The Hunter Gegenschein
A story by Keith Croes
I was made a Class 2 freightspacer, capable of guiding the moon-size tankers between the stars and strong enough to bully cargo around at either end. You don't need a lot of brains to do that. But I've been operating way beyond my genetic program ever since joining the hunter and I'm rich enough now not to care what anybody thinks. So think what you want.
My name is Wallace 1215 Radnyrra. I took my last name from the planet of my manufacture and a man named Wallace was the genetic seed for almost 2000 of us. Everyone calls me Wally.
Fifteen years ago the hunter Gegenschein bought me or bartered me or blackmailed me away from Amalgamated Star Systems Transport, where I was assigned to the Dintric Aria. The Dintric was a rickety old bucket crewed by 500 Class 3 freightspacers and thirty of us Class 2's, many of whom were praying intently about an hour before superspace crossing between galaxies on the day Gegenschein arrived to change my life forever. I was on the bridge when his brassy voice punched out of the receiver.
"Gegenschein to dock the Diana."
The captain's face went white. "Try the center dock, Mr. Gegenschein, number two."
"Uh...do you have a welder out on the skin down here?"
"No."
"Then you have an electrical fire of some kind, dock number two."
The captain stuck an angry index finger toward the first mate, who sprinted from the room. "Try the dock on the left, Mr. Gegenschein."
"That would be dock number one, I'm guessing."
The captain held the mike against his chest. "Wally, get down there and meet him. Just bring him straight up here."
I made my way to level four and the docks, had just reached the hatch to dock number one when it opened. No man has ever shocked me so much at first sight. His thick fur coat a billowing storm cloud around him, he blew into the passageway like a force of nature.
"Which way, spacer?"
And then he made me run, urging me on down the corridor to the elevators. "Come on. Let's go. Move it along, now."
In the elevator he stood perfectly still in front of the door with me behind him and to the right. His arms were crossed and he seemed hardly to be breathing. The running and the shock -- and I'm programmed against shock, engineered to meet and greet the ugliest lifeforms on the trade routes with a grin and a nod -- had me struggling to catch my breath and calm my pulse, and I stared at the coat, which hung soft and supple to his knees. It was a dark brown fur with light brown vertical stripes. I could feel coldness coming from it.
He was taller than any man I'd ever seen -- two meters and then some -- with long, wavy brown hair, the same dark brown as the coat, and a huge droopy mustache. I'd never heard of Gegenschein before that day, but I was beginning to understand why the color had fled the captain's face up on the bridge. Captain Morgan Brewster of the Dintric Aria, as I have witnessed first-hand several times, had no small amount of unblinking, iron-ball courage. But Gegenschein, he was like lightning with hair. I suddenly felt something against my shoulder blades and realized I had backed up against the far wall of the elevator.
He turned his head and looked at me, his mustache snagging on the fur of his collar. He had a scar circling from the corner of his left eye around his cheek. "You sure are noisy."
Somehow I quieted everything and stared straight in his eyes.
"Very good." He seemed genuinely impressed.
"Natural humans," I said. The words seemed to spill out of me. Freightspacers have a knack for easy conversation, especially for the kind of bantering that provides a release during moments of stress. "We don't see that many. Captain Brewster's the only one on board. There's no mold for you, is there? You're all different. Sometimes surprisingly so. Some of you are more different than others. Almost like...other lifeforms." I wished I could shut up, but Gegenschein was staring at me, sizing me up, letting me go. "Is that a corgantz?" I nodded at the coat. "I saw one in a zoo on...oh, shit, I forget what planet. Come to think of it, I forget what galaxy."
The door opened and Gegenschein was out of the elevator. "Which way, spacer? Let's go." I stepped lively.
On the bridge Gegenschein towered over the captain, who had adopted a calm smile.
"I suppose they told you what I came for," Gegenschein said.
"We're due for superspace crossing in 53 minutes. Takes you any longer than that, it's another two days of computations. I don't think they had that in mind, do you? Wally will take you to crew quarters and you can take your pick. Any Class 3 you want."
"I want a Class 2."
"Jesus." The captain clenched his fists, something I always hated to see. "I need my Class 2's." He shook his head. "I thought you sold this company years ago."
"Oh, yes, certainly, I did," Gegenschein nodded amiably. "But I managed to maintain some influence."
The captain shook his head again. "Wally, take him to the Class 2 quarters."
Gegenschein looked at me. "How old are you?"
"Eighty-five," I said.
"A 150-year warranty?"
"That's right."
He looked back at the captain. "I'll take this one."
"No. I need Wally."
"Glad to hear it. Now, tell your boss I took one who was 85. I asked for no one over 50, so she'll think she got off easy. Any questions, captain?"
With his chin thrust out, the captain started to respond, then changed his mind.
Gegenschein put his hand on my shoulder. "The final decision, of course, is Wally's. What do you say, spacer? How would you like to fly with me on the Diana? She was custom-made 20 years ago on Manchuba, has dual-reactor propulsion and a Trybyl superspace generator, Ffister navigation -- the guts are the same as a commercial cruiser. And we'll push her flat out to the edges, right behind the cartographers. I need a spacer, Wally."
On the way down, in the elevator, Gegenschein put his face close to mine and smiled, and I would never be the same. Gegenschein had more...humanity, more character, more life than any breathing human that ever was. I'd always been a bit envious of natural humans. Engineered lifeforms, well, some of us are smart enough to be aware of our limitations. For the most part, we accept that. But my program also allowed me to appreciate the fact that nature, every now and then, produces a wonderful freak like Gegenschein. One wonderful, powerful freak. There in the elevator, I fell in something like love with him. He smiled and, with his right hand, rubbed the fur of the coat on his left arm.
"Corgantz," he said.
I shrugged. "I've seen one."
"In a zoo you've seen one."
A corgantz is 2000 kilos of muscle and 12 poisonous, ripping, razor-sharp forelimbs. The one I saw in the Finnig galaxy, I think, gave me nightmares for weeks. A shudder went through me.
"There's one for you, too," he said.
It was hanging in the airlock of the Diana, which felt ice cold compared to the Dintric, and he plucked it from a hook and tossed it to me. As we thrust out from the Dintric, with me wearing my new coat and fondling the Ffister navigation controls, he explained that he kept the Diana at 15 degrees centigrade to get used to it. The most dangerous predators in the universe, it seems, are warm-blooded, fur-bearing, and live on planets with an average annual temperature in that vicinity. I took his word for it.
For the rest of the trip, I studied in a fascinated trance the most sophisticated, exquisite power plant and operational controls of any ship I'd ever piloted.
