Space

A sticky, moist heat hit Malenfant as soon as he left his hut. He walked down the broad hill, after de Bonneville, working through a hierarchy of smaller and more sinuous paths until there was savannah grass under his feet, long and damp with dew. Wagandans were following them, men and women alike, talking softly, some laughing.

The blue Moon had long set. There were still stars above. Malenfant saw a diffuse light, clearly green, tracking across the southern sky: it was a Tree, a living satellite populated by posthumans, floating above this primeval African landscape.

De Bonneville cast about and pointed. “There’s a track — see, where the grass has been beaten down? It leads toward the lake. Come. We will walk.” And, without waiting for acquiescence, he turned and led the way, limping and wheezing, his pains evidently forgotten in his eagerness for the spectacle.

Malenfant followed, tracking through the long damp grass. They passed a herd of the elephant analogs, the deinotherium. They seemed unaware of the humans. From a stand of trees, Malenfant saw the scowl of a cat — perhaps a lion — with long saber teeth protruding over its lower jaw. De Bonneville said it was a megantereon. And he almost tripped over a lizard hiding in the undergrowth at his feet; it was half a meter long, with three sharp horns protruding from its crest. It scampered away from him and then sat in the grass, its huge eyes fixed on him.

They passed a skull, perhaps of an antelope, bleached of flesh. It had been cracked open by a stone flake — little more than a shaped pebble — embedded in a pit in the bone. Malenfant bent down and prised out the flake with his fingers. Was it made by the Uprights? It seemed too primitive.

De Bonneville grabbed his arm. “There,” he whispered.

Perhaps half a kilometer away, a group of what looked like big apes — muscular, hairy, big-brained — was gathered around a carcass. Malenfant could see curved horns; maybe it was another antelope. In the dawn light the hominids were working together with what looked like handheld stone tools, butchering the carcass. A number of them were keeping watch at the fringe of the group, throwing rocks at circling hyenas.

“Are these the hunters you brought me to see?” Malenfant asked.

De Bonneville snorted with contempt. “These? No. They are not even hunters. They waited for the hyenas or jackals to kill that sivatherium, and now they steal it for themselves… Ah. Look, Malenfant.”

To Malenfant’s left, crouching figures were moving forward through the grass. In the gray light, Malenfant could make out golden skin, flashes of white cloth. It was Magassa, and more of his people, moving toward the apelike scavengers.

“Now,” de Bonneville hissed. “Now the sport begins.”

“What are these creatures, de Bonneville?”

He grinned. “When the ice was rolled back, the Earth was left empty. Various… experiments… were performed to repopulate it. But not as it had been before.”

“With older forms.”

“Of animals and even hominids, us. Yes.”

“So Magassa—”

“ — is a once-extinct hominid, recreated here, in the year A.D. 3265. Magassa is Homo Erectus. And there are tigers once more in India, and mammoths in the north of Europe, and roaming the prairies of North America once more are many of the megafauna species destroyed by the Stone Age settlers there… Quite something, isn’t it, Malenfant? I’m sure you didn’t expect to find this on your return to Earth: the lost species of the past, restored to roam the empty planet, here at the end of time.”

It sounded, to Malenfant, like characteristic Gaijin tinkering. Just as they had poked around with Earth’s climate and biosphere and geophysical cycles, so, it seemed, they were determined to explore the possibilities inherent in DNA, life’s treasury of the past. Endless questing, as they sought answers to their unspoken questions. But still, here was a hunting party of Homo Erectus, by God, stalking easily across the plains of Africa in this year A.D. 3265. “Is anyone studying this?”

De Bonneville looked at him curiously. “Perhaps you don’t understand. Science is dead, Malenfant. These are only Uprights. But…” He looked more thoughtful. “I sometimes wonder if Magassa has a soul. Magassa can speak, you know, to some extent. His speech mechanism is closer to nonhuman primates. Still, he can make himself understood. Look into Magassa’s eyes, Malenfant, and you will see a true consciousness — far more developed than any animal’s — but a consciousness lacking much of the complexity and darkness and confusion of our own. Is there still a Pope or a mullah, somewhere on Earth or the Moon, concerned with such issues, perhaps declaring Magassa an abomination even now? But Magassa himself would not frame such questions; without our full inner awareness, he would lack the ability to impute consciousness in other beings, and so could not envisage consciousness in nonhuman animals and objects. That is to say, he would not be able to imagine God.”

“You envy him,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Yes, I envy Magassa his calm sanity. Well. They make good laborers. And the women — Wait. Watch this.”

Magassa stood suddenly, whooped, and brandished a torch, which burst into flame. The other Uprights stood with him and hollered. Their high, clear voices carried across the grassy plain to Malenfant, like the cries of gulls.

At the noise, the primitive scavenging hominids jumped up, startled. With bleating cries they ran away from the Uprights and their fire, abandoning the antelope. One of the hominids — a female — was a little more courageous; she reached back and tore a final strip of flesh from the carcass before fleeing with the others, flat breasts flapping.

