place to work, harsh, terribly dry, a place where all the bushes have thorns on them… Fascinating story.” She picked up the scrap of bone from her desk. “This was the first significant find Julia made. She told me she was engaged on another dig. She was walking one day along the bed of a dried-out river, when she happened to glance down… Well. It is a fragment of skull. A trace of a woman, of a species called Homo erectus. The Erectus were an intermediate form of human. They arose perhaps two million years ago, and became extinct a quarter-million years ago. They had bodies close to modern humans, but smaller brains — perhaps twice the size of chimps’. But they were phenomenally successful. They migrated out of Africa and covered the Old World, reaching as far as Java.”
Malenfant said dryly, “Fascinating, ma’am. And the significance—”
“The significance is that the homs who rained out of the sky, on the day you lost your wife, Malenfant, appear to have been Homo erectus. Or a very similar type.”
There was a brief silence.
“But if Erectus died out two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, what is he doing falling out of the sky?”
“That is what you must find out, Malenfant, if your mission is approved. Think of it. What if there is a link between the homs of the Wheel and ancestral Erectus? Well, how can that be? What does it tell us of human evolution?” Della fingered her skull fragment longingly. “You know, we have spent billions seeking the aliens in the sky. But we were looking in the wrong place. The aliens aren’t separated from us by distance, but by time. Here—” she said, holding out the bit of bone ” — here is the alien, right here, calling to us from the past. But we have to infer everything about our ancestors from isolated bits of bone — the ancient homs” appearance, gait, behaviour, social structure, language, culture, tool-making ability — everything we know, or we think we know about them. We can’t even tell how many species there were, let alone how they lived, how they felt. You, on the other hand, might be able to view them directly.” She smiled. “Even ask them. Think what it would mean.”
Malenfant began to see the pattern of the meeting. In her odd mix of hard-nosed scepticism at his mission plans, and wide-eyed wonder at what he might find up there, Della was groping her way towards a decision. His best tactic was surely to play straight.
Nemoto had been listening coldly. She leaned forward. “Madam Vice-President. You want this Dr Corneille to have a seat on the mission.”
Ah, Malenfant thought. Now we cut to the horse-trading.
Della sat back in her rocker, hands settling over her belly. “Well, they sent geologists to the Moon on Apollo.”
“One geologist,” said Malenfant. “Only after years of infighting. And Jack Schmitt was trained up for the job; he made sure he was, in fact. As far as I know there are no palaeoanthropologists in the Astronaut Office.”
“Would there be room for a passenger?”
Malenfant shook his head. “You’ve seen our schematics.”
Della tapped her desk, and brought up computer-graphic images of booster rockets and spaceplanes. “You are proposing to build a booster from Space Shuttle components.”
“Our Saturn V replacement, yes.”
“And you will glide down into the Red Moon’s atmosphere in a — what is it?”
“An X-38. It is a lifting body, the crew evacuation vehicle used on the Space Station. We will fit it out to keep us alive for the three-day trip. On the surface we will rendezvous with a package of small jets and boosters for the return journey, sent up separately. The whole mission design is based around a two-person crew. Madam Vice-President, we just couldn’t cram in anybody else.”
“Not on the way out,” Della said evenly. “Two out, three back. Isn’t that your slogan, Malenfant?”
“That’s the whole idea, ma’am. And those outbound two have to be astronauts. The best scientist in the world will be no use on the Red Moon dead.”
“The same argument was used to keep scientists off Apollo.” Della said.
“But it is still valid.”
Nemoto said coldly, “The reality is that I must fly this mission because the Japanese funding depends on it. And Malenfant must fly the mission—”
“Because the American public longs for him to go,” Della sighed. “You’re right, of course. If this mission is approved, then it will be you two sorry jerks who fly it.”
If. Malenfant allowed himself a flicker of hope.
Nemoto seemed to be growing agitated. “Madam Vice-President, we must do this. If I may—” She leaned forward and unrolled her softscreen on Della’s desktop.
Della watched her blankly. Malenfant had no idea where this was leading.
“There is evidence that similar events have touched human history before, evidence buried deep in our history and myths. Consider the story of Ezekiel, from the Old Testament: And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the Earth, the wheels were lifted up. Or consider a tale from the ancient Persian Gulf, about an animal endowed with reason called Oannes, who used to converse with men but took no food… and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art—”
Shit, Malenfant thought.
Della was keeping her face straight. “So is this your justification for a billion-dollar space mission? UFOs from the Bible?”
Nemoto said, “My point is that the irruption of the Red Moon is the greatest event in modern human history. It will surely shape our future — as it has our past. The emergence of the primitive hominids from Malenfant’s portal tells us that. This one event is the pivot on which history turns.”
“I feel I have enough on my plate without assuming responsibility for all human history.”
Nemoto subsided, angry, baffled.
Della said bluntly, “However I do need to know why you are trying to kill yourselves.”
Malenfant bridled. “The mission profile—”
“ — is a death-trap. Come on, Malenfant; I’ve studied space missions before.”
Malenfant sat up straight, Navy style. “We don’t have time not to buy the risks on this one, ma’am.”
“You’re both obsessed enough to take those risks. That’s clear enough. Nemoto I think I understand.”
“You do?”
Della smiled at Nemoto. “Forgive me, dear. Malenfant, she may be an enigma to you, but that’s because she’s young. She lost her family, her home. She wants revenge.”
Nemoto did not react to this.
“But 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. “0 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
