by R. Lee Smith
In 1898, the mine had been nearly a settlement in its own right; now its many chambers provided treasure to the many generations of the clan who had usurped it. Even if much of this stuff had been ultimately covered by the steady growth of rotting furs, much yet remained—old carts, picks, winches and pullies, rust-frozen links of chain, all tumbled together in a great heap at one end of the track line—and occasionally some forgotten piece would be unearthed and marveled at once more. Boredom was unknown to the clan. Even the most familiar passageway could bring something new at any time and anyway, familiarity was reassuring. To change, to evolve, was no great ambition of their kind. Even Pool, who enjoyed his distractions in ways few of his clan could understand, wanted nothing more than to come home to his particular piece of the sleeping place and bed down among those he knew, hear their same speech and feel their same touches, knowing that tomorrow would pass just as yesterday had.
There were nearly forty of them now, and another coming, if White Belly’s swelling stomach meant a baby and not belly-bloat or worms or some other trouble. Pool was fairly certain it would be the baby. White Belly was good at growing them, if not so good at rearing them, and in all of his memories, she had either the round swell of her stomach out before her or a baby keening for her slack breast. Pool thought it was a baby, and more importantly, Edges, who slept his angry, muttering sleep at White Belly’s side, also seemed to think it was a baby and would not let anyone else close enough either to feed her or give the concerning bulge a testing slap.
Pool actually could count. Not as high as forty, but to five easily, to ten with difficulty, and with time and effort as far as twenty. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive understanding of his clan; he knew at a glance who was there and who missing, just as he could look at meat and know at once how many it would feed and how well. Numbers he found difficult (and most of his people found them impossible), but many mouths and small fish he understood very well.
Still, it was not the leader’s responsibility to feed others. That Pool had made it his responsibility upon occasion might have been an indication of his essential strangeness or perhaps nobility (which was itself a strangeness), but then, his motives were frequently suspect. Pool had often fed Flicker, for example, simply because he knew she was far too quick to grab when the soft root of a man’s body turned hard and insistent. That Flicker had been caught now and then only made her that much quicker and more wary around the men in the small clan, and yet, with the steady offering of food over enough days, Pool had managed, quietly and without fighting, to feed her from his hand first and then to mount her and finally to coax her into the crossways to sleep beside him so that he could mount her without the bother of having to find her first.
It was the same reason, essentially, that Edges fed White Belly, not because she was difficult to ease onto her back, but because she would do so for anyone, at any time, for any reason. An unexpected hiss or sudden movement would send her rolling over to expose that soft, white belly (and strangely bloodless woman-wound that made a man’s root so demanding), and send Edges into a howling, slapping rage if he happened to be near enough to see it. The paradox was, that in order to make sure White Belly did not take food from other men (or let them rub their roots in her while she ate it), Edges alone fed her, which meant that he had to leave her in order to find food, which meant that he often returned to find Splinter or Broken Tooth huffing hurriedly away on top of her. There had been blood over it already, and that someone might be killed was a definite possibility, but it wasn’t a leader’s responsibility to stop that. Maybe he would have made it his responsibility if Pool wanted White Belly for himself, but he didn’t.
Pool wanted Echo.
They had been children together—he had some hazy memory of her as a suckling, but was not quite old enough to remember her being born—but they were not close. Echo wasn’t close to anyone. She was clan in that she was the same as them, and was known to have been born to Fur and so was unquestionably accepted, but she had not come to the crossways where the others slept, choosing instead to flit through the tunnels, untouchable. She was a flash of white in the darkness, the splash of a leaping foot in water, the drift of familiar scent in an empty passage. She was Echo, the sound of something that is no longer there.
But she was beautiful, healthy and strong, and more, she was clever, far too clever to be caught even by the quickest lunge or the fattest and most tempting frog. Pool had tamed Flicker to his side with food and patience, but not Echo. Never Echo. He had tried to woo her several times with fire, and thought for a time he had been making some progress; the little red flame had proved as mesmerizing to her as to any of the others, and he could draw her in close enough to see by its light, but at his first movement, at even the gentlest purr, she was gone.
