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Fire has his name again. It is Dig who tends his burned hands, smiling.
‘Blue light!’ he shouts, suddenly.
Dig looks at him. Her eyes narrow. She tends his hands.
Fire’s hand reaches out. It cups one conical breast. The breast is hot in his hand.
The fire is hot in his hand. A captured bat is hot in his hand.
His member does not rise. Dig tends his hands.
Blue and Stone return. Their hands carry rabbits. The rabbits are skinned. There is blood on the mouths of the men. The rabbits fall to the ground.
The children with no names fall on the rabbits. They jabber, snapping at each other. The children’s small faces are bloody. The adults push the children aside, and growl and jostle over the rabbits. All the people work at the meat, stealing it from each other.
Grass and Cold throw some pieces of meat on the fire. The meat sizzles. Their hands pick out the meat. Their mouths chew the burned meat, swallowing some. Fire sees that their mouths want to swallow all the meat. But their fingers take meat from their mouths. They put the meat in the mouths of their babies with no names.
Sing groans. She is on the ground near the branches. Her nose can smell the food. Her hands can’t reach it.
Fire is eating a twisted-off rabbit leg. His hands pluck meat off it, and put the meat in Sing’s mouth.
Her head turns. Her mouth chews. Her eyes are closed. She chokes. Her mouth spits out meat.
Fire’s hands pop the chewed meat in his mouth.
Sing is shivering.
Fire thinks of a bower.
There are branches here, on the ground. He has forgotten that they were used to transport Sing. He keeps thinking of the bower.
He makes his hands lay the branches on the ground. He thinks of twigs and grass and leaves. He gathers them, thinking of the bower. He makes his hands pile everything up on the branches.
He makes his arms pick up Sing.
It is sunny. He has no name. Sing is carrying Fire. Sing is large, Fire small.
It is dark. His name is Fire. Fire is carrying Sing. Fire is large, Sing shrunken.
He lays her on the crude bower. She sinks into the soft leaves and grass. The branches roll away. The grass scatters. Sing falls into the dirt, with a gasp.
Fire hoots and howls, kicking at the branches.
One of the branches is lodged against a rock. It did not roll away.
Fire makes his hands gather the branches again. He puts the branches down alongside the rock he found. His hands pile up more grass. At last he lowers Sing on the bower. The branches are trapped by the rocks. They do not roll away.
Sing sighs.
Every day he makes a bower for Sing. Every day he forgets how he did it before. Every day he has to invent a way to fix it, from scratch. Some days he doesn’t manage it at all, and Sing has to sleep on the dirt, where insects bite her.
She sings. Her voice is soft and broken. Fire listens. He has forgotten the rocks and the branches.
She stops singing. She sleeps.
People are sleeping. People are huddled around the children. People are coupling. People are making water. People are making dung. People are chattering, for comfort, through rivalry.
Beyond the glow of the flames, the sky is dark. The land is gone. Something howls. It is far away.
Dig is sleeping near the fire.
Fire’s legs walk to her. His hand touches her shoulder. She rolls on her back. She opens her eyes and looks at him.
His member is stiff.
‘Hoo! Fire!’
It is Loud. He is on the ground. Fire’s eyes had not seen him. Fire’s eyes had seen only Dig.
Loud’s hands throw red dirt into Fire’s eyes. Fire blinks and sneezes and hoots.
Loud has crawled to Dig. His hands paw at her. His tongue is out, his member hard. Her hands are pushing him away. She is laughing.
Fire’s hands grab Loud’s shoulders. Loud falls off Dig and lands on his back. He pulls Fire to the ground and they roll. Fire feels hot gritty dirt cling to his back.
Stone roars. His scar shines in the fire light. His filth-grimed foot separates them with a shove. His axe clouts Loud on the head. Loud howls and scuttles away.
Stone’s axe swings for Fire. Fire ducks and scrambles back.
Stone grunts. He moves to Dig. Stone’s big hand reaches down to her, and flips her onto her belly.
