Bestiary!

by Jack Dann

  The dancers swirled about them. For a single pure moment, life was bright and full and good. And then .. .

  A touch of cool air passed through the crowd. A chance movement, a subtle shifting of colors brought the Minotaur's eyes around to the door. A flash of artificial streetlight dazzled and was gone as the door swung shut.

  The Woman entered.

  She was masked in silver filigree, and her breasts were covered. Red silk washed from shoulder to ankle, now caressing a thigh, now releasing it. Her eyes were a drenched, saturated green. She walked with a sure and sensual authority, knowing the dancers would part for her. No one could mistake her for a mortal.

  The Minotaur was stunned. Chemical and hormonal balances shifted in preparation for the bonding to come. Nevertheless, his arms fell to his sides. With an angry squawk, the woman he had hoisted into the air leapt, arms waving, to avoid falling. The Minotaur did not notice. He stepped forward, eyes wide and helpless, toward the immortal.

  The silver mask headed straight for him. Green eyes mocked, challenged, promised.

  Behind him, unnoticed, the Harlequin slipped to the floor. He wrapped long fingers lovingly around a length of granite pipe, and brought it down, fast and surprisingly forcefully, into the back of the Minotaur's neck.

  Bright shards of light flashed before the Minotaur's eyes. The dance floor washed out and faded to white. He fell.

  At the Minotaur's direction, Yarrow led him out to the bluffs on the outskirts of the city. There was a plaza there, overlooking the ocean. He sent the child away.

  Though his every bone protested, he slowly crouched, and then carefully spread out a small white cloth before him. He was a beggar now.

  Salt breezes gusted up from the ocean, and he could feel the cobalt sky above, and the cool cumulus clouds that raced across the sun. There were few passersby, mostly dirt farmers who were not likely to be generous. Perhaps once an hour a small ceramic coin fell on his cloth.

  But that was how he preferred it. He had no interest in money, was a beggar only because his being demanded a role to play. He had come to remember, and to prepare himself for death by saying farewell to the things of life.

  Times had changed. There was a stone altar set in the center of this very plaza where children had been sacrificed. He had seen it himself, the young ones taken from their homes or schooling-places by random selection of the cruel Lords. They had shrieked like stuck pigs when the gold-masked priests raised their bronze knives to the noonday sun. The crowds were always large at these events. The Minotaur was never able to determine whether the parents were present or not.

  This was only one of the means the Lords had of reminding their subjects that to be human was often painful or tragic.

  "Let's not sleep the day away, eh? Time to start rehearsing.”

  The Minotaur awoke to find himself sprawled on the wooden floor of a small caravan. The Harlequin, sitting cross-legged beside him, thrust a jar of wine into his hand.

  Groggily, the Minotaur focused his eyes on the Harlequin. He reached for the man's neck. Only to find one hand taken up by the winejar. He squinted at it. The day was already hot, and his throat as dry as the Sevema. His body trembled from the aftereffects of its raging hormonal storm. He lifted the wine to his lips.

  Chemical imbalances shifted, found a new equilibrium.

  "Bravo!" The Harlequin hauled the Minotaur to his feet, clapped him on the back. "We'll be famous friends, you and I. With luck, we may even keep each other alive, eh?"

  It was a new idea to the Minotaur, and a disquieting, perhaps even blasphemous one. But he grinned shyly, and dipped his head. He liked the little fellow. "Sure," he said.

  The sun was setting. The Minotaur felt the coolness coming off of the sea, heard the people scurrying to their homes. He carefully tied the ceramics into his cloth, and knotted it onto his belt. He stood, leaning wearily on his staff. Yarrow had not yet come for him, and he was glad; he hoped she had gone off on her own, forgotten him, left him behind forever. But the city's rhythms demanded that he leave, though he had nowhere to go, and he obeyed.

  He went down into the city, taking the turns by random whim. He could not be said to be lost, for one place was as good as another to him.

