Evolution

But they were all around her — she heard them in the dark, sliding and rustling, saw them in the indistinct light.

Mole people. That was how they seemed. They had loose, fleshy skin that hung in folds around their necks and bodies. They were hairless: Their heads were bald, their pink scalps wrinkled, and they lacked eyelashes and eyebrows. Their ears were small, vestigial; their noses had pulled forward into snouts. They even had whiskers. And they had no eyes: There were only layers of skin covering the sockets where their eyes had been.

They had the arms and legs and torsos and heads of people. But they were all small, none of them larger than a child among her own kind, and yet many of them were adults. She saw breasts and functional penises on those small bodies.

Blind or not, they were flinching from the light. They swarmed away, disappearing into tunnels cut into the ground. The nails of their hands were shovel-like claws, equipped for digging. One touch of those claws had left deep furrows in Remembrance’s shoulder.

She was in a nest, a nest of people who squirmed and burrowed. She screamed, driven by a deep horror of these distorted posthumans, a horror she couldn’t understand, and she reached up toward the light.

And found herself staring straight into the eyes of the mouse-raptor. It hissed and braced to leap.

She hurled herself into an empty tunnel.

The walls were packed hard and worn smooth by the passage of many, many squirming bodies, and she was immersed in the characteristic stink of milk and piss. The tunnels had been built by the mole folk to take their own slim, scrabbling little bodies, and they were too small for Remembrance. She had to crawl on her belly, dragging herself along with arms and legs that soon ached painfully. It was a nightmare of enclosure.

But there was light. Narrow chimneys snaked to the surface. Thin, angled, they were intended to allow the passage of air while excluding any predator. But enough light diffused down to give her partial impressions of what she was passing through.

Tunnels, branching everywhere, a whole network of them. She could hear echoing spaces beneath and around her, chambers and tunnels and alcoves branching away forever. She caught occasional glimpses of the mole folk — a scrabbling limb or retreating rump, or smoothed over eye sockets gazing blindly.

Fear and dread filled her mind. But she had no choice but to go on.

Without warning she fell through a thin wall, and tumbled through into a crowded chamber. Babies instantly swarmed over her, biting and scratching.

This large chamber was crowded with children, miniature versions of the adults she had first glimpsed. The place stank overwhelmingly of blood and shit and milk and vomit. Struggling, she pushed the babies away. Almost all of them were female. Their soft, hot little bodies were somehow even more repulsive than the adults’. She turned and tried to clamber back up to the tunnel from which she had fallen.

But now adults came tumbling out of the tunnel. These newcomers did not retreat, as had those she had first encountered. These mole folk were soldiers, come to protect the birthing chamber from the intruder.

The first of the soldiers leapt at her, its digging claws extended. Remembrance raised her arm to protect her throat. Under the mole creature’s soft weight she fell back into the wriggling heap of infants.

The soldier was an adult, a female. But her breasts were as tiny as a child’s, her pudenda undeveloped. She was sterile. Nevertheless, squirming, biting, and scratching, she fought as ferociously as if her own children were at risk.

Remembrance might have succumbed to the soldier’s assault, but she got in a lucky kick. The heel of her foot caught the soldier just below her breastbone. The little creature went flying back, colliding with those who were trying to follow her, so they dissolved into a wriggling mass of limbs and claws.

Dimly making out a tunnel mouth on the far side of the chamber, Remembrance hurled herself that way. She went on all fours, wading through mewling infants.

But still the soldiers pursued her. She struggled on through the tunnels, selecting branches at random. She could not tell if she were climbing upward or deeper into the ground. But for now nothing mattered but to flee.

She broke through another wall, fell, landed on something hard, like a heap of rocks. No, not rocks — they were nuts, big heavy nuts, the nuts of the borametz tree. Stumbling further, she found an immense heap of seed and roots. This huge chamber was crammed full of food.

Still the soldiers came, swarming, snuffling.