Beowulf's Children Part 4

Jessica sat down next to Justin, winked at him. "Caught h.e.l.l from Zack about our slippery friend."

Chaka was big, the strongest of the Star Born, but you didn't notice that when he was at work. "We'll just dissect one of the eggs so Ca.s.sandra can have a look. There. Window, please." A flood of biological and mathematical symbols reeled past them in a small holographic window, a peek into Ca.s.sandra's mind. She was comparing the eel with other Avalonian life forms, including the dreaded grendel. And she was scanning the eggs down to their DNA. And although it was understood to be no more than thirty percent accurate, Ca.s.sandra would devise a best-guess life cycle for the beast, including preferred foods at varied points in its development.

Before their eyes the eel transformed: Now its holographic image was covered with skin, now it was a network of muscles, now it was a mere skeleton whipping eerily through the water. Now it was a jelly sac crowded with internal organs, and in the next second it was merely a nervous system, each branching node outlined in blue.

Jessica lit a cigarette. It was machine-rolled but unfiltered. The tobacco field covered less than ten acres of the twelve thousand acres of cultivated land surrounding Camelot. There had been discussion as to whether the seeds should be grown at all. Most of the Earth Born didn't smoke and hated tobacco. Some were astonished to find there were tobacco seeds aboard Geographic. The same debate had preceded the hemp planting.

Mankind's vices had accompanied him to the stars. Alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana existed on Avalon; likewise poppy fields and coca plants. The mountain ridges had been seeded with coffee. Pharmaceutical cocaine and morphine were too valuable medicinally. Hemp too hardy and useful a plant fiber. Tobacco . . . well, tobacco was tobacco.

Jessica allowed herself a cigarette or two a day. You'd have to quadruple that level of consumption to find clinical deterioration of lung tissue, and it had been a century since anyone died of cancer anyway. As for the other drugs . . . well, they were a part of Man's history.

"Terrible habit," Justin said. She nodded, and shook him out a b.u.t.t.

The pumps made small, moist rhythmic sounds, swishing murky water about in the egg tank.

Chaka was totally absorbed: the rest of the world might as well have disappeared. Jessica said, "Listen, we'll check back with you, all right?"

Ruth Moskowitz waited right outside the door for them, a bemused look on her round and pleasant face. She was five foot seven of clean-featured brunette. Attractive, but not pretty. Rounded, but not chubby. Competent, but not particularly bright as far as anyone could tell. Ruth was on the edge of everything, and not remarkable for anything but being Zack's daughter. She stripped off her work gloves. "It's beautiful," she said.

"What's beautiful?" Justin asked.

"The eel! Tell me about it."

"Not much to tell," Jessica said. "It swam up the Amazon this morning, you know, right through the living room-Oh. The Amazon is a stream."

"I've been to your house," Ruth said. "It must have been going to the pools above the Keep."

"Yes, that's right."

"What would it want?" Ruth mused, "There's nothing up there, just glacier."

"Right again. Got to the headwaters and laid eggs."

"Ooh. Wish I'd been there," Ruth said. "It's safe, then?"

"Looks harmless enough. Chaka is looking into it."

"I bet Daddy had a tizzy," Ruth said. "Munic.i.p.al Standing Order 142." She looked puzzled. "He must have ordered you to kill it, but I can see it's still alive."

"That's right," Jessica said.

"Wish I'd been here," Ruth said again. Her comm card chirped. She lifted it, listened a moment, and said, "Yes, sir. I'll ask him." She smiled uncertainly at Jessica. "Got to ask Chaka something-"

"Right. See you."

Ruth went into the Biomed building. Justin and Jessica looked at each other and grinned. "Wish I'd been here," Justin said, his voice mocking Ruth's.

"You're unkind," Jessica said, but she laughed. It was easy to laugh at Ruth.

"You're the one who forgot she'd been to the Keep. She was there more than once, actually."

"Years ago," Jessica said. "Look, you decided she couldn't be a Grendel Scout-"

"We all did. You know she'd go straight to Zack if she learned what we do." Justin climbed the ladder to the top of pen number two, and sloshed his hand in the water until Hipshot, the small dark male of the dolphin pair, approached and rubbed against it. He stroked the dolphin carefully. "What do you think, boy? Think you'll give Quanda a tumble?"

Jessica sat next to him. They looked down on Avalon Town.

The main colony boasted almost three hundred separate dwellings now, and another went up every month or so.

