there — and not with this Ham.
But now she glanced back at the Elves. They had pulled open the boy’s rib cage, and the child gave a final, exhausted moan as his heart was torn out.
You’re kind of short of choices, Emma.
She followed the Ham.
The Ham glided away through the forest, pointing to the footsteps she made in the dead brush on the ground. When Emma stepped there, she made no sound.
Reid Malenfant:
Nemoto said laconically, “Three, two, one.”
The booster pack fired, and Malenfant was pushed deep into his seat.
The light of their rockets illuminated the deserts and forests of the Red Moon. All over the little world, eyes were raised to the sky, curious and incurious.
— III —
HOMINIDS
Manekatopokanemahedo:
Manekato lingered on the threshold of the room, held back by a mixture of respect and dread.
Her mother, Nekatopo, was dying.
Nekatopo, breathing evenly, gazed at the soft-glowing ceiling. A slim Worker waited beside the bed for her commands, as still as a polished rock.
Nekatopo’s room was a hexagonal chamber whose form was the basis of the design of the House, indeed of the Farm itself. This room had been occupied by matriarchs throughout the deep history of the Lineage, and so it was Nekatopo’s now — and would be Manekato’s soon. But the room was stark. The ceiling was tall and the walls bare panels, glowing softly pink. The only piece of furniture was the bed on which Nekatopo lay, itself hexagonal.
Manekato remembered how her grandmother had decorated these same walls with exuberant fruits. But her daughter had stripped away all of that. “I honour my mother’s memory,” she had said. “But these walls are of Adjusted Space; they are not material. They do not tarnish or erode. They have a beauty beyond space and time, as our ancestors intended. Why deface them with transience?…”
But Manekato found the unreal simplicity as overwhelming, in its way, as the happy clutter of her grandmother. When this room was hers, Manekato would find a middle way: her own way, as all the matriarchs had done — and she felt a sudden flush of shame, for her mother was not yet dead, and here she was calculating how she would use her room.
Now she saw that salty tears leaked over Nekatopo’s cheeks, soaking the sparse hair, and trickled into her flat nose.
Manekato was troubled to her core. Her mother had never cried — not even on hearing the news of her imminent death — not even on the day when she had had to send away her only son, Babo, Mapping him to his marriage on a Farm on the other side of the world.
Manekato fled, hoping her mother had not noticed she had been here.
She walked alone, along the path that led to the ocean. The Wind was gentle today, comparatively; she was barely aware of the way it ruffled the thick black hair on her back, and shivered over the trees that clung to the ground nearby.
To a human she would have looked something like a gorilla: stocky, powerful, all of eight feet tall, she knuckle-walked elegantly. She pressed her knuckles into the crushed gravel of the path with gentleness, even reverence. Every speck of land on the Farm was precious to her, like an extension of her own heart. Even this humble path served its purpose with quiet dignity, and had borne the weight of her mother and her mother’s mother, deep into the roots of time, as it bore her weight now.
Quiet dignity, she thought. That is what I must strive for, in the difficult days ahead.
The path ended at a shallow cliff top that overlooked the sea. The sea was grey and cloudy, laden with silt, and tall waves, generated by a storm raging far over the horizon, crashed with exorbitant violence on the heavily eroded shore. Manekato glimpsed the rectangular gridwork that covered the ocean floor — the boundary of the undersea Farms — a shining mesh that disappeared into the murk of the cloudy water.
The tides were shallow on this moonless Earth, so the beach was narrow and battered by waves. But still huge birds plummeted from the sky, their muscular wings folded, stabbing after the unwary fish and crabs who clung to life at this thin, inhospitable margin. Manekato swivelled her ears to hear the calls of the birds, deep-pitched and throaty to penetrate the unceasing roar of the Wind.
Manekato turned and looked back the way she had come, resting her weight easily on her knuckles. The Farm sprawled over a low hill — in fact it was the core of a volcano, Wind-eroded to a snub long before her Lineage had begun to work this land. The Farm was dominated by the low, streamlined House that sat at the crest of the hill, its prow facing the direction of the prevailing Wind like a beached ship. Around the House sprawled a glowing gridwork of light, in the hexagonal pattern that was the signature of the Poka Lineage. Each of the fields marked out by the grid bore a different crop, ranging from the most advanced self recursive Worker designs — even from here she could see nubs of heads and stubby limbs pushing out of the ground — all the way back to the Lineage’s first harvest, a fat-trunked, ground-hugging willow whose bark still provided some of the best tea available anywhere.
But the land itself was only a cross-section of the greater Farm. There were more cultivated layers stacked deep beneath her feet, fed by light piped from the surface, and mines for the water and hydrocarbons locked in the ground’s deeper rocks, and even one mighty borehole that punched through the planet’s crust and into the mantle, sipping at Earth’s core heat. There were more ducts that pumped heat and carbon dioxide and other waste products back into the ground, of course, as the Poka Lineage contributed to the husbandry of the world.
