Origin

— IV — WORLD ENGINE

Reid Malenfant:

“You always were a heathen bastard, Malenfant. No wonder Praisegod had it in for you. I remember the trouble we had when we chose a church. Even though it was a time when overt religiosity was a career asset if you wanted to be part of the public face of NASA.”

“I did like that chapel at Ellington. Kind of austere, for a Catholic chapel. Not too many bleeding guys on the wall. And I liked the priest. Monica Chaum, you could go bowling with.”

“Well, I liked the chapel too, Malenfant. I found it comforting. A place to get away from the squawk boxes and the rest, when you were in orbit.”

“On orbit. You never told me that.”

“There are lots of things you don’t know about me, Malenfant. I remember one Christmas Eve when you were up there, doing whatever you did. Christmas Eve, and I was alone. I was sick of it all, Malenfant. I wanted to go to church, but I didn’t want people gawping. So I asked Monica if she would open up the church for me. Well, she dug out the organist, and she went through the church lighting all the candles, just as they would be lit for the Midnight Mass that night, and the organist played the programme planned for the service. When I walked in and saw it was all there just for me — well, it was one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw.”

“I remember that Christmas. I asked Monica to get you a gift. It was a dress. I picked it out.”

“Oh, Malenfant. It was at least five sizes too big. Monica had to apologize; she knew. No wonder you can’t figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don’t know your own wife’s dress size… I never liked being alone, you know.”

“Nobody does. I guess that’s why we’re here, why we swung down from the damn trees. Every one of us is looking for somebody…”

“Stop it. Even now, you’d rather talk about issues, about human destiny and the rest of the garbage, anything but us. Anything but me. When you’re gone I’ll be alone here, Malenfant — truly alone, more alone than any person I can think of to all intents and purposes the only one of my kind, on the whole Moon, in this whole universe… It’s unimaginable. I’m an accountant, Malenfant. It’s not supposed to be like this. Not for me. And it’s all your fault. Do you want to know what I’m afraid of — really afraid of?”

“Tell me.”

“Chronic reactive depression. You ever heard of that? I looked it up once. You can die of loneliness, Malenfant. Four months, that’s all it takes. You don’t have to be a failure. Just — outcast.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Bullshit.”

Shadow:

There was little food to be had on the plain. The Elf-folk had carried some food from their crater-wall forest, figs and bananas and apples. But now the sun was setting, the footsteps made by the people in the bare patches of dust were little pools of shadow, and most of the food was gone. Plaintively, as they trooped after Shadow across the dusty grass, many of them looked back to the forest they had left.

They came to the site of an old kill. The bones were so scattered and worn by the teeth of successive predators and scavengers that it was impossible to tell what animal it might once have been.

Nevertheless Shadow stopped here. She sat amid the bones and, with a grunt, passed water into the dirt. The fungal growth on her face was a thick mask over her brow and cheeks and nose, making her look alien, ferocious, and some of the more livid scars on her body seemed to glow as bright red as the dust at her feet.

The others followed her lead: first Stripe, the strongest of the men, then Silverneck and the women who followed her. Infants clambered down to the dusty ground and plucked yellow grass blades, stuffing them into their mouths with rust-red fingers.

The adults huddled together uneasily. On this vast table-top of a landscape the Elf-folk were a dark knot, easily visible, horribly vulnerable. Nevertheless Shadow seemed content to stay here, and so stay they must.

None of the people sat close to Shadow.

Some of them made small offerings to her: a fig, an apple they had carried in their hands. Soon a small pile of food built up. Without acknowledging the people. Shadow reached down and took pieces of the food.

The sun sank further, its edge dipping below rounded hills. A nervy young man, Shiver, emitted a hesitant, hooting roosting call. But there were no trees here to make nests, and the gentle, eerie sound only made the people huddle still closer.

Silverneck sat on the fringe of the group. She picked up a bone from the litter around her. It was a section of a skull. The face was almost intact: she pushed her fingers into eye sockets, nostrils. This might have been a person, an Elf, a Ham, a Nutcracker, a Runner. She ran her finger along it, picking out scrapes and notches, made by teeth or, perhaps, tools. She was almost naked of fur now, so frantically had she been groomed by the other women in these days of turmoil and doubt. Her remaining hairs clung in patches to her blue-black skin and stuck out from her body; the low reddening sunlight made her hair glow, as if she was surrounded by a soft cloud.

Shiver was sitting close to a woman. Palm, barely out of her adolescence. She in turn was resting against her mother’s stolid back. Shiver was eating an apple, slowly, his eyes fixed on Palm. His erection was obvious. Shiver started flicking bits of the apple at Palm; the half-chewed fragments landed at her feet, or on her lap.

Without looking at Shiver, Palm picked up the morsels and popped them in her mouth. Gradually, in silence, all but imperceptibly, Shiver moved closer to the girl, his erection dangling before him.

With a sigh, Palm folded back from her mother and lay on the ground, legs separated, her arms stretched above her head. Shiver slid over her and entered her, all in one liquid, silent movement. With a few thrusts he reached orgasm, and withdrew smoothly. Seconds later he and Palm were sitting side by side as if nothing had happened.

Stripe, the boss man, absently grooming Silverneck, had noticed none of this challenge to his status.

Shadow had watched it all. But she cared nothing for such reproductive play. Shadow’s dominance had nothing to do with the community’s traditional bonds, sex and children.

After the death of One-eye she had soon become the strongest of the women. And the men — even mighty Stripe — had learned to submit to her power. Though many of them outsized her, her naked, unbridled aggression gave her an edge in most contests. Many of the men and boys cradled hands and feet missing fingers or toes, nipped away by Shadow as an indelible mark of their defeat.

And now she had led them all far from home, far from the trees and shrubs and streams and clearings they knew, across this crimson plain — for a purpose only Shadow, in the deepest recesses of her mind, understood.

A small boy approached Shadow. He had his eyes fixed on the pile of fruit before her. His mother, Hairless, growled warningly, but he feigned not to hear. The boy grabbed his infant sister, and, pulling a twisted, funny face, began to wrestle with her. She joined in, chortling. Soon he was on top of her, making playful pelvic thrusts, and then she rolled on top of him. But every roll took them closer to Shadow’s food pile.

As soon as the boy was close enough, his hand whipped out to grab a fig. He tucked it in his mouth, immediately abandoning his play, and walked back towards his mother.

One of the women laughed at his clever deceit.

A sharpened cobble hissed through the air. It caught the boy at the top of his spine, laying open the flesh. He howled and went down. Hairless hurried forward and grabbed him. He curled up in her lap, screaming with pain, as she tended the wound.

Stripe picked up the bloody cobble, wiped it on the grass, and passed it back to Shadow.

The group sat in silence, save for the screams of the boy, which took a long time to subside.

The sun slid beneath the horizon. Light bled from the sky.

The people huddled in a close circle. The adults had their backs to the dark, with the children and infants at the centre of the circle. Without fire, without weapons that could strike at a distance save a handful of stones, these hominids were defenceless against the creatures that prowled the savannah night.

Nobody but the infants would sleep tonight. But they feared Shadow more than they feared the dark.

When the dawn came, they found that the boy who had stolen Shadow’s fig had gone. As the group moved on. Hairless, his mother, was inconsolable. She had to be half-carried by her sisters and mother, until the memory had started to fade.

At last they reached the cover of trees. This was a forest that lapped at the foot of a tall mountain range; bare rock shone high above. With relief, they slipped into the trees” shadows. Some submitted to ancient green impulses and clambered high into the trees to make nests, even though the day was not yet half over.

But Shiver, clambering high, found a nest already made. He broke it apart, hooting loudly, his fur standing on end.

Then others joined in the noise, for they began to find discarded fruit peel, and even an abandoned termite-fishing stick. They sniffed and licked these remnants; they were fresh. Others had been here, and recently.

And then, as they spread deeper through the new forest, seeking shoots and fruit-bearing shrubs and trees, a child yelled. The adults came crashing through the undergrowth to see, their hair bristling.

A small girl was standing at the edge of a clearing where a great tree had fallen; its carcass lay on the ground, surrounded by crushed bushes. The girl was facing a child a little older than she was. It was another girl, standing unsteadily, gazing back nervously.

It was in fact Tumble, Shadow’s small sister. But Shadow did not recognize her. And Tumble, even if she had remembered Shadow, would not have known this scarred creature with her grotesque fungal mask.

Shadow had come home: transformed, unrecognizable, infused with a new and deadly purpose.

It was no coincidence that the encounter had taken place so quickly. As the forest remnants had continued to shrink back, the Nutcracker-men, living in the green heart of the forest, had managed to hold their territory against the incursions of hungry Elf-folk. So the Elves had been restricted to the shrinking forest fringe, patrolling ever closer to its border with the mountains or the plain.

The little girl stepped forward, and tentatively touched Tumble’s face. Tumble nipped her finger playfully. In a moment they were rolling in the dry leaves, wrestling. When the little girl reached for Tumble’s genitals. Tumble shrank back, but then she submitted, curiously, to the gentle touch. Then they chased each other over the fallen tree trunk, and started to play together with the fallen leaves. They pushed them into great piles, and rolled in the leaves, throwing handfuls over their heads and rubbing them against their faces.

Now, on the far side of the little clearing, silent shadows flitted through the trees. They were adults, some carrying infants. Led by Stripe and Silverneck, the people stepped forward into the clearing. A loose circle of watchful adults surrounded the playing children.

Only Shadow stayed in the dark green shade.

Silverneck walked forward. She was met by a large, calm woman. She was Termite, Shadow’s mother. Cautiously, eyes locked, the women began to groom, plucking at each other’s hair. More children joined in the play on the forest floor.

The men were more tentative. They eyed each other warily and made subdued displays, showing bristling hair and waving erections.

Suddenly Shiver ran forward towards the other men. He yelled, stamped and slapped at the ground and drummed with his flat hands on a tree trunk, uttering loud, fierce calls. Then he retreated quickly to the safety of his own group.

He was imitated by a burly man from the other group. This was Little Boss. His display of strength was vivid. He hurled rocks on the ground, making them shatter, and pulled branches this way and that. Never as dominant since the death of his mentor, Big Boss, he was still a massive, powerful presence. The invading men retreated subtly, raising their fists and hooting. But Little Boss too drew back to his friends.

So it went on, with the children playing, the women grooming or making tentative sexual contact, and a display of noisy aggression by the men. But not a single punch or kick was landed, or stone thrown in earnest.

Now one small, muscular man broke out of the group and approached the woman Hairless. He was Squat, another of Shadow’s original group. He seemed fascinated by Hairless’s baldness, and he stroked her bare blue-black skin. She responded, cupping his scrotum in her hand.

Within a few minutes they had coupled, belly to belly.

After that the groups separated, the men issuing a few last threats to each other, the women apologetically abandoning their grooming. Mothers had to pry their children away from their fascinating new playmates.

Shadow watched all this. And when her old family group dispersed into the trees, she followed.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

The delegation of angry and fearful citizens was led by a stocky, sullen woman called Hahatomane, of the Nema Lineage.

They met at the centre of the platform of Adjusted Space. Manekato waited patiently, resting easily on her knuckles, with Babo and Nemoto to either side of her. Hahatomane stood facing her, with her followers in a rough triangle behind her, and attended by Workers that crawled or hovered.

“What is it you want to talk about, Hahatomane of Nema?”

“That should be obvious,” Hahatomane said. She glanced into the sky, where the rising Earth was a fat banded ball, almost full. “Renemenagota of Rano is already dead. Many others of us have suffered unspeakable deprivations. This is a foolish quest, devised by foolish Astrologers, which will not help germinate a single seed. We have done what we can. We should leave Workers here to complete the rest, and return to Earth before more of us lose our lives or our sanity.”

Babo stepped forward. Though the medical Workers had striven to heal his injuries, the Zealots” crossbow bolts had been laced with an exotic poison of vegetable oils and fish extracts, and he suffered internal agonies that caused a heavy limp. “But you have no place on Earth, Hahatomane. Your Farm is destroyed by the tides and “quakes, and the Nema Lineage is extinguished.”

Hahatomane kept her gaze locked on his sister. “You do us a dishonour by keeping a man and your ugly hominid by your side, Manekato of Poka,” she said. “I do not hear the words of this one.”

“Then you should,” Manekato said quietly. “For we are all hominids. We are all people, in fact, of one flavour or another.”

Hahatomane bared her teeth, an unconscious but primal gesture. “We do not recognize you as any form of leader, Manekato.”

“Fine. If you wish to leave, do so.”

“And you—”

“I intend to stay on this Moon until I have unravelled the mystery of its design.”

Hahatomane growled. “Then none of us can leave.”

Everybody understood that this was true. If this expedition were a success its members would be honoured, even allowed to carve out new Farms. But if Hahatomane were to split the group, those who abandoned the project could expect nothing but contempt. This was the true source of Manekato’s power, and Hahatomane knew it.

Hahatomane’s shoulders hunched, as if she longed to launch herself at Manekato’s throat — and perhaps it would be healthier if she did. Mane thought. Hahatomane said, “You drag us all into your folly, Manekato of Poka. I for one will be happy to witness your inevitable disillusion.”

“No doubt on that day you will remind me of this conversation,” Manekato said.

Hahatomane snorted her frustration and turned away. Her followers scattered, bemused and disappointed, and Workers scuttled after them, bleating plaintively.

Manekato sat on the yellow floor. Now that the confrontation was over she felt the strength drain out of her. Babo absently groomed her, picking non-existent insects from the heavy fur on her back. Nemoto sat cross-legged. She had a large bunch of young, bright yellow bananas, and she passed the fruit to Manekato and Babo.

“You did well,” Babo said; then, glancing at Nemoto, he repeated the remark in her tongue, slowing his speech to suit her sluggish oxygen-starved pace of thinking.

Manekato grunted, and spoke in Nemoto’s language. “But I would rather not endure such encounters. We faced off like two groups of Elf-creatures, in their matches of shouting and wrestling. Hahatomane’s group even surrounded themselves with Workers to make themselves look larger and stronger, just as male Elves will make their hair bristle in their aggressive displays.”

Nemoto laughed softly. “We are all hominids here, all primates.”

Babo said, “But it is cruel to be reminded of it so bluntly. Perhaps there is something in the bloody air of this place which has infected us.”

“That is foolish and unscientific,” Manekato said. “Even Earth is no paradise of disembodied intelligence and pure reason.” She glanced at the banded planet that shone brightly in the sky. “Think about it. Why have we clung to our scraps of land for so many thousands of generations?”

Babo looked offended. “To cultivate every atom, the final goal of farming, is to pay the deepest homage to the world which bore us—”

“That’s just rationalization, brother. We cling to our land because it is an imperative that comes to us from the deepest past, from the time before we had minds. We cling to our land for the same reasons that Nutcrackers cling to their tree nests — because that is what we do; it is in our genes, our blood. And what of the exclusion we suffered when we lost our Farms? Why must it be so? What is that but savage cruelty — what is that but sublimated aggression, even murder? No, brother. This Moon has not polluted our souls; we brought the blood and the lust with us.”

“You should not be so harsh on yourselves,” Nemoto said.

Even now Manekato felt a frisson of annoyance that this small-brained hominid was trying to comfort her.

But Babo said, “She’s right. Isn’t it possible to celebrate what we have achieved, despite our limitations? Can we not see how we have risen above our biological constraints?”

Manekato said, “That is true of your kind, Nemoto. You spoke of the contagions of madness that sweep your people. And yet those grand obsessions have driven your kind to a certain greatness: a deep scientific description of the universe, an exploration of your world and others, even a type of art… Achievements that press against the boundaries of your capabilities. We, by comparison, have done little to transcend our biology — have done little for the past two million years, in fact, but squat on our Farms. Two million years of complacency.”

“Again that is harsh,” Nemoto said. “Two million years of peace, given the savagery in your breast, is not a small achievement. We must all strive to embrace the context provided by this place — perhaps that is one of its purposes.”

“Yes,” said Babo. “There are many ways to be a hominid.The Red Moon is teaching us that.”

“And,” said Nemoto, “we must anticipate meeting the Old Ones, who may be superior to us all. Then we will see how long a shadow we cast in their mighty light.”

Babo said, “But are you content with such abstractions, Nemoto? Don’t you long for home too?”

Nemoto shrugged. “My home is gone. One day there were eight billion people in the sky; the next they had all vanished. The shock continues to work through my psychology. I don’t welcome exploring the scar.”

The three of them sat in their small ring, soberly eating the sweet young bananas, while Workers politely scuttled to and fro, removing the discarded skins.

Reid Malenfant:

Much of the time he slept, drifting through uneasy, green-tinged dreams of the kind that had plagued him since the day he had come to this unnatural Moon. And then the dreams would merge into a fragmented wakefulness, fringed by blood and pain, with such soft transitions he couldn’t have said where dream finished and reality began.

He was lying on his side — he could tell that much — with his arms and legs splayed out in front of him, like a GI Joe fallen off the shelf. He didn’t even know where he was. He was surrounded by wood and earth. Some shelter, he supposed, something constructed by hands and eyes and brains, human or otherwise.

It was all very remote, as if he were looking down a long tunnel lined with brown and green and blood-red.

He supposed he was dying. Well, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, and he had no desire to fight it.

But if he could feel little with his busted-up body — taste nothing of the glop that was ladled into his mouth, barely sense the warm palm oil that was rubbed into his limbs-there was one thing he could still feel, one anguished pinpoint that pushed into him whenever he made out Emma’s face.

Regret.

“Regret what, Malenfant?”

