The Beastbreaker

The Beastbreaker

By Ray Aldridge

/The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1991/

Dilvermoon is a silver apple, big as a world. Ten thousand competing cultures fill her, packed between her steel rind and her hollow heart. You can, if it's your luck to be wealthy, rent a ship and follow the sunset around her equator. Fly low! You'll see signs of the vast trade Dilvermoon supports: innumerable star freighters, huge landing bays set into the armored hull, monstrous flatscreens advertising every conceivable product and service. Fly far enough, and you'll eventually pass over a black pit a hundred kilometers deep and six hundred across, the scar of some long-forgotten disaster.

«You've found the Big Dimple, a ruinous wilderness full of mutated beasts, criminals, savage tribes, and a few madmen.

«There are no tourist facilities.»

– from The Adventurous Travelers Guide to the Manichaean Region.

* * *

The Glimmerchild rode the Midnight Beast through the dark ruins, and the big, beautiful lizard covered ten meters with each lazy bound. Crimson glowlight dripped richly over the Midnight Beast's black hide, clustering thick and bright along her spine, spilling down her withers in sinuous lines, twinkling on the Glimmerchild's crystal scales. The Glimmerchild took pride in the loveliness the two of them made. What a fine thing it must be, to see us pass in the starshine, he thought. A pity there's no one to admire us.

The trend of his thoughts annoyed him. What if were alonel 1 have the Midnight Beast; she has me. He clamped his knees tighter to her warm barrel, and gave himself to the pleasure of movement.

Hours later, far down on the lower slopes, the Glimmerchild sensed an intelligent mind. He liked to touch other intellects, even if he could never be with them, so he reached out.

... madness boiled. Faces leered, distorted with a thousand unwholesome emotions. Eyes glittered; mouths sneered; brows wriggled like snakes. A thousand aimless noises rattled and wheezed; a thousand thin voices whispered evil instructions; a thousand itches and pains crawled an ancient body.

All this was background to a burning point of alertness, a watchfulness so intense as to be disorienting....

The Glimmerchild jerked away. He tugged at the Midnight Beast's horn, and she glided to a stop in a small clearing. The Glimmerchild glanced warily about; such potent madness demanded caution.

Reluctantly, he extended his mind. Nothing. The watcher had appeared, a bubble of lunatic foulness, then dissipated. Perhaps the Glimmerchild had touched a dying artificial-intelligence node. Such things existed, buried beneath the ruins, but still capable of an occasional pulse of thought. No wonder it's mad, he thought. Entombed in black decay, never changing, alone forever.

The Glimmerchild slipped from the Midnight Beast's back. To one side the ruins were overgrown with a dense stand of bonecane, glowing a faint, tarnished green. On the other the wiry stems of a dead stiletto vine covered a twisted doorframe. At the far end of the clearing was a small pond bordered by rushes.

The Midnight Beast stepped through the rubble to the water's edge. She posed there for a moment, lit by the bonecane's pale light. The Glimmerchild admired her long, powerful hind legs; her dainty forelegs; the smooth, sinuous arc of her neck; her lovely, cruel head.

He saw a flash, heard a concussive thump, and a stickyshock net knocked her rolling. She screamed, struggled, forelegs tearing uselessly at the net, until it locked tight around her. Her glowlight faded, and her eyes dimmed.

The Glimmerchild started forward, horrified, but an instant later a figure leaped from the rushes. It shrieked something. It did an antic little dance beside the Midnight Beast, a man in battered servoarmor, camouflaged with splotches of gray, ocher, greenish black – colors to match the ruins. Madness shrieked forth, making the Glimmerchild's head swim. He turned to run, and the madman saw him.

The madman's hand swooped to his belt rack, drew forth a netshell, chambered it with appalling speed, before the Glimmerchild had quite reached the edge of the clearing. «Aha!» the madman shouted, aiming. Just as he fired, the Glimmerchild dodged behind the doorframe, so that the net captured only the dead stiletto vine.

The Glimmerchild ran into the concealing darkness.

«Come back here; come back, pretty little thing,» the madman roared, in a powerful, disappointed voice.

Ortolan Veek was a mad old man.

His madness spanned a remarkable range of obsessions and delusions. He cultivated his madness, fed it well, kept it free of the weeds of rationality. It had flowered into a great and repulsive edifice.

He wooed his madness as passionately as an artist his Muse.

Occasionally it occurred to him that if he stopped working so hard at it, he might no longer be so mad. Such thoughts he put away immediately.

Tonight he hunted from one of his favorite lurks, a clump of rushes beside a small pond. Veek was motionless, poised, the net gun held ready. Through the stems he could see the starlit shimmer of the water.

A variety of beasts came to drink there, drawn by the pond's relative purity. They were wary, but Veek was the cleverest creature in the ruins. He giggled, suppressed the sound instantly. His madness battered at him – it was trying to escape, to fly wailing from his mouth out into the night.

