“Come back, come back, you nasty!” Maxie falls to the dirt and howls.
Emma comes running to Fire. “Fire, are you going to the forest? Can I come with you?”
Fire. Forest. That is what Fire hears.
“Em-ma,” he says.
Emma has blue hair. Fire frowns. He thinks of Emma with brown hair. Fire’s hand touches Emma’s hair. The blue hair is smooth like skin. It has bits of white vine stuck to it.
Emma says, “It’s just a hat. Fire. Just parachute silk.” She puts the blue hair back on her head and pulls the vines under her chin. “Can I come to the forest?”
There is something on Emma’s chest. It is bright red. Berries are bright red. Fire touches the berry. It is hard. It is stuck to a vine. The vine is around Emma’s neck. His teeth bite the berry-thing. It is hard, like a nut. His teeth cannot break the shell.
Emma pulls it back from him. “It’s my knife. Fire. I showed you yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. Look.” Emma touches her knife. When she shows him again, there is a red part, and a part like a raindrop. There is a spot of light behind the raindrop, on Emma’s hand. Emma is smiling. “See, Fire? The lens? Remember this?”
Fire sees the raindrop and the light. He hoots.
Emma steps away. “Emma hungry. Emma forest. Fire forest. Emma Fire forest.”
Fire thinks of Emma and Fire in the forest, gathering berries, eating berries. He smiles. “Emma Fire forest. Berries trees nuts.”
Emma smiles. “Good. Let’s go.” She takes his hand.
The forest is a huge mouth. It is dark and green and cool.
He waits at the edge of the forest. His ears listen, his eyes see. The forest is still.
His legs walk into the wood. His feet explore the ground, finding soft bare earth. His arms and his torso and his head duck around branches. He is not thinking of how his body is moving.
His eyes learn to see the dark. His nose smells, his ears listen. He is not aware of time passing, of the sun climbing in the sky, of the dappled bits of light at his feet sliding over the forest-floor detritus.
He sees a pitcher plant. It is a big purple sac, high above his head. His hands pull it down. There is water in the pitcher plant. There are insects in the water. His hand scoops out water and insects. He drinks the water. It tastes sweet. His teeth crunch the insects.
Emma is here. He has forgotten she was here. He gives her the pitcher plant.
Her hand lifts water and bugs to her mouth. She coughs. She spits out insects.
His eyes see a cloudberry plant. It has white flowers and pink fruit. His hands pull the fruit from the plant, avoiding the spiky brambles. His mouth chews the berries.
Here is Emma. Her hands explore the blue skin on her legs. Now she has a soft shining thing in her hands. Her hands open a mouth in the shining thing. She feeds the mouth with berries. He can see them in the stomach of the shining thing.
She holds up the shining thing. “This is a bag. Fire. These berries are for Sally and Maxie. I can carry more in the bag than I can with my hands. You see?…”
He thinks of Sally eating berries. He thinks of Maxie eating berries.
He thinks of Sing, on her bower. He thinks of Sing eating berries. His hands pluck berries. His mouth wants to eat the berries, but he thinks of Sing eating them. He keeps the berries in his hands.
His legs move him on. Soon he forgets about Sing, and his mouth eats the berries.
He finds a chestnut tree. It has leaves the size of his hands and sticky buds and nuts. Beneath the chestnut something white is growing. His hands and eyes explore it. It is a morel, a mushroom. His hands pull great chunks of it free, and lift them to his mouth.
Emma is here. Her hands are taking nuts from the chestnut. The nuts want to hurt Emma. He slaps her hands so they stop taking the nuts.
His ears hear a grunt, a soft rustle.
He stops thinking. He stops moving. His ears listen, his nose smells, his eyes flicker, searching.
His eyes see a dark form, squat. It has arms that move slowly. He sees eyes glinting in the green gloom. He sees ears that listen. He sees orange-brown hair, a fat heavy gut, a head with huge cheeks, a giant jaw.
It is a Nutcracker-man.
The Nutcracker-man grunts. He lifts pistachio nuts to his huge mouth. Fire can see his broad, worn teeth, glinting in the dappled light. The Nutcracker-man grinds the nuts between his giant teeth.
Fire’s mouth fills with water, to tell him it wants the nuts.
Fire stands up suddenly. He rattles branches and throws twigs. “Nutcracker-man. Ho!”
The Nutcracker-man screeches, startled. His arms lift him into a tree and swing him away, crashing through foliage, bits of nut falling from his mouth.
Fire pushes through the brush. His hands cram the nuts into his grateful mouth.
Emma is here. Her hands are taking nuts and putting them into the mouth of the shining thing.
His nose can still smell the dung of the Nutcracker-man. He thinks of many Nutcracker-folk, out in the shadows of the forest.
His legs take him away from the place with the pistachio nuts, back towards the open daylight.
Emma follows him. But he has forgotten Emma. He remembers the nuts and the fungus and the Nutcracker-man.
Reid Malenfant:
He kept right on pulling on his pants. When he was done, his breath misting slightly, he walked up the slope of the eroded beach.
His silent observer was a woman: little more than a girl, really, slim, composed, dark. She was wearing a nondescript jumpsuit. She was very obviously Japanese.
“I know you,” he said.
“We have not met.” Her voice was deep, composed. “But, yes, I know you too, Reid Malenfant.”
“Just Malenfant,” he said absently, trying to place her. Then he snapped his fingers. “You were on Station when—”
“ — when the Moon changed. Yes. My name is Nemoto.” She bowed. “I am pleased to meet you.”
He bowed back. He felt awkward. He couldn’t care less if she had glimpsed his wrinkly ass. But he wished, oddly, that he had his shoes on.
He looked up and down the beach. He saw no sign of transportation, not so much as a bicycle. “How did you get here?”
“I walked. I have a car, parked at the Beachhouse.”
“As I have.”
“Yes.”
“Will you walk back that way with me?”
“Yes.”
Side by side, in the gathering pink-grey light, they walked north along the beach.
Malenfant glanced sideways at Nemoto. Her face was broad, pale, her eyes black; her hair was elaborately shaved, showing the shape of her skull. She could have been no more than half Malenfant’s age, perhaps twenty-five.
“The Red Moon is very bright,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It is a great spectacle. But it will be bad for the astronomers.”
“You were an astronomer…”
“I am an astronomer.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Nemoto was a Japanese citizen trained as an astronaut at NASA. Her speciality had been space-based astronomy. She had been the brilliant kid who had made it all the way into space at the incredibly young age of twenty-four. He remembered Nemoto as being bright, excitable, even bubbly. Well, she wasn’t bright and bubbly now. It was as if she had gone into eclipse.
“I have been looking for you,” she said now. “I have missed you several times in your tour of the NASA centres. Malenfant, when you are not at your scheduled meetings, you are something of a recluse.”
“Yeah,” he said ruefully. “Nowadays more than I’d like to be.”
“You miss your wife,” she said bluntly.
“Yes. Yes, I miss my wife.”
“I almost found you at your church.”
“The chapel at Ellington Air Force Base?”
“I had not realized you are Catholic.”
“I guess you should call me lapsed. I converted when I married Emma, back in “82. Emma, my wife. It was for the sake of her family. When I joined NASA we looked around for a chapel. Ellington was near Johnson, and a lot of my colleagues and their families went there, and we liked the priest…”