“Regret I’m going to die not knowing why.”

“You’re dying because some psychopathic religious nut had you beaten to death. That’s why.”

“But why the Red Moon? Why the Fermi Paradox—”

“Malenfant, for Christ’s sake, is this the time or the place for—”

“Emma, give me a break. This is my death-bed. What other time and place is there? That damn Paradox baffled me my whole life. I thought the showing-up of this Red Moon, for sure the strangest event in human history since Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky, had to have something to do with that flaw in the universe. I guess I hoped it did. But…”

“But what?”

“It didn’t work out that way. Emma, it just got more mysterious. Nemoto saw that immediately. Not only did we suddenly find that we inhabit just one of a whole bunch of universes, there are no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in the other universes either. Not a trace. It’s Fermi writ large — as if there is something wrong not just with this universe, but all our cosmic neighbours…”

“Malenfant, none of this matters. Not any more.”

“But it does. Emma, find the advanced guys. The ones with the light shows in the sky. That’s what you’ve got to do. Ask them what the hell is going on here. Maybe they caused it. All this, the multiple realities, the wandering Moon. Maybe they even caused Fermi, in some way. That’s what you must do, after…”

“After you’re gone? Poor Malenfant. I know what’s really bothering you. It’s not that the question is unanswered. It’s the idea that you won’t be around when the answer comes. You always did think you were the centre of everything, Malenfant. You can’t stand to think that the universe will go on without you.”

“Doesn’t everybody feel that way?”

“Actually, no, not everybody, Malenfant. And you know what? The universe will go on. You don’t have to save it. It doesn’t need you to keep space expanding or the stars shining. We’ll keep on finding out new stuff, visiting new places, finding new answers, even when you aren’t around to make it happen.”

“Some bedside manner, babe.”

“Come on, Malenfant. We are what we are, you and I. I can’t imagine us changing now.”

“I guess.”

Shadow:

She slid through the forest, stepping on roots and rocks to avoid dead leaves and undergrowth, silent save for the brush of her fur on the leaves. Her hair was fully erect, and her fungal mask seemed to glow with purpose and power.

There were three men with her. They were tense, fearful. Shadow turned back to the men and grinned fiercely, knowing how her teeth shone white under the hairless protuberance over her brow and cheeks. They grinned back, and they punched and slapped each other, seeking courage. The smallest and youngest, Shiver, absently sucked the forefinger of his right hand; it was a stump, the first two joints nipped off by Shadow.

Shadow moved forward once more, and the men followed.

She froze. She had heard the soft whimper of an infant — and there, again.

She roared and charged forward, crushing through low shrubbery.

A woman and child were in the low branches of a tree. They had been eating fruit; the forest floor beneath the tree was littered with bits of yellow skin. The woman was called Smile. She was in fact a sister of Termite’s, an aunt of Shadow. Shadow did not know this — nor would it have made any difference if she had known.

Smile tumbled out of her tree. She landed with a roll on the forest floor, got to her feet and turned to flee. But her child, less than three years old, was still in the tree. He clung to a branch, screaming. So Smile ran back, scrambled up the tree, collected the child, and dropped back to the ground. But she had lost her advantage; now the attackers were on her.

Shadow grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to the ground. Shiver joined in, kicking and stamping. Stripe grabbed the infant from his mother’s arms. He held the child by his feet and flailed him this way and that, slamming him against a tree trunk. The child was soon limp, and Stripe hurled him away, sending the little body spinning into a clump of undergrowth.

With grim determination. Smile fought against the odds. She twisted and bit Shiver hard on the shoulder. He howled. She managed to ram his body into Shadow and the others, momentarily reducing them to a tangle of flailing limbs.

That was enough of a break for Smile to get away. She scrambled into a fig tree. Stripe followed her. But Smile clambered around the branches, evading him, screaming. Now Shadow climbed up the tree, more stiffly than Stripe, for her lifetime of injuries and beatings had left their mark.

But as she approached, Smile made an almighty leap. She crashed into the branches of another tree, and tumbled to the ground. In an instant she was on her feet. She ran to the foliage where her child had fallen, picked up the limp body, and ran into the deeper woods.

Shiver pursued, but she was soon out of his reach. He ran back and forth across the bloodied forest floor, howling and throwing rocks and kicking at the trees, ridding himself of his desperate aggression.

Shadow fell on Stripe. She jabbered at him, and hailed blows on his head and shoulders. He huddled over, long arms protecting his head and chest.

For now Smile had been spared. But it was only the beginning.

Shadow’s next target was Little Boss. She took six men with her, armed with sticks and rocks, and patrolled the forest until she found him.

Little Boss was alone, drinking from a small stream. Beside him was a pile of cobbles, suitable for making sharp new tools. When he heard Shadow’s party approach, he stood straight, hair immediately erect, and snarled defiance. By this time, the newcomers” murderous aggression was well known among Little Boss’s group. But when he saw how many men had come with Shadow, Little Boss turned to run.

He was built for power, not speed.

Shiver was the first to catch him, seizing his legs and throwing him to the ground. Shadow pinned him down, sitting on his head and holding his shoulders. The other men fell on Little Boss, attacking with a savagery only impeded by the fact that they got in each other’s way.

At last Shadow and the men backed off. Charged with energy, fists clenched, mouths and stone tools stained by blood, the men ran to and fro, howling and pounding their weapons against tree trunks and rocks.

Little Boss remained motionless for a time. Then, uttering faint screams, he sat up. He had great gashes on his face, legs and back. He could not move one leg. The ground where he had lain was stained by blood and panic shit. He looked back at his assailants, who were capering and howling their rage. He opened his mouth, as if to cry defiance. But a great bubble of bloody mucus formed there, and his voice was a strangle. When the bubble broke, Little Boss fell back, rigid as a falling tree.

Shadow fell on the body immediately. She pulled it by its ankles out into the clearing, sat on its chest, and immediately began to slice away its flesh with a new stone cobble.

With degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm, the others joined her. Soon they were all feeding.

The miniature war was brief but savage.

Shadow’s only tactic was to isolate her targets and destroy them. But it was a tactic beyond the grasp of her opponents, and it worked over and over. The women, especially if burdened by infants, were easy prey. The men were picked off one by one, always by overwhelming force.

And as Shadow’s group fed day after day on fresh meat, they grew stronger, and hungrier.

It finished as Shadow watched her acolytes fall on the body of her mother. In her last moments, before they opened her chest. Termite reached out a bloody hand to Shadow, who stayed unmoved.

And then Shadow went alone into the forest to hunt down the last free man, her brother. Claw. When Shadow returned to her warmongering group, the object she clutched in her hand was his heart.

But when the opponents were annihilated, the group, filled with a rage for blood and murder, anxious for more meat, began to fall, on each other.

Reid Malenfant:

He remembered how his father, on learning of his inoperable tumour, had suddenly rediscovered the Episcopalian faith of his youth. Somehow that had hurt Malenfant — as if his father, in these last months, had chosen to draw away from him. But he hadn’t been about to deny his dad the comfort he sought.

It had always seemed to him that religion was a kind of bargain. You gave over your whole life, a portion of your income and half your intellect, in return for a freedom from the fear of death. Maybe, it wasn’t such a bad bargain at that.

But look at the Hams: Julia and the rest, these Moon-bound Neandertals, as rational and smart as any human being, just as aware of the human tragedy of death and pain and loss — and yet, it seemed, quite without the consolation of religion. But they seemed able to cope with the dreadful truth of life without hiding from it.

Well, maybe they were tougher than humans.

And what about you, Malenfant, now the black meteor is approaching at last? Don’t you need comfort — forgiveness — the prospect of continued existence beyond the grave of crimson dust that will soon welcome your bones?

Too late for me now, he thought. But it doesn’t seem to trouble me. Maybe I’m more like a damn Neandertal than a human.

Or maybe Emma was right: that nothing mattered so much to him about where he was going, compared to what he was escaping from.

Julia was here, her concerned, Moon-like face swimming in the gloom before his eyes. He wondered absently if it was night or day.

After a time, Emma was here. She frowned, wiped at his mouth with a scrap of leaf, and tried to give him water.

“Things to tell you.”

“You need to save your strength for drinking. Eating. All that good stuff.”

“No time.”

“If you’re going to start lecturing me about Fermi again—”

“I did my best, Emma.”

“I know you did.”

“I came all the way to this damn Moon to find you. I went to the White House. I built a rocket ship.”

“That always was the kind of stuff you were good at, Malenfant.”

“Looking out for you?”

“No,” she said sadly. “The grand gesture.”

“I found you. But I can’t do anything for you.”

She looked at him, her eyes blank, oddly narrowed. “But was that ever the idea?”

“What else?”

“You’re a complicated man, Reid Malenfant. Your motives aren’t simple.”

“Your mother thinks I’ve been trying to kill you for years.”

“Oh, it’s not that, Malenfant. It’s not me you’re trying to destroy. It’s you. It’s just that I’m sometimes in the way…”

He frowned, deeply disturbed, remembering fragments of conversations with McCann, Nemoto. “What are you talking about?”

“What about Praisegod Michael?”

“He was a psychopath. I had to—”

“You had to what? Malenfant, it wasn’t your fight. What does Praisegod Michael matter to you, or me? If you really had been devoted to the cause of getting to me, you’d have said anything he wanted to hear, to keep your skin intact. But not you. You walked into his guns, Malenfant. Deliberately. And you must have known you couldn’t win. On some level you wanted him to do this to you.”

“I was looking for you,” he said stubbornly. “That’s why I came to the Moon.”

“I’m sorry, Malenfant. I see what I see.”

He licked his lips with a tongue that felt like a piece of wood.

“Tell me this,” she said now. “When we were in that damn T-38 over Africa, when the Wheel appeared in the sky—”

“Yeah.”

“You could have turned away.”

He closed his eyes. He thought back to those moments, the glittering sky-bright seconds of the crash, when he and Emma had been suspended in the deep African light, before the enigmatic alien artefact.

…Yes. He remembered how the aerosurfaces had bit, just for a second. He had felt the stick respond. He knew he could turn the nose of the plane away from the Wheel. It was a chance. He didn’t take it.

“Yes,” he rasped. “And then—”

And then there had been that instant of exuberance — the sense of relief, of freedom, as the T-38 hurtled at the Wheel, as he felt the little jet slide out of his control, as the great blue circle had rushed towards him, and he had reached the point where he could do no more.

“How did you know? The slaved instruments—”

“I didn’t need to watch instruments, Malenfant. I know you. It’s just — the way you are, the kind of person you are. You could no more help it than you could stop breathing, or keep from farting in your sleep.”

“I do that?”

“I never knew when would be a good time to tell you.”

“You picked a doozy.”

“Poor Malenfant. The universe never has made much sense to you, has it? — not from the grandness of the Fermi Paradox, not yourself, on down to your relationship with your first grade teacher.”

“She really was an asshole.”

“I’ve always known all about you, what you are, what you could not help but become. Right from the beginning, I’ve known. And I went along with you anyway. What does that say about me?… Maybe we’re alike, you and I.” She reached up and passed her hands over his eyes. “Sleep now.”

But sleep eluded him, though regret lingered.

“Listen, Malenfant. I’ve decided. You’re right. I’m going to go on, to track down the Daemons — Homo superior, whatever they are. Every time this damn Moon shifts, people suffer and die, right here on the Moon, and on all the Earths. What gives those guys the right to screw up so many lives — so many billions of lives?”

“And you intend to stop them.”

“Malenfant, I don’t know what I intend. I haven’t had a plan since the day I fell through that blue Wheel and found myself here, covered in shit. I’ll do what you always did. I’ll improvise.”

“Take care.”

“Because you won’t be around to look out for me? Malenfant, if it escaped your notice, I rescued you. All you did was lose your spacecraft, your sole companion and all your gear, and get yourself thrown in jail. Twice.”

“Anger can make you feel good.”

“…Yes. Maybe that’s what I need. An enemy. Somebody to be mad at. Other than you, that is.”

“Why here?”

“What?”

“Why is it finishing like this, here, now, so far from home?”

“You always did ask big questions, Malenfant. Big, unanswerable questions. Why are there no aliens? Why is there something, rather than nothing?…”

“I mean it. Why did I have to run into a petty thug like Praisegod? Why couldn’t it have been more—”

“More meaningful? But it is meaningful, Malenfant. There’s a logic. And it has nothing to do with the Red Moon or the Fermi Paradox, or any of that. It’s you, Malenfant. It’s us. Your whole life has a logic leading up to this place and time. It just had to be this way.”

“The universe is irrelevant. That’s what you’re saying.”

“I guess so… But there are other universes. We know that now. We’ve seen them. Are there other destinies for us, Malenfant?… Malenfant!”

The tunnel was long now, and filling with an oily darkness. Her face was like a distant beacon, a point of light like a star in a telescope, and he struggled to see her. There was a dim awareness of hands working his body, hands pounding at his chest, heavy hands, not human.

The light went out, the last light.

Soft lips brushed his brow, gentle as a butterfly’s wings, yet the most vivid event in all the collapsing universe.

Enough, he thought, gratefully, fearfully.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

It was time for the Mapping to the crater that promised to reveal the secrets of the world engine.

The people stood in a rough circle at the centre of the platform. The yellow floor was bare again, the temporary structures it had borne unravelled, spacetime allowed to heal. The great turning Map of the Red Moon had been folded away also, having served its purpose. There was nothing left but the platform, and its cargo of people.

Beyond there was only the unmanaged forest, where, perhaps, curious eyes gazed out at the creatures they had learned to call Daemons.

Manekato sought out Nemoto. The little hominid stood alone, ignored by the rest. She wore her much-repaired blue coverall, and over her shoulder she bore the bag of parachute fabric that contained her few artefacts.

Manekato knew that it would serve no purpose to tell Nemoto that possessions were meaningless, for anything desired could be reproduced at will, over and over. Mapped out of the raw stuff of the universe itself. In this, oddly, Manekato’s kind had much in common with the more primitive hominids here. The Hams and Runners would manufacture tools for a single use and then discard them, without sentiment or longing. Perhaps Manekato shared with them some deep sense of the unstinting bounty of the universe — there would always be another rock to make a hand-axe — an intuition that Nemoto, caught between the two, coming from a culture of acquisition and limits, could never share.

Manekato sighed, aware of the drift of her thinking. As always, just as Without Name had complained, too many philosophical ruminations! — Enough, Mane. It is time to act.

She took Nemoto’s hand; it lay against her own, tiny and white and fragile. “Are you ready?”

Nemoto forced a smile. “I have been fired across space by a barely controlled explosion devised by primitives. By comparison you are masters of space and time. I should feel confident in your hands.”

“But you don’t.”

“But I don’t.”

Manekato said gently, “A Mapping is only a matter of logic. You are a creature of logic, Nemoto; I admire that in you. And in the working-out of logic there is nothing to fear.”

“Yes,” Nemoto said softly. But her hand tightened in Manekato’s.

In due course, the Mapping was expressed.

Hand in hand, the people and their Workers — and one frightened Homo sapiens drifted upwards from the platform. The great shield of Adjusted Space folded away beneath them, leaving a disc of light-starved, barren, crushed land. But Manekato knew that the denuded patch would soon be colonized by the vigorous life forms here, and she felt no guilt.

Then the Mapping’s deep logic worked into her bones, and she was smeared over the sky.

She hung among the stars, suspended in a primal triumvirate of bodies: Earth, sun and Moon, the only bodies in all the universe that showed as more than a point of light to a naked human eye. But this was not Nemoto’s Earth, or her sun; and it was nobody’s Moon. How strange, she thought.

She had no body, and yet she was aware of Nemoto’s hand in her own.

“Nemoto?”

“…How can I hear you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Can you see the Red Moon?”

“I see it all at once! — but that is impossible. Oh, Mane…”

“Try not to understand. Let the logic guide you.”

“But it is a world. It is magnificent,” Nemoto said. “It seems absurd, grandiose, to suppose that this is a mere cog in some vast machine.”

It took Manekato a moment to secure the translation of “cog’. “Look at the stars, Nemoto.”

“I can’t see them. The sun dazzles me.”

“You can see them if you choose,” Manekato said gently.

“…Yes,” Nemoto said at length. “Yes, I see them. How wonderful.”

“Are they the same stars as shine on your Earth?”

“I think so. And they are just as silent. Are we alone in all the human universes, Manekato?”

“Perhaps.” She glared at the unchanging stars. “But if we are alone, the stars have no purpose save what they can offer humanity. My people have sat in their Farms for two million years,” Manekato said, “a vast desert of time we could have spent cultivating the sky. Long enough, Nemoto. When this is over — Ah. I think—”

And then the Mapping was done.

The platform coalesced, as spacetime adjusted itself for the convenience of the expedition. People moved here and there, speaking softly, trailed by Workers. Few of them showed much interest in their new environs; already the first shelters were coalescing, sprouting from the platform like great flat fungi.

Once again Manekato found herself injected into a new part of the Red Moon.

This place was bright, more open than the forest location. And she could smell ocean salt in the air. To the east, the way the gentle, salt-laden breeze came, the land rose, becoming greener, until it reached a crest that was crowned by a line of trees. As she studied the ridge of rock, she saw how it curved away from her. It was the rim of a crater. To the west was a broad plain of rock and crimson dust, all but barren. In the far distance, beyond a rippling curtain of heat haze, hominids ran across the plain. They moved silently and without scent, like ghosts.

Nemoto had slumped to the ground. She peered into her bag, rummaging through its contents, as if unable to believe that a Mapping could be completed without losing some key piece of her battered and improvised equipment.

