Beowulf's Children (10 page)

Geographic had spotted it first, almost a year before. The general hilarity and grudging admiration was balanced by alarm. How had they done it? And who? Well, the Merry Pranksters, of course, but who were they? Justin and Jessica knew, Cadmann thought; one or the other of them might actually be a Prankster. But there was no way that the carving of Mount Tushmore could have been anything less than perilous. The danger doubtless added to their pleasure in the deed.

"If we knew..." he said finally, hovering at approximately anus-level with the second buttock on the left. A flat, petal-shaped protrusion marred the surface just below the right cheek. "... whether that was just an irregularity in the rock, or a birthmark, it might be possible to figure out just whose buttocks these were... "

"But..." Sylvia choked, "and that's a big but... that still wouldn't establish whether the owner of said birthmarked buttocks was in fact the perpetrator."

"How true," Cadmann said. "It would be just like those rascals to display someone else's buttocks, just to throw us... off the scent. As it were."

"Ahem."

He spun the skeeter around and headed back north. He pointed his forefinger at Mary Ann, thumb cocked, and Mary Ann said, "I do hate to leave it behind."

About fifty miles from the Bluff, Cadmann engaged his communications link. Immediately Cassandra's familiar voice said, "There are seventeen messages waiting for you, Colonel."

He sighed. "Any of them emergency?"

"In case of an emergency message I would have initiated contact despite your request for isolation," she chided gently. "You have several priority dispatches, but no emergency."

"Hmmm... sort and play."

There was a beep, and before Cassandra could broadcast an old message, the air crackled. "Dad! Are you there?"

"Absolutely. Justin?"

"Glad you ‘re on line."

"Problems?"

"We've had a little excitement since you left."

"Like what?"

"That would be telling. Why don't you just fly straight to Aquatics, Dad-and promise me something?"

"Like what?"

"That you'll try to keep an open mind."

"You implying I have a problem in that department?"

"First edition: Oxford-Avalonian Dictionary. Verb: Weylandize.

Definition: to render inflexible."

"Hah hah. Want to give me a hint?"

"I think not. See you in about twenty minutes. And first-class promise about that open mind, remember?"

"Remember."

Cadmann took himself back off line for a moment. Mary Ann was shaking herself awake. "What was that?"

"Our eldest boy. He's got a surprise for me. At Aquatics..." His thumb hovered over the control panel. If he touched the switch again, Cassandra would come back on, and in all probability tell him more about the surprise than he really wanted to hear.

I'll let it be a mystery, he thought.

All right, Justin, m'boy. Thrill me.

The skeeter pad was clear as they dropped down toward Aquatics. A small crowd had already gathered around it, with another clutch of curiosity-seekers ringing one of the dolphin pens. Dolphins... ? Had Quanda and Hipshot finally made the beast with two backs, or whatever it was that dolphins did? But that wouldn't be a priority call-

He hovered for a moment, until the crowd backed farther away. There had only been one skeeter accident on Avalon, but that was enough. A sudden gust of wind, and Harry Siep's arm was spurting in the dust. Lucky for Harry. It could have been his head, and heads were much more difficult to reattach.

They spun down into a perfect landing. Mary Ann threw aside her blanket, and stretched like a big chubby blond cat as the rotors began to slow. Before Cadmann could open the door Jessica was there, golden and radiant, flinging it aside to buss him soundly.

Seeing her made him sigh. She possessed all of her mother's beauty, and she didn't have ice on her mind. "Daddy," she whispered in his ear, as intimate as a lover, "we've really got something."

He stepped down from the skeeter, and was immediately awash in comments from the rest of the crowd. He waved an awkward hello. As always, he had the sense that the group was waiting for something. Some proclamation, some reaction from him. They hung on his words as if his opinion meant more than all the rest of theirs combined. It was this as much as anything that created his intermittent need to escape, to be off in the south hunting, or fishing, or collecting plants. On such trips he turned his goddamned tracer off. Nothing but an emergency message was authorized to break through. Zack had "tested" that precisely once. No one else even tried.

