From here Malenfant could make out the full sweep of the ship’s length, a slim spear that must have been two hundred yards long. Its lovely back was broken; and green tendrils clutched at the ship, as if pulling it into the belly of the Moon that had killed it. But still a solitary fin poked out of the greenery, crumpled but defiant. The fin bore a faded roundel that reminded Malenfant of the logo of the Royal Air Force.
The Ham man, Thomas, walked beside the ship close to McCann, keeping his eyes on the Englishman.
“He is loyal,” said Malenfant. “He looks out for you all the time.”
“He knows I have done my best to improve the lot of his people.”
Even if it didn’t need improving, Malenfant thought. “But he seems to be having trouble looking at the rocket.”
“The bar-bar mind is rigid, Malenfant. Conservative beyond imagining, they are utterly resistant to the new. At the beginning we had a devil of a battle to keep them from destroying our gear — even when tamed, a bar-bar still harbours destructive tendencies.”
Malenfant recalled the fate of his shoulder camera. He said, “That almost seems superstitious.”
“Oh, not that. There is no superstition among the bar-bars: there is no magic in their world, no sense of the numinous. To them the surface of the world is everything; they do not see hidden meanings, nor seek deeper explanations.”
“They have no gods, then.”
“Nor can they even conceive of the possibility.” McCann smiled. “And what a loss that is. I am sure they are well spared propitiations to the savage and bloody gods of the jungle. But they cannot know the Mercy of the one true God. You understand, it is not merely that they do not know Him — they cannot. And without God, there is no order to their lives, no meaning — save what we provide.” He tapped Malenfant on the chest with the worn head of his walking stick. “I know you are uncomfortable with our relationship to these barbarians, Malenfant. I see it in your eyes. I’ve seen it in Africa, when men of conscience go among the Kaffirs there. But can’t you see it is our duty to provide them with a Johannen way of life — even if they can’t comprehend its meaning? — just as the philosophers and theologians have been proposing since the first steel clippers found these bar-bars” cousins running wild in the New World.”
Malenfant studied Thomas’s face, but could see no hint of reaction to McCann’s sermonizing.
McCann began to talk briskly about the horsepower generated by the “Darwin engines” that had once powered the ship. “I know your little tub came gliding in like a bat. We applied a little more brute force. In the last stages of its descent the redoubtable was intended to land upright on Earth or Moon, standing on its rocket exhaust. And it should have taken off in the same manner.”
“Direct ascent,” Malenfant said. It was a mode that had been considered for Apollo’s lunar landings, a whole ship traversing back and forth between Earth and Moon. But aside from the greater expense compared to the final Lunar Module design, landing such a giant ship with rockets would have posed stability problems, like an ICBM landing on its tail.
From McCann’s descriptions, it sounded as if that had been the downfall of the Redoubtable.
“She was a veteran,” McCann said softly. “She had done the Earth-Moon round trip a dozen times or more. But now we were dealing with a new Moon, you see. Well, we hastily modified her for her new mission. She landed on her fins well enough on the fields at Cosford, but this crater floor is no tarmacadam strip in Shropshire. She was top-heavy, and—” He fell silent, studying the ruined carcass of the ship. “I was navigator; I must share responsibility for the disaster that followed. Most of us got out, by the Mercy of God.” He clapped Malenfant on the back, forcing a laugh. “And since then our lovely ship has been scavenged to make cooking pots.”
“Erasmus Darwin,” Nemoto called.
Malenfant looked down.
Nemoto was standing in the ruins of the habitable compartment, peering up at him. Her face was like a brown coin in the gloom. “The Darwin drive,” she said. “Grandfather of Charles, who is probably the Darwin you’re thinking of, Malenfant. In the 1770s he sketched a simple liquid-fuel rocket engine, along with a ramjet. In our world, the sketch languished unnoticed in his notebooks until the 1990s. But in Mr McCann’s world—”
McCann nodded. “The design was the seed around which a new generation of rockets and missiles grew. After the pioneering work of Congreve, the Brunels, father and son, became involved in the development of craft capable of carrying heavy loads into the atmosphere. The first dummy load was orbited around the Earth before the death of Victoria, Empress of the Moon, and the first manned flight beyond the atmosphere was launched from Ceylon in 1920… Ah, but none of this happened in your world, did it, Malenfant? It is a divergence of history. In your world Darwin was ignored or forgotten, his ideas no doubt rediscovered by some other, more vigorous nation.”
“Something like that.”
Nemoto moved on, working her way through the ship’s gloomy interior.
McCann watched her, then leaned closer to Malenfant. “Always watching, thinking, recording, your little Oriental friend — eh, Malenfant?”
“That’s her way,” Malenfant said cautiously. “And it’s our mission. Part of it, anyhow.”
“And quite the fount of knowledge about obscure British philosophers two centuries dead.” McCann’s eyes narrowed. “I have observed the gadget she carries.”
Malenfant saw no point in lying. “It’s called a softscreen.”
