Fire is not afraid. The grey 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 towards 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 grey 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 grey 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 towards 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 towards 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 colour 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, towards the light of the fire, the grey 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 greyness 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 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 grey 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 grey 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.

Reid 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, coffin-like, 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 womb-like 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 in 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.