Beastchild

Chapter Two

The second warning from the Phasersystem had disconcerted Hulann. He had honestly forgotten all about the need to make an appointment with the traumatist. He was shaken by his neglectfulness and decided to complete his obligation before going to the diggings. He set a time with Banalog's computer-secretary for late that afternoon. He went to work, late for the second day in a row.

He passed the others without comment, noticing the odd looks he drew from them. Realizing that his lips were pulled in over his teeth giving him a look of shame, he quickly rearranged his facial composure until he seemed nothing more than a happy bone hunter on his way to rich graveyards.

He went into the tumbled-down building, down the stairs, into the cellar, flicking on the lights as he went. He walked to the break in the continuous stretch of rooms, took his handlamp through the hole and into the chamber where the human child had been yesterday.

Leo was still there.

He sat in a pile of clothes, wearing two coats to keep from freezing, eating some earthly fruit from a plastic container. The container apparently had a heat tab, for steam was rising from it.

Hulann stood in disbelief, his eyes totally uncovered, the lids folded like accordions in the overhanging ledge of bone above his sockets.

"Would you like some?" Leo asked, offering the fruit.

"What are you doing here?" Hulann demanded.

Leo said nothing, took another bite of food, swallowed it. "Well, where else was there for me to go?"

"The city," Hulann said. "The whole city!"

"No. There are other naoli. It is all occupied."

"Out of the city, then. Away from here!"

"My leg's better," Leo admitted. "Though I couldn't walk well on it yet. Even so, there isn't anything outside the city. There has been a war, remember."

Hulann could find nothing to say. For the first time in his life, he felt that he could not control his emotions. There was a great desire in him to kneel and relax and cry.

"It's so cold," Leo said, still eating. "Yet you don't wear anything. Aren't you cold?"

Hulann crossed, sat down in the dirt a few feet in front of the boy. Almost absentmindedly, he said, "No. I'm not cold. We have no constant body temperature such as humans have. Ours varies according to the cold. Though not greatly, really. And then there are our skins. Little body heat can escape us if we wish to contain it."

"Well, I'm cold!" Leo said. He put the empty can aside. Slight white vapors still steamed upward from it. "I've looked for a personal heating unit ever since the city fell. I can't find one. Do you think you can bring one to me?"

Hulann looked incredulous. Yet he found himself saying, "I've seen a few recovered from the ruins. Maybe."

"That would be swell."

"If I bring it, would you leave?" he asked.

Leo shrugged his shoulders, which seemed to be his most characteristic gesture. Hulann wished he knew for certain what emotion it expressed. "Where would I go?"

Hulann waved his arms weakly, pointlessly. "Away from the city. Even if there isn't much of anything out there, you could take food and wait until we were gone."

"Ten years."

"Yes."

"That's silly."

"Yes."

"So we're back where we started."

"Yes."

"Doesn't that hurt?" Leo asked, leaning forward.

"What?"

"Your lips. When you pull them in over your teeth like that."

Hulann quickly showed his teeth, put a hand to his lips and felt them. "No," he said. "We have few nerves in our outer layers of flesh."

"You looked funny," Leo said. He drew his own lips in over his teeth and made talking motions, then burst out laughing.

Hulann found himself laughing also, watching the boy mimic him. Did he really look like that? It was a mysterious expression on a naoli; or at least he had been raised to respect it as such. In this mock version, it truly was humorous.

"What are you doing?" the boy squealed, laughing even harder.

"What?" Hulann asked, looking about him. His body was still. His hands and feet did not move.

"That noise," Leo said.

"Noise?"

"That wheezing sound."

Hulann was perplexed. "Mirth," he said. "Laughter like yours."

"It sounds like a drain that's clogged," Leo said. "Do I sound that bad to you?"

Hulann began laughing again. "To me you sound strange. I had not noticed before. You sound like some birds that we have on my world. They are great, hairy things with legs three feet long and little, tiny bills."

They laughed some more until they were tired.

