Rain falls. His ears hear it tapping on the ground. His eyes see the drops fall towards his face. They are fat and slow. Some of them fall on his face.

Water runs in his eyes. It stings. He sits up.

Fire is sitting on the ground. He is wet. His eyes hurt. His burned hands hurt.

He stands up. His legs walk him towards the trees.

People walk, run, stumble over muddy ground, adults and children. They move in silence, in isolation. Nobody is calling, nobody helping. They are cold and they hurt. They have each forgotten the other people, all save the mothers with their babies with no names. The mothers’ arms carry the infants, sheltering them.

Fire reaches the trees.

The wind changes. His nose smells ash.

He remembers the fire. His legs run back.

The fire is out, drowned by the rain. The back of Fire’s head hurts in anticipation of Stone’s punishing axe.

Sing is calling. She is lying on a bower. The bower is falling apart, the leaves damp and shrivelled.

Loud is walking back to Sing.

Sing screams. Fire spins and crouches.

There is a Mouth. It is bright blue. The Mouth is skimming over the shining grass. The Mouth is approaching Fire, gaping wide.

Cats have mouths. A cat’s mouth will take a person’s head. This Mouth would take a whole person, standing straight. It is coming towards him, this Mouth with no body, this huge Mouth, widening.

It makes no noise. The rain hisses on the grass.

Fire screams. Fire’s legs carry him off into the forest.

Still the Mouth comes. It towers into the sky.

Sing is at its base. Her arms push at the bower. Her legs can’t stand up. She screams again.

Loud runs. His hands are throwing dirt at the Mouth.

The Mouth scoops him up.

There is a flash of light. Fire can see nothing but blue.

Loud screams.

Emma Stoney:

‘Malenfant – you see it too, right?’

He laughed. ‘It ain’t no scratch in your contacts, Emma.’ He seemed to be testing the controls. Experimentally he veered away to the right. The ride got a lot more rocky.

The blue circle stayed right where it was, hanging in the African sky. No optical effect, then. This was real, as real as this plane. But it hung in the air without any apparent means of support. And still she had no real sense of its scale.

But now she saw a contrail scraped across the air before the wheel, a tiny silver moth flying across its diameter. The moth was a plane, as least as big as their own.

‘Damn thing must be a half-mile across,’ Malenfant growled. ‘A half-mile across, and hovering in the air eight miles high –’

‘How appropriate.’

‘My God, it’s the real thing,’ Malenfant said. ‘The UFO-nauts must be going crazy.’ She heard the grin in his voice. ‘Everything will be different now.’

Now she made out more planes drawn up from the dusty ground below, passing before the artefact – if artefact it was. One of them looked like a fragile private jet, a Lear maybe, surely climbing well beyond its approved altitude.

Malenfant continued his turn. The artefact slid out of sight.

Dusty land wheeled beneath her. She was high above a gorge, cut deeply into a baked plain, perhaps thirty or forty miles long. Perhaps it was Olduvai itself, the miraculous gorge that cut through million-year strata of human history, the gorge that had yielded the relics of one ancient hominid form after another to the archaeologists’ patient inspection.

How strange, she thought. Why here? If this wheel in the sky really is what it appears to be, an extraordinary alien artefact, if this is a first contact of a bewilderingly unexpected type (and what else could it be?) then why here, high above the cradle of mankind itself? Why should this gouge into humanity’s deepest past collide with this most unimaginable of futures?

The plane dropped abruptly. For a heartbeat Emma was weightless. Then the plane slammed into the bottom of an air pocket and she was shoved hard into her seat.

‘Sorry,’ Malenfant muttered. ‘The turbulence is getting worse.’ The slaved controls worked before her. The plane soared and banked.

She suddenly wished she was on the ground, perhaps holed up in her well-equipped hotel room back in Joburg. The world must be going crazy over this. She would have every softscreen in the room turned to the coverage, filling her ears and eyes with a babble of instant commentary. Here, in this bubble of Plexiglas, she felt cut off.

But this is the real experience, she thought. I am here by the sheerest chance, at the moment when this vision appeared in the sky like the Virgin Mary over Lourdes, and yet I pine for my online womb. Well, I’m a woman of my time.

The artefact settled into place before Emma once more, vast, enigmatic, slowly approaching. Planes criss-crossed before it, puny. Emma spotted that small private jet, lumbering through the air so much more slowly than the military vehicles around it. She wondered if anybody had tried to make contact with the wheel yet – or if it had been fired on.

‘Holy shit,’ said Malenfant. ‘Do you see that?’

‘What?’

