And he could smell ash.
Nemoto was inspecting a small portable analyser. “No unanticipated toxins,” she said. “Thin but breathable.” She stripped off her Snoopy hat, and started to shuck off her orange pressure suit. “In fact,” she said, “the air here is healthier than in most locations on Earth.”
After their three days in space cooped up in a volume no larger than the interior of a family car, Malenfant was no longer shy of Nemoto. But he felt oddly self-conscious getting naked, out here in the open, where who-knew-what eyes might be watching. But he began to unzip his suit anyhow. “I can smell ash.”
“That is probably the Bullseye,” Nemoto said. The big volcano had been observed to erupt more or less continuously since the Red Moon’s arrival in Earth orbit, perhaps induced by the tides exerted by the Earth on its new Moon. “You should welcome the ash, Malenfant. This is a small world, with no tectonic activity, Weathering here is a one-way process, and without a restorative mechanism all the air would eventually get locked up in the rocks, with no way to recycle it.”
“Like Mars.”
“And yet not like Mars. We don’t yet understand the geological and biological cycles on the Red Moon. Perhaps we never will. But the injection of gases into the air by the Bullseye surely serves to keep the atmosphere replenished. What else do you notice?”
He raised his head, sniffed, listened.
“Birdsong,” Nemoto said. “An absence rather than a presence.”
“No birds? It ought to be easier for them to fly here, in the lower gravity.”
“But the air is less dense. Wings would have less lift than on Earth. The bird would require more muscle power, respiration… We may see gliders, and flightless birds. But we cannot expect the diversity we see on Earth.”
A pity, Malenfant thought.
Malenfant donned T-shirt, shorts, a thin sweater, and a bright blue coverall, and then pulled his boots back on. He was glad of the warmth of the clothes; the air here was damp and cold, though the sun’s heat was sharp. Nemoto dressed the same way. They tucked their heavy Gore-Tex escape suits back into the lander, against the time when they would be needed during the return to Earth — an eventuality Malenfant was finding increasingly hard to visualize.
Malenfant settled his comms pack on his shoulder. This was a specialized piece of gear manufactured for them by technicians at the Johnson Space Center. On top of a small but powerful transceiver package sat a tiny, jewel-like camera. Antennae were built into their coveralls, and the signals were relayed by small comsats orbiting low around the Red Moon The deal was that save for emergency the controllers would keep their mouths shut during the surface stay (which they insisted on calling an extra-vehicular activity, with, to Malenfant’s mind, an absurd emphasis on the vehicle they had arrived in, as opposed to the place they had come to). But in return the ground had control of the cameras.
Soon the little camera on Malenfant’s shoulder was swivelling back and forth with a minute whirring noise. “Good grief,” he said. “I feel like Long John Silver.”
Nemoto laughed, as she usually did when she detected one of his jokes. He wasn’t sure whether she understood the reference or not.
With her own camera working, she walked across the flattened clearing. She began to load small sample bags with fast, random selections of the vegetation and the underlying crimson soil; these were contingency samples, to be lodged in the loader against the event that they had to leave here in a hurry. She found a shallow puddle, covered with a greenish scum, and she pushed the probe of her sensor pack into it. “Water,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t recommend you drink it.”
Malenfant, his own camera peering here and there, turned to face the way the lander had come down, from the west. The route was somewhat easy to spot. The lander, suspended beneath its blue parafoil, had come bellying down out of the sky, crashing through the trees with abandon, and had left a clear trail of its glide-down in snapped trunks, crushed branches and ripped-up bits of parafoil. The trail terminated in this small clearing, where shattered tree trunks clustered close around the lander’s incongruous black and white carcass.
Malenfant stalked around the lander, inspecting the damage. The whole underside was scored, crushed and gouged. Heat-resistant tiles had been plucked away and scattered through the forest, and all the aerosurfaces were scarred and crumpled.
The only good thing you could say about that landing was that it wasn’t his fault.
After scouting out the Red Moon from orbit for a few days, the crew and the mission planners on the ground had settled on the largest settlement they had spotted as a suitable target for the landing. (Not that they could tell who or what had built that settlement…) It was close to the delta where the great continental river completed its long journey to the ocean. The plan had been to come down on a reasonably flat, open plain a few miles to the west of the Beltway, the thick belt of forest at the continent’s eastern coast, close enough to that big settlement for Malenfant and Nemoto to complete their journey on foot. Later, the follow-up rocket pack would rendezvous with the lander on the ground.
That was the plan. The Red Moon hadn’t proven quite so cooperative.
As soon as the lander had ducked into the thicker layers of this little world’s surprising deep atmosphere, strong winds had gripped it. The mission planners had expected the unexpected; there had been no time or resources to model the Red Moon’s meteorology in detail. But none of that had helped ease Malenfant’s mind as he lay helpless in his bucket seat, buffeted like a toy in the hands of a careless child, watching their landing ellipse whip away beneath the lander’s prow.
The lander’s autonomous systems had looked actively for an alternative site suitable for a safe and controlled landing. But another gust stranded the lander over the Beltway itself. When it realized that it was running out of altitude and that soon it would reach a line of cliffs, beyond which there was only ocean — the lander had taken a metaphorical deep breath and dumped itself in the forest.
“The trees appear to be predominantly spruce,” Nemoto said. “The growths are tall, somewhat spindly. If we had come down in a forest more typical of Earth—”
“I know,” Malenfant growled. “We’d have crumpled like a cardboard box. You know, that path we cut through the trees reminds me of Star City. Moscow. Yuri Gagarin’s jet trainer came down into forest, and cut its way through the trees just like that. Ever since, they have cropped the trees to preserve the path. Gagarin’s last walk from the sky.”
