were not those who had gone before; they had no memory of their forebears, no continuity. The extinction of the Neandertals, in the deep past of Earth, had buried hope and memory, disconnected the past from the future.

  And now, Malenfant feared, the time was drawing close for an extinction event on a still more massive scale: extinction across multiple star systems, so complete that not even bones and tools would be left behind for some future archaeologist to ponder.

  Valentina woke him with a kick. She beckoned him, a universal gesture, and handed him his suit.

  He got dressed groggily and followed her out of the teepee.

  Out on the surface, he relieved himself and looked around. Io was in eclipse right now, so that the pinpoint Sun was hidden by Jupiter. The ground was darkened by the giant planet’s shadow, illumined only by starlight and by an auroral glow from Jupiter, which was otherwise a hole in the sky.

  As the warm fluid trickled uncomfortably down his leg, he stumbled after Valentina, who had already set off across the crusty plain.

  There were five Neandertals in the party, plus Malenfant. They were all carrying bags of tools. The Neandertals moved at a loping half-jog that Malenfant found almost impossible to match, despite the gravity.

  They kept this up for an hour, maybe more. Then they stopped, abruptly. Malenfant leaned forward and propped himself up against his knees, wheezing.

  There was something here. A line on the ground, shining silver in the starlight. It arrowed straight for the swollen face of Jupiter.

  Malenfant recognized the texture. It was the same material he’d seen trailing from the roots of Trees, in orbit: material that had been found on the surface of Venus.

  It was superconductor cable.

  The Neandertals, signing busily, pressed a gadget to the cable. Malenfant couldn’t see what they were doing. Maybe this was some kind of diagnostic tool. After a couple of minutes, they straightened up and moved on.

  As they trotted, the eclipse was fini
shing. The Sun started to poke out from behind Jupiter’s limb, a shrunken disc that rose up through layers of cloud; orange-yellow light fled through the churning cloud decks, casting shadows longer than Earth’s diameter.

  The dawn light caught Io’s flux tube. It was like a vast, wispy tornado reaching up over his head. The flux tube was a misty flow of charged particles hurled up from Io’s endless volcanoes’ sweeping in elegant magnetic-field curves into the face of the giant planet. And where the tube hit Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s cloud decks, there was a continuing explosion: gases made hotter than the surface of the Sun, dragged across the face of the giant planet at orbital speed, patches of rippling aurora hundreds of kilometers across.

  Io, a planet-sized body shoving its way through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, was like a giant electrical generator. There was a potential difference of hundreds of thousands of volts across the moon’s diameter, currents of millions of amps flowing through the ionosphere.

  Standing here, peering up into the flux tube itself, the physical sense of energy was immense; Malenfant wanted to quail, to protect himself from the sleet of high-energy particles that must be gushing down from the sky. But he stood straight, facing this godlike play of energy. Not in front of the Neandertals, he told himself.

  Soon they arrived at a place where the cable was buried by a flow of sulphurous lava, now frozen solid. After a flurry of signs, the Neandertals unpacked simple shovels and picks and began to hack away at the lava, exposing the cable.

  Malenfant longed to rest. His legs seized up in agonizing cramps; the muscles felt like boulders. But, he felt, he had to earn his corn. He rubbed his legs and joined the others. He used a pick on the lava, and helped haul away the debris.

  He couldn’t believe this was the only length of superconductor on Io. He imagined the whole damn moon being swathed by a net of the stuff, wrapping the shifting surface like lines of longitude. Perhaps it had been mined from Venus, scavenged from that ancient, failed project, brought here for some new purpose of the Gaijin.

  The Neandertals’ job must be to maintain the superconductor network, to dig it out. Otherwise, such was the resurfacing rate on this ferocious little moon, the net would surely be buried in a couple of centuries or so. The work would be haphazard, as the Neandertals could travel only where the volcanic hot spots allowed them. But, given enough time, they could cover the whole moon.

  It was a smart arrangement, he thought. It gave the Neandertals a world of their own, safe from the predations of Homo Sap. And it gave the builders of this net — presumably the Gaijin — a cheap and reliable source of maintenance labor.

  Neandertals were patient, and dogged. On Earth, they had persisted with a technology that suited them, all but unchanged, for sixty thousand years. They might already have been here, on Io, for centuries. With Neandertals, the Gaijin had gotten a labor pool as smart as humans, not likely to breed themselves over their resource limits here, and lacking any of the angst and hassle that came with your typical Homo Sap workforce.

  Smart deal, for the Gaijin.

  All he had to do now was figure out the purpose of the net itself: this immense Gaijin project, evidently intent on tapping the huge natural energy flows of Io. What were they making here?

  Without a word to Malenfant the Neandertals jogged off again, along the cable toward Jupiter.

  Malenfant, wheezing, followed.

  When they got back to the teepee, they found Esau had died.

  Valentina was inordinately distressed. She hunkered down in a corner of the tent, her huge body heaving with sobs. Evidently she had had some close relation to Esau; perhaps he was her father, or brother.

  Nobody seemed moved to comfort her.

  Malenfant squatted down opposite her. He cupped her chinless jaw in his hand, and tried to raise up her huge head.

  At first Valentina stayed hunched over. Then — hesitantly, clumsily, without looking at him — she lifted her huge hand and stroked the back of his head.

