He was woken before dawn.
De Bonneville’s ruined face loomed over him like a black moon, the sweet stink of pombe on his breath. “Malenfant. Come. They’re hunting.”
“Who?”
“You’ll see.”
A sticky, moist heat hit Malenfant as soon as he left his hut. He walked down the broad hill, after de Bonneville, working through a hierarchy of smaller and more sinuous paths until there was savannah grass under his feet, long and damp with dew. Wagandans were following them, men and women alike, talking softly, some laughing.
The blue Moon had long set. There were still stars above. Malenfant saw a diffuse light, clearly green, tracking across the southern sky: it was a Tree, a living satellite populated by posthumans, floating above this primeval African landscape.
De Bonneville cast about and pointed. “There’s a track — see, where the grass has been beaten down? It leads toward the lake. Come. We will walk.” And, without waiting for acquiescence, he turned and led the way, limping and wheezing, his pains evidently forgotten in his eagerness for the spectacle.
Malenfant followed, tracking through the long damp grass. They passed a herd of the elephant analogs, the deinotherium. They seemed unaware of the humans. From a stand of trees, Malenfant saw the scowl of a cat — perhaps a lion — with long saber teeth protruding over its lower jaw. De Bonneville said it was a megantereon. And he almost tripped over a lizard hiding in the undergrowth at his feet; it was half a meter long, with three sharp horns protruding from its crest. It scampered away from him and then sat in the grass, its huge eyes fixed on him.
They passed a skull, perhaps of an antelope, bleached of flesh. It had been cracked open by a stone flake — little more than a shaped pebble — embedded in a pit in the bone. Malenfant bent down and prised out the flake with his fingers. Was it made by the Uprights? It seemed too primitive.
De Bonneville grabbed his arm. “There,” he whispered.
Perhaps half a kilometer away, a group of what looked like big apes — muscular, hairy, big-brained — was gathered around a carcass. Malenfant could see curved horns; maybe it was another antelope. In the dawn light the hominids were working together with what looked like handheld stone tools, butchering the carcass. A number of them were keeping watch at the fringe of the group, throwing rocks at circling hyenas.
“Are these the hunters you brought me to see?” Malenfant asked.
De Bonneville snorted with contempt. “These? No. They are not even hunters. They waited for the hyenas or jackals to kill that sivatherium, and now they steal it for themselves… Ah. Look, Malenfant.”
To Malenfant’s left, crouching figures were moving forward through the grass. In the gray light, Malenfant could make out golden skin, flashes of white cloth. It was Magassa, and more of his people, moving toward the apelike scavengers.
“Now,” de Bonneville hissed. “Now the sport begins.”
“What are these creatures, de Bonneville?”
He grinned. “When the ice was rolled back, the Earth was left empty. Various… experiments… were performed to repopulate it. But not as it had been before.”
“With older forms.”
“Of animals and even hominids, us. Yes.”
“So Magassa—”
“ — is a once-extinct hominid, recreated here, in the year A.D. 3265. Magassa is Homo Erectus. And there are tigers once more in India, and mammoths in the north of Europe, and roaming the prairies of North America once more are many of the megafauna species destroyed by the Stone Age settlers there… Quite something, isn’t it, Malenfant? I’m sure you didn’t expect to find this on your return to Earth: the lost species of the past, restored to roam the empty planet, here at the end of time.”
It sounded, to Malenfant, like characteristic Gaijin tinkering. Just as they had poked around with Earth’s climate and biosphere and geophysical cycles, so, it seemed, they were determined to explore the possibilities inherent in DNA, life’s treasury of the past. Endless questing, as they sought answers to their unspoken questions. But still, here was a hunting party of Homo Erectus, by God, stalking easily across the plains of Africa in this year A.D. 3265. “Is anyone studying this?”
