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  “The trees appear to be predominantly spruce,” Nemoto said. “The growths are tall, somewhat spindly. If we had come down in a forest more typical of Earth—”

  “I know,” Malenfant growled. “We’d have crumpled like a cardboard box. You know, that path we cut through the trees reminds me of Star City. Moscow. Yuri Gagarin’s jet trainer came down into forest, and cut its way through the trees just like that. Ever since, they have cropped the trees to preserve the path. Gagarin’s last walk from the sky.”

  “But our landing was not so terminal,” Nemoto said dryly. “Not yet anyhow.”

  The sturdy little craft could never make another descent — but that didn’t matter, for it didn’t need to. The plan for the return to Earth was that Malenfant and Nemoto would fit a rocket pack to the lander’s rear end, raise the assembly upright, and take off vertically. And since the lander’s shell, sheltering its crew, hadn’t crumpled or broken or otherwise lost its integrity, the return flight might still be possible. All Malenfant had to do to get home, then, was to find the rocket pack when it came floating down from the sky after its separate journey from Earth — completing its lunar surface rendezvous, as the mission planners had called it — fit it and launch.

  Oh, and find Emma.

  Malenfant turned away from the lander and walked tentatively towards the edge of the forest. The gravity was indeed eerie, and it was hard not to break into a run.

  The trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with parasites. Here a single snake-like liana wound around a trunk; here a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a not of ferns, orchids and other plants. From a bole in one aged trunk, an eye peered out at him. It was steady, unblinking, like an owl’s. He backed away, cautiously.

  He found a tall, palm-like tree, with dead brown fronds piled at its base. He crouched down and rummaged in the litter until he had reached crimson dirt. It was dry and sandy, evidently poor in nutrients. When he touched it to his lips, it tasted sharply of blood, or iron. He spat out the grains. The dust seemed to drift slowly to the ground.

  He picked out yellow fruit from the debris of fronds. With a sideways glance at his shoulder camera, he said, “Here’s some fruit that seems to have fallen from the tree up there. You can see it is shaped like a bent cylinder. It is yellow, and its skin is smooth and soft to the touch—”

  A small brown ball unrolled from the middle of the nest of fronds. Malenfant yelped, stumbling back. The ball sprouted four stubby legs and shot out into the clearing. Malenfant had glimpsed beady black eyes, a spiky hide, for all the world like a hedgehog.

  Nemoto walked up to him, her camera tracking the small creature.

  “The double-domes said there would be no small animals here,” he grumbled. “Thin air, fast metabolism—”

  “A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis, Malenfant. Perhaps our small friend evolved greater lung surfaces through a novel strategy like folding, or even a fractal design. Perhaps she conserves energy by spending periods dormant, like some reptiles. We are here to learn, after all.” She grabbed the fruit. “Your description of this banana was acute.” She peeled it briskly, exposing soft white flesh, and bit into it. “But it is a banana. A little stringy, the taste thin, but definitely Musa sapientum. And, of course, the thinness of the taste might be an artefact of the body fluid redistribution we have both suffered as a result of our spaceflight.”

  Malenfant took another banana, peeled it and bit into it savagely. “You’re a real smart ass, Nemoto, you know that?”

  “Malenfant, all the species here should be familiar, more or less. We have the hommid samples who fell through the portals to the Earth. Although their species is uncertain, their DNA sequencing was close to yours and mine…”

  A shadow moved through the forest behind Nemoto: black on green, utterly silent, fluid.

  “Holy shit,” Malenfant said.

  The shadow moved forward, resolved, stepped into the light.

  It was a woman. And yet it was not.

  She must have been six feet tall, as tall as Malenfant. Her eyes locked on Malenfant’s, she bent, picked up the banana Nemoto had dropped, and popped it into her mouth, skin and all.

