Womb of the New World
Chapter 3
Do you feel me coming? Does your wet, swollen flesh tighten in knowledge of me? Your body was made to bend beneath mine. Oh, sweeting, I can hardly wait.
I wash clothes once a week in my rounds, and above the boiling vat of lye and water, I stir and work the long wooden pole, pushing the clothes.
There are calluses on my fingers from beginning this task years ago as a girl, and it has made my upper body firm without losing the lushness our men prefer. I am heavily curved, like my mother, with childbearing hips. My father has often commented I’ll bear him many grandchildren one day.
But today, my mind is not on grandchildren or laundry. I stare off into the tunnels, feeling as though I hear voices but knowing there are none down here where I am. The lye makes a foul smell that we keep away from our main trails.
A footstep grinds on the dirt floor and I lean hard against the pole and turn back to look. In the dim light totters an old crony, staring at me from one eye, the other covered with a dirtied cloth.
“You smell of sex, girl,” she hisses, and I stand up ramrod straight in my damp breeches and tunic and scowl.
“Luna, stop it. I am not in the mood today.”
She’s the woman who makes herbs and potions for our damo. She used to know my mother, which is why I tolerate her far more than I would normally.
“You are always in the mood. I can smell it wherever you are. Something is wrong with you, girl.”
I stare hard at her, then look away, shrugging.
“Perhaps it’s just a sign I need to marry and have children. I’ve been avoiding it.”
“You smell like your mother.” She gives me a wide, nasty grin and peers up at me with one black, gleaming eye. She has always looked cruel, and in this moment I found her to be her ugliest.
“What are you talking about?” I can’t tolerate her standing so close to me with that look in her eye, so I jump off the platform and stalk away, feeling restless and hot again. Working all day down here hasn’t helped my mood – I want to run, or fuck, or play. I can’t sit still.
“Seven years ago,” Luna says craftily, turning to keep that baleful eye on me, “your mother started to smell like sex. Day and night, she mounted your father, but she couldn’t stay spent. They went out on an expedition, yes, and she never came back.”
“Stop lying, Luna. Women don’t go on expeditions.”
“Some do. She did. She insisted.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I turn and frown at her, willing her to leave, but she won’t. Instead, she creeps closer, and it takes all my strength of will not to back away as she rounds the vat and its platform, moving toward me.
“You smell like your mother, little Imogenne. I wonder if you’ll run away, too?”
Hours later I am rethinking the story from Luna over and over in my mind. I was young, and my father had told me that my mother had been taken from the upper tunnels by one of the Wrok slaves, kidnapped for their ill uses. I had always believed him.
Part of me didn’t want to believe Luna at all. But I have a faint memory of my mother from those days, wild-haired, tall, and forceful. She was not a weak woman. Had she run away deliberately? Why would she have done such a thing? What about those she loved left behind, underground?
We began hunting nearly two centuries after the Fallout. We cannot always father a child by our own females. We cannot depend on them to help us save our own kind. They are as likely to kill their own children as to willingly birth them.
My previous Wrok Lord Avgur, older and wiser than I, came across one in the second century after the Fallout. She was hunting and gathering with her clan in the southern mud pits that were once Antarctica. Her entire clan went into a panic and dragged her with them, but she fell down confused and disoriented. They left her, returning to their burrows, and I followed my lord, walking with him toward her.
There was a strange moment in which she stared at him as one who sees something they don’t understand – blankness, not fear. And then she began trembling, but could not manage to lift herself and run.
“You are different,” came the dark voice of my lord, one of the very first of our generation. He gestured that I stay back as he approached her. The closer he came, with his peeling, mottled face and a slender sensor that extended from between his eyes, the more she trembled, until her eyes rolled up into her head, and she went unconscious.
He told me afterward, when he had kept her hidden for months, that she was something very, very special he had not expected to ever truly exist. I had asked him to elaborate, and he’d grown very quiet.
“Brother,” he began, “What I tell you has the power to destroy our kind. Wars were fought so easily over our ownership; the rest of the world is hanging by a thread.”
I had watched him pacing, clawed hands clasped behind his back as he spoke.
“There was once an experiment, by a Hermann V. Lodenz, working with the Biomedical Institution of New York. They attempted to breed human clones with biomachines. If a biomachine can be bred into a perfect symbiosis, a human clone with biomechanical improvements, more human than machine, more durable than human – we could make a new human race, potentially. Not just machines that are partially human, but humans that are partially machines.”
The statement made me start. “That’s madness. We’re two separate species, and one’s entirely artifical. Inorganic.”
“But what if you could truly merge the organic and inorganic? What if it were possible? They began their experiments with female clones so that they could try biomechanical procreation. The federal government discovered it, and they were shut down. But what if they did not stop their experiments?”
“What are you saying?”
He passed a hand over his warped face, more humanoid that most of us, and grumbled a sigh.
“I distinctly remember a controversy over a symbiotic relationship between male biomachines and female clones. Our minds are no longer what they once were, and we do not have the advanced means – but we can try to find these women. They are a life source for us. Do you understand?”
I did. I stared at him for a long moment. “Have you been withholding anything else?”
“She is with child.”
“What?” I moved toward him swiftly, and he raised a large arm to block me, warning me that he would hurt me if necessary. I snarled at him. “Explain yourself, lord!”
“Yoevin, we mated. The mindless state you saw her in – is a reaction to some chemical in my body. What, I don’t know, but when I visited her again and again, I saw she reacted only slightly to our immediate cousins, and most of all, to me. I think it is something to do with my age. I practiced speaking with her. Half the time she made no sense, but I eventually learned her language.”
“How did you mate with her?” I demanded. There was a panic in my throat, a horrible desire to throttle him for the answer. The answer seemed all-important, beyond life or death, and these details did not matter to me.