Babo came to Manekato. “Interesting. She behaves like an infant after her first Mapping. But then we arrive in the world knowing that reality has certain properties. Deep in our hind brains, the parts we share with these sub-human hominids and even more ancient lines, we store the deep intuition that a thing is either here or there, that it either exists or it does not — it cannot spontaneously leap between the two states. And Mapping violates all that. Perhaps we should admire Nemoto for keeping her sanity.”

“Yes.” Manekato rubbed his head fondly. “For now our companions are all too busy rebuilding their houses to have much to complain about. Shall we investigate what we have come so far to see?”

He raised his hand, preparing to execute another short-range Mapping.

She grabbed his arm. “No. Renemenagota was a monster. But I have come to believe that some of her intuition was sound.” Deliberately she walked forward, knuckles and feet working confidently, until she had stepped off the platform and onto the raw native ground. She scraped at the dirt, and clouds of crimson dust drifted into the air. Soon her feet and lower legs were stained a pale pink.

Babo grinned, showing white teeth. “You’re right, Mane. We are creatures designed for walking. Let us walk.” He jumped off the platform, landing with hands and feet flat, evoking more billows of dust.

Side by side they loped away from the compound, and began to scale the wall of the crater.

Shadow:

The Nutcracker-woman was eating her way through a pile of figs. A child played at her feet, rolling and scrabbling in dead leaves. The woman was about the same height as one of the Elf-folk, and she was covered in similar black-brown hair. But her belly seemed swollen compared to an Elf’s — it housed a large stomach capable of fermenting her low-quality feed — and her head was a sculpture of bone, with a great crested ridge over the top of her skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were anchored.

A rock hurtled out of the surrounding foliage. It slammed into the trunk of the fig with a rich hollow noise, then fell to the earth.

The Nutcracker-woman screeched and scrambled back. She stared at the fallen stone. At last, cautiously, she poked it with one finger, as if it were a living thing, a bat that had stunned itself on the tree. But the stone lay still, unresponsive.

And now a stick came spinning from another part of the foliage.

The Nutcracker-woman got to her feet, gathered up her infant, and looked about suspiciously, sniffing the air with her broad, dirty nostrils. She took a step away from the fig tree.

Shadow struck.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

The ground rose steadily.

Manekato could feel a layer of hard, compact rock beneath a thin skim of dust. Green things grew here, grass and shrubs and even a few low trees, but they struggled to find purchase. It was dry; there was no sign of the springs that sometimes could be observed bubbling from the shattered walls of craters. And, though the rise of the slope was steady, it was not becoming noticeably steeper.

The morphology of this formation was like no other impact crater or volcanic caldera she had encountered. The rim of a crater this size should be more sharply defined: a circular ridge, perhaps eroded into hillocks, with a splash plain of rubble and ejecta beyond. There was none of that here; the “crater” was just an upraised blister erupting from an empty plain.

She glanced at Babo. She saw his mouth was working as he studied the rock, the vegetation, the dust, thinking, analysing.

Babo saw her looking, and grinned. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Artificial. But then, we know this Red Moon is a thing of artifice, and we suspect this crater may be the key to its secrets. Why should we expect anything but artifice here, of all places?”

The climb had already been long, and Manekato halted and rested her weight on her clenched knuckles. Babo raised a handful of crimson dust and let it drift off in the air; she could smell its rich iron tang, and some of it stuck to the sweat-soaked palm of his hand.

She glanced to the west, over the landscape from which they had climbed. The Adjusted Space platform nestled at the foot of this slope, a bright splash, oddly ugly. Beyond it a plain of crimson dust stretched away, its colour remarkably bright, marked by the pale green of vegetation clumps. The horizon of this small world curved noticeably, a smeared band of muddy grey. The sky was a dome littered by high clouds, and to the west she saw the dingy stain of volcanic dust streaking the air.

It was not a spectacular view, but something in its sweep tugged at her imagination. If she were anywhere on her Earth she would see the work of people, and it had never before struck her quite how claustrophobic that could be. This was an empty, unmade land.

Babo pointed. “Look. Down there.”

She saw that near the foot of the crater wall a group of hominids were working their way through the sparse coating of vegetation towards a fig tree. She thought they were Elves, the small, gracile creatures Nemoto called Australopithecines. They moved with stealth, and they approached the tree from several directions, surrounding it.

“I think they are hunting something,” Babo said. “…Ah. Look, there. Under the tree. It is another hominid.”

Manekato saw it now: a burly black-furred form, with a bony, crested skull and distended belly, this was the alternate variant of Australopithecines called a Nutcracker. This hominid had swollen, milk-laden breasts: a female. An infant huddled close to this mother.

The Elves crept closer.

Manekato murmured, “Must this world see more sentience dissipated needlessly?”

“It is not our affair. Mane,” Babo said gently. “They are only animals.”

“No,” she said softly.

Shadow:

The Elf-folk charged into the clearing.

The Nutcracker-woman squealed, dropped her child, and scrambled up the fig tree for safety. The child tried to climb after her, but her hands and feet were small and poor at grasping, and she fell back again.

Shadow was the first to grab the infant.

Shiver had the temerity to attempt to snatch a limb of the infant for himself; they might have torn it apart between them. But Shadow pulled the infant to her chest, in a parody of parental protectiveness, and bared her teeth at Shiver.

The Nutcracker-folk mother dropped out of her tree, screaming her rage, mouth open to show rows of flat teeth. Nutcracker-folk were powerfully built, and were formidable opponents at close quarters. She charged at Shadow.

But Stripe lunged forward. His big bulk, flying through the air, knocked her flat. But the Nutcracker-woman wrapped her big arms around Stripe’s torso and began to squeeze. Bones cracked, and he howled.

Now more of the men threw themselves at the Nutcracker-woman. Shadow saw that some of them had erections. This was the first time they had hunted one of the Nutcracker-folk. The men had grown accustomed to using the Elf-women of the forest before killing them. Perhaps this Nutcracker-woman, when subdued, would provide similar pleasure.

Shadow took the Nutcracker infant by her scrawny neck and held her up. Her short legs dangled, and huge eyes in a small pink face gazed at Shadow. But she could never be mistaken for the child of an Elf; the exotic bony ridges of her skull saw to that.

Shadow opened her mouth, and placed the child’s forehead between her lips.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

As the Nutcracker mother fought for her life, as the wild-looking Elf-woman, battered and scarred, lifted the helpless infant by its neck, Manekato raised her head and roared in anguish.

Shadow:

…And there was a flash of bright white light, and searing pain filled her head.

When Shadow could see again, the men were lying on the ground, some clutching their eyes, as dazzled and shocked as she was. Of the Nutcracker mother and child there was no sign. The men sat up. Stripe looked at Shadow. There was no prey, no meat. Stripe bared his teeth and growled at her.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

Babo touched Manekato’s shoulder. “You should not have done that,” he said regretfully.

“The Nutcracker-woman knew, Babo. She knew the pain she would endure if she lost her infant. Perhaps the child itself knew.”

“Mane—”

“No more,” she said. “No more suffering, of creatures who understand that they suffer. Let that be the future of this place.”

One by one the scattered Elves were clambering to their feet. Still rubbing their eyes, they stumbled back towards the plain — all but one, the woman who had captured the infant. She stood as tall as she could on the rocky slope, gazing up in suspicion. Manekato and Babo were well sheltered by the trees here, and the creature could surely suspect no causal connection between Manekato and her own defeat anyhow. But nevertheless the Elf howled, baring broken teeth to show pink gums, and she hurled a rock as far as she could up the slope.

Then she turned and loped away, limping, her muscles working savagely even as she walked.

Manekato shuddered, wondering what, in this creature’s short and broken life, could have caused such anguish and anger.

Babo sat on his haunches. “An Air Wall,” Babo said. “We will erect an Air Wall to exclude unwelcome hominids, and other intruders. We will move the platform inside the cordon.”

“Yes…”

“No more blood and pain, Mane.”

They turned, and began to clamber further up the crater wall.

It was not long before they had reached the summit of the crater rim wall — and found themselves facing a broad plateau. A thin breeze blew, enough to cool Manekato’s face, and to ruffle her fur. The rock here was crimson-red, like a basalt or perhaps a very compact and ancient sandstone. It was bare of vegetation and very smooth, as if machined, and covered by a hard glaze that glistened in the sun’s weak light. There was little dust here, only a few pieces of scattered rock debris.

It was as if the crater had been filled in. “I don’t remember this from the Mapped image,” Babo said, disturbed.

Manekato dug her fingers into the fur on his neck. “Evidently we have limits.”

“But it means we don’t know what we will find, from now on.”

“Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that why we came? Come, brother, let us walk, and let us remember our humility.”

They walked forward, for perhaps a mile. And then they came to a circular pit, geometrically perfect. It was only yards across. Light leaked out of it, trapped by dust motes, a shaft that reached dimly to the sky.

Manekato’s imagination quailed. She reached for Babo’s hand, reluctantly reminded of how she had guided Nemoto through the strangeness of the Mapping.

Babo grinned at his sister. “This is strange and frightening — perhaps it is our turn to be humbled now — but I am sure we will find nothing that will not yield to the orderly application of science.”

“Your faith is touching,” she said dryly.

He laughed.

“But it is not time to approach it yet,” she said.

“No. We must study it.”

“Not just that.” They regarded each other, sharing a deep instinctive wisdom. “This is not for us alone, but for all hominids.”

“Yes,” he said. “But how long must we wait?”

“I think we will know…”

There was a blue flash, painfully bright, that seemed to fill Mane’s head; it reminded her uncomfortably of the punishment she had imposed on the Elf-folk.

She raised her head. “…Ah. Look, Babo.”

In the sky swam a new world. It looked like a vast ball of steel. Its atmosphere seemed clear, save for streaks and whorls of cloud. But beneath the cloud there was no land: not a scrap of it, no continents or islands, nothing but an ocean that gleamed grey, stretching unbroken from pole to pole. There weren’t even any polar caps to speak of: just crude, broken scatterings of pack ice, clinging to this big world’s axes. The only feature away from the poles was a glowing ring of blood-red, a vast undersea volcano, perhaps. And here and there she saw more soot-black streaks of dust or smoke, disfiguring the world ocean; drowned or not, this was a geologically active world.

It was a startling, terrifying sight — Manekato’s hind brain knew from five million years of observation that things in the sky weren’t supposed to change suddenly, arbitrarily — and she tried not to cower.

“It is a new Earth,” Babo said thinly. “So we have completed a transition, riding this rogue Red Moon. How interesting.”

“Yes.” She clutched her brother’s hands. Despite his cool words, he was trembling. “And now we are truly of this world, Babo.”

It was true. For Banded Earth, Manekato’s Earth, had gone.

Emma Stoney:

With Joshua, Mary and Julia, Emma walked south, towards the place where — as the Hams put it — the wind touched the ground.

Emma was pretty much toughened up by now. So long as she avoided leg ulcers, or getting tangled up in lianas or bramble, and the snakes and the multitude of insects that seemed to target any bare flesh like heat-seeking missiles, she was able to maintain a steady plod, covering miles and miles each day, across desert or semi-scrub or savannah or even through denser forest.

The Hams had more trouble. Their sheer strength vastly exceeded her own, but long-distance walking was alien to their physiques. They looked awkward as they barrelled along, and after a couple of days she could see how they suffered aches in the hips and knees of their bow legs, and the low arches of their great flat feet. Also, she suspected, such sedentary creatures as these must suffer a deeper disturbance as they dragged themselves across the landscape, far from any settled community. But, though they moaned wordlessly and rubbed at the offending parts of their anatomies, they never complained, not to her or each other.

The days were long and hot, and the nights, spent under the crudest of lean-tos, cold and cruelly uncomfortable. The Hams seemed capable of sleeping wherever they lay down, their great muscled bodies tensed and hard even in their sleep, like marble sculptures. But Emma had to work hard to get settled, with bits of parachute silk wrapped around her, and socks and vests bundled into a ball under her head.

Much of this stuff was Malenfant’s.

She had forced herself to take everything from him that might prove useful, even the little lens that had found its way from her hands to his. It wasn’t sentiment — sentiment would have driven her to bury the stuff with him — but a question of seeking advantages that might prolong her own survival. Not that there was much left, even though Malenfant had come to this Red Moon as part of a purposeful expedition, unlike her own helpless tumble through the Wheel. Idiot, Malenfant.

Anyhow, each night she immersed her face in the ragged bits of Malenfant’s clothing, seeking the last traces of his scent.

Day after day, they walked. The Hams never wavered in their course, each clumsy step directed by a wordless navigation.

It occurred to Emma to wonder how people who moved house less often than empires rose and fell on Earth were able to find their way across such challenging distances. She tried to discuss this with Julia. But Julia was unforthcoming. She shrugged her mighty shoulders. “Lon” time. People come, people go. This way, tha’. See?”

No, Emma didn’t see. But maybe it was something to do with their long Neandertal timescales — far longer than any human.

The Hams, squatting in their caves and huts, made nothing like the seasonal or annual congregations associated with human communities. But there had to be occasional contacts even so, for example when outlying hunting parties crossed each other’s paths, or maybe when a group was forced to move by some natural disaster, a cave flood or a land slip.

And such was the static nature of the Ham world that even very occasional contacts — not even once a generation — would suffice to keep you up to date. Once you knew that Uncle Fred and Aunt Wilma lived in those limestone caves two days” hike west of here, you could be absolutely sure that they would always be there. And so, over generations, bit by bit, from one small clue after another, the Hams and their forefathers built up a kind of map of the world around them. The Ham world was a place of geological solidity, the locations of their communities as anchored as the positions of mountains and rocks and streams, shifting only with the slow adjustments of climate.

It was an oddly comforting world-view, filled with a certain calm and order: where nothing ever changed much, but where each person had her own place in the sun, along with every rock and stream. But it wasn’t a human world-view. People rooted like trees… Though she struggled to understand, it was beyond her imagination.

And of course she might be quite wrong. Maybe the Hams worked on infra-sound like the elephants, or on telepathy, or astral projection. She didn’t know, and as Julia was unable to answer questions Emma was barely able to frame, she guessed she never was going to know.

And anyhow, after the first few days” walk, the direction they were all travelling became obvious even to her. Far to the south a column of darkness reached up to the sky: not quite straight, with a sinuous, almost graceful curve. It was a permanent storm, tamed, presumably, by some advanced technology she couldn’t even guess at.

It was, of course, the fortress of Homo superior, whoever and whatever they were.

The Hams plodded on, apparently unaffected by this vision. But when the twister’s howling began to be audible, banishing the deep silences of the night, Emma found it hard to keep up her courage.

The weeping came to her in the night.

Or in the morning when she woke, sometimes from dreams in which she fled to an alternate universe where she still had him with her.

Or, unexpectedly, during the day as they walked or rested, as something — the slither of a reptile, the chirp of an insect, the way the sunlight fell on a leaf — reminded her unaccountably of him.

She knew was grieving. She had seen it in others; she knew the symptoms. It wasn’t so much that she was managing to function despite her grief; rather, she thought, this unlikely project to go challenge Homo superior was something to occupy the surface of her mind, while the darker currents mixed and merged beneath. Therapy, self-prescribed.

The Hams seemed to understand grief. So they should, she thought bleakly; their lives were harder than any human’s she had known, brief lives immersed in loss and pain. But they did not try to soothe her or, God forbid, cheer her up.

There is no consolation, they seemed to be telling her. The Hams had no illusion of afterlife or redemption or hope. It was as if they were vastly mature, ancient, calm, compared to self-deluding mayfly humans, and they seemed to give her something of their great stolid strength.

And so she endured, day by day, step by step, approaching the base of that snake of twisting air.

It didn’t surprise Emma at all when the Hams, with the accuracy of expert map readers, walked out of the desert and straight into an inhabited community.

It was a system of caves, carved in what looked like limestone, in the eroded rim wall of what appeared to be a broad crater. The upper slopes were coated thinly by tough grass or heather, but the sheltered lower valleys were wooded. And the crater was at the very bottom of that huge captive twister, which howled continually, as if seeking to be free.

As she approached she made out the bulky forms of Hams, wrapped in their typical skin sheets, coming and going from scattered cave mouths that spread high up the hillsides.

Emma could see the advantages of the site. The cave mouths were mostly north facing, which would maximize the sunlight they captured and shelter them from the prevailing winds. She suspected the elevated position of the caves was a plus too. Maybe the migration paths of herd animals came this way. Hams preferred not to have to go too far to find their food; sitting in their caves, gazing out over the broken landscape around the crater, all they would have to do was wait for their food supply to come their way.

…But that wind snake curled into the air above their heads, strange, inexplicable, filling the air with its noise — even if it didn’t disturb so much as a dust grain. You’d think it would bother the Hams. She saw no sign that it did.

Emma and her companions walked to the foot of the crater wall, and began to clamber up. The adults glanced down at their approach, but turned away, incurious.

The first person who showed any interest in them was a child: stark naked, a greasy bundle of muscle and fat no more than three years old, with one finger lodged in his cavernous nostril. This little boy stared relentlessly at Emma and followed her, but at a safe distance of a yard or so; if she tried to get closer he backed away rapidly until his buffer of safety was restored. Ham children were much more like human children than their adult counterparts. But Ham kids grew fast; soon they lost the open wonder of youth, and settled into the comfortable, stultifying conservatism of adulthood.

She stepped into the mouth of the largest cave. The noise of the whirlwind was diminished. The sun was bright behind them, and Emma, dazzled, peered into the gloom.

