Beastchild

other things danced delightfully beneath them; -a flock of dark birds, moving by the mountain, flying level with them, knifing the storm with soft feathers; -his and Leo's breath fogging the glass so that the boy had to reach out a hand and clear the port…
        Hulann's tail snapped, then wound around his left thigh, tight.
        "What's the matter?" the boy asked.
        "Nothing."
        "You look upset."
        Hulann grimaced, his reptilian features taking on a pained look. "We're awfully high," he said in a thin voice.
        "High? But it's only a hundred feet down!"
        Hulann looked mournfully at the cable sliding past above them. "A hundred feet is enough if that should break."
        "You've been in a shuttlecraft without even a cable."
        "The highest they go is fifteen feet."
        "Your starships, then. You can't get any higher than that."
        "And you can't fall, either. There's no gravity out there."
        Leo was laughing now, bending over the waist-high safety bar and giggling deep down in his throat. When he looked up again, his small face was red, and his eyes were watery. "This is something else!" he said. "You're afraid of heights. Naoli aren't supposed to be afraid of anything. Do you know that? Naoli are vicious fighters, hard, ruthless opponents. Nowhere does it say they are permitted to fear anything."
        "Well-" Hulann said weakly.
        "We're almost there," Leo said. "Just steel yourself for another minute or two, and it'll all be over."
        Indeed, the bulk of the receiving station loomed out of the storm ahead. It was a gaily painted Swiss-styled header with a scalloped shelter roof over the entrance trough and large windows divided into dozens of small panes by criss-crossing spines of polished pine. As they glided up the cable, it seemed as if the header was moving to meet them, as if they were the stationary object.
        A dozen feet from the header station, the yellow bee jolted, leaped up and down on its connections, bouncing the two occupants severely. There was a crunching sound, much like that the ice had been making on the last few hundred feet of unbroken trail-though this noise was nastier and somehow frightening. The car seemed to stop, then lurch ahead. Then, very definitely, it slipped back. There was a second jolt, worse than the first, which knocked Hulann's feet out from under him and made him fall in against the wall and the safety bar to which he still clung.
        "What is it?" he asked the boy.
        "I don't know."
        The car tried to move ahead toward the looming header station, thumped again, slipped back, began swaying wildly. It was a combination of ferris wheel, roller coaster, out-of-control shuttlecraft, a dizzying, horrifying explosion of movement, sound and swirling light. Hulann felt his second stomach reject its refined contents, tasted the product of his first stomach in his throat. It required all the effort he could muster to avoid vomiting.
        Leo lost his hold on the safety bar, went rolling across the front of the cabin, slammed hard against the far wall. Hulann thought he heard the boy squeal in pain, but the rattling of the bee and the singing of the tortured cable drowned it out.
        The car moved forward again, leaped again, was tossed backwards a few feet on the cable.
        The cabin swung like a pendulum. Leo rolled away, arms and legs akimbo, came up sharply against the edge of the guidance console, only a few feet from Hulann.
        The alien could see the bright blood trickling from the broken corner of the boy's mouth. Leo reached for something which might give him a handhold, scrabbled ungloved fingers over smooth, cold metal. The car swung violently, ripping him back across the bottom of the bee.
        The arcs of the pendulum were high and distant now, the swings so long and wild that they made Hulann feel giddy like a child on an amusement ride. But he was not amused.
        Leo pulled himself into a tight ball to protect his more vulnerable regions, rebounded from the far wall without much damage, bounced back and came up against the housing of the guidance system again. There was a bruise along his left jaw, already brown-blue and growing darker.
        Hulann held to the safety railing with one hand, reached out and clutched the boy's coat with the other, slid his six claws into the layers of fabric to hook it securely. The cabin tilted