«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.
