Kitabı oku: «Origin»

1 WHEEL
Reid Malenfant:

‘… Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!’

So here was Reid Malenfant, his life down the toilet, chasing joky UFO reports around a desolate African sky. Emma’s voice snapped him to full alertness, for just about for the first time, he admitted to himself, since takeoff.

‘What about the Moon?’

‘Just look at it!’

Malenfant twisted his head this way and that, the helmet making his skull heavy, seeking the Moon. He was in the T-38’s forward blister. Emma was in the bubble behind him, her head craned back. The jet trainer was little more than a brilliant shell around them, white as an angel’s wing, suspended in a powder-blue sky. Where was the Moon – the west? He couldn’t see a damn thing.

Frustrated, he threw the T-38 into a savage snap roll. A flat brown horizon twisted around the cockpit in less than a second.

‘Jesus, Malenfant,’ Emma groaned.

He pulled out into a shallow climb towards the west, so that the low morning sun was behind him.

… And then he saw it: a Moon, nearly full, baleful and big too big, bigger than it had any right to be. Its colours were masked by the washed-out blue of the air of Earth, but still, it had colours, yes, not the Moon’s rightful palette of greys, but smatterings of a deep blue-black, a murky brown that even had tinges of green, for God’s sake – but it was predominantly red, a strong scorched red like the dead heart of Australia seen from the flight deck of a Shuttle orbiter …

It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.

He just stared, still pulling the T-38 through its climb. He sensed Emma, behind him, silent. What was there to say about this, the replacement of a Moon?

That was when he lost control.

Fire:

The people walk across the grass.

The sky is blue. The grass is sparse, yellow. The ground is red under the grass. Fire’s toes are red with the dust. The people are slim black forms scattered on red-green.

They are called the Running-folk.

The people call to each other.

‘Fire? Dig! Fire?’

‘Dig, Dig, here! Loud, Loud?’

Loud’s voice, from far away. ‘Fire, Fire! Dig! Loud!’

The sun is high. There are only people on the grass. The cats sleep when the sun is high. The hyenas sleep. The Nutcracker-men and the Elf-men sleep in their trees. Everybody sleeps except the Running-folk. Fire knows this without thinking.

As his legs walk Fire holds his hands clamped together. Smoke curls up from between his thumbs. There is moss inside his hands. The fire is in the moss. He blows on the moss. More smoke comes. The fire hurts his palms and fingers. But his hands are hard.

His legs walk easily. Walking is for legs. Fire is not there in his legs. Fire is in his hands and his eyes. He makes his hands tend the fire, while his legs walk.

Fire is carrying the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.

It is darker. The people are quiet.

Fire looks up. A fat cloud hangs over him. The sun is behind the cloud. The edge of the cloud glows golden. His nose can smell rain. His bare skin prickles, cold. Immersed in this new moment, he has forgotten he is hungry.

The clouds part. There is a blue light, low in the sky. Fire looks at the blue light. It is not the sun. The blue light is new.

Fire fears anything new.

The fire wriggles in his hands.

He looks down, forgetting the blue light. There is no smoke. The moss has turned to ash. The fire is shrinking.

Fire crouches down. He shelters the moss under his belly. He feels its warmth on his bare skin. He hoots. ‘Fire, Fire! Fire, Fire!’

Stone is small-far. He turns. He shouts. He is angry. He begins to come back towards Fire.

Loud comes to Fire. Loud hoots. His voice is loud. Loud is his name. Loud kneels. He looks for bits of moss and dry grass. He pushes them into the bit of fire.

Dig comes to Fire. Her hand holds arrowhead roots. She squats beside Fire. Her taut dugs brush his arm. His member stiffens. He rocks. She grins. Her hands push a root into his mouth. He tastes her fingers, her salty sweat.

Loud hoots. His member is stiff too, sticking out under his belly. He crams bits of grass into Fire’s hands.

Fire snaps his teeth. ‘Loud, Loud away!’

Loud hoots again. He grabs Dig’s arm. She laughs. Her legs take her skipping away from both of them.

Others come to Fire. Here are women, Grass and Shoot and Cold and Wood. Here are their babies with no names. Here are children with no names. The children jabber. Their eyes are round and bright.

Here is Stone. Stone is dragging branches over the ground. Blue is helping Stone drag the branches. Sing is lying on the branches. Sing is white-haired. She is still. She is asleep.

