Red hunched in the thin shadow of a dry thorn-bush. The lake had evaporated, leaving a pink, glittering crust. Small armoured fish were frosted into the salt, contorted and grinning with pronounced overbites. The rain hadn't come that year. The sky was vermilion with dust.

Baby was safely stowed in the battered shopping trolley under the overhanging rocks, soundless and motionless. Red scooped up the salty crystallised fish, planning to stew them with the few bitter herbs that still grew in the valley. A faint clatter of leathery pterodactyl wings, and Red's heart contracted like a sea anemone. Black shapes stood on a nearby knoll, tasting her scent and Baby's with flickering tongues.

Think fast, stay alive. Red ripped off her filthy smock and hung it on the thorn-bush, where it flapped in the wind. Naked and scaly, she crept on her belly to where Baby rested in the shade. Pterodactyls had a strong sense of smell, and poor visual acuity. They were alerted by motion.

The charred looking shapes reminded her of something, an object from the past. "Parapluie, parce qu'il pleuvait? Um-brella? Because it is raining?" There would be a definition, somewhere, in one of the yellow manuscripts stacked and crumbling within the white stone library. Because it might never rain again, because no one would ever again make such an elaborate, frivolous object, the question was poignantly useless. Red needed to know only for Baby, only for the future. The pterodactyls attacked. Red could almost smell their disappointment, then fury, as they shredded the flapping smock. One of them caught its beak in the armhole and struggled to free its crested head. Smelling fear, the others speared its belly, spilling hot purple guts. The creature was wearing the smock, surprise and dismay flashing in its black eyes. The cries were like those of a long-extinct bird. Sea-gull?

Red pushed the trolley to the lip of the hill, and jumped onto the back. The trolley ploughed along an old water-course, to where the valley began and pterodactyls dared not fly. The ancient town was reduced to strange outcroppings, gutted buildings clustered like broken teeth in the sand. Red wheeled Baby to their home, an elegant dome whose portals kept the sand at bay, whose chiselled pillars were still intact after five centuries. She pushed the trolley into the dignified semi-darkness of the library. Its galleries were heaped with yellowing manuscripts — the sciences, natural history, literature and art of centuries — stacked in an eclectic, yet exhaustive, collection of facsimiles. Red's parents had spent their lives assembling the library, scrolling databases, printing and reading, absent-mindedly watering the garden. Two dim figures disconnected from the baked landscape, they had lived in their heads in a way Red could not afford to do.

Red patted and stroked the imperturbable Baby, releasing her from the dusty swaddling, admiring the soft, rippling skin, the smooth, black hair. Baby rolled a little, showing her pleasure. It was bath-time, and Red prepared the water in a wine-drum that came apart at a central seam, forming a bath with a lid. Red added some salty fish, a handful of grass seeds, and a pinch of bitter herbs. Light streamed down through a stained glass window in ruby reds and brilliant blues, undiminished by the relentless sunlight. The coloured light illuminated the water and dappled Baby's soft, loose skin. Red slid Baby into the bath and closed the lid. She listened to Baby enjoying the winy essences of the ancient oak.

Red believed in essences. She knew the effects of micronutrients on growth and development. She found myriad essences for Baby to savour, the extracts of cactus, crustaceans, salt fish and insects. Absorbing nutrients and learning were the things Baby had to do, if she was to grow and flourish. Baby tumbled happily in the water that would teach her about her origins, the sea from which all things had come. When she finished her bath, Red lifted the lid and wrapped her in swaddling, smoothing her brow. Gently, she slipped Baby into the sling, close to her heart. She chose books to read to Baby, and went out to the sandy street.

The old aircraft observation dome cast a dark violet shadow over the hot white sand. Like the library, it had been built to withstand cyclones, earthquakes or floods, but now it stood empty, a lonely sentinel watching only for flocks of cawing pterodactyls. Red passed through the defunct metal detectors and security scanners. Her footsteps rapped on the cracked old stairs and the metallic ladder as she climbed up to the observation area. It was like entering the vitreous humour of an enormous eye. Centuries of sandstorms had blasted the glass observation window, giving the view a blurred, gentle feel.

At the top, where the sky was more red than blue, Red surveyed her domain. She could see the horizon for 360 degrees. Once the old town had been situated beside a green, sliding sea. The remnants of its buildings now faced the seabed, a glittering crystalline salt pan stretching out to the horizon in the noonday sun.

