Origin
Stephen Baxter
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 Reid’s wife, Emma, his quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal.While desperately searching to discover what happened to the woman he loves, Reid embarks upon an adventure to the very fount of human development . . . on earth and beyond.
STEPHEN BAXTER
ORIGIN
MANIFOLD 3
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_6e317824-1b89-55a0-a690-03fe94fa71b1)
HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2001
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2000
Cover image of Calabi-yau manifold © Laguna Design/Getty Images
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780008134495
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN 9780007401147
Version: 2015-09-01
DEDICATION (#ulink_714e0cc7-3808-5ed2-a74e-fbf261d4d0e5)
To my nephew, William Baxter
CONTENTS
Cover (#ue35da280-b25e-5e28-a99f-72bfef15d231)
Title Page (#uc18d2f50-fe7f-5cc0-8445-114cc59d7ff2)
Copyright (#u81ebd451-7e0d-5ef1-a575-e4488da6b70a)
Dedication (#ue49fbe64-7e31-5a1b-aaca-38b596ce2b64)
Preface (#u7ef2e902-565e-5394-a2bd-da003ea8fbc8)
1 Wheel (#ub609a398-699d-5194-86c1-cceda083b93b)
2 Red Moon (#u2f98069b-fc53-5408-90b7-ee660dd715b4)
3 Hominids (#litres_trial_promo)
4 World Engine (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Manifold (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_49b4bde5-f949-53f8-bf1e-ca6ef3c07502)
Emma Stoney:
Do you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant …
I 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 lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity.
But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?
And 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?
How – 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.
But if so, where is everybody?
This 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.
But 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.
Much of your life has been shaped by thinking about that cosmic graph. Your life and, as a consequence, mine.
Well, 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?
I always knew why. We care because we are lonely.
I 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?
… Malenfant? Can you hear me? Do you know me? Do you know who you are? – oh.
Watch the Earth, Malenfant. Watch the Earth …
Manekatopokanemahedo:
This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.
Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone.
Humans 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.
Everywhere humans found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.
Nowhere did they find mind save what they brought with them or created no other against which human advancement could be tested.
They came to understand that they would forever be alone.
With 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 time’s far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There 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.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But 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.
And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe’s resources, the final down-streamers lonely, dogged, all but insane – reached to the deepest past …
1 WHEEL (#ulink_b8b87687-6c74-5012-963e-55e750f16dd8)
Reid Malenfant:
‘… Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!’
So 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 for the first time, he admitted to himself, since takeoff.
‘What about the Moon?’
‘Just look at it!’
Malenfant 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.
Frustrated, he threw the T-38 into a savage snap roll. A flat brown horizon twisted around the cockpit in less than a second.
‘Jesus, Malenfant,’ Emma groaned.
He pulled out into a shallow climb towards the west, so that the low morning sun was behind him.
… And then he saw it: a Moon, nearly full, baleful and big too big, bigger than it had any right to be. Its colours were masked by the washed-out blue of the air of Earth, but still, it had colours, yes, not the Moon’s rightful palette of greys, 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 …
It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.
He 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?
That was when he lost control.
Fire:
The people walk across the grass.
The 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.
They are called the Running-folk.
The people call to each other.
‘Fire? Dig! Fire?’
‘Dig, Dig, here! Loud, Loud?’
Loud’s voice, from far away. ‘Fire, Fire! Dig! Loud!’
The 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.
As 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.
His 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.
Fire is carrying the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.
It is darker. The people are quiet.
Fire 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.
The 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.
Fire fears anything new.
The 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.
Fire crouches down. He shelters the moss under his belly. He feels its warmth on his bare skin. He hoots. ‘Fire, Fire! Fire, Fire!’
Stone is small-far. He turns. He shouts. He is angry. He begins to come back towards Fire.
Loud comes to Fire. Loud hoots. His voice is loud. Loud is his name. Loud kneels. He looks for bits of moss and dry grass. He pushes them into the bit of fire.
Dig comes to Fire. Her hand holds arrowhead roots. She squats beside Fire. Her taut dugs brush his arm. His member stiffens. He rocks. She grins. Her hands push a root into his mouth. He tastes her fingers, her salty sweat.
Loud hoots. His member is stiff too, sticking out under his belly. He crams bits of grass into Fire’s hands.
Fire snaps his teeth. ‘Loud, Loud away!’
Loud hoots again. He grabs Dig’s arm. She laughs. Her legs take her skipping away from both of them.
Others come to Fire. Here are women, Grass and Shoot and Cold and Wood. Here are their babies with no names. Here are children with no names. The children jabber. Their eyes are round and bright.
Here is Stone. Stone is dragging branches over the ground. Blue is helping Stone drag the branches. Sing is lying on the branches. Sing is white-haired. She is still. She is asleep.
Stone sees the dying fire. He sees Fire’s stiff member. He roars. Stone’s hands drop the branches.
Stone has forgotten Sing, on the branches. Sing tips to the ground. She groans.
Stone’s axe clouts Fire on the back of the head. There is a hard sound. Stone shouts in Fire’s face. ‘Fire, Fire! Hungry, feed!’ His face is split by a scar. The scar is livid red.
‘Fire, Fire,’ says Fire quietly. His arms drop and his head bows. He keeps hold of the fire.
Sing moans. Her eyes are closed. Her dugs are slack. The men pick her up by shoulders and legs and lift her back on the branches.
Stone and Blue grab the branches. Their legs walk them back the way they had come.
Fire tells his legs to stand him up. They can’t. His hands are still clasped around the fire. Lights fill his head, more garish than that blue stripe in the sky. He nearly falls over backwards.
Loud’s hand grabs his armpit. Loud lifts him until his legs are straight.
Loud laughs. Loud walks away, fast, after Dig.
Fire’s head hurts. Fire’s hands hurt. Fire’s member wants Dig.
He starts walking. He wants to stop thinking.
He thinks of the blue light.
Emma Stoney:
Emma had accompanied Malenfant, her husband, on a goodwill tour of schools and educational establishments in Johannesburg, South Africa. It had been a remarkably dismal project, a throwback to NASA PR malpractices of old, a trek through mostly prosperous, middle-class-and-up neighbourhoods, with Malenfant running Barco shows from his two missions to the Space Station before rows of polite and largely uncaring teenagers.
In darkened classrooms Emma had watched the brilliance of the students’ smiles, and the ruby-red winking of their earpiece phones like fireflies in the night. Between these children growing up in the fractured, complex, transformed world of 2015, and Reid Malenfant, struggling worker astronaut, all of fifty-five years old and still pursuing Apollo dreams from a boyhood long lost, there was a chasm as wide as the Rift Valley, she thought, and there always would be.
Still, for Emma, it had been a holiday in the African sun – the reason she had prised herself away from her work as financial controller of OnlineArt and she and Malenfant had gotten along reasonably well, for them, even given Malenfant’s usual Earthbound restless moodiness.
But that had been before the word had come through from the Johnson Space Center, headquarters of NASA’s manned spaceflight programme, that Malenfant had been washed out of his next mission, STS-194.
Well, that was the end of it. With a couple of phone calls Malenfant had cut short their stay in Joburg, and begun to can the rest of the tour. He had been able to get out of all of it except for a reception at the US ambassador’s residence in Nairobi, Kenya.
To her further dismay, Malenfant had leaned on Bill London – an old classmate from Annapolis, now a good buddy in the South African Navy – to let him fly them both up to Nairobi from out of a Joburg military airfield in a T-38, a sleek veteran supersonic jet trainer, a mode of transport favoured by the astronauts since the 1960s.
It wasn’t the first time Emma had been taken for a ride in one of those toy planes, and with Malenfant in this mood she knew she could expect to be thrown around the sky. And she shuddered at the thought of how Malenfant in this wounded state was going to behave when he got to Nairobi.
But she had gone along anyhow. Somehow she always did.
So that was how Emma Stoney, forty-five-year-old accountant, had found herself in a gear room getting dressed in a blue flight suit, oxygen mask, oversized boots, helmet, going through the procedures for using her parachute and survival kit and emergency oxygen, struggling to remember the purpose of the dozens of straps, lanyards and D-rings.
Malenfant was ready before she was, of course. He stomped out into the bright morning sunlight towards the waiting T-38. He carried his helmet and his flight plan, and his bald head gleamed in the sun, bronzed and smooth as a piece of machinery itself. But his every motion was redolent with anger and frustration.
Emma had to run to keep up with him, laden down with all her absurd right-stuff gear. By the time she reached the plane she was hot already. She had to be hoisted into her seat by two friendly South African female techs, like an old lady being lifted into the bath. Malenfant was in his cockpit, angrily going through a pre-takeoff checkout.
The T-38 was sleek and brilliant white. Its wings were stubby, and it had two bubble cockpits, one behind the other. The plane was disturbingly small; it seemed barely wide enough to squeeze in a whole person. Emma studied an array of controls and dials and softscreen readouts at whose purpose she could only guess. The venerable T-38 had been upgraded over the years – those shimmering softscreen readouts, for instance – but every surface was scuffed and worn with use, the metal polished smooth where pilots’ gloved hands had rubbed against it, the leather of her seat extensively patched.
The last few minutes of the prep wore away quickly, as one of the ground crew took her through her final instructions: how she should close her canopy bubble, where to fasten a hook to a ring on a parachute, how to change the timing of her parachute opening. She watched the back of Malenfant’s head, his jerky tension as he prepared his plane.
Malenfant taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Emma watched the stick move before her, slaved to Malenfant’s movements. Her oxygen mask smelled of hot rubber, and the roar of the jets was too loud for her to make out anything of Malenfant’s conversation with the ground.
Do you ever think of me, Malenfant?
There was a mighty shove at her back.
Fire:
Stone drops the branches. Sing rolls to the ground. Stone has forgotten her again.
The sun is low. They are close to a thick stand of trees. Fire can smell water.
Fire is tired. His stomach is empty. His hands are sore. ‘Hungry Fire hungry,’ he moans.
Sing, on the ground, looks up at him. She smiles. ‘Hungry Fire,’ she says. He thinks of her feeding him. But she is small and withered. She does not get up to feed him.
Stone walks over the branches he hauled across the savannah, the branches that transported Sing. He kicks them aside. He has forgotten he hauled them here. He bends. His hands seek out a piece of dung on the ground. His tongue tastes it. It is Nutcracker-man dung. The dung is old. The dung crumbles.
Fire is not fearful. There are no Nutcracker-men near here.
Stone’s feet kick aside more branches and twigs. He uncovers a round patch of black ground. Fire’s nose smells ash. Stone hoots. ‘Hah! Fire Fire.’
Fire crouches over the ash. The fire is warm in his hands.
Loud and Dig and others huddle near him. Their hands scrape dry stuff from the floor, dead leaves and dry moss and grass and bits of bark. Their hands pick up rocks, and rub the tinder against the rocks. Their fingers turn the tinder, making it fine and light.
Wood’s legs walk to the forest. She comes back with a bundle of sticks, of wood. That is what she does. That is her name. She piles the sticks on the ground.
The hands of the others push the tinder into the middle of the pile of wood.
Working closely, the people jostle each other. They are hot from the walk. Their bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger, irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives. Their ancestors’ hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Fire waits while they work.
He sees himself.
He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this other’s face. The adults’ huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push him out of the way.
A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.
… The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.
Fire’s hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.
People laugh and hoot at the fire.
Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.
Emma Stoney:
The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural land beyond showing as patches of greyish green and brown. On the eastern horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon, almost full, its small grey face peering back at the sun’s harsh glare.
Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.
Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten per cent of the time on his two spaceflights throwing up.
Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon to left. As they headed towards the interior of the continent, the land turned brown, parched, flat.
‘What a shithole,’ Malenfant said, his voice a whisper over the jet’s roar. ‘Africa. Cradle of mankind my ass.’
‘Malenfant –’
He hurled the T-38 forward with a powerful afterburner surge.
Within seconds they had reached 45,000 feet and had gone through a bone-shaking Mach 1. The vibrations damped away and the noise of the jets dwindled – for, of course, they were outstripping most of the sound they made – and the plane seemed to hang in shining stillness.
Emma, as she had before, felt a surge of exhilaration. It was at such paradoxical moments of stillness and speed that she felt closest to Malenfant.
But Malenfant was consumed by his gripes.
‘Two years. I can’t fucking believe it. Two years of training, two years of meetings and planning sessions, and paddling around in hydro labs and spinning around in centrifuges. All of it for nothing.’
‘Come on, Malenfant. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not as if Station work was ever such a prize anyhow. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. That’s what you used to say –’
‘Nobody was flying to fucking Mars. Station was all that was available, so I took it. Two flights, two lousy flights. I never even got to command a mission, for Christ’s sake.’
‘You got washed out this time. That doesn’t mean you won’t fly again. A lot of crew are flying past your age.’ That was true, of course, partly because NASA was having such difficulty finding willing applicants from younger generations.
But Malenfant growled, ‘It’s that asshole Bridges. He even called me into the JSC director’s office to explain the shafting. That fucking horse holder has always had it in for me. This will be the excuse he needs to send me to purgatory.’
Emma knew whom he meant. Joe Bridges was the director of flight operations – in effect, in NASA’s Byzantine, smothering internal bureaucracy, in charge of astronaut selection for missions.
Malenfant was still muttering. ‘You know what Bridges offered me? ASP.’
Emma riffled through her mental file of NASA acronyms. ASP: Astronaut Support Personnel, a non-flying astronaut assigned to support the crew of a mission.
‘I’d have been point man on STS-194,’ Malenfant spat. ‘The Caped Crusader. Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole into my seat on the flight deck.’
‘I gather you didn’t take the job,’ Emma said dryly.
‘I took it okay,’ he snapped. ‘I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil-pusher’s fat ass.’
‘Oh, Malenfant,’ she sighed.
She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to-ceiling office window with its view of the park-like JSC campus, complete with the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crashlanded beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for too many eager crew-persons, so – in what seemed to Emma his own very small world – Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.
She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat, the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role; perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in NASA’s sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.
Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long, complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high-tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.
But to Malenfant – Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human behaviour, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy, barely engaged with the complexities of the world – to Malenfant, Joe Bridges, controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me, she thought) could be nothing but a monster.
She stared out the window at the baked African plain. It was huge and ancient, she thought, a place that would endure all but unchanged long after the little white moth that buzzed over it today was corroded to dust, long after the participants in this tiny domestic drama were mouldering bones.
Now she heard a whisper from the ground-to-air radio. It sounded like Bill London, good old bullshitter Bill from Annapolis, with some garbled report about UFOs over central Africa.
The plane veered to the right, and the rising sun wheeled around the cockpit, sparking from scuffs in the Plexiglas around her.
‘Let’s go UFO-hunting,’ Malenfant snapped. ‘We got nothing better to do today, right?’
She wasn’t about to argue; as so often in her relationship with Malenfant she was, literally, powerless.
Fire:
Stone and Blue put branches into the fire. Leaves and twigs burn. Stone and Blue pull out the burning branches. Their legs carry them into the wood. Small animals squeal and run before the fire. Stone and Blue pursue, their eyes darting, their hands hurling rocks and bits of wood.
Fire’s hands are very red and raw.
Dig comes to him. Water is in her mouth. The water spills on his hands. The water is cool. Dig has leaves. Her hands rub them on his burns.
Fire has no name. Sing is huge and smiling. Sing’s hands rub his palms with leaves.
Fire has his name again. It is Dig who tends his burned hands, smiling.
‘Blue light!’ he shouts, suddenly.
Dig looks at him. Her eyes narrow. She tends his hands.
Fire’s hand reaches out. It cups one conical breast. The breast is hot in his hand.
The fire is hot in his hand. A captured bat is hot in his hand.
His member does not rise. Dig tends his hands.
Blue and Stone return. Their hands carry rabbits. The rabbits are skinned. There is blood on the mouths of the men. The rabbits fall to the ground.
The children with no names fall on the rabbits. They jabber, snapping at each other. The children’s small faces are bloody. The adults push the children aside, and growl and jostle over the rabbits. All the people work at the meat, stealing it from each other.
Grass and Cold throw some pieces of meat on the fire. The meat sizzles. Their hands pick out the meat. Their mouths chew the burned meat, swallowing some. Fire sees that their mouths want to swallow all the meat. But their fingers take meat from their mouths. They put the meat in the mouths of their babies with no names.
Sing groans. She is on the ground near the branches. Her nose can smell the food. Her hands can’t reach it.
Fire is eating a twisted-off rabbit leg. His hands pluck meat off it, and put the meat in Sing’s mouth.
Her head turns. Her mouth chews. Her eyes are closed. She chokes. Her mouth spits out meat.
Fire’s hands pop the chewed meat in his mouth.
Sing is shivering.
Fire thinks of a bower.
There are branches here, on the ground. He has forgotten that they were used to transport Sing. He keeps thinking of the bower.
He makes his hands lay the branches on the ground. He thinks of twigs and grass and leaves. He gathers them, thinking of the bower. He makes his hands pile everything up on the branches.
He makes his arms pick up Sing.
It is sunny. He has no name. Sing is carrying Fire. Sing is large, Fire small.
It is dark. His name is Fire. Fire is carrying Sing. Fire is large, Sing shrunken.
He lays her on the crude bower. She sinks into the soft leaves and grass. The branches roll away. The grass scatters. Sing falls into the dirt, with a gasp.
Fire hoots and howls, kicking at the branches.
One of the branches is lodged against a rock. It did not roll away.
Fire makes his hands gather the branches again. He puts the branches down alongside the rock he found. His hands pile up more grass. At last he lowers Sing on the bower. The branches are trapped by the rocks. They do not roll away.
Sing sighs.
Every day he makes a bower for Sing. Every day he forgets how he did it before. Every day he has to invent a way to fix it, from scratch. Some days he doesn’t manage it at all, and Sing has to sleep on the dirt, where insects bite her.
She sings. Her voice is soft and broken. Fire listens. He has forgotten the rocks and the branches.
She stops singing. She sleeps.
People are sleeping. People are huddled around the children. People are coupling. People are making water. People are making dung. People are chattering, for comfort, through rivalry.
Beyond the glow of the flames, the sky is dark. The land is gone. Something howls. It is far away.
Dig is sleeping near the fire.
Fire’s legs walk to her. His hand touches her shoulder. She rolls on her back. She opens her eyes and looks at him.
His member is stiff.
‘Hoo! Fire!’
It is Loud. He is on the ground. Fire’s eyes had not seen him. Fire’s eyes had seen only Dig.
Loud’s hands throw red dirt into Fire’s eyes. Fire blinks and sneezes and hoots.
Loud has crawled to Dig. His hands paw at her. His tongue is out, his member hard. Her hands are pushing him away. She is laughing.
Fire’s hands grab Loud’s shoulders. Loud falls off Dig and lands on his back. He pulls Fire to the ground and they roll. Fire feels hot gritty dirt cling to his back.
Stone roars. His scar shines in the fire light. His filth-grimed foot separates them with a shove. His axe clouts Loud on the head. Loud howls and scuttles away.
Stone’s axe swings for Fire. Fire ducks and scrambles back.
Stone grunts. He moves to Dig. Stone’s big hand reaches down to her, and flips her onto her belly.
Dig gasps. She pulls her legs beneath her. Fire hears the scrape of her skin on red dust.
Stone kneels. His hands push her legs apart. She cries out. He reaches forward. His hands cup her breasts. His member enters her. His hands clutch her shoulders, and his flabby hips thrust and thrust.
He gives a strangled cry. His back straightens. He shudders.
He pulls back and stands up. His member is bruised purple and moist. He turns. He kicks Fire in the thigh. Fire yells and doubles over.
Dig is on the ground, her hands tucked between her legs. She is curled up.
Loud is gone.
Fire’s legs walk.
Fire stops.
Dig is far. The fire is far. He is in a mouth of darkness. Eyes watch him.
He makes his legs walk him back to the fire.
Sing is lying on a bower. He has forgotten he made the bower. Her eyes watch him. Her arm lifts.
He kneels. His face rests on her chest. The bower rustles. Sing gasps.
Her hand runs over his belly. Her hand finds his member. It is painfully swollen. Her hand closes around it. He shudders.
She sings.
He sleeps.
Emma Stoney:
If this really was the close of Malenfant’s career at NASA, Emma thought, it could be a good thing.
She wasn’t the type of foolish ground-bound spouse who palpitated every moment Malenfant was on orbit (although she hadn’t been able to calm her stomach during those searing moments of launch, as the Shuttle passed through one of NASA’s ‘non-survivable windows’ after another …). No, the sacrifices she had made went broader and deeper than that.
It had started as far back as the moment when, as a new arrival at the Naval Academy, he had broken his hometown girl’s seventeen-year-old heart with a letter saying that he thought they should break off their relationship. Now he was at Annapolis, he had written, he wanted to devote himself ‘like a monk’ to his studies. Well, that had lasted all of six months before he had started to pursue her again, with letters and calls, trying to win her back.
That letter had, in retrospect, set the course of their lives for three decades. But maybe that course was now coming to an end.
‘You know,’ she said dreamily, ‘maybe if it is ending, it’s fitting it should be like this. In the air, I mean. Do you remember that flight to San Francisco? You had just got accepted by the Astronaut Office …’
It had been Malenfant’s third time of trying to join the astronaut corps, after he had applied to the recruitment rounds of 1988 – when he wasn’t even granted an interview – and 1990. Finally in 1992, aged thirty-two, he had gotten an interview at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and had gone back to his base in San Diego.
At last the Astronaut Office had called him. But he was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement, to be made the next day. Naturally he had kept the secret strictly, even from Emma.
So the next day they had boarded a plane for San Francisco, where they were going to spend a long weekend with friends of Emma’s (Malenfant tended not to have the type of friends you could spend weekends with, not if you wanted to come home with your liver). Malenfant had given the pilot the NASA press release. Just after they got to cruise altitude, the pilot called Emma’s name: Would Emma Malenfant please identify herself? Would you please stand up?
It had taken Emma a moment to realize she was being called, for she used her maiden name, Stoney, in business and her personal life, everywhere except the closed world of the Navy. Baffled – and wary of Malenfant’s expressionless stillness – she had unbuckled her seat belt and stood up.
I hope you like barbecue, Ms Malenfant, said the pilot, because I have a press release here that says you are going to Houston, Texas. Commander Reid Malenfant, US Navy, has been selected to be a part of the 1992 NASA astronaut class.