Cadmann helped Mary Ann down, and she immediately turned to hug Jessica. Occasionally he suspected that there was some communication between mother and daughter from which he was utterly excluded, some dark and intimate female understanding.

At the moment Jessica was all showboat, twinkly and vibrating with secret knowledge, hugging Sylvia to give both mothers equal attention, then linking arms with Cadmann. Without another word she marched the three of them into the Aquatics building.

Justin opened the door for them.

Cadmann entered, and held his breath.

"Jesus Christ..." he started. He was frozen, felt the chill right down to his heels. The beast reminded him of a moray, in some ways... but it was a good deal larger. "You dredge this out of the Deeps?"

"Damn near grabbed it out of your living room, Dad," Jessica said. Justin quickly recounted their adventure. Cadmann stared at Sylvia and then at Mary Ann. He excused himself brusquely and went outside to break through the ring of observers surrounding the dolphin tank. He needed a look at the beast itself.

A large yellowish plastic bubble framed the tank, and several wet oily splotches on the inside suggested that the eel had attempted escape. It glided through the water, swishing hard from side to side, around and around endlessly, expending vast energy. Jessica and Justin appeared behind him.

"Does it eat?"

"Sure does. Anything that swims. The dolphins have been sharing."

"Has Big Chaka looked at this yet?"

"He'll fly in from the coast this evening," Jessica said. "Little Chaka's run a simulation."

"And?"

Little Chaka spoke from just behind him. The voice was always deep and resonant, and a little surprising because it came from slightly above him. Only two people in the world were taller than Cadmann. "It lived in the Deeps," Chaka said, "and came upstream to lay eggs."

"It eats fish. Land animals too?"

"If it could swallow them whole. It's not built to carve out steaks. But I think we're seeing it at the end of its life cycle. This is an old creature. What passes for a liver is operating at maybe fifty percent. I think it will be dead in a year. Have to ask Father, of course."

"Could it have had legs early in its cycle?"

"Interesting idea, but Cassandra says no. The eggs are almost mature-"

"Eggs?"

"Yes, we've got samples. What she's producing are thousands of little eely things that look just like Mama. No sign of legs. I think that Mama Eel is primarily aquatic, and can survive out of the water just long enough to get back upstream. She really prefers salt water to fresh. No sign of speed sacs or anything like them. This is a pretty standard animal. Not a lot of surprises."

Cadmann heard Chaka's voice as if it came from the bottom of a rain barrel. A sudden wave of fatigue washed over him, hot and clammy, transmuting his limbs to lead. In his suddenly blurred vision, the thing in the water began to transmute. It grew legs, and its tail fattened. It reared up out of the tank with its huge, savagely powerful teeth drizzling blood, and snapped down just inches from his foot, and-

He shook his head, and all was normal again. A perfectly harmless eel swished angrily through the water. Harmless. Captured.

Swish, swish.

"So why has it come back?"

"To breed," someone said.

"What Colonel Weyland meant was why now?" Chaka said. "And we don't know."

Cadmann turned to stare northward toward the mainland.

"Dad, we'll have to go," Jessica said.

He nodded. The eel would start that debate again. It was time for a full-dress expedition to the mainland, had been for years. He'd always known they would have to go there.

Someday. He had no taste for it. After the Grendel Wars, he had thought he wanted that, and had made two trips to the mainland, the second shorter than the first. He had bagged a grendel with the new grendel guns, and been holo'ed grinning next to his prize.

But something had altered within him, some subtle tidal change in his bones.

If there was anything he needed to prove about himself, he would prove it here, on the island. And if there was anything that he needed to know about grendels, he would allow others to learn it for him.

He lived with awful, bloody dreams in which all of their efforts had meant nothing. In his sleeping mind, rapacious demons had rolled over the colony like a red tide, killing everything, everyone. The few dozen survivors stranded up in Geographic could hear the screams, and see the blood, but they couldn't come down. Couldn't ever come down. And stayed up there until they slowly ran out of food... and water... and air.

