Emma saw it made sense. It only took a quarter-hour or so to make a reasonable hand-axe, and the Runners were smart at finding the raw materials they needed; they presumably wouldn’t stop in a place that couldn’t provide them in that way. To invest fifteen minutes in making a new axe was a lot better than spending all day carrying a lethally sharp blade in your bare hands.
All this shaped their lifestyle, in a way she found oddly pleasing. The Runners had no possessions. If they wanted to move to some new place they just abandoned everything they had, like walking out of a house full of furniture leaving the doors unlocked. When they got to where they were going they would just make more of whatever they needed, and within half a day they were probably as well equipped as they had been before the move. There must be a deep satisfaction in this way of life, never weighed down by possessions and souvenirs and memories. A clean self-sufficiency.
But Sally was dismissive. “Lions don’t own anything either. Elephants don’t. Chimps don’t. Emma, these ape-men are animals, even if they are built like basketball players. The notion of possessing anything that doesn’t go straight in their mouths has no more meaning to them than it would to my pet cat.”
Emma shook her head, troubled. The truth, she suspected, was deeper than that.
Anyhow, people or animals, the Runners walked, and walked, and walked. They were black shadows that glided over bright red ground, hooting and calling to each other, nude walking machines.
Soon Emma’s socks were a ragged bloody mess, and where her boots didn’t fit quite right they chafed at her skin. A major part of each new day was the foot ritual, as Emma and Sally lanced blisters and stuffed their battered boots with leaves and grass. And if she rolled up her trousers wet sores, pink on black, speckled her shins; Sally suffered similarly. They took turns carrying Maxie, but they were laden down with their parachute silk bundles, and a lot of the time he just had to walk as best he could, clinging to their hands, wailing protests.
During the long days of walking, Emma found herself inevitably spending more time than she liked with Sally.
Emma and Sally didn’t much like each other. That was the blunt truth.
There was no reason why they should; they had after all been scooped at random from out of the sky, and just thrown together. At times, hungry or thirsty or frightened or bewildered, they would take it out on each other, bitching and arguing. But that would always pass. They were both smart enough to recognize how much they needed each other.
Still, Emma found herself looking down on Sally somewhat. Riding on her husband’s high-flying career, Sally had gotten used to a grander style of life than Emma had ever enjoyed, or wanted. Emma had often berated herself for sacrificing her own aspirations to follow her husband’s star, but it seemed to her that Sally had given up a lot more than she had ever been prepared to.
For the sake of good relations, she tried to keep such thoughts buried.
And Emma had to concede Sally’s inner toughness. She had after all lost her husband, brutally slain before her eyes. Once she was through the shock of that dreadful arrival, Sally had shown herself to be a survivor, in this situation where a lot of people would surely have folded quickly.
Besides, she had achieved a lot of things Emma had never done. Not least raising kids. Maxie was as happy and healthy and sane as any kid his age Emma had ever encountered. And there turned out to be a girl, Sarah, twelve years old, left at home in Boston for the sake of her schooling while her parents enjoyed their extended African adventure.
Now, of course, this kid Sarah was left effectively orphaned. Sally told Emma that she knew that even if she didn’t make it home her sister would take care of the girl, and that her husband’s will and insurance cover would provide for the rest of her education and beyond. But it clearly broke her up to think that she couldn’t tell Sarah what had become of her family.
It seemed odd to Emma to talk of wills and grieving relatives — as if they were corpses walking round up here on this unfamiliar Moon, too dumb to know they were dead — but she supposed the same thing must be happening in her family. Her will would have handed over all her assets to Malenfant, who must be dealing with her mother and sister and family, and her employers would probably by now be recruiting to fill an Emma-shaped hole in their personnel roster.
But somehow she never imagined Malenfant grieving for her. She pictured him working flat-out on some scheme, hare-brained or otherwise, to figure out what had happened to her, to send her a message, even get her home.
Don’t give up, Malenfant; I’m right here waiting for you. And it is, after all, your fault that I’m stuck here.
One day at around noon, with the sun high in the south, the group stopped at a water hole.
The three humans sat in the shade of a broad oak-like tree, while the Runners ate, drank, worked at tools, played, screwed, slept, all uncoordinated, all in their random way. Maxie was playing with one child, a bubbly little girl with a mess of pale brown hair and a cute, disturbingly chimp-like face.
All around the Runners, a fine snow of volcano ash fell, peppering their dark skins white and grey.
The woman called Wood approached Emma and Sally shyly, her hand on her lower belly. Emma had noticed she had some kind of injury just above her pubis. She would cover it with her hand, and at night curl up around it, mewling softly.
Emma sat up. “Do you think she wants us to help?” Maybe the Runners had taken notice of her treatment of the child with yaws after all.
“Even if she does, ignore her. We aren’t the Red Cross.”
Emma stood and approached the woman cautiously. Wood backed away, startled. Emma made soothing noises. She got hold of the woman’s arm, and, gently, pulled her hand away.
“Oh God,” she said softly.
She had exposed a raised, black mound of infection, as large as her palm. At its centre was a pit, deep enough for her to have put her fingertip inside, pink rimmed. As Wood breathed the sides of the pit moved slightly.
Sally came to stand by her. “That’s an open ulcer. She’s had it.”
Emma rummaged in their minuscule medical kit.
“Don’t do it,” Sally said. “We need that stuff.”
“We’re out of dressings,” Emma murmured.
“That’s because we already used them all up,” Sally said tightly.
Emma found a tube of Savlon. She got her penknife and cut off a strip of “chute fabric. The ulcer stank, like bad fish. She squeezed Savlon into the hole, and wrapped the strip of fabric around the woman’s waist.
Wood walked away, picking at the fabric, amazed, somehow pleased with herself. Emma found she had used up almost all the Savlon.
Sally glowered. “Listen to me. While you play medicine woman with these flat heads…” She made a visible effort to control her temper. “I don’t know how long I can keep this up. My feet are a bloody mass. Every joint aches.” She held up a wrist that protruded out of her grimy sleeve. “We must be covering fifteen, twenty miles a day. It was bad enough living off raw meat and insects while we stayed in one place. Now we’re burning ourselves up.”
Emma nodded. “I know. But I don’t see we have any choice. It’s obvious the Runners are fleeing something: the volcanism maybe. We have to assume they know, on some level anyhow, a lot more than we do.”
Sally glared at the hominids. “They killed my husband. Every day I wake up wondering if today is the day they will kill and butcher me, and my kid. Yes, we have to stick with these flat-heads. But I don’t have to be comfortable with it. I don’t have to like it.”