Читать книгу Origin - Stephen Baxter - Страница 22

Emma clung to sleep as long as possible. When she could sleep no longer, she rolled on her back, stiff and cold. There was sky above her, an ugly lid of cloud.

Still here, she thought. Shit. And there was an unwelcome ache in her lower bowels.

Nothing for it.

She went behind a couple of trees close enough that she could still see her parachute canopy tent and stripped to her underwear. She took a dump, her Swiss Army knife dangling absurdly around her neck. The problem after that was finding a suitable wipe; the dried leaves she tried to use just crumbled in her hands.

Where am I? Answer came there none.

Maybe some kind of adrenaline rush had gotten her through yesterday. Today was going to be even worse, she thought. This morning she felt cold, stiff, dirty, lost, miserable and with a fear that had sunk deep into her gut.

She got dressed and kicked leaves over the, umm, deposit she’d left. We have got to build a latrine today.

Sally and Maxie, waking slowly, showed no desire to leave the forest. But Emma decided she ought to go say hello to the neighbours.

She stepped out of the forest.

It had stopped raining, but the sky was grey and solid and the grassy plain before her was bleak, uninviting. If she had not known otherwise she would have guessed it was uninhabited; the heapings of branches and stones seemed scarcely more than random.

And yet hominids people sat and walked, jabbered and argued, from a distance just as human as she was, every one of them as naked as a newborn. And they were talking English. The utter strangeness of that struck her anew.

I don’t want to be here, facing this bizarreness, she thought. I want to be at home, with the net, and coffee and newspapers, and clean clothes and a warm bathroom.

But it might not be long before she was begging at these hominids’ metaphorical table. She had no doubt that those tall, powerful qua-people had a much better ability to survive in this wilderness than she did; she sensed that might become very important, unless they were rescued out of here in the next few days. So she forced herself forward.

Some of the women were tending to nursing infants. Older children were wrestling clumsily and wordlessly, save for an occasional hoot or screech. The children seemed to her to have the least humanity; without the tall, striking, very human bodies of the adults, their low brows and flat skulls seemed more prominent, and they reminded her more of chimps.

Listening to the hominids yesterday, she had picked up a few of their functional names. The boy who had given her the caterpillar was called Fire. Right now Fire was tending the old woman on the ground, who was called Sing. He seemed to be feeding her, or giving her water. Evidence of kinship bonds, of care for the old and weak? It somewhat surprised Emma. But it was also reassuring, she thought, considering her own situation.

The largest man Stone, the dominant type who had groped Sally was sitting on the ground close to the smoking remains of the fire. He was picking through a pile of rocks. He was the leader, she figured the leader of the men anyhow.

She plucked up her courage and sat opposite him.

He glowered at her. His brown eyes, under a heavy lid of brow, were pits of hostility and suspicion. He actually raised his right fist at her, a mighty paw bearing a blunt rock.

But she sat still, her hands empty. Perhaps he remembered her. Or perhaps he was figuring out all over again that she was no threat. Anyhow, his hand lowered.

Seeming to forget her, he started working at the rocks again. He picked out a big lump of what looked like black glass; it must be obsidian, a volcanic glass. He turned it this way and that, inspecting it. His movements were very rapid, his gaze flickering over the rock surface.

His muscles were hard, his skin taut. His hair was tightly curled, but it was peppered with grey. His face would have passed in any city street so long as he wore a hat, anyhow, to conceal that shrivelled skull. But an Aladdin Sane zigzag crimson scar cut right across his face.

She thought he looked around fifty. Hard to tell in the circumstances.

He picked out another rock from his pile, a round pebble. He began to hammer at the obsidian, hard and confident. Shards flew everywhere, and for the first time Emma noticed that he had a patch of foliage over his lap, protecting his genitals from flying rock chips. He worked fast, confident, his eyes flickering – faster than a human would have, she thought, faster and more instinctively. It was less like watching the patient practising of a human craft than a fast-reaction sport, like tennis or soccer, where the body takes over.

He may not have a wide repertoire of skills, she thought. Maybe this is the one type of tool he can make. But there was nothing limited in what she saw, nothing incomplete; it was as efficient a process as eating or breathing. The contrast with the way the people had struggled to build their heaped-up tepees couldn’t have been more striking. How was it possible to be so smart about one thing, yet so dumb about another?

She felt her ideas adjust, her preconceptions dissolve. These people are not like me, she thought.

After a time, Stone abruptly stood up. He dropped his hammerstone, his lap cover, even the tool he had been making, and wandered away.

Emma stayed put.

Stone hunted around the grass, digging into the red dust beneath, picking out bits of rock or perhaps bone, discarding them where he found them. At last he seemed to have found what he wanted.

But then he was distracted by an argument between two of the younger men. He dropped the bone fragment and waded into what was fast becoming a wrestling match. Pretty soon all three of them were battling hard.

Others were gathering around, hooting and hollering. At last Stone floored one of the young men and drove off the other.

Breathing hard, sweating heavily enough to give him a pungent stink, he came back to the pile of rocks, where Emma waited patiently. When he got there he looked around for his bit of bone – but of course it had never made it this far. He bellowed, apparently frustrated, and got up again and resumed his search.

A human craftsman would have got all his tools together before he started, Emma supposed.

Stone came back with a fresh bit of bone. It was red, and bits of meat clung to it; Emma shuddered as she speculated where it might have come from. He used it to chip at the edge of his obsidian axe.

When he was done he dropped the improvised bone tool at his feet without another thought. He turned the axe over and over in his hands; it was a disc of shaped rock four inches across, just about right to fit into his powerful hand.

Then he hefted it and began to scrape at his neck with it.

My God, she thought. He’s shaving.

He saw her looking. ‘Stone Stone!’ he yelled. He turned away deliberately, suddenly as self-conscious as a teenager.

She got up and moved away.