Origin. Stephen Baxter

stares at the leaves. Water runs down his face.

      Fire pokes a leaf into his small, hot mouth. Maxie’s mouth tries to spit it out. Fire pushes it back. Maxie’s mouth chews the leaf. Fire holds his jaw so the mouth can’t chew.

      Maxie swallows the leaf, and wails.

      Fire makes him swallow another. And another.

      Somebody is shouting. ‘Meat! Meat!’

      Fire’s head snaps around. The voice is coming from upwind. Now his nose can smell blood.

      Something big has died.

      His legs jog that way.

      He finds Stone and Blue and Dig and Grass and others. They are squatting in the dirt. They hold axes in their hands.

      The meat is an antelope. It is lying on the ground.

      Killing birds are tearing at the carcass.

      The killing birds tower over the people. They have long gnarled legs, and stubby useless wings, and heads the size of Fire’s thigh. The heads of the birds dig into the belly and joints of the antelope, pushing right inside the carcass.

      The people wait, watching the birds.

      A pack of hyenas circles, warily watching the birds and the people. And there are Elf-folk. They sit at the edge of the forest, picking at their black-brown hair. The bands of scavengers are set out in a broad circle around the carcass, well away from the birds, held in place by a geometry of hunger and wariness. The Running-folk are scavengers among the others – not the weakest, not the strongest, not especially feared. The people wait their turn with the others, waiting for the birds to finish, knowing their place.

      One by one the birds strut away. Their heads jerk this way and that, dipping. Their eyes are yellow. They are looking for more antelopes to kill.

      The hyenas are first to get to the corpse. Their faces lunge into its ripped-open rib cage. The hyenas start to fight with one another, forgetting the killing birds, forgetting the people.

      Blue and Stone and Fire hurl bits of rock.

      The dogs back away. Their muzzles are bloody red, their eyes glaring. Their mouths want the meat. But their bodies fear the stones and sticks of the people.

      The people fall on the carcass.

      Stone’s axe, held between thumb and forefinger, slices through the antelope’s thick hide. The axe rolls to bring more of its edge into play. It slices meat neatly from the bones. The birds have beaks to rip meat. The hyenas and cats have teeth. The people have axes. The people work without speaking, not truly cooperating.

      Fire’s hands cram bits of meat into his mouth, hot and raw. Fire thinks of the other people by the fire, the women and their infants and children with no name. He tells his mouth it must not eat all the meat. He holds great slabs of it in his hands, slippery and bloody.

      Fire’s ears hear a hollering. His head snaps around.

      More Elf-folk are boiling out of the forest fringe, hooting, hungry. They have rocks and stones and axes in their hands. They run on their legs like people. But their legs are shorter than a person’s, and they have big strong arms, longer and stronger than a person’s.

      Stone growls. His mouth bloody, he raises his axe at the Elf-folk.

      The Elf-folk show their teeth. They hoot and screech.

      A bat swoops from the sky. It is a hunter. Its wings are broad and flap slowly. The people scatter, fearing talons and beak.

      The bat falls on the Elf-folk. It caws. It rises into the air. It has its talons dug into the scalp of an Elf-woman. She wriggles and cries, dugs swinging.

      One Elf-man throws a rock at the bat. It misses. The others just watch. She is gone, in an instant, her life over.

      Suddenly Stone charges forward at the Elf-folk. Blue follows. Dig follows.

      The Elf-folk scamper away, into the safety of their forest.

      Stone hoots his triumph.

      The people return to the antelope. The hyenas have approached again, and bats have flown down, digging into the entrails of the antelope. The people hurl stones and shout. The people’s hands take meat and bones from the carcass, until their hands are full. The people’s mouths dig into the carcass and bite away final chunks of meat.

      Other scavengers move in. Soon there will be nothing left of the antelope but scattered, crushed, chewed bones, over which insects will crawl.

      The children fall on the meat. Their mouths snap and their hands punch and scratch as they fight over the meat.

      Fire approaches Dig. He holds out meat. Her hands grab it. She throws it away. A child with no name falls on the discarded scrap.

      Dig laughs. She turns her back on Fire.

      Emma comes to Fire. She smiles, seeing the meat. His belly wants to keep all the meat, but he makes his hands give her some.

      Emma takes it to the fire. There are rocks in the fire. Emma beats the meat flat and puts it on the hot rocks. She peels it off the rocks and carries it to Sally and Maxie.

      Fire squats on the ground. His hands tear meat. His teeth crush it.

      Emma stands before him. She is smiling. She pulls his hand.

      His legs follow her.

      She stops by a patch of dung. The dung is pale and watery and smelly. There is a leaf in the dung. There is a worm on the leaf, dead.

      Emma says, ‘I think you did it, Doctor Fire. You got the damn worm out of him.’

      Fire does not remember the leaf, or Maxie. Emma’s mouth is still moving, but he does not think about the noises she makes.

      Reid Malenfant:

      A flock of pigeons flew at the big Marine helicopter. Such was their closing speed that the birds seemed to explode out of the air all around them, a panicky blur of grey and white. The pilot lifted his craft immediately, and the pigeons fell away.

      Nemoto’s hands were over her mouth.

      Malenfant grinned. ‘Just to make it interesting.’

      ‘I think the times are interesting enough, Malenfant.’

      ‘Yeah.’

      Now the chopper rolled, and the capital rotated beneath him. They flew over the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington monuments, set out like toys on a green carpet, and to the right the dome of the Capitol gleamed bright in the sunlight, showing no sign of the hasty restoration it had required after last month’s food riots.

      The helicopter levelled and began a gentle descent towards the White House, directly ahead. The old sandstone building looked as cute, or as twee, as it had always done, depending on your taste. But now it was surrounded by a deep layer of defences, even including a moat around the perimeter fence. And, save for a helipad, the lawn had been turned to a patchwork of green and brown, littered with small out-buildings. In a very visible (though hardly practical) piece of example-setting, the lawn had been given over to the raising of vegetables and chickens and even a small herd of pigs, and every morning the President could be seen by webcast feeding his flock. It was not a convincing portrait, Malenfant always thought, even if the Prez was a farmer’s son. But for human beings, it seemed, symbolism was everything.

      The helicopter came down to a flawless landing on the pad. Nemoto climbed out gracefully, carrying a rolled-up softscreen. Malenfant followed more stiffly, feeling awkward to have been riding in a military machine in his civilian suit – but he was a civilian today, at the insistence of the NASA brass.

      An aide greeted them and escorted them into the building itself. They had to pass through a metal-and-plastics detector in the doorway, and then spent