Origin

— V — MANIFOLD

Emma Stoney:

Hello, Malenfant. I want to tell you I’m all right.

I know that’s not what you’d want to hear. The notion that I’m alive, I’m prospering without you, is anathema. Right?

But then you probably aren’t listening at all.

You never did listen to me. If you had you wouldn’t have screwed up our entire relationship, from beginning to end. You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself. Or me.

But I miss you even so.

I guess you know I’m alone here. Even Nemoto has gone, off to a different fate, in some corner of the manifold or other…

Mary:

There were more yesterdays than tomorrows. Her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, even one of her own children.

And there came a day when they put old Saul in the ground, and Mary found herself the last to remember the old place, the Red Moon where she had been born.

It didn’t matter. There was only today.

Nemoto was not so content, of course.

Even in the deepest times of the Long Night, Nemoto would bustle about the cave, agitated, endlessly making her incomprehensible objects. Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, not really a person, and so of no significance.

But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto. Mary understood. Nemoto had brought them here, home to the Grey Earth. Now it was Nemoto who was stranded far from her home.

And so Mary made space for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when she fell ill, or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat, softening the deep frozen meat with her own strong jaws, chewing it as she would to feed a child.

But one day, Nemoto spat out her mouthful of meat on the floor of the cave. She raged and shouted in her jabbering Skinny tongue, and pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.

She returned staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. It was a bat, dormant, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. Nemoto jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.

Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm titbits to the children. But when she offered them the bloated, pink-grey internal organs of the bat, mothers pulled the children away.

After that, Nemoto would never be healthy again.

There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, but it was the first time it had shown at all for sixty-eight days. There was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals — birds and a few large rats — were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting in their torpor.

The people capered and threw off their furs.

Nemoto was growing more ill. She suffered severe bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. She lost weight. And her skin grew flaky and sore.

Mary tried to treat the diarrhoea. She brought salt water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto’s system.

The days lengthened rapidly. The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, life swarmed. The people gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations.

And soon a distant thunder boomed across the land. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds. The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed towards the sea.

It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes: long-legged, the bucks sporting huge unwieldy antlers. The animals were slim and streamlined, and the muscles of their legs and haunches were huge and taut. And they ran like the wind. Since most of this tipped-up world was, at any given moment, either freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of miles, spanning continents in their search for food, water and temperate climes.

But predators came too, streamlined hyenas and cats, stalking the vast herds. Those predators included the people, who inhabited a neck of land between two continents, a funnel down which the migrant herds were forced to swarm.

The antelope herd was huge. But it passed so rapidly that it was gone in a couple of days, a great river of flesh that had run its course.

The people ate their meat and sucked rich marrow, and waited for their next provision to come to them, delivered up by the tides of the world.

The air grew hotter yet. Soon the fast-growing grass and herbs were dying back, and the migrant animals and birds had fled, seeking the temperate climes.

The season’s last rain fell. Mary closed her eyes and raised her open mouth to the sky, for she knew it would be a long time before she felt rain on her face again.

The ground became a plain of baked and cracked mud.

The people retreated to their cave. Just as its thick rock walls had sheltered them from the most ferocious cold of the winter, so now the walls gave them coolness.

Nemoto’s relentless illness drove her to her pallet, where she lay with a strip of skin tied across her eyes.

At length there came a day when the sun failed even to brush the horizon at its lowest point. For sixty-eight days it would not rise or set, but would simply complete endless, meaningless circles in the sky, circles that would gradually grow smaller and more elevated.

The Long Day had begun.

Nemoto said she would not go into the ground until she saw a night again. But Nemoto’s skin continued to flake away, as the bat she had woken took its gruesome revenge.

There came a day when the sun rolled along the horizon, its light shimmering through the trees which flourished there.

Mary carried Nemoto to the mouth of the cave — she was light, like a thing of twigs and dried leaves.

Nemoto screwed up her face. “I do not like the light,” she said, her voice a husk. “I can bear the dark. But not the light. I long for tomorrow. For tomorrow I will understand a little more. Do you follow me? I have always wanted to understand. Why I am here. Why there is something, rather than nothing. Why the sky is silent.”

“Lon” for tomorrow,” Mary echoed, seeking to comfort her.

“Yes. But you care nothing for tomorrow, or yesterday. Here especially, with your Long Day and your Long Night, as if a whole year is made of a single great day.”