But she was clever, and sometimes Pool found her little caches of brush which she dragged from the light places to dry in the tunnels, and smudgy ashes of fires he knew he hadn’t made, the burnt branches and charred bones of her own curious experiments. Seeing these things encouraged him, made him think that catching her was possible if the right lure were found. Fire interested her, and Pool thought that interest was the right lure. He just had to find something better than fire. That he knew of nothing better gnawed at him, but he did know that there were no mysteries in the crossways, so he went on foraging treks like this one, partly for food, partly to keep aware of any threat or danger in his domain, and partly (the largest part, in fact) to look for something that just might interest Echo.
Now Pool crouched in the rain, slapping himself where the fat drops fell until it registered that this was water, only water. It fell sometimes in other places. Now it was falling here, where it had never fallen before, and there was light above him, which had never shown light before, and these were things that needed thinking about.
The corpse earned none of his attention. Bloated and blackened by early rot, it had been at once identified and disregarded. Not as a dead man, but as a dead something—spoiled meat unfit for eating. Something that would need to be dealt with, in other words, but not a man. It was too different for Pool’s eyes to see as a person, so it was just a thing, not-same.
Looking at the two together, the forty-day corpse and the living man, it was not immediately clear which looked the most human. Their shapes shared enough—two arms, two legs, five fingers to each hand, two eyes that looked curiously out from a thinking mind—but no one would have ever believed they were looking at a man if they had glimpsed Pool at a distance in the dark. Uncounted eons breeding in the deep tunnels under the earth had worked its changes, seen and unseen.
Although he could and sometimes did go upon two legs, he was more apt to prowl about on his belly, his powerful fingers and grasping toes made to pull him through narrow channels and over uneven stone as swiftly as a snake. The body that perched now, guardedly, just beyond the shine of daylight had been carved for this life, bred for it in the blind treachery of the hollow earth; he was small, more than a head shorter than Big Bill had been in life and half the old man’s weight, but every sinewy muscle held a terrible reserve of strength. His skin, pale as pearl and entirely hairless, stretched tight over this deceptively small, powerful frame, showing clearly each coiling muscle as he picked his way across the newly-fallen debris, pausing at every new hand-hold and foot-step to sniff at a shard of rotted wood or rifle barrel. The rain slicked over his naked flesh, but he felt little of it, little of the high mountain cold. Nature had compensated for his kind’s scarcity of body fat with thick skin and a circulatory system that could keep him quite comfortable at temperatures near freezing, although the Hodel mine rarely saw such a need. So the impression overall was perhaps cadaverous, but still essentially human. It was only when one looked at the creature’s face that one realized how widely his kind had diverged.
It was not an evil face, but neither was it, even at an idle glance, at all human. His brow was round and somewhat backwards-slanted into his high, domed
skull, proportionately overlarge to human eyes. Likewise, the front of his face seemed to bulge, as with too many teeth, although this slight snout was more to accommodate his millions of smell receptors and the spongy mass just above his mostly-defunct eyes which caught the soundwaves bouncing back from any exploratory clicks he might send out. But he did have more teeth than a human, and with the exception of four molars, they were all long, sharp, carnivore’s teeth. When he showed them, it was not a smile. His eyes were huge, sunken sockets that gave him an oddly fetal, imploring appearance as he looked around, but these looks were as deceptive as his wiry frame. What might be seen as plaintive and helpless was in fact an expression of hostile intent: I see you, those wide-open eyes meant to say, as the slightly-pursed and trembling lips were actually a warning, proof that he was primed for a nasty bite.
But no one was here to see his fierceness, and soon his strange features relaxed.
