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She spat out the shell and, cautiously, passed it to the Nutcracker-woman.
Just as hesitantly, the Nutcracker-woman took it. Her hand was just like Shadow’s, the back coated with fine black hairs, the palm pink.
Shadow had grown used to meeting Nutcracker-folk.
The Elf-folk favoured the fringes of the forest, for they could exploit the open land beyond, where meat could often be scavenged. The Nutcracker-folk preferred the dense green heart of the forest, where the vegetation grew richer. But as the forest shrank, the Elf-folk were forced to push deeper into the remaining pockets of green.
Sometimes there was conflict. The Nutcracker-folk were powerful and limber, more powerful than most Elf-folk, and they made formidable opponents.
All things considered, it was better to try to get along.
But now, as Shadow and the Nutcracker-woman amiably swapped fruit back and forth, there was a screech and crash at the base of the tree. The Nutcracker-woman peered down nervously, her child clinging to her shoulders.
It was the hunting party or rather, what was left of them. She saw the two powerful brothers, Big Boss and Little Boss, and there was her own brother, Claw, trailing behind. They were empty-handed, and there was no blood around their mouths, or on their pelts. Big Boss seemed enraged. His hair bristled, making him a pillar of spiky blackness. As he stalked along he lashed out at the trees, at his brother and especially at Claw, who was forced to flee, whimpering. But he needed to stay with the men, for he was in more danger from the predators of the forest than from their fists.
And there was no sign of Hurler, her uncle.
It was Hurler who had been killed by Stone’s obsidian axe.
Images of him rattled through Shadow’s memory. By tomorrow, though she would be aware of a loss, she would barely remember Hurler had existed.
The men abruptly stopped below Shadow’s tree. They peered upwards, silent, watchful.
The Nutcracker-woman had clamped her big hand over her baby’s mouth, and it struggled helplessly. But now a nut-shell slipped from the baby’s paw, falling with a gentle clatter to the ground.
Big Boss grinned, his hair bristling. Little Boss and Claw spread out around the base of the tree.
Shadow slithered down the tree trunk. The men ignored her.
The three of them clambered into nearby trees. Soon there was an Elf-man in each of the trees to which the Nutcracker-woman could flee.
She began to call out, a piercing cry of fear. ‘Oo-hah!’ Nutcracker-people were fierce and strong, and would come rushing to the aid of their own.
But if any Nutcrackers were near, they did not respond.
Suddenly Big Boss made a leap, from his tree to the Nutcracker-woman’s. The Nutcracker-woman screeched. She leapt to Claw’s tree, her big belly wobbling.
But Claw, small as he was, was ready for her. As the Nutcracker-woman scrambled to get hold of a branch, Claw grabbed her infant from her.
He bit into its skull, and it died immediately.
The Nutcracker-woman screamed, and hurled herself towards Claw. But already, with his kill over his shoulder, Claw was scurrying down the tree trunk to the ground. Blood smeared around his mouth, he held up his limp prize, crying out with triumph.
But Big Boss and Little Boss converged on him. With a casual punch, Little Boss knocked Claw to the dirt, and Big Boss grabbed the infant. The two of them huddled over the carcass. With firm strong motions, they began to dismember it, twisting off the infant’s limbs one by one as easily as plucking leaves from a branch. When Claw came close, trying to get a share of the meat, he was met by a punch or a kick. He retreated, screeching his anger.
In the tree above, the Nutcracker-woman could only watch, howling: ‘Hah! Oo-hah!’
Claw came up to the men time and again, pulling at their shoulders and beating their backs.
A powerful blow from Big Boss now sent Claw sprawling. Clutching his chest, he groaned and lay flat.
Shadow approached her brother. She held out a hand, fingers splayed, to groom him, calm him.
He turned on her.
There was blood on his mouth, and his hair bristled around him, and his eyes were crusted with tears. He punched her temple.
She found herself on the ground. The colours of the world swam, yellow leaching into the green.
Now Claw stood over her, breathing hard. He had an erection.
She reached for him.
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard, so that her fingers were bent back. She cried out as bones bent and snapped.
