eroded into hillocks, with a splash plain of rubble and ejecta beyond. There was none of that here; the “crater” was just an upraised blister erupting from an empty plain.
She glanced at Babo. She saw his mouth was working as he studied the rock, the vegetation, the dust, thinking, analysing.
Babo saw her looking, and grinned. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Artificial. But then, we know this Red Moon is a thing of artifice, and we suspect this crater may be the key to its secrets. Why should we expect anything but artifice here, of all places?”
The climb had already been long, and Manekato halted and rested her weight on her clenched knuckles. Babo raised a handful of crimson dust and let it drift off in the air; she could smell its rich iron tang, and some of it stuck to the sweat-soaked palm of his hand.
She glanced to the west, over the landscape from which they had climbed. The Adjusted Space platform nestled at the foot of this slope, a bright splash, oddly ugly. Beyond it a plain of crimson dust stretched away, its colour remarkably bright, marked by the pale green of vegetation clumps. The horizon of this small world curved noticeably, a smeared band of muddy grey. The sky was a dome littered by high clouds, and to the west she saw the dingy stain of volcanic dust streaking the air.
It was not a spectacular view, but something in its sweep tugged at her imagination. If she were anywhere on her Earth she would see the work of people, and it had never before struck her quite how claustrophobic that could be. This was an empty, unmade land.
Babo pointed. “Look. Down there.”
She saw that near the foot of the crater wall a group of hominids were working their way through the sparse coating of vegetation towards a fig tree. She thought they were Elves, the small, gracile creatures Nemoto called Australopithecines. They moved with stealth, and they approached the tree from several directions, surrounding it.
“I think they are hunting something,” Babo said. “…Ah. Look, there. Under the tree. It is another hominid.”
Manekato saw it now: a burly black-furred form, with a bony, crested skull and distended belly, this was the alternate variant of Australopithecines called a Nutcracker. This hominid had swollen, milk-laden breasts: a female. An infant huddled close to this mother.
The Elves crept closer.
Manekato murmured, “Must this world see more sentience dissipated needlessly?”
“It is not our affair. Mane,” Babo said gently. “They are only animals.”
“No,” she said softly.
Shadow:
The Elf-folk charged into the clearing.
The Nutcracker-woman squealed, dropped her child, and scrambled up the fig tree for safety. The child tried to climb after her, but her hands and feet were small and poor at grasping, and she fell back again.
Shadow was the first to grab the infant.
Shiver had the temerity to attempt to snatch a limb of the infant for himself; they might have torn it apart between them. But Shadow pulled the infant to her chest, in a parody of parental protectiveness, and bared her teeth at Shiver.
The Nutcracker-folk mother dropped out of her tree, screaming her rage, mouth open to show rows of flat teeth. Nutcracker-folk were powerfully built, and were formidable opponents at close quarters. She charged at Shadow.
But Stripe lunged forward. His big bulk, flying through the air, knocked her flat. But the Nutcracker-woman wrapped her big arms around Stripe’s torso and began to squeeze. Bones cracked, and he howled.
Now more of the men threw themselves at the Nutcracker-woman. Shadow saw that some of them had erections. This was the first time they had hunted one of the Nutcracker-folk. The men had grown accustomed to using the Elf-women of the forest before killing them. Perhaps this Nutcracker-woman, when subdued, would provide similar pleasure.
Shadow took the Nutcracker infant by her scrawny neck and held her up. Her short legs dangled, and huge eyes in a small pink face gazed at Shadow. But she could never be mistaken for the child of an Elf; the exotic bony ridges of her skull saw to that.
Shadow opened her mouth, and placed the child’s forehead between her lips.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
As the Nutcracker mother fought for her life, as the wild-looking Elf-woman, battered and scarred, lifted the helpless infant by its neck, Manekato raised her head and roared in anguish.
Shadow:
…And there was a flash of bright white light, and searing pain filled her head.
When Shadow could see again, the men were lying on the ground, some clutching their eyes, as dazzled and shocked as she was. Of the Nutcracker mother and child there was no sign. The men sat up. Stripe looked at Shadow. There was no prey, no meat. Stripe bared his teeth and growled at her.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
Babo touched Manekato’s shoulder. “You should not have done that,” he said regretfully.
“The Nutcracker-woman knew, Babo. She knew the pain she would endure if she lost her infant. Perhaps the child itself knew.”
“Mane—”
“No more,” she said. “No more suffering, of creatures who understand that they suffer. Let that be the future of this place.”