He lifted his arm and pointed; she could see the gesture through the Plexiglas blisters that encased them. ‘There. Near the bottom of the ring.’

It looked like a very fine dark rain falling out of the ring, like a hail of iron filings.

Malenfant lifted small binoculars. ‘People,’ he said bluntly. He lowered the binoculars. ‘Tall, skinny, naked people.’

She couldn’t integrate the information. People – thrust naked into the air eight miles high, to fall, presumably, all the way to the welcoming gorge of bones… Why? Where were they from?

‘Can they be saved?’

Malenfant just laughed.

The plane buffeted again. As they approached the wheel the turbulence was growing stronger. It seemed to Emma that the air at the centre of the ring was significantly disturbed; she made out concentric streaks of mist and dust there, almost like a sideways-on storm, neatly framed by the wheel’s electric blue frame.

And now that lumbering business-type jet reached dead centre of the artefact. It twisted once, twice, then crumpled like a paper cup in an angry fist. Glittering fragments began to hail into the ring.

It was over in seconds. There hadn’t even been an explosion.

Fire:

Wind gusts. Lightning flashes.

There is no Loud.

People come spewing out of the Mouth. They fall to the grass.

The rain falls steadily on the grass, hissing.

Emma Stoney:

‘Like it got sucked in,’ Malenfant said with grim fascination. ‘Maybe the wheel is a teleporter, drawing out our atmosphere.’ The plane juddered again, and she could see him wrestling with the stick. ‘Whatever it is it’s making a mess of the air flow.’

She could see the other planes, presumably military jets, pulling back to more cautious orbits. But the T-38 kept right on, battering its way into increasingly disturbed air. Malenfant’s shoulders jerked as they hauled at the recalcitrant controls.

‘Malenfant, what are you doing?’

‘We can handle this. We can get a lot closer yet. Those African guys are half-trained sissies –’

The plane hit another pocket. They fell fifty or a hundred feet before slamming into a floor that felt hard as concrete.

Emma could taste blood in her mouth. ‘Malenfant!’

‘Did you bring your Kodak? Come on, Emma. What’s life for? This is history.’

No, she thought. This is your wash-out. That’s why you are risking your life, and mine, so recklessly.

The artefact loomed larger in the roiling sky ahead of her, so large now that she couldn’t see its full circle for the body of the plane. Those iron-filing people continued to rain from the base of the disc, some of them twisting as they fell.

‘Makes you think,’ Malenfant said. ‘I spend my life struggling to get into space. And on the very day I get washed out of the programme, the very same day, space comes to me. Wherever the hell this thing comes from, whatever mother ship orbiting fucking Neptune, you can bet there’s going to be a clamour to get out there. Those NASA assholes must be jumping up and down; it’s their best day since Neil and Buzz. At last we’ve got someplace to go – but whoever they send it isn’t going to be me. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? If Mohammed can’t get to the mountain …’

She closed her hand on the stick before her, letting it pull her passively to and fro. What if she grabbed the stick hard, yanked it to left or right? Could she take over the plane? And then what? ‘Malenfant, I’m scared.’

‘Of the UFO?’

‘No. Of you.’

‘Just a little closer,’ he said, his voice a thin crackle over the intercom. ‘I won’t let you come to any harm, Emma.’

Suddenly she screamed.‘… Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!’

Reid Malenfant:

It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.

It was a day of strange lights in the sky. But it was a sky that was forever barred to him.

The plane was flung sideways.

It was like a barrel roll. Suddenly his head was jammed into his shoulders and his vision tunnelled, worse than any eyeballs-back launch he had ever endured – and harder, much harder, than he would have wanted to put Emma through.

His systems went dead: softscreens, the clunky old dials, even the hiss of the comms, everything. He wrestled with the stick, but got no response; the plane was just falling through an angry sky, helpless as an autumn leaf.

The rate of roll increased, and the Gs just piled on. He knew he was already close to blacking out; perhaps Emma had succumbed already, and soon after that the damn plane was going to break up.

With difficulty he readied the ejection controls. ‘Emma! Remember the drill!’ But she couldn’t hear, of course.

… Just for a second, the panels flickered back to life. He felt the stick jerk, the controls bite.

It was a chance to regain control.

He didn’t take it.

Then the moment was gone, and he was committed.

He felt exuberant, almost exhilarated, like the feeling when the solid boosters cut in during a Shuttle launch, like he was on a roller-coaster ride he couldn’t get off.

But the plane plummeted on towards the sky wheel, rolling, creaking. The transient mood passed, and fear clamped down on his guts once more.

