The child clapped his little hands together, looked at them as if he had never seen them before, and gazed up at his mother with wide eyes.
Shadow embraced him, suddenly overwhelmed by her feelings, warm and deep red and powerful.
And a great mass caromed into her back, knocking her flat.
Her child was screaming. She forced herself to her knees and turned her head.
One-eye had the infant. He was sitting on the ground, holding the baby by his waist. The child’s heavy head lolled to and fro. One-eye was flanked by two younger men, who watched him intently. One-eye flicked the side of the child’s skull with a bloody finger, making the head roll further.
Shadow got to her feet. Her back was a mass of bruises. She walked forward unsteadily, and with every step pain lanced. She stood before One-eye and held her hands out for her child.
One-eye clutched the child closer to his chest, not roughly, and the child scrabbled at his fur, seeking to cling on. The other men watched Shadow with a cold calculation.
Shadow stood there, bewildered, hot, exhausted, aching. She didn’t know what One-eye wanted. She sat on the ground and lay back, opening her legs for him.
One-eye grinned. He held the child before him. And he bit into the front of its head. The child shuddered once, then was limp.
Shadow’s world dissolved into crimson rage. She was aware of the child’s body being hurled into the air, blood still streaming from the wound in his head, as limp as a chewed leaf. She lunged at One-eye, screaming in his face, clawing and biting. One-eye was knocked flat on the ground, and he raised his hands before his bloody face to ward off her blows.
Then the other men got hold of her shoulders and dragged her away. She kicked and fought, but she was weakened by her long deprivation, her heatings and her illness; she was no match for two burly men. At last they took her by an arm and a leg. They swung her in the air and hurled her against a broad tree trunk.
The men were still there, One-eye and the others, sitting in a tight circle on the ground. They were working at something. She heard the rip of flesh, smelled the stink of blood. She tried to rise, but could not, and she fell back into darkness.
The next time she woke she was alone. The light was gone, and only pale yellow Earthlight, filtered through the forest canopy, littered the ground.
She crawled to where the men had been sitting.
She picked up one small arm. A strip of gristle at the shoulder showed where it had been twisted from the torso. The hand was still in place, perfectly formed, clenched into a tiny fist.
She was high in a tree, in a roughly prepared nest. She didn’t remember getting there. It was day, the sun high and hot.
She remembered her baby. She remembered the tiny hand.
By the time she clambered down from the tree, her determination was as pure as fast-running water.
Emma Stoney:
Emma trudged wearily over the soft sand of the ocean shore. The ocean itself was a sheet of steel, visibly curving at the horizon, and big low-gravity waves washed across it languidly.
This strip of yellow-white beach lay between the ocean and a stretch of low dunes. Further inland she saw a grassy plain, a blanket of green that rippled as the wind touched it, studded here and there by knots of trees. A herd of grazing animals moved slowly across the plain, their collective motion flowing, almost liquid; they looked like huge wild horses. The stretch of savannah ended in a cliff of some dark volcanic rock, and a dense forest spilled over the lip of the cliff, a thick green-black. It was a scene of life, of geological and biological harmony, characterized by the scale and slow pace of this world. In any other context it might have been beautiful.
But Emma walked warily, the rags of her flight suit flapping around her, her loose pack strapped to her back with bits of vegetable rope, a wooden spear in one hand and a basalt axe in the other. Beautiful or not, this was a world full of dangerous predators — not least, the humans.
And then she saw a flash of blue fabric, high on the cliff.
She walked up the beach towards the cliff, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart.
Every day her mood swung between elation and feverish hope, to bitterness that bordered on despair. One day at a time, Emma. Think like a Ham. Take it one day at a time.
But now she could see the lander itself. She broke into a run, staring, wishing her eyes had a zoom feature.
It was unmistakably NASA technology, like a stubby scale-model Space Shuttle, with black and white protective tiles. It was surrounded by shreds of its blue parafoil. But it was stuck in a clump of trees, halfway down the cliff; it looked like some fat moth clinging to the rock.
“Nice landing, Malenfant,” she murmured.
Disturbingly, she saw no sign that anybody had done anything constructive up there. There were no ropes leading up or down the cliff, no stars and stripes waving, no SOS sign carved into the foliage.
Maybe the crew hadn’t survived the crash.
She put that thought aside. They could have gotten out before the lander had plummeted over the cliff, even ejected on the way down. There were many possibilities. At the very least, there should be stuff she could use — tools, a first aid kit, maybe even a radio.
Messages from home.
What was for sure was that she was going to have to get up that cliff to find out. And she wasn’t going to make it up there alone.
There was an encampment of Hams, a squat hut of skin weighted down with stone, almost directly under the blue flash. She could see them moving around before the hut, slabs of muscle wrapped in crudely cut skins.
That was how she was going to get up that damn cliff.
She forced herself to slow. One step at a time, Emma; you know the protocol. It was going to be hard to be patient, to engage a new group of Hams once again. But that was what she was going to have to do.
