“Then it must have been hard for you here,” Malenfant said.
“Indeed. But when my companions withdrew into themselves, I sought out the company of the lesser folk: the Hams, even the Runners at times. My companions took to calling me Mowgli. Perhaps you know the reference. I have attempted to civilize them, teach them skills — more advanced tool-making, even reading. With little success, I am afraid. Your bar-bar is smarter than your Runner, and these pre-sapients are smarter in turn than the pongid species, the Elves and Nutcrackers. Your bar-bar can be taught to use a new tool, you know — to use it but never to make it. They can make things work but never understand how they work, rather like human infants. And, like your Kaffir, your bar-bar can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more.
“And that, of course, is the difference between man and pre-sapient. Wherever there are sub-men, who live only for the day and their own bellies, we must rule. But the work shapes one. The responsibility. It has made me pitiful and kindly, I would say, as I have learned something of their strange, twisted reasoning.” He leaned towards them. “They have no chins, you see, none of them. And everybody knows that a weak chin generally denotes a weak race.”
When evening came again, fires were built within the palm-thatched huts, and smoke rose through the roofs and the crude chimneys that pierced them. Malenfant saw a pair of bats, flapping uncertainly between the turbulent columns of smoke. They were big, as big as crows, with broad, rounded wings.
“Leaf-nose bats,” Nemoto murmured.
“Don’t tell me. Prehistoric bats.”
Nemoto shrugged. “Perhaps. There are many bats here. They have occupied some of the niches never taken by the birds.”
Malenfant watched the bats” slow, ungainly flapping. “They sure look unevolved.”
“Ah, but they were the peak of aerial engineering when they hunted flies and mosquitoes over lakes full of dinosaurs, Malenfant. You should have a little more respect.”
“I guess I should.”
Nemoto whispered conspiratorially, “It all hangs together, Malenfant.”
“What does?”
“McCann’s account of his alternate Earth. A much larger Moon would raise immense tides. The oceans would not be navigable. McCann’s America must once have been linked to Eurasia by land bridges, as ours was, for otherwise the Hams presumably couldn’t have reached it. But when the land bridges were submerged, the Americas were effectively cut off — until iron-hulled ships and aeroplanes emerged, in the equivalent of our own twentieth century. Malenfant, it may have been easier to fly to the Moon than to reach America. Think of that.”
“What does all this mean, Nemoto?”
“I am working on it,” she said seriously. “Consider this, though. We are alone on our Earth, our closest relatives terribly distant. But McCann’s world has a spectrum of hominid types — as it was on our own Earth, long ago. McCann’s Earth may in some senses be more typical than ours.”
A party of Runners, supervised by a Ham, brought in a couple of deer, slung between them, half-butchered.
“Look at that,” muttered Nemoto. “I think that one is a mouse deer.” It was small, the size of a dog, its coat yellow-brown spotted with white, and it had tusks in its upper jaw. “You see them in Africa. Actually it isn’t really a deer at all. It is midway between pigs and deer, and more primitive than either. It climbs trees. It catches fish in the streams. Probably unchanged across thirty million years. Older than grass, Malenfant.”
“And the other?”
This was a little larger than the mouse deer, with a black stripe down its back, and powerful hind legs: a creature evolved for the undergrowth, Malenfant thought.
“A duiker, I think,” Nemoto said. “Another primitive form, the oldest of the antelopes. Sometimes hunts birds and feeds on carrion. Maybe here it eats bats. Everything is ancient here.” Now she seemed agitated. “Perhaps these forms were brought here by the same mechanism that imported hominids. What do you think?”
“Take it easy.”
Her small, thin face worked in the gathering gloom. “This is wrong, Malenfant.”
“Wrong? What’s wrong with it?”
“The ecology is — out of tune. Like a misfiring engine. It is a jumble of species and micro-ecologies, a mixed-up place, fragments thrown together. Though many of the fragments are very ancient, there has been no time for these plants and animals to evolve together, to find an equilibrium. Periodically something disturbs this world, Malenfant, over and over, stirring it up.”
Malenfant grunted. “Guess you can’t go wandering across the reality lines without a little confusion.”
But Nemoto would not take the matter lightly. “This is not right, Malenfant. All this mixing. There is a reason the primitive hominids became extinct, a reason why the mouse deer’s descendants evolved new forms. An ecology is like a machine, where all parts work together, interlocking. You see?”
Malenfant said, amused, “These deer and antelopes seem to have been prospering before they ran into some hunter’s crossbow bolt.”
“It shouldn’t be this way, Malenfant. To meddle with ecologies, to short-circuit them, is irresponsible.”
Malenfant shrugged. “Sure. And we cut down the forests to build shopping malls.” He was feeling restless; maybe his first shock was wearing off. He’d had enough of McCann; he was eager to get out of here, get back to the lander — and progress his primary mission, which was to find Emma.
But when he expressed this to Nemoto she laughed harshly. “Malenfant, we barely managed to survive our first few minutes after landing. Here we are safe. Have patience.”
He seethed. But without her support, he didn’t see what he could do about it.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
When she was Mapped to the Market — when the information that comprised her had been squeezed through cracks in the quantum foam that underlay all space and time — she was no longer, quite, herself, and that disturbed her greatly.
Manekato was used to Mapping. The Farm was large enough that walking, or transport by Workers, was not always rapid enough. But Mappings covering such a short distance were brief and isomorphic: she felt the same coming out of the destination station as entering it (just as, of course, principles of the identity of indiscernible objects predicted she should).
A Mapping spanning continents was altogether more challenging. To compensate for differences in latitude and altitude and seasons — early summer there, falling into autumn here — and to adjust for momentum differences — people on the far side of the spinning Earth were moving in the opposite direction to her — such a Mapping could be no more than homomorphic. What came out looked like her, felt like her. But it was not indiscernible from the original; it could not be her.
Still, despite these philosophical drawbacks, the process was painless, and when she walked off the Mapping platform, her knuckles tentatively touching new ground, she found herself comfortable. The air was hot, humid, but caused her no distress, and even its thinness at this higher altitude did not give her any discomfort.
And the air was still. There was no Wind. Thanks to the Air Wall wrapped around it, the Market was the only place on Earth from which the perpetual Wind was excluded. She had been prepared for this intellectually, of course. But to stand here in this pond of still air — not to feel the caressing shove of the Wind on her back — was utterly strange.
This crowded Mapping station was full of strangers. She peered around, feeling conspicuous, bewildered. Some of the people here were small, some tall, some squat, some thin; some were coated with hair that was red or black or brown, and some had no hair at all;