‘… And everybody on the plane started whooping, just as if you were John Glenn himself, and the stewards brought us those dumb little plastic bottles of champagne. Do you remember, Malenfant?’ She laughed. ‘But you couldn’t drink because you were doubled over with air sickness.’
Malenfant grunted sourly. ‘It starts in the air, so it finishes in the air. Is that what you think?’
‘It does have a certain symmetry … Maybe this isn’t the end, but the beginning of something new. Right? We could be at the start of a great new adventure together. Who knows?’
She could see how the set of his shoulders was unchanged.
She sighed. Give it time, Emma. ‘All right, Malenfant. What UFOs?’
‘Tanzania. Some kind of sighting over the Olduvai Gorge, according to Bill.’
‘Olduvai? Where the human fossils come from?’
‘I don’t know. What does that matter? It sounds more authentic than most. The local air forces are scrambling spotter planes: Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique.’
None of those names was too reassuring to Emma. ‘Malenfant, are you sure we should get caught up in that? We don’t want some trigger-happy Tanzanian flyboy to mistake us for Eetie.’
He barked laughter. ‘Come on, Emma. You’re showing your prejudice. We trained half those guys and sold the planes to the other half. And they’re only spotters. Bill is informing them we’re coming. There’s no threat. And, who knows? Maybe we’ll get to be involved in first contact.’
Under his veneer of cynicism she sensed an edge of genuine excitement. From out of the blue, here was another adventure for Reid Malenfant, hero astronaut. Another adventure that had nothing to do with her.
I was wrong, she thought. I’m never going to get him back, no matter what happens at NASA. But then I never had him anyhow.
Losing sympathy for him, she snapped, ‘You really told Joe Bridges to shove his job?’
‘Sweetest moment of my life.’
‘Oh, Malenfant. Don’t you know how it works yet? If you took your punishment, if you sweated out your time, you’d be back in rotation for the next assignment, or the one after that.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s the way of the world. I’ve had to go through it, in my own way. Everybody has. Everybody who wants to get on in the real world, with real people, anyhow. Everybody but you, the great hero.’
‘You sound like you’re writing my appraisal,’ he said, a little ruefully. ‘Anyhow, ass-kissing wouldn’t have helped. It was the Russians, that fucking Grand Medical Commission of theirs.’
‘The Russians scrubbed you?’
‘It was when I was in Star City.’
Star City, the Russian military base thirty miles outside Moscow that served as the cosmonauts’ training centre.
‘Malenfant, you got back from there a month ago. You never thought to tell me about it?’
Through two layers of Plexiglas, she could see him shrug. ‘I was appealing the decision. I didn’t see the point of troubling you. Hell, Emma, I thought I would win. I knew I would. I thought they couldn’t scrub me.’
Far off, to left and right, she saw contrails and glittering darts. Fighter planes, perhaps, converging on the strange anomaly sighted over Olduvai, whatever it was, if it existed at all.
She felt an odd frisson of anticipation.
‘It took them a morning,’ Malenfant said. ‘They brung in a dozen Russian doctors to probe at my every damn orifice. A bunch of snowy-haired old farts with pubic hair growing out of their noses, with no experience of space medicine. They ought to have no jurisdiction over the way we run our programme.’
‘It’s their programme too,’ she said quietly. ‘What did they say?’
‘One of them pulled me up over my shoulder.’ Malenfant suffered from a nerve palsy behind his right shoulder, the relic of an ancient football injury, a condition NASA had long ago signed off on. ‘Well, our guys gave them shit. But the fossil stood his ground.
‘Then they took me into the Commission itself. I was sat on a stage with the guy who was going to be my judge, in front of an auditorium full of white-haired Russian doctors, and two NASA guys who were as mad as hell, like me. But the old asshole from the surgical group got up and said my shoulder was a “disqualifying condition” that needed further tests, and our guys said I wasn’t going to do that, and so the Russians said I was disqualified anyhow …’
Emma frowned, trying to puzzle it out. It sounded like a pretext to her; Malenfant had after all flown twice to the Station before, and the Russians must have known all about his shoulder, like everything else about him. Why should it suddenly become a mission-threatening disability now?
Malenfant put the little jet through a gut-wrenching turn so tight she thought she heard the hull creak. ‘I knew we’d appeal,’ he said. ‘Those two NASA surgeons were livid, I’m telling you. They said they’d pass it all the way up the line, I should just get on with my training as if I was planning to fly, they’d clear me through. Hell, I believed them. But it didn’t happen. When it got to Bridges –’
‘Was your shoulder the only thing the Russians objected to?’
He hesitated.
‘Malenfant?’
‘No,’ he said reluctantly. ‘They smuggled shrinks’ remarks into their final report to NASA. They should have presented them at the Commission … Hey, can you see something? Look, right on the horizon.’
She peered into the north. The horizon was a band of dusty, mist-laden air, grey between brown earth and blue sky, precisely curving. Was something there? – a spark of powder-blue, a hint of a circle, like a lens flare?
But the day was bright, dazzling now the sun was climbing higher, and her eyes filled with water.
She sat back in her seat, and her various harnesses and buckles rustled and clinked around her, loud in the tiny cockpit. ‘What did it say, Malenfant? The Russian psych report.’
He growled, ‘“Peculiarities”.’
‘What kind of peculiarities?’
‘In my relations with the rest of the crew. They gave an example about how I was in the middle of a task and some Russkie came over nagging about how we were scheduled to do something else. Well, I nodded politely, and carried right on with what I was doing, until I was finished …’
Now she started to understand. The Russians, who rightly believed they were still far ahead of the West in the psychology of the peculiarly cramped conditions of space travel, placed great collectivist emphasis on teamwork and sacrifice. They would not warm to a driven, somewhat obsessive loner-perfectionist like Malenfant.
‘I should have socialized with the assholes,’ he said now. ‘I should have gone to the cosmonauts’ coldwater apartments, and drunk their crummy vodka, and pressed the flesh with the guys on the gate.’
She laughed, gently. ‘Malenfant, you don’t even socialize at NASA.’
‘My nature got me where I am now.’
Yeah, washed out, she thought brutally. ‘But maybe it’s not the nature you need for long-duration space missions. I guess not everybody forgives you the way I do.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
She ignored the question. ‘So the psych report is the real reason they grounded you. The shoulder was just an excuse.’
‘The Russians must have known the psych report would never stand up to scrutiny. If Joe Bridges had got his thumb out of his ass –’
‘Oh, Malenfant, don’t you see? They were giving you cover. If you’re going to be grounded, do you want it to be because of your shoulder, or your personality? Think about it. They were trying to help you. They all were.’
‘That kind of help I can live without.’ Again he wrenched the plane through a savage snap roll.
Her helmet clattered against the Plexiglas, as varying acceleration tore at her stomach, and the brown African plain strobed around her. She was cocooned in the physical expression of his anger.
She glared at the back of Malenfant’s helmeted head, which cast dazzling highlights from the African sun, with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. Well, that was Malenfant for you.
And because she was staring so hard at Malenfant she missed seeing the artefact until it was almost upon them.
Malenfant peeled away suddenly. Once again she glimpsed pale blue-white sky, dusty brown ground, shafts of glowering sunlight – and an arc, a fragment of a perfect circle, like a rainbow, but glowing a clear cerulean blue. Then it fell out of her vision.
‘Malenfant – what was that?’
‘Damned if I know.’ His voice was flat. Suddenly he was concentrating on his flying. The slaved controls in front of her jerked this way and that; she felt remote buffeting, some kind of turbulence perhaps, smoothed out by Malenfant’s skilful handling.
He pulled the jet through another smooth curve, and sky and ground swam around her once more.
And he said, ‘Holy shit.’
There was a circle in the sky.
It was facing them full on. It was a wheel of powder-blue, like a hoop of the finest ribbon. It looked the size of a dinner plate held before her face – but of course it must be much larger and more remote than that.
Emma saw this beyond Malenfant’s head and shoulders and the slim white fuselage. The jet’s needle nose pointed straight at the centre of the ring, so that the wheel framed her field of view with perfect symmetry, like some unlikely optical flare. Its very perfection and symmetry made it seem unreal. She had no idea of its scale – it would seem so close it must be hanging off the plane’s nose, then something in her head would flip the other way and it would appear vast and distant, like a rainbow. She found it physically difficult to study it, as if it was an optical illusion, deliberately baffling; her eyes kept sliding away from it, evading it.
It’s beyond my comprehension, she thought. Literally. Evolution has not prepared me for giant wheels suspended in the air.
Fire:
Water runs down his face.
He is lying on his back. The sky is flat and grey.
Rain falls. His ears hear it tapping on the ground. His eyes see the drops fall towards his face. They are fat and slow. Some of them fall on his face.
Water runs in his eyes. It stings. He sits up.
Fire is sitting on the ground. He is wet. His eyes hurt. His burned hands hurt.
He stands up. His legs walk him towards the trees.
People walk, run, stumble over muddy ground, adults and children. They move in silence, in isolation. Nobody is calling, nobody helping. They are cold and they hurt. They have each forgotten the other people, all save the mothers with their babies with no names. The mothers’ arms carry the infants, sheltering them.
Fire reaches the trees.
The wind changes. His nose smells ash.
He remembers the fire. His legs run back.
The fire is out, drowned by the rain. The back of Fire’s head hurts in anticipation of Stone’s punishing axe.
Sing is calling. She is lying on a bower. The bower is falling apart, the leaves damp and shrivelled.
Loud is walking back to Sing.
Sing screams. Fire spins and crouches.
There is a Mouth. It is bright blue. The Mouth is skimming over the shining grass. The Mouth is approaching Fire, gaping wide.
Cats have mouths. A cat’s mouth will take a person’s head. This Mouth would take a whole person, standing straight. It is coming towards him, this Mouth with no body, this huge Mouth, widening.
It makes no noise. The rain hisses on the grass.
Fire screams. Fire’s legs carry him off into the forest.
Still the Mouth comes. It towers into the sky.
Sing is at its base. Her arms push at the bower. Her legs can’t stand up. She screams again.
Loud runs. His hands are throwing dirt at the Mouth.
The Mouth scoops him up.
There is a flash of light. Fire can see nothing but blue.
Loud screams.
Emma Stoney:
‘Malenfant – you see it too, right?’
He laughed. ‘It ain’t no scratch in your contacts, Emma.’ He seemed to be testing the controls. Experimentally he veered away to the right. The ride got a lot more rocky.
The blue circle stayed right where it was, hanging in the African sky. No optical effect, then. This was real, as real as this plane. But it hung in the air without any apparent means of support. And still she had no real sense of its scale.
But now she saw a contrail scraped across the air before the wheel, a tiny silver moth flying across its diameter. The moth was a plane, as least as big as their own.
‘Damn thing must be a half-mile across,’ Malenfant growled. ‘A half-mile across, and hovering in the air eight miles high –’
‘How appropriate.’
‘My God, it’s the real thing,’ Malenfant said. ‘The UFO-nauts must be going crazy.’ She heard the grin in his voice. ‘Everything will be different now.’
Now she made out more planes drawn up from the dusty ground below, passing before the artefact – if artefact it was. One of them looked like a fragile private jet, a Lear maybe, surely climbing well beyond its approved altitude.
Malenfant continued his turn. The artefact slid out of sight.
Dusty land wheeled beneath her. She was high above a gorge, cut deeply into a baked plain, perhaps thirty or forty miles long. Perhaps it was Olduvai itself, the miraculous gorge that cut through million-year strata of human history, the gorge that had yielded the relics of one ancient hominid form after another to the archaeologists’ patient inspection.
How strange, she thought. Why here? If this wheel in the sky really is what it appears to be, an extraordinary alien artefact, if this is a first contact of a bewilderingly unexpected type (and what else could it be?) then why here, high above the cradle of mankind itself? Why should this gouge into humanity’s deepest past collide with this most unimaginable of futures?
The plane dropped abruptly. For a heartbeat Emma was weightless. Then the plane slammed into the bottom of an air pocket and she was shoved hard into her seat.
‘Sorry,’ Malenfant muttered. ‘The turbulence is getting worse.’ The slaved controls worked before her. The plane soared and banked.
She suddenly wished she was on the ground, perhaps holed up in her well-equipped hotel room back in Joburg. The world must be going crazy over this. She would have every softscreen in the room turned to the coverage, filling her ears and eyes with a babble of instant commentary. Here, in this bubble of Plexiglas, she felt cut off.
But this is the real experience, she thought. I am here by the sheerest chance, at the moment when this vision appeared in the sky like the Virgin Mary over Lourdes, and yet I pine for my online womb. Well, I’m a woman of my time.
The artefact settled into place before Emma once more, vast, enigmatic, slowly approaching. Planes criss-crossed before it, puny. Emma spotted that small private jet, lumbering through the air so much more slowly than the military vehicles around it. She wondered if anybody had tried to make contact with the wheel yet – or if it had been fired on.
‘Holy shit,’ said Malenfant. ‘Do you see that?’
‘What?’
He lifted his arm and pointed; she could see the gesture through the Plexiglas blisters that encased them. ‘There. Near the bottom of the ring.’
It looked like a very fine dark rain falling out of the ring, like a hail of iron filings.
Malenfant lifted small binoculars. ‘People,’ he said bluntly. He lowered the binoculars. ‘Tall, skinny, naked people.’
She couldn’t integrate the information. People – thrust naked into the air eight miles high, to fall, presumably, all the way to the welcoming gorge of bones… Why? Where were they from?
‘Can they be saved?’
Malenfant just laughed.
The plane buffeted again. As they approached the wheel the turbulence was growing stronger. It seemed to Emma that the air at the centre of the ring was significantly disturbed; she made out concentric streaks of mist and dust there, almost like a sideways-on storm, neatly framed by the wheel’s electric blue frame.
And now that lumbering business-type jet reached dead centre of the artefact. It twisted once, twice, then crumpled like a paper cup in an angry fist. Glittering fragments began to hail into the ring.
It was over in seconds. There hadn’t even been an explosion.
Fire:
Wind gusts. Lightning flashes.
There is no Loud.
People come spewing out of the Mouth. They fall to the grass.
The rain falls steadily on the grass, hissing.
Emma Stoney:
‘Like it got sucked in,’ Malenfant said with grim fascination. ‘Maybe the wheel is a teleporter, drawing out our atmosphere.’ The plane juddered again, and she could see him wrestling with the stick. ‘Whatever it is it’s making a mess of the air flow.’
She could see the other planes, presumably military jets, pulling back to more cautious orbits. But the T-38 kept right on, battering its way into increasingly disturbed air. Malenfant’s shoulders jerked as they hauled at the recalcitrant controls.
‘Malenfant, what are you doing?’
‘We can handle this. We can get a lot closer yet. Those African guys are half-trained sissies –’
The plane hit another pocket. They fell fifty or a hundred feet before slamming into a floor that felt hard as concrete.
Emma could taste blood in her mouth. ‘Malenfant!’
‘Did you bring your Kodak? Come on, Emma. What’s life for? This is history.’
No, she thought. This is your wash-out. That’s why you are risking your life, and mine, so recklessly.
The artefact loomed larger in the roiling sky ahead of her, so large now that she couldn’t see its full circle for the body of the plane. Those iron-filing people continued to rain from the base of the disc, some of them twisting as they fell.
‘Makes you think,’ Malenfant said. ‘I spend my life struggling to get into space. And on the very day I get washed out of the programme, the very same day, space comes to me. Wherever the hell this thing comes from, whatever mother ship orbiting fucking Neptune, you can bet there’s going to be a clamour to get out there. Those NASA assholes must be jumping up and down; it’s their best day since Neil and Buzz. At last we’ve got someplace to go – but whoever they send it isn’t going to be me. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? If Mohammed can’t get to the mountain …’
She closed her hand on the stick before her, letting it pull her passively to and fro. What if she grabbed the stick hard, yanked it to left or right? Could she take over the plane? And then what? ‘Malenfant, I’m scared.’
‘Of the UFO?’
‘No. Of you.’
‘Just a little closer,’ he said, his voice a thin crackle over the intercom. ‘I won’t let you come to any harm, Emma.’
Suddenly she screamed.‘… Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!’
Reid Malenfant:
It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.
It was a day of strange lights in the sky. But it was a sky that was forever barred to him.
The plane was flung sideways.
It was like a barrel roll. Suddenly his head was jammed into his shoulders and his vision tunnelled, worse than any eyeballs-back launch he had ever endured – and harder, much harder, than he would have wanted to put Emma through.
His systems went dead: softscreens, the clunky old dials, even the hiss of the comms, everything. He wrestled with the stick, but got no response; the plane was just falling through an angry sky, helpless as an autumn leaf.
The rate of roll increased, and the Gs just piled on. He knew he was already close to blacking out; perhaps Emma had succumbed already, and soon after that the damn plane was going to break up.
With difficulty he readied the ejection controls. ‘Emma! Remember the drill!’ But she couldn’t hear, of course.
… Just for a second, the panels flickered back to life. He felt the stick jerk, the controls bite.
It was a chance to regain control.
He didn’t take it.
Then the moment was gone, and he was committed.
He felt exuberant, almost exhilarated, like the feeling when the solid boosters cut in during a Shuttle launch, like he was on a roller-coaster ride he couldn’t get off.
But the plane plummeted on towards the sky wheel, rolling, creaking. The transient mood passed, and fear clamped down on his guts once more.
He bent his head, found the ejection handle, pulled it. The plane shuddered as Emma’s canopy was blown away, then gave another kick as her seat hurled her clear.
And now his own canopy disappeared. The wind slammed at him, Earth and sky wheeling around, and all of it was suddenly, horribly real.
He felt a punch in the back. He was hurled upwards like a toy and sent tumbling in the bright air, just like one of the strange iron-filing people, shocked by the sudden silence.
Pain bit savagely at his right arm. He saw that his flight-suit sleeve and a great swathe of skin had been sheared away, leaving bloody flesh. Must have snagged it on the rim of the cockpit on the way out.
Something was flopping in the air before him. It was his seat. He still had hold of the ejection handle, connected to the seat by a cable.
He knew he had to let go of the handle, or else it might foul his ’chute. Yet he couldn’t. The seat was an island in this huge sky; without it he would be alone. It made no sense, but there it was.
At last, apparently without his volition, his hand loosened. The handle was jerked out of his grip, painfully hard.
Something huge grabbed his back, knocking all the air out of him again. Then he was dangling. He looked up and saw his ’chute open reassuringly above him, a distant roof of fully blossomed orange and white silk.
But the thin air buffeted him, and he was swaying alarmingly, a human pendulum, and at the bottom of each swing G forces hauled on his entrails. He was having trouble breathing; his chest laboured. He pulled a green toggle to release his emergency oxygen.
The artefact hung above him, receding as he fell.
He had been flung west of it, he saw now, and it was closing up to a perfect oval, like a schoolroom demonstration of a planetary orbit. There was no sign of the other planes. Even the T-38 seemed to have vanished completely, save for a few drifting bits of light wreckage, a glimmer that must have been a shard of a Plexiglas canopy.
And he saw another ’chute. Half open. Hanging before the closing maw of the artefact like a speck of food before the mouth of some vast fish.
Emma, of course: she had ejected a half-second before Malenfant, so that she had found herself that much closer to the artefact than he had been.
And now she was being drawn in by the buffeting air currents.
He screamed, ‘Emma!’ He twisted and wriggled, but there was nothing he could do.
Her ’chute fell into the portal. There was a flash of electric-blue light. And she was gone.
‘Emma! Emma!’
… Something fell past him, not ten yards away. It was a man: tall and lithe like a basketball player, stark naked. He was black, and under tight curls, his skull was as flat as a board. His mouth was working, gasping like a fish’s. His gaze locked with Malenfant’s, just for a heartbeat. Malenfant read astonishment beyond shock.
Then the man was gone, on his way to his own destiny in the ancient lands beneath.
A new barrage of turbulent air slammed into Malenfant. He rocked viciously. Nursing his damaged arm he fought the ’chute, fought to keep it stable fought for his life, fought for the chance to live through this day, to find Emma.
As he spun, he glimpsed that new Red Moon, a baleful eye gazing down on his tiny struggles.
Fire:
The Mouth is gone.
The new people are nearby. The smallest is a child. They are all yelling. Their skin is bright, yellow-brown and blue. They are trying to stand up, but they stumble backwards.
Fire’s legs walk forward. He walks over the soaked fireplace. The ashes are still hot. He yelps and his feet lift up, off the ashes.
Sing is nearby, on her branches, weeping.
Fire’s eyes see Dig. They can’t see Loud. Fire calls out. ‘Loud, Loud, Fire!’ But Loud is gone.
Shrugging, the rain running down his back, he turns away. Fire will never think of his brother again.
A new person is coming towards him. This stranger has blue and brown skin on his body. Fire can’t see his member. It is a woman. But he can’t see breasts. It is a man.
The new person holds out empty hands. ‘Please, can you help us? Do you know what happened to us? What place is this?’
Fire hears: ‘Help. What. Us. What.’ The voice is deep. It is a man.
Stone is standing beside Fire. ‘Nutcracker-man,’ he says softly.
‘No,’ says Fire.
‘Elf-man.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’ The new person steps forward. ‘I have a wife and child. Do you speak English? My wife is hurt. We need shelter. Is there a road near here, a phone we could use –’
Stone’s axe slams into the top of the new person’s head. The head cracks open. Grey and red stuff splashes out.
The new person’s eyes look at Fire. He shudders. He falls backwards.
Stone grunts. ‘Nutcracker-man.’ Stone slices off the new person’s cheek and crams it into his mouth.
Fire hoots at the kill. Nutcracker-folk fight hard. This kill was easy.
Other people’s legs bring them running from the trees to join Stone at his feast. They have forgotten the rain. They get wet again. But they are all drawn by the scent of the fresh meat.
The new person’s skin yields easily to Stone’s axe. It comes off in a sheet. Fire’s finger touches the sloughed skin. It is blue and brown, thick and dense. Fire is confused. It is skin. It is not skin,
The flesh under the strange skin is white. Stone’s axe cuts into it easily. The axe butchers the body rapidly and expertly, an unthinking skill honed across a million years.
The other new people are screaming.
Fire had forgotten them. He straightens up. He has a chunk of flesh in his mouth. His teeth gnaw at it, while his hands pull on it.
The new people’s legs are trying to run away. But the new people fall easily, as if they are weak or sick.
Grass and Cold catch the new people. They push them to Stone. One of the new people is bleeding from her head and staggering. Its arms are clutching the small one. When it screams its voice is high. It is a woman.
