Origin

— II — RED MOON

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 outre 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 hommids, 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 wondenngly 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 hammer-stone, 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 100-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 supercontment, 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 supercontment. 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 supercontment 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 rime 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 Delia.”

“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 Delia 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. “0 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.

His life story, suitably edited by the flacks, had become as well known as the Nativity story. His feelings of satisfaction at seeing the booster stack evaporated.

He really hadn’t expected this kind of attention. But just as Nemoto had predicted, and just as Vice-President Della’s political instincts had warned her, Malenfant and his brave, lunatic stunt had raised public spirits at a time when many people were suffering grievously. In the end it wouldn’t matter what he did — people seemed to understand that there was no conceivable way he was going to “solve” the problem of the Red Moon — but as long as he pursued his mission with courage and panache, he would be applauded; it was as if everybody was escaping the suffering Earth with him.

But the catch was they all wanted a piece of him.

Paulis was still talking. “That thing in the sky changed everything. It didn’t just deflect the tides. It deflected all our lives — mine included. When I woke up that first day, when I tuned my “screens to the news and saw what it was doing to us, I felt — helpless. Swapping one jerkwater Moon for another is probably a trivial event, in a Galaxy of a hundred billion suns. Who the hell knows what else goes on out there? But I’ve never felt so small. I knew at that moment that my whole life could be shaped by events I can’t control. Who knows what I might have become if not for that, knocking the world off of its axis? Who knows what I might have achieved?”

“Life is contingent,” the driver, Xenia, said unexpectedly. Her accent was vaguely east European. She reached back and covered Paulis’s hand. “All we can do is try our best for each other.”

“You’re wise,” Malenfant said.

She sat gravely, not responding.

“On our behalf, please go kick ass, sir,” Frank Paulis said.

“I have less than twelve hours before I fly back out of here, Frank. Tell me who it is I have to meet.”

The car pulled away from the viewpoint and headed towards the sprawling base. Malenfant took a last long breath of the crisp ocean air, bracing himself to be immersed in the company of people once more.

Shadow:

Shadow huddled under a tree, alone.

Claw came stalking past, panting, carrying yellow fruit in his good hand. She cowered away from him, seeking to hide in the deep brown dark of the tree’s thick trunk. He hooted and slapped her. Then he stalked on, teeth bared.

Flies clustered around her hand. The webbing between her thumb and forefinger had been split open. Her inner thighs were scratched and sore. Her belly and breasts were bruised, and a sharp pain lingered deep inside her.

Claw had used her again.

Her hands reached for food — a sucked-out fruit skin dropped by somebody high in the tree above her, a caterpillar she spotted on a leaf. But her mouth chewed without relish, and her stomach did not want the food. Agony shot upwards from her deepest belly to her throat. A thin, stinking bile spilled out of her mouth. She groaned and rolled over onto the ground, huddled over her wounded hand.

The light leaked out of the sky.

There was rustling and hooting as the people converged on the roosting site from wherever they had wandered during the day. The high-ranking women built their nests first, weaving branches together to make soft, springy beds, and settling down with their infants.

Somebody thumped Shadow’s back, or kicked it. She didn’t see who it was. She didn’t care.

She stared at the dust. She did not eat. She did not drink. She did not climb the trees to build a nest. She only nursed the scarlet pain in her belly.

Just before the last sunlight faded, she heard screeching and crashing, far above her. Big Boss was making one last show of strength for the day, leaping from nest to nest, waking the women and throwing out the men.

The noises faded, like the light.

Something smelled bad.

She held up her hand in the blue-tinged dark. Something moved in the wound between thumb and forefinger, white and purposeful. She tucked the hand away from her face, deep under her belly.

She closed her eyes again.

Daylight.

She pushed at the ground. She sat up, and slumped back against the tree root.

The people were all around her, jostling, arguing, playing, eating. They didn’t see her, here in her brown-green dark.

There was shit smeared on her fur. It was drying, but it smelled odd.

The man called Squat was trying to lead the people, to start the day. He was walking away from them, shaking a branch, stirring bright red dust that clung to his legs. He looked back at Big Boss, walked a little further, looked back again.

Big Boss followed, growling, his hair bristling all over his back. One by one the others followed, the adults feeding as they walked, the children playing with manic energy, as always.

Here was Little Boss. He squatted down on his haunches before Shadow. He was a big slab of hot, sweating muscle, bigger in height and weight than Big Boss himself. He picked up her damaged hand and turned it over. He poked at the edges of the wound, where pus oozed from broken flesh. He let go of the hand, so it fell into the dirt. He inspected her, wrinkling his nose.

He got up and walked a few paces away.

Then he turned. He ran back and, with all his momentum behind it, he kicked her, hard. She ducked her head out of the way, but the kick caught her shoulder and sent her sprawling.

Others came by: women, men, children. She received more slaps and kicks, and was confronted by teeth-baring displays of disgust. Shadow just lay in the dirt, where Little Boss’s kick had thrown her.

But the heatings by the men were not severe today. They saved their energy for each other. Many of them jabbered and punched each other, in noisy, inconclusive bouts. The elaborate politics of the men was taking some new turn.

Then there were no more kicks or slaps. The people walked-away, the rustle of their passing receding. Shadow was left alone. She dissolved, becoming only a mesh of crimson pain.

She knew herself only in relationship to other people: not through the place she lived, the skills she had. Ignored, it was as if she did not exist.

Now somebody crouched down before her. She smelled familiar warmth. She turned her head with difficulty; her neck was stiff. It was Termite, her mother. Beyond her Tumble, the infant, was playing with a lizard she had found, chasing it this way and that, picking it up by the tail and throwing it.

Termite, huge, strong, studied her daughter. Her face was twisted by uneasy disgust. But she probed at the scratches on Shadow’s legs, dipped her fingers into the blood that had dried around Shadow’s vagina, and tasted it. Then she inspected the ugly wound on Shadow’s hand. Fly maggots were wriggling there.

Termite groomed carefully around the edge of the wound. She pulled out the maggots, squeezed out pus, and licked the edges of the wound. Then she gathered a handful of thick, dark green leaves. She chewed these up, spitting them out into a green mass that stank powerfully, and scraped it over the wound.

It hurt sharply. Shadow squealed and pulled her hand back. But her mother was strong. Termite grabbed her hand and continued to tend the wound, despite Shadow’s struggles.

Tumble kept her distance. She would approach her mother, stare at Shadow and wrinkle her small nose, and retreat; then she would forget whatever she had smelled, and approach once more. She hovered a few paces away, attraction and repulsion balanced.

Later, Termite put her powerful arms under Shadow’s armpits, hauled her upright by main force, and dragged her into the shade of a fat, tall palm. She brought her food: figs, leaves and shoots. Shadow tried to pull her face away. Termite grabbed her jaw and pinched the joints until Shadow opened her mouth. She forced the food between Shadow’s lips, and pushed at her jaw until Shadow chewed and swallowed.

Shadow threw up.

Termite persisted.

By the time the roosting calls began to sound once more through the forest, Shadow was keeping down much of what she swallowed.

The people returned. The adults carried shaped cobbles, or bits of food. Some of the men had meat.

But there was much unrest. Squat and Little Boss were jabbering and throwing slaps at each other. Squat grabbed at a bloody animal leg Little Boss was carrying, trying to snatch it off him. Little Boss punched him hard in the nose, sending Squat flying back, and Little Boss took a defiant, bloody mouthful of his meat.

When the women started making their nests, Tumble climbed up her mother’s legs and clung onto her shoulders and head.

Once again Termite tried to make Shadow stand, but Shadow fell back and sprawled in the dirt. So Termite leaned over and let Shadow fall across her shoulders. She stood straight with a grunt, and Shadow’s arms and legs dangled at her back and belly.

With powerful gasps. Termite began to climb a palm, laden down by her infant and her nearly grown daughter.

Shadow’s head dangled at Termite’s back. She saw Termite’s legs and rump, a dark slope before her, powerful muscles working. With every jolt. Shadow felt her innards clench, and bright red pain flowed through her. Tumble’s small hands delivered stinging slaps to her unprotected backside.

High in a palm, Termite let Shadow slide into the crook of a branch. Sweating and panting. Termite quickly pulled branches together to make a nest. Then she grabbed Shadow by the armpits and pulled her into the nest.

Termite settled herself, curling around her daughter’s back. Whimpering, Tumble settled down in the nest at her mother’s back, on the far side from Shadow.

The light slid away. The world was black and grey.

Shadow closed her eyes. She slept, entering a deep dreamless sleep, with her mother’s warmth around her.

When she woke, in the first pink light of day, she found her thumb in her mouth, as if she was an infant. Memories flooded into her head. Her illness was like a tunnel of blood red, leading back to greener days beyond.

Her back was cold. Termite wasn’t there.

She sat up. Termite and Tumble were in the nest, on its far side. Termite was assiduously grooming her infant’s fur. Tumble was picking through a lump of faeces, seeking undigested food.

Shadow inspected the wound in her hand. Green, chewed-up fibre clung to it. She licked away the green stuff. There was no sign of maggots or pus, and much of the damaged area was scabbed over, although the scabs cracked when she flexed her thumb.

She hooted and scrambled towards her mother.

Termite sat on the edge of the nest, her long arms wrapped around Tumble, watching Shadow with a hard, still face.

Shadow sat for long heartbeats in the centre of the nest. She picked up bits of fur from the nest and teased them through her fingers. The scent of her mother was still there, mixed with the green smells of the tree. But there was a sourness too.

The sourness was her own smell, Shadow’s smell. Her mother, like her sister, could not bear to be with her, because of the smell. She ripped at her fur, screeching, and scattered handfuls of it around the disintegrating nest.

Termite watched impassively.

A stab of pain, lancing up from the depths of her gut, stopped Shadow dead.

She looked down at herself, her breasts and belly and legs. She felt a shiver of surprise that she was here, inside this body that stank so strangely.

The pain stabbed again, hot and white. She doubled over, and. vomit surged from her, sour and yellow.

It was a hard time for them all. With Big Boss weakening, the social order of the group was breaking down, and anger washed among the people like froth on a turbulent stream.

It went hard for Shadow. Pushed even from her mother’s protective circle, suddenly she was the lowest woman in the group. They all hated her, not just for her low place, but because of what she had become, this stinking, bleeding monster. She could not defend herself, from their beatings and the theft of her food.

But still she clung to the group. Still she made her nest each night, high in the trees, away from the cats and other predators, as close to the others as she dared approach. Much as she feared their fists, she was drawn back, for there was nowhere else to go.

And she was still ill. Her bleeding had stopped. She was afflicted by stomach cramps and pain deep in her back. Her breasts and belly started to swell. She was violently sick each morning. Her days were a blur of pain and loneliness. When she saw her shadow, of a hunched-over creature with hair ragged and filthy, she did not recognize herself.

But then, one day, she felt something squirm in her belly, a kicking foot.

Her head filled with memories, of blood and shit and milk. She remembered a woman lying on her back, legs askew, other women working to pull a pink, slick mass from her body, their hands sticky with blood.

Her loneliness sharpened into fear.

