McCann tried to rise. But Sprigge kicked his backside, knocking him flat again. Two of the Runners ripped McCann’s jacket from his back, exposing an expanse of pasty skin, and Sprigge loosened his whip.
Malenfant watched this, his own fists bunched.
Don’t do it, Malenfant. This isn’t your argument; it’s not even your damn world. Think of Emma. She is all that matters.
But as Sprigge raised his arm for the first lash, Malenfant hit him in the mouth, hard enough to knock him flat.
He didn’t remember much after that.
Shadow:
For days after her latest beating at One-eye’s hands. Shadow had stayed in her nest. There was a little fruit here, and dew to be sucked from the leaves. She found something like contentment, simply to be left in peace.
But the child developed rashes on his belly and inner thighs, and Shadow herself lost a lot of hair around her groin. Her hair, and the child’s, were matted with urine and faeces. In her illness she had failed to clean the child, or herself when the child fouled her.
She clambered down from the tree and set the child on the ground. When Shadow propped him up the child was actually able to sit up by himself — wobbling, his legs tangled, that great strange head bobbing like a heavy fruit, but sitting up nevertheless. She bathed him gently, with cool clean water from a stream. The coolness made the rash subside. The child’s infection was subsiding too, and his nose was almost free of snot.
The child clapped his little hands together, looked at them as if he had never seen them before, and gazed up at his mother with wide eyes.
Shadow embraced him, suddenly overwhelmed by her feelings, warm and deep red and powerful.
And a great mass caromed into her back, knocking her flat.
Her child was screaming. She forced herself to her knees and turned her head.
One-eye had the infant. He was sitting on the ground, holding the baby by his waist. The child’s heavy head lolled to and fro. One-eye was flanked by two younger men, who watched him intently. One-eye flicked the side of the child’s skull with a bloody finger, making the head roll further.
Shadow got to her feet. Her back was a mass of bruises. She walked forward unsteadily, and with every step pain lanced. She stood before One-eye and held her hands out for her child.
One-eye clutched the child closer to his chest, not roughly, and the child scrabbled at his fur, seeking to cling on. The other men watched Shadow with a cold calculation.
Shadow stood there, bewildered, hot, exhausted, aching. She didn’t know what One-eye wanted. She sat on the ground and lay back, opening her legs for him.
One-eye grinned. He held the child before him. And he bit into the front of its head. The child shuddered once, then was limp.
Shadow’s world dissolved into crimson rage. She was aware of the child’s body being hurled into the air, blood still streaming from the wound in his head, as limp as a chewed leaf. She lunged at One-eye, screaming in his face, clawing and biting. One-eye was knocked flat on the ground, and he raised his hands before his bloody face to ward off her blows.
Then the other men got hold of her shoulders and dragged her away. She kicked and fought, but she was weakened by her long deprivation, her heatings and her illness; she was no match for two burly men. At last they took her by an arm and a leg. They swung her in the air and hurled her against a broad tree trunk.
The men were still there, One-eye and the others, sitting in a tight circle on the ground. They were working at something. She heard the rip of flesh, smelled the stink of blood. She tried to rise, but could not, and she fell back into darkness.
The next time she woke she was alone. The light was gone, and only pale yellow Earthlight, filtered through the forest canopy, littered the ground.
She crawled to where the men had been sitting.
She picked up one small arm. A strip of gristle at the shoulder showed where it had been twisted from the torso. The hand was still in place, perfectly formed, clenched into a tiny fist.
She was high in a tree, in a roughly prepared nest. She didn’t remember getting there. It was day, the sun high and hot.
She remembered her baby. She remembered the tiny hand.
By the time she clambered down from the tree, her determination was as pure as fast-running water.
Emma Stoney:
Emma trudged wearily over the soft sand of the ocean shore. The ocean itself was a sheet of steel, visibly curving at the horizon, and big low-gravity waves washed across it languidly.
This strip of yellow-white beach lay between the ocean and a stretch of low dunes. Further inland she saw a grassy plain, a blanket of green that rippled as the wind touched it, studded here and there by knots of trees. A herd of grazing animals moved slowly across the plain, their collective motion flowing, almost liquid; they looked like huge wild horses. The stretch of savannah ended in a cliff of some dark volcanic rock, and a dense forest spilled over the lip of the cliff, a thick green-black. It was a scene of life, of geological and biological harmony, characterized by the scale and slow pace of this world. In any other context it might have been beautiful.
But Emma walked warily, the rags of her flight suit flapping around her, her loose pack strapped to her back with bits of vegetable rope, a wooden spear in one hand and a basalt axe in the other. Beautiful or not, this was a world full of dangerous predators — not least, the humans.
And then she saw a flash of blue fabric, high on the cliff.
She walked up the beach towards the cliff, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart.