He bent his head, found the ejection handle, pulled it. The plane shuddered as Emma’s canopy was blown away, then gave another kick as her seat hurled her clear.

And now his own canopy disappeared. The wind slammed at him, Earth and sky wheeling around, and all of it was suddenly, horribly real.

He felt a punch in the back. He was hurled upwards like a toy and sent tumbling in the bright air, just like one of the strange iron-filing people, shocked by the sudden silence.

Pain bit savagely at his right arm. He saw that his flight-suit sleeve and a great swathe of skin had been sheared away, leaving bloody flesh. Must have snagged it on the rim of the cockpit on the way out.

Something was flopping in the air before him. It was his seat. He still had hold of the ejection handle, connected to the seat by a cable.

He knew he had to let go of the handle, or else it might foul his ’chute. Yet he couldn’t. The seat was an island in this huge sky; without it he would be alone. It made no sense, but there it was.

At last, apparently without his volition, his hand loosened. The handle was jerked out of his grip, painfully hard.

Something huge grabbed his back, knocking all the air out of him again. Then he was dangling. He looked up and saw his ’chute open reassuringly above him, a distant roof of fully blossomed orange and white silk.

But the thin air buffeted him, and he was swaying alarmingly, a human pendulum, and at the bottom of each swing G forces hauled on his entrails. He was having trouble breathing; his chest laboured. He pulled a green toggle to release his emergency oxygen.

The artefact hung above him, receding as he fell.

He had been flung west of it, he saw now, and it was closing up to a perfect oval, like a schoolroom demonstration of a planetary orbit. There was no sign of the other planes. Even the T-38 seemed to have vanished completely, save for a few drifting bits of light wreckage, a glimmer that must have been a shard of a Plexiglas canopy.

And he saw another ’chute. Half open. Hanging before the closing maw of the artefact like a speck of food before the mouth of some vast fish.

Emma, of course: she had ejected a half-second before Malenfant, so that she had found herself that much closer to the artefact than he had been.

And now she was being drawn in by the buffeting air currents.

He screamed, ‘Emma!’ He twisted and wriggled, but there was nothing he could do.

Her ’chute fell into the portal. There was a flash of electric-blue light. And she was gone.

‘Emma! Emma!’

… Something fell past him, not ten yards away. It was a man: tall and lithe like a basketball player, stark naked. He was black, and under tight curls, his skull was as flat as a board. His mouth was working, gasping like a fish’s. His gaze locked with Malenfant’s, just for a heartbeat. Malenfant read astonishment beyond shock.

Then the man was gone, on his way to his own destiny in the ancient lands beneath.

A new barrage of turbulent air slammed into Malenfant. He rocked viciously. Nursing his damaged arm he fought the ’chute, fought to keep it stable fought for his life, fought for the chance to live through this day, to find Emma.

As he spun, he glimpsed that new Red Moon, a baleful eye gazing down on his tiny struggles.

Fire:

The Mouth is gone.

The new people are nearby. The smallest is a child. They are all yelling. Their skin is bright, yellow-brown and blue. They are trying to stand up, but they stumble backwards.

Fire’s legs walk forward. He walks over the soaked fireplace. The ashes are still hot. He yelps and his feet lift up, off the ashes.

Sing is nearby, on her branches, weeping.

Fire’s eyes see Dig. They can’t see Loud. Fire calls out. ‘Loud, Loud, Fire!’ But Loud is gone.

Shrugging, the rain running down his back, he turns away. Fire will never think of his brother again.

A new person is coming towards him. This stranger has blue and brown skin on his body. Fire can’t see his member. It is a woman. But he can’t see breasts. It is a man.

The new person holds out empty hands. ‘Please, can you help us? Do you know what happened to us? What place is this?’

Fire hears: ‘Help. What. Us. What.’ The voice is deep. It is a man.

Stone is standing beside Fire. ‘Nutcracker-man,’ he says softly.

‘No,’ says Fire.

‘Elf-man.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’ The new person steps forward. ‘I have a wife and child. Do you speak English? My wife is hurt. We need shelter. Is there a road near here, a phone we could use –’

Stone’s axe slams into the top of the new person’s head. The head cracks open. Grey and red stuff splashes out.

The new person’s eyes look at Fire. He shudders. He falls backwards.

Stone grunts. ‘Nutcracker-man.’ Stone slices off the new person’s cheek and crams it into his mouth.

Fire hoots at the kill. Nutcracker-folk fight hard. This kill was easy.

Other people’s legs bring them running from the trees to join Stone at his feast. They have forgotten the rain. They get wet again. But they are all drawn by the scent of the fresh meat.

