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Page 4.

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 bread loaves 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 recognizable 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 humankind 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.