Starblood

readable. Then Taguster sighed, dropped the pencil. It made an eerily loud sound as it clattered on the slate floor.
    "Lenny!"
    Timothy seemed to remember having heard the name before, though he could not place the source. However, he felt justified in slipping out of the set now to call the police. But as he was loosening himself from the brain blank, someone screamed.
    It was a woman; it came high and piercing, bursting out full strength and turning into a gurgle, trailing away in seconds. It had come from the bedroom, and Ti tensed his mind and shifted into the bedroom receiver extension.
    It
was
a woman. She had been trying to get out of the window, but her flimsy nightdress had caught on the latch, delaying her one moment too long. There were three darts in her back. Blood dripped off the frilly lace and onto the floor.
    Ti had been working under the assumption that the killer had left Now he shifted the camera to the left and saw the murderer.
    A Hound floated toward the doorway, twin servo-hands flying ahead of it, fingers seemingly tensed as if to strangle someone. The dart tube on the burnished belly of the spherical machine protruded, ready. Here was the killer: thirty-odd pounds of ball-shaped computer that could track with seven sensory systems.
    And only the police should have one.
    But why should the police want Taguster dead… and why should they choose such an easily traced means of obtaining his destruction?
    The Hound disappeared through the doorway, suddenly reminding Ti that Taguster was back there in the living-room, half dead. The Hound was returning to check on its work. Ti shifted his consciousness into the main receiver again.
    Taguster was in the same position, still gurgling. When the mechanical killer entered the room, the dying man saw it.
    Ti found a curio, a small brass peasant leading a brass mule, a handcrafted trinket Taguster had brought back from a trip to Mexico. Lifting with his psionic power, he threw it at the Hound with all the force he could muster. The toy bounced off the dully gleaming hide and fell harmlessly to the floor.
    The Hound drifted toward Taguster, firing tube open.
    Timothy found an ashtray, tried to lift it but could not manage. He cursed the limitations of his power. Then he remembered the gun on the desktop, lying opposite the pencils, heavy and ugly. He touched the pistol psionically, but could not budge it. He pressed harder, eventually moved it slightly until the barrel pointed directly at the Hound. Pulling the light wire of the trigger was easy enough. The gun spat a narcodart that bounced off the beast with no effect other than to elicit a scanning by its sight receptors.
    Then the Hound shot Taguster. Four times in the chest.
    Timothy felt as if all his energy had been sucked out of him by an electronic vampire. He wanted only to fold up, shrivel in upon himself, and slide home into his temporal shell where, at least, he could gain succor from his books, his films, his house. But he could not let the Hound escape. He sent the cameras swiveling in search of articles small enough for his talent to handle. He found a number of trinkets and figurines and rained these uselessly upon the machine.
    The Hound surveyed the chamber, perplexed, firing darts in the direction of the hurled souvenirs, unable to discover its assailant Then it turned a spatter of darts on the receiver head and floated out of the room, out of the house and away…

CHAPTER 2
    For a time, Ti remained in the living-room staring at Taguster's corpse. He felt too emotionally weakened to move elsewhere. Memories flipped past his mind like a parade of lizards, tail flicking after tail, cold claws sunk into his brain. With each came more realization that there would be no more experiences with Taguster, no more conversations to be stored for later retrieval and reflection. What he remembered now was all that he would ever have. When a friend dies, it is much like a candle flame being snuffed—the warmth and brightness gone, leaving a vague recollection of what it had once been like.
    He broke from Taguster's receiver and allowed his mind to flow into the Mindlink beam, through the penumbra landscape, back into his own body. He sat for a moment, regaining lost energies, and slowly became aware of the tears welling out of his eye and running down his pallid, clammy skin. He was not crying so much for Taguster as for himself—for the one thing he feared more than all else was loneliness.