Beastchild

form washed off the cleansing cream, dissipated it. Then the clear fluid began draining out of holes in the floor.
        He stood, waited until it was gone. His scales were already dry. He opened the door and went into the living room, gathered up his note tapes and stuffed them into the recorder case. He slung the recorder over one arm, the camera over the other, and set out for the diggings.
        The others were busy with their individual projects. They toiled through the half-demolished structures, prying with their tools, x-raying partitions and mounds of fallen stones and steel. They had been assigned the ruined sections of the city which the humans had destroyed with their own weapons trying to fend off the naoli forces. Hulann did not care that their site was a difficult one. If he had been assigned to the group tilling the un-destroyed sectors of the city, he would have been bored to tears. Naoli could cry. There was no adventure in gathering things that were sitting in the open. The pleasure came from unearthing a treasure, from the painstaking work of separating a find from the rubble around it.
        Hulann nodded to the others, stepped by Fiala, then turned to look at her collection of statsheets which she had uncovered only yesterday. They had been waterlogged but readable. She was translating.
        "Any luck?" he asked.
        "Nothing much that's new."
        She licked her lips with her tongue, then stuck more of it out and flicked at her chin. She was pretty. He did not understand how he had almost walked by without stopping.
        "Can't expect a treasure every day," he said.
        "But they have a mania for repetition. I've found that."
        "How so?"
        "Day after day, the same stories appear in the stat sheets. Oh, new ones come along. But once they printed a story, they didn't let up on it. Here. Look. For seven days in succession, this stat sheet gave frontpage coverage to the destruction of their Saturn moon bases and the pulling back of their defense ring."
        "It was a major story."
        "No story is that major. After two or three days, they were only repeating themselves."
        "Research it," he said. "It may prove interesting."
        She went back to her papers, forgetting his intrusion.
        He watched her a moment longer, reluctant to leave. More than any other female he had seen in the last two hundred years, she made him want to make a verbal commitment. It would be a delight to go away with her, into the warren of his own house back on the home world, and fuse for sixteen days, living off the fat of their bodies and the ceremonial waters they would take with them.
        He could envision her in ecstasy.
        And when she came out of the warren, she would have the gaunt, fleshless look of a desirable woman who has mated for a standard fusing period.
        She would be gorgeous in the aura of her femininity.
        But Fiala was not concerned with the things in his reproductive pouch. Indeed, he often wondered if she had a sex drive. Perhaps she was not a male or a female at all. Perhaps she was a third sex: an archaeologist.
        He continued along the diggings until he reached the end, walked a hundred yards through a narrow street where the substantially damaged buildings still stood. He had saved the best spot for himself. Others might consider that reprehensible, but he viewed it as a simple perogative of his position.
        He went through the doorway of a large, marble and concrete structure. The door had been of glass, shattered during the final battles. Inside, he crossed the littered floor and went down the dark stairs, feeling a delicious thrill at entering the catacombs of the mysterious creatures whose planet this had once been. At the bottom of the steps, he flicked on the lights he had rigged three days ago.
        Light sprung up for a great distance. Today, he would extend the bulbs another few blocks. The cellars and the sub-cellars of this entire section of the city had been connected and turned into a repository for what the human's considered precious. Hulann meant to open all of it and see everything first-hand before pulling the other members of the team from their present tasks to sift through what he had found.
        He walked to the end of the lights and took his camera and recorder off his shoulders, piled them next to the cases of tools left since yesterday. Taking a handlamp, he