Hyena Eyes

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.

Many of the beasters had so modified their bodies that it was the remnant of humanity that seemed out of place. On the far side of the open space, Cayten observed a pack of wolfheads lounging against the bulkhead: a dozen or so men and women with wide yellow eyes, facial hair in grizzled tufts, and furry bodies as hard and narrow as slats.

One woman detached herself from the pack and came toward them. "Look," she said, baring hypertrophied canines. "A carrion dog. And a big bull." She laughed, and Cayten felt a flush of anger — too intense. She snarled, made a little darting movement toward the wolfhead, then veered back to Thendard's side. Her jaws ached to close on the wolfhead's throat, and it was so bizarre an emotion that she felt faint.

Thendard rumbled a warning at the wolfhead, who stepped back. Then she laughed again. "Will you breed with the elephant?"

"Pay no attention," Thendard told Cayten. "The wolves hold everyone in contempt; it's their nature. But they have no particular courage."

They moved on through the Level, and Thendard explained. "She wouldn't have dared to speak, had she been alone. The wolves need each other to feel real. Besides, there's no real antipathy between wolves and hyenas. They derive from completely different habitats. It's not like the leopards and the hyenas, who truly despise one another. Or the hyenas and lions, who've shared the same hunting grounds for eons. Should we meet a leopard — or worse, a pride of lions, stay very close to me, Cayten, even though there's probably no great danger. This is a safe sector, well-monitored. Only a mad person would seriously attempt to injure you here; the deckhead crawls with lawmechs."

Thendard pointed up, and Cayten saw a lawmech clinging to the rough steel of the ceiling like a black metal insect, its scanners rotating, its stunners deployed in all directions. "I see," she said. "But what if we can't find Genoaro in the safe sectors? What if he's in the tween corridors, or even the Dark Level?"

Thendard frowned. "No, he's not that far gone, Cayten. And if he were, all you could do would be to go home and change the locks. He wouldn't be Genoaro anymore. What you feel now is just a pale, clean shadow of what the creatures on the Dark feel. You're still a woman now, 95 percent human. You still think like a human being; your perceptions are only lightly filtered through the hyena persona. If we went a little way into the tween corridors and came across a corpse a couple days' ripe, you still wouldn't be able to ignore the maggots. You'd have to crank up the skein a good bit before you'd really enjoy a meal like that."

She felt an unpleasant disorientation when she realized she was not quite as repulsed by the idea of eating carrion as she had been after she had learned what Genoaro was doing. "Thendard," she said in a weak voice. "Shut up, please. Help me look, but shut up."