He forced it back inside. No, no, not now, he thought. Wait awhile, just a little while. First catch a beast, first catch a beast. Teeth clenched, Veek rocked back and forth, a motion barely perceptible. He forced his madness to silence, and narrowed his mind to a needlepoint of watchfulness.

The beast stalked into view, magnificent, a great lizard moving on two legs, teeth like white knives, black as the deepest hole in the Big Dimple. A serrated horn on its forehead curved back in a graceful sweep. Fire covered the rex, as though her hide were a transparent crystal over lava-filled depths. A black opal of a beast, Veek thought, just before he fired the net.

The beast dropped screaming, but its struggles quickly ceased. Veek bounded forth to claim it, laughing. «Mine!» he shouted. «You're mine! Now your life begins.»

A furtive movement caught his eye. Another beast! He reloaded, fired. The creature dodged nimbly away, disappeared into the night.

He hopped from foot to foot, shouting curses after it. «You'll be sorry!» he shrieked. Should he pursue? He peered into the darkness. Perhaps not – the night favored the beast. Nor was Veek young, though he was still strong. Besides, he could not leave the black rex helpless; who knew what scavengers might want to gnaw at its pretty hide while he was off chasing the other one? But more to the point...

Veek looked up, and his madness swept over him. Ah, the constellations told the story: the Sapphire Sycophant lay low over the rim of the Big Dimple, topped by the Broken Helix; ominous, ominous. He listened. From far away came the hunting whistles of a stinkweasel pack. Omens, evil omens – all wrong for a jolly chase amid the ruins. His excitement ebbed, leaving him weary. I'm too extravagant, he thought. My emotions run in eroded channels, all muddy.

Veek lost the thought in the next instant. He stooped over his prize, examined the net's monitor node. Ah, good! The beast's heart pumped strongly; its lungs pulsed regularly. All was well. Occasionally a beast died in the net, from some mutant incompatibility with the stickyshock fiber. On such occasions, Veek was inconsolable; he would weep for hours over the corpse.

From behind the bonecane thicket, he summoned a floater equipped with a swiveling crane and winch. By the time he had the black rex secured on the floater's cargo platform, he had almost forgotten about the other beast.

But when he turned to go, its image bloomed in his memory: a small ape, standing on two legs, covered with mirrored scales. It gleamed with reflected starlight, a soft glory.

Veek sighed regretfully, then forgot all about it.

HIDDEN BY the night, the Glimmerchild watched. His first impulse had been to run away as fast as his feet would carry him, but in the end he found himself unable to abandon the Midnight Beast. The practical consideration was this: he was small and weak, and would be vulnerable to the Big Dimples many dangers until he found and trained another big predator.

The real consideration was this: he loved the Midnight Beast.

He watched the madman load her on a floater. At least the madman was not planning to make an immediate meal of her. She seemed to be breathing well, and his spirits rose.

When the madman drove away, the Glimmerchild ran behind, his heart pounding.

The floater soon outdistanced him, but the Glimmerchild kept on, touching the small minds of the ruins. He passed a frightened mouse, a belligerent ripstoat, a wary chumog, others; all had noticed the floaters alien passage.

Half an hour passed, and now the Glimmerchild reached the very bottom of the Big Dimple. Here the destruction was less complete. Girders rose almost intact above the sparse vegetation, looking like a skewed wireframe map of the burned-away corridors. Occasionally the bulk of a larger structure loomed above the rubble, the remnant of a corridor nexus, built of more enduring metal. The thought-trace led straight toward the largest of these, a mound topped by a struggling copse of spur pine.

The Glimmerchild sensed a vast concentration of beasts in the nexus. He identified the mind-signatures of a humpweasel, a bogtiger, a white rex, a stonesnark, a long-tailed colreave; many others familiar and strange. All seemed quiescent – not quite asleep, not quite awake. From dreamless minds came threads of uncharacteristic emotion – cold hatred; weary fear; bitter, frustrated rage. Nowhere could he find a trace of the cheerful ferocity he would expect from the big carnivores.

The Glimmerchild withdrew, shaken. What did the madman plan for the Midnight Beast? He searched, found her. She was alive and slowly returning to consciousness, though puzzled apprehensions clouded her mind.

He approached the big nexus with exaggerated caution, taking advantage of every bit of cover he could find. He felt vulnerable without the Midnight Beast's protection, and very small, as though he were still the most insignificant member of his tribe.

His mother had died soon after weaning him, and none of the men would acknowledge him. His scaly skin was considered strange, even by the gnarly standards of the tribe. His muteness denied him allies, but saved him from revealing his talent before he was old enough to understand how dangerous that would have been. Such talents were rogued from the tribe's gene pool far more mercilessly than mere physical deviations.