Again she ran to her mother, reaching for her sparse fur, trying to groom, to get close.

Since the illness had started, Termite had never once struck her daughter, not as the others did. But now, as her broad nostrils widened with the stink of Shadow’s body, her fists clenched.

Shadow cowered, whimpering.

Claw came running by, hair bristling, hooting inanely. He was grinning, but blood ran from a gouge in the side of his face. He was running from a fight. As he passed Shadow he aimed a kick at her that caught her in the small of her back.

Shadow dragged herself to the shade of a big palm. There she slumped down, and vomited copiously.

Reid Malenfant:

The next time he woke, Malenfant found the light that soaked through his parachute-canopy tent was a little less bright, the air perhaps a fraction cooler.

Night was coming, at last, to the desert.

He tried to sit up. His head banged as if his brain was rattling around in his skull. His mouth was a sandbox, and he felt a burning dryness right through his throat and nose. It felt like the worst hangover of all time.

But you’re built for heat, Malenfant. You’ve got a body adapted to function away from the shelter of the trees, to walk upright in the heat of the day. That’s why you sweat and the chimps don’t. Haven’t you learned anything from those palaeo classes?…

He reached for his water flask and shook it. Still a quarter full, just as it had been before he slept. Deliberately he tucked it back under his blanket.

He got to his feet. He staggered, brushing his head against the hot, dusty canopy. The fabric rippled, and he heard sand hissing off it. He bent and found his broad stiff-brimmed hat, and jammed it on his bare scalp. Then, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, he stepped out of the makeshift tent.

Outside was like a dry sauna. He felt the moisture just suck straight out of his skin. The pain intensified around his temples and eyes, crumpling his forehead.

The world was elemental: nothing but sand, sky and gnarled Joshua trees, over which their “chutes were draped.

This was the Mojave desert. He and Nemoto had been dumped here as a survival training exercise. During the day the heat was flat and crushing; they could do nothing but lie in their tent of “chutes. And at night they foraged for food.

Nemoto was crouched over a low fire. She was heating some kind of thin broth in a pan she’d made out of aluminium foil. She had a spare T-shirt wrapped around her head. To survive you don’t need equipment, the instructor had said. All you need to pack is strength and ingenuity and determination. That, and a willingness to eat insects and lizards.

Nemoto had proved ingenious at setting traps.

“I wonder—” His throat was so dry he had to start again. “I wonder what’s in the soup this time.”

Nemoto glanced up at him, and then looked back to her cooking. “Your speech is slurred. Drink some water, Malenfant.”

He walked around their little campsite, stretching his legs. He could feel a tingling in his limbs, and the air felt thin. The horizon seemed blurred, perhaps by dust.

“I mean, why the hell are we here?” He lifted his arms and turned around. “Whatever we find on the Red Moon, it won’t be like this.”

“But on returning to Earth we might land in a desert area, and—”

He barked laughter, hurting his throat. “Let’s face it, Nemoto. The chances of our returning healthy enough to play wild man in the desert are too remote to think about.”

“Drink some water.”

He stalked away, vainly seeking cooler air.

As the project had grown, as all such projects did, it had acquired its own logic, much of it loaned from NASA — to Malenfant’s chagrin, and against his better judgement. While the ship was being prepared, the booster assembled and tested, nobody seemed to know what to do with the astronauts, except train them to death and send them on goodwill tours, just as NASA always had.

Some of the training Malenfant could swallow. He had, after all, flown in space twice before, and Nemoto, on her single trip to Station, had logged up an impressive number of days on orbit. So they endured hours in classrooms and in hastily mocked-up simulators going over every aspect of their unlikely craft’s systems, and the procedures they would have to follow at their mission’s major stages.

The major problem with that turned out to be the very volatility of the design. As teams of engineers struggled to cram in everything they thought they needed, key systems went through major redesigns daily — and all of it impacted in the crew’s interface with their craft. In the end Malenfant had grown tired of the simulation programmers” labouring efforts. He had shut down the sims, had a dummy cabin mocked up from plywood, and had blown-up layouts of their instrument panels cut out of paper and pasted over the wood. It wasn’t too interactive, but it familiarized them with systems and procedures — and it was easy to upgrade each morning with bits of tape and sticky paper, as news of each redesign came through.

But the spacecraft-specific training was the easy stuff. The rest was more problematic. How, after all, do you train to face a completely unknown world?

Malenfant and Nemoto had undergone a lot of altitude training, for it was clear that the Red Moon’s air would be thinner than Earth’s. Likewise they had been taken to tropical jungles, for it was planned to bring them down in a vegetated region close to the Moon’s equator.

But beyond that, all was uncertain. Nobody knew if they would find water fresh enough to drink. Nobody knew if they would be able to eat the vegetation always assuming the grey-green swathes visible through telescopes were vegetation at all. Nobody knew if there would be animals to hunt — or if there were animals that might hunt two human astronauts. It wasn’t even clear if the air could be breathed unfiltered.

The ship would be packed with three days” ground supplies, including air filters and water and compressed food. If the makeshift explorers found they couldn’t live off the land in that time, they were just going to have to climb back in their lander and depart (always supposing they could find the return-journey rocket pack that was supposed to follow them to the Moon).

And then there was the mystery of the hominids who had come tumbling through the Wheel in the sky.

Malenfant and Nemoto had sat through hours of lectures by Julia Corneille and others, trying to absorb the best understanding of the evolution of mankind, watching one species after another parade through dimly realized computer animations — Australopithecus, Homo habilis. Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens. Homo heidelbergensis. Homo neandertalensis… It was a plethora of speculation as fragmentary, it seemed to Malenfant, as the bone scraps on which it was based. He had vaguely imagined that the newer evidence based on DNA variation might have cleared the picture, but it seemed only to have confused everybody further. Nobody knew where humanity was going, of course. It had startled Malenfant to find that if you dug deeper than pop science simplifications, nobody really knew where man had come from either.

The truth was that the sessions had been of little use. Malenfant had learned more than he wanted to know about archaeological. techniques and dating methods and anatomical signifiers and all the rest. What he needed to know was how to handle a tribe of Homo habilis, alive, fighting and breeding, should he crest a hillside on the Red Moon and discover them — or vice versa. But NASA’s experts, curators of fragments all, simply weren’t tuned to thinking that way. It was as if they could only see the bits of bone, and not the people that must once have lived to yield up these ancient treasures.

The only real consensus was that Malenfant and Nemoto should pack guns.

…He had lost his hat. He saw it on the ground.

There was a ringing in his ears. He ought to get his hat. He bent to reach it.

Next thing he knew, he was on his side. He lay there fuming.

The hat was too far away to reach, so he wriggled that way. Like a snake, he thought, cackling. When he had his hat he stuck it on the side of his head, so it shielded his face.

At least the palaeo training had been relevant, he thought. Too much of the rest of his time had been filled up with pointless exercises like this. They had even threatened to put him back in a centrifuge. “I told them to stick the fucking centrifuge where the sun don’t shine,” he muttered.

The sand was hot and soft. Its pressure seemed to ease the pain in his head. Maybe he would sleep awhile.

There were hands under his hips and shoulders, pushing him onto his back. A face above him blocked out the sky. It, she, was saying something. Nemoto, of course.

He said, “Leave me alone.”

She leaned closer. “Open your mouth.” She lifted a flask and poured in water.

He made to spit it out, but that would be even more stupid. He swallowed it. “Stop that. We have to save it.”

“You’re dehydrated, Malenfant. You know the drill. You drink what you have until it’s gone, and if you have not been found by then, you die of thirst. Simple logic. Either way it does no good to ration your water.”

“Horse feathers,” he said. But he let her pour more water into his mouth. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.

Emma Stoney:

They continued to work their way east. A range of mountains, low and eroded almost to shapelessness, began to loom above the horizon. Though their outlines and colours were softened to blurs by the murky air, Emma thought she made out bands of vegetation, forest perhaps, on their lower slopes.

After another day’s walking, the Runners paused by a shallow, slow-running stream.

Sally threw herself flat on the ground. She seemed to go to sleep at once. Maxie, as ever full of life at precisely the wrong time, ran off to play with the Runner children.

Emma sat on dusty grass and eased off her boots. Maybe her feet were toughening up; at least she didn’t have to pour any blood out of her boots today. She limped to the stream to drink, wash her face, bathe her feet. She found a stand of root plants, a little like potatoes, small enough to dig out of the ground. It was a pleasure for once to be able to provide for herself.

Emma watched the Runners. The descending sun had turned the western sky a tall orange-pink — volcano sunset, she thought — and peering through the dusty air was like looking into a tank of shining water, through which exotic creatures swam.

The stream had washed down a rich supply of volcanic pebbles, and many of the adults were knapping tools. They squatted on their haunches in the stream, their lithe bodies folded up like penknives, tapping one stone against another. The axes they made were flattened slabs of stone, easy to grip, with clean sharp edges. Stone axes and wooden spears: the only tools the Runners ever made, over and over, tools they turned to every task from butchering carcasses to shaving even though their hands were clearly just as capable of fine manipulation as Emma’s.

There were a lot of oddities, if you watched carefully.

The toolmakers worked in silence and isolation, as if the others didn’t exist. Emma never saw a Runner pick up a tool dropped by somebody else and use it, not once. A few children and young adults sat beside their elders, watching, trying to copy them. Mostly the adults ignored their apprentices; only very rarely did Emma see examples of coaching, such as when one woman picked a rock from out of a boy’s hand and turned it around so it served to flake the anvil stone better.

All the tools turned out by the women, so far as Emma could tell, were functional. But some of the men’s were different. Take Stone, for example, the bullying alpha-male. Sometimes he would sit and labour for hours at an axe, knocking off a chip here, a flake there. It was as if he pursued some impossible dream of symmetry or fineness, working at his axe far beyond the point where he could be adding any value.

Or, more strangely, he would sit with a pile of stones and work feverishly, turning out axe after axe. But some of these “axes” were mere flakes of rock the size of Emma’s thumb — and some were great monsters that she could have held only in two hands, like a book opened for reading. These pathological designs seemed no use as tools; Stone would do no more than carry them around with him for a few hours, making sure everybody saw them, before dumping them, never used, their edges as sharp as the instant they were made.

Emma didn’t know why Stone did this. Maybe it was a dim groping towards culture: hand-axe as art form. After all, the hand-axe was the only meaningful artefact they actually made, taking planning and vision and a significant skill; their other “tools’, like their termite-digging sticks or even their spears, were little more than broken-off bits of wood or bone, based on serendipitous discoveries of raw materials, scarcely finished. The hand-axe was the only way the Runners had to express themselves.

But if that was so, why didn’t the women join in such “artistic” activities as well?

Or maybe the useless hand-axes were about sex, not practicality or culture. After all to be able to make a decent axe showed a broad range of skills planning, vision, manual skills, strength — essential for survival in this unforgiving wilderness. Look at me, girls. I’m so fit and strong and full of food, I’ve got time to waste on these useless monsters and fingernail-sized scale models. Look at me! When everybody around you had a body as drop-dead beautiful as any athlete’s she had ever seen, you needed something to stand out from the crowd.

