Beowulf's Children Part 40

She swam upstream as she had before, crawling over the dam, never straying onto land. They smelled her in the water. The water carried a scratching sound, not loud, but audible everywhere in the lake, and every builder's nose and eyes broke surface. They saw the great wedge-shaped head emerge with something alive in her mouth.

The queen had come.

What the queen was doing was part of a pattern warped out of true. The light was turning weird. Something tremendous had been floating in the sky for days, never responding to challenge, nor interacting at all. The wrongness in the world encroached on the lake itself. They could taste changes in the water and air, changes that rang down in their bones.

The queen knew it too. She had made four trips in as many turnings of the sun, and each time she had carried a similar burden.

Not for an instant did they forget the queen's blinding speed. She moved slowly, carefully, and the builders watched with respect.

Between the queen's teeth she held a live swimmer. Not one of the queen's own children-but another builder child, from another stream and another lake.

She had brought three of these, tired and feeble but alive. One had died from the distance the queen had carried it between water holes, and damage from the great, serrated teeth.

The queen set the newcomer in the water. It floated for a moment, then began to twitch its tail, then to move.

And the builders slowly, carefully approached it. It began to swim. They nudged it along. The other young b.u.t.ted it, but the builders were a friendly clan. Even during the best of times there would have been no challenge.

Change was coming. They must keep to the water, for the Death Wind seemed to be everywhere these days. The builders were distracted; they would not challenge the queen's guest.

The queen slipped into the water, gliding like death. She vanished beneath its surface, and came up with one of the lens-crabs that lived in the builder-made pond, a prey-creature. It flipped and flashed just once.

The queen moved like the owner of all creation, smoothly through the water, along the length and breadth of the lake. The very Lady of the Lake.

"Did you see that?" Justin said, astonished.

"Would have been hard to miss. Ca.s.sandra?"

"I have recorded all of it."

"What do you make of it?"

"Please narrow your question."

"I seem to be looking at some kind of grendel social interaction," Justin said. "I know that's ridiculous, but there it is."

Jessica nodded. "The grendel brought those others-those huge hands!

They must be specialized to the task of building dams-"

"Beaver grendels-"

"Brought them a sacrifice. I thought that it was food of some kind. Apparently it wasn't. The beavers gathered around and helped to guide the baby-that's almost certainly what it was-around in the pond until it could swim by itself."

"Grendels cooperating in a snowstorm. Grendels carrying the young of other grendels in their mouths. What in the h.e.l.l were our parents dealing with on Camelot?"

Jessica's right eyebrow went up. "r.e.t.a.r.ded grendels?"

"Right. So what do we do? We can destroy this entire ecology-"

"Not on your life."

Jessica took them up another two hundred feet. "Ca.s.sandra. Route a message to Shangri-La and Camelot. I want an alternate path. This is the first such ecology we've found, and I want to preserve it."

"Checking now," Ca.s.sandra said.

Jessica raised her right eyebrow again. "Do you have any objections to that?"

"No, I'm with you," Justin said.

"I was wondering if you thought that it was a little flaky. You know, grendel cult and all of that?"

Justin was looking down out of the side of the skeeter, at the shimmering water hole far beneath them. Within it, there was a world that none of them had ever known.

"No. Whatever is going on there, it would be an absolute sin to destroy it."

Jessica twinkled, and squeezed his hand. For the first time in months, he felt that they were operating on the same frequency. She nodded her head happily. "Thank you," she said. And then, impulsively, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

His cheek burned, and he wasn't completely certain that he understood why.

Ca.s.sandra said, "Your alternate path is approved. You will head west by fifteen degrees-"

The second water hole was smaller. They'd found a grendel carca.s.s lying seven meters away from the water's edge. They'd left it untouched. Justin lay thirty meters farther out, flat on his stomach behind a bush, and examined the scene through war specs.

"What do you think?" he asked into his mike.

Jessica answered from her vantage point in the skeeter above. "I think that the grendel who owns the water hole got into a fight for supremacy. It must have been something to see."

"All right. Hit it."

She brought the skeeter in to five meters above the water and dropped a wad of cotton scented with speed. Alien speed, guaranteed to make a grendel crazy.

Justin watched. The skeeter throbbed. The water lapped at the edge of the pool.

And nothing else.

"Try it again," he whispered, and she did. Splash. And then nothing.

The sound of his own breathing grew almost unendurably loud. There was something wrong here.

He stood. Justin tucked his war specs away, and approached cautiously.

"Keep scanning for infrared. No grendel sign?"

"None," she said, "We've scanned that water hole. There are samlon there, but no adult."

"Then the old adult was killed. How long ago?"

He examined the corpse. It was torn and flattened, but he noted some fluttery motion around the edges. He backed up, then tore a branch from a nearby tree to use as a lever. He lifted the grendel's jaw. "Scavengers," he said. "Like the one I saw earlier. Bugs."

"They're not bugs," Jessica said.

"I know, they're obviously related to crabs like half the life on this planet." One of the scavengers flew up as he exposed it. The motor wings buzzed violently. It circled his head, then settled again. "Jessica, this carca.s.s is just seething with these things. Ca.s.sandra, are you recording?"

"Affirmative. This is a new life-form."

"I'll get a sample." Justin lowered the grendel to the ground and took out a collection box. The grendel's hollow eye sockets stared at him. A beetle emerged from the left socket and flew away to the south with a harsh burring sound.

The chamels had been watered and grazed, and were settled down for the night. Tents had blossomed around the water hole, and a defensive perimeter was established.