  She looked up in surprise. Her hard, strong fingers had found a bony protrusion. It was called an occipital bun, Malenfant knew, a relic of his distant French ancestry. She grabbed his hand and pulled it to the back of her own scalp. There was a similar knotty bulge there, under her long black hair. Here was one place, anyhow, where they were similar. Maybe his own occipital bun was some relic of Neandertal ancestry, a ghost trace of some interspecies romance buried millennia in the past.

  Valentina’s human eyes, buried under that ridge of bone, stared out at him with renewed curiosity. Her breasts were flat, her waist solid, her build as bulky as a man’s. And her face thrust forward with its great projecting nose, her puffed-up cheekbones, her long chinless jaw. But she wasn’t ugly to him. She was even beautiful.

  The moment stretched. This close to her, this still, Malenfant was uncomfortably aware of a tightness in his groin.

  Damn those Bad Hair Day twins. He hadn’t wanted any of this complication.

  He tried to imagine Valentina behaving provocatively: those eyes coyly retreating, perhaps, tilting her chin, glancing over her shoulder, parting her mouth, signals common to women of his own species the world over, in his day.

  But that wasn’t the way Neandertal women behaved. They were not coy, he thought.

  It may be humans and Neandertals couldn’t interbreed anyhow. And for sure, a few hundred millennia of separate evolution had given them a different set of come-on signals. He began to understand how it might have been back in the deep past: how two equally gifted, resourceful, communicative, curious, emotionally rich human species could have been crammed together into one small space — and yet be as mindless of each other as two types of birds in his old backyard. It was chilling, epochally sad.

  He thought of Valentina’s massive hand grabbing his balls, and what was left of his erection drained away.

  The Neandertals held a ceremony.

  They pulled back the groundsheet of the teepee to reveal the brick-red ground. The teepee filled up with a pungent, bleachlike stink: sulphur dioxide.

  Briskly the Neandertals dug out a grave. They used their strong bare hands, working together efficiently and cooperatively. A meter or so down they started hauling out dirt that was stained a more vivid orange and blue.

  Malenfant inspected it curiously: This was, after all, the soil of Io. The dirt looked just like crumbled-up rock, but it was laced with orange, yellow, and green: sulphur compounds, he supposed, suffused through the rock. There were a few grains of native sulphur, crumbling yellow crystals.

  The deeper dirt looked as if it was polluted by lichen.

  Some of this was colorless, a dull gray, and some of it was green and purple. Malenfant had never been a biologist, but he knew there were types of bacteria on Earth that flourished in environments like this: acidic, sulphur-rich, oxygen-free, like the volcanic vents on Earth. Maybe there was actually some photosynthesis going on here. Or maybe it was based on some more exotic kind of chemistry. There could be underground reservoirs where some kind of plants stored energy by binding up sulphur dioxide into a less stable compound, like sulphur trioxide; and maybe there were even simple animals that breathed that in, burning elemental sulphur, for energy…

  Scientifically, he supposed, it was interesting. But he was never going to know. And he wasn’t here for the science, anymore than the Neandertals.

  And anyhow, Malenfant, life in the universe is commonplace. And so, it seems, is death.

  When the grave was dug, they lowered the body of Esau into it. Valentina got down there with him and curled him up into a kind of fetus shape. The girl surrounded the old man with a handful of artifacts, maybe stuff that had been important to him: a flute, for instance, carved out of what looked like a femur.

  And Valentina tucked the totem rod, the Staff of Kintu, into Esau’s dead hand.

  After that Valentina stayed in the grave with the corpse a long, long time. There was a lot of signing, back and fo
rth; Malenfant couldn’t follow many words, but he could see a rhythmic flow to the signs, as they washed around the grave. They were singing, he suspected.

  When at last Valentina clambered out, Malenfant felt his own morbid mood start to lift. The Neandertals started to throw Io dirt back into the grave.

  Then, just before the grave was closed over, Esau turned his shrunken head, lifted a sticklike arm.

  Opened gummy eyes.

  The Neandertals kept right on kicking in Io dirt.

  But he was still alive. Malenfant froze, with no idea what to say or do.

  Stick to your own business, Malenfant. Be grateful they didn’t do it to you.

  After that, he found it difficult to sleep. He kept hearing scrabbling, scratching at the ground beneath him.

  He was startled awake.

  There was a bright electric blue glow coming from under the groundsheet, leaking into the teepee’s conical space. A glow, coming from the old geezer’s grave.

  Malenfant had seen that glow before: a thousand astronomical units from Earth, and by the light of other Suns, and in the heart of an African mountain, and even here, on Io. It was the glow of Saddle Point gateway technology.

  He tried to ask Valentina, the others. But he didn’t have the words, and they slapped him away.

  A while after that — it might have been a couple of days — the Neandertals lifted the sheet and started to dig out the grave.

  To Malenfant’s relief, the stink wasn’t too bad, perhaps masked by the sulphur dioxide. Maybe the wrong bacteria in the soil, he thought.

  Valentina reached down into the grave and pulled out the metal Staff. She showed no signs of the distress she had exhibited before.

  The Neandertals, with little fuss or ceremony, started to refill the grave.

  Malenfant got close enough to look inside the grave. It was empty. He felt his skin prickle, a kid at Halloween.