“Its working is no doubt beyond my comprehension, but its purpose is clear enough. It is a repository of knowledge, from which Madam Nemoto sips as she requires. I am a man of this dismal jungle now, Malenfant, but you need not think me a fool.”
“Take it easy, McCann.”
McCann frowned, as if decoding the colloquialism. “Without my shelter you would both surely be ‘taking it easy’ beneath the crimson dust by now. Remember that.” When Malenfant did not answer, McCann clapped him on the shoulder again. “Enough of one beached vessel; let us seek another. Come.” McCann began to clamber down to the ground, into the helpful arms of the Ham who served him.
It took another two hours to reach the clearing dug out by the lander on its way down.
The lander was gone.
This was the place he remembered: the Gagarin avenue cut through | the trees, the scattered bushes and branches — and even bits of blue ! parafoil, grimy, damp, still clinging to the damaged foliage. But the | lander was gone.
McCann stalked over the grass, inspecting ripped-up bushes, scattered trees. “You’re sure this is the place?”
“It can’t be.”
Nemoto approached him. “Malenfant, you are not a man who has trouble remembering where he parked the car.”
Malenfant wanted to believe the lander was sitting someplace else, where it had fallen, as battered and crumpled and precious as when he and Nemoto had so foolishly become parted from it — a key part of the technological ladder that would take him, and Emma, home. But there could be no doubt.
“We’re stranded, Nemoto,” he blurted. “As stranded as these damn English.”
“Perhaps we always were,” she said evenly.
He hitched his pack of tied-up skin, containing all his belongings, all that was left of Earth. “We’re a pretty pathetic expeditionary force.”
She shrugged. “We still have the most important tools: our minds, and our hands, and our knowledge.” She eyed him. “What do you intend to do now?”
“Let’s get out of here. We have to find the lander. There’s nothing more we can achieve with these English. I hate to be a bad guest, but I’m not sure how well McCann will take our leaving.”
“Not well, I fear,” Nemoto said dryly. And she stepped back.
A hand clamped on Malenfant’s arm. It was a Ham, not Thomas.
McCann came walking up, leaning on his stick, his broad face red and grim. “Thank you, Madam Nemoto,” he said. “He has behaved just as you predicted.”
“Malenfant glared at Nemoto, disbelieving. “You betrayed me. You warned him I’d try something.”
“You are very predictable, Malenfant.” She sighed, impatient, her face expressionless. “You should not make the mistake of believing we share the same agenda, Malenfant. This new Moon, this Red Moon, is the greatest mystery in recorded history — a mystery that deepens with every day that passes, everything we learn. Unless we discover the truth behind it, we will have accomplished nothing.”
“And you believe you can achieve that by staying here, with McCann?”
“We need a base, Malenfant. We need resources. We can’t spend our whole lives looking over our shoulders for the next stone axe to fall, or grubbing around in the forest for food. These British have all that.”
“And what of Emma?”
Nemoto said nothing, but McCann said smoothly, “Our scouts and hunters range far and wide, Malenfant. If she is here, we will find her for you.”
If your Ham scouts tell you everything they see, Malenfant thought. He fingered the little lens in his pocket.
“Let’s look at the matter in a sensible light,” McCann said now. “I know you think little of me, Malenfant. But once again I assure you I am not a fool. I desire more than a chess partner; I desire escape from this place — what man wouldn’t? Now you have fallen from the sky into my lap, and only a fool would let you go, for surely your Americans will come looking for you from that blue Earth of yours. And when they do, they will find me.”
“My world isn’t your world,” Malenfant snarled.
“But my world is lost,” McCann said wistfully. “And I know you have an England. Perhaps I will find a place there.” His face hardened, and Malenfant perceived a new toughness. This was, Malenfant remembered, a representative of a breed who had carved out a global empire — and on a much more hostile planet than Earth. “Providence has given me my chance and I must take it. I believe that in keeping you now, in following the promptings of my own infallible heart, I see the workings of Omnipotence. Is this moral arrogance? But without such beliefs man would never have left the trees and the caves, and remained like our pre-sapient and pongid cousins.” He glanced at Nemoto. “As for your companion’s slight treachery — perhaps she is destined to betray you, over and over, on all Anaxarchus’s infinity of worlds. What do you think?” And he brayed laughter.
The little column formed up for the homeward journey. The big Ham called Thomas took his place beside Malenfant. And he winked broadly.
Emma Stoney:
A day after leaving the first troupe, Emma found another group of Hams, women and a few infants foraging for berries and fruit. They had regarded her blankly, but then, seeing she was no threat — and, as not one of them, of no conceivable interest — they had turned away and continued their gathering.
Emma waited patiently until they were done. Then she followed them back to their encampment.
She stayed here a couple of days, and then moved on, seeking another troupe.
And then on again.
Hams were basically the same, wherever she found them. Their tool-making, for instance. Though each group varied its kit a little according to circumstances, like the availability of different types of stone — and perhaps, she speculated, some slight cultural tradition — still, if something was not in their tool making repertoire, which was evidently very ancient and fixed, no Ham was interested.
