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Emma clung to sleep as long as possible. When she could sleep no longer, she rolled on her back, stiff and cold. There was sky above her, an ugly lid of cloud.
Still here, she thought. Shit. And there was an unwelcome ache in her lower bowels.
Nothing for it.
She went behind a couple of trees close enough that she could still see her parachute canopy tent and stripped to her underwear. She took a dump, her Swiss Army knife dangling absurdly around her neck. The problem after that was finding a suitable wipe; the dried leaves she tried to use just crumbled in her hands.
Where am I? Answer came there none.
Maybe some kind of adrenaline rush had gotten her through yesterday. Today was going to be even worse, she thought. This morning she felt cold, stiff, dirty, lost, miserable and with a fear that had sunk deep into her gut.
She got dressed and kicked leaves over the, umm, deposit she’d left. We have got to build a latrine today.
Sally and Maxie, waking slowly, showed no desire to leave the forest. But Emma decided she ought to go say hello to the neighbours.
She stepped out of the forest.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was grey and solid and the grassy plain before her was bleak, uninviting. If she had not known otherwise she would have guessed it was uninhabited; the heapings of branches and stones seemed scarcely more than random.
And yet hominids people sat and walked, jabbered and argued, from a distance just as human as she was, every one of them as naked as a newborn. And they were talking English. The utter strangeness of that struck her anew.
I don’t want to be here, facing this bizarreness, she thought. I want to be at home, with the net, and coffee and newspapers, and clean clothes and a warm bathroom.
But it might not be long before she was begging at these hominids’ metaphorical table. She had no doubt that those tall, powerful qua-people had a much better ability to survive in this wilderness than she did; she sensed that might become very important, unless they were rescued out of here in the next few days. So she forced herself forward.
Some of the women were tending to nursing infants. Older children were wrestling clumsily and wordlessly, save for an occasional hoot or screech. The children seemed to her to have the least humanity; without the tall, striking, very human bodies of the adults, their low brows and flat skulls seemed more prominent, and they reminded her more of chimps.
Listening to the hominids yesterday, she had picked up a few of their functional names. The boy who had given her the caterpillar was called Fire. Right now Fire was tending the old woman on the ground, who was called Sing. He seemed to be feeding her, or giving her water. Evidence of kinship bonds, of care for the old and weak? It somewhat surprised Emma. But it was also reassuring, she thought, considering her own situation.
The largest man Stone, the dominant type who had groped Sally was sitting on the ground close to the smoking remains of the fire. He was picking through a pile of rocks. He was the leader, she figured the leader of the men anyhow.
She plucked up her courage and sat opposite him.
He glowered at her. His brown eyes, under a heavy lid of brow, were pits of hostility and suspicion. He actually raised his right fist at her, a mighty paw bearing a blunt rock.
But she sat still, her hands empty. Perhaps he remembered her. Or perhaps he was figuring out all over again that she was no threat. Anyhow, his hand lowered.
Seeming to forget her, he started working at the rocks again. He picked out a big lump of what looked like black glass; it must be obsidian, a volcanic glass. He turned it this way and that, inspecting it. His movements were very rapid, his gaze flickering over the rock surface.
His muscles were hard, his skin taut. His hair was tightly curled, but it was peppered with grey. His face would have passed in any city street so long as he wore a hat, anyhow, to conceal that shrivelled skull. But an Aladdin Sane zigzag crimson scar cut right across his face.
She thought he looked around fifty. Hard to tell in the circumstances.
He picked out another rock from his pile, a round pebble. He began to hammer at the obsidian, hard and confident. Shards flew everywhere, and for the first time Emma noticed that he had a patch of foliage over his lap, protecting his genitals from flying rock chips. He worked fast, confident, his eyes flickering – faster than a human would have, she thought, faster and more instinctively. It was less like watching the patient practising of a human craft than a fast-reaction sport, like tennis or soccer, where the body takes over.
He may not have a wide repertoire of skills, she thought. Maybe this is the one type of tool he can make. But there was nothing limited in what she saw, nothing incomplete; it was as efficient a process as eating or breathing. The contrast with the way the people had struggled to build their heaped-up tepees couldn’t have been more striking. How was it possible to be so smart about one thing, yet so dumb about another?
She felt her ideas adjust, her preconceptions dissolve. These people are not like me, she thought.
After a time, Stone abruptly stood up. He dropped his hammerstone, his lap cover, even the tool he had been making, and wandered away.
Emma stayed put.
Stone hunted around the grass, digging into the red dust beneath, picking out bits of rock or perhaps bone, discarding them where he found them. At last he seemed to have found what he wanted.
But then he was distracted by an argument between two of the younger men. He dropped the bone fragment and waded into what was fast becoming a wrestling match. Pretty soon all three of them were battling hard.
Others were gathering around, hooting and hollering. At last Stone floored one of the young men and drove off the other.