The other new person has no small one. It has blue skin all over its body. ‘We don’t mean you any harm. Please. My name is Emma Stoney.’ Its voice is high. It is a woman.
Shoot’s hand grabs the hair of this one, pulls her head back.
The new woman’s elbow rams into Shoot’s belly. ‘Get your hands off of me!’ Shoot doubles over, gasping.
The men laugh at the women fighting.
The woman with the child speaks to Stone. ‘Please. We’re American citizens. My name is Sally Mayer. I – my husband… I know you can speak English. We heard you. Look, we can pay. American dollars.’ She holds out something green. Handfuls of leaves. Not leaves. Her arm is bleeding, he sees.
I. You. That is what Fire hears.
The woman has fallen silent. Her eyes are staring at the top of Stone’s head. Her mouth is open.
The top of the woman’s head is swollen.
Fire makes his hand run over his own brow. He feels thick eye ridges. He feels a sloping brow. He feels the small flat crown behind his brow. His fingers find a fly trapped in his greasy hair. He pulls it out. He pops it into his mouth.
Stone studies the new woman. Stone’s fingers squeeze the woman’s dug. It is large and soft, under its skin of green and brown. The woman yelps and backs away. The child, eyes wide, cringes from Stone’s bloody hand.
Fire laughs. Stone will mount the woman. Stone will eat the woman.
‘No.’
The other new woman steps forward. Her hands pull the other woman behind her. ‘We are like you. Look! We are people. We are not meat.’ She points to the child.
The child has no hair on his face. The child has wide round eyes. The child has a nose.
Nutcracker-folk have hair on their faces. Nutcracker-folk have no noses. Nutcracker-folk have nostrils flat against their faces.
Running-folk have no hair on their faces. They have round eyes. They have noses.
Stone’s axe rises.
Fire takes a step forward. He is afraid of Stone and his axe. But he makes his hand grab Stone’s arm.
‘People,’ Fire says.
‘Yes.’ The new woman nods. ‘Yes, that’s right. We’re people.’
Slowly, Stone’s arm lowers.
The smell of meat is strong. One by one the people drift away from the new people, and cluster around the corpse.
Fire is left alone, watching the new people.
The fat new person is shaking, as if cold. Now she falls to the ground. The other puts the child down, and cradles the fat one’s head on her lap.
The other’s face lifts up to Fire. ‘My name is Emma. Em-ma. Do you understand?’
Fire carries the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.
Emma is her name. Emma is what she does. He doesn’t know what Em-ma is.
He says, ‘Em-ma.’
‘Emma. Yes. Good. Please – will you help us? “We need water. Do you have any water?’
His eye spots something. Something moves on a branch on the ground nearby. He has forgotten that he used these branches to make a bower.
His hand whips out and grabs. His hand opens, revealing a caterpillar, fat and juicy. He did not have to think about catching it. It is just here. He pops it in his mouth.
‘Please.’
He looks down at the new people. Again he had forgotten they were there. ‘Em-ma.’ The caterpillar wriggles on his tongue. His hand pulls it out of his mouth. He remembers how he caught it, a sharp shard of recent memory.
He makes his hand hold out the caterpillar.
Emma’s eyes stare at it. It is wet from his spit. Her hand reaches out and takes it.
The caterpillar is in her mouth. She chews. He hears it crunch. She swallows, hard. ‘Good. Thank you.’
Fire’s nose can smell meat more strongly now. Stone’s axe has cracked the rib cage. Whatever is in the new person’s belly may be good to eat.
The other new woman wakes up. Her eyes look at the corpse, at what the people are doing there. She screams. Emma’s hand clamps over her mouth. The woman struggles.
The people crowd close around the corpse. Fire joins them.
He has forgotten the new people.
2 RED MOON (#ulink_fc0ee1a7-707b-5daa-aa1b-80c6d7da2032)
Emma Stoney:
Her chest hurt. Every time she took a breath she was gasping and dragging, as if she had been running too far, or as if she was high on a mountainside.
That was the first thing Emma noticed.
The second thing was the dreaminess of moving here.
When she walked – even on the slippery grass, encumbered by her clumsy flight suit – she felt light, buoyant. But she kept tripping up. It was easy to walk slowly, but every time she tried to move at what seemed a normal pace she stumbled, as if about to take off. Eventually she evolved a kind of half-jog, somewhere between walking and running.
Also she was strong here. When she struggled to drag the woman – Sally? – out of the rain and into the comparative shelter of the trees, with the crying kid at her heels, she felt powerful, able to lift well above her usual limit.
The forest was dense, gloomy. The trees seemed to be conifers – impossibly tall, towering high above her, making a roof of green – but here and there she saw ferns, huge ancient broad-leafed plants. The forest canopy gave them some shelter, but still great fat droplets of water came shimmering down on them. When the droplets hit her flesh they clung – and they stung. She noticed how shrivelled and etiolated many of the trees’ leaves looked. Acid rain?…
The forest seemed strangely quiet. No birdsong, she thought. Come to think of it she hadn’t seen a bird in the time she’d been here.
The flat-head people – hominids, whatever – did not follow her into the forest, and as their hooting calls receded she felt vaguely reassured. But that was outweighed by a growing unease, for it was very dark, here in the woods. The kid seemed to feel that too, for he went very quiet, his eyes round.
But then, she thought resentfully, she was disoriented, spooked, utterly bewildered anyhow – she had just been through a plane wreck, for God’s sake, and then hurled through time and space to wherever the hell – and being scared in a forest was scarcely much different from being scared on the open plain.
… What forest? What plain? What is this place? Where am I?
Too much strangeness: panic brushed her mind.
But the blood continued to pulse from that crude gash on Sally’s arm, an injury she had evidently suffered on the way here, from wherever. And the kid sat down on the forest floor and cried right along with his mother, great bubbles of snot blowing out of his nose.
First things first, Emma.
The kid gazed up at her with huge empty eyes. He looked no older than three.
Emma got down on her knees. The kid shrank back from her, and she made an effort to smile. She searched the pockets of her flight suit, seeking a handkerchief, and finding everything but. At last she dug into a waist pocket of Sally’s jacket – she was wearing what looked like designer safari gear, a khaki jacket and pants – and found a paper tissue.
‘Blow,’ she commanded.
With his nose wiped, the boy seemed a bit calmer.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Maxie.’ His tiny voice was scale-model Bostonian.
‘Okay, Maxie. My name’s Emma. I need you to be brave now. We have to help your mom. Okay?’
He nodded.
She dug through her suit pockets. She found a flat plastic box. It turned out to contain a rudimentary first aid kit: scissors, plasters, safety pins, dressings, bandages, medical tape, salves and creams.
With the awkward little scissors she cut back Sally’s sleeve, exposing the wound. It didn’t look so bad: just a gash, fairly clean-edged, a few inches long. She wiped away the blood with a gauze pad. She could see no foreign objects in there, and the bleeding seemed mostly to have stopped. She used antiseptic salve to clean up, then pressed a fresh gauze pad over the wound. She wrapped the lower arm in a bandage, and taped it together.
… Was that right? How was she supposed to know? Think, damn it. She summoned up her scratchy medical knowledge, derived from what she had picked up at second-hand from Malenfant’s training – not that he’d ever told her much – and books and TV shows and movies … She pressed Sally’s fingernail hard enough to turn it white. When she released it, the nail quickly regained its colour. Good; that must mean the bandage wasn’t too tight.
Now she propped the injured arm up in the air. With her free hand she packed up what was left of her first aid kit. She had already used one of only two bandages, half-emptied her only bottle of salve … If they were going to survive here, she would have to ration this stuff.
Or else, she thought grimly, learn to live like those nude hominids out there.
She turned to the kid. She wished she had some way to make this experience easier on him. But she couldn’t think of a damn thing. ‘Maxie. I’m going to find something to keep the rain off. I need you to stay right here, with your mom. You understand? And if she wakes up you tell her I’ll be right back.’
He nodded, eyes fixed on her face.
She ruffled his hair, shaking out some of the water. Then she set off back towards the plain.
She paused at the fringe of the forest.
Most of the hominids were hunched over on themselves, as if catatonic with misery in the rain. One, apparently an old woman, lay flat out on the floor, her mouth open to the rain.
The rest seemed to be working together, loosely. They were upending branches and stacking them against each other, making a rough conical shape. Perhaps they were trying to build a shelter, like a tepee. But the whole project was chaotic, with branches sliding off the pile this way and that, and every so often one of them seemed to forget what she was doing and would simply wander off, letting whatever she was supporting collapse.
At last, to a great hoot of dismay from the workers, the whole erection just fell apart and the branches came clattering down.
The people scratched their flat scalps over the debris. Some of them made half-hearted attempts to lift the branches again, one or two drifted away, others came to see what was going on. At last they started to work together again, lifting the branches and ramming them into the ground.
It wasn’t like watching adults work on a project, however unskilled. It was more like watching a bunch of eight-year-olds trying to build a bonfire for the very first time, figuring it out as they went along, with only the dimmest conception of the final goal.
But these hominids, these people, weren’t eight-year-olds. They were all adults, all naked, hairless, black. And they had the most beautiful bodies Emma had ever seen, frankly, this side of a movie screen anyhow. They were tall and lean – as tall as basketball players, probably – but much stronger-looking, with an all-round grace that reminded her of decathletes, or maybe Aussie Rules footballers (a baffling, sexy sport she’d tried to follow as a student, long ago).
With broad prominent noses and somewhat rounded chins, they had human-looking faces – human below the eye line, anyhow. Above the eyes was a powerful ridge of bone that gave each of them, even the smallest child, a glowering, hostile look. And above that came a flat forehead and a skull that looked oddly shrunken, as if the top of their heads had somehow been shaved clean off. Their hair was curly, but it was slicked down by the rain, showing the shape of their disturbingly small skulls too clearly.
The bodies of humans, the heads of apes. They spoke in hoots and fragmentary English words. And not one of them looked as if he or she had ever worn a stitch of clothing.
She had never heard of creatures like this. What were these people? Some kind of chimp, or gorilla? but with bodies like that? And what chimps used English?
What part of Africa had she landed in, exactly?
The rain came down harder still, reminding her she had a job to do.
She made her way out into the open, working across increasingly boggy ground, until she reached her parachute. She had been worried that the hominids might have taken it away, but it lay where it had fallen when she had come tumbling from out of the sky.
She took an armful of cloth and pulled it away from the ground. It came loose of the mud only with difficulty, and it was soaked through. She’d had vague plans of hauling the whole thing into the forest, but that was obviously impractical. She hunted through her pockets until she found a Swiss Army knife, kindly provided by the South African air force. She quickly discovered she had at her disposal a variety of screwdrivers, a can and bottle opener, a wood saw, scissors, a magnifying glass, even a nail file. At last she found a fat, sturdy blade. She decided she would cut loose a piece of cloth perhaps twenty feet square, which would suffice for a temporary shelter. Later, when the rain let up, she would come back and scavenge the rest of the silk.
She began to hack her way through the ’chute material. But it was slow work.
For the first time since that dreadful moment of mid-air disintegration, she had time to think.
It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant’s final scream over the intercom, her sudden ejection – without warning, she had been thrust into the cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat’s rockets slammed into the small of her back – and then, even as her ’chute had begun to open, she saw the wheel opening like a mouth all around her – and she had realized that for better or worse she was going to fall through it …
Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.
And then, this.
She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the breath knocked out of her. Lying on the ground, an instant after being forty thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: that was the first shock.
She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal, foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that, stranding her here.
Yes, but where was here?
She had cut the ’chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.
Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall with swimming slowness.
Low gravity. As if she was on the Moon.
That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, where?
Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are going to do about it – specifically, how you plan to stay alive, long enough for Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.
… Malenfant.
Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn’t anywhere near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other side of the great blue portal?
But he’d been through the crash too. Was he alive at all?
She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her haunches. She remembered how he had been in those last instants before the destruction of the plane, the reckless way he had hurled them both at the unknown.
Malenfant, Malenfant, what have you done?
A scream tore from the forest.
Emma bundled up her parachute cloth and ran back the way she had come.
On her bed of dead leaves, Sally was sitting up. With her good arm she held her kid to her chest. Maxie was crying again, but Sally’s face was empty, her eyes dry.
Uneasy, Emma dumped the parachute cloth. In the seeping rain, she got to her knees and embraced them both. ‘It’s all right.’
The kid seemed to calm, sandwiched between the two women.
But Sally pushed her away. ‘How can you say that? Nothing’s right.’ Her voice was eerily level.
Emma said carefully, ‘I don’t think they mean us any harm … Not any more.’
‘Who?’
‘The hominids.’
‘I saw them,’ Sally insisted.
‘Who?’
‘Ape-men. They were here. I just opened my eyes and there was this face over me. It was squat, hairy. Like a chimp.’
Then not like the hominids out on the plain, Emma thought, wondering. Was there more than one kind of human-ape, running around this strange, dreamy forest?
‘It was going through my pockets,’ Sally said. ‘I just opened my eyes and looked right in its face. I yelled. It stood up and ran away.’
‘It stood up? Chimps don’t stand upright. Not habitually … Do they?’
‘What do I know about chimps?’
‘Look, the – creatures – out there on the plain don’t sound like that description.’
‘They are ape-men.’
‘But they aren’t squat and hairy.’ Emma said hesitantly, ‘We’ve been through a lot. You’re entitled to a nightmare or two.’
Doubt and hostility crossed Sally’s face. ‘I know what I saw.’
The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.
At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outré concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn’t a flat, infinite, unchanging stage … To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.
And then there was the small matter of Sally’s husband.
Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally’s reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.
She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.
As she worked she said hesitantly, ‘My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you –’
‘I’m Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg.’ (Is?) ‘I guess you’ve met Maxie. We’re from Boston.’
‘Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK.’
‘Yes …’ Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was in her early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn’t as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. ‘We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg… Where are we, do you think?’
‘I don’t know any more than you do. I’m sorry.’
Sally’s smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. ‘Well, it sure isn’t your fault. What do you think we ought to do?’
Stay alive. ‘Keep warm. Keep out of trouble.’
‘Do you think they know we are missing yet?’
What ‘they’? ‘That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet.’
Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn’t scared out of his wits. ‘I’m hungry.’
Emma squeezed his shoulder. ‘Me too.’ She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.
She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colourful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.
Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of digestive biscuits before he gobbled up the handful of boiled sweets he had spotted immediately.
Emma kept back one of the sweets for herself, however. She sucked the cherry-flavour sweet until the last sliver of it dissolved on her tongue. Anything to get rid of the lingering taste of that damn caterpillar.
Caterpillar, for God’s sake. Her resentful anger flared. She felt like throwing away the petty scraps of supplies, rampaging out to the hominids, demanding attention. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t want anything to do with this. She didn’t want any responsibility for this damaged woman and her wretched kid – and she didn’t want her head cluttered up with the memories of what had become of the woman’s husband.
But nobody was asking what she wanted. And now the food was finished, and the others were staring at her, as if they expected her to supply them.
If not you, Emma, who else?
Emma took the foil box and went looking for water.
She found a stream a few minutes’ deeper into the forest. She clambered down into a shallow gully and scooped up muddy water. She sniffed at it doubtfully. It was from a stream of running water, so not stagnant. But it was covered with scummy algae, and plenty of green things grew in it. Was that good or bad?
She carried back as much water as she could to their improvised campsite, where Sally and Maxie were waiting. She set the water down and started going through her pockets again.
Soon she found what she wanted. It was a small tin, about the size of the tobacco tins her grandfather used to give her to save her coins and stamps. Inside a lot of gear was crammed tight; Maxie watched wonderingly as she pulled it all out. There were safety pins, wire, fish hooks and line, matches, a sewing kit, tablets, a wire saw, even a teeny-tiny button compass. And there was a little canister of dark crystals that turned out to be potassium permanganate.
Following the instructions on the can – to her shame she had to use her knife’s lens to read them – she dropped crystals into the water until it turned a pale red.
Maxie turned up his nose, until his mother convinced him the funny red water was a kind of cola.
Habits from ancient camping trips came back to Emma now. For instance, you weren’t supposed to lose anything. So she carefully packed all her gear back into its tobacco tin, and put it in an inside pocket she was able to zip up. She took a bit of parachute cord and tied her Swiss Army knife around her neck, and tucked it inside her flight suit, and zipped that up too.
And while she was fiddling with her toys, Sally began shuddering.
‘Greg. My husband. Oh my God. They killed him. They just crushed his skull. The ape-men. Just like that. I saw them do it. It’s true, isn’t it?’
Emma put down her bits of kit with reluctance.
‘Isn’t it strange?’ Sally murmured. ‘Greg isn’t here. But I never thought to ask why he isn’t here. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I knew … Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’
‘No,’ Emma said, as soothing as she could manage. ‘Of course not. It’s very hard, a very hard thing to take –’
And then Sally just fell apart, as Emma had known, inevitably, she must. The three of them huddled together, in the rain, as Sally wept.
It was dark before Sally was cried out. Maxie was already asleep, his little warm form huddled between their two bodies.
The rain had stopped. Emma pulled down her rough canopy, and wrapped it around them.
Now Sally wanted to talk, whispering in the dark.
She talked of her holiday-of-a-lifetime in Africa, and how Maxie was doing at nursery school, another child, a daughter, at home, and her career and Greg’s, and how they had been considering a third child or perhaps opting for a frozen-embryo deferred pregnancy, pending a time when they might be less busy.
And Emma told her about her life, her career, about Malenfant. She tried to find the gentlest, most undemanding stories she could think of.
Like the one about their engagement, at the end of Malenfant’s junior year as a midshipman at the Naval Academy. He had received his class ring, and at the strange and formal Ring Dance she had worn his ring around her neck, while he carried her miniature version in his pocket. And then at the climax of the evening the couples took their turns to go to the centre of the dance floor and climb up under a giant replica of the class ring. Filled with youth and love and hope, they dipped their rings in a bowl of water from the seven seas, and exchanged the rings, and made their vows to each other …
Oh, Malenfant, where are you now?
Eventually they slept: the three of them, brought together by chance, lost in this strange quasi-Africa, now huddled together on the floor of a nameless forest. But Emma came to full wakefulness every time she heard a leaf rustle or a twig snap, and every time a predator howled, in the huge lands beyond this sheltering forest.
Tomorrow we have to make a proper shelter, she thought. We can’t sleep on the damn ground.
Shadow:
She woke early.
She turned on her back, stretching her long arms lazily. Her nest of woven branches was soft and warmed by her body heat, but where her skin was exposed to the cold, her hair prickled, standing upright. She found moist dew on her black fur, and she scooped it off with a finger and licked it.
Scattered through the trees she could see the nests of the Elf-folk, fat masses of woven branches with sleek bodies embedded, still slumbering.
She had no name. She had no need of names, nor capacity to invent them.
Call her Shadow.
The sky was growing light. She could see a stripe of dense pink, smeared along one horizon. Above her head there was a lid of cloud. In a crack in the cloud an earth swam, bright, fat, blue.
Shadow stared at the earth. It hadn’t been there last time she woke up.
Loose associations ran through her small skull: not thoughts, not memories, just shards, but rich and intense. And they were all blue. Blue like the sky after a storm. Blue like the waters of the river when it ran fat and high. Blue, blue, blue, clean and pure, compared to the rich dark green of night thoughts.
Blue like the light in the sky, yesterday.
Shadow’s memories were blurred and unstructured, a corridor of green and red in which a few fragments shone, like bits of a shattered sculpture: her mother’s face, the lightness of her own body as a child, the sharp, mysterious pain of her first bleeding. But nowhere in that dim green hall was there a flare of blue light like that. It was strange, and therefore it was frightening.
But memories were pallid. There was only the now, clear and bright: what came before and what would come after did not matter.
As the light gathered, the world began to emerge out of the dark green. Noise was growing with the light, the humming of insects and the whirring flight of bats.
Here, in this clump of trees high on an escarpment, she was at the summit of her world. The ground fell away to the sliding black mass of the river. The trees were scattered here, the ground bare and grey, but patches of green-black gathered on the lower slopes, gradually becoming darker and thicker, merging as they tumbled down the gullies and ravines that led to the river valley itself.
She knew every scrap of this terrain. She had no idea what lay beyond – no real conception that anything lay beyond the ground she knew.
The others were stirring now. Her infant sister, Tumble, sat up on the belly of their mother, Termite. Termite stretched, and one shapely foot raised, silhouetted against the sky.
Shadow slid out of her nest. The pliant branches rustled back to their natural positions. This was a fig tree, with vines festooned everywhere. Shadow found a dense cluster of ripe fruit, and began to feed.
Soon there was a soft rain all around her, as discarded skins and seeds fell from the lips of the folk, towards the ground.
Above her there was a sharp, sudden crack. She flinched, looking up. It was Big Boss. His teeth bared, without so much as a stretch, he leapt out of his nest and went leaping wildly through the trees, swaying the branches and swinging on the vines.
Everywhere people abandoned their nests, scrambling to get out of the way of Big Boss. The last peace of the night was broken by grunts and screams.
But one man wasn’t fast enough. It was Claw, Shadow’s brother, hindered by his need to favour his useless hand, left withered by a childhood bout of polio.
Big Boss crashed directly into the nest of the younger male, smashing it immediately. Claw, screeching, fell crashing through the branches and down to the ground.
Big Boss scrambled after him, down to the ground. He strutted back and forth, waving his fists. He shook the vegetation and threw rocks and bits of dead wood. Then he sat, black hair bristling thick over his hunched shoulders.
One by one, Big Boss’s acolytes approached him, weaker men he dominated with his fists and teeth and shows of anger. Big Boss welcomed them with embraces and brief moments of grooming.
Claw was one of the last, loping clumsily, his withered hand clutched to his belly. Shadow saw how his back was scratched and bleeding, a marker of his rude awakening. He bent and kissed Big Boss’s thigh. But Claw’s obeisance was rewarded only by a cuff on the side of his head, hard enough to send him sprawling.
The other men joined in, following their leader’s example, kicking and punching at the howling Claw – but each of them retreated quickly after delivering his blow.
Big Boss spread his lips in a wide grin, showing his long canines.
Now Termite strode into the little clearing, calm and assured, her infant clinging to the thick black hair on her back. Claw ran to her and huddled at his mother’s side, whimpering as if he was an infant himself.
One of the men pursued Claw, yelling. Like most of the men he was a head taller than Termite, and easily outweighed her. But Termite cuffed him casually, and he backed away.
Now Big Boss himself approached Termite. He slapped her, hard enough to make her stagger.