Could that be true? The Runners had to enjoy something like full humanity, in planning and vision and concentration, when making the axes. But could they then abandon that humanity and revert to some lower level of instinct, as the axes became a symbol of sexual prowess, as unconscious as a bird’s bright plumage?

It was all another reminder to her that no matter how human these beautiful creatures looked and sometimes behaved, they were not human. Their small heads contained shards of humanity, she thought, floating on a sea of animal drives and instincts: humans sometimes, not other times…

Or maybe she was just being anthropomorphic. Maybe she shouldn’t be comparing the Runners to herself, seeing how human they were, or weren’t; the Runners were simply Runners, and they fit into their world as well as she fit into hers.

Though it was a full hour since they had abandoned the trek for the day, Fire was still wandering around with his hands clasped together. He couldn’t drop his hot burden until the others had gathered kindling and fuel for him, and as long as the sun was up and the air was warm they had no interest in doing that — in fact it didn’t even seem to occur to them — and so Fire was stuck.

But he had more than that on his mind. He was vainly pursuing one of the girls, Dig: a real knock-out, Emma thought, with crisp auburn hair, full, high breasts and hips to die for. Poor Fire seemed to have no idea how to get through to her; he just followed her around, holding out his handfuls of ash, and plaintively calling her name. “Dig! Dig!”

Being the fire-carrier was obviously a key job, a cornerstone of this untidy little community. But as far as Emma could see his role didn’t win Fire much respect from the other Runners, especially the men. Each night he would deliver his embers to the latest heap of kindling, and then would be pushed and slapped away. It was as if he was the runt of the litter. Certainly his handful of ashes just didn’t get him the girls the way the hand-axes of the other boys and men did.

But this time, for once, Fire was getting closer to the object of his desire. She backed up against a tree, and he walked towards her, hands clasped, that ridiculous, tragic erection sticking out like a divining rod.

But a rock hit him hard in the side of the head.

The rock had been thrown by Stone.

Fire went down, toppling like a felled tree. He opened his hands to save himself before he hit the mud. His precious ashes scattered.

Runners ran forward. Dig and Blue got to their knees in the mud, and tried to scrape together the ashes and embers. But the embers were hissing, quickly extinguished in the mud.

Stone hadn’t grasped the chain of events that led from his own hurled rock to the death of the fire, or else he just didn’t want to know; either way he capered and howled, pressing the useless embers into the mud with his bare feet, and he aimed hefty kicks at Fire’s ribs.

Fire curled up, arms wrapped over his head, whimpering in misery. Emma winced, but she knew better than to try to intervene.

After that, the daylight seemed to run out quickly. As the sun descended towards the horizon, the golden air turned to a dismal brown. The shadows of trees to the west lengthened, clutching at the cowering Runners like claws.

In the absence of a fire the Runners gathered more closely than usual, the women clutching their children, even the usually solitary men huddling close.

The first predators began to call.

Sally came to Emma. “You have to use your spyglass,” she said. “Make a fire. And you have to do it now, before we run out of sun.”

Emma sighed. “I’m frightened of showing them too much of what we’ve got.”

“They aren’t going to steal your glass and start using it all over the savannah,” Sally said. “They don’t learn.”

“It’s not that. Right now they seem to think we are like them. If they think we’re too strange, they might reject us.”

The shadow of a distant tree slid across Sally’s face. “Sister, I don’t think it’s the time for philosophical dilemmas. In a couple of hours the hyenas are going to be chomping on our bones. And anyhow these guys have attention spans that make Maxie look like Michelangelo. By the morning, they’ll have forgotten it all. Come on, Emma. Just do it.”

“All right. Let’s try to keep our tools out of their sight, though.”

“Agreed.”

They spent a few minutes gathering dry wood, and building a little tepee a couple of feet high. Then they scraped together dried leaves and tinder.

Emma crouched down on the ground, folded her magnifying glass out of her knife, and angled it until she caught the crimson light of the low sun. She moved it back and forth until she had focused a tight spot of light on a few bits of dry tinder. Then she waited, the cold of the ground seeping into her, her awkwardly angled arm growing stiff. She grumbled, “I don’t know why the hell the South African air force didn’t just give me a box of matches.”

Some of the Runners came to watch what they were doing. They hooted excitedly, one woman even making rubbing-hands-warm motions. But when the tinder didn’t catch light immediately, they became baffled and quickly lost interest.

Her spot of light disappeared. She looked up to see a small silhouetted figure, a grasping hand.

“Maxie’s. Maxie’s!”

Sally scooped him up. “Get away, Maxie, for heaven’s sake.” Maxie, denied the toy, began wailing.

Unnoticed, the tinder had started smoking.

Emma immediately dropped her glass. She cupped the thread of smoke with her hands and blew gently. The smoke trail billowed, nearly died.

She sat back and beckoned to Fire. “Hey. Come over here. Come on. This is your job.”

Poor Fire sat squat on the ground, clutching his ribs, an immense lump forming on the side of his head.

“Umm, Fire smoke Fire. Fire Fire!”

At last he came forward, hobbling painfully. Shivering, he cupped his hands around the thread of smoke and blew, lips pursed.

It seemed to take him mere seconds to have a small flame going. With the precise motions of a surgeon, he began to feed the tiny red-yellow spot with bits of tinder.

When the smoke started to spread, the other Runners were drawn back. As the fire grew, they settled down around it, just as they did every night, and the men began to drag over heavy branches to make night logs.

Sally watched the Runners with cold contempt. “Not a word, not a gesture of congratulation or apology. Or surprise. Or relief. They’ve already forgotten how Fire lost his embers… The fire is just here, and they accept it. They really don’t think like us, do they?”

Emma stretched stiff limbs. “Right now, I couldn’t care less. Just so long as the fire keeps away the bad guys with the teeth.”

As Emma fell into sleep, a rough hand grabbed her shoulder.

She froze. Her eyes snapped open. The sky, full of ash and smoke, retained a lingering purple-black glow, enough to show her a lithe, crouching silhouette. It, he, leaned over her. She was pushed onto her back. She could smell Runner: a thick, pungent, meaty smell of flesh that had never once been washed.

In the back of her mind she had rehearsed for this, from the first day here. Don’t resist, she told herself. Don’t cry out. She had seen the Runners copulate, every day. It would be fast, brutal, and over.

For a moment her assailant was still, his breath hot. She stiffened, expecting hands to claw at her clothing. But that didn’t come. Instead a head, heavy, topped by tight curls, descended to her breast. She felt shuddering, a low moan.

Gingerly she reached up. She explored a flat skull, those extraordinary brow ridges like motorcycle goggles. And she touched a swollen mass on one temple. Her assailant flinched away.

It was Fire.

He was weeping. She remembered how he used to go to the old woman, Sing, for comfort, before she died. She wrapped one arm around his back. His muscles were hard sheets, his skin slick with dirt and sweat.

He reached up and grabbed her fingers. With a sharpness that made her yelp, he pulled her hand down towards his crotch. She found an erection as stiff as a piece of wood. She tried to pull away, but he pushed her hand back.

Gently, hesitantly, she wrapped her fingers around his hot penis. His hand took her wrist and pushed it back and forth.

She rubbed him once, twice. He came quickly, in a rapid gush against her leg. He sighed, released her wrist, and lay more heavily against her.

Half-crushed, barely able to breathe, she waited until his breathing was regular. Then, gingerly, she pushed at his shoulder. To her intense relief, he rolled away.

In the morning. Fire scooped up his embers and ash, and the Runners dispersed for their walk. It was as if none of the previous evening’s events had ever happened.

Reid Malenfant:

In the last hours he had to endure a visit from an Apollo astronaut: a walker on a now-vanished Moon, eighty-five years old, ramrod straight and tanned like a movie star. “You know, just before my flight we had a visit from Charles Lindbergh and his wife. He had figured that in the first second of my Saturn’s flight, it would burn ten times more fuel than he had all the way to Paris. We laughed about that, I can tell you. Well, Lindbergh came to see me before I flew, and here I am come to see you before your flight. Passing on the torch, if you will…”

And so Malenfant, with a mixture of humility and embarrassment, shook the hand of a man who had shaken the hand of Lindbergh.

It was, at last, the night before launch.

At Vandenberg, he stood in the crisp Californian night air. The BDB’s service structure was like an unfinished building, a steel cage containing catwalks and steps and elevators and enclosures. A dense tangle of pipes and ducts and tubing snaked through the metalwork. The slim booster itself was brilliantly lit, the sponsors” logos and NASA meatballs encrusting its hide shining brightly. Its main tanks were full of cryogenic propellants, and they spewed plumes of vapour into the air. No doubt in violation of a dozen safety rules, hard-hatted technicians, NASA and contractor grunts, scurried to and fro at the booster’s base, and electric carts whirred by. It was a scene of industry, of competence, of achievement.

Malenfant stepped into an elevator and pushed the button for the service structure’s crew level, three hundred feet high. He was escorted by a single tech, a Cape ape in clean-room regalia of a white one-piece coverall, latex gloves and puffy plastic hat. Malenfant had met the guy before, and they nodded, grinning; he was a somewhat grizzled veteran, long laid off by NASA but rehired for this project.

They rose vertically in the clanking, swaying steel cage. Beyond the cage flashed steel beams, cables and work platforms, mostly unattended now. And beyond that was the hide of the main tank itself: sleek, smooth, coated with ice where the cryogenic fuels had frozen the moisture out of the night air. It was such an immense cold mass that Malenfant felt the heat being drawn out of his own body, as if he were some speck of moisture that might end up glued to that glistening skin.

The elevator came to a stop. He stepped out, turned right, and walked over the access-arm catwalk. The walk was just a flimsy rail that spanned the rectilinear gulf between the tangled, rusted gantry, and the sleek hide of the booster. An ocean breeze picked up, laden with salt, and the catwalk creaked and swayed as if the gantry were mounted on springs. He grabbed a handrail for support. Through the chain-link fence he could see the lights of the base scattered in rectangles and straight lines over the darkened ground, and the more diffuse lights of the inland communities. The coast was black, of course, swept clean of habitation by the Tide.

This was a noisy place. The Pacific wind moaned through the complex, and the huge propellant pipes groaned and cracked as rivers of the super-cold fluids surged through them. Fuel and wind: it was a noise of power, of gathering strength, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

He reached the end of the walk. He stepped through the white room, the cramped enclosure where he would be inspected one last time before the launch, and he faced the streamlined fairing that would protect the Moon lander during launch. There was a hatchway cut into the fairing. A small wooden step led up to the hatch, a touch of home-workshop mundanity amid all this shining hardware.

From here he could see into the cabin of the lander itself: small, crammed with supplies, and with two canvas-frame couches side by side. The light was a subdued green. Instrument panels on the wall glowed with softscreen displays and telltale lights. It was like looking into a small cave, he thought, an undersea cave crusted with jewels.

Malenfant had been through it all before. Every space project, as it developed, became entangled and complex beyond the understanding of any single human. But from the astronaut’s point of view that proliferating tangle reached a certain maximum, until, after some indefinable point — as the booster stack crept forward through its integration schedule, as launch day approached — the whole thing began to simplify, to focus.

