Part 6 (1/2)

'I've been thinking,' the poet said. 'But it would have been better if He had been a Goliath. There is nothing particularly heroic about smas.h.i.+ng a helpless slug to pulp.'

Sam finished his drink, set the gla.s.s down. 'I'm going for a walk,' he said, standing. 'I'll be back in a while.' Before anyone could speak, he turned for the door, struggling through the crowd, and stepped outside. Night was giving way to day; a touch of golden dawn tinted the horizon already.

'You all right?' Gnossos asked, stepping out beside him.

'I'm not sick, if that's what you mean. Not exactly.'

'Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean.'

'The purpose of life: to overcome your creator.'

'But what can a walk do? Me? I'm getting drunk.'

'Yeah,' Sam said slowly. 'But you know that won't work. Maybe I'll get drunk too, later. But now I'll walk.'

'Want me to come along?'

'No.'

Sam stepped off the curb and into the cobblestoned street. The ways here were twisted, for the aesthetic quality was supposed to be reminiscent of an old Earth city-though much cleaner and far more efficient. He found streets that tangled in on themselves, twisted through tree-dotted parks and between quaint old buildings. With him were memories of the chamber beyond Breadloaf's office wall, pictures of cold emptiness. He could still feel the cool breeze rippling through his hair from the gaping, empty tank.

He walked past the park where the lake stretched away in the distance. There was a gentle slapping of its waves against the pilings of the free-form walkway that bridged its shallower portions. There was the sound of fish jumping now and again. Somewhere a dog barked. And in his mind, there were questions.

Who was he?

What had been his past?

And where-oh, where!-was he bound?

TWO: SOULDRIFT.

And men shall be torn between the old way and the new*

(Compiled from several entries in the diary of Andrew Coro)

I.

Long ago, shortly after my mother's blood was sluiced from the streets of Changeover and her body burned upon a pyre outside of town, I suffered what the psychologists call a trauma. That seems like a very inadequate word to me.

To understand this 'trauma,' one should know some of the events that preceded it. The townsfolk came in the middle of the night and took her, decapitated her, stuffed a cross cut from stale bread into her dead mouth, and charred her on fire fed by the boughs of a dogwood tree. I was five years old at the time.

Those were the days when men still killed, before Hope sprang up as the capital of our galaxy and pushed forth a society where no man killed another man, where sanity ruled. That was a thousand years ago, a century after Galactic War I, before Eternity Combine gave us immortality. And worst of all, that was Earth. The rest of the galaxy was staggering to its feet, aware that something had gone amiss in the great chauvinistic dreams that had dominated for so many hundreds of years. Hope was an idea born in the brighter minds, a last possibility for the survival of what Man should be, a dream of kinglessness, of Utopia unmarred, a last chance but the best chance ever for mankind. Yet Earthmen were still hunting witches.

To hide me from those who would destroy me because my mother was a mutant who could lift pencils (only pencils and sc.r.a.ps of paper!) with her mind, my grandparents locked me in a closet of their house. Smells: mothb.a.l.l.s, old rubber rainshoes, yellowed magazine paper. Sights: dark ghosts of wools and cottons hanging about, imagined spiders scuttering viciously through the darkness.

And I wept. There was little else to do.

On the third day, the witch-hunters were certain that I had perished in the fire of the house, for they could not find me and trusted my grandparents because-as a cover against the day he knew was coming-my grandfather had belonged to the witch-hunting group. So it was that on the third day I was brought forth from the closet and into the parlor where my grandmother kissed me and dried my eyes on her gray, coa.r.s.e ap.r.o.n. On that same day, Grandfather came to me where I sat with my grandmother, his huge and calloused hands folded over each other, concealing something. 'I've a surprise for you, Andy.'

I smiled.

He took one hand from the other, revealing a lump of coal with eyes a shade darker than the rest of it. 'Caesar!' I cried. Caesar was my myna bird, rescued in some unknown, unknowable, miraculous fas.h.i.+on from the holocaust of the exorcism.

I ran to Grandfather, and as I ran, the bird screeched in imitation: 'Andyboy, Andyboy.' I stopped, my feet suddenly rocks too heavy to lift another inch, and I stared at it. It fluttered a wing. 'Andyboy, Andyboy, An-'

And I started to scream. It was an involuntary scream, torn from my lungs, bursting through my lips, roaring madly into the room. The myna's words were mockings of my mother's words. The inflection, though certainly not the tone, was perfect. Memories of my mother flooded me: warm kitchens to burned corpse to storytelling sessions to a headless, bloodless body. Bad and good memories mixed, mingled, blew each other to larger than life reality in my memory. I turned and ran from the parlor. Wings beat against me. Caesar was a stuck recording.