Stone sees the dying fire. He sees Fire’s stiff member. He roars. Stone’s hands drop the branches.

Stone has forgotten Sing, on the branches. Sing tips to the ground. She groans.

Stone’s axe clouts Fire on the back of the head. There is a hard sound. Stone shouts in Fire’s face. ‘Fire, Fire! Hungry, feed!’ His face is split by a scar. The scar is livid red.

‘Fire, Fire,’ says Fire quietly. His arms drop and his head bows. He keeps hold of the fire.

Sing moans. Her eyes are closed. Her dugs are slack. The men pick her up by shoulders and legs and lift her back on the branches.

Stone and Blue grab the branches. Their legs walk them back the way they had come.

Fire tells his legs to stand him up. They can’t. His hands are still clasped around the fire. Lights fill his head, more garish than that blue stripe in the sky. He nearly falls over backwards.

Loud’s hand grabs his armpit. Loud lifts him until his legs are straight.

Loud laughs. Loud walks away, fast, after Dig.

Fire’s head hurts. Fire’s hands hurt. Fire’s member wants Dig.

He starts walking. He wants to stop thinking.

He thinks of the blue light.

Emma Stoney:

Emma had accompanied Malenfant, her husband, on a goodwill tour of schools and educational establishments in Johannesburg, South Africa. It had been a remarkably dismal project, a throwback to NASA PR malpractices of old, a trek through mostly prosperous, middle-class-and-up neighbourhoods, with Malenfant running Barco shows from his two missions to the Space Station before rows of polite and largely uncaring teenagers.

In darkened classrooms Emma had watched the brilliance of the students’ smiles, and the ruby-red winking of their earpiece phones like fireflies in the night. Between these children growing up in the fractured, complex, transformed world of 2015, and Reid Malenfant, struggling worker astronaut, all of fifty-five years old and still pursuing Apollo dreams from a boyhood long lost, there was a chasm as wide as the Rift Valley, she thought, and there always would be.

Still, for Emma, it had been a holiday in the African sun – the reason she had prised herself away from her work as financial controller of OnlineArt and she and Malenfant had gotten along reasonably well, for them, even given Malenfant’s usual Earthbound restless moodiness.

But that had been before the word had come through from the Johnson Space Center, headquarters of NASA’s manned spaceflight programme, that Malenfant had been washed out of his next mission, STS-194.

Well, that was the end of it. With a couple of phone calls Malenfant had cut short their stay in Joburg, and begun to can the rest of the tour. He had been able to get out of all of it except for a reception at the US ambassador’s residence in Nairobi, Kenya.

To her further dismay, Malenfant had leaned on Bill London – an old classmate from Annapolis, now a good buddy in the South African Navy – to let him fly them both up to Nairobi from out of a Joburg military airfield in a T-38, a sleek veteran supersonic jet trainer, a mode of transport favoured by the astronauts since the 1960s.

It wasn’t the first time Emma had been taken for a ride in one of those toy planes, and with Malenfant in this mood she knew she could expect to be thrown around the sky. And she shuddered at the thought of how Malenfant in this wounded state was going to behave when he got to Nairobi.

But she had gone along anyhow. Somehow she always did.

So that was how Emma Stoney, forty-five-year-old accountant, had found herself in a gear room getting dressed in a blue flight suit, oxygen mask, oversized boots, helmet, going through the procedures for using her parachute and survival kit and emergency oxygen, struggling to remember the purpose of the dozens of straps, lanyards and D-rings.

Malenfant was ready before she was, of course. He stomped out into the bright morning sunlight towards the waiting T-38. He carried his helmet and his flight plan, and his bald head gleamed in the sun, bronzed and smooth as a piece of machinery itself. But his every motion was redolent with anger and frustration.

Emma had to run to keep up with him, laden down with all her absurd right-stuff gear. By the time she reached the plane she was hot already. She had to be hoisted into her seat by two friendly South African female techs, like an old lady being lifted into the bath. Malenfant was in his cockpit, angrily going through a pre-takeoff checkout.

The T-38 was sleek and brilliant white. Its wings were stubby, and it had two bubble cockpits, one behind the other. The plane was disturbingly small; it seemed barely wide enough to squeeze in a whole person. Emma studied an array of controls and dials and softscreen readouts at whose purpose she could only guess. The venerable T-38 had been upgraded over the years – those shimmering softscreen readouts, for instance – but every surface was scuffed and worn with use, the metal polished smooth where pilots’ gloved hands had rubbed against it, the leather of her seat extensively patched.

