having it stolen.
The group did not have the physical grammar of a group bound by language, Emma thought. This was not a true hearth. Their bits of words, their proto-language, were surely a lot closer to the screeches of chimps, or even the songs of birds, than the vocalizations of humans. Though the Runners huddled together for security, they lived their lives as individuals, pursuing solitary projects, each locked forever inside her own head.
They aren’t human, Emma realized afresh, however much they might look like it. And this wasn’t a community. It was more like a herd.
As night fell, Emma and the others would creep into the shelter she had made with Fire. A few of the hominids followed them, mothers with nursing infants. Maxie cried and complained at the pungent stink of their never-washed flesh. But Emma and Sally calmed him, and themselves, assuring each other that they were surely safer here than in the open, or in the forest.
One child, looking no more than five or six years old in human terms, fell ill. Her eyelids, cheeks, nose and lips were encrusted with sores. The child was skinny, and was evidently in distress; her gestures were faint, her movements listless.
‘I think it’s yaws,’ Sally said. ‘I’ve seen it upriver, in Africa … It’s related to syphilis. But it’s transmitted by flies, who carry it from wound to wound. That’s where the first signs show: little bumps in the corners of your eyes, or your nostrils, where the flies go to suck your moisture.’
‘What’s the cure?’
‘A shot of Extencilline. Safeguards you for life. But we don’t have any.’
Emma rummaged through her medical pocket. ‘What about Floxapen?’
‘Maybe. But you’re crazy to use it up on them. We’re going to need it ourselves. We’ll get ulcers. We need it.’
Emma struggled to read the directions on the little bottle. She found a scrap of meat, embedded a pill in it, and fed it to the child. It was hard to hold her hand near that swollen, grotesque face.
The next morning, she did the same. She kept it up until the Floxapen was gone. It seemed to her the child was getting gradually better.
Maybe it helped the Runners accept them. She wasn’t sure if they understood what she was doing, if they saw the cause-and-effect relationship between her treatment and any change in the girl’s condition.
Sally didn’t try to stop her. But Emma could see she was silently resentful at what she regarded as a waste of their scarce resources. It didn’t help relations between them.
Five or six days after their arrival, she woke to find shards of deep blue sky showing through the loosely stacked branches above her. She threw off her parachute-silk blanket and crawled out of the shelter’s rough opening.
It was the first time the sky had been clear since she had got here. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face. The sky was a rich beautiful blue, and it was scattered with clouds, and it was deep. She saw low cumulus clouds, fat and grey and slow, and higher cirrus-like clouds that scudded across the sky, and wispy traces even above that: layers of cloud that gave her an impression of tallness that she had rarely, if ever, seen on Earth.
She tried to orient herself. If the sun was that way, at this hour, she was looking east. And when she looked to the west oh, my Lord there was a Moon: more than half-full, a big fat beautiful bright Moon.
… Too big, too fat, too bright. It had to be at least twice the diameter of the pale grey Moon she was used to. And it was no mottled grey disc, like Luna. This was a vibrant dish of colour. Much of it was covered with a shining steel-blue surface that glimmered in the light of the sun. Elsewhere she saw patches of brown and green. At either extreme of the disc at the poles, perhaps she saw strips of blinding white. And over the whole thing clouds swirled, flat white streaks and stripes and patches, gathered in one place into a deep whirlwind knot.
Ocean: that was what that shining steel surface must be, just as the brown-green was land. That wasn’t poor dead Luna: it was a planet, with seas and ice caps and continents and air.
And she quickly made out a characteristic continent shape on that brightly lit quadrant, almost bare of cloud, baked brown, familiar from schoolbook studies and CNN reports and Malenfant’s schoolkid slideshows. It was Africa, quite unmistakably, the place she had come from.
That was no ‘Moon’. That was Earth.
And if she was looking at Earth, up in the sky, her relentlessly logical mind told her, then she couldn’t be on Earth any more. ‘Stands to reason,’ she murmured.
It made sense, of course: the different air, the lightness of walking, these alien not-quite humans running around everywhere. She had known it the whole time, on some level, but she hadn’t wanted to face it.
But, if not on Earth, where was she? How had she got here? How was she ever going to get home again? All the time she had been here, she realized, she had got not one whit closer to answering these most basic questions.
Now a shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. A new cloud was driving overhead, flat, thick, dark.
Sally was standing beside her. ‘They talk English.’
‘What?’
‘The flat-heads. They talk English. Just a handful of words, but it is English. Remember that. They surely didn’t evolve it for themselves.’
‘Somebody must have taught it to them.’
‘Yes.’ She turned to Emma, her eyes hard. ‘Wherever we are, we aren’t the first to get here. We aren’t alone here, with these apes.’
She’s right, Emma realized. It wasn’t much, but it was a hope to cling to, a shred of evidence that there was more to this bizarre experience than the plains and the forests and the hominids.
Emma peered into the sky, where Earth was starting to set.
Malenfant, where are you?
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant parked at the Beachhouse car park. Close to the Kennedy Space Center, this was an ancient astronaut party house that NASA had converted into a conference centre.
Malenfant, in his disreputable track suit, found the path behind the house. He came to a couple of wooden steps and trotted down to the beach itself. The beach, facing the Atlantic to the east, was empty, as far as he could see. This was a private reserve, a six-mile stretch of untouched coastline NASA held back for use by astronauts and their families and other agency personnel.
It wasn’t yet dawn.
He stripped off his shoes and socks and felt the cool, moist sand between his toes. Tiny crabs scuttled across the sand at his feet, dimly visible. He wondered whether they had been disturbed by the new Moonlight, like so many of the world’s animals. He stretched his hams, leaning forward on one leg, then the other. Too old to skip your stretching, Malenfant, no matter what else is on your mind.
The Red Moon was almost full the first full Moon since its appearance, and Emma’s departure. A month
