The Soul Eater

by Mike Resnick

  The results were startling. The Horndemon did a complete backflip in the air, hit the ground with a resounding thud, shook its head vigorously, floundered once, and then began emitting the same hollow hooting noise Lane had heard the previous day. Suddenly its eyes fell on Lane again, and it staggered up and charged across the intervening ground with a swiftness that Lane hadn't expected in so large a creature. He dropped the screecher and picked up and fired the imploder all in one motion. The Horndemon gave one surprised grunt and turned to jelly in midcharge.

  “I wasn't kidding when I said they were hard to kill,” said the Mariner, still leaning against his tree.

  “You were awake?” said Lane, startled by his voice.

  “Yep. I just wanted to see what kind of hunter I'd hooked up with, so I kept quiet and watched.”

  “You've already been on two hunts with me,” said Lane. “What did you plan to do if the damned thing charged while I was sleeping?”

  “Shoot it with my own screecher,” said the Mariner. “You'd have been awake before it got around to doing anything serious. By the way, why'd you kill it with the imploder? You could have jumped behind the tree and kept the screecher on.”

  “We couldn't have loaded this one into the ship,” said Lane. “Even if the screecher killed it I'd have turned the imploder on the carcass.”

  “Tough bastards, aren't they?” said the Mariner, looking at what little remained of the Horndemon.

  “Yes, they are,” said Lane. “I've had creatures survive the screecher for a while, but they've always tried to run away from it. This is the first tune I ever saw an animal run right into the sound waves that are scrambling his brain. I don't think he was disoriented, either; just mean and tough. I don't see being able to kill one with a screecher in much less than a minute, and probably it'll go closer to ninety seconds. That means I'll have to get within about seventy-five yards. Any closer and I might have to use the imploder if it charges; much farther and it could run out of the screecher's effective range.”

  “Beautiful things, screechers,” said the old man. “Stand in front of one and it burns out half your brain circuits; fire it and you don't even hear a hum.”

  “The Horndemon didn't hear anything either. He just felt it” Lane stood up, picked up his gear, took one last look at the remains of the Horndemon, and turned to the Mariner. “We might as well get started. The next Horndemon I kill I want to take back with me.”

  They reached the floor of the crater in less than five hours. Then, with between eight and nine hours of sunlight left, the hunt began in earnest.

  Lane found his first Horndemons in a grove of fruit trees about four hundred meters from the crater wall. It took him almost an hour to isolate one of them from its four companions, but he finally accomplished it and fired the screecher at a distance of eighty yards. This Horndemon reacted even more violently than the one on the rim had done; finally it saw Lane and raced toward him, collapsing less than the length of its body from Lane's feet.

  Lane immediately turned to look at the other four. Two had fled into the denser forest behind the grove, one was staring at him, and one was approaching. He debated killing the nearer one with the imploder and going after the second one with the screecher, but decided to see if he could keep both of them intact. He dispatched the nearer of the Horndemons without much difficulty, and still the other made no motion.

  “It's like shooting fish in a barrel, to borrow an old expression,” said Lane to the Mariner, who was standing a short distance behind him. “No one has ever hunted them before; they don't know enough to be scared.”

  He walked toward the remaining Horndemon. He was just about to aim the screecher when the creature charged down upon him without a sound. Lane was surprised but unexcited. He took careful aim and fired the screecher at thirty yards. The Horndemon fell to its knees for an instant, but almost immediately regained its feet. Lane kept the screecher trained on it. The Horndemon kept coming, but was staggering now, and Lane jumped nimbly aside at the last instant. Then the beast's eyes fell on the Mariner, and it lowered its horns and charged the old man.

  Lane dropped the screecher and fired the imploder. The beast was so close to the Mariner when it died that Lane had to help him out from under what remained of it.

  “Thanks, Lane,” said the Mariner, gasping for breath.

  “Go to hell, old man!” snapped Lane. “From now on you hold the imploder and keep at least a hundred yards behind me. And God help you if we have to turn another Horndemon into putty.”

  He went back to the two usable corpses and applied the preservative. This done, he walked over to the remains of the third carcass and had the Mariner use the imploder on it again, until nothing but liquid remained. Lane stood there until it had all seeped into the soft ground.

  “What was that for?” asked the Mariner.

  “The Horndemons don't know that another predator has set up housekeeping here,” said Lane. “Why leave any hints?”

  “What about the other two carcasses?”

  “The preservative will kill any odor, and from the way these creatures are built, I'd guess they'll believe their noses before their eyes.”

  Lane killed three more Horndemons in late afternoon, then set up camp at the base of the crater wall, surrounding the area with a number of warning devices. None were triggered, and the next day he killed seven more of the beasts.

  By the third day they had become more cautious, and he changed his base of operations, moving to the far side of the crater, some nine miles distant. Here he downed eight more Horndemons in the next two days before he found it expedient to move again.

  By the morning of the sixth day he had filled his order, and, hardly feeling like a heroic hunter, he returned to the Deathmaker, awoke the Mufti, picked up his Horndemons, and prepared himself for an uneventful six weeks in space while the Mariner chased after his elusive dream.

