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The three day ride back to the training camp in the wagon felt like a mortal punishment for all the sins of every ancestor going back to the time the old gods ruled the earth. If he could have begged those who had carried him to the lake to find the stretcher and take him up again, he would have. But, he was alone with his jostling pain as the wagon bounced and rocked, pitched and shook. His knee and wrist combined their agony, crossed all his bruises and scrapes in between to jump up and down on the tenderest places on his head.
Each night on the road, he asked the healer for more of the mind and body numbing potion, but the healer claimed there was no one to watch him through the night. And patients already on the mend, when using the elixir, were known to wander around in their sleep. He didn't want Keo to fall from the wagon thinking he was merely going for a walk.
No one was happier than Keo to see the camp come into view on their final day of the march. The healer's wagon was the first of the support wagons behind the training battalion travelling on foot. Propped against the back of the bed in a sitting position, he could lean his head out the side and watch the trainees disperse back to their barracks.
When Keo woke next he realized he had a different need than the night before and his left leg and right wrist were in splints. The swamp water had worked its way through his system and wanted to come out, explosively. The rest of the trainees used trench latrines constructed on the first day for that purpose. With his knee in a splint he found it difficult just getting up, and unable to squat. Without the healer's ready and skillful assistance it would have been an uncomfortable as well as painful morning.
Crystal returned to the wagon just as the healer helped Keo back onto the bed of the wagon.
"Did I miss something?" Crystal asked.
"I can't, Crystal," Keo said, forcing the words from deep in his chest. "I'm afraid during the night my desires will become too strong and I might take advantage of you in your sleep."
"I wouldn't mind." She took both of his hands and gripped them close to her. "You wouldn't be taking advantage of me, because I would want you to. Stay with me."
"That's the problem, Chrystal. I don't want that…We don't want that kind of accident. We have too much at stake. We're here to find our creatures and then grow with them. An accident, whether we were okay with it or not, would change all of that. We have to stay focused on the future, not this moment."
His shoulders seemed to have crept up his neck without him realizing it. Keo sighed and relaxed. He wrapped his arms around Crystal and pulled her close to his chest and kissed the top of her head.
"I love you little girl." Keo looked down on her. "I hadn't planned on telling you that tonight because it's so new to me, being in love, loving you. But, I do. Of all the girls in this camp, it's you who my eye keeps returning to, and my ears are forever straining for the sound of your voice[PC1] . Trust me. There will be plenty of time, later. When we have our creatures we can be together. I'll see you in the morning."
Keo saw her then—the top of her head, just beyond his platform. He knew her thoughts and worries as clearly as the walnut brown hair of Crystal Spinebeck.
She sat on a log rolled next to his platform for the purpose, her back to him, so she didn't see his approach.
"Crystal," he called in his mind. She spun around and jumped to her feet, as if expecting to find him standing directly behind her. Her round cheeks glowed with sudden excitement and embarrassment. Embarrassed? Keo wondered why she should feel that way.
Her wide eyes considered him from the distance, and he sensed her anxiety and fear.
"Are you waiting for me?" He called out.
She licked her lips and Keo felt her expectation and desire. His mind and body reacted without his intention. His breath came roughly as he understood her need. As he approached, a wave of fear emanated from Crystal so strongly, he shook in response.
The Pariah Podcast, Episode 16: Prophecies, Preparations, and Off to Camp.
At times it was difficult for Nick to maintain his hatred for his core leader. Keo's natural amiability and his unconditional acceptance of others made him a decent person. Though they were both ultimately pawns on a playing board being pushed about by some unknown hand for the players enjoyment or benefit, they were still enemy pawns and one could not succeed while the other remained in play.
If Nick and Keo had grown up together, they probably would have been friends. But they didn't, and it was Keo's very existence that brought on the death of Nick's parents—had the other boy not become a threat, his father and mother would not have died at his own hand. Though he would have been left to scrape out a living as a street orphan without them, murdering his own family would have been avoided.
Still, kings and queens and wizards and knights all moved about the board and with each of their moves, the pawns were shifted as well. How long would he remain a pawn? Was Keo in fact a pawn as well or something much more powerful in disguise, or in embryo? If Nick could figure a way to eliminate the boy sooner, rather than later, he wouldn't have to find out.
As the summer solstice approached the weather turned warmer. The uniform wool tunics with their high stiff collars became unbearable to wear. When Keo thought they would begin to lose trainees to heat sickness they were informed they would be receiving their summer uniforms. The company looked like a completely new group of young people as they put their winter uniforms into wooden lockers with mothballs.
Crisp tan linen tunics replaced the sagging red, woolen ones and cool linen leggings replaced the hot and scratchy winter hose. Keo felt like he was back home at a summer solstice dance—when all the young girls showed up in their prettiest skirts and fresh linen blouses. He couldn't wait to see how Crystal looked in her new uniform.
He wasn't disappointed, either. The tan tunic was a much better contrast to her pale skin tones than the red wool had been, and the tucks in the blouse accentuated her petite female form.
Keo thought the rotting fraternization rules would probably kill him. They had already lost two from their company to remedial training, though other companies had lost more. How were young people supposed to live under such rules? Others their age, back in their homes, were dancing, holding hands under the moonlight and some were even marrying. But here, they were expected to live side by side, work side by side, but not develop any kind of emotional ties? Maybe after he got his tiger-hawk he would understand better.
Of all the classes each core would attend over the next year, Keo's core began with Creature Empathy, and he couldn't have been happier. Creature identification and differentiation, creature health and food preferences would all come later in the year. Right then, by learning more about how the special empathetic bond occurs and develops between a creature and its handler, he hoped he would better understand why he was so different than all the other trainees and had come upon his empathic skills at such a young age.
The core virtually buzzed with excitement on the first morning of the specialized training. A whole week of nothing but military drill and physical exercise had become tedious at best. The trainees whispered among themselves as they waited for their instructor. Keo knew Lt. Gorley would be apoplectic if he heard the slightest noise from them inside a classroom but allowing the others to vent some of their energy seemed like it was worth the risk.
Animal stalls surrounded the wooden class building with the only windows opening directly into the pens. The wind passing through filled the room with the rich musk of living creatures. While some of the students complained and pinched their noses, Keo felt pleasantly nostalgic for his faraway home with its barns and fields.
Five days march brought the battalion to a junction on the northern highway. One day marching south led them to the borders of the Creature Handler Training Camp.
The entire battalion travelled in a malaise from the events and court-martial. Competition remained between the cores, but at a less enthusiastic level, until they saw the camp rising up on the horizon. Excitement for becoming their King's and Country's elite fighting force returned.
The camp must have spotted their approach as well.
Ten ticks of flying creatures—100 animals and their handlers—flew out from the<|fim_middle|>o stood above a large wool blanket spread across the boards of the veranda and examined his work from above.
On it lay three linen under tunics, three dark green pairs of woolen hose, a black wool tunic, a wool cloak and a waxed linen over-cloak with hood. Beside the clothes were few objects; a candle stub, flint and tinder box, a dozen sheets of writing paper in a thin leather folio, a pen with three nibs and two small bottles; one empty, the other corked and filled with ink powder.
Keo Noshahne climbed into the apple box to retrieve the last of the fruit nestled in the corners—an advantage of being only five years old. Four men had drug the box from a wagon only an hour before, heaped with glistening red and green fruit. Leaning out of the box, sorting the last of the fruit into barrels, Keo thought he had shown his older brothers and sister that he could work as hard as they did.
A momentary shadow darkened the apple box and sorting barrels, a shadow which would follow Keo the rest of his life. | camp, circled the entire parade three times and turned back. The leading tick was, of course, Tiger-hawks. Following shortly thereafter was a tick of dragon-dogs with broad leathery wings, long necks, and the blunt heads of bull mastiffs. A tick of bat-chucks followed, with black, velvet wings and round, furry bodies. Like the Bat-Chucks, Cat hawks were smaller than the tiger hawks, more maneuverable, and in the case of the cats, uniformly silver-tabby colored.
More ticks followed made up of similar creatures, yet probably with less experienced flyers. Even with all the studying he had done during long winters, Keo didn't recognize some of the animals, their winged bodies carrying the head or tail of an exotic, unfamiliar animal.
There would be more creatures and handlers in the camp—the newly hatched and other land bound animals.
The quartermaster called a halt for lunch at the normal hour. Such an uproar rose from the battalion, with the camp in sight and only a few hours away, that Major Jarrellian gave them permission to eat from their emergency rations, take a short break, and return to the parade to push on to camp.
He recognized the voice and it sounded concerned.
"Gilner Panderstash didn't follow protocol and went to…you know. He didn't take a companion. Vaard, the perimeter guard, heard a noise and found him. He's not moving, and Vaard thought he saw blood."
"Have someone bring some water and a rag and take me to him," Keo said, rolling out of his blanket and pulling on his boots. Outside his tent he twisted open the door of his lantern, blew onto the wick, and poured in more oil.
Bree hurried back with one of her link members and stood at the edge of the lantern light.
She led Keo to the fallen boy. They found him on the far edge of their camp with nothing but open countryside beyond. He lay face down in the dewy, spring grass.
"Help me roll him over. Careful of his neck and head."
The boy who had brought the bucket, Bree, and the girl who had waited with Gilner, helped Keo roll their unconscious core member over.
"Is he dead?" The girl asked.
"I don't think so. Here. Hold this lantern close to his face," Keo said handing her his lantern.
In the weak light, Keo only saw half of the boy's face. That side glimmered, wet and red with blood. Gilner squinted and his cheek twitched when the light shone on his face.
"Give me the wet rag."
The boy dipped it into the bucket and handed it to Keo, water dripping into the ankle-high grass. Keo wiped it across Gilner's face, wetting his hair and pushing it back over the boy's head. He carefully tipped the boy's head from side to side and found a deep cut over his left ear.
"Here. Wet it again," Keo said handing the rag back.
He washed clotted blood and debris from Giner's hair and brought the lantern in close again. The gash in his scalp was jagged and uneven.
"I think someone clobbered him with a rock," Keo said, looking up at the sky. "The cut's not bleeding, so it must have happened a while ago. It figures they'd hit us when we're deepest asleep. We need two more pairs of hands to get him to the healer's wagon. Get someone big, Bree."
She stood, looked around and charged through the tents.
The Pariah, Episode 11 – An Audience with the King.
Nit closed his eyes and waited for the dry burn to ease. His hand remained poised above the sand tray, the stylus pinched delicately between finger tips.
"Nit. Wake up," Funglass barked at him and rushed across the creaking floorboards, his arthritic knees snapping and popping as loudly as the wood plank floor. "If I've told you a thousand time to remain alert when scribing the runes, then I must tell you a thousand times again, the slightest mistake can generate the greatest catastrophe."
Nit opened his eyes and looked up at the man leaning over him with crazed bloodshot eyes and a madman's spittle formed on his lips. He inhaled a calming breath, blinked his eyes once and said to his master, "And if I've told you a thousand times that the sage-wax candle dries my eyes I would be far from exaggerating."
The old man inflated like a toad, standing more erect with each breath as he added energy to his impending rant. Nit quickly drew "Wool Cloak" in the upper left corner of the sand tray in case his mentor became too agitated to control himself. The protective rune would prevent Funglass from so much as dropping a hair onto Nit's person.
"Relax, Old Man," Nit said in an affectionate, yet dismissive tone, "I've told you equally many times that I am instantly alert and aware of the stylus and the sand tray anytime I take the wooden piece in my hand."
"I don't like how you speak to me. I am your mentor. I have raised you, paid for your training, and could still sell you to the slave masters if you anger me too much," he said and dragged a stool closer to Nit's desk, settling on it with a wheeze like a bellows.
"I will be twelve tomorrow," Nit said, unable to keep defiance from his voice. "I will be old enough to apprentice myself to a master and you will be able to do nothing about it. With my skill at writing there isn't a scribe or accountant in the entire capitol who wouldn't apprentice me."
Nit slid the stylus into a velvet tube and folded his arms.
"And that would be the biggest waste of arcane talent our world would ever see," Funglass mumbled, pressing a closed fist to his lips. He tapped his knuckle rapidly against his lips and said, "Never mind that. We have a new task ahead of us in the morning. One you have been preparing for these many years."
The Pariah Podcast, Episode 10: Waking Up With a Bump.
Having earned a few extra minutes from being first to lunch, Keo's core relaxed in their camp. Keo called Trainees Oakley and Beecham to his tent and waited outside to speak with them.
"I told you earlier that we have twelve girls in our company. I think it's only fair that we have a link leader to represent them. Not that the girls will all be in one link, they'll be spread evenly between the links, but to have one in the leadership might help with issues you girls have that boys might not understand."
Keo waited a moment for questions, and continued, "You were watching all the girls today when they got their uniforms. Is there anyone you saw who might make a good link leader?"
"Oh. Well," Trainee Oakley said. "That's quite a responsibility to put on us. Identify a link leader from the girls. I don't know. Let me consider. Well, that's a tough one..."
She went on saying similar phrases as she scratched her frizzy orange mop and shook her head. "Really. I think, of all the girls I saw I would think Beecham here is about the best leader I saw of them all."
The other girl was shocked and said, 'Oh. Be serious. The only girl in there worth having as a leader is you."
Two and a half before midnight, Keo opened the door to a small windowless room; his candle shed weak light on an empty bed to the right. As quietly as he could, he slipped into the room, not wanting to disturb the boy already sleeping in the bed opposite. He set the candle on a small table beside the head of the bed, wide enough to fill the small space between the two. An extinguished candle on the far edge sat next to a tinderbox and striker. The sleeping boy faced the wall. Covered to his neck by a blanket Keo saw only the ghostly glow of white blonde hair, cut short and standing straight up like the down of a dandy lion.
Keo slipped off his boots, tunic and hose and climbed into bed.
"You better not snore," the other boy said.
"Who is Sindestra?" Keo asked as he followed Moordan up the stairs to their room.
Once in their room, Keo took a deep breath, coughed and rubbed his nose. He lifted a pin in the window frame, turned the panel ninety degrees and went to their small fireplace and opened the flue, allowing fresher air to flow into the room.
"Why'd you do that?" Moorden asked.
Moorden just shook his head and muttered something about servants.
Three men already occupied the way-hut. In the light of a single lantern sitting on the stone oven, one of the men was clearly dead. Blood oozed from a slice across his neck and his sightless eyes stared up at shadows dancing on the ceiling as the other two dug through his pockets.
Keo had entered the hut first and consequently stood between the murderer and his knife. Moorden crowding into the room behind, pushed him toward the two men. Fortunately, the thieves were as surprised as were the two boys.
Property values in Port Bannard follow the lay of the land and climb up the capitol city slopes to the gates of the royal palace. Constructed of golden granite, imported from kingdoms to the south, the palace stands, broad and monolithic to face the setting sun as it sinks into the ocean. Smaller palaces and manors crouch in its morning shadow, also gazing onto the ocean, the source of much of the kingdom's wealth.
Traveling north, descending the increasingly narrow streets the city deteriorates, eventually, into slums. Hovels built upon stilts and pilings above the perpetually wet salt marshes seem to rot and crumble even before they are completed, and are thus in a continuous state of patching and repair. However, it is the lowland marshes which inspire Westener magic and give the coastal witches their true power.
He wants to travel with me? Keo thought.
"No thanks. I like my solitude," Keo said. He wasn't hungry but he picked at the crust of his bread and scooped up peas with it and ate them together.
"I do too, but I'll make that sacrifice. I've been sitting with dullards for the last ten days. Walking with you couldn't be any worse."
"I don't walk. I run." Keo thought it was a good comeback at first, and then realized it left him as no worse than the other dullards. Keo was annoyed this boy treated him like a servant, and assumed Keo would do whatever he said.
"And if the choice is between riding with dullards and walking with one, why are you choosing to walk, now? Is it getting too crowded on the wagon?"
"Yes. Or rather, no. The wagon is turning south to loop off the highway and pass through numerous small villages in the southern forest. It will take another two weeks for the wagon to reach Hander's Peak. At your pace, I will be there in half that time."
"That's my pace. You think you can keep up?" Keo asked.
Keo wanted to wipe the dismissive look from the condescending boy's face.
Keo watched from the corner of his eye. Moordan seemed unaffected by his jab and only scowled at his bowl, wiping it with the hem of his sleeve.
Fierra introduced the two new boys who took to Keo quickly when they could see he was cut closer to their own weave of material than to Moordan's. Soon all at the table but Moordan were laughing as they each shared antics or adventures from their homes.
Ardle, the taller of the two new boys, said to Keo, "Moordan said you think you're going to be a creature handler."
There was challenge in the boy's voice, though there was also an edge of wistfulness that said, he wished he would, too.
The Southern Highway brought Keo no new challenges in the first few days of his journey. Paved with square, kiln-fired bricks, the road undulated slowly downhill toward the Capital more than two-hundred miles to the west. The only traffic sharing the road were the occasional coal wagons rumbling to the east. From short conversations with the drivers he learned they headed to the Southern Draw, hoping to find it free of snow, trying to be first to collect coal mined during the snowbound month's winter.
"Keo," his mother shouted from the kitchen. "Shelby Lacoore brought something by for you."
On the back porch, Ke | 2,680 |
Muhammad Ali Is Now an Airport
Ali was known as The Greatest, and his legend will withstand the test of time—aided by acts like the renaming of this airport in his honor.
In case you missed it, the Louisville International Airport announced yesterday they will be renaming their port of arrivals and departures to the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.
The exact date of the change has not been named, but it's expected to take place in the next few months.
FAA approval for a name change can<|fim_middle|> earth. From a tall NYC high rise to the smallest village in Africa (Ali boomaye!)…
..he was known and drew crowds just by stepping foot on the street. Whether that path of road was made of concrete or dirt.
The airport has made a deal with the family for his likeness which will be seen by rushed travelers trying to make their connections. There will be no statue, as in accordance with his Muslim faith, such creations are seen as idolatry.
There will be an airport named after a man whose fame, athletic prowess, and righteousness spoke to his generation and beyond. He already belonged to history as one of the most significant and magnificent figures in the history of this still young country. Now he belongs to the airways too.
To paraphrase that French journalist exiting the plane to Zaire in When We Were Kings, we gonna fly in zee air 'til we get to L'ville."
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Jaron Boots Ennis Postfight: I'll Be Champ & Undisputed at 3-4 Weights | take up to 18 months. However, officials with the Louisville Airport Authority expect the change to happen much faster than that, if not as fast as its future namesake's hands.
The Greatest was born in Louisville and after many years living in the tiny hovel of Berrien Springs, Michigan, the champ returned home and lived out his remaining days there. Before leaving the small Michigan town, Ali bequeathed a sizable sum of money to the Niles, Michigan little league, resulting in the park (in which I once played) being renamed as Champ's Field.
While this is certainly not the first time a structure has been named after him, it is the most prestigious. Typically, major airports are named after presidents. See JFK or Ronald Reagan. It is exceedingly rare for a sports figure to receive this distinction.
Of course, as we all know, Muhammad Ali was much more than a sports figure. The gold medal winning Olympian and three-time heavyweight champion of the world transcended his sport as well as American life. It was not so long ago that he stood up to the American government over the Vietnam War, refusing his draft orders. It took a long time, but his act of courage – which wrongly cost him much of the peak of his career – has largely been accepted as what it was–an act of conscientious courage.
In his later years he was robbed of his physical dexterity and vibrant loquaciousness by the wicked affliction known as Parkinson's. Despite his infirmity, he never hid. He was very public up until his final seasons on earth. His hands shook, and his voice was mostly silent. His presence remained mighty.
There was a time on this planet when he was the most famous man on | 353 |
The sixteenth annual College Quest, a FREE college information night, will take place on Monday, September 21st, at the Simpson University Gym (2211 College View Drive, Redding) from 5:00 to 8:00pm. This free community event is open to everyone, but<|fim_middle|> Student Life Center and parking is free. College Quest will feature booths from over 50 colleges, universities, military, local scholarship providers and other career pathway information. Recruiters will be on hand to showcase their academic programs and provide students with admission information. Attendees can learn about degree options, costs of attending, and accreditation. There will also be free workshops presented by College OPTIONS staff covering financial aid information at 5:30pm and 6:45pm. College Quest is part of a tour network, coordinated by statewide organizations. The Redding event is planned and sponsored by representatives from College OPTIONS, ScholarShare California's 529 College Savings Plan, Shasta College, Shasta Union High School District, Simpson University, National University, and the Shasta County Office of Education. | is specifically designed for north state high school students and their families to explore higher education opportunities. The gym is called the Heritage | 24 |
The Jewish Camp of the Arts prides itself with its exceptional staff. All staff come with prior camp experience and a desire to work with kids. In addition there are Junior Counselors to help. Each elective is run by<|fim_middle|> staff members return year after year, lending experience and continuity to all programs. Each counselor is a role model for our children, promising them friendship which will last forever. Their love for the children is perhaps surpassed only by the children's love for them.
Click here to join the greatest staff on earth! | a professional instructor. The Jewish Camp of the Arts is under the able direction of Mrs. Chani Ezagui, who has years of camping experience as a counselor, head counselor and director. Mrs. Ezagui focusses on creating a nurturing environment to bring out the best in our staff and children. The real secret to our success lies in our outstanding staff. Our counselors are warm personal and known for their ability to care for each child as an individual. Many | 94 |
Memorial Edward J. Jaramillo Jr. '<|fim_middle|> Then Hewlett-Packard recruited him for sales support in Central and South America.
Transferred to Puerto Rico, he found that he needed to write special code for customers. Eventually he became an independent software developer. After 27 years he and Barbara moved back to California, where Eddie taught school for juvenile offenders and substituted in middle school.
In 2012, he lost Barbara, "the most beautiful influence in our lives." Eddie was immensely proud of his children, Ed III '96, Tom, and Steven, and three grandchildren, who survive him.
Undergraduate Class of 1963
Mudd Archive Memorials
Visit the Mudd Manuscript Library database for information about PAW memorials published from 1900 to 2011.
View Mudd Archive Memorials
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Geoscientists Explore Scientific Racism in the Teachings of a Princeton Pioneer
Campus Photo: An Empty McCosh Hall Bulletin Board
Here's How Princeton Plans to Bring Back Students Safely
Spring plan includes social distancing, testing, and more than 3,000 undergrads
As International Travel and Studies Are Disrupted, Scholars Adapt | 63
Published in the February 12, 2020 Issue
Eddie died Aug. 24. 2019, of a heart attack in Redwood City, Calif. He was a pioneering software engineer.
After Burges High School in El Paso, Texas, where his honors included outstanding student in public speaking, he studied communications electronics as an electrical engineer at Princeton, and was athletics chairman of Dial Lodge and treasurer of Orange Key. His roommates were Barrow, DeRochi, Einstein, Kelley, Mueller, Soare, and Twiggar.
Upon graduation Eddie joined Lockheed in space satellite development. He was sent to check on a contractor in Princeton, and on the plane from San Francisco he met Barbara, a flight attendant who happen to live near him. At Lockheed he managed ground stations for satellites while earning a a second bachelor's degree, in electrical engineering, and an MBA at Stanford. | 190 |
GOL is one of the largest low-cost low-fare airlines in the world in terms of passengers transported in 2008, and the only low-cost low-fare airline providing frequent service on routes connecting all of Brazil's major cities and from Brazil to major cities in South America and Caribbean. With young and standardized operating fleet of 108 Boeing 737 aircraft, the company serves the largest number of destinations of any airline in the Brazilian air passenger transportation market. Since the beginning of GOL´s operations in 2001, our affordable, reliable and simple service and our focus on markets that were either underserved or did not have a lower-fare alternative have led to a strong awareness of the company´s brand and a rapid increase in our market share. GOL is the first company to successfully introduce low-cost carrier industry practices and technologies in Latin America. We have a diversified revenue base, with customers ranging from business passengers to leisure passengers traveling throughout Brazil and other South American destinations.
The company controls important and recognized brands in the Brazilian aviation industry: GOL,<|fim_middle|> The miles are accrued every time a client flies with GOL, VARIG or partner airlines, or when hiring services or purchasing products from about 160 non-airline program partners, in Brazil and abroad.
GOLLOG is the company's cargo transportation service that also incorporates ease and innovation. Its modern system also allows our clients to have online access to the cargo delivery and tracking documentation form any internet connected computer, by means of the AWB (Airway Bill).
The Voe Fácil card, another of the company's innovations, was launched to stimulate demand and allows GOL clients to acquire tickets over the internet, without a credit card and with the choice of paying in up to 36 installments. | VARIG, GOLLOG, SMILES and VOE FÁCIL.
Recognized for making air travel affordable in Brazil, the GOL brand is synonymous with innovation and modernity, thanks to several actions initiated to provide service that is simple, safe and efficient. GOL flies to 50 domestic and seven international destinations: Asuncion (Paraguay), Buenos Aires, Cordoba and Rosario (Argentina), Montevideo (Uruguay), Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) and Santiago (Chile – via Buenos Aires).
VARIG is the GOL Group brand that operates the company's midrange international routes, to Aruba (Caribbean), Bogota (Colombia), Caracas (Venezuela) and Punta Cana (Dominican Republic). In the Comfort Class, VARIG provides a series of benefits to the client, such as more room between seats, more privacy on board, 150% bonus in SMILES miles accrual, onboard service with more options of hot entrées and individual onboard entertainment.
The SMILES program has issued over one million cards abroad and is the largest mileage plan in Latin America, with over 6.7 million participants. | 247 |
NHL 2013-14: Devils ready to regroup in Jersey after change of ownership, loss of Kovalchuk
NEWARK, N.J. - While other teams made the most of the lockout-shortened season, the New Jersey Devils missed the playoffs a year after making the Stanley Cup finals.
There were injuries. There were slumps. It was not pretty.
But it was also only one part of the story. Then came the off-season.
Forward Ilya Kovalchuk stunned the team in July, by walking away from $77 million left on his 15-year contract to play in Russia. Technically, the 30-year-old retired. Realistically, he left the Devils without a star player. Forward David Clarkson left via free agency, as well.
That was the downside. The positive was that Josh Harris—owner of the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers—and partner David Blitzer headed a group that purchased the franchise from Jeff Vanderbeek in August. They kept general manager Lou Lamoriello in charge and guaranteed that the long-time executive will have money to spend down the road for free agents.
Lamoriello had a decent off-season regardless. Despite the Kovalchuk decision, the Devils re-signed forwards Patrik Elias and Dainius Zubrus and defenceman Marek Zidlicky. He also added forwards Ryane Clowe, Michael Ryder and Rostislav Olesz as free agents, and acquired goaltender Cory Schneider from the Vancouver Canucks for a first-round draft pick.
Finally, the Devils went out and signed future Hall of Fame forward Jaromir Jagr, as well as former Detroit left wing Damien Brunner.
"I think they did the right thing—to move on," goaltender Martin Brodeur said. "It was impressive to see<|fim_middle|>0, the Devils scored two goals or less. And their power play was virtually non-existent. But knowing he's not coming back might be better for this team. They can officially move forward, and Ryder and Clowe should help up front. Ryder had three seasons of 30-plus goals, including 35 with Dallas in 2012. Clowe had 24 with San Jose in 2011.
AGING LEGENDS: Brodeur and Jagr are 41 years old and one has to wonder how much is left in the tank. Expect the 27-year-old Schneider to emerge as the No. 1 goaltender as some point in the season. Jagr had 16 goals last season, splitting time between Dallas and Boston.
DEVILS Defence: Defence was the trademark of the Devils' three Stanley Cup titles, the last coming in 2003. Andy Greene has emerged as the star of a no-name unit that includes captain Bryce Salvador and Zidlicky. The Devils are hoping former first-round pick Adam Larsson emerges as the unit's top player.
GENERAL HEALTH: Injuries were the primary reason for the team's downfall last year and the Devils have already had a tough time staying healthy in the preseason. Jagr has gone almost two weeks without practicing. And Clowe suffered a leg injury in the first preseason game.
CHANGING OF THE GUARD: The Devils need some of their younger players contributing. Travis Zajac is an outstanding two-way player but the goals have been missing. Adam Henrique struggled in his second season after a good rookie year. Others who might step up are Stefan Matteau, last year's first-round pick, Jacob Josefson, Mattias Tedenby and Andrei Loktionov. | how quickly the organization moved to bring in a lot of new faces. It's going to be an adjustment for everyone. It's going to be interesting to see how all the pieces of the puzzle Lou brought in fit and how everything pans out."
The Devils will be looking to make the playoffs for the 20th time in 23 years, but there are already some concerns.
Jagr, who signed a one-year contract, has been bothered by a lower body injury since training camp opened.
"I love the game and want to keep playing," said Jagr, who has 681 goals. "I just want to stay healthy and make the people who brought me here happy. Age really doesn't matter to me. As long as I'm willing to work hard, that's what keeps me young."
Here are five things to watch as the Devils prepare to open vs. Pittsburgh on Oct. 3:
REPLACING KOVY: The Devils struggled after Kovalchuk suffered a late-season back injury, losing all 10 games he missed. In eight of those 1 | 223 |
List of missions our church supports
Senior Pastor Peter Hilst
Bible Tabernacle
The mission of The Bible Tabernacle is to glorify Christ by preaching The Gospel to the poor and helping those in need, teaching them how to help themselves through God's Word. Senior Pastor Peter Hilst directs the mission with Associate Pastor Richard Libby. Director Michael Hughes managing the family and women's programs, and Wesley Russell directs the men's programs at the Canyon Country location.
Milt and Carolyn Monell
Prayer is at the heart of Cru.
Dr. Bill Bright founded this ministry on prayer and it is through prayer that Campus Crusade has been blessed to make such a significant contribution to fulfilling the Great Commission. Rim Church supports Milt and Carolyn Monell, who leads the Global Prayer Movement at Campus Crusade for Christ, or CRU Headquarters in Orlando, FL.
Compassion means "to suffer with" and is an emotional response of sympathy. But it's not just a feeling. The feeling is combined with a desire to help.
Hebrew Christian Witness
Pastor Gill Villalpando and Rachel' Perl (pictured on left) work to<|fim_middle|> a leadership role there, starting new churches through them. He recently started a new church, as Pastor of The African Inland Church Daystar, which is located just 100 meters from the university campus. He asks us to pray for his spiritual impact on as many as possible. Paul's wife, Meg, is leading the ladies program, which has grown from 9 to 30 ladies. She is also teaching Sunday school, and leading the music ministry.
Olivia & Roberto Trasvina
Mexicali Mission Site
This is our "hands-on" mission opportunity. We have trips several times each year to visit the mission site at the Eslas suburb of Mexicali. We are building a residence, church and a clinic at the site, and often help with building projects for churches and individuals in the local community. We also go on outreaches to bring the Gospel message to some of the most needy people in Mexicali. Call John Clemens (909)867-3019 for information or to join our next mission trip.
Bala Konate
UWM Senegal, Africa Discipleship Experience
Pastor Balla Konate is one of the few well-qualified native Wolof-language Bible scholars in Senegal, West Africa. United World Missions worked with Pastor Balla over the past 10 years to put together a curriculum that equips students to accurately present the Bible to their countrymen in their own language, with relevant examples and explanations. This project has become the mission's primary focus. The financial support we provide is currently going to this effort to train and place national pastors.
Pierre & Meggie DeMers
Wycliffe Bible Translators, Healy, Alaska and Saskatchewan, Canada
Pierre and Meggie DeMers completed translation of the New Testament in both written and spoken form of the Gwich'in Indian language spoken in central and western Canada. They are now translating the New Testament in the Dene language spoken in northern Saskatchewan, Canada in two oral dialects and in written form.
Brian and Anna Kleinsasser
Youth With a Mission
Brian Kleinsasser helps manage the Impact World Tour project (a high-impact stage show designed to present the Good News in a dynamic, exciting way to youth and young adults), Call to All (a project to reach the last places on earth without the Gospel) and the Discipleship Training Program for YWAM. He is also involved in several other YWAM Headquarters programs. We first met Brian and Anna when they were young missionaries in Hong Kong. We followed them to Australia, and then to New Zealand before they were moved to YWAM HQ in Kansas City, MO. | acquaint Jewish people first with the full truth as it is in the Bible and with the God of Truth personally. Their ministry involves Bible study and prayer meetings, Jewish holiday celebrations, personal contact ministry, and humanitarian aide trips to Israel by Tom and Jeannie Gronewald.
Dr. Paul and Meg Mutinda
Dr. Paul Mutinda, Kenya, Africa
Paul is professor of Bible studies at Daystar Christian University in Nairobi. He joined the African Inland Church and immediately took | 96 |
Books by David R. George III
Enjoy David R. George III's Books? Tell us Why and Win a Free Book!
Welcome to David R. George III's BookGorilla Author Page! We're working hard to bring you the best deals ever on David R. George III's Kindle books. If you're a David R. George III fan, we'd love to have your help in making this author page special. Tell us, in no more than 150 words, why you think David R. George III is great. Use this webform to send us your submission, and if we select yours we'll offer you one of David R. George III's books or a Kindle Gift Card as a free gift<|fim_middle|> bestselling author. A beautiful green world, rich in fertile soil and temperate climate . . . a textbook Class-M planet that should be teeming with life. Scans show no life-signs, but there are...
Star Trek: The Original Series: Crucible: McCoy: Provenance of Shadows
David R. George's Crucible Trilogy explores the legacy of one pivotal, crucial moment in the lives of the men at the heart of Star Tre k -- what led them to it, and to each other, and how their destinies were intertwined. For Doctor Leonard McCoy, life takes two paradoxically divergent paths. In one, displaced in time, he saves a...
Star Trek: The Original Series: Crucible: Spock: The Fire and the Rose
IN A SINGLE MOMENT ...the lives of three men will be forever changed. In that split second, defined paradoxically by both salvation and loss, they will destroy the world and then restore it. Much had come before, and much would come after, but nothing would color their lives more than that one, isolated instant on the edge of...
Star Trek: The Original Series: Crucible: Kirk: The Star to Every Wandering
IN A SINGLE MOMENT . . . the lives of three men will be forever changed. In that split second, defined paradoxically by both salvation and loss, they will destroy the world and then restore it. Much had come before, and much would come after, but nothing would color their lives more than that one, isolated instant on the edge of forever.... | ! Thanks!
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Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek- Typhon Pact Book 7)
by David R. George III
After the disastrous events in the Bajoran system, Captain Benjamin Sisko must confront the consequences of the recent choices he has made in his life. At the same time, the United Federation of Planets and its Khitomer Accords allies have come to the brink of war with the Typhon Pact. While factions within the Pact unsuccessfully used...
Today's Bargain Price: $7.99
Categories: All Science Fiction
Original Sin (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Continuing the Deep Space Nine saga—an original novel from New York Times bestselling author David R. George III! At the end of 2385, in a significant shift of its goals from military back to exploratory, Starfleet sent Captain Benjamin Sisko and the crew of the U.S.S. Robinson on an extended mission into the Gamma Quadrant....
Serpents Among the Ruins: The Lost Era 2311 (Star Trek: The Lost Era Book 2)
Discover the astonishing story of an infamous and deadly confrontation with this thrilling original Star Trek novel. The year is 2311, a year of infamy for the United Federation of Planets. It is the year of the Tomed Incident, and its tale can at last be told. In the midst of escalating political tensions among the Klingons, the...
The Long Mirage (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Continuing the post-television Deep Space Nine saga comes this thrilling original novel from New York Times bestselling author David R. George III! More than two years have passed since the destruction of the original Deep Space 9. In that time, a brand-new, state-of-the-art starbase has replaced it, commanded by Captain Ro Laren...
Star Trek: Tales From the Captain's Table
by Keith R. A. DeCandido
In this follow-up to the bestselling Captain's Table series of books, nine new Star Trek® captains belly up to the bar to tell their tales of adventure and romance, of triumph and tragedy, of duty and honor, of debts paid and prices exacted, including: Jonathan Archer of the Starship Enterprise™, as told by Louisa Swann Chakotay...
The Fall: Revelation and Dust (Star Trek: The Fall Book 1)
WELCOME TO THE NEW DEEP SPACE 9 After the destruction of the original space station by a rogue faction of the Typhon Pact, Miles O'Brien and Nog have led the Starfleet Corps of Engineers in designing and constructing a larger, more advanced starbase in the Bajoran system. Now, as familiar faces such as Benjamin Sisko, Kasidy Yates...
Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night (Star Trek- Typhon Pact Book 6)
The first novel in a two-part Typhon Pact adventure set in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation!In the wake of the final Borg invasion, which destroyed entire worlds, cost the lives of sixty-three billion people, and struck a crippling blow to Starfleet, six nations adversarial to the United Federation of Planets—the Romulan...
Sacraments of Fire (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
The latest novel in the ongoing Next Generation/Deep Space Nine expanded universe crossover, from New York Times bestselling author David George! Days after the assassination of Federation President Nan Bacco on Deep Space 9, the unexpected appearance of a stranger on the station raises serious concerns. He seems dazed and confused...
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: These Haunted Seas
by David R. George III, Heather Jarman
It is a time of renewed hope. As the U.S.S. Defiant sails through the wormhole and charts a new course of discovery into the unknown ocean of the Gamma Quadrant, powerful individuals from distant worlds gather at station Deep Space 9™ to usher in a bright new era; with the Dominion War now only a memory, Bajor is poised at last to...
Ascendance (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
The post-television Deep Space Nine saga continues with this original novel from New York Times bestselling author David R. George III! On the original Deep Space Nine, Captain Kira Nerys watches as the nearby wormhole opens and discharges a single, bladelike vessel. Attempts to contact its crew fail, and the ship is soon followed...
Star Trek: Myriad Universes #3: Shattered Light (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
by David R. George III, Steve Mollmann, Michael Schuster, Scott Pearson
It's been said that for any event, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcome will follow, and therefore all possibilities that could happen do happen across alternate realities. In these divergent realms, known history is bent, like white light through a shattered prism—broken into a...
Typhon Pact #3: Rough Beasts of Empire (Star Trek- Typhon Pact)
Still on Romulus in pursuit of his goal of reunifying the Vulcans and Romulans, Spock finds himself in the middle of a massive power struggle. In the wake of the assassination of the Praetor and the Senate, the Romulans have cleaved in two. While Empress Donatra has led her nascent Imperial Romulan State to establish relations with the...
Categories: All Fantasy; All Science Fiction
Typhon Pact: The Khitomer Accords Saga: Plagues of Night, Raise the Dawn, and Brinkmanship (Star Trek)
by David R. George III, Una McCormack
Three thrilling novels set in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation! Plagues of Night In the wake of the final Borg invasion, which destroyed entire worlds, cost the lives of sixty-three billion people, and struck a crippling blow to Starfleet, six nations adversarial to the United Federation of Planets—the Romulan Star...
Mission Gamma: Book One: Twilight (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 1)
THE TIME HAS COME ...for a new era of exploration. With the Dominion War behind them, the crew of the U.S.S. Defiant journeys through the wormhole as Commander Elias Vaughn leads a "corps of discovery" to blaze new trails into the unexplored reaches of the Gamma Quadrant. THE TIME HAS COME ...for a civilization to reach a...
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Worlds of Deep Space Nine #3: The Dominion and Ferenginar
by Keith R. A. DeCandido, David R. George III
Travel to two of the most colorful and fascinating civilizations in the Star Trek universe with this collection of two sweeping and reflective novellas that transport us to the alien planets of Ferenginar and the Dominion. In Ferenginar , Quark's profit-driven home planet is rocked by a shocking scandal when allegations that...
The Lost Era: One Constant Star (Star Trek: The Lost Era Book 2319)
An original novel set in "The Lost Era" time period between Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation!When Captain Demora Sulu leads the crew of U.S.S. Enterprise-B on a mission near Tzenkethi space, they explore Rejarris II, a mysterious planet. A strange structure on the surface could hold answers, but when a...
Star Trek: The Original Series: Allegiance in Exile
Captain James T. Kirk embarks on a mission that he may soon regret in this all-new Original Series adventure from the New York Times | 1,576 |
Global study identifies key areas for emergency department improvement
Research from Philips and the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences reveals unsustainable emergency department (ED) use in seven developed nations
Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), a global leader in health technology, today announced the results of an international research study conducted with the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine & Health Sciences evaluating the use of emergency departments (EDs) in seven developed nations. The paper, titled, "Acute unscheduled care in seven developed nations: a cross-country comparison," compares the similarities and differences across nations with a focus on care delivery and the impact of socio-economic factors. Countries evaluated for the report include: Canada, the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Australia. The full report is available for download here.
Better access to primary care can result in lower ED Use
Combining public data with extensive, regional physician interviews, researchers from Philips and the GW School of Medicine & Health Sciences were able to highlight key insights from the seven countries studied. "There's a belief that easy access to primary care can result in lower emergency department use," said Mark Feinberg, Managing Partner, leading Healthcare Transformation Services in North America for Philips. "However, as a result of this report, it is clear that even if people have easy access to primary care and full healthcare coverage, there is no guarantee the patients will make economically prudent decisions to seek the most appropriate medical care setting."
More specifically, the findings of the report show Germany (22%) and Australia (22%) as having the lowest ED use, likely resulting from better (and faster) access<|fim_middle|>023 in Vienna, with largest exhibition space at Congress
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Key areas for emergency department improvement | to primary care—nearly two-thirds of Australians (58%) and three-quarters of Germans (72%) were able to make same or next day appointments with their primary care physicians (PCPs) compared to less than half of Americans (48%) and Canadians (41%).
In relation to readmissions, a metric used to determine the quality of care delivered, the U.S. showed the best performance for readmissions due to gaps in hospital or surgery discharge, discharge planning and transitional care. This, despite the fact it has the lowest compulsory insurance coverage. This could be attributed to the fact that the U.S. has instituted a number of programs with payment incentives proven to be effective in improving care transitions and reducing hospital readmissions. As a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, for example, U.S. hospitals are now facing financial penalties if patients are readmitted to a hospital [1].
Key areas for improvement
Taking the global data, researchers distilled their findings into a list of key areas impacting the way care is delivered in emergency settings. Making these observations actionable, researchers produced a list of the ten areas that cause these broad differences in available treatments, provider trainings and care quality across countries. Key takeaways include:
Social determinants (smoking, eating, violence, substance abuse and poverty) have a strong impact on the use of EDs.
Reduced access to health insurance results in poorer population health; placing a greater strain on emergency departments.
Sick patients do not make the most efficient decisions about when and where to seek medical care.
Extensive provider training is mandatory for effective delivery of acute unscheduled care.
Quality measures for EDs are immature and not standardized.
"In looking at the way emergency departments are used around the world, we were able to obtain valuable new insights to help improve care delivery," said Jesse Pines, MD, MBA, MSCE and Director of the GW Center for Healthcare Innovation and Policy Research at the GW School of Medicine & Health Sciences. "Because of research findings presented in this report, all emergency departments (no matter their location) have the opportunity to efficiently improve the way care is delivered in emergency department settings."
To access the complete report, please visit: Acute unscheduled care in seven developed nations: a cross-country comparison. For more information about emergency department use rates and to hear what healthcare professionals can do about it, please join the upcoming webinar on Sept. 8, 2017 from 11:30 am –12:30 pm ET co-hosted by Philips Blue Jay Consulting and the Urgent Matters team from the GW School of Medicine & Health Sciences. To register, please visit: Webinar: Acute unscheduled care in seven developed nations: a cross-country comparison.
[1] S. Thompson, R. Osborn, International Profiles of Health Care Systems, 2013, The Commonwealth Fund, November 2013.
About the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences
Founded in 1824, the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) was the first medical school in the nation's capital and is the 11th oldest in the country. Working together in our nation's capital, with integrity and resolve, the GW SMHS is committed to improving the health and well-being of our local, national and global communities. smhs.gwu.edu
Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Philips' health technology portfolio generated 2016 sales of EUR 17.4 billion and employs approximately 71,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter.
Diagnosis & Treatment Health economics Cost management Access to care Press release
GW School of Medicine& Health Sciences Media Relations
https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/news/archive/standard/news/press/2017/20170823-global-study-identifies-key-areas-for-emergency-department-improvement.html Link copied
10 healthcare technology trends for 2023
Philips to expand presence at ECR 2 | 948 |
Garth Brooks Announces Knoxville Date for His Massive 2019 Stadium Tour
John Medina, Getty Images
Garth Brooks has announced an upcoming<|fim_middle|> Vegas Residency Launching May 2023
Garth Brooks Hopes to Help Open a Police Substation in Downtown Nashville
Garth Brooks Sets 2022 Stadium Tour Date for Buffalo
Garth Brooks Duets With 'Rock Star' 7-Year-Old at Nashville Show [Watch] | concert date in Knoxville, Tenn., as part of his ongoing 2019 Stadium Tour. The country superstar is set to perform at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville on Saturday, Nov. 16, at 7PM.
Brooks' performance will mark the first concert to take place at the stadium venue in 16 years. He and his band will perform in the round at Neyland Stadium.
Tickets for the Knoxville Stadium Tour gig are slated to go on sale on Friday, Sept. 13, at 10AM EDT / 9AM CDT, with an eight-ticket limit per purchase. Seats are available exclusively via ticketmaster.com/garthbrooks, by calling the Garth Brooks Ticketmaster line at1-877-654-2784 or through the Ticketmaster phone app. There will be no ticket sales at the venue box office or Ticketmaster outlets on Sept. 13. All tickets will cost a total of $94.95.
The newly announced date is part of a massive stadium tour that will see Brooks performing in 10-12 stadiums each year over the course of three years. Brooks announced the tour at a press conference at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville in October of 2018.
Brooks recently released a new single, "Dive Bar," a duet with Blake Shelton. "Dive Bar" is set to appear on Brooks' upcoming new studio album, Fun. He has not yet revealed the details for that project.
The Secret History of Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places"
How He's Changed! Garth Brooks' Storied Career in Pictures:
Source: Garth Brooks Announces Knoxville Date for His Massive 2019 Stadium Tour
Filed Under: Garth Brooks
33 Years Ago: Garth Brooks Earns First No. 1 With 'If Tomorrow Never Comes'
Garth Brooks Announces a Las | 403 |
Please Mum is having a huge 50% off the entire store sale from April 29-30, 2011. The sale is extended for one extra day if shopping online.
Kids outgrow and tear their clothes so quickly. With a savings of 50% off, parents should definitely checkout Please Mum and take advantage of this offer.
Click here for more information about the deal at Please Mum or to shop online.
Valid online and in-stores, Old Navy is offering a buy one, get one 50% off from now until May 1, 2011. While supplies last. Cannot be combined with other offers or discounts. For online purchases, enter the promotion code "ONHALF" at checkout. Some additional restrictions apply.
Until April 30, 2011, save 25% off on all regular priced items at Gap. This offer is valid online and in-stores. The promotion excludes Gap Factory and Gap Generation stores and is not valid on sale items. To shop online, enter the promo code "SAVEGAP" to receive the discount. Other conditions apply.
In case you missed last weeks post and because Mother's Day is just around the corner, I decided to post Coach Factory's latest printable coupon. From now until May 1, 2011, save an extra 30% off your purchase at Coach Factory with this coupon. This offer applies to already reduced prices.
Print this coupon and present it at time of purchase at any Northern Reflections store to receive 40% off one regular priced item. One coupon per customer, per day. This promotion can not be combined with any other offers and is valid until May 8, 2011.
Click here to print the Northern Reflections 40% off coupon.
Get your teenagers off the sofa, away from their computers and video games this summer by registering them for GoodLife Fitness`s Free Teen Fitness Program for youths between 12 and 17 years old.
This program is offered at all GoodLife Fitness Clubs between 8am-4pm, 7 days a week for July and August 2011. Participants will have full club access except for tanning, pool, sauna, whirlpools, and Hot Yoga. Registration begins on June 1, 2011 at www.goodlifefitness.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to teach your children the importance of achieving a healthy and happy lifestyle<|fim_middle|> decking, fencing posts and decking accessories are 10% off at Rona. This offer is valid from now until April 27, 2011. For online purchases add the 10% off offer to the shopping cart to receive the discount. Check details in-store.
Click here to buy Rona online now or for more information about the deal. | .
Click here for more information about GoodLife Fitness`s Free Teen Fitness Program.
For a limited time, Banana Republic has an incredible 40% Off your entire purchase sale from April 28 – 30, 2011. This sale is available in-store and online. If you're shopping online, enter the promo code "ROYAL40" at checkout to get the discount. Not valid on men's and women's bags, shoes, Monogram, Heritage and third party branded merchandise.
Banana Republic offers free sipping on any order over $50.
Click here to shop Banana Republic online now.
During Reebok`s Friends & Family Days, receive 40% off on regular priced and sale merchandise. This offer is valid from April 28-30, 2011. Print out and present the invitation below at your nearest Reebok store to redeem the discount. The link below also lists all the participating stores. Some additional conditions apply.
Click here to print the Reebok 40% off invitation.
Save big on lingerie, sleepwear and more by visiting La Vie en Rose between April 28-May 1, 2011.
Receive 35% off on all regular-priced items online and in-store. Simply print out and present the coupon at time of purchase in-store or use the promotional code "VIPS11″ at checkout online.
La Vie en Rose offers free shipping on online purchases of $75 or more. Some additional restrictions apply.
Click here to print the 35% off coupon or to buy La Vie en Rose online now.
Receive 20% off on online purchases of $50 or more at Robeez.com until May 11, 2011. Use the promo code "MOTHERS2011″ at checkout to receive the discount. Offer is valid for in-stock merchandise only, while supplies last. Some additional conditons apply.
Remember that if you purchase two or more pairs of Robeez footwear, standard shipping is free.
Click here to buy Robeez online now or for more information about the deal.
Right now Payless Shoesource is having their buy one item and get the second item of equal or lesser price for 50% off. This applies to everything in the store. This offer is valid until May 16, 2011.
I love Payless Shoesource because you can stock up on shoes at a low price, and with this offer your closet will be overflowing with shoes.
Click here to buy Payless Shoesource online now or for more information about the deal.
All in stock cedar lumber, | 553 |
Kids golf
DJGA History
Home / Interview /
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Former DJGA player through many years, winner of national and international titles and national team player on the Danish National team. Player at UTEP Miners College golf program, and winner of several titles in US College golf.
What was the most exciting thing about<|fim_middle|> you go to practice and play.
What was the best thing you learned from DJGA?
Again, I learned a lot from my time in DJGA, and the best thing I learned was that whether it's in golf or life, you can't do everything alone, and having great people, players, and coaches around you is possibly the most important part of becoming better.
If you should give advice to a young DJGA player what would that be?
An advice I would give to a young DJGA player would be to try and have fun with the process every day, knowing that not all days are going to be easy. Also, compare your game to yourself instead of others because no one's process looks the same. | being a part of the DJGA?
The most exciting thing about being a part of DJGA was being part of such a unique environment, supported by highly skilled coaches, where everyone made each other better, while creating friends for life.
What was the best advice you got from your coaches in DJGA?
I received so many great advice throughout my time in DJGA, and the best one was probably to have a clear purpose every time | 87 |
STEM Week at the dlr Mill<|fim_middle|> and fun, creating a dynamic learning experience. Their models were the centrepiece of the lesson, which included an educator-scripted discussion designed to engage students in a discovery process. | Theatre went off with a bang! Sell-out science shows and performances all week teaching girls and boys the wonder of space, robots, and explosive chemistry!
Primary School children and their teachers from all over Dublin and beyond came to the theatre to enjoy our Exploration Dome, Bricks4Kids, and Junior Einsteins. With geysers and rockets and galaxies galore these schoolkids came away with a new love for science and all its possibilities for the future.
The Exploration Dome, we were given the chance to take a tour of galaxies far, far away right in the middle of our auditorium! Girls and boys were able to discover new and fun ways of learning about astronomy, geology, and geography with the help of state-of-the-art Full dome 360 degree 3-D digital projection technology, stunning graphics and advanced computer simulations.
Bricks 4 Kids is designed in a fun and challenging way using LEGO®, Technic & Robotics. Bricks 4 Kidz successfully engaged the curiosity and creativity of school children from all over Dublin in a relaxed learning environment where initiative was encouraged and self-expression celebrated.
The Bricks 4 Kidz approach to learning is imaginative, multi-sensory | 241 |
Mark Calabria on Housing Policy and the Behavioral Case for Monetary Rules
Mark Calabria is the director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato Institute. Before joining Cato in 2009, he worked as a member of the senior staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. He joins the show to discuss working on Capitol Hill amidst the 2008 financial crisis. Mark also discusses his recent Cato paper where he argues insights from behavioral economics suggest monetary policy should be more rules-based.
Read the full episode transcript
Note: While transcripts are lightly edited, they are not rigorously proofed for accuracy. If you notice an error, please reach out to macromusings@mercatus.gmu.edu [1].
David Beckworth: Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Calabria: Thanks David, it's great to be here.
Beckworth: Okay, like with all my guests, we are curious to find out, how did you get into finance as well as Fed related issues?
Calabria: So, I would say mine was actually quite roundabout, if you will. I, at heart, think of myself as actually an applied micro guy, so I appreciate being included in the macro scope. So, my graduate work, for instance, was mostly in topics around information, around process. You think about a lot of these moral hazard asymmetric information questions, and in fact to give you an example, my dissertation was on food and drug regulation. So, I think about my career having moved from the study of toxic foods to the study of toxic assets.
Beckworth: Very nice.
Calabria: And to some extent there's a lot of the same models actually do apply. So, like many of us, I looked at teaching, honestly didn't like a lot of the offers I got, and ended up working for a couple of trade associations, and then I ended up also being able to do a fellowship at Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, and got me really interested in mortgage markets, which are obviously also vulnerable to asymmetric information questions, and again, that's sort of been a theme of my interest, and working on mortgages is actually what ended up getting me on the banking committee.
Calabria: I actually started my career doing a little bit less than a year for the end of Phil Graham's 10 years chair, and as you recall, Graham was an economist, still an economist as well. So, they brought me on to do mortgage issues, and slowly started working my way into the rest of the issues facing the committee, and then when Graham retired, ended up spending a year at HUD running their mortgage regulation area. Interestingly, for another economist, John Weicher, who's a Chicago PhD from that golden era of the '60s, but he's at the Hudson Institute now, and really kind of got to banking via thinking about the transmission mechanism of monetary policy that is property markets, that is housing, that is mortgage markets. I think it was Ed Lehrman who said something along the lines of housing is the business cycle?
Beckworth: Yep.
Calabria: So, to me, it really ... it's hard to think about these markets for a long time without really thinking about monetary policy. Say as aside before working on the Hill, spent a little bit of time at a couple of trade associations in a real estate industry, and spent a little time there doing regional macro forecasting. So, really, the exciting things of sitting around, thinking about what housing starts in Des Moines were going to be next quarter, and it really did kind of get you thinking about how does the economy work, and how does monetary policy feed into all this, which got me to the committee, and started working on monetary policy there. I was our only PhD on either side, and got the opportunity to work on nominations.
Calabria: So, for instance, worked on Bernanke's not only his CEA nomination, but his first nomination is Fed chairman. I also got to know other members of the Fed board that way and interacted pretty regularly despite what my friends over at the Joint Economic Committees do, which is very important. They're an oversight committee, banking actually does most of the actual economics stuff in terms of legislation. So, it was really a wonderful opportunity to kind of see economic policy making from the inside, and quite frankly, not what I thought I was going to do when I was in grad school, but it ended up being a lot of fun.
Beckworth: Well, let's talk about your experience on the committee in the Senate, and let's go to the Fed hearings that you just alluded to. Maybe, how did you prepare your senator for those hearings, because often when you watch them it seems, and maybe this is more on the House side, that the communication between the Fed chair, and the congressman, or congresswoman, are often ... there are different levels, they're on same things that they don't really speak to each other. So, how did you prepare your senator?
Calabria: I think that's a very fair observation. I may be a little biased and saying that I think the dialogue in the Senate hearings are slightly better-
Beckworth: Better, okay. That's my impression, too.
Calabria: ... than they are in the House hearings. So, in one way I think it's gotten worse, in one way I think it's gotten better, and I'll talk about my preparation in terms of going to that as well. So, rarely do you have anybody, even in the Senate, where a member understands much about monetary policy. So, first getting yourself to the point of being to explain to them the pros and cons, it really depends on the member. Unsurprisingly, the short time I worked for Phil Graham, you didn't prep him at all, you didn't write questions for him, you didn't write statements for him, he knew what he was going to ask, he had his own thoughts on monetary policy, and he asked them.
Calabria: Shelby was a much different animal in that we would walk Shelby through the ... we'd write his opening statement, you'd write questions, you'd talk him through what the points were. He certainly wasn't going to ask anything he wasn't comfortable with, but you tried to educate him on what the basic parameters were. You certainly were never going to be in a situation, where you could get to very detailed questions. Shelby wasn't going to ask how much you can rely on an expectations-augmented Phillips curve. You weren't going to get those sort of questions.
Beckworth: Okay.
Calabria: Unfortunately, one of the things I think has gotten ... Well, one of the things that's been consistent, but it's probably actually gotten better in some ways, particularly in the Greenspan era, this was such a media circus that the hearings were always an opportunity, especially in the House, for members to get their 30 seconds of national TV time. So, you had a lot of discussions of things that weren't monetary. You go back 10 years, and you watch these hearings, and maybe a third of it was actually discussions of monetary. I think that's gotten better. I think the conversations have actually gotten a little deeper from the members. I think you've seen a little bit more engagement.
Calabria: Again, I would be the first to say, I think there's a lot talking past each other. I think there's a lot of positioning. I think there's unfortunately not as much dialogue as you would like, but we would look to a lot of outside sources. So, for instance, the Congressional Research Service has a very fine macroeconomist who's still there who would come over and brief the committee, and we would do hearings for the staff, and we would walk them through the dozen or so basic metrics of the macroeconomy you'd look at, and we'd talk about what the impact were. So, we would get members and their staff up to speed so they weren't completely embarrassed to ask a question, but very, very difficult, and unfortunately I think it's fair to say other than the twice a year Humphrey-Hawkins there really is very little engagement at a really in depth level. I mean, yes, the Fed chair would normally have lunch or breakfast with members of the committees, but those conversations were rarely quite deep.
Improving the Discourse on Monetary Policy
Beckworth: Yes, I had Andy Levin on the show recently, and he proposed something that Scott Summer has also proposed, and that is to have a quarterly report come out from the Fed that assesses what it has done recently, and where it is going. He also talked about having an annual ... each chair annual goal have quarterly reports kind of update what they've done, kind of give an accounting of why they may have gotten close to their target, why they haven't, and I think that would be incredibly useful for these hearings. Something that both sides could speak from. Congressman, the Senator could say, "Hey, what's happening? Your own report says you have deviated for these reasons.", and then the Fed chair could respond to that, as opposed to speaking past each other.
Calabria: I think that would be incredibly helpful. One of the ... I should say, the primary reason that I have been relatively sympathetic to proposals, the sort of audit the Fed proposals, and I'm not dismissive of the political concerns, and I may be naively optimistic here, but I see it as at least an attempt to try to educate members of Congress, and we really do this is so many areas where, and we may come to this later, but I said along the path of trying to figure out what the right regulatory framework for Fannie and Freddie was, the first thing we did was ask GAO to do a number of reports, and say, "What can you tell us about what the literature says? What's best practice?"
Calabria: I think having that external voices, and again, GAO any sort of report is going to be relatively bland, and relatively unbiased, and we'll give you here's kind of what the consensus of the literature is. So, trying to get members and staff up to speed, you certainly seen some improvement. Again, office size, I was the only PhD on either side of the committee staff at the time, you didn't even have that on the House then, you do now. So, there's been some improvement there, and that's going to back and forth. I mean, you've certainly seen times where it's worked well and where it hasn't. I don't know if we'll ever get back to the era.
Calabria: I think back, I guess this must've been '50s or '60s when Paul Douglas of, of course, the Cobb-Douglas Production Function, chaired the monetary subcommittee, and just like you rarely get senators, of course, with their own productions functions named after them, but also, ones that can engaged, and you go back and look at those hearings, and you really have really good just conversations about monetary policy. I think it's tough to get there without getting members to that point. So, more exposure, more briefing, more background, I think that would help move the conversation, because I do think you need to have a conversation that doesn't occur today.
Beckworth: Right. I think there needs to be some kind of benchmark against which Fed policy can be evaluated. I know the Form Act has created a lot of controversy, a lot of pushback, in my own view, I don't think it is that onerous. I think, if anything, it's just purely a benchmark. If you look at the Act closely, if you can get past your emotions and look at that closely it says, "Pick a rule, you choose it, and yes, if it's different than a Taylor rule, justify why." But the Fed will pick its own rule, and it would give reports on why it deviated from that, but it's not a binding rule, it's not a rule that's going to punish them. But I think it'd be useful, something like the Form Act, maybe not the Form Act, but something like it, in a sense there'd be a benchmark, because it's kind of hard right now for our congressperson to evaluate the Fed if they don't even know what the Fed's own goals are.
Beckworth: Now, the Fed has an inflation target, it has consistently undershot it, so it kind of creates this uncertainty of what are you trying to do? You trying to maximize employment? Are you trying to ... price stability? It's very murky, very unclear. Something I've pushed for is I wish the Federal Reserve would release their own estimates of the natural or neutral interest rate, because they often talk about it, even now, this last week, Stanley Fisher talked about rates are going to be lowered permanently, maybe there's demographic reasons, and they talk about this natural rate, but they never tell us what they think it actually is. It's going to be low.
Beckworth: Now, the Board of Governors release the projections, which show the long run estimate, but we don't know what their short run real-time estimates are, and Janet Yellen had a speech in the last year where she had a chart that showed a range of estimates based on different models, and I know that the natural rate is uncertain, we don't know it perfectly. But something like that, that would give a ballpark where we think the neutral policy is, why we're there, why we're not there, just as a starting point for conversation.
Calabria: I very much agree with that, and I think the Form Act has been misinterpreted in a lot of ways, and to some extent what it is suggesting, because we know that for the most part the Fed is running together rules internally. So, to some extent, the real substance of it is, why don't you share with us what you're already doing so that we can have a conversation about it to see whether it's effective or not. Of course, it's worth reminding people that, to me, inherent in the Taylor rule is kind of this Keynesian output gap trade off. So, it's not as if you're asking for some sort freedom and style rule. I mean, it's really not all that radical, it's what the Fed does today you're really just asking them to tell you that.
Calabria: I'll note what I think has been not really looked at in terms of what I think could ultimately be a very powerful but minor reform, and the Form Act suggests that like a lot of other agencies, such as the SEC and the CFTC, that individual members of the Fed board get some of their own staff. This is something I think it just seems minor, but the fact that if you were a board member that all the staff work for the chair, and that is the control of information. I think this is particularly important as long as we're going to lead in a world where the Fed does not only monetary policy, but also regulatory policy.
Calabria: I mean, for instance, I don't think I'm disrespecting Dan Tarullo to suggest that his expertise is regulation, not monetary policy. Again, I think we saw this in the Greenspan years where he, quite frankly, for good or bad to very little interest in the regulatory side, and I think that's true with Yellen. So, to me, to have a situation where Dan Tarullo could have an economist that works for him are ... if you're an economist on the board, and you might want a lawyer to work for you to tell you understand how the capital rules work. So, I think that would actually help empower debate, because right now the staff control, or the resources are really controlled by the chair, and it's not the way that other agencies work.
Beckworth: This leads to groupthink-
Calabria: Absolutely.
Beckworth: ... and the possibility for that decision, which we'll get to later, some of the cognitive biases that we learn from behavioral economics. You have a paper in the Cato Journal, and gave another version of that at a conference, and it's really interesting, we'll get to that in a bit. So, we've been talking about the Fed, we've segued into that from your experience in becoming a macroeconomist/finance person. Yes, we will let you wear the hat that says macroeconomist on it, during this interview at least. I'm also curious about your time on the Senate Banking Committee during the crisis. So, can you tell us about that experience, some of the things that had happened? That was a very intense time, and you lived right through it front lines. Tell us what it was like.
Calabria: Oh, absolutely. Let me first say, I started on the committee in the summer of 2001, and again, went to the administration for a year and was back by 2003, and there were a number of things early on that we had very strong concerns about. So, I often hear in the popular press that nobody saw it coming, and of course, nobody saw exactly what happened, but many of us had a lot of strong concerns. I had put together hearings on the housing market starting in 2005, where we were worried even before then about imbalances that were there. We were certainly, most of my time actually on the committee was spent on a form of Fannie and Freddie, which we felt was not going to end well, and of course did not end well. Some other issues, so for instance, I worked on a credit rating agency bill in 2006 where we thought we needed to bring more competition to that market.
Calabria: I'd be the first to say it ended up being too little too late, but again, it was an issue of concern of how the rating of securitized mortgage-backed securities and other ABS were being rated, and trying to fix that market. So, there were a number of things that I think we got right in terms of we saw, it put it on our radar screen, but in many instances ... simply couldn't get 60 votes in the Senate for us, is the short answer of it. So, there was certainly a frustration on my part in that 10 years ago the broad sense in congress was everything's fine. It certainly was very commonly heard that housing prices only go up, and worse case scenario they flatten down. So, you remember, this was the heart of the great moderation, and of course it was not long after during that time when Bernanke's famous speech to Freedman, "We won't do it again."
Calabria: So, there really was this sense of complacency. I feel a lot better at least today, because I don't feel like when I raise issues of financial instability I'm alone in the same way. But that's pre-crisis, so getting to the crisis, there really was ... Let me put it this, the call you would get from Treasury and the Fed were generally either minutes before they were going to do something, or right after, so the decisions were certainly made. There really was not an interactive kind of, "We're going to tell you what we're doing, or we're going to seek input from Congress on this.", up until the TARP, and of course they had to come to Congress for that.
Calabria: So, you would hear about these things only a little bit before they'd hit the press. The benefit of course was you'd have them come up, and Scott Alvarez who's a general counsel with the Fed spent a lot of time coming up, and walking us through why they did decision X, why they did decision Y. As much as I like Scott I will say some of the justifications that I think I got at that term were not, to me, from a legally perspective very compelling, but you got a lot of real-time, or at least after that time analysis of why they made the choices they made.
Calabria: I will say, unfortunately, I think a lot of it, which is just a very difficult, and is sort of a falsifiable matter, almost always came back to fears and panic. They were rarely about could we resolve these institutions in a manner where we could allocate losses correctly. They were rarely questions about could we reorganize this? It really was how will markets react? It's very hard to kind of figure out whether that's right or wrong. Of course there were frustrations the other side. I often say, if you don't think you have a panic then putting the President and the Treasury Secretary or NTB and telling people you need bill X by Monday will probably cause a panic.
Calabria: So, there was this really kind of running around. I think if you read some of the things ... I actually think one of the best books during that time is Paulson's, because it was written right after the crisis, he doesn't have any scores to settle, and it conveys what I think I felt at the time, that fog of war. So, there certainly was, "Put out this fire. Put out that fire.", and it really was until they got to the TARP, and even the TARP was not clearly thought out, as you know, it was first supposed to buy assets, and then later it was turned to equity injections. So, there was very little long term thinking, the most anybody was seeing was two weeks in front of themselves, if that.
Beckworth: So, wasn't there a meeting where Paulson and Bernanke came in and said, "Look, if you don't do ..." Was it TARP where they came in-
Calabria: Yes.
Beckworth: ... and said, "If you don't sign this bill by Monday your debit card won't work, your bank account won't work."?
Calabria: There was a lot of what ... I don't think I would ungenerously call fear mongering, there really ... we got that on the committee. We got literally I was told, "If we didn't do this you couldn't go to your ATM and get cash out.", and I don't know whether that's true or not. I was working on Capitol Hill on 9/11 and we know on 9/11 actual physical components of the payment system were destroyed, and despite that, and despite the grounding of planes, the stopping of check transactions, you were able to cash checks in the system largely worked.
Calabria: So, at some extents, I guess I'd put it this way, what we were being told felt like we were being sold a bag of goods without necessarily an explanation, and that was really one of the more frustrating parts is someone trying to play an oversight role on behalf of the public is you don't feel like you were getting the full story, and I understand, I mean, I think the perspective of the Fed was kind of, we're in the middle of this, you don't stop a firefighter in the middle of a fire to tell you what he's going to do, you you let him do it. That was defense perspective, and I understand their logic to it, I disagree with a number of the decisions that were made, but there really was not as much dialogue as I think needed to happen, and there really was a sort of doomsday scenario regularly promised that if we didn't do X really bad things would happen.
Beckworth: Well, that only reinforced the fear though, I mean-
Beckworth: ... and the thing is, I wrote about it, others wrote about it, it wasn't just you, so the fact that the media got ahold of it and spread it, maybe it was used to manipulate certain people on the Hill. But that's just generating and reinforcing the fear that's already out there.
Calabria: I think that's absolutely the case, and if you've ... there was a piece a couple of years ago on the trust crisis where he tries to measure some of this trust impact, and I mean, I guess this is part of my inner Keynesian talking, I think confidence is important, and I think is certainly a contributor to macroeconomics stability and instability, but it cuts both ways. I mean, to me, you simply can't believe that the government can be a strong source of confidence without believing the government can be a strong source of undermining confidence, and I would say, what we got during the crisis was not a sense of strong hand at the wheel, there was a sense of panic.
Beckworth: This reminds me of a talk that Ben Bernanke gave soon after he became Fed chair in, I think, March 2006, where he's discussing the flattening of the yield curve, and in that talk he tries to explain away why the yield curve is flattening. So, for our listeners who don't know, whenever the treasury yield curve which shows the relationship between the maturity of a treasury security, and the interest rates on them, whenever that yield curve flattens, or another way of saying it, whenever short term rates start to go above long terms rates, usually it has led to a recession.
Beckworth: So, this was beginning to happen, and in 2006 it was evident, so Bernanke in a speech said, "Don't worry about it, it's different this time." In theory, you could argue it was due to a change in the term premium. The traditional story is if short term rates are going up, or if long term rates are going down it must mean that the market expects a recession in the future, because short term rates are going down. He argued that wasn't what was happening. What was happening was the term premium, and there were some things that had happened, some accounting law changes and stuff that had occurred, but in retrospect, it was the market was forward looking and concerned.
Calabria: I think the market was certainly forward looking, and you might remember earlier Greenspan talked about it as the bond market conundrum. I actually think going to the small contributing factors of that in the mortgage side, because you do remember when rates started going up in mid 2004, the long term rates in the mortgage market were quite sticky.
Beckworth: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Calabria: Interestingly during this period, and I don't think we fully recognized this until later that the channel of essentially global savings, and this is one of the things I think Bernanke gets partly right, the global savings glut, setting aside of course that global savings nets zero, but that money coming in from the rest of the world, much of it flowed through Fannie and Freddie, and they were buying long dated assets. So, this is not to disagree with the expectation part of the yield curve, but to also add in that, to me, I am a believer in that there are segmented markets along the yield curve, and that the greater demand for assets at that end of the yield curve in the terms of mortgage-backed securities flowing through Fannie and Freddie I think were one of the things that held down the long end of the curve.
Beckworth: I completely buy that, and that would be the term premium story-
Calabria: Exactly, agreed.
Beckworth: ... that this inversion wasn't entirely the result of-
Calabria: Expectations.
Beckworth: ... weakening of economic forecasts, but it was part of the story. But you can go look at ... people have studied, they do decompositions, what part expectation, what part term premium, and the largest part is expectations, although term premium was going down. However, I guess the point I'm bringing this up, even if Bernanke did believe that it was due to a weakening of expectations, even if he thought the bond market was saying look out ahead, he couldn't really say that. I mean, I guess, just as maybe as the opposite side of what he said to you guys, the world's falling apart, and maybe that was an extreme care, but what if Bernanke had believed that the yield curve would stay in recession, I mean, could somebody in his position acknowledge that?
Calabria: That's a really good question. So, I've actually had this conversation a number of times with friends of mine who worked at the board, and they were there for the meetings, and they often say to me that, yeah, there's more of a recognition of the uncertainty, and there is this concern of the Fed projecting confidence. And again, if you might remember McCain, remember in 2008, got all sorts of abuse in the presidential race saying that the fundamentals of the economy were fine, and of course what he was trying to do was talk ... to me, he was trying to do the public spirited thing of talk up the economy to try to avoid a recession, and I do think you're in this situation where, and again, it's a long term credibility issue, I don't think the Fed chair really ... there's a degree to which your limited in how honest you can be. I think that that's true, and I say that at somebody who's very frustrated with feeling like I don't often get as much honesty from the Fed as I'd like, but it's a gamble, and it is a risky thing.
Calabria: I think there was more, and again, we've seen this from some of the transcripts that have come out, so of course we didn't know these things at the time, so I think we know two things. On one hand, other than say, Susan B. and a few others, there really weren't all that much discussions at the board late into the game about an impending recession or problems in the housing market. So, some of the public statements of Bernanke, such as saying that he thought subprime would be contained, I think he thought that, and I think the evidence suggest that he thought that. There were other things that I think to your point about, I think there were concerns about a slowering economy that were going on internally that were not spoken, I do think there was this concern of if we voice that it might become self-fulfilling. So, it really is an expectations game, and that's certainly a very important part of it.
Beckworth: Right. So, we had on the show Roger Farmer, who talked about his approach to macro and we talked about this earlier, and how animal spirits can definitely play a part. He considers confidence a fundamental input to production, just as much as technology and capital and labor is. So, it's an interesting decision, and again, must have been an interesting time to be involved in the Senate Banking Committee during that period. Well, let's move on to an area where you're an expert, and spend a lot of time, and that's with Fannie and Freddie, and maybe if you give our listeners a quick history of it, what were the problems, and where do we stand now with Fannie and Freddie?
Fannie and Freddie: History and Current State
Calabria: Sure. Fannie Mae was created in the '30s to buy mortgages from, of course, commercial banks at that time to try to add liquidity to the market. It was initially created as a government agency, so basically what Ginnie Mae is now. It was later in the '60s in order to move it off budget privatized. Freddie was later created in 1970, and interestingly enough when Freddie was created it was created to be the Thrift, the savings and loan version of Fannie.
Calabria: So, it only bought from the Thrifts, and Fannie only bought from the commercial banks. Different, but fascinating I think, topic for another day is that Freddie was initially part of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, which was initially created to be kind of a Federal Reserve for Thrifts, because of course, then the Federal Reserve created Thrifts are not eligible, and largely with the advancements to the federal home loan bank, is it's kind of like a discounting business to the federal. That has all converged of course, Fannie and Freddie today will buy from Thrifts, insurance companies, commercial banks, and a whole list of potential originators. And of course, I emphasize, they buy loans, they don't originate them. So, you can't go to Fannie or Freddie and get a mortgage.
Calabria: They are currently, or rather have since been of September of 2008 what we call conservatorship, which is not quite a bankruptcy, but it's a bankruptcy light, there's no real organization, it's meant to be a holding tank. Part of what I worked on on the committee was creating the structure for that. I'll say, as aside, it didn't work out the way we had planned. For reference, the longest bank conservatorship was like 18 months, and we've been Fannie and Freddie conservatorship for about eight years, so much longer than was ever expected, or intended for that matter. So, we began the reform efforts in 2003, and this was really ... not because we didn't think there were problems at Freddie beforehand, but 2003 where we're in the recounting scandals at Freddie Mac began-
Beckworth: Oh, yes.
Calabria: ... and you started to have this momentum for reform, and an opportunity that wasn't there before. I mean, prior to that, I'll give him credit, then congressman Richard Baker of Louisiana was essentially the only voice in congress for we need to be concerned this is not going to end well, and of course there are a few others like Congressman Leach from Iowa who were concerned as well. And there were also consensus were saying that Fannie failed in ... 1981, and got essentially regulatory forbearance, they got a tax ... there were laws pass to basically give them some tax right back so to basically fill the whole, but they failed in 1981, so this isn't like the first time.
Calabria: It is partly that Fannie and Freddie grew out of the ashes of the S&L Crisis. So, before the S&L crisis there were activities were rounding errors, literally low single digit market share. S&L's failed, Fannie and Freddie largely gathered that business and became themselves essentially to very large S&L's. So, a number of problems faced them very, very little capital. So, for instance, one of their business lines was to guarantee mortgage-backed securities they sold. By statute their guaranteed business was leveraged 200 to one.
Beckworth: Wow.
Calabria: So, to me, if you want to think about, and I guess four gentlemen at Stern have a book called guaranteed to fail, which is a great read, but it really was the case, and that to me, one of the fundamental debates about the financial crisis are these issues of liquidity versus solvency, and so to me, they're certainly very interrelated, but at Fannie and Freddie I have no doubt in my mind the primary drivers were simply no capital even in good times. So, certainly, for a number of months Fannie and Freddie were insolvent solely because deferred tax losses were being counted as capital, so you had a lot of game planning accounting wise, certainly Peter Wallace and others have talked about their housing goals, I think that's a part of it.
Calabria: I don't put as much emphasis on that as Peter does, because again, I think just the massive amount of leveraged. Fannie and Freddie would've failed from losses under private loans, because they simply had no capital. You had this ambiguous what we call the implied guarantee. I'll say as an aside, I've always puzzled at that terms, it seems like a contradiction in terms in some sense. I should say, even today, there's no statutory guarantee of Fannie and Freddie debt. In fact, what we thought we were doing in the 2008 legislation was creating a framework where losses could be imposed on creditors, and that we were trying to end too big to fail for Fannie and Freddie.
Calabria: Clearly we did not, but part of the intention of the legislation was to be able to essentially turn debt holders into equity holders, and to recapitalize. We went through a lot of ... I mean, essentially what we did was marked up the Federal Deposit Insurance Act and said, "What do you do that would work in a bank situation? What do you do in a non-bank situation?" So, Fannie, we recognized that unlike most bank failures where the FDIC finds someone else to buy the bank, that was never going to work with Fannie and Freddie, we were never going to be able to find someone to buy Fannie Mae. I think that that's the case probably if Citibank were to fail today, the odds of finding someone to buy Citi are probably pretty low. So, you need to find essentially a bridge bank facility where the main operational things stay in place.
Calabria: This was actually one of the debates we had the time at the TARP too of why aren't we looking at potentially doing debt to equity swaps. One of the things that's talked about a lot today is the TLAC, the total loss-absorbent capital, which is supposed to be a fix to too big to fail. One of the things I point out in terms of my skepticism of that approach is at the time of the TARP, Citi had about 400 billion in long term debt. We could've fill the hole with Citi completely by turning debt holders into equity holders. Would that have caused problems? Might have, but I think it's a conversation we needed to had, it was a conversation we did had and made decisions on for Fannie and Freddie.
Calabria: So, certainly the implied guarantees I think caused a lot of distortions. Certainly Fannie and Freddie, because of that implied guarantee, they were the conduit toward which global saving flowed back into the U.S. market. I mean, essentially what they did was they sold debt to China, they got the money back from China, and they bought subprime mortgage-backed securities with it and held it on their balance sheet, and they arbitraged that difference, and they had no capital behind it. So, again, it was in recipe to end up poorly.
Beckworth: So, the implied guarantee is what made it attractive to foreigners overseas.
Calabria: Yeah. Absolutely. The Chinese central bank was not buying countrywide stock, they were buy treasuries and agencies.
Beckworth: So, tell me about this story then, there was a ... I believe it was on a Bloomberg story that I saw back then that the government of China made a phone call to our treasury secretary about the time of this crisis and said, "Hey, we bought this with the understanding this stuff was backed." Is that a true story?
Calabria: There is truth to that, and Paulson went to China near after, and I mean, I'll say, it's a legal issue. It's actually a violation of the law for Paulson to have said that. It's a violation of the Antideficiency Act, but of course, we don't hold public officials accountable in that way, even though it's going to incur penalties. So, there were promises made ... and this is actually pretty interesting, if you go back and look at the legislative record and the hearings we had ... and organized in, say, 2006 and 2007, the committee is debating this very point where we understand that China has a lot of holdings, and you will find statements of Shelby saying, "That's tough, China, you will take losses if this goes poorly.", that's the will of Congress. We can debate whether foreign creditors should be favored creditors. As you know in a bank, the depositors are first in line-
Beckworth: Right.
Calabria: ... and so we make choices over where people stand in line, and of course things like auto bailouts we sometimes unmake those choices. But so, Congress made a choice that foreign creditors, even official foreign creditors, would be treated as unsecured creditors, and treated just like everybody else. Of course, treasury decided that their policy preferences were a little different than that. So, there were foreign policy considerations that came into place. But it's absolutely the case. Another story that I haven't been able to verify, but I believe is true from the sources I've seen, is that at one point Russia apparently reached out to China and suggested that they both dump their agency securities at the same time-
Beckworth: Really?
Calabria: ... in an attempt to royal the U.S. housing market. Yeah, and China said no, but of course it's partly because of course if you were China and you held that much, your holdings are going to take a hit. So, what is the quip about I borrow $100 from you, but you hold me over a barrel, I borrow a million from you, you hold me over a barrel. We really in some sense had China over a barrel given the amount of-
Beckworth: Well, so Larry Summers, I think, called it the financial balance of terror.
Calabria: Yes. But I mean, this is a frustrating question to me in terms of just the balance of powers and economic policy in general in that ... So, congress very clearly made an affirmative decision that foreign official creditors would not be favored. Treasury decided they weren't going to respect that are very good reasons to not respect that, but the question is who's supposed to be the one to make that decision? One of the reasons I wrote the paper was to kind of flesh out some of these questions, not only in the relevancy of Fannie and Freddie, but to also ask because the Title II of Dodd-Frank resolution authority there is mirrored in some ways on what was done for Fannie and Freddie and didn't work.
Calabria: So, some of my skepticism about Title II's, well, we kind of tried this. To put it in perspective, Freddie is smaller than Citi, and a lot less complex. So, for instance, with Fannie and Freddie you don't need to worry about ring fencing assets in London or anything like that. You don't have to worry about ... we've all seen these organizational charts of Citi and other banks where there's all these hundreds of …
Beckworth: Right. That's interesting.
Calabria: ... and it's not that way with Fannie and Freddie. Very simple corporate forms, and so to me, and not even round-able debt, all of their debt is long term, most of their debt is over five ... about half it's five year duration. So, I go through this in the paper sort of like here are the common reasons we're told that we couldn't have done it this way, and we have to do it this way, and I walk through this and say, "Well, was this relevant in the Fannie and Freddie context, how would this matter in a, say, Citibank context?" So, this is some of my skepticism that we've ended too big to fail, because I don't think we've actually changed the dynamic in terms of the regulatory incentives.
Beckworth: Especially if we still haven't solved the Fannie and Freddie. I mean, they're still on a conservatorship, I mean, how many years later is this? Eight years later? Eight years later.
Calabria: Eight years later.
Beckworth: I guess I haven't been following, I thought by now they sorted this out. I remember them talk about breaking into smaller entities, maybe.
Calabria: There's been a lot of proposals, but very little done very little likely to be happening.
Beckworth: What do you see happening in, I guess, going forward for Fannie and Freddie?
Fannie and Freddie Going Forward
Calabria: Well, my quip sometimes, and I said it a number of years ago that I was fairly certain that this administration would hand them to the next administration and conservator ship, so my joke is that the next Clinton Administration may hand them to the next Bush Administration, which at some point maybe President Chelsea will deal with them, but there really is not a tremendous amount of urgency. Foreign policy makers deal with it, and there's also a tremendous amount of disagreement, I mean, so you still have a number of republicans who don't want to have the backstop, who don't want this sort of guarantee for the mortgage market.
Calabria: I'll say as an aside, very important caveat, the home ownership rate today is about where it was in 1960 before Freddie was created and when Fannie was in single digits, and largely an irrelevant player. So, the argument that you often hear that we would see reversals in home ownership just aren't borne out by the data. Interestingly enough one of the arguments given for Fannie and Freddie is that they would help close the gap between white and minority home ownership rates, but interestingly enough if you chart out the market share of Fannie and Freddie and you chart out the racial home ownership gap, the racial home ownership gap increases with the market share of Fannie and Freddie. In fact, the difference between black and white home ownership rate today is the largest it's been in 100 years. So, at some point ... you know the quip about you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet, well at some point you have to ask, "Where's the omelet?" And in terms of home ownership and housing policy we've broken a lot of eggs, and we still don't see an omelet yet.
Beckworth: And what's to show for it? Well, very sobering message on Fannie and Freddie. Well, let's move on to another area that you deal with in your job at Cato, and that's the Dodd-Frank Act, and this thing is a beast. I'm told there's very few people who've actually have read it from being to end. Do you know how many pages it is?
Understanding Dodd-Frank
Calabria: Don't know, it's 16 titles, and depending on the version you have it may be 800 or the committee print I have is about 800, but there are versions of it.
Beckworth: That's amazing. So, it's hard to imagine that any senator or congressperson's ever gone through it, but with that said, give us an overview what it was meant to do, and what we know about its success, or lack of success so far.
Calabria: Sure, and that's fair, and there were a number of objectives. So, Titles I and II were really the too big to fail titles, and Title I, of course, is what sets up the financial stability oversight council, where we identify institutions we think are systemically important, personally in my mind that's synonymous with too big to fail, and then we subject them to heightened prudential regulation. Of course, this allows that just to be expanded not simply to banks, but also to non banks. So, there's a couple of insurance companies, MetLife recently wanted to get out of this, but there are a couple of others like AIG, Prudential that are still in.
Calabria: Title II is the Orderly Resolution. So, essentially receivership for non-bank financials. So, those are the too big to fail components. There are other components, maybe the one most famous is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that's in Title X. You see titles dealing with derivatives. So, one of the things that doesn't get enough discussion is for the first time clearing houses could have access to the Federal Reserve discount window. And of course, we also expand federal deposit insurance permanently 250.
Calabria: So there's a number of expansions of the safety net, some explicit, some implicit within Dodd-Frank. There are some mergers of the agencies, so for instance the Office of Thrift Supervision was moved down to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, there are some changes to the Federal Reserve governance. So, there's a hodge podge of stuff, and there's things that people probably heard of like the conflict minerals components that have nothing to do with the crisis. In fact, it's fair to say that probably half of Dodd-Frank has nothing to do with the crisis, and then the other half's relevance is debatable by how effective it would be.
Beckworth: Yeah, so Larry Summers recently come out and said that the big banks are still leveraged as ever, they're still as risky as ever. So, on that account it doesn't seem to be to have done much, or am I mistaken?
Calabria: No, you're correct, there are two elements to Summers' argument, one of which I don't think he pushes as much as I have, which is a lot of the change in capital happened through the Basel Process, which ran parallel to Dodd-Frank. So, we would've seen changes to the capital regardless of whether Dodd-Frank were passed, and more importantly, a lot of the changes in capital that makes it ... on the surface it looks like banks hold a lot more capital, is simply because of the fact that they've shifted into more assets that have lower risk weights. So, if it's sovereign debt, where the risk weight is zero, and you shift a lot of assets into that, then you look like you've got a lot more capital, but you don't really. So, again, I've actually written about this that there's not a lot more capital in the system there was despite the fact of the claims to that.
Calabria: Summers has written an interesting point in that he looks partly like the franchise value. So, this is, I think, a really important case in that up until the savings and loan crisis, I would say, and I know you've had some great economic historians on the podcast in the past, and to me, one of the interesting facets of banking history in the U.S. is we basically created little monopolies off it, and because we created little monopolies with very high franchise value, you incentivize the institutions to be risk averse. Like I've given you a bank charter, in not going to let anybody in this little town you're in compete with you. You have something of value, you have a very strong incentive not to screw that up.
Calabria: So, what we've seen at least since the erosion of branch banking restrictions, which I think that competition's a great thing, but I think one of the things that we forgot that came out of that is it eroded the franchise value of banks going into the crisis, and what Summers has argued about is that part of what Dodd-Frank did was erode the franchise value of banks, changing the incentive of banks away from holding even more capital, because again, you've got these heavy costs, you're not making a lot of money on it, why would you put more money into it?
Calabria: I do worry that we're getting to a point ... I often describe banking in the U.S. as the state largely curates a kind of pseudo-monopoly, and the debates are really about who gets the division of monopoly rents, and partly some of those monopoly rents are redistributed to preferred constituency, but as importantly, we don't know the level of those monopoly rents ahead of time. So, how does the industry ever credibly say to the government, "There's not a lot more for you to extract."? Once you've extracted all of that you end up with really big problems, and I think fundamentally the problem facing our financial system today is we have a combination of very rigorous competition, which is a good thing generally, but however combined with very extensive guarantees. So, you don't get the normal control on risk taking you would get because of that moral hazard.
Calabria: So, it's one thing to have deposit insurance, and implied guarantees when you've got little monopolies, because the incentive to gamble's a lot less. I don't think we've ... I mean, I don't think we want to put the genie back in the bottle of the benefits of competition Ross Sovine and others have written tons of work on how much benefit we've gotten out of the increase in competition, the banking system, and I think that those benefits have been very real. So, to me, I think our approach going forward has to be a rollback of some of the safety net guarantees, because ultimately vigorous competition combined with extensive guarantees implies to me that those guarantees will someday be called upon.
Beckworth: Okay, so one of the proposals to change Dodd-Frank Act is the Financial Choice Act, and there's a number of things that it does here, I have a list of them, but what is your sense of the Financial Choice Act, and what direction does it push the banking sector towards?
Calabria: Well, I would certainly have written a different Act. I think it's a move in the right direction. The core of it is really to do this swap of more capital for less regulation, and you've got a lot of compliance costs that I don't think fundamentally make the system safer, and as Larry Summers has gotten to, they actually erode the franchise value of these institutions. So, there's really strong incentive to not hold any capital. So, how do you change this where you reduce the moral hazard in the system, and you try to better align those is by having more capital on hand.
Calabria: Again, I think this is the reason what we saw with Fannie and Freddie, but we also so this with Citi, and Bank of America, and others where during the crisis they were essentially for all intents and purposes insolvent. Again, you see so little capital, and it's also meant to try to bring more transparency to it. One of, I think, the real problems is, when the layperson picks up The Wall Street Journal and it says Bank X has 8% tier 1 risk weighted capital the layperson thinks that means 8% capital when the reality is it might be 2% or 3% actual capital, which again ... So, our banks are often leveraged 30 to one, and how do you rollback that leverage and try to readjust the incentive of management not to gamble?
Calabria: So, I do understand, and I think Congressman Hensarling did author a choice that gets this, which is if you don't combine some relief with increased capital you're essentially going to make it impossible for banks to function. So, and this is really along the lines of some of what Ahmadi and others have argued about, you could have much higher capital. I'm certainly of the belief that if we didn't have the guarantees we have in place today the market would force banks to hold more capital, because obviously debt holders would charge you higher. So, in some sense it's a Modigliani-Miller argument, but it really is an argument about let's put more capital in the system. Again, there are other things like see it be in changes of the consumer agency, which I think are very laudable, I think they're structure that's very problematic, but probably a conversation for another day.
Beckworth: Well, let me go back to that point you made, because the name implies choice, the financial Choice Act.
Calabria: Exactly.
Beckworth: So, we didn't hear an excerpt from an article that was on it, the Financial Choice Act would allow the countries largest banks to exempt themselves from capital liquidity requirements and other regulatory standards if they hold enough capital to maintain a leverage ration of 10%. So, it's a choice in the sense if you voluntarily opt in to holding more capital, you don't have to have all these regulatory burdens placed on you.
Calabria: Absolutely, and it's referred to as an off-ramp in the bill, and there's also some elements, I mean, many of the elements of the Consumer Financial Protection stuff that are changed are consistent with that choice of you get to choose the products you want rather than the products the government thinks you should be able to have. But a core component of the higher capital is the institutions being able to choose it themselves, I think ultimately that was likely done for political reasons, if it was me, I would say, "Let's get rid of the regulatory relief, and I'll make you hold higher capital." So, I do worry about ... it wouldn't be the way I would draft it, but I think it's a step in the right direction, and is probably the best you're going to get in this political environment.
Beckworth: I don't suspect it's going to be making any progress with the elections going on.
Calabria: Well, my understanding is Hensarling has some sense from leadership that they will give him floor time in December for it. Obviously, there's no time to pass in the Senate. Hensarling assuming the Republicans keep the House will have another two years as chair. So, there is a degree to which they're explicitly trying to lay groundwork for next year. To go back to my earlier comments about Fannie and Freddie, so we finally passed Fannie and Freddie forum in 2008, we started in 2003. So, it took us five years, three congresses. I guess, put it this way-
Beckworth: That's some dedication.
Calabria: ... it makes looking like resubmissions to internal look easy.
Beckworth: Oh, wow. Okay, they have a long horizon then.
Calabria: You have to, and sometimes these things do take a long time.
Beckworth: And that's why, I guess, having congressional staffers that stick around's important, even if someone looses a seat in Congress.
Beckworth: Well, let's go back to the Federal Reserve in the time we have left, and I want to turn to an article you've written that came out in the Cato Journal, and you have another article that's similar coming out in Journal of Macro at some point, but you draw upon behavioral economics, and look at cognitive biases, and how this can influence monetary policy making, and I really liked your presentation when I heard it at the conference, because you made this point ... in fact, the other two panelists, they were kind skeptical of monetary policy rules, even though this was a conference about monetary policy rules they went up there and said, "Eh, principals are important, but we don't want to be too, too rigid with the rules.", and you argued that because of all these biases we need rules. So, can you restate that argument, and tell us why it's important.
Behavioral Economics: Insights for Monetary Policy
Calabria: Sure, I thought in a way the other panelist made the argument that we don't know enough to have rules, and I tried to make the argument that we don't know enough not to have rules.
Beckworth: Yes, that's right.
Calabria: So, the way I think about it is, let's say we all start with some model of the economy, and you all start ... whether you're going to follow it or not, and the question is really if you think it's the right model, or you really want to be able to test the model, what are the likelihood that you'll deviate from your own model? Of course, we know that individuals are the ones making monetary policy, we know there's actually group decision making, so the potential for groupthink, and so I really wanted to think through, and a lot of this, I think, happens to any of us who are economists and we look at something in economic policy and say, "Well, seems to me the answer should be X, why aren't we doing that?" So, a lot of my work over my career has been to think about process, and to think about why we end up making decisions that don't seem optimal, both in government and private market to begin with.
Calabria: So, I really wanted to think through, what are some of the biases that we might see for Federal Reserve policy makers? I'll note, it's not original with me, I think I've probably written more extensive papers on it. Bob Shiller, for instance, wrote a fascinating op-ed 2008/2009, arguing that the Fed missed the crisis because of groupthink. Orphanides has written some things on why he thinks they've delayed liftoff in his opinion because of status quo bias. There've been a few other pieces here and there, I tried to pull a lot of this together, and really try to get us thinking systematically about if you wanted to essentially think of yourself as Ulysses, and you wanted to sail through and not get yourself in trouble you would bound yourself with rules, because you wouldn't want to get distracted by other things. That really is kind of the underlying question.
Calabria: In the forthcoming paper, built it little bit out of a mathematical model based on some of the work that Ron Heiner here at George Mason has done over the years in terms of the lower your capacity for making good decisions or the higher likelihood that you'll make mistakes, the more likely you should follow rules. So, one way to think about this in a very simple way is most of us stop at red lights when we drive. There's a lot of times, particularly in the middle of the night, when there's probably nobody else coming in the other direction, and you would argue it'd be more efficient for you to simply drive through. There may be instances where your wife is going into labor, or you've, I don't know, shot yourself in the foot or something, and you need to hurry to the hospital where you may actually break that rule. But by and large, stopping at the red light whether somebody else is there or not is a good rule, and generally efficient overall.
Calabria: The question really is, is your own cognitive ability a risk that you will break from that rule and get yourself into more trouble. Again, it's a recognition that the errors in decision making are on both sides. So, often the argument for discretion is it will stop you from making good choices, and I agree, discretion ... if we have rules, an all-knowing agent will do better under discretion, but the question is we don't have those kind of agents. So, some of the discussion in the paper is trying to look at, at least kind of the circumstantial, the record of conversations you see at the Fed, and putting it in the context of biases we think that might be out there.
Calabria: So, one of the ones I think is interesting for, say, the crisis, is that you think about yourself as a lender of last resort, and you have a couple of institutions that come up to you and say, "We're experiencing liquidity problems." Well, how do you know whether those institutions are representative or not? Is it simply the institutions that are in trouble who are poorly managed that tell you they're having liquidity problems, or are the liquidity problems they're talking about broadly representative of the entire system, and you need broader liquidity provision or not. That's a really hard question to know, but I think trying to frame it that way, and getting central bankers to think about, "How do I make sure the observations I see are far more representative?"
Calabria: So, in fact, I would say one of the arguments for having a regional system is the economy in Cleveland is not the same as the economy in D.C. or the economy in California, and being able to gather those different sources of information so that you reduce that representativeness bias, and get a little bit less groupthink, a little bit more observations that enter the picture. Of course, there's to me, really big in macroeconomics is availability bias, which is we tend to overestimate the probability of things that come quickly to mind. I would go as far to say probably the biggest availability bias in macroeconomics is the Great Depression.
Calabria: It's interesting, if you go back and look at the press and conversations around probably almost every recession we've had since the Great Depression, somebody invokes the Great Depression. Even in 1987 the stock market someone invoked the Great Depression in the press, so every time. It's hard for me to believe that there was a high probability of the Great Depression in happening any of those times. So, how do we kind of de-bias ourselves in that way so that we don't fall into this trap?
Calabria: Of course, it cuts the other way, too. Many of us will talk about the Great Inflation of the '70s, so this isn't simply the other guy's wrong. So, I do think that behavioral economics is still at an early point, I do worry that some of it comes across as just so stories, but there's some good working being done. So, for instance, there's work being done looking across corporate boards, because of course there's a lot of data there across corporate boards, and we can come up with proxies for groupthink such as cohesiveness of the group, and overlap of members. So, some of the empirical studies suggest that these are very real impacts. So, what I'm trying to do in this paper is really to try to set up a framework for thinking about decision making at the Fed, and potentials for cognitive biases, and potentials to offset those. Again, one of those that I suggest is having a sort of rule based policy so that we can try to figure out the impact of those biases, and reduce the temptation.
Calabria: I actually think, when you hear opposition, informed opposition to the Form Act, which we talked about earlier, which again, requires the Fed to put out a rule, but allows the Fed to deviate from the rule. Now, the bill is pretty clear that there's very little penalty to deviate. You got to come up and explain it, which at the end of the day is not all that much of an onus, or a burden. What I think the proponents of that are actually reading into this are very strong status quo bias. I think what they're saying implicitly is that to put this rule out there that the Fed can deviate from will be very difficult psychologically for the Fed, because there'll be a strong status quo bias to go by the rule, and that's the criticism, of course, to me, that's the benefit of it as well. We can have an argument about how much debate you want to be able to have and how much flexibility.
Calabria: I also think just even if you have a rule that we know is going to be imperfect, it allows market participants to make predictable decisions around those rules. So, again, a lot of what I've tried to do, which interestingly has been, I think, a consistent approach of mine over the years is just to ask, why are we making the decisions we're making, and given that we probably don't know what we think we need to know given the ignorance that is there, given the cognitive biases that are there ... I should lastly say, despite all of that, I do think there's a very useful role for rational expectation type models.
Calabria: I'm one of these people that are quite eclectic in terms of let's look at the methodology at hand and figure out what we can learn from this situation. So, I'm not as dismissive of ... we should certainly be ... our starting point should be not to assume a lot of biases unless we can't explain what we're seeing, but then to start looking at biases to start to think about why what we're seeing doesn't match what we would hope to see, or think we should see.
Beckworth: Well, I think it's very interesting<|fim_middle|> of capture from the financial services industry, one of my proposals has been that no more than two board members should be from a certain category. One of those categories would be academia, but another would be industry commerce, so that we really get people with different life experiences. So, I understand the calls for diversity from Senator Warren and others, and I don't think those are unimportant, because I think they're trying to get at what I'm trying to get at, which is that we have a different set of perspectives and experiences on the board. Some of those have to be geographic because we are not one economy, some of this have to be ... and I'm sure you run into this on a daily basis, and I often say that I learned more economics in the classes I taught than the classes I took.
Calabria: I learn as much economics trying to explain it somebody else, because it forces you to think about this, and why all this is important for the Fed board is that if you're an economist in the Fed, and you're trying to explain it to other board members who aren't economists, and you're trying to essentially get them to your point of view, you really have to sharpen it, you really have to get to the essence of it in a way that a lot of economics just start from a set of assumptions. So, I think having more of that dialogue, and I actually think it helps the Fed explain their decision making to the broader public. If you are the Fed chair, and you're used to spending your time talking to the board economists, talking to other economists, and going to economic meetings and talking to economists, you lose your ability somewhat to clearly talk to the public.
Beckworth: You're in a bubble.
Calabria: Yeah, and so this is ultimately a lot of my suggestions are how do we eliminate the groupthink that's there? How do we break the bubble open a little bit? I talk about some of the literature that's been done, and there really are this set of characteristics and conditions of groups that have historically been found to lead to groupthink in bad situations, and some of the paper's asking, do those situations and characteristics look applicable to the Fed, and of course my argument is yes for many of them. So, I think there are very legitimate reasons that if we think groupthink is real, we should think that the Fed is susceptible to it, and we should think hard about ways to try to offset that diversity and rules being two such ways.
Beckworth: Very interesting. We will have these papers put up on the page where the podcast is listed. Well, we are out of time. Our guest today has been Mark Calabria. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.
Calabria: Really been my pleasure.
David Beckworth
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Macro Musings [2]
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Fannie Mae [4]
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Behavioral Economics [6]
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Source URL: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/11212016/mark-calabria-housing-policy-and-behavioral-case-monetary-rules
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Calabria: Thank you.
Beckworth: ... and it's another way for me to make sense of the world as I see it-
Calabria: And that's the intention.
Beckworth: ... I mean, maybe it's a bias of my own, I'll invoke the biases to justify my bias. But two examples, there's been this fear since 2009, late 2000 ... when the Fed did QE the massive inflation.
Calabria: Oh, yeah.
Beckworth: I mean, massive, and that speaks to, to me, the availability bias, because-
Beckworth: ... a lot of these people are older, they're looking back to the 1970s, and that's the first thing comes to mind ... So, I think as a result, it's one of the key reasons that the Fed has undershot its inflation target. I think there's this political economy pressure to be careful, and I think it-
Calabria: It leads you almost to the interesting argument that you want to make sure you have a board that has people from different cohorts and generations, because I mean, we're all influenced by the time in which we went to grad school.
Beckworth: Absolutely.
Calabria: I'll go back and mention that ... So, about half of the time I was on banking committee the senior Democrat there was former Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. He was a lawyer, but he was also very at the beginning of his career a staff assistant to Walter Heller on the CEA, and you could tell it in conversations with him, and listening to him, he learned a lot of economics in about a two year window in the '60s, and that's all he ever learned, and it stuck with him. The fact is, some of it was right, some of it was wrong, and it's interesting. And I think if we could find a way to kind of have staggered cohorts of people on the federal-
Beckworth: Yeah.
Calabria: ... to bring those different things to bear.
Beckworth: Well, that's when I say we will do in our conversation due to time, and that is to a piece you've written called The Fed's Diversity Problems. Right there, their whole generational issue might be one manifestation of this problem, but you talk about this, and you talk about how there's a lack of diversity on the boards. Speak to some of these issues. I mean, let me start you off, some striking things in that paper of yous, one was geography, 80% of the Fed governors, come from the East Coast. That was very surprising me to me-
Calabria: Yeah, wow.
Beckworth: Yes, very, very surprising. Now, is that just chance, or maybe it's a revolving door issue, or ... I mean, later you point to there is a certain number of schools that produce them. So, what is your story for that?
Calabria: So, we'll come back to the schools in a bit, because I think that's more impactful for the economist. So, we should remember that up until the Kennedy Administration it was unusual to have PhDs actually on the board itself-
Beckworth: Oh, okay.
Calabria: ... and this is a modern phenomenon, so it wouldn't have been captures in that. So, of course, I'll also mention Section 10 of the Federal Reserve Act says you can't have any one governor from the same district, and of course there have been problems with that over the years, and I'm trying to remember, there was Nathan Sheets, I forget, the co-author had a fascinating paper several years ago where they found that even board governors their votes were influence by their macroeconomic conditions of the districts that they came from. So, this is not something about the presidents, but also the board members.
Calabria: So, you are getting this narrowing of where ... And again, this is partly representative bias, but it's also partly where your networks are, but I also think because it's gotten to be more political in terms of who we choose people from the board, it's highly unlikely that you're going to end up on the Federal Reserve board today if you haven't spent some time in Washington. You haven't been appointed to something, even if at least you would've traveled through CEA, Council of Executive Advisors, at some point. So, I do think we're limiting it to a narrower range of people within political networks which predominantly ends up being Washington, New York, Boston.
Calabria: I don't think it's been ... it's not some grand conspiracy, it's not how do we make sure that Wall Street takes over, it just happens to be that these are the circle of people you travel through, and the networks that they built, which I think is quite different than how it used to be at the Fed. So, that's a concern of mine, I do think it ends up reflecting the economic conditions more of the East Coast. The fact is, I mean, the only member of the board today that is from west of the Mississippi is Janet Yellen, and Berkeley probably has more in common with Boston and New York than it does with much of the rest of the country.
Beckworth: Well, I remember when Ben Bernanke was appointed it was claimed that he came from Georgia? Or South Carolina?
Calabria: So, he was appointed from the Richmond District and South Carolina is in the Richmond District. Over-
Beckworth: Because he grew up there.
Calabria: Yeah. So, and this is a good ... So, the only thing the Act says is you can't have two people from the same district, it doesn't actually define what any of that means. So, one of the proposals I've put out is let's put a 10 year, doesn't even need to be consecutive, you have to have lived in that district for some point. Even to Bernanke's credit, he did go back regularly to South Carolina, he talked to people there, he had relations there, so you knew that some of the conversations he would have in his life were reflective of that.
Calabria: To me, and again, I'm not trying to pick on anybody, to me, it finally reached the ultimate absurdity with Peter Diamond's nomination where the White House claimed that despite living his entire life in Greater Boston he was actually from Chicago, because he'd once given a lecture at North Western. It wasn't even ... Yeah-
Beckworth: Wow, I didn't realize that. That is absurd, yes.
Calabria: Yeah. So, at some point, they've just read that out of the Act, but I think that's an important part of the Act. There's another thing I'll mention, that's in the Federal Reserve Act, which is this might come as a shock to some of our listeners, there's no explicit mention of academia, whereas Section 10 of the Federal Reserve Act says the president must give due consideration to agriculture and commerce. So, the Federal Reserve is very explicitly set up not to be a board of academic economists, it was set up to be a board mostly of people in various lines of industry.
Calabria: So, while I am sympathetic to some of the concerns | 1,538 |
HIGH-SCHOOL
Bleise rebounds from disappointment, helps Brighton reach wrestling final
Bill Khan
KALAMAZOO — Nick Bleise couldn't afford to feel sorry for himself.
Yes, getting pinned in the state quarterfinals was difficult to take for someone who is one of the top<|fim_middle|> will face enormous odds in the championship match, having lost 65-0 to Catholic Central on Dec. 22.
Greathouse's message to his team?
"We're in the state finals," he said. "Enjoy it. Just go after it, fight hard and take it to them. Just don't leave anything to regret. See what happens." | wrestlers in Michigan.
But Brighton overcame what could have been a devastating result to edge Hartland by one point Friday and earn a berth in the Division 1 state semifinals against Macomb Dakota.
The Bulldogs would need Bleise to be in the right frame of mind less than 24 hours later.
Bleise came back with a strong effort, winning a 4-2 decision over Christian Karges at 152 pounds to clinch Brighton's second trip to the state finals in four years.
Brighton lost the final two matches, but Bleise's decision gave the Bulldogs an insurmountable lead in a 33-23 victory Saturday at Wings Event Center.
The Bulldogs (33-3) will face top-ranked Detroit Catholic Central (28-1) for the state title at 3:30 p.m. Saturday.
In the quarterfinals, Bleise was pinned by Hartland's Tanner Culver, a wrestler he beat by decision in the teams' regular-season dual meet. It was a major factor that made a matchup Brighton won by 20 points in the regular season much more competitive.
"You've got to have a short memory in tournaments like this or it's going to run you down thinking about it too much," Bleise said. "After that match, I just cooled down for a little bit. I thought I'd forget about it and move on to the next day, help the team out, be a good leader, keep the team positive."
Brighton coach Tony Greathouse praised Bleise's ability to bounce back from what was a low point personally.
MORE WRESTLING
► Brighton captain Eddie Homrock wins final match to beat Hartland, send team to state semis
► Adam Coon's goals: NCAA wrestling champ, Olympian, rocket scientist
► Good to great: Greyson Stevens' transformation makes Brighton serious threat in state finals
► Three days after scare, Hartland's Shettler wins wrestling regional title
"He handled it really well," Greathouse said. "It was obviously a tough thing for him. Once again, we talked about being selfless. Even though it didn't work out the way he wanted, we got the team win. You've got to forget about it, got to move on and get ready for the next day. He did a great job of that."
Brighton got out to a 7-0 lead on victories by Greyson Stevens at 189 and Luke Stanton at 215, then braced itself for the strength of the Cougars' lineup.
Dakota won the next four matches, with fifth-ranked Rahmi Khalil winning 12-1 over Colby Ford at 285, second-ranked Brock Prater winning 7-2 over Mason Shrader at 103, top-ranked Nick Alayan winning 4-0 over Ben Manly at 112 and second-ranked Justin Tiburcio winning 15-0 over Logan Kehres at 119.
Greathouse was pleased that the damage was minimized in those four weight classes.
"We said, 'We need you to just do what's best for the team, which is not give up bonus points, be smart, stay off your back, stay out of dangerous situations,'" Greathouse said. "All four of those guys — Colby, Mason, Ben, Logan Kehres — all did a phenomenal job. That really set the table for what came after."
What followed were six straight victories by the Bulldogs, the first two of which were pins by Eddie Homrock at 125 and Zach Johnson at 130.
From there, Aiden Brown (135) and Dane Donabedian (140) won by decisions, Victor Grabowski (145) won with an 18-3 technical fall and Bleise won at 152 to clinch the dual.
Dakota won the final two matches.
The Bulldogs are making their second trip to the state finals, the other coming in 2015 when they beat Hartland for the championship.
Brighton is doing it with a lineup consisting of two freshmen, seven sophomores, three juniors and two seniors.
The Bulldogs | 880 |
Savings in actual fact does less to wealth creation. It makes<|fim_middle|> difficult to save when disposable income doesn't even appear capable of matching monthly expenditures. The habit of saving was also one of the most difficult to learn; it was only until last year that I personally exceeded my savings targets for the first time. Everything I did in full doesn't include using an app, but I believe if I discovered this app earlier last year, I would have really achieved more with savings.
The Wallet … this app is not your ordinary expenses tracker, or budget app, or anything most of those other apps promise but don't deliver … this app is actually an ordinary app with "extraordinary" utilities. If you hate tracking expenses or if you feel that tracking expenses is boring and hard to keep up, this app makes it easier. This app will tell you where your money is coming from, how you're spending it, how fast you're spending it, where you spend the most, what you spend on the most etc. It has a "Debts" hub, where you keep track of all records of those you lend to and those you borrow from, fusing the figures effortlessly into your cash flow. What makes this app my favorite is how it reports to you. It doesn't have complex diagrams which only make sense to PhD Finance holders, it uses user chosen colors to tell you exactly what you need to know about your expenditures and earnings.
Widening your income streams or generating more is a sure way to making savings easier, but the way this our economy is currently setup, if that's proving to be so much of a challenge in the interim, knowing what you spend on and realising which expenses can be controlled is a good way to start. I have been in the position of not knowing what I used my money for: I'll feel I had so much yesterday and wouldn't know how I disbursed it. That has completely changed with this app. Inputting data immediately is the best as the app gets the opportunity to capture more data; where exactly you made the expenditure (has Google maps services imbedded) and the time of the expenditure. So the where becomes very useful … let's assume you check on reports at the end of the month and you realise that you spent more at Smoothy's, I believe such an information will become useful.
The only downside is that, users who have used the app on both Android and iOS claim that features on Android is far more advanced, intuitive and superior to that on iOS. I believe with time, the developers will push updates to rectify the difference. | life comfortable, but those with absurd wealth created something or inherited.
The concept of wealth creation through savings for the proletariat is something I tweeted against. Nevertheless savings, must be of immense importance to the proletariat, probably even more than those who earn above average. It's also very | 55 |
Dr. Graf is a veteran pain management doctor in Beverly Hills with over 20 years experience.
Dr. Graf offers comprehensive treatments for his patients, which include options for both medication management and interventional procedures. Dr. Graf has a considerable academic history, having been an Assistant Professor at both Yale and UCLA in the past. He has authored over a dozen book chapters and articles while producing a considerable amount of research articles as well.
Dr. Graf is committed to helping his patients live a pain-free life, without invasive surgeries.
Intelligent Pain Solutions treats all types of simple and complicated pain conditions. Relief is impressive for sciatica, back and neck pain.
Over 90% of patients at Intelligent Pain Solutions are able to avoid potentially risky surgery, achieve pain relief and become more functional.
Treatments at Intelligent Pain Solutions are<|fim_middle|> condition my son would be in. Treatment has been tough but always directed with Dr. Graf's knowledge with my son's welfare in mind. I would highly recommend anybody who needs pain management service to look into Dr. Graf. Both myself and my son recommend him and still use him as a primary physician."
"I have been having hip pain for 6 months since having it replaced almost 2 years ago. Dr. George Graf was recommended to me by my Primary Care Doc. The office was cheerful, friendly and very efficient. Before having my hip replaced, I had many injections by different doctors in Northern and Southern Cal. I have never had such a great experience and all of my pain is gone. Dr. Graf had a radiologist and assistant there so I could see what he was injecting on the screen. I HIGHLY recommend Intelligent Pain Solutions and Dr. George Graf!" | cutting edge and performed by a first-rate pain management doctors in Beverly Hills.
If you need a doctor for Pain Therapies including Stem Cell Therapy for the Spine and ALL joints!
Dr. George Graf cares deeply about each and every patient. He is very competent. I feel very confident my quality of life would be horrific. By pinpointing my pain, and treating my back, He has given me the ability to function more efficiently. He is amazing, unlike other back doctors whom just wants to treat the pain, he continuously tries to eliminate the cause of the pain, and correct it.
I had seen 2 other pain doctors in Beverly Hills for my disk bulges. None of them helped me: they just threw pills at me and wanted to do shots. Dr. George Graf doesn't mind spending the time. I was not sure at first, since he was so optimistic…but the results speak for themselves….he suggested a diagnostic block and then referred me for the correct surgery: I am 2 years out with no pain.
"I went to Dr. Graf in desperation when post-surgical pain kept increasing despite my surgeon assuring me that the operation had gone perfectly and there was no reason he could find for the pain I was experiencing. Dr. Graf identified the problem during my first visit, and over a two-month course of treatment gave me my life back. He was resourceful, flexible, and extremely personal. Both he, and his nurse Adela gave me their cell numbers for questions along the way. During the tougher patches, my wife, and even my son texted him and he always found the time to answer their questions as well. I'm just finishing my treatment now, and I've already passed Dr. G's name to two friends. I'll continue to do so forever!"
I have had chronic back pain, stemming from a slipped disc and spinal stenosis, for years. I have tried physical therapy, water therapy, acupuncture, spinal decompression, and numerous sessions with a personal trainer. I have also had 3 epidural spinal injections with another physician. The success of all interventions was negligible. I recently had a radio frequency procedure with Dr. Graf. Results of procedure were immediate. Not only has my pain decreased by about 80%, but I am also not as stiff. This intervention will not "fix" my spinal issues, but it has enabled me to delay surgery indefinitely. I no longer experience daily pain so severe that it would take my breath away. I am thrilled and wish that I would have gone to Dr. Graf years ago.
"Intelligent Pain and Regenerative Medicine Solutions providers are truly concerned about your pain and help you get relief. They take time to listen to you and are very amicable. The support staff is all also very nice, courteous and respectful."
"Dr. Graf has been a superior doctor for my son. My son developed "CRPS" chronic regional pain syndrome after injuring his left hand and without the treatment and guidance from Dr. Graf I don't know where or in what | 616 |
UMCOR - Hurricane Relief
Persons who would like to give toward Hurricane Relief may do so by indicating on their check/memo—UMCOR/Hurricane Relief. Grace Church will be sending this support<|fim_middle|>ology from the University of Indianapolis. He will attend the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis in the fall to focus on family therapy. Joe was a member of the youth ministry of Grace Church.
Gabrielle Ginder – Gabrielle Ginder received the Bob Coleman Scholarship at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio and has graduated with honors from UTS. She has recently been appointed to serve at Sonrise UMC in Fort Wayne.
Jenothy Rather – Jenothy has two more years to complete her Doctor of Ministry at Northern Theological Seminary in Chicago.
Grace United Methodist Church takes an active role in supporting and partnering with several missionaries and mission organizations around the world. Through Faith-Promise Missions Giving, Grace Church seeks to fulfill the Great Commission of making disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:16-20).
Please visit our Ministry Partners page for information of each missionary and organization and ways to give direct financial support. Mission trips and extended periods of stay and service are also possible with advanced planning. Please contact the Church Office at Grace Church to learn more at 317-736-7962.
Grace Has Left the Building T-Shirts
Grace T-Shirts are now on sale. If you would like to purchase one, please asked in the office. Cost is $10.
The need is great and there are children denied hot lunch due to lack of funds in their lunch account. For the cost of $2.60 a day or $12.00 a week an elementary student in Franklin receives a well-balanced nutritious hot lunch. If they do not have the money they receive a cold lunch consisting of a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, cold veggies (probably carrot & celery sticks), a fruit and milk. Would you consider contributing to the health and welfare of our Franklin youth by donating to a "school lunch" campaign? This will be an ongoing project through the school year. If any questions, please contact Jenny Beck (jennybeck@franklingrace.org) | to UMCOR to assist relief efforts in the Carolinas due to Hurricane Florence.
Faith Promise Distributions
The Missions Team of Grace Church wants to thank those who give to the Faith Promise Mission Efforts. Here is a breakdown of what the church supported in September.
$250 Emerging Mission Ministries
$135 Assist Fundraiser (Franklin)
$750 Leadership Johnson County
$250 Karl Hinkle Ministries
$250 Good Samaritan Ministry
$1000 McCurdy Ministries Campaign
$600 World Communion Sunday Offering
$1000 Otterbein/Franklin Benevolent Fund
Barnes United Methodist Church Inner City Ministry
Congregation that helps children and youth in and around Barnes UMC in Indy and supports its effort to curb urban violence.
Brightwood United Methodist Community Center
Community center that supports children in the community near and around Brightwood in urban Indy with educational and nutritional programs.
Fletcher Place Community Center
Community center that works with folks in urban Indianapolis with a wide-variety of social needs.
East 10th UMC Children & Youth Center
Ministry that helps children in neighborhoods around the East 10th UMC.
Viva Nueva UM Ministry
Ministry that reaches out to and works with Hispanic populations in Indianapolis.
Roberts Park UMC Soup Kitchen
Soup Kitchen Ministry to persons and families on the streets of downtown Indianapolis. Groups from Grace Church serve at this kitchen on a regular basis.
Indiana United Methodist Children's Home in Lebanon, IN
A home dedicated to helping children and youth through education and spiritual care in Indiana. Go to www.childrenshome.net.
United Methodist Campus Ministries
Ministries that work to reach and build up younger people on college campuses around the state. Go to www.inumc.org for more information.
Paster Jenothy Education Fund
Persons are invited to make one-time or ongoing gifts to Pastor Jenothy's Education Fund as she completes a Doctor of Ministry degree at Northern Seminary in Chicago. Jenothy will be sharing more about her experience in worship on May 12 and 13. Mark checks in Memo: Pastor Jenothy Education Fund.
Celebrating Ministry
Grace Church celebrates persons who are now moving into full-time and other forms of ministry. The following persons have been associated with ministry here at Grace:
Efrain Belmontes – He will be attending Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Chicago. He is also getting married in the summer. Efrain was a summer intern at Grace Church four years ago. He is a graduate of the Methodist Seminary in Mexico.
Chris Dourson – Grace Church wants to thank Chris and Chelsea Dourson for the ministry they have shared with the people of this congregation over the last three years. A graduate of Asbury Theological Seminary, and a ministry intern at Grace Church, Chris has been serving in different capacities, offering Bible studies, prayer, counseling, and visitation. He has also helped and preached at the Vespers Service at the Otterbein Franklin Senior Life Community. Chelsea has also been instrumental in building up the Vine service on Sunday mornings. Both Chris and Chelsea will be moving to Morristown, Indiana where Chris will serve as the pastor of the Morristown/Carrollton UMC Charge. Their new address is Morristown, UMC, 221 S Washington St, Morristown, IN 46161. Prayers to Chris and Chelsea!
Joe Gamboa – Joe has graduated with a BA in Pre-The | 743 |
Amazon Price: $54.99 (as of October 18, 2017 7:17 am - Details). Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on the<|fim_middle|> shine with A quality polishing cloth over and over again for their life time. Allowing your Chakra Collar to patina is another natural option that gives your collar that natural rustic and antiqued look. The Chakra Collar is designed off centered for an artistic and unusual appeal. The larger portion of the design is centered in the middle of the chest while the smaller side caresses your skin just below the collar bone. The Chakra Collar is easy to adjust with very small movements. To put it on, you simply pull open to the size of your neck, slip on from the back or side, push the two side designs together, allow them to spring back and separate, and simply center the larger side to the middle of your chest. Designed to look like fine silver, Nickel silver, also known as German Silver is an alloy blend that marries 65% copper, 17% nickel, and 18% zinc. German silver is designed to tarnish slower than silver and this semi-precious metal alloy is barely distinguishable from fine silver at its highest polish. | Amazon site at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.
Experience quality hand hammered craftsmanship fashioned in the ancient Egyptian tradition made right here in the USA. This hand hammered and hardened solid Nickel Silver alloy half collar is designed to gracefully lay around your neck flat on the skin or around clothing. Because we use bare wire to make our collars with no coating or plating, these handcrafted works of art can be polished to their original bright | 91 |
We had a chance to catch up with most of the authors of Early Literacy Skills Builder and hear their perspective on how special education and student expectations have changed over the last decade!
"In the last 10 years, educators have begun to expect that all students, including those with moderate and severe disabilities can benefit from literacy. Using literacy and other skills, students can access the full general curriculum in meaningful ways. The science of reading and assistive technology were breakthroughs in the early 21st century that paved the way for promoting literacy for all children. Building on these breakthroughs, the Early Literacy Skills Builder<|fim_middle|> not have been able to make that statement, some teachers may have even agreed with the "they cannot" sentiment. But today, in part due to quality instruction that promotes evidence-based practices, special educators have seen student successes and have embraced a "presumption of competence.""
"Since the ELSB was first released, I believe that teachers have higher expectations for their students in the area of literacy and academics in general. When teachers understand how to teach the content and can see student gains, everyone benefits!"
What interesting insight and observations! Have you noticed a shift in expectations for students over the years? Do you have a story to share? Feel free to comment below!
Also, enjoy 10% off the blended or print-only kit through 2018 with code ELSB10 at checkout. | provided teachers with a specific way to teach students with moderate and severe disabilities to find meaning in printed text. I celebrate that students with moderate and severe disabilities have shown us [that] they can learn much more than we ever dreamed possible once given the opportunity and support."
"I remember 10-12 years ago when we began talking about literacy and reading instruction for students with significant disabilities. There was a prevailing expectation that these students would not learn to read. We often responded to questions like "Are you talking about my students?" First, we had to convince the audience that reading was possible. Now instead of questions that ask whether reading is possible, the expectation is that... some of these students will learn to read and deserve the opportunity to do so. The questions now are about how to teach literacy and reading skills: We have moved from 'if' to 'how'."
"The changes to both special education instruction and student expectations are significant and numerous! There is a teacher quote that is included in a video for Attainment's Access Language Arts App that illustrates how far we have come, but also how far we still have to go. Here's the quote: "An outsider looking in might think 'they cannot', and now we can say 'yes they can,'…and we have the research to back it up." Ten years ago, teachers would | 271 |
Economists apply economic analysis to issues within a variety of fields, such as education, health, development, and the environment.<|fim_middle|> in math is essential. | They research and analyze data using a variety of software programs, including spreadsheets, statistical analysis, and database management programs. More than half of all economists work in federal, state, and local government. Federal government economists collect and analyze data about the U.S. economy. They also project spending needs and inform policy makers on the economic impact of laws and regulations. Many economists work for corporations and help them understand how the economy will affect their business. Specifically, economists may analyze issues such as consumer demand and sales to help a company maximize its profits. Students can pursue an advanced degree in economics with a bachelor's degree in a number of fields, but a strong background | 132 |
Mississippi State started its season with a 28-point win over Austin Peay at Humphrey Coliseum.
STARKVILLE – Mississippi State's 95-67 season-opening win over Austin Peay in Humphrey Coliseum on Friday night wasn't as much of a landslide as the final score indicates.
Not for much of the first half, anyway.
Leading by four and needing a spark late in the first half, junior point guard Lamar Peters crossed his defender and made a move for the basket. Then he dished to freshman Reggie Perry who easily jammed it.
After giving up two free throws on the other end, the pressure was still on MSU to get a bucket. Peters went down the floor and did it himself. He got by his man and made a layup plus a foul.
"He is really hard to stay in front of," Mississippi State coach Ben Howland praised Peters post-game with a smile.
Peters sunk the free throw to get the lead up to seven.
The Bulldogs got a stop defensively, then Peters went back to work. He drew the defenders to the left side of the court and found a wide-open Robert Woodard in the right corner. Woodard drained the 3-pointer, and the lead was suddenly up to 10.
Peters didn't<|fim_middle|> with a 7-0 run of his own following the outburst from Peters. State had a 50-34 lead at halftime led by Weatherspoon's 13 points.
He finished the game with 21, barely outdoing his younger brother Nick. The sophomore had 19 and paced Mississippi State's 3-point attack with a trio of treys. He was only a 29.2 percent 3-point shooter as a freshman but hopes he can be more reliable in Year 2.
His older brother appears to be Mr. Reliable himself in many areas of the game. Playing at 90 percent after suffering an MCL injury a week and a half ago, Weatherspoon made 10-of-15 shot attempts and pulled down five rebounds.
"I was just trying to do whatever to help my team get going and get a lead," Weatherspoon said.
Howland harped on Mississippi State's perimeter shooting heading into the season, saying it would be much improved from last year. Other than Weatherspoon, though, the Bulldogs shot it pretty poorly from distance.
Weatherspoon said scoring 95 points while only making 28 percent of their threes shows that the Bulldogs can "score in more than one way." His head coach agreed. | need to pass on the next possession.
He drilled a three of his own to give Mississippi State a double-digit lead again at 40-29 with 3:26 left in the first half. Mississippi State never let the game get within single digits from that point forward.
Peters finished the game with only six points, but he had seven assists to just one turnover. Howland said he also created some turnovers that don't show up next to his name in the box score as steals by staying in Austin Peay's passing lanes.
"I was really happy with how hard he played," Howland said.
After Peters got the Bulldogs rolling, the Weatherspoon brothers took it from there. Senior guard Quinndary Weatherspoon led the way | 154 |
SEC's Greg Sankey bans Lane Kiffin from 'Dan Patrick Show' to talk Nick Saban/Jimbo Fisher
Erik Hall
Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin was scheduled to appear on "The Dan Patrick Show" on Friday.
But Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey derailed that appearance, according to Dan Patrick.
"Lane Kiffin was going to come on, but the commissioner of the SEC asked him not to comment on the Nick Saban, Jimbo Fisher situation," Patrick said.
Patrick then started discussing and mocking that Sankey had publicly reprimanded Alabama football coach Nick Saban and Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher on Thursday. Saban and Fisher had a public back-and-forth over the course<|fim_middle|>HallErik. | of Wednesday and Thursday.
"I like how the SEC, the commissioner Greg Sankey reprimanded Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher," Patrick said. "Do you think out of all of this — and then Nick Saban goes, 'Yeah, I got reprimanded, too.' ... I don't know what that means that you got reprimanded. Lane Kiffin was going to join us, but the commissioner said he's not allowed to."
Patrick "Seton" O'Connor, the director of operations for "The Dan Patrick Show," chimed in several times while Patrick talked about Kiffin and Sankey.
"Might have really crossed the line now," O'Connor said of the public reprimands from Sankey.
Kiffin is a frequent guest on "The Dan Patrick Show."
A comment by "The Dan Patrick Show" executive producer Paul Pabst later in the show indicated the directive from Sankey was not just aimed at Kiffin.
"Supposedly he's not letting the coaches talk to the media today," Pabst said.
Sankey's statement on the public reprimand of Saban and Fisher on Thursday stated, "The membership of the Southeastern Conference has established expectations for conduct and sportsmanship that were not met last night nor today. A hallmark of the SEC is intense competition within an environment of collaboration. Public criticism of any kind does not resolve issues and creates a distraction from seeking solutions for the issues facing college athletics today.
"There is tremendous frustration concerning the absence of consistent rules from state to state related to name, image and likeness. We need to work together to find solutions and that will be our focus at the upcoming SEC Spring Meetings."
Here's more Nick Saban, Jimbo Fisher news:
Lane Kiffin, Nick Saban, Jimbo Fisher:Lane Kiffin won't stop tweeting about Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher NIL war of words
Jimbo Fisher, Nick Saban:Everything Jimbo Fisher said about 'narcissist' Nick Saban's Texas A&M NIL comments: 'Go dig into wherever he's been'
Nick Saban, Texas A&M football:Alabama football coach Nick Saban says Texas A&M 'paid all of their players' for 2022 class
Patrick is a former ESPN broadcaster and former host of NBC's "Football Night in America."
Erik Hall is the lead digital producer for sports with the USA Today Network. You can find him on Twitter @ | 498 |
We hope you come join in!
I have a card to share with you using an adorable cut file from Pretty Paper Pretty Ribbons along with pairing it up with stamps and metal dies from My Craft Spot.
The file is called "Safari Love".
I started with a Spellbinders Grand Large Labels metal die for the base<|fim_middle|>ebra and oh the papers! FAB job as always! I so hope the weather is starting to get nice your way.. we have rain but I will take that instead of snow or anything else!
What a super cute card!!! Love the adorable zebra!!
Thanks for join us at Docerla Creations!
Your zebra is so, so cute, Sherrie!! The doodling looks fantastic! So fun to combine polkadots and stripes too! | and the base layers. I went through my scrap pile, keeping in mind the challenge for this week and pulled out some pattern papers I thought would work well together.
I adhered the layers in place and then wrapped snow white crinkle ribbon and tied a double bow. I added a twine bow using black bakers twine and a fun polka dot button to the center. The adorable zebra is from the Safari Love cutting file from Pretty Paper Pretty Ribbons that I cut using my cameo. I cut out the pieces and popped this cutie on the card with foam tape.
In the upper right corner I used My Craft Spot's Tiny Doilies 2 along with the Tiny Doilies metal die. I stamped the sentiment with the Stamping All Around Spring stamp set.
Soooooo adorable! LOVING the colors and the zebra!!!!
How super ADORABLE is this Sherrie! LOVE the color combo, that zebra is just as cute as can be and all your added touches are perfect!!!
Okay, this seriously could not be cuter!! I have the biggest smile on my face!! What an adorable zebra!! He just pops against the red background!! As always, your details are perfect!! Love, love this, Sherrie!! It's a happy card!!
Such a fun challenge!!! Adorable critter!!! Love the sweet sentiment!!
and Gorgeous ribbon!! Awesome job!
Your zebra is soooo cute, Sherrie! I love the papers you chose and the flower in his mouth is a great touch! What a fun, happy card!
How fun , and super cute !!!! Perfect patterns , design ,and that adorable zebra , all come together so perfectly !!! Hope you have a wonderful day !!
Awww this is just adorable! I love the zebra and the color combination you used!
ahhhh he is so stinkin adorable!!!
This is fabulous Sherrie! I love the little zebra, and the pop of red yuo chose to add--red, black and white has always been one of my favorite color combos!!
What a sweet and uplifting card! Love the Zebra!
Cute, cute, cute. I love the zebra. The contrast in colors and patterns PERFECT! Love it.
Sherrie ~ you did an AMAZING job on finding scraps and patterned paper that work well together ! LOVE this card! LOVE the color combination, the CUTE z | 490 |
Engine Shed
The former 'The Jam' man will be performer in Lincoln soon
Paul Weller will be in Lincoln later this year (Image: Sliding Doors Publicity)
Paul Weller has announced the new date for his Engine Shed gig after having to cancel his original performance last month.
The Former frontman of hit<|fim_middle|> Shed due to a positive COVID case. (Image: Surrey Advertiser - Grahame Larter)
"This is obviously incredibly disappointing news for not just the fans but Paul and the whole team involved, but we need to follow guidelines to keep everyone as safe as possible."
Later this year, Paul Weller will be returning to the county once again for a massive gig at Lincolnshire Showground.
The gig will be on Saturday, July 2.
The Crown season 5: Cast, release date and Lincolnshire filming locations
Lincoln band The Rills named among 'top emerging artists' for 2022
Lincoln City Centre | 70s and 80s band 'The Jam' was originally due to play the venue at Lincoln University on Saturday, December 4, but had to cancel due to a positive Covid-19 test from a member of his band.
Now, he has announced that he will finally perform the Lincoln gig on March 28.
On its social media pages, The Engine Shed said that all tickets for the original gig remain valid for this new date.
After the original gig was cancelled, Mr Weller released a statement saying: "We are very sorry to announce that due to a band member testing positive for Covid-19, the remaining tour dates (Norwich 3rd Dec / Lincoln 4th Dec / Cambridge 5th Dec) will not be able to take place on their scheduled dates.
"We are working hard to see if we can reschedule the shows and will share more information on that as soon as we possibly can.
Paul Weller had to cancel his original gig at Lincoln Engine | 205 |
Women make up approximately 25 percent of<|fim_middle|> to right: Leslie Young, Yanping Guo, Cathy Olkin, Jeanette Thorn, Debi Rose, Ann Harch, Heather Elliott, Fran Bagenal. | the New Horizons flyby team. The female team members were photographed at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on July 11, 2015, just three days before the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto. Kneeling from left to right: Amy Shira Teitel, Cindy Conrad, Sarah Hamilton, Allisa Earle, Leslie Young, Melissa Jones, Katie Bechtold, Becca Sepan, Kelsi Singer, Amanda Zangari, Coralie Jackman, Helen Hart. Standing, from left to right: Fran Bagenal, Ann Harch, Jillian Redfern, Tiffany Finley, Heather Elliot, Nicole Martin, Yanping Guo, Cathy Olkin, Valerie Mallder, Rayna Tedford, Silvia Protopapa, Martha Kusterer, Kim Ennico, Ann Verbiscer, Bonnie Buratti, Sarah Bucior, Veronica Bray, Emma Birath, Carly Howett, Alice Bowman. Not pictured: Priya Dharmavaram, Sarah Flanigan, Debi Rose, Sheila Zurvalec, Adriana Ocampo, Jo-Anne Kierzkowski.
Alice Bowman, the Mission Operations Manager, at work in the Mission Operations Center. On the job, Bowman is the ?MOM? of the MOC.
Members of the New Horizons team are shown at the launch of the spacecraft, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida on January 19, 2006. From left | 306 |
<|fim_middle|>lon Ferguson, to short-circuit drives and bring down the quarterback quickly. Tech also brings along their massive tackle O'Shea Dugas, who was recently named to the All-Conference USA team.
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ills (0-2) are to pull off the HUGE upset Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings (1-0-1) in Minneapolis Womens Customized Buffalo Bills Jerseys , the offense is going to have to find a way to score points against a talented Vikings' defense. When prized rookie quarterback Josh Allen directs the Bills offense onto the field, he should have the full services of Kelvin Benjamin, the team's number one wide receiver. Benjamin, who was limited in practice Wednesday with a hip injury, returned to the practice field Thursday as a full participant. In speaking with reporters after practice, Benjamin, who has three catches for 29 yards and one touchdown in Buffalo's first two games, said the hip ailment shouldn't cause him any problems Sunday. "Not at all. I'm all go www.billscheapshop.com , man," Benjamin said. That's good news for Allen and a Bills offense that is averaging only 11.5 points per game through a winless start to the season. Slow starts have doomed the team in 2018, with the Bills being shutout in the first half of a season-opening loss to the Baltimore Ravens before being held to a pair of first-half Stephen Hauschka field goals last week vs. the Los Angeles Chargers. This week, Benjamin has the enviable task of lining up against Xavier Rhodes, Minnesota's talented All-Pro cornerback. "Yeah, Xavier Rhodes will probably be matched up on me, so he will probably follow me around the whole game other than when I'm in the slot or inside," Benjamin said. "We just got to come off the ball and play physical Buffalo Bills T-Shirt , block on the outside for the runs, and we have to establish the run early. Just go out and play physical. (Play) pitch and catch and get some points on the board." College football's bowl season continues with a steady rise in the quality of the match-ups. If last week's action seemed a little sparse, this Saturday's slate of games features a much more impressive batch of future NFLers to watch. Below you'll find information about each of the bowl games slated for today as well as the main NFL prospects to keep an eye on.As always, let's talk about the games, leave questions on prospects and enjoy the weekend.Memphis vs. Wake ForestBirmingham Bowl12:00 PM Eastern, ESPNThe Tigers will look to pound the rock all afternoon, despite not having the nation's second-leading rusher Darrell Henderson. Henderson has a chance to be the first running back taken in the draft. Center Drew Kyser will have to carry much of the load instead. The Demon Deacons have a much more underrated pairing, with tailback Matt Colburn II and guard Phil Haynes Buffalo Bills Hats , but are nonetheless intriguing. Haynes has the necessary size teams want in an NFL starting guard.Houston vs. ArmyArmed Forces Bowl3:30 PM Eastern, ESPNEd Oliver will be skipping his bowl game in order to prepare for the 2019 Draft, but the Cougars still have cornerback Isaiah Johnson on defense. A senior bowl invitee, Johnson has the size and speed necessary to play outside press-man coverage and could be a late riser. Unfortunately, he won't have much chance to shine against the Black Knights' triple-option attack.Buffalo vs. TroyDollar General Bowl7:00 PM Eastern, ESPNThe Bulls are traveling all the way down to Mobile, AL thanks to three players. Receiver Anthony Johnson has dealt with injuries and wasn't quite the dominant force that he was in 2017. Linebacker Khalil Hodge has been the model of consistency, racking up at least 120 tackles every season he's played. Quarterback Tyree Jackson has not declared yet Buffalo Bills Hoodie , but at 6'7" and 245 pounds he has the ability to run and pass all over the Trojans. Jackson better at least try to avoid Troy cornerback Blace Brown, a converted wide receiver.Hawaii vs. Louisiana TechHawaii Bowl10:30 PM Eastern, ESPNHe has yet to declare his intentions, but John Ursua has been one of the most productive wide receivers in the country. The Warriors like to line up the 5'10" receiver all over the formation and take advantage of the resulting match-ups. It's up to the nation's sack leader,Bulldogs defensive end Jay | 1,039 |
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Oceania Football Confederation > News > 2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup > Bazeley names strong NZ U-20 squad
Bazeley names strong NZ U-20 squad
ofcmedia2
in2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup
The New Zealand U-20 national team. Image: Phototek
New Zealand U-20 coach Darren Bazeley has named an experienced squad to contest the in FIFA U-20 World Cup Korea Republic 2017 this month.
Bazeley has named a 21-strong squad which includes five senior All Whites – Clayton Lewis, Moses Dyer, Henry Cameron, Logan Rogerson and Dane Ingham – as they look to surpass the achievement of the 2015 squad who progressed to the Round of 16 in the tournament staged in New Zealand.
Bazeley and his support staff staged a final training camp in Auckland last week with a greater squad of 30 to complete their preparation for the tournament which will be staged from 20 May to 11 June.
The head coach, who led the New Zealand U-20s to a comprehensive victory of the OFC U-20 Championship in Vanuatu last September, said the depth of quality, and the various locations around the world of the eligible players in the group, made it a difficult squad to select.
"We are really happy with the squad we have named," he said.
"It is an experienced and exciting squad, we have some good players and we are ready to go and take on this big challenge."
Bazeley said the training camp last week was about getting the potential identified players all together,<|fim_middle|> been selected, Dane Ingham just came into the squad and Henry Cameron and Logan Rogerson have previously been part of the senior team."
Bazeley said this squad also has a number of good players from around the world who are aspiring to get to that level. Noah Billingsley, who performed so well at the FIFA U-20 World Cup in New Zealand and scored in the historic 5-1 win against Myanmar, is a good example.
There are also 11 players in the squad who represented New Zealand at the FIFA U-17 World Cup in 2015 including Sunderland FC Premier League Goalkeeper Michael Woud. Add to that Nike Academy graduate Myer Bevan who was Player of the Tournament and top scorer in the OFC U-20 Championship last year and it is clear that it is an exciting squad.
Bazeley said it has been a long process getting to this point. They have been on this task of selecting this squad for almost two years. They held two camps in July and January, monitored the players' performances and scouted around the world to get the balance of their squad right.
They are expecting a tough challenge when they face Vietnam, Honduras and powerhouse France in Group E.
"Once you get to the World Cup you know that every team you come up against is going to be strong. They have all qualified through their own Federation to get there. They are all going to be tough and a good challenge, but I believe it is a reasonably good draw for us," Bazeley said.
"With Vietnam you have a team that is going to their first World Cup and we have them first so that is a game that we have to look to win, but we know that they qualified through a tough Asia qualifying tournament.
"Honduras are not necessarily one of the big hitters in world football but they only lost in the final of the CONCACAF Championship on penalties to the USA and we know the quality of the USA from last time. Honduras are going to be a good team."
"In our last game we meet France who are probably the favourite to win the World Cup. That is going to be a great experience and opportunity for our players to match up and compete with some very, very good players."
Bazeley said the excellent performance of the NZ U-20s at the last FIFA World Cup adds some pressure and expectation, but that is an exciting challenge for this group to overcome.
"We want to be better than the last group, we have to continue to improve and move forward in the right direction, that's the challenge for this group," he said.
"The last time the World Cup was staged here in New Zealand and we got out of our group. We gave Portugal a good game in the round of 16 and the goal for this group is to surpass that. To get out of our group, to get to the round of 16 game and to win that game. It will be a big challenge but we will be ready for that."
The New Zealand U-20s are currently in China tomorrow in an eight day training camp. They play games against the Mexico U-20s on 13 May and a local Chinese club side on 16 May before heading to Korea on 18 May.
New Zealand U-20 squad to contest the FIFA U-20 World Cup (Club, NZ unless noted)
Michael Woud, Sunderland FC (ENG)
Cameron Brown, Waitemata
Conor Tracey, Three Kings United
Dane Ingham, Brisbane Roar (AUS)
Sean Liddicoat, Coastal Spirit
Luke Johnson, Wellington United
Hunter Ashworth, University of San Francisco (USA)
Reese Cox, East Coast Bays
Jack-Henry Sinclair, Wellington United
James McGarry, Wellington Phoenix
Connor Probert, University of Kentucky (USA)
Moses Dyer, Northcote City (AUS)
Joe Bell, University of Virginia (USA)
Clayton Lewis, Auckland City FC
Callum McCowatt, Western Suburbs
Sarpreet Singh, Wellington United
Henry Cameron, Blackpool FC (ENG)
Noah Billingsley, University of Santa Barbara (USA)
Myer Bevan, Nike Academy (ENG)
Logan Rogerson, Wellington Phoenix
Lucas Imrie, Loyola University Chicago (USA)
Story courtesy of New Zealand Football
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New faces eager to make an impact
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OFC Shop | checking their fitness levels and working on the style of play the team is looking to play at the upcoming FIFA U-20 World Cup.
"The week really did help with making our final choices. There were some really tough decisions. We have a strong squad who all performed well and worked hard throughout the week. It is always hard when players are so close to making the final World Cup squad and to then have those last tough conversations."
Bazeley expected the All Whites, three of whom who were part of the All Whites squad who managed two wins over Fiji in the FIFA World Cup qualifying in March, would help lead his team on the world stage.
"They bring experience and they are all very good players," he said.
"Hopefully what they bring to the squad will rub off on the other players. Clayton Lewis is now an established All White, Moses Dyer has consistently | 175 |
Two<|fim_middle|> ham and hollandaise sauce.
Toasted muffin, two poached eggs, Scottish smoked salmon and hollandaise sauce.
Your choice of two eggs either fried, scrambled or poached on granary or white toast.
With butter and raspberry jam.
Slow cooked tender beef brisket, Yorkshire white teacake, caramelised onions, rich beef gravy, hand-cut chips.
Roast pork, sausage meat stuffing, crackling, Yorkshire white teacake, pot of apple sauce, pork gravy, hand-cut chips.
Grilled chicken breast, crisp bacon, tomato, lettuce, egg mayo.
With roasted peppers, garlic mayonnaise and pesto.
All the above served with house coleslaw, a small salad and on granary or white bread.
With lemon & dill mayonnaise. | pork sausages, two rashers of bacon, two fried eggs, one hash brown, one slice of black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes and mushrooms. Served with granary or white toast.
Pork sausage, bacon, fried egg, hash brown, black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes and mushrooms. Served with granary or white toast.
Served on a white Yorkshire teacake.
Toasted muffin, two poached eggs, home roast | 94 |
Planning Commission votes 8-1 to recommend County Commission amend Siesta zoning regulations to allow flexibility with commercial structures' street setbacks
December 14, 2017 by Rachel Brown Hackney, Editor & Publisher
Majority of public speakers oppose the initiative, saying a Siesta chiropractor has pursued it so he can build a new hotel
The site of the former Fandango Cafe on Old Stickney Point Road (outlined in red) is zoned Commercial General. Image from the Sarasota County Property Appraiser's Office
Eight of nine Sarasota County Planning Commission members have agreed that developers should have the flexibility to construct buildings taller than 35 feet as close as 2 feet to the sidewalk in three commercial zoning districts on Siesta Key.
The lone "No" vote at the conclusion of a Dec. 7 public hearing was cast by Commissioner Laura Benson. It is her belief, Benson said, that the intent of the Siesta Key Overlay District (SKOD) zoning regulations is for commercial buildings on the island "to remain on a lower scale," to keep that "beach-y feel."
The other eight Planning Commission members sided with Sarasota attorney Charles D. Bailey III of the Williams Parker firm and Robert "Bo" Medred of Genesis Planning & Development in Bradenton, who submitted a privately initiated zoning text amendment on behalf of Clayton A. Thompson and Diane Heiden Thompson, owners of Clayton's Siesta Grille on Old Stickney Point Road.
In the spring, Bailey sought a letter of determination from county Zoning Administrator Donna Thompson about the SKOD street setback requirements. She provided a document detailing her assertion that any structure taller than 35 feet built in a Commercial General (CG), Commercial Intensive (CI) or Office, Professional and Institutional (OPI) district under the SKOD zoning regulations would have to be at least 25 feet from the street, up to a distance half the height of the structure — whichever was greater. The maximum height allowed on the barrier islands is 85 feet, Thompson pointed out, so that meant an 85-foot-tall structure would need to be 42.5 feet from the street.
On Jan. 30, the County Commission tentatively is set to hold its hearing on the proposed change in the SKOD regulations. If approved, the amendment would enable the County Commission to grant a special exception to a developer, stipulating how much street setback would be required for a new building exceeding 35 feet in the three Siesta commercial zoning districts.
Planning Commissioner Jack Bispham. File photo
"This is not increasing Siesta Key residents by two-fold," Commissioner Jack Bispham pointed out on Dec. 7, referring to the proposed SKOD change.
Bailey reiterated several times that no new structure has been proposed in conjunction<|fim_middle|> for walkability and for pedestrian-friendly use," Commissioner Ron Cutsinger said of the intent of the SKOD regulations, as noted in the ordinance.
"Correct, but the standard is for buildings up to 35 feet," Thompson told him. "The issue comes when you go over 35 feet."
During her public comments to the board, Lourdes Ramirez, president of Siesta Key Community, pointed out that she was involved in the development of the SKOD regulations. The intent, she explained, was to make the smaller-scale buildings in Siesta Village more easily visible, since parking is allowed in front of them. "But we never wanted a tall building," Ramirez stressed. Since the first zoning regulations were implemented for the Key in 1953, she said, residents have fought increased density. "We want more open space."
The building that housed Fandango Cafe (left) stands next to a self-storage business on Old Stickney Point Road. Both parcels are zoned Commercial General. File photo
Bob Waechter, who said he has lived on Siesta for 40 years, countered Ramirez's comments, telling the board, "I believe I'm the only person in the room tonight who actually sat through the whole process." Ramirez joined the discussions in the final months, he added.
(Thompson told the board that the SKOD was adopted on Aug. 3, 2001.)
Waechter emphasized that the intent of the SKOD was to have commercial buildings only 2 feet from the street.
Moreover, Waechter said, "It's interesting to hear a line of folks who live in 70-foot-tall buildings come up and plead for you to keep Siesta Key small." He was referring to most of the other speakers, who identified themselves as residents of condominium complexes on the island.
Among the opponents was Frank Jurenka, president of the Siesta Key Condominium Council. He pointed out that the nonprofit organization represents about 90 of the 97 condominium complexes on Siesta Key, which have about 7,100 doors, as he put it. The council's members represent about 6,800 of those doors, he said.
All of the 48 respondents to a survey the nonprofit sent to its members regarding a potential hotel on the island opposed the possibility of increased density and intensity, Jurenka added.
Altogether, 15 people addressed the board, with only Dave Stewart, owner of Captain Curt's Crab & Oyster Bar on Old Stickney Point Road, joining Waechter and Piccolo in endorsing the amendment.
Bo Medred. News Leader photo
Medred of Genesis Planning & Development pointed out to the Planning Commission that Siesta Key comprises only about 2,200 acres, and only 29 of those acres are zoned for commercial development, or just slightly more than 1% of the total. Siesta Village has about 16 of those acres, Medred said, while another 11 acres is available south of the Stickney Point Road bridge. The remainder is the site of a Wells Fargo bank near the intersection of Beach Road and Midnight Pass Road, he noted.
"There are very little, teeny tiny pockets of [Commercial General zoning districts] … and even teenier tiny commercial properties [on Siesta Key]," Bailey told the board. "You don't see any one big honking piece of property on which you can do redevelopment."
Medred said that most of the new development has been in the form of bars. "You're seeing a proliferation of them."
When Commissioner Benson asked Bailey and Medred what they view as the barriers to economic viability of new development on the island, Bailey said he believes bars and restaurants are "more profitable"; property owners have no desire to demolish and rebuild structures because of the necessity of having to comply with state and local building codes as well as Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) coastal flood zone guidelines. "Ain't nothing more expensive per square foot" than new construction on a barrier island, Bailey added.
However, Ramirez pointed to the redevelopment of the building that once housed Napoli's Restaurant on Ocean Boulevard: It is home to Gidget's Coastal Provisions. The structure that housed the Jo-To Japanese Restaurant for years also is being turned into a new business, she added.
Commissioner Bispham finally made the motion to recommend the County Commission approve the zoning text amendment, and Commissioner Colin Pember seconded it.
"I think that this is fixing an issue that was an unintended consequence," Commissioner Morris said.
Categories Beaches, Business, Construction, Neighborhoods, Sarasota County, Siesta Key, Tourism, Transportation Tags Tinypass
Two Miami men charged with installing skimming devices at Sarasota service stations
Jonathan Lewis the choice of full County Commission to replace County Administrator Harmer | with the amendment. "There's no project before you; there's no development application before you."
However, several speakers referred to an effort initiated late last year by Dr. Gary Kompothecras, a Siesta Key chiropractor known for the 1-800-ASK-GARY advertising for his clinics, regarding a new hotel on the island.
One Siesta resident, Janet Emanuel, pointed out that a county demolition permit has been sought for the old Fandango Café at 1266 Old Stickney Point Road. (The Sarasota News Leader confirmed that through county permitting records this week.) A limited liability company for which Kompothecras is the principal — Stickney Storage — has owned that property since August 2016, county records show. Through another company — 1260 Inc. — Kompothecras also owns the adjacent parcel at 1260 Stickney Point Road, according to Sarasota County Property Appraiser's Office records.
Sarasota County Permitting records show these details for the site of the former Fandango Cafe, as of Dec. 11. Image courtesy Sarasota County
If the SKOD amendment would enable Kompothecras to build a hotel, Bispham said, that would be good for Siesta Key.
Commissioner Joseph Neunder agreed, citing public comments by Frederick Piccolo, president and CEO of Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. One critical element that has hampered the airport in inking agreements with "long-haul carriers," Piccolo told the commission, has been the lack of diversity among accommodations on Siesta Key, in spite of its No. 1 U.S. beach ranking this year.
"This is a very stringent process," Commissioner Robert Morris explained of any request for a special exception. "If it's a bad application, it's not going to get through," especially if the structure is designed to be 85 feet high.
"Anybody would have to have a lot of courage to seek a special exception to 85 feet, period," Bailey told the board. "You're not going to see Charlie Bailey standing before you, asking for that. I like living and breathing."
County Zoning Administrator Thompson also noted that a super-majority of the County Commission — four of five members — would have to approve a petition for a special exception for it to be granted.
Getting to Dec. 7
Zoning Administrator Donna Thompson. File photo
Thompson and Bailey both provided background to the Planning Commission in their remarks during the hearing, which lasted about two hours and 10 minutes.
Bailey explained that he disagreed with Donna Thompson's determination about the SKOD setback requirements, so he appealed her decision to the county's Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) on behalf of Siesta Acquisitions LLC; Kompothecras is the principal of that company, as well.
The BZA ruled 3-2 on June 12 that Thompson was correct.
On July 12, a number of Siesta Key business owners — including Clayton Thompson; Mark Smith of Smith Architects, who also serves as chair of the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce; and Kompothecras — appeared before the County Commission to seek a county-initiated zoning text amendment to comply with what they argued was the intent of the SKOD: to encourage a pedestrian-friendly atmosphere in Siesta commercial districts by ensuring buildings are close to the sidewalk.
The county commissioners asked staff to work on an amendment to achieve the modifications Bailey had sought. However, on Aug. 29, the majority agreed that the zoning text amendment should be the focus of a private initiative, instead of a staff undertaking, based on a report from Donna Thompson and Matt Osterhoudt, director of the county's Planning and Development Services Department. Osterhoudt and Thompson wrote in a report to the board that "the issue appears to focus on a specific project …"
Additionally, they noted, they had not had a bevy of complaints about the SKOD language that Bailey had targeted.
In the meantime, Bailey explained to the Planning Commission, Siesta Acquisitions filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari on July 13 in the 12th Judicial Circuit Court, seeking to overturn the BZA decision. The attorney who handled that on behalf of Kompothecras, Bailey continued, has worked with the Office of the County Attorney to keep the litigation in abeyance, pending a resolution of the initiative to amend the SKOD.
The intent of the regulations
Gidget's Coastal Provisions has been open in Siesta Village since early 2014. File photo
Commissioner Benson sought clarification early on during the Planning Commission hearing that even if a new building on Siesta Key were 36 feet, it would have to be set back 25 feet from the street, under the current regulations.
"That's correct," Thompson replied.
"There's nowhere else [in the county zoning regulations] where it's this drastic of a difference," Commissioner Kevin Cooper told Thompson. "What was the thought there [for] such a weird variance?"
Thompson replied that she was not aware of the historical context of the discussions.
"This is supposed to be designed | 1,081 |
It's pretty obvious that my blog isn't what one would call a destination for healthy food options. However, I do occasionally stick my big toe out of my usual dude food box and venture into things that flirt with the healthful. This would be one of those rare times.
I will be completely honest and say that prior to making this I'd never tasted hummus. I know, I know... It just didn't appeal to me in the slightest. To me it had all the earmarks of something that only Birkenstock-clad folks eat. And, having now made it, I can't say that it's a favorite. My daughters (who apparently got some Birkenstock in them somewhere in the gene pool) assure me that this concoction of mine is good, but how do I know? They could be just stroking my ego despite my assurance that it wouldn't hurt my feelings if they thought it sucked.
So, here, try it and tell me what you think.
Start your grill and prepare for direct cooking over medium heat (325-350º).
Wrap the edges of a fine mesh rack with foil to ensure the chickpeas don't roll off while grilling. The girls and I have dubbed this "the bean corral<|fim_middle|> smoky flavor from the grill. I'm trying this when the weather gets warmer. I love hummus and thank you for sharing your recipe.
I'll have to make it for Alexis and she'll know. She's the hippy food eater in our family, ha ha.
We pretty much live off of hummus at my house...but we always buy the plain kind at the store, nothing too exciting but it is still good. This is something I really want to try out! I never thought of grilling the garbanzo beans, that would give it such an amazing flavor.
Liz - It really does add a nice added dimension of flavor. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
Does the water get completely absorbed by the beans or does this need to be drained off?
Anonymous - The water is absorbed. | ".
Combined the chickpeas, garlic and 2 teaspoons of the oil in a medium mixing bowl and stir to coat.
Arrange the chickpeas, garlic and lemon halves on the rack. Keep the bowl handy for later.
Place the rack directly over the coals and cook until the chickpeas are golden and lightly charred, about 15 minutes, rolling them around gently with a spatula every five minutes.
Remove the rack from the grill and let cool about ten minutes.
Put the chickpeas in the original mixing bowl, squeeze the juice of the lemons into the bowl (no seeds, please), and squeeze the garlic cloves out of their paper into the bowl. Add the boiling water and salt and let soak 30 minutes to rehydrate the beans.
Add the tahini, cumin, paprika, chipotle and 1 tablespoon of the oil to the bowl. Blend to a semi-smooth consistency with an immersion blender, or process in a blender or food processor.
Put the hummus in a bowl, drizzle on the remaining oil and garnish with the chives.
I'm loving your chipotle version of hummus. This might have to make an appearance this Sunday.
John, I really really love Hummus. This is such a cool idea, I can't wait to make this!!! WOW, one of my favorite items + the smoke and char from the grill! YAY!!!
Thanks, Lea Ann! Please let me know what you think.
You don't look like the hummus type of guy;, but what a great idea to get that | 323 |
"Sitting in the audience, you are positively immersed in this old-timey and enchanting world of Dixieland jazz and bootleg gin, of broad pratfalls and vaudevillian slapstick comedy. This immersion is the wonderful thing about the show: after only a few minutes of admiring the quality of the music and snickering<|fim_middle|> Snark Ensemble with Ben Redwine & Dale Barton – our most frequent guest soloists. | at the antics in the films, you'll find that the two combine together seamlessly to make something greater than the component parts… To me, their music – its composition and its execution – is magnificent. It is by turns lyrical and exhilarating, and when paired with the hijinks onscreen, the 6-piece ensemble suits the note to the action, as it were, flawlessly.
