Beastchild Read Free

delight to go away with her, into the warren of his own house back on the home world, and fuse for sixteen days, living off the fat of their bodies and the ceremonial waters they would take with them.
        He could envision her in ecstasy.
        And when she came out of the warren, she would have the gaunt, fleshless look of a desirable woman who has mated for a standard fusing period.
        She would be gorgeous in the aura of her femininity.
        But Fiala was not concerned with the things in his reproductive pouch. Indeed, he often wondered if she had a sex drive. Perhaps she was not a male or a female at all. Perhaps she was a third sex: an archaeologist.
        He continued along the diggings until he reached the end, walked a hundred yards through a narrow street where the substantially damaged buildings still stood. He had saved the best spot for himself. Others might consider that reprehensible, but he viewed it as a simple perogative of his position.
        He went through the doorway of a large, marble and concrete structure. The door had been of glass, shattered during the final battles. Inside, he crossed the littered floor and went down the dark stairs, feeling a delicious thrill at entering the catacombs of the mysterious creatures whose planet this had once been. At the bottom of the steps, he flicked on the lights he had rigged three days ago.
        Light sprung up for a great distance. Today, he would extend the bulbs another few blocks. The cellars and the sub-cellars of this entire section of the city had been connected and turned into a repository for what the human's considered precious. Hulann meant to open all of it and see everything first-hand before pulling the other members of the team from their present tasks to sift through what he had found.
        He walked to the end of the lights and took his camera and recorder off his shoulders, piled them next to the cases of tools left since yesterday. Taking a handlamp, he went to the wall of rubble, where a ceiling had partially caved in. There was a gap between the ruins and the walls that he just might be able to push through to reach the cellars beyond and string his lights.
        He clambered up the stones, sliding back a bit for, every piece of progress he made. Dust rose around him.
        At the top, he stretched on his belly and went through the gap into darkness. He turned up the power of his lamp and illuminated most of the chamber in which he found himself. The place was a library of sorts, full of booktapes. For the humans to have buried it this deep must mean that the tomes here contained were considered by them as most valuable.
        He advanced to a rack of spools and began to read the titles. He did, not recognize most of them. What ones he knew were fiction. This, of course, was quite a surprise. The humans he had met-that his race had met-in the stars some hundred and seventy years ago had not been the type to enjoy fiction. They had been cold, precise men with little time to smile and only a slight imagination.
        Yet here, apparently, was a room full of novels.
        And they had thought highly enough of them to bury them against destruction.
        He was still fumbling through the racks, amazed, when the light, airy voice called to him in pure, unaccented Terran: "Above you! A rat!"
        He whirled, looked up.
        The rat hung almost upside down from a beam. It's red eyes glared with reflected light.
        Foolishly, he had come without a weapon.
        He held the beam of the handlamp on it, paralyzing it, blinding it. He could see it plainly, and he was not happy with what he could see. It weighed a good twenty pounds; it had the wide mouth of a mutant, and the extra long teeth. He could hear them gnashing. Its claws, now hooked around the overhead beam, were more wicked than those of a normal rat It was ironic that one of the naoli's own weapons might kill a naoli. Ironic,