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7.
In the ninth month of the new young man’s gestation, specific nanofactors started executing.
Some of it was RNA, working its way along natural zipper strips of genetic polysaccharides. Other bits of it were synthetically engineered machines no larger than molecules, building up protein sequences that would structure his memory for him. Even after such a vast time, a lot of it still worked. It all worked, and it worked at all, because the process had taken on a life of its own. The drive of life, tropism to the light, the push of root through wall, the symbiosis of coral and a thousand darting guest species, had won here too. He dreamed blissfully of Maryan Shurey as the specially programmed protein chains released their artfully packaged data, reel after reel of film, into his memory. Maryan was a slim, athletic blonde with an angel face and blue eyes. A dancer, a skater, casually tanned and even a bit wind-chapped as she whirled around him in tighter and tighter arcs while taking off, one piece at a time, every item of clothing except of course her skates. Her blue eyes and white teeth smiled into his soul. He was about to be born.
The chamber had been almost perfectly still for such a long time that the stalagmites rising drip by sedimentary drip from the gallery floors had time to touch, and in some cases meld with, stalactites hanging drip by longer drip from the gallery ceilings. Now it was the turn of the young man to be a brief drip in the unimaginably ancient life of this semi-darkened place. The water stirred in ripples, distorting his features, as he moved his hands in tiny twitching motions. Was that a faint smile on his perfectly formed lips and face? He had light brown hair, medium coarse, just long enough to fluff lightly at the edges as the water moved around his head. Everything was perfectly formed—the muscles in his shoulders, the biceps on his upper arms, the thick veins in his strong forearms. Now a fleck of blood drifted by his face. And another. The water stirred. His expression changed to one of displeasure, then pain. Thick gouts of blood swirled around him, looking more black than red in this faint greenish light.
The moment of his birth must have been barely hours or minutes away, and it was a good thing, for something unexpected was happening that he could not explain. He was not quite ready to open his eyes, but he knew that he must. His dreams of Maryan Shurey had fled; no bringing them, or her, back. He felt a searing pain, a terrible tearing in his gut, as if pieces of him were being torn out. He was not quite ready to take his first breath, but already he was screaming. Great silver and brass and ruby bubbles erupted as he doubled over, clutching his midsection. As he doubled over, he felt a slippery, slimy strength and realized it was someone-not-he, some other, for he could push against it and he did not feel anything, so it was not part of him. The Other pushed back when he pushed. The Other grew angrier, hungrier, more frantic, he didn’t know what to call it, but the pain doubled.
The Other tore at him, and he could feel parts of him shredding like cloth. He tasted his own blood as he screamed in underwater bubbles. He blared with excruciating, blinding agony as he struggled to hold his insides together. The Other shook him. He was flung up and down as the Other tore at him. He felt his teeth in him. He banged his head on the hard side of the birthing womb. As he rode up and down, his head bobbed into the air several times. Involuntarily, he took his first breath. He was pulled under and nearly drowned. Desperately, he made a fist and beat against his pulpy head, and he backed off for a minute or so, long enough for him to be born.
And so he was born, struggling for his very life before it was properly infused and inspired into him by contact with the air.
Lightning bolts of adrenalin surged through him in those incredible minutes. He could see in the dark; his pupils must have been fully extended. He hung back in horror, with his elbows pulled over the edges of the birthing tank, his body up his lowest ribs above the water.
He saw the thing that was eating him—it was a man not much unlike him, though covered with blood and gore, and staring with white hungry insane eyes. The Other’s teeth were bared, and its angry red hands held up like claws. The Other’s mouth made slobbering, anguished noises. The Other’s long hair was a mass of blood and strands of skin and gore. The Other wore some kind of simple hide cloak that steamed wetly in the poor light.
Terrified, the young man sat up splashing water from the tank. His pale new hands gripped the slippery marble-like stone rim of the tank or tub that surrounded him like a sarcophagus with no lid.
This was the moment of his birth, and he was shot through with a million volts of adrenalin for he was being eaten alive.
Screaming, he flailed at the predator his wet white hands. His hair lay back slick and shiny, and his eyes were dark holes of terror and anguish. He beat his fists on the hairy, powerful creature mauling him. He saw its wild eyes, the blood rolling out of the corners of its mouth, the blackness of its slurping tongue. He smelled the stink on its hide, the stench on its fur, the rot in its folds.
He saw what hurt on him, his gut, the mottled and bumpy mass that covered his stomach like a tumor. Coming from various parts of his torso were long tubes. Some were diaphanous, like cellophane (good Twenty-Second Century word! even through this, his memory kept sturdily building, those proteins just programmed to keep whaling away at his brain). Other tubes were rubbery, white, venous. Many were slim like little snakes or spaghetti strands. But out of that pile of warts and breadloaves on his mid section came a handful of these thick blackish-brown tubes, and they must have been ripe with nutrients, for the killer’s hands fastened about the remnants of them. The Other had consumed much of his connections to the birthing tank, to the galleries around him, by now, but its greed had no end, and the closer it got to his belly, the more intense was the pain for the newly born young man, the Alex who now struggled with slipping heels and sloshing water to rise to his feet in the tank.
He screamed, pushing at the beast with his feet, but it returned a bare-knuckled blow at his face that stunned him. He almost drowned as he sank down into the water. As he went down, still clutching the slippery stone rim, he carried with him a glimpse of the mingled malevolence and innocent fury in the starving predator’s eyes: and a wink of intelligence. They knew each other. They were of the same blood. Somehow, they were brothers.
