Ray Aldridge ("The Cold Cage," February 1990) returns with a compelling new story about the world Dilvermoon, whose citizens seek escape by adopting beast-like personas...
Hyena Eyes
By Ray Aldrildge
Ray Aldridge. Hyena Eyes. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1990
THENDARD LOAM WAS larger than any human being should be. Cayten Borlavinda always saw him with a small start of amazement, though she had known him for many years. He was nearly three meters tall, and almost as wide. He had three hearts, two sets of lungs, and remote boosterpumps in each massive limb. His skin was charcoal black; his hair, which rose in high, spiraling twists, was bone white.
Cayten wandered aimlessly through Thendard's loft, which had once been an autofac. A few dead robots still stood on the steel floor, towering above the other furnishings. During some long-ago fit of domesticity, Thendard had painted the robots in fanciful pastels — pinks, aquas, powder blues — so that they seemed like enormous toys. She leaned against one of them and touched her forehead to the cool metal, which still smelled faintly of machine oil.
"Well, we must have him killed, Cayten," Thendard said. Thendard filled an oversize powerchair, his flesh spilling over the arms in dark, shiny billows. His great face bore an expression of painful concern.
She stood back and shook her head. "No. I'm not quite ready for that." Her face felt stiff, as though her tears had been not ordinary salt but some strong preservative solution, effective against decay and further emotion. Her eyes were dry now. Pseudoskin covered her injured cheek; the medunit had assured her that there would be no scars to be repaired.
"A joke, Cayten, please." Thendard shifted his bulk, and the chair squeaked, a small, desperately overloaded sound.
"I still want to punish him."
Thendard shook his head. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't have thought it of him. To think that Genoaro would hurt you.... He's always been a strange man — you knew that when you contracted with him — but always a gentle man, too."
"You know why, Thendard. It's the Level."
"Ah, the Level! Yes, the Level is bad for some. Dilvermoon may be the sweetest melon in the universe, as they say, but the Level might be a layer of rot just under her rind." Thendard was solemn. "Yes, Dilvermoon suffers a disease, much like all of us who dwell within her — and Genoaro is no exception."
She loved Thendard, but sometimes she had no patience with his pompous epigrams. He delivered them so relentlessly. "Please, Thendard, not now," she said wearily.
"Oh..." His brows drew together; his mouth pursed. "Sorry. Well, what can I do?"
"Give me a place to stay, for a while. Give me advice when I'm ready to hear it. Please." She knew her voice was harsh, but she couldn't help it. Thendard was a beaster, too, and so partook of Genoaro's sins; for all that Thendard was a sweet and guileless man.
"Of course," Thendard said quickly. "Of course."
Down in the artists' quarter, the Bo'eme, she shared a renovated warehouse with Genoaro. Their workshops were at opposite ends of that echoing space; their living area in the middle. She had been having a late breakfast alone, when she heard a crash from his workshop, followed by a truncated sob. She went to investigate, with caution and more than a touch of fear, though she could not yet consciously admit to that emotion in connection with Genoaro Maryal.
She found him slumped cross-legged in a comer, toying with the pieces of a broken obsidian dagger.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It won't come right," he muttered. "This is the sixth casting, and it won't come right."
She knelt beside him. "What happened this time?"
"The same. The annealing...."
"This is for the Linean embassy?" She touched a fragment, still warm from the annealing oven. Cayten did not pretend to understand the intricacies of his craft, which was the making of ceremonial glass weapons. He labored not only under the handicap of a delicate, unforgiving technique, but also under a thorny thicket of political and religious requirements. But he was very good; his knives and swords and axes were much sought after by collectors. He attracted many commissions from the diplomatic enclaves of Dilvermoon; his work was elegant, fragile, expensive — ideal qualities in a gift of state.
"Yes. For one of their more repulsive rituals, I'm told. They need it by the end of the month." Genoaro's voice was thick with some scornful emotion. He stood up, a tall man with large, rough hands. His cheekbones were as sharp as his knives, his pale eyes deep-set under thick brows. He walked to the bench, picked up a pipe, set it down, peered into the gloryhole furnace, adjusted the flow of fuel — all his movements betraying anxious energy, barely under control.
Sadness stabbed through her. He had changed so much — even in his body. Before, he had been elegantly wiry; now his body was thickening with clone-doubled muscle. Daily he grew more heavy-shouldered, more powerful. His face had broadened, and knobs of new muscle writhed at the corners of his jaws.
He reached up, probed carefully at the back of his neck, and Cayten stiffened. "No," she said. "Please don't. That's not the thing to do, Genoaro."
He looked at her, expressionless, for a long moment. "How do you know?"
"Genoaro...." Her voice trailed away under the flat stare he gave her.
He reached into a cupboard, took down a small platinum case. He opened it, removed a small ovoid of plastic and metal. He held it up between thumb and forefinger, showing it to her. "Why shouldn't I?" His eyes seemed to belong to an unpleasant stranger.
She looked away. "I don't think it's good for you. The Level."
"You're not my crechemother, Cayten." His voice, ordinarily so soft, grated. She winced.
"No, no, I'm not. But I do love you."
He was very still, as if caught on the sharp edge of a decision, balanced just for the moment. He moved suddenly, closing the cupboard and shutting down his furnaces. Then he reached back and snapped the personaskein into the receptacle at the base of his skull.
He changed, as the persona spread out into his cortex. His face hardened; his mouth stretched in a wide, humorless grin; his eyes took on a yellow opacity. He took a step toward her, an abrupt, alien movement. "I'm going up," he growled. He showed his teeth, his lips wrinkling back in a frightening inhuman gesture.
She stepped to block the door, and held up her hands pleadingly. "I know you're still there, Genoaro. I know you're not a real hyena. Thendard's told me how it is, so don't pretend you can't understand me."
He moved so quickly.
She was too surprised to dodge. He knocked her aside, and his sharp nails slashed open her cheek.
Then he was gone, and she had found herself sitting on the floor, bleeding.
CAYTEN WALKED along the wall where Thendard kept his memorabilia — the charming detritus of a long and experimental life. Thendard kept pace with her, riding his powerchair a step behind.
She paused before a cluster of wall-mounted holostills, which showed Thendard roaming the Level in his favored persona.
"You make a lovely elephant, Thendard." She peered at one window, in which a naked Thendard mounted another beaster, a gigantic woman wearing the swirling shoulder tattoos of a Retrantic enforcer. Cayten wondered if such sexual congress was even possible, considering the immensity of the participants. Perhaps Thendard had additional bodymods, she thought, peering closer; but the constricted angle from which she could view the image preserved his modesty. The two of them wore identical wish-you-were-here smiles. "How...?"
A good-natured leer earthquaked across Thendard's face. "I'd show you, but you're far too insubstantial, a wisp of a woman, a sprite."
