Origin. Stephen Baxter
out what had happened to her, to send her a message, even get her home.
Don’t give up, Malenfant; I’m right here waiting for you. And it is, after all, your fault that I’m stuck here.
One day at around noon, with the sun high in the south, the group stopped at a water hole.
The three humans sat in the shade of a broad oak-like tree, while the Runners ate, drank, worked at tools, played, screwed, slept, all uncoordinated, all in their random way. Maxie was playing with one child, a bubbly little girl with a mess of pale brown hair and a cute, disturbingly chimp-like face.
All around the Runners, a fine snow of volcano ash fell, peppering their dark skins white and grey.
The woman called Wood approached Emma and Sally shyly, her hand on her lower belly. Emma had noticed she had some kind of injury just above her pubis. She would cover it with her hand, and at night curl up around it, mewling softly.
Emma sat up. ‘Do you think she wants us to help?’ Maybe the Runners had taken notice of her treatment of the child with yaws after all.
‘Even if she does, ignore her. We aren’t the Red Cross.’
Emma stood and approached the woman cautiously. Wood backed away, startled. Emma made soothing noises. She got hold of the woman’s arm, and, gently, pulled her hand away.
‘Oh God,’ she said softly.
She had exposed a raised, black mound of infection, as large as her palm. At its centre was a pit, deep enough for her to have put her fingertip inside, pink-rimmed. As Wood breathed the sides of the pit moved slightly.
Sally came to stand by her. ‘That’s an open ulcer. She’s had it.’
Emma rummaged in their minuscule medical kit.
‘Don’t do it,’ Sally said. ‘We need that stuff.’
‘We’re out of dressings,’ Emma murmured.
‘That’s because we already used them all up,’ Sally said tightly.
Emma found a tube of Savlon. She got her penknife and cut off a strip of ’chute fabric. The ulcer stank, like bad fish. She squeezed Savlon into the hole, and wrapped the strip of fabric around the woman’s waist.
Wood walked away, picking at the fabric, amazed, somehow pleased with herself. Emma found she had used up almost all the Savlon.
Sally glowered. ‘Listen to me. While you play medicine woman with these flat-heads …’ She made a visible effort to control her temper. ‘I don’t know how long I can keep this up. My feet are a bloody mass. Every joint aches.’ She held up a wrist that protruded out of her grimy sleeve. ‘We must be covering fifteen, twenty miles a day. It was bad enough living off raw meat and insects while we stayed in one place. Now we’re burning ourselves up.’
Emma nodded. ‘I know. But I don’t see we have any choice. It’s obvious the Runners are fleeing something: the volcanism maybe. We have to assume they know, on some level anyhow, a lot more than we do.’
Sally glared at the hominids. ‘They killed my husband. Every day I wake up wondering if today is the day they will kill and butcher me, and my kid. Yes, we have to stick with these flat-heads. But I don’t have to be comfortable with it. I don’t have to like it.’
A Runner hunting party came striding across the plain. They brought chunks of some animal: limbs covered in orange hair, a bulky torso. Emma saw a paw on one of those limbs: not a paw, a hand, hairless, its skin pink and black, every bit as human as her own.
Nobody offered them a share of the meat, and she was grateful.
That night her sleep, out in the open, was disturbed by dreams of flashing teeth and the stink of raw red meat.
She thought she heard a soft padding, smelled a bloody breath. But when she opened her eyes she saw nothing but Fire’s small blaze, and the bodies of the Runners, huddled together close to the fire’s warmth.
She closed her eyes, cringing against the ground.
In the morning she was woken by a dreadful howl. She sat up, startled, her joints and muscles aching from the ground’s hardness.
One of the women ran this way and that, pawing at the rust-red dirt. She even chased some of the children; when she caught them she inspected their faces, as if longing to recognize them.
Sally said, ‘It was the little brown-haired kid. You remember? Yesterday she played with Maxie.’
‘What about her?’
Sally pointed at the ground.
In the dust there were footprints, the marks of round feline paws, a few spots of blood. The scene of this silent crime was no more than yards from where Emma had slept.
After a time, in their disorganized way, the Runners prepared to resume their long march. The bereft mother walked with the others. But periodically she would run around among the people, searching, screaming, scrabbling at the ground. The others screeched back at her, or slapped and punched her.
This lasted three or four days. After that the woman’s displays of loss became more infrequent and subdued. She seemed immersed in a mere vague unhappiness; she had lost something, but what it was, and what it had meant to her, were slipping out of her head.
Only Emma and Sally (and, for now, Maxie) remembered who the child had been. For the others, it was as if she had never existed, gone into the dark that had swallowed up every human life before history began.
Reid Malenfant:
As soon as Malenfant had landed the T-38 and gotten out of his flight suit, here was Frank Paulis, running across the tarmac in the harsh Pacific sunlight, round and fat, his bald head gleaming with sweat.
Paulis enclosed Malenfant’s hand in two soft, moist palms. ‘I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you at last. It’s a great honour to have you here.’
Malenfant extracted his hand warily. Paulis looked thirty-five, maybe a little older. His eyes shone with what Malenfant had come to recognize as hero worship.
That was why he was here at Vandenberg, after all: to scatter a little Stardust on the overworked, underpaid legions of engineers and designers who were labouring to construct his Big Dumb Booster for him. But he hadn’t expected it of a hard-headed entrepreneur type like Frank Paulis.
They clambered into an open-top car, Paulis and Malenfant side by side in the back. An aide, a trim young woman Paulis called Xenia, climbed into the driver’s seat and cut in the SmartDrive. The car pulled smoothly away from the short airstrip.
They drove briskly along the empty roads here at the fringe of Vandenberg ASFB. To either side of the car there were low green shrubs speckled with bright yellow flowers. They were heading west, away from the sun and towards the ocean, and towards the launch facility.
Paulis immediately began to chatter about the work they were doing here, and his own involvement. ‘I want you to meet my engine man, an old buzzard called George Hench, from out of the Air & Space Force. Of course he still calls it just the Air Force. He started working on missile programmes back in the 1950s …’
Malenfant sat back in the warm sunlight and listened to Paulis with half an ear. It was a skill he’d developed since the world’s fascinated gaze had settled on him. Everybody seemed a lot more concerned to tell him what they felt and believed, rather than listen to whatever he had to say. It was as if they all needed to pour a little bit of their souls into the cranium of the man who was going to the Red Moon on their behalf.
Whatever. So long as they did their work.
They rose a slight incline and headed along a rise. Now Malenfant could see the ocean for the first time since landing. This was the Pacific coast of California, some hundred miles north of