The survivors had recruited local Hams, and used their muscles and Runner labour to construct this little township. They had found no others of their kind, save for the sinister-sounding Zealots, of whom McCann was reluctant to speak, who lived some distance from the compound.
It seemed that it had been the mysterious Zealots who had taught the indigenes their broken English — if inadvertently, through escaped slaves returning to their host populations. The Zealots had been here for centuries, McCann seemed to believe.
“Not much of a life,” McCann said grimly. “No women, you see. Some of us sought relief with the Hams, even with Runners. But they aren’t women. And there were certainly no children to follow.” He smiled stoically. “Without women and children, you can’t make a colony, can you? After a time you wonder why you bother to shave every day.”
One by one the Englishmen had died, their neat little huts falling into disrepair.
McCann showed them a row of graves, outside the stockade gate, marked by bits of stone. The last to die had been a man called Jordan— ‘dead of paralytic shock’, McCann said. McCann appeared especially moved to be at Jordan’s grave side. Malenfant wondered if these withdrawn, lonely men, locked in civility and their memories of a forever lost home, had in the end sought consolation in each other.
But McCann, in a gruesome effort to play the good host, talked brightly of better times. “We had a life of sorts. We played cards — until they wore out and we made chess sets, carving pieces from bits of balsa. We had no books, but we would spin each other yarns, recounting the contents of novels as best we remembered them. I dare say the shades of a few authors are restless at the liberties we took. Once or twice we even put on a play or two. Marlowe comedies mostly: Much Ado About Nothing, that kind of thing. Just to amuse ourselves, of course.
“We used to play sports. Your average Ham can’t kick a soccer ball to save his life, but he’s a formidable rugby player. As for the Runners, they can’t grasp the simplest principle of rules or sportsmanship. But, my, can they run! We would organize races. The record we got was under six seconds for the hundred yard dash. That fellow was rewarded with plenty of bananas and beer…”
McCann spoke of how the survivors, just four of them, had become withdrawn, even one from the other, as they waited gloomily for death. Crawford would disappear into the forest for days on end with squads of Hams, “fossicking around’, as McCann put it. The others would rarely even leave their huts.
“And you?” Nemoto asked. “What is your eccentricity, Mr McCann?”
“A longing for company,” he said immediately, smiling with self-deprecation. “That’s always been my weakness, I’m afraid.”
“Then it must have been hard for you here,” Malenfant said.
“Indeed. But when my companions withdrew into themselves, I sought out the company of the lesser folk: the Hams, even the Runners at times. My companions took to calling me Mowgli. Perhaps you know the reference. I have attempted to civilize them, teach them skills — more advanced tool-making, even reading. With little success, I am afraid. Your bar-bar is smarter than your Runner, and these pre-sapients are smarter in turn than the pongid species, the Elves and Nutcrackers. Your bar-bar can be taught to use a new tool, you know — to use it but never to make it. They can make things work but never understand how they work, rather like human infants. And, like your Kaffir, your bar-bar can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more.
“And that, of course, is the difference between man and pre-sapient. Wherever there are sub-men, who live only for the day and their own bellies, we must rule. But the work shapes one. The responsibility. It has made me pitiful and kindly, I would say, as I have learned something of their strange, twisted reasoning.” He leaned towards them. “They have no chins, you see, none of them. And everybody knows that a weak chin generally denotes a weak race.”
When evening came again, fires were built within the palm-thatched huts, and smoke rose through the roofs and the crude chimneys that pierced them. Malenfant saw a pair of bats, flapping uncertainly between the turbulent columns of smoke. They were big, as big as crows, with broad, rounded wings.
“Leaf-nose bats,” Nemoto murmured.
“Don’t tell me. Prehistoric bats.”
Nemoto shrugged. “Perhaps. There are many bats here. They have occupied some of the niches never taken by the birds.”
Malenfant watched the bats” slow, ungainly flapping. “They sure look unevolved.”
“Ah, but they were the peak of aerial engineering when they hunted flies and mosquitoes over lakes full of dinosaurs, Malenfant. You should have a little more respect.”
“I guess I should.”
Nemoto whispered conspiratorially, “It all hangs together, Malenfant.”
“What does?”
“McCann’s account of his alternate Earth. A much larger Moon would raise immense tides. The oceans would not be navigable. McCann’s America must once have been linked to Eurasia by land bridges, as ours was, for otherwise the Hams presumably couldn’t have reached it. But when the land bridges were submerged, the Americas were effectively cut off — until iron-hulled ships and aeroplanes emerged, in the equivalent of our own twentieth century. Malenfant, it may have been easier to fly to the Moon than to reach America. Think of that.”
“What does all this mean, Nemoto?”
“I am working on it,” she said seriously. “Consider this, though. We are alone on our Earth, our closest relatives terribly distant. But McCann’s world has a spectrum of hominid types — as it was on our own Earth, long ago. McCann’s Earth may in some senses be more typical than ours.”
A party of Runners, supervised by a Ham, brought in a couple of deer, slung between them, half-butchered.
“Look at that,” muttered Nemoto. “I think that one is a mouse deer.” It was small, the size of a dog, its coat yellow-brown spotted with white, and it had tusks in its upper jaw. “You see them in Africa. Actually it isn’t really a deer at all. It is midway between pigs and deer, and more primitive than either. It climbs trees. It catches fish in the streams. Probably unchanged across thirty million years. Older than grass, Malenfant.”