She ignored him, and leaned over a case of antique skinmasks. Thendard had once been an actor, and his collection of theatrical artifacts was very fine. But she wasn't seeing the gleaming contours of the masks; she was seeing Genoaro, curved over the back of some thick-bodied hyena bitch, taut as a bowstring, snarling joyfully.
"Why," she asked, "couldn't Genoaro have chosen a persona like yours? Something strong and admirable, something I could understand. To want to be an elephant;
Thendard floated in his chair, looking up at the holowindows. "They say our personas choose us, not the other way round."
"Oh, that's mystical shit, Thendard. Why, why would anyone want to be a hyena? Ugly, treacherous rot-eaters!" She shuddered and shut her eyes.
Thendard reached out and patted her shoulder with a hand the size of a pillow. "I have theories. Perhaps you don't want to hear them just now?"
"No. Tell me."
"Well. You've never felt the pull of the Level, so it's hard to explain. Here we all are, Old Earth so far away in time and space that many think it no more than a charming myth. Dilvermoon is full of humans, and Dilvermoon is not our native land, oh no. Small wonder that some of us try to follow our genes back into the beforetime, down the backbrain into the plains we rose from. The Level is a steel Serengeti. We try to find a link to ourselves there."
Cayten shrugged. "I've heard the rationale."
"Heard, yes. Understood? Cayten, you're an admirable person, but you navigate these new waters more easily than most of us; you're in control, and you like it. You don't seem to need reassurance as much as most of us do; or need to touch the ancestral dirt. Perhaps you're evolved — or perhaps you're just too tightly wrapped to see the fun in a little costumed frolicking."
"That's what you call the Beaster Level? 'Costumed frolicking'? Genoaro sharpens his teeth and goes looking for carrion in the tween corridors, and that's 'frolicking'?"
Thendard looked away. "Well, some go too far. Still, the hyena has an important place on the Level, as on the ancestral plain. It's the final priest: it culls the weak; it buries the dead. Genoaro has always had something of a preoccupation with mortality. You knew about that darkness in him. It's how he came to his work. The knives he makes are used for all sorts of ugly purposes: sacrifices, executions, ritual mutilations. He feels himself to be an instrument of death, and the hyena eased him, gave him acceptance. He's talked to me about it. He couldn't talk to you." Thendard's rumble had a reproachful overtone.
"He couldn't talk to me? Why not?"
"Cayten... you would never try the skein. You had no point of reference for such a discussion."
"I didn't need to try it, to see what it was doing to Genoaro. He spends most of his time on the Level, or brooding about it. He's behind in his work, and even when he's in his workshop, his work doesn't go well. Our lives are running down different paths now; I rarely see him, and we're supposed to be living together. We were lovers...."
Her eyes filled again, but in sorrow, not rage.
A long, silent time passed, before she came to a decision. "Thendard, you have a very good medunit here, don't you? You must: you're too fat to live, otherwise. I want an implant."
His eyebrows rose. "A persona interface? Why?"
CAYTEN RUBBED at the base of her skull. There was no significant pain, only a bit of soreness around the implant site, a mild ache in the vertebrae — symptoms that Thendard assured her would disappear. The most disconcerting sensation was the simple strangeness of it, to reach up and touch a new part of herself, a plastic-and-metal surface where always before she had touched only soft skin and downy hair. The locking lugs on the mating surface of the interface were smooth and precise, the dataport textured with a hundred tiny fiber pins.
"It looks good on you, Cayten." Thendard attempted a lascivious wink, so absurdly exaggerated that Cayten laughed.
"Oh?"
"Oh yes! There's something about a woman with an implant. One can't help but wonder what her vices are; such speculation is titillating."
"I see. Well, now what?"
"I suppose you must choose a skein. I have a few female skeins, if that's the orientation you'd prefer."
She looked at him, and his broad face revealed a mild degree of embarrassment. "Well," he said. "It's occasionally instructive. But at any rate: a skein. May I recommend? You'd enjoy the gemsbok, I think — you're strong, graceful, beautiful. Don't you like to run? Or perhaps the otter. Such a quick, clever creature."
Annoyance flickered through her. "You'd prefer me to be a cud-chewer, so that I'd be captured by the first big red-eyed buck I ran into on the Level? Have a hot time? Or spend a nice relaxing day cracking open clams and playing chutes-and-ladders in a mud room?" The sharpness of her voice surprised her.
Thendard spread his hands defensively. "No offense meant."
She shook herself, and pulled her hand away from her neck. "I'm sorry. You've been nothing but kind, Thendard."
A silent minute passed.
"I want to be a hyena," she finally said.
In the dim red light of the Beaster Level, pleasure seekers pressed against them, a sea of wild eyes, wet mouths, sweat-slick bodies. They moved cautiously through the clamor and stink. The noise was louder and the smells more intense than anything she had ever experienced — the effect of the skein? Cayten stayed very close to the comforting bulk of Thendard, who now moved with a rolling, deliberate gait, swinging his head from side to side. Naked, he seemed even larger.
She found it difficult to analyze her own sensations. Was she different? She wore the skein at its least powerful setting, but her mind had become strange to her. Her thoughts ran in alien channels. She was afraid; she was eager. She felt ready to attack Genoaro if she found him; at the same time, she felt ready to flee, should he speak unkindly to her. She constantly repressed an urge to giggle, though she felt no amusement. She was in a curiously volatile state, unconnected to the self she knew — a feeling unlike any she had ever felt.
They paused at the radiant point of half a dozen corridors, where a large domed space provided room enough for the herds to congregate. Strips of pallid grass sprouted from deck boxes; succulent fungoid vines dropped from steel trellises.
In the half-light of the overhead lightstrips, the hall seethed. Beasters walked, staggered, crawled, swaggered, hopped, according to the personaskein each had chosen. Every near-variant of humanity was represented. Pointed ears quivered; teeth glinted; fur grew luxuriantly in gardens of human flesh. Glittering skeins clung to the base of each skull. No other adornment was permitted on the Level, no garment that might conceal a weapon. In appearance the beasters ranged from the wholly human to those who had so modified their bodies that they seemed ugly caricatures of the creatures they pretended to be.
A small herd of wildebeests surrounded a clear space along the scarred metal of a bulkhead. A slender young woman leaned there, her pale body shivering in fear and anticipation. The bull, massive, shaggy, approached. Cayten felt no sexual intrigue; she did not find herself imagining what the woman might soon feel. Instead, a thread of hunger trickled through her mind. What, she wondered, would the woman's delicate flesh taste of? She shuddered.
Several of the bachelor bulls sensed Cayten's attention and whirled, snorting, to fix red truculent eyes on her. She drifted away.
