Beastchild

by Dean Koontz

  Docanil leaped into the snow, covering several yards, landing more lightly than Banalog would have thought possible. He started for the ground car in which Hulann and the human rode.

  The car turned from the demolished copter, struck for the side of the hotel, trying to get behind it and away across the wild top of the mountain.

  The Hunter Docanil turned, trying to cut them off, running faster than was possible in snow so deep.

  Hulann gunned the engine of the car. The tread kicked up chunks of snow and mud, threw them back over the Hunter.

  But it would take a few moments for the car to gain speed, whereas the specially nurtured, specially constructed muscles of the Hunter had ground into high gear in a fraction of a second. It would be a toss-up who would reach the end of the hotel wall soonest.

  Banalog was furious that he could do nothing. But, if he had the power to decide the outcome of the contest, who would he choose? Hulann and the boy? And go against his race. Or side with the Hunter—and be responsible for the other two deaths. Two deaths? A human death was merely an extermination, was it not? His head spun dizzily . . .

  It was now apparent that, despite his furious pace, Docanil was going to lose the race. The ground car was moving now, leaving him a few more feet behind every moment.

  The Hunter stopped, not even panting for breath, and raised his bare hands.

  The car was at the corner of the hotel.

  Docanil's fingers twitched.

  Around the car, flames sprang up, and the snow burned.

  The fingers twitched again.

  The rear left fender of the car burst like a balloon, the fragments of steel whirling upwards into the snow, ringing down on the patio or falling with soft plops in the whiteness.

  But Hulann kept his foot on the accelerator. The car moved on, around the wall, out of sight.

  The Hunter Docanil ran to the corner and stared after it. Once more, he raised his fingers and tried to destroy it. But it was beyond his range now.

  He watched it for several minutes. Soon, the elements pulled a white veil over it.

  Watching the spot where he had last seen it, he took his gloves from his pockets and slowly pulled them on his freezing hands.

  "What now?" Banalog asked at his side.

  He said nothing.

  The Hunter's Guild perpetuates the original conception of the proper making of a Hunter. While the foetus is still in early stages, steps are made to limit the emotions its brain is capable of. Things like love and sympathy are, naturally, excised! Duty remains. A Hunter must have a sense of duty. Hate is left in too. That always helps. But perhaps, most important of all, a Hunter is permitted to feel humiliation. And when once humiliated, he is relentless. He pursues with a dogged determination that rules out all possibility of escape.

  Docanil the Hunter had just been humiliated for the first time in his life . . .

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was three o'clock in the morning when Docanil the Hunter found the abandoned groundcar that Hulann and the human child had used to escape. He would have discovered it sooner (they had only driven it twenty miles before leaving it) but he had been forced to wait for a replacement helicopter to arrive in reply to his Phasersystem summons. Now, when it was the time to sleep and store energies, he was toiling more vigorously than ever. Though naoli preferred to sleep on much the same schedule as humans, they could go as much as five days without rest and still function properly. A Hunter, it was rumored, could perform his duties well for up to two sleepless weeks.

  Banalog, on the other hand, was beginning to drag. He followed Docanil about the groundcar as the creature explored it for every thread of evidence left clinging to it. Then the search pattern widened, taking in the rest of the cluster of buildings that made up the little town of Leimas near the base of the mountain, at the opposite side of the hotel.

  Docanil stopped before a squat building to their right, turned and carefully approached it. He started to take off his gloves, then ceased as he more fully interpreted the data supplied to his oversensitive system.

  "They aren't here?" Banalog asked.

  "No. They were."

  "Oh."

  Docanil turned from his examination of the premises and stared openly at the traumatist with an intensity common only to Hunters. "You seem relieved."

  Banalog tried to remain expressionless. A Hunter might have the talent to see deeper, but a traumatist had the talent to increase the depth of his facade. "What do you mean?"

  "Relieved. As if you were glad they have still managed to avoid me."

  "Nonsense."

  Although he tried to maintain a self-righteous look, tried to keep his lips from drawing tightly over his teeth, tried to keep his whiplike tail from lashing around his thigh, Banalog was certain that the Hunter had seen the crack in his facade, had seen the festering doubt that he ' held concerning the value, morality, and wisdom of the naoli-human war. After an uncomfortably long while (which could actually be no more than one or two Earth-length minutes) the Hunter looked away.

  And he had seen.

  Yes ...

  Banalog was certain Docanil had found that crack in his false front, had peered through it and had seen the turmoil within the traumatist's mind. He would report what he had seen to higher officials. There would be a Phasersystem probe of him some morning soon, during the psychological conditioning periods. Enough would be found for him to be sent to a session with the Third Division traumatist. If his guilt index was as high as he sometimes thought, he would soon be boarding a ship for the home system and a stretch in a hospital for therapy. Maybe they would wash and restructure his tainted mind. Wipe out his past. That was possible. Was it desirable? Well, it would allow him to start fresh. He did not want to be a detriment of the naoli race. He did not want to be always plagued with these stirrings of self-disgust and displeasure with the doings of his people. The idea did not hold as much terror for him as it had for Hulann. True, his children would be denied his past, would have to found their homes on only scraps of history. And he had far more children than Hulann. Yet he did not mind the idea of washing and restructuring so much—for he had sent so many people to have it done. And in justifying all those cases, he had pretty much convinced himself that the process was desirable and beneficial, not only to society, but to the individual in question.

