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 inwards.

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.

Reid 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 pendulum-like 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 analyser. “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.

“Birdsong,” Nemoto said. “An absence rather than a presence.”