She watched the passing faces with sidelong glances, fascinated by the animal lusts and fears and cravings, modeled so oddly in human bone and skin. That heavy-limbed, paunchy man, with the carefully coiffed mane of blue hair — what had moved him to abandon his executive desk for the uncertainties of the Beaster Level, to hunt with the dancing, weaving gait of a weasel? And what of his companion? She was skillfully painted with fashionable body toners, she wore her thick orange hair in a love knot, and her sharp little fingernails were buffed to crimson perfection. Cayten might have guessed her to be a confidential secretary or perhaps an expensive concubine. She also wore the weasel persona, and watched the other beasters with luminous eyes.
Many of the beasters had so modified their bodies that it was the remnant of humanity that seemed out of place. On the far side of the open space, Cayten observed a pack of wolfheads lounging against the bulkhead: a dozen or so men and women with wide yellow eyes, facial hair in grizzled tufts, and furry bodies as hard and narrow as slats.
One woman detached herself from the pack and came toward them. "Look," she said, baring hypertrophied canines. "A carrion dog. And a big bull." She laughed, and Cayten felt a flush of anger — too intense. She snarled, made a little darting movement toward the wolfhead, then veered back to Thendard's side. Her jaws ached to close on the wolfhead's throat, and it was so bizarre an emotion that she felt faint.
Thendard rumbled a warning at the wolfhead, who stepped back. Then she laughed again. "Will you breed with the elephant?"
"Pay no attention," Thendard told Cayten. "The wolves hold everyone in contempt; it's their nature. But they have no particular courage."
They moved on through the Level, and Thendard explained. "She wouldn't have dared to speak, had she been alone. The wolves need each other to feel real. Besides, there's no real antipathy between wolves and hyenas. They derive from completely different habitats. It's not like the leopards and the hyenas, who truly despise one another. Or the hyenas and lions, who've shared the same hunting grounds for eons. Should we meet a leopard — or worse, a pride of lions, stay very close to me, Cayten, even though there's probably no great danger. This is a safe sector, well-monitored. Only a mad person would seriously attempt to injure you here; the deckhead crawls with lawmechs."
Thendard pointed up, and Cayten saw a lawmech clinging to the rough steel of the ceiling like a black metal insect, its scanners rotating, its stunners deployed in all directions. "I see," she said. "But what if we can't find Genoaro in the safe sectors? What if he's in the tween corridors, or even the Dark Level?"
Thendard frowned. "No, he's not that far gone, Cayten. And if he were, all you could do would be to go home and change the locks. He wouldn't be Genoaro anymore. What you feel now is just a pale, clean shadow of what the creatures on the Dark feel. You're still a woman now, 95 percent human. You still think like a human being; your perceptions are only lightly filtered through the hyena persona. If we went a little way into the tween corridors and came across a corpse a couple days' ripe, you still wouldn't be able to ignore the maggots. You'd have to crank up the skein a good bit before you'd really enjoy a meal like that."
She felt an unpleasant disorientation when she realized she was not quite as repulsed by the idea of eating carrion as she had been after she had learned what Genoaro was doing. "Thendard," she said in a weak voice. "Shut up, please. Help me look, but shut up."
He nodded, and groped for the skein at the back of his neck. Cayten marveled that he could reach it at all, considering his bulk, but he did, and made an adjustment.
Instantly his affect changed visibly to a more intense mode, and his features became unfamiliar. His eyes filmed over, as though inward thoughts preoccupied him, and his vast body slouched into an even more slope-shouldered arm-swinging stance.
They moved deeper into the Level, into areas where the lights were dimmer and the lawmechs fewer, closer to the tween corridors. Here the beasters lived in greater earnest. The tall, graceful antelope; the tiny, delicate gazelles; the truculent Cape buffalo — showed white rolling eyes to them, as the men and women of the herd played the game with fearful abandon. Apparently, the sight of an elephant bull and a hyena bitch traveling together was odd enough to frighten the more timid of the beasts. Often when the two of them emerged into a nexus, the herds would scent them and bolt for the exits, abandoning the plots of force-grown grass they had been feeding on.
"How do they know?" she whispered to Thendard, in a suddenly empty nexus. "Why do they fear me? I don't look like a hyena."
"The skein. It transmits an ID signature." Thendard's voice was not his own; it had become a trembling rumble. "Every other skein picks up the signal and tags the wearer's perceptual process with the correct cast. Haven't you noticed? How you don't have any trouble knowing the part each beaster plays?"
She heard a stealthy creak. In the far corner of the nexus was a tangle of rusting girders, like a patch of tall, angular brush. She caught a swift movement, and picked out the shape of a small, lithe man stretched out along a crossbar. His skin was tattooed in jagged splotches; his golden eyes watched her, unblinking. After a moment he opened a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth and hissed at her. A
"The intensity depends on the setting of his skein, and yours," Thendard said. "If he were cranked all the way down into his hindbrain, you wouldn't be able to see a man at all. And he'd try to kill you, if he could cut you away from me. Leopards hate hyenas — hyenas will eat any leopard they catch in the open. Leopards won't eat hyenas, unless they're starving, but they like to kill them when they can surprise one alone, then hang the carcass in a tree as a trophy. It's a bone-deep hate, much deeper than, say, the mutual contempt that hyenas and lions have for each other."
They passed into a darker corridor. Thendard threw up his head and snorted. "We've found a pack, though I can't say if it's Genoaro's." His little eyes gleamed, and he shuffled forward at a ponderous gallop.
She followed, and now her body and its movements seemed to grow stranger. She found herself running beside Thendard, using a bouncing, light-footed shamble that was both utterly alien and undeniably comfortable.
She laughed. A mindless titter came out of her mouth and frightened her into silence. She sniffed at the air, and she smelled that scent that she had in late months come to associate with Genoaro: a smell of old blood and death and unwashed bodies.
THENDARD STOPPED at the end of the corridor. A hot light came from the nexus beyond. Cayten peered around Thendard's bulk.
The nexus was very large, a hundred meters across, and lit by blinding mercury arcs. At the far side, a metallic clatter attended the opening of a heavy door. From the dark opening, a four-footed creature bounded, some sort of antelope with a striped brown hide and short, twisted horns. It stood blinking for a moment, then leaped away, pursued by a pack of beasters that rose abruptly from concealment.
"Hyenas," Thendard whispered.
The beasters ran after the animal, yipping, giggling, and Cayten could hear the clash of snapping jaws, echoing across the nexus. The animal's eyes rolled desperately, but it appeared slowed by some injury or weakness. It stayed just ahead of the pack, eluding them with sudden cuts and frantic leaps.
The hyenas were closer now, and Cayten recognized Genoaro at the back of the pack. He ran with his head thrown back, eyes fiery, mouth stretched wide open, as if he were swallowing the moment. She felt a deep revulsion; at the same instant, she longed to join him. The futile dodging of the animal suddenly seemed less pitiable and more exciting.
