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Page 7.

3. Daylight

Daylight!

The cave mouth was open, and for the first time he could see the world outside the birth caves.

Alex rounded a corner and stumbled through a wider gallery of caves, then into a blinding blue luminosity. Rubbing his hurting eyes, he glimpsed puffs of laundry-clean white cumulus clouds over the red cliffs opposite. He glimpsed birds, and things that looked like huge yellow and red butterflies.

He had never seen blue sky, sunshine, white clouds, but remembered things like that from Alex Kirk’s memories. This must mean some of his memories were valid. If some were valid, then maybe all of them were.

In that same instant, he also reacted with visceral terror to the sight of three animals feasting on the half-man’s body.

The animals, rippers, were a cross between wild boar and bear, with curling yellowish tusks and vicious little eyes. They had powerful furry dark bodies, with ruffles of hair hanging from the back of each of their four bear-like legs made for climbing and running. Their small oval ears perked up as he came around the corner.

The half-man had dragged itself onto the sand in the middle of a wide gallery, and these rippers were now feasting on its dying body. What had made him so eager to crawl toward the light? Probably the same great urge that was causing Alex to venture here, he figured as he crouched behind a crop of boulders.

Alex glimpsed what the caves were about. The string-like attachments on the walls were the farthest tips of a vast root system extending from a tree-derived life form that had evolved around the cave entrance. More than anything, the life form resembled a huge root system, coiled like a mass of anaconda snakes on the floor, under the ceiling, around the entrance. Situated on leathery brown muscles attached to the inside of the cave itself, as tendons attach to human bone, a large chitinous door plate had slid open to allow animals from outside to come in. There could only be one reason for this, Alex saw even in that single sweeping glimpse: the cave lured animal life into itself, like a giant Venus fly-trap. Perhaps it used the Alexes growing in their tanks as part of the lure. Or perhaps it used the waters lingering in pools just inside the cave entrance to trap animals, drown them, slowly digest them, and let the stench of their rotting carcasses draw in more animals to become the next victims in an endless chain. The half-man had crawled partway through the maze of deep pools (each pool just wider than a man could straddle), when the beasts from outside pounced on it.

Two of the rippers were about the size of grown lions, while the third was smaller—most likely their cub. He saw also dozens of scattered bones and skulls on the ground outside, some whose eye sockets were half buried in loam since years ago.

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.