  "You see?" Docanil the Hunter asked, interrupting the other naoli's reveries.

  "I'm afraid not."

  A mixture of disgust and pleasure crossed the Hunter's face. Disgust at the traumatist's lack of powers of observation; pleasure at his own superior powers. A Hunter felt pleasure in a limited number of situations. He could not enjoy sex. He loathed it. Hunter's did not reproduce, but were made from normal foetuses. He had little interest in food beyond supplying himself with a well-balanced diet. He felt nothing when administered sweet-drugs. His system burned alcohol so fast that the drug could have no effect, ill or beneficial. He did have an ego, for the ego is the motivator for all good work. When anything fed this intangible portion of his overmind, he felt comfortable, happy, and warm as he could in no other way. His ego was subjugated only to the Hunter's Guild; it fed triumphantly on all other naoli

  "Look," Docanil went on. "The drifts about the buildings on this street."

  Banalog looked.

  "Compare them to the drift before this building."

  "They are deeper," Banalog said.

  "Yes. This one has been disturbed and has had to rebuild itself during the last several hours. There was a shuttlecraft within, most certainly."

  Inside the structure, they found three shuttlecraft— and a space between two of them where another had been parked until quite recently. Docanil knew the fourth had been moved only hours earlier, for a brown mouse had made a nest in the undercarriage of that long-stilled vehicle and had been chopped to bits when it had started and the big blades had stuttered to life without warning. Though the flesh and blood were frozen, the eyes wer
e not solidly white as they would have been had the incident occurred more than a day ago.

  They went back into the night and the snow, which was finally beginning to taper off. The wind whipped what had already fallen and blew that around, stinging wet clouds of it that cut their range of vision as thoroughly as if the storm had still been in progress.

  "Do you know which way?" Banalog asked.

  "West," Docanil said. "So they went that way."

  "What are the signs?"

  "There are none. No physical ones. The snow has obliterated their passage."

  "Then how—"

  "The Haven is to the west, is it not?"

  "That's mythical, of course," the traumatist said.

  "Is it?"

  "Yes."

  "So many of their leaders have not been found," Docanil said. "They must be hiding somewhere."

  "They could have died in the nuclear suicides. Or been carried away in the general holocaust. We have probably already disposed of them, thinking them only part of the common people."

  "I think not."

  "But—"

  "I think not." There was no argumentative tone in the Hunter's words. His opinion was stated in the same voice a scientist might use to set forth an established law of the universe.

  They boarded the new chopper.

  Docanil lifted it into the night, after connecting himself to the patch-ins. Banalog saw that the copper needles had a film of dried blood on them.

  Docanil flew, watching. Banalog, resigned to the unrelenting pace of the search, settled into his seat, freed his overmind from his organic brain, set a time alarm in his subconscious, and slipped into simulated death . . .

  It was dawn, and Hulann had driven the shuttlecraft far enough south to leave the snowline and enter a place of leafless trees and cold, clear skies. The naoli thought the weather was now comfortable, though Leo told him it was still somewhat chilly by human standards. They kept to secondary roads, simply because it would be easier for the Hunter to check the main arteries, therefore easier to be found if they rode them. Besides, the snow no longer hid the pavement, and Hulann was able to adjust their blade speed and elevation far in advance of any change in the surface.

  They had been making light conversation on and off through the dark hours of their flight. At first, the talk had helped to soothe them, had distracted them so that they could not dwell on the memory of the Hunter's Lightning that had torn off the rear fender. It was not "lightning" of course. The Hunters had several surgically implanted weapons systems within their overlarge bodies. In their arms and hands was the gas pellet gun. From a storage sack in their arm, the system drew a highly compressed droplet of liquid oxygen, propelled it through the tubes by the controlled explosion of other gas, and fired the pellet from beneath the fingernails. It sunk into its target, expanding, and exploding the target from within. It was a short-range device. But effective. Knowing how it worked did not make it seem any the less mystical.

  Hunters made an effort to cloak themselves in the attributes of gods—even in a race without a religious mythos. It was no surprise that they succeeded. Indeed, when Hulann had first comprehended the "gods" concept held in several of the other galactic races, he had immediately wondered whether—in a hundred or a thousand centuries—the naoli would look back upon the first Hunters as ancient gods of a sort. Perhaps these genetically engineered creatures were destined to be the first of a line of saints that would one day be held in more esteem than they truly deserved. Worshiped? Maybe . . .

  Eventually, their conversation turned to more personal channels, away from the artificial, frantic chatter which had first been subconsciously meant to blot out unpleasant thoughts. They talked of their pasts, of their families. Hulann was surprised at the compassion the boy showed, at the way he cried when he told of the death of his father and sister (his mother had died shortly after his birth). It was not like a human to show such emotions. At least, it was rare—and always with less intensity than this. Humans were cold, with little laughter and even fewer tears. This unemotional, stoic reserve was the thing that made them so basically alien to the naoli. And alien to all of the other races as well—all of which were gregarious.