  She was naked, hairless save for a dark triangle at her crotch and a tangle of tight curls on her head. She held nothing in her hands, wore no belt, carried no bag. She had the body of a nineteen-year-old tennis player, Malenfant thought, or a heptathlete: good muscles, high breasts. Perhaps her chest was a little enlarged, the ribs prominent, affording room for the larger lungs the theorists had anticipated, like an inhabitant of a 1950s dream of Mars. There was a liquid grace in her movements, a profound thoughtfulness in her stillness.

  But over this wonderful body, and a small, child-like face, was the skull of a chimp. That was Malenfant’s first impression anyhow: there were ridges of bone over the eyes, a forehead that sloped sharply back. Not a chimp, no, but not human either.

  Her eyes were blue and human.

  “Homo erectus,” Nemoto was muttering nervously. “Or H. ergaster. Or some other species we never discovered. Or something unrelated to any hominid that ever evolved on Earth… And even if descended from some archaic stock, this is not a true Erectus, of course, but a descendant of that lineage shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution — just as a chimp is not like our common ancestor, but a fully evolved species in its own right.”

  “You talk too much, Nemoto.”

  “Yes… We have seen the reconstructions, inspected the bodies ejected from the Wheel. But to confront her alive, moving, is eerie.”

  The hominid girl studied Malenfant with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of a child, without calculation or fear.

  He stepped forward. He could smell the girl: unwashed, not like an animal, an intense locker-room smell. He felt a deep charge, pulling him to her. At first he thought it was an erotic attraction — and that was present too; the combination of that clear animal gaze and the beautiful, fully human body was undeniably compelling, even if he sensed those stringy arms could break his back if she chose. But what he felt was deeper than that. It was a kind of recognition, he thought.

  “I know you,” he said.

  The girl stared back at him.

  Nemoto fidgeted behind him. “Malenfant, we were given protocols for encounters like this.”

  He murmured, “I should offer her a candy and show her a picture card?” He returned his attention to the girl. “I know you,” he repeated.

  I know who you are. We evolved together. Once my grandmother and yours ran around the echoing plains of Africa, side by side.

  This is a first contact, it struck him suddenly: a first contact between humanity and an alien intelligent species — for the intelligence in those eyes could not be denied, despite the absence of tools and clothing.

  …Or rather, this is a contact renewed. How strange to think that buried deep in man’s past was a last contact, a last time we met one of these cousins of ours: perhaps a final encounter between one of my own ancestors and a girl like this in the plains of Asia, or a dying Neandertal on the fringe of the Atlantic, when we left them no place else to go.

  The girl held her hands out, palms up. “Banana,” she said, thickly, clearly.

  Malenfant’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”

  “English,” Nemoto breathed. “She speaks English.”

  “En’lish,” the girl said.

  Now Malenfant’s heart hammered. “That must mean Emma is here. She is near, and she survived.”

  Nemoto said cautiously, “We know very little, Malenfant; there is a whole world around us, a world of secrets.”

  There was a crackle behind Malenfant: a twig breaking, a footfall. He whirled.

  There were more of the ape-people, eight or ten of them, male and female, all adults. They were as naked as the girl, though not all as handsome; some of them sported scars, gashes and even burns, and some had hair streaked with grey. They
were standing in a line, neatly fencing off Malenfant and Nemoto from the lander, and they were all gazing hard at the two of them.

  “These do not seem quite so friendly,” Nemoto murmured.

  “Oh, really? You think now’s a good time to start the sign-language classes?”

  “Malenfant, where are the guns?”

  “…In the lander.” Shit.

  The silence stretched. The ape-people stood like statues.

  “I am loath to abandon the lander,” Nemoto hissed. “We have not even packed the contingency samples.”

  Malenfant suppressed a foolish laugh. “There go our science bonuses.”

  One of the ape-people stepped forward. Straggles of beard clung to his chin, though the longer strands seemed to have been cut, crudely. He opened his mouth and hissed. Malenfant thought his teeth were stained red.

  Nemoto said, “Malenfant, I think—”

  “Yeah. I think he’s about to take a sample of us.”