Breathing hard, sweating heavily enough to give him a pungent stink, he came back to the pile of rocks, where Emma waited patiently. When he got there he looked around for his bit of bone – but of course it had never made it this far. He bellowed, apparently frustrated, and got up again and resumed his search.
A human craftsman would have got all his tools together before he started, Emma supposed.
Stone came back with a fresh bit of bone. It was red, and bits of meat clung to it; Emma shuddered as she speculated where it might have come from. He used it to chip at the edge of his obsidian axe.
When he was done he dropped the improvised bone tool at his feet without another thought. He turned the axe over and over in his hands; it was a disc of shaped rock four inches across, just about right to fit into his powerful hand.
Then he hefted it and began to scrape at his neck with it.
My God, she thought. He’s shaving.
He saw her looking. ‘Stone Stone!’ he yelled. He turned away deliberately, suddenly as self-conscious as a teenager.
She got up and moved away.
Shadow:
The people were moving again, working deeper into the forest, seeking food. She spotted Termite and Tumble, walking hand-in-hand, and she followed them.
There had been a shower here. The vegetation was soaking, and droplets sprayed her as she pushed past bushes and low branches. But the droplets sparkled in the sun, and the wet leaves were a bright vivid green. The people’s black hair was shot with flashes of rust brown, smelling rich and damp.
Termite came to an ants’ nest, a mound punctured by small holes. She reached out and broke a long thin branch from a nearby bush. She removed the side branches and nibbled off the bark, leaving a long, straight stick half as long as her arm. She pushed one hand into the ants’ nest and scooped out dirt.
Soon the ants began to swarm out of the nest. Termite plunged her stick into the nest, waited a few heartbeats, and then withdrew it. It was covered with squirming ants. She slid the tool through her free hand so that she was left with a palm filled with crushed and wriggling ants, which she scooped into her mouth, crunching quickly. There was a strong acid smell. Then she returned her stick to the mound and waited for a fresh helping.
Shadow and the other women and children joined in the feast with sticks of their own. Occasionally they had to slap at their feet and thighs as the ants swarmed to repel the invaders; these were big, strong ants that could bite savagely. But Shadow’s stick was too spindly and it bent and finally snapped as she shoved it into the loose earth.
More people crowded around. The ants’ nest became a mass of jostling and poked elbows and slaps and screeching.
Shadow quickly tired of the commotion. She straightened up, brushed dirt from her legs, and slipped further into the forest.
She came to a tall palm. She thought she could see clusters of red fruit, high above the ground. Briskly she began to climb, her strong arms and gripping legs propelling her fast above the ground.
She found a cluster of fruit. She picked one, then another, stripping off the rich outer flesh, and letting the kernels fall with a whisper to the distant ground. This was one of the tallest trees in the forest. The sky seemed close here, the ground a distant place.
There were eyes, watching her.
She yelped and recoiled, gripping the palm’s trunk with her arms.
She saw a face. But it was not like her own. The head was about the size of Shadow’s, but there was a thick bony crest over the top of the skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were fixed. The body, covered in pale brown fur, was squat, the belly distended. Two pink nipples protruded from the fur, and an infant clung there, peering back at Shadow with huge pale eyes. The infant might have been a twin of Tumble, but already that bony skull had started to evolve its strange, characteristic superstructure.
Mother and child were Nutcracker-folk.
Emma Stoney:
All the tepee shelters had fallen down.
One younger man was struggling, alone, to hoist branches upright. It was Fire, the teenager-type who had gifted her the caterpillar. But nobody was helping him, so his branches had nothing to lean on, and they just fell over. Still he kept trying. At one point he even ran around his construction, trying to beat gravity, hoisting more branches before the others fell. Of course he failed. It was as if he knew what he wanted to build, but couldn’t figure out how to achieve it.
Cautiously, Emma stepped forward.
Fire was startled. He stumbled backwards. His branches fell with a crash.
She held her hands open and smiled. ‘Fire,’ she said. She pointed to herself. ‘Emma. Remember?’
At length he jabbered, ‘Fire Fire. Fire Emma.’
‘Emma, yes. Remember? You gave me the caterpillar.’ She pointed to her mouth.
His eyes widened. He ran away at startling speed, and came back with a scrap of what looked like potato. With impatient speed, he shoved it into her mouth. His fingers were strong, almost forcing her jaws open.
She chewed, feeling bruised, tasting the dirt on his fingers. The root was heavy and starchy. ‘Thank you.’
He grinned and capered, like a huge child. She noticed that in his excitement he had sprouted an erection. She took care not to look at it; some complications could wait for another day.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said. She walked around his pile of branches. She picked up a light-looking sapling and hoisted it over her shoulder until it was upright. Though her strength still seemed boosted, she struggled to hold the sapling in place.
Mercifully Fire quickly got the idea. ‘Fire, Emma, Fire!’ He ran around picking up more branches some of them thick trunks, which he lifted as if they were made of polystyrene and rammed them into place against hers.