The Snark Ensemble is an instrumental group dedicated to the creation and live performance of new music to silent film. The ensemble joyfully celebrates the zany, clever, and brilliant world of vintage silent comedies in its specially-crafted film scores. Built around a core of three composer-performers (Andrew Earle Simpson, keyboards; Maurice Saylor, woodwinds; and Phil Carluzzo, percussion and frets), the Snark Ensemble creates and performs scores which respond to and amplify the events taking place on screen. To the composers of the Snark Ensemble, each film suggests a unique sound world. To this end, the multi-instrumental talents of the ensemble's composers and guest performers allow them to draw on an astonishing range of instruments and stylistic diversity. The ensemble also creates and performs concert versions of their film scores and has supplied music for dance and incidental music for theater.
Since its founding in 2005, the members of the Snark Ensemble have composed and premiered more than thirty silent film scores for DVD release and live performance. They recently recorded three of their scores for a forthcoming audio release on Naxos Records. Snark Ensemble scores are available on two DVD sets on the Allday Entertainment label: Lost and Found: the Harry Langdon Collection and the newly-released Becoming Charley Chase.
You can see clips from the films and hear the complete scores on our Sounds & Sites page.
The ensemble is named after Lewis Carroll's epic nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in Eight Fits.
The | 394 |
The Sun has moved out of sedentary Taurus and into the naturally curious and chatty sign of Gemini. Gemini natives are restless with eclectic interests. They are usually walking encyclopedias due to their inveterate fact-gathering. They also equally love to share the information that<|fim_middle|> do with Jupiter in Gemini), yesterday we had the Sun sextile Uranus influence. If you recall in yesterday's blog, I mentioned that it was cool energy and very innovative. Uranus rules genius and invention, as well as scientific breakthroughs. Well, it was announced Thursday that the world's first synthetic life form has been built. Definitely an Uranian announcement. Also, must give some credit here to Mercury (governing news and communication) trine Pluto, as Pluto rules scientific research governing life and death areas. Mercury-Pluto perennially delivers up news about historic firsts and it came through again for us here.
Enjoy your Friday! Give someone a warm hug with Venus in Cancer. | they have compiled.
This Gemini energy inclines us to be more inquisitive now in our daily lives. It's also a good time for us to take up new studies, although after that Einstein quote, perhaps we're better off studying on our own versus anything formal.
The Moon in studious Virgo supports the Gemini Sun today insofar as both are ruled by the planet Mercury, which governs our reasoning ability, and both like to figure things out. However, Virgo is much more thorough and detailed, while Gemini is more diffuse.
Nevertheless today is an excellent day for any projects or tasks that call for a good measure of analysis. We are also more introspective with the Virgo Moon.
Venus in sensitive Cancer turns the volume up on our emotional needs in relationships.
With Jupiter and Uranus in idealistic Pisces continuing their opposition to austere Saturn in Virgo, the sign of labor, there were labor strikes in Greece and Spain Thursday over their respective governments belt-tightening (Saturn) measures.
Jupiter expands whatever it is connected with and conjoined now with rebel Uranus we see this configuration manifesting as the urge for revolt (depicted by Uranus) resulting in some measure of chaos and anarchy. Jupiter and Uranus fueled by escapist Pisces want to defiantly break free but restrictive Saturn is like a noose around their neck and will not budge. No-frills Saturn is perennially about "doing more with less" and adhering to a budget. This is not sitting well with much of the populace.
Growth (Jupiter-Uranus) is possible now but it has to be based on sound principles and drawing from previous tried and true experience (Saturn). It is much riskier going out and starting something new from scratch now and forget about starting anything lavish, without the necessary funds. Saturn won't let you get away with it. Pluto won't either!
We have also seen the financial markets tanking due in large part to debt-fears and worry (Saturn).
Remember a couple days ago in my horoscope when I wrote about the "weird" Sun square Neptune influence and that we had to be careful because we could get hoodwinked, especially financially. I also discussed how that influence is often "ego-denying" and also how things sometime just "dissolve" and pass out of our lives under that configuration?
Unfortunately, that is exactly when we had that Paris art theft which robbed the world of five great paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including works by Picasso and Matisse. Neptune rules art and paintings and the challenging square that day from the acquisition-oriented Taurus Sun (ruling money and possessions) perhaps cosmically fueled this greedy act by the perpetrators. Neptune rules con men and "get rich quick schemes" and even though that day I wrote to steer clear of trying to make a fast buck, these criminal minds did exactly that.
I do believe, however, that the Universe has a way of balancing the karmic scales, so whoever did this will eventually have to pay, one way or the other, but in the meantime, it is very sad that these (Neptune) paintings have suddenly "dissolved" from world view. That is often how Neptune energy operates, we can't understand why certain things have to "pass away." John F. Kennedy was assassinated under a strong Neptune influence (Saturn square Neptune).
Speaking of "world view" also with Sun square Neptune this week the Pakistani government blocked YouTube and Facebook citing "growing sacrilegious" content. Neptune rules imagery and photos and also gives a preoccupation with spiritual matters. Neptune is presently in the sign of Aquarius which rules the internet. Anyway, thought it was very interesting that with the Sun-Neptune, internet images were "banned" or suddenly snatched away again (Neptune's dissolving ray) as well, at the same time as the paintings.
Wrapping it up here (it's often hard for me to | 818 |
It was about as gritty of an effort as they come for the Dover-Sherborn boys on the road at Westwood on Monday afternoon. The Raiders (10<|fim_middle|> the rebound and the buzzer sounded as the Wolverines escaped with the two-point victory.
The TVL-leading Wolverines will return to action at home on January 25 against Ashland while DS will look to get back on track at Bellingham the same night. | -3, 6-3) came from 13 down to tie the game late, while senior captain/forward Brett Stark battled through the flu to record a game-high 19 points.
In the end, however, it still was not enough, as sophomore guard James McGowan (18 points) and junior guard Patrick Reilly (15 points) helped carry Westwood to a thrilling 67-65 victory to remain unbeaten in TVL play. Senior guard Owen Gaffney also finished in double figures for the Wolverines (11-1, 9-0) with 11 points.
It took a couple minutes into the game for the two sides to find their rhythms on offense, but DS took a 6-3 lead off of back-to-back three-pointers by sophomore guard Evan Skeary (11 points) and senior forward Alex Waugh (seven points). Back-to-back three-pointers by McGowan gave Westwood back the lead at 9-6 and forced DS to a timeout. Following the break, Westwood began aggressively pressing DS in the backcourt and forced several turnovers that resulted in easy lay-ins. The Wolverines extended their lead to 20-11 at the end of one quarter.
A three-point play by junior forward Favor Wariboko (seven points) extended the Westwood lead to 30-20 midway through the second quarter. The game entered halftime with Westwood ahead by nine at 34-25.
The Wolverines went up by as many as 13 at 40-27 early in the third quarter before DS called another timeout to settle things down. Whatever adjustments DS made during the timeout worked perfectly; the Raiders embarked on a 9-0 run, headlined by a three-point play from Stark to trim the deficit to 40-36. A three-pointer by Kirby Ryan moments later cut the deficit to a single point for DS at 42-41, but Gaffney immediately responded with a three-pointer for Westwood to extend the lead back to 45-41. A lefty fade by junior forward James Bean (four points) just before the buzzer gave Westwood a 49-45 lead at the end of three quarters.
The teams continued to trade blows throughout the fourth quarter. A pair of free throws by Waugh trimmed the deficit to 50-49 for DS, but Westwood kept answering every time DS got to within a point. A three-pointer by Reilly with 2:15 to play gave the Wolverines a five-point lead at 64-59. Back-to-back layups by Stark and Skeary made it a 64-63 game with 1:22 remaining, followed by a layup from McGowan to make it 66-63.
Down 67-65 with 10 seconds to play, DS got the ball back for one final shot to tie the game. The Raiders inbounded the ball to Stark, who drove into the paint and lofted up a shot that came up just short of the rim. Westwood grabbed | 656 |
A previous<|fim_middle|> you?
OMG! What would be your most embarrassing moment at prom? | version of this story contained an incorrect name of a business with discounted tuxedos. Tuxedos To You is the correct business.
The date is set, you've booked the limo and your perfect prom night is beginning to take shape…now what? The quest for the perfect outfit can be frustrating, long and even discouraging, but with the right tips to keep you on track, you can avoid the meltdowns and blowing your budget, and find the perfect dress or tux for prom.
On average, prom dresses cost between $60 and $300. So before you go shopping for the perfect dress or go out to rent a tux, it's best to know how much you plan on spending before you even open your wallet.
"Make your budget realistic," said Madison Saunders, junior at Bishop Moore Catholic High School. "You don't need to spend a ton of money on a prom dress; chances are you are only going to wear it once."
Don't feel the need to buy your prom dress brand-new. Many students are either borrowing dresses or buying from secondhand stores. Lauren Killer, a junior at Lake Brantley High School, refers to her form of shopping as "thrifting," or the practice of buying previously owned clothing to save money.
"I don't just thrift to save money though; I do it to break convention and be unorthodox," Killer said. "I will most definitely buy my prom dress at a thrift store because I know it will be unique and it will save me a ton of money!"
Prior to going shopping, you should determine the kind of dress or tux you want. Although keeping an open mind may benefit you in other parts of life, trying on dress after dress can become tiresome and confusing, and can make your search overwhelming.
So before going shopping, browse a few catalogues or Web sites before venturing out into the department stores. Whether you chose a timeless classic or a fashion-forward dress, gathering a few ideas of the styles and colors you like will keep you focused on your quest for the perfect dress, and make shopping quick and easy.
"I had been browsing the La Femme website for a while before I even went shopping, so then when I went to Nordstrom's I already knew what I did and did not want," Rachael Houston said, a senior at Lake Brantley High School.
Now that you've got a budget and a few ideas in mind, where should you start looking? Ranging from department stores with a multitude of choices to boutiques specializing in a one-of-a-kind experience, Central Florida has a variety of places to shop.
Abby Winn, senior at Bishop Moore Catholic High School, purchased last year's prom dress at Bloomingdale's. "They had a huge selection and had a bunch of sales happening right around prom time."
Although department stores offer an abundant selection during prom season, if you'd rather have a smaller, more unique selection of dresses, shopping at smaller boutiques could be the best way to find a dress with that extra flare.
"I probably am going to go look at some boutiques because I know all of their dresses will be unique," said Payton Frappier, a junior at Lake Mary High School.
As for the boys, when it comes to finding the perfect tux, word on the street is to look for any stores that have deals for your school. For example, Lake Brantley students who buy their tuxes at Tuxedos To You get a discounted price and the school gets a portion of every tux sold.
Once you're in the store, don't be afraid to ask for advice when searching for your tux. Although color coordinating with your date is a popular choice, you can't go wrong with the classic black and white ensemble. With the help of sales associates, finding the right size at the right price should be simple. The only dilemma you may face is choosing to wear a bow tie or the traditional neck tie.
"Last year I bought [rented] my tux at Men's Warehouse. It was only around $100 and the service was great," said Austin Lee, a senior at Bishop Moore Catholic High School.
QUIZ: Which prom dress is right for | 866 |
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Spiritual Symphony
by Rabbi Yirmiyahu Ullman - www.rabbiullman.com
From: Allen
Dear Rabbi,
Recently I heard of the musical role of the Levites in the Temple and it reminds me of the role of musicians and music in the aristocratic courts of Europe throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I was wondering what your thinking on this would be.
Dear Allen,
While I understand why this suggestion resonates with you, my take on this is not harmonious with yours. I'll explain why.
It is true that the aristocracy in Europe practiced and enjoyed both religious and secular classical music. But, as such, the masses had little or no access to this culturally elevating experience. And of the aristocracy, many, if not most, had only very rudimentary musical understanding and ability. And their musical taste was often banal and mundane.
The Levites, however, were not a political or monetary aristocracy, but a learned one. They were the most Torah-knowledgeable and spiritually elevated of all Israel. This, coupled with rigorous, exceptional musical training, not only made them musicians par excellence, but infused their music with the most spiritually uplifting of intentions. What's more, this was openly shared with, and experienced by, the masses as an integral part of the Temple service.
In addition, while the European aristocracy patronized art and artists in general, including music and musicians, it was primarily for their own aesthetic and social gratification and indulgence. As such, their relationship with musicians was essentially exploitative, while the musicians themselves often viewed their patrons' musical tastes and appreciation with contempt. The result was often "underfed" artists who were in constant tension between pleasing their musically plebeian patrons and realizing their own musical genius. Even someone as musically brilliant as Mozart lived a life of poverty and died and was buried with ignominy.
In contrast, the Levites, the professional musicians of the Holy Temple, were supported and patronized by the entire Jewish People, who donated vast sums to the upkeep and running of the Temple and its many services. The people had great appreciation and admiration for the Levites, whose worship they valued not for their own delight, but for its beautification of G-d. Simultaneously, the Levites viewed themselves as humble servants and emissaries for the Jewish People whom they honored before G-d. And just as Israel had a part in the sacrifices offered to G-d via the priestly kohanim, so too did each Jew have a role in the Divine music offered to G-d via the Levites. In fact, when a person came to the public precincts of the Temple and heard the heavenly melodies of the Levites, he was enveloped in rapture and was transformed into a better, more elevated, refined and spiritual person.
Finally, for the greater part of the European court-music period, for various reasons, aristocratic patrons limited their sponsorship of music to chamber music. This resulted in limiting musical expression both quantitatively and qualitatively to small orchestras of specific instruments.
However, already in ancient times, the Temple employed a vast number of musicians who played a tremendous variety of instruments, many of which are not even know today. Thus, long before the invention of the modern symphony, the Temple maintained a Grand Symphony Orchestra which performed in unison with a tremendous choir of angelic-voiced Levites, who together played and sang the most ethereal and spiritually uplifting melodies that the human ear ever heard.
So, European court music is far from being akin to the music of the Temple, whose scale and tenor is far above anything we can possibly imagine. And this is because the music of the Temple reverberates with and inspires Divine service and prophecy, for whose return we await with longing.
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The end of summer<|fim_middle|> Gordon-Levitt in a role that lets him loosen up a little bit.
But when the movie gets off the road, it slows down both literally and figuratively.
The film tries to complicate its (thankfully) simple plot by shaking up the timeline, but after so many other movies have done this, the device feels tired.
And it doesn't help that Michael Shannon, usually a reliably good actor (such as in Revolutionary Road), gives one of his weakest performances here. His overacting lessens the suspense of just what is so special about the envelope Wilee is transporting.
When it's on the move, Premium Rush is a good time. So see it for those scenes, and use the downtime to chug more soda.
I'm giving the movie a B.
← Happy 7th Blogiversary to Me! | is always a slow time, what with people taking time off to enjoy the last gasp of these warm-weather months before things start up again and get busy.
So what a fun bit of counter-programming the movie Premium Rush is.
This brisk, action-packed story of a New York City bike messenger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) caught in the middle of a suspicious delivery picks up the pace on these lazy days and gives the audience what feels like a quick cinematic shot of Jolt cola.
That is to say, it's a refreshing but not completely satisfying caffeine boost.
When the movie sticks to Gordon-Levitt on his bike, and shows with impressive camerawork how he zigs and zags around cabs, cars, and trucks, avoiding people and roadblocks, and thinking with split-second precision where he'll go next, it's pretty cool.
Gordon-Levitt, one of the most likable and charming actors around right now, gives an engaging performance as Wilee, the good-hearted messenger who believes "breaks are death," and lives for the thrill of the ride (after all, it's not a gig that pays a lot).
It looks like Gordon-Levitt enjoyed making Premium Rush; a short behind-the-scenes video during the closing credits shows that he performed at least some of his own stunts, and kept his good humor even in the face of injury. After serious roles in films like The Dark Knight Rises and 50/50, it's nice to see | 307 |
During her first solo trip as U.S. education secretary, Betsy DeVos highlighted Valencia College's manufacturing and dual-enrollment programs.
DeVos, who was met with boos<|fim_middle|> system by steering more taxpayer money toward school choice options.
"The president's budget is investing in education that works and education that will actually help advance students," she says. "Stay tuned." | the last time she was in Central Florida, spent the day in Kissimmee on Friday with little protest as she learned about the community college's success in helping non-traditional students in affordable ways.
"Community colleges are a tremendous option and a tremendous on ramp for many students," DeVos says. "We need to do a much better job of highlighting the important work they do across this country to help students achieve their goals and abilities."
DeVos first visited Valencia's Advanced Manufacturing Training Center, where she saw mechanical lab demonstrations and listened to students and business owners who talked about the program's effectiveness. Lockheed Martin vice president Pat Sunderlin called the program a "poster child" that DeVos needed to see. Samantha Rogers, a student, told DeVos she was working at IHOP as a dishwasher before she started the construction program. Now, she works at Jr. Davis Construction Company as a dump truck driver and earns significantly more than in her restaurant days.
"Working for Junior has been amazing," Rogers says. "I'm a single mom, so it made it a little easier for me to provide for my children."
DeVos then ventured over to Valencia's Osceola campus where she talked to high school students enrolled in the dual-enrollment program, which allows them to complete college courses for credit.
Farrah Lubin, a junior at Poinciana High School enrolled in the program, says her main reason for taking early college classes was to help her parents financially. Ultimately, she wants to become a physician.
"I know that requires a lot of years of continuous education," Lubin says. "Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a high income, so this has actually helped my parents out."
DeVos spoke briefly about President Donald Trump's planned cuts to the federal Education Department. The proposed 2018 budget includes a $9 billion cut for the department, which includes eliminating a $2.25 billion program that trains teachers in high-need schools and $732 million grant program that helps needy college students. Trump's budget, though, does add significant amounts of funding toward "school choice" programs, including a $168 million increase for charters; $250 million for private school choice programs; and $1 billion increase for promoting school choice at high-poverty schools. Critics have accused the Michigan billionaire and Trump of trying to gut the public education | 487 |
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Giving citizens their place alongside researchers in the production of knowledge and innovation is the objective of participatory research. This approach, which concerns all scientific fields and subjects in extremely varied forms, promotes science that is responsive to societal issues.
« Citizen science and participatory research are types of scientific knowledge production in which stakeholders from civil society, as individuals or groups, participate with researchers in an active and deliberate manner »: this is the definition used in the Charter of citizen science and participatory research in France, signed by higher education and research institutions (including Inserm), NGOs and patient organizations, all determined to work together to accelerate progress for the benefit of everyone.
The idea that science should be steered only by decision-makers and researchers has become obsolete: while citizens need researchers in order to access new knowledge, research needs society in order to progress. And this intensification of civil society's expertise and skills, combined with its growing mobilization in producing and co-producing knowledge and innovation, has created a veritable third sector of research.
Alongside the historical academic and industrial research players, this third sector has enabled the<|fim_middle|> WordPress powered websites. The cookie stores the language code of the last browsed page. | emergence of participatory research together with a space for dialog and joint action. Combining the expertise of scientists and citizens, it:
enables better responses to society's issues, thanks to science that is closely aligned with society's expectations
strengthens the link between science and society, giving the latter deeper insights into the scientific process and its constraints
Co-constructing knowledge
Participatory research can be applied to all scientific fields and at all stages of the research continuum. Researchers and members of civil society can work together to build a project and carry out its successive phases:
definition of the questions to resolve and the objectives to achieve
definition of the resources needed to make this possible
production and/or collection of data
analysis of that data
interpretation of the results
creation of value from the results, particularly through their dissemination (including scientific publications), application, or development
The third sector will participate in some or all of the steps, depending on the project.
Clinical research protocols: contribution of the patient's perspective
For over ten years now, Inserm has been training patient organization members in the review of clinical research protocols. These reviewers are then asked to evaluate, on a voluntary basis, the clarity of the documents relating to the clinical trials that Inserm sponsors (information leaflets and consent forms). Not only that, but the reviewers also have the possibility to make suggestions for improving the protocol, for the benefit of the participants' treatment.
To find out more about the Inserm College of Reviewers (only available in French)
Citizen science, a key element in co-constructing knowledge
The concept of citizen science generally refers to research projects in which citizens volunteer to collect data according to a methodology defined by scientists. These data are most often analyzed and interpreted by researchers. Their conclusions are then disseminated – not only through traditional scientific channels (publications in specialized journals) but also for the attention of those having collected the data.
Initially used mainly by naturalists, this approach is becoming popular in many research fields, including health. For example, it has been used to document various aspects and impacts of the COVID-19 health crisis, via surveys posted online by researchers during the Spring 2020 lockdown.
A participatory research project often starts from needs expressed by the third sector, for example by patients or their relatives in the field of biomedical research. In order to jointly clarify the objectives to achieve, their purposes and stakes, a stage of stabilization and sharing of knowledge – that of the scientists and that of the people directly concerned by the project objective – is necessary. This requires time and resources and must be repeated at each stage of the research, which is why all participatory research is based on a strong partnership between researchers and members of civil society.
Participatory research at Inserm
Building such partnerships is a key Inserm objective, actively implemented since 2003 and the creation of the Think Tank Network with Patient Organizations (GRAM), followed by that of the Associations, Research & Society (MARS) network. Interactions between patient organizations and Inserm scientists have been developed both locally and nationally through multiple initiatives: visits to laboratories, training, scientific days, working groups between patient organizations and researchers, etc. All of which are opportunities to forge links and help researchers and organizations get to know each other better.
In 2017, a national meeting between patient organizations, researchers, and political players, entitled Sharing knowledge and research perspectives was held by Inserm. It enabled an overview of participatory research and its stakeholders in France, highlighting the questions raised by citizen science in terms of methodology, professional conduct, and ethics. It has also given new impetus to Inserm's strategy, which is now about moving to a new stage with tangible implementation of the conditions for effective research co-construction by Inserm researchers and civil society.
As a result, the reinforcement of Inserm's commitment to participatory research is now included in its Strategic Plan (Objective 10). Citizen involvement will be encouraged wherever this is meaningful: it must be possible for all partner organizations (for patients or their families, consumer organizations, citizens' organizations) to find their place in the research conducted at Inserm and be consulted on topics particularly relating to healthcare, research ethics, public health policy, and the consideration of scientific uncertainty. Similarly, the participatory potential of Inserm's Collective Expert Reviews (only available in French) – the Institute's expertise, knowledge-sharing, and policy decision-making system – will be strengthened.
Formalizing methodology
To achieve these objectives, Inserm will actively contribute to the development of an ecosystem that is conducive to participatory research, in particular by formalizing a methodology for the creation, conduct – up to the return of project results to the participants, and funding of projects co-constructed by its researchers and health professionals, patient or citizen organizations. A mission which has been entrusted to the Science and Society Department, which is taking over from the Associations, Research & Society (MARS) network.
From Science to Health
Inserm stands for « Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale » (National Institute of Health and Medical Research). We are the only French public research organization entirely dedicated to human health. Our goal: improving health for everyone, through a better knowledge of living organisms and diseases, innovating treatments and conducting public health research.
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Home Article Beyond The Spin, Deep Differences
Beyond The Spin, Deep Differences
by Robert Kuttner
After one of the emptiest political conventions on record, the stage is actually set for a very consequential November election. Though the Republicans did their best to camouflage it,theirs remains a highly conservative program. There really are enormous differences of substance between the two major candidates.
If the election can<|fim_middle|> helping to shore up the system, by definition the effect must be to leave Social Security with smaller reserves. There are only three possible consequences. Either retired people are left with smaller Social Security checks or government must borrow money to make then system whole. Or government must raise taxes.
Gore, by contrast, would allocate most of the surplus to making the system whole, and some of it to a new system of optional private accounts. But these would be a supplement to Social Security, not a diversion from it.
. Here, differences could not be greater. The Democrats want tough regulation of managed care plans, so that doctors can make medical decisions and patients can sue insurance plans that make deadly mistakes when they try to play doctor. The Republicans have proposed a reform that was written by the insurance industry.
On drug coverage, the Bush camp proposes to let those same private insurers offer supplemental drug coverage, most of which would still end up being paid out of pocket. Gore and the Democrats want supplemental coverage under Medicare.
In case you didn't catch it at the GOP's extended infomercial, there are also very significant differences between the two candidates on abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action. And in every case, these differences are principled ones, about which reasonable people can differ.
If you think that government has no business meddling in your life (except in your bedroom), you should probably vote for Bush. If you think some important things cannot be trusted solely to private profit, Gore is probably your man.
Neither of these guys is a prize personally. Neither would be where they are without famous fathers. Even so, putting aside the fluff and the spin, we will be making a very momentous decision this election year. Let's hope we pay attention.
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University's Heller School.
Read more by Robert Kuttner | be made to turn on issues, it probably cuts in Al Gore's favor. If it turns on atmospherics and personality, the winner will likely be George W. So all eyes now shift to Gore: Can he rouse the electorate to focus on issues? Can he rouse himself to be a plausible messenger? And can the voters grow up?
Watching the Republican National Convention, it was difficult to believe the atmospherics fooled anybody. Writing in The New York Times, editorialist Brent Staples referred to the over-representation of black and brown symbols at a mostly white party as Minstrelsy.
The real divisions within the GOP over issues such as abortion rights were denied prime airtime. Everything was scripted and vetted. This was the sort of a party convention that you'd expect in an authoritarian country, where there is no brooking of public dissent.
For the most part audiences tuned out. Real entertainment proved more compelling than politics masquerading as entertainment. Whenever the networks cut from sitcoms and game shows to the convention, viewers hit the remote.
Yet voters raised in a media age do pay attention to atmospherics. Though the Republicans have sponsored wrenching cuts in public services, the Republican convention could give prime air time to a single mother from Arkansas, thereby signaling that in their hearts (if not their budgets) they really care. Despite the P.T. Barnum quality of the convention, Bush will likely get his anticipated bounce in the polls.
If the voters do pay attention to issue differences, it will probably not be until after Labor Day. Here are several worth watching:
. Bush wants a massive cut in personal income taxes and an elimination of the estate tax. Most of the benefit would go to the richest Americans. Gore's tax cuts would be smaller and more narrowly targeted to working families.
If Gore is shrewd, he wont just let the issue be posed as a choice between different kinds of tax cuts, but between different uses of the budget surplus. Do we want the most affluent two percent of taxpayers (those who pay estate tax at all) to get a tax holiday or should we use that $30-50 billion a year to provide, say, universal prescription drug benefits under Medicare?
. Though Bush hasn't spelled out the details, he would divert a portion of the payroll tax to new private retirement accounts. Though billed, erroneously, as | 481 |
The Laguna Playhouse has launched the Players Club with a goal of attracting new theatergoers, rekindling<|fim_middle|> Dotorotos, Mary and Matt Lawson, Otis Healy and former Mayors Kathleen Blackburn and Cheryl Kinsman.
Annual memberships start at $1,000, which can be paid in a lump sum or quarterly. Members receive eight Playhouse tickets, to be used singly or spread over a year, and an opportunity to socialize at three-to-five "invitation only" events held off-site.
Members can benefit from discounts to the Nirvana Grille, Lumberyard, Sundried Tomato, Tommy Bahama's, Laguna Beach Books and Laguna Canyon Winery, which comes with membership in its wine club.
A $3,000-membership adds to the perks the coveted parking behind the theater, free beverages at the bar in the lobby and recognition by the Playhouse media.
"The Playhouse is a treasure that is worthy of our preservation and support," Pearson said. "We would never want to see its doors close.
"It is important to remember that ticket sales alone cannot sustain the Playhouse — and only account for 60 percent of what is required to successfully produce and present world-class live theater and entertainment to our community," she added.
The nonprofit Playhouse is the oldest continuously running theater on the West Coast.
"We were founded in October 1924," said Executive Director Karen Wood. "Plays were performed in private homes then."
The current theater opened in 1969 on land donated to the city by the Moulton family.
Among the well-known actors that have trod the boards: Nanette Fabray, Roddy McDowell, Barbara Eden, Marlo Thomas, Sally Struthers, Julie Harris, Harrison Ford and Bette Davis, who gave a reading to help raise funds.
More recently, Cloris Leachman and Rita Rudner have appeared at the Playhouse, Wood said.
Newly appointed Artistic Director Annie Wareham presented a preview of what is coming up at the Playhouse: A season with six professional plays, special engagement like the Hershey Felder performances as George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Ludwig van Beethoven and Frederic Chopin; Youth Productions such as "Looking for Home," which is now playing; and collaborations with local performing arts groups.
For more information about the Player's Club, send an email to epearson@adworx.net, or call (949) 497-7128. | old relationships and helping raise money for the theater's operations.
Councilwoman Elizabeth Pearson organized the club and its launch at the Pacific Edge Hotel on Nov. 10, signing up new members for the support group before the party ended. Playhouse officials had sought her assistance as a professional fundraiser.
"Just about everyone who lives in Laguna Beach or is associated with Laguna Beach knows this is a community that appreciates the arts and it is a community that likes to have fun," Pearson said. "So with that in mind, I thought why not combine the two into something that will bring all of us who love Laguna together and, at the same time, help the Playhouse. The outcome is what we are calling the Players Club."
Pearson is its founding member. The club's roster of other members, whom she recruited at the launch, include David Sanford and Steve | 173 |
<|fim_middle|> full day of sightseeing it was time for the classically Italian drink, Apero Spritz. Drinks were followed by dinner in a nearby restaurant, again with magnificent views of the lake. After eating and drinking a little more than my fill, I woke up fuzzy-headed the next day, but luckily it was a much more calm and relaxed itinerary - we visited the company's offices and then the factory to see how all the fabrics are made before heading to the airport to fly home. | to peruse the vast exhibition dedicated to food and art through the ages that showcases everything from kitchen design, cutlery and ceramics to how food is portrayed or used in modern art. If you're a big foodie, this is a good one to add to your bucket list.
This was followed by lunch in the terrace restaurant on the roof of the building, which had launched when the exhibition opened this year. Lovely and airy, with a view over the gardens and Milan's financial district beyond, it was the perfect place to take a lunchtime pause before we ventured on to our next destination.
starring Tilda Swinton (in which she plays a Russian, married to a Milanese), you'll recognise the interior, as it's the house where the family lives. An incredibly-designed space - the architect, Piero Portaluppi was given free reign and an unlimited budget - it was originally owned by one of Milan's wealthiest families, who made their fortune by creating the Necchi sewing machine. It's one of the most beautifully designed and furnished villas I've ever had the pleasure of visiting. To say I was excited to see it, was an understatement. I would happily have stayed there all day snapping away, and probably done my best to lock myself in and never leave had we not had a guide. The interior is what you might expect (and more) from an Italian villa built in the 1930s in the art-deco style. Marble is in abundance - all the bathrooms are furnished from floor to ceiling in the opulent material, either in blue, green, pink or black. The staircase is made from walnut, there are wooden floors, marble fireplaces, ornately-carved doors and the furnishings are equally luxurious. My favourite being the green velvet sofas in one of the living spaces, which has a huge corner window that looks out into the trees and garden, so that the outside feels part of the space. The villa was the location used for Dedar's most recent collection campaign, hence our visit and I could see just how well Dedar's fabrics suited the villa's interior style. Heaven.
]. The foundation is currently showing a range of contemporary artists, including Louise Bourgeois. If you're an art fan and find yourself in Milan, this is a must-see.
]. I quickly changed and met the rest of the group, including the Dedar's two owners Caterina and Rafaelle Fabrizio for a drink on the bar's terrace. After a | 507 |
grazAng = grazingang(H,R) returns the grazing angle for a sensor H meters above the surface, to surface targets R meters away. The computation assumes a curved earth model with an effective earth radius of approximately 4/3 times the actual earth radius.
grazAng = grazingang(H,R,MODEL) specifies the earth model used to compute the grazing angle. MODEL is either 'Flat' or 'Curved'.
grazAng = grazing<|fim_middle|> | ang(H,R,MODEL,Re) specifies the effective earth radius. Effective earth radius applies to a curved earth model. When MODEL is 'Flat', the function ignores Re.
Grazing angle, in degrees. The size of grazAng is the larger of size(H) and size(R).
Determine the grazing angle (in degrees) of a path to a ground target located 1.0 km from a sensor. The sensor is mounted on a platform that is 300 m above the ground.
The grazing angle is the angle between a line from the sensor to a surface target, and a tangent to the earth at the site of that target. | 133 |
New Tech Specialist Joins Diamond V
Diamond V has welcomed Christine Warzecha, MS to the company as its equine, pet and specialty technical specialist.
"In this role, Christine is responsible for providing sales and technical leadership for our equine, pet, and specialty business in North America," said Kevin Larson, director of national accounts. "She's working closely with our entire team to provide service for Diamond V customers in these species segments."
Most recently, Warzecha was a sales consultant with Bluebonnet Feeds in North Texas. She has conducted a wide range of equine nutrition seminars and is active in the National Reining Horse Association (NHRA), National Cutting Horse Association (NCHA), and hunter and jumper shows.
"I look forward to improving general<|fim_middle|> Warzecha said. "It is an honor to be part of such a talented team at Diamond V." | animal health and performance through education and product integration in the market," | 13 |
It is the policy of Quin Systems Limited to operate a comprehensive Quality System in accordance with BS EN ISO 9001 requirements.
The system employed incorporates the use of formal procedures and where necessary detailed work and inspection instructions.
The Quality System is the means by which the company supports its policy of providing to its customers a quality service in accordance with company standards and customers' expectations and needs.
The company<|fim_middle|> by the company.
The requirements of the system are mandatory for all company employees and no unauthorised alterations or deviations are permitted. | is committed to continuously improving the effectiveness of our Quality System and ongoing development of our products and processes.
All employees of the company whether or not directly involved in quality matters, are required to work within the system described by this manual and to place the highest priority on the quality of service provided | 57 |
SANTA<|fim_middle|>1939); and Best Picture Winner, The Best Years of Our Lives.
Other acclaimed Goldwyn titles that the Miramax sales team will represent include: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; Hans Christian Andersen; Ball of Fire; Dodsworth; and The Westerner, among scores of other timeless comedies, musicals and dramas. | MONICA, CA, April 2, 2012 – Miramax and the Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust today announced that Miramax's Global Sales team will manage global licensing of the library produced by the legendary Samuel Goldwyn. Terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.
Miramax will license content across a broad range of television and digital platforms, including free and premium linear services, subscription video-on-demand and ad-supported video-on-demand, maximizing distribution of beloved films from the library including such classics as: Guys and Dolls; The Bishop's Wife; Pride of the Yankees; Little Foxes; Wuthering Heights ( | 129 |
By Stephen Baxter
_Published by Del Rey Books_
Manifold: Time
Manifold: Space
Manifold: Origin
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Baxter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random
House, Inc.
www.delreydigital.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baxter, Stephen.
Manifold : origin / Stephen Baxter.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR 6052.A849 M34 2002
823′.914—dc21 2001052803
eISBN: 978-0-345-45547-5
v3.1_r1
_To my nephew, William Baxter_
# Contents
_Cover_
_Other Books by This Author_
_Title Page_
_Copyright_
_Dedication_
Part One: Wheel
Part Two: Red Moon
Part Three: Hominids
Part Four: World Engine
Part Five: Manifold
#
## _E mma Stoney_
Do you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant...
I know _you_. And you're just what you always were, an incorrigible space cadet. That's how we both finished up stranded here, isn't it? I remember how I loved to hear you talk when we were kids. When everybody else was snuggling at the drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity.
But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?
And what if we blew ourselves up before we ever got to the stars? Would the universe just evolve on, a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly devoid of life and mind?
How—desolating.
Surely it couldn't be like that. All those suns and worlds spinning through the void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang itself... You always said you just couldn't believe that there was nobody out _there_ looking back at you down _here_.
But if so, where is everybody?
This is the Fermi Paradox—right, Malenfant? _If the aliens existed, they would be here_. I heard you lecture on that so often I could recite it in my sleep.
But I agree with you. It's powerful strange. I'm sure Fermi is telling us something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in. It is as if we are all embedded in a vast graph of possibilities, a graph with an axis marked _time_ , for our own future destiny, and an axis marked _space_ , for the possibilities of the universe.
Much of your life has been shaped by thinking about that cosmic graph. Your life and, as a consequence, mine.
Well, on every graph there is a unique point, the place where the axes cross. It's called the origin. Which is where we've finished up, isn't it, Malenfant? And now we _know_ why we were alone...
But, you know, one thing you never considered was the subtext. Alone or not alone—why do we _care_ so much?
I always knew why. We care because we are lonely.
I understood that because _I_ was lonely. I was lonely before you stranded me here, in this terrible place, this Red Moon. I lost you to the sky long ago. Now you found me here—but you're leaving me again, aren't you, Malenfant?
... Malenfant? Can you hear me? Do you know me? Do you know who you are?—Oh.
Watch the Earth, Malenfant. Watch the Earth...
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.
Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone.
Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere humans found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.
Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no _other_ against which human advancement could be tested.
They came to understand that they would forever be alone.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age were like, minds of times far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, to breed, or even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. _It wasn't supposed to have been like this_.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final downstreamers—lonely, dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past...
# _PART ONE_
# **Wheel**
#
## _R eid Malenfant_
"... Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!"
So here was Reid Malenfant, his life down the toilet, chasing joky UFO reports around a desolate African sky. Emma's voice snapped him to full alertness, for just about the first time, he admitted to himself, since takeoff.
"What about the Moon?"
"Just look at it!"
Malenfant twisted his head this way and that, the helmet making his skull heavy, seeking the Moon. He was in the T-38's forward blister. Emma was in the bubble behind him, her head craned back. The jet trainer was little more than a brilliant shell around them, white as an angel's wing, suspended in a powder-blue sky. Where was the Moon—the west? He couldn't see a damn thing.
Frustrated, he threw the T-38 into a savage snap roll. A flat brown horizon twisted around the cockpit in less than a second.
"Jesus, Malenfant," Emma groaned.
He pulled out into a shallow climb toward the west, so that the low morning sun was behind him.
... And then he saw it: a Moon, nearly full, baleful and big— _too_ big, bigger than it had any right to be. Its colors were masked by the washed-out blue of the air of Earth, but still, it had _colors_ , yes, not the Moon's rightful palette of grays, but smatterings of a deep blue-black, a murky brown that even had tinges of green, for God's sake—but it was predominantly red, a strong scorched red like the dead heart of Australia seen from the flight deck of a Shuttle orbiter...
It was a Moon, but not _the_ Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.
He just stared, still pulling the T-38 through its climb. He sensed Emma, behind him, silent. What was there to say about this, the replacement of a Moon?
That was when he lost control.
## _F ire_
The people walk across the grass.
The sky is blue. The grass is sparse, yellow. The ground is red under the grass. Fire's toes are red with the dust. The people are slim black forms scattered on red-green.
They are called the Running-folk.
The people call to each other.
"Fire? Dig! Fire?"
"Dig, Dig, here! Loud, Loud?"
Loud's voice, from far away. "Fire, Fire! Dig! Loud!"
The sun is high. There are only people on the grass. The cats sleep when the sun is high. The hyenas sleep. The Nutcracker men and the Elf men sleep in their trees. Everybody sleeps except the Running-folk. Fire knows this without thinking.
As his legs walk, Fire holds his hands clamped together. Smoke curls up from between his thumbs. There is moss inside his hands. The fire is in the moss. He blows on the moss. More smoke comes. The fire hurts his palms and fingers. But his hands are hard.
His legs walk easily. Walking is for legs. Fire is not there in his legs. Fire is in his hands and his eyes. He makes his hands tend the fire, while his legs walk.
Fire is carrying the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.
It is darker. The people are quiet.
Fire looks up. A fat cloud hangs over him. The sun is behind the cloud. The edge of the cloud glows golden. His nose can smell rain. His bare skin prickles, cold. Immersed in this new moment, he has forgotten he is hungry.
The clouds part. There is a blue light, low in the sky. Fire looks at the blue light. It is not the sun. The blue light is new.
Fire fears anything new.
The fire wriggles in his hands.
He looks down, forgetting the blue light. There is no smoke. The moss has turned to ash. The fire is shrinking.
Fire crouches down. He shelters the moss under his belly. He feels its warmth on his bare skin. He hoots. "Fire, Fire! Fire, Fire!"
Stone is small-far. He turns. He shouts. He is angry. He begins to come back toward Fire.
Loud comes to Fire. Loud hoots. His voice is loud. Loud is his name. Loud kneels. He looks for bits of moss and dry grass. He pushes them into the bit of fire.
Dig comes to Fire. Her hand holds arrowhead roots. She squats beside Fire. Her taut dugs brush his arm. His member stiffens. He rocks. She grins. Her hands push a root into his mouth. He tastes her fingers, her salty sweat.
Loud hoots. His member is stiff too, sticking out under his belly. He crams bits of grass into Fire's hands.
Fire snaps his teeth. "Loud, Loud away!"
Loud hoots again. He grabs Dig's arm. She laughs. Her legs take her skipping away from both of them.
Others come to Fire. Here are women, Grass and Shoot and Cold and Wood. Here are their babies with no names. Here are children with no names. The children jabber. Their eyes are round and bright.
Here is Stone. Stone is dragging branches over the ground. Blue is helping Stone drag the branches. Sing is lying on the branches. Sing is white-haired. She is still. She is asleep.
Stone sees the dying fire. He sees Fire's stiff member. He roars. Stone's hands drop the branches.
Stone has forgotten Sing, on the branches. Sing tips to the ground. She groans.
Stone's axe clouts Fire on the back of the head. There is a hard sound. Stone shouts in Fire's face. "Fire, Fire! Hungry, feed!" His face is split by a scar. The scar is livid red.
"Fire, Fire," says Fire quietly. His arms drop and his head bows. He keeps hold of the fire.
Sing moans. Her eyes are closed. Her dugs are slack. The men pick her up by shoulders and legs and lift her back on the branches.
Stone and Blue grab the branches. Their legs walk them back the way they had come.
Fire tells his legs to stand him up. They can't. His hands are still clasped around the fire. Lights fill his head, more garish than that blue stripe in the sky. He nearly falls over backward.
Loud's hand grabs his armpit. Loud lifts him until his legs are straight.
Loud laughs. Loud walks away, fast, after Dig.
Fire's head hurts. Fire's hands hurt. Fire's member wants Dig.
He starts walking. He wants to stop thinking.
He thinks of the blue light.
## _E mma Stoney_
Emma had accompanied Malenfant, her husband, on a goodwill tour of schools and educational establishments in Johannesburg, South Africa. It had been a remarkably dismal project, a throwback to NASA PR malpractices of old, a trek through mostly prosperous, middle-class-and-up neighborhoods, with Malenfant running Barco shows from his two missions to the Space Station before rows of polite and largely uncaring teenagers.
In darkened classrooms Emma had watched the brilliance of the students' smiles, and the ruby-red winking of their earpiece phones like fireflies in the night. Between these children growing up in the fractured, complex, transformed world of 2015, and Reid Malenfant, struggling worker astronaut, all of fifty-five years old and still pursuing Apollo dreams from a boyhood long lost, there was a chasm as wide as the Rift Valley, she thought, and there always would be.
Still, for Emma, it had been a holiday in the African sun—the reason she had pried herself away from her work as financial controller of OnlineArt—and she and Malenfant had gotten along reasonably well, for them, even given Malenfant's usual Earthbound restless moodiness.
But that had been before the word had come through from the Johnson Space Center, headquarters of NASA's manned spaceflight program, that Malenfant had been washed out of his next mission, STS-194.
Well, that was the end of it. With a couple of phone calls Malenfant had cut short their stay in Joburg, and had begun to can the rest of the tour. He had been able to get out of all of it except for a reception at the US ambassador's residence in Nairobi, Kenya.
To her further dismay, Malenfant had leaned on Bill London—an old classmate from Annapolis, now a good buddy in the South African Navy—to let him fly them both up to Nairobi from out of a Joburg military airfield in a T-38, a sleek veteran supersonic jet trainer, a mode of transport favored by the astronauts since the 1960s.
It wasn't the first time Emma had been taken for a ride in one of those toy planes, and with Malenfant in this mood she knew she could expect to be thrown around the sky. And she shuddered at the thought of how Malenfant in this wounded state was going to behave when he got to Nairobi.
But she had gone along anyhow. Somehow she always did.
So that was how Emma Stoney, forty-five-year-old accountant, had found herself in a gear room getting dressed in a blue flight suit, oxygen mask, oversized boots, helmet, going through the procedures for using her parachute and survival kit and emergency oxygen, struggling to remember the purpose of the dozens of straps, lanyards and D-rings.
Malenfant was ready before she was, of course. He stomped out into the bright morning sunlight toward the waiting T-38. He carried his helmet and his flight plan, and his bald head gleamed in the sun, bronzed and smooth as a piece of machinery itself. But his every motion was redolent with anger and frustration.
Emma had to run to keep up with him, laden down with all her absurd right-stuff gear. By the time she reached the plane she was hot already. She had to be hoisted into her seat by two friendly South African female techs, like an old lady being lifted into the bath. Malenfant was in his cockpit, angrily going through a pre-takeoff checkout.
The T-38 was sleek and brilliant white. Its wings were stubby, and it had two bubble cockpits, one behind the other. The plane was disturbingly small; it seemed barely wide enough to squeeze in a whole person. Emma studied an array of controls and dials and softscreen readouts at whose purpose she could only guess. The venerable T-38 had been upgraded over the years—those shimmering softscreen readouts, for instance—but every surface was scuffed and worn with use, the metal polished smooth where pilots' gloved hands had rubbed against it, the leather of her seat extensively patched.
The last few minutes of the prep wore away quickly, as one of the ground crew took her through her final instructions: how she should close her canopy bubble, where to fasten a hook to a ring on a parachute, how to change the timing of her parachute opening. She watched the back of Malenfant's head, his jerky tension as he prepared his plane.
Malenfant taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Emma watched the stick move before her, slave to Malenfant's movements. Her oxygen mask smelled of hot rubber, and the roar of the jets was too loud for her to make out anything of Malenfant's conversation with the ground.
Do you _ever_ think of me, Malenfant?
There was a mighty shove at her back.
## _F ire_
Stone drops the branches. Sing rolls to the ground. Stone has forgotten her again.
The sun is low. They are close to a thick stand of trees. Fire can smell water.
Fire is tired. His stomach is empty. His hands are sore. "Hungry Fire hungry," he moans.
Sing, on the ground, looks up at him. She smiles. "Hungry Fire," she says. He thinks of her feeding him. But she is small and withered. She does not get up to feed him.
Stone walks over the branches he hauled across the savannah, the branches that transported Sing. He kicks them aside. He has forgotten he hauled them here. He bends. His hands seek out a piece of dung on the ground. His tongue tastes it. It is Nutcracker-man dung. The dung is old. The dung crumbles.
Fire is not fearful. There are no Nutcracker men near here.
Stone's feet kick aside more branches and twigs. He uncovers a round patch of black ground. Fire's nose smells ash. Stone hoots. "Hah! Fire Fire."
Fire crouches over the ash. The fire is warm in his hands.
Loud and Dig and others huddle near him. Their hands scrape dry stuff from the floor, dead leaves and dry moss and grass and bits of bark. Their hands pick up rocks, and rub the tinder against the rocks. Their fingers turn the tinder, making it fine and light.
Wood's legs walk to the forest. She comes back with a bundle of sticks, of wood. That is what she does. That is her name. She piles the sticks on the ground.
The hands of the others push the tinder into the middle of the pile of wood.
Working closely, the people jostle each other. They are hot from the walk. Their bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger, irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives. Their ancestors' hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Fire waits while they work.
He sees himself.
He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this other's face. The adults' huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push him out of the way.
A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.
... The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.
Fire's hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.
People laugh and hoot at the fire.
Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.
## _E mma Stoney_
The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural land beyond showing as patches of grayish green and brown. On the eastern horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon rising, almost full, its small gray face peering back at the sun's harsh glare.
Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.
Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten percent of the time on his two spaceflights throwing up.
Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon to left. As they headed toward the interior of the continent, the land turned brown, parched, flat.
"What a shithole," Malenfant said, his voice a whisper over the jet's roar. "Africa. Cradle of mankind my ass."
"Malenfant—"
He hurled the T-38 forward with a powerful afterburner surge.
Within seconds they had reached 45,000 feet and had gone through a bone-shaking Mach 1. The vibrations damped away and the noise of the jets dwindled—for, of course, they were outstripping most of the sound they made—and the plane seemed to hang in shining stillness.
Emma, as she had before, felt a surge of exhilaration. It was at such paradoxical moments of stillness and speed that she felt closest to Malenfant.
But Malenfant was consumed by his gripes.
"Two years. I can't fucking believe it. Two years of training, two years of meetings and planning sessions, and paddling around in hydro labs and spinning around in centrifuges. All of it for nothing."
"Come on, Malenfant. It's not the end of the world. It's not as if Station work was ever such a prize anyhow. _Looking at stars, pissing in jars_. That's what you used to say—"
"Nobody was flying to fucking Mars. Station was all that was available, so I took it. Two flights, two lousy flights. I never even got to command a mission, for Christ's sake."
"You got washed out this time. That doesn't mean you won't fly again. A lot of crew are flying past your age." That was true, of course, partly because NASA was having such difficulty finding willing applicants from younger generations.
But Malenfant growled, "It's that asshole Bridges. He even called me into the JSC director's office to _explain_ the shafting. That fucking horse holder has always had it in for me. This will be the excuse he needs to send me to purgatory."
Emma knew who he meant. Joe Bridges was the director of flight operations—in effect, in NASA's Byzantine, smothering internal bureaucracy, in charge of astronaut selection for missions.
Malenfant was still muttering. "You know what Bridges offered me? ASP."
Emma riffled through her mental file of NASA acronyms. ASP: Astronaut Support Personnel, a nonflying astronaut assigned to support the crew of a mission.
"I'd have been point man on STS-194." Malenfant spat. "The Caped Crusader. Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole into _my_ seat on the flight deck."
"I gather you didn't take the job," Emma said dryly.
"I took it okay," he snapped. "I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil-pusher's fat ass."
"Oh, Malenfant." She sighed.
She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to-ceiling office window with its view of the parklike JSC campus, complete with the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crash-landed beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for too many eager crewpersons, so—in what seemed to Emma his own very small world—Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.
She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat, the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role; perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in NASA's sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.
Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long, complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high-tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization's supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.
But to Malenfant—Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human behavior, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy, barely engaged with the complexities of the world—to Malenfant, Joe Bridges, controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me, she thought) could be nothing but a monster.
She stared out the window at the baked African plain. It was huge and ancient, she thought, a place that would endure all but unchanged long after the little white moth that buzzed over it today was corroded to dust, long after the participants in their tiny domestic drama were moldering bones.
Now she heard a whisper from the ground-to-air radio. It sounded like Bill London, good old bullshitter Bill from Annapolis, with some garbled report about UFOs over central Africa.
The plane veered to the right, and the rising sun wheeled around the cockpit, sparking from scuffs in the Plexiglas around her.
"Let's go UFO hunting," Malenfant snapped. "We got nothing better to do today, right?"
She wasn't about to argue; as so often in her relationship with Malenfant, she was, literally, powerless.
## _F ire_
Stone and Blue put branches into the fire. Leaves and twigs burn. Stone and Blue pull out the burning branches. Their legs carry them into the wood. Small animals squeal and run before the fire. Stone and Blue pursue, their eyes darting, their hands hurling rocks and bits of wood.
Fire's hands are very red and raw.
Dig comes to him. Water is in her mouth. The water spills on his hands. The water is cool. Dig has leaves. Her hands rub them on his burns.
Fire has no name. Sing is huge and smiling. Sing's hands rub his palms with leaves.
Fire has his name again. It is Dig who tends his burned hands, smiling.
"Blue light!" he shouts, suddenly.
Dig looks at him. Her eyes narrow. She tends his hands.
Fire's hand reaches out. It cups one conical breast. The breast is hot in his hand.
The fire is hot in his hand. A captured bat is hot in his hand.
His member does not rise. Dig tends his hands.
Blue and Stone return. Their hands carry rabbits. The rabbits are skinned. There is blood on the mouths of the men. The rabbits fall to the ground.
The children with no names fall on the rabbits. They jabber, snapping at each other. The children's small faces are bloody. The adults push the children aside, and growl and jostle over the rabbits. All the people work at the meat, stealing it from each other.
Grass and Cold throw some pieces of meat on the fire. The meat sizzles. Their hands pick out the meat. Their mouths chew the burned meat, swallowing some. Fire sees that their mouths want to swallow all the meat. But their fingers take meat from their mouths. They put the meat in the mouths of their babies with no names.
Sing groans. She is on the ground near the branches. Her nose can smell the food. Her hands can't reach it.
Fire is eating a twisted-off rabbit leg. His hands pluck meat off it, and put the meat in Sing's mouth.
Her head turns. Her mouth chews. Her eyes are closed. She chokes. Her mouth spits out meat.
Fire's hands pop the chewed meat in his mouth.
Sing is shivering.
Fire thinks of a bower.
There are branches here, on the ground. He has forgotten that they were used to transport Sing. He keeps thinking of the bower.
He makes his hands lay the branches on the ground. He thinks of twigs and grass and leaves. He gathers them, thinking of the bower. He makes his hands pile everything up on the branches.
He makes his arms pick up Sing.
It is sunny. He has no name. Sing is carrying Fire. Sing is large, Fire small.
It is dark. His name is Fire. Fire is carrying Sing. Fire is large, Sing shrunken.
He lays her on the crude bower. She sinks into the soft leaves and grass. The branches roll away. The grass scatters. Sing falls into the dirt, with a gasp.
Fire hoots and howls, kicking at the branches.
One of the branches is lodged against a rock. It did not roll away.
Fire makes his hands gather the branches again. He puts the branches down alongside the rock he found. His hands pile up more grass. At last he lowers Sing on the bower. The branches are trapped by the rocks. They do not roll away.
Sing sighs.
Every day he makes a bower for Sing. Every day he forgets how he did it before. Every day he has to invent a way to fix it, from scratch. Some days he doesn't manage it at all, and Sing has to sleep on the dirt, where insects bite her.
She sings. Her voice is soft and broken. Fire listens. He has forgotten the rocks and the branches.
She stops singing. She sleeps.
People are sleeping. People are huddled around the children. People are coupling. People are making water. People are making dung. People are chattering, for comfort, through rivalry.
Beyond the glow of the flames, the sky is dark. The land is gone. Something howls. It is far away.
Dig is sleeping near the fire.
Fire's legs walk to her. His hand touches her shoulder. She rolls on her back. She opens her eyes and looks at him.
His member is stiff.
"Hoo! Fire!"
It is Loud. He is on the ground. Fire's eyes had not seen him. Fire's eyes had seen only Dig.
Loud's hands throw red dirt into Fire's eyes. Fire blinks and sneezes and hoots.
Loud has crawled to Dig. His hands paw at her. His tongue is out, his member hard. Her hands are pushing him away. She is laughing.
Fire's hands grab Loud's shoulders. Loud falls off Dig and lands on his back. He pulls Fire to the ground and they roll. Fire feels hot gritty dirt cling to his back.
Stone roars. His scar shines in the fire light. His filth-grimed foot separates them with a shove. His axe clouts Loud on the head. Loud howls and scuttles away.
Stone's axe swings for Fire. Fire ducks and scrambles back.
Stone grunts. He moves to Dig. Stone's big hand reaches down to her, and flips her onto her belly.
Dig gasps. She pulls her legs beneath her. Fire hears the scrape of her skin on red dust.
Stone kneels. His hands push her legs apart. She cries out. He reaches forward. His hands cup her breasts. His member enters her. His hands clutch her shoulders, and his flabby hips thrust and thrust.
He gives a strangled cry. His back straightens. He shudders.
He pulls back and stands up. His member is bruised purple and moist. He turns. He kicks Fire in the thigh. Fire yells and doubles over.
Dig is on the ground, her hands tucked between her legs. She is curled up.
Loud is gone.
Fire's legs walk.
Fire stops.
Dig is far. The fire is far. He is in a mouth of darkness.
Eyes watch him.
He makes his legs walk him back to the fire.
Sing is lying on a bower. He has forgotten he made the bower. Her eyes watch him. Her arm lifts.
He kneels. His face rests on her chest. The bower rustles. Sing gasps.
Her hand runs over his belly. Her hand finds his member. It is painfully swollen. Her hand closes around it. He shudders.
She sings.
He sleeps.
## _E mma Stoney_
If this really was the close of Malenfant's career at NASA, Emma thought, it could be a good thing.
She wasn't the type of foolish ground-bound spouse who palpitated every moment Malenfant was in orbit (although she hadn't been able to calm her stomach during those searing moments of launch, as the Shuttle passed through one of NASA's "nonsurvivable windows" after another...). No, the sacrifices she had made went broader and deeper than that.
It had started as far back as the moment when, as a new arrival at the Naval Academy, he had broken his hometown girl's seventeen-year-old heart with a letter saying that he thought they should break off their relationship. Now he was at Annapolis, he had written, he wanted to devote himself "like a monk" to his studies. Well, that had lasted all of six months before he had started to pursue her again, with letters and calls, trying to win her back.
That letter had, in retrospect, set the course of their lives for three decades. But maybe that course was now coming to an end.
"You know," she said dreamily, "maybe if it is ending, it's fitting it should be like this. In the air, I mean. Do you remember that flight to San Francisco? You had just got accepted by the Astronaut Office..."
It had been Malenfant's third time trying to join the astronaut corps, after he had applied to the recruitment rounds of 1988—when he wasn't even granted an interview—and 1990. Finally in 1992, aged thirty-two, he had gotten an interview at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and had gone back to his base in San Diego.
At last the Astronaut Office had called him. But he was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement, to be made the next day. Naturally he had kept the secret strictly, even from Emma.
So the next day they had boarded a plane for San Francisco, where they were going to spend a long weekend with friends of Emma's (Malenfant tended not to have the type of friends you could spend weekends with, not if you wanted to come home with your liver). Malenfant had given the pilot the NASA press release. Just after they got to cruise altitude, the pilot called Emma's name: _Would Emma Malenfant please identify herself? Would you please stand up?_
It had taken Emma a moment to realize she was being called, for she used her maiden name, Stoney, in business and her personal life, everywhere except the closed world of the Navy. Baffled—and wary of Malenfant's expressionless stillness—she had unbuckled her seat belt and stood up.
_I hope you like barbecue, Mrs. Malenfant_ , said the pilot, _because I have a press release here that says you are going to Houston, Texas. Commander ReidMalenfant, US Navy, has been selected to be a part of the 1992 NASA astronaut class_.
"... And everybody on the plane started whooping, just as if you were John Glenn himself, and the stewards brought us those dumb little plastic bottles of champagne. Do you remember, Malenfant?" She laughed. "But you couldn't drink because you were doubled over with airsickness."
Malenfant grunted sourly. "It starts in the air, so it finishes in the air. Is that what you think?"
"It does have a certain symmetry... Maybe this isn't the end, but the beginning of something new. Right? We could be at the start of a great new adventure together. Who knows?"
She could see how the set of his shoulders was unchanged.
She sighed. Give it time, Emma. "All right, Malenfant. What UFOs?"
"Tanzania. Some kind of sighting over the Olduvai Gorge, according to Bill."
"Olduvai? Where the human fossils come from?"
"I don't know. What does that matter? It sounds more authentic than most. The local air forces are scrambling spotter planes: Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique."
None of those names were too reassuring to Emma. "Malenfant, are you sure we should get caught up in that? We don't want some trigger-happy Tanzanian flyboy to mistake us for Eetie."
He barked laughter. "Come on, Emma. You're showing your prejudice. We trained half those guys and sold the planes to the other half. And they're only spotters. Bill is informing them we're coming. There's no threat. And, who knows? Maybe we'll get to be involved in first contact."
Under his veneer of cynicism she sensed an edge of genuine excitement. From out of the blue, here was another adventure for Reid Malenfant, hero astronaut. Another adventure that had nothing to do with her.
I was wrong, she thought. I'm never going to get him back, no matter what happens at NASA. But then I never had him anyhow.
Losing sympathy for him, she snapped, "You really told Joe Bridges to shove his job?"
"Sweetest moment of my life."
"Oh, Malenfant. Don't you know how it works yet? If you took your punishment, if you sweated out your time, you'd be back in rotation for the next assignment, or the one after that."
"Bullshit."
"It's the way of the world. I've had to go through it, in my own way. Everybody has. Everybody who wants to get on in the real world, with real people, anyhow. Everybody but you, the great hero."
"You sound like you're writing my appraisal," he said, a little ruefully. "Anyhow, ass-kissing wouldn't have helped. It was the Russians, that fucking Grand Medical Commission of theirs."
"The _Russians_ scrubbed you?"
"It was when I was in Star City."
Star City, the Russian military base thirty miles outside Moscow that served as the cosmonauts' training center.
"Malenfant, you got back from there a month ago. You never thought to tell me about it?"
Through two layers of Plexiglas, she could see him shrug. "I was appealing the decision. I didn't see the point of troubling you. Hell, Emma, I thought I would win. I _knew_ I would. I thought they couldn't scrub me."
Far off, to left and right, she saw contrails and glittering darts. Fighter planes, perhaps, converging on the strange anomaly sighted over Olduvai, whatever it was, if it existed at all.
She felt an odd frisson of anticipation.
"It took them a morning," Malenfant said. "They brought in a dozen Russian doctors to probe at my every damn orifice. A bunch of snowy-haired old farts with pubic hair growing out of their noses, with _no_ experience of space medicine. They ought to have no jurisdiction over the way we run our program."
"It's their program too," she said quietly. "What did they say?"
"One of them pulled me up over my shoulder." Malenfant suffered from a nerve palsy behind his right shoulder, the relic of an ancient football injury, a condition NASA had long ago signed off on. "Well, our guys gave them shit. But the fossil stood his ground.
"Then they took me into the Commission itself. I was sat on a stage with the guy who was going to be my judge, in front of an auditorium full of white-haired Russian doctors, and two NASA guys who were as mad as hell, like me. But the old asshole from the surgical group got up and said my shoulder was a 'disqualifying condition' that needed further tests, and our guys said I wasn't going to do that, and so the Russians said I was disqualified anyhow..."
Emma frowned, trying to puzzle it out. It sounded like a pretext to her; Malenfant had flown twice to the Station before after all, and the Russians must have known all about his shoulder, along with everything else about him. Why should it suddenly become a mission-threatening disability now?
Malenfant put the little jet through a gut-wrenching turn so tight she thought she heard the hull creak. "I knew we'd appeal," he said. "Those two NASA surgeons were livid, I'm telling you. They said they'd pass it all the way up the line, I should just get on with my training as if I was planning to fly, they'd clear me through. Hell, I believed them. But it didn't happen. When it got to Bridges—"
"Was your shoulder the only thing the Russians objected to?"
He hesitated.
"Malenfant?"
"No," he said reluctantly. "They smuggled shrinks' remarks into their final report to NASA. They should have presented them at the Commission... Hey, can you see something? Look, right on the horizon."
She peered into the north. The horizon was a band of dusty, mistladen air, gray between brown earth and blue sky, precisely curving. Was something there?—a spark of powder blue, a hint of a circle, like a lens flare?
But the day was bright, dazzling now the sun was climbing higher, and her eyes filled with water.
She sat back in her seat, and her various harnesses and buckles rustled and clinked around her, loud in the tiny cockpit. "What did it say, Malenfant? The Russian psych report."
He growled, " 'Peculiarities.' "
"What kind of peculiarities?"
"In my relations with the rest of the crew. They gave an example about how I was in the middle of some task and some Russkie came over nagging about how we were scheduled to do something else. Well, I nodded politely, and carried right on with what I was doing, until I was done..."
Now she started to understand. The Russians, who rightly believed they were still far ahead of the west in the psychology of the peculiarly cramped conditions of space travel, placed great collectivist emphasis on teamwork and sacrifice. They would not warm to a driven, somewhat obsessive loner-perfectionist like Malenfant.
"I should have socialized with the assholes," he said now. "I should have gone to the cosmonauts' cold-water apartments, and drunk their crummy vodka, and pressed the flesh with the guys on the gate."
She laughed gently. "Malenfant, you don't even socialize at NASA."
"My nature got me where I am now."
Yeah, washed out, she thought brutally. "But maybe it's not the nature you need for long-duration space missions. I guess not everybody forgives you the way I do."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
She ignored the question. "So the psych report is the real reason they grounded you. The shoulder was just an excuse."
"The Russians must have known the psych report would never stand up to scrutiny. If Joe Bridges had got his thumb out of his ass—"
"Oh, Malenfant, don't you see? They were giving you cover. If you're going to be grounded, do you want it to be because of your shoulder, or your personality? Think about it. They were trying to help you. They all were."
"That kind of help I can live without." Again he wrenched the plane through a savage snap roll.
Her helmet clattered against the Plexiglas, as varying acceleration tore at her stomach, and the brown African plain strobed around her. She was cocooned in the physical expression of his anger.
She glared at the back of Malenfant's helmeted head, which cast dazzling highlights from the African sun, with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. Well, that was Malenfant for you.
And because she was staring so hard at Malenfant she missed seeing the artifact until it was almost upon them.
Malenfant peeled away suddenly. Once again she glimpsed pale blue-white sky, dusty brown ground, shafts of glowering sunlight—and an arc, a fragment of a perfect circle, like a rainbow, but glowing a clear cerulean blue. Then it fell out of her vision.
"Malenfant—what was that?"
"Damned if I know." His voice was flat. Suddenly he was concentrating on his flying. The slaved controls in front of her jerked this way and that; she felt remote buffeting, some kind of turbulence perhaps, smoothed out by Malenfant's skillful handling.
He pulled the jet through another smooth curve, and sky and ground swam around her once more.
And he said, "Holy shit."
There was a circle in the sky.
It was facing them full on. It was a wheel of powder blue, like a hoop of the finest ribbon. It looked the size of a dinner plate held before her face—but of course it must be much larger and more remote than that.
Emma saw this beyond Malenfant's head and shoulders and the slim white fuselage. The jet's needle nose pointed straight at the center of the ring, so that the wheel framed her field of view with perfect symmetry, like some unlikely optical flare. Its very perfection and symmetry made it seem unreal. She had no idea of its scale—it would seem so close it must be hanging off the plane's nose, then something in her head would flip the other way and it would appear vast and distant, like a rainbow. She found it physically difficult to study it, as if it were an optical illusion, deliberately baffling; her eyes kept sliding away from it, evading it.
It's beyond my comprehension, she thought. Literally. Evolution has not prepared me for giant wheels suspended in the air.
## _F ire_
Water runs down his face.
He is lying on his back. The sky is flat and gray.
Rain falls. His ears hear it tapping on the ground. His eyes see the drops fall toward his face. They are fat and slow. Some of them fall on his face.
Water runs in his eyes. It stings. He sits up.
Fire is sitting on the ground. He is wet. His eyes hurt. His burned hands hurt.
He stands up. His legs walk him toward the trees.
People walk, run, stumble over muddy ground, adults and children. They move in silence, in isolation. Nobody is calling, nobody helping. They are cold and they hurt. They have each forgotten the other people, all save the mothers with their babies with no names. The mothers' arms carry the infants, sheltering them.
Fire reaches the trees.
The wind changes. His nose smells ash.
He remembers the fire. His legs run back.
The fire is out, drowned by the rain. The back of Fire's head hurts in anticipation of Stone's punishing axe.
Sing is calling. She is lying on a bower. The bower is falling apart, the leaves damp and shrivelled.
Loud is walking back to Sing.
Sing screams. Fire spins and crouches.
There is a Mouth. It is bright blue. The Mouth is skimming over the shining grass. The Mouth is approaching Fire, gaping wide.
Cats have mouths. A cat's mouth will take a person's head. This Mouth would take a whole person, standing straight. It is coming toward him, this Mouth with no body, this huge Mouth, widening.
It makes no noise. The rain hisses on the grass.
Fire screams. Fire's legs carry him off into the forest.
Still the Mouth comes. It towers into the sky.
Sing is at its base. Her arms push at the bower. Her legs can't stand up. She screams again.
Loud runs. His hands are throwing dirt at the Mouth.
The Mouth scoops him up.
There is a flash of light. Fire can see nothing but blue.
Loud screams.
## _E mma Stoney_
"Malenfant—you see it, too, right?"
He laughed. "It ain't no scratch in your contacts, Emma." He seemed to be testing the controls. Experimentally he veered away to the right. The ride got a lot more rocky.
The blue circle stayed right where it was, hanging in the African sky. No optical effect, then. This was _real_ , as real as this plane. But it hung in the air without any apparent means of support. And still she had no real sense of its scale.
But now she saw a contrail scraped across the air before the wheel, a tiny silver moth flying across its diameter. The moth was a plane, at least as big as their own.
"Damn thing must be a half-mile across," Malenfant growled. "A half-mile across, and hovering in the air eight miles high—"
"How appropriate."
"My God, it's the real thing," Malenfant said. "The UFO-nauts must be going crazy." She heard the grin in his voice. "Everything will be different now."
Now she made out more planes drawn up from the dusty ground below, passing before the artifact—if artifact it was. One of them looked like a fragile private jet, a Lear maybe, surely climbing well beyond its approved altitude.
Malenfant continued his turn. The artifact slid out of sight.
Dusty land wheeled beneath her. She was high above a gorge, cut deeply into a baked plain, perhaps thirty or forty miles long. Perhaps it was Olduvai itself, the miraculous gorge that cut through million-year strata of human history, the gorge that had yielded the relics of one ancient hominid form after another to the archaeologists' patient inspection.
How strange, she thought. Why here? If this wheel in the sky really is what it appears to be, an extraordinary alien artifact, if this is a first contact of a bewilderingly unexpected type (and what else could it be?) then _why here_ , high above the cradle of mankind itself? Why should this gouge into humanity's deepest past collide with this most unimaginable of futures?
The plane dropped abruptly. For a heartbeat Emma was weightless. Then the plane slammed into the bottom of an air pocket and she was shoved hard into her seat.
"Sorry," Malenfant muttered. "The turbulence is getting worse." The slaved controls worked before her. The plane soared and banked.
She suddenly wished she were on the ground, perhaps holed up in her well-equipped hotel room back in Joburg. The world must be going crazy over this. She would have every softscreen in the room turned to the coverage, filling her ears and eyes with a babble of instant commentary. Here, in this bubble of Plexiglas, she felt cut off.
But this is the real experience, she thought. I am here by the sheerest chance, at the moment when this vision appeared in the sky like the Virgin Mary over Lourdes, and yet I pine for my on-line womb. Well, I'm a woman of my time.
The artifact settled into place before Emma once more, vast, enigmatic, slowly approaching. Planes crisscrossed before it, puny. Emma spotted that small private jet, lumbering through the air so much more slowly than the military vehicles around it. She wondered if anybody had tried to make contact with the wheel yet—or if it had been fired on.
"Holy shit," said Malenfant. "Do you see that?"
"What?"
He lifted his arm and pointed; she could see the gesture through the Plexiglas blisters that encased them. "There. Near the bottom of the ring."
It looked like a very fine dark rain falling out of the ring, like a hail of iron filings.
Malenfant lifted small binoculars. "People," he said bluntly. He lowered the binoculars. "Tall, skinny, naked people."
She couldn't integrate the information. _People_ —thrust naked into the air eight miles high, to fall, presumably, all the way to the welcoming gorge of bones... Why? Where were they from?
"Can they be saved?"
Malenfant just laughed.
The plane buffeted again. As they approached the wheel the turbulence was growing stronger. It seemed to Emma that the air at the center of the ring was significantly disturbed; she made out concentric streaks of mist and dust there, almost like a sideways-on storm, neatly framed by the wheel's electric blue frame.
And now that lumbering business-type jet reached dead center of the artifact. It twisted once, twice, then crumpled like a paper cup in an angry fist. Glittering fragments began to hail into the ring.
It was over in seconds. There hadn't even been an explosion.
## _F ire_
Wind gusts. Lightning flashes.
There is no Loud.
People come spewing out of the Mouth. They fall to the grass.
The rain falls steadily on the grass, hissing.
## _E mma Stoney_
"Like it got sucked in," Malenfant said with grim fascination. "Maybe the wheel is a teleporter, drawing out our atmosphere." The plane juddered again, and she could see him wrestling with the stick. "Whatever it is it's making a mess of the air flow."
She could see the other planes, presumably military jets, pulling back to more cautious orbits. But the T-38 kept right on, battering its way into increasingly disturbed air. Malenfant's shoulders jerked as they hauled at the recalcitrant controls.
"Malenfant, what are you doing?"
"We can handle this. We can get a lot closer yet. Those African guys are half-trained sissies—"
The plane hit another pocket. They fell fifty or a hundred feet before slamming into a floor that felt hard as concrete.
Emma could taste blood in her mouth. "Malenfant!"
"Did you bring your Kodak? Come on, Emma. What's life for? This is history."
No, she thought. This is your washout. _That's_ why you are risking your life, and mine, so recklessly.
The artifact loomed larger in the roiling sky ahead of her, so large now that she couldn't see its full circle for the body of the plane. Those iron-filing people continued to rain from the base of the disk, some of them twisting as they fell.
"Makes you think," Malenfant said. "I spend my life struggling to get into space. And on the very day I get washed out of the program, _the very same day_ , space comes to me. Wherever the hell this thing comes from, whatever mother ship orbiting fucking Neptune, you can bet there's going to be a clamor to get out there. Those NASA assholes must be jumping up and down; it's their best day since Neil and Buzz. At last we've got someplace to go—but whoever they send, it isn't going to be _me_. Makes you laugh, doesn't it? If Mohammed can't get to the mountain..."
She closed her hand on the stick before her, letting it pull her passively to and fro. What if she grabbed the stick hard, yanked it to the left or the right? Could she take over the plane? And then what? "Malenfant, I'm scared."
"Of the UFO?"
"No. Of you."
"Just a little closer," he said, his voice a thin crackle over the intercom. "I won't let you come to any harm, Emma."
Suddenly she screamed. "... Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!"
## _R eid Malenfant_
It was a Moon, but not _the_ Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.
It was a day of strange lights in the sky. But it was a sky that was forever barred to him.
The plane was flung sideways.
It was like a barrel roll. Suddenly his head was jammed into his shoulders and his vision tunnelled, worse than any eyeballs-back launch he had ever endured—and harder, much harder, than he would have wanted to put Emma through.
His systems went dead: softscreens, the clunky old dials, even the hiss of the comms, everything. He wrestled with the stick, but got no response; the plane was just falling through an angry sky, helpless as an autumn leaf.
The rate of roll increased, and the Gs just piled on. He knew he was already close to blacking out; perhaps Emma had succumbed already, and soon after that the damn plane was going to break up.
With difficulty he readied the ejection controls. "Emma! Remember the drill!" But she couldn't hear, of course.
... Just for a second, the panels flickered back to life. He felt the stick jerk, the controls bite.
It was a chance to regain control.
He didn't take it.
Then the moment was gone, and he was committed.
He felt exuberant, almost exhilarated, like the feeling when the solid boosters cut in during a Shuttle launch, like he was on a roller-coaster ride he couldn't get off.
But the plane plummeted on toward the sky wheel, rolling, creaking. The transient mood passed, and fear clamped down on his guts once more.
He bent his head, found the ejection handle, pulled it. The plane shuddered as Emma's canopy was blown away, then gave another kick as her seat hurled her clear.
And now his own canopy disappeared. The wind slammed at him, Earth and sky wheeling around, and all of it was suddenly, horribly real.
He felt a punch in the back. He was hurled upward like a toy and sent tumbling in the bright air, just like one of the strange iron-filing people, shocked by the sudden silence.
Pain bit savagely at his right arm. He saw that his flight-suit sleeve and a great swathe of skin had been sheared away, leaving bloody flesh. Must have snagged it on the rim of the cockpit on the way out.
Something was flopping in the air before him. It was his seat. He still had hold of the ejection handle, connected to the seat by a cable.
He knew he had to let go of the handle, or else it might foul his chute. Yet he couldn't. The seat was an island in this huge sky; without it he would be alone. It made no sense, but there it was.
At last, apparently without his volition, his hand loosened. The handle was jerked out of his grip, painfully hard.
Something huge grabbed his back, knocking all the air out of him again. Then he was dangling. He looked up and saw his chute open reassuringly above him, a distant roof of fully blossomed orange and white silk.
But the thin air buffeted him, and he was swaying alarmingly, a human pendulum, and at the bottom of each swing G forces hauled on his entrails. He was having trouble breathing; his chest labored. He pulled a green toggle to release his emergency oxygen.
The artifact hung above him, receding as he fell.
He had been flung west of it, he saw now, and it was closing up to a perfect oval, like a schoolroom demonstration of a planetary orbit. There was no sign of the other planes. Even the T-38 seemed to have vanished completely, save for a few drifting bits of light wreckage, a glimmer that must have been a shard of a Plexiglas canopy.
And he saw another chute. Half open. Hanging before the closing maw of the artifact like a speck of food before the mouth of some vast fish.
Emma, of course: she had ejected a half-second before Malenfant, so that she had found herself that much closer to the artifact than he had been.
And now she was being drawn in by the buffeting air currents.
He screamed, "Emma!" He twisted and wriggled, but there was nothing he could do.
Her chute fell into the portal. There was a flash of electric-blue light. And she was gone.
"Emma! _Emma!_ "
... Something fell past him, not ten yards away. It was a man: tall and lithe like a basketball player, stark naked. He was black, and under tight curls, his skull was as flat as a board. His mouth was working, gasping like a fish's. His gaze locked with Malenfant's, just for a heartbeat. Malenfant read astonishment beyond shock.
Then the man was gone, on his way to his own destiny in the ancient lands beneath.
A new barrage of turbulent air slammed into Malenfant. He rocked viciously. Nursing his damaged arm he fought the chute, fought to keep it stable—fought for his life, fought for the chance to live through this day, to find Emma.
As he spun, he glimpsed that new Red Moon, a baleful eye gazing down on his tiny struggles.
## _F ire_
The Mouth is gone.
The new people are nearby. The smallest is a child. They are all yelling. Their skin is bright, yellow-brown and blue. They are trying to stand up, but they stumble backwards.
Fire's legs walk forward. He walks over the soaked fireplace. The ashes are still hot. He yelps and his feet lift up, off the ashes.
Sing is nearby, on her branches, weeping.
Fire's eyes see Dig. They can't see Loud. Fire calls out. "Loud, Loud, Fire!" But Loud is gone.
Shrugging, the rain running down his back, he turns away. Fire will never think of his brother again.
A new person is coming toward him. This stranger has blue and brown skin on his body. Fire can't see his member. It is a woman. But he can't see breasts. It is a man.
The new person holds out empty hands. _"Please, can you help us? Do you know what happened to us? What place is this?"_
Fire hears: _"Help. What. Us. What."_ The voice is deep. It is a man.
Stone is standing beside Fire. "Nutcracker-man," he says softly.
"No," says Fire.
"Elf-man."
"No."
_"Please."_ The new person steps forward. _"I have a wife and child. Do you speak English? My wife is hurt. We need shelter. Is there a road near here, a phone we could use—"_
Stone's axe slams into the top of the new person's head. The head cracks open. Gray and red stuff splashes out.
The new person's eyes look at Fire. He shudders. He falls backwards.
Stone grunts. "Nutcracker-man." Stone slices off the new person's cheek and crams it into his mouth.
Fire hoots at the kill. Nutcracker-folk fight hard. This kill was easy.
Other people's legs bring them running from the trees to join Stone at his feast. They have forgotten the rain. They get wet again. But they are all drawn by the scent of the fresh meat.
The new person's skin yields easily to Stone's axe. It comes off in a sheet. Fire's fingers touch the sloughed skin. It is blue and brown, thick and dense. Fire is confused. It is skin. It is not skin.
The flesh under the strange skin is white. Stone's axe cuts into it easily. The axe butchers the body rapidly and expertly, an unthinking skill honed across a million years.
The other new people are screaming.
Fire had forgotten them. He straightens up. He has a chunk of flesh in his mouth. His teeth gnaw at it, while his hands pull on it.
The new people's legs are trying to run away. But the new people fall easily, as if they are weak or sick.
Grass and Cold catch the new people. They push them to Stone. One of the new people is bleeding from her head and staggering. Its arms are clutching the small one. When it screams its voice is high. It is a woman.
The other new person has no small one. It has blue skin all over its body. _"We don't mean you any harm. Please. My name is Emma Stoney."_ Its voice is high. It is a woman.
Shoot's hand grabs the hair of this one, pulls her head back.
The new woman's elbow rams into Shoot's belly. _"Get your hands off of me!"_ Shoot doubles over, gasping.
The men laugh at the women fighting.
The woman with the child speaks to Stone. _"Please. We're American citizens. My name is Sally Mayer. I—my husband... I know you can speak English. We heard you. Look, we can pay. American dollars."_ She holds out something green. Handfuls of leaves. Not leaves. Her arm is bleeding, he sees.
_I. You_. That is what Fire hears.
The woman has fallen silent. Her eyes are staring at the top of Stone's head. Her mouth is open.
The top of the woman's head is swollen.
Fire makes his hand run over his own brow. He feels thick eye ridges. He feels a sloping brow. He feels the small flat crown behind his brow. His fingers find a fly trapped in his greasy hair. He pulls it out. He pops it into his mouth.
Stone studies the new woman. Stone's fingers squeeze the woman's dug. It is large and soft, under its skin of green and brown. The woman yelps and backs away. The child, eyes wide, cringes from Stone's bloody hand.
Fire laughs. Stone will mount the woman. Stone will eat the woman.
_"No."_
The other new woman steps forward. Her hands pull the other woman behind her. _"We are like you. Look! We are people. We are not meat."_ She points to the child.
The child has no hair on his face. The child has wide round eyes. The child has a nose.
Nutcracker-folk have hair on their faces. Nutcracker-folk have no noses. Nutcracker-folk have nostrils flat against their faces.
Running-folk have no hair on their faces. They have round eyes. They have noses.
Stone's axe rises.
Fire takes a step forward. He is afraid of Stone and his axe. But he makes his hand grab Stone's arm.
"People," Fire says.
_"Yes."_ The new woman nods. _"Yes, that's right. We're people."_
Slowly, Stone's arm lowers.
The smell of meat is strong. One by one the people drift away from the new people, and cluster around the corpse.
Fire is left alone, watching the new people.
The fat new person is shaking, as if cold. Now she falls to the ground. The other puts the child down, and cradles the fat one's head on her lap.
The other's face lifts up to Fire. _"My name is Emma. Em-ma. Do you understand?"_
Fire carries the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.
Emma is her name. Emma is what she does. He doesn't know what _Em-ma_ is.
He says, "Em-ma."
_"Emma. Yes. Good. Please—will you help us? We need water. Do you have any water?"_
His eye spots something. Something moves on a branch on the ground nearby. He has forgotten that he used these branches to make a bower.
His hand whips out and grabs. His hand opens, revealing a caterpillar, fat and juicy. He did not have to think about catching it. It is just here. He pops it in his mouth.
_"Please."_
He looks down at the new people. Again he had forgotten they were there. "Em-ma." The caterpillar wriggles on his tongue. His hand pulls it out of his mouth. He remembers how he caught it, a sharp shard of recent memory.
He makes his hand hold out the caterpillar.
Emma's eyes stare at it. It is wet from his spit. Her hand reaches out and takes it.
The caterpillar is in her mouth. She chews. He hears it crunch. She swallows, hard. _"Good. Thank you."_
Fire's nose can smell meat more strongly now. Stone's axe has cracked the rib cage. Whatever is in the new person's belly may be good to eat.
The other new woman wakes up. Her eyes look at the corpse, at what the people are doing there. She screams. Emma's hand clamps over her mouth. The woman struggles.
The people crowd close around the corpse. Fire joins them.
He has forgotten the new people.
# _PART TWO_
# **Red Moon**
#
## _E mma Stoney:_
Her chest hurt. Every time she took a breath she was gasping and dragging, as if she had been running too far, or as if she was high on a mountainside.
That was the first thing Emma noticed.
The second thing was the dreaminess of moving here.
When she walked—even on the slippery grass, encumbered by her clumsy flight suit—she felt light, buoyant. But she kept tripping up. It was easy to walk slowly, but every time she tried to move at what seemed a normal pace she stumbled, as if about to take off. Eventually she evolved a kind of half-jog, somewhere between walking and running.
Also she was strong here. When she struggled to drag the woman—Sally?—out of the rain and into the comparative shelter of the trees, with the crying kid at her heels, she felt powerful, able to lift well above her usual limit.
The forest was dense, gloomy. The trees seemed to be conifers—impossibly tall, towering high above her, making a roof of green—but here and there she saw ferns, huge ancient broad-leafed plants. The forest canopy gave them some shelter, but still great fat droplets of water came shimmering down on them. When the droplets hit her flesh they clung—and they _stung_. She noticed how shrivelled and etiolated many of the trees' leaves looked. Acid rain?...
The forest seemed strangely quiet. No birdsong, she thought. Come to think of it she hadn't seen a bird in the entire time she'd been here.
The flat-head people—hominids, whatever—did not follow her into the forest, and as their hooting calls receded she felt vaguely reassured. But that was outweighed by a growing unease, for it was very dark here in the woods. The kid seemed to feel that, too, for he went very quiet, his eyes round.
But then, she thought resentfully, she was disoriented, spooked, utterly bewildered anyhow—she had just been through a plane wreck, for God's sake, and then hurled through time and space to wherever the hell—and being scared in a forest was scarcely much different from being scared on the open plain.
... _What_ forest? What plain? What is this place? _Where am I?_
Too much strangeness: Panic brushed her mind.
But the blood continued to pulse from that crude gash on Sally's arm, an injury she had evidently suffered on the way here, from wherever. And the kid sat down on the forest floor and cried right along with his mother, great bubbles of snot blowing out of his nose.
First things first, Emma.
The kid gazed up at her with huge empty eyes. He looked no older than three.
Emma got down on her knees. The kid shrank back from her, and she made an effort to smile. She searched the pockets of her flight suit, seeking a handkerchief, and finding everything but. At last she dug into a waist pocket of Sally's jacket—she was wearing what looked like designer safari gear, a khaki jacket and pants—and found a paper tissue.
"Blow," she commanded.
With his nose wiped, the boy seemed a bit calmer.
"What's your name?"
"Maxie." His tiny voice was scale-model Bostonian.
"Okay, Maxie. My name's Emma. I need you to be brave now. We have to help your mom. Okay?"
He nodded.
She dug through her suit pockets. She found a flat plastic box. It turned out to contain a rudimentary first aid kit: scissors, plasters, safety pins, dressings, bandages, medical tape, salves, and creams.
With the awkward little scissors she cut back Sally's sleeve, exposing the wound. It didn't look so bad: just a gash, fairly clean-edged, a couple of inches long. She wiped away the blood with a gauze pad. She could see no foreign objects in there, and the bleeding seemed mostly to have stopped. She used antiseptic salve to clean up, then pressed a fresh gauze pad over the wound. She wrapped the lower arm in a bandage, and taped it together.
... Was that right? How was she supposed to know? Think, damn it. She summoned up her scratchy medical knowledge, derived from what she had picked up secondhand from Malenfant's training—not that he'd ever told her much—and books and TV shows and movies... She pressed Sally's fingernail hard enough to turn it white. When she released it, the nail quickly regained its color. Good; that must mean the bandage wasn't too tight.
Now she propped the injured arm up in the air. With her free hand she packed up what was left of her first aid kit. She had already used one of only two bandages, half-emptied her only bottle of salve... If they were going to survive here, she would have to ration this stuff.
Or else, she thought grimly, learn to live like those nude hominids out there.
She turned to the kid. She wished she had some way to make this experience easier on him. But she couldn't think of a damn thing. "Maxie. I'm going to find something to keep the rain off. I need you to stay right here, with your mom. You understand? And if she wakes up you tell her I'll be right back."
He nodded, eyes fixed on her face.
She ruffled his hair, shaking out some of the water. Then she set off back toward the plain.
She paused at the fringe of the forest.
Most of the hominids were hunched over on themselves, as if catatonic with misery in the rain. One, apparently an old woman, lay flat out on the floor, her mouth open to the rain.
The rest seemed to be working together, loosely. They were upending branches and stacking them against each other, making a rough conical shape. Perhaps they were trying to build a shelter, like a teepee. But the whole project was chaotic, with branches sliding off the pile this way and that, and every so often one of them seemed to forget what she was doing and would simply wander off, letting whatever she was supporting collapse.
At last, to a great hoot of dismay from the workers, the whole erection just fell apart and the branches came clattering down.
The people scratched their flat scalps over the debris. Some of them made half-hearted attempts to lift the branches again, one or two drifted away, others came to see what was going on. At last they started to work together again, lifting the branches and ramming them into the ground.
It wasn't like watching adults work on a project, however unskilled. It was more like watching a bunch of eight-year-olds trying to build a bonfire for the very first time, figuring it out as they went along, with only the dimmest conception of the final goal.
But these hominids, these _people_ , weren't eight-year-olds. They were all adults, all naked, hairless, black. And they had the most beautiful bodies Emma had ever seen, frankly, this side of a movie screen anyhow. They were tall and lean—as tall as basketball players, probably—but much stronger-looking, with an all-around grace that reminded her of decathletes, or maybe Aussie Rules footballers (a baffling, sexy sport she'd tried to follow as a student, long ago).
With broad prominent noses and somewhat rounded chins, they had human-looking faces—human below the eye line, anyhow. Above the eyes was a powerful ridge of bone that gave each of them, even the smallest child, a glowering, hostile look. And above that came a flat forehead and a skull that looked oddly shrunken, as if the top of their heads had somehow been shaved clean off. Their hair was curly, but it was slicked down by the rain, showing the shape of their disturbingly small skulls too clearly.
The bodies of humans, the heads of apes. They spoke in hoots and fragmentary English words. And not one of them looked as if he or she had ever worn a stitch of clothing.
She had never heard of creatures like this. What _were_ these people? Some kind of chimp, or gorilla?—But with bodies like that? And what chimps used English?
What part of Africa had she landed in, exactly?
The rain came down harder still, reminding her she had a job to do.
She made her way out into the open, working across increasingly boggy ground, until she reached her parachute. She had been worried that the hominids might have taken it away, but it lay where it had fallen when she had come tumbling from out of the sky.
She took an armful of cloth and pulled it away from the ground. It came loose of the mud only with difficulty, and it was soaked through. She'd had vague plans of hauling the whole thing into the forest, but that was obviously impractical. She hunted through her pockets until she found a Swiss Army knife, kindly provided by the South African air force. She quickly discovered she had at her disposal a variety of screwdrivers, a can and bottle opener, a wood saw, scissors, a magnifying glass, even a nail file. At last she found a fat, sturdy blade. She decided she would cut loose a piece of cloth perhaps twenty feet square, which would suffice for a temporary shelter. Later, when the rain let up, she would come back and scavenge the rest of the silk.
She began to hack her way through the chute material. But it was slow work.
For the first time since that dreadful moment of midair disintegration, she had time to think.
It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant's final scream over the intercom, her sudden ejection—without warning, she had been thrust into the cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat's rockets slammed into the small of her back—and then, even as her chute had begun to open, she saw the wheel opening like a mouth all around her—and she had realized that for better or worse she was going to fall _through_ it...
Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.
And then, _this_.
She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the breath knocked out of her. _Lying on the ground_ , an instant after being forty thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: That was the first shock.
She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal, foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that, stranding her here.
Yes, but where was _here_?
She had cut the chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.
Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall with swimming slowness.
Low gravity. As if she were on the Moon.
That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, _where_?
Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are going to do about it—specifically, how you plan to stay alive long enough for Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.
... _Malenfant_.
Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn't anywhere near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other side of the great blue portal?
But he'd been through the crash, too. Was he alive at all?
She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her haunches. She remembered how he had been in those last instants before the destruction of the plane, the reckless way he had hurled them both at the unknown.
Malenfant, Malenfant, what have you done?
A scream tore from the forest.
Emma bundled up her parachute cloth and ran back the way she had come.
On her bed of dead leaves, Sally was sitting up. With her good arm she held her kid to her chest. Maxie was crying again, but Sally's face was empty, her eyes dry.
Uneasy, Emma dumped the parachute cloth. In the seeping rain, she got to her knees and embraced them both. "It's all right."
The kid seemed to calm, sandwiched between the two women.
But Sally pushed her away. "How can you say that? Nothing's _right_." Her voice was eerily level.
Emma said carefully. "I don't think they mean us any harm... Not any more."
"Who?"
"The hominids."
_"I saw them,"_ Sally insisted.
"Who?"
"Ape-men. They were _here_. I just opened my eyes and there was this face over me. It was squat, hairy. Like a chimp."
Then not like the hominids out on the plain, Emma thought, wondering. Were there more than one kind of human-ape, running around this strange, dreamy forest?
"It was going through my pockets," Sally said. "I just opened my eyes and looked right in its face. I yelled. It stood up and ran away."
"It _stood up_? Chimps don't stand upright. Not habitually... Do they?"
"What do I know about chimps?"
"Look, the—creatures—out there on the plain don't sound like that description."
"They are ape-men."
"But they aren't squat and hairy." Emma said hesitantly. "We've been through a lot. You're entitled to a nightmare or two."
Doubt and hostility crossed Sally's face. "I know what I saw."
The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.
At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outré concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn't a flat, infinite, unchanging stage... To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.
And then there was the small matter of Sally's husband.
Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally's reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.
She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.
As she worked she said hesitantly, "My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you—"
"I'm Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg." _Is?_ "I guess you've met Maxie. We're from Boston."
"Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK."
"Yes..." Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn't as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. "We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg... Where are we, do you think?"
"I don't know any more than you do. I'm sorry."
Sally's smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. "Well, it sure isn't _your_ fault. What do you think we ought to do?"
_Stay alive_. "Keep warm. Keep out of trouble."
"Do you think they know we are missing yet?"
_What "they"?_ "That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet."
Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn't scared out of his wits. "I'm hungry."
Emma squeezed his shoulder. "Me, too." She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.
She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colorful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.
Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli, and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of crackers before he gobbled up the handful of hard candy he had spotted immediately.
Emma kept back one of the candies for herself, however. She sucked the cherry-flavored candy until the last sliver of it dissolved on her tongue. Anything to get rid of the lingering taste of that damn caterpillar.
_Caterpillar_ , for God's sake. Her resentful anger flared. She felt like throwing away the petty scraps of supplies, rampaging out to the hominids, demanding attention. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn't supposed to be here. She didn't want anything to do with this. She didn't want any responsibility for this damaged woman and her wretched kid—and she didn't want her head cluttered up with the memories of what had become of the woman's husband.
But nobody was asking what she wanted. And now the food was finished, and the others were staring at her, as if they expected her to supply them.
If not you, Emma, who else?
Emma took the foil box and went looking for water.
She found a stream a few minutes deeper into the forest. She clambered down into a shallow gully and scooped up muddy water. She sniffed at it doubtfully. It was from a stream of running water, so not stagnant. But it was covered with scummy algae, and plenty of green things grew in it. Was that good or bad?
She carried back as much water as she could to their improvised campsite, where Sally and Maxie were waiting. She set the water down and started going through her pockets again.
Soon she found what she wanted. It was a small tin, about the size of the tobacco tins her grandfather used to give her to save her coins and stamps. Inside a lot of gear was crammed tight; Maxie watched wonderingly as she pulled it all out. There were safety pins, wire, fish hooks and line, matches, a sewing kit, tablets, a wire saw, even a teeny-tiny button compass. And there was a little canister of dark crystals that turned out to be potassium permanganate.
Following the instructions on the can—to her shame she had to use her knife's lens to read them—she dropped crystals into the water until it turned a pale red.
Maxie turned up his nose, until his mother convinced him the funny red water was a kind of cola.
Habits from ancient camping trips came back to Emma now. For instance, you weren't supposed to _lose_ anything. So she carefully packed all her gear back into its tobacco tin, and put it in an inside pocket she was able to zip up. She took a bit of parachute cord and tied her Swiss Army knife around her neck, and tucked it inside her flight suit, and zipped that up, too.
And while she was fiddling with her toys, Sally began shuddering.
"Greg. My husband. Oh my God. _They killed him_. They just crushed his skull. The ape-men. Just like that. I saw them do it. It's true, isn't it?"
Emma put down her bits of kit with reluctance.
"Isn't it strange?" Sally murmured. "Greg isn't here. But I never thought to ask _why_ he isn't here. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I _knew_... Do you think there's something wrong with me?"
"No," Emma said, as soothingly as she could manage. "Of course not. It's very hard, a very hard thing to take—"
And then Sally just fell apart, as Emma had known, inevitably, she must. The three of them huddled together, in the rain, as Sally wept.
It was dark before Sally was cried out. Maxie was already asleep, his little warm form huddled between their two bodies.
The rain had stopped. Emma pulled down her rough canopy, and wrapped it around them.
Now Sally wanted to talk, whispering in the dark.
She talked of her holiday-of-a-lifetime in Africa, and how Maxie was doing at nursery school, another child, a daughter, at home, and her career and Greg's, and how they had been considering a third child or perhaps opting for a frozen-embryo deferred pregnancy, pending a time when they might be less busy.
And Emma told her about her life, her career, about Malenfant. She tried to find the gentlest, most undemanding stories she could think of.
Like the one about their engagement, at the end of Malenfant's junior year as a midshipman at the Naval Academy. He had received his class ring, and at the strange and formal Ring Dance she had worn his ring around her neck, while he carried her miniature version in his pocket. And then at the climax of the evening the couples took their turns to go to the center of the dance floor and climb up under a giant replica of the class ring. Filled with youth and love and hope, they dipped their rings in a bowl of water from the seven seas, and exchanged the rings, and made their vows to each other...
Oh, Malenfant, where are you now?
Eventually they slept: the three of them, brought together by chance, lost in this strange quasi-Africa, now huddled together on the floor of a nameless forest. But Emma came to full wakefulness every time she heard a leaf rustle or a twig snap, and every time a predator howled, in the huge lands beyond this sheltering forest.
Tomorrow we have to make a proper shelter, she thought. We can't sleep on the damn ground.
## _S hadow_
She woke early.
She turned on her back, stretching her long arms lazily. Her nest of woven branches was soft and warmed by her body heat, but where her skin was exposed to the cold, her hair prickled, standing upright. She found moist dew on her black fur, and she scooped it off with a finger and licked it.
Scattered through the trees she could see the nests of the Elf-folk, fat masses of woven branches with sleek bodies embedded, still slumbering.
She had no name. She had no need of names, nor capacity to invent them.
Call her Shadow.
The sky was growing light. She could see a stripe of dense pink smeared along one horizon. Above her head there was a lid of cloud. In a crack in the cloud an earth swam, bright, fat, blue.
Shadow stared at the earth. It hadn't been there last time she woke up.
Loose associations ran through her small skull: not thoughts, not memories, just shards, but rich and intense. And they were all blue. Blue like the sky after a storm. Blue like the waters of the river when it ran fat and high. Blue, blue, blue, clean and pure, compared to the rich dark green of night thoughts.
Blue like the light in the sky, yesterday.
Shadow's memories were blurred and unstructured, a corridor of green and red in which a few fragments shone, like bits of a shattered sculpture: her mother's face, the lightness of her own body as a child, the sharp, mysterious pain of her first bleeding. But nowhere in that dim green hall was there a flare of blue light like that. It was strange, and therefore it was frightening.
But memories were pallid. There was only the now, clear and bright: What came before and what would come after did not matter.
As the light gathered, the world began to emerge out of the dark green. Noise was growing with the light, the humming of insects and the whirring flight of bats.
Here, in this clump of trees high on an escarpment, she was at the summit of her world. The ground fell away to the sliding black mass of the river. The trees were scattered here, the ground bare and gray, but patches of green-black gathered on the lower slopes, gradually becoming darker and thicker, merging as they tumbled down the gullies and ravines that led to the river valley itself.
She knew every scrap of this terrain. She had no idea what lay beyond—no real conception that _anything_ lay beyond the ground she knew.
The others were stirring now. Her infant sister, Tumble, sat up on the belly of their mother, Termite. Termite stretched, and one shapely foot raised, silhouetted against the sky.
Shadow slid out of her nest. The pliant branches rustled back to their natural positions. This was a fig tree, with vines festooned everywhere. Shadow found a dense cluster of ripe fruit, and began to feed.
Soon there was a soft rain all around her, as discarded skins and seeds fell from the lips of the folk, toward the ground.
Above her there was a sharp, sudden crack. She flinched, looking up. It was Big Boss. His teeth bared, without so much as a stretch, he leapt out of his nest and went leaping wildly through the trees, swaying the branches and swinging on the vines.
Everywhere people abandoned their nests, scrambling to get out of the way of Big Boss. The last peace of the night was broken by grunts and screams.
But one man wasn't fast enough. It was Claw, Shadow's brother, hindered by his need to favor his useless hand, left withered by a childhood bout of polio.
Big Boss crashed directly into the nest of the younger male, smashing it immediately. Claw, screeching, fell crashing through the branches and down to the ground.
Big Boss scrambled after him, down to the ground. He strutted back and forth, waving his fists. He shook the vegetation and threw rocks and bits of dead wood. Then he sat, black hair bristling thick over his hunched shoulders.
One by one, Big Boss's acolytes approached him, weaker men he dominated with his fists and teeth and shows of anger. Big Boss welcomed them with embraces and brief moments of grooming.
Claw was one of the last, loping clumsily, his withered hand clutched to his belly. Shadow saw how his back was scratched and bleeding, a marker of his rude awakening. He bent and kissed Big Boss's thigh. But Claw's obeisance was rewarded only by a cuff on the side of his head, hard enough to send him sprawling.
The other men joined in, following their leader's example, kicking and punching at the howling Claw—but each of them retreated quickly after delivering his blow.
Big Boss spread his lips in a wide grin, showing his long canines.
Now Termite strode into the little clearing, calm and assured, her infant clinging to the thick black hair on her back. Claw ran to her and huddled at his mother's side, whimpering as if he was an infant himself.
One of the men pursued Claw, yelling. Like most of the men he was a head taller than Termite, and easily outweighed her. But Termite cuffed him casually, and he backed away.
Now Big Boss himself approached Termite. He slapped her, hard enough to make her stagger.
Termite stood her ground, watching Big Boss calmly.
With a last growl Big Boss turned away. He bent over and defecated explosively. Then he reached for leaves to wipe his backside, while his acolytes jostled to groom his long black fur.
Termite walked away, followed by Claw and her infant, seeking food.
The incident was over, power wielded and measured by all concerned.
Another day had begun in the forest of the Elf-folk.
Shadow, her long arms working easily, swung down to the ground to join her family.
The people lingered by the trees where they had slept. They sat with legs folded and groomed each other, picking carefully through the long black hairs, seeking dirt, ticks, and other insects.
Shadow sat her little sister on her lap. Tumble squirmed and wriggled—but with an edge of irritation, for she had picked up bloodsucking ticks some days before. Shadow found some of the tiny, purplish creatures in the child's scalp now. She plucked them away between delicate fingernails and popped them in her mouth, relishing the sharp tang of blood when they burst beneath her teeth.
All around her people walked, groomed, fed, locked into an intricate geometry of lust, loyalty, envy, power. The people were the most vivid thing in Shadow's world; everything else was a blur, barely more noticed than the steady swell of her own breathing.
At eleven years old, Shadow was three feet tall. She had long legs under narrow hips, long, graceful arms, a slim torso, a narrow neck and shoulders. She walked upright. But her legs were a little splayed, her gait clumsy, and her long, strong arms were capable of carrying her high in the trees. Her rib cage was high and conical, and her skull was small, her mouth with its red lips prominent. And over pink-black skin, her body was covered with long black fur.
Her eyes were clear, light brown, curious.
A few days before, Shadow had begun the bleeding, for the first time in her life. Several of the men and boys, smelling this, had begun to pursue her. Even now a cluster of the boys pressed close to her, dragging clumsy fingers through her hair, their eyes bright. But Shadow desired none of them, and when they got too persistent she approached her mother, who growled deeply.
Termite herself was surrounded by a group of attentive men and adolescent boys, some of them displaying spindly erections. Termite submitted to the gentle probing of their fingers. Though she was growing old now, and some of her fur was shot through with silver, Termite was the most popular woman in the group, as far as the men were concerned. On some patches of her head and shoulders her fur had been worn away by the constant grooming; her small skull was all but hairless, her black ears prominent.
That allure, of course, made her one of the most powerful women. Just as the weaker men would compete for the friendship of Big Boss, so the women were ambitious to be part of Termite's loose circle. Shadow—and Tumble, and even Claw—had special privileges, as Termite's children, arising from that power.
And it was real power, the only power, even if the women had to endure the blows and bites of the powerful men. Everybody knew her mother and her siblings, and that was where loyalty lay; for nobody knew her father. No man, not even Big Boss, would have achieved his status without the backing of a powerful mother and aunts.
At last it was time to move on. Little Boss—the brother of Big Boss, his closest lieutenant—led off, working his way down the hillside toward the river. He paused frequently, watching nervously to be sure that Big Boss followed.
The people gave up their grooming and wandered after them.
The Elf-folk entered thicker swathes of forest. The day grew hot, the air oppressive in the greenery. The people walked easily, save where the vines and brambles grew too dense, and then they would use their powerful arms to climb into the trees. They moved slowly, stopping to feed wherever the opportunity arose.
Even at its most dense the forest was sparse. Many of the trees' leaves were yellow, shriveled and sickly, and some of the trees themselves were dead, no more than gaunt stumps with broken-off branches at their roots. There was much space between the big trees, and the gaps in the forest canopy allowed the sunlight to reach the ground, where shoots and bushes grew thickly.
Shadow, like the others, kept away from the more open clearings. Though her long slim legs carried her easily over the clear ground, the denser green of the forest pulled at her, while the blue-white open sky and green-brown undergrowth repelled her.
They came to a knot of low shrubs.
Termite lowered Tumble to the ground. This was a bush Termite knew well, and her experienced eyes had spotted that some of the leaves had been rolled into tubes, held together by sticky threads. When Shadow opened up such a tube she was rewarded by a wriggling caterpillar, which she popped into her mouth.
The three of them rested on the ground, relishing the treat.
Little Tumble snuggled up to her mother, seeking her nipples. Gently Termite pushed the child away. At first Tumble whimpered, but soon her pleading turned to a tantrum, and the little ball of fur ran in circles and thumped the ground. Her mother held her close, subduing her struggles, until she was calm. Tumble took some of the caterpillars her mother unpacked for her. But later, Tumble made a pretence of having eaten her fill, and began to groom her mother with clumsy attentiveness. Termite submitted to this as she fed—and pretended not to notice as Tumble worked her way ever closer to her nipple, at last stealing a quick suck.
Shadow stretched out on the grass, legs comfortably crossed. She plucked caterpillar leaves from the bushes with one hand, holding the other crooked behind her head.
The sky was a washed-out blue, but clouds were tumbling across it. She had a dim sense of the future: Soon it would be dark, and it would rain, and she would get wet and cold. But she saw little further than that, little further than the bright sunny warmth of the sun and the softness of this patch of grass, and she relaxed, her thoughts warm and yellow.
She raised her free hand before her eyes. She stretched her fingers, making slats through which the sun peeked. She moved her hand back and forth, rapidly, making the sun flicker and dance.
Now, with a single graceful movement, she turned over and got to her knees. She gazed at the sharp shadow the sun cast on the leaf-strewn ground before her. She raised her hands, making the shadow do the same, and then she spread her fingers, making light shine through the hands of her shadow.
She got to her feet and began to whirl and dance, and the shadow, this other self, capered in response, its movements distorted and comical. Her dance was eerily beautiful.
The wind shifted, bringing a scent of smoke. Smoke and meat.
Big Boss stood tall and peered into the green. His nostrils flared.
He rooted around on the ground until he found a cobble the size of his fist. He hurled the cobble against a large rock embedded in the ground, smashing it. Then, with some care, he fingered the debris, searching for flakes of the right size and sharpness.
He stood tall, hands full of sharp flakes, a small trickle of blood oozing from one finger. He issued his summoning cry— _"Ai, ee!"_ —and, without looking back, he began to stalk off to the west, the way the smoke had come from. His brother Little Boss and another senior man, Hurler, scurried to follow him, keeping a submissive few paces back.
Claw had been crouching in the grass. He stood up now, and took a few steps after the men, uncertainly.
Little Boss slapped him so hard in the back that Claw was sent sprawling on his chest.
But Hurler helped him get back to his feet with a fast, savage yank. Hurler, a big man with powerful hands and a deadly accuracy with thrown rocks, was Termite's brother—Claw's uncle—and so favored him, more than the other men anyhow. The two of them trotted after Big and Little Boss.
As the men receded, Termite shrugged her slim shoulders and returned to her inspection of the shrubs.
## _E mma Stoney_
Emma clung to sleep as long as possible. When she could sleep no longer, she rolled onto her back, stiff and cold. There was sky above her, an ugly lid of cloud.
Still here, she thought. Shit. And there was an unwelcome ache in her lower bowels.
Nothing for it.
She went behind a couple of trees—close enough that she could still see her parachute canopy tent—and stripped to her underwear. She took a dump, her Swiss army knife dangling absurdly around her neck. The problem after that was finding a suitable wipe; the dried leaves she tried to use just crumbled in her hands.
Where am I? Answer came there none.
Maybe some kind of adrenaline rush had gotten her through yesterday. Today was going to be even worse, she thought. This morning she felt cold, stiff, dirty, lost, miserable—and with a fear that had sunk deep into her gut.
She got dressed and kicked leaves over the, umm, deposit she'd left. We have _got_ to build a latrine today.
Sally and Maxie, waking slowly, showed no desire to leave the forest. But Emma decided she ought to go say hello to the neighbors.
She stepped out of the forest.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was gray and solid and the grassy plain before her was bleak, uninviting. If she had not known otherwise she would have guessed it was uninhabited; the heapings of branches and stones seemed scarcely more than random.
And yet hominids— _people_ —sat and walked, jabbered and argued, from a distance, just as human as she was, every one of them as naked as a newborn. And they were talking English. The utter strangeness of that struck her anew.
I don't want to be here, facing this bizarreness, she thought. I want to be at home, with the net, and coffee and newspapers, and clean clothes, and a warm bathroom.
But it might not be long before she was begging at these hominids' metaphorical table. She had no doubt that those tall, powerful qua-people had a much better ability to survive in this wilderness than she did; she sensed that might become very important, unless they were rescued out of here in the next few days. So she forced herself forward.
Some of the women were tending to nursing infants. Older children were wrestling clumsily—and wordlessly, save for an occasional hoot or screech. The children seemed to her to have the least humanity; without the tall, striking, very human bodies of the adults, their low brows and flat skulls seemed more prominent, and they reminded her more of chimps.
Listening to the hominids yesterday, she had picked up a few of their functional names. The boy who had given her the caterpillar was called Fire. Right now Fire was tending the old woman on the ground, who was called Sing. He seemed to be feeding her, or giving her water. Evidence of kinship bonds, of care for the old and weak? It somewhat surprised Emma. But it was also reassuring, she thought, considering her own situation.
The largest man—Stone, the dominant type who had groped Sally—was sitting on the ground close to the smoking remains of the fire. He was picking through a pile of rocks. He was the leader, she figured—the leader of the men, anyhow.
She plucked up her courage and sat opposite him.
He glowered at her. His brown eyes, under a heavy lid of brow, were pits of hostility and suspicion. He actually raised his right fist at her, a mighty paw bearing a blunt rock.
But she sat still, her hands empty. Perhaps he remembered her. Or perhaps he was figuring out all over again that she was no threat. Anyhow, his hand lowered.
Seeming to forget her, he started working at the rocks again. He picked out a big lump of what looked like black glass; it must be obsidian, a volcanic glass. He turned it this way and that, inspecting it. His movements were very rapid, his gaze flickering over the rock surface.
His muscles were hard, his skin taut. His hair was tightly curled, but it was peppered with gray. His face would have passed in any city street—so long as he wore a hat, anyhow, to conceal that shrivelled skull. But an _Aladdin Sane_ zigzag crimson scar cut right across his face.
She thought he looked around fifty. Hard to tell in the circumstances.
He picked out another rock from his pile, a round pebble. He began to hammer at the obsidian, hard and confident. Shards flew everywhere, and for the first time Emma noticed that he had a patch of foliage over his lap, protecting his genitals from flying rock chips. He worked fast, confident, his eyes flickering—faster than a human would have, she thought, faster and more instinctively. It was less like watching the patient practicing of a human craft than a fast-reaction sport, like tennis or soccer, where the body takes over.
He may not have a wide repertoire of skills, she thought. Maybe this is the one type of tool he can make. But there was nothing limited in what she saw, nothing incomplete; it was as efficient a process as eating or breathing. The contrast with the way the people had struggled to build their heaped-up teepees couldn't have been more striking. How was it possible to be so smart about one thing, yet so dumb about another?
She felt her ideas adjust, her preconceptions dissolve. These people are not like me, she thought.
After a time, Stone abruptly stood up. He dropped his hammerstone, his lap cover, even the tool he had been making, and wandered away.
Emma stayed put.
Stone hunted around the grass, digging into the red dust beneath, picking out bits of rock or perhaps bone, discarding them where he found them. At last he seemed to have found what he wanted.
But then he was distracted by an argument between two of the younger men. He dropped the bone fragment and waded into what was fast becoming a wrestling match. Pretty soon all three of them were battling hard.
Others were gathering around, hooting and hollering. At last Stone floored one of the young men and drove off the other.
Breathing hard, sweating heavily enough to give him a pungent stink, he came back to the pile of rocks, where Emma waited patiently. When he got there he looked around for his bit of bone—but of course it had never made it this far. He bellowed, apparently frustrated, and got up again and resumed his search.
A human craftsman would have got all his tools together before he started, Emma supposed.
Stone came back with a fresh bit of bone. It was red, and bits of meat clung to it; Emma shuddered as she speculated where it might have come from. He used it to chip at the edge of his obsidian axe.
When he was done he dropped the improvised bone tool at his feet without another thought. He turned the axe over and over in his hands; it was a disc of shaped rock four inches across, just about right to fit into his powerful hand.
Then he hefted it and began to scrape at his neck with it.
My God, she thought. He's shaving.
He saw her looking. "Stone Stone!" he yelled. He turned away deliberately, suddenly as self-conscious as a teenager.
She got up and moved away.
## _S hadow_
The people were moving again, working deeper into the forest, seeking food. She spotted Termite and Tumble, walking hand-in-hand, and she followed them.
There had been a shower here. The vegetation was soaking, and droplets sprayed her as she pushed past bushes and low branches. But the droplets sparkled in the sun, and the wet leaves were a bright vivid green. The people's black hair was shot with flashes of rust brown, smelling rich and damp.
Termite came to an ants' nest, a mound punctured by small holes. She reached out and broke a long thin branch from a nearby bush. She removed the side branches and nibbled off the bark, leaving a long, straight stick half as long as her arm. She pushed one hand into the ants' nest and scooped out dirt.
Soon the ants began to swarm out of the nest. Termite plunged her stick into the nest, waited a few heartbeats, and then withdrew it. It was covered with squirming ants. She slid the tool through her free hand so that she was left with a palm filled with crushed and wriggling ants, which she scooped into her mouth, crunching quickly. There was a strong acid smell. Then she returned her stick to the mound and waited for a fresh helping.
Shadow and the other women and children joined in the feast with sticks of their own. Occasionally they had to slap at their feet and thighs as the ants swarmed to repel the invaders; these were big, strong ants that could bite savagely. But Shadow's stick was too spindly and it bent and finally snapped as she shoved it into the loose earth.
More people crowded around. The ants' nest became a mass of jostling and poking elbows and slaps and screeching.
Shadow quickly tired of the commotion. She straightened up, brushed dirt from her legs, and slipped farther into the forest.
She came to a tall palm. She thought she could see clusters of red fruit, high above the ground. Briskly she began to climb, her strong arms and gripping legs propelling her fast above the ground.
She found a cluster of fruit. She picked one, then another, stripping off the rich outer flesh, and letting the kernels fall with a whisper to the distant ground. This was one of the tallest trees in the forest. The sky seemed close here, the ground a distant place.
There were eyes, watching her.
She yelped and recoiled, gripping the palm's trunk with her arms.
She saw a face. But it was not like her own. The head was about the size of Shadow's, but there was a thick bony crest over the top of the skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were fixed. The body, covered in pale brown fur, was squat, the belly distended. Two pink nipples protruded from the fur, and an infant clung there, peering back at Shadow with huge pale eyes. The infant might have been a twin of Tumble, but already that bony skull had started to evolve its strange, characteristic superstructure.
Mother and child were Nutcracker-folk.
## _E mma Stoney_
All the teepee shelters had fallen down.
One younger man was struggling, alone, to hoist branches upright. It was Fire, the teenager-type who had gifted her with the caterpillar. But nobody was helping him, so his branches had nothing to lean on, and they just fell over. Still he kept trying. At one point he even ran around his construction, trying to beat gravity, hoisting more branches before the others fell. Of course he failed. It was as if he knew what he wanted to build, but couldn't figure out how to achieve it.
Cautiously, Emma stepped forward.
Fire was startled. He stumbled backward. His branches fell with a crash.
She held her hands open and smiled. "Fire," she said. She pointed to herself. "Emma. Remember?"
At length he jabbered, "Fire Fire. Fire Emma."
"Emma, yes. Remember? You gave me the caterpillar." She pointed to her mouth.
His eyes widened. He ran away at startling speed, and came back with a scrap of what looked like potato. With impatient speed, he shoved it into her mouth. His fingers were strong, almost forcing her jaws open.
She chewed, feeling bruised, tasting the dirt on his fingers. The root was heavy and starchy. "Thank you."
He grinned and capered, like a huge child. She noticed that in his excitement he had sprouted an erection. She took care not to look at it; some complications could wait for another day.
"I'll help you," she said. She walked around his pile of branches. She picked up a light-looking sapling and hoisted it over her shoulder until it was upright. Though her strength still seemed boosted, she struggled to hold the sapling in place.
Mercifully Fire quickly got the idea. "Fire, Emma, Fire!" He ran around picking up more branches—some of them thick trunks, which he lifted as if they were made of polystyrene—and rammed them into place against hers.
The three or four branches propped each other up, a bit precariously, and the beginning of their makeshift teepee was in place. But, hooting with enthusiasm, Fire hurled more branches onto the tall conical frame. Soon the whole thing collapsed.
Fire shouted his disappointment. He did a kind of dance, kicking viciously at the branches. Then, with a kind of forgetful doggedness, he began to pick up the scattered branches once more.
Emma said, "I've a better idea." Raising her hands to make him wait, she jogged over to the muddy remnant of her parachute. She cut free a length of cord—taking care not to show her Swiss Army knife to any of the hominids—and hurried back.
Fire had, predictably, wandered away.
Emma squatted down on the ground to wait, as Fire dug more tubers from the ground, and spent some time throwing bits of stone, with startling accuracy, at a tree trunk, and went running after a girl—"Dig! Dig, Fire, Dig!" Then he happened to glance Emma's way, appeared to remember her and their project, and came running across as fast as a 100-meter record holder. Straightaway he began to pick up the branches again.
She motioned him to wait. "No. Look." She took one of the branches, and pulled another alongside, and then another. Soon he got the idea, and he helped her pile the branches close together. Now she wrapped her cord around them, maybe three feet below their upper extent, and tied a knot.
... Emma Stoney, frontier woman. What the hell are you doing? What if the knot slips or the cord breaks or your sad teepee just falls apart?
Well, then, she thought, I'll just think of something else, and try again. And again and again.
All the time the bigger issues were there in her mind, sliding under the surface like a shark: the questions of where she was, how she had got here, how long it was going to be before she got home again. How she felt about Malenfant, who had stranded her here. How come these ape-folk existed at all, and how come they spoke English... But this was _real_ , the red dust under her feet, the odd musk stink of the ape-boy before her, the hunger already gnawing at her belly. Right now there was nobody to take care of her, nobody but herself, and her first priority was survival. She sensed she had to find a way of working with these people. So far, in all this strange place, the only creature who had showed her any helpfulness or kindness at all was this lanky boy, and she was determined to build on that.
Find strength, Emma. You can fall apart later, when you're safely back in your apartment, and all this seems like a bad dream.
She labored to tie her knot tight and secure. When she was done, she backed away. "Up, up! Lift it up, Fire!"
With terrifying effortlessness he hoisted the three branches vertical. When he let go, they immediately crashed to the ground, of course, but she encouraged him to try again. This time she closed her hands around his, making him hold the branches in place, while she ran around pulling out the bases of the branches, making a pyramidal frame.
At last they finished up with a firmly secured frame, tied off at the top—and it was a frame that held as Fire, with exhilaration and unnerving vigour, hurled more branches over it.
Now all I have to do, Emma thought, is make sure he remembers this favor.
"... Emma! _Emma!_ "
Emma turned. Sally came running out of the forest, with Maxie bundled in her arms.
Creatures pursued her.
They looked like humans—no, not human, like chimps, with long, powerful arms, short legs, covered in fine black-brown hair—but _they walked upright_ , running, almost emulating a human gait. There were four, five, six of them.
Emma thought, dismayed, What now? What new horror is this?
One of the creatures, despite the relative clumsiness of his gait, was fast closing on Sally and the child.
Stone stepped forward. The old male stood stock still, reached back, and whipped his arm forward. His axe, spinning, flew like a Frisbee.
The axe sliced into the ape-thing's face. He, it, was knocked flat, dead immediately. The hominids hooted their triumph and ran to the fallen creature.
The other ape-things ran back to the forest's edge. They screeched their protest, but they weren't about to come out of the forest to launch a counterattack.
Sally kept running until she had reached Emma. They clutched each other.
"Now we know why our friends keep out of the forest," Emma said.
Fire was standing beside them. "Elf-folk," Fire said, pointing at the ape-things. "Elf-folk."
"That's what I saw yesterday," Sally murmured. "My God, Emma, they could have come on us while we slept. We're lucky to be alive—"
"They took the ice cream," Maxie said solemnly.
Sally patted his head. "It's true. They took all your food, Emma. I'm sorry. And the damn canopy."
Maxie said, "What are we going to eat now?"
It appeared the hominids had their own answer to this. From the spot where the apelike "Elf" had fallen came the unmistakable sounds of butchering.
## _S hadow_
For long moments Nutcracker-woman and Shadow gazed at each other, fearful, curious.
Then the Nutcracker-woman took a red fruit, stripped off the flesh, and popped the kernel into her mouth. She pressed up on her lower jaw with her free hand. Caught between her powerful molars, the shell neatly cracked in two. She extracted the nut's flesh and pushed it into her infant's greedy mouth.
Shadow's fear evaporated. She took a fruit herself and stripped it of flesh. But when she tried to copy the Nutcracker-woman's smooth destruction of the nut, she only hurt her jaw.
She spat out the shell and, cautiously, passed it to the Nutcracker-woman.
Just as hesitantly, the Nutcracker-woman took it. Her hand was just like Shadow's, the back coated with fine black hairs, the palm pink.
Shadow had grown used to meeting Nutcracker-folk.
The Elf-folk favored the fringes of the forest, for they could exploit the open land beyond, where meat could often be scavenged. The Nutcracker-folk preferred the dense green heart of the forest, where the vegetation grew richer. But as the forest shrank, the Elf-folk were forced to push deeper into the remaining pockets of green.
Sometimes there was conflict. The Nutcracker-folk were powerful and limber, more powerful than most Elf-folk, and they made formidable opponents.
All things considered, it was better to try to get along.
But now, as Shadow and the Nutcracker-woman amiably swapped fruit back and forth, there was a screech and crash at the base of the tree. The Nutcracker-woman peered down nervously, her child clinging to her shoulders.
It was the hunting party—or rather, what was left of them. She saw the two powerful brothers, Big Boss and Little Boss, and there was her own brother, Claw, trailing behind. They were empty-handed, and there was no blood around their mouths, or on their pelts. Big Boss seemed enraged. His hair bristled, making him a pillar of spiky blackness. As he stalked along he lashed out at the trees, at his brother—and especially at Claw, who was forced to flee, whimpering. But he needed to stay with the men, for he was in more danger from the predators of the forest than from their fists.
And there was no sign of Hurler, her uncle.
It was Hurler who had been killed by Stone's obsidian axe.
Images of him rattled through Shadow's memory. By tomorrow, though she would be aware of a loss, she would barely remember Hurler had existed.
The men abruptly stopped below Shadow's tree. They peered upward, silent, watchful.
The Nutcracker-woman had clamped her big hand over her baby's mouth, and it struggled helplessly. But now a nutshell slipped from the baby's paw, falling with a gentle clatter to the ground.
Big Boss grinned, his hair bristling. Little Boss and Claw spread out around the base of the tree.
Shadow slithered down the tree trunk. The men ignored her.
The three of them clambered into nearby trees. Soon there was an Elf-man in each of the trees to which the Nutcracker-woman could flee.
She began to call out, a piercing cry of fear. _"Oo-hah!"_ Nutcracker-people were fierce and strong, and would come rushing to the aid of their own.
But if any Nutcrackers were near, they did not respond.
Suddenly Big Boss made a leap, from his tree to the Nutcracker-woman's. The Nutcracker-woman screeched. She leapt to Claw's tree, her big belly wobbling.
But Claw, small as he was, was ready for her. As the Nutcracker-woman scrambled to get hold of a branch, Claw grabbed her infant from her.
He bit into its skull, and it died immediately.
The Nutcracker-woman screamed, and hurled herself toward Claw. But already, with his kill over his shoulder, Claw was scurrying down the tree trunk to the ground. Blood smeared around his mouth, he held up his limp prize, crying out with triumph.
But Big Boss and Little Boss converged on him. With a casual punch, Little Boss knocked Claw to the dirt, and Big Boss grabbed the infant. The two of them huddled over the carcass. With firm strong motions, they began to dismember it, twisting off the infant's limbs one by one as easily as plucking leaves from a branch. When Claw came close, trying to get a share of the meat, he was met by a punch or a kick. He retreated, screeching his anger.
In the tree above, the Nutcracker-woman could only watch, howling: _"Hah! Oo-hah!"_
Claw came up to the men time and again, pulling at their shoulders and beating their backs.
A powerful blow from Big Boss now sent Claw sprawling. Clutching his chest, he groaned and lay flat.
Shadow approached her brother. She held out a hand, fingers splayed, to groom him, calm him.
He turned on her.
There was blood on his mouth, and his hair bristled around him, and his eyes were crusted with tears. He punched her temple.
She found herself on the ground. The colors of the world swam, yellow leaching into the green.
Now Claw stood over her, breathing hard. He had an erection.
She reached for him.
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard, so that her fingers were bent back. She cried out as bones bent and snapped.
Then he walked around her, legs splayed, erection sticking out of his fur. He grabbed at the trees and waved branches at her.
She understood the signs he was making. She knew what he wanted, in his frustration, in his rage. But he was her brother. The thought of him lying on her filled her head with blackness, her throat with bile.
She turned over and tried to stand. But when she put her injured hand on the ground, pain flared, and she fell forward.
He stamped hard on her back. She was driven flat into the undergrowth. She felt his hands on her ankles. He dragged her back toward him and pulled her legs apart. He was stronger than she was; sprawled facedown on the ground, she could not fight him.
His shadow fell over her, looming.
In another bloody heartbeat he was inside her. He screamed, in pain or pleasure. Shadow called for her mother, but she was far away.
## _E mma Stoney_
The days here lasted about thirty hours. Emma timed them with her wristwatch and a stick stuck in the ground to track shadows.
_Thirty hours_. No possibility of a mistake.
Not Earth, she thought reluctantly. But that thought was unreal. Absurd.
She knocked over her stick and took her watch off her wrist and stowed it in a pocket, so she wouldn't have to look at it.
After the Elf attack, the three of them stayed on the open plain.
But every morning it was strange, disorienting, to wake among the hominids. Whichever of them woke first would take one look at the strangers and hoot and holler in alarm. Soon they would all be awake, all of them yelling and brandishing their fists, and Emma and the others would have to cower away, waiting for the storm to pass. At last, somebody would recognize them—Fire, or Stone, or one of the younger women. "Em-ma. Sal-ly." After that the others would gradually calm down.
But Emma would have sworn that some of them _never_ regained their memories of the day before, that every day they woke up not recognizing Emma and the others. It seemed they came awake with the barest memory of the detail of their lives before, as if every day were like a new birth.
Emma wasn't sure if she pitied them for that, or envied them.
The days developed a certain routine. Emma and Sally worked to keep themselves and Maxie clean; they would rinse out their underwear—they had only one set each, the clothes they had arrived in—and scrub the worst of the dirt off the rest of their clothes and gear.
The women had precisely two tampons between them. When they were gone, they labored to improvise towels from bits of cloth.
As evening drew in Emma and little Maxie would help build the hominids' haphazard fire by throwing twigs and branches onto it. Paying dues, Emma thought; making sure we earn our place in the warmth.
In the dark the hominids gathered close to the fire, she supposed for safety and warmth. But they didn't form into anything resembling a circle, as humans would. There were little knots of them, men testing their strength against each other, women with their children, pairs coupling with noisy (and embarrassing) enthusiasm. But there was no storytelling, no singing, no dancing. They even ate separately, each hunched over her morsel, as if fearful of having it stolen.
The group did not have the physical grammar of a group bound by language, Emma thought. This was not a true hearth. Their bits of words, their proto-language, were surely a lot closer to the screeches of chimps, or even the songs of birds, than the vocalizations of humans. Though the Runners huddled together for security, they lived their lives as individuals, pursuing solitary projects, each locked forever inside her own head.
_They aren't human_ , Emma realized afresh, however much they might look like it. And this wasn't a community. It was more like a herd.
As night fell, Emma and the others would creep into the shelter she had made with Fire. A few of the hominids followed them, mothers with nursing infants. Maxie cried and complained at the pungent stink of their never-washed flesh. But Emma and Sally calmed him, and themselves, assuring each other that they were surely safer here than in the open, or in the forest.
One child, looking no more than five or six years old in human terms, fell ill. Her eyelids, cheeks, nose, and lips were encrusted with sores. The child was skinny, and was evidently in distress; her gestures were faint, her movements listless.
"I think it's yaws," Sally said. "I've seen it upriver, in Africa... It's related to syphilis. But it's transmitted by flies, who carry it from wound to wound. That's where the first signs show: little bumps in the corners of your eyes, or your nostrils, where the flies go to suck your moisture."
"What's the cure?"
"A shot of Extencilline. Safeguards you for life. But we don't have any."
Emma rummaged through her medical pocket. "What about Floxapen?"
"Maybe. But you're crazy to use it up on _them_. We're going to need it ourselves. We'll get ulcers. We need it."
Emma struggled to read the directions on the little bottle. She found a scrap of meat, embedded a pill in it, and fed it to the child. It was hard to hold her hand near that swollen, grotesque face.
The next morning, she did the same. She kept it up until the Floxapen was gone. It seemed to her the child was getting gradually better.
Maybe it helped the Runners accept them. She wasn't sure if they understood what she was doing, if they saw the cause-and-effect relationship between her treatment and any change in the girl's condition.
Sally didn't try to stop her. But Emma could see she was silently resentful at what she regarded as a waste of their scarce resources. It didn't help relations between them.
Five or six days after their arrival, she woke to find shards of deep blue sky showing through the loosely-stacked branches above her. She threw off her parachute-silk blanket and crawled out of the shelter's rough opening.
It was the first time the sky had been clear since she had got here. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face. The sky was a rich beautiful blue, and it was scattered with clouds, and it was _deep_. She saw low cumulus clouds, fat and gray and slow, and higher cirruslike clouds that scudded across the sky, and wispy traces even above that: layers of cloud that gave her an impression of tallness that she had rarely, if ever, seen on Earth.
She tried to orient herself. If the sun was _that_ way, at this hour, she was looking east. And when she looked to the west—oh, my Lord—there was a Moon: more than half-full, a big fat beautiful bright Moon.
... _Too_ big, too fat, too bright. It had to be at least twice the diameter of the pale gray Moon she was used to. And it was no mottled gray disk, like Luna. This was a vibrant dish of color. Much of it was covered with a shining steel-blue surface that glimmered in the light of the sun. Elsewhere she saw patches of brown and green. At either extreme of the disk—at the poles, perhaps—she saw strips of blinding white. And over the whole thing clouds swirled, flat white streaks and stripes and patches, gathered in one place into a deep whirlwind knot.
_Ocean_ : That was what that shining steel surface must be, just as the brown-green was land. That wasn't poor dead Luna: It was a planet, with seas and ice caps and continents and air.
And she quickly made out a characteristic continent shape on that brightly lit quadrant, almost bare of cloud, baked brown, familiar from schoolbook studies and CNN reports and Malenfant's schoolkid slide-shows. It was Africa, quite unmistakeably, the place she had come from.
That was no "Moon." That was _Earth_.
And if she was looking at Earth, up in the sky, her relentlessly logical mind told her, then she couldn't be _on_ Earth any more. "Stands to reason," she murmured.
It made sense, of course: the different air, the lightness of walking, these alien not-quite humans running around everywhere. She had known it the whole time, on some level, but she hadn't wanted to face it.
But, if not on Earth, _where was she_? How had she got here? How was she ever going to get home again? All the time she had been here, she realized, she had got not one whit closer to answering these most basic questions.
Now a shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. A new cloud was driving overhead, flat, thick, dark.
Sally was standing beside her. "They talk English."
"What?"
"The flat-heads. They talk English. Just a handful of words, but it is _English_. Remember that. They surely didn't evolve it for themselves."
"Somebody must have taught it to them."
"Yes." She turned to Emma, her eyes hard. "Wherever we are, we aren't the first to get here. We aren't alone here, with these apes."
She's right, Emma realized. It wasn't much, but it was a hope to cling to, a shred of evidence that there was more to this bizarre experience than the plains and the forests and the hominids.
Emma peered into the sky, where Earth was starting to set.
Malenfant, where are you?
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant parked at the Beachhouse car park. Close to the Kennedy Space Center, this was an ancient astronaut party house that NASA had converted into a conference center.
Malenfant, in his disreputable track suit, found the path behind the house. He came to a couple of wooden steps and trotted down to the beach itself. The beach, facing the Atlantic to the east, was empty, as far as he could see. This was a private reserve, a six-mile stretch of untouched coastline NASA held back for use by astronauts and their families and other agency personnel.
It wasn't yet dawn.
He stripped off his shoes and socks and felt the cool, moist sand between his toes. Tiny crabs scuttled across the sand at his feet, dimly visible. He wondered whether they had been disturbed by the new Moonlight, like so many of the world's animals. He stretched his hams, leaning forward on one leg, then the other. Too old to skip your stretching, Malenfant, no matter what else is on your mind.
The Red Moon was almost full—the first full Moon since its appearance, and Emma's departure. A month already. The light cast by the Red Moon was much brighter than the light of vanished silvery Luna, bright enough to wash out all but the brightest stars, bright enough to turn the sky a rich deep blue—but it was an eerie glow, neither day nor night. It was like being in a movie set, Malenfant thought, some corny old 1940s musical with a Moon painted on a canvas sky.
Malenfant hated it all: the light, the big bowl of mystery up there in the sky. To him the Red Moon was like a glowing symbol of his loss, of Emma.
Breathing deeply of the salty ocean air, he jogged through gentle dunes, brushing past thickets of palmetto. It wasn't as comfortable a jog as it used to be: The beach had been heavily eroded by the tide, and it was littered with swathes of sea-bottom mud, respectably large rocks, seaweed and other washed-up marine creatures—not to mention a large amount of oil smears and garbage, some of it probably emanating from the many Atlantic wrecks. But to Malenfant the solitude here was worth the effort of finding a path through the detritus.
It had been another sleepless night. He was consumed with his desire to reach the Red Moon.
Frustrated by the reception his proposals were receiving at NASA headquarters in Washington, he had decided to take his schemes, his blueprints and models and Barco shows, around the NASA centers, to Ames and Marshall and Kennedy and Johnson, trying to drum up grassroots support, and put pressure on the senior brass.
_We can do this. We've been to the Moon before—a Moon, anyhow—and this new mother is a lot more forgiving than old Luna. Now we have an atmosphere to exploit. No need to stand on your rockets all the way from orbit; you can glide to the ground... We can throw together a heavy-lift booster from Shuttle components in months_. That one the challenge for Marshall, where von Braun had built his Moon rockets. For Kennedy and Johnson, where the astronauts worked: _We have whole cadres of trained, experienced and willing pilots, specialists and mission controllers itching to take up the challenge of a new Moon. Hell, I'll go myself if you'll let me_... He had appealed to the scientists, too, the geologists and meteorologists and even the biologists who suddenly had a whole new world to study: _It will be a whole new challengein human spaceflight, a world with oceans and an atmosphere—an oxygen atmosphere, by God—just three days away. It's the kind of world we were hoping we might find when we sent our first fragile ships out on the ocean of space half a century ago. And who knows what we'll discover there..._
And then there were the groups he had come to think of as the xenoologists: the biologists and philosophers and astronomers and others who, long before the sudden irruption of the Red Moon, had considered the deeper mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Even if not, why does it _seem_ that we are alone? If we were to meet others—what would they be like?
_Come on, people. Our Moon disappeared, and was replaced by another. How the hell? Can this possibly be some natural phenomenon? If not_ , who's responsible? _Not us, that's for sure. The greatest mystery of this or any other age is hanging up there like some huge Chinese lantern. Shouldn't we go take a look?_
But, to his dismay and surprise, he had gotten no significant support from anybody—save the wacko UFO-hunting fringe types, who did him more harm than good. NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was working on a couple of unmanned orbital probes and a lander to go visit the Red Moon. But that was it. The notion of sending humans to Earth's new companion was definitively out of the question.
So he had been told, gently but firmly, by Joe Bridges.
"In these road shows of yours you underestimate the magnitude of the task, Malenfant. Whether you're doing that deliberately or not isn't for me to say. We know diddly about the structure of the Red Moon's atmosphere, which is somewhat essential data before you even begin to develop your gliding lander. And then what about the cost and schedule implications of putting together your 'Big Dumb Booster'—a brand new man-rated heavy-lift launcher, for God's sake? Our analysis predicts a schedule of years and a cost of maybe a hundred billion bucks. We just don't have that kind of money, Malenfant. And NASA can't go asking for it right now. Get your head out of your ass and take a look around. _The Tide_. The human race has other priorities..."
The first sunlight began to seep into the Atlantic horizon, smears of orange and pink banishing the Red Moon's unnatural light. Malenfant's calves were beginning to tingle, and he could feel his breathing deepening, his heart starting to pound.
Too long since I did this.
He had gotten hooked on running in the dawn light during the preparation for his first spaceflight. Emma had complained that he was spending even less time with her, but as long as he crept out of bed without waking her she had seemed to forgive him. But then there always had been a lot she had had to forgive him for. Is that why I want to reach her—just so I can say I'm sorry? Well, is that so bad? Or is it selfish—do I just want to get to her so I can project even more of my own shit onto her?...
_Emma!_
He pounded on, the moist sand cold under every footstep. As his blood pumped he felt the structure of his thoughts dissolve, his obsessive nighttime round of planning and worrying and agonizing over I-should-have-said and I-should-have-done, all of it washing away. The main reason to exercise, he thought: It stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you're still an animal.
It was the only respite he got from being himself.
He'd meant to run a couple of miles before doubling back. But when he reached his turnback point he spotted something on the beach, maybe a mile farther south: blocky, silhouetted, very large, returning crumpled orange highlights to the approaching sun. A beached whale? The tide had played hell with migration patterns. No, too angular for that. A wreck, then?
On impulse he continued on down the beach.
The washed-up object was the size of a small house, twenty-five or thirty feet high. It was heavily eroded, its walls sculpted by wind and water into pits and pillars. When Malenfant stood at its foot the sea breeze that washed over it was distinctly colder.
He ran his hand over its surface. Under stringy seaweed he found a gray, pitted surface, cold and slick under his palm. Ice, of course. The dawn light was still dim, but he could make out the cold clean blue-white shine of the harder ice beneath. He wondered how long the berg would sit here before it melted into the sand.
It was here because of the Tide.
The first few days had been the worst, when Earth's oceans, subject to a sudden discontinuous shock, had sloshed like water in a bathtub. Millions of square miles of coastal lowland had been scoured. In some places, pushed by currents or channelled by sea bottoms, the oceans had spawned waves several hundred feet high, walls of water that had crushed everything in their paths.
After that, with twenty times the mass of Luna, the Red Moon raised daily tides twenty times as high as before—roughly anyhow; the new Moon's spin complicated the complex gravitational dance of the worlds.
The coastlines of the world had been drastically reshaped. The English Channel was being widened as the soft white chalk of the lands that bordered it, including Dover's white cliffs, was worn away. Even rocky coastlines like Maine were being eroded. The lowest tides on the planet used to be in the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere: Now those tides of two feet or less had become forty feet, and around the shores of the Mediterranean many communities, with roots dating back to the dawn of civilization, had been smashed and worn away in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile the tides had forced their way into the mouths of many of the world's rivers, making powerful bores a hundred feet high, and vast floodplains filled and drained with each ebb and flow, drowning some of the planet's most fertile land in salt water.
People had fled inland, a secondary tide of misery, away from the devastated coasts. Already there had been too many deaths even to count, from flooding and tsunamis and quakes—and there were surely many more to come, as the displaced populations succumbed to disease, and flooded-out farmers failed to return a crop, and as the wars broke out over remaining stocks.
Meanwhile, as the polar seas flexed, titanic rafts of ice broke away from the shelves of Antarctica and the glaciers of Alaska and Greenland. The larger bergs broke up in the tempestuous seas, but many of them survived to the Equator, filling the oceans, already all but impassable, with an additional hazard. And so bergs like this one were now common sights at all latitudes on the seaboards of the Atlantic and Pacific. In some places they were actually being mined to make up for the disrupted local supplies of clean, fresh water. Always a silver lining, Malenfant thought sourly.
He stripped off his sweaty track suit and ran naked into the surf. Deeply mixed by the Tide with the waters of the deep ocean, the sea was icy cold and very salty, stinging when it splashed his eyes and the scar tissue on his healing arm. He took care not to go far out of his depth; he could feel a strong undercurrent as the sea drew back.
He swam a few strokes and then lay on his back, studying the sky, buoyant in the salty water.
The Red Moon was fat and swollen in the sky above him. Though it had (somehow) inserted itself into the same orbit as the old, vanished Moon, it was more than twice Luna's diameter, as large in area as five old Moons put together—and a lot more than five times as bright, because of its reflective cloud and water.
And this morning, the Red Moon was blue. The hemisphere facing him showed a vast, island-strewn ocean, blue-black and cloud-littered, with the shining white of ice caps at the northern and southern extremes. The Red Moon's north pole was tilted towards Earth by ten degrees or so, and Malenfant could see a huge high-pressure system sitting over the pole, a creamy swirl of cloud. But dark bands streaked around the equator, clouds of soot and smoke.
Malenfant, for all his personal animosity, admitted that the new Moon was hauntingly lovely. It even _looked_ like a world: obviously three-dimensional, with that shading of atmosphere at the sunlit limb, and sun casting a big fat highlight on its wrinkled ocean skin, as if it was some immense bowling ball. Poor Luna had been so dust-choked that its scattered light had made it look no more spherical than a painted dinner-plate.
Malenfant had, understandably obsessive, kept up with the evolving science of the Red Moon.
The new Moon turned on its axis relative to Earth—unlike departed, lamented Luna—with a "day" of about thirty hours, so that Earthbound watchers were treated to views of both sides. The other hemisphere was dominated by the worldlet's main landmass: a supercontinent, some called it, a roughly circular island-continent with a center red as baked clay, and fringed by gray-green smears that might be forests. The Red Moon was hemispherically asymmetric, then: like Mars and Luna, unlike Earth and Venus.
That great continent was pitted by huge, heavily eroded impact craters: To Malenfant they were an oddly pleasing reminder of true, vanished Luna. And the center of the supercontinent was marked by a single vast volcano that thrust much of the way out of the atmosphere. Its immense, shallow flanks, as seen in the telescope, were marked at successively higher altitudes by (apparent) rings of vegetation types, what appeared to be glaciers, and then by bare rock, giving it, to terrestrial observers, something of the look of a shooting target. (And so the commentators had called it Bullseye.)
The Red Moon's mightiest river rose on the flanks of the Bullseye. Perhaps that great magma upwelling had lifted and broken ancient aquifers. Or perhaps air uplifted by the great mountain was squeezed dry of its water by altitude. Anyhow the river snaked languidly across a thousand miles to the eastern coast, where it cut through a mountain chain there to reach the sea at a broad delta.
There were mountains on both east and west coasts of the supercontinent. They were presumably volcanoes. Those on the east coast appeared to be dormant; they were heavily eroded, and they seemed to cast a rain shadow over the desiccated interior of the continent. There was, however, a comparatively lush belt of vegetation between the mountains and the coast. The commentators had called it the Beltway. The greenery pushed its way into the interior of the continent in a narrow strip along the valley of that great river, which was a Nile for this small world.
But the mountains on the west coast were definitely not dormant. Presumably prompted by rock tides induced by Earth's gravity field, they had been observed to begin erupting a few days after the Red Moon's arrival in orbit around Earth.
They must have been spectacular eruptions. Thick, dense rock near the surface appeared to have blocked the magma flows, bottling up increasing pressure before yielding explosively like a champagne cork flying out of a bottle. On Earth, such stratovolcanoes—like Mount Fuji, Mount Rainier—could eject debris miles into the air. On the Moon the volcanoes had blown debris clear of the planet altogether. Meanwhile vast quantities of dust and gases had been pumped into the atmosphere, to spread in thick bands around much of the Moon's middle latitudes.
There was a great deal you could tell about the Red Moon, even from a quarter-million miles, with telescopes and spectrometers and radar, as the two hemispheres conveniently turned themselves up for inspection. For instance, those oceans really were water. The temperature range was right—as you'd expect since the Moon shared Earth's orbit around the sun—and examination of the visible and infrared spectra showed that the cloud caps were made of water vapor, just the right amount to have evaporated off the oceans.
The Red Moon's surface gravity was some two-thirds Earth's—a lot more than Luna's, and, crucially, enough for this miniature planet to have retained all the essential ingredients of an Earthlike atmosphere: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, water vapor, carbon dioxide—unlike poor barren Luna. So the Red Moon had water oceans and a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
Already the study of the Red Moon had revolutionized the young science of planetology. With a quarter of Earth's mass—but four times the mass of Mars, some twenty times the mass of Luna—the Red Moon was a planet in its own right, intermediate in size between the Solar System's small and large denizens, and so a good test bed for various theories of planetary formation and evolution.
It differed in key ways from Earth. Because it was so much smaller, it must have started its formation (wherever _that_ had occurred) with a much smaller supply of heat energy than Earth. And that inner heat had been rapidly dissipated through its surface.
Like a shrivelled orange, the Red Moon's rind was thick. Probably eons ago, the tectonic plates fused, and continents no longer slid over its face. There was no continental drift, no tectonic cycling, no oceanic ridges. Unlike Earth, the Moon's uncycled surface was very ancient; and that was why the interior of the continent bore those huge eroded craters, the scars left by immense impacts long ago.
And that was why the Bullseye was so vast. The huge shield mountain had probably formed over a fountain of magma erupting through a flaw in the crust layers. The crust beneath it must have been held in place over the flaw for hundreds of millions of years—so it more resembled Mars's Olympus Mons than, say, Earth's Hawaiian islands.
But there was more than geology up there. On the Red Moon, it appeared, there was life.
The air was Earthlike, containing around a sixth oxygen—a smaller proportion than Earth's atmosphere, but difficult to explain away by nonliving processes. It hadn't taken long to establish that the green-gray pigment that stained the fringes of the supercontinent and its wider river valleys, as well as the shallower sections of the world's ocean, was chlorophyll, the green of plants. There were other fingerprints of a living world: an excess of methane in the air, for example, put there perhaps by bacteria in bogs, or burning vegetation, or even the farts of Moon-calves. Though some scientists remained skeptical—and though nobody could say for sure if the Red Moon harbored anything like bogs or bacteria or cows—most people seemed to concur that there was indeed life on the Red Moon, life of some sort.
But was there intelligence?
Nobody had detected any structured radio signals. There had been no response to various efforts to signal to the Red Moon using radio and TV and laser, not to mention a few wacko methods, like the cutting of a huge right-angled triangle of ditches into the Saharan desert filled with burning oil.
But what were the mysterious lights that flickered over the night lands? Most observers claimed they were forest fires caused by lightning or drought. Perhaps, perhaps not. Could the streaming "wakes" sometimes visible on the great oceans be the wakes of ships, or were they simply peculiar meteorological features? And what about the geometrical traces—circles, rectangles, straight lines—that some observers claimed to have made out in clearings along the coasts and river valleys of the Red Moon's single huge continent? What were they but evidence of intelligence?
And if any of these signs were artificial, what kind of being might live up there to make them?
Malenfant was willing to admit that one manned expedition could do little to probe the mysteries of a world with fully half the surface area of Earth. But there were mysteries that no amount of remote viewing could unravel. The fact was, the most powerful telescope could not resolve an individual human being up there.
Malenfant was never going to find Emma by staring up from Earth.
But at this time of crisis, nobody wanted to see Malenfant's drawings of rocket boosters and gliding spaceships.
Of course there was the question of resources, of priorities. But Malenfant suspected that people were shying away from dealing with the most fundamental issue here: the existence of the Red Moon itself. It was just too big, too huge, impossible to rationalize or grasp or extrapolate. The Wheel was different. A blue circle in the air, a magic doorway? Yes, we can imagine ways we might do that, even if we can't think why we should. Peculiar-looking human beings falling out of the air? Yes, we know about the plasticity of the genome; we can even imagine time travel, the retrieval of our flat-browed ancestors. But _what kind of power hangs a new Moon in our sky?_
He didn't last long in the water; it was too cold. He took a few brisk strokes until the water was shallow enough for him to walk. He splashed out of the surf, shivering, briskly dried himself on his shirt, and began to pull on his pants.
There was somebody standing beside the beached berg fragment, just a slim shadow in the gray dawn light, watching him.
## _F ire_
Maxie is running around Fire's feet. _"Hide and seek. Hide and seek, Fire. Hide and seek."_
Fire stares at Maxie. To him the boy is a blur of movement and noise, unpredictable, incomprehensible, fascinating.
Maxie has leaves on his head. They flutter away as he runs. Sally puts them back on. _"No, Maxie,"_ she says. _"Be careful of the sun."_
_"Hide and seek, hide and seek."_ He stands still. His hands cover his eyes. _"Hands, Fire, eyes, Fire."_ His hands cover his eyes.
Fire puts his hands over his eyes. It is dark. The night is dark. He starts to feel sleepy.
Maxie calls, _"Eight nine ten ready! Fire Fire Fire!"_
Fire lowers his hands. It is not night. The sunlight is bright. The world is red and green and blue. He blinks.
Maxie has gone away.
Fire sees Sing on her bower of leaves. He walks toward her. He has forgotten Maxie.
Maxie is at his feet. _"Here I am, here I am!"_ Maxie stamps his foot. Red dust rises and sticks to Maxie's white flesh. _"You have to try, you silly. You have to play it right. Try again, try again. Eyes, Fire, hands, Fire."_ He covers his eyes.
As the sun climbs into the sky, the game goes on. Every time Maxie disappears Fire forgets about him. Every time he comes back Fire is surprised to see him.
Fire grows hungry. Fire thinks of himself in the forest, eating nuts and berries and leaves. Fire lopes toward the forest.
_"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 toward the open daylight.
Emma follows him. But he has forgotten Emma. He remembers the nuts and the fungus and the Nutcracker-man.
## _R eid 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-gray 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 centers. 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..."
"Are you religious now?"
"No." He had tried, for the sake of the priest, Monica Chaum, as much as anybody else. But, unlike some who came back from space charged with religious zeal, Malenfant had lost it all when he made his first flight into orbit. Space was just too _immense_. Humans were like ants on a log, adrift in some vast river. How could any Earth-based ritual come close to the truth of the God who had made such a universe?
"So I gave up the chapel. It caused some problems with Emma's family. But she supported me. She always did."
"But now you have returned to the faith?"
"No. I do find the chapel kind of restful. But I get a lot more comfort from going out on a toot with Monica Chaum over at the Outpost. She has quite a capacity for a woman Catholic priest. I make no excuses; I've been through a lot." He eyed her. "As have you."
"Yes." Her face, never beautiful, was empty of expression. "As is well known."
Nemoto had been aboard the International Space Station, in low Earth orbit, when the Red Moon had made its dramatic entrance. Nemoto had been forced to watch from orbit as the first great tides battered at Japan.
"I returned to Earth as soon as I could. I and my colleague used our Japanese Hope shuttle. You may know that our landing facility was at Karitimati Island in the South Pacific—"
"Where? Oh, yeah, Christmas Island."
"There is little left of Karitimati. We were forced to come down here, at KSC."
He said carefully, "Where was your home?"
"I have no home now," was all she would reply.
He nodded. "Nor do I." It was true. He had an empty house in Clear Lake, but the hell with that. His home was with Emma—wherever she was.
Nemoto paused and looked into the sky. Although the first liquid glimmer of sun was resting on the horizon, the Red Moon still shone bright in the sky. "If you have abandoned your attempts to acquire faith, you do not believe that God is responsible for _that_?"
He grinned, rubbing his hand over his bare scalp, feeling a rime of salt there. "Not God, no. But I think _somebody_ is."
"And you would like to find out who."
"Wouldn't you?"
"Do you believe that the bodies which fell through the African portal were human?"
He frowned, taken aback by the question. "Nobody can make much of the mashed-up remains that they scraped out of the savannah."
"But they appear to be human, or a human variant. You _saw_ them, Malenfant. I've read your testimony. They share our DNA—much of it, though the recovered sequences show a large diversity from our own genome. There is speculation that they are more like one of our ancestors, a primitive hominid species."
"Yeah. So there are ape-men running all over our new Moon up there, right? I read the tabloids, too."
"Malenfant, what do _you_ believe?"
He said fiercely, "I believe that the Wheel was some kind of portal. I believe it linked Earth to its new moon. And I believe it transported those poor unevolved saps, here from there. What I don't know is what the hell it all means."
"And you believe your wife made the return journey. That she is still alive up there on the Red Moon, breathing its air, drinking its water, perhaps eating its vegetation."
"Where else could she be?... I'm sorry. It's what I want to believe, I guess. It's what I have to believe."
"Yes." She smiled. "Everybody knows this, Malenfant. Your longing to reach her is tangible. I can see it, now, in your eyes, the set of your body."
"You think I'm an asshole," he said brutally. "You think I should let go."
"No. I think you are fully human. This is to be admired."
He felt awkward again. He'd only just met this girl, yet somehow she'd already seen him naked every which way a person could be naked.
They reached the Beachhouse. They sat on its porch, facing the ocean. Malenfant sipped water from a plastic bottle. "So how come you've been pursuing me around NASA? What do you want, Nemoto?"
"I believe we can help each other. You want to set up a mission to reach the Red Moon. So do I. I believe we should. I believe we must. _I can get you there_."
Suddenly his heart was pumping. "How?"
Rapidly, with the aid of a pocket softscreen, she sketched out a cut-down mission profile, using a simplified version of Malenfant's Shuttle-based Big Dumb Booster design, topped by a Space Station evacuation lander, adapted for the Moon's conditions. "It will not be safe," she said. "But it will work. And it could be done, we believe, in a couple of months, at a cost of a few billion dollars."
It was fast and dirty, even by the standards of the proposals he had been touting himself. But it could work... "If we could get anybody to fund it."
"There are many refugee Japanese who would support this," Nemoto said gravely. "Of all the major nations it is perhaps the Japanese who have suffered most in this present disaster. Among the refugees, there is a strong desire at least to _know_ , to understand what has caused the deaths of so many. Thus there are significant resources to call on. But we would need to work with NASA, which has the necessary facilities for ground support."
"Which is where I come in." He drank his water. "Nemoto, maybe you're speaking to the wrong guy. I've already tried, remember. And I got nowhere. I come up against brick walls like Joe Bridges the whole time."
"We must learn to work with Mr. Bridges, not against him."
"How?"
She touched his hand. Her skin was cold. He was shocked by the sudden, unexpected contact. "By telling the truth, Malenfant. You care nothing for geology or planetology or the mystery of the Red Moon, or even the tide, do you? You want to find Emma." She withdrew her hand. "It is a motive that will awaken people's hearts."
"Ah. I get it. You want me to be a fundraiser. To blub on live TV."
"You will provide a focus for the project—a _human_ reason to pursue it. At a time when the waters are lapping over the grain fields, nobody cares about science. But they always care about family. We need a story, Malenfant. A hero."
"Even if that hero is a Quixote."
She looked puzzled. "Quixote's was a good story. And so will yours be."
She didn't seem in much doubt that he'd ultimately fall into line. And, looking into his heart, neither did he.
Irritated by her effortless command, he snapped, "So why are _you_ so keen to go exploring the new Moon, Nemoto? Just to figure out why Japan got trashed?... I'm sorry."
She shrugged. "There is more. I have read of your speeches on the Fermi Paradox."
"I wouldn't call them speeches. Bullshit for goodwill tours..."
"As a child, your eyes were raised to the stars. You wondered who was looking back. You wondered why you couldn't see them. Just as I did, half a world away."
He gestured at the Moon. "Is that what you think this is? We were listening for a whisper of radio signals from the stars. You couldn't get much less subtle a first contact than _this_."
"I think this huge event is more than that—even more significant. Malenfant, _people rained out of the sky_. They may or may not belong to a species we recognize, but they were people. It is clear to me that the meaning of the Red Moon is intimately bound up with us: what it is to be human—and why we are alone in the cosmos."
"Or _were_."
"Yes," she said. "And, consider this. This Red Moon simply appeared in our sky... It is not as if a fleet of huge starships towed it into position. We don't know how it got there. _And we don't know how long it will stay_ , conveniently poised next to the Earth. The Wheel disappeared just hours after it arrived. If we don't act now—"
"Yes, you're right. We must act urgently." The sun was a shimmering globe suspended on the edge of the ocean, and Malenfant began to feel its heat draw at the skin of his face. "We've a lot to talk about."
"Yes."
They walked up the path to their cars.
## _F ire_
The sun is above his head. The air is hot and still. The red ground shines brightly through brittle grass. People move to and fro on the red dust.
Fire thinks of Dig. He thinks of himself touching Dig's hair, her dugs, the small of her back. His member stiffens. His eyes and ears seek Dig. They don't find her.
He sees Sing.
Sing is lying flat her bower, in the sun. Her head does not rise. Her hand does not lift from where it is sprawled in the red dirt. Her legs are splayed. Flies nibble at her belly and eyes and mouth.
Fire squats. His hands flap at the flies, chasing them away. He shakes Sing's shoulder. "Sing Sing Fire Sing!"
She does not move. He puts his finger in her mouth. It is dry.
Fire picks up Sing's hand. It is limp, but her arm is stiff. He drops the hand. The arm falls back with a soft thump. Dust rises, falls back.
Emma is beside him.
_"Fire. Maxie is ill. Perhaps you can help. Umm, Maxie sore Maxie. Fire Maxie... Fire, is something wrong?"_
Her eyes look at Sing. Her hands press at Sing's neck. Emma's head drops over Sing's mouth, and her ear listens.
Fire thinks of Sing laughing. She is huge and looms over him. Her face blocks out the sun.
