The Skinny woke with a gulping snore. He sat up abruptly, and his hat fell off his head. Seeing the two hulking Hams, he raised his hands to the sky and began to yell. “Oh, Heaven help me! By God’s wounds, help me!”
Mary looked up into the sky, trying to see who he was speaking to. But of course there was nobody there. The Skinny-folk were immersed in madness: they would talk to the sky, the trees, the patterns on their clothes or ornaments, as if those things were people, but they were not.
So Mary sat on the Zealot’s chest, crushing him to the ground; he gasped under her weight. “Stop talkin” sky! Stop!” The bearded Zealot howled. She slapped him across the face. The Zealot’s head was jerked sideways, and he instantly became limp. Mary backed away. “Dead?”
Joshua, reluctantly, bent closer. The Zealot had fouled himself, perhaps when Mary had leapt on him; a thin slime of filthy piss trickled from his trouser legs. But his chest rose and fell steadily. “No” dead.”
Mary, her eyes wide under her lowering brow ridges, said, “Kill?”
Joshua grimaced. “Bad meat. Leave for th” bears.”
“Yes,” Mary said doubtfully. “Leave for th” bears.”
They wiped their hands clean of the Zealot’s filth on handfuls of leaves. Then they turned and pushed on, heading steadily north.
After a time, Joshua stepped cautiously into a clearing.
The trees here were battered and twisted. When he looked to the west, he saw how they had been smashed down and broken back to make a great gully through the forest.
And to the east, at the tip of this gully, was the seed from the sky.
He gazed at the blocky shape at the end of the huge trench, excitement warring with apprehension. It was a mound of black and white, half-concealed by smashed foliage. It was surrounded by bits of blue skin — or not skin; a bit of it fluttered against his leg, a membrane finer than any skin he had ever seen.
It was so strange he could barely even make it out.
Mary, nervous, had stayed back in the fringe of the forest.
“Ware,” she said. “Zealots.”
Joshua knew it was true. He could smell the smoke of their hearths, their burned meat. They were now very close to the Zealots” camp.
But the lure of the sky seed was irresistible. He began to work his way around the edge of the clearing, stepping over fallen tree trunks, shoving aside smashed branches, ready to duck back into the forest’s green shadows.
The sky seed was big, bigger than any animal, perhaps as big as the hut where the people lived. He saw that the thing had fallen here after crashing through the trees, almost reaching the point where the forest gave out at the edge of the cliff itself.
But that was all the sense he could make of it.
He had no words to describe it, no experience against which to map it. Even the touch of it was unfamiliar: glossy black or white, the patches separated by clear straight lines, the soft surface neither hot nor cold, neither skin nor stone nor wood. It was difficult for him even to see the thing. He would study some part of it — like the small neat puncture-holes on one part of its hide, surrounded by scorch-marks — but then his gaze would slide away from the strangeness, seeking some point of familiarity and finding none.
“Back,” Mary hissed to Joshua.
He made out the telltale signs that Skinny-folk had been here: the narrow footmarks in the raw dirt, the remains of the burnt rolls of leaves they liked to carry in their mouths. The Zealots had indeed been here too, inspecting the sky seed, just as he was.
But, despite the imminence of danger, he could not abandon this sky seed. It repelled him — yet it attracted him, like the carving on a Skinny-folk spear. Drawn close, driven away, he hovered.
He came to a sudden decision.
He bent and applied his shoulder to the blunt rear of the sky seed. It was lighter than it looked, and it ground forward through the dirt. But soon he was coming up against the resistance of the last battered trees at the cliff’s edge.
“Joshua!” Mary hissed.
“Help push.” And he applied himself again.
She tried to make him give up his self-appointed task, wheedling and plucking at his skins. But when she saw he wouldn’t come away, she joined him at the back of the sky seed. She was not yet fully grown, but her strength was already immense, enough to drive the sky seed forward, crunching through the spindly cliff-edge trees.
With a screeching scrape, the sky seed pitched over the raw rock lip of the cliff and lurched out of sight. After a last tortured groan, silence fell.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
“Soon, something will appear in the sky,” Babo said. “A satellite, like those of the outer planets. Earth will have a Moon, for the first time in its history.”
Manekato scratched her head. “How? By some gravitational deflection?”
“No. Like a Mapping, I think. But not a Mapping. The truth is nobody knows, Mane. But the Astrologers can see it is approaching, in the shivers of the starlight.”
“It must be artificial, this moving of a Moon. A contrivance.”
“Yes, of course. It is a deliberate act. But we do not know the agents or their motive.”
Manekato thought through the implications. “There will be tides,” she said. “Earthquakes. Great waves.”
“Yes. And that is the danger posed to our Farm, and some others.”
Suddenly she was filled with hope. “Is that why I am here? Is it possible to avert this Moon — to save the Farm?”
“No,” he said, sadly but firmly.
She pulled away from him. “You talked of my mission. What mission, if the Farm is doomed?”
“You must travel to the Moon,” said Babo.
“Impossible,” she spanned. “No Mapping has ever been attempted over such a distance.”
“Nevertheless you must make it possible,” Babo said. “You must use the resources of the Farm to achieve it.”
“And if I reach the Moon?”
“Then you must find those responsible for sending this rogue here. You must make them remove it, and have them assure you it will not return.” He forced a smile. “We are a species good at negotiation, Mane. The Lineages could not have survived otherwise. You are all but a matriarch, the matriarch of Poka Lineage. You will find a way. Go to the Moon, Mane — take this chance. I will be with you, if you wish. If you succeed, Poka will be granted new land. We have pledges…”
“And if I fail — or refuse?”
He stiffened. “Then our Lineage will die with us. Of course.”
“Of course—”
There was a fizz of purple light, a stink of ozone. A Worker fell from the sky and landed in the centre of the room. Semi-sentient, it raised a sketchy face and peered at them. Recognizing Manekato, it gave her the doleful news it had brought, its voice flat and unengaged.
Orphaned, brother and sister clung to each other as they wept.
Reid Malenfant:
After days of pressure from Malenfant, McCann agreed to lead them in an orderly expedition back to the crash site of the lander. Malenfant felt a vast relief, as if he was being let out of gaoclass="underline" at last, some progress.
First, McCann inspected them critically. “I’ll have Julia fit you both with buckskin. One must go cannily. You’ll stand out a mile in those sky-blue nursery rompers.”
The buckskin gear turned out to be old and musty — presumably manufactured, with much labour, for deceased inhabitants of this place. And McCann loaned Malenfant and Nemoto calf-length leather boots, to keep out the snakes and the bugs. The boots were ill-fitting, and much worn. The gear was heavy, stiff and hot to wear, and its rough interior scratched Malenfant’s skin. But it was substantial, feeling like a suit of armour, and was obscurely comforting.