Deathbeast

by David Gerrold

  Megan saw all this as if it were a portrait etched in falling glass—a moment poised before its essence shattered on inevitability. And in that single moment, she felt pity for the man. Because he could never be complete—no matter what the challenge was, there’d always be a bigger one tomorrow. And he’d keep meeting them head on, until he met the one that was too big, the one that finally would kill him—

  Suddenly she wanted to go to him, she longed to hold him, draw him close to her and hold him against the long eternal night and whisper to him, “Ethab, Ethab, it’s all right. You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone,

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  and mostly, not even to yourself. Why are you trying so hard to be what you already are?” She wanted to explain to him, patiently, and with compassion, “Completeness isn’t a goal to achieve. It’s a process. It comes from accepting yourself within each moment, accepting the challenges within your life, not structuring impossible new and larger ones beyond yourself. The. deathbeast is an arbitrary foe—you don’t have to meet him, not now or ever—” •

  But even as she thought that, she knew that she was wrong. Oh, maybe her thoughts were right for some people, they certainly felt right for her—but not for Ethab. For Ethab it was already too late. The deathbeast wasn’t an arbitrary challenge any more—perhaps it had been once, but that was before it had killed Kalen. Kalen was the only person Ethab had ever... loved, the only one who’d ever made him feel close to complete—almost. Not quite. There was that one thing that they couldn’t do—they couldn’t say their love—for that would make them something less than men. They could only care about each other if they didn’t show they cared—the contradiction carried its own incompleteness. Ethab could only feel justified in vengeance now. He had to kill the deathbeast for fulfillment. And after that—after that, he’d be used up. And empty....

  After he killed the deathbeast, there wouldn’t be any more challenges for him, because there couldn’t be any challenges bigger than this one. He’d kill the deathbeast as an act of love for Kalen

  Megan knew and understood. Nusa was wrong. They couldn’t stop, they couldn’t quit.

  And Megan felt like crying, because the day already smelled of death, and it was only morning.

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  She turned to gather up her gear. Ethab would be getting impatient soon.

  Tril was offering a piece of ration bar, chicken flavored, to the little peeper.

  “Peep?” he queried, then sat up, sniffing. Something smelled good to him. He edged forward out of the safety of the boot and tentatively took a step toward Tril. Then another. Tril put the pieces of rubber chicken on the ground and moved her hand slowly back. Peep-peep approached cautiously, his big eyes blinking alertly. Then, quickly, he darted at the piece of food, grabbed it, gobbled it before anyone could take it away from him, and dashed back to the boot. He stopped at the entrance to it and looked back questioningly. Please, sir, may I have some more?

  Tril held out another piece. Her face was curious, she was no longer as expressionless as before; but she still lacked the animation of a real person. She moved, not to act on her environment, but only to test it. Nothing was certain any more. She forgot to let go of the piece of ration and Peep-peep got tired of waiting; he boldly came up and took it from her. His belly fur was white, his paws were tiny pink claws and his nose was brown and blunt.

  “Peep!” he finished the piece of ration and demanded more. He darted backward, but not quite as far back as before and waited impatiently. Tril broke off another chunk and held it out. This time, he didn’t even pretend to be cautious. He sniffed up, climbed up on her hand, took it and ate it where he stood.

  Abruptly, sensing the footfall of someone approaching, Peep jumped off her hand and bolted for the boot. There was a thump as he hit the back of it.

  Tril looked up, blinking slowly.

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  Loevil hunkered down and said to her, “We’re going to have to go now. You’re going to have to put on your boot.”

  Something inside the boot said, “Peep!” in an angry tone of voice.

  “Peep?” echoed Tril.

  “That’s right,” said Loevil. He touched her hand gently, then reached and picked up the boot. “Here, we’ll put the little fellow in your sidebag.” He reached over to her and opened the specimen case that she wore on her left hip. There wasn’t anything in it except two ration bars. Loevil tipped the boot into it and something furry scuttled, peeped and slid into the case. “He’ll be happy. You’ve left some food in there. We’ll give him some water later, okay?” He snapped the case shut. “Okay?”

  She moved to open it and look in—he caught her hand. “No, not now, Tril. Later.”

  She looked at him. “Peep?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” he agreed.

  “All right,” Ethab was calling. “Let’s go. Loevil, take the rear, mind your scanner. Megan, move out ahead. You’ll take the point. Let’s go.”

  Loevil handed Tril her boot—she started putting it on mechanically. He stood up and moved to pick up his pack, his rifle, and his scanner.

  Nusa was looking at Ethab with a hurt and angry expression, a “What-about-me?” look.

  Ethab turned to her as if she were merely an object. “You can watch Tril.” And turned away as smoothly. He headed after Megan, not even waiting. He knew they’d follow. They’d have to.

  Nusa’s lips tightened and her eyes narrowed as she glared at his back, but she went to Tril and helped her with the seal on her boots, then pulled her to her feet.

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  “Cmon, numbwit,” she said. “Let’s go help the great white hunter. I don’t know who’s the bigger fool—you or him.”

