He smelled strange.

The skinny woman thrust the baby at Shadow, letting him drop on her belly. Feebly the baby grasped at her fur, mouth opening and closing with a pop.

With hesitant hands, Shadow picked him up around the waist. He wriggled feebly. She turned him around so his face was towards her, and pressed his face against her chest. Soon his mouth had found her nipple, and she felt a warm white gush course through her body.

But the baby smelled wrong. She could hardly bear even to hold him.

The Running-folk let her stay the rest of the day, and through the night. But they gave her no more food. And when dawn came, they drove her away with stones and yells.

Her baby clamped to her chest, its big awkward head dangling, Shadow walked unsteadily across the savannah, towards the wooded crater wall.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant woke to the scent of bacon.

He surfaced slowly. The smell took him back to Emma and the home they had made in Clear Lake, Houston, and even deeper back than that, to his parents, the sunlit mornings of his childhood.

But he wasn’t at home, in Clear Lake or anywhere else.

When he opened his eyes he found walls of smoothed-over turf all around him, a roof of crudely cut planking, the whole covered in a patina of smoke and age. Light streamed in through unglazed windows, just holes cut in the sod covered by animal skin scraped thin. Under the smell of the bacon he could detect the cool green earthy scent of forest.

The day felt hot already. Thin air, Malenfant: hot days, cold nights, like living at altitude.

Nemoto’s pallet was empty.

When he tried to sit up, pushing back the blankets of crudely woven fibre, his shoulder twinged sharply: injured, he was reminded, where a Homo erectus had thrown a stone at him, prior to trying to eat him.

He swung his legs out of bed. He was in his underwear, including his socks, and his boots were set neatly behind the hut’s small door. He could feel the ache of a faint hangover, and his mouth felt leathery. He remembered the beer he had consumed the night before, a rough, chewy ferment of some local vegetation, sluiced down from wooden cups.

The door opened, creaking on rope hinges. A woman walked in.

Malenfant snatched back the blankets, covering himself. She was short, squat, dressed in a blouse and skirt dyed a bright, almost comical yellow. Her face protruded beneath a heavy brow, but her hair was tied back neatly and adorned with flowers. She looked like a pro wrestler in drag. She curtsied neatly. She was carrying Malenfant’s coverall, which had been cleaned and patched at the shoulder. She put the coverall on his bed, and crossed to a small dresser, evidently home-made. There was a wooden bowl of dried flowers on top of the dresser. She scooped out the flowers and replaced them with a handful of pressed yellow blooms — marigolds, perhaps — that she drew from a pouch in her skirt. Her feet were bare, he saw, great spade-shaped toes protruding from under the skirt.

She curtsied again. “Breakfas’, Baas,” she said, her voice a gruff rasp. She had not once met his eyes. She turned to go out the door.

“Wait,” he said.

She stopped. He thought he saw apprehension in her stance, though she must have been twice his weight, and certainly had nothing to fear from him.

“What’s your name?”

“Julia.” It was difficult for her to make the “J” sound; it came out as a harsh squirt. Choo-li-a.

“Thanks for looking after me.”

She curtsied once again and walked stolidly out of the room, her big feet padding on the wooden floor.

The settlement consisted of a dozen huts, of cut sod or stacked logs, with roofs of thick green blankets of turf. The huts were a uniform size and laid out like a miniature suburban street. The central roadway was crimson dust beaten flat by the passage of many feet, and lined with heavy rocks. Around each of the huts a small area was cordoned off by more lines of rocks. Some of the rocks were painted white. In the “gardens” plants grew, vegetables and flowers, in orderly rows.

Crude-looking carts were parked in the shadow of one wall, and other bits of equipment — what looked like spades, hoes, crossbows — were stacked in neat piles under bits of treated skin. There was even a neat, orderly latrine system: trenches topped by little cubicles and wooden seats.

The effect was oddly formal, like a barracks, a small piece of a peculiarly ordered civilization carved out of the jungle, which proliferated beyond the tall stockade that surrounded the huts. Last night McCann had been apologetic about the settlement’s crudity, but with its vegetable-fibre clothing and carts and tools of wood and stone, it struck Malenfant as a remarkable effort by a group of stranded survivors to carve out of this unpromising jungle something of the civilization they had left behind.

But the huts” sod walls were eroded and heavily patched by mud. And several of the huts appeared abandoned, their walls in disrepair, their tiny gardens desiccated back to crimson dust.

There was nobody about — no humans, anyhow.

A man dressed in skins crossed the compound’s little street, barefoot, passing from one hut to another. He was broad, stocky, like Julia. A Neandertal, perhaps.

In one corner of the compound two men worked at a pile of rocks, steadily smashing them one against the other, as if trying to reduce them to gravel. The men were naked, powerful. Malenfant could immediately see they were the Homo erectus types. They were restrained by heavy ropes on their ankles, and they didn’t seem aware of his presence. The display of their strength, unaccompanied by the control of minds, disturbed him.

But he could still smell bacon. Comparative anthropology could wait.

He followed his nose to a hut at the centre of the compound. Within, a table had been set with wooden plates and cups and cutlery, and in a small kitchen area another Neandertal-type woman, older then Julia, was frying bacon on slabs of rock heated by a fire. In the circumstances, it seemed incredibly domesticated.

Nemoto was sitting at the table, chewing her way steadily through a slab of meat. She looked at him as he entered, and raised an eyebrow.

“…Malenfant. Good morning.”

Malenfant turned at the voice, and his hand was grasped firmly.

Hugh McCann was wearing a suit, Malenfant was startled to see, with a collared shirt and even a tie. But the suit and shirt were threadbare, and Malenfant saw how McCann’s belt dug into his belly.

McCann saw him looking. He said ruefully, “I never was much of a hand with the needle. And our bar-bar friends make fine cooks, but they don’t have much instinct for tailoring, I fear.”

Malenfant was fuddled by the scent of the food. “Bar-bars?”

“For barbarians,” Nemoto said, her mouth full. “The Neandertals.”

“They call themselves Hams,” McCann said. “A Biblical reference, of course. But bar-bars they were to me as a boy, and bar-bars they will always remain, I fear.” His accent was clearly British, but of a peculiarly strangulated type Malenfant hadn’t encountered outside of World War II movies. And he gave Malenfant’s name a strong French pronunciation. He took Malenfant’s elbow and guided him towards the kitchen area. “What can we offer you? The bacon comes from the local breed of hog, and is fairly authentic, but the bird who laid those eggs was no barnyard chicken: rather some dreadful flightless thing like a bush turkey. Still, the eggs are pretty tasty.” He flashed a smile at the Ham cook, showing decayed teeth.

First things first. Malenfant grabbed a plate and began to ladle it full of food. The wooden utensils were crude, but easy to use. He took his plate to the table, and sat with Nemoto, who was still eating silently. Malenfant sliced into his bacon. The well-cooked meat fell apart easily.