“But our landing was not so terminal,” Nemoto said dryly. “Not yet anyhow.”
The sturdy little craft could never make another descent — but that didn’t matter, for it didn’t need to. The plan for the return to Earth was that Malenfant and Nemoto would fit a rocket pack to the lander’s rear end, raise the assembly upright, and take off vertically. And since the lander’s shell, sheltering its crew, hadn’t crumpled or broken or otherwise lost its integrity, the return flight might still be possible. All Malenfant had to do to get home, then, was to find the rocket pack when it came floating down from the sky after its separate journey from Earth — completing its lunar surface rendezvous, as the mission planners had called it — fit it and launch.
Oh, and find Emma.
Malenfant turned away from the lander and walked tentatively towards the edge of the forest. The gravity was indeed eerie, and it was hard not to break into a run.
The trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with parasites. Here a single snake-like liana wound around a trunk; here a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a not of ferns, orchids and other plants. From a bole in one aged trunk, an eye peered out at him. It was steady, unblinking, like an owl’s. He backed away, cautiously.
He found a tall, palm-like tree, with dead brown fronds piled at its base. He crouched down and rummaged in the litter until he had reached crimson dirt. It was dry and sandy, evidently poor in nutrients. When he touched it to his lips, it tasted sharply of blood, or iron. He spat out the grains. The dust seemed to drift slowly to the ground.
He picked out yellow fruit from the debris of fronds. With a sideways glance at his shoulder camera, he said, “Here’s some fruit that seems to have fallen from the tree up there. You can see it is shaped like a bent cylinder. It is yellow, and its skin is smooth and soft to the touch—”
A small brown ball unrolled from the middle of the nest of fronds. Malenfant yelped, stumbling back. The ball sprouted four stubby legs and shot out into the clearing. Malenfant had glimpsed beady black eyes, a spiky hide, for all the world like a hedgehog.
Nemoto walked up to him, her camera tracking the small creature.
“The double-domes said there would be no small animals here,” he grumbled. “Thin air, fast metabolism—”
“A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis, Malenfant. Perhaps our small friend evolved greater lung surfaces through a novel strategy like folding, or even a fractal design. Perhaps she conserves energy by spending periods dormant, like some reptiles. We are here to learn, after all.” She grabbed the fruit. “Your description of this banana was acute.” She peeled it briskly, exposing soft white flesh, and bit into it. “But it is a banana. A little stringy, the taste thin, but definitely Musa sapientum. And, of course, the thinness of the taste might be an artefact of the body fluid redistribution we have both suffered as a result of our spaceflight.”
Malenfant took another banana, peeled it and bit into it savagely. “You’re a real smart ass, Nemoto, you know that?”
“Malenfant, all the species here should be familiar, more or less. We have the hommid samples who fell through the portals to the Earth. Although their species is uncertain, their DNA sequencing was close to yours and mine…”
A shadow moved through the forest behind Nemoto: black on green, utterly silent, fluid.
“Holy shit,” Malenfant said.
The shadow moved forward, resolved, stepped into the light.
It was a woman. And yet it was not.
She must have been six feet tall, as tall as Malenfant. Her eyes locked on Malenfant’s, she bent, picked up the banana Nemoto had dropped, and popped it into her mouth, skin and all.
She was naked, hairless save for a dark triangle at her crotch and a tangle of tight curls on her head. She held nothing in her hands, wore no belt, carried no bag. She had the body of a nineteen-year-old tennis player, Malenfant thought, or a heptathlete: good muscles, high breasts. Perhaps her chest was a little enlarged, the ribs prominent, affording room for the larger lungs the theorists had anticipated, like an inhabitant of a 1950s dream of Mars. There was a liquid grace in her movements, a profound thoughtfulness in her stillness.
But over this wonderful body, and a small, child-like face, was the skull of a chimp. That was Malenfant’s first impression anyhow: there were ridges of bone over the eyes, a forehead that sloped sharply back. Not a chimp, no, but not human either.
Her eyes were blue and human.
“Homo erectus,” Nemoto was muttering nervously. “Or H. ergaster. Or some other species we never discovered. Or something unrelated to any hominid that ever evolved on Earth… And even if descended from some archaic stock, this is not a true Erectus, of course, but a descendant of that lineage shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution — just as a chimp is not like our common ancestor, but a fully evolved species in its own right.”
“You talk too much, Nemoto.”
“Yes… We have seen the reconstructions, inspected the bodies ejected from the Wheel. But to confront her alive, moving, is eerie.”
The hominid girl studied Malenfant with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of a child, without calculation or fear.
He stepped forward. He could smell the girl: unwashed, not like an animal, an intense locker-room smell. He felt a deep charge, pulling him to her. At first he thought it was an erotic attraction — and that was present too; the combination of that clear animal gaze and the beautiful, fully human body was undeniably compelling, even if he sensed those stringy arms could break his back if she chose. But what he felt was deeper than that. It was a kind of recognition, he thought.
“I know you,” he said.
The girl stared back at him.
Nemoto fidgeted behind him. “Malenfant, we were given protocols for encounters like this.”
He murmured, “I should offer her a candy and show her a picture card?” He returned his attention to the girl. “I know you,” he repeated.
I know who you are. We evolved together. Once my grandmother and yours ran around the echoing plains of Africa, side by side.