De Bonneville looked at him curiously. “Perhaps you don’t understand. Science is dead, Malenfant. These are only Uprights. But…” He looked more thoughtful. “I sometimes wonder if Magassa has a soul. Magassa can speak, you know, to some extent. His speech mechanism is closer to nonhuman primates. Still, he can make himself understood. Look into Magassa’s eyes, Malenfant, and you will see a true consciousness — far more developed than any animal’s — but a consciousness lacking much of the complexity and darkness and confusion of our own. Is there still a Pope or a mullah, somewhere on Earth or the Moon, concerned with such issues, perhaps declaring Magassa an abomination even now? But Magassa himself would not frame such questions; without our full inner awareness, he would lack the ability to impute consciousness in other beings, and so could not envisage consciousness in nonhuman animals and objects. That is to say, he would not be able to imagine God.”
“You envy him,” Malenfant said.
“Yes. Yes, I envy Magassa his calm sanity. Well. They make good laborers. And the women — Wait. Watch this.”
Magassa stood suddenly, whooped, and brandished a torch, which burst into flame. The other Uprights stood with him and hollered. Their high, clear voices carried across the grassy plain to Malenfant, like the cries of gulls.
At the noise, the primitive scavenging hominids jumped up, startled. With bleating cries they ran away from the Uprights and their fire, abandoning the antelope. One of the hominids — a female — was a little more courageous; she reached back and tore a final strip of flesh from the carcass before fleeing with the others, flat breasts flapping.
But now more Uprights burst out of the grass before the fleeing hominids. It was a simple trap, but obviously beyond the more primitive hominids’ mental grasp.
At this new obstacle the scavengers hesitated for a second, like startled sheep. Then they bunched together and kept on running. They forced their way right through the cluster of Uprights, who hailed stones and bone spears at them. Some of the weapons struck home, with a crunching violence that startled Malenfant. But as far as he could see all the hominids got through.
All, that is, except one: the female who had hung back, and who was now a few dozen meters behind the rest.
The Uprights closed around her. She fought — she seemed to have a rock in her clenched fist — but she was overwhelmed. The Uprights fell on her, and she went down in a forest of flailing arms.
Her fleeing companions didn’t look back.
De Bonneville stood up, his blackened face slick with sweat, breathing hard.
The Upright Magassa came stalking out of the pack with a corpse slung over his shoulder. He had blood on his teeth and on the golden fur of his chest.
The body he carried was about the size of a twelve-year-old child’s, Malenfant guessed, coated with fine dark hair. The arms were long, but the hands and feet were like a modern human’s. The brainpan was crushed, a bloody mess, but the face was prominent: a brow ridge, a flat apelike nose, the jaw protruding, big front teeth. That tool was still clutched in the female’s hand; it was a lava rock, crudely shaped.
The head, in life, had been held up. This was a creature that had walked upright.
Magassa dumped the corpse at de Bonneville’s feet and howled his triumph.
“And what is this, de Bonneville?”
“Another reconstruction: Handy Man, some two million years vanished. Even less conscious, less self-aware, than our Upright friends.”
“Homo Habilis.”
“Malenfant, every species of extinct hominid is represented on this big roomy land of ours. I was pleased to see the prey were habilines, this morning — the Australopithecines can run, but are too stupid for good sport—”
“Get me out of here, de Bonneville.”
De B
onneville’s ruined eyes narrowed. “So squeamish. So hypocritical. Listen to me, Malenfant. This is how we lived. Sometimes they rape before the kill. Think of it, Malenfant! You and I have traveled to the stars. And yet, all the time, we carried the Old Men with us, asleep in our bones, waiting to be recalled…”
The Upright took a rock from his belt and started to hammer at the back of the dead habiline’s skull. He dug his fingers into the hole he had made, pulled out gray material, blood-soaked, and crammed it into his mouth.
Reid Malenfant knew, at last, that he had truly come home. He turned away from the habiline corpse.
Chapter 26
Kimera’s Breath
Soon after the Upright hunt, de Bonneville disappeared. Nemoto warned Malenfant not to ask too many questions.
On his own, Malenfant wandered around the court, the streets outside, even out into the country. But he learned little.
He found it hard to make any human contact. The Waganda were incurious — even of his sleek biocomposite coverall, a gift from the Bad Hair Day space twins, an artifact centuries of technological advancement ahead of anything here.