Other children set ambushes for him; he avoided them. In fights, he was hard to defeat, despite his small stature. When onerous tasks were given out, the Glimmerchild was absent an uncanny percentage of the time. All these things caused the other children to resent him, but fortunately, no one could put a precise name to the thing that was wrong with the Glimmerchild.

He had one friend, Mitsube, the old woman who guarded the tribe's teaching machine. The teaching machine was their link with the civilizations that filled Dilvermoon's steel rind. Without it the tribe would devolve. Their tech would fail, and no one would know how to make repairs. They would forget how to tap the econets, and so they would be cheated when the traders came among them. The tribe's children would become savages.

As the keeper of this essential device, Mitsube was an important woman, able to protect the Glimmerchild. She fed him, allowed him to live in her comfortable burrow. She showed her affection by permitting him more than his fair share of time on the machine. She sometimes called him beautiful.

On the day Mitsube died, the Glimmerchild lay in the machine's embrace, dreaming of Lost Earth. When the timer released him from reverie, he found her lying in the middle of her orange tarn wool rug. A mahogany stain spread beneath her body.

Her skin was cold when he touched her, and he ran from the burrow, making ugly croaks of fear and sorrow. He might have been put to death for her murder. But the knife had been thrust through her with a grown man's strength.

In council that night, the tribe's chairman, a man named Wu, rose to his feet. «Who knows of this matter?» Wu asked, but no one answered.

The Glimmerchild watched Loeren, a tall, heavy-shouldered man who might have been handsome but for a habitual look of petulant stupidity. Loeren's wife, Nanda, had often expressed an ambition to assume the stewardship of the teaching machine upon Mitsube's death. Something dark moved behind Loeren's eyes.

Loeren's mind opened before the Glimmerchild's probe, revealing a shallow wasteland where wooden people slowly postured. Here was Loeren, sitting before the door of Mitsube's burrow, draped in a fine stonemole cape. Here was Nanda, collecting rich fees from important people, fees that she would give in gratitude to Loeren. Gratitude! The Glimmerchild swam deeper, and found a memory. Loeren, speaking angrily to Mitsube. Mitsube, laughing and pointing to the door. The knife, tearing into Mitsube's frail body.

Wu spoke again. «Must I put the matter away? I ask for the last time: Who knows of this matter?»

The Glimmerchild pointed at Loeren, made the croak that was his only sound. Loeren shrank back momentarily. The Glimmerchild pushed through the crowd, finger still aimed. The people murmured.

Loeren paled, but he fixed a disdainful expression upon his face. «You lie, geek. You could not see me; you slept in the machine.»

Wu's face turned to stone, and the tribe grew still. It took Loeren a moment to realize that he had betrayed himself. Then he tried to flee, but the provosts caught him.

The tribe crucified Loeren on a rusting girder. Long before the murderer was dead, the Glimmerchild had run away, pursued by a stone-throwing crowd. He took with him nothing but a loincloth, which soon rotted.

He had come close to death a hundred times. Hiding in crevices, drinking foul water, feeding from carcasses too ripe for the larger scavengers ….

But three months after the tribe had banished him, he had begun to adapt to his solitary existence. He had a bonecane spear, tipped with a jagged bit of alloy. He learned to use it. He had shelter, a trickle of safe water. He was without any sort of companionship, but that was not entirely bad.

One day the Glimmerchild hid beside a game trail, clutching his spear, waiting for manageable prey to come along.

First he heard the thud of big, dangerous feet, and he shrank down, terrified. But the gray rex that came down the trail was mortally wounded; something had bitten several cubic meters of meat from her back, and torn away one of her forelegs. She moved with a hitch and a stagger, slowly and painfully.

She fell in front of him. Her breathing grew labored, and after a while she stopped trying to get up. The Glimmerchild waited until he was reasonably certain that whatever had hurt her was not following, then he crept out and thrust his spear through her great golden eye into her brain.

When he split open her paunch, three near-term spratlings fell out kicking. Two were gray, and one was black. The Glimmerchild took the mothers liver and heart, and trussed up the spratlings to carry along. They would live for a time, a convenient supply of fresh meat.

Back at the bit of broken-down corridor he called home, he ate the gray spratlings first, and fed the leftovers to their black sister. He watched her clean predators mind form, and he was intrigued. Her beauty emerged, and he was not immune to beauty. For a while the hunting was good, and so he kept her in reserve. One day he realized that she had become a companion. She learned to help him hunt, so that he no longer needed his spear. By the time she could carry him through the ruins on her glorious back, she was his beloved.

The Glimmerchild hid at the edge of the cleared area surrounding the madmans nexus, behind a broken meltstone column.

In the Big Dimple, unfortified dwellings soon were sacked, and the inhabitants eaten or sold to specialty slavers. So the Glimmerchild looked for defenses. The madman was tech-rich, judging by the armor and the floater; did he also possess mech guard units? Perimeter sensors? Sniffers? Autogun emplacements: Snuff fields? The possibilities were many and intimidating.

