Beast [antikvár]

IT HOVERED IN the ink-dark water, waiting.It was not a fish, had no air bladder to give it buoyancy, but because of the special chemistry of its flesh, it did not sink into the abyss.It was not a mammal, did not breathe air, so it felt no impulse to move to the surface.It hovered.It was not asleep, for it did not know sleep, sleep was not among its natural rhythms. It rested, nourishing itself with oxygen absorbed from the water it pumped through the caverns of its bullet-shaped body.Its eight sinuous arms floated on the current; its two long tentacles were coiled tightly against its body. When it was threatened or in the frenzy of a kill, the tentacles would spring forward, like tooth-studded whips.It had but one enemy: All the other creatures in its world were prey.It had no sense of itself, of its great size or of the fact that its capacity for violence was unknown in other creatures of the deep.It hung more than half a mile below the surface, far beyond the reach of any sunlight, yet its enormous eyes registered faint glimmers, generated, in terror or excitement, by other, smaller hunters.Had it been observable to the human eye, the animal would have been seen as purplish maroon, but that was4Peter Benchleynow, at rest. When aroused, it would change color agaiife and again.IThe only element of the sea that the animal's sensory; system monitored constantly was temperature. It was most comfortable in a range between 40 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and as it drifted with the currents and encountered thermoclines and upwellings that warmed or cooled the water, it moved up or down.It sensed a change now. Its drift had brought it to the scarp of an extinct volcano, which rose like a needle from the ocean canyons. The sea swept around the mountain, and cold water was driven upward.And so, propelled by its tail fins, the beast rose slowly in the darkness.Unlike many fish, it did not need community; it roamed the sea alone. And so it was unaware that many more of its kind existed than had ever existed before. The balance of nature had been disrupted.It existed to survive. And to kill.For, peculiarlyif not uniquelyin the world of living things, it often killed without need, as if Nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end.FROM AFAR, THE boat might have been a grain of rice on a vast field of blue satin.For days, the wind had blown steadily from the