Now she started to understand. The Russians, who rightly believed they were still far ahead of the West in the psychology of the peculiarly cramped conditions of space travel, placed great collectivist emphasis on teamwork and sacrifice. They would not warm to a driven, somewhat obsessive loner perfectionist like Malenfant.

“I should have socialized with the assholes,” he said now. “I should have gone to the cosmonauts” coldwater apartments, and drunk their crummy vodka, and pressed the flesh with the guys on the gate.”

She laughed, gently. “Malenfant, you don’t even socialize at NASA.”

“My nature got me where I am now.”

Yeah, washed out, she thought brutally. “But maybe it’s not the nature you need for long-duration space missions. I guess not everybody forgives you the way I do.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

She ignored the question. “So the psych report is the real reason they grounded you. The shoulder was just an excuse.”

“The Russians must have known the psych report would never stand up to scrutiny. If Joe Bridges had got his thumb out of his ass—”

“Oh, Malenfant, don’t you see? They were giving you cover. If you’re going to be grounded, do you want it to be because of your shoulder, or your personality? Think about it. They were trying to help you. They all were.”

“That kind of help I can live without.” Again he wrenched the plane through a savage snap roll.

Her helmet clattered against the Plexiglas, as varying acceleration tore at her stomach, and the brown African plain strobed around her. She was cocooned in the physical expression of his anger.

She glared at the back of Malenfant’s helmeted head, which cast dazzling highlights from the African sun, with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. Well, that was Malenfant for you.

And because she was staring so hard at Malenfant she missed seeing the artefact until it was almost upon them.

Malenfant peeled away suddenly. Once again she glimpsed pale blue-white sky, dusty brown ground, shafts of glowering sunlight — and an arc, a fragment of a perfect circle, like a rainbow, but glowing a clear cerulean blue. Then it fell out of her vision.

“Malenfant — what was that?”

“Damned if I know.” His voice was flat. Suddenly he was concentrating on his flying. The slaved controls in front of her jerked this way and that; she felt remote buffeting, some kind of turbulence perhaps, smoothed out by Malenfant’s skilful handling.

He pulled the jet through another smooth curve, and sky and ground swam around her once more.

And he said, “Holy shit.”

There was a circle in the sky.

It was facing them full on. It was a wheel of powder-blue, like a hoop of the finest ribbon. It looked the size of a dinner plate held before her face — but of course it must be much larger and more remote than that.

Emma saw this beyond Malenfant’s head and shoulders and the slim white fuselage. The jet’s needle nose pointed straight at the centre of the ring, so that the wheel framed her field of view with perfect symmetry, like some unlikely optical flare. Its very perfection and symmetry made it seem unreal. She had no idea of its scale — it would seem so close it must be hanging off the plane’s nose, then something in her head would flip the other way and it would appear vast and distant, like a rainbow. She found it physically difficult to study it, as if it was an optical illusion, deliberately baffling; her eyes kept sliding away from it, evading it.

It’s beyond my comprehension, she thought. Literally. Evolution has not prepared me for giant wheels suspended in the air.

Fire:

Water runs down his face.

He is lying on his back. The sky is flat and grey.

Rain falls. His ears hear it tapping on the ground. His eyes see the drops fall towards his face. They are fat and slow. Some of them fall on his face.

Water runs in his eyes. It stings. He sits up.

Fire is sitting on the ground. He is wet. His eyes hurt. His burned hands hurt.

He stands up. His legs walk him towards the trees.

People walk, run, stumble over muddy ground, adults and children. They move in silence, in isolation. Nobody is calling, nobody helping. They are cold and they hurt. They have each forgotten the other people, all save the mothers with their babies with no names. The mothers” arms carry the infants, sheltering them.

Fire reaches the trees.

The wind changes. His nose smells ash.

He remembers the fire. His legs run back.

The fire is out, drowned by the rain. The back of Fire’s head hurts in anticipation of Stone’s punishing axe.

Sing is calling. She is lying on a bower. The bower is falling apart, the leaves damp and shrivelled.

Loud is walking back to Sing.

Sing screams. Fire spins and crouches.

There is a Mouth. It is bright blue. The Mouth is skimming over the shining grass. The Mouth is approaching Fire, gaping wide.

Cats have mouths. A cat’s mouth will take a person’s head. This Mouth would take a whole person, standing straight. It is coming towards him, this Mouth with no body, this huge Mouth, widening.

It makes no noise. The rain hisses on the grass.

Fire screams. Fire’s legs carry him off into the forest.

Still the Mouth comes. It towers into the sky.

Sing is at its base. Her arms push at the bower. Her legs can’t stand up. She screams again.

Loud runs. His hands are throwing dirt at the Mouth.

The Mouth scoops him up.

There is a flash of light. Fire can see nothing but blue. Loud screams.

Emma Stoney:

“Malenfant — you see it too, right?”

He laughed. “It ain’t no scratch in your contacts, Emma.” He seemed to be testing the controls. Experimentally he veered away to the right. The ride got a lot more rocky.

The blue circle stayed right where it was, hanging in the African sky. No optical effect, then. This was real, as real as this plane. But it hung in the air without any apparent means of support. And still she had no real sense of its scale.

But now she saw a contrail scraped across the air before the wheel, a tiny silver moth flying across its diameter. The moth was a plane, as least as big as their own.

“Damn thing must be a half-mile across,” Malenfant growled. “A half-mile across, and hovering in the air eight miles high—”

“How appropriate.”

“My God, it’s the real thing,” Malenfant said. “The UFO-nauts must be going crazy.” She heard the grin in his voice. “Everything will be different now.”

Now she made out more planes drawn up from the dusty ground below, passing before the artefact — if artefact it was. One of them looked like a fragile private jet, a Lear maybe, surely climbing well beyond its approved altitude.

Malenfant continued his turn. The artefact slid out of sight.

Dusty land wheeled beneath her. She was high above a gorge, cut deeply into a baked plain, perhaps thirty or forty miles long. Perhaps it was Olduvai itself, the miraculous gorge that cut through million-year strata of human history, the gorge that had yielded the relics of one ancient hominid form after another to the archaeologists” patient inspection.

How strange, she thought. Why here? If this wheel in the sky really is what it appears to be, an extraordinary alien artefact, if this is a first contact of a bewilderingly unexpected type (and what else could it be?) then why here, high above the cradle of mankind itself? Why should this gouge into humanity’s deepest past collide with this most unimaginable of futures?

The plane dropped abruptly. For a heartbeat Emma was weightless. Then the plane slammed into the bottom of an air pocket and she was shoved hard into her seat.

“Sorry,” Malenfant muttered. “The turbulence is getting worse.” The slaved controls worked before her. The plane soared and banked.