Origin. Stephen Baxter
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