He had already done the same with a haunch of antelope. It was simple stuff, dredged up from his memories of his astronaut survival training. But the treatment ought to make these bits of fish and meat last months.
McCann sat and watched him. He was nursing a wooden bowl filled with a tea made of crushed green needles from a spruce tree. Malenfant had been sceptical of what he saw as an English affectation, but the tea was oddly refreshing; Malenfant suspected the needles were full of Vitamin C. But the tea was strongly flavoured and full of sharp bits of needle (which he had learned to strain out through a sock).
McCann said, “Malenfant, you are a man of silence and unswerving intent. Your preparations are admirable and thorough. But to enter the desert is foolhardy, no matter how many pemmican cakes you make. Even if you could find your way through the mountains, there is only aridity beyond.”
Malenfant growled, “We have this conversation roughly once a day, Hugh. We must have found all the Runner groups who work this area, and have come up blank. On the other hand, we know a lot of them work deeper into the desert.” He squinted, peering into the harsh flat light of the arid western lands. “There could be dozens more tribes out there. We have to go find them.”
McCann pulled a face and sipped his tea. “And seek out traces of your Emma.”
Malenfant kept kneading his pemmican. “You’ve come this far, and I’m grateful. But if you don’t want to follow me any further that’s okay by me.”
McCann smiled, tired. “I suppose I have attached myself to you — become a squire to your chessboard knight. On this desolate Red Moon we are all lost, you see, Malenfant — not just your Emma. And we all seek purpose.”
Malenfant grunted, uncomfortable. “I’m grateful for your company. But why the hell you’re doing it is your business, not mine. I never cared much for psychoanalysis.”
McCann frowned at the term, but seemed to puzzle out its meaning. “You always look outward, don’t you? — but perhaps it would serve you to look inward, from time to time.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“For a man with such a powerful drive — a drive to a goal for which he is clearly prepared to give his life — you seem little interested in the origin of that drive.” McCann raised a finger. “I predict you will puzzle it out in the end — though it may require you to find Emma herself before you do so.”
They would take turns to stand watch: McCann first, then Malenfant.
Malenfant cleaned his teeth with a bit of twig. Then he settled down for his first sleep.
The nights here were always cold. Malenfant zipped up his jumpsuit, placed a bag of underwear under his hips to soften the hardness of the ground, and pulled a couple of layers of “chute cloth over his body. He set his head on the pack in which he carried the remnant of his NASA coverall, his real-world underwear and the rest of his few luxuries, and he put spare underwear under his hip for a mattress. Though he had gotten used to his suit of deerskin — it had softened with use, and after the first few days he suspected it stank more of him than its original owner — he clung to the few items he had salvaged from the ludicrous wreck of his mission as a kind of message to himself, a reminder that he hadn’t been born in these circumstances, and maybe he wouldn’t have to die in them either.
As usual he had trouble settling.
“I don’t like to complain,” he said at length.
“Of course not.”
“This ground is like rock. I can’t turn over without dislocating a hip.”
“Then don’t turn over.”
So it went.
After three hours it was Malenfant’s turn to stand watch. McCann shook Malenfant awake, pitching him into a cold, star-littered night. Malenfant shook out his blanket and went to take a leak. Sign of age, Malenfant.
Beyond the circle of light from their hearth, the desert was deep and dark, its emptiness broken only by the ragged glow of the Runners” fire.
Sometimes it scared him to think of what a wilderness it was that had claimed him. There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him — no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature.
And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain — but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, was a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives. And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it.
All save one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.
The final time he woke that night, he found Julia looming over him. She was a vast silhouette whose disturbing scent of other was enough to kick Malenfant’s hind brain into wakefulness. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. His “chute-silk blanket fell away, and all his warmth was lost to the cool, moist air. It was a little after dawn, and the world was drenched with a blue-grey light that turned the crimson sand purple.
The Runners had gone. He could just make them out, slim dark figures against the purple-grey desert, running easily and silently, far away into the desert.
He hadn’t even gotten to show them his lens.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
There was a call from Babo, who was standing beneath his beautiful spinning globe. Manekato hurried to her brother, and Nemoto jogged after her.
The great rotating Moon-projection had been rendered semi-transparent. And there was a hole in its very heart.
Something lurked there, blocky, enclosed — clearly artificial, very large. It was connected to the surface by a long, thread-like tube: not entirely straight, bending like a reed as it passed through the Moon’s layers of core, thick mantle and deep, hard lithosphere, so much thicker on this small cold world than the crustal layers of the Earth. The tube terminated in what looked like a small, compact crater, not far from the eastern shore of the world-spanning continent not far from the location of the compound, in fact.
Manekato reached inside the Map. The misty layers of mantle and core resisted her gently, as if her fingers were pushing through some viscous liquid. She wrapped her fingers around the knot of machinery at the Map’s centre. It was dense and complex and well-anchored.
Nemoto watched her carefully.
“It is the world engine,” said Babo.
Studying the globe as a whole, Manekato saw that the surface crater was diametrically opposite the summit of the great volcanic mountain, at the peak of the huge region of uplift that so distorted the figure of the world. Looking more closely she could see detail in the Map’s misty outer layers: a disturbance in the core, a great plume in the deep-buried mantle, hot magmatic material working its way up through cracks in the mighty lithosphere towards that antipodal bulge.
“I cannot believe that such asymmetry is deliberate,” Babo said.
“No,” Manekato said. “The internal disturbances must be a result of the poor control of the Moon as it lurches from universe to universe. Perhaps the Moon is not meant to plummet about the cosmic manifold like this. The mechanism is poorly designed…”
“Or faulty. If it has been sweeping up hominids since early in our evolution, Mane, it must have been operating for millions of years.”