The last few minutes of the prep wore away quickly, as one of the ground crew took her through her final instructions: how she should close her canopy bubble, where to fasten a hook to a ring on a parachute, how to change the timing of her parachute opening. She watched the back of Malenfant’s head, his jerky tension as he prepared his plane.

Malenfant taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Emma watched the stick move before her, slaved to Malenfant’s movements. Her oxygen mask smelled of hot rubber, and the roar of the jets was too loud for her to make out anything of Malenfant’s conversation with the ground.

Do you ever think of me, Malenfant?

There was a mighty shove at her back.

Fire:

Stone drops the branches. Sing rolls to the ground. Stone has forgotten her again.

The sun is low. They are close to a thick stand of trees. Fire can smell water.

Fire is tired. His stomach is empty. His hands are sore. ‘Hungry Fire hungry,’ he moans.

Sing, on the ground, looks up at him. She smiles. ‘Hungry Fire,’ she says. He thinks of her feeding him. But she is small and withered. She does not get up to feed him.

Stone walks over the branches he hauled across the savannah, the branches that transported Sing. He kicks them aside. He has forgotten he hauled them here. He bends. His hands seek out a piece of dung on the ground. His tongue tastes it. It is Nutcracker-man dung. The dung is old. The dung crumbles.

Fire is not fearful. There are no Nutcracker-men near here.

Stone’s feet kick aside more branches and twigs. He uncovers a round patch of black ground. Fire’s nose smells ash. Stone hoots. ‘Hah! Fire Fire.’

Fire crouches over the ash. The fire is warm in his hands.

Loud and Dig and others huddle near him. Their hands scrape dry stuff from the floor, dead leaves and dry moss and grass and bits of bark. Their hands pick up rocks, and rub the tinder against the rocks. Their fingers turn the tinder, making it fine and light.

Wood’s legs walk to the forest. She comes back with a bundle of sticks, of wood. That is what she does. That is her name. She piles the sticks on the ground.

The hands of the others push the tinder into the middle of the pile of wood.

Working closely, the people jostle each other. They are hot from the walk. Their bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger, irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives. Their ancestors’ hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.

Fire waits while they work.

He sees himself.

He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this other’s face. The adults’ huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push him out of the way.

A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.

… The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.

Fire’s hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.

People laugh and hoot at the fire.

Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.

Emma Stoney:

The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural land beyond showing as patches of greyish green and brown. On the eastern horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon, almost full, its small grey face peering back at the sun’s harsh glare.

Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.

Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten per cent of the time on his two spaceflights throwing up.

Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon to left. As they headed towards the interior of the continent, the land turned brown, parched, flat.

‘What a shithole,’ Malenfant said, his voice a whisper over the jet’s roar. ‘Africa. Cradle of mankind my ass.’

‘Malenfant –’

He hurled the T-38 forward with a powerful afterburner surge.

Within seconds they had reached 45,000 feet and had gone through a bone-shaking Mach 1. The vibrations damped away and the noise of the jets dwindled – for, of course, they were outstripping most of the sound they made – and the plane seemed to hang in shining stillness.

Emma, as she had before, felt a surge of exhilaration. It was at such paradoxical moments of stillness and speed that she felt closest to Malenfant.

But Malenfant was consumed by his gripes.

‘Two years. I can’t fucking believe it. Two years of training, two years of meetings and planning sessions, and paddling around in hydro labs and spinning around in centrifuges. All of it for nothing.’

‘Come on, Malenfant. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not as if Station work was ever such a prize anyhow. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. That’s what you used to say –’

‘Nobody was flying to fucking Mars. Station was all that was available, so I took it. Two flights, two lousy flights. I never even got to command a mission, for Christ’s sake.’

‘You got washed out this time. That doesn’t mean you won’t fly again. A lot of crew are flying past your age.’ That was true, of course, partly because NASA was having such difficulty finding willing applicants from younger generations.

But Malenfant growled, ‘It’s that asshole Bridges. He even called me into the JSC director’s office to explain the shafting. That fucking horse holder has always had it in for me. This will be the excuse he needs to send me to purgatory.’