The walls were softened and eroded, as if streaked with butter. There was a powerful stink of meat, coming from haunches and skins stacked at the back of the cave. The place was not designed for the convenience of people, she saw; the roof was so low in places that the Hams had to duck to pass, and crude lumps of rock stuck out awkwardly from the walls and floor. She recognized the usual pattern of Ham occupation: a floor strewn thick with trampled-down debris, an irregular patchwork of hearths. The roof was coated with soot from innumerable fires, and the walls at head height and below were worn away and blackened by the touch of bodies, generation on generation of them. This place had been lived in a long time.

Emma found a piece of wall that seemed unoccupied. She dumped her pack and sat down in the dirt.

A woman approached the travellers. Bent, her hair streaked with white, a tracery of scars covering her bare arms, she looked around eighty, but was probably no older than thirty-five or forty. She began to jabber in a guttural language Emma did not understand, with no discernible traces of English or any other human language. Julia seemed uncertain how to reply, but Mary and Joshua answered confidently. Neither party seemed ill at ease or even surprised to see the other.

Julia came to Emma.

Emma said, “So can we stay?”

Julia nodded, a Homo sap gesture Emma knew she affected for her benefit. “Stay.”

With relief Emma leaned back against the creamy, cool wall of the cave. She opened her pack and dug out her parachute silk blanket and a bundle of underwear to use as a pillow. The ground here, just crimson dust, much trodden and no doubt stuffed with the bones of Ham grandmothers, was soft by comparison with what she had become used to; soon she felt herself sliding towards sleep.

But she could hear the howl of that tame whirlwind, relentless, unnatural, profoundly disturbing.

She spent a full day doing nothing but letting her body recover, her head become used to the sights and sounds and smells of this new place.

Right outside the cave entrance, a stream of clear water worked its way through rocky crevices towards the impact-broken plain below. Its course was heavily eroded, so that it cascaded between lichen-crusted, round-bottomed pools. The people used the pools for washing and preparing food, though they drank from the higher, cleaner streams.

Emma waited until she wasn’t in anybody’s way. Then she drank her fill of the stream, and washed out her underwear, and spread it out to dry over the sunlit rocks.

As she tended her blistered feet and ulcerated legs, and made small repairs to her boots and underwear, she watched the hominids around her.

Her Ham companions seemed to settle in quickly, according to their nature. Mary, strong and powerful, spent happy hours wrestling with the younger men, besting them more often than not. By the end of the day she was hardening spear points in a hearth, apparently preparing for a hunt.

Julia seemed to make friends with a group of women and children who spent much of their time clustered around one hearth — she blended in so well, in fact, that Emma soon had trouble distinguishing her from her companions, as if she had been here all her life.

Joshua, a loner in his own community, was a loner here. He settled into a small, solitary cave, and Emma saw little of him. But the Hams here seemed to tolerate his eccentricities, as had his own people.

As for Emma, she was largely ignored, much as she been with her other communities of Hams. Unable to shake off a feeling of sufferance — after all, how would a Neandertal stray be treated if she wandered into a human community? — she did her best to keep out of everybody’s way.

There was one old man who seemed to take a liking to her, however — old, meaning maybe ten years younger than she was. He was badly disfigured by a swathe of scar tissue that lapped up from where his right ear should have been to the crown of his head. She didn’t have a word in common with this guy, and she couldn’t ask him about his injury. But this wounded, smiling man seemed vaguely curious about her: curious enough, anyhow, to offer her meat. The meat was a prime cut, apparently from the shoulder of some animal — an antelope, maybe, but it could have been a rhino for all she knew. It was a groaning bloody slab two fingers thick and twice the size of a dinner plate. Her benefactor watched with absent interest as she rigged up a frame of sticks to cook it over the nearest fire.

It seemed he had no English name. She took to thinking of him as Scarhead.

The meat was frankly delicious, though she longed for green vegetables, gravy and a mellow Bordeaux to go with it.

The Hams worked hard, of course. But it struck her how happy they all seemed or if not that, content. Evidently the game was bountiful here, the living easy; all these guys had to do was sit around and wait for the meat to come wandering past, season after season. They even had fresh running water, day and night, right outside the cave. She remembered fantasies as a child of finding Candy land, where all the trees were chocolate and the streams lemonade, where you didn’t have to work for anything, where you could take as much as you liked, just by reaching out. Was the way these people lived so different from that?

But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?

Well, they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candy-land. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.

Then would come the famines and the wars.

So much for Candy-land. Maybe these Hams weren’t just as smart as humans, she mused; maybe they were actually smarter.

On the third day she walked out of the caves, alone, and set off up the eroded hillside.

The rocks were broken and worn, and cut deeply by gullies, in some of which water still flowed. She found that the easiest way to make progress was to lower herself into one of the gullies and clamber up its smooth, sloping sides, taking care not to slip on moss or lichen, until the channel petered out and she had to transfer to another.

Though she was soon panting hard and sweating into her coverall, she could feel her heart and lungs pump, the muscles of her newly powerful legs tingling. You’re in the best shape you’ve been in for years, girl.

The noise of the tame whirlwind howled ever louder. She resolutely ignored it.

Just below the summit she sat on a patch of bare rock, gathering her breath, getting the hassles of the climb out of her head. The eroded hillside, deeply punctured by its limestone gullies and caves, swept away beneath her. The sun was still low; it was maybe ten in the morning local time.

She stood and turned away from the plain. She walked up the last few paces to the crater’s summit plateau, and faced the wind.

It was a wall of churning air: a cylinder, laden with dust, that must have been a couple of miles wide. It looked flat on her puny human scale, like the wall of a vast building. But it snaked into the sky, diminishing as her gaze followed it, and at its highest extremity it curled in the air, thread-like. The whole thing was streaked horizontally, like the clouds of Jupiter, by billows of crimson dust. The flow of the air seemed smooth, though here and there she saw bits of rock and vegetation, even a few snapped-off trees. But the rock at the wind’s shimmering foot was worn bare.

The violence, the energy, were startling; it was like a waterfall, a rocket launch. A deep part of her mind couldn’t accept that it was controlled by anything: the animal in her, conditioned by a million years of experience, knew that this lethal expression of nature’s power was unpredictable, beyond propitiation.

Nevertheless she walked forward. After a few paces, she felt the first breath of wind, and a speckle of dust on her cheek.

When she got to within maybe a hundred paces of that dense wall of dust the air grew turbulent. She staggered but kept on, leaning into the wind to keep to a rough straight line, and the dust bit harder, stinging her mouth and eyes.

She shielded her eyes. Only maybe fifty paces to the dust. Forty-nine, forty eight… The air was a powerful physical presence, battering at her torso and face, whipping her hair, snatching the breath from her lungs.

And now she was inside the dust, suddenly, as if walking into a sandstorm. The dust was’a thick glowing cloud around her, obscuring the sky, the rock, even the twister itself; and when she looked downwind she saw how she cast a kind of shadow in the streaming particles.

A fresh surge hit her, unexpectedly violent. She fell sideways, rolled a couple of times, and hit her head on a rock.

She lay there for a moment. Then she got to all fours on the worn-bare rock and tried crawling.

She fell again, rolled back, tried again. Her hands and the skin of her cheeks were streaked with tiny cuts, where sharp bits of rock had bitten into her. Still she kept trying.

Lacking a plan B, she tried again the next day. And the next.

She tried wrapping herself in her parachute silk, to keep out the dust and bits of rock. She just got blown away faster. So she tied the silk tightly around herself, an outer-body garment with slits for her hands, a mask over her face. She managed to get further into that central wall of dust, maybe ten paces deep, before the sheer strength of the wind stopped her progress.

She tried crawling in, all the way. That didn’t work.

The Hams watched all this, bemused.

She considered schemes with ropes and pitons and rock-hammers, where she would make a kind of ladder that she could “climb’, across the face of the barren windswept rock, all the way to the centre. But she had no rope or pitons or rock-hammers, and couldn’t come up with any way of making them.

She explored the cave system, but found no way through that way.

And if she couldn’t go under the twister wall, she surely couldn’t go over it; it looked to her as if that tunnel of tortured air stretched all the way out of the atmosphere. (She did toy with insane schemes of retrieving Malenfant’s lander and firing it up into some kind of Alan Shepard sub-orbital trajectory that would take her up and over the wall of air, and re-enter right into the eye of the storm. But — despite her various rash promises to Joshua to pilot him and the lander all the way to his mythical Grey Earth — she didn’t know how to fly the lander, still less how to rig it for such a flight, still less how to land it.)

On the tenth day of trying, as she lay clinging to the rock, sucking air from dust through a sheet of muslin, somebody walked past her.

Mouth gaping, bits of “chute silk flapping around her, she watched as a Ham man and child walked hand in hand into the teeth of the storm, blurring. Granted the Hams were stronger than she was — both of them probably, even the boy — but they weren’t that strong. They weren’t even leaning into the damn wind.

Then she noticed, just before they disappeared into grey-red dust, that their skin wraps were hanging loose around them. The churning air wasn’t touching them.

She spent more days watching.

The Hams had always used the other side of the crater as part of their domain for hunting and gathering. They had trails leading that way, so ancient they were actually worn into the rock. When a Ham walked such a trail, heading for the crater’s interior, she just carried on through the wall of wind and dust.

The Hams weren’t the only ones.

A flock of bats flapped clumsily into the crimson mist one day, their fragile wings unaffected by the tearing air. She spotted a young deer, apparently lost, that stumbled out of the dust, gazed around with wide eyes at the world beyond, then bolted back into the wind storm. Even other hominids could make it through: notably Runners, and one Nutcracker she spotted.

But not herself — and, for some reason, not the chimp-like Elves, an association she found insulting.

She tried to interrogate the Hams. “Julia, how come you can get through the wind and I can’t?”

An intense frown creased that powerful face. “Hams live here.” She waved her arm. “Still live here.”

“All right. But why am I kept out?”

A shrug.

“What is it I’m not allowed to see? Is there some kind of installation in there, a base? Are the Hams allowed to go up to it? Do you have any, umm, trade with whoever built it?”

None of this meant much to Julia. “Funny stuff.” She waved her fingers before her face. “Hard to see.”

Emma sighed. So the Hams might be wandering around or through some kind of fabulous Homo superior base without even looking at it, interested only in their perennial pursuits, perhaps not even capable of seeing it from out of their bony cages of conservatism.

And that, presumably, was why the Daemons let the Hams wander at will past their meteorological moat. The Hams would restrict themselves, going where they had always gone inside the crater, doing what they had always done, taking not a step beyond their self-imposed boundaries; they would not interfere with whatever projects and designs the Daemons were developing in there. Whereas noisy, curious, destructive Homo sap types like herself would not rest until they had barged their way into the Daemons” shining city.

Breaking this demeaning exclusion became an obsession with her.

She focused on the Hams. She kept trying their trails. She carried Ham tools and weapons as if intent on some Ham-type gathering and hunting. She tried walking in with a party of Hams, her slim form tucked into a line of their great hulking bodies. But the wind seemed to whip through their immense muscular forms, to grab at her and push her aside.

She pushed the deception further. She purloined some skins and wrapped herself up like a Ham. Slouching, bending her legs, she practised the Hams” powerful, clumsy gait. She let her hair grow ragged and filthy, and even smeared clay on her face, letting it dry in a hopeful imitation of a Ham’s bulky facial morphology, the high cheekbones and the bony crest over the eyes.

Then, joining another foraging party, she slouched towards the wind, her gait rolling, keeping her distinctive Homo sap chin tucked into her chest.

The wind wasn’t fooled.

Furious, she stamped back to the caves, and sought out Joshua.

“You have to help me.”

Joshua stared at her. He was ragged, filthy, sitting in a debris-strewn cave that managed to be remarkably ill-appointed, even by the Palaeolithic standards of this Red Moon.

“Wha” for?”

She sighed, forgiving him his squalor, and kneeled in the dirt before him. “/ want to know,” she said. “I want to know what they are doing in there — and who they are. If they are responsible for dragging this Moon around the realities I mean, for changing the sky — I want to know why they are doing it. And to make them understand the damage they are causing, the suffering. Do you see?”

He frowned at her. “Deal,” he said simply.

“Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes, we had a deal. We still have a deal. You help me, and I’ll try to help you get to the Grey Earth. Just as I promised.” God forgive me for lying, she thought.

But his eyes narrowed, almost calculating. “Fin” a way.”

“Yes, I’ll find a way. We’ll go back to the lander and—”

His massive hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. The grip was painful, but she knew that he was using only a fraction of his strength, that if he chose he could probably crush her bone.

“No lies.”

He means it, she thought. He knows my kind too well. “Okay. No lies. I’ll find a way. Get me through the wind wall and I’ll work on it, I’ll find a way. I promise, Joshua. Please, my arm…”

He squeezed harder — just a little — but it was like a vice closing over her flesh. Then he released her. He sat back, baring his teeth in a wide grin. “How?”

“How can I get through the wind wall? I’ve been thinking about that. Whatever controls the wind is too smart to be fooled by appearance. It’s not enough that I look like a Ham. But maybe if I can learn to think like a Ham…”

Scarhead dragged a couple of haunches of meat from the back of the cave. For one brief moment the old guy looked the image of the cartoon caveman. He threw the meat down on the trampled ground, then went back into the cave to fetch tools.

Emma had once more donned her best-effort Neandertal disguise. She got to the ground gingerly, conscious of the need to keep her face rigid so as not to crack her mask of clay.

As usual, nobody showed the slightest interest in her — by now, not even the children.

The meat was, gruesomely, a couple of legs, intact from hoof to shoulder, perhaps from a horse. The limbs were already skinned, fresh, bloody, steaming slightly. Flies buzzed languidly around the exposed flesh.

Scarhead returned. He threw his handfuls of tools on the ground and sat cross legged. He grinned, and the low morning sun made his scar tissue glisten.

She inspected the tools with absent interest. There were limestone pebbles gathered from the beds of rivers, used as chopping tools, and dark basalt blocks shaped into bi-faced hand-axes and cleavers. These were working tools, each of them heavily worn and blood-splashed.

Before she left the Earth she’d known nothing of technology like this, and if she had been confronted with this collection of pebbles and rocks she would have dismissed them as nothing but random debris. Now she knew differently. Tools like this, or the still more primitive artefacts of the Runners, had kept her alive for months.

Scarhead held out a hand-axe to her.

She took the rock, feeling its rough texture. She turned it over in her hands, testing its weight, feeling how it fit perfectly into her small human hand for, of course, Scarhead had chosen it to suit her grip.

Now Scarhead held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He said bluntly, “Copy.” He grabbed one of the horse legs, and began to saw at the joint between the scapula and humerus, between shoulder and leg. His stone blade rasped as he cut through tough tendons and ligaments.

She tried. Just manhandling the heavy limb proved a challenge to her; the joints were gruesomely stiff, the meat slippery and cold in her hands.

She sighed. “Could I see the vegetarian menu?”

Scarhead just stared at her.

No smart-ass H sap jokes, Emma; today you’re a Neandertal, remember?

She kept trying. She worked the knife into the meat until she had exposed the tendons beneath the shoulder. The meat, cold and slippery against her legs, was purple-red and marbled with fat; it was coldly dead, and yet so obviously, recently attached to something alive.

Turning the stone tool in her hand, she sought to find the sharpest edge. She managed to insert her blade into the joint and sawed at — the tough ligaments, scraping them until they gave, like tough bits of rope.

Scarhead grunted.

Surprised, she raised her hand. The tool’s edge had cut into her flesh, causing long straight-line gashes that neatly paralleled the lifeline on her palm. She hadn’t even felt the cuts happen — but then the blade on a stone knife could be sharper than a metal scalpel; it could slide right into you and you’d never know it. She saw belatedly that Scarhead’s working hand was wrapped in a hunk of thick, toughened animal skin, and a kind of apron was draped over his lap.

…And now the pain hit, sharp and deep like a series of paper cuts, and she yowled. She went to a stream to drench her cut palm in cold water until the slow bleeding had stopped.

Scarhead waited patiently for her, no expression she could read on his broad, battered face.

You aren’t doing too well here, Emma.

She tried again. She spread a skin apron over her lap, and improvised a protective binding for her hand from a bit of tough leather. Then she resumed her work at the ligaments and tendons.

Think about the work, Emma. Think about the feel of the stone,. listen to the rasp of the tendons, smell the coagulated blood; feel the sun on your head, listen to the steady breathing of Scarhead…

She reached bone. Her axe scraped against the hard surface, almost jarring from her hand. She pulled the axe back and turned it over, exposing fresh edge, and began to dig deeper into the joint, seeking more tendon to cut.

A last tough bit of gristle gave way, and the leg disarticulated.

She stared, oddly fascinated, at the bone joints. Even Malenfant, who had never shown the slightest interest in biology, might have been interested at this bit of natural engineering, if he had gotten to take it apart in his own hands.

And she was still analysing. Wrong.

She glanced up at Scarhead. Not watching her, apparently immersed in the work, he had begun to fillet the meat from the shoulder joint he was holding. Emulating his actions, she did the same. She dug her blade into the gap between meat and bone, cutting the muscle that was attached to the bone surface. She soon found the easiest way was to prop the scapula on the ground between her legs, and pull at the muscle with one hand to expose the joint, which she cut with the other hand. She got into a rhythm of turning the axe in her hand, to keep exposing fresh edge.

She tried not to think about anything — not Earth, Malenfant, the wind wall, the destiny of mankind, her own fate — nothing but the feel of the sun, the meat in her hand, the scrape of stone on bone.

