Stephen Baxter - Space

“Homo Habilis.”

“Malenfant, every species of extinct hominid is represented on this big roomy land of ours. I was pleased to see the prey were habilines, this morning — the Australopithecines can run, but are too stupid for good sport—”

“Get me out of here, de Bonneville.”

De Bonneville’s ruined eyes narrowed. “So squeamish. So hypocritical. Listen to me, Malenfant. This is how we lived. Sometimes they rape before the kill. Think of it, Malenfant! You and I have traveled to the stars. And yet, all the time, we carried the Old Men with us, asleep in our bones, waiting to be recalled…”

The Upright took a rock from his belt and started to hammer at the back of the dead habiline’s skull. He dug his fingers into the hole he had made, pulled out gray material, blood-soaked, and crammed it into his mouth.

Reid Malenfant knew, at last, that he had truly come home. He turned away from the habiline corpse.

Soon after the Upright hunt, de Bonneville disappeared. Nemoto warned Malenfant not to ask too many questions.

On his own, Malenfant wandered around the court, the streets outside, even out into the country. But he learned little.

He found it hard to make any human contact. The Waganda were incurious — even of his sleek biocomposite coverall, a gift from the Bad Hair Day space twins, an artifact centuries of technological advancement ahead of anything here.

Most definitely, he did not fit in here. Madeleine Meacher had warned him it would be like this.

Anyhow, he tired quickly, and his hand still ached. Maybe those Bad Hair Day twins hadn’t done as good a job on him as they thought.

The days wore on, and his mind kept returning to de Bonneville. When he thought about it, Pierre de Bonneville — for all he was an asshole — was the only person in all this dead-end world who had tried to help him, to give him information. And besides, de Bonneville was a fellow star traveler who was maybe in trouble in this alien time.

So he started campaigning, with the Kabaka and Nemoto in her role as the katekiro, to be allowed to see de Bonneville.

After a few days of this, Nemoto summoned Malenfant from his villa. Impatient and reluctant, she said she had been ordered to escort Malenfant to de Bonneville. It turned out he was being held in Kimera’s Engine, the mysterious construct buried in the hillside at the heart of this grass-hut capital.

“I do not advise this, Malenfant.”

“Why? Because it’s dangerous? I’ve seen de Bonneville. I know how ill he is—”

“Not just that. What do you hope to achieve?” She looked at him out of eyes like splinters of lava; she seemed sunk in bitterness and despair. “I survive, as best I can. That’s what you must do. Find a place here, a niche you can defend. What else is there? Hasn’t your hop-and-skip tour of a thousand years taught you that much?”

“If that’s what you believe, why do you want my pressure suit?”

She coughed into a handkerchief; he saw the cloth was speckled by blood. “Malenfant—”

“Take me to de Bonneville.”

Accompanied by a couple of guards, Nemoto led Malenfant from the palace compound, and out into Rubaga. They followed streets, little more than tracks of dust, that wound between the grass huts.

After a while the huts became sparser, until they reached a place where there were no well-defined roads, no construction. The center of the plateau — maybe a kilometer in diameter and fringed by huts — was deserted: just bare rock and lifeless soil, free of grass, bushes, insects or bird song. Even the breeze from Lake Victoria seemed suppressed here.

It looked, he thought, as if a neutron bomb had gone off.

They marched on into this grim terrain. Nemoto was silent, her resentment apparent in every gesture and step.

Malenfant had been ill during the night and hadn’t gotten much sleep. He was feeling queasy, shivering. And the landscape didn’t help. The ground here was like a little island of death in the middle of this African ocean of life.

At last they reached the heart of the central plain. They came to a wide, deep well set in the ground. There were steps cut into the rock, spiraling into the ground around the cylindrical inner face of the well. In the low light of the morning Malenfant could see the steps for the first fifty meters or so, beyond that only darkness.

Nemoto began to clamber down the steps. She walked like the stiff old woman she had become, her gaudy court plumage incongruous in the shadows. Malenfant followed more slowly.

He wished he had a gun.

Within a few minutes they’d come down maybe thirty meters — the open mouth of the well was a disc of blue sky, laced with high clouds — and Nemoto rapped on a wooden door set in the wall.

The door opened. Beyond, Malenfant saw a lighted chamber, a rough cube dug out of the rock, lit up by rush torches. At the door stood one of the Kabaka’s guards. He was a pillar of bone and muscle, overlaid by fat and leathery skin. Nemoto spoke briefly, and the guard, after a hostile inspection of Malenfant, let them through.

The room was surprisingly large. The heat was intense, and the smoke from wall-mounted torches was thick, despite air passages cut into the walls. But the smoke couldn’t mask the sweet stenches of vomit, of corrupt and decaying flesh. Malenfant grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his face.

Pallets of wood and straw, covered by grimy blankets, were arranged in rows across the floor, and Malenfant had to step between them to make his way. Maybe half of the pallets were occupied. The eyes that met Malenfant’s flickered with only the dullest curiosity.

The invalids all seemed wasted by the disease that had afflicted de Bonneville, to a greater or lesser degree. Patches of skin were burned to blackness, and there were some people with barely any skin left at all. Malenfant saw heads free of hair — even eyelashes and eyebrows were missing as if burned off — and there were limbs swollen to circus-freak proportions, as well as broken and bleeding mouths and nostrils. There were attendants here, but as far as Malenfant could see they were all Uprights: Homo Erectus, reconstructed genetic fossils, tall and naked and golden furred, moving between the sick and dying. There seemed to be no real medical care, but the Uprights were giving out water and food — some kind of thin soup — and they murmured comfort in their thin, consonant-free voices to the ill.

It was like a field hospital. But there had been no war: and besides there were women and children here.

At last Malenfant found de Bonneville. He lay sprawled on a pallet. He stared up, his face swollen and burned beyond expression. “Malenfant — is it you? Have you any beer?” He reached up with a hand like a claw.

Malenfant tried to keep from backing away from him. “I’ll bring some. De Bonneville, you got worse. Is this a hospital?”

He made a grisly sound that might have been a laugh. “Malenfant, this is… ah… a dormitory. For the workers, including myself, who service the yellow-cake.”

“Yellow-cake?”

“The substance that fuels the Engine of Kimera…” He coughed, grimacing from the pain of his broken mouth, and shifted his position on his pallet.

“What’s wrong with you? Is it contagious?”

“No. You need not fear for yourself, Malenfant.”

“I don’t,” Malenfant said.

De Bonneville laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Indeed, nor should you. The illness comes from contact with the yellow-cake itself. When new workers arrive here, they are as healthy as you. Like that child over there. But within weeks, or months — it varies by individual, it seems, and not even the strongest constitution is any protection — the symptoms appear.”