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14.
Just as the rippers spotted him, Alex turned and fled.
One ripper detached itself in a few sparse, frugal motions and darted after him kicking up dust. He just managed to scramble up a wall, onto a ledge, from which he threw sharp rocks. It shied away, snarling and roaring. He struck it on the flank with a sharp stone, and it darted away with a frenzied wail of pain and anger that promised a return bout soon.
His legs trembled. He saw other rocks he could throw, bigger rocks, but he was scared rigid and could only hold on to the ledge around him. The animal joined its partners in a dusty fight over the remains—and then there was a cry of alarm from one of the rippers. He heard the rumble of the door. He heard their exchange of snarls, and the dragging of body parts, while the door slowly closed. It made not quite a rumbling sound, nor a metallic one, as much as the loud grinding of carapace surfaces, of horn on horn, a crunching shut of claws.
With a final thump of the door, he was in complete darkness, and alone—He hoped. It took him a long time to gather the courage to climb down. His knees shook for hours. He hurried back to his birthing gallery, where he sated himself with cleansing green and mushroom fare. He knelt and drank deeply of the water, feeling its comforting and pleasurable coolness on his skin.
Now he understood the precariousness of his situation. There was no barrier to come stop them if they wanted to enter the galleries, only their fear of being trapped if the door closed on them while they were inside. He figured it out slowly: this place had been birthing clones for (how long? Eons?). When it was time to leave the cave, the clones knew instinctively to head for the door that led to life; but which led to death, because from the evidence he’d seen, generations of rippers had grown up feasting on the delicacies released by that door. No wonder they’d been roaring eagerly, probably smelling the blood of his birth!
These animals would be the bane of his existence, the constant companions of every waking and sleeping hour, the ever-energetic predators who dreamt of eating him alive. He called them rippers, not knowing if that had ever been an animal contemporary to Alex Kirk. He was sure the animals he’d just seen had not existed in that form during Alex’s time. That in turn suggested that a huge amount of time had gone by—perhaps eons.
He considered the problem from every angle as he trudged back down into the darkness of his birthplace.
First, how long would it be until the door opened again? Would the mountain know when another of him was born? Already, forms were shaping in two birthing pods. It would be weeks, months, something like that, before the next rush of instinct. He must be ready by then. But what did he have? He was naked, and had only the shabby cloak he’d torn from the brother he’d killed. He could throw rocks, but how long before they jumped around him faster than he could throw?
He searched and searched, but there was no high ground to which he could run, where they could not also climb. In the birthing gallery was a ledge high up, not much bigger than his feet. It was the highest point he could find, and also the farthest from the door. In an emergency, he could perch precariously for a while, but he’d grow tired and eventually slip down. His only hope was that the rippers would not venture this deep into the cave system.
He waited patiently, hoping to find at least one more brother like himself growing in the tanks. He would have a friend then, someone to talk to. He would cut his cloak in half and give him the other half. But the dozen or so remaining tanks, surrounded by ankle-deep water, remained empty and silent.
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