THE MOTHER OF THE BEAST

Gordon Eklund

Because her children were special and so often misunderstood, Hera believed it was her duty not only to teach them the ways of the universe but also to shield and protect them from its more malevolent aspects. For this, their first excursion away from the Moon, she had chosen the planet Kraton, a virgin world, newly discovered, quite devoid of danger. Hera had wanted it that way, for the sake of the children. The landscape here where she had scanned was dominated on all sides by jagged cliffs and crags. With her head tilted at an awkward angle, she could observe a fleet of dark clouds darting like demons above the tall pinnacles. Kraton—what she had so far seen of it—was a dark, brooding planet. She felt pleased; this place was exactly what she had sought.

The children scanned one by one. Hera counted as each materialized in turn before her: eight … nine … ten. Cady, staring in wide-eyed wonderment at her instantaneous trip through twelve parsecs of interstellar space, made eleven.

But time passed. Too much time.

“Now where’s Ares?” she finally asked. “We can’t possibly have lost him already.”

“Peekaboo!” cried Ares, the horned child. He darted suddenly out from behind a tree and waved his arms gleefully. Nine E-years old, Ares wore pale green shorts and no shirt. His horns protruded stiffly through a pile of unkempt black human hair. Because of his hoofed feet, he limped as he walked. “I got here even before you, Hera. I was the first—the very first.”

“No,” she said, her breath coming short. “Never do that— never.” She had intended to speak to all twelve children, but several had already gone romping into the woods. “Now, you come here,” she cried, slapping her hands. “I mean everyone— right now—I mean it. We have a lot to do. We’ll need a camp and a fire. It may be dark soon.”

“And the wild animals?” asked little Cady, nestling close to Hera’s knees in search of protection. Her upper lip, a loose fold of fat skin, dangled an inch past her lower. She was young, fragile, a new student; the other children frightened her.

“We’ll see about exploring tomorrow. Remember, except for the scouting team, we’re the first humans ever to come here. We’ll see about the animals tomorrow.”

“And they’ll tear us apart,” said a boy, Dangel, growling fiercely.

“No, no!” cried Cady, shying back even farther.

“Yes, yes,” said Hera, patting the child. “Dangel is just being funny. The animals here are very peaceful. You’ll see.”

“Does that mean we’ve got to climb those big cliffs?” asked another boy.

“Unless we intend to stay in this valley.” Hera grew impatient. “Now some of you please get to work. Unpack our supplies, start the tent.”

“What I want to know,” Ares said, glancing around, “is where are the aliens? You know they’re here—all around. When they catch us, that’ll be the end.”

Cady began to sniffle in fear. Hera said angrily, “Ares, that’ll be enough of that nonsense. There are no aliens on this world and you know it. If there were, we’d hardly be here. Now be quiet and stop frightening Cady.”

“I’ll be quiet if the aliens will.”

“Ares.”

“Yes, Hera, dear.”

Darkness fell suddenly on Kraton. Fortunately, both tents had been inflated and the lantern cast sufficient light to allow the children to gather wood from the forest.

After heating their dinners over the fire, the children ate greedily until Hera rose and ordered them off to bed. She undressed in her own tent and then came down to visit. Cautiously, she counted heads and bodies: nine … ten … only eleven.

“All right. Who’s missing this time? Is it Cady?”

“I’m here, Hera.”

“Patria, get back in your own pouch and leave Cady alone.”

“But, Hera, she—”

“I said no. Now, please.”

After Patria had sullenly complied, Hera addressed the twelve: “I want you children to get as much rest as possible tonight, as it’s my intention to move out shortly past dawn. We’ll hike northward and scale the cliffs there. The maps indicate a series of finger lakes in that direction and we ought to uncover a good deal of native wildlife.”

“Big ugly fierce growling monsters,” said Ares, “who’ll gobble us up and spit out the pieces.” Of the children, only he was part of a second generation—three-quarters human, in spite of the horns and hoofs. Hera went away. As soon as she left their tent, the children began whispering.

Hera paused just outside and cocked an ear. She heard, “Hera, Hera.” Her own name. Damn them, she thought. Hadn’t she warned them—no talking tonight? Their damned whisperings followed her everywhere. Feeling rage inside her like a flame, she shut her eyes and clenched her fists. She hated them when they whispered like this, when they talked about her.

