Testing her, he said, “I have a functioning pressure suit.”

She scarcely moved, as if trying to mask her reaction to that. She was like a statue, some greater Moon-rock Buddha herself.

There is, he realized, something she isn’t telling me — something significant.

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.