There were many Hams, working as servants. And there appeared to be several of the so-called Runners, kept under control at all times, apparently domiciled outside the main stockade. He tried to put aside judgement. He was not the one who had battled to survive here for so long; and it was evident that this McCann and his companions came from a very different world from his.
And besides, McCann appeared to believe that he treated “his” hominids well.
They met one other of the English, a bloated-looking red-faced man with a Santa Claus beard and an immense pot belly that protruded from the grimy, much-patched remnant of a shirt. He was riding in a cart drawn by two of the Runners, harnessed with strips of leather like pack animals. Santa Claus glared at Malenfant and Nemoto as he passed them, and then went riding out of the stockade through gates smoothly pulled back by Hams.
“There goes Crawford in his Cape cart,” whispered McCann conspiratonally. “Something of an oddball, between you and me. Well, we all are, I suppose, after all this time. I fear he’s too much set in his ways to deal with you. Of course if he suspected you were French he’d shoot you where you stand!… Martyr to his lumbago, poor chap. And I fear he may have a touch of the black-water.”
McCann talked quickly and fluently, as if he had been too long alone.
There had been twelve of them, it seemed — all men, all British, from an Empire that had thrived longer than in Malenfant’s world. Their rocket ship had been driven by something called a Darwin engine.
McCann struggled to describe the history of his world, his nation. After bombarding them with a lot of detail, names of wars and kings and generals and politicians that meant nothing to Malenfant, he settled on a blunt summary.
“We are engaged in a sort of global war,” McCann said. “That’s been the shape of it for a couple of centuries now. Our forefathers struck out for new lands, in Asia and Africa and Australia — even the New World — as much out of rivalry as for expectations of gain.”
But the ultimate “new land” had always hovered in the sky. Before the Red Moon had appeared in McCann’s sky, a Moon had sailed there — not tiny Luna, but a much fatter world, a world of water-carved canyons and aquifers and dust storms, a world that sounded oddly like Mars. Drawn by that Moon, the great nations of this other Earth had launched themselves into a space race as soon as the technology was available, decades before Malenfant’s history had caught up.
Malenfant, battered by strangeness, found room for a twinge of nostalgia. He’d have exchanged McCann’s fat Moon for Luna any time. If only a world like Mars had been found to orbit the Earth, instead of poor desiccated Luna — a world with ice and air, just waiting for an explorer’s tread! With such a world as a lure, just three days away from Earth, how different history might have been. And how differently his own life, and Emma’s, might have turned out.
“The lure of the Moon was everything, of course,” McCann said. “From times before memory it has floated in the sky, fat and round and huge, with storms and ice caps and even, perhaps, traces of vegetation, visible with the naked eye. You could see it was another world in the sky, waiting for the tread of man, for the flag of empire, the ploughs of farmers… It was quite a chase. Got to stop the other chap getting there first, you see.”
Malenfant was getting confused again. “Other chap? You mean the Americans?”
Nemoto said gently, “There are no Americans in his world, Malenfant.”
“The French, of course,” said McCann. “The blooming French!”
Colonies on this bounteous Moon had been founded in what sounded like the equivalent of the first half of the twentieth century. Since then wars had already been fought, wars on the Moon waged between spreading mini-empires of Brits and French and Germans.
But then, in McCann’s universe, the Mars-Moon had disappeared, to be replaced by this peculiar, wandering Red Moon, with its own cargo of oceans and life. Once the world had gotten over its bewilderment — once the last hope of contacting the lost colonies on Mars-Moon was gone — a new race had begun to plant a flag in the Red Moon.
“…Or Lemuria, as we call it,” McCann said.
Nemoto said, “A lost continent beneath the Indian Ocean, once thought to have been the cradle of mankind.”
McCann talked on: of how the dozen men had travelled here; of a disastrous landing that had wrecked their ship and killed three of them; of how they had sent heliograph and radio signals home and waited for rescue — and of how their Earth had flickered out of the sky, to be replaced by another, and another.
“A sheaf of worlds,” murmured Nemoto, gazing at McCann.
When it was clear that no rescue was to come, some of the exploratory party had submitted to despair. One committed suicide. Another handed himself over to a party of Elf-folk for a hideous and protracted death.
The survivors had recruited local Hams, and used their muscles and Runner labour to construct this little township. They had found no others of their kind, save for the sinister-sounding Zealots, of whom McCann was reluctant to speak, who lived some distance from the compound.
It seemed that it had been the mysterious Zealots who had taught the indigenes their broken English — if inadvertently, through escaped slaves returning to their host populations. The Zealots had been here for centuries, McCann seemed to believe.
“Not much of a life,” McCann said grimly. “No women, you see. Some of us sought relief with the Hams, even with Runners. But they aren’t women. And there were certainly no children to follow.” He smiled stoically. “Without women and children, you can’t make a colony, can you? After a time you wonder why you bother to shave every day.”
One by one the Englishmen had died, their neat little huts falling into disrepair.
McCann showed them a row of graves, outside the stockade gate, marked by bits of stone. The last to die had been a man called Jordan— ‘dead of paralytic shock’, McCann said. McCann appeared especially moved to be at Jordan’s grave side. Malenfant wondered if these withdrawn, lonely men, locked in civility and their memories of a forever lost home, had in the end sought consolation in each other.
But McCann, in a gruesome effort to play the good host, talked brightly of better times. “We had a life of sorts. We played cards — until they wore out and we made chess sets, carving pieces from bits of balsa. We had no books, but we would spin each other yarns, recounting the contents of novels as best we remembered them. I dare say the shades of a few authors are restless at the liberties we took. Once or twice we even put on a play or two. Marlowe comedies mostly: Much Ado About Nothing, that kind of thing. Just to amuse ourselves, of course.
“We used to play sports. Your average Ham can’t kick a soccer ball to save his life, but he’s a formidable rugby player. As for the Runners, they can’t grasp the simplest principle of rules or sportsmanship. But, my, can they run! We would organize races. The record we got was under six seconds for the hundred yard dash. That fellow was rewarded with plenty of bananas and beer…”
McCann spoke of how the survivors, just four of them, had become withdrawn, even one from the other, as they waited gloomily for death. Crawford would disappear into the forest for days on end with squads of Hams, “fossicking around’, as McCann put it. The others would rarely even leave their huts.
“And you?” Nemoto asked. “What is your eccentricity, Mr McCann?”
“A longing for company,” he said immediately, smiling with self-deprecation. “That’s always been my weakness, I’m afraid.”