Deathbeast

by David Gerrold

  Something was tugging at her hair.

  Something was caught in a tangle and trying to pull loose.

  The sensation existed as if at the bottom of a tunnel. She was aware of it without awareness. (She merely existed—without ego—and without ego, she had no knowledge of ego -death. Survival was ... something else; she existed and she accepted that; if she stopped existing, she would accept that too. She didn’t feel threatened because she couldn’t conceive of... whatever it was that a threat implied. Pain was discomfort, but it was only more information about the state of the universe—it was accepted

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  as equally as the absence of pain. It existed, she existed. Nowhere was there the thought that she might act to change either of these conditions.) So the sensation existed without judgment, and she accepted it. Something was tugging at her hair. She wondered what it was. She opened her eyes. She blinked. She raised her head and looked. Something went “Peep!”

  It was hanging onto her hair, something furry, one foot caught—it fell free and bounced, skittered back against a rock, looking for a crevice. There wasn’t one— it stopped and turned and stared at her; its eyes were too large for its head, like shiny black buttons pinned onto a tiny stuffed mouse. They were little saucers, blinking wetly as the creature waited to see what she would do.

  She stared back at it, and she said “Oh,” in understated surprise. Her knuckles brushed her lips, she didn’t notice.

  It made a decision, “Peepand dashed for the nearest hole—one of Tril’s boots, lying on its side in the dirt. It scuttled into it and down the length of the calf—it went thump against the heel. There was a beat of soft silence, and then a muffled “Peep?”

  Then silence again.

  Tril blinked. She was curious. She wondered what would happen next. (The thought that she might pick up the boot and look into it never occurred to her. The environment was something that acted on her, never the other way around.)

  There was silence from the boot, as if the little creature was thinking, “What the hell—?” Then, some annoyed cluttering as it figured out where it was and decided it had done something stupid. It scolded itself in a terrible tone of voice. There was the sound of scuffling as it explored its situation, and the boot bumped and wiggled.

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  Tril blinked and stared—the boot wiggled?

  Boots don’t wiggle. Why did the boot wiggle? Was there something inside of it? There was, wasn’t there? But she’d forgotten—■

  Her hand reached out—of its own volition, she hadn’t moved it—and touched the boot. The boot felt—alive inside. What a curious sensation. Her hand—wasn’t that curious the way it moved itself—lifted the boot and brought it toward her eyes so she could look into it.

  Something with big shiny eyes was looking up at her. It blinked twice and asked politely, “Peep?” All right, you caught me—will you treat me carefully?

  Tril just looked at it, with flickering awareness. What—?

  It chittered once—no, that wasn’t any good—then looked back up at Tril again and repeated its question, “Peep?”

  “Peep—?” asked Tril. Did that mean something? “Peep?”

  “Peep,” repeated the little creature; it was the great- umpteenth-great-great-grandfather of all mammals everywhere. It straightened itself proudly and said, “Peep.” It washed at its muzzle for a moment—when in doubt, wash—then looked to Tril again and presented its credentials: “Peep, peep, peep, peep.” As an afterthought, it added, “Peep, peep.”

  “Peep, peep, peep,” echoed Tril. The sound was amusing—I’ve got a peeper. “Peep, peep, peep.” She waited to see what the peeper would do next.

  Her peeping caught Nusa’s attention—she cut off her description of Ethab’s refusal to see the truth and touched Loevil’s arm; she nodded in Tril’s direction. She and Loevil exchanged a curious glance, then both moved toward Tril to investigate the sound.

  Tril was holding the boot in both hands; she sat with

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  her legs spread apart in front of her and she held the boot in the space between them. She was looking into it with the total concentration of one enchanted, and crooned softly, “Peep, peep, peep... peep, peep, peep...”

  Loevil hunkered down before her. Very carefully, he

  edged forward to look into the boot too.

  “Peep, peep—” It stopped as his shadow fell across the top.

  Loevii looked, and it looked back up at him. He recognized it as the little critter that had fought the ration wrapper, the brave little mouse-thing of the night before.

