Others growled assent behind her.

Manekato, deeply disturbed, stepped closer to Without-Name. “We did not come here to inflict pain.”

“There is no pain here,” Without-Name said easily. “For there is no sentience. You see only reflex, as a leaf follows the sunlight.”

“No.” It was Nemoto. She stepped forward, evading the clutching hand of Manekato.

The nameless one gaped at her, briefly too startled to react.

“I know that you understand me. I believe your species has superior cognition to my own. But nevertheless we have cognition. This man is aware of himself, of his pain. And he is terrified, for he is aware that you plan to kill him, Renemenagota.”

Without-Name reared up on her hind legs, and the man in the dust howled. “You will not use my name.”

“Let him go.” Nemoto held out her arms, her hands empty.

The moment stretched. Without-Name towered over the slim form of the hominid.

Then Without-Name stepped off the fallen man and pushed him away with her foot. She dropped to her knuckles and laughed. “Your pet has an amusing defiance, Manekato. Nevertheless I tell you that these creatures of the Moon are the key to our strategy here. The key!” And she knuckle-walked away towards the forest, where she blended into the shadows of the trees.

Where she had shoved him, the fallen Zealot had left a trail of urine and blood. Workers hurried forward to tend him, and to clean the mess he had made.

Manekato approached the trembling hominid. “Nemoto — I am sorry—”

Nemoto shrugged off her touch. “So you understand, at last. Let me reward you with a banana.” And she stalked away, her anger visible in every step, every gesture.

Reid Malenfant:

“About the desert,” McCann said. He took a half-burned twig and started to scrape at the red dust, sketching out a map. “Here is the Congo — I mean, the great river which rises in the foothills of the great volcano you call the Bullseye, the river that winds its way through the interior of the continent to debouche into the ocean beyond the forests. For much of its length the river’s flow is confined to a series of ancient canyons, where the stream is fed by a series of underground tributaries. The north bank is very arid. But on its south bank — here, for example — there are flood plains where the vegetation grows a little more thickly.

“Here is what I propose. We will cut across the plain, meeting the river valley at this point, where there is a crossing place to the south bank, which is the greener. We will follow the river, heading steadily west, following it upstream as it works its way through the mountains, and using the vegetation and its inhabitants as our base resource. Thus we will seek out these shy Runner bands of yours. And if we fail to find your Emma before the character of the country changes — well, we will think of something else.”

Malenfant felt tempted to argue with this strategy. But he had no better ideas of how to explore a continent-wide desert, in search of a single person. And there might be a logic to it: whatever she was doing, whoever she was with, Emma surely couldn’t be anywhere else but close to water.

The river, then. He nodded curtly. McCann grinned and scuffed over his map with the sole of his boot.

They heard a cry.

It was Julia. She was hunting a lame deer. She had stripped naked and was running flat out towards it; baffled by a rock outcropping, the animal turned the wrong way, and Julia fell on the animal’s neck and wrestled it to the ground.

“Dinner is served,” McCann said dryly.

“There must be an easier way to make a living,” Malenfant said.

McCann shrugged. “You don’t find much to admire about these non-human humans, do you, Malenfant? Don’t you envy Julia her brutal strength, her immersion in the bloody moment, her uncomplicated heart?”

“No,” Malenfant said quietly.

They entered the desert.

Malenfant sacrificed more parafoil silk to make a hat and a scarf for his neck, and he added a little of a silvered survival blanket to the top of his hat to deflect the sunlight. After the first couple of days his eyes hurt badly in the powerful light. In his pack was a small chemical-film camera; he broke this open with a rock, and tied the fogged film over his eyes with a length of “chute cord.

McCann fared a little better. His ancient suit of skin, well-worn and much-used, had a hood he could pull over his head, and various ingenious flaps he could open to make the suit more or less porous.

Julia’s squat bow-legged frame was made for short bursts of extreme energy, not for the steady slog of a desert hike. She struggled as her feet sank into the soft, stingingly hot sand. But she kept on, grinning, self-deprecating, her tongue lolling from her open mouth, her sparse hair plastered to the top of her head.

Anyhow it wasn’t a desert, Malenfant supposed; not strictly. Life flourished, after a fashion. In the red dust shrubs and cacti battled for space with the ubiquitous stands of spiky spinifex grass. Lizards of species he couldn’t identify scuttled after insects. He spotted a kind of mouse hopping by like a tiny kangaroo. He had no idea how such a creature could survive here; maybe it had some way of manufacturing its own water from the plants it chewed on.

Not a desert, then. Probably a climatologist would call it a temperate semi desert. But it was dry as toast, and hot enough for Malenfant.

It was a relief to them all when they reached the river.

Malenfant and Julia pulled off their clothes and ran with howls of relief into the sluggish water. McCann was a little more decorous, but he stripped down to his trousers and paddled cautiously. Malenfant splashed silty-brown liquid into his face, and watched improbably large droplets hover around him; he felt as if his skin were sucking in the water directly through his pores.

Great islands floated past, natural rafts of reed and water-hyacinth, emissaries from the continent’s far interior, a startling procession of vegetation on its way to the sea. It was a reminder that this single mighty stream drained an area the size of India.

The river flowed sluggishly between yellow sandstone cliffs streaked with white and black. Here and there he saw sandbars strewn with black or brown boulders mudstones and shales, said McCann, laid down in ancient swamps. The sedimentary strata here were all but horizontal, undisturbed: these were rocks that had remained stable for a great length of time, for a thousand million years and more. This Moon was a small, static world.

Life flourished close to the river. The bank was crowded with plants that craved the direct sunlight, bushes and lianas competing for space. Even behind them the first rank of trees was draped with lianas, ferns and orchids, overshadowed only by the occasional climbing palm. Wispy manioc shrubs grew on the lower slopes. Speckled toads croaked all along the river bank, and fireflies the size of earwigs, each of them making a spark of green light, danced and darted in the tangled shadows of the trees.

A vast spider-web stretched between two relatively bare tree trunks. It was heavy with moisture, and glistened silver-white, like strings of pearls. Looking closer, Malenfant saw that many spiders, maybe a hundred or more, inhabited the web. A social species of spider?

Objects hung from the higher branches of the palms, like pendulous fruit, leathery and dark brown, each maybe a foot long.

“They are bats,” McCann murmured. “They have wing spans of a yard or more. Those are males. At night they call for the attention of females.” He rammed his fingers into his nostrils, and cried, “Kwok! Kwok! And the females fly up and down the line for hours, selecting the male who sings the most sweetly…”

After a time Julia clambered out of the water. She took a handful of palm oil from a wooden gourd in McCann’s pack, and worked it into her skin, paying attention to every crease and the spaces between her fingers and toes. When she stood, her skin shone, lustrous. She was silent, beautiful.