What, Malenfant?
He saw bars, circles, lines, patterns that seemed to congeal and then disappear. If he stared fixedly at one point of the sky he would make out a fragment of texture, as if something was sliding by, something huge, beyond the roof of the world. But it never stayed stable in his vision — like an optical illusion, a form that oscillated between two interpretations, a bubble that flipped into a crater. And no matter how he tried he would find his eyes sliding away to the familiar, to the huts, the red dust of the ground.
“Why can’t I see it?”
Nemoto kept her head down. “It’s too far beyond your experience, Malenfant. Or above it. You think of your eyes as little cameras, your ears as microphones, giving you some objective impression of the true world. They are not. Everything you think you see is a kind of virtual-reality projection, based on sensory input, framed by prejudice about what the brain imagines ought to be out there. Remember, we evolved as plain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, and our sensoriums are conditioned to the hundred-mile scale of Earth landscapes. Malenfant, you just aren’t programmed to see—”
“The scaffolding in the sky.”
“Whatever it is.”
“Like the Hams. When we went to the wreck of the Redoubtable. It was as if they couldn’t see it at all.”
“Do you find the thought disturbing, Malenfant? To find you have the same limitations as Neandertals?”
“What’s happening, Nemoto? What is coming down on us?”
“I could not begin even to guess.”
McCann was standing alone, still weeping.
As Malenfant approached, McCann used his sleeve to wipe away the dampness on his cheeks, the dribble of mucus that had dangled from his nose. “Malenfant. You bear yourself well. The first Change I witnessed threw me into a cold grue of terror. But you have a stiff back; I could see that about you from the start.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Can’t you see?” And he stabbed a finger at the sky, at the Earth.
The new Earth.
The planet was a ball of yellow-white cloud, very bright. It was banded by water-colour streaks of varying colours. There were dark knots in the bands, perhaps giant storms. It reminded Malenfant of nothing so much as spaceprobe images of Jupiter or Saturn. It was a Banded Earth.
Deep unease settled into his gut. “What happened to the Earth?”
“Nothing, Malenfant,” Nemoto said, her voice expressionless. “It’s gone. Or rather, we have. The Red Moon has moved on a fresh universe, another of the vast ensemble of possibilities—”
“And it has taken us with it,” McCann said bitterly. “We have suffered another knight’s move between possibilities. Now do you see why I weep? It is unmanly, perhaps — but now that the Red Moon has moved on from your world, any chance of rescue by your people is gone with it.” He laughed, an ugly sound. “I have seen a whole succession of worlds skip through that dismal sky, Malenfant, each of them as bleak as the last — save only for yours, where I could see the glint of cities on the night side. And then your squat glider came floating down from the sky, and I allowed myself to hope, you see — a fool’s mistake. But now hope is gone, and you are as stranded as I am — both of you — all of us in this Purgatory…”
Malenfant saw it in that instant; it was as if the world swivelled around him, taking on new, and unwelcome, configurations. The Red Moon had moved on. He was indeed stranded, beyond the reach of any help from those who knew him — stranded in another universe, to which he had somehow been transported.
In a corner of his mind he wondered if poor impoverished Luna had been restored to the skies of Earth.
As the light show faded the Hams — the “new shift” — were moving slowly around the stockade, picking up brooms and tools, heading for the huts. Beginning their work.
Malenfant said, “Why do they come here?”
McCann held up his hands, plucked at his threadbare jacket. “Look at me. I am old and fat and tired — and at that I am perhaps the best functioning of those who survived the crash of the Redoubtable. And now look at the bar-bars.” He faced Malenfant. “You think I am some slave-keeper. How could I keep these people, if they did not wish to stay? Or — if I keep slaves, where are the children? Where are the old, the lame?” He pointed beyond the gate. “There is a troupe of them out there. We keep up a certain trade, I suppose you’d call it. They sustain this little township with their labour, as you have seen. And in return, there are things we have which they covet: certain foodstuffs — and beer, Malenfant, your bar-bar gentleman likes his beer!”
Nemoto said levelly to Julia, “Why do you keep these English alive?”
Julia grinned, showing a row of tombstone teeth. “Tired ol” men,” she said.
McCann eyed Malenfant ruefully. “Pity, you see; the pity of animals. They saw we had no women or children, that we were slowly dying. They regard us as pets, these Hams. That is what we are reduced to.”
“And all your talk of educating them in a Christian, umm, Johannen life—”
“A man does not welcome too much reality…”
That gate was still open. You’re wasting time, Malenfant.
He found Julia. She was dressed in her native skins; no trace of her guise as a maid for the English remained. He pointed towards the open gate. He said, “Emma.”
She nodded.
He went back to the others. “I’m out of here, McCann. Will you try to stop me?”
McCann laughed. “What difference does it make now? But what will you do?”
“What I came to do,” Malenfant said bluntly.
“Ah — Emma. I wish I had the comfort of such a goal.” McCann looked at Nemoto. “And you, Madam Nemoto? Will you stay with a beaten old man?”
Nemoto raised her face to the sky; flickering light reflected from her skin. “I will seek answers.”
“Answers?” McCann snorted. “Of what use are answers? Can you eat answers, sleep under them, use them to ward off the Runners, the Elves?”
She shrugged. “I am not content to subsist, like you, like these Hams.”
Malenfant felt reluctant to lose her, even though she had betrayed him. And besides, she was scarcely street-wise: he imagined her dreaming of sheaves of parallel universes as a shaped cobble stove in her skull… “Come with me.”
She appraised him coolly. “We have always had different agendas, Malenfant.”
McCann looked from one to the other. Impulsively he said, “I have been sedentary too long. Let me accompany you, Malenfant. I dare say I have a few tricks, born of long experience, which might yet save your hide.”
Malenfant glanced at Julia, who had no reaction. “What about Crawford and the others?”
McCann clapped Thomas on his broad shoulder. “I see no reason why our friends should fail to look after three as well as they have looked after four.”
Thomas nodded curtly.
Malenfant faced Nemoto. “I hope you find what you are looking for.”
“I will see you again,” she said.
“No,” he said, flooded by a sudden certainty. “No, you won’t. We’ll never meet again.”
She stared at him. Then she turned away.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
She was standing on a shining, smooth surface of Adjusted Space, bright yellow, softly warm under her bare feet. Babo and Without-Name still clung to her hands; she released them.
On the Red Moon, there was no Wind. She relished the luxury of not having to fight against the air’s power, enjoying the ease with which she took each breath.
Around them were a dozen more people — more exiles from one ruined Farm or another, their symmorphs adorned with a startling variety of colours and stylings of skin and hair — and perhaps a hundred times as many Workers: Workers tall and slim, short and squat, Workers that flew and crawled and rolled and walked. As was customary, the people’s new symmorphs were as close as possible in appearance to the shells they had abandoned on Earth.