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Fire’s legs jog downwind. They jog until his eyes see the people are far away. Then his arms dump the body on the ground. It sprawls. He hears bones snap. Gas escapes from its backside.
Bad meat.
He jogs away, back to the people.
He goes to Sing’s bower. But the bower is empty. People are here, and then they are gone, leaving no memorials, no trace but their children, as transient as lions or deer or worms or clouds. Sing is gone from the world, as if she never existed. Soon he will forget her.
He scatters the branches with his foot.
Emma is watching him.
Sally is here, holding Maxie. Maxie is weeping. Emma says, ‘Fire, I’m sorry. Can you help us? I don’t know what to do …’
Fire grins. He reaches for Maxie.
Maxie cringes. Sally pulls him back.
Emma says, ‘No, Fire. He doesn’t want to play. Fire Maxie ill sick sore.’
Fire frowns. He touches Maxie’s forehead. It is hot and wet. He touches his belly. It is hard.
He thinks of a shrub with broad, coarse-textured leaves. He does not know why he thinks of the shrub. He doesn’t even formulate the question. The knowledge is just there.
He lopes to the forest. His ears listen and his eyes peer into the dark greenery. There are no Nutcracker-folk. There are no Elf-folk.
He sees the shrub. He reaches out and plucks leaves.
His legs take him out of the forest.
Maxie stares at the leaves. Water runs down his face.
Fire pokes a leaf into his small, hot mouth. Maxie’s mouth tries to spit it out. Fire pushes it back. Maxie’s mouth chews the leaf. Fire holds his jaw so the mouth can’t chew.
Maxie swallows the leaf, and wails.
Fire makes him swallow another. And another.
Somebody is shouting. ‘Meat! Meat!’
Fire’s head snaps around. The voice is coming from upwind. Now his nose can smell blood.
Something big has died.
His legs jog that way.
He finds Stone and Blue and Dig and Grass and others. They are squatting in the dirt. They hold axes in their hands.
The meat is an antelope. It is lying on the ground.
Killing birds are tearing at the carcass.
The killing birds tower over the people. They have long gnarled legs, and stubby useless wings, and heads the size of Fire’s thigh. The heads of the birds dig into the belly and joints of the antelope, pushing right inside the carcass.
The people wait, watching the birds.
A pack of hyenas circles, warily watching the birds and the people. And there are Elf-folk. They sit at the edge of the forest, picking at their black-brown hair. The bands of scavengers are set out in a broad circle around the carcass, well away from the birds, held in place by a geometry of hunger and wariness. The Running-folk are scavengers among the others – not the weakest, not the strongest, not especially feared. The people wait their turn with the others, waiting for the birds to finish, knowing their place.
One by one the birds strut away. Their heads jerk this way and that, dipping. Their eyes are yellow. They are looking for more antelopes to kill.
The hyenas are first to get to the corpse. Their faces lunge into its ripped-open rib cage. The hyenas start to fight with one another, forgetting the killing birds, forgetting the people.
Blue and Stone and Fire hurl bits of rock.
The dogs back away. Their muzzles are bloody red, their eyes glaring. Their mouths want the meat. But their bodies fear the stones and sticks of the people.
The people fall on the carcass.
Stone’s axe, held between thumb and forefinger, slices through the antelope’s thick hide. The axe rolls to bring more of its edge into play. It slices meat neatly from the bones. The birds have beaks to rip meat. The hyenas and cats have teeth. The people have axes. The people work without speaking, not truly cooperating.
Fire’s hands cram bits of meat into his mouth, hot and raw. Fire thinks of the other people by the fire, the women and their infants and children with no name. He tells his mouth it must not eat all the meat. He holds great slabs of it in his hands, slippery and bloody.
Fire’s ears hear a hollering. His head snaps around.
More Elf-folk are boiling out of the forest fringe, hooting, hungry. They have rocks and stones and axes in their hands. They run on their legs like people. But their legs are shorter than a person’s, and they have big strong arms, longer and stronger than a person’s.
Stone growls. His mouth bloody, he raises his axe at the Elf-folk.
The Elf-folk show their teeth. They hoot and screech.
A bat swoops from the sky. It is a hunter. Its wings are broad and flap slowly. The people scatter, fearing talons and beak.