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  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  A week passed. Then another, and a third.

  The Deathmaker had passed Pinnipes, gone to the end of the dust cloud, and begun its trek back. There was no sign of the Starduster.

  The ship passed half a dozen stars, then twenty more. It shot in and out of the cloud, it sought out the few charted black holes, it set off an occasional flare. There was no response.

  “Looking for a needle in a haystack would be easy compared to this,” said Lane as the two of them were relaxing over a meal. “It's a damned big galaxy, Mariner, and a damned small beast.”

  “He's around somewhere,” said the Mariner with conviction. “I'm an old, crippled man, Lane, and that bit of mountain climbing on Ansard IV didn't do me any good. But if there's a God anywhere in the cosmos, He's not going to let me die without getting a good close look at the Starduster. I've been too many places, seen too many strange things, to not be vouchsafed another look at the strangest thing of all.”

  “First we've got to find it,” said Lane. “Then you can look to your heart's content.”

  “We'll find him, all right,” said the Mariner.

  “You've got three weeks left,” said Lane, rising from the table and walking over to his hammock.

  It didn't take three weeks, or even two. It took precisely eleven days, two hours and thirty-five minutes.

  “Well, I'll be damned,” said Lane, scanning his instrument panel. “Either there's a ship out there going no place in particular, or else we've caught up to your Starduster after all.”

  He stepped aside and let the old man look at the panel. The Mariner tried a spectroscopic analysis and came up with a blank.

  “It's him, all right,” he said, his eyes alight with excitement. “Pure energy, and damned near as big as a neutron star.”

  “You didn't get that description from our sensing equipment,” said Lane.

  “He's a giant, that one,” said the Mariner. “Get close enough and he'll blot out the stars.”

  “A littl
e less bad poetry and a little more navigation,” said Lane, having the computer plot a pair of courses that would allow the Deathmaker to intersect the creature's path and choosing the less direct one.

  Lane tracked the creature on his panel while the Deathmaker began eating up the distance between them. It was moving along in an unhurried fashion, very much like the last time he had seen it. They were still about two hours from the intersection point when the creature changed its course.

  “Think he's trying to get away from us, Lane?” asked the Mariner.

  “I doubt it,” said Lane. “It probably doesn't even know we're here yet. Besides, why should it try to evade us?”

  “Maybe he knows we've got a killer on board,” said the Mariner.

  “Let's not endow it with too many paranormal abilities just yet,” said Lane. “Besides, we just want to look at it, not kill it.”

  “Maybe he doesn't know the difference,” said the Mariner. “And once we get close enough, maybe you won't know the difference either.”

  “I don't mind the fact that you borrowed your name from the Ancient Mariner,” said Lane, “but I sure as hell wish you wouldn't try so hard to sound like him.” He turned back to the computer, fed in the creature's new coordinates, and changed the ship's course accordingly.

  Another ninety minutes passed uneventfully, and then Lane activated the ship's viewing screens.

  “If it'll just get out of the cloud for a minute, we ought to be able to see it,” said Lane. “From this distance it'll probably look like a very bright star, but it ought to be pulsating a bit and moving like all hell.”

  They waited, their eyes shifting from the panel to the screen and back again, but the creature showed no inclination to leave the dust cloud.

  “We're getting close now,” said Lane at last. “Maybe we can scare it out of there.”

  He took over manual control of the Deathmaker and got to within about eight thousand miles. The creature still remained within the cloud, and he fired one of his laser cannons.

  “Don't kill it before I get to see it!” yelled the Mariner.

  “It's going to take something more than a laser to kill that, thing,” said Lane. “I'm just trying to prod it out into the open.”

  The creature came to a complete stop, and Lane found himself within a thousand miles before he could bring the Deathmaker to a halt. He could see just the hint of the Starduster now, a section of the cloud that seemed to glow faintly.

  “I don't like this,” said Lane. “The damned animal ought to be doing something.”

  He began moving in again, stopping at five hundred yards. His hands were moist, and his left eyelid began to itch. He inched the ship forward.

  “Damn it!” he muttered. “Why doesn't it move?”

  “You're shaking like a leaf, Lane,” said the Mariner with a hysterical laugh.

  “You don't look all that relaxed yourself,” shot back Lane, looking at the sweat-drenched old man.

  They remained thus, motionless, spaceship and space beast. Lane suddenly became aware of the fact that he was indeed trembling, just as the Mariner had said. It upset him. In a quarter century of hunting and killing he had been in his share of tight scrapes, and usually he became calmer as the situation grew more tense. Now he found himself fighting a blind panic deep within himself, an urge to turn tail and run as quickly as possible.

  With an enormous effort of will he forced his hand back to the acceleration controls and began approaching the creature once again. The Mariner strapped himself into a chair and pressed hard against its back, his face ashen, his hands in a deathgrip on the chair's arms.

