Phase Space (38 page)

The bat revived briefly, flapping its broad wings against the cave floor. But Nemoto briskly slit its throat with a stone knife, and began to butcher it.

Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm titbits to the children who clustered around to see. She sucked marrow from its thread-thin bones, and gave that to the children as well. But when she offered the children bloated, pink-grey internal organs, mothers pulled the children away.

That was the last time Nemoto was ever healthy.

Mary eats her meat raw, tearing at it with her shovel-shaped teeth and cutting it with a flake knife; every so often she scrapes her teeth with the knife. And as her powerful jaw grinds at the meat, great muscles work in her cheeks.

Mary is short, robust, heavily built. She is barrel-chested, and her arms and massive-boned legs are slightly bowed. Her feet are
broad, her toes fat and bony. Her massive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, are scarred from stone chips. Her skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, is long and low with a pronounced bulge at the rear. Her face is pulled forward into a great prow fronted by her massive, fleshy nose; her cheeks sweep back as if streamlined, but her jaw, though chinless, is massive and thrust forward. From her lower forehead a great ridge of bone thrusts forward, masking her eyes. There is a pronounced dip above the ridges, before her shallow brow leads back into a tangle of hair.

She is Neandertal. There can be no doubt.

She lives – I live – in a system of caves. There is an overpowering stench of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement and burning fur, and a musty, disagreeable odour of people who don’t wash.

Every move the Hams make, every act they complete, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air, is suffused with strength. They suffer a large number of injuries, bone fractures and crushing injuries and gouged and scarred skin. But then their favoured hunting technique is to wrestle their prey to the ground. It is like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.

The Hams barely notice me. They are utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children pluck at the remnants of my clothing with their intimidatingly strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams step around me, their eyes sliding away, as if I am a rock embedded in the ground. I sometimes theorize that they are only truly conscious in social interactions; everything else – eating, making tools, even hunting – is done in a rapid blur, as I used to drive a car without thinking. Certainly, to a Neandertal, by far the most fascinating things in the world are other Neandertals.

They are not human. But they care for their children, and for their ill and elderly. However coolly the Hams treat me, they have not expelled me, which is how I survive.

I brought them here, from the Red Moon. This tipped-up Earth is their home. They remembered it during the time of their exile on another world. Remembered it for forty thousand years, an unimaginable time.

I imagined I would be able to get away from here, to home. It did not happen that way.

There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, just for an hour, but it was the first time the sun had shown at all for sixty-eight days.

When the people saw the light they came bursting out of the cave.

They scrambled onto the low bluff over the cave, where the blood-tree stood: leafless and gaunt now, but its blood-red sap coursed with the warmth it had drawn from the Grey Earth’s belly, the warmth that had sustained the people through the Long Night. The people danced and capered and threw off their furs. Then they retreated to the warmth of the cave, where there was much chatter, much eating, much joyous sex.

Though it would be some time yet before the frozen lakes and rivers began to thaw, there was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals – birds and a few large rats – were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting. The people enjoyed the first thin fruits of the new season.

But Nemoto’s illness was worse.

She suffered severe bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. She steadily lost weight, becoming, in the uninterested eyes of the people, even more gaunt than she had seemed before. And her skin grew flaky and sore. The children would watch in horrified fascination as she shucked off her furs and her clothes, and then peeled off bits of her skin, as if she would keep on until nothing was left but a heap of bones.

Mary tried to treat the diarrhoea. She brought water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto’s system.

The key incident in the formation of the Earth was the collision of proto-Earth with a wandering planetesimal larger than Mars. This is known as the Big Whack.

It is hard to envisage such an event. The projectile that ended the Cretaceous era, sending the dinosaurs to extinction, was perhaps six miles across. The primordial impactor was some four thousand miles across. It was a fully formed planet in its own right. And the collision released two hundred million times as much energy as the Cretaceous impact.

The proto-Earth’s oceans were boiled away. About half of Earth’s crust was demolished by the impact. A tremendous spray of liquid rock was hurled into space. The impactor was stripped
of its own mantle material, and its core sank into the interior of the Earth. Much of the plume fell back to Earth. Whatever was left of the atmosphere was heated to thousands of degrees.

The remnant plume settled into a ring around the Earth, glowing white hot. As it cooled it solidified into a swarm of moonlets. It was like a replay of the formation of the solar system itself. The largest of the moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and under the influence of tidal forces, rapidly receded from Earth.

Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge tides, a molten crust and savage rains as the ocean vapour fell back from space. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more.