  “Peep, peep,” said Tril.

  Loevil looked at her—her eyes seemed more alert this morning. Or was that his imagination? Did he see the flicker of intelligence because that was what he wanted to see? Or was it actually there?

  “Peep?” said Tril.

  “I didn’t know you could speak dinosaur,” Loevil said.

  She blinked at him. “Peep.” Then she looked back into the boot. “Peep, peep?”

  Loevil put his hands gently around hers, then slid them toward the top of the boot itself. He slowly pulled the boot toward himself. Tril resisted—not a lot, she didn’t have that much awareness yet, but she resisted. Her hands would not let go as Loevil pulled the boot away from her, and her arms kept wanting to hold it back.

  “It’s all right,” Loevil said. “But you have to stop peeping for a while. It’s time for breakfast.”

  “Peep?” she asked. Her eyes were wide with concern.

  “Right,” Loevil agreed. He straightened quickly, taking the boot and glancing at Nusa. “And you thought we’d never get another peep out of her.” They took a couple of steps away from Tril and Loevil showed Nusa what was in the boot. “Well, what do we do with it?”

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  “Peep,” suggested the boot. “Peep!” it demanded.

  “You said it,” Loevil answered, poking his finger toward the top of the boot. The creature backed away, hissing.

  Nusa shrugged, she couldn’t care less. “Turn it loose.” Loevil frowned. “I’m not so sure—” He glanced back

  toward Tril. “This is the first thing she’s reacted to ”

  Nusa shrugged again, this time resignedly. “Do what you want.” She turned away, leaving Loevil holding the boot like an offering.

  “Peep?” said the boot. Peep, peep, peep.”

  Loevil looked down into it again. “Well, all right,” he answered. “Peep to you too. Peep? Peep, peep, peep?” Silence. The mouse-thing in the boot shut up; it glared uply at him. As if to say, I don’t peep to just anybody.

  Loevil did a take, a surprised reaction, both quizzical and ironic. He gave a resigned shrug of his own and bent to give the boot back to Tril. She took it happily and resumed her peeping conversation with her newfound friend. “Peep, peep, peep... ?”

  . Loevil shook his head and walked away. At least she was reacting to things around her now, that was something. ...

  Megan looked at her watch agah^Had she waited long enough?

  Maybe a few minutes more....

  She was sitting on a granite slab that jutted out from the upward-sloping floor of the gully like a shelf. She had her rifle across her knees and her scanner set on the rock before her; but everything was silent. Even the wind was subdued—or perhaps it just didn’t reach down into this gully. Something large and white glided across the sky, a pteranodon. She studied it with detached interest. It held

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  its head so its beak pointed down and its hollow crestbone up—a rudder for its flight.

  The pteranodon couldn’t flap its wings; it didn’t have the muscle structure, it was a glider—a living kite, all graceful and transparent, a fragile floating thing of silk and bone, gliding on the whispery breeze like an afte
rthought of nature, a paper sail, bannering the joys of light and airy soaring. It turned upon the wind like a seagull made of silver gauze; it was white—so white it seemed to shimmer—it was covered with a downy coat of fur so fine it looked like powdered snow. The color of its fur was its defense against the glare of sun and sea and the immutable laws of physics; the surface area of its wings was large and they were finely veined—during the day, during the long hours of motionless gliding, those wings would present their broad flat surfaces to the sun; the blood flowing through the tiny vessels in the wings would pick up all the heat that hit them and carry it back to the body. Were it not for the fur, the pteranodon would be quickly cooked in its own skin—but its fur was shiny white and reflected back the bulk of the sunlight that hit the spreading wings, serving the same purpose as feathers on a seabird. At night the process was reversed; the same blood in the same extensive network of capillaries would dissipate the body heat in the cold starlit darkness were it not for the insulation that the fur provided.

