It had been this way for two hundred thousand years.
The Worker carried her away from the Market’s crowded centre towards its fringe. The crowds thinned out, and Manekato felt a calming relief to be alone. Alongside an impossibly tall building the Worker paused and hunched down, letting her slip to the ground.
A door dilated in the side of the building. She glanced into the interior; it was filled with darkness.
Reluctant to enter immediately, she loped further along the gleaming, dust-free road. Not far beyond the building the ground fell away. She was approaching the rim of the summit plateau, worn smooth by the feet and hands of visitors. She leaned forward curiously. The mountain’s shallow flanks fell away into thicker, murky air; far below she glimpsed green growing things.
And she saw the Air Wall.
It was like a bank of windblown cloud, moving swiftly, grey and boiling. But this cloud bank hung vertically from the sky, and the clouds streamed horizontally past her. Now that it was not masked. by the buildings she could see how the great Wall curved around the mountain-top, enclosing it neatly. It stretched down like a curtain to the ground below, where dust storms perpetually beat against the struggling vegetation, and it stretched up towards the sky.
It was not easy for her to look up, for her back tilted forward, and her neck was thick, heavily muscled, adapted to fight the Wind. Besides, at home there was generally nothing to see but a lid of streaked, scudding cloud. But now she tipped back awkwardly, raising her chinless jaw.
It was like peering up into a tunnel, lined by scraps of hurrying cloud. And at the very end of the tunnel there was a patch of clear blue.
She had never before seen the sky beyond the clouds.
She shuddered. She hurried inside the building.
And there she met her brother.
Reid Malenfant:
While he waited for an opportunity to progress his mission, Malenfant ate and drank as much as he could, and after the first day put his body through some gentle exercise. He stretched and pushed up and pounded around the red dust of the neat little stockade in his vest and shorts, while Ham servants watched with a kind of absent curiosity, and Runners hooted and shook their shackling ropes. The low gravity made him feel stronger, but conversely the reduced oxygen content of the low-pressure air weakened him. If he over-exerted himself he would soon run out of air; his chest would ache, and, in the worst cases, black spots would gather around his vision.
But he would adapt. And for now, it did no harm to test his limits.
McCann took him for tourist-guide jaunts around the compound, and even beyond. He seemed childishly eager to show off what he and his companions had built here.
McCann said the English had tried to mine mudstone — a kind of natural brick so as to build better houses. “We have the raw muscle, among the Runners and the Hams,” McCann said. “That’s fine for hauling, lifting and dragging. But they can’t be set to fine work, Malenfant; not without a man’s constant supervision. You certainly can’t send off a party even of the Hams to a mudstone seam and expect them to return with anything but a jumble of gouged-out, misshapen rocks — nothing like bricks, you see — that’s if they bring back anything at all.”
There were a lot of pleasurable knick-knacks to inspect, constructed over long hours by the ingenious hands of these bored Englishmen. Malenfant, a gadget fan, pored over wooden locks, clocks and slide rules, all made entirely of wood.
McCann had even maintained a crude calendar system — though it was little more than marks on wood. “Like a rune staff,” McCann said, grimacing. “How far we have fallen. But we haven’t quite mastered the knack of paper-making, you see; needs must. And besides this wandering world has a damnably irregular sky. Even the stars swim about sometimes, you know. But we try to impose order. We do try.”
Everything was made of wood, or stone, or bone, or material manufactured from vegetable products. You could make rope, for instance, from birch bark, pine roots or willow. Ham women baked pine bread made from phloem, the soft white flesh just inside the tree’s bark. You could drink the sap of birch trees, if you had to. And there were medicinal products: spruce resin to ease gut ache. And so on.
McCann said, “This benighted world is bereft of metals, you see — of sizeable ore lodes, anyhow, so far as we could find. Of course the very dust is iron oxide — hematite, I think — but we have notably failed to establish a workable extraction regime… It was an early disappointment, and all the more severe for that. And we were reluctant to mine the only source of refined metals here — I mean our ship, of course. As long as we clung to hope that we might escape this jungle world, we were reluctant to turn our only vessel into pots and pans. All seems a little foolish now, doesn’t it? And so ours is an economy of stone and wood. We have become like our woad-wearing forebears. Amusing, isn’t it?”
They came to a hut where a Ham woman, somewhat bent, was ladling water from a wooden bucket at her feet. Malenfant, glimpsing machinery, poked his head inside the hut, and allowed his eyes to adjust to the shade.
A big wooden container sat on a stand above a smouldering fire. There was some kind of mash inside the container: the woman showed him, though she had to remove a lid sealed with some kind of wax to do it. Two narrow bamboo pipes led down from the container. Condenser pipes, Malenfant thought. The pipes finished in v-notches that tipped their contents neatly into gourds…
“It’s a still,” Malenfant breathed. “Holy shit. Hillbilly stuff. Just the way Jack Daniels started. God, I love this stuff.”
McCann preened, inordinately proud; briefly Malenfant was taken back to his pre launch inspections at Vandenberg and elsewhere.
Immediately outside the stockade the forest seemed sparse. The leaves were a pale green, lighter than usual, and lianas tangled everywhere, irregular. Though there were sudden patches of shade, much of the ground was open to the sun; there was no solid canopy here.
This area had been cleared, Malenfant realized — twenty, thirty years ago? — and then abandoned. And now, oblivious to the failed ambitions of the stranded English, the forest was claiming back the land. He gazed at the ground, and thought he discerned the straight-line edges of forgotten fields, like Roman ruins.