"How long can you stay today?" the boy asked when they had sat in comfortable silence for some minutes.

The depression settled on Hulann again. "Not long. And you can stay for even a shorter time. You must leave. Now."

"I've said I can't, Hulann."

"No. There will be no refusal. You must leave now, or I will turn you over to the executioners as I should have in the first place."

Leo made no move to leave.

Hulann stood. "Now!" he commanded.

"No, Hulann."

"Now, now, now!" He grabbed the boy, lifted him off the floor, surprised at his own lightness. He shook him until the boy's face was a blur. "Now, or I will kill you myself!" He dropped him back onto the floor.

Leo made no move to depart. He looked at Hulann, then down at the clothes spread around him. He began to draw them in against himself, cuddled into a hollow to contain the heat from his body. With only his upper face uncovered, he stared at the naoli.

"You can't do this to me," Hulann said. He was no longer angry, just exasperated. "You can't make me do these things. Please. It is not right of you."

The boy did not answer.

"Don't you see what you're doing? You're making a criminal of me. You are making me a traitor."

A gust of cold air found its way through the debris and twisted by the two of them. Hulann did not notice. The child drew deeper into his nest.

"You should have let the rat kill me. You were a stupid child for warning me. What am I to you? I am the enemy. I was better dead to you than alive."

The boy listened.

"Stupid. And a traitor to your own race."

"The war is over," Leo said. "You won."

Hulann hunched as if bending over a pain in his stomachs. "No! No, the war is not over — until one or the other race is extinct. There is no quarter in this battle."

"You can't believe that."

Hulann did not speak. He did not, of course, believe it — just as the boy had said. Perhaps he had never believed it. Now, he realized the war was somewhat of a mistake. Man and naoli had never been able to co-exist even in a cold war sort of situation. They were too alien to meet on any common ground. Yet this child was reachable. They were communicating. Which meant there had been a flaw in their reasoning — which meant the war could have been avoided.

"Well," Hulann said, "I have no choice. I must open these cellars to the researchers on my team. I cannot hide their existence. I'll string the lights. If you are not gone when I call them in, it is your problem. It is no longer mine."

He got up and began his work for the day. Two hours before he was due to go to the traumatist, he had strung lights through most of the cellars. He came back and looked at the boy. "The next cellar is the last. I've finished."

Leo said nothing.

"You should be going."

Again: "There is nowhere for me to go."

Hulann stood, watching the child for a long while. At last, he turned and unstrung the glow bulbs, pulled up the poles he had planted, rewound the wire and took everything into the outer cellar. He came back and put his handlamp with the boy.

"It will give you light tonight."

"Thank you," Leo said.

"I have undone my work."

Leo nodded.

"Perhaps, tomorrow, I can fill up the crevice in the wall of ruins, seal this at the last cellar and try to keep the continuation from being discovered. Then, you would not be bothered." 'I'll help you," Leo said.

"You know," Hulann said, his heavy face strained so even the boy could see the anguish in the alien features, "you are… you are… crucifying me?"

And he went away. Leaving the boy with light.

"Come in, Hulann," the traumatist Banalog said, smiling and friendly as all traumatists are with their patients. He exuded a fatherliness, an exaggerated sense of well-being that could not help but infect his charges.

Hulann took the seat to the right of Banalog's desk while the older naoli went behind and sat down in his customary chair, leaned back and feigned relaxation.

"I am sorry I forgot to arrange an appointment yesterday," Hulann said.

"Nothing damaged," Banalog assured him gently, quietly. "Just shows that this guilt is not so bad as the Phasersystem computer thinks. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to continue working as you did." Banalog wondered if his lie was transparent. Hulann seemed to perk up, and he thought that he had told it with conviction. But now he was certain that the archaeologist was consciously aware of his guilt and trying to hide it."

"I didn't know I had a guilt complex until the Phasersystem told me about it."

