Beowulf's Children Part 19

The day pa.s.sed quickly, samples were gathered and catalogued, lessons on wildlife and herbology were taught by the elder Scouts, and a considerable amount of skinny-dipping, impromptu tree-climbing compet.i.tions, and general h.e.l.l-raising continued through the day.

When evening finally fell again, there was a pleasant air of fatigue settling over the camp. They had shared two extremely alive days. Carey had also learned that three other Biters had suffered as he had. He was a member of a fraternity now, and he was already relishing the thought of pa.s.sing that favor to one of the younger kids in a few years. Say, his younger brother Patrick . . .

The cook fires were burning, and soon dinner would be prepared. But there was another question still on the Biters' minds, and they had pestered their elders all day long.

Finally, Aaron sat them down, not a shred of playfulness in his att.i.tude.

"All right," he said. "There's something serious we need to talk about tonight. Tonight, it's time that you learned things."

"About our parents?" Sharon asked.

"Things about your parents. And grandparents. There are reasons why they didn't come over here. Why we're the ones."

"Why?"

Justin and Jessica looked at each other nervously; then Justin said, "When you freeze something that has water in it, you get ice crystals. They thought that they had whipped the problems, but something went wrong. They froze the crew of Geographic. They woke them up in shifts for various duties around the ship, crossing from Sol to Tau Ceti. And there were problems."

"Problems?" Carey asked.

"Yes. When you freeze people for a hundred years and then wake them up, chances are you've formed some ice crystals in their brains. Wake them twice, you get more crystals. Crystals rupture cells, mess it up in-" He tapped his skull. "-here."

"What did it do?"

"A lot of our parents aren't as smart as they used to be. They get emotional problems, too. Coordination. Early strokes. Just plain stupidity. At first it didn't really matter. They were still smarter than most people they'd known, and they'd chosen the island because it was safe. No problems to face, nothing they couldn't deal with. Even then, they got in the habit of talking things over, being sure they weren't doing something stupid-"

"Rules," Sharon McAndrews said.

"Rules," Justin agreed. "And that was good enough for a while. There weren't any real dangers here, none that they knew about anyway. Then, the first grendel came. They didn't understand. They had rules, and they stuck to the rules, and it didn't work, but Colonel Weyland helped them and they defeated the first grendels. They went hunting, and when they thought they had killed all the grendels, they hadn't. You know about that. What you don't know is how bad it shook them. After the Grendel Wars they stopped trusting themselves and they stopped trusting each other. They didn't work well together when the grendels popped up, and that's one of the reasons that our parents are so afraid of them now."

There was silence. Justin could see it: they were trying to find a lie in the story. But there were too many clues. They knew, they had always known. There was something wrong with Mom, with Dad. With Uncle. They had always known, but never had a label.

Now they did.

"Ice on his mind," Carey Lou said. "I've heard that, but n.o.body would tell me what it meant-"

"And my mother slapped me when I said it to her," Sharon said.

"Christ," Carey Lou said. "What can we do?"

"Love them," Jessica said. "They're doing the best they can. That's what we expect of you. Just love them, but do your own thinking. Including about their rules. That's why they make rules. They don't trust their own thoughts, not when they act alone. So they try to get a collective judgment on everything that can happen, and make that a rule, and then they follow the rules no matter what."

"Ice on their minds," Carey Lou said again, slowly. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

Aaron and Trish carried a pole across their shoulders, with a dozen netted samlon suspended from it. They were singing some kind of hunting song or working song . . . "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to hunt I go" . . . making up verses as they approached the campfire.

Water was already simmering and bubbling in the gla.s.s cauldron. Potatoes and onions had been brought over from Camelot, but there was more: mainland bulbs and leaves known to be edible, and tasty. Some of the brighter Scouts noticed how flashlights had been focused into the cauldron, so that the vegetables could be seen dancing around in the roiling water.

There was an air of excitement, and someone ooh'd as Justin produced a wicked-looking knife and sliced the heads off the samlon.

"Look at their eyes," he said. "But for us, they would have been grendels one day, and hunted us. We killed them first. What eats grendels?" he asked. "We eat grendels."

They were as tense as an audience awaiting a magic trick. Justin figured that that was pretty close to accurate.

His blood-smeared hands gathered the beheaded samlon up and carried them to the pot, dropping them into the water.

The water foamed with blood.

"Watch," Justin said, "watch and see . . ."

