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 centre.”

“The centre?”

“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 already have 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, for ever and a day. They do not covet what their neighbours 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 lifespans, 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.”