Shadow’s head dangled at Termite’s back. She saw Termite’s legs and rump, a dark slope before her, powerful muscles working. With every jolt. Shadow felt her innards clench, and bright red pain flowed through her. Tumble’s small hands delivered stinging slaps to her unprotected backside.
High in a palm, Termite let Shadow slide into the crook of a branch. Sweating and panting. Termite quickly pulled branches together to make a nest. Then she grabbed Shadow by the armpits and pulled her into the nest.
Termite settled herself, curling around her daughter’s back. Whimpering, Tumble settled down in the nest at her mother’s back, on the far side from Shadow.
The light slid away. The world was black and grey.
Shadow closed her eyes. She slept, entering a deep dreamless sleep, with her mother’s warmth around her.
When she woke, in the first pink light of day, she found her thumb in her mouth, as if she was an infant. Memories flooded into her head. Her illness was like a tunnel of blood red, leading back to greener days beyond.
Her back was cold. Termite wasn’t there.
She sat up. Termite and Tumble were in the nest, on its far side. Termite was assiduously grooming her infant’s fur. Tumble was picking through a lump of faeces, seeking undigested food.
Shadow inspected the wound in her hand. Green, chewed-up fibre clung to it. She licked away the green stuff. There was no sign of maggots or pus, and much of the damaged area was scabbed over, although the scabs cracked when she flexed her thumb.
She hooted and scrambled towards her mother.
Termite sat on the edge of the nest, her long arms wrapped around Tumble, watching Shadow with a hard, still face.
Shadow sat for long heartbeats in the centre of the nest. She picked up bits of fur from the nest and teased them through her fingers. The scent of her mother was still there, mixed with the green smells of the tree. But there was a sourness too.
The sourness was her own smell, Shadow’s smell. Her mother, like her sister, could not bear to be with her, because of the smell. She ripped at her fur, screeching, and scattered handfuls of it around the disintegrating nest.
Termite watched impassively.
A stab of pain, lancing up from the depths of her gut, stopped Shadow dead.
She looked down at herself, her breasts and belly and legs. She felt a shiver of surprise that she was here, inside this body that stank so strangely.
The pain stabbed again, hot and white. She doubled over, and. vomit surged from her, sour and yellow.
It was a hard time for them all. With Big Boss weakening, the social order of the group was breaking down, and anger washed among the people like froth on a turbulent stream.
It went hard for Shadow. Pushed even from her mother’s protective circle, suddenly she was the lowest woman in the group. They all hated her, not just for her low place, but because of what she had become, this stinking, bleeding monster. She could not defend herself, from their beatings and the theft of her food.
But still she clung to the group. Still she made her nest each night, high in the trees, away from the cats and other predators, as close to the others as she dared approach. Much as she feared their fists, she was drawn back, for there was nowhere else to go.
And she was still ill. Her bleeding had stopped. She was afflicted by stomach cramps and pain deep in her back. Her breasts and belly started to swell. She was violently sick each morning. Her days were a blur of pain and loneliness. When she saw her shadow, of a hunched-over creature with hair ragged and filthy, she did not recognize herself.
But then, one day, she felt something squirm in her belly, a kicking foot.
Her head filled with memories, of blood and shit and milk. She remembered a woman lying on her back, legs askew, other women working to pull a pink, slick mass from her body, their hands sticky with blood.
Her loneliness sharpened into fear.
Again she ran to her mother, reaching for her sparse fur, trying to groom, to get close.
Since the illness had started, Termite had never once struck her daughter, not as the others did. But now, as her broad nostrils widened with the stink of Shadow’s body, her fists clenched.
Shadow cowered, whimpering.
Claw came running by, hair bristling, hooting inanely. He was grinning, but blood ran from a gouge in the side of his face. He was running from a fight. As he passed Shadow he aimed a kick at her that caught her in the small of her back.
Shadow dragged herself to the shade of a big palm. There she slumped down, and vomited copiously.
Reid Malenfant:
The next time he woke, Malenfant found the light that soaked through his parachute-canopy tent was a little less bright, the air perhaps a fraction cooler.
Night was coming, at last, to the desert.
He tried to sit up. His head banged as if his brain was rattling around in his skull. His mouth was a sandbox, and he felt a burning dryness right through his throat and nose. It felt like the worst hangover of all time.
But you’re built for heat, Malenfant. You’ve got a body adapted to function away from the shelter of the trees, to walk upright in the heat of the day. That’s why you sweat and the chimps don’t. Haven’t you learned anything from those palaeo classes?…
He reached for his water flask and shook it. Still a quarter full, just as it had been before he slept. Deliberately he tucked it back under his blanket.
He got to his feet. He staggered, brushing his head against the hot, dusty canopy. The fabric rippled, and he heard sand hissing off it. He bent and found his broad stiff-brimmed hat, and jammed it on his bare scalp. Then, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, he stepped out of the makeshift tent.