Those first few trips, the Scouts had been crawling all over each other to watch and see, to look down into an inadequate aluminum pot. Once Ansel Stevens fell in and scalded his whole arm. Once there was a full riot. The pots kept getting bigger, but the Scouts still missed most of the action, until Chaka got big enough to carry this mucking great gla.s.s cauldron. And now everyone could see it all.

The three gallons of water in the pot churned. The samlon sank, and then churned up to the surface again, in a curious and disquieting imitation of life.

Something was happening. The flesh of the samlon split, and worm-like things boiled out. Scores of them. Hundreds. Pale, fleshy things churning and dying in the boiling water, turning the clear bubbling broth into a kind of thick gumbo . . . or jambalaya.

The Biters pulled back, choking. There rose from the red kettle a stench of blood.

And in a disturbing way . . . it was a good smell. Like last night's savory aroma, only stronger.

Justin and Aaron and Katya and Jessica and the other Second watched ghoulishly. The children stared at the kettle, sniffed at it One of them fled to the entrance of the cave and vomited.

In a half hour the brew was done, and ladled into bowls. It was an evil-looking mess, filled with fragments of samlon heads and the gutted carca.s.ses now torn into chunks by Katya's b.l.o.o.d.y knife. The dead worms and corkscrew things were bloated pinkly in death. There were little transparent crabs no bigger than a Biter's fingernail. The base stock was as crimson as tomato soup. It looked filled with insects.

Aaron held the bowl to his lips. The Biters watched him, horribly fascinated.

"Mmmmm," he raised the spoon to his lips. He blew on it. Something thick and wormy flopped over the edge of the broad spoon. He slurped it up as if it were vermicelli, making a smacking sound. "Delicious."

"Dinner," Jessica said, "is served."

Chapter 10.

THE FIRST CHURCH OF THE GRENDEL.

In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed: deliver me in thy righteousness.

Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily; be thou my strong rock, for an house of defense to save me.

For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's sake lead me, and guide me.

Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for thou art my strength.

Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord G.o.d of truth.

Psalm 31:16

Jessica rose only when she was absolutely certain that the others were asleep. On tiptoes, she crept out of the cave. The soft purring snores of sleeping children surrounded her. She felt a delicious synthesis of maternal concern and utter wickedness.

Aaron waited just outside the cave, and held a finger to his lips.

"Shhh."

Jessica nodded, understanding the need for secrecy. This wasn't for Justin. Not anymore-he had made his choice, and Jessica had made hers. Her heart thudded in her chest as she followed Aaron down the path. They pa.s.sed a tree, and it wasn't until they had pa.s.sed that she realized that it wasn't just a shadow, but Trish, dark as the night. A Bottle Baby.

Trish joined them as they moved silently down the trail. Little Chaka and others drifted into their line until there were seven in all. They came to a small clearing near a very shallow running stream.

"Running water," she observed unnecessarily. "Everything I am, and everything I've learned says to stay away from it."

Aaron nodded. "In mortis veritas," he said.

He pulled a stone away from a cairn of fist-sized, smooth rocks. Then all seven of them were rolling away rocks, until they exposed a small kettle wrapped in transparent plastic.

Trish produced a hot plate and a battery cell. Toshiro brought water from the stream, and filled the small kettle.

Jessica's stomach felt light and fluttery. During the day she watched Aaron studying leaves and plants with the intensity of a trained ethn.o.botanist. She was one of the very few who knew why he studied so intently. Quietly, without drawing any attention to himself, he had collected the plants that he needed.

He had also collected the grendel's liver.

Speed generates enormous heat. The metabolic byproducts would kill the grendel, just as the by-products of combustion will kill a fire. Its liver and bile ducts-or the grendel versions thereof-are awesome. A grendel can eat anything, and survive the products of its own ma.s.sive oxidation, because of its efficient cooling and detoxification systems.

At thirteen years of age, Aaron had a.n.a.lyzed grendel bile ducts, livers, and other organs of cleansing with a view to psychopharmacology.

At fourteen he had created the Ritual. Since then, he had indoctrinated ten others into the mysteries of grendel flesh.

"The First Church of the Grendel," Jessica had laughed. Aaron had barely smiled.

The kettle was bubbling now, and would soon be ready. He added a few handfuls of mushroom-looking things, and something that looked like a fern. She nervously contributed her own handful, a few leaves pruned from one of Cadmann's living room cacti. Poisonous, yes. But in very precise combination with certain plants, and the liver of a grendel that had died on speed . . .

