Work Text:
We are underside. We are in the tunnels, listening to the earth from beneath its skin. Sometimes it rumbles, sometimes it flexes its muscles and shakes. We sing to it then, through our pipes made of wood and bone. We tell the earth to be quiet, to cover us from the poison overside and keep us safe.
I am Nadet. I come from the tunnels, but there are moments in my dreams when I remember something different. I saw the sun everyday, and at night there were white spots in the sky and we called them stars, and two glowing things that got bigger and smaller, which we called moons.
Tonight I dream of a woman. She holds me close, and tells me how we once traveled through the stars, how they have names and pictures in them. "When I was a child," she says, "I searched for constellations. We have to make our own here, because these stars are not the same as mine."
I close my eyes as she speaks to me, and I imagine living in the sky. The stars would hum around us, I know. I would draw their pictures with my hands. They would speak their names to me and ask me to come play, but I would tell them I could not leave my mother.
When I wake up, I cannot remember how she was lost. She was not with the others who brought us into the earth, who carried us and hunted the diggers for meat and explored the tunnels until they fell down from weakness. They grew sick, their skin peeled and blood spilled out of their mouths. When they died, the ones who were left wrapped them in cloths and took the bodies away. But in the end, the ones who were left fell down too.
When I bled for the first time the sick ones were long gone.
I am old now. The others who came into the tunnels with me are few. I wake from my dreams and I look at their faces, and I know they remember what I do, the words for the sick ones and the lost ones -- mother, father, grown-ups. I know they remember the sick ones' faces were not like ours, and that they knew different stars.
We do not talk about these things in the open. Once we did, but we argued over what was shale and what was truth. Some came to blows because of it. I remember a boy, Forrest, who was killed when another boy shot him with a gun. We wrapped him in cloths like the sick ones, and put him in the earth.
After that we were silent. There is death in the memories. We could not let it leak out to touch us again.
But we are breakable now, old. Many of us have died without violence, by accident or illness.
The sick ones told us to stay in the underside. We did, the oldest ones hunting the diggers for food and exploring the tunnels as the sick ones had. Some began to go off in pairs, by themselves, and the girls' bellies grew round until they had babies. They screamed with the pain of it, and blood and water spilled out of them and into the earth.
Later, the younger ones did as they did. I mated with Peter, our hands and mouths touching each other until I felt warm and wanting. When he put himself inside me there was pain and blood, and I cried out, but then as he moved I began to feel the warmth and wanting again.
He whispered in my ear, "This is what our parents did to make us."
My belly grew round. There was pain as the baby left me, far more than there had been before. I screamed like the oldest ones had, and felt as though my body were splitting apart.
We became mother and father. The babies grew into children, and then into grown-ups, and some became mother and father like us and some were alone. Some died in accidents or of sickness, and we put them into the earth.
We have passed on to our children the only thing that is not shale, the only thing we all agree is truth. It is the name of the first death-bringers, those who drove us underside.
They are called Human. We know because the sick ones told us.
"They will come back one day," the sick ones said. "They will come back because they hate the Novans, and they want the planet for themselves. That is why they poisoned it."
We are afraid the sick ones spoke truth. The young men risk the poison of the overside sometimes and go up into it with the guns. They say no Humans have arrived yet.
We are afraid. We do not know where we will go if the Humans return. There is no more underside for us to run to. Only the earth is left.