Unnatural Creatures

“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.

By now the horse would have escaped. But he now knew its size, and he knew there were horses in the area. To business, then…

Svetz took the anesthetic rifle from where it was clamped to the wall. He loaded it with what he guessed was the right size of soluble crystalline anesthetic needle. The box held several different sizes, the smallest of which would knock a shrew harmlessly unconscious, the largest of which would do the same for an elephant. He slung the rifle and stood up.

The world turned grey. Svetz caught a wall clamp to stop himself from falling.

The cage had stopped moving twenty minutes ago. He shouldn’t still be dizzy! —But it had been a long trip. Never before had the Institute for Temporal Research pushed a cage beyond zero PA. A long trip and a strange one, with gravity pulling Svetz’s mass uniformly toward Svetz’s navel…

When his head cleared, he turned to where other equipment was clamped to a wall. The flight stick was a lift field generator and power source built into five feet of pole, with a control ring at one end, a brush discharge at the other, and a bucket seat and seat belt in the middle. Compact even for Svetz’s age, the flight stick was a spin-off from the spaceflight industries.

But it still weighed thirty pounds with the motor off. Getting it out of the clamps took all his strength. Svetz felt queasy, very queasy.

He bent to pick up the flight stick, and abruptly realized that he was about to faint.

He hit the door button and fainted.

“We don’t know where on Earth you’ll wind up,” Ra Chen had told him. Ra Chen was the Director of the Institute for Temporal Research, a large round man with gross, exaggerated features and a permanent air of disapproval. “That’s because we can’t focus on a particular time of day—or on a particular year, for that matter. You won’t appear underground or inside anything because of energy considerations. If you come out a thousand feet in the air, the cage won’t fall; it’ll settle slowly, using up energy with a profligate disregard for our budget….”