But even out here there were signs of rudimentary industry. A charcoal pile had been constructed: just a heap of logs with earth piled over the top, steadily burning. And there was a tar pit, a hole in the ground filled with pine logs, buried under a layer of earth. The logs burned steadily, and crude wooden guttering brought out the tar.
They came to a stand of small oil-palm trees that clung to the banks of a stream. They were slim and upright with scruffy green fronds, holding onto the slope with prop-roots, like down-turned fingers curling out from the base of their pale grey trunks. Under the direction of one or two of the Hams, Runner workers gathered oil from the flesh of the nut and the kernel of the seeds, and sap from shallow cuts near the trees” bases.
. “You cook with the oil, or you make soap with it,” McCann said. “And if you were to hang a bucket under that cut in the trunk you’d be rewarded by ready made palm wine, Malenfant. Nature is bountiful sometimes, even here. Though it takes human ingenuity to exploit it to the full, of course.”
McCann even showed Malenfant the poignant ruin of a windmill. Crudely constructed, it was a box of wood already overgrown by vegetation and with daylight showing through cracks in its panels. Later McCann showed him elaborate drawings, crammed into the blank pages of yellowing log books. There had been ambitious schemes for different designs of mills — ‘magpie mills’ with a tail to turn into the wind, and even a water mill — none of them realized. “We never had the labour, you see. Your Ham or your Runner is strong as an ox. But you can’t teach him to build, or to maintain, anything more complex than a hand-axe or a spear. He will go where you tell him, do what you tell him, but no more; he has no initiative or advanced skill, not a scrap. One had to oversee everything, every hand turned to the work. After a time — well, and with no hope for the future — one rather became disheartened.”
McCann was obviously desperate for company, and it was hard to blame him. He challenged Malenfant to a game of chess — which Malenfant refused, never having grasped the game. Despite this McCann set out crudely carved wooden pieces, and moved them around the board in fast, well-practised openings. “I played a lot with old Crawford before he lost his wits. I do miss the game. I even tried to teach the bar-bars to play! — but though they appear capable of remembering the moves of the pieces, not even the brightest of them, even Julia, could grasp its essence, the purpose. Still, I would have Julia or another sit where you are sitting, Malenfant, and serve as a sort of token companion as I played out solitary games…”
As he pushed the pieces around the board McCann bombarded Malenfant with anecdotes and memories, of his time here on the Red Moon and on his own lost version of Earth.
But the talk was unsatisfactory. They were exiles from different versions of parallel Earths. They could compare notes on geography and the broad sweep of history, but they had no detail in common. None of the historical figures in. their worlds seemed to map across to each other. Although McCann seemed to follow a variant of Christianity — something like Calvinism, so far as Malenfant could determine — his “Christ” was not Jesus, but a man called John; “Christian” translated, roughly, to “Johannen’.
No doubt all this was fascinating as a study of historical inevitability. But it made for lousy small talk. McCann strove to mask his profound disappointment that Malenfant was not from the home where he had left a wife and child, a family from whom he had not heard since their world had disappeared from the sky.
Conversely Malenfant told McCann what he could of Emma, and asked if anyone like her had shown up, here on the Red Moon. But McCann seemed to know little of what went on beyond the limits of the stockade, and the scrap of Red Moon he and his colleagues controlled. Malenfant, frustrated, realized afresh he was going to have to find Emma alone.
McCann said now, “Solitary, seeking diversion, I discovered the intricate delights of the knight’s tour.” He swept the board empty of pieces, save for a solitary knight, which he made hop in its disturbingly asymmetrical fashion from square to square. “The knight must move from square to square over an empty board, touching all the cells, but each only once. An old schoolboy puzzle… I quickly discovered that a three-by-four board is the smallest on which such a tour can be made. I have discovered many tours on the standard chessboard, many of which have fascinating properties. A closed tour, for example, starts and ends at the same cell.” The knight moved around the board with bewildering rapidity. “I do not know how many tours are possible. I suspect the number may be infinite.” He became aware of Malenfant’s uncomfortable silence.
Malenfant tried to soften his look — how sane would you be after so many decades alone on Neandertal Planet, Malenfant?
Embarrassed, McCann swept the pieces into a wooden box. “Rather like our situation here, don’t you think?” he said, forcing a smile. “We move from world to world with knight’s hops, forward a bit and sideways. We must hope our tours are closed too, eh?”
After the first night McCann gave the two of them separate huts. In this dwindling colony there was plenty of room.
Malenfant found it impossible to sleep. Lying in his battered sod hut, he gazed through his window as the night progressed.
He heard the calls of the predators as the last light faded. Then there was an utter stillness, as if the world were holding its breath — and then a breath of wind and a coolness that marked the approaching dawn.
Malenfant wasn’t used to living so close to nature. He felt as if he were trapped within some vast machine.
His head rattled with one abortive scheme after another. He was a man who was used to taking control of a situation, of bulling his way through, of pushing until something gave. This wasn’t his world, and he had arrived here woefully ill-equipped; he still couldn’t see any way forward more promising than just pushing into the forest on foot, at random. He had to wait, to figure out the situation, to find an option with a reasonable chance of success. But still his enforced passivity was burning him up.
The door opened.
The Neandertal girl came into his hut. She was carrying a bowl of water that steamed softly, a fresh towel, a jug that might hold nettle tea.
He said softly, “Julia.”
She stood still in the grey dawn light, the glow from the window picking out the powerful contours of her face. “Here, Baas.”
“Do you know what’s going on here?”
She waited.
He waved a hand. “All of this. The Red Moon. Different worlds.”
“Ask Ol” Ones,” she said softly.
“Who?”
