animals decimated.
Then would come the famines and the wars.
So much for Candy-land. Maybe these Hams weren’t just as smart as humans, she mused; maybe they were actually smarter.
On the third day she walked out of the caves, alone, and set off up the eroded hillside.
The rocks were broken and worn, and cut deeply by gullies, in some of which water still flowed. She found that the easiest way to make progress was to lower herself into one of the gullies and clamber up its smooth, sloping sides, taking care not to slip on moss or lichen, until the channel petered out and she had to transfer to another.
Though she was soon panting hard and sweating into her coverall, she could feel her heart and lungs pump, the muscles of her newly powerful legs tingling. You’re in the best shape you’ve been in for years, girl.
The noise of the tame whirlwind howled ever louder. She resolutely ignored it.
Just below the summit she sat on a patch of bare rock, gathering her breath, getting the hassles of the climb out of her head. The eroded hillside, deeply punctured by its limestone gullies and caves, swept away beneath her. The sun was still low; it was maybe ten in the morning local time.
She stood and turned away from the plain. She walked up the last few paces to the crater’s summit plateau, and faced the wind.
It was a wall of churning air: a cylinder, laden with dust, that must have been a couple of miles wide. It looked flat on her puny human scale, like the wall of a vast building. But it snaked into the sky, diminishing as her gaze followed it, and at its highest extremity it curled in the air, thread-like. The whole thing was streaked horizontally, like the clouds of Jupiter, by billows of crimson dust. The flow of the air seemed smooth, though here and there she saw bits of rock and vegetation, even a few snapped-off trees. But the rock at the wind’s shimmering foot was worn bare.
The violence, the energy, were startling; it was like a waterfall, a rocket launch. A deep part of her mind couldn’t accept that it was controlled by anything: the animal in her, conditioned by a million years of experience, knew that this lethal expression of nature’s power was unpredictable, beyond propitiation.
Nevertheless she walked forward. After a few paces, she felt the first breath of wind, and a speckle of dust on her cheek.
When she got to within maybe a hundred paces of that dense wall of dust the air grew turbulent. She staggered but kept on, leaning into the wind to keep to a rough straight line, and the dust bit harder, stinging her mouth and eyes.
She shielded her eyes. Only maybe fifty paces to the dust. Forty-nine, forty eight… The air was a powerful physical presence, battering at her torso and face, whipping her hair, snatching the breath from her lungs.
And now she was inside the dust, suddenly, as if walking into a sandstorm. The dust was’a thick glowing cloud around her, obscuring the sky, the rock, even the twister itself; and when she looked downwind she saw how she cast a kind of shadow in the streaming particles.
A fresh surge hit her, unexpectedly violent. She fell sideways, rolled a couple of times, and hit her head on a rock.
She lay there for a moment. Then she got to all fours on the worn-bare rock and tried crawling.
She fell again, rolled back, tried again. Her hands and the skin of her cheeks were streaked with tiny cuts, where sharp bits of rock had bitten into her. Still she kept trying.
Lacking a plan B, she tried again the next day. And the next.
She tried wrapping herself in her parachute silk, to keep out the dust and bits of rock. She just got blown away faster. So she tied the silk tightly around herself, an outer-body garment with slits for her hands, a mask over her face. She managed to get further into that central wall of dust, maybe ten paces deep, before the sheer strength of the wind stopped her progress.
She tried crawling in, all the way. That didn’t work.
The Hams watched all this, bemused.
She considered schemes with ropes and pitons and rock-hammers, where she would make a kind of ladder that she could “climb’, across the face of the barren windswept rock, all the way to the centre. But she had no rope or pitons or rock-hammers, and couldn’t come up with any way of making them.
She explored the cave system, but found no way through that way.
And if she couldn’t go under the twister wall, she surely couldn’t go over it; it looked to her as if that tunnel of tortured air stretched all the way out of the atmosphere. (She did toy with insane schemes of retrieving Malenfant’s lander and firing it up into some kind of Alan Shepard sub-orbital trajectory that would take her up and over the wall of air, and re-enter right into the eye of the storm. But — despite her various rash promises to Joshua to pilot him and the lander all the way to his mythical Grey Earth — she didn’t know how to fly the lander, still less how to rig it for such a flight, still less how to land it.)
On the tenth day of trying, as she lay clinging to the rock, sucking air from dust through a sheet of muslin, somebody walked past her.
Mouth gaping, bits of “chute silk flapping around her, she watched as a Ham man and child walked hand in hand into the teeth of the storm, blurring. Granted the Hams were stronger than she was — both of them probably, even the boy — but they weren’t that strong. They weren’t even leaning into the damn wind.
Then she noticed, just before they disappeared into grey-red dust, that their skin wraps were hanging loose around them. The churning air wasn’t touching them.
She spent more days watching.
The Hams had always used the other side of the crater as part of their domain for hunting and gathering. They had trails leading that way, so ancient they were actually worn into the rock. When a Ham walked such a trail, heading for the crater’s interior, she just carried on through the wall of wind and dust.