Grandfather was running too, but he did not seem to be Grandfather any longer. Instead, he had become one of the witch-hunters shooting out the windows of our house, screaming for my mother's death.

Running through the half open cellar door, I stumbled down the steps, almost cras.h.i.+ng down to a broken neck on the concrete, flailing at the hideous wings and the sharp orange beak that tried to be her lips. I locked myself in the coal room while Caesar battered himself to tatters against the thick door. When Grandfather finally broke it down, I was on my knees with my head against the floor, unable to scream in anything but a hoa.r.s.e whisper. My knuckles were raw from pounding them into the concrete, my blood a polka-dot pattern on the smooth grayness.

I was taken to bed, nursed, recovered, and sent off-planet to an aunt's house in another solar system where men were coming of age faster. I grew up, took Eternity Combine's treatments in one of the first test groups, and outlived Caesar, Grandfather, witch-hunters, and all.

Years later at one of Congressman Horner's parties, a psychologist told me it had all been a trauma concerning death and my new perception of it. I told him trauma was a terribly inadequate word and went off to dance with a particularly lovely young woman.

Now, even years after that, I was experiencing fear much the same as the fear that day so long ago when I was five and my mother was three days dead. It was the fear of death, stinking, oppressive, and omnipresent. I am always afraid at the beginning of a hunt. It made no difference, this day, that I had gone on two hundred and fifteen others; it was this one that was immediate and frightening. If I was killed in these jungles, Eternity Combine could never reach me in time to restore me to life. If I died here, I stayed dead. Forever is a long, long time.

Why the risk? It does seem strange that, in a galaxy so diversified, so full of things to do and ways to earn a living, anyone would chose something as dangerous as Beast hunting. But there are always reasons. Man, a part of nature, is never totally illogical. He can generally come up with reasons for his actions. Sometimes, of course, the reasons may give rise to questions* Anyway, Crazy had a good reason for coming on this hunt: this Beast had killed his only brother, who had been on the last team that had gone after it. Crazy wanted revenge. No Hamlet, but every bit as determined. Lotus came because she can't leave us if she knows we're endangering ourselves. She would go insane waiting for us, so she comes along. Me? Money, in part. There was an enormous bounty on this Beast, and I was determined it would be one-third mine. Besides, I was born on Earth and the faults of the place partially warped me. I like to kill. Not anything but Beasts, you understand. I could never bring myself to murder another human being. But Beasts* Well, Beasts are different*

I loaded the last of the cameras into the floater, looked around for the others. 'Lotus! Crazy! Let's get a move on!'

'All right, all right,' Crazy said, stomping down the steps to the outside entrance of the guest house. We were staying on Congressman Horner's Earth ranch under the supervision of his aide, Sam Penuel, an altogether strange man, until the completion of the job. Horse, being as he weighed three hundred pounds plus fifty and was blessed with hooves, did not use the highly polished, slippery indoor steps of glittering plastigla.s.s. Oh, his full name was Crazy Horse. No it wasn't, either. Jackson Lincoln Puicca was his given name-after the famous general, the famous president and humanitarian, and the famous scientist. But we called him Crazy Horse-mostly because he was crazy-and because he sure did look like a horse.

Crazy was a natural mutant, not a product of the Artificial Wombs. One day there had been a nuclear war spreading through the civilized galaxy. Several generations later, there was Crazy-muscular, bright, s.h.a.ggy-headed, and horse-behinded. Not a Beast, mind you; a valuable man on a bounty hunt.

'Where's Lotus?' I asked.

'Out picking berries somewhere. You know her.'

'You know what what about her?' Lotus asked as she drifted over a nearby corral fence, her blue-fog wings fluttering gently as she glided on the breezes. 'What would you say of me behind my back, Crazy?' about her?' Lotus asked as she drifted over a nearby corral fence, her blue-fog wings fluttering gently as she glided on the breezes. 'What would you say of me behind my back, Crazy?'

Crazy Horse stomped his hooves, folded his hands in supplication. 'What could could I say behind your back, pretty one, when you are possessed of such marvelous ears?' I say behind your back, pretty one, when you are possessed of such marvelous ears?'

Lotus settled on the ground next to me. She fingered the delicate, elongated sh.e.l.ls that were her elfin ears, looked at Crazy. 'Yours are bigger. I don't think I should make nasty remarks about another person's ears if mine were distended bladders like yours.'

Crazy snorted, shook his huge head so that his wild mane of hair flopped, fluffed, and covered his baggy ears.

Satisfied, Lotus said, 'I'm on time, I trust.'

'Trouble is,' I said, putting an arm around her tiny waist (twenty inches) and looking down on her small form (four feet eleven), 'is that you know d.a.m.ned well we'd wait for you all day and not be angry.'