Stephen Baxter - Manifold 3 - Origin

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Manifold
Book #03
Origin
by Stephen Baxter
Emma Stoney:
Do you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant...
I know you. And you're just what you always were, an incorrigible space cadet.
That's how we both finished up stranded here, isn't it? I remember how I loved
to hear you talk, when we were kids. When everybody else was snuggling at the
drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be
mined, a resource for humanity.
But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for
mankind to strut and squabble?
And what if we blew ourselves up before we ever got to the stars? Would the
universe just evolve on, a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly
devoid of life and mind?
How - desolating.
Surely it couldn't be like that. All those suns and worlds spinning through the
void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang
itself... You always said you just couldn't believe that there was nobody out
there looking back at you down here.
But if so, where is everybody?
This is the Fermi Paradox - right, Malenfant? If the aliens existed, they would
be here. I heard you lecture on that so often I could recite it in my sleep.
But I agree with you. It's powerful strange. I'm sure Fermi is telling us
something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in. It is as if
we are all embedded in a vast graph of possibilities, a graph with an axis
marked time, for our own future destiny, and an axis marked space, for the
possibilities of the universe.
Much of your life has been shaped by thinking about that cosmic graph. Your life
and, as a consequence, mine.
Well, on every graph there is a unique point, the place where the axes cross.
It's called the origin. Which is where we've finished up, isn't it, Malenfant?
And now we know why we were alone...
But, you know, one thing you never considered was the subtext. Alone or not
alone - why do we care so much?
I always knew why. We care because we are lonely.
I understood that because J was lonely. I was lonely before you stranded me
here, in this terrible place, this Red Moon. I lost you to the sky long ago. Now
you found me here - but you're leaving me again, aren't you, Malenfant?
... Malenfant? Can you hear me? Do you know me? Do you know who you are? - oh.
Watch the Earth, Malenfant. Watch the Earth...
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Manekatopokanemahedo:
This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still
burned.
Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone.
Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe,
sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars,
there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers
of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to
be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence
across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere humans found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal,
churning meaninglessly in the dark.
Nowhere did they find mind - save what they brought with them or created - no
other against which human advancement could be tested.
They came to understand that they would forever be alone.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational
fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to
understand what minds of that age were like, minds of time's far downstream.
They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They needed
nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of
identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction
against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to
the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably
old.
And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have
been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers - lonely,
dogged, all but insane - reached to the deepest past...
-I-
WHEEL
Reid Malenfant:
'... Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!'
So here was Reid Malenfant, his life down the toilet, chasing joky UFO reports
around a desolate African sky. Emma's voice snapped him to full alertness, for
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just about for the first time, he admitted to himself, since takeoff.
'What about the Moon?'
'Just look at it!'
Malenfant twisted his head this way and that, the helmet making his skull heavy,
seeking the Moon. He was in the T-38's forward blister. Emma was in the bubble
behind him, her head craned back. The jet trainer was little more than a
brilliant shell around them, white as an angel's wing, suspended in a powder
blue sky. Where was the Moon - the west? He couldn't see a damn thing.
Frustrated, he threw the T-38 into a savage snap roll. A flat brown horizon
twisted around the cockpit in less than a second.
'Jesus, Malenfant,' Emma groaned.
He pulled out into a shallow climb towards the west, so that the low morning sun
was behind him.
... And then he saw it: a Moon, nearly full, baleful and big - too big, bigger
than it had any right to be. Its colours were masked by the washed-out blue of
the air of Earth, but still, it had colours, yes, not the Moon's rightful
palette of greys, but smatterings of a deep blue-black, a murky brown that even
had tinges of green, for God's sake - but it was predominantly red, a strong
scorched red like the dead heart of Australia seen from the flight deck of a
Shuttle orbiter...
It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.
He just stared, still pulling the T-38 through its climb. He sensed Emma, behind
him, silent. What was there to say about this, the replacement of a Moon?
That was when he lost control.
Fire:
The people walk across the grass.
The sky is blue. The grass is sparse, yellow. The ground is red under the grass.
Fire's toes are red with the dust. The people are slim black forms scattered on
red-green.
They are called the Running-folk.
The people call to each other.
'Fire? Dig! Fire?'
