Bestiary! (18 page)

The sign read: INTELLIGENT LIFE IS SACRED. He flourished it overhead, though he knew the cameras had not come yet. A few of the soldiers stared at him. They were young recruits for the most part, boys under twenty.

Janet ran up to him, boots splashing slush, blond hair vivid as lightning above her red ski suit. "Andy, I'm so glad you've come! They've sent for a wrecker. They're going to pull the cars out of the way."

"Then we'll lock arms in front of the wrecker," he said.

"We can't ask these people to lie down in this slop." He was looking at the other demonstrators as he spoke. There

were only six, five of them middle-aged women. Good people, but without leadership they wouldn't stand up to much bullying.

Send me at least into the war,

And let me lead thy Myrmidons, that thus The Greeks may have some gleam of hope.

Dumont emerged from his van, caught sight of Anderson and waved. His parka was much like Anderson's own, but his face was thinner and he was going bald. "We don't know what it is, yet. Some of our members are interviewing the farmer who saw it. A capripede, possibly."

"Fine," Anderson said. A satyr, by no coincidence at all, looked like the conventional representation of the Devil—not such an easy thing to defend in public as, say, a little winged Eros.

"You need me out there?" Dumont asked.

"Not yet," Janet told him. "Stay with the radio."

An officer had been trudging across the snow-covered field from the helicopter. He was close enough now for Anderson to see the silver eagles on his field jacket. Roman eagles, Anderson thought. Greek aircraft—the spiral-winged. I'll bet be doesn't know it. Or care.

A bearded man Anderson had not seen before left the cluster of demonstrators to ask, "This new creature .. . will we get to see it?"

"Him," Anderson said. "Always say
him
or
her.
It's much easier for them to shoot an it. Maybe, but more likely not."

Janet smiled at the bearded man. "You'll get to see—and even talk to—quite a few eventually, if you keep coming. We might even be lucky today."

The bearded man smiled back beneath his beard and seemed to lift himself on his toes. "There's more than one out there, isn't there? I've heard of them. It makes one feel like Adam."

Anderson said, "We're on the edge of one of the largest forested areas in Wisconsin. A lot of people bring them here, and more drift in. A friend of mine who's a statistician tells me there are gradients of diminishing population we're largely oblivious to. They sense those and follow them to places like this. There are quite a few of them in Minnesota too, and upper Michigan."

Janet added, "The Smokey Mountains are supposed to be full of them. Dr. Dumont plans to go there this summer."

"Professor Anderson?" It was the colonel.

Anderson said, "Afraid so."

"The dossier I saw is a little sketchy, but I thought I recognized you from your picture. What do you teach? Biology? Bio-physics?"

"Classical literature."

"Say, that's interesting. I like Sherlock Holmes myself, and Kipling. I suppose this biological engineering stuff is a hobby with you."

Anderson shook his head.

The colonel glanced around as though expecting to see the Minotaur step out of a cowshed. "I can see where it would be a good one in certain respects. Eventually I assume there will be a licensing procedure and some supervision. At present the thing is a mess."

"The question is which side the mess is on."

"I suppose you could say that. Did you hear what they killed yesterday on Market Street in Philadelphia? A cat with the head of a snake. It was as big as a small dog."

"A great many cats are as big as small dogs, and I'd think it would be a good deal less intelligent a hunter than most cats. No doubt it was somebody's first stab at making a chimera."

The colonel seemed not to have heard him. "They do these things, and they can't handle the results. Then instead of destroying them they turn them loose. It's funny, isn't it, how all the stuff that was originally developed by some high-powered scientists eventually turns into something the average Joe can do in his basement. Take zv—you can get a kit and build as good a television as anybody can buy. Or airplanes—a man I went to the Point with is building a plane in his garage."

Anderson said, "If the Wright brothers hadn't been able to build the first one in a bike shop, there wouldn't be any planes."

"Maybe." The colonel looked unconvinced, and Anderson decided he thought the airplane had been invented by Boeing. "Just the same, my orders are to clean this up. You and your followers are interfering with that."

