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‘Malenfant?’
‘No,’ he said reluctantly. ‘They smuggled shrinks’ remarks into their final report to NASA. They should have presented them at the Commission … Hey, can you see something? Look, right on the horizon.’
She peered into the north. The horizon was a band of dusty, mist-laden air, grey between brown earth and blue sky, precisely curving. Was something there? – a spark of powder-blue, a hint of a circle, like a lens flare?
But the day was bright, dazzling now the sun was climbing higher, and her eyes filled with water.
She sat back in her seat, and her various harnesses and buckles rustled and clinked around her, loud in the tiny cockpit. ‘What did it say, Malenfant? The Russian psych report.’
He growled, ‘“Peculiarities”.’
‘What kind of peculiarities?’
‘In my relations with the rest of the crew. They gave an example about how I was in the middle of a task and some Russkie came over nagging about how we were scheduled to do something else. Well, I nodded politely, and carried right on with what I was doing, until I was finished …’
Now she started to understand. The Russians, who rightly believed they were still far ahead of the West in the psychology of the peculiarly cramped conditions of space travel, placed great collectivist emphasis on teamwork and sacrifice. They would not warm to a driven, somewhat obsessive loner-perfectionist like Malenfant.
‘I should have socialized with the assholes,’ he said now. ‘I should have gone to the cosmonauts’ coldwater apartments, and drunk their crummy vodka, and pressed the flesh with the guys on the gate.’
She laughed, gently. ‘Malenfant, you don’t even socialize at NASA.’
‘My nature got me where I am now.’
Yeah, washed out, she thought brutally. ‘But maybe it’s not the nature you need for long-duration space missions. I guess not everybody forgives you the way I do.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
She ignored the question. ‘So the psych report is the real reason they grounded you. The shoulder was just an excuse.’
‘The Russians must have known the psych report would never stand up to scrutiny. If Joe Bridges had got his thumb out of his ass –’
‘Oh, Malenfant, don’t you see? They were giving you cover. If you’re going to be grounded, do you want it to be because of your shoulder, or your personality? Think about it. They were trying to help you. They all were.’
‘That kind of help I can live without.’ Again he wrenched the plane through a savage snap roll.
Her helmet clattered against the Plexiglas, as varying acceleration tore at her stomach, and the brown African plain strobed around her. She was cocooned in the physical expression of his anger.
She glared at the back of Malenfant’s helmeted head, which cast dazzling highlights from the African sun, with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. Well, that was Malenfant for you.
And because she was staring so hard at Malenfant she missed seeing the artefact until it was almost upon them.
Malenfant peeled away suddenly. Once again she glimpsed pale blue-white sky, dusty brown ground, shafts of glowering sunlight – and an arc, a fragment of a perfect circle, like a rainbow, but glowing a clear cerulean blue. Then it fell out of her vision.
‘Malenfant – what was that?’
‘Damned if I know.’ His voice was flat. Suddenly he was concentrating on his flying. The slaved controls in front of her jerked this way and that; she felt remote buffeting, some kind of turbulence perhaps, smoothed out by Malenfant’s skilful handling.
He pulled the jet through another smooth curve, and sky and ground swam around her once more.
And he said, ‘Holy shit.’
There was a circle in the sky.
It was facing them full on. It was a wheel of powder-blue, like a hoop of the finest ribbon. It looked the size of a dinner plate held before her face – but of course it must be much larger and more remote than that.
Emma saw this beyond Malenfant’s head and shoulders and the slim white fuselage. The jet’s needle nose pointed straight at the centre of the ring, so that the wheel framed her field of view with perfect symmetry, like some unlikely optical flare. Its very perfection and symmetry made it seem unreal. She had no idea of its scale – it would seem so close it must be hanging off the plane’s nose, then something in her head would flip the other way and it would appear vast and distant, like a rainbow. She found it physically difficult to study it, as if it was an optical illusion, deliberately baffling; her eyes kept sliding away from it, evading it.