Banalog waved his hands to indicate the unimportance of the situation Hulann now found himself in. The point was to, a little at least, put the patient at ease. He pulled his chair in closer to the desk, rested his arms on the top and began to punch a series of buttons on his multicolored control console.

There was a stirring above Hulann's head. As he looked up to see the cause of the noise and movement, the hood of the monitoring robot, gray and dully burnished, descended like a landing shuttlecraft. It stopped two feet above where he sat, the four-foot diameter of the hood radiating, to all sides of him.

Banalog worked other controls, calling forth a post which consisted of lenses and sensors of various types, all of high receptivity. It rose from the floor, half a dozen feet before Hulann, stopped when it was at his eye level.

"I thought this equipment was for severe cases," he said to Banalog, losing the sense of ease he had entered this room with, a hard edge of terror in his voice.

"Misconception," Banalog said as if he were quite bored, really, with this whole affair. "We have much more sophisticated equipment for a severe case."

"But are you afraid that I would lie to you?"

"No, no. I do not insult you, Hulann. Such a thing is opposite of my purpose. But remember that the mind is strange. Your overmind may lie to you. You would sit there telling me what you thought was the truth about your guilt complex — but it would still be festering inside you. We are all creatures strange to our own selves."

The machines vibrated slightly as they came to life out of oiled slumber. Some of the sensors glowed green, like a naoli's eyes. Others were yellow and purple. Hulann's skin crawled as the probing waves penetrated him without sensation and began collecting data for the traumatist.

"Then it is necessary?" he asked.

"Not necessary, Hulann. That makes it sound as if you are in a bad way. You do not feel ill, do you? I should hope not. Believe me, I think your problem is a minor one. Not necessary, just standard procedure in such a case."

Hulann nodded, resigned to it. He would have to be extremely cautious and hedge his answers, try to be as honest as possible — but also try to phrase his responses so that they were literally true while not giving away the exact situation.

The questioning began gently.

"You like your work, Hulann?"

"Very much."

"How many years have you been an archaeologist?"

"Seventy-three."

"Before that?"

"A writer."

"How interesting!"

"Yes."

"A writer of what?"

"History. Creative history."

"Archaeology, then, was a natural follow-up."

"I suppose so."

"Why do you like archaeology, Hulann? Wait. Why do you like this archaeological job in particular?"

"The excitement of resurrecting the past, of finding things unexpectedly, of learning."

Banalog checked the readout monitors on his desk and tried to keep from frowning. He looked up at Hulann and, with an effort, smiled. "Does your work here on this planet assauge your guilt any?"

"I don't understand."

"Well, do you feel as if you are working out a penance, so to speak, in re-constructing the daily life of mankind?"

And so the questions went. Probing… prodding… It soon began to be clear to Hulann that Banalog was learning more than he had intended to let him discover. He tried to answer as well as he could, but there was no way to hide from the probing traumatist and the clever machines.

Then the trouble came.

Banalog leaned forward, conspiratorially, and said, "Of course, Hulann, you are as aware as I am that your subconscious guilt is now a conscious one."

"I — "

Banalog frowned and waved him to silence before he could offer denial. "It is. I can see that, Hulann. But there is something else you are hiding from me."

"Nothing."

"Please, Hulann." Banalog looked pained. "This is for your own good. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes," he said reluctantly.

"Then, will you tell me?"

"I can't."

"You would feel guilty?"

He nodded.

Banalog sat back in his chair and was quiet for a long while. The machines continued to hum and lance their invisible fingers through Hulann. Banalog turned to the window and watched the snow falling in the dim light. It had been spitting for a day now, but it was putting the white stuff down in earnest finally, had been doing that since noon. He worked over the details he had thus far uncovered, munched them with his overmind until he thought he had the proper question to pose next.

"Hulann, does this have anything to do with something you have uncovered in your diggings?"

The monitors on Banalog's desk reacted violently.

"No," Hulann said.

Banalog ignored the answer and paid close attention to the opinions of his machines. "What have you found?"