"They're not my followers. They simply happen to believe as I do—or rather, I happen to believe as they do."

"Your dossier says you're one of the leaders, Professor Anderson. You're a man and most of them are women; you're well educated and you're the tallest. Who would you think the leader was if you were in my shoes?"

Anderson said, "If I were in your shoes, I'd probably be wrong about a lot of other things too," but his attention was no longer on the conversation. A truck was coming over the hill, and at first he thought it was the Army tow truck. Then the bearded man and several of the women raised a cheer, and he saw the call-letters on the side.

The colonel said something inaudible to a captain, the captain mumbled to a sergeant, and the sergeant bawled something at the troops, who fell into ranks. Janet and the bearded man hustled their charges into a straggling line, and Dumont emerged from his van to join them. Anderson suddenly understood that this was what everyone had been waiting for: the Army would prove they were acting without brutality, and let an audience of millions feel the thrill of the hunt; the demonstrators would put their case before the same audience and try to stir up sympathy for the hunted.

A man with a microphone climbed out of the truck, followed by a man with a camera. Guided by unerring instinct, both made for Janet. Anderson wanted to point it out to the colonel, but the colonel was busy looking soldierly as he inspected his troops in the background. In an undertone, the man with the microphone identified his channel and announced that any footage used would make the twelve o'clock news, then switched on his mike.

"You have to realize they will be murdering a
person
out there," Janet said without preamble. "Probably someone with the heart and mind of a child."

"Do you do this sort of life-shaping yourself?"

Dumont leaned toward the mike, his eyes on the camera. "I do. You must understand that it is completely legal as well as morally impeccable. It's not like similar research on bacteria—this can breed no plagues. It's just that the products of this work are deprived of even the protection afforded wild animals."

The interviewer asked, "What is your purpose in doing what you do?"

Janet put a hand on Dumont's shoulder, and Anderson, though he knew she was projecting for the camera, felt a tiny thrill at the beauty of her profile. "We have lost so many of our fellow citizens of this world. All the larger whales, the gorilla, two kinds of cheetah, all within the last Yen years. Now humanity can make real what it has always loved. Now we can see the friends our ancestors dreamed of. The world is big enough for all of us, and some of us don't want to have to live here alone."

Patrols were leaving on foot now, apparently in the hope of drawing the television crew away. Anderson sent off two demonstrators with each, telling them to stand between the hunted and the soldiers' M16s if they could. If they dared. Behind him, the bearded man was talking now. "God gave to the first human being the authority to name the creatures, and in the language of the Bible, to name is to create. 'In the beginning was the word ... "

Anderson found himself trudging after a patrol too. Despite their weapons and equipment, the young soldiers moved faster than he, and though their footprints were plain enough in the snow, he lost sight of them when they entered the birches. The helicopter was beating overhead again. Anderson used his sign pole for a staff. The wind that stirred the branches smelled of spring and seemed made of something purer than air; and he felt again, as he had in his car, that he was somehow privileged. After a quarter hour or so, he caught sight of the soldiers—or perhaps of other soldiers. They appeared to have halted to examine some track their own feet soon obscured. Almost at once they were gone again. Exulting in the knowledge that he had not yet heard a shot, Anderson hurried after them... .

The sun climbed above the trees. Twice the helicopter had whirred overhead and vanished. The pocket compass Anderson had bought only a few months before was lost somewhere in the snow. Perhaps because Dumont moved, it was him Anderson saw first, his parka looking black against the snow. Then Janet in her red ski suit facing him.

O Father Jove, if ever I have aided thee, Grant but this one desire.

He called and they answered; and something in their weary voices told him they were as lost as he was, and had been debating which way to go.

A little, ice-choked stream undulated through the snow near where they stood; and there were rocks, half masked with snow. The sun, too high now to give much direction, flashed from the few whirling flakes still in the air. "Well here we are," Janet said, and laughed. "We three ringleaders! Some leaders. I'll bet you don't know the way back either. Do you, Andy?"

