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45.
The cave door closed and the rippers were shut out.
The caverns resumed their timeless quiet. Water dripped into birthing tanks. It was too dark to see in which tanks another Maryan or other woman might be growing, and in which some monstrosity, and yet which other tanks were past the point of ever giving birth again.
Maryan grew very sick, and Alex nursed her hour after hour, bathing her in the healing water, cradling her in his arms which she breathed in labored gasps and her body was racked with fever. He kissed her cheek, touched her face and her arms with his hands, tried to keep his tears from spilling over her. He should be grateful to have had her for a few days, he thought. At least he had for the first and only time in his life felt the nearness of another human being. Slowly, she improved, and they lived in the eerie tranquility of faint green light. They ate wall mushrooms and sat talking together. They embraced each other and explored what it meant to love another person, both in the body and in the soul. They reminisced about the ice cream truck and other memories of growing up in Beacham University. Each had some extra memories to contribute that the other had lost, and so Alex learned that Alex Kirk had been a Special Forces commando during one of the Middle Eastern wars.
As he remembered the healing atmosphere and healing waters of his own cave, the brilliance of this place fill him with a solar clarity. He understood: Eons ago, there had been the university, and this cloning center. For some reason, mankind had vanished. The earth had shifted, tearing the male and female wings apart a quarter mile. The river had pushed through, clearing out a valley. The cloning facility was so powerfully intoxicated with the life principle that it had evolved, become an organic thing. After all, here was a breeding ground of human stem cells, a loom that wove constant tapestries of DNA.
Time passed, and he slumbered by her side as she lay in her birthing tank. At some point, he awoke, filled with a sense of urgency. He looked down into the tank, where she floated like a shimmering mosaic image at the bottom.
The very next moment, she sat up in a fan of flying water and gasped for air. She gripped the sides of the tank with her fists and looked straightaway with wild, wide eyes.
He thought his heart skipped a beat, and he took a step backward.
“Ah!” she cried, and started breathing in loud gasps. Water, blood, and mucus flew from her nostrils. Her breathing gurgled as if through a tube.
She grasped her neck and writhed in the tank splashing water everywhere. She was choking on something.
He grasped her from behind, linked his fists, and pulled them sharply upward into her solar plexus.
She started coughing violently, crawling about, but whatever she’d been choking on was loose and gone now.
At last she rose, calming down, exhausted from her ordeal.
The mass of tissue on her belly was smaller and pinker. The bite marks were gone—the necrotic tissue had dissolved. She was healing! And the tank had kept her alive through the deepest coma, when he’d thought she was dead.
They whooped and laughed and held each other, for quite a while. And they spoke. Did they ever speak! they chattered like two kids.
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