"It's not a real animal," Thendard said. "It's a thinframe robot hung with vatmeat. But it's a good simulation. See. It doesn't really try to escape, just tries to make a good chase of it. The Level management provides them, for a fee."
She wished Thendard would shut up. The end of the hunt was near; the animal moved on shaky legs, and its sides heaved. Finally it turned, at bay in an angle of the nexus.
A muscular, swag-bellied woman darted in, teeth snapping. The animal twisted to meet the attack, and a second bulky woman rushed in, bit into the animal's ham. It tried to shake her off, but she clung, jaws working. Blood sprayed her face, then the animal's hindquarters collapsed. Two more pack members dove in and seized the animal's throat.
It was over, and the pack fought over the corpse, whooping and elbowing. Genoaro seemed to hang back, along with several of the smaller men. Avidity and uncertainty warred in Genoaro's face.
Cayten felt the call of the animal's flesh, longed to taste the blood. Some part of her was horrified, but she pushed past Thendard's arm, out into the bright light of the nexus.
"Genoaro," she called, approaching the kill.
"A dozen bloody faces lifted up from the animal's open belly, and lips writhed back from white teeth.
"What do you want?" The big woman's voice was an unsteady warble. She giggled, but the sound held more menace than humor. Cayten saw that she affected a blind eye, a disk that shone dead white in the pink blaze of the lights. The woman's lower jaw was huge; she looked as if she could easily break bones between those teeth.
Cayten recognized her, quite suddenly. She was Shinvel Dward, an influential critic of Bo'eme, specializing in domestic art forms. She had publicly praised Cayten's work on several occasions, and come to Cayten's last opening, dressed modishly and escorted by two beautiful young bond servants. Cayten tried to connect that memory to the naked beaster who now glared at her, and grew dizzy. Dward's stance seemed terribly threatening; Cayten had an urge to fawn, as though the woman were her superior in some clear but unidentifiable way. She bowed her head.
Dward snorted. "Join us," she finally said. "But wait your turn."
The beasters returned to their feast, ignoring Cayten.
Genoaro watched Cayten with eyes that seemed to contain no humanity at all. "What did you expect to find here?" he asked finally.
She had no answer. The feeding beasters slowed, the first edge of appetite blunted, and Genoaro sank to his knees by the corpse, and began to tear at it with his teeth.
Cayten observed him dispassionately, as though she watched from a dream. She compared this scarlet-faced creature with the man whose hands had once touched her so sweetly, so intimately. The influence of the skein faded in her mind, until it no longer seemed important. She reached behind her neck and switched off the skein, and found herself on a bloody steel killing ground, in the company of human horrors. She turned away, abruptly sick.
Thendard guided her from the nexus, before he reactivated her skein, at minimal function. "I thought I warned you," he said. "Never switch out while you're still on the Level; it takes time to come up from the hindbrain. You want to do that when you're back in Bo'eme. Decompress slowly. Besides, the lawmechs will stun you if they don't pick up a skein signature from you. Got to run the skein when you're on the Level. The beasters despise tourists; even the beaster tourists feel that way."
"Take me home," she muttered.
Genoaro was gone for two days, and when he came home, he stank of death and sex. She could not speak to him, nor would he look at her. She went to her own studio and immersed herself in her work and did not see him for another day.
She was working on a tall, graceful goblet, glazing the spidery porcelain armature with tiny flecks of corundum. The goblet depicted a pastoral scene, ruby horses running on a field of aquamarine under sapphire skies. She lifted each bit of gemstone into place with a fine-tipped brush, fused it to the porcelain with a needle of coherent light. The process demanded so much concentration that she didn't notice Genoaro until he spoke.
"Beautiful," he said.
She turned to look at him. His face was still drawn with fatigue, and taut with some deeper strain. A muscle jumped under his left cheekbone. But his eyes seemed to belong to him again, as though the Genoaro she knew had returned.
He stood at her door, leaning against the frame, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. "I'm sorry," he said.
She believed him, with a sudden rush of relief. She laid aside her brush and laser; then she went to him.
He held her so tight that her ribs creaked and she could not breathe. She held still for a long moment, but then fear licked at her, just a little, and she pushed at him. He didn't seem to notice at first, but then he released her and stepped back.
"I'm sorry," he said again, and his face was so full of confusion and pain that she put her arms around him and held him as hard as she could.
Genoaro's furnaces were cold, and for several days he did not light them. He moved about the studio like a ghost, face gray, body slumped into a defeated shape. Cayten had no words of comfort to give him. When she tried to speak of pleasantly trivial things, he listened with a look of grim patience.
On the third day, she found him by his furnaces, warming a pot of cloudy green soda glass. His face was sharp with intent.
"You're going back to work?" She felt a warm rush of relief.
He smiled tautly. "Well, I'll try."
A week passed, and another. Genoaro worked with a strangely fierce concentration, as if he were determined to build from his labors a refuge of some sort. He seemed to be willing himself into thoughtless exhaustion. At first Cayten welcomed his absorption as a sign of returning normality, but after a while she found it increasingly disturbing.
He was always in his studio, not even pausing to take meals with her. His face grew more drawn with each day that passed, until he wore a look of constant haggard desperation.
When she asked him what was wrong, he shook his head and said, "I've gotten behind, Cayten. I'll have to work very hard for a while, or I'll lose too many clients."
"Genoaro... they'll make allowances."
He darted a hot glance at her. "I don't want anyone to make allowances."
She couldn't understand his anger.
She never found a way to discuss the Level with him, though she tried more than once. Each time she mentioned the Level to Genoaro, he turned the subject away, as if it were a dagger she had thrust at him. Finally he shouted at her. "That's over, Cayten! You do me no good bringing it up, making me think about it. You can help me most if you never mention the Level again."
"I won't, then," she said, though she wondered if it was the right thing to do.
One day soon after, a Linean came to their door to fetch a work it had commissioned.
The alien, a rotund blue batrachian creature, lifted the brown glass poniard from its velvet-lined presentation case. "Fine work," it grunted, as it turned the edge so that the blade threw a delicate glitter into Cayten's eyes.
"Thank you," Genoaro said stiffly, waiting impatiently for the Linean to finish its examination.
Acting on a sudden impulse, Cayten spoke. "Kingly one," she said - that being the proper term of respect for a Linean of elevated rank. "May I ask for whom the poniard is intended?"
Genoaro glared at her, shaking his head. But the Linean responded courteously. "One of our elder diplomats soon will retire."
She ignored Genoaro's obvious displeasure, and spoke again. "A lovely gift to commemorate your honored person's service, then."
The Linean shook its greasy blue head. "No gift. With this will we cut the honored person's aged throat, it being essential to demonstrate the proper respect."
She drew back, still smiling, though she was sure her smile had gone as glassy as the poniard.
