Stephen Baxter - Space

They had rented a car, a chunky four-wheel-drive with immense broad tires, already stained deep red with dust. Ben loaded up some food — tucker, he called it, his accent deepening as he spoke to the locals — and a lot of water, far more than she imagined they would need, in big chilled clear-walled tanks called Eskis, after Eskimo. In fact the car wouldn’t allow itself to be started unless its internal sensors told it there was plenty of water on board.

The road was a straight black strip of tarmac — probably smart-concrete, she thought, self-repairing, designed to last centuries without maintenance. It was empty of traffic, save for themselves.

At first she glimpsed fences, windmills with cattle clustered around them, even a few camels.

They passed an Aboriginal settlement surrounded by a link fence. It was a place of tin-roof shacks and a few central buildings that were just brown airless boxes: a clinic, a church perhaps. Children seemed to be running everywhere, limbs flashing. Rubbish blew across the ground, where bits of glass sparkled.

They didn’t stop; Ben barely glanced aside. Madeleine was shocked by the squalor.

Soon they moved beyond human habitation, and the ground was crimson and treeless. Nothing moved but the wispy shadows of high clouds. It was too arid here to farm or even graze.

“A harsh place,” she said unnecessarily.

“You bet,” Ben said, his eyes masked by mirrored glasses. “And getting harsher. It’s becoming depopulated, in fact. But it was enough for us. We touched the land lightly, I suppose.”

It was true. After tens of millennia of trial and error and carefully accumulated lore, the Aborigines had learned to survive here, in a land starved of nutrient and water. But there was no room for excess: There had been no fixed social structure, no prophets or chiefs, no leisured classes, and their myths were dreams of migration. And, before the coming of the Europeans, the weak, infirm, and elderly had been dealt with harshly.

In a land the size of the continental United States, there had been only three hundred thousand of them. But the Aborigines had survived, where it might seem impossible.

As the ground began to rise, Ben stopped the car and got out. Madeleine emerged into hot, skin-sucking dust, flat dense light, stillness.

She found herself walking over a plateau of sand hills and crumbled, weathered orange-red rock, red as Mars, she thought, broken by deep dry gulches. But there was grass here, tufts of it, yellow and spiky; even trees and bushes, such as low, spiky-leaved mulgas. Some of the bushes had been recently burned, and green shoots prickled the blackened stumps. To her eyes, there was the look of park land about these widely separated trees and scattered grass; but this land had been shaped by aridity and fire, not western aesthetics.

Ben seemed exhilarated to be walking, stretching his legs, thumbs hooked in the straps of a backpack. “Australia is a place for creatures who walk,” he said. “That’s what we humans are adapted for. Look at your body some time. Every detail of it, from your long legs to your upright spine, is built for long, long walks through unforgiving lands, of desert and scrub. Australia is the kind of land we’ve been evolved for.”

“So we’ve been evolved to be refugees,” Madeleine said sourly.

“If you like. Looking at the crowd that seems to be on the way along the spiral arm, maybe that’s a good thing. What do you think?”

Walking, he said, was the basis of the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal Genesis.

“In the beginning there was only the clay. And the Ancestors created themselves from the clay — thousands of them, one for each totemic species…” Each totemic Ancestor traveled the country, leaving a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his footprints. And these tracks served as ways of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

Madeleine had heard of this. “The song lines.”

“We call them something like ‘the Footprints of the Ancestors.’ And the system of knowledge and law is called the Tjukurpa… But, yes. The whole country is like a musical score. There is hardly a rock or a creek that has been left unsung. My ‘clan’ isn’t my tribe, but all the people of my Dreaming, whether on this side of the continent or the other; my ‘land’ isn’t some fixed patch of ground, but a trade route, a means of communication.

“The main song lines seem to enter Australia from the north or northwest, perhaps from across the Torres Strait, and then weave their way southwards across the continent. Perhaps they represent the routes of the first Australians of all, when they ventured over the narrow Ice Age strait from Asia. That would make the lines remnants of trails that stretch much farther back, over a hundred thousand years, across Asia and back to Africa.”

“From Africa,” she said, “to Triton.”

“Where the land is unsung. Yes.”

They climbed a little farther, through clumps of the wiry yellow-white grass, which was called spinifex. She reached out to touch a clump, feeling nothing; Ben snatched her hand back. He turned it over. She saw spines sticking out of her palm.

Patiently he plucked out the spines. “Everything here has spines. Everything is trying to survive, to hold onto its hoard of water. Just remember that… Look. ”

There was a crackle of noise. A female kangaroo, with a cluster of adolescents, had broken cover from a stand of bushes.

The kangaroos looked oddly like giant mice, clumsy but powerful, with rodentlike faces and thick fur. Their haunches were white against the red of the dirt. When the big female moved, she used a swiveling gait Madeleine had never seen before, using her tail and forelegs as props while levering herself forward on her great lower legs. There was a cub in her pouch — no, Ben said it was called a joey — a small head that protruded, curious, and even browsed on the spinifex as the mother moved.

The creatures, seen close up, seemed extraordinarily alien to Madeleine: a piece of different biological engineering, as if she had wandered into some alternate world. The Chaera, she thought, are hardly less exotic.

Something startled the kangaroos. They leapt away with great efficient bounds.

Madeleine grinned. “My first kangaroo.”

“You don’t understand,” Ben said tightly. “I think that was a procoptodon: a giant kangaroo. They grow as high as three meters…”

Madeleine knew nothing about kangaroos. “And that’s unusual?”

“Madeleine, procoptodon has been extinct for ten thousand years. That’s what makes it unusual.”

They walked on, farther from the car, sipping water from flasks.

“It’s the Gaijin,” he said. “Of course it’s the Gaijin. They are restoring megafauna that have long been extinct here. There have been sightings of wanabe, a snake a meter in diameter and seven long, a flightless bird twice the mass of an emu called genyornis… The Gaijin seem to be tinkering with the genetic structure of existing species, exploring these archaic, lost forms.”

They came upon an area of bare rock that was littered with bones. The bones were broken up and scattered, and had apparently been gnawed. Few of the fragments were large enough for her to recognize — was this an eye socket, that a piece of jaw?

“We think they use parsimony analysis,” Ben was saying. “DNA erodes with time. But you can deconstruct evolution if you have access to the evolutionary products. You track backward to find the common gene from which all the products descended; the principle is to seek the smallest number of branch points from which the present family could have evolved. When you have the structure you can recreate the ancient gene by splicing synthesized sequences into modern genes. You see?” He stopped, panting lightly. “And, Madeleine, here’s a thought. Australia has been an island, save for intervals of bridging during the Ice Ages, for a hundred million years. The genetic divergence between modern humans is widest between Australian natives and the rest of the population.”