In the end, he thought, every mission reduces to this: human beings climbing into the mouth of a monster, to be hurled away from the Earth. And all the technicians and managers and fundraisers and cheerleaders and paper-chasers in the world can do nothing but watch.

Emma’s mother and her sister’s family were staying in apartments on the ASFB. They had invited Malenfant to join them for Mass, celebrated by the base’s Catholic chaplain.

Blanche Stoney, the mother, was an intimidating seventy-year-old. She offered Malenfant her hand without getting out of her chair. The sister, Joan, a little younger than Emma, had raised four kids alone, and had looked exhausted every time Malenfant had met her. But the kids were all now young teenagers and, it seemed to Malenfant, remarkably well behaved.

The priest said Mass for the family in a cramped living room.

Malenfant, upright in his civilian suit, tanned walnut brown by the desert sun, felt as out of place as a spanner in a sewing basket. But he endured the ceremony, and took his bread and wine with the others. He tried to find some meaning and comfort in the young priest’s familiar words, and the play of light on the scraps of ornate cloth, the small chalices and the ruby-red wine.

The priest had asked Joan’s two eldest boys to serve as altar boys. They did fine except during the communion service, when the younger boy held the chalice upside down so that the hosts slid out and fell to the carpet, fluttering down one by one. In the background a softscreen showed live images of the preparation of the BDB. There were a lot of holds. Malenfant tried not to watch the whole time.

When it was done, the priest packed up and went home with promises to call during the mission.

Joan brought Malenfant a beer. “I think we owe you this.”

Blanche, the mother, snapped, “But you owed us your presence here tonight.”

“I don’t deny that, Blanche.”

Malenfant spent some time trying to explain the technicalities of the mission to them — the countdown, the launch, the flight profile. Joan listened politely. At first the children seemed interested, but they drifted away.

In the end Malenfant was left alone with Blanche.

She skewered him with her gaze. “You wish you were anywhere but here, don’t you?”

“Either that or I had another beer.”

She laughed, clambered stiffly out of her chair, and, somewhat to his surprise, brought him a fresh can.

“I know you try,” she said. “But you never really had much time for religion, did you? To you we’re all just ants on a log, aren’t we? I heard you say that on some “cast or other.”

He winced at the over-familiar words. “I think my wisdom has been spread a little thin recently.”

She leaned forward. “Why are you going to the Red Moon? Is it really to find my daughter — or just vainglory? To prove you’re not too old? I know what you flyboys are like. I know what really drives you. You have nobody here, do you? Nobody but Emma. So it’s easy for you to leave.”

“That’s what the Vice-President thinks.”

“Don’t name-drop with me. What do you say?”

“Blanche, I’m going up there for Emma. I really and truly am.”

With sudden, savage intensity, she leaned forward and grabbed his hand. “Why?”

“Blanche, I don’t—”

“You destroyed her. You started doing that from the moment you set your sights on her. I remember what you used to say. You bake the cakes, I’ll fly the planes. From the moment she met you, she had to start making sacrifices. It was the whole logic of your relationship. And in the end, you fulfilled that logic. You killed her. And now you want to kill yourself to get away from the guilt. Look me in the eyes, damn it, and deny that’s true.”

For about the first time since it happened, he thought back to those final moments in the T-38, the clamour in that sun-drenched sky. He remembered the instant when he might have regained control, his sense of exhilaration as that huge disastrous Wheel approached.

He couldn’t find words. Her rheumy eyes were like searchlights.

“I don’t know, Blanche,” he said honestly. “Maybe it’s for me. Without her, I’m lonely. That’s all.”

She snorted contempt. “Every human being I know is lonely. I don’t know why, but it’s so. Children are consolation. You never let Emma have children, did you?”

“It was more complicated than that.”

“Religion is comfort for the loneliness. But you rejected that too, because we’re just ants on a log.”

“Blanche — I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry.”

“No,” she said more softly. Then she rested her hand on his head, and he bowed. “Don’t say you’re sorry. Just bring her back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Where do you think she is now? What do you think she is going through?”

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly.

Shadow:

Relations among the men worsened. Every day there were increasingly savage and unpredictable fights, and many of the women and infants, not just Shadow, suffered punches and kicks and bites as a consequence.

One day it all came to a head.

Big Boss was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his back to a small clearing, working assiduously at a cluster of nut-palm fruit. Shadow was in shade at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden as had become her custom.

Without warning Squat stalked into the clearing. All his hair stood on end, doubling his apparent bulk. He leaped up and grabbed branches, ripping them off the trees, shaking them and throwing them down before him. He picked up rocks and hurled them this way and that. His silence was eerie, but his lips were pursed tightly together, pulling his face into a harsh frown, his eyes fixed on Big Boss.

Big Boss ignored him. He kept on plucking at the fruit in his lap. Squat, and the other men, had made such displays before, and nothing had resulted.

But now Little Boss suddenly broke from the cover of the trees. Without warning or apparent provocation, he hurled himself on Big Boss.

Big Boss roared and faced his attacker, hair bristling. But Squat screeched and joined in. The three of them dissolved into a blur of nailing fists and thrashing limbs.

All around the clearing, other men ran to see what was happening. They circled the battlers, hooting and crying — but not one of them rushed to the aid of Big Boss.

Big Boss broke away. His eyes were round and white, and blood leaked over the side of his head, where one ear had been bitten so savagely it dangled by a thread of gristle. He ran towards the nearest tree, and tried to clamber into it. But he was limping, and Squat and Little Boss easily caught him. They pulled him back and hurled him to the ground, and punched and kicked and bit him. Squat began to jump on Big Boss’s back, slamming his heels again and again into ribs and spine.

Now more of the men joined in, screaming and yelling. Though they concentrated their attentions on Big Boss, they squabbled and fought amongst themselves, vying for their places in the new order.

At last Little Boss climbed up on Big Boss’s back. He stood straight and roared. His mouth was bloody. He grabbed one of Big Boss’s arms, as if Big Boss were no more than a monkey he had caught in the forest. Little Boss twisted the arm this way and that, and Shadow heard bones snap, muscle tear.

The women and children huddled together beneath the trees, clutching each other or grooming tensely, shrinking from the aggression.

The men ran off into the forest, tense and excited, hair bristling. Big Boss lay where he had fallen, a bloody heap on the ground.

Slowly the women emerged from their sheltered places. Cautiously they fed and groomed each other and their children. None of them went near the fallen Big Boss — none save an over-inquisitive child, who was hastily retrieved by his mother.

Only Shadow stayed in her pool of shade.

The day wore away. The shadows lengthened.

Big Boss raised his head, then let it fall flat again.

Then he got one arm under his body, and pushed himself upright. The other arm dangled. His flesh was ripped open, by teeth or chipped cobbles, so that flaps hung down from patches of gleaming gristle, and his skin was split by great gouges, crusted with dirt and half-dried blood. He had lost one ear completely, and one eye was a pit of blood from which a pale fluid leaked.

He opened his mouth. Spittle and blood looped between smashed teeth, and he moaned loudly.

The women and children ignored him.

Big Boss pulled his legs beneath him. He began to crawl towards the trees, one leg dragging, one arm dangling. Twice he fell flat. Twice he got himself up again, and continued to drag himself forward. Where he had been lying, the blood had soaked into the ground, leaving the dirt purple. And where he passed, he left a trail of sticky blood and spit and snot, like some huge snail.

When he got to the base of the tree, he twisted so he got his back against the bark of the trunk, and slumped back.

He was still for a long time. The sun, intermittently obscured by cloud, slid across the sky. Shadow thought Big Boss was dead.

But then he began to move again. Using the tree as a support, he pushed himself upright. He reached up with his less damaged arm to grab a low branch. He growled with pain. He got his chest over the branch, and felt forward, gasping. For a long time he was still once more, clinging to the branch. Then he carried on, hauling himself grimly from branch to branch, higher into the tree.

At last he reached a high point. Clinging to the tapering trunk with his legs, he pulled down branches with grim determination. Surrounded by clusters of yellow fruit, he slumped flat in this nest, the last he would ever make.

The women on the ground called, their panting hoots summoning each other and their children. The women climbed into the trees, infants clinging to their mothers” backs or chests. Shadow followed, keeping her distance. Soon she could see the women in their nests, clumpy shadows high in the trees, silhouetted against the deepening pink of the sky; here and there a limb stretched out, fingers working at a pelt or stroking a face.

Shadow glanced up at Big Boss’s nest. One foot dangled in the air, toes clenching and unclenching. Until a new leader emerged, the ladder of rank was broken into chaos. The days to come would be stressful and trying for everyone.

As the last light seeped from the sky, the men returned. They swarmed around the bases of the trees. They were still squabbling, screeching and fighting. Some of them clambered up into the trees and began to harass the women and children, smashing open their nests and chasing them across the branches; the women fought back grimly.

Now two of the men started climbing into Shadow’s own tree, peering up at her, whispering and showing their white teeth. Shadow could smell the blood on their fur.

Forces worked in Shadow’s mind: a fear of the dark unknown, a fear of further punishment at the hands of the people, a chill urge to cradle the thing in her womb. At last the forces reached a new equilibrium.

She slid out of her nest. As silently as she could, enduring the feeble kicking of the child in her womb, she clambered from the branches of her tree into the next, and then the next.

She slipped, alone, into the arboreal dark. Soon the sounds of the squabbling, roosting people were far behind her.

Fire:

Here is Fire. Here are his legs walking. Here he is, keeping his hands closed together, cupping the hot embers and the ash.

The sun is hot. The light is in his eyes. His eyes hurt him. His head hurts him.

He remembers why. He is lying on the ground. His eyes see bits of light. Stone’s feet swinging at his head and belly and chest. Once again Stone has driven him away from Dig.

Fire wants not to be here. But it is Fire who holds the embers, not his hands. Fire must be here to make his hands hold the hot embers.

The sky grows dark. The air grows cold. Fire looks up. The sky is covered over by cloud.

Something falls before Fire. It is a flake. It is white and soft. There are many flakes, falling slowly, all around him.

A flake settles on his chest. Another on his shoulders. His skin cannot feel them. More flakes settle around him, on the floor. His feet make footprints in the thickening grey cover. He stops. He looks back at the prints. He laughs. He steps backwards into the prints he has made. He steps forward into the prints.

The ground is growing grey. The people are grey. The trees are grey. Some of the people are afraid. Their fingers wipe grey from their eyes and scalps. The children with no names whimper. Their faces hide in their mothers” bellies.

Fire is not afraid. The grey is ash. Fire sees himself in the morning light. He sees his hands sweeping through ash, gathering embers. Now everything is ash. His head tips back. Ash falls into his mouth. His tongue tastes it. Fire is happy in this ash world. His legs run, and his mouth gibbers and hoots.

But now his head is wet.

His legs stop running. He lifts his head. He sees big fat raindrops fall from the sky, slowly sliding towards his face. They hit his mouth and his cheeks and his nose and his eyes. His eyes sting.

The rain makes little pits in the ash. His toes explore the pits. The wet ash turns to grey mud.

The other people trudge around him. Their hair is flat. The mud sticks to their feet in great heavy cakes. The rain turns the ash on their bodies to grey streaks.