It’s beyond my comprehension, she thought. Literally. Evolution has not prepared me for giant wheels suspended in the air.
Fire:
Water runs down his face.
He is lying on his back. The sky is flat and grey.
Rain falls. His ears hear it tapping on the ground. His eyes see the drops fall towards his face. They are fat and slow. Some of them fall on his face.
Water runs in his eyes. It stings. He sits up.
Fire is sitting on the ground. He is wet. His eyes hurt. His burned hands hurt.
He stands up. His legs walk him towards the trees.
People walk, run, stumble over muddy ground, adults and children. They move in silence, in isolation. Nobody is calling, nobody helping. They are cold and they hurt. They have each forgotten the other people, all save the mothers with their babies with no names. The mothers’ arms carry the infants, sheltering them.
Fire reaches the trees.
The wind changes. His nose smells ash.
He remembers the fire. His legs run back.
The fire is out, drowned by the rain. The back of Fire’s head hurts in anticipation of Stone’s punishing axe.
Sing is calling. She is lying on a bower. The bower is falling apart, the leaves damp and shrivelled.
Loud is walking back to Sing.
Sing screams. Fire spins and crouches.
There is a Mouth. It is bright blue. The Mouth is skimming over the shining grass. The Mouth is approaching Fire, gaping wide.
Cats have mouths. A cat’s mouth will take a person’s head. This Mouth would take a whole person, standing straight. It is coming towards him, this Mouth with no body, this huge Mouth, widening.
It makes no noise. The rain hisses on the grass.
Fire screams. Fire’s legs carry him off into the forest.
Still the Mouth comes. It towers into the sky.
Sing is at its base. Her arms push at the bower. Her legs can’t stand up. She screams again.
Loud runs. His hands are throwing dirt at the Mouth.
The Mouth scoops him up.
There is a flash of light. Fire can see nothing but blue.
Loud screams.
Emma Stoney:
‘Malenfant – you see it too, right?’
He laughed. ‘It ain’t no scratch in your contacts, Emma.’ He seemed to be testing the controls. Experimentally he veered away to the right. The ride got a lot more rocky.
The blue circle stayed right where it was, hanging in the African sky. No optical effect, then. This was real, as real as this plane. But it hung in the air without any apparent means of support. And still she had no real sense of its scale.
But now she saw a contrail scraped across the air before the wheel, a tiny silver moth flying across its diameter. The moth was a plane, as least as big as their own.
‘Damn thing must be a half-mile across,’ Malenfant growled. ‘A half-mile across, and hovering in the air eight miles high –’
‘How appropriate.’
‘My God, it’s the real thing,’ Malenfant said. ‘The UFO-nauts must be going crazy.’ She heard the grin in his voice. ‘Everything will be different now.’
Now she made out more planes drawn up from the dusty ground below, passing before the artefact – if artefact it was. One of them looked like a fragile private jet, a Lear maybe, surely climbing well beyond its approved altitude.
Malenfant continued his turn. The artefact slid out of sight.
Dusty land wheeled beneath her. She was high above a gorge, cut deeply into a baked plain, perhaps thirty or forty miles long. Perhaps it was Olduvai itself, the miraculous gorge that cut through million-year strata of human history, the gorge that had yielded the relics of one ancient hominid form after another to the archaeologists’ patient inspection.
How strange, she thought. Why here? If this wheel in the sky really is what it appears to be, an extraordinary alien artefact, if this is a first contact of a bewilderingly unexpected type (and what else could it be?) then why here, high above the cradle of mankind itself? Why should this gouge into humanity’s deepest past collide with this most unimaginable of futures?
The plane dropped abruptly. For a heartbeat Emma was weightless. Then the plane slammed into the bottom of an air pocket and she was shoved hard into her seat.
‘Sorry,’ Malenfant muttered. ‘The turbulence is getting worse.’ The slaved controls worked before her. The plane soared and banked.