Waking, he would shrug away the dreams. He didn't want to know how narrowly sanity had been preserved. And when he thought about going back to the mainland, he wondered what would happen if another grendel ever touched him. He wondered if he could take it. If his sanity would hold.

He didn't ever want to find out.

"... Zack," Justin said, pulling him out of his reverie.

"Zack?"

"Wants to kill it. And the eggs."

He felt an instantaneous, visceral flash of agreement, followed swiftly by the voice of reason. "As long as it's not dangerous that's not his decision to make," Cadmann said. He pointed to the tank cover. "Your idea?"

Jessica looked sheepish. "Zack ordered a cover."

"Good."

She hesitated. "We didn't put it on, until the eel tried to escape.

Took three of us with poles to keep it in. Then we put up the cover."

"Not when Zack told you to?"

"No, sir."

"He had the authority to order that. Do you dispute it?"

"No, Dad, it just seemed-"

Cadmann shook his head. "Jessica, we've been through this before. Zack is chairman and governor, and we don't lightly disobey him."

"You did. You rebelled-"

"Exactly," Cadmann said. "I rebelled. Some things are important enough for that. But you don't do it lightly! I take it your researchers found the cover inconvenient—" She looked at her feet.

"So you ignored a valid order because it wasn't convenient. Do I have to say anything else?"

"No, sir. But he wanted to kill it, too! And we found it at the Bluff, not down here!"

"And at the Bluff you and your brother had every right to do what you thought right," Cadmann said wearily. "Not here."

"It'll go to a vote," Jessica said. "Can we rely on you?"

"To approve keeping it alive? Yes." He thought for a moment. "That's not all that will go to a vote. The next question will be about the mainland, you know. We need that major expedition. Not just quick trips to initiate Grendel Scouts, a study expedition... "

"Yes," Justin said. "Joe Sikes thinks so too. Something's going wrong with the mining robots."

Something in Justin's tone made Cadmann frown. "Eh?"

"Don't know. Joe thinks it's Star Born. But it's not, it's another Avalon surprise."

Cadmann nodded. "And the ecology returns to Camelot. The wind blows from the north part of the year. God knows what may get rafted over here. We have to know what else may come."

"Avalonian homing pigeons," Justin offered. Jessica looked pained. "And no grendels here to eat them. We're likely to be up to our clavicles in something."

"There haven't been for twenty years," Jessica offered.

"There weren't any eels for twenty years, either," Justin said.

Cadmann frowned. "Good point. And the ecology is returning. Not just the eel. Why now?" He nodded in submission. "I suppose there will need to be... some kind of expedition."

"We can plan it on the next Grendel Scout outing," Justin said.

"Safety-"

Justin grinned. "We can work that out, Dad. We can work it all out. We just want to know that, if it comes to a fight, you'll be on our side."

Cadmann hesitated.

"Or at least not against us," Jessica added swiftly.

Cadmann considered them both. The fear was in him, dammit, not in them. Fear would be a horrible legacy to bestow upon his children. And-it was their world, more and more it was their world. They hadn't asked to be born here.

Cadmann often wondered what the children-the Star Born-thought about that. Did they resent being born here, denied the heritage of Earth? Earth, the solar system, crowded, teeming with humanity, and with the crowding came rules, rules, rules-He had come here to escape the rules. And now they had rules because they couldn't trust their own damaged brains.

And it's their world, not ours.

"Open mind," he said. "I'm already bound, right, Justin?"

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

God bless the King, I mean the Faith's Defender;

God bless-no harm in blessing-the Pretender;

But who Pretender is, or who is King,

God bless us all-that's quite another thing.

JOHN BYROM, to an officer in the Army

The debate was already in full swing as Cadmann entered the town hall. The hall fairly shimmered with the aromas of the communal meal: mutton and turkey, bakery smells, mustard greens, and steamed corn fresh from the fields. It was a laughing, murmuring, jostling family chaos. Three hundred, nearly every Earth Born, most of the Star Born, all of the Grendel Scouts, many children. There were tables and seats for more than seven hundred, and that was a reminder of what population they had expected to have before the grendels nearly destroyed them.