  The creature began retreating, and finally burst from the cloud into open space. The Deathmaker followed it a few seconds later, and the two men got their first good look at it. It was shaped like an irregular sphere, glowing a dullish red-orange and constantly fluctuating in intensity. There seemed to be no sensory organs and no means of motive power, though it was obvious that the creature was completely aware of its surroundings and quite capable of leaving them at will. It was large, perhaps seven miles in diameter, although its dimensions changed minutely with each fluctuation in its color. Lane couldn't even begin to guess how it ate, what it ate, how it reproduced, or even if it reproduced. He suspected that it didn't. It could have been a year old, or a century, or as old as the galaxy; there was a timelessness about it that made such speculation seem both futile and unnecessary. It hung in space, an enormous, pulsating, living thing of pure energy, awesome in its size and the potential of its power.

  “Well,” said Lane, “was it worth waiting for?”

  “Magnificent!” whispered the Mariner. “He's everything I knew he'd be.”

  “Let's see if we can't make it jump a little bit and figure out how it moves,” said Lane.

  He turned the ship's molecular imploder on the creature, but it had no visible effect.

  “Figures,” muttered Lane. “The damned thing hasn't got any molecules.”

  He still had an occasional frenzied impulse to flee, but he found it easier to control himself, now that the creature was drifting a little farther away.

  “What's he doing out there, Lane?” asked the Mariner.

  “Damned if I know,” said Lane. “Sizing us up, probably; just what we're doing to it. It's beautiful, isn't it?”

  They both looked at the creature in the viewscreen—and as they did so, it stopped drifting away and began approaching them.

  “Two choices,” said Lane with a coolness he didn't feel. “We can run, or we can see if the vibrator will keep it at arm's length.”

  “Let's run,” said the Mariner.

  Lane wanted to run, too, wanted to run so badly that he forced himself to stay. He wasn't ussed to fear, was greatly troubled by it, and decided the only way to conquer it was to meet it head-on. He wasn't even thinking about the creature approaching the ship. His sole, concern was defeating the secret demon that had suddenly been unleashed inside himself.

  He moved his hand to the vibrator—a radio-frequency ship-size screecher—and fired a blast into the creature.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Lane and the Mariner screamed simultaneously. The old man collapsed in a heap, but Lane managed to keep his balance if not his senses. All the fear and apprehension he had felt vanished, to be replaced with something else, something strange and alien and painful that threatened to tear his consciousness to pieces.

  Solely from instinct he kept the vibrator trained on the creature and maneuvered the ship back into the dust cloud. Then he stood, motionless and unblinking, for the better part of ten minutes before his faculties returned to him.

  He checked the viewscreen, but saw nothing except dust. The sensor panel couldn't come up with anything at first, but finally pinpointed an object that had to be the creature, racing away at near-light speed.

  “Wake up, Mariner,” said Lane, walking over to the old man and shaking him.

  There was no response.

  He put his head to the Mariner's chest, trying to find a heartbeat. There wasn't any.

  He opened the old man's eyes. The pupils didn't respond to light. There was no pulse, no sign of breathing.

  “Well, at least you saw it before you died,” said Lane. He lifted the corpse over his shoulder, walked to an airlock, and deposited the body there. A moment later it was floating through space, a deformed hulk that had once been a man.

  He shook his head, still dazed by whatever it was that had affected him. Then he went back to his panel, located the fleeing creature, and computed two courses—one in pursuit of the creature, and one to Northpoint.

  He stared at them for a long time. Then, finally, he laid in the course for home, while deep inside him, almost unnoticed, a tiny voice screamed in agony and outrage.

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  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  “Impossible!” said Tchaka.

  “Why?” demanded Lane. “Because you n
ever saw one before?”

  “Because nobody ever saw one before!” said Tchaka.

  They were sitting, drinks in hand, in Tchaka's chart shop. Covering every wall were maps of Northpoint, Northpoint's solar system, the galaxy, and a score of rarely seen worlds, some of them still thought to be figments of the cartographers’ imaginations. One counter, looking like a huge wine rack, was filled with row upon row of rolled maps and charts, while all across the enormous chamber were bookcases and tapeholders stocked with ancient and semi-ancient maps. Hanging down in the center of the room was a large, meticulously detailed chandelier with hundreds of exact topographical representations of Earth and other human abodes. Numerous other globes, some hard and metallic, some shiny and sparkling like Tchaka's left eye, and a few made of materials entirely unknown to Lane, were placed artistically throughout the room.

  “But we know empaths exist!” said Lane.

  “No one has ever reported a sending empath before,” said Tchaka. “Every race of empaths we've run across just receives.”

  “Well, maybe empath is the wrong word, then,” said Lane. “But I'm telling you, Tchaka the damned thing sends out its own emotional impulses. Whenever I got too near it I was so scared I actually trembled.”

  “I would have been scared, too,” said Tchaka. “So what?”

  “Dammit, you don't understand!” snapped Lane. “I've never felt like that in my life.”

  “You never saw anything like the Dreamwish Beast in your life,” said Tchaka.

  “That has nothing to do with it. Hell, when I hunt Baffle-divers I use myself for bait in an ocean where the visibility is just about nil. That doesn't frighten me. More than once I've been ripped up by animals on unpopulated worlds with no one around to help me, and that never frightened me. But suddenly here I was, armed to the teeth in the Deathmaker, and I started shaking like a leaf.”