Fear that man

concerning death and my new perception of it. I told him trauma was a terribly inadequate word and went off to dance with a particularly lovely young woman.
        Now, even years after that, I was experiencing fear much the same as the fear that day so long ago when I was five and my mother was three days dead. It was the fear of death, stinking, oppressive, and omnipresent. I am always afraid at the beginning of a hunt. It made no difference, this day, that I had gone on two hundred and fifteen others; it was this one that was immediate and frightening. If I was killed in these jungles, Eternity Combine could never reach me in time to restore me to life. If I died here, I stayed dead. Forever is a long, long time.
        Why the risk? It does seem strange that, in a galaxy so diversified, so full of things to do and ways to earn a living, anyone would chose something as dangerous as Beast hunting. But there are always reasons. Man, a part of nature, is never totally illogical. He can generally come up with reasons for his actions. Sometimes, of course, the reasons may give rise to questions… Anyway, Crazy had a good reason for coming on this hunt: this Beast had killed his only brother, who had been on the last team that had gone after it. Crazy wanted revenge. No Hamlet, but every bit as determined. Lotus came because she can’t leave us if she knows we’re endangering ourselves. She would go insane waiting for us, so she comes along. Me? Money, in part. There was an enormous bounty on this Beast, and I was determined it would be one-third mine. Besides, I was born on Earth and the faults of the place partially warped me. I like to kill. Not anything but Beasts, you understand. I could never bring myself to murder another human being. But Beasts… Well, Beasts are different…
        I loaded the last of the cameras into the floater, looked around for the others. “Lotus! Crazy! Let’s get a move on!”
        “All right, all right,” Crazy said, stomping down the steps to the outside entrance of the guest house. We were staying on Congressman Horner’s Earth ranch under the supervision of his aide, Sam Penuel, an altogether strange man, until the completion of the job. Horse, being as he weighed three hundred pounds plus fifty and was blessed with hooves, did not use the highly polished, slippery indoor steps of glittering plastiglass. Oh, his full name was Crazy Horse. No it wasn’t, either. Jackson Lincoln Puicca was his given name-after the famous general, the famous president and humanitarian, and the famous scientist. But we called him Crazy Horse-mostly because he was crazy-and because he sure did look like a horse.
        Crazy was a natural mutant, not a product of the Artificial Wombs. One day there had been a nuclear war spreading through the civilized galaxy. Several generations later, there was Crazy-muscular, bright, shaggy-headed, and horse-behinded. Not a Beast, mind you; a valuable man on a bounty hunt.
        “Where’s Lotus?” I asked.
        “Out picking berries somewhere. You know her.”
        “You know what about her?” Lotus asked as she drifted over a nearby corral fence, her blue-fog wings fluttering gently as she glided on the breezes. “What would you say of me behind my back, Crazy?”
        Crazy Horse stomped his hooves, folded his hands in supplication. “What could I say behind your back, pretty one, when you are possessed of such marvelous ears?”
        Lotus settled on the ground next to me. She fingered the delicate, elongated shells that were her elfin ears, looked at Crazy. “Yours are bigger. I don’t think I should make nasty remarks about another person’s ears if mine were distended bladders like yours.”
        Crazy snorted, shook his huge head so that his wild mane of hair flopped, fluffed, and covered his baggy ears.
        Satisfied, Lotus said, “I’m on time, I trust.”
        “Trouble is,” I said, putting an arm around her tiny waist (twenty inches) and looking down on her small form (four feet eleven), “is that you know damned well we’d wait for you all day and not be angry.”
        “That’s cause I’m the prettiest girl around,” she snapped, her green-blue eyes adance.
        “Not much competition on an all-male ranch,” Crazy muttered.
        “And you, Crazy, are the handsomest horse I’ve seen here.” She smiled, and she said it so that he didn’t know whether to be mad or to laugh. So he laughed.
        That was