The people reach a bank of trees. They stand there, baffled.

Stone steps forward. His great nostrils flare. “River river river!” he cries. His legs march him into the trees. His arms push aside the foliage with great cracks and snaps.

Fire’s legs carry him hurrying after Stone, into the forest.

The forest is green and dark and moist. Leaves and twigs clutch at Fire. His eyes look around fearfully, for Elf-folk, or worse. He sees nothing but people, like muddy shadows sliding through the bank of trees. He hears nothing but the crush of foliage by feet and hands, the soft breathing of the people.

Fire pushes out of the other side of the bank of trees.

The ground slopes down. There is rock here, purple-red, sticking out of the grass. Fire’s feet carry him carefully over the slippery rocks.

He reaches water. The water is brown, and slides slowly past his feet. It is the river.

The people come down to the bank. Their hands splash water on their faces, washing away mud.

Fire does not touch the water. Fire’s hands still hold the embers. Fire stands tall, and his eyes watch the river. To his left the river has scooped holes out from under the bank. A great lip of grass dangles towards the water. Fire sees that there is a gravel beach below the undercut, and deep dark openings behind it, caves.

“Fire Fire!” he cries. “Fire Fire!”

Fire walks towards the caves, cupping the embers. Grass and Wood, the women, follow him. They build a pile of the branches they have carried. They find the driest moss they can.

Inside the cave, Fire lowers his embers reverently into the moss. It smokes, but soon a flame is there, licking at the moss. Fire blows on it carefully.

When the fire is rising, Emma and Sally and Maxie come into the cave. Things cling to their backs, things of blue skin. Emma and Sally make the clinging things slide to the floor. They come to the fire and hold up their hands to its warmth. Sally rubs Maxie’s wet hair.

Fire grins. Emma grins back.

The flames are bright. Fire has a shadow. It stretches into the back of the cave, across a bumpy, mottled floor of rock. Fire follows his shadow. It grows longer, leading deeper into the dark.

There are animals at the back of the cave. Fire’s eyes open wide. Fire’s legs prepare to run.

His nose cannot smell animals. His nose smells people. He makes his legs walk forward.

The animals are sprawled flat against the wall. He makes his hand touch an animal. The fur is ragged and loose. He grabs it and pulls. The skin of the animal comes away from the wall.

There is no animal. There is only the skin of the animal. It was stretched out over branches. He pushes. The whole frame falls over with a clatter.

Behind the fallen frame he sees spears. He picks up a spear. Its tip is a different colour from the wood. His finger touches the tip. The tip is stone. It is an axe. No matter how hard he pulls, the stone wants to cling to its spear.

He drops the spear. He walks back along the cave, towards the light of the fire, the grey daylight.

People are gathered around the fire. Some children are sleeping. One woman sits in another’s lap, gently cupping her breasts. A man and a woman are coupling noisily.

Emma and Sally and Maxie sit against a wall. Their eyes gaze at the fire, or out into the greyness beyond.

The people are not here, though their bodies are here. Emma and Sally and Maxie are here. They are always here.

Fire’s body, warm and dry, wants to couple with Dig. His member stiffens quickly. He looks for Dig.

Dig is lying under Stone, on the floor. His hips thrust at her. Her eyes are closed.

Fire finds a rock on the floor. His fist closes around the rock and raises it, over Stone’s head.

Fire thinks of Stone’s anger, his fists and feet.

He drops the rock.

He walks out of the cave, to the river.

The rain is less now. It makes little grey pits on the surface of the water that come and go, come and go. He watches the pits.

For a time he is not there. There is only his body, only the water at his toes, the rain on his head, the pits on the water.

He squats down. The water is a cloudy, muddy brown. A fine grey scum floats on its surface. His eyes cannot see fish. But the water pools here, quietly. And he sees bubbles, bursting on the water.

He slides his hands into the water. His hands like the water. It is cool and soothes his scarred palms. He waits, knees on the ground, hands in the water, the last rain pattering on the back of his neck.

He is not there.

A cold softness brushes his hands.

His hands grab and lift. A fish flies over his head, wriggling, silvery. His ears hear it land with a thump on the grass behind him. He slides his hands back into the water. He is not there.

Reid Malenfant:

So here was Malenfant, for better or worse in space once again, flying ass backwards towards the Moon — a Moon, anyhow.

Nemoto and Malenfant sat upright, side by side, in a rounded bulge at the rear of the cramped, coffin-like, gear-crammed capsule. They were each encased in the heavy folds of their garish orange launch-and-entry suits, and a rubbery wet raincoat stink filled the air.

Malenfant gazed into the tiny, scuffed, oil-smeared rectangle of glass before his face, trying to make out the greater universe into which he had been thrust. There was no sense of space, of openness; surrounded by the womb-like ticking and purring of fans and pumps, immersed in the stench of rubber and metal, peering out through these tiny windows, it was like being stuck in a miniature submarine.

…But now Earth swam into view.

From the Station’s low orbit Earth had always been immense to Malenfant, a vast glowing roof or floor to his world, ever present, dwarfing his petty craft. But now Earth was receding. First one precisely curved horizon slid into his window frame, and then the other, so that soon he could see the whole Earth, hanging like a Christmas-tree bauble in the velvet black, blue patches peeking out from beneath the white swirl of clouds, painted with the familiar continent-shapes. Malenfant could see Florida, Africa, Gibraltar and even much of South America, his single glance spanning the Atlantic Ocean. The planet slowly shifted position, drifting from the top of his window to the bottom, so he had to crane forward to see it. Even from here he could see the damage done by the Tide: smoke was smeared over a dozen coastal cities, and he saw the cold gleam of white-tops as angry waves continued to pound the land.

Malenfant had been somewhat relieved that the launch had gone through without significant hitches.

He had lain in his couch listening to the flexing of the tanks as they were laden with cryos, then the roar of propellants like a distant locomotive, the whine of the pumps, the waterfall shout of the pad’s huge deluge system — and then the bursting roar of the engines. And he could think of nothing but the fact that this BDB booster stack on which he perched had never before flown in test, not even once — no time for that.

Anyhow they had gotten off the pad. The acceleration had been low at first. But as the engines far below had swivelled from side to side to adjust the direction of thrust, the two astronauts, stuck at the top of the stack, had been thrown back and forth, like ants clinging to the tip of a car antenna.

Then had come the violence of staging, as first the solid rocket boosters and then the big main engine cluster had cut out. Malenfant had been thrown forward against his harness, crashing his helmeted head against the curving bulkhead before him. After a heart-stopping moment of drift, the second stage had cut in, thrusting him back into his seat once more.

That second-stage burn had seemed to go on and on — six, seven, eight minutes, their craft growing lighter as fuel burned off, their velocity piling on. Not for Malenfant and Nemoto the old Apollo luxury of taking a couple of swings around the Earth to check out the systems; the BDB’s last contribution had been to hurl them on a direct-ascent trajectory all the way out of Earth’s gravity well without pausing.

Just ten minutes after leaving the pad at Vandenberg, the second stage finally cut out. Malenfant and Nemoto had listened to the clunk of the burnt-out stage disengaging itself from the lander, and the bull-snorts of nose-mounted attitude thrusters turning their little craft so it pointed nose-first to the Earth — ten minutes gone, and already Malenfant was bound irrevocably for the Moon.

Still the Earth shrank.

“There she goes,” he murmured. “I feel as if I’m driving a car into a long, dark tunnel…”

It struck him that Nemoto hadn’t said a single word since the pad rats had strapped them into their couches. Now, as they watched the Earth fall away, her small hand crept into his.

And then they broke. They began to work from panel to panel, throwing switches and checking dials, working through their post-insertion checklist, configuring the software that would run the craft’s life support systems. Necessary work without which they would not survive, not even for an hour.

New Moon or old, Earth’s satellite orbited just as far from the mother planet, and so it was going to take them three days to get there, just as it always had. But because they were flying backwards, they weren’t going to be able to see the Red Moon itself. Not until they got there.

For the first few hours the abandoned BDB second stage trailed after them, following its own independent path. It was scheduled to sail past the Moon and fly into interplanetary space. The stage was a lumpy cylinder, shining bright in the intense sunlight. Malenfant could clearly see the details of the attachment mechanisms at its upper face, and how its thin walls had crumpled during the launch. But it was venting unburnt fuel from three or four places. The small thrust of the fuel vents was making it tumble, like a garden sprinkler, and it was surrounded by a cloud of frozen fuel droplets that glimmered like stars.

The stage’s subtly modified path was bringing it closer to the lander than Malenfant would have liked, at one point no more than a few hundred feet away. He stayed strapped into his seat, watching this potential hazard, and weighing up options. But after a couple more hours the stage began to drift away of its own accord.

When the lander was alone in the emptiness, Malenfant felt an odd pang of loneliness, and almost wished the booster stage would come swimming back, like some great metal whale.

After six hours in space, twelve since they had been woken before the launch, they unbuckled.

Malenfant felt a surge of validating freedom as he found himself floating up from his couch. His treacherous stomach gave a warning growl, however. Throwing up in this confined space would be even more of a catastrophe than on Shuttle. He turned his back and popped a couple of tabs, trusting that the queasiness would pass.

Awkwardly, helping each other, they stripped out of their launch suits. Now they would wear lightweight jumpsuits and cloth bootees, all the way to the Red Moon.

The X-38, hastily modified from a Space Station bail-out craft, was just thirty feet long, an ungainly shape the pilots likened to a potato with fins. Malenfant and Nemoto had been given couches in the rounded bulge at the craft’s rear. The craft, designed for a couple of hours” flight down to Earth from low orbit, had been crammed with gear to keep them alive for ten, eleven, twelve days, the time it would take to reach the Red Moon, and come straight back again, if the natives didn’t look friendly. Much of its interior was too cramped for the crew even to sit upright — but then, in its primary bail-out mode carrying injured or even unconscious crew back to Earth, reclining couches would have sufficed.

To the rear end of the lander was fixed a liquid-rocket pack. The engine and propellants were based on the simple, reliable systems of the old Apollo Lunar Module. This engine would be used to decelerate them into lunar orbit, and then, if they chose to commit, to slow them further, until the lander began its long glide down into the atmosphere, shedding its heat of descent in a long series of aerodynamic manoeuvres, much like the Shuttle orbiter’s entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

During the last stages of the descent, a big blue and white parafoil, a steerable parachute a hundred and fifty feet wide, would blossom from the lander’s rear compartment. That would be quite a ride. The parafoil, the largest steerable “chute ever made, would be controlled by warping its wings, which was just the way the Wright brothers had steered their first ever manned flying machine. That seemed somehow appropriate. Anyhow, thus they would steer their way to a final descent, landing gently on skids.

In theory.

In fact they wouldn’t be steering the craft anywhere. The whole descent was automated. This was something against which Malenfant had fought hard. To give up control of the rudders and flaps to some virus-ridden computer program went against every instinct he’d built up in thirty years of flying. But it was much easier and simpler for the engineers to devise a lander that could fly itself all the way down than to figure out how to give a pilot control. Trust us, Malenfant. Trust the machine.