From Travellers' tales Red knew that the plumes of dust on the purple horizon arose from the remnants of old cities, as the wind slowly ate and blew them away. Endless kilometres of red desert stretched like the skin of a burned face, dotted with a few green basins like eyes, the oases. Travellers told of wizened isolates, like Red, gardening in those green basins amidst the acres of burning sand, stoically accepting their loneliness.

Travellers rarely came any more. In the past, she had often sat in the observation tower and watched the columns of ant-like figures slowly cross the dunes. Cradling Baby, watching the sky, Red listened to an internal debate. Had she done the right thing, staying with Baby, or should she have joined the Travellers?

Baby filled the gap left in Red's life when her parents died. Without Baby, she would have lacked the strength to get out of bed. Impossible to have gone on working the garden, maintaining the seed bank. Monotony had a capacity for providing comfort, something the nomadic Travellers had not discovered. Every day, Red fingered the same crack in a metal doorframe, flaking off a small piece of paint, savouring the knowledge that this rudder in the inchoate sea of time would be there tomorrow. Most importantly, Baby did not want her to leave, and Baby could not travel, she had to eat, to bathe a certain number of times a day. Baby required filtered sunlight or she would die. And Baby was the future.

As she rocked the infant in the sling, gazing at the horizons, Red felt a surge of euphoria. She had done the right thing. Red would never leave Baby. She read to Baby every day, her voice raised against the wind's ululations, the spatters of sand blasting on glass. Baby wept when Red whispered the line from T.S. Eliot, "the dawn wind wrinkles and slides". It was clear that Baby appreciated these visions of a long-dead human mind. A mysterious inner instinct dictated Red's choice of reading material. Some of the choices were so strange that Red resisted them, but Baby found as much pleasure in an ancient repair manual for a washing machine, or the names in centuries-old telephone directories, as she did in Homer or T. S. Eliot.

Even mathematical equations occupying an entire page pleased Baby, who gurgled and rolled as Red intoned the abstruse proofs. Science texts were less comprehensible. Red mumbled over jargon she did not understand, but Baby moved her lashes, as if she followed closely. Red declaimed Margulis' First Law: "All visible organisms, whether plant, animal, or fungus, evolved through body fusions."

She droned through the Archives her mother had bequeathed, muttered the minutiae of the cell fusion experiments of the past. Human cancer cells fused together, then fused with cells of plants, pigeons, crocodiles. The innocent enthusiasm of a golden age of genomic fusion, its endpoint the invincible chimera, its legacy a biological recidivism. Thus reemerged the pernicious and pestiferous, most persistently the Cretaceous pterodactyls.

Red finished reading and watched the pterodactyls in the desert. They were chasing their prey on foot, wings folded, charging clumsily in pecking order. Red could not see what the creature was, but a dark shape darted toward the sand-cliffs that towered above the salt pan. The pterodactyls followed, beaks outstretched. They did not anticipate the creature leaping off the edge, preferring to smash onto the salt pan below than become their prey. Unable to slow their momentum, the pterodactyls broke into clumsy cawing flight over the cliffs, and drifted, like burned paper, down to the carcass below.

Red was growing tired of evading pterodactyls. Becoming bolder, they were venturing into the town as prey disappeared from the desert. Vicious young pterodactyls sometimes glided over the streets, casting sinister shadows. Once a pterodactyl flapped slowly past the observation tower, staring in at her and Baby. Were they becoming organised in their efforts to attack? She wondered why she persisted, trekking in the burning heat, scanning for pterodactyls as well as for life in the sand, the patch of green or red indicating algae, shrimps or insects. Better, perhaps, that she should curl up with Baby and let the sand-drifts quietly bury them both.

Reading to Baby was the antidote to her dark feelings. She aimed to teach Baby the human history her parents had selected. Old books were better company than the Travellers, who were inevitably engaged in preposterous mystical quests, seeking dream cities over the horizon, or the apocryphal inland seas.

Red smiled down on the glowing Baby. She'd got a fright, finding her huddled in a ditch, hadn't been sure if Baby was even alive. Baby was the size and shape of a melon, with her black, glossy hair arranged in a neat whorl. At her hairline, a row of fleshy gills, moving slowly in and out. On her undersurface, delicate, fleshy root-like structures. Chloroplasts gave a greenish pallor, the web of scarlet capillaries a rosy glow. Eyeless, limbless, a featureless head, Baby rolled around in the ditch sputtering through her gills. Initially Red looked after Baby because she couldn't bear to simply let her die. After Red's parents died, she realised she was alone with the books and the glittering salt pan, waiting for a soul-mate traveller who would probably never arrive, looking after a baby with special needs.