Pool cupped his pale, broad hands and drank the water that slowly filled them. He held each sip in his mouth a long time before swallowing. He thought.
Not-same as the water that came from below, he decided at last. But same enough. He cupped his hands again, ignoring the shit-and-sour-meat smell that permeated this hole, and drank again, more naturally. He was not thirsty, but the taste of this not-same water intrigued him. He drank it a lot when it fell in the other light places. He had begun to think, in that eerie way that none of the others understood, that the different taste was not in this not-same water, but in the real water. That the difference was (and this was exactly the sort of thinking that so unnerved the others that long before they had made him their leader, they had frequently contemplated killing him) not in water at all, but something in the rock that cupped the water, as Pool’s hands cupped it now and Pool’s own taste lingered in his mouth. It was something in the fish and the frogs that lived in the water, something in the green scum and pale fungus that came with it. It was something…
…but it was not-same.
Pool looked down at the corpse, the high slits of what had once been human nostrils flaring wide as he sniffed it. He didn’t need to sniff it. He could see it was too far gone for eating and he wasn’t hungry anyway. He had caught two lizards in the tunnels before catching this scent and coming here. Big lizards, as long as his whole hand, as wide as two whole fingers. He had eaten them both (although he had stopped briefly to consider taking one of them back to Flicker, who had shared his sleeping place off and on ever since he had become leader, and then stopped even longer to consider taking it to Echo, who shared no one’s sleeping place and probably never would, much to Pool’s quiet and distracted frustration), but he had cooked one of them first, because fire still needed much experimenting.
Fire was a new thing to all this particular clan, what could be called the Hodel clan, although it was not entirely new to the people as a whole. It had been discovered and rediscovered countless times since their severing from the line of what would become modern man, and it had come back to the Hodel clan now, after perhaps two hundred years, because Edges had found a pick deep in one of the tunnels and had been trying to use what seemed like a very sturdy if ungainly tool to make a far more practical one, and when the ancient pick-head hit his rock, there had been sparks. Edges, disgusted beyond all expressing, had flung the pick violently away (and then gone spitting into the dark to find it and bash it even more violently into the wall several times before throwing it away for good), but Pool had picked it up again. Pool could not knap a proper stone (and did not see the need, seeing as how Edges could make anything he wanted for him), but with patience and much trial, he found he could make a spark. And that sparks could eat certain things, certain dry things, and become fire, which was warm and gave a gentle red light and so was useful. It also seemed to Pool that fire made things dry faster, although he wasn’t sure yet just how this worked, since if you put too much wet on the fire, it hissed out and turned to smoke. Also, fire hurt if you tried to touch it, or even if you only touched the places it had been sitting, and sometimes fire came back after it had gone, so it always bore thinking about and testing.
So Pool made a fire and put one of the lizards he had caught inside, because both lizards were wet and he wanted to see, with both lizards in front of him, if one dried faster. It did, but that was not all it did. The lizard in the fire came out not-same as the lizard which had not been in the fire. The skin had all turned black, which Pool had half-expected, since that was what happened to most things he put inside fire, but inside the skin was the most interesting thing. The blood had all gone away and the meat itself had turned all strange: a different taste, a different texture, a different everything. Not-same in every sense. And yet, he knew it was same, because he’d had two lizards and here was one and here was the other, and they were same and not-same at the same time!
More fires were called for, but then, this smell, the death-smell, bothered him and Pool supposed he really ought to take it to the Pit. Other animals might come to eat it still, and fall in like they fell in the other light places, and be good to eat if someone found it soon enough, but bugs would come first, bugs that bit and bugs that burrowed, and more death might come after. Pool wasn’t sure of the connection, but he was sure there was one, and this was knowledge of which his people had been certain from the Beginning Time. You could not leave a corpse to rot. He was leader. He was responsible. He ate his lizards and gathered the meat by its loose, stinking skin and dragged it away to the Pit.