  It was by mistake, though, that he found himself in a building whose doors were never shut, whose windows were not shuttered. He had entered, thinking the way yet another alley. No doors barred progress down halls or into rooms. Still, he felt closed in. The corridors smelled—there was the male stench and the female, and intermingled with them, almost overpowering, an insect smell, the odor of something large and larval.

  He stopped. Things stirred about him. There was the pat of bare feet on stone, the slow breathing of many people and—again—a sluggish movement of creatures larger than anything smelling thus should be. People were gathering; twelve, eighteen, more. They surrounded him. He could tell they were all naked, for there was not the whisper of cloth on cloth. Some walked as if they had almost forgotten how. In the distance, he thought he could hear someone crawling.

  "Who are you?" Panic touched him lightly; sourceless, pure.

  "Whrrarrwr," began one of the people. He stopped, swallowed, tried again. "Why are you in the Hive?" His voice sounded forced, as if he were unused to speech. "Why are you here? You are a creature of the old days, of the Lords. This is no place for you."

  "I took a wrong turn," the Minotaur said simply. Then, when there was no reply. "Who are you people? Why do you cohabit with insects?"

  Someone coughed and sputtered and made hacking noises. A second joined her, making the same sounds, and then others, and yet more. With a start, the Minotaur realized they were laughing at him. "Is it religious or political?" he demanded. "Are you seeking transcendence?"

  "We are trying to become victims," the speaker said.

  "Does that help you understand?" He was growing angry. "How can we explain ourselves to you, Old Fossil? You never performed a free act in your life."

  Some whim, then, of internal chemistry made him want these strangers, these creatures, to understand him. It was the same compulsion that had forced him to empty himself to the newshawks before Yarrow appeared to lead him out of the arena.

  "I had a friend, another immortal," the Minotaur said "Together, we cheated the patterning instinct by making our own pattern, a safe, strong one, we were like—" his short, powerful fingers joined, closing around the staff, intermeshing—"like this, you see. And it worked, it worked for years. It was only when our predators worked within the patterns we formed that we were destroyed." The words gushed out, and he trembled as the hormones that might give him the power to explain almost keyed in.

  But the communards did not want to understand. They closed in on him, their laughter growing sharper, with more of a bark, more of a bite to it. Their feeble footsteps paltered closer, and behind them the chitinous whine grew louder, was joined by that of more insects, and more, until all the world seemed to buzz. The Minotaur flinched back.

  And then they seemd to hesitate in confusion. They milled about uncertainly for a moment, then parted, and quick, small footsteps passed through them, ran to his side. A cool, smooth hand took his.

  "Come home with me," Yarrow said. And he followed.

  He dreamed of the arena that night, of the hot white sands underfoot that drank up his friend's blood. The Harlequin's body lay limp at his feet, and the bronze knife was as heavy as guilt in his hands.

  He trembled in aftershock as the programming chemicals cut off. The world blazed up around him, as if his eyes had just opened and he were seeing clearly for the first time. He stared at the encircling bleachers, and every detail burned into his brain.

  The people were graceful and well-dressed; they might almost have been the old Lords, deposed these many years ago in violent public revulsion. The Woman sat ringside.

  Her silver mask rested lightly on the lip of the white limestone wall, beside a small bowl of orange ices. She held a spoon in he
r hand, cocked lightly upward.

  The Minotaur stared into her blazing green eyes, and read in them a fierce triumph, an obscene gloating, a very specific and direct lust. She had hunted him out of hiding, stripped him of his protection, and chivvied him into the open. She had forced him to rise to his destiny. To enter the arena.

  Try though he might, the Minotaur could not awaken. If he had not known all this to be a dream, he would have gone mad.

  Waking, he found himself already dressed, the last bit of breakfast in his hand. He dropped it, unnerved by this transition. Yarrow was cleaning the kitchen walls, singing an almost tuneless, made-up song under her breath.

  "Why aren't you out being taught?" he demanded, trying to cover over his unease with words. She stopped singing. "Well? Answer me!"

  "I'm learning from you," she said quietly.

  "Learning what?" She did not answer. "Learning how to tend to a cripple? Or maybe how a beggar lives? Hey? What could you possibly learn from me?"

