Hyena Eyes

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.