After a moment McCann joined them. “I expect last night is all a bit of a blur. You did rather go on a bust, Malenfant.”

“Body fluid redistribution,” Nemoto said dryly. “Low oxygen content. You just could not take it, Malenfant.”

“I’ll know better next time.”

“Runners,” Nemoto said.

“What?”

“The Erectus/Ergaster breed. Mr McCann calls them Runners — Running Men, Running-folk.”

“Quite a danger in the wild,” McCann said around a mouthful of bacon. “That scrog of wood where we found you was hotching with them. But once broken they are harmless enough. And useful. A body strong enough for labour, hands deft enough to handle tools, and yet without the will or wit to oppose a man’s commands — if backed up by a light touch of the sjambok from time to time…”

Nemoto leaned forward. “Mr McCann. You said that when you were a boy you called the Neandertals — that is, the Hams — bar-bars. So were there Hams in, umm, in the world you came from?”

McCann dug a fork into his scrambled egg, considering the question. He seemed more comfortable talking to Malenfant than to Nemoto, and he directed his remarks to him. “Look here,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, not yet. But I’m going to be honest with you from the start. I don’t mind telling you that yours are the first white faces we’ve seen since we’ve come here. Aside from those dreadful Zealot types, of course, but they’re no help to us, and beyond the pale anyhow… Yes,” he said. “Yes, there are Hams where I come from. There. That’s a straight answer to a straight question, and I trust you’ll treat me with the same courtesy.”

“Where?” Nemoto pressed. “Where are your Hams? In Europe, Asia—”

“Yes. Well, they are now. But not by origin, of course. The Hams came originally from the New World.”

Nemoto asked, “America?”

McCann frowned. “I don’t know that name.”

Malenfant eyed Nemoto. “What are you thinking?”

“An alternate Earth,” Nemoto said simply.

Yes, he thought. McCann had come from an Earth, a different Earth, a world where Neandertals had survived to the present — a world where pre-European America had been in the occupation, not of a branch of Homo sapiens, but of another species of humankind altogether, a different flesh… What an adventure that must have been, Malenfant thought, for a different Columbus.

Nemoto said softly, “I think we may be dealing with a whole sheaf of worlds here, Malenfant. And all linked by this peculiar wandering Red Moon.”

McCann was listening intently Malenfant saw how deeply cut were the lines in his face, he might have been fifty, but he looked older, careworn, intense, lit by a kind of desperation. He said, “You believe we come from different worlds.”

“Different versions of Earth,” Nemoto said.

He nodded. “And in this Earth of yours, there are no Hams?”

“No,” Nemoto said steadily.

“Well, we have no Runners. The Runners may be native to this place, perhaps.” He eyed them sharply. “And what about the others, the Elf-folk and the Nutcrackers…”

Malenfant said, “If you mean other breeds of hominids, or pre-homimds — no. Nothing between us and the chimps. The chimpanzees.”

McCann’s eyes opened wider. “How remarkable. How — lonely.”

The Neandertal woman, with a bulky grace, came to the table and began to gather up their dishes.

They walked around the compound.

There was very little metal here: a few knives, bowls, shears. These tools, it seemed, had been cut from the wreck of the ship that had brought McCann and his colleagues here: like Nemoto and Malenfant, the English had got here under their own power. So the tools were irreplaceable and priceless — and they were a target for steady theft, by Hams within and without the compound. McCann said the Hams did not use the tools; they seemed to destroy them or bury them, removing this trace of novelty from the world.

There were many Hams, working as servants. And there appeared to be several of the so-called Runners, kept under control at all times, apparently domiciled outside the main stockade. He tried to put aside judgement. He was not the one who had battled to survive here for so long; and it was evident that this McCann and his companions came from a very different world from his.

And besides, McCann appeared to believe that he treated “his” hominids well.

They met one other of the English, a bloated-looking red-faced man with a Santa Claus beard and an immense pot belly that protruded from the grimy, much-patched remnant of a shirt. He was riding in a cart drawn by two of the Runners, harnessed with strips of leather like pack animals. Santa Claus glared at Malenfant and Nemoto as he passed them, and then went riding out of the stockade through gates smoothly pulled back by Hams.

“There goes Crawford in his Cape cart,” whispered McCann conspiratonally. “Something of an oddball, between you and me. Well, we all are, I suppose, after all this time. I fear he’s too much set in his ways to deal with you. Of course if he suspected you were French he’d shoot you where you stand!… Martyr to his lumbago, poor chap. And I fear he may have a touch of the black-water.”

McCann talked quickly and fluently, as if he had been too long alone.

There had been twelve of them, it seemed — all men, all British, from an Empire that had thrived longer than in Malenfant’s world. Their rocket ship had been driven by something called a Darwin engine.

McCann struggled to describe the history of his world, his nation. After bombarding them with a lot of detail, names of wars and kings and generals and politicians that meant nothing to Malenfant, he settled on a blunt summary.

“We are engaged in a sort of global war,” McCann said. “That’s been the shape of it for a couple of centuries now. Our forefathers struck out for new lands, in Asia and Africa and Australia — even the New World — as much out of rivalry as for expectations of gain.”

But the ultimate “new land” had always hovered in the sky. Before the Red Moon had appeared in McCann’s sky, a Moon had sailed there — not tiny Luna, but a much fatter world, a world of water-carved canyons and aquifers and dust storms, a world that sounded oddly like Mars. Drawn by that Moon, the great nations of this other Earth had launched themselves into a space race as soon as the technology was available, decades before Malenfant’s history had caught up.

Malenfant, battered by strangeness, found room for a twinge of nostalgia. He’d have exchanged McCann’s fat Moon for Luna any time. If only a world like Mars had been found to orbit the Earth, instead of poor desiccated Luna — a world with ice and air, just waiting for an explorer’s tread! With such a world as a lure, just three days away from Earth, how different history might have been. And how differently his own life, and Emma’s, might have turned out.

“The lure of the Moon was everything, of course,” McCann said. “From times before memory it has floated in the sky, fat and round and huge, with storms and ice caps and even, perhaps, traces of vegetation, visible with the naked eye. You could see it was another world in the sky, waiting for the tread of man, for the flag of empire, the ploughs of farmers… It was quite a chase. Got to stop the other chap getting there first, you see.”

Malenfant was getting confused again. “Other chap? You mean the Americans?”

Nemoto said gently, “There are no Americans in his world, Malenfant.”

“The French, of course,” said McCann. “The blooming French!”

Colonies on this bounteous Moon had been founded in what sounded like the equivalent of the first half of the twentieth century. Since then wars had already been fought, wars on the Moon waged between spreading mini-empires of Brits and French and Germans.

But then, in McCann’s universe, the Mars-Moon had disappeared, to be replaced by this peculiar, wandering Red Moon, with its own cargo of oceans and life. Once the world had gotten over its bewilderment — once the last hope of contacting the lost colonies on Mars-Moon was gone — a new race had begun to plant a flag in the Red Moon.