In 1898, the mine had been nearly a settlement in its own right; now its many chambers provided treasure to the many generations of the clan who had usurped it. Even if much of this stuff had been ultimately covered by the steady growth of rotting furs, much yet remained—old carts, picks, winches and pullies, rust-frozen links of chain, all tumbled together in a great heap at one end of the track line—and occasionally some forgotten piece would be unearthed and marveled at once more. Boredom was unknown to the clan. Even the most familiar passageway could bring something new at any time and anyway, familiarity was reassuring. To change, to evolve, was no great ambition of their kind. Even Pool, who enjoyed his distractions in ways few of his clan could understand, wanted nothing more than to come home to his particular piece of the sleeping place and bed down among those he knew, hear their same speech and feel their same touches, knowing that tomorrow would pass just as yesterday had.
There were nearly forty of them now, and another coming, if White Belly’s swelling stomach meant a baby and not belly-bloat or worms or some other trouble. Pool was fairly certain it would be the baby. White Belly was good at growing them, if not so good at rearing them, and in all of his memories, she had either the round swell of her stomach out before her or a baby keening for her slack breast. Pool thought it was a baby, and more importantly, Edges, who slept his angry, muttering sleep at White Belly’s side, also seemed to think it was a baby and would not let anyone else close enough either to feed her or give the concerning bulge a testing slap.
Pool actually could count. Not as high as forty, but to five easily, to ten with difficulty, and with time and effort as far as twenty. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive understanding of his clan; he knew at a glance who was there and who missing, just as he could look at meat and know at once how many it would feed and how well. Numbers he found difficult (and most of his people found them impossible), but many mouths and small fish he understood very well.
Still, it was not the leader’s responsibility to feed others. That Pool had made it his responsibility upon occasion might have been an indication of his essential strangeness or perhaps nobility (which was itself a strangeness), but then, his motives were frequently suspect. Pool had often fed Flicker, for example, simply because he knew she was far too quick to grab when the soft root of a man’s body turned hard and insistent. That Flicker had been caught now and then only made her that much quicker and more wary around the men in the small clan, and yet, with the steady offering of food over enough days, Pool had managed, quietly and without fighting, to feed her from his hand first and then to mount her and finally to coax her into the crossways to sleep beside him so that he could mount her without the bother of having to find her first.
It was the same reason, essentially, that Edges fed White Belly, not because she was difficult to ease onto her back, but because she would do so for anyone, at any time, for any reason. An unexpected hiss or sudden movement would send her rolling over to expose that soft, white belly (and strangely bloodless woman-wound that made a man’s root so demanding), and send Edges into a howling, slapping rage if he happened to be near enough to see it. The paradox was, that in order to make sure White Belly did not take food from other men (or let them rub their roots in her while she ate it), Edges alone fed her, which meant that he had to leave her in order to find food, which meant that he often returned to find Splinter or Broken Tooth huffing hurriedly away on top of her. There had been blood over it already, and that someone might be killed was a definite possibility, but it wasn’t a leader’s responsibility to stop that. Maybe he would have made it his responsibility if Pool wanted White Belly for himself, but he didn’t.
Pool wanted Echo.
They had been children together—he had some hazy memory of her as a suckling, but was not quite old enough to remember her being born—but they were not close. Echo wasn’t close to anyone. She was clan in that she was the same as them, and was known to have been born to Fur and so was unquestionably accepted, but she had not come to the crossways where the others slept, choosing instead to flit through the tunnels, untouchable. She was a flash of white in the darkness, the splash of a leaping foot in water, the drift of familiar scent in an empty passage. She was Echo, the sound of something that is no longer there.
But she was beautiful, healthy and strong, and more, she was clever, far too clever to be caught even by the quickest lunge or the fattest and most tempting frog. Pool had tamed Flicker to his side with food and patience, but not Echo. Never Echo. He had tried to woo her several times with fire, and thought for a time he had been making some progress; the little red flame had proved as mesmerizing to her as to any of the others, and he could draw her in close enough to see by its light, but at his first movement, at even the gentlest purr, she was gone.
But she was clever, and sometimes Pool found her little caches of brush which she dragged from the light places to dry in the tunnels, and smudgy ashes of fires he knew he hadn’t made, the burnt branches and charred bones of her own curious experiments. Seeing these things encouraged him, made him think that catching her was possible if the right lure were found. Fire interested her, and Pool thought that interest was the right lure. He just had to find something better than fire. That he knew of nothing better gnawed at him, but he did know that there were no mysteries in the crossways, so he went on foraging treks like this one, partly for food, partly to keep aware of any threat or danger in his domain, and partly (the largest part, in fact) to look for something that just might interest Echo.
Now Pool crouched in the rain, slapping himself where the fat drops fell until it registered that this was water, only water. It fell sometimes in other places. Now it was falling here, where it had never fallen before, and there was light above him, which had never shown light before, and these were things that needed thinking about.
The corpse earned none of his attention. Bloated and blackened by early rot, it had been at once identified and disregarded. Not as a dead man, but as a dead something—spoiled meat unfit for eating. Something that would need to be dealt with, in other words, but not a man. It was too different for Pool’s eyes to see as a person, so it was just a thing, not-same.
Looking at the two together, the forty-day corpse and the living man, it was not immediately clear which looked the most human. Their shapes shared enough—two arms, two legs, five fingers to each hand, two eyes that looked curiously out from a thinking mind—but no one would have ever believed they were looking at a man if they had glimpsed Pool at a distance in the dark. Uncounted eons breeding in the deep tunnels under the earth had worked its changes, seen and unseen.
Although he could and sometimes did go upon two legs, he was more apt to prowl about on his belly, his powerful fingers and grasping toes made to pull him through narrow channels and over uneven stone as swiftly as a snake. The body that perched now, guardedly, just beyond the shine of daylight had been carved for this life, bred for it in the blind treachery of the hollow earth; he was small, more than a head shorter than Big Bill had been in life and half the old man’s weight, but every sinewy muscle held a terrible reserve of strength. His skin, pale as pearl and entirely hairless, stretched tight over this deceptively small, powerful frame, showing clearly each coiling muscle as he picked his way across the newly-fallen debris, pausing at every new hand-hold and foot-step to sniff at a shard of rotted wood or rifle barrel. The rain slicked over his naked flesh, but he felt little of it, little of the high mountain cold. Nature had compensated for his kind’s scarcity of body fat with thick skin and a circulatory system that could keep him quite comfortable at temperatures near freezing, although the Hodel mine rarely saw such a need. So the impression overall was perhaps cadaverous, but still essentially human. It was only when one looked at the creature’s face that one realized how widely his kind had diverged.