The bat falls on the Elf-folk. It caws. It rises into the air. It has its talons dug into the scalp of an Elf-woman. She wriggles and cries, dugs swinging.
One Elf-man throws a rock at the bat. It misses. The others just watch. She is gone, in an instant, her life over.
Suddenly Stone charges forward at the Elf-folk. Blue follows. Dig follows.
The Elf-folk scamper away, into the safety of their forest.
Stone hoots his triumph.
The people return to the antelope. The hyenas have approached again, and bats have flown down, digging into the entrails of the antelope. The people hurl stones and shout. The people’s hands take meat and bones from the carcass, until their hands are full. The people’s mouths dig into the carcass and bite away final chunks of meat.
Other scavengers move in. Soon there will be nothing left of the antelope but scattered, crushed, chewed bones, over which insects will crawl.
The children fall on the meat. Their mouths snap and their hands punch and scratch as they fight over the meat.
Fire approaches Dig. He holds out meat. Her hands grab it. She throws it away. A child with no name falls on the discarded scrap.
Dig laughs. She turns her back on Fire.
Emma comes to Fire. She smiles, seeing the meat. His belly wants to keep all the meat, but he makes his hands give her some.
Emma takes it to the fire. There are rocks in the fire. Emma beats the meat flat and puts it on the hot rocks. She peels it off the rocks and carries it to Sally and Maxie.
Fire squats on the ground. His hands tear meat. His teeth crush it.
Emma stands before him. She is smiling. She pulls his hand.
His legs follow her.
She stops by a patch of dung. The dung is pale and watery and smelly. There is a leaf in the dung. There is a worm on the leaf, dead.
Emma says, ‘I think you did it, Doctor Fire. You got the damn worm out of him.’
Fire does not remember the leaf, or Maxie. Emma’s mouth is still moving, but he does not think about the noises she makes.
Reid Malenfant:
A flock of pigeons flew at the big Marine helicopter. Such was their closing speed that the birds seemed to explode out of the air all around them, a panicky blur of grey and white. The pilot lifted his craft immediately, and the pigeons fell away.
Nemoto’s hands were over her mouth.
Malenfant grinned. ‘Just to make it interesting.’
‘I think the times are interesting enough, Malenfant.’
‘Yeah.’
Now the chopper rolled, and the capital rotated beneath him. They flew over the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington monuments, set out like toys on a green carpet, and to the right the dome of the Capitol gleamed bright in the sunlight, showing no sign of the hasty restoration it had required after last month’s food riots.
The helicopter levelled and began a gentle descent towards the White House, directly ahead. The old sandstone building looked as cute, or as twee, as it had always done, depending on your taste. But now it was surrounded by a deep layer of defences, even including a moat around the perimeter fence. And, save for a helipad, the lawn had been turned to a patchwork of green and brown, littered with small out-buildings. In a very visible (though hardly practical) piece of example-setting, the lawn had been given over to the raising of vegetables and chickens and even a small herd of pigs, and every morning the President could be seen by webcast feeding his flock. It was not a convincing portrait, Malenfant always thought, even if the Prez was a farmer’s son. But for human beings, it seemed, symbolism was everything.
The helicopter came down to a flawless landing on the pad. Nemoto climbed out gracefully, carrying a rolled-up softscreen. Malenfant followed more stiffly, feeling awkward to have been riding in a military machine in his civilian suit – but he was a civilian today, at the insistence of the NASA brass.
An aide greeted them and escorted them into the building itself. They had to pass through a metal-and-plastics detector in the doorway, and then spent a tough five minutes in a small security office just inside the building being frisked, photographed, scanned and probed by heavily-armed Marine sergeants. Nemoto even had to give up her softscreen after downloading its contents into a military-issue copy.
Nemoto seemed to withdraw deeper into herself as they endured all this.
‘Take it easy,’ Malenfant told her. ‘The goons are just doing their job. It’s the times we live in.’
‘It is not that,’ Nemoto murmured. ‘It is this place, this moment. From orbit, I watched the oceans batter Japan. I felt I was in the palm of a monster immeasurably more powerful than me – a monster who would decide the fate of myself, and my family, and all I possessed and cared for, with an arbitrary carelessness I could do nothing to influence. And so, I feel, it is now. But I must endure.’
‘You really want to go on this trip, don’t you?’
She glanced at him. ‘As you do.’