'Dig, Dig, here! Loud, Loud?'
Loud's voice, from far away. 'Fire, Fire! Dig! Loud!'
The sun is high. There are only people on the grass. The cats sleep when the sun
is high. The hyenas sleep. The Nutcracker-men and the Elf-men sleep in their
trees. Everybody sleeps except the Running-folk. Fire knows this without
thinking.
As his legs walk Fire holds his hands clamped together. Smoke curls up from
between his thumbs. There is moss inside his hands. The fire is in the moss. He
blows on the moss. More smoke comes. The fire hurts his palms and fingers. But
his hands are hard.
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His legs walk easily. Walking is for legs. Fire is not there m his legs. Fire is
in his hands and his eyes. He makes his hands tend the fire, while his legs
walk.
Fire is carrying the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.
It is darker. The people are quiet.
Fire looks up. A fat cloud hangs over him. The sun is behind the cloud. The edge
of the cloud glows golden. His nose can smell rain. His bare skin prickles,
cold. Immersed in this new moment, he has forgotten he is hungry.
The clouds part. There is a blue light, low in the sky. Fire looks at the blue
light. It is not the sun. The blue light is new.
Fire fears anything new.
The fire wriggles in his hands.
He looks down, forgetting the blue light. There is no smoke. The moss has turned
to ash. The fire is shrinking.
Fire crouches down. He shelters the moss under his belly. He feels its warmth on
his bare skin. He hoots. 'Fire, Fire! Fire, Fire!'
Stone is small-far. He turns. He shouts. He is angry. He begins to come back
towards Fire.
Loud comes to Fire. Loud hoots. His voice is loud. Loud is his name. Loud
kneels. He looks for bits of moss and dry grass. He pushes them into the bit of
fire.
Dig comes to Fire. Her hand holds arrowhead roots. She squats beside Fire. Her
taut dugs brush his arm. His member stiffens. He rocks. She grins. Her hands
push a root into his mouth. He tastes her fingers, her salty sweat.
Loud hoots. His member is stiff too, sticking out under his belly. He crams bits
of grass into Fire's hands.
Fire snaps his teeth. 'Loud, Loud away!'
Loud hoots again. He grabs Dig's arm. She laughs. Her legs take her skipping
away from both of them.
Others come to Fire. Here are women, Grass and Shoot and Cold and Wood. Here are
their babies with no names. Here are children with no names. The children
jabber. Their eyes are round and bright.
Here is Stone. Stone is dragging branches over the ground. Blue is helping Stone
drag the branches. Sing is lying on the branches. Sing is white-haired. She is
still. She is asleep.
Stone sees the dying fire. He sees Fire's stiff member. He roars. Stone's hands
drop the branches.
Stone has forgotten Sing, on the branches. Sing tips to the ground. She groans.
Stone's axe clouts Fire on the back of the head. There is a hard sound. Stone
shouts in Fire's face. 'Fire, Fire! Hungry, feed!' His face is split by a scar.
The scar is livid red.
'Fire, Fire,' says Fire quietly. His arms drop and his head bows. He keeps hold
of the fire.
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Sing moans. Her eyes are closed. Her dugs are slack. The men pick her up by
shoulders and legs and lift her back on the branches.
Stone and Blue grab the branches. Their legs walk them back the way they had
come.
Fire tells his legs to stand him up. They can't. His hands are still clasped
around the fire. Lights fill his head, more garish than that blue stripe in the
sky. He nearly falls over backwards.
Loud's hand grabs his armpit. Loud lifts him until his legs are straight.
Loud laughs. Loud walks away, fast, after Dig.
Fire's head hurts. Fire's hands hurt. Fire's member wants Dig.
He starts walking. He wants to stop thinking.
He thinks of the blue light.
Emma Stoney:
Emma had accompanied Malenfant, her husband, on a goodwill tour of schools and
educational establishments in Johannesburg, South Africa. It had been a
remarkably dismal project, a throwback to NASA PR malpractices of old, a trek
through mostly prosperous, middle-class-and-up neighbourhoods, with Malenfant
running Barco shows from his two missions to the Space Station before rows of
polite and largely uncaring teenagers.
In darkened classrooms Emma had watched the brilliance of the students' smiles,
and the ruby-red winking of their earpiece phones like fireflies in the night.