When the Linean was gone, Genoaro looked at her wordlessly.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It doesn't matter," he said, turning away. "You know what sort of work I do."
"You aren't responsible for the use your clients make of your work."
"No, of course not," he answered in a muffled voice. "But I like the work, you see. I like to make sharp things; I like to make things that love blood. I won't ever find another line of work I like as well."
"But...."
"No, I won't find a new job. I might as well cut out the middleman. Don't you think?"
In the morning he was gone again.
Two days after Genoaro left, she went to see Shinvel Dward.
She announced herself at the door to Dward's apartment, and a long time passed before the door slid up and a pretty bond servant motioned for her to enter.
Dward lounged on a curved divan, her muscular bulk swathed in magenta spidersilk. "Cayten Borlavinda. An interesting and delightful surprise. How may I help you?"
"Citizen Dward...," Cayten began.
Dward made an impatient gesture. "Please call me Shinvel. Let's not stand on ceremony; sit here beside me."
Cayten sat in the corner of the divan. Dward rolled to her belly, struck a grotesquely adolescent pose, chin in hand, bare feet waving in the air. "Tell me," she said in a chummy voice.
"Well... Shinvel. It's about Genoaro."
Dward raised her heavy eyebrows. "Who?"
"Genoaro Maryal. He runs with your pack. My lover."
Dward's broad face shifted through a quick cycle of emotion: recognition, disdain, withdrawal. "Your lover? I know him only vaguely. You're a novice on the Level; I can tell. Otherwise you'd know there is no 'pack.' Hyenas aren't true pack animals. They come together to hunt, but the alliance is loose and soon dissolved. Never love a hyena, dear; they're inconstant." Dward put a large hand on Cayten's thigh, smoothed a tiny wrinkle from the fabric of Cayten's bodysuit.
Cayten repressed a shudder, but Dward noticed and jerked her hand away. The big woman sat up abruptly, face hardening. "You're wasting your time," Dward said. "That one's lost." She snorted dismissively, and gestured for a bond servant. A wispy girl with short lavender hair and a silver-striped face ran forward, bearing a tray.
Dward took up a long-stemmed pipe, filled it with some pale green herb from a cloisonne humidor, lit it. She took a deep pull and offered the pipe to Cayten, who shook her head.
"What do you mean, he's 'lost'?" Cayten asked.
Dward released the fragrant cloud. "I mean, you don't want him anymore. He's past the edge. If he isn't in the Dark already, he soon will be. Change your locks and forget him."
Thendard had said much the same thing once, she remembered. This time she didn't attempt to hide the shudder. She dropped her face into her hands.
"Oh, for...." Dward was exasperated. "He was a weak man, and now he's not even that much. People like that have no business on the Level. They can't separate their pleasures from their responsibilities, and so they end up in the Dark. Look at me; I go up to the Level to play. It means more than that to your lover. A lot more; too much."
Cayten lifted her head. "He was a good man. Is a good man!"
Dward laughed and drew deeply on her pipe. "'Good' has nothing to do with it, Cayten. I'm not 'good,' but I can run the Level and take my pleasures there and come back to Bo'eme and do my work. I'll keep on doing that as long as it pleases me. Genoaro is different. He may have been a 'good' man once, but the Dark calls him too strongly. He belongs to the Dark now, not to you. Not even to himself."
Cayten shook her head, blinked back tears. "No. He loves me. I can bring him back."
The drug smoothed some of the scorn from Dward's face, but there was no sympathy there. "You're a good little artist," Dward said, her voice slurring slightly. "And you have pretty little breasts, which I'd like to touch. But you have no grasp of Genoaro's situation. The Dark has him now, and the Dark is a more satisfying lover than any human could be. For Genoaro."
As Cayten left, Dward laughed again.
She went up to the Level alone, too frantic to ask Thendard for his company and his help. She moved through the herds and brushed against the other predators, her skein idling.
She drifted toward the tween corridors, where the law still held, but where violence was a stronger possibility. Refugees from the Holding Arks squatted in these corridors, their skeinless presence tolerated. Though they lived unprotected by the laws that guarded the citizens of Dilvermoon, they were safer than in the jungle of the Dark. They survived any way they could, selling their bodies and their services, hoping to sell their contracts before chance or the whim of a citizen terminated their hopes.
The smells intensified, and the noises became more secretive, as she approached the tween corridors. Cayten saw no refugees; apparently they could hide quite successfully from a beaster operating at her minimal level. The light dropped off, until the corridors became shadowy places where silent forms moved.
She wandered for hours through that dim maze. Occasionally a pack of beasters would run past her, rolling crazy eyes at her. But apparently her possession of a skein marked her as a citizen, and none molested her, though many flung crude remarks at her in passing. All these she ignored. She began to think that Thendard was too cautious.
Finally she passed into a nexus that lay on the border between the tween corridors and the Dark. On the Dark side of the nexus, the deckhead had collapsed into a tangle of corroding conduit and cable.
She was at first not certain how she could be so sure that she had reached the border. But she was. The junk that blocked the far side of the nexus shouted danger to her; each shadow seemed to conceal a leopard; lions might skulk beneath the rusty canopy; crocodiles might burst from the puddles of seepage and oil that glimmered here and there. After a bit she understood that her skein was signaling a warning, using the appropriate imagery.
Several openings led into the Dark, illuminated only by the faint glow of emergency lightstrips. Cayten studied these openings with a sort of morbid fascination. Was Genoaro inside somewhere, doing hideous things, or, perhaps, the victim of some dire act?
The nexus was silent and empty; her steps echoed as she approached the center of the open space. A faint breeze blew from the Dark, and carried an unfamiliar scent. She could see a little way into the Dark, through the aisles cleared through the debris, but nothing moved. The Dark might be a steel jungle, but for the moment it seemed as uninhabited as any desert.
She turned away, back into the tween corridors. She was growing desperate; she might search for Genoaro for weeks without success, and surely he would be dead or irretrievably devolved long before that. Her unaugmented human senses were too dull.
She paused at the edge of the nexus, and her fingers touched the hard shell of the personaskein at the back of her neck. She toyed with it for a moment, then disengaged the interlock and cranked up the vernier, higher than she had set it before — though well below maximum intensity.
The world turned, and became a far more interesting place. She felt light, powerful, unnaturally alert. The scent that blew from the Dark resolved into a complex of distinct odors, each sharp and well-defined. There was the enticing sweetness of decaying protein, the harshness of corroding metal, the chemical tang of a thousand varieties of plastic. There were the scent-signatures of half a dozen predators who claimed territories in the near Dark. She turned away, a shudder twitching her hide, and ran into the tween corridors, head up, sniffing for Genoaro's scent.
The tween corridors seemed changed, dense with striving life, full of sounds and scents that she had not noticed before. She ran with an easy lolloping gait, tossing her head, occasionally voicing a high-pitched giggle, a sound that now seemed perfectly natural.