Ahead, on a gentle slope, her own tent stood. The lantern gleamed and flickered through the open doorway.

Curled naked inside the sleeping pouch, Hera wondered. How long could she lie like this without moving? One hour, two, three, ten? Their damned fathers. Hera tried to imagine such men. She saw them strutting, wild-eyed, long-limbed, big-muscled. In harsh reality, a scout might stand four feet, ten inches, and be fat. The women were much worse. How could anyone bear to mate with something unhuman? They always said, no, we’re all one, descendants of the original longships that peopled the galaxy in millennia past. There are no aliens; everything is human, the same stock: Cady with her long lip; Samuel with his distended sex organ; Bruto with his reddish fur; Ares with his horns and hoofs. Still, evolution on alien worlds had turned wonders, created new breeds. To mate with such a being, overpowered by a vicious beast as lusty as a stag, was an ultimate desecration of the soul. And yet it happened. Twelve children testified to that. Hera heard their incessant, whispering voices.

Naked, she slipped free of the sleeping pouch, grasped the lantern, padded across the ground. At their tent she paused, then hurled open the flaps. “Now, please,” she said, trembling. “Now, children, please be silent.” The lantern cast crazy shadows on the inner walls. “We cannot—we simply cannot—”

“Damn it, we were,” said Ares. “We were trying to sleep.”

“You damned liar!” she cried. And then, with a start, she noticed that Patria had again left her pouch.

The second night, near midnight, while they were camped halfway up the face of the cliff, Ares entered her tent. She could see his figure only dimly, despite the bright lanternlight. He moved like a creature from a dream.

“What do you want here?” she asked coldly.

He limped forward, his eyes burning with a strange excitement. “Hera, I’ve found something utterly amazing that you won’t believe. You’ve got to come and see.”

“You ought to be in your tent, asleep.”

“Oh, no, don’t be silly.” He crouched beside her. “Listen, I’m half-nocturnal, like Latone.” He winked.

“I barely remember your father.”

“No, of course not, but this doesn’t concern him.” He reached out and, with incredible strength, drew her out of the pouch to kneel before him. “I want you to come with me now.”

She glared, neither frightened nor angry. “Don’t you ever touch me that way again.”

“I won’t.” His voice was a ghostly, disembodied thing. “Hey, Hera, come on, I’m not kidding. You’ll want to share the credit for this, I guarantee you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Put on some clothes and I’ll show you.”

“All right.” Obediently she dressed. “Now talk.”

“Okay. It’s a cave I found. A little off the trail and hidden by a couple of boulders.”

“There’s no cave indicated on any of the maps.”

“So? It’s not possible to map every feature of a whole planet in just a few E-years. Well, I went inside. To the very back. It was pitch black and wet along the sides but somehow I could just see. It wasn’t empty. Something used to live there. I found alien artifacts. I mean real aliens, Hera, not longship humans. These things were monsters.”

She stared at him. “Ares, don’t tell stories.”

“I think they’re all dead now—extinct.”

She was taken aback. “Ares, you’re not making any sense. How do you know all this?”

“Because their coffins are in there. It’s a burying place for alien monsters. Come on.” He reached out to tug her arm, then thought better of it. “It’s easier to show than tell. Everyone else is waiting, too.”

“Everyone?”

When he admitted that he had roused the camp, she could not repress her fury. Outside, she found the children waiting in the dark, eager to be led. She ordered all of them to bed and stayed, watching, until they had drifted obediently away.

The cave was not far off. There was a malevolent air about the place, a feeling of rot and decay. Hera carried the lantern but saw nothing until they reached the back wall of the cave. There were eight large triangular metal boxes stacked in two piles against the cave wall. The vision appeared less than wholly substantial. She feared the boxes might vanish if she tried to touch them. She could understand why Ares assumed that each contained the body of a monster.

“Good God,” she said softly.

Ares moved closer to the wall. “Shine the lantern over here.”

She turned the light to illuminate a section of the damp wall. There were several small paintings here, crudely drawn, like obscene scribbles. Each showed an alien creature in the form of a triangular lump. Were these the beings who lay in the piled coffins?

“This is the most fantastic discovery in the whole history of creation,” Ares said.

“If it’s real.”

“What do you mean by that?” He seemed suddenly tense. “Don’t we have eyes? This is an immense discovery and we can’t tell a soul for two damned weeks.”

“I don’t see how the scouts could have missed this.”