The Hams weren’t the only ones.
A flock of bats flapped clumsily into the crimson mist one day, their fragile wings unaffected by the tearing air. She spotted a young deer, apparently lost, that stumbled out of the dust, gazed around with wide eyes at the world beyond, then bolted back into the wind storm. Even other hominids could make it through: notably Runners, and one Nutcracker she spotted.
But not herself — and, for some reason, not the chimp-like Elves, an association she found insulting.
She tried to interrogate the Hams. “Julia, how come you can get through the wind and I can’t?”
An intense frown creased that powerful face. “Hams live here.” She waved her arm. “Still live here.”
“All right. But why am I kept out?”
A shrug.
“What is it I’m not allowed to see? Is there some kind of installation in there, a base? Are the Hams allowed to go up to it? Do you have any, umm, trade with whoever built it?”
None of this meant much to Julia. “Funny stuff.” She waved her fingers before her face. “Hard to see.”
Emma sighed. So the Hams might be wandering around or through some kind of fabulous Homo superior base without even looking at it, interested only in their perennial pursuits, perhaps not even capable of seeing it from out of their bony cages of conservatism.
And that, presumably, was why the Daemons let the Hams wander at will past their meteorological moat. The Hams would restrict themselves, going where they had always gone inside the crater, doing what they had always done, taking not a step beyond their self-imposed boundaries; they would not interfere with whatever projects and designs the Daemons were developing in there. Whereas noisy, curious, destructive Homo sap types like herself would not rest until they had barged their way into the Daemons” shining city.
Breaking this demeaning exclusion became an obsession with her.
She focused on the Hams. She kept trying their trails. She carried Ham tools and weapons as if intent on some Ham-type gathering and hunting. She tried walking in with a party of Hams, her slim form tucked into a line of their great hulking bodies. But the wind seemed to whip through their immense muscular forms, to grab at her and push her aside.
She pushed the deception further. She purloined some skins and wrapped herself up like a Ham. Slouching, bending her legs, she practised the Hams” powerful, clumsy gait. She let her hair grow ragged and filthy, and even smeared clay on her face, letting it dry in a hopeful imitation of a Ham’s bulky facial morphology, the high cheekbones and the bony crest over the eyes.
Then, joining another foraging party, she slouched towards the wind, her gait rolling, keeping her distinctive Homo sap chin tucked into her chest.
The wind wasn’t fooled.
Furious, she stamped back to the caves, and sought out Joshua.
“You have to help me.”
Joshua stared at her. He was ragged, filthy, sitting in a debris-strewn cave that managed to be remarkably ill-appointed, even by the Palaeolithic standards of this Red Moon.
“Wha” for?”
She sighed, forgiving him his squalor, and kneeled in the dirt before him. “/ want to know,” she said. “I want to know what they are doing in there — and who they are. If they are responsible for dragging this Moon around the realities I mean, for changing the sky — I want to know why they are doing it. And to make them understand the damage they are causing, the suffering. Do you see?”
He frowned at her. “Deal,” he said simply.
“Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes, we had a deal. We still have a deal. You help me, and I’ll try to help you get to the Grey Earth. Just as I promised.” God forgive me for lying, she thought.
But his eyes narrowed, almost calculating. “Fin” a way.”
“Yes, I’ll find a way. We’ll go back to the lander and—”
His massive hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. The grip was painful, but she knew that he was using only a fraction of his strength, that if he chose he could probably crush her bone.
“No lies.”
He means it, she thought. He knows my kind too well. “Okay. No lies. I’ll find a way. Get me through the wind wall and I’ll work on it, I’ll find a way. I promise, Joshua. Please, my arm…”
He squeezed harder — just a little — but it was like a vice closing over her flesh. Then he released her. He sat back, baring his teeth in a wide grin. “How?”
“How can I get through the wind wall? I’ve been thinking about that. Whatever controls the wind is too smart to be fooled by appearance. It’s not enough that I look like a Ham. But maybe if I can learn to think like a Ham…”
Scarhead dragged a couple of haunches of meat from the back of the cave. For one brief moment the old guy looked the image of the cartoon caveman. He threw the meat down on the trampled ground, then went back into the cave to fetch tools.
Emma had once more donned her best-effort Neandertal disguise. She got to the ground gingerly, conscious of the need to keep her face rigid so as not to crack her mask of clay.
As usual, nobody showed the slightest interest in her — by now, not even the children.
The meat was, gruesomely, a couple of legs, intact from hoof to shoulder, perhaps from a horse. The limbs were already skinned, fresh, bloody, steaming slightly. Flies buzzed languidly around the exposed flesh.
Scarhead returned. He threw his handfuls of tools on the ground and sat cross legged. He grinned, and the low morning sun made his scar tissue glisten.
She inspected the tools with absent interest. There were limestone pebbles gathered from the beds of rivers, used as chopping tools, and dark basalt blocks shaped into bi-faced hand-axes and cleavers. These were working tools, each of them heavily worn and blood-splashed.