And then, because Pool was Pool, he came back. He did this partly to check and see if he had gotten all the meat, because sometimes bits fell off if the meat was really bad. This wasn’t one of those times, but he discovered to his interest that the meat had left something behind, even if it wasn’t skin or bones.
There were, of course, pieces of Big Bill’s shattered rifle, but these were entirely beneath Pool’s notice. He saw only slivers of wood and chips of stone, no different than any of the other dead branches that fell into the tunnels or the other chunks of rock that occasionally broke away from the rest. Big Bill’s shoes were here as well—he’d cut them off when his feet had first started to swell and his adrenaline had still been high enough to allow him to do it without realizing just how badly it hurt him—but Pool hadn’t noticed them yet. What captured his considerable interest was instead the shiny silver flask that had held the dying man’s sippin’ likker from his fifteenth birthday on.
He picked it up and when he did, water dribbled out of the narrow mouth in a stream that became a puddle at Pool’s feet, fascinating while it lasted. He touched it and it was smooth, smooth as baby-skin, but hard, like rock or bone. He held it up to the grey shine of the up-world, only to flinch back when a brighter patch of light unexpectedly splashed up onto the walls. Pool rattled out a warning to this invader, snatching back his new prize, and the light at once vanished. He looked for it cursorily, even standing at his full height to send a series of short, threatening snaps up the shaft where he assumed, logically enough for him, it must have gone, and then settled back on his haunches to investigate what he considered the greater mystery.
The flask sloshed in his hands when he moved it. Its weight shifted. When he turned it fully upside-down, more water trickled out. Pool caught a few drops thoughtfully in one palm and then, with remarkable intuitiveness for one of his kind, found one of the deeper puddles around him and pressed the flask to the ground.
Water burbled up inside it. He could see the ripples of movement, feel the change in weight when he lifted the flask again. Slowly, he poured it out into the puddle, then filled it again and poured it out once more. Again. Again. On his not-quite human face, a fairly-human expression of deep and pensive stillness grew.
This was useful. This was very useful.
There were no natural predators in the tunnels where his people lived (had always lived, to their way of thinking; Upworld was a big, bright nothing from which fell meat and branches and sometimes water, but not even Poo
l had yet considered that anything lived there). There had always been enough for Pool’s small clan to eat, and while very occasionally they might kill each other (in fits of rage, like the kind that sometimes took hold of Edges, or out of a certain confused resentment, of the sort which had compelled White Belly, the young female who shared Edges’ sleeping place, to pile furs over each of her previous infants when they would not stop crying and not take them off again until after the infants were very quiet and very, very still), it was not unusual for them to live a long time. Death came to them in the form of bloat-belly, the infrequent fall, the inexplicable and sudden collapse (as old Bent Thumb had done, with time enough for just one gasping rattle, one spastic grab at his own arm, and then he was just meat), and most of all, the fever.
The fever came in many forms, and every form was terrible. Fever might touch one of them and linger for days and days, or it might rip through all of them and be gone again almost at once. It could kill a man or let him live, chill his blood, take his sight or his hearing, gnaw his guts or his bones, or simply leave and do nothing at all. If it touched a child, that child died so often that sometimes the grieving mother went ahead and carried the limp and shivering body to the Pit and pitched it in as soon as the fever was identified. Flicker would have done that—twice—when little Glow caught the fever, had Pool not stopped her.
It was the sort of thing that made the others nervous, him stopping her. Bent Thumb never would have. Yes, he was leader, but Flicker was Glow’s mother. Pool had seen her born, yes, and many was the day he had spent crouched around that squirming, squeaking infant and nuzzling at her soft, round head, but that didn’t mean anything. All the same, when he’d seen Flicker take a dragging grip on little Glow’s unresisting ankles, he had not only leapt in front of her, but had slapped both hands down on the thick furs between them over and over until Flicker retreated and allowed Pool to crawl over the small girl’s body and press his own close.