He looks at the slack eyes, the open mouth, the dried drool. This is not Sing.
His legs stand him up. He bends down and lifts the body over his shoulders. It is stiff. It is cold.
Emma stands. _"Fire? Are you all right?"_
Fire's legs jog downwind. They jog until his eyes see the people are far away. Then his arms dump the body on the ground. It sprawls. He hears bones snap. Gas escapes from its backside.
Bad meat.
He jogs away, back to the people.
He goes to Sing's bower. But the bower is empty. People are here, and then they are gone, leaving no memorials, no trace but their children, as transient as lions or deer or worms or clouds. Sing is gone from the world, as if she never existed. Soon he will forget her.
He scatters the branches with his foot.
Emma is watching him.
Sally is here, holding Maxie. Maxie is weeping. Emma says, _"Fire, I'm sorry. Can you help us? I don't know what to do..."_
Fire grins. He reaches for Maxie.
Maxie cringes. Sally pulls him back.
Emma says, _"No, Fire. He doesn't want to play. Fire Maxie ill sick sore."_
Fire frowns. He touches Maxie's forehead. It is hot and wet. He touches his belly. It is hard.
He thinks of a shrub with broad, coarse-textured leaves. He does not know why he thinks of the shrub. He doesn't even formulate the question. The knowledge is just there.
He lopes to the forest. His ears listen and his eyes peer into the dark greenery. There are no Nutcracker-folk. There are no Elf-folk.
He sees the shrub. He reaches out and plucks leaves.
His legs take him out of the forest.
Maxie stares at the leaves. Water runs down his face.
Fire pokes a leaf into his small, hot mouth. Maxie's mouth tries to spit it out. Fire pushes it back. Maxie's mouth chews the leaf. Fire holds his jaw so the mouth can't chew.
Maxie swallows the leaf, and wails.
Fire makes him swallow another. And another.
Somebody is shouting. "Meat! Meat!"
Fire's head snaps around. The voice is coming from upwind. Now his nose can smell blood.
Something big has died.
His legs jog that way.
He finds Stone and Blue and Dig and Grass and others. They are squatting in the dirt. They hold axes in their hands.
The meat is an antelope. It is lying on the ground.
Killing birds are tearing at the carcass.
The killing birds tower over the people. They have long gnarled legs, and stubby useless wings, and heads the size of Fire's thigh. The heads of the birds dig into the belly and joints of the antelope, pushing right inside the carcass.
The people wait, watching the birds.
A pack of hyenas circles, warily watching the birds and the people. And there are Elf-folk. They sit at the edge of the forest, picking at their black-brown hair. The bands of scavengers are set out in a broad circle around the carcass, well away from the birds, held in place by a geometry of hunger and wariness. The Running-folk are scavengers among the others—not the weakest, not the strongest, not especially feared. The people wait their turn with the others, waiting for the birds to finish, knowing their place.
One by one the birds strut away. Their heads jerk this way and that, dipping. Their eyes are yellow. They are looking for more antelopes to kill.
The hyenas are first to get to the corpse. Their faces lunge into its ripped-open rib cage. The hyenas start to fight with one another, forgetting the killing birds, forgetting the people.
Blue and Stone and Fire hurl bits of rock.
The dogs back away. Their muzzles are bloody red, their eyes glaring. Their mouths want the meat. But their bodies fear the stones and sticks of the people.
The people fall on the carcass.
Stone's axe, held between thumb and forefinger, slices through the antelope's thick hide. The axe rolls to bring more of its edge into play. It slices meat neatly from the bones. The birds have beaks to rip meat. The hyenas and cats have teeth. The people have axes. The people work without speaking, not truly cooperating.
Fire's hands cram bits of meat into his mouth, hot and raw. Fire thinks of the other people by the fire, the women and their infants and children with no name. He tells his mouth it must not eat all the meat. He holds great slabs of it in his hands, slippery and bloody.
Fire's ears hear a hollering. His head snaps around.
More Elf-folk are boiling out of the forest fringe, hooting, hungry. They have rocks and stones and axes in their hands. They run on their legs like people. But their legs are shorter than a person's, and they have big strong arms, longer and stronger than a person's.
Stone growls. His mouth bloody, he raises his axe at the Elf-folk.
The Elf-folk show their teeth. They hoot and screech.
A bat swoops from the sky. It is a hunter. Its wings are broad and flap slowly. The people scatter, fearing talons and beak.
The bat falls on the Elf-folk. It caws. It rises into the air. It has its talons dug into the scalp of an Elf-woman. She wriggles and cries, dugs swinging.
One Elf-man throws a rock at the bat. It misses. The others just watch. She is gone, in an instant, her life over.
Suddenly Stone charges forward at the Elf-folk. Blue follows. Dig follows.
The Elf-folk scamper away, into the safety of their forest.
Stone hoots his triumph.
The people return to the antelope. The hyenas have approached again, and bats have flown down, digging into the entrails of the antelope. The people hurl stones and shout. The people's hands take meat and bones from the carcass, until their hands are full. The people's mouths dig into the carcass and bite away final chunks of meat.
Other scavengers move in. Soon there will be nothing left of the antelope but scattered, crushed, chewed bones, over which insects will crawl.
The children fall on the meat. Their mouths snap and their hands punch and scratch as they fight over the meat.
Fire approaches Dig. He holds out meat. Her hands grab it. She throws it away. A child with no name falls on the discarded scrap.
Dig laughs. She turns her back on Fire.
Emma comes to Fire. She smiles, seeing the meat. His belly wants to keep all the meat, but he makes his hands give her some.
Emma takes it to the fire. There are rocks in the fire. Emma beats the meat flat and puts it on the hot rocks. She peels it off the rocks and carries it to Sally and Maxie.
Fire squats on the ground. His hands tear meat. His teeth crush it.
Emma stands before him. She is smiling. She pulls his hand.
His legs follow her.
She stops by a patch of dung. The dung is pale and watery and smelly. There is a leaf in the dung. There is a worm on the leaf, dead.
Emma says, _"I think you did it, Doctor Fire. You got the damn worm out of him."_
Fire does not remember the leaf, or Maxie. Emma's mouth is still moving, but he does not think about the noises she makes.
## _R eid Malenfant_
A flock of pigeons flew at the big Marine helicopter. Such was their closing speed that the birds seemed to explode out of the air all around them, a panicky blur of gray and white. The pilot lifted his craft immediately, and the pigeons fell away.
Nemoto's hands were over her mouth.
Malenfant grinned. "Just to make it interesting."
"I think the times are interesting enough, Malenfant."
"Yeah."
Now the chopper rolled, and the capital rotated beneath him. They flew over the Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington monuments, set out like toys on a green carpet, and to the right the dome of the Capitol gleamed bright in the sunlight, showing no sign of the hasty restoration it had required after last month's food riots.
The helicopter leveled and began a gentle descent toward the White House, directly ahead. The old sandstone building looked as cute as it always had, depending on your taste. But now it was surrounded by a deep layer of defenses, even including a moat around the perimeter fence. And, save for a helipad, the lawn had been turned to a patchwork of green and brown, littered with small outbuildings. In a very visible (though hardly practical) piece of example-setting, the lawn had been given over to the raising of vegetables and chickens and even a small herd of pigs, and every morning the president could be seen by webcast feeding his flock. It was not a convincing portrait, Malenfant always thought, even if the prez was a farmer's son. But for human beings, it seemed, symbolism was everything.
The helicopter came down to a flawless landing on the pad. Nemoto climbed out gracefully, carrying a rolled-up softscreen. Malenfant followed more stiffly, feeling awkward to have been riding in a military machine in his civilian suit—but he was a civilian today, at the insistence of the NASA brass.
An aide greeted them and escorted them into the building itself. They had to pass through a metal-and-plastics detector in the doorway, and then spent a tough five minutes in a small security office just inside the building being frisked, photographed, scanned, and probed by heavily-armed Marine sergeants. Nemoto even had to give up her softscreen after downloading its contents into a military-issue copy.
Nemoto seemed to withdraw deeper into herself as they endured all this.
"Take it easy," Malenfant told her. "The goons are just doing their job. It's the times we live in."
"It is not that," Nemoto murmured. "It is this place, this moment. From orbit, I watched the oceans batter Japan. I felt I was in the palm of a monster immeasurably more powerful than me—a monster who would decide the fate of myself, and my family, and all I possessed and cared for, with an arbitrary carelessness I could do nothing to influence. And so, I feel, it is now. But I must endure."
"You really want to go on this trip, don't you?"
She glanced at him. "As you do."
"You always deflect my questions about yourself, Nemoto. You are a _koan_. An enigma."
She smiled at that fragment of Japanese.
At last they were done, and the aide, accompanied by a couple of the armed Marines, took them through corridors to the Oval Office, on the West Wing's first floor, which the vice president was using today. Her official residence, a rambling brick house on the corner of 34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was no longer considered sufficiently secure.
Nemoto said as they walked, "You say you know Vice President Della."
"Used to know her. She's had an interest in space all her career. As a senator she served on a couple of NASA oversight committees." Now the president had asked Della to take responsibility for Malenfant's project, in her capacity as chair of the Space Council.
Nemoto said, "If she is a friend of yours—"
"Hardly that. More an old sparring partner. Mutual, grudging respect. I haven't seen her for a long time—certainly not since she got _here_."
"Do you think she will support us?"
"She's from Iowa. She's a canny politician. She is—practical. But she has always seen a little further than most of the Beltway crowd. She believes space efforts have value. But she's a utilitarian. I've heard her argue for weather satellites, Earth resources programs. She even supports blue-sky stuff about asteroid mining and power stations in orbit. Moving the heavy industries off the planet might provide a future for this dirty old world... But robots can do all that. I don't think she sees much purpose in Man in Space. She never supported the Station, for instance."
"Then we must hope that she sees some utility in our venture to the Red Moon."
He grimaced. "Either that or we manage to twist her arm hard enough."
As they entered the Oval Office, Vice President Maura Della was working through documents on softscreens embedded in a walnut desk. The desk was positioned at one of the big office's narrow ends—the place really was oval-shaped, Malenfant observed, gawking like a tourist.
Della glanced up, stood, and came out from behind the desk to greet them. Dressed in a trim trouser suit, she was dark, slim, in her sixties. She shook them both briskly by the hand, waved them to green wing-back chairs before the desk, then settled back into her rocking chair.
The only other people in the room were an aide and an armed Marine at the door. Malenfant had been expecting Joe Bridges, and other NASA brass.
Without preamble Della said, "You're trying to get me over a barrel, aren't you, Malenfant?"
Malenfant was taken aback. This was, after all, the vice president. But he could see from the glint in Della's eye that if he wanted to win the play this was a time for straight talking. "Not you personally. But—yes, ma'am, that's the plan."
Della tapped her desk. Malenfant glimpsed his own image scrolling before her, accompanied by text and video clips and the subdued insect murmur of audio.
Maura Della always had been known for a straightforward political style. To Malenfant she looked a little lost in the cool grandeur of the Oval Office, even after three years in the job, out of place in the crispness of the powder-blue carpet and cream paintwork, and the many alcoves crammed with books, certificates, and ornaments, all precisely placed, like funerary offerings. This was clearly not a room you could feel you lived in.
There was a stone sitting on the polished desk surface, a sharp-edged fragment about the size of Malenfant's thumb, the color of lava pebbles. No, not stone, Malenfant realized, studying the fragment. _Bone_. A bit of skull, maybe.
Della said, "Your campaign has lasted two weeks already, in every media outlet known to man. Reid Malenfant the stricken hero, tilting at the new Moon to save his dead wife." She eyed him brutally.
"It has the virtue of being true, ma'am," Malenfant said frankly. "And she may not be dead. That's the whole point."
Nemoto leaned forward. "If I may—"
Della nodded.
"The response of the American public to Malenfant's campaign has been striking. The latest polls show—"
"Overwhelming support for what you're trying to do," Della murmured. She tapped her desk and shut down the images. "Of course they do. But let me tell you something about polls. The president's own approval ratings have been bouncing along the floor since the day the tides began to hit. You know why? Because people need somebody to blame.
"The appearance of a whole damn Moon in the sky is beyond comprehension. If as a consequence your house is smashed, your crops destroyed, family members injured or dead, you can't blame the Moon, you can't rage at the tide. In another age you might have blamed God. But now you blame whoever you think ought to be helping you climb out of your hole, which generally means all branches of the federal government, and specifically this office." She shook her head. "So polls don't drive me one way or the other. Because whatever I decide, your stunt isn't going to help _me_."
"Perhaps not," said Nemoto. "But it might help the people beyond this office. The people of the world. And that is what we are talking about, isn't it?"
Malenfant covered her hand. _Take it easy_.
Della glared. "Don't presume to tell me my job, young woman." Then she softened. "Even if you're right." She turned to a window. "God knows we need some good news... You know about the quakes."
"Yes, ma'am," Malenfant said grimly.
This was the latest manifestation of the Red Moon's baleful influence. Luna had raised tides in Earth's rock, just as in its water. Luna's rock tides had amounted to no more than a few inches.
But the Red Moon raised great waves several feet high.
Massive earthquakes had occurred in Turkey, Chile, and elsewhere, many of them battering communities already devastated by the effects of the tide. In fault zones like the San Andreas in California, the land above the faults was being eroded away much more rapidly than before, thus exposing the unstable rocks beneath, and exacerbating the tidal flexing of the rocks themselves.
Della said, "The geologists tell me that if the Red Moon stays in orbit around Earth, it is possible that the fault lines between Earth's tectonic plates—such as the great Ring of Fire that surrounds the Pacific—will ultimately settle down to constant seismic activity. _Constant_. I can't begin to imagine what that will mean for us, for humanity. No doubt devastating long-term impacts on the Earth's climate, all that volcanic dust and ash and heat being pumped into the air... When I look into the future now, the only rational reaction is dread and fear."
"People need to see that we are hitting back," Malenfant said. "That we are _doing_ something."
"Perhaps. That is the American way. The myth of action. But does our action hero have to be _you_ , Malenfant? And what happens when you crash up there, or die of starvation, or burn up on re-entry? How will _that_ play in the polls?"
"Then you find another hero," Malenfant said stonily. "And you try again."
"But even if you make it to the Moon, what will you find? You should know I've had several briefings in preparation for this meeting. One of them was with Dr. Julia Corneille, from the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. An old college friend, as it happens."
"Anthropology?"
"Actually Julia's speciality is paleoanthropology. Extinct homs, the lineage of human descent. You see the relevance."
"Homs?"
"Hominids." Della smiled. "Sorry. Field slang. You can tell I spent some time with Julia... She told me something of her life, her work in the field. Mostly out in the desert heartlands of Kenya."
"Looking for fossils," Malenfant said.
"Looking for fossils. People don't leave many fossils, Malenfant. And they don't just lie around. It took Julia years before she learned to pick them out, tiny specks against the soil. It's a tough place to work, harsh, terribly dry, a place where all the bushes have thorns on them... Fascinating story." She picked up the scrap of bone from her desk. "This was the first significant find Julia made. She told me she was engaged on another dig. She was walking one day along the bed of a dried-out river, when she happened to glance down... Well. It is a fragment of skull. A trace of a woman, of a species called _Homo erectus_. The _Erectus_ were an intermediate form of human. They arose perhaps two million years ago, and became extinct a quarter-million years ago. They had bodies close to modern humans, but smaller brains—perhaps twice the size of chimps'. But they were phenomenally successful. They migrated out of Africa and covered the Old World, reaching as far as Java."
Malenfant said dryly, "Fascinating, ma'am. And the significance—"
"The significance is that the homs who rained out of the sky, on the day you lost your wife, Malenfant, appear to have been _Homo erectus_. Or a very similar type."
There was a brief silence.
"But if _Erectus_ died out two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, what is he doing raining out of the sky?"
"That is what you must find out, Malenfant, if your mission is approved. Think of it. What if there _is_ a link between the homs of the Wheel and ancestral _Erectus_? Well, how can that be? What does it tell us of human evolution?" Della fingered her skull fragment longingly. "You know, we have spent billions seeking the aliens in the sky. But we were looking in the wrong place. The aliens aren't separated from us by distance, but by time. Here—" she said, holding out the bit of bone " _—here_ is the alien, right here, calling to us from the past. But we have to infer everything about our ancestors from isolated bits of bone—the ancient homs' appearance, gait, behavior, social structure, language, culture, tool-making ability—everything we know, or we think we know about them. We can't even tell how many species there were, let alone how they lived, how they _felt_. You, on the other hand, might be able to view them directly." She smiled. "Even _ask_ them. Think what it would mean."
Malenfant began to see the pattern of the meeting. In her odd mix of hard-nosed skepticism at his mission plans, and wide-eyed wonder at what he might find up there, Della was groping her way toward a decision. His best tactic was surely to play straight.
Nemoto had been listening coldly. She leaned forward. "Madam Vice President. You want this Dr. Corneille to have a seat on the mission."
Ah, Malenfant thought. Now we cut to the horse-trading.
Della sat back in her rocker, hands settling over her belly. "Well, they sent geologists to the Moon on Apollo."
" _One_ geologist," said Malenfant. "Only after years of infighting. And Jack Schmitt was trained for the job; he made sure he was, in fact. As far as I know there are no paleoanthropologists in the Astronaut Office."
"Would there be room for a passenger?"
Malenfant shook his head. "You've seen our schematics."
Della tapped her desk, and brought up computer-graphic images of booster rockets and spaceplanes. "You are proposing to build a booster from Space Shuttle components."
"Our Saturn V replacement, yes."
"And you will glide down into the Red Moon's atmosphere in a—what is it?"
"An X-38. It is a lifting body, the crew evacuation vehicle used on the Space Station. We will fit it out to keep us alive for the three-day trip. On the surface we will rendezvous with a package of small jets and boosters for the return journey, sent up separately. The whole mission design is based around a two-person crew. Madam Vice President, we just couldn't cram in anybody else."
"Not on the way out," Della said evenly. " _Two out, three back_. Isn't that your slogan, Malenfant?"
"That's the whole idea, ma'am. And those outbound two have to be astronauts. The best scientist in the world will be no use on the Red Moon dead."
"The same argument was used to keep scientists off Apollo," Della said.
"But it is still valid."
Nemoto said coldly, "The reality is that I must fly this mission because the Japanese funding depends on it. And Malenfant must fly the mission—"
"Because the American public longs for him to go," Della sighed. "You're right, of course. If this mission is approved, then it will be you two sorry jerks who fly it."
_If_. Malenfant allowed himself a flicker of hope.
Nemoto seemed to be growing agitated. "Madam Vice President, _we must do this_. If I may—" She leaned forward and unrolled her softscreen on Della's desktop.
Della watched her blankly. Malenfant had no idea where this was leading.
"There is evidence that similar events have touched human history before, evidence buried deep in our history and myths. Consider the story of Ezekiel, from the Old Testament: 'And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the Earth, the wheels were lifted up.' Or consider a tale from the ancient Persian Gulf, about an 'animal endowed with reason called Oannes, who used to converse with men but took no food... and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art—' "
Shit, Malenfant thought.
Della was keeping her face straight. "So is this your justification for a billion-dollar space mission? UFOs from the Bible?"
Nemoto said, "My point is that the irruption of the Red Moon is the greatest event in modern human history. It will surely shape our future— _as it has our past_. The emergence of the primitive hominids from Malenfant's portal tells us that. This one event is the pivot on which history turns."
"I feel I have enough on my plate without assuming responsibility for all human history."
Nemoto subsided, angry, baffled.
Della said bluntly, "However I do need to know why you are trying to kill yourselves."
Malenfant bridled. "The mission profile—"
"—is a death-trap. Come on, Malenfant; I've studied space missions before."
Malenfant sat up straight, Navy style. "We don't have time not to buy the risks on this one, ma'am."
"You're both obsessed enough to take those risks. That's clear enough. Nemoto I think I understand."
"You do?"
Della smiled at Nemoto. "Forgive me, dear. Malenfant, she may be an enigma to you, but that's because she's young. She lost her family, her home. She wants revenge."
Nemoto did not react to this.
"But what about you, Malenfant?"
"I lost my wife," he said angrily. "That's motive enough. With respect, ma'am."
She nodded. "But you are grounded. Let me put it bluntly, because others will ask the same question many times before you get to the launch pad. Are you going back to space to find your wife? Or are you using Emma as a lever to get back into space?"
Malenfant kept his face blank, his bearing upright. He wasn't about to lose his temper with the Vice President of the United States. "I guess Joe Bridges has been talking to you."
She drummed her fingers on her desk. "Actually he is pushing you, Malenfant. He wants you to fly your mission." She observed his surprise. "You didn't know that. You really don't know much about people, do you, Malenfant?"
"Ma'am, with respect, does it matter? If I fly to the Red Moon, whatever my motives, I'll still serve your purposes." He eyed her. "Whatever they are."
"Good answer." She turned again to her softscreen. "I'm going to sleep on this. Whether or not you bring back your wife, I do need you to bring us some good news, Malenfant. Oh, one more thing. Julia's ape-men falling from the sky... You should know there are a lot of people very angered at the interpretation that they might have anything to do with the origins of humankind."
Malenfant grunted. "The crowd that thinks Darwin was an asshole."
Della shrugged. "It's the times, Malenfant. Today only forty percent of American schools teach evolution. I'm already coming under a lot of pressure from the religious groups over your mission, both from Washington and beyond."
"Am I supposed to go to the Red Moon and convert the ape-men?"
She said sternly, "Watch your public pronouncements. You will go with God, or not at all." She fingered the bit of hominid skull on her desk. " 'O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.' "
"Pardon?"
"Our old friend Ezekiel. Chapter thirty-seven, verse four. Good day."
## _E mma Stoney_
There were bees that swarmed at sunset. Some of them stung, but you could brush them away, if you were careful. But there were other species which didn't sting, but which gathered at the corner of the mouth, or the eyes, or at the edge of wet wounds, apparently feeding on the fluids of the body.
You couldn't relax, not for a minute.
Uncounted days after her arrival, Emma woke to find an empty shelter.
She threw off her parachute silk and crawled out of the shelter's rough opening. The sun was low, but it was strong, its warmth welcome on her face.
Sally's hair was a tangled mess, her safari suit torn, bloody and filthy. Maxie clung to her leg. Sally was pointing toward the sun. "They're leaving."
The Runners were walking away. They moved in their usual disorganized way, scattered over the plain in little groups. They seemed to be empty-handed. They had abandoned everything, in fact: their shelters, their tools. Just up and walked away, off to the east. Why?
"They left us," Maxie moaned.
A shadow passed over them, and Emma felt immediately cold. She glanced up at the deep sky. Cloud was driving over the sun.
A flake touched her cheek.
Something was falling out of the sky, drifting like very light snow. Maxie ran around, gurgling with delight. Emma held out her hand, letting a flake land there. It wasn't cold: in fact, it wasn't snow at all.
It was ash.
"We have to go, don't we?" Sally asked reluctantly.
"Yes, we have to go."
"But if we leave here, how will they find us?"
_They?_ What "they"? The question seemed almost comical to Emma.
But she knew Sally took it very seriously. They had spent long hours draping Emma's parachute silk over rocks and in the tops of trees, hoping its bright color might attract attention from the air, or even from orbit. And they had labored to pull pale-colored rocks into a vast rectangular sigil. None of it had done a damn bit of good.
There was, though, a certain logic to staying close to where they had emerged from the wheel-shaped portal. After all, who was to say the portal wouldn't reappear one day, as suddenly as it had disappeared, a magic door opening to take them home?
And beyond that, if they were to leave with the Runners—if they were to walk off in some unknown direction with these gangly, naked not-quite-humans—it would feel like giving up: a statement that they had thrown in their lot with the Runners, that they had accepted that _this_ was their life now, a life of crude shelters and berries from the forest and, if they were lucky, scraps of half-chewed, red-raw meat: _This_ was the way it would be for the rest of their lives.
But Emma didn't see what the hell else they could do.
They compromised. They spent a half-hour gathering the largest, brightest rocks they could carry, and arranging them into a great arrow that pointed away from the Runners' crude hearth, toward the east. Then they bundled up as much of their gear as they could carry in wads of parachute silk, and followed the Runners' tracks.
Emma made sure they stayed clear of a low heap of bones she saw scattered a little way away. She was glad it had never occurred to Sally to ask hard questions about what had become of her husband's body.
The days wore away.
Their track meandered around natural obstacles—a boggy marsh, a patch of dense forest, a treeless, arid expanse—but she could tell that their course remained roughly eastward, away from the looming volcanic cloud.
The Runners seemed to prefer grassy savannah with some scattered tree cover, and would divert to keep to such ground—and Emma admitted to herself that such parklike areas made her feel relatively comfortable, too, more than either dense forest or unbroken plains. Maybe it was no coincidence that humans made parks that reminded them, on some deep level, of countryside like this. I guess we all carry a little Africa around with us, she thought.
She was no expert on botany, African or otherwise. It did seem to her there were a lot of fernlike trees and relatively few flowering plants, as if the flora here was more primitive than on Earth. A walk in the Jurassic, then.
As for the fauna, she glimpsed herds of antelopelike creatures: Some of them were slim and agile, who would bolt as the Runners approached, but others were larger, clumsier, hairier, crossing the savannah in heavy-footed gangs. The animals kept their distance, and she was grateful for that. But again they didn't strike her as being characteristically _African_ : She saw no elephants, no zebra or giraffes. (But then, she told herself, there were barely any elephants left in Africa anyhow.)
It was clear there were predators everywhere. Once Emma heard the throaty, echoing roar of what had to be a lion. A couple of times she spotted cats slinking through brush at the fringe of forests: leopards, perhaps.
And once they came across a herd—no, a _flock_ —of huge, vicious-looking carnivorous birds.
The flightless creatures moved in a tight group with an odd nervousness, pecking at the ground with those savagely curved beaks, and scratching at their feathers and cheeks with claws like scimitars. Their behavior was very birdlike, but unnerving in creatures so huge.
The Runners took cover in a patch of forests for a full half-day, until the flock had passed.
The Runners called them "killing birds." A wide-eyed Maxie called the birds "dinosaurs."
And they did look like dinosaurs, Emma thought. Birds had evolved from dinosaurs, of course; here, maybe, following some ecological logic, birds had lost their flight, had forgotten how to sing, but they had rediscovered their power and their pomp, becoming lords of the landscape once more.
The Runners' gait wasn't quite human. Their rib cages seemed high and somewhat conical, more like a chimp's than a human's, and their hips were very narrow, so that each Runner was a delicately balanced, slim form with long striding legs.
Emma wondered what problems those narrow hips caused during childbirth. The heads of the Runners weren't that much smaller than her own. But there were no midwives here, and no epidurals either. Maybe the women helped each other.
Certainly each of them clearly knew her own children—unlike the men, who seemed to regard the children as small, irritating competitors.
The women even seemed to use sex to bond. Sometimes in the night, two women would lie together, touching and stroking, sharing gentle pleasures that would last much longer than the short, somewhat brutal physical encounters they had with the men.
By comparison, the men had no real community at all, just a brutish ladder of competition: They bickered and snapped among themselves, endlessly working out their pecking order. At that, Emma thought, this bunch of guys had a lot of common with every human mostly-male preserve she had ever come across, up to and including the NASA Astronaut Office.
Stone was the boss man; he used his fists and feet and teeth and hand-axes to keep the other men in their place, and to win access to the women. But he, and the other men, did not seek to injure or kill his own kind. It was all just a dominance game.
And Stone was not running a harem here. With all that fist-fighting he won himself more rolls in the hay than the other men, but the others got plenty, too; all they had to do was wait until Stone was asleep, or looking the other way, or was off hunting, or just otherwise engaged. Emma had no idea why this should be so. Maybe you just couldn't run a harem in a highly mobile group like this; maybe you needed a place to hold your female quasi-prisoners, a fortress to defend your "property" from other men.
It was what these people _lacked_ that struck Emma most strongly. They had no art, no music, no song. They didn't even have language; their verbless jabber conveyed basic emotions—anger, fear, demands—but little information. They only "talked" anyhow in social encounters, mating or grooming or fighting, never when they were working, making tools or hunting or even eating. She thought their "talk" had more in common with the purring and yowling of cats than information-rich human conversation.
Certainly the Runners never discussed where they were going. It was clear, though, from the way they studied animal tracks, and fingered shrubs, and sniffed the wind, that they had a deep understanding of this land on which they lived, and knew how to find their way across it.
... Yes, but how did that knowledge get there, if not through talking, learning? Maybe a facility for tracking was hard-wired into their heads at birth, she speculated, as the ability to pick up language seemed to be born with human infants.
Whatever, it was a peculiar example of how the Runners could be as smart as any human in one domain—say, tracking—and yet be dumber than the smallest child in another—such as playing Maxie's games of hide-and-seek and catch. It was as if their minds were chambered, some rooms fully stocked, some empty, all of the chambers walled off from each other.
When the Runners stopped for the night, they would scavenge for rocks and bits of wood and quickly make any tools they needed: hand axes, spears. But they carried nothing with them except chunks of food. In the morning, when it was time to move on, they would just drop their hand axes in the dirt and walk away, sometimes leaving the tools in the mounds of spill they had made during their creation.
Emma saw it made sense. It only took a quarter-hour or so to make a reasonable hand axe, and the Runners were smart at finding the raw materials they needed; they presumably wouldn't stop in a place that couldn't provide them in that way. To invest fifteen minutes in making a new axe was a lot better than spending all day carrying a lethally sharp blade in your bare hands.
All this shaped their lifestyle, in a way she found oddly pleasing. They had no possessions. If they wanted to move to some new place they just abandoned everything they had, like walking out of a house full of furniture leaving the doors unlocked. When they got to where they were going they would just make more of whatever they needed, and within half a day they were probably as well-equipped as they had been before the move. There must be a deep satisfaction in this way of life, never weighed down by possessions and souvenirs and memories. A clean self-sufficiency.
But Sally was dismissive. "Lions don't own anything either. Elephants don't. Chimps don't. Emma, these ape-men are animals, even if they are built like basketball players. The notion of possessing anything that doesn't go straight in their mouths has no more meaning to them than it would to my pet cat."
Emma shook her head, troubled. The truth, she suspected, was deeper than that.
Anyhow, people or animals, the Runners walked, and walked, and walked. They were black shadows that glided over bright red ground, hooting and calling to each other, nude walking machines.
Soon Emma's socks were a ragged bloody mess, and where her boots didn't fit quite right they chafed at her skin. A major part of each new day was the foot ritual, as Emma and Sally lanced blisters and stuffed their battered boots with leaves and grass. And if she rolled up her trousers, wet sores, pink on black, speckled her shins; Sally suffered similarly. They took turns carrying Maxie, but they were laden down with their parachute silk bundles, and a lot of the time he just had to walk as best he could, clinging to their hands, wailing protests.
During the long days of walking, Emma found herself inevitably spending more time than she liked with Sally.
Emma and Sally didn't much like each other. That was the blunt truth.
There was no reason why they should; they had after all been scooped at random from out of the sky, and just thrown together. At times, hungry or thirsty or frightened or bewildered, they would take it out on each other, bitching and arguing. But that would always pass. They were both smart enough to recognize how much they needed each other.
Still, Emma found herself looking down on Sally somewhat. Riding on her husband's high-flying career, Sally had gotten used to a grander style of life than Emma had ever enjoyed, or wanted. Emma had often berated herself for sacrificing her own aspirations to follow her husband's star, but it seemed to her that Sally had given up a lot more than she had ever been prepared to.
For the sake of good relations, she tried to keep such thoughts buried.
And Emma had to concede Sally's inner toughness. She had after all lost her husband, brutally slain before her eyes. Once she was through the shock of that dreadful arrival, Sally had shown herself to be a survivor, in this situation where a lot of people would surely have folded quickly.
Besides, she had achieved a lot of things Emma had never done. Not least raising kids. Maxie was as happy and healthy and sane as any kid his age Emma had ever encountered. And there turned out to be a girl, Sarah, twelve years old, left at home in Boston for the sake of her schooling while her parents enjoyed their extended African adventure.
Now, of course, this kid Sarah was left effectively orphaned. Sally told Emma that she knew that even if she didn't make it home her sister would take care of the girl, and that her husband's will and insurance cover would provide for the rest of her education and beyond. But it clearly broke her up to think that she couldn't tell Sarah what had become of her family.
It seemed odd to Emma to talk of wills and grieving relatives—as if they were corpses walking around up here on this unfamiliar Moon, too dumb to know they were dead—but she supposed the same thing must be happening in her family. _Her_ will would have handed over all her assets to Malenfant, who must be dealing with her mother and sister and family, and her employers would probably by now be recruiting to fill an Emma-shaped hole in their personnel roster.
But somehow she never imagined Malenfant grieving for her. She pictured him working flat-out on some scheme, hare-brained or otherwise, to figure 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 oaklike 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 chimplike face.
All around the Runners, a fine snow of volcano ash fell, peppering their dark skins white and gray.
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 center 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.
## _R eid 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 honor 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 laboring 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 toward the ocean, and toward 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 and Space Force. Of course he still calls it just the Air Force. He started working on missile programs 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 along 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 Los Angeles. The ocean was a heaving gray mass, its big waves growling. The ground was hilly, with crags and valleys along the waterline and low mountains in the background.
The area struck him as oddly beautiful. It wasn't Big Sur, but it was a lot prettier than Canaveral.
But the big Red Moon hung in the sky above the ocean, its parched desert face turned to the Earth, and its deep crimson color made the water look red as blood, unnatural.
The coastline here had not been spared by the Tide; shore communities like Surf had been comprehensively obliterated. But little harm had come to this Air and Space Force Base, a few miles inland. Canaveral, on the other hand, on Florida's Atlantic coast, had been severely damaged by the Tide. So Vandenberg had been the default choice to construct the launch facilities for Malenfant's unlikely steed.
The car slowed to a halt. They were in the foothills of the Casmalia Hills here. From this elevated vantage Malenfant could see a sweep of lowland speckled with concrete splashes linked by roadways: launch pads, many of them decommissioned.
Beyond that he made out blocky white structures. That was the Shuttle facility itself, the relic of grandiose 1970s Air Force dreams of pilots in space. The launch pad itself looked much like its siblings on the Atlantic coast: a gaunt service structure set over a vast flame pit, with gaping vents to deflect the smoke and flame of launch. The gantry was accompanied to either side by two large structures, boxy, white, open, both marked boldly with the USASF and NASA logos. The shelters were mounted on rails and could be moved in to enclose and protect the gantry itself.
It was nothing like Cape Canaveral. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren't even any fuel tanks, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their flanks. Engineers, most of them young, moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert's expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces. There was an air of improvisation, of invention and urgency, about this pad being reborn after two decades under wraps.
"This has been a major launch center since 1958," Paulis said, sounding as proud as if he'd built the place himself. "Many of them polar launches. Good site for safety: If you go south of here, the next landmass you hit is Antarctica... Slick-six—sorry, SLC-6—is the southernmost launch facility here. It was originally built back in the 1960s to launch a spy-in-the-sky space station for the Air Force, which never flew. Then they modified it for the Air Force Shuttle program. But the Shuttle never flew from here either, and after _Challenger_ the facility was left dormant.'
"I guess it took a lot of un-mothballing," Malenfant said.
"You got that right."
And now, right at the heart of the gray industrial-looking equipment of the Shuttle facility, he made out a slim spire, brilliant white, nestling against its gantry as if for protection.
It looked something like the lower half of a Space Shuttle—two solid rocket boosters strapped to a fat, rust-brown external fuel tank—but there was no moth-shaped Shuttle orbiter clinging to the tank. Instead the tank was topped by a blunt-nosed payload cover almost as fat and wide as the tank itself. The stack vented vapor, and Malenfant could see ice glimmer on its unpainted flanks; evidently the engineers were running a fueling test.
Malenfant felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
It was he who had produced the first back-of-the-envelope sketch of a Big Dumb Booster like this, sketches to show how Shuttle technology could be warped and mutated to manufacture a heavy-lift launcher, a remote descendant of the Saturn V, for this one-shot project. With Nemoto's backers in place he had led the way in fleshing out the design, based on ancient, never-funded studies from the 1970s and 1980s. He had overseen the computer-graphic simulations, the models. His fingerprints were all over the whole damn project.
But it was not until now, this oddly mundane moment here on this hillside, in a cheap car with jabbering Paulis and taciturn Xenia, that he had actually set eyes on his BDB: his Big Dumb Booster, the spaceship whose destiny would shape the rest of this life, one way or the other.
But it was Paulis who had got the thing built.
Even after Malenfant had been given presidential approval, such strict limits had been placed on budget and schedule that the NASA brass had soon realized they would need input from the private sector. They had turned to Boeing, their long-term partners in running the Shuttle, but Paulis had been quick to thrust himself forward. Frank J. Paulis had made his fortune from scratch; unusually for his generation he had made most of it from heavy engineering, specifically aerospace. He had made promises of impressive funding and the use of his design, manufacture, and test facilities around the country—in return for a senior management position on the BDB project.
NASA had predictably rebuffed him. Paulis had handed over his money and facilities anyhow.
But after a couple of months, when the first calamities had predictably hit the project and the schedule had begun to fall apart before it had properly started, NASA, under pressure from the White House, had turned to Paulis.
Paulis's first public act, in front of the cameras, had been to gather an immense heap of NASA documentation before the launch pad. "This isn't Canaveral, and this is not the Shuttle program," he'd told his bemused workers. "We can't afford to get tied up in a NASA paper trail. I invest the responsibility for quality in you, each and every one of you. I trust you to do your jobs. All I ask is that you do it right." And he set the documentation heap alight with a flame-thrower.
There were some, raised all their careers in NASA's necessarily safety-obsessed bureaucracy, who couldn't hack it; Paulis had had a twenty percent drop-out. But the rest had cheered him to the Pacific clouds.
After that, Paulis had proven himself something of a genius in raising public interest in the project. A goodly chunk of the booster when it lifted from its pad would be paid for by public subscriptions, raised every which way from Boy Scout lemonade stalls to major corporate sponsors; in fact when it finally took off the BDB's hide would be plastered with sponsors' logos. But Malenfant couldn't care less about that, as long as it _did_ ultimately take off, with him aboard.
Paulis, remarkably, was still talking, a good five minutes since Malenfant had last spoken.
"... The stack is over three hundred feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You'll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit—"
Malenfant touched his shoulder. "Frank. I do know what we're building here."
"... Yes." Nervously, Paulis dug out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his neck. "I apologize."
"Don't apologize."
"It's just that I'm a little over-awed."
"Don't be." Malenfant was still studying the somewhat squat lines of the booster stack. "Although I feel a little awe myself. I've come a long way from the first rocket I ever built."
At age seventeen, Malenfant was already building and flying model airplanes. With some high school friends he started out trying to make a liquid-fueled rocket, like the BDB, but failed spectacularly, and so they switched to solid fuels. They bought some gunpowder and packed it inside a cardboard tube, hoping it would burn rather than explode. "We propped it against a rock, stuck on some fins, and used a soda straw packed with powder for a fuse. We spent longer painting the damn thing than constructing it. I lit the fuse at a crouch and then ran for cover. The rocket went up fifty feet, whistling. Then it exploded with a bang—"
Paulis said, reverent, "And Emma was watching from her bedroom window, right? But she was just seven years old."
Malenfant was aware that the girl driver, Xenia, was watching him with a hooded, judgmental gaze.
Weeks back, in the course of his campaign to build support, he'd told the story of the toy rocket to one of his PR flacks, and she had added a few homey touches—of course Emma hadn't been watching; though she had been a neighbor at that time, at seven years old she had much more important things to do—and since then the damn anecdote had been copied around the planet.
His life story, suitably edited by the flacks, had become as well known as the Nativity story. His feelings of satisfaction at seeing the booster stack evaporated.
He really hadn't expected this kind of attention. But just as Nemoto had predicted, and just as Vice President Della's political instincts had warned her, Malenfant and his brave, lunatic stunt had raised public spirits at a time when many people were suffering grievously. In the end it wouldn't matter _what_ he did—people seemed to understand that there was no conceivable way he was going to "solve" the problem of the Red Moon—but as long as he pursued his mission with courage and panache, he would be applauded; it was as if everybody was escaping the suffering Earth with him.
But the catch was they all wanted a piece of him.
Paulis was still talking. "That thing in the sky changed everything. It didn't just deflect the tides. It deflected all our lives—mine included. When I woke up that first day, when I tuned my screens to the news and saw what it was doing to us, I felt—helpless. Swapping one jerkwater Moon for another is probably a trivial event, in a Galaxy of a hundred billion suns. Who the hell knows what else goes on out there? But I've never felt so small. I knew at that moment that my whole life could be shaped by events I can't control. Who knows what I might have become if not for _that_ , knocking the world off of its axis? Who knows what I might have achieved?"
"Life is contingent," the driver, Xenia, said unexpectedly. Her accent was vaguely east European. She reached back and covered Paulis's hand. "All we can do is try our best for each other."
"You're wise," Malenfant said.
She sat gravely, not responding.
"On our behalf, please go kick ass, sir," Frank Paulis said.
"I have less than twelve hours before I fly back out of here, Frank. Tell me who it is I have to meet."
The car pulled away from the viewpoint and headed toward the sprawling base. Malenfant took a last long breath of the crisp ocean air, bracing himself to be immersed in the company of people once more.
## _S hadow_
Shadow huddled under a tree, alone.
Claw came stalking past, panting, carrying yellow fruit in his good hand. She cowered away from him, seeking to hide in the deep brown dark of the tree's thick trunk. He hooted and slapped her. Then he stalked on, teeth bared.
Flies clustered around her hand. The webbing between her thumb and forefinger had been split open. Her inner thighs were scratched and sore. Her belly and breasts were bruised, and a sharp pain lingered deep inside her.
Claw had used her again.
Her hands reached for food—a sucked-out fruit skin dropped by somebody high in the tree above her, a caterpillar she spotted on a leaf. But her mouth chewed without relish, and her stomach did not want the food. Agony shot upward from her deepest belly to her throat. A thin, stinking bile spilled out of her mouth. She groaned and rolled over onto the ground, huddled over her wounded hand.
The light leaked out of the sky.
There was rustling and hooting as the people converged on the roosting site from wherever they had wandered during the day. The highranking women built their nests first, weaving branches together to make soft, springy beds, and settling down with their infants.
Somebody thumped Shadow's back, or kicked it. She didn't see who it was. She didn't care.
She stared at the dust. She did not eat. She did not drink. She did not climb the trees to build a nest. She only nursed the scarlet pain in her belly.
Just before the last sunlight faded, she heard screeching and crashing, far above her. Big Boss was making one last show of strength for the day, leaping from nest to nest, waking the women and throwing out the men.
The noises faded, like the light.
Something smelled bad.
She held up her hand in the blue-tinged dark. Something moved in the wound between thumb and forefinger, white and purposeful. She tucked the hand away from her face, deep under her belly.
She closed her eyes again.
Daylight.
She pushed at the ground. She sat up, and slumped back against the tree root.
The people were all around her, jostling, arguing, playing, eating. They didn't see her, here in her brown-green dark.
There was shit smeared on her fur. It was drying, but it smelled odd.
The man called Squat was trying to lead the people, to start the day. He was walking away from them, shaking a branch, stirring bright red dust that clung to his legs. He looked back at Big Boss, walked a little further, looked back again.
Big Boss followed, growling, his hair bristling all over his back. One by one the others followed, the adults feeding as they walked, the children playing with manic energy, as always.
Here was Little Boss. He squatted down on his haunches before Shadow. He was a big slab of hot, sweating muscle, bigger in height and weight than Big Boss himself. He picked up her damaged hand and turned it over. He poked at the edges of the wound, where pus oozed from broken flesh. He let go of the hand, so it fell into the dirt. He inspected her, wrinkling his nose.
He got up and walked a few paces away.
Then he turned. He ran back and, with all his momentum behind it, he kicked her, hard. She ducked her head out of the way, but the kick caught her shoulder and sent her sprawling.
Others came by: women, men, children. She received more slaps and kicks, and was confronted by teeth-baring displays of disgust. Shadow just lay in the dirt, where Little Boss's kick had thrown her.
But the beatings by the men were not severe today. They saved their energy for each other. Many of them jabbered and punched each other, in noisy, inconclusive bouts. The elaborate politics of the men was taking some new turn.
Then there were no more kicks or slaps. The people walked away, the rustle of their passing receding. Shadow was left alone. She dissolved, becoming only a mesh of crimson pain.
She knew herself only in relationship to other people: not through the place she lived, the skills she had. Ignored, it was as if she did not exist.
Now somebody crouched down before her. She smelled familiar warmth. She turned her head with difficulty; her neck was stiff. It was Termite, her mother. Beyond her Tumble, the infant, was playing with a lizard she had found, chasing it this way and that, picking it up by the tail and throwing it.
Termite, huge, strong, studied her daughter. Her face was twisted by uneasy disgust. But she probed at the scratches on Shadow's legs, dipped her fingers into the blood that had dried around Shadow's vagina, and tasted it. Then she inspected the ugly wound on Shadow's hand. Fly maggots were wriggling there.
Termite groomed carefully around the edge of the wound. She pulled out the maggots, squeezed out pus, and licked the edges of the wound. Then she gathered a handful of thick, dark-green leaves. She chewed these up, spitting them out into a green mass that stank powerfully, and scraped it over the wound.
It hurt sharply. Shadow squealed and pulled her hand back. But her mother was strong. Termite grabbed her hand and continued to tend the wound, despite Shadow's struggles.
Tumble kept her distance. She would approach her mother, stare at Shadow and wrinkle her small nose, and retreat; then she would forget whatever she had smelled, and approach once more. She hovered a few paces away, attraction and repulsion balanced.
Later, Termite put her powerful arms under Shadow's armpits, hauled her upright by main force, and dragged her into the shade of a fat, tall palm. She brought her food: figs, leaves, and shoots. Shadow tried to pull her face away. Termite grabbed her jaw and pinched the joints until Shadow opened her mouth. She forced the food between Shadow's lips, and pushed at her jaw until Shadow chewed and swallowed.
Shadow threw up.
Termite persisted.
By the time the roosting calls began to sound once more through the forest, Shadow was keeping down much of what she swallowed.
The people returned. The adults carried shaped cobbles, or bits of food. Some of the men had meat.
But there was much unrest. Squat and Little Boss were jabbering and throwing slaps at each other. Squat grabbed at a bloody animal leg Little Boss was carrying, trying to snatch it off him. Little Boss punched him hard in the nose, sending Squat flying back, and Little Boss took a defiant, bloody mouthful of his meat.
When the women started making their nests. Tumble climbed up her mother's legs and clung onto her shoulders and head.
Once again Termite tried to make Shadow stand, but Shadow fell back and sprawled in the dirt. So Termite leaned over and let Shadow fall across her shoulders. She stood straight with a grunt, and Shadow's arms and legs dangled at her back and belly.
With powerful gasps, Termite began to climb a palm, laden down by her infant and her nearly-grown daughter.
Shadow's head dangled at Termite's back. She saw Termite's legs and rump, a dark slope before her, powerful muscles working. With every jolt, Shadow felt her innards clench, and bright red pain flowed through her. Tumble's small hands delivered stinging slaps to her unprotected backside.
High in a palm, Termite let Shadow slide into the crook of a branch. Sweating and panting, Termite quickly pulled branches together to make a nest. Then she grabbed Shadow by the armpits and pulled her into the nest.
Termite settled herself, curling around her daughter's back. Whimpering, Tumble settled down in the nest at her mother's back, on the far side from Shadow.
The light slid away. The world was black and gray.
Shadow closed her eyes. She slept, entering a deep dreamless sleep, with her mother's warmth around her.
When she woke, in the first pink light of day, she found her thumb in her mouth, as if she were an infant. Memories flooded into her head. Her illness was like a tunnel of blood red, leading back to greener days beyond.
Her back was cold. Termite wasn't there.
She sat up. Termite and Tumble were in the nest, on its far side. Termite was assiduously grooming her infant's fur. Tumble was picking through a lump of feces, seeking undigested food.
Shadow inspected the wound in her hand. Green, chewed-up fiber clung to it. She licked away the green stuff. There was no sign of maggots or pus, and much of the damaged area was scabbed over, although the scabs cracked when she flexed her thumb.
She hooted and scrambled toward her mother.
Termite sat on the edge of the nest, her long arms wrapped around Tumble, watching Shadow with a hard, still face.
Shadow sat for long heartbeats in the center of the nest. She picked up bits of fur from the nest and teased it through her fingers. The scent of her mother was still there, mixed with the green smells of the tree. But there was a sourness, too.
The sourness was her own smell, Shadow's smell. Her mother, like her sister, could not bear to be with her, because of the smell. She ripped at her fur, screeching, and scattered handfuls of it around the disintegrating nest.
Termite watched impassively.
A stab of pain, lancing up from the depths of her gut, stopped Shadow dead.
She looked down at herself, her breasts and belly and legs. She felt a shiver of surprise that she was _here_ , inside this body that stank so strangely.
The pain stabbed again, hot and white. She doubled over, and vomit surged from her, sour and yellow.
It was a hard time for them all. With Big Boss weakening, the social order of the group was breaking down, and anger washed among the people like froth on a turbulent stream.
It went hard for Shadow. Pushed even from her mother's protective circle, suddenly she was the lowest woman in the group. They all hated her, not just for her low place, but because of what she had become, this stinking, bleeding monster. She could not defend herself, from their beatings and the theft of her food.
But still she clung to the group. Still she made her nest each night, high in the trees, away from the cats and other predators, as close to the others as she dared approach. Much as she feared their fists, she was drawn back, for there was nowhere else to go.
And she was still ill. Her bleeding had stopped. She was afflicted by stomach cramps and pain deep in her back. Her breasts and belly started to swell. She was violently sick each morning. Her days were a blur of pain and loneliness. When she saw her shadow, of a hunched-over creature with hair ragged and filthy, she did not recognize herself.
But then, one day, she felt something squirm in her belly, a kicking foot.
Her head filled with memories, of blood and shit and milk. She remembered a woman lying on her back, legs askew, other women working to pull a pink, slick mass from her body, their hands sticky with blood.
Her loneliness sharpened into fear.
Again she ran to her mother, reaching for her sparse fur, trying to groom, to get close.
Since the illness had started, Termite had never once struck her daughter, not as the others did. But now, as her broad nostrils widened with the stink of Shadow's body, her fists clenched.
Shadow cowered, whimpering.
Claw came running by, hair bristling, hooting inanely. He was grinning, but blood ran from a gouge in the side of his face. He was running from a fight. As he passed Shadow he aimed a kick at her that caught her in the small of her back.
Shadow dragged herself to the shade of a big palm. There she slumped down, and vomited copiously.
## _R eid Malenfant_
The next time he woke, Malenfant found the light that soaked through his parachute-canopy tent was a little less bright, the air perhaps a fraction cooler.
Night was coming, at last, to the desert.
He tried to sit up. His head banged as if his brain was rattling around in his skull. His mouth was a sandbox, and he felt a burning dryness right through his throat and nose. It felt like the worst hangover of all time.
But you're built for heat, Malenfant. You've got a body adapted to function away from the shelter of the trees, to walk upright in the heat of the day. That's why you sweat and the chimps don't. Haven't you learned anything from those paleo classes?...
He reached for his water flask and shook it. Still a quarter full, just as it had been before he slept. Deliberately he tucked it back under his blanket.
He got to his feet. He staggered, brushing his head against the hot, dusty canopy. The fabric rippled, and he heard sand hissing off it. He bent and found his broad stiff-brimmed hat, and jammed it on his bare scalp. Then, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, he stepped out of the makeshift tent.
Outside was like a dry sauna. He felt the moisture just suck straight out of his skin. The pain intensified around his temples and eyes, crumpling his forehead.
The world was elemental: nothing but sand, sky, and gnarled Joshua trees, over which their chutes were draped.
This was the Mojave desert. He and Nemoto had been dumped here as a survival training exercise. During the day the heat was flat and crushing; they could do nothing but lie in their tent of chutes. And at night they foraged for food.
Nemoto was crouched over a low fire. She was heating some kind of thin broth in a pan she'd made out of aluminum foil. She had a spare T-shirt wrapped around her head. _To survive you don't need equipment_ , the instructor had said. _All you need to pack is strength and ingenuity and determination. That, and a willingness to eat insects and lizards_.
Nemoto had proved ingenious at setting traps.
"I wonder—" His throat was so dry he had to start again. "I wonder what's in the soup this time."
Nemoto glanced up at him, and then looked back to her cooking. "Your speech is slurred. Drink some water, Malenfant."
He walked around their little campsite, stretching his legs. He could feel a tingling in his limbs, and the air felt thin. The horizon seemed blurred, perhaps by dust.
"I mean, why the hell are we here?" He lifted his arms and turned around. "Whatever we find on the Red Moon, it won't be like this."
"But on returning to Earth we might land in a desert area, and—"
He barked laughter, hurting his throat. "Let's face it, Nemoto. The chances of our returning healthy enough to play wild man in the desert are too remote to think about."
"Drink some water."
He stalked away, vainly seeking cooler air.
As the project had grown, as all such projects did, it had acquired its own logic, much of it loaned from NASA—to Malenfant's chagrin, and against his better judgment. While the ship was being prepared, the booster assembled and tested, nobody seemed to know what to do with the astronauts, except train them to death and send them on goodwill tours, just as NASA always had.
Some of the training Malenfant could swallow. He had, after all, flown in space twice before, and Nemoto, on her single trip to the Station, had logged an impressive number of days in orbit. So they endured hours in classrooms and in hastily mocked-up simulators going over every aspect of their unlikely craft's systems, and the procedures they would have to follow at their mission's major stages.
The major problem with that turned out to be the very volatility of the design. As teams of engineers struggled to cram in everything they thought they needed, key systems went through major redesigns daily—and all of it impacted in the crew's interface with their craft. In the end Malenfant had grown tired of the simulation programmers' laboring efforts. He had shut down the sims, had a dummy cabin mocked up from plywood, and had blown-up layouts of their instrument panels cut out of paper and pasted over the wood. It wasn't too interactive, but it familiarized them with systems and procedures—and it was easy to upgrade each morning with bits of tape and sticky paper, as news of each redesign came through.
But the spacecraft-specific training was the easy stuff. The rest was more problematic. How, after all, do you train to face a completely unknown world?
Malenfant and Nemoto had undergone a lot of altitude training, for it was clear that the Red Moon's air would be thinner than Earth's. Likewise they had been taken to tropical jungles, for it was planned to bring them down in a vegetated region close to the Moon's equator.
But beyond that, all was uncertain. Nobody knew if they would find water fresh enough to drink. Nobody knew if they would be able to eat the vegetation—always assuming the gray-green swathes visible through telescopes were vegetation at all. Nobody knew if there would be animals to hunt—or if there were animals that might hunt two human astronauts. It wasn't even clear if the air could be breathed unfiltered.
The ship would be packed with three days' ground supplies, including air filters and water and compressed food. If the makeshift explorers found they couldn't live off the land in that time, they were just going to have to climb back in their lander and depart (always supposing they could find the return-journey rocket pack that was supposed to follow them to the Moon).
And then there was the mystery of the hominids who had come tumbling through the Wheel in the sky.
Malenfant and Nemoto had sat through hours of lectures by Julia Corneille and others, trying to absorb the best understanding of the evolution of mankind, watching one species after another parade through dimly-realized computer animations— _Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus_ , archaic _Homo sapiens, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neandertalensis..._ It was a plethora of speculation as fragmentary, it seemed to Malenfant, as the bone scraps on which it was based. He had vaguely imagined that the newer evidence based on DNA variation might have cleared the picture, but it seemed only to have confused everybody further. Nobody knew where humanity was going, of course. It had startled Malenfant to find that if you dug deeper than pop science simplifications, nobody really knew where man had come from either.
The truth was that the sessions had been of little use. Malenfant had learned more than he wanted to know about archaeological techniques and dating methods and anatomical signifiers and all the rest. What he needed to know was how to handle a tribe of _Homo habilis_ , alive, fighting and breeding, should he crest a hillside on the Red Moon and discover them—or vice versa. But NASA's experts, curators of fragments all, simply weren't tuned to thinking that way. It was as if they could only see the bits of bone, and not the people that must once have lived to yield up these ancient treasures.
The only real consensus was that Malenfant and Nemoto should pack guns.
... He had lost his hat. He saw it on the ground.
There was a ringing in his ears. He ought to get his hat. He bent to reach it.
Next thing he knew, he was on his side. He lay there fuming.
The hat was too far away to reach, so he wriggled that way. Like a snake, he thought, cackling. When he had his hat he stuck it on the side of his head, so it shielded his face.
At least the paleo training had been relevant, he thought. Too much of the rest of his time had been filled up with pointless exercises like this. They had even threatened to put him back in a centrifuge. "I told them to stick the fucking centrifuge where the sun don't shine," he muttered.
The sand was hot and soft. Its pressure seemed to ease the pain in his head. Maybe he would sleep awhile.
There were hands under his hips and shoulders, pushing him onto his back. A face above him blocked out the sky. It, she, was saying something. Nemoto, of course.
He said, "Leave me alone."
She leaned closer. "Open your mouth." She lifted a flask and poured in water.
He made to spit it out, but that would be even more stupid. He swallowed it. "Stop that. We have to save it."
"You're dehydrated, Malenfant. You know the drill. You drink what you have until it's gone, and if you have not been found by then, you die of thirst. Simple logic. Either way it does no good to ration your water."
"Horse feathers," he said. But he let her pour more water into his mouth. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.
## _E mma Stoney_
They continued to work their way east. A range of mountains, low and eroded almost to shapelessness, began to loom above the horizon. Though their outlines and colors were softened to blurs by the murky air, Emma thought she made out bands of vegetation, forest perhaps, on their lower slopes.
After another day's walking, the Runners paused by a shallow, slow-running stream.
Sally threw herself flat on the ground. She seemed to go to sleep at once. Maxie, as ever full of life at precisely the wrong time, ran off to play with the Runner children.
Emma sat on dusty grass and eased off her boots. Maybe her feet were toughening up; at least she didn't have to pour any blood out of her boots today. She limped to the stream to drink, wash her face, bathe her feet. She found a stand of root plants, a little like potatoes, small enough to dig out of the ground. It was a pleasure for once to be able to provide for herself.
Emma watched the Runners. The descending sun had turned the western sky a tall orange-pink—volcano sunset, she thought—and peering through the dusty air was like looking into a tank of shining water, through which exotic creatures swam.
The stream had washed down a rich supply of volcanic pebbles, and many of the adults were knapping tools. They squatted on their haunches in the stream, their lithe bodies folded up like penknives, tapping one stone against another. The axes they made were flattened slabs of stone, easy to grip, with clean sharp edges. Stone axes and wooden spears: the only tools the Runners ever made, over and over, tools they turned to every task from butchering carcasses to shaving—even though their hands were clearly just as capable of fine manipulation as Emma's.
There were a lot of oddities, if you watched carefully.
The toolmakers worked in silence and isolation, as if the others didn't exist. Emma never saw a Runner pick up a tool dropped by somebody else and use it, not once. A few children and young adults sat beside their elders, watching, trying to copy them. Mostly the adults ignored their apprentices; only very rarely did Emma see examples of coaching, such as when one woman picked a rock from out of a boy's hand and turned it around so it served to flake the anvil stone better.
All the tools turned out by the women, so far as Emma could tell, were functional. But some of the men's were different. Take Stone, for example, the bullying alpha-male. Sometimes he would sit and labor for hours at an axe, knocking off a chip here, a flake there. It was as if he pursued some impossible dream of symmetry or fineness, working at his axe far beyond the point where he could be adding any value.
Or, more strangely, he would sit with a pile of stones and work feverishly, turning out axe after axe. But some of these "axes" were mere flakes of rock the size of Emma's thumb—and some were great monsters that she could have held only in two hands, like a book opened for reading. These pathological designs seemed no use as tools; Stone would do no more than carry them around with him for a few hours, making sure everybody saw them, before dumping them, never used, their edges as sharp as the instant they were made.
Emma didn't know why Stone did this. Maybe it was a dim groping toward culture: hand axe as art form. After all, the hand axe was the only meaningful artifact they actually made, taking planning and vision and a significant skill; their other "tools," like their termite-digging sticks or even their spears, were little more than broken-off bits of wood or bone, based on serendipitous discoveries of raw materials, scarcely finished. The hand axe was the only way the Runners had to express themselves.
But if that was so, why didn't the women join in such "artistic" activities as well?
Or maybe the useless hand axes were about sex, not practicality or culture. After all to be able to make a decent axe showed a broad range of skills—planning, vision, manual skills, strength—essential for survival in this unforgiving wilderness. _Look at me, girls. I'm so fit and strong and full of food, I've got time to waste on these useless monsters and fingernail-sized scale models. Look at me!_ When everybody around you had a body as drop-dead beautiful as any athlete's she had ever seen, you needed something to stand out from the crowd.
Could that be true? The Runners had to enjoy something like full humanity, in planning and vision and concentration, when making the axes. But could they then abandon that humanity and revert to some lower level of instinct, as the axes became a symbol of sexual prowess, as unconscious as a bird's bright plumage?
It was all another reminder to her that no matter how human these beautiful creatures looked and sometimes behaved, they were not human. Their small heads contained shards of humanity, she thought, floating on a sea of animal drives and instincts: humans sometimes, not other times...
Or maybe she was just being anthropomorphic. Maybe she shouldn't be comparing the Runners to herself, seeing how human they were, or weren't; the Runners were simply Runners, and they fit into their world as well as she fit into hers.
Though it was a full hour since they had abandoned the trek for the day, Fire was still wandering around with his hands clasped together. He couldn't drop his hot burden until the others had gathered kindling and fuel for him, and as long as the sun was up and the air was warm they had no interest in doing that—in fact it didn't even seem to occur to them—and so Fire was stuck.
But he had more than that on his mind. He was vainly pursuing one of the girls, Dig: a real knock-out, Emma thought, with crisp auburn hair, full, high breasts and hips to die for. Poor Fire seemed to have no idea how to get through to her; he just followed her around, holding out his handfuls of ash, and plaintively calling her name. "Dig! Dig!"
Being the fire-carrier was obviously a key job, a cornerstone of this untidy little community. But as far as Emma could see his role didn't win Fire much respect from the other Runners, especially the men. Each night he would deliver his embers to the latest heap of kindling, and then would be pushed and slapped away. It was as if he was the runt of the litter. Certainly his handful of ashes didn't get him the girls the way the hand axes of the other boys and men did.
But this time, for once, Fire was getting closer to the object of his desire. She backed up against a tree, and he walked toward her, hands clasped, that ridiculous, tragic erection sticking out like a divining rod.
But a rock hit him hard in the side of the head.
The rock had been thrown by Stone.
Fire went down, toppling like a felled tree. He opened his hands to save himself before he hit the mud. His precious ashes scattered.
Runners ran forward. Dig and Blue got to their knees in the mud, and tried to scrape together the ashes and embers. But the embers were hissing, quickly extinguished in the mud.
Stone hadn't grasped the chain of events that led from his own hurled rock to the death of the fire, or else he just didn't want to know; either way he capered and howled, pressing the useless embers into the mud with his bare feet, and he aimed hefty kicks at Fire's ribs.
Fire curled up, arms wrapped over his head, whimpering in misery. Emma winced, but she knew better than to try to intervene.
After that, the daylight seemed to run out quickly. As the sun descended toward the horizon, the golden air turned to a dismal brown. The shadows of trees to the west lengthened, clutching at the cowering Runners like claws.
In the absence of a fire the Runners gathered more closely than usual, the women clutching their children, even the usually solitary men huddling close.
The first predators began to call.
Sally came to Emma. "You have to use your spyglass," she said. "Make a fire. And you have to do it now, before we run out of sun."
Emma sighed. "I'm frightened of showing them too much of what we've got."
"They aren't going to steal your glass and start using it all over the savannah," Sally said. "They don't _learn_."
"It's not that. Right now they seem to think we are like them. If they think we're too strange, they might reject us."
The shadow of a distant tree slid across Sally's face. "Sister, I don't think it's the time for philosophical dilemmas. In a couple of hours the hyenas are going to be chomping on our bones. And anyhow these guys have attention spans that make Maxie look like Michelangelo. By the morning, they'll have forgotten it all. Come on, Emma. Just do it."
"All right. Let's try to keep our tools out of their sight, though."
"Agreed."
They spent a few minutes gathering dry wood, and building a little teepee a couple of feet high. Then they scraped together dried leaves and tinder.
Emma crouched down on the ground, folded her magnifying glass out of her knife, and angled it until she caught the crimson light of the low sun. She moved it back and forth until she had focused a tight spot of light on a few bits of dry tinder. Then she waited, the cold of the ground seeping into her, her awkwardly angled arm growing stiff. She grumbled, "I don't know why the hell the South African air force didn't just give me a box of matches."
Some of the Runners came to watch what they were doing. They hooted excitedly, one woman even making rubbing-hands-warm motions. But when the tinder didn't catch light immediately, they became baffled and quickly lost interest.
Her spot of light disappeared. She looked up to see a small silhouetted figure, a grasping hand.
"Maxie's. Maxie's!"
Sally scooped him up. "Get away, Maxie, for heaven's sake." Maxie, denied the toy, began wailing.
Unnoticed, the tinder had started smoking.
Emma immediately dropped her glass. She cupped the thread of smoke with her hands and blew gently. The smoke trail billowed, nearly died.
She sat back and beckoned to Fire. "Hey. Come over here. Come on. This is your job."
Poor Fire sat squat on the ground, clutching his ribs, an immense lump forming on the side of his head.
"Umm, Fire smoke Fire. Fire Fire!"
At last he came forward, hobbling painfully. Shivering, he cupped his hands around the thread of smoke and blew, lips pursed.
It seemed to take him mere seconds to have a small flame going. With the precise motions of a surgeon, he began to feed the tiny red-yellow spot with bits of tinder.
When the smoke started to spread, the other Runners were drawn back. As the fire grew, they settled down around it, just as they did every night, and the men began to drag over heavy branches to make night logs.
Sally watched the Runners with cold contempt. "Not a word, not a gesture of congratulation or apology. Or surprise. Or relief. They've already forgotten how Fire lost his embers... The fire is just here, and they accept it. They really don't think like us, do they?"
Emma stretched stiff limbs. "Right now, I couldn't care less. Just so long as the fire keeps away the bad guys with the teeth."
As Emma fell into sleep, a rough hand grabbed her shoulder.
She froze. Her eyes snapped open. The sky, full of ash and smoke, retained a lingering purple-black glow, enough to show her a lithe, crouching silhouette. It, he, leaned over her. She was pushed onto her back. She could smell _Runner_ : a thick, pungent, meaty smell of flesh that had never once been washed.
In the back of her mind she had rehearsed for this, from the first day here. Don't resist, she told herself. Don't cry out. She had seen the Runners copulate, every day. It would be fast, brutal, and over.
For a moment her assailant was still, his breath hot. She stiffened, expecting hands to claw at her clothing. But that didn't come. Instead a head, heavy, topped by tight curls, descended to her breast. She felt shuddering, a low moan.
Gingerly she reached up. She explored a flat skull, those extraordinary brow ridges like motorcycle goggles. And she touched a swollen mass on one temple. Her assailant flinched away.
It was Fire.
He was weeping. She remembered how he used to go to the old woman, Sing, for comfort, before she died. She wrapped one arm around his back. His muscles were hard sheets, his skin slick with dirt and sweat.
He reached up and grabbed her fingers. With a sharpness that made her yelp, he pulled her hand down toward his crotch. She found an erection as stiff as a piece of wood. She tried to pull away, but he pushed her hand back.
Gently, hesitantly, she wrapped her fingers around his hot penis. His hand took her wrist and pushed it back and forth.
She rubbed him once, twice. He came quickly, in a rapid gush against her leg. He sighed, released her wrist, and lay more heavily against her.
Half-crushed, barely able to breathe, she waited until his breathing was regular. Then, gingerly, she pushed at his shoulder. To her intense relief, he rolled away.
In the morning, Fire scooped up his embers and ash, and the Runners dispersed for their walk. It was as if none of the previous evening's events had ever happened.
## _R eid Malenfant_
In the last hours he had to endure a visit from an Apollo astronaut: a walker on a now-vanished Moon, eighty-five years old, ramrod straight and tanned like a movie star. "You know, just before my flight we had a visit from Charles Lindbergh and his wife. He had figured that in the first second of my Saturn's flight, it would burn ten times more fuel than he had all the way to Paris. We laughed about that, I can tell you. Well, Lindbergh came to see me before I flew, and here I am come to see you before your flight. Passing on the torch, if you will..."
And so Malenfant, with a mixture of humility and embarrassment, shook the hand of a man who had shaken the hand of Lindbergh.
It was, at last, the night before launch.
At Vandenberg, he stood in the crisp Californian night air. The BDB's service structure was like an unfinished building, a steel cage containing catwalks and steps and elevators and enclosures. A dense tangle of pipes and ducts and tubing snaked through the metalwork. The slim booster itself was brilliantly lit, the sponsors' logos and NASA meatballs encrusting its hide shining brightly. Its main tanks were full of cryogenic propellants, and they spewed plumes of vapor into the air. No doubt in violation of a dozen safety rules, hard-hatted technicians, NASA and contractor grunts, scurried to and fro at the booster's base, and electric carts whirred by. It was a scene of industry, of competence, of achievement.
Malenfant stepped into an elevator and pushed the button for the service structure's crew level, three hundred feet high. He was escorted by a single tech, a Cape ape in clean room regalia of a white one-piece coverall, latex gloves and puffy plastic hat. Malenfant had met the guy before, and they nodded, grinning; he was a somewhat grizzled veteran, long laid off by NASA but rehired for this project.
They rose vertically in the clanking, swaying steel cage. Beyond the cage flashed steel beams, cables and work platforms, mostly unattended now. And beyond _that_ was the hide of the main tank itself: sleek, smooth, coated with ice where the cryogenic fuels had frozen the moisture out of the night air. It was such an immense cold mass that Malenfant felt the heat being drawn out of his own body, as if he were some speck of moisture that might end up glued to that glistening skin.
The elevator came to a stop. He stepped out, turned right, and walked over the access-arm catwalk. The walk was just a flimsy rail that spanned the rectilinear gulf between the tangled, rusted gantry, and the sleek hide of the booster. An ocean breeze picked up, laden with salt, and the catwalk creaked and swayed as if the gantry was mounted on springs. He grabbed a handrail for support. Through the chain-link fence he could see the lights of the base scattered in rectangles and straight lines over the darkened ground, and the more diffuse lights of the inland communities. The coast was black, of course, swept clean of habitation by the tide.
This was a noisy place. The Pacific wind moaned through the complex, and the huge propellant pipes groaned and cracked as rivers of the super-cold fluids surged through them. Fuel and wind: it was a noise of power, of gathering strength, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
He reached the end of the walk. He stepped through the white room, the cramped enclosure where he would be inspected one last time before the launch, and he faced the streamlined fairing that would protect the Moon lander during launch. There was a hatchway cut into the fairing. A small wooden step led up to the hatch, a touch of home-workshop mundanity amid all this shining hardware.
From here he could see into the cabin of the lander itself: small, crammed with supplies, and with two canvas-frame couches side-by-side. The light was a subdued green. Instrument panels on the wall glowed with softscreen displays and telltale lights. It was like looking into a small cave, he thought, an undersea cave crusted with jewels.
Malenfant had been through it all before. Every space project, as it developed, became entangled and complex beyond the understanding of any single human. But from the astronaut's point of view that proliferating tangle reached a certain maximum, until, after some indefinable point—as the booster stack crept forward through its integration schedule, as launch day approached—the whole thing began to simplify, to focus.
In the end, he thought, every mission reduces to this: human beings climbing into the mouth of a monster, to be hurled away from the Earth. And all the technicians and managers and fundraisers and cheerleaders and paper-chasers in the world can do nothing but watch.
Emma's mother and her sister's family were staying in apartments on the ASFB. They had invited Malenfant to join them for Mass, celebrated by the base's Catholic chaplain.
Blanche Stoney, the mother, was an intimidating seventy-year-old. She offered Malenfant her hand without getting out of her chair. The sister, Joan, a little younger than Emma, had raised four kids alone, and had looked exhausted every time Malenfant had met her. But the kids were all now young teenagers and, it seemed to Malenfant, remarkably well behaved.
The priest said Mass for the family in a cramped living room.
Malenfant, upright in his civilian suit, tanned walnut brown by the desert sun, felt as out of place as a spanner in a sewing basket. But he endured the ceremony, and took his bread and wine with the others. He tried to find some meaning and comfort in the young priest's familiar words, and the play of light on the scraps of ornate cloth, the small chalices and the ruby-red wine.
The priest had asked Joan's two eldest boys to serve as altar boys. They did fine except during the communion service, when the younger boy held the ciborium upside down so that the hosts slid out and fell to the carpet, fluttering down one by one. In the background a softscreen showed live images of the preparation of the BDB. There were a lot of holds. Malenfant tried not to watch the _whole_ time.
When it was done, the priest packed up and went home with promises to call during the mission.
Joan brought Malenfant a beer. "I think we owe you this."
Blanche, the mother, snapped, "But you owed us your presence here tonight."
"I don't deny that, Blanche."
Malenfant spent some time trying to explain the technicalities of the mission to them—the countdown, the launch, the flight profile. Joan listened politely. At first the children seemed interested, but they drifted away.
In the end Malenfant was left alone with Blanche.
She skewered him with her gaze. "You wish you were anywhere but here, don't you?"
"Either that or I had another beer."
She laughed, clambered stiffly out of her chair, and, somewhat to his surprise, brought him a fresh can.
"I know you try," she said. "But you never really had much time for religion, did you? To you we're all just _ants on a log_ , aren't we? I heard you say that on some cast or other."
He winced at the overfamiliar words. "I think my wisdom has been spread a little thin recently."
She leaned forward. "Why are you going to the Red Moon? Is it really to find my daughter—or just vainglory? To prove you're not too old? I know what you flyboys are like. I know what really drives you. You have nobody here, do you? Nobody but Emma. So it's easy for you to leave."
"That's what the vice president thinks."
"Don't name-drop with me. What do _you_ say?"
"Blanche, I'm going up there for Emma. I really and truly am."
With sudden, savage intensity, she leaned forward and grabbed his hand. "Why?"
"Blanche, I don't—"
"You destroyed her. You started doing that from the moment you set your sights on her. I remember what you used to say. _You bake the cakes, I'll fly the planes_. From the moment she met you, she had to start making sacrifices. It was the whole logic of your relationship. And in the end, you fulfilled that logic. _You killed her_. And now you want to kill yourself to get away from the guilt. Look me in the eyes, damn it, and deny that's true."
For about the first time since it happened, he thought back to those final moments in the T-38, the clamor in that sun-drenched sky. He remembered the instant when he might have regained control, his sense of exhilaration as that huge disastrous Wheel approached.
He couldn't find words. Her rheumy eyes were like searchlights.
"I don't know, Blanche," he said honestly. "Maybe it's for me. Without her, I'm lonely. That's all."
She snorted contempt. "Every human being I know is lonely. I don't know why, but it's so. Children are consolation. You never let Emma have children, did you?"
"It was more complicated than that."
"Religion is comfort for the loneliness. But you rejected that, too, because we're just ants on a log."
"Blanche—I don't know what you want me to say. I'm sorry."
"No," she said more softly. Then she rested her hand on his head, and he bowed. "Don't say you're sorry. Just bring her back," she said.
"Yes."
"Where do you think she is now? What do you think she is going through?"
"I don't know," he said, honestly.
## _S hadow_
Relations among the men worsened. Every day there were increasingly savage and unpredictable fights, and many of the women and infants, not just Shadow, suffered punches and kicks and bites as a consequence.
One day it all came to a head.
Big Boss was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his back to a small clearing, working assiduously at a cluster of nut-palm fruit. Shadow was in the shade at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden as had become her custom.
Without warning Squat stalked into the clearing. All his hair stood on end, doubling his apparent bulk. He leaped up and grabbed branches, ripping them off the trees, shaking them and throwing them down before him. He picked up rocks and hurled them this way and that. His silence was eerie, but his lips were pursed tightly together, pulling his face into a harsh frown, his eyes fixed on Big Boss.
Big Boss ignored him. He kept on plucking at the fruit in his lap. Squat, and the other men, had made such displays before, and nothing had resulted.
But now Little Boss suddenly broke from the cover of the trees. Without warning or apparent provocation, he hurled himself on Big Boss.
Big Boss roared and faced his attacker, hair bristling. But Squat screeched and joined in. The three of them dissolved into a blur of flailing fists and thrashing limbs.
All around the clearing, other men ran to see what was happening. They circled the battlers, hooting and crying—but not one of them rushed to the aid of Big Boss.
Big Boss broke away. His eyes were round and white, and blood leaked over the side of his head, where one ear had been bitten so savagely it dangled by a thread of gristle. He ran toward the nearest tree, and tried to clamber into it. But he was limping, and Squat and Little Boss easily caught him. They pulled him back and hurled him to the ground, and punched and kicked and bit him. Squat began to jump on Big Boss's back, slamming his heels again and again into ribs and spine.
Now more of the men joined in, screaming and yelling. Though they concentrated their attentions on Big Boss, they squabbled and fought among themselves, vying for their places in the new order.
At last Little Boss climbed up on Big Boss's back. He stood straight and roared. His mouth was bloody. He grabbed one of Big Boss's arms, as if Big Boss was no more than a monkey he had caught in the forest. Little Boss twisted the arm this way and that, and Shadow heard bones snap, muscle tear.
The women and children huddled together beneath the trees, clutching each other or grooming tensely, shrinking from the aggression.
The men ran off into the forest, tense and excited, hair bristling. Big Boss lay where he had fallen, a bloody heap on the ground.
Slowly the women emerged from their sheltered places. Cautiously they fed and groomed each other and their children. None of them went near the fallen Big Boss—none save an overinquisitive child, who was hastily retrieved by his mother.
Only Shadow stayed in her pool of shade.
The day wore away. The shadows lengthened.
Big Boss raised his head, then let it fall flat again.
Then he got one arm under his body, and pushed himself upright. The other arm dangled. His flesh was ripped open, by teeth or chipped cobbles, so that flaps hung down from patches of gleaming gristle, and his skin was split by great gouges, crusted with dirt and half-dried blood. He had lost one ear completely, and one eye was a pit of blood from which a pale fluid leaked.
He opened his mouth. Spittle and blood looped between smashed teeth, and he moaned loudly.
The women and children ignored him.
Big Boss pulled his legs beneath him. He began to crawl toward the trees, one leg dragging, one arm dangling. Twice he fell flat. Twice he got himself up again, and continued to drag himself forward. Where he had been lying, the blood had soaked into the ground, leaving the dirt purple. And where he passed, he left a trail of sticky blood and spit and snot, like some huge snail.
When he got to the base of the tree, he twisted so he got his back against the bark of the trunk, and slumped back.
He was still for a long time. The sun, intermittently obscured by cloud, slid across the sky. Shadow thought Big Boss was dead.
But then he began to move again. Using the tree as a support, he pushed himself upright. He reached up with his less damaged arm to grab a low branch. He growled with pain. He got his chest over the branch, and fell forward, gasping. For a long time he was still once more, clinging to the branch. Then he carried on, hauling himself grimly from branch to branch, higher into the tree.
At last he reached a high point. Clinging to the tapering trunk with his legs, he pulled down branches with grim determination. Surrounded by clusters of yellow fruit, he slumped flat in this nest, the last he would ever make.
The women on the ground called, their panting hoots summoning each other and their children. The women climbed into the trees, infants clinging to their mothers' backs or chests. Shadow followed, keeping her distance. Soon she could see the women in their nests, clumpy shadows high in the trees, silhouetted against the deepening pink of the sky; here and there a limb stretched out, fingers working at a pelt or stroking a face.
Shadow glanced up at Big Boss's nest. One foot dangled in the air, toes clenching and unclenching. Until a new leader emerged, the ladder of rank was broken into chaos. The days to come would be stressful and trying for everyone.
As the last light seeped from the sky, the men returned. They swarmed around the bases of the trees. They were still squabbling, screeching, and fighting. Some of them clambered up into the trees and began to harass the women and children, smashing open their nests and chasing them across the branches; the women fought back grimly.
Now two of the men started climbing into Shadow's own tree, peering up at her, whispering and showing their white teeth. Shadow could smell the blood on their fur.
Forces worked in Shadow's mind: a fear of the dark unknown, a fear of further punishment at the hands of the people, a chill urge to cradle the thing in her womb. At last the forces reached a new equilibrium.
She slid out of her nest. As silently as she could, enduring the feeble kicking of the child in her womb, she clambered from the branches of her tree into the next, and then the next.
She slipped, alone, into the arboreal dark. Soon the sounds of the squabbling, roosting people were far behind her.
## _F ire_
Here is Fire. Here are his legs walking. Here he is, keeping his hands closed together, cupping the hot embers and the ash.
The sun is hot. The light is in his eyes. His eyes hurt him. His head hurts him.
He remembers why. He is lying on the ground. His eyes see bits of light, Stone's feet swinging at his head and belly and chest. Once again Stone had driven him away from Dig.
Fire wants not to be here. But it is Fire who holds the embers, not his hands. Fire must be here to make his hands hold the hot embers.
The sky grows dark. The air grows cold. Fire looks up. The sky is covered over by cloud.
Something falls before Fire. It is a flake. It is white and soft. There are many flakes, falling slowly, all around him.
A flake settles on his chest. Another on his shoulders. His skin cannot feel them. More flakes settle around him, on the floor. His feet make footprints in the thickening gray cover. He stops. He looks back at the prints. He laughs. He steps backwards into the prints he has made. He steps forward into the prints.
The ground is growing gray. The people are gray. The trees are gray. Some of the people are afraid. Their fingers wipe gray from their eyes and scalps. The children with no names whimper. Their faces hide in their mothers' bellies.
Fire is not afraid. The gray is ash. Fire sees himself in the morning light. He sees his hands sweeping through ash, gathering embers. Now everything is ash. His head tips back. Ash falls into his mouth. His tongue tastes it. Fire is happy in this ash world. His legs run, and his mouth gibbers and hoots.
But now his head is wet.
His legs stop running. He lifts his head. He sees big fat raindrops fall from the sky, slowly sliding toward his face. They hit his mouth and his cheeks and his nose and his eyes. His eyes sting.
The rain makes little pits in the ash. His toes explore the pits. The wet ash turns to gray mud.
The other people trudge around him. Their hair is flat. The mud sticks to their feet in great heavy cakes. The rain turns the ash on their bodies to gray streaks.
The people reach a bank of trees. They stand there, baffled.
Stone steps forward. His great nostrils flare. "River river river!" he cries. His legs march him into the trees. His arms push aside the foliage with great cracks and snaps.
Fire's legs carry him hurrying after Stone, into the forest.
The forest is green and dark and moist. Leaves and twigs clutch at Fire. His eyes look around fearfully, for Elf-folk, or worse. He sees nothing but people, like muddy shadows sliding through the bank of trees. He hears nothing but the crush of foliage by feet and hands, the soft breathing of the people.
Fire pushes out of the other side of the bank of trees.
The ground slopes down. There is rock here, purple-red, sticking out of the grass. Fire's feet carry him carefully over the slippery rocks.
He reaches water. The water is brown, and slides slowly past his feet. It is the river.
The people come down to the bank. Their hands splash water on their faces, washing away mud.
Fire does not touch the water. Fire's hands still hold the embers. Fire stands tall, and his eyes watch the river. To his left the river has scooped holes out from under the bank. A great lip of grass dangles toward the water. Fire sees that there is a gravel beach below the undercut, and deep dark openings behind it, caves.
"Fire Fire!" he cries. "Fire Fire!"
Fire walks toward the caves, cupping the embers. Grass and Wood, the women, follow him. They build a pile of the branches they have carried. They find the driest moss they can.
Inside the cave, Fire lowers his embers reverently into the moss. It smokes, but soon a flame is there, licking at the moss. Fire blows on it carefully.
When the fire is rising, Emma and Sally and Maxie come into the cave. Things cling to their backs, things of blue skin. Emma and Sally make the clinging things slide to the floor. They come to the fire and hold up their hands to its warmth. Sally rubs Maxie's wet hair.
Fire grins. Emma grins back.
The flames are bright. Fire has a shadow. It stretches into the back of the cave, across a bumpy, mottled floor of rock. Fire follows his shadow. It grows longer, leading deeper into the dark.
There are animals at the back of the cave. Fire's eyes open wide. Fire's legs prepare to run.
His nose cannot smell animals. His nose smells people. He makes his legs walk forward.
The animals are sprawled flat against the wall. He makes his hand touch an animal. The fur is ragged and loose. He grabs it and pulls. The skin of the animal comes away from the wall.
There is no animal. There is only the skin of the animal. It was stretched out over branches. He pushes. The whole frame falls over with a clatter.
Behind the fallen frame he sees spears. He picks up a spear. Its tip is a different color from the wood. His finger touches the tip. The tip is stone. It is an axe. No matter how hard he pulls, the stone wants to cling to its spear.
He drops the spear. He walks back along the cave, toward the light of the fire, the gray daylight.
People are gathered around the fire. Some children are sleeping. One woman sits in another's lap, gently cupping her breasts. A man and a woman are coupling noisily.
Emma and Sally and Maxie sit against a wall. Their eyes gaze at the fire, or out into the grayness beyond.
The people are not here, though their bodies are here. Emma and Sally and Maxie are here. They are always here.
Fire's body, warm and dry, wants to couple with Dig. His member stiffens quickly. He looks for Dig.
Dig is lying under Stone, on the floor. His hips thrust at her. Her eyes are closed.
Fire finds a rock on the floor. His fist closes around the rock and he raises it, over Stone's head.
Fire thinks of Stone's anger, his fists and feet.
He drops the rock.
He walks out of the cave, to the river.
The rain is less now. It makes little gray pits on the surface of the water that come and go, come and go. He watches the pits.
For a time he is not there. There is only his body, only the water at his toes, the rain on his head, the pits on the water.
He squats down. The water is a cloudy, muddy brown. A fine gray scum floats on its surface. His eyes cannot see fish. But the water pools here, quietly. And he sees bubbles, bursting on the water.
He slides his hands into the water. His hands like the water. It is cool and soothes his scarred palms. He waits, knees on the ground, hands in the water, the last rain pattering on the back of his neck.
He is not there.
A cold softness brushes his hands.
His hands grab and lift. A fish flies over his head, wriggling, silvery. His ears hear it land with a thump on the grass behind him.
He slides his hands back into the water.
He is not there.
## _R eid Malenfant_
So here was Malenfant, for better or worse in space once again, flying ass-backwards towards the Moon—a Moon, anyhow.
Nemoto and Malenfant sat upright, side by side, in a rounded bulge at the rear of the cramped, coffinlike, gear-crammed capsule. They were each encased in the heavy folds of their garish orange launch-and-entry suits, and a rubbery wet-raincoat stink filled the air.
Malenfant gazed into the tiny, scuffed, oil-smeared rectangle of glass before his face, trying to make out the greater universe into which he had been thrust. There was no sense of space, of openness; surrounded by the womblike ticking and purring of fans and pumps, immersed in the stench of rubber and metal, peering out through these tiny windows, it was like being stuck in a miniature submarine.
... But now Earth swam into view.
From the Station's low orbit Earth had always been immense to Malenfant, a vast glowing roof or floor to his world, ever present, dwarfing his petty craft. But now Earth was receding. First one precisely curved horizon slid into his window frame, and then the other, so that soon he could see the whole Earth, hanging like a Christmas-tree bauble in the velvet black, blue patches peeking out from beneath the white swirl of clouds, painted with the familiar continent-shapes. Malenfant could see Florida, Africa, Gibraltar, and even much of South America, his single glance spanning the Atlantic Ocean. The planet slowly shifted position, drifting from the top of his window to the bottom, so he had to crane forward to see it. Even from here he could see the damage done by the tide: smoke was smeared over a dozen coastal cities, and he saw the cold gleam of white-tops as angry waves continued to pound the land.
Malenfant had been somewhat relieved that the launch had gone through without significant hitches.
He had lain on his couch listening to the flexing of the tanks as they were laden with cryos, then the roar of propellants like a distant locomotive, the whine of the pumps, the waterfall shout of the pad's huge deluge system—and then the bursting roar of the engines. And he could think of nothing but the fact that this BDB booster stack on which he perched had never before flown in test, not even once—no time for that.
Anyhow they had gotten off the pad. The acceleration had been low at first. But as the engines far below had swivelled from side to side to adjust the direction of thrust, the two astronauts, stuck at the top of the stack, had been thrown back and forth, like ants clinging to the tip of a car antenna.
Then had come the violence of staging, as first the solid rocket boosters and then the big main engine cluster had cut out. Malenfant had been thrown forward against his harness, crashing his helmeted head against the curving bulkhead before him. After a heart-stopping moment of drift, the second stage had cut in, thrusting him back into his seat once more.
That second-stage burn had seemed to go on and on—six, seven, eight minutes, their craft growing lighter as fuel burned off, their velocity piling on. Not for Malenfant and Nemoto the old Apollo luxury of taking a couple of swings around the Earth to check out the systems; the BDB's last contribution had been to hurl them on a direct-ascent trajectory all the way out of Earth's gravity well without pausing.
Just ten minutes after leaving the pad at Vandenberg, the second stage finally cut out. Malenfant and Nemoto had listened to the clunk of the burnt-out stage disengaging itself from the lander, and the bull-snorts of nose-mounted attitude thrusters turning their little craft so it pointed nose-first to the Earth—ten minutes gone, and already Malenfant was bound irrevocably for the Moon.
Still the Earth shrank.
"There she goes," he murmured. "I feel as if I'm driving a car into a long, dark tunnel..."
It struck him that Nemoto hadn't said a single word since the pad rats had strapped them into their couches. Now, as they watched the Earth fall away, her small hand crept into his.
And then they broke. They began to work from panel to panel, throwing switches and checking dials, working through their postinsertion checklist, configuring the software that would run the craft's life support systems. Necessary work without which they would not survive, not even for an hour.
New Moon or old, Earth's satellite orbited just as far from the mother planet, and so it was going to take them three days to get there, just as it always had. But because they were flying backward, they weren't going to be able to see the Red Moon itself. Not until they got there.
For the first few hours the abandoned BDB second stage trailed after them, following its own independent path. It was scheduled to sail past the Moon and fly into interplanetary space. The stage was a lumpy cylinder, shining bright in the intense sunlight. Malenfant could clearly see the details of the attachment mechanisms at its upper face, and how its thin walls had crumpled during the launch. But it was venting unburnt fuel from three or four places. The small thrust of the fuel vents was making it tumble, like a garden sprinkler, and it was surrounded by a cloud of frozen fuel droplets that glimmered like stars.
The stage's subtly modified path was bringing it closer to the lander than Malenfant would have liked, at one point no more than a few hundred feet away. He stayed strapped into his seat, watching this potential hazard, and weighing out options. But after a couple more hours the stage began to drift away of its own accord.
When the lander was alone in the emptiness, Malenfant felt an odd pang of loneliness, and almost wished the booster stage would come swimming back, like some great metal whale.
After six hours in space, twelve since they had been woken before the launch, they unbuckled.
Malenfant felt a surge of validating freedom as he found himself floating up from his couch. His treacherous stomach gave a warning growl, however. Throwing up in this confined space would be even more of a catastrophe than on the Shuttle. He turned his back and popped a couple of tabs, trusting that the queasiness would pass.
Awkwardly, helping each other, they stripped out of their launch suits. Now they would wear lightweight jumpsuits and cloth booties, all the way to the Red Moon.
The X-38, hastily modified from a Space Station bail-out craft, was just thirty feet long, an ungainly shape the pilots likened to a potato with fins. Malenfant and Nemoto had been given couches in the rounded bulge at the craft's rear. The craft, designed for a couple of hours' flight down to Earth from low orbit, had been crammed with gear to keep them alive for ten, eleven, twelve days, the time it would take to reach the Red Moon, and come straight back again, if the natives didn't look friendly. Much of its interior was too cramped for the crew even to sit upright—but then, in its primary bail-out mode carrying injured or even unconscious crew back to Earth, reclining couches would have sufficed.
To the rear end of the lander was fixed a liquid-rocket pack. The engine and propellants were based on the simple, reliable systems of the old Apollo Lunar Module. This engine would be used to decelerate them into lunar orbit, and then, if they chose to commit, to slow them further, until the lander began its long glide down into the atmosphere, shedding its heat of descent in a long series of aerodynamic maneuvres, much like the Shuttle orbiter's entry to Earth's atmosphere.
During the last stages of the descent, a big blue and white parafoil, a steerable parachute a hundred and fifty feet wide, would blossom from the lander's rear compartment. That would be quite a ride. The parafoil, the largest steerable chute ever made, would be controlled by warping its wings, which was just the way the Wright brothers had steered their first-ever manned flying machine. That seemed somehow appropriate. Anyhow, thus they would steer their way to a final descent, landing gently on skids.
In theory.
In fact _they_ wouldn't be steering the craft anywhere. The whole descent was automated. This was something against which Malenfant had fought hard. To give up control of the rudders and flaps to some virus-ridden computer program went against every instinct he'd built up in thirty years of flying. But it was much easier and simpler for the engineers to devise a lander that could fly itself all the way down than to figure out how to give a pilot control. _Trust us, Malenfant. Trust the machine_.
The facilities were not glamorous, even compared to the Station and the Shuttle. To wash Malenfant had to strip to the buff and give himself a sponge-bath. It took longer to chase down floating droplets of water and soap than to bathe in the first place.
The toilet arrangements were even more basic. There was no lavatory compartment, as in the Shuttle and the Station, so they were thrown back to arrangements no more advanced than those used on Apollo, and earlier. There were receptacles for their urine, which wasn't so bad as long as you avoided spillage, but for anything more serious you had to strip to the buff again and try to dump your load into plastic bags you clamped over your ass with your hands.
In this cramped environment they had, of course, absolutely no privacy from each other. But it never became a problem. Nemoto was twenty-five years old, with a fine, lithe figure; but Malenfant never found her distracting—and vice versa applied, so far as he could tell. Their relationship was prickly, but they were easy together, even intimate, but like siblings.
It was as if he had known this odd, quiet girl for a long time. In some other life, perhaps.
After eighteen hours awake, they prepared for sleep.
Malenfant had always had trouble sleeping in orbit. Every time his thoughts softened he seemed to drift up from his couch, no matter how well he strapped himself down, and jerk himself to wakefulness, fearful of falling.
And on this trip it was even worse. He was acutely aware that he had travelled far from home this time—in particular, far beyond the invisible ceiling of Earth's magnetic field, which sheltered the world's inhabitants from the lethal radiation which permeated interplanetary space. When Malenfant closed his eyes he would see flashes and sparks—trails left in the fluid of his eyeballs by bits of flying cosmic debris that had come fizzing out of some supernova a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps—and he folded over on himself, imagining what that cold rain was doing to his vulnerable human body.
After a couple of hours he prescribed himself a sleeping pill.
On the couch next to his, Nemoto lay very still, and didn't react when he moved; he couldn't tell if she was asleep or awake.
When he woke up, the pure oxygen of the cabin's atmosphere had made his nose irritable and runny, and his skin was starting to flake off, bits of it floating around him in the gentle breezes.
The nearest thing to navigation in space Malenfant had performed before had been the not-inconsiderable task of sliding a Shuttle orbiter into its correct low-Earth orbit, and then nudging two giant spacecraft, the Space Station and the orbiter, into a hair's-width precise docking and capture.
Flying to the Red Moon was a whole different ball game.
The X-38 had left a planet whose surface was moving at around 1000 miles per hour. The craft was aiming to encounter a Moon moving at some 2300 miles per hour relative to the Earth, with an orbital plane that differed from the spacecraft's. Furthermore the X-38 had to aim, not at where the Moon was at time of launch, but where it would be three days later. For the sake of the air-to-ground public-consumption transmissions they were forced to endure, Malenfant sought metaphors for what they were trying to achieve. "It's like jumping from one moving train to another—and landing precisely in a top-price seat. No, more than that. Imagine jumping from a roller coaster car, and catching a bullet in your teeth as you fall..."
And the various computations had to be accurate to within one part in four _million_ , or the X-38 would slam too steeply into the Red Moon's atmosphere and burn up, or else go flying past the Moon and become lost, irretrievably, in interplanetary space. If they got the navigation wrong, they were both dead. It was as simple as that.
It didn't console Malenfant at all to consider that this feat of translunar navigation had been achieved by manned missions before—nine times, in fact, if you included Apollo 13—since here he was in an untried, utterly untested spacecraft, heading for an alien Moon, and everybody who had worked on those ancient missions was retired or dead.
So he labored at his astronomical sightings, in-situ position recordings which backed up tracking from the ground. He had a navigational telescope and sextant, and he used these to peer through the grimy windows of the lander to take sightings of the Earth, the sun, and the brighter stars. He kept checking the figures until he had "all balls," nothing but zeroes in his discrepancy analysis.
Oddly, it was this work, when he was forced to concentrate on what lay beyond the cabin's cozy walls, that gave him his deepest sense of the vastness he had entered. There was Earth, for example, the stage for (almost) all of human history, now reduced to a tiny blue marble in all that blackness. Sometimes it was simply impossible to believe that this wasn't just another sim, that the darkness beyond wasn't just blacked-out walls, a few feet away, close enough for him to touch if he reached out a hand.
But sometimes he got it, and the animal inside him quailed.
## _F ire_
It is morning. The rain has stopped. The sky is gray.
Fire's eyes watch a branch drift down the river.
Blue wades into the water, waist-deep. He catches the branch. It is heavy. He sets his shoulders and pushes until the branch is resting against the bank.
Another branch comes. Blue grabs it, and hauls and pushes it against the first.
More people come, men and women. Some of them remember the river. Some of them don't, and are startled to see it. They wade into the water. They catch branches and shove them against Blue's crude, growing raft.
Children play, running up and down the bank, jabbering.
A crocodile sits in the deeper water. Fire sees the ridges on his back, his yellow eyes. The crocodile's eyes watch the people. Its teeth want the children.
Fire walks back to the cave. The fire is still burning. People have brought more wood. The damp stuff makes billows of smoke that linger under the roof of the cave.
Maxie is standing before the fire. Maxie's hands hold a fish. The fish is small and silver. A stick is jammed into the fish's mouth. Maxie throws the fish on a rock at the center of the fire. The rock is hot. The fish's skin blisters. Its flesh spits and sizzles. There is a smell of fish and ash.
Sally helps Maxie get the fish out of the fire. _"Careful, Maxie. It's very hot."_
Stone is watching Sally, his eyes hard and unblinking. His member stiffens. His hand strokes it.
Maxie blows on the fish noisily. His white teeth bite into the belly of the fish.
Stone strides to Sally. She stumbles back, alarmed. Stone tucks his leg behind Sally's. She falls on her back. He falls on top of her. She yells. His hand rips at her brown skin. It tears open. Fire sees her pink breast, a shadow of hair below her belly.
Sally's fingers scramble on the floor of the cave. They find a rock. _"Keep off me, you fucking ape!"_ The rock slams into Stone's temple.
Stone grunts and slumps sideways.
Sally pulls herself out from under him. She scrambles away across the floor.
Stone's fingers touch his head. They come away bloody. He looks at
Sally.
His hand locks around her ankle. She screams. He hauls at her leg. She is thrown across the floor, screaming. She slams hard against a rock wall.
Fire's ears hear bone snap. Sally is silent.
Stone grabs her ankles. She lies there, limp, one arm bent above the elbow. He pries her legs apart. His strong fingers rip at brown skin.
Maxie is pressed against the wall. His mouth is wide open.
Emma has come into the cave. She runs to Stone. Her hand drags at his shoulder. _"Leave her alone!"_
Stone ignores her. Fire knows he cannot hear Emma. Stone is not in his ears and his head, but in his penis, his balls.
Fire thinks of Maxie, manipulating the fish in the fire. Maxie is smart. Maxie remembers. Maxie has hands to make good axes. Sally is Maxie's mother. Stone wants more babies like Maxie.
Stone is doing what is right for his people.
All this shimmers in Fire's head, like raindrop splashes on the water. But then it breaks up, like the splashes, and all he sees is an elemental logic: Stone with Sally, Fire with Dig.
Fire smiles.
Emma goes limp. She is sobbing. _"For God's sake."_
A rock flies past Fire's shoulder. It strikes Stone's arm. Stone roars. Blood spurts. He falls away from Sally. Sally lies limp. Fire sees he has not entered her.
Another rock flies in from the mouth of the cave. Stone drops flat. The rock flies over his head.
Fire faces the mouth of the cave. A person is standing there.
Not a person. Fire sees a short, stocky body draped with animal skins, a heavy, protruding face, a brow ridge as thick as a person's, straight black hair. One hand holds an axe. The other hand holds a spear.
It is not a person. It is a Ham. The Ham says, _"My home, Runner."_
Fire's hands ram into the Ham's belly.
The Ham falls back. Fire runs out of the cave.
People run this way and that, making for the river, screaming from fear or anger. Shadows flicker along the top of the undercut, flicker between caves. Spears stab, stone-tipped, so fast Fire can barely see them. Voices call. _"U-lu-lu-lu-lu!"_
A Ham drives a spear into the chest of the woman, Wood. She is knocked onto her back. The spear breaks and twists as she falls. Her body rips and spills. She cries out.
Fire is terrified, awed.
_"Help me. Fire, please."_
It is Emma. She has dragged Sally to her feet. Sally is lolling, unconscious. Sally's arm dangles, blood soaking into the brown skin over it.
Fire remembers the river. Fire remembers the raft. Fire's legs want to be on the raft, away from this blizzard of jabbing spears and shadows.
Fire's hands grab Sally by the waist. He hurls her over his shoulder. She cries out as her broken arm is jarred against his hip. He feels the cool flesh of her belly and breast against his shoulder. Emma has picked up Maxie. Her legs are running.
Stones hail around them, sticking into the ground. The people's legs run from the stones and the Hams' yells. _"U-lu-lu-lu-lu!"_
The people run splashing into the water. There is nowhere else to go. They scramble onto the raft. It is just a mass of floating branches, roughly pushed together. The raft is too small. The people fall off, or climb on each other's backs. As their legs and arms scrabble at the branches the raft drifts apart, in big floating chunks. The people call out and grab at each other's hands and ankles.
Fire runs onto the raft. His foot plunges through the soaked foliage and he falls forward. Sally falls off his shoulders and lands on a wriggling pile of children. The children push her away.
Emma is on the raft. Her hands slap at the children. _"Leave her alone!"_
Maxie sits by his mother, his hands clutching leaves and branches, wailing.
The raft is drifting away from the bank, into the deeper river. It twists, slowly. The people yell and sprawl, their hands clinging to the branches.
Stone comes running down the bank. His eyes are white. Hams pursue him. Stone hurls himself into the water. He goes under. His head comes up. He is coughing. Blue reaches out and grabs Stone. Stone clings to a branch, his body dangling in the water. Fire sees blood seep from Stone's shoulder.
The Hams run up and down the bank, yelling, hurling stones. _"U-lu-lu-lu-lu!"_ The stones fall harmlessly into the water.
The raft drifts toward the middle of the river, away from the bank with the undercut, the capering Hams.
Fire's shoulder stings. He looks around. Emma has slapped him. _"Help me."_
Emma's small axe cuts away Sally's brown, bloody skin. Underneath is more skin. It is pink, but it is mottled purple and black. Emma's hands run up and down the skin.
_"Good. The skin isn't broken. But I have no idea how to set a broken bone. Damn, damn."_ She produces a small gleaming thing. Water pours out over Sally's arm. No, not water: it stinks, like rotten fish. Her hands pull a chunk of branch from the raft. Fire can see water rippling underneath. Emma holds the branch against Sally's arm. _"Hold this,"_ she says. _"Fire hold. Hold it, damn it."_ Her hands wrap his around Sally's arm. His hands hold the branch against the arm. Emma takes a sheet of skin from around her neck. Her hands move over Sally's arm, very fast. When she pulls away her hands, the skin is wrapped around Sally's arm.
Fire stares and stares.
Emma lifts Sally's head and places it on her lap.
Maxie says, _"Is mommy going to be all right?"_
_"Yes. Yes, I hope so, Maxie."_
_"She needs a hospital."_
Emma laughs, but it is like a sob. _"Yes, Maxie. Yes, she needs a hospital."_
The raft is in the middle of the river, slowly turning. The banks to either side are far away, just lines of green and brown. The raft is small, and the river is large.
There is a scream.
Fire sees ridges. Yellow eyes. Teeth.
Stone roars. His arms lift his body. His bulk comes crashing down on the raft.
The whole raft shakes. People scream, clinging to each other. Branches splinter and separate. A child falls into the water, wailing.
Yellow eyes gleam. The crocodile's vast mouth opens.
The child's eyes are white. They stare at the people on the raft.
The mouth snaps shut.
The child is gone, forgotten.
The raft drifts down the river, slowly turning. The people cling to it in silence, locked inside their heads.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Ten minutes before lunar orbit insertion the cabin grew subtly darker. Gradually, as his eyes dark-adapted, Malenfant caught his first true view of the stars, a rich spangling carpet of them, glowing clear and steady.
They had fallen into the shadow of the Red Moon.
Malenfant and Nemoto were both strapped onto their couches. They had a checklist to work through, and settings on their various softscreen displays to confirm, just as if they were real pilots, like Borman and Anders, Armstrong and Collins. But the insertion sequence was completely automated, it either worked or it didn't, and there wasn't a damn thing Malenfant could do about it—nothing save slam his fist into the fat red abort button that would change the engine's firing sequence to send them straight home again. He would only do that in the event of a catastrophic control failure. Or, he mused, if somebody down there started shooting...
He glanced up at his window. There was a disc of darkness spreading across the stars, like an unwelcome tide.
It was, of course, the Red Moon. His heart thumped.
What were you thinking, Malenfant? Were you surprised to find that this huge object, this vast new Moon, is in fact real?
Well, maybe he was. Maybe he had spent too long in Shuttles and the Station, going around and around, boring a hole in the sky. He had become conditioned to believing that spaceflight wasn't about _going_ anywhere.
Passing behind the alien Moon, they abruptly lost the signal from Houston. For the first time since launch day, they were alone.
The cabin was warm—over eighty degrees—but his skin was cold where his clothes touched him.
## _E mma Stoney_
The river's broad body ran from west to east, so that the setting sun glimmered above its upstream sections, making the water shine like greasy tarmac. Thick black volcanic clouds streaked the glowing sky. And when she looked downstream, she saw the Earth, nearly full, hanging low over the horizon, directly above the dark water, as if the river were a great road leading her home.
The raft drifted over the brown, lazily swelling water, rotating slowly, heading roughly east. In fact it was scarcely a raft, Emma thought, just a jammed-together collection of branches, held together by no more than the tangle of the branches and twigs, and the powerful fingers of the Runners. Every so often a chunk of foliage would come loose and drift away, diminishing the raft further, and the Runners would huddle closer together, fearful. And the raft drifted: just that, with no oars or rudder or sail, completely out of any conscious control.
The Runners did not speak to each other, of course. Where humans would have been shouting, crying, yelling, debating what to do, comforting or blaming each other, the Runners just clung to the branches and to each other, silent, eyes wide and staring. Each Runner was locked in her own silent fear, almost as isolated as if she was physically alone. Emma was frightened, too, but at least she understood the fix they were in, and her head whirred busily seeking plans and options. All the Runners could do was wait passively while fate, and the river, took them where it would.
Emma, surrounded by naked, powerful, trembling bodies, had never been so forcefully struck by the Runners' limitations.
And meanwhile those Hams had looked for all the world to her like picture-book Neandertals. What was going on here?...
The river crowded through a section of swamp-forest. Here the trees were low, and the purple spikes of flowering water-hyacinths crowded close to the oily black water. They passed an inlet crowded with water-lilies, their white flowers cupped half-closed. Their leaves were oval, with serrated edges bright green on top and red-brown underneath. As Emma watched dully, a red-brown body of a bird unfolded from its well-concealed place at the base of one lily pad. Its neck and collar were white and gold, and it unfolded long legs and spindly toes, watching them suspiciously.
... Not a bird. A bat, apparently incubating its young on nests built on these floating weeds. She had never heard of bats behaving like that. As the Runner raft passed, the bat stepped with a surgical precision across the lily-pads, its leathery wings rustling. Then it scuttled back to its nest of weed, settling with an air of irritation.
Though the meal of the lost child seemed to have satisfied the huge creature that had first stalked them, Emma glimpsed ridges of skin and yellow eyes everywhere. The crocodiles watched as the raft eroded, inevitably approaching the point where it would dump all its hapless inhabitants in the water.
Sally turned her head. With a cough, she threw up. Pale yellow bile splashed over Emma's lap, stinking.
"Shit, oh shit." She got hold of Sally's leg, behind the knee, and strove to push her over on her side.
The raft rocked, its component branches rippling, and the Runners hooted and snapped.
Emma ignored them. At last she got Sally on her side. She pushed Sally's good arm under her head, with her broken arm on top of her torso, and one knee bent over so she wouldn't roll back. She tipped Sally's head back, hoping to ensure she wouldn't choke, and was rewarded with another gush of vomit that splashed over her hands.
And now she became aware of another problem: a fresh stink, a spreading patch of moisture over Sally's behind. Diarrhea, obviously.
Fire hooted and held his hands over his prominent nose.
There wasn't anything Emma could do about it, not for now. But it sure wasn't a good sign. Perhaps it was blood poisoning: one touch of a filthy Runner finger in a wound, one splash of river water, might have done the damage. Or it might be something worse, some disease such as hepatitis or cholera or typhoid, or even some virulent nasty native to this ugly little world; she didn't know enough about the symptoms of such things to be able to diagnose, one way or another.
And even if she did know what Sally was suffering from, what could she do about it? Her pocket-sized medical kit was gone, lost with the rest of her meager kit as they had fled from the huge skin-clad creatures called Hams. She began to go through the pockets of her ragged, filthy flight suit, hoping to find even a single antibiotic tablet that had gone astray.
Sally convulsed again, and her vomit turned more clear, just a thin, stringy fluid.
Maxie, squatting with the other children, watched all this in wide-eyed dismay. He had been silent since they had left the shore, and now he watched Emma wrestle with Sally as if she was a side of beef, no doubt storing up more problems in that tousled, bewildered head. Later, Emma; one patient at a time.
After an hour of random drifting, the raft began to approach the river's far shore. Shallow beaches strewn with purple-black pebbles slid by. More by chance than design, the Runners were completing the crossing of this huge, sluggish waterway.
Sand glimmered rust-red, a few feet beneath the surface, and it was snagging the raft's branches. The raft creaked and spun. It began to break up, its component branches drifting apart. The Runners cried out. One skinny woman fell into the water with a fearful hoot.
"Emma!" Maxie came stumbling to her, his little feet plunging into brown river water. He threw himself into her arms, and she clutched him close.
More of the Runners fell into the water, or leapt away from the raft toward the shore, splashing noisily and yelling with fear. They seemed to have a lot of difficulty swimming, and Emma wondered if their heavily-muscled bodies were denser than humans'. Wading clumsily, grabbing onto each other and their children, they began to flop out of the water and onto the beach, where they lay like sleek, muscular seals. They shook their heads to rid their tightly curled hair of water; droplets fell back to the river with eerie low-gravity slowness.
Emma felt cold water seeping into the legs of her track suit. Maxie cried out and squirmed higher up her body.
There was simply no way Emma was going to be able to get both Maxie and his mother across those few yards of deeper water.
Fire was one of the last to leave the raft. He actually stood upright on the raft, precariously, and its branches cracked and parted under his feet. Then, hooting, he leapt feet-first into the water. He staggered as his feet sank into the mud, but kept his balance. He looked down at the water lapping around his waist, as if amazed.
Emma called, "Fire! Help us, Fire. Fire Fire Emma Maxie!"
He looked around dully.
Emma held Maxie up above her head. The kid squealed and kicked; Emma wasn't going to be able to hold him like this for long. She cried, "Fire Fire!"
Fire reached out with a liquid motion. With one hand he grabbed Maxie under his armpit and lifted him away from Emma, as if the child were as light as balsa wood. Then he turned and began splashing his way to the shore, holding Maxie high.
Without allowing herself to think about it—without even looking out for crocs—Emma pushed away the last branches, the last of the raft, and let herself and Sally slide into the water. Sally lay facedown in the water, passive, but Emma managed to roll her onto her back. The makeshift sling was filthy, stained by blood and the muddy river water. Emma got the inert woman's head against her belly, and cupped her fingers under Sally's chin. Then, working with her feet and her one free arm, she began to swim backwards, towing Sally's floating form.
She was soon exhausted. Her soaked clothes were heavy and clinging, and her boots made her feet feel as if they were encased in concrete. It seemed an age before her kicking feet began to sink into a steeply rising river bottom. She stood up, gasping.
Sally was still floating, so Emma grabbed a handful of cloth at her shoulder and, still supporting her head, began to drag her out of the water. Nobody came to her assistance—nobody but Maxie, and he was more hindrance than help.
At last she got Sally out of the river, far enough that her feet were free of the lapping, muddy brown water, and she fell on her back with exhaustion.
On this side of the river, there was less evidence of the ash falls that had plagued the Runners for days. But beyond the narrow, pebble-strewn beach, the shore was heavily wooded. The Runners huddled together in suspicious silence, peering at the dense green banks above them.
Night was coming.
With barely a word exchanged, some of the Runners crept cautiously into the woods. Others walked down the beach, tentatively exploring, and Fire and a couple of the women began to drag branches from the edge of the forest, building a fire. Fire cast shy glances at Emma; evidently he remembered, in some dim way, how she had managed to start a fire even when he had lost his treasured handful of embers, probably a key moment in his tortured young life.
First things first, she thought.
She pulled Sally further up the beach. She turned Sally over once more to the recovery position, unzipped Sally's trousers and with some difficulty wrestled them off her, followed by her panties. The clothes were filthy, of course, from feces and river mud, and they clung to her flesh; but Emma was reluctant to use her knife—this was Sally's only set of clothing in the whole world, after all. When she had the pants off she used handfuls of leaves to clean Sally up as best she could, and covered her with her own T-shirt, briskly stripped off.
Then, leaving Maxie with his mother, she walked briskly down the beach. After fifty paces she came to a small stream, decanting from some source in the forest. It had cut itself a shallow, braided valley. Two of the children were playing here, splashing and wrestling. Emma walked a little way upstream of them and began to rinse out Sally's trousers and underwear in the shallow, sluggish water. When she was done she cleaned off her arms and hands, splashed cold water over her face, and took a deep drink. Then she dug her plastic bag out of her pocket—one of the few artifacts she had yet to lose—and dipped it to the stream to fill it with water.
More barely-remembered medical lore came back to her. Diarrhea and vomiting led to dehydration, which you ought to treat with sugar and salt, a teaspoon of each to a liter of water, if she remembered right. Fine, save that she had no sugar or salt, and no teaspoon for that matter...
She glanced up the beach.
Stone was squatting beside Sally. He had removed the T-shirt from her lower body, and was running his hands up her thigh. Maxie had cowered back to the edge of the woods, watching the huge man grope his mother.
Emma put down the water, straightened up, and began to walk back to Sally. She felt around her neck for her Swiss Army knife. She got to within a foot of Stone without him noticing she was there.
So where are you going to stick your blade, Emma? In his cheek, his rock-hard penis, his back? What makes you think this tiny little bee-sting blade will do more than goad him anyhow? He'll kill you, then do what he wants with Sally anyhow.
She pulled out the foldaway lens and lifted it up. She angled it so she caught the sun, and focused a bright spot on the back of Stone's broad neck. He howled, slapping his neck, and jumped up, whirling, his penis flopping. As calmly as she could she tilted back the lens so the spot of light shone in his eyes. He raised his hands, dazzled. She said, "Keep away from her, Stone, you asshole, or I will bring down the sun on you. Stone sun Stone sun! Understand?"
He growled, but still the light shone in his eyes. He stumbled away, his penis wilting.
Trembling, trying to give an impression of command, Emma walked back along the beach, picked up her bag of water, and hurried back to Sally.
Sally still lay on her side, her head resting on her good arm, eyes closed, mouth open. There was a bubble of saliva at her mouth. That bubble of saliva popped, abruptly.
"Oh shit," Emma said. She grabbed Sally and pushed her on her back. Sally sighed once, and then was still. Emma pinched Sally's cheeks until her lips parted. The skin was cool and waxy. She dug her fingers in Sally's mouth, and scooped out gobbets of vomit and flung it on the sand. Then she placed one hand under Sally's chin and tilted her head back. She could hear no breath, not a whisper.
She ran her hands over Sally's torso, seeking the end of the breastbone. Then she pulled her hands to the middle of her chest, placed the heel of her hand a little higher, and began to press down. "One-and-two-and..."
A child leapt out of the woods, a lithe hairy child, its face twisted into a snarl. Maxie scrambled away, screaming. Emma shrank back from Sally, gasping with terror.
... No, not a child. It was an ape, an adult—a female, in fact, with two small empty dugs, a skinny, naked body covered in spiky black-brown hair. She was maybe three feet tall. She had the face of a chimp, with lowering eyes gazing out of ridged sockets, and a protruding mouth with thick wrinkled lips covering angular teeth. Emma could have cupped her brain pan in one hand. But she walked and ran upright, human-style, like a clumsy mannequin—her feet were more human than not—and in one curved, bony hand, dangling below her knees, she clutched what looked like a shaped pebble.
She was a caricature, a shrunken, shrivelled, spellbound mix of ape and human, a dwarfish sprite: an Elf, just as the Runners called her kind. This ape-woman ran up to Emma and capered before her.
Emma picked up a handful of sand and hurled it in the Elf's face.
The Elf howled and staggered back, rubbing her eyes.
Fire came running out of the forest's shade. With a single, almost graceful swipe, he slammed a rock against the side of the Elf's head. She fell sprawled on the beach, unconscious or dying, half her face crushed.
Now there was screaming and yelling. All along the beach, Elf-folk were boiling out of the forest. They ran along the shore, rocks and sticks in their hands.
But the Runners fought back hard. Mothers grabbed their children and ran into the river, where the Elf-folk seemed reluctant to follow. Men and women threw rocks at the scampering Elf-folk, and swung at them with their fists and feet.
But there were many, many of the Elf-folk, and they fought with a mindless intensity that seemed to overwhelm even the Runners.
Emma, trying to ignore this hideous drama, threw herself back at Sally.
After fifteen compressions Emma pinched Sally's nose, clamped her mouth on Sally's, and breathed hard and deep. She tasted vomit and blood. She pulled her head away, let Sally's chest deflate, and tried again. After two breaths she searched again for a pulse, found none, and slammed the heel of her hand into Sally's chest once more.
The conflict went on, crude, animal-like.
It's not my battle, Emma told herself. These aren't people. If they are humans at all they are some kind of predecessor species. Really, they are just two breeds of animals fighting for space. But one breed was at least hollering simple words—"Stone!" "Stone, Blue, Blue!" "Away, away!"—and she couldn't help a deep sense of gratification every time one of those spindly Elf bodies went down, under Runner fists and feet.
Now Stone broke out of the squabbling pack. He had two Elves clinging to his back. One had its teeth sunk into his shoulder, and the other had torn off part of his scalp and a section of his right ear. Stone was howling, and blood poured over him from the glistening crimson wound in his head. More Elves swarmed over him, scratching, biting and beating. Stone went down, and rolled over into the water.
Emma heard an anguished scream. A woman burst out of the squabbling pack. It was Grass. Some of the Elves had closed in a pack around something that struggled, yelling, brown limbs flashing. It was a Runner child—perhaps Grass's child. Grass threw herself at the Elves' backs. They drove her off easily, but she came back for more, twice, three times, until at last a chipped rock was slammed against the side of her head, and she fell to her knees, grunting.
The Elf-folk slid into the forest with their prize, their screeching cries of triumph sounding like laughter.
... And still Emma could find no pulse. She sat back, arms hurting, lungs aching. She was aware of Maxie watching her, a little pillar of desolation, ominously silent. "Oh, Maxie, I'm sorry."
Stone was still in the water, on all fours, head lolling, his hair soaked, the water swirling crimson-brown under him.
Fire stood over him. He was holding a boulder, Emma saw, a slab of worn basaltic rock as big as his head.
Stone looked up, blood congealing over one eye. He raised a hand to Fire, reaching up for help.
Fire slammed the rock down on the crown of Stone's skull. There was a sound like a crunching apple.
Stone slumped. Thick red-black blood diffused in the water.
Fire stood staring at the body. Then he turned to Emma. His gait and eyes held a glittering hardness she had not seen before. She shrank back, scrambling over the ground, away from Sally's body.
Fire squatted down before her. His powerful, bloody fingers brushed her neck. She shuddered at his touch, feeling the burn scars on his palms. He pushed his hand inside her flight suit, and his hand closed around the Swiss Army knife. The lens was open. He snapped off the lens attachment as if breaking a matchstick.
Fire looked at the lens, and at Sally's body, and at Emma. Then he backed away from her, stinking of blood.
Maxie was a few feet away, backed up against a tree. His gaze was sliding over Runners, bloodstained sand, the river.
Emma stood, cautiously. Keeping her eyes on Fire, she reached out for Maxie. "Come on, Maxie. This is no place for us, not any more. It never was..."
"No!" Maxie pulled away from her, his face twisted.
She thought, Now I'm the woman who killed his mother. Nevertheless, I'm all he's got. She made a grab for him.
He ran along the beach.
"Maxie!"
Before she had taken a couple of strides after him he had joined the Runners, who were clustered together, fingering their wounds. She caught one last glimpse of his small face, hard resentful eyes peering back at her. He seemed to be pulling off his clothes.
Then he was lost.
There was a cry, a grisly, high-pitched cry, a child's cry, eloquent of unbearable pain. The woman, Grass, stood and peered mournfully into the forest.
Emma slid into the gloom of the forest, for she had no other place to go.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Events unfolded quickly now, faster than they had for the Apollo astronauts. The Red Moon's gravity, stronger than Luna's, was pulling hard at their falling spaceship, dragging it into a curve that would all but skim the atmosphere.
Nemoto murmured to herself, still working through her tasks as calmly as if they were in just another simulator in Houston.
Malenfant tried to focus on his checklist. But he kept looking up at the strange, shifting diorama beyond the window.
Suddenly he saw the dawn.
Light seeped into the edge of the great disc of blackness. At first it was a deep red, spreading smoothly out around the curve of this small world. Then the band of light began to thicken, growing orange-yellow, and finally shading into blue. The light was coalescing at its brightest point, as if gathering to give birth to the disc of sun itself. And now Malenfant saw shadows of low clouds in the atmosphere; they drew clear dark lines hundreds of miles long over deeper air layers. The surface began to pick up the first of the light—it was an ocean, dark and smooth and sleek, glowing a deep bloody red. And still the light continued to leak into the sky, diffusing higher and higher.
This was a sunrise, not on airless Luna, but on a world with an atmosphere actually deeper than Earth's—and an atmosphere left laden with dust by a chain of great stratovolcanoes. It was a startling, full-blooded dawn, somehow unexpected so far from home.
For the first time Malenfant's thoughts swivelled from Earth, his departure point, and turned with a rush to the world he was approaching. Suddenly he was eager to be down on the ground, to be sinking his fingers into the soil of a new world, and drinking in its air.
## _E mma Stoney_
The light seeped away, and the shadows turned a deeper green.
She moved as silently as she could. But still she was aware of every leaf she crushed, every twig that cracked. And each time she heard a rustle or snap, she expected an Elf to leap out at her.
She didn't know where she was going, what the hell she was doing. But she knew she had to get away from that beach.
The screaming began again, startling her. It was very close, very loud. She crouched down in the bush, staring, listening, too frightened to move.
And she glimpsed movement, through a screen of trees to her right. Smart, Emma. You walked right in on them.
They were the Elf-folk, of course. They had the Runner child spread-eagled against a bare patch of ground. His eyes were wide and staring. Elf teeth closed on the boy's upper thigh, and came away bloody, huge ape lips wrapped around a handful of meat.
The boy thrashed. Emma saw how his eyes turned white. And he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
After that—as Emma watched, frozen in place by her fear of detection—the boy was steadily dismembered: the drinking of blood, the biting-off of genitals, the startlingly efficient twisting-off of an arm. And through all of this the boy was still alive, still screaming.
... There was a hand on her shoulder.
She gasped, swivelled, fell back in the bush with a soft crash. Someone was standing over her, a shadowy figure.
It was not an Elf, or a Runner. It was a woman. She was wearing a loose tunic of skin, bound around her waist with what looked like a rope plaited from greenery. There were tools stuck in the belt, tools of bone and wood. Her body looked shorter, stockier than a Runner's. Her face protruded. She had no chin. Her skull was large, larger than a Runner's, but she sported a thick ridge of bone over her eyes, and there were prominent crests of bones at her cheeks and over the crown of her head.
Not a human, then. This was one of the powerful, shadowy creatures the Runners had called a "Ham." Emma felt savage disappointment, renewed fear.
But the other beckoned, an unmistakeably human gesture.
Still Emma hesitated. Somewhere on this brutal world were the people who had taught the Runners to speak English. If she couldn't get back to Earth, then if her destiny lay anywhere, it was there—and not with this Ham.
But now she glanced back at the Elves. They had pulled open the boy's rib cage, and the child gave a final, exhausted moan as his heart was torn out.
You're kind of short on choices, Emma.
She followed the Ham.
The Ham glided away through the forest, pointing to the footsteps she made in the dead brush on the ground. When Emma stepped there, she made no sound.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Nemoto said laconically, "Three, two, one."
The booster pack fired, and Malenfant was pushed deep into his seat.
The light of their rockets illuminated the deserts and forests of the Red Moon. All over the little world, eyes were raised to the sky, curious and incurious.
# _PART THREE_
# **Hominids**
#
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
Manekato lingered on the threshold of the room, held back by a mixture of respect and dread.
Her mother, Nekatopo, was dying.
Nekatopo, breathing evenly, gazed at the soft-glowing ceiling. A slim Worker waited beside the bed for her commands, as still as a polished rock.
Nekatopo's room was a hexagonal chamber whose form was the basis of the design of the House, indeed of the Farm itself. This room had been occupied by matriarchs throughout the deep history of the Lineage, and so it was Nekatopo's now—and would be Manekato's soon. But the room was stark. The ceiling was tall and the walls bare panels, glowing softly pink. The only piece of furniture was the bed on which Nekatopo lay, itself hexagonal.
Manekato remembered how her grandmother had decorated these same walls with exuberant fruits. But her daughter had stripped away all of that. "I honor my mother's memory," she had said. "But these walls are of Adjusted Space; they are not material. They do not tarnish or erode. They have a beauty beyond space and time, as our ancestors intended. Why deface them with transience?..."
But Manekato found the unreal simplicity as overwhelming, in its own way, as the happy clutter of her grandmother. When this room was hers, Manekato would find a middle way: her own way, as all the matriarchs had done—and she felt a sudden flush of shame, for her mother was not yet dead, and here she was calculating how she would use her room.
Now she saw that salty tears leaked over Nekatopo's cheeks, soaking the sparse hair, and trickled into her flat nose.
Manekato was troubled to her core. Her mother had never cried—not even on hearing the news of her imminent death—not even on the day when she had had to send away her only son, Babo, Mapping him to his marriage on a Farm on the other side of the world.
Manekato fled, hoping her mother had not noticed she had been here. She walked alone, along the path that led to the ocean. The Wind was gentle today, comparatively; she was barely aware of the way it ruffled the thick black hair on her back, and shivered over the trees that clung to the ground nearby.
To a human she would have looked something like a gorilla: Stocky, powerful, all of eight feet tall, she knuckle-walked elegantly. She pressed her knuckles into the crushed gravel of the path with gentleness, even reverence. Every speck of land on the Farm was precious to her, like an extension of her own heart. Even this humble path served its purpose with quiet dignity, and had borne the weight of her mother and her mother's mother, deep into the roots of time, as it bore her weight now.
Quiet dignity, she thought. That is what I must strive for, in the difficult days ahead.
The path ended at a shallow cliff top that overlooked the sea. The sea was gray and cloudy, laden with silt, and tall waves, generated by a storm raging far over the horizon, crashed with exorbitant violence on the heavily eroded shore. Manekato glimpsed the rectangular gridwork that covered the ocean floor—the boundary of the undersea Farms—a shining mesh that disappeared into the murk of the cloudy water.
The tides were shallow on this moonless Earth, so the beach was narrow and battered by waves. But still huge birds plummeted from the sky, their muscular wings folded, stabbing after the unwary fish and crabs who clung to life at this thin, inhospitable margin. Manekato swivelled her ears to hear the calls of the birds, deep-pitched and throaty to penetrate the unceasing roar of the Wind.
Manekato turned and looked back the way she had come, resting her weight easily on her knuckles. The Farm sprawled over a low hill—in fact it was the core of a volcano, Wind-eroded to a snub long before her Lineage had begun to work this land. The Farm was dominated by the low, streamlined House that sat at the crest of the hill, its prow facing the direction of the prevailing Wind like a beached ship. Around the House sprawled a glowing gridwork of light, in the hexagonal pattern that was the signature of the Poka Lineage. Each of the fields marked out by the grid bore a different crop, ranging from the most advanced self-recursive Worker designs—even from here she could see nubs of heads and stubby limbs pushing out of the ground—all the way back to the Lineage's first harvest, a fat-trunked, ground-hugging willow whose bark still provided some of the best tea available anywhere.
But the land itself was only a cross-section of the greater Farm. There were more cultivated layers stacked deep beneath her feet, fed by light piped from the surface, and mines for the water and hydrocarbons locked in the ground's deeper rocks, and even one mighty borehole that punched through the planet's crust and into the mantle, sipping at Earth's core heat. There were more ducts that pumped heat and carbon dioxide and other waste products back into the ground, of course, as the Poka Lineage contributed to the husbandry of the world.
Even above the ground the Farm's activities extended. Manekato could see engineered birds wheeling over the main House, snapping Wind-blown debris from the sky. The birds were restricted to the Farm's perimeter, and Manekato could see how they flocked in a great wedge-shaped slice of sky that projected up from the ground, so high that the uppermost birds were mere dots against the banded, rippling clouds that were the province of the Sky Farmers.
From the core of the Earth to the bellies of the clouds: That was the extent of the Poka Farm, every scrap of it worked and reworked, every speck of dirt, every molecule of air and water functional, every bacterium and insect and animal and bird with a well-designed role to play in the managed ecology.
There was not a patch of this world that was not similarly cultivated, cherished by its Lineage.
And the Farm would soon belong to Manekato, all of it—even though she was just eight years old: still a young adult, little more than a third of her life gone.
Even though she didn't want it.
Now Manekato heard a faint cry. She swivelled her parabolic ears towards the House, and picked out the voice of her mother, calling her name.
She hurried up the path, back sloping, powerful legs working, levering herself forward on her knuckles. As she passed, immature Workers called out to her, tinny voices piping from ill-formed mouths, already seeking to serve; and willow leaves swivelled frantically in her shadow as they strove to drink in all the light of the eight-hour day.
She returned to her mother's room, at the heart of the Farm. Unhappily she stepped forward, approaching the bed.
Her mother's bed looked like a simple hexagonal nest, woven of leafy branches. It was in fact a cluster of semisentient Workers, designed to mimic the nests of willow and birch branches that children learned to make for themselves from an early age. It had been manufactured to Manekato's design by Worker artisans, twelve generations removed from the crude self-recursive creatures budding in the fields outside.
The floor of the room was a pit filled with hard-compacted white dust. The dust was the ground-up bones of her ancestors. One day Nekatopo's bones would be added to the pit, and, not many years after that, Manekato's, too. Nobody knew how deep the dust pit extended. Manekato could feel the soft grittiness of the dust, but not a grain of it clung to her feet.
Nekatopo opened her eyes.
"... Mother?"
"Oh, Mane, Mane." It was a childish diminutive she had not used since Manekato was a baby. She reached up, her great arms withered and weak.
Manekato embraced her, feeling the tears soak into the hairs in her own chest.
"Oh, Mane, I'm so sorry. But you must go to the Market."
Manekato frowned. She knew that no woman had travelled to the Market since her grandmother's day. Manekato herself had never left the boundary of the Farm, and the prospect of travelling so far filled her with dread. "Why?"
Nekatopo struggled to sit up, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I don't even know how to tell you this. _We are going to lose the Farm_."
Manekato felt her mouth fall open. A change in the possession of a Farm occurred only when a Lineage became extinct, or when some member of a Lineage had committed a grave crime.
"I don't understand."
"I know you don't. Oh dear, dear Mane! It is the Astrologers. They have news for us which—well, it has gone around and around in my head, like the Astrologers' own wretched stars wheeling around the world. _The Farm is to be destroyed_. A great catastrophe is to befall the world—so say the Astrologers."
Manekato could not take in any of this. "Storms can be averted, waves tamed—"
"You must believe the Astrologers," Nekatopo whispered, insistent. "I'm sorry, Manekato. You must go to the Market and meet them."
Manekato pulled away from her frail mother, frightened, resentful. "Why? If all this is true, what use is talk?"
"Go to them," Nekatopo sighed, subsiding back into the arms of the semisentient branches.
Manekato walked to the door. Then—torn by shock, uncertainty, shame, doubt—she hesitated. "Nekatopo—if the Farm dies—what will become of me?"
Nekatopo lay on her bed, a dark brown bundle, breathing softly. She did not reply—but Manekato knew there was only one possible answer. If the Farm died, then the Lineage must die with it.
She burned with confusion, resentment.
But still she hesitated. It struck her that whatever the fate of the Farm, if she travelled to the Market, her mother might not be able to welcome her home again.
So, softly, she began to recite her true name. "Manekatopokanemahedo..."
Manekato's true name consisted of nearly fifty thousand syllables—one syllable more than her mother's name, two more than her grandmother's—one syllable added for each generation of the Lineage, back to the beginning, when members of a very different species, led by a matriarch called Ka, and her daughter called Poka, had first scratched at the unpromising slopes of the eroded hills here.
Manekato's people had farmed this scrap of land for fifty thousand generations, for more than a million years.
Nekatopo listened to this childlike performance, unmoving, but Manekato sensed her wistful pleasure.
## _J oshua_
Joshua crouched by a bubbling stream. His nostrils were filled by the musky smell of the hunters' skins, the soft green scent of grass.
The giant horse had become separated from its herd. It snorted, stamping a leg that seemed a little lame. Forgetting its peril in the foolish way of all horses, it nibbled at grass.
The Ham hunters crept forward. Most of them were men. There was no cover, here on the open plain, but they hunkered down in the long grass, and the drab brown skins they wore helped them blend into the background. They were patient. They worked toward the horse step by silent step, staying resolutely downwind of the animal. Lame or not, the heavy old stallion could still outrun any of them—or punish them with its hooves should they fail to trap it properly.
This small drama took place on a plain that stretched from the foot of a cliff. To the east, beyond a stretch of coarsely grassed dunes, the sea glimmered, a band of gray steel. And to the north a great river decanted into the sea via a broad, sluggish delta system. The plain was wet and scrubby, littered by pools. At the base of the cliff itself, a broad lake was fed by springs that sprouted from the cliff's rocks.
The coastal plain, with its caves and streams and pools and migrant herds, was the home of Joshua's people. They called themselves the People of the Gray Earth. Others called them Hams. They had lived here for two thousand generations.
To Joshua, the landscape was a blur, marked out by the position of the other hunters, as if they glowed brightly—and by the horse, the center of their attention.
A soft call came. Abel was waving his arm, indicating they should approach the horse a little closer. Abel was Joshua's older brother.
Joshua crouched lower and moved through the grass, toward the incurious horse.
But now his questing fingers found something new, lying hidden in the grass. It was a stick, long and straight. No, it was a _spear_ , with a stone tip fixed to the wood by some black, hard substance; he could see where twigs had been sheared away from it by a stone knife. He picked up the spear and hefted it, testing its weight. It was light and flimsy; it would surely break easily on a single thrust. Its shaft was oddly carved, into fine, baffling shapes.
A _bear_.
He dropped the spear, crying out, and stumbled back. Suddenly a bear had been looking at him, from out of the shaped wood in his hands.
A massive hand clamped over his mouth and he was pushed to the ground.
Abel loomed over him. His skins, of horse and antelope, were tightly bound about his body by lengths of rawhide thread. His eyes were dark pools under his bony brow. "Th' horse," he hissed.
"Bear," Joshua said, panting. "Saw bear."
Abel frowned and cast around, seeking the bear. Then he saw the broken spear. He picked it up, briefly fingering its dense carving, then hurled it from him with loathing. "Zealots," he said. "Or En'lish. Skinny-folk."
Yes, Joshua thought uneasily. Skinnies must have made the little spear. But nevertheless there had been, briefly, a bear glaring at him from out of the carved wood.
"Ho!" It was Saul, another of the Ham hunters. "Horse breakin'!"
Abel and Joshua struggled to their feet. The horse, startled, was coming straight toward the brothers, a mountain of meat and muscle, a giant as large as a carthorse.
Joshua grabbed a cobble, and Abel raised his thrusting spear. They grinned at each other in anticipation.
Joshua ran straight into the animal's mighty chest.
He was knocked flying, and he landed in the dirt in a tangle of loosened furs. Winded, he got straight up, and ran back toward the fray.
He saw that his brother had grabbed the horse around its neck. The horse was bucking, still running, and it carried Abel with it; but Abel was stabbing at the horse's throat with his spear. The spear was a short solid pillar of wood, stained deep with the blood of many kills. It was a weapon of strength and utility, without carving or decoration of any kind.
The slender spear of the Skinny-folk was meant to be thrown, so that an animal could be brought down from a distance, sparing such hard labor; the Hams had no such technology, and never would.
In a moment Abel's thrusts had reached some essential organ, and the animal crashed to the dust. The other men closed, yelling, hurling themselves on the animal to subdue it before it died. With a gleeful howl, ignoring the pain of his bruised chest and back, Joshua joined in. Before the animal was overpowered they all suffered bruises and cuts; one man broke a finger.
When the horse was dead, the butchery began.
Joshua found a flat cobble. He sat on the ground with one leg folded under him, tucked a flap of antelope skin over each hand, and began to work the cobble with fast, precise motions.
With fast blows of a pebble, he knocked away bits of stone, working around the cobble until he had left a series of thin ridges on a domed surface. After twenty or thirty strokes, with bits of stone littering the ground around him, he pulled a bone hammer from the cord around his waist. The hammer was a bit of antelope thigh bone, broken, discolored, heavily worn with use. With care, he struck one of the ridges. A thin, teardrop-shaped flake fell away. He picked it up and inspected it; it was fine and sharp, good enough for use without further work. He returned to his cobble and knocked out a series of flakes, with one confident blow after another, until the core had been returned to convexity. Then he began to prepare the core to make further flakes.
Joshua was good at working stone. It was a high art because each nodule of stone had its own unique properties; the toolmaker had to find a path through the stone to the tools he or she wanted. It was a question of seeing the tools in the raw stone. Men and women alike would watch his fast, precise movements, seeking to copy him. The women pushed their children toward him, making them watch. Nobody asked him about it, of course; people didn't _talk_ about toolmaking.
Making such tools was the thing Joshua did best, the thing for which he was most valued, the thing for which he valued himself. And yet it set him aside from the others.
He tucked his bone hammer back in his rawhide belt and took his flakes to the horse. He began work on a leg. With a series of swipes he cut down the skin on the inside of the limb, pulling it away from the muscle. Some of the horse's thick brown hair stuck to the edge of the tool. Then he moved to the belly, opening up the hide. He grasped the open skin and pulled it sideways. Where membranes clung to the skin, he swiped at them gently with his flake, holding the stone at its center between his fingers. The membranes parted easily. There was no blood, no mess.
When the horse was skinned, it was easily dismembered. Joshua cut away the meat of the neck. It fell open and was pulled away. He turned his axe over and over, seeking to use all its edge. When he was done he moved to the rib cage, and sliced down it with a crunch.
The people talked softly, steadily. They talked boastfully about their own and each other's prowess in the hunt of the horse, the people waiting for them at the hut—especially young Mary, whose breasts and hips were beginning to fill out, making her a center of intense interest among the men, and amusement for the women. Their attention was filled with each other; the horse, now it had turned to a mere mine of meat, had receded.
But even here, as the people worked together on the fallen horse, they sat a little away from Joshua. They were reluctant to look at him directly, and did not respond to what he said, as they responded to others.
Joshua was short, robust, heavily built. He was barrel-chested, and his arms and short, massive-boned legs were slightly bowed. His feet were broad, his toes fat and bony. His massive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, were scarred from stone chips. His skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, was long and low with a pronounced bulge at the rear. His face was pulled forward into a great prow fronted by his massive, fleshy nose; his cheeks swept back as if streamlined, but his jaw, though chinless, was massive and thrust forward. Over each of his eyes a great ridge of bone thrust forward, masking his eyes. There was a pronounced dip above the brow ridges, before his shallow forehead led back into a tangle of hair.
He looked powerful, ferocious. But in his pale brown eyes there was uncertainty and confusion.
Joshua was twenty-five years old. Already he was one of the senior members of the group; only a handful of men and women were older than he was. And yet he still felt something of an outsider, as he had been all his life.
The problem was his toolmaking. He would always be valued for it. But others were suspicious of what lay at the center of that profound skill: his ability to see the tools in the stone.
It was uncomfortably like what the Zealots did, and the English. Skinny-folk spoke to the sky and the ground as if they were people. Their tools were carved and painted in ways that, sometimes, made even Joshua see people or animals that weren't really there.
Just as the knives and burins and scrapers he saw in the cobbles weren't really there either, not until he dug them out. The others sensed that his head was full of strangeness, and that was why there was a barrier around him, a barrier that never broke down.
Now the hunters had completed their butchery, and the meat lay scattered around them in neat crimson piles. Joshua dropped his stone flakes, and soon forgot them. The hunters picked up cobbles and smashed open the bones. They would bring the meat back to their hut at the base of the cliffs. But first they would enjoy the warm, greasy, delicious marrow, the privilege of successful hunters. There was a mood of contentment. They knew that they need not hunt again for several days, that the women and children would welcome their return with joy, and that the evening would be filled with good food, companionship, and sex.
And, while the men lolled contentedly, Abel began to talk of the Gray Earth.
The Gray Earth was the home of the people.
The Hams had fallen, baffled, to this strange place of red dirt and grass. They lived here, but it was not as the Gray Earth had been. On the Gray Earth, the animals ran past the people's caves like great rivers of meat. On the Gray Earth, there were no skinny Zealots or English or troublesome Elf-folk; on the Gray Earth there were only Hams, the people of the Gray Earth.
The men listened. The Gray Earth lay two thousand generations in the past, and now it made the people's only legend, relayed from one generation to the next, utterly unchanging and unembroidered; they were a people conservative even in their storytelling.
But Joshua looked up into the sky. The sun was fading now, and the earth shone brightly. This earth was not the Gray Earth, for it was not gray, but a bright, watery blue.
The Hams lived in an unchanging present. Joshua's sense of his life was of a series of days more or less like today, stretching ahead of and behind him like images in a hall of mirrors, reaching from his dimly-recalled days as a toddler begging scraps from his mother, all the way to no-longer-remote times when he would become as toothless and broken-down as old Jacob, back in the hut, again helpless and dependent on the kindness of others. The Hams knew of life and death and the cycle of their lives. But of the world beyond themselves they knew of no change.
... No change but one, Joshua reflected: in the past, they had lived on the Gray Earth, and now they did not.
Joshua looked at his companions as they rested, lolling against the ground, licking marrow from their fingertips, listening amiably to Abel's loose legends. He knew that not one of them would share his thoughts, of past and future and change, of knives buried in rocks.
Joshua kept silent, and peered up at the earth's cool loveliness.
The hut was in the overhang of the cliff, close to the lake. It was built of beech saplings stuck in the ground, bent over and tied at the top. Skins of horses and antelopes had been laid loosely over the frame, weighted down with rocks. More massive rocks had been dragged to the rim of the hut. The area around was scattered with debris, animal bones, abandoned tools, cobbles scooped from the hut floor, and handfuls of ashes.
As the hunters returned with their haul of meat, Joshua saw that smoke was already rising from rents in the roof. Only a few children were outside, playing with the scattered cobbles and bits of skin. Joshua saw bats pecking hopefully at the abandoned bones.
The children ran to the hunters, and playfully grabbed at their meat.
Inside the hut the air was smoky, but the fires in their shallow hearths gave off a yellow-red glow that sent long flickering shadows over the dome of skin above. Beside the hearths, many of the women and children were already eating. The women had been hunting, too. Impeded by their children and infants, women mostly did not tackle the huge game taken on by the men, but the steady flow of smaller game they returned, like beavers and rabbits and bats, provided more than half the group's provisions.
Joshua began to shuck off his skins, loosening or cutting rawhide ropes and letting the skins fall where they may. In the hot, stuffy air of the hut he began to scrape dirt and sweat from his skin with a bit of antelope jaw bone.
Soon everybody was naked. Men and women alike were muscular and stocky, as were all but the very youngest children, so that the hut was filled with brawny, glistening bodies, moving to and fro with slabs of meat and bits of stone and bone and skin, comparing fresh injuries and wounds. The Hams lived lives of constant exertion and physical stress, and injuries were common.
Nobody knew their fathers here. But people were tied by loyalty to their mothers and siblings, and couples were more or less monogamous while they stayed together. So the horse meat was distributed through the group, fairly evenly.
Joshua, with his own slab of meat, found a place on the fringe of the hearth built by Ruth, who coupled with Abel. The low fire was surrounded by heaps of dried seaweed, to be used as bedding. Abel sat with Ruth, and two small children settled down before them, noisily tearing at rabbit legs, blood running down their chins.
One of the younger men approached the pubescent girl Mary, but she huddled close to her mother.
Joshua ate his meat raw, tearing at it with his shovel-shaped teeth and cutting it with a flake knife; every so often he scraped his teeth with the knife. And as his powerful jaw ground at the meat, great muscles worked in his cheeks.
On the fringe of the firelight he sat alone, speaking to nobody.
He had had only brief relationships with some of the women. Abel, by comparison, had shared a hearth with this one woman, Ruth, for many seasons. Like the men and even some of the children, the women saw too much strangeness in Joshua.
In one corner of the hut sat old Jacob. He was sitting on a patch of cobbles, flat sides up, laid over a damp place on the floor. He watched the others, waiting without complaint.
Now Abel, his own hunger sated, sat beside the older man. He gossiped to him gently of the day, of who had said and done what to whom, and he tore at meat, cutting off strips with a small knife. But the old man had trouble chewing; he complained loudly about the pain of the pulpy stumps of his smashed teeth. So Abel chewed the meat himself, pulling at it until it was soft, and pushed it into Jacob's mouth as if feeding an infant. Jacob accepted it without comment or shame.
Jacob's body showed the traces of a long life's relentless work. A charge by an enraged horse had left him with smashed teeth, a shattered arm, a crushed left side and a sprained leg that stubbornly refused to heal. The suite of injuries had left him incapable of participating in the hunt, or even joining in the easier tasks of the hut, like building the fires or making tools.
Joshua recalled how a healthier Jacob had once helped Joshua tend Miriam, Joshua's mother, when she lay dying of an illness that had made her belly swell and caused her to cough blood. And now Abel tended Jacob. It was the way of things, accepted without question.
Jacob was the oldest individual in the group, at thirty-nine years old.
As the evening drew in the adults gathered in loose knots. Joshua joined a loose circle, saying little, cutting at a stick of fire-hardened wood to make a new thrusting spear. Ruth scraped at the skin of the horse to remove its fur, and dragged it through her teeth. Others settled into similar quiet chores.
Like the others Joshua listened intently to the talk, absorbing every detail of rumors, of promises made, romances broken, children praised or disciplined, injuries healed or acquired. His hands worked at the stick, but it was a simple, ancient task, so deeply ingrained by generations of practice that it was almost as unconscious as breathing. It was as if all that existed in the world was the circle of faces, orbiting the light of the fires. All they talked of was each other, never of the tools they made; those were things of doing, not talking.
As the last of the daylight seeped out of the bits of sky visible through the smoke vents, people drifted apart. Abel took Ruth's hand and led her to a dark corner of the hut, close to where toothless Jacob snored noisily.
Joshua lay down alone, close to the fire Ruth had built, on a rough pallet of seaweed. He stared into the fire, and he thought he saw creatures capering in the flames, Skinny people like the Zealots or the English. But though the dancing creatures amused him, they disturbed him, too, for there were only flames, no people or animals here.
It seemed to Joshua that he woke to hear a soft gasp, like surprise, from Jacob, and then silence. But Joshua ignored this, and fell deeper into sleep.
In the morning they found Jacob lying dead, slumped over on his damaged arm.
They would bury Jacob just outside the hut's main entrance.
Joshua swept away rubbish, picked-over animal bones and flakes of worked rock, and began to dig, using bare hands and stone scrapers, powerful muscles working.
When the grave was done it was about half Joshua's height in length, and so shallow that when he stood in it, its lip barely came up to his knees. Even so the diggers had disturbed other bones, yellow and brown from their immersion in the ground, the bones of people long forgotten.
Abel carried Jacob's corpse in his arms. The ruined body, toothless mouth gaping, was light, for it had been some time since Jacob could eat properly. Abel was weeping, for he had been fond of Jacob, who was now gone. Abel put the body on the ground. He tried to fold it up into a fetal position, knees tucked against the chest, head resting on a forearm, but the body was already too stiff. So Abel and others were forced to haul at the body until its joints cracked, and it folded as required. Then Abel bound up the wrists and ankles with rawhide thong.
Children watched wide-eyed.
Abel set the body into the grave among the yellowed bones of deeper, nameless ancestors. Then he used his broad feet to scuff dirt back into the hole.
Others joined in, with hands and feet, kicking at the piles of dirt around the grave. When the grave was roughly filled, Abel stamped on it to level it, and allowed the children to run over it.
People wept openly. Many of them had loved Jacob. But now Jacob was gone.
If the world of the Hams was unchanging, it was also a world of limits. If too many children were born, then they would starve, for the land afforded only so much food. No animal could be hunted save those small or old or weak enough to be brought down by the strength of a combination of hunters at close quarters. Every person went through life limited by their strength and their health and the richness of the land and the vagaries of the weather. Nobody, not even Joshua, could make a _new_ tool, of a type that had not been made before.
And here was the ultimate limit, the limit of death. Jacob was _gone_ , no more existent than in the days before he was born, beyond hope and pain and love. For now the people grieved, and they would speak of him as if he were alive. But soon those who remembered him would die in their turn, and even his name would fade from the world.
Absently Joshua looked up to the sky, his thick neck stiff, seeking the Blue Earth.
And that was when he saw it: a thing like a bat that sailed across the sky, black and white like a gull—and yet it was not a bat. Its wings were stiff, and it was huge and fat, and it drifted beneath a huge blue and white skin, suspended there by threads.
It sailed out of Joshua's sight, beyond the line of the cliffs. He watched, open-mouthed, noting where the extraordinary bat-creature fell.
## _S hadow_
Shadow didn't want to wake up. In her sleep she was warm and cushioned by the woven branches, dreaming arboreal dreams five million years old.
It was the baby that dispelled her dreams, with a bout of savage kicking that led to a stabbing stomach cramp.
Her green mood shattered in a hail of red. She rolled over, groaning, and her gullet flexed, as if she was about to vomit. But it was a dry retch; her stomach was empty.
She sat up, rubbing the base of her belly. Slowly the cramps eased. The sun was already above the horizon, the sky tinged subtly pink by the air's dust.
She inspected this tree to which she had fled in the dark. Elf-folk had been here. The branches were twisted and torn where they had been pulled together for nests, and much of the green fruit of the tree was missing.
She had not come far. She was still within the range of the people. The sun was already high, glimmering down through the canopy. The people woke with the dawn. They might be close already.
She grabbed a handful of fruit and pushed it into her mouth.
_The people_. As she did every time she woke, she remembered in grim red shards what had happened to her, Claw and Big Boss and Little Boss and the rejection by her mother. The fragmentary, terrified images broke up into a wash of green and red and blue. She hooted in alarm, as if some predator had come wheeling out of her own head to threaten her.
She abandoned her nest and scurried down the tree to the ground. She crashed through the undergrowth, twisting aside small branches and shrubs without a thought for the noise she was making. She saw no people, and did not hear them.
And she did not stop until she was in a place she did not know.
For the first time in her life, she was in a place without the guidance of her elders, who had known the position of every fruiting tree, every bubbling stream. _Everything was new_ : the trees, the rocks, the subtle crimson shades of the dust, even the way the sun lanced down through the canopy. She had no way to figure out a path through this new landscape, a way to survive. Her kind did not see patterns in the natural world; they learned the features of the environment around them—the dangers, the sources of food and water—by rote.
Panic struck her. She longed to run back the way she had come.
She thought of Claw.
One of the trees had a hole in its trunk, a little above her eye level. Suddenly she was thirsty. She probed at the hole with one finger. She was rewarded with cool dampness. She pulled out her finger and licked it. Hastily she gathered leaves, chewed them to a spongy mass, and stuck them in the hole. When she pulled out the leaf mass it was dripping wet, and she sucked the water gratefully.
Her stomach clenched abruptly. She squatted on her haunches and briskly, painfully, passed watery shit. She took some soft, crumbling wood from a rotting tree trunk, mashed it up to a wool, and used it to wipe her backside clean of the sour-smelling stuff.
She heard a distant hooting, an answering scream. It was the Elf-folk.
As soon as she was able, she got to her feet and walked on, feeding on whatever fruit and shoots she found, heading resolutely away from the noises of her people.
But soon, very soon, she ran out of forest. She stood on the fringe of the open savannah, clinging to the forest's green shade.
And a bat came drifting across the sky, a great black and white bat with blue wings.
She howled and lunged back into the green mouth of the forest.
## _E mma Stoney_
After getting away from Fire's Runner group, Emma had followed the beckoning Ham woman into the forest. It was an arduous trek, through increasingly dense foliage. But after perhaps a mile they came to a small clearing.
There were shelters here, made of skins stretched out over saplings driven into the ground. There was an overpowering stench, of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement, and burning fur. Even the walls of the huts stank, she found, a musty, disagreeable odor of a kind she associated with the clothing of old people who didn't wash or change enough.
But, stench or not, it was a kind of village.
A Ham village.
A village of Neandertals.
She approached cautiously, following the Ham who had found her.
The Hams barely seemed to notice her. They were utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children plucked at her clothing with their intimidating, strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams stepped around her, their eyes sliding away.
But however coolly the Hams greeted Emma, they did not expel her.
She dug out her own hearth and built a fire.
Nobody shared food with her that first night. But the next day she managed to catch a rabbit with a homemade snare, and she brought the meat back to the camp and cooked it, even sharing a little with the adults. They took the meat, sniffing the burned stuff gingerly, but ignored her.
So it went on.
There were many of them, she soon learned, perhaps eighty or ninety, in shelters that faded into the dense green forest background.
With their hulking bodies and broad bony faces the Hams seemed like extras in some dreadful old movie to Emma, wrapped up in their animal skins, knocking their crude tools out of the rock. Everything they did, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air, was suffused with strength—they seemed much more powerful even than the Runners—and Emma quailed before their brute power. But it was apparent that such strength was not always wisely applied, for she saw evidence of a large number of injuries, bone fractures, and crushing injuries, and scarred skin.
They were humans, of a sort, but humans who made a living about the hardest way she could imagine. Their favored hunting technique, for example, even for the largest prey, was to wrestle it to the ground. It was like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.
But they cared for their children, and for their ill and elderly.
_And they spoke English_ , just like Fire's people, the Runners. Who could have taught them? That central mystery nagged at her—and she sensed her own destiny lay in unravelling it.
The forest, like the savannah, was full of predators: cats and bears and dogs, not to mention snakes and insects, some of them giant-sized, that she didn't trust at all.
But the most dangerous creatures of all were the people.
There seemed to be many types of hominids wandering around this globe. She knew there were Hams and Runners and Elf-folk and Nutcracker-folk, and presumably others. The vegetarian Nutcrackers seemed content to chew on bamboo and nuts in the depths of the forest, following a sleepy, untroubled, almost mindless lifestyle that Emma sometimes envied. The Runners conversely generally stuck to the plains.
The forest-dwelling Elf-folk—three or four feet high, like upright, savage chimps—were, for Emma, the most dangerous factor in the landscape. Having glimpsed what that troupe of Elf-folk had done to the Runner child, to finish her life as a living food source in the hands of Elfmen remained her abiding nightmare.
But everybody pretty much left the Hams alone.
For one thing, with their clothing and comparatively elaborate tool kit and distorted English they were a lot smarter than the rest. And they were beefy besides, even the women and children, more than a match for any Elf.
For all the Hams jabbered their broken English, Emma knew she could never become part of this inward-looking, deeply conservative community. But she also knew she was a lot safer here than wandering around, alone in the forest.
And so she stayed, inhabiting a rough lean- to on the edge of the community, bit by bit building up her own survival skills and recovering her strength, and waiting for something to turn up.
The Hams' technology was more advanced than the Runners, but still, considering those big brain pans, remarkably limited. They had more advanced knapping techniques, manufacturing a range of flakes and points and burins in addition to the ubiquitous hand axes. They fitted stone tips to their thick thrusting-spears.
But that was about it. They had no piece of technology with more than two or three components. They didn't have innovations even Emma could think of, such as spear-throwers and bows.
Other gaps. If they weren't interested in something—a type of plant, for instance, which had no use for food or medicine or tools, nor carried any threat as a poison—they simply ignored it. If it didn't matter, it was as if it didn't even exist; as far as she could tell there were whole categories of such "useless" objects and phenomena which had no names.
There were no books here, of course—there was nothing like writing of any kind. And no art: no paintings on animal skins, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child's face.
Indeed, the Hams seemed to loathe symbology of any kind. The Hams tolerated the odd colors of Emma's skin and hair, her slimness of build, the way she spoke, even the garish blue of her clothes—but they could not bear the South African air force logo that adorned the breast of her flight suit, and she had to cut it out with a stone knife. (Loathe to throw away anything that had come from home, she had tucked the patch into a pocket on her sleeve.)
She came to suspect that what disturbed them wasn't the symbols themselves as much as the response of herself to them—and other _Skinny-folk_ , a class which seemed to include herself and the mysterious "Zealots" and "En'lish." The Hams would jabber about how Skinnies saw _people in the rock_ , as if the symbols themselves were somehow sentient.
As a result, the Hams' world was a startlingly drab place, lacking art and religion and story—save, of course, for their one great central myth of the Gray Earth, where they had come from. They didn't tell jokes. The children played only as baby chimps might, exercising their muscles and testing their animal reactions against each other.
And to them, death appeared to be a genuine termination, a singularity beyond which an individual, leaving no trace, had no meaning. To the Hams, today was everything, yesterday a minor issue—and if you weren't here tomorrow, you wouldn't matter.