"Nothing."

"What could it be that you would consider so important that you would risk a washing and restructuring to hide it from me?"

Hulann was terrified. Suddenly, he saw his world falling down around him, crumbling to ruin, powdering, blowing away on a cold wind. His past would be erased by the washing techniques. His first two hundred and eighty-seven years would be taken from him. He would have no past for his children. The stigma would be borne by his family for a dozen generations.

Banalog raised his head, his lids stripped back, looking suddenly shocked. "Hulann! Have you found a human in those ruins of yours? A living human?"

"You have!" Banalog gasped.

Hulann had a vision of Leo being dragged from the shattered, charred building. He had another vision of the boy's frightened face — and a final picture of the small, twisted, bloodied body lying on the frozen earth after the executioners had finished with it.

He came out of the chair with a swiftness he did not know he could summon, a swiftness reserved for the first two hundred years of a naoli's life. He went over the desk, not around it, tramping on the screens of the traumatist's data devices, flicking switches off and on as he scrambled over them.

Banalog tried to scream.

Hulann toppled the traumatist's chair, spilled both of them onto the floor, using his forearm to choke the other naoli's mouth so full that the call for help could not be heard. Banalog tried to push up. Though he was a hundred years Hulann's senior, he almost managed to break free.

Swinging his arm, Hulann cracked Banalog's head. It bounced off the floor. The wide, green eyes were shut off by the slowly descending double lids.

Hulann struck again, to make certain. But Banalog was unconscious and would remain that way long enough for Hulann to make plans.

Make plans.

The full understanding of his position came to him harshly, making him dizzy and weak. He thought that he might vomit. He felt the contents of his more sensitive second stomach surging back into his first stomach. But he managed to stop the regression there. Up until a moment ago, he had been a candidate for washing and restructuring. That had been bad. Now, it was worse. He was a traitor. He had struck Banalog to keep himself from being committed and to keep a human child safe. They would surely execute him now.

Once he had thought losing his past was the worst they could do to him, worse than death as a traitor. Now he realized this was not so. At least, restructured, he could give his children the heritage of his future deeds. But" executed as a turncoat, he would give them nothing but disgrace for centuries to come.

What could be done? Nothing. There was no way to salvage his family name. He was only thankful that he had bred so few children. He rose from Banalog and considered his next step. Suicide, at first, seemed the only honorable path. As not even that would redeem his name, it seemed silly. He had nothing now but his life. He must salvage that.

And the life of Leo. That too. For, after all, it had been for Leo that he had ruined himself. To let Leo die now would be to give an air of farce to the entire affair.

The first thing, then, was to secure Banalog so that he could not spread an alarm until Hulann and the boy were beyond the clutches of the Second Division.

Transferring the unconscious traumatist to the chair beneath the hood where he himself had recently sat, he searched the office for something with which to bind him. He uncovered nothing of value. At last, he took down the drapes to either side of the window and tore them into strips. He wet the strips in the attached toilet and secured Banalog to the chair. Both feet first, then both hands. He looped his rope around the naoli's shoulders and tied that strand to the chair. Then his chest. Then a strip across his lap and under the seat.

"That would seem enough," Banalog said.

Hulann stood, startled.

"It would take a trick expert to escape from these."

Hulann drew his lips over his teeth.

"No need for that," Banalog said. "You're doing what you consider correct. You are ill. You do not know better."

Hulann turned for the door.

"Wait. Two things," Banalog said. "First, an injection of sweet-drugs so that my Phasersystem contact is no good. Then a gag for my mouth."

Numbly, he went back, found the traumatist's sweet-drugs in the center drawer, filled a needle with a strong dose of the potent liquid form, slipped the stuff into a vein in Banalog's neck. Then he gagged him. All of this, he kept thinking, made no sense. Why was Banalog cooperating? Hulann was tempted to remove the wad of drapery material and ask the older naoli. But there was no time for that. He was a fugitive now. He had to move swiftly.