And so she stayed, inhabiting a rough lean-to on the edge of the community, bit by bit building up her own survival skills and recovering her strength, and waiting for something to turn up.
The Hams” technology was more advanced than the Runners’, but still, considering those big brain pans, remarkably limited. They had more advanced knapping techniques, manufacturing a range of flakes and points and burins in addition to the ubiquitous hand-axes. They fitted stone tips to their thick thrusting spears.
But that was about it. They had no piece of technology with more than two or three components. They didn’t have innovations even Emma could think of, such as spear-throwers and bows.
Other gaps. If they weren’t interested in something — a type of plant, for instance, which had no use for food or medicine or tools, nor carried any threat as a poison — they simply ignored it. If it didn’t matter, it was as if it didn’t even exist; as far as she could tell there were whole categories of such “useless” objects and phenomena which had no names.
There were no books here, of course — there was nothing like writing of any kind. And no art: no paintings on animal skins, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child’s face.
Indeed, the Hams seemed to loathe symbology of any kind. The Hams tolerated the odd colours of Emma’s skin and hair, her slimness of build, the way she spoke, even the garish blue of her clothes — but they could not bear the South African air force logo that adorned the breast of her flight suit, and she had to cut it out with a stone knife. (Loath to throw away anything that had come from home, she had tucked the patch into a pocket on her sleeve.)
She came to suspect that what disturbed them wasn’t the symbols themselves as much as the response of herself to them — and other Skinny-folk, a class which seemed to include herself and the mysterious “Zealots” and “En’lish’. The Hams would jabber about how Skinnies saw people in the rock, as if the symbols themselves were somehow sentient.
As a result, the Hams” world was a starthngly drab place, lacking art and religion and story — save, of course, for their one great central myth of the Grey Earth, where they had come from. They didn’t tell jokes. The children played only as baby chimps might, exercising their muscles and testing their animal reactions against each other.
And to them, death appeared to be a genuine termination, a singularity beyond which an individual, leaving no trace, had no meaning. To the Hams, today was everything, yesterday a minor issue — and if you weren’t here tomorrow, you wouldn’t matter.
In many ways, they were like the Runners, then. But, unlike the Runners, they talked and talked and talked. They seemed to have a wide vocabulary, much of it English, and they would hold long, complex conversations around their fires.
But it was only gossip. They never talked about how to make a better tool. Just about each other.
Emma thought she had gotten used to the Runners, who were a strange mixture of human and animal. If these Hams were still not quite human as she was, nevertheless they had their own gaps in their heads, barriers between the rooms. As she watched them jabbering of who was screwing whom while their hands worked at one tool or another, apparently independently, she found it hard to imagine how it must be to be a Ham.
Sometimes she envied them, however.
To her, a beautiful sunset was a comforting reminder of home, a symbol of renewal, of hope for a better day tomorrow. The Hams would watch such displays as intently as she did. But to them, she believed, a sunset was just a sunset, like the sound of some instrument lacking any overtones, a simple pure tone but a tone with a beauty and purity which they experienced directly and without complication, as if it was the first sunset they had ever seen.
Day succeeded empty day.
At first, on arriving here, she dreamed of physical luxuries: running hot water, clean, well-prepared food, a soft bed. But as time wore on, it was as if her soul had been eroded down. She had simpler needs now: to sleep in the open on a bower of leaves no longer troubled her; to have her skin coated in slippery grime was barely noticeable.
But she longed for security, to be able to settle down to sleep without wondering if she would be alive to see the morning, to live without the brutality and death that permeated the forest.
And she longed for the sight of another human face. It didn’t have to be Malenfant. Anybody.
One day her wish was granted.
They had been men, pushing their way through the forest, pursuing some project of their own. They wore clothing of animal skin, but it was carefully stitched a long way beyond the crude wraps the Hams tied around their bodies — and they spoke English, with a strong, twisted accent.
Emma was electrified. She gazed on their thin, somewhat pinched faces with longing, as intently as one Ham might gaze at another. Were they the source of the Hams” and Runners” language? Her impulse was to call out to them, approach them.
But she saw that the Hams cowered from these Zealots, as they called them, a label Emma found less than encouraging. So she, too, slipped back into the forest with her Hams.
Sometimes she raged inwardly. Or she worked through imaginary conversations with Malenfant — who had, after all, been flying the plane when she got stuck here, and so was the only person she could think of to blame.
But when the Hams saw her stalking around the forest lashing at branches and lianas, or, worse, muttering to herself, they became disturbed.
So she learned not to look inwards.
She watched the Hams as they shambled about their various tasks, their brute bodies wrapped up in tied-on animal skins like Christmas parcels. One day at a time: that was how the Hams lived, with no significant thought for tomorrow for they appeared simply to assume that tomorrow would be much like today, and like yesterday, and the day before that.
She did not abandon her shining thread of hope that someday she would get out of here — without that she would have feared for her sanity — but she tried to emulate the Hams in their focus on the now. One day at a time. It was almost comforting. She tried to accept the notion that the best prospect for the rest of her life might be to dwell on the fringes of a group like this: physically safe, but excluded, utterly ignored, the only representative of a different, and uninteresting species.
The future stretched out in front of her, a long dark hall empty of hope.
Until she sighted the lander.
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant took a tentative step away from the lander. Encumbered by his escape suit, breathing canned air, he peered out of a sealed-up helmet. His heavy black boots crunched on dead leaves and sparse grass, all of it overlaid on a ruddy, dusty soil. But he could barely hear the noise of his footsteps, and could not smell the grass or the leaves.
All around this little clearing, dense forest sprouted: a darkness through which green shadows flitted. He tipped back on his heels and peered up into a tall, washed-out sky. The Earth sailed there, fat and blue, the outline of a continent dimly visible.
So here was Reid Malenfant walking on the surface of a new world: a boyhood dream, realized at last. But he sure hadn’t expected it to be like this.
Maybe he was unimaginative — it was something Emma had accused him of many times — maybe he had focused too much on the battle to assemble the mission in the first place, and the thrilling details of the three-day flight across space to get here. Maybe, somehow, he had been expecting this wandering Red Moon would be content to serve as no more than a passive stage for his designs. Now, for the first time, on some deep, gut level, he realized that this was a whole world he was dealing with here — complex in its own right, with its own character and issues and dangers.