Between these children growing up in the fractured, complex, transformed world
of 2015, and Reid Malenfant, struggling worker astronaut, all of fifty-five
years old and still pursuing Apollo dreams from a boyhood long lost, there was a
chasm as wide as the Rift Valley, she thought, and there always would be.
Still, for Emma, it had been a holiday in the African sun - the reason she had
prised herself away from her work as financial controller of OnlineArt - and she
and Malenfant had gotten along reasonably well, for them, even given Malenfant's
usual Earthbound restless moodiness.
But that had been before the word had come through from the Johnson Space
Center, headquarters of NASA's manned spaceflight programme, that Malenfant had
been washed out of his next mission, STS-194.
Well, that was the end of it. With a couple of phone calls Malenfant had cut
short their stay in Joburg, and begun to can the rest of the tour. He had been
able to get out of all of it except for a reception at the US ambassador's
residence in Nairobi, Kenya.
To her further dismay, Malenfant had leaned on Bill London - an old classmate
from Annapolis, now a good buddy in the South African Navy - to let him fly them
both up to Nairobi from out of a Joburg military airfield in a T-38, a sleek
veteran supersonic jet trainer, a mode of transport favoured by the astronauts
since the 1960s.
It wasn't the first time Emma had been taken for a ride in one of those toy
planes, and with Malenfant in this mood she knew she could expect to be thrown
around the sky. And she shuddered at the thought of how Malenfant in this
wounded state was going to behave when he got to Nairobi.
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But she had gone along anyhow. Somehow she always did.
So that was how Emma Stoney, forty-five-year-old accountant, had found herself
in a gear room getting dressed in a blue flight suit, oxygen mask, oversized
boots, helmet, going through the procedures for using her parachute and survival
kit and emergency oxygen, struggling to remember the purpose of the dozens of
straps, lanyards and D-rings.
Malenfant was ready before she was, of course. He stomped out into the bright
morning sunlight towards the waiting T-38. He carried his helmet and his flight
plan, and his bald head gleamed in the sun, bronzed and smooth as a piece of
machinery itself. But his every motion was redolent with anger and frustration.
Emma had to run to keep up with him, laden down with all her absurd right-stuff
gear. By the time she reached the plane she was hot already. She had to be
hoisted into her seat by two friendly South African female techs, like an old
lady being lifted into the bath. Malenfant was in his cockpit, angrily going
through a pre-takeoff checkout.
The T-38 was sleek and brilliant white. Its wings were stubby, and it had two
bubble cockpits, one behind the other. The plane was disturbingly small; it
seemed barely wide enough to squeeze in a whole person. Emma studied an array of
controls and dials and softscreen readouts at whose purpose she could only
guess. The venerable T-38 had been upgraded over the years - those shimmering
softscreen readouts, for instance - but every surface was scuffed and worn with
use, the metal polished smooth where pilots' gloved hands had rubbed against it,
the leather of her seat extensively patched.
The last few minutes of the prep wore away quickly, as one of the ground crew
took her through her final instructions: how she should close her canopy bubble,
where to fasten a hook to a ring on a parachute, how to change the timing of her
parachute opening. She watched the back of Malenfant's head, his jerky tension
as he prepared his plane.
Malenfant taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Emma watched the stick move
before her, slaved to Malenfant's movements. Her oxygen mask smelled of hot
rubber, and the roar of the jets was too loud for her to make out anything of
Malenfant's conversation with the ground.
Do you ever think of me, Malenfant? There was a mighty shove at her back.
Fire:
Stone drops the branches. Sing rolls to the ground. Stone has forgotten her
again. The sun is low. They are close to a thick stand of trees. Fire can smell
water.
Fire is tired. His stomach is empty. His hands are sore. 'Hungry Fire hungry,'
he moans.
Sing, on the ground, looks up at him. She smiles. 'Hungry Fire,' she says. He
thinks of her feeding him. But she is small and withered. She does not get up to
feed him.
Stone walks over the branches he hauled across the savannah, the branches that
transported Sing. He kicks them aside. He has forgotten he hauled them here. He
bends. His hands seek out a piece of dung on the ground. His tongue tastes it.
It is Nutcracker-man dung. The dung is old. The dung crumbles.
