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  Origin

  ( Manifold - 3 )

  Stephen Baxter

  This is the third installment in Stephen Baxter’s Manifold trilogy. It sees Manifold regular Reid Malenfant and others once again dealing with possibilities of primate evolution in all forms and grappling with the Fermi Paradox. This time an artifact in the sky transports a select few individuals including Malenfant’s wife to a new red moon which has appeared in place of the moon we know. Blaming himself, Malenfant launches a one man mission to find his wife and solve the Fermi Paradox once and for all.

  Manifold: 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…

  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 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 w
ithout 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.