In many ways, they were like the Runners, then. But, unlike the Runners, they talked and talked and talked. They seemed to have a wide vocabulary, much of it English, and they would hold long, complex conversations around their fires.
But it was only gossip. They never talked about how to make a better tool. Just about each other.
Emma thought she had gotten used to the Runners, who were a strange mixture of human and animal. These Hams were still not quite human as she was, nevertheless they had their own gaps in their heads, barriers between the rooms. As she watched them jabbering of who was screwing whom while their hands worked at one tool or another, apparently independently, she found it hard to imagine how it must be to _be_ a Ham.
Sometimes she envied them, however.
To her, a beautiful sunset was a comforting reminder of home, a symbol of renewal, of hope for a better day tomorrow. The Hams would watch such displays as intently as she did. But to them, she believed, a sunset was just a sunset, like the sound of some instrument lacking any overtones, a simple pure tone—but a tone with a beauty and purity which they experienced directly and without complication, as if it was the first sunset they had ever seen.
Day succeeded empty day.
At first, on arriving here, she dreamed of physical luxuries: running hot water; clean, well-prepared food; a soft bed. But as time wore on, it was as if her soul had been eroded down. She had simpler needs now: to sleep in the open on a bower of leaves no longer troubled her; to have her skin coated in slippery grime was barely noticeable.
But she longed for security, to be able to settle down to sleep without wondering if she would be alive to see the morning, to live without the brutality and death that permeated the forest.
And she longed for the sight of another human face. It didn't have to be Malenfant. Anybody.
One day her wish was granted.
They had been men, pushing their way through the forest, pursuing some project of their own. They wore clothing of animal skin, but it was carefully stitched—a long way beyond the crude wraps the Hams tied around their bodies—and they spoke English, with a strong, twisted accent.
Emma was electrified. She gazed on their thin, somewhat pinched faces with longing, as intently as one Ham might gaze at another. Were they the source of the Hams' and Runners' language? Her impulse was to call out to them, approach them.
But she saw that the Hams cowered from these _Zealots_ , as they called them, a label Emma found less than encouraging. So she, too, slipped back into the forest with her Hams.
Sometimes she raged inwardly. Or she worked through imaginary conversations with Malenfant—who had, after all, been flying the plane when she got stuck here, and so was the only person she could think of to blame.
But when the Hams saw her stalking around the forest lashing at branches and lianas, or, worse, muttering to herself, they became disturbed.
So she learned not to look inward.
She watched the Hams as they shambled about their various tasks, their brute bodies wrapped up in tied-on animal skins like Christmas parcels. One day at a time: That was how the Hams lived, with no significant thought for tomorrow—for they appeared simply to assume that tomorrow would be much like today, and like yesterday, and the day before that.
She did not abandon her shining thread of hope that someday she would get out of here—without that she would have feared for her sanity—but she tried to emulate the Hams in their focus on the now. One day at a time. It was almost comforting. She tried to accept the notion that the best prospect for _the rest of her life_ might be to dwell on the fringes of a group like this: physically safe, but excluded, utterly ignored, the only representative of a different, and uninteresting species.
The future stretched out in front of her, a long dark hall empty of hope.
Until she sighted the lander.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant took a tentative step away from the lander. Encumbered by his escape suit, breathing canned air, he peered out of a sealed-up helmet. His heavy black boots crunched on dead leaves and sparse grass, all of it overlaid on a ruddy, dusty soil. But he could barely hear the noise of his footsteps, and could not smell the grass or the leaves.
All around this little clearing, dense forest sprouted: a darkness through which green shadows flitted. He tipped back on his heels and peered up into a tall, washed-out sky. The Earth sailed there, fat and blue, the outline of a continent dimly visible.
So here was Reid Malenfant walking on the surface of a new world: a boyhood dream, realized at last. But he sure hadn't expected it to be like this.
Maybe he was unimaginative—it was something Emma had accused him of many times—maybe he had focused too much on the battle to assemble the mission in the first place, and the thrilling details of the three-day flight across space to get here. Maybe, somehow, he had been expecting this wandering Red Moon would be content to serve as no more than a passive stage for his designs. Now, for the first time, on some deep, gut level, he realized that this was a _whole world_ he was dealing with here—complex in its own right, with its own character and issues and dangers.
And his scheme to rescue Emma seemed as absurd and quixotic as many of his opponents at home had argued.
But what else could he have done but come here and try? Nemoto was walking around the clearing experimentally, slim despite the bulky orange escape suit and the parachute pack still strapped to her back. Her gait was something like a Moonwalk, halfway between a walk and a run. "Fascinating," she said. "Walking is a pendulumlike motion, an interchange between the body's gravitational potential energy and the forward kinetic energy. The body, seeking to minimize mechanical energy spent, aims for an optimal form of gait—walking or running—at any given speed. But the lower the gravity, the lower the speed at which walking breaks into running. It's all a question of scaling laws. The Froude number—"
"Give me a break, Nemoto."
She stopped, coming to stand beside him. And, before he could stop her, she unlocked her helmet and removed it.
She grinned at him. She looked green about the gills, but then she always did. And she hadn't dropped dead yet.
Malenfant lifted his own helmet over his head. He kept his hand on the green-apple pull that would activate his suit's emergency oxygen supply. His Snoopy-hat comms unit felt heavy, incongruous in this back-to-nature environment.
He took a deep breath.
The air was thin. But he'd anticipated as much, and the altitude training he'd gone through reduced the ache in his chest to a distant nuisance. (But Emma, he remembered, had had no altitude training; this thin air must have hurt her.) The air was moist, faintly cold, what he would describe as bracing. He could smell green, growing things—the autumn smell of dead leaves, a denser green scent that came from the forest.
And he could smell ash.
Nemoto was inspecting a small portable analyzer. "No unanticipated toxins," she said. "Thin but breathable." She stripped off her Snoopy hat, and started to shuck off her orange pressure suit. "In fact," she said, "the air here is healthier than in most locations on Earth."
After their three days in space cooped up in a volume no larger than the interior of a family car, Malenfant was no longer shy of Nemoto. But he felt oddly self-conscious getting naked, out here in the open, where who-knew-what eyes might be watching. But he began to unzip his suit anyhow. "I can smell ash."
"That is probably the Bullseye," Nemoto said. The big volcano had been observed to erupt more or less continuously since the Red Moon's arrival in Earth orbit, perhaps induced by the tides exerted by the Earth on its new Moon. "You should welcome the ash, Malenfant. This is a small world, with no tectonic activity. Weathering here is a one-way process, and without a restorative mechanism all the air would eventually get locked up in the rocks, with no way to recycle it."
"Like Mars."
"And yet not like Mars. We don't yet understand the geological and biological cycles on the Red Moon. Perhaps we never will. But the injection of gases into the air by the Bullseye surely serves to keep the atmosphere replenished. What else do you notice?"
He raised his head, sniffed, listened.
"Bird song," Nemoto said. "An absence rather than a presence."
"No birds? It ought to be easier for them to fly here, in the lower gravity."
"But the air is less dense. Wings would have less lift than on Earth. The bird would require more muscle power, respiration... We may see gliders, and flightless birds. But we cannot expect the diversity we see on Earth."
A pity, Malenfant thought.
Malenfant donned T-shirt, shorts, a thin sweater, and a bright blue coverall, and then pulled his boots back on. He was glad of the warmth of the clothes; the air here was damp and cold, though the sun's heat was sharp. Nemoto dressed the same way. They tucked their heavy Gore-Tex escape suits back into the lander, against the time when they would be needed during the return to Earth—an eventuality Malenfant was finding increasingly hard to visualize.
Malenfant settled his comms pack on his shoulder. This was a specialized piece of gear manufactured for them by technicians at the Johnson Space Center. On top of a small but powerful transceiver package sat a tiny, jewel-like camera. Antennae were built into their coveralls, and the signals were relayed by small comsats orbiting low around the Red Moon. The deal was that save for emergency the controllers would keep their mouths shut during the surface stay (which they insisted on calling an extravehicular activity, with, to Malenfant's mind, an absurd emphasis on the vehicle they had arrived in, as opposed to the place they had come to). But in return the ground had control of the cameras.
Soon the little camera on Malenfant's shoulder was swivelling back and forth with a minute whirring noise. "Good grief," he said. "I feel like Long John Silver."
Nemoto laughed, as she usually did when she detected one of his jokes. He wasn't sure whether she understood the reference or not.
With her own camera working, she walked across the flattened clearing. She began to load small sample bags with fast, random selections of the vegetation and the underlying crimson soil; these were contingency samples, to be lodged in the loader against the event that they had to leave here in a hurry. She found a shallow puddle, covered with a greenish scum, and she pushed the probe of her sensor pack into it. "Water," she said. "Though I wouldn't recommend you drink it."
Malenfant, his own camera peering here and there, turned to face the way the lander had come down, from the west. The route was somewhat easy to spot. The lander, suspended beneath its blue parafoil, had come bellying down out of the sky, crashing through the trees with abandon, and had left a clear trail of its glide-down in snapped trunks, crushed branches, and ripped-up bits of parafoil. The trail terminated in this small clearing, where shattered tree trunks clustered close around the lander's incongruous black and white carcass.
Malenfant stalked around the lander, inspecting the damage. The whole underside was scored, crushed, and gouged. Heat-resistant tiles had been plucked away and scattered through the forest, and all the aerosurfaces were scarred and crumpled.
The only good thing you could say about that landing was that it wasn't his fault.
After scouting out the Red Moon from orbit for a few days, the crew and the mission planners on the ground had settled on the largest settlement they had spotted as a suitable target for the landing. (Not that they could tell who or what had built that settlement...) It was close to the delta where the great continental river completed its long journey to the ocean. The plan had been to come down on a reasonably flat, open plain a few miles to the west of the Beltway, the thick belt of forest at the continent's eastern coast, close enough to that big settlement for Malenfant and Nemoto to complete their journey on foot. Later, the follow-up rocket pack would rendezvous with the lander on the ground.
That was the plan. The Red Moon hadn't proven quite so cooperative.
As soon as the lander had ducked into the thicker layers of this little world's surprisingly deep atmosphere, strong winds had gripped it. The mission planners had expected the unexpected; there had been no time or resources to model the Red Moon's meteorology in detail. But none of that had helped ease Malenfant's mind as he lay helpless in his bucket seat, buffeted like a toy in the hands of a careless child, watching their landing ellipse whip away beneath the lander's prow.
The lander's autonomous systems had looked actively for an alternative site suitable for a safe and controlled landing. But another gust stranded the lander over the Beltway itself. When it realized that it was running out of altitude—and that soon it would reach a line of cliffs, beyond which there was only ocean—the lander had taken a metaphorical deep breath and dumped itself in the forest.
"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 toward 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 snakelike liana wound around a trunk; here a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a riot 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, palmlike 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, looking 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 artifact 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 hominid 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, childlike 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 gray. 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 program. 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 paleontologists 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 upward 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 shadows toward them—a human this time, a stocky man, white, age 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 toward 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.
## _E mma Stoney_
The spaceship had been quite unmistakeable as it drifted out of the sky, heading east, the 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.
She attempted to say good-bye to the Ham who had first found her, and to some of the others she had gotten to know. But she was met with only blankness or bafflement.
After all, since nobody ever went anywhere, nobody said _good-bye_ in a Ham community—except maybe at death.
She slipped into the forest.
## _S hadow_
Thanks to extended pulses of volcanism, this small world was steadily warming, and temperate forests were shrinking back in favor of more open grasslands. The range of Shadow's family group was only a little smaller than the remnant of forest to which they clung; with invisible, unconscious skill, Shadow's elders had always guided her away from the exposed fringes of the forest.
But now her people had turned on Shadow. And to escape them she would have to leave her forest home.
Emerging from the trees, she found herself at the foot of a shallow forest-covered slope, a foothill of taller mountains which reared up behind her. She faced a wide plain, a range of open, parklike savannah, grasslands punctuated by stands of trees. To the right of the plain a broad river ran, sluggish and brown. Away to the left a range of more rocky hills rose, their lower slopes coated with a thick carpet of forest. The hills marched away in a subtly curving ring; they were the rim mountains of a small crater.
She longed to slink back into the dark cool womb of the woods behind her.
She looked again at that smudge of green covering the crater wall. _Forest_ : the only other patch of it in her vision. She thought of food and water, nests high in the trees.
She took a step out into the open.
The sun's heat was like a warm hand on her scalp. She saw her shadow at her feet, shrunken by the height of the sun. The forest behind her tugged at her heart like the call of her mother. But she did not turn back.
She ran forward, alone, her footsteps singing in the grass.
She was soon hot, panting, dreadfully thirsty. Her thick fur trapped the heat of the sun. Her feet ached as they pounded the ground. Her arms dangled uselessly at her side; she longed to grasp, to climb. But there was nothing here to climb. She ran on, clumsy, determined, over ground that shone red through sparse yellow grass.
But as she ran she turned this way and that, fearing predators. A cat or a hyena would have little difficulty outrunning her, and still less in bringing her down. And she watched those remote woods. To her dismay they seemed to come no closer, no matter how hard she ran.
She came to a clear, shallow stream.
Unbearably thirsty, panting, she waded straight into the water. The stream was deliciously cool. The bed was of cobbles, laced with green growing things that streamed in the water. At its deepest the stream came up a little way beyond her knees.
She slid forward until she was on all fours. She rolled on her back, letting the water soak into her fur. She raised handfuls of water to her mouth. The water, leaking from her fingers, had a greenish tinge, and it was a little sour, but it was cold. She drank deeply, letting the water wash away the dust in her mouth and nose. She saw a thin trail of dust and blood seeping away from her.
A thin mucus clung to her wet hand. She saw that it contained tiny, almost transparent shrimps. She scraped the shrimps off her palm and popped them in her mouth. Their taste was sharp and creamy and delicious.
She stood up. With her gravid belly stroking the surface of the stream, she put her hands in the water, open like a scoop. She watched carefully as the water trickled through her fingers, and when the little crustaceans struck her palm she closed her hands around them.
Her thoughts dissolved, becoming pink and blue, like the sky, like the shrimp.
When she had had her fill of shrimp she clambered out of the stream, her fur dripping. She reclined on the bank. She folded her legs and inspected her feet. They were bruised and cut, and a big blister had swollen up on one toe. She washed her feet clean of the last of the grit between her toes, and then inspected the blister curiously; when she poked it with a fingernail the clear liquid in it moved around, accompanied by a sharp pain.
She heard a distant growl.
Startled, she tucked her feet underneath her, resting her knuckles on the ground. She peered around at the open plain.
The shadows, of rocks and isolated trees, had grown long. She had forgotten where she was: while she had played in the water, the day had worn away. She mewled and wrapped her long arms around her torso. She did not want to return to the running. But every instinct in her screamed that she must get off the ground before night fell.
She climbed out of the stream and began running toward the crater rim hills.
The light faded, terribly rapidly. Her shadow stretched out before her, and then dissolved into grayness.
Her face began to itch, as if some insect was working its way into her skin. She scratched her cheeks and brow. She looked for someone to groom her. But there was nobody here, and the itch wouldn't go away.
Still she ran, thirsty, dusty, exhausted.
And still those growls came, echoing across the savannah: the voices of predators calling to each other, marking out the territory they claimed.
It grew darker. The earth climbed in the sky. The land became drenched in a silvery blueness.
There was a growl, right in front of her. She glimpsed yellow eyes, like two miniature suns.
She screamed. She picked up handfuls of dirt and threw them at the yellow eyes. There was a howl.
She turned and ran, not caring where she went. But her gait was waddling and stiff, her feet broken and sore.
She could hear steady, purposeful footsteps behind her.
Memories clattered through her mind: of a bite that had crushed the skull of a child in a moment, of the remains of a predator's feast, bloody limbs and carcass, of the screams of a victim taken live to a nest, where cubs had fed long into the night. She screamed and ran and ran.
There was light ahead of her.
She ran toward the light, panting and hooting. She thought of daybreak in a safe treetop, her nest warm under her, her mother's massive body close by.
The light was yellow, and it flickered, and shadows moved before it. Afire.
She heard those scampering footsteps. There was a hot, panting breath on her neck.
A stone zinged through the air, past her head. It clattered against a rock, harmlessly. Now another stone flew. It caught her in the chest, knocking her flat on her back.
Behind her, the chasing cat yelped and yowled. When she sat up and turned, she saw its lithe silhouette sliding across the blue, glittering grass.
"Elf Elf away."
She yelled and scrabbled in the dirt.
She found herself looking up at a tall figure—a woman, perhaps twice as tall as she was, taller even than Big Boss had been, her torso long and ugly. She had small flat breasts. She was hairless, save for knots of hair on her head and between her legs. She had a small face and wide nose, and she carried a stick that she was pointing at Shadow.
She was a Runner.
Cautiously Shadow got to her feet. She jabbered at the woman, a series of intense pants, hoots, screeches, and cries. She expected the woman to respond. They would chatter together, sounds without words, their cries slowly matching in pitch and intensity as they greeted each other.
But the woman jabbed with the stick, coming close to piercing Shadow's skin. "Elf Elf away!"
Shadow feared the stick. But before her was the yellow fire. She could hear the fire pop and crackle, and she could smell food, the sharpness of leaves and burned meat. Many people were there—all tall and skinny and hairless like this stretched-out woman, but people nevertheless. Behind her there was only the darkness of the savannah, like a vast black mouth waiting to swallow her.
She took a pace toward the woman, hands outstretched. She tried to groom her, reaching for the hair on the woman's head.
The sharp stick jabbed in her shoulder. Again Shadow was thrown back into the dirt. She poked a finger in her latest wound; blood seeped slowly from it, soaking her fur. She whimpered in misery. The sharp noses of the cats would soon detect the blood.
Still the woman stood over her, arms akimbo, stick poised for another thrust.
Shadow tried to stand. A searing pain clamped around her stomach, making her stumble to the crimson dirt. She cried out, and beat her fists on her betraying belly. She looked up at the threatening, curious woman. She whimpered. She held out her feet, and flexed her toes. Helpless, she was reduced to the gestures of an infant.
The woman lowered the stick. She crouched down. Clear eyes looked into Shadow's. She reached out with her hand and stroked Shadow's fur. She touched the wounded shoulder, and the hand came away bloody; the woman wiped it in the dirt at her feet. Then she ran a curious hand over the bump in Shadow's belly.
Again Shadow reached for the woman's scalp and crotch to groom her. But the woman flinched back.
Shadow dropped her head, her energy exhausted. She lay in the dirt, on her back, her arms and legs splayed; Shadow was beaten.
The woman stared at her a while longer. Then she walked away, toward the fire.
Shadow curled over on her side.
Something hit her chest. She flinched back.
It was a piece of meat. It lay on the ground before her. She saw it had been cut from an animal—perhaps an antelope—by a sharp-edged stone. And people had bitten into it already; she saw where it had been ripped and torn by teeth. But still it was meat, a piece as big as her hand. She crammed it into her mouth, tearing at it with hands and teeth.
When she was done she lay down once more. The ground was hard and dusty, and she longed for the springy platform of a nest. But her arm made a pillow for her head.
Suspended between black night and the flickering firelight, she sank into redness.
## _R eid Malenfant_
On the walk through the forest with McCann, this oddball English guy, Malenfant got fixated on McCann's crossbow.
The crossbow, made purely of wood, was heavy. There was a long underslung trigger that neatly lifted a bowstring out of the notch. The trigger mechanism worked smoothly. The string itself was made of twisted vine, very fine, very strong. But there was no groove to direct the bolt. And the bolts themselves seemed crude to Malenfant: about as long as a pencil, but a lot thinner, and with a flight made from a single leaf, tucked into a slice in the wooden bolt, just one plane. It was hard to see how you could make an accurate shot with such a thing. But as they walked McCann did just that, over and over, apparently pleased to have an audience.
Nemoto's silent contempt for all this was obvious. Malenfant didn't care. His mind was tired of all the strangeness; to play with a gadget for a while was therapy.
It was getting dark by the time the Englishman led them to a fortress in the jungle. The two of them, bruised and bewildered, were led into the compound, taking in little. Surrounded by a tough-looking stockade, it turned out to be a place of straight lines and right angles, the huts lined up like ranks of soldiers, the line of the stockade walls as perfect as a geometrical demonstration.
"Shit," murmured Malenfant. "I can feel my anus clench just standing here."
Nemoto said, "They are very frightened people, Malenfant. That much is clear."
Malenfant glimpsed people moving to and fro in the gathering dark. No, not quite people. He shuddered.
McCann showed them hospitality, including food and generous draughts of some home-brew beer, thick and strong.
The hours passed in a blur.
He found himself in a sod hut, with Nemoto. His bed was a boxy frame containing a mattress of some vegetable fabric. It didn't look too clean.
They were both fried. They hadn't slept in around thirty-six hours. They had been through the landing, the assault by the _Erectus_ types, the march through the jungle. And, frankly, the beer hadn't helped. At least here, against all expectations, they had found what seemed like a haven. But still Malenfant inspected his lumpy bed suspiciously.
"I know what to do," Malenfant said. "Always turn your mattress. Then the body lice have to work their way back up to get to you." He lifted the corner of his mattress out of its wooden box.
"I would not do that," Nemoto said; but it was too late.
There was the sound of fingernails on wood, a smell like a poultry shed. Cockroaches poured out of the box, a steady stream of them, each the size of a mouse.
"Shit," Malenfant, said. "There are thousands in there." He stamped on one, briskly killing it.
"It's best to leave them," Nemoto said evenly. "They have glands on their backs. They only stink when disturbed."
Malenfant cautiously picked up a cockroach. Its antenna and palps hung limp, and it had a pale pink band over its head and thorax.
"Very ancient creatures, Malenfant," Nemoto said. "You find traces of them in carboniferous strata, three hundred million years deep."
"Doesn't mean I want to share my bed with one," Malenfant said. Carefully, as if handling a piece of jewelry, he set the cockroach on the floor. It scuttled out of sight under his bed frame.
Malenfant finally lowered his head to the pillow.
"Just think," Nemoto said from the darkness. "When you sleep with that pillow, you sleep with all the people who used it before."
Malenfant thought about that for a while. Then he dumped the pillow on the floor, rolled up his coverall, and stuck that under his head.
Later that night Malenfant was disturbed by a howl, like a lost child. Peering out, he spotted a small creature high in a palm tree, about the size of a squirrel.
"A hyrax," Nemoto murmured. "Close to the common ancestor of elephants, hippos, rhinos, tapirs, and horses."
"Another ancient critter, crying in the night. I feel like I've been lost in this jungle since God was a boy."
"I suspect we are very far from God. Try to get some sleep, Malenfant."
## _S hadow_
Pain stabbed savagely in her lower belly. It awoke her from a crimson dream of teeth and claws. She sat up screaming.
There was no cat. In the gray-pink light of dawn, she was sitting in the dirt. She was immediately startled to find herself on the ground, and not high in a tree.
Before her she could see skinny people walking around, pissing, children tumbling sleepily. Some of them turned to stare at her with their oddly flat faces.
But now more pain came, great waves of it that tore at her as if her whole body was clenched in some huge mouth.
Something gushed from between her legs. She looked down, parting her fur. She saw bloody water, seeping into the ground. She screamed again.
She scrabbled at the ground, seeking to find a tree, her mother, seeking to get away from this dreadful, wrenching agony. But the pain came with her. Her belly flexed and convulsed, like huge stones moving around inside her, and she fell back once more.
Now there was a face over hers: smooth and flat, shadowed against the pinkish sky. Strong hands pressed at her shoulders, pushing her back against the dirt. She lashed out, trying to scratch this creature who was attacking her. But she was feeble, and her blows were easily brushed aside. She could feel more hands on her ankles, prying her legs apart, and she thought of Claw, and screamed again. But the pressure, though gentle, was insistent, and kick as she might she could not free herself of these grasping, controlling hands.
Now the pain pulsed again, a red surge that overwhelmed her.
No more than half-conscious, she barely glimpsed what followed: the strong, skillful hands of the Runner women as they levered the baby from its birth canal, fingers clearing a plug of mucus from its mouth, the brisk slicing of the umbilical with a stone axe. All that Shadow perceived was the pain, the way it washed over her over and over, receding at last as the baby was taken from her—to be followed by a final agonizing pulse as the afterbirth emerged.
When it was done, Shadow struggled to prop herself up on her elbows. Her hair was matted with dust and blood. The ground between her legs was a mess of blood and mucus, drying in the gathering sunlight.
There were women around her, tall like tree trunks, their shadows long.
One of them—older, with silvery hair—was holding the afterbirth, which steamed gently. The old woman nibbled at it cautiously, and then, with a glance at Shadow, she ran away toward the smoking fire with her stolen treat.
The other women stared at Shadow's face. Their small, protruding noses wrinkled. Now that the greater pain was ebbing, Shadow became aware of an itching that had spread across her cheeks and forehead and nose; she scratched it absently.
A woman stood before her. She held the baby, her long fingers clamped around its waist. It had large pink ears, small, pursed lips, and wrinkled, bluish-black skin. Its head was swollen, like a pepper. It—he—opened his mouth and wailed.
He smelled strange.
The skinny woman thrust the baby at Shadow, letting him drop on her belly. Feebly the baby grasped at her fur, mouth opening and closing with a pop.
With hesitant hands, Shadow picked him up around the waist. He wriggled feebly. She turned him around so his face was toward her, and pressed his face against her chest. Soon his mouth had found her nipple, and she felt a warm white gush course through her body.
But the baby smelled wrong. She could hardly bear even to hold him.
The Running-folk let her stay the rest of the day, and through the night. But they gave her no more food. And when dawn came, they drove her away with stones and yells.
Her baby clamped to her chest, its big awkward head dangling, Shadow walked unsteadily across the savannah, toward the wooded crater wall.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant woke to the scent of bacon.
He surfaced slowly. The smell took him back to Emma and the home they had made in Clear Lake, near Houston, and even deeper back than that, to his parents, the sunlit mornings of his childhood.
But he wasn't at home, in Clear Lake or anywhere else.
When he opened his eyes he found walls of smoothed-over turf all around him, a roof of crudely cut planking, the whole covered in a patina of smoke and age. Light streamed in through unglazed windows, just holes cut in the sod covered by animal skin scraped thin. Under the smell of the bacon he could detect the cool green earthy scent of forest.
The day felt hot already. Thin air, Malenfant: hot days, cold nights, like living at altitude.
Nemoto's pallet was empty.
When he tried to sit up, pushing back the blankets of crudely woven fiber, his shoulder twinged sharply: injured, he was reminded, where a _Homo erectus_ had thrown a stone at him, prior to trying to eat him.
He swung his legs out of bed. He was in his underwear, including his socks, and his boots were set neatly behind the hut's small door. He could feel the ache of a faint hangover, and his mouth felt leathery. He remembered the beer he had consumed the night before, a rough, chewy ferment of some local vegetation, sluiced down from wooden cups.
The door opened, creaking on rope hinges. A woman walked in.
Malenfant snatched back the blankets, covering himself.
She was short, squat, dressed in a blouse and skirt dyed a bright, almost comical yellow. Her face protruded beneath a heavy brow, but her hair was tied back neatly and adorned with flowers.
She looked like a pro wrestler in drag. She curtsied neatly.
She was carrying Malenfant's coverall, which had been cleaned and patched at the shoulder. She put the coverall on his bed, and crossed to a small dresser, evidently homemade. There was a wooden bowl of dried flowers on top of the dresser. She scooped out the flowers and replaced them with a handful of pressed yellow blooms—marigolds, perhaps—that she drew from a pouch in her skirt. Her feet were bare, he saw, great spade-shaped toes protruding from under the skirt.
She curtsied again. "Breakfas', baas," she said, her voice a gruff rasp. She had not once met his eyes. She turned to go out the door.
"Wait," he said.
She stopped. He thought he saw apprehension in her stance, though she must have been twice his weight, and certainly had nothing to fear from him.
"What's your name?"
"Julia." It was difficult for her to make the "J" sound; it came out as a harsh squirt. _Choo-li-a_.
"Thanks for looking after me."
She curtsied once again and walked stolidly out of the room, her big feet padding on the wooden floor.
The settlement consisted of a dozen huts, of cut sod or stacked logs, with roofs of thick green blankets of turf. The huts were a uniform size and laid out like a miniature suburban street. The central roadway was crimson dust beaten flat by the passage of many feet, and lined with heavy rocks. Around each of the huts a small area was cordoned off by more lines of rocks. Some of the rocks were painted white. In the "gardens" plants grew, vegetables and flowers, in orderly rows.
Crude-looking carts were parked in the shadow of one wall, and other bits of equipment—what looked like spades, hoes, crossbows—were stacked in neat piles under bits of treated skin. There was even a neat, orderly latrine system: trenches topped by little cubicles and wooden seats.
The effect was oddly formal, like a barracks, a small piece of a peculiarly ordered civilization carved out of the jungle, which proliferated beyond the tall stockade that surrounded the huts. Last night McCann had been apologetic about the settlement's crudity, but with its vegetable-fiber clothing and carts and tools of wood and stone, it struck Malenfant as a remarkable effort by a group of stranded survivors to carve out of this unpromising jungle something of the civilization they had left behind.
But the huts' sod walls were eroded and heavily patched by mud. And several of the huts appeared abandoned, their walls in disrepair, their tiny gardens desiccated back to crimson dust.
There was nobody about—no humans, anyhow.
A man dressed in skins crossed the compound's little street, barefoot, passing from one hut to another. He was broad, stocky, like Julia. A Neandertal, perhaps.
In one corner of the compound two men worked at a pile of rocks, steadily smashing them one against the other, as if trying to reduce them to gravel. The men were naked, powerful. Malenfant could immediately see they were the _Homo erectus_ types. They were restrained by heavy ropes on their ankles, and they didn't seem aware of his presence. The display of their strength, unaccompanied by the control of minds, disturbed him.
But he could still smell bacon. Comparative anthropology could wait.
He followed his nose to a hut at the center of the compound. Within, a table had been set with wooden plates and cups and cutlery, and in a small kitchen area another Neandertal-type woman, older than Julia, was frying bacon on slabs of rock heated by a fire. In the circumstances, it seemed incredibly domesticated.
Nemoto was sitting at the table, chewing her way steadily through a slab of meat. She looked at him as he entered, and raised an eyebrow.
"... Malenfant. Good morning."
Malenfant turned at the voice, and his hand was grasped firmly.
Hugh McCann was wearing a suit, Malenfant was startled to see, with a collared shirt and even a tie. But the suit and shirt were threadbare, and Malenfant saw how McCann's belt dug into his belly.
McCann saw him looking. He said ruefully, "I never was much of a hand with the needle. And our bar-bar friends make fine cooks, but they don't have much instinct for tailoring, I fear."
Malenfant was fuddled by the scent of the food. "Bar-bars?"
"For _barbarians_ ," Nemoto said, her mouth full. "The Neandertals."
"They call themselves Hams," McCann said. "A Biblical reference, of course. But bar-bars they were to me as a boy, and bar-bars they will always remain, I fear." His accent was clearly British, but of a peculiarly strangulated type Malenfant hadn't encountered outside of World War II movies. And he gave Malenfant's name a strong French pronunciation. He took Malenfant's elbow and guided him toward the kitchen area. "What can we offer you? The bacon comes from the local breed of hog, and is fairly authentic, but the bird who laid those eggs was no barnyard chicken: rather some dreadful flightless thing like a bush turkey. Still, the eggs are pretty tasty." He flashed a smile at the Ham cook, showing decayed teeth.
First things first. Malenfant grabbed a plate and began to ladle it full of food. The wooden utensils were crude, but easy to use. He took his plate to the table, and sat with Nemoto, who was still eating silently. Malenfant sliced into his bacon. The well-cooked meat fell apart easily.
After a moment McCann joined them. "I expect last night is all a bit of a blur. You did rather go on a bust, Malenfant."
"Body fluid redistribution," Nemoto said dryly. "Low oxygen content. You just could not take it, Malenfant."
"I'll know better next time."
"Runners," Nemoto said.
"What?"
"The _Erectus/Ergaster_ breed. Mr. McCann calls them Runners—Running men, Running-folk."
"Quite a danger in the wild," McCann said around a mouthful of bacon. "That scrog of wood where we found you was hotching with them. But once broken they are harmless enough. And useful. A body strong enough for labor, hands deft enough to handle tools, and yet without the will or wit to oppose a man's commands—if backed up by a light touch of the _sjambok_ from time to time..."
Nemoto leaned forward. "Mr. McCann. You said that when you were a boy you called the Neandertals—that is, the Hams—bar-bars. So were there Hams in, umm, in the world you came from?"
McCann dug a fork into his scrambled egg, considering the question. He seemed more comfortable talking to Malenfant than to Nemoto, and he directed his remarks to him. "Look here," he said. "I don't know who you are or where you're from, not yet. But I'm going to be honest with you from the start. I don't mind telling you that yours are the first white faces we've seen since we've come here. Aside from those dreadful Zealot types, of course, but they're no help to us, and beyond the pale anyhow... Yes," he said. "Yes, there are Hams where I come from. There. That's a straight answer to a straight question, and I trust you'll treat me with the same courtesy."
"Where?" Nemoto pressed. "Where are your Hams? In Europe, Asia—"
"Yes. Well, they are now. But not by origin, of course. The Hams came originally from the New World."
Nemoto asked, "America?"
McCann frowned. "I don't know that name."
Malenfant eyed Nemoto. "What are you thinking?"
"An alternate Earth," Nemoto said simply.
Yes, he thought. McCann had come from an Earth, a different Earth, a world where Neandertals had survived to the present—a world where pre-European America had been in the occupation, not of a branch of _Homo sapiens_ , but of another species of humankind altogether, a different flesh... What an adventure that must have been, Malenfant thought, for a different Columbus.
Nemoto said softly, "I think we may be dealing with a whole sheaf of worlds here, Malenfant. And all linked by this peculiar wandering Red Moon."
McCann was listening intently. Malenfant saw how deeply cut were the lines in his face; he might have been fifty, but he looked older, careworn, intense, lit by a kind of desperation. He said, "You believe we come from different worlds."
"Different versions of Earth," Nemoto said.
He nodded. "And in this Earth of yours, there are no Hams?"
"No," Nemoto said steadily.
"Well, we have no Runners. The Runners may be native to this place, perhaps." He eyed them sharply. "And what about the others, the Elf-folk and the Nutcrackers..."
Malenfant said, "If you mean other breeds of hominids, or prehominids—no. Nothing between us and the chimps. The chimpanzees."
McCann's eyes opened wider. "How remarkable. How—lonely."
The Neandertal woman, with a bulky grace, came to the table and began to gather up their dishes.
They walked around the compound.
There was very little metal here: a few knives, bowls, shears. These tools, it seemed, had been cut from the wreck of the ship that had brought McCann and his colleagues here: like Nemoto and Malenfant, the English had got here under their own power. So the tools were irreplaceable and priceless—and they were a target for steady theft, by Hams within and without the compound. McCann said the Hams did not use the tools; they seemed to destroy them or bury them, removing this trace of novelty from the world.
There were many Hams, working as servants. And there appeared to be several of the so-called Runners, kept under control at all times, apparently domiciled outside the main stockade. He tried to put aside judgment. He was not the one who had battled to survive here for so long; and it was evident that this McCann and his companions came from a very different world from his.
And besides, McCann appeared to believe that he treated "his" hominids well.
They met one other of the English, a bloated-looking red-faced man with a Santa Claus beard and an immense pot belly that protruded from the grimy, much-patched remnant of a shirt. He was riding in a cart drawn by two of the Runners, harnessed with strips of leather like pack animals. Santa Claus glared at Malenfant and Nemoto as he passed them, and then went riding out of the stockade through gates smoothly pulled back by Hams.
"There goes Crawford in his Cape cart," whispered McCann conspiratorially. "Something of an oddball, between you and me. Well, we all are, I suppose, after all this time. I fear he's too much set in his ways to deal with you. Of course if he suspected you were French he'd shoot you where you stand!... Martyr to his lumbago, poor chap. And I fear he may have a touch of the black-water."
McCann talked quickly and fluently, as if he had been too long alone.
There had been twelve of them, it seemed—all men, all British, from an Empire that had thrived longer than in Malenfant's world. Their rocket ship had been driven by something called a Darwin engine.
McCann struggled to describe the history of his world, his nation. After bombarding them with a lot of detail, names of wars and kings and generals and politicians that meant nothing to Malenfant, he settled on a blunt summary.
"We are engaged in a sort of global war," McCann said. "That's been the shape of it for a couple of centuries now. Our forefathers struck out for new lands, in Asia and Africa and Australia—even the New World—as much out of rivalry as for expectations of gain."
But the ultimate "new land" had always hovered in the sky. Before the Red Moon had appeared in McCann's sky, a Moon had sailed there—not tiny, desiccated Luna, but a much fatter world, a world of water-carved canyons and aquifers and dust storms, a world that sounded oddly like Mars. Drawn by that Moon, the great nations of this other Earth had launched themselves into a space race as soon as the technology was available, decades before Malenfant's history had caught up.
Malenfant, battered by strangeness, found room for a twinge of nostalgia. He'd have exchanged McCann's fat Moon for Luna any time. If only a world like Mars had been found to orbit the Earth, instead of poor desiccated Luna—a world with ice and air, just waiting for an explorer's tread! With such a world as a lure, just three days away from Earth, how different history might have been. And how differently his own life, and Emma's, might have turned out.
"The lure of the Moon was everything, of course." McCann said. "From times before memory it has floated in the sky, fat and round and huge, with storms and ice caps and even, perhaps, traces of vegetation, visible with the naked eye. You could see it was another world in the sky, waiting for the tread of man, for the flag of empire, the ploughs of farmers... It was quite a chase. Got to stop the other chap getting there first, you see."
Malenfant was getting confused again. "Other chap? You mean the Americans?"
Nemoto said gently, "There are no Americans in his world, Malenfant."
"The French, of course," said McCann. "The blooming French!"
Colonies on this bounteous Moon had been founded in what sounded like the equivalent of the first half of the twentieth century. Since then wars had already been fought, wars on the Moon waged between spreading mini-empires of Brits and French and Germans.
But then, in McCann's universe, the Mars-Moon had disappeared, to be replaced by this peculiar, wandering Red Moon, with its own cargo of oceans and life. Once the world had gotten over its bewilderment—once the last hope of contacting the lost colonies on Mars-Moon was gone—a new race had begun to plant a flag in the Red Moon.
"... Or _Lemuria_ , as we call it," McCann said.
Nemoto said, "A lost continent beneath the Indian Ocean, once thought to have been the cradle of mankind."
McCann talked on: of how the dozen men had travelled here; of a disastrous landing that had wrecked their ship and killed three of them; of how they had sent heliograph and radio signals home and waited for rescue—and of how their Earth had flickered out of the sky, to be replaced by another, and another.
"A sheaf of worlds," murmured Nemoto, gazing at McCann.
When it was clear that no rescue was to come, some of the exploratory party had submitted to despair. One committed suicide. Another handed himself over to a party of Elf-folk for a hideous and protracted death.
The survivors had recruited local Hams, and used their muscles and Runner labor to construct this little township. They had found no others of their kind, save for the sinister-sounding Zealots, of whom McCann was reluctant to speak, who lived some distance from the compound.
It seemed that it had been the mysterious Zealots who had taught the indigenes their broken English—if inadvertently, through escaped slaves returning to their host populations. The Zealots had been here for centuries, McCann seemed to believe.
"Not much of a life," McCann said grimly. "No women, you see. Some of us sought relief with the Hams, even with Runners. But they aren't _women_. And there were certainly no children to follow." He smiled stoically. "Without women and children, you can't make a colony, can you? After a time you wonder why you bother to shave every day."
One by one the Englishmen had died, their neat little huts falling into disrepair.
McCann showed them a row of graves, outside the stockade gate, marked by bits of stone. The last to die had been a man called Jordan—"dead of paralytic shock," McCann said. McCann appeared especially moved to be at Jordan's graveside. Malenfant wondered if these withdrawn, lonely men, locked in civility and their memories of a forever lost home, had in the end sought consolation in each other.
But McCann, in a gruesome effort to play the good host, talked brightly of better times. "We had a life of sorts. We played cards—until they wore out—and we made chess sets, carving pieces from bits of balsa. We had no books, but we would spin each other yarns, recounting the contents of novels as best we remembered them. I dare say the shades of a few authors are restless at the liberties we took. Once or twice we even put on a play or two. Marlowe comedies mostly: _Much Ado About Nothing_ , that kind of thing. Just to amuse ourselves, of course.
"We used to play sports. Your average Ham can't kick a soccer ball to save his life, but he's a formidable rugby player. As for the Runners, they can't grasp the simplest principle of rules or sportsmanship. But, my, can they run! We would organize races. The record we got was under six seconds for the hundred-yard dash. _That_ fellow was rewarded with plenty of bananas and beer..."
McCann spoke of how the survivors, just four of them, had become withdrawn, even one from the other, as they waited gloomily for death. Crawford would disappear into the forest for days on end with squads of Hams, "fossicking around," as McCann put it. The others would rarely even leave their huts.
"And you?" Nemoto asked. "What is your eccentricity, Mr McCann?"
"A longing for company," he said immediately, smiling with self-deprecation. "That's always been my weakness, I'm afraid."
"Then it must have been hard for you here," Malenfant said.
"Indeed. But when my companions withdrew into themselves, I sought out the company of the lesser folk: the Hams, even the Runners at times. My companions took to calling me _Mowgli_. Perhaps you know the reference. I have attempted to civilize them, teach them skills—more advanced toolmaking, even reading. With little success, I am afraid. Your bar-bar is smarter than your Runner, and these presapients are smarter in turn than the pongid species, the Elves and Nutcrackers. Your bar-bar can be taught to use a new tool, you know—to _use_ it but never to make it. They can make things work but never understand _how_ they work, rather like human infants. And, like your Kaffir, your bar-bar can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more.
"And that, of course, is the difference between man and presapient. Wherever there are sub-men, who live only for the day and their own bellies, we must rule. But the work shapes one. The responsibility. It has made me pitiful and kindly, I would say, as I have learned something of their strange, twisted reasoning." He leaned toward them. "They have no chins, you see, none of them. And everybody knows that a weak chin generally denotes a weak race."
When evening came again, fires were built within the palm-thatched huts, and smoke rose through the roofs and the crude chimneys that pierced them. Malenfant saw a pair of bats, flapping uncertainly between the turbulent columns of smoke. They were big, as big as crows, with broad, rounded wings.
"Leaf-nose bats," Nemoto murmured.
"Don't tell me. Prehistoric bats."
Nemoto shrugged. "Perhaps. There are many bats here. They have occupied some of the niches never taken by the birds."
Malenfant watched the bats' slow, ungainly flapping. "They sure look unevolved."
"Ah, but they were the peak of aerial engineering when they hunted flies and mosquitoes over lakes full of dinosaurs, Malenfant. You should have a little more respect."
"I guess I should."
Nemoto whispered conspiratorially, "It all hangs together, Malenfant."
"What does?"
"McCann's account of his alternate Earth. A much larger Moon would raise immense tides. The oceans would not be navigable. McCann's America must once have been linked to Eurasia by land bridges, as ours was, for otherwise the Hams presumably couldn't have reached it. But when the land bridges were submerged, the Americas were effectively cut off—until iron-hulled ships and airplanes emerged, in the equivalent of our own twentieth century. Malenfant, it may have been easier to fly to the Moon than to reach America. Think of that."
"What does all this mean, Nemoto?"
"I am working on it," she said seriously. "Consider this, though. We are alone on our Earth, our closest relatives terribly distant. But McCann's world has a spectrum of hominid types—as it was on our own Earth, long ago. McCann's Earth may in some senses be more _typical_ than ours."
A party of Runners, supervised by a Ham, brought in a deer, slung between them, half-butchered.
"Look at that," muttered Nemoto. "I think that one is a mouse deer." It was small, the size of a dog, its coat yellow-brown spotted with white, and it had tusks in its upper jaw. "You see them in Africa. Actually it isn't really a deer at all. It is midway between pigs and deer, and more primitive than either. It climbs trees. It catches fish in the streams. Probably unchanged across thirty million years. Older than grass, Malenfant."
"And the other?"
This was a little larger than the mouse deer, with a black stripe down its back, and powerful hind legs: a creature evolved for the undergrowth, Malenfant thought.
"A duiker, I think," Nemoto said. "Another primitive form, the oldest of the antelopes. Sometimes hunts birds and feeds on carrion. Maybe here it eats bats. Everything is ancient here." Now she seemed agitated. "Perhaps these forms were brought here by the same mechanism that imported hominids. What do you think?"
"Take it easy."
Her small, thin face worked in the gathering gloom. "This is wrong, Malenfant."
"Wrong? What's wrong with it?"
"The ecology is—out of tune. Like a misfiring engine. It is a jumble of species and microecologies, a mixed-up place, fragments thrown together. Though many of the fragments are very ancient, there has been no time for these plants and animals to evolve together, to find an equilibrium. Periodically something disturbs this world, Malenfant, over and over, stirring it up."
Malenfant grunted. "Guess you can't go wandering across the reality lines without a little confusion."
But Nemoto would not take the matter lightly. "This is not right, Malenfant. All this _mixing_. There is a _reason_ the primitive hominids became extinct, a reason why the mouse deer's descendants evolved new forms. An ecology is like a machine, where all parts work together, interlocking. You see?"
Malenfant said, amused, "These deer and antelopes seem to have been prospering before they ran into some hunter's crossbow bolt."
"It shouldn't be this way, Malenfant. To meddle with ecologies, to short-circuit them, is irresponsible."
Malenfant shrugged. "Sure. And we cut down the forests to build shopping malls." He was feeling restless; maybe his first shock was wearing off. He'd had enough of McCann; he was eager to get out of here, get back to the lander—and progress in his primary mission, which was to find Emma.
But when he expressed this to Nemoto she laughed harshly. "Malenfant, we barely managed to survive our first few minutes after landing. Here we are safe. Have patience."
He seethed. But without her support, he didn't see what he could do about it.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
When she was Mapped to the Market—when the information that comprised her had been squeezed through cracks in the quantum foam that underlay all space and time—she was no longer, quite, herself, and that disturbed her greatly.
Manekato was used to Mapping. The Farm was large enough that walking, or transport by Workers, was not always rapid enough. But Mappings covering such a short distance were brief and isomorphic: she felt the same coming out of the destination station as entering it (just as, of course, principles of the identity of indiscernible objects predicted she should).
A Mapping spanning continents was altogether more challenging. To compensate for differences in latitude and altitude and seasons—early summer _there_ , falling into autumn _here_ —and to adjust for momentum differences—people on the far side of the spinning Earth were moving in the opposite direction to her—such a Mapping could be no more than homomorphic. What came out looked like her, felt like her. But it was not indiscernible from the original; it could not _be_ her.
Still, despite these philosophical drawbacks, the process was painless, and when she walked off the Mapping platform, her knuckles tentatively touching new ground, she found herself comfortable. The air was hot, humid but caused her no distress, and even its thinness at this higher altitude did not give her any discomfort.
And the air was still. _There was no Wind_. Thanks to the Air Wall wrapped around it, the Market was the only place on Earth from which the perpetual Wind was excluded. She had been prepared for this intellectually, of course. But to stand here in this pond of still air—not to feel the caressing shove of the Wind on her back—was utterly strange.
This crowded Mapping station was full of strangers. She peered around, feeling conspicuous, bewildered. Some of the people here were small, some tall, some squat, some thin; some were coated with hair that was red or black or brown, and some had no hair at all; some crawled close to the ground, and some almost walked upright, like their most distant ancestors, their hands barely brushing the ground. Manekato, who had spent her whole life on a Farm where everybody looked alike, tried to mask her shock and revulsion at so much _difference_.
She was met outside the station by a Worker, a runner from the Astrologers. She slid easily onto its broad back, wrapping her long arms around its chest, and allowed herself to be carried away.
Her first impression of the Market was of waste. The streets were broad, the buildings an inefficient variety of designs, and she could spot immediately places where heat would leak or dust gather, or where the layout must prevent optimally short journeys from being concluded.
All of this jarred with her instinct. The goal for every Farmer was to squeeze the maximum effectiveness and efficiency from every last atom—and beyond, to the infinitesimal. The mastery of matter at the subatomic level, resulting in such everyday wonders as Mapping and Workers, had brought that ultimate dream a little closer.
But, she reminded herself, this was the Market, not a Farm.
In the deepest past there had been a multitude of markets, where Farmers traded goods and information and wisdom. The transient population of the markets had always been predominantly male. Women were more tightly bound to the land, locked into the matriarchal Lineages that had owned the land since the times almost before history; men were itinerant, sent to other Farms for the purpose of trade and marriage.
But as technology had advanced and the Farms had become increasingly self-sufficient, the primary function of the markets had dwindled. One by one they had fallen into disuse. But the role of the markets as centers of innovation had been recognized—and, perhaps, their purpose in providing an alternate destiny for rootless men and boys. So some of the markets had been preserved.
At last only one Market remained: the grandest and most famous, perched here on the eroded peak of its equatorial mountain, supported now by tithes from Farms around the world. Here men, and a few women, dreamed their dreams of how differently things might be—and enough of those innovative dreams bore fruit that it was worth preserving.
It had been this way for two hundred thousand years.
The Worker carried her away from the Market's crowded center toward its fringe. The crowds thinned out, and Manekato felt a calming relief to be alone. Alongside an impossibly tall building the Worker paused and hunched down, letting her slip to the ground.
A door dilated in the side of the building. She glanced into the interior; it was filled with darkness.
Reluctant to enter immediately, she loped further along the gleaming, dust-free road. Not far beyond the building the ground fell away. She was approaching the rim of the summit plateau, worn smooth by the feet and hands of visitors. She leaned forward curiously. The mountain's shallow flanks fell away into thicker, murky air; far below she glimpsed green growing things.
And she saw the Air Wall.
It was like a bank of windblown cloud, moving swiftly, gray and boiling. But this cloud bank hung vertically from the sky, and the clouds streamed horizontally past her. Now that it was not masked by the buildings she could see how the great Wall curved around the mountaintop, enclosing it neatly. It stretched down like a curtain to the ground below, where dust storms perpetually beat against the struggling vegetation, and it stretched up toward the sky.
It was not easy for her to look up, for her back tilted forward, and her neck was thick, heavily muscled, adapted to fight the Wind. Besides, at home there was generally nothing to see but a lid of streaked, scudding cloud. But now she tipped back awkwardly, raising her chinless jaw.
It was like peering up into a tunnel, lined by scraps of hurrying cloud. And at the very end of the tunnel there was a patch of clear blue.
She had never before seen the sky beyond the clouds.
She shuddered. She hurried inside the building.
And there she met her brother.
## _R eid Malenfant_
While he waited for an opportunity to progress in his mission, Malenfant ate and drank as much as he could, and after the first day put his body through some gentle exercise. He stretched and pushed up and pounded around the red dust of the neat little stockade in his undershirt and shorts, while Ham servants watched with a kind of absent curiosity, and Runners hooted and shook their shackling ropes. The low gravity made him feel stronger, but conversely the reduced oxygen content of the low-pressure air weakened him. If he overexerted himself he would soon run out of air; his chest would ache, and, in the worst cases, black spots would gather around his vision.
But he would adapt. And for now, it did no harm to test his limits.
McCann took him for tourist-guide jaunts around the compound, and even beyond. He seemed childishly eager to show off what he and his companions had built here.
McCann said the English had tried to mine mudstone—a kind of natural brick—so as to build better houses. "We have the raw muscle, among the Runners and the Hams," McCann said. "That's fine for hauling, lifting, and dragging. But they can't be set to fine work, Malenfant; not without a man's constant supervision. You certainly can't send off a party even of the Hams to a mudstone seam and expect them to return with anything but a jumble of gouged-out, misshapen rocks—nothing like _bricks_ , you see—that's if they bring back anything at all."
There were a lot of pleasurable knickknacks to inspect, constructed over long hours by the ingenious hands of these bored Englishmen. Malenfant, a gadget fan, pored over locks, clocks, and slide rules, all made of wood.
McCann had even maintained a crude calendar system—though it was little more than marks on wood. "Like a rune staff," McCann said, grimacing. "How far we have fallen. But we haven't quite mastered the knack of papermaking, you see; needs must. And, besides, this wandering world has a damnably irregular sky. Even the stars swim about sometimes, you know. But we try to impose order. We do try."
Everything was made of wood, or stone, or bone, or material manufactured from vegetable products. You could make rope, for instance, from birch bark, pine roots, or willow. Ham women baked pine bread made from phloem, the soft white flesh just inside the tree's bark. You could drink the sap of birch trees, if you had to. And there were medicinal products: spruce resin to ease gut ache. And so on.
McCann said, "This benighted world is bereft of metals, you see—of sizable ore lodes, anyhow, so far as we could find. Of course the very dust is iron oxide—hematite, I think—but we have notably failed to establish a workable extraction regime... It was an early disappointment, and all the more severe for that. And we were reluctant to mine the only source of refined metals here—I mean our ship, of course. As long as we clung to hope that we might escape this jungle world, we were reluctant to turn our only vessel into pots and pans. All seems a little foolish now, doesn't it? And so ours is an economy of stone and wood. We have become like our woad-wearing forebears. Amusing, isn't it?"
They came to a hut where a Ham woman, somewhat bent, was ladling water from a wooden bucket at her feet. Malenfant, glimpsing machinery, poked his head inside the hut, and allowed his eyes to adjust to the shade.
A big wooden container sat on a stand above a smoldering fire. There was some kind of mash inside the container: The woman showed him, though she had to remove a lid sealed with some kind of wax to do it. Two narrow bamboo pipes led down from the container. Condenser pipes, Malenfant thought. The pipes finished in V-notches that tipped their contents neatly into gourds...
"It's a still," Malenfant breathed. "Holy shit. Hillbilly stuff. Just the way Jack Daniels started. God, I love this stuff."
McCann preened, inordinately proud; briefly Malenfant was taken back to his prelaunch inspections at Vandenberg and elsewhere.
Immediately outside the stockade the forest seemed sparse. The leaves were a pale green, lighter than usual, and lianas tangled everywhere, irregular. Though there were sudden patches of shade, much of the ground was open to the sun; there was no solid canopy here.
This area had been cleared, Malenfant realized—twenty, thirty years ago?—and then abandoned. And now, oblivious to the failed ambitions of the stranded English, the forest was claiming back the land. He gazed at the ground, and thought he discerned the straight line edges of forgotten fields, like Roman ruins.
But even out here there were signs of rudimentary industry. A charcoal pile had been constructed: just a heap of logs with earth piled over the top, steadily burning. And there was a tar pit, a hole in the ground filled with pine logs, buried under a layer of earth. The logs burned steadily, and crude wooden guttering brought out the tar.
They came to a stand of small oil-palm trees that clung to the banks of a stream. They were slim and upright with scruffy green fronds, holding onto the slope with prop-roots, like down-turned fingers curling out from the base of their pale gray trunks. Under the direction of one or two of the Hams, Runner workers gathered oil from the flesh of the nut and the kernel of the seeds, and sap from shallow cuts near the trees' bases.
"You cook with the oil, or you make soap with it," McCann said. "And if you were to hang a bucket under that cut in the trunk you'd be rewarded by ready-made palm wine, Malenfant. Nature is bountiful sometimes, even here. Though it takes human ingenuity to exploit it to the full, of course."
McCann even showed Malenfant the poignant ruin of a windmill. Crudely constructed, it was a box of wood already overgrown by vegetation and with daylight showing through cracks in its panels. Later McCann showed him elaborate drawings, crammed into the blank pages of yellowing log books. There had been ambitious schemes for different designs of mills—"magpie mills" with a tail to turn into the wind, and even a water mill—none of them realized. "We never had the labor, you see. Your Ham or your Runner is strong as an ox. But you can't teach him to build, or to maintain, anything more complex than a hand axe or a spear. He will go where you tell him, do what you tell him, but no more; he has no initiative or advanced skill, not a scrap. One had to oversee everything, every hand turned to the work. After a time—well, and with no hope for the future—one became rather disheartened."
McCann was obviously desperate for company, and it was hard to blame him. He challenged Malenfant to a game of chess—which Malenfant refused, never having grasped the game. Despite this McCann set out crudely carved wooden pieces, and moved them around the board in fast, well-practiced openings. "I played a lot with old Crawford before he lost his wits. I do miss the game. I even tried to teach the bar-bars to play!—but though they appear capable of remembering the moves of the pieces, not even the brightest of them, even Julia, could grasp its essence, the _purpose_. Still, I would have Julia or another sit where you are sitting, Malenfant, and serve as a sort of token companion as I played out solitary games..."
As he pushed the pieces around the board McCann bombarded Malenfant with anecdotes and memories, of his time here on the Red Moon and on his own lost version of Earth.
But the talk was unsatisfactory. They were exiles from different versions of parallel Earths. They could compare notes on geography and the broad sweep of history, but they had no _detail_ in common. None of the historical figures in their worlds seemed to map across to each other. Although McCann seemed to follow a variant of Christianity—something like Calvinism, so far as Malenfant could determine—his "Christ" was not Jesus, but a man called John; "Christian" translated, roughly, to "Johannen."
No doubt all this was fascinating as a study of historical inevitability. But it made for lousy small talk. McCann strove to mask his profound disappointment that Malenfant was not from the home where he had left a wife and child, a family from whom he had not heard since their world had disappeared from the sky.
Conversely Malenfant told McCann what he could of Emma, and asked if anyone like her had shown up, here on the Red Moon. But McCann seemed to know little of what went on beyond the limits of the stockade, and the scrap of Red Moon he and his colleagues controlled. Malenfant, frustrated, realized afresh he was going to have to find Emma alone.
McCann said now, "Solitary, seeking diversion, I discovered the intricate delights of the knight's tour." He swept the board empty of pieces, save for a solitary knight, which he made hop in its disturbingly asymmetrical fashion from square to square. "The knight must move from square to square over an empty board, touching all the cells, but each only once. An old schoolboy puzzle... I quickly discovered that a three-by-four board is the smallest on which such a tour can be made. I have discovered many tours on the standard chessboard, many of which have fascinating properties. A closed tour, for example, starts and ends at the same cell." The knight moved around the board with bewildering rapidity. "I do not know how many tours are possible. I suspect the number may be infinite." He became aware of Malenfant's uncomfortable silence.
Malenfant tried to soften his look—how sane would _you_ be after so many decades alone on Neandertal Planet, Malenfant?
Embarrassed, McCann swept the pieces into a wooden box. "Rather like our situation here, don't you think?" he said, forcing a smile. "We move from world to world with knight's hops, forward a bit and sideways. We must hope our tours are closed, too, eh?"
After the first night McCann gave the two of them separate huts. In this dwindling colony there was plenty of room.
Malenfant found it impossible to sleep. Lying in his battered sod hut, he gazed through his window as the night progressed.
He heard the calls of the predators as the last light faded. Then there was an utter stillness, as if the world was holding its breath—and then a breath of wind and a coolness that marked the approaching dawn.
Malenfant wasn't used to living so close to nature. He felt as if he was trapped within some vast machine.
His head rattled with one abortive scheme after another. He was a man who was used to taking control of a situation, of bullying his way through, of pushing until something gave. This wasn't his world, and he had arrived here woefully ill-equipped; he still couldn't see any way forward more promising than just pushing into the forest on foot, at random. He had to wait, to figure out the situation, to find an option with a reasonable chance of success. But still his enforced passivity was burning him up.
The door opened.
The Neandertal girl came into his hut. She was carrying a bowl of water that steamed softly, a fresh towel, a jug that might hold nettle tea.
He said softly, "Julia."
She stood still in the gray dawn light, the glow from the window picking out the powerful contours of her face. "Here, Baas."
"Do you know what's going on here?"
She waited.
He waved a hand. "All of this. The Red Moon. Different worlds."
"Ask Ol' Ones," she said softly.
"Who?"
"Th' Ol' Ones. As' them wha' for."
"The Old Ones? Where do they live?"
She shrugged, her shoulders moving volcanically. "In th' ol'est place."
He frowned. "What about you, Julia?"
"Baas?"
"What do you want?"
"Home," she said immediately.
"Home? Where is home?"
She pointed into the sky. "Gray Earth."
"Does Mr. McCann know you want to go home?"
She shrugged again. "Born here."
"What?"
She pointed to herself. "Born here. Mother. Moth' born here."
"Then this is your home, with Mr. McCann."
She shook her head, a very human gesture. She pointed again to the forest, and the sky.
Then she said, "You, Baas? What you wan'?"
He hesitated. "I came looking for my wife."
Her face remained expressionless. But she said, "Fam'ly."
"Yes. I guess so. Emma is my family. I came here looking for her."
"Lon' way."
"Yes. Yes, it was a long way. And I ain't there yet."
She walked toward him, rummaging in the pouch of her skirt.
"Thomas," she said.
"I know him. He found me."
"Took off of Runner in fores'." She held out something in the dark, something small and jewel-like that glittered in her palm.
He took it, held it up to the light of the window. It was a hand-lens, badly scuffed, snapped off at its mount. It was marked with the monogram of the South African air force.
_"Emma,"_ he breathed. He was electrified. So there were indeed things McCann didn't know, even about the Hams of his own household. "Julia, where—"
But she had gone.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
"I have three wives and six children. That is how it is done in my new home..." Babo was talking fast, nervously, and his knuckles rattled as he walked with her through the tall dark halls of the building. His body hair was plaited and colored in a fashion that repelled Mane's simple Poka tastes. "The Farm is fine, Mane, and bigger than that of the Poka Lineage, but its design is based on the triangle: plane-covering, of course, but cramped and cluttered compared to Poka's clean-lined hexagons."
"You always were an aesthete," she said dryly.
This whole building, she realized slowly, was a store of records piled up high from the lowest room to the highest. Physically, some of the records were stored in twinkling cubes that held bits of the quantum foam, minuscule wormholes frozen into patterns of meaning; and some were scraped onto parchment and animal skin.
"Some of these pieces are very ancient indeed," Babo said. "Dating back half a million years or more. And the Air Wall, you know, is a controlled storm. It is like a hurricane, but trapped in one place by subtle forces. It has raged here, impotent, for fifty thousand years—so that for all that time the Market has been in the eye of the storm—an eye that reveals the sky beyond the clouds, a sky opened for the study of the Astrologers..."
She stopped and glared at him. "Oh, Babo, I don't want to know about Air Walls or records! I never thought I would see you again—I didn't know you had become an Astrologer."
He sighed, ruminatively picking his nose. "I am no Astrologer. But the Astrologers sent for me. When I was younger I did spend some time here, working informally, before I reached the home of my wives. Many boys do, Mane. You matriarchs run the world, but there is much you do not know, even about those who sire your children!"
" _Why are you here_ , Babo?"
He wrapped his big hands over his head. "Because the Astrologers thought it would be _kinder_ that way. Kinder if your brother told you the news, rather than a stranger..."
"What news?"
He grabbed her hand, pulling her. "Come see the sky with me. Then I'll tell you everything."
Reluctantly, she followed.
The building was tall, and they had a long way to ascend. At first they used simple short-range isomorphic Mappers, but soon they came to more primitive parts of the building, and they had to climb, using rungs stapled to walls of crude bricks.
Babo led the way. "A remarkable thing," he called down to her. "We find climbing easy; our arms are strong, our feet well adapted to grasping. But it appears that our climbing ancestors evolved into creatures that, for a time, walked upright, on their hind feet. You can see certain features of the position of the pelvis—well. But we have given that up, too; now, once more, we walk on all fours, using our knuckles, clinging to the ground."
"If you tried to walk upright you would be knocked over by the Wind."
"Of course, of course—but then _why_ is it we carry traces of a bipedal ancestry? We are creatures of anomaly, Mane. We are not closely related to any of the animals on this Earth of ours—not one, not above a certain basic biochemical equivalence of course, without which we could not eat our food and would quickly starve to death. We can trace evolutionary relationships among all the world's creatures, one related to the other in a hierarchy of families and phyla— _except us_. We seem to be unique, as if we fell out of the sky. We have no evolutionary forebears, no bones in the ground that might mark the passing of those who came before us.
"Is it possible _we evolved somewhere else_?—a place where the Wind did not blow so strongly, where it was possible to walk upright?"
"What sort of place? And how could we have got here from there?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows. But the pattern of the bones, the biochemistry, is unmistakeable."
"Idle speculation, Babo, won't germinate a single seed."
"A Farmer's practical reply," he said sadly. "But we are surrounded by mystery, Manekato. The Astrologers hope that your mission will settle some of these fundamental quandaries. Oh, please keep climbing, dear Mane! We are soon there, and I will tell you everything."
With bad grace, clinging to the rungs with feet and hands, she continued her ascent.
They reached a platform, open to the sky. But there was no breeze, and the air felt as warm as it had inside the tower.
Babo walked around nervously, peering into the sky. "It is darkening already. Our days are short, because the planet spins quickly—did you ever reflect on that, Mane? It didn't have to be so. Earth could spin more slowly, and we would have leisurely days, and—oh, look!" He pointed with a long stabbing finger. "Look, a star!"
She peered up awkwardly. There was a single bright star, close to the zenith, set against the deepening blue of the sky.
"How strange," Babo breathed, "that before the first tentative Mappings no human eye saw a star."
Manekato grunted. "What of it? Stars are trivial. You don't need to _see_ them."
That was true, of course. Every child was expected to figure out the stars.
When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of artifacts: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other objects. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.
Of course the results of such trials varied—in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind. But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.
Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.
"Ah, but the detail is everything," Babo said, "and that you can never predict, of course. That and the _beauty_. That was quite unexpected, to me. Oh, and one other thing. The _emptiness_ of the universe..."
Manekato's childhood cohort, like most others, had concluded—groping with an intuition of uniformity—that if _this_ world was inhabited, and the universe was _large_ —well, then, there must be many inhabited planets. She recalled what a great and unwelcome surprise it had been to learn that that was not true: that, as far as could be discerned, the universe was empty of the organization that would have marked the work of intelligence.
"It is a deep, ancient mystery," Babo said. "Why do we see no Farms in the sky? Of course we are a sedentary species, content to cultivate our Farms. But not every species need have the same imperatives as us. Imagine an _acquisitive_ species, that covets the territory of others."
She thought it through quickly. "That is outlandish and unlikely. Such a species would surely destroy itself in fratricidal battles, as the illogic of its nature worked itself out."
"Perhaps. But wouldn't we see the flaring of the wars, the mighty ruins they left behind? We should _see_ them, Mane."
She snapped, "Babo, get to the point."
He sighed and came to squat before her. Gently he groomed her, picking imaginary insects from her coat, as he had when they were children. "Mane, dear Mane, the Astrologers have read the stars..."
The word "astrology," in Manekato's ancient, rich language, derived from older roots meaning "the word of the stars." Here astrology had absorbed astronomy and physics and other disciplines; here astrology was no superstition, no foolishness, but one of the fundamental sciences. For if the universe was empty of mind save for humans, then the courses of the stars could have no meaning—save for their role in the affairs of humanity.
And now, Babo said, the Astrologers, peering into the sky and poring over records dozens of millennia deep, had discerned a looming threat.
## _J oshua_
Mary was in estrus. The scent of her seemed to fill the air of the hut, and the head of every man.
Joshua longed for the time of her blood to pass, and she and the other women could recede to the gray periphery of his awareness. For the deep ache aroused by Mary distracted him from the great conundrum which plagued him.
Over and over he thought of the great blue wings he had seen falling from the sky, bearing that fat black and white seed to its unknown fate in the forest at the top of the cliff. He had never seen such a thing before. _What was it?_
Joshua's was a world that did not countenance change. And yet, a stubborn awareness told him, there _was_ change. Once the people had lived on the Gray Earth. Now they lived here. So the past contained a change. And now the black and white seed had fallen from the sky, and whatever grew from it surely marked change to come in the future as well.
Change in the past, change in the future.
Joshua, helplessly conservative himself, had an instinctive grasp of parsimony: his world contained two extraordinary events—Gray Earth and sky seed—and surely they must be linked. But how? The elements of the conundrum revolved in his head.
Joshua had solved puzzles before.
Once, as a boy, he had found a place where Abel, his older brother, had knapped out a burin. It was just a patch of dune where stone flakes were scattered, in a rough triangle that showed where Abel had sat. Joshua had picked over the debris, curious. Later, in the hut, he had found the discarded burin itself. It was a fine piece of work, slender and sharp, and yet fitting easily into Joshua's small hand. And he remembered the spall outside.
He sat where his brother had sat—one leg outstretched, the other tucked underneath. He reached for bits of the spall, and tried to fit them back onto the finished tool. One after another he found flakes that nestled closely into the hollows and valleys of the tool, and then more flakes which clustered around them.
Soon there were more flakes than he could hold in his hands, so he put down his assemblage carefully, and climbed a little way up the cliff behind the hut. He found a young tree sprouting from a hollow, and bled it of sap. With the sticky stuff cradled in his hands he ran back to his workplace, and began to fix the flakes to the tool with dabs of the sap. The sap clung to his fingers, and soon the whole thing was a sticky mess. But he persisted, ignoring the sun that climbed steadily into the sky.
At last he had used up almost all the large flakes he could find on the ground, and there was nothing left there but a little dust. And he had almost reassembled the cobble from which the burin had been carved.
Shouting with excitement he ran into the hut, cradling his reconstruction. But he had received a baffled response. Abel had picked at the sticky assemblage of flakes, saying, "What, what?"
A cobble was a cobble, until it was turned into a tool, and then the cobble no longer existed. Just as Jacob had been a man until he died, and then there was only a mass of meat and bones, soon to be devoured by the worms. To turn a tool back into a cobble was almost as strange to the people as if Joshua had tried to turn Jacob's bones back into the man himself.
Eventually Abel crushed the little stone jigsaw. The gummy flakes stuck to his hand, and he brushed them off on the dusty ground, growling irritably.
But in some corner of his spacious cranium Joshua had never forgotten how he had solved the puzzle of the shattered cobble. Now, as he pondered the puzzle of the multiple earths and the falling seed, Joshua found that long-ago jigsaw cobble pricking his memory.
And when a second seed fell from the sky—another fat black and white bundle suspended under a blue canopy, landing where the first had lodged at the top of the cliffs—he knew that he could not rest until he had seen for himself what mighty tree might sprout from those strange seeds.
Joshua approached Abel and Saul and other men to accompany him on his jaunt up the cliff face. But there was no purpose to his mission—no game to be hunted, no useful rock, no foraging save for the huge enigmatic seeds which had slid silently over the surface of everybody else's mind.
And besides, everybody knew there was danger at the top of the cliff. The camp of the Zealots was there, in the center of a great clearing hacked crudely out of the forest. The Zealots were Skinny-folk. They were easily bested if you could ever get one engaged in close quarters. But the Zealots were cunning, and their heads were full of madness: They could baffle the most powerful of the Hams. They were best avoided.
Joshua tried to go alone. He set foot on the rough goat trail that led by gully and switchback turn up to that cliff-crest forest.
The trail was easy enough, but he soon turned back. The isolation worked on him, soon making him feel as if he didn't exist at all. The People of the Gray Earth needed nothing in life so much as each other.
But word of his project permeated the gossip-ridden hut. A few days later, to his surprise, he was approached by the young girl Mary, who asked him about the cliff, and the forest, and the strange sky seed.
And a day after that, to his greater surprise, she accompanied him on the trail.
She gossiped all the way to the top of the cliff. "... Ruth say Abel skinny as an En'lish. An' Ruth tell tha' to Miriam. An' Miriam tell Caleb, an' Caleb tell Abel. An' Abel throw rocks and skins all over th' hut. So Abel couple Miriam, and he tell Caleb about tha', and he tell Ruth. And Ruth say..."
Unlike himself she was no loner. She was immersed in her little society. By comparison it was as if he couldn't even see or hear the vibrant, engaged people she described.
All of which made it still stranger that she should choose to accompany him on this purposeless jaunt. But Mary was at a key moment in her life, and a certain wanderlust was in her blood right now. Soon she would have to leave the security of the hearths her mother built, and share her life with the men, and with the children who would follow. To cross from one side of a skin hut to the other was an immense journey for someone like Mary. And as nervous courage empowered her for that great adventure, she seemed ready, for the time being, to take on much more outlandish quests.
She was not in estrus, to Joshua's great relief. As he made his careful way up the cliff face he was pleased not to have the distraction of his own singing blood.
They reached the top of the cliff. Here they found a shrub laden with bright yellow fruit, and they sat side by side at the cliff's edge, plucking the fruit, their broad feet dangling in the air. They gazed out in silence toward the east, and the sea.
The sun was still rising, and its light glimmered from the sea's steel-gray, wrinkled hide. The distinct curve of the world was reflected in layers of scattered purple clouds which hovered over the sea. Joshua could see the grassy plain where he lived, sweeping towards the ocean, terminating in dune fields and pale sand. Near the squat brown shape of the hut itself, people moved to and fro, tiny and clear. He followed streams, shining lines of silver that led towards the sea.
A small group of antelopes picked their way through the morning grass. One of them looked up, as if staring directly at him.
Joshua felt himself dissolve, out from the center of his head, to the periphery of the world. There was no barrier around him, no layer of interpretation or analogy or nostalgia; for now he _was_ the plain and the sea and the clouds, and he was the slim doe that looked up at the cliff, just as he was the stocky, quiet man who gazed down from it. For a time he was immersed in the world's beauty in a way no human could have shared.
Then, by unspoken consent, Joshua and Mary folded their legs under them and stood. Side by side, they walked into the forest that crowded close to the cliff.
The green dark was a strong contrast to the bright sea vista. It was not a comfortable place to be.
Washed by the salty air off the sea, the forest was chill, thick with a clammy moisture that settled into Joshua's bones. And as they penetrated deeper the ground was covered in a tangled mass of roots, branches, leaves, and moss, so that in some places Joshua couldn't see the actual surface at all. He slipped, stumbled, and crashed over the undergrowth, making a huge amount of noise.
Mary started to shiver and complain, growing increasingly fearful. But Joshua pulled his skin wraps tighter around him and shoved his way deeper into the forest.
A shadow slid through the wood, just a little way ahead, utterly silent.
Joshua and Mary both froze. Joshua bunched his fists. Was it a Zealot?
The shadow slowed to a halt, and Joshua made out a squat, stocky body, with short legs and immensely long arms, the whole covered by a dark brown layer of hair. A hand reached out and grabbed a bamboo tree. The tree was pulled down until it cracked, and drawn toward a gaping mouth.
It was a Nutcracker-man. Joshua relaxed.
Mary stumbled closer to Joshua, making a cracking noise.
The Nutcracker-man turned his great head with its sculpted skull ridge and giant cheekbones. Perhaps he saw them; if he did he showed no concern. He pulled his bamboo toward his mouth and bit sideways at the trunk, seeking the pithy interior. As he chewed, the heavy muscles that worked his jaw expanded and contracted, making his entire head move.
Though slow and foolish and easily trapped, the Nutcrackers' muscles made them formidable opponents. But the Nutcrackers rarely ventured from their forests, and when they did they showed no instinct for aggression against the Hams. Likewise the Hams did not eat people. The two kinds of people had little in common and nothing to fight about, and simply avoided each other.
After a short time the Nutcracker-man finished his bamboo. He slid effortlessly away into the green, placing his hands and feet slowly and methodically, but he moved rapidly and almost noiselessly, soon outstripping any effort Joshua might have made to catch him.
Out of curiosity Joshua and Mary tried the bamboo. It took both of them to crack a trunk as thick as the one the Nutcracker had pulled over with one hand, and when he tried to bite into it Joshua's teeth slid off the trunk's glossy casing.
They moved deeper into the forest. The sun, showing in glittering fragments through the dense canopy, was now high. But Joshua caught occasional glimpses of the sea, and he kept it to his right, so that he knew he was working roughly the way the floating black and white seed had fallen. Mary kept close behind him. Her biceps showed, hard and massive, beneath the tight skins wrapped around her arms.
And now there was another shadow passing through the forest ahead. But this time there was much more noise. Maybe it was a bear, careless of who or what heard it. They both crouched down in a dense patch of tangled branches, and peered out fearfully.
The shadow was small, even slender.
It was just a man, and a feeble-looking man at that, with nothing like the bulk of a Ham, still less a Nutcracker. He was a Skinny: surely a Zealot. He wore skins wrapped closely around his limbs and torso, and he carried a length of bamboo tube. His face was covered by an ugly mass of black beard, and he was muttering to himself as he blundered noisily through the forest.
With some care he selected a broad-trunked tree. He sat down beneath it. He reached into his trousers to scratch his testicles, and emitted a long, luxurious fart. Then he raised the bamboo to his lips. To Joshua's astonishment, a foamy liquid gushed from the bamboo into the man's mouth. _"Up your arse, Praisegod Michael."_ He raised the flask, and drank again. Soon he began to wail. _"There is a lady, sweet and kind..."_
Mary clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. The Zealot was squealing like a sickly child.
Joshua was fascinated by the bamboo flask, by the way the murky liquid poured out into the man's mouth and down his bearded chin.
The Zealot finished off the contents of his flask. He settled farther back against his tree trunk, tucking his arms into his sleeves. He had a broad-rimmed hat on his head, and as he reclined it tipped down over his eyes, hiding his face. His mouth popped open, and soon rattling snores issued from it.
Joshua and Mary crept forward until they stood over the sleeping Zealot. Joshua bent to pick up the bamboo. He tipped it upside down. A little foamy fluid dripped onto his palm. He licked it curiously. The taste was sour, but seemed to fill his head with sharpness.
He inspected the bamboo more closely. Its end had been stopped by a plug of wood, and a loop of leather attached another plug that, with some experimentation, Joshua managed to fit into the open end of the tube, sealing it. Joshua's people carried their water in their hands, or sometimes plaited leaves or hollowed-out fruit. Though they would have been capable of it, it had never occurred to them to make anything like the Zealot's bamboo flask.
Mary, meanwhile, was crouching over the Zealot. She was studying his clothing. Joshua saw that it had been cut from finely-treated skin. The skin had been heavily modified, with whorls and zigzag lines and crosses scratched into it and colored with some white mineral. The edges of the various pieces of skin had been punctured. Then a length of vegetable twine had been pushed through the puncture holes, to hold the bits of skin together. Mary picked at the seams and hems with her blunt fingers; she had never seen anything like it.
Joshua found the patterns on the skins deeply disturbing. He had seen their like before, on other Zealot artifacts. To Joshua the patterns made by the markings were at the limit of his awareness, neither there nor not there, flickering like ghosts between the rooms of his mind.
Now Mary's searching fingers found something dangling around the man's neck on a piece of thread. It was a bit of bone, that was all, but it had been shaped, more finely than Abel's best tools.
Joshua studied the bone. Suddenly a man surged out of the carving: his face contorted, his hands outstretched, and his chest ripped open to reveal his heart.
Joshua screamed. He grabbed the bit of bone and yanked it so the thread around the Skinny's neck broke, and he hurled it away into the forest.
The Skinny woke with a gulping snore. He sat up abruptly, and his hat fell off his head. Seeing the two hulking Hams, he raised his hands to the sky and began to yell. _"Oh, Heaven help me! By God's wounds, help me!"_
Mary looked up into the sky, trying to see who he was speaking to. But of course there was nobody there. The Skinny-folk were immersed in madness: they would talk to the sky, the trees, the patterns on their clothes or ornaments, as if those things were people, but they were not.
So Mary sat on the Zealot's chest, crushing him to the ground; he gasped under her weight. "Stop talkin' sky! Stop!"
The bearded Zealot howled.
She slapped him across the face. The Zealot's head was jerked sideways, and he instantly became limp.
Mary backed away. "Dead?"
Joshua, reluctantly, bent closer. The Zealot had fouled himself, perhaps when Mary had leapt on him; a thin slime of filthy piss trickled from his trouser legs. But his chest rose and fell steadily. "No' dead."
Mary, her eyes wide under her lowering brow ridges, said, "Kill?"
Joshua grimaced. "Bad meat. Leave for th' bears."
"Yes," Mary said doubtfully. "Leave for th' bears."
They wiped their hands clean of the Zealot's filth on handfuls of leaves. Then they turned and pushed on, heading steadily north.
After a time, Joshua stepped cautiously into a clearing.
The trees here were battered and twisted. When he looked to the west, he saw how they had been smashed down and broken back to make a great gully through the forest.
And to the east, at the tip of this gully, was the seed from the sky.
He gazed at the blocky shape at the end of the huge trench, excitement warring with apprehension. It was a mound of black and white, half-concealed by smashed foliage. It was surrounded by bits of blue skin—or not skin; a bit of it fluttered against his leg, a membrane finer than any skin he had ever seen.
It was so strange, he could barely even make it out.
Mary, nervous, had stayed back in the fringe of the forest. " 'Ware," she said. "Zealots."
Joshua knew it was true. He could smell the smoke of their hearths, their burned meat. They were now very close to the Zealots' camp.
But the lure of the sky seed was irresistible. He began to work his way around the edge of the clearing, stepping over fallen tree trunks, shoving aside smashed branches, ready to duck back into the forest's green shadows.
The sky seed was big, bigger than any animal, perhaps as big as the hut where the people lived. He saw that the thing had fallen here after crashing through the trees, almost reaching the point where the forest gave out at the edge of the cliff itself.
But that was all the sense he could make of it.
He had no words to describe it, no experience against which to map it. Even the touch of it was unfamiliar: glossy black or white, the patches separated by clear straight lines, the soft surface neither hot nor cold, neither skin nor stone nor wood. It was difficult for him even to _see_ the thing. He would study some part of it—like the small neat puncture-holes on one part of its hide, surrounded by scorch-marks—but then his gaze would slide away from the strangeness, seeking some point of familiarity and finding none.
"Back," Mary hissed to Joshua.
He made out the telltale signs that Skinny-folk had been here: the narrow footmarks in the raw dirt, the remains of the burnt rolls of leaves they liked to carry in their mouths. The Zealots had indeed been here, too, inspecting the sky seed, just as he was.
But, despite the imminence of danger, he could not abandon this sky seed. It repelled him—yet it attracted him, like the carving on a Skinny-folk spear. Drawn close, driven away, he hovered.
He came to a sudden decision.
He bent and applied his shoulder to the blunt rear of the sky seed. It was lighter than it looked, and it ground forward through the dirt. But soon he was coming up against the resistance of the last battered trees at the cliff's edge.
"Joshua!" Mary hissed.
"Help push." And he applied himself again.
She tried to make him give up his self-appointed task, wheedling and plucking at his skins. But when she saw he wouldn't come away, she joined him at the back of the sky seed. She was not yet fully grown, but her strength was already immense, enough to drive the sky seed forward, crunching through the spindly cliff-edge trees.
With a screeching scrape, the sky seed pitched over the raw rock lip of the cliff and lurched out of sight. After a last tortured groan, silence fell.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
"Soon, something will appear in the sky," Babo said. "A satellite, like those of the outer planets. _Earth will have a Moon_ , for the first time in its history."
Manekato scratched her head. "How? By some gravitational deflection?"
"No. Like a Mapping, I think. But not a Mapping. The truth is nobody knows, Mane. But the Astrologers can see it is approaching, in the shivers of the starlight."
"It must be artificial, this moving of a Moon. A contrivance."
"Yes, of course. It is a deliberate act. But we do not know the agents or their motive."
Manekato thought through the implications. "There will be tides," she said. "Earthquakes. Great waves."
"Yes. And _that_ is the danger posed to our Farm, and some others."
Suddenly she was filled with hope. "Is that why I am here? Is it possible to avert this Moon—to save the Farm?"
"No," he said, sadly but firmly.
She pulled away from him. "You talked of my mission. What mission, if the Farm is doomed?"
"You must travel to the Moon," said Babo.
"Impossible," she snapped. "No Mapping has ever been attempted over such a distance."
"Nevertheless you must make it possible," Babo said. "You must use the resources of the Farm to achieve it."
"And if I reach the Moon?"
"Then you must find those responsible for sending this rogue here. You must make them remove it, and have them assure you it will not return." He forced a smile. "We are a species good at negotiation, Mane. The Lineages could not have survived otherwise. You are all but a matriarch, the matriarch of Poka Lineage. You will find a way. Go to the Moon, Mane—take this chance. I will be with you, if you wish. If you succeed, Poka will be granted new land. We have pledges..."
"And if I fail—or refuse?"
He stiffened. "Then our Lineage will die with us. Of course."
"Of course—"
There was a fizz of purple light, a stink of ozone. A Worker fell from the sky and landed in the center of the room. Semisentient, it raised a sketchy face and peered at them. Recognizing Manekato, it gave her the doleful news it had brought, its voice flat and unengaged.
Orphaned, brother and sister clung to each other as they wept.
## _R eid Malenfant_
After days of pressure from Malenfant, McCann agreed to lead them in an orderly expedition back to the crash site of the lander. Malenfant felt a vast relief, as if he was being let out of jail: at last, some progress.
First, McCann inspected them critically. "I'll have Julia fit you both with buckskin. One must go cannily. You'll stand out a mile in those sky-blue nursery rompers."
The buckskin gear turned out to be old and musty—presumably manufactured, with much labor, for deceased inhabitants of this place. And McCann loaned Malenfant and Nemoto calf-length leather boots, to keep out the snakes and the bugs. The boots were ill-fitting, and much worn. The gear was heavy, stiff and hot to wear, and its rough interior scratched Malenfant's skin. But it was substantial, feeling like a suit of armor, and was obscurely comforting.
McCann wore a suit of sewn skin and a Davy Crockett hat; he had a crossbow on his back, and a belt of flechettes over his shoulder. He looked capable, tough, and well-adapted.
Malenfant wrapped up his coverall and other bits of gear in a skin pack that he wore on his back. He insisted Nemoto do the same; he wanted to be sure they didn't have to return here if they got the chance to get away.
A party of six Hams was gathered in the courtyard. They were all squat, burly men. The Hams wore their peculiar wrappings of skin, tied in place by bits of thong or vegetable rope, not shaped or sewn. They carried weapons, spears, and clubs on loops of rope or tucked into their belts, and their broad elliptical heads were shaded by hats of woven grass.
One of them was Thomas, the man who had rescued Malenfant and Nemoto from the wild Runners in the first place.
Malenfant couldn't figure out why the Hams had gotten the lens to him (or come to that, how they knew he would be interested). Maybe they just like the story, Malenfant said, the guy who flies to another world in search of his wife. Just like the American taxpayer. Or maybe there are aspects of these quasi-people none of us will ever understand.
When Malenfant approached to thank him, Thomas shook his hand, an oddly delicate gesture he must have learned from the stranded English, taking care not to crush Malenfant's bones. But, when Malenfant questioned him away from the others, he would say nothing of where he had found Emma's lens.
Two Hams opened the gates of the stockade, and the little party formed up. McCann was to ride in a kind of litter—"What a Portugoose would call a _machila_ , I'm told." The litter, just a platform of wood, was to be borne by two Hams, and McCann had offered the same to Malenfant and Nemoto.
Malenfant had refused.
Nemoto had been skeptical. "You are sentimental, Malenfant. After a few hours you may long for a ride. And besides, the Hams are well capable of bearing our weight. They are treated well—"
"That's not the point."
"Survival is the point. What else?"
Anyhow, with the sun still climbing—with McCann's litter in the van, Malenfant and Nemoto walking in the center with Hams beside and behind them—the little party set off.
McCann said they would take a roundabout route to the lander. It would take longer, but would avoid the densest forest and so would be less problematic.
They walked through the forest. The air was laden with moisture and without a breath of wind. The sweat was soon dripping from Malenfant's scalp into his eyes, and his buckskin was clinging to his back as if glued there.
The Hams walked barefoot along a trail that was invisible to Malenfant, with their feet splayed at wide angles, making fast, short steps, almost delicate. Malenfant tried to keep up. But the brown sheets of dead leaves on top of wet mud made him slip, or he would walk into thorny lianas, or trip over the surface roots that splayed out from the boles of the largest trees. As the feet and legs of the Ham in front began to blur, he realized he was going to have to imitate the Ham's small movements, but he lost further ground as he tried to master the oddly precise mincing motions.
McCann walked alongside Malenfant, musing. "Hear how quiet it is. One does miss birdsong. Africa is full of birds, of course: parrots and plovers, kingfishers and skimmers. How sad a world without the song of birds, Malenfant."
Here was a canthium tree: a massive straight black trunk, branches spreading high above the palms. "Keep away from it," McCann said. "The flowers stink like corpses—to attract flies, you see, which carry its pollen. The presapients keep away from it. The trunk is covered in biting ants—" He froze, and held Malenfant's arm. "Look there. _An Elf_." He dropped to all fours and crawled forward, hiding behind a tree.
Malenfant followed suit. The two of them finished lying in cold mud, side by side, peering through a brush of greenery.
A man sat on a bough, a few feet off the ground—a dwarvish, naked, hairy man with a face like a chimp's, and no forehead to speak of. He had long legs like a human, long arms like an ape. He pulled twigs toward his face and bit off leaves, with thick, active lips. His face was black, his eyes brown, sheltered by a thick brow of bone. He moved slowly, thoughtfully.
A twig cracked.
The Elf stopped eating. He leaned forward, rocked from side to side to see better. He urinated, a stream of acrid piss that splashed to the floor not feet from Malenfant's face.
Then he turned away and called. _"Oo-hah!"_
Suddenly there were more of them, more Elves, shadowy figures with glinting eyes and empty hands. They had black faces and palms and soles. If they had crouched like chimpanzees it would have been okay, but they didn't; they stood eerily upright, as if their bodies had been distorted in some hideous lab. They were _wrong_ , and Malenfant shivered.
"There are ways to trap them," McCann whispered. "Though their more robust cousins the Nutcrackers provide better meat. You hunt with special spears, twelve feet long. Then you goad the Nutcracker man, until he charges onto your spear point..."
The first Elf man stood up straight on his bough. He opened his mouth wide, revealing pink gums and impressive canines, and let out a series of short, piercing barks. He slapped the tree trunk and rattled a branch.
The others joined in, whooping with rage. Their hair was suddenly erect, which made them look twice the size, and they stamped and shook branches in a frenzy. It was quite a display, Malenfant thought, a mass of noise and movement.
Then the man in the tree turned, bent over and let out an explosion of feces that showered over Malenfant and McCann.
Malenfant brushed gloopy shit off his head. "Jesus. What a situation."
McCann was laughing.
Now McCann's Hams stood up. They yelled and banged their spears together, or against logs and tree trunks.
The Elves turned and ran, melting into the green shadows as fast as they had appeared.
Malenfant was relieved when they broke out of the forest, just as McCann had promised, and he found himself walking through a more open country, a kind of parkland of grass and scattered clumps of trees.
Nemoto trudged sourly beside him, her small face hidden by a broad straw hat.
There were herbs in the grass, and when they were crushed by bare Neandertal feet they sent up a rich aroma. The sun was strong on Malenfant's face, and the blue Earth rode high in the sky. Malenfant felt lifted, exhilarated—even giddy, he thought, anoxic perhaps, and he made sure he kept his breathing deep and even, making the most of the thin air.
McCann noticed Malenfant's mood. With a touch of the stubby whip he called a _sjambok_ , he directed his Ham bearers to carry him closer to Malenfant. "Quite a day, isn't it, Malenfant? You know, I believe that with a knight's move of that mopani tree over _here_ one might take that kopje, with the thicket of wild banana, over _there_."
Malenfant forced a laugh. "Remember, I'm a checkers man."
McCann was clutching a battered Gladstone bag on his lap, from which he extracted water and ointments to dab on his face, neck, and wrists. He looked sideways at Malenfant, as if apologetically. "I fear I may have come across as something less than a man to you, on our first meetings."
"Not at all."
"It's just that one is so desperate for company. But you mustn't think that I am protesting my lot. I draw strength from the teachings of my father—I grew up in a kirk on the Scottish borders—which took a grip on my mind from early days. My father made me a fatalist in creed: Man is but a playing-piece in the hands of the Maker. Chess again, eh? And so it was foreordained that I should be brought to this distant shore. But I admit to a great deal of pleasure in my new home on a day like today. Much of it is familiar. In my time here I've spotted wildebeest, kudu, impala. There are few birds in flight, but you'll find flightless, clucking versions of quail, partridge, pheasant..."
"But it isn't your true home," Malenfant said gently. "Nor mine. It's not even from the right universe. Just as it isn't home for these Hams, is it?"
McCann eyed him sharply. "You've been talking to the fragrant Julia—their legend of the Gray Earth, the place in the sky from which they stumbled. Yes?" He laughed. "Well, it might even be true. Perhaps a party of bar-bars did fall through a shining portal, just as you say your wife did. But it was a blooming long time ago, Malenfant.
"Listen. Once upon a time old Crawford got it into his head that there might be something of value in the ground here—gold, diamonds, even hidden treasure of obscure origin, perhaps laid down by some race of supermen. And he went digging—especially in the hearths and caves of the bar-bars. He had to turf out a few of them to do that, for they will cling to their domiciles. He found no treasure. But what he did find was more bar-bars, or anyhow traces of them, their buried bones mixed in with those peculiar knobkerries and assegais they favor in the wild. There was layer upon layer of bone, said old Crawford, in every place he dug.
"Well, the meaning is obvious. These bar-bars have endured a long stretch on this exotic little world: They must surely have been here for hundreds of generations, thousands of years, or more. And in all that time they have clung to their dreams of home." He considered Malenfant. "You may think I am harsh with the bar-bars, Malenfant, or uncaring. I am not. Inferior they may be. But what memory lies buried in those deep skulls of theirs!—don't you think?"
The country began to rise. The little party grew strung out. The grass grew thinner, the underlying crimson soil more densely packed.
They reached the crest of a ridge and took a break. The ground was hard-packed here, covered thinly by bracken and little bushes like hazels. The party, drinking water from a pannikin handed around by a Ham, was surrounded by a thin, subsiding cloud of red dust.
Malenfant stepped forward. The ground fell away before him, and he saw that this ridge curved around, making a neat circle. It was a bowl of greenery. A few improbably tall trees sprouted, but much of the basin was covered by grass that was littered with color, the yellow and white of marigolds and lilies. Pools glistened on the uneven floor, ringed by lush primeval-looking ferns.
It was a crater, a classic impact formation a couple of miles across. Standing here, Malenfant heard distant calls and hoots. They were the cries of hominids, cousins to mankind, patrolling this forested crater. It was a startling, uplifting, utterly alien prospect.
McCann was standing beside him. "Here we stand, men born on different worlds, confronting a third. Do you know your Plutarch, Malenfant? 'Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds... "Do you not think it lamentable that with such a vast multitude of worlds, we have not yet conquered one?" ' "He pointed with imperious confidence into the bowl of the crater. "There lies our _Redoubtable_ —or at least her corpse. Come, you men."
Brushing a walking-stick before him, he strode off down the flank of the crater. Malenfant and Nemoto, and the Hams with their litter, hurried to follow.
Malenfant came first on a rib of metal, heavily corroded, that arched into the air above him. Its smooth circular shape was a startling contrast to the fractal profusion of the greenery all around. He stepped under the rib, onto twisted and rusted metallic remnants that groaned under his weight. He found he was in a long cylindrical chamber, its walls extensively broken and corroded, open to the sky. When it was intact this tank must have been six or seven yards in diameter.
Thorn bushes pushed through the base of the cylinder, and creepers curled over its sides; above, a thick canopy turned the light dim, moist, and green. The ship had been a long time dead, and the vegetation had grown over and through it, concealing its remains.
McCann walked in alongside him, followed by Nemoto. The Hams lingered on the fringe of the deeper forest, leaning on the litter and sipping water. Thomas kept an eye on McCann, but his gaze slid over the lines of the ship, as if it was a thing of mists and shadows, not really there.
"This was the propellant tank," McCann said. He pointed with his stick. "You can see the bulkheads to either end, or what's left of 'em." McCann pushed on through mazes of piping and cables. Malenfant and Nemoto followed more cautiously, taking care of the sharp edges of twisted metal under their feet.
McCann's figure was stocky and competent, and swathed in his treated animal skins he looked somehow right against the background of the fallen, smashed-open ship; Malenfant wondered how often he visited this relic of home.
They passed through a ripped-open dome into another cylindrical tank. "Here we stored oxidants. Though of course much of the oxidant was drawn from the air."
"A ramjet," Malenfant said to Nemoto.
McCann came to a tangle of what looked like crude electrical equipment, valves and relays, so badly corroded it was an inseparable mass. "Control gear," he said. "For the pumps and valves and so forth." They passed through a more solid bulkhead, supported by heavy ribs, and arrived in what appeared to have been habitable quarters. There had been several decks, separated by two or three yards—but now tipped over, so the floors and ceilings had become walls. A fireman's pole ran along the length of this section, passing neatly through holes in the floors, horizontal now.
McCann pointed out highlights with his stick. "Stores." Malenfant saw the crumpled remnants of bulky machines, perhaps recycling and cleansing devices for air and water, and refrigerated stores for food, but damaged by fire and gutted; they lay in the dark of the rocket's hull like fetuses in unhatched dinosaur eggs. "Infirmary, galley, sleeping quarters and such." Little was left here save a bare frame that might have held bunk beds, a heavy table bolted to the tilted-over floor and fitted with leather restraints, perhaps intended for surgery, and the nubs of pipes and flues showed where galley equipment had been ripped out or salvaged.
"And the bridge." At the nub of the ship, this had been lined with polished oak panels, now scuffed, broken, and covered by lichen and moss. Brass portholes bore only fragments of the thick glass that had once lined them. There were heavy couch frames bolted to the floor, long since stripped of their soft coverings. Malenfant could make little of what must once have been instrument panels; now they were just rectangular hollows in the fascia, though he glimpsed tangles of wires behind.
McCann saw him looking. "Once we realized the old lady wasn't serviceable we stripped out what we could. We built a succession of radio transmitters and heliographs. We got replies, of course, as long as the Earth—I mean, _my_ Earth—still hovered in the sky. That, and promises of rescue, which assurances I have no doubt would have been fulfilled. We kept on trying even after Earth had gone, until the last generator seized up. Powered by a bicycling Runner, incidentally."
"I'm sorry," Malenfant said. "She must have been a beautiful ship."
"Oh, she was. Help me." Leaning on Malenfant's arm, he clambered stiffly up the hull wall, using gaping porthole sockets as hand- and footholds.
Malenfant followed him. Soon the two of them stood side by side on the outer hull of the habitable section, surrounded by gashes and treacherous-looking rents. But McCann was confident in his step.
From here Malenfant could make out the full sweep of the ship's length, a slim spear that must have been two hundred yards long. Its lovely back was broken; and green tendrils clutched at the ship, as if pulling it into the belly of the Moon that had killed it. But still a solitary fin poked out of the greenery, crumpled but defiant. The fin bore a faded roundel that reminded Malenfant of the logo of the Royal Air Force.
The Ham man, Thomas, walked beside the ship close to McCann, keeping his eyes on the Englishman.
"He is loyal," said Malenfant. "He looks out for you all the time."
"He knows I have done my best to improve the lot of his people."
Even if it didn't need improving, Malenfant thought. "But he seems to be having trouble looking at the rocket."
"The bar-bar mind is rigid, Malenfant. Conservative beyond imagining, they are utterly resistant to the new. At the beginning we had a devil of a battle to keep them from destroying our gear—even when tamed, a bar-bar still harbors destructive tendencies."
Malenfant recalled the fate of his shoulder camera. He said, "That almost seems superstitious."
"Oh, not that. There is no superstition among the bar-bars: There is no magic in their world, no sense of the numinous. To them the surface of the world is everything; they do not see hidden meanings, nor seek deeper explanations."
"They have no gods, then."
"Nor can they even conceive of the possibility." McCann smiled. "And what a loss that is. I am sure they are well spared propitiations to the savage and bloody gods of the jungle. But they cannot know the Mercy of the one true God. You understand, it is not merely that they do not know Him—they _cannot_. And without God, there is no order to their lives, no meaning—save what _we_ provide." He tapped Malenfant on the chest with the worn head of his walking stick. "I know you are uncomfortable with our relationship to these barbarians, Malenfant. I see it in your eyes. I've seen it in Africa, when men of conscience go among the Kaffirs there. But can't you see it is our duty to provide them with a Johannen way of life—even if they can't comprehend its meaning?—just as the philosophers and theologians have been proposing since the first steel clippers found these bar-bars' cousins running wild in the New World."
Malenfant studied Thomas's face, but could see no hint of reaction to McCann's sermonizing.
McCann began to talk briskly about the horsepower generated by the "Darwin engines" that had once powered the ship. "I know your little tub came gliding in like a bat. We applied a little more brute force. In the last stages of its descent the _Redoubtable_ was intended to land upright on Earth or Moon, standing on its rocket exhaust. And it should have taken off in the same manner."
"Direct ascent," Malenfant said. It was a mode that had been considered for Apollo's lunar landings, a whole ship traversing back and forth between Earth and Moon. But aside from the greater expense compared to the final Lunar Module design, landing such a giant ship with rockets would have posed stability problems, like an ICBM landing on its tail.
From McCann's descriptions, it sounded as if that had been the downfall of the _Redoubtable_.
"She was a veteran," McCann said softly. "She had done the Earth-Moon round trip a dozen times or more. But now we were dealing with a new Moon, you see. Well, we hastily modified her for her new mission. She landed on her fins well enough on the fields at Cosford, but this crater floor is no tarmacadam strip in Shropshire. She was top-heavy, and—" He fell silent, studying the ruined carcass of the ship. "I was navigator; I must share responsibility for the disaster that followed. Most of us got out, by the Mercy of God." He clapped Malenfant on the back, forcing a laugh. "And since then our lovely ship has been scavenged to make cooking pots."
"Erasmus Darwin," Nemoto called.
Malenfant looked down.
Nemoto was standing in the ruins of the habitable compartment, peering up at him. Her face was like a brown coin in the gloom. "The Darwin drive," she said. "Grandfather of Charles, who is probably the Darwin you're thinking of, Malenfant. In the 1770s he sketched a simple liquid-fuel rocket engine, along with a ramjet. In our world, the sketch languished unnoticed in his notebooks until the 1990s. But in Mr. McCann's world—"
McCann nodded. "The design was the seed around which a new generation of rockets and missiles grew. After the pioneering work of Congreve, the Brunels, father and son, became involved in the development of craft capable of carrying heavy loads into the atmosphere. The first dummy load was orbited around the Earth before the death of Victoria, Empress of the Moon, and the first manned flight beyond the atmosphere was launched from Ceylon in 1920... Ah, but none of this happened in your world, did it, Malenfant? It is a divergence of history. In your world Darwin was ignored or forgotten, his ideas no doubt rediscovered by some other, more vigorous nation."
"Something like that."
Nemoto moved on, working her way through the ship's gloomy interior.
McCann watched her, then leaned closer to Malenfant. "Always watching, thinking, _recording_ , your little Oriental friend—eh, Malenfant?"
"That's her way," Malenfant said cautiously. "And it's our mission. Part of it, anyhow."
"And quite the fount of knowledge about obscure British philosophers two centuries dead." McCann's eyes narrowed. "I have observed the gadget she carries."
Malenfant saw no point in lying. "It's called a softscreen."
"Its working is no doubt beyond my comprehension, but its purpose is clear enough. It is a repository of knowledge, from which Madam Nemoto sips as she requires. I am a man of this dismal jungle now, Malenfant, but you need not think me a fool."
"Take it easy, McCann."
McCann frowned, as if decoding the colloquialism. "Without my shelter you would both surely be 'taking it easy' beneath the crimson dust by now. Remember that." When Malenfant did not answer, McCann clapped him on the shoulder again. "Enough of one beached vessel; let us seek another. Come." McCann began to clamber down to the ground, into the helpful arms of the Ham who served him.
It took another two hours to reach the clearing dug out by the lander on its way down.
The lander was gone.
This was the place he remembered: the Gagarin avenue cut through the trees, the scattered bushes and branches—and even bits of blue parafoil, grimy, damp, still clinging to the damaged foliage. But the lander was gone.
McCann stalked over the grass, inspecting ripped-up bushes, scattered trees. "You're sure this is the place?"
"It can't be."
Nemoto approached him. "Malenfant, you are not a man who has trouble remembering where he parked the car."
Malenfant wanted to believe the lander was sitting someplace else, where it had fallen, as battered and crumpled and precious as when he and Nemoto had so foolishly become parted from it—a key part of the technological ladder that would take him, and Emma, home. But there could be no doubt.
" _We're stranded_ , Nemoto," he blurted. "As stranded as these damn English."
"Perhaps we always were," she said evenly.
He hitched his pack of tied-up skin, containing all his belongings, all that was left of Earth. "We're a pretty pathetic expeditionary force."
She shrugged. "We still have the most important tools: our minds, and our hands, and our knowledge." She eyed him. "What do you intend to do now?"
"Let's get out of here. We have to find the lander. There's nothing more we can achieve with these English. I hate to be a bad guest, but I'm not sure how well McCann will take our leaving."
"Not well, I fear," Nemoto said dryly. And she stepped back.
A hand clamped on Malenfant's arm. It was a Ham, not Thomas.
McCann came walking up, leaning on his stick, his broad face red and grim. "Thank you, Madam Nemoto," he said. "He has behaved just as you predicted."
Malenfant glared at Nemoto, disbelieving. "You betrayed me. You warned him I'd try something."
"You are very predictable, Malenfant." She sighed, impatient, her face expressionless. "You should not make the mistake of believing we share the same agenda. This new Moon, this Red Moon, is the greatest mystery in recorded history—a mystery that deepens with every day that passes, everything we learn. Unless we discover the truth behind it, we will have accomplished nothing."
"And you believe you can achieve that by staying here, with McCann?"
"We need a base, Malenfant. We need resources. We can't spend our whole lives looking over our shoulders for the next stone axe to fall, or grubbing around in the forest for food. These British have all that."
_"And what of Emma?"_
Nemoto said nothing, but McCann said smoothly, "Our scouts and hunters range far and wide, Malenfant. If she is here, we will find her for you."
If your Ham scouts tell you everything they see, Malenfant thought. He fingered the little lens in his pocket.
"Let's look at the matter in a sensible light," McCann said now. "I know you think little of me, Malenfant. But once again I assure you I am not a fool. I desire more than a chess partner; I desire escape from this place—what man wouldn't? Now you have fallen from the sky into my lap, and only a fool would let you go, for surely your _Americans_ will come looking for you from that blue Earth of yours. And when they do, they will find me."
"My world isn't your world," Malenfant snarled.
"But my world is lost," McCann said wistfully. "And I know you have an England. Perhaps I will find a place there." His face hardened, and Malenfant perceived a new toughness. This was, Malenfant remembered, a representative of a breed who had carved out a global empire—and on a much more hostile planet than Earth. "Providence has given me my chance and I must take it. I believe that in keeping you now, in following the promptings of my own infallible heart, I see the workings of Omnipotence. Is this moral arrogance? But without such beliefs man would never have left the trees and the caves, and remained like our presapient and pongid cousins." He glanced at Nemoto. "As for your companion's slight treachery—perhaps she is destined to betray you, over and over, on all Anaxarchus's infinity of worlds. What do you think?" And he brayed laughter.
The little column formed up for the homeward journey. The big Ham called Thomas took his place beside Malenfant.
And he winked broadly.
## _E mma Stoney_
A day after leaving the first troupe, Emma found another a group of Hams, women and a few infants foraging for berries and fruit. They had regarded her blankly, but then, seeing she was no threat—and, as not _one of them_ , of no conceivable interest—they had turned away and continued their gathering.
Emma waited patiently until they were done. Then she followed them back to their encampment.
She stayed there a couple of days, and then moved on, seeking another troupe.
And then on again.
Hams were basically the same, wherever she found them. Their tool-making, for instance. Though each group varied its kit a little according to circumstances, like the availability of different types of stone—and perhaps, she speculated, some slight cultural tradition—still, if something was not in their toolmaking repertoire, which was evidently very ancient and fixed, no Ham was interested.
They didn't even talk about their toolmaking, even while they jabbered endlessly about their intricate social lives. It was as if they were conscious while they were interacting with each other, but not while they were making tools, or even hunting.
After a time Emma began to get used to it. She reasoned that _she_ did many things she wasn't aware of, like breathing, and keeping her heart pumping. And she could think of times when she had performed quite complex tasks requiring skill, judgment, and the focus on a specific goal without knowing about it—such as driving all the way to work with her mind on some stunt of Malenfant's, only to "wake up" when she found herself in the car lot. Or she thought of her father, able to carve fine furniture from wood in his hobby workshop, but never able to tell her how it was done; all he could do was show her.
With the Hams, that circle of unawareness spread a little further, that was all. Or maybe it was just that you could get used to anything, given time.
Anyhow it didn't matter. She wasn't here to run experiments in hominid cognition. It was enough that she was able to use her fish and rabbits and other hunting produce as subtle bribes to gain favor—or at least as a hedge against exclusion.
Thus she worked her way through the forest, moving from one Ham group to the next, using them as stepping stones of comparative safety, one way or another travelling steadily east, day after day, seeking Malenfant.
But sometimes she glimpsed faces in the forest, just at the limit of her vision: hominid faces, watchful, like no species she had yet encountered. It seemed she had barely glimpsed the extent of her kin, on this strange world.
## _R eid Malenfant_
The details of the regime that would govern Malenfant's life coalesced with startling speed and efficiency—such speed, in fact, that Malenfant wondered who else McCann or the others had had cause to imprison.
Malenfant was free to come and go, within the stockade. But there was always a burly male Ham at his elbow, even sleeping outside his hut during the night.
He took to prowling around the perimeter fence. It was tall, and its ferocious spikes were daubed with a sticky, tarlike substance. For the first time it struck him that the fence was just as effective at keeping him in as keeping out the undesirables of the wilds beyond. And anyhow every time Malenfant tried to approach the fence too closely, he was immobilized by his Ham guard—as simple as that; one of those massive hands would clamp on his shoulder or elbow or even his head, exerting a strength he couldn't hope to match.
He tested his cage in other ways.
He spoke to Thomas, asking for his help. But Thomas would say nothing, giving no hint that he was prepared to follow up on that reassuring wink in the forest.
One night Malenfant tried climbing out of his hut's window. But though it was unglazed the window was small and high. By the time he had dropped clumsily to the ground his Ham keeper was standing over him, silhouetted by blue Earthlight, solid and silent as a rock.
He considered making other protests—going on a hunger strike, maybe. But he sensed McCann might simply let him starve; the steel he had glimpsed in the soul of this other-world Brit did not encourage him to seek weakness or pity. Alternatively McCann might have his Ham servants force-feed Malenfant, not a prospect he relished, since the Hams were muscled a little too heavily to be good nurses.
Anyhow he needed to build his strength for the days to come, and the search for Emma he confidently expected to be progressing sooner rather than later.
So, after a couple of days, Malenfant began to engage with McCann once more: eating with him, even walking around the compound, conversing. It was a peculiar arrangement, in which both of them clearly knew their relative positions of power and yet did not speak of it, as if they were engaged in some formal game.
Malenfant tried to find out as much as he could about this world from McCann. But the British had done little exploring more than a few day's travel away from their stockade. Their main business here had, after all, been ensuring their survival. And McCann's mind seemed peculiarly closed to Malenfant. The purpose of McCann's original mission had not been exploration, and still less science, but economic and political gain for his Empire; he was more like a prospector than a surveyor. But sometimes he spoke again of the deeper mission he felt he had taken on: to bring the word of his God, and his Christ-figure John, to the barbarian hominids of the Red Moon.
McCann was a man with a head full of agendas. It seemed to Malenfant he was barely able to see the Red Moon and its exotic inhabitants for what they were—just as the Hams had seemed unable to look directly at the wreckage of the _Redoubtable_.
Maybe every hominid species had such blind spots, mused Malenfant. He wondered what his own were.
For his part McCann pressed Malenfant about rescue.
Malenfant tried to describe the politics and economics of his home world. He knew it was extremely unlikely that the will to mount a further mission could be assembled on tide-ravaged Earth—even though the NASA support teams knew where the lander had come down, and had received those few minutes of footage to show he and Nemoto had survived, at least for a time.
McCann showed Malenfant the transceiver gear he and his companions had scavenged from the wreck of the _Redoubtable_. It was a formidable array of antique-type parts, huge glass valves and mica capacitors and big clattering relays. For years the British had nursed it, for instance keeping it continually powered to save the valves from the thermal shock of being switched on and off. But at last too many of the valves had failed, and other parts were corroded and damaged from prolonged exposure to the damp air. Malenfant tinkered with the gear, but he had less of an idea than McCann how to fix it.
In his own mind Malenfant's primary mission remained clear: to find Emma, and get the hell off this Moon. If he could help McCann on the way, fine; if Nemoto wanted to come home or stay here, it was up to her. But they were side issues. To Malenfant, only home and Emma mattered.
So they worked through their days. But as time passed it seemed to Malenfant that McCann grew steadily more anxious. Periodically he would peer up into the sky, as if seeking to reassure himself that Earth was still there.
And Malenfant barely saw Nemoto.
One morning, maybe a week into his captivity, he was woken as usual by Julia, with her wooden bowl of hot water and a fresh stone blade for him to shave. Dressed in her blouse and long skirt of sewn skin, with her muscled body moving powerfully, she looked absurd, like a chimpanzee in a child's dress.
She picked up his covered slop bucket, curtsied at him—"Baas"—and made to leave.
"Help me," Malenfant blurted.
She stopped by the door. Malenfant could see the shadow of a burly Ham male outside the door.
"Baas?"
"You know I'm being kept here against my will—umm, Boss McCann won't let me go. You helped me before. You gave me the lens—the clear stone. You know it came from Emma. I want to get out of here and find her, Julia. I don't want to hurt anybody, not Boss McCann, not anybody. I just want to get to Emma."
She shrugged, her mountainous shoulders rippling. "Breakfas'," she said.
Frustrated, he snapped, "Why do you stay here? Any one of you could take on McCann and his cronies. Even their crossbows couldn't hold you back if you put your mind to it."
She looked at him reproachfully. "Tired ol' men," she said, as if that was explanation enough. Then she turned and walked out, the slop pail carried effortlessly in one huge hand.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
The great Mapping, across a distance unprecedented in recorded history, could be regarded as a technological triumph. But to Manekato it had been like the working out of an intricate mathematical theorem, a theorem that proved the identity of certain points of space and time with certain other points. The fact that those other points were placed close to the surface of a world which had not even existed as the proof was developed scarcely added to the complexity of the procedure. And once the proof was established, the journey itself would be a mere corollary, of little interest save as an exercise for the young.
The proof had not been trivial, but it had not been overdemanding. Most adults, with a little effort, could have achieved the same result. Manekato had worked at the Mapping with part of her mind, with the rest consumed by her grief for her mother and her concerns over her own future.
On Mane's Earth, anybody could develop a space program in their spare time.
With her brother Babo and the woman who called herself Without-Name, Manekato stood on the crushed bones of her ancestors. The eternal Wind blasted over the rock, unnoticed. Above her hovered a great rippling lens of star-filled sky, as if a hole had been cut in the clouds: Thanks to simple Mapping techniques it was as if she were suspended in orbit, far above the clouds of Earth. But the three of them barely glanced up; it was a minor, uninteresting miracle.
This eroded volcanic core, once the heart of the Farm, was bare now. After her mother had died, Manekato had ordered the deletion of the great House. The walls of Adjusted Space had disappeared like a bursting bubble, as if fifty millennia of sturdy existence had been but a dream. Manekato had welcomed the simple geologic clarity of the mountain's eroded summit: she knew she could never live in the House, and it served no purpose save to preserve memories of unhappiness.
But she had retained the pit containing the ashes of her grandmothers, and to it she had added the last remains of Nekatopo.
Without-Name stalked around the perimeter of the ash pit, her knuckles pressing disrespectfully into the sealed-in dirt, leaving impressions of her hands and feet. A Worker followed this ill-mannered guest, restoring the pit's smoothness. "Destroy the pit," Without-Name told Manekato. "Fill it in. Delete it. It serves no purpose."
"The pit is the memory of my Lineage," said Manekato evenly.
Without-Name bared her teeth and growled. "This pit is not a memory. It is a hole filled with dust."
Babo protested, "The practice of adding oneself to the Farm's ground at the end of one's life is as old as our species. It derives from the sensible desire to use every resource to enrich the ground for one's descendants. Today the practice is symbolic, of course, but—"
"Symbolism. Pah! Symbolism is for fools."
Babo looked shocked.
If Without-Name enjoyed goading Manekato, she positively relished taunting Babo. "Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone."
Babo said defiantly, "I have visited the Rano Lineage and I saw the pit of your ancestors. You are a hypocrite. You say one thing and practice the other."
She raised herself to her hind feet and towered over him. She wore her body hair plucked clean in great patches over her body, and where hair remained it had been stiffened into great bristling spikes. It was a fashion from the other side of the world that made her seem oddly savage to Manekato. _"Not any more,"_ she hissed. "I salute death. I salute the cleansing it brings. There is only life—all that matters is the here and the now—and what can be achieved in the moment."
Manekato held back her emotions.
This Without-Name's preferred diminutive actually was—had been—Renemenagota. But she insisted she had abandoned her true name. "My land is to be destroyed," she had said. "And so is my Lineage. What purpose does a fossilized name serve?" Even the contradiction in her position—for _Without-Name_ was itself a name, of course, so that she was trapped in an oxymoron—seemed only to please her perversely. Manekato knew she must work with this woman, who was a refugee as she was, to study the rogue Moon and its fabricators; that had been the directive of the Astrologers. But Manekato felt that she had been the target of Without-Name's bitterness and discourtesy from the moment they had been thrown together...
There was a dazzling electric-blue flash, gone in an instant.
A shift in the Wind touched Manekato's face. She looked into the tunnel of stars.
"If you embrace experience," she said, "then you must embrace _that_."
Without-Name lifted her head awkwardly, and fell forward onto her knuckles.
Babo was already gazing at the sky, open-mouthed. Even the Workers were backing away, small visual sensors protruding from their hides, peering up at the dangerous sky.
Suddenly the Red Moon swam there, complete, huge.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Nemoto said in a monotone, "We are dealing with multiple universes. That much is clear. We have seen for ourselves multiple Moons. And we have hints of multiple Earths. The Earth of Hugh McCann is clearly quite different from our Earth—even if his history is interestingly convergent with ours. And the Hams talk of a Gray Earth, a third place where conditions may be different again..."
In the hut Malenfant had come to think of as the dining hall, Nemoto and Malenfant faced each other at either end of the long table. The table's wooden surface, polished to darkness by decades of use, was bare. An elderly Ham woman was preparing lunch.
It had taken days before Malenfant had been able to face Nemoto, such was his anger at her betrayal. But she was his only companion from home, and if he was ever going to get out of here he might need her help. As for Nemoto, it was as if the incident of the betrayal had simply been a step in some grand plan, which any rational person would accept as justified.
But she was changing, Malenfant saw: becoming more withdrawn, hollow-eyed—dangerously detached from the texture of the world around her, obsessed instead with huge ideas of origins and destinies.
So Malenfant listened coldly, as Nemoto described alternate realities.
"Malenfant, perhaps there are a cluster of alternate universes with identical histories up to the moment of some key event in the evolution of humanity—and differing after that only in the details of that event, and its consequences." Nemoto waved her hands vaguely, as if trying to indicate three-dimensional space around her. "Imagine the possible universes arrayed around us in a kind of probability space, Malenfant. Do you see that universes differing _only_ in the details of the evolution of mankind must somehow be _close_ to ours in that graph?"
"And you're saying this is what we're experiencing—a crossover between possible universes? Well, maybe. But it's just talk. What I don't see is how you can hop from one cosmos to the next."
Nemoto smiled coldly. "I do not know how that is possible, Malenfant. And what is more important is that I do not know _why_ anybody should wish to make it happen."
" _Why_... You think all of this is deliberate—somehow artificial?"
"Your Wheel in Africa looked artificial to me, Malenfant. Perhaps the Hams' Old Ones, if they exist, will be able to tell us what they intended."
"And you're going to ask them, I suppose."
"If they exist. If I can find them. What else is there to do? Malenfant, there is something else. I have raised with McCann the question of whether other life forms exist beyond the Earth _—his_ Earth, I mean. His scientists have looked for evidence, as ours have. They have found none. Philosophers there have propounded something similar to our Fermi Paradox to crystallize this observation."
"Why is this important?"
"I don't know yet. But it does appear odd that such a profound contradiction is to be found in both universes..."
Light flickered, startlingly blue, beyond the door frame. Malenfant gasped. The color had tugged at his heart—for it was the color of the flash from within the Wheel that had consumed Emma.
They hurried outside. There was something in the sky.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
In her first stunned glance Manekato made out a single vast continent, scorched red, and a blue-gray ocean from which the sun cast a single blunt highlight. The disk, almost full, was surrounded by a thin layer of blurred softness. An atmosphere, then. But no lights shone in the darkened, shadowed crescent.
The Wind buffeted Manekato, turbulent, suddenly uneven. Already it begins, she thought.
Small Workers, no larger than insects, hovered around Babo's head, defying the shifting breeze; she saw their light play over his face, dense with information. "Its gross parameters are as we anticipated," he said. "A Moon, a world, two-thirds of Earth's diameter, a quarter of its mass. It has an atmosphere—"
"It is not Farmed," Without-Name hissed. "Your jabber of numbers is meaningless, you fool. Look at it: _It is not Farmed_. This Moon is primordial."
Without-Name was right. Even without magnification Manekato could see great expanses where nothing lived: that ugly red scar of a continent, the naked oceans, those crude caps of ice. It was a world of waste, of unawakened resources.
Wild.
"Wild, yes," growled Without-Name. "Consider the comparison with our Earth. For two million years we have cherished every atom. We have carefully sustained the diversity of species. We have even sacrificed ourselves—billions of years of lost lives—refusing longevity in order to maintain the balance of the world."
Mane murmured, "An ecology consisting of a single species would not be sustainable."
Without-Name laughed. "You quote childish slogans. Think, Manekato! Our species has been shaped, even as we have shaped our world. But _nothing_ about that ugly Moon has been managed. We will have no place. We will have to fight to achieve our purposes, perhaps even to survive."
Mane was troubled by that perception, though she acknowledged it might contain a grain of truth.
"But," Babo said, an edge in his voice, "the Red Moon cannot be primordial—it must contain mind— _for it would not be here otherwise_."
Yes, Mane thought. Yes. And for that she was afraid of this monstrous Moon. It was a deep fear, of a type she had never suffered before, a fear suffused by a sense of powerlessness. She had to search deep into the recesses of her memory, poring through the most ancient roots of the million-year-old language with which all children were born, to find an ancient, obsolete word that suited what she felt:
_Superstition_.
Babo rattled more statistics of the Moon's composition, describing a ball of silicate rock and a small iron core. But as his courage grew his thinking seemed to clear. _"Earth,"_ he said. "That wandering Moon is made of the same material as Earth's outer layers. How can that be?"
The three of them began to talk rapidly, their minds developing and sharing hypotheses.
"Given the identity of substances this body cannot have formed elsewhere in the Solar System." "Could it have budded off of Earth while the planet was accreting from the primordial cloud of dust and ice?" "No, for then its proportions should resemble Earth's global composition, and this body shows a deficiency of iron and other heavy elements. It is more like a piece of the Earth's mantle, its outer layers, ripped up and wadded together and thrown into the sky." "Then an Earth must have formed, differentiated so the iron-rich rocks sank to the core, before the material to assemble this Moon was detached from the outer layers. But how would it happen?" "A vast volcanic event? But surely that would not be sufficiently violent—" "A collision. A rogue planetesimal, a giant, or even a planet. Such a collision might cause a splash of ejecta which could accrete into this Moon..."
Within seconds, then, they had unravelled the mystery of the Moon's origin, a deduction that had taken humans two centuries of geological science.
All around the Earth, other witnesses must be coming to a similar conclusion, and Manekato imagined a growing consensus of understanding whispering in Babo's ear.
"But," Manekato said, "if this Red Moon was born from Earth, it was not _our_ Earth."
"No," Babo said somberly. "For our Earth never suffered a catastrophic collision of that magnitude. We would see the results today, for example in the composition of the planet's core. And if our world had enjoyed the company of such a Moon everything would have been different in its evolution: Much of the primordial atmosphere would have been stripped off in the collision, leaving thinner air less rich in carbon dioxide; there would have been many subtle effects on tides and the world's spin..."
"On such a world," Manekato said, "one would not need a Mapping to see the stars. And in such a sky a Moon like this would ride. But such is not our world."
"Not our universe," said Without-Name bluntly. "Tell me then, Babo: what do your Astrologers have to say of a power which can Map a Moon, not merely from planet to planet, but _between universes_?"
"They have little to say," he said evenly. "That is why we must go there... There is something more." He uttered a soft command to his Workers.
A new Mapping was made, showing them a vision from a large Farm that straddled the equator of the planet.
A giant blue circle, hovering above the ground, was sweeping over the Farm's cultivated ground, upright and improbably tall. People stood and watched as it passed. Workers backed away before it. Children ran alongside it, laughing, levering themselves forward on their knuckles in their excitement.
And there were people falling out of the circle's empty disk.
No, not people, Manekato saw: _like_ people, naked hominids, some tall and hairless, some short and squat and covered in fine black hair. They flopped and gasped for breath like stranded fish, and their flimsy bodies were buffeted this way and that by the Wind.
"What does it mean, Babo?"
"One can predict the broad outline of events. But chaos is in the detail..." He waved his hand, banishing the image.
A gust of Wind howled across the bare, eroded plateau, powerful enough to make Manekato stagger.
Babo stepped forward. "It is time."
Manekato and Without-Name took his hands and each other's, so the three of them were locked together in a ring.
At the last moment Manekato asked, "Must it be so?"
Babo shrugged regretfully. "The predictions are exact, Mane. The focusing effect of the shoreline's shape here, the gradient of the ocean floor, the precise positioning of the new Moon in the sky: All of these have conspired to doom our Farm, and the Poka line with it."
Without-Name tipped back her head and laughed, the spikes that covered her body bristling and twisting. "And for all our vaunted power we can do nothing about it. This is a moment that separates past from future. It is a little death. My friends, welcome the cleansing!"
Manekato uttered a soft command.
The three of them rose into the air, through a body's height. The Mapping had begun.
_Mane..._
Surprised to hear her name called, Manekato looked down. One of the Workers, a battered old gadget from a long-forgotten crop, was peering up at her with a glinting lens. It was clinging to the ground with long stabilizing suckers, but the Wind battered at it, and its purple-black hide glistened with rain.
Memory stirred. There had been a Worker like this when she had clambered from her mother's womb, chattering excitedly, full of energy and curiosity. In those first days and weeks that Worker had fed her, instructed her, kept her from harm, and comforted her when she was afraid. She had not seen the old gadget for years, and had thought little of it. Could this be the same Worker? Why should it seek her now, as it was about to be destroyed?
A wall of rain swept over the mountaintop. The three of them were immediately soaked, and Manekato labored to breathe the harshly gusting air.
When the rain gust passed, the mountaintop had been swept bare; all the Workers were gone, surely destroyed. Manekato felt an odd, distracting pang—regret, perhaps?
But this was no time to dwell on the past; the nameless one was right about that.
The three of them ascended without effort.
She was still clothed in her body, her legs dangling, her hair soaked. But of course this body was a mere symmorph: differing from her original self in form, but representing the same idea. (And in fact, as she had been through hundreds of previous Mappings, that "original" body had itself been nothing but a symmorph, a copy of a copy reworked to suit temporary needs, though one tailored to remain close to her primary biological form as possible.)
But such a morphology was no longer appropriate. With a soundless word, she discarded the symmorph, and accepted another form.
Now she was smeared around Earth, immersing it in her awareness, as if it were a speck that floated in her eyeball.
The great Farms glittered over the planet: from pole to pole, around the equator, even on the floor and surface of the oceans, and in the clouds. It was as if the planet were encrusted with jewels of light and life and order. There were no barren red deserts, no frozen ice caps _here_.
But already, as the Red Moon began its subtle gravitational work, the first changes were visible. Huge ocean storms were unravelling the delicate ocean-floor and water-borne Farms. A vast line of earthquakes and ugly volcanism was unstitching an eastern continent. And, from an ocean which was sloshing like water in a disturbed bath, a train of immense tsunamis marched toward the land.
Soon the Poka Farm was covered—extinguished, scoured clear, even the bedrock shattered, the bone dust of her ancestors scattered and lost, beyond memory.
The jewel-like lights were failing, all over the world. There was nothing for her here.
She gazed at her destination, the new, wandering Moon.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant's world was stratified into layers of varying incomprehensibility.
At the base of it all was the stockade, the familiar sturdy fence and the huts of mud and wood: the physical infrastructure of the world, solid, imperturbable.
And then there were the people.
Hugh McCann was standing alone at the center of the colony's little street, hands dangling at his sides, gazing up at a corner of the sky. His mouth was open, and his cheeks glistening, as if he were weeping. Nemoto was shielding her eyes, so that she couldn't so much as glimpse the sky above.
He saw Julia and Thomas, close together near the gate. The Hams didn't seem disturbed by the fiery sky. They were stripping off their neat, sewn-together garments, revealing bodies that were ungainly slabs of corded muscle. They pulled on much cruder skin wraps, of the kind Malenfant had seen Thomas wear out in the bush, tying them up with thongs. More Hams were coming in through the open gate _(the gate is open, Malenfant!)_ , and they picked up the discarded English-type clothing and started to pull it on.
A shift change, he thought, wondering. As if the settlement was a factory maintained by a pool of labor beyond the stockade walls.
And in the sky...
You can't put off thinking about it any longer, Malenfant.
Start with the basics. There is the white sun, the yellow Earth _(yellow?)_. There are the clouds, stringy cirrus today, littered over the sky's dome. And beyond the clouds, in the spaces between sun and Earth—
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 were 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 watercolor streaks of varying hues. There were dark knots in the bands, perhaps giant storms. It reminded Malenfant of nothing so much as space-probe 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 to 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 slavekeeper. 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 labor, 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 toward 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 streetwise: 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 daresay 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.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
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 colors 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.
The Mapping had taken account of the different physical conditions. Thus Manekato felt no discomfort as her lungs drank in the thin, oxygen-depleted air of this small world, and her new body would suffer no ill-effects from the relative lack of carbon dioxide. But she had taken care not to engineer out all of the Red Moon's experiential differences; for if she had there would scarcely be a purpose in coming here at all. Thus the air was cold and damp and laden with a thousand powerful, unfamiliar scents—and thus the lower gravity, just two-thirds of Earth's, tugged only feebly at her limbs.
Manekato loped through the crowd of gazing people and scuttling Workers. Her gait felt oddly clumsy in the low gravity, as if her muscles were suddenly overpowered. The yellow floor was perhaps a hundred paces across. It was a neatly circular disk of Adjusted Space, its smoothness comforting. She reached the rim of the disk. Tiny Workers streamed past her into the green world beyond, recording, interpreting, transmitting.
Beyond the platform was a wall of forest, concealing a dense green gloom. The trees were tall here: great spindly structures of wood, very different from the ground-hugging species of Wind-blasted Earth. Shadows flitted through that green darkness. She thought she saw eyes peering out at her, eyes like a mirror of her own.
Babo ran past her with a gurgled cry. He ran straight into the forest and clambered into the lowest branches of a tree, clumsily, but with enthusiasm and strength.
Manekato peered down. In the Moon's red dust grass grew, sprinkled with small flowers, white and yellow. She leaned forward, supporting her weight on one fist, and touched the grass. The blades were coarse, and other plants and moss crowded around, fighting over each scrap of soil. She saw leaves protruding from beneath the disk, crushed, bent back; some of the living things of this world had already died because of her presence.
The land here had never been Farmed: not once, not in all the billions of years this world had existed. Even this patch of grass-covered land, where billions of living things fought for life in every scrap, was disturbing, enthralling proof of that.
In front of the forest fringe she made out a small, brown-furred Worker—no, not a Worker, an _animal_ , its species probably unmodified by conscious design. It had a short, slim body, and four spindly legs; it bent a graceful neck, and a small mouth nibbled at the grass. It moved gracefully, but with a startling slowness, an unhurried languor that contrasted with the frantic scuttling of the people and the workers. By the look of the genitalia between its back legs its kind must reproduce in a mammalian fashion, rather than be nurtured directly from the ground...
_Nobody_ had nurtured this creature, she reminded herself; there had been no conscious process. It had been born in blood and pain and mucus, without the supervision of any human, and it found food to sustain its growth in this wild, unmanaged, undisciplined place.
On her world, there had been no parks or zoos for nine hundred millennia. Though the richness of the ecology was well understood and managed minutely—including the place of people within that ecology—there were no creatures save those which served a conscious purpose, no aspect of nature which was not thought through and controlled. Not so much as a stomach bacteria.
Manekato had known that this new Moon would be wild, but that its ecology would function nonetheless. But it was one thing to have a theoretical anticipation and another to be confronted with the fact. She felt as if she had entered the workings of some vast intricate machine, all the more remarkable for lacking a conscious designer or a controlling intelligence.
Now Babo came hurrying back from the forest. He clutched something in his arms that wriggled sluggishly.
Babo's legs were covered in scrapings of green moss, and his hair was dishevelled and dirty. But his eyes were bright, and he was breathing hard. "My arms are strong," he told his sister. "I can _climb_. It is as if this body of mine remembers its deepest past, many millions of years lost, even though the trees on Earth are mere wind-blown stubs compared to these mighty pillars..."
Without-Name asked, "What is it you carry?"
He held it out carefully. It had a slim body and a small head. Its legs were short and somewhat bowed, but Manekato could see immediately that this creature was designed—no, had _evolved_ —to walk bipedally. It was perhaps half of Babo's height, and much slimmer.
"It is a hominid," she said wonderingly.
"I found it in the tree," Babo said. "It is quite strong, but moves slowly. It was easy to catch."
Manekato reached to touch the creature's face.
The hominid whipped its head sideways and sank its teeth into Manekato's finger.
Manekato fell back with a small cry. Miniature Workers in her bloodstream caused the ripped flesh to close immediately.
_"Ha!"_ the creature yelled. _"Elf strong Elf good hurt stupid Ham hah!"_
This jabber meant nothing to Manekato.
Without-Name took the creature from an unresisting Babo. She held it up by its head. Dangling, the hominid hooted and thrashed, scratching at Manekato's arm with its legs and fists, but its motions were slow and feeble.
With a single, harsh motion Without-Name crushed the hominid's skull. The body shuddered once and was limp. Without-Name let the body fall to the ground, its head a bloody pulp. A Worker scuttled close and swept up the tiny corpse.
Babo looked at Without-Name, his face empty of expression. "Why did you do that?"
"There was no mind," said Without-Name. "There was no utility. Therefore there was no right to life. I have been dispossessed by this Moon. I will not rest until I have made the Moon my possession in turn."
Manekato suppressed her anger. "We did not come here to kill. We came to learn—to learn and negotiate."
Without-Name spat a gobbet of thick phlegm out onto the grass. "We all have our reasons to be here, Manekatopokanemahedo. You follow the foolish dreams of the Astrologers. _I_ am a Farmer."
"And," Manekato said slowly, "is that your ambition here? To subdue a new world, to turn it all into your dominion?"
"What higher ambition could there be?"
"But we have yet to find those who moved this world. _They_ were more powerful than these blades of grass, that wretched hominid. Remember that, Renemenagota, when you boast of what you will conquer."
Now Manekato saw that two burly Workers had brought another hominid for their inspection. It was taller, heavier than the last, but it was scrawny, filthy, hollow-eyed.
Again Without-Name picked up the specimen by its skull and lifted it easily off the ground. The creature cried and struggled, clearly in distress, but its movements were still more sluggish than the first's, and it made no attempt to injure Without-Name.
"Let it go," Manekato said evenly.
Without-Name studied her. "You are not of my Lineage. You do not have authority over me."
"Look at it, Renemenagota. _It is wearing clothes_."
Babo breathed deeply. "Do it," he said. "Or I will have the Workers stop you. _I_ have the authority for that, nameless one, thanks to the Astrologers you despise."
Without-Name growled her protest. But she released the hominid, which fell into a heap on the floor, and stalked away.
Manekato and Babo huddled over the hominid. It had curled into a fetal position; as gently as they could they turned it on its back and pried open its limbs.
"I think it is female," Babo said. "Its head is badly bruised, as is its neck, and it struggles to breathe. Without-Name has damaged it."
"Perhaps the Workers can repair it."
The hominid coughed and struggled to sit up. Babo helped it with a lift from a powerful hand.
_"My name,"_ the hominid said, _"is Nemoto."_
## _S hadow_
The antelope had gotten separated from its herd. It was running awkwardly, perhaps hampered by age or injury.
With fluid grace, the lion leapt onto the antelope's back, forcing it to the ground in a cloud of crimson dust. The antelope kicked and struggled, its back and haunches already horribly ripped. Then the lion inflicted a final, almost graceful bite to its throat. As its blood poured onto the dust of the savannah, Shadow saw surprise in the antelope's eyes.
More lions came loping up to feed.
Shadow remained huddled behind her rock—exposed on the open savannah, but downwind of the kill. She kept her baby quiet by cradling its big, deformed head tightly against her stomach.
The lions pushed their faces into the fallen antelope's carcass, digging into the entrails and the easily accessible meat of the fleshy areas. Soon their muzzles were crimson with blood, and their growls of contentment were loud. Shadow was overwhelmed by the iron stink of blood, and the sharp burning scent of the lion's fur—and by hunger; her mouth pooled with saliva.
Her face itched, and she scratched it.
At last the lions' purring growls receded.
Already more scavengers were approaching the carcass. Hyenas loped hungrily toward it in a jostling pack, and overhead the first bats were wheeling, huge carrion-eating bats, their wings black stripes against the sky.
And, from the crater's wooded rim, people emerged: Elf-folk like Shadow, men, women, and infants, melting out of the green shelter of the woods, their black pelts stark against the green and crimson of the plain. They eyed the carcass hungrily, and they carried sticks and cobbles.
But the hyenas were hungry, too, and in a moment they were on the antelope, burying their muzzles inside the great rips made by the lions' jaws, already fighting among themselves. Their lithe bodies clustered over the carcass, tails high in the air, from a distance like maggots working a wound.
The people moved in, yelling and waving their sticks and throwing their stones. Some of the dogs were hit by hurled cobbles. One man, a squat, manic creature with one eye closed by a huge scar, got close enough to pound one animal with a fat branch, causing the dog to yelp and stumble. But the dogs did not back away. A few of them tore themselves away from the meat long enough to rush at the hominids, barking and snapping, before hurling themselves back into the feast. Most simply ignored the people, gouging out as much meat as they could before being forced away by a dog bigger and stronger.
So it went, a web of complex but unconscious calculations: each hyena's dilemma over whether to attack the hominids, or whether to gamble that another dog would, leaving it free to take more meat; the hominids' estimation of the strength and determination of the hyenas versus their own hunger and the value of the meat.
This time, at least, the hyenas were too strong.
The Elf-folk troupe backed away sullenly. They found a place in the shade of the trees at the forest edge, staring with undisguised envy at the rich meat being devoured by the dogs.
At last the hyenas started to disperse. They had taken most of the meat, and the antelope was reduced to scattered bones and bits of flesh on a blood-stained patch of ground, as if it had exploded. Again the people came forward, and their stones and sticks drove away the last of the dogs.
There was little meat to be had. But there was still a rich resource here, which hominid tools could reach. The adults took the antelope's bones and, with brisk, skillful strikes of their shaped stones, they cracked them open. Soon many of the people were sucking marrow greedily. Children fought over scraps of flesh and cartilage.
Huge bats flapped down, their leathery wings black, vulturelike. They pecked at outlying bits of the carcass, bloodying their fur. The people tolerated them. But if the bats came too close they would be greeted by a stick wielded by a hooting hominid.
Shadow came out from behind her rock.
A child came up to her, curious, a bit of gristle dangling from her chin. But as Shadow neared, the child wrinkled her nose and stared hard at Shadow's face. Then she turned and ran for the security of her mother.
As Shadow approached the group, the people moved their children away from her, or growled, or even threw stones. But they did not try to drive her away.
Shadow saw a big older woman, the hair of her back oddly streaked with silver. This woman—Silverneck—was working assiduously at the remnant of a thigh bone. Shadow sat close to Silverneck, not asking for food, content not to be rejected.
The sun wheeled across the sky, and the people worked at the carcass.
At length Silverneck hurled away the last fragments of bone. She lay on her back, legs crossed, and crooked an arm behind her head. She belched, picked bits of marrow and bone from her teeth, and thrust a finger into one nostril with every sign of contentment.
Cautiously, her baby clinging to her back, Shadow crept closer. She started to groom Silverneck, picking gently through the hairs of Silverneck's shoulders. The older woman, reclining stiffly, submitted to this in silence, eyes closed as if asleep.
Shadow knew what she must do to win a place here. In her home forest she had watched women seeking favor with their seniors. Still cautious, Shadow moved toward Silverneck's waist and reached out to stroke the older woman's genitals, just as she had seen others do before.
A hand grasped her wrist, gentle but strong. Silverneck's face, worn almost bald by grooming, was a mass of wrinkles. And it showed disgust. She pulled her legs under her, and pushed Shadow away.
Shadow sat still, baffled, disturbed.
After a time Shadow again reached out to groom Silverneck. Again Silverneck submitted. This time Shadow did not try to cross the boundary to sexual contact, and Silverneck did not push her away.
As the shadows lengthened across the plain, the carrion-eating bats clustered closer around the remnants of the carcass. One by one the people started to drift back to the forest. The first roosting calls began to sound from the tree tops.
At last the old woman stretched and yawned loudly, bones popping. Then she got to her feet and ambled back toward the forest's edge.
Shadow sat where she was, waiting.
Silverneck looked back once, thoughtfully. Then she turned and moved on.
Shadow got to her feet, her baby clinging to her back. Hastily she rummaged through the carcass, but the marrow and meat had been chewed or sucked off every bone. Cramming bits of greasy skin into her mouth, she hurried after Silverneck into the forest.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
With a wave of his hand Babo conjured an image of the Red Moon—but it was not an image, rather a limited injective-recursive Mapping of the Moon into itself. The Moon turned for their benefit, a great hovering globe twice Babo's height. Manekato gazed at searing red desert-continent and steel ocean.
The little hominid who called herself Nemoto stood close to Manekato, her eyes wide, her smooth face bearing some unreadable expression.
"Your work is proceeding well," Manekato said to her brother.
"It is a routine application of familiar techniques; merely a question of gathering sufficient data... But already the key to this world's mysteries is clear."
"Ah." Manekato said somberly. She reached up and pointed at the huge volcano that dominated the western side of the rust-red continent. "You mean _that_."
"Yes, the volcanic anomaly," Babo said. "Which in turn must derive from some magmatic feature, a plume arising deep within the belly of this world."
_"You talk of the Bullseye?"_ Nemoto was watching them, straining to hear, turning her little head this way and that in order to position her small immobile ears.
Babo watched Nemoto uneasily. "Do you think she can follow us?"
"I have taught her a few words," said Manekato. "But our speech is too rapid for her to grasp; like all the creatures here on this oxygen-starved world, she is sluggish and slow-witted. I have had more success in decoding her own language. It is a little like the nonsense argots you used to make up for my amusement as a child, Babo."
Babo was still watching Nemoto. "She imitates your behavior well. Look how she gazes at the volcano! It's almost as if she can understand what she is seeing."
Manekato grunted. "Do not underestimate her, brother. I believe she is intelligent, to a degree. Consider the clothes she wears, her speech with its limited grammar, the tools she deploys—even her writing of symbols into her blocks of bound paper. Why, she claims to have come here, not through the blue portals, but in a spacecraft designed by others of her kind. And that she came to this Moon from _curiosity_. I found this as hard to believe as you, but she drew sketches which convinced me she is telling the truth."
"But even the making of clothes may be no more than the outcome of instinct, Mane," Babo said gently. "There is a kind of aquatic spider that makes diving-bells from its webbing, and nobody would argue that _it_ is intelligent. Perhaps some day we will discover a species, utterly without mind, which makes starships. Why not? And nor is symbol-making sufficient to demonstrate intelligence; there are social ants which—"
Manekato raised a hand to quiet him. "I am aware of the dangers of anthropomorphism. You think I have found a pet, here in this dismal place—that I am seeking intelligence where all I see is a reflection of my own self."
Babo rubbed her back affectionately. "Well, isn't that true?"
"Perhaps. But I strive to discount it. And meanwhile I have come to the belief that Nemoto and her kind may be—not merely intelligent—but _self-aware_."
Babo laughed. "Come now, Mane. Let us show her a mirror, and together we will watch her seek the hominid behind the glass."
"I already tried that test," Manekato said. "She was very insulted."
"If she is too proud to be tested, why does she follow you around?"
"For protection," Manekato said promptly. "You saw how Without-Name treated her when she first found her. Nemoto shows great fear of her."
Babo grunted. He crouched down before the hominid, Nemoto; his huge body was like a wall before her slim frame.
Nemoto returned his gaze calmly.
"... Intelligent, Mane? But the size of the cranium, the limited expanse of the frontal lobes— _the dullness of those eyes_. I do not get a sense of a person looking back out at me."
Manekato snapped, "And you can assess a creature's intelligence merely by looking at it?" She said, _"Nemoto."_
The hominid looked up at her.
_"You remember what I told you of the Mapping."_ Manekato strove to slow down her speech, and to pronounce each word of Nemoto's limited language clearly and distinctly.
Nemoto was frowning, concentrating hard. _"I remember. You defined a mathematical function to map the components of your body to material of the Moon."_ Her words, like her actions, were slow, drawn-out. _"The domain of this function was yourselves and your equipment, the range a subset of the Moon. When you had defined the Mapping..."_
"Yes?"
Nemoto struggled, but failed to find the words. _"I have much to learn."_
Babo grunted. "It is impressive that she knows there are limits to her knowledge. Perhaps that indicates some degree of self-awareness after all."
Manekato said, "Then I am winning the argument."
Babo grumbled good-naturedly. "Just remember we are here to study the Moon, and those who sent it spinning between the universes—not to converse with these brutish hominids, who were certainly not responsible."
Manekato studied Nemoto. The little creature was watching her with empty, serious eyes. _"Come,"_ said Manekato, and she held out her hand.
Nemoto took it with some reluctance.
Babo turned back to the refinement of his Mapping.
Manekato led Nemoto across the Mapped-in floor of the compound. They passed between structures that had been conjured out of Adjusted Space to shelter the people. Rounded yellow forms, to Mane's taste overornate, they made the compound look like a plate set before a giant, loaded with exotic shapes—and with insectlike humans, Workers, and hominids scuttling across it.
_"You must not let my brother upset you,"_ Manekato said evenly, striving to express herself correctly in the narrow confines of Nemoto's limited tongue.
_"He has no imagination,"_ said Nemoto.
Manekato barked laughter, and Nemoto flinched. _"I'll tell him you said that!... But he means you no harm."_
_"Unlike Without-Name, who does mean harm, and who has far too much imagination."_
_"That is insightful, and neatly phrased."_ She snapped her fingers and a Worker came scuttling. _"Well done, Nemoto. You deserve a banana."_
Nemoto regarded the yellow fruit proffered by the Worker with loathing.
Manekato shrugged. She popped the banana into her mouth and swallowed it whole, skin and all.
Nemoto said cautiously, _"I think your world has no Moon—none but this unwanted arrival."_
Manekato, interested, said, _"And what of it?"_
_"Our scientists have speculated how the destiny of my world might have differed if it had been born without a Moon."_
_"Really?"_ Manekato wondered briefly if "scientists" was correctly translated.
Nemoto took a deep breath. _"Our Moon was born in a giant impact, in the final stage of the violent formation of the Solar System. The effects on Earth were profound..."_
Manekato was fascinated by all this—not so much by the content, which seemed trivially obvious, but by the fact that Nemoto was able to spin together such a coherent statement at all—even if it was delivered in a maddeningly slow drawl. But Nemoto seemed desperate to retain Manekato's attention, to win her understanding—and perhaps her approval.
_"And what difference would all this make to the evolution of life?"_
Nemoto said, _"You come from a world that spins fast. There must be winds there—persistent, strong. Perhaps you were once bipeds, but now you walk on all fours; probably I could not stand upright on your world. Your trees must hugthe ground. And so on. Your air, derived from a primordial atmosphere never stripped off by impact, is thicker than mine, richer in carbon dioxide, probably richer in oxygen. You think fast, move fast, fuelled by the oxygen-rich air."_ She hesitated. _"And perhaps you die fast. Mane, I can expect to live for seventy years—years measured on your Earth, or mine. And you?"_
_"Twenty-five,"_ Manekato breathed. _"Or less."_ She was stunned by Nemoto's sudden acuity—but then the hominid had been observing her for days now, learning about Manekato as Manekato had learned about her; she had simply saved up her conclusions—as a good scientist should.
_"The evolution of life must have been quite different,"_ Nemoto said now. _"With lower tides your oceans must be less enriched of silt washed down from the continents. And there must be less global ocean movement. I would expect a significantly different biota_.
_"As for humans, I believe that our evolutionary paths diverged at the stage we call the 'Australopithecine,' Manekato. But the environment was different on our worlds, evoking a different adaptation. I would hazard that hunting is not a viable strategy for hominids on your world. Probably your short days were simply not long enough. You call yourself 'Farmers.' Perhaps your world encouraged the early development of agriculture."_
_" 'Australopithecines.' I don't know that word."_
_"The hominids called Nutcrackers and Elves here seem to be surviving specimens. From that root stock your kind took one path; mine took another."_
_"But, Nemoto—why do such divergent worlds have people at all? Why would hominid forms evolve on world after world—"_
_"Your kind did not originate on your Earth,"_ Nemoto said bluntly. _"Your scientists must have deduced that much."_
Manekato bristled. She tried to put aside her annoyance at being patronized by this monkey-thing. _"You are right. That much is evident. People share the same biochemical substrate as other living things, but are linked to no animal alive or of the past by any clear evolutionary path."_
_"But on my Earth there_ is _a clear evolutionary path to be traced from humans back into the past."_
_"So you are saying my line originated on your Earth? And how did my Australopithecine grandmothers get delivered to 'my Earth'?"_
Nemoto shrugged. _"Perhaps by this Red Moon, and its blue-ring scoops."_
It was a startling vision—especially coming from the mouth of this small-brained biped—but it had a certain cogency. Manekato was aware her mouth was dangling open; she shut it with a snap of her great teeth. _"Who would have devised such a mechanism? And why?"_
Nemoto's face pulled tight in the grimace Manekato had come to recognize as a smile. _"The Hams have a legend of the Old Ones, who built the world. I am hoping you will find them."_
Manekato glared at Nemoto: She was profoundly impressed by Nemoto's acuity, yet she was embarrassed at her own condescension toward the hominid. It was not a comfortable mixture. _"We will talk of this further."_
_"We must,"_ said Nemoto.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant counted them. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen Runners: eighteen powerful, languid bodies relaxing on the barren ground. The band seemed to be settling here for the night. The three of them—Julia, Malenfant, Hugh McCann—hunkered down in the dirt. The grass beneath Malenfant's scuffed boots was sparse, and the Mars-red dust of the world showed through, crimson-bright where it caught the light of the setting sun.
This swathe of scrubby grassland was at the western border of the coastal forest strip NASA cartographers had christened the Beltway. Farther west of this point, beyond a range of eroded mountains, there was only the arid, baked interior of the great continent, hundreds of miles of red desert, an Australia in the sky. No doubt it was stocked with its own unique ecology exquisitely evolved to maximize the use of the available resources, Malenfant thought sourly, but it was an unremittingly hostile place for a middle-aged American—and of no interest to him whatsoever, unless it held Emma in its barren heart.
McCann moved closer to Malenfant, his buckskin clothes creaking softly. "How strange these pongids are," he said. "How very obviously ante-human. See the way they have made their crude camp. They have built a fire, you see, probably from a hot coal carried for tens of miles by some horny-handed wretch. They even have a rudimentary sense of the hearth and home: Look at that big buck voiding his bowels, off beyond the group—what an immense straining—everything these fellows do is mighty!
"But that is about the extent of their humanity. They have no tools, save the pebbles they pluck from the ground to be shaped; they carry nothing for sentiment—nothing at all, so their nakedness is deeper than ever yours or mine could be. And though they gather in little clusters, of mothers with infants, a few younger siblings, there is no community there.
"If you look into the eyes of a Runner, Malenfant, you see a bright primal presence, you see cleverness—but you do not see a _mind_. There is only the now, and that is all there will ever be. Whatever dim spark of awareness resides behind those deceptive eyes is trapped forever in a cage of inarticulacy... One must pity them, even as one admires them for their animal grace."
Malenfant grimaced. "Another lecture, Hugh?"
McCann sighed. "I have been effectively alone here too long, my reflections on the strange lost creatures who inhabit this place rattling around in my head. Would I were as conservative with my words as dear Julia, who, like the rest of her kind, speaks only when necessary."
Or maybe, Malenfant thought, she just hasn't got much to say to you, or me. He'd observed the Hams chattering among themselves, when they thought no human was watching them. For all his bush craft, McCann's understanding of the creatures around him was obviously shallow.
Without a word, Julia stood up and began to walk across the sparse scrub toward the Running-folk. McCann and Malenfant stayed crouched in the dirt.
The Runners turned to watch her approach. They were silent, still, like wary prey animals.
Julia got as far as the Runners' fire. She hunkered down there, making sure she didn't sit close to the meat. The Runners were still wary—one burly man bared his teeth at Julia, which she calmly ignored—but they didn't try to drive her away.
After a time an infant came up to her, bright eyes over a lithe little body. Julia reached out her massive hand, but its mother instantly snatched the child back.
Malenfant suppressed a sigh. Sometimes Julia would win the Runners' confidence quickly; other times it took longer. Tonight it looked as if Julia would have to spend the night in the Runners' rough camp before they could make any further progress.
As the days had worn on, Malenfant had lost count of the number of Runner groups they had tracked down. Julia was always given the lead, hoping to establish a basis of trust, and then Malenfant and McCann would follow up. Malenfant would produce his precious South African air force lens, his one indubitable trace of Emma, hoping for some spark of recognition in those bright animal eyes.
It hadn't worked so far, and Malenfant, despite his own grim determination, was gradually losing hope. But he didn't have any better ideas.
As Julia sat quietly with the Runners, the light leaked out of the sky. The predators began to call, their eerie howls carrying far on the still evening air.
Briskly, without speaking, Malenfant and McCann built a fire. They used dry grass for tinder, and had brought bundles of wood from the Beltway for fuel.
Malenfant's supper was a few mouthfuls of raw fish. The Runners used their fires primarily for warmth, not cooking. If McCann or Malenfant were to throw this tough, salty fish onto the fire, the smell of burned flesh would spook the Runners and quickly drive them away.
After that it was foot maintenance time. Malenfant eased off his boots and inspected the latest damage. There was a kind of flea that laid eggs under your toenail, and naturally it was Malenfant who was infected. When the critters started to grow in the soft flesh under there, feeding off his damn toe cheese, McCann said Julia would dig them out with her stone knives. Malenfant backed off from that, sterilized his pocket knife in the fire, and did it himself. But, Christ, it hurt, unreasonably so, and it made a bloody mess of his toes; for the next few days he had had a _lot_ of trouble walking.
When he was done with his feet, Malenfant started making pemmican. It was one of his long-term projects. You took congealed fat from cooked fish, and softened it in your hands. Then you used one of Julia's stone knives to grate the cooked flesh into powdery pieces and mixed it with the fat. You added some salt and berries and maybe a little grated nutmeg from McCann's pack, and then pulled the mess apart into lumps the size of a golf ball. You rolled the balls into cocktail-sausage shapes, and put them in the sun, to set hard.
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 skeptical 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 flavored 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. 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, were 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-gray light that turned the crimson sand purple.
The Runners had gone. He could just make them out, slim dark figures against the purple-gray desert, running easily and silently, far away into the desert.
He hadn't even gotten to show them his lens.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
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 semitransparent. 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, threadlike 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 center. 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."
"Perhaps even the great machines of the Old Ones are subject to failure."
"Quantum tunneling," said Babo. "That's how they do it. That's how this thing in the core sends this Moon from universe to universe."
Manekato said, "Tell me what you mean, brother."
"You understand the concept. An electron, say, does not have a precise position or velocity; rather it is embedded in a spreading cloud of probability. Given a measurement of its position, there is a small but finite chance that the electron will next be found—not close to the last position—but far away, outside any cage you care to throw around it—or at the heart of the sun—or in orbit around a distant star..."
"Yes, yes. _Or even another universe_. Is that your point?"
He scratched his head absently. "Well, we know that quantum tunneling can cause the nucleation of a new universe. The vacuum sustains a series of energy levels. A bubble of 'our' vacuum can tunnel to an otherwise empty space-time at a lower energy state, and there expand and become causally disconnected from our own..."
"We are talking of moving not an electron, but a world."
Babo shrugged. "I think we have the pieces of the puzzle now, at least; perhaps understanding will follow."
"In any case, our next object is clear," Manekato said. She pressed a finger into the crater at the top of the tube from the core; she could barely feel the feather-touch of its tiny rim. "We must go to this strange crater, learn all we can—and, perhaps, seek a way to direct the future course of this rogue Moon."
_"The manifold is a sheaf of possible universes,"_ Nemoto said.
Babo grimaced. "What did she say?"
Nemoto went on, _"I understand some of what you say. Perhaps the manifold universes were nucleated from a single primal universe by some such mechanism as quantum tunneling. Perhaps the nucleation of the universes was deliberate. Perhaps the Old Ones lived in the primal universe..."_
Babo bared his teeth at her, and Nemoto fell silent.
Manekato said dryly, "What's wrong?"
"She sees so much," Babo said. "Much further than I imagined. If she sees so much, will she not see that the achievements of the Old Ones are as far beyond us as..."
"As our Farms and our Maps are beyond her poor grasp?" She touched his shoulder, mock-grooming, seeking to calm him. "But would that be so bad? Would it hurt us to learn some of her humility?"
"I don't think she is so humble, Mane. Look at the defiance in that small face. It is unnatural. It is like being challenged by a Worker."
A cry rent the air.
Nemoto turned sharply. Manekato felt her ears swivel. It had been a cry of pain and despair—an animal's cry, but desolating nonetheless.
Nemoto began to run toward the place the cry had come from.
After a moment's hesitation, Manekato hurried after her pet.
_"Oh, let me up; I beg you, Madam Daemon, by the blood of Christ, let me up!"_
It was Without-Name, of course. She had caught another hominid. She had him sprawled on the smooth floor of the compound with her massive foot in the small of the back, so that he could do little but flop like a fish. He was wearing clothes of a cruder design than Nemoto's—scraps of skin sewn together with bits of hide, as if he had clambered inside the gruesome reconstruction of a dead animal. It seemed his capture had not been without incident. Blood leaked from a filthy wound on his forehead, and his right foot was dangling at an awkward angle, just a mass of blood, badly pulped. His blood and snot and sweat, even his urine, had spilled over the floor of Adjusted Space-time.