The facilities were not glamorous, even compared to the Station and the Shuttle. To wash Malenfant had to strip to the buff and give himself a sponge-bath. It took longer to chase down floating droplets of water and soap than to bathe in the first place.

The toilet arrangements were even more basic. There was no lavatory compartment, as in the Shuttle and Station, so they were thrown back to arrangements no more advanced than those used on Apollo, and earlier. There were receptacles for their urine, which wasn’t so bad as long as you avoided spillage, but for anything more serious you had to strip to the buff again and try to dump your load into plastic bags you clamped over your ass with your hands.

In this cramped environment they had, of course, absolutely no privacy from each other. But it never became a problem. Nemoto was twenty-five years old, with a fine, lithe figure; but Malenfant never found her distracting — and vice versa applied, so far as he could tell. Their relationship was prickly, but they were easy together, even intimate, but like siblings.

It was as if he had known this odd, quiet girl for a long time. In some other life, perhaps.

After eighteen hours awake, they prepared for sleep.

Malenfant had always had trouble sleeping on orbit. Every time his thoughts softened he seemed to drift up out of his couch, no matter how well he strapped himself down, and jerk himself to wakefulness, fearful of falling.

And on this trip it was even worse. He was acutely aware that he had travelled far from home this time — in particular, far beyond the invisible ceiling of Earth’s magnetic field, which sheltered the world’s inhabitants from the lethal radiation which permeated interplanetary space. When Malenfant closed his eyes he would see flashes and sparks — trails left in the fluid of his eyeballs by bits of flying cosmic debris that had come fizzing out of some supernova a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps — and he folded over on himself, imagining what that cold rain was doing to his vulnerable human body.

After a couple of hours he prescribed himself a sleeping pill.

On the couch next to his, Nemoto lay very still, and didn’t react when he moved; he couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake.

When he woke up, the pure oxygen of the cabin’s atmosphere had made his nose irritable and runny, and his skin was starting to flake off, bits of it floating around him in the gentle breezes.

The nearest thing to navigation in space Malenfant had performed before had been the not-inconsiderable task of sliding a Shuttle orbiter into its correct low Earth orbit, and then nudging two giant spacecraft, Space Station and orbiter, into a hair’s-width precise docking and capture.

Flying to the Red Moon was a whole different ball game. The X-38 had left a planet whose surface was moving at around 1,000 miles per hour. The craft was aiming to encounter a Moon moving at some 2,300 miles per hour relative to the Earth, with an orbital plane that differed from the spacecraft’s. Furthermore the X-38 had to aim, not at where the Moon was at time of launch, but where it would be three days later. For the sake of the air-to-ground public-consumption transmissions they were forced to endure, Malenfant sought metaphors for what they were trying to achieve. “It’s like jumping from one moving train to another — and landing precisely in a top-price seat. No, more than that. Imagine jumping from a roller coaster car, and catching a bullet in your teeth as you fall…”

And the various computations had to be accurate to within one part in four million, or the X-38 would slam too steeply into the Red Moon’s atmosphere and burn up, or else go flying past the Moon and become lost, irretrievably, in interplanetary space. If they got the navigation wrong, they were both dead. It was as simple as that.

It didn’t console Malenfant at all to consider that this feat of translunar navigation had been achieved by manned missions before — nine times, in fact, if you included Apollo 13 — since here he was in an untried, utterly untested spacecraft, heading for an alien Moon, and everybody who had worked on those ancient missions was retired or dead.

So he laboured at his astronomical sightings, in-situ position recordings which backed up tracking from the ground. He had a navigational telescope and sextant, and he used these to peer through the grimy windows of the lander to take sightings of the Earth, the sun and the brighter stars. He kept checking the figures until he had “all balls’, nothing but zeroes in his discrepancy analysis.

Oddly, it was this work, when he was forced to concentrate on what lay beyond the cabin’s cosy walls, that gave him his deepest sense of the vastness he had entered. There was Earth, for example, the stage for (almost) all of human history, now reduced to a tiny blue marble in all that blackness. Sometimes it was simply impossible to believe that this wasn’t just another sim, that the darkness beyond wasn’t just blacked-out walls, a few feet away, close enough for him to touch if he reached out a hand.

But sometimes he got it, and the animal inside him quailed.

Fire:

It is morning. The rain has stopped. The sky is grey.

Fire’s eyes watch a branch drift down the river.

Blue wades into the water, waist-deep. He catches the branch. It is heavy. He sets his shoulders and pushes until the branch is resting against the bank.

Another branch comes. Blue grabs it, and hauls and pushes it against the first.

More people come, men and women. Some of them remember the river. Some of them don’t, and are startled to see it. They wade into the water. They catch branches and shove them against Blue’s crude, growing raft.

Children play, running up and down the bank, jabbering.

A crocodile sits in the deeper water. Fire sees the ridges on his back, his yellow eyes. The crocodile’s eyes watch the people. Its teeth want the children.

Fire walks back to the cave. The fire is still burning. People have brought more wood. The damp stuff makes billows of smoke that linger under the roof of the cave.

Maxie is standing before the fire. Maxie’s hands hold a fish. The fish is small and silver. A stick is jammed into the fish’s mouth. Maxie throws the fish on a rock at the centre of the fire. The rock is hot. The fish’s skin blisters. Its flesh spits and sizzles. There is a smell of fish and ash.

Sally helps Maxie get the fish out of the fire. “Careful, Maxie. It’s very hot.”

Stone is watching Sally, his eyes hard and unblinking. His member stiffens. His hand strokes it.

Maxie blows on the fish noisily. His white teeth bite into the belly of the fish.

Stone strides to Sally. She stumbles back, alarmed. Stone tucks his leg behind Sally’s. She falls on her back. He falls on top of her. She yells. His hand rips at her brown skin. It tears open. Fire sees her pink breast, a shadow of hair below her belly.

Sally’s fingers scramble on the floor of the cave. They find a rock. “Keep off me, you fucking ape!” The rock slams into Stone’s temple.

Stone grunts and slumps sideways.

Sally pulls herself out from under him. She scrambles away across the floor.

Stone’s fingers touch his head. They come away bloody. He looks at Sally.

His hand locks around her ankle. She screams. He hauls at her leg. She is thrown across the floor, screaming. She slams hard against a rock wall.

Fire’s ears hear bone snap. Sally is silent.

Stone grabs her ankles. She lies there, limp, one arm bent above the elbow. He prises her legs apart. His strong fingers rip at brown skin.

Maxie is pressed against the wall. His mouth is wide open.

Emma has come into the cave. She runs to Stone. Her hand drags at his shoulder. “Leave her alone!”

Stone ignores her. Fire knows he cannot hear Emma. Stone is not in his ears and his head, but in his penis, his balls.

Fire thinks of Maxie, manipulating the fish in the fire. Maxie is smart. Maxie remembers. Maxie has hands to make good axes. Sally is Maxie’s mother. Stone wants more babies like Maxie.

Stone is doing what is right for his people.

All this shimmers in Fire’s head, like raindrop splashes on the water. But then it breaks up, like the splashes, and all he sees is an elemental logic: Stone with Sally, Fire with Dig.

Fire smiles.

Emma goes limp. She is sobbing. “For God’s sake.”

A rock flies past Fire’s shoulder. It strikes Stone’s arm. Stone roars. Blood spurts. He falls away from Sally. Sally lies limp. Fire sees he has not entered her.

Another rock flies in from the mouth of the cave. Stone drops flat. The rock flies over his head.

Fire faces the mouth of the cave. A person is standing there.

Not a person. Fire sees a short, stocky body draped with animal skins, a heavy, protruding face, a brow ridge as thick as a person’s, straight black hair. One hand holds an axe. The other hand holds a spear.

It is not a person. It is a Ham. The Ham says, “My home, Runner.”

Fire’s hands ram into the Ham’s belly.

The Ham falls back. Fire runs out of the cave.

People run this way and that, making for the river, screaming from fear or anger. Shadows flicker along the top of the undercut, flicker between caves. Spears stab, stone-tipped, so fast Fire can barely see them. Voices call. “U-lu lu-lu-lu!”

A Ham drives a spear into the chest of the woman. Wood. She is knocked onto her back. The spear breaks and twists as she falls. Her body rips and spills. She cries out.

Fire is terrified, awed.

“Help me. Fire, please.”

It is Emma. She has dragged Sally to her feet. Sally is lolling, unconscious. Sally’s arm dangles, blood soaking into the brown skin over it.

Fire remembers the river. Fire remembers the raft. Fire’s legs want to be on the raft, away from this blizzard of jabbing spears and shadows.

Fire’s hands grab Sally by the waist. He hurls her over his shoulder. She cries out as her broken arm is jarred against his hip. He feels the cool flesh of her belly and breast against his shoulder. Emma has picked up Maxie. Her legs are running.

Stones hail around them, sticking into the ground. The people’s legs run from the stones and the Hams” yells. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu!”

The people run splashing into the water. There is nowhere else to go. They scramble onto the raft. It is just a mass of floating branches, roughly pushed together. The raft is too small. The people fall off, or climb on each other’s backs. As their legs and arms scrabble at the branches the raft drifts apart, in big floating chunks. The people call out and grab at each other’s hands and ankles.

Fire runs onto the raft. His foot plunges through the soaked foliage and he falls forward. Sally falls off his shoulders and lands on a wriggling pile of children. The children push her away.

Emma is on the raft. Her hands slap at the children. “Leave her alone!”

Maxie sits by his mother, his hands clutching leaves and branches, wailing.

The raft is drifting away from the bank, into the deeper river. It twists, slowly. The people yell and sprawl, their hands clinging to the branches.

Stone comes running down the bank. His eyes are white. Hams pursue him. Stone hurls himself into the water. He goes under. His head comes up. He is coughing. Blue reaches out and grabs Stone. Stone clings to a branch, his body dangling in the water. Fire sees blood seep from Stone’s shoulder.

The Hams run up and down the bank, yelling, hurling stones. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu!” The stones fall harmlessly into the water.

The raft drifts towards the middle of the river, away from the bank with the undercut, the capering Hams.

Fire’s shoulder stings. He looks around. Emma has slapped him. “Help me.”

Emma’s small axe cuts away Sally’s brown, bloody skin. Underneath is more skin. It is pink, but it is mottled purple and black. Emma’s hands run up and down the skin.

“Good. The skin isn’t broken. But I have no idea how to set a broken bone. Damn, damn.” She produces a small gleaming thing. Water pours out over Sally’s arm. No, not water: it stinks, like rotten fish. Her hands pull a chunk of branch from the raft. Fire can see water rippling underneath. Emma holds the branch against Sally’s arm. “Hold this,” she says. “Fire hold. Hold it, damn it.” Her hands wrap his around Sally’s arm. His hands hold the branch against the arm. Emma takes a sheet of skin from around her neck. Her hands move over Sally’s arm, very fast. When she pulls away her hands, the skin is wrapped around Sally’s arm.

Fire stares and stares.

Emma lifts Sally’s head and places it on her lap.

Maxie says, “Is mommy going to be all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I hope so, Maxie.”

“She needs a hospital.”