At the next corridor nexus, she surprised a group of wildebeests gathered around an algae-covered sump. They were, Cayten thought with the part of her mind that remained hers, a remarkably homely group of people with long, pendulous noses and awkward, rawboned bodies. They snorted, showed white eyes, but, evidently perceiving no threat in a solitary hyena, held their ground. She charged playfully around their flank, and they whirled to keep her in sight. Several children pressed back into the center of the herd, and Cayten was transiently horrified to find herself wondering if they could be separated from their parents.
She turned aside and raced off into the nearest corridor, choosing a direction at random, and a moment later she had forgotten her revulsion.
Genoaro's scent, along with the associated scents of other excited hyenas, came to her a few minutes later, as she passed through a maze of low-ceilinged access tunnels. She stopped, filled her nostrils with him, savoring the mingled odors of his sweat, the metallic burnt-clay reek of his glass furnace — a scent that still clung to him — and the coppery tang of fresh blood.
She pounded after him, smiling, feeling an unambiguous pleasure at the thought of seeing him. She burst from the access tunnels into a long, empty warehouse bay, and heard the yelping of a pack. The last hyena disappeared into a corridor on the far side of the bay, and she increased her speed, ignoring the pain that began to stitch her side. She could feel her face stretching in a wild fixed grin, and she barked with anticipation.
She caught up with the pack at the exit of the corridor into another large bay. She recognized Genoaro, running at the front of the pack, legs pumping easily, body hunched forward in yearning. Then she saw what the pack was running.
Half a dozen preadolescent children raced desperately for the next tunnel. They wore the gray rags of Holding Ark refugees, and their thin legs flashed in the blue light. They wasted no energy on cries for help.
A brief keen delight lifted her forward, shouldering the other hyenas aside. She caught up with Genoaro and laughed. He glanced over, recognized her, and dodged aside in startlement. He slowed, his face filling with confusion. Then he took her arm and jerked her to a stop.
She tried to twist free, but his fingers tightened painfully.
"What are you doing, Cayten?" he asked, in a voice she did not recognize.
"Hunting," she said, and giggled. Her feet still wanted to run, and she danced up and down in place.
He groaned and reached up to his skein. Watching his face, she thought:
He shook her. "Crank down, Cayten. Come on."
The pack disappeared into the far corridor, and she felt a sudden heaviness in her heart.
"Yes, all right." She twisted the vernier, and a large part of the world died away softly.
She became aware of what she had been doing, in stages, as though a holoprojectionist with an unsteady hand had taken control of her mind's eye. The Dark and its deadly scents. The tween corridors and their shifting currents of life. Her hunt for Genoaro. The Ark children, fleeing from her teeth, from her hunger.
"Oh," she gasped. "Oh."
"You don't understand," Genoaro said.
Her revulsion, which had first centered on herself, widened to include him, and she did pull away finally, and took several involuntary steps back.
"What... what were you
Genoaro shook his head dumbly, watching her with dull eyes.
"What were you doing?" she shouted, and sprang at him, fists balled.
He made no move to defend himself when she thumped his chest. He said nothing until she grew tired and let her hands drop to her sides.
"Really, Cayten, you're wrong," he said, in a barely audible whisper. "It's just sport; we wouldn't have hurt them. When we catch them, we give them money and let them go. Who does it hurt? It's nothing, compared to the other things they're willing to do for money, things they do all the time."
She covered her face, and concentrated on controlling her breathing. The skein idled in her backbrain, but she was barely aware of its influence. When she thought she could speak with some semblance of calm, she looked at him. "Will you take me home?"
He looked at the corridor into which the pack had run, then shrugged.
"Yes, of course, Cayten."
They were almost out of the tween corridors, when she smelled fresh death. Even though her skein was only idling, she still felt drawn to investigate the off-corridor maintenance shaft from which the smell came. She started toward the shaft, impelled by her skein, and then thought,
"No," Genoaro said, just as she decided not to look. His voice changed her mind.
"No?" She studied his face. He was almost a stranger, but not quite. Something under that sheath of twitching muscle still showed the presence of Genoaro Maryal, but he was looking for a place to hide.
She ducked through the oval pressure hatchway, into the shaft. In the dim red glow of the safety light lay a small, ravaged corpse, eviscerated and partially dismembered. Thin ribs thrust whitely from what was left of the torso, and the floor was slick with blood and other fluids.
When she backed out, gagging, Genoaro was gone.
GENOARO DIDN'T come home. Cayten roamed her studio silently, doing no work, feeling a revulsion for herself, and for Genoaro, so powerful that it seemed to produce an odd species of numbness. She could feel an agony trying to be born, but it was as if her mind were refusing to process the thing she had learned about Genoaro, as if it were fighting the onset of some storm that would forever alter the shoreline between her and Genoaro.
She found herself, perversely, thinking of the many tender things that Genoaro had done for her in the sixteen years she had known him.
So much evidence contradicted the new knowledge she had gained of him in the tween corridors. She paused beside the glass-fronted case in which she kept those things she had made that were too precious to sell. On the bottom shelf was a small begging bowl she had made when she was still learning her craft, before her skills had brought her the critical and financial success she now enjoyed. The bowl was built on an armature of clone-grown walrus ivory, a net of warm, pale yellow, polished to a glassy smoothness. Genoaro, at the time still an unknown himself, still working in relative poverty, had given her the planet-born gems from which she had cut the major parts of the design. Viewed from the top, the bowl displayed a man and woman carved from lambent blue-white moonstone, languorously entwined on a shimmering coverlet of black opal.
The two of them.... The piece had marked the beginning of her rise to prominence. He had bought her the gemstone slabs, a gift he could not afford, as an expression of his faith in her talent.
She opened the case and took out the bowl. The ivory warmed her fingers, but the opal sucked away the heat. She traced the moonstone figures with her fingertip, concentrating on the silky texture.
Her hands suddenly shook with an impulse to smash the bowl against the wall. Instead, she returned it to the case, very carefully, so carefully.
She went to Thendard that night.
She told him everything, all the terrible details.
When she was done, he shook his great head, slowly, his jowls quivering. "Cayten, Cayten. I hardly know what to say. I suppose I didn't know Genoara as well as I once thought I did."
She looked at her hands, which twisted together in her lap like two creatures with a separate life. "Nor did I. But I still love him, Thendard, though I hate myself for it."
"There's no shame in loving the dead, Cayten. But you have to live for the living."
She looked up, her eyes full of hot tears. "But he's not dead. He's not. There must be something I can do."
Thendard rose from his powerchair and paced heavily back and forth. "I don't think so. What? Cayten, please, it'll be easiest if you think of him as dead. They don't come home from the Dark."
"You don't know he's gone to the Dark?"
