Shiver pursued, but she was soon out of his reach. He ran back and forth across the bloodied forest floor, howling and throwing rocks and kicking at the trees, ridding himself of his desperate aggression.
Shadow fell on Stripe. She jabbered at him, and hailed blows on his head and shoulders. He huddled over, long arms protecting his head and chest.
For now Smile had been spared. But it was only the beginning.
Shadow’s next target was Little Boss. She took six men with her, armed with sticks and rocks, and patrolled the forest until she found him.
Little Boss was alone, drinking from a small stream. Beside him was a pile of cobbles, suitable for making sharp new tools. When he heard Shadow’s party approach, he stood straight, hair immediately erect, and snarled defiance. By this time, the newcomers” murderous aggression was well known among Little Boss’s group. But when he saw how many men had come with Shadow, Little Boss turned to run.
He was built for power, not speed.
Shiver was the first to catch him, seizing his legs and throwing him to the ground. Shadow pinned him down, sitting on his head and holding his shoulders. The other men fell on Little Boss, attacking with a savagery only impeded by the fact that they got in each other’s way.
At last Shadow and the men backed off. Charged with energy, fists clenched, mouths and stone tools stained by blood, the men ran to and fro, howling and pounding their weapons against tree trunks and rocks.
Little Boss remained motionless for a time. Then, uttering faint screams, he sat up. He had great gashes on his face, legs and back. He could not move one leg. The ground where he had lain was stained by blood and panic shit. He looked back at his assailants, who were capering and howling their rage. He opened his mouth, as if to cry defiance. But a great bubble of bloody mucus formed there, and his voice was a strangle. When the bubble broke, Little Boss fell back, rigid as a falling tree.
Shadow fell on the body immediately. She pulled it by its ankles out into the clearing, sat on its chest, and immediately began to slice away its flesh with a new stone cobble.
With degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm, the others joined her. Soon they were all feeding.
The miniature war was brief but savage.
Shadow’s only tactic was to isolate her targets and destroy them. But it was a tactic beyond the grasp of her opponents, and it worked over and over. The women, especially if burdened by infants, were easy prey. The men were picked off one by one, always by overwhelming force.
And as Shadow’s group fed day after day on fresh meat, they grew stronger, and hungrier.
It finished as Shadow watched her acolytes fall on the body of her mother. In her last moments, before they opened her chest. Termite reached out a bloody hand to Shadow, who stayed unmoved.
And then Shadow went alone into the forest to hunt down the last free man, her brother. Claw. When Shadow returned to her warmongering group, the object she clutched in her hand was his heart.
But when the opponents were annihilated, the group, filled with a rage for blood and murder, anxious for more meat, began to fall, on each other.
Reid Malenfant:
He remembered how his father, on learning of his inoperable tumour, had suddenly rediscovered the Episcopalian faith of his youth. Somehow that had hurt Malenfant — as if his father, in these last months, had chosen to draw away from him. But he hadn’t been about to deny his dad the comfort he sought.
It had always seemed to him that religion was a kind of bargain. You gave over your whole life, a portion of your income and half your intellect, in return for a freedom from the fear of death. Maybe, it wasn’t such a bad bargain at that.
But look at the Hams: Julia and the rest, these Moon-bound Neandertals, as rational and smart as any human being, just as aware of the human tragedy of death and pain and loss — and yet, it seemed, quite without the consolation of religion. But they seemed able to cope with the dreadful truth of life without hiding from it.
Well, maybe they were tougher than humans.
And what about you, Malenfant, now the black meteor is approaching at last? Don’t you need comfort — forgiveness — the prospect of continued existence beyond the grave of crimson dust that will soon welcome your bones?
Too late for me now, he thought. But it doesn’t seem to trouble me. Maybe I’m more like a damn Neandertal than a human.
Or maybe Emma was right: that nothing mattered so much to him about where he was going, compared to what he was escaping from.
Julia was here, her concerned, Moon-like face swimming in the gloom before his eyes. He wondered absently if it was night or day.
