Читать книгу Origin - Stephen Baxter - Страница 20

Her chest hurt. Every time she took a breath she was gasping and dragging, as if she had been running too far, or as if she was high on a mountainside.

That was the first thing Emma noticed.

The second thing was the dreaminess of moving here.

When she walked – even on the slippery grass, encumbered by her clumsy flight suit – she felt light, buoyant. But she kept tripping up. It was easy to walk slowly, but every time she tried to move at what seemed a normal pace she stumbled, as if about to take off. Eventually she evolved a kind of half-jog, somewhere between walking and running.

Also she was strong here. When she struggled to drag the woman – Sally? – out of the rain and into the comparative shelter of the trees, with the crying kid at her heels, she felt powerful, able to lift well above her usual limit.

The forest was dense, gloomy. The trees seemed to be conifers – impossibly tall, towering high above her, making a roof of green – but here and there she saw ferns, huge ancient broad-leafed plants. The forest canopy gave them some shelter, but still great fat droplets of water came shimmering down on them. When the droplets hit her flesh they clung – and they stung. She noticed how shrivelled and etiolated many of the trees’ leaves looked. Acid rain?…

The forest seemed strangely quiet. No birdsong, she thought. Come to think of it she hadn’t seen a bird in the time she’d been here.

The flat-head people – hominids, whatever – did not follow her into the forest, and as their hooting calls receded she felt vaguely reassured. But that was outweighed by a growing unease, for it was very dark, here in the woods. The kid seemed to feel that too, for he went very quiet, his eyes round.

But then, she thought resentfully, she was disoriented, spooked, utterly bewildered anyhow – she had just been through a plane wreck, for God’s sake, and then hurled through time and space to wherever the hell – and being scared in a forest was scarcely much different from being scared on the open plain.

… What forest? What plain? What is this place? Where am I?

Too much strangeness: panic brushed her mind.

But the blood continued to pulse from that crude gash on Sally’s arm, an injury she had evidently suffered on the way here, from wherever. And the kid sat down on the forest floor and cried right along with his mother, great bubbles of snot blowing out of his nose.

First things first, Emma.

The kid gazed up at her with huge empty eyes. He looked no older than three.

Emma got down on her knees. The kid shrank back from her, and she made an effort to smile. She searched the pockets of her flight suit, seeking a handkerchief, and finding everything but. At last she dug into a waist pocket of Sally’s jacket – she was wearing what looked like designer safari gear, a khaki jacket and pants – and found a paper tissue.

‘Blow,’ she commanded.

With his nose wiped, the boy seemed a bit calmer.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Maxie.’ His tiny voice was scale-model Bostonian.

‘Okay, Maxie. My name’s Emma. I need you to be brave now. We have to help your mom. Okay?’

He nodded.

She dug through her suit pockets. She found a flat plastic box. It turned out to contain a rudimentary first aid kit: scissors, plasters, safety pins, dressings, bandages, medical tape, salves and creams.

With the awkward little scissors she cut back Sally’s sleeve, exposing the wound. It didn’t look so bad: just a gash, fairly clean-edged, a few inches long. She wiped away the blood with a gauze pad. She could see no foreign objects in there, and the bleeding seemed mostly to have stopped. She used antiseptic salve to clean up, then pressed a fresh gauze pad over the wound. She wrapped the lower arm in a bandage, and taped it together.

… Was that right? How was she supposed to know? Think, damn it. She summoned up her scratchy medical knowledge, derived from what she had picked up at second-hand from Malenfant’s training – not that he’d ever told her much – and books and TV shows and movies … She pressed Sally’s fingernail hard enough to turn it white. When she released it, the nail quickly regained its colour. Good; that must mean the bandage wasn’t too tight.

Now she propped the injured arm up in the air. With her free hand she packed up what was left of her first aid kit. She had already used one of only two bandages, half-emptied her only bottle of salve … If they were going to survive here, she would have to ration this stuff.

Or else, she thought grimly, learn to live like those nude hominids out there.

She turned to the kid. She wished she had some way to make this experience easier on him. But she couldn’t think of a damn thing. ‘Maxie. I’m going to find something to keep the rain off. I need you to stay right here, with your mom. You understand? And if she wakes up you tell her I’ll be right back.’

He nodded, eyes fixed on her face.

She ruffled his hair, shaking out some of the water. Then she set off back towards the plain.

She paused at the fringe of the forest.

Most of the hominids were hunched over on themselves, as if catatonic with misery in the rain. One, apparently an old woman, lay flat out on the floor, her mouth open to the rain.

The rest seemed to be working together, loosely. They were upending branches and stacking them against each other, making a rough conical shape. Perhaps they were trying to build a shelter, like a tepee. But the whole project was chaotic, with branches sliding off the pile this way and that, and every so often one of them seemed to forget what she was doing and would simply wander off, letting whatever she was supporting collapse.

At last, to a great hoot of dismay from the workers, the whole erection just fell apart and the branches came clattering down.

