Beowulf's Children Part 59

She dove beneath the water, hauling the weird with her.

Rachael Moskowitz didn't turn as her husband entered Avalon Town's main mess hall and wrapped his arms around her waist. None of the First spoke. The news from the mainland, the word of sudden savage death, had hit them hard.

And now this: on the communal vidscreen. Geographic beamed them an image of the storm descending on Shangri-La. Camelot had been lashed by rain for almost a week, but that was only the fringe of the storm that would cross Shangri-La.

"How did she take it?" Rachael said. "How is Mary Ann?"

"Mickey told her, personally," he said softly, pressing his lips against her ear.

Rachael nodded. "That was probably best."

"He said she's all right. Just all right. Wants her children around her."

"Ruth," Rachael murmured. "G.o.d. We need to get through to Ruth."

Zack stiffened a little. Ruth had betrayed them. But . . . but she was their only child, and it was time to forget such things. "We'll patch through. The important thing is Robor, and Robor is safe at the mine. We can be sure of that. Cadmann made sure of that."

They were quiet for a moment, watching the colored swirl that represented vast ma.s.ses of warm and cold air fighting above the mainland.

Rachael shook her head slowly. "Cadmann. Somehow . . . I always thought he was immortal."

"He never did," Zack said. "That's one mistake he never made."

Chapter 39.

BEES.

Let Justice be done, though the world perish.

EMPEROR FERDINAND I.

Little Chaka awoke from a dream of drowning, and found himself vomiting water. He felt only confusion, and pain, and the savage certainty that he had gone beyond agony into death, beyond death into h.e.l.l.

When the sick ended, he rolled over onto his side, not opening his eyes. He couldn't bring himself to want to look at the surroundings. The ground beneath him was rock, not the mud and silt of a riverbank. Distantly, water trickled into water. More distant still was another sound, a steady, drumming vibration.

He opened his eyes. There was nothing to see. He wasn't certain his eyes had opened at all.

But he'd moved, he could move his left leg and left arm. He told himself very firmly not to reach up and touch his head. He got his elbow under him, his knee, then his other knee, which felt limp and dead. He slipped, and almost went over the edge of a rock shelf, into water.

Water again? Where the h.e.l.l was he? His left hand touched something cold and scaly. His fingers felt it, and he knew immediately what it was. A dead samlon. He could feel the scales, the fins now fully developed into legs. The teeth. Tiny spikes budding on the tail. Something had bitten it, its flesh torn and . . .

Something.

He stopped, quite still, and listened again. Out in the water.

Something was moving. There came a sound. Not water sounds dripping from the rocks. Not the beat of his heart, or the thunder of his breathing The grendel. The beast that had brought him here, unharmed. Which had left a dead samlon for him.

Food?

What the h.e.l.l?

He was so weak. So weak. Impossibly, the darkness spun. He couldn't think, couldn't move. Lights appeared in the darkness, and then he was gone, wondering only at the very last if he would ever wake up again.

The sky opened, gushing with rain and lightning as if it had saved it all up since Avalon was new. On Camelot the waves pounded the already drowned Surf's Up, demolished it, drove its pilings into splinters and changed the very shape of the land.

The storm moved across the continent like a malevolent amoeboid monster. It hit Shangri-La like a bomb. The Second draped tarps across the unfinished buildings that composed half the camp, protecting the naked wood from the savage downpour: Then they took to their shelters, huddled together, and listened to the rain. They thought of the swelling rivers. Grendels would be out tonight, but there would be no scent in rain such as this. And so they were safe.

But quiet. Their mourning penetrated to the very roots of the colony.

They had never known a moment as black as this.

Aaron sat near the fireplace in the main hall, his long arms wrapped around his knees. He looked out at the rain and said very little, as if words would somehow cheapen his misery. His eyes were red-rimmed.

The rain had hammered at them for twenty hours already, as savage as a hail of ball bearings.