"No.... But it's what I prefer to believe. If he hasn't gone into the Dark, then he's a purposeful monster, like the others who hunt the tween corridors for helpless victims. I prefer to think that he can't help himself. I loved him, too, Cayten. He
"Why do you do it, then?" She watched him with narrowed eyes, holding in a sudden rush of anger. Thendard had proved stronger than Genoaro; she could not contain her resentment.
"Adventure? Renewal? All the standard rationales for which you have no patience...."
A silence grew between them.
"What will you do?" Thendard finally asked.
"I'll take him home, if I can find him. Is it any different from ganglusar dust, or wireheading, or any of the other ways people can lose themselves?" she asked.
"No," Thendard said, and nothing more. His deep-set eyes were dark with premonition.
"Help me again," she asked. "I can't be a hyena bitch anymore. Help me build a new body — I'll look for him as a lioness, if you'll help me."
Thendard pursed his lips. "Lions despise hyenas," he said. "They're too much alike — except that the lions are stronger."
"I know," she said.
She submitted herself to Thendard's medunit, and, over the course of a month, it carved her into a new being. The process was sometimes painful; but the pain the medunit's drugs could not wash away, she endured without complaint. A deeper source of pain was Genoaro's continued absence.
The medunit reinforced her bones, built new tendons, installed fifty kilos of clone-doubled muscle. It paid particular attention to her hands, enlarging and knitting them into massive clubs of bone and sinew.
She could flex her hands only with difficulty. Her nails had become needle-sharp hooks, gleaming scimitars. Fangs touched the flesh on either side of her mouth, cold and hard.
Thendard watched as she stood naked before a mirror, admiring her new shape, flexing the ropy ridges of muscle that had altered the shape of her body into something only marginally human in appearance. "You look dangerous," he said mildly.
"I don't feel that way."
"You will in a bit," he said, and handed her a new skein.
Thendard was right. She ran the Level every night for a week, growing more comfortable with her new persona, nudging the vernier a little higher each night. She evaded the attentions of the dominant lions she met, who were eager to recruit her into their prides. She ignored the frantic sexual posturing of nomad lions. She saw hyenas, which bounded away when they became aware of her watchfulness, but she found no sign of Genoaro.
She felt herself growing into her new persona, though once or twice she wondered if she was instead shrinking into a smaller mindshape. These thoughts she immediately dismissed. The lioness skein gave her a seductive pleasure; it grew more irresistible each time she took it. She began to understand the pit that had opened under Genoaro's feet. The delight she felt was primarily centered in her heightened senses, and in the novelty of her new viewpoint; everything — scents, sights, sounds, tactile sensations — took on a more immediate, vital presence. She was always careful to feed well before she went up to the Level, so she could pad through the herds with no more than a intellectual appetite. She only rarely thought of making a kill, and then it was no more than a passing impulse, easily quelled.
She talked to Thendard about it, but he dismissed her notion that the lion was a nobler creature than the hyena.
"Lions are lazy creatures, Cayten," he told her. "There's no lion so content as a zoo lion — one who has nothing to do but eat and sleep and fuck."
When he said this, she experienced a poignant animosity, just for an instant. She felt her lips writhe back.
He looked away quickly, as if he did not wish to see what was in her face.
"I'm sorry, Thendard." She took a deep breath. "I don't know what got into me."
He looked at her and smiled. "
"My life... is stopped. Until I can find Genoaro and bring him home."
"Cayten, Cayten.... You'll never bring him home, though it saddens me to say this to you. Give it up."
"No!"
She went away, back to the Level, where she roamed for a day and a night among the beasters, hunting Genoaro.
She failed to find any trace of him, but at the end, when she was exhausted and surly with hunger, she found Shinvel Dward and two of the critic's bond servants.
She trapped the three of them in a dead-end tween corridor. Dward glared without recognition as Cayten moved closer. The two bond servants — delicate, pale girls with elaborately braided red hair — darted back and forth aimlessly, making little shrieks of alarm.
Dward stood her ground, clashing her jaws in warning. "I'm a citizen of Dilvermoon, catbitch. Harm me, and you'll deal with the lawmechs!"
Cayten glanced up at the deckhead, which was empty. "I see no lawmechs."
Dward paled slightly. "I'm strong; you won't have an easy time of it."
Cayten growled and showed her fangs.
Dward fell back a step, and now there was terror on her lumpy face.
Cayten shook herself, and turned down the intensity of the skein. She felt a weight of outrage slip away — a surprisingly heavy weight. Abruptly the world seemed a cool and precise place, much reduced in contrast. She took a deep breath and straightened from the tense crouch she found herself in. "Don't you remember me, Shinvel? Me and my pretty little breasts. They at least are the same."
Dward's mouth fell open. "Cayten Borlavinda? Is that you? What have you done?"
"Adapted."
Dward's face displayed amazement, then resentment — finally rage. "What do you mean, frightening me that way? I should teach you a lesson!"
To her surprise, Cayten felt a growl rising from her chest, and she took an involuntary step toward Dward. "You'll teach me no lessons tonight, Shinvel. Don't provoke me. Tell me where Genoaro is, if you want to leave the tween corridors undamaged."
Dward stood frozen for a moment, then relaxed by slow degrees, smiling crookedly. "Still chasing that worthless dog? I can tell you where to look, but I don't think you'll find him."
"Where?'
Dward laughed a humorless hyena laugh. "He's gone into the Dark, of course. None of us have seen him on the Legal Level for over a month."
Cayten's mind clicked into belief, and she turned away.
Dward called after her. "You've made a bad enemy today, cutie. See if I don't ruin you in Bo'eme; see if I don't."
The words made no impression on her.
She was afraid to go into the Dark. Thendard had told her terrible stories about acts of depravity too imaginative to have ever been conceived by real animals. "The Dark isn't a clean place, Cayten," he had said.
Now he warned her again. "No one who values their humanity goes into the Dark. The Dilvermoon authorities tolerate the Dark only because it drains off the violently insane and their natural victims. The Dark saves the lawmechs the trouble of catching and protecting."
"How could it be much worse than the tween corridors?'
Thendard shook his head, solemnly exasperated. "Do you never listen to me, Cayten? Well, listen now. The Dark is different. In the Dark, your skein knows only one setting: maximum intensity. Doesn't matter what you set it to; you're banged down into your hindbrain, all the way. Non-beasters can't even survive in the Dark. The datafield there stops your heart if you're not wearing a full-spec skein...."
"I've been running the skein pretty deep, Thendard. I could handle it."
He snorted. "Sure."
"Well, why not?'
He shifted uneasily in his powerchair, and didn't speak for a long moment. "Oh, maybe you could handle it. It depends on something I can't measure. Some of us are more human than others, and those who are most human can run the Dark and come back. They have a little reserve; they can still think like a human being."
She thought about it. "Have you been in the Dark, Thendard?"