A hundred and thirty-seven of the original two hundred remained alive. Most of them lived here, in the expanded grounds of the original encampment. A few had imitated Colonel Cadmann Weyland and built permanent dwellings elsewhere on the island. More had hunting lodges and second homes near the snows. The fishing colony at Surf's Up was the unofficial domain of the Star Born, not quite a separate city, not quite permanent, a perpetual summer camp linked to the main colony by skeeters. If the comm cards were the nervous system of the colony, the skeeter autogyros, built on Earth and a.s.sembled on Avalon, were its blood vessels. There were never enough skeeters. Building more would require fuel cells, and fuel cells required palladium and platinum for catalysts; those required mines and prospecting, which required access to the mainland, but the skeeters didn't have enough range for routine operations to the mainland, and there wasn't any facility there to recharge their fuel cells anyway. But if we had a power station and more fuel cells that could be charging over there.

Everything we want to do requires two other things, Jessica thought. And as the First grew older, more and more of the colony's resources went into consumption, things the First Generation wanted, no, needed, leaving less for investment in the future.

I guess we're rich, she thought, recalling Ca.s.sandra's images of poverty on Earth. Earth people would call this Paradise. And the First won't last forever. She suppressed that thought as quickly as it came. It seemed ghoulish. We have the skeeters, and we have the comm cards. We all have Ca.s.sandra and all the libraries of Old Earth, everything people learned before the First left it behind and brought us here. We 're still one community, if you close one eye and squint a little.

One community, but several places to live now. Jessica preferred the original settlement-the nerve center. Surf's Up was lovely and vibrant, with a slight j.a.panese feel to it, the domain of the Second Generation. The mountain settlement (thirty-five up there now!) was wonderful, with good siding most of the year. In five years there would be hunting-the vegetation was established. Some of the trees were twenty years old, a new forest like nothing ever seen on the planet before. Deer and moose and bear were being released slowly into the fields and meadows. Some would survive; some would thrive. There was general agreement that when the herds were well established they should thaw out some of the frozen wolf embryos and release a pack. Exactly when was argued vigorously, and so far "not yet" won out. That wasn't a question that cut deep between the generations. Not yet. The generation wars were about other things.

There were 280 Second Generation "children," an average of four for every woman who survived the Grendel Wars.

Truly, Jessica thought cynically, an heroic achievement. And of the hundred and fifty female "children," almost half had already had children of their own, an additional seventy progeny, for a total of 480 inhabitants either immigrated or born here on the fourth planet of the star called Tau Ceti. And for all we know, we 're the whole universe. I guess that's what really eats at Zack. Dad, too. Where is Earth in all this? She never calls, she never writes . . .

The sounds and smells of life here were utterly routine now. Cattle grazed, dogs roamed the streets in packs-and not an ill-fed animal in the lot. Half-naked children played in alien dust ten light-years removed from their closest non-Avalonian relations.

Life went on.

The smells and sounds and sights of Camelot weren't very different from those captured in holovids of Earth. Their sun was a little brighter. From what her father said, shadows were sharper and bluer.

But the voracious grendels had so stripped the island that Man found it easy to conquer. Earthworms had defeated the local annelids for mastery of the soil. Earth crickets chirped at night. Crows had been seen to attack lower-level pterodon nests, destroying eggs in a battle for territory.

After the Grendel Wars, the Firsts had helped their imported organisms along. You could still get arguments among both Earth Born and Star Born on whether they'd given them too much help in competing with native life, but it was hard to blame those who favored the familiar Earth organisms over Avalon's. "Samlon," the grendel's larval stage, had seemed so harmless, until they changed . . . who knew what might next grow fangs and claws? So an orgy of slaughter had ensued. The creatures of Earth completely dominated Camelot, this small island corner of Avalon.

Justin stood and stretched lazily. "I'm going to see Carlos. Staying here?"

"Sure." She slipped off her sandals and pants. She wore bright blue underpants, which contrasted beautifully with her long, muscular tanned legs. With barely a splash, she slipped into the tank with Quanda and Hipshot, who immediately glided over to investigate. Jessica dove under, then came up and spit out a mouthful of water. "Should only take an hour or so to get the preliminary reports. Inquiring minds want to know."

"You've been reading those tabloids again."

"The twentieth century's highest cultural achievement Seems they spent all their time hunting something called Bigfoot, or triangulating Elvis sightings."

"Who?"