She suddenly wished she was on the ground, perhaps holed up in her well-equipped hotel room back in Joburg. The world must be going crazy over this. She would have every softscreen in the room turned to the coverage, filling her ears and eyes with a babble of instant commentary. Here, in this bubble of Plexiglas, she felt cut off.
But this is the real experience, she thought. I am here by the sheerest chance, at the moment when this vision appeared in the sky like the Virgin Mary over Lourdes, and yet I pine for my online womb. Well, I’m a woman of my time.
The artefact settled into place before Emma once more, vast, enigmatic, slowly approaching. Planes criss-crossed before it, puny. Emma spotted that small private jet, lumbering through the air so much more slowly than the military vehicles around it. She wondered if anybody had tried to make contact with the wheel yet – or if it had been fired on.
‘Holy shit,’ said Malenfant. ‘Do you see that?’
‘What?’
He lifted his arm and pointed; she could see the gesture through the Plexiglas blisters that encased them. ‘There. Near the bottom of the ring.’
It looked like a very fine dark rain falling out of the ring, like a hail of iron filings.
Malenfant lifted small binoculars. ‘People,’ he said bluntly. He lowered the binoculars. ‘Tall, skinny, naked people.’
She couldn’t integrate the information. People – thrust naked into the air eight miles high, to fall, presumably, all the way to the welcoming gorge of bones… Why? Where were they from?
‘Can they be saved?’
Malenfant just laughed.
The plane buffeted again. As they approached the wheel the turbulence was growing stronger. It seemed to Emma that the air at the centre of the ring was significantly disturbed; she made out concentric streaks of mist and dust there, almost like a sideways-on storm, neatly framed by the wheel’s electric blue frame.
And now that lumbering business-type jet reached dead centre of the artefact. It twisted once, twice, then crumpled like a paper cup in an angry fist. Glittering fragments began to hail into the ring.
It was over in seconds. There hadn’t even been an explosion.
Fire:
Wind gusts. Lightning flashes.
There is no Loud.
People come spewing out of the Mouth. They fall to the grass.
The rain falls steadily on the grass, hissing.
Emma Stoney:
‘Like it got sucked in,’ Malenfant said with grim fascination. ‘Maybe the wheel is a teleporter, drawing out our atmosphere.’ The plane juddered again, and she could see him wrestling with the stick. ‘Whatever it is it’s making a mess of the air flow.’
She could see the other planes, presumably military jets, pulling back to more cautious orbits. But the T-38 kept right on, battering its way into increasingly disturbed air. Malenfant’s shoulders jerked as they hauled at the recalcitrant controls.
‘Malenfant, what are you doing?’
‘We can handle this. We can get a lot closer yet. Those African guys are half-trained sissies –’
The plane hit another pocket. They fell fifty or a hundred feet before slamming into a floor that felt hard as concrete.
Emma could taste blood in her mouth. ‘Malenfant!’
‘Did you bring your Kodak? Come on, Emma. What’s life for? This is history.’
No, she thought. This is your wash-out. That’s why you are risking your life, and mine, so recklessly.
The artefact loomed larger in the roiling sky ahead of her, so large now that she couldn’t see its full circle for the body of the plane. Those iron-filing people continued to rain from the base of the disc, some of them twisting as they fell.
‘Makes you think,’ Malenfant said. ‘I spend my life struggling to get into space. And on the very day I get washed out of the programme, the very same day, space comes to me. Wherever the hell this thing comes from, whatever mother ship orbiting fucking Neptune, you can bet there’s going to be a clamour to get out there. Those NASA assholes must be jumping up and down; it’s their best day since Neil and Buzz. At last we’ve got someplace to go – but whoever they send it isn’t going to be me. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? If Mohammed can’t get to the mountain …’
She closed her hand on the stick before her, letting it pull her passively to and fro. What if she grabbed the stick hard, yanked it to left or right? Could she take over the plane? And then what? ‘Malenfant, I’m scared.’