Emma laughs, but it is like a sob. “Yes, Maxie. Yes, she needs a hospital.”

The raft is in the middle of the river, slowly turning. The banks to either side are far away, just lines of green and brown. The raft is small, and the river is large.

There is a scream.

Fire sees ridges. Yellow eyes. Teeth.

Stone roars. His arms lift his body. His bulk comes crashing down on the raft.

The whole raft shakes. People scream, clinging to each other. Branches splinter and separate. A child falls into the water, wailing.

Yellow eyes gleam. The crocodile’s vast mouth opens.

The child’s eyes are white. They stare at the people on the raft.

The mouth snaps shut.

The child is gone, forgotten.

The raft drifts down the river, slowly turning. The people cling to it in silence, locked inside their heads.

Reid Malenfant:

Ten minutes before lunar orbit insertion the cabin grew subtly darker. Gradually, as his eyes dark-adapted, Malenfant caught his first true view of the stars, a rich spangling carpet of them, glowing clear and steady.

They had fallen into the shadow of the Red Moon.

Malenfant and Nemoto were both strapped into their couches. They had a checklist to work through, and settings on their various softscreen displays to confirm, just as if they were real pilots, like Borman and Anders, Armstrong and Collins. But the insertion sequence was completely automated, it either worked or it didn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing Malenfant could do about it — nothing save slam his fist into the fat red abort button that would change the engine’s firing sequence to send them straight home again. He would do that only in the event of a catastrophic control failure. Or, he mused, if somebody down there started shooting…

He glanced up at his window. There was a disc of darkness spreading across the stars, like an unwelcome tide.

It was, of course, the Red Moon. His heart thumped.

What were you thinking, Malenfant? Are you surprised to find that this huge object, this vast new Moon, is in fact real?

Well, maybe he was. Maybe he had spent too long in Shuttles and the Station, going around and around, boring a hole in the sky. He had become conditioned to believing that spaceflight wasn’t about going anywhere.

Passing behind the alien Moon, they abruptly lost the signal from Houston. For the first time since launch day, they were alone.

The cabin was warm — over eighty degrees — but his skin was cold where his clothes touched him.

Emma Stoney:

The river’s broad body ran from west to east, so that the setting sun glimmered above its upstream sections, making the water shine like greasy tarmac. Thick black volcanic clouds streaked the glowing sky. And when she looked downstream, she saw the Earth, nearly full, hanging low over the horizon, directly above the dark water, as if the river were a great road leading her home.

The raft drifted over the brown, lazily swelling water, rotating slowly, heading roughly east. In fact it was scarcely a raft, Emma thought, just a jammed together collection of branches, held together by no more than the tangle of the branches and twigs, and the powerful fingers of the Runners. Every so often a chunk of foliage would come loose and drift away, diminishing the raft further, and the Runners would huddle closer together, fearful. And the raft drifted: just that, with no oars or rudder or sail, completely out of any conscious control.

The Runners did not speak to each other, of course. Where humans would have been shouting, crying, yelling, debating what to do, comforting or blaming each other, the Runners just clung to the branches and to each other, silent, eyes wide and staring. Each Runner was locked in her own silent fear, almost as isolated as if she were physically alone. Emma was frightened too, but at least she understood the fix they were in, and her head whirred busily seeking plans and options. All the Runners could do was wait passively while fate, and the river, took them where it would.

Emma, surrounded by naked, powerful, trembling bodies, had never been so forcefully struck by the Runners” limitations.

And meanwhile those “Hams” had looked for all the world to her like picture-book Neandertals. What was going on here?…

The river crowded through a section of swamp-forest. Here the trees were low, and the purple spikes of flowering water-hyacinths crowded close to the oily black water. They passed an inlet crowded with water-lilies, their white flowers cupped half-closed. Their leaves were oval, with serrated edges bright green on top and red-brown underneath. As Emma watched dully, a red-brown body of a bird unfolded from its well-concealed place at the base of one lily-pad. Its neck and collar were white and gold, and it unfolded long legs and spindly toes, watching them suspiciously.

…Not a bird. A bat, apparently incubating its young on nests built on these floating weeds. She had never heard of bats behaving like that. As the Runner raft passed, the bat stepped with a surgical precision across the lily-pads, its leathery wings rustling. Then it scuttled back to its nest of weed, settling with an air of irritation.

Though the meal of the lost child seemed to have satisfied the huge creature that had first stalked them, Emma glimpsed ridges of skin and yellow eyes everywhere. The crocodiles watched as the raft eroded, inevitably approaching the point where it would dump all its hapless inhabitants in the water.

Sally turned her head. With a cough, she threw up. Pale yellow bile splashed over Emma’s lap, stinking.

“Shit, oh shit.” She got hold of Sally’s leg, behind the knee, and strove to pull her over on her side.

The raft rocked, its component branches rippling, and the Runners hooted and snapped.

Emma ignored them. At last she got Sally on her side. She pushed Sally’s good arm under her head, with her broken arm on top of her torso, and one knee bent over so she wouldn’t roll back. She tipped Sally’s head back, hoping to ensure she wouldn’t choke, and was rewarded with another gush of vomit that splashed over her hands.

And now she became aware of another problem: a fresh stink, a spreading patch of moisture over Sally’s behind. Diarrhoea, obviously.

Fire hooted and held his hands over his prominent nose.

There wasn’t anything Emma could do about it, not for now. But it sure wasn’t a good sign. Perhaps it was blood poisoning: one touch of a filthy Runner finger in a wound, one splash of river water, might have done the damage. Or it might be something worse, some disease such as hepatitis or cholera or typhoid, or even some virulent nasty native to this ugly little world; she didn’t know enough about the symptoms of such things to be able to diagnose, one way or another.

And even if she did know what Sally was suffering from, what could she do about it? Her pocket-sized medical kit was gone, lost with the rest of her meagre kit as they had fled from the huge skin-clad creatures called Hams. She began to go through the pockets of her ragged, filthy flight suit, hoping to find even a single antibiotic tablet that had gone astray.

Sally convulsed again, and her vomit turned more clear, just a thin, stringy fluid.

Maxie, squatting with the other children, watched all this in wide-eyed dismay. He had been silent since they had left the shore, and now he watched Emma wrestle with Sally as if she were a side of beef, no doubt storing up more problems in that tousled, bewildered head. Later, Emma; one patient at a time.

After an hour of random drifting, the raft began to approach the river’s far shore. Shallow beaches strewn with purple-black pebbles slid by. More by chance than design, the Runners were completing the crossing of this huge, sluggish waterway.

Sand glimmered rust-red, a few feet beneath the surface, and it was snagging the raft’s branches. The raft creaked and spun. It began to break up, its component branches drifting apart. The Runners cried out. One skinny woman fell into the water with a fearful hoot.

“Emma!” Maxie came stumbling to her, his little feet plunging into brown river water. He threw himself into her arms, and she clutched him close.

More of the Runners fell into the water, or leapt away from the raft towards the shore, splashing noisily and yelling with fear. They seemed to have a lot of difficulty swimming, and Emma wondered if their heavily muscled bodies were denser than humans’. Wading clumsily, grabbing onto each other and their children, they began to flop out of the water and onto the beach, where they lay like sleek, muscular seals. They shook their heads to rid their tightly curled hair of water; droplets fell back to the river with eerie low-gravity slowness.

Emma felt cold water seeping into the legs of her track suit. Maxie cried out and squirmed higher up her body.

There was simply no way Emma was going to be able to get both Maxie and his mother across those few yards of deeper water.

Fire was one of the last to leave the raft. He actually stood upright on the raft, precariously, and its branches cracked and parted under his feet. Then, hooting, he leapt feet-first into the water. He staggered as his feet sank into the mud, but kept his balance. He looked down at the water lapping around his waist, as if amazed.

Emma called, “Fire! Help us. Fire. Fire Fire Emma Maxie!”

He looked around dully.

Emma held Maxie up above her head. The kid squealed and kicked; Emma wasn’t going to be able to hold him like this for long. She cried, “Fire Fire!”

Fire reached out with a liquid motion. With one hand he grabbed Maxie under his armpit and lifted him away from Emma, as if the child was as light as balsa wood. Then he turned and began splashing his way to the shore, holding Maxie high.

Without allowing herself to think about it — without even looking out for crocs — Emma pushed away the last branches, the last of the raft, and let herself and Sally slide into the water. Sally lay face-down in the water, passive, but Emma managed to roll her onto her back. The makeshift sling was filthy, stained by blood and the muddy river water. Emma got the inert woman’s head against her belly, and cupped her fingers under Sally’s chin. Then, working with her feet and her one free arm, she began to swim backwards, towing Sally’s floating form.

She was soon exhausted. Her soaked clothes were heavy and clinging, and her boots made her feet feel as if they were encased in concrete. It seemed an age before her kicking feet began to sink into a steeply rising river bottom. She stood up, gasping.

Sally was still floating, so Emma grabbed a handful of cloth at her shoulder and, still supporting her head, began to drag her out of the water. Nobody came to her assistance — nobody but Maxie, and he was more hindrance than help.

At last she got Sally out of the river, far enough that her feet were free of the lapping, muddy brown water, and she fell on her back with exhaustion.

On this side of the river, there was less evidence of the ash falls that had plagued the Runners for days. But beyond the narrow, pebble-strewn beach, the shore was heavily wooded. The Runners huddled together in suspicious silence, peering at the dense green banks above them.

Night was coming.

With barely a word exchanged, some of the Runners crept cautiously into the woods. Others walked down the beach, tentatively exploring, and Fire and a couple of the women began to drag branches from the edge of the forest, building a fire. Fire cast shy glances at Emma; evidently he remembered, in some dim way, how she had managed to start a fire even when he had lost his treasured handful of embers, probably a key moment in his tortured young life.

First things first, she thought.

She pulled Sally further up the beach. She turned Sally over once more to the recovery position, unzipped Sally’s trousers and with some difficulty wrestled them off her, followed by her panties. The clothes were filthy, of course, from faeces and river mud, and they clung to her flesh; but Emma was reluctant to use her knife — this was Sally’s only set of clothing in the whole world, after all. When she had the pants off she used handfuls of leaves to clean Sally up as best she could, and covered her with her own T-shirt, briskly stripped off.

Then, leaving Maxie with his mother, she walked briskly down the beach. After fifty paces she came to a small stream, decanting from some source in the forest. It had cut itself a shallow, braided valley. Two of the children were playing here, splashing and wrestling. Emma walked a little way upstream of them and began to rinse out Sally’s trousers and underwear in the shallow, sluggish water. When she was done she cleaned off her arms and hands, splashed cold water over her face, and took a deep drink. Then she dug her plastic bag out of her pocket — one of the few artefacts she had yet to lose — and dipped it to the stream to fill it with water.

More barely remembered medical lore came back to her. Diarrhoea and vomiting led to dehydration, which you ought to treat with sugar and salt, a teaspoon of each to a litre of water, if she remembered right. Fine, save that she had no sugar or salt, and no teaspoon for that matter…

She glanced up the beach.

