It was not an evil face, but neither was it, even at an idle glance, at all human. His brow was round and somewhat backwards-slanted into his high, domed skull, proportionately overlarge to human eyes. Likewise, the front of his face seemed to bulge, as with too many teeth, although this slight snout was more to accommodate his millions of smell receptors and the spongy mass just above his mostly-defunct eyes which caught the soundwaves bouncing back from any exploratory clicks he might send out. But he did have more teeth than a human, and with the exception of four molars, they were all long, sharp, carnivore’s teeth. When he showed them, it was not a smile. His eyes were huge, sunken sockets that gave him an oddly fetal, imploring appearance as he looked around, but these looks were as deceptive as his wiry frame. What might be seen as plaintive and helpless was in fact an expression of hostile intent: I see you, those wide-open eyes meant to say, as the slightly-pursed and trembling lips were actually a warning, proof that he was primed for a nasty bite.
But no one was here to see his fierceness, and soon his strange features relaxed.
Pool cupped his pale, broad hands and drank the water that slowly filled them. He held each sip in his mouth a long time before swallowing. He thought.
Not-same as the water that came from below, he decided at last. But same enough. He cupped his hands again, ignoring the shit-and-sour-meat smell that permeated this hole, and drank again, more naturally. He was not thirsty, but the taste of this not-same water intrigued him. He drank it a lot when it fell in the other light places. He had begun to think, in that eerie way that none of the others understood, that the different taste was not in this not-same water, but in the real water. That the difference was (and this was exactly the sort of thinking that so unnerved the others that long before they had made him their leader, they had frequently contemplated killing him) not in water at all, but something in the rock that cupped the water, as Pool’s hands cupped it now and Pool’s own taste lingered in his mouth. It was something in the fish and the frogs that lived in the water, something in the green scum and pale fungus that came with it. It was something…
…but it was not-same.
Pool looked down at the corpse, the high slits of what had once been human nostrils flaring wide as he sniffed it. He didn’t need to sniff it. He could see it was too far gone for eating and he wasn’t hungry anyway. He had caught two lizards in the tunnels before catching this scent and coming here. Big lizards, as long as his whole hand, as wide as two whole fingers. He had eaten them both (although he had stopped briefly to consider taking one of them back to Flicker, who had shared his sleeping place off and on ever since he had become leader, and then stopped even longer to consider taking it to Echo, who shared no one’s sleeping place and probably never would, much to Pool’s quiet and distracted frustration), but he had cooked one of them first, because fire still needed much experimenting.
Fire was a new thing to all this particular clan, what could be called the Hodel clan, although it was not entirely new to the people as a whole. It had been discovered and rediscovered countless times since their severing from the line of what would become modern man, and it had come back to the Hodel clan now, after perhaps two hundred years, because Edges had found a pick deep in one of the tunnels and had been trying to use what seemed like a very sturdy if ungainly tool to make a far more practical one, and when the ancient pick-head hit his rock, there had been sparks. Edges, disgusted beyond all expressing, had flung the pick violently away (and then gone spitting into the dark to find it and bash it even more violently into the wall several times before throwing it away for good), but Pool had picked it up again. Pool could not knap a proper stone (and did not see the need, seeing as how Edges could make anything he wanted for him), but with patience and much trial, he found he could make a spark. And that sparks could eat certain things, certain dry things, and become fire, which was warm and gave a gentle red light and so was useful. It also seemed to Pool that fire made things dry faster, although he wasn’t sure yet just how this worked, since if you put too much wet on the fire, it hissed out and turned to smoke. Also, fire hurt if you tried to touch it, or even if you only touched the places it had been sitting, and sometimes fire came back after it had gone, so it always bore thinking about and testing.
So Pool made a fire and put one of the lizards he had caught inside, because both lizards were wet and he wanted to see, with both lizards in front of him, if one dried faster. It did, but that was not all it did. The lizard in the fire came out not-same as the lizard which had not been in the fire. The skin had all turned black, which Pool had half-expected, since that was what happened to most things he put inside fire, but inside the skin was the most interesting thing. The blood had all gone away and the meat itself had turned all strange: a different taste, a different texture, a different everything. Not-same in every sense. And yet, he knew it was same, because he’d had two lizards and here was one and here was the other, and they were same and not-same at the same time!
More fires were called for, but then, this smell, the death-smell, bothered him and Pool supposed he really ought to take it to the Pit. Other animals might come to eat it still, and fall in like they fell in the other light places, and be good to eat if someone found it soon enough, but bugs would come first, bugs that bit and bugs that burrowed, and more death might come after. Pool wasn’t sure of the connection, but he was sure there was one, and this was knowledge of which his people had been certain from the Beginning Time. You could not leave a corpse to rot. He was leader. He was responsible. He ate his lizards and gathered the meat by its loose, stinking skin and dragged it away to the Pit.
And then, because Pool was Pool, he came back. He did this partly to check and see if he had gotten all the meat, because sometimes bits fell off if the meat was really bad. This wasn’t one of those times, but he discovered to his interest that the meat had left something behind, even if it wasn’t skin or bones.
There were, of course, pieces of Big Bill’s shattered rifle, but these were entirely beneath Pool’s notice. He saw only slivers of wood and chips of stone, no different than any of the other dead branches that fell into the tunnels or the other chunks of rock that occasionally broke away from the rest. Big Bill’s shoes were here as well—he’d cut them off when his feet had first started to swell and his adrenaline had still been high enough to allow him to do it without realizing just how badly it hurt him—but Pool hadn’t noticed them yet. What captured his considerable interest was instead the shiny silver flask that had held the dying man’s sippin’ likker from his fifteenth birthday on.
He picked it up and when he did, water dribbled out of the narrow mouth in a stream that became a puddle at Pool’s feet, fascinating while it lasted. He touched it and it was smooth, smooth as baby-skin, but hard, like rock or bone. He held it up to the grey shine of the up-world, only to flinch back when a brighter patch of light unexpectedly splashed up onto the walls. Pool rattled out a warning to this invader, snatching back his new prize, and the light at once vanished. He looked for it cursorily, even standing at his full height to send a series of short, threatening snaps up the shaft where he assumed, logically enough for him, it must have gone, and then settled back on his haunches to investigate what he considered the greater mystery.
The flask sloshed in his hands when he moved it. Its weight shifted. When he turned it fully upside-down, more water trickled out. Pool caught a few drops thoughtfully in one palm and then, with remarkable intuitiveness for one of his kind, found one of the deeper puddles around him and pressed the flask to the ground.