The Glimmerchild slumped down behind the column. The Midnight Beast was only an animal; perhaps she was already beyond assistance. True, she was magnificent, and he loved her. Still, he had only one life, and the Big Dimple was full of magnificent beasts. And if he had to tame another, the process would be swifter this time.

Dawn found the Glimmerchild still wavering. He had almost decided to be sensible, to run away, when he sensed a large group of humans approaching.

One was potent, a large, energetic mind, cold and controlled, throwing off a black radiance. The other minds slept; like the animals in the nexus, they were still, bitter, defeated.

The Glimmerchild's curiosity was aroused. He slid a little deeper into his hiding place.

When the red sun lifted above the rim of the Big Dimple, a train of six armored gondola cars rolled down into view, pulled by a landwalker with a dozen short, powerful legs. Lemon polka dots, cerulean chevrons, sea-green fleur-de-lis covered the landwalkers chassis. Florid script, woven into the pattern, proclaimed the Traders name: Margolian. A dorsal weapons blister bristled with deadly mechanisms: a big graser, a brace of smartmortars, a battery of high-cycle splinter guns, a flame ring.

The train stopped beside the Glimmerchild's hiding place. The large mind concentrated, narrowed its focus. A series of images flickered past, so fast that the Glimmerchild could barely sense them: a vat boiling with flesh, the sharp odor of ozone, an old hand holding a flask of pale liqueur – finally an ancient face, sly, mad, gleeful. The large mind clenched, grew quiet.

A bullhorn unfolded from a niche in the landwalkers side. «Ortolan!»a deep voice shouted. «Wake up in there! It is I, Hovhannes. Let me in, old friend.»

A dozen sensor masts popped from the nexus. The Glimmerchild cringed back. Evidently the madman was vigilant. The mechanisms on the mast whirred and clattered; finally another voice boomed out, which the Glimmerchild recognized. «Hovhannes? Is that you? How do I know it's you?

A sharp twinge of annoyance came from the large mind. «Of course it is I. Who else, Ortolan?»

«I got lots of enemies – as you ought to know if you're really Hovhannes.» A mad titter came from the nexus.

The Glimmerchild read sour resignation. «I will show myself. Please, old friend, hold your fire.»

The bow of the landwalker split open, slid back. An armorglass pod rose from the opening. Inside, lying on a gel couch, was a monumentally fat man, dark-skinned, bald, and naked. A glittering cluster of medical limpets clung to his vast chest. His features seemed tiny and ill-formed, except for his mouth, which was large and full of strong white teeth.

The pod sank; the armor closed protectively around the Trader.

«Hovhannes! Who else could be so ugly? Come on in!»

From the Trader came cold loathing, an emotion so intense that the Glimmerchild felt his stomach twist.

The train moved toward the nexus. When it paused to allow the heavy doors to open, the last gondola stopped right beside the Glimmerchild's hiding place. The Glimmerchild squirmed from his crevice and looked at the dark opening into which the Midnight Beast had disappeared.

A strong current tugged his heart toward the madmans lair. He shrugged, leaped onto the back of the gondola. He hung from the coupling, motionless, and was carried inside.

UNUSUAL EXCITEMENT gripped Veek; first the beautiful new beast, and now a visit from Hovhannes Margolian. He deactivated the snuff fields that surrounded his fortress, set the autoweaponry to Hold. When the train was close enough, he opened the blast doors. He watched half a dozen screens as the train slipped quickly inside. When the last carrier passed the threshold, Veek caught a glimpse of something out of place, a lively flicker of light at the back of the carrier, where only weathered alloy should be.

His carefully nurtured paranoia ignited. «Hah!» he shouted. «Trick me, would you?» He cycled the blast doors shut, so that the train was trapped in his security lock.

Hovhannes's amplified voice thundered in the tight confines of the lock. «What's wrong, Ortolan? Why would I trick you?»

Hovhannes was trying to make his voice soothing, but Veek saw the protective covers retract from the Trader's weapons. 'Now we'll see! Oh yes!» He stabbed at a red button on his security console. Anesthetic gas flooded the lock, a thick lavender fog. Something dropped from the last gondola.

The Trader's sensors swiveled about, searching for the source of Veek's alarm. One lifted away from the landwalker and flew back along the train, moving in a looping, evasive pattern. «That's right,» Veek shouted. «Make it look good.»

The sensor swooped down on the thing that had fallen from the gondola. Its rotors blew away the fog, and Veek saw that it was the pretty little ape. It must have followed the black rex, he thought. Sentimental tears blurred his vision.

«I'll burn it,» the Trader said. «It's nothing of mine.»

«No!» Veek shouted. «I want it!»

