This eroded volcanic core, once the heart of the Farm, was bare now. After her mother had died, Manekato had ordered the deletion of the great House. The walls of Adjusted Space had disappeared like a bursting bubble, as if fifty millennia of sturdy existence had been but a dream. Manekato had welcomed the simple geologic clarity of the mountain’s eroded summit: she knew she could never live in the House, and it served no purpose save to preserve memories of unhappiness.

But she had retained the pit containing the ashes of her grandmothers, and to it she had added the last remains of Nekatopo.

Without-Name stalked around the perimeter of the ash pit, her knuckles pressing disrespectfully into the sealed-in dirt, leaving impressions of her hands and feet. A Worker followed this ill-mannered guest, restoring the pit’s smoothness. “Destroy the pit,” Without-Name told Manekato. “Fill it in. Delete it. It serves no purpose.”

“The pit is the memory of my Lineage,” said Manekato evenly.

Without-Name bared her teeth and growled. “This pit is not a memory. It is a hole filled with dust.”

Babo protested, “The practice of adding oneself to the Farm’s ground at the end of one’s life is as old as our species. It derives from the sensible desire to use every resource to enrich the ground for one’s descendants. Today the practice is symbolic, of course, but—”

“Symbolism. Pah! Symbolism is for fools.”

Babo looked shocked.

If Without-Name enjoyed goading Manekato, she positively relished taunting Babo. “Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.”

Babo said defiantly, “I have visited the Rano Lineage and I saw the pit of your ancestors. You are a hypocrite. You say one thing and practise the other.”

She raised herself to her hind feet and towered over him. She wore her body hair plucked clean in great patches over her body, and where hair remained it had been stiffened into great bristling spikes. It was a fashion from the other side of the world that made her seem oddly savage to Manekato. “Not any more,” she hissed. “I salute death. I salute the cleansing it brings. There is only life all that matters is the here and the now — and what can be achieved in the moment.”

Manekato held back her emotions.

This Without-Name’s preferred diminutive actually was — had been — Renemenagota. But she insisted she had abandoned her true name. “My land is to be destroyed,” she had said. “And so is my Lineage. What purpose does a fossilized name serve?” Even the contradiction in her position — for Without-Name was itself a name, of course, so that she was trapped in an oxymoron — seemed only to please her perversely. Manekato knew she must work with this woman, who was a refugee as she was, to study the rogue Moon and its fabricators; that had been the directive of the Astrologers. But Manekato felt that she had been the target of Without-Name’s bitterness and discourtesy from the moment they had been thrown together…

There was a dazzling electric-blue flash, gone in an instant.

A shift in the Wind touched Manekato’s face. She looked into the tunnel of stars.

“If you embrace experience,” she said, “then you must embrace that.”

Without-Name lifted her head awkwardly, and fell forward onto her knuckles.

Babo was already gazing at the sky, open-mouthed. Even the Workers were backing away, small visual sensors protruding from their hides, peering up at the dangerous sky.

Suddenly the Red Moon swam there, complete, huge.

Reid Malenfant:

Nemoto said in a monotone, “We are dealing with multiple universes. That much is clear. We have seen for ourselves multiple Moons. And we have hints of multiple Earths. The Earth of Hugh McCann is clearly quite different from our Earth even if his history is interestingly convergent with ours. And the Hams talk of a Grey Earth, a third place where conditions may be different again…”

In the hut Malenfant had come to think of as the dining hall, Nemoto and Malenfant faced each other at either end of the long table. The table’s wooden surface, polished to darkness by decades of use, was bare. An elderly Ham woman was preparing lunch.

It had taken days before Malenfant had been able to face Nemoto, such was his anger at her betrayal. But she was his only companion from home, and if he was ever going to get out of here he might need her help. As for Nemoto, it was as if the incident of the betrayal had simply been a step in some grand plan, which any rational person would accept as justified.

But she was changing, Malenfant saw: becoming more withdrawn, hollow-eyed dangerously detached from the texture of the world around her, obsessed instead with huge ideas of origins and destinies.

So Malenfant listened coldly, as Nemoto described alternate realities.

“Malenfant, perhaps there are a cluster of alternate universes with identical histories up to the moment of some key event in the evolution of humanity — and differing after that only in the details of that event, and its consequences.” Nemoto waved her hands vaguely, as if trying to indicate three-dimensional space around her. “Imagine the possible universes arrayed around us in a kind of probability space, Malenfant. Do you see that universes differing only in the details of the evolution of mankind must somehow be close to ours in that graph?”

“And you’re saying this is what we’re experiencing — a crossover between possible universes? Well, maybe. But it’s just talk. What I don’t see is how you can hop from one cosmos to the next.”

Nemoto smiled coldly. “I do not know how that is possible, Malenfant. And what is more important is that I do not know why anybody should wish to make it happen.”

“Why… You think all of this is deliberate — somehow artificial?”

“Your Wheel in Africa looked artificial to me, Malenfant. Perhaps the Hams” Old Ones, if they exist, will be able to tell us what they intended.”

“And you’re going to ask them, I suppose.”

“If they exist. If I can find them. What else is there to do? Malenfant, there is something else. I have raised with McCann the question of whether other life forms exist beyond the Earth — his Earth, I mean. His scientists have looked for evidence, as ours have. They have found none. Philosophers there have propounded something similar to our Fermi Paradox to crystallize this observation.”

“Why is this important?”

“I don’t know yet. But it does appear odd that such a profound contradiction is to be found in both universes…”

Light flickered, startlingly blue, beyond the door frame. Malenfant gasped. The colour had tugged at his heart — for it was the colour of the flash from within the Wheel that had consumed Emma.

They hurried outside. There was something in the sky.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

In her first stunned glance Manekato made out a single vast continent, scorched red, and a blue-grey ocean from which the sun cast a single blunt highlight. The disc, almost full, was surrounded by a thin layer of blurred softness. An atmosphere, then. But no lights shone in the darkened, shadowed crescent.

The Wind buffeted Manekato, turbulent, suddenly uneven. Already it begins, she thought.

Small Workers, no larger than insects, hovered around Babo’s head, defying the shifting breeze; she saw their light play over his face, dense with information. “Its gross parameters are as we anticipated,” he said. “A Moon, a world, two thirds of Earth’s diameter, a quarter of its mass. It has an atmosphere—”

“It is not Farmed,” Without-Name hissed. “Your jabber of numbers is meaningless, you fool. Look at it: it is not Farmed. This Moon is primordial.”