"Mid-twentieth-century pop singer. Died of fame."

"So should we all."

"On this backwater? Not likely."

Jessica vanished back beneath the surface. Quanda came up beneath her. Jessica firmly grabbed a fin, and let Quanda take her for a ride around the tank.

Chapter 3.

ICE ON THEIR MINDS.

All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina

Justin chuckled as he headed toward Avalon Town's main street. Jess amused him. Saving the eel was just like her. Had she done it only to antagonize Zack? She usually had several reasons for anything she did.

He swiveled aside to let a stream of half-naked boys and girls playing some spontaneously generated variant of tag scamper past. They giggled and sang, tripped, rolled ignoring their bruised shins and shoulders, and ran out into the fields. The game might progress until midnight, when exhaustion, not security, dictated an end to play. The grendels were dead. The only things that could harm a human child were the dogs, and they wouldn't. Children had never been safer, nor held more precious.

The streets of Camelot were broad and well paved, with private gardens where vegetables and fruits were nurtured into bloom. Intimate hothouses and hobby sheds were tucked along every byway.

Justin's favorite garden was behind Carolyn McAndrews's place. In neat, furrowed rows she cultivated roses, carnations, tulips, and daisies. Within the plastic-sheet walls of her hothouse lived Avalon's greatest-and only-orchid collection. Human shapes moved inside the hothouse: Carolyn herself, followed closely by a small brood of children. She had seven in all, three fast after the Wars, and another four in more leisurely fashion. The latest was barely out of diapers. The oldest two had children of their own. Coleen, the youngest of the first group, still lived at home, but lately she spent most of her time studying. Coleen wanted to go back to the stars.

She'll outgrow that, Justin thought. He had. It wasn't possible, not now, not in Coleen's lifetime. There was just too much to do with this world before they could rebuild and refuel Geographic-and beyond that was the problem no one could solve. Slower-than-light travel meant decades between stars. Stay awake and die of boredom, or go into frozen sleep and risk hibernation instability, ice on my mind. He shuddered.

He saw motion through the plastic, and hurried past. Carolyn McAndrews was coming out of the greenhouse. He was out of sight before she emerged.

Carolyn had been like an aunt to him until he was twelve or so. He had sensed her withdrawal without understanding it. She did well with children, couldn't cope with adults. She was damaged, and knew it.

Hibernation instability if you were polite, ice crystals in the brain if you were accurate, ice on your mind if you were rude, it was all the same thing and it affected all of them. Justin remembered the shock when he'd found it out. He'd been searching through the computer for something else, and found closed files, and- His parents, Zack, the adults, all damaged, all unwilling to trust their own judgment. How to survive? Think in advance, use collective wisdom. Make rules; talk them through; change them endlessly. In a crisis, follow them blindly.

It wasn't hereditary. Carolyn was right when she said "But I make good babies . . ." Carolyn and her sister Phyllis-her late sister Phyllis, killed in the final minutes of the Grendel Wars-had gone into cold sleep as a pair of Earth's best and brightest, and wakened with their emotional stability shattered. Others had come out judgment-impaired or simply stupid.

But we don't have ice crystals in our brains, Justin thought. We don't have to make rules and obey them blindly. He'd been shocked when he first realized that. Now they taught it to the Grendel Scouts when they were old enough. The big secret: the adults have ice on their minds.

Every turn through the warren was comfortable to him . . . in some odd way, too comfortable. Everything on the island was safe, and sometimes it chafed.

In a world of fewer than five hundred people, every detail, every sight, every face becomes tediously familiar, comes entirely too readily to mind. He'd seen the next house uncounted thousands of times. It slid in and out of his mind so effortlessly that it felt like an extension of his own flesh.

The house frame was the same prefabricated rod structure employed by most of the First. Over the years, its exterior had been modified with simulated stone sculpted to imitate rock blasted and hauled from a distant quarry. Some of it was rock blasted and hauled from a distant quarry . . .

The porch was broad. There was a swinging bench with a striped awning to protect it from the sun. Justin vaulted the fence one-handed, calling "Tio Carlos!" There was no answer by the time he reached the top of the stairs. He poked his head in, and looked around.

He smelled coffee.

This was every bit as much his home as Cadmann's Bluff. He used to spend two or three nights a week here. He was seventeen, eleven Avalon, by the time he moved to Surf's Up. These well-worn stones and boards still smelled like home. At Cadmann's Bluff the smell of coffee was rare; but this house always smelled of coffee.