  Then the understanding came.

  It sliced through his brain, stabbed upward into his overmind, jolting the entire foundation of his reason.

  It hurt.

  The first inklings of comprehension stirred and began to blossom when Leo pointed to a distant light of a rising naoli starship, easily a hundred miles away to the east. He watched the flame and the blue-green haze it created with the gaze of a washed and restructured naoli longing for his past He sucked in his breath as the majestic plume grew longer on the velvet backdrop of the still dark sky. (just the horizon rim was touched with orange daylight). Hulann's mind leaped into the chasm of discovery when Leo said:

  "I wanted to be a spacer. Always wanted it. But I wasn't chosen."

  "Chosen?" Hulann asked, not realizing yet where the conversation was leading.

  "Yes. My family stock was not what they called "prime.'"

  "But you are too young to have applied for space work."

  Leo looked confused.

  "You said you were only eleven."

  "You're chosen before you're born," the boy said. "Isn't it that way with naoli?"

  "That makes no sense!" Hulann said. "You can't be trained for space work until you're older, able to grasp basic physics."

  "It would take too long that way," Leo said. "To be a spacer, you have to know so many things. Hundreds of thousands of things. To learn them as an adult—even with the help of hypnoteachers—would require too long."

  "Forty years. Fifty at the most," Hulann said. "Then there are centuries ahead in which—"

  "Exactly," Leo said when Hulann failed to finish the sentence. "Humans only live to an average age of a hundred and fifty years. Only the first two thirds are 'strong' years in which we can withstand the rigors of intergalactic travel."

  "That's horrible!" the naoli said. "Then your spacers spend their entire lives doing the same thing?"

  "What else?"

  Hulann tried to explain that the naoli held many occupations in one lifetime. It was unthinkable, he said, that a man should spend his short years doing the same thing. Limiting. Boring. Deadly to the mind. But it was not easy to press across this basic naoli principle of life to someone of so short-lived a species.

  The understanding was hovering closer. Hulann felt the weight of it, though he could not understand exactly what was weighing on him . . .

  "Once," Leo said, "in the early days of our space programs, spacers were not trained from before birth. They grew up, led normal lives, went to the moon, came back. Maybe they remained in the space program, maybe not. Some of them went into business. Others entered politics. One of them became President of the major country of that time. But when the faster-than-light drives were perfected and we began to accumulate more and more relevent data a spacer had to learn, the old way of choosing astronauts had to be replaced."

  There was now full understanding. Hulann realized why there had been a war, why Leo was different from the humans the naoli had met in space.

  "The fertilized egg is withdrawn from the mother soon after conception," the boy went on. "The Spacer Institute then takes it and develops it into all the things a spacer should be. A spacer has toes twice as long as non-spacers, because he needs them for grasping in free-fall The big toe is also an opposable thumb after the genetic engineers are finished. His range of vision runs into the infra-red. His hearing is more, acute. When the foetus is four months developed, it is subjected to a constant learning environment where data is fed directly into its developing brain. The human brain never learns faster than during that five month period."

  Hulann found he could barely speak. His voice was thinner, hoarser than normal. His lips kept drawing in over his teeth in shame, and he had to withdraw them to speak clearly. "How . . . did the non-spacers fe
el . . . about the spacers?"

  "Hated them. They were different from the rest of us, of course. They could survive much better in space, in any alien environment. There was talk of beginning to send out non-spacers as passengers, but the spacers fought that for a good many years. They guarded their own power."

  "And they were cold," Hulann said sickly. "Showed very few emotions, never laughed . . ."

  "Was bred out of them. The less emotional they were, the better job they could be counted on to perform."

  "The war—" Hulann said.

  When he did not finish, Leo said: "Yeah?"

  "We thought the spacers . . . We never considered that they might not be typical of your race. We met hundreds. Thousands of them. They were all alike. We could not know."

  "What are you saying?" Leo asked curiously.

  "The war was a mistake. We were fighting Hunters. Your spacers are the equivalent of our Hunters. And we destroyed all of you because we thought your Hunters— your spacers were typical of all of you . . ."

  Master Hunter Peneton sat in the control chair of the Shaper, three hundred and sixty-one electrodes attached to his body, snaking away from every part of him, disappearing into the vast machinery of the micro-surgical machine. His fingers danced across three hundred and sixty-one controls on the board before him.

  He shaped.

  He changed.

  In the steamy, sealed plastiglass module beyond the foot-thick quartz wall, a tiny foetus was buoyed on a cushion of forces that would be forever beyond his understanding, even when he was grown into a full creature. For this foetus was destined only to be a Hunter. Not a Master Hunter.

  That was something else again. There was a special program of genetic juggling, a program of the highest complexities, to be used in the creation of Master Hunters. It was used only once every Century. There were never more than five Master Hunters at any one moment.