Others stood around the gruesome little tableau. Manekato was dismayed to see fascination on several faces, as if the blood-soaked allure of this world were seeping into more than one soul.
She rested a hand on Nemoto's shoulder. _"He is a member of your troupe? That is why you are distressed."_
_"No. I have never seen him before. And we don't have 'troupes.' But he is human, and he is suffering."_
Babo challenged Without-Name. "What new savagery is this, Renemenagota of Rano?"
"Am I the savage? Then what is this under my foot? We are not at home now, Manekato—we are not even on Earth. And if we wish to progress our inquiries we must abandon the techniques we would apply on the Earth."
"I don't understand."
"You gaze at a pretty Map while the real world is all around you—vibrant, primal." She slapped at the floor of Adjusted Space. "You even separate yourselves from the dirt. Have you stepped off this platform, Manekato, even once? I tell you, this is not a place for logic and Maps. It is a place of red and green, of life and blood and death—a place for the heart, not the head."
"And your heart tells you to torment this helpless wretch," Babo said.
"But not without a purpose," Without-Name said. "He comes from a troupe of hominids to the north of here. They live in crude shelters of wood and mud, and they call themselves _Zealots_. They are as intelligent as your pet, Manekato—but they are utterly insane, driven by dreams of a God they cannot see." She bellowed laughter, and applied more pressure with her heel to the Zealot's back; he groaned, his eyes rolling, as bones cracked. "These Zealots have been here for centuries. With their feeble eyes, their dim brains, they have seen this world which you are too frightened to touch. _They have seen the workings of the Old Ones_ , for they have been dragged from one cosmos to the next by their meddling. And they have formulated their own ambition in response: to spit in the face of the sky itself." She looked down at the sprawled, twitching hominid. "It is absurd. But in its way, it is magnificent. Hah! _These_ are the creatures of this world. I want to see what they see, know what they know. That way I will learn the truth about the Old Ones—and what must be done to defeat them."
Others growled assent behind her.
Manekato, deeply disturbed, stepped closer to Without-Name. "We did not come here to inflict pain."
"There is no pain here," Without-Name said easily. "For there is no sentience. You see only reflex, as a leaf follows the sunlight."
_"No."_ It was Nemoto. She stepped forward, evading the clutching hand of Manekato.
The nameless one gaped at her, briefly too startled to react.
_"I know that you understand me. I believe your species has superior cognition to my own. But nevertheless we have cognition. This man is aware of himself, of his pain. And he is terrified, for he is aware that you plan to kill him, Renemenagota."_
Without-Name reared up on her hind legs, and the man in the dust howled. _"You will not use my name."_
_"Let him go."_ Nemoto held out her arms, her hands empty.
The moment stretched. Without-Name towered over the slim form of the hominid.
Then Without-Name stepped off the fallen man and pushed him away with her foot. She dropped to her knuckles and laughed. "Your pet has an amusing defiance, Manekato. Nevertheless I tell you that these creatures of the Moon are the key to our strategy here. The key!" And she knuckle-walked away toward the forest, where she blended into the shadows of the trees.
Where she had shoved him, the fallen Zealot had left a trail of urine and blood. Workers hurried forward to tend him, and to clean the mess he had made.
Manekato approached the trembling hominid. _"Nemoto—I am sorry—"_
Nemoto shrugged off her touch. _"So you understand, at last. Let me reward you with a banana."_ And she stalked away, her anger visible in every step, every gesture.
## _R eid Malenfant_
"About the desert," McCann said. He took a half-burned twig and started to scrape at the red dust, sketching out a map. "Here is the Congo—I mean, the great river which rises in the foothills of the great volcano you call the Bullseye, the river that winds its way through the interior of the continent to debouche into the ocean beyond the forests. For much of its length the river's flow is confined to a series of ancient canyons, where the stream is fed by a series of underground tributaries. The north bank is very arid. But on its south bank _—here_ , for example—there are floodplains where the vegetation grows a little more thickly.
"Here is what I propose. We will cut across the plain, meeting the river valley at _this_ point, where there is a crossing place to the south bank, which is the greener. We will follow the river, heading steadily west, following it upstream as it works its way through the mountains, and using the vegetation and its inhabitants as our base resource. Thus we will seek out these shy Runner bands of yours. And if we fail to find your Emma before the character of the country changes—well, we will think of something else."
Malenfant felt tempted to argue with this strategy. But he had no better ideas of how to explore a continent-wide desert, in search of a single person. And there might be a logic to it: Whatever she was doing, whoever she was with, Emma surely couldn't be anywhere else but close to water.
The river, then. He nodded curtly. McCann grinned and scuffed over his map with the sole of his boot.
They heard a cry.
It was Julia. She was hunting a lame deer. She had stripped naked and was running flat out toward it; baffled by a rock outcropping, the animal turned the wrong way, and Julia fell on the animal's neck and wrestled it to the ground.
"Dinner is served," McCann said dryly.
"There must be an easier way to make a living," Malenfant said.
McCann shrugged. "You don't find much to admire about these non-human humans, do you, Malenfant? Don't you envy Julia her brutal strength, her immersion in the bloody moment, her uncomplicated heart?"
"No," Malenfant said quietly.
They entered the desert.
Malenfant sacrificed more parafoil silk to make a hat and a scarf for his neck, and he added a little silvered survival blanket to the top of his hat to deflect the sunlight. After the first couple of days his eyes hurt badly in the powerful light. In his pack was a small chemical-film camera; he broke this open with a rock, and tied the fogged film over his eyes with a length of chute cord.
McCann fared a little better. His ancient suit of skin, well-worn and much-used, had a hood he could pull over his head, and various ingenious flaps he could open to make the suit more or less porous.
Julia's squat bow-legged frame was made for short bursts of extreme energy, not for the steady slog of a desert hike. She struggled as her feet sank into the soft, stingingly hot sand. But she kept on, grinning, self-deprecating, her tongue lolling from her open mouth, her sparse hair plastered to the top of her head.
Anyhow it wasn't a desert, Malenfant supposed; not strictly. Life flourished, after a fashion. In the red dust shrubs and cacti battled for space with the ubiquitous stands of spiky spinifex grass. Lizards of species he couldn't identify scuttled after insects. He spotted a kind of mouse hopping by like a tiny kangaroo. He had no idea how such a creature could survive here; maybe it had some way of manufacturing its own water from the plants it chewed on.
Not a desert, then. Probably a climatologist would call it a temperate semidesert. But it was dry as toast, and hot enough for Malenfant.
It was a relief to them all when they reached the river.
Malenfant and Julia pulled off their clothes and ran with howls of relief into the sluggish water. McCann was a little more decorous, he stripped down to his trousers and paddled cautiously. Malenfant splashed silty-brown liquid into his face, and watched improbably large droplets hover around him; he felt as if his skin was sucking in the water directly through his pores.
Great islands floated past, natural rafts of reed and water hyacinth, emissaries from the continent's far interior, a startling procession of vegetation on its way to the sea. It was a reminder that this single mighty stream drained an area the size of India.
The river flowed sluggishly between yellow sandstone cliffs streaked with white and black. Here and there he saw sandbars strewn with black or brown boulders—mudstones and shales, said McCann, laid down in ancient swamps. The sedimentary strata here were all but horizontal, undisturbed: These were rocks that had remained stable for a great length of time, for a thousand million years and more. This Moon was a small, static world.
Life flourished close to the river. The bank was crowded with plants that craved the direct sunlight, bushes and lianas competing for space. Even behind them the first rank of trees was draped with lianas, ferns, and orchids, overshadowed only by the occasional climbing palm. Wispy manioc shrubs grew on the lower slopes. Speckled toads croaked all along the river bank, and fireflies the size of earwigs, each of them making a spark of green light, danced and darted in the tangled shadows of the trees.
A vast spiderweb stretched between two relatively bare tree trunks. It was heavy with moisture, and glistened silver-white, like strings of pearls. Looking closer, Malenfant saw that many spiders, maybe a hundred or more, inhabited the web. A social species of spider?
Objects hung from the higher branches of the palms, like pendulous fruit, leathery and dark brown, each maybe a foot long.
"They are bats," McCann murmured. "They have wing spans of a yard or more. Those are males. At night they call for the attention of females." He rammed his fingers into his nostrils, and cried, " _Kwok! Kwok!_ And the females fly up and down the line for hours, selecting the male who sings the most sweetly..."
After a time Julia clambered out of the water. She took a handful of palm oil from a wooden gourd in McCann's pack, and worked it into her skin, paying attention to every crease and the spaces between her fingers and toes. When she stood, her skin shone, lustrous. She was silent, beautiful.
McCann went fishing. He found a spot where the bank curved, cupping a still, shallow patch of water, thick with reeds. He took leaves from a pretty little bush with white flowers shaped like bells. He scattered the flowers in the river, over the still spot.
Above the shallower water, by the reed beds, dragonflies hovered and zigzagged, big scarlet creatures the size of small birds. Sometimes they dipped their abdomens into the river, breaking the sluggish, oily surface of the water. Perhaps they were laying eggs, Malenfant mused, wishing he knew more natural history; when you got down to it he knew very little about his own world, let alone this exotic new one.
To Malenfant's surprise, fish started coming to the surface in front of McCann, their fins breaking the oily meniscus, their mouths popping. Evidently they couldn't breathe. McCann, stocky, determined, splashed into the water and started grabbing the fish, holding their tails and slamming their heads against rocks on the bank.
Malenfant thought he saw something move through the water. He scrambled out fast.
It had been bigger than any fish, but not the distinctive shape of a croc or an alligator—something that must have been at least his size, and covered with sleek hair, like a seal. But neither of the others noticed anything, so he didn't mention it.
They spent a day at the side of the river, and replenished their stock of fish, then moved on, heading steadily west.
By noon the following day they had come to a place which showed signs of habitation. A small beach close to the river was littered with blackened scars, perhaps the marks of hearths, and neat rings of holes showed in the ground. When Malenfant walked his boots crunched over a litter of stone tools.
Julia cowered, her huge arms wrapped around her torso.
Malenfant asked, "What is it? A Runners' camp?"
McCann's face was grim. "Runners are not so permanent as this—nor do they make such structures. See these holes? They are for the wooden supports of tents and the like... But see the scattering of the fires, the heaps of discarded tools. Men do not conduct themselves so, Malenfant; we would build a single fire; we would take our tools with us. This is a Ham settlement—or was. And, look, the great thickness of the debris tells of a long occupation, which is of course typical of these dogged, infinitely patient Hams. But it was an occupation that was ended bloodily. Here, and here..." Stains on rocks, that might have been dried blood. "They are recent. It is the Zealots, Malenfant. We must be alert for their scouts."
Julia was clearly distressed here. They moved on quickly.
After that, another day's hike took them to the spot McCann had picked out as a possible crossing place. On the far side of the river, just as he had promised, the land was flatter and less rocky, and there was more life: a few shrubs, some straggling trees, even patches of green grass.
And, stretched between the banks, tied firmly to a rock on either side, there was a rope.
Malenfant and McCann inspected the rope dubiously. It seemed to be of vegetable fiber, woven tightly together into a thick cord.
McCann picked at the rope. "Look at this. I think this material has been worked by teeth."
"It isn't human, is it?"
McCann smiled. "Certainly this is not what our hands would make—but we have never observed the Hams or the Runners use ropes on such a scale, or to have the imaginative intellect to make a bridge—and still less the Elves or Nutcrackers." He looked around coolly. "Perhaps there are others here, other presapient types we have yet to encounter."
Malenfant grunted. "Well, whoever they are, I'm glad they came this way."
Malenfant crossed first. He went naked. He probed at the river bed with a wooden pole as he inched forward, and he dragged another rope, a length of chute cord, tied around his waist. The water never came higher than his ribs.
Once he was across, he and McCann started to transfer their packs of clothes and food. They used a carabiner clip from Malenfant's NASA jumpsuit to attach each pack to the ropes, then pulled at the chute cord to jiggle the packs across.
Julia came next. She entered the water with a dogged determination that overcame her obvious reluctance—which wasn't surprising, as her stocky frame was too densely packed for her to float; whatever else they were capable of, Neandertals couldn't swim. McCann fixed a loop of cord around her waist and clipped her to the chute line with the carabiner clip. Then he and Malenfant kept a tight hold of the chute line as she crossed—though whether they could have retrieved her great weight from the water if something had gone wrong, Malenfant wasn't sure.
It took no more than an hour for them all to get across. They spread out their gear to dry, and rested. Cleansed by the water, lying on warm rocks, Malenfant found he enjoyed the touch of the sun on his face, the arid breeze that blew off the desert.
Julia grunted, pointing at the river. There were creatures in the water.
They were sleek swimmers, their hair long and slicked down, their bodies streamlined. Their hands and feet were clearly webbed—but those hands had five fingers, and the small-brained heads had recognizable eyes and noses and mouths. They were churning in the water, clambering over each other like mackerel in a net. Oblivious of Malenfant and the others, they seemed to be lunging at the sky, their round eyes shining.
They were hominids.
"Swimmers," said McCann morosely. "Sometimes they'll steal fish off your line... The Hams have stories of how a Swimmer will aid you if you get yourself into trouble in the water, but I've never observed such a thing. And, do you know, they appear to sleep with only one eye shut at a time; perhaps they need to keep conscious enough to control their breathing..."
Malenfant imagined a troupe of Australopithecines, perhaps, scooped from some quasi-African plain a couple of million years ago, and dumped by the merciless working of the electric-blue portals on an isolated outcrop of rock on some watery Earth. Ninety-nine out of a hundred such colonies would surely have starved quickly—even if they hadn't drowned first. But a few survived, and learned to use the water, seeking fish and vegetation—and, in time, they left the land behind altogether...
And now here were their descendants, scooped up by another Wheel, stranded once again on the Red Moon.
Hominids like dolphins. How strange, Malenfant thought.
Something immense collided with the back of his head.
He was on the ground. He felt something pushing down on his back. A foot, maybe. One eye was pressed into the ground, but the other was exposed, and could see.
That fat new Earth still swam in the sky.
He heard a commotion. Maybe Julia was putting up a fight. A face—runtish, filthy—eclipsed the Banded Earth.
Once again the back of his head was struck, very hard, and he could think no more.
## _S hadow_
Shadow learned day by day how to live with these new people, here on the slope of the crater wall.
One morning she brought a bundle of ginger leaves she had collected from the forest. She approached the group of women that was, as usual, centered on Silverneck. She sat next to Silverneck, offering the leaves.
A woman called Hairless—left almost totally bald in her upper body by overgrooming—immediately grabbed all the leaves. She passed some to Silverneck and the others. When Shadow tried to get back some of her leaves, Hairless slapped her away.
So Shadow came up behind Hairless and began to groom her. Though Hairless flinched away at first, she submitted.
But now Hairless spotted the baby, clinging to Shadow's neck. She reached out and plucked the baby off Shadow, as if picking a fruit off a branch. Shadow did not resist. Hairless poked her finger in the baby's mouth and fingered his genitals. The baby squirmed, his huge head lolling.
While Hairless probed at her baby, Shadow stole back some leaves.
But Hairless developed a sudden disgust for the malformed infant. She thrust the child back at Shadow, jabbering.
Shadow retreated to the fringe of the group, chewing quietly on her prize.
Shadow was the lowest of the women here. She made her nests on the periphery of the group, and she kept as quiet as possible. Though she clung to Silverneck as much as she could, she was subject to abuse, violence, and theft of her food from men and women alike.
But this community was different from that of Termite and Big Boss. Here, sex was everything.
During some rough-and-tumble play between older infants, a chase and wrestle involved a boy taking the penis of another in his mouth. Soon the wrestling had dissolved into a bout of oral sex and other erotic games, after which the chasing began again.
One day two of the more powerful men came into conflict. One of them was Stripe, the dominant man, a tall, robust man with a stripe of gray hair down one side of his head. The other was One-eye, the shorter, more manic man who had taken it on himself to attack the pack of hyenas with a stick on the day Shadow had joined this new group. The fight, caused when One-eye didn't respond submissively enough to an early-morning show of power by Stripe, escalated from yelling and hair-bristling to a show of shoving and punching. At last one firm kick from Stripe put One-eye on his back.
The smaller man got up, confronting Stripe again. Both men's fur bristled, as if full of electricity—and both had erections. After another bout of shouting, they grew quieter, and One-eye, hesitantly, reached out and took Stripe's erection, rubbing it gently. After a time Stripe's bristling hair subsided, and he briskly cupped One-eye's scrotum.
The contact was quickly over. Neither man reached an orgasm, but orgasms were usually not the point.
Sex was everything. Couplings between men and women, and the older children, were frequent, both belly-to-back and belly-to-belly. Infants became excited during couplings, jumping over the adults involved and sometimes pressing their own genitals against the adults'. But contact between members of the same sex was common, too.
It was a lesson Shadow learned quickly. She learned how to avert a male fist by grasping a penis or scrotum, or taking it in her mouth, or allowing a brief copulation. She earned toleration by groups of women as they fed or groomed by rubbing breasts and genitals, or allowing herself to be touched in turn.
But still, things went badly for her, no matter how hard she worked. She was surrounded by hostility and disgust. The women would push her and her baby away, the men would hit her, and children would stare, wrinkle their noses at her, and throw stones or sticks.
There was something wrong, with herself and her baby. The wrongness began to be embedded in her, so that she accepted it as part of her life.
That was why she submitted to the attentions of One-eye without resisting.
Many of the men, at one time or another, initiated sexual contact with Shadow. She was young, and, save for the lingering _wrongness_ , healthy and attractive. But the contacts rarely led to ejaculation; the man, after being lost briefly in pleasure, would look at her, and his face would change, and he would push her away. After a time most of her contacts came from boys, eager to experiment with a mature woman, and men who for some reason were frustrated elsewhere; she learned to submit to their immature or angry fumblings, and the blows that came with them.
But One-eye was different. Of all the men, One-eye alone developed an obsession with Shadow.
At first his approaches to her were conventional. He would come to her with legs splayed and erection showing, sometimes shaking branches and leaves. She would submit, as she had learned to submit to any demand made of her, and he would take her into the shade of a tree.
But from the beginning his coupling was rough, leaving her breasts pinched and bitten, her thighs scratched and bruised.
After a time his demands became cruder. He would drop the formalities of the invitation and simply take her, wherever and whenever he felt like it—even if she was feeding, or suckling her child, or sleeping in her nest. He seemed to find her exciting and would quickly reach orgasm. But the speed of the couplings did not reduce their violence.
The other women rejected One-eye. If he approached them they would turn away, or run to the protection of the powerful women. His intent, manic strength repelled the women. And so he was forced to prey on the very old and young and weak, who were unable to defend themselves—them, and Shadow, for Shadow got no protection from the other women, not even Silverneck.
Bruised and bloodied, she submitted to his attentions, over and again, and the sex became harsher.
One day Shadow caught a glimpse of one reason why she continued to be shunned.
One-eye had used her particularly hard that day, and some old wounds had been opened by his roughness; she wanted to clear the dirt and blood from the injuries before they began to stink. Deep in the forest, high on the wall of the crater, she found a small, still pool. She leaned over the pool, reaching for the water.
A reflection peered back out at her.
She leapt back, jabbering in alarm. Her infant, feebly crawling in the leaves, fell on her belly and mewled.
Cautiously Shadow crept back to the pond. A face peered out at her, a face made grotesque with a bulbous nose and lumpy protrusions on its cheekbones and brow. The face was alarming and threatening—but of course it was her own face.
Screeching, she dug her fingernails into her face, the swellings there, and tried to rip it off, longing to throw it far away from her. But she succeeded only in making her face bleed, and great crimson drops splashed into the little pool that had betrayed her.
By now, Shadow had no memory of the infected stream from which she had drunk when she crossed the plain, and had no understanding of the fungus infection she had contracted.
She lay down in the leaves, thumb jammed in her mouth. Her child began to sneeze, loudly and liquidly.
Shadow uncurled. She rolled over and picked up her infant. She inspected the child's dribbling nose, then she plucked some leaves and wiped away the snot and dirt. Then she took the softly weeping child to her breast.
Far away she heard a hooting. It was the cry of One-eye, seeking to use her body once more. She curled tighter around her child.
The infant's cold grew steadily worse, developing into a fever that kept him awake during the night.
Shadow quickly grew exhausted, without energy enough even to feed herself, or keep herself properly clean. The swellings on her face now itched constantly. They hurt badly when struck. And they continued to grow, to the point where she could see the fleshy masses framing her eye sockets and cheekbones.
Even in the midst of all this, she was not spared One-eye's voracious demands.
She never resisted him. But out of his sight she would place her sickly infant down carefully on a bed of leaves or a nest of branches. If the coupling permitted it, she would look across that way, and even reach out to touch or stroke the child.
Eventually One-eye noticed this.
It enraged him. He was already lying on top of her. He pinched her chin in his right hand, making her face him, and he punched her hard on the lumps in her brow, making her scream. Then he grabbed her ankles and pushed them back toward her head, and entered her savagely.
When he was done he pushed her away and began to beat her, aiming precise blows at her belly and kidneys. When she curled in on herself he grabbed her arms and pulled her open, making her lie unprotected on her back, and rammed his fist over and over into her solar plexus.
The world dissolved into fragments, red as blood, white as bone.
When she came to she could barely move. Her belly and back were a mass of pain, and one eye was covered with a film of drying blood.
Silverneck had taken her baby. The older woman cradled him on her lap, and was even allowing him to suck on her cracked, dry nipples.
With a groan, Shadow let the world fall away again.
After a time, she was aware of a looming shape before her. Her child was sleeping uneasily at her breast. She cringed, trying to curl tighter.
But a gentle hand touched her shoulder, and pushed her gently back. It was Silverneck. She was carrying a pepper. Its stem had been pulled out, and it was full of water. Shadow drank greedily. But her lips were cracked and swollen, and she felt the water dribble down her chin.
It was dark before she found the strength to clamber a little way up into a tree, and construct a rough nest.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant was bent double. His arms were pinned behind his back. Something was jolting him, over and over. His head felt like it would explode. It was like the feeling you got after a few days on orbit, when your body fluid balance hadn't yet adjusted to microgravity, and blood pooled in your head.
But when he forced his eyes open—the light stabbed bright, making him squint—he saw, in glimpsed shards, a ground of rust-red dust, powerful bare legs pumping.
Not in orbit, it appears, Malenfant. He was being carried over somebody's shoulder, in a fireman's lift. But his head was upside down, and with every step his cheek crashed into the back of his carrier.
He threw up. It was a spasm of gut and throat; suddenly hot yellow-green fluid was spilling down the naked back before his eyes.
There was a loud hoot of protest. With a shrug he was thrown off the shoulder, as if he were as light as a feather, with a good two yards to fall to the ground.
The fall seemed long, slow-motion. He couldn't raise his bound arms to protect himself. He landed headfirst.
When he came to again his head ached even worse than before. He was lying on his side. All he could see was red dust, and a pair of grimy buckskin boots. His legs were free. But his arms, still pinned behind his back, felt like they were half-wrenched out of their sockets.
A buckskin boot dug into his stomach to tip him over, none too gently. He finished up on his back, as helpless as a landed fish. It felt as if his neck was in his own warm vomit.
Faces loomed over him. One pushed closer. It was a bearded man, aged perhaps forty; his face was round, greasy, suspicious.
Malenfant tried to speak. "Let me up," he gasped.
The man's eyes narrowed. "English? But no argot I ever heard. What are you, a Frenchie?" His accent was thick, the vowels twisted, almost incomprehensible.
Somebody said, "He's sick. Leave him. We ain't here for this."
Beyond the bearded man Malenfant saw McCann; he seemed composed, though his arms were bound. "Sprigge. In the bowels of Christ I beseech you. _He is an Englishman_."
The bearded man—Sprigge—glared at McCann. Then he turned back to Malenfant. "Get him up."
Ungentle hands dug into Malenfant's armpits and hauled him off the dirt. He managed to get his feet on the ground. But he couldn't keep his eyes targeted; they slid sideways in their sockets as if he were drunk, and when he was let go he fell back into the dirt.
His NASA boots were gone. His feet were bare, grimy and bleeding. They even took my socks, he thought. He wondered what had happened to his pack.
Sprigge stood over Malenfant again. "Get up or I leave you for the Elves."
Malenfant slumped forward. He managed to get up onto one knee, got one foot on the ground, and pushed himself up. This time he staggered, and his head still spun, but he stayed upright.
McCann said, "You can't expect the man to walk."
Sprigge nodded, and snapped a finger.
A huge Runner stepped up to Malenfant. He was naked, dust-encrusted—and his head was small, like a child's, though his face was weather-beaten and scarred. From the look of the dribble of vomit down his back, this had been Malenfant's reluctant mount.
The Runner kneeled in front of Malenfant, his hands making a stirrup. Malenfant stared stupidly.
McCann said, "Use him, Malenfant." Now Malenfant saw that McCann was sitting on the shoulders of another huge Runner, like a child riding on its father. The Runner's head was bowed, his eyes fixed on the dirt. McCann seemed relaxed, almost comfortable. "Follow my lead, Malenfant. One must keep up the front."
"... I."
Julia walked up to Malenfant. Her head was bowed, and her wraps of skin had been ripped away, leaving her naked. But her hands were unbound.
Sprigge touched his belt, where a whip was coiled.
Julia kept her gaze directed at the dirt, not looking the humans in the face. She said, "Carry Mal'fan'."
Sprigge barked a laugh. "So you use a Ham's quim, Sir Malenfant. Your punishment will sting if you let Praisegod Michael witness such iniquity." But he stepped back.
Julia slid her arms under Malenfant's body and lifted him effortlessly, like a child.
The party formed up and began to move off over the dirt.
The party was made up of perhaps a dozen Runners. Most were naked, though some wore loincloths. Some of them bore heavy packs, or loads on their heads and shoulders. Two of them were dragging the carcass of an immense bull antelope on a crude travois. The rest of the Runners had passengers: buckskin-clothed men sitting on their shoulders, stubby whips in their hands. All the Runners walked silently, just waiting for instruction. Several of them had scars striped on their shoulders and bellies.
There was one other hominid: a Ham, dressed in clothes as comparatively well-stitched as those of the humans. He carried a whip; perhaps he was a supervisor, a boss.
Malenfant saw that Julia's breasts were scratched, as if by fingernails, or teeth. "Did they hurt you?"
She did not answer.
McCann's Runner came trotting alongside. "She shouldn't speak to you, Malenfant," McCann said urgently. "It will be a whipping for her if she does, and perhaps for you. She knows how to behave with these types; you must learn, and fast. These brutes had a little gruesome fun with her, but yon Constable Sprigge stopped them. I sense there is a core of decency in that man, under the dirt and violence. Perhaps that will assist us as we deal with these Zealots..."
"Zealots," Malenfant growled.
McCann said grimly, "I did not expect to encounter them here. They are clearly expanding their area of operations—which is all the worse for us. Listen to me, Malenfant. Your romantic quest for Emma is going to have to wait. It's vital to keep up a front. All that keeps us from doing the carrying rather than being carried is that these fellows accept us as human beings. So you must act as if it is your privilege, no, your _right_ , to use the muscles of these poor creatures as if they belonged to you. And don't forget, you're English." He eyed Malenfant. "A colonial type like you might take it as a great indignity to have to impersonate a Britisher. But I believe any of these ruffians would run you through if they suspected you were a French or a Spaniard or a Portugoose..."
Malenfant said bitterly, "You know what? I miss America. In America you can travel more than a couple of miles without getting robbed, attacked, kidnapped, or trussed up."
"Chin up, sir. Chin up."
Malenfant's thinking dissolved. Lulled by the stink of the dust, his weakness, and Julia's steady warmth, he dozed.
Somewhere thunder cracked, and when he looked up he saw more fat clouds scudding across the sky.
Half a day after the capture of Malenfant and the others, the party reached the fringes of the Zealot empire.
They crossed a plain scattered with broken rock fragments. The rim of a broad young crater loomed over the horizon; perhaps they were in the crater's debris field. In any event it was slow, difficult going, as the Runners had to pick their way past huge sharp-edged boulders.
They came to a place where a thin, sluggish stream ran, and green growing things clustered close to its banks. The land had been cleared. Malenfant saw how the rocks had been piled up into waist-high dry stone walls, mile after mile of them. The rocks must have been broken up before they were moved, a hell of a labor—but then labor was cheap here.
In a field close to the river, a team of Runners was drawing a wooden plough. The four of them were bound together by a thick leather harness, and wooden yokes lay over their shoulders. The Runners were followed by a Ham, a stocky man who carried a long whip.
When Sprigge's party came alongside, the Ham overseer stared at Julia. Then he turned back to his charges and lashed them, a single stroke that cut across all four backs. The Runners, their faces empty, did not look up from the dirt they tilled.
"Good God," Malenfant said, disgusted.
"It would pay you not to blaspheme in this company," McCann said evenly. "And besides, is it any less cruel to use an ox or a horse for such a purpose?"
"Those draught animals aren't oxen, McCann. They are hominids."
"Hominids, but not people, Malenfant," McCann said sadly. "If they have no conception of pain—if even their Ham boss does not—then what harm is done?"
"You can't believe that's true."
McCann said stiffly, "I would sooner believe it than join those poor Runner gentlemen behind their plough."
They passed a small farmhouse, just a rough sod hut. In a yard of red mud, children were playing—they looked like human children, a boy and a girl. They gazed at the approaching party, then ran into the hut. A man emerged from the hut, stripped to the waist, bareheaded. He looked apprehensive.
From his Runner mount, Sprigge nodded to him. "No tithes to collect today, George."
'Aye, Master Sprigge.' The man George nodded back, cordially enough, but his eyes were wary, fixed on Sprigge as if he were a predator.
They moved on, following the river as it worked its way toward the Beltway forest. As the land became less arid, the cultivation spread away from the river bank. Soon Malenfant was surrounded by fields, toiling hominids, an occasional human. It might have been a scene from some vision of the old west, or maybe the European Middle Ages, if not for the humanoid forms of the beasts of burden here, the unmistakeably Neandertal features of their supervisors, and the unremitting crimson glower of the land itself.
But this was a genuine colony, he thought, a growing community, for all its ugliness—unlike the dying, etiolated English camp.
Rain began to fall. The rough path by the riverbank soon turned to mud, and the party trudged on in miserable silence. Malenfant tucked his head closer to Julia's chest. With remarkable kindness she leaned over him and sheltered him from the rain with her own bare back, and Malenfant could not find the strength to protest.
Again he dozed.
When he woke, he was dumped on his feet. They had reached the Zealot fortress, it seemed.
They were in a clearing, surrounded by dense wood; Malenfant hadn't even noticed they had come back to the forest. Ditches, ramparts, gates, and drawbridges stretched all the way around the township. Sharpened stakes were stuck in the sides of the ramparts, so that the compound bristled, like some great hedgehog of wood and mud.
A big gate was opened. They were pushed inside.
The encampment was a place of rambling muddy paths and ugly, low-tech buildings placed haphazardly. There was one central building that looked more sturdily built, mud brick on a wooden frame, like a chapel. Aside from that, the huts were so rough they seemed to have grown out of the debris that littered the muddy ground. They were built of stripped saplings and wattles, and laid over with palm fronds. Everything showed signs of much use and recycling; here was half of what looked like a dugout canoe, for example, serving as a chicken coop.
There were no straight lines anywhere, no squares or rectangles, no hard edges; everything was sloppy, all the lines blurred. It was as if the first arrivals here had just marked out trails where they wandered and put up their wattle-and-daub huts where they felt like. There was none of the regularity and discipline of the British compound: Malenfant sensed McCann's impatience at this disorderliness.
Malenfant's arms were untied. He could barely move them because of cramp, and he could feel where the cord had cut into his wrists.
With McCann, he was pushed into a dark, stinking sod hut. He couldn't see what had become of Julia. The hut was dark, the floor was just mud, uneven. A door of saplings bound together by liana twine blocked the door.
Malenfant limped to a dark corner and slumped there. The floor was greasy and black; when he lifted his hand a great slick sheen came away with it. The whole place stank like a toilet.
Termite passageways, like the stems of some dead plant, curled up the walls and disappeared into the wooden beams and the thatch. A gecko clambered across the ceiling, incurious.
He hadn't eaten or drunk anything since being hit over the head by the Zealots. He felt as if he had been systematically pummelled, all over his body, with a baseball bat. And here he was in some quasi-medieval prison block, lying in filth. The world he had come from—of NASA and Houston and Washington, of computers and phones and cars and planes—seemed utterly unreal, evanescent as the shining surface of a bubble, a dream.
What a mess, he thought.
McCann was waxing enthusiastic. "I see the pattern, Malenfant. The Hams and Runners surely do not have the wit to be rebellious or to long for escape; unlike human slaves it is unlikely they can conceive of _freedom_. Besides, if you get them young enough, you can quite easily break their spirits, as with a young horse. If each man controls, say, ten of the Ham bosses, and then each Ham in turn controls ten Runners, you have a formidable army of workers. And at the top of it you have this fellow Praisegod Michael of whom Sprigge has spoken, who creams off the tithes. It is like a vast, spreading, self-sustaining—"
"Prison camp," Malenfant said sourly.
"Oh, much more than that, Malenfant. Think how carefully the strata of this little society are defined. You have the humans, with of course their own ranks and order. Beneath them you have your Hams, who in turn lord it over the Runners. And since in this case each lower rank is clearly the intellectual inferior of that above, you have a social order that reflects the natural order. It is a hierarchy as stable as a cathedral."
Malenfant growled, "I thought you despised the Zealots. You wouldn't tell me a damn word about them."
"I think I am beginning to see I have underestimated them, Malenfant. Oh, this is a place of repellent squalor, of blood, and mud. It _is_ cruel, Malenfant. I don't deny it. But those subject to the greatest cruelty, as far as I can see, are those least capable of perceiving it. And as a social arrangement it is intricate and marvelous. One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one's moral qualms."
He sounded brittle, almost feverish, Malenfant thought dully. This bizarre mood of his, his fan-worship of the Zealots, could probably evaporate as fast as it had come.
The hell with it. Malenfant closed his eyes.
But still, he saw Emma's face in his mind's eye, bright and clear, as if she stood before him. He probed a pocket on his sleeve. The spyglass lens still nestled there, hard and round under his fingers, comforting.
McCann went to a window—just a hole in the wall, unglazed. He called, "We need water and food. And tell him, Sprigge! Tell your Praisegod Michael we are Englishmen! It will go worse for you if you fail!"
McCann shook him awake. "We have an invitation to dinner, Malenfant! How jolly exciting."
A sullen Zealot had brought them a wooden pail of water. They both inspected this suspiciously; they were ferociously thirsty, but in the dim light diffusing from the window, the water looked cloudy.
McCann shrugged. "Needs must." He plunged his hands into the water and scooped up mouthfuls, which he gulped down.
Malenfant followed suit. The water tasted sour, but it had no odor.
When they were done they used the rest of the water to wash themselves. Malenfant cleaned dried blood and grit out of wounds on his bare feet, wrists, and neck.
McCann used the water to slick down his hair. He even produced a tie from one jacket pocket and knotted it around his neck. "Impression is everything," he said to Malenfant. "Outer form. Get that right and the rest follows. Eh?"
The door was pushed open, its leather hinges creaking. Sprigge walked in, looking as dusty as when they had all walked in from the plains. "You have your wish, gentlemen." He raised his fist. "But any defiance or dissimulation and you'll know my wrath."
McCann and Malenfant nodded silently.
They were led out of the hut, into a broad compound. It was raining, and the evening was drawing in. The ground was just red dirt, hard-packed by the passage of human feet. But it was heavily rain-soaked, and Malenfant felt the mud seep between his naked toes.
People moved between the huts, carrying food and tools or leading children by the hand. They seemed to be humans, but they were small, skinny, stunted folk, dressed in filthy skin rags. There were no lanterns, and the only light inside the huts came from fire hearths.
McCann murmured to him like a tour guide. "They do not approach us; the authority of this Praisegod Michael of theirs is binding. Look there. I think that hut yonder is a house of ill-fame."
"A what?... Oh. A brothel."
"Yes, but a brothel stocked with Runners—women and boys, so far as I can tell. There are contradictions here, Malenfant. We have a community run by this Praisegod fellow, seemingly on rigid religious lines. And yet here is a bordello operating openly."
The rain grew heavier. The Zealot compound was turning to a muddy swamp. The buildings seemed to slump in defeat, as if sliding back down into the earth from which they had been dragged. And the people, humans, Runners, and Hams alike were wan figures, all the same dun color, images of misery.
McCann stamped through puddles contemptuously. "These people don't know what they are doing," he barked. "We coped rather better. Culverts! Storm drains!" And with broad sweeps of his arms he sketched an ambitious drainage system.
They were brought to the compound's central structure, the solid-looking chapel. Well, maybe it really was a chapel; now Malenfant saw it had a narrow spire.
Sprigge led the two of them along a short, dark hallway. Grilles of tightly interwoven wooden laths were set in the floor. Malenfant glanced down. He thought he saw movement, eyes peering up at him. But the light was uncertain.
They arrived at a large, bright room. It had neat rectangular windows—unglazed, but covered with sheets of what looked like woven and scraped palm leaves, so that they admitted a cool yellow light. Lanterns burned on the walls, each just a stone bowl cupping oil within which a wick floated, burning smokily. At the head of the room was a stone fireplace, impressively constructed from heavy red blocks—perhaps ejecta from the crater field they had crossed. No fire burned beneath the blackened chimney stack, but there was a large, impressive crucifix set over the fireplace. At the other end of the room was a plain altar, set with goblets and plates, all of it carved from wood.
At the center of the room was a small, unevenly made, polished wooden table. A man sat behind the table, eating steadily. There were no plates; the man ate bits of fish and meat off what looked like slabs of thick bread.
The man wore a black robe that swept to the ground, with a napkin thrown over his shoulder. A band of silver-gray hair surrounded a crown that looked shaved, like a tonsure. His narrow face was disfigured by warts.
This was, presumably, Praisegod Michael. He ignored Malenfant and McCann.
Behind Praisegod two Ham women stood, backed up against the wall. They were both dressed in modest, all-covering dresses of soft leather, and they kept their eyes on the floor.
Sprigge nudged McCann, and indicated they should sit on the floor before the table. McCann complied readily enough. Malenfant followed his lead. Sprigge stepped back, and took a station at the corner of the room.
As Praisegod Michael ate, everybody in the room waited in silence.
Malenfant couldn't take his eyes off the food.
There was a puree of what looked like chicken mixed in with rice and some kind of nuts. An animal like a young piglet, roasted, had been carved and set before Michael, and he picked at its white flesh. Other side dishes included some kind of beans cooked in what smelled like meat stock, and mushrooms in a kind of cream, and a green salad. There was even wine—or anyhow it looked like wine, served in a delicately carved wooden goblet.
At length Praisegod Michael slowed down. More than half the piglet was left on its serving plate. Michael belched, and mopped his lip with a scrap of cloth.
Then he looked up, directly into Malenfant's eyes. Malenfant was jolted by the intensity of his gaze.
One of the Ham women behind him stepped forward. Malenfant was startled to recognize Julia. With heavy grace she took the unfinished dishes from Michael, and set them on the floor before McCann and Malenfant.
Malenfant reached straight for the pork, but McCann touched his arm.
McCann closed his eyes. "For this blessing, Lord, we thank You."
Michael watched coldly.
Now McCann began to eat, using his fingers to tear at the pork. Malenfant followed suit.
Michael spoke. "Your Ham girl is well-tempered," he said to Malenfant. His voice was deep, commanding, but his accent was powerfully strange.
Malenfant said, "She isn't _my_ anything."
McCann said quickly, "She has an even nature, and is wise for a Ham."
Michael's gaze swivelled to McCann. "I know of you, or at least men who speak like you. Once one was brought here."
McCann blanched. "Russell. Is he—"
"He died for his sins."
There was a long silence. McCann's eyes were closed, even as he chewed steadily on the meat. Then he said carefully, "There are only a handful of us—a handful, and Hams and Runners. We have no women, no children. We are weak old men," he said, looking directly at Michael. "We are no threat to your—umm, your expansion."
Michael got out of his chair. Tall, cadaverously thin, his arms clasped before his belly, he walked around the table and studied McCann and Malenfant. "My soldiers will spare them."
"They live in God," McCann said fervently.
Michael nodded. "Then let them die in God. But you talk of an _expansion_."
McCann said hastily, "I am sorry if—"
"Whenever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down, for He alone will be exalted," said Praisegod Michael. His speech was rapid, his delivery flat. He laid his hand on Julia's flat brow; she did not react. "My language is not of kingdoms and kings, empires and emperors. No king I, but a Protector," he said.
McCann was nodding vigorously. "I see that. Yes, I see that. As men we are different—we come from different worlds—but differences between men are as nothing compared to the gulf between men and animals. There are few enough strong men scattered over this world, Praisegod Michael, to shoulder the responsibility."
Michael regarded him. "God hath poured this confused nation from vessel to vessel, until He poured it into my lap. Perhaps it is divine providence that brings you here."
McCann smiled. "Providence, by God's dispensation. Indeed."
Praisegod Michael turned to Malenfant. "And what of this one? His eye is defiant, his accent strange. What is your religion, man? Popish? Atheistical?"
McCann said quickly, "His faith is as strong as mine."
Michael smiled thinly. "Then perhaps he will have the courage to say it for himself." He seemed to come to a decision. "You are right. There are few enough decent men here. But can I trust you?... Tomorrow we hunt. Accompany me, and we will talk further." He knelt before his altar, his eyes closed.
Sprigge motioned Malenfant and McCann to follow him out of the room.
Back in their crude hut, McCann seemed excited. "He is English—that is clear enough—but I would say that his history must have split off from our own no later than our seventeenth century... Perhaps you number your dates differently. Well, it looks as if the Zealots have been here since then. But they seem to have made no significant progress, socially or mechanically, since those days..."
Malenfant said sourly, "What difference does it make?"
" _We understood each other_ , Malenfant. Don't you see? Myself and this Praisegod. His is a faith which has much in common with my own. He spoke of providences. Through providences, you see, God intervenes in the world, to make His will visible. And I have no doubt that Praisegod will count himself among the Elect—that is, those who are already destined to be saved—but he has surely been cast in a world of Reprobates, the already damned." He smiled, and his eyes glinted in the dark. "I understand him. I can do business with this man."
Malenfant frowned. "But his 'business' seems to be to enslave those he regards as lesser than him."
"Ah, but that's the delicious irony of it all, Malenfant—oh, but I forget, you slept and did not see—I spied a man coming out of the Runner bawdy-house, his trousers dangling around his knees. A more unspeakable wretch you never saw. But _I could make out clearly that he had a tail_. Malenfant, our grandiloquent Praisegod Michael, the savior of the world, has a monkey's tail!"
After a minute, Malenfant began to laugh. McCann joined in. Once they started, they couldn't stop.
## _J oshua_
Joshua and Mary, breathing hard, stepped gingerly over crushed branches and uprooted shrubs. They reached the edge of the cliff and peered down. The sky seed still lay where it had fallen when they had pushed it over the cliff: trapped well below the lip of the cliff, pinned by a ledge and a thick knot of shrubbery.
Joshua grinned. Every few days he had come clambering up the trail to this battered clearing, to see again what they had done to the sky seed.
The seed was safe here. The feeble muscles of the Zealots would never succeed in hauling this prize up from such a place—and the Nutcracker-folk, though good climbers, were surely too stupid even to envisage such a thing. Only the People of the Gray Earth, with their brains and powerful bodies, could retrieve the sky seed from where it rested, pinned against the cliff's gray breast—
Voices screamed, all around them.
They whirled, shocked.
There were only trees and bushes and leaves, some of them shaking violently, as if in a wind, though there was no wind.
From nowhere a spear flew. It lanced into Joshua's shoulder, neatly puncturing it through.
He was knocked back. He fell on the spear. It twisted, and there was savage pain.
And now something new descended over him, a thing of ropes and threads knotted together, that tangled up his legs and arms and head.
Leaves and twigs fell away, and suddenly there were people: men, all around them. They were Skinnies. They carried spears and knives that glinted. Still screaming, they threw themselves forward. It had all happened in a heartbeat, overwhelming, bewildering. The Zealots had just melted out of the trees: One instant they were not there, the next they were there, an overwhelming magic beyond Joshua's experience.
Their blows and kicks were feeble, but there were many of them, and they clung to Joshua's limbs while punching his stomach and chest and head. He heard Mary cry out, an angry, fearful roar.
"... Looks like Tobias was right. A fine old pair we trapped here!"
"Wrap up yon buck and give us a hand with the maid, will you? She's struggling like a bear..."
Joshua lay passively, defeated by shock as much as the spear, peering up at the indifferent sun. He saw that the men had got Mary on the ground, and had ripped open her skins.
"By the tears of the Lord—"
"Get her legs. Get her legs."
"The buck is for the minister. This one's for us, eh, lads?"
"Face like a bear but the tits of an angel. She's going to take a bit of stilling, though..."
Joshua came to himself. With a bellow he wrenched himself over, rolling onto his belly. Zealots, yelling, went flying. For a moment he was free of their weight and their blows. But the spear ground into the dirt, opening his wound wider, and he cried out.
But Joshua's struggle had distracted Mary's attackers, and she had got one arm loose. With a fist more massive than any Skinny's, she pounded at the temple of one of her assailants. Joshua heard the crunch of bone; a Zealot went down.
"God's wounds. Peter—Peter!"
"Get her, lads!"
Mary struggled to her feet, her ripped skins swinging, her small breasts glistening with blood. She had her back to the forest. The men, all save the fallen one, made a half-circle to face her, wielding their weapons. Their lust had been replaced by caution, Joshua saw, for even a half-mature Ham girl, if free, was more than a match for any one of the Skinnies.
But she could not defeat them all.
With a last, regretful glance at Joshua, she turned and crashed into the trees. Though she made an immense racket, she had soon disappeared out of sight, and Joshua knew that the Zealots could not follow her.
He let his head slump to the blood-soaked ground beneath his face.
A shadow crossed him. "This is for Peter."
A boot hurled at his face.
## _R eid Malenfant_
The morning after their capture, Malenfant and McCann found their door was not barred, no guard posted.
They crept out into light still tinged gray with dawn.
Already the business of the day was starting. Runners and Hams were working silently to sweep the ground clear of yesterday's debris, and to fill the water casks that sat outside each hut. It was strange to see specimens of _Homo neandertalensis_ and _erectus_ dressed in crudely-sewn parodies of clothing, their heads and bodies strikingly misshapen in the uncertain dawn light, coming and going as they pursued their chores. It was like a mockery of a human township.
Away from the Zealots, neither Hams nor Runners made any attempt to use human language; they simply got through their work with steady dullness, united in blank misery.
There was a specialized group of Runners who were used solely to carry passengers. Some of them wore primitive harnesses. But these unfortunates were stooped, with overdeveloped shoulders and necks, and what looked like permanent curves to their backs. Their shoulders and thighs bore bright red weals.
Malenfant said, "Look at those scars. These Zealot jockeys don't spare the whip."
McCann grunted, impatient. "Have you much experience in the husbandry of animals, Malenfant? None of them look terribly _old_ , do they?—I would wager that under excessive loading their bodies break down rather rapidly once the flush of youth is over.
"But the whip is surely necessary. In Africa I knew a man who tried to train elephants. You may know that while your Indian elephant has been tamed by the locals for centuries, your African runs wild. My acquaintance struggled to master his elephants, even though he imported experienced mahouts from India; freedom runs in the blood of those African tuskers, and they are far more intelligent than, say, a horse."
"Hence the whip."
"Yes. For it is only by severe and strict punishment that such intelligent beasts can be controlled. Even then, of course, you can never be sure; even in India the tamest-looking elephant with a grudge against his mahout may wait years, decades—but he will take his one chance and gore or trample his tormenter, careless of his fate.
"Now your Runner, who is after all a man, if a different stripe of man, is surely more intelligent than an elephant. Hence, as you say, the whip. And perhaps other practices have been developed. See there—that grizzled, rather bent old chap is tied up to the boy." The old man and the boy, sitting in the dirt, listless and naked, were attached by tight bonds around their ankles. "If you want to break an animal you will sometimes put him in with an older beast. The tamed creature may prove an example in the work to be done, and so forth. But in addition the young perceives there is no hope, you see, and quits his rebelliousness sooner."
Malenfant said, "I don't understand why these Runners don't just up and get out of here."
McCann pulled his walrus moustache. "These boys have probably been in captivity since they were very young—either born here, or wrest from their dead mothers' arms in the wild. They know nothing else; they cannot imagine freedom. And these wretches could not run off if you turned them free tomorrow. See how they limp—the scars on the backs of their ankles? Hamstrung. Perhaps that explains their demeanor of defeat. They are creatures evolved, surely, for one thing above all else—running—and if they cannot run anymore, they have no aspiration. Perhaps it is humane to excise the very possibility of escape; believe me, hope harms a creature far more than despair ever did..."
Praisegod Michael emerged from his chapel-like residence. His black robe flapped about his ankles, heavy, as he walked. He threw his arms wide, loudly sniffing the air. Then he fell to his knees, bowed his head, and began to pray.
Praisegod's hunting party formed up rapidly. There were to be five humans (or near-humans)—Praisegod, his man Sprigge and one other Zealot, and Malenfant and McCann—along with four Hams and ten Runner bearers.
One of the Hams was just a child, about the size of a human ten-year-old. This boy seemed dressed in clothing of a somewhat finer cut than most of the Zealots. Praisegod kept him close by, sometimes resting his hand on the boy's flattened skull, or cupping him under his chinless jaw. The boy submitted to this, and ran small errands for Praisegod.
Five of the Runners were to carry equipment—homemade spears and crossbows. The rest were there to carry the humans.
Malenfant's mount was to be one of the older, more broken-down specimens he had observed that morning. The hominid stood before him, as tall as Malenfant despite his stoop, his very human eyes empty of expression.
Malenfant flatly refused to climb aboard his shoulders.
McCann leaned toward him. "For God's sake, Malenfant," he hissed.
Praisegod Michael watched this with a thin amusement. "Do you imagine you spare this stooped one discomfort or indignity? There is no soul behind those deceptive eyes, sir, to experience such complicated passions. I trust your compassion will not pour away when your bare feet are bleeding and sore... But perhaps you are right; he is rather worn down." He nodded to Sprigge.
Sprigge tapped the old Runner's elbow, and he obediently knelt on the ground. Sprigge stepped behind him and drew a knife from his belt—metal, very old, sharpened and polished until the blade was a thin, fragile remnant.
"Shit." Malenfant lunged forward, but McCann grabbed his arm.
Distracted by the commotion, the Runner saw the knife. His battered face twisted in animal rage. He started to rise, perhaps for the first time in his life defying those who used him.
But Sprigge wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his back. He sliced the knife through the old Runner's throat. Blood spurted, a brighter red shining in the crimson dirt. Still the Runner fought; he didn't stop struggling until his head had been all but sawn off his body.
McCann released Malenfant. "The rogue elephant and the mahout, Malenfant," he whispered grimly. "And if you defy, you will only make matters worse for the creatures here."
"Thank you, sir," Praisegod said to Malenfant, his look calculating, mocking. "You perceived a lack which I have been remiss in correcting. Well, it is done, and the sun is already high. Come now." And he slapped the face of his own mount, who trotted away to the west, away from the rising sun.
The others hastily mounted, and the hunting party proceeded at a steady jog after Praisegod, the Runners' bare feet thumping into the earth, the Hams following the graceful Runners as best they could with their awkward, bow-legged style.
They reached the fringe of the forest, and moved out onto the plain.
The forest floor hadn't been so bad for Malenfant's bare feet, save for bites, for which he'd no doubt suffer later. But after a half-mile of desert his feet were aching and bloody. And as the miles wore away he began to dig deep into his already shallow reserves of energy. Malenfant knew they had had no choice but to go along with Praisegod Michael's invitation to join his hunt, which was obviously some kind of bullshit character test. He tried to see it as an opportunity. But there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
He found his thoughts dissolving, his purpose reducing merely to a determination to keep one foot moving in front of the others, to show no weakness.
The weather fell apart. A lid of boiling cloud settled over the sky, making the small world seem flat and enclosed, washing the colors out of everything. And then the rain came, a ferocious storm that stippled the crimson sand with miniature craters. Much of the water drained quickly into the dry soil, but soon rivulets were running over the ground, and the sand turned into clinging mud.
Praisegod called a halt. The humans dismounted. Malenfant rested, hands on his knees, breathing deep of the thin air.
Under the brisk supervision of the Hams, the Runners unloaded sheets of sewn-together leather. They quickly put together a kind of teepee.
The Zealots, with McCann and Malenfant, huddled in the teepee. Inside there was a stink of old leather and damp bodies and clothing. The other hominids were excluded—all save Praisegod's Ham boy, who snuggled close to the Zealot; Praisegod stroked his cheek with in-turned fingers. The other Hams had a few sections of skin that they held up over themselves, to keep the rain off their heads.
As for the Runners, they had no shelter at all. They huddled together under a rain so thick it turned the air gray, their knees tucked into their chests, naked, visibly shivering.
McCann saw Malenfant watching the Runners. "You should not concern yourself," he said. "In the wild they have no conception of shelter. If it rains they get wet; if they catch a chill they die. Nothing in their present circumstances changes that."
Praisegod had been reading passages in a book, a clumsy thing of scraped-leather pages, presumably a Bible or a prayer book. He leaned forward, as if trying to find a more comfortable position for the comical, stubby tail he must have curled up under his robe. "I suspect you fear the rain, Malenfant."
Malenfant frowned. "Ah, bullshit. All this turbulent weather has got to be a result of that new Earth in the sky. It's a bigger world: You're going to get tides, quakes, atmospheric disruptions—"
"Your language is a jabber. Perhaps you believe the rain will wash away this puny world, and you along with it. Well, it will not; for if this island resisted the very Flood itself, a little local rain will not harm it now."
"Ah." McCann was smiling. Malenfant could tell what he was thinking. _This is what this guy believes. Don't say anything to contradict him_. McCann said, "We are on an island, an island that survived the Flood. Yes, of course." He glanced out at the huddled Runners. "And that explains _them_."
Praisegod said, "They are less than men yet more than the animals. What can they be but _Homo diluvii testi_ —witnesses of the Flood? This island was spared the rising waters; and so were its inhabitants, who must have crowded here with the ignorant instincts of any animal."
"Then," said McCann carefully, "we are privileged to glimpse the antediluvian order of things."
"Privileged or damned," Sprigge muttered, staring at the Neandertal boy on Praisegod's lap. "This place is an abomination."
"Not an abomination," snapped Praisegod. "It is like a strange reflected Creation. Man was born to look up at the orders of beings above him, the angels, prophets, saints, and apostles, who serve the Holy Trinity. Here, we look _down_ , down on these creatures with men's hands and faces and even tongues, but creatures without mind or soul, who sprawl in the mud."
They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust. But Malenfant slowly learned something of Praisegod Michael.
The Zealot township had been a godless place when Praisegod was a child, given to anarchy and lawlessness, weakened by the endless green lure of the forest. But—so Michael was told by his parents—God was involved in every detail of life. God watched the daily deeds of men and punished their sins, and the Elect—those who obeyed God's law—would be saved. Praisegod learned this in prayer and torment, in misery and distrust, at the hands of what sounded to Malenfant like abusive parents.
And then they abandoned him, just melted away into the bush, leaving the child to the tender mercies of the townspeople.
Life had been very hard for the young Praisegod, it seemed. But eventually he had rediscovered the religion inside himself. He drew strength from this inner core. And when the growing, toughening Praisegod had come to see that he himself was one of the Elect, his duty had become clear: to devote himself to God's fight and the establishment of His kingdom on this fragmentary world.
He had pursued that goal from then on with an ever-burning zeal and an unswerving fixity of purpose that had turned this gaunt, lisping, wart-ridden preacher into something like a man of true destiny.
But there was a cost, of course.
To the Zealots, it seemed to Malenfant, the other hominids, the presapients, barely even existed. They had no language, no clothing, no religion, and therefore they had absolutely no rights under God or man. They were animals, no more than that, regardless of the curiosity of their gaze, the pain in their cries, their misery in enslavement: simply a resource for exploitation.
Malenfant leaned forward. "I'm curious. What do you want, Praisegod Michael? What do you want to achieve among all these animals?"
Michael's eyes were bright. "I seek only to emulate Ramose, who led his nation out of Egypt to the land of Canaan..." Malenfant soon realized that this "Ramose" was a kind of analogue of Moses from his own timeline, like the John who had replaced Christ in McCann's history. "I believe I have seen the providence of God, for surely it is by His dispensation I have been given my place here. And I have no choice but to follow that providence."
McCann seemed to be growing agitated. "But one must search for the truth of providences, Praisegod Michael. One must be wary of the exaltation of the self."
Michael just laughed. "You have not lived in this land long. You will learn that it is only _I_ who stands between these mindless apes and chaos itself." His hands, apparently without conscious volition, stroked the Neandertal boy's broad chest. He glanced out of the teepee's flap door; the rain had slackened. "Come. Time enough for theology later. For now there is a hunt to be made, bellies to be filled." And he led the way out of the teepee.
"The man is too much," McCann said, glowering at Praisegod's back. "He takes divinity on himself. He is close to blasphemy. He likens himself to Bay—that is, his own twisted version of Bay." Malenfant guessed that Bay was another of Moses' parallel-historical pseudonyms. "Malenfant, the man is a self-aggrandizing monster. He must be stopped. Otherwise, what will come to pass, as Praisegod's blasphemous hordes swarm like locusts over this wretched Moon?"
Malenfant shrugged. For all McCann's talk of Praisegod's ambitions, he found it hard to take seriously anybody who lived in a mud hut. "He's vicious. But he's a shithead. Anyhow I thought you were going to do business with him."
McCann glared at him, angry, frustrated. And Malenfant saw that McCann's mood had switched, just as he had feared. It was as if a veneer had been stripped away.
Malenfant felt only dismay. He just wanted to get out of here; if McCann went off the rails, he had no idea how he was going to handle the situation.
Now there was a commotion up ahead. Sprigge had reached the huddle of Hams. Two of them were standing unsteadily, while the third sprawled in the mud. Sprigge began to beat the Hams vigorously.
"It is the wine," Praisegod remarked. "They steal it from us and hide it in their clothing. Though their bellies are large, their brains are small, and they cannot take it as men can."
The Runners watched apathetically as the Hams were chastised.
The sky cleared rapidly. Through high thin clouds the sunlight returned. The red dust began to steam under their feet, making the air humid.
A little after noon, they reached the fringe of a belt of dense forest. They made a rough camp in the shade of the wood, spreading out their clothes and goods to dry. The Runners were tied up by their necks or ankles to tree trunks, but were able to forage for food among the roots of the trees.
McCann nodded. "Efficient. It saves their carrying their own provision. And while their fingers are nimble with food, their minds are too empty to puzzle out knots."
Sprigge was to lead a hunting party into the forest. He would take four Runners, and—as a punishment—all three Hams, who seemed to have crashed into catastrophic hangovers. Both McCann and Malenfant were invited to join them; McCann agreed to go, but Malenfant refused.
Praisegod settled down on a sheet of leather. The other Zealot, a squat, silent man, dug foodstuffs from out of the Runners' packs and laid them out. Praisegod nibbled on nuts, fruit, and dried meat; he pressed tidbits into the mouth of his Ham boy, fingering the child's lips each time.
Malenfant sat in the dirt, waiting for a turn at the food. The silent Zealot sat alone some distance away, chewing on something that looked like beef jerky; he watched Malenfant warily.
Praisegod said, "So you declined to join the hunt, Sir Malenfant." He smiled coldly. "You are not a hunter, then—not a woodsman or a man of the heath either, I would say. What, then? A scholar?"
"A sailor, I guess."
"A sailor." Praisegod chewed thoughtfully. "In my father's day some effort was made to escape this antediluvian island. Men took to the desert, which stretches west of this place. And they built boats and took to the sea, which stretches away to the east. Most did not come back, from either longitude. Those who did reported only emptiness—deserts of sand or water, the land populated by lowly forms. Of course you and your friend have yet to confess what marvelous ship, or providential accident, brought _you_ here."
"So that you can use it to get out of here," Malenfant said cautiously. "Is that what you want?"
Praisegod said, "I do not long for escape. I know what _you_ want, Reid Malenfant, for I have discussed your state of mind with your wiser companion. You seek your wife. You have wagered your life, in fact, on finding her. It is a goal with some nobility, but a goal of the body, not the soul."
Malenfant smiled coldly. "It's all I have."
The hunting party returned.
Two of the Runners carried limp, hairy bodies, slung over their shoulders. They looked to Malenfant like the chimplike Elf-folk. One was an adult, but the other was an infant, just a scrap of brown-black fur. The other two Runners bore a net slung on a horizontal pole. A third Elf squirmed within the net, frightened, angry, jabbering, a bundle of muscle and fur and long, humanlike limbs. Malenfant could see heavy, milk-laden breasts.
Praisegod got up to greet the party, an expression of anticipation on his cadaverous face. His Ham boy clung to Praisegod's robe and stayed behind him, evidently frightened of the Elf's jabber. Under Sprigge's sharp commands, two of the Runners and the Hams set to constructing a large fire, with a spit set over it.
McCann approached Malenfant, his hands scratched by branches and brambles, his face red with exertion. His mood seemed to have swung again. "Quite an adventure, Malenfant! You should have seen it. The Runners are remarkable. They crept like shadows through that forest, closing on those helpless pongids like Death himself. They caught these three, and though the Elves fought, our fellows would have despatched them all in seconds if not for Sprigge's command..."
The Hams had wrestled the live Elf to the ground, and were cautiously lifting away the net. The Elf squirmed and spat—and Malenfant thought she looked longingly at the corpse of the infant, piled carelessly on top of the adult's body. Perhaps she was the child's mother.
Praisegod walked around the little campsite until he had found a fist-sized rock. He turned to Malenfant, holding out the rock. "Sir, you omitted the hunt. Will you share in the kill?"
Malenfant folded his arms.
"No?" Praisegod motioned to Sprigge.
Now, at a sharp command from Sprigge, a Runner approached, bearing a fire-hardened spear. With a single powerful gesture he skewered the Elf, ramming the pole into her body through her anus, pushing until its tip emerged bloody from her mouth.
This time it was Malenfant who had to restrain McCann.
The Elf was still alive when the Hams lifted the pole onto the spit frames—Malenfant heard her body rip as it slumped around its impaling pole—and, he thought, she was still alive, if barely, when a burly Runner went to work on her skull, curling back the flesh and cracking the skull as if it were the shell of a boiled egg.
Praisegod studied Malenfant. "Perhaps it would have been merciful to kill it first. Or perhaps not; this creature cannot comprehend its fate in any case. It is the brains, you see; freshness is all for that particular delicacy."
McCann broke away from Malenfant. He strode toward Praisegod Michael, his fists bunched, his face purple. "Now I know what you are, Praisegod. No Bay, no Ramose! 'Him the Almighty Power / Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Sky / With hideous ruin and combustion down / To bottomless perdition.' You are no man of God. This is Hell, and you are its Satan!"
Sprigge slammed his fist into the back of McCann's head, and the Englishman went sprawling.
Praisegod Michael seemed unperturbed. "Blasphemy and anarchy, sir. Flogging, branding and tongue-boring will be your fate. That is God's law, as I have interpreted it."
McCann tried to rise. But Sprigge kicked his backside, knocking him flat again. Two of the Runners ripped McCann's jacket from his back, exposing an expanse of pasty skin, and Sprigge loosened his whip.
Malenfant watched this, his own fists bunched.
Don't do it, Malenfant. This isn't your argument; it's not even your damn world. Think of Emma. She is all that matters.
But as Sprigge raised his arm for the first lash, Malenfant hit him in the mouth, hard enough to knock him flat.
He didn't remember much after that.
## _S hadow_
For days after her latest beating at One-eye's hands, Shadow had stayed in her nest. There was a little fruit here, and dew to be sucked from the leaves. She found something like contentment, simply to be left in peace.
But the child developed rashes on his belly and inner thighs, and Shadow herself lost a lot of hair around her groin. Her hair, and the child's, were matted with urine and feces. In her illness she had failed to clean the child, or herself when the child fouled her.
She clambered down from the tree and set the child on the ground. When Shadow propped him up the child was actually able to sit up by himself—wobbling, his legs tangled, that great strange head bobbing like a heavy fruit, but sitting up nevertheless. She bathed him gently, with cool clean water from a stream. The coolness made the rash subside. The child's infection was subsiding, too, and his nose was almost free of snot.
The child clapped his little hands together, looked at them as if he had never seen them before, and gazed up at his mother with wide eyes.
Shadow embraced him, suddenly overwhelmed by her feelings, warm and deep red and powerful.
And a great mass caromed into her back, knocking her flat.
Her child was screaming. She forced herself to her knees and turned her head.
One-eye had the infant. He was sitting on the ground, holding the baby by his waist. The child's heavy head lolled to and fro. One-eye was flanked by two younger men, who watched him intently. One-eye flicked the side of the child's skull with a bloody finger, making the head roll further.
Shadow got to her feet. Her back was a mass of bruises. She walked forward unsteadily, and with every step pain lanced. She stood before One-eye and held her hands out for her child.
One-eye clutched the child closer to his chest, not roughly, and the child scrabbled at his fur, seeking to cling on. The other men watched Shadow with a cold calculation.
Shadow stood there, bewildered, hot, exhausted, aching. She didn't know what One-eye wanted. She sat on the ground and lay back, opening her legs for him.
One-eye grinned. He held the child before him. And he bit into the front of its head. The child shuddered once, then was limp.
Shadow's world dissolved into crimson rage. She was aware of the child's body being hurled into the air, blood still streaming from the wound in his head, as limp as a chewed leaf. She lunged at One-eye, screaming in his face, clawing and biting. One-eye was knocked flat on the ground, and he raised his hands before his bloody face to ward off her blows.
Then the other men got hold of her shoulders and dragged her away. She kicked and fought, but she was weakened by her long deprivation, her beatings, and her illness; she was no match for two burly men. At last they took her by an arm and a leg. They swung her in the air and hurled her against a broad tree trunk.
The men were still there, One-eye and the others, sitting in a tight circle on the ground. They were working at something. She heard the rip of flesh, smelled the stink of blood. She tried to rise, but could not, and she fell back into darkness.
The next time she woke she was alone. The light was gone, and only pale yellow earthlight, filtered through the forest canopy, littered the ground.
She crawled to where the men had been sitting.
She picked up one small arm. A strip of gristle at the shoulder showed where it had been twisted from the torso. The hand was still in place, perfectly formed, clenched into a tiny fist.
She was high in a tree, in a roughly prepared nest. She didn't remember getting there. It was day, the sun high and hot.
She remembered her baby. She remembered the tiny hand.
By the time she clambered down from the tree, her determination was as pure as fast-running water.
## _E mma Stoney_
Emma trudged wearily over the soft sand of the ocean shore. The ocean itself was a sheet of steel, visibly curving at the horizon, and big low-gravity waves washed across it languidly.
This strip of yellow-white beach lay between the ocean and a stretch of low dunes. Further inland she saw a grassy plain, a blanket of green that rippled as the wind touched it, studded here and there by knots of trees. A herd of grazing animals moved slowly across the plain, their collective motion flowing, almost liquid; they looked like huge wild horses. The stretch of savannah ended in a cliff of some dark volcanic rock, and a dense forest spilled over the lip of the cliff, a thick green-black. It was a scene of life, of geological and biological harmony, characterized by the scale and slow pace of this world. In any other context it might have been beautiful.
But Emma walked warily, the rags of her flight suit flapping around her, her loose pack strapped to her back with bits of vegetable rope, a wooden spear in one hand and a basalt axe in the other. Beautiful or not, this was a world full of dangerous predators—not least, the humans.
And then she saw a flash of blue fabric, high on the cliff.
She walked up the beach toward the cliff, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart.
Every day her mood swung between elation and feverish hope, to bitterness that bordered on despair. One day at a time, Emma. Think like a Ham. Take it one day at a time.
But now she could see the lander itself. She broke into a run, staring, wishing her eyes had a zoom feature.
It was unmistakeably NASA technology, like a stubby scale-model Space Shuttle, with black and white protective tiles. It was surrounded by shreds of its blue parafoil. But it was stuck in a clump of trees, halfway down the cliff; it looked like some fat moth clinging to the rock.
"Nice landing, Malenfant," she murmured.
Disturbingly, she saw no sign that anybody had done anything constructive up there. There were no ropes leading up or down the cliff, no stars and stripes waving, no SOS sign carved into the foliage.
Maybe the crew hadn't survived the crash.
She put that thought aside. They could have gotten out, before the lander had plummeted over the cliff, even ejected on the way down. There were many possibilities. At the very least, there should be stuff she could use—tools, a first aid kit, maybe even a radio.
Messages from home.
What was for sure was that she was going to have to get up that cliff to find out. And she wasn't going to make it up there alone.
There was an encampment of Hams, a squat hut of skin weighted down with stone, almost directly under the blue flash. She could see them moving around before the hut, slabs of muscle wrapped in crudely-cut skins.
That was how she was going to get up that damn cliff.
She forced herself to slow. One step at a time, Emma; you know the protocol. It was going to be hard to be patient, to engage a new group of Hams once again. But that was what she was going to have to do.
She dropped her pack at the edge of the sea, and splashed her face with salt water. Then she walked up and down the beach, picking out bits of scattered driftwood. She found a long, straight branch, and selected a handful of thorny sticks. She took her favored hand axe and, with a skill born of long hours of practice and many cut fingers, she made notches in one end of the stick, wide enough to fit the thorny twigs. Then she took a bit of rawhide string from her pack, and wrapped it around the stick, lashing the barbs in place.
Thus, one harpoon.
She slipped off her boots and socks and coverall and waded into the shallows, harpoon raised.
Fishing had become her speciality. It didn't seem to have occurred to any of the Ham communities here to figure out how to catch fish, either in the ocean or in freshwater streams. Fish meat, exotic but appealing, made a good bribe.
There was a ripple at her feet, a roughly diamond shape that emerged briefly from the sand. She stabbed down hard, feeling the crunch of breaking wood.
She found she had speared a skate, a big brown fleshy square of a fish, maybe two feet across. Skate buried themselves in the mud, coming up at night to hunt shellfish. Her catch was wriggling violently, and it was all she could do to hold onto the harpoon. With a grunting effort she heaved the skate over her head and out onto the sand, where it flopped, slowly dying. One bit of lingering squeamishness was a reluctance to kill anything; acknowledging the hypocrisy, she let her victims die instead.
She splashed out of the water. Briskly she inspected her harpoon, considering whether it was worth keeping; she had learned to conserve her energy and time, never throwing away anything that might be used again. But the barbs were broken. She stripped off the hide string and stuffed it back into her pack, and let the bits of the harpoon fall, abandoning this thing she had made that would have been beyond her imagining a few months ago, forgetting it as carelessly as any every-day-a-new-day Ham craftsman.
With her hand axe she skinned and gutted the fish. You had to avoid the guts, and the skin could be coated by toxic mucus or dangerous spines: tricks she remembered from her childhood camping-in-the-woods days.
Then she pulled on her coverall and boots, picked up the skate meat and her pack, and walked steadily up the beach toward the Ham encampment.
These Hams accepted her silent presence in the corner of their hut, as readily as every other group she had encountered. They predictably turned away from her first offer of skate meat. But she continued to bring home gifts from the sea, until they had, one by one, experimentally, begun to taste the pale, sharp flesh.
So she settled into her corner of the communal hut, wrapping herself each night in grimy bits of parachute canvas, watching the Hams, waiting for some opportunity to find a way up the cliff to the lander.
She learned their names—Abel and Ruth and Saul and Mary—odd quasi-Biblical names, presumably bequeathed to them, like their fractured English, by some ancient contact with humans, Zealots or other "Skinny-folk." She tried to follow their complex social interactions, much of it centering on speculative gossip about the vigorous child-woman Mary.
They were typical Hams. Come to that, _all_ Hams were typical Hams.
Their English was broken—mispronounced, with missing or softened _G_ and _K_ and _th_ sounds and vowels that blurred to sameness. The language had tenses—past, future—and there were even conditionals, used for instance by gossiping women as they speculated what would follow if Mary gave herself to Saul, or if she fell for Abraham's clumsy wooing first. But their language was elemental, with a simple vocabulary focusing on each other, their bodies, the hut.
As for Mary herself, she was clearly at the center of a storm of hormonal change, relishing and fearing all the attention she got at the same time. But she never teased, Emma observed, never led any of the men on. Deceit seemed utterly unknown to these people. They were clever in many ways, but whatever they used those big brains for it wasn't for lying to each other, as humans did.
All this dubious anthropological speculation served to occupy her mind. But it was all spectacularly useless when it came to bringing her closer to her central goal of reaching the big black and white moth suspended on the cliff over their heads, in which none of the Hams showed the slightest interest.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
Manekato pushed into the forest. The foliage was dense, dark green, damp, cold, and it seemed to clutch at her face and limbs. The shadows stretched deep all around her, concealing subtle, elusive forms, as if wild creatures were Mapping themselves into and out of existence all around her.
Briefly she considered going back to the compound and seeking a new symmorph—perhaps with better dark-adapting vision. But as she worked deeper into the wood her body moved increasingly easily, her feet and hands clutching at branches and roots, and a clear sense of direction worked with her powerful hearing to guide each footfall. She dismissed her fears; she even felt a certain deep exhilaration. We came from the forest, she thought, and it is to the forest that I now return.
She was seeking Without-Name, who had left the encampment of exiles.
Even before her final departure Without-Name had taken to spending increasingly long times away from the compound. After her challenge by Nemoto over the captured Zealot, she had not brought back further "specimens," but at times Manekato thought she had glimpsed blood on her dirt-matted fur, and even on her lips.
To her surprise the little hominid Nemoto had expressed sympathy with Without-Name. _"Without-Name is out of control. But she is right. You are too slow, too cerebral, Mane. Perhaps your minds have grown overornate, and are strangled by their own complexity. It is time to confront the Old Ones, not to theorize over them..."_
It had been deeply shocking for Manekato to hear such critical sentiments expressed by a mere lower hominid.
Still, Without-Name had become an increasing distraction, a wild blood-stained rogue planet crashing through the orderly solar system of purpose and knowledge acquisition that Manekato had sought to establish. Babo and others had expressed relief when Without-Name had finally failed to return from one of her ambiguous jaunts. But Manekato had sensed that Without-Name would cause them all severe and unwelcome problems yet.
Finally Manekato had been disturbed by a cacophony of cries, coming from deep in the nearby belt of forest. Something there had died, in great pain and anguish; and Manekato had had a powerful intuition that it was time for her to seek out Without-Name and meet her on her own terms.
And so here she was, just another hominid picking her way through the forest.
She emerged from the bank of trees. Beyond a stretch of rock-strewn ground, a low cliff rose: broken and eroded, perhaps limestone, pocked with hollows and low caves, overgrown with moss and struggling trees. Somewhere water trickled.
The sky was clouded over. The place was claustrophobic, enclosing. She could smell blood, and dread gathered in her heart.
A hominid walked out of one of the caves. To judge by the sewn skins he wore, he was a Zealot, like the specimen Without-Name had brought back to the camp. He carried a crossbow, and his tunic and leggings were splashed with dirt and blood. He saw Manekato, standing alone at the edge of the forest. His eyes widened. He dropped his bow and ran back into the cave. _"Daemons! Strange Daemons!"_
Manekato gathered her courage. She stepped forward, crossing the rock-strewn floor.
She paused in the cave's entrance, giving her eyes time to adapt to this deeper dark. The cave's roof was a layer of rock just above her head. It was worn smooth, as if by the touching of many fingers; perhaps this place had been inhabited for many generations. The cave stank of hominid, of crudely prepared food, of stale urine and feces and sweat—and of blood.
A shadow moved before her. As it approached the light, it coalesced into the form of Without-Name. Her fur was splashed with blood, and a gouge had been cut into her arm.
"I suppose I have been expecting you," she growled. "Are you aware what a target you provide, silhouetted against the light? We have not fought a war for a million years, Manekato; we have lost our instincts for survival."
"What have you done, Renemenagota?" Manekato reached out and touched the wound in the other's arm. It was a deep slice over the bicep, still leaking blood—it had not even been cleaned. "I see your victims did not submit quietly."
Without-Name barked laughter. "It was glorious. Come."
She turned and led the way deeper into the cave, and Manekato followed reluctantly.
At the back of the cave a lamp of what looked like burning animal fat flickered in a hollow on one wall; the rock above was streaked with black grease. By its light Manekato saw she was walking over scorched patches of dirt—hearths, perhaps, all cold and disused. Bits of stone and bone and wood were scattered everywhere. At the rear of the cave, animal skins had been stretched over rough frames of wood.
There were hominids here. They were Zealots, dressed in their characteristic garb of crudely sewn skin. When Manekato knuckle-walked towards them they yelled and grabbed their weapons.
Without-Name held up her hands. _"She is weak. She will not harm you."_
The Zealots hurried out of her way, jabbering their alarm to each other.
Beyond the Zealots there was a mound of slumped forms.
They were hominids, all dead. They were the powerful squat creatures Nemoto called Hams. They had been slaughtered by crossbow bolts and spear thrusts. They had not died easily: ripped throats and gouged eyes and severed limbs testified to that, as did the injuries nursed by the Zealots. Blood soaked through the grisly heap, and spilled guts glistened on the floor beneath.
Without-Name's eyes glittered. "You cannot engage these fellows hand-to-hand; the power of their stocky bodies is simply too great. But they work strictly short range. And so they fell to our bows and throwing spears as they tried to close with us, one after the other. Once they were down it was a case of moving in to finish them off. But they fought on even with their bellies torn open, their throats cut. Well, this was their home for uncounted generations—you can see that—they were fighting as we would for our Farms..."
Manekato discerned a smaller bundle, laid on top of the heap of corpses. It was an infant, its age impossible to tell, one leg bent back at an impossible angle. "Did this little one give you a good spectacle, Renemenagota?"
Without-Name shrugged. "The Zealots took most of the smaller infants back to their stockade. You can't tame an adult Ham, you see; you have to get them young to break them. This one wouldn't leave its mother's side. The efforts to remove it resulted in a snapped leg." She grinned, her teeth showing bright in the gloom. "Praisegod Michael was here. Their leader, you see; the leader of the Zealots. He uttered words over the corpses, blessing them, commending their souls to the afterlife he believes awaits us—or rather awaits _his_ sort of hominid; he isn't so sure about the rest of us. Michael said his prayers over this little creature and then cut its throat. A delicious contradiction, don't you think?
"You should see the ambition that burns in Michael's eyes! He dreams of cleansing his world of such _creatures of the Devil_ as this—what an ambition!—but he has lacked the understanding to make it so. He was wary of me when I approached him—no, contemptuous, because for him I am less than human. But I forced him to listen to me. I made him see that by taking his captives and training them properly, he increases his resources, you see, which he can deploy for further conquest; once initiated, it is a simple exponential growth."
"You spoke to this monster—you are _working_ with him?" Manekato said tightly, "Whoever this _Praisegod_ is, his reasons for wishing to destroy the Hams and the others have surely more to do with the flaws in his own heart than any ideological justification."
Without-Name grabbed her arm and held it tight; Manekato felt moisture, blood and sweat, soaking into her fur. "Of course Praisegod Michael is mad. But it is a glorious madness."
Manekato pried her arm away from Without-Name's grip. Regretfully she said, "Glorious or not, I have to stop you."
Without-Name laughed. "You do not have the imagination or the courage for that, Manekato."
The Zealots were returning to the pile of Ham corpses. They were cutting away ears and hands, perhaps as trophies. But their movements were characteristically sluggish, like pale worms moving in the dark.
## _J oshua_
Joshua lay on the filth-crusted floor of his cell.
He was left alone for days. It was worse than any beating. There was nobody to look at him.
The People of the Gray Earth were never alone by choice. They spent their entire lives in their tight-knit communities, surrounded day and night by the same faces, change coming only through the slow tide of birth and death. Some women spent their entire lives within a hundred paces of where they were born. Even parties of hunters who ranged farther in search of big game would not mix with other groups of hominids, even other Hams; strangers were like faces in a dream, remote, not real.
He tried to picture the hut, the people coming and going about their business. He tried to recall the faces of Abel and Saul and Mary and Ruth and the others. The life of the people was going on, even though he was not there to be looked at—just as it had continued after the death of Jacob, the endless round of days and nights, of eating and sleeping and fornicating, of birth and love and death.
Jacob was dead. Was Joshua dead?
Away from others, Joshua was not even fully conscious. As the light came and went, he felt himself crumble. He was the walls, the filthy floor, the patch of daylight in the roof.
... And yet he was not alone, for there were people in the walls.
Faint marks had been scratched there, perhaps by fingernails, or with bits of stone. Some of them were so ancient they were crusted with dirt, and could only be detected by the touch of his fingertips. Perhaps they were made by Skinny or Nutcracker-man or Elf or Runner. But not by Ham, for no Ham made marks like these.
Scratches on the wall. Patterns that pulled at his consciousness. Boxes and circles and lines that longed to speak to him.
He was in a cave. But it was not a cave, for its walls were made of rocks piled one on top of the other. Sometimes the people would build walls, lines of rubble loosely piled, to help keep out the small animals that foraged at night. Joshua knew what a wall was. But _these_ walls went up, high above Joshua's head, too high for him to reach.
And there was a roof made of rocks, too, suspended over his head. On first waking here, he had cringed, thinking a sky full of rocks was descending on him. But the roof did not fall. He learned to uncurl, even to stand—though each time he woke from sleep he forgot about the roof, and whimpered in terror and curled in a corner of the cell.
The only light here came from a hole in the roof. He saw the days come and go through that hole, night succeeding day. He would lie on his back staring at the little circle of light. But when it rained, the water would pour through the hole, and he would huddle in a corner, shivering.
Sometimes a face would appear in the hole, the face of a Skinny. Stuff would be thrown down at him. Sometimes it would be food that he would scrabble to collect from the floor. The food was poor, scraps of cut-up vegetable or fruit peel or bits of gristle, some of it already chewed, sour with the saliva of Skinnies. But he devoured it all, for he was constantly hungry.
Sometimes they would hurl down water at him, usually brackish and stinking, enough to drench him. It would drain away out of a hole in the center of the blackened, worn floor, taking much of his own shit and piss with it. When the water came he would stand with his mouth and hands open, catching as much as he could. And when it had finished he would scrape at the filth-blackened floor with his fingers, collecting as much of the water as he could, even lick the floor with his tongue.
But sometimes all the Skinnies would throw down was their own thin shit, or they would piss in the hole, trying to hit him as he scurried from side to side.
His memories of how he had come here were blurred.
He remembered the clearing. After Mary had escaped he had been picked up by many Skinnies, all grunting with the effort. With every jolt his shoulder had blazed with pain. They had thrown him onto a platform made of strips of cut-up wood. And then the platform had been dragged away, along broad trails burned into the woods.
He remembered entering the stockade. It was a great wall of sharpened tree trunks driven into the ground, many times higher than Joshua could have reached. Inside there were huts of sod and wood, dark hovels whose stink had struck him as he was dragged past. There were many animals, goats and rabbits and ducks. There were many, many Skinnies, with grimy skin and brown teeth.
And there were Hams. They dragged at ropes and pushed bits of wood and dug at the ground. Joshua had hooted to the Hams, seeking help. Though the Hams were few, they could surely overpower these Skinny folk easily. But they had not responded, not even looked up, and he had been silenced by a slamming blow to his mouth.
They had removed his skins, and he was naked. And he had been thrown into this darkened cell.
The punishment had started immediately.
There had been Skinnies around him. Some of them were grinning. One of them carried a stick whose tip glowed bright red. Joshua stared at the glowing stick; it was one of the most beautiful colors he had ever seen. For one brief instant he left his aching body, and was the fiery glow.
But then the Skinnies shoved him on his back, trapping his limbs. The man with the glowing stick held it before Joshua's face—he could feel heat, like a fire—the man rammed it into the wound in his shoulder.
Only fragments after that, dark red fragments soaked with pain. Fragments, fading into dark.
But Joshua welcomed the presence of those who beat him. For at least, then, he was not alone.
One day he saw faces in the scratches on the wall. Faces that peered out at him, the faces of Skinnies.
No, not faces: one face, over and over.
The face of a man, thin, bearded, a circle over his head. The man looked at him, but did not look at him. Sometimes Joshua yelled at him, punched the face. But the wall would return, scraping his knuckles, and the man, not replying, would disappear into his web of scratches.
Joshua was dead. He was in a hole in the ground, like Jacob. But there were no worms here. There were only the faces, looking at him, not looking at him.
He screamed. He cowered in the corner, as he did when his captors pissed on him.
That was how the Skinnies found him one day, when they burst into his cell with their clubs and rocks and whips. They mocked him, kicking at his back and kidneys, and they pulled him out of the corner and stretched him.
A leering face hovered over him. "We'll break you yet, boy, while there's still some work left in that hulking body of yours." He arched his back, trying to see the man in the wall.
There was laughter. "He's looking for Jesus."
Running footsteps. A boot launched at his face. He felt a tooth smash at the back of his mouth.
"Help!" he cried. "Help me, Chee-sus!"
The jailers staggered back, open-mouthed, staring.
A day and a night. His tooth was a pit of pain.
Skinnies were in the cell. Joshua scuttled to his corner, expecting the usual blows.
But a net was thrown over him. He did not resist. His hands and arms and feet and legs were tightly bound, and then his legs folded behind his back and tied up to his waist.
Wrapped in the net, he was dragged out of his cell.
Outside was a long, narrow cavern. There was no daylight, but fires burned in pits on the wall. He saw only the floor and walls, the lumping shadows of his jailers as they dragged him, letting his bruised limbs and head rattle on the floor.
They paused, and there was a clanking, clattering noise. Joshua lifted his head dully.
He was facing an open cell. A man sat in the cell, a Skinny. But this was a Skinny like none Joshua had ever seen. He had no hair on the top of his head, none at all, although stubble clustered on his cheek. And his clothing, though filthy, blood-stained and torn, was not like the skin the Zealots wore. It was blue: a blue membrane, like the wings of the sky seed.
Joshua, electrified, gasped with recognition.
The man was looking at him. "My name is Reid Malenfant," he said gently. "If you get out of here, remember that. Malenfant."
Joshua worked his mouth; it was crusted with blood and his lips were cracked. "Mal'fan'."
Malenfant nodded. "Good luck to you, friend."
And then the door was slammed.
## _S hadow_
She stayed away from the others. She slept in nests at the periphery of the crater-wall forest, and fed from trees and shrubs far from the movements of the rest of the group.
She searched for cobbles in streams and on the exposed, eroded crater walls.
She had not grown old enough to acquire more than the most basic tool-making skills. So it took her many tries, chipping at cobbles with stones and bits of bone, before she had manufactured something that felt right. It was a lens-shaped cobble, with one crudely sharpened edge, that fit neatly in her hand.
Through these days her determination burned, clear and unwavering.
Burned until she was ready.
## _J oshua_
Joshua was in a new place. The walls were white, like snow. The floor shone, smooth as a bamboo trunk.
Joshua stood naked at the cell's center. Heavy ropes bound his hands before him and his feet, and the ropes were fixed to a great bar dug out of the rock floor beneath him. There were big holes in the walls covered by palm fronds, and through them Joshua could see daylight. He sniffed deeply, but his cavernous nostrils were clogged with snot and blood.
There were people in the walls.
The marks on these walls were not mere scratches. They were vivid images in bright bloodred and night black, and in them Joshua saw the thin, bearded man. The man was much clearer here than in the deep cell—so clear he never went away—and there were many of him, shining brightly, even one version of him fixed to a tree trunk and bleeding.
Joshua cowered.
"Well might you avert your eyes from the Lord's countenance."
Joshua turned. A man had spoken. A Skinny. He was taller than Joshua, his hair gray, and his black clothing swept to the ground. His black robes were skin, finely worked, black like charcoal from a hearth.
Joshua cringed. But no blow came. There was only a hand on his forehead, light, almost curious, exploring his brow ridges.
"Well might you hide your face for shame of what you are. And yet you called out for the Lord's help—so the brutes assigned to break you assured me... Stand up, boy." Joshua received a hard toe cap to the side of his leg. "Up, Ham."
Reluctantly Joshua stood.
The man had a sharp nose, and warts on his face, and eyes such a pale blue they made Joshua think of the sky. He walked around Joshua, and touched his chest and back. His hands were very soft. "I did ask for you to be cleaned up," he said absently. "Well. You may call me Praisegod Michael. Do you understand? I am Praisegod Michael. _Praisegod_."
"Prai'go'."
"Praisegod Michael, yes." Praisegod peered into his eyes. "What brows, what a countenance... And you, do you give yourself a name?" When Joshua didn't reply, Praisegod pointed to his own chest. "Praisegod Michael." And he pointed to Joshua.
Joshua spoke his name. When he moved his mouth his smashed tooth hurt; he could feel pulp leak into his mouth.
Praisegod laughed. " _Joshua_. My fathers named your fathers, when they found themselves sharing this Purgatorial place with you... And now you pass on the names one to the other, down through the generations, like heirlooms in the hands of apes. Very well, Joshua. And _what_ are you?"
The man's thin face, with its flat brow and high, bulging forehead, terrified Joshua. He had no idea what Praisegod wanted.
Praisegod produced a short, thick whip. With practiced motions he lashed at Joshua's shoulder. The pain was great, for that was the site of Joshua's spear wound. But the skin was not broken.
"If you do not answer, you will be treated so," Praisegod said evenly. "But let me answer for you. You have a man's name, but you are not a man. _You are a Ham_. That is another name my father gave yours, and it is appropriate. Do you know who Ham was?"
A failure to reply brought a fresh lash of the whip.
"Ham, father of Canaan, son of Noah. He failed to respect his father. 'Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.' Genesis 9:25. A servant of servants, yes; that is your place, boy. But then you know nothing of Noah, do you? You are an animal—a magnificent one, perhaps, and yet an animal even so. From your misshapen head to your splayed feet you signify antediluvian stock—if not pre-Adamite, indeed." Praisegod seemed to be growing angry. Joshua watched him dully. "The world was cleansed of your kind by the waters of the Flood. But you survive beyond your time in this dismal pit. And now you call on the Lord Himself—"
Another lash to the shoulders, and Joshua flinched. Then a blow to the back of the legs forced Joshua to his knees.
Praisegod Michael grabbed Joshua by his hair, making him raise his head. "Look on His merciful face. What can _you_ know of His benison? Do you know what my fathers suffered to bring the Word to this world? When they fell here, they had nothing: nothing but the clothes they wore. _They were set upon by beasts like yourself;_ they starved; they fell prey to diseases. And yet they survived, and built this community, all by the strength of their hands, and their faith.
"And in all this they remembered the Word. They had no Book with them, not a single copy. But they remembered. They would sit around their fires and recite the verses, one after another, seeking to recall it for their children, for they knew they had no way home.
"And _that_ is how the Word of the Lord came to this pit. And now you, an animal of the field, with your thunderbolts of stone, you presume to call on Him for help?"
Joshua folded over himself, letting the whip fall. He felt his flesh break, and the whip dug deeper into the wounds it had made.
## _S hadow_
The fungal growth now framed her vision, black as night.
When she heard the roosting calls of the people, she slid through the trees. The people nested, silhouetted high against a cloud-laced earth-blue sky. She recognized One-eye by the grunting snores he made, the stink of a body she had come to know too well.
She slipped up the trunk of the tree, her long hands and feet gripping. With scarcely a rustle, she clung to branches above One-eye's rough nest.
He lay on his back, hands wide, legs splayed, one foot dangling over the edge of his nest. His mouth was open, and a thin stream of drool slid down his chin. He had an erection, dark in the earthlight.
She clung to the branches with her feet and legs, and hung upside down over him. She took his penis in her mouth and sucked it gently, rubbing the shaft with her lips. In his sleep, he moaned.
Then she bit down, as savagely as she could.
He screamed and thrashed. She could hear answering hoots from surrounding nests.
She flung herself down on him. His eyes were wide and staring, and she thought she could smell blood on his breath. He was stronger than she was, but he was already in intense agony, and she had the advantage of surprise. He pushed feebly at her face with one hand. She grabbed the hand, pulled a finger into her mouth, and nipped off a joint with a single savage bite. He howled again, and she spat the bloody joint into his open mouth, making him gag.
Then she raised her shaped cobble and slammed it against the side of his head.
## _J oshua_
A day and a night, here in this white place, without food or water.
Men scrubbed him roughly. They mopped away the blood and shit from the floor.
Praisegod was prone to swings of mood, which Joshua neither understood nor could predict. Sometimes there was coldness, cruelty, beatings. But sometimes Praisegod would gaze at him with bright eyes, and run his hands over his battered body, as a mother might stroke a child. Joshua quickly learned to dread such moments, for they always finished in the most savage beatings of all.
And yet he longed for Praisegod Michael to stay, rather than leave him alone.
He lay on his side, staring at the marks on the walls—not the face of _Chee-sus_ , but strange angular lines, the loops and whorls. Bewildered by pain and exhaustion, he stared and stared, trying to lose himself in the lines, trying to see the faces there.
"What is it you see, boy? Can you read? Can you read the Lord's words? Do you hear what they tell you?" Showing his sporadic, chilling tenderness, Praisegod Michael was kneeling on the floor, with Joshua's head on his lap.
His mouth dry, his tongue thick, Joshua whispered, "People."
"People?" Praisegod Michael stared at the marks. " _These_ are words, and _these_ are pictures. The words speak to us... Ah, _but they do not_ , do they? Marks on the wall do not speak. They are _symbols_ , of the sounds we make when we speak, which are themselves symbols of the thoughts we concoct... Is that what you mean?" His hands explored Joshua's body with a rough eagerness. "What lies inside that cavernous head of yours? The words you utter are themselves symbolic—but your kind have no books, no art. Is that why you cannot understand? Would you like me to tell you what those letters say to me?" He pointed at the wall. " 'After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in Heaven.' Revelation 4,1."
"Heav'n," Joshua mumbled.
"The sky, child, where we will pass when we die."
Joshua twisted his head to see Praisegod's face. "Dead."
"No." Praisegod was almost crooning, and he rocked Joshua back and forth. "No, you poor innocent. You are alive. And when you die, you will be alive again in Christ—if His mercy extends to your kind..."
"Dead," said Joshua. "Dead. Gone. Like Jacob."
"Dead but not gone! The corpse in the ground is the seed that is planted in the earth. So we will all bloom in the spring of the Lord. 'And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.' But I am talking in symbols again, ain't I? A man is not a seed. But a man is _like_ a seed."
Suddenly he pushed Joshua away. The Ham's head clattered on the floor, jarring his aching tooth.
"You can know nothing of what I speak, for your head is empty of symbols... Ah, but what if my religion is nothing but symbols—is that what you are thinking?—the symbol of the seed, the Mother and Child—a dream concocted by words rattling in my empty head?" Now Joshua felt kicks, hard, frantic, aimed at his back and buttocks. "O you witness to the Flood, O you underman! See how you have planted doubts in my mind! How clever you are, how cunning! You and that Daemon of the forest, Renemenagota, she of the ape build and mocking, wise eyes... The Daemons make me promises. They can take my vision and make it real, make this antediluvian island a godly place. So they say. So _she_ says. Ah, but in her dark eyes I sense mockery, Joshua! Do you know her? _Did she send you?_... How you madden me! Are you agents of Satan, sent to confuse me with your whispers of God's work?"
But now Praisegod leaned over Joshua again and grabbed his face. Joshua saw how his eyes were red and brimming with tears, his face swollen as if by weeping. " _Can sin exist here?_ The brutes who serve me have their Runner women, their whores with the bodies of angels and the heads of apes. I, I am not of that kind... But now, here! Here!" He grabbed Joshua's bound hands and pushed them into his crotch; Joshua could feel a skinny erection. "You are destroying me!"
And the beatings went on.
Joshua lay on the floor, his own blood sticky under his face. Pieces moved around in his head, just as they had before: when he saw the sky seed fall from the sky, when he put together the cobble from the bits of shattered stone.
The kind Skinny's face peered through a cloud of pain and black-edged exhaustion.
He whispered, " 'Fore me was door standin' open Heaven."
Praisegod Michael was here. Panting, he gazed into Joshua's eyes. "What did you say?"
But Joshua was, for now, immersed in his own head, where the pieces were orbiting one another, the flakes sticking to the core of the cobble one by one. The Gray Earth. The seed that fell from the air. The door in the sky.
Joshua was, in his way, a genius. Certainly none of his kind had experienced such a revelation before.
"Heav'n," he said at last.
Praisegod Michael pushed his ear close to his mouth to hear.
"Heav'n is th' Gray Earth. Th' seed. Th' seed takes th' people. Th' people pass through th' door. Door to heaven. To Gray Earth."
"By God's eyes." Praisegod Michael stumbled back. "Is it possible you _believe_?"
Joshua tried to raise his head. "Believe," he said, for he did, suddenly, deeply and truly. "Th' door in th' sky. Th' Gray Earth."
Praisegod Michael stalked around the cell, muttering. "I have never heard an ape-thing like yourself utter such words. Is it possible you have _faith_? And if so, must you therefore have a _soul_?" Again he stroked the heavy ridges over Joshua's eyes, and he pressed his gaunt body close to the Ham's. "You intrigue me. You madden me. I love you. I despise you." He leaned closer to the Ham, and kissed him full on the lips. Joshua tasted sourness, a rank staleness.
_"Graah_ — _"_ Praisegod rolled away, lying sprawled on the floor, and vomited, so that thin bile spread across the shining floor.
Then he stood, trembling, striving for composure. "I would kill you. But if you have the soul of a _man_ —I will not risk damnation for you—if you have not damned me already!" He smiled, suddenly cold, still. "I will send you out. You will spread the Word to your kind. You will be a Saul of the apes." He raised his pale eyes to the light from the window. "A mission, yes, with you as my acolyte _—you_ , a pre-Adamite man-ape."
Joshua stared at him, understanding nothing, thinking of a door in the sky.
But now Praisegod stood over him again, and again he spoke tenderly. "I will help you." He reached into his clothing and produced a knife. It was not of stone; it glittered like ice, though Joshua could see how worn and scuffed it was. "No beast should speak the Word of God. Here." He put his fingers inside Joshua's mouth. The fingers tasted of burning. He pushed down, until Joshua's mighty jaw dropped.
Then, without warning, he grabbed Joshua's tongue and dragged it out of his mouth. Joshua felt the slash, a stab of pain.
Blood sprayed over Praisegod Michael.
## _S hadow_
The next morning the women surrounded Silverneck, as usual. With their infants clambering over them, they munched on figs.
With a crash, One-eye fell from his tree. His hands and feet left a smear of blood where they touched bark or leaves, for several of his fingers and toes had been nipped off. White bone showed in a huge deep wound on the side of his head. And his penis was almost severed, dangling by a thread of skin. His fur was matted by blood and piss and panic shit.
The women stared.
He looked about vaguely, as if blinded, and he mewled like an infant. Then he stumbled away, alone, into the deeper forest.
Shadow walked out of the tree cover.
Silverneck moved aside for her. One of the younger women growled, but Shadow punched her in the side of the head, so hard she was knocked sideways. Shadow sat with the group, and clawed figs into her mouth. But nobody looked at her, nobody groomed her, and even the children avoided her.
That night, when the roosting calls went out, One-eye did not return.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Malenfant was kept chained up in a dark, filthy cell. It was just a brick-lined pit, its damp mud floor lined with packed-down filth. The only light came from a grilled window high in the ceiling. The door was heavy with a massive wooden bolt on the outside.
He reached out to touch the walls. The bricks were rotten. Maybe he could dig out handholds and climb up to that window.
And then what? What then, after you climb out into the middle of Praisegod's courtyard?
You are not dealing with rational people, Malenfant.
It was true Praisegod had built a place of relative order here. But this was an island of rigidity in a world of fluidity and madness, a world where mind itself was at a premium, a world where the very stars regularly swum around the sky, for all Praisegod's zeal and discipline—just as, Malenfant suspected, Praisegod's own inner core of horror constantly threatened to break through his surface of control.
There was nothing he could do, nothing to occupy his mind.
Sometimes the most courageous thing was doing nothing. _Do-nothing heroics_ : Was that a phrase from Conrad? If there was really, truly no way you could change your situation, the last thing you wanted to do was to pour so much energy into fighting your fear that you burned yourself up before the chance came for a break.
As he sat in the dark and the filth, utterly alone, Malenfant wondered how long his own do-nothing heroics would sustain him.
At last he was brought before Praisegod Michael.
At Praisegod's chapel-residence Malenfant was kept waiting, standing before Praisegod's empty desk bound hand and foot, for maybe an hour.
Finally Praisegod walked in, slowly, contemplative, his Ham boy at his side. Praisegod didn't look at Malenfant. He sat at his desk, and a Ham girl brought in a tray of chopped fish set on slabs of hard, dark bread, with a bowl of what looked like mustard and a wooden goblet of wine. Praisegod ate a little of the fish, dipping it in the mustard, and then he passed the rest to the Ham boy, who sat on the floor and ate ravenously.
Praisegod's manner seemed distracted to Malenfant, almost confused. He said rapidly, "I have been forced to punish Sir McCann. You see why—you witnessed his blasphemous disrespect. His soul is hard, set in a mold of iniquity. But you—you are different. You seek the woman you love; you are moved by a chivalrous zeal. In you I see a soul that could be turned to higher goals."
"Don't count on it," Malenfant said.
Praisegod's eyes narrowed. "You should not presume on God's grace."
"This place has nothing to do with God," Malenfant said evenly, staring hard at Praisegod. "You play with human lives, but you don't even see that much, do you? Praisegod, this place—this Moon—is an artifact. Not made by God. _Humans_. Men, Praisegod. Men as different from you or me as we are different from the Elves, maybe, but men nevertheless. They are moving this whole damn Moon from one reality strand to the next, from Earth to Earth. And everything you see here, the mixing up of uncounted possibilities is because of that moving. Because of _people_. Do you get it? God has nothing to do with it."
Praisegod closed his eyes. "This is a time of confusion. Of change... I think you may yet serve my purpose, and therefore God's. But I must shape you, like clay on the wheel. But there is much bile in you that must be driven out." He nodded to Sprigge. "A hundred stripes to start with."
Malenfant was dragged out of the room. "You're a savage, Praisegod. And you run a jerkwater dump. If this is some holy crusade, why do you allow your men to run a forced brothel?"
But Praisegod wasn't listening. He had turned to his Ham boy, and stroked his misshapen head.
Malenfant was taken to a room further down the dismal corridor.
He found himself stretched out over an open wooden frame, set at forty-five degrees above the horizontal. His feet were bound to the base of the frame. Sprigge wrapped rope around his wrists and pulled Malenfant's arms above his head until his joints ached.
Sprigge looked Malenfant in the eye. "I have to make it hard," he said. "It'll be the worse for me if I spare you."
"Just do your job," Malenfant said sourly.
"I know Praisegod well enough. That fat Englishman just riled him. He thinks you might be useful to him. But you must play a canny game. If you go badly with him, he'll ill use you, Malenfant. I've seen that before, too. He has a lot of devices more clever than my old whip, I'll tell you. He has gadgets that crush your thumbs or fingers until they are as flat as a gutted fish. Or he will put a leg-clamp on you, a thing he'll use on recalcitrant Runner folk, and every day we have to turn it a little tighter, until the bones are crushed and the very marrow is leaking into your boots."
Malenfant tried to lift his head. "I don't have any boots."
"Boots will be provided."
A joke? He could dimly make out Sprigge's face, and it bore an expression of something like compassion—compassion, under a layer of dirt and weathered scars and tangled beard, the mask of a hard life. "Why do you follow him, Sprigge? He's a madman."
Sprigge tested the bonds and stepped back. "Sometimes the lads go off into the bush. They think life is easier there, that they can have their pick of the bush women, not like the bleeding whores they keep here. Well, the bush folk kill them, if the animals or the bugs don't first. As simple as that. Without Praisegod we'd all be prey, see. He organizes us, Sir Malenfant. We're housed and we're fed and nobody harms us. And now that he's taken up with the Daemons—well, he has big ideas. You have to admire a man for that."
Malenfant thought, What the hell is a Daemon? He felt his jacket being pulled off his back. The air was damp and cold.
"Now, a hundred stripes is a feeler, Sir Malenfant. I know how you'll bear it. But you'll live; remember that." He stepped away, into the dark.
Malenfant heard running footsteps.
And then he heard the lash of the whip, an instant before the pain shot through his nervous system. It was like a burn, a sudden, savage burn. He felt blood trickling over his sides and falling to the floor, and he understood why the frame under him had to be open.
More of Sprigge's "stripes" rained down, and the pain cascaded. There seemed to be no cut-off in Malenfant's head, each stroke seemingly doubling the agony that went before, a strange calculus of suffering.
He didn't try to keep from crying out.
Maybe he lost consciousness before the hundred was done.
At last he was hit by a rush of water—it felt ice-cold—and then more pain reached him, sinking into every gash on his back, like cold fire.
Sprigge appeared before him. "The salty back," he said, cutting Malenfant's wrists free. "It'll help you heal."
Malenfant fell to the floor, which stank of his own blood, like the iron scent of the crimson dust of this rusted Red Moon.
A heavy form moved around him in the dark. He cowered, expecting more punishment.
But there was a hand on his brow, water at his lips. He could smell the dense scent of a Ham—perhaps it was Julia. The Ham helped him lie flat on his belly, with his ripped jacket under his face. His back was bathed—the wounds stung with every drop—and then something soft and light was laid over his back, leaves that rustled.
The square window in the ceiling above showed diffuse gray-blue. It was evening, or very early morning.
He was left alone after that, and he slept, falling into a deeper slumber.
When he woke again that square of sky was bright blue. By its light he saw that the leaves on his back were from a banana tree. His pain seemed soothed.
"... Malenfant. Malenfant, are you there?"
The voice was just a whisper, coming from the direction of the door.
Malenfant got his hands under his chest, pushed himself up to a crawling position. He felt the leaves fall away from his back. His bare chest was sticky with his own dried blood, and with every move he felt scabs crack, wounds ache.
He crawled to the wall by the door, kneeling there in the mud and blood.
"McCann?"
"Malenfant! By God it's good to hear the voice of a civilized man. Have they hurt you?"
Malenfant grimaced. "A 'feeler,' Sprigge called it."
"It could get worse, Malenfant."
"I know that."
McCann's voice sounded odd—thick, indistinct, as if he were talking around something in his mouth. _Flogging_ , _branding, tongue-boring_ , Malenfant recalled. The penalty for blasphemy.
"What have they done to you, Hugh?"
"My punishment was enthusiastically delivered," McCann lisped. "One must admire their godly zeal... And the beatings are not the half of it. Malenfant, he has me laboring in the fields: pulling ploughs, along with the Runner slaves. It is not the physical trial—I can barely add an ounce to the mighty power of my Runner companions—but the indignity, you see. Praisegod has made me one with the sub-men, and his brutish serfs mock me as I toil."
"You can stand a little mockery."
"Would that were true! Praisegod understands how to hurt beyond the crude infliction of blows and cuts and burns; and the shame of this casting-down has hurt me grievously—and _he_ knows it. But his punishment will not last long, Malenfant. I am not so young nor as fit as I was; soon, I think, I will evade Praisegod's monstrous clutches once and for all... But it need not be so for you. Malenfant, I think Praisegod has some sympathy for you—or purpose, at least. Tell him whatever it is you think he wants to hear. That way you will be spared his wrath."
Malenfant said softly, "You were the one who said you could do business with him."
"Do as I say, not as I do," McCann hissed. "It is my faith, Malenfant, my faith. Praisegod arouses in me a righteous rage which I cannot contain, whatever the cost to myself. But he is an intelligent man, a cunning man. I suspect his grasp of his ugly crew here was slipping. I have heard the men mutter. They tell fortunes, you know, with cowrie shells—much handled, shining like old ivory... Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion. He was on his uppers, Malenfant, until quite recently. But now his inchoate ambitions have found a new clarity, a _plausibility_. He has found new allies: these Daemons, whoever or whatever they are. He has suddenly become a much more credible, and dangerous, figure... If I had half a brain I would stay in his fold.
"But you are different, Malenfant. Without faith—a paradoxically enviable condition!—you have no moral foundation to inhibit you; you must lie and cheat and steal; you must kowtow to Praisegod; you must do everything you can, everything you _must_ , to survive."
"I'll try," Malenfant gasped.
"Will you, my friend? Will you truly? There is a darkness in you, Malenfant. I saw it from the beginning. You may choose, without knowing it, to use Praisegod as the final instrument of your own destruction."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You must look into your heart, Malenfant. Think about the logic of your life... The day advances. Soon I will be called to my work in the fields, and I must sleep if I can."
"Take care of yourself, Hugh."
"Yes... God be with you, my friend."
That night Malenfant called McCann's name. The only reply was a kind of gasping, inarticulate, and a moist slithering.
The night after that Malenfant called for McCann, over and over, but there was no reply.
## _E mma Stoney_
She had first become aware of Joshua as an absence. There was a spare place at the hearths of Ruth and others, portions of meat left set aside by the hunters. It was a pattern she had noticed before when somebody had recently died; the Hams clearly remembered their dead, and they made these subtle tributes of absence—halfway to a ritual, she supposed.
Then, one day, Joshua came back.
Within a couple of days it was clear Joshua was not like the other Hams.
He was perhaps twenty-five years old, as much as she was any judge of the ages of these people. His body bore the marks of savage beatings, and his tongue seemed to be damaged, making his speech even more impenetrable than the rest.
No Hams lived alone. But Joshua lived alone, in his cave beyond the communal space around the hut. Hams did not go naked—but Joshua did, wearing not so much as a scrap of skin to cover his filth-encrusted genitals. Hams cut their hair and, crudely, shaved their beards with stone knives. Joshua did not, and his hair was a mane of black streaked with gray, his beard long but rather comically wispy under that huge jaw. Hams joined in the activities of the community, making tools, gathering and preparing food, repairing clothes and the hut. Joshua did none of this.
Hams did not make markings, or symbols of any kind—in fact they showed loathing of such things. Joshua covered the walls of his cave with markings made by stone scrapers and bits of bone. They might have been faces; he sketched rough ovals and rectangles, crisscrossed by interior lines—noses, mouths?—over and over. The marks were crude scratches, as if made by a small child—but still, they were more than she had ever observed any other Ham to make.
The other Hams tolerated him. In fact, since he did no gathering or hunting, by providing him with food they were keeping him alive, as she had seen other groups sustain badly injured, sickly, or elderly individuals. Perhaps they thought he was ill, beyond his body's slowly healing wounds.
Certainly, by the standards of his kind, he was surely insane. Studying this Ham hermit from afar, Emma concluded that whatever his story, she had best avoid him.
But when Joshua spotted her, the matter was taken out of her hands.
She was walking up the beach from the sea. Her catch of fish had been good that day, and she had used a scrap of blue chute cloth from her pack to carry it all.
Joshua was sitting outside his cave, muttering to himself. When he saw her blue cloth, he got to his feet, hooted loudly, and came running.
Other Hams, close to the hut, watched dully.
Joshua capered before her, muttering, his accent thicker than any she had heard before. He was gaunt, and his back was still red with half-healed welts. But he might have been three times her weight.
Emma reached for the stone knife she kept tucked in her belt. "Keep back, now."
He grabbed the blue cloth, spilling the fish on the sand. He sniffed the cloth with his giant, snot-crusted nostrils, and wiped it over his face. "This," he shouted. _"This!"_
She frowned. "What is it? What are you trying to tell me?"
"Th' door in the sky," he said. "Th' door in Heaven. Th' wings of th' seed." His voice was horribly indistinct—and when he opened his mouth to yell these things at her, she saw a great notch had been cut out of his tongue.
She should get out of here, flee to the sanctuary of the hut, get away from his deranged grasp. But she stayed. For no other Ham had used phrases like "the door in the sky."
She asked cautiously, "What door?"
"Th' sky seed. Th' Gray Earth. Th' seed fell th' sky."
She understood it in a flash. She whirled and pointed to the lander, stranded on the cliff face. "Is that what you're talking about? The lander—the thing that fell from the sky?" She grabbed back the bit of cloth. "Under a parachute. A blue chute, wings, like this."
For answer he bellowed, "Sky seed!" And he turned away and ran full tilt toward the foot of the cliff, beneath the lander.
Emma watched him go, her heart thumping.
She could stay here her whole life and never persuade the Hams to help her get to the lander. Maybe it took an insane Ham even to conceive of such a project. A Ham like Joshua.
Now or never, Emma.
She grabbed her pack and ran after Joshua.
There was a trail, of sorts, that led from the beach to the top of the cliff. At least Joshua showed her the way; she couldn't have managed at all otherwise. But it was a trail for Hams—or maybe goats—certainly not for humans. The scrambling and climbing was a major challenge for Emma, never superfit, never any kind of climber. Nevertheless, by sheer force of will, she kept up.
At the top of the cliff she fell back, exhausted, her heart pumping and her lungs scratching for air. It was like her first few days after the portal, when she had struggled to acclimatize to this strange mountaintop world.
Joshua immediately plunged into the cliff-top forest. Emma forced herself to her feet and followed.
Joshua crashed through the dense forest by main force, pushing aside branches, saplings, and even some mature trees. He seemed careless of the noise he made and the trail he left behind—again unlike most Hams, who took care to pass silently through the dangerous twilight of the forest.
At last they pushed into a clearing. Here the trees had been battered flat, she saw, and bits of blue cloth clung to scattered branches. Her heart thumped harder. Joshua ran across the clearing to the far side, where a last line of trees had been broken down, exposing blue-gray sky. She followed him.
She found herself at the lip of the cliff, looking down on a trail of scraped rock and bits of cloth and chute cord. And there, really not so far beneath the lip of the cliff, like a fat bug trapped in some huge spiderweb, lay the lander.
Joshua squatted on his haunches and pointed down at the lander. "Sky seed," he said excitedly. "Sky seed!"
She gazed hungrily down at the lander: crumpled, battered, stained and weathered, but intact. She saw no sign that anybody had climbed out of it since its plummet down the cliff.
From here the lander looked very small. Specifically, she couldn't see any sign of an engine pack, no way the thing could get itself off the ground and back to Earth.
She sat back, forcing herself to think. Sitting here with a Neandertal the internal politics of America seemed a remote abstraction—but still she couldn't believe that the US government would sanction any kind of one-way mission, even for someone as persuasive as Reid Malenfant. But that meant—she thought, her brain working feverishly—that the engine had to be somewhere else.
She grabbed Joshua's arms, and immediately regretted it; his skin was covered in filth and scabs. He flinched back from her touch, as if she intended to hurt him. She let go, and held her empty hands up before him. "I'm sorry... Listen to me. _There must be another lander_. I mean, another sky seed. A second one." But Hams did not count. She held her hands up to mime two landers coming down from the west, one after the other. But Hams did not use symbols.
She pointed, bluntly. "Sky seed. Down there. Sky seed." She pointed into the forest, at random. "Over there."
He frowned. He pointed west, deeper into the forest. "Ov' there."
She took a deep breath. _I knew it_.
But now Joshua was jabbering, pointing at the lander and the sky. "Sky seed. Praisegod. 'There 'fore me was door standin' open Heav'n.' Sky seed in Heav'n. People of th' Gray Earth. People of Heav'n." And on and on, a long, complex, baffling diatribe.
She peered into his ridged eye sockets, struggling to understand what was going through that mind—so alien from hers, and damaged, too.
Bit by bit she got it.
Joshua had seen the lander come down from the sky. He had seen the second lander, too. She knew that Hams believed their people came from a place in the sky, which they called the Gray Earth. Joshua, alternately, called it Heaven. As best she could make out he wanted to use the lander to take his people home, to Gray Earth, to Heaven.
"Was it the Zealots who taught you about Heaven? Did the Zealots hurt you? Did this Praisegod hurt you?"
'Prai'go' Michael," he mumbled. "Mal'fan."
Suddenly she couldn't breathe. She grabbed his shoulders, mindless of the filth, resisting his flinching. _"What did you say?"_
"Mal'fan'. Zealots. Mal'fan'."
The Zealots had Malenfant. _Malenfant was here_.
She sat back on her haunches, breathing in gasps. "Do you know where Malenfant is being held?—no, you can't tell me that. But you could show me." She studied Joshua, who gazed back at her. "Listen to me. There is something you want. There is something I want. This is what we will do. You take me to Malenfant... If you do this, I will give you the lander. It will take you home, to Heaven, to the Gray Earth."
It took a long time to make him understand all of this. It might have been the first time in the history of these Hams, she thought, that anybody had tried to strike a bargain.
And, as she had absolutely no intention of using the lander for anything else but getting herself and Malenfant out of here, it might have been the first time anybody had told a Ham a lie.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Uncounted days after his whipping, Malenfant was again dragged before Praisegod Michael.
Malenfant stood as straight as he could, his arms tied behind his back, a new skin jacket over his upper body. He seethed with resentment at his own pain and humiliation, anger at what he suspected had become of McCann, and a kind of self-righteous disgust at Praisegod.
Get a hold of yourself, Malenfant. Do business, remember.
"What now, Praisegod? Another beating?"
Praisegod walked around Malenfant. Malenfant saw how his right leg spasmed, as if he wished to flee; he seemed unusually agitated. Praisegod Michael was a man of depths, all of them murky.
Praisegod's Ham boy sat on the edge of the desk, staring at Malenfant.
"I do not wish to punish you, Sir Malenfant. I can tell you have twice the mentation of Sprigge, here. I would rather obtain your support."
"You know nothing about me."
Praisegod said, "Where we came from does not matter, Malenfant. For we cannot escape this place; men have spent their lives to prove that. And as your friend McCann understood, what unites men, in this world of animals, is greater than that which separates us. All that matters is that we are here, now, and we must make the best of it. Though it has the face of a work of Satan, this island is a world made by God—of course it is; to argue otherwise would be to support the heresy of Manichaeus. Therefore it is perfectible, and therefore there is good work to be done here by righteous men... There is much to be done here."
Malenfant eyed him. Praisegod was a shithead, yes. He wasn't about to conquer the Red Moon. But a shithead like this could cause a lot of suffering to a lot of people, and near-people. "Perfectible? Right. I know your kind. You intend to build an empire, Praisegod. A _perfect_ empire, soaked in blood."
"What is blood?" Praisegod said easily. "If men stand against us, they will be as stubble before our swords. And as for the rest, to spill the blood of an animal is not a sin, Malenfant. Indeed, given that these soulless apes show a mockery of man's features, I am convinced that to cleanse the worlds of their obscene forms is a duty."
"So you will use the Hams and the Runners as a resource to build your empire on this Moon. And when the hominids' usefulness has passed, you will exterminate them."
Praisegod's predator's eyes gleamed. "It is time for your answer, Malenfant."
Malenfant closed his eyes.
_Stay alive_ , Malenfant. That's all that matters. The creatures on this Red Moon mean nothing to you. A little while ago you didn't even know they existed. (But some of them have helped me, even saved my life...) And they are not even human. (But they are differently human...) This Praisegod may be difficult, but he is powerful. If you can work with him he may even help you achieve your goal—which is, was, and always will be to find Emma. (But he's a psychopathic monster...)
He imagined he heard Emma's mocking voice.
_You can't do it, can you? You never were too good at politics, were you, Malenfant?—even in NASA—anyplace where the ancient primate strategies of knowing when to fight and when to groom, when to dominate and when to submit, were essential. Ah, but this is about more than politics, isn't it, Malenfant?Are you growing a conscience? You, who lied his way to Washington and back to get his BDB off the ground, who used up people and spat them out on the way to achieving what you wanted? Now you stand here on this jungle Moon and you can't swallow a few preachy platitudes to save your own worthless hide?_
Or, he thought, maybe McCann was right about me. So was my mother-in-law, come to that. Maybe all I ever wanted to do was crash and burn.
Praisegod's foot was tapping out its nervous drumbeat. The Ham boy, seeming to sense the tension between the two men, slid off the desk and crawled behind Praisegod's chair.
Malenfant took a breath. He said, "Why are you really so dead set against the hominids?" He glanced at the Neandertal boy; one eye and a thatch of ragged dark hair protruded from behind the chair leg. "Does this boy warm your bed, Praisegod Michael? Is that why you have to destroy him?"
Malenfant saw white all the way around Praisegod's pupils, and a dribble of blood and snot was leaking from his nose. The man stood before Malenfant, close enough to smell the fishy stink of his breath. He whispered, "This time the whips will fillet the flesh off you, until the men will be flogging your neck and the soles of your feet. And I, I will prevail, in the light of His countenance."
Malenfant had time for an instant of satisfaction. Got through to you, you bastard. Then he was clubbed to his knees.
## _E mma Stoney_
She spent days in the cliff-top forest, spying, scouting.
This patch of forest was damp and thin. There were extensive clearings where old trees had fallen to the ground in chaotic tangles of branches. Paths wound among the trees, marked out through rotting leaves, fungus-ridden trunks, brambles, and crushed saplings. Many of these paths were made no doubt by animals, or perhaps hominids, the Nutcracker-folk or the Elf-folk. But some of them were, unmistakeably, the work of humans; straight, sometimes rutted by wheels.
And the human paths converged on a township, a brooding, massive structure at the heart of the forest. It was the fortress of the Zealots.
The great gate of the compound would open a couple of times a day to let out or admit parties, apparently for hunting and provisioning. The open gates, swinging on massive hinges of rope, revealed a shabby cluster of huts and fire-pits within. The Zealot foragers, always men, always dressed in drab green-stained skins, were armed with pikes and bows and arrows. They stayed alert as they made their way along the paths they had worn between the trees.
The returning parties would call out informal _halloos_ to let those inside know they wanted in. Nobody seemed to feel the need for passwords or other identifiers. But the gate openings were brief, and the forest beyond was always carefully watched by armed men. The foragers would return with sacks full of the forest's fruits, or with bats or animals, commonly small hogs, or even grain and root vegetables brought in from the hinterland that must stretch beyond the forest.
But they would also bring home Elves, even the occasional Nutcracker, suspended limply from poles, heads lolling. The Zealots had no taboo, it seemed, over consuming the flesh of their apparent near-relatives—which she heard them call, in their thick, strangulated accent, _bush meat_. The hunters seemed to prize the hands and ears of infant Elves, which they would hack off and wear around their necks as gruesome trophies.
Also, less frequently, they brought home captured Runners. The Runners were always returned alive. The men and boys were evidently beaten into submission, their backs bearing the scars of whips and their faces misshapen from blows; they trudged through the forests with ropes around their necks and wrists, and with their long legs hobbled so they had to shuffle. She supposed the male Runners were brought back to the stockade as slave labor. Their strong, supple bodies and clever hands well qualified them for the role.
Perhaps some of the captured women and girls were used that way, too, but Emma suspected they had a darker fate in store. They were returned to the township with bite marks and scratches on their breasts and blood running down their legs. Some of the boys seemed to have been similarly abused. Evidently the hunters took the breaking-in of a new captive as a perk of the job. Emma had no way of knowing how many of these victims had fought too hard, and ended their lives in the forest in uncomprehending misery beneath the grunting bodies of the Zealots.
She was relieved her instinct had always been to keep out of sight of these people. She didn't quite know what reaction they would have to finding a human woman alone in the forest, but she didn't feel inclined to take a chance on their charity.
At last her spying paid off. She overheard a group of hunters, as they lazed in the shade of a fig tree, feeding themselves on its plump fruit and talking loosely. Their gossip was of a major expedition—it almost sounded military—to take on a new group the Zealots called the _Daemons_. The Zealots sounded alternately apprehensive and excited about the coming conflict; there was much speculation about the quality of the women among the Daemons.
Emma knew nothing about these Daemons, and couldn't care less. But if a large number of the township's able bodies was going to be taken away, she sensed a window of opportunity.
She sat in the cave before Joshua, holding his massive head with both her hands on his filthy cheeks, making him face her. "Hunting Praisegod Michael. Tomorrow. Hunting Praisegod. Do you understand?"
"Hunt Prai'go'," he said at last, thickly, his damaged tongue protruding. "Tomorr'."
"Yes. Tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow. All right?"
He gazed back at her, his eyes containing an eerie sharpness that none of his people seemed to share. Perhaps there was madness there—but even so, it was a much more human gaze than any she had encountered since losing Sally and Maxie. But there was absolutely no guile in those eyes, none at all, and no element of calculation or planning.
She released him.
He picked up a rock he had been knapping, and resumed working on it, steady, patient. She sat down in the corner of the cave, her legs drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her knees, watching him. The blue-gray glow of the sky, leaching of light, reflected in his eyes as he worked; often, like most Ham knappers, he didn't even look at the stone he was working.
Tomorrow, this child-man would have to take part in a concerted assault.
Not for the first time Emma wondered what the hell she was doing here. _How have I come so far? I'm an accountant, for God's sake..._
She had spent the days waiting for the Zealots' expedition trying to raise a fighting force from among the Hams. But she had quickly learned that it was impossible to turn these huge, powerful, oddly gentle creatures into anything resembling soldiers—not in a short time, probably not if she kept at it forever. She had hit at last on the notion of making the assault a hunt, the one activity where the Hams did appear to show something resembling guile.
But even now she didn't know how many of them she could count on. She, and Joshua, had managed to enthuse a few of the younger men to join the battle. But when she approached them the next day even the most ardent would-be warriors would have forgotten all about the project.
Another problem was that the Hams' _only_ notion of actual combat was hand-to-hand: just yesterday she had seen three of the men wrestle an overgrown buck antelope to the ground with their bare hands. It was a strategy that had worked for them so far, evidently, or the cold hand of natural selection would long ago have eliminated them—even if they paid the price in severe injuries and shortened life spans. But it wasn't a strategy that would work well in a war, even against the disorganized and weakened rabble she hoped the Zealots would prove to be.
In the end, she realized, the Hams would fight (or not) according to their instinct and impulse, and they would fight the way they always had, come what may. She would just have to accept that, and deal with the consequences.
Joshua turned the rock over in his hands, running his scarred fingertips over the planes he had exposed, gazing intently at it. Unlike her, he wasn't fretting about tomorrow. She sensed a stillness about his mind, as if it were a clear pool, clear right to the bottom, and in its depths all she could see was the rock. It was as if Joshua and the rock blurred together, becoming a single entity, as if his self-awareness were dimming, as if he were more aware of the microstructure of the rock even than of himself.
With her head echoing as ever with hopes and fears and schemes, Emma couldn't begin to imagine how that might feel. But she knew she envied him. Since starting to live with the Hams she had often wished she could simply switch off the clamor in her head, the way they seemed to.
Now Joshua lifted his worn bone hammer—the only possession he cherished—and, with the precision of a surgeon, tapped the rock. A flake fell away. It was a scraper, she saw, an almost perfect oval.
He lifted his head and grinned at her, his scarred tongue protruding.
The Zealots' attacking army had drawn up in rough order outside the stockade, armed with their crossbows and knives and pikes. There looked to be fifty men and boys, and they had been followed by about as many Runner bearers, all of them limping, their arms full of bundles of weapons and provisions.
Emma watched the soldiers prepare, curious. The pikemen, in addition to their immensely long pikes, had leather armor: breastplates and backplates, what they called gorgets to protect their throats, and helmets that they called pots. They carried provisions in leather packs they called snapsacks. There was even a cavalry, of sorts; but the soldiers rode the shoulders of men, of Runners. They were marshalled by an insane-looking cleric type, in a long robe of charcoal-blackened skin—and by a hominid, a vast, hulking gorillalike creature with rapid, jerky movements and swivelling ears. Was it a Daemon? At least eight feet tall, it looked smart, purposeful; Emma hadn't seen its like before.
Not your problem, Emma.
The army, its preparations nearly done, sang hymns and psalms. Then a man they called Constable Sprigge stood on a rock before them, and began to pray. "Lord, you know how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me..." Emma found the wry soldiers' prayer oddly moving.
And with that the army marched off through the forest. The Zealot fortress was as weakened as it would ever be.
She crouched by the stockade gate, her heart beating like a hammer drill, clutching the shortest, sharpest thrusting spear she could find. She surveyed her own motley army. In the end, only the big man, Abel—Joshua's brother—and the oddly adventurous girl Mary had elected to join her and Joshua on this expedition. Three Hams counted physically for a lot more than twice as many Zealots. And she was planning nothing more than a smash-and-grab raid, a commando operation, a mission with a single goal. But still, there were only four of them—three child-people and herself, and she was certainly no soldier.
She was frightened for the Hams, already guilty for the harm they would surely suffer today—and, of course, profoundly frightened for herself, middle-aged accountant turned soldier. But this was the only way she could see to get to Malenfant. And getting to him was the only way she was ever going to get out of this dismal, bizarre place—if he really was here, if he was still alive, if she hadn't somehow misunderstood Joshua, fooled by his damaged tongue and her own aching heart. And so she put aside her fears and doubts and guilt, for there was no choice.
She kept her Hams quiet until she was sure the ragged Zealot army was out of hearing.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
The compound was calm, quiet, orderly. Workers trundled to and fro over the bright yellow floor of Adjusted Space, pursuing their unending chores.
But not a person moved. They stood or sat or lay in a variety of poses, like statues, or corpses, arrayed beneath the huge turning Map of the world. The core activity here was internal, as each person contemplated the vast conundrum of the Red Moon.
After two million years of continuous civilization, nobody rushed.
But to Manekato, after her vivid experiences in the forest, it was like being in a mausoleum. She found a place of shade and threw herself to the ground. A Worker came over and offered her therapeutic grooming, but Manekato waved it away.
Nemoto came to her. She carried her block of paper, much scribbled on. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and regarded Manekato gravely. _"Renemenagota of Rano represents a great danger."_
Manekato snapped her teeth angrily. _"What do you know of the hearts of people? You are not even a person. You are like a Worker..."_
But Nemoto showed no distress. _"Person or not, I may perceive certain truths more clearly than you. I see, for instance, that you are troubled on a deep level. You are human, but you are still animal, too, Manekato. And your animal side is repelled by the cold efficiency of this place you have built, and is drawn to the dark mysteries of the forest. Perhaps my lesser kind have a better understanding of the shadows of our hearts."_ But there was defiance in her pronunciation of that word _lesser_.
Manekato felt shamed. Hadn't she just taken out her own distress and confusion on a weaker creature—this Nemoto—just as Without-Name had punished the hominids she had captured? She propped herself up on her elbows. _"What is it you want?"_
_"I have a hypothesis,"_ said the little hominid.
Manekato sighed. More of Nemoto's theories: partial, immature, expressed badly and at the pace of a creeping glacier—and yet suffused by an earnest need to be understood, listened to, approved. She nodded, a gesture she had learned from Nemoto herself.
Nemoto began to spread pages of her paper block over the floor. The paper bore columns labeled _Earth, Banded Earth, Gray Earth (Hams)_ , and so on, though some columns were headed by nothing but query marks. And the paper was covered with a tangle of lines and arrows that linked the columns one to the other.
_"I have elaborated my views,"_ Nemoto said. _"I have come to believe that this Red Moon has played a key role in human evolution. Consider. How do new species arise, of hominids or any organism? Isolation is the key. If mutations arise in a large and freely mixing population, any new characteristic is diluted and will disappear within a few generations. But when a segment of the population becomes isolated from the rest, dilution through interbreeding is prevented. Then, when a new characteristic appears within the group—and provided it is beneficial to the survival of the group and the individuals within it—it will be reinforced. Thus the isolated group may, quite rapidly, diverge from the base population_.
_"And when those barriers to isolation are removed, the new species finds itself in competition with its predecessors. If it is better adapted to the prevailing conditions, it will survive by outcompeting the parent stock. If not, it declines_.
_"When our scientists believed there was only one Earth, they suspected the evolution of humanity had been the consequence of a number of speciation steps. The apelike bipedal Australopithecines gave rise to tool users, who in turn produced erect hairless creatures capable of walking on the open plain, who in turn gave rise to various species of_ Homo sapiens _—the family that includes myself. It is believed that at some points in history there were many hominid species, all derived from the base Australopithecine stock, living together on the Earth. But my kind_ —Homo sapiens sapiens— _proved the fittest of them all. By outcompetition, the variant species were removed_.
_"Presumably, each speciation episode was instigated by the isolation of a group of the parent stock. We had generally assumed that the key isolating events were caused by climate changes: rising or falling sea levels, the birth or death of forests, the coming and going of glaciation. It was a plausible picture. Before we knew of the Red Moon."_
_"And now your radical hypothesis—"_
Nemoto tapped her papers. _"What if the vagaries of the Red Moon were involved in all this? Look here. This central column sketches the history of the Earth."_
"Your _Earth_."
Nemoto smiled, her small naked face pinched. _"Assume that the base Australopithecine stock evolved on Earth. Imagine that the Red Moon with its blue Wheel portals scooped up handfuls of undifferentiated Australopithecines and, perhaps some generations later, deposited them on a variety of subtly different Earths."_
_"It is hard to imagine a more complete isolation."_
_"Yes. And the environments in which they were placed might have had no resemblance to those from which they were taken. In that case our Australopithecineswould have had to adapt or die. Perhaps one group was stranded on a world of savannah and open desert—"_
_"Ah. You are suggesting that the hairless, long-legged Runners might have evolved on such a world."_
"Homo erectus— _yes. Other worlds produced different results. And later, the Red Moon returned and swept up samples of those new populations, and handed them on to other Earths—or perhaps returned them to where they had come from, to compete with the parent stock, successfully or otherwise_.
_"My species shares a comparatively recent common ancestor with creatures like the Hams—which are of the type we call Neandertals, I think. Perhaps a group of that ancestral stock was taken to the world the Hams call the Gray Earth, where they evolved the robust form we see now. And, later, a sample of Hams was returned to the Earth. Later still, groups of_ Homo sapiens sapiens _—that is, my kind—were swept here from the Earths of the groups called the English and the Zealots, and no doubt others."_ She gazed at her diagrams. _"Perhaps even my own kind evolved on some other Earth, and were brought back by the Moon in some ancient accident."_
Manekato picked her nose thoughtfully. _"Very well. And my Earth—which you have labeled 'Banded Earth'?"_
Somewhat hesitantly, Nemoto said, _"It seems that your Earth may have been seeded by Australopithecine stock from_ my _Earth. You seem to have much in common, morphologically, with the robust variant of australopithecines to be seen in the forests here, called Nutcrackers."_
Manekato lay back and sighed, her mind racing pleasurably. _"You fear you have offended me by delegating my world to a mere offshoot. You have not. And your scheme is consistent with the somewhat mysterious appearance of my forebears on Earth—my Earth."_ She glanced at Nemoto's sketches. _"It is a promising suggestion. This strange Moon might prove to be the crucible of our evolution: Certainly it is unlikely that hominid forms could have evolved independently on so many diverse Earths. But such is the depth of time involved, and such is the complexity of the mixing achieved by our wandering Moon, the full picture is surely more complicated than your sketch—and it is hard to believe that_ your _Earth just happens to be the primary home of the lineage... And how is it that so many of these other Earths share, not just hominid cousins, but a shared history, even shared languages? Your own divergence from the Zealot type must be quite ancient—their peculiar tails attest to that—and yet your history evidently shares much in common with them."_
Nemoto frowned, her small face comically serious. _"That is a difficulty. Perhaps there is such a thing as historical convergence. Or perhaps thewandering of the Moon has induced mixing even in historical times. Cultural, linguistic transmission—"_
It was a simplistic suggestion, but Manekato did not want to discourage her. _"Perhaps. But the truth may be more subtle. Perhaps the manifold of universes is larger than you suppose. If it were arbitrarily large, then there would be an arbitrarily close match to any given universe."_
Nemoto puzzled through that. _"Just as I would find my identical twin, in a large enough population of people."_
_"That's the idea. The closer the match you seek, the more unlikely it would be, and the larger the population, of, umm, candidate twins you would need to search."_
_"But the degree of convergence between, say, the Zealot universe and my own—language, culture, even historical figures—is so unlikely that the manifold of possibilities would have to be very large indeed."_
_"Infinite,"_ said Mane gently. _"We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wander is in fact infinite."_
Nemoto considered that for a while. Then she said, _"But no matter how large the manifold, I still have to understand_ why _this apparatus of a reality-wandering Moon should have been devised in the first place—and who by."_
Manekato studied Nemoto, wishing she could read the hominid's small face better. _"Why show me your schema now?"_
_"Because,"_ Nemoto said, _"I believe all of this, this grand evolutionary saga, is now under threat."_
Manekato frowned. _"Because of the failure of the world engines?"_
_"No,"_ Nemoto said. _"Because of you. And Renemenagota of Rano."_
A shadow fell over Manekato's face. "Your monkey may be right, Mane. You should listen to it."
It was Without-Name. She stepped forward, carelessly scattering Nemoto's spidery diagrams.
## _E mma Stoney_
Emma lifted her head. _"Hall-oo! Hall-oo!"_ Her call, though pitched higher than that of the men who mostly ventured outside the stockade, was, she was sure, a pretty accurate imitation of the soft cries of returning hunters.
Within a couple of minutes she heard an answering grunt, and the rattle of heavy wooden bolts being slid back.
All or nothing, she thought. Malenfant—or death.
When the heavy gate started to creak open, she yelled and threw herself at it. Her flimsy mass made no difference. But the Hams immediately copied her, making a sound like a car ramming a tree. The splintering gate was smashed back, and she heard a howl of pain.
The Hams surged forward. There were people in the compound, women and children. As three immense Hams came roaring in among them, they ran screaming.
Emma glanced around quickly. She saw a litter of crude adobe huts, one substantial chapel-like building at the centre, a floor of dust stamped flat by feet and stained with dung and waste. She smelled shit, stale piss.
Now the door to one of the buildings flew open. Men boiled out, pulling on clothing. Inside the building's smoky darkness Emma glimpsed naked Runner women, some of them wearing mockeries of dresses, others on beds and tables, on their backs or their bellies, legs splayed, scarred ankles strapped down.
Grabbing pikes and clubs and bows, the men ran at Abel, howling. With a cry of pleasure Abel joined with them. He brushed aside their clubs as if they were twigs wielded by children. He got two of the Zealots by the neck, lifted them clean off the ground, and slammed their heads together, making a sound like eggs cracking.
But now the bowmen had raised their weapons and let fly. Emma, despising herself, huddled behind Abel's broad back. She heard the grisly impact of arrows in Abel's chest. He fell to his knees, and blood spewed from his mouth.
The archers were struggling to reload. Mary hurled herself at them, fists flailing.
Emma grabbed Joshua's arm. "Malenfant! Quickly, Joshua. Malenfant—where?"
For answer he ran toward the chapel-like central building. Emma touched Abel's back apologetically, and ran after Joshua toward the chapel. She seethed with rage and adrenaline and fear. This had better be worth the price we're paying, Malenfant.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
Manekato stood quickly. Nemoto hurried behind her, sheltering behind her bulk. Babo came running to join them, his legs and arms levering him rapidly over the floor of Adjusted Space. Other people gathered in a loose circle around this central confrontation, watching nervously. Workers scuttled back and forth, seeking tasks, trying to discern the needs of the people, ignored.
For the first time it struck Manekato just how physically big Without-Name was—towering over a lesser hominid like Nemoto, but larger than Manekato, too, larger than any of the other people on this expedition. Physical size did not matter at home, on civilized Earth. But on this savage Moon, strength and brute cunning were key survival factors; and Without-Name seemed to relish her unrestrained power.
And now Manekato noticed a new hominid following in Without-Name's wake. It was a male, taller than Nemoto, rake-thin, and he was dressed in a tight robe of animal skin stained black, perhaps by charcoal. He drew a Ham boy after him. The boy was dressed in elaborate clothing, and he had a collar around his neck, connected to a lead in the tall hominid's hand.
Babo said tightly, "And is this your Praisegod Michael, Renemenagota of Rano?"
Without-Name raised one hand.
Crossbow bolts thudded into Babo's belly and chest and upper arms. He cried out softly, dull surprise on his face. He crumpled forward and fell on the bolts, making them twist, and his cries deepened. A Worker rushed to tend Babo's wounds, but Without-Name kicked it away.
Manekato, stunned, saw that the circular platform was surrounded by hominids—Zealots, in their sewn skins. Some of them, bizarrely, were riding on the shoulders of Running-folk. They seemed afraid, but they held up their crossbows and spears with defiance.
Praisegod Michael passed his hands over Babo's shuddering form, making a cross in the air. " 'Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man...' "
Manekato found words. "Renemenagota—what are you doing?"
"Providing you with a purpose."
"Your army of hominids would be no match for the power we could deploy," Manekato whispered.
"Of course not— _if_ you choose to deploy it," Without-Name said mockingly. "But you won't, will you? Meanwhile these hominids believe they are soldiers of God. They have only their simple handmade weapons, but their heads are on fire. And so their crossbow bolts will best all your learning and technology. And under my guidance, they will sweep the world."
Now Nemoto stepped out from behind Manekato. Without-Name eyed the little hominid with undisguised loathing.
But Praisegod Michael faced her, apparently unsurprised to find her here. _"You are the one called Nemoto. Malenfant told me I would find you here."_
_"I know your kind,"_ Nemoto said. She turned to Manekato. _"You must stop this, here and now. You have not seen such things before, Manekato. With Renemenagota's organizational skill, Michael and his fellows will march on, overwhelming others with their savagery and determination, armed with an unwavering faith that will lead them to their deaths if necessary. Those they do not destroy will be forcibly converted to the creed. By the second generation the conquered will regard themselves as soldiers of the conquering army. We are limited creatures, Manekato, and we do not have the strength of mind to fight off a contagion of seductive but lethal ideas. You must stop this for the slaughter that will follow if you don't."_
Babo twisted on the ground, his hands clamped to his stomach, his face a rictus of pain. "Yes," he hissed. "Exponential growth, Mane. They will conquer, acquire resources to fuel further expansion, thus acquiring still more, and all driven by a dazzling virus of the mind."
Manekato said, "It is—unbelievable."
Nemoto faced her. _"Manekato, you must save us from ourselves—and save this machine-world from the deadly manipulation of Renemenagota."_
Without-Name stood before her, her immense biceps bunched, gazing into her eyes, so close Manekato could smell blood on her breath. "Perhaps this ape-thing is right, Manekato. Will you take its advice?—Ah, but then you would have to become like me, wouldn't you, and how you dread that! You must destroy me—but you cannot, can you, Mane?"
Babo, on the floor, groaned and raised one bloody arm. "But I can, Renemenagota of Rano."
A sudden wind, hot and dense, billowed before Manekato's face.
People staggered back, crying out. Nemoto took hold of Babo's arm, anchoring herself against the gusts.
A tube of whirling air formed over the platform. It was the end of a winding column that stretched down from the sky, silvery-gray, suddenly tightly defined. It was a controlled whirlwind, like that which had stormed around the Market for two hundred thousand years.
And in the heart of the column of tortured air was Renemenagota. She raised her fists, briefly bipedal like those who she had sought to lead. But she could land no blows on the twisting air, and it paid no heed to her screamed defiance.
In a brief blur of brown and black, she was gone.
The whirlwind shrivelled, shrinking back up into the lid of cloud that had covered the sky. A cloud of crimson dust came drifting down on the platform.
Mane, stunned, bewildered, looked around. Nemoto still clung to the fallen Babo. Of the ring of armed Zealots there was no sign.
Praisegod had been bowled over. He lay on his back on the platform, his black clothing scattered around him. His eyes flickered, cunning, calculating, the eyes of a trapped animal seeking a way out.
But his pet Ham boy stood over him.
Praisegod lifted his hand to the boy, asking for help, forcing a smile.
The boy bunched his fist and rammed it into Praisegod's chest, through clothing, skin, an arch of ribs.
Praisegod shuddered and flopped like a landed fish. The Ham's squat face was expressionless as he rummaged in that bloody cavern. Then the Ham boy grimaced, and the muscles of his arms contracted.
Praisegod's head arched back, and his voice was a rasp. _"Why have you forsaken me?"_
Then, his heart crushed, he was still.
## _E mma Stoney_
There was a lot of shouting going on. Mary was running around the compound, busily engaging her foe. Though Abel had fallen, Mary was moving too quickly for the archers to get an accurate sight on her, and every time she got close enough she was slamming heads, breaking arms, and generally kicking ass with a joyous vigor.
The chapel, built of mud brick around a sturdy wooden frame, was as substantial as it looked. Emma ducked into the building and slammed the door, and ran a heavy wooden bolt into a notch.
Within seconds fists were hammering on the door.
"Quickly," she said to Joshua. "Malenfant. Where?"
But Joshua did not reply, and when she turned, she saw that he was facing a crucifix, gazing at the gentle, anguished face of a Messiah. Joshua cringed, but was unable to look away.
The yelling at the door was growing intense, and the first hints of organized battering were detectable. Emma couldn't wait any longer. She cast around the little chapel, shoving aside furniture and a small, ornately carved wooden altar.
And she found a hatchway.
The hatch opened on a small, dark shaft, fitted with stubby wooden rungs. Emma clambered down hastily, to find herself in a short corridor. A single wicker torch burned fitfully in a holder. She grabbed it and hurried along the corridor.
The corridor led to two wooden doors. One door was swinging open, and Emma recoiled. The cell within was just a pit, with a filth-crusted floor and blackened, scratched walls; it stank of blood and vomit and urine.
The other door was shut. Emma hammered on it. "Malenfant! Are you there?" The wood was so filthy her hands came away smeared with deep black.
No reply.
Struggling to hold up the torch, she made out a thick bolt, just wood, a smaller copy of the one on the compound gate. She hesitated for a heartbeat, her hand on the bolt.
She reminded herself that she actually had no idea what lay on the other side of this door. But you've come this far, Emma.
She pulled back the bolt, dragged open the door. She held the torch in front of her protectively.
There were two people here. One was sitting on the floor, hands crossed over her chest for protection—her, for it was a woman, in a long dress that looked finely made. But despite the dress and the tied-back hair, that protruding face and the ridged eyes marked her out as a Ham.
The other was a man. He was wearing a blue coverall, and he was curled up in the dirt, folded on himself.
Emma hurried to him. Gently she lifted aside his arm, to reveal his face. "Do you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant..."
He opened his eyes, and his face worked. "Welcome to hell," he whispered.
The Ham woman slipped her arms under Malenfant and cradled him, with remarkable tenderness. She said her name was Julia; her English, though slurred by the deficiencies of the Ham palate, was well-modulated and clear.
With Malenfant limp but seemingly light as a baby in Julia's arms, they clambered out of the pit and back into the chapel.
Still the Zealots battered at the door. Joshua remained in his apelike crouch, his head buried in his big arms. He was whimpering, as if horrified by what he had done.
Gently Emma pulled his arm away from his face. His cheeks were smeared with tears. "No time," she said. "Mary. Skinnies hurt Mary. Joshua help."
It took an agonizing minute of repetition, with the hammering on the door turning into a splintering, before he responded.
He got to his feet with a roar. He ran to the door, dragged it open, and with a sweep of his massive arm he knocked aside the scrambling crowd of Zealot men. He forced his way outside, calling for Mary.
Julia followed, carrying Malenfant. Emma stayed close by her side, cradling Malenfant's lolling head.
# _PART FOUR_
# **World Engine**
#
## _R eid Malenfant_
"You always were a heathen bastard, Malenfant. No wonder Praisegod had it in for you. I remember the trouble we had when we chose a church. Even though it was a time when overt religiosity was a career asset if you wanted to be part of the public face of NASA."
"I did like that chapel at Ellington. Kind of austere, for a Catholic chapel. Not too many bleeding guys on the wall. And I liked the priest. Monica Chaum, you could go bowling with."
"Well, I liked the chapel, too, Malenfant. I found it comforting. A place to get away from the squawk boxes and the rest, when you were in orbit."
" _On_ orbit. You never told me that."
"There are lots of things you don't know about me, Malenfant. I remember one Christmas Eve when you were up there, doing whatever you did. _Christmas Eve_ , and I was alone. I was sick of it all, Malenfant. I wanted to go to church, but I didn't want people gawping. So I asked Monica if she would open up the church for me. Well, she dug out the organist, and she went through the church lighting all the candles, just as they would be lit for the Midnight Mass that night, and the organist played the program planned for the service. When I walked in and saw it was all there just for me—well, it was one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw."
"I remember that Christmas. I asked Monica to get you a gift. It was a dress. I picked it out."
"Oh, Malenfant. It was at least five sizes too big. Monica had to apologize; _she_ knew. No wonder you can't figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don't know your own wife's dress size... I never liked being alone, you know."
"Nobody does. I guess that's why we're here, why we swung down from the damn trees. Every one of us is looking for somebody..."
"Stop it. Even now, you'd rather talk about issues, about human destiny and the rest of the garbage, anything but us. Anything but _me_. When you're gone I'll be alone here, Malenfant—truly alone, more alone than any person I can think of—to all intents and purposes the only one of my kind, on the whole Moon, in this whole _universe_... It's unimaginable. I'm an accountant, Malenfant. It's not supposed to be like this. Not for me. And it's all your fault. Do you want to know what I'm afraid of—really afraid of?"
"Tell me."
"Chronic reactive depression. You ever heard of that? I looked it up once. You can die of loneliness, Malenfant. Four months, that's all it takes. You don't have to be a failure. Just—outcast."
"I'm sorry."
"Bullshit."
## _S hadow_
There was little food to be had on the plain. The Elf-folk had carried some food from their crater-wall forest, figs and bananas and apples. But now the sun was setting, the footsteps made by the people in the bare patches of dust were little pools of shadow, and most of the food was gone. Plaintively, as they trooped after Shadow across the dusty grass, many of them looked back to the forest they had left.
They came to the site of an old kill. The bones were so scattered and worn by the teeth of successive predators and scavengers that it was impossible to tell what animal it might once have been.
Nevertheless Shadow stopped here. She sat amid the bones and, with a grunt, passed water into the dirt. The fungal growth on her face was a thick mask over her brow and cheeks and nose, making her look alien, ferocious, and some of the more livid scars on her body seemed to glow as bright red as the dust at her feet.
The others followed her lead: first Stripe, the strongest of the men, then Silverneck and the women who followed her. Infants clambered down to the dusty ground and plucked yellow grass blades, stuffing them into their mouths with rust-red fingers.
The adults huddled together uneasily. On this vast tabletop of a landscape the Elf-folk were a dark knot, easily visible, horribly vulnerable. Nevertheless Shadow seemed content to stay here, and so stay they must.
None of the people sat close to Shadow.
Some of them made small offerings to her: a fig, an apple they had carried in their hands. Soon a small pile of food built up. Without acknowledging the people, Shadow reached down and took pieces of the food.
The sun sank further, its edge dipping below rounded hills. A nervy young man, Shiver, emitted a hesitant, hooting roosting call. But there were no trees here to make nests, and the gentle, eerie sound only made the people huddle still closer.
Silverneck sat on the fringe of the group. She picked up a bone from the litter around her. It was a section of a skull. The face was almost intact: she pushed her fingers into eye sockets, nostrils. This might have been a person, an Elf, a Ham, a Nutcracker, a Runner. She ran her finger along it, picking out scrapes and notches, made by teeth or, perhaps, tools. She was almost naked of fur now, so frantically had she been groomed by the other women in these days of turmoil and doubt. Her remaining hairs clung in patches to her blue-black skin and stuck out from her body; the low reddening sunlight made her hair glow, as if she were surrounded by a soft cloud.
Shiver was sitting close to a woman, Palm, barely out of her adolescence. She in turn was resting against her mother's stolid back. Shiver was eating an apple, slowly, his eyes fixed on Palm. His erection was obvious. Shiver started flicking bits of the apple at Palm; the half-chewed fragments landed at her feet, or on her lap.
Without looking at Shiver, Palm picked up the morsels and popped them in her mouth. Gradually, in silence, all but imperceptibly, Shiver moved closer to the girl, his erection dangling before him.
With a sigh, Palm folded back from her mother and lay on the ground, legs separated, her arms stretched above her head. Shiver slid over her and entered her, all in one liquid, silent movement. With a few thrusts he reached orgasm, and withdrew smoothly. Seconds later he and Palm were sitting side by side as if nothing had happened.
Stripe, the boss man, absently grooming Silverneck, had noticed none of this challenge to his status.
Shadow had watched it all. But she cared nothing for such reproductive play. Shadow's dominance had nothing to do with the community's traditional bonds, sex, and children.
After the death of One-eye she had soon become the strongest of the women. And the men—even mighty Stripe—had learned to submit to her power. Though many of them outsized her, her naked, unbridled aggression gave her an edge in most contests. Many of the men and boys cradled hands and feet missing fingers or toes, nipped away by Shadow as an indelible mark of their defeat.
And now she had led them all far from home, far from the trees and shrubs and streams and clearings they knew, across this crimson plain—for a purpose only Shadow, in the deepest recesses of her mind, understood.
A small boy approached Shadow. He had his eyes fixed on the pile of fruit before her. His mother, Hairless, growled warningly, but he feigned not to hear. The boy grabbed his infant sister, and, pulling a twisted, funny face, began to wrestle with her. She joined in, chortling. Soon he was on top of her, making playful pelvic thrusts, and then she rolled on top of him. But every roll took them closer to Shadow's food pile.
As soon as the boy was close enough, his hand whipped out to grab a fig. He tucked it in his mouth, immediately abandoning his play, and walked back toward his mother.
One of the women laughed at his clever deceit.
A sharpened cobble hissed through the air. It caught the boy at the top of his spine, laying open the flesh. He howled and went down. Hairless hurried forward and grabbed him. He curled up in her lap, screaming with pain, as she tended the wound.
Stripe picked up the bloody cobble, wiped it on the grass, and passed it back to Shadow.
The group sat in silence, save for the screams of the boy, which took a long time to subside.
The sun slid beneath the horizon. Light bled from the sky.
The people huddled in a close circle. The adults had their backs to the dark, with the children and infants at the center of the circle. Without fire, without weapons that could strike at a distance save a handful of stones, these hominids were defenseless against the creatures that prowled the savannah night.
Nobody but the infants would sleep tonight. But they feared Shadow more than they feared the dark.
When the dawn came, they found that the boy who had stolen Shadow's fig had gone. As the group moved on, Hairless, his mother, was inconsolable. She had to be half-carried by her sisters and mother, until the memory had started to fade.
At last they reached the cover of trees. This was a forest that lapped at the foot of a tall mountain range; bare rock shone high above. With relief, they slipped into the trees' shadows. Some submitted to ancient green impulses and clambered high into the trees to make nests, even though the day was not yet half over.
But Shiver, clambering high, found a nest already made. He broke it apart, hooting loudly, his fur standing on end.
Then others joined in the noise, for they began to find discarded fruit peel, and even an abandoned termite-fishing stick. They sniffed and licked these remnants; they were fresh. Others had been here, and recently.
And then, as they spread deeper through the new forest, seeking shoots and fruit-bearing shrubs and trees, a child yelled. The adults came crashing through the undergrowth to see, their hair bristling.
A small girl was standing at the edge of a clearing where a great tree had fallen; its carcass lay on the ground, surrounded by crushed bushes. The girl was facing a child a little older than she was. It was another girl, standing unsteadily, gazing back nervously.
It was in fact Tumble, Shadow's small sister. But Shadow did not recognize her. And Tumble, even if she had remembered Shadow, would not have known this scarred creature with her grotesque fungal mask.
Shadow had come home: transformed, unrecognizable, infused with a new and deadly purpose.
It was no coincidence that the encounter had taken<|fim_middle|> our genes, our blood. And what of the exclusion we suffered when we lost our Farms?_ Why _must it be so? What is that but savage cruelty—what is that but sublimated aggression, even murder? No, brother. This Moon has not polluted our souls; we brought the blood and the lust with us."_
_"You should not be so harsh on yourselves,"_ Nemoto said.
Even now Manekato felt a frisson of annoyance that this small-brained hominid was trying to comfort her.
But Babo said, _"She's right. Isn't it possible to celebrate what we have achieved, despite our limitations? Can we not see how we have risen above our biological constraints?"_
Manekato said, _"That is true of your kind, Nemoto. You spoke of the contagions of madness that sweep your people. And yet those grand obsessions havedriven your kind to a certain greatness: a deep scientific description of the universe, an exploration of your world and others, even a type of art... Achievements that press against the boundaries of your capabilities. We, by comparison, have done little to transcend our biology—have done little for the past two million years, in fact, but squat on our Farms. Two million years of complacency."_
_"Again that is harsh,"_ Nemoto said. _"Two million years of peace, given the savagery in your breast, is not a small achievement. We must all strive to embrace the context provided by this place—perhaps that is one of its purposes."_
_"Yes,"_ said Babo. _"There are many ways to be a hominid. The Red Moon is teaching us that."_
_"And,"_ said Nemoto, _"we must anticipate meeting the Old Ones, who may be superior to us all. Then we will see how long a shadow we cast in their mighty light."_
Babo said, _"But are you content with such abstractions, Nemoto? Don't you long for home, too?"_
Nemoto shrugged. _"My home is gone. One day there were eight billion people in the sky; the next they had all vanished. The shock continues to work through my psychology. I don't welcome exploring the scar."_
The three of them sat in their small ring, soberly eating the sweet young bananas, while Workers politely scuttled to and fro, removing the discarded skins.
## _R eid Malenfant_
Much of the time he slept, drifting through uneasy, green-tinged dreams of the kind that had plagued him since the day he had come to this unnatural Moon. And then the dreams would merge into a fragmented wakefulness, fringed by blood and pain, with such soft transitions he couldn't have said where dream finished and reality began.
He was lying on his side—he could tell that much—with his arms and legs splayed out in front of him, like a GI Joe fallen off the shelf. He didn't even know where he was. He was surrounded by wood and earth. Some shelter, he supposed, something constructed by hands and eyes and brains, human or otherwise.
It was all very remote, as if he were looking down a long tunnel lined with brown and green and bloodred.
He supposed he was dying. Well, there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it, and he had no desire to fight it.
But if he could feel little with his busted-up body—taste nothing of the glop that was ladled into his mouth, barely sense the warm palm oil that was rubbed into his limbs—there was one thing he could still feel, one anguished pinpoint that pushed into him whenever he made out Emma's face.
Regret.
"Regret what, Malenfant?"
"Regret I'm going to die not knowing _why_."
"You're dying because some psychopathic religious nut had you beaten to death. That's why."
"But _why the Red Moon_? Why the Fermi Paradox—"
"Malenfant, for Christ's sake, is this the time or the place for—"
'emma, give me a break. This is my deathbed. What other time and place is there? That damn Paradox baffled me my whole life. I thought the showing up of this Red Moon, for sure the strangest event in human history since Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky, had to have something to do with that flaw in the universe. I guess I _hoped_ it did. But..."
"But what?"
"It didn't work out that way. Emma, it just got more mysterious. Nemoto saw that immediately. Not only did we suddenly find that we inhabit just one of a whole bunch of universes, there are no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in the other universes either. Not a trace. It's Fermi writ large—as if there is something wrong not just with this universe, but all our cosmic neighbors..."