  The big man raised his arm. Too late, Malenfant saw he was holding a stone in his fist. Malenfant ducked sideways. The stone missed his head, but it sliced through the layers of cloth over his shoulder, and nicked the flesh.

  “Plan B,” he gasped.

  The two of them broke and ran for the forest. They pushed past the girl, who made a half-hearted effort to grab them. For a heartbeat Malenfant nursed a hope that he had made some connection, that she had on some level decided to let them go.

  But then he was plunging into the green mouth of the forest after Nemoto, and there was no time for reflection.

  The forest, away from the sunlight, was suffused by a clinging cloudy moistness that seemed to linger around every bush, and made every tree trunk slippery under Malenfant’s palms. Soon they were both shivering.

  And it was almost impossible to walk. Malenfant had done a little jungle survival training during his induction into the Shuttle programme. But this forest was almost impassable, so deeply layered were the tangled roots, branches, leaves and moss over the uneven ground. Malenfant was acutely aware that this was not a place for humans.

  Still they blundered on, slipping, crashing, blundering, falling, making a noise that must have echoed off the flanks of the Bullseye itself.

  He imagined the frantic activity in the back rooms of Mission Control in Houston, the buzzing calls to palaeontologists and anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. For once in his life he would have been glad to hear the tinny voices from the ground. But, though there was a hiss of static from the tiny speaker built into his shoulder pack, he could make out no voices.

  Once he thought he confronted one of the ape-people. He caught a glimpse of someone — some thing — in the dense green gloom ahead of him, upright like an ape-person, but smaller, chimp-sized, maybe hairy. It jabbered at him, reached up its long arms, and slipped out of sight into the forest canopy above.

  After that, Malenfant found himself looking for possible threats upwards as well as side to side.

  At length, breathing hard in the thin air, shivering, they came to a halt, crouching close to the ground by a fat, fungus-laden tree trunk. Malenfant’s face was slick with sweat and forest dew.

  Nemoto’s eyes were wide in the gloom, glancing this way and that, like a cornered animal.

  “We haven’t been too smart, have we?” he whispered.

  “We were not expecting to come under immediate attack by a troupe of Homo erectus.”

  “Yeah, but it’s taken us a bare half-hour after opening the hatch to lose the lander, our supplies, and our weapons. I’m not even sure which way we’re running.”

  “We will recover the lander.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we must,” Nemoto said simply.

  A shadow slid across his field of view. It was subtle, difficult to distinguish from the swaying motion of a branch, the shifting coins of dappled sunlight that lay over the forest floor.

  The camera on his shoulder swivelled to look into his face, and he forced a grin “If you guys have any suggestions, now would be a good time… ”

  Eight, nine, ten shadows moved, all around them, shadows that coalesced into ape-people.

  “The Erectus. They have been hunting us,” Nemoto said. “Their intelligence is advanced enough for that, at least.” She seemed calm, beyond fear.

  The ape-people advanced. Some of them were grinning, and one of the men, perhaps excited by the prospect of a kill, sported an impressive erection.

  Malenfant stood up slowly. The camera on his shoulder swivelled back and forth, whirring, somehow the most distracting object in his universe. He said, “I think—”

  A vast, heavy creature came running out of the depths of the wood. It hurled itself at the largest ape-man. They rolled on the floor, wrestling.

  The ape-men gathered around the combatants, hooting and hollering, their teeth showing between drawn-back lips — perhaps a rictus of fear — and they slapped ineffectually at the rolling figures.

  Nemoto clutched Malenfant’s arm, and they backed away.

  Nemoto said, “I thought it was a bear.”

  “No,” Malenfant said grimly.

  No, not a bear: a man — yet another sort of man, shorter than his naked opponent, but much more heavily muscled, and dressed in animal skins that were tied to his body with bits of red-black rope. Though the ape-man on the ground was a formidable opponent — surely more than a match for any human in hand-to hand combat — the bear-man was stronger yet, and soon he had the ape-man pinned to the ground by sitting on his chest.

  The bear-man snarled, “Enough?”