The people scratched their flat scalps over the debris. Some of them made half-hearted attempts to lift the branches again, one or two drifted away, others came to see what was going on. At last they started to work together again, lifting the branches and ramming them into the ground.

It wasn’t like watching adults work on a project, however unskilled. It was more like watching a bunch of eight-year-olds trying to build a bonfire for the very first time, figuring it out as they went along, with only the dimmest conception of the final goal.

But these hominids, these people, weren’t eight-year-olds. They were all adults, all naked, hairless, black. And they had the most beautiful bodies Emma had ever seen, frankly, this side of a movie screen anyhow. They were tall and lean – as tall as basketball players, probably – but much stronger-looking, with an all-round grace that reminded her of decathletes, or maybe Aussie Rules footballers (a baffling, sexy sport she’d tried to follow as a student, long ago).

With broad prominent noses and somewhat rounded chins, they had human-looking faces – human below the eye line, anyhow. Above the eyes was a powerful ridge of bone that gave each of them, even the smallest child, a glowering, hostile look. And above that came a flat forehead and a skull that looked oddly shrunken, as if the top of their heads had somehow been shaved clean off. Their hair was curly, but it was slicked down by the rain, showing the shape of their disturbingly small skulls too clearly.

The bodies of humans, the heads of apes. They spoke in hoots and fragmentary English words. And not one of them looked as if he or she had ever worn a stitch of clothing.

She had never heard of creatures like this. What were these people? Some kind of chimp, or gorilla? but with bodies like that? And what chimps used English?

What part of Africa had she landed in, exactly?

The rain came down harder still, reminding her she had a job to do.

She made her way out into the open, working across increasingly boggy ground, until she reached her parachute. She had been worried that the hominids might have taken it away, but it lay where it had fallen when she had come tumbling from out of the sky.

She took an armful of cloth and pulled it away from the ground. It came loose of the mud only with difficulty, and it was soaked through. She’d had vague plans of hauling the whole thing into the forest, but that was obviously impractical. She hunted through her pockets until she found a Swiss Army knife, kindly provided by the South African air force. She quickly discovered she had at her disposal a variety of screwdrivers, a can and bottle opener, a wood saw, scissors, a magnifying glass, even a nail file. At last she found a fat, sturdy blade. She decided she would cut loose a piece of cloth perhaps twenty feet square, which would suffice for a temporary shelter. Later, when the rain let up, she would come back and scavenge the rest of the silk.

She began to hack her way through the ’chute material. But it was slow work.

For the first time since that dreadful moment of mid-air disintegration, she had time to think.

It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant’s final scream over the intercom, her sudden ejection – without warning, she had been thrust into the cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat’s rockets slammed into the small of her back – and then, even as her ’chute had begun to open, she saw the wheel opening like a mouth all around her – and she had realized that for better or worse she was going to fall through it …

Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.

And then, this.

She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the breath knocked out of her. Lying on the ground, an instant after being forty thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: that was the first shock.

She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal, foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that, stranding her here.

Yes, but where was here?

She had cut the ’chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.

Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall with swimming slowness.

Low gravity. As if she was on the Moon.

That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, where?

Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are going to do about it – specifically, how you plan to stay alive, long enough for Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.

… Malenfant.

Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn’t anywhere near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other side of the great blue portal?

But he’d been through the crash too. Was he alive at all?

She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her haunches. She remembered how he had been in those last instants before the destruction of the plane, the reckless way he had hurled them both at the unknown.

Malenfant, Malenfant, what have you done?

A scream tore from the forest.

Emma bundled up her parachute cloth and ran back the way she had come.

On her bed of dead leaves, Sally was sitting up. With her good arm she held her kid to her chest. Maxie was crying again, but Sally’s face was empty, her eyes dry.

Uneasy, Emma dumped the parachute cloth. In the seeping rain, she got to her knees and embraced them both. ‘It’s all right.’

The kid seemed to calm, sandwiched between the two women.

But Sally pushed her away. ‘How can you say that? Nothing’s right.’ Her voice was eerily level.

Emma said carefully, ‘I don’t think they mean us any harm … Not any more.’

‘Who?’

‘The hominids.’

‘I saw them,’ Sally insisted.

‘Who?’

‘Ape-men. They were here. I just opened my eyes and there was this face over me. It was squat, hairy. Like a chimp.’

Then not like the hominids out on the plain, Emma thought, wondering. Was there more than one kind of human-ape, running around this strange, dreamy forest?

‘It was going through my pockets,’ Sally said. ‘I just opened my eyes and looked right in its face. I yelled. It stood up and ran away.’

‘It stood up? Chimps don’t stand upright. Not habitually … Do they?’

‘What do I know about chimps?’

‘Look, the – creatures – out there on the plain don’t sound like that description.’

‘They are ape-men.’

‘But they aren’t squat and hairy.’ Emma said hesitantly, ‘We’ve been through a lot. You’re entitled to a nightmare or two.’

Doubt and hostility crossed Sally’s face. ‘I know what I saw.’

The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.

At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outré concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn’t a flat, infinite, unchanging stage … To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.