Emma knew whom he meant. Joe Bridges was the director of flight operations – in effect, in NASA’s Byzantine, smothering internal bureaucracy, in charge of astronaut selection for missions.

Malenfant was still muttering. ‘You know what Bridges offered me? ASP.’

Emma riffled through her mental file of NASA acronyms. ASP: Astronaut Support Personnel, a non-flying astronaut assigned to support the crew of a mission.

‘I’d have been point man on STS-194,’ Malenfant spat. ‘The Caped Crusader. Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole into my seat on the flight deck.’

‘I gather you didn’t take the job,’ Emma said dryly.

‘I took it okay,’ he snapped. ‘I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil-pusher’s fat ass.’

‘Oh, Malenfant,’ she sighed.

She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to-ceiling office window with its view of the park-like JSC campus, complete with the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crashlanded beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for too many eager crew-persons, so – in what seemed to Emma his own very small world – Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.

She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat, the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role; perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in NASA’s sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.

Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long, complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high-tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.

But to Malenfant – Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human behaviour, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy, barely engaged with the complexities of the world – to Malenfant, Joe Bridges, controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me, she thought) could be nothing but a monster.

She stared out the window at the baked African plain. It was huge and ancient, she thought, a place that would endure all but unchanged long after the little white moth that buzzed over it today was corroded to dust, long after the participants in this tiny domestic drama were mouldering bones.

Now she heard a whisper from the ground-to-air radio. It sounded like Bill London, good old bullshitter Bill from Annapolis, with some garbled report about UFOs over central Africa.

The plane veered to the right, and the rising sun wheeled around the cockpit, sparking from scuffs in the Plexiglas around her.

‘Let’s go UFO-hunting,’ Malenfant snapped. ‘We got nothing better to do today, right?’

She wasn’t about to argue; as so often in her relationship with Malenfant she was, literally, powerless.

Fire:

Stone and Blue put branches into the fire. Leaves and twigs burn. Stone and Blue pull out the burning branches. Their legs carry them into the wood. Small animals squeal and run before the fire. Stone and Blue pursue, their eyes darting, their hands hurling rocks and bits of wood.

Fire’s hands are very red and raw.

Dig comes to him. Water is in her mouth. The water spills on his hands. The water is cool. Dig has leaves. Her hands rub them on his burns.

Fire has no name. Sing is huge and smiling. Sing’s hands rub his palms with leaves.

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.

‘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.’

‘Of the UFO?’

‘No. Of you.’

‘Just a little closer,’ he said, his voice a thin crackle over the intercom. ‘I won’t let you come to any harm, Emma.’

Suddenly she screamed.‘… Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!’

Reid Malenfant:

It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.

It was a day of strange lights in the sky. But it was a sky that was forever barred to him.

The plane was flung sideways.

It was like a barrel roll. Suddenly his head was jammed into his shoulders and his vision tunnelled, worse than any eyeballs-back launch he had ever endured – and harder, much harder, than he would have wanted to put Emma through.

His systems went dead: softscreens, the clunky old dials, even the hiss of the comms, everything. He wrestled with the stick, but got no response; the plane was just falling through an angry sky, helpless as an autumn leaf.

The rate of roll increased, and the Gs just piled on. He knew he was already close to blacking out; perhaps Emma had succumbed already, and soon after that the damn plane was going to break up.

With difficulty he readied the ejection controls. ‘Emma! Remember the drill!’ But she couldn’t hear, of course.

… Just for a second, the panels flickered back to life. He felt the stick jerk, the controls bite.

It was a chance to regain control.

He didn’t take it.

Then the moment was gone, and he was committed.

He felt exuberant, almost exhilarated, like the feeling when the solid boosters cut in during a Shuttle launch, like he was on a roller-coaster ride he couldn’t get off.

But the plane plummeted on towards the sky wheel, rolling, creaking. The transient mood passed, and fear clamped down on his guts once more.

He bent his head, found the ejection handle, pulled it. The plane shuddered as Emma’s canopy was blown away, then gave another kick as her seat hurled her clear.

And now his own canopy disappeared. The wind slammed at him, Earth and sky wheeling around, and all of it was suddenly, horribly real.

He felt a punch in the back. He was hurled upwards like a toy and sent tumbling in the bright air, just like one of the strange iron-filing people, shocked by the sudden silence.