Dig gasps. She pulls her legs beneath her. Fire hears the scrape of her skin on red dust.
Stone kneels. His hands push her legs apart. She cries out. He reaches forward. His hands cup her breasts. His member enters her. His hands clutch her shoulders, and his flabby hips thrust and thrust.
He gives a strangled cry. His back straightens. He shudders.
He pulls back and stands up. His member is bruised purple and moist. He turns. He kicks Fire in the thigh. Fire yells and doubles over.
Dig is on the ground, her hands tucked between her legs. She is curled up.
Loud is gone.
Fire’s legs walk.
Fire stops.
Dig is far. The fire is far. He is in a mouth of darkness. Eyes watch him.
He makes his legs walk him back to the fire.
Sing is lying on a bower. He has forgotten he made the bower. Her eyes watch him. Her arm lifts.
He kneels. His face rests on her chest. The bower rustles. Sing gasps.
Her hand runs over his belly. Her hand finds his member. It is painfully swollen. Her hand closes around it. He shudders.
She sings.
He sleeps.
Emma Stoney:
If this really was the close of Malenfant’s career at NASA, Emma thought, it could be a good thing.
She wasn’t the type of foolish ground-bound spouse who palpitated every moment Malenfant was on orbit (although she hadn’t been able to calm her stomach during those searing moments of launch, as the Shuttle passed through one of NASA’s ‘non-survivable windows’ after another …). No, the sacrifices she had made went broader and deeper than that.
It had started as far back as the moment when, as a new arrival at the Naval Academy, he had broken his hometown girl’s seventeen-year-old heart with a letter saying that he thought they should break off their relationship. Now he was at Annapolis, he had written, he wanted to devote himself ‘like a monk’ to his studies. Well, that had lasted all of six months before he had started to pursue her again, with letters and calls, trying to win her back.
That letter had, in retrospect, set the course of their lives for three decades. But maybe that course was now coming to an end.
‘You know,’ she said dreamily, ‘maybe if it is ending, it’s fitting it should be like this. In the air, I mean. Do you remember that flight to San Francisco? You had just got accepted by the Astronaut Office …’
It had been Malenfant’s third time of trying to join the astronaut corps, after he had applied to the recruitment rounds of 1988 – when he wasn’t even granted an interview – and 1990. Finally in 1992, aged thirty-two, he had gotten an interview at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and had gone back to his base in San Diego.
At last the Astronaut Office had called him. But he was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement, to be made the next day. Naturally he had kept the secret strictly, even from Emma.
So the next day they had boarded a plane for San Francisco, where they were going to spend a long weekend with friends of Emma’s (Malenfant tended not to have the type of friends you could spend weekends with, not if you wanted to come home with your liver). Malenfant had given the pilot the NASA press release. Just after they got to cruise altitude, the pilot called Emma’s name: Would Emma Malenfant please identify herself? Would you please stand up?
It had taken Emma a moment to realize she was being called, for she used her maiden name, Stoney, in business and her personal life, everywhere except the closed world of the Navy. Baffled – and wary of Malenfant’s expressionless stillness – she had unbuckled her seat belt and stood up.
I hope you like barbecue, Ms Malenfant, said the pilot, because I have a press release here that says you are going to Houston, Texas. Commander Reid Malenfant, US Navy, has been selected to be a part of the 1992 NASA astronaut class.
‘… And everybody on the plane started whooping, just as if you were John Glenn himself, and the stewards brought us those dumb little plastic bottles of champagne. Do you remember, Malenfant?’ She laughed. ‘But you couldn’t drink because you were doubled over with air sickness.’
Malenfant grunted sourly. ‘It starts in the air, so it finishes in the air. Is that what you think?’
‘It does have a certain symmetry … Maybe this isn’t the end, but the beginning of something new. Right? We could be at the start of a great new adventure together. Who knows?’
She could see how the set of his shoulders was unchanged.
She sighed. Give it time, Emma. ‘All right, Malenfant. What UFOs?’