‘You always deflect my questions about yourself, Nemoto. You are a koan. An enigma.’
She smiled at that fragment of Japanese.
At last they were done, and the aide, accompanied by a couple of the armed Marines, took them through corridors to the Oval Office, on the West Wing’s first floor, which the Vice-President was using today. Her official residence, a rambling brick house on the corner of 34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was no longer considered sufficiently secure.
Nemoto said as they walked, ‘You say you know Vice-President Della.’
‘Used to know her. She’s had an interest in space all her career. As a senator she served on a couple of NASA oversight committees.’ Now the President had asked Della to take responsibility for Malenfant’s project, in her capacity as chair of the Space Council.
Nemoto said, ‘If she is a friend of yours –’
‘Hardly that. More an old sparring partner. Mutual, grudging respect. I haven’t seen her for a long time – certainly not since she got here.’
‘Do you think she will support us?’
‘She’s from Iowa. She’s a canny politician. She is – practical. But she has always seen a little further than most of the Beltway crowd. She believes space efforts have value. But she’s a utilitarian. I’ve heard her argue for weather satellites, Earth resources programmes. She even supports blue-sky stuff about asteroid mining and power stations in orbit. Moving the heavy industries off the planet might provide a future for this dirty old world … But robots can do all that. I don’t think she sees much purpose in Man in Space. She never supported the Station, for instance.’
‘Then we must hope that she sees some utility in our venture to the Red Moon.’
He grimaced. ‘Either that or we manage to twist her arm hard enough.’
As they entered the Oval Office, Vice-President Maura Della was working through documents on softscreens embedded in a walnut desk. The desk was positioned at one of the big office’s narrow ends – the place really was oval-shaped, Malenfant observed, gawking like a tourist.
Della glanced up, stood, and came out from behind the desk to greet them. Dressed in a trim trouser-suit, she was dark, slim, in her sixties. She shook them both briskly by the hand, waved them to green wing-back chairs before the desk, then settled back into her rocking-chair.
The only other people in the room were an aide and an armed Marine at the door. Malenfant had been expecting Joe Bridges, and other NASA brass.
Without preamble Della said, ‘You’re trying to get me over a barrel, aren’t you, Malenfant?’
Malenfant was taken aback. This was, after all, the Vice-President. But he could see from the glint in Della’s eye that if he wanted to win the play this was a time for straight talking. ‘Not you personally. But – yes, ma’am, that’s the plan.’
Della tapped her desk. Malenfant glimpsed his own image scrolling before her, accompanied by text and video clips and the subdued insect murmur of audio.
Maura Della always had been known for a straightforward political style. To Malenfant she looked a little lost in the cool grandeur of the Oval Office, even after three years in the job, out of place in the crispness of the powder-blue carpet and cream paintwork, and the many alcoves crammed with books, certificates and ornaments, all precisely placed, like funerary offerings. This was clearly not a room you could feel you lived in.
There was a stone sitting on the polished desk surface, a sharp-edged fragment about the size of Malenfant’s thumb, the colour of lava pebbles. No, not stone, Malenfant realized, studying the fragment. Bone. A bit of skull, maybe.
Della said, ‘Your campaign has lasted two weeks already, in every media outlet known to man. Reid Malenfant the stricken hero, tilting at the new Moon to save his dead wife.’ She eyed him brutally.
‘It has the virtue of being true, ma’am,’ Malenfant said frankly. ‘And she may not be dead. That’s the whole point.’
Nemoto leaned forward. ‘If I may –’
Della nodded.
‘The response of the American public to Malenfant’s campaign has been striking. The latest polls show –’
‘Overwhelming support for what you’re trying to do,’ Della murmured. She tapped her desk and shut down the images. ‘Of course they do. But let me tell you something about polls. The President’s own approval ratings have been bouncing along the floor since the day the tides began to hit. You know why? Because people need somebody to blame.
‘The appearance of a whole damn Moon in the sky is beyond comprehension. If as a consequence your house is smashed, your crops destroyed, family members injured or dead, you can’t blame the Moon, you can’t rage at the Tide. In another age you might have blamed God. But now you blame whoever you think ought to be helping you climb out of your hole, which generally means all branches of the federal government, and specifically this office.’ She shook her head. ‘So polls don’t drive me one way or the other. Because whatever I decide, your stunt isn’t going to help me.’