"Malenfant, none of this matters. Not any more."
"But it does. Emma, find the advanced guys. The ones with the light shows in the sky. That's what you've got to do. Ask _them_ what the hell is going on here. Maybe they caused it. All this, the multiple realities, the wandering Moon. Maybe they even _caused_ Fermi, in some way. That's what you must do, after..."
"After you're gone? Poor Malenfant. I know what's really bothering you. It's not that the question is unanswered. It's the idea that you won't be around when the answer comes. You always did think you were the center of everything, Malenfant. You can't stand to think that the universe will go on without you."
"Doesn't everybody feel that way?"
"Actually, no, not everybody, Malenfant. And you know what? The universe _will_ go on. You don't have to save it. It doesn't need you to keep space expanding or the stars shining. We'll keep on finding out new stuff, visiting new places, finding new answers, even when you aren't around to make it happen."
"Some bedside manner, babe."
"Come on, Malenfant. We are what we are, you and I. I can't imagine us changing now."
"I guess."
## _S hadow_
She slid through the forest, stepping on roots and rocks to avoid dead leaves and undergrowth, silent save for the brush of her fur on the leaves. Her hair was fully erect, and her fungal mask seemed to glow with purpose and power.
There were three men with her. They were tense, fearful.
Shadow turned back to the men and grinned fiercely, knowing how her teeth shone white under the hairless protuberance over her brow and cheeks. They grinned back, and they punched and slapped each other, seeking courage. The smallest and youngest, Shiver, absently sucked the forefinger of his right hand; it was a stump, the first two joints nipped off by Shadow.
Shadow moved forward once more, and the men followed.
She froze. She had heard the soft whimper of an infant—and there, again.
She roared and charged forward, crushing through low shrubbery.
A woman and child were in the low branches of a tree. They had been eating fruit; the forest floor beneath the tree was littered with bits of yellow skin. The woman was called Smile. She was in fact a sister of Termite's, an aunt of Shadow. Shadow did not know this—nor would it have made any difference if she had known.
Smile tumbled out of her tree. She landed with a roll on the forest floor, got to her feet and turned to flee. But her child, less than three years old, was still in the tree. He clung to a branch, screaming. So Smile ran back, scrambled up the tree, collected the child, and dropped back to the ground. But she had lost her advantage; now the attackers were on her.
Shadow grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to the ground. Shiver joined in, kicking and stamping. Stripe grabbed the infant from his mother's arms. He held the child by his feet and flailed him this way and that, slamming him against a tree trunk. The child was soon limp, and Stripe hurled him away, sending the little body spinning into a clump of undergrowth.
With grim determination, Smile fought against the odds. She twisted and bit Shiver hard on the shoulder. He howled. She managed to ram his body into Shadow and the others, momentarily reducing them to a tangle of flailing limbs.
That was enough of a break for Smile to get away. She scrambled into a fig tree. Stripe followed her. But Smile clambered around the branches, evading him, screaming. Now Shadow clambered up the tree, more stiffly than Stripe, for her lifetime of injuries and beatings had left their mark.
But as she approached, Smile made an almighty leap. She crashed into the branches of another tree, and tumbled to the ground. In an instant she was on her feet. She ran to the foliage where her child had fallen, picked up the limp body, and ran into the deeper woods.
Shiver pursued, but she was soon out of his reach. He ran back and forth across the bloodied forest floor, howling and throwing rocks and kicking at the trees, ridding himself of his desperate aggression.
Shadow fell on Stripe. She jabbered at him, and hailed blows on his head and shoulders. He huddled over, long arms protecting his head and chest.
For now Smile had been spared. But it was only the beginning.
Shadow's next target was Little Boss. She took six men with her, armed with sticks and rocks, and patrolled the forest until she found him.
Little Boss was alone, drinking from a small stream. Beside him was a pile of cobbles, suitable for making sharp new tools. When he heard Shadow's party approach, he stood straight, hair immediately erect, and snarled defiance. By this time, the newcomers' murderous aggression was well known among Little Boss's group. But when he saw how many men had come with Shadow, Little Boss turned to run.
He was built for power, not speed.
Shiver was the first to catch him, seizing his legs and throwing him to the ground. Shadow pinned him down, sitting on his head and holding his shoulders. The other men fell on Little Boss, attacking with a savagery only impeded by the fact that they got in each other's way.
At last Shadow and the men backed off. Charged with energy, fists clenched, mouths and stone tools stained by blood, the men ran to and fro, howling and pounding their weapons against tree trunks and rocks.
Little Boss remained motionless for a time. Then, uttering faint screams, he sat up. He had great gashes on his face, legs, and back. He could not move one leg. The ground where he had lain was stained by blood and panic shit. He looked back at his assailants, who were capering and howling their rage. He opened his mouth, as if to cry defiance. But a great bubble of bloody mucus formed there, and his voice was a strangle. When the bubble broke, Little Boss fell back, rigid as a falling tree.
Shadow fell on the body immediately. She pulled it by its ankles out into the clearing, sat on its chest, and immediately began to slice away its flesh with a new stone cobble.
With degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm, the others joined her. Soon they were all feeding.
The miniature war was brief but savage.
Shadow's only tactic was to isolate her targets and destroy them. But it was a tactic beyond the grasp of her opponents, and it worked over and over. The women, especially if burdened by infants, were easy prey. The men were picked off one by one, always by overwhelming force.
And as Shadow's group fed day after day on fresh meat, they grew stronger, and hungrier.
It finished as Shadow watched her acolytes fall on the body of her mother. In her last moments, before they opened her chest, Termite reached out a bloody hand to Shadow, who stayed unmoved.
And then Shadow went alone into the forest to hunt down the last free man, her brother, Claw. When Shadow returned to her warmongering group, the object she clutched in her hand was his heart.
But when the opponents were annihilated, the group, filled with a rage for blood and murder, anxious for more meat, began to fall on each other.
## _R eid Malenfant_
He remembered how his father, on learning of his inoperable tumor, had suddenly rediscovered the Episcopalian faith of his youth. Somehow that had hurt Malenfant—as if his father, in those last months, had chosen to draw away from him. But he hadn't been about to deny his dad the comfort he sought.
It had always seemed to him that religion was a kind of bargain. You gave over your whole life, a portion of your income and half your intellect, in return for a freedom from the fear of death. Maybe it wasn't such a bad bargain at that.
But look at the Hams: Julia and the rest, these Moon-bound Neandertals, as rational and smart as any human being, just as aware of the human tragedy of death and pain and loss—and yet, it seemed, quite without the consolation of religion. But they seemed able to cope with the dreadful truth of life without hiding from it.
Well, maybe they were tougher than humans.
And what about you, Malenfant, now the black meteor is approaching at last? Don't you need comfort—forgiveness—the prospect of continued existence beyond the grave of crimson dust that will soon welcome your bones?
Too late for me now, he thought. But it doesn't seem to trouble me. Maybe I'm more like a damn Neandertal than a human.
Or maybe Emma was right: that nothing mattered so much to him about where he was going, compared to what he was escaping from.
Julia was here, her concerned, Moonlike face swimming in the gloom before his eyes. He wondered absently if it was night or day.
After a time, Emma was here. She frowned, wiped at his mouth with a scrap of leaf, and tried to give him water.
"Things to tell you."
"You need to save your strength for drinking. Eating. All that good stuff."
"No time."
"If you're going to start lecturing me about Fermi again—"
"I did my best, Emma."
"I know you did."
"I came all the way to this damn Moon to find you. I went to the White House. I built a rocket ship."
"That always was the kind of stuff you were good at, Malenfant."
"Looking out for you?"
"No," she said sadly. "The grand gesture."
"I found you. But I can't do anything for you."
She looked at him, her eyes blank, oddly narrowed. "But was that ever the idea?"
"What else?"
"You're a complicated man, Reid Malenfant. Your motives aren't simple."
"Your mother thinks I've been trying to kill you for years."
"Oh, it's not that, Malenfant. It's not me you're trying to destroy. _It's you_. It's just that I'm sometimes in the way..."
He frowned, deeply disturbed, remembering fragments of conversations with McCann, Nemoto. "What are you talking about?"
"What about Praisegod Michael?"
"He was a psychopath. I had to—"
"You had to _what_? Malenfant, it wasn't your fight. What does Praisegod Michael matter to you, or me? If you really had been devoted to the cause of getting to me, you'd have said anything he wanted to hear, to keep your skin intact. But not you. You walked into his guns, Malenfant. Deliberately. And you must have known you couldn't win. On some level you _wanted_ him to do this to you."
"I was looking for you," he said stubbornly. "That's why I came to the Moon."
"I'm sorry, Malenfant. I see what I see."
He licked his lips with a tongue that felt like a piece of wood.
"Tell me this," she said now. "When we were in that damn T-38 over Africa, when the Wheel appeared in the sky—"
"Yeah."
_"You could have turned away."_
He closed his eyes. He thought back to those moments, the glittering sky-bright seconds of the crash, when he and Emma had been suspended in the deep African light, before the enigmatic alien artifact.
... Yes. He remembered how the aerosurfaces had bit, just for a second. He had felt the stick respond. He knew he could turn the nose of the plane away from the Wheel. It was a chance. He didn't take it.
"Yes," he rasped. "And then—"
And then there had been that instant of _exuberance_ —the sense of relief, of freedom, as the T-38 hurtled at the Wheel, as he felt the little jet slide out of his control, as the great blue circle had rushed toward him, and he had reached the point where he could do no more.
"How did you know? The slaved instruments—"
"I didn't need to watch instruments, Malenfant. I know you. It's just—the way you are, the kind of person you are. You could no more help it than you could stop breathing, or keep from farting in your sleep."
"I do that?"
"I never knew when would be a good time to tell you."
"You picked a doozy."
"Poor Malenfant. The universe never has made much sense to you, has it?—not from the grandness of the Fermi Paradox, not yourself, on down to your relationship with your first grade teacher."
"She really was an asshole."
"I've always known all about you, what you are, what you could not help but become. Right from the beginning, I've known. And I went along with you anyway. What does that say about me?... Maybe we're alike, you and I." She reached up and passed her hands over his eyes. "Sleep now."
But sleep eluded him, though regret lingered.
"Listen, Malenfant. I've decided. You're right. I'm going to go on, to track down the Daemons— _Homo superior_ , whatever they are. Every time this damn Moon shifts, people suffer and die, right here on the Moon, and on all the Earths. What gives those guys the right to screw up so many lives—so many billions of lives?"
"And you intend to stop them."
"Malenfant, I don't know what I intend. I haven't had a plan since the day I fell through that blue Wheel and found myself here, covered in shit. I'll do what you always did. I'll improvise."
"Take care."
"Because you won't be around to look out for me? Malenfant, if it escaped your notice, _I_ rescued _you_. All _you_ did was lose your spacecraft, your sole companion, and all your gear, and get yourself thrown in jail. Twice."
"Anger can make you feel good."
"... Yes. Maybe that's what I need. An enemy. Somebody to be mad at. Other than you, that is."
"Why here?"
"What?"
"Why is it finishing like this, here, now, so far from home?"
"You always did ask big questions, Malenfant. Big, unanswerable questions. Why are there no aliens? Why is there something, rather than nothing?"
"I mean it. Why did I have to run into a petty thug like Praisegod? Why couldn't it have been more—"
"More meaningful? But it is meaningful, Malenfant. There's a logic. And it has nothing to do with the Red Moon or the Fermi Paradox, or any of that. It's _you_ , Malenfant. It's _us_. Your whole life has a logic leading up to this place and time. It just had to be this way."
"The universe is irrelevant. That's what you're saying."
"I guess so... But there are other universes. We know that now. We've seen them. Are there other destinies for us, Malenfant?... _Malenfant!_ "
The tunnel was long now, and filling with an oily darkness. Her face was like a distant beacon, a point of light like a star in a telescope, and he struggled to see her. There was a dim awareness of hands working his body, hands pounding at his chest, heavy hands, not human.
The light went out, the last light.
Soft lips brushed his brow, gentle as a butterfly's wings, yet the most vivid event in all the collapsing universe.
Enough, he thought, gratefully, fearfully.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
It was time for the Mapping to the crater that promised to reveal the secrets of the world engine.
The people stood in a rough circle at the center of the platform. The yellow floor was bare again, the temporary structures it had borne unraveled, space-time allowed to heal. The great turning Map of the Red Moon had been folded away also, having served its purpose. There was nothing left but the platform, and its cargo of people.
Beyond there was only the unmanaged forest, where, perhaps, curious eyes gazed out at the creatures they had learned to call Daemons.
Manekato sought out Nemoto. The little hominid stood alone, ignored by the rest. She wore her much-repaired blue coverall, and over her shoulder she bore the bag of parachute fabric that contained her few artifacts.
Manekato knew that it would serve no purpose to tell Nemoto that possessions were meaningless, for anything desired could be reproduced at will, over and over, Mapped out of the raw stuff of the universe itself. In this, oddly, Manekato's kind had much in common with the more primitive hominids here. The Hams and Runners would manufacture tools for a single use and then discard them, without sentiment or longing. Perhaps Manekato shared with them some deep sense of the unstinting bounty of the universe—there would always be another rock to make a hand axe—an intuition which Nemoto, caught between the two, coming from a culture of acquisition and limits, could never share.
Manekato sighed, aware of the drift of her thinking. As always, just as Without-Name had complained, too many philosophical ruminations!—Enough, Mane. It is time to act.
She took Nemoto's hand; it lay against her own, tiny and white and fragile. _"Are you ready?"_
Nemoto forced a smile. _"I have been fired across space by a barely-controlled explosion devised by primitives. By comparison you are masters of space and time. I should feel confident in your hands."_
_"But you don't."_
_"But I don't."_
Manekato said gently, _"A Mapping is only a matter of logic. You are a creature of logic, Nemoto; I admire that in you. And in the working out of logic, there is nothing to fear."_
_"Yes,"_ Nemoto said softly. But her hand tightened in Manekato's.
In due course, the Mapping was expressed.
Hand in hand, the people and their Workers—and one frightened _Homo sapiens_ —drifted upward from the platform. The great shield of Adjusted Space folded away beneath them, leaving a disk of light-starved, barren, crushed land. But Manekato knew that the denuded patch would soon be colonized by the vigorous life forms here, and she felt no guilt.
Then the Mapping's deep logic worked into her bones, and she was smeared over the sky.
She hung among the stars, suspended in a primal triumvirate of bodies: Earth, sun and Moon, the only bodies in all the universe that showed as more than a point of light to a naked human eye. But this was not Nemoto's Earth, or her sun; and it was nobody's Moon. How strange, she thought.
She had no body, and yet she was aware of Nemoto's hand in her own.
_"Nemoto?"_
_"... How can I hear you?"_
_"It doesn't matter. Can you see the Red Moon?"_
_"I see it all at once!—but that is impossible. Oh, Mane..."_
_"Try not to understand. Let the logic guide you."_
_"But it is a world. It is magnificent,"_ Nemoto said. _"It seems absurd, grandiose, to suppose that this is a mere cog in some vast machine."_
It took Manekato a moment to secure the translation of "cog." _"Look at the stars, Nemoto."_
_"I can't see them. The sun dazzles me."_
_"You can see them if you choose,"_ Manekato said gently.
_"... Yes,"_ Nemoto said at length. _"Yes, I see them. How wonderful."_
_"Are they the same stars as shine on your Earth?"_
_"I think so. And they are just as silent. Are we alone in all the human universes, Manekato?"_
_"Perhaps."_ She glared at the unchanging stars. _"But if we are alone, the stars have no purpose save what they can offer humanity. My people have sat on their Farms for two million years,"_ Manekato said, _"a vast desert of time we could have spent cultivating the sky. Long enough, Nemoto. When this is over—Ah. I think—"_
And then the Mapping was done.
The platform coalesced, as space-time adjusted itself for the convenience of the expedition. People moved here and there, speaking softly, trailed by Workers. Few of them showed much interest in their new environs; already the first shelters were coalescing, sprouting from the platform like great flat fungi.
Once again Manekato found herself injected into a new part of the Red Moon.
This place was bright, more open than the forest location. And she could smell ocean salt in the air. To the east, the way the gentle, salt-laden breeze came, the land rose, becoming greener, until it reached a crest that was crowned by a line of trees. As she studied the ridge of rock, she saw how it curved away from her. It was the rim of a crater. To the west was a broad plain of rock and crimson dust, all but barren. In the far distance, beyond a rippling curtain of heat haze, hominids ran across the plain. They moved silently and without scent, like ghosts.
Nemoto had slumped to the ground. She peered into her bag, rummaging through its contents, as if unable to believe that a Mapping could be completed without losing some key piece of her battered and improvised equipment.
Babo came to Manekato. "Interesting. She behaves like an infant after her first Mapping. But then we arrive in the world _knowing_ that reality has certain properties. Deep in our hind brains, the parts we share with these sub-human hominids and even more ancient lines, we store the deep intuition that a thing is either _here_ or _there_ , that it either exists or it does not—it cannot spontaneously leap between the two states. And Mapping violates all that. Perhaps we should admire Nemoto for keeping her sanity."
"Yes." Manekato rubbed his head fondly. "For now our companions are all too busy rebuilding their houses to have much to complain about. Shall we investigate what we have come so far to see?"
He raised his hand, preparing to execute another short-range Mapping.
She grabbed his arm. "No. Renemenagota was a monster. But I have come to believe that some of her intuition was sound." Deliberately she walked forward, knuckles and feet working confidently, until she had stepped off the platform and onto the raw native ground. She scraped at the dirt, and clouds of crimson dust drifted into the air. Soon her feet and lower legs were stained a pale pink.
Babo grinned, showing white teeth. "You're right, Mane. We are creatures designed for walking. Let us walk." He jumped off the platform, landing with hands and feet flat, evoking more billows of dust.
Side by side they loped away from the compound and began to scale the wall of the crater.
## _S hadow_
The Nutcracker-woman was eating her way through a pile of figs. A child played at her feet, rolling and scrabbling in dead leaves. The woman was about the same height as one of the Elf-folk, and she was covered in similar black-brown hair. But her belly seemed swollen compared to an Elf's—it housed a large stomach capable of fermenting her low-quality feed—and her head was a sculpture of bone, with a great crested ridge over the top of her skull, and immense cheekbones to which powerful muscles were anchored.
A rock hurtled out of the surrounding foliage. It slammed into the trunk of the fig with a rich hollow noise, then fell to the earth.
The Nutcracker-woman screeched and scrambled back. She stared at the fallen stone. At last, cautiously, she poked it with one finger, as if it were a living thing, a bat that had stunned itself on the tree. But the stone lay still, unresponsive.
And now a stick came spinning from another part of the foliage.
The Nutcracker-woman got to her feet, gathered up her infant, and looked about suspiciously, sniffing the air with her broad, dirty nostrils. She took a step away from the fig tree.
Shadow struck.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
The ground rose steadily.
Manekato could feel a layer of hard, compact rock beneath a thin skim of dust. Green things grew here, grass and shrubs and even a few low trees, but they struggled to find purchase. It was dry; there was no sign of the springs that sometimes could be observed bubbling from the shattered walls of craters. And, though the rise of the slope was steady, it was not becoming noticeably steeper.
The morphology of this formation was like no other impact crater or volcanic caldera she had encountered. The rim of a crater this size should be more sharply defined: a circular ridge, perhaps eroded into hillocks, with a splash plain of rubble and ejecta beyond. There was none of that here; the "crater" was just an upraised blister erupting from an empty plain.
She glanced at Babo. She saw his mouth was working as he studied the rock, the vegetation, the dust, thinking, analyzing.
Babo saw her looking, and grinned. "I know what you're thinking," he said. " _Artificial_. But then, we know this Red Moon is a thing of artifice, and we suspect this crater may be the key to its secrets. Why should we expect anything but artifice here, of all places?"
The climb had already been long, and Manekato halted and rested her weight on her clenched knuckles. Babo raised a handful of crimson dust and let it drift off in the air; she could smell its rich iron tang, and some of it stuck to the sweat-soaked palm of his hand.
She glanced to the west, over the landscape from which they had climbed. The Adjusted-Space platform nestled at the foot of this slope, a bright splash, oddly ugly. Beyond it a plain of crimson dust stretched away, its color remarkably bright, marked by the pale green of vegetation clumps. The horizon of this small world curved noticeably, a smeared band of muddy gray. The sky was a dome littered by high clouds, and to the west she saw the dingy stain of volcanic dust streaking the air.
It was not a spectacular view, but something in its sweep tugged at her imagination. If she were anywhere on her Earth she would see the work of people, and it had never before struck her quite how claustrophobic that could be. _This_ was an empty, unmade land.
Babo pointed. "Look. Down there."
She saw that near the foot of the crater wall a group of hominids were working their way through the sparse coating of vegetation towards a fig tree. She thought they were Elves, the small, gracile creatures Nemoto called _Australopithecines_. They moved with stealth, and they approached the tree from several directions, surrounding it.
"I think they are hunting something," Babo said. "... Ah. Look, there. Under the tree. It is another hominid."
Manekato saw it now: a burly black-furred form, with a bony, crested skull and distended belly, this was the alternate variant of Australopithecines called a Nutcracker. This hominid had swollen, milk-laden breasts: a female. An infant huddled close to this mother.
The Elves crept closer.
Manekato murmured, "Must this world see more sentience dissipated needlessly?"
"It is not our affair, Mane," Babo said gently. "They are only animals."
"No," she said softly.
## _S hadow_
The Elf-folk charged into the clearing.
The Nutcracker-woman squealed, dropped her child, and scrambled up the fig tree for safety. The child tried to climb after her, but her hands and feet were small and poor at grasping, and she fell back again.
Shadow was the first to grab the infant.
Shiver had the temerity to attempt to snatch a limb of the infant for himself; they might have torn it apart between them. But Shadow pulled the infant to her chest, in a parody of parental protectiveness, and bared her teeth at Shiver.
The Nutcracker-folk mother dropped out of her tree, screaming her rage, mouth open to show rows of flat teeth. Nutcracker-folk were powerfully built, and were formidable opponents at close quarters. She charged at Shadow.
But Stripe lunged forward. His big bulk, flying through the air, knocked her flat. But the Nutcracker-woman wrapped her big arms around Stripe's torso and began to squeeze. Bones cracked, and he howled.
Now more of the men threw themselves at the Nutcracker-woman. Shadow saw that some of them had erections. This was the first time they had hunted one of the Nutcracker-folk. The men had grown accustomed to using the Elf-women of the forest before killing them. Perhaps this Nutcracker-woman, when subdued, would provide similar pleasure.
Shadow took the Nutcracker infant by her scrawny neck and held her up. Her short legs dangled, and huge eyes in a small pink face gazed at Shadow. But she could never be mistaken for the child of an Elf; the exotic bony ridges of her skull saw to that.
Shadow opened her mouth, and placed the child's forehead between her lips.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
As the Nutcracker mother fought for her life, as the wild-looking Elf woman, battered and scarred, lifted the helpless infant by its neck, Manekato raised her head and roared in anguish.
## _S hadow_
... And there was a flash of bright white light, and searing pain filled her head.
When Shadow could see again, the men were lying on the ground, some clutching their eyes, as dazzled and shocked as she was.
Of the Nutcracker mother and child there was no sign.
The men sat up. Stripe looked at Shadow. There was no prey, no meat. Stripe bared his teeth and growled at her.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
Babo touched Manekato's shoulder. "You should not have done that," he said regretfully.
"The Nutcracker woman _knew_ , Babo. She knew the pain she would endure if she lost her infant. Perhaps the child itself knew."
"Mane—"
"No more," she said. "No more suffering of creatures who understand that they suffer. Let that be the future of this place."
One by one the scattered Elves were clambering to their feet. Still rubbing their eyes, they stumbled back toward the plain—all but one, the woman who had captured the infant. She stood as tall as she could on the rocky slope, gazing up in suspicion. Manekato and Babo were well sheltered by the trees here, and the creature could surely suspect no causal connection between Manekato and her own defeat anyhow. But nevertheless the Elf howled, baring broken teeth to show pink gums, and she hurled a rock as far as she could up the slope.
Then she turned and loped away, limping, her muscles working savagely even as she walked.
Manekato shuddered, wondering what, in this creature's short and broken life, could have caused such anguish and anger.
Babo sat on his haunches. "An Air Wall," Babo said. "We will erect an Air Wall to exclude unwelcome hominids, and other intruders. We will move the platform inside the cordon."
"Yes..."
"No more blood and pain, Mane."
They turned, and began to clamber farther up the crater wall.
It was not long before they had reached the summit of the crater rim wall—and found themselves facing a broad plateau. A thin breeze blew, enough to cool Manekato's face, and to ruffle her fur. The rock here was crimson red, like a basalt or perhaps a very compact and ancient sandstone. It was bare of vegetation and very smooth, as if machined, and covered by a hard glaze that glistened in the sun's weak light. There was little dust here, only a few pieces of scattered rock debris.
It was as if the crater had been filled in. "I don't remember this from the Mapped image," Babo said, disturbed.
Manekato dug her fingers into the fur on his neck. "Evidently we have limits."
"But it means we don't know what we will find, from now on."
"Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that why we came? Come, brother, let us walk, and let us remember our humility."
They walked forward, for perhaps a mile. And then they came to a circular pit, geometrically perfect. It was only yards across. Light leaked out of it, trapped by dust motes, a shaft that reached dimly to the sky.
Manekato's imagination quailed. She reached for Babo's hand, reluctantly reminded of how she had guided Nemoto through the strangeness of the Mapping.
Babo grinned at his sister. "This is strange and frightening—perhaps it is our turn to be humbled now—but I am sure we will find nothing that will not yield to the orderly application of science."
"Your faith is touching," she said dryly.
He laughed.
"But it is not time to approach it yet," she said.
"No. We must study it."
"Not just that." They regarded each other, sharing a deep instinctive wisdom. "This is not for us alone, but for all hominids."
"Yes," he said. "But how long must we wait?"
"I think we will know..."
There was a blue flash, painfully bright, that seemed to fill Mane's head; it reminded her uncomfortably of the punishment she had imposed on the Elf-folk.
She raised her head. "... Ah. Look, Babo."
In the sky swam a new world. It looked like a vast ball of steel. Its atmosphere seemed clear, save for streaks and whorls of cloud. But beneath the cloud there was no land: not a scrap of it, no continents or islands, nothing but an ocean that gleamed gray, stretching unbroken from pole to pole. There weren't even any polar caps to speak of: just crude, broken scatterings of pack ice, clinging to this big world's axes. The only feature away from the poles was a glowing ring of bloodred, a vast undersea volcano, perhaps. And here and there she saw more soot-black streaks of dust or smoke, disfiguring the world ocean; drowned or not, this was a geologically active world.
It was a startling, terrifying sight—Manekato's hind brain knew from five million years of observation that things in the sky weren't supposed to change suddenly, arbitrarily—and she tried not to cower.
"It is a new Earth," Babo said thinly. "So we have completed a transition, riding this rogue Red Moon. How interesting."
"Yes." She clutched her brother's hands. Despite his cool words, he was trembling. "And now we are truly of this world, Babo."
It was true. For Banded Earth, Manekato's Earth, had gone.
## _E mma Stoney_
With Joshua, Mary, and Julia, Emma walked south, towards the place where—as the Hams put it—the wind touched the ground.
Emma was pretty much toughened up by now. So long as she avoided leg ulcers, getting tangled up in lianas or bramble, and the snakes and the multitude of insects that seemed to target any bare flesh like heat-seeking missiles, she was able to maintain a steady plod, covering miles and miles each day, across desert or semi-scrub or savannah or even through denser forest.
The Hams had more trouble. Their sheer strength vastly exceeded her own, but long-distance walking was alien to their physiques. They looked awkward as they barrelled along, and after a couple of days she could see how they suffered aches in the hips and knees of their bow legs, and the low arches of their great flat feet. Also, she suspected, such sedentary creatures as these must suffer a deeper disturbance as they dragged themselves across the landscape, far from any settled community. But, though they moaned wordlessly and rubbed at the offending parts of their anatomies, they never complained, not to her or each other.
The days were long and hot, and the nights, spent under the crudest of lean-tos, cold and cruelly uncomfortable. The Hams seemed capable of sleeping wherever they lay down, their great muscled bodies tensed and hard even in their sleep, like marble sculptures. But Emma had to work hard to get settled, with bits of parachute silk wrapped around her, and socks and vests bundled into a ball under her head.
Much of this stuff was Malenfant's.
She had forced herself to take everything from him that might prove useful, even the little lens that had found its way from her hands to his. It wasn't sentiment—sentiment would have driven her to bury the stuff with him—but a question of seeking advantages that might prolong her own survival. Not that there was much left, even though Malenfant had come to this Red Moon as part of a purposeful expedition, unlike her own helpless tumble through the Wheel. Idiot, Malenfant.
Anyhow, each night she immersed her face in the ragged bits of Malenfant's clothing, seeking the last traces of his scent.
Day after day, they walked. The Hams never wavered in their course, each clumsy step directed by a wordless navigation.
It occurred to Emma to wonder how people who moved house less often than empires rose and fell on Earth were able to find their way across such challenging distances. She tried to discuss this with Julia. But Julia was unforthcoming. She shrugged her mighty shoulders. "Lon' time. People come, people go. This way, tha'. See?"
No, Emma didn't see. But maybe it was something to do with their long Neandertal timescales—far longer than any human.
The Hams, squatting in their caves and huts, made nothing like the seasonal or annual congregations associated with human communities. But there had to be occasional contacts even so, for example when outlying hunting parties crossed each other's paths, or maybe when a group was forced to move by some natural disaster, a cave flood or a land slip.
And such was the static nature of the Ham world that even very occasional contacts—not even once a generation—would suffice to keep you up to date. Once you knew that Uncle Fred and Aunt Wilma lived in those limestone caves two days' hike west of here, you could be absolutely sure that they would always be there. And so, over generations, bit by bit, from one small clue after another, the Hams and their forefathers built up a kind of map of the world around them. The Ham world was a place of geological solidity, the locations of their communities as anchored as the positions of mountains and rocks and streams, shifting only with the slow adjustments of climate.
It was an oddly comforting worldview, filled with a certain calm and order: where nothing ever changed much, but where each person had her own place in the sun, along with every rock and stream. But it wasn't a human worldview. _People rooted like trees_... Though she struggled to understand, it was beyond her imagination.
And of course she might be quite wrong. Maybe the Hams worked on infra-sound like the elephants, or on telepathy, or astral projection. She didn't know, and as Julia was unable to answer questions Emma was barely able to frame, she guessed she was never going to know.
And anyhow, after the first few days' walk, the direction they were all travelling became obvious even to her. Far to the south a column of darkness reached up to the sky: not quite straight, with a sinuous, almost graceful curve. It was a permanent storm, tamed, presumably, by some advanced technology she couldn't even guess at.
It was, of course, the fortress of _Homo superior_ , whoever and whatever they were.
The Hams plodded on, apparently unaffected by this vision. But when the twister's howling began to be audible, banishing the deep silences of the night, Emma found it hard to keep up her courage.
The weeping came to her in the night.
Or in the morning when she woke, sometimes from dreams in which she fled to an alternate universe where she still had him with her.
Or, unexpectedly, during the day as they walked or rested, as something—the slither of a reptile, the chirp of an insect, the way the sunlight fell on a leaf—reminded her unaccountably of him.
She knew she was grieving. She had seen it in others; she knew the symptoms. It wasn't so much that she was managing to function despite her grief; rather, she thought, this unlikely project to go challenge _Homo superior_ was something to occupy the surface of her mind, while the darker currents mixed and merged beneath. Therapy, self-prescribed.
The Hams seemed to understand grief. So they should, she thought bleakly; their lives were harder than any human's she had known, brief lives immersed in loss and pain. But they did not try to soothe her or, God forbid, cheer her up.
_There is no consolation_ , they seemed to be telling her. The Hams had no illusion of afterlife or redemption or hope. It was as if they were vastly mature, ancient, calm, compared to self-deluding mayfly humans, and they seemed to give her something of their great stolid strength.
And so she endured, day by day, step by step, approaching the base of that snake of twisting air.
It didn't surprise Emma at all when the Hams, with the accuracy of expert map readers, walked out of the desert and straight into an inhabited community.
It was a system of caves, carved in what looked like limestone, in the eroded rim wall of what appeared to be a broad crater. The upper slopes were coated thinly by tough grass or heather, but the sheltered lower valleys were wooded. And the crater was at the very bottom of that huge captive twister, which howled continually, as if seeking to be free.
As she approached she made out the bulky forms of Hams, wrapped in their typical skin sheets, coming and going from scattered cave mouths that spread high up the hillsides.
Emma could see the advantages of the site. The cave mouths were mostly north-facing, which would maximize the sunlight they captured and shelter them from the prevailing winds. She suspected the elevated position of the caves was a plus, too. Maybe the migration paths of herd animals came this way. Hams preferred not to have to go too far to find their food; sitting in their caves, gazing out over the broken landscape around the crater, all they would have to do was wait for their food supply to come their way.
... But that wind snake curled into the air above their heads, strange, inexplicable, filling the air with its noise—even if it didn't disturb so much as a dust grain. You'd think it would bother the Hams. She saw no sign that it did.
Emma and her companions walked to the foot of the crater wall, and began to clamber up. The adults glanced down at their approach, but turned away, incurious.
The first person who showed any interest in them was a child: stark naked, a greasy bundle of muscle and fat no more than three years old, with one finger lodged in his cavernous nostril. This little boy stared relentlessly at Emma and followed her, but at a safe distance of a yard or so; if she tried to get closer he backed away rapidly until his buffer of safety was restored. Ham children were much more like human children than their adult counterparts. But Ham kids grew fast; soon they lost the open wonder of youth, and settled into the comfortable, stultifying conservatism of adulthood.
She stepped into the mouth of the largest cave. The noise of the whirlwind was diminished. The sun was bright behind them, and Emma, dazzled, peered into the gloom.
The walls were softened and eroded, as if streaked with butter. There was a powerful stink of meat, coming from haunches and skins stacked at the back of the cave. The place was not designed for the convenience of people, she saw; the roof was so low in places that the Hams had to duck to pass, and crude lumps of rock stuck out awkwardly from the walls and floor. She recognized the usual pattern of Ham occupation: a floor strewn thick with trampled-down debris, an irregular patchwork of hearths. The roof was coated with soot from innumerable fires, and the walls at head height and below were worn away and blackened by the touch of bodies, generation after generation of them. This place had been lived in a _long_ time.
Emma found a piece of wall that seemed unoccupied. She dumped her pack and sat down in the dirt.
A woman approached the travellers. Bent, her hair streaked with white, a tracery of scars covering her bare arms, she looked around eighty, but was probably no older than thirty-five or forty. She began to jabber in a guttural language Emma did not understand, with no discernible traces of English or any other human language. Julia seemed uncertain how to reply, but Mary and Joshua answered confidently. Neither party seemed ill at ease or even surprised to see the other.
Julia came to Emma.
Emma said, "So can we stay?"
Julia nodded, a _Homo sap_ gesture Emma knew she affected for her benefit. "Stay."
With relief Emma leaned back against the creamy, cool wall of the cave. She opened her pack and dug out her parachute silk blanket and a bundle of underwear to use as a pillow. The ground here, just crimson dust, much trodden and no doubt stuffed with the bones of Ham grandmothers, was soft by comparison with what she had become used to; soon she felt herself sliding toward sleep.
But she could hear the howl of that tame whirlwind, relentless, unnatural, profoundly disturbing.
She spent a full day doing nothing but letting her body recover, letting her head become used to the sights and sounds and smells of this new place.
Right outside the cave entrance, a stream of clear water worked its way through rocky crevices towards the impact-broken plain below. Its course was heavily eroded, so that it cascaded between lichen-crusted, round-bottomed pools. The people used the pools for washing and preparing food, though they drank from the higher, cleaner streams.
Emma waited until she wasn't in anybody's way. Then she drank her fill of the stream, and washed out her underwear, and spread it out to dry over the sunlit rocks.
As she tended her blistered feet and ulcerated legs, and made small repairs to her boots and underwear, she watched the hominids around her.
Her Ham companions seemed to settle in quickly, according to their nature. Mary, strong and powerful, spent happy hours wrestling with the younger men, besting them more often than not. By the end of the day she was hardening spear points in a hearth, apparently preparing for a hunt.
Julia seemed to make friends with a group of women and children who spent much of their time clustered around one hearth—she blended in so well, in fact, that Emma soon had trouble distinguishing her from her companions, as if she had been here all her life.
Joshua, a loner in his own community, was a loner here. He settled into a small, solitary cave, and Emma saw little of him. But the Hams here seemed to tolerate his eccentricities, as had his own people.
As for Emma, she was largely ignored, much as she been with her other communities of Hams. Unable to shake off a feeling of sufferance—after all, how would a Neandertal stray be treated if she wandered into a human community?—she did her best to keep out of everybody's way.
There was one old man who seemed to take a liking to her, however— _old_ , meaning maybe ten years younger than she was. He was badly disfigured by a swathe of scar tissue that lapped up from where his right ear should have been to the crown of his head. She didn't have a word in common with this guy, and she couldn't ask him about his injury. But this wounded, smiling man seemed vaguely curious about her: curious enough, anyhow, to offer her meat. The meat was a prime cut, apparently from the shoulder of some animal—an antelope, maybe, but it could have been a rhino for all she knew. It was a groaning bloody slab two fingers thick and twice the size of a dinner plate. Her benefactor watched with absent interest as she rigged up a frame of sticks to cook it over the nearest fire.
It seemed he had no English name. She took to thinking of him as Scarhead.
The meat was frankly delicious, though she longed for green vegetables, gravy, and a mellow Bordeaux to go with it.
The Hams worked hard, of course. But it struck her how _happy_ they all seemed—or if not that, content. Evidently the game was bountiful here, the living easy; all these guys had to do was sit around and wait for the meat to come wandering past, season after season. They even had fresh running water, day and night, right outside the cave. She remembered fantasies as a child of finding Candyland, where all the trees were chocolate and the streams lemonade, where you didn't have to work for anything, where you could take as much as you liked, just by reaching out. Was the way these people lived so different from that?
But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?
Well, they wouldn't be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They'd breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.
Then would come the famines and the wars.
So much for Candyland. Maybe these Hams weren't just as smart as humans, she mused; maybe they were actually smarter.
On the third day she walked out of the caves, alone, and set off up the eroded hillside.
The rocks were broken and worn, and cut deeply by gullies in some of which water still flowed. She found that the easiest way to make progress was to lower herself into one of the gullies and clamber up its smooth, sloping sides, taking care not to slip on moss or lichen, until the channel petered out and she had to transfer to another.
Though she was soon panting hard and sweating into her coverall, she could feel her heart and lungs pump, the muscles of her newly powerful legs tingling. You're in the best shape you've been in for years, girl.
The noise of the tame whirlwind howled even louder. She resolutely ignored it.
Just below the summit she sat on a patch of bare rock, gathering her breath, getting the hassles of the climb out of her head. The eroded hillside, deeply punctured by its limestone gullies and caves, swept away beneath her. The sun was still low; it was maybe ten in the morning local time.
She stood and turned away from the plain. She walked up the last few paces to the crater's summit plateau, and faced the wind.
It was a wall of churning air: a cylinder, laden with dust, that must have been a couple of miles wide. It looked flat on her puny human scale, like the wall of a vast building. But it snaked into the sky, diminishing as her gaze followed it, and at its highest extremity it curled in the air, threadlike. The whole thing was streaked horizontally, like the clouds of Jupiter, by billows of crimson dust. The flow of the air seemed smooth, though here and there she saw bits of rock and vegetation, even a few snapped-off trees. But the rock at the wind's shimmering foot was worn bare.
The violence, the energy, was startling; it was like a waterfall, a rocket launch. A deep part of her mind couldn't accept that it was _controlled_ by anything: the animal in her, conditioned by a million years of experience, knew that this lethal expression of nature's power was unpredictable, beyond propitiation.
Nevertheless she walked forward. After a few paces, she felt the first breath of wind, and a speckle of dust on her cheek.
When she got to within maybe a hundred paces of that dense wall of dust the air grew turbulent. She staggered but kept on, leaning into the wind to keep to a rough straight line, and the dust bit harder, stinging her mouth and eyes.
She shielded her eyes. Only maybe fifty paces to the dust. Forty-nine, forty-eight... The air was a powerful physical presence, battering at her torso and face, whipping her hair, snatching the breath from her lungs.
And now she was inside the dust, suddenly, as if walking into a sandstorm. The dust was a thick glowing cloud around her, obscuring the sky, the rock, even the twister itself; and when she looked downwind she saw how she cast a kind of shadow in the streaming particles.
Afresh surge hit her, unexpectedly violent. She fell sideways, rolled a couple of times, and hit her head on a rock.
She lay there for a moment. Then she got to all fours on the worn-bare rock and tried crawling.
She fell again, rolled back, tried again. Her hands and the skin of her cheeks were streaked with tiny cuts, where sharp bits of rock had bitten into her. Still she kept trying.
Lacking a plan B, she tried again the next day.
And the next.
She tried wrapping herself in her parachute silk, to keep out the dust and bits of rock. She just got blown away faster. So she tied the silk tightly around herself, an outer-body garment with slits for her hands, a mask over her face. She managed to get further into that central wall of dust, maybe ten paces deep, before the sheer strength of the wind stopped her progress.
She tried crawling in, all the way. That didn't work.
The Hams watched all this, bemused.
She considered schemes with ropes and pitons and rock hammers, where she would make a kind of ladder that she could "climb," across the face of the barren windswept rock, all the way to the center. But she had no rope or pitons or rock hammers, and couldn't come up with any way of making them.
She explored the cave system, but found no way through that way.
And if she couldn't go under the twister wall, she surely couldn't go over it; it looked to her as if that tunnel of tortured air stretched all the way out of the atmosphere. (She did toy with insane schemes of retrieving Malenfant's lander and firing it up into some kind of Alan Shepard suborbital trajectory that would take her up and over the wall of air, and re-enter right into the eye of the storm. But—despite her various rash promises to Joshua to pilot him and the lander all the way to his mythical Gray Earth—she didn't know how to fly the lander, still less how to rig it for such a flight, still less how to land it.)
On the tenth day of trying, as she lay clinging to the rock, sucking air from dust through a sheet of muslin, somebody walked past her.
Mouth gaping, bits of chute silk flapping around her, she watched as a Ham man and child walked hand in hand into the teeth of the storm, blurring. Granted the Hams were stronger than she was—both of them probably, even the boy—but they weren't _that_ strong. They weren't even leaning into the damn wind.
Then she noticed, just before they disappeared into gray-red dust, that their skin wraps were hanging loose around them. The churning air wasn't touching them.
She spent more days watching.
The Hams had always used the other side of the crater as part of their domain for hunting and gathering. They had trails leading that way, so ancient they were actually worn into the rock. When a Ham walked such a trail, heading for the crater's interior, she just carried on through the wall of wind and dust.
The Hams weren't the only ones.
A flock of bats flapped clumsily into the crimson mist one day, their fragile wings unaffected by the tearing air. She spotted a young deer, apparently lost, that stumbled out of the dust, gazed around with wide eyes at the world beyond, then bolted back into the wind storm. Even other hominids could make it through: notably Runners, and one Nutcracker she spotted.
But not herself—and, for some reason, not the chimplike Elves, an association she found insulting.
She tried to interrogate the Hams. "Julia, how come you can get through the wind and I can't?"
An intense frown creased that powerful face. "Hams live here." She waved her arm. " _Still_ live here."
"All right. But why am I kept out?"
A shrug.
"What is it I'm not allowed to see? Is there some kind of installation in there, a base? Are the Hams allowed to go up to it? Do you have any, umm, trade with whoever built it?"
None of this meant much to Julia. "Funny stuff." She waved her fingers before her face. "Hard to see."
Emma sighed. So the Hams might be wandering around or through some kind of fabulous _Homo superior_ base without even looking at it, interested only in their perennial pursuits, perhaps not even _capable_ of seeing it from out of their bony cages of conservatism.
And that, presumably, was why the Daemons let the Hams wander at will past their meteorological moat. The Hams would restrict themselves, going where they had always gone inside the crater, doing what they had always done, taking not a step beyond their self-imposed boundaries; they would not interfere with whatever projects and designs the Daemons were developing in there. Whereas noisy, curious, destructive _Homo sap_ types like herself would not rest until they had barged their way into the Daemons' shining city.
Breaking this demeaning exclusion became an obsession with her.
She focused on the Hams. She kept trying their trails. She carried Ham tools and weapons as if intent on some Ham-type gathering and hunting. She tried walking in with a party of Hams, her slim form tucked into a line of their great hulking bodies. But the wind seemed to whip _through_ their immense muscular forms, to grab at her and push her aside.
She pushed the deception further. She purloined some skins and wrapped herself up like a Ham. Slouching, bending her legs, she practiced the Hams' powerful, clumsy gait. She let her hair grow ragged and filthy, and even smeared clay on her face, letting it dry in a hopeful imitation of a Ham's bulky facial morphology, the high cheekbones and the bony crest over the eyes.
Then, joining another foraging party, she slouched toward the wind, her gait rolling, keeping her distinctive _Homo sap_ chin tucked into her chest.
The wind wasn't fooled.
Furious, she stamped back to the caves, and sought out Joshua.
"You have to help me."
Joshua stared at her. He was ragged, filthy, sitting in a debris-strewn cave that managed to be remarkably ill-appointed, even by the Paleolithic standards of this Red Moon.
"Wha' for?"
She sighed, forgiving him his squalor, and kneeled in the dirt before him. _"I want to know,"_ she said. "I want to know what they are doing in there—and who _they_ are. If they are responsible for dragging this Moon around the realities—I mean, for changing the sky—I want to know why they are doing it. And to make them understand the damage they are causing, the suffering. Do you see?"
He frowned at her. "Deal," he said simply.
"Yes," she said wearily. "Yes, we had a deal. We still have a deal. You help me, and I'll try to help you get to the Gray Earth. Just as I promised." God forgive me for lying, she thought.
But his eyes narrowed, almost calculating. "Fin' a way."
"Yes, I'll find a way. We'll go back to the lander and—"
His massive hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. The grip was painful, but she knew that he was using only a fraction of his strength, that if he chose he could probably crush her bone.
"No lies."
He means it, she thought. He knows my kind too well. "Okay. No lies. I'll find a way. Get me through the wind wall and I'll work on it, I'll find a way. I promise, Joshua. Please, my arm..."
He squeezed harder—just a little—but it was like a vice closing over her flesh. Then he released her. He sat back, baring his teeth in a wide grin. "How?"
"How can I get through the wind wall? I've been thinking about that. Whatever controls the wind is too smart to be fooled by appearance. It's not enough that I look like a Ham. But maybe if I can learn to _think_ like a Ham..."
Scarhead dragged a couple of haunches of meat from the back of the cave. For one brief moment the old guy looked the image of the cartoon caveman. He threw the meat down on the trampled ground, then went back into the cave to fetch tools.
Emma had once more donned her best-effort Neandertal disguise. She got to the ground gingerly, conscious of the need to keep her face rigid so as not to crack her mask of clay.
As usual, nobody showed the slightest interest in her—by now, not even the children.
The meat was, gruesomely, a couple of legs, intact from hoof to shoulder, perhaps from a horse. The limbs were already skinned, fresh, bloody, steaming slightly. Flies buzzed languidly around the exposed flesh.
Scarhead returned. He threw his handfuls of tools on the ground and sat cross-legged. He grinned, and the low morning sun made his scar tissue glisten.
She inspected the tools with absent interest. There were limestone pebbles gathered from the beds of rivers, used as chopping tools, and dark basalt blocks shaped into bi-faced hand axes and cleavers. These were working tools, each of them heavily worn and blood-splashed.
Before she left the Earth she'd known nothing of technology like this, and if she had been confronted with this collection of pebbles and rocks she would have dismissed them as nothing but random debris. Now she knew differently. Tools like these, or the still more primitive artifacts of the Runners, had kept her alive for months.
Scarhead held out a hand axe to her.
She took the rock, feeling its rough texture. She turned it over in her hands, testing its weight, feeling how it fit perfectly into her small human hand—for, of course, Scarhead had chosen it to suit her grip.
Now Scarhead held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He said bluntly, "Copy." He grabbed one of the horse legs, and began to saw at the joint between the scapula and humerus, between shoulder and leg. His stone blade rasped as he cut through tough tendons and ligaments.
She tried. Just manhandling the heavy limb proved a challenge to her; the joints were gruesomely stiff, the meat slippery and cold in her hands.
She sighed. "Could I see the vegetarian menu?"
Scarhead just stared at her.
No smart-ass _H sap_ jokes, Emma; today you're a Neandertal, remember?
She kept trying. She worked the knife into the meat until she had exposed the tendons beneath the shoulder. The meat, cold and slippery against her legs, was purple-red and marbled with fat; it was coldly dead, and yet so obviously, recently attached to something alive.
Turning the stone tool in her hand, she sought to find the sharpest edge. She managed to insert her blade into the joint and sawed at the tough ligaments, scraping them until they gave, like tough bits of rope.
Scarhead grunted.
Surprised, she raised her hand. The tool's edge had cut into her flesh, causing long straight-line gashes that neatly paralleled the lifeline on her palm. She hadn't even felt the cuts happen—but then the blade on a stone knife could be sharper than a metal scalpel; it could slide right into you and you'd never know it. She saw belatedly that Scarhead's working hand was wrapped in a hunk of thick, toughened animal skin, and a kind of apron was draped over his lap.
... And now the pain hit, sharp and deep like a series of paper cuts, and she yowled. She went to a stream to drench her cut palm in cold water until the slow bleeding had stopped.
Scarhead waited patiently for her, no expression she could read on his broad, battered face.
You aren't doing too well here, Emma.
She tried again. She spread a skin apron over her lap, and improvised a protective binding for her hand from a bit of tough leather. Then she resumed her work at the ligaments and tendons.
Think about the work, Emma. Think about the feel of the stone, listen to the rasp of the tendons, smell the coagulated blood; feel the sun on your head, listen to the steady breathing of Scarhead...
She reached bone. Her axe scraped against the hard surface, almost jarring from her hand. She pulled the axe back and turned it over, exposing fresh edge, and began to dig deeper into the joint, seeking more tendon to cut.
A last tough bit of gristle gave way, and the leg disarticulated.
She stared, oddly fascinated, at the bone joints. Even Malenfant, who had never shown the slightest interest in biology, might have been interested at this bit of natural engineering, if he had gotten to take it apart in his own hands.
And she was still analyzing. _Wrong_.
She glanced up at Scarhead. Not watching her, apparently immersed in the work, he had begun to fillet the meat from the shoulder joint he was holding. Emulating his actions, she did the same. She dug her blade into the gap between meat and bone, cutting the muscle that was attached to the bone surface. She soon found the easiest way was to prop the scapula on the ground between her legs, and pull at the muscle with one hand to expose the joint, which she cut with the other hand. She got into a rhythm of turning the axe in her hand, to keep exposing fresh edge.
She tried not to think about anything—not Earth, Malenfant, the wind wall, the destiny of mankind, her own fate—nothing but the feel of the sun, the meat in her hand, the scrape of stone on bone.
For brief moments, as the hypnotic rhythms of the butchery tugged at her mind, she got it.
It was as if _she_ was no longer the little viewpoint camera stuck behind her eyes; it was as if her consciousness had dispersed, so that _she_ was her working hands, or spread even further to her tool, the flesh and bone she worked, and the trails and bits of forest and scrub and the crater walls and the migrating herds and all the other details of this scrap of the world, a scrap inhabited by the Hams, unchanging, for generation upon generation upon generation.
... Her hands had finished the butchery. On one side of her, a flensed shoulder-bone; on the other, a neat stack of filleted meat.
She looked into cavernous eyes, feeling the sun's heat, feeling the pleasurable ache of her arms and hands. She forgot the name she had given him, forgot her own name, forgot herself in his deep stare.
Shadows beside her. It was Joshua, and Julia... No, no names; these people simply were who they were, everybody in their world knew them, without the need for labels. She took their hands and let herself be raised to her feet.
The Hams led her up the hillside, away from the caves, toward the place where the unnatural wind moaned.
It was not like a dream; it was too detailed for that. She felt the sharpness of every grain of red dust under her feet, the lick of the air on her cheeks, the salty prickle of sweat on her brow and neck, the sharp, almost pleasant ache of her cut palm. It was as if a veil had been removed from her eyes, stops from her ears and nose, so that the colors were vivid and alive—red earth, green vegetation, blue sky—and the sounds were clear, grainy, loud, their footsteps crunching into the earth, the hiss of wind over the scrubby grass that clung to these upper slopes. It was like being a child again, she thought, a child on a crisp summer's Saturday morning, when the day was too long for its end to be imagined, the world too absorbing to be analyzed.
Was _this_ how it was to be a Neandertal? If so, how—enviable.
They had reached the crest of the crater-rim hill. They began to walk forward, in a line, hand in hand.
That wall of air spread across the land before her, a cylinder so wide it looked flat. She felt a lick of wind, touching her cheek, disturbing her hair, the first prickle of dust on her skin. She dropped her head, concealing her _Homo sap_ protruding chin, and walked steadily on. She concentrated on the sun, the texture of the ground, the bloody iron scent of the dusty air.
Anything but the wind.
They went into the dust. She walked steadily, between her Ham friends, immersed in crimson light. She was ten paces inside the dust. Then fifteen, past her previous record. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two...
Maybe it was the counting. Hams did not count.
The wind hit her like a train.
Her hands were wrenched from the Hams' grip. She was lifted up off the ground, flipped on her back, and slammed down again.
The light dimmed to a dull Venusian red. Suddenly she couldn't see Julia or Joshua, nothing but a horizontal hail of dust particles and bits of rock, looming out of infinity as if she was looking into a tunnel. If she turned her head into the wind she could hardly breathe.
Another gust—she was rolled over—she scrabbled at the ground. And then she was lifted up, up into the air, limbs flailing, like a cow caught by a Midwest tornado. She was immersed in a shell of whirling dust; she couldn't see ground or sky, couldn't tell how far away the ground was, couldn't even tell which way up she was. But she could tell she was falling.
She screamed, but her cry was snatched away. _"Malenfant!"_
She was on her back. She could feel that much. But there was no wind: no hot buffeting gusts at her face, no sting of grit on her exposed skin. Nothing but a remote howl.
She opened her eyes.
She was looking up into a dark tunnel, like gazing up from the depths of a well, towards a circle of cloud-scattered blue sky. The light was odd, grayish-red, as if shadowed. Was she back in the caves? She tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her back and stomach.
A face loomed above her, silhouetted by the patch of bright sky, back-lit by diffuse gray light. "Take it easy. We don't think any bones are broken. But you are cut and bruised and badly winded. You may be concussed." The face was thin, capped by a splash of untidy black hair. Emma stared at an oddly jutting chin, weak cheekbones, an absurd bubble skull with loose scraps of hair. It was a woman's face.
It came into focus. A _human_ woman.
The woman frowned. "Do you understand me?"
When she tried to speak Emma found her mouth full of dust. She coughed, spat, and tried again. "Yes."
"You must be Emma Malenfant."
"Stoney," Emma corrected automatically. "As if it makes a difference now." She saw the woman was wearing a faded blue coverall, scuffed and much-repaired, with a NASA meatball logo on her chest. "You're Nemoto. Malenfant's companion."
Nemoto regarded her gravely, and with a start Emma recognized for the first time the Oriental cast of her features. A lesson, she thought wryly. Compared to the distance between humans and other hominids, the gap between our races really is so small as to be unnoticeable.
"... Malenfant is dead," she said hesitantly. "I'm sorry."
She thought she saw hope die, just a little, in Nemoto's blank, narrowing eyes.
"I don't know how well you knew him. I—"
"We have much to discuss, Emma Stoney."
"Yes. Yes, we do."
Nemoto slid an arm under Emma's back and helped Emma sit up. Everything worked, more or less. But her belly and back felt like one immense bruise, and she was having trouble breathing.
She was sitting on crimson dirt. A few paces away from her, waiting patiently, she saw Joshua and Julia. She grinned at them, and Julia gave her an oddly human wave back.
Beyond them was strangeness.
A yellow floor sprawled over the ground—seamless and smooth, obviously artificial. There were buildings on this floor, rounded structures the same color and apparently made of the same material, as if they had grown seamlessly from out of the floor, as if the whole thing was a sculpture of half-melted cheddar cheese.
Hominids were moving among the structures. They walked on feet and knuckles, big and bulky, too remote for her to make out details. Like gorillas, she thought, like the creature she had seen leaving the Zealot stockade with the ragtag army. Could they be Daemons?
She looked over her shoulder. She saw that wall of wind, streaked with dirt and ripped-up vegetation. But now she could see how it curved inward, _around_ her—confining her here, not excluding her. And when she looked up it stretched into the sky, making a twisting, slowly writhing tunnel.
She was inside the twister.
"Ha!" she said, and she punched the air. "Fooled 'em, by God."
Nemoto was frowning. There was an edge about her, a tension that seemed wound tight. "It was not like that. You did not 'fool' anybody. The Daemons watched your approach. They watched as you plastered clay on your face and butchered your meat—"
"How did they watch me?"
Nemoto waved at the air. "They can see what they like, go wherever they want to, at a gesture. They call it Mapping."
"I don't understand."
Nemoto leaned down, thrusting her face at Emma, anger sparking. "Your efforts to deceive them were comical. Embarrassing. They could not have succeeded. _It was me_ , Emma Stoney. I was the one who practiced deceit in the end; I convinced them to admit you. I tried to spin your absurd stunt into an act of true cognition. I told them that deceit is a sign of a certain level of intelligence. But I said you were aware of the shallowness of your deceit. You _intended_ to demonstrate an ability to bluff and counterbluff, thus showing multiple levels of cognition which—"
Emma raised a hand. "I think I get it." Holding Nemoto's hand, she pulled herself to her feet. "I wish I could say I was so smart. Intentionally, anyhow. Umm, I guess it's appropriate to thank you."
She heard heavy footsteps. She turned.
One of the gorilla-things was coming toward her. It—no, _she_ , she had breasts—she walked using her knuckles. But she moved fast, more than a walk: it was a knuckle-sprint, a knuckle-gallop, startlingly fast for such a huge animal.
The creature must have been eight feet tall. The ground seemed to shake.
Emma felt Nemoto's hand slide into hers. "Show no fear. Her name is Manekato, or Mane. She will not harm you."
The Daemon stood before Emma. She straightened up, her massive black-haired bulk towering, and her hands descended on Emma's shoulders, powerful, heavy, humanlike. Emma felt overwhelmed by weight, solidity, the powerful rank stench of chest hair. She raised her hands and pressed against that black chest, pushing with all her strength against the surging muscle. Effortlessly, it seemed, the Daemon pressed closer, bringing her shining black face close to Emma's. The mouth opened, and Emma glimpsed a pink cavern and tongue, two huge spikelike upper canines, and smelled a breath sweet as milk.
Two ears swivelled towards Emma, like little radar dishes.
Then the Daemon backed off, dropping to rest her weight on her knuckles once more. She growled and hooted.
Nemoto was smiling thinly. "That was English. You will get used to her pronunciation. Mane asks, _What is it you want?_ "
"Tell her I want—"
"Tell her yourself, Emma Stoney."
Emma faced Manekato, gazed into deep brown gorilla eyes. "I've come here looking for answers." She waved a hand. "Don't you see the damage you cause?"
Mane frowned, a distinctly puzzled expression, and she peered at Nemoto, as if seeking clarification there. Just as with the Hams, Emma had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that she wasn't even asking the right questions.
Again Nemoto had to translate for Emma. _"You think we made this. The engine that moved the world. Child, the Old Ones are far above us—so far they are as distant from me as from you. Do you not understand that?"_
Emma shuddered. But she said belligerently, "I just want to know what is going on."
This time, Emma made out Mane's guttural words for herself. "We hoped you could tell us."
That first night, Emma stayed in the shelter the Daemons had given Nemoto—despite Nemoto's obvious reluctance to share. A second bed was "grown" inside the little shelter's main room for Emma, fully equipped with mattress, pillow, and sheets; the gorilla-thing called Mane apologized to Emma for the crowding, but promised a place of her own by the next night.
Unlike the rounded, quasi-organic feel of the other structures on the disk floor, Nemoto's residence was a boxy design with rectangular doors and windows, giving it a very human feel. But, like the other structures, it seemed to have grown from the smooth, oddly warm, bright yellow substrate. It was as if the whole place were a seamless chunk of pepper-yellow plastic that had popped out of some vast mold.
But the Daemons had provided for Nemoto well. She had a bed with a soft mattress and sheets of some smooth fabric. She was given fruit and meat to eat; she even had a box the size of a microwave oven, with pretty much the same function. There were spigots for hot and cold water, a bathroom with a toilet that flushed.
Holiday Inn it wasn't, but it was close enough, Emma thought, in the circumstances. Nemoto said the flush toilet, for instance, had taken a couple of prototypes to get right.
None of this had anything to do with the way the Daemons lived their lives. They seemed to have no desire for privacy when defecating or urinating, for instance; they just let go wherever they happened to be, making sure they didn't splash the food. The magic floor absorbed the waste, no doubt recycling it for some useful purpose, and would even dispel odors. The Daemons, though, were understanding, or at least tolerant, of Nemoto's biological and cultural hang-ups.
Anyhow it suited Emma fine.
There were sanitary towels. Emma fell on these and stole as many as she could carry away.
There was coffee (or a facsimile).
There was a shower.
She luxuriated in her first hot wash for months, using soap and shampoo that didn't smell as if it had come oozing straight out of the bark of a tree. At first the water just ran black-red at her feet, as if every pore on her body was laden with crimson dirt. By the time she had washed out her hair two, three times, it began to _feel_ like her hair again. She cleaned out the black grime from beneath her fingernails. She looked around for a razor, but could find none; so she used one of her stone blades, purloined from a Neandertal community many miles away, to work at her armpits.
Towelling herself dry, Emma stood by the window of Nemoto's little chalet, peering out at the Daemons' encampment.
Feeling oddly like a primatologist in a hide, she watched little knots of the huge gorillalike creatures knuckle-walking to and fro. _H. superior_ or not, they all looked alike, for God's sake. And little cartoon robots buzzed everywhere, rolling, hopping, and flying. She had to remind herself that these really were creatures capable of flying between worlds, of putting on a light show in the sky to shame the aurora borealis, of _growing_ a city in the jungle.
But as she watched, one of the "gorillas" flickered out of existence, reappearing a few minutes later on the other side of the compound.
At that moment Emma knew, deep in her gut, that there was indeed nothing primitive about these shambling, knuckle-walking, hairy slabs of muscle, despite her _Homo sap_ prejudices.
And it made it still more terrifying that it was not the Daemons who were responsible for moving the Moon, but another order of creatures beyond even them. She felt that she was at the bottom of a hierarchy of power and knowledge, unimaginably tall.
She hit her first soft pillow in months. Emma spent twelve hours in deep, dreamless sleep.
When she hauled herself out of bed the next day, Nemoto made her brunch (French toast, by God). But Nemoto was largely silent, volunteering little of her experiences here.
Emma, in turn, resented this silence. After all Nemoto had spent a good deal of time with Malenfant—spent most of his last few months alive with him, in fact, when Emma had been about as far from him as she could be. But Emma wasn't about to beg for scraps of information about her own damn husband.
I am not, Emma thought, going to get along easily with this woman.
Manekato came visiting. She crouched to get her eight-feet-tall bulk inside Nemoto's shelter, then sat squat on the floor, a gorilla in a too-small cage. Her accent was thick, her voice a Barry White growl. But when she spoke slowly, Emma found she understood her.
Manekato said, "You have talked. Nemoto has shared with you what she has learned."
Nemoto and Emma shared a glance.
Emma said, "Actually, no."
Mane slapped her huge thigh, apparently in frustration. "You are the same species! You are alone here, far from home! Why can you not cooperate?"
Nemoto said easily, "You are showing your prejudice, Manekato. You must see us as individuals. We are the same species, but that does not determine our goals—any more than you and Renemenagota had identical motivations."
The name meant nothing to Emma.
Mane turned to Emma, her huge head swivelling. "Very well. Em-ma? Why have you come here?"
Emma thought about that. "I want to go home."
Manekato said, "I regret that is not within my gift. _I_ cannot go home."
Emma closed her eyes for a moment, letting her last sliver of hope disappear. She should have expected this, of course. If it were possible to reach Earth, Nemoto would surely have been sent there by now.
She opened her eyes and met Mane's gaze. "Then I want to go to the center."
"The center?"
"The place where everything happens."
Nemoto grinned. "She wants to see the world engine."
Mane asked, "Why?"
Emma felt angry. _Who are you to ask? It isn't yours, any more than it is human_... "Because I've come this far. Because I've kept myself alive on this damn Moon that took my husband's life, and I want to know what the hell it is all for."
"What difference would _knowing_ make?"
"It just would," Emma snapped. "And I resent your cross-questioning."
Mane paused. Then she said gently, "Em-ma, how did you come here?"
"It was an accident. I, umm, fell through a portal. A Wheel, a blue circle."
"Yes. We know of such devices. But your mate, Mal-en-fant, came here purposefully, with Nemoto."
"He came to rescue me."
"How is it Mal-en-fant had the technology to travel to the Red Moon? Did he invent it from scratch?"
Emma glanced at Nemoto, who showed no reaction. Mane was asking her questions to which Nemoto must have already given answers; perhaps this was some obscure test.
"No," Emma said. "We had travelled to our own Moon—umm, a lifeless world—long before the Red Moon showed up. The technical base was there."
"Why did you go to this Moon? For science, for learning?"
"For politics," Nemoto said sourly. "For irrational purposes. For typical _Homo sapiens_ reasons."
"It wasn't just that," Emma said, frowning. "You don't live with an astronaut your whole life without figuring out some of the bigger picture. Manekato, we went to the Moon because we are a species that explores. We go places even when there is no immediate purpose. 'Why choose this as our goal? Why climb the highest mountain? Why... fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the Moon... because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our abilities and skills...' "
Nemoto laughed. "President Kennedy's 1961 speech. It is a long time since I heard those words."
"Malenfant was fond of quoting it."
"So," Mane said, "you intended to live on your Moon, to colonize it."
"Ultimately, I guess, yeah."
"And then?"
"And then the other planets," Emma said vaguely. "Mars, the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter."
"And then?"
"And then the stars, I guess. Alpha Centauri... You'd have been better asking Malenfant." She studied Manekato, trying to read the expressions that passed over that broad, blue-black face. "Every intelligent species must have the same kind of goals. Expansion, colonization. Mustn't they? Especially every intelligent variety of hominid."
Nemoto was shaking her head. "Not so, it seems."
Emma was growing irritated again; she wasn't enjoying being treated as the dope of the class. "Why are _you_ here, Manekato?"
"Like you," Mane said evenly, "when this Red Moon appeared in our skies—and it disrupted our world as much as it did yours—we asked the question _why_."
Emma leaned forward. "But _why you_ , Mane, rather than somebody else?"
Mane frowned. "I came because I had no home."
It turned out that Mane's home, which she referred to as a _Farm_ , had been wiped off the face of her Earth by Red Moon tides.
"She came here because she was forced," Nemoto said.
"You could have rebuilt someplace else."
"There is nowhere else," Mane said. She pulled at an ear that was all but buried in thick black fur. "It was the end of my Lineage. A Lineage that stretched back through a hundred thousand generations." She sighed, and began to scratch at the other ear.
Emma sat, stunned. A hundred thousand generations? If each generation was, say, twenty years at minimum—why, that added up to _two million years_.
Nemoto said, "Emma, these people are _not like us_. They are much more like the Hams. They sit on those Farms of theirs, forever and a day. They do not covet what their neighbors possess. There is no robbery, no territorial or economic expansion, no nation, no war."
"And if you lose your Farm—"
"If you lose your Farm, you die. Or anyhow your Lineage does."
"That's terrible," Emma said to Mane. "What do they do? Sterilize you? Take your children?"
But it seemed that once again she had asked the wrong question. Mane asked blankly, _"They?"_
"Nobody has to enforce it," Nemoto said. "It just happens. The families let themselves die out. It is seen as a price worth paying for ecological stability. Emma, the Daemons have _evolved_ this way, shaped by their cultural imperatives. Two million years, remember."
Emma shook her head, uncomfortable under Mane's steady gaze. She felt defiant. "Humans wouldn't live like that. We wouldn't accept it."
Mane kept pulling her ear. "What would you do?"
Emma shrugged. "The family would go on. The _Mayflower_ syndrome. We'd carve a place out of the wilderness—"
"But there is no wilderness," Mane said. "Even without war, even if you found a space not already cultivated, you would be forced to occupy a region, delineated in space, time, and energy flow, already exploited by another portion of the ecology."
It took some time for Emma to figure that out. "Yes," she said. "There is bound to be some environmental impact. But—"
"Other species would find reduced living space. Diversity would fall. And so it would go on. Soon the world would be covered from pole to pole by humans, fighting over the diminishing resources." Mane nodded. "Such was the ambition of Praisegod Michael. At least you are consistent."
"The Daemons limit their numbers," said Nemoto. "They don't overrun their Earth. By respecting the stability of the ecosystem that provides for them they have survived for millions of years. They even accept their short life spans, though it would be trivial for them to do something about that."
"A brief life burns brightly," said Manekato.
Emma shook her head. "I still say humans couldn't live like that."
Nemoto said slyly, "The Hams do. And they are _almost_ human."
"Are you saying we should live like Neandertals, in caves, wearing skins, wrestling buffalo, watching our children die young?"
Mane said, "Are the Hams suffering?"
No, Emma thought. Actually they are happy. But her pride was hurt; she stayed silent.
Mane leaned forward, and Emma could smell her milk-sweet breath. "The lion takes only the last deer in the herd. She does not dream of having so many cubs that the plains would be full of nothing but lions. There are simple laws. Most species figure them out; you are the exception. An ecology of a single species is not viable. A diverse, stable world would provide for you."
Candyland, Emma said.
"We have a story," Mane said. "A mother was dying. She called her daughter. She said, 'This is the most beautiful Farm in the world.' And so it was. The mother said, 'When I die, you will be free to act. Do with it what you will.' The daughter pondered these words.
"And when the mother died, the daughter took a torch and set fire to her Farm—every bit of it, the buildings and crops and creatures.
"When asked why she had done this—for of course, without a Farm, her Lineage would be extinguished—the daughter said, 'One night of glory is better than a thousand years of toil.' " The big Daemon actually shuddered as she finished her tale.
"We have a similar legend," Emma said. "There was a warrior, called Achilles. The gods gave him a choice: a brief life of glory, or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. Achilles chose the glory." She looked up at Mane. "In my culture, that story is regarded as uplifting."
Mane turned her tremendous head. "The tale I told you is, umm, a scary story. Intended to frighten the children into proper behavior."
Nemoto said grimly, "But we will go on anyhow. To the planets, the stars. If we get the chance; if we survive the human-induced extinction event that is unfolding on our Earth. Because we don't have a choice." She eyed Manekato bleakly. "Sure, our strategy is flawed. But it has a deadly internal logic. We're stuck on this road we have chosen. We have to keep expanding, or we'll die anyhow."
"There is that," Mane said gently. She stood, and with startling clumsiness rammed her head against the low roof of the chalet. "You wish to see the engine of the world. So do I, Em-ma. We will go together."
Nemoto nodded warily. "How? Will you Map us?"
Manekato laid a hand on Emma's scalp. It was heavy, gentle, the pads of flesh on the palm soft. "We have found we cannot Map there. But it would not be appropriate anyway. We are all hominids together, here on this Red Moon. Let us do what hominids do. We will walk to our destiny."
Four of them would be travelling together: Emma, Nemoto, Manekato—and Julia, the Ham. As Emma was preparing to leave, Julia had walked out of nowhere, with every sign of staying at Emma's side until they reached whatever there was to find, at the center of this wind-wrapped crater.
Manekato loomed over the three of them, the massive muscles of her shoulders as big as Emma's skull. "Now we go, we four, to discover the secret of the universe." She threw back her mighty head and laughed, a roar that rattled off the smooth-walled structures of the compound. And, without hesitation, she walked off the yellow platform floor, heading for the interior of the crater, and the forest that lay there.
The little column turned single file and spread out. The going was easy over the dust-strewn rock, and Emma, hardened by her weeks of living rough, found it easy to keep up with Manekato's knuckle-gallop. But when she looked back she saw that Nemoto was laboring, lagging behind Emma by a hundred yards. Julia walked at her side, stolid, slow, patient, her own awkward gait endearingly clumsy.
Emma waited until Nemoto caught up. Nemoto did not look her in the eye; she plodded on, her gait showing a trace of a limp. Emma clapped her on the shoulder. "I guess the human species isn't going to conquer the stars if we can't even walk a couple of miles, Nemoto."
"I am not as acclimatized as you," Nemoto said.
"Despite all that astronaut training you must have had. Whereas _I_ was just thrown here on my ass from out of the blue sky—"
"Punish me if you like. Your misfortunes are not my fault."
"Right. You came here to rescue me. Or was it just to give me somebody even worse off than I am?"
Julia moved between them. "No' worry, Emma. I help."
Emma grinned. "Just throw her over your shoulder if she gives you any trouble. Nemoto—even if they can't Map there, I don't understand why the Daemons haven't been to this center before."
"They have been studying it. They can be remarkably patient. And—"
"Yes?"
"I think they have been waiting for us."
Emma observed, "Nobody's carrying anything."
Julia shrugged. "Fores' has food. Fores' has water."
"You see?" Nemoto glared. "These _others_ do not think as we do. Julia _knows_ that the land will provide everything she needs: food, water, even raw materials for tools. It is a different set of assumptions, Emma Stoney. Just as Manekato said. _They_ see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous mother land. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered."
"So we're inferior in every way," Emma grumbled, resentful.
"Not that," Nemoto said. "But we are different. The Daemons' intellectual capacity is obvious—the rapidity of their comprehension, the richness and precision of their thinking. But they come from a world where hunters, indeed predators of any kind, cannot prosper. Even their games are cooperative, all concerned with building things."
"What about religion? What do they believe?"
Nemoto shrugged. "If they have a religion it is buried well, in their minds and their culture. They need not worship sublimated mothers or seeds as we do, because they control nature—at least, below the Red Moon. And without the metaphor of the seed, of renewal, they have no urge to believe in a life beyond the grave."
"Like the Hams."
"Yes. The Hams, Neandertals, have much more in common with the Daemons than we do. And remember this, Emma Stoney. Mane's people regard us as less intelligent than them. Save for academic interest or sentimentality, they have no more interest in _talking_ to us than you would have in chatting to a Colobus monkey. This is the framework within which we must operate, no matter how hurtful to your _Homo sapiens_ ego."
They reached a patch of forest. Manekato plunged into it, seeking fruit. The others followed more slowly.
Keeping Manekato's broad back in sight, Emma stepped cautiously over a muddy, leaf-strewn ground. Roots snaked everywhere, as if put there to trip her. In some places the trees towered high. She could see the canopy, where the thick branches of each tree spread out, making an almost horizontal roof of greenery. The trunks themselves were dense with life, with lianas that looped and sagged, and ferns and orchids sprouting like underarm hair from every crevice and fork. Though it was humid and still, the moist air felt almost cool on her cheeks, as if this were fall. There was a mild, pervading stench of decaying vegetation.
A shadow flitted between the tree trunks, a round, uncertain form dimly glimpsed among the shadowy verticals.
Emma stopped dead, heart hammering.
Manekato was a massive, reassuring form at her side. "It is a Nutcracker. A vegetarian hominid which—"
"I know about Nutcrackers."
Manekato peered curiously into her face. "I sense fear."
Emma found her breath was shallow; she tried to control it. "Does that surprise you?"
"You are already far from home. Without prior preparation, without aid, you have survived in this place for many weeks. What more is there for you to fear now?"
"Humans aren't creatures of the forest, like the Elves or the Nutcrackers. We are creatures of the open. Like the Runners."
"Ah." Apologetically Manekato reached for her and, with thick, gentle, leather-skinned fingers, she probed at Emma's shoulders, elbows, hips. "It is true. You are designed for steady walking, for running, over long distances. You sweat—unlike me—so that you can control your heat loss efficiently in the open sunlight. Yes, your link with the forest is lost deep in the past. And so you see it, not as a place of bounty and safety, but of threat."
"We have tales. Fictions. Many of them are scary. They involve dense forests, being lost in the woods."
Manekato showed ferocious teeth. "And if an Elf were able, it would frighten its companions with tales of being trapped in the open, with no forest cover in sight, at sunset, as the predators begin to feed... But that hominid appeared to be fleeing. Little threatens the Nutcrackers, here in their forest domain; they are strong and smart. Curious." Mane loped forward, more slowly than before, her massive form moving with barely a rustle through the crowded foliage. Emma followed in her tracks.
Then Mane slowed, peering down at something on the ground.
Emma heard the buzzing of flies. Then came the stench, the rotting-meat stench: sanitized out of the world she had come from, a smell she would not get used to no matter how long she lasted on this strange, mixed-up Moon.
The smell of death.
It looked like a chimp that had been hit by a truck. Its hairy skin was broken by wounds and lesions, and a watery fluid leaked from a gaping mouth and empty eye-sockets. Maggots squirmed in the lesions, giving the corpse a semblance of life. The body seemed to be deliquescing, in fact, its flesh and bones dissolving right out from within its skin and pouring into the ground.
There was an infant sitting on the ground beside the adult, presumably its mother, a round bundle of misery.
"Now we know why that Nutcracker was fleeing," Emma said.
Nemoto, panting hard, joined Emma. "I have seen this before. Do not touch anything."
"What is it?"
"Something like the Ebola virus, I think. It starts with a headache, a fever. As your cells fill with the replicating virus your immune system collapses. Your skin turns to pulp; you hemorrhage; your gut fills with blood; blood leaks from your eyes, mouth, nose, ears, anus. When you die your body turns to slime. If somebody picks up the corpse, they contract it, too, and die in turn. There is no vaccine or cure. I guess that is why the others of this one's troupe have abandoned it, and its child."
"I have made this one safe," Mane murmured. "There is no infection here." Emma hadn't seen her do anything.
The baby raised its head and studied Emma. The little Nutcracker, surely no more than a year old, was surrounded by scrapings of thin white infant scut.
Emma said to Mane, "It's safe to pick it up?"
"Yes."
Emma pulled a piece of cloth over her mouth and nose and stepped forward, toward the infant. The infant cowered back, but it was weak and hungry and scared, and let Emma tuck her hands under its armpits.
She lifted it easily, though it was heavier than she had thought, a boulder of hair and bone. "Well, it's a girl; I can tell that much." The infant had brown-black eyes, creamy white at the edges. Her skin beneath the hair was black, and wrinkles ran across her brow, between her eyes and over her stubby ape nose, giving her a troubled expression. Her mouth was open, and was a startlingly bright pink inside. The hair on her body was thick and coarse, but on her head, over that improbable crest of bone, the hair was sparser.
Emma held the baby against her chest. The little body was very warm. The sad, small black face tucked into a fold of Emma's coverall, and Emma bent to kiss the bony crest on the top of her head. She smelled leaves.
Then the infant hugged her tight with legs and arms, tensed, and defecated in a stream that spilled down Emma's trouser legs.
Julia made claw hands. "Leopards. Hyenas. Chomp baby Nu'cracker."
"Right," Emma said. "Smart baby. You only take a dump when you're mother is holding you."
Nemoto was watching her. "Emma Stoney, I hope you're not considering bringing that infant with you."
Emma hadn't thought that far ahead. "Why not?"
"Because you do not know how to look after it."
"Her. I don't know how to look after _her_."
"You know nothing of the ecology of these creatures. You are sentimental."
"She is right," Mane said mournfully. The big Daemon loomed over the little tableau, like an adult standing over a child with her doll. "This infant has been abandoned by its kind. It will shortly die, of starvation, predation, disease. Death is commonplace for all hominid species, Emma. Among the Nutcrackers, in fact, the men compete for access to groups of women and children. And sometimes if one man displaces another, he will destroy the children of his defeated opponent."
"All very evolutionarily sound," Emma said coldly. "But I'm keeping her."
She felt a massive hand on her back: Julia's. "Lonely," said the Ham.
"Yes. Yes, I'm lonely, Julia. I lost my husband, my world, my life. For all your kindness, of course I'm lonely."
"All," Julia said softly. "Lonely."
Nemoto prowled about the little clearing, agitated, avoiding the corpse. "We are the lonely hominids. On Earth it is thirty-five thousand years since we last encountered another hominid species. Maybe it was our relentless expansion that drove the last of the Neandertals to extinction; maybe it was our fault—but whatever the cause it was surely the last contact. And when we look out into the sky, we see nothing but emptiness. An empty world in an empty universe. No wonder we have been at war with our planet since before records began. Earth had betrayed us, orphaned us: what else was there to do? Yes, we are lonely, all of us. Lonely and frightened. But do you really think making a pet of an orphaned Australopithecine is going to make any difference?"
Emma felt Mane's heavy, gentle hand touch the top of her head, distant, comforting.
They approached the center.
People moved over the rocky ground. They were Daemons, little clusters of them walking to and fro, bearing incomprehensible pieces of equipment, occasionally flickering into and out of existence in that baffling, utterly disturbing way of theirs.
Beyond the Daemons, Emma thought she could see light shining up from the ground, caught by swirling dust motes. She shivered.
Nemoto was silent, tense.
They reached the center of the clearing. Emma stepped forward gingerly.
There was a hole in the ground, a few yards wide, like a well. Light shone from it, up into the dusty air, like an inverted sunbeam.
Emma felt cold with awe.
She sat on the grass with the Nutcracker infant and reached for a flask of milk from her pack. She opened up the yellow plastic-feel flask, exposing a nipple, and tipped it toward the infant's head, making soothing noises. The infant grabbed the yellow flask with hands and feet, and she began to suck at the nipple, very hard. Milk splashed into her mouth and over her face, and over Emma.
Emma wiped milk from her lap and eyes. "I should do this with an apron."
"You shouldn't do it at all," Nemoto said sourly. "You should give her back to her kind."
"Nutcrackers don't adopt orphans. You know that."
Mane stood over them like a block of granite. "We could make the infant acceptable to a troupe of its kind."
Emma scowled. "How?"
Nemoto said, "Emma, if they can travel between worlds just by thinking about it, the Daemons can surely fool some half-evolved ape."
Mane reproached her, "Nutcrackers are fully evolved. Just differently evolved."
The infant finished the milk, or at any rate lost patience with the bottle. She threw it over her head. Then she touched the milk that had pooled on Emma's chin, and opened her mouth to make fast, rasping cries. "Hah hah hah!"
"She's laughing at me," Emma said.
"I am not surprised," Nemoto said.
"I'll find some running water and wash us both up."
Julia, watching, grinned. "Nutcracker don' wash!"
Nemoto grimaced. "This is not a toy, still less a human child! Soon you will be stinking as badly as her! Emma, give up this sentimentality. Give her back to her own kind." She seemed obsessed with the issue of the infant.
Emma looked up at Manekato, and she looked into her own heart. "Not yet," she said.
There was a moment of stillness. In this open space the sun was warm on her face, invigorating, its light making the dusty air shine. The infant Nutcracker gurgled and plucked at Emma's sleeve. Manekato walked to the lip of the tunnel. She stood silently, on crimson earth, peering into the well in the Moon, its diffuse light picking out the folds in her blue-black skin. Emma wondered what she was thinking, what the tunnel was saying to her.
Mane turned. "It is time." She held out her hands.
Yes, Emma thought. Somehow she knew it, too. She stood up, brushing dust off her coveralls. The Nutcracker child clambered up into her arms. She settled her distorted head against Emma's chest and promptly fell asleep.
Nemoto stood reluctantly. Emma could see she was trembling, utterly afraid. Mane took Emma's hand, and Nemoto's, and Julia took Nemoto's other hand. Cradling the infant, Emma walked up to the lip of the well.
The shaft at her feet was a cylinder, walled by what looked like sparkling glass, a wall that receded downward to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few yards, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Conduits snaked along the tunnel, their purpose unclear. The shaft was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.
Momentarily dizzy, Emma stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Red Moon.
Nemoto said, "What is this?"
Mane said evenly, "It is a tunnel in the Moon."
"But what is it for?"
"We don't know."
Emma said, "How deep is it?"
"We don't know that either," Manekato said. "We have tried sending—" she hesitated "— _radio signals_ and other emissions into the well. No echo has returned."
"But," said Emma, "it can't be longer than the width of the Moon. Even if it came out the other side... It can't be longer than that."
"We don't know," Mane said. _"We did not put it here."_
Nemoto said tightly, "What do we have to do?"
Mane regarded her with her large eyes, pupils black, the whites flecked with yellow. "I think you know."
Yes, Emma knew—though she didn't understand how she knew. A prickly wave of vertigo swept over her. Malenfant, she thought desperately, you should be here to see this. You would _love_ it. But _me_...
There was no more time, no time for thinking, for doubt. Without a word, the five of them stepped off the lip of the tunnel, into the air.
For a moment they floated there in space, bathed in the light from the heart of the world, like cartoon characters for whom the laws of physics are momentarily suspended.
And then they began to sink, gently.
There was nothing beneath her feet. The air was full of light.
Slow as a snowflake, tugged by a force that felt like gravity—and yet it could not be gravity—Emma fell toward the heart of the Moon. There was no noise save the rustle of clothing, their soft breathing, no smell save the lingering iron-and-blood stink of the crimson dust of the Red Moon.
She could tell she was falling. Lines in the wall, like depth markers, were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But it was as if she were suspended here, in the glowing air; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.
She could hear her own heart pound.
Nemoto was laughing, manic.
Emma held the black bundle of fur closer to her chest, drawing comfort from the Nutcracker's solid animal warmth. "I don't know what the hell is so funny."
Nemoto's face was twisted, a mask of fear and denial. "We are not in the hands of some omnipotent, infallible god. This is no more than a gadget, Emma. More ancient than our species, more ancient than worlds perhaps, very advanced—but very old, and cranky, and probably failing as well. And we are relying on it for our lives. _That_ is what strikes me as funny."
Their speed picked up quickly.
In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine layers of the Red Moon's outer geology. Now they sailed past giant chunks of rock that crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.
"The megaregolith," Nemoto murmured. "In the later stages of its formation this little world must have been just as bombarded as our own Luna. Under the surface geology, the craters and cracks, this is what you get. Pulverization, shattered rock, mile upon mile of it. We are already far beyond the reach of any human mining, Emma. We are truly sinking deep into the carcass of this world."
Mane regarded her, curious, judgmental. "You are analytical. You like to find names for what you see."
"It helps me cope," Nemoto said tightly.
The material beyond the walls turned smooth and gray. This must be bedrock, Emma thought, buried beyond even the probing and pulverizing of the great primordial impactors. Unlike Earth, on this small world there had been no tectonic churning, no cycling of rocks from surface to interior; these rock layers had probably lain here undisturbed since the formation of the Red Moon.
Already they must be miles deep.
Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.
She had no real sense of how long she had been falling—it might have been seconds, or minutes—perhaps time flowed as deceptively here as space, as gravity. But she was reluctant to glance at a watch, or even look up to the receding disk of daylight above. She was not like Nemoto, determinedly labeling everything; rather she felt superstitious, as if she might break the spell that held her in the air if she questioned these miracles too hard.
They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock beyond the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull gray-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.
"The mantle," Nemoto whispered. "Basalt. Neither solid nor liquid, a state that you don't find on the surface of a planet, rock so soft it pulls like taffy."
Soon the rock brightened to a cherry-pink, rushing upward past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Gazing at that shining pink-hot rock just yards away, Emma felt heat, but that was surely an illusion.
The baby Nutcracker stirred, eyes closed, wiping her broad nose on Emma's chest.
Falling, falling. Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. She wondered what their purpose was; neither Nemoto nor Mane offered an opinion.
For the first time she felt a lurch, like an elevator slowing. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque material that plugged the tunnel.
She asked, "Where are we?"
Mane said, "Thousands of miles deep. Some two-thirds of the way to the center of the Moon."
They slowed, drifting to a crawl maybe a yard above the platform. Emma landed on her feet, still clutching the infant—an easy landing, even if it had reminded her of her involuntary skydive.
Now she glanced at the watch Nemoto had loaned her. The fall had taken twenty minutes.
The smooth surface was neither hot nor cold, a subdued white, stretching seamlessly from one side of the shaft to the other.
Emma put down the infant Nutcracker. With a happy grunt the infant urinated, a thin stream that pooled on the gleaming floor.
In this place of shining geometric perfection, all the hominids looked misshapen, out of place: Julia with her heavy-browed skull, the Daemon with her looming gorilla body, her fast, jerky motions and her eerily swivelling ears, and Nemoto and Emma, the proud ambassadors of _Homo sapiens_ , huddled close together in their dusty, much-patched coveralls. We are barely evolved, Emma thought—even Mane—unformed compared to the chill, effortless perfection of this place.
"... Noise," Julia said. She turned her great head, peering around. "Noise. Lights."
Nemoto scowled, peering around, up into the tunnel that receded into infinity over their heads. "I cannot hear anything."
"There is much information here," Mane said gently. She had closed her eyes. "You must—let it in."
"I don't know how," Nemoto said miserably.
Emma glanced down at the infant Nutcracker. She was crawling on legs and knuckles and peering into the floor, as if it were the surface of a pond. Emma, stiffly, got to her knees beside the child. She stared at the floor, looked where the infant looked.
There was a flash of blue light, an instant of searing pain.
The floor had turned to glass. With the Nutcracker, she was kneeling on nothingness. She gasped, pressed her hands against the hard surface. No, not glass: there was no reflection, nothing but the warm feel of the floor under her hands and knees.
And below her, a huge chamber loomed.
She felt Nemoto's hand on her shoulder, gripping tight, as if for comfort.
Emma said, "Can you see it?"
"Yes, I see it."
Emma glimpsed a far wall. It was covered with lights, like stars. But these stars marked out a regular pattern of equilateral triangles. Artificial, then. She looked from side to side, trying to make out the curve of that remote wall. But it was too far away for her to make out its shape, too far beyond her puny sense of scale.
"It's a hole," she said. "A chamber at the heart of the Moon."
"It is whatever it seems to be."
"The chamber looks flattened. Like a pancake."
"No," Nemoto murmured. "It is probably spherical. You have the eyes of a plains ape, Emma Stoney. Evolved for distances of a few hundred miles, no more. Even the sky looks like a flat lid to you. Humans aren't evolved to comprehend spaces like this—a cave thousands of miles across, a cave big enough to store a world."
"Those lights are regular. Like fake stars on a movie set."
"Perhaps they are the mouths of tunnels, like this one."
"Leading to more holes on the surface?"
"Or leading somewhere else." Nemoto's voice was quavering. "I don't know, Emma. I understand none of this."
But you understand more than me, Emma thought. Which is, perhaps, why you are more frightened.
There was motion in the heart of the chamber. Blueness. Vast wheels turning. A churning, regular, like a huge machine.
The Nutcracker child gurgled, her eyes shining. She seemed enchanted by the turning wheels, as if the whole display, surely a thousand miles across, were no more than a nursery mobile.
"Blue rings," Nemoto breathed.
Emma squinted, wishing her eyes would dark-adapt faster. "Like the Wheel, the portal I fell through to come here."
Nemoto said, "This technology has a unifying, if unimaginative, aesthetic."
"It is the world engine," Mane said simply.
Emma saw the turning wheels reflected in Mane's broad, glistening eyes. "What is a _world engine_?"
"Can you not see? Look deeper."
"... Ah," Nemoto said.
At the heart of the turning rings, there was a world.
It was like Earth, but it was not Earth. Turning slowly in the light of an off-stage sun, it was wrapped in a blanket of thick, ragged cloud. Emma glimpsed land that was riven by bright-glowing cracks and the pinpricks of volcanoes. Plumes of black smoke and dust streaked the air, and lightning cracked between fat purple clouds.
"Not a trace of ocean," Nemoto murmured. "Too hot and dry for that."
"Do you think it is Earth?—or any of the Earths?"
"If it is, it is a young Earth, an Earth still pouring out the heat of its formation..."
"The sky," Mane said, her voice quavering, "is full of rock."
Emma glanced up.
... And for an instant she saw what the Daemon saw: a different point of view, as if she were standing on that burnt, barren land, on bare rock so hot it glowed, close to a river of some sticky, coagulating lava. She looked up through rents in fat, scudding clouds—into a sky that was covered by a lid of rock, an inverted landscape of mountains and valleys and craters.
She gasped, and the vision faded.
Emma saw again the hot young world, and another beside it now, a Moonlike world, evidently cooler than Earth, but large, surely larger than Mars, say. The two planets sat side by side, like an orange and an apple in a still life.
But they were approaching each other.
"I think we are watching the Big Whack," Nemoto murmured. "The immense collision that devastated young Earth, but created the Earth-Moon system..."
The planets touched, almost gently, like kissing. But where they touched a ring of fire formed, shattering the surface of both worlds, a spreading splash of destruction into which the smaller body seemed to implode, like a fruit being drained of its flesh.
"The collision took about ten minutes," Nemoto said softly. "The approach speed was tens of thousands of miles per hour. But a collision between such large bodies, even at such speeds, would look like slow motion."
A vast fount of material, glowing liquid rock, gushed into space from the impact point. Emma glimpsed the impacting planetesimal's gray curve, a last fragment of geometric purity, lost in the storm of fire. A great circular wave of fire spread out around the Earth from the impact point.
A ring of glowing light began to coalesce in Earth orbit. As it cooled it solidified into a swarm of miniature bodies. And then spiral arms formed in the glowing moonlet cloud. It was a remarkable, beautiful sight.
"This is how the Moon was born," Nemoto said. "The largest of those moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and under the influence of tidal forces rapidly receded from Earth. Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge rock tides, savage rains as the ocean vapor fell back from space. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more."
"You know a lot about this stuff, Nemoto."
Nemoto turned, her face underlit by the glow of Earth's violent formation. "A few months ago a new Moon appeared in Earth's sky. I wanted to know how the old one had got there. I thought it might be relevant."
Emma glanced at Mane. The Daemon stood with her knuckles resting lightly on invisibility. Her eyes were closed, her face blank. Julia's eyes were closed, too.
"What do they see?" she whispered to Nemoto. "What do they hear?"
"Perhaps more than this show-and-tell diorama. Manekato said this place, this tunnel in the Moon, was _information-rich_. Julia is as smart as we are, but different. Manekato is smarter still. I don't know what they can apprehend, how far they can see beyond what we see."
"... Hey. What happened to the Earth?"
The glowing, devastated planet had blown apart. Fragments of its image had scattered to corners of the chamber—where the fragments coalesced into new Earths, new Moons, a whole family of them. They hung around the chamber like Christmas tree ornaments, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.
_Other Earths:_
Emma saw a fat, solitary world, banded with yellow cloud.
Here was another cloud-striped world, but the clouds swirled around a point on its equator—no, it was a world tipped over so that its axis pointed to its sun, like Uranus (or was it Neptune?).
Here was an Earth like Venus, with a great shroud of thick clouds that glowed yellow-white, nowhere broken.
Here was a world with a fat, cloud-shrouded Moon that seemed to loom very close. This Earth was streaked by volcanic clouds. It lacked ice caps, and its unrecognizable continents were pierced by shining threads that must have been immense rivers. This world must be battered by the great tides of air, water, and rock raised by that too-close companion.
Most of the Earths seemed about the size of Earth—of _the_ Earth, Emma's Earth. But some were smaller—wizened worlds that reminded her of Mars, with huge continents of glowering red rock and brooding weather systems squatting over their poles. And some of the Earths were larger. These monster planets were characteristically wreathed in thick, muddy atmospheres and drowned in oceans, water that stretched from pole to pole, with a few eroded islands protruding above the surface, rooted on some deep-buried crust.
The Moons varied, too. There seemed to be a spectrum of possible Moons. The smallest were bare gray rock like Luna, those somewhat larger cratered deserts of crimson rock more or less like Mars. Some were almost Earthlike, showing thick air and ice and the glint of ocean—like the Red Moon itself. There were even Earths with pairs of Moons, Emma saw, or triplets. One ice-bound Earth was surrounded, not by a Moon, but by a glowing ring system like Saturn's.
Emma looked, without success, for a blue Earth with a single, gray, modest Moon.
"The Big Whack collision shaped Earth and Moon," Nemoto murmured. "Everything about Earth and Moon—their axial tilt, composition, atmosphere, length of day, even Earth's orbit around the sun—was determined by the impact. But it might have turned out differently. Small, chance changes in the geometry of the collision would have made a large difference in the outcome. Lots of possible realities, budding off from that key, apocalyptic moment."
"What are we looking at here? Computer simulations?"
"Or windows into other possible realities. It is a glimpse of the vast graph of probability and possibility, of alternates that cluster around the chaotic impact event." Nemoto seemed coldly excited. "This is the key, Emma Stoney. The Big Whack was the pivotal event whose subtly different outcomes produced the wide range of Earths we have encountered..."
Emma barely understood what she was saying.
Julia grunted. "Gray Earth," she said. She was pointing to the tipped-over, Uranuslike Earth.
Emma said, "Where you came from."
"Home," Julia said simply.
Nemoto said, "I recognize _that_ one." She pointed to the fat, solitary Earth, banded by Jupiterlike clouds. "A Moonless Earth, an Earth where the great impact did not happen at all. It may be the Earth they call the Banded Earth, which seems to be the origin of these Daemons."
Mane laid gentle, patronizing hands on their scalps. "Analyze, analyze. Your minds are very busy. You must watch, listen."
"Ooh." It was the Nutcracker infant. She was crawling over the invisible floor, chortling at the light show.
Emma glanced down. The various Earths had vanished, to be replaced by a floor of swirling, curdled light.
It was a galaxy.
"Oh, my," she muttered. "What now?"
The galaxy was a disk of stars, flatter than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disk, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disk like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars—a granularity of light—and with dark lanes traced between the arms. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light years across.
But the familiar disk—shining core, spiral arms—was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.
The five of them stood over this vast image—if it _was_ an image—Daemon and Ham and humans and Nutcracker baby, squat, ungainly, primitive forms.
"So, a galaxy," said Emma. " _Our_ Galaxy?"
"I think so," Nemoto said. "It matches radio maps I have seen." She pointed, tracing patterns. "Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm."
The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other "arms" were really just scraps, Emma saw—the Galaxy's spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected—but still, she thought, the sun is in one of those scattered fragments.
The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.
Emma could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving, too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disk of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, she saw, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.
"A galactic day," Nemoto breathed. "It takes two hundred million years to complete a turn."
Oh, Malenfant, Emma thought again, you should be here to see this. Not me—not _me_.
Nemoto said, "But _whose_ Galaxy is it?"
"That is a good question," Mane said. "It is our Galaxy—that is, it belongs to all of us. The Galactic background is common to the reality threads bound by the Earth-Moon impact probability sheaf—"
"Whoa," Emma said. "Nemoto, can you translate?"
Nemoto frowned. "Think of the Galaxy, a second before the Earth-Moon impact. All those stars have nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Whack, and will not be affected by it. The Galaxy will turn, whether the Moon exists or not, whether humans evolve or not..."
Mane said, "Our Galaxy looks the same as _yours_. And it is unmodified."
Emma snapped, "What does _that_ mean?"
Nemoto said, "That there is no sign of life, Emma."
"But we're looking at a whole damn _galaxy_. From this perspective the sun is a dot of light. The place could be swarming with creatures like humans, and you wouldn't see it."
Nemoto shook her head. "The Fermi Paradox. In our universe, and Mane's, there has been time for a thousand empires to sweep over the face of the Galaxy. Some of the signs of their passing ought to be very visible."
"Like what?"
"Like they might tamper with the evolution of the stars. Or they might mine the black hole at the Galaxy's core for its energy. Or they might wrap up the Galactic disk in a shell to trap all its radiant energy. Emma, there are many possibilities. It is very likely that we would see _something_ even when we peer at a Galaxy from without like this."
"But we don't."
"But we don't. Humanity seems to be alone in our universe, Emma; Earth is the only place where mind arose." Nemoto confronted Mane. "And _your_ universe is empty, too. As was Hugh McCann's. Perhaps that is true in all the universes in this reality sheaf."
Emma murmured, "The Fermi paradox."
Nemoto seemed surprised she knew the name.
"Something is happening to the Galaxy," Mane said.
They clustered close to watch.
The Galaxy was spinning fast now. All over the disk the stars were flaring, dying. Some of them, turning to red embers, began to drift away from the main body of the disk.
Emma picked up the Nutcracker infant and clutched her to her chest. "It is—shrivelling," she said.
"We are seeing vast swathes of time," Nemoto said sombrely. "This is the future, Emma."
" _The future?_ How is that possible?"
Suddenly the stars died. All of them went out, it seemed, all at once.
The Galaxy seemed to implode, becoming much dimmer.
At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash of light. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch, surrounded by a blood-colored river, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles. That great central complex was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the center.
Further out still, the core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be set in a ragged disk, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disk, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater or lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points studded at regular intervals around the disk. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points toward the bloated central mass.
Emma said, "What happened to all the stars?"
"They died," Nemoto said bluntly. "They grew old and died, and there wasn't enough material left to make any more. And then, _this_." Nemoto pointed. "The wreck of the Galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into black holes—those blisters you see in the disk. That central mass is the giant black hole at the core."
" _When_ is this?"
Nemoto hesitated, thinking, and when she spoke again, she sounded awed. "Umm, perhaps a hundred thousand billion years into the future—compared to the universe's present age _five thousand times_ older."
The numbers seemed monstrous to Emma. "So this is the end of life."
"Oh, no." Mane replied. She pointed to the clusters of brighter light around the rim of the galactic corpse. " _These_ seem to be normal stars: small, uniform, but still glowing in the visible spectrum."
"How is that possible?"
"Those stars can't be natural," Nemoto said. She turned to Emma, her eyes shining. "You see? Somebody must be gathering the remnant interstellar gases, forming artificial birthing clouds... Somebody is farming the Galaxy, even so far in the future. Isn't it wonderful?"
" _Wonderful?_ The wreck of the Galaxy?"
"Not that," Nemoto said. "The existence of life. They still need stars and planets, and warmth and light. But their worlds must be huddled close to these small, old stars—probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark... I think this is, umm, a biography," Nemoto said. "This whole vast show. The story of a race. _They_ are trying to tell us what became of them."
"A very human impulse," said Mane.
Emma shrugged. "But why should they care what we think?"
Nemoto said, "Perhaps they were our descendants..."
Mane said nothing, her eyes wide as she peered at the crimson image, and Emma wondered what strange news from the future was pouring into her head.
And now the Galaxy image whirled again, evolving, changing, dimming.
Emma hugged the baby hominid and closed her eyes.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.
Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone, and forever after.
Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.
Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no _other_ against which human advancement could be tested.
They were forever alone.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age were like, minds of time's far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, to breed, or even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. _It wasn't supposed to have been like this_.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final downstreamers—lonely, dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past...
## _E mma Stoney_
Nemoto was muttering, perhaps to Emma or Manekato, or perhaps to herself, as she impatiently swept lianas and thorn tangles out of her path. "Evolution has turned out to be a lot more complicated than we ever imagined, of course. Well, everything is more complicated now, in this manifold of realities. Even though Darwin's basic intuition was surely right..." And so on.
Carrying the sleeping Nutcracker infant, Emma walked through the forest. Ahead she could see the broad back of Manekato.
Emma let Nemoto talk.
"... Even before this Red Moon showed up in our skies we had developed major elaborations to the basic Darwinian model. Darwin's 'tree of life' is no simple tree, it turns out, no simple hierarchy of ancestral species. It is a tangle—"
"Like this damn jungle," Emma said, trying to turn the monologue into a conversation. "Lianas and vines cutting across everywhere. If it were just the trees it would be easy."
"A crisscross transfer of genetic information, this way and that. And now we have this Red Moon wandering between alternate Earths, the Wheels returning to different Africas over and over, scooping up species here and depositing them there, making an altogether untidy mess of the descent of mankind—and of other species; no wonder this world is full of what Malenfant called 'living fossils.' Surely without the Red Moon we would never have evolved, we _Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo erectus_ was a successful species, lasting millions of years, covering the Earth. We did not _need_ to become so smart..."
It had been some days since their jaunt into the tunnel in the Moon. Nemoto had spent the time with Manekato and other Daemons, struggling to interpret the experience. For her part, Emma had barely been able to function once those visions of the aging Galaxy had started to blizzard over her—even though it had been, apparently, just a fraction of the information available in that deep chamber, for those minds capable of reading it.
But she remembered the last glimpse of all.
_... It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed_.
_But even now there was something rather than nothing_.
_The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth..._
That ultimate, dismal vision was slow to dispel, like three-in-the-morning fears of her own death. She knew she didn't have the mental toughness to confront all this, special effects or not. Unlike Nemoto, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. To Nemoto, the whole thing seemed to have been more like a traumatic shock than an imparting of information. She had come out of the experience needing human company, in her reticent way, and needing to talk. But when she talked it was about Charles Darwin and the Red Moon, or even Malenfant and the politics of NASA, anything but the central issue of the Old Ones.
Emma concentrated on the leafy smell of the child, the crackle of dead leaves, the prickle of sunlight on her neck, even the itch of the ulcers on her legs. _This_ was reality, of life and breath and senses.
Manekato had stopped, abruptly. Nemoto fell silent. They were in a small scrap of clearing, by the side of the lichen-covered corpse of a huge fallen tree. Manekato lifted herself up on her hind legs, sniffed the air and swivelled her ears, and belched with satisfaction. "Here," she said. "The Nutcrackers will come." With a massive thump she sat on the ground, and began exploring the bushes around her for berries.
Emma gratefully put down the infant Nutcracker and sat beside her. The leaves were slippery and damp; the morning was not long advanced. She considered giving the infant some more milk, but the child had already discovered Manekato's fruit, and was clambering up the Daemon's impassive back.
Nemoto sat beside Emma. Her posture was stiff, her arms wrapped around her chest, her right heel drumming on the ground. Emma laid one hand on Nemoto's knee. Gradually the drumming stopped.
And, suddenly, Nemoto began to talk.
"They made the manifold."
"Who did?"
"The Old Ones. They constructed a manifold of universes—an infinite number of universes. They _made_ it all." Nemoto shook her head. "Even framing the thought, conceiving of such ambition, is overwhelming. But they did it."
Manekato was watching them, her large eyes thoughtful.
Emma said carefully, "How did they do this, Nemoto?"
"The branching of universes, deep into the hyperpast," Manekato murmured.
Emma shook her head, irritated. "What does that mean?"
Nemoto said, "Universes are born. They die. We know two ways a universe can be born. The most primitive cosmos can give birth to another through a Big Crunch, the mirror-image of a Big Bang suffered by a collapsing universe at the end of its history. Or else a new universe can be budded from the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Black holes are the key, Emma, you see. A universe which cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. But a universe which is complex enough to make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters, baby universes connected to the mother by space-time umbilicals through the singularities."
"And so when the Old Ones tinkered with the machinery—"
"We don't know how they did it. But they changed the rules," Nemoto said.
Emma said hesitantly, "So they found a way to create a lot more universes."
Manekato said, "We believe the Old Ones created, not just a multiplicity of daughter universes, but _an infinite number_." The bulky Daemon studied Emma's face, seeking understanding.
"Infinity is significant, you see," Nemoto said, too rapidly. "There is, umm, a qualitative difference between a mere large number, however large, and infinity. In the infinite manifold, in that infinite ensemble, _all_ logically possible universes must exist. And therefore _all_ logically possible destinies must unfold. Everything that is possible _will_ happen, somewhere out there. They created a grand stage, you see, Emma: a stage for endless possibilities of life and mind."
"Why did they do this?"
"Because they were lonely. The Old Ones were the first sentient species in their universe. They survived their crises of immaturity. And they went on, to walk on the planets, to touch the stars. But everywhere they went—though perhaps they found life—they found no sign of mind, save for themselves."
"And then the stars went out."
"And the stars went out. There are ways to survive the darkness, Emma. You can mine energy from the gravity wells of black holes, for instance... But as the universe expanded relentlessly, and the available energy dwindled, the iron logic of entropy held sway. Existence became harsh, straitened, in an energy-starved universe that was like a prison. Some of the Old Ones looked back over their lonely destiny, which had turned into nothing but a long, desolating struggle to survive, and—well, some of them rebelled."
The infant crawled over Manekato's stolid head and down her chest, clutching great handfuls of hair. Then she curled up in the Daemon's lap, defecated efficiently, and quickly fell asleep. Emma suppressed a pang of jealousy that it was not _her_ lap.
"So they rebelled. How?"
Nemoto sighed. "It's all to do with quantum mechanics, Emma."
"I was afraid it might be."
Manekato said, "Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future. Handshakes across time. The story of the universe is like a tapestry, stitched together by uncountable trillions of such tiny handshakes. If you create an artificial timelike loop to some point in space-time within the negative light cone of the present—"
"Whoa. In English."
Manekato looked puzzled.
Nemoto said, "If you were to go back in time and try to change the past, you would damage the universe, erasing a whole series of consequential events. Yes? So the universe starts over, from the first point where the forbidden loop would have begun to exist. As the effects of your change propagate through space and time, the universe knits itself into a new form, transaction by transaction, handshake by handshake. The wounded universe heals itself with a new set of handshakes, working forward in time, until it is complete and self-consistent once more."
Emma tried to think that through. "What you're telling me is that changing history is possible."
"Oh, yes," said Nemoto. "The Old Ones must have come to believe _they had lived through the wrong history_. So they reached back, to the deepest past, and made the change—and the manifold was born."
Emma thought she understood. So this had been the purpose the Old Ones had found. Not a saga of meaningless survival in a dismal future of decay and shadows. The Old Ones had reached back, back in time, back to the deepest past, and put it right, by creating infinite possibilities for life, for mind.
She said carefully, "I always wondered if life had any meaning. Now I know. The purpose of the first intelligence of all was to reshape the universe, in order to create a storm of mind."
"Yes," Manekato said. "That is a partial understanding, but—yes."
"Whew," Emma said.
Nemoto seemed to be shivering, exhausted. "I feel as if I have been gazing through a pinhole at the sun; I have stared so long that I have burned a hole in my retina. And yet there is still so much more to see."
"You have done well," Manekato said gently.
Nemoto snapped, "Do I get another banana?"
"We must all do the best we can." Manekato's massive hand absently stroked the Nutcracker; the child purred like a cat.
"But," Emma said, "the Old Ones must have wiped out their own history in the process. Didn't they? They created a time paradox. Everybody knows about time paradoxes. If you kill your grandmother, the universe repairs itself so you never existed..."
"Perhaps not," Manekato murmured. "It seems that conscious minds may, in some form, survive the transition."
"Do not ask how," Nemoto said dryly. "Suffice it to say that the Old Ones seem to have been able to look on their handiwork, and see that it was good... mostly."
"Mostly?"
Nemoto said, "We think that we, unwilling passengers on this Red Moon, are, umm, exploring a corner of the manifold, of that infinite ensemble of universes the Old Ones created. Remember the Big Whack. Remember how we glimpsed many possible outcomes, many possible Earths and Moons, depending on the details of the impact."
"It is clear," Manekato said, "that within the manifold there must be a sheaf of universes, closely related, all of them deriving from that primal Earth-shaping event and its different outcomes."
Nemoto said, "Many Earths. Many realities."
"And in some of those realities," Manekato said, "what you call the Fermi Paradox was resolved a different way."
"You mean, alien intelligences arose."
"Yes." Nemoto rubbed her nose and glanced uneasily at the sky. "But in every one of those alien-inhabited realities, _humans got wiped out_ —or never evolved in the first place. Every single time."
"How come?"
Nemoto shrugged. "Lots of possible ways. Interstellar colonists from ancient cultures overwhelmed Earth before life got beyond the single-cell stage. Humankind was destroyed by a swarm of killer robots. Whatever. The Old Ones seem to have selected a bundle of universes—all of them deriving from the Big Whack—in which there was _no_ life beyond the Earth. And they sent this Moon spinning between those empty realities, from one to the other—"
"So that explains Fermi," Emma said.
"Yes," said Nemoto. "We see no aliens _because we have been inserted into an empty universe_. Or universes. For our safety. To allow us to flourish."
"But why the Red Moon, why link the realities?"
"To express humanity," Manekato said simply. "There are many different ways to be a hominid, Em-ma. We conjecture the Old Ones sought to explore those different ways: to promote evolutionary pulses, to preserve differing forms, to make room for different types of human consciousness."
Emma frowned. "You make us sound like pets. Toys."
Manekato growled; Emma wondered if that was a laugh. "Perhaps. Or it may be that we have yet to glimpse the true purpose of this wandering world."
Emma said, "But I still don't get it. Why would these superbeing Old Ones care so much about humanity?"
Nemoto frowned. "You haven't understood anything, Emma. _They were us_. They were our descendants, our future. _Homo sapiens sapiens_ , Emma. And their universe-spanning story is our own lost future history. _We_ built the manifold. _We_ —our children—are the Old Ones."
Emma was stunned. Somehow it was harder to take, to accept that these universe-making meddlers might have been—not godlike, unimaginable aliens—but the descendants of humans like herself. What hubris, she thought.
Nemoto said now, "That was the purpose, the design of the Red Moon. But now the machinery is failing."
"It is?"
"The sudden, frequent and irregular jumps. The instabilities, the tides, the volcanism. It shouldn't be happening that way."
Emma turned back to Manekato. "Let me get this straight. The Red Moon has been the driver of human evolution. But now it is breaking down. So what happens next?"
"We will be on our own," said Nemoto. She raised her thin hands, turned them over, spread the fingers. "Our evolutionary destiny, in hominid hands. Does that frighten you?"
"It frightens _me_ ," Manekato said softly.
For a moment they sat silently. Emma was aware of the dampness of the breeze, the harsh breathing of the big Daemon. On impulse she put her hand on Manekato's arm. Her fur was thick and dense, and her skin hot—hotter than a human's, perhaps a result of her faster metabolism.
"... Wait," Manekato said softly, peering into the trees.
Shadows moved there: shadows of bulky, powerful forms. They paused, listening. There were at least three adults, possibly more. Emma could make out the characteristic prow-shaped silhouettes of their skulls.
The Nutcracker infant roused from her sleep. Bleary-eyed, she peered into the trees and yowled softly.
The shadows moved closer, sliding past the trees, at last resolving into recognizable fragments: curling fingers, watchful eyes, the unmistakeable morphology of hominids. One of them, perhaps a woman, extended a hand.
The infant clambered off Manekato's lap and stood facing the Nutcracker woman, nervous, uncertain.
The Nutcracker woman took a single step into the clearing, her eyes fixed on the infant. The child whimpered, and took a hesitant step forward.
Nemoto hissed to Emma, "Listen to me. I have a further theory. The Old Ones did not disappear into some theoretical universe-spanning abstraction. _They are still here_. Wouldn't they want to be immersed in the world they made, to eat its fruit, to drink its water? Maybe they have become these Nutcrackers, the most content, pacific, unthreatened, _mindless_ of all the hominid species. They shed everything they knew to live the way hominids are supposed to, the way we never learned, or forgot. What do you think?"
The infant glanced back at Emma, knowing. Then, with a liquid motion, the Nutcracker woman scooped up the child and melted into green shadows.
Back in the Daemons' yellow-plastic compound, Emma luxuriated in a hot shower, a toweling robe, and a breakfast of citrus fruit.
Luxuriate, yes. Because you know you aren't going to enjoy this much longer, are you, Emma? And maybe you'll never live like this again, not ever, not for the rest of your life.
You will miss the coffee, though.
She dressed and emerged from her little chalet. The sky was littered with cloud, the breeze capricious and laden with moisture. Storm coming.
She saw Nemoto arguing with Manekato. Nemoto looked, in fact, as if she still wasn't getting a great deal of sleep; black smudges made neat hyperbolae around her eyes. By contrast, Manekato was leaning easily on her knuckles, her swivelling ears facing Nemoto, her great black-haired body a calming slab of stillness. And Julia, the Ham girl, was standing close by, listening gravely.
When Emma approached, Mane turned to her, smooth and massive as a swivelling gun-turret. "Good morning, Em-ma."
"And to you. Nemoto, you look like shit."
Nemoto glowered at her.
"What's the hot topic?"
"Future plans." Nemoto's foot was characteristically tapping the plastic-feel floor like a trapped animal, about the nearest she got to expressing a true emotion.
"Gray Earth," Julia said.
"... Oh. The deal we made."
"The deal _you_ made," Nemoto said. "Over and over again. You said you would take the Hams back to their home world, if they helped you."
"I know what I said."
"Well, now it is payback time."
Emma sighed. She stepped forward and took Julia's great hands; her own fingers, even hardened by weeks of rough living, were pale white streaks compared to Julia's muscular digits. "Julia, I meant what I said. If I could find a way I would get you people home." She waved toward the latest Earth in the sky, a peculiarly shrunken world with a second Moon orbiting close to it. "But you can see the situation for yourself. Your world is gone. It's lost. You see—"
Nemoto said, "Emma, you have made enough mistakes already. It would pay you, pay us both, not to patronize this woman."
Emma said, "I'm sorry." So I am, she thought. But I made a promise I couldn't keep, and I knew it when I made it, and now I just have to get out of this situation as gracefully as I can. That's life. "The point is the Gray Earth _isn't_ coming back. Not in any predictable way." She looked up at Mane. "Is it?"
The great Daemon rubbed her face. "We are studying the world engine. It is ancient and faulty." She grunted. "Like a bad-tempered old hominid, it needs love and attention."
Emma frowned. "But you think you might get it to work again?"
Mane patted Emma's head. "Nemoto frequently accuses me of underestimating you. I am guilty. But you are symmetrically guilty of overestimating me. We cannot repair the world engine. We cannot understand its workings. Perhaps in a thousand years of study... For now we can barely _see_ it."
Nemoto shuddered. "We are all on very low rungs of a very tall ladder."
But Mane said, "There is no ladder. We are all different. Difference is to be cherished."
"And that's what we humans must learn," Emma said.
"You will not learn it," Manekato said cheerfully, "for you will not survive long enough." She sighed, a noise like a steam train in a tunnel. "However, to return to the point, we believe we may be able to direct the wandering of the Red Moon, to a limited extent. Prior to shutting down the world engine altogether."
"Gray Earth come," Julia said again, and her face relaxed from its mock-human smile into the gentle, beatific expression Emma had come to associate with happiness.
Emma held her breath. "And Earth," she said. "My Earth; our Earth. Can you reach that, too?"
"The Daemons can make _one_ directed transition," said Nemoto gravely. "And they are going to use it to take us to the universe of the Gray Earth."
"Because of me?"
"Because of you."
Emma studied Nemoto. "I sense you're pissed at me," she said dryly.
Nemoto glowered. "Emma, _these are not humans_. They don't lie, the Hams and the Daemons. It's all part of the rule set with which they have managed to achieve such longevity as species. A bargain, once struck, is absolutely rigid."
"But what's the big deal? Even if the Daemons manage to bring us back to the Gray Earth universe, they can just send the Hams home. As many as want to go. They can just _Map_ them there."
Nemoto shook her head. "You aren't thinking right. The deal was with us, not the Daemons. We have to get them home. Whichever way we can."
"The lander?"
Nemoto just glared. Then she walked away, muttering, scheming, her whole body tense, her gait rigid, like a machine.
# _PART FIVE_
# **Manifold**
#
## _E mma Stoney_
Hello, Malenfant. I want to tell you I'm all right.
I know that's not what you'd want to hear. The notion that I'm alive, I'm prospering without _you_ , is anathema. Right?
But then you probably aren't listening at all.
You never did listen to me. If you had you wouldn't have screwed up our entire relationship, from beginning to end. You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving _me_ , you never thought about yourself. Or me.
But I miss you even so.
I guess you know I'm alone here. Even Nemoto has gone, off to a different fate, in some corner of the manifold or other...
## _M ary_
There were more yesterdays than tomorrows. Her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, even one of her own children.
And there came a day when they put old Saul in the ground, and Mary found herself the last to remember the old place, the Red Moon where she had been born.
It didn't matter. There was only today.
Nemoto was not so content, of course.
Even in the deepest times of the Long Night, Nemoto would bustle about the cave, agitated, endlessly making her incomprehensible objects. Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, not really a person, and so of no significance.
But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto. Mary understood. Nemoto had brought them here, home to the Gray Earth. Now it was Nemoto who was stranded far from her home.
And so Mary made space for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when she fell ill, or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat, softening the deep-frozen meat with her own strong jaws, chewing it as she would to feed a child.
But one day, Nemoto spat out her mouthful of meat on the floor of the cave. She raged and shouted in her jabbering Skinny tongue, and pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.
She returned staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. It was a bat, dormant, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. Nemoto jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.
Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm titbits to the children. But when she offered them the bloated, pink-gray internal organs of the bat, mothers pulled the children away.
After that, Nemoto would never be healthy again.
There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, but it was the first time it had shown at all for sixty-eight days. There was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals—birds and a few large rats—were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting in their torpor.
The people capered and threw off their furs.
Nemoto was growing more ill. She suffered severe bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. She lost weight. And her skin grew flaky and sore.
Mary tried to treat the diarrhea. She brought salt water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto's system.
The days lengthened rapidly. The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, life swarmed. The people gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations.
And soon a distant thunder boomed across the land. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds. The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed toward the sea.
It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes: long-legged, the bucks sporting huge unwieldy antlers. The animals were slim and streamlined, and the muscles of their legs and haunches were huge and taut. And they ran like the wind. Since most of this tipped-up world was, at any given moment, either freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of miles, spanning continents in their search for food, water, and temperate climes.
But predators came, too, streamlined hyenas and cats, stalking the vast herds. Those predators included the people, who inhabited a neck of land between two continents, a funnel down which the migrant herds were forced to swarm.
The antelope herd was huge. But it passed so rapidly that it was gone in a couple of days, a great river of flesh that had run its course.
The people ate their meat and sucked rich marrow, and waited for their next provision to come to them, delivered up by the tides of the world.
The air grew hotter yet. Soon the fast-growing grass and herbs were dying back, and the migrant animals and birds had fled, seeking the temperate climes.
The season's last rain fell. Mary closed her eyes and raised her open mouth to the sky, for she knew it would be a long time before she felt rain on her face again.
The ground became a plain of baked and cracked mud.
The people retreated to their cave. Just as its thick rock walls had sheltered them from the most ferocious cold of the winter, so now the walls gave them coolness.
Nemoto's relentless illness drove her to her pallet, where she lay with a strip of skin tied across her eyes.
At length there came a day when the sun failed even to brush the horizon at its lowest point. For sixty-eight days it would not rise or set, but would simply complete endless, meaningless circles in the sky, circles that would gradually grow smaller and more elevated.
The Long Day had begun.
Nemoto said she would not go into the ground until she saw a night again. But Nemoto's skin continued to flake away, as the bat she had woken took its gruesome revenge.
There came a day when the sun rolled along the horizon, its light shimmering through the trees which flourished there.
Mary carried Nemoto to the mouth of the cave—she was light, like a thing of twigs and dried leaves.
Nemoto screwed up her face. "I do not like the light," she said, her voice a husk. "I can bear the dark. But not the light. I long for tomorrow. For tomorrow I will understand a little more. Do you follow me? I have always wanted to _understand_. Why I am here. Why there is something, rather than nothing. Why the sky is silent."
"Lon' for tomorrow," Mary echoed, seeking to comfort her.
"Yes. But _you_ care nothing for tomorrow, or yesterday. Here especially, with your Long Day and your Long Night, as if a whole year is made of a single great day."
Overhead, a single bright star appeared, the first star since the spring.
Nemoto gasped. She was trying to raise her arm, perhaps to point, but could not. "You have a different pole star here. It is somewhere in Leo, near the sky's equator. Your world is tipped over, you see, like Uranus, like a top lying on its side; that is how the impact shaped it. And so for six months, when your pole points at the sun, you have endless light; and for six months endless dark... Do you follow me? No, I am sure you do not."
She coughed, and seemed to sink deeper into the skins. "All my life I have sought to understand. I believe I would have pursued the same course, whichever of our splintered worlds I had been born into. And yet, and yet—" She arched her back. "And yet I die alone."
Mary took her hand. It was as delicate as a bundle of dried twigs. "Not alone."
Nemoto tried to squeeze Mary's hand; it was the gentlest of touches.
And the sun, as if apologetically, slid beneath the horizon. A crimson sunset towered into the sky.
Mary placed her in the ground, the ground of this Gray Earth.
The memory of Nemoto faded, as memories did. But sometimes, sparked by a scent, or the salty breeze that blew off the sea, Mary would think of Nemoto, who had not died alone.
## _E mma Stoney_
Alone.
Yes, Malenfant, I'm alone. I know I have company—various specimens of _Homo superior_ , who you never got to meet, and the Hams, including your Julia, who didn't get to ride back to the Gray Earth. But I'm alone even so. I'm a pet of the Daemons. They are—kindly. So are the Hams. I feel like I'm drowning in chocolate.
I've decided to leave. I'm going upriver, into the heart of the continent. I'm intending to hook up with another band of Runners. I did that before; I can do it again. They range far into the continent's interior, the desert. They know how to find water, how to eat, how to survive out there. If anybody knows a way across the red center it will be the Runners.
I want to see the Bullseye up close, that big volcanic blister. Although maybe it won't be so spectacular. Like you used to say about Olympus Mons on Mars: too big for the human eye to take in, right? Well, those mile-deep rift canyons around its base look like they'd be worth a snapshot.
But I want to go on beyond that.
Maybe I can get past the Bullseye, all the way to the other side of the continent. There is another Beltway over there, Malenfant, another strip of greenery on the western edge of the continent. Nemoto told me you didn't see any dwellings or structures, from Earth or when you orbited the Moon. But maybe there are people there even so, in the western Beltway.
Maybe they are like me. Maybe they are like the Hams, or the Daemons, or maybe another form we haven't dreamed of before. Nobody seems to know. Not the Daemons, not even the Hams.
I can hear your voice. I know what you're saying. I know it's dangerous. Doubly so for a person alone. But I'm going anyhow. I'm tougher than I used to be, Malenfant.
I'll tell you what I'd like to find, in the other Beltway, or someplace else. The place where humans evolved.
We know the Hams were shaped by conditions on the Gray Earth. We think the Daemons are descended from a bunch of Australopithecines that wandered over to the Banded Earth millions of years ago. And so on.
Well, presumably humans came from a group of Runners, similarly isolated. Maybe there were several of Nemoto's "speciations": one to produce some archaic form, a common ancestor of humans and Neandertals—Hams—and then others to produce the Hams, and us. And maybe others. Other cousins.
I think I'd like to find that place. To meet the others.
Nobody knows everything there is to know about this Red Moon. It's a big place. It's full of people.
Full of stories.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
Babo shrugged massively, as Manekato groomed him. "It may yet be possible to use the world engine, if only in a limited way..."
"To do what?"
"We can explore the manifold. We can Map to other realities. Other possibilities. You don't have to send a whole Moon to do that."
Mane pondered. "But what is there to look for?"
"In fact there is a valid goal," Babo said carefully.
The Astrologers, he told Manekato, believed that the universe—any given universe—was a fundamentally comprehensible system. If a system was comprehensible, then an entity must exist that could comprehend it. Therefore an entity must exist that could comprehend the entire universe, arbitrarily well—or rather _She_ must exist, as Babo put it.
"The God of the Manifold," Manekato said dryly.
The catch was that there was a manifold of possible universes, of which this was only one. So She may not exist in this universe.
Anyhow, it—She—was to be the ultimate goal of the Daemons' quest.
"Of course," Babo said, "She may actually be an expression of the manifold itself—or perhaps the manifold itself, the greater structure of reality strands, _is itself_ self-referential, in some sense conscious. Or perhaps the manifold is itself merely one thread in a greater tapestry—"
"A manifold of manifolds."
"And perhaps there is a further recursion of structure, no end to the hierarchies of life and mind, which—"
Mane held up her hands. "If we find Her: what will we ask Her?"
Babo picked his nose thoughtfully. "I asked Em-ma that. She said, 'Ask Her if She knows what the hell is going on.' "
Mane touched her brother's head. "Then that is what we will ask. Come, brother; we have much to do."
Hand in hand, the two of them loped toward the forest, seeking shade and food.
## _S hadow_
Shadow found a scrap of meat.
It was on the ground, under a fig leaf, where she had been looking for fruit. It was just a scrap, half-chewed, not much more than a bit of gristle. Shadow scrabbled it up off the floor. Her fingers were stiff now, her vision poor, and she had trouble making her hands do what she wanted them to do.
She sat on the ground and chewed the gristle, sucking away the dust and the tang of somebody else's saliva. The meat was well-chewed. There was barely any flavor; any blood; she couldn't even tell what animal it had come from. But it was tough, and the way it scraped between her teeth made her ache with hunger. She swallowed it only when she had reduced it to a shred of fiber, too ragged to hold or gnaw.
She had not eaten meat for a long, long time: not yesterday, not the days she remembered in vivid, nonchronological, blood-soaked glimpses, not as far back as she could remember.
... She became aware of their scent first. The scent of fur, musk, blood. Then their shadows.
All around her.
They had come on her silently. But they had been coming for her, one way or another, since the day when she had failed to kill the Nutcracker infant, in that blinding flash of light. She tried to run, willing all her strength into legs, which had once been so strong. But her life had been very hard, and she was slow.
Young hands grabbed her legs. She fell facefirst into the dirt.
She twisted, trying to get on her back. But those strong hands kept a grip of her ankle. Her grimace of hatred and defiance turned to a yell of pain, as bones snapped.
They fell on her. Both her legs were held. Somebody sat on her head, and dark stinking fur pushed into her mouth and nose and eyes. She flailed and got one blow on hard flesh. But then her arms were pinned down. She couldn't see who they were.
The blows began to fall. Kicks, stamps, jumps, punches. Bodies hurling themselves onto her. She glimpsed others running around the main group of assailants, landing kicks and blows when the chance came. It was a bedlam, of screams, pain, motion. Still she couldn't make out their faces.
Thumbs pressing into her eyes. Strong hands working at one of her arms, twisting. Bright red pain in her shoulder and elbow, the crunch of ligament and bone.
Termite!... But her mother was long dead, of course.
The pain lessened. With relief, she fell into darkness.
## _E mma Stoney_
You know, I think I always knew we couldn't manage to live together. But I think I always dreamed we would get to die together.
But it's been quite a ride. I wouldn't have missed it for the world, Malenfant. For _all_ the worlds.
Of course there is another possibility. Maybe I should go with the Daemons, off into the manifold. If this really is a manifold of infinite universes, anything is possible. No, strike that—anything that _can_ happen _will_ happen, someplace.
And so there must be one reality where you're waiting for me. There _must_ be. A whole universe, just for us. Kind of romantic, don't you think?
I'm still blown away by what I've learned of the Old Ones.
The Old Ones created infinite possibility—infinite opportunities for life, for mind. What higher mission could there be? And what really overwhelms me is that they may have been _us_. Or at least humans from some variant of our future history. _Us_ : We did this. Think of that.
You'd have loved it, Malenfant. But of course, maybe you already know all about it.
To redesign an infinite ensemble of universes: what terrible responsibility, what arrogance... Maybe they really were us. It sounds just the kind of thing your average _Homo sap_ would do for a dare.
An _H. sap_ like Reid Malenfant.
Is it all your fault? Malenfant, _what did you do_ , out there in the forest of realities?
Time to go. Good-bye, Malenfant, good-bye.
## _M axie_
The people walk across the grass. Maxie's legs are walking. He is following Fire.
The sky is blue. The grass is sparse, yellow. The ground is red under the grass. The people are slim black forms scattered on red-green.
The people call to each other.
"Berry? Sky! Berry!"
"Sky, Sky, here!"
The sun is high. There are only people on the grass. The cats sleep when the sun is high. The hyenas sleep. The Nutcracker men and the Elf men sleep in their trees. Everybody sleeps except the Running-folk. Maxie knows this without thinking.
There is a blue light, low in the sky.
Maxie looks at the blue light. The blue light is new. The blue light is still. It watches him. It is a bat. Or an eye.
Maxie grins. He cares nothing for the blue light.
He walks on, across the hot crimson dust.
| place so quickly. As the forest remnants had continued to shrink back, the Nutcracker-men, living in the green heart of the forest, had managed to hold their territory against the incursions of hungry Elf-folk. So the Elves had been restricted to the shrinking forest fringe, patrolling ever closer to its border with the mountains or the plain.
The little girl stepped forward, and tentatively touched Tumble's face. Tumble nipped her finger playfully. In a moment they were rolling in the dry leaves, wrestling. When the little girl reached for Tumble's genitals, Tumble shrank back, but then she submitted, curiously, to the gentle touch. Then they chased each other over the fallen tree trunk, and started to play together with the fallen leaves. They pushed them into great piles, and rolled in the leaves, throwing handfuls over their heads and rubbing them against their faces.
Now, on the far side of the little clearing, silent shadows flitted through the trees. They were adults, some carrying infants. Led by Stripe and Silverneck, the people stepped forward into the clearing. A loose circle of watchful adults surrounded the playing children.
Only Shadow stayed in the dark green shade.
Silverneck walked forward. She was met by a large, calm woman. She was Termite, Shadow's mother. Cautiously, eyes locked, the women began to groom, plucking at each other's hair. More children joined in the play on the forest floor.
The men were more tentative. They eyed each other warily and made subdued displays, showing bristling hair and waving erections.
Suddenly Shiver ran forward toward the other men. He yelled, stamped and slapped at the ground and drummed with his flat hands on a tree trunk, uttering loud, fierce calls. Then he retreated quickly to the safety of his own group.
He was imitated by a burly man from the other group. This was Little Boss. His display of strength was vivid. He hurled rocks on the ground, making them shatter, and pulled branches this way and that. Never as dominant since the death of his mentor, Big Boss, he was still a massive, powerful presence. The invading men retreated subtly, raising their fists and hooting. But Little Boss, too, drew back to his friends.
So it went on, with the children playing, the women grooming or making tentative sexual contact, and a display of noisy aggression by the men. But not a single punch or kick was landed, or stone thrown in earnest.
Now one small, muscular man broke out of the group and approached the woman Hairless. He was Squat, another of Shadow's original group. He seemed fascinated by Hairless's baldness, and he stroked her bare blue-black skin. She responded, cupping his scrotum in her hand.
Within a few minutes they had coupled, belly to belly.
After that the groups separated, the men issuing a few last threats to each other, the women apologetically abandoning their grooming. Mothers had to pry their children away from their fascinating new playmates.
Shadow watched all this. And when her old family group dispersed into the trees, she followed.
## _M anekatopokanemahedo_
The delegation of angry and fearful citizens was led by a stocky, sullen woman called Hahatomane, of the Nema Lineage.
They met at the center of the platform of Adjusted Space. Manekato waited patiently, resting easily on her knuckles, with Babo and Nemoto to either side of her. Hahatomane stood facing her, with her followers in a rough triangle behind her, and attended by Workers that crawled or hovered.
"What is it you want to talk about, Hahatomane of Nema?"
"That should be obvious," Hahatomane said. She glanced into the sky, where the rising Earth was a fat banded ball, almost full. "Renemenagota of Rano is already dead. Many others of us have suffered unspeakable deprivations. This is a foolish quest, devised by foolish Astrologers, which will not help germinate a single seed. We have done what we can. We should leave Workers here to complete the rest, and return to Earth before more of us lose our lives or our sanity."
Babo stepped forward. Though the medical Workers had striven to heal his injuries, the Zealots' crossbow bolts had been laced with an exotic poison of vegetable oils and fish extracts, and he suffered internal agonies that caused a heavy limp. "But you have no place on Earth, Hahatomane. Your Farm is destroyed by the tides and quakes, and the Nema Lineage is extinguished."
Hahatomane kept her gaze locked on his sister. "You do us a dishonor by keeping a man and your ugly _hominid_ by your side, Manekato of Poka," she said. "I do not hear the words of this one."
"Then you should," Manekato said quietly. "For we are all hominids. We are all people, in fact, of one flavor or another."
Hahatomane bared her teeth, an unconscious but primal gesture. "We do not recognize you as any form of leader, Manekato."
"Fine. If you wish to leave, do so."
"And you—"
"I intend to stay on this Moon until I have unraveled the mystery of its design."
Hahatomane growled. "Then none of us can leave."
Everybody understood that this was true. If this expedition were a success its members would be honored, even allowed to carve out new Farms. But if Hahatomane were to split the group, those who abandoned the project could expect nothing but contempt. This was the true source of Manekato's power, and Hahatomane knew it.
Hahatomane's shoulders hunched, as if she longed to launch herself at Manekato's throat—and perhaps it would be healthier if she did, Mane thought. Hahatomane said, "You drag us all into your folly, Manekato of Poka. I for one will be happy to witness your inevitable disillusion."
"No doubt on that day you will remind me of this conversation," Manekato said.
Hahatomane snorted her frustration and turned away. Her followers scattered, bemused and disappointed, and Workers scuttled after them, bleating plaintively.
Manekato sat on the yellow floor. Now that the confrontation was over she felt the strength drain out of her. Babo absently groomed her, picking nonexistent insects from the heavy fur on her back. Nemoto sat cross-legged. She had a large bunch of young, bright yellow bananas, and she passed the fruit to Manekato and Babo.
"You did well," Babo said; then, glancing at Nemoto, he repeated the remark in her tongue, slowing his speech to suit her sluggish oxygen-starved pace of thinking.
Manekato grunted, and spoke in Nemoto's language. _"But I would rather not endure such encounters. We faced off like two groups of Elf-creatures, in their matches of shouting and wrestling. Hahatomane's group even surrounded themselves with Workers to make themselves look larger and stronger, just as male Elves will make their hair bristle in their aggressive displays."_
Nemoto laughed softly. _"We are all hominids here, all primates."_
Babo said, _"But it is cruel to be reminded of it so bluntly. Perhaps there is something in the bloody air of this place which has infected us."_
_"That is foolish and unscientific,"_ Manekato said. _"Even Earth is no paradise of disembodied intelligence and pure reason."_ She glanced at the banded planet that shone brightly in the sky. _"Think about it. Why have we clung to our scraps of land for so many thousands of generations?"_
Babo looked offended. _"To cultivate every atom, the final goal of Farming, is to pay the deepest homage to the world which bore us—"_
_"That's just rationalization, brother. We cling to our land because it is an imperative that comes to us from the deepest past, from the time before we had minds. We cling to our land for the same reasons that Nutcrackers cling to their tree nests—because that is what we do; it is in | 1,756 |
\section{Introduction}
Quantum field theory has been formulated in different ways, the most
popular ones being the path-integral approach and the operator formalism.
In the path integral approach, one aims to construct the correlation
functions of the theory as the moments of some measure on the space of classical
field configurations. In the operator formalism, the quantum fields are
viewed as linear operators which can act on physical states.
The path integral has the advantage of being closely related to classical field theory.
In fact, the path integral measure is, at least formally, directly given in terms
of the classical action of the theory. The operator formalism is more useful in
contexts where no corresponding classical theory---and hence no Lagrange formalism---is
known for the quantum field theory. It has been used extensively in the context
of conformal or integrable field theories in two spacetime dimensions. In the
operator formalism, one may take the point of view that the theory is determined
by the algebraic relations between the quantum field observables. This viewpoint was
originally proposed in a very abstract form by Haag and Kastler, see e.g.~\cite{Haag}. Other
proposals aimed in particular at conformal field theories include e.g. the
approach via vertex operator algebras due to Borcherds, Frenkel, Lopowski, Meurman
and others~\cite{vertex1,vertex2,vertex3,vertex4}, see also a related proposal by Gaberdiel and Goddard~\cite{Gaberdiel}.
A different approach of an essentially algebraic nature applicable
to "globally conformally invariant quantum field theories" in $D$ dimensions is due to~\cite{Rehren1,Rehren2}.
Approaches emphasizing the algebraic relations between the fields have also
turned out to fundamental to the construction of quantum field theories on general curved backgrounds~\cite{HW01,HW02,BF00,BFV03}, because in this case there is no preferred Hilbert
space representation or vacuum state.
One way to encode the algebraic relations between the fields in a very
explicit way (at least at short
distances) is the Wilson operator product expansion (OPE)~\cite{Wilson,WZ,Zimmermann}.
This expansion is at the basis of the modern treatments of two-dimensional conformal
field theory, and it is a key tool in the quantitative analysis of asymptotically free
quantum gauge theories in four dimensions such as Quantum Chromo Dynamics. The OPE can also be established
for perturbative quantum field theory in general curved spacetimes~\cite{Hollands06}.
In this reference, it was observed in particular that the OPE coefficients satisfy
certain "asymptotic clustering" or "factorization" relations when various groups of points in the operator products are
scaled together at different rates. This observation was taken one step further in~\cite{HW08},
where it was suggested that the OPE should in fact be viewed as the
fundamental datum describing a quantum field theory on curved (and flat) spacetimes, and that the factorization
conditions should be viewed as the essential constraints upon the OPE coefficients.
In this paper, we will analyze these constraints on the OPE coefficients, and thereby
formulate a new approach to quantum field theory in terms of the resulting consistency conditions.
One of our main new points is that all these constraints can be encoded in a single
condition which is to be viewed as an analogue of the
usual "associativity condition" in ordinary algebra. We then show that
it is possible to give a new formulation of perturbation theory which directly
involves the OPE coefficients, but does not directly use such notions---and is more general as---path
integrals or interaction Lagrangians. This new approach relies on a perturbative formulation of the
consistency condition and is hence essentially algebraic in nature.
Its mathematical framework is a certain cohomology of "Hochschild type"
which we will also set up in this paper. If our approach to perturbation theory
is combined with the assumptions of certain linear or non-linear field equations,
then a constructive algorithm is obtained to determine the terms in the perturbation
series order-by-order. We expect that our approach is equivalent to more standard
ones despite its rather different appearance, but we do not investigate this
issue in the present paper.
Some of our ideas bear a (relatively remote) resemblance to
ideas that have been proposed a long time ago within the
``bootstrap-approach'' to conformally invariant quantum field
theories, where constraints of a somewhat similar, but not identical,
nature as ours have been considered under the name ``crossing
relations"~\cite{Migdal, Polyakov, Todorov, Mack1, Mack2}.
But we stress from the outset that our approach is aimed at all quantum field theories---including
even quantum field theories on generic spacetime manifolds without symmetries---and not just conformal ones as in
these references. The ideas on the use of non-linear field equations expressed in section~\ref{interactingfields}
also bear a resemblance to a constructive method in quantum field theory introduced by Steinmann (see e.g.~\cite{steinmann}), but
he is mainly concerned with the Wightman functions rather than the OPE, which is a key difference. Some
of the ideas in section~\ref{interactingfields} were developed, in preliminary form, in extensive discussions
with N.~Nikolov during his tenure as a Humboldt fellow at the U. of G\" ottingen in 2005/2006, see also
the notes~\cite{Nikolovnotes}. In the present form described in section~\ref{interactingfields}, these
ideas were developed in collaboration with H.~Olbermann, and more details will be given in
a future paper~\cite{Olbermann}.
This paper is organized as follows. We first explain in sec.~2 the
basic ideas of this paper, namely, the idea of that the
factorization conditions may be expressed by a single associativity
condition, the new formulation of perturbation theory in
our framework, the generalization to gauge field theories, and
the approach via field equations. These ideas are then
explained in detail in the subsequent sections.
\section{Basic ideas of the paper}
The operator product expansion states that the product of two operators
may be expanded as
\begin{equation}\label{basic}
\phi_{a}(x_1) \phi_{b}(x_2) = \sum_c C_{ab}^c(x_1, x_2) \, \phi_c(x_2) \, ,
\end{equation}
where $a, b, c$ are labels of the various composite quantum fields
$\phi_{a}$ in the theory. This relation is intended to
be valid after taking expectation values in any (reasonable) state
in the quantum field theory. The states, as well as the OPE coefficients
typically have certain analytic continuation properties that
arise from the spectrum condition in the quantum field theory. These
properties imply that the spacetime arguments may be continued to
a real Euclidean section of complexified Minkowski spacetime, and
we assume this has been done. An important condition on
the OPE coefficients arises when one
considers the operator product expansion of $3$ operators (in the Euclidean domain),
\begin{equation}\label{3ops}
\phi_{a} (x_1) \phi_{b}(x_2) \phi_{c}(x_3) = \sum_d
C_{abc}^d(x_1, x_2, x_3) \, \phi_d(x_3) \, .
\end{equation}
Let us consider a situation where one pair of points is closer to each other than another pair of points.
For example, let $r_{23}$ be
smaller than $r_{13}$, where
\begin{equation}
r_{ij} = |x_i - x_j|
\end{equation}
is the Euclidean distance between point $x_i$ and point $x_j$. Then we expect that we can
first expand the operator product $\phi_{b}(x_2) \phi_{c}(x_3)$ in eq.~\eqref{3ops}
around $x_3$, then multiply by $\phi_{a}(x_1)$, and finally expand the resulting product
around $x_3$. We thereby expect to obtain the relation
\begin{equation}\label{2ops1}
C_{abc}^d(x_1, x_2, x_3) = \sum_e C_{bc}^e(x_2, x_3) C_{ae}^d(x_1, x_3)
\end{equation}
Similarly, if
$r_{12}$ is smaller than $r_{23}$, we expect that we
can first expand the operator product $\phi_{a}(x_1) \phi_{b}(x_2)$ around $x_2$,
then multiply the result by $\phi_{c}(x_3)$, and finally expand again around $x_3$.
In this way, we expect to obtain the relation
\begin{equation}\label{2ops2}
C_{abc}^d(x_1, x_2, x_3) = \sum_e C_{ab}^e(x_1, x_2) C_{ec}^d(x_2, x_3) \, .
\end{equation}
A consistency relation now arises because on the open domain $r_{12} < r_{23} < r_{13}$
both expansions~\eqref{2ops1}, \eqref{2ops2} must be valid and therefore should
coincide. Thus, we must have
\begin{equation}\label{assoccomp}
\sum_e C_{ab}^{e}(x_1, x_2) C_{e c}^{d}(x_2, x_3) =
\sum_e C_{bc}^{e}(x_2, x_3) C_{a e}^{d}(x_1, x_3) \,
\end{equation}
when $r_{12} < r_{23} < r_{13}$.
This requirement imposes a very stringent condition on the
OPE-coefficients. We will refer to this condition as a "consistency-" or "associativity" condition. The basic idea of this paper is that this condition on the 2-point OPE coefficients
incorporates the full information about the structure of the quantum field theory.
Therefore, conversely, if a solution to the consistency condition
can be found, then one has in effect constructed a quantum field theory.
We will pursue this idea below in the following different directions.
\subsection{Coherence}
First, we will pursue the question whether any further consistency conditions
in addition to eq.~\eqref{assoccomp} can arise when one considers products
of more than three fields, by analogy with the analysis just given for three fields. For
example, if we consider the OPE of four fields $\phi_{a}(x_1) \phi_{b}(x_2)
\phi_{c}(x_3) \phi_{d}(x_4)$ and investigate the possible different
subsequent expansions of such a product in a similar manner as above, we
will get new relations for the 2-point OPE coefficients analogous to eq.~\eqref{assoccomp}.
These will now involve four points and correspondingly more factors of the 2-point
OPE coefficients. Are these conditions genuinely new, or do they already follow from the
relation~\eqref{assoccomp}?
As we will argue, this question is analogous to the
question whether, in an ordinary algebra, there are new constraints on the product
coming from "higher order associativity conditions". As in this analogous
situation, we will see that in fact no new
conditions arise, i.e. the associativity condition~\eqref{assoccomp} is
the only consistency condition. We will also see that all higher order expansion
coefficients such as $C_{abcd}^e(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4)$ are
uniquely determined by the 2-point OPE coefficients. Thus, in this sense,
the entire information about the quantum field theory is contained in
these 2-point coefficients $C^c_{ab}(x_1, x_2)$, and the entire
set of consistency conditions is coherently encoded in the associativity
condition~\eqref{assoccomp}.
For this reason, we call the result
a "coherence theorem", by analogy with the well-known similar result
in algebra and in category theory~\cite{MacLane}.
These results are described in detail in sec.~\ref{coherence}.
\subsection{Perturbation theory as Hochschild cohomology}\label{subsecpert}
Given that the 2-point OPE coefficients $C^c_{ab}(x_1, x_2)$ are
considered in as the fundamental entities in quantum field theory in
our approach, it is interesting
to ask how to formulate perturbation theory in terms of these coefficients.
For this, we imagine that we are given a 1-parameter family of these coefficients
parametrized by $\lambda$. For each $\lambda$, the coefficients should
satisfy the associativity condition~\eqref{assoccomp}, and for $\lambda=0$,
the coefficients describe the quantum field theory that we wish to perturb around.
We now expand the 1-parameter family of OPE-coefficients in a Taylor- or perturbation series
in $\lambda$, and we ask what constraints the consistency condition will impose upon the
Taylor coefficients. In order to have a reasonably uncluttered notation, let us use an
"index free" notation for the OPE-coefficients suppressing the indices $a,b,c,\dots$.
Thus, let us view the 2-point OPE coefficients $C^c_{ab}(x_1, x_2)$ as the
components of a linear map ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2): V \otimes V \to V$,
where $V$ is the vector space whose basis elements are in one-to-one correspondence
with the composite fields $\phi_a$ of the theory. The Taylor expansion is
\begin{equation}\label{Cexpansioncomp}
{\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda) = \sum_{i=0}^\infty
{\cal C}_i(x_1, x_2) \, \lambda^i \, .
\end{equation}
We similarly expand the associativity condition as a power series in $\lambda$.
If we assume that the associativity condition is fulfilled at zeroth order, then
the corresponding condition for the first order perturbation of the
2-point OPE-coefficients is given by
\begin{eqnarray}\label{firstocons}
&&{\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3)\Big({\cal C}_1(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) - {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}_1(x_2, x_3) \Big) + \nonumber\\
&&{\cal C}_1(x_2, x_3)\Big({\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) - {\cal C}_1(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3) \Big) = 0
\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
for $r_{12} < r_{23} < r_{13}$, in an obvious tensor product notation.
As we will see, this condition is of a cohomological nature,
and the set of all first order perturbations satisfying this condition modulo
trivial perturbations due to field redefinitions
can be identified with the elements of a certain cohomology ring which we will
define in close analogy to Hochschild cohomology~\cite{MacLane1,Happel,Connes}.
Similarly, the conditions for the higher order perturbations can also be
described in terms of this cohomology ring. More precisely, at each order
there is a potential obstruction to continue the perturbation series---i.e.,
to satisfy the associativity condition at that order---and this
obstruction is again an element of our cohomology ring.
In practice, $\lambda$ can be e.g. a parameter that measures the strength of
the self interaction of a theory, as in the theory characterized by
the classical Lagrangian $L = (\partial \varphi)^2 + \lambda \varphi^4$. In this example,
one is perturbing around a free field theory, for which the OPE-coefficients are
known completely. Another example is when one perturbs around a more general
conformal field theory---not necessarily described by a Lagrangian. Yet another
example is when $\lambda = 1/N$, where $N$ is the number of "colors" of a
theory, like in $SU(N)$~Yang-Mills theory. In this example, the theory that one is perturbing
around is the large-$N$-limit of the theory.
These constructions are described in detail in sec.~\ref{perturbations}.
\subsection{Local gauge theories}
Some modifications must be applied to our constructions when one is dealing with
theories having local gauge invariance, such as Yang-Mills theories.
When dealing with such theories, one typically has to proceed in two steps. The first step is
to introduce an auxiliary theory including further fields. For example, in pure
Yang-Mills theory, the auxiliary theory has as basic fields the 1-form gauge
potential $A$, a pair of anti-commuting "ghost fields" $U, \bar U$, as well as another
auxiliary field $F$, all of which take values in a Lie-algebra.
Having constructed the auxiliary theory, one then removes the
additional degrees of freedom in a second step, thereby arriving at the
actual quantum field theory one is interested in. The necessity of
such a two-step procedure can be seen from many viewpoints, maybe most directly
in the path-integral formulation of QFT~\cite{Faddeev}, but also actually even
from the point of view of classical Hamiltonian field theory, see e.g.~\cite{Henneaux}.
As is well-known, a particularly elegant and useful way to implement this two-step procedure
is via the so-called BRST-formalism~\cite{Becci}, and this is also the most
useful way to proceed in our approach to quantum field theory via the OPE.
In this approach one defines, on the space of auxiliary fields,
a linear map $s$ ("BRST-transformation"). The crucial properties of this map
are that it is a symmetry of the auxiliary theory, and that it is nilpotent,
$s^2 = 0$. In the case of Yang-Mills theory it is given by
\begin{equation}\label{BRSTt}
sA = dU - i\lambda[A, U]\, , \quad sU = -\frac{i\lambda}{2}[U,U] \, , \quad
s\bar U = F \, , \quad sF=0 \, ,
\end{equation}
on the basic fields and extended to all monomials in the basic fields and
their derivatives ("composite fields") in such a way that $s^2 = 0$. In our formalism,
the key property of the auxiliary theory is now that the map $s$ be compatible
with the OPE of the auxiliary theory.
The condition that we need is that, for any product of composite fields, we have
\begin{equation}
s[\phi_{a}(x_1) \phi_{b}(x_2)] = [s \phi_{a}(x_1)] \phi_{b}(x_2) \pm
\phi_{a}(x_1) s\phi_{b}(x_2) \, ,
\end{equation}
where the choice of $\pm$ depends on the Bose/Fermi character of the fields under
consideration. If we apply the OPE to the products in this equation, then it
translates into a compatibility condition between the OPE coefficients $C_{ab}^c(x_1, x_2)$ and the
map $s$. This is the key condition on the auxiliary theory beyond the associativity
condition~\eqref{assoccomp}. As we show, it enables one to pass
from the auxiliary quantum field theory to true gauge theory by taking a
certain quotient of the space of fields.
We will also perform a perturbation analysis of gauge theories. Here,
one needs not only to expand the OPE-coefficients [see eq.~\eqref{Cexpansioncomp}],
but also the BRST-transformation map $s(\lambda)$, as perturbations will typically change the form
of the BRST transformations as well---seen explicitly for Yang-Mills
theory in eqs.~\eqref{BRSTt}. We must now satisfy at each order in perturbation
theory an associativity condition as described above,
and in addition a condition which ensures compatibility of the perturbed BRST map and the
perturbed OPE coefficients at the given order.
As we will see, these conditions can again be
encoded elegantly and compactly in a cohomological framework.
These ideas will be explained in detail in sec.~\ref{hochschild}.
\subsection{Field equations}\label{subfieldeq}
The discussion so far has been focussed so far on the general mathematical structures behind
the operator product expansion. However, it is clearly also of interest to construct the
OPE coefficients for concrete theories. One way to describe a theory is via classical field
equations such as
\begin{equation}\label{phicubed}
\square \varphi = \lambda \varphi^3 \, ,
\end{equation}
where $\lambda$ is a coupling parameter. One may exploit such relations
by turning them into conditions on the OPE coefficients. The OPE coefficients are then determined
by a ``bootstrap''-type approach. The conditions implied by eq.~\eqref{phicubed} arise as follows:
We first view the above field equation as a relation between quantum fields, and we multiply by an
arbitrary quantum field $\phi_a$ from the right:
\begin{equation}
\square \varphi(x_1) \phi_a(x_2) = \lambda \varphi^3(x_1) \phi_a(x_2) \, .
\end{equation}
Next, we perform an OPE of the expressions on both sides, leading to the relation
$\square C_{\varphi a}^b = \lambda C_{\varphi^3 a}^b$. As explained above in subsection~\ref{subsecpert},
each OPE coefficient itself is a formal power series in $\lambda$, so this equation clearly
yields a relationship between different orders in this power series. The basic idea is to exploit
these relations and to derive an iterative construction scheme.
To indicate how this works, it is useful to introduce, for each field $\phi_a$,
a ``vertex operator'' ${\cal Y}(x, \phi_a)$, which is a linear map on the space $V$ of
all composite fields. The matrix components of this linear map are simply given
by the OPE coefficients, $[{\cal Y}(x, \phi_a)]_b^c = C_{ab}^c(x,0)$, for details see
sec.~\ref{leftrep}. Clearly, the vertex
operator contains exactly the same information as the OPE coefficient. In the above theory,
it is a power series ${\cal Y} = \sum {\cal Y}_i \lambda^i$ in the coupling. The field equation then
leads to the relation
\begin{equation}
\square {\cal Y}_{i+1}(x, \varphi) = {\cal Y}_{i}(x,\varphi^3) \, .
\end{equation}
The zeroth order ${\cal Y}_0$ corresponds to the free theory, described in sec.~\ref{freefield},
and the higher order ones are determined inductively by inverting the Laplace operator.
To make the scheme work, it is necessary to construct ${\cal Y}_{i}(x, \varphi^3)$ from
${\cal Y}_{i}(x,\varphi)$ at each order. It is at this point that we need the consistency
condition. In terms of the vertex operators, it implies e.g. relations like
\begin{equation}
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_j(x, \varphi) {\cal Y}_{i-j}(y, \varphi) = \sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_j(y, {\cal Y}_{i-j}(x-y, \varphi)\varphi) \, .
\end{equation}
On the right side, we now use a relation like ${\cal Y}_0(x-y, \varphi)\varphi = \varphi^2 + \dots$.
Such a relation enables one to solve for ${\cal Y}_i(y, \varphi^2)$ in terms of inductively
known quantities. Iterating this type of argument, one also obtains ${\cal Y}_i(y, \varphi^3)$, and
in fact any other vertex operator at $i$-th order. In this way, the induction loop closes.
Thus, we obtain an inductive scheme from
the field equation in combination with the consistency condition.
At each order, one has to perform one---essentially trivial---inversion
of the Laplace operator, and several infinite sums implicit in the consistency condition.
These sums arise when composing two vertex operators if these are written in terms of their
matrix components. Thus, to
compute the OPE coefficients at
$n$-th order in perturbation theory, the "computational cost" is roughly
to perform $n$ infinite sums. This is
similar to the case of ordinary perturbation theory, where at $n$-th order one
has to perform a number of Feynman integrals increasing with $n$. Note however that,
by contrast with the usual approaches to perturbation theory, our procedure
is completely well-defined at each step. Thus,
there is no "renormalization" in our approach in the sense of "infinite counterterms".
The details of this new approach to perturbation theory are outlined in sec.~\ref{interactingfields}, and
presented in more detail in a forthcoming paper with H. Olbermann.
\pagebreak
\section{Axioms for quantum field theory}\label{axiomatic}
Having stated the basic ideas in this paper in an informal
way, we now turn to the precise formulation of these ideas. For this, we begin
in this section by explaining our axiomatic setup for quantum field theory.