Gegenschein had virtually encapsulated an asteroid on an eccentric orbit around the star Webbor in the Haagel galaxy and had named it Askylkas, his home and estate. It was about 150 years away from reentering the proximity of Webbor, whose two inhabited planets had already issued him a notice that taxes would be exacted when Askylkas was within a distance described by two times the radius of the star system. It had been 100 years since the asteroid had been that close. Askylkas, from what I could gather, had been built about 50 years before, so Gegenschein and his eclectic retinue effectively were looking forward to at least two centuries of living outside the law and rule of any civilization save the tenuous influence of the Council. I figured Gegenschein at that time to be about 100 years old with a chance of reaching two. He'd be lucky if taxes didn't overtake him before death.
Askylkas was not alone in its forsaken path: a number of asteroids in parallel orbits provided a challenging approach to the glittery structure, which was really a city. Gegenschein told me about them moments after we dropped into the universe after a week in superspace. It didn't help that we -- I -- had overshot in the first damn place.
"Take her in, Wally. Here." He poked some coordinates into the Ffister. "It's a universal docking set-up. But just watch out for the -- "
"Holy shit!" I groped for the manual override.
" -- rocks. You'll need manual, but it will automatically lock back on to the coordinates."
"Thanks."
It was a rough ride, but the Diana responded like a new handball. As I massaged the controls, Askylkas zipped off the viewer in every direction, then gradually moved back to center. It grew larger until I could see it clearly, crystals jutting from a dome of light encircled by a jagged waistband of the original rock. Gegenschein never raised a finger to help me, though at one point, at the edge of my vision, I saw him reach for something near the communications panel. After we had docked, he smiled, the curved corners of his mustache rising and squaring off.
"We'll be preparing for a hunt soon. Sysys will help you settle in." He grasped the arms of the soft, contoured chair. "By the way, it's easier if you come in from directly above. There are only three primary levels of debris in that direction." He pointed at a black switch on the communications panel. "And if you don't activate the identification signal, you'll never make it past the second level." Before I had even let go of the sweaty control handles, he was out of the seat and through the airlock.
Sysys was an old male pneumian, a blotchy-red upright lobster with aging physiologic hydraulics that hissed and popped as he moved. He belched a greeting at me that came from deep in his throat and sounded like a hoarse toad in a cave: "Welcome to Askylkas."
By then I was ready for just about anything, so it seemed almost normal for me to follow this elderly representative of the fiercest warrior culture in the universe across an airy courtyard paved with huge granite slabs, with light coming from nowhere identifiable, marble statuary and plants of every conceivable species, a fountain foaming around a green-copper figure ten meters high -- a naked man standing with one foot on the ribcage of a downed lion, an empty crossbow held loosely against his thigh. I stopped to touch the overhanging tangle of a tall, stringy tree, then pressed my palm against a bush at my waist.
Sysys stopped ahead of me and swiveled around, his eyestalks aimed in different directions. "Artificial. There are no plants on Askylkas, except for the hydroponics."
"No plants," I echoed. "And a pneumian for a butler. Who washes your windows, a Council combat battalion?" I shook my head. "It's warm in here."
"Yes. He gives us that. It's only the ship that will keep milk from turning. Give me your coat."
I took the corgantz off. "I'll carry it. Thanks."
"Come. Your quarters are on the seventh level near the hunter's. In one hour I am to show you the gallery."
In a small park adjoining the courtyard near the elevators, two female pneumians and a handsome human female chatted as several pneumian and human children chased each other through an improvised obstacle course of stone benches, fake bushes and smooth, dark-gray rocks. The women watched as Sysys gestured me ahead of him into the elevator.
My belongings fit in one small black bag bearing the blue logo of the Dintric, and it took me all of two minutes to unpack. I spent the remainder of the hour rummaging through the closets and drawers, which were filled mainly with cold-weather gear, and sitting on the bed, thinking. The room was elegant and large, ten times the size of my compartment on the Dintric. An ELF could do a lot of thinking in there.
For the week we had spent in superspace, I had barely spoken a word, feeling that Gegenschein had little need for conversation and that my priority was to learn the Diana. Gegenschein had seemed satisfied, content, almost jovial. So we crossed to Haagel in silence. Only now the questions began to nag.
Sysys arrived and took me down to the bottom of Askylkas, to the gallery, level after transparent level of animals poised to strike, coiled or stalking figures of all sizes, all of them ferocious even in their frozen deaths. We visited only a fraction of it, but I noticed that many levels were still empty, waiting for future expeditions to halt the cries and cackles and roars of the monsters throughout the universe, the creatures who undoubtedly were more at home on the other side of death -- on the winning side.
It was both holy and unholy, with the engraved metal plaques, fifty centimeters square, identifying each animal and its home planet, and as we walked, Sysys seemed as engrossed in his thoughts as I. We stood before a hairy slug with fangs and I read the plaque: Adercian Cave Worm.
"He names these, doesn't he?"
Sysys nodded and squished. "Most have no names until he names them. The names are submitted to the Scientific Union, which accepts most of them. He names the planets, too, or lets his exploration teams name them."
I looked at the pneumian, whose eyestalks still studied the cave worm. "Why are there no plants on Askylkas?"
His crusty head-and-neck armor settled slightly into the top of his thorax. "I can only guess. But it is a good guess. The hunter is afraid of plants. He believes that somewhere there exists a world where the plants are the killers, and where he won't know the rules. When he finds a new planet, he studies the plants first."
"You've hunted with him?" Another leaky nod, then his eyestalks focused on me. "You will take my place at his side. Do you have a god?"
"I'm an ELF. It's not in my program. But you bet your ass I do." There is no such thing as a freightspacer who doesn't have a god, but don't bother arguing about it with a genetic engineer.
"Good," Sysys belched.
When the simulated evening came to Askylkas, we ate dinner with Gegenschein in a dining room lush with dark wood and rare utensils of glass and metal and ceramic. Four human women, including the one I saw in the park off the courtyard, joined Sysys and me and two old male humans named Cowper and Bernard, brothers whom Gegenschein introduced as his master taxidermists. I seemed to be accepted without question. Toward the end of the meal, the woman in the park, whose name was Bren, smiled and complimented my new clothing. I thanked her and complimented Gegenschein's research, which obviously turned up the exact size of Class 2 freightspacers.
Over the next week I adjusted to life on Askylkas, spending every waking hour with Sysys preparing the Diana for the hunt. We talked as we worked, and I learned that the women were Gegenschein's wives and lived separately in nearby quarters. For some reason, Gegenschein had ceased sleeping with them shortly after Askylkas was completed, and he had no children to any of them. The human children I had seen belonged to the families of technicians, engineers and laborers who lived in modest but comfortable quarters on the fringes of the estate. Bren was a teacher in their school.
We packed the Diana with food and medicine and weapons, everything from old-fashioned explosive-powder armaments -- projectile rifles, land mines, grenades, mortars and rocket launchers -- to a variety of laser and particle-beam weaponry. Sysys taught me how to maintain the refrigerated hold and operate the "gut shuttle," as he called it, a smartly compact planetary-exploration probe tucked in the Diana's belly.