Everything was shaped in those moments of impact: Earth’s spin, the tilt of the axis that gives us seasons, the planet’s internal composition, the Moon’s composition and orbit.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

Such immense collisions are probably common in the formation of any planetary system. But the impact itself was a random event: chaotic, in that small differences could have produced large, even unpredictable consequences. The impactor might have missed Earth altogether – but that would have left Earth with its original atmosphere, a crushing Venus-like blanket of carbon dioxide. Or the impactor might have hit at a subtly different angle. A single Moon isn’t necessarily the most likely outcome; many collision geometries would produce two twin Moons, or three or four, or ring systems like Saturn’s. And so on.

Many possibilities. All of which, somewhere in the infinite manifold of universes, must have come to pass.

I know this because I have visited several of those possibilities.

The days lengthened rapidly.

The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. Soon the lakes were blue, though pale cores of unmelted ice lingered in their cores.

Life swarmed. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, plants and animals alike engaged in a frenzied round of fighting, feeding, breeding, dying.

The people moved rapidly about the landscape. They gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations to seek mates and nesting places.

And soon a distant thunder sounded across the land: relentless, billowing day and night across the newly green plains, echoing from green-clad mountains. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds.

The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed towards the sea.

It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes. They were slim and streamlined, the muscles of their legs and haunches huge and taut, the bucks sporting huge folded-back antlers. And they ran like the wind. Since most of this tilted world was, at any given moment, freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of kilometres, spanning continents in their search for food, water and temperate climes. Speed and endurance were of the essence for survival.

But predators came too, sleek hyenas and cats stalking the vast herds. Though the antelopes were mighty runners – fuelled by high-density fat, able to race for days without a break – there were always outliers who could not keep up: the old, the very young, the injured, mothers gravid with infants. And it was on these weaker individuals that the predators feasted.

Those predators included the people, who inhabited a neck of land between two continents, a funnel down which the migrant herds were forced to swarm.

The antelope herd was huge. But it passed so rapidly that the great river of flesh was gone in a couple of days. And after another day, the predator packs that stalked it had gone too.

The people ate their antelope meat and sucked rich marrow, and gathered their fruit and nuts and shoots, and waited for their next provision to come to them, delivered up by the tides of the world.

But the next group of running animals to come by was small – everyone could sense that – and everybody knew what they were, from their distinctive, high-pitched cries.

Everybody lost interest. Everybody but Nemoto.

The Hams are aware of the coming and going of the herds of migrating herbivores on which they rely for much of their meat, and are even able to predict them by the passage of the seasons. But Hams do not plan. They seem to rely on the benison of the
world to provision them, day to day. It means they sometimes go hungry, but not even that dents their deep, ancient faith in the world’s kindness.

I remember a particular hunt. I followed a party of Hams along a trail through the forest.

They stopped by a small tree, thick with hanging fibres, and with dark hollows showing beneath its prop roots. White lichen was plastered over its trunk, and a parasitic plant with narrow, dark-green leaves dangled from a hollow in its trunk. A Ham cut a sapling and pushed it into one deep dark hollow, just above the muddy mush of leaves and detritus at the base of the tree.

A deep growling emerged from beneath the roots of the tree.

Excited, the Hams gathered around the tree and began to haul at it, shaking it back and forth. To my amazement they pulled the tree over by brute force, just ripping the roots out of the ground. Out squirmed a crocodile, a metre long, jaws clamped at the end of the pole. It was dark brown with a red-tinged head, huge eyes, and startlingly white teeth.

It was a forest crocodile. These creatures come out at night. They eat frogs, insects, flightless birds, anything they can find. They have barely changed in two hundred million years.

This world is full of such archaisms and anachronisms – like the Hams themselves. Of course it is. For it is not my world, my Earth. It is not my universe.

The Hams fell on the crocodile in their brutal, uncompromising way. They rolled it onto its back. One woman took a stone hand-axe and sliced off the right front leg, then the left. The animal, still alive, struggled feebly; its screams were low, like snoring. When the woman opened its chest it slumped at last.

I confronted Abel. ‘Why didn’t you kill it before starting the butchering
?’

The big man just looked back at me, apparently bemused.

These are not pet-owners. They aren’t even farmers. They are hunter-gatherers. They have no reason to be sentimental about the animals, to care about them. My ancestors were like this once.

Not only that: the Hams do not anthropomorphize. They could not imagine how it would be to suffer like the animal, for it was a crocodile, not a person.

I turned away from the blood, which was spreading over the ground.

Sickly, gaunt, enfeebled, her clothing stained with her own shit and piss, her eyes so weak she had to wear slitted skins over her face, Nemoto seemed enraged by the approach of these new arrivals. She gathered up her tools of stone and metal, and hurried out of the cave towards the migrants.