Beastchild

The vines did not burn: a naoli only destroyed that which had to be destroyed.

The beasts did death dances on flaming toes, tongues lit, eyes turned to coals and then gray ashes

And Hulann enjoyed it. He was grinning. Laughing now? ? and suddenly gagging.

He choked, felt his stomachs contracting. The conditioning dream had not been strong enough to counteract the truth he had learned. The humans weren't vicious enemies. They were basically as peaceful as naoli. What should have been done was this: the Hunters should have been pitted against the spacers. And the normal citizens of both races should have been left to their gentle lives.

The dreams were your last chance, Docanil said through the Phasersystem. I did not agree to the flan. But others thought you could be reached.

Hulann said nothing. He opened the door and vomited on the sand. When both stomachs were empty, he became aware of Docanil the Hunter still speaking on the Phasersystem link.

I am coming, Hulann.

'Please-'

I know where you are. I come.

Hulann broke his Phasersystem contact. He felt seven hundred years old, in the last of his days. He was hollow, a blown glass figurine, nothing more.

The boy returned to the car, got in. 'Well?'

Hulann shook his head.

He started the engine.

The shuttlecraft moved forward, down the rise into the great desert, on toward the Haven somewhere in the mountains of the west

Half an hour later, Docanil the Hunter brought his copter down on the same knoll where Hulann had stopped to contact him. He looked out across the plain of sand and stone and cactus, grinning. A very, wide grin. Some minutes later, he looked away, took out the maps, and looked them over. Banalog watched him trace a route for a moment, then said, 'Aren't we following them?'

'No,' Docanil said.

'But why?'

'There is no need.'

'You think the desert will kill them?'

'No.'

'What then?'

'The naoli have some expensive and effective weapons systems,' the Hunter said. 'But none more expensive or more effective than the Region Isolator.'

Banalog felt the scales of his scalp tighten painfully.

'The next two hundred miles was-at the beginning of the war, a major nuclear weapons stockpile for the humans. An Isolator was dropped to effectively cut the humans off from the greatest number of their warheads. It has not yet been dismantled. It will seek out any human life with its sensors, engineer a weapon, and destroy that target. The boy, if he is not dead already, will perish before nightfall.'

Banalog felt ill.

'Then, what will Hulann do?' the Hunter mused. 'I can hardly imagine. If they planned on going to the Haven, that will be impossible. He could not get in without the boy's aid. We will fly around the region affected by the Isolator. There is only one highway exit. We will wait there to see if Hulann continues his journey.'

He was grinning quite widely-for a Hunter.

Chapter Fifteen

In a glass bubble laced through with fire, the gnome danced, its feet snarled in filaments of spun milk, millions of puppet strings stretching away from it into invisibility. The creature was no larger than a man's hand, but fired with the energy of multitudes. It spun and waltzed and jigged with itself, flailing its tiny arms about, leaping and frolicking this way and that until the transparent walls of its prison made it turn and twirl in a new path. As it cavorted, it cackled and gibbered, laughed at its own gems of humor, spoken in a tongue of nonsense and folly.

The glass ball spun slowly, slowly, as if the gnome were upon a revolving stage.

He danced more furiously than ever to a music that did not exist. He laughed and cackled and whooped explosively, stomping his tiny feet hard against the inside of his prison. He began to whirl, standing on his toes like a ballet dancer, faster and faster, his feet stamping smartly in a tight circle. His face flushed, and perspiration rolled out of his flesh, beaded on his miniature forehead, trickled down his doll's face. Still, he moved at an increasing pace until he was all but a whirl.

Then his flesh began to grow soft. His facial features melted and ran together. He no longer had a nose or mouth. His eyes flashed and dribbled down his face

He did not slow his pace. From deep within him, the sound of his manic laughter continued-though the lack of a mouth denied the sound full egress. He bobbled, bounced, weaved, his smooth whirl becoming more erratic as his feet and legs began to fuse and obliterate the ankles.

The glass sphere filled with licking green flames to replace the warm orange tongues that had been there.

His arm fused with his side and ceased to exist, except for a thumb which stuck out just below his last rib. A moment later, the second arm disappeared as well.

The emerald fire became all-consuming: the gnome was reduced to a thick pudding within the glass, a semi- living jell that gurgled and sloshed against the sides of the small sphere and was, at last, silent

The Isolator regarded the glass ball, juggling it on fingers of pure force. It began to shape the jell into another figure, but suddenly felt a wave of depression wash through it, battering the foundations of its being. It dropped the glass ball and watched the trinket splash down into the pool of its own temporal mass. It digested the thing and waited

Waiting had been what the naoli had designed it for- waiting and destroying. But there had been so little of the latter and so much of the former since the war had been won that the Isolator craved activity (and tried to satisfy the longing through toys like the gnome). Perhaps, the Isolator mused, it was not wise to build weapons which were alive. Did their designers know how bored a thinking weapon could get-when it had been designed only to think about its job and its job had become obsolete?

Then it ceased to think about that. The naoli had made certain that the Isolator could not think about itself, as an entity, for more than a few seconds at a time. In that manner, they could be certain it would never get ideas of its own beyond those programmed into it The Isolator, gurgling within the huge vat that contained it, raised its alert to red station and began checking the monitoring posts in the outlying areas. Its pseudopods of plastic flesh thinned into two molecule thicknesses and pressed through the vat, beyond the Isolator station and into the warm sands of Earth's desert. In a moment, it had formed a net beneath the land for a thousand feet in every direction. Such first-hand data gathering was senseless when its mechanical aides could assist so dependably, but the only way to defeat the boredom was to do something.

It pulsated beneath the sand, fifty percent of its body withdrawn from the subterranean vat. It wished it could go further and explore the surrounding terrain. But its physical bulk could not extend more than these thousand feet from the vat. It was not truly mobile. It was only a thing, not an individual, no matter how much it tried to bridge the gap into full awareness.

A thing, nothing more.

But a very efficient thing.

The harsh sting of the alarms sliced through the Isolator from the monitors in the station. Quickly, it withdrew from the sand, back into the vat. It formed an eyeball of a thousand facets and examined the three-' dimensional vision on the bank of screens on the station's second level. For the first time in months, it knew excitement. It almost rushed the majority of its bulk through the wall into the screen room and managed to check itself just a hair this side of disaster (at least half of the Isolator must remain within the nurturing vat at all times).