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.