The new person’s skin yields easily to Stone’s axe. It comes off in a sheet. Fire’s finger touches the sloughed skin. It is blue and brown, thick and dense. Fire is confused. It is skin. It is not skin,

The flesh under the strange skin is white. Stone’s axe cuts into it easily. The axe butchers the body rapidly and expertly, an unthinking skill honed across a million years.

The other new people are screaming.

Fire had forgotten them. He straightens up. He has a chunk of flesh in his mouth. His teeth gnaw at it, while his hands pull on it.

The new people’s legs are trying to run away. But the new people fall easily, as if they are weak or sick.

Grass and Cold catch the new people. They push them to Stone. One of the new people is bleeding from her head and staggering. Its arms are clutching the small one. When it screams its voice is high. It is a woman.

The other new person has no small one. It has blue skin all over its body. ‘We don’t mean you any harm. Please. My name is Emma Stoney.’ Its voice is high. It is a woman.

Shoot’s hand grabs the hair of this one, pulls her head back.

The new woman’s elbow rams into Shoot’s belly. ‘Get your hands off of me!’ Shoot doubles over, gasping.

The men laugh at the women fighting.

The woman with the child speaks to Stone. ‘Please. We’re American citizens. My name is Sally Mayer. I – my husband… I know you can speak English. We heard you. Look, we can pay. American dollars.’ She holds out something green. Handfuls of leaves. Not leaves. Her arm is bleeding, he sees.

I. You. That is what Fire hears.

The woman has fallen silent. Her eyes are staring at the top of Stone’s head. Her mouth is open.

The top of the woman’s head is swollen.

Fire makes his hand run over his own brow. He feels thick eye ridges. He feels a sloping brow. He feels the small flat crown behind his brow. His fingers find a fly trapped in his greasy hair. He pulls it out. He pops it into his mouth.

Stone studies the new woman. Stone’s fingers squeeze the woman’s dug. It is large and soft, under its skin of green and brown. The woman yelps and backs away. The child, eyes wide, cringes from Stone’s bloody hand.

Fire laughs. Stone will mount the woman. Stone will eat the woman.

‘No.’

The other new woman steps forward. Her hands pull the other woman behind her. ‘We are like you. Look! We are people. We are not meat.’ She points to the child.

The child has no hair on his face. The child has wide round eyes. The child has a nose.

Nutcracker-folk have hair on their faces. Nutcracker-folk have no noses. Nutcracker-folk have nostrils flat against their faces.

Running-folk have no hair on their faces. They have round eyes. They have noses.

Stone’s axe rises.

Fire takes a step forward. He is afraid of Stone and his axe. But he makes his hand grab Stone’s arm.

‘People,’ Fire says.

‘Yes.’ The new woman nods. ‘Yes, that’s right. We’re people.’

Slowly, Stone’s arm lowers.

The smell of meat is strong. One by one the people drift away from the new people, and cluster around the corpse.

Fire is left alone, watching the new people.

The fat new person is shaking, as if cold. Now she falls to the ground. The other puts the child down, and cradles the fat one’s head on her lap.

The other’s face lifts up to Fire. ‘My name is Emma. Em-ma. Do you understand?’

Fire carries the fire. That is his name. That is what he does.

Emma is her name. Emma is what she does. He doesn’t know what Em-ma is.

He says, ‘Em-ma.’

‘Emma. Yes. Good. Please – will you help us? “We need water. Do you have any water?’

His eye spots something. Something moves on a branch on the ground nearby. He has forgotten that he used these branches to make a bower.

His hand whips out and grabs. His hand opens, revealing a caterpillar, fat and juicy. He did not have to think about catching it. It is just here. He pops it in his mouth.

‘Please.’

He looks down at the new people. Again he had forgotten they were there. ‘Em-ma.’ The caterpillar wriggles on his tongue. His hand pulls it out of his mouth. He remembers how he caught it, a sharp shard of recent memory.

He makes his hand hold out the caterpillar.

Emma’s eyes stare at it. It is wet from his spit. Her hand reaches out and takes it.

The caterpillar is in her mouth. She chews. He hears it crunch. She swallows, hard. ‘Good. Thank you.’

Fire’s nose can smell meat more strongly now. Stone’s axe has cracked the rib cage. Whatever is in the new person’s belly may be good to eat.

The other new woman wakes up. Her eyes look at the corpse, at what the people are doing there. She screams. Emma’s hand clamps over her mouth. The woman struggles.

The people crowd close around the corpse. Fire joins them.

He has forgotten the new people.