Overhead, a single bright star appeared, the first star since the spring.

Nemoto gasped. She was trying to raise her arm, perhaps to point, but could not. “You have a different pole star here. It is somewhere in Leo, near the sky’s equator. Your world is tipped over, you see, like Uranus, like a top lying on its side; that is how the impact shaped it. And so for six months, when your pole points at the sun, you have endless light; and for six months endless dark… Do you follow me? No, I am sure you do not.”

She coughed, and seemed to sink deeper into the skins. “All my life I have sought to understand. I believe I would have pursued the same course, whichever of our splintered worlds I had been born into. And yet, and yet—” She arched her back. “And yet I die alone.”

Mary took her hand. It was as delicate as a bundle of dried twigs. “Not alone.”

Nemoto tried to squeeze Mary’s hand; it was the gentlest of touches.

And the sun, as if apologetically, slid beneath the horizon. A crimson sunset towered into the sky.

Mary placed her in the ground, the ground of this Grey Earth.

The memory of Nemoto faded, as memories did. But sometimes, sparked by a scent, or the salty breeze that blew off the sea, Mary would think of Nemoto, who had not died alone.

Emma Stoney:

Alone.

Yes, Malenfant, I’m alone. I know I have company — various specimens of Homo superior, who you never got to meet, and the Hams, including your Julia, who didn’t get to ride back to the Grey Earth. But I’m alone even so. I’m a pet of the Daemons. They are — kindly. So are the Hams. I feel like I’m drowning in chocolate.

I’ve decided to leave. I’m going up-river, into the heart of the continent. I’m intending to hook up with another band of Runners. I did that before; I can do it again. They range far into the continent’s interior, the desert. They know how to find water, how to eat, how to survive out there. If anybody knows a way across the red centre it will be the Runners.

I want to see the Bullseye up close, that big volcanic blister. Although maybe it won’t be so spectacular. Like you used to say about Olympus Mons on Mars: too big for the human eye to take in, right? Well, those mile-deep rift canyons around its base look like they’d be worth a snapshot.

But I want to go on beyond that.

Maybe I can get past the Bullseye, all the way to the other side of the continent. There is another Beltway over there, Malenfant, another strip of greenery on the western edge of the continent. Nemoto told me you didn’t see any dwellings or structures, from Earth or when you orbited the Moon. But maybe there are people there even so, in the western Beltway.

Maybe they are like me. Maybe they are like the Hams, or the Daemons, or maybe another form we haven’t dreamed of before. Nobody seems to know. Not the Daemons, not even the Hams.

I can hear your voice. I know what you’re saying. I know it’s dangerous. Doubly so for a person alone. But I’m going anyhow. I’m tougher than I used to be, Malenfant.

I’ll tell you what I’d like to find, in the other Beltway, or someplace else. The place the humans evolved.

We know the Hams were shaped by conditions on the Grey Earth. We think the Daemons are descended from a bunch of Australopithecines that wandered over to the Banded Earth millions of years ago. And so on.

Well, presumably humans came from a group of Runners, similarly isolated. Maybe there were several of Nemoto’s ‘speciations’:

one to produce some archaic form, a common ancestor of humans and Neandertals Hams — and then others to produce the Hams, and us. And maybe others. Other cousins.

I think I’d like to find that place. To meet the others.

Nobody knows everything there is to know about this Red Moon. It’s a big place. It’s full of people.

Full of stories.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

Babo shrugged massively, as Manekato groomed him. “It may yet be possible to use the world engine, if only in a limited way…”

“To do what?”

“We can explore the manifold. We can Map to other realities. Other possibilities. You don’t have to send a whole Moon to do that.”

Mane pondered. “But what is there to look for?”

“In fact there is a valid goal,” Babo said carefully.

The Astrologers, he told Manekato, believed that the universe — any given universe — was a fundamentally comprehensible system. If a system was comprehensible, then an entity must exist that could comprehend it. Therefore an entity must exist that could comprehend the entire universe, arbitrarily well or rather She must exist, as Babo put it.

“The God of the Manifold,” Manekato said dryly.

The catch was that there was a manifold of possible universes, of which this was only one. So She may not exist in this universe.

Anyhow, it — She — was to be the ultimate goal of the Daemons” quest.

“Of course,” Babo said, “She may actually be an expression of the manifold itself — or perhaps the manifold itself, the greater structure of reality strands, is itself self-referential, in some sense conscious. Or perhaps the manifold is itself merely one thread in a greater tapestry—”

“A manifold of manifolds.”

