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.