Most definitely, he did not fit in here. Madeleine Meacher had warned him it would be like this.
Anyhow, he tired quickly, and his hand still ached. Maybe those Bad Hair Day twins hadn’t done as good a job on him as they thought.
The days wore on, and his mind kept returning to de Bonneville. When he thought about it, Pierre de Bonneville — for all he was an asshole — was the only person in all this dead-end world who had tried to help him, to give him information. And besides, de Bonneville was a fellow star traveler who was maybe in trouble in this alien time.
So he started campaigning, with the Kabaka and Nemoto in her role as the katekiro, to be allowed to see de Bonneville.
After a few days of this, Nemoto summoned Malenfant from his villa. Impatient and reluctant, she said she had been ordered to escort Malenfant to de Bonneville. It turned out he was being held in Kimera’s Engine, the mysterious construct buried in the hillside at the heart of this grass-hut capital.
“I do not advise this, Malenfant.”
“Why? Because it’s dangerous? I’ve seen de Bonneville. I know how ill he is—”
“Not just that. What do you hope to achieve?” She looked at him out of eyes like splinters of lava; she seemed sunk in bitterness and despair. “I survive, as best I can. That’s what you must do. Find a place here, a niche you can defend. What else is there? Hasn’t your hop-and-skip tour of a thousand years taught you that much?”
“If that’s what you believe, why do you want my pressure suit?”
She coughed into a handkerchief; he saw the cloth was speckled by blood. “Malenfant—”
“Take me to de Bonneville.”
Accompanied by a couple of guards, Nemoto led Malenfant from the palace compound, and out into Rubaga. They followed streets, little more than tracks of dust, that wound between the grass huts.
After a while the huts became sparser, until they reached a place where there were no well-defined roads, no construction. The center of the plateau — maybe a kilometer in diameter and fringed by huts — was deserted: just bare rock and lifeless soil, free of grass, bushes, insects or bird song. Even the breeze from Lake Victoria seemed suppressed here.
It looked, he thought, as if a neutron bomb had gone off.
They marched on into this grim terrain. Nemoto was silent, her resentment apparent in every gesture and step.
Malenfant had been ill during the night and hadn’t gotten much sleep. He was feeling queasy, shivering. And the landscape didn’t help. The ground here was like a little island of death in the middle of this African ocean of life.
At last they reached the heart of the central plain. They came to a wide, deep well set in the ground. There were steps cut into the rock, spiraling into the ground around the cylindrical inner face of the well. In the low light of the morning Malenfant could see the steps for the first fifty meters or so, beyond that only darkness.
Nemoto began to clamber down the steps. She walked like the stiff old woman she had become, her gaudy court plumage incongruous in the shadows. Malenfant followed more slowly.
He wished he had a gun.
Within a few minutes they’d come down maybe thirty meters — the open mouth of the well was a disc of blue sky, laced with high clouds — and Nemoto rapped on a wooden door set in the wall.
The door opened. Beyond, Malenfant saw a lighted chamber, a rough cube dug out of the rock, lit up by rush torches. At the door stood one of the Kabaka’s guards. He was a pillar of bone and muscle, overlaid by fat and leathery skin. Nemoto spoke briefly, and the guard, after a hostile inspection of Malenfant, let them through.
The room was surprisingly large. The heat was intense, and the smoke from wall-mounted torches was thick, despite air passages cut into the walls. But the smoke couldn’t mask the sweet stenches of vomit, of corrupt and decaying flesh. Malenfant grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his face.
Pallets of wood and straw, covered by grimy blankets, were arranged in rows across the floor, and Malenfant had to step between them to make his way. Maybe half of the pallets were occupied. The eyes that met Malenfant’s flickered with only the dullest curiosity.