“Be calm, brother, I will tell you. One night, I fell asleep in talking with her – I had been out hunting earlier that day, and forgot myself. When I awoke, she was touching me, exploring my flesh with curiosity, not revulsion. When she saw me, she tried to run, but I held her. I smelled her. She was aroused, and her arousal further aroused me.”
“Did you take her then?” I heard the rage in my voice and struggled to squash it.
“No. I put her away from me. There was something in her eyes, something strange and – I did not understand it. I do not understand it. But after several nights she wanted to sit closer to me. I found it harder to keep her from me. She wanted to arouse me, deliberately responded to me in ways our own females – our females never do.”
He stopped, striding to the arch of his stone balcony and staring out at the night as he spoke.
“She began to deliberately provoke me. We could speak, now, everything – everything was a challenge. Eventually – I do not know which of us began it – but we took one another, as animals, beyond the unwilling bodies of our females. She – went mad for whatever the chemical is, for I can’t imagine her desire for my physical appearance. Her breasts were so large and soft, so unlike our women … I am large, I imagined I would hurt her –“
“And?” My voice shook, and I didn’t know if it was with rage or fear.
Avgar stood staring out at the reddened sky and the cracked mountainsides before he spoke again, voice whisper-soft.
“I am large, Yoevin, we are all – unnatural in our shape, our entire forms. Her … body … her womb … seemed never-ending. There was no limit. She opened wholly, and she … seemed to take endless pleasure in it. I did, as well.”
He pressed his hand to the wall and leaned there for a moment before turning back to look at me, his black eyes confused and torn.
“There must be others like her. I do not know what the consequences will be, but I know that her belly fills with child more each day. We have no idea what she will birth. We can only wait, and protect her. And find more. We must find more.”
My first urge after this tale was to find the female and mate with her. The knowledge of a female of this sort, when in my body was the memory of rutting with a true human female – it was too much. But I knew that to cross Avgar would mean death. I respected him. I loved him. I stayed away.
She held the child for 13 months, and birthed it in a painful, bloody ritual of screaming and rending. We were all there to watch her wail and beg in the middle of our courtyard. We ignored her cries - it was a miracle to us. We were birthing a new generation.
The child was born in a sac – one of our slaves tore it open, shaking and frightened. The creature inside was obsidian, no hint of either parent in its makeup. Its eyes, ears, and mouth were wet slits, its limbs folded in on one another. A pair of wings hung in a dark slime against its back.
But it began to grow quickly. His mother named him Tavni. She said it meant dark path. Avgar thought it as apt a name as any. Within two years he was the size of an adult Wrok, but his features were softer, smoother, and paler; he grew hair, where we had none. He did not rot, he did not carry disease. He was a miracle, but a fragile one. He came with wide, pupil-less eyes, and a long tongue that could reach out and flicker a dewdrop from the air. But we could do nothing with a male – we needed viable wombs.
The woman, his mother, was murdered by a jealous Wrak only a few months after she gave birth to him. There are only a few thousand of us, and the females did not like being usurped by a human. Lord Avgar, in attempting to take revenge upon the Wrak who had killed her, lost his sight in one eye and tore his left shoulder.
In the decades that passed, he grew distant from us all, as though he were longing for something, but none of us knew what.
He, my mentor, had given us proof. We used his wisdom and our persistence to find any female we could. Our future depended on it.
Seven years ago, he found another viable human female. This one did not lose her senses at the sight of him but instead spit at him and stood proud. Knowing her language, he challenged her, and taking us all by surprise, he took her tightly in his arms and jettisoned off into the sky, not returning for weeks.
When he returned, it was to me as I patrolled our grounds, observing the slaves at their nighttime work of harvesting water from the desert wells.
“Brother,” came his voice, low and melancholy, and I stopped where I was, turning to face him.
“You’re a thief,” was my first response, but instead of striking him, I stared at him silently. He had forever cursed us to be potential enemies to one another by his actions.
“I name you my successor, Yoevin. I cannot return to this … place. I can no longer live this life.”
“Where are you going? Why do you leave us?”
“The first female … I do not know what it was, but she … we needed one another, in some way. In her absence … I was at a loss. I did not know how to return to what I was. She changed me.”
“You make no sense.”
“There is an old concept, you know the old concept.”
We didn’t say it, but we both knew the word. A human word, one our kind had never used.
“It is impossible for you to feel such a thing. It is irrational.”
“Who can claim rationality or not? Who can define what we are in this new age?”
“You are leaving your own species for a frail human?”
“She is different. My … our … bodies are different than the first. I don’t know, perhaps every mating will be different, or she … is different. I did not want to take another, Yoevin, you know that I gave them all to our cousins. But this one – I could not … I could not leave her to their hands. I stood there looking down at her and knew I could not.”
“What are you doing, Avgar?” My words left my mouth in a choking sneer.
“She is mine!”
He strode forward and struck me full across the face, hissing the words. The attack drew blood, the side of my face burning. It pushed me to wild anger, our natures rising, blind rage erupting, and I howled and attacked him.
We rolled and scratched, bit and tore, until, bloody and triumphant, I sat atop him. Blood seeped from a gash alongside his throat.
“A worthy fight, for a leader,” he wheezed, and I cursed and rose from him, turning away.
“You’re a coward. You can’t simply turn your back on your people.”
“I want her, only her. If we have offspring, I don’t want them here. I want to protect her, and guard her. Her kind will take her from me, as would all of you. But she is mine. I will not risk another loss. I am sorry you cannot see this … but perhaps you’ll find your own, in time.”
The last of his words hung in the air, soft and raw with sorrow. By the time I turned to see him go, he had gone.