It was ash.
“We have to go, don’t we?” Sally asked reluctantly.
“Yes, we have to go.”
“But if we leave here, how will they find us?”
They? What they? The question seemed almost comical to Emma.
But she knew Sally took it very seriously. They had spent long hours draping Emma’s parachute silk over rocks and in the tops of trees, hoping its bright colour might attract attention from the air, or even from orbit. And they had laboured to pull pale-coloured rocks into a vast rectangular sigil. None of it had done a damn bit of good.
There was, though, a certain logic to staying close to where they had emerged from the wheel-shaped portal. After all, who was to say the portal wouldn’t reappear one day, as suddenly as it had disappeared, a magic door opening to take them home?
And beyond that, if they were to leave with the Runners — if they were to walk off in some unknown direction with these gangly, naked not-quite-humans — it would feel like giving up: a statement that they had thrown in their lot with the Runners, that they had accepted that this was their life now, a life of crude shelters and berries from the forest and, if they were lucky, scraps of half-chewed, red-raw meat: this was the way it would be for the rest of their lives.
But Emma didn’t see what the hell else they could do.
They compromised. They spent a half-hour gathering the largest, brightest rocks they could carry, and arranging them into a great arrow that pointed away from the Runners” crude hearth, towards the east. Then they bundled up as much of their gear as they could carry in wads of parachute silk, and followed the Runners” tracks.
Emma made sure they stayed clear of a low heap of bones she saw scattered a little way away. She was glad it had never occurred to Sally to ask hard questions about what had become of her husband’s body.
The days wore away.
Their track meandered around natural obstacles — a boggy marsh, a patch of dense forest, a treeless, arid expanse — but she could tell that their course remained roughly eastward, away from the looming volcanic cloud.
The Runners seemed to prefer grassy savannah with some scattered tree cover, and would divert to keep to such ground — and Emma admitted to herself that such park-like areas made her feel relatively comfortable too, more than either dense forest or unbroken plains. Maybe it was no coincidence that humans made parks that reminded them, on some deep level, of countryside like this. I guess we all carry a little Africa around with us, she thought.
She was no expert on botany, African or otherwise. It did seem to her there were a lot of fern-like trees and relatively few flowering plants, as if the flora here was more primitive than on Earth. A walk in the Jurassic, then.
As for the fauna, she glimpsed herds of antelope-like creatures: some of them were slim and agile, who would bolt as the Runners approached, but others were larger, clumsier, hairier, crossing the savannah in heavy-footed gangs. The animals kept their distance, and she was grateful for that. But again they didn’t strike her as being characteristically African: she saw no elephants, no zebra or giraffes. (But then, she told herself, there were barely any elephants left in Africa anyhow.)
It was clear there were predators everywhere. Once Emma heard the throaty, echoing roar of what had to be a lion. A couple of times she spotted cats slinking through brush at the fringe of forests: leopards, perhaps.
And once they came across a herd — no, a flock — of huge, vicious-looking carnivorous birds.
The flightless creatures moved in a tight group with an odd nervousness, pecking at the ground with those savagely curved beaks, and scratching at their feathers and cheeks with claws like scimitars. Their behaviour was very bird-like, but unnerving in creatures so huge.
The Runners took cover in a patch of forests for a full half-day, until the flock had passed.
The Runners called them “killing birds’. A wide-eyed Maxie called the birds “dinosaurs’.
And they did look like dinosaurs, Emma thought. Birds had evolved from dinosaurs, of course; here, maybe, following some ecological logic, birds had lost their flight, had forgotten how to sing, but they had rediscovered their power and their pomp, becoming lords of the landscape once more.
The Runners” gait wasn’t quite human. Their rib cages seemed high and somewhat conical, more like a chimp’s than a human’s, and their hips were very narrow, so that each Runner was a delicately balanced slim form with long striding legs.
Emma wondered what problems those narrow hips caused during childbirth. The heads of the Runners weren’t that much smaller than her own. But there were no midwives here, and no epidurals either. Maybe the women helped each other.
Certainly each of them clearly knew her own children — unlike the men, who seemed to regard the children as small, irritating competitors.
The women even seemed to use sex to bond. Sometimes in the night, two women would lie together, touching and stroking, sharing gentle pleasures that would last much longer than the short, somewhat brutal physical encounters they had with the men.
By comparison, the men had no real community at all, just a brutish ladder of competition: they bickered and snapped amongst themselves, endlessly working out their pecking order. At that, Emma thought, this bunch of guys had a lot of common with every human mostly-male preserve she had ever come across, up to and including the NASA Astronaut Office.
Stone was the boss man; he used his fists and feet and teeth and hand-axes to keep the other men in their place, and to win access to the women. But he, and the other men, did not seek to injure or kill his own kind. It was all just a dominance game.
And Stone was not running a harem here. With all that fist-fighting he won himself more rolls in the hay than the other men, but the others got plenty too; all they had to do was wait until Stone was asleep, or looking the other way, or was off hunting, or just otherwise engaged. Emma had no idea why this should be so. Maybe you just couldn’t run a harem in a highly mobile group like this; maybe you needed a place to hold your female quasi-prisoners, a fortress to defend your “property” from other men.
It was what these people lacked that struck Emma most strongly. They had no art, no music, no song. They didn’t even have language; their verbless jabber conveyed basic emotions — anger, fear, demands — but little information. They only “talked” anyhow in social encounters, mating or grooming or fighting, never when they were working, making tools or hunting or even eating. She thought their “talk” had more in common with the purring and yowling of cats than information-rich human conversation.
Certainly the Runners never discussed where they were going. It was clear, though, from the way they studied animal tracks, and fingered shrubs, and sniffed the wind, that they had a deep understanding of this land on which they lived, and knew how to find their way across it.
…Yes, but how did that knowledge get there, if not through talking, learning? Maybe a facility for tracking was hard-wired into their heads at birth, she speculated, as the ability to pick up language seemed to be born with human infants.
Whatever, it was a peculiar example of how the Runners could be as smart as any human in one domain — say, tracking — and yet be dumber than the smallest child in another — such as playing Maxie’s games of hide-and-seek and catch. It was as if their minds were chambered, some rooms fully stocked, some empty, all of the chambers walled off from each other.
When the Runners stopped for the night, they would scavenge for rocks and bits of wood and quickly make any tools they needed: hand-axes, spears. But they carried nothing with them except chunks of food. In the morning, when it was time to move on, they would just drop their hand-axes in the dirt and walk away, sometimes leaving the tools in the mounds of spill they had made during their creation.