Gegenschein took me aside for instruction in planetary assessment -- meteorology, geology, biology -- things in which I already was passably fluent. In ten days we were ready for my first expedition. Over the next 15 years, I would accompany the hunter on more than 40 such excursions. Sometimes I never felt more alive. Sometimes I felt that the edges of the universe must be bleeding.
Between hunts Gegenschein would tend to his sundry businesses and we'd work together to find the next planet for the hunt. The computer in his library linked us to one of Gegenschein's ventures, probably the most respected mapping and exploration firm in the known universe, a company whose activities pretty much defined the known universe. As the data became available -- and new information was almost constantly coming in as new star systems were explored -- we'd sit at the console for hours and review the planet outlines.
There were more suitable planets than there was time to hunt them. We averaged about three months between expeditions and during that hiatus we usually came up with four or five probables. There were certain characteristics we'd look for: the top line of the computer display on a probable would carry the abbreviations AL and NS, meaning animal life, no sapience. Intelligent life required a report to the Council of Intergalactic Civilizations, to which Gegenschein paid at least superficial allegiance, and travel to those planets became something for governments to worry about. Other planets, though, were fair game for private enterprise -- and sport, if that's what it was Gegenschein was perpetrating.
Sport was part of it, I guess. Though he'd never explained it in so many words, I'd noticed that Gegenschein deliberately armed himself with weapons commensurate to the strength of the prey. But the gallery really wasn't about any kind of contest, symbolic or otherwise. It was about hunt. Not the hunt. Just hunt. In a way that I don't pretend to understand, it wasn't even about animals at all. It was about man.
And there was something more. One night between my fourth and fifth hunt, I think, Gegenschein called me to his library. When I entered he was slumped in the chair before the computer. "Spell me for awhile, Wally. I just...can't find it. It's not there." He rose and began an agitated shuffle around the room.
"Really?" Without grasping his problem in the least, I sat and started paging through the planet outlines. I knew that there had been dry spells before, periods of several weeks without probables, but there were always probables in memory from previous explorations. There were never none, and Gegenschein had never instructed me to look for any one it. I had no idea what he was talking about.
"Well, look here. AL, NS, eighty-five billion species plant and animal, 45-55 land-to-water, 18 degrees average global temperature. High carbon dioxide, low oxygen -- we'd need breathers, but it could be good."
He grabbed my shoulder like a muscle cramp and spun me around. "That's not it! Don't you see, that's not it!"
He retreated quickly and stood staring at the snout of a lion's head mounted on the wall. "I know it's out there." In a moment he left the room and I spent a few hours looking for God knows what.
Sysys and I became great friends. He filled the gaps in my knowledge, teaching me about weaponry and military strategy, which was often hunting strategy, and about preparing the animals, something that required the combined skills of a gymnast and a surgeon. He'd joined the hunter at the age of 40, had helped build Askylkas, and since pneumians live only about a hundred years, he was approaching death and made no secret of it. Perhaps he saw me as a way to live on, a way to serve the hunter even after the tough red armor had been vaporized in the reactors of Askylkas.
"The Council had decided that my people could only be brought into their little group by force," he once told me, "and they were in the process of blowing us back into the oceans when the hunter showed up. He had a converted battleship then, a Ridley. You know the Ridley? A classic!" He laughed, a sound like mud boiling.
"He had been hunting nearby and noticed the commotion. So he found an orbit away from the Council warships, brought a shuttle down and grabbed someone -- me. Pure chance...or something." His eyestalks gazed upward.
"He made me an intermediary, and through me we armed the planet. My people were able to hold off the Council offensive long enough to make them aware that we were able to negotiate, to reason, as well as we could wage war. And the hunter probably had something to do with making them understand that. Without him, there would be no pneumians today fighting for the Council.
"My people made me a hero, of course. The hunter wanted nothing out of it, nothing, and he swore me to secrecy. And the day he swore me to secrecy was the day I asked to remain with him. He refused and I challenged him to combat. No weapons. Just us."
Sysys didn't tell me whether they had fought or, if so, who had won, and I didn't ask. Somehow I figured that was one secret he was going to keep.
Despite their bond and their years together, Sysys had only a rough idea of the hunter's many activities and holdings. He knew the hunter manufactured weapons and supplied them to various governments and groups, but if he did so with any kind of philosophical consistency, it wasn't clear. Some hard-bitten characters had docked at Askylkas over the years, and it stretches the imagination to picture all of them as deserving underdogs. The hunter owned a few planets, perhaps a mining concern or two, and received something from the Council whenever a planet he had discovered was colonized.
After a time the hunter took to me, too. Once, about three years after he conscripted me, we had a particularly messy hunt, and I was in bad shape. We always spent the first week in orbit around a new planet performing every possible type of evaluation. The hunter's goal was to take one specimen of every major predatory animal, and for most planets that represents about twenty or thirty species. On this planet, we confirmed more than eighty.
The hunter worked in one of two ways, depending on the size and capabilities of the game. Leaving the Diana in orbit, we'd take the gut shuttle down to the planet's surface and he'd either go off on foot with supplies and hand weapons, or use the bubble, a flying five-meter sphere of transparent plastic with room for one passenger -- the hunter. The thing was driven by two tiny fusion reactors and armed with both a laser and projectile cannon. Either way, I'd ready the gut shuttle for the kill, then sit tight and wait for his call.
On this hunt the calls just kept on coming, day after day, week after week. Some of the animals were big, requiring me literally to crawl inside their ribcages and their abdomens after the viscera. All that crap got vaporized, of course, and the gutted animals were hosed down and winched into the hold of the gut shuttle. For the first time, blood was leaking through my protective oversuit, and the animals were coming so fast that sometimes I didn't even get a chance to shower before having to haul a load up to the refrigerated hold of the Diana. I remember lifting off in the gut shuttle, my fingers sticking to the controls, and then struggling to keep from vomiting for most of the flight just from the smell and the sight of my bloody clothing.
But Sysys had warned me it could be that bad, and that's not what finally got to me. There was one animal the hunter had targeted. That first week in orbit around the planet when we called it up on the telescope viewer, my breath caught when I saw it. It was a predator. I mean, it was a dangerous son of a bitch -- but it had two wide eyes set in the front of its large fuzz-covered head. It looked so damn kind. And smart. When the hunter bagged one somewhere in the southern hemisphere, I told him to gut it himself. He ignored me, of course, and I ended up doing it, crying the whole time.
Later, when the hunt was finished and we were seated quietly in the bridge waiting for the Diana to compute superspace crossing, I asked Gegenschein about it.
"How do you know whether an animal is intelligent or not?"
He sighed. He knew exactly what was bothering me. "You just do, Wally."
"Because they have no civilization, use no tools?"
"That's part of it. That's how the exploration teams define it. But there's more to it. You have to see the animal close up. And then you just know it."
"Well, Gegenschein, I don't fucking know it. I don't fucking know anything."
I left the bridge for my quarters and didn't come out for three days, taking maybe twenty showers. And when I finally emerged, we didn't say a single word to one another for the next two and a half weeks, until we dropped out of superspace in the wrong place. Gegenschein watched me analyze the coordinates and smiled at my blank stare.
