“Grey Earth come,” Julia said again, and her face relaxed from its mock-human smile into the gentle, beatific expression Emma had come to associate with happiness.

Emma held her breath. “And Earth,” she said. “My Earth; our Earth. Can you reach that too?…”

“The Daemons can make one directed transition,” said Nemoto gravely. “And they are going to use it to take us to the universe of the Grey Earth.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of you.”

Emma studied Nemoto. “I sense you’re pissed at me,” she said dryly.

Nemoto glowered. “Emma, these are not humans. They don’t lie, the Hams and the Daemons. It’s all part of the rule-set with which they have managed to achieve such longevity as species. A bargain, once struck, is absolutely rigid.”

“But what’s the big deal? Even if the Daemons manage to bring us back to the Grey Earth universe, they can just send the Hams home. As many as want to go. They can just Map them there.”

Nemoto shook her head. “You aren’t thinking right. The deal was with us, not the Daemons. We have to get them home. Whichever way we can.”

“The lander?”

Nemoto just glared. Then she walked away, muttering, scheming, her whole body tense, her gait rigid, like a machine.

— V —

MANIFOLD

Emma Stoney:

Hello, Malenfant. I want to tell you I’m all right.

I know that’s not what you’d want to hear. The notion that I’m alive, I’m prospering without you, is anathema. Right?

But then you probably aren’t listening at all.

You never did listen to me. If you had you wouldn’t have screwed up our entire relationship, from beginning to end. You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself. Or me.

But I miss you even so.

I guess you know I’m alone here. Even Nemoto has gone, off to a different fate, in some corner of the manifold or other…

Mary:

There were more yesterdays than tomorrows. Her future lay in the black cold ground, where so many had gone before her: Ruth, Joshua, even one of her own children.

And there came a day when they put old Saul in the ground, and Mary found herself the last to remember the old place, the Red Moon where she had been born.

It didn’t matter. There was only today.

Nemoto was not so content, of course.

Even in the deepest times of the Long Night, Nemoto would bustle about the cave, agitated, endlessly making her incomprehensible objects. Few watched her come and go. To the younger folk, Nemoto had been here all their lives, not really a person, and so of no significance.

But Mary remembered the Red Moon, and how its lands had run with Skinnies like Nemoto. Mary understood. Nemoto had brought them here, home to the Grey Earth. Now it was Nemoto who was stranded far from her home.

And so Mary made space for Nemoto. She would protect Nemoto when she fell ill, or injured herself. She would even give her meat to eat, softening the deep frozen meat with her own strong jaws, chewing it as she would to feed a child.

But one day, Nemoto spat out her mouthful of meat on the floor of the cave. She raged and shouted in her jabbering Skinny tongue, and pulled on her furs and gathered her tools, and stamped out of the cave.

She returned staggering and laughing, and she carried a bundle under her arms. It was a bat, dormant, still plump with its winter fat, its leathery wings folded over. Nemoto jabbered about how she would eat well of fresh meat.

Nemoto consumed her bat, giving warm titbits to the children. But when she offered them the bloated, pink-grey internal organs of the bat, mothers pulled the children away.

After that, Nemoto would never be healthy again.

There was a time of twilights, blue-purple shading to pink. And then, at last, the edge of the sun was visible over the horizon: just a splinter of it, but it was the first time it had shown at all for sixty-eight days. There was already a little meltwater to be had. And the first hibernating animals — birds and a few large rats — were beginning to stir, sluggish and vulnerable to hunting in their torpor.

The people capered and threw off their furs.

Nemoto was growing more ill. She suffered severe bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. She lost weight. And her skin grew flaky and sore.

Mary tried to treat the diarrhoea. She brought salt water, brine from the ocean diluted by meltwater. But she did not know how to treat the poisoning which was working its way through Nemoto’s system.

The days lengthened rapidly. The ice on the lakes and rivers melted, causing splintering crashes all over the landscape, like a long, drawn-out explosion. In this brief temperate interval between deadly cold and unbearable heat, life swarmed. The people gathered the fruit and shoots that seemed to burst out of the ground. They hunted the small animals and birds that emerged from their hibernations.

And soon a distant thunder boomed across the land. It was the sound of hoofed feet, the first of the migrant herds. The men and women gathered their weapons, and headed towards the sea.

It turned out to be a herd of giant antelopes: long-legged, the bucks sporting huge unwieldy antlers. The animals were slim and streamlined, and the muscles of their legs and haunches were huge and taut. And they ran like the wind. Since most of this tipped-up world was, at any given moment, either freezing or baking through its long seasons, migrant animals were forced to travel across thousands of miles, spanning continents in their search for food, water and temperate climes.

But predators came too, streamlined hyenas and cats, stalking the vast herds. Those predators included the people, who inhabited a neck of land between two continents, a funnel down which the migrant herds were forced to swarm.

The antelope herd was huge. But it passed so rapidly that it was gone in a couple of days, a great river of flesh that had run its course.

The people ate their meat and sucked rich marrow, and waited for their next provision to come to them, delivered up by the tides of the world.

The air grew hotter yet. Soon the fast-growing grass and herbs were dying back, and the migrant animals and birds had fled, seeking the temperate climes.

The season’s last rain fell. Mary closed her eyes and raised her open mouth to the sky, for she knew it would be a long time before she felt rain on her face again.

The ground became a plain of baked and cracked mud.

The people retreated to their cave. Just as its thick rock walls had sheltered them from the most ferocious cold of the winter, so now the walls gave them coolness.

Nemoto’s relentless illness drove her to her pallet, where she lay with a strip of skin tied across her eyes.

At length there came a day when the sun failed even to brush the horizon at its lowest point. For sixty-eight days it would not rise or set, but would simply complete endless, meaningless circles in the sky, circles that would gradually grow smaller and more elevated.

The Long Day had begun.

Nemoto said she would not go into the ground until she saw a night again. But Nemoto’s skin continued to flake away, as the bat she had woken took its gruesome revenge.

There came a day when the sun rolled along the horizon, its light shimmering through the trees which flourished there.

Mary carried Nemoto to the mouth of the cave — she was light, like a thing of twigs and dried leaves.

Nemoto screwed up her face. “I do not like the light,” she said, her voice a husk. “I can bear the dark. But not the light. I long for tomorrow. For tomorrow I will understand a little more. Do you follow me? I have always wanted to understand. Why I am here. Why there is something, rather than nothing. Why the sky is silent.”