Huddle. Part 1

STEPHEN BAXTER.

HUDDLE.

HIS BIRTH WAS VIOLENT. He was expelled from warm red-dark into black and white and cold, a cold that dug into his flesh immediately.

He hit a hard white surface and roiled onto his back.

He tried to lift his head. He found himself inside a little fat body, gray fur soaked in a ruddy liquid that was already freezing.

Above him there was a deep violet-blue speckled with points of light, and two gray discs. Moons. The word came from nowhere, into his head. Moons, two of them.

There were people with him, on this surface. Shapeless mounds of fat and fur that towered over him. Mother. One of them was his mother. She was speaking to him, gentle wordless murmurs.

He opened his mouth, found it clogged. He spat. Air rushed into his lungs, cold, piercing.

Tenderly his mother licked mucus off his face.

But now the great wind howled across the ice, unimpeded. It grew dark. A flurry of snow fell across him.

His mother grabbed him and tucked him into a fold of skin under her belly. He crawled onto her broad feet, to get off the ice. There was bare skin here, thick with blood vessels, and he snuggled against its heat gratefully. And there was a nipple, from which he could suckle.

He could feel the press of other people around his mother, adding their warmth.

He slept, woke, fed, slept again, barely disturbed by his mother's shuffling movements.

The sharp urgency of the cold dissipated, and time dissolved.

He could hear his mother's voice, booming through her big belly. She spoke to him, murmuring; and, gradually, he learned to reply, his own small voice piping against the vast warmth of her stomach. She told him her name -- No-Sun -- and she told him about the world: people and ice and rock and food. "Three winters: one to grow, one to birth, one to die..." Birth, s.e.x and death. The world, it seemed, was a simple place.

The cold and wind went on, unrelenting. Perhaps it would go on forever.

She told him stories, about human beings.

"...We survived the Collision," she said. "We are surviving now. Our purpose is to help others. We will never die..." Over and over.

To help others. It was good to have a purpose, he thought. It lifted him out of the dull ache of the cold, that reached him even here.

He slept as much as he could.

No-Sun pulled her broad feet out from under him, dumping him onto the hard ice.

It was like a second birth. The ice was dazzling white, blinding him. Spring.

The sun was low to his right, its light hard and flat, and the sky was a deep blue-black over a landscape of rock and scattered sc.r.a.ps of ice. On the other horizon, he saw, the land tilted up to a range of mountains, tall, blood-red in the light of the sun. The mountains were to the west of here, the way the sun would set; to the east lay that barren plain; it was morning, here on the ice.

East. West. Morning. Spring. The words popped into his head, unbidden.

There was an austere beauty about the world. But nothing moved in it, save human beings.

He looked up at his mother. No-Sun was a skinny wreck; her fur hung loose from her bones. She had spent herself in feeding him through the winter, he realized.

He tried to stand. He slithered over the ice, flapping ineffectually at its hard surface, while his mother poked and prodded him.

There was a sound of sc.r.a.ping.

The people had dispersed across the ice. One by one they were starting to scratch at the ice with their long teeth. The adults were gaunt pillars, wasted by the winter. There were other children, little fat b.a.l.l.s of fur like himself.

He saw other forms on the ice: long, low, snow heaped up against them, lying still. Here and there fur showed, in pathetic tufts.

"What are they?"

His mother glanced apathetically. "Not everybody makes it."

"I don't like it here."

She laughed, hollowly, and gnawed at the ice. "Help me."

After an unmeasured time they broke through the ice, to a dark liquid beneath.

Water.

When the hole was big enough, No-Sun kicked him into it.

He found himself plunged into dark fluid. He tried to breathe, and got a mouthful of chill water. He panicked, helpless, scrabbling. Dark shapes moved around him.

A strong arm wrapped around him, lifted his head into the air. He gasped gratefully.

He was bobbing, with his mother, in one of the holes in the ice. There were other humans here, their furry heads poking out of the water, nostrils flaring as they gulped in air. They nibbled steadily at the edges of the ice.

"Here's how you eat," No-Sun said. She ducked under the surface, pulling him down, and she started to graze at the underside of the ice, sc.r.a.ping at it with her long incisors. When she had a mouthful, she mushed it around to melt the ice, then squirted the water out through her big, overlapping molars and premolars, and munched the remnants.

He tried to copy her, but his gums were soft, his teeth tiny and ineffective.

"Your teeth will grow," his mother said. "There's algae growing in the ice. See the red stuff?"

He saw it, like traces of blood in the ice. Dim understandings stirred.

"Look after your teeth."

"What?"

"Look at him."

A fat old man sat on the ice, alone, doleful.

"What's wrong with him?"

"His teeth wore out." She grinned at him, showing incisors and big canines.

He stared at the old man.