"Where are we?" I asked. He pointed at the star in the viewer. "That's Etlos. If I recall, Radnyrra is the second planet? I thought you might like to see your birthplace. Well, your factory."
Radnyrra was a manufacturing planet, and it turned out that one of the company's vice presidents recognized Gegenschein's name and arranged for a guided tour. And what a tour it was. I've never been filled with such strange emotions as I was that day, visiting my home planet, seeing the very uterine hutch in which I was conceived, the nursing centers and playgrounds where I romped as a child, the little freightspacers and other ELFs still harrying the staff with shouts and laughter. But the overriding emotion was the realization that Gegenschein knew how much it would all mean to me. There is no way he should have known.
Before we left, we stood on a beach along one of Radnyrra's oceans with Etlos low in the sky.
"What should we name our new planet?" Gegenschein asked.
I had almost forgotten about the hunt and it took me a moment to understand the question. "Hell, I don t know. I'm no good with names."
"How about the animal with big eyes?"
"How about it?"
"Would you like to name it?"
"Let's name it after Sysys." For some reason, the pneumian had popped into my head. Gegenschein looked startled, then nodded.
Sysys died four years later, an inglorious butler's death in a soft bed with Bren and Gegenschein's other wives, Fal, Marta and Porimbular, sitting with him in shifts to the end. But he kept his dignity and humor, or so they told Gegenschein and me when we returned. We had been on a hunt.
Several hours after our arrival I was stretched out on my bed, half asleep and still wearing my clothes, when I heard Gegenschein's voice. I thought it was part of a dream.
"Wally."
"Hmmm?"
"Wally. We've got to make a toast. Wally."
It was the intercom. I slapped the button. "Where are you?"
"In the library."
Gegenschein was sitting bleary-eyed on the oversize couch with a handful of brandy.
"Help yourself."
I half-filled a snifter and sat in a chair facing him. "To Sysys." We drank. "And the hunt sucked, too." The first three probables we had visited had turned out to be unacceptable, and Gegenschein hadn't found the animals on the fourth planet to be much of a challenge. In all we had two months in superspace, and I had spent most of that trying to lighten the hunter's shitty mood. The planets Gegenschein was choosing, they just seemed to be getting farther and farther away. "Why don't we back up a little bit? There must be fifty galaxies closer than the ones we're working now that we haven't even touched."
He nodded. He was wearing a purple robe with white trim and had showered but hadn't shaved. The stubble darkened his face, and the damp hair and red eyes made him look tired, beaten. His mustache, usually a bristly menace, seemed somehow an ineffectual posing, like the blustery threat of a weak, cornered animal. "The Sysys, the one in the gallery -- " He motioned with the glass in no particular direction. " -- you remember it?"
I nodded.
"It wasn't...sapient. But Sysys was sapient. Have I ever told you how we met?" He never had, but he didn't wait for my answer. "The Council was blasting the pneumians' planet, Halioc, to pieces, trying to eliminate a species that had already eliminated two other sapient races on that planet. The Council had decided that the pneumians were intractably warlike, irredeemable. What the Council didn't know was that the two species the pneumians had destroyed were indescribably worse. The three races of Halioc had fought terrible wars that had lasted centuries, and the pneumians had...survived." He lowered the snifter to his lap, his wrist resting on his right thigh.
"I heard the Council fleet's transmissions and took an orbit around Halioc to investigate. I got nosy. I took a shuttle down and landed near a village, or what was left of it. I was standing in a path at the edge of the village when Sysys stepped out of a hut and faced me. I'd never seen a pneumian before. I was carrying a laser rifle and I shattered a rock at his feet. There was some kind of frightened gibberish coming out of the hut, as though someone weren't too happy about Sysys deciding to take a stroll." Gegenschein sipped some brandy.
"If Sysys had been an animal, at that moment he would have done one of two things. He would have run. Or he would have attacked. Instead, he looked down at where the rock had been and started walking slowly toward me. I could tell by his leg musculature that he was capable of moving a lot more quickly than that, so I waited. But the laser was aimed at his ugly head.
"He kept coming, and about halfway to me, about ten meters away, he held his hands out -- those incredible pincers -- to show me he was unarmed. But he kept walking toward me, spreading his arms wide and sort of shaking them, until he was about two meters in front of me. Then he stood there, sticking his chest out at me, head bowed as much as he could bow it, arms extended like Christ on the cross. And the message, Wally, was as clear as it was complex. What Sysys was telling me -- every nuance of it -- was that at this point, mister, it doesn't much matter if you put me away, but if you can help, I'm willing to discuss it. And that's why I don't worry too much about what ends up in the gallery. Animals can be ferocious, even cunning to a degree, but only sapience can be brave. And when you see it, you know it."
That night was the first time I had seen the hunter drunk. I had been with him almost eight years.
We sometimes got in three or four hunts a year for the next few years, as Gegenschein was true to his word and selected probables closer to home. But he still followed the incoming planet outlines closely, and every now and then we were off to the far reaches.
Soon after Sysys died the hunter fired the chief executive officer of the mapping and exploration company, and within five years he had gone through three more CEOs. He was pushing for an outpost in each of eight far galaxies -- eight outposts roughly describing a cube around the known universe. He meant for exploration to proceed outward from each of them. The problem was staffing.
The truth is, two months in superspace crossing with Gegenschein was about as much as I could take. I could still amuse him, I guess, and we got along well enough, but after Sysys died Gegenschein's laughter was never quite the same. The mood on the long trips was more intense, and I more and more got the feeling that we were looking for something. Only I had no idea what it was.
Staffing problems or no, exploration at the edges continued in fits and starts, until nine months ago when Gegenschein and I were in the library and he found it. I was sitting there watching him, not really paying attention, when I realized he had been looking at the same planet outline for an unusually long time. His fist came down hard on the desk just as I was about to ask him what was going on. I saw it coming, but the smack in the quiet room shocked me all the same.
He gave me a look I'd seen in dozens of jungles and deserts and swamps throughout the universe just before something died. Out of reflex, I thought of the gut shuttle. Even his voice was the same demanding whisper. "When will the Diana be ready?"
"A week."
"Make it three days." He stood and left the room, leaving the planet outline on the screen for me to puzzle over. Animal life, no sapience, 6O-to-40 land to water, average global temperature 16 degrees, plenty of oxygen, three-quarters gravity. Nothing special. Except for the number of plant and animal species: indefinite. I'd never seen that before. It made me nauseous, and I was still queasy an hour later when I groped into bed.
The planet was the fourth of ten circling the star Artemi in the Catullus galaxy, where the exploration teams were trying for a second time to set up an outpost. A year before Gegenschein had ordered that the teams' salaries be jacked up considerably, had devised a sane rotation schedule, and was confident that this one would take. The outpost was on the planet Gordon of the sun Hypus. We headed there with the Diana slipping neatly through superspace and the hunter in the best mood I'd seen him in for a long time. Lucky for me. The trip would take almost three months.