Even above the ground the Farm’s activities extended. Manekato could see engineered birds wheeling over the main House, snapping Wind-blown debris from the sky. The birds were restricted to the Farm’s perimeter, and Manekato could see how they flocked in a great wedge-shaped slice of sky that projected up from the ground, so high that the uppermost birds were mere dots against the banded, rippling clouds that were the province of the Sky Farmers.
From the core of the Earth to the bellies of the clouds: that was the extent of the Poka Farm, every scrap of it worked and reworked, every speck of dirt, every molecule of air and water functional, every bacterium and insect and animal and bird with a well-designed role to play in the managed ecology.
There was not a patch of this world that was not similarly cultivated, cherished by its Lineage.
And the Farm would soon belong to Manekato, all of it — even though she was just eight years old: still a young adult, little more than a third of her life gone.
Even though she didn’t want it.
Now Manekato heard a faint cry. She swivelled her parabolic ears towards the House, and picked out the voice of her mother, calling her name.
She hurried up the path, back sloping, powerful legs working, levering herself forward on her knuckles. As she passed, immature Workers called out to her, tinny voices piping from ill-formed mouths, already seeking to serve; and willow leaves swivelled frantically in her shadow as they strove to drink in all the light of the eight-hour day.
She returned to her mother’s room, at the heart of the Farm. Unhappily she stepped forward, approaching the bed.
Her mother’s bed looked like a simple hexagonal nest, woven of leafy branches. It was in fact a cluster of semi-sentient Workers, designed to mimic the nests of willow and birch branches that children learned to make for themselves from an early age. It had been manufactured to Manekato’s design by Worker artisans, twelve generations removed from the crude self-recursive creatures budding in the fields outside.
The floor of the room was a pit filled with hard-compacted white dust. The dust was the ground-up bones of her ancestors. One day Nekatopo’s bones would be added to the pit, and, not many years after that, Manekato’s too. Nobody knew how deep the dust pit extended. Manekato could feel the soft grittiness of the dust, but not a gram of it clung to her feet.
Nekatopo opened her eyes.
“…Mother?”
“Oh, Mane, Mane.” It was a childish diminutive she had not used since Manekato was a baby. She reached up, her great arms withered and weak.
Manekato embraced her, feeling the tears soak into the hairs in her own chest.
“Oh, Mane, I’m so sorry. But you must go to the Market.”
Manekato frowned. She knew that no woman had travelled to the Market since her grandmother’s day. Manekato herself had never left the boundary of the Farm, and the prospect of travelling so far filled her with dread. “Why?”
Nekatopo struggled to sit up, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I don’t even know how to tell you this. We are going to lose the Farm.”
Manekato felt her mouth fall open. A change in the possession of a Farm occurred only when a Lineage became extinct, or when some member of a Lineage had committed a grave crime.
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. Oh dear, dear Mane! It is the Astrologers. They have news for us which — well, it has gone around and around in my head, like the Astrologers” own wretched stars wheeling around the world. The Farm is to be destroyed. A great catastrophe is to befall the world — so say the Astrologers.”
Manekato could not take in any of this. “Storms can be averted, waves tamed—”
“You must believe the Astrologers,” Nekatopo whispered, insistent. “I’m sorry, Manekato. You must go to the Market and meet them.”
Manekato pulled away from her frail mother, frightened, resentful. “Why? If all this is true, what use is talk?”
“Go to them,” Nekatopo sighed, subsiding back into the arms of the semi-sentient branches.
Manekato walked to the door. Then — torn by shock, uncertainty, shame, doubt she hesitated. “Nekatopo — if the Farm dies — what will become of me?”
Nekatopo lay on her bed, a dark brown bundle, breathing softly. She did not reply — but Manekato knew there was only one possible answer. If the Farm died, then the Lineage must die with it.
She burned with confusion, resentment.
But still she hesitated. It struck her that whatever the fate of the Farm, if she travelled to the Market, her mother might not be able to welcome her home again.
So, softly, she began to recite her true name. “Manekatopokane-mahedo…”
Manekato’s true name consisted of nearly fifty thousand syllables — one syllable more than her mother’s name, two more than her grandmother’s — one syllable added for each generation of the Lineage, back to the beginning, when members of a very different species, led by a matriarch called Ka, and her daughter called Poka, had first scratched at the unpromising slopes of the eroded hills here.
Manekato’s people had farmed this scrap of land for fifty thousand generations, for more than a million years.
Nekatopo listened to this child-like performance, unmoving, but Manekato sensed her wistful pleasure.
