“Not well, I fear,” Nemoto said dryly. And she stepped back.
A hand clamped on Malenfant’s arm. It was a Ham, not Thomas.
McCann came walking up, leaning on his stick, his broad face red and grim. “Thank you, Madam Nemoto,” he said. “He has behaved just as you predicted.”
“Malenfant glared at Nemoto, disbelieving. “You betrayed me. You warned him I’d try something.”
“You are very predictable, Malenfant.” She sighed, impatient, her face expressionless. “You should not make the mistake of believing we share the same agenda, Malenfant. This new Moon, this Red Moon, is the greatest mystery in recorded history — a mystery that deepens with every day that passes, everything we learn. Unless we discover the truth behind it, we will have accomplished nothing.”
“And you believe you can achieve that by staying here, with McCann?”
“We need a base, Malenfant. We need resources. We can’t spend our whole lives looking over our shoulders for the next stone axe to fall, or grubbing around in the forest for food. These British have all that.”
“And what of Emma?”
Nemoto said nothing, but McCann said smoothly, “Our scouts and hunters range far and wide, Malenfant. If she is here, we will find her for you.”
If your Ham scouts tell you everything they see, Malenfant thought. He fingered the little lens in his pocket.
“Let’s look at the matter in a sensible light,” McCann said now. “I know you think little of me, Malenfant. But once again I assure you I am not a fool. I desire more than a chess partner; I desire escape from this place — what man wouldn’t? Now you have fallen from the sky into my lap, and only a fool would let you go, for surely your Americans will come looking for you from that blue Earth of yours. And when they do, they will find me.”
“My world isn’t your world,” Malenfant snarled.
“But my world is lost,” McCann said wistfully. “And I know you have an England. Perhaps I will find a place there.” His face hardened, and Malenfant perceived a new toughness. This was, Malenfant remembered, a representative of a breed who had carved out a global empire — and on a much more hostile planet than Earth. “Providence has given me my chance and I must take it. I believe that in keeping you now, in following the promptings of my own infallible heart, I see the workings of Omnipotence. Is this moral arrogance? But without such beliefs man would never have left the trees and the caves, and remained like our pre-sapient and pongid cousins.” He glanced at Nemoto. “As for your companion’s slight treachery — perhaps she is destined to betray you, over and over, on all Anaxarchus’s infinity of worlds. What do you think?” And he brayed laughter.
The little column formed up for the homeward journey. The big Ham called Thomas took his place beside Malenfant. And he winked broadly.
Emma Stoney:
A day after leaving the first troupe, Emma found another group of Hams, women and a few infants foraging for berries and fruit. They had regarded her blankly, but then, seeing she was no threat — and, as not one of them, of no conceivable interest — they had turned away and continued their gathering.
Emma waited patiently until they were done. Then she followed them back to their encampment.
She stayed here a couple of days, and then moved on, seeking another troupe.
And then on again.
Hams were basically the same, wherever she found them. Their tool-making, for instance. Though each group varied its kit a little according to circumstances, like the availability of different types of stone — and perhaps, she speculated, some slight cultural tradition — still, if something was not in their tool making repertoire, which was evidently very ancient and fixed, no Ham was interested.
They didn’t even talk about their tool-making, even while they jabbered endlessly about their intricate social lives. It was as if they were conscious while they were interacting with each other, but not while they were making tools, or even hunting.
After a time Emma began to get used to it. She reasoned that she did many things she wasn’t aware of, like breathing, and keeping her heart pumping. And she could think of times when she had performed quite complex tasks requiring skill, judgement and the focus on a specific goal without knowing about it — such as driving all the way to work with her mind on some stunt of Malenfant’s, only to “wake up” when she found herself in the car lot. Or she thought of her father, able to carve fine furniture from wood in his hobby workshop, but never able to tell her how it was done; all he could do was show her.
With the Hams, that circle of unawareness spread a little further, that was all. Or maybe it was just that you could get used to anything, given time.
Anyhow it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to run experiments in hominid cognition. It was enough that she was able to use her fish and rabbits and other hunting produce as subtle bribes to gain favour — or at least as a hedge against exclusion.
Thus she worked her way through the forest, moving from one Ham group to the next, using them as stepping stones of comparative safety, one way or another travelling steadily east, day after day, seeking Malenfant.
But sometimes she glimpsed faces in the forest, just at the limit of her vision: hominid faces, watchful, like no species she had yet encountered. It seemed she had barely glimpsed the extent of her kin, on this strange world.
Reid Malenfant:
The details of the regime that would govern Malenfant’s life coalesced with startling speed and efficiency — such speed, in fact, that Malenfant wondered who else McCann or the others had had cause to imprison.
Malenfant was free to come and go, within the stockade. But there was always a burly male Ham at his elbow, even sleeping outside his hut during the night.
He took to prowling around the perimeter fence. It was tall, and its ferocious spikes were daubed with a sticky, tar-like substance. For the first time it struck him that the fence was just as effective at keeping him in as keeping out the undesirables of the wilds beyond. And anyhow every time Malenfant tried to approach the fence too closely, he was immobilized by his Ham guard — as simple as that; one of those massive hands would clamp on his shoulder or elbow or even his head, exerting a strength he couldn’t hope to match.
He tested his cage in other ways.
He spoke to Thomas, asking for his help. But Thomas would say nothing, giving no hint that he was prepared to follow up on that reassuring wink in the forest.
One night Malenfant tried climbing out of his hut’s window. But though it was unglazed the window was small and high. By the time he had dropped clumsily to the ground his Ham keeper was standing over him, silhouetted by blue Earthlight, solid and silent as a rock.
He considered making other protests — going on a hunger strike, maybe. But he sensed McCann might simply let him starve; the steel he had glimpsed in the soul of this other-world Brit did not encourage him to seek for weakness or pity. Alternatively McCann might have his Ham servants force-feed Malenfant, not a prospect he relished, since the Hams were muscled a little too heavily to be good nurses.
Anyhow he needed to build his strength for the days to come, and the search for Emma he confidently expected to be progressing sooner rather than later.
So, after a couple of days, Malenfant began to engage with McCann once more: eating with him, even walking around the compound, conversing. It was a peculiar arrangement, in which both of them clearly knew their relative positions of power and yet did not speak of it, as if they were engaged in some formal game.
Malenfant tried to find out as much as he could about this world from McCann. But the British had done little exploring more than a few days” travel away from their stockade. Their main business here had, after all, been ensuring their survival. And McCann’s mind seemed peculiarly closed to Malenfant. The purpose of McCann’s original mission had not been exploration, and still less science, but economic and political gain for his Empire; he was more like a prospector than a surveyor. But sometimes he spoke again of the deeper mission he felt he had taken on: to bring the word of his God, and his Christ-figure John, to the barbarian hominids of the Red Moon.