For brief moments, as the hypnotic rhythms of the butchery tugged at her mind, she got it.

It was as if she was no longer the little viewpoint camera stuck behind her eyes; it was as if her consciousness had dispersed, so that she was her working hands, or spread even further to her tool, the flesh and bone she worked, and the trails and bits of forest and scrub and the crater walls and the migrating herds and all the other details of this scrap of the world, a scrap inhabited by the Hams, unchanging, for generation upon generation upon generation.

…Her hands had finished the butchery. On one side of her, a flensed shoulder bone; on the other, a neat stack of filleted meat.

She looked into cavernous eyes, feeling the sun’s heat, feeling the pleasurable ache of her arms and hands. She forgot the name she had given him, forgot her own name, forgot herself in his deep stare.

Shadows beside her. It was Joshua, and Julia… No, no names; these people simply were who they were, everybody in their world knew them, without the need for labels. She took their hands and let herself be raised to her feet.

The Hams led her up the hillside, away from the caves, towards the place where the unnatural wind moaned.

It was not like a dream; it was too detailed for that. She felt the sharpness of every grain of red dust under her feet, the lick of the air on her cheeks, the salty prickle of sweat on her brow and neck, the sharp, almost pleasant ache of her cut palm. It was as if a veil had been removed from her eyes, stops from her ears and nose, so that the colours were vivid and alive — red earth, green vegetation, blue sky — and the sounds were clear, grainy, loud, their footsteps crunching into the earth, the hiss of wind over the scrubby grass that clung to these upper slopes. It was like being a child again, she thought, a child on a crisp summer’s Saturday morning, when the day was too long for its end to be imagined, the world too absorbing to be analysed.

Was this how it was to be a Neandertal? If so, how — enviable.

They had reached the crest of the crater-rim hill. They began to walk forward, in a line, hand in hand.

That wall of air spread across the land before her, a cylinder so wide it looked flat. She felt a lick of wind, touching her cheek, disturbing her hair, the first prickle of dust on her skin. She dropped her head, concealing her Homo sap protruding chin, and walked steadily on. She concentrated on the sun, the texture of the ground, the bloody iron scent of the dusty air.

Anything but the wind.

They went into the dust. She walked steadily, between her Ham friends, immersed in crimson light. She was ten paces inside the dust. Then fifteen, past her previous record. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…

Maybe it was the counting. Hams did not count.

The wind hit her like a train.

Her hands were wrenched from the Hams” grip. She was lifted up off the ground, flipped on her back, and slammed down again.

The light dimmed to a dull Venusian red. Suddenly she couldn’t see Julia or Joshua, nothing but a horizontal hail of dust particles and bits of rock, looming out of infinity as if she were looking into a tunnel. If she turned her head into the wind she could barely breathe.

Another gust — she was rolled over — she scrabbled at the ground. And then she was lifted up, up into the air, limbs flailing, like a cow caught by a Midwest tornado. She was immersed in a shell of whirling dust; she couldn’t see ground or sky, couldn’t tell how far away the ground was, couldn’t even tell which way up she was. But she could tell she was falling.

She screamed, but her cry was snatched away. “Malenfant!—”

She was on her back. She could feel that much. But there was no wind: no hot buffeting gusts at her face, no sting of grit on her exposed skin. Nothing but a remote howl.

She opened her eyes.

She was looking up into a dark tunnel, like gazing up from the depths of a well, towards a circle of cloud-scattered blue sky. The light was odd, greyish-red, as if shadowed. Was she back in the caves? She tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her back and stomach.

A face loomed above her, silhouetted by the patch of bright sky, backlit by diffuse grey light. “Take it easy. We don’t think any bones are broken. But you are cut and bruised and badly winded. You may be concussed.” The face was thin, capped by a splash of untidy black hair. Emma stared at an oddly jutting chin, weak cheekbones, an absurd bubble skull with loose scraps of hair. It was a woman’s face.

It came into focus. A human woman.

The woman frowned. “Do you understand me?”

When she tried to speak Emma found her mouth full of dust. She coughed, spat, and tried again. “Yes.”

“You must be Emma Malenfant.”

“Stoney,” Emma corrected automatically. “As if it makes a difference now.” She saw the woman was wearing a faded blue coverall, scuffed and much-repaired, with a NASA meatball logo on her chest. “You’re Nemoto. Malenfant’s companion.”

Nemoto regarded her gravely, and with a start Emma recognized for the first time the Oriental cast of her features. A lesson, she thought wryly. Compared to the distance between humans and other hominids, the gap between our races really is so small as to be unnoticeable.

“…Malenfant is dead,” she said hesitantly. “I’m sorry.”

She thought she saw hope die, just a little, in Nemoto’s blank, narrowing eyes.

“I don’t know how well you knew him. I—”

“We have much to discuss, Emma Stoney.”

“Yes. Yes, we do.”

Nemoto slid an arm under Emma’s back and helped Emma sit up. Everything worked, more or less. But her belly and back felt like one immense bruise, and she was having trouble breathing.

She was sitting on crimson dirt. A few paces away from her, waiting patiently, she saw Joshua and Julia. She grinned at them, and Julia gave her an oddly human wave back.

Beyond them was strangeness.

A yellow floor sprawled over the ground — seamless and smooth, obviously artificial. There were buildings on this floor, rounded structures the same colour and apparently made of the same material, as if they had grown seamlessly from out of the floor, as if the whole thing was a sculpture of half-melted Cheddar cheese.

Hominids were moving among the structures. They walked on feet and knuckles, big and bulky, too remote for her to make out details. Like gorillas, she thought, like the creature she had seen leaving the Zealot stockade with the ragtag army. Could they be Daemons?

She looked over her shoulder. She saw that wall of wind, streaked with dirt and ripped-up vegetation. But now she could see how it curved inwards, around her confining her here, not excluding her. And when she looked up it stretched into the sky, making a twisting, slowly writhing tunnel.

She was inside the twister.

“Ha!” she said, and she punched the air. “Fooled “em, by God.”

Nemoto was frowning. There was an edge about her, a tension that seemed wound tight. “It was not like that. You did not ‘fool’ anybody. The Daemons watched your approach. They watched as you plastered clay on your face and butchered your meat—”

“How did they watch me?”

Nemoto waved at the air. “They can see what they like, go wherever they want to, at a gesture. They call it Mapping.”

“I don’t understand.”

Nemoto leaned down, thrusting her face at Emma, anger sparking. “Your efforts to deceive them were comical. Embarrassing. They could not have succeeded. It was me, Emma Stoney. I was the one who practised deceit in the end; I convinced them to admit you. I tried to spin your absurd stunt into an act of true cognition. I told them that deceit is a sign of a certain level of intelligence. But I said you were aware of the shallowness of your deceit. You intended to demonstrate an ability to bluff and counter-bluff, thus showing multiple levels of cognition which—”

Emma raised a hand. “I think I get it.” Holding Nemoto’s hand, she pulled herself to her feet. “I wish I could say I was so smart. Intentionally, anyhow. Umm, I guess it’s appropriate to thank you.”

She heard heavy footsteps. She turned.

One of the gorilla-things was coming towards her. It — no, she, she had breasts — she walked using her knuckles. But she moved fast, more than a walk: it was a knuckle-sprint, a knuckle-gallop, startlingly fast for such a huge animal.

The creature must have been eight feet tall. The ground seemed to shake.

Emma felt Nemoto’s hand slide into hers. “Show no fear. Her name is Manekato, or Mane. She will not harm you.”

The Daemon stood before Emma. She straightened up, her massive black-haired bulk towering, and her hands descended on Emma’s shoulders, powerful, heavy, human like. Emma felt overwhelmed by weight, solidity, the powerful rank stench of chest-hair. She raised her hands and pressed against that black chest, pushing with all her strength against the surging muscle. Effortlessly, it seemed, the Daemon pressed closer, bringing her shining black face close to Emma’s. The mouth opened, and Emma glimpsed a pink cavern and tongue, two huge spike-like upper canines, and smelled a breath sweet as milk.

Two ears swivelled towards Emma, like little radar dishes.

Then the Daemon backed off, dropping to rest her weight on her knuckles once more. She growled and hooted.

Nemoto was smiling thinly. “That was English. You will get used to her pronunciation. Mane asks, What is it you want?”

“Tell her I want—”

“Tell her yourself, Emma Stoney.”

Emma faced Manekato, gazed into deep brown gorilla eyes. “I’ve come here looking for answers.” She waved a hand. “Don’t you see the damage you cause?”

Mane frowned, a distinctly puzzled expression, and she peered at Nemoto, as if seeking clarification there. Just as with the Hams, Emma had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that she wasn’t even asking the right questions.

Again Nemoto had to translate for Emma. “You think we made this. The engine that moved the world. Child, the Old Ones are far above us — so far they are as distant from me as from you. Do you not understand that?”

Emma shuddered. But she said belligerently, “I just want to know what is going on.”

This time, Emma made out Mane’s guttural words for herself. “We hoped you could tell us.”

That first night, Emma stayed in the shelter the Daemons had given Nemoto despite Nemoto’s obvious reluctance to share. A second bed was “grown” inside the little shelter’s main room for Emma, fully equipped with mattress, pillow and sheets; the gorilla-thing called Mane apologized to Emma for the crowding, but promised a place of her own by the next night.

Unlike the rounded, quasi-organic feel of the other structures on the disc floor, Nemoto’s residence was a boxy design with rectangular doors and windows, giving it a very human feel. But, like the other structures, it seemed to have grown from the smooth, oddly warm, bright yellow substrate. It was as if the whole place was a seamless chunk of pepper-yellow plastic that had popped out of some vast mould.

But the Daemons had provided for Nemoto well. She had a bed with a soft mattress and sheets of some smooth fabric. She was given fruit and meat to eat; she even had a box the size of a microwave oven, with pretty much the same function. There were spigots for hot and cold water, a bathroom with a toilet that flushed.

Holiday Inn it wasn’t, but it was close enough, Emma thought, in the circumstances. Nemoto said the flush toilet, for instance, had taken a couple of prototypes to get right.

None of this had anything to do with the way the Daemons lived their lives. They seemed to have no desire for privacy.when defecating or urinating, for instance; they just let go wherever they happened to be, making sure they didn’t splash the food. The magic floor absorbed the waste, no doubt recycling it for some useful purpose, and would even dispel odours. The Daemons, though, were understanding, or at least tolerant, of Nemoto’s biological and cultural hang ups.

Anyhow it suited Emma fine.

There were sanitary towels. Emma fell on these and stole as many as she could carry away.

There was coffee (or a facsimile).

There was a shower.

She luxuriated in her first hot wash for months, using soap and shampoo that didn’t smell as if it had come oozing straight out of the bark of a tree. At first the water just ran black-red at her feet, as if every pore on her body was laden with crimson dirt. By the time she had washed out her hair two, three times, it began to feel like her hair again. She cleaned out the black grime from beneath her fingernails. She looked around for a razor, but could find none; so she used one of her stone blades, purloined from a Neandertal community many miles away, to work at her armpits.

Towelling herself dry, Emma stood by the window of Nemoto’s little chalet, peering out at the Daemons” encampment.

Feeling oddly like a primatologist in a hide, she watched little knots of the huge gorilla-like creatures knuckle-walking to and fro. H. superior or not, they all looked alike, for God’s sake. And little cartoon robots buzzed everywhere, rolling, hopping and flying. She had to remind herself that these really were creatures capable of flying between worlds, of putting on a light show in the sky to shame the aurora borealis, of growing a city in the jungle.

But as she watched, one of the “gorillas” flickered out of existence, reappearing a few minutes later on the other side of the compound.

At that moment Emma knew, deep in her gut, that there was indeed nothing primitive about these shambling, knuckle-walking, hairy slabs of muscle, despite her Homo sap prejudices.

And it made it still more terrifying that it was not the Daemons who were responsible for moving the Moon, but another order of creatures beyond even them. She felt that she was at the bottom of a hierarchy of power and knowledge, unimaginably tall.

She hit her first soft pillow in months. Emma spent twelve hours in deep, dreamless sleep.

When she hauled herself out of bed the next day, Nemoto made her brunch (French toast, by God). But Nemoto was largely silent, volunteering little of her experiences here.

Emma, in turn, resented this silence. After all Nemoto had spent a good deal of time with Malenfant — most of his last few months alive, in fact, when Emma had been about as far from him as she could be. But Emma wasn’t about to beg for scraps of information about her own damn husband.

I am not, Emma thought, going to get along easily with this woman.

Manekato came visiting. She crouched to get her eight-feet-tall bulk inside Nemoto’s shelter, then sat squat on the floor, a gorilla in a too-small cage. Her accent was thick, her voice a Barry White growl. But when she spoke slowly, Emma found she understood her.

Manekato said, “You have talked. Nemoto has shared with you what she has learned.”

Nemoto and Emma shared a glance.

Emma said, “Actually, no.”

Mane slapped her huge thigh, apparently in frustration. “You are the same species! You are alone here, far from home! Why can you not cooperate?”

Nemoto said easily, “You are showing your prejudice, Manekato. You must see us as individuals. We are the same species, but that does not determine our goals any more than you and Renemenagota had identical motivations.”

The name meant nothing to Emma.

Mane turned to Emma, her huge head swivelling. “Very well. Em-ma? Why have you come here?”

Emma thought about that. “I want to go home.”

Manekato said, “I regret that is not within my gift. I cannot go home.”

Emma closed her eyes for a moment, letting her last sliver of hope disappear. She should have expected this, of course. If it were possible to reach Earth, Nemoto would surely have been sent there by now.

She opened her eyes and met Mane’s gaze. “Then I want to go to the centre.”

“The centre?”

“The place where everything happens.”

Nemoto grinned. “She wants to see the world engine.”

Mane asked, “Why?”

Emma felt angry. Who are you to ask? It isn’t yours, any more than it is human… “Because I’ve come this far. Because I’ve kept myself alive on this damn Moon that took my husband’s life, and I want to know what the hell it is all for.”

“What difference would knowing make?”

“It just would,” Emma snapped. “And I resent your cross-questioning.”

Mane paused. Then she said gently, “Em-ma, how did you come here?”

“It was an accident. I, umm, fell through a portal. A Wheel, a blue circle.”

“Yes. We know of such devices. But your mate, Mal-en-fant, came here purposefully, with Nemoto.”

“He came to rescue me.”

“How is it Mal-en-fant had the technology to travel to the Red Moon? Did he invent it from scratch?”

Emma glanced at Nemoto, who showed no reaction. Mane was asking her questions to which Nemoto must already have given answers; perhaps this was some obscure test.

“No,” Emma said. “We had travelled to our own Moon — umm, a lifeless world long before the Red Moon showed up. The technical base was there.”

“Why did you go to this Moon? For science, for learning?”

“For politics,” Nemoto said sourly. “For irrational purposes. For typical Homo sapiens reasons.”

“It wasn’t just that,” Emma said, frowning. “You don’t live with an astronaut your whole life without figuring out some of the bigger picture. Manekato, we went to the Moon because we are a species that explores. We go places even when there is no immediate purpose. Why choose this as our goal? Why climb the highest mountain? Why… fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the Moon… because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our abilities and skills…”

Nemoto laughed. “President Kennedy’s 1961 speech. It is a long time since I heard those words.”

“Malenfant was fond of quoting it.”

“So,” Mane said, “you intended to live on your Moon, to colonize it.”

“Ultimately, I guess, yeah.”

“And then?”

“And then the other planets,” Emma said vaguely. “Mars, the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter.”

“And then?”

“And then the stars, I guess. Alpha Centauri… You’d have been better asking Malenfant.” She studied Manekato, trying to read the expressions that passed over that broad, blue-black face. “Every intelligent species must have the same kind of goals. Expansion, colonization. Mustn’t they? Especially every intelligent variety of hominid.”

Nemoto was shaking her head. “Not so, it seems.”

Emma was growing irritated again; she wasn’t enjoying being treated as the dope of the class. “Why are you here, Manekato?”

“Like you,” Mane said evenly, “when this Red Moon appeared in our skies — and it disrupted our world as much as it did yours — we asked the question why.”

Emma leaned forward. “But why you. Mane, rather than somebody else?”

Mane frowned. “I came because I had no home.”

It turned out that Mane’s home, which she referred to as a Farm, had been wiped off the face of her Earth by Red Moon tides.

“She came here because she was forced,” Nemoto said.

“You could have rebuilt someplace else.”

“There is nowhere else,” Mane said. She pulled at an ear that was all but buried in thick black fur. “It was the end of my Lineage. A Lineage that stretched back through a hundred thousand generations.” She sighed, and began to scratch at the other ear.

Emma sat, stunned. A hundred thousand generations? If each generation was, say, twenty years at minimum — why, that added up to two million years.

Nemoto said, “Emma, these people are not like us. They are much more like the Hams. They sit on those Farms of theirs, for ever and a day. They do not covet what their neighbours possess. There is no robbery, no territorial or economic expansion, no nation, no war.”

“And if you lose your Farm—”

“If you lose your Farm, you die. Or anyhow your Lineage does.”

“That’s terrible,” Emma said to Mane. “What do they do? Sterilize you? Take your children?”

But it seemed that once again she had asked the wrong question. Mane asked blankly, “They?”

“Nobody has to enforce it,” Nemoto said. “It just happens. The families let themselves die out. It is seen as a price worth paying for ecological stability. Emma, the Daemons have evolved this way, shaped by their cultural imperatives. Two million years, remember.”