Termite stood her ground, watching Big Boss calmly.
With a last growl Big Boss turned away. He bent over and defecated explosively. Then he reached for leaves to wipe his backside, while his acolytes jostled to groom his long black fur.
Termite walked away, followed by Claw and her infant, seeking food.
The incident was over, power wielded and measured by all concerned.
Another day had begun in the forest of the Elf-folk.
Shadow, her long arms working easily, swung down to the ground to join her family.
The people lingered by the trees where they had slept. They sat with legs folded and groomed each other, picking carefully through the long black hairs, seeking dirt, ticks and other insects.
Shadow sat her little sister on her lap. Tumble squirmed and wriggled – but with an edge of irritation, for she had picked up bloodsucking ticks some days before. Shadow found some of the tiny, purplish creatures in the child’s scalp now. She plucked them away between delicate fingernails and popped them in her mouth, relishing the sharp tang of blood when they burst beneath her teeth.
All around her people walked, groomed, fed, locked into an intricate geometry of lust, loyalty, envy, power. The people were the most vivid thing in Shadow’s world; everything else was a blur, barely more noticed than the steady swell of her own breathing.
At eleven years old, Shadow was three feet tall. She had long legs under narrow hips, long, graceful arms, a slim torso, a narrow neck and shoulders. She walked upright. But her legs were a little splayed, her gait clumsy, and her long, strong arms were capable of carrying her high in the trees. Her rib cage was high and conical, and her skull was small, her mouth with its red lips prominent. And over pink-black skin, her body was covered with long black fur.
Her eyes were clear, light brown, curious.
A few days before, Shadow had begun the bleeding, for the first time in her life. Several of the men and boys, smelling this, had begun to pursue her. Even now a cluster of the boys pressed close to her, dragging clumsy fingers through her hair, their eyes bright. But Shadow desired none of them, and when they got too persistent she approached her mother, who growled deeply.
Termite herself was surrounded by a group of attentive men and adolescent boys, some of them displaying spindly erections. Termite submitted to the gentle probing of their fingers. Though she was growing old now, and some of her fur was shot through with silver, Termite was the most popular woman in the group, as far as the men were concerned. On some patches of her head and shoulders her fur had been worn away by the constant grooming; her small skull was all but hairless, her black ears prominent.
That allure, of course, made her one of the most powerful women. Just as the weaker men would compete for the friendship of Big Boss, so the women were ambitious to be part of Termite’s loose circle. Shadow – and Tumble, and even Claw – had special privileges, as Termite’s children, arising from that power.
And it was real power, the only power, even if the women had to endure the blows and bites of the powerful men. Everybody knew her mother and her siblings, and that was where loyalty lay; for nobody knew her father. No man, not even Big Boss, would have achieved his status without the backing of a powerful mother and aunts.
At last it was time to move on. Little Boss – the brother of Big Boss, his closest lieutenant – led off, working his way down the hillside towards the river. He paused frequently, watching nervously to be sure that Big Boss followed.
The people gave up their grooming and wandered after them.
The Elf-folk entered thicker swathes of forest. The day grew hot, the air oppressive in the greenery. The people walked easily, save where the vines and brambles grew too dense, and then they would use their powerful arms to climb into the trees. They moved slowly, stopping to feed wherever the opportunity arose.
Even at its most dense the forest was sparse. Many of the trees’ leaves were yellow, shrivelled and sickly, and some of the trees themselves were dead, no more than gaunt stumps with broken-off branches at their roots. There was much space between the big trees, and the gaps in the forest canopy allowed the sunlight to reach the ground, where shoots and bushes grew thickly.
Shadow, like the others, kept away from the more open clearings. Though her long slim legs carried her easily over the clear ground, the denser green of the forest pulled at her, while the blue-white open sky and green-brown undergrowth repelled her.
They came to a knot of low shrubs.
Termite lowered Tumble to the ground. This was a bush Termite knew well, and her experienced eyes had spotted that some of the leaves had been rolled into tubes, held together by sticky threads. When Shadow opened up such a tube she was rewarded by a wriggling caterpillar, which she popped into her mouth.
The three of them rested on the ground, relishing the treat.
Little Tumble snuggled up to her mother, seeking her nipples. Gently Termite pushed the child away. At first Tumble whimpered, but soon her pleading turned to a tantrum, and the little ball of fur ran in circles and thumped the ground. Her mother held her close, subduing her struggles, until she was calm. Tumble took some of the caterpillars her mother unpacked for her. But later, Tumble made a pretence of having eaten her fill, and began to groom her mother with clumsy attentiveness. Termite submitted to this as she fed – and pretended not to notice as Tumble worked her way ever closer to her nipple, at last stealing a quick suck.
Shadow stretched out on the grass, legs comfortably crossed. She plucked caterpillar leaves from the bushes with one hand, holding the other crooked behind her head.
The sky was a washed-out blue, but clouds were tumbling across it. She had a dim sense of the future: soon it would be dark, and it would rain, and she would get wet and cold. But she saw little further than that, little further than the bright sunny warmth of the sun and the softness of this patch of grass, and she relaxed, her thoughts warm and yellow.
She raised her free hand before her eyes. She stretched her fingers, making slats through which the sun peeked. She moved her hand back and forth, rapidly, making the sun flicker and dance.
Now, with a single graceful movement, she turned over and got to her knees. She gazed at the sharp shadow the sun cast on the leaf-strewn ground before her. She raised her hands, making the shadow do the same, and then she spread her fingers, making light shine through the hands of her shadow.
She got to her feet and began to whirl and dance, and the shadow, this other self, capered in response, its movements distorted and comical. Her dance was eerily beautiful.
The wind shifted, bringing a scent of smoke. Smoke, and meat.
Big Boss stood tall and peered into the green. His nostrils flared.
He rooted around on the ground until he found a cobble the size of his fist. He hurled the cobble against a large rock embedded in the ground, smashing it. Then, with some care, he fingered the debris, searching for flakes of the right size and sharpness.
He stood tall, hands full of sharp flakes, a small trickle of blood oozing from one finger. He issued his summoning cry – ‘Ai, ee!’ – and, without looking back, he began to stalk off to the west, the way the smoke had come from. His brother Little Boss and another senior man, Hurler, scurried to follow him, keeping a submissive few paces back.
Claw had been crouching in the grass. He stood up now, and took a few steps after the men, uncertainly.
Little Boss slapped him so hard in the back that Claw was sent sprawling on his chest.
But Hurler helped him get back to his feet with a fast, savage yank. Hurler, a big man with powerful hands and a deadly accuracy with thrown rocks, was Termite’s brother – Claw’s – uncle and so favoured him, more than the other men anyhow. The two of them trotted after Big and Little Boss.
As the men receded, Termite shrugged her slim shoulders and returned to her inspection of the shrubs.
Emma Stoney:
Emma clung to sleep as long as possible. When she could sleep no longer, she rolled on her back, stiff and cold. There was sky above her, an ugly lid of cloud.
Still here, she thought. Shit. And there was an unwelcome ache in her lower bowels.
Nothing for it.
She went behind a couple of trees close enough that she could still see her parachute canopy tent and stripped to her underwear. She took a dump, her Swiss Army knife dangling absurdly around her neck. The problem after that was finding a suitable wipe; the dried leaves she tried to use just crumbled in her hands.
Where am I? Answer came there none.
Maybe some kind of adrenaline rush had gotten her through yesterday. Today was going to be even worse, she thought. This morning she felt cold, stiff, dirty, lost, miserable and with a fear that had sunk deep into her gut.
She got dressed and kicked leaves over the, umm, deposit she’d left. We have got to build a latrine today.
Sally and Maxie, waking slowly, showed no desire to leave the forest. But Emma decided she ought to go say hello to the neighbours.
She stepped out of the forest.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was grey and solid and the grassy plain before her was bleak, uninviting. If she had not known otherwise she would have guessed it was uninhabited; the heapings of branches and stones seemed scarcely more than random.
And yet hominids people sat and walked, jabbered and argued, from a distance just as human as she was, every one of them as naked as a newborn. And they were talking English. The utter strangeness of that struck her anew.
I don’t want to be here, facing this bizarreness, she thought. I want to be at home, with the net, and coffee and newspapers, and clean clothes and a warm bathroom.
But it might not be long before she was begging at these hominids’ metaphorical table. She had no doubt that those tall, powerful qua-people had a much better ability to survive in this wilderness than she did; she sensed that might become very important, unless they were rescued out of here in the next few days. So she forced herself forward.
Some of the women were tending to nursing infants. Older children were wrestling clumsily and wordlessly, save for an occasional hoot or screech. The children seemed to her to have the least humanity; without the tall, striking, very human bodies of the adults, their low brows and flat skulls seemed more prominent, and they reminded her more of chimps.
Listening to the hominids yesterday, she had picked up a few of their functional names. The boy who had given her the caterpillar was called Fire. Right now Fire was tending the old woman on the ground, who was called Sing. He seemed to be feeding her, or giving her water. Evidence of kinship bonds, of care for the old and weak? It somewhat surprised Emma. But it was also reassuring, she thought, considering her own situation.
The largest man Stone, the dominant type who had groped Sally was sitting on the ground close to the smoking remains of the fire. He was picking through a pile of rocks. He was the leader, she figured the leader of the men anyhow.
She plucked up her courage and sat opposite him.
He glowered at her. His brown eyes, under a heavy lid of brow, were pits of hostility and suspicion. He actually raised his right fist at her, a mighty paw bearing a blunt rock.
But she sat still, her hands empty. Perhaps he remembered her. Or perhaps he was figuring out all over again that she was no threat. Anyhow, his hand lowered.
Seeming to forget her, he started working at the rocks again. He picked out a big lump of what looked like black glass; it must be obsidian, a volcanic glass. He turned it this way and that, inspecting it. His movements were very rapid, his gaze flickering over the rock surface.
His muscles were hard, his skin taut. His hair was tightly curled, but it was peppered with grey. His face would have passed in any city street so long as he wore a hat, anyhow, to conceal that shrivelled skull. But an Aladdin Sane zigzag crimson scar cut right across his face.
She thought he looked around fifty. Hard to tell in the circumstances.
He picked out another rock from his pile, a round pebble. He began to hammer at the obsidian, hard and confident. Shards flew everywhere, and for the first time Emma noticed that he had a patch of foliage over his lap, protecting his genitals from flying rock chips. He worked fast, confident, his eyes flickering – faster than a human would have, she thought, faster and more instinctively. It was less like watching the patient practising of a human craft than a fast-reaction sport, like tennis or soccer, where the body takes over.
He may not have a wide repertoire of skills, she thought. Maybe this is the one type of tool he can make. But there was nothing limited in what she saw, nothing incomplete; it was as efficient a process as eating or breathing. The contrast with the way the people had struggled to build their heaped-up tepees couldn’t have been more striking. How was it possible to be so smart about one thing, yet so dumb about another?
She felt her ideas adjust, her preconceptions dissolve. These people are not like me, she thought.
After a time, Stone abruptly stood up. He dropped his hammerstone, his lap cover, even the tool he had been making, and wandered away.
Emma stayed put.
Stone hunted around the grass, digging into the red dust beneath, picking out bits of rock or perhaps bone, discarding them where he found them. At last he seemed to have found what he wanted.
But then he was distracted by an argument between two of the younger men. He dropped the bone fragment and waded into what was fast becoming a wrestling match. Pretty soon all three of them were battling hard.
Others were gathering around, hooting and hollering. At last Stone floored one of the young men and drove off the other.
Breathing hard, sweating heavily enough to give him a pungent stink, he came back to the pile of rocks, where Emma waited patiently. When he got there he looked around for his bit of bone – but of course it had never made it this far. He bellowed, apparently frustrated, and got up again and resumed his search.
A human craftsman would have got all his tools together before he started, Emma supposed.
Stone came back with a fresh bit of bone. It was red, and bits of meat clung to it; Emma shuddered as she speculated where it might have come from. He used it to chip at the edge of his obsidian axe.
When he was done he dropped the improvised bone tool at his feet without another thought. He turned the axe over and over in his hands; it was a disc of shaped rock four inches across, just about right to fit into his powerful hand.
Then he hefted it and began to scrape at his neck with it.
My God, she thought. He’s shaving.
He saw her looking. ‘Stone Stone!’ he yelled. He turned away deliberately, suddenly as self-conscious as a teenager.
She got up and moved away.
Shadow:
The people were moving again, working deeper into the forest, seeking food. She spotted Termite and Tumble, walking hand-in-hand, and she followed them.
There had been a shower here. The vegetation was soaking, and droplets sprayed her as she pushed past bushes and low branches. But the droplets sparkled in the sun, and the wet leaves were a bright vivid green. The people’s black hair was shot with flashes of rust brown, smelling rich and damp.
Termite came to an ants’ nest, a mound punctured by small holes. She reached out and broke a long thin branch from a nearby bush. She removed the side branches and nibbled off the bark, leaving a long, straight stick half as long as her arm. She pushed one hand into the ants’ nest and scooped out dirt.
Soon the ants began to swarm out of the nest. Termite plunged her stick into the nest, waited a few heartbeats, and then withdrew it. It was covered with squirming ants. She slid the tool through her free hand so that she was left with a palm filled with crushed and wriggling ants, which she scooped into her mouth, crunching quickly. There was a strong acid smell. Then she returned her stick to the mound and waited for a fresh helping.
Shadow and the other women and children joined in the feast with sticks of their own. Occasionally they had to slap at their feet and thighs as the ants swarmed to repel the invaders; these were big, strong ants that could bite savagely. But Shadow’s stick was too spindly and it bent and finally snapped as she shoved it into the loose earth.
More people crowded around. The ants’ nest became a mass of jostling and poked elbows and slaps and screeching.
Shadow quickly tired of the commotion. She straightened up, brushed dirt from her legs, and slipped further into the forest.
She came to a tall palm. She thought she could see clusters of red fruit, high above the ground. Briskly she began to climb, her strong arms and gripping legs propelling her fast above the ground.
She found a cluster of fruit. She picked one, then another, stripping off the rich outer flesh, and letting the kernels fall with a whisper to the distant ground. This was one of the tallest trees in the forest. The sky seemed close here, the ground a distant place.
There were eyes, watching her.
She yelped and recoiled, gripping the palm’s trunk with her arms.
She saw a face. But it was not like her own. The head was about the size of Shadow’s, but there was a thick bony crest over the top of the skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were fixed. The body, covered in pale brown fur, was squat, the belly distended. Two pink nipples protruded from the fur, and an infant clung there, peering back at Shadow with huge pale eyes. The infant might have been a twin of Tumble, but already that bony skull had started to evolve its strange, characteristic superstructure.
Mother and child were Nutcracker-folk.
Emma Stoney:
All the tepee shelters had fallen down.
One younger man was struggling, alone, to hoist branches upright. It was Fire, the teenager-type who had gifted her the caterpillar. But nobody was helping him, so his branches had nothing to lean on, and they just fell over. Still he kept trying. At one point he even ran around his construction, trying to beat gravity, hoisting more branches before the others fell. Of course he failed. It was as if he knew what he wanted to build, but couldn’t figure out how to achieve it.
Cautiously, Emma stepped forward.
Fire was startled. He stumbled backwards. His branches fell with a crash.
She held her hands open and smiled. ‘Fire,’ she said. She pointed to herself. ‘Emma. Remember?’
At length he jabbered, ‘Fire Fire. Fire Emma.’
‘Emma, yes. Remember? You gave me the caterpillar.’ She pointed to her mouth.
His eyes widened. He ran away at startling speed, and came back with a scrap of what looked like potato. With impatient speed, he shoved it into her mouth. His fingers were strong, almost forcing her jaws open.
She chewed, feeling bruised, tasting the dirt on his fingers. The root was heavy and starchy. ‘Thank you.’
He grinned and capered, like a huge child. She noticed that in his excitement he had sprouted an erection. She took care not to look at it; some complications could wait for another day.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said. She walked around his pile of branches. She picked up a light-looking sapling and hoisted it over her shoulder until it was upright. Though her strength still seemed boosted, she struggled to hold the sapling in place.
Mercifully Fire quickly got the idea. ‘Fire, Emma, Fire!’ He ran around picking up more branches some of them thick trunks, which he lifted as if they were made of polystyrene and rammed them into place against hers.
The three or four branches propped each other up, a bit precariously, and the beginning of their makeshift tepee was in place. But, hooting with enthusiasm, Fire hurled more branches onto the tall conical frame. Soon the whole thing collapsed.
Fire shouted his disappointment. He did a kind of dance, kicking viciously at the branches. Then, with a kind of forgetful doggedness, he began to pick up the scattered branches once more.
Emma said, ‘I’ve a better idea.’ Raising her hands to make him wait, she jogged over to the muddy remnant of her parachute. She cut free a length of cord taking care not to show her Swiss Army knife to any of the hominids and hurried back.
Fire had, predictably, wandered away.
Emma squatted down on the ground to wait, as Fire dug more tubers from the ground, and spent some time throwing bits of stone, with startling accuracy, at a tree trunk, and went running after a girl ‘Dig! Dig, Fire, Dig!’ Then he happened to glance Emma’s way, appeared to remember her and their project, and came running across as fast as a ioo-metre record holder. Straightaway he began to pick up the branches again.
She motioned him to wait. ‘No. Look.’ She took one of the branches, and pulled another alongside, and then another. Soon he got the idea, and he helped her pile the branches close together. Now she wrapped her cord around them, maybe three feet below their upper extent, and tied a knot.
… Emma Stoney, frontier woman. What the hell are you doing? What if the knot slips or the cord breaks or your sad tepee just falls apart?
Well, then, she thought, I’ll just think of something else, and try again. And again and again.
All the time the bigger issues were there in her mind, sliding under the surface like a shark: the questions of where she was, how she had got here, how long it was going to be before she got home again. How she felt about Malenfant, who had stranded her here. How come these ape-folk existed at all, and how come they spoke English … But this was real, the red dust under her feet, the odd musk stink of the ape-boy before her, the hunger already gnawing at her belly. Right now there was nobody to take care of her, nobody but herself, and her first priority was survival. She sensed she had to find a way of working with these people. So far, in all this strange place, the only creature who had showed her any helpfulness or kindness at all was this lanky boy, and she was determined to build on that.
Find strength, Emma. You can fall apart later, when you’re safely back in your apartment, and all this seems like a bad dream.
She laboured to tie her knot tight and secure. When she was done, she backed away. ‘Up, up! Lift it up, Fire!’
With terrifying effortlessness he hoisted the three branches vertical. When he let go, they immediately crashed to the ground, of course, but she encouraged him to try again. This time she closed her hands around his, making him hold the branches in place, while she ran around pulling out the bases of the branches, making a pyramidal frame.
At last they finished up with a firmly secured frame, tied off at the top and it was a frame that held as Fire, with exhilaration and unnerving vigour, hurled more branches over it.
Now all I have to do, Emma thought, is make sure he remembers this favour.
‘… Emma! Emma!’
Emma turned. Sally came running out of the forest, with Maxie bundled in her arms.
Creatures pursued her.
They looked like humans – no, not human, like chimps, with long, powerful arms, short legs, covered in fine black-brown hair – but they walked upright, running, almost emulating a human gait. There were four, five, six of them.
Emma thought, dismayed, What now? What new horror is this?
One of the creatures, despite the relative clumsiness of his gait, was fast closing on Sally and the child.
Stone stepped forward. The old male stood stock still, reached back, and whipped his arm forward. His axe, spinning, flew like a Frisbee.
The axe sliced into the ape-thing’s face. He, it, was knocked flat, dead immediately. The hominids hooted their triumph and ran to the fallen creature.
The other ape-things ran back to the forest’s edge. They screeched their protest, but they weren’t about to come out of the forest to launch a counter-attack.
Sally kept running until she had reached Emma. They clutched each other.
‘Now we know why our friends keep out of the forest,’ Emma said.
Fire was standing beside them. ‘Elf-folk,’ Fire said, pointing at the ape-things. ‘Elf-folk.’
‘That’s what I saw yesterday,’ Sally murmured. ‘My God, Emma, they could have come on us while we slept. We’re lucky to be alive –’
‘They took the ice cream,’ Maxie said solemnly.
Sally patted his head. ‘It’s true. They took all your food, Emma. I’m sorry. And the damn canopy.’
Maxie said, ‘What are we going to eat now?’
It appeared the hominids had their own answer to this. From the spot where the ape-like ‘Elf’ had fallen came the unmistakable sounds of butchering.
Shadow:
For long moments Nutcracker-woman and Shadow gazed at each other, fearful, curious.
Then the Nutcracker-woman took a red fruit, stripped off the flesh, and popped the kernel into her mouth. She pressed up on her lower jaw with her free hand. Caught between her powerful molars, the shell neatly cracked in two. She extracted the nut’s flesh and pushed it into her infant’s greedy mouth.
Shadow’s fear evaporated. She took a fruit herself and stripped it of flesh. But when she tried to copy the Nutcracker-woman’s smooth destruction of the nut, she only hurt her jaw.
She spat out the shell and, cautiously, passed it to the Nutcracker-woman.
Just as hesitantly, the Nutcracker-woman took it. Her hand was just like Shadow’s, the back coated with fine black hairs, the palm pink.
Shadow had grown used to meeting Nutcracker-folk.
The Elf-folk favoured the fringes of the forest, for they could exploit the open land beyond, where meat could often be scavenged. The Nutcracker-folk preferred the dense green heart of the forest, where the vegetation grew richer. But as the forest shrank, the Elf-folk were forced to push deeper into the remaining pockets of green.
Sometimes there was conflict. The Nutcracker-folk were powerful and limber, more powerful than most Elf-folk, and they made formidable opponents.
All things considered, it was better to try to get along.
But now, as Shadow and the Nutcracker-woman amiably swapped fruit back and forth, there was a screech and crash at the base of the tree. The Nutcracker-woman peered down nervously, her child clinging to her shoulders.
It was the hunting party or rather, what was left of them. She saw the two powerful brothers, Big Boss and Little Boss, and there was her own brother, Claw, trailing behind. They were empty-handed, and there was no blood around their mouths, or on their pelts. Big Boss seemed enraged. His hair bristled, making him a pillar of spiky blackness. As he stalked along he lashed out at the trees, at his brother and especially at Claw, who was forced to flee, whimpering. But he needed to stay with the men, for he was in more danger from the predators of the forest than from their fists.
And there was no sign of Hurler, her uncle.
It was Hurler who had been killed by Stone’s obsidian axe.