Pain bit savagely at his right arm. He saw that his flight-suit sleeve and a great swathe of skin had been sheared away, leaving bloody flesh. Must have snagged it on the rim of the cockpit on the way out.

Something was flopping in the air before him. It was his seat. He still had hold of the ejection handle, connected to the seat by a cable.

He knew he had to let go of the handle, or else it might foul his ’chute. Yet he couldn’t. The seat was an island in this huge sky; without it he would be alone. It made no sense, but there it was.

At last, apparently without his volition, his hand loosened. The handle was jerked out of his grip, painfully hard.

Something huge grabbed his back, knocking all the air out of him again. Then he was dangling. He looked up and saw his ’chute open reassuringly above him, a distant roof of fully blossomed orange and white silk.

But the thin air buffeted him, and he was swaying alarmingly, a human pendulum, and at the bottom of each swing G forces hauled on his entrails. He was having trouble breathing; his chest laboured. He pulled a green toggle to release his emergency oxygen.

The artefact hung above him, receding as he fell.

He had been flung west of it, he saw now, and it was closing up to a perfect oval, like a schoolroom demonstration of a planetary orbit. There was no sign of the other planes. Even the T-38 seemed to have vanished completely, save for a few drifting bits of light wreckage, a glimmer that must have been a shard of a Plexiglas canopy.

And he saw another ’chute. Half open. Hanging before the closing maw of the artefact like a speck of food before the mouth of some vast fish.

Emma, of course: she had ejected a half-second before Malenfant, so that she had found herself that much closer to the artefact than he had been.

And now she was being drawn in by the buffeting air currents.

He screamed, ‘Emma!’ He twisted and wriggled, but there was nothing he could do.

Her ’chute fell into the portal. There was a flash of electric-blue light. And she was gone.

‘Emma! Emma!’

… Something fell past him, not ten yards away. It was a man: tall and lithe like a basketball player, stark naked. He was black, and under tight curls, his skull was as flat as a board. His mouth was working, gasping like a fish’s. His gaze locked with Malenfant’s, just for a heartbeat. Malenfant read astonishment beyond shock.

Then the man was gone, on his way to his own destiny in the ancient lands beneath.

A new barrage of turbulent air slammed into Malenfant. He rocked viciously. Nursing his damaged arm he fought the ’chute, fought to keep it stable fought for his life, fought for the chance to live through this day, to find Emma.

As he spun, he glimpsed that new Red Moon, a baleful eye gazing down on his tiny struggles.

Fire:

The Mouth is gone.

The new people are nearby. The smallest is a child. They are all yelling. Their skin is bright, yellow-brown and blue. They are trying to stand up, but they stumble backwards.

Fire’s legs walk forward. He walks over the soaked fireplace. The ashes are still hot. He yelps and his feet lift up, off the ashes.

Sing is nearby, on her branches, weeping.

Fire’s eyes see Dig. They can’t see Loud. Fire calls out. ‘Loud, Loud, Fire!’ But Loud is gone.

Shrugging, the rain running down his back, he turns away. Fire will never think of his brother again.

A new person is coming towards him. This stranger has blue and brown skin on his body. Fire can’t see his member. It is a woman. But he can’t see breasts. It is a man.

The new person holds out empty hands. ‘Please, can you help us? Do you know what happened to us? What place is this?’

Fire hears: ‘Help. What. Us. What.’ The voice is deep. It is a man.

Stone is standing beside Fire. ‘Nutcracker-man,’ he says softly.

‘No,’ says Fire.

‘Elf-man.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’ The new person steps forward. ‘I have a wife and child. Do you speak English? My wife is hurt. We need shelter. Is there a road near here, a phone we could use –’

Stone’s axe slams into the top of the new person’s head. The head cracks open. Grey and red stuff splashes out.

The new person’s eyes look at Fire. He shudders. He falls backwards.

Stone grunts. ‘Nutcracker-man.’ Stone slices off the new person’s cheek and crams it into his mouth.

Fire hoots at the kill. Nutcracker-folk fight hard. This kill was easy.

Other people’s legs bring them running from the trees to join Stone at his feast. They have forgotten the rain. They get wet again. But they are all drawn by the scent of the fresh meat.