«As you wish, Ortolan. Shall I have my mech bring it inside?»

All Veek's instincts shouted against allowing one of the Traders devices within the nexus, even though Hovhannes was a friend, proven so over the centuries. «No. No. HI attend to it later. Let it lie for now, and you come in alone.»

Veek scanned the pod for hidden weapons, found none. Metal filled the Trader, as always. To keep his vast bulk alive, Hovhannes needed three auxiliary hearts pounding away in his chest. His bones were braced with alloy to keep him from collapsing into a puddle of crushed meat. Perhaps the Trader hid a bomb in his belly. Veek quelled his paranoia. If he never removed his armor, how could the Trader hurt him, even with a bomb? He let Hovhannes inside.

The Glimmerchild woke in a cage. His head pounded; his mouth tasted vile; his eyes seemed full of sharp grit. He rolled over on the steel floor, got to his hands and knees.

When he raised his head, he saw, through the bars, the Midnight Beast. She pressed against the bars of a larger cage, across an aisle. A single glowbulb, high overhead, lit her dimly.

He reached out, touched her with the fingers of his mind. Sad anger filled him. The Midnight Beast had never been handled so roughly, had never been made to feel helpless. Her small, strong mind was dull with bewilderment.

The Glimmerchild soothed her as well as he could, hid his own helplessness. Don't be afraid, he thought. I'll think of something. Don't give up.

He almost wept; he wished he could curse. But all he could do was wait.

After a bit he looked around. He was in a very large space. The dimness obscured dozens of cages and hundreds of stasis chambers, stacked on concentric ledges that marched upward to the pitted metal of the roof.

Nearby, a few animals stirred, but many more slept dreamless in the stasis chambers. The air was warm, rich with competing stenches: animals, rust, mildew, and the ozone-and-plastic reek of high-level tech.

Metal doors crashed open, and lights flared. The Glimmerchild squinted through his fingers. Veek swaggered in, still encased in his servoarmor. The fat Trader rode an upholstered power chair.

«Come on, Hovhannes. I'll show you my latest.» The madman gestured at the Midnight Beast. «I caught this one last night. Oh, she'll be prime. Biolume reticulations – rare – and that fine black hide.»

The Trader peered incuriously at the Midnight Beast. «And what will you make of her, Ortolan?»

I'm thinking about that. Beastbreaking is a patient art.» Veek pondered the Midnight Beast. «But at a guess... maybe a warbeast. Or a domestic guardian. Ho ho. You'd never fear the pinchmasters, with her in your kennel. Eh?»

The Glimmerchild glared out at the madman with as much ferocity as he could muster. Ugly visions filled his mind: the Midnight Beast chained to a gate, guarding trinkets. Or worse: the Midnight Beast carrying some fop into the dueling lists, the Midnight Beast spilling her precious blood for a fool's honor, the Midnight Beast lying torn and discarded. He made a grunting sound of despair.

The Trader glanced at the Glimmerchild. «What's this? I thought you took only beasts.»

«So I do, Hovhannes.»

«But Ortolan, this is human. Or once was.»

«You lie! To confuse me. I take no part in your filthy commerce, selling souls. Never say I'm a slaver! I break beasts only! That's no man! Where are its tools, its clothes, its ornaments?» He turned a madly affectionate eye on the Glimmerchild. «Like a star's nightgown, this one's skin.»

«Of course, of course. My mistake; I meant no offense.» The Trader fixed a placating smile on his face. The Glimmerchild watched a thought float to the top of the Trader's mind, a bubble of rancid conviction: it's all the same; we're all beasts, ancient dingwilly. The thoughts had a murderous shape, and the Glimmerchild withdrew with a shudder.

«All right!» Veek shook himself, armor clattering. «All right. Now let me show you the goods. The hunting's been fair.» Veek trudged off down the line of cages, and the Glimmerchild followed his mind, touching the old madman lightly – just enough to see through Veek's eyes. Veek's perceptions wavered constantly. Shapes bubbled, flowed like thick water, and the bars of the cages took on a sinuous life. The Glimmerchild grew dizzy.

«Now here, here's a fine property, a spiny chumog. Highly poisonous – the tribes call it a two-beat chumog. Two heartbeats, right? Notice the armorglass cage? It throws its spines. I've trained it to stealth.»

Through Veek's mad eyes, the chumog seemed a red-eyed demon: malevolent, sly, calculating.

«It attacks selectively. I show it an image of the victim, whistle a bar of 'Up Pops the Weasel,' and... death's a-slither!»

«Marketable,» the Trader said.

Veek took a stasis vial and a sensie chip from a cagefront rack, dropped them into a rack on the Trader's chair.

The Glimmerchild understood then that the madman would not sell the Midnight Beast herself, only her cloned sisters. He felt no relief.

