(2019)
(Part of A Matter of Time)
10 million years hence
Darkness. Silence.
Khra startled awake, as if by a flash of lightning or a violent noise. Instead, there were only darkness and silence. Too much silence, as understood not by the lump of nervous tissue that sat in her skull, but by the sensorial reflexes that twitched deep beneath her colorless fur. The gurgle of the Stream – the blessed Stream that provided them with food, and carried their waste away to unsounded depth – could no longer be heard.
All others slept, cuddled together on the slippery slabs of eroded concrete. Khra clambered down the furry mound of bodies, an easy task with her spindly spiderlike limbs, rousing grunts of annoyance. Then she threw her thin call. The echo returned to her of a flat and solid surface.
Below the group stagnated the comforting scent of her kin's dung, the hallmark of a prosperous colony. It was the supreme call of triumph, there's many of us, there's many of me. Below that, further still, pale mushrooms grew in the muck, and among them lay half-devoured the body of Gul, killed in a fight many days earlier. Beneath everyone's fur ran delicious blood that gave life to the body, just like the Stream gave life to this lightless world; one could not kill one's kin to eat, or the tribe would go extinct, but there were many reasons to kill
Khra passed a hand on Gul's cold face, so warm during the last couplings, now no more than a nest for blind maggots. It was somehow in the middle between being a part of Khra's kin, and a part of the inanimate world, a duality that her brain could not quite handle. The result was that she had often come down to take her share of meat, but every time she began to sink her teeth in the dissolving flesh, she recoiled back, as if she'd bitten herself. That repeated again and again, every day.
Then she came to the bottom of the world, a hard plain of concrete, strewn with rounded pebbles of glass, dried algal mats, still twitching blind fish and giant shrimps. Water did not flow around her ankles as it should have.
Disaster! Where would food come from, now? Where would waste go? Instinctively she covered her eyes in despair - a useless gesture, as her eyes had never seen anything. How long would the people last, before turning against each other?
She fell on her knuckles and threw herself in a desperate run; uphill, among the bushy lichens, to the wall of chipped rock that marked the upper edge of her world, from which the Stream was supposed to burst forth mysteriously in a frothing waterfall; then downhill, to the piles of guano that marked its lower edge. Beyond those, faceless horrors flapped in the darkness, that grabbed the unwary and tore them apart in mid-air.
She scratched the concrete floor, she pressed on it her tongue: it was still moist, it tasted of rust, of urine, of mold, of putrefying vegetation. Her instincts prepared her body to swing in the canopy of a tropical rainforest, to run in the grass of a thunderous savanna, even to chat in the glow of a campfire and bind grain in a plain between rivers. All useless now, like those eyes that were nothing more than a vessel for the infections that took away so many, two perpetually open wounds. She called this gallery home, buried deep below the world of her ancestors, and yet it was as frightening and alien as ten million years before.
There was a cruel mismatch between this sunken pit of a world and its wretched inhabitants, twisted by the necessities of life in the utter darkness, in dearth of nourishment and oxygen, in this oppressive enclosed space and this air choked by carbon dioxide and by the stench of decay, constantly triggering some sense of claustrophobia latent in all. Was it any surprise that this colony was so stunted, so violent, so verily inhuman, almost making a mockery of the wonderful social world that was the pride of all primates ever since the last dinosaur closed its eyes?
There was little room in these starving brains for truth and beauty and good, for art or for love. Little, although not none at all; sometimes Khra did feel strange sensations in her dreams, like vistas of an impossibly vast and luminous world somehow streaming in through her eyes. Then she awoke, and mourned the loss of something she had never known; and she tried to relive those visions, screaming at the stony vault in the broadest part of the world and basking in its echo.
And then sometimes she wished Gul was still alive and warm, and running his bony fingers through her fur picking bits of dried slime, rather than rotting at the bottom with the fish and the shrimps. And she felt some desire that whatever would bloom from her belly would grow strong and healthy, and bear some of the scent of the creature that had sired them.
This Khra's ancestors a hundred thousand generations back would have considered the crudest, the most primitive sparks of self-awareness. But for her and her kin, these few heartbeats of knowledge, these eyeblinks of love, were samples of enlightenment at the very edge of their grasp, brief raptures into a world beyond memory, messages from a hyperuranion descended into the world of rot and filth. Something beyond filling and emptying one's bowels forever. Something great, something beautiful, that perhaps was not hopelessly beyond their reach.
An idea took shape in her compressed brow. The seed of the last coupling was still in her. If she would take immediately some food, she could try to flee to another region of the world and raise an offspring in security. She would be safe and undisputed, the whole universe reduced to her and her babies. And then... Well, "then" was beyond her comprehension, or even her imagination. Something would have happened. Somehow she would survive.
She went back to the slabs, where the group had now awoken. Their calls had accents of panic and grief. Having retraced Khra's thoughts, they had gathered like beetles on Gul's carrion, biting and pushing each other in the attempt of taking the last scraps of meat. Some seized the infants; Khra was pushed sideways.
Then a distant rumble echoed through the walls. Perhaps the water was back…