She dropped her pack at the edge of the sea, and splashed her face with salt water. Then she walked up and down the beach, picking out bits of scattered driftwood. She found a long, straight branch, and selected a handful of thorny sticks. She took her favoured hand-axe and, with a skill born of long hours of practice and many cut fingers, she made notches in one end of the stick, wide enough to fit the thorny twigs. Then she took a bit of rawhide string from her pack, and wrapped it around the stick, lashing the barbs in place.
Thus, one harpoon.
She slipped off her boots and socks and coverall and waded into the shallows, harpoon raised.
Fishing had become her speciality. It didn’t seem to have occurred to any of the Ham communities here to figure out how to catch fish, either in the ocean or in freshwater streams. Fish meat, exotic but appealing, made a good bribe.
There was a ripple at her feet, a roughly diamond shape that emerged briefly from the sand. She stabbed down hard, feeling the crunch of breaking wood.
She found she had speared a skate, a big brown fleshy square of a fish, maybe two feet across. Skate buried themselves in the mud, coming up at night to hunt shellfish. Her catch was wriggling violently, and it was all she could do to hold on to the harpoon. With a grunting effort she heaved the skate over her head and out onto the sand, where it flopped, slowly dying. One bit of lingering squeamishness was a reluctance to kill anything; acknowledging the hypocrisy, she let her victims die instead.
She splashed out of the water. Briskly she inspected her harpoon, considering whether it was worth keeping; she had learned to conserve her energy and time, never throwing away anything that might be used again. But the barbs were broken. She stripped off the hide string and stuffed it back into her pack, and let the bits of the harpoon fall, abandoning this thing she had made that would have been beyond her imagining a few months ago, forgetting it as carelessly as any every-day-a-new-day Ham craftsman.
With her hand-axe she skinned and gutted the fish. You had to avoid the guts, and the skin could be coated by toxic mucus or dangerous spines: tricks she remembered from her childhood camp
ing-in-the-woods days.
Then she pulled on her coverall and boots, picked up the skate meat and her pack, and walked steadily up the beach towards the Ham encampment.
These Hams accepted her silent presence in the corner of their hut, as readily as every other group she had encountered. They predictably turned away from her first offer of skate meat. But she continued to bring home gifts from the sea, until they had, one by one, experimentally, begun to taste the pale, sharp flesh.
So she settled into her corner of the communal hut, wrapping herself each night in grimy bits of parachute canvas, watching the Hams, waiting for some opportunity to find a way up the cliff to the lander.
She learned their names — Abel and Ruth and Saul and Mary — odd quasi-Biblical names, presumably bequeathed to them, like their fractured English, by some ancient contact with humans, Zealots or other “Skinny-folk’. She tried to follow their complex social interactions, much of it centring on speculative gossip about the vigorous child-woman Mary.
They were typical Hams. Come to that, all Hams were typical Hams.
Their English was broken — mispronounced, with missing or softened “G” and “K” and “th” sounds and vowels that blurred to sameness. The language had tenses past, future — and there were even conditionals, used for instance by gossiping women as they speculated what would follow if Mary gave herself to Saul, or if she fell for Abraham’s clumsy wooing first. But their language was elemental, with a simple vocabulary focusing on each other, their bodies, the hut.
As for Mary herself, she was clearly at the centre of a storm of hormonal change, relishing and fearing all the attention she got at the same time. But she never teased, Emma observed, never led any of the men on. Deceit seemed utterly unknown to these people. They were clever in many ways, but whatever they used those big brains for it wasn’t for lying to each other, as humans did.
All this dubious anthropological speculation served to occupy her mind. But it was all spectacularly useless when it came to bringing her closer to her central goal of reaching the big black and white moth suspended on the cliff over their heads, in which none of the Hams showed the slightest interest.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
Manekato pushed into the forest. The foliage was dense, dark green, damp, cold, and it seemed to clutch at her face and limbs. The shadows stretched deep all around her, concealing subtle, elusive forms, as if wild creatures were Mapping themselves into and out of existence all around her.
Briefly she considered going back to the compound and seeking a new symmorph perhaps with better dark-adapting vision. But as she worked deeper into the wood her body moved increasingly easily, her feet and hands clutching at branches and roots, and a clear sense of direction worked with her powerful hearing to guide each footfall. She dismissed her fears; she even felt a certain deep exhilaration. We came from the forest, she thought, and it is to the forest that I now return.
She was seeking Without-Name, who had left the encampment of exiles.
Even before her final departure Without-Name had taken to spending increasingly long times away from the compound. After her challenge by Nemoto over the captured Zealot, she had not brought back further “specimens’, but at times Manekato thought she had glimpsed blood on her dirt-matted fur, and even on her lips.
To her surprise the little hominid Nemoto had expressed sympathy with Without Name. “Without-Name is out of control. But she is right. You are too slow, too cerebral. Mane. Perhaps your minds have grown over-ornate, and are strangled by their own complexity. It is time to confront the Old Ones, not to theorize over them…”
It had been deeply shocking for Manekato to hear such critical sentiments expressed by a mere lower hominid.
Still, Without-Name had become an increasing distraction, a wild blood-stained rogue planet crashing through the orderly solar system of purpose and knowledge acquisition which Manekato had sought to establish. Babo and others had expressed relief when Without-Name had finally failed to return from one of her ambiguous jaunts. But Manekato had sensed that Without-Name would cause them all severe and unwelcome problems yet.
