Beowulf's Children Part 44

It was like the Encyclopaedia Britannica as designed by social scientists. There was emotion, but no real information. And the emotional inference was a culture so fatuously delighted with itself that it was blind to the efforts of unspeakably vast and numerous generations of men to get them there.

Sylvia toyed with the images, trying to find something new. Stopping and moving forward, and stopping again, and finding nothing. Nothing at all.

And then a human shape walked through the dancing light.

What Cadmann had taken for another image from the Earth message was his wife.

Mary Ann was naked, her head down as if she were sleepwalking, her swollen, ungainly limbs more pitiful when not covered by well-cut cloth. She raised her face, and stared at them, and the impression of near sleepwalking was still strong. "I . . . I heard music," she said. "Sounds. Street sounds."

Cadmann reached out and turned the video down. There was a little-girl quality to Mary Ann's voice that he recognized. She came and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the images. She pointed into the midst of them, an image of the Canadian Rockies.

"I've been there," she said. "I grew up not too far from there."

Cadmann and Sylvia were silent.

"I'd like to see them again one day," she said, and then waited. There was no comment from either of them, and Mary Ann suddenly seemed to understand what she had said, and her hand went over her mouth.

"Oops. I guess I can't do that, can I?"

"We could go virtual," Sylvia said softly.

Mary Ann nodded. "I'd like that. I'd like that very much," she said. And she curled up at the edge of the bed like a cat, watching the images playing in the air in front of her.

Cadmann said nothing, watching Mary Ann. She didn't move again, didn't speak, but her eyes were open. And she just watched.

And finally, Sylvia's hand stole into his, and they watched until, at some point, he fell asleep.

Dawn came slowly to Camelot. There was no excitement, just another day, one of an endless stream of days. There would be a single difference, perhaps. Robor was anch.o.r.ed over the main aeros.p.a.ceport, shadowing it, and was being loaded now.

Zack oversaw the loading, although the kids from the eastern encampment were actually in charge. It was, as were most things dealing with the mainland expedition, a joint venture.

Rachael approached him. "Zack," she said, "Cadmann made a rather unusual request. He wants to look at Aaron's records."

Zack's round, sallow face grooved with thought. "Is he all right?"

She evaded. "He's concerned about the dirigible incident."

"He's not making any trivial request, love. What's itching him?"

"Well. The entire ectogynic issue."

"We went over all of that a long time ago."

"And we don't talk about it much anymore. I know."

Zack walked unsteadily over to a tree stump and sat, resting his hands on his knees. He drew a large red bandanna from his pocket, and wiped it across his face with a hand that trembled.

"I think that Carlos is taking the Minerva up to the Orion today. We want to check the main systems. Why don't you invite Cadmann along, and we'll have a place to talk."

She nodded her head.

Chapter 27.

GEOGRAPHIC.

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee: Thou dost smile, I sing the while Sweet joy befall thee.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Infant Joy

The Minervas were the fusion-powered landing craft brought from Sol system. Once on the ground they had served as primary power plants until the mines had produced enough materials for the fabrication of the solar-collector material known as Begley cloth. One Minerva died in the Grendel Wars. The others were used to visit the ship that had brought the children of Earth to their new world: the Geographic.

Late in the morning, Cadmann skeetered in with Sylvia. "Mickey's up at the house with Mary Ann," he said quietly.

"How is she doing?"

Cadmann's face was dark. "Not well. Worse than I expected. It is as if something was just taken right out of her. Linda's death was a near final thing, and then the business with Toshiro-that was a last straw of some kind. I can't say that I don't understand it. I just regret it. Regret everything."

Zack nodded.

He helped Sylvia out of the skeeter.

Cadmann went to Carlos. "Hola." Carlos smiled at him lazily, stretched a little, and nodded his head. "A good day for hiking, eh?"

"A very good one."

The Minerva was a 160-foot long delta-winged aero-s.p.a.ceplane. Its dock was the artificial lake northeast of the colony, but it could land on any body of water. The Minerva's power plants would dissociate lake water into hydrogen and oxygen to use as fuel. Together they had made almost four hundred round-trips to the Orion craft.

That couldn't last. All of the original equipment from Earth was aging fast. One day another Minerva would fail. When the last Minerva failed, as it must, the human race on Avalon would be grounded until they could build an industrial base capable of taking Mankind back to the stars. Depending on priorities, that might take a hundred years. Knowledge alone wasn't enough. s.p.a.cecraft require specialized equipment.

They strapped themselves into the worn seats. There had been fifty, but now there were only nine. The others had been removed: more cargo s.p.a.ce and less weight.

