Beastchild

said.
        "This is true."
        Docanil left the room, went into the corridor where Banalog waited. He glanced at the traumatist as he went by, as if he did not know him and was only mildly curious. Banalog rose and followed him to the end of the hall, through a plasti-glass door into the frigid morning air. A copter was waiting, a large one with living quarters and enough supplies to last the two of them as long as the hunt required.
        "You found them?" he asked Docanil when they were seated in the cockpit of the craft.
        "More or less."
        "Where are they?"
        "West."
        "That's all you know?"
        "Not quite."
        "What else?"
        Docanil looked at the traumatist with interest. The glance made the other naoli cringe and draw away, tight against the door of the cabin.
        "I was just curious," Banalog explained.
        "Fight your curiosity. The rest is for me to know. It can mean nothing to you."
        He started the copter and lifted it out of the ruins of Boston, into the wind and snow and bleak winter sky…

Chapter Ten
        
        POINT:
        In the Nucio system, on the fourth planet circling the giant sun (the place once called Data but now called nothing at all) it was early evening. A brief but intense rain had just fallen, and the air was saturated with a fine, blue mist that settled ever so slowly on the glossy leaves of the thick forests. There were no animal sounds anywhere. Occasionally, there was a soft ululation-but that was not the cry of a beast.
        Near the calm sea, where there had once been beasts, the jungle labored to turn a tangle of steel beams into dust. The metal was already eaten through in many places…
        A hundred feet beyond this, closer to the water's edge, a walking vine snaked a healthy green tentacle through the empty, yellow eye' socket of a long, gleaming naoli skull…

Chapter Eleven
        
        COUNTERPOINT:
        In the city of Atlanta it was noon. It was a bright day, though a cloud or two drifted across the sun. In the foundry yard on the west end of town, everything was still-except for the rats scrambling about the interior of a huge storage tank at the yard's end. There were about a dozen of them, chittering and hissing at one another. This had once been the tank that temporarily housed Sara Laramie. The rats feasted…

Chapter Twelve
        
        As they neared the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Hunter Docanil prepared to initiate as careful a search as possible of the oncoming terrain. He withdrew the sensory patch-ins from their slots on the console. The patches were little metal tabs whose undersides were studded with a dozen half-inch needles of the finest copper alloy, honed and sharpened to a rigid specification. There were six of them, and Docanil pressed each of them into a different set of nerve clusters on his body, having to roll back his sleeves in the process; his trousers were equipped with zippers along the legs to open them for the same purpose. When he was patched into the exterior sensory amplifiers on the copter's hide, he settled back in his chair, six wire snakes winding from him to the console, making him look like some automaton or some part of the machine and not a living creature in his own right.
        Banalog watched, fascinated and horrified. What fascinated him would fascinate anyone watching a Hunter at work for the first time. What horrified him was the ease with which the creature became a part of a machine. He seemed to suffer no psychological shock in the process. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy linking to the copter and its electronic ears and eyes and nose. The mechanical devices amplified not only his perceptions, but his stature, his very being-until now he was as some mytho-poetic creature from legends.
        Docanil had closed his eyes, for he did not need them now. The exterior cameras fed sight data directly to his brain-that super brain that could interpret all sensations much more thoroughly and readily than the average organic mound of gray tissue.
        The copter swept up the mountainside, following the road that its radar gear said existed beneath the billowing, undulating dunes of snow.
        Banalog had never seen so much snow in his life. It had begun snowing steadily only yesterday afternoon, and in one day had put down almost a foot. The occupation force meteorologists said the end was not in sight. It