  Loevil looked up from his scanner. “Ethab is—because Tril’s not hypocritical about being psychotic.” He fell into line behind them and they moved out.

  They headed toward the ridge and over it—not too far from the ravaged allosaur—and down the eroded slope into the gullies, rills, and ridges of the badlands. The ground was like a ripped and rumpled bedsheet; here it was folded, there it was ragged. They kept to the easy slopes and tried to circle the worst places. Beyond, there was a plain; they would descend to that and follow along the edges of the broken lands, scanning for the deathbeast. Ethab was convinced it kept to the gullies, they were the best cover for kilometers in any direction, besides being protection from the fierce heat of the day.

  “It’s getting hot,” said Nusa, wiping her forehead. She was beginning to look fatigued.

  “Well, of course, it’s getting hot,” Loevil agreed. “It’s half-past the Cretaceous. There’s twelve million years of drought coming up soon.”

  “Not till the Pliocene,” said Megan. “We have time.”

  “How much?” asked Nusa; her voice was tinged with concern.

  “Oh, about eighty-seven million years, give or take a couple weeks,” Loevil answered. “First there’s the Eocene, then the Oligocene, then the Miocene, and then after that, the Pliocene. I think it starts on a Thursday ... ”

  “At half past four.” Megan nodded.

  “Anybody who’s anybody at all is certain to be there,” Loevil said. “The ribbon-cutting ceremony will be the hit of the social season. But you’d better order your tickets early. There’s sure to be quite a crowd.”

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  Nusa closed up her face with an annoyed expression. She disliked being sported with—and she wondered about Megan and Loevil; they hardly seemed to talk to each other, yet they were almost always in tune—and always in agreement. There was an ease, a familiarity— as if they were secure in their relationship—as if the highest compliment that each could give was to take the other one for granted. Was that what real love looked like? She thought again of what she’d seen in Ethab, and wondered if she’d ever see it again.

&nb
sp; They picked their way across a dry river bed. Ethab stood guard while Megan and Loevil crossed, then they stood guard while he followed with the others. They scanned the area carefully—still nothing, but their maps of the area were growing; the memory banks in the scanners kept adding to their stored information as they moved through the landscape. Eventually, if they covered enough area, they’d have a complete map of the local territory.

  Some of the more sophisticated scanners used satellite units to relay information back to the main terminal. The satellites were planted as the hunters moved through an area; they extended the eyes of the scanning system all the way back to the Nexus. On a long enough hunt, it was possible to plant satellite scanners on a vast scale, a giant overlapping grid that let the main terminal track the movements of every creature in the area—but those were usually the scientific expeditions; generally they were twenty-one days long and nothing was killed except out of necessity. Those were hunts for knowledge rather than trophies.

  They followed the river bed down through the narrow valley the river had started to carve before it had died for lack of water. It opened out onto an alluvial plain, and they came onto it with caution. High above them, on a

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  distant ridge, a yellow and brown lizard-thing, three meters tall and carnivorous, looked up from its recently deceased meal and studied them with black, expressionless eyes. It decided they were too small and too far away to be either a threat or a meal, and it returned to its more immediate concern. The flesh ripped from the bones with a wet, slobbery sound.

  “It won’t bother us,” said Megan, pointing to the sin-, gularity lines on her screen. “Too small, too far away. Too interested in the feast it .already has.”

  Ethab nodded and continued staring out across the plain. His hand was shielding his eyes from the direct glare of the sun—somewhere he’s lost or forgotten his helmet—here and there the land was cut with other, smaller gullies. Beyond this plain there was probably another. The whole landscape might be a series of plains like shelves, each eroding down to the next level. He studied the bright noontime haze dispassionately. The horizon was an aching gray and yellow blur—the sense of distance was enormous. Far out there, on the other side of the dust, the bulk of some huge mountain could be seen rising, rising massively up toward the sky. It could be a hundred kilometers away, or a thousand. There was no way to tell. The air sizzled under a fiery pink sky; the light curved as if it were melting on a griddle. They could be looking halfway around the planet. The mountain might not even be there; it wavered mysteriously as the heat shimmered across the plain. And yet it was there, bulking huge and black and distant. Its upper slopes were all in silver-white, its peak reflected back the sun like starlight caught in diamonds. The snow and ice upon those towering flanks must have been as old as the mountain itself. If it was a mirage, it was the most solid one they’d ever seen; and if it wasn’t a

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  mirage, then it was the most unreal-looking mountain that had ever loomed across a horizon.

  Ethab turned back to the closer landscape, lowering his hand.

  Nusa interrupted his study; her voice was a little too loud: “There’s only thirty hours left, Ethab. And it’s a long way back to the Nexus.”

  “I know,” he said, ignoring her. He stepped away, trying to reestablish his sense of connection with the landscape. Which way? Out toward the mountain? North along the edge of the plain? Or back south, following the more jagged region of gullies?

  South, perhaps....

  Megan waited till it looked as if he’d made a decision. She knew she couldn’t change his mind—she knew why he’d keep on going till he dropped. And yet—she still had to try to stop him, if only to keep him from missing the pickup at the Nexus. “Ethab,” she began softly, trying to sound as gentle as she could. “We ought to talk about this. We’re getting to the limit of our range.”