Anderson shook his head. "We'll find it."

"I hope Paul did better."

Anderson decided Paul must be the bearded man.

Dumont said, "We really ought to split up," and just at that moment a little figure stepped around some snow covered bushes and came hesitantly forward. Its ears were pointed and its face was the face of a clever, sickly child; two small horns pushed through a tangle of dark curls. At first Anderson thought it was—insanely—wearing a scarlet sash. Janet moaned and dropped to her knees beside it, and it let the scarlet sash fall straight. There were fingers at the end of it; its blood dripped from them.

"Your arm!" Janet whispered. "Oh my God, your poor arm."

She and Dumont produced aid kits. Never until that moment had it occurred tò Anderson that if the Army were to shoot something, it might fall to him to patch that something up. Coming on top of the lost compass it was almost too much. He experienced a self-contempt as great as the euphoria he had felt earlier, yet at the same time he was compelled to look at the faun's mangled arm as though he too had bandages and penicillin.

Janet muttered, "They shot him! Can you imagine, they shot this little body, this poor baby."

Dumont was tightening a tourniquet about the faun's upper arm. "You're coming home with us, young fellow. I have a place where you can stay until that's better."

"Those aren't gunshot wounds," Anderson said.

Janet and Dumont stared at him; the faun averted its wide, melting eyes.

"I was in the Marines; I saw films, and once one of the men in our barracks got hold of live ammunition and shot a lieutenant. I've seen bullet wounds out here too, and so. have both of you. Bullets puncture the skin on entry and leave a blue corona. If they have much velocity left when they exit, they blow out a cone of flesh. They shatter bone, if they hit it. These bones aren't broken. There are puncture wounds, but mostly the flesh is torn. Whatever attacked that arm did it with its teeth—my guess would be a dog."

Then slowly, between minutes of sobbing and despite naïve evasions, it all came out: the dead twin; the footprints like, but not quite like, a bear's; the terror in the winter-wrapped woods. The goat-tongue had difficulty in forming words (Anderson recalled a lisping boy who had lived across the street when he was a child), but they soon grew accustomed to its faults, and the protection its distractions had afforded them vanished. After a time they found it hard to meet one another's eyes.

"Somebody's finally done it," Dumont said at last. "Once at least—probably more. It wasn't me."

"We never thought it was," Anderson told him. He wanted to swear.

"Those tracks couldn't be a centaur's...." Dumont hesitated, looking from Anderson to Janet and back. A centaur could kill with his hooves, I suppose, or his hands. But his teeth would be no more dangerous than yours or mine. Werewolves?"

"Maybe," Anderson said. "There are other possibilities —Anubis and Set, perhaps even Narashimha, the lion-man of the Vedas. Whatever they are, we're going to have to use our connections with the others to lead the soldiers to them before they kill a human being."

Dumont nodded, but Janet's blue eyes were blazing. "You-would, wouldn't you! You'd see them shot down—shot down with guns!"

Suddenly she was gone. Anderson sprinted after her, with Dumont close behind him. They had not run twenty yards through the snow when Anderson heard the thunder of hooves.

Only once before had Anderson seen him. Then he had thought him roan, the human torso, arms, and face, Caucasian. Now Pholus looked black, bigger than any horse, immensely bigger than any man, muscled like a giant. Janet, clinging to his back, harnessing those mighty arms with her slender hands, might have been a child, a little girl dreaming.

He could have trampled them, but at the last moment he turned aside, sending up a spume of mud and melting snow, smiting them instead with his wild glance. Anderson caught a flash of red. Perhaps Janet had waved. Perhaps she had not. Panting, he halted.

Dumont ran on, less swiftly even than Anderson had run. Blindly. Stupidly.

Anderson did not care. In the clearing he found the faun and took him by the hand. The road and the cars, all the relics of the dying twentieth century except himself,

would be in the direction opposite the one Pholus had taken. Anderson trudged toward
them.

Midst others of less note came one frail form,

A phantom among men; companionless

As the last cloud of an expiring storm,

Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,

Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,