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.
She leapt to the far side of the chamber and dug herself in against the wall, behind a pile of the heavy seeds. She picked up nuts and hurled them as hard as she could. She could hardly miss, and she was rewarded by the crack of the heavy shells on those eyeless heads. There was whimpering and confusion as the front line of the soldiers pushed back into those who followed, trying to get away from this missile-throwing demon.
But not all the soldiers retreated. Several stayed at the mouth of the tunnel, hissing and spitting at her.
Remembrance, exhausted and battered, really didn’t care. She couldn’t get out of here, but the soldiers couldn’t get to her either. She stopped hurling the nuts.
She smelled dampness. She found a place in the earth wall behind her where a thin tree root pushed through. She had broken the root, and now it was dripping a thin, watery sap. She clamped the root to her mouth and began to suck down the sap. It was sweet, and it trickled over her parched throat. She found some tubers under the nut pile. In the near dark, she bit into sweet flesh, sating her hunger.
She lay down over what was left of her stolen roots, with heavy nuts grasped against her chest. Soon the hissing of the impotent soldiers seemed no more disturbing than the noise of a distant rainstorm. Her energy drained, shocked, bewildered, she actually dozed.
But there was movement in the chamber, scrabbling, slithering. Reluctantly she poked her head above the barrier of nuts. She saw mole folk moving around the chamber, but these were not soldiers. They seemed to have forgotten she was here. They were picking up nuts and passing them out of the chamber, into the tunnel entrance. She had no idea what they were doing. She didn’t have the intellectual capacity even to formulate the question. All that mattered was that they were no threat to her.
She slumped back into her improvised nest and, nibbling on a bit of root, fell asleep.
The mole folk’s underground way of life had started as a response to the aridity of this place — that and the usual ferocious predation. Even the rats couldn’t get you if you burrowed in the ground.
Of course there had been prices to be paid. People had shrunk, generation by generation, the better to fit into the growing complexes of burrows. And over time bodies had been shaped by the restrictions of tunnel life: useless eyes were lost, nails became digging claws, body hair evaporated save for vibrissae, whiskers, which sprouted from lengthening muzzles, the better to help them feel their way in the dark.
The aridity had also promoted cooperation.
The mole folk lived off roots and tubers, riches buried in the ground. But in the dryness the tubers grew large and widely spaced. It was better for the plants that way, because big tubers did not desiccate so easily. A solo mole person, however, burrowing away at random, was likely to starve long before stumbling across the scattered bounty. But if you were prepared to share what you found, then having many colony members digging in all directions brought a more likely chance of success for the group as a whole.
All posthumans were social, like their ancestors, but they specialized in the way they had developed that sociality. These mole folk had taken sociality about as far as you could go. They came to live like social insects, like ants or bees or termites. Or perhaps they were like naked mole rats, the peculiar hive-dwelling rodents that had once infested Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, now long extinct.
This was a hive. There was no conscious mind at work here in the hive. But then consciousness wasn’t necessary. The hive’s global organization emerged from the sum of the interactions of its members.
Most of the inhabitants of the colony were female, but only a few of those females were fertile. These “queens” had produced the infants Remembrance had stumbled upon in the birthing chamber. The rest of the females were sterile — indeed they never entered puberty — and their lives were devoted to the care not of their own children, but of those of their sisters and cousins.
For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened. The colony was one vast family, bound together by inbreeding. By ensuring the preservation of the colony, you could ensure that your genetic legacy was transmitted to the future, even if not directly through your own offspring. In fact, if you were sterile, that was the only way you could pass on your genes.
More sacrifices. As the bodies of these colony people had shriveled, so had their brains. You didn’t need a brain. The hive would take care of you — rather as the mouse-raptors took care of the elephant folk they farmed. There were better things to be done with your body’s energy than fuel an unnecessary brain.
And, with time, the mole folk were even giving up that most precious of all mammalian inheritances: hot-bloodedness itself. As they rarely ventured out of their burrows, the mole folk did not need such expensive metabolic machinery — and a cold-blooded scout cost less food than a hot-blooded one. It was done without sentiment. With time, the colony folk would grow smaller yet, smaller than any hot-blooded mammal’s design could maintain. In another few million years these mole folk would swarm like tiny lizards, competing with the reptiles and amphibians who had always inhabited the microecology.
So the mole folk scuttled through their spit-walled corridors, their whiskers twitching, fearful and ignorant. But in their dreams their residual eyes, covered by flesh, would flicker and dart as they dreamed strange dreams of open plains, and running, running.
She lost track of time. Suspended in the suffocating heat of the chamber, she slept, ate roots and tubers, sucked water from the tree roots. The mole folk left her alone. She was in there for days, not thinking, with no impulse to act save to eat, piss, shit, sleep.
At last, though, something disturbed her. She woke, looked up drowsily.
In the dim, diffuse light, she saw that mole folk were clambering into the chamber, and out again through a narrow passageway in the roof. They moved in a jostling column, the flaccid skin on their pale bodies crumpling as they pressed against each other, their whiskers twitching, clawed hands scrabbling.
Though the mouse-raptor and other dangers lingered at the back of her mind, Remembrance found herself longing for openness — for a glimpse of day, for fresh air, for green.
She waited until the mole folk had passed. Then she clambered over the low heapings of roots and pushed her way into the narrow breach in the roof.
It was a kind of chimney that led up toward a crack of purple-black sky. The sight of the sky drove her on, and she wedged her body ever more tightly into the narrow, irregular chimney, scrabbling at the dirt with her hands and feet, knees and elbows, forcing her chest and hips through gaps that seemed far too small for them.
At last her head broke above ground level. She took in great gulps of fresh air and immediately felt invigorated. But the air was cold. The twisted forms of the borametz trees occluded a star-laden sky. It was night, the most natural time for the mole folk to venture to the surface. She forced her arms out of the hole, got her hands onto the surface, and with a tree-climber’s strength she pushed herself upward, prizing her body out of the chimney like a cork from a bottle.