«And here,» Veek said, moving on to the next cage. «What do you think of this?» The Glimmerchild saw a yellow hydrasnake, its tentacles knotted around a chunk of meltstone, its hundreds of tiny heads weaving in a slow, crisscrossing dance.

The Trader shrugged. «I prefer your colorful descriptions to my ignorant speculations, Ortolan.»

Veek snickered. «Ah, you know just what to say. You're dangerous; why did I let you in?»

The Trader sighed. «Because I pay you well for your cell samples and your training chips. Because you don't get many visitors. Because you can trust me.» Though the Glimmerchild was touching Veek's mind, a thought pulsed so strongly from the Trader that he caught it: Because you re a fool.

Veek turned a sharp glance at the Trader. For a brief instant, the madman's thoughts ran pure and cold. Then the fog closed in again, and Veek cackled, only a little uncertain. He took a small silver pitch pipe from his belt and blew a tone. The hydrasnake swayed as Veek swung his arm in a spritely rhythm. The creature began to hum a melody in a minor key, a hundred-voice harmony. The Glimmerchild pressed against the bars. The song was beautiful beyond anything the Glimmerchild had ever heard.

But the Trader shrugged and shook his head. «Interesting, Ortolan. But....»

«You don't want it?» Veek seemed both amazed and hurt. Then a red blaze of anger: «Why do I ever let you in? You're a bloodsucking pig; all you want are killers and fighting beasts and things ugly enough to turn jaded stomachs. Beauty – what does that mean to you?» Veek seemed to swell, to tower over the fat Trader. His armored fists were clenched; his helmeted head trembled back and forth. The hydrasnake's song faltered, died away.

The Trader raised a placating hand. «Perhaps you're right, Ortolan. I'll take it after all; your judgment is often sound.»

By slow stages, Veek relaxed. He led the Trader to his other treasures, but there was a sourness to his thoughts, a weariness that quieted his madness. The Glimmerchild found himself almost pitying the old man.

Veek made the circuit of the cages, went through the motions, put his beasts through their paces, handed vials and chips to Hovhannes – but there was no pleasure in it.

Had his emotions somehow exhausted themselves? Was he doomed ever after to this weary automatism? He was afraid; he cast about for a distraction. He remembered the Trader's remark about the shiny little beast. Human? Absurd! His irritation with the Trader returned, but this time he hid it in his heart, banking the fire, hoarding the heat.

When the tour was over, he took Hovhannes back to his armored pod. A crane levered from the pod, transferred the Trader inside, where the machines that sustained the Traders life clucked over him, touching his bulk with slender silver probes. The Traders head rolled loosely; his eyelids drooped.

Veek watched, unleashed his madness for a moment. Suddenly he saw a frightening symbolism in the movements of the probes. Were they carrion creatures, licking at the Trader's body, tasting the death hidden inside that taut bag of guts? He almost cried out a warning; then he remembered that he was mad, and turned away.

The Glimmerchild, exhausted by the contact with Veek, curled and slept. When he woke, the dim light was unchanged. The Midnight Beast still leaned against her bars. The Glimmerchild sent her reassuring thoughts. She seemed stronger, more alert, as though she had gathered herself to make the best of this strange situation.

A few mintues later, a small, shiny robot trundled along the aisle, pulling a high-wheeled cart. At each cage, it paused to feed the creature within.

When it reached the Midnight Beast, it lifted a bloody haunch of fenlizard from its cart and passed it through the bars. The Glimmerchild was pleased to see her fall on it hungrily.

The robot turned its black lenses on the Glimmerchild. A long arm shot through the bars and seized him by the neck. Before he could react, another arm pried his mouth open, the rubber-padded fingertips probed his teeth, and then the robot released him.

He stumbled back warily. The robot held a bowl under a spigot on the cart, set the bowl inside the cage, rolled on.

The bowl held a slurry of meat and vegetables. After a brief hesitation, he ate.

When the Midnight Beast slept, he slept.

Veek laid his hand against the switch. Light burst over the arena, illuminating a thousand surrounding cages and stasis chambers.

This morning his madness seemed weary, as if extended beyond some natural limit the day before. Anxiety pulsed through Veek. Now was no time for his madness to desert him, now when he must begin with the new beasts, now when he most needed inspiration.

At one side of the arena, Hovhannes Margolian watched from his power chair.

The beautiful black rex stood against the far wall, leashed to an iron ring. The glittering ape shifted slowly from foot to foot in a cage of shock fiber, its tiny, dark eyes fixed intently on Veek. His madness stirred, converted the ape into a caricature of a man: lipless, chinless, hairless. «Hah!» said Veek. «Look if you like.»

Overhead, in the darkness above the arena lamps, Veek's security mech hovered, ready to intervene, if, as almost never happened, he lost control of his new beasts. «I'm a cautious maniac,» Veek muttered.

«What do you plan, Ortolan?» The Trader's voice was flat, disinterested.