Desperate, filled with adrenalin, he rose out of the water like a violent cork. He wrapped one arm around the Other’s head and gouged at the Other’s eyes with the fingers of his other hand. He didn’t have strong nails yet, and those he had were waterlogged, or he would have gouged the Other’s eyeballs out. He must have hurt it, for the Other bellowed with pain and shot a sharp elbow into his diaphragm that left him feeling winded. He sank back into the water, and he saw the Other’s hands coming down for his throat. He saw the insane glow in the Other’s eyes, the arctic sheen of its teeth, the primordial expression of the predator. He felt the Other’s powerful grip around his throat, and realized that it meant to kill him right then. He pulled in his chin so that it would not have a good choke on his neck. He felt the bruising strength of the Other’s fingers against his exposed collar bones, but his windpipe was intact—if only he could go up for air!
He raised his arms and shoved his forearms into the crooks of the Other’s elbows, making its arms collapse. It still had a powerful grip around his throat, but with its arms bent in, its face was closer—just within reach above the surface. Everything was a blur as he reached up. Young Alex worked his hands into a firm grip on the edges of the cloak around the Other’s neck. He pulled the cloak tight around his neck, starting a choke on him. Immediately, he felt his grip weaken. He let his back sink to the bottom while he planted his feet into the Other’s stomach and thrust upward. At the same time, he pulled sharply down with his hands.
The Other came crashing helplessly into the water, banging its head on the edge before it went under. As it went down with a massive plash that showered the floors all around, Alex came up. He felt weak, limp, and took a rasping hungry cry for air. While his lungs filled, the Other’s hands rose like claws out of the opaque water and scratched his face. Its fingernails rasped down his neck, down his chest, seeking someplace to grasp, to harm. It still had a choke on his neck with both hands.
Alex wrapped his legs and arms around it to keep it under water. He felt it weaken in two or three abrupt increments. Was it a trick, or was the thing now actively dying? He felt its fur rasping against his tender new skin, and recoiled. It stank of rot and meat and vomit. Its foul orifice was close enough to kiss, and it stank of deep garbage and offal. Alex head-butted it and it weakened another increment, sinking under the water.
As he held the Other, Alex felt it kick and punch. He felt the thud of its fists against his ribs, and nearly let go. He knew if he gave it even a hand-span of freedom it would find a way to kill him.
So he ignored his deep aching pain and tightened the way his arms wrapped around it. He knotted his fists together, wrists pressing its head, and ignored the pain as it bit his hands. Its fingers clawed desperately, trying to break his fingers.
One of the fingers gave with a soggy snap, breaking backwards, and Alex screamed loudly, filling the cave with his electric anguish, but he managed to tighten himself around his enemy even more tightly.
He had no choice. In another minute it gave up clawing him and struggled with its hands to push up from the bottom. Alex wiggled into position, placing one knee on its ribs, while bracing his other foot against the tank wall. This way, he pinioned it against the corner and bottom of the tank, and it weakened quickly.
Alex’s heart pounded. He saw spots. He gasped for breath, again and again, while his body started to shut down the searing adrenalin that would soon burn it up. He waited a long time after the last bubbles rose, after the last twitches subsided, when the Other was still as a piece of rubber, growing cold, and he was sure it had drowned.
Alex waited for a while, still holding the Other’s corpse down, while listening to the caverns around him. He heard the dripping in its darkness. He saw the glow of sponges on the walls, the ripple of biolumes in the stony creases of the natural ceiling, the gleam of dim reflections in the still waters covering the floor.
Then he heard a new terror, in this unknown world of terrors into which he had just been born. The new terror came in the form of savage roaring from somewhere far away yet near enough so that Alex could almost hear spit crackling in the pink and pulpy throat of whatever wild and savage predator waited outside the caves to make a meal of him. He let go of the dead body underwater and stepped sobbing from his womb, holding himself, shivering as he danced cold and naked from one foot to the other. He hugged himself and chattered teeth behind blue lips as he stared about with newly terrified eyes.
There! He heard it again, the hungry roar of a large mammal looking for him. He sensed that it was looking for him, looking for a way in to come tear him apart and eat him, something more powerful than this weak and misshapen copy of a human being he’d just killed.
Even as he stood hugging himself and chattering, the dead thing floated up in the pool. Its face floated up, just barely breaking the surface enough for its outlines to be clear. The water was blackened and made opaque by Alex’s blood, and in its surface tensions emerged the bizarrely malformed but still recognizeable features of a Neanderthal-looking carbon copy of Alex Kirk.
So why am I Alex when I am not? As he looked down in wonder at who and what he was, he vaguely understood that something terrible had been done to mankind and that he was supposed to be where he was, but this poor deformed brother of his had interrupted his birth process, and he could only hope that the proteins in his brain would continue their work without the precious nutrients. In the dim light, he could see the trunks of the tubes still hanging out of his midsection in fragments, about six of them, none longer than his hand could grasp, most too short to grasp. Pulling on them caused pain. Leaving them alone made the pain subside. He staggered about, reeling from the pain of his one touch, and almost wished he’d let the Other kill him. It was a wish he would have many times again as the realities of his new world became starkly plain.
Then he had no more time to speculate, for he heard the first of several prowling and hungry beasts trying to get in. It roared with a terrifying power that echoed loudly through the sunken galleries and corridors. He realized it had already smelled him.
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