Fear That Man

then landed on the twisted semi-shoulders behind the Beast’s head. She tossed her legs around that neck, riding it like it was a wild bronc and seeming to enjoy the ride as much as the cowboys on real horses back at Horner’s ranch. It swiveled its eyes, trying to catch sight of her, but the eyes didn’t revolve far enough. Just when they were at the apex of their revolution, she drove the silver blade into the left orb, up to the crimson gem hilt, and slashed downard.

The spider reared.

The stream of web fluid ceased abruptly, and the Beast wobbled backward down the inclined silken plane, throbbing its voice like a thousand flutes gone sour. It staggered sideways like a drunk. I wanted to shout that it might try to roll over on her, but my mouth was blocked with fast-drying web, and I could not move my arms to clear it.

She pulled the knife out, found the second eye with it. The spider flailed, ran at the cliffs, found it too much trouble to climb out and still bear the pain that was wracking it. Blindly, it stumbled from one cliff to the other, seeking some pathway in the darkness and finding none. Then it rolled.

“Lotus!” I screamed. But it came out a choked, reverberating whisper, strained through the matting on my lips.

But she was flying again, her wings beating furiously until they had taken her high enough to catch the low breezes. They fluffed out then, carried her back and forth across the chasm, letting her watch the spider.

It died. Slowly, and with lots of kicking. Once I was sure it was going to blunder onto the web and fall in on Crazy and me, but it never did. When it was down for good, Lotus drifted in to the web, settled very gently at its edge. “Andy! Crazy!”

I tried to call out. The result was a low-key vibration in the web.

“I hear you! I’ll get you out.”

I blessed her elongated ears. A moment later, she began hacking into the silken fiber with her knife. In time, she reached me, cut away the fuzz that bound my arms and closed my mouth. Together, we removed Crazy, ready for the worst.

But it wasn’t that bad at all. He was still unconscious, but the webbing had matted over the grub-spine wound, putting a stop to the blood that had been fountaining from it.

“We’ll have to take him back,” I said.

“The cameras?”

“We were only setting up the second one.”

“You finish.”

“I can’t just—”

“You finish,” she insisted. “I checked ahead. Follow the main trail for half a mile, and you’ll cross six major intersections. That should give us enough coverage to see if the Beast uses these trails regularly. If you bring the floater here first, I can get to the medikit and take care of Crazy.”

“He may be—”

“He’ll be okay. There’re enough supplies in the floater to fix him up without any trouble.”

She was a good nurse; I knew that from wounds of my own she had bound. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Actually, it was four minutes, but when I settled the floater down next to the pieces of web, she already had Crazy uncovered and clean of every fragment of the stuff. I took the cameras, slung them over my shoulders, and set out — lugging what two were meant to carry — keeping my gun drawn and an eye out for hairy trees…

Three hours later, I stumbled back, worn out and showing it. Lotus and Crazy were sitting there laughing about something. “Nice way to get out of work,” I said, standing over them.

Crazy looked up and whinnied that silly whinny of his. “You can have this blasted arm if you want. I’d rather have gone setting the cameras than nursing this.”

“A likely story.”

“We’d better be getting back,” Lotus said. “Looks like a storm, and I don’t want to see what might come tramping around in the rain.”

It was heavy rain that gave Fanner II’s vampire plants their most voracious appetites.

“Okay. Can you walk, Crazy?”

“I can manage.”

One day, the men start looking like animals to you. Noses metamorphose into snouts. Eyes grow beadier. Ears suddenly become tufted with hair. Fingernails take on the appearance of claws. And you realize you are allowed to shoot animals: it is within you to shoot animals, though men are off limits. You go to oil your guns… But you also realize you are just imagining them as animals so that you will be able to shoot them and revenge your mother — and maybe wipe out that entire chapter of your life. Deep down, you fear that you want to spill the rich blood of men — spill it and drink it…

I must have been moaning in my sleep. It was an old and often felt dream, recurring through all the years that I could remember. I say that I must have been muttering, for when I slipped from the dream to the dark reality of the bedroom, there was a light body against mine, lips on my two, and soft velvet wings enclosing us in the closet of our souls… The next morning, we went out to collect the cameras. Crazy’s arm was almost healed, thanks to the speedheal salve and bandages. We hoped that he would be well enough to begin the hunt shortly after noon, in the event the cameras had recorded anything that would interest us.

And the cameras had.

“I don’t like it,” Crazy grunted as the film loop came across the viewer for the sixth time.

“It isn’t the ugliest we’ve met,” I said, trying to reassure myself as well as them. Not the ugliest, but ugly enough. Seven and a half feet, heavier than Crazy. Two arms trailing the ground, six-inch claws on them, and a set of smaller arms in the middle of the barrel chest. The little hands fiddled with each other, lacing fingers, picking insects from each other, scratching in a strange symbiosis. The mouth was a treasure trove — if one happened to be a biologist who valued sharp yellow teeth. The Beast had one sunken eye in the left side of its face, an undeveloped socket where the other one should be. The facial skin was leathery, dark, broken occasionally by tufts of bristly hair. “It doesn’t even look as dangerous as the spider.”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t like it.”

“Huh?”

“I think,” Lotus interrupted, “that Crazy means it looks too easy. Anything as easy as this Beast looks would have been knicked out by the first team that went after it. It must have something else besides claws, teeth, and an extra pair of hands.”

It did look evil. And there were those other twenty-two bounty hunters to think about. “What do you think?”

“Can’t say,” Lotus murmured, almost as if she were talking to herself. “That would be like stating the cause of death before the murder.”

“What’s the consensus? Should we back out of this one?”

They both said no.

“We don’t really need the money yet.”

“There was Garner,” Crazy added.

I smiled, shut off the tape loop. “Okay. Let’s get started. Crazy, your arm good enough?”

He peeled off the bandage, flexed the muscular arm. The skin stretched new and tight and delicately across the wound. It was swollen and red, but unscarred. “Never felt better. Let’s go.”

And we did.

IV

After a short but hot march, we made camp near the cross-way where the camera had caught him. Lotus took the first watch near evening, and I was halfway into the second when I heard something of more than medium size coming along from the right. Unholstering my pistol, I stretched out behind a heavy row of bushes and waited. My infrared goggles filtered away most of the night, giving me a view that was probably as good as the