Not long into it I brought up our ultimate destination. "This planet in the Artemi system, there's something unusual about it?"
The hunter cocked his head at me. We were playing roundlins, and he snapped his magnetic piece halfway up the grid. His eyebrows raised and his eyes flashed. "They're all unusual. You trying to distract me?"
"Wouldn't think of it. It's just that I noticed that there was no reading on the number of species."
"Indefinite."
"You ever see that before?"
"Never."
"What's it mean?"
"I don't know. But the electronics of that scan should be able to tally any number of species. I figure that the reading must be...I don't know. Maybe the equipment is defective. We'll check it out on Gordon."
The exploration team on Gordon had been alerted that Gegenschein was on his way, and we picked up their signal within two minutes of our leaving the static of superspace. "Welcome to Gordon, Mr. Gegenschein." It was a woman's voice.
Gegenschein grinned and took the mike. "Good to be here. What's this star you have?"
"Hypus."
"And Gordon is named after...?"
"The first son of the last team leader, Gordon Eller."
"So this place ought to be Gordon Junior. We're headed for Artemi and thought we'd drop by. I'm reading your local time at about eleven hundred hours, it's about 24 degrees outside and sunny, and you're settled in there nice and cozy in a subtropical zone north of the equator. Good morning, ma'am. You folks do know how to pick 'em. I bet you're near a beach."
"Come on down, the water's fine."
"There just better not be too many good suntans down there."
We played for two days on Gordon until the exploration ship, the Venture, returned, then flew up in the gut shuttle to check out its scanning equipment. The team leader was a short, athletic man named Bowermaster, who was immediately defensive.
Gegenschein watched the diagnostic program flicker across a control panel in the Venture, then squatted and stuck a long arm through an open service door. "Relax, Mr. Bowermaster. It's just that we've had ten to fifteen ships scanning more than 850,000 planets in the last sixty years, and we've never had an indefinite reading from our biodetection gear. This thing's been working okay lately?"
The man nodded furiously, then more slowly.
Gegenschein rose. "Were you on board when the Artemi system was mapped?"
"Uh, I think so." He stepped up to the panel, eyeing Gegenschein uneasily, and made a few entries. "Yes. Ten planets. I was there."
"Did you notice anything unusual about any of them? Specifically, the fourth one?"
"No. One orbit and away we went. Routine."
Gegenschein could find nothing wrong with the Venture's systems.
The next day, speeding quietly in the chilly Diana, we reached Artemi and the fourth planet. There was no wait for the weirdness. The Diana's biodetection confirmed the indefinite readings for plant and animal species. Cataloging them, which usually took an entire day, would be impossible. Gegenschein and I could only look at one another.
"Go on to geology," he said finally. "I'll do meteorology."
The geology was equally wacky. The tectonics -- number of plates, surface movement, thickness of crust, etc. -- was within acceptable limits, but from the mantle down there didn't seem to be much comparison to anything I'd seen before and the computer was no help at all. From the readings it appeared that the depths of the planet consisted of a relatively homogeneous mush swirling in involuted patterns at close to thirty kilometers an hour. There were several minor areas of volcanic activity spread out over the globe between the plates, which was unremarkable, but two major centers were sprouting about a quadrant apart directly on the equator.
At the end of the day I was gnawing on some dried beef, poring over the readings and trying to make sense of the three-dimensional pictures, when Gegenschein spoke, startling me. "Those two volcanic centers at the equator are heavy-duty weathermakers, Wally. Any idea if they're coming or going?"
"Shit. Hold on." It was possible to establish a rough age of the nearby lava formations. "I'd say they were stable. But really, hunter -- " I caught his eye. " -- who the fuck knows?"
"Yeah. Let's wrap it up. Tomorrow we go to the telescopes."
"Do you think we need to? I mean, this place..."
"I know what you mean," he snapped. "Tomorrow we go to the telescopes."
I may or may not have slept. At 0700 hours Diana's time, which was Askylkas' time, we nosed around in food storage, then walked forward to the bridge. "I'll take the plants, you take the animals," Gegenschein said, chewing something. "Try to catalog as much as you can. It's possible to superimpose the 'scope image over animals in memory. Do you remember how to do that?" I nodded, squeezing the dregs of a fruit-juice cylinder into my mouth.
By noon I had tabulated 150 predatory species and I stopped counting. I couldn't point the telescope without finding a nightmare figure, a stalking terror in the veldt, a blood-splashed strike on the white snows of the arctic, a swooping pounce from high jungle trees by flying mammals with a six-meter wingspread. I noticed Gegenschein frozen at his telescope controls. "I hope the flora is more amiable than the fauna," I said.
"How many do you have?"
"There are hundreds, hunter. I quit."
He laughed. I heard the worry. "Forget the animals. Lock on to these coordinates." I keyed them in as he spoke. There was a spreading tree with leaves like thick green flaps in the monitor. He gave me two more sets of coordinates for the other two telescopes, two more plant species, both imposing, alarming. "We're going to monitor these for 24 hours. We'll have to pull the ship back to geosynchronous." We were in a slow drift across the day side of the planet. I walked over to the Ffister and backed the Diana off about 5000 kilometers.
We spent the rest of the day trying to make connections between the morning's animal and plant data and anything in Diana's memory. There seemed to be structural and anatomical parallels with almost every planet we'd hunted -- variations on a theme. I retired to my quarters that night with an irritating mixture of excitement and resigned foreboding, knowing that if the plants in the telescopes didn't pull themselves out of the ground and prance off on their roots to perpetrate some kind of a mindless, vegetative killing spree, we were headed for the greatest hunt of our lives.
Sitting in front of a meteorology image, Gegenschein made the decision the next afternoon. It was summer in the southern hemisphere. "We'll have as much daylight as we need down there. There's a high-pressure break right here." He pointed. "We should be clear for a couple of days working north. Check out the bubble. We go tomorrow morning."
The gut shuttle and the bubble were both ready, as I knew they would be. That night, I didn't come within a thousand light years of sleep.
We kicked off from the Diana in the gut shuttle at 0800, neither of us having said a word. As we crunched into the snow 1500 kilometers from the southern pole, Gegenschein reached over and touched my arm. "You may have to do some hunting of your own down here, my friend. Stay close to the shuttle and set up three laser cannons around you. Call if you need help."
The bubble whirred smoothly in its sling out of the open hatch into the bright cold. We had traded our furs for heated arctic suits, and we both wore UV-blocking face shields, though Gegenschein would be able to strip down to his insulated underwear in the bubble if he chose to. As he poked around in the cabin of the sphere, I carried the cannons, surprisingly light in the three-quarters gravity, from a compartment in the back of the empty bay and positioned them in a triangle around the shuttle. I was sighting through the third one when the bubble lifted off behind me and headed in the opposite direction. Gegenschein would be making long zigzags, working his way slowly to the north. I loosed a shot at a jagged white crag 300 meters away, then tested the other two lasers.