“It’s possible. Maybe this is all that’s left. It could have been a million years since these things were alive.”

“I wonder if—” said Hera.

All at once, she realized they were no longer alone. Ares sensed it, too. He ran to her and gripped her body.

“There,” he cried, pointing frantically toward the roof of the cave. “I see it! Look! It’s up there!”

Hera failed to raise the lantern in time to see anything. Ares kept shouting at her to turn this way and that until finally she stopped him. “No, that’s enough. Hush up. You’re frightening yourself.”

“But didn’t you see—?”

“No,” she said quickly. “That’s just enough of that.” She drew him toward the cave mouth. “I want you to forget all about this. We can tell the scouts and leave it for them to study.”

Late the next day they reached the edge of a broad plateau. While the children warmed a meal, Hera went to her own tent. She wasn’t hungry. She prepared her sleeping pouch and climbed inside. In time, the children were resting, too. It was a cold night. Shivering, she touched her skin, silk-smooth after thirty-six E-years. Twenty-six on the Earth itself, then the last ten on the Moon. She believed in bodily care, saw it as a spiritual duty to the self. The lantern burned at high intensity. The thing in the alien cave. The shadow. Ares had insisted he had seen something corporeal. Who could know? She had felt it herself, and then today, while scaling the cliff, twice more, the same feeling. A lurking presence, never quite seen. Hallucination? Suggestion? Ares had told the other children nothing. It was only she and he who knew and thus believed.

Then she heard the scream.

“Oh, God, it’s Samuel!”

The children, all eleven of them, clustered near the body. Hera forced them away. At twelve E-years, Samuel had been their eldest. After Latone, he had been the second crossbreed to fall into normal human hands.

“Don’t look. Get back.”

“I was just—” Ares turned away from the body. “He’s been torn apart. God, what a mess.”

She raised the lantern and saw what he meant. She gagged.

“Is there anything you can do for him? You used to be a doctor, didn’t you?”

“He’s dead.”

“But we don’t know how it happened,” said Bruto, round and plump, red fur gleaming. “We just heard him scream.”

“Ares, you tell me.”

He dropped to his haunches and dug his hoofs into the hard ground. “It’s just the way he said. We were asleep, and he must have gone out alone, maybe to pee.”

“But how did you get here so quickly? I just heard him scream myself.”

“I guess we ran faster.”

“All of you,” she said, “please get away from here. Go to your tent. There’s no need to see this. It must have been a dreadful accident,”

“Bullshit,” Ares said.

“Patria, please. Take care of Cady.” She pushed the clinging, sobbing girl away from her. “And be quiet, Ares. This is terrible enough already.”

The children dispersed with unusual obedience. Only Ares remained. “Shine your lantern here, Hera.” He meant the neat pile of internal organs arranged beside the carcass. “Now, these are the lungs, right? And this is a liver. The heart. And all these are the guts. Now, no accident can do that.”

“Then it must be something else. Some rare animal the scouts missed.”

He nodded slowly and gazed at her. “An animal, yes. A beast. Some great, dark, terrible beast that’s not going to let any of us live.”

“Ares, please.” She tried to meet his eyes. “Let’s not make this worse than it already is.”

Morning arrived without incident and Hera woke the children. She expected to reach the string of finger lakes within another two days.

“I think,” she told the children, when they were ready to march, “we should decide about what happened last night. Clearly, poor Samuel died beneath the claws of some local beast, and it’s our duty to protect ourselves from now on. Except for my knife, we aren’t armed, but with sufficient caution, I believe we can all remain safe. No one will be allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied, especially at night. While we sleep, a watch will be maintained. This creature—this beast—it won’t be strong enough to dare attack us all.”

“Want to make a bet?” Ares asked.

She saw the necessity of exerting her own authority. “I’m saying this in order to save our lives,”

“And yours?” he asked, grinning.

“Mine?”

“You said it yourself—nobody is to go alone. That means giving up your private tent, Hera. It means snuggling up with us freaks.”

“No,” she said quickly. “I appreciate your—your consideration, but I don’t—” She made herself stop. He was mocking her openly. “I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.”

“That’s not good enough. Look, to get scanned home on time, we have to make it back to that valley, right? Without you, how are we going to pull it off? No, like it or not, you’re necessary for our survival, and we don’t intend to lose you to any roving monsters.”

