Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 31

"The Adaqo need it, but you don't?"

"No," the old woman said with a smile. "We build it. We don't need it."

Gray Earth

STEPHEN BAXTER.

Stephen Baxter (www.sam.math.ethz.ch/%7Epkeller/Baxter-Page.html) is now one of the big names in hard SF, the author of a number of highly regarded novels (he has won the Philip K.

d.i.c.k Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF a.s.sociation Award, and others for his novels) and many short stories. He published four books in 2000, including a collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days, and s.p.a.ce: Manifold 2 (t.i.tled Manifold: s.p.a.ce in the U.S.), and won the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award for his collection, Vacuum Diagrams (1999). The third volume, Origin: Manifold 3, was published in 2001, as was Icebones, Deep Time, and a collection, Ormegatropic: Non-Fiction & Fiction. In the mid and late 1990s, he produced five or ten short stories a year in fantasy, SF, and horror venues, and did so again in 2001. He appeared in most of the major magazines, sometimes twice.

"Gray Earth" appeared in Asimov's, and although complete in itself, is an outtake from his novel Manifold: Origin. Filled with SF ideas, it is about a dying human woman living among Neanderthals on an alternate Earth, coming to terms with her death in the context of an orchestrated human evolution. It feels like Baxter is emulating Ursula K. Le Guin here, withrespectable results.

She was old now. The cold dug into her joints and her scars, and the leg she had fractured long ago, more than it used to.

She still called herself Mary. But she was one of the last to use the old names. And the people no longer called themselves Hams-for there were no Skinnies here who could call them that, none save Nemoto-and they were no longer called the People of the Gray Earth, for they had come home to the Gray Earth, and had no need to remember it.

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

Outside the cave that day there was only darkness, the still darkness of the Long Night, broken by the stars that sprinkled the cloudless black sky. Mary's deep past was a place of dark green warmth. But her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, Saul, even one of her own children.

But it didn't matter.

All that mattered were her skins, and the fug of gossip and talk that filled the cave, and the warm sap that bled from the root of the blood-tree that pierced the cave roof, on its way to seek out the endless warmth that dwelled in the belly of this earth, this Gray Earth.

All that mattered was today. Comparisons with misty other times-with past and future, with a girl who had fought and laughed and loved on a different world, with the bones that would soon rot in the ground-were without meaning.

Nemoto was not so content, of course.

Day succeeds empty day.

At first, on arriving here, I dreamed of physical luxuries:running hot water, clean, well-prepared food, a soft bed. But now it is as if my soul has been eroded down to an irreducible core. To sleep in the open on a bower of leaves no longer troubles me. To have my skin coated in slippery grime is barely noticeable.

But I long for security. And I long for the sight of another human face.

Sometimes I rage inwardly. But I have no one to blame for the fact that I have become lost between worlds, between realities.

And when I become locked inside my own head, when my inner distress becomes too apparent, it disturbs the Hams, as if I am becoming a danger to them.

So I have learned not to look inward.

I watch the Hams as they shamble about their various tasks, their brute bodies wrapped up in tied-on animal skins like Christmas parcels. All I see is their strangeness, fresh every day. They will complete a tool, use it once, drop it where they stand, and move on. It is as if every day is the very first day of their lives, as if they wake up to a world created anew.

It is obvious that their minds, housed in those huge skulls, are powerful, but they are not like humans'. But then they are not human. They are Neandertal.

This is their planet. A Neandertal planet.

Still, I try to emulate them. I try to live one day at a time. It is comforting.

My name is Nemoto. If you find this diary, if you understand what I have to say, remember me.

Nemoto was never content. Even in the deepest dark of the Long Night, she would bustle about the cave, arguing with herself, agitated, endlessly making her incomprehensible objects. Or else she would blunder out into the dark, heavily wrapped in furs, perhaps seeking her own peace in the frozen stillness beyond.

Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, a constant, unique, somewhat irritating presence. But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto.

Mary understood. Mary was of the Gray Earth, and she had come home. But Nemoto was of the Red Moon-or perhaps of another place, a Blue Earth of which she sometimes spoke-and now it was Nemoto who had been stranded far from her home.

And so Mary made s.p.a.ce for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when the children were too boisterous with her, or when an adult challenged her, or when she fell ill or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat. But Nemoto's thin, pointed jaw could make no impression on the deep-frozen meat of the winter store, nor could her s.h.i.+ning tools. So Mary would soften the meat for her 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, expressing disgust. She pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.

