Fear that man

right with a thousand copies of myself, a shabby army in the corridors of eternity.
        My arm had become a flaming tree, its roots grown deep into my chest, constricting my lungs. Panting, I moved on through the winding glass hallways, sane enough to know who I was and that I must get out, but just delirious enough not to think of turning back and retracing my steps. In this manner, I came across the Beast in its lair. The Beast.
        The tunnel ended in a room where grasses had been dragged in, where bits of rotting flesh from past meals littered the floor grotesquely. There was a natural stairway, uneven, sharply edged, but usable, breaking one wall. It led to the ceiling where a half-moon aperture offered escape to the crater floor overhead. I felt like a man trapped beneath an ice-covered river who finally sees a thin patch overhead. But lying between that escape route and me was the Beast. And, though dying, it was not yet dead.
        I stopped, swayed crazily. For a moment, I thought I would fall over onto the mutant and lay immovable while he mauled me. With a great deal of effort, I forced away an almost imperceptible fraction of the fogginess, just enough to keep tenuous control of my body. The Beast watched me from where it lay, its massive head raised from the floor, its single red eye a hideous lantern, bright even in this sparkling room of fantasy walls. It grunted, tried to move, howled. Its leg was a mess. That was the work of my vibra-pistol. It shoved its other leg under itself, pulled to a sitting position, all its weight on the good arm and good leg. It snarled. I saw that, even in its weakness, the Beast was going to attempt to leap.
        I looked about for a chunk of loose glass, found one the size of my fist. I bent, growing dangerously dizzy with the effort, picked it up, weighed it in my palm. I brought my healthy arm back, heaved the glass at the Beast’s head. It struck its chest instead, knocking it onto its behind. The Beast struggled to a sitting position while I searched for another chunk of glass: the battle of the invalids, nonetheless deadly for its absurdity.
        The walls shone, seemed to quickly approach and recede when I moved too much…
        I found a sharp-edged piece, brought it back to throw.
        And the Beast spoke. “Make Caesar shut up!” it said. “Make him shut up!”
        I almost dropped the rock. The walls wiggled crazily. The Beast kept repeating the blasphemy over and over. Then it leaped.
        The force of its impact was not as great as it would have been had the Beast been able to use both feet to propel itself. Still, it bowled me over, raked claws down the side of my face as we rolled. I kicked free, rolled across the floor to the far wall. Above was the exit.
        “Andy!” Lotus and Crazy appeared at the entrance to the room. It had been they, not the spider’s mate, who had been scrambling down that inclined tunnel!
        “Make Caesar shut up!” the Beast recited. “Make him shut up!”
        The two of them froze. Crazy had his gun drawn and was about to fire. Now he left the weapon dangling from his fingers, unable to fire upon something that seemed human.
        “Kill it!” I shouted.
        “It’s intelligent,” Lotus said, rubbing her tiny hands together.
        “It is like hell!”
        “It’s more than an animal,” Crazy said, the gun useless in his hand.
        “It got that phrase from me!” I shouted hoarsely, and I suppose a little insanely. “I said that when I shot it in the woods. It must have been speaking then-something it picked up from a previous bounty hunter-and I thought it was intelligent. That’s why I couldn’t shoot it again. Man does not kill man. But this isn’t a man in any way! This is a myna bird!”
        “It got that phrase from me!” the Beast shouted, struggling across the floor toward me, throwing a few cautious glances behind it at Crazy and Lotus. But its old trick was working. It was immobilizing the enemy. Crazy and Lotus couldn’t wipe out all those centuries of pacifism against other humans in one short moment. It talked; that might make it human. And they could not shoot it. “It got that phrase from me!” it said again.
        “See!”
        “See!” it echoed.
        Lotus grabbed the gun from Crazy, aimed. But she could not fire. “Here, Andy!” And she tossed it over the Beast. It clattered against the wall five feet away. Wearily, I started