Images of him rattled through Shadow’s memory. By tomorrow, though she would be aware of a loss, she would barely remember Hurler had existed.
The men abruptly stopped below Shadow’s tree. They peered upwards, silent, watchful.
The Nutcracker-woman had clamped her big hand over her baby’s mouth, and it struggled helplessly. But now a nut-shell slipped from the baby’s paw, falling with a gentle clatter to the ground.
Big Boss grinned, his hair bristling. Little Boss and Claw spread out around the base of the tree.
Shadow slithered down the tree trunk. The men ignored her.
The three of them clambered into nearby trees. Soon there was an Elf-man in each of the trees to which the Nutcracker-woman could flee.
She began to call out, a piercing cry of fear. ‘Oo-hah!’ Nutcracker-people were fierce and strong, and would come rushing to the aid of their own.
But if any Nutcrackers were near, they did not respond.
Suddenly Big Boss made a leap, from his tree to the Nutcracker-woman’s. The Nutcracker-woman screeched. She leapt to Claw’s tree, her big belly wobbling.
But Claw, small as he was, was ready for her. As the Nutcracker-woman scrambled to get hold of a branch, Claw grabbed her infant from her.
He bit into its skull, and it died immediately.
The Nutcracker-woman screamed, and hurled herself towards Claw. But already, with his kill over his shoulder, Claw was scurrying down the tree trunk to the ground. Blood smeared around his mouth, he held up his limp prize, crying out with triumph.
But Big Boss and Little Boss converged on him. With a casual punch, Little Boss knocked Claw to the dirt, and Big Boss grabbed the infant. The two of them huddled over the carcass. With firm strong motions, they began to dismember it, twisting off the infant’s limbs one by one as easily as plucking leaves from a branch. When Claw came close, trying to get a share of the meat, he was met by a punch or a kick. He retreated, screeching his anger.
In the tree above, the Nutcracker-woman could only watch, howling: ‘Hah! Oo-hah!’
Claw came up to the men time and again, pulling at their shoulders and beating their backs.
A powerful blow from Big Boss now sent Claw sprawling. Clutching his chest, he groaned and lay flat.
Shadow approached her brother. She held out a hand, fingers splayed, to groom him, calm him.
He turned on her.
There was blood on his mouth, and his hair bristled around him, and his eyes were crusted with tears. He punched her temple.
She found herself on the ground. The colours of the world swam, yellow leaching into the green.
Now Claw stood over her, breathing hard. He had an erection.
She reached for him.
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard, so that her fingers were bent back. She cried out as bones bent and snapped.
Then he walked around her, legs splayed, erection sticking out of his fur. He grabbed at the trees and waved branches at her.
She understood the signs he was making. She knew what he wanted, in his frustration, in his rage. But he was her brother. The thought of him lying on her filled her head with blackness, her throat with bile.
She turned over and tried to stand. But when she put her injured hand on the ground, pain flared, and she fell forward.
He stamped hard on her back. She was driven flat into the undergrowth. She felt his hands on her ankles. He dragged her back towards him and pulled her legs apart. He was stronger than she was; sprawled face-down on the ground, she could not fight him.
His shadow fell over her, looming.
In another bloody heartbeat he was inside her. He screamed, in pain or pleasure. Shadow called for her mother, but she was far away.
Emma Stoney:
The days here lasted about thirty hours. Emma timed them with her wristwatch and a stick stuck in the ground to track shadows.
Thirty hours. No possibility of a mistake.
Not Earth, she thought reluctantly. But that thought was unreal. Absurd.
She knocked over her stick and took her watch off her wrist and stowed it in a pocket, so she wouldn’t have to look at it.
After the Elf attack, the three of them stayed on the open plain.
But every morning it was strange, disorienting, to wake among the hominids. Whichever of them woke first would take one look at the strangers and hoot and holler in alarm. Soon they would all be awake, all of them yelling and brandishing their fists, and Emma and the others would have to cower away, waiting for the storm to pass. At last, somebody would recognize them Fire, or Stone, or one of the younger women. ‘Em-ma. Sal-ly.’ After that the others would gradually calm down.
But Emma would have sworn that some of them never regained their memories of the day before, that every day they woke up not recognizing Emma and the others. It seemed they came awake with the barest memory of the detail of their lives before, as if every day was like a new birth.
Emma wasn’t sure if she pitied them for that, or envied them.
The days developed a certain routine. Emma and Sally worked to keep themselves clean, and Maxie; they would rinse out their underwear they had only one set each, the clothes they had arrived in and scrub the worst of the dirt off the rest of their clothes and gear.
The women had precisely two tampons between them. When they were gone, they laboured to improvise towels from bits of cloth.
As evening drew in Emma and little Maxie would help build the hominids’ haphazard fire by throwing twigs and branches onto it. Paying dues, Emma thought; making sure we earn our place in the warmth.
In the dark the hominids gathered close to the fire, she supposed for safety and warmth. But they didn’t form into anything resembling a circle, as humans would. There were little knots of them, men testing their strength against each other, women with their children, pairs coupling with noisy (and embarrassing) enthusiasm. But there was no story-telling, no singing, no dancing. They even ate separately, each hunched over her morsel, as if fearful of having it stolen.
The group did not have the physical grammar of a group bound by language, Emma thought. This was not a true hearth. Their bits of words, their proto-language, were surely a lot closer to the screeches of chimps, or even the songs of birds, than the vocalizations of humans. Though the Runners huddled together for security, they lived their lives as individuals, pursuing solitary projects, each locked forever inside her own head.
They aren’t human, Emma realized afresh, however much they might look like it. And this wasn’t a community. It was more like a herd.
As night fell, Emma and the others would creep into the shelter she had made with Fire. A few of the hominids followed them, mothers with nursing infants. Maxie cried and complained at the pungent stink of their never-washed flesh. But Emma and Sally calmed him, and themselves, assuring each other that they were surely safer here than in the open, or in the forest.
One child, looking no more than five or six years old in human terms, fell ill. Her eyelids, cheeks, nose and lips were encrusted with sores. The child was skinny, and was evidently in distress; her gestures were faint, her movements listless.
‘I think it’s yaws,’ Sally said. ‘I’ve seen it upriver, in Africa … It’s related to syphilis. But it’s transmitted by flies, who carry it from wound to wound. That’s where the first signs show: little bumps in the corners of your eyes, or your nostrils, where the flies go to suck your moisture.’
‘What’s the cure?’
‘A shot of Extencilline. Safeguards you for life. But we don’t have any.’
Emma rummaged through her medical pocket. ‘What about Floxapen?’
‘Maybe. But you’re crazy to use it up on them. We’re going to need it ourselves. We’ll get ulcers. We need it.’
Emma struggled to read the directions on the little bottle. She found a scrap of meat, embedded a pill in it, and fed it to the child. It was hard to hold her hand near that swollen, grotesque face.
The next morning, she did the same. She kept it up until the Floxapen was gone. It seemed to her the child was getting gradually better.
Maybe it helped the Runners accept them. She wasn’t sure if they understood what she was doing, if they saw the cause-and-effect relationship between her treatment and any change in the girl’s condition.
Sally didn’t try to stop her. But Emma could see she was silently resentful at what she regarded as a waste of their scarce resources. It didn’t help relations between them.
Five or six days after their arrival, she woke to find shards of deep blue sky showing through the loosely stacked branches above her. She threw off her parachute-silk blanket and crawled out of the shelter’s rough opening.
It was the first time the sky had been clear since she had got here. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face. The sky was a rich beautiful blue, and it was scattered with clouds, and it was deep. She saw low cumulus clouds, fat and grey and slow, and higher cirrus-like clouds that scudded across the sky, and wispy traces even above that: layers of cloud that gave her an impression of tallness that she had rarely, if ever, seen on Earth.
She tried to orient herself. If the sun was that way, at this hour, she was looking east. And when she looked to the west oh, my Lord there was a Moon: more than half-full, a big fat beautiful bright Moon.
… Too big, too fat, too bright. It had to be at least twice the diameter of the pale grey Moon she was used to. And it was no mottled grey disc, like Luna. This was a vibrant dish of colour. Much of it was covered with a shining steel-blue surface that glimmered in the light of the sun. Elsewhere she saw patches of brown and green. At either extreme of the disc at the poles, perhaps she saw strips of blinding white. And over the whole thing clouds swirled, flat white streaks and stripes and patches, gathered in one place into a deep whirlwind knot.
Ocean: that was what that shining steel surface must be, just as the brown-green was land. That wasn’t poor dead Luna: it was a planet, with seas and ice caps and continents and air.
And she quickly made out a characteristic continent shape on that brightly lit quadrant, almost bare of cloud, baked brown, familiar from schoolbook studies and CNN reports and Malenfant’s schoolkid slideshows. It was Africa, quite unmistakably, the place she had come from.
That was no ‘Moon’. That was Earth.
And if she was looking at Earth, up in the sky, her relentlessly logical mind told her, then she couldn’t be on Earth any more. ‘Stands to reason,’ she murmured.
It made sense, of course: the different air, the lightness of walking, these alien not-quite humans running around everywhere. She had known it the whole time, on some level, but she hadn’t wanted to face it.
But, if not on Earth, where was she? How had she got here? How was she ever going to get home again? All the time she had been here, she realized, she had got not one whit closer to answering these most basic questions.
Now a shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. A new cloud was driving overhead, flat, thick, dark.
Sally was standing beside her. ‘They talk English.’
‘What?’
‘The flat-heads. They talk English. Just a handful of words, but it is English. Remember that. They surely didn’t evolve it for themselves.’
‘Somebody must have taught it to them.’
‘Yes.’ She turned to Emma, her eyes hard. ‘Wherever we are, we aren’t the first to get here. We aren’t alone here, with these apes.’
She’s right, Emma realized. It wasn’t much, but it was a hope to cling to, a shred of evidence that there was more to this bizarre experience than the plains and the forests and the hominids.
Emma peered into the sky, where Earth was starting to set.
Malenfant, where are you?
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant parked at the Beachhouse car park. Close to the Kennedy Space Center, this was an ancient astronaut party house that NASA had converted into a conference centre.
Malenfant, in his disreputable track suit, found the path behind the house. He came to a couple of wooden steps and trotted down to the beach itself. The beach, facing the Atlantic to the east, was empty, as far as he could see. This was a private reserve, a six-mile stretch of untouched coastline NASA held back for use by astronauts and their families and other agency personnel.
It wasn’t yet dawn.
He stripped off his shoes and socks and felt the cool, moist sand between his toes. Tiny crabs scuttled across the sand at his feet, dimly visible. He wondered whether they had been disturbed by the new Moonlight, like so many of the world’s animals. He stretched his hams, leaning forward on one leg, then the other. Too old to skip your stretching, Malenfant, no matter what else is on your mind.
The Red Moon was almost full the first full Moon since its appearance, and Emma’s departure. A month already. The light cast by the Red Moon was much brighter than the light of vanished silvery Luna, bright enough to wash out all but the brightest stars, bright enough to turn the sky a rich deep blue but it was an eerie glow, neither day nor night. It was like being in a movie set, Malenfant thought, some corny old 1940s musical with a Moon painted on a canvas sky.
Malenfant hated it all: the light, the big bowl of mystery up there in the sky. To him the Red Moon was like a glowing symbol of his loss, of Emma.
Breathing deep of the salty ocean air, he jogged through gentle dunes, brushing past thickets of palmetto. It wasn’t as comfortable a jog as it used to be: the beach had been heavily eroded by the Tide, and it was littered with swathes of sea-bottom mud, respectably large rocks, seaweed and other washed-up marine creatures not to mention a large amount of oil smears and garbage, some of it probably emanating from the many Atlantic wrecks. But to Malenfant the solitude here was worth the effort of finding a path through the detritus.
It had been another sleepless night. He was consumed with his desire to reach the Red Moon.
Frustrated by the reception his proposals were receiving at NASA Headquarters in Washington, he had decided to take his schemes, his blueprints and models and Barco shows, around the NASA centres, to Ames and Marshall and Kennedy and Johnson, trying to drum up grass-roots support, and put pressure on the senior brass.
We can do this. We’ve been to the Moon before a Moon, anyhow and this new mother is a lot more forgiving than old Luna. Now we have an atmosphere to exploit. No need to stand on your rockets all the way from orbit; you can glide to the ground … We can throw together a heavy-lift booster from Shuttle components in months. That one the challenge for Marshall, where von Braun had built his Moon rockets. For Kennedy and Johnson, where the astronauts worked: We have whole cadres of trained, experienced and willing pilots, specialists and mission controllers itching to take up the challenge of a new Moon. Hell, I’ll go myself if you’ll let me … He had appealed to the scientists, too: the geologists and meteorologists and even the biologists who suddenly had a whole new world to study: It will be a whole new challenge in human spaceflight, a world with oceans and an atmosphere an oxygen atmosphere, by God just three days away. It’s the kind of world we were hoping we might find when we sent our first fragile ships out on the ocean of space half a century ago. And who knows what we’ll discover there …
And then there were the groups he had come to think of as the xeno-ologists: the biologists and philosophers and astronomers and others who, long before the sudden irruption of the Red Moon, had considered the deeper mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Even if not, why does it seem that we are alone? If we were to meet others what would they be like?
Come on, people. Our Moon disappeared, and was replaced by another. How the hell? Can this possibly be some natural phenomenon? If not, who’s responsible? Not us, that’s for sure. The greatest mystery of this or any other age is hanging up there like some huge Chinese lantern. Shouldn’t we go take a look?
But, to his dismay and surprise, he had gotten no significant support from anybody save the wacko UFO-hunting fringe types, who did him more harm than good. NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was working on a couple of unmanned orbital probes and a lander to go visit the Red Moon. But that was it. The notion of sending humans to Earth’s new companion was definitively out of the question.
So he had been told, gently but firmly, by Joe Bridges.
‘In these road shows of yours you underestimate the magnitude of the task, Malenfant. Whether you’re doing that deliberately or not isn’t for me to say. We know diddley about the structure of the Red Moon’s atmosphere, which is somewhat essential data before you even begin to develop your gliding lander. And then what about the cost and schedule implications of putting together your “Big Dumb Booster” a brand-new man-rated heavy-lift launcher, for God’s sake? Our analysis predicts a schedule of years and a cost of maybe a hundred billion bucks. We just don’t have that kind of money, Malenfant. And NASA can’t go asking for it right now. Get your head out of your ass and take a look around. The Tide. The human race has other priorities …’
The first sunlight began to seep into the Atlantic horizon, smears of orange and pink banishing the Red Moon’s unnatural light. Malenfant’s calves were beginning to tingle, and he could feel his breathing deepening, his heart starting to pound.
Too long since I did this.
He had gotten hooked on running in the dawn light during the preparation for his first spaceflight. Emma had complained that he was spending even less time with her, but as long as he crept out of bed without waking her she had seemed to forgive him. But then there always had been a lot she had had to forgive him for. Is that why I want to reach her just so I can say I’m sorry? Well, – is that so bad? Or is it selfish – do I just want to get to her so I can project even more of my own shit onto her?…
Emma!
He pounded on, the moist sand cold under every footstep. As his blood pumped he felt the structure of his thoughts dissolve, his obsessive night-time round of planning and worrying and agonizing over I-should-have-said and I-should-have-done, all of it washing away. The main reason to exercise, he thought: it stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal.
It was the only respite he got from being himself.
He’d meant to run a couple of miles before doubling back. But when he reached his turn-back point he spotted something on the beach, maybe a mile further south: blocky, silhouetted, very large, returning crumpled orange highlights to the approaching sun. A beached whale? The Tide had played hell with migration patterns. No, too angular for that. A wreck, then?
On impulse he continued on down the beach.
The washed-up object was the size of a small house, twenty-five or thirty feet high. It was heavily eroded, its walls sculpted by wind and water into pits and pillars. When Malenfant stood at its foot the sea breeze that washed over it was distinctly colder.
He ran his hand over its surface. Under stringy seaweed he found a grey, pitted surface, cold and slick under his palm. Ice, of course. The dawn light was still dim, but he could make out the cold clean blue-white shine of the harder ice beneath. He wondered how long the berg would sit here before it melted into the sand.
It was here because of the Tide.
The first few days had been the worst, when Earth’s oceans, subject to a sudden discontinuous shock, had sloshed like water in a bathtub. Millions of square miles of coastal lowland had been scoured. In some places, pushed by currents or channelled by sea bottoms, the oceans had spawned waves several hundred feet high, walls of water that had crushed everything in their paths.
After that, with twenty times the mass of Luna, the Red Moon raised daily tides twenty times as high as before – roughly anyhow; the new Moon’s spin complicated the complex gravitational dance of the worlds.
The coastlines of the world had been drastically reshaped. The English Channel was being widened as the soft white chalk of the lands that bordered it, including Dover’s white cliffs, was worn away. Even rocky coastlines like Maine were being eroded. The lowest tides on the planet used to be in the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere: now those tides of two feet or less had become forty feet, and around the shores of the Mediterranean many communities, with roots dating back to the dawn of civilization, had been smashed and worn away in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile the tides had forced their way into the mouths of many of the world’s rivers, making powerful bores a hundred feet high, and vast floodplains filled and drained with each ebb and flow, drowning some of the planet’s most fertile land in salt water.
People had fled inland, a secondary tide of misery, away from the devastated coasts. Already there had been too many deaths even to count, from flooding and tsunamis and ’quakes – and there were surely many more to come, as the displaced populations succumbed to disease, and flooded-out farmers failed to return a crop, and as the wars broke out over remaining stocks.
Meanwhile, as the polar seas flexed, titanic rafts of ice broke away from the shelves of Antarctica and the glaciers of Alaska and Greenland. The larger bergs broke up in the tempestuous seas, but many of them survived to the Equator, filling the oceans, already all but impassable, with an additional hazard. And so bergs like this one were now common sights at all latitudes on the seaboards of the Atlantic and Pacific. In some places they were actually being mined to make up for the disrupted local supplies of clean fresh water. Always a silver lining, Malenfant thought sourly.
He stripped off his sweaty track suit and ran naked into the surf. Deeply mixed by the Tide with the waters of the deep ocean, the sea was icy cold and very salty, stinging when it splashed his eyes and the scar tissue on his healing arm. He took care not to go far out of his depth; he could feel a strong undercurrent as the sea drew back.
He swam a few strokes and then lay on his back, studying the sky, buoyant in the salty water.
The Red Moon was fat and swollen in the sky above him. Though it had (somehow) inserted itself into the same orbit as the old, vanished Moon, it was more than twice Luna’s diameter, as large in area as five old Moons put together – and a lot more than five times as bright, because of its reflective cloud and water.
And this morning, the Red Moon was blue. The hemisphere facing him showed a vast, island-strewn ocean, blue-black and cloud-littered, with the shining white of ice caps at the northern and southern extremes. The Red Moon’s north pole was tilted towards Earth by ten degrees or so, and Malenfant could see a huge high-pressure system sitting over the pole, a creamy swirl of cloud. But dark bands streaked around the equator, clouds of soot and smoke.
Malenfant, for all his personal animosity, admitted that the new Moon was hauntingly lovely. It even looked like a world: obviously three-dimensional, with that shading of atmosphere at the sunlit limb, and sun casting a big fat highlight on its wrinkled ocean skin, as if it were some immense bowling ball. Poor Luna had been so dust-choked that its scattered light had made it look no more spherical than a painted dinner plate.
Malenfant, understandably obsessive, had kept up with the evolving science of the Red Moon.
The new Moon turned on its axis relative to Earth – unlike departed, lamented Luna with – a ‘day’ of about thirty hours, so that Earthbound watchers were treated to views of both sides. The other hemisphere was dominated by the worldlet’s main landmass: a supercontinent, some called it, a roughly circular island-continent with a centre red as baked clay, and fringed by grey-green smears that might be forests. The Red Moon was hemispherically asymmetric, then: like Mars and Luna, unlike Earth and Venus.
That great continent was pitted by huge, heavily eroded impact craters: to Malenfant they were an oddly pleasing reminder of true, vanished Luna. And the centre of the supercontinent was marked by a single vast volcano that thrust much of the way out of the atmosphere. Its immense, shallow flanks, as seen in the telescope, were marked at successively higher altitudes by (apparent) rings of vegetation types, what appeared to be glaciers, and then by bare rock, giving it to terrestrial observers something of the look of a shooting target. (And so the commentators had called it Bullseye.)
The Red Moon’s mightiest river rose on the flanks of the Bullseye. Perhaps that great magma upwelling had lifted and broken ancient aquifers. Or perhaps air uplifted by the great mountain was squeezed dry of its water by altitude. Anyhow the river snaked languidly across a thousand miles to the eastern coast, where it cut through a mountain chain there to reach the sea at a broad delta.
There were mountains on both east and west coasts of the supercontinent. They were presumably volcanoes. Those on the east coast appeared to be dormant; they were heavily eroded, and they seemed to cast a rain shadow over the desiccated interior of the continent. There was, however, a comparatively lush belt of vegetation between the mountains and the coast. The commentators had called it the Beltway. The greenery pushed its way into the interior of the continent in a narrow strip along the valley of that great river, which was a Nile for this small world.
But the mountains on the west coast were definitely not dormant. Presumably prompted by rock tides induced by Earth’s gravity field, they had been observed to begin erupting a few days after the Red Moon’s arrival in orbit around Earth.
They must have been spectacular eruptions. Thick, dense rock near the surface appeared to have blocked the magma flows, bottling up increasing pressure before yielding explosively like a champagne cork flying out of a bottle. On Earth, such stratovolcanoes – like Mount Fuji, Mount Rainier – could eject debris miles into the air. On the Moon the volcanoes had blown debris clear of the planet altogether. Meanwhile vast quantities of dust and gases had been pumped into the atmosphere, to spread in thick bands around much of the Moon’s middle latitudes.
There was a great deal you could tell about the Red Moon, even from a quarter-million miles, with telescopes and spectrometers and radar, as the two hemispheres conveniently turned themselves up for inspection. For instance, those oceans really were water. The temperature range was right – as you’d expect since the Moon shared Earth’s orbit around the sun – and examination of the visible and infra-red spectra showed that the clouds’ caps were made of water vapour, just the right amount to have evaporated off the oceans.
