of an old tradition, Beast Managers, and this kind of Beast requires a lot of maintenance. It needs pruning and fertilizer. It needs exercise. It needs the occasional blood sacrifice. It’s no big deal. That’s what tourists and collectors are for.
I wrap Billy Beecham’s net around my hand and sling it over him, using the neck-pinch skill. I wrap one end around a tree and tie a knot. I wave at my Father as I walk out of the clearing, so that the Beast can do its Beast thing.
“Are you going to let me be eaten?” Billy Beecham looks stunned.
“Don’t you know that sometimes Beast collectors get collected?” I ask him.
“But you’re a virgin.”
“Virgins were never sacrifices,” I say. “Not to this kind of Beast. Virgins are collaborators.”
And the Beast moves like it hasn’t moved in a hundred years. The Beast dances, and I turn my head as Billy Beecham sinks into the gaping maw of the mini-forest.
“Are you happy now?” I ask the Beast.
The Beast roars and slows its walk, dropping down into place only a little way from where it was crouching. After a moment, the birds return, and the breeze winds itself back into the Beast’s twigs. The streetlamps come back on. The Mothers resume their night patrol of Bastardville’s streets. My Father shakes a little more fertilizer on the Beast’s roots, and the Beast sighs in satisfaction.
I lean back against one of the Beast’s trees, and kick off my Dreamy Creamy high heels. I put my head back against the Beast, and listen to the Beast’s giant heart beating.
10
LARRY NIVEN is best known as a science-fiction writer. He created Ringworld, and many other futures. I learned a lot from him as a writer. He once wrote that writers should treasure their spelling mistakes, and when I typed Coraline instead of Caroline, I did. Is a horse an unnatural creature?
Time-traveling backward a thousand years in order to procure a long-extinct horse, Svetz is at a loss. He’s never seen a horse before. This one looks almost right….
THE YEAR WAS 750 A.A. (AnteAtomic) or 1200 A.D. (Anno Domini), approximately. Hanville Svetz stepped out of the extension cage and looked about him.
To Svetz the atomic bomb was eleven hundred years old and the horse was a thousand years dead. It was his first trip into the past. His training didn’t count; it had not included actual time travel, which cost several million commercials a shot. Svetz was groggy from the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. He was high on pre-industrial-age air, and drunk on his own sense of destiny; while at the same time he was not really convinced that he had gone anywhere. Or anywhen. Trade joke.
He was not carrying the anesthetic rifle. He had come to get a horse; he had not expected to meet one at the door. How big was a horse? Where were horses found? Consider what the Institute had had to go on: a few pictures in a salvaged children’s book, and an old legend, not to be trusted, that the horse had once been used as a kind of animated vehicle!
In an empty land beneath an overcast sky, Svetz braced himself with one hand on the curved flank of the extension cage. His head was spinning. It took him several seconds to realize that he was looking at a horse.
It stood fifteen yards away, regarding Svetz with large intelligent brown eyes. It was much larger than he had expected. Further, the horse in the picture book had had a glossy brown pelt with a short mane, while the beast now facing Svetz was pure white, with a mane that flowed like a woman’s long hair. There were other differences…but no matter, the beast matched the book too well to be anything but a horse.
To Svetz it seemed that the horse watched him, waited for him to realize what was happening. Then, while Svetz wasted more time wondering why he wasn’t holding a rifle, the horse laughed, turned, and departed. It disappeared with astonishing speed.
Svetz began to shiver. Nobody had warned him that the horse might have been sentient! Yet the beast’s mocking laugh had sounded far too human.
Now he knew. He was deep, deep in the past.
Not even the horse was as convincing as the emptiness the horse had left behind. No reaching apartment towers clawed the horizon. No contrails scratched the sky. The world was trees and flowers and rolling grassland, innocent of men.
The silence—it was as if Svetz