Stone was squatting beside Sally. He had removed the T-shirt from her lower body, and was running his hands up her thigh. Maxie had cowered back to the edge of the woods, watching the huge man grope his mother.

Emma put down the water, straightened up, and began to walk back to Sally. She felt around her neck for her Swiss Army knife. She got to within a foot of Stone without him noticing she was there.

So where are you going to stick your blade, Emma? In his cheek, his rock-hard penis, his back? What makes you think this tiny little bee-sting blade will do more than goad him anyhow? He’ll kill you, then do what he wants with Sally anyhow.

She pulled out the foldaway lens and lifted it up. She angled it so she caught the sun, and focused a bright spot on the back of Stone’s broad neck. He howled, slapping his neck, and jumped up, whirling, his penis flopping. As calmly as she could she tilted back the lens so the spot of light shone in his eyes. He raised his hands, dazzled. She said, “Keep away from her. Stone, you asshole, or I will bring down the sun on you. Stone sun Stone sun! Understand?”

He growled, but still the light shone in his eyes. He stumbled away, his penis wilting.

Trembling, trying to give an impression of command, Emma walked back along the beach, picked up her bag of water, and hurried back to Sally.

Sally still lay on her side, her head resting on her good arm, eyes closed, mouth open. There was a bubble of saliva at her mouth. That bubble of saliva popped, abruptly.

“Oh shit,” Emma said. She grabbed Sally and pushed her on her back. Sally sighed once, and then was still. Emma pinched Sally’s cheeks until her lips parted. The skin was cool and waxy. She dug her fingers in Sally’s mouth, and scooped out gobbets of vomit and flung it on the sand. Then she placed one hand under Sally’s chin and tilted her head back. She could hear no breath, not a whisper.

She ran her hands over Sally’s torso, seeking the end of the breastbone. Then she pulled her hands to the middle of her chest, placed the heel of her hand a little higher, and began to press down. “One-and-two-and…”

A child leapt out of the woods, a lithe hairy child, its face twisted into a snarl. Maxie scrambled away, screaming. Emma shrank back from Sally, gasping with terror.

…No, not a child. It was an ape, an adult — a female, in fact, with two small empty dugs, a skinny, naked body covered in spiky black-brown hair. She was maybe three feet tall. She had the face of a chimp, with lowering eyes gazing out of ridged sockets, and a protruding mouth with thick wrinkled lips covering angular teeth. Emma could have cupped her brain pan in one hand. But she walked and ran upright, human-style, like a clumsy mannequin — her feet were more human than not — and in one curved, bony hand, dangling below her knees, she clutched what looked like a shaped pebble.

She was a caricature, a shrunken, shrivelled, spellbound mix of ape and human, a dwarfish sprite: an Elf, just as the Runners called her kind. This ape-woman ran up to Emma and capered before her.

Emma picked up a handful of sand and hurled it in the Elf’s face.

The Elf howled and staggered back, rubbing her eyes.

Fire came running out of the forest’s shade. With a single, almost graceful swipe, he slammed a rock against the side of the Elf’s head.

She fell sprawled on the beach, unconscious or dying, half her face crushed.

Now there was screaming and yelling. All along the beach. Elf-folk were boiling out of the forest. They ran along the shore, rocks and sticks in their hands.

But the Runners fought back hard. Mothers grabbed their children and ran into the sea, where the Elf-folk seemed reluctant to follow. Men and women threw rocks at the scampering Elf-folk, and swung at them with their fists and feet.

But there were many, many of the Elf-folk, and they fought with a mindless intensity that seemed to overwhelm even the Runners.

Emma, trying to ignore this hideous drama, threw herself back at Sally.

After fifteen compressions Emma pinched Sally’s nose, clamped her mouth on Sally’s, and breathed hard and deep. She tasted vomit and blood. She pulled her head away, let Sally’s chest deflate, and tried again. After two breaths she searched again for a pulse, found none, and slammed the heel of her hand into Sally’s chest once more.

The conflict went on, crude, animal-like.

It’s not my battle, Emma told herself. These aren’t people. If they are humans at all they are some kind of predecessor species. Really, they are just two breeds of animals fighting for space. But one breed was at least hollering simple words — “Stone!”

“Stone, Blue, Blue!”

“Away, away!” — and she couldn’t help a deep sense of gratification every time one of those spindly Elf bodies went down, under Runner fists and feet.

Now Stone broke out of the squabbling pack. He had two Elves clinging to his back. One had its teeth sunk into his shoulder, and the other had torn off part of his scalp and a section of his right ear. Stone was howling, and blood poured over him from the glistening crimson wound in his head. More Elves swarmed over him, scratching, biting and beating. Stone went down, and rolled over into the water.

Emma heard an anguished scream. A woman burst out of the squabbling pack. It was Grass. Some of the Elves had closed in a pack around something that struggled, yelling, brown limbs flashing. It was a Runner child — perhaps Grass’s child. Grass threw herself at the Elves” backs. They drove her off easily, but she came back for more, twice, three times, until at last a chipped rock was slammed against the side of her head, and she fell to her knees, grunting.

The Elf-folk slid into the forest with their prize, their screeching cries of triumph sounding like laughter.

…And still Emma could find no pulse. She sat back, arms hurting, lungs aching. She was aware of Maxie watching her, a little pillar of desolation, ominously silent. “Oh, Maxie, I’m sorry.”

Stone was still in the water, on all fours, head lolling, his hair soaked, the water swirling crimson-brown under him.

Fire stood over him. He was holding a boulder, Emma saw, a slab of worn basaltic rock as big as his head.

Stone looked up, blood congealing over one eye. He raised a hand to Fire, reaching up for help.

Fire slammed the rock down on the crown of Stone’s skull. There was a sound like a crunching apple.

Stone slumped. Thick red-black blood diffused in the water.

Fire stood staring at the body. Then he turned to Emma. His gait and eyes held a glittering hardness she had not seen before. She shrank back, scrambling over the ground, away from Sally’s body.

Fire squatted down before her. His powerful, bloody fingers brushed her neck. She shuddered at his touch, feeling the burn scars on his palms. He pushed his hand inside her flight suit, and his hand closed around the Swiss Army knife. The lens was open. He snapped off the lens attachment as if breaking a matchstick.

Fire looked at the lens, and at Sally’s body, and at Emma. Then he backed away from her, stinking of blood.

Maxie was a few feet away, backed up against a tree. His gaze was sliding over Runners, blood-stained sand, the river.

Emma stood, cautiously. Keeping her eyes on Fire, she reached out for Maxie. “Come on, Maxie. This is no place for us, not any more. It never was…”

“No!” Maxie pulled away from her, his face twisted.

She thought, Now I’m the woman who killed his mother. Nevertheless, I’m all he’s got. She made a grab for him.

He ran along the beach.

“Maxie!”

Before she had taken a couple of strides after him he had joined the Runners, who were clustered together, fingering their wounds. She caught one last glimpse of his small face, hard resentful eyes peering back at her. He seemed to be pulling off his clothes.

Then he was lost.

There was a cry, a grisly, high-pitched cry, a child’s cry, eloquent of unbearable pain. The woman. Grass, stood and peered mournfully into the forest. Emma slid into the gloom of the forest, for she had no other place to go.

Reid Malenfant:

Events unfolded quickly now, faster than they had for the Apollo astronauts. The Red Moon’s gravity, stronger than Luna’s, was pulling hard at their falling spaceship, dragging it into a curve that would all but skim the atmosphere.

Nemoto murmured to herself, still working through her tasks as calmly as if they were in just another simulator in Houston… Malenfant tried to focus on his checklist. But he kept looking up at the strange, shifting diorama beyond the window.

Suddenly he saw the dawn.

Light seeped into the edge of the great disc of blackness. At first it was a deep red, spreading smoothly out around the curve of this small world. Then the band of light began to thicken, growing orange-yellow, and finally shading into blue. The light was coalescing at its brightest point, as if gathering to give birth to the disc of sun itself. And now Malenfant saw shadows of low clouds in the atmosphere; they drew clear dark lines hundreds of miles long over deeper air layers. The surface began to pick up the first of the light — it was an ocean, dark and smooth and sleek, glowing a deep bloody red. And still the light continued to leak into the sky, diffusing higher and higher.

This was a sunrise, not on airless Luna, but on a world with an atmosphere actually deeper than Earth’s — and an atmosphere left laden with dust by a chain of great stratovolcanoes. It was a startling, full-blooded dawn, somehow unexpected so far from home.

For the first time Malenfant’s thoughts swivelled from Earth, his departure point, and turned with a rush to the world he was approaching. Suddenly he was eager to be down on the ground, to be sinking his fingers into the soil of a new world, and drinking in its air.

Emma Stoney:

The light seeped away, and the shadows turned a deeper green.

She moved as silently as she could. But still she was aware of every leaf she crushed, every twig that cracked. And each time she heard a rustle or snap, she expected an Elf to leap out at her.

She didn’t know where she was going, what the hell she was doing. But she knew she had to get away from that beach.

The screaming began again, startling her. It was very close, very loud. She crouched down in the bush, staring, listening, too frightened to move.

And she glimpsed movement, through a screen of trees to her right. Smart, Emma. You walked right in on them.

They were the Elf-folk, of course. They had the Runner child spreadeagled against a bare patch of ground. His eyes were wide and staring. Elf teeth closed on the boy’s upper thigh, and came away bloody, huge ape lips wrapped around a handful of meat.

The boy thrashed. Emma saw how his eyes turned white. And he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

After that — as Emma watched, frozen in place by her fear of detection — the boy was steadily dismembered: the drinking of blood, the biting-off of genitals, the startlingly efficient twisting-off of an arm. And through all of this the boy was still alive, still screaming… There was a hand on her shoulder.

She gasped, swivelled, fell back in the bush with a soft crash. Someone was standing over her, a shadowy figure.

It was not an Elf, or a Runner. It was a woman. She was wearing a loose tunic of skin, bound around her waist with what looked like a rope plaited from greenery. There were tools stuck in the belt, tools of bone and wood. Her body looked shorter, stockier than a Runner’s. Her face protruded. She had no chin. Her skull was large, larger than a Runner’s, but she sported a thick ridge of bone over her eyes, and there were prominent crests of bones at her cheeks and over the crown of her head.

Not a human, then. This was one of the powerful, shadowy creatures the Runners had called a “Ham’. Emma felt savage disappointment, renewed fear.

But the other beckoned, an unmistakably human gesture.

Still Emma hesitated. Somewhere on this brutal world were the people who had taught the Runners to speak English. If she couldn’t get back to Earth, then if her destiny lay anywhere, it was there — and not with this Ham.

But now she glanced back at the Elves. They had pulled open the boy’s rib cage, and the child gave a final, exhausted moan as his heart was torn out.

You’re kind of short of choices, Emma.

She followed the Ham.

The Ham glided away through the forest, pointing to the footsteps she made in the dead brush on the ground. When Emma stepped there, she made no sound.

Reid Malenfant:

Nemoto said laconically, “Three, two, one.”

The booster pack fired, and Malenfant was pushed deep into his seat.

The light of their rockets illuminated the deserts and forests of the Red Moon. All over the little world, eyes were raised to the sky, curious and incurious.