“And perhaps there is a further recursion of structure, no end to the hierarchies of life and mind, which—”

Mane held up her hands. “If we find Her: what will we ask Her?”

Babo picked his nose thoughtfully. “I asked Em-ma that. She said, Ask Her if She knows what the hell is going on.”

Mane touched her brother’s head. “Then that is what we will ask. Come, brother; we have much to do.”

Hand in hand, the two of them loped towards the forest, seeking shade and food.

Shadow:

Shadow found a scrap of meat.

It was on the ground, under a fig leaf, where she had been looking for fruit. It was just a scrap, half-chewed, not much more than a bit of gristle. Shadow scrabbled it up off the floor. Her fingers were stiff now, her vision poor, and she had trouble making her hands do what she wanted them to do.

She sat on the ground and chewed the gristle, sucking away the dust and the tang of somebody else’s saliva. The meat was well-chewed. There was barely any flavour, any blood; she couldn’t even tell what animal it had come from. But it was tough, and the way it scraped between her teeth made her ache with hunger. She swallowed it only when she had reduced it to a shred of fibre, too ragged to hold or gnaw.

She had not eaten meat for a long, long time: not yesterday, not the days she remembered in vivid, non-chronological, blood-soaked glimpses, not as far back as she could remember.

…She became aware of their scent first. The scent of fur, musk, blood. Then their shadows.

All around her.

They had come on her silently. But they had been coming for her, one way or another, since the day when she had failed to kill the Nutcracker infant, in that blinding flash of light. She tried to run, willing all her strength into legs that had once been so strong. But her life had been very hard, and she was slow.

Young hands grabbed her legs. She fell face-first into the dirt.

She twisted, trying to get on her back. But those strong hands kept a grip of her ankle. Her grimace of hatred and defiance turned to a yell of pain, as bones snapped.

They fell on her. Both her legs were held. Somebody sat on her head, and dark stinking fur pushed into her mouth and nose and eyes. She flailed and got one blow on hard flesh. But then her arms were pinned down. She couldn’t see who they were.

The blows began to fall. Kicks, stamps, jumps, punches. Bodies hurling themselves onto her. She glimpsed others running around the main group of assailants, landing kicks and blows when the chance came. It was a bedlam, of screams, pain, motion. Still she couldn’t make out their faces.

Thumbs pressing into her eyes. Strong hands working at one of her arms, twisting. Bright red pain in her shoulder and elbow, the crunch of ligament and bone.

Termite!… But her mother was long dead, of course.

The pain lessened. With relief, she fell into darkness.

Emma Stoney:

You know, I think I always knew we couldn’t manage to live together. But I think I always dreamed we would get to die together.

But it’s been quite a ride. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Malenfant. For all the worlds.

Of course there is another possibility. Maybe I should go with the Daemons, off into the manifold. If this really is a manifold of infinite universes, anything is possible. No, strike that — anything that can happen will happen, someplace.

And so there must be one reality where you’re waiting for me. There must be. A whole universe, just for us. Kind of romantic, don’t you think?…

I’m still blown away by what I’ve learned of the Old Ones.

The Old Ones created infinite possibility — infinite opportunities for life, for mind. What higher mission could there be? And what really overwhelms me is that they may have been us. Or at least humans from some variant of our future history. Us: we did this. Think of that.

You’d have loved it, Malenfant. But of course, maybe you already know about it all.

To redesign an infinite ensemble of universes: what terrible responsibility, what arrogance… Maybe they really were us. It sounds just the kind of thing your average Homo sap would do for a dare.

An H. sap like Reid Malenfant.

Is it all your fault? Malenfant, what did you do, out there in the forest of realities?

Time to go. Goodbye, Malenfant, goodbye.

Maxie:

The people walk across the grass. Maxie’s legs are walking. He is following Fire.

The sky is blue. The grass is sparse, yellow. The ground is red under the grass. The people are slim black forms scattered on red-green.

The people call to each other.

“Berry? Sky! Berry!”

“Sky, Sky, here!”

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. Maxie knows this without thinking.

There is a blue light, low in the sky.

Maxie looks at the blue light. The blue light is new. The blue light is still. It watches him. It is a bat. Or an eye.

Maxie grins. He cares nothing for the blue light.

He walks on, across the hot crimson dust.