“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.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

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 centre of the platform. The yellow floor was bare again, the temporary structures it had borne unravelled, spacetime 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 artefacts.

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 that 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 upwards from the platform. The great shield of Adjusted Space folded away beneath them, leaving a disc 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 in 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 spacetime 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.

Shadow:

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.