Mountains of Fate

Our hero arrives on a planet where the natives slowly die out, bringing a genetically modified lion that has a mind. In time immemorial, the aliens who visited this place decided to exterminate the humanoids in a very original way—by creating a machine that predicts the future. Once people learned what awaited them, their interest in life vanished.

The last one to fall under the machine’s infernal workings before it broke was our hero and his lion. But the machine lacked power for the final impulse, and the hero remembers only fragments of the predictions—and that his genetically modified friend is supposed to die.

The lion remembers everything, but it cannot tell anyone…