The long struggle of living had begun.

LATER, THE LIGHT started to fade from the sky: purple, black, stars. Above the western mountains there was a curtain of light, red and violet, ghostly, shimmering, semi-transparent.

He gasped in wonder. "It's beautiful."

She grinned. "The night dawn."

But her voice was uneven; she was being pulled under the water by a heavy gray-pelted body. A snout protruded from the water and bit her neck, drawing blood. "Ow," she said. "Bull --"

He was offended. "Is that my father?"

"The Bull is everybody's father."

"Wait," he said. "What's my name?"

She thought for a moment. Then she pointed up, at the sky burning above the mountains like a rocky dream. "Night-Dawn," she said.

And, in a swirl of bubbles, she slid into the water, laughing.

Night-Dawn fed almost all the time. So did everybody else, to prepare for the winter, which was never far from anyone's thoughts.

The adults cooperated dully, bickering.

Sometimes one or other of the men fought with the Bull. The contender was supposed to put up a fight for a while -- collect scars, maybe even inflict a few himself -- before backing off and letting the Bull win.

The children, Night-Dawn among them, fed and played and staged mock fights in imitation of the Bull. Night-Dawn spent most of his time in the water, feeding on the thin beds of algae, the krill and fish. He became friendly with a girl called Frazil. In the water she was sleek and graceful.

Night-Dawn learned to dive.

As the water thickened around him he could feel his chest collapse against his spine, the thump of his heart slow, his muscles grow more sluggish as his body conserved its air. He learned to enjoy the pulse of the long muscles in his legs and back, the warm satisfaction of cramming his jaw with tasty krill. It was dark under the ice, even at the height of summer, and the calls of the humans echoed from the dim white roof.

He dived deep, reaching as far as the bottom of the water, a hard invisible floor. Vegetation clung here, and there were a few fat, reluctant fishes. And the bones of children.

Some of the children did not grow well. When they died, their parents delivered their misshapen little bodies to the water, crying and cursing the sunlight.

His mother told him about the Collision.

Something had come barreling out of the sky, and the Moon -- one or other of them -- had leapt out of the belly of the Earth. The water, the air itself was ripped from the world. Giant waves reared in the very rock, throwing the people high, crushing them or burning them or drowning them.

But they -- the people of the ice -- survived all this in a deep hole in the ground, No-Sun said. They had been given a privileged shelter, and a mission: to help others, less fortunate, after the calamity.

They had spilled out of their hole in the ground, ready to help.

Most had frozen to death, immediately.

They had food, from their hole, but it did not last long; they had tools to help them survive, but they broke and wore out and shattered. People were forced to dig with their teeth in the ice, as Night-Dawn did now.

Their problems did not end with hunger and cold. The thinness of the air made the sun into a new enemy.

Many babies were born changed. Most died. But some survived, better suited to the cold. Hearts accelerated, life shortened. People changed, molded like slush in the warm palm of the sun.

Night-Dawn was intrigued by the story. But that was all it was: a story, irrelevant to Night-Dawn's world, which was a plain of rock, a frozen pond of ice, people sc.r.a.ping for spa.r.s.e mouthfuls of food. How, why, when: the time for such questions, on the blasted face of Earth, had pa.s.sed.

And yet they troubled Night-Dark, as he huddled with the others, half-asleep.

One day -- in the water, with the soft back fur of Frazil pressed against his chest -- he felt something stir beneath his belly. He wriggled experimentally, rubbing the b.u.mp against the girl.

She moved away, muttering. But she looked back at him, and he thought she smiled. Her fur was indeed sleek and perfect.

He showed his erection to his mother. She inspected it gravely; it stuck out of his fur like a splinter of ice.

"Soon you will have a choice to make."

"What choice?"

But she would not reply. She waddled away and dropped into the water.

The erection faded after a while, but it came back. More and more frequently, in fact.

He showed it to Frazil.

Her fur ruffled up into a ball. "It's small," she said dubiously. "Do you know what to do?"

"I think so. I've watched the Bull."

"All right."

She turned her back, looking over her shoulder at him, and reached for her genital slit.

But now a fat arm slammed into his back. He crashed to the ice, falling painfully on his p.e.n.i.s, which shrank back immediately.

It was the Bull, his father. The huge man was a mountain of flesh and muscle, silhouetted against a violet sky. He hauled out his own p.e.n.i.s from under his graying fur. It was a fat, battered lump of flesh. He waggled it at Night-Dawn.

"I'm the Bull. Not you. Frazil is mine."

Now Night-Dawn understood the choice his mother had set out before him.

He felt something gather within him. Not anger: a sense of wrongness.

"I won't fight you," he said to the Bull. "Humans shouldn't behave like this."

The Bull roared, opened his mouth to display his canines, and turned away from him.