Fire is not fearful. There are no Nutcracker-men near here.
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Stone's feet kick aside more branches and twigs. He uncovers a round patch of
black ground. Fire's nose smells ash. Stone hoots. 'Hah! Fire Fire.'
Fire crouches over the ash. The fire is warm in his hands.
Loud and Dig and others huddle near him. Their hands scrape dry stuff from the
floor, dead leaves and dry moss and grass and bits of bark. Their hands pick up
rocks, and rub the tinder against the rocks. Their fingers turn the tinder,
making it fine and light.
Wood's legs walk to the forest. She comes back with a bundle of sticks, of wood.
That is what she does. That is her name. She piles the sticks on the ground.
The hands of the others push the tinder into the middle of the pile of wood.
Working closely, the people jostle each other. They are hot from the walk. Their
bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger,
irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their
hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives.
Their ancestors' hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Fire waits while they work.
He sees himself.
He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this
other's face. The adults' huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push
him out of the way.
A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She
swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.
... The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.
Fire's hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of
fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out
of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The
wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.
People laugh and hoot at the fire.
Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.
Emma Stoney:
The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged
through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the
rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the
glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural
land beyond showing as patches of greyish green and brown. On the eastern
horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing
through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon, almost full,
its small grey face peering back at the sun's harsh glare.
Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.
Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies
of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than
her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten per cent of the time on his two
spaceflights throwing up.
Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon
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to left. As they headed towards the interior of the continent, the land turned
brown, parched, flat.
'What a shithole,' Malenfant said, his voice a whisper over the jet's roar.
'Africa. Cradle of mankind my ass.'
'Malenfant -'
He hurled the T-38 forward with a powerful afterburner surge.
Within seconds they had reached 45,000 feet and had gone through a bone-shaking
Mach 1. The vibrations damped away and the noise of the jets dwindled - for, of
course, they were outstripping most of the sound they made - and the plane
seemed to hang in shining stillness.
Emma, as she had before, felt a surge of exhilaration. It was at such
paradoxical moments of stillness and speed that she felt closest to Malenfant.
But Malenfant was consumed by his gripes.
'Two years. I can't fucking believe it. Two years of training, two years of
meetings and planning sessions, and paddling around in hydro labs and spinning
around in centrifuges. All of it for nothing.'
'Come on, Malenfant. It's not the end of the world. It's not as if Station work
was ever such a prize anyhow. Looking at stars, pissing in Jars. That's what you
used to say -'
'Nobody was flying to fucking Mars. Station was all that was available, so I
took it. Two flights, two lousy flights. I never even got to command a mission,
for Christ's sake.'
'You got washed out this time. That doesn't mean you won't fly again. A lot of
crew are flying past your age.' That was true, of course, partly because NASA
was having such difficulty finding willing applicants from younger generations.
But Malenfant growled, 'It's that asshole Bridges. He even called me into the
JSC director's office to explain the shafting. That fucking horse holder has
always had it in for me. This will be the excuse he needs to send me to
purgatory.'
Emma knew whom he meant. Joe Bridges was the director of flight operations - in
effect, in NASA's Byzantine, smothering internal bureaucracy, in charge of
astronaut selection for missions.
Malenfant was still muttering. 'You know what Bridges offered me? ASP.'
Emma riffled through her mental file of NASA acronyms. ASP:
Astronaut Support Personnel, a non-flying astronaut assigned to support the crew
of a mission.
'I'd have been point man on STS-194,' Malenfant spat. The Caped Crusader.
Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole
into my seat on the flight deck.'
'I gather you didn't take the job,' Emma said dryly.
'I took it okay,' he snapped. 'I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil
pusher's fat ass.'
'Oh, Malenfant,' she sighed.
She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to
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ceiling office window with its view of the park-like JSC campus, complete with
the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crashlanded
beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for
too many eager crew-persons, so - in what seemed to Emma his own very small
world - Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.
She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat,
the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together
any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role;
perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond
his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a
network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in
NASA's sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.
Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long,
complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high
tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear
pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have
something to do with the organization's supposed mission. The wise person
accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.
But to Malenfant - Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human
behaviour, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy,
barely engaged with the complexities of the world - to Malenfant, Joe Bridges,
controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me,
she thought) could be nothing but a monster.
