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 bum. 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.