Then he walked around her, legs splayed, erection sticking out of his fur. He grabbed at the trees and waved branches at her.
She understood the signs he was making. She knew what he wanted, in his frustration, in his rage. But he was her brother. The thought of him lying on her filled her head with blackness, her throat with bile.
She turned over and tried to stand. But when she put her injured hand on the ground, pain flared, and she fell forward.
He stamped hard on her back. She was driven flat into the undergrowth. She felt his hands on her ankles. He dragged her back towards him and pulled her legs apart. He was stronger than she was; sprawled face-down on the ground, she could not fight him.
His shadow fell over her, looming.
In another bloody heartbeat he was inside her. He screamed, in pain or pleasure. Shadow called for her mother, but she was far away.
Emma Stoney:
The days here lasted about thirty hours. Emma timed them with her wristwatch and a stick stuck in the ground to track shadows.
Thirty hours. No possibility of a mistake.
Not Earth, she thought reluctantly. But that thought was unreal. Absurd.
She knocked over her stick and took her watch off her wrist and stowed it in a pocket, so she wouldn’t have to look at it.
After the Elf attack, the three of them stayed on the open plain.
But every morning it was strange, disorienting, to wake among the hominids. Whichever of them woke first would take one look at the strangers and hoot and holler in alarm. Soon they would all be awake, all of them yelling and brandishing their fists, and Emma and the others would have to cower away, waiting for the storm to pass. At last, somebody would recognize them Fire, or Stone, or one of the younger women. ‘Em-ma. Sal-ly.’ After that the others would gradually calm down.
But Emma would have sworn that some of them never regained their memories of the day before, that every day they woke up not recognizing Emma and the others. It seemed they came awake with the barest memory of the detail of their lives before, as if every day was like a new birth.
Emma wasn’t sure if she pitied them for that, or envied them.
The days developed a certain routine. Emma and Sally worked to keep themselves clean, and Maxie; they would rinse out their underwear they had only one set each, the clothes they had arrived in and scrub the worst of the dirt off the rest of their clothes and gear.
The women had precisely two tampons between them. When they were gone, they laboured to improvise towels from bits of cloth.
As evening drew in Emma and little Maxie would help build the hominids’ haphazard fire by throwing twigs and branches onto it. Paying dues, Emma thought; making sure we earn our place in the warmth.
In the dark the hominids gathered close to the fire, she supposed for safety and warmth. But they didn’t form into anything resembling a circle, as humans would. There were little knots of them, men testing their strength against each other, women with their children, pairs coupling with noisy (and embarrassing) enthusiasm. But there was no story-telling, no singing, no dancing. They even ate separately, each hunched over her morsel, as if fearful of having it stolen.
The group did not have the physical grammar of a group bound by language, Emma thought. This was not a true hearth. Their bits of words, their proto-language, were surely a lot closer to the screeches of chimps, or even the songs of birds, than the vocalizations of humans. Though the Runners huddled together for security, they lived their lives as individuals, pursuing solitary projects, each locked forever inside her own head.
They aren’t human, Emma realized afresh, however much they might look like it. And this wasn’t a community. It was more like a herd.
As night fell, Emma and the others would creep into the shelter she had made with Fire. A few of the hominids followed them, mothers with nursing infants. Maxie cried and complained at the pungent stink of their never-washed flesh. But Emma and Sally calmed him, and themselves, assuring each other that they were surely safer here than in the open, or in the forest.
One child, looking no more than five or six years old in human terms, fell ill. Her eyelids, cheeks, nose and lips were encrusted with sores. The child was skinny, and was evidently in distress; her gestures were faint, her movements listless.
‘I think it’s yaws,’ Sally said. ‘I’ve seen it upriver, in Africa … It’s related to syphilis. But it’s transmitted by flies, who carry it from wound to wound. That’s where the first signs show: little bumps in the corners of your eyes, or your nostrils, where the flies go to suck your moisture.’
‘What’s the cure?’
‘A shot of Extencilline. Safeguards you for life. But we don’t have any.’
Emma rummaged through her medical pocket. ‘What about Floxapen?’
