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, Space Station and 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 1,000 miles per hour. The craft was aiming to encounter a Moon moving at some 2,300 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 laboured 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 cosy 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.

Fire:

It is morning. The rain has stopped. The sky is grey.

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 centre 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 prises 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.