His face changed subtly; his attention seemed to turn inward. She could see memories playing behind his eyes, as though tiny holotanks flickered and danced there. "One time," he said. "Long ago."
She waited for him to elaborate, as he always did, but for once no words welled from his mouth. Watching him, she was startled to see something unfamiliar in his face.
Finally she said, "I'm going, Thendard. Will you come with me?"
He smiled a weary smile. "Can I change your mind?"
"No."
He shrugged and turned away, so that she could not see his eyes. After a long silence, which she could not bring herself to break, he sighed. "I'll go with you, Cayten, if you won't see sense. Why not?"
THENDARD INSISTED on certain preparations. "It's very different in the Dark, Cayten. You're a civilized woman. You'd eat off the floor in any legal corridor in Dilvermoon if you had to, and feel no fear of infection. Do that in the Dark, and you might have half a dozen parasites eating you from the inside out."
So she submitted to immunizations, to an implant of general-purpose nanovores, to an on-need endorphin synthesizer.
Thendard was pleased by her cooperation. "It's good of you to humor me. I'll feel much better about our expedition, especially if...." His voice trailed off.
"If what, Thendard?"
"If you don't come back, dear." The laugh lines around his eyes crinkled into sadness. "At least now you'll have an edge over the other Darkrunners. If you don't come back — and I do — I'll want to think of you as living a different life. Happy again. A long, healthy life. I wouldn't want to live in the Dark myself, but it's better to live in the Dark than to die there. No?"
Thendard and Cayten passed rapidly through the tween corridors, until they stood in a long, narrow hall, from which multiple doorways led into the Dark.
"This is the safest ingress I know of," Thendard said. "These tunnels let into a maze complex. The predators who wait for new — and unwary —prey... they prefer other, less complicated lurks."
Cayten shivered. The doorways seemed hot with some unseen light, a black bloody radiance. She fixed her mind on Genoara, calling up sweetmemories to push away the fear. She remembered his face, smiling. His voice, before it harshened. The touch of his hands on her body, before his hands grew too strong to be gentle.
Thendard looked at her, shaking his great head. "You can change your mind, Cayten. No shame in finding a bit of sense, even at this late date."
She shook her head. She tried to smile, and patted Thendard's arm. "I'm a constant sort of fool, Thendard."
He smiled back, but there was a resignation in his eyes that she found more unsettling than the doorways.
"All right, then. Crank down your skein, dear — you'll suffer less disorientation when we come out. About 70 percent of max; that'll be about right." Thendard adjusted his own skein. He seemed to melt into a new form, one with eroded gray skin and tiny, knowing eyes.
Cayten was sure he was cranked down more than 70 percent, but she was not so daring.
She took a deep breath, and tried to look on the shape of her own mind, to preserve it in perfect memory. It was a strange effort; it made her feel suddenly adrift on a sea more mysterious than she had ever guessed existed. She shook her head.
When her hand dropped away, she was deeper into her hindbrain than she had ever gone. Her mind contained nothing but purpose. She trotted toward the nearest tunnel, which no longer seemed so threatening. Instead, it called to her irresistibly; it sang to her of freedom from human concerns. She felt Thendard at her heels, however, and she could still take comfort from his huge, friendly presence.
That was the last wholly human thought she had before she passed into the Dark.
The lioness ran along the corridor, under the dim red lights, living the Serengeti that was not there. The unnatural tang of corroding metal stifled her. Ozone tingled her nose, and none of the smells was quite right. But some sort of prey were here, she knew, and even though she was not hungry, she took comfort and reassurance from that.
An old bull elephant staggered along at her heels, and she darted aside, wary of his huge feet. But then she remembered dimly that he was some sort of ally, as unlikely as that seemed. As she resumed her hunt, a picture formed in her mind's eyes: a human, a man with a long, narrow face and gentle eyes, whom she hated and desired. The memory was associated with a scent tag, the sly carrion stink of hyenas, which she despised. She snarled and ran faster, so that the elephant began to fall behind. The bull called to her, making meaningless sounds; she ignored him. His thin trumpeting took on an edge of desperation.
By the time she reached the first big nexus, she could barely hear him, and the thud of his feet against the steel had slowed. She put him from her mind, and concentrated on that face, the one that filled her with so many conflicting emotions. Was she hunting the thin-faced man? She could not decide. She lay down in the deep shadow beneath a dead cargo ramp, twitching with indecision and frustration.
At the exact moment when the old elephant emerged behind her, puffing and clutching at his chest, hunting dogs burst from a nearby tunnel.
The hunting dogs were smaller, more agile, and better-organized cousins of the hyenas. Even the lions feared them, when the dogs hunted in large numbers. This was a small pack, half a dozen scrawny creatures. Their ribs stood out, their skins were patchy with disease, and the alpha dog limped. The lioness relaxed. If they attacked her, she would kill as many of them as pleased her. For the moment she would do nothing; the ventilators blew their scent toward her, and they were unaware of her presence.
They saw the old elephant and barked with excitement. When they saw that he was alone, they raced across the nexus toward him, baying and snapping, bouncing with excitement.
In ordinary circumstances, in a herd of his own kind, the old elephant would have been safe. But he
As she processed this thought, an uneasiness came over the lioness, and her mind filled with the buzzing of competing impulses. Something was wrong; something bad was happening. She made a small sound of distress, as the dogs sprang on the old bull.
He put up a spirited defense, whirling, stamping, swatting at the dogs, but he was too slow. Streams of blood began to trickle down his torn legs. The lioness saw that it was only a matter of time before one of the dogs would bite deep enough to hamstring the bull, and then it would be over.
The dogs drew back for a moment, just to savor the taste of the impending kill, and the old bull looked at the lioness.
She saw some pitiful message in those tiny bright eyes, and, though she could not read it, the message drew forth the last bit of humanity that she possessed.
She exploded from her lurk, landing in the midst of the dogs before they knew she was there. She lashed out, broke the neck of one skinny piebald bitch, disemboweled another dog with a rake of her claws. The rest fled, shrieking disappointment and outrage.
She was alone with the bull. He made meaningless sounds at her. She shook her head, and growled softly.
After a while he turned away and shuffled slowly back the way he had come.
She followed, just out of sight, until he reached the border of the world, and she watched as he passed out of the world. She could follow no farther. But just before he went away, he looked back into the world and smiled at her, a strange thing for an elephant to do.
The image of the thin-faced man with the gentle eyes was gone, and it never returned to trouble her.
The lioness hunted the steel Serengeti for many seasons after. She was strong enough to choose her own mate, a big deep-chested male with a wild black mane.
Once, when her cubs were still small, a hyena approached her. He made strange gestures at her, and babbled in the foolish hyena way. Oddly, he didn't try to do her or her cubs any harm.
After a while she chased him away, and she never saw him again.