Fire,’ says Fire quietly. His arms drop and his head bows. He keeps hold of the fire.
Sing moans. Her eyes are closed. Her dugs are slack. The men pick her up by shoulders and legs and lift her back on the branches.
Stone and Blue grab the branches. Their legs walk them back the way they had come.
Fire tells his legs to stand him up. They can’t. His hands are still clasped around the fire. Lights fill his head, more garish than that blue stripe in the sky. He nearly falls over backwards.
Loud’s hand grabs his armpit. Loud lifts him until his legs are straight.
Loud laughs. Loud walks away, fast, after Dig.
Fire’s head hurts. Fire’s hands hurt. Fire’s member wants Dig.
He starts walking. He wants to stop thinking.
He thinks of the blue light.
Emma Stoney:
Emma had accompanied Malenfant, her husband, on a goodwill tour of schools and educational establishments in Johannesburg, South Africa. It had been a remarkably dismal project, a throwback to NASA PR malpractices of old, a trek through mostly prosperous, middle-class-and-up neighbourhoods, with Malenfant running Barco shows from his two missions to the Space Station before rows of polite and largely uncaring teenagers.
In darkened classrooms Emma had watched the brilliance of the students’ smiles, and the ruby-red winking of their earpiece phones like fireflies in the night. Between these children growing up in the fractured, complex, transformed world of 2015, and Reid Malenfant, struggling worker astronaut, all of fifty-five years old and still pursuing Apollo dreams from a boyhood long lost, there was a chasm as wide as the Rift Valley, she thought, and there always would be.
Still, for Emma, it had been a holiday in the African sun – the reason she had prised herself away from her work as financial controller of OnlineArt and she and Malenfant had gotten along reasonably well, for them, even given Malenfant’s usual Earthbound restless moodiness.
But that had been before the word had come through from the Johnson Space Center, headquarters of NASA’s manned spaceflight programme, that Malenfant had been washed out of his next mission, STS-194.
Well, that was the end of it. With a couple of phone calls Malenfant had cut short their stay in Joburg, and begun to can the rest of the tour. He had been able to get out of all of it except for a reception at the US ambassador’s residence in Nairobi, Kenya.
To her further dismay, Malenfant had leaned on Bill London – an old classmate from Annapolis, now a good buddy in the South African Navy – to let him fly them both up to Nairobi from out of a Joburg military airfield in a T-38, a sleek veteran supersonic jet trainer, a mode of transport favoured by the astronauts since the 1960s.
It wasn’t the first time Emma had been taken for a ride in one of those toy planes, and with Malenfant in this mood she knew she could expect to be thrown around the sky. And she shuddered at the thought of how Malenfant in this wounded state was going to behave when he got to Nairobi.
But she had gone along anyhow. Somehow she always did.
So that was how Emma Stoney, forty-five-year-old accountant, had found herself in a gear room getting dressed in a blue flight suit, oxygen mask, oversized boots, helmet, going through the procedures for using her parachute and survival kit and emergency oxygen, struggling to remember the purpose of the dozens of straps, lanyards and D-rings.
Malenfant was ready before she was, of course. He stomped out into the bright morning sunlight towards the waiting T-38. He carried his helmet and his flight plan, and his bald head gleamed in the sun, bronzed and smooth as a piece of machinery itself. But his every motion was redolent with anger and frustration.
Emma had to run to keep up with him, laden down with all her absurd right-stuff gear. By the time she reached the plane she was hot already. She had to be hoisted into her seat by two friendly South African female techs, like an old lady being lifted into the bath. Malenfant was in his cockpit, angrily going through a pre-takeoff checkout.
The T-38 was sleek and brilliant white. Its wings were stubby, and it had two bubble cockpits, one behind the other. The plane was disturbingly small; it seemed barely wide enough to squeeze in a whole person. Emma studied an array of controls and dials and softscreen readouts at whose purpose she could only guess. The venerable T-38 had been upgraded over the years – those shimmering softscreen readouts, for instance – but every surface was scuffed and worn with use, the metal polished smooth where pilots’ gloved hands had rubbed against it, the leather of her seat extensively patched.
The last few minutes of the prep wore away quickly, as one of the ground crew took her through her final instructions: how she should close her canopy bubble, where to fasten a hook to a ring on a parachute, how to change the timing of her parachute opening. She watched the back of Malenfant’s head, his jerky tension as he prepared his plane.
Malenfant taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Emma watched the stick move before her, slaved to Malenfant’s movements. Her oxygen mask smelled of hot rubber, and the roar of the jets was too loud for her to make out anything of Malenfant’s conversation with the ground.
Do you ever think of me, Malenfant?
There was a mighty shove at her back.
Fire:
Stone drops the branches. Sing rolls to the ground. Stone has forgotten her again.
The sun is low. They are close to a thick stand of trees. Fire can smell water.
Fire is tired. His stomach is empty. His hands are sore. ‘Hungry Fire hungry,’ he moans.
Sing, on the ground, looks up at him. She smiles. ‘Hungry Fire,’ she says. He thinks of her feeding him. But she is small and withered. She does not get up to feed him.
Stone walks over the branches he hauled across the savannah, the branches that transported Sing. He kicks them aside. He has forgotten he hauled them here. He bends. His hands seek out a piece of dung on the ground. His tongue tastes it. It is Nutcracker-man dung. The dung is old. The dung crumbles.
Fire is not fearful. There are no Nutcracker-men near here.
Stone’s feet kick aside more branches and twigs. He uncovers a round patch of black ground. Fire’s nose smells ash. Stone hoots. ‘Hah! Fire Fire.’
Fire crouches over the ash. The fire is warm in his hands.
Loud and Dig and others huddle near him. Their hands scrape dry stuff from the floor, dead leaves and dry moss and grass and bits of bark. Their hands pick up rocks, and rub the tinder against the rocks. Their fingers turn the tinder, making it fine and light.
Wood’s legs walk to the forest. She comes back with a bundle of sticks, of wood. That is what she does. That is her name. She piles the sticks on the ground.
The hands of the others push the tinder into the middle of the pile of wood.
Working closely, the people jostle each other. They are hot from the walk. Their bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger, irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives. Their ancestors’ hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Fire waits while they work.
He sees himself.
He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this other’s face. The adults’ huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push him out of the way.
A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.
… The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying