where the vegetation grows a little more thickly.
“Here is what I propose. We will cut across the plain, meeting the river valley at this point, where there is a crossing place to the south bank, which is the greener. We will follow the river, heading steadily west, following it upstream as it works its way through the mountains, and using the vegetation and its inhabitants as our base resource. Thus we will seek out these shy Runner bands of yours. And if we fail to find your Emma before the character of the country changes — well, we will think of something else.”
Malenfant felt tempted to argue with this strategy. But he had no better ideas of how to explore a continent-wide desert, in search of a single person. And there might be a logic to it: whatever she was doing, whoever she was with, Emma surely couldn’t be anywhere else but close to water.
The river, then. He nodded curtly. McCann grinned and scuffed over his map with the sole of his boot.
They heard a cry.
It was Julia. She was hunting a lame deer. She had stripped naked and was running flat out towards it; baffled by a rock outcropping, the animal turned the wrong way, and Julia fell on the animal’s neck and wrestled it to the ground.
“Dinner is served,” McCann said dryly.
“There must be an easier way to make a living,” Malenfant said.
McCann shrugged. “You don’t find much to admire about these non-human humans, do you, Malenfant? Don’t you envy Julia her brutal strength, her immersion in the bloody moment, her uncomplicated heart?”
“No,” Malenfant said quietly.
They entered the desert.
Malenfant sacrificed more parafoil silk to make a hat and a scarf for his neck, and he added a little of a silvered survival blanket to the top of his hat to deflect the sunlight. After the first couple of days his eyes hurt badly in the powerful light. In his pack was a small chemical-film camera; he broke this open with a rock, and tied the fogged film over his eyes with a length of “chute cord.
McCann fared a little better. His ancient suit of skin, well-worn and much-used, had a hood he could pull over his head, and various ingenious flaps he could open to make the suit more or less porous.
Julia’s squat bow-legged frame was made for short bursts of extreme energy, not for the steady slog of a desert hike. She struggled as her feet sank into the soft, stingingly hot sand. But she kept on, grinning, self-deprecating, her tongue lolling from her open mouth, her sparse hair plastered to the top of her head.
Anyhow it wasn’t a desert, Malenfant supposed; not strictly. Life flourished, after a fashion. In the red dust shrubs and cacti battled for space with the ubiquitous stands of spiky spinifex grass. Lizards of species he couldn’t identify scuttled after insects. He spotted a kind of mouse hopping by like a tiny kangaroo. He had no idea how such a creature could survive here; maybe it had some way of manufacturing its own water from the plants it chewed on.
Not a desert, then. Probably a climatologist would call it a temperate semi desert. But it was dry as toast, and hot enough for Malenfant.
It was a relief to them all when they reached the river.
Malenfant and Julia pulled off their clothes and ran with howls of relief into the sluggish water. McCann was a little more decorous, but he stripped down to his trousers and paddled cautiously. Malenfant splashed silty-brown liquid into his face, and watched improbably large droplets hover around him; he felt as if his skin were sucking in the water directly through his pores.
Great islands floated past, natural rafts of reed and water-hyacinth, emissaries from the continent’s far interior, a startling procession of vegetation on its way to the sea. It was a reminder that this single mighty stream drained an area the size of India.
The river flowed sluggishly between yellow sandstone cliffs streaked with white and black. Here and there he saw sandbars strewn with black or brown boulders mudstones and shales, said McCann, laid down in ancient swamps. The sedimentary strata here were all but horizontal, undisturbed: these were rocks that had remained stable for a great length of time, for a thousand million years and more. This Moon was a small, static world.
Life flourished close to the river. The bank was crowded with plants that craved the direct sunlight, bushes and lianas competing for space. Even behind them the first rank of trees was draped with lianas, ferns and orchids, overshadowed only by the occasional climbing palm. Wispy manioc shrubs grew on the lower slopes. Speckled toads croaked all along the river bank, and fireflies the size of earwigs, each of them making a spark of green light, danced and darted in the tangled shadows of the trees.
A vast spider-web stretched between two relatively bare tree trunks. It was heavy with moisture, and glistened silver-white, like strings of pearls. Looking closer, Malenfant saw that many spiders, maybe a hundred or more, inhabited the web. A social species of spider?
Objects hung from the higher branches of the palms, like pendulous fruit, leathery and dark brown, each maybe a foot long.
“They are bats,” McCann murmured. “They have wing spans of a yard or more. Those are males. At night they call for the attention of females.” He rammed his fingers into his nostrils, and cried, “Kwok! Kwok! And the females fly up and down the line for hours, selecting the male who sings the most sweetly…”
After a time Julia clambered out of the water. She took a handful of palm oil from a wooden gourd in McCann’s pack, and worked it into her skin, paying attention to every crease and the spaces between her fingers and toes. When she stood, her skin shone, lustrous. She was silent, beautiful.
McCann went fishing. He found a spot where the bank curved, cupping a still, shallow patch of water, thick with reeds. He took leaves from a pretty little bush with white flowers shaped like bells. He scattered the flowers in the river, over the still spot.
Above the shallower water, by the reed-beds, dragonflies hovered and zigzagged, big scarlet creatures the size of small birds. Sometimes they dipped their abdomens into the river, breaking the sluggish, oily surface of the water. Perhaps they were laying eggs, Malenfant mused, wishing he knew more natural history; when you got down to it he knew very little about his own world, let alone this exotic new one.
