Sing, on the ground, looks up at him. She smiles. “Hungry Fire,” she says. He thinks of her feeding him. But she is small and withered. She does not get up to feed him.
Stone walks over the branches he hauled across the savannah, the branches that transported Sing. He kicks them aside. He has forgotten he hauled them here. He bends. His hands seek out a piece of dung on the ground. His tongue tastes it. It is Nutcracker-man dung. The dung is old. The dung crumbles.
Fire is not fearful. There are no Nutcracker-men near here.
Stone’s feet kick aside more branches and twigs. He uncovers a round patch of black ground. Fire’s nose smells ash. Stone hoots. “Hah! Fire Fire.”
Fire crouches over the ash. The fire is warm in his hands.
Loud and Dig and others huddle near him. Their hands scrape dry stuff from the floor, dead leaves and dry moss and grass and bits of bark. Their hands pick up rocks, and rub the tinder against the rocks. Their fingers turn the tinder, making it fine and light.
Wood’s legs walk to the forest. She comes back with a bundle of sticks, of wood. That is what she does. That is her name. She piles the sticks on the ground.
The hands of the others push the tinder into the middle of the pile of wood.
Working closely, the people jostle each other. They are hot from the walk. Their bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger, irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives. Their ancestors” hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Fire waits while they work.
He sees himself.
He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this other’s face. The adults” huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push him out of the way.
A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.
…The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.
Fire’s hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.
People laugh and hoot at the fire.
Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.
Emma Stoney:
The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural land beyond showing as patches of greyish green and brown. On the eastern horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon, almost full, its small grey face peering back at the sun’s harsh glare.
Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.
Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten per cent of the time on his two spaceflights throwing up.
Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon to left. As they headed towards the interior of the continent, the land turned brown, parched, flat.
“What a shithole,” Malenfant said, his voice a whisper over the jet’s roar. “Africa. Cradle of mankind my ass.”
“Malenfant—”
He hurled the T-38 forward with a powerful afterburner surge.
Within seconds they had reached 45,000 feet and had gone through a bone-shaking Mach 1. The vibrations damped away and the noise of the jets dwindled — for, of course, they were outstripping most of the sound they made — and the plane seemed to hang in shining stillness.
Emma, as she had before, felt a surge of exhilaration. It was at such paradoxical moments of stillness and speed that she felt closest to Malenfant.
But Malenfant was consumed by his gripes.
“Two years. I can’t fucking believe it. Two years of training, two years of meetings and planning sessions, and paddling around in hydro labs and spinning around in centrifuges. All of it for nothing.”
“Come on, Malenfant. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not as if Station work was ever such a prize anyhow. Looking at stars, pissing in Jars. That’s what you used to say—”
“Nobody was flying to fucking Mars. Station was all that was available, so I took it. Two flights, two lousy flights. I never even got to command a mission, for Christ’s sake.”
“You got washed out this time. That doesn’t mean you won’t fly again. A lot of crew are flying past your age.” That was true, of course, partly because NASA was having such difficulty finding willing applicants from younger generations.
But Malenfant growled, “It’s that asshole Bridges. He even called me into the JSC director’s office to explain the shafting. That fucking horse holder has always had it in for me. This will be the excuse he needs to send me to purgatory.”
Emma knew whom he meant. Joe Bridges was the director of flight operations — in effect, in NASA’s Byzantine, smothering internal bureaucracy, in charge of astronaut selection for missions.
Malenfant was still muttering. “You know what Bridges offered me? ASP.”
Emma riffled through her mental file of NASA acronyms. ASP: Astronaut Support Personnel, a non-flying astronaut assigned to support the crew of a mission.
“I’d have been point man on STS-194,” Malenfant spat. The Caped Crusader. Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole into my seat on the flight deck.”
“I gather you didn’t take the job,” Emma said dryly.
“I took it okay,” he snapped. “I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil pusher’s fat ass.”
“Oh, Malenfant,” she sighed.
She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to ceiling office window with its view of the park-like JSC campus, complete with the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crashlanded beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for too many eager crew-persons, so — in what seemed to Emma his own very small world — Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.
She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat, the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role; perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in NASA’s sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.
Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long, complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.
But to Malenfant — Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human behaviour, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy, barely engaged with the complexities of the world — to Malenfant, Joe Bridges, controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me, she thought) could be nothing but a monster.