{"product_id":"manifold-origin-isbn-9780345430809","title":"Manifold: Origin","description":"\u003cb\u003e“One of the best SF writers in the business . . . [\u003ci\u003eManifold: Origin\u003c\/i\u003e is] filled with  marvelous scientific speculations, strange events, novel concepts, and an awe-inspiring  sense of the wonders of the universe.”—\u003ci\u003eScience Fiction Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the year 2015,  astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying over the African continent, intent on examining  a mysterious glowing construct in Earth’s orbit. But when the very fabric of the  sky tears open, spilling living creatures to the ground and pulling others inside  (including his wife, Emma), Malenfant’s quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal.  While desperately searching to discover what happened to the woman he loves, Malenfant  embarks upon an adventure to the very fount of human development . . . on earth and  beyond.\u003cb\u003e“A FUN AND FASCINATING READ . . . Armed with degrees in both mathematics and aeroengineering research, Baxter has the scientific and intellectual clout to present a compelling premise of evolution.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–The Flint Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“BAXTER IS A DEEP THINKER AND A VISIONARY WRITER.”\u003cbr\u003e–DAVID BRIN\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eStephen Baxter\u003c\/b\u003e is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southampton Universities (doctorate in aeroengineering research). Baxter is the winner of both the British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, most recently for \u003ci\u003eManifold: Time\u003c\/i\u003e. His novel \u003ci\u003eVoyage\u003c\/i\u003e won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel of the Year; he also won the John W. Campbell Award and the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel \u003ci\u003eThe Time Ships\u003c\/i\u003e.Emma Stoney\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI know you. And you’re just what you always were, an incorrigible space cadet. That’s how we both finished up stranded here, isn’t it? I remember how I loved to hear you talk when we were kids. When everybody else was snuggling at the drive-in, you used to lec- ture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd what if we blew ourselves up before we ever got to the stars? Would the universe just evolve on, a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly devoid of life and mind?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow—desolating. Surely it couldn’t be like that. All those suns and worlds spinning through the void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang itself . . . You always said you just couldn’t believe that there was nobody out there looking back at you down here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut if so, where is everybody?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is the Fermi Paradox—right, Malenfant? If the aliens existed, they would be here. I heard you lecture on that so often I could recite it in my sleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I agree with you. It’s powerful strange. I’m sure Fermi is telling us something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in. It is as if we are all embedded in a vast graph of possibilities, a graph with an axis marked time, for our own future destiny, and an axis marked space, for the possibilities of the universe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMuch of your life has been shaped by thinking about that cosmic graph. Your life and, as a consequence, mine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWell, on every graph there is a unique point, the place where the axes cross. It’s called the origin. Which is where we’ve finished up, isn’t it, Malenfant? And now we know why we were alone . . . But, you know, one thing you never considered was the subtext. Alone or not alone—why do we care so much?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI always knew why. We care because we are lonely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI understood that because I was lonely. I was lonely before you stranded me here, in this terrible place, this Red Moon. I lost you to the sky long ago. Now you found me here—but you’re leaving me again, aren’t you, Malenfant?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e. . . Malenfant? Can you hear me? Do you know me? Do you know who you are?—Oh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWatch the Earth, Malenfant. Watch the Earth . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eManekatopokanemahedo\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHumans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHumans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence across billions upon billions of years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEverywhere humans found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey came to understand that they would forever be alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age were like, minds of times far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, to breed, or even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was despair and loneliness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe great rivers of mind guttered and dried.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBurning the last of the universe’s resources, the final downstreamers—lonely, dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART ONE Wheel\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReid Malenfant\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“. . . Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo here was Reid Malenfant, his life down the toilet, chasing joky UFO reports around a desolate African sky. Emma’s voice snapped him to full alertness, for just about the first time, he admitted to himself, since takeoff.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What about the Moon?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Just look at it!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMalenfant twisted his head this way and that, the helmet making his skull heavy, seeking the Moon. He was in the T-38’s forward blister. Emma was in the bubble behind him, her head craned back. The jet trainer was little more than a brilliant shell around them, white as an angel’s wing, suspended in a powder-blue sky. Where was the Moon—the west? He couldn’t see a damn thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrustrated, he threw the T-38 into a savage snap roll. A flat brown horizon twisted around the cockpit in less than a second.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jesus, Malenfant,” Emma groaned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe pulled out into a shallow climb toward the west, so that the low morning sun was behind him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e. . . And then he saw it: a Moon, nearly full, baleful and big—too big, bigger than it had any right to be. Its colors were masked by the washed-out blue of the air of Earth, but still, it had colors, yes, not the Moon’s rightful palette of grays, but smatterings of a deep blue-black, a murky brown that even had tinges of green, for God’s sake—but it was predominantly red, a strong scorched red like the dead heart of Australia seen from the flight deck of a Shuttle orbiter . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe just stared, still pulling the T-38 through its climb. He sensed Emma, behind him, silent. What was there to say about this, the replacement of a Moon?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was when he lost control.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe people walk across the grass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe sky is blue. The grass is sparse, yellow. The ground is red under the grass. Fire’s toes are red with the dust. The people are slim black forms scattered on red-green.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey are called the Running-folk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe people call to each other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Fire? Dig! Fire?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dig, Dig, here! Loud, Loud?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLoud’s voice, from far away. “Fire, Fire! Dig! Loud!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe sun is high. There are only people on the grass. The cats sleep when the sun is high. The hyenas sleep. The Nutcracker men and the Elf men sleep in their trees. Everybody sleeps except the Running-folk. Fire knows this without thinking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs his legs walk, Fire holds his hands clamped together. Smoke curls up from between his thumbs. There is moss inside his hands. The fire is in the moss. He blows on the moss. More smoke comes. The fire hurts his palms and fingers. But his hands are hard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis legs walk easily. Walking is for legs. Fire is not there in his legs. Fire is in his hands and his eyes. He makes his hands tend the fire, while his legs walk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFire is carrying the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is darker. The people are quiet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFire looks up. A fat cloud hangs over him. The sun is behind the cloud. The edge of the cloud glows golden. His nose can smell rain. His bare skin prickles, cold. Immersed in this new moment, he has forgotten he is hungry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe clouds part. There is a blue light, low in the sky. Fire looks at the blue light. It is not the sun. The blue light is new.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFire fears anything new.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fire wriggles in his hands. He looks down, forgetting the blue light. There is no smoke. The moss has turned to ash. The fire is shrinking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFire crouches down. He shelters the moss under his belly. He feels its warmth on his bare skin. He hoots. “Fire, Fire! Fire, Fire!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStone is small-far. He turns. He shouts. He is angry. He begins to come back toward Fire.","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304885604581,"sku":"NP9780345430809","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345430809.jpg?v=1767732222","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/manifold-origin-isbn-9780345430809","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}