And then there was the small matter of Sally’s husband.

Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally’s reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.

She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.

As she worked she said hesitantly, ‘My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you –’

‘I’m Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg.’ (Is?) ‘I guess you’ve met Maxie. We’re from Boston.’

‘Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK.’

‘Yes …’ Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was in her early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn’t as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. ‘We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg… Where are we, do you think?’

‘I don’t know any more than you do. I’m sorry.’

Sally’s smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. ‘Well, it sure isn’t your fault. What do you think we ought to do?’

Stay alive. ‘Keep warm. Keep out of trouble.’

‘Do you think they know we are missing yet?’

What ‘they’? ‘That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet.’

Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn’t scared out of his wits. ‘I’m hungry.’

Emma squeezed his shoulder. ‘Me too.’ She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.

She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colourful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.

Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of digestive biscuits before he gobbled up the handful of boiled sweets he had spotted immediately.

Emma kept back one of the sweets for herself, however. She sucked the cherry-flavour sweet until the last sliver of it dissolved on her tongue. Anything to get rid of the lingering taste of that damn caterpillar.

Caterpillar, for God’s sake. Her resentful anger flared. She felt like throwing away the petty scraps of supplies, rampaging out to the hominids, demanding attention. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t want anything to do with this. She didn’t want any responsibility for this damaged woman and her wretched kid – and she didn’t want her head cluttered up with the memories of what had become of the woman’s husband.

But nobody was asking what she wanted. And now the food was finished, and the others were staring at her, as if they expected her to supply them.

If not you, Emma, who else?

Emma took the foil box and went looking for water.

She found a stream a few minutes’ deeper into the forest. She clambered down into a shallow gully and scooped up muddy water. She sniffed at it doubtfully. It was from a stream of running water, so not stagnant. But it was covered with scummy algae, and plenty of green things grew in it. Was that good or bad?

She carried back as much water as she could to their improvised campsite, where Sally and Maxie were waiting. She set the water down and started going through her pockets again.

Soon she found what she wanted. It was a small tin, about the size of the tobacco tins her grandfather used to give her to save her coins and stamps. Inside a lot of gear was crammed tight; Maxie watched wonderingly as she pulled it all out. There were safety pins, wire, fish hooks and line, matches, a sewing kit, tablets, a wire saw, even a teeny-tiny button compass. And there was a little canister of dark crystals that turned out to be potassium permanganate.

Following the instructions on the can – to her shame she had to use her knife’s lens to read them – she dropped crystals into the water until it turned a pale red.

Maxie turned up his nose, until his mother convinced him the funny red water was a kind of cola.

Habits from ancient camping trips came back to Emma now. For instance, you weren’t supposed to lose anything. So she carefully packed all her gear back into its tobacco tin, and put it in an inside pocket she was able to zip up. She took a bit of parachute cord and tied her Swiss Army knife around her neck, and tucked it inside her flight suit, and zipped that up too.

And while she was fiddling with her toys, Sally began shuddering.

‘Greg. My husband. Oh my God. They killed him. They just crushed his skull. The ape-men. Just like that. I saw them do it. It’s true, isn’t it?’

Emma put down her bits of kit with reluctance.

‘Isn’t it strange?’ Sally murmured. ‘Greg isn’t here. But I never thought to ask why he isn’t here. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I knew … Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’

‘No,’ Emma said, as soothing as she could manage. ‘Of course not. It’s very hard, a very hard thing to take –’

And then Sally just fell apart, as Emma had known, inevitably, she must. The three of them huddled together, in the rain, as Sally wept.

It was dark before Sally was cried out. Maxie was already asleep, his little warm form huddled between their two bodies.

The rain had stopped. Emma pulled down her rough canopy, and wrapped it around them.

Now Sally wanted to talk, whispering in the dark.

She talked of her holiday-of-a-lifetime in Africa, and how Maxie was doing at nursery school, another child, a daughter, at home, and her career and Greg’s, and how they had been considering a third child or perhaps opting for a frozen-embryo deferred pregnancy, pending a time when they might be less busy.

And Emma told her about her life, her career, about Malenfant. She tried to find the gentlest, most undemanding stories she could think of.

Like the one about their engagement, at the end of Malenfant’s junior year as a midshipman at the Naval Academy. He had received his class ring, and at the strange and formal Ring Dance she had worn his ring around her neck, while he carried her miniature version in his pocket. And then at the climax of the evening the couples took their turns to go to the centre of the dance floor and climb up under a giant replica of the class ring. Filled with youth and love and hope, they dipped their rings in a bowl of water from the seven seas, and exchanged the rings, and made their vows to each other …

Oh, Malenfant, where are you now?

Eventually they slept: the three of them, brought together by chance, lost in this strange quasi-Africa, now huddled together on the floor of a nameless forest. But Emma came to full wakefulness every time she heard a leaf rustle or a twig snap, and every time a predator howled, in the huge lands beyond this sheltering forest.

Tomorrow we have to make a proper shelter, she thought. We can’t sleep on the damn ground.