  Once again the use of English, distorted but clear enough, startled Malenfant. Was it really credible that Emma could have taught the use of English to not one but two species of other-men? But if not, what was going on?

  The man on the ground snapped at the hand that slapped him, but it was clear that the fight had gone out of him. The bear-man sat back and let him up.

  The ape-man rejoined his companions and, his defiance momentarily sparking, he growled at the bear-man. “Ham! Eat Ham good eat!”

  The bear-man — the “Ham” — opened his huge mouth wide, exposing a row of flat brown teeth. He ran at the ape-people, making them scatter, and with a broad, bare foot he aimed a heavy kick at the naked rump of the last man.

  Then the bear-man walked up to Malenfant and Nemoto. He was a good head shorter than Malenfant — no more than five five, five six — but he was broad as a barn door. Under the skins which wrapped him loosely, Malenfant could see muscles moving. His walk was somewhat ungainly, as if his legs were bowed, or his balance not quite perfect. His skull was long and flat, with a bulge at the back that showed beneath a sprawl of thick black hair. He had a vast cavernous nose, and brown eyes glinted beneath bony brows like two caves. Sweat had pooled in a hollow between the brow ridges and his low forehead.

  “Neandertal,” Nemoto muttered. “Or possibly Homo heidelbergensis. Most probably Neandertalensis, of the so-called classic variant. Or rather a lineage evolved from Neandertal stock, in this unique place.”

  Malenfant could smell beer on the Neandertal’s breath. “Holy shit,” he said. Beer?

  The Neandertal — or bear-man, or Ham — grinned at them. “Stupi” Runners,” he said. “Scare easy.” He stuck his tongue out and lunged forward. “Boo!”

  Both Malenfant and Nemoto took a step back. The bear-man’s voice was gravelly and thick, and his vowel sounds slurred one into the other. “But,” Malenfant said, “he speaks better than I do after a couple of hours at the Outpost.”

  Now there was a crashing from the forest that resolved itself into clumsy, unconcealed footsteps. A new voice called, “What the devil is going on, Thomas?”

  Malenfant frowned, trying to place the accent. English, of course — a British accent, maybe — but twisted in a way he didn’t recognize.

  The bear-man called, “Here, Baas. Runners. Chase off.”

  A man walked out of the shado
ws towards them — a human this time, a stocky man, white, aged maybe fifty, with a grubby walrus moustache. He was dressed in a buckskin suit, and he had a kind of crossbow over his shoulder. What looked like a long-legged rabbit hung from his belt.

  When he saw Malenfant and Nemoto, he stopped dead, mouth a perfect circle.

  Malenfant spread his hands wide. “We’re from America. NASA.”

  The man frowned. “From where?… Have you come to rescue us?” Malenfant saw hope spark in his eyes, sudden, intense. He walked towards Malenfant, hand extended. “McCann. Hugh McCann. Oh, it has been so long in this place! Are you here to take us home?”

  Malenfant felt a light touch on his shoulder, a soft crunch. When he looked, the camera he had worn there had gone, disappeared into the paw of the Neandertal.

  Emma Stoney:

  The spaceship had been quite unmistakable as it drifted out of the sky, heading east, Shuttle-orbiter black and white under a glowing blue and white canopy. Her eyes weren’t what they used to be, but she’d swear she made out the round blue NASA meatball logo on its flank.

  Malenfant. Who else?

  She knew immediately she had to follow it. She couldn’t stay with the Ham troupe any more. She couldn’t rely on whoever had drifted down from the sky to come find her. Her destiny had been in her own hands since the moment she had fallen out of the sky of Earth into this strange place, and it was no different now. She had to get herself to that lander.

  She gathered up her gear. She equipped herself with stone tools and spears from the Ham encampment — without guilt, for the Hams seemed to make most of their tools as they needed them and then abandoned them. With her hat of woven grasses and her poncho of animal skin, all draped over the remnants of her air force coverall, she must look like the wild woman of the woods, she thought.