Ocean: that was what that shining steel surface must be, just as the brown-green was land. That wasn’t poor dead Luna: it was a planet, with seas and ice caps and continents and air.
And she quickly made out a characteristic continent shape on that brightly lit quadrant, almost bare of cloud, baked brown, familiar from schoolbook studies and CNN reports and Malenfant’s schoolkid slideshows. It was Africa, quite unmistakably, the place she had come from.
That was no “Moon’. That was Earth.
And if she was looking at Earth, up in the sky, her relentlessly logical mind told her, then she couldn’t be on Earth any more. “Stands to reason,” she murmured.
It made sense, of course: the different air, the lightness of walking, these alien not-quite humans running around everywhere. She had known it the whole time, on some level, but she hadn’t wanted to face it.
But, if not on Earth, where was she? How had she got here? How was she ever going to get home again? All the time she had been here, she realized, she had got not one whit closer to answering these most basic questions.
Now a shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. A new cloud was driving overhead, flat, thick, dark.
Sally was standing beside her. “They talk English.”
“What?”
“The flat-heads. They talk English. Just a handful of words, but it is English. Remember that. They surely didn’t evolve it for themselves.”
“Somebody must have taught it to them.”
“Yes.” She turned to Emma, her eyes hard. “Wherever we are, we aren’t the first to get here. We aren’t alone here, with these apes.”
She’s right, Emma realized. It wasn’t much, but it was a hope to cling to, a shred of evidence that there was more to this bizarre experience than the plains and the forests and the hominids.
Emma peered into the sky, where Earth was starting to set.
Malenfant, where are you?
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant parked at the Beachhouse car park. Close to the Kennedy Space Center, this was an ancient astronaut party house that NASA had converted into a conference centre.
Malenfant, in his disreputable track suit, found the path behind the house. He came to a couple of wooden steps and trotted down to the beach itself. The beach, facing the Atlantic to the east, was empty, as far as he could see. This was a private reserve, a six-mile stretch of untouched coastline NASA held back for use by astronauts and their families and other agency personnel.
It wasn’t yet dawn.
He stripped off his shoes and socks and felt the cool, moist sand between his toes. Tiny crabs scuttled across the sand at his feet, dimly visible. He wondered whether they had been disturbed by the new Moonlight, like so many of the world’s animals. He stretched his hams, leaning forward on one leg, then the other. Too old to skip your stretching, Malenfant, no matter what else is on your mind.
The Red Moon was almost full — the first full Moon since its appearance, and Emma’s departure. A month already. The light cast by the Red Moon was much brighter than the light of vanished silvery Luna, bright enough to wash out all but the brightest stars, bright enough to turn the sky a rich deep blue — but it was an eerie glow, neither day nor night. It was like being in a movie set, Malenfant thought, some corny old 1940s musical with a Moon painted on a canvas sky.
Malenfant hated it alclass="underline" the light, the big bowl of mystery up there in the sky. To him the Red Moon was like a glowing symbol of his loss, of Emma.
Breathing deep of the salty ocean air, he jogged through gentle dunes, brushing past thickets of palmetto. It wasn’t as comfortable a jog as it used to be: the beach had been heavily eroded by the Tide, and it was littered with swathes of sea-bottom mud, respectably large rocks, seaweed and other washed-up marine creatures — not to mention a large amount of oil smears and garbage, some of it probably emanating from the many Atlantic wrecks. But to Malenfant the solitude here was worth the effort of finding a path through the detritus.
It had been another sleepless night. He was consumed with his desire to reach the Red Moon.
Frustrated by the reception his proposals were receiving at NASA Headquarters in Washington, he had decided to take his schemes, his blueprints and models and Barco shows, around the NASA centres, to Ames and Marshall and Kennedy and Johnson, trying to drum up grass-roots support, and put pressure on the senior brass.
We can do this. We’ve been to the Moon before — a Moon, anyhow — and this new mother is a lot more forgiving than old Luna. Now we have an atmosphere to exploit. No need to stand on your rockets all the way from orbit; you can glide to the ground… We can throw together a heavy-lift booster from Shuttle components in months. That one the challenge for Marshall, where von Braun had built his Moon rockets. For Kennedy and Johnson, where the astronauts worked: We have whole cadres of trained, experienced and willing pilots, specialists and mission controllers itching to take up the challenge of a new Moon. Hell, I’ll go myself if you’ll let me… He had appealed to the scientists, too: the geologists and meteorologists and even the biologists who suddenly had a whole new world to study: It will be a whole new challenge in human spaceflight, a world with oceans and an atmosphere — an oxygen atmosphere, by God — just three days away. It’s the kind of world we were hoping we might find when we sent our first fragile ships out on the ocean of space half a century ago. And who knows what we’ll discover there…
And then there were the groups he had come to think of as the xeno-ologists: the biologists and philosophers and astronomers and others who, long before the sudden irruption of the Red Moon, had considered the deeper mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Even if not, why does it seem that we are alone? If we were to meet others — what would they be like?
Come on, people. Our Moon disappeared, and was replaced by another. How the hell? Can this possibly be some natural phenomenon? If not, who’s responsible? Not us, that’s for sure. The greatest mystery of this or any other age is hanging up there like some huge Chinese lantern. Shouldn’t we go take a look?
But, to his dismay and surprise, he had gotten no significant support from anybody — save the wacko UFO-hunting fringe types, who did him more harm than good. NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was working on a couple of unmanned orbital probes and a lander to go visit the Red Moon. But that was it. The notion of sending humans to Earth’s new companion was definitively out of the question.
So he had been told, gently but firmly, by Joe Bridges.
“In these road shows of yours you underestimate the magnitude of the task, Malenfant. Whether you’re doing that deliberately or not isn’t for me to say. We know diddley about the structure of the Red Moon’s atmosphere, which is somewhat essential data before you even begin to develop your gliding lander. And then what about the cost and schedule implications of putting together your ‘Big Dumb Booster’ — a brand-new man-rated heavy-lift launcher, for God’s sake? Our analysis predicts a schedule of years and a cost of maybe a hundred billion bucks. We just don’t have that kind of money, Malenfant. And NASA can’t go asking for it right now. Get your head out of your ass and take a look around. The Tide. The human race has other priorities…”
The first sunlight began to seep into the Atlantic horizon, smears of orange and pink banishing the Red Moon’s unnatural light. Malenfant’s calves were beginning to tingle, and he could feel his breathing deepening, his heart starting to pound.
Too long since I did this.
He had gotten hooked on running in the dawn light during the preparation for his first spaceflight. Emma had complained that he was spending even less time with her, but as long as he crept out of bed without waking her she had seemed to forgive him. But then there always had been a lot she had had to forgive him for. Is that why I want to reach her — just so I can say I’m sorry? Well, is that so bad? Or is it selfish — do I just want to get to her so I can project even more of my own shit onto her?…