Time did not matter during the Long Night, nor during its bright twin, the Long Day. Nemoto was gone, as gone as if she had been put in the ground, and she began to soften in the memory.

But at last Nemoto returned, as if from the dead. She was staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. The children gathered around to see.

It was a bat, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. The bat had tucked itself into a tree hollow to endure the Long Night. But Nemoto had dug it out, and now she put it close to a warm root of the blood-tree to let it thaw. She jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.

The bat revived briefly, flapping its broad wings against the cave floor. But Nemoto briskly slit its throat with a stone knife, and began to butcher it.

Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm tidbits to the children who cl.u.s.tered around to see. She sucked marrow from its thread-thin bones, and gave that to the children as well. But when she offered the children bloated, pink-gray internal organs, mothers pulled the children away.

That was the last time Nemoto was ever healthy.

Mary eats her meat raw, tearing at it with her shovel-shaped teeth and cutting it with a flake knife; every so often she sc.r.a.pes her teeth with the knife. And as her powerful jaw grinds at the meat, great muscles work in her cheeks.

Mary is short, robust, heavily built. She is barrel-chested, and her arms and ma.s.sive-boned legs are slightly bowed. Her feet are broad, her toes fat and bony. Her ma.s.sive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, are scarred from stone chips. Her skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, is long and low, with a p.r.o.nounced bulge at the rear. Her face is pulled forward into a great prow fronted by her ma.s.sive, fleshy nose; her cheeks sweep back as if streamlined, but her jaw, though chinless, is ma.s.sive and thrust forward. From her lower forehead a great ridge of bone thrusts forward, masking her eyes. There is a p.r.o.nounced dip above the ridges, before her shallow brow leads back into a tangle of hair.

She is Neandertal. There can be no doubt.

She lives -I live-in a system of caves. There is an overpowering stench of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement, and burning fur, and a musty, disagreeable odor of people who don't wash.

Every move the Hams make, every act they complete, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air, is suffused with strength. They suffer a large number of injuries bone fractures and crus.h.i.+ng injuries and gouged and scarred skin. But then, their favored hunting technique is to wrestle their prey to the ground. It is like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.

The Hams barely notice me. They are utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children pluck at the remnants of my clothing with their intimidatingly strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams step around me, their eyes sliding away, as if I am a rock embedded in the ground. I sometimes theorize that they are only truly conscious in social interactions; everything else - eating, making tools, even hunting-is done in a rapid blur, as I used to drive a car, without thinking. Certainly, to a Neandertal, by far the most fascinating things in the world are otherNeandertals.

They are not human. But they care for their children, and for their ill and elderly. However coolly the Hams treat me, they have not expelled me, which is why I survive.

I brought them here, from the Red Moon. This tipped-up Earth is their home. They remembered it during the time of their exile on another world. Remembered it for forty thousand years, an unimaginable time.

I imagined I would be able to get away from here, to home. It did not happen that way.

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, just for an hour, but it was the first time the sun had shown at all for sixty-eight days.

When the people saw the light they came bursting out of the cave.

They scrambled onto the low bluff over the cave, where the blood-tree stood: leafless and gaunt now, but its blood-red sap coursed with the warmth it had drawn from the Gray Earth's belly, the warmth that had sustained the people through the Long Night. The people danced and capered and threw off their furs. Then they retreated to the warmth of the cave, where there was much chatter, much eating, much joyous s.e.x.

Though it would be some time yet before the frozen lakes and rivers began to thaw, there was already a little melt.w.a.ter to be had. And the first hibernating animals-birds and a few large rats-were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting. The people enjoyed the first thin fruits of the new season.

But Nemoto's illness was worse.

She suffered severe bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. She steadily lost weight, becoming, in the uninterested eyes of the people, even more gaunt than she had seemed before. And her skin grew flaky and sore. The children would watch in horrified fascination as she shucked off her furs and her clothes, and then peeled off bits of her skin, as if she would keep on until nothing was left but a heap of bones.

Mary tried to treat the diarrhea. She brought water, brine from the ocean diluted by melt.w.a.ter. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning that was working its way through Nemoto's system.

The key incident in the formation of the Earth was the collision of proto-Earth with a wandering planetesimal larger than Mars. This is known as the Big Whack.