Veek took offense. Who was this slug of a Trader to dismiss Ortolan Veek? Why was Hovhannes here, if he found Veek's skills so boring? But he could not resist explaining. «I do a rare thing; I've decided to train these two as a team. When I took the rex, the ape appeared. The ape followed me. They're companions.»

Veek touched the controller he held in his armored hand, fed a small, painful charge into the ape's cage. It hopped about vigorously, making small, anguished grunts. The rex lifted high on its powerful back legs, pawed with its clawed forelegs, bellowed.

«See?» Veek shut off the cage. «The rex cares.»

«How could they be companions? They're of different species, different orders.»

«It's the Big Dimple. There's so much mutation here. Many creatures can't find companions of their own kind. I've seen stranger associations, by far….» Veek darted a look at the Trader, caught a look of condescend ing tolerance. Rage overpowered Veek. «Laugh at me, will you?» He shook his fist, fumbled with the controller.

His security mech swooped down on the Trader, menacing Hovhannes with a tranquilizer rod.

«Wait,» the Trader said, holding up his plump hands. «Please, Ortolan, be calm. I meant no offense, and I have no wish to wake up in one of your cages. And I do truly wish to see how you make your miracles.» Hovhannes spoke easily, confidently; his face was placid.

Veek struggled to control his anger. Finally he gestured, and the mech rose back into the darkness.

He gave his attention to the beautiful rex. He had attached controller pads to the base of her skull and over the major ganglia. Veek touched the controller; her leash fell away, and a slow, sweet music played from speakers above the arena.

Veek's fingers played over the keypad of the controller. The rex danced to his tune: little, mincing, tail-swinging steps, delicately graceful. His madness receded, disappeared in the exercise of his skill. «This,» he said, «this accustoms her to my touch, helps her learn to bear it. See her eyes;

are they so fierce? No, no; they grow soft....» Veek smiled, felt happiness spread through him. Was anything else as satisfying? No.

THE GLIMMERCHILD watched the Midnight Beast from his cage, wondered if he would dance so well when his turn came.

He touched Veek's thoughts. At the moment, Veek was calm, focused, free of that unbearable confusion. The Glimmerchild tried to reach Veek, to plead for the Midnight Beast, to make his humanity known. But he failed; the Midnight Beast possessed the only mind he could project his thoughts into over any distance – a result, perhaps, of their long and intimate association. If he could lay a hand on Veek's naked skin, he might be able to communicate usefully.

At least the madman was gentle. The Glimmerchild could feel the Midnight Beast's relaxing fury. He could even sense a trickle of pleasure from her. She seemed to anticipate the movements of the dance with a certain relish. His attention wandered to the fat Trader.

Black purposeful malevolence streamed from the Trader. The emotion was so strong that the Glimmerchild's gaze jerked toward him.

Oh oh....

The Trader's vast body bulged and writhed. The Trader's mouth was stretched wide in a silent rictus of pain and glee. The Trader's skin lifted in hard lines along his arms and legs, as if his bones were trying to burst from his flesh. A large, round shape bulged from the Trader's vast belly. The stretching skin split suddenly and peeled back, spattering blood. From the ragged wounds rose shiny black rods, articulated into a nightmare shape. A skull-like head broke from the Trader's belly, shedding tattered skin.

Veek's back was turned, all his attention on the dance.

In an instant the killmech stood free. Tiny red eyes locked on Veek's back. The Trader held a controller similar to Veek's; now he punched at bloody keys, and the killmech sprang forward, a blur.

It slapped away Veek's controller before the madman even knew it was there. A punchgun rose from its crest and fired up into the darkness. Pieces of Veek's shattered mech rained down. It flung its slender limbs around Veek's servoarmor, a black spider.

Rage detonated in Veek's mind, making the Glimmerchild's head hurt. Servomotors whined, as Veek struggled to free himself. Just as quickly, the rage evaporated, leaving nothing but a cool watchfulness. Veek stood meekly in the killmech's grip.

The Glimmerchild realized that the Midnight Beast, free of the controller's compulsion, was preparing to spring at her tormentor. BE STILL; DON'T MOVE; NOT A QUIVER! he shouted silently. He pushed the thought at her with so much force that his vision went dark for a moment.

She froze, as if immobilized by the controller.

The Trader was laughing. «Got you, oh, got you, old fool,» he shouted. He shook his controller at Veek. «Now you'll dance to my tune!»

The Traders mind was so hot with triumph that the Glimmerchild could not touch it. The Glimmerchild was confused; who was the madman here?

«Clever,» Veek observed. «Why?»

«Why? You ask why?» The Traders lips pursed; he blew out a gusty breath. «Because I wont ever have to pay you again. Because of your insults; you'll never speak so to me again. Because it's beneath my dignity to humor filthy madmen, and henceforth you'll break the beasts 1 want you to break, for the purposes I select. Yes! But mostly for the fun of it. The fun of it, Veek!»