Emma shook her head, uncomfortable under Mane’s steady gaze. She felt defiant. “Humans wouldn’t live like that. We wouldn’t accept it.”

Mane kept pulling her ear. “What would you do?”

Emma shrugged. “The family would go on. The Mayflower syndrome. We’d carve a place out of the wilderness—”

“But there is no wilderness,” Mane said. “Even without war, even if you found a space not already cultivated, you would be forced to occupy a region, delineated in space, time, and energy flow, already exploited by another portion of the ecology.”

It took some time for Emma to figure that out. “Yes,” she said. “There is bound to be some environmental impact. But—”

“Other species would find reduced living space. Diversity would fall. And so it would go on. Soon the world would be covered from pole to pole by humans, fighting over the diminishing resources.” Mane nodded. “Such was the ambition of Praisegod Michael. At least you are consistent.”

“The Daemons limit their numbers,” said Nemoto. “They don’t overrun their Earth. By respecting the stability of the ecosystem that provides for them they have survived for millions of years. They even accept their short lifespans, though it would be trivial for them to do something about that.”

“A brief life burns brightly,” said Manekato.

Emma shook her head. “I still say humans couldn’t live like that.”

Nemoto said slyly, “The Hams do. And they are almost human.”

“Are you saying we should live like Neandertals, in caves, wearing skins, wrestling buffalo, watching our children die young?”

Mane said, “Are the Hams suffering?”

No, Emma thought. Actually they are happy. But her pride was hurt; she stayed silent.

Mane leaned forward, and Emma could smell her milk-sweet breath. “The lion takes only the last deer in the herd. She does not dream of having so many cubs that the plains would be full of nothing but lions. There are simple laws. Most species figure them out; you are the exception. An ecology of a single species is not viable. A diverse, stable world would provide for you.”

Candy-land, Emma thought.

“We have a story,” Mane said. “A mother was dying. She called her daughter. She said, ‘This is the most beautiful Farm in the world.’ And so it was. The mother said, ‘When I die, you will be free to act. Do with it what you will.’ The daughter pondered these words.

“And when the mother died, the daughter took a torch and set fire to her Farm every bit of it, the buildings and crops and creatures.

“When asked why she had done this — for of course, without a Farm, her Lineage would be extinguished — the daughter said, “One night of glory is better than a thousand years of toil.’” The big Daemon actually shuddered as she finished her tale.

“We have a similar legend,” Emma said. “There was a warrior, called Achilles. The gods gave him a choice: a brief life of glory, or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. Achilles chose the glory.” She looked up at Mane. “In my culture, that story is regarded as uplifting.”

Mane turned her tremendous head. “The tale I told you is, umm, a scary story. Intended to frighten the children into proper behaviour.”

Nemoto said grimly, “But we will go on anyhow. To the planets, the stars. If we get the chance; if we survive the human-induced extinction event that is unfolding on our Earth. Because we don’t have a choice.” She eyed Manekato bleakly. “Sure our strategy is flawed. But it has a deadly internal logic. We’re stuck on this road we have chosen. We have to keep expanding, or we’ll die anyhow.”

“There is that,” Mane said gently. She stood, and with startling clumsiness rammed her head against the low roof of the chalet. “You wish to see the engine of the world. So do I, Em-ma. We will go together.”

Nemoto nodded warily. “How? Will you Map us?”

Manekato laid a hand on Emma’s scalp. It was heavy, gentle, the pads of flesh on the palm soft. “We have found we cannot Map there. But it would not be appropriate anyway. We are all hominids together, here on this Red Moon. Let us do what hominids do. We will walk, to our destiny.”

Four of them would be travelling together: Emma, Nemoto, Manekato — and Julia, the Ham. As Emma was preparing to leave, Julia had walked out of nowhere, with every sign of staying at Emma’s side until they reached whatever there was to find, at the centre of this wind-wrapped crater.

Manekato loomed over the three of them, the massive muscles of her shoulders as big as Emma’s skull. “Now we go, we four, to discover the secret of the universe.” She threw back her mighty head and laughed, a roar that rattled off the smooth-walled structures of the compound. And, without hesitation, she walked off the yellow platform floor, heading for the interior of the crater, and the forest that lay there.

The little column turned single-file and spread out. The going was easy over the dust-strewn rock, and Emma, hardened by her weeks of living rough, found it easy to keep up with Manekato’s knuckle-gallop. But when she looked back she saw that Nemoto was labouring, lagging behind Emma by a hundred yards. Julia walked at her side, stolid, slow, patient, her own awkward gait endearingly clumsy.

Emma waited until Nemoto caught up. Nemoto did not look her in the eye; she plodded on, her gait showing a trace of a limp. Emma clapped her on the shoulder. “I guess the human species isn’t going to conquer the stars if we can’t even walk a couple of miles, Nemoto.”

“I am not as acclimatized as you,” Nemoto said.

“Despite all that astronaut training you must have had. Whereas / was just thrown here on my ass from out of the blue sky—”

“Punish me if you like. Your misfortunes are not my fault.”

“Right. You came here to rescue me. Or was it just to give me somebody even worse off than I am?”

Julia moved between them. “No” worry, Emma. I help.”

Emma grinned. “Just throw her over your shoulder if she gives any trouble. Nemoto — even if they can’t Map there, I don’t understand why the Daemons haven’t been to this centre before.”

“They have been studying it. They can be remarkably patient. And—”

“Yes?”

“I think they have been waiting for us.”

Emma observed, “Nobody’s carrying anything.”

Julia shrugged. “Fores” has food. Fores” has water.”

“You see?” Nemoto glared. “These others do not think as we do. Julia knows that the land will provide everything she needs: food, water, even raw materials for tools. It is a different set of assumptions, Emma Stoney. Just as Manekato said. They see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous mother land. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered.”

“So we’re inferior in every way,” Emma grumbled, resentful.

“Not that,” Nemoto said. “But we are different. The Daemons” intellectual capacity is obvious — the rapidity of their comprehension, the richness and precision of their thinking. But they come from a world where hunters, indeed predators of any kind, cannot prosper. Even their games are cooperative, all concerned with building things.”

“What about religion? What do they believe?”

Nemoto shrugged. “If they have a religion it is buried well, in their minds and their culture. They need not worship sublimated mothers or seeds as we do, because they control nature — at least, below the Red Moon. And without the metaphor of the seed, of renewal, they have no urge to believe in a life beyond the grave.”

“Like the Hams.”

“Yes. The Hams, Neandertals, have much more in common with the Daemons than we do. And remember this, Emma Stoney. Mane’s people regard us as less intelligent than them. Save for academic interest or sentimentality, they have no more interest in talking to us than you would have in chatting to a Colobus monkey. This is the framework within which we must operate, no matter how hurtful to your Homo sapiens ego.”

They reached a patch of forest. Manekato plunged into it, seeking fruit. The others followed more slowly.

Keeping Manekato’s broad back in sight, Emma stepped cautiously over a muddy, leaf-strewn ground. Roots snaked everywhere, as if put there to trip her. In some places the trees towered high. She could see the canopy, where the thick branches of each tree spread out, making an almost horizontal roof of greenery. The trunks themselves were dense with life, with lianas that looped and sagged, and ferns and orchids sprouting like underarm hair from every crevice and fork. Though it was humid and still, the moist air felt almost cool on her cheeks, as if this was fall. There was a mild, pervading stench of decaying vegetation.

A shadow flitted between the tree trunks, a round, uncertain form dimly glimpsed among the shadowy verticals.

Emma stopped dead, heart hammering.

Manekato was a massive, reassuring form at her side. “It is a Nutcracker. A vegetarian hominid which—”

“I know about Nutcrackers.”

Manekato peered curiously into her face. “I sense fear.”

Emma found her breath was shallow; she tried to control it. “Does that surprise you?”

“You are already far from home. Without prior preparation, without aid, you have survived in this place for many weeks. What more is there for you to fear now?”

“Humans aren’t creatures of the forest, like the Elves or the Nutcrackers. We are creatures of the open. Like the Runners.”

“Ah.” Apologetically Manekato reached for her and, with thick, gentle, leather skinned fingers, she probed at Emma’s shoulders, elbows, hips. “It is true. You are designed for steady walking, for running, over long distances. You sweat unlike me — so that you can control your heat loss efficiently in the open sunlight. Yes, your link with the forest is lost deep in the past. And so you see it, not as a place of bounty and safety, but of threat.”

“We have tales. Fictions. Many of them are scary. They involve dense forests, being lost in the woods.”

Manekato showed ferocious teeth. “And if an Elf were able, it would frighten its companions with tales of being trapped in the open, with no forest cover in sight, at sunset, as the predators begin to feed… But that hominid appeared to be fleeing. Little threatens the Nutcrackers, here in their forest domain; they are strong and smart. Curious.” Mane loped forward, more slowly than before, her massive form moving with barely a rustle through the crowded foliage. Emma followed in her tracks.

Then Mane slowed, peering down at something on the ground.

Emma heard the buzzing of flies. Then came the stench, the rotting-meat stench: sanitized out of the world she had come from, a smell she would not get used to no matter how long she lasted on this strange, mixed-up Moon.

The smell of death.

It looked like a chimp that had been hit by a truck. Its hairy skin was broken by wounds and lesions, and a watery fluid leaked from gaping mouth and empty eye sockets. Maggots squirmed in the lesions, giving the corpse a semblance of life. The body seemed to be deliquescing, in fact, its flesh and bones dissolving right out from within its skin and pouring into the ground.

There was an infant sitting on the ground beside the adult, presumably its mother, a round bundle of misery.

“Now we know why that Nutcracker was fleeing,” Emma said.

Nemoto, panting hard, joined Emma. “I have seen this before. Do not touch anything.”

“What is it?”

“Something like the Ebola virus, I think. It starts with a headache, a fever. As your cells fill with the replicating virus your immune system collapses. Your skin turns to pulp; you haemorrhage; your gut fills with blood; blood leaks from your eyes, mouth, nose, ears, anus. When you die your body turns to slime. If somebody picks up the corpse, they contract it too, and die in turn. There is no vaccine or cure. I guess that is why the others of this one’s troupe have abandoned it, and its child.”

“I have made this one safe,” Mane murmured. “There is no infection here.” Emma hadn’t seen her do anything.

The baby raised its head and studied Emma. The little Nutcracker, surely no more than a year old, was surrounded by scrapings of thin white infant scut.

Emma said to Mane, “It’s safe to pick it up?”

“Yes.”

Emma pulled a piece of cloth over her mouth and nose and stepped forward, towards the infant. The infant cowered back, but it was weak and hungry and scared, and let Emma tuck her hands under its armpits.

She lifted it easily, though it was heavier than she had thought, a boulder of hair and bone. “Well, it’s a girl; I can tell that much.” The infant had brown black eyes, creamy white at the edges. Her skin beneath the hair was black, and wrinkles ran across her brow, between her eyes and over her stubby ape nose, giving her a troubled expression. Her mouth was open, and was a startlingly bright pink inside. The hair on her body was thick and coarse, but on her head, over that improbable crest of bone, the hair was sparser.

Emma held the baby against her chest. The little body was very warm. The sad, small black face tucked into a fold of Emma’s coverall, and Emma bent to kiss the bony crest on the top of her head. She smelled leaves.

Then the infant hugged her tight with legs and arms, tensed, and defecated in a stream that spilled down Emma’s trouser-legs.

Julia made claw hands. “Leopards. Hyenas. Chomp baby Nu’cracker.”

“Right,” Emma said. “Smart baby. You only take a dump when your mother is holding you.”

Nemoto was watching her. “Emma Stoney, I hope you’re not considering bringing that infant with you.”

Emma hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Why not?”

“Because you do not know how to look after it.”

“Her. I don’t know how to look after her.”

“You know nothing of the ecology of these creatures. You are sentimental.”

“She is right,” Mane said mournfully. The big Daemon loomed over the little tableau, like an adult standing over a child with her doll. “This infant has been abandoned by its kind. It will shortly die, of starvation, predation, disease. Death is commonplace for all hominid species, Em-ma. Among the Nutcrackers, in fact, the men compete for access to groups of women and children. And sometimes if one man displaces another, he will destroy the children of his defeated opponent.”

“All very evolutionarily sound,” Emma said coldly. “But I’m keeping her.”

She felt a massive hand on her back: Julia’s. “Lonely,” said the Ham.

“Yes. Yes, I’m lonely, Julia. I lost my husband, my world, my life. For all your kindness, of course I’m lonely.”

“All,” Julia said softly. “Lonely.”

Nemoto prowled about the little clearing, agitated, avoiding the corpse. “We are the lonely hominids. On Earth it is thirty-five thousand years since we last encountered another hominid species. Maybe it was our relentless expansion that drove the last of the Neandertals to extinction; maybe it was our fault — but whatever the cause it was surely the last contact. And when we look out into the sky, we see nothing but emptiness. An empty world in an empty universe. No wonder we have been at war with our planet since before records began. Earth had betrayed us, orphaned us: what else was there to do? Yes, we are lonely, all of us. Lonely and frightened. But do you really think making a pet of an orphaned Australopithecine is going to make any difference?…”

Emma felt Mane’s heavy, gentle hand touch the top of her head, distant, comforting.

They approached the centre.

People moved over the rocky ground. They were Daemons, little clusters of them walking to and fro, bearing incomprehensible pieces of equipment, occasionally flickering into and out of existence in that baffling, utterly disturbing way of theirs.

Beyond the Daemons, Emma thought she could see light shining up from the ground, caught by swirling dust motes. She shivered.

Nemoto was silent, tense.

They reached the centre of the clearing. Emma stepped forward gingerly.

There was a hole in the ground, a few yards wide, like a well. Light shone from it, up into the dusty air, like an inverted sunbeam.

Emma felt cold with awe.

She sat on the grass with the Nutcracker infant and reached for a flask of milk from her pack. She opened up the yellow plastic-feel flask, exposing a nipple, and tipped it towards the infant’s head, making soothing noises. The infant grabbed the yellow flask with hands and feet, and she began to suck at the nipple, very hard. Milk splashed into her mouth and over her face, and over Emma.

Emma wiped milk from her lap and eyes. “I should do this with an apron.”

“You shouldn’t do it at all,” Nemoto said sourly. “You should give her back to her kind.”

“Nutcrackers don’t adopt orphans. You know that.”

Mane stood over them like a block of granite. “We could make the infant acceptable to a troupe of its kind.”

Emma scowled. “How?”

Nemoto said, “Emma, if they can travel between worlds just by thinking about it, the Daemons can surely fool some half-evolved ape.”

Mane reproached her, “Nutcrackers are fully evolved. Just differently evolved.”

The infant finished the milk, or at any rate lost patience with the bottle. She threw it over her head. Then she touched the milk that had pooled on Emma’s chin, and opened her mouth to make fast, rasping cries. “Hah hah hah!”

“She’s laughing at me,” Emma said.

“I am not surprised,” Nemoto said.

“I’ll find some running water and wash us both up.”

Julia, watching, grinned. “Nutcracker don” wash!”

Nemoto grimaced. “This is not a toy, still less a human child! Soon you will be stinking as badly as her! Emma, give up this sentimentality. Give her back to her own kind.” She seemed obsessed with the issue of the infant.

Emma looked up at Manekato, and she looked into her own heart. “Not yet,” she said.

There was a moment of stillness. In this open space the sun was warm on her face, invigorating, its light making the dusty air shine. The infant Nutcracker gurgled and plucked at Emma’s sleeve.

Manekato walked to the lip of the tunnel. She stood silently, on crimson earth, peering into the well in the Moon, its diffuse light picking out the folds in her blue-black skin. Emma wondered what she was thinking, what the tunnel was saying to her.

Mane turned. “It is time.” She held out her hands.

Yes, Emma thought. Somehow she knew it too. She stood up, brushing dust off her coveralls. The Nutcracker child clambered up into her arms. She settled her distorted head against Emma’s chest and promptly fell asleep.

Nemoto stood reluctantly. Emma could see she was trembling, utterly afraid.

Mane took Emma’s hand, and Nemoto’s, and Julia took Nemoto’s other hand. Cradling the infant, Emma walked up to the lip of the well.

The shaft at her feet was a cylinder, walled by what looked like sparkling glass, a wall that receded downwards to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few yards, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Conduits snaked along the tunnel, their purpose unclear. The shaft was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.

Momentarily dizzy, Emma stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Red Moon.

Nemoto said, “What is this?”

Mane said evenly, “It is a tunnel in the Moon.”

“But what is it for?”

“We don’t know.”

Emma said, “How deep is it?”

“We don’t know that either,” Manekato said. “We have tried sending—” she hesitated ” — radio signals and other emissions into the well. No echo has returned.”

“But,” said Emma, “it can’t be longer than the width of the Moon. Even if it came out the other side… It can’t be longer than that.”

“We don’t know,” Mane said. “We did not put it here.”

Nemoto said tightly, “What do we have to do?”

Mane regarded her with her large eyes, pupils black, the whites flecked with yellow. “I think you know.”

Yes, Emma knew — though she didn’t understand how she knew. A prickly wave of vertigo swept over her. Malenfant, she thought desperately, you should be here to see this. You would love it. But me…

There was no more time, no time for thinking, for doubt. Without a word, the five of them stepped off the lip of the tunnel, into the air.

For a moment they floated there in space, bathed in the light from the heart of the world, like cartoon characters for whom the laws of physics are momentarily suspended.

And then they began to sink, gently.

There was nothing beneath her feet. The air was full of light.