  She flung a wet cloth to the floor. "You won't tell me anything," she cried. "I ask you and you won't tell me." "Go home to your mother," he said.

  "I can't." She was crying now. "She told me to take care of you. She said not to come back until my task was done."

  The Minotaur bowed his head. Whatever else she might or might not be, the mother had the casual arrogance of an immortal. Even he could be surprised by it.

  "Why won't you tell me anything?"

  "Go and fetch me my stick."

  Bleak plains dominated the southern continent, and the Minotaur came to know them well. The carnival worked the long route, the four-year circuit of small towns running up the coast and then inland to the fringes of the Severna Desert.

  Creeping across the plains, the carnival was small, never

  more than eight hands of wagons and often fewer. But when the paper lanterns had been lit, the fairway laid out, the holographic woven canvases blazing neon-bright, they created a fantasy city that stretched to the edge of forever.

  The Minotaur grunted. Muscles glistening, he bent the metal bar across his chest. Portions of the audience were breathing heavily.

  It was the last performance of the evening. Outside the hot, crowded tent, the fairgoers were thinning, growing quieter. The Minotaur was clad only in a stained white loincloth. He liked to have room to sweat.

  Applause. He threw the bar to the stage and shouted: "My last stunt! I'll need five volunteers!" He chose the four heaviest, and the one who blushed most prettily. Her he helped up on the stage, and set in the middle of the lifting bench, a pair of hefty bouergers to either side.

  The Minotaur slid his head under the bench. His face emerged between the young woman's legs, and she shrieked and drew them up on the bench. The audience howled. He rolled his eyes, flared his nostrils. And indeed, she did have a pleasant scent.

  He dug into the stage with naked toes, placed his hands carefully. With a grunt, the Minotaur lifted the bench a handsbreadth off the floor. It wobbled slightly, and he shifted his weight in compensation. A surge—he was crouching.

  Sweat poured down the Minotaur's face, and ran in rivulets from his armpits. The tent was saturated with the sweet smell, redolent with his pheromones. He felt a light touch on his muzzle. The woman on the bench had reached down to caress his nose with quick, shy fingertips. The Minotaur quirked a half-grin on one side of his mouth.

  By the tent flap, the Harlequin lounged on a wooden crate, cleaning his toenails with a knife. They had a date with a sculptor after the show.

  The Minotaur awoke suddenly, reached out and touched the cloth laid out before him. There was nothing on it, though he distinctly remembered having heard ceramics fall earlier. He swept his hands in great arcs in the dust, finding nothing.

  Snickers and derisive jeers sounded from the stone in the plaza's center. Small feet scurried away—children running to deliver the swag to their masters. "Little snots," the Minotaur grumbled. They were an ever-present nuisance, like sparrows. He fell back into his daydreaming.

  The sculptor had had stone jugs of wine sent up. By orgy's end they were empty, and the women lay languid on the sheets of their couches. They all stared upwards, watching the bright explosion in space, like slow-blossoming flowers. "What do they hope to accomplish, these rebels?" the Minotaur asked wonderingly. "I can see no pattern to their destruction."

  "Why should a man like you—a real man—look any higher than his waist?" the sculptor asked coarsely. He laid a hand on the Minotaur's knee. His lady of the moment laughed throatily, reached back over her head to caress his beard.

  "I'd just like to know."

  The Harlequin had been perched on the wall. He leapt down now, and tossed the Minotaur his clothes. "Time we went home," he said.

  The streets were dark and still, but there were people in the shadows, silently watching the skies. The sidestreet cabarets were uncharacteristically crowded. They stopped in several on their way back to the carnival.

  The Minotaur was never sure at exactly what point they picked up the woman with skin the color of orange brick. She was from offworld, she said, and needed a place to hide. Her hands were calloused and beautiful from work. The Minotaur liked her strong, simple dignity.

  Back at the carnival, the Harlequin offered their wagon, and the woman refused. The Minotaur said that he would sleep on the ground, it didn't bother him, and she changed her mind.