‘Maybe. But you’re crazy to use it up on them. We’re going to need it ourselves. We’ll get ulcers. We need it.’
Emma struggled to read the directions on the little bottle. She found a scrap of meat, embedded a pill in it, and fed it to the child. It was hard to hold her hand near that swollen, grotesque face.
The next morning, she did the same. She kept it up until the Floxapen was gone. It seemed to her the child was getting gradually better.
Maybe it helped the Runners accept them. She wasn’t sure if they understood what she was doing, if they saw the cause-and-effect relationship between her treatment and any change in the girl’s condition.
Sally didn’t try to stop her. But Emma could see she was silently resentful at what she regarded as a waste of their scarce resources. It didn’t help relations between them.
Five or six days after their arrival, she woke to find shards of deep blue sky showing through the loosely stacked branches above her. She threw off her parachute-silk blanket and crawled out of the shelter’s rough opening.
It was the first time the sky had been clear since she had got here. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face. The sky was a rich beautiful blue, and it was scattered with clouds, and it was deep. She saw low cumulus clouds, fat and grey and slow, and higher cirrus-like clouds that scudded across the sky, and wispy traces even above that: layers of cloud that gave her an impression of tallness that she had rarely, if ever, seen on Earth.
She tried to orient herself. If the sun was that way, at this hour, she was looking east. And when she looked to the west oh, my Lord there was a Moon: more than half-full, a big fat beautiful bright Moon.
… Too big, too fat, too bright. It had to be at least twice the diameter of the pale grey Moon she was used to. And it was no mottled grey disc, like Luna. This was a vibrant dish of colour. Much of it was covered with a shining steel-blue surface that glimmered in the light of the sun. Elsewhere she saw patches of brown and green. At either extreme of the disc at the poles, perhaps she saw strips of blinding white. And over the whole thing clouds swirled, flat white streaks and stripes and patches, gathered in one place into a deep whirlwind knot.
Ocean: that was what that shining steel surface must be, just as the brown-green was land. That wasn’t poor dead Luna: it was a planet, with seas and ice caps and continents and air.
And she quickly made out a characteristic continent shape on that brightly lit quadrant, almost bare of cloud, baked brown, familiar from schoolbook studies and CNN reports and Malenfant’s schoolkid slideshows. It was Africa, quite unmistakably, the place she had come from.
That was no ‘Moon’. That was Earth.
And if she was looking at Earth, up in the sky, her relentlessly logical mind told her, then she couldn’t be on Earth any more. ‘Stands to reason,’ she murmured.
It made sense, of course: the different air, the lightness of walking, these alien not-quite humans running around everywhere. She had known it the whole time, on some level, but she hadn’t wanted to face it.
But, if not on Earth, where was she? How had she got here? How was she ever going to get home again? All the time she had been here, she realized, she had got not one whit closer to answering these most basic questions.
Now a shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. A new cloud was driving overhead, flat, thick, dark.
Sally was standing beside her. ‘They talk English.’
‘What?’
‘The flat-heads. They talk English. Just a handful of words, but it is English. Remember that. They surely didn’t evolve it for themselves.’
‘Somebody must have taught it to them.’
‘Yes.’ She turned to Emma, her eyes hard. ‘Wherever we are, we aren’t the first to get here. We aren’t alone here, with these apes.’
She’s right, Emma realized. It wasn’t much, but it was a hope to cling to, a shred of evidence that there was more to this bizarre experience than the plains and the forests and the hominids.
Emma peered into the sky, where Earth was starting to set.
Malenfant, where are you?
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant parked at the Beachhouse car park. Close to the Kennedy Space Center, this was an ancient astronaut party house that NASA had converted into a conference centre.
Malenfant, in his disreputable track suit, found the path behind the house. He came to a couple of wooden steps and trotted down to the beach itself. The beach, facing the Atlantic to the east, was empty, as far as he could see. This was a private reserve, a six-mile stretch of untouched coastline NASA held back for use by astronauts and their families and other agency personnel.
It wasn’t yet dawn.
