It used to live in Scotland, and it came across the ocean on a ship it took over by talking to the planks. We keep it under control. That’s why we’re here, on all sides. Bastardville stands guard over our Beast. The last time it got loose, it took over half the Rocky Mountains and created a whole army of pines before we got it back.
Billy Beecham is staring at me.
“What?” I ask.
“Are you trying to poach my Beast?” he says.
I have already discovered that I don’t like him. Forgive my momentary delusion. He belongs with his face in a tub of Peppy Ripple. He belongs here, in the mini-forest.
“It’s not your Beast,” I say. “It’s its own Beast. We just keep it boundaried.”
The Beast starts to walk. Billy Beecham sits down abruptly, his face drained of color. I see my Father peering out from behind a tree, the bag of fertilizer still in his hand. He’s grinning at me as the forest tilts and lifts us up. He gives me a thumbs-up. I’ve never seen fit to participate in this, but along with the neck-pinch skill, girls get some training early on in Beast Management. Maybe this is my calling. Maybe I’m a hunter. Maybe I’m a gatherer.
We’re on the move. I think about the houses on the eastern border of the Beast. This is a bad little forest. It moves around. Those houses just went back up again, but thankfully, they’re empty at present. The Beast tends to like to walk toward the sunrise. We’ve learned some things over the years. Mostly the Beast only moves a few feet, but today, it’s really shaking. The birds that have been hanging out in the Beast’s hair scream insulted screams and take off.
I can see a little bit, through the trees. We’re way above the streetlamps now, and the Beast is maybe twenty feet in the air, walking on its taproots.
Billy Beecham’s mouth is hanging open.
“You know what the Beast eats?” I ask him.
“I don’t,” Billy Beecham says. “Let me down.” After a moment of looking at me, he increases his pitch to the high whine of someone being picked up against his will. “LET ME DOWN.”
I feel a little bit of sympathy for him, but he is also the person who kissed me without an invitation. Collector. I don’t like being collected any more than the Beast does. Don’t come in here, thinking you can collect Bastardville’s Beast. Just be calm, go into the mini-forest, and let the Beast have a snack. You’d think people would learn.
Some people called us tree huggers here in Bastardville, back when we were Utopian. Some people called us weirdos, some people called us pagans, and we were those things too. We’re part 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 had gone deaf. He had heard no sound since the laughter of the horse. In the year 1100 PostAtomic, such silence could have been found nowhere on Earth. Listening, Svetz knew at last that he had reached the British Isles before the coming of civilization. He had traveled in time.
The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the traveling. It had its own air supply, and needed it while being pushed through time. But not here. Not before civilization’s dawn—not when the air had never been polluted by fission wastes and the combustion of coal, hydrocarbons, tobaccos, wood, et al.
Now, retreating in panic from that world of the past to the world of the extension cage, Svetz nonetheless left the door open behind him.
He felt better inside the cage. Outside was an unexplored planet, made dangerous by ignorance. Inside the cage it was no different from a training mission. Svetz had spent hundreds of hours in a detailed mockup of this cage, with a computer running the dials. There had even been artificial gravity to simulate the peculiar side effects of motion in time.