An hour later the hunter called in some coordinates, which I recorded, but a white mound was moving steadily in my direction and I aligned it in one of the laser's crosshairs. The scope was telling me it was 500 meters away closing at 25 kilometers per hour. The thing looked like an iceberg with legs; its mouth opened briefly, a cave full of yellow spears. Without the laser I would have had about 30 seconds to live. I drilled a two-centimeter hole through where I figured its cranium to be and watched it fold in on itself and stop. Backing up to the shuttle, I opened a panel and reached in to the radio.
"I got one of those hairy glaciers, hunter. What's up?"
"Never mind. Take it. But you will save something for me, won't you? Look, Wally, put your scanner on it and let me know what you read."
I understood what he was getting at: if the ship's biodetection equipment was useless, then maybe we couldn't count on the portable scanners, either. I tracked the shuttle on the ground the 200 meters to the beast, keeping one of the lasers next to me in the cab. From ten meters away, I held the scanner out toward the animal.
"I'm getting a reading. The scanner says the thing's dead. It's a corpse."
"Well, hit it again through the head. I don't care if you have to mess it up a bit. Bernard and Cowper will consider it a challenge. Or you can come up here and pick up the one I got. Get back to me."
I walked up and kicked it, then returned to the radio. "It's dead, hunter. I'm taking it." I slipped into my plastic oversuit and gutted the iceberg beast. From a distance, the steam must have looked as though I had a fire going.
The hunter tracked and killed northward for fifteen hours, and I leaped along behind him in the gut shuttle. Most of the animals were big and wore variations of mottled white and gray, though one huge woolly thing was almost black. With its seven appendages, one of which could barely be discerned as the head, it looked like a humpbacked seven-pointed star. It filled what was left of the gut shuttle's hold.
The star animal had had sharp vertebral projections like spikes along the inside of its body cavity and I had managed to snag the left arm of the protective oversuit. I sat in the cab and dabbed at the blood that had seeped through to my arctic gear, tried to wipe it off my left hand, then got on the radio. "Full load, hunter. I'm going up."
"I'm going with you. It's too cold to camp out down here."
The gut shuttle ordinarily held about a dozen animals. We were full with eight. Waiting for the hunter to reach me, I stripped and showered in the shuttle. Fortunately, I'd learned my lesson years before and now stocked the gut shuttle with at least thirty plastic oversuits and a generous supply of towels.
We averaged about 500 kilometers a day for the first week, and on the eighth day it was warm enough to wear only our furs. I could tell that the hunter was taking a longitude up the opposite side of the planet from the two huge volcanoes on the equator. At the finish of the tenth day the hunter decided to set up camp next to the bubble and spend the night on the planet. That's the way he liked to do it.
By then he was killing enough game to fill the gut shuttle twice a day. The Diana was in near orbit, so the round trip there and back took about two hours. From the sixth day through the tenth, we hunted in the morning for about six hours, I took a load up and returned, then we hunted for another five or six hours. As usual, after transferring the kill from the gut shuttle to the refrigerated hold at the end of the day, I slept in my quarters on the Diana.
We were killing a lot more than we were taking only because the animals seemed so bent on attacking us. Down closer to the pole I must have killed twenty iceberg beasts myself, and by the tenth day I was killing ten or fifteen different animals in between my gutting. In view of the circumstances, the familiar routine -- my sleeping on the Diana and the hunter camped out on the planet -- seemed plain stupid, but I had never suggested anything to Gegenschein about hunting without being overruled, ignored or ridiculed. It took more than the animals to make me think I ought to speak my mind.
It was my first night alone on the Diana and I was running through the standard systems checks. I had just showered and eaten, muscles ached everywhere, and I was fighting sleep. The Diana happened to be passing over the day side of the planet, over the twin volcanoes, and when I checked the meteorology, I saw the ringed cloud formations like eyes staring at me from the monitor.
The clouds were thick, roiling collars extending from 2000 to 14,000 meters above sea level around each peak, and through their clear centers I could focus down into the maws of the volcanoes. There was no new lava flow, but their boiling pits were 300 degrees hotter than they had been a week before. My first impulse was to call the hunter, but I decided against it. Instead, I instructed the geology system to alert me if the temperature rose another 50 degrees, then went to my quarters. My argument to get the hunter to change his strategy would have better effect if it were delivered face to face, and now I had even greater motivation. The planet gave me the creeps.
At dawn the next morning I interrupted a battle. I remembered seeing the animals through the telescope, but wasn't prepared for the side view, which revealed long, stringy folds of flesh the color of red clay beneath their chins. Nor was I prepared for their size. When they reared back on their thick tails and two massive hind legs, they stood taller than the bubble, which was five meters in diameter.
I could see Gegenschein's indistinct figure strapped within the transparent dome of the sphere. He was bobbing and dodging above ten or so of the animals. They had overrun his campsite, which he'd staked on a high spot of the rolling terrain among scrub brush and long grass. Six or seven of them lay dead around the hill. He was using both the projectile and laser cannons seemingly interchangeably and with similar effect. The bubble's spotlights were still on.
Unlike their rear legs, the animals' two forelegs were spindly posts used mainly for balance and locomotion, and lacking the mobility needed for offense. They fought with their neck folds, which were actually a sort of articulated rib cage. Sharp bone projected in hooks from the end of each fold, and each rib was jointed so that the unit could retract up and in with incredible power toward the mouth. The mouth itself was all you could see of the head, a grasping trap capable of opening at least two meters and then slamming shut in a blink, and the things could leap 40 meters. I could imagine them springing and scooping up prey, then swallowing it before it was even dead.
You couldn't see their eyes, and I immediately realized that Gegenschein was having trouble locating their brains. A laser burst would penetrate the skin but coagulate the wound, so bleeding was minimal. As for the projectiles, the animals seemed to be able to absorb quite a few hits without slowing down.
I figured the brain must sit behind the head-mouth between the shoulder blades and, hovering above and to the side of the scene, I got on the gut shuttle's radio. "Shoot them in the back."
"They're very protective of it. Watch." Gegenschein zipped in a tight circle above one of the animals and it spun on its forelegs, facing him the entire turn. Gegenschein rotated the bubble slightly, apparently to get a look at the gut shuttle, and the bubble dropped a few meters. The animal came up below him and wrapped its rib cage like a clawed curtain halfway up the sphere, then snapped its head-mouth backwards, sending the bubble into the ground. It rolled over once and lifted straight up.
"Get the hell up here!" I shouted into the mike. I was already reaching for the button that would open the side hatch for the bubble, and in a moment felt it enter. Gegenschein came forward, calm as ice.
"Take me down over the group."
"We can come back later. One of the dead ones must be worth saving."
"We're going to have to get your fucking ears checked. Take me down."
