Valentina came up to him. She was in her suit already, with the soft helmet closed over. She was holding out another suit; it looked like a flayed skin.
He took it gratefully. She showed him how to step inside it, how to seal up the seams with a fingernail. It was too short and wide for him, but it seemed to stretch.
It stank: of urine, feces, an ancient, milklike smell. It smelled like Esau, like an old Neandertal geezer.
Somebody had died in this suit.
When he realized that he almost lost his breakfast and tried to pull the suit off his flesh. But Valentina slapped him, harder than she’d done for a long time. There was no mistaking the commands in her peremptory signs. Put it on. Now.
This, he thought, is not the Manned Spaceflight Operations Building, Cape Canaveral. Things are different here. Accept it, if you want to keep breathing.
He pulled on the suit and sealed it up. Then he stood there trying not to throw up inside the suit’s claustrophobic stink, as the Neandertals dismantled their camp and the light of Jupiter was revealed.
Morning on Io:
Auroras flapped overhead, huge writhing sheets of light.
The Sun was a shrunken disc, low down, brighter than any star in the sky. It cast long, point-source shadows over the burnt-pizza terrain. In the sky, Jupiter hung above the horizon, just where it had before, a fat pink stripy-painted ball. But now the phase was different; Jupiter was a crescent, the terminator blurred by layers of atmosphere, and the dark side was a chunk out of the starry background, a slab of night sparking with the crackles of electrical storms bigger than Earth, like giant flashbulbs exploding inside pink clouds.
In a red-green auroral glow, the Neandertals moved about, packing up their teepee and other gear, loading it all onto big sledlike vehicles, signing to each other busily. Malenfant picked up his only possession, the remnant of his NASA suit, and bundled it up on the back of a sled.
When they were loaded, the adult Neandertals started strapping themselves into traces at the front of the sled, simple harnesses made of the ubiquitous translucent plastic. Soon everybody was saddled up except the smallest children, who would ride on the top of the loaded sleds.
Nobody told Malenfant what to do. He looked for Valentina and made sure he got into a slot alongside her. She helped him fit a harness around his body; it tightened with simple buckles.
And then they started hauling.
The Neandertals just leaned into the traces, like so many squat pack horses. And by the light of Jupiter, they began to drag the sleds across the crusty Io surface. It turned out that Malenfant’s sled was a little harder to move than the others, and his team had to strain harder, snapping signs at each other, until the runners came free of the clinging rock with a jerk.
Valentina’s gait, when walking, was… different. She seemed to lean forward as if her center of gravity was somewhere over her hip joints, instead of farther back like Malenfant’s. And when she walked her whole weight seemed to pound down, with every stride, on her hips. It was clumsy, almost apelike, the least human of her features, as far as Malenfant could see.
Valentina wasn’t built for walking long distances, like Malenfant was. Maybe the Neandertals had evolved to be sedentary.
Malenfant did his best to pull with the rest. It wasn’t clear to him why he was being kept alive, except as some vaguely altruistic impulse of Valentina’s. But he sure wanted to be seen tobe working for his supper. So he added his feeble Homo Sap strength to the Neandertals’.
Thus, hominids from Earth toiled across the face of Io.
The ground was mostly just rock: silicates, big lumps of it under his feet, peppered by bubbles. It was basalt, volcanic rock pumped out of Io’s interior. Sulphur lay in great yellow sheets over the rock, crunching under his feet. Io was a rocky world, not an ice ball like most of the other outer-system moons; sized midway between Earth’s Moon and Mars, Io was a terrestrial planet, lost out here in Jupiter orbit.
Jupiter changed constantly, a compelling, awesome sight.
Io was, he recalled, tidally locked to its giant parent; it kept the same face to Jupiter the whole time. But the moon skated around Jupiter’s waist every forty-two hours, and so the gas giant went through its whole cycle of phases in less than two days. And Jupiter, meanwhile, rotated on its own axis every ten hours or so. He didn’t have to watch that huge face for long to see the cloud decks turning, those turbulent bands and chains of little white globules chasing each other around the stripy bands. But there was no Big Red Spot, he was disappointed to find; evidently that centuries-long storm had blown itself out some time in the millennium he’d been away.
Jupiter had a powerful magnetosphere, a radiation belt of electrons and ions locked to the giant planet, within which Io circled. Jupiter’s fast rotation made that magnetosphere whip over Io like an invisible storm. That was the cause of the huge auroras that flapped constantly over his head, energetic particles battering at the thin air of this forsaken moon, ripping away a ton of atmospheric material every second. Malenfant shivered, naked inside his old man’s suit, as he thought of that thin, fast sleet of energetic particles slamming down from the sky, pounding at his flesh.
But the Neandertals weren’t concerned. They pulled for hours, and the tracks of the three sleds arrowed across the flat landscape, straight toward Jupiter. Malenfant — a hundred years old and still recovering from radiation exposure — could do little but lean into the traces and let the rest carry him along.
He’d built up an impression that the Neandertals worked hard. They used their big gorilla bodies where Homo Sap would have used tools. Their bodies were under intense physical stress, the whole time. Malenfant observed that Esau’s body, for example, bore a lot of old injuries: scars and badly set bones. It was as if they climbed a mountain or ran a marathon every day of their lives.
But the Neandertals accepted this, an occupational hazard.
The compensation was the very physical nature of their lives. They lived immersed in their world. They were vigorous, intensely alive. By comparison, Malenfant, as the only available sample of the species Homo Sap, felt weak, vague, as if he were blundering about in a mist. He found he envied them.
The Neandertals sang as they hauled — sign-sang, that is. It was a song about the Face of Kintu. Kintu was one of the few words they vocalized, and it was, Malenfant recalled, the name of a Ugandan god, the grandfather of Kimera. The song was about Kintu blowing himself up with breath until stars and worlds popped out over his body, like volcanoes on Io. Kintu was God and the universe for the Neandertals, and the Face of Kintu — it took him a while to realize — was their name for Io itself.
The signing was functional for the Neandertals, for their magic suits had no radios. But it was more than that. It was beautiful when you got to follow it a little, a mix of dance and speech.
He had to be shown how to use his magic suit’s sanitary facilities. Basically the trick was just to let go. The suit’s surface absorbed the waste, liquid and solid; it simply disappeared into that translucent wall, as if dissolving. Most of it anyhow. On the move, Malenfant had no chance to open his magic suit, this shell he had to share with the stink of a dead old man and now of his own waste. The Neandertals clearly weren’t hung up on personal hygiene. After a couple of days, however, Malenfant was longing for a shower.
After a time, snow fell around the Neandertals, fine little blue crystals that settled over Malenfant’s head and shoulders, crisping the basaltic ground.