But beyond that, all was uncertain. Nobody knew if they would find water fresh enough to drink. Nobody knew if they would be able to eat the vegetation always assuming the grey-green swathes visible through telescopes were vegetation at all. Nobody knew if there would be animals to hunt — or if there were animals that might hunt two human astronauts. It wasn’t even clear if the air could be breathed unfiltered.
The ship would be packed with three days” ground supplies, including air filters and water and compressed food. If the makeshift explorers found they couldn’t live off the land in that time, they were just going to have to climb back in their lander and depart (always supposing they could find the return-journey rocket pack that was supposed to follow them to the Moon).
And then there was the mystery of the hominids who had come tumbling through the Wheel in the sky.
Malenfant and Nemoto had sat through hours of lectures by Julia Corneille and others, trying to absorb the best understanding of the evolution of mankind, watching one species after another parade through dimly realized computer animations — Australopithecus, Homo habilis. Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens. Homo heidelbergensis. Homo neandertalensis… It was a plethora of speculation as fragmentary, it seemed to Malenfant, as the bone scraps on which it was based. He had vaguely imagined that the newer evidence based on DNA variation might have cleared the picture, but it seemed only to have confused everybody further. Nobody knew where humanity was going, of course. It had startled Malenfant to find that if you dug deeper than pop science simplifications, nobody really knew where man had come from either.
The truth was that the sessions had been of little use. Malenfant had learned more than he wanted to know about archaeological. techniques and dating methods and anatomical signifiers and all the rest. What he needed to know was how to handle a tribe of Homo habilis, alive, fighting and breeding, should he crest a hillside on the Red Moon and discover them — or vice versa. But NASA’s experts, curators of fragments all, simply weren’t tuned to thinking that way. It was as if they could only see the bits of bone, and not the people that must once have lived to yield up these ancient treasures.
The only real consensus was that Malenfant and Nemoto should pack guns.
…He had lost his hat. He saw it on the ground.
There was a ringing in his ears. He ought to get his hat. He bent to reach it.
Next thing he knew, he was on his side. He lay there fuming.
The hat was too far away to reach, so he wriggled that way. Like a snake, he thought, cackling. When he had his hat he stuck it on the side of his head, so it shielded his face.
At least the palaeo training had been relevant, he thought. Too much of the rest of his time had been filled up with pointless exercises like this. They had even threatened to put him back in a centrifuge. “I told them to stick the fucking centrifuge where the sun don’t shine,” he muttered.
The sand was hot and soft. Its pressure seemed to ease the pain in his head. Maybe he would sleep awhile.
There were hands under his hips and shoulders, pushing him onto his back. A face above him blocked out the sky. It, she, was saying something. Nemoto, of course.
He said, “Leave me alone.”
She leaned closer. “Open your mouth.” She lifted a flask and poured in water.
He made to spit it out, but that would be even more stupid. He swallowed it. “Stop that. We have to save it.”
“You’re dehydrated, Malenfant. You know the drill. You drink what you have until it’s gone, and if you have not been found by then, you die of thirst. Simple logic. Either way it does no good to ration your water.”
“Horse feathers,” he said. But he let her pour more water into his mouth. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.
Emma Stoney:
They continued to work their way east. A range of mountains, low and eroded almost to shapelessness, began to loom above the horizon. Though their outlines and colours were softened to blurs by the murky air, Emma thought she made out bands of vegetation, forest perhaps, on their lower slopes.
After another day’s walking, the Runners paused by a shallow, slow-running stream.
Sally threw herself flat on the ground. She seemed to go to sleep at once. Maxie, as ever full of life at precisely the wrong time, ran off to play with the Runner children.
Emma sat on dusty grass and eased off her boots. Maybe her feet were toughening up; at least she didn’t have to pour any blood out of her boots today. She limped to the stream to drink, wash her face, bathe her feet. She found a stand of root plants, a little like potatoes, small enough to dig out of the ground. It was a pleasure for once to be able to provide for herself.
Emma watched the Runners. The descending sun had turned the western sky a tall orange-pink — volcano sunset, she thought — and peering through the dusty air was like looking into a tank of shining water, through which exotic creatures swam.
The stream had washed down a rich supply of volcanic pebbles, and many of the adults were knapping tools. They squatted on their haunches in the stream, their lithe bodies folded up like penknives, tapping one stone against another. The axes they made were flattened slabs of stone, easy to grip, with clean sharp edges. Stone axes and wooden spears: the only tools the Runners ever made, over and over, tools they turned to every task from butchering carcasses to shaving even though their hands were clearly just as capable of fine manipulation as Emma’s.
There were a lot of oddities, if you watched carefully.
The toolmakers worked in silence and isolation, as if the others didn’t exist. Emma never saw a Runner pick up a tool dropped by somebody else and use it, not once. A few children and young adults sat beside their elders, watching, trying to copy them. Mostly the adults ignored their apprentices; only very rarely did Emma see examples of coaching, such as when one woman picked a rock from out of a boy’s hand and turned it around so it served to flake the anvil stone better.
All the tools turned out by the women, so far as Emma could tell, were functional. But some of the men’s were different. Take Stone, for example, the bullying alpha-male. Sometimes he would sit and labour for hours at an axe, knocking off a chip here, a flake there. It was as if he pursued some impossible dream of symmetry or fineness, working at his axe far beyond the point where he could be adding any value.
Or, more strangely, he would sit with a pile of stones and work feverishly, turning out axe after axe. But some of these “axes” were mere flakes of rock the size of Emma’s thumb — and some were great monsters that she could have held only in two hands, like a book opened for reading. These pathological designs seemed no use as tools; Stone would do no more than carry them around with him for a few hours, making sure everybody saw them, before dumping them, never used, their edges as sharp as the instant they were made.
Emma didn’t know why Stone did this. Maybe it was a dim groping towards culture: hand-axe as art form. After all, the hand-axe was the only meaningful artefact they actually made, taking planning and vision and a significant skill; their other “tools’, like their termite-digging sticks or even their spears, were little more than broken-off bits of wood or bone, based on serendipitous discoveries of raw materials, scarcely finished. The hand-axe was the only way the Runners had to express themselves.
But if that was so, why didn’t the women join in such “artistic” activities as well?
Or maybe the useless hand-axes were about sex, not practicality or culture. After all to be able to make a decent axe showed a broad range of skills planning, vision, manual skills, strength — essential for survival in this unforgiving wilderness. Look at me, girls. I’m so fit and strong and full of food, I’ve got time to waste on these useless monsters and fingernail-sized scale models. Look at me! When everybody around you had a body as drop-dead beautiful as any athlete’s she had ever seen, you needed something to stand out from the crowd.