‘Tanzania. Some kind of sighting over the Olduvai Gorge, according to Bill.’
‘Olduvai? Where the human fossils come from?’
‘I don’t know. What does that matter? It sounds more authentic than most. The local air forces are scrambling spotter planes: Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique.’
None of those names was too reassuring to Emma. ‘Malenfant, are you sure we should get caught up in that? We don’t want some trigger-happy Tanzanian flyboy to mistake us for Eetie.’
He barked laughter. ‘Come on, Emma. You’re showing your prejudice. We trained half those guys and sold the planes to the other half. And they’re only spotters. Bill is informing them we’re coming. There’s no threat. And, who knows? Maybe we’ll get to be involved in first contact.’
Under his veneer of cynicism she sensed an edge of genuine excitement. From out of the blue, here was another adventure for Reid Malenfant, hero astronaut. Another adventure that had nothing to do with her.
I was wrong, she thought. I’m never going to get him back, no matter what happens at NASA. But then I never had him anyhow.
Losing sympathy for him, she snapped, ‘You really told Joe Bridges to shove his job?’
‘Sweetest moment of my life.’
‘Oh, Malenfant. Don’t you know how it works yet? If you took your punishment, if you sweated out your time, you’d be back in rotation for the next assignment, or the one after that.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s the way of the world. I’ve had to go through it, in my own way. Everybody has. Everybody who wants to get on in the real world, with real people, anyhow. Everybody but you, the great hero.’
‘You sound like you’re writing my appraisal,’ he said, a little ruefully. ‘Anyhow, ass-kissing wouldn’t have helped. It was the Russians, that fucking Grand Medical Commission of theirs.’
‘The Russians scrubbed you?’
‘It was when I was in Star City.’
Star City, the Russian military base thirty miles outside Moscow that served as the cosmonauts’ training centre.
‘Malenfant, you got back from there a month ago. You never thought to tell me about it?’
Through two layers of Plexiglas, she could see him shrug. ‘I was appealing the decision. I didn’t see the point of troubling you. Hell, Emma, I thought I would win. I knew I would. I thought they couldn’t scrub me.’
Far off, to left and right, she saw contrails and glittering darts. Fighter planes, perhaps, converging on the strange anomaly sighted over Olduvai, whatever it was, if it existed at all.
She felt an odd frisson of anticipation.
‘It took them a morning,’ Malenfant said. ‘They brung in a dozen Russian doctors to probe at my every damn orifice. A bunch of snowy-haired old farts with pubic hair growing out of their noses, with no experience of space medicine. They ought to have no jurisdiction over the way we run our programme.’
‘It’s their programme too,’ she said quietly. ‘What did they say?’
‘One of them pulled me up over my shoulder.’ Malenfant suffered from a nerve palsy behind his right shoulder, the relic of an ancient football injury, a condition NASA had long ago signed off on. ‘Well, our guys gave them shit. But the fossil stood his ground.
‘Then they took me into the Commission itself. I was sat on a stage with the guy who was going to be my judge, in front of an auditorium full of white-haired Russian doctors, and two NASA guys who were as mad as hell, like me. But the old asshole from the surgical group got up and said my shoulder was a “disqualifying condition” that needed further tests, and our guys said I wasn’t going to do that, and so the Russians said I was disqualified anyhow …’
Emma frowned, trying to puzzle it out. It sounded like a pretext to her; Malenfant had after all flown twice to the Station before, and the Russians must have known all about his shoulder, like everything else about him. Why should it suddenly become a mission-threatening disability now?
Malenfant put the little jet through a gut-wrenching turn so tight she thought she heard the hull creak. ‘I knew we’d appeal,’ he said. ‘Those two NASA surgeons were livid, I’m telling you. They said they’d pass it all the way up the line, I should just get on with my training as if I was planning to fly, they’d clear me through. Hell, I believed them. But it didn’t happen. When it got to Bridges –’
‘Was your shoulder the only thing the Russians objected to?’
He hesitated.