  Still, he was not surprised when, some time later, she joined him under the wagon.

  had been driven from his mind, irretrievably burned away, even in dream. But he remembered the killing rage that drove the knife upward, the insane fury that propelled his hand. And afterwards he stood staring into the Woman's eyes.

  Her eyes were as green as oceans, and as complex, but easy to read for all that. The lusts and rages, the fears and evil, grasping desire that had brought them all to this point—they were all there, and they were ... insignificant. For the true, poisoned knowledge was that she was lost in her own chemical-hormonal storm, her body trembling almost imperceptibly, all-but-invisible flecks of foam on her lips. She had run not only him but herself as well, to the blind end of a tangled and malignant fate. She was as much a puppet to her programming as he or the Harlequin. All this he saw in a single lucid instant of revulsion.

  There, on the burning sands, he tore out his eyes.

  The newshawks vaulted the fence to get at him. His drama completed, he was fair game—for it might be he had fulfilled his true purpose and become that one out of a thousand immortals whose patterning instinct formed a new, a true and real myth.

  They probed, scanned, recorded—prodded to find the least significant detail of a story that might be told over campfires a thousand years hence, in theatrical productions on worlds not yet discovered, in uninvented media, or simply be remembered in times of stress. Trying to get in on a story that might have meaning to the human race as it grew away from its homeworld, forgot its origins, expanded and evolved and changed in ways that could not be predicted.

  They questioned the Minotaur for hot, grueling hours. The corpse of his friend began to rot, or perhaps that was only olfactory hallucination, a side effect of his mind telling his body that it had no further purpose. He felt dizzy and without hope, and he could not express his grief, could not cry, could not scream or rage or refuse their questions or even move away until they were done with him.

  And then a cool hand slipped into his, and tugged him away. A small voice said, "Come home, Papa," and he went.

  Yarrow was screaming. The Minotaur awoke suddenly, on his feet and slashing his stick before him, back and forth in pure undirected reaction. "Yarrow!" he cried.

  "No!" the child shrieked in anger and panic. Someone slapped her face so hard she fell. The sound echoed from the building walls. "Fuckpigs!" she swore from the ground.

  The Minotaur lurched toward her, and someone tripped him up, so that he crashed onto the road. He heard a rib crack. He felt a trickle of blood from
one nostril. And he heard laughter, the laughter of madwomen. And under that he heard the creaking of leather harness, the whirring of tiny pumps, the metal snicks of complex machinery.

  There was no name for them, these madwomen, though their vice was not rare. They pumped themselves full of the hormone drugs that had once been the exclusive tools of the Lords, but they used them randomly, to no purpose. Perhaps—the Minotaur could not imagine, but did not care—they enjoyed the jolts of power and importance, of sheer godlike caprice.

  He was on his feet. The insane ones—there were three, he could tell by their sick laughter—ignored him. "What are you doing?" he cried. "Why are you doing it?" They were dancing, arms linked, about the huddled child. She was breathing shallowly like a hypnotized animal.

  "Why?" asked the one. "Why do you ask why?" and convulsed in giggles.

  "We are all frogs!" laughed the second.

  Yarrow lay quietly now, intimidated not so much by the women's hyperadrenal strength as by the pattern of victim laid out for her. There were microtraces of hormones in the air, leaks from the chemical pumps.

  "She has interesting glands," said the third. "We can put their secretions to good use."

  The Minotaur roared and rushed forward. They yanked the stick from his hand and broke it over his head. He fell against the altar stone, hard, nearly stunning himself.

  "We need to use that stone," said a madwoman. And when he did not move away, said, "Well, we'll wait."

  But again the Minotaur forced himself to stand. He stepped atop the stone. Something profound was happening deep within him, something beyond his understanding. Chemical keys were locking into place, hormones shifting into balance. Out of nowhere his head was filled with eloquence.

  "Citizens!" he cried. He could hear the people at their windows, in their doorways, watching and listening, though with no great interest. They had not interfered to save Yarrow. The Lords would have interfered, and human society was still in reaction to the rule of the Lords. "Awake! Your freedom is being stolen from you!"