«You enjoy besting fools, Hovhannes?»

The Trader frowned. «Peel him,» he told the killmech.

The arena filled with the sound of tearing metal, snapping conduit. Then Veek stood naked in the midst of his scattered armor, his thin old body wrinkled and white, marked here and there by purple stains from the armor's sensor pads. His colorless hair stood up in wild tufts, giving him the look of a startled bird. His narrow face was composed. The killmech gripped his arm.

«How do you plan to control me?» Veek asked, smiling.

The Trader smiled back. «Ah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking of all the crude ways of making slaves obedient – like the ones you use in your animals – chemicals, crude electromechanical devices, and so forth. Marionette makers. No, I'll use nothing so clumsy on you. After all, we wouldn't want to impair your famous skills, eh? What would be the point?»

«Right,» Veek said dryly. His smile slipped.

The Trader extended his open hand. In it lay a bit of shiny metal. «In a minute you'll sleep, Ortolan. Then this little worm will crawl into your ear, burrow down to the base of your brain, and make one small change in your emotional balance.»

Veek made a small, wordless, hopeless sound.

«Just like the fairy tale,» chortled the Trader. «When you open your eyes, you'll love the first thing you see; you'll do anything to please your beloved. Your skills will be intact. You'll be so anxious to please, so anxious.»

The Trader activated his chair, lifted from the packed sand of the arena, moved toward Veek. «Guess who?» the Trader said. «Guess who'll be hovering over you as you wake. Not a princess, sadly.»

«Depressing,» Veek said, and looked away.

«The world is a pot, and man is a spoon in it' – so goes the proverb. Also, Ortolan, I regret to say that this great love will leave no scope for your madness. I know you'll miss it, but what's to be done?» The Trader nodded, and the killmech pressed an injector to Veek's thin neck. The old man's eyes rolled back, and he slumped into the mech's arms.

«Well,» said the Trader, almost gently. «It was never as entertaining a madness as you thought.» The Trader's chair floated forward, passing quite close to the immobile Midnight Beast.

The Glimmerchild touched her mind.

She took one swift step; her head snaked out; her jaws crunched.

The headless corpse bucked, and the fat fingers drummed against the controller. Dropping Veek, the killmech sprang up, performed a capering dance, smashed into the wall, and fell down, still kicking. The Midnight Beast chewed reflectively. She swallowed. The Trader seemed to die as slowly as a beheaded snake, as though the machines within that vast body could not stop grinding away.

But finally the corpse was still, and the killmech ceased its aimless thumping. The Glimmerchild called the Midnight Beast to him, and with a casual sweep of her foreclaws, she tore away the fibrous bars of his cage. She knelt for him to mount. He was about to climb to her smooth back, when he looked up at Veek's captives.

Their cold loneliness swept over him, choked him, almost drowned him in sadness. Painful tears squeezed from his eyes. No, he thought. What can 1 do!

Presently he went over to the Trader's chair and began to search. For long minutes he thought he would not find the mindworm; finally a silver glitter winked from the red sand, and his fingers closed on it.

He knelt beside Ortolan Veek. J'm a little sorry, the Glimmerchild thought. He dropped the worm into Veek's crusty ear.

He hoped he had properly understood the thing's mechanism.

Veek woke full of lucid terror, though he could not remember what he feared. He opened his eyes.

He saw his beasts, in their cages and stasis chambers, stacked to the high roof of the nexus. Love exploded in him, an intensity that made all the other passions of his long life seem pale.

He wanted to touch each one, to throw his arms around each scaly, hairy, slimy, spiny creature. Tears ran from his eyes.

He sensed movement at his side. He turned, saw the ape. He reached out, gripped the creature's hard arm. It looked at him from deep-set eyes, and Veek fell choking into those two dark whirlpools.

He tossed on a shallow, bitter ocean. The slow, hopeless pain of his beasts broke over him, dragged him under, rolled his heart over sharp stones. He screamed, and tearing sobs burst from him.

«What did I do?» he cried. «How could I have?» In his agony, he rolled away from the shining ape, and the ocean spit him out.

But the pain was still with him, and the love.

The first to go were the beautiful black rex and her small, bright rider. Veek watched them trot out into the night with mingled sorrow and pleasure.

Next he pried open the Traders landwalker, set its autopilot to take the slave train out to a territory where slaving was illegal.

His last beast, a big red stonemole, wandered forth into the ruins a week later, and then Veek's nexus was empty, except for memories.

He stood there, watching, until the stonemole merged with the shadows. His madness had abandoned him. For an instant only, he felt the loss of it, as bittersweet as the loss of a beloved and treacherous friend.

For a while wonders walked the ruins, and there was more of death and more of beauty than anyone could remember.