Beastchild

his arm, making it numb. The pipe fell out of his fingers, clattered on the floor.
        The noise made the rat leap aside and fall back. But now that the echo had died, it came at him once more.
        His hand was still too weak to grasp anything.
        The rat was close enough to leap. It had almost launched itself-when a chunk of concrete smashed into it, crushing its hindquarters. Another chunk rained down, missing it. A third connected. And a fourth. It stopped squirming then-absolutely dead.
        In his excitement, Hulann had all but forgotten the voice that had first called out a warning to him. The warning that had been in pure Terran.-Unaccented Terran. Massaging his numbed arm, he looked around until he saw the human.
        It was a young one, about eleven years old, crouched on a shelf of rubble to his left. It looked down on him with a curious expression, then eyed the rat.
        "Is it dead?"
        "Yes," Hulann said.
        "Are you all right?"
        "Yes."
        "It was a mutant."
        "I know. Yes. A mutant."
        The boy looked at the naoli, then back the way the alien had come. "You're alone?"
        Hulann nodded.
        "I guess you'll turn me over to the rest of them."
        Hulann's chest was afire. He was waging a constant battle between his mind and overmind, trying desperately to stifle at least a little of the fear his organic brain was feeding the higher levels of his thinking apparatus. He had seen humans before. But never when he was alone. And never when they would have so much to hate him for.
        "Will you turn me in?" the boy asked.
        Hulann was afraid. Desperately. Painfully. But there was something else stirring in him as well. It took some moments before he realized that this other thing was guilt.
        Though surely there must have been things the boy wished to say to Hulann (curses and damnations should fill at least an hour; a naoli rarely engaged in physical violence with one of his own kind, resorting to sustained verbal denunciations to work off accumulated frustrations), he merely sat upon the rubble, the concrete, wood and steel, the plastic and aluminum, watching the alien. He did not seem frightened nor particularly angry. Curious, more than anything else.
        It was quite an uncomfortable situation as far as Hulann was concerned. To be spat upon and reviled would have raised his own hatred. Hating the boy, he could have acted. But the lengthening silence was a wall he could not breach.
        Hulann went to the rat, kicked the chunks of stone away and looked at the corpse. He prodded it with a tentative foot. The fleshy body quivered with a post mortem muscle spasm and was still again. He walked back to the boy and looked up at him where he sat just slightly above eye level.
        The boy looked back, his head tilted to one side. He was, Hulann supposed, a pretty specimen by human standards. His head seemed somewhat too large, but its features were well placed for his species. He had a thick mass of golden hair. Hair alone astounded the scaled naoli; golden hair was nearly too much to comprehend. Blue eyes beneath yellow brows, a small nose, and thin lips. His smooth skin was dotted here and there with what the humans called "freckles" and strangely considered an attribute-but which the naoli chose to regard as imperfections in coloration and possibly the marks of disease (although they never had been able to study a freckled human at close quarters).
        "What are you doing here?" Hulann asked.
        The boy shrugged his shoulders.
        Hulann interpreted this as indecision, though he was not certain that some more subtle, complex answer was being given.
        "You must have some reason for being down here in the cellars!"
        "Hiding," the boy said simply.
        Hulann felt the guilt again. He was doubly frightened. To be in the presence of a human after all that had happened was terrifying enough. But he was also afraid of his own guilt-and his lack of concern for that guilt. A good naoli would immediately call for help on the Phasersystem, then turn himself into the traumatist and get himself sent home for therapy. Somehow, though, the guilt feeling seemed fitting. Deep in his overmind, he had a desire to know penance.
        He repeated the arguments fed to all the naoli by the Phasersystem during the psychological conditioning periods every morning. He attempted to