“The trees appear to be predominantly spruce,” Nemoto said. “The growths are tall, somewhat spindly. If we had come down in a forest more typical of Earth—”
“I know,” Malenfant growled. “We’d have crumpled like a cardboard box. You know, that path we cut through the trees reminds me of Star City. Moscow. Yuri Gagarin’s jet trainer came down into forest, and cut its way through the trees just like that. Ever since, they have cropped the trees to preserve the path. Gagarin’s last walk from the sky.”
“But our landing was not so terminal,” Nemoto said dryly. “Not yet anyhow.”
The sturdy little craft could never make another descent — but that didn’t matter, for it didn’t need to. The plan for the return to Earth was that Malenfant and Nemoto would fit a rocket pack to the lander’s rear end, raise the assembly upright, and take off vertically. And since the lander’s shell, sheltering its crew, hadn’t crumpled or broken or otherwise lost its integrity, the return flight might still be possible. All Malenfant had to do to get home, then, was to find the rocket pack when it came floating down from the sky after its separate journey from Earth — completing its lunar surface rendezvous, as the mission planners had called it — fit it and launch.
Oh, and find Emma.
Malenfant turned away from the lander and walked tentatively towards the edge of the forest. The gravity was indeed eerie, and it was hard not to break into a run.
The trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with parasites. Here a single snake-like liana wound around a trunk; here a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a not of ferns, orchids and other plants. From a bole in one aged trunk, an eye peered out at him. It was steady, unblinking, like an owl’s. He backed away, cautiously.
He found a tall, palm-like tree, with dead brown fronds piled at its base. He crouched down and rummaged in the litter until he had reached crimson dirt. It was dry and sandy, evidently poor in nutrients. When he touched it to his lips, it tasted sharply of blood, or iron. He spat out the grains. The dust seemed to drift slowly to the ground.
He picked out yellow fruit from the debris of fronds. With a sideways glance at his shoulder camera, he said, “Here’s some fruit that seems to have fallen from the tree up there. You can see it is shaped like a bent cylinder. It is yellow, and its skin is smooth and soft to the touch—”
A small brown ball unrolled from the middle of the nest of fronds. Malenfant yelped, stumbling back. The ball sprouted four stubby legs and shot out into the clearing. Malenfant had glimpsed beady black eyes, a spiky hide, for all the world like a hedgehog.
Nemoto walked up to him, her camera tracking the small creature.
“The double-domes said there would be no small animals here,” he grumbled. “Thin air, fast metabolism—”
“A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis, Malenfant. Perhaps our small friend evolved greater lung surfaces through a novel strategy like folding, or even a fractal design. Perhaps she conserves energy by spending periods dormant, like some reptiles. We are here to learn, after all.” She grabbed the fruit. “Your description of this banana was acute.” She peeled it briskly, exposing soft white flesh, and bit into it. “But it is a banana. A little stringy, the taste thin, but definitely Musa sapientum. And, of course, the thinness of the taste might be an artefact of the body fluid redistribution we have both suffered as a result of our spaceflight.”
Malenfant took another banana, peeled it and bit into it savagely. “You’re a real smart ass, Nemoto, you know that?”
“Malenfant, all the species here should be familiar, more or less. We have the hommid samples who fell through the portals to the Earth. Although their species is uncertain, their DNA sequencing was close to yours and mine…”
A shadow moved through the forest behind Nemoto: black on green, utterly silent, fluid.
“Holy shit,” Malenfant said.
The shadow moved forward, resolved, stepped into the light.
It was a woman. And yet it was not.
She must have been six feet tall, as tall as Malenfant. Her eyes locked on Malenfant’s, she bent, picked up the banana Nemoto had dropped, and popped it into her mouth, skin and all.
She was naked, hairless save for a dark triangle at her crotch and a tangle of tight curls on her head. She held nothing in her hands, wore no belt, carried no bag. She had the body of a nineteen-year-old tennis player, Malenfant thought, or a heptathlete: good muscles, high breasts. Perhaps her chest was a little enlarged, the ribs prominent, affording room for the larger lungs the theorists had anticipated, like an inhabitant of a 1950s dream of Mars. There was a liquid grace in her movements, a profound thoughtfulness in her stillness.
But over this wonderful body, and a small, child-like face, was the skull of a chimp. That was Malenfant’s first impression anyhow: there were ridges of bone over the eyes, a forehead that sloped sharply back. Not a chimp, no, but not human either.
Her eyes were blue and human.
“Homo erectus,” Nemoto was muttering nervously. “Or H. ergaster. Or some other species we never discovered. Or something unrelated to any hominid that ever evolved on Earth… And even if descended from some archaic stock, this is not a true Erectus, of course, but a descendant of that lineage shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution — just as a chimp is not like our common ancestor, but a fully evolved species in its own right.”
“You talk too much, Nemoto.”
“Yes… We have seen the reconstructions, inspected the bodies ejected from the Wheel. But to confront her alive, moving, is eerie.”
The hominid girl studied Malenfant with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of a child, without calculation or fear.
He stepped forward. He could smell the girclass="underline" unwashed, not like an animal, an intense locker-room smell. He felt a deep charge, pulling him to her. At first he thought it was an erotic attraction — and that was present too; the combination of that clear animal gaze and the beautiful, fully human body was undeniably compelling, even if he sensed those stringy arms could break his back if she chose. But what he felt was deeper than that. It was a kind of recognition, he thought.
“I know you,” he said.
The girl stared back at him.
Nemoto fidgeted behind him. “Malenfant, we were given protocols for encounters like this.”
He murmured, “I should offer her a candy and show her a picture card?” He returned his attention to the girl. “I know you,” he repeated.
I know who you are. We evolved together. Once my grandmother and yours ran around the echoing plains of Africa, side by side.
This is a first contact, it struck him suddenly: a first contact between humanity and an alien intelligent species — for the intelligence in those eyes could not be denied, despite the absence of tools and clothing.
…Or rather, this is a contact renewed. How strange to think that buried deep in man’s past was a last contact, a last time we met one of these cousins of ours: perhaps a final encounter between one of my own ancestors and a girl like this in the plains of Asia, or a dying Neandertal on the fringe of the Atlantic, when we left them no place else to go.
The girl held her hands out, palms up. “Banana,” she said, thickly, clearly.
Malenfant’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”
“English,” Nemoto breathed. “She speaks English.”
“En’lish,” the girl said.
Now Malenfant’s heart hammered. “That must mean Emma is here. She is near, and she survived.”