One by one the scattered Elves were clambering to their feet. Still rubbing their eyes, they stumbled back towards the plain — all but one, the woman who had captured the infant. She stood as tall as she could on the rocky slope, gazing up in suspicion. Manekato and Babo were well sheltered by the trees here, and the creature could surely suspect no causal connection between Manekato and her own defeat anyhow. But nevertheless the Elf howled, baring broken teeth to show pink gums, and she hurled a rock as far as she could up the slope.
Then she turned and loped away, limping, her muscles working savagely even as she walked.
Manekato shuddered, wondering what, in this creature’s short and broken life, could have caused such anguish and anger.
Babo sat on his haunches. “An Air Wall,” Babo said. “We will erect an Air Wall to exclude unwelcome hominids, and other intruders. We will move the platform inside the cordon.”
“Yes…”
“No more blood and pain, Mane.”
They turned, and began to clamber further up the crater wall.
It was not long before they had reached the summit of the crater rim wall — and found themselves facing a broad plateau. A thin breeze blew, enough to cool Manekato’s face, and to ruffle her fur. The rock here was crimson-red, like a basalt or perhaps a very compact and ancient sandstone. It was bare of vegetation and very smooth, as if machined, and covered by a hard glaze that glistened in the sun’s weak light. There was little dust here, only a few pieces of scattered rock debris.
It was as if the crater had been filled in. “I don’t remember this from the Mapped image,” Babo said, disturbed.
Manekato dug her fingers into the fur on his neck. “Evidently we have limits.”
“But it means we don’t know what we will find, from now on.”
“Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that why we came? Come, brother, let us walk, and let us remember our humility.”
They walked forward, for perhaps a mile. And then they came to a circular pit, geometrically perfect. It was only yards across. Light leaked out of it, trapped by dust motes, a shaft that reached dimly to the sky.
Manekato’s imagination quailed. She reached for Babo’s hand, reluctantly reminded of how she had guided Nemoto through the strangeness of the Mapping.
Babo grinned at his sister. “This is strange and frightening — perhaps it is our turn to be humbled now — but I am sure we will find nothing that will not yield to the orderly application of science.”
“Your faith is touching,” she said dryly.
He laughed.
“But it is not time to approach it yet,” she said.
“No. We must study it.”
“Not just that.” They regarded each other, sharing a deep instinctive wisdom. “This is not for us alone, but for all hominids.”
“Yes,” he said. “But how long must we wait?”
“I think we will know…”
There was a blue flash, painfully bright, that seemed to fill Mane’s head; it reminded her uncomfortably of the punishment she had imposed on the Elf-folk.
She raised her head. “…Ah. Look, Babo.”
In the sky swam a new world. It looked like a vast ball of steel. Its atmosphere seemed clear, save for streaks and whorls of cloud. But beneath the cloud there was no land: not a scrap of it, no continents or islands, nothing but an ocean that gleamed grey, stretching unbroken from pole to pole. There weren’t even any polar caps to speak of: just crude, broken scatterings of pack ice, clinging to this big world’s axes. The only feature away from the poles was a glowing ring of blood-red, a vast undersea volcano, perhaps. And here and there she saw more soot-black streaks of dust or smoke, disfiguring the world ocean; drowned or not, this was a geologically active world.
It was a startling, terrifying sight — Manekato’s hind brain knew from five million years of observation that things in the sky weren’t supposed to change suddenly, arbitrarily — and she tried not to cower.
“It is a new Earth,” Babo said thinly. “So we have completed a transition, riding this rogue Red Moon. How interesting.”
“Yes.” She clutched her brother’s hands. Despite his cool words, he was trembling. “And now we are truly of this world, Babo.”
It was true. For Banded Earth, Manekato’s Earth, had gone.
Emma Stoney:
With Joshua, Mary and Julia, Emma walked south, towards the place where — as the Hams put it — the wind touched the ground.
Emma was pretty much toughened up by now. So long as she avoided leg ulcers, or getting tangled up in lianas or bramble, and the snakes and the multitude of insects that seemed to target any bare flesh like heat-seeking missiles, she was able to maintain a steady plod, covering miles and miles each day, across desert or semi-scrub or savannah or even through denser forest.
The Hams had more trouble. Their sheer strength vastly exceeded her own, but long-distance walking was alien to their physiques. They looked awkward as they barrelled along, and after a couple of days she could see how they suffered aches in the hips and knees of their bow legs, and the low arches of their great flat feet. Also, she suspected, such sedentary creatures as these must suffer a deeper disturbance as they dragged themselves across the landscape, far from any settled community. But, though they moaned wordlessly and rubbed at the offending parts of their
