McCann said now, “Solitary, seeking diversion, I discovered the intricate delights of the knight’s tour.” He swept the board empty of pieces, save for a solitary knight, which he made hop in its disturbingly asymmetrical fashion from square to square. “The knight must move from square to square over an empty board, touching all the cells, but each only once. An old schoolboy puzzle… I quickly discovered that a three-by-four board is the smallest on which such a tour can be made. I have discovered many tours on the standard chessboard, many of which have fascinating properties. A closed tour, for example, starts and ends at the same cell.” The knight moved around the board with bewildering rapidity. “I do not know how many tours are possible. I suspect the number may be infinite.” He became aware of Malenfant’s uncomfortable silence.

Malenfant tried to soften his look — how sane would you be after so many decades alone on Neandertal Planet, Malenfant?

Embarrassed, McCann swept the pieces into a wooden box. “Rather like our situation here, don’t you think?” he said, forcing a smile. “We move from world to world with knight’s hops, forward a bit and sideways. We must hope our tours are closed too, eh?”

After the first night McCann gave the two of them separate huts. In this dwindling colony there was plenty of room.

Malenfant found it impossible to sleep. Lying in his battered sod hut, he gazed through his window as the night progressed.

He heard the calls of the predators as the last light faded. Then there was an utter stillness, as if the world were holding its breath — and then a breath of wind and a coolness that marked the approaching dawn.

Malenfant wasn’t used to living so close to nature. He felt as if he were trapped within some vast machine.

His head rattled with one abortive scheme after another. He was a man who was used to taking control of a situation, of bulling his way through, of pushing until something gave. This wasn’t his world, and he had arrived here woefully ill-equipped; he still couldn’t see any way forward more promising than just pushing into the forest on foot, at random. He had to wait, to figure out the situation, to find an option with a reasonable chance of success. But still his enforced passivity was burning him up.

The door opened.

The Neandertal girl came into his hut. She was carrying a bowl of water that steamed softly, a fresh towel, a jug that might hold nettle tea.

He said softly, “Julia.”

She stood still in the grey dawn light, the glow from the window picking out the powerful contours of her face. “Here, Baas.”

“Do you know what’s going on here?”

She waited.

He waved a hand. “All of this. The Red Moon. Different worlds.”

“Ask Ol” Ones,” she said softly.

“Who?”

Th” Ol” Ones. As” them wha” for.”

“The Old Ones? Where do they live?”

She shrugged, her shoulders moving volcanically. “In th” ol’est place.”

He frowned. “What about you, Julia?”

“Baas?”

“What do you want?”

“Home,” she said immediately.

“Home? Where is home?”

She pointed into the sky. “Grey Earth.”

“Does Mr McCann know you want to go home?”

She shrugged again. “Born here.”

“What?”

She pointed to herself. “Born here. Mother. Moth” born here.”

“Then this is your home, with Mr McCann.”

She shook her head, a very human gesture. She pointed again to the forest, and the sky.

Then she said, “You, Baas? What you wan’?”

He hesitated. “I came looking for my wife.”

Her face remained expressionless. But she said, “Fam’ly.”

“Yes. I guess so. Emma is my family. I came here looking for her.”

“Lon” way.”

“Yes. Yes, it was a long way. And I ain’t there yet.”

She walked towards him, rummaging in the pouch of her skirt. “Thomas,” she said.

“I know him. He found me.”

“Took off of Runner in fores’.” She held out something in the dark, something small and jewel-like that glittered in her palm.

He took it, held it up to the light of the window. It was a hand-lens, badly scuffed, snapped off at its mount. It was marked with the monogram of the South African air force.

“Emma,” he breathed. He was electrified. So there were indeed things McCann didn’t know, even about the Hams of his own household. “Julia, where—”

But she had gone.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

“I have three wives and six children. That is how it is done in my new home…” Babo was talking fast, nervously, and his knuckles rattled as he walked with her through the tall dark halls of the building. His body hair was plaited and coloured in a fashion that repelled Mane’s simple Poka tastes. “The Farm is fine, Mane, and bigger than that of the Poka Lineage, but its design is based on the triangle: plane-covering, of course, but cramped and cluttered compared to Poka’s clean-lined hexagons.”

“You always were an aesthete,” she said dryly.

This whole building, she realized slowly, was a store of records piled up high from the lowest room to the highest. Physically, some of the records were stored in twinkling cubes that held bits of the quantum foam, minuscule wormholes frozen into patterns of meaning; and some were scraped onto parchment and animal skin.

“Some of these pieces are very ancient indeed,” Babo said. “Dating back half a million years or more. And the Air Wall, you know, is a controlled storm. It is like a hurricane, but trapped in one place by subtle forces. It has raged here, impotent, for fifty thousand years — so that for all that time the Market has been in the eye of the storm — an eye that reveals the sky beyond the clouds, a sky opened for the study of the Astrologers…”

She stopped and glared at him. “Oh, Babo, I don’t want to know about Air Walls or records! I never thought I would see you again — I didn’t know you had become an Astrologer.”

He sighed, ruminatively picking his nose. “I am no Astrologer. But the Astrologers sent for me. When I was younger I did spend some time here, working informally, before I reached the home of my wives. Many boys do, Mane. You matriarchs run the world, but there is much you do not know, even about those who sire your children!”

“Why are you here, Babo?”

He wrapped his big hands over his head. “Because the Astrologers thought it would be kinder that way. Kinder if your brother told you the news, rather than a stranger…”

“What news?”

He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Come see the sky with me. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Reluctantly, she followed.

The building was tall, and they had a long way to ascend. At first they used simple short-range isomorphic Mappers, but soon they came to more primitive parts of the building, and they had to climb, using rungs stapled to walls of crude bricks.

Babo led the way. “A remarkable thing,” he called down to her. “We find climbing easy; our arms are strong, our feet well adapted to grasping. But it appears that our climbing ancestors evolved into creatures that, for a time, walked upright, on their hind feet. You can see certain features of the position of the pelvis — well. But we have given that up too; now, once more, we walk on all fours, using our knuckles, clinging to the ground.”

“If you tried to walk upright you would be knocked over by the Wind.”

“Of course, of course — but then why is it we carry traces of a bipedal ancestry? We are creatures of anomaly, Mane. We are not closely related to any of the animals on this Earth of ours — not one, not above a certain basic biochemical equivalence of course, without which we could not eat our food and would quickly starve to death. We can trace evolutionary relationships among all the world’s creatures, one related to the other in a hierarchy of families and phyla — except us. We seem to be unique, as if we fell out of the sky. We have no evolutionary forebears, no bones in the ground that might mark the passing of those who came before us.