They came and they went, but Aaron stayed where he was. Jessica was usually by his side. She needed the touch as much as he did, but it was hours before he could let himself be comforted. When he finally leaned his great head against her chest, and held her, and at last slept, Jessica felt her own grief at last. Bleakly, she wondered how it would feel when its full impact finally struck her. For now there was the rain, and the watch for grendels in the rain. She left Aaron asleep and peered through the window at the mess hall. She knew that Justin was there, and she needed to talk to him more than she could say.

She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder, but it was only Trish. "Go on," she said quietly. "I'll watch things over here."

Jessica nodded her thanks, and hugged her friend. Was Trish her friend? G.o.d, what a thought. What was everything, what the h.e.l.l did it all mean? Toshiro dead. Joe and Linda dead. Stu dead. Now Chaka and her father dead. Why? Because Aaron had wanted to . . .

No. She couldn't allow herself to stumble down that road. Aaron would have saved them, if he could. Aaron was sorriest of all about everything that had happened. Aaron would have died to save Cadmann, or Chaka. Hadn't he said so? Didn't she know it?

Then why did she want to die?

She covered her head and went out into the storm.

Upstream of the base camp, the beaver grendels were in a panic. The river had swelled to twice its ordinary flow, and it hammered at them, drove at their nests and dams with a ferocity they had never experienced . . . but which something deep within them recognized.

Some knowing beyond their dim consciousness.

This is the time . . . this is the time . . .

So they fought to repair, and failed. And when the dams burst some were swept away and dashed against rocks. Others climbed blindly out of the ponds that had swollen to angry, storm-tossed lakes, seeking refuge from the tree trunks and jagged chunks of detritus that dashed them. Chunks of dams from their cousins farther north, chunks of their own dams. Blindly, they fought, but it was no use. And as the rains intensified, as the storms grew greater through the night and into the next day, the work that they and their ancestors had labored over for decades would be swept away as well.

Jessica found Justin in the mess hall, looking out of the window. Katya was at his side. Jessica felt a twinge, but there was nothing to be done. She had made her choice, long ago.

Katya pulled at Justin's arm as Jessica entered. He got up and kissed Katya's hand, crossed to Jessica, and hugged her.

G.o.d, it felt good. That hug was like physical nourishment. She just wanted to stay in his arms, and feel his heart beat against her, and feel that her entire life wasn't falling apart, that the tears streaming down her face would stop one day. That there was enough love in all the world to make everything right.

"Have you talked to Mary Ann?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I can't. Not yet. I talked with Mickey-he's the one who broke the news. I just can't talk about it over holo, Justin. I can't."

He nodded understanding. "I know. It was awful telling Sylvia. Jesus."

"How did she take it?"

"Well. They're busy up at the mine. There's a thousand things to do to get Robor lashed up and into the lee. It's safe-Dad made sure of that. It would be safe even against worse storm than this. But it keeps her busy, and I guess that that is a good idea."

She nodded, and backed away from him. She smelled coffee. "That smells good," she said.

"My manners."

G.o.d, how was he holding up so well? She knew how close he and Cadmann were. In some ways, terrible ways, closer than she had been.

Her heart broke again. Carlos brought her a cup of coffee, thrust it into her hands. "Your mothers, both of them, are very strong. If they weren't, they couldn't have survived this place. None of us could have. The weak did not make the trip. Those unsure of their strength took refuge in the HI."

Jessica stared. "Carlos? What does that mean?"

He shrugged. "Let's just say that I think HI was a convenient out for those who couldn't cope. Just work the garden. Raise children."

"Make sculptures?"

He smiled. "We all have our little refuges."

They paused, listening to the rain hammer against the walls, the ceiling. A steady, arrhythmic thrumming. According to Geographic, the first wave of rain would die away by morning. There would be peace, followed by more rain, in waves, for at least a week. And beyond that week, another storm front, and then yet another. They could wait it out. It was what they were here for.

"When the sky clears," Carlos said, "I'll take a skeeter up in the mountains. To the coordinates Aaron gave us. I will find your father's bones, I think." He sipped at his coffee. There was something in his eyes that she couldn't quite read. "His comm card was still broadcasting. I will find his bones. I believe that I owe your father that much."