To Malenfant’s surprise, fish started coming to the surface in front of McCann, their fins breaking the oily meniscus, their mouths popping. Evidently they couldn’t breathe. McCann, stocky, determined, splashed into the water and started grabbing the fish, holding their tails and slamming their heads against rocks on the bank.
Malenfant thought he saw something move through the water. He scrambled out fast.
It had been bigger than any fish, but not the distinctive shape of a croc or an alligator — something that must have been at least his size, and covered with sleek hair, like a seal. But neither of the others noticed anything, so he didn’t mention it.
They spent a day at the side of the river, and replenished their stock of fish, then moved on, heading steadily west.
By noon the following day they had come to a place which showed signs of habitation. A small beach close to the river was littered with blackened scars, perhaps the marks of hearths, and neat rings of holes showed in the ground. When Malenfant walked here his boots crunched over a litter of stone tools. Julia cowered, her huge arms wrapped around her torso. Malenfant asked, “What is it? A Runners” camp?”
McCann’s face was grim. “Runners are not so permanent as this — and nor do they make such structures. See these holes? They are for the wooden supports of tents and the like… But see the scattering of the fires, the heaps of discarded tools. Men do not conduct themselves so, Malenfant; we would build a single fire; we would take our tools with us. This is a Ham settlement — or was. And, look, the great thickness of the debris tells of a long occupation, which is of course typical of these dogged, infinitely patient Hams. But it was an occupation that was ended bloodily. Here, and here…” Stains on rocks, that might have been dried blood. “They are recent. It is the Zealots, Malenfant. We must be alert for their scouts.”
Julia was clearly distressed here. They moved on quickly.
After that, another day’s hike took them to the spot McCann had picked out as a possible crossing place. On the far side of the river, just as he had promised, the land was flatter and less rocky, and there was more life: a few shrubs, some straggling trees, even patches of green grass.
And, stretched between the banks, tied firmly to a rock on either side, there was a rope.
Malenfant and McCann inspected the rope dubiously. It seemed to be of vegetable fibre, woven tightly together into a thick cord.
McCann picked at the rope. “Look at this. I think this material has been worked by teeth.”
“It isn’t human, is it?”
McCann smiled. “Certainly this is not what our hands would make — but we have never observed the Hams or the Runners use ropes on such a scale, or to have the imaginative intellect to make a bridge — and still less the Elves or Nutcrackers.” He looked around coolly. “Perhaps there are others here, other pre-sapient types we have yet to encounter.”
Malenfant grunted. “Well, whoever they are, I’m glad they came this way.”
Malenfant crossed first. He went naked. He probed at the river bed with a wooden pole as he inched forward, and he dragged another rope, a length of “chute cord, tied around his waist. The water never came higher than his ribs.
Once he was across, he and McCann started to transfer their packs of clothes and food. They used a karabiner clip from Malenfant’s NASA jumpsuit to attach each pack to the ropes, then pulled at the “chute cord to jiggle the packs across.
Julia came next. She entered the water with a dogged determination that overcame her obvious reluctance — which wasn’t surprising, as her stocky frame was too densely packed for her to float; whatever else they were capable of, Neandertals couldn’t swim. McCann fixed a loop of cord around her waist and clipped her to the “chute line with the karabiner clip. Then he and Malenfant kept a tight hold of the “chute line as she crossed — though whether they could have retrieved her great weight from the water if something had gone wrong Malenfant wasn’t sure.
It took no more than an hour for them all to get across. They spread out their gear to dry, and rested. Cleansed by the water, lying on warm rocks, Malenfant found he enjoyed the touch of the sun on his face, the arid breeze that blew off the desert.
Julia grunted, pointing at the river. There were creatures in the water.
They were sleek swimmers, their hair long and slicked down, their bodies streamlined. Their hands and feet were clearly webbed — but those hands had five fingers, and the small-brained heads had recognizable eyes and noses and mouths. They were churning in the water, clambering over each other like mackerel in a net. Oblivious of Malenfant and the others, they seemed to be lunging at the sky, their round eyes shining.
They were hominids.
“Swimmers,” said McCann morosely. “Sometimes they’ll steal fish off your line… The Hams have stories of how a Swimmer will aid you if you get yourself into trouble in the water, but I’ve never observed such a thing. And, do you know, they appear to sleep with only one eye shut at a time; perhaps they need to keep conscious enough to control their breathing…”
Malenfant imagined a troupe of Australopithecines, perhaps, scooped from some quasi-African plain a couple of million years ago, and dumped by the merciless working of the electric-blue portals on an isolated outcrop of rock on some watery Earth. Ninety-nine out of a hundred such colonies would surely have starved quickly — even if they hadn’t drowned first. But a few survived, and learned to use the water, seeking fish and vegetation — and, in time, they left the land behind altogether…
And now here were their descendants, scooped up by another Wheel, stranded once again on the Red Moon.
Hominids like dolphins. How strange, Malenfant thought.
Something immense collided with the back of his head.
He was on the ground. He felt something pushing down on his back. A foot, maybe. One eye was pressed into the ground, but the other was exposed, and could see.
That fat new Earth still swam in the sky.
He heard a commotion. Maybe Julia was putting up a fight. A face — runtish, filthy — eclipsed the Banded Earth.