She watched the stars. The same, but different stars from those beneath which her ancestors had lived and died, loved and hunted, fought and borne children. But they were her stars. The way to survive is to become one with the environment. The Earth Born still saw Avalon as a place of strangeness, of danger. Every one of them would have to die, the things of Earth would have to die before this planet could be truly conquered. And this ritual, as old as humanity, was the prayer of the hunters and gatherers whose lives were interwoven with the land itself. The Earth Born had come as the Europeans to the new world. Aaron said that they would have to learn the traditions of the Native American peoples in order to survive here. They could not own the land, but they could be a part of it.

Aaron dipped a cup into the brew, and lifted it steaming to his lips.

"To us," he said. "To the children of a new world."

He drank. When he was finished, he pa.s.sed the cup to the left, and the ritual was repeated, and again, until all of them had downed a mouthful of the sour mash.

It smashed into her gut like napalm. She broke into a sweat, her heartbeat rocketing.

For a few foolish moments she prayed that nothing would happen this time . . . then her stomach soured, and she knew there was no use in hoping. It had begun.

During the first grendel ceremony, she had vomited. Since then Aaron had incorporated acid neutralizers and buffering agents, and now the entire experience was, at least physically, much milder.

The psychoactive alkaloids were kicking in now. External sounds were fading. It was not that they weren't there, or that she had gone deaf, it was that her focus of attention was so tight now, so utterly complete that it was as if she was staring down a long, long tunnel. There at the far end were the simmering kettle and the fire. And if she turned the focus of her attention on Aaron, she saw Aaron, and only Aaron, and if she looked up at the stars and the night sky, she could focus on any point of light, bring it up bright and tight, a hot little marble that she could almost hold in her hand. Aaron's voice crooned to her, sounding for all the world like the music of those very spheres: "We are the inheritors of this world. We own all of this, everything that we can see, everything that there is to own. We are the strong ones. The others call us Merry Pranksters. We do what we do to test our power. To ensure that we can control every aspect of this planet. And then we place a clown's face upon our deeds so that the old ones will feel no fear.

"But one day we may have to take other steps. And when we do we will have to act as one mind, as one body. As the inheritors of this world, with no barriers between intent and action. As one mind. As one body . . ."

She could hear his words, felt them slipping between those bright hot marbles. She was burning up, but sought refuge in the very fire that consumed her. Aaron's hands were on her. And then other hands. And then she was reaching, touching, tasting, consuming and allowing herself to be consumed in the fire raging within her, without her, and in the s.p.a.ce between those bright, hot marbles in the sky.

Chapter 11.

INVISIBLE DEATH.

Death hath so many doors to let out life JOHN FLETCHER, The Custom of the Country

The children and their guardians were not quite alone. Above them was Geographic. In geosynch over Camelot, Geographic maintained a web of satellites across the continent and around the planet, and kept careful track of weather and tidal conditions. Geographic, the largest movable object ever created by man, had carried its cargo of frozen human beings across ten light-years, expending a cubic kilometer of deuterium s...o...b..ll along the way. The deuterium was exhausted now. Its sleeve was a shrunken silver balloon, the pressure inside barely higher than the vacuum around it.

Geographic could still be moved by smaller steering rockets, but until the deuterium was replaced-if it ever was-she would remain in eternal orbit around Avalon. She was their link to Earth, and the Earth Born insisted that all of their children be taken up. "This is your heritage. You call yourselves Star Born, now see the stars."

A few came back as often as they could. Some of the Second still dreamed of crossing the void between the stars. A few even spoke of returning to Earth. For the most part, though, the children of Earth were rare visitors. Geographic's corridors were empty, cold, and dark, with only a few flickering lights to give any sign that she had once been alive.

In the command center, the duplicate of the ground-based Ca.s.sandra system a.n.a.lyzed a planet's worth of data. She filtered it, and relayed down whatever seemed of interest.

Greg Arruda looked up from his novel as the comm light came on.

"Arruda here."

"Zack. How are things?"

"Jesus Christ, Zack, they're the way they were the last time you asked." He looked at the console. "The board's green. No large objects approaching the oasis. Children all accounted for at last head count. Wait one-"

"What?"

"No panic, Zack. Yellow light from one of the close-in satellites. There's a wind coming up. Northwest wind, about thirty knots through the pa.s.s."