Beastchild

but the spacers fought that for a good many years. They guarded their own power."
        "And they were cold," Hulann said sickly. "Showed very few emotions, never laughed…"
        "Was bred out of them. The less emotional they were, the better job they could be counted on to perform."
        "The war-" Hulann said.
        When he did not finish, Leo said: "Yeah?"
        "We thought the spacers… We never considered that they might not be typical of your race. We met hundreds. Thousands of them. They were all alike. We could not know."
        "What are you saying?" Leo asked curiously.
        "The war was a mistake. We were fighting Hunters. Your spacers are the equivalent of our Hunters. And we destroyed all of you because we thought your Hunters- your spacers were typical of all of you…"
        Master Hunter Peneton sat in the control chair of the Shaper, three hundred and sixty-one electrodes attached to his body, snaking away from every part of him, disappearing into the vast machinery of the micro-surgical machine. His fingers danced across three hundred and sixty-one controls on the board before him.
        He shaped.
        He changed.
        In the steamy, sealed plastiglass module beyond the foot-thick quartz wall, a tiny foetus was buoyed on a cushion of forces that would be forever beyond his understanding, even when he was grown into a full creature. For this foetus was destined only to be a Hunter. Not a Master Hunter.
        That was something else again. There was a special program of genetic juggling, a program of the highest complexities, to be used in the creation of Master Hunters. It was used only once every Century. There were never more than five Master Hunters at any one moment.
        Peneton was a Master Hunter.
        He shaped.
        He changed…
        In a storage tank in Atlanta: rats…
        In the morning light, the Great Lakes conversion crater's light looked more yellow than green. Along the southeast rim, the first team of naoli anti-bacterial warfare technicians deployed their equipment and began to introduce the proper anti-toxin to eliminate the hungry, microbes. By nightfall, the warmth and the heat arid the lovely emerald radiance of conversion would be gone…

Chapter Fourteen
        
        Ahead was only desert, a vast stretch of yellow-white sand broken through with patches of redder dirt. Now and then, a volcanic plug arose to break the monotony, great columns of stone, freaks of the land-forming process. There was a sparse scattering of vegetation, none of it particularly healthy looking. It was not a place to be. Hulann stopped the shuttle on the crest of the ridge, looked down the highway that crossed the endless spanse of desolation.
        "It'll make good beater surface for the shuttle, even if we get off the road," Leo said.
        Hulann said nothing, merely stared ahead at what they must cover. The last eight hours had brought a lot of soul-searching. He had turned the facts over and over in his mind, and still he did not cease to be amazed, intrigued, and horrified by them. The awful, bloody war, had been totally unnecessary. But who would have guessed any race would have been breeding spacemen like naoli bred Hunters? Did this lessen the naoli guilt? Did this make their acts of genocide somehow more justified-or, at least, reasonable? Could they be held responsible for such a whim of Fate? Surely not. Yet…
        Even if one considered "the trick of Fate, the war did not become acceptable. Instead, it became morbidly amusing. Two giant races, both able to travel between stars with relative ease, waging total, blows-to-the-end combat over a simple misunderstanding. The entire affair became a cosmic comedy. And such awe-inspiring death counts should never be fodder for humor.
        "What are you thinking?" the boy asked.
        Hulann turned from the desert and looked at the human. So much had transpired between their races- with so little meaning. He looked back out the windscreen; it was easier to meet the glare of the desert than the soft, patient eyes of the child.
        "We should tell them," Hulann said.
        "'Your people?"
        "Yes. They should know about this. It changes everything so much. They wouldn't kill you once they knew. And they wouldn't wash and restructure me or hang me or whatever. They couldn't. Oh, some of them will want to. But the evidence does not permit it. If any humans