  The pteranodon was not a bird, not yet—if ever. It was only nature’s first design, but graceful, soaring, something wondrous, beautiful, and delicate as only airborne life could be. This one made a sound like a flute, a dove- like cooing in the wind; it circled once upon an updraft, calling softly to its distant mate. Its wings were stretched across a span of seven meters—not the largest pteranodon that Megan had ever seen, not the smallest either. It dipped its wings in greeting—or, perhaps, just in adjust

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  ment to the wind—and drifted off beyond the rocky edges of the golly.

  Megan sighed and checked her scanner once again. Its screen was reassuringly blank. She looked at her watch and decided it was time. She stood up, stretched—and stretched again. Lord! That felt good! The sun had baked the stiffness from her bones.

  —a wave of dizziness struck her then, mild—but she took a step to catch herself and kept from falling; she’d stood up too fast, she’d stretched too hard. She’d been half-asleep and the sudden stretch had caught her body unawares. She waited, counted to three, then stretched again, more cautiously.

  She took a drink from her canteen, shouldered her scanner, and, holding her rifle at the ready, moved up- slope through the gully, following along the side of the trickling stream.

  She came around the jut of rocks that shielded Ethab. She’d stood watch for him and kept herself out of his line of sight while he’d needed to be alone. Now he was sitting on an outcrop of yellow stone, his head buried in his hands. He was staring at something a million kilometers beyond his toes.

  Megan made no sign of reaction; she was a professional and knew better. Reaction was often interpreted as judgment—and she didn’t judge, she merely advised. She trudged slowly up toward Ethab, but did not approach him closely. She stopped at a respectful distance and waited. He didn’t look up.

  After a moment, she asked, “Are you ready to come back now?”

  Now, finally, he raised his head. His eyes were rimmed in red, his face was gray. Even his eagle-wing tattoo had lost its power. He looked like a man stunned, like one who’d opened the door to an explosion and had

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  it go off in his face, and was still wondering: How did this happen? How did I get" to be here? Can’t I close the door and go back to where I was before?

  He put his head back in his hands, but he said, “I guess so.” Then he was quiet again, and motionless, and he might just as well have never spoken at all.

  Megan waited for a moment. “It’s getting late,” she hinted.

  Ethab took a breath, then another. He nodded slowly and began to unfold himself. When he reached his full height, he loomed above her and she studied his face with concern.

  It was as if he were closing the door on his nakedness; his features hardened as she watched. His muscle tone returned, his narrow gaze turned icy and forbidding. The tattoo regained its glow. He looked at her, a look of meat and bone, a refutation of the human being locked within—she thought she’d seen the awful truth of Ethab, that somewhere deep inside there was a person screaming to be let out; but now he turned those iron-cold eyes of his upon her and she doubted if she’d ever really seen a thing that felt and hurt and cried inside that flesh. His body wasn’t human, never was, and nothing human lived inside of it. Whatever emotions she had seen had been illusions, switched off as casually as if they were just one more function of his electronic implants and augments. 1 will cry now, it is expected—program my eyes for tears.

  And now I am through crying—I will turn them off.

  He brushed past her like the wind. “It’s getting late,” he said, and his voice rang like stainless steel. Once again, he was larger than life, larger than nature, larger even than God. Larger than the deathbeast. He moved off down the slope and Megan followed after, stunned and startled and wondering.

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  At the bottom, he paused to look at the deathbeast’s tracks again; then he looked back up at her as she came stepping down. “We’re going after him.”

  Megan wasn’t surprised. She’d expected it. She’d known it as if for a thousand years. Ethab could no sooner turn his back on the hunt for the beast than he could stop breathing. “All right,” she said.

  “He’s got to be close by,” Ethab said. Megan caught herself frowning and blanked her face again; but there was something wrong with Ethab’s eyes. They didn’t seem completely focused and they wouldn’t meet hers directly, but instead kept drifting off to one side or the other. “They go torpid when they’re full,” Ethab was saying. “He’ll want a place to rest.” He thought for a moment, his glance Still sliding back and forth as if it wpre on ice. “He’ll be staying close to his kill, in any case. He’ll be coming back to it tonight.”

  Megan began, “There won’t be anything left by then—” but he didn’t hear her.

  He was saying, “—so he’s got to be somewhere close by—in a gully somewhere, out of the sun.”