The three or four branches propped each other up, a bit precariously, and the beginning of their makeshift tepee was in place. But, hooting with enthusiasm, Fire hurled more branches onto the tall conical frame. Soon the whole thing collapsed.
Fire shouted his disappointment. He did a kind of dance, kicking viciously at the branches. Then, with a kind of forgetful doggedness, he began to pick up the scattered branches once more.
Emma said, ‘I’ve a better idea.’ Raising her hands to make him wait, she jogged over to the muddy remnant of her parachute. She cut free a length of cord taking care not to show her Swiss Army knife to any of the hominids and hurried back.
Fire had, predictably, wandered away.
Emma squatted down on the ground to wait, as Fire dug more tubers from the ground, and spent some time throwing bits of stone, with startling accuracy, at a tree trunk, and went running after a girl ‘Dig! Dig, Fire, Dig!’ Then he happened to glance Emma’s way, appeared to remember her and their project, and came running across as fast as a ioo-metre record holder. Straightaway he began to pick up the branches again.
She motioned him to wait. ‘No. Look.’ She took one of the branches, and pulled another alongside, and then another. Soon he got the idea, and he helped her pile the branches close together. Now she wrapped her cord around them, maybe three feet below their upper extent, and tied a knot.
… Emma Stoney, frontier woman. What the hell are you doing? What if the knot slips or the cord breaks or your sad tepee just falls apart?
Well, then, she thought, I’ll just think of something else, and try again. And again and again.
All the time the bigger issues were there in her mind, sliding under the surface like a shark: the questions of where she was, how she had got here, how long it was going to be before she got home again. How she felt about Malenfant, who had stranded her here. How come these ape-folk existed at all, and how come they spoke English … But this was real, the red dust under her feet, the odd musk stink of the ape-boy before her, the hunger already gnawing at her belly. Right now there was nobody to take care of her, nobody but herself, and her first priority was survival. She sensed she had to find a way of working with these people. So far, in all this strange place, the only creature who had showed her any helpfulness or kindness at all was this lanky boy, and she was determined to build on that.
Find strength, Emma. You can fall apart later, when you’re safely back in your apartment, and all this seems like a bad dream.
She laboured to tie her knot tight and secure. When she was done, she backed away. ‘Up, up! Lift it up, Fire!’
With terrifying effortlessness he hoisted the three branches vertical. When he let go, they immediately crashed to the ground, of course, but she encouraged him to try again. This time she closed her hands around his, making him hold the branches in place, while she ran around pulling out the bases of the branches, making a pyramidal frame.
At last they finished up with a firmly secured frame, tied off at the top and it was a frame that held as Fire, with exhilaration and unnerving vigour, hurled more branches over it.
Now all I have to do, Emma thought, is make sure he remembers this favour.
‘… Emma! Emma!’
Emma turned. Sally came running out of the forest, with Maxie bundled in her arms.
Creatures pursued her.
They looked like humans – no, not human, like chimps, with long, powerful arms, short legs, covered in fine black-brown hair – but they walked upright, running, almost emulating a human gait. There were four, five, six of them.
Emma thought, dismayed, What now? What new horror is this?
One of the creatures, despite the relative clumsiness of his gait, was fast closing on Sally and the child.
Stone stepped forward. The old male stood stock still, reached back, and whipped his arm forward. His axe, spinning, flew like a Frisbee.
The axe sliced into the ape-thing’s face. He, it, was knocked flat, dead immediately. The hominids hooted their triumph and ran to the fallen creature.
The other ape-things ran back to the forest’s edge. They screeched their protest, but they weren’t about to come out of the forest to launch a counter-attack.
Sally kept running until she had reached Emma. They clutched each other.
‘Now we know why our friends keep out of the forest,’ Emma said.
Fire was standing beside them. ‘Elf-folk,’ Fire said, pointing at the ape-things. ‘Elf-folk.’
‘That’s what I saw yesterday,’ Sally murmured. ‘My God, Emma, they could have come on us while we slept. We’re lucky to be alive –’
‘They took the ice cream,’ Maxie said solemnly.
Sally patted his head. ‘It’s true. They took all your food, Emma. I’m sorry. And the damn canopy.’
Maxie said, ‘What are we going to eat now?’
It appeared the hominids had their own answer to this. From the spot where the ape-like ‘Elf’ had fallen came the unmistakable sounds of butchering.
Shadow:
For long moments Nutcracker-woman and Shadow gazed at each other, fearful, curious.
Then the Nutcracker-woman took a red fruit, stripped off the flesh, and popped the kernel into her mouth. She pressed up on her lower jaw with her free hand. Caught between her powerful molars, the shell neatly cracked in two. She extracted the nut’s flesh and pushed it into her infant’s greedy mouth.
Shadow’s fear evaporated. She took a fruit herself and stripped it of flesh. But when she tried to copy the Nutcracker-woman’s smooth destruction of the nut, she only hurt her jaw.