Carlos watched his friend ease into the pilot seat. The position was more symbolic than real: Minerva was controlled by a computer. And that's the way it is, Carlos thought. We sit at the controls, but we don't run the colony anymore. I wonder if Cadmann feels that way. Probably not. Cadmann was a strange one. He was bothered, he was troubled, but as long as there was a definite purpose to his life, he moved with all of the old intention and force. It had grown harder over the years to find a purpose to animate him, to give him a sense of meaning and potential contribution, but he still felt needed.

Or had until the Robor incident. Now, there seemed no way to console him. The death of one of the children . . . There was no word for the sense of loss. And Carlos, for all of the years of knowing Cadmann, couldn't say that he understood the workings of his friend's mind.

"Ca.s.sandra. System check."

Ca.s.sandra slowed her processes down to give Carlos a system-by-system check of all of the component parts of the Minerva. She stopped in the middle to flash a schematic, saying, "I have identified a burn-through spot in the right rear att.i.tude cl.u.s.ter. I would suggest repair during the next maintenance cycle."

"Is it safe for today?"

"Yes. Fractional chance of failure, and two backup systems."

"All right. Power up sequence. Destination, dock with Geographic."

"Two hundred and nine seconds to liftoff," Ca.s.sandra said. Lights flashed on the control board. "Ground tests complete. Engine ignition in one hundred and seventy seconds." They waited. Then pumps whined, and they felt the steady roar as the engines lit.

"Power-up complete," Ca.s.sandra announced. "All systems go."

"Take us up."

"Thirty-five seconds to liftoff," Ca.s.sandra said.

They waited again; then they felt the first motion. The Minerva slid across the water faster and faster, and suddenly they were aloft. The nose tilted up until it was almost vertical. Clouds broke across the nose; then the sky was baby blue, gradually darkening. The roar seemed to originate inside him, shaking and stirring him, giving him a wild and joyous sense of freedom unmatched by anything else in his world. He loved it.

His weight eased. A whisper of thrust continued: though the oxygen and hydrogen tanks were empty, the fusion plant remained. With that he could reach the planets. Once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere.

He glimpsed Geographic twinkling ahead.

"Docking sequence initiated," Ca.s.sandra said.

Carlos unlocked his chair and spun it sixty degrees around. Cadmann was resting with his eyes closed. Sylvia's hand rested softly in his. Zack was engrossed in a holo data-management module display, probably some inventory list that needed to be vetted for the hundredth time.

They needed someone like Zack. Thank G.o.d it didn't have to be Carlos Martinez! That, Carlos decided, would have been a genuine waste. But someone needed to put tomorrow on an even par with today.

He, Carlos, enjoyed the present far too much.

Geographic was nearly history's largest work of man (the Zuider Zee still held the record) and was certainly and by far the largest movable object. Though a mere skeleton of its former size and ma.s.s, it was still impressive as h.e.l.l. Cadmann could remember the young man he had been, flying up from Buenos Aires to Geographic for the first time, one of a shuttle group of twelve. The first inspection of a genuine interstellar s.p.a.cecraft was so different from the simulator sessions they had all suffered through.

It had been the culmination of a dream, a grand adventure at the end of a lifetime of adventures, something so beautiful, so rife with possibility . . .

It was too big. And it was going to take them someplace too far, and take entirely too long to do it-and they had worked to be there. If they had had regrets it was far too late to voice them by the time they were aboard.

"I was thinking . . ." Cadmann said. "Why did we come out here?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about. Not what we say to the children. Not the myths. Why are we really here?"

Zack glanced up from his figuring. "What do you mean?"

"Why is it that all of us were willing to risk our lives. Our histories. Not one of us had enough family or friends to hold us to Earth."

"I brought my wife with me," Zack said. "So did Joe Sikes and some others."

"Think, now. We weren't the smartest and bravest, even though that's what we told ourselves." The Minerva was sailing through a sea of stars, the bright blue haze of Avalon below them. "We were the ones willing to leave it all behind. To go."

"Speak for yourself," Sylvia said. "Terry and I wanted to come here. We worked at it. Worked hard. A lot of us did, Cadmann-for that matter so did you."

They felt a gentle jolt as the padded docking tubes engaged, and inflated. Docking with Geographic was like an act of slow love, a reunion with an old and dear friend. She had seen them through so much, and seemed to be waiting to discover if they would need her again, ever. The air always seemed to change flavor now, at this point. Just his imagination, no doubt.