She stared out the window at the baked African plain. It was huge and ancient,
she thought, a place that would endure all but unchanged long after the little
white moth that buzzed over it today was corroded to dust, long after the
participants in this tiny domestic drama were mouldering bones.
Now she heard a whisper from the ground-to-air radio. It sounded like Bill
London, good old bullshitter Bill from Annapolis, with some garbled report about
UFOs over central Africa.
The plane veered to the right, and the rising sun wheeled around the cockpit,
sparking from scuffs in the Plexiglas around her.
'Let's go UFO-hunting,' Malenfant snapped. 'We got nothing better to do today,
right?'
She wasn't about to argue; as so often in her relationship with Malenfant she
was, literally, powerless.
Fire:
Stone and Blue put branches into the fire. Leaves and twigs bum. Stone and Blue
pull out the burning branches. Their legs carry them into the wood. Small
animals squeal and run before the fire. Stone and Blue pursue, their eyes
darting, their hands hurling rocks and bits of wood.
Fire's hands are very red and raw.
Dig comes to him. Water is in her mouth. The water spills on his hands. The
water is cool. Dig has leaves. Her hands rub them on his burns.
Fire has no name. Sing is huge and smiling. Sing's hands rub his palms with
leaves.
Fire has his name again. It is Dig who tends his burned hands, smiling.
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'Blue light!' he shouts, suddenly.
Dig looks at him. Her eyes narrow. She tends his hands.
Fire's hand reaches out. It cups one conical breast. The breast is hot in his
hand.
The fire is hot in his hand. A captured bat is hot in his hand.
His member does not rise. Dig tends his hands.
Blue and Stone return. Their hands carry rabbits. The rabbits are skinned. There
is blood on the mouths of the men. The rabbits fall to the ground.
The children with no names fall on the rabbits. They jabber, snapping at each
other. The children's small faces are bloody. The adults push the children
aside, and growl and jostle over the rabbits. All the people work at the meat,
stealing it from each other.
Grass and Cold throw some pieces of meat on the fire. The meat sizzles. Their
hands pick out the meat. Their mouths chew the burned meat, swallowing some.
Fire sees that their mouths want to swallow all the meat. But their fingers take
meat from their mouths. They put the meat in the mouths of their babies with no
names.
Sing groans. She is on the ground near the branches. Her nose can smell the
food. Her hands can't reach it.
Fire is eating a twisted-off rabbit leg. His hands pluck meat off it, and put
the meat in Sing's mouth.
Her head turns. Her mouth chews. Her eyes are closed. She chokes. Her mouth
spits out meat.
Fire's hands pop the chewed meat in his mouth.
Sing is shivering.
Fire thinks of a bower.
There are branches here, on the ground. He has forgotten that they were used to
transport Sing. He keeps thinking of the bower.
He makes his hands lay the branches on the ground. He thinks of twigs and grass
and leaves. He gathers them, thinking of the bower. He makes his hands pile
everything up on the branches.
He makes his arms pick up Sing.
It is sunny. He has no name. Sing is carrying Fire. Sing is large, Fire small.
It is dark. His name is Fire. Fire is carrying Sing. Fire is large, Sing
shrunken.
He lays her on the crude bower. She sinks into the soft leaves and grass. The
branches roll away. The grass scatters. Sing falls into the dirt, with a gasp.
Fire hoots and howls, kicking at the branches.
One of the branches is lodged against a rock. It did not roll away.
Fire makes his hands gather the branches again. He puts the branches down
alongside the rock he found. His hands pile up more grass. At last he lowers
file:///C|/WINDOWS/Desktop/Incoming/Baxter,%2...xter%20-%20Manifold%20-%2003%20-%20Origin.txt (10 of 324) [7/14/2004 1:56:21 PM]
摘要：

file:///C|/WINDOWS/Desktop/Incoming/Baxter,%20Stephen%20-%20[Ma...rigin/\Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Manifold%20-%2003%20-%20Origin.txtManifoldBook#03OriginbyStephenBaxterEmmaStoney:Doyouknowme?Doyouknowwhereyouare?Oh,Malenfant...Iknowyou.Andyou'rejustwhatyoualwayswere,anincorrigiblespac\ecadet.That'show...

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