Phase Space (37 page)

She looked around. The Worker was close to the shore of this great Stomach cavern, but it was working its way back towards the exit from which it had emerged.

Time to get off, she thought.

She shook Sun Eyes. His eyes were crusted with sleep. ‘Green Wave? I can’t see so well. I’m cold.’

‘Come on. I’ll get you to the shore.’

She helped him disentangle himself from the netting. His legs unfolded from his chest with painful slowness.

At last they were standing, in water that came to their waists. She slid an arm around him, and they walked to shallower water, scooping up algae. Green Wave still carried her purloined Worker limb.

The Worker, apparently oblivious to the loss of its passengers, surged steadily towards the exit to the Arm.

‘It’s going back,’ Sun Eyes said.

‘I know. We have to go on.’

‘What for?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Where?’

She pointed. ‘That way. The Head.’

They began to work their way around the complex, sculpted shoreline, towards the exit Green Wave had labelled the Neck. They walked in the shallows. They could only manage a slow pace, such was Sun Eyes’ condition.

She felt a deep stab of regret. She’d taken Sun Eyes away from where he should be, with his children and grandchildren. And she was old herself now – too old to have a life of her own, too old for children. She wondered what had happened to Churning Wake, if he was surrounded now by splashing children who might have been hers.

They neared the sharp folds in the ground that marked the entrance to the Neck. She could see the big pipes that carried water up from the lake. The pipes were clear, and she could see thick, greenish, rich fluid within. Food, taken away from people who needed it. A diffuse anger gathered.

They walked into the Head.

It was darker here. Most of the light came from the Stomach lake, a greenish glow at the mouth of this broad tunnel.

There was little free water here, little food. But still she urged Sun Eyes on. ‘Just a bit more,’ she said.

They reached a pit in the ground, twenty or thirty paces across.

She sat Sun Eyes down, propping him up against a wall.

She lay on her stomach. The pit was pitch dark. It was the first time in her life she’d seen a breach in the floor. Her imagination raced.

She reached down into the pit.

At first she could feel nothing but the smooth flooring. But that came to an end quickly, and below it she could feel beneath, to some much rougher, looser material. It felt damp and cold. There were even algae here, clinging to the walls in clumps.

She could hear Workers doing something, perhaps chewing at the loose rubble down there. Building the pit, onwards and outwards.

She straightened up stiffly. She tried to see deeper into the Head – there were suggestions of vast, sleeping forms there, perhaps an immense face – but there was no light, no free water. She couldn’t go any further.

She went back to Sun Eyes. He seemed to be sleeping.

She told him what she’d found.

‘Maybe there are worlds beyond this one.’ Her imagination faltered. ‘If we are crawling through the body of some human form, maybe there is another, still greater form beyond. And perhaps another beyond that – an endless nesting …’

He slumped against her shoulder.

She laid his light, wizened body down against the floor. In the darkness she could feel his ribs, the lumps of his joints.

Her anger flared up, like the light of a new sun.

I know I’m still lying here in the regolith, on this dumb little misshapen asteroid, inside my fubar suit. I know nobody’s come to save me. Because I’m still here, right? But I can’t see, hear, feel a damn thing.

Although I sometimes think I can.

I’m going stir-crazy, inside my own head.

I know they’re coming, though.
The little guys.
The nems told me that much.

They aren’t supposed to be smart, damn it!

But the nems will stop them, if I tell them.

So I have a decision to make. I could stop them.

After all, it’s them or me.

She got to her feet. She picked up her battered Worker limb, and stumbled out of the Neck, towards the light of the Stomach lake.

She started to batter at the feeder pipes with the Worker limb, her only tool.

The pipes were broad, as thick as her waist, but they punctured easily. Soon she had ripped fist-sized holes in the first pipe, and algae-rich water spilled down over the flooring, and flowed steadily back into the lake. She kept it up until she’d severed the pipe completely.

Then she started on the next pipe.

The Workers didn’t react. They just swam around in their complacent circles, piling up the net hopper with algae that wasn’t going anywhere any more.

She worked until all the pipes were broken.

She threw away her Worker limb, and lay down where she was, in the slimy, brackish water she’d spilled. She licked at the floor, sucking in a little algal paste, and let herself sleep.

Sometimes I think humans aren’t supposed to be out here at all. Look at me, I’m grotesque. These little guys, on the other hand, might be able to survive.

Even prosper.

A hell of a shock for those smug Chinese in the asteroid belt, when a swarm of little Americans comes barrelling in from the orbit of Jupiter.

What the hell. It didn’t look as if anyone was coming for me anyhow.

Funny thing is, I feel cold. Now, that’s not supposed to happen, according to the Owner’s Manual.

It was hard to wake up. Her eyes didn’t open properly. And when they did, they wouldn’t focus.

She lifted up her hand, and held it close so she could see. Her skin was brown and sagging and covered in liver spots.

She got to her feet, and stumbled down the slope.

She stood at the edge of the water, peering at the Workers, until her rheumy, ruined eyes made out one which didn’t look quite right. One that was missing a limb.

She struggled through water that seemed thick and resistant, until she had caught hold of the Worker’s net, and it was pulling her away from the shore.

With any luck this creature would, unwitting, take her home. She’d be a sack of bones by then, of course, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that someone would see, and maybe connect her with the enriching of the water, and wonder what she’d found.

More would come, next time. Children, too.

They would find that pit, up in the Neck, the way out of the world.

She smiled.

The water was warm around her.

She wondered what had happened to Sun Eyes. Maybe he was somewhere beneath her now, fizzing in the light of those underwater suns.

She closed her eyes. She drifted in blue warmth, her thoughts dissolving.

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 Grey Earth, for they had come home to the Grey 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 warm 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 Grey 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, 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 Grey 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 space 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, and nor could her shining 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.