Then he closed his eyes, and drank, and didn't say another word for the rest of the night.

The merciless torrent tore the beaver dams into splinters', and the rivers swelled, changed course, flooded across the plains. Flash floods and waterspouts raged, whirled, tore the sky ever more brutally, made it bleed.

The water roared across the plain, and sank down into the nests, the bee nests that the Star Born had seen, but not understood. There were thousands of them across the southern portion of the continent. Each was home to tens of thousands of bees.

There was chaos, and they responded by huddling, and then swarming up and out. The water beat them back. They collapsed their tunnel walls to seal them, and then retreated into their deepest tunnels.

And waited.

For months now, they had fed their special variety of speed-enhanced "royal jelly" to selected embryos within the nest. Now it began to pay off, and the first of the new queens were shaking the water from their motor wings.

Edgar sheltered his head against the rain, and walked out in the ankle-high mud, and sloshed across the encampment. The lights of the distant mess hall were dimmed by the intensity of the rain.

He caught sight of a small shape huddled in the downpour against the wall of one of the dorms. Without knowing entirely why, he headed in that direction.

It was Ruth, and when she saw him coming, she ran in the opposite direction, sloshing through the rain. It was probably impossible but he would have sworn he heard a sound through the downpour, a small, hopeless animal cry.

He caught up with her, happy for his newfound stamina-it was d.a.m.ned difficult to make headway through mud this deep.

He grabbed a shoulder and spun her around. The rain had streaked her hair across her face. Her eyes were wide and staring. She didn't seem to recognize him. He guided her into one of the storerooms.

She shivered. Her teeth clattered until he thought that she would crack the enamel.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked.

She looked at him, through him. And was silent.

She stopped shuddering. Her skin looked very fine to him. Almost porcelain. Almost translucent. She looked to so innocent. So lost.

"You're going to catch your death," he said.

"I don't care,'" she said. "I . . . just don't care." She sounded so lost, so helpless.

He sat her down on a barrel, peeled the cowl back from her head.

"What's the matter? Why don't you care?"

"I don't know what I'm doing here," she said.

He started to speak, then realized how hard it was for her to say even that much, and kept silent.

"I came for Aaron. I thought that maybe there was a way to be . . . with Aaron."

She lowered her face into her hands. "What am I doing? Why am I here?"

Aaron didn't want Ruth. Or anyone. All Aaron wanted was this continent.

"What you did," Edgar said finally, surprised to hear the words escape his lips, "was follow your heart. You had to try."

She looked up at him, and focused on him, as if she were seeing him for the first time. And then lowered her face into her hands, and began to sob. And finally, after a long time, he pulled a barrel next to her, and put his arm around her. She let him.

After a while she leaned her head against his shoulder, and she cried, and he listened to rain, for a long, long time.

Two days later, the rains ceased. The waters began to recede, and the plains began to drain. The earth absorbed the waters, and finally the sun touched the earth again. Dark clouds still fringed the sky.

The earth trembled. And then began to crumble. And from within the ground crawled first one, then ten, and then a hundred, and then a million bees.

Tens of millions. Swarming. Hungry.

The Death Wind had come.

The second day after the rains ceased, Carlos was in Skeeter II, Evan Castaneda in Skeeter IV. They rose up over the mountain ridge, floating like insects on a breeze. Justin crouched next to him.

"Are you all right, amigo?" he asked. The question was one of those existential absurdities that friends were obliged to ask each other. Justin looked at him bleakly.

He didn't answer directly. "Look at the grendel dam," he said instead, pointing below them and to the east. "Utterly destroyed. They're pretty harmless most of the time, I guess-but who knows how they behave in a disaster like this?"

"Mmm." Carlos swung around. There was apart of him that didn't want to complete their stated mission, that would rather do anything in the world than find what they expected to find.

"How is Jessica?" Carlos asked. His voice had grown quieter. Much quieter. Justin could barely hear it above the hum of the rotors.