The invalids all seemed wasted by the disease that had afflicted de Bonneville, to a greater or lesser degree. Patches of skin were burned to blackness, and there were some people with barely any skin left at all. Malenfant saw heads free of hair — even eyelashes and eyebrows were missing as if burned off — and there were limbs swollen to circus-freak proportions, as well as broken and bleeding mouths and nostrils. There were attendants here, but as far as Malenfant could see they were all Uprights: Homo Erectus, reconstructed genetic fossils, tall and naked and golden furred, moving between the sick and dying. There seemed to be no real medical care, but the Uprights were giving out water and food — some kind of thin soup — and they murmured comfort in their thin, consonant-free voices to the ill.
It was like a field hospital. But there had been no war: and besides there were women and children here.
At last Malenfant found de Bonneville. He lay sprawled on a pallet. He stared up, his face swollen and burned beyond expression. “Malenfant — is it you? Have you any beer?” He reached up with a hand like a claw.
Malenfant tried to keep from backing away from him. “I’ll bring some. De Bonneville, you got worse. Is this a hospital?”
He made a grisly sound that might have been a laugh. “Malenfant, this is… ah… a dormitory. For the workers, including myself, who service the yellow-cake.”
“Yellow-cake?”
“The substance that fuels the Engine of Kimera…” He coughed, grimacing from the pain of his broken mouth, and shifted his position on his pallet.
“What’s wrong with you? Is it contagious?”
“No. You need not fear for yourself, Malenfant.”
“I don’t,” Malenfant said.
De Bonneville laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Indeed, nor should you. The illness comes from contact with the yellow-cake itself. When new workers arrive here, they are as healthy as you. Like that child over there. But within weeks, or months — it varies by individual, it seems, and not even the strongest constitution is any protection — the symptoms appear.”
“De Bonneville, why did they send you back here?”
“I have a propensity for offending the Kabaka, Malenfant, most efficiently and with the minimum of delay. So here I am again.”
“You’re a prisoner?”
“In a way. The guards ensure that the workers are kept here until such time as the Kimera sickness takes hold of their limbs and complexion. Then one is free to wander about the town without hindrance.” He touched his blackened cheeks; a square centimeter of skin came loose in his fingers, and he looked at this latest horror without shock. “The stigmata of Kimera’s punishment are all too obvious,” he said. “None
will approach a yellow-cake worker, and certainly none will feed or succor him. And so there is no alternative, you see, but to return to the Engine, where at least food and shelter is provided, there to serve out one’s remaining fragment of life…”
“Who is Kimera?”
“Ah, Kimera!” he said, and he threw back his ravaged head. Kimera, it turned out, was a mythical figure: a giant of Uganda’s past, so huge that his feet had left impressions in the rocks. “He was the great-grandson of Kintu, the founder of Uganda, who came here from the north; and it was Wanpamba, the great-great-grandson of Kimera, who first hollowed out the hill of Rubaga and entombed the soul of Kimera here…” And so forth: a lot of poetical, mythical stuff, but little in the way of hard fact. “You know, they had to reconstruct these old myths from the last encyclopedias, for the people had forgotten them — but don’t let the Kabaka hear you say it…” De Bonneville’s eyes closed, and he sank back, sighing.
Nemoto, nervous, plucked at Malenfant’s sleeve. Her mime was obvious. Time was up; they should go; this was an unhealthy place.
Malenfant didn’t see what choice he had. All the way out, Malenfant was aware of de Bonneville’s gaze, locked on his back.
Outside the grisly dormitory, Malenfant peered into the deeper blackness of the well. “Nemoto, what’s down there?”
“Danger. Death. Malenfant, we must leave.”
“It is the Engine of Kimera, whatever the hell that is. You know, don’t you? Or you think you know. Rubaga has the only significant radiation-anomaly signature on Earth…”
Her face was as expressionless as her Moon-rock Buddha’s. “If you want to fry your sorry skin, Malenfant, you can do it by yourself.” She turned and walked off, leaving him with the guard.
The guard looked at him quizzically. Malenfant shrugged, and pointed downward.
He walked to the ledge’s rim — a sheer drop into darkness, no protective rail of any kind — and leaned over. There seemed to be a breeze blowing down from above, rustling over the back of his neck, into the pit itself, as if there were a leak in the world down there. Now, he couldn’t figure that out at all. Where was the air going? Was there a tunnel, some kind of big extractor?
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