Two more drogue chutes snapped open, in quick succession, and then the main chute. He could see through his window a huge canopy of green leafy material, like a vegetable cloud against the blue sky. The chute looked reassuringly intact, despite its vegetable origins, and the swaying reduced.
Malenfant glimpsed the ground. He could even track his progress, with maps in his sensor pack. He’d come down over the island that used to be called Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa. And now he was drifting inland, to the northwest, toward Lake Victoria. Forest lay like thick green cloth over mountains.
Malenfant felt his couch rise up beneath him. Collapsing sacs pumped compressed carbon dioxide into the base of his seat, preparing to act as a shock absorber on landing. He was pressed up against the curved roof of his pod, with only a small gap between his knees and the roof itself. He felt hemmed in, heavy, hot. Gravity pulled at him, tangibly.
The pod hit the ground.
The parachutes pulled the capsule forward, so Malenfant was tipped up onto his face, and then the pod started to careen across rocky ground, rocking backward and forward, spinning and rattling. His head rattled against his couch headrest.
Finally the pod slithered to a halt.
Malenfant found himself suspended on his side, with daylight pouring through the window behind him. The shock absorber was still pressing him against the roof, so he couldn’t see outside. He lifted his hands to his face. There was blood in his mouth.
The pod wall dilated, releasing a flood of hot sunlit air into the capsule, so rich in oxygen and vegetable scents it made him gasp.
He began the painful process of climbing out.
His pod had come down on a low pebbly beach. The beach ran in a sinuous light-gray line between the darker gray face of a lake and the living green of a banana grove. From the margin of the lake to the highest hilltop, all he could see was contrasting shades of green, spreading like a carpet.
This was the northern coast of Lake Victoria. It was the closest place to that population center, with its odd radioactivity signature, that the Bad Hair Day twins would deliver him.
Once he got his balance, he didn’t have any trouble walking. He didn’t feel dizzy, but oddly disoriented. He could feel his internal organs moving around, seeking a new equilibrium inside him. And he seemed to be immune to sunburn.
But it was odd to be walking around without his pressure suit. Disconcerting. And the sense of openness, of scale, was startling. After all his travels, Malenfant had become an alien, uncomfortable on the surface of his home world.
There was no sign of humanity.
Malenfant made camp in the inert, scorched shell of his pod. He used the bubble helmet of his old NASA pressure suit to collect water from a brook, a little way inland. He ate figs and bananas. He figured if he was stuck here for long he’d try to fish that lake.
The days were short and hot, although there was usually a scattering of cloud over the blue sky. He set up a stick in the sand and watched its shadow shifting and lengthening with the hours. That way he figured out the time of local noon, and he reset his astronaut’s watch. If he was stuck here long enough he might find the equinox and start filling out a calendar.
The sunsets were spectacular. All the submicrometer dust.
The nights were cold, and he would wrap himself up inside the Beta-cloth outer layers of his pressure suit, there on the beach. But he stayed awake long hours, studying a changed sky.
The crescent Moon glowed blue.
The crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light that stretched partway around the dark half of the satellite. There was a thick band of what looked like cloud, piled up over the Moon’s equator. On the darkened surface itself there were lights, strung out in lines: towns, or cities, outlining hidden lunar continents. The Moon had a twin light: a giant mirror that orbited it slowly, shedding light on the Moon’s shadowed hemisphere, which would otherwise languish in the dark for fourteen days at a time, probably long enough for the precious new air to start snowing out.
And in the center of the darkened hemisphere that faced him was a dazzling point glow. The point source was Earthlight, reflecting from the oceans of the Moon.
Even a slim crescent Moon, now, drenched the sky with light, drowning out the stars and planets. The wildlife of Earth made use of the new light: He heard the croak of amphibians, the growl of some kind of cat. No doubt this changed Moon was working on the evolution of species, subtly.
The Moon was beautiful, wonderful, its terraforming one heck of an achievement. But to Malenfant it was as unreachable as before Apollo, a thousand years ago. And, even from here, Malenfant could see Gaijin craft orbiting over the lunar poles.
When the Moon set, taking its brilliant light with it, the full strangeness of the sky emerged.
Huge objects drifted against the blackness, green and gold: Trees, spectral patches of green life; and Gaijin flower-ships, their open ramscoop mouths tangles of silvery threads, like dragonflies. There was a chain of lights clustered around the plain of the ecliptic, sparkles in knots and clusters, almost like streetlights seen from orbit. They were Gaijin asteroid-belt cities.
The shapes of the constellations were mostly unchanged, the stars’ slow drift imperceptible in the mayfly beat he’d been away. A bright young star had come to life in Cassiopeia, turning that distinctive W shape into a zig zag. But many more stars had dimmed, to redness or even lurid green — or they were missing altogether, masked by life. This was the mark of the colonization wave, pulsing along the Galaxy’s star lanes, an engineered consumption of system after system, heading this way.
And in one part of the sky, loosely centered on the grand old constellation of Orion, stars were flickering, burning, sputtering to darkness. It was evidence of purposeful activity spread across many light-years, and it made him shiver. Perhaps it was the war he had come to fear, breaking over the Solar System.
In the deepest dark of the nights he made out a huge, beautiful comet, sprawled across the zenith. Even with his naked eye he could see the bright spark of its nucleus, a tail that swept, feathery, curved, across the dome of the sky.
Comets came from the Oort cloud. He wondered if there was any connection between this shining visitor, flying through the heart of the inner Solar System, and the sparkling lights he saw around Orion, the remote disturbance there.
One morning he crawled out of his pod, buck naked.
There was a man standing there, staring at him.
Malenfant yelped and clamped his hands over his testicles.
The man — no more than a boy, probably — was tall, more than two meters high. His skin was copper brown, covered by a pale golden hair so thick it was almost like fur, and his eyes were blue. He had muscles like an athlete’s. He was wearing some kind of breechcloth made of a coarse white material. He was carrying a sack. There was a belt around his waist, of some kind of leather. It contained a variety of tools, all of them stone, bone, or wood: round axes, cleavers, scrapers, a hammer stone.
His neck was thick, like a weightlifter’s. He had a long low skull, with some kind of bony crest behind. And he had bony eyebrows, a sloping forehead under that blond hair. He had a big projecting jaw — no chin — strong-looking teeth, a heavy browridge shielding his eyes, a flat apelike nose. He didn’t, Malenfant thought, look quite human. But he was beautiful for all that, his gaze on Malenfant direct and untroubled.
He grinned at Malenfant and emptied out the sack over the sand. It contained bananas, sweet potatoes, and eggs. “Eat food hungry eat food,” he said. His voice was high and indistinct, the consonants blurred.