Slow as a snowflake, tugged by a force that felt like gravity — and yet it could not be gravity — Emma fell towards the heart of the Moon. There was no noise save the rustle of clothing, their soft breathing, no smell save the lingering iron-and-blood stink of the crimson dust of the Red Moon.

She could tell she was falling. Lines in the wall, like depth markers, were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But it was as if she were suspended here, in the glowing air; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.

She could hear her own heart pound.

Nemoto was laughing, manic.

Emma held the black bundle of fur closer to her chest, drawing comfort from the Nutcracker’s solid animal warmth. “I don’t know what the hell is so funny.”

Nemoto’s face was twisted, a mask of fear and denial. “We are not in the hands of some omnipotent, infallible god. This is no more than a gadget, Emma. More ancient than our species, more ancient than worlds perhaps, very advanced — but very old, and cranky, and probably failing as well. And we are relying on it for our lives. That is what strikes me as funny.”

Their speed picked up quickly.

In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine layers of the Red Moon’s outer geology. Now they sailed past giant chunks of rock that crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.

“The megaregolith,” Nemoto murmured. “In the later stages of its formation this little world must have been just as bombarded as our own Luna. Under the surface geology, the craters and cracks, this is what you get. Pulverization, shattered rock, mile upon mile of it. We are already far beyond the reach of any human mining, Emma. We are truly sinking deep into the carcass of this world.”

Mane regarded her, curious, judgmental. “You are analytical. You like to find names for what you see.”

“It helps me cope,” Nemoto said tightly.

The material beyond the walls turned smooth and grey. This must be bedrock, Emma thought, buried beyond even the probing and pulverizing of the great primordial impactors. Unlike Earth, on this small world there had been no tectonic churning, no cycling of rocks from surface to interior; these rock layers had probably lain here undisturbed since the formation of the Red Moon.

Already they must be miles deep.

Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.

She had no real sense of how long she had been falling — it might have been seconds, or minutes — perhaps time flowed as deceptively here as space, as gravity. But she was reluctant to glance at a watch, or even look up to the receding disc of daylight above. She was not like Nemoto, determinedly labelling everything; rather she felt superstitious, as if she might break the spell that held her in the air if she questioned these miracles too hard.

They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock beyond the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull grey-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.

“The mantle,” Nemoto whispered. “Basalt. Neither solid nor liquid, a state that you don’t find on the surface of a planet, rock so soft it pulls like taffy.”

Soon the rock brightened to a cherry-pink, rushing upwards past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Gazing at that shining pink-hot rock just yards away, Emma felt heat, but that was surely an illusion.

The baby Nutcracker stirred, eyes closed, wiping her broad nose on Emma’s chest.

Falling, falling. Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. She wondered what their purpose was; neither Nemoto nor Mane offered an opinion.

For the first time she felt a lurch, like an elevator slowing. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque material that plugged the tunnel.

She asked, “Where are we?”

Mane said, “Thousands of miles deep. Some two-thirds of the way to the centre of the Moon.”

They slowed, drifting to a crawl maybe a yard above the platform. Emma landed on her feet, still clutching the infant — an easy landing, even if it had reminded her of her involuntary sky-dive.

Now she glanced at the watch Nemoto had loaned her. The fall had taken twenty minutes.

The smooth surface was neither hot nor cold, a subdued white, stretching seamlessly from one side of the shaft to the other.

Emma put down the infant Nutcracker. With a happy grunt the infant urinated, a thin stream that pooled on the gleaming floor.

In this place of shining geometric perfection, all the hominids looked misshapen, out of place: Julia with her heavy-browed skull, the Daemon with her looming gorilla body, her fast, jerky motions and her eerily swivelling ears, and Nemoto and Emma, the proud ambassadors of Homo sapiens, huddled close together in their dusty, much-patched coveralls. We are barely evolved, Emma thought — even Mane — unformed compared to the chill, effortless perfection of this place.

“…Noise,” Julia said. She turned her great head, peering around. “Noise. Lights.”

Nemoto scowled, peering around, up into the tunnel that receded into infinity over their heads. “I cannot hear anything.”

“There is much information here,” Mane said gently. She had closed her eyes. “You must — let it in.”

“I don’t know how,” Nemoto said miserably.

Emma glanced down at the infant Nutcracker. She was crawling on legs and knuckles and peering into the floor, as if it were the surface of a pond. Emma, stiffly, got to her knees beside the child. She stared at the floor, looked where the infant looked.

There was a flash of blue light, an instant of searing pain.

The floor had turned to glass. With the Nutcracker, she was kneeling on nothingness. She gasped, pressed her hands against the hard surface. No, not glass: there was no reflection, nothing but the warm feel of the floor under her hands and knees.

And below her, a huge chamber loomed.

She felt Nemoto’s hand on her shoulder, gripping tight, as if for comfort.

Emma said, “Can you see it?”

“Yes, I see it.”

Emma glimpsed a far wall. It was covered with lights, like stars. But these stars marked out a regular pattern of equilateral triangles. Artificial, then. She looked from side to side, trying to make out the curve of that remote wall. But it was too far away for her to make out its shape, too far beyond her puny sense of scale.

“It’s a hole,” she said. “A chamber at the heart of the Moon.”

“It is whatever it seems to be.”

“The chamber looks flattened. Like a pancake.”

“No,” Nemoto murmured. “It is probably spherical. You have the eyes of a plains ape, Emma Stoney. Evolved for distances of a few hundred miles, no more. Even the sky looks like a flat lid to you. Humans aren’t evolved to comprehend spaces like this — a cave thousands of miles across, a cave big enough to store a world.”

“Those lights are regular. Like fake stars on a movie set.”

“Perhaps they are the mouths of tunnels, like this one.”

“Leading to more holes on the surface?”

“Or leading somewhere else.” Nemoto’s voice was quavering. “I don’t know, Emma. I understand none of this.”

But you understand more than me, Emma thought. Which is, perhaps, why you are more frightened.

There was motion in the heart of the chamber. Blueness. Vast wheels turning. A churning, regular, like a huge machine.

The Nutcracker child gurgled, her eyes shining. She seemed enchanted by the turning wheels, as if the whole display, surely a thousand miles across, was no more than a nursery mobile.

“Blue rings,” Nemoto breathed.

Emma squinted, wishing her eyes would dark-adapt faster. “Like the Wheel, the portal I fell through to come here.”

Nemoto said, “This technology has a unifying, if unimaginative, aesthetic.”

“It is the world engine,” Mane said simply.

Emma saw the turning wheels reflected in Mane’s broad, glistening eyes. “What is a world engine?”

“Can you not see? Look deeper.”

“…Ah,” Nemoto said.

At the heart of the turning rings, there was a world.

It was like Earth, but it was not Earth. Turning slowly in the light of an off stage sun, it was wrapped in a blanket of thick, ragged cloud. Emma glimpsed land that was riven by bright-glowing cracks and the pinpricks of volcanoes. Plumes of black smoke and dust streaked the air, and lightning cracked between fat purple clouds.

“Not a trace of ocean,” Nemoto murmured. “Too hot and dry for that.”

“Do you think it is Earth? — or any of the Earths?”

“If it is, it is a young Earth, an Earth still pouring out the heat of its formation…”

“The sky,” Mane said, her voice quavering, “is full of rock.”

Emma glanced up.

…And for an instant she saw what the Daemon saw: a different point of view, as if she were standing on that burnt, barren land, on bare rock so hot it glowed, close to a river of some sticky, coagulating lava. She looked up through rents in fat, scudding clouds — into a sky that was covered by a lid of rock, an inverted landscape of mountains and valleys and craters.

She gasped, and the vision faded.

Emma saw again the hot young world, and another beside it now, a Moon-like world, evidently cooler than Earth, but large, surely larger than Mars, say. The two planets sat side by side, like an orange and an apple in a still-life.

But they were approaching each other.

“I think we are watching the Big Whack,” Nemoto murmured. “The immense collision that devastated young Earth, but created the Earth-Moon system…”

The planets touched, almost gently, like kissing. But where they touched a ring of fire formed, shattering the surface of both worlds, a spreading splash of destruction into which the smaller body seemed to implode, like a fruit being drained of its flesh.

“The collision took about ten minutes,” Nemoto said softly. “The approach speed was tens of thousands of miles per hour. But a collision between such large bodies, even at such speeds, would look like slow motion.”

A vast fount of material, glowing liquid rock, gushed into space from the impact. Emma glimpsed the impacting planetesimal’s grey curve, a last fragment of geometric purity, lost in the storm of fire. A great circular wave of fire spread out around the Earth from the impact point.

A ring of glowing light began to coalesce in Earth orbit. As it cooled it solidified into a swarm of miniature bodies. And then spiral arms formed in the glowing moonlet cloud. It was a remarkable, beautiful sight.

“This is how the Moon was born,” Nemoto said. “The largest of those moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and under the influence of tidal forces rapidly receded from Earth. Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge rock tides, savage rains as the ocean vapour fell back from space. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more.”

“You know a lot about this stuff, Nemoto.”

Nemoto turned, her face underlit by the glow of Earth’s violent formation. “A few months ago a new Moon appeared in Earth’s sky. I wanted to know how the old one had got there. I thought it might be relevant.”

Emma glanced at Mane. The Daemon stood with her knuckles resting lightly on invisibility. Her eyes were closed, her face blank. Julia’s eyes were closed too.

“What do they see?” she whispered to Nemoto. “What do they hear?”

“Perhaps more than this show-and-tell diorama. Manekato said this place, this tunnel in the Moon, was information-rich. Julia is as smart as we are, but different. Manekato is smarter still. I don’t know what they can apprehend, how far they can see beyond what we see.”

“…Hey. What happened to the Earth?”

The glowing, devastated planet had blown apart. Fragments of its image had scattered to corners of the chamber — where the fragments coalesced to new Earths, new Moons, a whole family of them. They hung around the chamber like Christmas-tree ornaments, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.

Other Earths:

Emma saw a fat, solitary world, banded with yellow cloud.

Here was another cloud-striped world, but the clouds swirled around a point on its equator — no, it was a world tipped over so that its axis pointed to its sun, like Uranus (or was it Neptune?).

Here was an Earth like Venus, with a great shroud of thick clouds that glowed yellow-white, nowhere broken.

Here was a world with a fat, cloud-shrouded Moon that seemed to loom very close. This Earth was streaked by volcanic clouds. It lacked ice caps, and its unrecognizable continents were pierced by shining threads that must have been immense rivers. This world must be battered by the great tides of air, water and rock raised by that too-close companion.

Most of the Earths seemed about the size of Earth — of the Earth, Emma’s Earth. But some were smaller — wizened worlds that reminded her of Mars, with huge continents of glowering red rock and brooding weather systems squatting over their poles. And some of the Earths were larger. These monster planets were characteristically wreathed in thick, muddy atmospheres and drowned in oceans, water that stretched from pole to pole, with a few eroded islands protruding above the surface, rooted on some deep-buried crust.

The Moons varied too. There seemed to be a spectrum of possible Moons. The smallest were bare grey rock like Luna, those somewhat larger cratered deserts of crimson rock more or less like Mars. Some were almost Earth-like, showing thick air and ice and the glint of ocean — like the Red Moon itself. There were even Earths with pairs of Moons, Emma saw, or triplets. One ice-bound Earth was surrounded, not by a Moon, but by a glowing ring system like Saturn’s.

Emma looked, without success, for a blue Earth with a single, grey, modest Moon.

“The Big Whack collision shaped Earth and Moon,” Nemoto murmured. “Everything about Earth and Moon — their axial tilt, composition, atmosphere, length of day, even Earth’s orbit around the sun — was determined by the impact. But it might have turned out differently. Small, chance changes in the geometry of the collision would have made a large difference in the outcome. Lots of possible realities, budding off from that key, apocalyptic moment.”

“What are we looking at here? Computer simulations?”

“Or windows into other possible realities. It is a glimpse of the vast graph of probability and possibility, of alternates that cluster around the chaotic impact event.” Nemoto seemed coldly excited. “This is the key, Emma Stoney. The Big Whack was the pivotal event whose subtly different outcomes produced the wide range of Earths we have encountered…”

Emma barely understood what she was saying.

Julia grunted. “Grey Earth,” she said. She was pointing to the tipped-over, Uranus-like Earth.

Emma said, “Where you came from.”

“Home,” Julia said simply.

Nemoto said, “I recognize that one.” She pointed to the fat, solitary Earth, banded by Jupiter-like clouds. “A Moonless Earth, an Earth where the great impact did not happen at all. It may be the Earth they call the Banded Earth, which seems to be the origin of these Daemons.”

Mane laid gentle, patronizing hands on their scalps. “Analyse, analyse. Your minds are very busy. You must watch, listen.”

“Ooh.” It was the Nutcracker infant. She was crawling over the invisible floor, chortling at the light show.

Emma glanced down. The various Earths had vanished, to be replaced by a floor of swirling, curdled light.

It was a galaxy.

“Oh, my,” she muttered. “What now?”

The galaxy was a disc of stars, flatter than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars — a granularity of light and with dark lanes traced between the arms. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light years across.

But the familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.

The five of them stood over this vast image — if it was an image — Daemon and Ham and humans and Nutcracker baby, squat, ungainly, primitive forms.

“So, a galaxy,” said Emma. “Our Galaxy?”

“I think so,” Nemoto said. “It matches radio maps I have seen.” She pointed, tracing patterns. “Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm.”

The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other “arms” were really just scraps, Emma saw — the Galaxy’s spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected — but still, she thought, the sun is in one of those scattered fragments.

The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.

Emma could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disc of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, she saw, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.

“A galactic day,” Nemoto breathed. “It takes two hundred million years to complete a turn.”

Oh, Malenfant, Emma thought again, you should be here to see this. Not me — not me.

Nemoto said, “But whose Galaxy is it?”

“That is a good question,” Mane said. “It is our Galaxy — that is, it belongs to all of us. The Galactic background is common to the reality threads bound by the Earth-Moon impact probability sheaf—”

“Woah,” Emma said. “Nemoto, can you translate?”

Nemoto frowned. “Think of the Galaxy, a second before the Earth-Moon impact. All those stars have nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Whack, and will not be affected by it. The Galaxy will turn, whether the Moon exists or not, whether humans evolve or not…”

Mane said, “Our Galaxy looks the same as yours. And it is unmodified.”

Emma snapped, “What does that mean?”

Nemoto said, “That there is no sign of life, Emma.”

“But we’re looking at a whole damn galaxy. From this perspective the sun is a dot of light. The place could be swarming with creatures like humans, and you wouldn’t see it.”

Nemoto shook her head. “The Fermi Paradox. In our universe, and Mane’s, there has been time for a thousand empires to sweep over the face of the Galaxy. Some of the signs of their passing ought to be very visible.”

“Like what?”

“Like they might tamper with the evolution of the stars. Or they might mine the black hole at the Galaxy’s core for its energy. Or they might wrap up the Galactic disc in a shell to trap all its radiant energy. Emma, there are many possibilities. It is very likely that we would see something even when we peer at a Galaxy from without like this.”

“But we don’t.”

“But we don’t. Humanity seems to be alone in our universe, Emma;

Earth is the only place where mind arose.” Nemoto confronted Mane. “And your universe is empty too. As was Hugh McCann’s. Perhaps that is true in all the universes in this reality sheaf.”

Emma murmured, “The Fermi Paradox.”

Nemoto seemed surprised she knew the name.

“Something is happening to the Galaxy,” Mane said.

They clustered close to watch.

The Galaxy was spinning fast now. All over the disc the stars were flaring, dying. Some of them, turning to red embers, began to drift away from the main body of the disc.

Emma picked up the Nutcracker infant and clutched her to her chest. “It is shrivelling,” she said.

“We are seeing vast swathes of time,” Nemoto said sombrely. “This is the future, Emma.”

“The future? How is that possible?”

Suddenly the stars died. All of them went out, it seemed, all at once.

The Galaxy seemed to implode, becoming much dimmer.

At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash of light. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch, surrounded by a blood-coloured river, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles. That great central complex was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the centre.

Further out still, the core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be set in a ragged disc, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disc, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater or lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points studded at regular intervals around the disc. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points towards the bloated central mass.

Emma said, “What happened to all the stars?”

“They died,” Nemoto said bluntly. “They grew old and died, and there wasn’t enough material left to make any more. And then, this.” Nemoto pointed. “The wreck of the Galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into black holes — those blisters you see in the disc. That central mass is the giant black hole at the core.”

“When is this?”

Nemoto hesitated, thinking, and when she spoke again, she sounded awed. “Umm, perhaps a hundred thousand billion years into the future — compared to the universe’s present age five thousand times older.”

The numbers seemed monstrous to Emma. “So this is the end of life.”

“Oh, no,” Mane replied. She pointed to the clusters of brighter light around the rim of the galactic corpse. “These seem to be normal stars: small, uniform, but still glowing in the visible spectrum.”

“How is that possible?”

“Those stars can’t be natural,” Nemoto said. She turned to Emma, her eyes shining. “You see? Somebody must be gathering the remnant interstellar gases, forming artificial birthing clouds… Somebody is farming the Galaxy, even so far in the future. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Wonderful? The wreck of the Galaxy?”

“Not that,” Nemoto said. “The existence of life. They still need stars and planets, and warmth and light. But their worlds must be huddled close to these small, old stars — probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark… I think this is, umm, a biography,” Nemoto said. “This whole vast show. The story of a race. They are trying to tell us what became of them.”

“A very human impulse,” said Mane.

Emma shrugged. “But why should they care what we think?”

Nemoto said, “Perhaps they were our descendants…”

Mane said nothing, her eyes wide as she peered at the crimson image, and Emma wondered what strange news from the future was pouring into her head.

And now the Galaxy image whirled again, evolving, changing, dimming. Emma hugged the baby hominid and closed her eyes.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.

It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.

Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone, and for ever after.

Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence across billions upon billions of years.

Everywhere they found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.

Nowhere did they find mind — save what they brought with them or created — no other against which human advancement could be tested.

They were forever alone.

With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age were like, minds of time’s far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.

Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.

The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.

There was despair and loneliness.

There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle…

The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.

But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.

And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.

Burning the last of the universe’s resources, the final down-streamers — lonely, dogged, all but insane — reached to the deepest past…

Emma Stoney:

Nemoto was muttering, perhaps to Emma or Manekato, or perhaps to herself, as she impatiently swept lianas and thorn tangles out other path. “Evolution has turned out to be a lot more complicated than we ever imagined, of course. Well, everything is more complicated now, in this manifold of realities. Even though Darwin’s basic intuition was surely right…” And so on.

Carrying the sleeping Nutcracker infant, Emma walked through the forest. Ahead she could see the broad back of Manekato.

Emma let Nemoto talk.

“…Even before this Red Moon showed up in our skies we had developed major elaborations to the basic Darwinian model. Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ is no simple tree, it turns out, no simple hierarchy of ancestral species. It is a tangle—”

“Like this damn jungle,” Emma said, trying to turn the monologue into a conversation. “Lianas and vines cutting across everywhere. If it was just the trees it would be easy.”

“A criss-cross transfer of genetic information, this way and that. And now we have this Red Moon wandering between alternate Earths, the Wheels returning to different Africas over and over, scooping up species here and depositing them there, making an altogether untidy mess of the descent of mankind — and of other species; no wonder this world is full of what Malenfant called ‘living fossils’. Surely without the Red Moon we would never have evolved, we Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo erectus was a successful species, lasting millions of years, covering the Earth. We did not need to become so smart…”

It had been some days since their jaunt into the tunnel in the Moon. Nemoto had spent the time with Manekato and other Daemons, struggling to interpret the experience. For her part, Emma had barely been able to function once those visions of the ageing Galaxy had started to blizzard over her — even though it had been, apparently, just a fraction of the information available in that deep chamber, for those minds capable of reading it.

But she remembered the last glimpse of all.

…It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.

But even now there was something rather than nothing.

The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth…

That ultimate, dismal vision was slow to dispel, like three-in-the-morning fears of her own death. She knew she didn’t have the mental toughness to confront all this, special effects or not. Unlike Nemoto, perhaps.

Or perhaps not. To Nemoto, the whole thing seemed to have been more like a traumatic shock than an imparting of information. She had come out of the experience needing human company, in her reticent way, and needing to talk. But when she talked it was about Charles Darwin and the Red Moon, or even Malenfant and the politics of NASA, anything but the central issue of the Old Ones.

Emma concentrated on the leafy smell of the child, the crackle of dead leaves, the prickle of sunlight on her neck, even the itch of the ulcers on her legs. This was reality, of life and breath and senses.

Manekato had stopped, abruptly. Nemoto fell silent. They were in a small scrap of clearing, by the side of the lichen-covered corpse of a huge fallen tree. Manekato lifted herself up on her hind legs, sniffed the air and swivelled her ears, and belched with satisfaction. “Here,” she said. “The Nutcrackers will come.” With a massive thump she sat on the ground, and began exploring the bushes around her for berries.

Emma, gratefully, put down the infant Nutcracker and sat beside her. The leaves were slippery and damp; the morning was not long advanced. She considered giving the infant some more milk, but the child had already discovered Manekato’s fruit, and was clambering up the Daemon’s impassive back.

Nemoto sat beside Emma. Her posture was stiff, her arms wrapped around her chest, her right heel drumming on the ground. Emma laid one hand on Nemoto’s knee. Gradually the drumming stopped.

And, suddenly, Nemoto began to talk.

“They made the manifold.”

“Who did?”

“The Old Ones. They constructed a manifold of universes — an infinite number of universes. They made it all.” Nemoto shook her head. “Even framing the thought, conceiving of such ambition, is overwhelming. But they did it.”

Manekato was watching them, her large eyes thoughtful.

Emma said carefully, “How did they do this, Nemoto?”

“The branching of universes, deep into the hyperpast,” Manekato murmured.

Emma shook her head, irritated. “What does that mean?”

Nemoto said, “Universes are born. They die. We know two ways a universe can be born. The most primitive cosmos can give birth to another through a Big Crunch, the mirror-image of a Big Bang suffered by a collapsing universe at the end of its history. Or else a new universe can be budded from the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Black holes are the key, Emma, you see. A universe which cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. But a universe which is complex enough to make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters, baby universes connected to the mother by spacetime umbilicals through the singularities.”

“And so when the Old Ones tinkered with the machinery—”

“We don’t know how they did it. But they changed the rules,” Nemoto said.

Emma said hesitantly, “So they found a way to create a lot more universes.”

Manekato said, “We believe the Old Ones created, not just a multiplicity of daughter universes, but an infinite number.” The bulky Daemon studied Emma’s face, seeking understanding.

“Infinity is significant, you see,” Nemoto said, too rapidly. “There is, umm, a qualitative difference between a mere large number, however large, and infinity. In the infinite manifold, in that infinite ensemble, all logically possible universes must exist. And therefore all logically possible destinies must unfold. Everything that is possible will happen, somewhere out there. They created a grand stage, you see, Emma: a stage for endless possibilities of life and mind.”

“Why did they do this?”

“Because they were lonely. The Old Ones were the first sentient species in their universe. They survived their crises of immaturity. And they went on, to walk on the planets, to touch the stars. But everywhere they went — though perhaps they found life — they found no sign of mind, save for themselves.”

“And then the stars went out.”

“And the stars went out. There are ways to survive the darkness, Emma. You can mine energy from the gravity wells of black holes, for instance… But as the universe expanded relentlessly, and the available energy dwindled, the iron logic of entropy held sway. Existence became harsh, straitened, in an energy starved universe that was like a prison. Some of the Old Ones looked back over their lonely destiny, which had turned into nothing but a long, desolating struggle to survive, and — well, some of them rebelled.”

The infant crawled over Manekato’s stolid head and down her chest, clutching great handfuls of hair. Then she curled up in the Daemon’s lap, defecated efficiently, and quickly fell asleep. Emma suppressed a pang of jealousy that it was not her lap.

“So they rebelled. How?”

Nemoto sighed. “It’s all to do with quantum mechanics, Emma.”

“I was afraid it might be.”

Manekato said, “Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future. Handshakes across time. The story of the universe is like a tapestry, stitched together by uncountable trillions of such tiny handshakes. If you create an artificial timelike loop to some point in spacetime within the negative light cone of the present—”

“Woah. In English.”

Manekato looked puzzled.

Nemoto said, “If you were to go back in time and try to change the past, you would damage the universe, erasing a whole series of consequential events. Yes? So the universe starts over, from the first point where the forbidden loop would have begun to exist. As the effects of your change propagate through space and time, the universe knits itself into a new form, transaction by transaction, handshake by handshake. The wounded universe heals itself with a new set of handshakes, working forward in time, until it is complete and self-consistent once more.”

Emma tried to think that through. “What you’re telling me is that changing history is possible.”

“Oh, yes,” said Nemoto. “The Old Ones must have come to believe they had lived through the wrong history. So they reached back, to the deepest past, and made the change — and the manifold was born.”

Emma thought she understood. So this had been the purpose the Old Ones had found. Not a saga of meaningless survival in a dismal future of decay and shadows. The Old Ones had reached back, back in time, back to the deepest past, and put it right, by creating infinite possibilities for life, for mind.

She said carefully, “I always wondered if life had any meaning. Now I know. The purpose of the first intelligence of all was to reshape the universe, in order to create a storm of mind.”

“Yes,” Manekato said. “That is a partial understanding, but — yes.”

“Whew,” Emma said.

Nemoto seemed to be shivering, exhausted. “I feel as if I have been gazing through a pinhole at the sun; I have stared so long that I have burned a hole in my retina. And yet there is still so much more to see.”

“You have done well,” Manekato said gently.

Nemoto snapped, “Do I get another banana?”

“We must all do the best we can.” Manekato’s massive hand absently stroked the Nutcracker; the child purred like a cat.

“But,” Emma said, “the Old Ones must have wiped out their own history in the process. Didn’t they? They created a time paradox. Everybody knows about time paradoxes. If you kill your grandmother, the universe repairs itself so you never existed…”

“Perhaps not,” Manekato murmured. “It seems that conscious minds may, in some form, survive the transition.”

“Do not ask how,” Nemoto said dryly. “Suffice it to say that the Old Ones seem to have been able to look on their handiwork, and see that it was good… mostly.”

“Mostly?”

Nemoto said, “We think that we, unwilling passengers on this Red Moon, are, umm, exploring a corner of the manifold, of that infinite ensemble of universes the Old Ones created. Remember the Big Whack. Remember how we glimpsed many possible outcomes, many possible Earths and Moons, depending on the details of the impact.”

“It is clear,” Manekato said, “that within the manifold there must be a sheaf of universes, closely related, all of them deriving from that primal Earth-shaping event and its different outcomes.”

Nemoto said, “Many Earths. Many realities.”

“And in some of those realities,” Manekato said, “what you call the Fermi Paradox was resolved a different way.”

“You mean, alien intelligences arose.”

“Yes.” Nemoto rubbed her nose and glanced uneasily at the sky. “But in every one of those alien-inhabited realities, humans got wiped out — or never evolved in the first place. Every single time.”

“How come?”

Nemoto shrugged. “Lots of possible ways. Interstellar colonists from ancient cultures overwhelmed Earth before life got beyond the single-cell stage. Humankind was destroyed by a swarm of killer robots. Whatever. The Old Ones seem to have selected a bundle of universes — all of them deriving from the Big Whack — in which there was no life beyond the Earth. And they sent this Moon spinning between those empty realities, from one to the other—”

“So that explains Fermi,” Emma said.

“Yes,” said Nemoto. “We see no aliens because we have been inserted into an empty universe. Or universes. For our safety. To allow us to flourish.”

“But why the Red Moon, why link the realities?”

“To express humanity,” Manekato said simply. “There are many different ways to be a hominid, Em-ma. We conjecture the Old Ones sought to explore those different ways: to promote evolutionary pulses, to preserve differing forms, to make room for different types of human consciousness.”

Emma frowned. “You make us sound like pets. Toys.”

Manekato growled; Emma wondered if that was a laugh. “Perhaps. Or it may be that we have yet to glimpse the true purpose of this wandering world.”

Emma said, “But I still don’t get it. Why would these super-being Old Ones care so much about humanity?”

Nemoto frowned. “You haven’t understood anything, Emma. They were us. They were our descendants, our future. Homo sapiens sapiens, Emma. And their universe spanning story is our own lost future history. We built the manifold. We — our children — are the Old Ones.”

Emma was stunned. Somehow it was harder to take, to accept that these universe making meddlers might have been — not godlike, unimaginable aliens — but the descendants of humans like herself. What hubris, she thought.

Nemoto said now, “That was the purpose, the design of the Red Moon. But now the machinery is failing.”

“It is?”

“The sudden, frequent and irregular jumps. The instabilities, the tides, the volcanism. It shouldn’t be happening that way.”

Emma turned back to Manekato. “Let me get this straight. The Red Moon has been the driver of human evolution. But now it is breaking down. So what happens next?”

“We will be on our own,” said Nemoto. She raised her thin hands, turned them over, spread the fingers. “Our evolutionary destiny, in hominid hands. Does that frighten you?”

“It frightens me,” Manekato said softly.

For a moment they sat silently. Emma was aware of the dampness of the breeze, the harsh breathing of the big Daemon. On impulse she put her hand on Manekato’s arm. Her fur was thick and dense, and her skin hot — hotter than a human’s, perhaps a result of her faster metabolism.

“…Wait,” Manekato said softly, peering into the trees.

Shadows moved there: shadows of bulky, powerful forms. They paused, listening. There were at least three adults, possibly more. Emma could make out the characteristic prow-shaped silhouettes of their skulls.

The Nutcracker infant roused from her sleep. Bleary-eyed, she peered into the trees and yowled softly.

The shadows moved closer, sliding past the trees, at last resolving into recognizable fragments: curling fingers, watchful eyes, the unmistakable morphology of hominids. One of them, perhaps a woman, extended a hand.

The infant clambered off Manekato’s lap and stood facing the Nutcracker-woman, nervous, uncertain.

The Nutcracker-woman took a single step into the clearing, her eyes fixed on the infant. The child whimpered, and took a hesitant step forward.

Nemoto hissed to Emma, “Listen to me. I have a further theory. The Old Ones did not disappear into some theoretical universe-spanning abstraction. They are still here. Wouldn’t they want to be immersed in the world they made, to eat its fruit, to drink its water? Maybe they have become these Nutcrackers, the most content, pacific, unthreatened, mindless of all the hominid species. They shed everything they knew to live the way hominids are supposed to, the way we never learned, or forgot. What do you think?…”

The infant glanced back at Emma, knowing. Then, with a liquid motion, the Nutcracker-woman scooped up the child and melted into green shadows.

Back in the Daemons” yellow-plastic compound, Emma luxuriated in a hot shower, a towelling robe, and a breakfast of citrus fruit.

Luxuriate, yes. Because you know you aren’t going to enjoy this much longer, are you, Emma? And maybe you’ll never live like this again, not ever, not for the rest of your life.

You will miss the coffee, though.

She dressed and emerged from her little chalet. The sky was littered with cloud, the breeze capricious and laden with moisture. Storm coming.

She saw Nemoto arguing with Manekato. Nemoto looked, in fact, as if she still wasn’t getting a great deal of sleep; black smudges made neat hyperbolae around her eyes. By contrast, Manekato was leaning easily on her knuckles, her swivelling ears facing Nemoto, her great black-haired body a calming slab of stillness. And Julia, the Ham girl, was standing close by, listening gravely.

When Emma approached, Mane turned to her, smooth and massive as a swivelling gun-turret. “Good morning, Em-ma.”

“And to you. Nemoto, you look like shit.”

Nemoto glowered at her.

“What’s the hot topic?”

“Future plans.” Nemoto’s foot was characteristically tapping the plastic-feel floor like a trapped animal, about the nearest she got to expressing a true emotion.

“Grey Earth,” Julia said.

“…Oh. The deal we made.”

“The deal you made,” Nemoto said. “Over and over again. You said you would take the Hams back to their home world, if they helped you.”

“I know what I said.”

“Well, now it is payback time.”

Emma sighed. She stepped forward and took Julia’s great hands; her own fingers, even hardened by weeks of rough living, were pale white streaks compared to Julia’s muscular digits. “Julia, I meant what I said. If I could find a way I would get you people home.” She waved towards the latest Earth in the sky, a peculiarly shrunken world with a second Moon orbiting close to it. “But you can see the situation for yourself. Your world is gone. It’s lost. You see—”

Nemoto said, “Emma, you have made enough mistakes already. It would pay you, pay us both, not to patronize this woman.”

Emma said, “I’m sorry.” So I am, she thought. But I made a promise I couldn’t keep, and I knew it when I made it, and now I just have to get out of this situation as gracefully as I can. That’s life. “The point is the Grey Earth isn’t coming back. Not in any predictable way.” She looked up at Mane. “Is it?”

The great Daemon rubbed her face. “We are studying the world engine. It is ancient and faulty.” She grunted. “Like a bad-tempered old hominid, it needs love and attention.”

Emma frowned. “But you think you might get it to work again?”

Mane patted Emma’s head. “Nemoto frequently accuses me of underestimating you. I am guilty. But you are symmetrically guilty of overestimating me. We cannot repair the world engine. We cannot understand its workings. Perhaps in a thousand years of study… For now we can barely see it.”

Nemoto shuddered. “We are all on very low rungs of a very tall ladder.”

But Mane said, “There is no ladder. We are all different. Difference is to be cherished.”

“And that’s what we humans must learn,” Emma said.

“You will not learn it,” Manekato said cheerfully, “for you will not survive long enough.” She sighed, a noise like a steam train in a tunnel. “However, to return to the point, we believe we may be able to direct the wandering of the Red Moon, to a limited extent. Prior to shutting down the world engine altogether.”

“Grey Earth come,” Julia said again, and her face relaxed from its mock-human smile into the gentle, beatific expression Emma had come to associate with happiness.

Emma held her breath. “And Earth,” she said. “My Earth; our Earth. Can you reach that too?…”

“The Daemons can make one directed transition,” said Nemoto gravely. “And they are going to use it to take us to the universe of the Grey Earth.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of you.”

Emma studied Nemoto. “I sense you’re pissed at me,” she said dryly.

Nemoto glowered. “Emma, these are not humans. They don’t lie, the Hams and the Daemons. It’s all part of the rule-set with which they have managed to achieve such longevity as species. A bargain, once struck, is absolutely rigid.”

“But what’s the big deal? Even if the Daemons manage to bring us back to the Grey Earth universe, they can just send the Hams home. As many as want to go. They can just Map them there.”

Nemoto shook her head. “You aren’t thinking right. The deal was with us, not the Daemons. We have to get them home. Whichever way we can.”

“The lander?”

Nemoto just glared. Then she walked away, muttering, scheming, her whole body tense, her gait rigid, like a machine.