The setup we present here is broadly speaking the same as that
presented in~\cite{HW08}. In particular, the key idea here as well as
in~\cite{HW08} is that the operator product expansion (OPE)
should be regarded as the defining property of a quantum field theory.
However, there are some differences to~\cite{HW08} in that
we work on flat space here (as opposed to a general curved spacetime), and
we also work in a Euclidean framework. As a consequence, the microlocal conditions
stated in~\cite{HW08} will be replaced by analyticity conditions, the commutativity
condition will be replaced by a symmetry condition and
the associativity conditions on the OPE coefficients
will be replaced by conditions on the existence of various
power series expansions.
The first ingredient in our definition of a quantum field theory is an infinite-dimensional
vector space, $V$. The elements in this vector space are to be thought of as the
components of the various composite scalar, spinor, and tensor fields in the theory.
For example, in a theory describing a single real scalar field $\varphi$, the elements of
$V$ would be in one-to-one correspondence with the monomials of $\varphi$ and its
derivatives [see sec.~\ref{freefield}].
The space $V$ is assumed to be graded in various ways which reflect the possibility to classify
the different composite quantum fields in the theory by their spin, dimension,
Bose/Fermi character, etc. First, for Euclidean quantum field theory on ${\mathbb R}^D$,
the space $V$ should carry a representation of the rotation group $SO(D)$ in
$D$ dimensions respectively of its covering group ${\rm Spin}(D)$ if
spinor fields are present. This representation should decompose into
unitary, finite-dimensional irreducible representations (irrep's) $V_{S}$,
which in turn are characterized
by the corresponding eigenvalues $S=(\lambda_1, \dots, \lambda_r)$ of the $r$
Casimir operators associated with $SO(D)$. For $D=2$, this
is a weight $w \in {\mathbb R}$, for $D=3$ this is an integer or half-integer
spin, and for $D=4$ this is a pair of spins (using the isomorphism between
$SU(2) \times SU(2)$ and the covering of the 4-dimensional rotation group).
Thus we assume that $V$ is a graded vector space
\begin{equation}\label{decomp}
V = \bigoplus_{\Delta \in {\mathbb R}_+} \bigoplus_{S \in {\rm irrep}}
{\mathbb C}^{N(\Delta, S)} \otimes V_{S} \, .
\end{equation}
The numbers $\Delta \in {\mathbb R}_+$ provide an additional grading which
will later be related to the "dimension" of the quantum fields. The natural
number $N(\Delta, S)$ is the multiplicity of the quantum fields
with a given dimension $\Delta$ and spins $S$. We assume this multiplicity
to be finite. As always in this paper, the infinite sums in this decomposition
are understood without any closure taken, i.e., the elements of $V$ are
in one-to-one correspondence with sequences of the form
$(|v_1 \rangle, |v_2\rangle, \dots, |v_n\rangle, 0, 0, \dots)$ with only finitely many non-zero entries,
where $|v_i\rangle$ is a vector in the $i$-th summand in the decomposition.
On the vector space $V$, we would like to have an anti-linear, involutive
operation called $\star: V \to V$ which should be thought of as taking the hermitian adjoint of
the quantum fields. We would also like to have a linear grading map $\gamma: V \to V$
with the property $\gamma^2 = id$. The vectors corresponding to eigenvalue $+1$ are
to be thought of as "bosonic", while those corresponding to eigenvalue $-1$ are to
be thought of as "fermionic".
So far, we have only defined a list of objects---in fact a linear space---that we think
of as labeling the various composite
quantum fields of the theory. The dynamical content and quantum nature of
the given theory is now incorporated in the operator product coefficients associated with
the quantum fields. This is a hierarchy denoted
\begin{equation}
{\cal C} = \bigg( {\cal C}(x_1, x_2), {\cal C}(x_1, x_2, x_3), {\cal C}(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4), \dots \bigg) \, ,
\end{equation}
where each ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ is an analytic function on the "configuration space"
\begin{equation}
M_n := \{(x_1, \dots, x_n) \in ({\mathbb R}^D)^n \mid x_i \neq x_j \quad
\text{for all $1 \le i< j \le n$}\} \, ,
\end{equation}
taking values in the linear maps\footnote{Strictly speaking, ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$
does not take its values in the space $V$, because for each $v_1, \dots, v_n \in V$,
the expression $C(x_1, \dots, x_n)(v_1 \otimes \dots \otimes v_n)$ typically has non-zero
components in an infinite number of summands in the decomposition~\eqref{decomp}.
By contrast, $V$ by definition only consists of vectors which have non-zero components
only for finitely many summands. Thus, ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ actually takes
values in the larger space ${\rm Hom}(V^*, {\mathbb C}) \supset V$, where $V^*$ is the
(algebraic) dual of $V$, see eq.~\eqref{dualdecomp}.
}
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) : V \otimes \cdots \otimes V \to V \, ,
\end{equation}
where there are $n$ tensor factors of $V$. For one point, we set ${\cal C}(x_1) = id: V \to V$,
where $id$ is the identity map.
The components of these maps in a basis of $V$ correspond to the OPE coefficients
mentioned in the previous section.
More explicitly, if $\{
|v_a \rangle \}$ denotes a basis of $V$ adapted to the grading of $V$,
and $\{\langle v^a |\}$ the corresponding basis of the dual space
\begin{equation}\label{dualdecomp}
V^* = \bigoplus_{\Delta \in {\mathbb R}_+} \bigoplus_{S \in {\rm irrep}} {\mathbb C}^{N(\Delta, S)}
\otimes V_{\overline S} \, ,
\end{equation}
with $V_{\overline S}$ denoting the conjugate representation,
$\langle v^b| v_a \rangle = \delta^b_a$, then
\begin{equation}\label{Ccompdef}
C^b_{a_1 \dots a_n}(x_1, \dots, x_n) = \langle v^b| {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)|
v_{a_1} \otimes \dots \otimes v_{a_n} \rangle \,\,\,\,,
\end{equation}
using the standard bra-ket notations such as $|v_{a_1} \otimes \dots \otimes v_{a_n}\rangle
:= |v_{a_1} \rangle \otimes \cdots \otimes |v_{a_n} \rangle$.
The basic properties of quantum field theory are now expressed as the following properties
on the OPE coefficients:
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Hermitian conjugation:} Denoting by $\iota: V \to V$ the
anti-linear map given by the star operation $\star$, we have
\begin{equation}
\overline{{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)} = \iota \, {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) \, \iota^n
\end{equation}
where $\iota^n := \iota \otimes \cdots \otimes \iota$ is the $n$-fold tensor
product of the map $\iota$.
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Euclidean invariance:} Let $R$ be the representation
of ${\rm Spin}(D)$ on $V$,
let $a \in {\mathbb R}^D$ and let $g \in {\rm Spin}(D)$. Then we have
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}(gx_1 + a, \dots, gx_n + a) = R^*(g)
\, {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) \, R(g)^n \, ,
\end{equation}
where $R(g)^n$ stands for the $n$-fold tensor product $R(g) \otimes \dots \otimes R(g)$.
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Bosonic nature:} The OPE-coefficients should themselves be
"bosonic" in the sense that
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) = \gamma \, {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) \, \gamma^n
\end{equation}
where $\gamma^n$ is again a shorthand for the $n$-fold tensor product
$\gamma \otimes \dots \otimes \gamma$.
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Identity element:} There exists a unique element
${\bf 1}$ of $V$ of dimension $\Delta = 0$,
with the properties ${\bf 1}^\star = {\bf 1}, \gamma({\bf 1}) = {\bf 1}$,
such that
\begin{equation}\label{iidop}
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)|v_1 \otimes \cdots {\bf 1} \otimes \cdots v_{n-1} \rangle =
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots \widehat{x_i}, \dots x_n) |v_1 \otimes \cdots \otimes v_{n-1}\rangle \, .
\end{equation}
where ${\bf 1}$ is in the $i$-th tensor position, with $i \le n-1$. When ${\bf 1}$
is in the $n$-th tensor position, the analogous formula takes a slightly
more complicated form. This is because $x_n$ is the point around which we expand
the operator product, and therefore this point and the corresponding $n$-th
tensor entry is on a different footing than the other points and tensor entries.
To motivate heuristically the appropriate form of the identity axiom in this case, we start by
noting that, if $\phi_a$ is a quantum (or classical) field, then we can formally
perform a Taylor expansion
\begin{equation}\label{taylor}
\phi_a(x_1) = \sum_{i=0}^\infty \frac{1}{i!} y^{\mu_1} \cdots y^{\mu_i}
\partial_{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_i} \phi_a(x_2) \, ,
\end{equation}
where $y=x_1-x_2$.
Now, each field $\partial_{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_i} \phi_a$ is
just another quantum field in the theory---denoted, say by $\phi_b$ for some label $b$---so trivially,
we might write this relation alternatively in the form
$\phi_a(x_1) = \sum t_a^b(x_1, x_2) \phi_b(x_2)$. Here, $t_a^b$ are defined by the above
Taylor expansion, up to potential trivial
changes in order to take into account the fact that in the chosen labeling of the fields,
a derivative of the field $\phi_a$
might actually correspond to a linear combination of other fields. Now formally, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
\sum_b C^b_{a_1 \dots a_{n-1} {\bf 1}}(x_1, \dots, x_n) \, \phi_b(x_n) &=&
\phi_{a_1}(x_1) \cdots \phi_{a_{n-1}}(x_{n-1}) {\bf 1} \\
&=& \sum_b C^b_{a_1 \dots a_{n-1}}(x_1, \dots, x_{n-1}) \, \phi_b(x_{n-1}) \nonumber\\
&=& \sum_{c,b} C^c_{a_1 \dots a_{n-1}}(x_1, \dots, x_{n-1}) \, t_c^b(x_{n-1}, x_n) \, \phi_b(x_{n}) \,, \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
so we are led to conclude that
\begin{equation}\label{unitcomp}
C^b_{a_1 \dots a_{n-1} {\bf 1}}(x_1, \dots, x_n) = \sum_c t^b_c(x_{n-1}, x_n) \,
C^c_{a_1 \dots a_{n-1}}(x_1, \dots, x_{n-1}) \, .
\end{equation}
Note that, in eq.~\eqref{taylor}, the operators on the right contain derivatives and
are thus expected to have a dimension that is not smaller than that of the operator
on the right hand side. It thus follows that $t^a_b(x_1, x_2)$ can only be nonzero
if the dimension of the operator $\phi_a$ is not less than the dimension of $\phi_b$.
Since there are only finitely many operators up to a given dimension, it follows that
the sum in eq.~\eqref{unitcomp} is finite, and there are no convergence issues.
We now abstract the features that we have heuristically derived. We postulate
the existence of a "Taylor expansion map", i.e. a
linear map\footnote{Here, the same remarks apply as in the
footnote 1.} $t(x_1, x_2): V \to V$ for each $x_1, x_2 \in {\mathbb R}^D$ with the
following properties. The map should transform in the same
way as the OPE coefficients, see the Euclidean invariance axiom. If $V^\Delta$ denotes the
subspace of $V$ in the decomposition~\eqref{decomp} spanned by vectors
of dimension $\Delta$, then
\begin{equation}
t(x_1, x_2) V^\Delta \subset \bigoplus_{\widehat \Delta \ge \Delta} V^{\widehat \Delta} \, .
\end{equation}
Furthermore, we have the cocycle relation
\begin{equation}
t(x_1, x_2) t(x_2, x_3) = t(x_1, x_3) \, .
\end{equation}
The restriction of any vector of $t(x_1, x_2) V^\Delta$ to any subspace $V^{\widehat \Delta}$
should have a polynomial dependence on $x_1-x_2$.
Finally, for each $v_1, \dots, v_{n-1} \in V$, we have
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)|v_1 \otimes \dots v_{n-1} \otimes {\bf 1} \rangle =
t(x_{n-1}, x_n) {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_{n-1}) |v_1 \otimes \dots \otimes v_{n-1}\rangle \, ,
\end{equation}
for all $(x_1, \dots, x_n) \in M_n$. This is the desired formulation
for the identity axiom when the identity operator is in the $n$-th position.
Note that this relation implies in particular the relation
\begin{equation}
t(x_1, x_2) |v\rangle = {\cal C}(x_1, x_2)| v \otimes {\bf 1} \rangle \, ,
\end{equation<|fim_middle|> want to assume this condition.
We will now show that these assumptions in fact imply that all $f_{\bf T}$ coincide
for all binary trees ${\bf T}$. In this sense, there are no further consistency conditions
on ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ beyond those for three points. The proof of this statement is
not difficult, and is in fact very similar to the proof of the corresponding statement
for ordinary algebras. The argument is most easily presented
graphically in terms of trees. For $n=3$, we graphically
present the assumption that all $f_{\bf T}$ agree
for the three trees associated with three elements as fig.~\ref{fig1}.
In this figure, each tree symbolizes the corresponding expression $f_{\bf T}$, and an arrow
between two trees means the following relation: (i) the intersection of the
corresponding domains [see eq.~\eqref{threet}] is
not empty, and (ii) the expressions coincide on that intersection. Because
the $f_{\bf T}$ are analytic, any such relation implies that the corresponding $f_{\bf T}$'s
in fact have to coincide everywhere on $M_n$.
Now consider $n>3$ points, and let ${\bf T}$ be an arbitrary
tree on $n$ elements. The goal is to present a sequence of trees ${\bf T}_0, {\bf T}_1, \dots, {\bf T}_r$
of trees such that ${\bf T}_0 = {\bf T}$, and such that ${\bf T}_r = {\bf S}$ is the "reference tree"
\begin{equation}
{\bf S} = \{ \{n\}, \{ n-1, n\}, \{n-2, n-1, n\}, \dots, \{1, 2, \dots n\} \}
\end{equation}
which is drawn in fig.~\ref{fig2}. The sequence should have the further property that
for each $i$, there is a relation as above between ${\bf T}_i$ and ${\bf T}_{i-1}$. As we
have explained, this would imply that $f_{\bf T} = f_{\bf S}$, and hence that all
$f_{\bf T}$'s are equal.
We now construct the desired sequence of trees inductively. We first write the binary
tree ${\bf T}={\bf T}_0$ as the left tree in fig.~\ref{fig3}, where the shaded regions again represent subtrees whose
particular form is not relevant. The next tree ${\bf T}_1$ is given by the right tree in
fig.~\ref{fig3}. We claim that there is a relation as above between these trees. In fact, it is easy to
convince oneself that the corresponding domains $D[{\bf T}_0]$ and $D[{\bf T}_1]$ have a non-empty
intersection. Secondly, because these trees differ by an elementary manipulation
as in fig.~\ref{fig1}, it is not difficult to see that the three-point consistency condition
implies that the corresponding expressions $f_{{\bf T}_0}$ and $f_{{\bf T}_1}$ coincide on
(at least an open subset of) $D[{\bf T}_0] \cap D[{\bf T}_1]$. Being analytic, they must hence coincide everywhere.
We now repeat this kind of process until
we arrive at the left tree ${\bf T}_{r_1}$ in fig.~\ref{fig4}. This tree has
the property that the $n$-th leaf is directly connected to the root. We change this
tree to the right tree in fig.~\ref{fig4}, again verifying that there is indeed the desired relation
between these trees. We repeat this step again
until we reach the tree ${\bf T}_{r_2}$ given in fig.~\ref{fig5}. It is clear now that this can be continued
until we have reached the tree ${\bf S}$ in fig.~\ref{fig2}.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=6.5in]{newfig1.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{A graphical representation of the associativity condition. The double arrows indicate that
the domains $D[{\bf T}_i]$ represented by the respective trees have a common intersection, and that on this
intersection, the OPE's represented by the respective trees coincide. Note that the double arrows
are not a transitive relation: The domains associated with left- and rightmost tree have empty
intersection.}
\label{fig1}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=3.5in]{newfig2.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{The reference tree $\bf S$.}
\label{fig2}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.0in]{newfig3.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{An elementary manipulation. The shaded triangles represent subtrees whose form is not relevant.}
\label{fig3}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5in]{newfig4.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{Another elementary manipulation.}
\label{fig4}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4.5in]{newfig5.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{The tree ${\bf T}_{r_2}$.}
\label{fig5}
\end{figure}
We summarize our finding in the following theorem:
\begin{thm}
("Coherence Theorem")
For each binary tree ${\bf T}$, let $f_{\bf T}$ be defined by eq.~\eqref{ftdef} on the domain $D[{\bf T}]$
as a convergent power series expansion, and assume that $f_{\bf T}$ has
an analytic extension to all of $M_n$. Furthermore, assume that the associativity
condition~\eqref{Cassoc} and symmetry and normalization conditions~\eqref{add1}, \eqref{add2}
hold, i.e. that all $f_{\bf T}$ coincide for trees
with three leaves. Then $f_{\bf T} = f_{\bf S}$ for any pair of binary trees ${\bf S}, {\bf T}$.
\end{thm}
\section{Perturbations and Hochschild cohomology}\label{perturbations}
Suppose we are given a quantum field theory in terms of
OPE-coefficients as described in sec.~\ref{axiomatic}. In this section we discuss the question
how to describe perturbations of such a quantum field theory.
According to our definition of a quantum field theory, a
perturbed quantum field theory should correspond to a
perturbation series in some parameter $\lambda$ for the OPE coefficients.
Because our axioms for the OPE coefficients imply constraints--especially
the factorization axiom--the perturbations of the coefficients
will also have to satisfy corresponding constraints. In this
section, we will show that these constraints are of a
cohomological nature.
As we have discussed, our definition of quantum field theory
is algebraic. In fact, as argued in sec.~\ref{coherence}, up to
technicalities related to the convergence of various series,
the constraints on the OPE coefficients
can be formulated in the form of an "associativity condition" for the
2-point OPE coefficients only, see eq.~\eqref{Cassoc}. Consequently,
the perturbed 2-point OPE coefficients will also have to satisfy
a corresponding perturbed version of this constraint, and this
is in fact essentially the only constraint. It is this
perturbed version of the associativity condition that we will
discuss in this section.
Our discussion is in close parallel to the well-known
characterization of perturbations ("deformations") of an
ordinary finite dimensional algebra, an analogy which we have already
emphasized in another context above. We therefore begin by recalling
the basic theory of deformations
of finite-dimensional algebras~\cite{Gerstenhaber, Happel}.
Let ${\bf A}$ be a finite-dimensional algebra (over ${\mathbb C}$, say), whose product
we denote as usual by ${\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}, A \otimes B \mapsto AB$.
A deformation of the algebra is a 1-parameter family of
products $A \otimes B \mapsto A \bullet_\lambda B$, where
$\lambda \in {\mathbb R}$ is a smooth deformation parameter. The product
$A \bullet_0 B$ should be the original product $AB$, but
for non-zero $\lambda$, we have a new product on ${\bf A}$---or alternatively
on the ring of formal power series ${\mathbb C}((\lambda)) \otimes {\bf A}$ if we merely
consider perturbations in the sense of formal power series. This new product
must satisfy the associativity law, which imposes a strong constraint.
If we denote the $i$-th order perturbation of the product by
\begin{equation}
m_i(A, B) = \frac{1}{i!} \, \frac{d^i}{d\lambda^i} A \bullet_\lambda B \Bigg|_{\lambda=0} \, ,
\end{equation}
then the associativity condition implies to first order that
we should have
\begin{equation}
m_0(id \otimes m_1) - m_0(m_1 \otimes id) + m_1(id \otimes m_0) -
m_1(m_0 \otimes id) = 0 \, ,
\end{equation}
as a map ${\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$, in an obvious tensor
product notation. $m_0(A,B) = AB$ is the original product on ${\bf A}$. Similar conditions
arise for the higher derivatives $m_i$ of the new product. These may be
written for $i \ge 2$ as
\begin{eqnarray}
&&m_0(id \otimes m_i) - m_0(m_i \otimes id) + m_i(id \otimes m_0) -
m_i(m_0 \otimes id) \nonumber\\
&=& -\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} m_{i-j}(id \otimes m_j) - m_{i-j}(m_j \otimes id)
\, .
\end{eqnarray}
Actually, we want to exclude the trivial case that the new product was
obtained from the old one by merely a $\lambda$-dependent redefinition of the
generators of ${\bf A}$. Such a redefinition may be viewed as a 1-parameter family of
invertible linear maps $\alpha_\lambda:
{\bf A} \to {\bf A}$, and the corresponding trivially deformed product is
\begin{equation}\label{trivial}
A \bullet_\lambda B =
\alpha_\lambda^{-1}\Big[\alpha_\lambda^{}(A) \alpha_\lambda^{}(B) \Big] \, .
\end{equation}
In other words, $\alpha_\lambda$ defines an isomorphism between
$({\bf A}, \bullet_0)$ and $({\bf A}, \bullet_\lambda)$, meaning that the latter
should not be regarded as a new algebra.
The trivially deformed product is given to first order by
\begin{equation}
m_1 = m_0(id \otimes \alpha_1) + m_0(\alpha_1 \otimes id) - \alpha_1 m_0 \, ,
\end{equation}
with similar formulas for $m_i$, where $\alpha_i = \frac{1}{i!}\, \frac{d^i}{d\lambda^i} \alpha_\lambda |_{\lambda=0}$.
The above conditions for the $i$-th order deformations of
an associative product have a useful and elegant cohomological interpretation~\cite{Gerstenhaber}.
To give this interpretation, consider the linear space $\Omega^n({\bf A})$ of
all linear maps $\psi_n: {\bf A} \otimes \dots \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$, and define a linear operator
$d: \Omega^n \to \Omega^{n+1}$ by the formula
\begin{eqnarray}
(d \psi_n)(A_1, \dots, A_{n+1}) &=& A_1 \psi_n(A_2, \dots, A_{n+1}) -
(-1)^n \psi_n(A_1, \dots, A_n)A_{n+1} \nonumber\\
&& +\sum_{j=1}^n (-1)^j \psi_n(A_1, \dots, A_{j} A_{j+1}, \dots, A_{n+1}) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
It may be checked using the associativity law for the original product on the algebra ${\bf A}$ that
$d^2 = 0$, so $d$ is a differential with a corresponding cohomology complex. This complex
is called the Hochschild complex, see e.g.~\cite{Connes}. More precisely, if $Z^n({\bf A})$ is the space of
all closed $\psi_n$, i.e., those satisfying $d \psi_n=0$, and $B^n({\bf A})$ the space of
all exact $\psi_n$, i.e., those for which $\psi_n = d \psi_{n-1}$ for some
$\psi_{n-1}$, then the $n$-th Hochschild cohomology
$HH^n({\bf A})$ is defined as the quotient $Z^n({\bf A})/B^n({\bf A})$.
The first order associativity condition may now be viewed as saying that $d m_1 = 0$, or
$m_1 \in Z^2({\bf A})$. Furthermore, if the new product just arises from a trivial
redefinition of the generators in the sense of~\eqref{trivial}, then
it follows that $m_1 = d \alpha_1$, so $m_1 \in B^2({\bf A})$ in that case.
Thus, the non-trivial first order perturbations $m_1$ of the algebra
product can be identified with the non-trivial classes $[m_1] \in HH^2({\bf A})$.
In particular, non-trivial deformations may only exist if $HH^2({\bf A}) \neq 0$.
Let us assume a non-trivial first order perturbation exists, and let us try
to find a second order perturbation. We view the right side of the second
order associativity condition as an element $w_2 \in \Omega^3({\bf A})$,
and we compute that
$d w_2 = 0$, so $w_2 \in Z^3({\bf A})$. Actually, the left side of the second order
associativity condition is just $d m_2 \in B^3({\bf A})$ in our cohomological notation,
so if the second order associativity condition is to hold, then $w_2$ must in fact
be an element of $B^3({\bf A})$, or equivalently, the class $[w_2] \in HH^3({\bf A})$ must
vanish. If it does not define the trivial class---as may only happen if
$HH^3({\bf A}) \neq 0$ itself is non-trivial---then there is an obstruction to
lift the perturbation to second order.
If there is no obstruction at second order, we continue to third order,
with a corresponding potential obstruction $[w_3] \in HH^3({\bf A})$, and so on.
In summary, the space of non-trivial perturbations corresponds to
elements of $HH^2({\bf A})$, while the obstructions lie in $HH^3({\bf A})$.
We now show how to give a similar characterization of perturbations of a
quantum field theory.
According to our definition of a quantum field theory
given in sec.~\ref{axiomatic}, a quantum field theory is defined by the set of
its OPE-coefficients with certain properties. Furthermore, as
argued in sec.~\ref{coherence}, all higher $n$-point operator product coefficients
are uniquely determined by the 2-point coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$.
Furthermore, we argued that, up to technical assumptions about
the convergence of the series~\eqref{ftdef}, the key constraints
on the OPE coefficients for $n$ points are encoded in the
associativity constraint~\eqref{Cassoc} for the 2-point coefficient,
which we repeat for convenience:
\begin{equation}\label{maincondition}
{\cal C}(x_2, x_3)\Big({\cal C}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) - {\cal C}(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}(x_2, x_3) \Big) = 0 \quad
\text{for $r_{12} < r_{23} < r_{13}$.}
\end{equation}
We ask the question when it is possible to find a 1-parameter deformation ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda)$ of
these coefficients by a parameter $\lambda$ so that the
associativity condition continues to hold, at least in the
sense of formal power series in $\lambda$. Actually, the analogues of
the symmetry condition~\eqref{add1}, the normalization condition~\eqref{add2}, the
hermitian conjugation, the Euclidean invariance, and the unit axiom should
hold as well for the perturbation. However, these conditions are much more
trivial in nature than~\eqref{maincondition}, because these conditions
are linear in ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$. These conditions could therefore easily be included in
our discussion, but would distract from the main point. For the rest of this section,
we will therefore discuss the implications of the associativity condition~\eqref{maincondition}
for the perturbed OPE-coefficients.
As we shall see now,
such perturbations can again be characterized in a cohomological framework
similar to the one given above. As above, we will presently define a
linear operator $b$ which defines the cohomology in question. The definition
of this operator will implicitly involve infinite sums [as our
associativity condition~\eqref{maincondition}], and such sums are
typically only convergent on certain domains. It is therefore necessary to get a set of domains
that will be stable under the action of $b$ and that is suitable
for our application. Many such domains can be defined, and
correspondingly different rings are obtained. For simplicity and definiteness,
we consider the non-empty, open domains of $({\mathbb R}^D)^n$ defined by
\begin{equation}\label{Fndef}
{\mathcal F}_n = \{(x_1, \dots, x_n) \in M_n; \,\,\, r_{1 \, i-1} < r_{i-1 \, i} < r_{i-2 \, i}
< \dots < r_{1i}, \,\,\, 1<i\le n \} \subset M_n \, .
\end{equation}
These domains also have a description in terms of the domains $D[{\bf T}]$ defined
above in eq.~\eqref{dtdef}, but we will not need this here. Note that the associativity
condition~\eqref{maincondition} holds on the domain ${\mathcal F}_3 = \{r_{12} < r_{23} < r_{13}\}$.
We define $\Omega^n(V)$ to be the set of all holomorphic functions
$f_n$ on the domain ${\mathcal F}_n$ that are valued in the linear maps~\footnote{The
same remark as in footnote 1 applies here.}
\begin{equation}
f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n): V \otimes \dots \otimes V \to V, \quad (x_1, \dots, x_n) \in {\mathcal F}_n \, .
\end{equation}
We next introduce a boundary operator $b: \Omega^n(V) \to \Omega^{n+1}(V)$ by the formula
\begin{eqnarray}\label{bfndef}
&&(b f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_{n+1}) :=
{\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1})(id \otimes f_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+1})) \nonumber\\
&&+ \sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^i f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_{n+1})(
id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}) \nonumber\\
&&+(-1)^{n+1} \, {\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1})(f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
Here ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ is the OPE-coefficient of the undeformed theory
and a caret means omission.
The definition of $b$ involves a composition of ${\cal C}$ with $f_n$, and
hence, when expressed in a basis of $V$, implicitly involves an
infinite summation over the basis elements of $V$. We must therefore
assume here (and in similar formulas in the following) that these
sums converge on the set of points $(x_1, \dots, x_{n+1})$ in the domain ${\mathcal F}_{n+1}$.
Thus, when we write $bf_n$, it is understood that $f_n \in \Omega^n(V)$ is
in the domain of $b$. We now have the following lemma:
\begin{lemma}
The maps $b$ is a differential, i.e., $b^2f_n = 0$ for
$f_n$ in the domain of $b$ such that $bf_n$ is also in the domain of $b$.
\end{lemma}
\medskip
\noindent
{\em Proof:} The proof is essentially a straightforward computation. Using the definition of
$b$, we have
\begin{eqnarray}\label{bbfn}
&&b(b f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_{n+2}) =
{\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+2}) (id \otimes b f_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+2})) \nonumber\\
&&+ \sum_{i=1}^{n+1} (-1)^i b f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_{n+2})(
id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n+1-i}) \nonumber\\
&&+(-1)^{n+2} {\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2}) (b f_n(x_1, \dots, x_{n+1}) \otimes id) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
Substituting the definition of $b$ again then gives, for the first term on
the right side
\begin{eqnarray}
&&={\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+2})[id \otimes {\cal C}(x_2, x_{n+2})(id \otimes f_n(x_3, \dots, x_{n+2}))]\nonumber\\
&&{\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+2})[id \otimes \sum_{k=2}^{n+1} (-1)^{k-1} f_n(x_2, \dots, \widehat x_k,
\dots, x_{n+2})(id^{k-2} \otimes {\cal C}(x_k, x_{k+1}) \otimes id^{n-k+1})] \nonumber\\
&&+ (-1)^{n+1} {\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+2})[id \otimes {\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2})(f_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+1}) \otimes id)]
\, .
\end{eqnarray}
Substituting the definition of $b$ into the third term on the right side
of eq.~\eqref{bbfn} gives
\begin{eqnarray}
&&=(-1)^{n} {\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2})[{\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1})(id \otimes f_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+1})) \otimes id] \nonumber\\
&&+(-1)^{n} {\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2})[ \sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^i f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_{n+1})
(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}) \otimes id] \nonumber\\
&&-{\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2})[{\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1}) (f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id) \otimes id] \, .
\end{eqnarray}
Substituting the definition of $b$ into the second term on the right side
of eq.~\eqref{bbfn} gives the following terms
\begin{eqnarray}
&&= \sum_{i=2}^{n+1} (-1)^i {\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+2})[id \otimes f_n(x_2, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_{n+2})
(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n+1-i})] \nonumber\\
&&
-{\cal C}(x_2, x_{n+2}) (id \otimes f_n(x_3, \dots, x_{n+2}))({\cal C}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id^n)
\nonumber\\
&& + \sum_{i=1}^{n} (-1)^{i+n+1}
{\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2})[(f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_{n+1}) \otimes id)
(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i+1})] \nonumber\\
&&+{\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+2}) (f_n(x_1, \dots, x_{n}) \otimes id)(id^n \otimes {\cal C}(x_{n+1}, x_{n+2})) \nonumber\\
&&+\sum_{k=2}^n \sum_{i=1}^{k-1} (-1)^{k+i} f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, \widehat x_{k+1},
\dots, x_{n+2}) \circ \nonumber\\
&& \quad \circ (id^{k-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{k+1}, x_{k+2}) \otimes id^{n-k})
(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{i}, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i+1}) \nonumber\\
&&+\sum_{k=1}^{n-1} \sum_{i=k+2}^{n+1} (-1)^{k+i} f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_k, \dots, \widehat x_{i},
\dots, x_{n+2}) \circ \nonumber\\
&& \quad \circ (id^{k-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{k}, x_{k+1}) \otimes id^{n-k})
(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{i}, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i+1}) \nonumber\\
&&-\sum_{k=1}^n f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_k, \widehat x_{k+1},
\dots, x_{n+2}) \circ \nonumber\\
&& \quad \circ (id^{k-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{k}, x_{k+2}) \otimes id^{n-k})
(id^{k} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{k+1}, x_{k+2}) \otimes id^{n-k}) \nonumber\\
&&+\sum_{k=1}^n f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_k, \widehat x_{k+1},
\dots, x_{n+2}) \circ \nonumber\\
&& \quad \circ (id^{k-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{k+1}, x_{k+2}) \otimes id^{n-k})
(id^{k-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_{k}, x_{k+1}) \otimes id^{n-k+1}) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
We now add up the expressions that we have obtained, and we use the
associativity condition eq.~\eqref{maincondition}, noting that we are allowed to
use this expression on the domain ${\mathcal F}_{n+2}$: For example, to apply the associativity
condition to the last two terms in the above expression, we need that
$r_{k\, k+1}< r_{k+1\,k+2} < r_{k \, k+2}$ for all $k$, which holds on ${\mathcal F}_{n+2}$. It is this property of the
domains ${\mathcal F}_i$ that motivates our definition~\eqref{Fndef}. Applying
the associativity condition, we find that all terms
cancel, thus proving the lemma. \qed
By this lemma, we can define a cohomology ring associated with the differential
$b$ as
\begin{equation}
H^n(V; {\cal C}) := \frac{Z^n(V; {\cal C})}{B^n(V; {\cal C})} = \frac{
\{ {\rm ker} \, b : \Omega^n(V) \to \Omega^{n+1}(V)\}
}{
\{
{\rm ran} \, b: \Omega^{n-1}(V) \to \Omega^n(V)
\}
} \, .
\end{equation}
As we will now see, the problem of finding a 1-parameter family of
perturbations ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda)$ such that our associativity
condition~\eqref{maincondition} continues to
hold for ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda)$ to all orders in $\lambda$ can
be elegantly and compactly be formulated in terms of this ring.
If we let
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}_i(x_1, x_2) = \frac{1}{i!} \, \frac{d^i}{d\lambda^i} {\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda) \Bigg|_{\lambda = 0} \, ,
\end{equation}
then we note that the first order associativity condition,
\begin{eqnarray}\label{maincondition1}
&&{\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3)\Big({\cal C}_1(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) - {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}_1(x_2, x_3) \Big) + \nonumber\\
&&{\cal C}_1(x_2, x_3)\Big({\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) - {\cal C}_1(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3) \Big) = 0\,\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
valid for $(x_1, x_2, x_3) \in {\mathcal F}_3$, is equivalent to the statement that
\begin{equation}
b {\cal C}_1 = 0 \, ,
\end{equation}
where here and in the following, $b$ is defined in terms of the unperturbed OPE-coefficient ${\cal C}_0$.
Thus, ${\cal C}_1$ has to be an element of $Z^2(V; {\cal C}_0)$. Let $z(\lambda): V \to V$
be a $\lambda$-dependent field redefinition in the sense of defn.~\ref{fieldred}, and
suppose that ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ and ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda)$ are connected
by the field redefinition. To first order, this means that
\begin{equation}\label{ctrivial}
{\cal C}_1(x_1, x_2) = -z_1 {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) + {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2)(z_1 \otimes id + id \otimes z_1) \, ,
\end{equation}
or equivalently, that $bz_1 = {\cal C}_1$,
where $z_i = \frac{1}{i!} \, \frac{d^i}{d\lambda^i} z(\lambda) |_{\lambda=0}$.
Thus, the first order deformations of ${\cal C}_0$ modulo the trivial ones defined by
eq.~\eqref{ctrivial}
are given by the classes in $H^2(V; {\cal C}_0)$. The associativity condition for $i$-th order
perturbation (assuming that all perturbations up to order $i-1$ exist) can be written as
the following condition for $(x_1, x_2, x_3) \in {\mathcal F}_3$:
\begin{eqnarray}\label{bciwi}
&& {\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3)\Big( {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big)
- {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3) \Big) +\\
&& {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3)\Big( {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) - {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_3)\Big(
id \otimes {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3)\Big) = w_i(x_1, x_2, x_3) \nonumber \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $w_i \in \Omega^3(V)$ is defined by
\begin{equation}
w_i(x_1, x_2, x_3) :=
-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_3)( id \otimes {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) ) -
{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3)( {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_2) \otimes id ) \, .
\end{equation}
We assume here that all infinite sums implicit in this expression
converge on ${\mathcal F}_3$. This equation may be written alternatively as
\begin{equation}\label{bciwiup}
b {\cal C}_i = w_i \, .
\end{equation}
We would like to define the $i$-th order perturbation by solving
this linear equation for ${\cal C}_i$. Clearly, a necessary condition for there to
exist a solution is that $b w_i = 0$ or $w_i \in Z^3(V, {\cal C}_0)$, and this can indeed shown to
be the case, see lemma~\ref{obstrlemma} below. If a solution to eq.~\eqref{bciwiup}
exists, i.e. if $w_i \in B^3(V, {\cal C}_0)$, then any other solution will differ from
this one by a solution to the corresponding "homogeneous" equation.
Trivial solutions to the homogeneous equation of the form
$b z_i$ again correspond to an $i$-th order field redefinition and are not
counted as genuine perturbations. In summary, the perturbation series can be continued at $i$-th order
if $[w_i]$ is the trivial class in $H^3(V; {\cal C}_0)$,
so $[w_i]$ represents a potential $i$-th
order obstruction to continue the perturbation series.
If there is no obstruction, then the space of non-trivial
$i$-th order perturbations is given by $H^2(V; {\cal C}_0)$.
In particular, if we knew e.g. that $H^2(V; {\cal C}_0) \neq 0$ while
$H^3(V; {\cal C}_0) = 0$, then perturbations could be defined to arbitrary orders in
$\lambda$.
\begin{lemma}\label{obstrlemma}
If $w_i$ is in the domain of $b$, and if $b {\cal C}_j = w_j$ for all $j<i$, then $bw_i = 0$.
\end{lemma}
\medskip
\noindent
{\em Proof:} We proceed by induction in $i$. For $i=1$, the lemma
is true as we have
$w_1 = b {\cal C}_1$, so $bw_1 = 0$ by $b^2 = 0$. In the general case, using the
definition of $b$, we obtain the
following expression for $bw_i$:
\begin{eqnarray}
&&-bw_i(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4) \\
&&
=\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_4)\Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_4)(id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_3, x_4))\Big)\nonumber\\
&&
-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_4)\Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_3, x_4) \Big) \Big( {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \otimes id^2 \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_4)\Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_3, x_4)\Big)\Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_4)\Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_4) \Big)\Big( id^2 \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_3, x_4) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_0(x_3, x_4)\Big( {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3)(id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3)) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_4)\Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_j(x_3, x_4)({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) \otimes id) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_3, x_4)\Big( {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) \otimes id \Big) \Big( {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \otimes id^2\Big) \nonumber\\
&&
-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_3, x_4)\Big( {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_3) \otimes id \Big) \Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_2, x_3) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_4)\Big( {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id\Big) \Big( id^2 \otimes {\cal C}_0(x_3, x_4) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&
-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_0(x_3, x_4)\Big( {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3)({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber \, .
\end{eqnarray}
After some manipulations using the definition of $b$ and that by definition the points
$(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4)$ are assumed to be in ${\mathcal F}_4$,
we can transform this into the following expression
\begin{eqnarray}
&& -bw_i(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4) \\
&=&+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} b {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_2, x_4)(id^2 \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_3,x_4)) \nonumber\\
&&-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_4)(id \otimes b{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3, x_4))\nonumber\\
&&-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1}b{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3, x_4)(id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) \otimes id)\nonumber\\
&&-\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_3, x_4)(b{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2, x_3) \otimes id) \nonumber\\
&&+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} b{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3, x_4)({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id^2) \, ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where the first sum comes from the first two sums of the previous
equation, the second from the third and fourth two sums, etc.
We now substitute the relation $b {\cal C}_j = w_j$ for $j\le i-1$ on ${\mathcal F}_3$, noting
that we are allowed to do so when $(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4) \in {\mathcal F}_4$: For example,
in the last term $(x_2, x_3, x_4) \in {\mathcal F}_3$ is satisfied whenever
$(x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4) \in {\mathcal F}_4$, and a similar statement holds for the
other 4 terms [this is in fact our motivation for our definition of the domains ${\mathcal F}_n$].
We then perform the sum over $j$. If this is done, then we see that the five terms in the sum become ten terms
involving each three factors of the ${\cal C}$'s. These terms cancel pairwise, and
we get the desired result that $bw_i=0$, as we desired to show. \qed
\section{Gauge Theories}\label{hochschild}
Local gauge theories are typically more complicated than
theories without local gauge invariance. One way to understand the
complicating effects due to local gauge invariance is to realize that
the dynamical field equations are not hyperbolic in nature in Lorentzian
spacetimes. This is seen most clearly
in the case of classical field theories. Because local gauge transformations may
be used to change the gauge connection in arbitrary compact regions of spacetime, it is
clear that the gauge connection cannot be entirely determined by the dynamical
equations and its initial data on some spatial time slice.
Thus, there is no well-posed initial value formulation in the standard sense. Similar
remarks apply to the Euclidean situation.
To circumvent this problem, one typically proceeds in two steps. At the first step, an
auxiliary theory is considered, containing the gauge fields as well as additional
"ghost" fields taking values in an infinite-dimensional Grassmann algebra.
This theory has a well-posed initial value formulation. At the second
step, the new degrees of freedom are removed. Here it is important that the auxiliary
theory possesses a new symmetry, the so-called BRST-symmetry, $s$, which is a linear
transformation on the space of classical fields with the property $s^2=0$ [for example,
in Yang-Mills theory $s$ is given by eq.~\eqref{BRSTt}]. It turns out
that the field content and dynamics
of the original theory may be recovered by considering only
the equivalence classes of fields in the auxiliary theory that are in the
null-space of $s$, modulo those that are in the range of $s$. Thus, the second step is
to define the observables of the gauge theory in question as the {\em cohomology}
of the "differential" $s$.
At the quantum level, one has a similar structure. In the framework considered in this
paper, the situation may be described abstractly as follows: As before, we have an
abstract vector space of fields, $V$. This space is to be thought of as the collection
of the components of all (composite) fields in the {\em auxiliary} theory including
ghost fields. The space $V$ is equipped with a grading $\gamma$ and a differential
$s$, i.e., two linear maps
\begin{equation}
s: V \to V \, , \quad \gamma: V \to V \, ,
\end{equation}
with the properties
\begin{equation}\label{sprop}
s^2 = 0 \, , \quad \gamma^2 = id \, \quad \gamma s + s \gamma = 0 \, .
\end{equation}
The map $s$ should be thought of as being analogous to the classical BRST-transformation.
The map $\gamma$ has eigenvalues $\pm 1$, and the eigenvectors
correspond as above to Bose/Fermi fields. At the classical level, the elements in the eigenspace of $-1$
are analogous to the classical (composite) fields of odd Grassmann parity, while those
in the eigenspace of $+1$ are analogous to those of even Grassmann parity. However,
we emphasize that these are just analogies, as we will be dealing with a quantum field
theory. For the general analysis of quantum gauge theories
we will only need $s$ and $\gamma$ to satisfy the
above properties. It is also natural to postulate the existence of another grading map
$g: V \to V$ with the properties ${\rm Spec} \, g = \mathbb Z$ and
$sg = (g + id) s$, $\gamma g - g \gamma = 0$.
This map is to be thought of as the number counter for the ghost fields (so that
$s$ increases the ghost number by one unit). Finally, we would like all maps
$s, \gamma, g$ to be compatible with the $\star$-operation on $V$, and to
preserve the grading by the spin, as well as the dimension.
We next consider a quantum field theory whose fields are described by the elements
of $V$, with operator product coefficients ${\cal C}$. At the classical level, $s$ is
a graded derivation, so we would also like $s$ to be a graded derivation at the quantum
level. Recall that if ${\bf A}$ is a graded algebra with grading map $\Gamma$ (i.e.,
$\Gamma^2=id$), then a graded derivation
is a map $D: {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$ with the property that
\begin{equation}\label{DAB}
D(AB) = (DA) B + \Gamma(A) DB \quad \text{for all $A,B \in {\bf A}$} \, .
\end{equation}
Equivalently, if we write the product in the algebra as $m: {\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$
with $m(A,B) = AB$, then $m$ should satisfy
\begin{equation}
D m = m(D \otimes id) + m(\Gamma \otimes D) \, ,
\end{equation}
in the sense of maps ${\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$.
As we have emphasized several times, the OPE-coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$
are to be thought of informally as the expansion coefficients of
a product. Therefore, if $s$ is to be a graded derivation we should
add a corresponding additional axiom to those formulated above in sec.~\ref{axiomatic}.
Heuristically, we want $s$ to act on a product of quantum fields $\phi_a$
in the following way analogous to eq.~\eqref{DAB}:
\begin{equation}
s\Big[ \prod_{i=1}^n \phi_{a_i}(x_i) \Big] =
\sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^{\sum_{j<i} \epsilon_i} \phi_{a_1}(x_1) \cdots
s \phi_{a_i}(x_i) \cdots \phi_{a_n}(x_n) \, ,
\end{equation}
Here, $\epsilon_i = 0,1$ according to whether $\phi_{a_i}$ is
bosonic or fermionic. If we formally apply an OPE to both sides of this equation, then we
arrive at the following condition for the OPE coefficients:
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf BRST-invariance:} The OPE coefficients of the auxiliary
should satisfy the additional condition
\begin{equation}\label{BRSTn}
s {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) = \sum_{i=1}^n {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes
s \otimes id^{n-i})
\end{equation}
for all $n$.
\medskip
\noindent
Above, we have seen in prop.~\ref{proposition1} that the 2-point OPE coefficients determine
all higher coefficients uniquely. Thus, as a corollary, the above conditions of
$BRST$-invariance will be satisfied if they hold for the 2-point coefficients,
i.e. if the condition
\begin{equation}\label{scompat}
s {\cal C}(x_1, x_2) = {\cal C}(x_1, x_2) (s \otimes id) + {\cal C}(x_1, x_2)(\gamma \otimes s)
\end{equation}
holds.
Furthermore,
we would like to formulate abstractly the condition that, since the OPE coefficients
are valued in the complex numbers, they should have "ghost number" equal to zero,
meaning that
\begin{equation}\label{gcompat}
g {\cal C}(x_1, x_2) = {\cal C}(x_1, x_2)(g \otimes id) + {\cal C}(x_1, x_2)(id \otimes g) \, .
\end{equation}
In summary a quantum gauge theory is described in our language abstractly as follows:
\begin{defn}
A quantum gauge theory is a system of OPE-coefficients
\begin{equation}
{\cal C} = ({\cal C}(x_1, x_2), {\cal C}(x_1,x_2,x_3), \dots)
\end{equation}
associated with $V$ satisfying the properties laid out in sec.~\ref{axiomatic},
together with a ghost number grading $g$ satisfying~\eqref{gcompat},
and a differential $s:V \to V$ satisfying~\eqref{scompat} and~\eqref{sprop}, as
well as $(g + id) s = sg$.
\end{defn}
By analogy with the classical case, we define the space of {\em physical fields}
of the gauge theory to be the quotient
\begin{equation}
\widehat V := \frac{\{{\rm ker} \, s: V^0 \to V^{+1} \}}{\{{\rm ran} \, s: V^{-1} \to V^0 \}}
\end{equation}
where $V^q$ are the
eigenspaces of the linear map $g$, with eigenvalue $q$,
\begin{equation}
V = \bigoplus_{q \in \mathbb Z} V^q \, , \quad s: V^q \to V^{q+1} \, .
\end{equation}
In other words, we define the space of physical fields as the zeroth cohomology group
defined by $s$, with the general cohomology group at $q$-th order defined by
\begin{equation}
H^q(V;s) = \frac{\{\ker s: V^q \to V^{q+1}\}}{\{{\rm ran}\, s: V^{q-1} \to V^q \}} \, .
\end{equation}
Because the OPE coefficients satisfy the assumption of BRST~invariance, eq~\eqref{BRSTn},
we have the following proposition/definition:
\begin{prop}\label{factorprop}
The OPE coefficients ${\cal C}$ of the auxiliary theory induce maps
\begin{equation}
\widehat {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n): \widehat V \otimes \dots \otimes \widehat V \to \widehat V \, ,
\end{equation}
so the operator product expansion "closes" on the space $\widehat V$ of physical fields.
Therefore, the {\em true physical sector of the gauge theory} can be defined as
the quantum field theory described by the pair $(\widehat V, \widehat {\cal C})$.
\end{prop}
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Remarks:} 1) In Yang-Mills theory with Lie algebra $\frak g$, the space $V$ is naturally identified with the free
unital commutative $\partial_\mu$-differential module (over ${\mathbb C}[\lambda]$) generated by the formal
expressions of the form ${\bf 1}$ and
\begin{equation}
\partial_{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_k} \psi_i ; \,\, \mu_j = 1, \dots, D \, ,
\end{equation}
where $\psi_i$ denotes either a component of $A$ or the auxiliary "field" $F$ or the ghost "fields", $U,\bar U$.
The expressions in
$V$ are taken modulo the relations $\psi_i \psi_j = (-1)^{F_i F_j} \psi_j \psi_i$, with
$F_i = 0$ or $=1$ according to whether $g(\psi_i) = \pm \psi_i$, where $g$ is $-1$ on
ghost fields $U,\bar U$, and $+1$ on $A,F$. Furthermore,
on $V$, the linear maps $\partial_\mu$ are defined to act as the (ungraded) derivations that are obtained by
formally viewing the elements of $V$ as classical fields. On $V$, there also acts the BRST-differential
$s$. It is defined to act on the generators of $V$ by eq.~\eqref{BRSTt}, and it is demanded to anti-commute
with the formal derivations $\partial_\mu$, i.e.,
\begin{equation}
\partial_\mu \in {\rm Der}(V) \, , \quad s \circ \partial_\mu = \partial_\mu \circ s \, , \quad
g \circ \partial_\mu = \partial_\mu \circ g \, .
\end{equation}
One can then show~\cite{barnich} that $\widehat V$
corresponds precisely to the gauge-invariant monomials of the
field strength tensor of the gauge connection and its covariant derivatives, i.e.,
\begin{equation}
\widehat V = \Big\langle p(D^{k_1} F, \dots, D^{k_n}F) ; p \in {\rm Inv}({\mathfrak g}^{\otimes n}, {\mathbb C}) \Big\rangle \, ,
\end{equation}
where ${\rm Inv}(\mathfrak g^{\otimes n}, {\mathbb C})$ is the space of $\frak{g}$-invariant multi-linear forms on Lie-algebra,
$D_\mu = \partial_\mu + i\lambda[A_\mu, \, . \, ]$ is the
standard covariant derivative, $F$ is a shorthand for its curvature, $F_{\mu\nu} = [\mathcal{D}_\mu, \mathcal{D}_\nu]$,
and $D^k$ is a shorthand for $D_{(\mu_1} \cdots D_{\mu_k)}$.
\medskip
\noindent
2) Note that the OPE-coefficients of the auxiliary theory
not only close on the space $\widehat V$, but more generally on any of the spaces
$W_k = \oplus_{q \ge k} H^q(V; s)$. These spaces contain also operators of non-zero
ghost number. One does not, however, expect this theory to have any non-trivial
states satisfying the OS-positivity axiom [see sec.~\ref{axiomatic}].
\medskip
\noindent
{\em Proof}: Let $|v_1 \rangle, \dots, |v_n\rangle \in {\rm ker} \, s$. Using eq.~\eqref{BRSTn}, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
&&s \Big( {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)|v_1 \otimes \dots \otimes v_n \rangle \Big) \\
&=& \sum_{i=1}^n {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) | \gamma(v_1) \otimes \dots \gamma(v_{i-1}) \otimes sv_i \otimes v_{i+1} \otimes \dots v_n \rangle = 0 \, . \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
Thus, the composition ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)|v_1 \otimes \dots \otimes v_n \rangle$ is in the kernel of $s$. One similarly shows that
if $|v_1 \rangle, \dots, |v_n\rangle \in {\rm ker} \, s$, and in addition $|v_i \rangle \in {\rm ran} \, s$ for some $i$, then
the composition is even in the image of $s$. Thus, ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ gives a well defined map
from $({\rm ker} \, s/{\rm ran} \, s)^{\otimes n}$ into ${\rm ker} \, s/{\rm ran} \, s$.
Finally, since ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ satisfies the analogue of eq.~\eqref{gcompat}, it follows that
the composition has ghost number zero if each $|v_i\rangle$ has. Thus, ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ gives a well defined map
$\widehat {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$
from $\widehat V^{\otimes n}$ to $\widehat V$. This map inherits the properties of
factorization, scaling, the unity axiom, the symmetry property etc. from the map ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$.
Thus, the collection $(\widehat {\cal C}, \widehat V)$ again defines a quantum field theory in our sense.
\qed
\medskip
We would now like to consider perturbations of a given quantum gauge theory
by analogy with the procedure described in the previous section.
Thus, as above, let $\lambda$ be a formal expansion parameter, and let
${\cal C}(x_1, x_2; \lambda)$ be a 1-parameter family describing a deformation of
the given 2-point OPE coefficient of the auxiliary theory.
As above let $({\cal C}_0, {\cal C}_1, {\cal C}_2, \dots)$ be the zeroth, first, second,
etc. perturbations of the expansion
coefficients. In order that the perturbed coefficients satisfy the
associativity constraint, the equations~\eqref{bciwi} must again hold for the coefficients.
In the situation at hand, we also should consider a deformation $s(\lambda)$ of
the BRST-differential, with expansion coefficients $(s_0, s_1, s_2, \dots)$,
\begin{equation}
s_i = \frac{1}{i!} \, \frac{d^i}{d\lambda^i} \, s(\lambda) \Bigg|_{\lambda = 0} \, .
\end{equation}
These quantities should satisfy the perturbative version of eq.~\eqref{sprop}, that is
\begin{equation}\label{sconsi}
\sum_{j=0}^i s_j s_{i-j} = 0 \, , \quad s_i \gamma + \gamma s_i = 0 \, ,
\end{equation}
and they should satisfy the perturbative version of eq.~\eqref{scompat},
\begin{equation}\label{cconsi}
\sum_{j=0}^i s_j {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) = \sum_{j=0}^i {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) (s_j \otimes id)
+ \sum_{j=0}^i {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2)(\gamma \otimes s_j) \, ,
\end{equation}
for all $i = 0, 1, 2, \dots$. For $i=0$, these conditions are just the
conditions that the undeformed theory described by $s_0, {\cal C}_0$ defines a gauge theory. For $i=1, 2, \dots$,
we get a set of conditions that constrain the possible $i$-th order perturbations
$s_i, {\cal C}_i$. Actually, as in the previous section,
we would like to exclude again that our deformations $s_i, {\cal C}_i$ are
simply due to a $\lambda$-dependent field redefinition, see defn.~\ref{fieldred}. In the present context,
a first order perturbation $s_1, {\cal C}_1$ that is simply due to a field redefinition is
one for which
\begin{equation}\label{ctrivial1}
{\cal C}_1(x_1, x_2) = -z_1 \, {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) + {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) (z_1 \otimes id + id \otimes z_1)
\, , \quad s_1 = s_0 \, z_1 + z_1 \, s_0 \, ,
\end{equation}
for some $z_1: V \to V$ such that $z_1 \, \gamma = \gamma \, z_1$. There are
similar conditions at higher order. We will now see that
the higher order conditions, have an elegant formulation
in terms of a variant of Hochschild cohomology associated with ${\cal C}_0$,
twisted with the cohomology of $s_0$.
In order to describe this, we begin by defining the respective cohomology rings.
Our first task is the definition of the Hochschild type differential
$b$ in the case when $V$ is a graded vector space. Let ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2): V \otimes V \to V$
satisfy the associativity condition~\eqref{maincondition} and be even under our grading
$\gamma$, meaning ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)(\gamma \otimes \gamma) = \gamma {\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$.
\begin{defn}
Let $\Omega^n(V)$ be the space of all translation invariant analytic maps
$f_n: {\mathcal F}_{n} \to \hom(V \otimes \dots \otimes V, V)$, where ${\mathcal F}_n \subset
({\mathbb R}^D)^n$ is the domain~\eqref{Fndef}. Let
\begin{equation}
f^\gamma_n := \gamma f_n (\gamma \otimes \dots \otimes \gamma) \, .
\end{equation}
If $f_n^\gamma = f_n$, then $f_n$ is said to be even and
the definition of $b f_n \in \Omega^{n+1}(V)$ is
as above in eq.~\eqref{bfndef}. If $f_n^\gamma = -f_n$, then $f_n$ is
said to be odd, and we define
\begin{eqnarray}\label{bdefodd}
(b f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_{n+1}) &:=& -{\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1})(\gamma \otimes f_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+1}) \nonumber\\
&-& \sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^i f_n( x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_{n+1})
(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}) \nonumber\\
&-& (-1)^{n+1} {\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1}) (f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
\end{defn}
As in the definition of $b$ in the ungraded case, we may check that
$b^2 = 0$, so we may again define the cohomology of $b$ as above. We next prove
a simple lemma about the relation between the differential $b$ and the differential
$s$ when the quantum field theory is a gauge theory $(V, {\cal C}, s)$. First,
we define an action of $s$ on the space $\Omega^n(V)$ of analytic maps $f_n$
by $B: \Omega^n(V) \to \Omega^n(V)$, where
\begin{eqnarray}\label{deltadef}
(B f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_n) &:=& s f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \nonumber\\
&-& \sum_{i=1}^n f^\gamma_n(x_1, \dots, x_n)(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i}) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{lemma}
We have $B (B f_n) =0$ for all $f_n$.
If $f_n$ is in the domain of $b$, then $B b f_n = - b B f_n$. Symbolically
\begin{equation}
b B + B b = 0, \quad B^2 = 0 \, .
\end{equation}
\end{lemma}
\noindent
{\em Proof:} For the proof of the first statement we consider first
the case when $f_n^\gamma = f_n$, and we apply $B$ one more time
to eq.~\eqref{deltadef}. We obtain the following three terms:
\begin{eqnarray}
&&B (B f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_n) = s^2 f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \\
&&-\sum_{i=1}^n [(sf_n)^\gamma(x_1, \dots, x_n)+sf_n^\gamma(x_1, \dots, x_n)](\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i})\nonumber\\
&&+\sum_{i,j=1}^n f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n)(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i})
(\gamma^{j-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-j}) \nonumber
\, .
\end{eqnarray}
The first term vanishes since $s^2=0$. The second term vanishes because if
$f_n$ is even under $\gamma$, then $sf_n$ is odd, so $(sf_n)^\gamma + sf_n^\gamma = 0$.
We split the double sum into three parts---the terms for which $i<j$, the terms for
$i>j$, and the terms for which $i=j$. The third set of terms give zero using $s^2 = 0$.
The first set of terms is manipulated using $s \gamma = - \gamma s$:
\begin{eqnarray}
&&+\sum_{i<j} f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n)
(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i})
(\gamma^{j-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-j})
\nonumber\\
&=&\sum_{i<j} f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n)(id^{i-1} \otimes s\gamma \otimes \gamma^{j-i-1}
\otimes s \otimes id^{n-j})
\nonumber\\
&=&-\sum_{i<j} f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) (\gamma^{j-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-j})
(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i})
\, .
\end{eqnarray}
After changing the names of the indices, this is seen to be
equal to minus the second set of terms, so $B (B f_n) = 0$.
The case $f_n^\gamma = -f_n$ is completely analogous.
We next prove the relation $b(B f_n) = - B (b f_n)$, again
assuming for definiteness that $f^\gamma_n = f_n$. To compute
$b(B f_n)$, we apply $b$ to eq.~\eqref{deltadef}, and
use that $(B f_n)^\gamma = - B f_n$. This gives
\begin{eqnarray}\label{bdel}
&-& b(B f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_{n+1}) = {\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1})[\gamma \otimes sf_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+1})] \nonumber\\
&-& \sum_{i=1}^n {\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1})[\gamma \otimes f_n(x_2, \dots, x_{n+1})
(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i})] \nonumber\\
&+& \sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^i sf_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_n)(id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}) \nonumber\\
&-& \sum_{i,j=1}^n (-1)^i f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_n)(\gamma^{j-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-j}) (id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}) \nonumber\\
&+& (-1)^{n+1} {\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1}) [s f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id] \nonumber\\
&-& (-1)^{n+1}
\sum_{i=1}^n {\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1}) (f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id)(\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n-i+1}) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
We next evaluate $B(b f_n)$ by applying $B$ to eq.~\eqref{bfndef}. This gives
\begin{eqnarray}\label{delb}
&& B(b f_n)(x_1, \dots, x_{n+1}) = s {\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1}) [id \otimes f_n(x_2, \otimes, x_{n+1})]\nonumber\\
&+& \sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^i \, s f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_n)
[id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}] \nonumber\\
&+& (-1)^{n+1} \, s {\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1})[f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id] \nonumber\\
&-& \sum_{i=1}^{n+1} {\cal C}(x_1, x_{n+1}) [id \otimes f_n(x_2, \otimes, x_{n+1})](\gamma^{i-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n+1-i}) \nonumber\\
&-& \sum_{j=1}^{n+1} \sum_{i=1}^n (-1)^i \, f_n(x_1, \dots, \widehat x_i, \dots, x_n)
[id^{i-1} \otimes {\cal C}(x_i, x_{i+1}) \otimes id^{n-i}](\gamma^{j-1} \otimes s \otimes id^{n+1-j}) \nonumber\\
&-& (-1)^{n+1} \sum_{i=1}^{n+1} {\cal C}(x_n, x_{n+1})[f_n(x_1, \dots, x_n) \otimes id] (\gamma^{i-1} \otimes
s \otimes id^{n+1-i}) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
We next bring $s$ behind ${\cal C}$ in all terms in this expression using eq.~\eqref{scompat},
and we use that ${\cal C}$ itself is even under $\gamma$. If these
steps are carried out, then it is seen that all terms in eq.~\eqref{bdel} match
a corresponding term in eq.~\eqref{delb}. The calculation when $f_n^\gamma = -f_n$
is again analogous.
\qed
The fact that $b^2 = 0$ and the
properties of $B$ and $b$ stated in the lemma imply that $(B+b)^2 = B^2 + b^2 + bB + Bb = 0$.
Hence the map
\begin{equation}
\delta := B + b \,, \quad \quad \delta : \bigoplus_n \Omega^n(V) \to \bigoplus_n \Omega^n(V)
\end{equation}
is again a differential, i.e., it satisfies $\delta^2 = 0$. Therefore, we can
again define a corresponding cohomology ring
\begin{equation}
H^n(\delta; V) := \frac{\{(f_1, f_2, \dots, f_n, 0, 0, \dots) \in \ker \delta\}}{
\{(f_1, f_2, \dots, f_n, 0, 0, \dots) \in {\rm ran}\, \delta \}} \equiv
\frac{Z^n(\delta; V)}{B^n(\delta; V)} \, .
\end{equation}
Thus, a general element in $H^n(\delta; V)$ consists of an equivalence class
of a sequence
\begin{equation}
(f_1, f_2, \dots, f_n, 0, 0, \dots)\,, \quad Bf_1 = bf_n = 0 \, , \quad bf_{i-1} = -Bf_i \, \quad \text{for $1<i\le n$} \, ,
\end{equation}
where each $f_i$ is an element in $\Omega^i(V)$ and $n$ is some finite number,
modulo all sequences with the property that there exist $h_i \in \Omega^i(V) \cap {\rm dom} \, b$
for $1 \le i < n$ such that
\begin{equation}
(f_1, f_2, \dots, f_n, 0, 0, \dots)\,, \quad f_1 = Bh_1\, , \quad f_n = bh_{n-1} \,, \quad f_i = bh_{i-1} + Bh_i \, ,
\end{equation}
for all $1<i<n$. The conditions~\eqref{sconsi}, \eqref{cconsi}, \eqref{bciwi} expressing
respectively the nilpotency of the perturbed BRST operator
$s_i$, the compatibility of the BRST operator with the perturbations
${\cal C}_i$ of the operator product, and the corresponding associativity condition at the $i$-th
order in perturbation theory may now be expressed by a simple condition
in terms of this cohomology ring. For this, we define the
differentials $b, B$ and $\delta = B+b$ as
above in terms of the unperturbed theory, i.e. using
${\cal C}_0$ and $s_0$. For $i>0$, we combine
$s_i$ and ${\cal C}_i$ into the element
\begin{equation}
\beta_i := (s_i, {\cal C}_i, 0, 0, \dots) \in \bigoplus_n \Omega^n(V) \, .
\end{equation}
and we define $\alpha_i = (u_i, v_i, w_i, 0, 0, \dots)$, where
\begin{eqnarray}
u_i(x_1) &:=& -\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} s_j s_{i-j} \,, \\
v_i(x_1, x_2) &:=& -\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} s_j {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) -
{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) (s_j \otimes id) - {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2)(\gamma \otimes s_j) \, , \nonumber\\
w_i(x_1, x_2, x_3) &:=& -\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3)[id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3)]
- {\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3)[{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id] \, . \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
The conditions~\eqref{sconsi}, \eqref{cconsi}, \eqref{bciwi} can now be simply
and elegantly be restated as the single condition
\begin{equation}\label{betacond}
\delta \beta_i = \alpha_i \, .
\end{equation}
This is the desired cohomological formulation of our consistency
conditions for perturbations of a gauge theory.
Let us analyze the conditions~\eqref{betacond} on $\beta_i$. First we
note that $\alpha_1 = 0$, and that $\alpha_i$ is defined in terms
of $\beta_1, \beta_2, \dots, \beta_{i-1}$ for $i>1$.
When $i=1$, the above condition hence states that $\delta \beta_1 = 0$,
meaning that $\beta_1 \in Z^2(\delta; V)$. On the other hand, we can
express the situation when
$s_1$ and ${\cal C}_1$ merely correspond to a
field redefinition [see eq.~\eqref{ctrivial1}] as saying that
\begin{equation}
\beta_1 = \delta \zeta_1 \, ,
\end{equation}
where $\zeta_1 \equiv (z_1, 0, 0, \dots)$ is given in terms of the first order
field redefinition $z_1$. Thus, in this case $\beta_1 \in B^2(\delta; V)$.
In summary, the first order perturbations of the BRST-operator and of the product modulo
the trivial ones are in one-to-one correspondence with the non-trivial elements
of the ring $H^2(V; \delta)$. Let us now assume that we have picked a non-trivial
first order perturbation $\beta_1$---assuming that such a perturbation exists. Then
$\beta_2$ must satisfy eq.~\eqref{betacond}, $\delta \beta_2 = \alpha_2$, for
the $\alpha_2$ calculated from $\beta_1$. Clearly, because $\delta^2 = 0$,
a necessary condition for the existence of a solution to eq.~\eqref{betacond}
is that $\delta \alpha_2 = 0$, meaning that $\alpha_2 \in Z^3(\delta; V)$. This
can indeed be checked to be the case (see the lemma below).
Our requirement that $\delta \beta_2 = \alpha_2$ is however a stronger
statement, meaning that in fact $\alpha_2 \in B^3(V; \delta)$. Thus, if the class
$[\alpha_2]$ in $H^3(\delta; V)$ is non-trivial, then no second order perturbations
to our gauge theory exists, or said differently, $[\alpha_2] \in H^3(\delta; V)$
is an obstruction to continue the deformation process.
Let us assume that there is no obstruction so that
a solution $\beta_2$ to the "inhomogeneous equation" $\delta \beta_2 = \alpha_2$ exists.
Any solution to the equation will only be unique up to a solution to the corresponding
"homogeneous equation" $\delta \beta_2 = 0$. In fact, because any solution
to the inhomogeneous equation can be written as an arbitrary but fixed solution
plus the general solution to the homogeneous equation, it follows that
the second order perturbations $\beta_2$ are parametrized by the elements of
$Z^2(\delta; V)$. Special solutions to the homogeneous equation
include in particular ones of the form $\beta_2 = \delta \zeta_2 \in B^2(\delta; V)$,
with $\zeta_2 \equiv (z_2, 0, 0, \dots)$. However, any such solution of the
homogeneous equation can again be absorbed into a second order field redefinition
parametrized by $z_2$. Thus, we see that if the obstruction $[\alpha_2]$
vanishes at second order, then the second order perturbations modulo the trivial
perturbations are again parametrized by the elements of the space $H^2(\delta; V)$.
In the general order, we assume inductively that a solution to the
consistency relations $\delta \beta_j = \alpha_j$ has been found for all
$j<i$, meaning in particular that the obstructions
$[\alpha_j]$ vanish for all $j<i$.
By the lemma below, $\delta \alpha_i = 0$, so
$\alpha_i$ defines a class $[\alpha_i] \in H^3(\delta; V)$.
If this class if non-trivial, then the deformation process cannot be continued. If
it is the trivial class, by definition there is a solution $\beta_i$ to the
equation $\delta \beta_i = \alpha_i$. Again, this is unique only up to a solution to the
corresponding homogeneous equation $\delta \beta_i = 0$. The non-trivial solutions among these
not corresponding to a field redefinition are again in one-to-one correspondence with
the elements in the ring $H^2(\delta; V)$. Thus, a sufficient condition for
there to exist a consistent, non-trivial perturbation to the product and
BRST operator to arbitrary order in perturbation theory is
\begin{equation}
H^2(\delta; V) \neq 0\, , \quad H^3(\delta; V) = 0 \, ,
\end{equation}
for in this case all obstructions are trivial.
Moreover, in that case, $H^2(\delta; V)$ parameterizes all non-trivial $i$-order
perturbations for any $i \ge 1$.
\begin{lemma}
Assume that $\delta \beta_j = \alpha_j$ for all $j<i$, or equivalently,
that $[\alpha_j] \in H^3(\delta; V)$ defines the trivial element for
all $j<i$, and assume that the chain $\alpha_i$ is in the domain of $\delta$ for all $i$. Then we have
$\delta \alpha_i = 0$. In component form
\begin{equation}
B u_i = 0 \, , \quad bu_i + Bv_i = 0 \, , \quad bv_i + Bw_i = 0 \, ,
\quad bw_i = 0 \, .
\end{equation}
\end{lemma}
\noindent
{\em Proof:} For a given $i$, the hypothesis of the lemma amounts to
saying that $Bs_j = u_j, bs_j + B{\cal C}_j = v_j$ and $b{\cal C}_j = w_j$ for all
$j<i$. It follows from the last equation that $bw_i = 0$, as we
have already proved above in lemma~\ref{obstrlemma} above.
We next concentrate on proving the relation $Bu_i = 0$. We have
\begin{equation}\label{Bf1}
B u_i = -\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} (Bs_j) s_{i-j} + \sum_{j=1}^{i-1} s_{i-j} (Bs_j) \, .
\end{equation}
Now, using that $Bs_j = u_j$ for the perturbations at order
$j<i$ and the definition of $u_j$, the first sum is equal to
\begin{eqnarray}
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} (Bs_j) s_{i-j} =\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} \sum_{k=1}^{j-1} s_k s_{j-k} s_{i-j}
\nonumber\\
&=&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} \sum_{k=1}^{i-j-1} s_j s_{i-j-k} s_k =
\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} s_{i-j} (Bs_j)
\, .
\end{eqnarray}
Thus, the first and second sum in~\eqref{Bf1} precisely cancel, and we have shown
$Bu_i = 0$.
We next show that $bu_i + Bv_i = 0$. A straightforward calculation using
the definitions of $v_i$ and of $B$ gives
\begin{eqnarray}
&&Bv_i(x_1, x_2) = \\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -(Bs_j) \Big( {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big) + s_j \Big( B{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big( Bs_j \otimes id + id \otimes Bs_j \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +B{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big( s_j \otimes id + \gamma \otimes s_j \Big) \, .\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
By the assumptions of the lemmas, we may substitute
$B{\cal C}_j = v_j - bs_j$ and $Bs_j = u_j$ for $j<i$.
This leads to
\begin{eqnarray}
&&Bv_i(x_1, x_2) = \\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -u_j \Big( {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big) - s_j \Big( bs_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big( u_j \otimes id + id \otimes u_j \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -bs_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big( s_j \otimes id + \gamma \otimes s_j \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +s_j v_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) + v_{i-j}(x_1, x_2)\Big( s_j \otimes id + \gamma \otimes s_j \Big)
\, .\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
We now use again the definition of $b$ and we substitute
the expressions for $v_j$ and $u_j$. If this is done,
then many terms cancel out and
we are left with
\begin{eqnarray}
B v_i(x_1, x_2) &=& \sum_{j=1}^{i-1} {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \Big( s_j s_{i-j} \otimes id + id \otimes
s_j s_{i-j} \Big) - s_{i-j}s_j \Big( {\cal C}_0(x_1, x_2) \Big) \nonumber\\
&=& -bu_i(x_1, x_2) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
which is what we wanted to show.
We finally prove the relation $Bw_i = -bv_i$.
Using the definition of $b$ and of $v_i$, we see after some
manipulations that $bv_i$ can be brought into the form
\begin{eqnarray}
&&bv_i(x_1, x_2, x_3) = \\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -bs_j(x_1, x_3) \Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2,x_3) \Big)
+bs_j(x_2, x_3) \Big({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big(bs_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big)
-{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big(\gamma \otimes bs_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -b{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_2, x_3) \Big(s_{i-j} \otimes id \otimes id +
\gamma \otimes s_{i-j} \otimes id +
\gamma \otimes \gamma \otimes s_{i-j}\Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} s_j \Big( b{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2, x_3) \Big) \,\, , \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where $(x_1, x_2, x_3) \in {\mathcal F}_3$. On this domain may substitute
the assumption of the lemma that $bs_j + B{\cal C}_j = v_j$ and that $b{\cal C}_j = w_j$
for all $j<i$. This results in the equation
\begin{eqnarray}
&&bv_i(x_1, x_2, x_3) = \\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +B{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2,x_3) \Big)
-B{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big(B{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big)
+{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big(\gamma \otimes B{\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -v_j(x_1, x_3) \Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2,x_3) \Big)
+v_j(x_2, x_3) \Big({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big(v_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big)
-{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big(\gamma \otimes v_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -w_j(x_1, x_2, x_3) \Big(s_{i-j} \otimes id \otimes id +
\gamma \otimes s_{i-j} \otimes id + \gamma \otimes \gamma \otimes s_{i-j}\Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +s_j \, w_{i-j}(x_1, x_2, x_3) \,\, . \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
We compute the first four terms in the expression on the right
hand side as
\begin{eqnarray}
&=&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +s_0{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big( id \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2,x_3) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big(s_0 \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -s_0{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big(\gamma \, {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2) \otimes s_0 \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big( {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1,x_2)(s_0 \otimes id) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} +{\cal C}_j(x_2, x_3) \Big({\cal C}_{i-j}(x_1, x_2)(\gamma \otimes s_0) \otimes id \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big(\gamma \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) (s_0 \otimes id) \Big) \nonumber\\
&&\sum_{j=1}^{i-1} -{\cal C}_j(x_1, x_3) \Big(\gamma \otimes {\cal C}_{i-j}(x_2, x_3) (\gamma \otimes s_0) \Big) = -Bw_i(x_1, x_2, x_3) \, .
\end{eqnarray}
The remaining terms cancel if we substitute the expressions $bs_j + B{\cal C}_j = v_j$ and $b{\cal C}_j = w_j$
for $v_j, w_j$ for $j<i$. Thus, we
have shown that $bv_i = -Bw_i$, and this concludes the proof of the lemma.
\qed
\section{Euclidean invariance}\label{euclidinvariance}
Above, we have defined quantum field theory by a collection of
OPE-coefficients subject to certain axiomatic requirements, and
we have pointed out that the essential information is contained in the
2-point coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$. The main condition that these
conditions have to satisfy is the associativity condition~\eqref{maincondition}.
They also have to satisfy the condition of Euclidean invariance. We will now
explain how that condition can be used to simplify the coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$,
and how to reformulate the associativity condition in terms of the simplified
coefficients.
Let us denote the components of ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ in a basis of $V$ by
$C^c_{ab}(x_1, x_2)$. We use Euclidean invariance to write these 2-point OPE
coefficients as
\begin{equation}\label{cdecomp}
C_{ab}^c(x_i, x_j) = \sum_I
\left[
\begin{matrix}
\hat c \\
\hat a \,\,\,\, \hat b
\end{matrix}
; \,\,I
\right] (\hat x_{ij}) \cdot
f_{ab}^c(I; r_{ij}) \, .
\end{equation}
Here, the quantity in brackets is an invariant tensor
\begin{equation}\label{invarianttensor}
\left[
\begin{matrix}
i \\
j \,\,\,\, k
\end{matrix}
;\,\,
I
\right]:
S^{D-1} \mapsto V_i^{} \otimes V_j^{} \otimes V_k^* \, ,
\end{equation}
meaning that it satisfies the transformation law
\begin{equation}
\left[
\begin{matrix}
i \\
j \,\,\,\, k
\end{matrix}
;\,\,
I
\right] (g \hat x) = R_i^*(g) R_j^{}(g) R_k^{}(g)
\left[
\begin{matrix}
i \\
j \,\,\,\, k
\end{matrix}
;\,\,
I
\right] (\hat x) \, ,
\end{equation}
for all $\hat x \in S^{D-1}$, and all $g$ in the
covering (spin) group of $SO(D)$. The quantities $f_{ab}^c: {\mathbb R}_+ \to {\mathbb C}$ are analytic functions valued in
the complex numbers, $r_{ij}=|x_i - x_j|$, $\hat x_{ij} = x_{ij}/r_{ij}$, and
$I$ is an index that labels the space of invariant tensors
on the $(D-1)$-dimensional sphere.
In the following, we will restrict attention to
the case $D=3$ for pedagogical purposes, since
the representation theory of the corresponding
spin group $SU(2)$ is most familiar.
In the case $D=3$, the representation
labels may be identified with spins $\in \frac{1}{2} {\mathbb N}$, and
the representation spaces are $V_j = {\mathbb C}^{2j+1}$.
A basis of invariant tensors~\eqref{invarianttensor} is labeled
by a pair of spins
$I=[l_1 l_2] \in \frac{1}{2} {\mathbb N} \times \frac{1}{2} {\mathbb N}$,
and is given by
\begin{equation}\label{o3inv}
\left[
\begin{matrix}
j_1 \\
j_2 \,\,\,\, j_3
\end{matrix}
;\,\,I
\right]
(\hat x) =
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
l_1 \\
j_2 \,\,\,\, j_3
\end{matrix}
\right\}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_1 \\
l_1 \,\,\,\, l_2
\end{matrix}
\right\} Y_{l_2}(\hat x)
\end{equation}
in terms of the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients ($3j$-symbols) of $SU(2)$ and the
spherical harmonics $Y_{lm}$ on $S^2$. Here
we have suppressed the magnetic quantum numbers, and as
everywhere in what follows,
magnetic quantum numbers associated with spins are summed
over if the spins appear twice. In the above example, the invariant
tensor should have 3 additional indices for the magnetic quantum
numbers associated with the representations
$j_1, j_2, j_3$, which have been suppressed.
The magnetic quantum numbers associated with $l_1, l_2$ are
contracted in the above expression, because each of these spins
appears twice.
The decomposition~\eqref{cdecomp} provides a split of the 2-point
OPE coefficients into the purely representation theoretic tensor part
$[
\therefore \,\, ;\,\,I
]$
determined entirely by the representation theory of $SU(2)$,
and the dynamical part $f^c_{ab}$, which is a scalar
function that is holomorphic in the radial variable $r \in {\mathbb R}_+$.
It is clear that it should be possible to formulate our associativity
condition in terms of these functions $f^c_{ab}$, as the
tensor coefficients are determined entirely in terms of group theory. To present
the resulting associativity conditions on $f^c_{ab}$
in a reasonably short form, we introduce the
notation $\rho_1= r_{23}, \rho_2 = r_{13}, \rho_3 = r_{12}$ for the
side lengths and
\begin{equation}
\theta_1 = \arccos \frac{\rho_2^2 + \rho_3^2 - \rho_1^2}{2 \rho_2 \rho_3}, \quad
{\rm etc.}
\end{equation}
for the angles of the triangle in ${\mathbb R}^3$ spanned by $x_1, x_2, x_3$, see fig.~\ref{triangle}.
\begin{figure}
\setlength{\unitlength}{1cm}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4.5in]{newfig6.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{The triangle spanned by $x_1, x_2, x_3$.}
\label{triangle}
\end{figure}
We also denote the spin associated with a field
$\phi_a$ by $\hat a \in \frac{1}{2} {\mathbb N}$.
Then the associativity condition~\eqref{maincondition} is equivalent
to the following condition:
\begin{eqnarray}\label{conscond3d}
&& \sum_b \sum_{j_1, j_2, j_5} \left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_6 & j_2 & \hat a_4\\
j_7 & j_5 & j_1
\end{matrix}
\right\} \left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_3 & j_5 & \hat b \\
j_1 & \hat a_3 & j_6
\end{matrix}
\right\} \,
{\rm P}_{j_1}(\cos \theta_2)\\
&& \times
f_{a_1 a_2}^{b}\Big(\rho_3; [j_3 j_1] \Big)
f_{b a_3}^{a_4}\Big(\rho_1; [j_5 j_2] \Big)=\nonumber\\
&& \sum_b \sum_{j_1, j_2, j_4, j_5}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_6 & j_2 & \hat a_4\\
j_7 & j_5 & j_1
\end{matrix}
\right\} \left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_4 & j_5 & \hat a_5 \\
j_1 & \hat a_2 & j_6
\end{matrix}
\right\}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
\hat a_1 & j_6 & j_4 \\
\hat a_3 & \hat a_2 & j_5
\end{matrix}
\right\}
\,
{\rm P}_{j_1}(\cos \theta_3) \nonumber\\
&&\times
f_{a_1 a_3}^{b}\Big(\rho_2; [j_4 j_1] \Big)
f_{a_2 b}^{a_4}\Big(\rho_1; [j_5 j_2] \Big) \nonumber \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
in the domain $\rho_3 < \rho_1 < \rho_2$.
Here, the expressions in brackets denote the
well-known $6j$-symbols for $SU(2)$,
\begin{equation}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_1 & j_2 & j_3\\
j_4 & j_5 & j_6
\end{matrix}
\right\}
=
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_3 \\
j_1 \,\,\,\, j_2
\end{matrix}
\right\}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_4 \\
j_3 \,\,\,\, j_5
\end{matrix}
\right\}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_5 \,\,\,\, j_2 \\
j_6
\end{matrix}
\right\}
\left\{
\begin{matrix}
j_6 \,\,\,\, j_1 \\
j_4
\end{matrix}
\right\} \, .
\end{equation}
The expressions
${\rm P}_j(z) = {}_2 F_1(-j, j+1, 1; (1-z)/2)$ are the Legendre polynomials.
A similar form of the associativity condition can be obtained for arbitrary
dimensions $D \ge 3$, the only essential difference being that we now encounter
the $6j$-symbols for the spin groups of $SO(D)$ for general $D$. The case $D=2$ is
an exceptional case and the corresponding expression is much simpler, owing
to the fact that the representation theory $SO(2)$ and its covering ${\mathbb R}$ is
much simpler.
If we let $|a|$ be the dimension of the field $\phi_a$, then the scaling axiom for the
OPE-coefficients implies the relation
\begin{equation}
f_{ab}^c(r) = O(r^{|c|-|a|-|b|}) \, .
\end{equation}
In the case of the free quantum field theory in 3 dimensions defined by the
Lagrangian $L = \frac{1}{2}(\partial \varphi)^2$, the coefficients are in fact monomials and
are given by $f_{ab}^c(r) = \zeta_{ab}^c r^{|c|-|a|-|b|}$ for some complex constants
$\zeta^c_{ab}$, see section~\ref{freefield} for details. Furthermore, one can show that~\cite{Hollands06},
for the coefficients of the perturbatively defined theory with Lagrangian $L = \frac{1}{2} (\partial \varphi)^2 -
\frac{1}{6} \lambda \varphi^6$ and dimensionless $\lambda$, the coefficients take the form
\begin{equation}
f_{ab}^c(r) = p_{ab}^c(\log r, \lambda) r^{|c|-|a|-|b|} \, ,
\end{equation}
with $p_{ab}^c$ a polynomial in two variables whose degree is $n$ in $\lambda$ if we
compute the coefficients to $n$-th order in perturbation theory, and whose degree in
$\log r$ is no more than $n$ at $n$-th order. The associativity condition~\eqref{conscond3d}
is a quadratic constraint for these polynomials $p_{ab}^c$ at each
arbitrary but fixed order in perturbation theory.
If there are dimensionful parameters in the
lagrangian, those would effectively be treated as other perturbations in our framework.
For example, for the Lagrangian $L = \frac{1}{2} (\partial \varphi)^2 + \frac{1}{2} m^2 \varphi^2 +
\frac{1}{6} \lambda \varphi^6$, the coefficients take the form
\begin{equation}
f_{ab}^c(r) = p_{ab}^c(r, \log r, m^2, \lambda) r^{|c|-|a|-|b|} \, ,
\end{equation}
where $p_{ab}^c$ is again a polynomial in all four variables at $n$-th
perturbation order in $m^2$ and $\lambda$. Each term in this polynomial
containing a power $m^{2k}$ contains exactly a power of $r^{2k}$ so as
to make each term "dimensionless" (with the logarithms and $\lambda$ not counting
as having a dimension).
\section{The fundamental left (vertex algebra) representation}\label{leftrep}
In the previous sections, we have elaborated on our definition of
quantum field theory in terms of consistency conditions. Our formulation involved
only the OPE coefficients such as $C_{ab}^c$. To motivate our constructions, we
sometimes wrote formal relations like
\begin{equation}
\text{``$\phi_a(x_1) \phi_b(x_2) = \sum_c C_{ab}^c(x_1, x_2) \, \phi_c(x_2)$''} \quad .
\end{equation}
But these relations were only heuristic, in the sense that none of our proposed
properties of the OPE coefficients relied on the existence or properties of the
hypothetical operators $\phi_a$, which were only "dummy variables".
As we have emphasized, our approach is similar
to the standard viewpoint taken in algebra that an abstract algebra ${\bf A}$ is entirely defined in
terms of its product---i.e., a linear map $m: {\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$ subject to
the associativity condition. But, as in our case, the algebra elements
need not be represented a priori by linear operators on a vector space. Representations in
the context of an algebra are an additional structure defined as
linear maps $\pi: {\bf A} \to {\rm End}(H)$ from the algebra to
the linear operators on a vector space $H$, subject to the condition $\pi[m(A,B)] = \pi(A)\pi(B)$. It is natural
to ask whether there is a construction similar to a representation also in our context.
We shall show in this section that there is indeed a certain "canonical" construction, which
has some features in common with an algebra representation, and which will be useful
in the next section. We will refer to this construction as the "fundamental left-" or
"vertex algebra representation".
\begin{defn}
Let $|v\rangle \in V$ be an arbitrary vector. We define a corresponding {\em vertex operator}
${\cal Y}(x, v): V \to V$ by the formula
\begin{equation}
{\cal Y}(x, v)|w\rangle = {\cal C}(x, 0)(|v\rangle \otimes |w\rangle) \, ,
\end{equation}
for all $x \neq 0$. In a basis $\{ |v_a\rangle \}$, the matrix representing the vertex operator is hence given by
\begin{equation}
[{\cal Y}(x, v_a)]_b^c := C_{ab}^c(x,0) \,\,\,\,\,.
\end{equation}
This is our {\it fundamental left-} or {\it vertex algebra representation}.
\end{defn}
Using the consistency condition~\eqref{maincondition},
one can immediately show that
\begin{equation}\label{lalblc1}
{\cal Y}(x, v_a) {\cal Y}(y, v_b) = \sum_c C_{ab}^c(x,y) \, {\cal Y}(y, v_c) \, ,
\end{equation}
for $0<|x-y|<|y|<|x|$, or equivalently that
\begin{equation}\label{lalblc}
{\cal Y}(x, v_a) {\cal Y}(y, v_b) = {\cal Y}(y, {\cal Y}(x-y, v_a)v_b ) \, .
\end{equation}
Thus, by eq.~\eqref{lalblc1}, the vertex operators operators ${\cal Y}(x, v_a): V \to V$ satisfy the operator product expansion.
The fact that the OPE coefficients in this expansion are precisely the matrix elements of the vertex operators
themselves is expressed in the second relation~\eqref{lalblc}. This quadratic relation is the key
axiom in the theory of vertex operator algebras, see \cite{vertex1, vertex2, vertex3, vertex4}.
Because of eq.~\eqref{lalblc1}, we may formally view the vertex operators as forming a "representation" of the heuristic field
operators, i.e., formally "$\pi(\phi_a(x)) = {\cal Y}(x, v_a)$" is a "representation" of the "algebra"
defined by the OPE coefficients. This "representation" is in some sense analogous to the
GNS-representation~(see e.g.~\cite{Haag}) for $C^*$-algebras. However, we emphasize that
in our case, $V$ is not in a natural way a Hilbert space, and should not be confused with the
physical Hilbert space obtained via the Osterwalder-Schrader reconstruction theorem, see our
remarks in section~\ref{axiomatic}. We will further develop the analogy of our approach to
the theory of vertex operator algebras in a forthcoming paper~\cite{Olbermann}.
\section{Example: The free field}\label{freefield}
Let us now explain our approach to quantum field theory in
a simple example, namely that of a free hermitian bosonic scalar field in $D$ dimensions
classically described by the field equation
$$\square \varphi = 0,$$
with $\square = \delta^{\mu\nu} \partial_\mu \partial_\nu$.
The aim is to present explicitly the OPE coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$
for this model.
This section is joint work with H. Olbermann and details will appear elsewhere.
We begin by describing the space $V$ of fields in our case, assuming $D>2$ for simplicity. The
case $D=2$ can be treated analogously, with only minor modifications.
\begin{defn}
$V$ is the defined to be the commutative, unital, ${\mathbb C}$-module
generated as a module (i.e., under addition, multiplication and scalar multiplication)
by formal expressions of the form $\partial_{\{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_N\}} \varphi$,
and unit ${\bf 1}$, where $\mu_i = 1, \dots, D$ and a curly bracket denotes the
totally symmetric, trace-free part, i.e. by definition,
\begin{equation}
\delta^{\mu_i \mu_j}\, \partial_{\{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_N\}} \varphi = 0 \, .
\end{equation}
\end{defn}
\noindent
The trace free condition has been imposed because any trace would give rise
to an expression containing $\square \varphi$, which we want to vanish in
order to satisfy the field equation on the level of $V$.
A basis of $V$ as a ${\mathbb C}$-vector space can e.g. be given as follows. First,
let us choose a basis of totally symmetric, trace-free, rank-$l$ tensors
in ${\mathbb R}^D$ for any $l \ge 0$. For a given $l \ge 0$, this space has
dimension $N(l,D)$, where
\begin{equation}
N(l,D) =
\begin{cases}
1 & \text{for $l=0$}\\
\frac{(2l+D-2)(l+D-3)!}{(D-2)!l!} & \text{for $l>0$.}
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
We denote the basis elements by $t_{l,m}, m=1, \dots, N(l,D)$, and
we assume for convenience that they are orthonormal with respect to the natural hermitian
inner product on $({\mathbb R}^{D})^{\otimes l}$ coming from the Euclidean metric
on ${\mathbb R}^D$, i.e. $\bar t_{l',m'} \cdot t_{l,m} = \delta_{ll'} \delta_{mm'}$.
A basis of $V$ is then given by ${\bf 1}$, together with the elements
\begin{equation}\label{vadef}
|v_a \rangle = \prod_{l,m} (a_{l,m}!)^{-1/2}
\left( c_l^{-1/2} \, t_{l,m} \cdot \partial^l \varphi \right)^{a_{l,m}} \, \quad \, ,
\end{equation}
where $a = \{ a_{l,m} \mid l \ge 0, 0 < m \le N(l,D) \}$ is a multi-index of
non-negative integers, only finitely many of which are non-zero. For later
convenience, we also set
\begin{equation}
c_l = \frac{2^l \, \Gamma(l+1) \Gamma(l+D/2-1)}{\Gamma(D/2-1)} \, .
\end{equation}
The canonical dimension of $|v_a \rangle$ is defined as
\begin{equation}
|a| = \sum_{l,m} a_{l,m}[(D-2)/2+l] \, .
\end{equation}
It is possible to formally view $V$ as a "Fock-space", with $a_{l,m}$ the "occupation numbers"
of the "mode" labeled by $l,m$. On this Fock-space, one can then define
creation and annihilation operators $\a_{l,m} , \a_{l,m}^+: V \to V$ as usual.
These are defined explicitly by
\begin{eqnarray}
\a_{l,m} |v_a \rangle &:=& (a_{l,m})^{1/2}
\, |v_{a-e_{l,m}} \rangle \\
\a_{l,m}^+ |v_a \rangle &:=& (a_{l,m}+1)^{1/2} \, |v_{a+e_{l,m}} \rangle
\end{eqnarray}
where $e_{l,m}$ is the multiindex with a unit entry at position $l,m$ and zeros elsewhere.
They satisfy the standard commutation relations
\begin{equation}
\left[ \a_{l,m}^{}, \a_{l',m'}^{+} \right] =
\delta_{ll'}\delta_{mm'} \,\, id \, , \quad
\left[ \a_{l,m}^+, \a_{l',m'}^+ \right] =
\left[ \a_{l,m}^{}, \a_{l',m'}^{} \right] = 0
\end{equation}
where $id$ is the identity operator on $V$. The ``vacuum'' vector $|0\rangle$ in this Fock space
by definition corresponds to the identity operator ${\bf 1} \in V$.
To present the OPE coefficients of the model, it is further convenient to
introduce spherical harmonics in $D$ dimensions. The most straightforward way to do this is
as follows. Let $l \in {\mathbb N}_0$, and let $h_l(x) \in {\mathbb C}[x]$ be a harmonic polynomial on ${\mathbb R}^D$ that
is homogeneous of degree $l$, meaning that $\square h_l(x) = 0$, and that $h(\lambda x) =
\lambda^l h_l(x)$ for all $\lambda \in {\mathbb R}_+$. It is not difficult to see that the vector
space spanned by such polynomials is of dimension $N(l,D)$. We let $h_{l,m}(x), 0<m\le N(l,D)$ be
a basis of this vector space
and we define the (scalar) spherical harmonics $Y_{l,m}:S^{D-1} \to {\mathbb C}$ to be the restriction
of the corresponding harmonic polynomials to the $(D-1)$-dimensional sphere. We normalize
the spherical harmonics to turn them into an orthonormal basis on the sphere, in the natural
$L^2$-inner product. The spherical harmonics are closely related to the trace free
symmetric tensors $t_{l,m}$ in $({\mathbb R}^D)^{\otimes l}$ that were introduced above. In fact,
we may choose
\begin{equation}\label{ylmdef}
Y_{l,m}(\hat x) =
k_l \, \bar t_{l,m} \cdot \hat x^{\otimes l} \, ,
\end{equation}
for some normalization constant $k_l$. With this notation in
place, we now explicitly present the OPE coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ for this model. For this, it is
sufficient to present the vertex operators (left-representatives) ${\cal Y}(x, v_a):V \to V$ for all $|v_a\rangle \in V$, since the
matrix elements $[{\cal Y}(x, v_a)]_b^c = C_{ab}^c(x,0)$ are by definition just the OPE coefficient components, see
sec.~\ref{leftrep}.
First, we give the formula for ${\cal Y}(x, \varphi)$ corresponding to the basic field $\varphi \in V$. This is defined by
\begin{multline}
{\cal Y}(x, \varphi) = \sqrt{{\rm vol}(S^{D-1})} \,
\sum_{l=0}^{\infty} \, \sum_{m=1}^{N(l,D)} \sqrt{\frac{D-2}{2l+D-2}} \times \\
\Big[ r^{l} Y_{l, m}(\hat x) \, \a_{l,m}^{+} + r^{-l-D+2} \overline{ Y_{l, m}(\hat x) } \, \a_{l,m}^{} \Big] \, .
\end{multline}
We will "derive" this formula
from the standard quantum field theory formalism in a future paper~\cite{Olbermann}.
Accidentally, this has precisely the familiar form for a free field operator, with
an "emissive" and an "absorptive" piece, which should not come as a surprise,
since ${\cal Y}(x, \varphi)$ is in a sense the "representative"
of the (formal) field operator $\varphi(x)$ on $V$. Actually, if we furthermore write $r = {\rm e}^t$, then this is
precisely the formula for a free field operator on the manifold ${\mathbb R} \times S^{D-1}$ with
"time" $t$ formally imaginary. We will pursue this analogy elsewhere.
For a general element in $V$, we now give a corresponding formula for the
vertex operator. It is defined by ${\cal Y}(x, {\bf 1}) = id$ for the identity element, and by
\begin{equation}\label{Ladeffree}
{\cal Y}\Big(x, \prod_i \partial^{l_i} \varphi \Big) =
\,\,
: \prod_{i}
\partial^{l_i} {\cal Y}\Big(x, \varphi \Big) :
\,\,
\, .
\end{equation}
for a general field monomial.
Here, the following notation is used. The double dots $: \dots :$ mean
"normal ordering", i.e., all creation operators are to the right of all annihilation operators.
Again, one can derive this formula using the standard quantum field theory formalism. The
OPE coefficients for the free field are consequently given by $C_{ab}^c(x_1, x_2) := [{\cal Y}(x_1-x_2, v_a)]_b^c
= \langle v^c | {\cal Y}(x_1-x_2, v_a) | v_b \rangle$ or more explicitly by
\begin{equation}\label{cabcfreedef}
C_{ab}^c(x_1, x_2) := \Big\langle 0 \Big|
\prod_{l,m} (\a_{l,m}^{})^{c_{l,m}}
\,
{\cal Y}(x_1-x_2, v_a)
\,
\prod_{l,m} (\a_{l,m}^+)^{b_{l,m}}
\Big| 0 \Big\rangle \, .
\end{equation}
We now state that the so-defined OPE-coefficients satisfy
our consistency condition:
\begin{thm}
Let ${\cal Y}(x, v): V \to V$ be defined for our model by formula~\eqref{Ladeffree},
and let the OPE-coefficients $C_{ab}^c(x_1, x_2)$ be defined by eq.~\eqref{cabcfreedef}.
Then the OPE coefficients satisfy the consistency condition~\eqref{maincondition}.
Equivalently, the vertex algebra condition~\eqref{lalblc} holds for the free
field vertex operators ${\cal Y}(x, v_a)$.
\end{thm}
\noindent
{\em Proof:} The proof of this theorem is essentially a longish but straightforward computation, using
various standard identities for the $D$-dimensional spherical harmonics. We will give a
complete proof in \cite{Olbermann}.
\section{Interacting fields}\label{interactingfields}
In the previous section, we have presented the (2-point) OPE coefficients in the example of
a free quantum field associated with the classical equation $\square \varphi = 0$.
It is clearly of interest to know what would be the corresponding coefficients for
a field associated with a non-linear equation such as
\begin{equation}
\square \varphi = \lambda \varphi^p
\end{equation}
where $p$ is some non-negative integer. As has been appreciated for a long time, the construction of
a quantum field theory (and hence in particular of the OPE) associated with such
an equation is extremely difficult, and has only been accomplished so far for
certain values of $p,D$ where the theory has a particularly simple behavior. However, one can treat
$\lambda$ as a formal perturbation parameter, and try to construct the OPE coefficients
in the sense of formal power series in $\lambda$ as we have outlined in general terms in section~\ref{hochschild}.
Here we would like to outline how a field equation can help to actually determine
the formal power series in the theory described by a field equation of the above type.
Some of the ideas in this section go back, in preliminary form, to discussions with
N.~Nikolov, and also to joint work with H.~Olbermann, which will be published in~\cite{Olbermann}.
As we have seen in section~\ref{leftrep}, the 2-point
OPE coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ contain the same information as the
corresponding vertex operators ${\cal Y}(x, v)$. In perturbation theory, they
are given by formal power series
\begin{equation}
{\cal Y}(x, v) = \sum_{i=0}^\infty {\cal Y}_i(x, v) \, \lambda^i \, ,
\end{equation}
where each ${\cal Y}_i(x, v)$ is a linear map $V \to V$, and where
${\cal Y}_0(x, v)$ is given by the free field vertex operator
defined in the previous section~\ref{freefield}. As discussed in
subsection~\ref{subfieldeq}, we expect
that the field equation implies:
\begin{equation}\label{fieldeqvertex}
{\cal Y}_i(x, \varphi) = \square^{-1} {\cal Y}_{i-1}(x, \varphi^p ) \, .
\end{equation}
More precisely, in this section we {\em assume} the existence of
${\cal Y}_i$ satisfying this equation, and we also {\em assume} that the
consistency condition~\eqref{lalblc} is satisfied order-by-order;
in vertex operator notation
\begin{equation}
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_j( y, v_a) {\cal Y}_{i-j}(x, v_b)
=
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_{i-j}\Big(x, {\cal Y}_j ( y-x, v_a ) v_b \Big) \, .
\end{equation}
As we will now show, these assumptions will allow us to inductively
determine the actual form of the vertex operators order by
order in $i$. But before we do this, we must explain a point
related to the choice of $V$ in for our interacting theory.
Recall that, in the underlying free theory with $\lambda=0$, $V$ was spanned by formal monomials in
$\varphi$ and its derivatives $\partial_{\{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_N\}} \varphi$,
where he curly brackets denote the trace-free
part of a tensor. In the free theory, we considered the trace free part only,
since any trace gives rise to a factor of $\square \varphi$ in such a monomial, $v$,
and the corresponding vertex operator ${\cal Y}_0(x,v)$ then vanishes (essentially by definition). However,
for the interacting theory, we must be more careful and allow also traces, i.e.,
we also consider vertex operators whose arguments are formal monomials in $\varphi$ and
its derivatives $\partial_{\mu_1} \dots \partial_{\mu_N} \varphi$.
This enlarged space of objects, $\widehat V$, is a commutative unital differential
module (with derivations $\partial_\mu, \mu=1, \dots, D$ acting in the usual way), and
the vertex operators ${\cal Y}_i(x, v)$ should now be considered as linear maps $\widehat V \owns v \mapsto
{\cal Y}_i(x, v) \in {\rm End}(\widehat V)$. We then also {\em assume} to have a relation
\begin{equation}
\partial_\mu \, {\cal Y}_i(x, v) = {\cal Y}_i(x, \partial_\mu v) \quad, \quad \mu=1, \dots, D \, ,
\end{equation}
where the symbol $\partial_\mu$ denotes a genuine partial $x$-derivative on the left side,
while it is the derivation on the differential module $\widehat V$ on the right side. For details, we
refer to~\cite{Olbermann}. To lighten the notation, we will drop the caret on $\widehat V$ again
for the remaining part of the section.
To make sense of eq.~\eqref{fieldeqvertex}, we first of all need to define the inverse of the Laplace operator.
We rewrite it in $D$-dimensional polar coordinates, and
we furthermore assume that we can expand each vertex operator in spherical harmonics and
coefficients in the ring ${\mathbb C}[r, 1/r, \log r] \otimes {\rm End}(V)$.
Then the vertex operators schematically take the form
\begin{equation}
{\cal Y}_i(x, v) = \sum A_{i,l,m,j,k}(v) r^k (\log r)^j Y_{l,m}(\hat x) \, ,
\end{equation}
with $A_{i,l,m,j,k}(v) \in {\rm End}(V)$.
We define the action of the inverse Laplacian on such expressions by putting\footnote{
It follows from the inductive construction that, if we take any matrix element
of ${\cal Y}_i$ between $\langle v^a|$ and $|v_b \rangle$, then there remain only finitely
many terms in the above sum. Hence, we may take the inverse of the Laplacian term-by-term
without problem.
}
\begin{eqnarray}
&&\square^{-1} [r^k (\log r)^j Y_{l,m}(\hat x) ] :=
j! Y_{l,m}(\hat x) \times \nonumber\\
&& \times
\begin{cases}
(-1)^{j+1} r^l \sum_{i=0}^{j+1} \frac{(-1)^i \log^i r}{i!(2l+D-2)^{j-i+2}} &
\text{if $k=l-2$}\\
-r^{-l-D+2} \sum_{i=0}^{j+1}
\frac{\log^i r}{i!(2l+D-2)^{j-i+2}} &
\text{if $k=-l-D$}\\
r^{k+2} \sum_{i=0}^j \sum_{n=0}^i \frac{(-1)^{i-n} \log^{j-i} r}{(j-i)!(l-k-2)^{n+1}(l+k+D)^{i-n+1}} &
\text{otherwise.}
\end{cases}
\end{eqnarray}
This is a left inverse for the Laplacian. Any other left
inverse can differ from this one only by terms in the kernel of
$\square$, i.e. a harmonic polynomial of $x$ with values in
${\rm End}(V)$.
Let us now assume inductively that we have constructed all the
vertex operators ${\cal Y}_j(x, v)$ up to
order $j=i-1$. The vertex operator ${\cal Y}_i(x, \varphi)$ is then given
by eq.~\eqref{fieldeqvertex}. Next, we would like to determine all other vertex operators ${\cal Y}_i(x, v )$,
where $|v \rangle \in V$ is a general element. For this, we perform, at fixed $i$,
an induction in the dimension $\Delta(v)$. Thus, let us assume that we
have succeeded in constructing all vertex operators up to dimension $d$, and let us assume
for the sake of concreteness that we are in $D=4$, so that $\Delta(\varphi) = 1$.
We may hence assume that $d \ge 2$. We may write a general field of dimension $d+1$
as a linear combination of fields of the form $v = w \partial^l \varphi$,
or of the form $v = \partial^{l+1} w$. In both cases,
$w$ has dimension $d-l$, and so ${\cal Y}_j(x, w)$ is inductively
known for $0 \le j \le i$. In the second case, we must have
${\cal Y}_i(x, v) = \partial^{l+1} {\cal Y}_i(x, w)$. In the first case, the
consistency condition gives
\begin{equation}
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_j\Big( y, \partial^l \varphi \Big) {\cal Y}_{i-j}\Big(x, w \Big)
=
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_{i-j}\Big(x, {\cal Y}_j ( y-x, \partial^l \varphi ) w \Big) \, .
\end{equation}
By the inductive hypothesis, all operators on the left side of the equation are already known.
Now we investigate which operators are not already known on the right side. Evidently,
if $j \neq 0$, then all terms in the corresponding expression are known. If $j = 0$,
we look at the terms that survive in the limit $y \to x$. Using the definition of the
zeroth order vertex operators (free theory), we see that
\begin{equation}
{\cal Y}_0 ( y-x, \partial^l \varphi ) w = w \partial^l \varphi + \dots ,
\end{equation}
where the dots stand for the following terms: (a) terms that vanish as $|x-y| \to 0$ and
(b) a finite Laurent series in $1/|x-y|$ with coefficients that are vectors of dimension
$ \le d$. Let $P_d^j: V \to V$ denote the map which is the identity for
$j \neq 0$, which is the projector onto the subspace of vectors of dimension
$\le d$ for $j=0$. Then we can write:
\begin{multline}
{\cal Y}_i(x, v) =
\lim_{y \to x} \Bigg[
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_j\Big( y, \partial^l \varphi \Big) {\cal Y}_{i-j}\Big(x, w \Big) \\
-
\sum_{j=0}^i {\cal Y}_{i-j}\Big(x, P_d^j \circ {\cal Y}_j ( y- x, \partial^l \varphi ) w \Big)
\Bigg] \, .
\end{multline}
Now all the terms on the right side are known inductively. We can hence determine all vertex operators
at order $i$, and hence to arbitrary orders.
This shows how we may construct inductively
the terms in the perturbation series starting from those of the free theory.
\section{Conclusions and outlook}
In this paper, we have suggested a new approach to general, non-conformal, quantum
field theories in terms of consistency conditions. These consistency conditions are
formulated in terms of the operator product expansion (OPE). We showed that these
conditions are quite powerful. For example, they can be used to characterize the possible perturbations of the
quantum field theory, and give rise to an efficient algorithm for explicitly
computing these coefficients.
This paper is just the beginning of a longer programme. In the future, we would like to
extend the ideas of the paper. In particular, it would be interesting to consider the
following issues:
\begin{itemize}
\item Generalization of our approach to curved space-time;
\item Convergence/Borel summability of the perturbation series;
\item Explicit perturbative calculations;
\item Incorporation of the renormalization group into our approach;
\item (Super-)conformal quantum field theories;
\item Perturbations of 2-dimensional conformal quantum field theories.
\end{itemize}
We intend to study these topics in future publications.
\\
\\
\\
\\
\\
\noindent
{\bf Acknowledgements:} I would like to thank N.~Nikolov for
extensive discussions on various topics in this paper. I would also like to
thank K.-H.~Rehren and R.~M.~Wald for discussions. I would especially
like to thank C.~Brouder for his careful reading of the manuscript, and
in particular for pointing out several sign errors in the first version.
| }
i.e., $t(x_1, x_2)$ uniquely determines the 2-point OPE coefficients with
an identity operator and vice-versa. In particular, we have $t(x_1, x_2) {\bf 1} = {\bf 1}$
using the eq.~\eqref{iidop} and ${\cal C}(x_1) = id$, meaning that the identity operator does not
depend on a "reference point".
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Factorization:} Let $I_1, \dots, I_r$ be a partition of the
set $\{1, \dots, n\}$ into disjoint ordered subsets, with the property
that all elements in $I_i$ are greater than all elements in $I_{i-1}$ for
all $i$. For example, for $n=5$, such a partition is
$I_1 = \{1\}, I_2 = \{2,3,4\}, I_3 = \{5,6\}$.
For each ordered subset $I \subset \{1, \dots, n\}$, let
$X_I$ be the ordered tuple $(x_i)_{i \in I} \in ({\mathbb R}^D)^{|I|}$,
let $m_k = {\rm max}(I_k)$, and set ${\cal C}(X_I) := id$ if
$I$ is a set consisting of only one element. Then we have
\begin{equation}\label{factorization}
{\cal C}(X_{\{1, \dots, n\}}) = {\cal C}(X_{\{m_1,\dots,m_r\}}) \Big(
{\cal C}(X_{I_1}) \otimes \cdots \otimes {\cal C}(X_{I_r})
\Big)
\end{equation}
as an identity on the open domain
\begin{eqnarray}\label{domaindef}
D[\{I_1, \dots, I_r\}] &:=& \bigg\{
(x_1, \dots, x_n) \in M_n \mid \nonumber\\
&& {\rm min} \, d(X_{\{m_1, \dots,m_r\}}) > {\rm max}\, (d(X_{I_1}), \dots, d(X_{I_r}))
\bigg\} \, .
\end{eqnarray}
Here, $d(X_I)$ denotes the set of relative distances between points
of points in a collection $X_I = (x_i)_{i \in I}$, defined as
the collection of positive real numbers
\begin{equation}
d(X_I) := \{ r_{ij} \,\, \mid i,j \in I, i \neq j \} \, .
\end{equation}
Note that the factorization identity~\eqref{factorization} when expressed in
a basis of $V \otimes \dots \otimes V$ involves an $r$-fold infinite sum on the
right side. The factorization property is in particular the statement that these
infinite sums converge on the indicated domain. No statement is made about the
convergence outside the domain, and in fact the series are expected
to diverge outside the above domains. For an arbitrary partition
of $\{1, \dots, n\}$, a similar factorization condition can be
derived from the (anti-)symmetry axiom. If
there are any fermionic fields in the theory, then
there are $\pm$-signs.
We also note that we may iterate the above factorization equation on suitable domains.
For example, if the $j$-th subset $I_j$ is itself partitioned into subsets, then
on a suitable subdomain associated with the partition, the coefficient ${\cal C}(X_{I_j})$
itself will factorize. Subsequent partitions may naturally be identified with
trees on $n$ elements $\{1, \dots, n\}$, i.e., the specification of a tree naturally
corresponds to the specification of a nested set of subsets of $\{1, \dots, n\}$.
In~\cite{HW08} and also below, a version of the above factorization property is given in terms of such
trees. However, we note that the condition given in reference~\cite{HW08} is not stated in
terms of convergent power series expansions, but instead in terms of asymptotic
scaling relations. The former seems to be more natural in the Euclidean domain.
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf Scaling:} Let $|v_{a_1}\rangle, \dots, |v_{a_n} \rangle \in V$ be vectors with dimension
$\Delta_1, \dots, \Delta_n$ [see the decomposition of $V$ in
eq.~\eqref{decomp}] respectively, and let $\langle v^b | \in V^*$ be an element
in the dual space of $V$ with dimension $\Delta_{n+1}$. Then the scaling degree\footnote{
The scaling degree is defined here as the infimum over all $p \in {\mathbb R}$ such that
$\lim \epsilon^p C_{a_1 \dots a_n}^b(\epsilon x_1, \dots, \epsilon x_n) = 0$ for all
$(x_1, \dots, x_n) \in M_n$.}
of the ${\mathbb C}$-valued distribution~\eqref{Ccompdef}
should be estimated by
\begin{equation}
sd \, C_{a_1 \dots a_n}^b \le \Delta_1 + \dots + \Delta_n - \Delta_{n+1} \, .
\end{equation}
If $v^b$ is an element of the 1-dimensional subspace of dimension-0 fields
spanned by the identity operator ${\bf 1} \in V$, if $n=2$ and if $|v_{a_1}^{} \rangle =
|v_{a_2}^\star \rangle \neq 0$, then it is required that the inequality is saturated.
\medskip
\noindent
\paragraph{\bf (Anti-)symmetry:} Let $\tau_{i-1, i} = (i-1 \,\, i)$ be the permutation
exchanging the $(i-1)$-th and the $i$-th object, which we define
to act on $V \otimes \dots \otimes V$ by exchanging the corresponding
tensor factors. Then we have
\begin{eqnarray}
&&{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_{i-1}, x_i, \dots, x_n) \, \tau_{i-1,i} =
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_i, x_{i-1}, \dots, x_n) \, (-1)^{F_{i-1}F_i} \\
&& F_i := \frac{1}{2} \,
id^{i-1} \otimes (id-\gamma)
\otimes id^{n-i} \, .
\end{eqnarray}
for all $1<i<n$. Here, the last factor is designed so that Bosonic fields
have symmetric OPE coefficients, and Fermi fields have anti-symmetric
OPE-coefficients. The last point $x_n$, and the $n$-th tensor factor
in $V\otimes \dots \otimes V$
do not behave in the same way under permutations. This is because we have
chosen to expand an operator product around the $n$-th (i.e., last) point,
and hence this point and tensor factor is
not on the same footing as the other points and tensor factors in the OPE.
The corresponding (anti-)symmetry property for
permutations involving $x_n$ is as follows. We let $t(x_1, x_n)$ be the
Taylor expansion map explained in the identity element axiom. Then we postulate
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_{n-1}, x_n) \, \tau_{n-1,n} =
t(x_{n-1}, x_n) \, {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n, x_{n-1}) \, (-1)^{F_{n-1}F_{n}}
\end{equation}
The additional factor of the Taylor expansion operator
$t(x_{n-1}, x_n)$ compensates for the change in the reference point.
This formula can be motivated heuristically in a similar way as
the similar formulae in the identity axiom.
\medskip
\noindent
The factorization property~\eqref{factorization} is the core property of the
OPE coefficients that holds everything together. It is clear that it imposes very stringent
constraints on the possible consistent hierarchies $({\cal C}(x_1, x_2), {\cal C}(x_1, x_2, x_3),
\dots )$. The Euclidean invariance axiom
implies that the OPE coefficients are translation invariant, and it links the
decomposition~\eqref{decomp} of the field space into sectors of different spin to the transformation
properties of the OPE coefficients under the rotation group. The scaling property likewise
links the decomposition into sectors with different dimension to the scaling properties
of the OPE coefficients. The (anti-)symmetry property is a replacement for local
(anti-)commutativity (Einstein causality) in the Euclidean setting. Note that
we do not impose here as a condition that the familiar relation between spin and
statistics~\cite{Wightman} should hold. As we have shown in~\cite{HW08}, this may be derived
as a consequence of the above axioms in the variant considered there. Similarly,
we do not postulate any particular transformation properties under discrete
symmetries such as $C,P,T$, but we mention that one can derive the $PCT$-theorem
in this type of framework, as shown in~\cite{HPCT}. The same
result may also be proved in the present setting by very similar techniques,
but we shall not dwell upon this here.
In summary, in the following, a quantum field theory is defined as a pair
consisting of an infinite dimensional vector space $V$ with the above stated
properties, together with a hierarchy of OPE coefficients
${\cal C}:= ({\cal C}(x_1, x_2), {\cal C}(x_1, x_2, x_3), \dots)$
with the above stated properties. It is natural to identify quantum field theories if
they only differ by a redefinition of its fields. Informally, a field redefinition
means that one changes ones definition of the quantum fields of the theory
from $\phi_a(x)$ to $\widehat \phi_a(x) = \sum_b z_a^b \phi_b(x)$, where $z_a^b$ is some matrix on field space.
The OPE coefficients of the redefined fields differ from the original ones accordingly by
factors of this matrix. We formalize this in the following definition:
\begin{defn}\label{fieldred}
Let $(V, {\cal C})$ and $(\widehat V, \widehat {\cal C})$ be two quantum field theories. If there exists
an invertible linear map $z: V \to \widehat V$ with the properties
\begin{equation}
z \, R(g) = \hat R(g) \, z \,, \quad z \, \gamma = \hat \gamma \, z \, , \quad
z \, \star = \hat \star \, z \, ,
\end{equation}
together with
\begin{equation}
{\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) = z^{-1} \, \widehat {\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n) \, z^n
\end{equation}
for all $n$, where $z^n = z \otimes \dots \otimes z$, then the two quantum field
theories are said to be equivalent, and $z$ is said to be a field redefinition.
\end{defn}
We would finally like to impose a condition that the quantum field theory $(V, {\cal C})$ described
by the field space $V$ and the OPE coefficients ${\cal C}$ has a vacuum state.
Since we are working in a Euclidean setting here, the appropriate notion
of quantum state is a collection of Schwinger- or correlation functions, denoted as usual by
$\langle \phi_{a_1}(x_1) \cdots \phi_{a_n}(x_n) \rangle_\Omega$, where $n$ and $a_1, \dots, a_n$
can be arbitrary. These functions should be analytic functions on $M_n$ satisfying the
Osterwalder-Schrader (OS) axioms for the vacuum state $\Omega$~\cite{OS1,OS2}. They should also satisfy the
OPE in the sense that
\begin{equation}
\big\langle \phi_{a_1} (x_1) \cdots \phi_{a_n}(x_n) \big\rangle_\Omega \sim
\sum_{b} C_{a_1 \dots a_n}^b(x_1, \dots, x_n) \, \big\langle \phi_b(x_n) \big\rangle_\Omega \, .
\end{equation}
Here, the symbol $\sim$ means that the difference between the left and right side is
a distribution on $M_n$ whose scaling degree is smaller than any given number $\delta$
provided the above sum goes over all of the finitely many
fields $\phi_b$ whose dimension is smaller than some number $\Delta = \Delta(\delta)$.
The OS-reconstruction theorem then guarantees that the theory can
be continued back to Minkowski spacetime, and that the fields can be represented as
linear operators on a Hilbert space $\H$ of states. One may want to
impose only the weaker condition that there exist {\em some} quantum state for the
quantum field theory described by $({\cal C}, V)$. In that case, one would postulate the
existence of a set of Schwinger functions satisfying all of the
OS-axioms except those involving statements about the invariance under the Euclidean group.
Such a situation is of interest in theories with unbounded potentials where a
vacuum state is not expected to exist, but where the OPE might nevertheless exist.
It is clear that the existence of a vacuum state (or in fact, just any quantum state)
satisfying the OS-axioms is a potentially new restriction on the OPE coefficients.
We will not analyze here the nature of these restrictions, as our focus is on the algebraic
constraints satisfied by the OPE-coefficients. We only note here that the condition of
OS-positivity is not satisfied in some systems in statistical mechanics, and it is also
not satisfied in gauge theories before the quotient by the BRST-differential is taken~(see
sec.~\ref{hochschild}). These systems on the other hand do satisfy an OPE in a suitable sense.
Thus, one would expect that the existence of
a set of correlation functions satisfying the full set of
OS-axioms is a genuinely new restriction\footnote{
Consequences of OS-positivity have been analyzed in the context of partial wave expansions~\cite{Rehren1,Rehren2},
and also in the framework of~\cite{Mack1}.
} on
the allowed theory, which one might want to drop in some cases.
\section{Coherence theorem}\label{coherence}
In the last section we have laid out our definition of a quantum field theory in
terms of a collection of operator product coefficients. The key condition that
these should satisfy is the factorization property~\eqref{factorization}. It is
clear that these conditions should impose a set of very stringent constraints upon the
coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ for $n \ge 2$. In this section, we will analyze
these conditions and show that, in a sense, all of these constraints may be thought
of encoded in the first non-trivial one arising at $n=3$ points. We shall
refer to this type of result as a "coherence theorem", because it means that
all the factorization constraints are coherently described by a single condition
in the precise sense explained below.
Before we describe our result in detail, we would
like to put it into perspective by drawing a parallel to an analogous
result valid for ordinary algebras. Let ${\bf A}$ be a finite-dimensional algebra.
The key axiom for an algebra is the associativity condition, stating that
\begin{equation}\label{aassoc}
(AB)C = A(BC) \quad \text{for all $A,B,C \in {\bf A}$.}
\end{equation}
Written somewhat differently, if we write the product as
$m(A,B) = AB$ with $m$ a linear map $m: {\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$, then
in a tensor product notation similar to the one used above
in context of the OPE, the associativity condition is equivalent to
\begin{equation}\label{massoc}
m(id \otimes m) = m(m \otimes id) \, ,
\end{equation}
where the two sides of the above equation are now maps ${\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \otimes {\bf A} \to {\bf A}$.
An elementary result for algebras is that there do not arise any
further constraints on the product $m$ from "higher associativity conditions" such
as for example
\begin{equation}\label{ahigherass}
(AB)(CD) = (A(BC))D \quad \text{for all $A,B,C,D \in {\bf A}$.}
\end{equation}
Indeed, it is not difficult to prove this identity by successively
applying eq.~\eqref{aassoc}, and this can be generalized
to prove all possible higher associativity identities.
The associativity condition~\eqref{aassoc} is analogous to
the consistency conditions for the OPE coefficients arising from the
the factorization constraint~\eqref{factorization}
for three points. Moreover, the higher order associativity conditions~\eqref{ahigherass}
are analogous
to the conditions that arise from the factorization constraint for more than three
points. Thus, our coherence theorem is analogous to the above statement for
ordinary algebras that there are no higher order associativity constraints which
are not already automatically satisfied on account of the
standard associativity condition~\eqref{aassoc}.
Let us now describe our coherence result in more detail.
For $n=3$ points, there are three partitions of the set $\{1, 2, 3\}$ leading
to three corresponding non-trivial factorization conditions~\eqref{factorization}, namely\footnote{
Note that, in our formulation of the factorization condition, there is an ordering
condition on the partitions. Here we mean more precisely all conditions that can be obtained
by combining this with the symmetry axiom, which will give conditions for arbitrary orderings.}
${\bf T}_3:=\{ \{1, 2\}, \{3\} \}$, ${\bf T}_2 := \{ \{1, 3\}, \{2\} \}$, and ${\bf T}_1:=
\{ \{2, 3\}, \{1\} \}$. The corresponding domains on which the factorization
identities are valid are given respectively by
\begin{eqnarray}\label{threet}
D[{\bf T}_1] &=& \{(x_1, x_2, x_3) \mid r_{23} < r_{13} \} \, ,\\
D[{\bf T}_2] &=& \{(x_1, x_2, x_3) \mid r_{13} < r_{23} \} \, ,\\
D[{\bf T}_3] &=& \{(x_1, x_2, x_3) \mid r_{12} < r_{23} \} \, .
\end{eqnarray}
Clearly, the first two domains have no common points, but they both have an open,
non-empty intersection with the third domain. Thus, on each of
these intersections, we have two factorizations of the OPE coefficient
${\cal C}(x_1, x_2, x_3)$ according to eq.~\eqref{factorization}.
These must hence be equal. Thus,
we conclude that
\begin{equation}\label{Cassoc}
{\cal C}(x_2, x_3) \Big( {\cal C}(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big) = {\cal C}(x_1, x_3) \Big( id \otimes {\cal C}(x_2, x_3) \Big) \,
\end{equation}
on the intersection $D[{\bf T}_1] \cap D[{\bf T}_3]$ [that is, the set
$\{r_{12}<r_{23}<r_{13}\}$] and a similar relation must hold
on the intersection $D[{\bf T}_2] \cap D[{\bf T}_3]$. However, the latter relation is
can also be derived from eq.~\eqref{Cassoc} by the
symmetry axiom for the OPE coefficients stated in the previous section,
\begin{equation}\label{add1}
{\cal C}(x_1, x_2) = t(x_1, x_2) {\cal C}(x_2, x_1) \tau_{1,2} \,
\end{equation}
and the relation
\begin{equation}\label{add2}
{\cal C}(x_1, x_3) = {\cal C}(x_2, x_3)\Big( t(x_1, x_2) \otimes id \Big)
\end{equation}
for $r_{12} < r_{23}$.
Thus, for three points, essentially the only independent
consistency condition is eq.~\eqref{Cassoc}. In component form, this condition
was given above in eq.~\eqref{assoccomp}.
The consistency condition~\eqref{Cassoc} is analogous to the
associativity condition~\eqref{massoc} for the product in
an ordinary algebra. By analogy to an ordinary algebra, we may
hence ask whether there are any further constraints on ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ arising
from the higher order factorization equations~\eqref{factorization} with
$n \ge 4$. As we will now show, this is not the case. We also show that, as in
an ordinary algebra, the coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ analogous to a product
of $n$ factors are completely determined by the coefficient ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ analogous
to a product with two factors.
Our first task is to write down all factorization conditions involving only the
coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$. For this, it is useful to employ the language of rooted
trees. One way to describe a rooted tree on $n$ elements $\{1, \dots, n\}$ is
by a set $\{S_1, \dots, S_k\}$ of nested subsets $S_i \subset \{1, \dots, n\}$.
This is a family of subsets with the property that each set $S_i$ is either contained
in another set of the family, or disjoint from it. The set $\{1, \dots, n\}$ is
by definition not in the tree, and is referred to as the root.
The sets $S_i$ are to be thought of as the
nodes of the tree, and a node is connected by branches to all those nodes
that are subsets of $S_i$ but not proper subsets of any element of the tree other
than $S_i$. The leaves are those nodes that
themselves do not possess any other set $S_i$ in the tree and are
given by the singleton sets $S_i = \{i\}$. If ${\bf T}$ is a tree
on $n$ elements of a set, then we also denote by $|{\bf T}|$ the elements
of this set. Let ${\bf T}$ be a tree upon $n$
elements of the form ${\bf T} = \{ {\bf T}_1, \dots, {\bf T}_r \}$, where each ${\bf T}_i$ is
itself a tree on a proper subset of $\{1, \dots, n\}$, so that $|{\bf T}_1| \cup \dots \cup
|{\bf T}_r| = \{1, \dots, n\}$ is a partition into disjoint subsets.
We define an open, non-empty domain of $M_n$ for such trees recursively
by
\begin{eqnarray}\label{dtdef}
D[{\bf T}] &=&
\bigg\{
(x_1, \dots, x_n) \in M_n \mid X_{|{\bf T}_1|} \in D[{\bf T}_1], \dots,
X_{|{\bf T}_r|} \in D[{\bf T}_r]; \nonumber\\
&&{\rm min} \, d(X_{\{m_1, \dots, m_r\}}) > {\rm max} \, (d(X_{|{\bf T}_1|}), \dots, d(X_{|{\bf T}_r|}))
\bigg\}
\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $m_i$ is the maximum element upon which the tree ${\bf T}_i$ is
built, and where we are using the same notations $d(X_I)$ and
$X_I = (x_i)_{i \in I}$ as above for any subset $I \subset \{1, \dots, n\}$.
If ${\bf T}_i$ are the trees with only a single node apart from the leaves,
then the above domain is identical with the domain defined above in the
factorization axiom~\eqref{factorization}, see eq.~\eqref{domaindef} with
$I_i$ in that definition given by the elements of the $i$-th subtree ${\bf T}_i$.
Otherwise, it is a proper open subset of that domain. In
any case, the factorization identity~\eqref{factorization} holds on $D[{\bf T}]$.
However, we may now iterate the factorization identity, because the
factors ${\cal C}(X_{|{\bf T}_i|})$ now themselves factorize on $D[{\bf T}]$, given
that $X_{|{\bf T}_i|} \in D[{{\bf T}_i}]$. We apply the factorization condition
to this term again, and continuing this way, we get a nested factorization identity on
each of the above domains $D[{\bf T}]$.
To write down these identities in a reasonably compact way,
we introduce some more notation. If $S \in {\bf T}$, we write
$\ell(1), \dots, \ell(j) \subset_{\bf T} S$ if $\ell(1), \dots, \ell(j)$ are the
branches descending from $S$ in the tree ${\bf T}$. We write
$m_i$ for the largest element in the sets $\ell(i)$, and we assume that the branches
have been ordered in such a way that $m_1 < \dots < m_j$.
As above in eq.~\eqref{Ccompdef}, we let
$C_{a_1 \dots a_n}^b(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ be the
basis components of the linear maps ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n): V^{\otimes n} \to V$.
Then, for each tree ${\bf T}$ on $\{1, \dots, n\}$, the
following factorization identity holds on the domain $D[{\bf T}]$:
\begin{equation}\label{treefactor}
C_{a_1 \dots a_n}^b(x_1, \dots, x_n) =
\sum_{a_S: S \in {\bf T}} \left( \prod_{S: \ell(1), \dots, \ell(j) \subset_{\bf T} S}
C^{a_S}_{a_{\ell(1)} \dots a_{\ell(j)}}
(x_{m_1}, \dots, x_{m_j}) \right) \, .
\end{equation}
Here, the sums are over all $a_S$ with $S$ a subset in the tree not equal to $\{1\}, \dots, \{n\}$
respectively
$\{1, \dots, n\}$ . For these sets, we define
$a_{\{1\}} := a_1, \dots, a_{\{n\}} := a_n$ respectively
$a_{\{1, \dots, n\}} := b$. The nested infinite sums are carried
out in the hierarchical order determined by the tree, with the sums corresponding
to the nodes closest to the leaves first. If ${\bf T}$ is a binary
tree, i.e., one where precisely two branches descend from each node, then
the above factorization formula expresses the $n$-point
OPE coefficient ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ in
terms of products of the 2-point coefficient in the open domain $D[{\bf T}] \subset M_n$.
Since ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ is by assumption analytic in the open, connected domain $M_n$,
and since an analytic function on a connected domain
is uniquely determined by its restriction to an open set, we have the
following simple proposition:
\begin{prop}\label{proposition1}
The $n$-point OPE-coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ are uniquely determined
by the 2-point coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$. In particular, if two quantum
field theories have equivalent 2-point OPE coefficients [see the previous section],
then they are equivalent.
\end{prop}
We next ask whether the factorization condition~\eqref{treefactor}
for binary trees ${\bf T}$ imposes any further restrictions on ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$ apart
from~\eqref{Cassoc}. For this, consider for any binary tree ${\bf T}$ the expression
\begin{equation}\label{ftdef}
(f_{\bf T})^b_{a_1 \dots a_n}(x_1, \dots, x_n) :=
\sum_{a_S: S \in {\bf T}} \left( \prod_{S: \ell(1), \ell(2) \subset_{\bf T} S}
C^{a_S}_{a_{\ell(1)} a_{\ell(2)}}
(x_{m_1}, x_{m_2}) \right)
\end{equation}
defined on the domain $D[{\bf T}]$.
Thus, $f_{\bf T}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ is the expression for
${\cal C}(x_1, \dots, x_n)$ in the factorization condition~\eqref{treefactor}
for the binary tree ${\bf T}$. This factorization condition hence implies that
$f_{\bf T}$ can be analytically continued to an analytic function on $M_n$
(denoted again by $f_{\bf T}$), and that this $f_{\bf T}$ is in fact independent
of the choice of the binary tree ${\bf T}$. In order to see to what kinds of
constraints this puts on the 2-point OPE coefficients ${\cal C}(x_1, x_2)$, let us now
pretend we only knew that the sums converge in
eq.~\eqref{ftdef}, that they define
an analytic function $f_{\bf T}$ on $D[{\bf T}]$, and that this can be analytically
continued to $M_n$, for all $n$ and all binary trees on $n$ elements.
In particular, for the sake of the argument,
let us {\em not} assume that the $f_{\bf T}$ coincide for different binary trees ${\bf T}$,
except in the case $n=3$. In this case, the assumption that $f_{\bf T}$ coincide for the
three binary trees and corresponding domains~\eqref{threet} is equivalent
to the assumption of associativity for three points [see eq.~\eqref{Cassoc}]
and the symmetry and normalization conditions~\eqref{add1},\eqref{add2},
and we | 7,392 |
Busta Rhymes is working on his first album in over half a decade, the follow up to 2012's Year of the Dragon. Today (Feb. 2), we get the Brooklyn rap legend's new single, "Get It," featuring Missy Elliott and Kelly Rowland.
Busta and Missy's chemistry is a match made in rap heaven, as they play off of each other's energy on the uptempo track, which is paced by hand claps and pounding<|fim_middle|> momentum going rapping, "Hop to the hop drop like a drop top/Everybody looking when I step up in the spot/See the way I rock, I'm hot you not/Everybody wanna cop, man get off my jock/Everybody know Misdemeanor don't stop and my records don't flop/Got the game on lock."
This isn't the first time the two have linked up. They previously collabed on 1998's "Contact."
In related news, Busta and Missy recently teamed up for a Mountain Dew and Doritos ad that will air during the Super Bowl. In the hilarious clip, the rappers prepare Morgan Freeman and Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage for an epic tongue-twister battle.
Listen to Busta Rhymes' new Missy Elliott and Kelly Rowland collab "Get It" below. | bass. "Why y'all money always coming in slow?/Peep game, 'cause you never getting started though/This right here be the anthem for all of my women and every one of my gangsta, yo!" Buss spits.
Missy keeps the | 55 |
Polo G, de son vrai Taurus Tremani Bartlett, né le à Chicago (Illinois), est un rappeur et chanteur américain.
Il s'est fait connaître en 2018 avec son single "Finer Things". En 2019, il s'est fait connaître du grand public avec son single "Pop Out<|fim_middle|> son propre label de disques, ODA Records, en partenariat avec Columbia Records. ODA est l'acronyme de "Only Dreamers Achieve Records". Le premier artiste signé sur ODA est Scorey, un artiste de Syracuse, New York.
Discographie
(2019)
(2020)
Hall of Fame (2021)
Références
Liens externes
Rappeur américain
Naissance en janvier 1999
Naissance à Chicago
Nom de scène
Artiste de Columbia Records | " (en featuring avec Lil Tjay), qui a atteint la 11e place du Billboard Hot 100. Les singles ont été inclus dans son premier album studio, Die a Legend (2019), qui a atteint le numéro 6 du Billboard 200 américain et a été certifié RIAA Platine. Le deuxième album studio de Bartlett, The Goat (2020), a atteint le numéro 2 du Billboard 200 américain et comprend dix singles classés au Hot 100. Son troisième album studio, Hall of Fame sortie le 11 juin 2021 et atteindra la 1er place des Billboard 200 américain grâce à plusieurs singles comme "Epidémic", ou encore "Party life" (en featuring avec DaBaby). Mais cela sera surtout rendu possible grâce à son plus gros single à se jour "Rapstar" dans lequel il se compare à une légende du rap; Tupac Shakur. "Rapstar" atteindra en un week-end la place de n°1 du Billboard 200 américain. Le 3 décembre 2021, Polo G sortira la réédition de son album Hall of Fame qui s'intitule "Hall of Fame 2.0".
Biographie
Jeunesse
Bartlett est né dans le quartier Old Town de Chicago, dans l'Illinois. Il est le deuxième d'une fratrie de quatre enfants, ayant une sœur aînée, un frère cadet et une sœur cadette.
Carrière et histoire
2018-2019 : Débuts, contrat en maison de disques et Die a Legend
La toute première chanson enregistrée par Bartlett s'intitulait "ODA", qu'il a publiée sur YouTube. Après avoir créé un compte SoundCloud en 2018, il a publié le titre "Gang WithMe", qui a rapidement accumulé des millions de lectures. Il a continué à gagner en popularité avec ses chansons "Welcome Back" et "Neva Cared". Bartlett a ensuite publié "Finer Things", une chanson qu'il a écrite pendant son incarcération, dans la seconde moitié de 2018 et a rapidement gagné des millions de vues. Au début de 2019, Bartlett a publié "Pop Out" en featuring avec Lil Tjay, qui a atteint la 11e place du Billboard Hot 100. Le clip de la chanson a obtenu plus de 200 millions de vues sur YouTube et l'a conduit à signer un contrat d'enregistrement avec Columbia Records. Bartlett a également publié des vidéos pour ses chansons "Deep Wounds", "Through Da Storm", "Effortless" et "Dyin' Breed" de son premier album studio Die a Legend, qui est sorti le 7 juin 2019 et a atteint le numéro 6 du Billboard 200. "Heartless", un single sorti plus tard en 2019, comportait une production de Mustard, et a ensuite figuré sur son deuxième album.
2020-actuel: The Goat et Hall of Fame
Le 14 février 2020, Bartlett a sorti le titre " Go Stupid ", avec les rappeurs Stunna 4 Vegas et NLE Choppa, avec une production vedette de Mike Will Made It et une coproduction de Tay Keith. "Go Stupid" est devenu sa deuxième chanson sur le Hot 100 (après "Pop Out"), atteignant le numéro 60 sur le Hot 100, le numéro 29 sur Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, et le numéro 20 sur Hot Rap Songs. Bartlett a ensuite sorti son deuxième album studio, The Goat, le 15 mai 2020. L'album a débuté à la deuxième place du Billboard 200 et dix chansons de l'album ont atteint le Hot 100, notamment "Flex" en featuring avec Juice Wrld et "Be Something" en featuring avec Lil Baby, atteignant respectivement les numéros 30 et 57. Le même mois, on le retrouve aux côtés de Lil Baby sur "3 Headed Goat" de Lil Durk, qui atteint la 43e place du Billboard Hot 100. En juillet, Bartlett figure sur l'album posthume de Juice Wrld, Legends Never Die, sur la chanson "Hate the Other Side". La chanson a culminé à la 10e place du Billboard Hot 100, son premier single au top 10 et sa chanson la mieux classée au total. Le 11 août 2020, il a été inclus dans le XXL's 2020 Freshman Class. Plus tard dans le mois, il a publié le clip de son single "Martin & Gina", qui a atteint la 61e place du Billboard Hot 100. En septembre, il a sorti le single "Epidemic", qui a atteint la 47e place du Billboard Hot 100. Le 30 octobre 2020, il a participé à la chanson "The Code" de King Von, tirée de son premier album Welcome to O'Block. La chanson a atteint la 66e place du Billboard Hot 100 et s'est classée au Canada.
Bartlett a été honoré dans la liste Forbes 30 Under 30 de 2021, dans la catégorie musique, et le 5 février 2021, il a sorti le single "GNF (OKOKOK)". Le 5 mars, Bartlett a figuré sur la bande-son du film Boogie de 2021 sur la chanson "Fashion" du défunt rappeur Pop Smoke. Bartlett a collaboré avec Lil Tjay et Fivio Foreign sur la chanson "Headshot", sortie le 19 mars. En mai 2020, Bartlett ainsi que la personnalité des médias sociaux Einer Bankz se sont rendus sur Instagram pour publier un extrait d'un prochain single de Polo G. La vidéo est rapidement devenue virale, accumulant des millions de vues sur les plateformes de médias sociaux, notamment TikTok. La chanson a ensuite été révélée comme étant intitulée "Rapstar" et est sortie le 9 avril 2021.
Vie privée
Bartlett a un fils nommé Tremani. En août 2019, lors d'une fête en l'honneur de son ami décédé, il a failli mourir après une overdose. Il a depuis cessé de consommer de l'ecstasy et du Xanax.
Style artistique
Polo G était à l'origine connu pour son son drill de Chicago, mais a finalement fait la transition vers un style plus mélodique. Il a été remarqué pour sa "narration vive et explicite" ; ses paroles abordent souvent des sujets difficiles, notamment le racisme et la santé mentale. Il rend aussi régulièrement hommage à sa ville natale et, comme l'a noté Ayana Rashed de Respect, "il est également prompt à reconnaître l'injustice commune et la brutalité policière fréquente auxquelles lui et tant d'autres sont confrontés au quotidien". Il a déclaré que le rappeur américain Lil Wayne et l'icône du hip-hop Tupac Shakur sont ses plus grandes influences. Il a également grandi en écoutant Gucci Mane, ainsi que les rappeurs de Chicago Lil Durk, G Herbo et Chief Keef.
Autres entreprises
ODA Records (Only Dreamers Achieve Records)
En septembre 2020, Polo G a annoncé la création de | 1,766 |
Get ahead of the Energy curve or fall behind
Bob Marshall wrote on the windmill action in the Gulf with the Governors task force and the winds that make it a good site. Today Stephanie Grace seconds his observations saying you either move forward or you move backwards. I prefer the forward movement!
"I thought we were an oil and gas state the whole time I've been here," state Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton, said in a widely quoted comment during the recent legislative session. And it's true. Louisiana is indeed an oil and gas state. One that exists in an increasingly renewable energy country, and world. That makes the coming revolution a threat, in the framing of Mizell and many other Louisiana politicians. Indeed, Mizell went on to warn of "choosing solar over oil and gas," even though the pushback during the session came largely from farmers fearing they'll lose available land to solar plants, not from oil and gas interests. But it's also an opportunity, if only the state's powers-that-be engage with the new energy economy rather than fight changes that are happening no matter what they do.
President Biden represents both a push from the top as well as action from the bottom. First he is not at war with oil, which the oil companies say, but rather he looks at renewables as the saving of our planet. Federally, we want carbon net-zero neutrality by 2050. That is the push from the top. The electorate elected him as they also see renewables as being good. Even the Governor is pushing for windmills in the Gulf, so the middle is involved also.
That wind isn't just metaphorical. Offshore wind power is actually having something of a moment in these parts, which lag far behind other areas in development. With Gov. John Bel Edwards taking a leading role, there's now a task force of officials from Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama exploring the possibility of offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Mexico. This week, Edwards' administration is hosting a series of online seminars on related issues. GNO Inc. has started GNOwind Alliance to help local players get a piece of the $1 trillion of expected new investment by 2040, by supplying existing projects in the northeast and by eventually developing offshore facilities in the Gulf. As for solar, there's good reason to believe farmers' doomsday fears are misplaced. Stephen Wright, executive director of Gulf States Renewable Energy Industry Association, told my colleague Sam Karlin that solar developments would take up less than 1% of available Louisiana farmland in the unlikely scenario in which solar ever became as widespread here as it is<|fim_middle|> a force in Louisiana for the foreseeable future, and there are environmental technologies such as carbon capture that will keep them in the mix.
The reality is that the world is moving in one direction and Louisiana is moving in the reverse direction. This will mean we lose and that is a shame as we can win by looking to the future.
Tagged on: Louisiana Opposition Wind Energy
George Bond June 23, 2021 June 23, 2021 Advocacy, Media Watch
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The last days at Isle de Jean Charles
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In one area we are first after being last in many others
7,000 miles away a glacier that impacts us | in California.
Politicians don't listen but still fight, which may be a rear guard action, against renewable energy. Mizell says farmers come to him crying because of the competition. House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, has proposed legislation to deny tax breaks to wind energy. Some parishes have also passed legislation to curb renewable energy.
A bill by state Sen. Bret Allain, R-Franklin, asking the state to craft regulations for utility-scale solar plants may help resolve questions. But there's also clearly some work to be done winning over hearts and minds of many in power. That means understanding that economic disruption is inevitable, and being straight with those affected. It means focusing on what's at stake, not just jobs but the environmental risk of resisting action, in an age of rising seas and more frequent and ferocious storms that leave the state particularly vulnerable. It means understanding that the changes will create winners and losers. Oil and gas will remain | 198 |
Tioman Island Conservation Day 2018 Preserve for Our Future
Berjaya Tioman Resort has once again successfully organized Tioman Island Conservation Day (TICD) alongside with their official partners Scuba People, Reef Check Malaysia, Malaysian New Zealand Chamber of Commerce and The Taaras Beach & Spa Resort on the 26th – 28th October. With a vision of preserving the sanctuary of the marine life and island's well-being, a total of 150 participants, media<|fim_middle|> activities such as beach clean-up at Bunut Beach.
Every year, TICD will have one marine icon to be highlighted throughout the event. This year, the icon is shark. We believe that we need to instil the environmental awareness from young as they are the future of the world. In order to create the awareness, Berjaya Tioman Resort shared more with the lead of Tioman Environment Officer about sharks and why we need to protect them.
TICD 2018 has demonstrated the true meaning of togetherness and teamwork, driven by the passion for the environment. With the growing passion of going green in our society, Berjaya Tioman Resort continues to identify new ways to strengthen environmentally-friendly practices and encourage sustainability. Caring for the environment is becoming a vital part of our 'Legacy of Care' by Berjaya, instilled by its founder Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan. We are committed to maintain the Tioman Island Conservation Day as part of the corporate social responsibility to give back to the Mother Nature. This event was sponsored by Sports Toto Malaysia Sdn Bhd with generous supports from Cosway Malaysia, Carlsberg and Starbucks Malaysia. | and sponsors had come together and made it an eventful project. Representatives from Scuba People, Reef Check, Jabatan Perikanan Malaysia, Yayasan Coral Malaysia, Jabatan Taman Laut and 7 dive operators from Malaysia and Singapore were also present to show their support towards this event.
TICD has been an ongoing CSR event since 2010 with the continuous support from PADI Project Aware, dive centres and passionate divers from around the region and members of the media. With the dedication of conserving the environment both land and marine, divers and non-divers from all over Malaysia & Singapore comes together and participates in this significant event. Resort Manager, Mr. Charles Eman quotes, 'Berjaya Tioman Resort believe in 'what we take, we give back' as the pillar of conservation.'
This year TICD continues to extend the project by expanding the project area by providing a bigger area of conducive environment for corals and marine life by deploying 2 giant coral structures and 5 coral structures with a new coral replanting method which uses ropes instead of the usual steel rod and cement structure. These coral structures comprise of a giant shark and turtle along with 5 tree structures. All these coral structures were built and submerged underwater to further encourage the growth of coral reefs. As part of the underwater clean-up, the divers also scoured through the ocean to restore the cleanliness of the seabed.
As for the non-diver participants, they experience an out of ordinarary series of activities such as participating in building their very own Fish House alongside with Tioman Island's school children. This Fish House Project is an artificial reef method. Fish House project has benefits to coral reef eco-system in various ways, one of them is to restore the coral reef by providing base (hard surface) for coral settlement and recruitment which will help in building coral reef structure for long term result. On the other hand, this structure also acts as shelter for small organisms, such as small fishes, crabs, shrimps, and shells. A part from that, Fish House also provide a new foraging area for the fishes for feeding purposes. Participants had the opportunity to deploy their fish houses into the ocean. They also helped out to build the coral structures before the divers submerges it underwater to plant the coral and land conservation | 473 |
The world today has truly become a global village. Our students are connected to various international activities by the simple fact that technology is available to them. Individual efforts are already in place, wherein the students have a wide exposure to international links. As a school, our primary goal is to make a conscious effort to<|fim_middle|> international cuisine. | link groups of students to one another across the world and hence initiate understanding of global issues. We hope that a tiny spark which is ignited during the formative years in school develops into a passion which enhances international peace and understanding thus making the world a more compassionate place for all.
* To develop a conscious awareness about international issues and enable the child to feel part of a larger global and shrinking world.
* To teach the child to face the challenges of today and take on the role of an active and responsible citizen.
* To help the child develop a genuine love for history and to understand how past events affect and influence the present and the future.
* To expose the child to philosophy, literature, music, art and culture from different parts of the world in order to appreciate the diversity of our planet.
* To understand stereotypes and biases which are endemic to closed cultures and to evolve into open-minded and tolerant human beings.
* To appreciate our own heritage and culture and understand it in a wider global context.
* To learn about situations which go far beyond the text book, and link different disciplines and languages.
* To develop confidence in one's own ability and feel secure that their learning will surpass all boundaries and restrictions.
* To sensitize children so that they may be more compassionate towards all sentient beings.
* To increase staff capability towards international understanding.
* To create opportunities for learning which include an international dimension to all subjects.
* To establish links with schools from other parts of the world.
* To engage in a multitude of creative activities which help children express themselves freely.
* To ensure that teachers work with one another beyond the confines of the subjects and textbooks.
* To liaise with visitors who come to the school from different parts of the world.
* To seize every opportunity for our students to travel and meet people from varied backgrounds and cultures.
* To expose the staff members to the international dimension of learning.
* To initiate a process of sharing of all activities through discussions and displays.
* To expose the students to a range of | 403 |
This is the underlying message of virtually every question people bring me.
So you're probably wondering the same thing<|fim_middle|> trust. | !
In this blog, I'll share a valuable tool for creating exactly what you want - I call it the GPS metaphor.
Just as with Waze, finding your way to your desired destination requires knowing where you're going - and in your life, that means knowing what you truly want! This is step #1 in creating the life you want to live.
It seems simple, but it's not a trivial thing.
Because the truth is, most people don't.
Many of us have forgotten to give ourselves permission to explore what we want - let alone pursue it and bring it into our lives.
You have full permission to want what you want - and receive it. Every pleasurable morsel - just for you.
What do I truly want to have/be/do in my life?
Let yourself start with whatever is clear to you. Explore what lights you up.
Get specific about it. Choose the things that feel really alive and juicy for you right now. That's your destination.
And once you have a clear goal in mind, you can use this simple GPS metaphor to create what you want - FAST.
Think about GPS for a moment: using an expertly programmed database that's full of evolving information, GPS determines the best route to your destination. It tells you where to go, which street to turn on, and your estimated arrival time. If you miss an exit, no big deal: GPS will tell you the next exit to take, so you can make a legal U-turn.
This is exactly how your Universal guidance system works.
When you're creating a new result in your life, your destination might be an experience you want to create, a goal you want to reach, an amount of money you want to make, etc.
2. Next, you must know your current location, your starting point.
Where are you now? This information is critical, because it will determine which set of directions you need to follow in order to get there. If you're starting in New York and trying to get to Florida, your directions will be way different than if you're starting in California. So where are you now, in relationship to your goal?
3. Finally, you simply need to follow the directions.
Listen. Take one step at a time. Trust that the next step will be given. And keep paying attention!
And note: figuring the "how" is NOT your job.
And the cool part is, the Universal guidance system leading you toward your desired destination is SO MUCH MORE more sophisticated than Google maps. You're in very good hands with this divine navigator, if you're willing to follow that guidance. Let go of knowing all the steps in advance and | 537 |
Membership in American Federation of Musicians in the U.S. 2000 - 2013
Published by Statista Research Department, May 9, 2017
This statistic shows the number of members in the American Federation of Musicians in the United States from 2000 to 2013. In 2013, 79,600 union members were counted.
Americas Federation of Musicians is the union representing musicians from the U.S. and Canada.
Number of members in American Federation of Musicians in the United States from 2000 to 2013 (in thousands)*
Number of members in thousands
* Numbers have been rounded to provide a better understanding of the statistic.
Figures for years before 2002 come from previous reports
Leading auction houses worldwide in 2018 by fine art revenue
Most visited art museums worldwide 2018
Leading countries in contemporary art revenue in 2017/2018
Number of visitors to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. 2007-20<|fim_middle|> culture occupations in the U.S. 1999-2013
Employees in creative industries in the U.S. 2003-2013
Art market in the United Kingdom (UK) Theater & Broadway in the U.S. Art market Museums
Americans for the Arts. (April 8, 2016). Number of members in American Federation of Musicians in the United States from 2000 to 2013 (in thousands)* [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved January 20, 2020, from https://cdn1.statista.com/statistics/192641/membership-in-american-federation-of-musicians-in-the-us/
Americans for the Arts. "Number of members in American Federation of Musicians in the United States from 2000 to 2013 (in thousands)*." Chart. April 8, 2016. Statista. Accessed January 20, 2020. https://cdn1.statista.com/statistics/192641/membership-in-american-federation-of-musicians-in-the-us/
Americans for the Arts. (2016). Number of members in American Federation of Musicians in the United States from 2000 to 2013 (in thousands)*. Statista. Statista Inc.. Accessed: January 20, 2020. https://cdn1.statista.com/statistics/192641/membership-in-american-federation-of-musicians-in-the-us/
Americans for the Arts. "Number of Members in American Federation of Musicians in The United States from 2000 to 2013 (in Thousands)*." Statista, Statista Inc., 8 Apr 2016, https://cdn1.statista.com/statistics/192641/membership-in-american-federation-of-musicians-in-the-us/
Americans for the Arts, Number of members in American Federation of Musicians in the United States from 2000 to 2013 (in thousands)* Statista, https://cdn1.statista.com/statistics/192641/membership-in-american-federation-of-musicians-in-the-us/ (last visited January 20, 2020) | 18
Statistics on "Art market in the United States"
Value of the art market worldwide 2007-2018
Global art market share in 2018, by country
Volume of transactions in the art market worldwide 2007-2018
Federal funding to the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S. 2002-2018
Leading art exhibitions worldwide 2018 by total visitor numbers
Leading art exhibitions worldwide in 2018, by number of daily visitors
Revenue, support and transfers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2011 to 2019
Expenses of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2018 to 2019, by category
Visits to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (With the Renwick Gallery) 2007-2018
Number of visits to the National Museum of African Art in the U.S. 2001-2018
Locations of the richest 200 art collectors worldwide by number of collectors in 2018
Share of art collectors in the U.S. as of February 2018, by gender
Percentage of art collectors in the U.S. as of February 2018, by age
Reasons for collecting art among millennial art collectors U.S. 2018
Reasons for collecting art among art collectors in the U.S. as of February 2018
Percentage of the worldwide auction market in 2018, by country
Market share of fine art auction revenue worldwide in 2018, by country
Sales at public art auctions in the U.S. 2010-2018
Distribution of fine art auctions in the West by price range 2018
Leading artists worldwide in 2018, by auction revenue
Leading art auction performances worldwide in 2018, by hammer price
Contemporary artworks with the highest auction price worldwide July 2017 to June 2018
Membership in the American Guild of Musical Artists in the U.S. 2000-2013
Membership in the Screen Actors Guild in the U.S. 2000 - 2013
Membership in arts-related unions in the U.S. 2000-2013
Number of members of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society U.S. 2000-2013
Number of members of the Writers Guild of America East in the U.S. 2000-2013
Number of members of the Writers Guild of America West in the U.S. 2000-2013
Number of members of the Directors Guild of America in the U.S. 2000-2013
Number of members of the Actors Equity union in the U.S. 2000-2013
Number of members of the American Guild of Variety Artists in the U.S. 2000-2013
Members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists U.S. 2000-2012
International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees members U.S. 2000-2013
Number of musicians in the U.S. 2011-2014
Number of independent artists, writers and performers in the U.S. 2000-2013
Federal funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. 2002-2013
Federal spending per capita on arts and culture in the U.S. 2013
State funding of art agencies in the U.S. 1999-2013
Local government funding of local arts agencies U.S. 2013
Funding of the Arts in Education program U.S. 2013
Workers in arts and | 863 |
The wedding gods continued to shine down on us this week-end with the stunningly beautiful Marsha & handsome Jason at the Popponesset Inn in Mashpee. Not only did they bless us with delightful weather they also provided us a couple who was crazy in love and as happy as you'll ever see a pair of newlyweds. The wedding was so much fun and the tent always shows the out-of towners the very best of Cape Cod.
Additional happiness was provided by Shannon Kennedy &<|fim_middle|> our lives!!
Love you both so much!!!
Frank Coombs - Amazing Bride & Groom making it easy!!
Marsha and Jason - Amazing photos!!!!!!!!
Wilma - Great pics, great couple & amazing night! Hanks Frank & Helen! Love u guys!!!!
Frank Coombs - Love you better! | Michelle Smoller of Artworx of Sandwich with flawless hair & make-up artistry, great tunes by Dave Solimine of Good Times Unlimited and the always amazing Wilma Lopez of the Popponesset who always makes EVERYONE happy! Congratulations Marsha & Jason , we hope you enjoy a perfect honeymoon in BVI!!
Janice Jasset - This was one of the happiest day of | 79 |
Home › Events › Dylan Scott
Dylan Scott
By Michael Macsuga • November 26, 2018<|fim_middle|> or whatever. There was always this understanding that someday, somehow, I would go to Nashville."
Dylan Scott's next big step is just around the corner. |
Date: February 15, 2019 9:00 PM – 11:30 PM
Venue: Ritz Raleigh
An old soul with a young spirit … a dreamer who imagined himself following his father's path to Nashville … a man's man with a lifelong love for hunting and country music … and a heartthrob whose wide smile and deep-voiced Louisiana drawl have already turned many a woman's head.
Even in the tide of hopeful young singers rising daily in Music City,
stands out. It takes just a few seconds to hear why: after Scott's vocal begins on his single "Crazy Over Me," intimate, even conversational, and then soars on a rush of buoyant emotion, you know something special is underway.
Not just the single, mind you — we're talking about a career. Dylan Scott's respect for traditional country, embrace of multiple modern genres, unique voice and welcoming personality guarantee his success in country music for years to come.
Everything that defines Dylan Scott lies in rural northeastern Louisiana, about 15 minutes from Bastrop, the nearest small town. "Growing up in the country is part of my music," he says. "There were woods near our house. I grew up duck hunting and deer hunting. I went fishing and I played ball. That's just what we did and who we were."
What made Scott different was that his father was often out of town and on the road, playing guitar behind Freddy Fender, Freddie Hart, and other country stars. Young Dylan listened attentively to stories of Dad's adventures on the road and in Nashville, which took shape in his imagination as a kind of Emerald City beyond the horizon.
"From as far back as I can remember, I wanted to go there," Scott says. "Even in elementary school, that's all I thought about. I never thought, 'Gee, I'd like to be a police officer' | 398 |
The Tasmanian bushfires in January 201<|fim_middle|> visitors' shoot to say thank you. | 3 were seared onto people's hearts and minds by televised scenes of a desperate mother clinging to her children at Dunalley wharf while fire consumed the town. The bushfires also devastated many other properties and the SSAA Blue Hills Shooters Club, not far from Dunalley, was totally ravaged on January 4, 2013.
From twisted iron sheets, warped and burned out storage containers and charred target frames, the club has since been rebuilt and is once again flourishing, three years on from the fire.
Our insurancer, through SSAA Insurance Brokers, was quick to inspect the damage and paid out the total sum of the insured value, but the money was insufficient to rebuild a suitable clubhouse. An extra payout from the government due to total loss helped top up the payout to a reasonable level and it was decided to relocate some transportable office units from the recently closed down Beaconsfield Gold Mine near Launceston.
We quickly found out that trying to reassemble five secondhand office units into a new configuration for a clubhouse was not going to be easy. Fresh plans had to be drawn up and planning and building permits approved before we could start the reconstruction. Leading the building program was John Featherstone, a recently retired builder from the Port Arthur Historic Site. John was ably assisted by Graeme Everett and several other volunteers who spent the better part of 18 months building a clubhouse from the old units to create a fine new structure. Everything had to be built to meet new regulations, including strict insulation and safety standards, which were not in place when we bought the units.
