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Page 6.

First he explored in the gallery where he had been born. He was depressed and lonely, but he was human, he lived, and therefore he had hope. He could not be the only one like Alex!

But he was disappointed. In the other birthing tanks floated an assortment of creatures like in a medical museum. In one tank floated a dead child the color of chalk, covered in bubbles. In another tank floated a mass of undifferentiated tissue, resembling a large nautilus shell covered by human skin, and in its side the hints of a sleeping face with sightless depressions for eyes. In another tank floated the longitudinal half of a person—alive! Along the tissue-thin wall down its center, healthy blood coursed in the veins, and he could see a heart pumping strongly. Its head, however, had no face, and the brain case was collapsed and anencephalic. Its well-formed arm and leg lay in an attitude of rest, and it had a faint erection. But it would be dead within hours of its birth.

He turned away from these horrors, hoping to find another like him, but the other tanks were dry and empty. The water on the floor was ankle deep, but the marks on the walls indicated it had once been waist-deep—almost up to the rims of the birthing pods. Perhaps it had once filled the entire gallery to the ceiling, and this whole place might have been one giant womb, nurturing dozens of copies of him.

Those clones would have been released from their umbilical cords, would have swum up toward the light, and clambered out on the dry floor of the caves above.

There were caves and caverns, and then more, but they dwindled into darkness and he could only go so far, no farther. He smelled oddly different air wafting his way, some of it smelling of decay, some of it vegetal, some of it almost like fresh air.

As far as he was able to explore before the wall lights and ceiling biolumes waned to nothing, he found that the caves were a disappointment. The ground rose out of the birthing area about ten feet to more galleries—but these were bone dry. He found other birthing areas, all of them dry and dusty, a few with bones in them, others with specks of mummified organic matter that crumbled to the touch. Whatever this was, it was dying. This whole place, this mother organism, was wasting away and he perceived its immense long age with a sense of his own insignificance.

He returned always to his place of birth, to his stone mother, in which now floated the uncorrupted loser of his birthing contest. He’d read once—or, more properly, Alex Kirk had read—of saints whose bodies had been immured and when the tombs were opened decades or centuries later, they were preserved in perfect blush, as if they were still alive. So floated the hideous copy of him, on his back, with streaks of the green healing vegetal matter growing over its skin. Ah, he could see now: the caves were dissolving and absorbing, consuming, the Other’s corpse to keep the birthing area antiseptically clean.

As it would eat Alex once he died. How long had this all been going on? Were the caves themselves alive? Tumid possibilities brewed in Alex’s unfolding consciousness as he prowled about the confines of his birth. In nine months he’d grown from a seed to a man. Now he was becoming restless in this blind paradise. He felt hormones exploding in his neural network, enzymes foaming over with mindless purposes which, he could guess, had to lead as all things in nature did to procreation, but if he were Adam, where was Eve? There wasn’t any, he suspected. He was alone in this universe with its dead or malformed copies of himself, in this cave of nightmares at the forward end of time.

Depressed, he sat on his haunches and whiled the hours away in fantasies of Alex Kirk’s past life. He picked at the hard material on the backs of his arms and legs until the surrounding skin bled. For while this place was not only giving him his body and brain, and filling that brain with his memories via some piggyback nanotechnology, the memories were not complete. The synapses had failed in places when the scientists were recording them. Maybe the process of recording in itself destroyed ten percent of the subject matter—so he had a pretty good knowledge of all that he had learned in school, perhaps from specially grown and specific cultures, but his personal life was a frustrating blur. Most of all he wanted to know who his parents were, so that he could claim them for his own, but memory of them seemed to be confined to early childhood. They were large shapes with comforting arms and pleasing voices that made him feel good inside, but he could not make out what they said.

He hoped in time he’d know what they had said to him to make him feel so good inside.

The very air around him seemed charged, as with some hormonal injection. He must get out! It was time to be born from the outer womb, now that he had been born in the inner womb of the tank. He rampaged through the upper galleries, throwing rocks, breaking stalagmites. He ran back down into the birthing gallery—and stopped.

The half-creature was gone. A trail of slime and wet ran up the corridors where it had crawled, propelled by instinct. And the same instinct forced him to follow to where the animals outside roared.

Leaving all that he knew behind, abandoning safety, Alex groped his way along through the darkness, uphill, toward the smell that was so good. He knew it almost before he saw it: Outside. He smelled the green of the trees, heard the low stately back and forth of fresh wind sighing in heavy tree crowns, heard the twittering of so many birds, and smelled the very sap flowing in the branches. He could almost already feel the warmth of the sun as it beamed down on the smooth brown skin of the trees.

He ignored his own fears as he pressed forward. Somewhere out there was Maryan Shurey, and he must get to her.

Sometimes he thought he could hear the half-creature slithering along, pulling itself by one hand, pushing with its leg. Perhaps its half-head was turned toward the light as it followed some plant-like phototropic impulse.

Already, a faint bluish glimmer was visible far ahead. The walls began to glisten with a hard new light. At the same time, Alex began to feel odd little crumbling somethings on the walls as his fingertips crept along ahead...and then the something began to feel more like...veins...He frowned, looking closely. He rubbed his fingers over the uneven stone surface. He felt the relative smoothness of cool stone underneath, but on top he felt strings of sandpapery material.

As he pressed forward, the ground leveled off. He smelled water again. He smelled a tinge of rot and yet a freshness on top, as if the wind were blowing over stagnant water.

Not once yet had he glimpsed a single evidence of human artifice. There was not a shred of evidence that humankind had ever existed. That struck him suddenly, in this unlikely place, at this unexpected moment, as he stood in the first glimmering of contact with the world outside his cave.

The nearby roar of a huge animal startled him out of his thoughts.