“My tent can be securely—”

“Not good enough. No tent.” He glanced furtively at the others and must have sensed their solid support. “Either come to our tent or else we go to yours.”

“I won’t let—”

“Damn it, we’re not kidding.”

She glared at him. All night—with them. What would it be like? And their damned whispering. “All right,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll do it.”

“And share a watch?”

She nodded, acknowledging defeat. “And that, too.”

Crouched within the dark, Hera heard the children breathing. With the lantern extinguished, the tent was a vast, unseen arena, filled with sound. For most of the day, while they marched, she had sensed the beast. It didn’t seem to be present now. The children had gone right to sleep—no whispering. Even Ares now was snoring. Latone, his father, had never slept a wink, but Ares was one-fourth more human.

“Hera?”

She jumped at the sound, reaching for her knife. “Who is it?”

“Me. Horace.” He was a shy, stammering boy, “I need to go out.”

“We already decided that you can’t.”

“But I have to—I—I have to eliminate.”

She understood his need. He was younger than most of them, only one E-year Cady’s senior. His hand suddenly gripped hers —five barbed fingers and a thumb. Like Latone, a blend of Zeus and Satan. How did these children live? “Then go. But don’t stray far. Do it right outside the tent and hurry back.” His mother’s people, longship puritans, had gleefully torn her apart when her bastard son was born among them. “And take my lantern.”

“Yes, Hera.”

She slid aside to let him pass. He loosened the tent flaps and went straight out.

Later she heard: “Hera?”

The voice came from right beside her. “Ares?”

“You bet.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s time for my watch.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, good. I’m already tired.”

At dawn the children woke, although no light penetrated the tent. Hera, struggling against lingering sleep, sat up and tried to find the lantern.

Then she heard Ares shout. Crawling over, she pushed open the unsealed tent flaps. Daylight momentarily blinded her.

The children, drawn by the light, pushed past her.

She heard Ares: “Hera, Hera, come quick—it’s Horace.”

She found him at last and fought the children to reach the body. The sight of poor Horace affected her even more deeply than Samuel. Had she forgotten the horror so soon?

“It’s exactly the same,” Ares said bitterly. He pointed at the neatly arranged pile of internal organs. “Do you still think it’s an accident?”

“Get back,” she told the children. “Go inside the tent and wait there. Patria, come and take Cady. Please go away.”

When they were alone at last, Ares pointed to the lantern beside the body. “How did this get out here?”

It was the moment she had dreaded since Ares’ first shout. “I gave it to him.”

“You let him come out?”

“I—I—he had to go eliminate. You know how he was. It was the way he was brought up.”

“You let him out and didn’t say anything.”

“I must have forgotten. I thought you’d notice.”

“You let this happen. The beast was there.”

“No, no.” She wouldn’t let him blame her. “It’s just a wild animal, and you can’t feel that.”

“You’ve felt it yourself—don’t tell me you haven’t.”

“No—never.”

“You liar!” He gripped and held her. “Damn it, you have to know.”

“I don’t—I don’t know anything.” She jerked away from him and ran, fleeing back to her children.

They walked unsteadily through a delicate forest that seemed alive with shades of green, blue, and gold. This, thought Hera, must be how the ancient Earth had looked and smelled during the long eons before mankind arrived to spoil its beauty. God, she thought, how long has it been since I’ve smelled these leaves and felt this wind? She remembered as a little girl experiencing such serene hours as these in urban parks; but this was a whole planet. She had gone to the Moon to teach. The special children —only Latone and Samuel then—had required a calm guiding spirit to lead them toward real humanity, and she had eagerly volunteered to serve.

Cady walked at her side. She would never remember. Nothing ever impressed Cady—nothing lingered. She had forgotten last year, last month, last week; in her mind, the past was a gray shadow. Cady saw the trees and clouds, felt the wind, heard the incessant music of whispering leaves and grass. Cady was a simple child who perceived existence as if it were a sudden and spontaneous creation; she carried no preconceptions within her. And I? thought Hera. If I stayed here, how long would it take before I became like her?

She sprang ahead, abandoning Cady. Ares stalked at the head of a ragged line. “I think we ought to stop somewhere near. We can’t reach the lakes today.”

“If you want. It’s back there, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“You can’t feel it?”

“The children said nothing. I’ve been walking with Cady all day.”

He laughed. “She knows a lot she doesn’t tell you. And I’ve been thinking, too. About the beast—what it might be.”

