Hyena Eyes

He reached up, probed carefully at the back of his neck, and Cayten stiffened. "No," she said. "Please don't. That's not the thing to do, Genoaro."

He looked at her, expressionless, for a long moment. "How do you know?"

"Genoaro...." Her voice trailed away under the flat stare he gave her.

He reached into a cupboard, took down a small platinum case. He opened it, removed a small ovoid of plastic and metal. He held it up between thumb and forefinger, showing it to her. "Why shouldn't I?" His eyes seemed to belong to an unpleasant stranger.

She looked away. "I don't think it's good for you. The Level."

"You're not my crechemother, Cayten." His voice, ordinarily so soft, grated. She winced.

"No, no, I'm not. But I do love you."

He was very still, as if caught on the sharp edge of a decision, balanced just for the moment. He moved suddenly, closing the cupboard and shutting down his furnaces. Then he reached back and snapped the personaskein into the receptacle at the base of his skull.

He changed, as the persona spread out into his cortex. His face hardened; his mouth stretched in a wide, humorless grin; his eyes took on a yellow opacity. He took a step toward her, an abrupt, alien movement. "I'm going up," he growled. He showed his teeth, his lips wrinkling back in a frightening inhuman gesture.

She stepped to block the door, and held up her hands pleadingly. "I know you're still there, Genoaro. I know you're not a real hyena. Thendard's told me how it is, so don't pretend you can't understand me."

He moved so quickly.

She was too surprised to dodge. He knocked her aside, and his sharp nails slashed open her cheek.

Then he was gone, and she had found herself sitting on the floor, bleeding.

CAYTEN WALKED along the wall where Thendard kept his memorabilia — the charming detritus of a long and experimental life. Thendard kept pace with her, riding his powerchair a step behind.

She paused before a cluster of wall-mounted holostills, which showed Thendard roaming the Level in his favored persona.

"You make a lovely elephant, Thendard." She peered at one window, in which a naked Thendard mounted another beaster, a gigantic woman wearing the swirling shoulder tattoos of a Retrantic enforcer. Cayten wondered if such sexual congress was even possible, considering the immensity of the participants. Perhaps Thendard had additional bodymods, she thought, peering closer; but the constricted angle from which she could view the image preserved his modesty. The two of them wore identical wish-you-were-here smiles. "How...?"

A good-natured leer earthquaked across Thendard's face. "I'd show you, but you're far too insubstantial, a wisp of a woman, a sprite."

She ignored him, and leaned over a case of antique skinmasks. Thendard had once been an actor, and his collection of theatrical artifacts was very fine. But she wasn't seeing the gleaming contours of the masks; she was seeing Genoaro, curved over the back of some thick-bodied hyena bitch, taut as a bowstring, snarling joyfully.

"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'?"