After a time, Emma was here. She frowned, wiped at his mouth with a scrap of leaf, and tried to give him water.
“Things to tell you.”
“You need to save your strength for drinking. Eating. All that good stuff.”
“No time.”
“If you’re going to start lecturing me about Fermi again—”
“I did my best, Emma.”
“I know you did.”
“I came all the way to this damn Moon to find you. I went to the White House. I built a rocket ship.”
“That always was the kind of stuff you were good at, Malenfant.”
“Looking out for you?”
“No,” she said sadly. “The grand gesture.”
“I found you. But I can’t do anything for you.”
She looked at him, her eyes blank, oddly narrowed. “But was that ever the idea?”
“What else?”
“You’re a complicated man, Reid Malenfant. Your motives aren’t simple.”
“Your mother thinks I’ve been trying to kill you for years.”
“Oh, it’s not that, Malenfant. It’s not me you’re trying to destroy. It’s you. It’s just that I’m sometimes in the way…”
He frowned, deeply disturbed, remembering fragments of conversations with McCann, Nemoto. “What are you talking about?”
“What about Praisegod Michael?”
“He was a psychopath. I had to—”
“You had to what? Malenfant, it wasn’t your fight. What does Praisegod Michael matter to you, or me? If you really had been devoted to the cause of getting to me, you’d have said anything he wanted to hear, to keep your skin intact. But not you. You walked into his guns, Malenfant. Deliberately. And you must have known you couldn’t win. On some level you wanted him to do this to you.”
“I was looking for you,” he said stubbornly. “That’s why I came to the Moon.”
“I’m sorry, Malenfant. I see what I see.”
He licked his lips with a tongue that felt like a piece of wood.
“Tell me this,” she said now. “When we were in that damn T-38 over Africa, when the Wheel appeared in the sky—”
“Yeah.”
“You could have turned away.”
He closed his eyes. He thought back to those moments, the glittering sky-bright seconds of the crash, when he and Emma had been suspended in the deep African light, before the enigmatic alien artefact.
…Yes. He remembered how the aerosurfaces had bit, just for a second. He had felt the stick respond. He knew he could turn the nose of the plane away from the Wheel. It was a chance. He didn’t take it.
“Yes,” he rasped. “And then—”
And then there had been that instant of exuberance — the sense of relief, of freedom, as the T-38 hurtled at the Wheel, as he felt the little jet slide out of his control, as the great blue circle had rushed towards him, and he had reached the point where he could do no more.
“How did you know? The slaved instruments—”
“I didn’t need to watch instruments, Malenfant. I know you. It’s just — the way you are, the kind of person you are. You could no more help it than you could stop breathing, or keep from farting in your sleep.”
“I do that?”
“I never knew when would be a good time to tell you.”
“You picked a doozy.”
“Poor Malenfant. The universe never has made much sense to you, has it? — not from the grandness of the Fermi Paradox, not yourself, on down to your relationship with your first grade teacher.”
“She really was an asshole.”
“I’ve always known all about you, what you are, what you could not help but become. Right from the beginning, I’ve known. And I went along with you anyway. What does that say about me?… Maybe we’re alike, you and I.” She reached up and passed her hands over his eyes. “Sleep now.”
But sleep eluded him, though regret lingered.
“Listen, Malenfant. I’ve decided. You’re right. I’m going to go on, to track down the Daemons — Homo superior, whatever they are. Every time this damn Moon shifts, people suffer and die, right here on the Moon, and on all the Earths. What gives those guys the right to screw up so many lives — so many billions of lives?”
“And you intend to stop them.”
“Malenfant, I don’t know what I intend. I haven’t had a plan since the day I fell through that blue Wheel and found myself here, covered in shit. I’ll do what you always did. I’ll improvise.”
“Take care.”
“Because you won’t be around to look out for me? Malenfant, if it escaped your notice, I rescued you. All you did was lose your spacecraft, your sole companion and all your gear, and get