“And the other?”
This was a little larger than the mouse deer, with a black stripe down its back, and powerful hind legs: a creature evolved for the undergrowth, Malenfant thought.
“A duiker, I think,” Nemoto said. “Another primitive form, the oldest of the antelopes. Sometimes hunts birds and feeds on carrion. Maybe here it eats bats. Everything is ancient here.” Now she seemed agitated. “Perhaps these forms were brought here by the same mechanism that imported hominids. What do you think?”
“Take it easy.”
Her small, thin face worked in the gathering gloom. “This is wrong, Malenfant.”
“Wrong? What’s wrong with it?”
“The ecology is — out of tune. Like a misfiring engine. It is a jumble of species and micro-ecologies, a mixed-up place, fragments thrown together. Though many of the fragments are very ancient, there has been no time for these plants and animals to evolve together, to find an equilibrium. Periodically something disturbs this world, Malenfant, over and over, stirring it up.”
Malenfant grunted. “Guess you can’t go wandering across the reality lines without a little confusion.”
But Nemoto would not take the matter lightly. “This is not right, Malenfant. All this mixing. There is a reason the primitive hominids became extinct, a reason why the mouse deer’s descendants evolved new forms. An ecology is like a machine, where all parts work together, interlocking. You see?”
Malenfant said, amused, “These deer and antelopes seem to have been prospering before they ran into some hunter’s crossbow bolt.”
“It shouldn’t be this way, Malenfant. To meddle with ecologies, to short-circuit them, is irresponsible.”
Malenfant shrugged. “Sure. And we cut down the forests to build shopping malls.” He was feeling restless; maybe his first shock was wearing off. He’d had enough of McCann; he was eager to get out of here, get back to the lander — and progress his primary mission, which was to find Emma.
But when he expressed this to Nemoto she laughed harshly. “Malenfant, we barely managed to survive our first few minutes after landing. Here we are safe. Have patience.”
He seethed. But without her support, he didn’t see what he could do about it.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
When she was Mapped to the Market — when the information that comprised her had been squeezed through cracks in the quantum foam that underlay all space and time — she was no longer, quite, herself, and that disturbed her greatly.
Manekato was used to Mapping. The Farm was large enough that walking, or transport by Workers, was not always rapid enough. But Mappings covering such a short distance were brief and isomorphic: she felt the same coming out of the destination station as entering it (just as, of course, principles of the identity of indiscernible objects predicted she should).
A Mapping spanning continents was altogether more challenging. To compensate for differences in latitude and altitude and seasons — early summer there, falling into autumn here — and to adjust for momentum differences — people on the far side of the spinning Earth were moving in the opposite direction to her — such a Mapping could be no more than homomorphic. What came out looked like her, felt like her. But it was not indiscernible from the original; it could not be her.
Still, despite these philosophical drawbacks, the process was painless, and when she walked off the Mapping platform, her knuckles tentatively touching new ground, she found herself comfortable. The air was hot, humid, but caused her no distress, and even its thinness at this higher altitude did not give her any discomfort.
And the air was still. There was no Wind. Thanks to the Air Wall wrapped around it, the Market was the only place on Earth from which the perpetual Wind was excluded. She had been prepared for this intellectually, of course. But to stand here in this pond of still air — not to feel the caressing shove of the Wind on her back — was utterly strange.
This crowded Mapping station was full of strangers. She peered around, feeling conspicuous, bewildered. Some of the people here were small, some tall, some squat, some thin; some were coated with hair that was red or black or brown, and some had no hair at all;
some crawled close to the ground, and some almost walked upright, like their most distant ancestors, their hands barely brushing the ground. Manekato, who had spent her whole life on a Farm where everybody looked alike, tried to mask her shock and revulsion at so much difference.
She was met outside the station by a Worker, a runner from the Astrologers. She slid easily onto its broad back, wrapping her long arms around its chest, and allowed herself to be carried away.
Her first impression of the Market was of waste. The streets were broad, the buildings an inefficient variety of designs, and she could spot immediately places where heat would leak or dust gather, or where the layout must prevent optimally short journeys from being concluded.
All of this jarred with her instinct. The goal for every Farmer was to squeeze the maximum effectiveness and efficiency from every last atom — and beyond, to the infinitesimal. The mastery of matter at the subatomic level, resulting in such everyday wonders as Mapping and Workers, had brought that ultimate dream a little closer.
But, she reminded herself, this was the Market, not a Farm.
In the deepest past there had been a multitude of markets, where Farmers traded goods and information and wisdom. The transient population of the markets had always been predominantly male. Women were more tightly bound to the land, locked into the matriarchal Lineages that had owned the land since the times almost before history; men were itinerant, sent to other Farms for the purpose of trade, and marriage.
But as technology had advanced and the Farms had become increasingly self sufficient, the primary function of the markets had dwindled. One by one they had fallen into disuse. But the role of the markets as centres of innovation had been recognized — and, perhaps, their purpose in providing an alternate destiny for rootless men and boys. So some of the markets had been preserved.
At last only one Market remained: the grandest and most famous, perched here on the eroded peak of its equatorial mountain, supported now by tithes from Farms around the world. Here men, and a few women, dreamed their dreams of how differently things might be — and enough of those innovative dreams bore fruit that it was worth preserving.