The Red Moon’s surface gravity was some two-thirds Earth’s – a lot more than Luna’s, and, crucially, enough for this miniature planet to have retained all the essential ingredients of an Earthlike atmosphere: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, water vapour, carbon dioxide – unlike poor barren Luna. So the Red Moon had water oceans and a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
Already the study of the Red Moon had revolutionized the young science of planetology. With a quarter of Earth’s mass – but four times the mass of Mars, some twenty times the mass of Luna – the Red Moon was a planet in its own right, intermediate in size between the Solar System’s small and large denizens, and so a good test-bed for various theories of planetary formation and evolution.
It differed in key ways from Earth. Because it was so much smaller, it must have started its formation (wherever that had occurred) with a much smaller supply of heat energy than Earth. And that inner heat had been rapidly dissipated through its surface.
Like a shrivelled orange, the Red Moon’s rind was thick. Probably aeons ago, the tectonic plates fused, and continents no longer slid over its face. There was no continental drift, no tectonic cycling, no oceanic ridges. Unlike Earth, the Moon’s uncycled surface was very ancient; and that was why the interior of the continent bore those huge eroded craters, the scars left by immense impacts long ago.
And that was why the Bullseye was so vast. The huge shield mountain had probably formed over a fountain of magma erupting through a flaw in the crust layers. The crust beneath it must have been held in place over the flaw for hundreds of millions of years – so it more resembled Mars’s Olympus Mons than, say, Earth’s Hawaiian islands.
But there was more than geology up there. On the Red Moon, it appeared, there was life.
The air was Earthlike, containing around a sixth oxygen – a smaller proportion than Earth’s atmosphere, but difficult to explain away by non-living processes. It hadn’t taken long to establish that the green-grey pigment that stained the fringes of the supercontinent and its wider river valleys, as well as the shallower sections of the world ocean, was chlorophyll, the green of plants. There were other fingerprints of a living world: an excess of methane in the air, for example, put there perhaps by bacteria in bogs, or burning vegetation, or even the farts of Moon-calves. Though some scientists remained sceptical – and though nobody could say for sure if the Red Moon harboured anything like bogs or bacteria or cows – most people seemed to concur that there was indeed life on the Red Moon, life of some sort.
But was there intelligence?
Nobody had detected any structured radio signals. There had been no response to various efforts to signal to the Red Moon using radio and TV and laser, not to mention a few wacko methods, like the cutting of a huge right-angled triangle of ditches into the Saharan desert filled with burning oil.
But what were the mysterious lights that flickered over the night lands? Most observers claimed they were forest fires caused by lightning or drought. Perhaps, perhaps not. Could the streaming ‘wakes’ sometimes visible on the great oceans be the wakes of ships, or were they simply peculiar meteorological features? And what about the geometrical traces – circles, rectangles, straight lines – that some observers claimed to have made out in clearings along the coasts and river valleys of the Red Moon’s single huge continent? What were they but evidence of intelligence?
And if any of these signs were artificial, what kind of being might live up there to make them?
Malenfant was willing to admit that one manned expedition could do little to probe the mysteries of a world with fully half the surface area of Earth. But there were mysteries that no amount of remote viewing could unravel. The fact was, the most powerful telescope could not resolve an individual human being up there.
Malenfant was never going to find Emma by staring up from Earth.
But at this time of crisis, nobody wanted to see Malenfant’s drawings of rocket boosters and gliding spaceships.
Of course there was the question of resources, of priorities. But Malenfant suspected that people were shying away from dealing with the most fundamental issue here: the existence of the Red Moon itself. It was just too big, too huge, impossible to rationalize or grasp or extrapolate. The Wheel was different. A blue circle in the air, a magic doorway? Yes, we can imagine ways we might do that, even if we can’t think why we should. Peculiar-looking human beings falling out of the air? Yes, we know about the plasticity of the genome; we can even imagine time travel, the retrieval of our flat-browed ancestors. But what kind of power hangs a new Moon in our sky?
He didn’t last long in the water; it was too cold. He took a few brisk strokes until the water was shallow enough for him to walk. He splashed out of the surf, shivering, briskly dried himself on his shirt, and began to pull on his pants.
There was somebody standing beside the beached berg fragment, just a slim shadow in the grey dawn light, watching him.
Fire:
Maxie is running around Fire’s feet. ‘Hide and seek. Hide and seek, Fire. Hide and seek.’
Fire stares at Maxie. To him the boy is a blur of movement and noise, unpredictable, incomprehensible, fascinating.
Maxie has leaves on his head. They flutter away as he runs. Sally puts them back on. ‘No, Maxie,’ she says. ‘Be careful of the sun.’
‘Hide and seek, hide and seek.’ He stands still. His hands cover his eyes. ‘Hands, Fire, eyes, Fire.’ His hands cover his eyes.
Fire puts his hands over his eyes. It is dark. The night is dark. He starts to feel sleepy.
Maxie calls, ‘Eight nine ten ready! Fire Fire Fire!’
Fire lowers his hands. It is not night. The sunlight is bright. The world is red and green and blue. He blinks.
Maxie has gone away.
Fire sees Sing on her bower of leaves. He walks towards her. He has forgotten Maxie.
Maxie is at his feet. ‘Here I am, here I am!’ Maxie stamps his foot. Red dust rises and sticks to Maxie’s white flesh. ‘You have to try, you silly. You have to play it right. Try again, try again. Eyes, Fire, hands, Fire.’ He covers his eyes.
As the sun climbs into the sky, the game goes on. Every time Maxie disappears Fire forgets about him. Every time he comes back Fire is surprised to see him.
Fire grows hungry. Fire thinks of himself in the forest, eating nuts and berries and leaves. Fire lopes towards the forest.
‘Come back, come back, you nasty!’ Maxie falls to the dirt and howls.
Emma comes running to Fire. ‘Fire, are you going to the forest? Can I come with you?’
Fire. Forest. That is what Fire hears.
‘Em-ma,’ he says.
Emma has blue hair. Fire frowns. He thinks of Emma with brown hair. Fire’s hand touches Emma’s hair. The blue hair is smooth like skin. It has bits of white vine stuck to it.
Emma says, ‘It’s just a hat, Fire. Just parachute silk.’ She puts the blue hair back on her head and pulls the vines under her chin. ‘Can I come to the forest?’
There is something on Emma’s chest. It is bright red. Berries are bright red. Fire touches the berry. It is hard. It is stuck to a vine. The vine is around Emma’s neck. His teeth bite the berry-thing. It is hard, like a nut. His teeth cannot break the shell.
Emma pulls it back from him. ‘It’s my knife, Fire. I showed you yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. Look.’ Emma touches her knife. When she shows him again, there is a red part, and a part like a raindrop. There is a spot of light behind the raindrop, on Emma’s hand. Emma is smiling. ‘See, Fire? The lens? Remember this?’
Fire sees the raindrop and the light. He hoots.
Emma steps away. ‘Emma hungry. Emma forest. Fire forest. Emma Fire forest.’
Fire thinks of Emma and Fire in the forest, gathering berries, eating berries. He smiles. ‘Emma Fire forest. Berries trees nuts.’
Emma smiles. ‘Good. Let’s go.’ She takes his hand.
The forest is a huge mouth. It is dark and green and cool.
He waits at the edge of the forest. His ears listen, his eyes see. The forest is still.
His legs walk into the wood. His feet explore the ground, finding soft bare earth. His arms and his torso and his head duck around branches. He is not thinking of how his body is moving.
His eyes learn to see the dark. His nose smells, his ears listen. He is not aware of time passing, of the sun climbing in the sky, of the dappled bits of light at his feet sliding over the forest-floor detritus.
He sees a pitcher plant. It is a big purple sac, high above his head. His hands pull it down. There is water in the pitcher plant. There are insects in the water. His hand scoops out water and insects. He drinks the water. It tastes sweet. His teeth crunch the insects.
Emma is here. He has forgotten she was here. He gives her the pitcher plant.
Her hand lifts water and bugs to her mouth. She coughs. She spits out insects.
His eyes see a cloudberry plant. It has white flowers and pink fruit. His hands pull the fruit from the plant, avoiding the spiky brambles. His mouth chews the berries.
Here is Emma. Her hands explore the blue skin on her legs. Now she has a soft shining thing in her hands. Her hands open a mouth in the shining thing. She feeds the mouth with berries. He can see them in the stomach of the shining thing.
She holds up the shining thing. ‘This is a bag, Fire. These berries are for Sally and Maxie. I can carry more in the bag than I can with my hands. You see? …’
He thinks of Sally eating berries. He thinks of Maxie eating berries.
He thinks of Sing, on her bower. He thinks of Sing eating berries. His hands pluck berries. His mouth wants to eat the berries, but he thinks of Sing eating them. He keeps the berries in his hands.
His legs move him on. Soon he forgets about Sing, and his mouth eats the berries.
He finds a chestnut tree. It has leaves the size of his hands and sticky buds and nuts. Beneath the chestnut something white is growing. His hands and eyes explore it. It is a morel, a mushroom. His hands pull great chunks of it free, and lift them to his mouth.
Emma is here. Her hands are taking nuts from the chestnut. The nuts want to hurt Emma. He slaps her hands so they stop taking the nuts.
His ears hear a grunt, a soft rustle.
He stops thinking. He stops moving. His ears listen, his nose smells, his eyes flicker, searching.
His eyes see a dark form, squat. It has arms that move slowly. He sees eyes glinting in the green gloom. He sees ears that listen. He sees orange-brown hair, a fat heavy gut, a head with huge cheeks, a giant jaw.
It is a Nutcracker-man.
The Nutcracker-man grunts. He lifts pistachio nuts to his huge mouth. Fire can see his broad, worn teeth, glinting in the dappled light. The Nutcracker-man grinds the nuts between his giant teeth.
Fire’s mouth fills with water, to tell him it wants the nuts.
Fire stands up suddenly. He rattles branches and throws twigs. ‘Nutcracker-man. Ho!’
The Nutcracker-man screeches, startled. His arms lift him into a tree and swing him away, crashing through foliage, bits of nut falling from his mouth.
Fire pushes through the brush. His hands cram the nuts into his grateful mouth.
Emma is here. Her hands are taking nuts and putting them into the mouth of the shining thing.
His nose can still smell the dung of the Nutcracker-man. He thinks of many Nutcracker-folk, out in the shadows of the forest.
His legs take him away from the place with the pistachio nuts, back towards the open daylight.
Emma follows him. But he has forgotten Emma. He remembers the nuts and the fungus and the Nutcracker-man.
Reid Malenfant:
He kept right on pulling on his pants. When he was done, his breath misting slightly, he walked up the slope of the eroded beach.
His silent observer was a woman: little more than a girl, really, slim, composed, dark. She was wearing a nondescript jumpsuit. She was very obviously Japanese.
‘I know you,’ he said.
‘We have not met.’ Her voice was deep, composed. ‘But, yes, I know you too, Reid Malenfant.’
‘Just Malenfant,’ he said absently, trying to place her. Then he snapped his fingers. ‘You were on Station when –’
‘– when the Moon changed. Yes. My name is Nemoto.’ She bowed. ‘I am pleased to meet you.’
He bowed back. He felt awkward. He couldn’t care less if she had glimpsed his wrinkly ass. But he wished, oddly, that he had his shoes on.
He looked up and down the beach. He saw no sign of transportation, not so much as a bicycle. ‘How did you get here?’
‘I walked. I have a car, parked at the Beachhouse.’
‘As I have.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you walk back that way with me?’
‘Yes.’
Side by side, in the gathering pink-grey light, they walked north along the beach.
Malenfant glanced sideways at Nemoto. Her face was broad, pale, her eyes black; her hair was elaborately shaved, showing the shape of her skull. She could have been no more than half Malenfant’s age, perhaps twenty-five.
‘The Red Moon is very bright,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘It is a great spectacle. But it will be bad for the astronomers.’
‘You were an astronomer …’
‘I am an astronomer.’
‘Yeah. Sorry.’
Nemoto was a Japanese citizen trained as an astronaut at NASA. Her speciality had been space-based astronomy. She had been the brilliant kid who had made it all the way into space at the incredibly young age of twenty-four. He remembered Nemoto as being bright, excitable, even bubbly. Well, she wasn’t bright and bubbly now. It was as if she had gone into eclipse.
‘I have been looking for you,’ she said now. ‘I have missed you several times in your tour of the NASA centres. Malenfant, when you are not at your scheduled meetings, you are something of a recluse.’
‘Yeah,’ he said ruefully. ‘Nowadays more than I’d like to be.’
‘You miss your wife,’ she said bluntly.
‘Yes. Yes, I miss my wife.’
‘I almost found you at your church.’
‘The chapel at Ellington Air Force Base?’
‘I had not realized you are Catholic’
‘I guess you should call me lapsed. I converted when I married Emma, back in ’82. Emma, my wife. It was for the sake of her family. When I joined NASA we looked around for a chapel. Ellington was near Johnson, and a lot of my colleagues and their families went there, and we liked the priest …’
‘Are you religious now?’
‘No.’ He had tried, for the sake of the priest, Monica Chaum, as much as anybody else. But, unlike some who came back from space charged with religious zeal, Malenfant had lost it all when he made his first flight into orbit. Space was just too immense. Humans were like ants on a log, adrift in some vast river. How could any Earth-based ritual come close to the truth of the God who had made such a universe?
‘So I gave up the chapel. It caused some problems with Emma’s family. But she supported me. She always did.’
‘But now you have returned to the faith?’
‘No. I do find the chapel kind of restful. But I get a lot more comfort from going out on a toot with Monica Chaum over at the Outpost. She has quite a capacity for a woman Catholic priest. I make no excuses; I’d been through a lot.’ He eyed her. ‘As have you.’
‘Yes.’ Her face, never beautiful, was empty of expression. ‘As is well known.’
Nemoto had been aboard the International Space Station, in low Earth orbit, when the Red Moon had made its dramatic entrance. Nemoto had been forced to watch from orbit as the first great tides battered at Japan.
‘I returned to Earth as soon as I could. I and my colleague used our Japanese Hope shuttle. You may know that our landing facility was at Karitimati Island in the South Pacific –’
‘Where? Oh, yeah, Christmas Island.’
‘There is little left of Karitimati. We were forced to come down here, at KSC.’
He said carefully, ‘Where was your home?’
‘I have no home now,’ was all she would reply.
He nodded. ‘Nor do I.’ It was true. He had an empty house in Clear Lake, but the hell with that. His home was with Emma – wherever she was.
Nemoto paused and looked into the sky. Although the first liquid glimmer of sun was resting on the horizon, the Red Moon still shone bright in the sky. ‘If you have abandoned your attempts to acquire faith, you do not believe that God is responsible for that?’
He grinned, rubbing his hand over his bare scalp, feeling a time of salt there. ‘Not God, no. But I think somebody is.’
‘And you would like to find out who.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Do you believe that the bodies which fell through the African portal were human?’
He frowned, taken aback by the question. ‘Nobody can make much of the mashed-up remains that they scraped out of the savannah.’
‘But they appear to be human, or a human variant. You saw them, Malenfant. I’ve read your testimony. They share our DNA – much of it, though the recovered sequences show a large diversity from our own genome. There is speculation that they are more like one of our ancestors, a primitive hominid species.’
‘Yeah. So there are ape-men running all over our new Moon up there, right? I read the tabloids too.’
‘Malenfant, what do you believe?’
He said fiercely, ‘I believe that the Wheel was some kind of portal. I believe it linked Earth to its new Moon. And I believe it transported those poor unevolved saps, here from there. What I don’t know is what the hell it all means.’
‘And you believe your wife made the return journey. That she is still alive up there on the Red Moon, breathing its air, drinking its water, perhaps eating its vegetation.’
‘Where else could she be?… I’m sorry. It’s what I want to believe, I guess. It’s what I have to believe.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘Everybody knows this, Malenfant. Your longing to reach her is tangible. I can see it, now, in your eyes, the set of your body.’
‘You think I’m an asshole,’ he said brutally. ‘You think I should let go.’
‘No. I think you are fully human. This is to be admired.’
He felt awkward again. He’d only just met this girl, yet somehow she’d already seen him naked every which way a person could be naked.
They reached the Beachhouse. They sat on its porch, facing the ocean. Malenfant sipped water from a plastic bottle. ‘So how come you’ve been pursuing me around NASA? What do you want, Nemoto?’
‘I believe we can help each other. You want to set up a mission to reach the Red Moon. So do I. I believe we should. I believe we must. I can get you there.’
Suddenly his heart was pumping. ‘How?’
Rapidly, with the aid of a pocket softscreen, she sketched out a cut-down mission profile, using a simplified version of Malenfant’s Shuttle-based Big Dumb Booster design, topped by a Space Station evacuation lander, adapted for the Moon’s conditions. ‘It will not be safe,’ she said. ‘But it will work. And it could be done, we believe, in a couple of months, at a cost of a few billion dollars.’
It was fast and dirty, even by the standards of the proposals he had been touting himself. But it could work … ‘If we could get anybody to fund it.’
‘There are many refugee Japanese who would support this,’ Nemoto said gravely. ‘Of all the major nations it is perhaps the Japanese who have suffered most in this present disaster. Among the refugees, there is a strong desire at least to know, to understand what has caused the deaths of so many. Thus there are significant resources to call on. But we would need to work with NASA, who have the necessary facilities for ground support.’
‘Which is where I come in.’ He drank his water. ‘Nemoto, maybe you’re speaking to the wrong guy. I’ve already tried, remember. And I got nowhere. I come up against brick walls like Joe Bridges the whole time.’
‘We must learn to work with Mr Bridges, not against him.’
‘How?’
She touched his hand. Her skin was cold. He was shocked by the sudden, unexpected contact. ‘By telling the truth, Malenfant. You care nothing for geology or planetology or the mystery of the Red Moon, or even the Tide, do you? You want to find Emma.’ She withdrew her hand. ‘It is a motive that will awaken people’s hearts.’
‘Ah. I get it. You want me to be a fundraiser. To blub on live TV.’
‘You will provide a focus for the project – a human reason to pursue it. At a time when the waters are lapping over the grain fields, nobody cares about science. But they always care about family. We need a story, Malenfant. A hero.’
‘Even if that hero is a Quixote.’
She looked puzzled. ‘Quixote’s was a good story. And so will yours be.’
She didn’t seem in much doubt that he’d ultimately fall into line. And, looking into his heart, neither did he.
Irritated by her effortless command, he snapped, ‘So why are you so keen to go exploring the new Moon, Nemoto? Just to figure why Japan got trashed?… I’m sorry.’
She shrugged. ‘There is more. I have read of your speeches on the Fermi Paradox.’
‘I wouldn’t call them speeches. Bullshit for goodwill tours …’
‘As a child, your eyes were raised to the stars. You wondered who was looking back. You wondered why you couldn’t see them. Just as I did, half a world away.’
He gestured at the Moon. ‘Is that what you think this is? We were listening for a whisper of radio signals from the stars. You couldn’t get much less subtle a first contact than this.’
‘I think this huge event is more than that – even more significant. Malenfant, people rained out of the sky. They may or may not belong to a species we recognize, but they were people. It is clear to me that the meaning of the Red Moon is intimately bound up with us: what it is to be human – and why we are alone in the cosmos.’
‘Or were.”
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And, consider this. This Red Moon simply appeared in our sky … It is not as if a fleet of huge starships towed it into position. We don’t know how it got there. And we don’t know how long it will stay, conveniently poised next to the Earth. The Wheel disappeared just hours after it arrived. If we don’t act now –’
‘Yes, you’re right. We must act urgently.’ The sun was a shimmering globe suspended on the edge of the ocean, and Malenfant began to feel its heat draw at the skin of his face. ‘We’ve a lot to talk about.’
‘Yes.’
They walked up the path to their cars.
Fire:
The sun is above his head. The air is hot and still. The red ground shines brightly through brittle grass. People move to and fro on the red dust.
Fire thinks of Dig. He thinks of himself touching Dig’s hair, her dugs, the small of her back. His member stiffens. His eyes and ears seek Dig. They don’t find her.
He sees Sing.
Sing is lying flat on her bower, in the sun. Her head does not rise. Her hand does not lift from where it is sprawled in the red dirt. Her legs are splayed. Flies nibble at her belly and eyes and mouth.
Fire squats. His hands flap at the flies, chasing them away. He shakes Sing’s shoulder. ‘Sing Sing Fire Sing!’
She does not move. He puts his finger in her mouth. It is dry.
Fire picks up Sing’s hand. It is limp, but her arm is stiff. He drops the hand. The arm falls back with a soft thump. Dust rises, falls back.
Emma is beside him.
‘Fire. Maxie is ill. Perhaps you can help. Umm, Maxie sore Maxie. Fire Maxie … Fire, is something wrong?’
Her eyes look at Sing. Her hands press at Sing’s neck. Emma’s head drops over Sing’s mouth, and her ear listens.
Fire thinks of Sing laughing. She is huge and looms over him. Her face blocks out the sun.
He looks at the slack eyes, the open mouth, the dried drool. This is not Sing.
His legs stand him up. He bends down and lifts the body over his shoulders. It is stiff. It is cold.
Emma stands. ‘Fire? Are you all right?’
Fire’s legs jog downwind. They jog until his eyes see the people are far away. Then his arms dump the body on the ground. It sprawls. He hears bones snap. Gas escapes from its backside.
Bad meat.
He jogs away, back to the people.
He goes to Sing’s bower. But the bower is empty. People are here, and then they are gone, leaving no memorials, no trace but their children, as transient as lions or deer or worms or clouds. Sing is gone from the world, as if she never existed. Soon he will forget her.
He scatters the branches with his foot.
Emma is watching him.
Sally is here, holding Maxie. Maxie is weeping. Emma says, ‘Fire, I’m sorry. Can you help us? I don’t know what to do …’
Fire grins. He reaches for Maxie.
Maxie cringes. Sally pulls him back.
Emma says, ‘No, Fire. He doesn’t want to play. Fire Maxie ill sick sore.’
Fire frowns. He touches Maxie’s forehead. It is hot and wet. He touches his belly. It is hard.
He thinks of a shrub with broad, coarse-textured leaves. He does not know why he thinks of the shrub. He doesn’t even formulate the question. The knowledge is just there.
He lopes to the forest. His ears listen and his eyes peer into the dark greenery. There are no Nutcracker-folk. There are no Elf-folk.
He sees the shrub. He reaches out and plucks leaves.
His legs take him out of the forest.
Maxie stares at the leaves. Water runs down his face.
Fire pokes a leaf into his small, hot mouth. Maxie’s mouth tries to spit it out. Fire pushes it back. Maxie’s mouth chews the leaf. Fire holds his jaw so the mouth can’t chew.