Outside was like a dry sauna. He felt the moisture just suck straight out of his skin. The pain intensified around his temples and eyes, crumpling his forehead.
The world was elemental: nothing but sand, sky and gnarled Joshua trees, over which their “chutes were draped.
This was the Mojave desert. He and Nemoto had been dumped here as a survival training exercise. During the day the heat was flat and crushing; they could do nothing but lie in their tent of “chutes. And at night they foraged for food.
Nemoto was crouched over a low fire. She was heating some kind of thin broth in a pan she’d made out of aluminium foil. She had a spare T-shirt wrapped around her head. To survive you don’t need equipment, the instructor had said. All you need to pack is strength and ingenuity and determination. That, and a willingness to eat insects and lizards.
Nemoto had proved ingenious at setting traps.
“I wonder—” His throat was so dry he had to start again. “I wonder what’s in the soup this time.”
Nemoto glanced up at him, and then looked back to her cooking. “Your speech is slurred. Drink some water, Malenfant.”
He walked around their little campsite, stretching his legs. He could feel a tingling in his limbs, and the air felt thin. The horizon seemed blurred, perhaps by dust.
“I mean, why the hell are we here?” He lifted his arms and turned around. “Whatever we find on the Red Moon, it won’t be like this.”
“But on returning to Earth we might land in a desert area, and—”
He barked laughter, hurting his throat. “Let’s face it, Nemoto. The chances of our returning healthy enough to play wild man in the desert are too remote to think about.”
“Drink some water.”
He stalked away, vainly seeking cooler air.
As the project had grown, as all such projects did, it had acquired its own logic, much of it loaned from NASA — to Malenfant’s chagrin, and against his better judgement. While the ship was being prepared, the booster assembled and tested, nobody seemed to know what to do with the astronauts, except train them to death and send them on goodwill tours, just as NASA always had.
Some of the training Malenfant could swallow. He had, after all, flown in space twice before, and Nemoto, on her single trip to Station, had logged up an impressive number of days on orbit. So they endured hours in classrooms and in hastily mocked-up simulators going over every aspect of their unlikely craft’s systems, and the procedures they would have to follow at their mission’s major stages.
The major problem with that turned out to be the very volatility of the design. As teams of engineers struggled to cram in everything they thought they needed, key systems went through major redesigns daily — and all of it impacted in the crew’s interface with their craft. In the end Malenfant had grown tired of the simulation programmers” labouring efforts. He had shut down the sims, had a dummy cabin mocked up from plywood, and had blown-up layouts of their instrument panels cut out of paper and pasted over the wood. It wasn’t too interactive, but it familiarized them with systems and procedures — and it was easy to upgrade each morning with bits of tape and sticky paper, as news of each redesign came through.
But the spacecraft-specific training was the easy stuff. The rest was more problematic. How, after all, do you train to face a completely unknown world?
Malenfant and Nemoto had undergone a lot of altitude training, for it was clear that the Red Moon’s air would be thinner than Earth’s. Likewise they had been taken to tropical jungles, for it was planned to bring them down in a vegetated region close to the Moon’s equator.
But beyond that, all was uncertain. Nobody knew if they would find water fresh enough to drink. Nobody knew if they would be able to eat the vegetation always assuming the grey-green swathes visible through telescopes were vegetation at all. Nobody knew if there would be animals to hunt — or if there were animals that might hunt two human astronauts. It wasn’t even clear if the air could be breathed unfiltered.
The ship would be packed with three days” ground supplies, including air filters and water and compressed food. If the makeshift explorers found they couldn’t live off the land in that time, they were just going to have to climb back in their lander and depart (always supposing they could find the return-journey rocket pack that was supposed to follow them to the Moon).
And then there was the mystery of the hominids who had come tumbling through the Wheel in the sky.
Malenfant and Nemoto had sat through hours of lectures by Julia Corneille and others, trying to absorb the best understanding of the evolution of mankind, watching one species after another parade through dimly realized computer animations — Australopithecus, Homo habilis. Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens. Homo heidelbergensis. Homo neandertalensis… It was a plethora of speculation as fragmentary, it seemed to Malenfant, as the bone scraps on which it was based. He had vaguely imagined that the newer evidence based on DNA variation might have cleared the picture, but it seemed only to have confused everybody further. Nobody knew where humanity was going, of course. It had startled Malenfant to find that if you dug deeper than pop science simplifications, nobody really knew where man had come from either.
The truth was that the sessions had been of little use. Malenfant had learned more than he wanted to know about archaeological. techniques and dating methods and anatomical signifiers and all the rest. What he needed to know was how to handle a tribe of Homo habilis, alive, fighting and breeding, should he crest a hillside on the Red Moon and discover them — or vice versa. But NASA’s experts, curators of fragments all, simply weren’t tuned to thinking that way. It was as if they could only see the bits of bone, and not the people that must once have lived to yield up these ancient treasures.
The only real consensus was that Malenfant and Nemoto should pack guns.
…He had lost his hat. He saw it on the ground.