Every day her mood swung between elation and feverish hope, to bitterness that bordered on despair. One day at a time, Emma. Think like a Ham. Take it one day at a time.
But now she could see the lander itself. She broke into a run, staring, wishing her eyes had a zoom feature.
It was unmistakably NASA technology, like a stubby scale-model Space Shuttle, with black and white protective tiles. It was surrounded by shreds of its blue parafoil. But it was stuck in a clump of trees, halfway down the cliff; it looked like some fat moth clinging to the rock.
“Nice landing, Malenfant,” she murmured.
Disturbingly, she saw no sign that anybody had done anything constructive up there. There were no ropes leading up or down the cliff, no stars and stripes waving, no SOS sign carved into the foliage.
Maybe the crew hadn’t survived the crash.
She put that thought aside. They could have gotten out before the lander had plummeted over the cliff, even ejected on the way down. There were many possibilities. At the very least, there should be stuff she could use — tools, a first aid kit, maybe even a radio.
Messages from home.
What was for sure was that she was going to have to get up that cliff to find out. And she wasn’t going to make it up there alone.
There was an encampment of Hams, a squat hut of skin weighted down with stone, almost directly under the blue flash. She could see them moving around before the hut, slabs of muscle wrapped in crudely cut skins.
That was how she was going to get up that damn cliff.
She forced herself to slow. One step at a time, Emma; you know the protocol. It was going to be hard to be patient, to engage a new group of Hams once again. But that was what she was going to have to do.
She dropped her pack at the edge of the sea, and splashed her face with salt water. Then she walked up and down the beach, picking out bits of scattered driftwood. She found a long, straight branch, and selected a handful of thorny sticks. She took her favoured hand-axe and, with a skill born of long hours of practice and many cut fingers, she made notches in one end of the stick, wide enough to fit the thorny twigs. Then she took a bit of rawhide string from her pack, and wrapped it around the stick, lashing the barbs in place.
Thus, one harpoon.
She slipped off her boots and socks and coverall and waded into the shallows, harpoon raised.
Fishing had become her speciality. It didn’t seem to have occurred to any of the Ham communities here to figure out how to catch fish, either in the ocean or in freshwater streams. Fish meat, exotic but appealing, made a good bribe.
There was a ripple at her feet, a roughly diamond shape that emerged briefly from the sand. She stabbed down hard, feeling the crunch of breaking wood.
She found she had speared a skate, a big brown fleshy square of a fish, maybe two feet across. Skate buried themselves in the mud, coming up at night to hunt shellfish. Her catch was wriggling violently, and it was all she could do to hold on to the harpoon. With a grunting effort she heaved the skate over her head and out onto the sand, where it flopped, slowly dying. One bit of lingering squeamishness was a reluctance to kill anything; acknowledging the hypocrisy, she let her victims die instead.
She splashed out of the water. Briskly she inspected her harpoon, considering whether it was worth keeping; she had learned to conserve her energy and time, never throwing away anything that might be used again. But the barbs were broken. She stripped off the hide string and stuffed it back into her pack, and let the bits of the harpoon fall, abandoning this thing she had made that would have been beyond her imagining a few months ago, forgetting it as carelessly as any every-day-a-new-day Ham craftsman.
With her hand-axe she skinned and gutted the fish. You had to avoid the guts, and the skin could be coated by toxic mucus or dangerous spines: tricks she remembered from her childhood camping-in-the-woods days.
Then she pulled on her coverall and boots, picked up the skate meat and her pack, and walked steadily up the beach towards the Ham encampment.
These Hams accepted her silent presence in the corner of their hut, as readily as every other group she had encountered. They predictably turned away from her first offer of skate meat. But she continued to bring home gifts from the sea, until they had, one by one, experimentally, begun to taste the pale, sharp flesh.
So she settled into her corner of the communal hut, wrapping herself each night in grimy bits of parachute canvas, watching the Hams, waiting for some opportunity to find a way up the cliff to the lander.
She learned their names — Abel and Ruth and Saul and Mary — odd quasi-Biblical names, presumably bequeathed to them, like their fractured English, by some ancient contact with humans, Zealots or other “Skinny-folk’. She tried to follow their complex social interactions, much of it centring on speculative gossip about the vigorous child-woman Mary.
They were typical Hams. Come to that, all Hams were typical Hams.
Their English was broken — mispronounced, with missing or softened “G” and “K” and “th” sounds and vowels that blurred to sameness. The language had tenses past, future — and there were even conditionals, used for instance by gossiping women as they speculated what would follow if Mary gave herself to Saul, or if she fell for Abraham’s clumsy wooing first. But their language was elemental, with a simple vocabulary focusing on each other, their bodies, the hut.
As for Mary herself, she was clearly at the centre of a storm of hormonal change, relishing and fearing all the attention she got at the same time. But she never teased, Emma observed, never
