"Presently, little Molly Redcap knocked on the door. 'Who is it? inquired a gruff voice. At first the voice frightened her, but thinking her grandma might be ill she replied, 'I bring you potato bread and wine from my mother. Softly the voice replied, 'Come in, come in, you are welcome to come in. When she entered, Father Siluroyne hid himself under the heat sheet. 'Put the bread and wine in a fridge and come sit on the bed with me. Molly took off her mask and bottle and skipped over to the bed where she was much surprised at the change in her grandma."
The woman leant back with her hand over her mouth for a moment — already she was beginning to recognize the change of tone. When the boy glanced round at her impatiently, she continued:
"Grandma, what big motion sensors you've got."
"All the better to follow you wherever you go."
"Grandma, what a lot of eyes you've got."
"All the better to see you my little morsel."
"Grandma, what big teeth you've got."
"The very same I used to chew up your friend with the axe."
"Oh, please don't eat me. I'm a God-loving child!"
The woman glanced at the child on her knee, who was staring at the picture of the thing in the bed in wide-eyed fascination.
"I'm beginning to see a pattern here," said the woman.
" 'Underground' is misleading in a number of ways," Fethan explained as they trudged on out of the stand of flute grass onto drier ground cloaked with mosses, wild rhubarb and black plantains. "It makes you think of a singular secret resistance organization, when in fact it's the aim of most people there merely to survive — not to overthrow the Theocracy. You could also be misled into thinking the word has nothing to do with 'ground' and 'under' when in reality it has everything to do with those words." Fethan stabbed a finger downwards. "Below us there's about ten metres of loose and highly organic soil — the creation of millions of years of tricone burrowing and feeding. Below that is a layer of chalk over fifty metres thick — created by tricone shells sinking through the soil and slowly conglomerating and compressing." Fethan stopped and pointed towards some current movement in the damp ground that was shaking the big purplish leaves of the rhubarb and causing disc molluscs to drop from their undersides like scatterings of silver coins. The ground humped up, and briefly the spiked end of a tricone broke the surface before retracting. "Industrious little soil makers those. The inhabitants here could make a fortune exporting tricones — and the concomitant ecology — to Polity-run terraforming projects. Of course that'll never happen with the Theocracy in control."
"You were saying about the Underground," Eldene reminded him — part machine or not, Fethan did tend to ramble.
"Oh yeah." Fethan looked about himself, then led the way to where the ground rose beyond yet more flute grass. "Underneath the chalk you've got layers of limestone — which is probably the result of the tricone's distant ancestors — with occlusions of basalt and obsidian and other volcanic rocks. You know the geology of this place is fascinating."
"The Underground," Eldene reminded.
"Yeah, well, the water flow of this landmass is also fascinating. As it soaks down, it wears the limestone away, making caverns and underground rivers, till eventually reaching the deeps where it's heated by geo-thermal energy and pushed out again in hot springs, about fifteen hundred kilometres from here. There are cave systems down there that are thousands of kilometres long, some as big as space habitats — room for cities if you wanted 'em. That's the Underground, and that's where, over the last couple of centuries, your people went when they fled the Theocracy."
Through this second stand of flute grass they moved onto higher ground clad in blister mosses and the occasional tricone shell blued by algae. Eldene considered asking what basalt and obsidian were, and how big exactly was a space habitat, but her scole was now shivering against her body, she herself was beginning to pant, and the air tasted like iron in her mouth. They reached a bank, which they climbed, and looked around. To their right a mechanical digger stood tilted into the ground, its windows broken and its entire surface orange with rust. Ahead of them stretched row upon row of low twisted black trees with yellow leaves and a peppering of nodular green fruit, growing out of ground thick with vegetation so green it made Eldene's eyes ache.
"Grape trees," said Fethan.
Eldene already knew about grape trees: those strange plants producing the fist-sized fruits that were turned into wine for the Theocracy. She'd seen pictures of them on the labels of stubby bottles, and once tasted some of the wine stolen by a friend back at the city orphanage. She instead pointed down at the surrounding green vegetation and gasped, "What's that?"
"Grass," Fethan replied.
Eldene glanced back at the flute grass, then eyed the old man with suspicion.
Fethan indicated the flute grass. "That's a native plant so named because of a few similarities to this" — he pointed now at the verdancy below the trees — "which is the real thing. It's one of the plants brought by the fanatics who first came here to set up their colony two hundred years ago. It's real grass from Earth."
After negotiating the slope, they entered the orchard of grape trees. Feeling weak and drained, Eldene stumbled to one side and slumped with her back against one of the trees. It was time — she could not go on like this any more. With reluctance, she hinged up the mask of Volus's breather and took a deep breath. The surge of oxygen left her suddenly light-headed, and in a somewhat distracted state she stared down as Fethan squatted before her and pulled open her shirt. For a moment she thought to slap his hand away, as she had with some of the younger male workers who had become a bit too curious about the tightening of her shirt above her scole, but he was an. old man — and a machine — and he was helping her.
Her scole was now almost white, and had pushed away from her chest on its eight chitinous legs. Its head was still attached to her: pincers still hooked in and feeding tubules still imbedded in her flesh, but there was now some leakage of blood, and a white pus crusting under her breasts. Below the creature was a neat row of 'leaves' — a litter of five baby scoles born to leech blood. Back at the worksheds these would have been carefully removed and transported to the piggeries in the north, where they would be fattened up on pig's blood before being returned to be attached to a new worker.
"About done with, your scole," commented Fethan. "Combination of leafing and Volus hitting it with that stinger of his." While she stared in perplexity, he tugged off each of the leaves and tossed them to one side. "Fucking things," he muttered, then removed his own false scole and opened it up. From within this he removed a small flat pack, which he also opened to expose a sewing kit, and Eldene wondered what the hell he needed that for. She stared at the old man in puzzlement.
"Best we get it done now," said Fethan. "Dying ones sometimes don't detach cleanly, and if they leave bits of 'emselves in you that can cause problems." With that he reached down and took hold of Eldene's scole. Eldene yelled at the horrible ripping sensation, then yelled again when the pain hit her. Through eyes blurred by tears she saw Fethan standing with the scole gripped tightly before him, its legs kicking in the air, its pincers opening and closing, and its three feeding tubules waving like bloody fingers. Then, cast aside, it landed in the grass on its back. Eldene felt a sudden frisson of fear at seeing the thing detached and moving on its own like that. She then stared down in horror at the raw wound welling blood from her chest and, as well as pain, felt embarrassment at her own nakedness — not for exposure of her breasts, but of the area below where the scole had been attached. For more than half her life this thing had lived on her torso and now she felt incomplete without it. After Fethan threaded a needle and stooped to sew together the ragged edges of the wound left by the scole, she turned her head away from such intimate work and wished she could faint from the pain.