Somehow Red always knew Baby's needs, as an ache or craving within herself. Red slept with Baby pressed into her stomach for comfort, yet Baby did not sleep. Instead, she assumed an air of serenity and motionless calm, tempered with the alert intelligence of a watchful, sentient animal.

In the cooler part of the day Red worked in the garden. Only at the oases were there still wells that tapped down into ancient Artesian waters. Red's well brought forth rusty waters that tasted of iron or blood.

Red released the Baby from the sling, put her onto the grass, and began to work the pump. The seeds on the wild grasses shimmered. Sunflowers turned dusky cat-faces towards the sun. The water gushed like blood into the trough. Clouds were scudding overhead for the first time in years. Baby rolled and fluttered her gill slits. Her pink and green skin was developing a pleasant dappled pattern of spots. Her little rootlets had strengthened and turned purple. Baby was growing up.

Red reached out to touch Baby, who was glowing on the grass. It was an ordinary afternoon, an ordinary moment of intimacy. Baby's mobile surface, hardly a face but a melding of many faces, puckered up at her. A wind seemed to sigh, then rush through Red's mind, bringing with it an echoing voice. "Red". Baby had not moved, but Red was sure it was Baby speaking, her first word, and then another, "Mother". The voice deepened, became tender, with an authoritative, knowing quality. The velvety, chocolate voice it was becoming seemed familiar, belonging to the past.

Red stood to watch the extraordinary thing that was happening. Baby was swelling. The wrinkled folds of her skin were expanding. Her spangled hide stretched to accommodate this change in form. Gills that had functioned only at bath-time now transformed topologically into the hard white hinges of a curious pair of jaws. She reached the size of a small boulder, and at her apex began to split apart, revealing a white interior. Red remembered the stone-like cacti she had seen in her parent's books. These cacti broke apart to emit a gorgeous scarlet flower with a deep throat, rather like the flower the engorged Baby was now revealing, at her red, velvety centre. The flower emerged. Enormous scarlet petals revolved metallically, moving so fast they made mesmerising rainbows of the light. In the centre, a beak-like mouth, sucking, inhaling, and imbibing the wind, the light, the garden. The little mouth calling her, "Mother". An irrepressible sweetness of resolve coursed through her limbs, and she hurried to where the flower lolled, its stamens erect, waiting.

The Baby's smile widened as Red bent over her. The tentacle slid out from the red, throbbing centre, and began to probe, to rub, to pluck at Red's flesh, making an opening above her heart, connecting at last with her bloodstream, her neurotransmitters, the chemicals of her mind. The thick proboscis injected strong green fluid, a brew of ancient chemicals that humans had called serotonin, dopamine, anandamide. Baby knew everything now. She revelled in the marriage with Red's mind, the ecstasy and rightness of the connection. Sounds and colours flowed through Baby's consciousness and melded into song.

The songs were hypnotic evocations of the sea, and Red wanted to drown in them. Perhaps she was drowning, or remembering an old way of breathing. So far from the sea, Red saw it now, the spume above the dune-grasses, the voluminous green waves turning glassy, exposing the faces of manta-rays. Enwrapped in the red, tactile velvet of Baby's innards, she had found an infinitely safe place, a place she remembered from her past, before her birth, when she had swum in an amniotic ocean. Red rejoiced in her parent's knowledge as Baby had learnt it. Saw log-books from labs, experiments unfurling. Not failures, she knew now, those countless cell fusions. Triumphant survival against all odds.

An echo of a sound, a word, "giggle", flickered into her greening mind, and she noticed the pterodactyls landing on the edge of the well. She held her breath, and saw a green papillomatous organ sliding from its sheath and out of the top of their head, hers and Baby's. She felt their whole body contract. A sticky bilious fluid spurted out of the organ, and into the cold black pterodactyl eyes that had no time to register surprise.

No need to hurry. The predator's flesh was preserved now, and she and Baby would enjoy it later. Meanwhile Baby was singing ecstatic songs, and Red surged with a potent joy, a sense of purpose. A rush of hot air shimmered toward them, from across the desert, from the other oases, where other chimerae, mothers and Babies, glittered and waited, under the suspenseful sun, under the swelling clouds.

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