Beastchild

could follow those to search for the Haven. Leo would be safe. He could grow, become a man, have his own brood in his own way. And would not the boy's brood have, as part of its cultural and historical heritage, the history of Hulann the naoli? That thought gave wings to his mind and made him feel even more free and happy with life. He turned to Leo, wanting to lift the boy and dance with him as he might have with one of his own lizardy children, and he felt the first bullet sink deep into his side, ripping through vital things and bringing with it a horrible, final darkness…

Chapter Eighteen
        
        At first the blackness had seemed like the plunge into sleep. But it was very much different, for he became aware of the blackness and was able to speculate on it. In sleep, such speculation would have been impossible for the naoli mind. In time, the blackness began to phase into gray, then soft blue. In the azure expanse that stretched to all sides, there was a gentle white radiance directly before him, pulsating much as the heart does within the chest…
        Death: Hello, Hulann.
        Spirit: What is this place?
        Death: This is The Changeover. You have been here before, of course. You do not remember, because memory is not the way of Changeover.
        Spirit: Where do I go from here?
        Death: A brood hole. Back into your own family.
        Spirit: Which I have disgraced.
        Death: Which you have honored. You will be raised, in your new husk, to revere the memory of Hulann.
        Spirit: But I left life a failure. I did not achieve the whole purpose.
        Death: The humans who shot you were from Haven. They thought you molested the boy, though they soon learned their error. They took you to their fortress for surgery. But they knew little of naoli anatomy. They failed to keep you alive. But they will find a means for bringing the truth to the occupying naoli. The war will end soon, before the human race is destroyed.
        Spirit: That's very good news. (He ponders the specter of Death a moment, somehow little interested in the past life now that he has been told the result of his role in it.) You are death?
        Death: I am.
        Spirit: And I am to be born again?
        Death: You are.
        Spirit: Then you are not permanent.
        Death: No. Your race long ago programmed me not to be. I operate on the proper laws, recalling your souls at their departure from your temporal husks and remaking you within a new husk. I have all the facilities for that sort of thing.
        Spirit: You are a machine!
        Death: Yes.
        Spirit: The humans…?
        Death: I know not of their Death; they are of a wholly different cloth. Though I believe they have not thought of the concept of "abstract mechanism." Sadly, I believe their deaths are permanent. But if you thought the war against men a little justified learning that death was not permanent, you are wrong. Your race has forgotten its abstract mechanisms, forgotten my creation as a restorer of souls. And so it was meant to be-to keep the race at least a little humble. And to help purify the race morally. To that end, we must get on with your reincarnation. By practice, as programmed, I am to ask you what single thing or lesson you wish to remember from your previous life, what Truth.
        Spirit: (Hesitating.) The Hunter. Docanil. Whatever would a naoli like that want to remember? What would he have to save from his previous life?
        Death: Surely you jest. A Hunter has no soul.
        Spirit: (Pondering for a time.) Then that is what I will remember. I wish to carry into my new life the knowledge that a naoli Hunter has no soul.
        Death: It is an unusual request.
        Spirit: It is all I will accept; it is the only thing worth remembering.
        Death: So be it!
        There was an explosion of life into rebirth…
        The white-haired man stood in the nook of rock overlooking the blue-green sea that ruffled in toward him, far below and like a liquid dream. He watched the boy named Leo and several of the men from the Haven as they buried the alien body in a grave dug in the beach above the high tideline where the eroding waters could not reach it. In the gloominess, with the rain obscuring details, their electric headlamps looked startlingly like flickering votive candles. As the boy bent over the deep hole and threw the first sand onto the stiffened alien