I positioned the gut shuttle over the animals and put it in auto, then scrambled back to the bubble bay. Gegenschein had one of the shuttle's laser cannons set up and poking out over the edge of the open hatch. Still in shadow, the animals pranced and snorted below us. I could smell the vegetation, the burnt powder of the projectile cannon, a whiff of charred fur.
"A much better view," he said, sighting through the laser's scope. "I would have thought of it eventually." He took the animals one by one behind the neck.
When he had finished I leaned with an elbow on the bubble. "You didn't need to do that."
He looked at me with eyes I knew hadn't closed all night. I wondered how long he'd been fighting them in the dark. "Did they look like they were leaving? Besides, my gear's down there and I'm headed north. And there's no telling how long those carcasses would last out in the open. So go gut one."
"You're going north?"
"It's another 600 kilometers to the ocean. I'm camping on the edge tonight and crossing it tomorrow morning."
I shook my head. "If you think this is bad, wait till you get to that continent ahead of you."
"Bad?" Gegenschein repeated. "Bad? Do you think that's the first time an animal ever tagged me in the bubble?" The rising sun flashed from his tired eyes. "This, Wally, is paradise."
I made no mention of the volcanoes and that day hauled two loads of six animals each back to the Diana. We must have killed two hundred.
That night I manipulated the Diana's orbit and speed so that the ship would be passing over the volcanoes each day about the same time I arrived back with my final load. As we moved northward we were forced to adjust our schedule to the planet's 22-hour rotation. With fewer hours to hunt and more animals to kill, we were soon covering only about 200 kilometers a day.
And the volcanoes were changing. Not the volcanoes, actually, but the area surrounding them. By the third week, there was no vegetation within 1000 kilometers of either, and no animals within 1500 kilometers.
The hunt was changing, too. Most mornings I had to fight my way down to the ground and found the hunter already engaged. He stayed much closer to the shuttle than he ever had before, covering me while I winched the animals up the rear ramp. I had to gut them inside, something I had always hated to do. By the end of the fourth week we were literally traveling together, within sight of one another.
It was around then, sitting in the cab of the gut shuttle at the end of a day, that I told the hunter about the volcanoes. They had gained another hundred degrees.
"Have you checked the isthmus?"
"What?"
He pointed. "The two continents are connected by a narrow bridge of land to our northeast, a quarter of the way around the planet in that direction, just above the equator."
I shook my head.
"We'll have to move faster. Tomorrow we bring the incendiaries."
"We?"
"From now on I sleep in the Diana." I laughed and could see his mustache square off as he grinned in the glow from the panel lights. It was nearly dark outside. There were trees here, some maybe eight meters tall, and he stared through the cab dome at their swaying silhouettes. "These plants, Wally, they talk to each other. I've probably killed as many plants as animals since we went sub-arctic." I'll never understand how Gegenschein survived to that point sleeping outside the bubble, unless he slept inside the bubble. The bubble's not made for sleeping, and if he stayed inside, he didn't do much of it.
An hour and a half later Gegenschein stood in the Diana and stared expressionless at the two volcanoes -- two steaming pockmarks that in the past week had evaporated away their cloud cover -- then walked to the Ffister and edged the Diana to where the long slice of morning was cutting across the isthmus between the continents. Enough light fell on the eastern end of the narrow strip to use optical resolution, and he switched to a telescope.
The image rippled as if viewed through shimmering heat waves, and it made no sense to me. I looked at Gegenschein, who stared without seeming to breathe.
"What is it?"
He focused down and the ripples became the solid swarming bodies of thousands of animals. "Migration," he said.
I spoke after a long pause. "Right. They're all headed to the other side, away from the volcanoes." I left him there and went to load incendiary bombs into the gut shuttle.
One bomb would clear a patch a thousand meters in diameter. After about six hours we would touch down in the middle of the destruction, unsling the bubble and set up a ring of weapons. And soon the animals would come -- sprinting, stomping, flying from the singed perimeter. We had only two or three hours to hunt and choose the best specimens, the last of which I gutted in the back of the shuttle as Gegenschein flew us up to the Diana.
Using the bombs, we could only manage one load a day, though we were probably killing more than a thousand animals. At the end of the fifth week we had almost 200 creatures in the Diana's refrigerated hold, and it was only half full. I had always considered the hold to be inefficiently large. I always thought it was just one of the hunter's damn stupid idiosyncrasies.
We bombed from the southern forests northward across a grassy plain and then worn, rolling hills, and even farther north into tropical jungle, veering east and west as we roughly paralleled a range of huge, spiny mountains. Just below the equator we had a choice of heading northwest or northeast, as a large bay -- maybe an ocean -- divided the northern half of the continent into a fat Y. With the isthmus to the east, we chose to go northwest.
During the seventh week, our forty-fourth day, I ripped out my last protective oversuit and finished the next four days a bloody mess. The animals near the equator were huge, and I was crawling around and sometimes half-standing inside them with lights and cutting tools, removing eighty-kilo kidneys and 100-kilo livers by hand. On the forty-eighth day I complained loudly enough to get the hunter to agree to a rest.
We took the next day off. The hunter had something he wanted to do anyway, he said, so in the morning I gathered a bunch of torn oversuits around me on the bridge and began to patch them. The volcanoes on the monitor were red eyes on the dark face of the planet.
Gegenschein backed the Diana out to geosynchronous orbit over the day side and began to sift through the animals that lay ahead of the swath of our hunt, flashing one after another on the telescope monitors. I worked and watched him for several hours, relishing the cool Diana after our days in the jungle, then headed for food storage.
"I'll take whatever you're having," he yelled behind me. When I returned he was bent over in his chair with his head tucked in the crook of his elbow.
"Let's go, hunter," I whispered. "We've finished hunts with a tenth as many. These are the best -- by far. We've got almost 250 of the most superb trophies in the universe on board. Now, let's go."
His head rocked from side to side and he spoke into his elbow. "There are at least 150 more worth taking. And hundreds of worthwhile secondary species." He looked up at me. "This is a planet of killers, Wally. This is what it's all about. We're okay ahead for...for awhile, maybe a month or more. We're going ahead. Now give me a fucking fudge bar."
At the end of the day the hunter retired to his quarters and I brought the Diana back down to near orbit. The morning crescent was well past the volcanoes and Artemi was shining brightly on what looked to be a baked mudflat. A vast central portion of the continent was stripped bare. The mouths of the volcanoes had widened threefold.
For almost four weeks we blasted our way northwest, collecting another hundred specimens. Gutting the animals was taking a physical toll on me and the hunter noticed it, so he began helping me restock the shuttle with explosives each night. Wars have been won with less ammunition than we were expending on the far side of the planet.
On our seventy-second day, halfway up the northwest arm of the continent with the huge bay not far to the east, we landed in the middle of the charred clearing we had made six hours earlier and broke out the bubble and the weapons. It was a temperate zone in the height of spring. A thick forest formed a roof over the land, a seamless, unpredictable stretch of hills and valleys.