“How could you ever know that?”

“I think it’s one of us. I think we made it. It wasn’t alive before we came. It’s a ghost, an ugly soul, but it belongs to one of us.”

“That’s superstition.”

“No, it’s not. We all know about the unconscious mind. And this is an alien planet. Who knows what can happen here?”

“You have no basis for making such an assumption.”

He glared at her. “Don’t I? Listen, you tell me one thing that makes more sense.”

“A wild animal.”

“Bullshit, Hera. Animals have feet and we’ve found no prints. Animals have bodies and we’ve seen nothing. The beast isn’t a thing—it’s a dark spirit, a soul. It’s part of this planet but it’s ours, too.”

“Oh, shut up, shut up.” She clutched her aching head. “Stop here.” She pointed to a stand of trees emerging ahead. “I’m tired —sick.”

She and Ares were struggling to inflate the tent when Patria rushed sobbing to her side.

“Hey, slow down. Dear, what is it? You can tell Hera—you can.” She shook the girl to calm her. “Is it about Cady?”

“She’s gone off,” cried Patria. “I tried to stop her, Hera, I did.”

“I believe you, child.”

“She wouldn’t listen.”

“Went off?” Ares broke in angrily. “How the hell could you let her do that?”

“You shut up,” Hera told him. She realized now that the beast had vanished. The air seemed freshly scrubbed. She repressed her sudden panic. “Just tell me, Patria. Where did Cady go?”

She turned instinctively to Ares. “You know how she can be. She must have just forgotten—about the beast. We were playing, and Jambal was with us. Cady was supposed to hide her eyes, except when we peeked, she was already running. We called and called—I did—but she wouldn’t answer. Before, she kept saying how pretty the forest looked. I think she just wanted to see it better.”

“Damn it, we’ll never find her now,” Ares said.

“No, I’ll try,” Hera said.

“But what if something happens?”

“Then I’ll be there to stop it.”

“In there,” Patria said, pointing. “That’s the way she went.”

“Then that’s the way I’ll have to go. Ares, you’ll be in charge until I return. Get the children inside the tent and keep them there. Darkness or not, don’t ever budge.”

He was trembling with some deep emotion. “Don’t forget. The beast is one of us.”

She touched the knife at her belt. “This will help me more.”

“Cady! Cady! Cady!” She shouted as loudly as she could. A dim, diffused sunlight filled these deep woods. Hera traveled in a circle, keeping near the camp. “Cady!” she called. “It’s me— it’s Hera!”

Would she even wish to answer? Cady’s strangeness set her apart from the others. Her father, it was said, had belonged to a longship race glimpsed only once. The scouts landed, found the people, and hurried home again with the news. When a second party followed later via scansystem, they found only an empty world. Cady’s mother, part of the original scout team, gave birth soon afterward to a daughter. If Hera had for a moment seriously considered Ares’ theory concerning the beast, she would have guessed it was Cady. Her personality was no more than a fragile wisp; her unconscious mind dominated her physical and mental being.

“Hera.”

She spun. “Cady?”

“Yes. Yes, here.”

“Where?” She turned and turned; had the light entirely vanished now?

“Here, Hera—here.”

She ran toward the sound of the voice, plunging through a thick, unseen clutter of foliage. Fallen limbs and tangled vines blocked her path. She stumbled, never quite fell. “Cady, I’m coming—hold on.” All at once she saw the girl kneeling beside a tree.

“Hera, here I am—right here.”

“I know. I see you. Wait.” Hera threw herself down, wrapped her arms around the girl, and kissed her lips violently.

Cady drew away, out of breath. “Hera, are you frightened?”

“Yes, yes. The beast. Come. Come, we must hurry.”

Cady stood as if frozen. “But the beast won’t harm me, will it?”

“I don’t know.” The girl was so ugly, with that distended lip. “I know nothing about it.”

“But it likes you.”

“No.” She shook Cady. “Don’t you ever say anything so silly. It’s evil, black. It can’t like me—it only hates.” She tried to gauge the fastest way of reaching the camp. Finally she pointed. “We’ll just have to go in this direction.”

“Back to them?”

“To the camp, the other children—yes, of course.”

“But they hate me.”

“Cady, don’t ever say that.”

“But they do. All except Patria. And you. I don’t ever want to go back to them. I like it better here.”

“Cady, you’ll die here.”