Aaron was off at the other fire with some of the kaffeeklatsch, and Jessica felt glad of it. Her reconnection with Justin was still fragile, still needed time to cement-but there might not be time after all. Katya snuggled up to him. Jessica tried not to feel anything, but she couldn't help watching. The two seemed to have settled into a rhythm. There were subtle turnings when either of them moved, subtle responses of body language when either spoke. They were more than lovers. Quietly and without fanfare, Justin and Katya had become a couple.

The firelight danced across them, as Jessica sipped her hot cocoa. At the second fire, there was singing, and Aaron's strong voice rose above the sound of the guitar.

Justin looked up at Jessica as she left the fireside, and smiled. He was happy. They were brother and sister again.

There was no reason for the odd sadness that she felt. Perhaps it was the loss of Stu. That had to be it.

"I'm going over to the singing," she said. "I don't think that I'll be missed too much."

Katya's head was against Justin, and she grinned up. "You and Aaron have a good evening, you hear?"

Jessica nodded.

Only thirty feet of s.p.a.ce separated the two fires, and in crossing she pa.s.sed the chamel pen. One of them nuzzled up against the wire that confined them. The wire carried a light charge. If pressure was applied, the charge grew stronger. The fence was portable, and bundled to swing beneath a skeeter.

The chamel nuzzled at her. She stopped to stroke its long, delicate neck.

She looked back at her unbrother. Justin and Katya. A good couple. Katya was quieter. She would bond more quickly. The two of them would probably start making fat babies. That would be a good thing. Justin needed to be a parent. He wasn't like her, not at all.

She looked over to where Aaron was strumming his guitar, head tilted back in song. He was golden, Apollonian. Her head swam at the thought of him. He was so strong. So . . . perfect. He made her ache. Just listening to his laugh, watching the way his head rolled back when he sang, when he tossed his hair . . . she wanted him inside her, she wanted to feel the enormous power of his body, to feel the fire that drove him igniting her.

But when she looked at Justin and Katya, she saw a gentle thing, a softness. Not at all like the driving hunger that she felt from Aaron. Jessica went and sat next to Aaron. After a while, she laughed, and sang along.

They made love, and as usual, it was perfect. Perfect. Her body had exploded more times than she could count. As usual. The perfection of their union was . . . almost predictable. As if he had direct access to her nervous system.

If anything was missing, it was the experience of exploration. With Toshiro there had been a constant unfolding that was lacking with Aaron.

"What are you thinking?" Aaron whispered.

Jessica felt the hard flat plates of his stomach muscles against her back. His left arm circled her waist. His right thumb made slow lazy circles around her right nipple. Waves of pleasure washed through her. "Don't," she said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't . . . that."

The pressure stopped. "Okay." He paused. She felt his heart beat against her back, strong and slow. "What are you thinking?"

"That I feel more connected to the dream than I do to you, Aaron."

"Is that so bad? I read somewhere that love isn't two people looking at each other. It's two people looking in the same direction."

She had to smile. "I read that too. But sometimes, sometimes we have to look at each other, too."

He rolled her over, and gazed directly into her eyes. "You don't think that I look at you?"

"Maybe," she said. "I've gone along with everything that you wanted. And I've given you everything that I have to give. I betrayed my father for you." Oh, G.o.d, it was true. It wasn't true until she said it. "I need to know how you feel. About us."

He took her hand, and placed it between his legs. Immediately, he began to stiffen.

She gave him a light squeeze. "Not that. Not . . . just that. I know we turn each other on. That's easy for us."

"Love, then?"

"I don't know."

She snuggled her head into the crook of his shoulder, saying to herself, as loudly as she dared. Yes, love. Call it love. Please, call it love.

He pulled up the blanket, tucking it under her chin, and sat up effortlessly. She could almost hear the gears grinding within his mind. His eyes stared out at the mountains on the horizon, and the stars above them, and she imagined that he could count them all.

"I've given you more than I've given anyone, Jessica."

"I know," she said. "Am I asking for too much?"

"No," he said quietly. "But you might be asking the wrong person." There was something that she had never heard in his voice before. A moment of self-doubt?

"There's something I've always wanted to ask," she said. "Was it hard for you? As a child. Not having any one family?"

Suddenly his lips curled in a merry smile, and she knew, knew, that his next response would be prefabricated, that the moment of truth had evaporated. "It was rough sometimes, but the roughest part was not knowing which family to stay with on a particular night. Every door was open," he said, and laughed. "They were all my family." And he laughed again.

The doors were open, to come in or to go out. But anyplace you can walk away from isn't home. You didn't have a home. Flit from one family to another, never deal with anything you didn't want to deal with. "Weren't you afraid that someday there wouldn't be a door open?"

"No. Why? I didn't do anything wrong, I was always who they wanted me to be." He turned and kissed her, more softly than she could ever remember. His perfect hair glowed in the moonlight, his mouth gentle upon hers. "This is our land, Jessica," he said. "We fought for it, and we are the ones to tame it."

"I know," she whispered.

"Our children will own this land."

His hands were soft on her arms, but she didn't try to squirm away from him. Somehow, she knew that it would be useless. His eyes trapped hers, and something within them terrified her.

"Our children. Yours and mine."

He'd said it. Suddenly, thoughts, feelings, sensations that she had never allowed herself to feel began to blossom within her, and she could feel it, feel where a child of Aaron's might grow within her, a void that opened like an awakening eye. Yes.

"Yes," she said. "I would love to carry your child."

"No!" he said fiercely. "You don't understand. The children of our bodies, yes, but we can have perfect children. Perfect. They can have everything, every advantage. We can control their nutrients, their prenatal education . . . everything."

His whisper was harsh, and his hands grew stronger upon her arms. "We can have a dozen, a hundred children at a time, and seed this entire continent with them."