She began to hack her way through the “chute material. But it was slow work.
For the first time since that dreadful moment of mid-air disintegration, she had time to think.
It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant’s final scream over the intercom, her sudden ejection — without warning, she had been thrust into the cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat’s rockets slammed into the small of her back — and then, even as her “chute had begun to open, she saw the wheel opening like a mouth all around her — and she had realized that for better or worse she was going to fall through it…
Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.
And then, this.
She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the breath knocked out of her. Lying on the ground, an instant after being forty thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: that was the first shock.
She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal, foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that, stranding her here.
Yes, but where was here?
She had cut the “chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.
Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall with swimming slowness.
Low gravity. As if she was on the Moon.
That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, where?
Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are going to do about it — specifically, how you plan to stay alive, long enough for Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.
…Malenfant.
Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn’t anywhere near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other side of the great blue portal?
But he’d been through the crash too. Was he alive at all?
She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her haunches. She remembered how he had been in those last instants before the destruction of the plane, the reckless way he had hurled them both at the unknown.
Malenfant, Malenfant, what have you done?
A scream tore from the forest.
Emma bundled up her parachute cloth and ran back the way she had come.
On her bed of dead leaves, Sally was sitting up. With her good arm she held her kid to her chest. Maxie was crying again, but Sally’s face was empty, her eyes dry.
Uneasy, Emma dumped the parachute cloth. In the seeping rain, she got to her knees and embraced them both. “It’s all right.”
The kid seemed to calm, sandwiched between the two women.
But Sally pushed her away. “How can you say that? Nothing’s right.” Her voice was eerily level.
Emma said carefully, “I don’t think they mean us any harm… Not any more.”
“Who?”
“The hominids.”
“I saw them,” Sally insisted.
“Who?”
“Ape-men. They were here. I just opened my eyes and there was this face over me. It was squat, hairy. Like a chimp.”
Then not like the hominids out on the plain, Emma thought, wondering. Was there more than one kind of human-ape, running around this strange, dreamy forest?
“It was going through my pockets,” Sally said. “I just opened my eyes and looked right in its face. I yelled. It stood up and ran away.”
“It stood up? Chimps don’t stand upright. Not habitually… Do they?”
“What do I know about chimps?”
“Look, the — creatures — out there on the plain don’t sound like that description.”
“They are ape-men.”
“But they aren’t squat and hairy.” Emma said hesitantly, “We’ve been through a lot. You’re entitled to a nightmare or two.”
Doubt and hostility crossed Sally’s face. “I know what I saw.”
The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.
At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outre concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn’t a flat, infinite, unchanging stage… To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.
And then there was the small matter of Sally’s husband.
Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally’s reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.
She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.
As she worked she said hesitantly, “My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you—”
“I’m Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg.” (Is?) “I guess you’ve met Maxie. We’re from Boston.”
“Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK.”
“Yes…” Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was in her early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn’t as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. “We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg… Where are we, do you think?”
“I don’t know any more than you do. I’m sorry.”
Sally’s smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. “Well, it sure isn’t your fault. What do you think we ought to do?”
Stay alive. “Keep warm. Keep out of trouble.”
“Do you think they know we are missing yet?”
What “they’? “That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet.”
Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn’t scared out of his wits. “I’m hungry.”
Emma squeezed his shoulder. “Me too.” She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.
She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colourful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.
Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of digestive biscuits before he gobbled up the handful of boiled sweets he had spotted immediately.
Emma kept back one of the sweets for herself, however. She sucked the cherry flavour sweet until the last sliver of it dissolved on her tongue. Anything to get rid of the lingering taste of that damn caterpillar.
Caterpillar, for God’s sake. Her resentful anger flared. She felt like throwing away the petty scraps of supplies, rampaging out to the hommids, demanding attention. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t want anything to do with this. She didn’t want any responsibility for this damaged woman and her wretched kid — and she didn’t want her head cluttered up with the memories of what had become of the woman’s husband.
But nobody was asking what she wanted. And now the food was finished, and the others were staring at her, as if they expected her to supply them.
If not you, Emma, who else?
Emma took the foil box and went looking for water.
She found a stream a few minutes deeper into the forest. She clambered down into a shallow gully and scooped up muddy water. She sniffed at it doubtfully. It was from a stream of running water, so not stagnant. But it was covered with scummy algae, and plenty of green things grew in it. Was that good or bad?
She carried back as much water as she could to their improvised campsite, where Sally and Maxie were waiting. She set the water down and started going through her pockets again.
Soon she found what she wanted. It was a small tin, about the size of the tobacco tins her grandfather used to give her to save her coins and stamps. Inside a lot of gear was crammed tight; Maxie watched wondenngly as she pulled it all out. There were safety pins, wire, fish hooks and line, matches, a sewing kit, tablets, a wire saw, even a teeny-tiny button compass. And there was a little canister of dark crystals that turned out to be potassium permanganate.
Following the instructions on the can — to her shame she had to use her knife’s lens to read them — she dropped crystals into the water until it turned a pale red.
Maxie turned up his nose, until his mother convinced him the funny red water was a kind of cola.
Habits from ancient camping trips came back to Emma now. For instance, you weren’t supposed to lose anything. So she carefully packed all her gear back into its tobacco tin, and put it in an inside pocket she was able to zip up. She took a bit of parachute cord and tied her Swiss Army knife around her neck, and tucked it inside her flight suit, and zipped that up too.
And while she was fiddling with her toys, Sally began shuddering.
“Greg. My husband. Oh my God. They killed him. They just crushed his skull. The ape-men. Just like that. I saw them do it. It’s true, isn’t it?”
Emma put down her bits of kit with reluctance.
“Isn’t it strange?” Sally murmured. “Greg isn’t here. But I never thought to ask why he isn’t here. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I knew… Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”
“No,” Emma said, as soothing as she could manage. “Of course not. It’s very hard, a very hard thing to take—”
And then Sally just fell apart, as Emma had known, inevitably, she must. The three of them huddled together, in the rain, as Sally wept.
It was dark before Sally was cried out. Maxie was already asleep, his little warm form huddled between their two bodies.
The rain had stopped. Emma pulled down her rough canopy, and wrapped it around them.