The beast walked with them—near—very near. Hera felt its evil presence like a foul, trailing stench. She wanted so desperately to run, but it was too dark now. If she tried, she would fall, and then the beast would surely be upon them.

Cady said, “It’s back there behind us, isn’t it?”

“No. What?”

“The beast.”

“No, it’s not there.”

“But it won’t harm us, will it? It’s just watching us, isn’t it?”

“Yes, just watching.”

“Will it follow us to the camp?”

“I don’t know what it will do.”

“Because I don’t want the others to be hurt. I hate them but I don’t want them to die. They hate you, too, Hera. Even Patria says she does. They think you want them dead because they’re freaks.”

If only they could reach an open meadow, she thought, any place where they could really run. She felt certain the beast would never catch them there. “Cady, I want you to take this.”

“What?” The girl held out her hand.

“My knife.”

“Oh, I won’t need that.”

“No, take it.” She tried to force the weapon into the girl’s hand, but she still refused. “It’s as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. It’ll protect you.”

“But I’m not afraid, Hera.”

She stopped.

“What—what is it?” For the first time, fear entered Cady’s voice. “Hera, what’s wrong?”

“Listen. Can’t you hear it? It’s the beast. It’s coming. Cady, run!” she cried. “Hurry—run!”

“Not without you, Hera.”

“I said run!” Hera hurled herself forward, dragging Cady’s hand, but the girl dug in her heels, and both of them went sprawling.

Stunned, Hera looked up.

The wind suddenly howled with the rush of the approaching beast. Hera stared into the sky. She screamed, “Cady, get up and run! I love you! I do—I do!”

But it was late—too late.

The beast came thundering out of the tall forest behind. Hera thought at first it was just a great featureless shadow—a black blot on the sky. The beast swept down upon them. Hera wanted to hide her eyes but could not. The beast rose, then fell. At last Cady screamed. The beast had her.

Hera felt the violent sweep of displaced air as the great beast rose to seek its lair once again.

Hera bore Cady’s body into the camp, where a fire burned, jagged flames reaching toward the midnight sky. A hard, swirling wind sent the smoke huffing through the air. The stink of the beast went with her. Ares, running frantically, darted forward to meet her. His eyes filled with tears, he said, “We knew it had to happen. We could feel it prowling out there all the time.”

“I loved Cady. If she had been my own daughter, I could not have loved her more.”

“I believe you, Hera.”

“They all think I hate them, but it’s not true.”

“No, you don’t hate them.”

“I wish we’d never come to this dreadful planet.”

“Isn’t it too late for that now?”

“Well, what else can I do?” She lowered Cady’s body to the ground. The survivors gathered around. Hera counted eight: Dangal, Jambal, Ulan, Patria, Jace, Bruto, Germania, Mendalio. But he was right. It was not they whom she hated.

“Now look here, Hera,” Ares said, “it’s just no use now. If we stay here and try to fight this thing, we’ll die, one after another. We’ve got to run and try to hide. Separate—every man for himself.”

“But we can’t go back. The scansystem has to be worked from outside. It’s not set to bring us back for days yet.”

“I said hide.”

“From the beast?” She could not help smiling. “I thought you said you thought it was one of us.”

“I said that was a possibility.”

“You said you thought it was Cady.”

“I never said anything of the kind. It could—” His voice grew very hushed. “It could be you, Hera.”

“Or you,” she said.

“But don’t you know?” he asked plaintively.

She shook her head. “No, not yet.”

Hating these children as she did, she would not have hesitated to wish almost any of them dead. The feeling was one she attempted to conceal. The outsiders—the agents in charge of the school, for instance—were not aware of her real feelings. They loathed the children, too, but assumed she was different. Latone had made them think that. When she came and confessed he had raped her, they had been willing at first to accept her statement, but when she refused an abortion and bore him a son, they had changed their minds. They believed she had opened her thighs and allowed him to penetrate her. If Latone had been a cross between Satan and Zeus—perverse mating of devil and god— then these others were simply wrong. Sometimes, seeing their extra fingers, sagging lips, colored fur, distended organs, beaks, horns, and fangs, she felt a physical revulsion, a symptom of spiritual disorder. The agents at the school had ordered Latone put to death for a crime of which they believed him innocent. Yet they carefully fostered these bastard children born of ungodly unions. Why? Was it merely human sympathy? She knew it was not. The true human race, bound in its purity to the Earth and a few sister worlds, feared those longship pioneers scattered on a hundred worlds. Who were they? What fantastic powers might they possess? To find out, the agents studied their halfbreed children. Hera knew them better than anyone. They were different—they were not superior.

