The Last Hour of Gann

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 u

…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 tu

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 tu

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 co

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 tu

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.

Water burbled up inside it. He could see the ripples of movement, feel the change in weight when he lifted the flask again. Slowly, he poured it out into the puddle, then filled it again and poured it out once more. Again. Again. On his not-quite human face, a fairly-human expression of deep and pensive stillness grew.

This was useful. This was very useful.

There were no natural predators in the tu

The fever came in many forms, and every form was terrible. Fever might touch one of them and linger for days and days, or it might rip through all of them and be gone again almost at once. It could kill a man or let him live, chill his blood, take his sight or his hearing, gnaw his guts or his bones, or simply leave and do nothing at all. If it touched a child, that child died so often that sometimes the grieving mother went ahead and carried the limp and shivering body to the Pit and pitched it in as soon as the fever was identified. Flicker would have done that—twice—when little Glow caught the fever, had Pool not stopped her.

It was the sort of thing that made the others nervous, him stopping her. Bent Thumb never would have. Yes, he was leader, but Flicker was Glow’s mother. Pool had seen her born, yes, and many was the day he had spent crouched around that squirming, squeaking infant and nuzzling at her soft, round head, but that didn’t mean anything. All the same, when he’d seen Flicker take a dragging grip on little Glow’s unresisting ankles, he had not only leapt in front of her, but had slapped both hands down on the thick furs between them over and over until Flicker retreated and allowed Pool to crawl over the small girl’s body and press his own close.