"Top floor dungeon," Carlos said. "Jewelry department, leg irons, neck irons-"

Rachael and Zack were out of the Minerva and swimming down the lines leading to the Geographic's main lock. A curved door sealed behind them, and they were in a womb of steel and ceramic. Another door opened, and they were in the main corridor.

The ship smelled faintly musty. Twenty years of near desolation hadn't changed that, and they had never quite gotten that smell out of the ship. Two hundred people living in close proximity for a hundred years will do that-even if ninety-five percent of them are asleep at any given time.

They heard a voice from deeper in the ship, and Carolyn McAndrews hailed them. She was followed by Julia Hortha and Greg Arruda. There was always someone aboard because Geographic served as an orbiting machine shop for maintenance of the observation satellites, and Ca.s.sandra and her maintenance and repair robots couldn't be prepared for everything. There was never a problem finding volunteers to keep watch for a week, and for many it was a plum a.s.signment, a chance to get away and meditate in near isolation. Carlos had, of course, taken advantage of other aspects of Geographic. He had taken many tours well stocked with female friends. He hadn't quite tired of the null-grav amenities, but he was slowing down.

Carolyn swam down the lines effortlessly. Although her bulk was growing more and more ponderous, she moved with an uncanny grace, here where her weight was that of thistledown.

"Good to see you," she greeted them. "It was only just getting lonely up here. Lots of time, and old cubes to sort through, but . . . well." A strand of her washed-out brown hair floated away, got away from her, and she chuckled and swept it back into place. "How are the children?" she asked.

"Fine," Carlos said. "But they overwater your plants."

She patted him on the chin, and kissed him lightly. "Thank you," she said. "Now-you want the computer room? Are you going to want privacy?"

Cadmann shook his head. "No. Get in on this, Carolyn. You were as much involved in Aaron's raising as anyone."

"More than most," she said. Then she closed her eyes, and blushed a little.

"This was Aaron's creche," Rachael said. "We can trace down anything, forward or backward. Ca.s.sandra, give us Childe Aaron One."

The holostage began to play out a series of images. Every image of young Aaron, from infancy onward. They were virtually a time-lapse display, carrying him through to toddlerhood.

Cadmann watched absently. "Who are his parents?"

Rachael looked uncomfortable. "As you know, the sperm and egg samples were chosen both from the members of the colony, and the frozen contributions of those who didn't make the trip for one reason or another. There are representative samples from all the basic genetic groups and cultures of the world, but all flawless. We could be picky. The idea was that some children would be raised by the colony as a whole, without any specific parental attachments. It was one of the theoretical bases of the colony, an experiment in shifting the primary bonding imperatives of a child from a pair, onto a concept or system. As you know, the experiment was begun in earnest after the Grendel Wars, and was terminated four years later."

Carolyn McAndrews smiled and said, "We were making enough babies."

"You always had doubts," Zack said. Carolyn nodded. "Maybe we should have listened." Ice on her mind, he didn't have to say. n.o.body would have listened to Carolyn; which was a bit odd, because Carolyn had been one of the genuine heroines of the Grendel Wars. No one could quite remember when they had stopped listening to her.

Rachael said, "The project was terminated for other reasons."

Cadmann was looking out into black s.p.a.ce. Carlos saw only his back. He asked, "Problems?"

"Stuff that came through from Earth, maybe a year after we left. There were files on the Bottle Baby research. We didn't get anything else for years. Geographic's last received signal was a light-speed communique ten years after we left. Garbled. It took quite a while to reconstruct it," Rachael said. "There was research that implied that the creche children had a more difficult time bonding. They had all been adopted info loving, supportive homes-where parents had waited years for children, but due to fertility problems were forced to utilize artificial wombs.

"Sure, problems, Cad. There're always problems. Statistically significant? Maybe. Some kind of academic dominance game was going on. Those can get nasty. I think some of their theories got sent and some got buried. Numbers, too.

"One theory had to do with the endocrinal flux in the uterus. The numbers we got suggest that the actual ebb and flow of biochemical products as the mother is awake, asleep, afraid, hungry, tired, s.e.xually stimulated, whatever . . . is a form of communication between mother and child. It's another nutrient . . . an emotional nutrient, if you will, as important as blood or oxygen."

"I thought that all of those things had been duplicated."

Rachael shrugged. "It's still an art form. When you try to create a computer program to simulate the messages that a mother sends to her child, you have to remember that it is a feedback loop between the mother and the fetus. Thousands of fetuses were studied, and the ways that their mothers responded to them were recorded, and a refinement of everything that was learned was created for use in the creches."

"So?"