Babo sat on his haunches. “An Air Wall,” Babo said. “We will erect an Air Wall to exclude unwelcome hominids, and other intruders. We will move the platform inside the cordon.”
“Yes…”
“No more blood and pain, Mane.”
They turned, and began to clamber further up the crater wall.
It was not long before they had reached the summit of the crater rim wall — and found themselves facing a broad plateau. A thin breeze blew, enough to cool Manekato’s face, and to ruffle her fur. The rock here was crimson-red, like a basalt or perhaps a very compact and ancient sandstone. It was bare of vegetation and very smooth, as if machined, and covered by a hard glaze that glistened in the sun’s weak light. There was little dust here, only a few pieces of scattered rock debris.
It was as if the crater had been filled in. “I don’t remember this from the Mapped image,” Babo said, disturbed.
Manekato dug her fingers into the fur on his neck. “Evidently we have limits.”
“But it means we don’t know what we will find, from now on.”
“Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that why we came? Come, brother, let us walk, and let us remember our humility.”
They walked forward, for perhaps a mile. And then they came to a circular pit, geometrically perfect. It was only yards across. Light leaked out of it, trapped by dust motes, a shaft that reached dimly to the sky.
Manekato’s imagination quailed. She reached for Babo’s hand, reluctantly reminded of how she had guided Nemoto through the strangeness of the Mapping.
Babo grinned at his sister. “This is strange and frightening — perhaps it is our turn to be humbled now — but I am sure we will find nothing that will not yield to the orderly application of science.”
“Your faith is touching,” she said dryly.
He laughed.
“But it is not time to approach it yet,” she said.
“No. We must study it.”
“Not just that.” They regarded each other, sharing a deep instinctive wisdom. “This is not for us alone, but for all hominids.”
“Yes,” he said. “But how long must we wait?”
“I think we will know…”
There was a blue flash, painfully bright, that seemed to fill Mane’s head; it reminded her uncomfortably of the punishment she had imposed on the Elf-folk.
She raised her head. “…Ah. Look, Babo.”
In the sky swam a new world. It looked like a vast ball of steel. Its atmosphere seemed clear, save for streaks and whorls of cloud. But beneath the cloud there was no land: not a scrap of it, no continents or islands, nothing but an ocean that gleamed grey, stretching unbroken from pole to pole. There weren’t even any polar caps to speak of: just crude, broken scatterings of pack ice, clinging to this big world’s axes. The only feature away from the poles was a glowing ring of blood-red, a vast undersea volcano, perhaps. And here and there she saw more soot-black streaks of dust or smoke, disfiguring the world ocean; drowned or not, this was a geologically active world.
It was a startling, terrifying sight — Manekato’s hind brain knew from five million years of observation that things in the sky weren’t supposed to change suddenly, arbitrarily — and she tried not to cower.
“It is a new Earth,” Babo said thinly. “So we have completed a transition, riding this rogue Red Moon. How interesting.”
“Yes.” She clutched her brother’s hands. Despite his cool words, he was trembling. “And now we are truly of this world, Babo.”
It was true. For Banded Earth, Manekato’s Earth, had gone.
Emma Stoney:
With Joshua, Mary and Julia, Emma walked south, towards the place where — as the Hams put it — the wind touched the ground.
Emma was pretty much toughened up by now. So long as she avoided leg ulcers, or getting tangled up in lianas or bramble, and the snakes and the multitude of insects that seemed to target any bare flesh like heat-seeking missiles, she was able to maintain a steady plod, covering miles and miles each day, across desert or semi-scrub or savannah or even through denser forest.
The Hams had more trouble. Their sheer strength vastly exceeded her own, but long-distance walking was alien to their physiques. They looked awkward as they barrelled along, and after a couple of days she could see how they suffered aches in the hips and knees of their bow legs, and the low arches of their great flat feet. Also, she suspected, such sedentary creatures as these must suffer a deeper disturbance as they dragged themselves across the landscape, far from any settled community. But, though they moaned wordlessly and rubbed at the offending parts of their anatomies, they never complained, not to her or each other.
The days were long and hot, and the nights, spent under the crudest of lean-tos, cold and cruelly uncomfortable. The Hams seemed capable of sleeping wherever they lay down, their great muscled bodies tensed and hard even in their sleep, like marble sculptures. But Emma had to work hard to get settled, with bits of parachute silk wrapped around her, and socks and vests bundled into a ball under her head.
Much of this stuff was Malenfant’s.
She had forced herself to take everything from him that might prove useful, even the little lens that had found its way from her hands to his. It wasn’t sentiment — sentiment would have driven her to bury the stuff with him — but a question of seeking advantages that might prolong her own survival. Not that there was much left, even though Malenfant had come to this Red Moon as part of a purposeful expedition, unlike her own helpless tumble through the Wheel. Idiot, Malenfant.
Anyhow, each night she immersed her face in the ragged bits of Malenfant’s clothing, seeking the last traces of his scent.
Day after day, they walked. The Hams never wavered in their course, each clumsy step directed by a wordless navigation.
It occurred to Emma to wonder how people who moved house less often than empires rose and fell on Earth were able to find their way across such challenging distances. She tried to discuss this with Julia. But Julia was unforthcoming. She shrugged her mighty shoulders. “Lon” time. People come, people go. This way, tha’. See?”
No, Emma didn’t see. But maybe it was something to do with their long Neandertal timescales — far longer than any human.
The Hams, squatting in their caves and huts, made nothing like the seasonal or annual congregations associated with human communities. But there had to be occasional contacts even so, for example when outlying hunting parties crossed each other’s paths, or maybe when a group was forced to move by some natural disaster, a cave flood or a land slip.
And such was the static nature of the Ham world that even very occasional contacts — not even once a generation — would suffice to keep you up to date. Once you knew that Uncle Fred and Aunt Wilma lived in those limestone caves two days” hike west of here, you could be absolutely sure that they would always be there. And so, over generations, bit by bit, from one small clue after another, the Hams and their forefathers built up a kind of map of the world around them. The Ham world was a place of geological solidity, the locations of their communities as anchored as the positions of mountains and rocks and streams, shifting only with the slow adjustments of climate.
It was an oddly comforting world-view, filled with a certain calm and order: where nothing ever changed much, but where each person had her own place in the sun, along with every rock and stream. But it wasn’t a human world-view. People rooted like trees… Though she struggled to understand, it was beyond her imagination.
And of course she might be quite wrong. Maybe the Hams worked on infra-sound like the elephants, or on telepathy, or astral projection. She didn’t know, and as Julia was unable to answer questions Emma was barely able to frame, she guessed she never was going to know.