Maxie swallows the leaf, and wails.
Fire makes him swallow another. And another.
Somebody is shouting. ‘Meat! Meat!’
Fire’s head snaps around. The voice is coming from upwind. Now his nose can smell blood.
Something big has died.
His legs jog that way.
He finds Stone and Blue and Dig and Grass and others. They are squatting in the dirt. They hold axes in their hands.
The meat is an antelope. It is lying on the ground.
Killing birds are tearing at the carcass.
The killing birds tower over the people. They have long gnarled legs, and stubby useless wings, and heads the size of Fire’s thigh. The heads of the birds dig into the belly and joints of the antelope, pushing right inside the carcass.
The people wait, watching the birds.
A pack of hyenas circles, warily watching the birds and the people. And there are Elf-folk. They sit at the edge of the forest, picking at their black-brown hair. The bands of scavengers are set out in a broad circle around the carcass, well away from the birds, held in place by a geometry of hunger and wariness. The Running-folk are scavengers among the others – not the weakest, not the strongest, not especially feared. The people wait their turn with the others, waiting for the birds to finish, knowing their place.
One by one the birds strut away. Their heads jerk this way and that, dipping. Their eyes are yellow. They are looking for more antelopes to kill.
The hyenas are first to get to the corpse. Their faces lunge into its ripped-open rib cage. The hyenas start to fight with one another, forgetting the killing birds, forgetting the people.
Blue and Stone and Fire hurl bits of rock.
The dogs back away. Their muzzles are bloody red, their eyes glaring. Their mouths want the meat. But their bodies fear the stones and sticks of the people.
The people fall on the carcass.
Stone’s axe, held between thumb and forefinger, slices through the antelope’s thick hide. The axe rolls to bring more of its edge into play. It slices meat neatly from the bones. The birds have beaks to rip meat. The hyenas and cats have teeth. The people have axes. The people work without speaking, not truly cooperating.
Fire’s hands cram bits of meat into his mouth, hot and raw. Fire thinks of the other people by the fire, the women and their infants and children with no name. He tells his mouth it must not eat all the meat. He holds great slabs of it in his hands, slippery and bloody.
Fire’s ears hear a hollering. His head snaps around.
More Elf-folk are boiling out of the forest fringe, hooting, hungry. They have rocks and stones and axes in their hands. They run on their legs like people. But their legs are shorter than a person’s, and they have big strong arms, longer and stronger than a person’s.
Stone growls. His mouth bloody, he raises his axe at the Elf-folk.
The Elf-folk show their teeth. They hoot and screech.
A bat swoops from the sky. It is a hunter. Its wings are broad and flap slowly. The people scatter, fearing talons and beak.
The bat falls on the Elf-folk. It caws. It rises into the air. It has its talons dug into the scalp of an Elf-woman. She wriggles and cries, dugs swinging.
One Elf-man throws a rock at the bat. It misses. The others just watch. She is gone, in an instant, her life over.
Suddenly Stone charges forward at the Elf-folk. Blue follows. Dig follows.
The Elf-folk scamper away, into the safety of their forest.
Stone hoots his triumph.
The people return to the antelope. The hyenas have approached again, and bats have flown down, digging into the entrails of the antelope. The people hurl stones and shout. The people’s hands take meat and bones from the carcass, until their hands are full. The people’s mouths dig into the carcass and bite away final chunks of meat.
Other scavengers move in. Soon there will be nothing left of the antelope but scattered, crushed, chewed bones, over which insects will crawl.
The children fall on the meat. Their mouths snap and their hands punch and scratch as they fight over the meat.
Fire approaches Dig. He holds out meat. Her hands grab it. She throws it away. A child with no name falls on the discarded scrap.
Dig laughs. She turns her back on Fire.
Emma comes to Fire. She smiles, seeing the meat. His belly wants to keep all the meat, but he makes his hands give her some.
Emma takes it to the fire. There are rocks in the fire. Emma beats the meat flat and puts it on the hot rocks. She peels it off the rocks and carries it to Sally and Maxie.
Fire squats on the ground. His hands tear meat. His teeth crush it.
Emma stands before him. She is smiling. She pulls his hand.
His legs follow her.
She stops by a patch of dung. The dung is pale and watery and smelly. There is a leaf in the dung. There is a worm on the leaf, dead.
Emma says, ‘I think you did it, Doctor Fire. You got the damn worm out of him.’
Fire does not remember the leaf, or Maxie. Emma’s mouth is still moving, but he does not think about the noises she makes.
Reid Malenfant:
A flock of pigeons flew at the big Marine helicopter. Such was their closing speed that the birds seemed to explode out of the air all around them, a panicky blur of grey and white. The pilot lifted his craft immediately, and the pigeons fell away.
Nemoto’s hands were over her mouth.
Malenfant grinned. ‘Just to make it interesting.’
‘I think the times are interesting enough, Malenfant.’
‘Yeah.’
Now the chopper rolled, and the capital rotated beneath him. They flew over the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington monuments, set out like toys on a green carpet, and to the right the dome of the Capitol gleamed bright in the sunlight, showing no sign of the hasty restoration it had required after last month’s food riots.
The helicopter levelled and began a gentle descent towards the White House, directly ahead. The old sandstone building looked as cute, or as twee, as it had always done, depending on your taste. But now it was surrounded by a deep layer of defences, even including a moat around the perimeter fence. And, save for a helipad, the lawn had been turned to a patchwork of green and brown, littered with small out-buildings. In a very visible (though hardly practical) piece of example-setting, the lawn had been given over to the raising of vegetables and chickens and even a small herd of pigs, and every morning the President could be seen by webcast feeding his flock. It was not a convincing portrait, Malenfant always thought, even if the Prez was a farmer’s son. But for human beings, it seemed, symbolism was everything.
The helicopter came down to a flawless landing on the pad. Nemoto climbed out gracefully, carrying a rolled-up softscreen. Malenfant followed more stiffly, feeling awkward to have been riding in a military machine in his civilian suit – but he was a civilian today, at the insistence of the NASA brass.
An aide greeted them and escorted them into the building itself. They had to pass through a metal-and-plastics detector in the doorway, and then spent a tough five minutes in a small security office just inside the building being frisked, photographed, scanned and probed by heavily-armed Marine sergeants. Nemoto even had to give up her softscreen after downloading its contents into a military-issue copy.
Nemoto seemed to withdraw deeper into herself as they endured all this.
‘Take it easy,’ Malenfant told her. ‘The goons are just doing their job. It’s the times we live in.’
‘It is not that,’ Nemoto murmured. ‘It is this place, this moment. From orbit, I watched the oceans batter Japan. I felt I was in the palm of a monster immeasurably more powerful than me – a monster who would decide the fate of myself, and my family, and all I possessed and cared for, with an arbitrary carelessness I could do nothing to influence. And so, I feel, it is now. But I must endure.’
‘You really want to go on this trip, don’t you?’
She glanced at him. ‘As you do.’
‘You always deflect my questions about yourself, Nemoto. You are a koan. An enigma.’
She smiled at that fragment of Japanese.
At last they were done, and the aide, accompanied by a couple of the armed Marines, took them through corridors to the Oval Office, on the West Wing’s first floor, which the Vice-President was using today. Her official residence, a rambling brick house on the corner of 34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was no longer considered sufficiently secure.
Nemoto said as they walked, ‘You say you know Vice-President Della.’
‘Used to know her. She’s had an interest in space all her career. As a senator she served on a couple of NASA oversight committees.’ Now the President had asked Della to take responsibility for Malenfant’s project, in her capacity as chair of the Space Council.
Nemoto said, ‘If she is a friend of yours –’
‘Hardly that. More an old sparring partner. Mutual, grudging respect. I haven’t seen her for a long time – certainly not since she got here.’
‘Do you think she will support us?’
‘She’s from Iowa. She’s a canny politician. She is – practical. But she has always seen a little further than most of the Beltway crowd. She believes space efforts have value. But she’s a utilitarian. I’ve heard her argue for weather satellites, Earth resources programmes. She even supports blue-sky stuff about asteroid mining and power stations in orbit. Moving the heavy industries off the planet might provide a future for this dirty old world … But robots can do all that. I don’t think she sees much purpose in Man in Space. She never supported the Station, for instance.’
‘Then we must hope that she sees some utility in our venture to the Red Moon.’
He grimaced. ‘Either that or we manage to twist her arm hard enough.’
As they entered the Oval Office, Vice-President Maura Della was working through documents on softscreens embedded in a walnut desk. The desk was positioned at one of the big office’s narrow ends – the place really was oval-shaped, Malenfant observed, gawking like a tourist.
Della glanced up, stood, and came out from behind the desk to greet them. Dressed in a trim trouser-suit, she was dark, slim, in her sixties. She shook them both briskly by the hand, waved them to green wing-back chairs before the desk, then settled back into her rocking-chair.
The only other people in the room were an aide and an armed Marine at the door. Malenfant had been expecting Joe Bridges, and other NASA brass.
Without preamble Della said, ‘You’re trying to get me over a barrel, aren’t you, Malenfant?’
Malenfant was taken aback. This was, after all, the Vice-President. But he could see from the glint in Della’s eye that if he wanted to win the play this was a time for straight talking. ‘Not you personally. But – yes, ma’am, that’s the plan.’
Della tapped her desk. Malenfant glimpsed his own image scrolling before her, accompanied by text and video clips and the subdued insect murmur of audio.
Maura Della always had been known for a straightforward political style. To Malenfant she looked a little lost in the cool grandeur of the Oval Office, even after three years in the job, out of place in the crispness of the powder-blue carpet and cream paintwork, and the many alcoves crammed with books, certificates and ornaments, all precisely placed, like funerary offerings. This was clearly not a room you could feel you lived in.
There was a stone sitting on the polished desk surface, a sharp-edged fragment about the size of Malenfant’s thumb, the colour of lava pebbles. No, not stone, Malenfant realized, studying the fragment. Bone. A bit of skull, maybe.
Della said, ‘Your campaign has lasted two weeks already, in every media outlet known to man. Reid Malenfant the stricken hero, tilting at the new Moon to save his dead wife.’ She eyed him brutally.
‘It has the virtue of being true, ma’am,’ Malenfant said frankly. ‘And she may not be dead. That’s the whole point.’
Nemoto leaned forward. ‘If I may –’
Della nodded.
‘The response of the American public to Malenfant’s campaign has been striking. The latest polls show –’
‘Overwhelming support for what you’re trying to do,’ Della murmured. She tapped her desk and shut down the images. ‘Of course they do. But let me tell you something about polls. The President’s own approval ratings have been bouncing along the floor since the day the tides began to hit. You know why? Because people need somebody to blame.
‘The appearance of a whole damn Moon in the sky is beyond comprehension. If as a consequence your house is smashed, your crops destroyed, family members injured or dead, you can’t blame the Moon, you can’t rage at the Tide. In another age you might have blamed God. But now you blame whoever you think ought to be helping you climb out of your hole, which generally means all branches of the federal government, and specifically this office.’ She shook her head. ‘So polls don’t drive me one way or the other. Because whatever I decide, your stunt isn’t going to help me.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Nemoto. ‘But it might help the people beyond this office. The people of the world. And that is what we are talking about, isn’t it?’
Malenfant covered her hand. Take it easy.
Della glared. ‘Don’t presume to tell me my job, young woman.’ Then she softened. ‘Even if you’re right.’ She turned to a window. ‘God knows we need some good news … You know about the ’quakes.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Malenfant said grimly.
This was the latest manifestation of the Red Moon’s baleful influence. Luna had raised tides in Earth’s rock, just as in its water. Luna’s rock tides had amounted to no more than a few inches.
But the Red Moon raised great waves several feet high.
Massive earthquakes had occurred in Turkey, Chile and elsewhere, many of them battering communities already devastated by the effects of the Tide. In fault zones like the San Andreas in California, the land above the faults was being eroded away much more rapidly than before, thus exposing the unstable rocks beneath, and exacerbating the tidal flexing of the rocks themselves.
Della said, ‘The geologists tell me that if the Red Moon stays in orbit around Earth, it is possible that the fault lines between Earth’s tectonic plates – such as the great Ring of Fire that surrounds the Pacific – will ultimately settle down to constant seismic activity. Constant. I can’t begin to imagine what that will mean for us, for humanity. No doubt devastating long-term impacts on the Earth’s climate, all that volcanic dust and ash and heat being pumped into the air… When I look into the future now, the only rational reaction is dread and fear.’
‘People need to see that we are hitting back,’ Malenfant said. ‘That we are doing something.’
‘Perhaps. That is the American way. The myth of action. But does our action hero have to be you, Malenfant? And what happens when you crash up there, or die of starvation, or burn up on re-entry? How will that play in the polls?’
‘Then you find another hero,’ Malenfant said stonily. ‘And you try again.’
‘But even if you make it to the Moon, what will you find? You should know I’ve had several briefings in preparation for this meeting. One of them was with Dr Julia Corneille, from the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. An old college friend, as it happens.’
‘Anthropology?’
‘Actually Julia’s specialty is palaeoanthropology. Extinct homs, the lineage of human descent. You see the relevance.’
‘Homs?’
‘Hominids.’ Della smiled. ‘Sorry. Field slang. You can tell I spent some time with Julia … She told me something of her life, her work in the field. Mostly out in the desert heartlands of Kenya.’
‘Looking for fossils,’ Malenfant said.
‘Looking for fossils. People don’t leave many fossils, Malenfant. And they don’t just lie around. It took Julia years before she learned to pick them out, tiny specks against the soil. It’s a tough place to work, harsh, terribly dry, a place where all the bushes have thorns on them … Fascinating story.’ She picked up the scrap of bone from her desk. ‘This was the first significant find Julia made. She told me she was engaged on another dig. She was walking one day along the bed of a dried-out river, when she happened to glance down … Well. It is a fragment of skull. A trace of a woman, of a species called Homo erectus. The Erectus were an intermediate form of human. They arose perhaps two million years ago, and became extinct a quarter-million years ago. They had bodies close to modern humans, but smaller brains – perhaps twice the size of chimps’. But they were phenomenally successful. They migrated out of Africa and covered the Old World, reaching as far as Java.’
Malenfant said dryly, ‘Fascinating, ma’am. And the significance –’
‘The significance is that the homs who rained out of the sky, on the day you lost your wife, Malenfant, appear to have been Homo erectus. Or a very similar type.’
There was a brief silence.
‘But if Erectus died out two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, what is he doing falling out of the sky?’
‘That is what you must find out, Malenfant, if your mission is approved. Think of it. What if there is a link between the homs of the Wheel and ancestral Erectus? Well, how can that be? What does it tell us of human evolution?’ Della fingered her skull fragment longingly. ‘You know, we have spent billions seeking the aliens in the sky. But we were looking in the wrong place. The aliens aren’t separated from us by distance, but by time. Here –’ she said, holding out the bit of bone ‘– here is the alien, right here, calling to us from the past. But we have to infer everything about our ancestors from isolated bits of bone – the ancient homs’ appearance, gait, behaviour, social structure, language, culture, tool-making ability – everything we know, or we think we know about them. We can’t even tell how many species there were, let alone how they lived, how they felt. You, on the other hand, might be able to view them directly.’ She smiled. ‘Even ask them. Think what it would mean.’
Malenfant began to see the pattern of the meeting. In her odd mix of hard-nosed scepticism at his mission plans, and wide-eyed wonder at what he might find up there, Della was groping her way towards a decision. His best tactic was surely to play straight.
Nemoto had been listening coldly. She leaned forward. ‘Madam Vice-President. You want this Dr Corneille to have a seat on the mission.’
Ah, Malenfant thought. Now we cut to the horse-trading.
Della sat back in her rocker, hands settling over her belly. ‘Well, they sent geologists to the Moon on Apollo.’
‘One geologist,’ said Malenfant. ‘Only after years of infighting. And Jack Schmitt was trained up for the job; he made sure he was, in fact. As far as I know there are no palaeoanthropologists in the Astronaut Office.’
‘Would there be room for a passenger?’
Malenfant shook his head. ‘You’ve seen our schematics.’
Della tapped her desk, and brought up computer-graphic images of booster rockets and spaceplanes. ‘You are proposing to build a booster from Space Shuttle components.’
‘Our Saturn V replacement, yes.’
‘And you will glide down into the Red Moon’s atmosphere in a – what is it?’
‘An X-38. It is a lifting body, the crew evacuation vehicle used on the Space Station. We will fit it out to keep us alive for the three-day trip. On the surface we will rendezvous with a package of small jets and boosters for the return journey, sent up separately. The whole mission design is based around a two-person crew. Madam Vice-President, we just couldn’t cram in anybody else.’
‘Not on the way out,’ Della said evenly. ‘Two out, three back. Isn’t that your slogan, Malenfant?’
‘That’s the whole idea, ma’am. And those outbound two have to be astronauts. The best scientist in the world will be no use on the Red Moon dead.’
‘The same argument was used to keep scientists off Apollo,’ Della said.
‘But it is still valid.’
Nemoto said coldly, ‘The reality is that I must fly this mission because the Japanese funding depends on it. And Malenfant must fly the mission –’
‘Because the American public longs for him to go,’ Della sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. If this mission is approved, then it will be you two sorry jerks who fly it.’
If. Malenfant allowed himself a flicker of hope.
Nemoto seemed to be growing agitated. ‘Madam Vice-President, we must do this. If I may –’ She leaned forward and unrolled her softscreen on Della’s desktop.
Della watched her blankly. Malenfant had no idea where this was leading.
‘There is evidence that similar events have touched human history before, evidence buried deep in our history and myths. Consider the story of Ezekiel, from the Old Testament: And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the Earth, the wheels were lifted up. Or consider a tale from the ancient Persian Gulf, about an animal endowed with reason called Oannes, who used to converse with men but took no food … and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art –’
Shit, Malenfant thought.
Della was keeping her face straight. ‘So is this your justification for a billion-dollar space mission? UFOs from the Bible?’
Nemoto said, ‘My point is that the irruption of the Red Moon is the greatest event in modern human history. It will surely shape our future – as it has our past. The emergence of the primitive hominids from Malenfant’s portal tells us that. This one event is the pivot on which history turns.’
‘I feel I have enough on my plate without assuming responsibility for all human history.’
Nemoto subsided, angry, baffled.
Della said bluntly, ‘However I do need to know why you are trying to kill yourselves.’
Malenfant bridled. ‘The mission profile –’
‘– is a death-trap. Come on, Malenfant; I’ve studied space missions before.’
Malenfant sat up straight, Navy style. ‘We don’t have time not to buy the risks on this one, ma’am.’
‘You’re both obsessed enough to take those risks. That’s clear enough. Nemoto I think I understand.’
‘You do?’
Della smiled at Nemoto. ‘Forgive me, dear. Malenfant, she may be an enigma to you, but that’s because she’s young. She lost her family, her home. She wants revenge.’
Nemoto did not react to this.
‘But what about you, Malenfant?’
‘I lost my wife,’ he said angrily. ‘That’s motive enough. With respect, ma’am.’
She nodded. ‘But you are grounded. Let me put it bluntly, because others will ask the same question many times before you get to the launch pad. Are you going back to space to find your wife? Or are you using Emma as a lever to get back into space?’
Malenfant kept his face blank, his bearing upright. He wasn’t about to lose his temper with the Vice-President of the United States. ‘I guess Joe Bridges has been talking to you.’
She drummed her fingers on her desk. ‘Actually he is pushing you, Malenfant. He wants you to fly your mission.’ She observed his surprise. ‘You didn’t know that. You really don’t know much about people, do you, Malenfant?’
‘Ma’am, with respect, does it matter? If I fly to the Red Moon, whatever my motives, I’ll still serve your purposes.’ He eyed her. ‘Whatever they are.’
‘Good answer.’ She turned again to her softscreen. ‘I’m going to sleep on this. Whether or not you bring back your wife, I do need you to bring us some good news, Malenfant. Oh, one more thing. Julia’s ape-men falling from the sky … You should know there are a lot of people very angered at the interpretation that they might have anything to do with the origins of humankind.’
Malenfant grunted. ‘The crowd who think Darwin was an asshole.’
Della shrugged. ‘It’s the times, Malenfant. Today only forty per cent of American schools teach evolution. I’m already coming under a lot of pressure from the religious groups over your mission, both from Washington and beyond.’
‘Am I supposed to go to the Red Moon and convert the ape-men?’
She said sternly, ‘Watch your public pronouncements. You will go with God, or not at all.’ She fingered the bit of hominid skull on her desk. ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Our old friend Ezekiel. Chapter 37, verse 4. Good day.’
Emma Stoney:
There were bees that swarmed at sunset. Some of them stung, but you could brush them away, if you were careful. But there were other species which didn’t sting, but which gathered at the corner of the mouth, or the eyes, or at the edge of wet wounds, apparently feeding on the fluids of the body.
You couldn’t relax, not for a minute.
Uncounted days after her arrival, Emma woke to find an empty shelter.
She threw off her parachute silk and crawled out of the shelter’s rough opening. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face.
Sally’s hair was a tangled mess, her safari suit torn, bloody and filthy. Maxie clung to her leg. Sally was pointing towards the sun. ‘They’re leaving.’
The Runners were walking away. They moved in their usual disorganized way, scattered over the plain in little groups. They seemed to be empty-handed. They had abandoned everything, in fact: their shelters, their tools. Just up and walked away, off to the east. Why?
‘They left us,’ Maxie moaned.
A shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. She glanced up at the deep sky. Cloud was driving over the sun.
A flake touched her cheek.
Something was falling out of the sky, drifting like very light snow. Maxie ran around, gurgling with delight. Emma held out her hand, letting a flake land there. It wasn’t cold: in fact, it wasn’t snow at all.
It was ash.
‘We have to go, don’t we?’ Sally asked reluctantly.
‘Yes, we have to go.’
‘But if we leave here, how will they find us?’
They? What they? The question seemed almost comical to Emma.
But she knew Sally took it very seriously. They had spent long hours draping Emma’s parachute silk over rocks and in the tops of trees, hoping its bright colour might attract attention from the air, or even from orbit. And they had laboured to pull pale-coloured rocks into a vast rectangular sigil. None of it had done a damn bit of good.
There was, though, a certain logic to staying close to where they had emerged from the wheel-shaped portal. After all, who was to say the portal wouldn’t reappear one day, as suddenly as it had disappeared, a magic door opening to take them home?
