Malenfant took another banana, peeled it and bit into it savagely. “You’re a real smart ass, Nemoto, you know that?”

“Malenfant, all the species here should be familiar, more or less. We have the hommid samples who fell through the portals to the Earth. Although their species is uncertain, their DNA sequencing was close to yours and mine…”

A shadow moved through the forest behind Nemoto: black on green, utterly silent, fluid.

“Holy shit,” Malenfant said.

The shadow moved forward, resolved, stepped into the light.

It was a woman. And yet it was not.

She must have been six feet tall, as tall as Malenfant. Her eyes locked on Malenfant’s, she bent, picked up the banana Nemoto had dropped, and popped it into her mouth, skin and all.

She was naked, hairless save for a dark triangle at her crotch and a tangle of tight curls on her head. She held nothing in her hands, wore no belt, carried no bag. She had the body of a nineteen-year-old tennis player, Malenfant thought, or a heptathlete: good muscles, high breasts. Perhaps her chest was a little enlarged, the ribs prominent, affording room for the larger lungs the theorists had anticipated, like an inhabitant of a 1950s dream of Mars. There was a liquid grace in her movements, a profound thoughtfulness in her stillness.

But over this wonderful body, and a small, child-like face, was the skull of a chimp. That was Malenfant’s first impression anyhow: there were ridges of bone over the eyes, a forehead that sloped sharply back. Not a chimp, no, but not human either.

Her eyes were blue and human.

“Homo erectus,” Nemoto was muttering nervously. “Or H. ergaster. Or some other species we never discovered. Or something unrelated to any hominid that ever evolved on Earth… And even if descended from some archaic stock, this is not a true Erectus, of course, but a descendant of that lineage shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution — just as a chimp is not like our common ancestor, but a fully evolved species in its own right.”

“You talk too much, Nemoto.”

“Yes… We have seen the reconstructions, inspected the bodies ejected from the Wheel. But to confront her alive, moving, is eerie.”

The hominid girl studied Malenfant with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of a child, without calculation or fear.

He stepped forward. He could smell the girl: unwashed, not like an animal, an intense locker-room smell. He felt a deep charge, pulling him to her. At first he thought it was an erotic attraction — and that was present too; the combination of that clear animal gaze and the beautiful, fully human body was undeniably compelling, even if he sensed those stringy arms could break his back if she chose. But what he felt was deeper than that. It was a kind of recognition, he thought.

“I know you,” he said.

The girl stared back at him.

Nemoto fidgeted behind him. “Malenfant, we were given protocols for encounters like this.”

He murmured, “I should offer her a candy and show her a picture card?” He returned his attention to the girl. “I know you,” he repeated.

I know who you are. We evolved together. Once my grandmother and yours ran around the echoing plains of Africa, side by side.

This is a first contact, it struck him suddenly: a first contact between humanity and an alien intelligent species — for the intelligence in those eyes could not be denied, despite the absence of tools and clothing.

…Or rather, this is a contact renewed. How strange to think that buried deep in man’s past was a last contact, a last time we met one of these cousins of ours: perhaps a final encounter between one of my own ancestors and a girl like this in the plains of Asia, or a dying Neandertal on the fringe of the Atlantic, when we left them no place else to go.

The girl held her hands out, palms up. “Banana,” she said, thickly, clearly.

Malenfant’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”

“English,” Nemoto breathed. “She speaks English.”

“En’lish,” the girl said.

Now Malenfant’s heart hammered. “That must mean Emma is here. She is near, and she survived.”

Nemoto said cautiously, “We know very little, Malenfant; there is a whole world around us, a world of secrets.”

There was a crackle behind Malenfant: a twig breaking, a footfall. He whirled.

There were more of the ape-people, eight or ten of them, male and female, all adults. They were as naked as the girl, though not all as handsome; some of them sported scars, gashes and even burns, and some had hair streaked with grey. They were standing in a line, neatly fencing off Malenfant and Nemoto from the lander, and they were all gazing hard at the two of them.

“These do not seem quite so friendly,” Nemoto murmured.

“Oh, really? You think now’s a good time to start the sign-language classes?”

“Malenfant, where are the guns?”

“…In the lander.” Shit.

The silence stretched. The ape-people stood like statues.

“I am loath to abandon the lander,” Nemoto hissed. “We have not even packed the contingency samples.”

Malenfant suppressed a foolish laugh. “There go our science bonuses.”

One of the ape-people stepped forward. Straggles of beard clung to his chin, though the longer strands seemed to have been cut, crudely. He opened his mouth and hissed. Malenfant thought his teeth were stained red.

Nemoto said, “Malenfant, I think—”

“Yeah. I think he’s about to take a sample of us.”

The big man raised his arm. Too late, Malenfant saw he was holding a stone in his fist. Malenfant ducked sideways. The stone missed his head, but it sliced through the layers of cloth over his shoulder, and nicked the flesh.

“Plan B,” he gasped.

The two of them broke and ran for the forest. They pushed past the girl, who made a half-hearted effort to grab them. For a heartbeat Malenfant nursed a hope that he had made some connection, that she had on some level decided to let them go.

But then he was plunging into the green mouth of the forest after Nemoto, and there was no time for reflection.

The forest, away from the sunlight, was suffused by a clinging cloudy moistness that seemed to linger around every bush, and made every tree trunk slippery under Malenfant’s palms. Soon they were both shivering.

And it was almost impossible to walk. Malenfant had done a little jungle survival training during his induction into the Shuttle programme. But this forest was almost impassable, so deeply layered were the tangled roots, branches, leaves and moss over the uneven ground. Malenfant was acutely aware that this was not a place for humans.

Still they blundered on, slipping, crashing, blundering, falling, making a noise that must have echoed off the flanks of the Bullseye itself.

He imagined the frantic activity in the back rooms of Mission Control in Houston, the buzzing calls to palaeontologists and anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. For once in his life he would have been glad to hear the tinny voices from the ground. But, though there was a hiss of static from the tiny speaker built into his shoulder pack, he could make out no voices.

Once he thought he confronted one of the ape-people. He caught a glimpse of someone — some thing — in the dense green gloom ahead of him, upright like an ape-person, but smaller, chimp-sized, maybe hairy. It jabbered at him, reached up its long arms, and slipped out of sight into the forest canopy above.

After that, Malenfant found himself looking for possible threats upwards as well as side to side.

At length, breathing hard in the thin air, shivering, they came to a halt, crouching close to the ground by a fat, fungus-laden tree trunk. Malenfant’s face was slick with sweat and forest dew.

Nemoto’s eyes were wide in the gloom, glancing this way and that, like a cornered animal.