Australians are generous when someone is down on their luck. SSAA Tasmania provided a grant and several local private companies and clubs such as Lions donated equipment and money for our rebuild. With dogged persistence, the remodelled clubhouse took shape, a new container was installed and target frames renewed. It is well known that in a crisis you quickly discover your real friends. Some who were not part of our circle before the disaster became our friends and some emerged from the shadows to become our strongest allies.
In early April, the clubhouse received its permit to occupy. We have a new range approval and we have plans to invite all our sponsors and benefactors to a | 459 |
Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble
by Covid Strategies | Jan 7<|fim_middle|>ist. "Society has decided to move on with their lives, and it's hard to blame health-care workers for doing the same," she said. | , 2022 | Featured, Science & News
Omicron is inundating a health-care system that was already buckling under the cumulative toll of every previous surge.
By Ed Yong
hen a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what's wrong happens invisibly. At first, there's just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that "you'll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it," Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are in short supply. Then delay becomes absence. The little acts of compassion that make hospital stays tolerable disappear. Next go the acts of necessity that make stays survivable. Nurses might be so swamped that they can't check whether a patient has their pain medications or if a ventilator is working correctly. People who would've been fine will get sicker. Eventually, people who would have lived will die. This is not conjecture; it is happening now, across the United States. "It's not a dramatic Armageddon; it happens inch by inch," Anand Swaminathan, an emergency physician in New Jersey, told me.
In this surge, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose slowly at first, from about 40,000 nationally in early November to 65,000 on Christmas. But with the super-transmissible Delta variant joined by the even-more-transmissible Omicron, the hospitalization count has shot up to 110,000 in the two weeks since then. "The volume of people presenting to our emergency rooms is unlike anything I've ever seen before," Kit Delgado, an emergency physician in Pennsylvania, told me. Health-care workers in 11 different states echoed what he said: Already, this surge is pushing their hospitals to the edge. And this is just the beginning. Hospitalizations always lag behind cases by about two weeks, so we're only starting to see the effects of daily case counts that have tripled in the past 14 days (and are almost certainly underestimates). By the end of the month, according to the CDC's forecasts, COVID will be sending at least 24,700 and up to 53,700 Americans to the hospital every single day.
This surge is, in many ways, distinct from the ones before. About 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and are still mostly protected against the coronavirus's worst effects. When people do become severely ill, health-care workers have a better sense of what to expect and what to do. Omicron itself seems to be less severe than previous variants, and many of the people now testing positive don't require hospitalization. But such cases threaten to obscure this surge's true cost.
Omicron is so contagious that it is still flooding hospitals with sick people. And America's continued inability to control the coronavirus has deflated its health-care system, which can no longer offer the same number of patients the same level of care. Health-care workers have quit their jobs in droves; of those who have stayed, many now can't work, because they have Omicron breakthrough infections. "In the last two years, I've never known as many colleagues who have COVID as I do now," Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, told me. "The staffing crisis is the worst it has been through the pandemic." This is why any comparisons between past and present hospitalization numbers are misleading: January 2021's numbers would crush January 2022's system because the workforce has been so diminished. Some institutions are now being overwhelmed by a fraction of their earlier patient loads. "I hope no one you know or love gets COVID or needs an emergency room right now, because there's no room," Janelle Thomas, an ICU nurse in Maryland, told me.
Here, then, is the most important difference about this surge: It comes on the back of all the prior ones. COVID's burden is additive. It isn't reflected just in the number of occupied hospital beds, but also in the faltering resolve and thinning ranks of the people who attend those beds. "This just feels like one wave too many," Ranney said. The health-care system will continue to pay these costs long after COVID hospitalizations fall. Health-care workers will know, but most other people will be oblivious—until they need medical care and can't get it.
The Patients
The patients now entering American hospitals are a little different from those who were hospitalized in prior surges. Studies from South Africa and the United Kingdom have confirmed what many had hoped: Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, and it is less likely to send its hosts to the hospital. British trends support those conclusions: As the Financial Times' John Burn-Murdoch has reported, the number of hospitalized COVID patients has risen in step with new cases, but the number needing a ventilator has barely moved. And with vaccines blunting the severity of COVID even further, we should expect the average COVID patient in 2022 to be less sick than the average patient in 2021.
In the U.S., many health-care workers told me that they're already seeing that effect: COVID patients are being discharged more easily. Fewer are critically ill, and even those who are seem to be doing better. "It's anecdotal, but we're getting patients who I don't think would have survived the original virus or Delta, and now we're getting them through," Milad Pooran, a critical-care physician in Maryland, told me. But others said that their experiences haven't changed, perhaps because they serve communities that are highly unvaccinated or because they're still dealing with a lot of Delta cases. Milder illness "is not what we're seeing," said Howard Jarvis, an emergency physician in Missouri. "We're still seeing a lot of people sick enough to be in the ICU." Thomas told me that her hospital had just seven COVID patients a month ago, and is now up to 129, who are taking up almost half of its beds. Every day, about 10 patients are waiting in the ER already hooked up to a ventilator but unable to enter the ICU, which is full.
During this surge, record numbers of children are also being hospitalized with COVID. Sarah Combs, a pediatric emergency physician in Washington, D.C., told me that during the height of Delta's first surge, her hospital cared for 23 children with COVID; on Tuesday, it had 53. "Many of the patients I'm operating on are COVID-positive, and some days all of them are," Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon in New York, told me. "That never happened at any point in the pandemic in the past." Children fare much better against the coronavirus than adults, and even severely ill ones have a good chance of recovery. But the number of such patients is high, and Combs and Sathya both said they worry about long COVID and other long-term complications. "I have two daughters myself, and it's very hard to take," Sathya said.
These numbers reflect the wild spread of COVID right now. The youngest patients are not necessarily being hospitalized for the disease—Sathya said that most of the kids he sees come to the hospital for other problems—but many of them are: Combs told me that 94 percent of her patients are hospitalized for respiratory symptoms. Among adults, the picture is even clearer: Every nurse and doctor I asked said that the majority of their COVID patients were admitted because of COVID, not simply with COVID. Many have classic advanced symptoms, such as pneumonia and blood clots. Others, including some vaccinated people, are there because milder COVID symptoms exacerbated their chronic health conditions to a dangerous degree. "We have a lot of chronically ill people in the U.S., and it's like all of those people are now coming into the hospital at the same time," said Vineet Arora, a hospitalist in Illinois. "Some of it is for COVID, and some is with COVID, but it's all COVID. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter." (COVID patients also need to be isolated, which increases the burden on hospitals regardless of the severity of patients' symptoms.)
Omicron's main threat is its extreme contagiousness. It is infecting so many people that even if a smaller proportion need hospital care, the absolute numbers are still enough to saturate the system. It might be less of a threat to individual people, but it's disastrous for the health-care system that those individuals will ultimately need.
Other countries have had easier experiences with Omicron. But with America's population being older than South Africa's, and less vaccinated or boosted than the U.K.'s or Denmark's, "it's a mistake to think that we'll see the same degree of decoupling between cases and hospitalizations that they did," James Lawler, an infectious-disease physician in Nebraska, told me. "I'd have thought we'd have learned that lesson with Delta," which sent hospitalizations through the roof in the U.S. but not in the U.K. Now, as then, hospitalizations are already spiking, and they will likely continue to do so as Omicron moves from the younger people it first infected into older groups, and from heavily vaccinated coastal cities into poorly vaccinated rural, southern, and midwestern regions. "We have plenty of vulnerable people who will fill up hospital beds pretty quickly," Lawler said. And just as demand for the health-care system is rising, supply is plummeting.
The Workers
The health-care workforce, which was short-staffed before the pandemic, has been decimated over the past two years. As I reported in November, waves of health-care workers have quit their jobs (or their entire profession) because of moral distress, exhaustion, poor treatment by their hospitals or patients, or some combination of those. These losses leave the remaining health-care workers with fewer trusted colleagues who speak in the same shorthand, less expertise to draw from, and more work. "Before, the sickest ICU patient would get two nurses, and now there's four patients for every nurse," Megan Brunson, an ICU nurse in Texas, told me. "It makes it impossible to do everything you need to do."
Omicron has turned this bad situation into a dire one. Its ability to infect even vaccinated people means that "the numbers of staff who are sick are astronomical compared to previous surges," Joseph Falise, a nurse manager in Miami, told me. Even though vaccinated health-care workers are mostly protected from severe symptoms, they still can't work lest they pass the virus to more vulnerable patients. "There are evenings where we have whole sections of beds that are closed because we don't have staff," said Ranney, the Rhode Island emergency physician.
Every part of the health-care system has been affected, diminishing the quality of care for all patients. A lack of pharmacists and outpatient clinicians makes it harder for people to get tests, vaccines, and even medications; as a result, more patients are ending up in the hospital with chronic-disease flare-ups. There aren't enough paramedics, making it more difficult for people to get to the hospital at all. Lab technicians are falling ill, which means that COVID-test results (and medical-test results in general) are taking longer to come back. Respiratory therapists are in short supply, making it harder to ventilate patients who need oxygen. Facilities that provide post-acute care are being hammered, which means that many groups of patients—those who need long-term care, dialysis, or care for addiction or mental-health problems—cannot be discharged from hospitals, because there's nowhere to send them.
These conditions are deepening the already profound exhaustion that health-care workers are feeling. "We're still speaking of surges, but for me it's been a constant riptide, pulling us under," Brunson said. "Our reserves aren't there. We feel like we're tapped out, and that person who is going to come in to help you isn't going to, because they're also tapped out … or they've tested positive."
Public support is also faltering. "We once had parades and people hanging up signs; professional sports teams used to do Zooms with us and send us lunches," Falise told me. "The pandemic hasn't really become any different, but those things are gone." Health-care workers now experience indifference at best or antagonism at worst. And more than ever, they are struggling with the jarring disconnect between their jobs and their communities. At work, they see the inescapable reality of the pandemic. Everywhere else—on TV and social media, during commutes and grocery runs—they see people living the fantasy that it is over. The rest of the country seems hell-bent on returning to normal, but their choices mean that health-care workers cannot.
As a result, "there's an enormous loss of empathy among health-care workers," Swaminathan said. "People have hit a tipping point," and the number of colleagues who've talked about retiring or switching careers "has grown dramatically in the last couple of months." Medicine runs on an unspoken social contract in which medical professionals expect themselves to sacrifice their own well-being for their patients. But the pandemic has exposed how fragile that contract is, said Arora, the Illinois hospital | 2,804 |
No. 2 Baylor women roll past No. 20 Iowa State, 84-69
AP Jan 24, 2019 at 12:25a ET
WACO, Texas (AP) — Lauren Cox scored 22 points to lead all five Baylor starters in double figures and the No. 2 Lady Bears pulled away in the second half for an 84-69 victory over No. 20 Iowa State on Wednesday night.
Cox had a tying layup to start an 8-0 run that put Baylor (16-1, 6-0 Big 12) ahead to stay midway through the second quarter, a quick spurt she capped with another layup. That was part of a 13-5 surge to end the first half that put Baylor up 41-35 after Cox hit a 3-pointer.
Kalani Brown had 18 points for Baylor. Juicy Landrum scored 16, DiDi Richards added 15 and Chloe Jackson had 11 points and 11 assists as the Lady Bears assisted on 29 of their 34 field goals.
Bridget Carleton scored 24 of her 28 points before halftime for Iowa State (14-5, 4-3).
No. 3 UCONN 79, SMU 39
STORRS, Conn. (AP) — Napheesa Collier scored 22 points and Katie Lou Samuelson added 21 to lead UConn over SMU for the Huskies' 107th straight victory against an American Athletic Conference opponent.
Christyn Williams had 12 points and Megan Walker chipped in with 11 for the Huskies (17-1, 6-0). UConn has won every AAC game in both the regular season and conference tournament since the league was formed in 2013.
Alicia Froling had 13 points for SMU (7-12, 1-5), which has lost seven of eight.
UConn had 26 assists on 31 baskets.
No. 12 TEXAS 62, KANSAS 43
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Sug Sutton scored 18 points, Joyner Holmes added 15 and Texas defeated Kansas.
The Longhorns (16-3, 6-1 Big 12) never trailed but didn't put away the Jayhawks (11-6, 1-5)<|fim_middle|>A CITY, Iowa (AP) — Megan Gustafson scored 32 points and Iowa made 12 of 15 free throws in the fourth quarter to end Rutgers' 10-game winning streak.
There were 14 ties and 12 lead changes in the early going before the Hawkeyes scored 10 straight points midway through the second quarter to take the lead for good.
Gustafson went 13 of 16 from the field and grabbed 12 rebounds for the Hawkeyes (15-4, 6-2 Big Ten), who have won four straight. Kathleen Doyle added 17 points and Iowa shot 50 percent from the floor.
Sasha Carey had 17 points for the Scarlet Knights (15-4, 7-1), who finished 4 of 25 from 3-point territory. | until a 12-0 run in the fourth quarter pushed the lead to 58-35 with 5½ minutes to go.
Texas was 1 of 9 from 3-point range but shot 24 of 48 overall and had a 45-26 edge in the paint.
The Jayhawks shot just 26 percent (17 of 66). Mariane De Carvalho had 11 points for Kansas.
MIAMI 84, No. 13 SYRACUSE 71.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — Emese Hof scored 21 points and Miami upset Syracuse.
Hof finished 11 of 11 from the foul line, tying a school record. The Hurricanes (17-4, 5-1 Atlantic Coast Conference) made nine of 10 free throws in the final 74 seconds to pull away from the Orange (15-4, 4-2), who dropped their second straight.
Laura Cornelius had 13 points and a career-high 10 assists for her first double-double. Beatrice Mompremier added 12 points and 10 rebounds, and Mykea Gray scored 17 for Miami, which never trailed after the first minute of the second quarter.
Kiara Lewis led the Orange with 16 points. Syracuse was 5 of 32 (15.6 percent) from 3-point range.
No. 17 IOWA 72, No. 14 RUTGERS 66
IOW | 337 |
Uniqlo clothing giant ready for Australia with its heavy emphasis on customer satisfaction
By Mark Hawthorne
April 16, 2014 — 3.00am
Bland is beautiful in "normcore" look
It is called the Uniqlo Way. Every morning at 9am - an hour before the first customers arrive - staff at Uniqlo's clothing stores around the world gather to recite what are called ''The Behaviours''.<|fim_middle|> is Senior Editor at The Age. Previously he was National Business Editor of Fairfax Metro Media. | These are a series of well-honed phrases that define customer service.
Sales staff - their official title is ''advisers'' - pair off, face each other, and say the following out loud:
■''Hello, my name is [insert name], how are you today?''
■''Did you find everything you were looking for?''
Tadashi Yanai. Credit:Josh Robenstone
■''Let me know if you need anything. My name is [insert name].''
■''Thank you for waiting.''
■''Goodbye, we hope to see you again soon.''
Every adviser must use a minimum of four of these lines - including ''Did you find what you were looking for?'' twice - or their service is deemed to be a failure.
Nothing is left unscrutinised at Uniqlo, from the folding of jeans to the speed of checkout, where a maximum of 60 seconds is allowed per transaction. Advisers must carry pens and notebooks at all times, and a small plastic card that outlines the values of the ''Fast Retailing Way''.
Welcome to the world of Tadashi Yanai, the founder of Uniqlo and, with an estimated $19 billion fortune, Japan's richest man. Mr Yanai is in Melbourne to open his first Australian store on Wednesday morning. It is No.1350 in his empire - and he has left little to chance. ''We hired our Australian staff a year ago,'' Mr Yanai says. ''There is customer service, and then there is Japanese customer service. We have spent a full year training our staff to get them to the levels we want.''
Australia has become a new hunting ground for the world's biggest fashion labels, with Zara, Topshop, H&M, and Uniqlo entering the market over the past 30 months. Mr Yanai differentiates his brand from his rivals. ''They sell fast fashion, always changing the product lines. We have a very stable line, and focus on quality of materials with large scale to get the price we want.''
Like Zara, H&M and Topshop, Uniqlo directly sources its clothing from the low-cost factories of China and south-east Asia.
That business model has been followed by Target, Kmart and Myer in Australia, but none can purchase on a scale that allows them to compete with the global players. An average order of denim jeans for Uniqlo is 1 million units.
''Department stores are having a very difficult time, I know, but they have to understand the revolution that the internet has brought,'' Mr Yanai says.
Mr Yanai started his first clothing stores - the name stands for ''Unique Clothing Warehouse'' - in 1984, and in the ensuing 2½ decades has grown his Uniqlo brand and its parent company, Fast Retailing, into one of the world's largest fashion empires. After conquering Japan with his urban fashion designs, Mr Yanai now wants to conquer the world. He has been vocal with his ambition of surpassing Zara as the world's largest clothing retailer.
To that end, Mr Yanai will open a further 200 stores by the end of the year. After Melbourne will come new stores in New York, Paris and Shanghai before Sydney gets its own taste of ''the Uniqlo Way''.
Mark Hawthorne
Mark Hawthorne | 698 |
Sleep Deprived Music Review: Elephant Micah
holley4734Posted on April 8, 2021 September 18, 2022 inMusic, music blog, music reviewLeave a comment
While listening to Elephant Michah's album, Vague Tidings<|fim_middle|>less Friday Video | , I feel like I should be on my imaginary horse, Honeybelle, headed off to find whatever destiny awaits us. If I was a musician, I would learn all of the words to every song on this album and sing them to Honeybelle while traveling, camping, and combing her hair. We'd be living our best life out on the road.
I would say that Elephant Micah is folk rock with a bit of Americana. Everything on this album could probably also be played in the post-Apocalyptic pony express movie, "The Postman." My favorite song on this album is "Occidental Blue." "Vague Tidings" would be a good song to sing to your horse.
This album reminds me of how much I cannot wait to travel again. Last summer, we should have been going on a Route 66 tour. Unfortunately, like everyone else, we were stuck at home. We did not get our kicks on Route 66.
Elephant Micah is the project of songwriter, Joseph O'Connell. He was inspired by a 2006 DIY tour that he participated in while in Alaska. Thank goodness that the trip happened, otherwise we might not be listening to this album. By the way, the album is officially available tomorrow, April 9, so check out the usual places and also the links below.
Facebook | Website | Twitter
Elephant Micah folk music folk rock indie folk music music review new music new music alert
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Combining AFM with XPS to Analyze Graphene Oxide Membranes
Sponsored by Digital SurfMar 23 2017
Graphene oxide (GO) is a two-dimensional nano-material consisting of a graphene monolayer highly functionalized with oxygen-containing chemical groups. Of late, GO have evinced great interest because of their excellent physiochemical properties that can be used for many applications.
Scalable, relatively easy, and cost-effective methods are available to convert GO sheets into a graphene-like material known as reduced GO (rGO). GO has become an important element in producing industrial-scale graphene-like materials.
Dr. Angel Perez del Pinho works in the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Barcelona (ICMAB), Spain, and specializes in the transformation of materials through laser processing. Recently, he and his fellow researchers published the findings on the conductivity of such processed GO materials.
GO has some interesting functional properties such as being dispersible in water and being biocompatible. Its optical band gap and electrical conductivity can be tailored by modifying its oxidation degree. Whilst GO does not conduct electricity, rGO is more conductive and behaves as a p-type semiconductor. rGO and GO have large potential for use in various electrochemical applications, such as photocatalysts.
L<|fim_middle|> Analyze Graphene Oxide Membranes. AZoNano. Retrieved on January 16, 2021 from https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=4438.
Digital Surf. "Combining AFM with XPS to Analyze Graphene Oxide Membranes". AZoNano. 16 January 2021. <https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=4438>.
Digital Surf. "Combining AFM with XPS to Analyze Graphene Oxide Membranes". AZoNano. https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=4438. (accessed January 16, 2021).
Digital Surf. 2019. Combining AFM with XPS to Analyze Graphene Oxide Membranes. AZoNano, viewed 16 January 2021, https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=4438.
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See all content from Digital Surf | aser processing is emerging as a promising technique for scalable fabrication of rGO-based devices. Recently, Perez's group employed nanosecond pulsed ultraviolet laser radiation to GO membranes in gaseous and liquid ammonia-rich environments. When the structure and composition of the resultant materials were analyzed, it was shown that there were substantial differences in the chemical composition and morphology of samples produced under analogous laser conditions in these two different environments.
Results and Further Analysis
When samples are irradiated in gaseous conditions, they undergo a significant deoxygenation process, a small amount of nitrogen species incorporation into the rGO structure, and a considerable amount of morphological modification. The resulting material is highly conductive whereas the analogous treatment in liquid brings about only a little reduction in electrical resistance.
SPM-based electric characterization was performed to further study the conductivity. The resulting series of spectra processed in MountainsMap® demonstrated the distinct electrical properties of each sample (Figure 1).
Measurements using scanning probe microscopy showed laser-induced structural defects, appearing as tiny filament-like features, in the gaseous environment sample. The multilayer feature in MountainsMap® (Figure 2) was used to create three-dimensional topography-resistance maps. These maps confirmed that the filament-like structures mostly show higher resistance at their topmost sites (crests).
MountainsMap®, An All-in-One Solution for Multiple Types of Analysis
As with other research projects, various types of instruments were employed to characterize samples in this study (scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, resistance measurement instrument, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy). MountainsMap® software offers multiple instrument compatibility, and can deal with various scientific analysis procedures. Two examples are given below.
Math Functions (Operator)
Math functions can be applied to data employing MountainsMap®.
In this study, the math function abs(A)-13 is applied to a series of spectra in order to convert the raw signal into electrical resistivity.
This allows asymmetric resistance to be observed in the non-irradiated GO membrane (in blue).
The irradiated samples (liquid conditions in gold, gaseous conditions in red) show symmetric behavior and demonstrate the ohmic nature of the material.
Build Multilayer Surface (Operator) + 3D View (Study)
Figure 2. Superimposition of the two layers shows a high correspondence between resistance-related structural defects and topography in the GO sample irradiated in gaseous conditions.
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Digital Surf. (2019, December 24). Combining AFM with XPS to | 551 |
Three Venuses (2012) by Aurel Schmidt
Aurel Schmidt
Three Venuses (2012)
colour pencil on paper
signed in the lower composition
20.5 x 12.75 ins ( 52.1 x 32.4 cms ) ( sheet )
"Three Venuses" exemplifies the artist's earlier practice of dense, detailed and intricate drawings with subtexts of mortality, ideals of beauty and gender norms. Three iconic art historical Venuses emerge from the swirling smoke of the extinguished candle—Titian's "Venus of Urbino", Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and Cabanel's "Birth of Venus"—bringing the viewers' attention to both the longevity of these icons as standards of beauty, but<|fim_middle|>, British Colombia and currently lives and works in New York. Schmidt was included in Phaidon's Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing (2013) and has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at P.P.O.W, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; and Peres Projects, Los Angeles. Schmidt was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has contributed to group exhibitions at Museum Moderner Kunst Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Deste Foundation For Contemporary Art, Greece; Garage Center of Contemporary Culture, Moscow; and Saatchi Gallery, London. Aurel Schmidt is known both for the technically adept execution and autobiographical frankness of her drawings. | also the fleetingness of said youth and beauty. The extinguished candle is traditionally recognized as symbolic of memento mori—the ancient theory of reflection on one's own mortality. Two classic themes in art history, beauty and death, are married in this baroque-like drawing, calling the viewers' attention to the inevitability of death in the face of idealizing beauty.
Aurel Schmidt was born in Kamloops | 84 |
Today's irrigation controllers are driven by data and technology. Contractors who embrace these advancements are seeing the benefits.
Technology has infiltrated every aspect of modern life, and the irrigation controller is no exception. The devices are more connected and data-driven than ever before, and contractors who are embracing the trends are seeing the advantages these advancements can bring.
As Wi-Fi, local area networks and cellular communications become universally affordable and available, consumers are growing accustomed to constant connectivity and instant information. The irrigation system controller is just one more gadget that can now be managed from anywhere with the use of a smartphone or a computer. For landscape professionals, the ability to remotely monitor and manage large numbers of clients is literally money in the bank, says David Shoup, senior product manager for controllers and sensors for Hunter Industries in San Marcos, Calif.
Irrigation experts say contractors benefit from controller connectivity in several ways.
The ability to provide remote water management assistance is one potential billing opportunity that can add to a contractor's revenue stream. Connected controllers also reduce operating costs because many situations that used to require a physical visit to a property can now be handled with a few clicks of a button. These controllers can increase customer satisfaction and retention because the contractor is visibly engaged with the client's landscape at all times. In fact, a connected contractor can know about a system problem before the customer does. In addition, the reporting capabilities of the more advanced systems allow contractors to not only save water, but also to demonstrate those savings to their customer base, which Shoup says enhances their value to the customers.
"These trends are allowing contractors to provide a greater level of service to their customers, while reducing labor costs, water consumption and liabilities associated with improper watering," says Oster.
Robert Brown, owner of Robert Brown Landscape Irrigation in Santee, Calif., says the advancements in controller connectivity have been a "game changer" for his business. The ability to adjust a client's irrigation system from his phone or computer has decreased the need for on-site visits. Getting alerts about problems, such as a broken pipe or a faulty electrical wire, allows Brown to stay on top of issues before they worsen. Robert Brown Landscape Irrigation is a $200,000 company that provides 90 percent irrigation and 10 percent lighting services to a 75 percent residential, 25 percent commercial clientele.
While flow sensors have been around for years, Shoup says sales of these components are increasing in the residential and light commercial markets. He says flow sensors used to be perceived as "rather exotic" accessories, partly because they required expensive communication options to retrieve their information. But with the rise of low-cost internet, the information is now more accessible. Additionally, the availability of intelligent cloud servers can do more with the information, including alerting homeowners and contractors to potentially wasteful situations. Hunter's newest line of flow sensors includes factory-calibrated and sealed visual dial indicators, in addition to the electronic output, which Shoup says makes the experience more visually reassuring and familiar to homeowners, who are used to these displays in their municipal meters.
Oster agrees that water conservation and flow management are growing trends in the irrigation industry.
"The data and information being generated by monitoring flow, along with the advanced diagnostic capabilities that continuously monitor a system for leaks, breaks and electrical issues, all help increase system efficiencies and water conservation," he says.
Brown says he is gaining experience with flow sensors as more clients express interest in water conservation. With flow sensors, Brown receives an alert if there is a problem with water flow, and he can quickly reach out to the client to schedule a service call, which he says allows him to take "better, closer care" of his customers.
Adapting to all of this new technology can be a challenge for contractors. Oster urges contractors to take advantage of the training and resources provided by manufacturers and distributors to learn how to operate all aspects of these new controllers.
"Those not utilizing these capabilities to improve operating efficiency will increasingly be at a competitive disadvantage," he says.
Establishing an internet connection to the controller location<|fim_middle|> contractors who aren't familiar with the process. Shoup says the typical household or business wireless router intended to provide connectivity for printers, televisions and other common devices is not typically in the optimum location to connect with an irrigation controller located in a garage or on an external wall. Cellular communications are usually more expensive, and even they can have connectivity challenges, given that an irrigation controller is a fixed object that cannot easily be moved to a spot that receives better coverage.
Brown agrees that it's imperative for the client to have a strong Wi-Fi signal in order for the new controllers to work. He's had a few instances where he attempted to install a connected controller, but ended up having to go with a traditional version instead.
example, manufacturers like Hunter have customer support call centers staffed with networking experts who can help contractors navigate these waters. The company trains and assists contractors with connectivity procedures on an hourly basis at the height of the busy season. | is another challenge for some | 5 |
Bill Roper (né le 27 mars 1965 à Concord en Californie) est un producteur de jeux vidéo américain principalement connu pour avoir travaillé comme producteur chez Blizzard Entertainment entre 1994 et 2003 et pour avoir participé au développement de certains titres des séries Warcraft, StarCraft et Diablo. En 2003 après son départ de Blizzard Entertainment il fonde Flagship Studios avec Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer et David Brevik et participe à la création des jeux Hellgate: London et Mythos. En 2008, à la suite de la fer<|fim_middle|> et références
Naissance à Concord (Californie)
Naissance en mars 1965
Producteur de jeux vidéo
Blizzard Entertainment | meture de Flagship Studios, il rejoint Cryptic Studios en tant que directeur du design et producteur du jeu Champions Online. En 2009 il devient chef créatif de Cryptic Studios mais quitte l'entreprise le 16 août 2010. Il travaille actuellement en tant que vice-président pour Disney Interactive Media Group chargé de la franchise Marvel.
Réalisation
Bill Roper a travaillé sur les titres suivants :
Blackthorne (1994) - Musique
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) - Producteur, doublage et documentation
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) - Design, scénario, doublage et documentation
Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) – Producteur exécutive, scenario, doublage
Diablo (1996) – Producteur, scénario, directeur, doublage et documentation
StarCraft (1998) – Producteur, doublage et documentation
StarCraft: Brood War (1998) – Producteur exécutive, doublage et documentation
Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition (1999) - Producteur
Diablo II (2000) – Producteur sénior, casting (doublage), doublage
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001)
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (2003)
Hellgate: London (2007) – Chief executive officer
Champions Online (2009) – Directeur du design, producteur exécutif
Star Trek Online (2010) - Directeur du design
Notes | 386 |
Occupy San Diego: A Year Later
October 9, 2012 by Source
Occupy San Diego marchers reach foot of Broadway. (All photos by Tom and Nadine Abbott.)
By Nadine Abbott
Occupy San Diego reached an important milestone this weekend. Occupy San Diego is now one year old, and like all children, it has learned a lot this year, but also achieved quite a bit.
The weekend saw a series of events, some low key, some going back to it's roots in the streets, celebrating the fact that OSD is still here. The first event was at Balboa Park on Saturday afternoon.
When I reached the Park I was no longer surprised to see San Diego Police coming in to talk to an Occupier. Well, so what is new? Same old, same old – right? This time, the officers had cause. No, not the usual we saw over the course of last year. They had a call, from another occupier, reporting what can best be described as a domestic dispute. Given the Occupier in question wore a Guy Fawkes costume with knives (which I could not tell at a distance were plastic either), the cops showed up in force. This is standard.
Moreover, while the Police kept an eye on Occupy, like they do on every demonstration that happens in this town, they also kept their actual contact to a minimum, and kept their distance.
Later in the weekend I did learn that while Occupiers are right to be weary of the police, the police feel they went overboard early on. This came from an unnamed source, and I must add, it was a tad surprising. Just like Occupy, San Diego Police has learned some lessons. The truth is, the people who witnessed the behavior of the police will not trust the police ever again, so that is a loss for the Department in their community relations. We can all hope that this becomes part of the institutional memory, and next time, if there will be one, when faced with people in the streets, SDPD will show a lot more restraint.
That said, there were a couple incidents that could be seen as intimidation. For example a Park Ranger asked an Occupier about putting his cigarette off on the park, and the Ranger did not understand it was a medical Nebulizer, and the two officers with her were a little aggressive. But that is life in the streets in some ways. There was another incident on Sunday morning where officers wanted to make sure a model drone did not have anything hard in it's core, and the Occupier got a little aggressive with the officers. Per usual, Occupiers are now filming all interactions with the police.
The food at the park on Saturday was a good spread, but this went beyond the food. Occupiers held conversations on matters that are important, and I sat down on the one dealing with misogyny. It was a long conversation on the nature of it, where it comes from, and whether it has a lot or a little to do with the other "isms we see in our society.
Due to some of the issues over the last year that have led to what some observe as the splintering of the Occupy movement, one issue that came up was conflict resolution, and the idea of a hand signal for when misogyny comes up. These internal battles were not dealt with right, according to many of the members of the group. We observers did see Occupy go into an internal war. Given the rifts that continue to open even at the one year anniversary, one has to wonder if Occupy will finally find a way to deal with internal division.
I arrived at Civic Center (dubbed by Occupiers Freedom Plaza) at ten in the morning. Now, you know it is a bad sign when the press and the police are there, but there is no Occupier in site. I joked with Captain Jones of SDPD about this thing called "Occupy time" while we cooled our heels and had a friendly conversation.
Thankfully a few minutes later the marchers started to trickle in. The police approached a few of the leaders and asked what time they were set to march, which was to be at eleven thirty, which was convenient since the plaza needed to start setting for an event at that time.
While we waited I talked with Mitchell Sterling, one of the core activists about the successes of OSD this year. He said that one of the most important accomplishments was "to spread the word of Occupy in San Diego." This was an important step that later on led to "City Council adopting an ordinance ordering banks to maintain foreclosed property." This will help to reduce urban blight.
A harpist set up near Children's Park.
Locally Occupy has adopted the Madrid Model, which means they have spread into the neighborhoods and have joined the work of many local community activists. Therefore, OSD and ancillary groups, such as Women Occupy and Occupy the Hood, have become deeply involved in projects such as the San Onofre Nuclear plant, raising awareness of it's problems<|fim_middle|> it. | .
The General Assembly reached consensus on the involvement of OSD in the "Yes on 37" campaign, and they have been very active on it. This also leads to work on food justice issues. As Sterling put it, "phase two is in the neighborhoods."
Therefore we have seen the rise of Occupy Ocean Beach, Occupy City Heights, and other issues such as the student debt crisis. Occupy activists have helped to energize a lot of other community groups, including Canvas for a Cause.
OSD was also very active during the Transpacific Trade Negations, not just protesting it, but holding a parallel conference explaining the effects of the TPP on Americans. After all, as was said then"the TTP is under the radar. It will offshore jobs. It is NAFTA on steroids."
Raising awareness is one of the strengths of OSD. But chiefly, what OSD achieved was to "change the dialogue locally with the politicians, the media and the public." He finished, "we are standing with the homeless, against foreclosures, and the concept of the 99%. The people now understand the 1% and the commodities market."
As people came they got ready for the march. There were about fifty marchers, getting ready with banners held high. As the march started another twenty-five OSD members, with two puppets, joined them. The first introduced at the Yes on 37 march, the second symbolizing the peaceful protestor, who wore a shirt that looked bloody. James explained later that this was in support of the Canadian students who won their battle against their government. Absent, or I did not see it, was any sign of solidarity with the "Yo Soy 132" movement in Mexico.
Going down Broadway, some familiar chants were heard, "who's streets, our streets," Others involved the Muslim community, who would be accepted by the marchers, no questions asked. Yet another was "we do not want your war."
Down Broadway we went, with people honking in support and with SDPD motor officers making sure the march remained safe.
Congressman Bob Filner: "It's a sad anniversary."
Once we reached the Midway Aircraft Carrier area we walked into an area with a small glen, where headstones with the names of every casualty of the war from this region was placed. It was a small memorial, with flags in front of each one of them. There, one of our Occupiers, Chaplain Ron, knelt to say a prayer, among the "headstones."
Anoki Casey, one of the members of Occupy San Diego, and one of the two puppeteers, told me: "The process is not doing what it is meant to do." He even added "Politicians were relevant in age of horse and buggy, but that today we should do things by consensus."
Casey gave me the example of Balboa Park. The people want one thing but City Council is doing whatever they want. We spoke a little about Councilmember Todd Gloria, who represents the district that includes the park. Casey said that his opinion of Gloria depended on what he did. "Todd Gloria made a verbal promise to save the World Beat Center, to give them the twenty five year lease. This is one of the few multicultural institutions." In Casey's mind his opinion of Gloria depends on the Council Member keeping that promise.
Later, and before the rally proper started, I asked Congressman Bob Filner, and current candidate for Mayor of San Diego, what was his view of this anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. He told me that it was "a sad anniversary. We should not be there. Casualties are not being reported. It is time to bring the troops home."
We had a minute to talk about the five-dollar fee to come to Balboa Park. Congressman Filner said that he was opposed to it. He also feels very confident about the coming election.
Then the Congressman was introduced to the rally attendants. He was once a civil rights marcher. As he climbed the stage and took the microphone he repeated what he told me, that this was a sad anniversary. He also told the audience "one million vets have shown up to the VA from this war"there is a deliberate attempt to mislead the people" as to the true cost of the war.
Filner was also emphatic, "as a historian if Alexander the Great could not do it, the Soviets could not do it, the British could not do it, how can we do it?"
Filner ended by telling the crowd, "I support the troops, bring them home."
Dave Paterson from Veterans for Peace spoke of the rallies they have every Thursday in front of General Atomics in Poway. He addressed an issue that has troubled me for a while. "People are beginning to think that sending their sons to war is not okay, but maybe it is by remote control."
He added, "they think it is great, not to send their sons to war and who the hell cares who gets killed. Less than 2% are known terrorists." This has troubled me for some time. War is becoming too easy, because nobody on our side is at risk.
Perhaps, as Paterson went on, the fact that the FAA is getting pressured to open US Skies to drones, that might bring the point home. It is not okay. He invited the audience to join them every Thursday at Poway.
Retired Colonel David Gapp took the stage next. He reminisced that his father was killed in Vietnam when he was young. His father left behind kids who were between four and twelve years of age. This war also is seeing an average in the dead that is low. For example Kamela Sleed was 31, and she was a resident of the City of San Diego.
Gapp also reminded the audience that while the war in Iraq is over, we still have one hundred thousand contractors still in country. He added that so far for Afghanistan we have lost 4, 485 casualties (not just American, this is the total for the coalition). Among them was David Emmanuel Hickman who was 24 and died on November 14, 2001. He was the first casualty of the war.
"Before Obama took over, 650 were killed, now 2115 dead." He spoke of the surge as well, as the estimated Afghan casualties, that right now are around twelve thousand, with over one million internally displaced.
Maurice Martin is a veteran of another silent war. He was in the US Army, and in the 1970s he spent some time in El Salvador, before the Central American Wars fully exploded. He is also the organizer of the City College Chapter of Veterans against the war. Martin thanked Occupy, and reminded the crowd that this the 100th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. "And still today Occupy cannot stand in front of the Civic Center."
Martin emphasized that these days, "They need more tax cuts for the rich. Really? Promote war, but not pay for it?"
Martin reminded the crowd, that the suicide rates among returning veterans is very high. This year alone one hundred thousand vets have committed suicide. He added, that we "have a million homeless veterans." The VA tries but they don't have the resources.
He closed, with "El pueblo vive, la lucha sigue." "The people live, the struggle continues."
Dave Conway came to the stage to remind the crowd about Bradley Manning. He told the crowd that the system "had deployed a devastating weapon of mass distraction." That be the elections and the debates. It was a way to try to keep people believing that they still lived in democracy. This is an illusion.
What Manning did, according to Conway, was tell the people what the government was doing in their name. For that he has been subjugated to cruel and inhumane treatment, that even the UN calls torture. It is the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, and Daniel Ellsberg.
The truth is that "a free society needs information to make decisions." And for releasing this needed information Manning faces life in prison. He added that this President has waged a war on whistle blowers.
Melissa Berens.
The last official speaker before the open mike was Melissa Berens. She is the grand daughter of a Marine, one of the Marines at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean war. She has never personally gone to war. But she has lived around people who have.
Her grandfather instilled in her values that if need be you die for. Among them were honor, integrity and truth. She also knew that she would have to fight someday. "This is why I occupy."
Barrens said "powers have risen that have taken our liberty away." We have allowed this to happen, but now we are starting to fight back.
She also used to believe that freedom of assembly was a right, but after last year, she has learned she was wrong. We know we have the duty to "balance all." We have a duty to recover our rights, and to keep the back of those we send to war. We need to make sure that we do that from now on.
"The disease in this country is apathy." But we are finally going back to doing our duty, and "we need to resist oppression." Barrens ended by reminding the audience "America is becoming a more corporate controlled fascist state before our very eyes."
On my way out I met a veteran of the first forgotten war. We started to talk on how this war, like his war, that is Korea, has already been forgotten. The sad difference is that at least Korea was forgotten after the shooting stopped. This one, we still have troops in the field, but the war is a distant memory to most Americans.
Return to Children's Park
Around six thirty Occupiers came full circle, where the movement first took its first halting steps, to Children's Park.
There Pat Herron told me that "It's been great. I've met wonderful people here trying to make the world a better place." She added, we have now reached to other groups.
First year cake.
"We have accomplished a lot, moving money out of big banks, yes on 37 and keeping Walmart out." (This is the Walmart in Sherman Heights in the end the Judge allowed Walmart to continue building where the Farmer's Market is.) She especially relished the week of action to stop the TPP, this includes the week of teach ins that ran parallel to it.
Herron asked a very relevant question, why is the TTP secret? "Anything that is that secret can't be good for the people of this country."
After that, they sang happy birthday to OSD and Melissa Kelsea Rae sang a composition she wrote for OSD, accompanied by her harp. As they say, there was no dry eye in the house.
Unlike many observers in the media, I do not think Occupy is over. I believe, from interacting with them on and off during the year, that Occupy is evolving and will continue to be relevant. It will not just be in the streets for the most part. Occupy is a social justice movement, and like many others before it, it will wax and wane, but will not go away. Those who claim it is dead need to pay attention. Many of our future community leaders will indeed come from its ranks.
Filed Under: Activism, Politics
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I will add, bone tired by Sunday night does not begin to describe | 2,390 |
Mythical Islands of Ancient Greece
Many of the most memorable stories of Greek mythology take place on the islands of the Mediterranean. Keep reading to learn more about some of the mythical islands of ancient Greek lore!
The modern country of Greece has roughly 6,000 islands off its shores. It's no wonder that so many ancient stories centered on the islands!
Many Greek myths and legends were set on islands that can be easily identified today. Delos, for example, was both a real place and the floating island where Apollo and Artemis were supposedly born.
Other stories, however, took place on more mythical islands. These incredible places featured amazing people, unusual animals, and wondrous landscapes.
The Islands of the Odyssey
Arguably the most famous islands in Greek mythology are those that appear in Homer's Odyssey. They and their hazards were so iconic that they were used in later works such as the Argonautica and the Aeneid.
Homer was vague in giving details that would allow these islands to be pinpointed on a map. This may have been because Odysseus, the story's narrator, was lost for most of his voyage or a deliberate choice by the writer to keep these legendary places from being equated with literal sites.
The most famous and enigmatic of the islands in the Odyssey is Aeaea. The location of Circe's home has been given as several possible islands off the coast of Italy, sites closer to Greece, or as entirely mythical.
According to Homer, Circe's island was a comfortable place where Odysseus and his crew were, after initially being turned to pigs, welcomed by the goddess for a year. While Odysseus shared Circe's home, his men lodged in a warm and comfortable cave near the shore.
Odysseus also spent time with Calypso on the island of Ogygia. Like Aeaea, the precise location of this island was never given and has been speculated about by many.
While the only truly unusual features of Aeaea and Ogygia were the magic of the goddesses who lived there, other mythical islands in the Odyssey were far more exotic.
Cerberus: The Hound of Hades
On one of the first islands Odysseus visited, for example, the inhabitants lived off the intoxicating fruit of a native plant. The Lotus-Eaters were so enthralled by the fruit that they thought of nothing else, and Odysseus had to flee the island quickly before his crew was similarly drugged.
While some have said that the giant, cannibalistic Laestrygonians lived on the southern coast of Sicily, the exact location of their city, Telepylos, is not given in the Odyssey.
The island of the cyclopes is not even given a name in the Odyssey. It has often been interpreted as part of Sicily by later historians.
Thrinacia has also been identified by some as Sicily, although others believe it may have been Malta. The legendary island was where the sun god Helios pastured his cattle.
The Isles of the Blessed
While many of the islands in the Odyssey have been identified as real-world locations, the Isles of the Blessed were far more mythical.
The Isles of the Blessed were seen as barely even belonging to the same<|fim_middle|>. The Mediterranean was a hub of trade between Northern Europe, Africa, the Near East, and Asia.
From their position on the Mediterranean, the Greeks could see that materials like tin and amber came in large quantities from the north while other riches, like gold and silver, were more plentiful in India or Africa.
They thus imagined that these far-off lands might have huge deposits of these valuable commodities that were not found closer to Greece. Mythical islands of valuable metals and precious gems explained how such large amounts of these goods could come from beyond the familiar regions of the world.
Of course, no island in Greek lore is as famous or notorious as Atlantis. Despite its popularity, however, the story of Atlantis was not one that was widely-told at the time.
All later mentions of Atlantis are based on the works of Plato, who first wrote about the legendary island in the 4th century BC.
Although later thought depicted Atlantis as a socially and technologically advanced society, Plato presented it as the antithesis of what he considered to be ideal. He was a citizen of Athens and, in The Republic Atlantis was antagonistic toward the early founders of his city.
According to Plato, the people of Atlantis launched an attack against what he called "ancient Athens." For attacking the favored city, Atlantis fell out of favor with the gods and was sunken as a result.
The Anemoi: The Greek Gods of the Winds
Aristotle believed that Plato, who was his mentor, had invented the island of Atlantis as a philosophical metaphor. Others came to believe that the island had once been a real place, however.
Plato claimed that the island's city had walls of orichalcum, brass and tin. From this description, more legends grew about the mythical island's riches and power.
Some people theorized that the island was somewhere in the Mediterranean and that the Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar, had once been mountains on the island. Others believed that it was further afield in the Atlantic.
In the 1st century BC, one historian wrote that the people of Gaul claimed descent from a lost island nation. They, and later other cultures, were thought by some to be descendants of the surviving Atlanteans.
After the discovery of the New World, for example, some Europeans believed that Atlantis may have been near South America or the Caribbean. Central American pyramids helped to reinforce this belief.
This was in part because, even in the ancient world, many people believed that Plato had learned the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian source. Plato was known to take many of his original tales from foreign influences, and an Egyptian origin would explain the existence of pyramids elsewhere in the world.
In the modern era, a popular theory supposed that the story of the lost empire may have originated closer to Greece, on the island of Crete.
The Minoan civilization of that island predated the Mycenaean Greek culture of the mainland. For several hundred years it was the dominant political and economic power in the region.
The Minoans were largely forgotten, although traces of their culture can be found in the Greek myths of King Minos. When early archaeologists began uncovering the palace of Knossos, which had features like indoor plumbing, they were reminded of the story of Atlantis as well as the tales of King Minos and his Labyrinth.
Who Really Killed the Hydra Monster?
Many people now believe that the ancient, advanced island of Atlantis may have been inspired by the advanced civilization of Minoan Crete. Plato's story of the attack on Atlantis may have the same roots as the legend of Theseus, the Athenian prince who was taken to Knossos.
Mythical Islands
The mythology of ancient Greece features many islands. While some are identifiable as real-world locations, others are more fantastical inventions.
Many of the most well-known mythical islands are named in the Odyssey. Odysseus and his crewmen visit many amazing places during their ten-year journey.
The islands featured in the Odyssey have been discussed by historians and scholars for thousands of years. Several different places near both Greece and Rome have been identified as possible locations for some of the Odyssey's famous islands.
Islands also played a role in the Greek idea of the afterlife. Truly exceptional heroes and kings could be elevated to a form of immortality on the Isles of the Blessed, where they would enjoy eternal comfort, fair weather, and leisurely entertainments.
Some islands provided Greece with valuable metals and gems. At the far ends of the world, it was said, were islands that provided the world's trade routes with gold, silver, tin, and amber.
Of course, one of the most famous islands of Greek lore was the lost civilization of Atlantis. First mentioned by Plato, many of his contemporaries believed that he had invented the story to teach a philosophical lesson.
The legend of Atlantis endured, however, and remains popular to this day. People have believed that evidence of the sunken island has been found everywhere from Crete to the pyramids of Central America. | realm as earth. While they existed somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, they were also a part of the afterlife.
While earlier Greek thought had held that the Underworld was a uniformly grim and dreary place, later ideas about a more pleasant possibility took hold. Those who lived particularly good lives might find a place in the Elysian Fields, while the truly great would eventually be taken to the Isles of the Blessed.
Those who were judged worthy, it was said, would have a chance to be reincarnated after reaching the Elysium Fields. If they lived good enough lives to attain this paradise three times, they would be rewarded with eternity on the Isles of the Blessed.
The Harpy: Destructive Spirits of Greek Mythology
The White Island, as this place was also sometimes called, were a place of constant beauty and leisure. The people there enjoyed entertainments, feasts, and material comfort in a land of eternally fair weather.
Because it was so difficult to achieve this honor, only the greatest heroes and kings of Greek mythology were believed to have gone to the Isles of the Blessed. This reward gave them near god-like status and some people believed that they could hear prayers and act as intermediaries with the Olympians.
The Isles of the Blessed were most often said to be ruled by Rhadamanthys, one of Zeus's sons by Europa. Some, however, claimed that Cronos had been given kingship there after being released from Tartarus.
Islands of Metal
Some mythical islands in Greek mythology were notable not for their inhabitants, but for the wonders that were found there.
The Greeks believed that the Mediterranean Sea was at the center of the world. The people, plants, and animals there were generally well-known to them and familiar.
The farther away one went from this center, however, more amazing and foreign things could be found. This included not only the strange human races and exotic animals, but incredible places as well.
At least four islands were said to exist in far-off places that were made entirely or mostly of costly materials.
Chryse and Argyre were two islands somewhere in the Indian Ocean that were named for their metals. Chryse was said to be made entirely of gold, chrysos, while Argyre had soil of pure silver, argyros.
Similar islands existed somewhere in the far north. One was made of tin while the other was solid amber.
Some level of belief in these islands persisted for hundreds, even thousands, of years. After Marco Polo reported that Japan was rich in gold and silver, for example, some European mapmakers imagined that Chryse and Argyre were near there.
Zeus' Brothers and Sisters
These islands of riches were based in part by the valuables that the Greek people witnessed coming from what seemed like the edges of the world.
The trade routes of the ancient world connected disparate lands | 587 |
As an Accountability Coach, I<|fim_middle|> real-life examples! | probably deal with time management and prioritizing the most. The biggest time sucker I see ALL. THE. TIME. is Interruptions from Interrupters. Here is my recommendation to combat it and 3 tips to help you implement it. For the sake of clarity, I'm going to walk you through my day-to-day life as your example.
For me, my biggest interrupters are my family. I love those guys, but when you work from home and you homeschool, you spend a lot of time together. As a result, it can be hard for them to recognize and appreciate when I am trying to work and need some uninterrupted time to get stuff done.
I've been on a journey of personal development since this year began, and, as part of my self-discovery throughout that process, I resolved to make some changes in my approach to trying to get the Holy Grail we call work/life balance. So naturally, I dug into my own bag of tips and tricks to begin to figure out what these changes would look like in my own day-to-day balancing act. Below you will find the tips I took advantage of and what they look like for me.
This has really been working for us. Why?
I will get to why dedicating the entire morning to our homeschool work in a minute. Let me jump down to independent time for now: I always have emails to respond to, social media channels to connect on, etc. that I only need a minute or two of uninterrupted time to get through. I take on these types of tasks during this time frame to manage my own expectations for when independent play may not be as it's supposed to be…and we all know that really happens.
As I have been going through my journey of self-discovery, I have realized that I need time to regroup in the afternoon and fill my own bucket from being 'ON' all morning with my autistic kiddos. When Max naps is a perfect time for us because usually Penny, my seven-year-old, is needing her own time to recharge as well. I have also given myself permission, through this journey, to honour myself and that I am a night owl; making my prime work time the evening.
This all comes together through practice and explicit modelling. Everyone knows the routine and understands what the expectations are; what it should look, sound and feel like.
Now let's talk about why dedicating the entire morning to our homeschool work. Scheduling my morning this way kills two birds with one stone for me. They are learning. They are getting to spend completely unfiltered and uninterrupted time with Mama, which means their buckets are filling up. When I am not as available throughout the rest of the day, they don't feel like they are getting the short end of the stick.
For this last one, I'm going to go outside of my house and talk specifically about it from a scheduling aspect.
Let's start with my clients. They know that I can only schedule in-person meetings on certain days and have dedicated call times as well. If at the outset, they can't meet with me during those times/days, then I will let them know we aren't a good match in the long run. If once we are working together, they need to reschedule a meeting or call, they may have to wait until the following week's call time. Now, I am pretty flexible for the most part (you'll find most autistic parents are out necessity I bet). However, having that clearly laid out from the beginning avoids bad tastes in everyone's mouth on the one time I have to enforce it.
Similarly, my follower's know what's going on in our community each day. Our Facebook group members understand when they can promote themselves and what we're talking about each day. They know when a new blog post comes out. Viewers know when Fempire LIVE is on each week so they can tune in. They know all this because I am consistent in my action and have clear, straightforward communication with them.
People feel more at ease and comfortable when things are predictable, which is why both of these approaches have worked so well for me and my business.
So what are your biggest interrupters AND what are doing to combat them? Let us know in the comments, Fempire Builders.
Great tips, and I appreciate your | 874 |
Jason Beem, who has called races at numerous Thoroughbred tracks since 2006, has been hired as the announcer at Tampa Bay Downs. He will begin on June 30, the first day of the track's two-day Summer Festival of Racing.
The 41-year-old University of Washington graduate currently announces at Grants Pass Downs in Oregon and will begin his third season at Colonial Downs in New Kent, Va., on July 19. At Tampa Bay Downs, he replaces Richard Grunder, who retired on May 2 after 37 years and more than 37,0<|fim_middle|> the Vice President of Marketing and Publicity at Tampa Bay Downs, believes Beem will be embraced by listeners accustomed to Grunder's energetic, fan-friendly style, while attracting new followers through his social-media platforms. In addition to his podcast, Beem is active on Twitter ( @BeemieAwards ) and Instagram ( @jasonbeemracing ) and has a YouTube channel.
"Jason hit all the checkpoints we were looking for," Flynn said. "He sees racing through a fan's eyes and understands the need to cultivate new fans and develop ways to target them. He has a big pair of shoes to fill, but he has the experience and love of the sport to make his own mark at Tampa Bay Downs. We are excited to have him on board and to introduce him to our fans on June 30 and July 1."
Beem, who started his announcing career in 2006 at River Downs (now Belterra Park), describes his race-calling style as high-energy and information-driven. "I have a quick delivery, I try to get as much information as I can to the horseplayer and I'm very descriptive.
Accuracy, obviously, is the most paramount thing for me.
"It's funny because I still get nervous before every race, even a $2,500 claiming event," he said. "I'm surprised that I always have that adrenaline rush when they're entering the gate, but I'm glad that hasn't stopped after 15 years."
Beem knows it is a next-to-impossible task replacing Grunder, who is a jockey's agent at Canterbury Park in Shakopee, Minn. In an almost-eerie coincidence, both called races at since-closed Portland Meadows in Oregon at similar stages of their careers, with Beem working there from 2006-2014.
"I don't look at it as trying to replace him, because he is a legend," Beem said. "I just want to be a great member of the Tampa Bay Downs team, get to know the horse-playing community and get a lot of people excited about horse racing." | 00 races at the Oldsmar oval.
Beem was chosen from among dozens of applicants after a nationwide search. A lifelong fan of racing with a strong social media following, Beem is excited to bring his enthusiastic style to a track that has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 20 years.
"I love the racing there and am excited to become a part of it," said Beem, who hosts an hour-long podcast each Monday through Friday – the Jason Beem Horse Racing Podcast sponsored by Twinspires – on which he interviews many of the sport's leading figures.
"From calling races at Colonial Downs and Monmouth Park (in 2019), I got to know a lot of the horses and horsemen who compete at Tampa, and it really appeals to me as a fan. It's good, quality racing, the turf races are outstanding and it's a very horseplayer-friendly track."
Margo Flynn, | 189 |
There is always something unmotivated about conversion experiences: it is of their essence that the sinner should be so blinded by lust or greed or pride that the psychic logic leading to the<|fim_middle|> be more precise, the elision of the either-or holding "fantasy" and "reality" apart—that caused such a stir when One Hundred Years of Solitude came out in 1967 has become commonplace in the novel well beyond the borders of Latin America. | turning point in his life becomes visible to him only in retrospect, when his eyes have been opened. So there is a degree of inbuilt incompatibility between the conversion narrative and the modern novel, as perfected in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on character rather than on soul and its brief to show step by step, without wild leaps and supernatural interventions, how the one who used to be called the hero or heroine but is now more appropriately called the central character travels his or her road from beginning to end.
Despite having the tag "magic realist" attached to him, García Márquez works very much in the tradition of psychological realism, with its premise that the workings of the individual psyche have a logic that is capable of being tracked. He himself has remarked that his so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories with a straight face, a trick he learned from his grandmother in Cartagena; furthermore, that what outsiders find hard to believe in his stories is often commonplace Latin American reality. Whether we find this plea disingenuous or not, the fact is that the mixing of the fantastical and the real—or, to | 235 |
It's that time once again when AutoPacific names the best-in-class winners from the Ideal Vehicle Awards. To further add to the FIAT Chrysler Automobiles awards, we received news that four FCA vehicles were labeled the best-in-class for 2018.
It's the eighth consecutive time that the Jeep® Grand Cherokee added the IVA to their list of Jeep awards. The Jeep® Grand Cherokee continues to lead the pack in the Mid-size SUV segment and claims the title of the most awarded SUV of all time.
The 2018 Jeep® Grand Cherokee offers superior refinement, top-notch craftsmanship and all the advanced safety features you desire for your family. With its four-wheel drive system, and a Selec-Terrain traction management system, the Jeep® Grand Cherokee also has the best-in-class towing capability of 7,400 pounds.
The leader in the Large Car segment this year was the Chrysler 300. The lineup is available in four trims that offer world-class design and performance. The elegant design is perfectly paired with modern innovations and the latest technology, ideal for any sophisticated<|fim_middle|> the second time in just three years, the Dodge Challenger won the Sporty Car segment. This comes during the same time that the Challenger lineup became the most powerful yet. For the 2019 year, you have access to the 797-horsepower SRT Hellcat Redeye. If that one doesn't suit your needs, there's a total of eight varying models; offering something for everyone. Check out the entire Dodge Challenger inventory in Southern California by visiting us online.
For the top winner of the Compact Car segment, we have the FIAT 500L. It's a fuel-efficient, stylish driving machine that pleases customers nationwide. The newest lineup comes with 42% more interior space and seating that's comfortable enough for five.
All of these four award winners are available at Bob Baker Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram FIAT. We have the latest models with all the top options ready for you in our extensive inventory. Stop by and visit so we can get you in a new vehicle today. | driver. If you want to check out the Chrysler inventory in Carlsbad, we have every model and option you could desire.
For | 27 |
I'm an architect with a decade of professional experience working in both new construction and remodeling, always with sustainability in mind. I have practiced in both rural (La Crosse, WI) and urban (Chicago, IL) environments. I'm also a first-time homeowner of a 1952 Ranch in Madison, Wisconsin working to restore my home to more than all its original glory.
I've transferred my attention to a new project: Mid Mod Midwest. Come find me there!
One thing I've always found to be true is that good design is specific, thoughtful and deeply rooted in the place it is built and the<|fim_middle|> just the same." With time, however, I've come to see them as right-sized, well-placed and customizable. The Ranch Neighborhoods of the 50's and 60's are filled with walkable sidewalks, DIY home maintenance projects and mid century functionality and flair. Want to read more about why I love the style: do it here!
Check out what I'm up to these days here on the blog! | needs of the people who will use it.
This blog tells the story of how I succumbed to that most basic of architects' urges: to get a house of my own and fix it up for myself with no need to transfer my ideas through a client and contractor in order to make them real.
I didn't always love ranches. While growing up in the north suburbs of Chicago, I conflated them with the builder contemporary and mcMansion filled developments that surrounded me in every former cornfield and rejected them all as "ticky-tacky and all look[ing] | 116 |
Adults to continue giving ear to inner self with 'Child Within Me' exhibit
The exhibit offers a journey to the child within us through various installations.
The Abdülmecid Efendi Mansion in the Nakkaştepe neighborhood, a significant example of late Ottoman architecture, is to host the "Child Within Me" exhibition. The selected works were picked from the collection of Koç Holding CEO Ömer M. Koç, during the 16th Istanbul Biennial. The exhibition, which has been visited by approximately 100,000 people since its opening on Sept. 20, 2019, has been extended<|fim_middle|> but only a few of them remember it," the exhibition offers visitors a journey to the child within them through Picasso's oil painting, The Little Prince's original drawings, contemporary art, and installations specially produced for this exhibition.
Previous in Events Pera Museum in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district takes visitors on a journey... Next in Events The Shona, Zimbabwe's largest tribe, are famed for their unique sculptures... | until Dec. 29 due to intense demand. The exhibition, which has been meticulously laid out by Ömer M. Koç at every phase, combines more than 100 works from artists from Turkey and across the world, with some pieces dating back to the 17th century and others still from currently active contemporary artists.
Károly Aliotti, the exhibition's art consultant, invites visitors to use the works as inspiration to listen to the child within – a habit many lose over time. The exhibit offers work harnessing a range of techniques and media, from paintings to photography, sculptures, installations and more. The exhibition can be seen from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day of the week, except Mondays.
Child Within Me was originally prepared in line with the Istanbul Biennial. The biannual event, set to be sponsored by Koç Holding between 2007-2026, overlaps with the Koç Group's aim of preserving cultural heritage to expand public access to art, and once again highlights the group's commitment in those areas.
Child Within Me
Child Within Me invites art enthusiasts to listen to the child within themselves to arose a sense of curiosity that encourages one to push one's inner limits. Recalling the remark by famous writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of "The Little Prince" that "All grown-ups were once children... | 289 |
In this collection of essays, award-winning humorist Jack Ohman explores the psychological state known as fly fishing, from the gear addict ("Screw<|fim_middle|> on today's op-ed pages. He is the author of An Inconvenient Trout (978-0-9793460-7-1). He has been the editorial cartoonist for The Oregonian since 1983 and lives in Portland, Oregon. | justification-you just get the second rod. Black budget it. Bury it in the Christmas tree appropriations bill . . . ") to the trout numb ("Freezing rain. Nuclear blast- speed wind. Icy pellets smashing into my face like 12-ought buckshot. Nothing. I felt nothing, really, nothing but happiness.") With over 50 new cartoons and writing that will have beginner and experienced anglers alike rolling on the floor, Angler Management is must-read comic relief for fly fishers who have gone off the deep end.
Jack Ohman's cartoons appear regularly in The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, and scores of other major newspapers. People magazine has called Ohman's cartoons "uncompromising, the most wicked and the most pointedly funny" | 176 |
C<|fim_middle|>, contemplative, and uses the historic language of Rite I. The later service is enriched by our organ and parish choir and is a family-friendly, yet still traditional liturgy. All baptized Christians are invited to receive communion at the Lord's table.
Children are very welcome in our services. The later service includes elements for our youngest worshipers. Nursery, led by one staff person and a volunteer, is available for preschool children from 9:15 am until 11:45 am, in the Parish House. Children ages 4 through 2nd grade can follow the children's crucifer out of the church before the reading of the Gospel and sermon, for Children's Worship. They return at the Peace. Parents can collect smaller children from the nursery at the Peace or just before receiving communion. The St. Cecilia Children's Choir sings periodically at the later service.
Dress for services varies; you'll see ties and dresses and jeans and sport shirts. Parking is available in the lots behind the church, on Marion Avenue, and in adjacent lots downtown. The main entrances to the church are through the bell tower and the courtyard, at the South Main Street end of the property. Handicapped access is via the covered breezeway. Please contact us in advance if we can assist you.
Once here, we encourage you to complete a visitor's card, found in the pew. We want to welcome you to this church, answer your questions, and offer you opportunities to serve and learn in the name of Christ. Please come and grow in Christ with us.
Copyright © 2023 The Episcopal Church of the Resurrection. All rights reserved. | lergy Staff
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Visitors are always welcome at Resurrection. There is a place for you in our diverse and welcoming congregation. We hope that you will worship with us and become part of the Body of Christ in this place.
Sunday is our traditional day of worship, and the Holy Eucharist (also called Communion and the Lord's Supper) is the principal act of worship on this day. The Book of Common Prayer guides our liturgical service; at our later service, it is reproduced in a comprehensive bulletin that will assist you. Our 8:30 am service is quiet | 185 |
REDMOND, Wash. – November 14, 2018 — Radiant Vision Systems, a leading provider of test and measurement solutions for lighting and displays, announces that it will host a webinar to present development trends in automotive head-up display (HUD) technology, from traditional to augmented reality (AR) HUD. The webinar will discuss optical measurement challenges and photometric imaging system benefits that ensure virtual image quality across all display types. The webinar, titled "Measuring Head-Up Displays from 2D to AR: System Benefits & Demonstration," will be broadcast live on Wednesday, November 28, 2018, from 10:00 to 11:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time (EST) (4:00 to 5:00 P.M. Central European Time (CET)). The broadcast includes a technical presentation and software demonstration by Radiant's automotive business leader, Matt Scholz, followed by a live audience question and answer session.
Projecting speed, navigation, and situational data onto the car windshield within the operator's field of view offers safety and design advantages that have given HUD technology the highest expected growth rate in the automotive market (Source<|fim_middle|> live broadcast on November 28, visit www.RadiantVisionSystems.com. | : Mordor Intelligence, Automotive Head-up Display Market – Analysis of Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2018 – 2023)). Introduced in several new vehicles, HUDs are evolving rapidly. With the rise of virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR) in consumer electronics, user expectations regarding projection and holographic displays have set a high bar for HUD design and quality. The opportunity for automakers to gain a competitive advantage by offering fixed-depth, two-dimensional HUDs may be brief. Anticipation is building for next-generation 3D and AR systems, even prior to a widespread commercial rollout of the first integrated HUDs.
With the advent of new HUD systems, equipment used to ensure HUD optical quality (the accuracy and visibility of projected images on the windshield) is likewise facing new demands. HUD measurement must adapt with the incorporation of 3D and AR-HUD systems, which project new types of virtual images, across larger fields of view, and at a range of depths. Responding to these demands, manufacturers are challenged to find measurement systems that can address the evolution of HUD technology.
Having contributed to the development of optical metrology parameters for new international HUD measurement standards (SAE J1757-2 "Optical System HUD for Automotive"), the automotive team at Radiant Vision Systems has adapted solutions for HUD testing to meet the measurement criteria of automotive OEMs and Tier I suppliers, whose products incorporate a range of technologies for traditional and AR HUD including TFT, DLP, and laser-based systems. Radiant ProMetric® imaging colorimeters and photometers feature an electronically-controlled lens that is highly effective at identifying and focusing on an image projected into infinity. This capability enables ProMetric analysis software to provide accurate luminance and chromaticity measurements at any working distance—from traditional HUD projections at two to five meters, to AR-HUD projections as far as 20 meters.
During the upcoming webinar, Radiant International Senior Business Advisor for Automotive applications, Matt Scholz, will present the measurement challenges posed new HUD technology from traditional fixed-depth, two-dimensional projections to AR-HUD and 3D images, and camera-based solutions that are adaptive to imaging requirements for simplified quality testing of HUD optical systems. Scholz will introduce Radiant's photometric HUD measurement system, review imaging specifications that are beneficial for measurement across HUD systems, and demonstrate HUD image quality tests in Radiant's new TT-HUD software module.
For information about this webinar and to register for the | 503 |
How Trevor Project counsellors are telecommuting to protect youth in crisis
In January of this year, the United States recorded its first known case of novel coronavirus, or COVID-19<|fim_middle|>
Helping Boys & Girls Clubs of America transform club management with MyClubHub | , in Washington State. In the months of rapid change that followed, offices and businesses began shutting their doors and people around the world began practicing social distancing and quarantining themselves at home. But, for The Trevor Project, the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, shutting down their call centers simply wasn't an option. The call centers support the TrevorLifeline, and many youths in crisis rely on the hotline's continued operation and support every day.
Founded in 1998 by the makers of Academy Award winning short film, Trevor, The Trevor Project is a crucial resource for youth in crisis. The Trevor Project's 2019 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health found that 39% of LGBTQ youth had seriously considered attempting suicide in the past twelve months, with more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth having seriously considered attempting suicide. The Trevor Project seeks to prevent suicide among the vulnerable LGBTQ youth population through their confidential crisis hotline, the TrevorLifeline.
More than 100,000 youth rely on this hotline every year for life-saving counseling support.
In late February, The Trevor Project's Director of Technology, John Callery, recognized the COVID-19 pandemic might result in the closure of their call centers.
"There were a lot of conflicting messages from federal and local governments, with some saying COVID-19 wasn't going to impact North America and others suggesting a more cautious approach," says John. "A conversation with my dad, a retired surgeon and healthcare executive, about emergency preparedness prompted a conversation with the Director of our Lifeline, Danielle Ehsanipour. It's the least elastic part of our organization. We knew that after more than two decades of operation it would require an immense amount of effort to transform our brick and mortar call centers into a remote hotline. We raised a sense of urgency and rallied leadership to build the momentum needed to move very quickly."
"As we saw how quickly COVID-19 was growing in the U.S., we realized it might be a matter of weeks before we'd have to close our physical offices for the safety of our staff and volunteers," says Danielle. "While most teams were set-up to work from home, the Lifeline was a whole different conversation. Since its first day 22 years ago, TrevorLifeline always operated out of a physical call center."
Building a remote hotline
The Trevor Project needed a way to transition TrevorLifeline to a remote model while ensuring the data of their constituents would remain secure. And, they would need to do this as soon as possible to prevent any lapse in service. In less than a week, The Trevor Project and Traction on Demand teams moved from first talks to a plan of action. A Statement of Work was signed on Monday, March 9th, and four days later the solution had been pushed to production.
"It was never an option for us to close the Lifeline."Danielle Ehsanipour, Director of the Lifeline
"Because we put relationships first, we could really lean into our values and drop some of the process," says Aria Ypma-Wollen, Business Development Manager at Traction on Demand. "We had strong organizational trust on both sides so we could move as fast as possible."
For The Trevor Project to enable Lifeline counsellors to work remotely, they needed to transform their data security model. Previously, counsellors could only access data directly on-site at call centers. Enabling remote access for counsellors meant defining what data they could see and what would be protected.
Technical Lead at Traction on Demand, Matt Freedman, had worked with The Trevor Project in the past and immediately dove into the project, taking on much of the work himself to streamline communications.
"The Trevor Project are a great organization to partner with and I loved having the chance to continue supporting their work."Matt Freedman, Technical Lead at Traction on Demand
"It was a small sacrifice to make sure The Trevor Project can keep doing the high impact work they do," says Matt. "The Trevor Project are a great organization to partner with and I loved having the chance to continue supporting their work."
Having worked together on three previous projects, Matt and The Trevor Project team had built a level of trust that allowed them to accomplish a lot in a very short amount of time.
"Matt knows our org forwards and backwards," says John Callery. "Having him take the helm on this project is deeply meaningful, and we all sleep more easily at night knowing he's working with us."
Consistency in a time of crisis
On Wednesday, March 18th, The Trevor Project went live with their remote solution and began a series of one-on-one sessions with counsellors to smooth the transition to telecommuting. With the emphasis of this project on maintaining a tight timeline, work will be done to continue fine-tuning and maintaining the solution. This event marks the first time in twenty-one years that The Trevor Project has had to consider telecommuting, and the solution may open up future opportunities to recruit counsellors for the TrevorLifeline around the country without the need to centralize them at call centers in New York and Los Angeles.
No matter where they're located, Lifeline counsellors are continuing to provide 24-hour support, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the work they do is more important than ever.
"We have been hearing young people express anxiety about social isolation stemming from COVID-19," says Kevin Wong, Head of Communications at The Trevor Project. "Recent school closures also have some students worrying about whether or not they'll be able to go to college in the fall. For many LGBTQ students from unsupportive families, college is a more open and progressive environment that they can look forward to."
What does it mean for The Trevor Project to maintain service during a time when we are practicing social distancing and anxieties are high? For the thousands of LGBTQ teens that rely on the TrevorLifeline every year, it means they can continue to receive support when they need it most. For volunteers and staff, it also means staying safe throughout this public health crisis, while they continue to provide life-saving support to youth.
"It was never an option for us to close the Lifeline," says Director of the Lifeline, Danielle Ehsanipour. "Youth rely on us every day and, with all the uncertainty COVID-19 brings, it is critical that Trevor counselors remain here for youth in crisis 24/7. It was a massive and absolutely necessary undertaking to ensure the safety of our counselors and the LGBTQ youth in crisis that we serve every day."
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Nonprofit guide to remote working: free tools to assist with work-from-home life | 1,422 |
Sourpuss Featured Retailer: 23 Skidoo!
What is your name and job title at 23 Skidoo?
I'm Sandi, and I am the owner, top dog, head honcho, big cheese, mama bear at 23 Skidoo.
Tell us more about 23 Skidoo ! When did you open and what's changed since then?
I opened 23 Skidoo in August, 2001. In the beginning, we were a strictly vintage clothing store. Around 2005ish, we started carrying new/retro/vintage inspired stuff, and have grown like crazy! The town we are in, Campbell, has also grown from a very small-town style community to a bustling little downtown. The customers now are more aware of vintage/retro, thanks to a revival of pinup and shows like Mad Men. There's definitely more of a demand for vintage/retro for every day wear, whereas before it was more<|fim_middle|> and one day just kinda thought, "I wanna open a cool store" and here you have it!
Happy customers!! When you get a shy gal who isn't sure about trying on a dress because she might be insecure, but she tries it on anyway and sees how amazing it looks… Her face brightens up, she gets excited about how beautiful she really is. It's a great feeling.
Peanut butter and cheese on toast.
What is the most important appliance in your home? Why?
My stove. It's from the late 30's and has not only grilling instructions, but a baking chart painted inside the oven doors. For someone like me, who can't cook, and doesn't like using books or online recipes, those instructions are life savers.
No. But I feel sorry for the guys who clean up their poop.
We have some really fun upcoming events we will be styling/sponsoring, and doing some great photo shoots to update our website. Plus, LOTS of new items will be coming in.
you didn't ask about cats. CATS ARE AWESOME.
Everyone knows skulls rule and we are big fans of them. Our ever popular Lust For Skulls print is now available in two new designs. First is our Black Lust For Skulls Sweater Dress. Our favorite skull print combined with soft, cotton yarn and a flattering V-neck makes this the one staple you're gonna want in your closet this season!
Another NEW item is our White Lust For Skulls Cardigan. This eye-popping, white and black knitted sweater is a true attention grabber! It's the perfect new addition to your Sourpuss collection!
For more of this great Lust For Skulls designs, click HERE.
New Hair Roses Now In Bloom!
Keep that pomp' in place with one of our new favorite rose clips! That's right, Sourpuss has new Hair Roses for this autumn. These hair rose attaches securely to an alligator clip to keep you lookin' retro fab all day!
Our favorite V-neck sweater is now available in an amazing Batty design! This design comes in either a Vivid Horror-Green color or Black. This deep v-neck and fitted silhouette all add up to one spookily fantastic combo!
NEW Resin Bone Necklaces Now Avaialbile!
Check out our brand new Raccoon Jaw Necklace and our Bird Skull Necklace! Don't worry, no animals were harmed for these beauties. They are 100% Resin and come on an adjustable chain!
Bats, Cats, Skulls, Teeth, and more now in stock!
We have some scary good new jewelry now in just in time for your Fall / Halloween orders! We have Bats, Cats, Skulls, Teeth, Coffins and more now available in our Jewelry Section. If you are stocking up for the Halloween season, Don't forget about all of our other perfect Halloween items and be sure place your order now to make sure you get what you need for all your favorite ghouls and ghosts at your shop!
Do not miss out on our new iPhone 5 cases deigned just for us by Australian tattoo artist Mimsy Gleeson. You can check out these and the rest of our iPhone 5 cases HERE.
NEW Bone Necklaces Are Here!
Make no bones about it, we LOVE our new bone necklaces and so will you! Choose between our Raccoon Jaw Bone or the Bird Skull. The bones are 100% resin so don't worry, no animals were harmed making this beauty!
Just in case you forgot, or you just decided to go to MAGIC next week, we wanted to remind you to come by our booth #YC75931. We will be showing our FALL / HOLIDAY 2014 collection as well as previewing our top designs for SPRING 2015 We will be part of WWD MAGIC that will be at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Due to high traffic volume we strongly suggest you book an appointment if you can. Reach out to your rep to set one up, and we will see you in the desert! For more information about MAGIC, you can go HERE.
Our Bad Kitty Diner Dress Now In Stock!
Meow!! You won't want to wait to get your paws on this little vintage-inspired number! Our fun, little a-line dress features a "MEOW" embroidery on the front chest and one verrrry angry kitty screenprinted on the back! All you cat lovers out there – this one's for you! | of a specialty market.
What did you do before 23 Skidoo ?
I've done lots of things… I actually still have a job part time as a unit assistant in an ER, but I also worked in veterinary clinics for over 15 years. Strange transition, I know! I've always loved vintage clothes and awesome style, | 70 |
Writing an ethnography paper is not a piece of cake. That is one of the most complicated academic assignments students get. The very first thing you need to find out is "What is an ethnography paper?" When getting a task to compose an ethnography paper, you should know that you are supposed to conduct research on the social and cultural peculiarities of an ethnicity and compare the lifestyle and beliefs of a particular ethnic group with others or to analyze the changes, which took place during the process of development within the same ethnic group.
Sounds not as easy as ABC but you will be able to cope with this task effectively if following the guidelines for writing an ethnographic paper for an A-grade. Do you feel puzzled having no idea on how to craft an ethnography paper? Then, don't waste time and get started with learning the useful tips for structuring this kind of writing the right way.
Choose what culture you want to research: You are recommended to choose either the culture you are familiar with or the one you will be glad to research. Keep in<|fim_middle|> thoughts and will make the entire writing process much more effective.
The main idea of your research.
The relevance of your research paper findings.
Follow the above-mentioned tips, and you will be able to cope with the task to craft an ethnography paper much faster than you can imagine. Moreover, take into account that it depends on you whether the research process is tiresome and dull or it is entertaining and fascinating. If you are interested in what you do, the success will be yours! | mind that being passionate about the topic is the primary rule you should be guided with when crafting any academic paper.
Formulate a serious thesis statement: You should focus on your main idea and create a persuasive thesis statement, which would help the reader to understand what your research is going to be about.
Tell about the methodology you have used: Any research paper writing implies that the writer should conduct research to get some practical results. When composing an ethnography work, you should tell the reader how you have gathered the information presented in the paper.
Make your ethnography research paper is bright and vivid: What is the most effective way to make your reader believe that you have really provided a certain type of survey or a questionnaire? It is really simple! Just, include some dialogues with people and quotes in your paper.
Include the information about the people who have taken part in your survey only if they gave you the consent: This is very important. Otherwise, you will violate the rights of those people.
Do your best to prove your arguments but remain subjective: Bear in mind that this kind of paper shouldn't focus on your opinion only. It is much more important to find out what other people think.
The correct ethnography paper structure is of the utmost importance. You should structure it properly for the reader to understand what the main idea of your research is. To make your paper clear and concise, you should stick to the ethnography paper format. Divide it into several sections: an introduction, the main body, the conclusion. Each of them should perform the particular function.
An introduction should state the topic, tell the reader what it is going to be about and include a strong thesis statement. Make your beginning eye-catching for the reader to hold on reading the main body, where you should tell about the conducted research and your findings. And, finally, write the conclusion. At the end of the paper, you are supposed to provide a summary of the most significant ideas and express your standpoint.
Stages of the formation of ethnology as a science.
Are peoples the subject field of ethnology?
Ethnology and ethnography in the system of scientific knowledge.
Methods and functions of ethnology.
The rudiments of ethnographic knowledge in the ancient period.
Have a look at the ethnography paper outline before you get started with your paper writing. You won't regret if spending time on crafting a plan. Believe, it will help to organize your | 488 |
If you have a horse, and you are about to purchase a horsebox<|fim_middle|> Make sure that you are looking for discounts that will help you choose the right option for yourself. | , then you should know that there are various important things that you will have to consider first. Make sure that you are always going through every single detail that will help you in the best way possible. If you are not going through all the important factors, then you won't be able to come up with a great solution. It can be hard for you to find the best horsebox insurance. However, if you are going through all the important factors, then it will become a lot easier for you to get the desired outcome.
You should always look for the horsebox insurance so you can avoid all the issues that you are facing. Make sure that you are checking things in detail so you can get rid of the future issues. Here are few important things that you should know about getting horsebox insurance.
First of all, you will have to check multiple levels of horsebox insurance. If you are not checking all the levels of horsebox insurance, then you won't be able to come up with a great solution. If you are going through all the details and asking all the right questions from the insurance company, then you will be able to make the right decision. Moreover, you can always compare veteran horse insurance online. Make sure that you are going through the detailed research process and checking out different levels of insurance to make the right decision.
The next thing that you will have to do is to get quotations from multiple providers. If you are getting quotations online, then it will become a lot easier for you to get the desired outcome. You can also have a look at veteran horse society to get a better idea of the things. It is always better for you to get different quotations from different providers so you can easily choose the right option for yourself. You can then compare the quotations, and choose the right option for yourself.
The next thing that you will have to do is to look for the discounts. Make sure that you are going through every single detail that will help you in the right way. | 401 |
Mistra reached a decision to invest 30 million crowns over four years towards a new Arctic research programmme, Mist<|fim_middle|>in Swedish) see ARCUM. | ra Arctic Sustainable Development. The research will focus on providing a nuanced picture of local and subnational governance challenges in the European Arctic mainland. The aim is to increase the capacity of local and regional decision makers to make informed decisions related to sustainable development.
Drawing on the social sciences and humanities, the programme will study the challenges facing the European Arctic. The aim is to sketch pathways for sustainable development in this sensitive region with its diverse stakeholders and opportunities. The programme, New Governance for Sustainable Development, will be led by Umeå University.
The new programme follows on the Mistra Arctic Futures in a Global Context, which commenced in 2011 and was recently extended to March 2014. Mistra Arctic Sustainable Development will be launched following the final event for Mistra Arctic Futures, early March 2014.
The call for proposals for the programme Mistra Arctic Sustainable Development opened in December 2012. The applications were reviewed by an international panel including Kim Holmén (International Director: Norwegian Polar Institute), Anna Kerttula de Ecvhave (National Science Foundation), Igor Krupnik (Smithsonian Institutions) and Lars Anders Baer (Sami Parliament) and the winning application was thoroughly revised before the Mistra board reached a final decision.
To read the full press release ( | 266 |
Mehidy Hasan Miraz: 'Getting a five-for overseas is even more special'
Posted on July 9, 2021 by ericadminchia
Takudzwanashe Kaitano, meanwhile, was elated to have made the highest score by a Zimbabwe opener on debut
Takudzwanashe Kaitano is the latest of 13 Test openers that Zimbabwe have tried in the last five years. On day three in Harare, he made 87, the highest score by a Zimbabwe Test opener, breaking Grant Flower's 29-year-old record.
Kaitano kept Zimbabwe in the game for a long period, adding 61 with Milton Shumba for the first wicket and 115 with Brendan Taylor for the second. Having only made the XI after Kevin Kasuza pulled<|fim_middle|>'s play. "It has been a dream come true for me to play Test cricket for the country. It is a good feeling but you want to get over the line, and get a big score. The wicket was really good. I really wanted to get a big score and put the team in a good position.
Najmul Hossain Shanto catches Richard Ngarava off Shakib Al Hasan's bowling BCB
"Going forward, I will take every innings as it comes. We just have to keep going as a team. We would have wanted to bat for longer, and get close to their total. Unfortunately we are back in the field again. We just have to keep it tight and hopefully restrict them to a low score that's chaseable."
Zimbabwe slumped from 225 for 2 to 276 all out, losing their last eight wickets for just 51 runs. Kaitano was one of those dismissed, caught down the leg side off Mehidy Hasan Miraz, who was rampant from that point on, running through the tail in a quick burst.
Miraz, who has now taken eight five-wicket hauls in Test cricket, said this one was special for being only his second five-for away from home.
"I took a five-for after a long time. A five-for gives the bowler a lot of confidence," he said. "I have been getting two or three wickets lately, so this is good. Getting a five-for in overseas conditions makes it even more special. I last took a five-for in the West Indies in 2018."
Miraz said Bangladesh captain Mominul Haque had reminded him and the other bowlers during the lunch break that they had to cut down the runs, after they had gone for a fair bit in the first session.
"It is a very slow and flat wicket, which made it difficult for our spinners," Miraz said. "We tried to bowl in the right areas, and contain the runs. Most of all, we waited for their mistakes.
"Our captain told me that the spinners should contain the runs, whether we take the wickets or not. They were building partnerships but you may have seen that we bowled very well in the post-lunch session, when we only gave away 35 runs in 29 overs. We also took three wickets."
Mohammad Isam is ESPNcricinfo's Bangladesh correspondent. @isam84
Posted in Bangladesh
Andy Balbirnie – 'If Ireland don't qualify for the World Cup, we've got no excuses'Mahmudullah makes shock decision to retire from Test cricket | out injured, Kaitano gave a good account of himself, facing 311 balls, the third-most by a Zimbabwe debutant, and the third-most in any innings by a Zimbabwe opener since 2000.
The 28-year-old Kaitano's elation at making his mark at the highest level was mixed with disappointment at the Zimbabwe collapse that gave Bangladesh a 192-run first-innings lead.
"I cannot express in words how special the feeling is," he said at the end of the day | 108 |
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Egg, Ham and Cheese Sandwiches
Egg, Ham and Cheese Sandwiches Puzzle Details:
About: Start the day with a relaxing puzzle and a delicious sandwich. Today we feature some delicious egg, ham and cheese sandwiches - we also have fresh salad, tomatoes and pickles. Sandwiches are a popular type of lunch food, taken to work, school, or picnics to be eaten as part of a packed lunch. The sandwich began as a portable finger food in the Western world, though over time it has become prevalent worldwide. There are both savoury sandwiches, such as deli meat sandwiches, and sweet sandwiches, such as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Enjoy!
Puzzle Of The Day On: 18/Jun/2018
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One of the most popular drinks around the world, coffee has been drunk around the world for at least 500 years. The earliest evidence of coffee-drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi shrines of Yemen. Once ripe, coffee berries are picked, processed, and dried. Once dry the coffee beans are roasted. Roasted beans are ground and brewed with near-boiling or boiling water to produce the hot beverage we all love to drink in the morning or when ever we need a bit more energy. Coffee may be served as white coffee with a dairy product such as milk or cream, or as black coffee with no such addition. It may be sweetened with sugar, server hot or cold. Now that you know a little bit more about the beans featured in this puzzle why not give it a try and solve it as fast as fast as you can for fun and relaxing time.
Ripe White Grapes On The Vine
Grape season is here and we're out in the vineyard checking out this year's harvest. Join us in the vineyard and see the vines full of ripe grapes, smell and taste their sweet and juicy fruits and relax with today's puzzle. Have fun!
Healthy Fruit And Veggie Smoothies
Smoothies are thick, creamy and cold beverages made from pureed raw fruit, vegetables, and sometimes dairy products (e.g. milk, yogurt, ice-cream or cottage cheese), typically using a blender. Many smoothies include large or multiple servings of fruits and vegetables, which are recommended in a healthy diet. Smoothies include dietary fiber (e.g. pulp, also skin and seeds) and so are thicker than fruit juice, often with a consistency similar to a milkshake. In today's fun puzzle we feature a variety of healthy and colorful fruit and veggie smoothies. Pick your difficulty level, click start and give it a try!
Brightly Colored Farfalle
Time for some delicious and colorful pasta! If you didn't know, farfalle are a type of pasta commonly known as bow-tie pasta or butterfly pasta. Farfalle come in several sizes and colors. The bright colors are added by mixing certain ingredients into the dough (beetroot can be used for red, spinach for green and cuttlefish ink for black).
Basket Of Farm Fresh Eggs
In this fun new puzzle we're on a farm and we've collected a basket full of farm fresh eggs. If you didn<|fim_middle|> settlers from Europe. Molasses, which was less expensive than sugar, soon became a common ingredient and produced a softer cake. Gingerbread Cookies are generally served around Christmas.
Fresh Green Peas
Time for another fun challenge! In this new jigsaw puzzle we feature lots and lots for fresh green peas. If you didn't know, peas are starchy, but high in fiber, protein, vitamin A, vitamin B6, vitamin C, vitamin K, phosphorus, magnesium, copper, iron, zinc and lutein. So what are you waiting for? Click start and prove your puzzle solving skills in this fun new game.
A new online puzzle featuring a bunch of delicious and colorful Smarties candy. Nestlé Smarties are a colour-varied sugar-coated chocolate confectionery. They have been manufactured since 1882, originally by H.I. Rowntree & Co. They come in eight colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, pink and brown, although the blue variety was temporarily replaced by a white variety in some countries, while an alternative natural colouring dye of the blue colour was being researched.
Homemade Crepes
Today we're in the kitchen whipping up some homemade crepes. Start today's puzzle and join us for some delicious homemade crepes. If you didn't know, a crepe is a type of very thin pancake. Crepes are served with a variety of fillings, from the simplest with only sugar, jam or fruit preserves to flambeed crepes Suzette or elaborate savoury galettes.
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This site uses cookies to deliver its services and to analyze traffic. For more information please read out Cookie & Privacy Policies. Third-party trademarks are used solely for describing the games indexed herein and no license or other affiliation is implied. | 't know, egg yolks and whole eggs store significant amounts of protein and choline (an essential nutrient for humans and many other animals). Bird eggs are a common food and one of the most versatile ingredients used in cooking. The most commonly used bird eggs are those from the chicken, duck, and goose eggs.
Freshly Baked Waffles
Waffles are eaten throughout the world, particularly in Belgium, which has over a dozen regional varieties. They are made from leavened batter or dough that is cooked between two plates that are patterned to give a characteristic size, shape and surface impression
Steamed Snow Crab
Snow crab are caught as far north as the Arctic Ocean, from Newfoundland to Greenland and north of Norway in the Atlantic Ocean, and across the Pacific Ocean, including the Sea of Japan, the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, Norton Sound, and even as far south as California. It is popular among seafood lovers and it's eaten steamed, boiled or cooked in other more complex ways.
Making A Fruit Salad
Let's start the day with a fresh and healthy fruit salad. If you didn't know, there are many types of fruit salad, ranging from the basic (no nuts, marshmallows, or dressing) to the moderately sweet (Waldorf salad) to the sweet (ambrosia salad). Fruit salad can be served as an appetizer, a side salad, or a dessert. Common ingredients used in fruit salads include strawberries, pineapple, honeydew, watermelon, grapes, and kiwifruit.
Heart Shaped Gingerbread Cookies
Gingerbread is typically flavored with ginger, cloves, nutmeg or cinnamon and sweetened with honey, sugar or molasses. Gingerbread is claimed to have been brought to Europe in 992 CE by the Armenian monk Gregory of Nicopolis. The first documented trade of gingerbread biscuits dates to the 17th century, where they were sold in monasteries, pharmacies, and town square farmers' markets. Gingerbread came to the Americas with | 417 |
Obama Hack Makes Bullsh** Claim That Attorney General Barr is Covering Up for President Trump
Posted at 5:00 pm on April 4, 2019 by streiff
William Barr – Caricature by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY<|fim_middle|> each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly. It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself."
Barr instead chose the one path that could call his behavior into question, while negating the entire reason for appointing a special counsel in the first place: to ensure that the taint of politics is removed from the Justice Department's decision-making. That choice would be odd for any attorney general. It makes even less sense for one whose impartiality was questioned from the outset, given that he was chosen for the job after he wrote an unsolicited memo questioning some of the very foundations of the special counsel's investigation.
Funny how all of this circles back to the same point, that is, the demand that Barr accept the summary written by the Weissmann lead investigators as his own.
What Miller is really upset about is that Barr is a canny operator and didn't meekly go along with the plan by Weissmann and his crew to turn a report that exonerated Trump and his campaign of any collusion with Russians into a tendentious rehash of things the Weissmann-led team didn't like about the way they were treated.
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Tags: andrew weissmann matthew miller Mueller Report New York Times Politico russia probe Washington Post william barr
9th Circuit Delivers A Win: Climate Change Teens Have Case Against Trump Admin Booted
Judge Refuses to Use Pedophile's Transgender Pronouns and Minds Are Lost
Bonchie
Nick Searcy's 'Hollywood Ain't Right': Normalize This
FISA Abuser Andrew McCabe to Participate In Forum On Stopping FISA Abuse
NYT Claims Top Pentagon Officials Were 'Flabbergasted' When President Trump Agreed to Use Their Plan to Kill Soleimani
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'Pulitzer worthy'! Media super-sleuth notices what domain was registered after 'McSally attacked Manu'
Congressman Who Lost Legs to IED Walks to Podium to Torch Dems for Being 'Cowards' After Soleimani Hit | -SA 2.0/Original
As I've posted on a few occasions, the Democrat strategy, now that the Mueller investigation has reached the same conclusion sane people reached in December 2016, is to convince their base and CNN watchers that the actual REAL real report shows collusion and obstruction of justice. They are doing that by demanding something they probably aren't going to get, which is the Mueller report with all the actual documentary evidence, and then using the redacted material as evidence of the good stuff being hidden.
To make this plausible, they have to take a GOPe guy and Washington fixture like William Barr and they have to turn him into a super villain. This is how they are going about it. The story is from Politico and headlined The Barr-Shaped Cloud Over the Justice Department, the subtitle is The attorney general has made a total hash of the Mueller report, undermining the very department he runs. The author is Matthew Miller who worked as spokesman for the criminally corrupt Eric Holder.
Instead, Barr's handling of the conclusion of the 22-month long investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election has thrust a new cloud over the Justice Department and his leadership, one that has grown darker with the reports that some members of the special counsel's team believe he has mischaracterized their findings and needlessly inserted himself into the process to make his own determination as to whether the president obstructed justice.
Barr is now in open warfare with the special counsel's office, with his spokesperson releasing a statement Thursday that seemed to push back on the contention, leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post, that he could have released a summary written by the special counsel's office rather than his own version of events. That statement came after Barr's peculiar assertion last week that his initial four-page letter was not a summary of the special counsel's conclusions, even though it was his own initial letter that said he was "summariz[ing] the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation."
Actuallly, this is not only not true, this is a damned lie.
Neither of the mischievous stories he refers to mentions any conflict between the special counsel's office (which has sort of ceased to exist) and Barr. Rather it is whinging by Weissmann about how the Barr summary wasn't the same as the summaries prepared by members of the special counsel's office. Those, we're assured, were much tougher on Trump. I've no doubt of that. Mueller's main deputy was a guy who specialized in destroying lives and careers of innocent people. I'm sure that things could be spun in a way that would be very damaging and which might be impossible to refute given, as my colleague bonchie posted, the special counsel's office had literally classified every page of the report.
Barr has also moved the goal posts on what categories of information would be redacted from the report, adding two new ones to the list he announced on March 24, while refusing so far to ask a court for permission to release grand jury material, as the Justice Department did at the conclusion of two previous investigations into presidential misconduct.
This is simply dishonest in the extreme. Mueller is not the same kind of counsel as the Nixon and Clinton independent counsels. He is a temp employee of Department of Justice. Grand jury material is only releasable if the House is undertaking an impeachment investigation. They aren't. So they aren't going to get it.
Barr simply could have told Congress that he had received the report and would make a version available when he had completed his review and made appropriate redactions. He could have released Mueller's principal findings, as he initially said he would do, without adding his own conclusion on obstruction of justice. Or he could have released one of the multiple summaries prepared by Mueller's team while review of the full report continued. As a U.S. official briefed on the matter told the Post, "the front matter from | 814 |
Home 27-19 Thomson Avenue
Excavation Underway at 27-19 Thomson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens
27-19 Thomson Avenue. Developed by Thomson Development LLC
By: Michael Young 7:30<|fim_middle|>ings Revealed for 35-01 Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens
Life Science Redevelopment Project Announced for 43-10 23rd Street in Long Island City, Queens
TF Cornerstone Completes 1,194-Unit Residential Complex in Hunter's Point South, Queens | am on August 2, 2021
Excavation has begun at 27-19 Thomson Avenue, the site of a ten-story, 30-unit building in Long Island City, Queens. Designed by Thomson Development LLC with Warner Construction Services Inc. handling construction, the 28,051-square-foot property will yield 23,012 square feet of residential space and 5,039 square feet of lower-level retail. The 116-foot-tall structure will rise from a 3,600-square-foot plot bound by Thomson Avenue to the south and 44th Drive to the northeast that was purchased for $6.85 million in 2018. Demolition of the site's former low-rise occupant concluded in early 2019.
Recent photographs show an excavator on site and a substantial amount of dirt already removed. It shouldn't be too long until the remainder of excavation is completed and work shifts to the foundations and cellar level of the building. The main rendering shows a mostly light-colored façade with a mixture of dark-colored panels enclosing the first two levels and the pointed eastern corner of the edifice, which features stacked balconies with glass railings.
27-19 Thomson Avenue. Photo by Michael Young
The cellar level and first two floors of 27-19 Thomson Avenue will be devoted to retail space, above which will be residences with no more than four units per floor. Amenities include a recreation room, a third-floor terrace, and an outdoor roof deck. The nearest subways are the 7 and G trains at the Court Square Station at the intersection of 23rd Street and Jackson Avenue; the E, M, and R trains at Queens Plaza to the northeast; and the E and M trains at the Court Square-23rd Street station at the corner of 44th Drive and 23rd Street.
A completion date for 27-19 Thomson Avenue is slated for spring 2023, as noted on the on-site construction board. A designer has also yet to be announced.
27-19 Thomson Avenue Architecture Mixed-Use New York Queens Residential Retail
3 Comments on "Excavation Underway at 27-19 Thomson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens"
Thomas | August 2, 2021 at 9:31 am | Reply
Nilda Aviles | August 2, 2021 at 10:29 pm | Reply
I have section 8 voucher i looking for a one bedroom please send me a application thank you
Aura López | August 23, 2021 at 1:03 pm | Reply
I will like to move there
NOVA Condominium Tower Tops Out at 41-05 29th Street in Long Island City, Queens
Render | 610 |
Storm damage repair Aurora CO gives you the chance to bring your building back to life. Whether there are major structural problems or small leaks, this will help you where you need it. It gives you the chance to avoid a worsening problem while actually improving the overall condition.
When this is your home, you have to remember the important role that this plays in your life. You need it to stay in top condition if you are going to be able to live there without fear or problems getting in the way. This is true for workplaces, as well. With there being a lot of people on site and it being<|fim_middle|> want to make sure that it is going to be good. If it is not, your home or office is going to remain in danger and you will not be able to make the improvements needed with leaks.
Right after something happens, find local storm damage repair in Aurora Co. You need to get on top of the problem before anything worsens. This should help you to manage it as a whole and avoid something much more expensive in the future. It is not hard to take advantage of this, but you need to know what you are doing.
Do your research into what is around and what is offered before making any final decision. You should be informed about what you are choosing so that you have the best results. | a major form of income, you need it fixed.
Storm damage repair Aurora Co covers problems caused by natural disasters. When wind, hail, and rain have wrecked parts of your building, this is where you can turn for assistance. It will help you to fix what is wrong and return it to its previous condition.
From minor to major issues, you will be able to see an incredible difference in the appearance and quality of the building. You will be able to use everything and move around without anything stopping you. No matter what has happened, you should turn to these services for help right away if you want to avoid the problem from worsening.
Putting this off can be dangerous. This increases the chances of something happening and the problem worsening. Even something small, like leaks that you cannot see, can lead to major problems throughout your building.
This can weaken the structure and even force you to do major, expensive fixes at a later time. Storm damage repair should be sought out right after something happens. You need to make sure that everything is in top condition and that you are not going to be in danger at any point.
While storm damage repairs Aurora Co is incredibly beneficial and important, you have to remember to look into what is out there. As with any service, there are going to be some poor quality options.
This may lead to serious issues and cause you to waste a lot of money on something that simply does not work. With how vital it is for you to have this done, you | 300 |
Home/General/Smartwatches Could Help Air Force Pilots, Crew Recognize Dangerous Fatigue
Kenya Taylor2019-10-29T12:50:48-05:0010/29/2019|General|
Work-related burnout is a national problem. But when it comes to military aviation, it can be deadly.
For the last few years, Air Force Maj. Alexander Criss has pursued a mission to get more rest for pilots and crew heading out for operations across the globe. And that has led to the development of a smartwatch app that aims to help pilots and crew understand their bodies' rhythms and when they're most drowsy.
It started as a simple question.
"Am I the only one who's tired all the time when I'm flying? Or is this a more systemic problem for mobility air forces?" Criss said during a recent interview with Military.com. The pilot, who had first approached the idea during a course at the Advanced Study of Air Mobility program, is now assigned to U.S. Transportation Command in Illinois.
Related: Air Force Looks to Artificial Intelligence to Fight Future Wars
Through his research, Criss found that more than half of mobility pilots — 53% — were flying "during this window when their body thinks they should be sleeping."
The lingering fatigue can greatly affect reflexes pilots need to keep aircraft steady, as well as coordination needed for air refueling, landing or dealing with an emergency, he said.
"One of the things that seemed like a constant was that, when we were flying, there was always a certain level of fatigue associated with these flying operations," he said.
Another component of the problem is that mobility pilots operate as a crew, Criss said.
"We are all trained to fly and work together as a team to get through the mission," he said. "Well, the problem is when we have impaired cognitive reflex and interpersonal capabilities, our crew resource management is negatively impacted."
Criss expanded his research at the Air Force's Air University School of Advanced Air and Space Studies last year and began to look for solutions.
Enter BETTY, or the Better Effectiveness Through Tracking Yourself project.
"BETTY helps fill a gap in our current fatigue risk management system," said Criss, who's flown as a C-21, KC-10 and C-5 pilot. He joined the service in 2006.
BETTY — which is what Criss also affectionately calls the voice in the cockpit alert system — is a multi-pronged process, he explained.
The system includes a wristwatch that measures a pilot's circadian rhythm, or the internal, 24-hour clock that regulates a person's sleep-wake cycle.
"Circadian rhythm disruption … is when our bodies are out of sync with our sleep and wake cycles," Criss said. After flying, many people feel jet lag because the body and mind interpret differently when they should be asleep or awake, he explained.
"So one of the things I wanted to look at was how many of our crews are flying the opposite of their body clock," he said.
A proposed software app would monitor "that data from the watch, and it's actually able to run it through some of the sleep models that are already out there," Criss said, adding that Air Mobility Command already uses a Sleep, Activity, Fatigue and Task Effectiveness (SAFTE) model that monitors some of these factors.
The combined data can act as a sleep assistant. "When I land in, say, Germany, and I'm trying and maybe I've already been awake for 27 hours, but the watch is telling me, 'Hey, you've entered a low point in your circadian rhythm, you need to get two hours of sleep right now," Criss said.
There is room for adjustment, especially if airmen can't sleep very long knowing they have to grab<|fim_middle|>, and an award contract is expected in the near future.
The Air Force-led organizations "put some money behind it to say, 'We want to solve this problem,' which is awesome," Criss said.
"Anytime you do research, one of the things is, 'Well, that'll probably just end up in a trash can,'" he said. "It's been pretty amazing that people have cared about it and that people are trying to actually take up a problem and work as a team to solve it."
— Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
Military.com | By Oriana Pawlyk | a bite to eat or take off again soon for another mission.
"Maybe I don't get that [two hours]," Criss said. "But BETTY is making all these adjustments in real time to try to help me maximize this crew rest" at a later time.
Criss' final vision for BETTY is for it to pull the data from each crew member's app into an aggregated dashboard that the crews, or even AMC, can monitor.
"Think of it like a battery for each crew — now AMC can see in real time all of the effectiveness and fatigue levels of their crews aggregated as one. When that call actually comes down for an alert, you can actually look at the 'batteries' of those crews, and see which crew is the most effective" to send out, he said.
The data would require backup security to protect privacy and avoid hacking.
"From a 'big brother' perspective to the crews, it's not AMC watching you specifically. They're looking at your crew as a whole" for operational benefit, Criss said.
"And [the data] absolutely" needs to stay out of adversaries' hands, he said.
Criss presented his research "Tired of Flying: The Unmitigated Risk of Aircrew Fatigue" and BETTY as the solution earlier this year to officials of MGMWERX, a partnership organization that blends part of DEFENSEWERX and the Air Force Research Laboratory at Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, to promote agile business.
MGMWERX in May offered a $1.5 million commitment for a Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, program in the phase two stage. Through AFWERX — an Air Force innovation program that partners with small business and academia — a team then put together a proposal, asking for a real-time fatigue system for risk assessment; the window on the SBIR proposals closed this week | 385 |
Karonia
We hadn't met the team from Karonia before but luckily our very helpful PR contact Deborah Lord was on hand to do the honours and help talk us through what was on display - and again there was plenty to see.
Karonia extended the Mistral range of 25mm solid surface worktops with the launch of five smart new colours at the show. The original collection of 11 effects was<|fim_middle|>cast kitchen sinks from Orello, in a number of different bowl formats.
W: www.karonia.com | launched at KBB 2010 and has gone from strength to strength as the versatility of this enhanced acrylic worksurface is fully appreciated.
In a nutshell, Mistral combines the look of natural quartz and stone with the practicality and unlimited creative potential of an acrylic-based material. Ideal for kitchens and bathrooms, the worktops are completely non-porous and, because there is no substrate, there are no internal joins to compromise structural integrity or hinder imaginative design.
If you look at our picture, you can see the central table with the blue lights but what you can't see is that its surface is made from Mistral. What John and I found incredible is that try as we might, we could not see the join and nor could we feel it with our fingers - even though Deb told us where it was. Truly remarkable!
"Since our UK debut, we have focused on communicating the features and benefits of a genuine 25mm thick solid surface material as the implications for installation, design and after-care are immense," explained Andrew Pickup, Director. "Our five new colours - Areno, Consera, Ignea, Toffee Cream and Zircona - will broaden the appeal of the range still further."
To coincide with the launch, Karonia has also introduced a new 16 page consumer brochure which highlights some of the many creative applications of Mistral through a series of inspirational, lifestyle settings. The product range is also supported by a new website which was launched in late 2011. Designed to be simple to navigate, the site presents comprehensive and detailed information on the range in a series of short, easily assimilated sections.
Andrew told us that the Mistral range of 25mm solid surface solutions is available in the UK and Ireland via a network of six appointed distributors listed on the website.
The stand also hosted a display of brand new Gel | 381 |
The call is pretty different. I don't know all that much about fish crows apart<|fim_middle|>'t know that much about the fish crow--exactly how different are they from the American crow?
Graduate students, here's a bird to study...and you could do it some place like Florida! | from knowing I'll find them when I'm along the coast in the easter US. I checked over at Birds of North America Online and my favorite section to check on bird profiles is "Priorities for Future Research." Boy howdy, though this bird is very common along the eastern coastal areas...there's a lot we don't know! And corvids are down right interesting to study.
I was especially surprised about how little we know about the fish crow repertoire. American crows have a crazy vocal repertoire beyond just the "caw" that most of us know and try to tune out. But they have various types of "caws" and they make weird maraca rattles and can mimic other species (including humans). We don | 150 |
I recently watched the BBC4 documentary Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing (Hannah Fry's 10-part radio series Computing Britain is also an interesting listen)[¹]. And although I know that Ada Lovelace is credited with publishing the first computer program, I hadn't ever seen the form that this program took before. It's not hard to track down – on Ada's Wikipedia page there is an image of the diagram ([image] – "Diagram for the computation by the Engine of the Numbers of Bernoulli").
The diagram itself was part of a note (Note G) that was attached to a translation of a French transcript (by an Italian military engineer named Luigi Frederico Menabrea – who would later become the Italian Prime Minister) of a seminar given by Charles Babbage at the University of Turin in <|fim_middle|> be implemented by placing an instruction after operation 23 of "branch if non-zero to operation 13". The outer loop would be implemented by placing an instruction after operation 25 of "branch always to operation 1" (or more likely to branch if n was less than a predefined constant value, so that a Bernoulli sequence of the specified length is generated).
The text also hints at the notion of indirection, where one variable (or register) can tell us which of a number of other variables we need to access. This is necessary as each time we iterate through the operations 13-23, we have computed the A coefficient after executing operation 20, but then in operation 21 we multiply this the corresponding number already computed in the B sequence. The first time round we would need B, stored in variable v22 (as specified in the operands for operation 21 in the diagram), but the next time round the loop we would need the B value stored in v23, and so forth. Likewise when the final result (B) is calculated it is stored by operation 24 into v24 and n is increased. The next time we get to operation 24 the final result will be B and it will be stored into v25. Although the diagram itself does not indicate how the instructions of operations 21 and 24 are modified as the program is executed it is clear that it is an issue that Ada has considered.
From the way Ada describes the program it seems that way this would happen is that for each value of n the program is run once. Then it must be set up slightly differently for next run. Ada notes that exactly the same sequence of operation cards can be reused, but the variable cards must be modified slightly on each iteration to achieve the required results.
One way the Analytical Engine could do indirection would be to allow the index of a variable to be specified in another variable, so instead of a "LOAD v" (load the Ingress Axis from variable 12 in the store), we would have something like "LOADI v" (load the Ingress Axis from the variable in the store whose index is stored in v12). So if v = 21, "LOADI v" would be the same as "LOAD v".
But variables in the store hold 50 decimal digits and indices into the store are only 3 decimal digits, so it is a bit odd. Instead we might consider that the Analytical Engine could be equipped with a few special purpose three decimal digit index registers, these could then be used to provide an additional offset in a load instruction.
For the purposes of Ada's program it would be necessary to only have a single additional index register. We could imagine a that "LOADI v" would correspond to "LOAD v[20 + i]" where i represents the value in the index register. So if i = 1 the instruction "LOADI v" would be the same as "LOAD v". And there would be a corresponding "STOREI" instruction. To increase the offset we would need an "INC" instruction, which would increment the number in the index register by 1. This would be sufficient to implement Ada's program.
But perhaps this approach is too influenced by modern computing. A different approach would be to allow the LOAD and STORE instructions to get a variable from an alternate stack of cards. "LOAD alt" and "STORE alt". That way the alternate stack of cards could be filled with the addresses of v21 to (say) v30. And in operation 10 the address that the first LOAD card uses isn't punched on the card itself, instead it is read from the alternate stack (it's the first card in the stack so it would be v21), and the stack moves to the next card. When we reach operation 21 we would again use a "LOAD alt" instruction to get the index of the variable from the alternate stack. The first time round the loop it will be v22, then v23 and so on. When the loop ends, and we have processed all the previously calculated results the next card in the alternate stack will be the correct address to store the newly computed number. So operation 24 uses "STORE alt" and the number is stored.
Finally at the end of the diagram as well as looping back to the beginning we also rewind the alternate card deck and we are ready to go again without needing to alter any of the cards. After 10 iterations the first 10 Bernoulli numbers will have been stored in the variables referenced by the alternate stack, and the program can halt.
To produce the transliteration of Ada's program that can run without intervention I have adopted the addition of an index register to allow indirection, although, as far as I know, this is not historically accurate.
Finally Ada notes that the process described in her diagram produces results of the correct magnitude, but not the correct sign. If there is no simple way to change the sign of a value, this can easily be remedied by subtracting the result (in v) from the variable that the result is to be stored in (as it will initially be 0), and then storing it back into the result variable. Consequently I've adjusted operation 24 from "v = v + v" to be "v = v − v", the sign is then correctly set for value to be reused by the algorithm.
Each program line would correspond to a punched card that would be fed to the Analytical Engine, so this is the closest we can get to what the original stack of punched cards, and hence the first program, would have looked like.
Note: Whilst writing up this article I have found a lot more information out about the Analytical Engine than when I started, and there is much more for me to go through. I intend to investigate the Analytical Engine further, and I will correct any glaring errors written above as I become more familiar with the subject. Please let me know of any problems you find and I will endeavour to sort them out.
[¹] Apologies if you can't access these programmes. BBC iPlayer is only available in the UK, and programmes are only available for a limited time.
[²] Ada's indices for the Bernoulli Numbers are one less than the indices now generally used. | 1840. It was the first and only time Babbage gave a public lecture on the Analytical Engine. Ada was commissioned to translate the paper into English. After nine months of working she published her translation, along with a set of notes (which were more than twice as long as the original paper). This was the first (and, for a hundred years, the only) text on computer programming. It is in one of the notes that the diagram that is considered to be the worlds first published computer program appeared. (The full text of Ada's paper is available here [link], along with a large version of the diagram [link]).
It's not what we think of now as a computer program – after all it pre-dates computer programming languages. Instead it essentially the description of a sequence of operations performed by the Analytical Engine. So it is more like a trace of the program execution than the source code of the program itself, and it only includes the actual arithmetic operations that the engine performs. The control flow of the execution is dealt with in the attached text.
Of course the Analytical Engine was never completed, so the actual form of the instructions is not completely clear. However, I'm not trying to construct copy of the punched cards necessary to run Ada's program. I'm attempting to transliterate her algorithm into a modern programming language in order to understand it, and the Analytical Engine, better.
Like Ada I have found that my own notes have become somewhat longer than I anticipated.
For k > 1, each A[k] is derived from A[k − 2] by multiplying the next two decreasing terms into the numerator, and the next two increasing terms into the denominator. (Note that for each value of n the sequence of A coefficients are different. We might more properly think of them as A[n, k]).
We then consider n=3, and use the previously computed value for B and B to calculate B. And the procedure can be repeated as many times as we like (or until we run out of space to store the results – the proposed design for the Analytical Engine would have had room for 1,000 variables, each containing 50 decimal digits). Each time we use the results from all the previous runs to calculate the next number in the sequence.
To explain the implementation of the algorithm here is my own implementation of it using modern Python idioms. This program is constructed using the same basic structure as Ada's program.
(Line 1) I'm using Python's Fraction library to generate the Bernoulli sequence. This makes it easy to check the computation against existing lists (which give them in rational form), and provides exact answers. The Analytical Engine would have computed the numbers as fixed point decimal fractions. (So small errors would accumulate in the final decimal places, and as these results are fed back into further computations the errors would compound. It would be best to use more decimal places than required in the results so that suitably accurate truncated results can be generated).
(Line 4) The bernoulli() function will generate successive Bernoulli numbers. I've implemented it as Python co-routine, so results are returned with the yield operator as they are determined. It's up to the calling code to consume as many results as it requires. The diagram given by Ada describes the generation of a single Bernoulli number. And while her program itself sets up some of the data required for the next run, it would also require some additional modification of the cards before it is run again to compute the next number in the sequence.
(Line 18) I've simplified the calculation of A1 from (2n/2) to just (n).
(Line 41) We can specify how many numbers in the sequence we want the program to compute (the default is 10). They are printed out according to Ada's numbering scheme.
The program is certainly non-trivial. It involves two loops (one nested in the other) and conditional execution, as well as the storing of the computed results to use in subsequent calculations.
Only columns 2, 3 and 4 are instructions to the computer, the rest are essentially supporting documentation to explain the program to the reader.
At line 4 the operation is given as v5 ÷ v4, although the comments and text make it clear that this should be v4 ÷ v5.
At line 23 the formula for A3 has two 3's in the denominator, instead of a 3 and a 4 (as in the previous line). This is just an error in the comment and would not affect execution of the program.
At line 25 it looks like v6 and v7 are reset to their initial values (of zero). In fact it's v7 and v13 that need to be reset for the algorithm to work correctly. In the accompanying text Ada refers to resetting v6, v7, and v13 to zero (although it is not necessary to zero v6, as the first thing the program does (operation 1) is to assign 2n to v4, v5, and v6).
These are all "typos" rather than "thinkos", and may not even have been present in Ada's original notes.
# pseudo-block to permit "break"
An operation card indicates the operation that the engine is to perform. (One of +, −, ×, ÷).
A variable card indicates which variable is transferred from the store (memory) to the first Ingress Axis of the mill (CPU). This provides the first operand.
A second variable card indicates which variable is transferred from the store to the second Ingress Axis if the mill. This provides the second operand.
The operation is then performed, the result appears in the Egress Axis of the mill.
A variable card indicates which variable in the store the contents of the Egress Axis are transferred to.
And each of these opcodes corresponds to a card that acts as instructions to the Analytical Engine.
Ada's accompanying text describes the need for some common programming idioms that we take for granted in modern programming languages, but are not present in the diagram (which just shows the arithmetic operations performed).
First there is the need for conditional execution. She mentions that when computing B operation 6 would complete the calculation. In my program at line 47 I exit the block when v10 becomes 0. Similarly, as Ada says, operation 12 works in a similar way. Again in my program I conditionally exit the block if v10 becomes 0.
Secondly there is the need for repeated execution of a sequence of instructions (looping). This is dealt with extensively in the notes where the repeated execution of operations 13-23 is described.
Both these could be achieved with a conditional branch instruction. Although the mechanism for branching is not explicitly mentioned in the paper it is clear that the Analytical Engine implements such a function. For example, if the Analytical Engine set a flag when a result was 0 (as microprocessors often do), then there could be an instruction to skip forward or backwards a certain number of program steps and resume operation from there. The instructions were to be provided on a punched cards, so this would require the card reader to skip forward or rewind a certain number of cards.
(In the Fourmilab simulation of the Analytical Engine a "run-up lever" is used. This is set by an operation if the sign of the result of the operation being different from the sign of the first operand (or if an overflow occurs). A conditional branch can then be made based on the state of the lever. So, we could test if a variable was zero by subtracting 1 from it. The only way the sign will change is if the variable initially held the value of 0 (so the result is −1), and the lever will be set. As Ada doesn't show these operations in her table I'm going to simplify by referring to a "branch if zero" instruction. In a similar way branching on other conditions can be implemented).
This would allow us to place an instruction after operation 7 and operation 12 of "branch if zero to operation 24". The inner loop would | 1,683 |
tvfanatic.com
4 min read Paul Dailly 2021-01-29 22:40:37
Justice League: #SnyderCut Gets HBO Max Premiere Date, New Posters
Some of the DC Universe's biggest heroes will be assembling this March on HBO Max.
The streamer announced Friday that the highly anticipated Zack Snyder<|fim_middle|> | cut of Justice League will be available to stream Thursday, March 18.
Determined to ensure Superman's (Henry Cavill) ultimate sacrifice was not in vain, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) aligns forces with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) with plans to recruit a team of metahumans to protect the world from an approaching threat of catastrophic proportions.
The task proves more difficult than Bruce imagined, as each of the recruits must face the demons of their own pasts to transcend that which has held them back, allowing them to come together, finally forming an unprecedented league of heroes.
Now united, Batman (Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and The Flash (Ezra Miller) may be too late to save the planet from Steppenwolf, DeSaad and Darkseid and their dreadful intentions.
The screenplay was written by Chris Terrio from a story by Terrio, Zack ,and Will Beall, based on characters from DC, Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
The film's producers are Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, with executive producers Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas, Wesley Coller, Jim Rowe, Curtis Kanemoto, Chris Terrio, and Ben Affleck.
The theatrical edition of Justice League dropped in 2017 to weak reviews and a less than expected performance at the box office.
Snyder was the original director, but he was forced to step away during post-production following a family tragedy.
Joss Whedon stepped in to bring the movie to fruition, but naturally, fans questioned how the two movies differed, and according to reports, there are many differences.
"I want to thank HBO Max and Warner Brothers for this brave gesture of supporting artists and allowing their true visions to be realized," Snyder said in a statement when HBO Max ordered the project.
"Also a special thank you to all of those involved in the SnyderCut movement for making this a reality."
Added Robert Greenblatt, chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment:
"Since I got here 14 months ago, the chant to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut has been a daily drumbeat in our offices and inboxes. Well, the fans have asked, and we are thrilled to finally deliver."
"At the end of the day, it really is all about them and we are beyond excited to be able to release Zack's ultimate vision for this film in 2021."
"This could never have happened if it weren't for the hard work and combined efforts of the teams at HBO Max and Warner Bros. Pictures."
Indeed, the outcry from fans to release the Snyder cut has been huge, with it trending on social media multiple times throughout the years and comments appearing on pretty much every WarnerMedia/HBO Max social with fans asking them to answer their wishes.
The movie was originally said to be eyed as a miniseries event because of its length, but it will now all be dropped at once, in one video, clocking in at around 214 minutes.
The theatrical cut came in at 120 minutes, so it remains to be seen whether what was supposed to be the original movie will live up to the tremendous expectations.
HBO Max also dropped a wealth of new posters that show various Justice League-branded things.
HBO Max is becoming a huge destination for movies after Warner Bros. announced its intention to break the box office window by premiering its entire 2021 slate in theaters and on the service simultaneously in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The deal kicked off with the arrival of Wonder Woman: 1984, which helped drive the subscriptions of the streamer, and led to the Gal Gadot-fronted movie getting another sequel.
If you're outside the U.S., Warner Bros. has announced it will be available on HBO in these destinations:
* HBO territories in the Nordic region – Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland
**HBO territories in Central Europe – Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Montenegro and Croatia *
**HBO GO territories in Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan
What are your thoughts on this exciting news?
Hit the comments with your thoughts on all of it!
Source: tvfanatic.com | 900 |
Last Days is hosting an informal Friendsgiving dinner this Thursday. Everyone is welcome to attend. Last Days and the Roskop Family will be providing turkey, ham, mash potatoes, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie. Please bring your favorite side dish if you can so we have enough for everyone. Comment on their Facebook events page of what you're bringing so everyone knows.
The plan is to open at 4:00 pm and eat around 6pm. Football will be on the TV's, board games are abundant and we can always use help decorating our Christmas tree. Maybe Zack or Barry will bring their guitars? Ya never know. Whatever happens let's just have a great day of enjoying our neighbors, friends and family.<|fim_middle|> It will be free to eat but if you bring a dish then we will give you $1.00 off all of your beers. If you would like to participate please e-mail us at beermktgm@gmail.com or message Bearden Beer Market on Facebook messenger. Cheers! | Cheers!!
The yearly Tradition of Thanksgiving Trivia continues!! We will open the doors at 4pm on Thanksgiving Day to help you escape the Thanksgiving Shenanigans. It will feature Happy Hour until close, Thanksgiving Day Football, and Live Trivia with Knoxville Trivia from 8-10p! So, come escape the crazy in-laws, or hell even bring them with you! It will be a fun night at Hops!! Redskins v Cowboys at 4:30pm & Falcons vs Saints 8:20pm.
We will be open from 6pm to 3am, kitchen is open until 2am. We will offer a potluck ,Thanksgiving style buffet dinner from 7 to 9. If you bring a dish to contribute, it's a $5 donation to eat or if you don't bring a dish, it's a $10 donation to eat. We will also gladly accept any cash donations outside of the potluck as well. All proceeds will benefit The Love Kitchen of Knoxville, helping our local friends and neighbors in need. Come join us after the family fun is done! Happy Thanksgiving to you all! POKER IS CANCELLED FOR THIS NIGHT! PINT NIGHT IS STILL ON FROM 7 TO CLOSE!
Join us as we have a pot-luck dinner Thanksgiving Style! It's pretty simple: there are many people that do not have family here or no place to eat a good Thanksgiving dinner. So please BRING YOUR FAVORITE DISH (so we have enough for everyone) and share it with all of your extended family here at Bearden Beer Market. | 331 |
So many phones and particularly the iPhone gets lost every day by skiers or snowboarder from the chairlifts.
That happens very often because, as you are on the chairlift and you receive a phone call, a text message or you want to take a picture with your phone, the moment<|fim_middle|>, ski adverts, ski blog, ski blog news, ski lessons, ski tips, skiing, skiing tips, snow. Bookmark the permalink.
« Family Ski Holiday – Things to do in resort other than skiing.. | you extract it from your pocket, or the chairlift swings a bit, and that's it your phone is gone.
We have recently found this fantastic accessory that came out this year, and we'd like to share it with you friends and followers of Fabulous Ski.
It is a leash that can be attached to your jacket pocket, or around your neck, and connects solidly the iPhone through the charging plug. It slots in as your iPhone charger plug does, but then to remove it, you have to press two release buttons on the side of it.
Have a look at the video below we made of it and, if you are an iPhone owner, we recommend you get yourself one of these Wantalis iPhone Leash, prior to hit the slopes!
Leash on iPhone ® is the first security system designed to secure your iPhone ® if you escape your hands. locking system / anchor designed for all generations of iPhone, click fix, click to release.
Attaches easily to any belt loop, pocket or backpack.
Retractable cable which runs according to your needs by simple traction (max. 62 cm).
Safety loop to temporarily release the iPhone ® Leash.
This entry was posted in Ski Blog News, Sponsors & Advertisers and tagged fabulous ski blog, fabulous ski holiday, fabulouSki, fabulousski, how to ski, iPhone accessories, iphone gadgets, iphone leash, ski, ski accessories, ski advertising | 293 |
8.8 million euros for the research on electronic correlations
ACAR positron spectrometer The spectometer ACAR uses positrons. PD Dr. Christoph Hugenschmidt (r.) and his PhD student Josef Schmidbauer (l.) have built it thanks to the funding of the TRR80. © W. Schürmann /<|fim_middle|> Center is equally supported by the University of Augsburg with spokesman Prof. Dr. Philipp Gegenwart and the Technical University of Munich with a number of professors of the Physics Department. Other partners include the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Walther Meißner Institute. "During the review of the transregio for this funding period, the panel stated that we have great potential because of the direct involvement of the FRM II with its neutrons and positrons," says Dr. Michael Leitner.
Looking at disorder
Leitner leads one of the subprojects that deals with so-called Heusler alloys. For example, the coupling of the magnetic and structural degrees of freedom in these materials allows them to be used in refrigeration-free refrigerators. So far, Michael Leitner has been studying with a doctoral student on the instruments SPODI and SANS-1 how the arrangement of the atoms affects the magnetic order. "We already know how perfectly ordered systems behave. But this is not realistic for the application, because there is always disorder, "explains Michael Leitner, who is employed at the FRM II and working towards his habilitation with Prof. Dr. Peter Böni. "Therefore, we now look at how the disorder affects the magnetic moments of the atoms."
Positrons examine new materials*
In another project, PD Dr. Christoph Hugenschmidt and his PhD student Josef Schmidbauer from the chair E21 of the TUM physics department study the electronic structure of materials – using positrons instead of neutrons. For this purpose they use their own compact positron source on their new spectrometer, which they set up at the MLL accelerator laboratory during the first funding period of the TRR80. The apparatus offers the great advantage of being able to measure the electronic structure in the bulk of solids, both temperature-dependent and spin-resolved. They take advantage of the fact that the positrons, as antiparticles of the electrons, all have a spin polarization in the flight direction. When an external magnetic field is applied to the sample, the positrons annihilate with their counterparts, the electrons, preferably when their spins point in opposite directions. The annihilation of both particles produces characteristic gamma radiation, which provides valuable information about electronic correlations and thus the fundamental understanding of magnetic phenomena in new materials.
Three further projects, which will be funded until 2021, use neutrons at the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum. Dr. Astrid Schneidewind from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Prof. Dr. Christian Pfleiderer from the TUM physics department E 51 investigate how magnetic order can be stabilized under extremely high pressure. Dr. Thomas Keller and Prof. Dr. Bernhard Keimer from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research focus on the lifetime of magnetic excitations, and Prof. Dr. Manfred Albrecht from the University of Augsburg is studying together with Prof. Dr. Peter Böni the magnetic order in thin layers by means of neutron reflectometry.
Funding for young scientists
Young scientists will mainly benefit from the funding of the TRR80. In the 21 sub-projects, 32 doctoral students will conduct research and present their results with the help of the funding at national and international conferences. As part of a so-called "Integrated Research Training Group", junior researchers can independently work on smaller projects and organize workshops and summer schools. Various soft skills courses complete the offer.
More nformation:
Homepage of the collaborative research center TRR80 | TUM
The spectometer ACAR uses positrons. PD Dr. Christoph Hugenschmidt (r.) and his PhD student Josef Schmidbauer (l.) have built it thanks to the funding of the TRR80. © W. Schürmann / TUM
The cryptic name TRR 80 hides 21 top-class research projects shared by theoretical and experimental physicists. The Collaborative Research | 87 |
Best <|fim_middle|> the anguish and doubt that accompany the choice to quit drinking. Specialist Erica Spiegelman highlights the importance of whole-body recovery. Designed to be alongside or in place of 12-step programs, you can use Rewired as a blueprint for a personalized and meaningful recovery plan. He's participated in all the major 12-step programs, and has now started his own men's group. In Recovery, he shares for the first time some of the tools he used to get from smoking crack to helping others stay clean. Author Michael Dash, entrepreneur and recovering addict, draws many parallels between his life pursuing business success and his obsession with gambling that caused him to bottom out. Dash also developed a drug addiction before he cleaned up and embarked on the road to recovery. Marketed as a memoir, a 2006 Smoking Gun exposé suggested elements of the story had been fabricated. He continues to write fiction and remains in committed recovery.
If you or someone you know someone is struggling with addiction and ready for help, contact Futures Recovery Healthcare today.
Why was it so easy to set boundaries and say no when they were children, yet it seems incomprehensible or impossible today?
For many people caught up in a destructive rock and roll lifestyle, the thought of sobriety might seem restrictive.
As a parent myself, I remember thinking how foolish that sounded as I would die for my children as most would.
These two books are suggested reads for addicts and alcoholics. | 20 Books About Addiction Recovery to Read in 2020
Categoría de la entrada:Sober Homes
This begins when one of the parents chooses one child and their addiction over the other children or family members. This book also deals with addiction science, and Hanson is a gifted writer who's able to express complex ideas in simple, straightforward language. And he also devotes a good deal of time to the care and healing aspects of substance abuse. It takes one to know one, as the saying goes, and Mr. Hanson knows from personal experience and extensive investigative research what it's like to struggle with addiction. Underrated and underread, this book is right up there with the best on the subjects of addiction and recovery.
The Big Fix is the story of a heroin addict who beat the odds, moved past her addiction, and reclaimed her life. She spent many years on the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin District. Maia Szalavitz shares a new perspective on the addictive personality. Learn to live your own life and stop assisting a loved one in destroying theirs.
Beautiful Boy by David Sheff
Recover from addiction at home with medication and online therapy––from the leader in virtual addiction care. A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor,Blackoutis the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure — the sober life she never wanted. Harris Wittels didn't fit the stereotype of what a junkie looks like. He was a successful comedian, actor, producer, and writer for Sarah Sober Home Silverman and on shows like Parks and Recreation and Master of None. Even with all his talent and jobs coming his way, he was not able to get clean and stay clean, eventually dying from an overdose in 2015 at age 29. Everything is Horrible and Wonderful is written by Harris's sister, Stephanie, about his tragic death and the aftermath of losing her younger brother who was her best friend and also an addict.
What is the first rule of recovery?
Rule 1: Change Your Life
The most important rule of recovery is that a person does not achieve recovery by just not using. Recovery involves creating a new life in which it is easier to not use.
For the past three decades, Codependent No More has been one of the best books for families of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. This book is a helpful guide for everyone whose life has been strongly affected by the disease of addiction. Filled with exercises and self-tests, the book is immensely helpful for the individual who has lost himself or herself in the continuous story of a loved one's addictive behavior. Codependent No More offers practical advice for regaining one's individuality. So often in drawn out battles of substance abuse, family members fall into familiar rhythms of place an imbalance of energy – for better or worse – into the addicted loved one. Codependency is dangerous for healthy treatment and addiction recovery practices, so we're grateful for this liberating book. Considered to be one of the best addiction recovery books in recent history, author Erica Spiegelman's lays out a path to recovery that is empowering and easy to follow. As the title infers, Rewired is about thinking differently about living clean and embracing recovery. The book presents healthy recovery as the result of living in accordance to twelve time-honored powerful principles, including honesty, evolution, solitude, love, compassion and hope. Erica Spiegelman is a well-respected addiction counselor, author and speaker who has had her own struggles with alcoholism and addiction.
The best books and drinking and recovery from alcohol addiction
These three powerful stories have common threads of hope, pain, mistrust, grief, worry, change, acceptance, belief, and the constant presence of varying levels of sanity across a broad spectrum. Those are the wrenching questions that haunted David Sheff's journey through his son Nic's addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. More people than ever before see themselves as addicted to, or recovering from, addiction, whether it be alcohol or drugs, prescription meds, sex, gambling, porn, or the internet. But despite the unprecedented attention, our understanding of addiction is trapped in unfounded 20th century ideas, addiction as a crime or as brain disease, and in equally outdated treatment. Addiction is a complex disease that can impact an individual, as well as their family and loved ones. Overcoming addiction is a long and difficult process, so it can help to have some extra perspective on the topic.
We hope that the reader will see things differently and apply the suggested solutions to help improve the situation. We can not stress enough the importance of doing something when children are being addiction recovery books affected. As we said above, if you don't want to help yourself or the substance user, that is on you. When children are involved, we feel it is child abuse and neglect not to take immediate action.
alcoholism,
Recommended by Katherine KetchamFrom Katherine's list onthe best books about addiction, recovery, and the triumph of the human spirit. Founder of a church called House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado, Nadia Bolz-Weber describes her path from a Fundamentalist upbringing to agnostic comedian to Lutheran pastor. With stories that range from vulnerable to hilarious, this book is fun to read and full of refreshing insights about God, church, hospitality, and grace. I write about spirituality, self-compassion, and mindfulness. The list above is a combination of what I have read and my research. Combining behavioral interventions with brain function research, the strategies and treatment suggested in the program are designed to overcome the biological factors that cause addictive behavior. This book is for anyone who is ready to take control of his or her life and take steps towards recovery now. You can use this book alone or as part of a 12-step program to create a personalized treatment plan that is right for you. If you had tried traditional methods of overcoming addiction such as 12-step program and they didn't work for you, this book will be a good alternative to try. No matter the addiction, this is an excellent book if you're seeking to understand addiction and what it takes to attain recovery.
Is depression a chemical imbalance?
It's often said that depression results from a chemical imbalance, but that figure of speech doesn't capture how complex the disease is. Research suggests that depression doesn't spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals.
Living fast and hard on the streets of Bend, Oregon, she commits crimes against herself, the community, and her own family. This list would not be complete without a book about America's opiate crisis. As a health care professional, I see the effects of this crisis daily. She is now a certified addiction specialist possessing a bachelor's degree in business administration and a master's degree in public administration. Her focus is on her recovery journey from a street addict to a successful, stable mother of three.
The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin – Tracey Helton Mitchell
As Birdie becomes closer to both Booker and Carlene, she yearns to spread her wings. But when long-buried secrets rise to the surface, everything she's known to be true is turned upside down. Seventeen-year-old Clare is the overprotected baby; Peter is the typical, rebellious middle child; and Luke is the can't-do-wrong favorite. But sometimes it's the people who are closest to us who are the hardest to see.
Let Go Now: Embrace Detachment as a Path to Freedom (Addiction Recovery and Al-Anon Self-Help Book) [FBXYPSZ]https://t.co/3GpKWBiQ2C
— Yvette33 (@Yvette3311) August 21, 2022
Some books talk about addictions in general while others are written specifically for a particular addiction in mind. Macy interviews doctors who were sounding the alarm early about liberal prescribing of OxyContin, mothers whose children died of an overdose, people who have used and sold drugs, and many more. She paints a clear picture of how the opioid crisis spread from rural places like Central Appalachia to cities and suburbs—making it clear how it became a national epidemic. While that can be distressing, the book is ultimately hopeful. It highlights the brain's remarkable ability to learn, adapt, and change—in addiction, but also in recovery. Journalist, Eilene Zimmerman gives her heart-wrenching tale of how she discovered that her ex-husband and father of her children was in active drug addiction and using several types of drugs. This revelation prompted her to explore drug use in white-collar settings and she soon discovered that addiction amongst high-achieving professionals is common.
Emotional sobriety that needs to occur to sustain recovery. From getting real about your circumstances to addressing related issues like relationships and taking responsibility, this book discusses about the emotional work that needs to accompany physical sobriety. For most addicts, removing their addictions doesn't work in the long-term because their main problem isn't resolved and they are still running away from it. Challenges the traditional perception of addiction as a brain disease. Someone in your family with addiction problems, this book is for you. To others, their addiction may seem immoral and unacceptable. Takes an intimate look into how being over-stressed and overworked can take people down the path of addiction. Jerry Stahl was a writer with significant and successful screenwriting credits – Dr. Caligari, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, and more. But despite that success, Stahl's heroin habit began to consume him, derailing his career and destroying his health until one final, intense crisis inspired him to get clean. Koren Zalickas began drinking at a young age — 14 years old.
This recovery story captures | 2,054 |
A component of Inno Racks multi-purpose base roof rack systems, the Inno IN-AR Stays (set of 4) are a versatile solution for cars, minivans, SUV's and pickup truck cabs with raised rail factory racks and track systems. Packaged as a set of four Stays, this product also includes a pack of 4 Inno locks & keys and Requires 2 Inno cross bars (not included). Purchasing just the set of 4 Inno IN-AR Stays is a great way to transfer your existing Inno base roof rack system to a new vehicle cheaply without the need to buy an entirely new base rack system.
This PlanCity Road & Rail covers a transportation theme. Children can imitate the transfer of containers with the Tower Crane. Mini station, train, cargo truck, figures, traffic signs, and trees are included in the set for realistic play. This set contains 48 pieces. Playtime Ideas:Road & Rail System provides opportunity for children to construct in various ways according to their imagination helping to promote creativity and planning skill just like little engineers which is important part in developing intellectual and thinking capacity and also promoting confidence.Children can tell stories and role play various character such as worker / controller responsible for controlling and transporting goods from truck and train. Children will also be able to understand about the various method of transportation.Children will enjoy moving the train according to their imagination by controlling the train to their desired destination and at the same time be able to learn about straight road, slope, curve, passing under and going up the bridge helping to develop eye-hand coordination and language skill together with having fun.To add more fun and enlarge their dream city, children can add the Expansion Track set and other PlanToys Road & Rail set.
To see a preview of High Tech Monorails go to RAKproducitons.netExperience this mesmerizing and efficient technology in some of the most exotic locations around the globe where monorails have found new life. From the 311 mph magnetically levitated monorail in Shanghai to the 100 year old Victorian Schwebebahn monorail in Germany. Learn how monorails are built and tested in Bombardier's monorail factory in Canada, see the world's first hybrid diesel monorail in Kuala Lumpur and find out why Los Angeles declined a free 40 mile monorail system the city so desperately needs.Experience the storied past and spectacular future of this promised transporter who's time has finally arrived. This 2 disc Directors Select Edition includes the original uncut broadcast version that has aired on major networks around the world plus hours of spectacular never before seen bonus features including the directors and cinematographers commentary, Numerous extended and deleted acts, 10 photo galleries, Ride the rails (a cockpit view of 7 featured monorails through there complete routes) and much more.When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
Switzerland is famous for its breath-taking scenery, with its beautiful delicate valleys separated by some of the highest mountains in Europe. Through this unequaled terrain run some of the greatest railway systems, allowing travelers access to some of the most impressive sights on Earth. This special collector's box set allows everyone to experience these sights for themselves. THE LOTSCHBERG RAILWAY For over an hour you will experience the impressive BLS Lötschberg Railway, the railroad stations and stops, branch lines, technical installations and of course the BLS rolling stock. In short, everything that makes a ride on the BLS Lötschberg Railway such a memorable experience. THE WILLIAM TELL EXPRESS Produced in cooperation with the Swiss Federal Rails and the lake of Lucerne Navigation Company, this program travels the William Tell Express, linking some of Switzerland's most attractive regions. THE GOTTHARD RAILWAY We study this fascinating railway which challenged the minds of its builders and explore the mighty Alpine Barrier. Our cameras capture the multitude of rail traffic that uses this Trans-Alpine route daily.
Ideal for use as both a mens wedding band or a womens wedding ring, this sleek tungsten carbide ring has a highly polished edges, mirror like finish. The simple yet stylish design includes beveled edges and shows off the grey. Available in whole and half sizes 4 to 15, the ring is 8 millimeters wide.
Train buffs and colorists will love adding their own hues to this fine fleet of luxury railway cars--from the elegant cars of Europe's Orient-Express, which catered to passenger comfort with deluxe dining and sleeping cars, to America's Super Chief that ran on a transcontinental route between Chicago and Los Angeles. Thirty drawings depict the interiors and exteriors of such famous trains as the multicolored cars of the Hiawatha, a passenger line traveling between Chicago and Seattle; the observation lounge on the Burlington Zephyr; and a sleeping compartment on New York Central's famed 20th Century Limited.
Mounts to Raised Factory Side Rails including most oversized Raised Side Rails. Rubber coated, stainless steel straps protect rails.
In each set, you will receive 12 (Twelve) Train Place Tent Cards. You can also use them as name cards or place cards. Printed on heavy duty cardstock, when folded, the front of each card measures 3.75" by 2". As these tent cards are printed on semi-gloss cardstock, it is highly recommended to USE PERMANENT INK PEN to prevent smears/ smudges. Handmade.
Trains, planes and motor vehicles all come together in this extensive wooden Transportation Train Set that brings an incredible amount of variety to every play session. Designed to educate and stimulate the brightest of young minds. Includes a heliport, boat, petrol station, hospital and locomotive wash. Watch your child's imagination run riot as they become increasingly absorbed with the endless scenarios that they can create. Consists of 122 play pieces. Additional accessories are available to expand this set. Made from high quality, responsibly sourced materials. The Bigjigs Rail range is one of the most complete wooden railway systems available. A comprehensive range of wooden railway products (including train track, train sets, trains, train tables and more) make Bigjigs Rail the perfect choice when starting or extending a wooden railway network. Founded in June 1985, Bigjigs Toys is a family operated business which has never lost sight of its roots.
Excerpt from The Cost of Transportation on the Erie Canal and by Rail A comparison of the cost of transportation by canal and by rail should include not only the immediate cost of conveyance, but also the cost of capital, of operation, and of maintenance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
This book details many of the different types of infrastructure that are present in a rail system. It is an overview, and presents a reasonable level of depth to the various engineering systems, such as track and signalling. The book discusses at length rail tunnels, and their related infrastructure, which includes the tunnel itself, fire systems, water management, and ventilation. The configuration of different rail tunnels is also discussed, and the advantages and disadvantages of each is also discussed.Many of the features of modern stations are shown and detailed in photos. The many different aspects of station design are discussed, so as passenger flows through the station. As with tunnels, there are different configurations for stations, which in some cases depend on the tunnel design, should the station be underground. Light rail station design is also discussed.Loading and structure gauges are important in their own right, as well as the definitions of track gauge. Platform heights, which is related to station design, is also discussed. The basics of the structure of signalling are also detailed. An explanation is provided of some very simple signalling, and track sections are explained. Indications and aspects of signals are also explained. Finally, there is some discussion of infrastructure related to the network design of a rail system, such as stabling yards, and maintenance centres. Signal boxes and control centres are also discussed.
Traveling across the treacherous and diverse landscape of western North Carolina is a challenge historically met with human ingenuity. Mountain traces of Native Americans, dusty stagecoach routes and vital railroads lined the region. Asheville installed the state's first electric streetcars. Intrepid young men and women continued North Carolina's aviation legacy. The Buncombe Turnpike helped tame the Blue Ridge Mountains, allowing livestock drives to reach markets in South Carolina. Author Terry Ruscin reveals the visionaries and risk-takers who paved the way to the "Land of the Sky" in a wondrous examination of western North Carolina transportation history.
Part of our value-added professional format series, the Rail Transport in a Theater of Operations Field Manual (FM 55-20) sets forth transportation rail doctrine and organizational structure. Coverage includes facilities, signals, procedures, rolling stock classification, and both steam and diesel locomotives. It is written to explain the functions of rail transport operations service in a theater of operations. It provides basic information for commanders and staffs of supporting units and for staff officers of higher HQ. It is also intended to serve as a text for student instruction and training of rail unit personnel.There are four primary functions of rail transport operations for military and commercial railways. These functions include the following:• Train operation.• Maintenance of way.• Maintenance of equipment.• Train control.This field manual has been converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction.As a bonus, this reproduction includes FM-1, The Army Field Manual, a capstone manual containing the vision for the Army - sold separately for $5.99. FM 1 establishes the<|fim_middle|>839, the High-Speed Rail Development Act of 1993, and Current Initiatives in High-Speed Ground Transportation: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation United States Senate One Hundred Third Congress First Session May 20, 1993 That is another way of saying I probably overstated the matter in a joking fashion at that time, but very seriously, I thank you for your leadership. We are looking forward to your testimony, and would ask you to proceed at this time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Canada has a large and well-developed railway system that today transports primarily freight. There are two major privately owned transcontinental freight railway systems, the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railway. Nation-wide passenger services are provided by the federal crown corporation Via Rail. This book studies rail transport in Canada including CNR radio, Canadian pacific hotels, and list of Via rail stations. Project Webster represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Project Webster continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge.
American transportation has undergone many technological revolutions: from sailing ships to steam ships; from canals to railroads; from steam to Diesels; from horse cars to electric streetcars; from passenger trains and urban rail transit to airplanes and automobiles. Normally, the government has allowed and even encouraged these revolutions, but for some reason the federal government is spending billions of dollars trying to preserve and build obsolete rail transit and passenger train lines, including high-speed trains that cost more but are less than half as fast as flying. In Romance of the Rails, rail fan and transportation policy expert Randal O'Toole asks why passenger trains have been singled out and whether this policy makes sense. To answer this question, the book looks at the history of both intercity and urban rail transportation going back to 1825. The Golden Age of rail passenger travel, from about 1890 to 1920, depended on job and population concentrations that no longer exist today. Moreover, even during that Golden Age, most rail travel was confined to the elites, while a majority of Americans rarely if ever rode a streetcar or intercity train. Federally subsidized efforts to return to that Golden Age, through subsidies to Amtrak and local transit agencies, are doing more harm than good to personal mobility. Instead, the transportation of the future will rely on America's 4 million miles of roads and air travel that requires minimal infrastructure.
This textbook attempts to details in depth the various concepts needed for the planning of rail transport. This textbook represents perhaps the first attempt anywhere to dfescribe in detail the processes involved in transport planning. The book is a combination of discussion on engineering systems, network analysis, economics, and detailed analysis of specific engineering systems. The first two parts of the book are devoted to an extensive discussion of the different engineering systems needed for the creation of a rail system. Engineering systems such as traction power, signalling, communications, and passenger information are discussed. There is also much discussion on the economics of rail transport planning. Discussed is the different methods of estimating demand for rail services, and elasticities of demand. The book also contains a large chapter on signalling headways, where the maximum possible frequency of trains is discussed. Formulas are developped to calculate the minimum headway. High Speed Rail is discussed in depth. Many examples are given of HSR systems, and the conventional wisdom for what constitutes a "good" HSR system is explained. The approach in the book is to provide as many examples as possible to explain the strengths and weaknesses of different rail systems. Most of the examples focus on South East Asia, or on Australia. Freight is also discussed.
Excerpt from Oversight and Reauthorization of Rail Safety Programs and S. 2132, the Federal Railroad Safety Authorization Act: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session, June 14, 1994 Senator exon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will be asking the witnesses to summarize their statements in a few moments. I now wish to reco ize Senator Hutchison for any comments or opening statement w ich she may have. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
This book will assess and compare several options for ammonia co-fueling of diesel locomotives with integrated heat recovery, multigeneration (including on-board hydrogen fuel production from ammonia), and emission reduction subsystems from energy, exergy, and environmental perspectives. Economic considerations will be presented to compare the cost of the proposed systems for different scenarios such as carbon-tax rates, diesel fuel cost and ammonia cost.Fossil fuel consumption and the associated negative environmental impact of their combustion is a significant global concern that requires effective, practical, and sustainable solutions. From a Canadian perspective, the Transportation Sector contributes more than 25% of national greenhouse gas emissions due to fossil fuel combustion, largely due to road vehicles (cars, light and heavy duty trucks). This is a complex and critical challenge to address, particularly in urban areas with high population density. There is a need to develop alternative energy solutions for mass passenger and freight transportation systems that will reduce both the traffic-volume of road vehicles as well as the emissions from the mass transportation systems. The book will be helpful to students in senior-level undergraduate and graduate level courses related to energy, thermodynamics, thermal sciences, combustion, HVAC&R, etc. The quantitative comparative assessment of such alternative energy systems provided by this book will be useful for researchers and professionals interested sustainable development.
Following the nationalization of transport in 1948, the British Transport Commission set up its own in-house film production unit. Launched on 1st May, 1949, and led for 25 years by Edgar Anstey OBE - a founding father of the British documentary movement - it became one of the largest industrial film units in Britain. This Kino DVD collection presents some of the classics produced by the BTF, including Blue Pullman, Elizabethan Express, Snowdrift at Bleath Gill, and John Betjeman Goes By Train, as well as lesser known gems, such as Under the River, This is York, and This Year - London. All these films are now preserved by the BFI National Film and Television Archive. This selection has been digitally remastered for this two-disc set, which is a quot;mustquot; not just for the transport enthusiast, but also for the documentary aficionado who will recognize traits and innovations in British non-fiction filmmaking. | fundamental principles for employing Landpower. The most important of these are the Army's operational concept and the fundamentals that support it. They form the foundation for all Army doctrine. All Soldiers should understand and internalize them. FM 1 describes the American profession of arms, the Army's place in it, and what it means to be a professional Soldier.This is a privately authored news service and educational publication of Progressive Management.
Excerpt from S. | 89 |
Tag: minneapolis
GUEST POST: TWO COW GARAGE – THE COVERS EP REVISITED (with originals):
This post comes from longtime 9B reader, Chris Green and really expands upon the Covers EP that Two Cow released yesterday. In his words, "When I saw the announcement, I really wanted to help out my favorite band more than $5 worth…"
Ninebullets.net faves Two Cow Garage have just completed their covers project and released the results as a 3-track bundle for sale on their bandcamp page (http://twocowgarage.bandcamp.com). For those of you who don't follow the band on facebook, here's the deal: in order to defray some of the costs of their upcoming European tour, the band sought the help of their fans online. They first contemplated a funding campaign in the style of a kickstarter project, but decided that it would be more interesting to do something a little different that would give something back to the fans for their generous donations. So they announced on their facebook page that they would run a poll via FB and email, with participants naming songs that they would like to hear TCG cover. The top two vote-getters would be recorded by the band and sold together for download for a minimum donation of $5.
As soon as the announcement was posted, the song titles started flying. Suggestions spanned the gamut from Don McClean's "American Pie" to NWA's "Gangsta Gangsta" and everywhere in between. (Autopsy IV Note: I voted for Cazwell's "Ice Cream Truck")
Many people suggested songs by The Replacements. This renowned Minneapolis band is often cited when people try to describe TCG's music and the song "Can't Hardly Wait" has been covered both by singer/guitarist Micah Schnabel on his solo album When The Stage Lights Go Dim and also by the whole band at live shows. So, it's not surprising that when it came time to tally the votes and announce the winners, the #2 slot was won by the song "Bastards of the Young", from the Replacements' classic 1985 album Tim. As you would expect, Two Cow totally nails the song, amping up the noise level a little bit and belting out the anthemic chorus. Micah sings lead on this one, and his voice fits perfectly into the space occupied by Paul Westerberg in the original song.
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Continue reading "GUEST POST: TWO COW GARAGE – THE COVERS EP REVISITED (with originals):"
Author Autopsy IVPosted on March 3, 2011 February 8, 2018 Categories GuestTags aerosmith, Kickstarter, Micah Schnabel, minneapolis, replacements, rocket from the tombs, Two Cow Garage8 Comments on GUEST POST: TWO COW GARAGE – THE COVERS EP REVISITED (with originals):
THE ROCK REPORT – DEEP BLUES FESTIVAL
It's taken me quite some time to get around to writing this recap. Personally, I find that when writing about festivals it's best to marinate on them for a while after they're over. This lets the truly enjoyable moments rise to the top, and such is the case with the Deep Blues Festival.
My personal experience for this year's festival was night and day from<|fim_middle|> the Vagabonds, Deep Blues Festival, Florida, Left Lane Cruiser, minneapolis, Twitter, weary boys, whiskey drink5 Comments on THE ROCK REPORT – DEEP BLUES FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL DEEP BLUES FESTIVAL '09 POSTER:
The 2009 version of the Deep Blues Festival kicks off next week and this weekend we got a view of the new poster (they can be purchased here).
Between now and boarding a flight for Minneapolis I got a couple of Left Lane Cruiser shows and Nerdapalooza to attend so it looks like another busy week.
Here is a track by Left Lane Cruiser that was written about the first DBF ever:
Left Lane Cruiser – Mr. Johnson
Author Autopsy IVPosted on July 6, 2009 February 8, 2018 Categories ReviewsTags deep blues, Deep Blues Festival, Left Lane Cruiser, minneapolis, Mr. Johnson, nerdapalooza | last. See, last year I went up to Minneapolis alone and didn't know anyone. So as a result, it was all about the music. I saw every song by every band. This year things were different, not only did I take the wife and her friend with me, but over the past year I'd managed to become decent friends with many of the bands playing the fest. An added distraction was that the festival was in a bar this year, which not only allowed for simultaneous shows to be occurring inside as well as outside, but it also allowed a person to drink just as much as they pleased (and we did). So, while it was as much a social event as it was a music event for me this year, it was also 100% more fun. I think Chris has really struck gold by moving the festival to The Cabooze. It's right on the light rail line with easy access to downtown restaurants and hotels and was a mighty upgrade from the field it was held in last year. Even the weather gods smiled upon this change and mostly kept the rain away. Enough about that though, let's talk about the music a little.
Thursday night, after being up since 5:30 in the morning, we pounded a few drinks at the hotel and headed out to The Cabooze for a little Left Lane Cruiser / Radio Moscow action. We'd caught Left Lane in an empty bar here in St. Pete a few days before, so it was nice to catch them in a packed house where everyone knew all the words to all the songs. The band was obviously feeding off this energy as the show wore on, playing requests as well as a healthy selection of songs from their upcoming album. At one point during their set, Brenn (drummer) missed his drum and broke his finger on the edge of it. Instead of calling it a night, Brenn just duct taped the drumstick to his hand and soldiered on…if that ain't rock and roll then I don't even know what is. Unfortunately we were only able to catch 2 songs from Radio Moscow, but the early hours & excessive whiskey finally got the upper hand and we had to find a bed. I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
Friday morning came and some seriously cold (for a Floridian) weather came with it, so after breakfast/early lunch I sent the wife and our friend downtown to buy us some warmer clothes. All of this resulted in us getting to the festival a lot later than we'd planned, but what are you gonna do? I'm from Florida- I do heat, not cold. We got there in time to see everyone I needed to, so let's run through some of the highlights.
One band that came highly recommended from my buddy here in Florida was Red Clay River. Their mournful country sounds were exactly what I needed on a chilly Friday afternoon. Friday was a weird day. As I've said before, it was cold (even for Minnesota) and my wife and her friend were drinking at an utterly freakish pace. I mean, I'm not complaining, it was just sort of weird to see her bringing me a fresh beverage while there was still 1/4 of a drink left in my current one. While reminiscing about the festival this week, my wife had this to say about Friday, "I remember at one point thinking, I've never been this fucked up in public before in my life and the sun is still up." As the day wore on, we drank with Brenn from LLC, Parker from Radio Moscow, Scotty from Poopdeflex and there is cloudy recollection of there being others, but nothing concrete. One of the "must see" bands of the festival for me was Davina & the Vagabonds, and I was center stage when they got started. Davina & The Vagabonds. In a word: sexy. In a tweet: "Davina and the Vagabonds. Music you should fuck to." These guys (and gal) are truly an undiscovered gem hanging out in Minneapolis. Between trips to the bar, greenroom, inside stages, outside stages & BS sessions with folks, we caught bits and pieces of Smokestack, Gravelroad, Deadeye and Porkchop, before settling in at one of the outside stages to catch the last ever performance of American Relay. They rocked the stage like there was no tomorrow and our little scene will be worse off without them. After the American Relay show we managed to catch a little bit of the T-Model Ford show before we had to leave to catch the Slim Cessnas Auto Club show in St. Paul (more on that tomorrow).
A neat story. On the way home Friday night I get an email from Matthew Dean Herman (wrote about him here). Turns out, he was in Minneapolis from Anchorage, Alaska so his daughter could attend a hockey camp. He was interested in checking out DBF before he had to leave on Saturday. I send an email back telling him how cool that would be, gave him my cell number and told him where we were staying. Turns out he was staying literally 4 doors down from us. It's a small world indeed.
Sunday morning came and the revelry of the prior day and night had a price that needed to be paid. I finally got the wife and co. up and moving and we got to DBF in time to get a few whiskey drinks in me before Poopdeflex took the stage. Now Poopdeflex had come highly recommended from fellow Ft. Wayne resident Brenn (Left Lane Cruiser) as an act that needed to be witnessed. Poopdeflex plays a version of the blues that dabbles in metal and punk as much as it does the blues, while his treatment of the crowd is planted firmly in "hostile", dropping nuggets such as, "God damn, they make folks ugly up here is Minnesota", "I hear there's are really good band playing inside, maybe you fuckers should go in there and check them out…I won't mind" & "I hate critics, and I hate fans too". We thought it was hilarious, but the bulk of the Minnesotans failed to see the humor in it. As the day wore on I managed to match the drinking pace the wife set the night before, while she limped along. We wandered back and forth between the inside stage and the outside stages until an (at the time) unknown gem by the name of Tom VandenAvond grabbed us by the backs of our heads. He also plays in The Woodsboss, which is the band that formed in the wake of The Weary Boys…a fact (him being a member) I didn't know until I was talking to him later in the day. Later came the highlight of the entire weekend, The Black Diamond Heavies. Anytime the Black Diamond Heavies are in the house, odds are they're the highlight and it's a burden they're proud to carry. They managed to put on the typical show, which is to say it was fucking awesome. After the Heavies I gotta be honest, my night devolves into a whiskey induced haze….a byproduct of this year's fest being as much a social event as it was a musical event, which is to say it was fucking awesome.
Sunday, instead of going to the Gospel brunch, we elected to spend our last few hours in Minneapolis sight-seeing. We had brunch at this place called the Uptown where we drank Bloody Marys in pint glasses we got to keep and ate burgers with bacon and eggs on them. All in all, while some of the evenings started to blur and the lineup wasn't as heavyweight-studded as last year's, it made up for that by ramping the fun level up tenfold. As we boarded the plane to come home Sunday afternoon, the wife and her friend were already making plans to return for the fest next year.
Hopefully, there will be a next year.
Next week I'll post a photoblog of the weekend and an interview or two.
Left Lane Cruiser – Big Mama
American Relay – Bonedry
Davina and the Vagabonds – St. Michael Vs. the Devil
Red Clay River – Letters To The Sky
Tom VandenAvond – Bones
Black Diamond Heavies – Smoothe It Out
Author Autopsy IVPosted on August 5, 2009 February 8, 2018 Categories The Rock ReportTags black diamond heavies, cabooze, Davina and | 1,763 |
Everpure, LLC. is a worldwide leader in providing water quality solutions to the foodservice, vending, residential, RV, marine and aviation markets since 1933. Our quality has earned us<|fim_middle|>Companies such as Coca-Cola®, United Airlines®, Winnebago®, Walt Disney World®, U.S. Navy and even Air Force One have relied on Everpure water filtration systems for years.
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Everpure products are designed to improve the quality of food and beverages, remove harmful particles and contaminants, and reduce water-using equipment maintenance costs and downtime. They are tested and certified to the highest standards by NSF International.
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