Андрэ Нортон: Beast Master's Circus

He'd trained many of the animals they had now. And unlike humans, the animals did not hate or fear him. This new one had been brought in after midnight. Cregar had dumped it in a sack by her tent and woken her to tend it. He'd been a little drunk and a lot angry. He muttered about stupid fools who couldn't obey a simple order. Then he'd snarled at her to do what she could, and stamped away. She'd lost the fight. She ignored him as he stood drinking. She had to take the samples of tissue Dedran had ordered. She took them gently, mourning over the body.

Cregar was often away, traveling ahead of the circus. When he met up with them again he often brought a new beast. Those he brought rarely survived their abduction and always it was her job to care for them, take samples when they died.

In her reading she'd come across word of beast masters. Those who had the gift of communication with animals. Terra had taken and trained the human halves of the teams, and had bred genetically altered beasts to match with the chosen humans.

Laris suspected Cregar might have been a beast master once. What had happened, she did not know. She knew only that now he seemed always to be in pain, not of body but of mind. Both she and her cat could sense it dimly whenever Cregar was around. She finished taking her samples and struggled to lift the beast. The circus had a simple method of disposal.

The ship's engines were typical of older freighters. They had no real speed but were far cheaper to run than the newer models. Ideal for a circus with its tons of litter each day. They would run on any form of matter fed to them. This carcass would become atoms just as soon as she reached the ship. Laris suspected that a few people had gone the same way. She was sure she would have been one had she failed to pass the tigerbat test and been killed.

Cregar walked away. She glared after him. If he must steal these beasts couldn't he at least see to it that his hirelings took more care? Bad enough being snatched from their human, to whom they were bonded deeply. But this one had been brutally struck about the head and would likely not have survived those injuries. Nor had it wished to. She'd felt its pain, the emptiness, and guessed Cregar's men had killed the human. She swore bitterly under her breath as she carried the body to the ship.

According to her reading the beast master teams were few and far between. Maybe fifty had been trained at first. Another dozen or so in training had broken free before the final Xik thrust which had left Terra a smoking cinder. Most of the trained teams had perished in the hard fighting shortly before that time. But even the partly trained teams were bonded. That intimate emotional and mental connection was set before the physical training began.

In fact, with the later teams the bond had been set far more deeply than with those first used. It was an experiment which, Laris felt, had been folly. The novice teams were bonded until death, but they lacked the military training which would help them resist Cregar's attack. Thus it was that Cregar targeted them, but also for that reason that he lost beast after beast to the trauma of its master's death.

She shivered as she placed the animal in the matter chamber and activated the turntable. Dedran was determined to have live beasts from such a team. They had proved over and over that they could not use beasts from the trainee teams. She was afraid she could guess where his eyes would turn next. But surely there were none left of the trained teams which had fought and mostly died for Terra.

Behind her Dedran spoke. "Prepare for departure, girl. I won't be needing you and the cat after all. Get the cages in. We up ship tonight."

"We have a show booked for tonight. They'll talk if we cancel." She paused then added, "Do we want talk and attention drawn to us?"

His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "True. All right. Start preparing after the show. We'll leave tomorrow morning as soon as we're packed up."

For a moment Laris wondered if this was the time to jump ship. But it wasn't a good planet on which to take that chance. Lereyne would be better. In her mind another's eyes opened and looked out on the bleak, chill landscape. Agreement came. There was always time to consider. But to act hastily could mean unnecessary suffering.

As she bustled about making ready for the show and then departure, Laris allowed that other to see through her eyes. Cregar didn't know how far they had come since Laris had found a tiny, shivering, starving cub three years gone on a world far off the beaten track. She'd taken the poor beast in, cared for him, loved him, and then found in him growing abilities which mixed strangely with the girl who loved him. Nowadays Prauo and Laris were useful to Dedran. The circus boss had many irons in the fire. They'd taken minute tissue samples from Prauo several times; Laris had been forced to permit that. But she smiled secretly on overhearing Dedran's rage.

"They can't produce anything. Damned beast we grow ends up mindless over and over. And it doesn't grow larger." He'd ranted on and Laris had slipped away in silence.

After that she'd carefully hidden other advances between herself and her friend. After his last growth spurt some eighteen months back Prauo had begun to be able to use her eyes. Not merely a bond, but a direct linkage. Shortly thereafter Laris had found she could do the same and see what the young cat saw. It had enabled them to please Dedran to a larger extent and he would suffer no interference by others in case his valuable asset was damaged beyond further use.

Laris did her show in the first half of the performance, a flamboyant turn on the trapeze with the carra. The act was half serious, half clowning, always skilled, and greeted as ever by loud laughter. Then she changed into a boy's costume and disguise to enter the tigerbat cage. Dedran had found four more of the creatures in the intervening years but her special friend was the oldest and largest of the tigerbats. He ruled the miniature swarm.

As part of her act they acted out a tiny play of a lad who found one of the creatures trapped and aided it. He was then rescued in turn when a swarm struck. Throughout her act there were gasps and cries from the audience. She finished, sent the tigerbats from the center cage, and turned to bow deeply. The applause was generous and Dedran nodded approvingly as he passed her. She'd been an excellent investment.

Laris watched as he ran lightly into the ring. She knew what he'd thought. She made sure he felt that way by keeping her head down, working hard, and being utterly discreet. What he did not know didn't hurt him. He did know of the small amount of quarter and half credits she had hidden in her cabin. Dedran would not have been pleased to learn that she had a far larger stack of credits saved about which he knew nothing. Enough to keep her and Prauo for many months at the subsistence level of most worlds should she decide to flee.

He'd have been still less pleased to know that she read as widely as she did. She regularly invested a credit here and there in unmonitored library access. Using her reading, overheard comments, newscasts, and the work Dedran sometimes required of Laris and her cat, she'd started to build a theory—that Dedran worked for the Thieves Guild. The war and destruction of two planets, the devastation of many others, had not been good for guild profits.

And even worse had been the patrol, a neutral force to monitor human-settled worlds and crewed often by ex-military and survey officers. It had been started soon after the human race had exploded outward. When war began it had been scaled back. In the three years since war's end though, it had grown again, and with such a reputation that even some worlds with races other than human asked for the patrol's intervention at times. As a result a trickle of people of other races were being accepted for patrol training. And the patrol did not like the Thieves Guild.