LITMIR.BIZ

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what about you, Malenfant?’

      ‘I lost my wife,’ he said angrily. ‘That’s motive enough. With respect, ma’am.’

      She nodded. ‘But you are grounded. Let me put it bluntly, because others will ask the same question many times before you get to the launch pad. Are you going back to space to find your wife? Or are you using Emma as a lever to get back into space?’

      Malenfant kept his face blank, his bearing upright. He wasn’t about to lose his temper with the Vice-President of the United States. ‘I guess Joe Bridges has been talking to you.’

      She drummed her fingers on her desk. ‘Actually he is pushing you, Malenfant. He wants you to fly your mission.’ She observed his surprise. ‘You didn’t know that. You really don’t know much about people, do you, Malenfant?’

      ‘Ma’am, with respect, does it matter? If I fly to the Red Moon, whatever my motives, I’ll still serve your purposes.’ He eyed her. ‘Whatever they are.’

      ‘Good answer.’ She turned again to her softscreen. ‘I’m going to sleep on this. Whether or not you bring back your wife, I do need you to bring us some good news, Malenfant. Oh, one more thing. Julia’s ape-men falling from the sky … You should know there are a lot of people very angered at the interpretation that they might have anything to do with the origins of humankind.’

      Malenfant grunted. ‘The crowd who think Darwin was an asshole.’

      Della shrugged. ‘It’s the times, Malenfant. Today only forty per cent of American schools teach evolution. I’m already coming under a lot of pressure from the religious groups over your mission, both from Washington and beyond.’

      ‘Am I supposed to go to the Red Moon and convert the ape-men?’

      She said sternly, ‘Watch your public pronouncements. You will go with God, or not at all.’ She fingered the bit of hominid skull on her desk. ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘Our old friend Ezekiel. Chapter 37, verse 4. Good day.’

      Emma Stoney:

      There were bees that swarmed at sunset. Some of them stung, but you could brush them away, if you were careful. But there were other species which didn’t sting, but which gathered at the corner of the mouth, or the eyes, or at the edge of wet wounds, apparently feeding on the fluids of the body.

      You couldn’t relax, not for a minute.

      Uncounted days after her arrival, Emma woke to find an empty shelter.

      She threw off her parachute silk and crawled out of the shelter’s rough opening. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face.

      Sally’s hair was a tangled mess, her safari suit torn, bloody and filthy. Maxie clung to her leg. Sally was pointing towards the sun. ‘They’re leaving.’

      The Runners were walking away. They moved in their usual disorganized way, scattered over the plain in little groups. They seemed to be empty-handed. They had abandoned everything, in fact: their shelters, their tools. Just up and walked away, off to the east. Why?

      ‘They left us,’ Maxie moaned.

      A shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. She glanced up at the deep sky. Cloud was driving over the sun.

      A flake touched her cheek.

      Something was falling out of the sky, drifting like very light snow. Maxie ran around, gurgling with delight. Emma held out her hand, letting a flake land there. It wasn’t cold: in fact, it wasn’t snow at all.

      It was ash.

      ‘We have to go, don’t we?’ Sally asked reluctantly.

      ‘Yes, we have to go.’

      ‘But if we leave here, how will they find us?’

      They? What they? The question seemed almost comical to Emma.

      But she knew Sally took it very seriously. They had spent long hours draping Emma’s parachute silk over rocks and in the tops of trees, hoping its bright colour might attract attention from the air, or even from orbit. And they had laboured to pull pale-coloured rocks into a vast rectangular sigil. None of it had done a damn bit of good.

      There was, though, a certain logic to staying close to where they had emerged from the wheel-shaped portal. After all, who was to say the portal wouldn’t reappear one day, as suddenly as it had disappeared, a magic door opening to take them home?

      And beyond that, if they were to leave with the Runners – if they were to walk off in some unknown direction with these gangly, naked not-quite-humans – it would feel like giving up: a statement that they had thrown in their lot with the Runners, that they had accepted that this was their life now, a life of crude shelters and berries from the forest and, if they were lucky, scraps of half-chewed, red-raw meat: this was the way it would be for the rest of their lives.

      But Emma didn’t see what the hell else they could do.

      They compromised. They spent a half-hour gathering the largest, brightest rocks they could carry, and arranging them into a great arrow that pointed away from the Runners’ crude hearth, towards the east. Then they bundled up as much of their gear as they could carry in wads of parachute silk, and followed the Runners’ tracks.

      Emma made sure they stayed clear of a low heap of bones she saw scattered a little way away. She was glad it had never occurred to Sally to ask hard questions about what had become of her husband’s body.

      The days wore away.

      Their track meandered around natural obstacles – a boggy marsh, a patch of dense forest, a treeless, arid expanse – but she could tell that their course remained roughly eastward, away from the looming volcanic cloud.

      The Runners seemed to prefer grassy savannah with some scattered tree cover, and would divert to keep to such ground – and Emma admitted to herself that such park-like areas made her feel relatively comfortable too, more than either dense forest or unbroken plains. Maybe it was no coincidence that humans made parks that reminded them, on some deep level, of countryside like this. I guess we all carry a little Africa around with us, she thought.

      She was no expert on botany, African or otherwise. It did seem to her there were a lot of fern-like trees and relatively few flowering plants, as if the flora here was more primitive than on Earth. A walk in the Jurassic, then.

      As for the fauna, she glimpsed herds of antelope-like creatures: some of them were slim and agile, who would bolt as the Runners approached, but others were larger, clumsier, hairier, crossing the savannah in heavy-footed gangs. The animals kept their distance, and she was grateful for that. But again they didn’t strike her as being characteristically African: she saw no elephants, no zebra or giraffes. (But then, she told herself, there were barely any elephants left in Africa anyhow.)

      It was clear there were predators everywhere. Once Emma heard the throaty, echoing roar of what had to be a lion. A couple of times she spotted cats slinking through brush at the fringe of forests: leopards, perhaps.

      And once they came across a herd – no, a flock – of huge, vicious-looking carnivorous birds.

      The flightless creatures moved in a tight group with an odd nervousness, pecking at the ground with those savagely curved beaks, and scratching at their feathers and cheeks with claws like scimitars. Their behaviour was very bird-like, but unnerving in creatures so huge.

      The Runners took cover in a patch of forests for a full half-day, until the flock had passed.

      The Runners called them ‘killing birds’. A wide-eyed Maxie called the birds ‘dinosaurs’.

      And they did look like dinosaurs,

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