The Nutcracker infant roused from her sleep. Bleary-eyed, she peered into the trees and yowled softly.
The shadows moved closer, sliding past the trees, at last resolving into recognizable fragments: curling fingers, watchful eyes, the unmistakable morphology of hominids. One of them, perhaps a woman, extended a hand.
The infant clambered off Manekato’s lap and stood facing the Nutcracker-woman, nervous, uncertain.
The Nutcracker-woman took a single step into the clearing, her eyes fixed on the infant. The child whimpered, and took a hesitant step forward.
Nemoto hissed to Emma, “Listen to me. I have a further theory. The Old Ones did not disappear into some theoretical universe-spanning abstraction. They are still here. Wouldn’t they want to be immersed in the world they made, to eat its fruit, to drink its water? Maybe they have become these Nutcrackers, the most content, pacific, unthreatened, mindless of all the hominid species. They shed everything they knew to live the way hominids are supposed to, the way we never learned, or forgot. What do you think?…”
The infant glanced back at Emma, knowing. Then, with a liquid motion, the Nutcracker-woman scooped up the child and melted into green shadows.
Back in the Daemons” yellow-plastic compound, Emma luxuriated in a hot shower, a towelling robe, and a breakfast of citrus fruit.
Luxuriate, yes. Because you know you aren’t going to enjoy this much longer, are you, Emma? And maybe you’ll never live like this again, not ever, not for the rest of your life.
You will miss the coffee, though.
She dressed and emerged from her little chalet. The sky was littered with cloud, the breeze capricious and laden with moisture. Storm coming.
She saw Nemoto arguing with Manekato. Nemoto looked, in fact, as if she still wasn’t getting a great deal of sleep; black smudges made neat hyperbolae around her eyes. By contrast, Manekato was leaning easily on her knuckles, her swivelling ears facing Nemoto, her great black-haired body a calming slab of stillness. And Julia, the Ham girl, was standing close by, listening gravely.
When Emma approached, Mane turned to her, smooth and massive as a swivelling gun-turret. “Good morning, Em-ma.”
“And to you. Nemoto, you look like shit.”
Nemoto glowered at her.
“What’s the hot topic?”
“Future plans.” Nemoto’s foot was characteristically tapping the plastic-feel floor like a trapped animal, about the nearest she got to expressing a true emotion.
“Grey Earth,” Julia said.
“…Oh. The deal we made.”
“The deal you made,” Nemoto said. “Over and over again. You said you would take the Hams back to their home world, if they helped you.”
“I know what I said.”
“Well, now it is payback time.”
Emma sighed. She stepped forward and took Julia’s great hands; her own fingers, even hardened by weeks of rough living, were pale white streaks compared to Julia’s muscular digits. “Julia, I meant what I said. If I could find a way I would get you people home.” She waved towards the latest Earth in the sky, a peculiarly shrunken world with a second Moon orbiting close to it. “But you can see the situation for yourself. Your world is gone. It’s lost. You see—”
Nemoto said, “Emma, you have made enough mistakes already. It would pay you, pay us both, not to patronize this woman.”
Emma said, “I’m sorry.” So I am, she thought. But I made a promise I couldn’t keep, and I knew it when I made it, and now I just have to get out of this situation as gracefully as I can. That’s life. “The point is the Grey Earth isn’t coming back. Not in any predictable way.” She looked up at Mane. “Is it?”
The great Daemon rubbed her face. “We are studying the world engine. It is ancient and faulty.” She grunted. “Like a bad-tempered old hominid, it needs love and attention.”
Emma frowned. “But you think you might get it to work again?”
Mane patted Emma’s head. “Nemoto frequently accuses me of underestimating you. I am guilty. But you are symmetrically guilty of overestimating me. We cannot repair the world engine. We cannot understand its workings. Perhaps in a thousand years of study… For now we can barely see it.”
Nemoto shuddered. “We are all on very low rungs of a very tall ladder.”
But Mane said, “There is no ladder. We are all different. Difference is to be cherished.”
“And that’s what we humans must learn,” Emma said.
“You will not learn it,” Manekato said cheerfully, “for you will not survive long enough.” She sighed, a noise like a steam train in a tunnel. “However, to return to the point, we believe we may be able to direct the wandering of the Red Moon, to a limited extent. Prior to shutting down the world engine altogether.”
“Grey Earth come,” Julia said again, and her face relaxed from its mock-human smile into the gentle, beatific expression Emma had come to associate with happiness.
Emma held her breath. “And Earth,” she said. “My Earth; our Earth. Can you reach that too?…”
“The Daemons can make one directed transition,” said Nemoto gravely. “And they are going to use it to take us to the universe of the Grey Earth.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of you.”
Emma studied Nemoto. “I sense you’re pissed at me,” she said dryly.
Nemoto glowered. “Emma, these are not humans. They don’t lie, the Hams and the Daemons. It’s all part of the rule-set with which they have managed to achieve such longevity as species. A bargain, once struck, is absolutely rigid.”
“But what’s the big deal? Even if the Daemons manage to bring us back to the Grey Earth universe, they can just send the Hams home. As many as want to go. They can just Map them there.”
Nemoto shook her head. “You aren’t thinking right. The deal was with us, not the Daemons. We have to get them home. Whichever way we can.”
“The lander?”
Nemoto just glared. Then she walked away, muttering, scheming, her whole body tense, her gait rigid, like a machine.
— V —
MANIFOLD
Emma Stoney:
Hello, Malenfant. I want to tell you I’m all right.
I know that’s not what you’d want to hear. The notion that I’m alive, I’m prospering without you, is anathema. Right?
But then you probably aren’t listening at all.
You never did listen to me. If you had you wouldn’t have screwed up our entire relationship, from beginning to end. You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself. Or me.
But I miss you even so.
I guess you know I’m alone here. Even Nemoto has gone, off to a different fate, in some corner of the manifold or other…
Mary:
There were more yesterdays than tomorrows. Her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, even one of her own children.
And there came a day when they put old Saul in the ground, and Mary found herself the last to remember the old place, the Red Moon where she had been born.
It didn’t matter. There was only today.
Nemoto was not so content, of course.
Even in the deepest times of the Long Night, Nemoto would bustle about the cave, agitated, endlessly making her incomprehensible objects. Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, not really a person, and so of no significance.
But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto. Mary understood. Nemoto had brought them here, home to the Grey Earth. Now it was Nemoto who was stranded far from her home.
And so Mary made space for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when she fell ill, or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat, softening the deep frozen meat with her own strong jaws, chewing it as she would to feed a child.
But one day, Nemoto spat out her mouthful of meat on the floor of the cave. She raged and shouted in her jabbering Skinny tongue, and pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.
She returned staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. It was a bat, dormant, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. Nemoto jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.
Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm titbits to the children. But when she offered them the bloated, pink-grey internal organs of the bat, mothers pulled the children away.
After that, Nemoto would never be healthy again.
There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, but it was the first time it had shown at all for sixty-eight days. There was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals — birds and a few large rats — were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting in their torpor.
The people capered and threw off their furs.
Nemoto was growing more ill. She suffered severe bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. She lost weight. And her skin grew flaky and sore.
Mary tried to treat the diarrhoea. She brought salt water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto’s system.
The days lengthened rapidly. The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, life swarmed. The people gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations.
And soon a distant thunder boomed across the land. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds. The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed towards the sea.
