Space

by Stephen Baxter

  He’d built up an impression that the Neandertals worked hard. They used their big gorilla bodies where Homo Sap would have used tools. Their bodies were under intense physical stress, the whole time. Malenfant observed that Esau’s body, for example, bore a lot of old injuries, scars and badly set bones. It was as if they climbed a mountain or ran a marathon every day of their lives.

  But the Neandertals accepted this, an occupational hazard.

  The compensation was the very physical nature of their lives. They lived immersed in their world. They were vigorous, intensely alive. By comparison Malenfant, as the only available sample of the species Homo Sap, felt weak, vague, as if he was blundering about in a mist. He found he envied them.

  The Neandertals sang as they hauled – sign-sang, that is. It was a song about the Face of Kintu. Kintu was one of the few words they vocalized, and it was, Malenfant recalled, the name of a Ugandan god, the grandfather of Kimera. The song was about Kintu blowing himself up with breath until stars and worlds popped out over his body, like volcanoes on Io. Kintu was God and the universe for the Neandertals, and the Face of Kintu – it took him a while to realize – was their name for Io itself.

  The signing was functional for the Neandertals, for their magic suits had no radios. But it was more than that. It was beautiful when you got to follow it a little, a mix of dance and speech.

  He had to be shown how to use his magic suit’s sanitary facilities. Basically the trick was just to let go. The suit’s surface absorbed the waste, liquid and solid; it simply disappeared into that translucent wall, as if dissolving. Most of it anyhow. On the move, Malenfant had no chance to open his magic suit, this shell he had to share with the stink of a dead old man, and now of his own waste. The Neandertals clearly weren’t hung up on personal hygiene. After a couple of days, however, Malenfant was longing for a shower.

  After a time, snow fell around the Neandertals, fine little blue crystals that settled over Malenfant’s head and shoulders, crisping the basaltic ground.

  Valentina nudged him, and pointed. Over the horizon, a geyser was erupting. It was the source of the snow.

  The sparkling plume was venting into space, tens of kilometres high. The plume was blue, sulphur dioxide. At the top of the plume the ice glittered brightly: ionized by Jupiter’s magnetic winds, the charged molecular fragments shimmered with energy, a miniature aurora. At the base of the plume lava was flowing. Perhaps it was liquid sulphur. As it emerged it flowed stickily, slowly, like molasses, but as it cooled it became runnier, until it pooled down the shallow slopes of the vent, like machine oil.

  A volcanic plume, glowing in the dark. It looked like a giant, twisted fluorescent tube: exotic, strange, spectacular. His heart lifted, the way it had when he first beheld Alpha Centauri. He might not understand everything he saw. But, he felt now, it was worth coming out here – worth exploring, worth suffering all the incomprehensible shit and endless culture shocks and even getting slapped around by Neandertals – worth it for sights like this.

  The march was diverted to skirt the plume’s caldera.

  Soon the party started to stray into an area where a kind of frost lay over the ground, thick and green-blue, probably sulphur dioxide. The ground started to get significantly colder under Malenfant, and he was shivering.

  The party moved away from the frost, seeking warmer ground.

  They were walking over hot spots, he realized. But the hot spots must shift. Io, plagued by volcanism, squeezed like a rubber ball in a fist by Jupiter’s tidal pumping, was resurfaced by lava flows all the time.

  So the Neandertals had to move on, wandering over Io, in search of warmth from the ground.

  It was one hell of a lifestyle. But they seemed to be happy.

  About twice every Io day the caravan stopped.

  The Neandertals didn’t always set up camp. They would unload scuffed and scarred pieces of equipment, boxes the size of refrigerators or washing machines. They plugged their magic suits into these, at hip and mouth, for a couple of hours at a time. The mouth socket supplied food, edible mush that tasted of nothing.

  Malenfant didn’t know how his magic suit kept him supplied with oxygen; he wasn’t carrying a tank. The suit must somehow break down the sulphur dioxide air, and scrub out carbon dioxide from his lungs. Maybe the hip socket extracted stored waste, carbon dioxide and urine and faecal matter, for recycling. Anyhow the boxes seemed to recharge the magic suits, making them good for another ten or twelve hours.

  The suits just worked, without any fuss. But the Neandertals only had a finite number of magic suits, and seemed to have no way of manufacturing more. If some sad old geezer hadn’t died, there would have been no magic suit for Malenfant. What then? Would they have abandoned him? Well, he hadn’t been invited here.

  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 artefact. It was just a pipe a half-metre long, of a metal that looked like aluminium, 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 non-manual 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 G
aijin’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. 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 human-like 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 finishing. 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 kilometres 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 kilometres 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 which 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 labour.

  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 labour 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 inte
nt 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 towards 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 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 inter-species 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.