He stripped off his shoes and socks and felt the cool, moist sand between his toes. Tiny crabs scuttled across the sand at his feet, dimly visible. He wondered whether they had been disturbed by the new Moonlight, like so many of the world’s animals. He stretched his hams, leaning forward on one leg, then the other. Too old to skip your stretching, Malenfant, no matter what else is on your mind.
The Red Moon was almost full the first full Moon since its appearance, and Emma’s departure. A month already. The light cast by the Red Moon was much brighter than the light of vanished silvery Luna, bright enough to wash out all but the brightest stars, bright enough to turn the sky a rich deep blue but it was an eerie glow, neither day nor night. It was like being in a movie set, Malenfant thought, some corny old 1940s musical with a Moon painted on a canvas sky.
Malenfant hated it all: the light, the big bowl of mystery up there in the sky. To him the Red Moon was like a glowing symbol of his loss, of Emma.
Breathing deep of the salty ocean air, he jogged through gentle dunes, brushing past thickets of palmetto. It wasn’t as comfortable a jog as it used to be: the beach had been heavily eroded by the Tide, and it was littered with swathes of sea-bottom mud, respectably large rocks, seaweed and other washed-up marine creatures not to mention a large amount of oil smears and garbage, some of it probably emanating from the many Atlantic wrecks. But to Malenfant the solitude here was worth the effort of finding a path through the detritus.
It had been another sleepless night. He was consumed with his desire to reach the Red Moon.
Frustrated by the reception his proposals were receiving at NASA Headquarters in Washington, he had decided to take his schemes, his blueprints and models and Barco shows, around the NASA centres, to Ames and Marshall and Kennedy and Johnson, trying to drum up grass-roots support, and put pressure on the senior brass.
We can do this. We’ve been to the Moon before a Moon, anyhow and this new mother is a lot more forgiving than old Luna. Now we have an atmosphere to exploit. No need to stand on your rockets all the way from orbit; you can glide to the ground … We can throw together a heavy-lift booster from Shuttle components in months. That one the challenge for Marshall, where von Braun had built his Moon rockets. For Kennedy and Johnson, where the astronauts worked: We have whole cadres of trained, experienced and willing pilots, specialists and mission controllers itching to take up the challenge of a new Moon. Hell, I’ll go myself if you’ll let me … He had appealed to the scientists, too: the geologists and meteorologists and even the biologists who suddenly had a whole new world to study: It will be a whole new challenge in human spaceflight, a world with oceans and an atmosphere an oxygen atmosphere, by God just three days away. It’s the kind of world we were hoping we might find when we sent our first fragile ships out on the ocean of space half a century ago. And who knows what we’ll discover there …
And then there were the groups he had come to think of as the xeno-ologists: the biologists and philosophers and astronomers and others who, long before the sudden irruption of the Red Moon, had considered the deeper mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Even if not, why does it seem that we are alone? If we were to meet others what would they be like?
Come on, people. Our Moon disappeared, and was replaced by another. How the hell? Can this possibly be some natural phenomenon? If not, who’s responsible? Not us, that’s for sure. The greatest mystery of this or any other age is hanging up there like some huge Chinese lantern. Shouldn’t we go take a look?
But, to his dismay and surprise, he had gotten no significant support from anybody save the wacko UFO-hunting fringe types, who did him more harm than good. NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was working on a couple of unmanned orbital probes and a lander to go visit the Red Moon. But that was it. The notion of sending humans to Earth’s new companion was definitively out of the question.
So he had been told, gently but firmly, by Joe Bridges.
‘In these road shows of yours you underestimate the magnitude of the task, Malenfant. Whether you’re doing that deliberately or not isn’t for me to say. We know diddley about the structure of the Red Moon’s atmosphere, which is somewhat essential data before you even begin to develop your gliding lander. And then what about the cost and schedule implications of putting together your “Big Dumb Booster” a brand-new man-rated heavy-lift launcher, for God’s sake? Our analysis predicts a schedule of years and a cost of maybe a hundred billion bucks. We just don’t have that kind of money, Malenfant. And NASA can’t go asking for it right now. Get your head out of your ass and take a look around. The Tide. The human race has other priorities …’
