They heard rapid motion and crouched unbreathing while a stomper minced by up ahead. It had a white crest.
On and on, fatigue the whip for greater fatigue and salvation at the end of endurance. They passed wild humans. A statuesque woman with dull eyes and yellow hair to her ankles, placidly feeding. Babies big as four-year-old normals, by themselves, grazing on finger-shaped fungi. An enormous human, fourteen feet tall, fat-enfolded, too ponderous to stand even in low gravity, crawling through fungus beds. The man could not tell its sex.
On and on, sleep and eat and travel and sleep, darkness above or darkness below, outside of time. The stream lost, found again, sourcing out finally under a great rock. And there, lodged in a black sandbank, the man found a human thigh bone half his own height. He scoured off the water mold with sand. He was armed.
The man walked ahead clutching his thigh bone, and the woman followed. They slept clasped together naked all three, man, woman and thigh bone.
Stompers passed them and they crouched in sham feeding. The man prayed without words, both or neither. And hatred grew in him.
Snakes and giant slugs and the beautiful, gigantic, mindless wild humans, again and again, a familiar part of nightmare. The fat and truly enormous humans; and the man learned they had been male once. He remembered from far away where time was linear the voice of Grandfather Man: Some are beyond saving, and those they kill.
And a stomper passed, white crested, and far ahead a human voice cried out in wordless pain and protest. The man was minded to deviate from his line for fear of what they might see, but he did not. When they came on the boy, larger than the man but beardless and without formed muscles, the man looked at the tears dropping from the dull eyes and the blood dropping from the mutilation and killed him with the thigh bone. Some are beyond saving. And the hatred in him flamed to whiteness.
On and on, day above and day below in recurrent clash of lights. A white crested stomper paused and looked at them, crouched apart and trembling. The man felt the deepest, most anguished fear of all and beneath it, hatred surged until his teeth ached.
On and on. The man's stubble softened into beard, his hair touched his ears. On and on.
The land sloped upward and became rocky. The trees became smaller and wider spaced so that whole trunks were visible and the light of upper day descended. A patch of blue sky, then more as they ran shouting with gladness, and a bare mountain crest reared in the distance.