Ares approached her where she sat gazing upon the sun as it cleared the distant hills. “Well, do you agree with what I said? Should we go and try to hide?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Then what, Hera?”

“We’ll go back. To the cliffs, the valley.”

*

They stopped at the edge of the plateau, with the cliffs dropping below them to the green valley beneath. Hera said, “It’s too dark to go farther. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

Ares shook his head. “I still don’t see any point to this,”

“Can you suggest an alternative?”

“No. No, I suppose not.”

“Then go help the others inflate the tent.”

She sighed and watched him limp away. All these last days, the beast had stalked them, but it had never drawn near. The cave was close now. Whatever was hidden there would provide the final clue she needed to solve the riddle, and for that reason she was certain she would not be allowed to reach it. The beast, despite its own deep fear, would surely kill tonight. She bowed her head. Was she ready?

She did not stir until a fire was burning; then she rose and sat down beside Ares, a little apart from the other children. She saw the scars his hoofs had made in the soft ground. “Well, so far, so good,” he said. “The thing hasn’t touched us yet.”

She nodded. “Yes, but it’s there.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “The others feel it, too.”

“Are they afraid, do you think?”

“They don’t want to die.”

“Them?” She felt herself losing control. “Why do you always speak of them? Why not us, Ares?”

“You?”

“Or you. What makes you so sure the beast won’t kill us, too?”

He stared at her, then suddenly tried to get up. “Don’t say that, Hera. Don’t twist my words.”

She pulled him down with one powerful hand, then threw her arms around him. “Ares,” she whispered in his ear, “please tell me now. The beast—it is real, isn’t it?”

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” He squirmed in her grasp.

“I’ve felt it. I’ve known it. And it’s you, isn’t it, Ares? You are the beast.”

“No, no!” he cried.

“There was no alien cave. That was a dream you made me have. No cave and no beast. It’s just you, Ares. You and your father—Latone. You’ve come to kill my children.”

“No!”

The beast rose into the air. She sensed it beating against the high sky. “You killed them,” she said. “Horace, Samuel, Cady. You killed them and you know why.”

“No, it’s not me. It—it’s you. I knew it all along. It’s you, Hera.”

She slapped him as hard as she could. He fell back and she stood over him. His nose was bleeding. “You hated them, but most of all you hate me. Why? Because I let him die? Because I let them kill him for the act of bringing you into this universe?”

“Stop it. Don’t say it.” He hugged his ears with his palms. “Please don’t.”

“Why?” She pulled his hands away and shouted. “Because you don’t already know it’s true? Yes, I’m your mother, goddamn it! Yes, I let him do it! Yes, it was the only time in my life! I wanted him to. I liked it. I loved him. And you knew that. You knew all along and you killed them for it!”

“Stop it. No.” His words came in tired spasms. “Make her stop it. Please.” Tears ran with the blood upon his cheek. “Come and please stop—” He sprang to his feet, his eyes widening in shock. “No, no, don’t do that! No!”

She embraced him. “It’s too late, Ares. You’ve told it what to do. That’s what you wanted all along. It was me you wanted dead —never them.”

“Don’t, Hera,” he begged.

But the beast had risen. It plunged toward them, a black charging shadow. Ares squirmed free and rushed toward the forest. Waving his arms, he cried at the beast to go back.

Hera sprinted after him. “Kill me!” Ares screamed. “It’s me you want—me!”

The beast came down upon them.

At the last moment, Hera drew her knife from her belt and drove the blade upward. Ares howled. She dropped the knife and put her arms around him. Their faces touched and she could see nothing. The beast—the beast engulfed them.

She kissed her son. Her lips smothered his and her tongue plunged inside his wet mouth. She felt his hard, bestial thighs.

Then he twisted away. “No, not me,” he said. “You thought it was me, Hera, but it wasn’t. It was him. The one who made me. It was that beast all along. It was Father, Mother, Father. We found him in that cave. We woke him up. Oh, God, please take me. “

And Hera watched as the beast took and tore the child apart. She saw his organs burst and his bones crack. It was over in a moment; then the beast rose into the sky and was gone forever.

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