It is hard to envisage such an event. The projectile that ended the Cretaceous era, sending the dinosaurs to extinction, was perhaps six miles across. The primordial impactor was some four thousand miles across. It was a fully formed planet in its own right. And the collision released two hundred million times as much energy as the Cretaceous impact.

The proto-Earth's oceans were boiled away. About half of Earth's crust was demolished by the impact. A tremendous spray of liquid rock was hurled into s.p.a.ce. The impactor was stripped of its own mantle material, and its core sank into the interior of the Earth. Much of the plume fell back to Earth. Whatever was left of the atmosphere was heated to thousands of degrees.

The remnant plume settled into a ring around the Earth, glowing white hot. As it cooled, it solidified into a swarm of moonlets. It was like a replay of the formation of the solar system itself.

The largest of the moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and, under the influence of tidal forces, rapidly receded from Earth.

Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge tides, a molten crust, and savage rains as the ocean vapor fell back from s.p.a.ce. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more.

Everything was shaped in those moments of impact: Earth's spin, the tilt of the axis that gives us seasons, the planet's internal composition, the Moon's composition and orbit.

But it didn't have to be that way.

Such immense collisions are probably common in the formation of any planetary system. But the impact itself was a random event: chaotic, in that small differences could have produced large,even unpredictable consequences. The impactor might have missed Earth altogether-but that would have left Earth with its original atmosphere, a crus.h.i.+ng Venus-like blanket of carbon dioxide. Or the impactor might have hit at a subtly different angle. A single Moon isn't necessarily the most likely outcome; many collision geometries would produce two twin Moons, or three or four, or ring systems like Saturn's. And so on.

Many possibilities. All of which, somewhere in the infinite manifold of universes, must have come to pa.s.s.

I know this because I have visited several of those possibilities.

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. Soon the lakes were blue, though pale cores of unmelted ice lingered in their cores.

Life swarmed. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, plants and animals alike engaged in a frenzied round of fighting, feeding, breeding, dying.

The people moved rapidly about the landscape. They 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 to seek mates and nesting places.

And soon a distant thunder sounded across the land: relentless, billowing day and night across the newly green plains, echoing from green-clad mountains. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds.

The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed toward the sea.

It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes. They were slim and streamlined, the muscles of their legs and haunches huge and taut, the bucks sporting large folded-back antlers. And they ran like the wind.

Since most of this tilted world was, at any given moment, freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of kilometers, spanning continents in their search for food, water, and temperate climes. Speed and endurance were of the essence for survival.

But predators came too, sleek hyenas and cats stalking the vast herds. Though the antelopes were mighty runners-fueled by high-density fat, able to race for days without a break-there were always outliers who could not keep up: the old, the very young, the injured, mothers gravid with young. And it was on these weaker individuals that the predators feasted.

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 pa.s.sed so rapidly that the great river of flesh was gone in a couple of days. And after another day, the predator packs that stalked it had gone too.

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

But the next group of running animals to come by was small-everyone could sense that-and everybody knew what they were, from their distinctive, high-pitched cries. Everybody lost interest.

Everybody but Nemoto.

The Hams are aware of the coming and going of the herds of migrating herbivores on which they rely for much of their meat, and are even able to predict them by the pa.s.sage of the seasons.

But Hams do not plan. They seem to rely on the benison of the world to provision them, day to day. It means they sometimes go hungry, but not even that dents their deep, ancient faith in the world's kindness.

I remember a particular hunt. I followed a party of Hams along a trail through the forest.

They stopped by a small tree, thick with hanging fibers, and with dark hollows showing beneath its prop roots. White lichen was plastered over its trunk, and a parasitic plant with narrow, dark-green leaves dangled from a hollow in its trunk. A Ham cut a sapling and pushed it into one deep dark hollow, just above the muddy mush of leaves and detritus at the base of thetree.

A deep growling emerged from beneath the roots of the tree.

Excited, the Hams gathered around the tree and began to haul at it, shaking it back and forth.

To my amazement they pulled the tree over by brute force, just ripping the roots out of the ground. Out squirmed a crocodile, a meter long, jaws clamped at the end of the pole. It was dark brown with a red-tinged head, huge eyes, and startlingly white teeth.

It was a forest crocodile. These creatures come out at night. They eat frogs, insects, flightless birds, anything they can find. They have barely changed in two hundred million years.

This world is full of such archaisms and anachronisms -like the Hams themselves. Of course it is. For it is not my world, my Earth. It is not my universe.