And beyond that, if they were to leave with the Runners – if they were to walk off in some unknown direction with these gangly, naked not-quite-humans – it would feel like giving up: a statement that they had thrown in their lot with the Runners, that they had accepted that this was their life now, a life of crude shelters and berries from the forest and, if they were lucky, scraps of half-chewed, red-raw meat: this was the way it would be for the rest of their lives.
But Emma didn’t see what the hell else they could do.
They compromised. They spent a half-hour gathering the largest, brightest rocks they could carry, and arranging them into a great arrow that pointed away from the Runners’ crude hearth, towards the east. Then they bundled up as much of their gear as they could carry in wads of parachute silk, and followed the Runners’ tracks.
Emma made sure they stayed clear of a low heap of bones she saw scattered a little way away. She was glad it had never occurred to Sally to ask hard questions about what had become of her husband’s body.
The days wore away.
Their track meandered around natural obstacles – a boggy marsh, a patch of dense forest, a treeless, arid expanse – but she could tell that their course remained roughly eastward, away from the looming volcanic cloud.
The Runners seemed to prefer grassy savannah with some scattered tree cover, and would divert to keep to such ground – and Emma admitted to herself that such park-like areas made her feel relatively comfortable too, more than either dense forest or unbroken plains. Maybe it was no coincidence that humans made parks that reminded them, on some deep level, of countryside like this. I guess we all carry a little Africa around with us, she thought.
She was no expert on botany, African or otherwise. It did seem to her there were a lot of fern-like trees and relatively few flowering plants, as if the flora here was more primitive than on Earth. A walk in the Jurassic, then.
As for the fauna, she glimpsed herds of antelope-like creatures: some of them were slim and agile, who would bolt as the Runners approached, but others were larger, clumsier, hairier, crossing the savannah in heavy-footed gangs. The animals kept their distance, and she was grateful for that. But again they didn’t strike her as being characteristically African: she saw no elephants, no zebra or giraffes. (But then, she told herself, there were barely any elephants left in Africa anyhow.)
It was clear there were predators everywhere. Once Emma heard the throaty, echoing roar of what had to be a lion. A couple of times she spotted cats slinking through brush at the fringe of forests: leopards, perhaps.
And once they came across a herd – no, a flock – of huge, vicious-looking carnivorous birds.
The flightless creatures moved in a tight group with an odd nervousness, pecking at the ground with those savagely curved beaks, and scratching at their feathers and cheeks with claws like scimitars. Their behaviour was very bird-like, but unnerving in creatures so huge.
The Runners took cover in a patch of forests for a full half-day, until the flock had passed.
The Runners called them ‘killing birds’. A wide-eyed Maxie called the birds ‘dinosaurs’.
And they did look like dinosaurs, Emma thought. Birds had evolved from dinosaurs, of course; here, maybe, following some ecological logic, birds had lost their flight, had forgotten how to sing, but they had rediscovered their power and their pomp, becoming lords of the landscape once more.
The Runners’ gait wasn’t quite human. Their rib cages seemed high and somewhat conical, more like a chimp’s than a human’s, and their hips were very narrow, so that each Runner was a delicately balanced slim form with long striding legs.
Emma wondered what problems those narrow hips caused during childbirth. The heads of the Runners weren’t that much smaller than her own. But there were no midwives here, and no epidurals either. Maybe the women helped each other.
Certainly each of them clearly knew her own children – unlike the men, who seemed to regard the children as small, irritating competitors.
The women even seemed to use sex to bond. Sometimes in the night, two women would lie together, touching and stroking, sharing gentle pleasures that would last much longer than the short, somewhat brutal physical encounters they had with the men.
By comparison, the men had no real community at all, just a brutish ladder of competition: they bickered and snapped amongst themselves, endlessly working out their pecking order. At that, Emma thought, this bunch of guys had a lot of common with every human mostly-male preserve she had ever come across, up to and including the NASA Astronaut Office.
Stone was the boss man; he used his fists and feet and teeth and hand-axes to keep the other men in their place, and to win access to the women. But he, and the other men, did not seek to injure or kill his own kind. It was all just a dominance game.
And Stone was not running a harem here. With all that fist-fighting he won himself more rolls in the hay than the other men, but the others got plenty too; all they had to do was wait until Stone was asleep, or looking the other way, or was off hunting, or just otherwise engaged. Emma had no idea why this should be so. Maybe you just couldn’t run a harem in a highly mobile group like this; maybe you needed a place to hold your female quasi-prisoners, a fortress to defend your ‘property’ from other men.
It was what these people lacked that struck Emma most strongly. They had no art, no music, no song. They didn’t even have language; their verbless jabber conveyed basic emotions anger, fear, demands but little information. They only ‘talked’ anyhow in social encounters, mating or grooming or fighting, never when they were working, making tools or hunting or even eating. She thought their ‘talk’ had more in common with the purring and yowling of cats than information-rich human conversation.
Certainly the Runners never discussed where they were going. It was clear, though, from the way they studied animal tracks, and fingered shrubs, and sniffed the wind, that they had a deep understanding of this land on which they lived, and knew how to find their way across it.
… Yes, but how did that knowledge get there, if not through talking, learning? Maybe a facility for tracking was hard-wired into their heads at birth, she speculated, as the ability to pick up language seemed to be born with human infants.
Whatever, it was a peculiar example of how the Runners could be as smart as any human in one domain – say, tracking – and yet be dumber than the smallest child in another – such as playing Maxie’s games of hide-and-seek and catch. It was as if their minds were chambered, some rooms fully stocked, some empty, all of the chambers walled off from each other.
When the Runners stopped for the night, they would scavenge for rocks and bits of wood and quickly make any tools they needed: hand-axes, spears. But they carried nothing with them except chunks of food. In the morning, when it was time to move on, they would just drop their hand-axes in the dirt and walk away, sometimes leaving the tools in the mounds of spill they had made during their creation.
Emma saw it made sense. It only took a quarter-hour or so to make a reasonable hand-axe, and the Runners were smart at finding the raw materials they needed; they presumably wouldn’t stop in a place that couldn’t provide them in that way. To invest fifteen minutes in making a new axe was a lot better than spending all day carrying a lethally sharp blade in your bare hands.
All this shaped their lifestyle, in a way she found oddly pleasing. The Runners had no possessions. If they wanted to move to some new place they just abandoned everything they had, like walking out of a house full of furniture leaving the doors unlocked. When they got to where they were going they would just make more of whatever they needed, and within half a day they were probably as well-equipped as they had been before the move. There must be a deep satisfaction in this way of life, never weighed down by possessions and souvenirs and memories. A clean self-sufficiency.
But Sally was dismissive. ‘Lions don’t own anything either. Elephants don’t. Chimps don’t. Emma, these ape-men are animals, even if they are built like basketball players. The notion of possessing anything that doesn’t go straight in their mouths has no more meaning to them than it would to my pet cat.’
Emma shook her head, troubled. The truth, she suspected, was deeper than that.
Anyhow, people or animals, the Runners walked, and walked, and walked. They were black shadows that glided over bright red ground, hooting and calling to each other, nude walking machines.
Soon Emma’s socks were a ragged bloody mess, and where her boots didn’t fit quite right they chafed at her skin. A major part of each new day was the foot ritual, as Emma and Sally lanced blisters and stuffed their battered boots with leaves and grass. And if she rolled up her trousers wet sores, pink on black, speckled her shins; Sally suffered similarly. They took turns carrying Maxie, but they were laden down with their parachute silk bundles, and a lot of the time he just had to walk as best he could, clinging to their hands, wailing protests.
During the long days of walking, Emma found herself inevitably spending more time than she liked with Sally.
Emma and Sally didn’t much like each other. That was the blunt truth.
There was no reason why they should; they had after all been scooped at random from out of the sky, and just thrown together. At times, hungry or thirsty or frightened or bewildered, they would take it out on each other, bitching and arguing. But that would always pass. They were both smart enough to recognize how much they needed each other.
Still, Emma found herself looking down on Sally somewhat. Riding on her husband’s high-flying career, Sally had gotten used to a grander style of life than Emma had ever enjoyed, or wanted. Emma had often berated herself for sacrificing her own aspirations to follow her husband’s star, but it seemed to her that Sally had given up a lot more than she had ever been prepared to.
For the sake of good relations, she tried to keep such thoughts buried.
And Emma had to concede Sally’s inner toughness. She had after all lost her husband, brutally slain before her eyes. Once she was through the shock of that dreadful arrival, Sally had shown herself to be a survivor, in this situation where a lot of people would surely have folded quickly.
Besides, she had achieved a lot of things Emma had never done. Not least raising kids. Maxie was as happy and healthy and sane as any kid his age Emma had ever encountered. And there turned out to be a girl, Sarah, twelve years old, left at home in Boston for the sake of her schooling while her parents enjoyed their extended African adventure.
Now, of course, this kid Sarah was left effectively orphaned. Sally told Emma that she knew that even if she didn’t make it home her sister would take care of the girl, and that her husband’s will and insurance cover would provide for the rest of her education and beyond. But it clearly broke her up to think that she couldn’t tell Sarah what had become of her family.
It seemed odd to Emma to talk of wills and grieving relatives as if they were corpses walking round up here on this unfamiliar Moon, too dumb to know they were dead but she supposed the same thing must be happening in her family. Her will would have handed over all her assets to Malenfant, who must be dealing with her mother and sister and family, and her employers would probably by now be recruiting to fill an Emma-shaped hole in their personnel roster.
But somehow she never imagined Malenfant grieving for her. She pictured him working flat-out on some scheme, hare-brained or otherwise, to figure out what had happened to her, to send her a message, even get her home.
Don’t give up, Malenfant; I’m right here waiting for you. And it is, after all, your fault that I’m stuck here.
One day at around noon, with the sun high in the south, the group stopped at a water hole.
The three humans sat in the shade of a broad oak-like tree, while the Runners ate, drank, worked at tools, played, screwed, slept, all uncoordinated, all in their random way. Maxie was playing with one child, a bubbly little girl with a mess of pale brown hair and a cute, disturbingly chimp-like face.
All around the Runners, a fine snow of volcano ash fell, peppering their dark skins white and grey.
The woman called Wood approached Emma and Sally shyly, her hand on her lower belly. Emma had noticed she had some kind of injury just above her pubis. She would cover it with her hand, and at night curl up around it, mewling softly.
Emma sat up. ‘Do you think she wants us to help?’ Maybe the Runners had taken notice of her treatment of the child with yaws after all.
‘Even if she does, ignore her. We aren’t the Red Cross.’
Emma stood and approached the woman cautiously. Wood backed away, startled. Emma made soothing noises. She got hold of the woman’s arm, and, gently, pulled her hand away.
‘Oh God,’ she said softly.
She had exposed a raised, black mound of infection, as large as her palm. At its centre was a pit, deep enough for her to have put her fingertip inside, pink-rimmed. As Wood breathed the sides of the pit moved slightly.
Sally came to stand by her. ‘That’s an open ulcer. She’s had it.’
Emma rummaged in their minuscule medical kit.
‘Don’t do it,’ Sally said. ‘We need that stuff.’
‘We’re out of dressings,’ Emma murmured.
‘That’s because we already used them all up,’ Sally said tightly.
Emma found a tube of Savlon. She got her penknife and cut off a strip of ’chute fabric. The ulcer stank, like bad fish. She squeezed Savlon into the hole, and wrapped the strip of fabric around the woman’s waist.
Wood walked away, picking at the fabric, amazed, somehow pleased with herself. Emma found she had used up almost all the Savlon.
Sally glowered. ‘Listen to me. While you play medicine woman with these flat-heads …’ She made a visible effort to control her temper. ‘I don’t know how long I can keep this up. My feet are a bloody mass. Every joint aches.’ She held up a wrist that protruded out of her grimy sleeve. ‘We must be covering fifteen, twenty miles a day. It was bad enough living off raw meat and insects while we stayed in one place. Now we’re burning ourselves up.’
Emma nodded. ‘I know. But I don’t see we have any choice. It’s obvious the Runners are fleeing something: the volcanism maybe. We have to assume they know, on some level anyhow, a lot more than we do.’
Sally glared at the hominids. ‘They killed my husband. Every day I wake up wondering if today is the day they will kill and butcher me, and my kid. Yes, we have to stick with these flat-heads. But I don’t have to be comfortable with it. I don’t have to like it.’
A Runner hunting party came striding across the plain. They brought chunks of some animal: limbs covered in orange hair, a bulky torso. Emma saw a paw on one of those limbs: not a paw, a hand, hairless, its skin pink and black, every bit as human as her own.
Nobody offered them a share of the meat, and she was grateful.
That night her sleep, out in the open, was disturbed by dreams of flashing teeth and the stink of raw red meat.
She thought she heard a soft padding, smelled a bloody breath. But when she opened her eyes she saw nothing but Fire’s small blaze, and the bodies of the Runners, huddled together close to the fire’s warmth.
She closed her eyes, cringing against the ground.
In the morning she was woken by a dreadful howl. She sat up, startled, her joints and muscles aching from the ground’s hardness.
One of the women ran this way and that, pawing at the rust-red dirt. She even chased some of the children; when she caught them she inspected their faces, as if longing to recognize them.
Sally said, ‘It was the little brown-haired kid. You remember? Yesterday she played with Maxie.’
‘What about her?’
Sally pointed at the ground.
In the dust there were footprints, the marks of round feline paws, a few spots of blood. The scene of this silent crime was no more than yards from where Emma had slept.
After a time, in their disorganized way, the Runners prepared to resume their long march. The bereft mother walked with the others. But periodically she would run around among the people, searching, screaming, scrabbling at the ground. The others screeched back at her, or slapped and punched her.
This lasted three or four days. After that the woman’s displays of loss became more infrequent and subdued. She seemed immersed in a mere vague unhappiness; she had lost something, but what it was, and what it had meant to her, were slipping out of her head.
Only Emma and Sally (and, for now, Maxie) remembered who the child had been. For the others, it was as if she had never existed, gone into the dark that had swallowed up every human life before history began.
Reid Malenfant:
As soon as Malenfant had landed the T-38 and gotten out of his flight suit, here was Frank Paulis, running across the tarmac in the harsh Pacific sunlight, round and fat, his bald head gleaming with sweat.
Paulis enclosed Malenfant’s hand in two soft, moist palms. ‘I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you at last. It’s a great honour to have you here.’
Malenfant extracted his hand warily. Paulis looked thirty-five, maybe a little older. His eyes shone with what Malenfant had come to recognize as hero worship.
That was why he was here at Vandenberg, after all: to scatter a little Stardust on the overworked, underpaid legions of engineers and designers who were labouring to construct his Big Dumb Booster for him. But he hadn’t expected it of a hard-headed entrepreneur type like Frank Paulis.
They clambered into an open-top car, Paulis and Malenfant side by side in the back. An aide, a trim young woman Paulis called Xenia, climbed into the driver’s seat and cut in the SmartDrive. The car pulled smoothly away from the short airstrip.
They drove briskly along the empty roads here at the fringe of Vandenberg ASFB. To either side of the car there were low green shrubs speckled with bright yellow flowers. They were heading west, away from the sun and towards the ocean, and towards the launch facility.
Paulis immediately began to chatter about the work they were doing here, and his own involvement. ‘I want you to meet my engine man, an old buzzard called George Hench, from out of the Air & Space Force. Of course he still calls it just the Air Force. He started working on missile programmes back in the 1950s …’
Malenfant sat back in the warm sunlight and listened to Paulis with half an ear. It was a skill he’d developed since the world’s fascinated gaze had settled on him. Everybody seemed a lot more concerned to tell him what they felt and believed, rather than listen to whatever he had to say. It was as if they all needed to pour a little bit of their souls into the cranium of the man who was going to the Red Moon on their behalf.
Whatever. So long as they did their work.
They rose a slight incline and headed along a rise. Now Malenfant could see the ocean for the first time since landing. This was the Pacific coast of California, some hundred miles north of Los Angeles. The ocean was a heaving grey mass, its big waves growling. The ground was hilly, with crags and valleys along the waterline and low mountains in the background.
The area struck him as oddly beautiful. It wasn’t Big Sur, but it was a lot prettier than Canaveral.
But the big Red Moon hung in the sky above the ocean, its parched desert face turned to the Earth, and its deep crimson colour made the water look red as blood, unnatural.
The coastline here had not been spared by the Tide; shore communities like Surf had been comprehensively obliterated. But little harm had come to this Air & Space Force base, a few miles inland. Canaveral, on the other hand, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, had been severely damaged by the Tide. So Vandenberg had been the default choice to construct the launch facilities for Malenfant’s unlikely steed.
The car slowed to a halt. They were in the foothills of the Casmalia Hills here. From this elevated vantage Malenfant could see a sweep of lowland speckled with concrete splashes linked by roadways: launch pads, many of them decommissioned.
Beyond that he made out blocky white structures. That was the Shuttle facility itself, the relic of grandiose 1970s Air Force dreams of pilots in space. The launch pad itself looked much like its siblings on the Atlantic coast: a gaunt service structure set over a vast flame pit, with gaping vents to deflect the smoke and flame of launch. The gantry was accompanied to either side by two large structures, boxy, white, open, both marked boldly with the USASF and NASA logos. The shelters were mounted on rails and could be moved in to enclose and protect the gantry itself.
It was nothing like Cape Canaveral. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their flanks. Engineers, most of them young, moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces. There was an air of improvisation, of invention and urgency, about this pad being reborn after two decades under wraps.
‘This has been a major launch centre since 1958,’ Paulis said, sounding as proud as if he’d built the place himself. ‘Many of them polar launches. Good site for safety: if you go south of here, the next landmass you hit is Antarctica … Slick-six – sorry, SLC-6 – is the southernmost launch facility here. It was originally built back in the 1960s to launch a spy-in-the-sky space station for the Air Force, which never flew. Then they modified it for the Air Force Shuttle programme. But Shuttle never flew from here either, and after Challenger the facility was left dormant.’
‘I guess it took a lot of un-mothballing,’ Malenfant said.
‘You got that right.’
And now, right at the heart of the rust-grey industrial-looking equipment of the Shuttle facility, he made out a slim spire, brilliant white, nestling against its gantry as if for protection.
It looked something like the lower half of a Space Shuttle – two solid rocket boosters strapped to a fat, rust-brown external fuel tank but there was no moth-shaped Shuttle orbiter clinging to the tank. Instead the tank was topped by a blunt-nosed payload cover almost as fat and wide as the tank itself. The stack vented vapour, and Malenfant could see ice glimmer on its unpainted flanks; evidently the engineers were running a fuelling test.
Malenfant felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
It was he who had produced the first back-of-the-envelope sketch of a Big Dumb Booster like this, sketches to show how Shuttle technology could be warped and mutated to manufacture a heavy-lift launcher, a remote descendant of the Saturn V, for this one-shot project. With Nemoto’s backers in place he had led the way in fleshing out the design, based on ancient, never-funded studies from the 1970s and 1980s. He had overseen the computer-graphic simulations, the models. His fingerprints were all over the whole damn project.
But it was not until now, this oddly mundane moment here on this hillside, in a cheap car with jabbering Paulis and taciturn Xenia, that he had actually set eyes on his BDB: his Big Dumb Booster, the spaceship whose destiny would shape the rest of this life, one way or the other.
But it was Paulis who had got the thing built.
Even after Malenfant had been given presidential approval, such strict limits had been placed on budget and schedule that the NASA brass had soon realized they would need input from the private sector. They had turned to Boeing, their long-term partners in running the Shuttle, but Paulis had been quick to thrust himself forward. Frank J. Paulis had made his fortune from scratch; unusually for his generation he had made most of it from heavy engineering, specifically aerospace. He had made promises of impressive funding and the use of his design, manufacture and test facilities around the country – in return for a senior management position on the BDB project.
NASA had predictably rebuffed him. Paulis had handed over his money and facilities anyhow.
But after a couple of months, when the first calamities had predictably hit the project and the schedule had begun to fall apart before it had properly started, NASA, under pressure from the White House, had turned to Paulis.
Paulis’s first public act, in front of the cameras, had been to gather an immense heap of NASA documentation before the launch pad. ‘This ain’t Canaveral, and this is not the Shuttle programme,’ he’d told his bemused workers. ‘We can’t afford to get tied up in a NASA paper trail. I invest the responsibility for quality in you, each and every one of you. I trust you to do your jobs. All I ask is that you do it right.’ And he set the documentation heap alight with a flame-thrower.
There were some, raised all their careers in NASA’s necessarily safety-obsessed bureaucracy, who couldn’t hack it; Paulis had had a twenty per cent drop-out. But the rest had cheered him to the Pacific clouds.
After that, Paulis had proven himself something of a genius in raising public interest in the project. A goodly chunk of the booster when it lifted from its pad would be paid for by public subscriptions, raised every which way from Boy Scout lemonade stalls to major corporate sponsors; in fact when it finally took off the BDB’s hide would be plastered with sponsors’ logos. But Malenfant couldn’t care less about that, as long as it did ultimately take off, with him aboard.
Paulis, remarkably, was still talking, a good five minutes since Malenfant had last spoken.
‘… The stack is over three hundred feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit –’
Malenfant touched his shoulder. ‘Frank. I do know what we’re building here.’
‘… Yes.’ Nervously, Paulis dug out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his neck. ‘I apologize.’
‘Don’t apologize.’
‘It’s just that I’m a little over-awed.’
‘Don’t be.’ Malenfant was still studying the somewhat squat lines of the booster stack. ‘Although I feel a little awe myself. I’ve come a long way from the first rocket I ever built.’
At age seventeen, Malenfant was already building and flying model airplanes. With some high-school friends he started out trying to make a liquid-fuelled rocket, like the BDB, but failed spectacularly, and so they switched to solid fuels. They bought some gunpowder and packed it inside a cardboard tube, hoping it would burn rather than explode. ‘We propped it against a rock, stuck on some fins, and used a soda straw packed with powder for a fuse. We spent longer painting the damn thing than constructing it. I lit the fuse at a crouch and then ran for cover. The rocket went up fifty feet, whistling. Then it exploded with a bang –’
Paulis said, reverent, ‘And Emma was watching from her bedroom window, right? But she was just seven years old.’
Malenfant was aware that the girl driver, Xenia, was watching him with a hooded, judgmental gaze.
Weeks back, in the course of his campaign to build support, he’d told the story of the toy rocket to one of his PR flacks, and she had added a few homely touches – of course Emma hadn’t been watching; though she had been a neighbour at that time, at seven years old she had much more important things to do – and since then the damn anecdote had been copied around the planet.
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