Emma tried to think that through. “What you’re telling me is that changing history is possible.”
“Oh, yes,” said Nemoto. “The Old Ones must have come to believe they had lived through the wrong history. So they reached back, to the deepest past, and made the change — and the manifold was born.”
Emma thought she understood. So this had been the purpose the Old Ones had found. Not a saga of meaningless survival in a dismal future of decay and shadows. The Old Ones had reached back, back in time, back to the deepest past, and put it right, by creating infinite possibilities for life, for mind.
She said carefully, “I always wondered if life had any meaning. Now I know. The purpose of the first intelligence of all was to reshape the universe, in order to create a storm of mind.”
“Yes,” Manekato said. “That is a partial understanding, but — yes.”
“Whew,” Emma said.
Nemoto seemed to be shivering, exhausted. “I feel as if I have been gazing through a pinhole at the sun; I have stared so long that I have burned a hole in my retina. And yet there is still so much more to see.”
“You have done well,” Manekato said gently.
Nemoto snapped, “Do I get another banana?”
“We must all do the best we can.” Manekato’s massive hand absently stroked the Nutcracker; the child purred like a cat.
“But,” Emma said, “the Old Ones must have wiped out their own history in the process. Didn’t they? They created a time paradox. Everybody knows about time paradoxes. If you kill your grandmother, the universe repairs itself so you never existed…”
“Perhaps not,” Manekato murmured. “It seems that conscious minds may, in some form, survive the transition.”
“Do not ask how,” Nemoto said dryly. “Suffice it to say that the Old Ones seem to have been able to look on their handiwork, and see that it was good… mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Nemoto said, “We think that we, unwilling passengers on this Red Moon, are, umm, exploring a corner of the manifold, of that infinite ensemble of universes the Old Ones created. Remember the Big Whack. Remember how we glimpsed many possible outcomes, many possible Earths and Moons, depending on the details of the impact.”
“It is clear,” Manekato said, “that within the manifold there must be a sheaf of universes, closely related, all of them deriving from that primal Earth-shaping event and its different outcomes.”
Nemoto said, “Many Earths. Many realities.”
“And in some of those realities,” Manekato said, “what you call the Fermi Paradox was resolved a different way.”
“You mean, alien intelligences arose.”
“Yes.” Nemoto rubbed her nose and glanced uneasily at the sky. “But in every one of those alien-inhabited realities, humans got wiped out — or never evolved in the first place. Every single time.”
“How come?”
Nemoto shrugged. “Lots of possible ways. Interstellar colonists from ancient cultures overwhelmed Earth before life got beyond the single-cell stage. Humankind was destroyed by a swarm of killer robots. Whatever. The Old Ones seem to have selected a bundle of universes — all of them deriving from the Big Whack — in which there was no life beyond the Earth. And they sent this Moon spinning between those empty realities, from one to the other—”
“So that explains Fermi,” Emma said.
“Yes,” said Nemoto. “We see no aliens because we have been inserted into an empty universe. Or universes. For our safety. To allow us to flourish.”
“But why the Red Moon, why link the realities?”
“To express humanity,” Manekato said simply. “There are many different ways to be a hominid, Em-ma. We conjecture the Old Ones sought to explore those different ways: to promote evolutionary pulses, to preserve differing forms, to make room for different types of human consciousness.”
Emma frowned. “You make us sound like pets. Toys.”
Manekato growled; Emma wondered if that was a laugh. “Perhaps. Or it may be that we have yet to glimpse the true purpose of this wandering world.”
Emma said, “But I still don’t get it. Why would these super-being Old Ones care so much about humanity?”
Nemoto frowned. “You haven’t understood anything, Emma. They were us. They were our descendants, our future. Homo sapiens sapiens, Emma. And their universe spanning story is our own lost future history. We built the manifold. We — our children — are the Old Ones.”
Emma was stunned. Somehow it was harder to take, to accept that these universe making meddlers might have been — not godlike, unimaginable aliens — but the descendants of humans like herself. What hubris, she thought.
Nemoto said now, “That was the purpose, the design of the Red Moon. But now the machinery is failing.”
“It is?”
“The sudden, frequent and irregular jumps. The instabilities, the tides, the volcanism. It shouldn’t be happening that way.”
Emma turned back to Manekato. “Let me get this straight. The Red Moon has been the driver of human evolution. But now it is breaking down. So what happens next?”
“We will be on our own,” said Nemoto. She raised her thin hands, turned them over, spread the fingers. “Our evolutionary destiny, in hominid hands. Does that frighten you?”
“It frightens me,” Manekato said softly.
For a moment they sat silently. Emma was aware of the dampness of the breeze, the harsh breathing of the big Daemon. On impulse she put her hand on Manekato’s arm. Her fur was thick and dense, and her skin hot — hotter than a human’s, perhaps a result of her faster metabolism.
“…Wait,” Manekato said softly, peering into the trees.
Shadows moved there: shadows of bulky, powerful forms. They paused, listening. There were at least three adults, possibly more. Emma could make out the characteristic prow-shaped silhouettes of their skulls.
The Nutcracker infant roused from her sleep. Bleary-eyed, she peered into the trees and yowled softly.
The shadows moved closer, sliding past the trees, at last resolving into recognizable fragments: curling fingers, watchful eyes, the unmistakable morphology of hominids. One of them, perhaps a woman, extended a hand.
The infant clambered off Manekato’s lap and stood facing the Nutcracker-woman, nervous, uncertain.
The Nutcracker-woman took a single step into the clearing, her eyes fixed on the infant. The child whimpered, and took a hesitant step forward.
Nemoto hissed to Emma, “Listen to me. I have a further theory. The Old Ones did not disappear into some theoretical universe-spanning abstraction. They are still here. Wouldn’t they want to be immersed in the world they made, to eat its fruit, to drink its water? Maybe they have become these Nutcrackers, the most content, pacific, unthreatened, mindless of all the hominid species. They shed everything they knew to live the way hominids are supposed to, the way we never learned, or forgot. What do you think?…”
The infant glanced back at Emma, knowing. Then, with a liquid motion, the Nutcracker-woman scooped up the child and melted into green shadows.
Back in the Daemons” yellow-plastic compound, Emma luxuriated in a hot shower, a towelling robe, and a breakfast of citrus fruit.
Luxuriate, yes. Because you know you aren’t going to enjoy this much longer, are you, Emma? And maybe you’ll never live like this again, not ever, not for the rest of your life.