Finally Manekato had been disturbed by a cacophony of cries, coming from deep in the nearby belt of forest. Something there had died, in great pain and anguish; and Manekato had had a powerful intuition that it was time for her to seek out Without-Name and meet her on her own terms.
And so here she was, just another hominid picking her way through the forest.
She emerged from the bank of trees. Beyond a stretch of rock-strewn ground, a low cliff rose: broken and eroded, perhaps limestone, pocked with hollows and low caves, overgrown with moss and struggling trees. Somewhere water trickled.
The sky was clouded over. The place was claustrophobic, enclosing. She could smell blood, and dread gathered in her heart.
A hominid walked out of one of the caves. To judge by the sewn skins he wore, he was a Zealot, like the specimen Without-Name had brought back to the camp. He carried a crossbow, and his tunic and leggings were splashed with dirt and blood. He saw Manekato, standing alone at the edge of the forest. His eyes widened. He dropped his bow and ran back into the cave. “Daemons! Strange Daemons!”
Manekato gathered her courage. She stepped forward, crossing the rock-strewn floor.
She paused in the cave’s entrance, giving her eyes time to adapt to this deeper dark. The cave’s roof was a layer of rock just above her head. It was worn smooth, as if by the touching of many fingers; perhaps this place had been inhabited for many generations. The cave stank of hominid, of crudely prepared food, of stale urine and faeces and sweat — and of blood.
A shadow moved before her. As it approached the light, it coalesced into the form of Without-Name. Her fur was splashed with blood, and a gouge had been cut into her arm.
“I suppose I have been expecting you,” she growled. “Are you aware what a target you provide, silhouetted against the light? We have not fought a war for a million years, Manekato; we have lost our instincts for survival.”
“What have you done, Renemenagota?” Manekato reached out and touched the wound in the other’s arm. It was a deep slice over the bicep, still leaking blood — it had not even been cleaned. “I see your victims did not submit quietly.”
Without-Name barked laughter. “It was glorious. Come.”
She turned and led the way deeper into the cave, and Manekato followed reluctantly.
At the back of the cave a lamp of what looked like burning animal fat flickered in a hollow on one wall; the rock above was streaked with black grease. By its light Manekato saw she was walking over scorched patches of dirt — hearths, perhaps, all cold and disused. Bits of stone and bone and wood were scattered everywhere. At the rear of the cave, animal skins had been stretched over rough frames of wood.
There were hominids here. They were Zealots, dressed in their characteristic garb of crudely sewn skin. When Manekato knuckle-walked towards them they yelled and grabbed their weapons.
Without-Name held up her hands. “She is weak. She will not harm you.”
The Zealots hurried out of her way, jabbering their alarm to each other.
Beyond the Zealots there was a mound of slumped forms.
They were hominids, all dead. They were the powerful squat creatures Nemoto called Hams. They had been slaughtered by crossbow bolts and spear thrusts. They had not died easily: ripped throats and gouged eyes and severed limbs testified to that, as did the injuries nursed by the Zealots. Blood soaked through the grisly heap, and spilled guts glistened on the floor beneath.
Without-Name’s eyes glittered. “You cannot engage these fellows hand-to-hand; the power of these stocky bodies is simply too great. But they work strictly short range. And so they fell to our bows and throwing spears as they tried to close with us, one after the other. Once they were down it was a case of moving in to finish them off. But they fought on even with their bellies torn open, their throats cut. Well, this was their home for uncounted gen
erations — you can see that — they were fighting as we would for our Farms…”
Manekato discerned a smaller bundle, laid on top of the heap of corpses. It was an infant, its age impossible to tell, one leg bent back at an impossible angle. “Did this little one give you a good spectacle, Renemenagota?”
Without-Name shrugged. “The Zealots took most of the smaller infants back to their stockade. You can’t tame an adult Ham, you see; you have to get them young to break them. This one wouldn’t leave its mother’s side. The efforts to remove it resulted in a snapped leg.” She grinned, her teeth showing bright in the gloom. “Praisegod Michael was here. Their leader, you see; the leader of the Zealots. He uttered words over the corpses, blessing them, commending their souls to the afterlife he believes awaits us — or rather awaits his sort of hominid; he isn’t so sure about the rest of us. Michael said his prayers over this little creature and then cut its throat. A delicious contradiction, don’t you think?
“You should see the ambition that burns in Michael’s eyes’. He dreams of cleansing his world of such creatures of the Devil as this — what an ambition! but he has lacked the understanding to make it so. He was wary of me when I approached him — no, contemptuous, because for him I am less than human. But I forced him to listen to me. I made him see that by taking his captives and training them properly, he increases his resources, you see, which he can deploy for further conquest; once initiated, it is a simple exponential growth.”
“You spoke to this monster — you are working with him?” Manekato said tightly, “Whoever this Praisegod is, his reasons for wishing to destroy the Hams and the others have surely more to do with the flaws in his own heart than any ideological justification.”
Origin m-3 Page 38