  Megan’s voice was carefully soft as she suggested, “Let’s go get the others first.”

  The others? Ethab was momentarily confused—what others? “Oh, yes—the others....” He’d forgotten for a moment—“You go. I’ll go on ahead.”

  Megan made a motion as if to touch his arm. He drew back, he turned to peer at the tracks of the beast again. Megan stepped in closer, her hand still ready to touch his arm. “Come on,” she said.

  Ethab looked down at her hand. As if it were something dead. Don’t touch me with that. She tried to meet his eyes again. He flicked away. She touched his arm then. To show she meant what she was saying.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll come.”

  Thirteen

  WHAT MAKES LOEVIL RUN?

  When they told him, Loevil shrugged and began assembling his gear. Nusa started to break camp as well, but as she did so, her thoughts began to bubble to the surface. “This is stupid!” she said. She punctuated her Words with an angry pointing gesture; her hand chopped through the air like a blade. “Eese is dead! Dorik’s dead! Kalen’s dead—”

  At this, Ethab turned to her suddenly, an intense, unreadable expression on his face.

  Nusa ignored it. “—Tril is... ” She hesitated, then picked a word. “ ... damaged. We have no rechargers, our weaponry is depleted—there’s less than thirty-six hours to pickup—” Her tone went lower for emphasis, “We can’t miss our pickup—" then rose back to its previous level, “—and you want to go on?”

  She crossed to Ethab and confronted him head on. “I think we’ve overestimated ourselves, Ethab. The thing is too big for us.”

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  Ethab’s voice was quiet; he didn’t even look at her. “We can’t stop now.”

  “Sure, we can. We pick up our gear and we go home.”

  Ethab didn’t hear her. He was looking past her shoulder. “He’s sti
ll out there. We can’t stop.” His voice was almost thoughtful, “We have one more night before pickup . . . he knows we’re here . . . he does. . . .” He turned outward toward the hills, as if speaking directly to the beast. “We can’t stop any more than he can.”

  Nusa looked disgusted, but she tried again, once more. Patiently. “We put our guns over our shoulders, Ethab; we turn around and we start walking back toward the Nexus. We enjoy the scenery. That’s how we stop.”

  Ethab turned back and looked through her. He spoke slowly and with an air of finality. “You’re wrong.” Then he turned away from her without elaborating why. She was wrong, that was enough; he’d pointed it out, therefore the conversation was ended. If she couldn’t figure out why she was wrong, then that was too bad— but it was obvious to him that she was wrong, and that was enough.

  Nusa opened her mouth to say something at Ethab’s departing back, then she shut it with a snap. She looked defeated. She turned and looked to Megan for support, then to Loevil. Megan’s face was carefully blank, her eyes were veiled, and Loevil only shrugged, and said, “Don’t look at me. I only work here.”

  Megan was watching Ethab—and suddenly she knew what was wrong with his eyes. He wasn’t trying to avoid looking at any of them; he just didn’t see them any more. He was looking beyond the other human beings with him—looking through them toward some distant vista. His eyes were focused on the distant deathbeast. He

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  watched it through the rocks and hills, beyond the creeks and gullies, beyond the distant valleys—no matter where it went, he saw it in his mind, and the movements of his eyes were gauges of the distance he could see. He looked into the heart of prehistoric darkness and saw the Tyrant living there—and, drawn to it, like death, he would confront it head on.

  In that single crystalline moment, Megan understood. Something inside Ethab, something mechanical, obsessive, driven by a single need to be complete, looked at itself and saw a hollowness, a place where something larger than himself had staked a claim. In that hollow place, there lived a fear of death and he must master it and drive it from himself to be complete, to be immortal, to be free. Whatever Ethab hated most, whatever Ethab feared, he challenged it head on-—and when he mastered it, he proved that he was greater. And now, today, this morning, Ethab had come finally to the biggest challenge of them all, there were no others left— he had to challenge death itself^ He had to beat the deathbeast. Today, he’d be a man. Today, he’d be complete.