The taste had shocked Justin the eight-year-old. Jessica and others of the Star Born had acquired the taste, but Justin never had. Coffee was bitter. Still, he loved the smell.

The house was crammed with bric-a-brac carved from stone and thornwood and seash.e.l.ls. Weird sculptures of grendel bone were shelved under a broad window above a row of complex topological puzzles molded of composition plastic. There were hypercubes one disa.s.sembled to convert into Klein bottles, and Gordian knots only Ca.s.sandra could untie. Every inch of the walls was covered with handcrafted delights. Most of the incredible creative output was the product of one mind, the mind of Carlos Martinez.

On the way out to the workshop, he pa.s.sed Carlos's bedroom. The bed was wide and s.p.a.cious and rarely lonely. Justin's "Uncle" Carlos had married only once: he'd gone "down the rapids" with Bobbie Kanagawa. The marriage was six hours of bliss, bloodily annulled by a grendel attack.

Holotape of that awful event was required viewing. The attack patterns had been a.n.a.lyzed endlessly. They'd all heard the lecture, too often.

Carlos had married only once and became a widower the same day, but he had half a dozen acknowledged children. Some lived with him, some with their mothers. He was rumored to have more. You could never be sure who had been in that bed. His gametes get a huge return on investment for making him . . .

The burr of a high-intensity drill grew louder, more jarring as he approached the high-domed workshop behind the house.

The path between house and workshop was crowded with sculpture. Naked G.o.ddesses cavorted with satyrs rendered in volcanic stone. Impressionistic cloud cities carved in some kind of webbed driftwood. The eruption of Vesuvius whittled from an enormous bone flown back from the mainland, years before.

Carlos was an accomplished wood sculptor before he left Earth for Avalon. Over the years he'd gained skills in metalwork, gla.s.sblowing, and odd, "found" art. He was, beyond question, Camelot's premier graphic artist. There was probably no single home on Avalon that didn't have a plaque, lamp, sculpture, or doorplate signed with his rakish scrawl.

Katya Martinez opened the workshop door before he could get to it. Her faceplate and baggy coveralls disguised flaming red hair and a flawless body. She was a month younger than Justin's nineteen adjusted Earth years-or about twelve Avalonian cycles. Athletic, which made her attractive in ways that Trish, who lifted weights, never would be.

Katya's mother had died early enough that Justin had no memory of her, but he'd heard her talk about it. Three of the First had died of strokes in the s.p.a.ce of four days, and one had been Carlotta Nolan's current love. Ice on their minds: damaged arteries in their brains held for a few years, then tore open. Carlotta had fallen dead during the triple funeral, and that made four.

Katya had grown up in this house, with no female role model or too many of them depending on who you asked, but she had never been in any doubt as to what s.e.x she was. For years Justin thought of her as another sister, like Jessica. Then one day that had changed very quickly- A flame-jet flared to silhouette two welders in coveralls in the workshop behind her. "Katya. How's the anniversary piece coming along?"

She flipped up her faceplate, and gave him a radiant, brown-eyed, broad-mouthed smile. It had been months since Katya and Justin had played games. "Fantastic. Dad's welding Madagascar into place just now."

"Let me get into safety gear. I'm down for a couple hours-thought I'd say hi."

Katya nodded enthusiastically and slipped past him. Justin pulled on heavy woven cotton overalls, and belted them in the front. By the time he finished, Katya was back to hand him a pod of beer. They watched each other while they drank. "I thought that you were taking the Grendel Scouts out for an overnight."

"Were, yes. Didn't you hear the alarm?"

"Alarm?" She brushed a crimson strand of hair out of her face, and sipped deeply. "Nope. What's up?"

"Big eel. Came right up the Miskatonic and the Amazon, right through the Hold. We captured it. It looks pretty harmless, but it's the first grendel-sized carnivore we've seen on the island, and it's bound to get some attention . . . "

"Over at Aquatics?"

"Yeah." He tossed the empty pod into the trash. Two points.

"Keep me posted."

She held the door open for him. He was very aware that her fingers brushed his thigh as he pa.s.sed her.

Four shadowy figures crouched around an eight-foot curved metal bas-relief of the African continent. The huge silhouette would soon be attached to the Earth globe under construction just north of Camelot's main gates. A series of overhead winches kept Madagascar in place while one man waved semaph.o.r.e to the others.