Origin. Stephen Baxter

crossed Sally’s face. ‘I know what I saw.’

      The kid was calm now; he was making piles of leaves and knocking them down again. Emma saw Sally take deep breaths.

      At least Emma was married to an astronaut; at least she had had her head stuffed full of outré concepts, of other worlds and different gravities; at least she was used to the concept that there might be other places, other worlds, that Earth wasn’t a flat, infinite, unchanging stage … To this woman and her kid, though, none of that applied; they had no grounding in weirdness, and all of this must seem unutterably bewildering.

      And then there was the small matter of Sally’s husband.

      Emma was no psychologist. She did not kid herself that she understood Sally’s reaction here. But she sensed this was the calm before the storm that must surely break.

      She got to her feet. Be practical, Emma. She unwrapped her parachute silk and started draping it over the trees, above Sally. Soon the secondary forest-canopy raindrops pattered heavily on the canvas, and the light was made more diffuse, if a little gloomier.

      As she worked she said hesitantly, ‘My name is Emma. Emma Stoney. And you –’

      ‘I’m Sally Mayer. My husband is Greg.’ (Is?) ‘I guess you’ve met Maxie. We’re from Boston.’

      ‘Maxie sounds like a miniature JFK.’

      ‘Yes …’ Sally sat on the ground, rubbing her injured arm. Emma supposed she was in her early thirties. Her brunette hair was cut short and neat, and she wasn’t as overweight as she looked in her unflattering safari suit. ‘We were only having a joy ride. Over the Rift Valley. Greg works in software research. Formal methodologies. He had a poster paper to present at a conference in Joburg… Where are we, do you think?’

      ‘I don’t know any more than you do. I’m sorry.’

      Sally’s smile was cold, as if Emma had said something foolish. ‘Well, it sure isn’t your fault. What do you think we ought to do?’

      Stay alive. ‘Keep warm. Keep out of trouble.’

      ‘Do you think they know we are missing yet?’

      What ‘they’? ‘That wheel in the sky was pretty big news. Whatever happened to us probably made every news site on the planet.’

      Here came Maxie, kicking at leaves moodily, absorbed in his own agenda, like every kid who wasn’t scared out of his wits. ‘I’m hungry.’

      Emma squeezed his shoulder. ‘Me too.’ She started to rummage through the roomy pockets of her flight suit, seeing what else the South African air force had thought to provide.

      She found a packet of dried foods, sealed in a foil tray. She laid out the colourful little envelopes on the ground. There was coffee and dried milk, dried meal, flour, suet, sugar, and high-calorie stuff like chocolate powder, even dehydrated ice cream.

      Sally and Emma munched on trail mix, muesli and dried fruits. Sally insisted Maxie eat a couple of digestive biscuits before he gobbled up the handful of boiled sweets he had spotted immediately.

      Emma kept back one of the sweets for herself, however. She sucked the cherry-flavour sweet until the last sliver of it dissolved on her tongue. Anything to get rid of the lingering taste of that damn caterpillar.

      Caterpillar, for God’s sake. Her resentful anger flared. She felt like throwing away the petty scraps of supplies, rampaging out to the hominids, demanding attention. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t want anything to do with this. She didn’t want any responsibility for this damaged woman and her wretched kid – and she didn’t want her head cluttered up with the memories of what had become of the woman’s husband.

      But nobody was asking what she wanted. And now the food was finished, and the others were staring at her, as if they expected her to supply them.

      If not you, Emma, who else?

      Emma took the foil box and went looking for water.

      She found a stream a few minutes’ deeper into the forest. She clambered down into a shallow gully and scooped up muddy water. She sniffed at it doubtfully. It was from a stream of running water, so not stagnant. But it was covered with scummy algae, and plenty of green things grew in it. Was that good or bad?

      She carried back as much water as she could to their improvised campsite, where Sally and Maxie were waiting. She set the water down and started going through her pockets again.

      Soon she found what she wanted. It was a small tin, about the size of the tobacco tins her grandfather used to give her to save her coins and stamps. Inside a lot of gear was crammed tight; Maxie watched wonderingly as she pulled it all out. There were safety pins, wire, fish hooks and line, matches, a sewing kit, tablets, a wire saw, even a teeny-tiny button compass. And there was a little canister of dark crystals that turned out to be potassium permanganate.

      Following the instructions on the can – to her shame she had to use her knife’s lens to read them – she dropped crystals into the water until it turned a pale red.

      Maxie turned up his nose, until his mother convinced him the funny red water was a kind of cola.

      Habits from ancient camping trips came back to Emma now. For instance, you weren’t supposed to lose anything. So she carefully packed all her gear back into its tobacco tin, and put it in an inside pocket she was able to zip up. She took a bit of parachute cord and tied her Swiss Army knife around her neck, and tucked it inside her flight suit, and zipped that up too.

      And while she was fiddling with her toys, Sally began shuddering.

      ‘Greg. My husband. Oh my God. They killed him. They just crushed his skull. The ape-men. Just like that. I saw them do it. It’s true, isn’t it?’

      Emma put down her bits of kit with reluctance.

      ‘Isn’t it strange?’ Sally murmured. ‘Greg isn’t here. But I never thought to ask why he isn’t here. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I knew … Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’

      ‘No,’ Emma said, as soothing as she could manage. ‘Of course not. It’s very hard, a very hard thing to take –’

      And then Sally just fell apart, as Emma had known, inevitably, she must. The three of them huddled together, in the rain, as Sally wept.

      It was dark before Sally was cried out. Maxie was already asleep, his little warm form huddled between their two bodies.

      The rain had stopped. Emma pulled down her rough canopy, and wrapped it around them.

      Now Sally wanted to talk, whispering in the dark.

      She talked of her holiday-of-a-lifetime in Africa, and how Maxie was doing at nursery school, another child, a daughter, at home, and her career and Greg’s, and how they had been considering a third child or perhaps opting for a frozen-embryo deferred pregnancy, pending a time when they might be less busy.

      And Emma told her about her life, her career, about Malenfant. She tried to find the gentlest, most undemanding stories she could think of.

      Like the one about their engagement, at the end of Malenfant’s junior year as a midshipman at the Naval Academy. He had received his class ring, and at the strange and formal Ring Dance she had worn his ring around her neck, while he carried her miniature version in his pocket. And then at the climax of the evening the couples took their turns to go to the centre of the dance floor and climb up under a giant replica of the class ring. Filled with youth and love and hope, they dipped their rings in a bowl of water from the seven seas, and exchanged the rings, and made their vows to each other …

      Oh, Malenfant, where are you now?

      Eventually they slept: the three of them, brought together by chance, lost in this strange quasi-Africa,