  “You can quit, if you want.”

  “We have to stay together. It’s the law. Guides can’t leave their clients—even if they’ve been legally fired. We have to stay with you until pickup.” She added, “Besides, it’s safer.”

  “We have time.” His voice was fiat and emotionless, quiet and determined.

  “But not enough.” She hated to contradict him head-on; she thought she understood him a little better now. “It’ll take more than twenty hours to get back to the Nexus from here. You’re using up our margin.”

  He didn’t take offense; he hadn’t noticed she was arguing with him. He remained patient and detached. “There’s time.” It was as if he hadn’t even heard the meaning of her words.

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  “K you do find him, there’s not going to be enough time to kill him—assuming you can.”

  “There’ll be time.” He didn’t even stress his words to indicate he was arguing with her. He wasn’t. He was stating facts. “Mr. Loevil,” he said. “Will you scan that valley to the south?”

  Megan was insistent. She took a step closer to him and lowered her voice for emphasis. “You have four hours. That’s it. That leaves us twenty hours to get back. And a four-hour margin.”

  Ethab looked right through her. “I’ll take whatever time I need,” he said, and Megan wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that. “Mr. Loevil?” Ethab asked.

  “I don’t show anything on my screens.”

  “No matter,” Ethab said. “He’s in that valley. Somewhere. He has to be. We’ve covered everywhere else.”

  “And what if you’re wrong?” Megan asked.

  “I won’t be. I haven’t been wrong yet. I won’t be wrong now.” I won’t allow myself to be wrong. ■

  “The valley opens up into another network of gullies,” Loevil said. “Shallow ones mostly. Some water too— lots of plant life. Probably a couple of herbivores.” He added thoughtfully, “There might be something down that way.”

  Ethab nodded and moved. The others looked at each other’s faces, sighed, and followed with resignation. Tril opened up her sidebag and clucked into it. She opened up one of the ration-wrappers so Peep-peep could nibble at the bar as they went along. She stared into the leather case so hard she nearly walked into a gnarly- tree—finally Nusa made her close the sidebag and pay attention to where she was walking.

  They went down through the valley and out the other side. Here, the land was forested again, but lighter than before because of the ruggedness of the area. Higher up,

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  there was more topsoil, but here, most of it had been eroded away and the plants were limited to the places between the rocks and boulders, crevices where a bit of soil might be found. Here, the river bed was gravelly and only a bare trickle of water washed through it. They followed it Without crossing. Small herbivores moved away through the bushes as they approached, and occasionally little lizards ran on high stiff legs across the hot granite slabs or scuttled quickly over the rocky'shelves.

  In the distance, something was making a noise.

  The hunter paused, the guides exchanged glances. They could feel the thudding of the ground beneath their feet. Whatever it was, it was heavy and moving. There were rhythmic hissings and screeches, followed by a crash of foliage.

  “There,” pointed Megan. “Through those rocks. On the other side of those bushes.”

  “What—” began Nusa. She looked to Megan. “What is it?”

  Megan shook her head in an “I don’t know” gesture.

  Loevil moved up next to Nusa. He stage whispered: “Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my.”

  Nusa moved away from him in disgust. She followed Megan and Ethab through the rocks. Loevil gave smiling Tril a push and they followed.

  Through the bushes they could see-—two somethings; they were large, gray-green, streaked with black; their shiny vinyl skin bedecked with glittering moss: they were brontosaurs—and they moved back and
forth in a smooth hypnotic pattern; they bumped and balanced in a ponderous ballet. Their heads darted at each other, their long necks touched and stroked—then they backed away and each rose up, impressively, then came down like thunder.

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  Ethab lowered his rifle, frowning—

  The others pushed up beside him and looked as well.

  By the side of a wide mirrored lake, two brontosaurs—their heads held high in silver winds, their tails poised like lances—two giant brontosaurs were dancing. They stood up high and huge, then came back down with little booming earthquakes. Their heads were flat and almost smiling, their faces bobbed and weaved, their necks would slide along each other’s as they moved, almost like two serpents turning side by side. They bumped like graceful blimps, they circled on a common axis, and always, always they kept on bouncing at each other. The smaller one was more aggressive, perhaps he was the male—there was no easy way to tell— but he kept on poking at the larger one and stroked her neck along his own as if asking her to turn. He stroked along her slender neck and bumped her side. He nudged her shoulder mightily, and then began again. The sound was loud and meaty.

  Loevil was grinning like a fool. Next to him, Tril too was shining and entranced, as if basking in their radiance. “You were wondering how they did it?” Loevil poked Nusa. “Well, you’re about to find out. That has to be a courtship dance.”

  Nusa’s cheeks began to color. Astonished, she turned to Megan—

  Megan nodded. “Yup, that’s it.”

  Nusa turned back and looked despite herself. Brontosaurs mating? The mind boggled. Mechanically, she took her holo out of its case and began buzzing off a long exposure.