"Why," she asked, "couldn't Genoaro have chosen a persona like yours? Something strong and admirable, something I could understand. To want to be an elephant; that I could understand. Or a lion or a buffalo or even a wolf. All admirable creatures in their way."
Thendard floated in his chair, looking up at the holowindows. "They say our personas choose us, not the other way round."
"Oh, that's mystical shit, Thendard. Why, why would anyone want to be a hyena? Ugly, treacherous rot-eaters!" She shuddered and shut her eyes.
Thendard reached out and patted her shoulder with a hand the size of a pillow. "I have theories. Perhaps you don't want to hear them just now?"
"No. Tell me."
"Well. You've never felt the pull of the Level, so it's hard to explain. Here we all are, Old Earth so far away in time and space that many think it no more than a charming myth. Dilvermoon is full of humans, and Dilvermoon is not our native land, oh no. Small wonder that some of us try to follow our genes back into the beforetime, down the backbrain into the plains we rose from. The Level is a steel Serengeti. We try to find a link to ourselves there."
Cayten shrugged. "I've heard the rationale."
"Heard, yes. Understood? Cayten, you're an admirable person, but you navigate these new waters more easily than most of us; you're in control, and you like it. You don't seem to need reassurance as much as most of us do; or need to touch the ancestral dirt. Perhaps you're evolved — or perhaps you're just too tightly wrapped to see the fun in a little costumed frolicking."
"That's what you call the Beaster Level? 'Costumed frolicking'? Genoaro sharpens his teeth and goes looking for carrion in the tween corridors, and that's 'frolicking'?"
Thendard looked away. "Well, some go too far. Still, the hyena has an important place on the Level, as on the ancestral plain. It's the final priest: it culls the weak; it buries the dead. Genoaro has always had something of a preoccupation with mortality. You knew about that darkness in him. It's how he came to his work. The knives he makes are used for all sorts of ugly purposes: sacrifices, executions, ritual mutilations. He feels himself to be an instrument of death, and the hyena eased him, gave him acceptance. He's talked to me about it. He couldn't talk to you." Thendard's rumble had a reproachful overtone.
"He couldn't talk to me? Why not?"
"Cayten... you would never try the skein. You had no point of reference for such a discussion."
"I didn't need to try it, to see what it was doing to Genoaro. He spends most of his time on the Level, or brooding about it. He's behind in his work, and even when he's in his workshop, his work doesn't go well. Our lives are running down different paths now; I rarely see him, and we're supposed to be living together. We were lovers...."
Her eyes filled again, but in sorrow, not rage.
A long, silent time passed, before she came to a decision. "Thendard, you have a very good medunit here, don't you? You must: you're too fat to live, otherwise. I want an implant."
His eyebrows rose. "A persona interface? Why?"
CAYTEN RUBBED at the base of her skull. There was no significant pain, only a bit of soreness around the implant site, a mild ache in the vertebrae — symptoms that Thendard assured her would disappear. The most disconcerting sensation was the simple strangeness of it, to reach up and touch a new part of herself, a plastic-and-metal surface where always before she had touched only soft skin and downy hair. The locking lugs on the mating surface of the interface were smooth and precise, the dataport textured with a hundred tiny fiber pins.
"It looks good on you, Cayten." Thendard attempted a lascivious wink, so absurdly exaggerated that Cayten laughed.
"Oh?"
"Oh yes! There's something about a woman with an implant. One can't help but wonder what her vices are; such speculation is titillating."
"I see. Well, now what?"
"I suppose you must choose a skein. I have a few female skeins, if that's the orientation you'd prefer."
She looked at him, and his broad face revealed a mild degree of embarrassment. "Well," he said. "It's occasionally instructive. But at any rate: a skein. May I recommend? You'd enjoy the gemsbok, I think — you're strong, graceful, beautiful. Don't you like to run? Or perhaps the otter. Such a quick, clever creature."
Annoyance flickered through her. "You'd prefer me to be a cud-chewer, so that I'd be captured by the first big red-eyed buck I ran into on the Level? Have a hot time? Or spend a nice relaxing day cracking open clams and playing chutes-and-ladders in a mud room?" The sharpness of her voice surprised her.
Thendard spread his hands defensively. "No offense meant."
She shook herself, and pulled her hand away from her neck. "I'm sorry. You've been nothing but kind, Thendard."
A silent minute passed.
"I want to be a hyena," she finally said.
In the dim red light of the Beaster Level, pleasure seekers pressed against them, a sea of wild eyes, wet mouths, sweat-slick bodies. They moved cautiously through the clamor and stink. The noise was louder and the smells more intense than anything she had ever experienced — the effect of the skein? Cayten stayed very close to the comforting bulk of Thendard, who now moved with a rolling, deliberate gait, swinging his head from side to side. Naked, he seemed even larger.
She found it difficult to analyze her own sensations. Was she different? She wore the skein at its least powerful setting, but her mind had become strange to her. Her thoughts ran in alien channels. She was afraid; she was eager. She felt ready to attack Genoaro if she found him; at the same time, she felt ready to flee, should he speak unkindly to her. She constantly repressed an urge to giggle, though she felt no amusement. She was in a curiously volatile state, unconnected to the self she knew — a feeling unlike any she had ever felt.
They paused at the radiant point of half a dozen corridors, where a large domed space provided room enough for the herds to congregate. Strips of pallid grass sprouted from deck boxes; succulent fungoid vines dropped from steel trellises.
In the half-light of the overhead lightstrips, the hall seethed. Beasters walked, staggered, crawled, swaggered, hopped, according to the personaskein each had chosen. Every near-variant of humanity was represented. Pointed ears quivered; teeth glinted; fur grew luxuriantly in gardens of human flesh. Glittering skeins clung to the base of each skull. No other adornment was permitted on the Level, no garment that might conceal a weapon. In appearance the beasters ranged from the wholly human to those who had so modified their bodies that they seemed ugly caricatures of the creatures they pretended to be.
A small herd of wildebeests surrounded a clear space along the scarred metal of a bulkhead. A slender young woman leaned there, her pale body shivering in fear and anticipation. The bull, massive, shaggy, approached. Cayten felt no sexual intrigue; she did not find herself imagining what the woman might soon feel. Instead, a thread of hunger trickled through her mind. What, she wondered, would the woman's delicate flesh taste of? She shuddered.
Several of the bachelor bulls sensed Cayten's attention and whirled, snorting, to fix red truculent eyes on her. She drifted away.
She watched the passing faces with sidelong glances, fascinated by the animal lusts and fears and cravings, modeled so oddly in human bone and skin. That heavy-limbed, paunchy man, with the carefully coiffed mane of blue hair — what had moved him to abandon his executive desk for the uncertainties of the Beaster Level, to hunt with the dancing, weaving gait of a weasel? And what of his companion? She was skillfully painted with fashionable body toners, she wore her thick orange hair in a love knot, and her sharp little fingernails were buffed to crimson perfection. Cayten might have guessed her to be a confidential secretary or perhaps an expensive concubine. She also wore the weasel persona, and watched the other beasters with luminous eyes.