What part of Africa had she landed in, exactly?
The rain came down harder still, reminding her she had a job to do.
She made her way out into the open, working across increasingly boggy ground, until she reached her parachute. She had been worried that the hominids might have taken it away, but it lay where it had fallen when she had come tumbling from out of the sky.
She took an armful of cloth and pulled it away from the ground. It came loose of the mud only with difficulty, and it was soaked through. She’d had vague plans of hauling the whole thing into the forest, but that was obviously impractical. She hunted through her pockets until she found a Swiss Army knife, kindly provided by the South African air force. She quickly discovered she had at her disposal a variety of screwdrivers, a can and bottle opener, a wood saw, scissors, a magnifying glass, even a nail file. At last she found a fat, sturdy blade. She decided she would cut loose a piece of cloth perhaps twenty feet square, which would suffice for a temporary shelter. Later, when the rain let up, she would come back and scavenge the rest of the silk.
She began to hack her way through the “chute material. But it was slow work.
For the first time since that dreadful moment of mid-air disintegration, she had time to think.
It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant’s final scream over the intercom, her sudden ejection — without warning, she had been thrust into the cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat’s rockets slammed into the small of her back — and then, even as her “chute had begun to open, she saw the wheel opening like a mouth all around her — and she had realized that for better or worse she was going to fall through it…
Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.
And then, this.
She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the breath knocked out of her. Lying on the ground, an instant after being forty thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: that was the first shock.
She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal, foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that, stranding her here.
Yes, but where was here?
She had cut the “chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.
Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall with swimming slowness.
Low gravity. As if she was on the Moon.
That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, where?
Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are going to do about it — specifically, how you plan to stay alive, long enough for Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.
…Malenfant.
Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn’t anywhere near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other side of the great blue portal?
But he’d been through the crash too. Was he alive at all?
She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her haunches. She remembered how he had been in those last instants before the destruction of the plane, the reckless way he had hurled them both at the unknown.
Malenfant, Malenfant, what have you done?
A scream tore from the forest.
Emma bundled up her parachute cloth and ran back the way she had come.
On her bed of dead leaves, Sally was sitting up. With her good arm she held her kid to her chest. Maxie was crying again, but Sally’s face was empty, her eyes dry.
Uneasy, Emma dumped the parachute cloth. In the seeping rain, she got to her knees and embraced them both. “It’s all right.”
The kid seemed to calm, sandwiched between the two women.
But Sally pushed her away. “How can you say that? Nothing’s right.” Her voice was eerily level.
Emma said carefully, “I don’t think they mean us any harm… Not any more.”
“Who?”
“The hominids.”
“I saw them,” Sally insisted.
“Who?”
“Ape-men. They were here. I just opened my eyes and there was this face over me. It was squat, hairy. Like a chimp.”
Then not like the hominids out on the plain, Emma thought, wondering. Was there more than one kind of human-ape, running around this strange, dreamy forest?
“It was going through my pockets,” Sally said. “I just opened my eyes and looked right in its face. I yelled. It stood up and ran away.”
“It stood up? Chimps don’t stand upright. Not habitually… Do they?”
“What do I know about chimps?”
“Look, the — creatures — out there on the plain don’t sound like that description.”
“They are ape-men.”
“But they aren’t squat and hairy.” Emma said hesitantly, “We’ve been through a lot. You’re entitled to a nightmare or two.”
Doubt and hostility crossed Sally’s face. “I know what I saw.”
The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.
At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outre concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn’t a flat, infinite, unchanging stage… To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.
And then there was the small matter of Sally’s husband.
Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally’s reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.
She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.
As she worked she said hesitantly, “My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you—”
“I’m Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg.” (Is?) “I guess you’ve met Maxie. We’re from Boston.”
“Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK.”
“Yes…” Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was in her early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn’t as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. “We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg… Where are we, do you think?”
“I don’t know any more than you do. I’m sorry.”
Sally’s smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. “Well, it sure isn’t your fault. What do you think we ought to do?”
Stay alive. “Keep warm. Keep out of trouble.”
“Do you think they know we are missing yet?”
What “they’? “That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet.”
Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn’t scared out of his wits. “I’m hungry.”
Emma squeezed his shoulder. “Me too.” She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.
She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colourful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.
Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of digestive biscuits before he gobbled up the handful of boiled sweets he had spotted immediately.