But now more Uprights burst out of the grass before the fleeing hominids. It was a simple trap, but obviously beyond the more primitive hominids’ mental grasp.

At this new obstacle the scavengers hesitated for a second, like startled sheep. Then they bunched together and kept on running. They forced their way right through the cluster of Uprights, who hailed stones and bone spears at them. Some of the weapons struck home, with a crunching violence that startled Malenfant. But as far as he could see all the hominids got through.

All, that is, except one: the female who had hung back, and who was now a few dozen meters behind the rest.

The Uprights closed around her. She fought — she seemed to have a rock in her clenched fist — but she was overwhelmed. The Uprights fell on her, and she went down in a forest of flailing arms.

Her fleeing companions didn’t look back.

De Bonneville stood up, his blackened face slick with sweat, breathing hard.

The Upright Magassa came stalking out of the pack with a corpse slung over his shoulder. He had blood on his teeth and on the golden fur of his chest.

The body he carried was about the size of a twelve-year-old child’s, Malenfant guessed, coated with fine dark hair. The arms were long, but the hands and feet were like a modern human’s. The brainpan was crushed, a bloody mess, but the face was prominent: a brow ridge, a flat apelike nose, the jaw protruding, big front teeth. That tool was still clutched in the female’s hand; it was a lava rock, crudely shaped.

The head, in life, had been held up. This was a creature that had walked upright.

Magassa dumped the corpse at de Bonneville’s feet and howled his triumph.

“And what is this, de Bonneville?”

“Another reconstruction: Handy Man, some two million years vanished. Even less conscious, less self-aware, than our Upright friends.”

“Homo Habilis.”

“Malenfant, every species of extinct hominid is represented on this big roomy land of ours. I was pleased to see the prey were habilines, this morning — the Australopithecines can run, but are too stupid for good sport—”

“Get me out of here, de Bonneville.”

De Bonneville’s ruined eyes narrowed. “So squeamish. So hypocritical. Listen to me, Malenfant. This is how we lived. Sometimes they rape before the kill. Think of it, Malenfant! You and I have traveled to the stars. And yet, all the time, we carried the Old Men with us, asleep in our bones, waiting to be recalled…”

The Upright took a rock from his belt and started to hammer at the back of the dead habiline’s skull. He dug his fingers into the hole he had made, pulled out gray material, blood-soaked, and crammed it into his mouth.

Reid Malenfant knew, at last, that he had truly come home. He turned away from the habiline corpse.

Chapter 26 Kimera’s Breath

Soon after the Upright hunt, de Bonneville disappeared. Nemoto warned Malenfant not to ask too many questions.

On his own, Malenfant wandered around the court, the streets outside, even out into the country. But he learned little.

He found it hard to make any human contact. The Waganda were incurious — even of his sleek biocomposite coverall, a gift from the Bad Hair Day space twins, an artifact centuries of technological advancement ahead of anything here.

Most definitely, he did not fit in here. Madeleine Meacher had warned him it would be like this.

Anyhow, he tired quickly, and his hand still ached. Maybe those Bad Hair Day twins hadn’t done as good a job on him as they thought.

The days wore on, and his mind kept returning to de Bonneville. When he thought about it, Pierre de Bonneville — for all he was an asshole — was the only person in all this dead-end world who had tried to help him, to give him information. And besides, de Bonneville was a fellow star traveler who was maybe in trouble in this alien time.

So he started campaigning, with the Kabaka and Nemoto in her role as the katekiro, to be allowed to see de Bonneville.

After a few days of this, Nemoto summoned Malenfant from his villa. Impatient and reluctant, she said she had been ordered to escort Malenfant to de Bonneville. It turned out he was being held in Kimera’s Engine, the mysterious construct buried in the hillside at the heart of this grass-hut capital.

“I do not advise this, Malenfant.”

“Why? Because it’s dangerous? I’ve seen de Bonneville. I know how ill he is—”

“Not just that. What do you hope to achieve?” She looked at him out of eyes like splinters of lava; she seemed sunk in bitterness and despair. “I survive, as best I can. That’s what you must do. Find a place here, a niche you can defend. What else is there? Hasn’t your hop-and-skip tour of a thousand years taught you that much?”

“If that’s what you believe, why do you want my pressure suit?”

She coughed into a handkerchief; he saw the cloth was speckled by blood. “Malenfant—”

“Take me to de Bonneville.”

Accompanied by a couple of guards, Nemoto led Malenfant from the palace compound, and out into Rubaga. They followed streets, little more than tracks of dust, that wound between the grass huts.

After a while the huts became sparser, until they reached a place where there were no well-defined roads, no construction. The center of the plateau — maybe a kilometer in diameter and fringed by huts — was deserted: just bare rock and lifeless soil, free of grass, bushes, insects or bird song. Even the breeze from Lake Victoria seemed suppressed here.