Behind a semicircle of laser cannons, rocket launchers, mortars and automatic projectile weapons, I took my position at the rear of the gut shuttle, and Gegenschein strapped himself into the bubble and hovered overhead. Usually, one or two of the most fearless animals would come into the clearing almost immediately. After ten minutes, using the scope on the laser cannon, I began scanning the perimeter of the clearing intently. In the shadows of the overlying vegetation, for the entire 300-degree pivot of the laser on its tripod, all I could see was eyes.
I wanted to back into the open hatch of the shuttle and close it. Instead, I found the mike in my hand. "Hunter, get down here. You won't be able to see it from up there."
"See what? Where is everybody?"
"They're out there. But your angle is wrong. Come on down."
The bubble settled alongside the rear of the shuttle and I ushered the hunter over to the scope. He sighted steadily through the same 300 degrees, then picked up the laser, cradling it in his arms. "Bring one with you." It was his hunting whisper. "You go up one side, I'll go up the other." We made our way slowly to the front of the shuttle and entered the cab. "There's got to be another isthmus, another passage." His gaze darted crazily out the cab dome.
"I don't think so."
"They couldn't have followed us so fast from the east. The first wave is at least two weeks behind us. How in the fuck could we have missed it?"
"Too busy hunting."
"Get into the goddamn ship's memory." I pressed the buttons. We sped backward through the Diana's view of the planet in her last thirty or so orbits until the lighting was right.
"Stop," said the hunter. "Mag down."
The northwest branch of the continent, only several thousand kilometers from where we were hunting, narrowed to a sharp peninsula just south of the arctic. A corresponding peninsula reached out from the continent on the other side of the planet. "More mag, Wally. Do those touch?"
"Maybe the water is shallow. But it really doesn't matter. We have to go."
The animals were pouring into the blackened hole in their forest. My right hand found the lifter controls and took the gut shuttle up 200 meters, then snapped on the auto. I put the scene directly below us on the monitor.
"I'd rather see it for myself." Gegenschein pressed the button to open the side hatch, then disappeared to the rear. I followed him.
The incendiary patch was a swarm of living movement and color. Animals leaped against the bubble, stood on it, fell off it, rolled it around in their tangled midst.
"Let's go, hunter," I said, and he nodded. As we took a last look, the shuttle appeared to fall, but my sense of balance told me that we weren't moving. The ground heaved up toward us. The animals were directly below us, the tallest ones just meters from the open hatch. We stepped back instinctively and a huge muzzle flopped up on the deck, then was forced back as the ground receded again.
"Go, go, go!" The hunter pushed me forward, like the time in the Dintric when he hurried me to the elevators. I tried to talk on the way back to the Diana, but the words made no sense and the hunter offered no response.
Gegenschein stared straight ahead as I docked the gut shuttle, and as soon as the atmospheres had equalized he was out of the cab. I chased after him to the bridge, where he sat near the Ffister. I went to the telescopes and scanning controls. The Diana was perched over the peninsulas that reached out to one another between the continents, a picture much like the one we had just seen in the gut shuttle, except it was early morning.
"Mag down," he said.
"What the fuck does it matter. Let's go."
He sat there. I focused down. Thousands of islands spanned the strait, most of them less than a kilometer apart.
"How could we have missed it?"
"Let's go."
"They've got the bubble."
"We'd need military beams to get it back."
"I had military beams on the Ridley."
"Let's go."
He grasped the control handles and we circled around to the dark side and the white-fire eyes of the volcanoes, intense as little suns. A glow from behind the planet silhouetted the curving horizon on all sides. As we watched, the eyes shifted, moving west against the planet's west-to-east rotation. One came to rest directly below us.
"Either the Diana just accelerated on its own or that planet has changed its rotation," I said. For some reason I activated a biodetection scan. "Hunter?" I looked toward him until his frantic eyes left the screen and found me. "The biodetection is working again."
"What's it say?" The question was level, controlled.
"Number of animal species -- one. Number of plant species -- one. The planet is an organism. A single plant-animal."
The glow brightened from behind the planet, where the fierce manifestations we had hunted huddled by the millions. It cast a bright edge around the black background of the volcano below us. As we watched, the viewer went white and the Diana creaked.
"It's got a beam on us, hunter," I yelled. In that instant, I heard the hunter in my head: He would have run. Or he would have attacked.
The Diana lurched forward and climbed several thousand kilometers up into Artemi's bright illumination.
"Keep it on the screen, Wally."
We watched behind us as the planet left its orbit and followed. The glow behind it provided an unbelievably quick propulsion. Bright shafts flashed from its two volcanoes from whatever kind of furnace cooked within it. The hunter was heading for a tight orbit around Artemi.
"Can you get a reading on those beams?"
I checked memory. "Coherent light from ultraviolet, 200 nanometers, through infrared, 10,000 nanometers. And protons, hunter. The thing's spewing protons. Another two or three seconds back there and we'd be vacuum."
Closing fast, the planet duplicated our arc around Artemi. Something about it struck a chord.
"It looks like the bubble, hunter. Two cannons breathing fire."
Gegenschein took only a half orbit and gunned off in no particular direction. "Let's see how fast it is."
It was fast enough to keep the hunter zigzagging out of the star system, and it continued to follow when he pulled up perpendicular to the major axis of the galaxy. And it was fast enough to keep the Diana in range. After an hour, it became obvious that it would catch us.
"It couldn't possibly go superspace," I said.
"It won't have to. No matter where we wanted to go, it would take at least eight hours for the computations. Take over here, Wally."
I replaced him at the controls and he stood over me. "We need a diversion. I'm taking the gut shuttle out. Get the ship back, Wally."
"I'll do it." He disappeared from the corner of my eye as I watched the screen and it was the last I'd ever see him. "I'll do it, hunter!"
The gut shuttle was as speedy sublight as the Diana, and more maneuverable. I watched it drift back five hundred kilometers and held my breath as it changed direction. The planet followed, both of them disappearing from the screen.
Bernard and Cowper and their crew are preparing the 352 animals and will arrange them on an entire level of the gallery, each with a plaque indicating their home planet, Gegenschein, the fourth of the star Artemi in the Catullus galaxy. It's the only planet I've ever named. And it's not even there anymore.
The four women and most of the rest of the inhabitants of Askylkas have decided to remain. Gegenschein had a will, and no one close to him is complaining about the provisions. At the reading last week, I had to laugh. Gegenschein referred to me as "the ELF who learned how to be quiet."
Askylkas will go on. I'm looking forward to running the businesses he left me, including the mapping and exploration company. I must be the only engineered life form in the universe with natural humans working for it. I may even take the Diana out to the fringes as new planets, new stars, new galaxies are explored. We won t even have cataloged a tenth of the universe by the time my warranty runs out. But I won't hunt. I was never a hunter. I intend to die like Sysys, in bed, with beautiful women wiping my brow.
THE END
keith@croes.com