The new person’s skin yields easily to Stone’s axe. It comes off in a sheet. Fire’s finger touches the sloughed skin. It is blue and brown, thick and dense. Fire is confused. It is skin. It is not skin,

The flesh under the strange skin is white. Stone’s axe cuts into it easily. The axe butchers the body rapidly and expertly, an unthinking skill honed across a million years.

The other new people are screaming.

Fire had forgotten them. He straightens up. He has a chunk of flesh in his mouth. His teeth gnaw at it, while his hands pull on it.

The new people’s legs are trying to run away. But the new people fall easily, as if they are weak or sick.

Grass and Cold catch the new people. They push them to Stone. One of the new people is bleeding from her head and staggering. Its arms are clutching the small one. When it screams its voice is high. It is a woman.

The other new person has no small one. It has blue skin all over its body. ‘We don’t mean you any harm. Please. My name is Emma Stoney.’ Its voice is high. It is a woman.

Shoot’s hand grabs the hair of this one, pulls her head back.

The new woman’s elbow rams into Shoot’s belly. ‘Get your hands off of me!’ Shoot doubles over, gasping.

The men laugh at the women fighting.

The woman with the child speaks to Stone. ‘Please. We’re American citizens. My name is Sally Mayer. I – my husband… I know you can speak English. We heard you. Look, we can pay. American dollars.’ She holds out something green. Handfuls of leaves. Not leaves. Her arm is bleeding, he sees.

I. You. That is what Fire hears.

The woman has fallen silent. Her eyes are staring at the top of Stone’s head. Her mouth is open.

The top of the woman’s head is swollen.

Fire makes his hand run over his own brow. He feels thick eye ridges. He feels a sloping brow. He feels the small flat crown behind his brow. His fingers find a fly trapped in his greasy hair. He pulls it out. He pops it into his mouth.

Stone studies the new woman. Stone’s fingers squeeze the woman’s dug. It is large and soft, under its skin of green and brown. The woman yelps and backs away. The child, eyes wide, cringes from Stone’s bloody hand.

Fire laughs. Stone will mount the woman. Stone will eat the woman.

‘No.’

The other new woman steps forward. Her hands pull the other woman behind her. ‘We are like you. Look! We are people. We are not meat.’ She points to the child.

The child has no hair on his face. The child has wide round eyes. The child has a nose.

Nutcracker-folk have hair on their faces. Nutcracker-folk have no noses. Nutcracker-folk have nostrils flat against their faces.

Running-folk have no hair on their faces. They have round eyes. They have noses.

Stone’s axe rises.

Fire takes a step forward. He is afraid of Stone and his axe. But he makes his hand grab Stone’s arm.

‘People,’ Fire says.

‘Yes.’ The new woman nods. ‘Yes, that’s right. We’re people.’

Slowly, Stone’s arm lowers.

The smell of meat is strong. One by one the people drift away from the new people, and cluster around the corpse.

Fire is left alone, watching the new people.

The fat new person is shaking, as if cold. Now she falls to the ground. The other puts the child down, and cradles the fat one’s head on her lap.

The other’s face lifts up to Fire. ‘My name is Emma. Em-ma. Do you understand?’

Fire carries the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.

Emma is her name. Emma is what she does. He doesn’t know what Em-ma is.

He says, ‘Em-ma.’

‘Emma. Yes. Good. Please – will you help us? “We need water. Do you have any water?’

His eye spots something. Something moves on a branch on the ground nearby. He has forgotten that he used these branches to make a bower.

His hand whips out and grabs. His hand opens, revealing a caterpillar, fat and juicy. He did not have to think about catching it. It is just here. He pops it in his mouth.

‘Please.’

He looks down at the new people. Again he had forgotten they were there. ‘Em-ma.’ The caterpillar wriggles on his tongue. His hand pulls it out of his mouth. He remembers how he caught it, a sharp shard of recent memory.

He makes his hand hold out the caterpillar.

Emma’s eyes stare at it. It is wet from his spit. Her hand reaches out and takes it.

The caterpillar is in her mouth. She chews. He hears it crunch. She swallows, hard. ‘Good. Thank you.’

Fire’s nose can smell meat more strongly now. Stone’s axe has cracked the rib cage. Whatever is in the new person’s belly may be good to eat.

The other new woman wakes up. Her eyes look at the corpse, at what the people are doing there. She screams. Emma’s hand clamps over her mouth. The woman struggles.

The people crowd close around the corpse. Fire joins them.

He has forgotten the new people.