Beowulf's Children (45 page)

Trish doesn't take orders worth a damn, you know."

Ruth had reached the coffee vat. She drew two cups and tried to fill them, still without looking at Edgar. The vat was empty. "We're going to seed coffee in the hills around Point Ten," she said.

"Below where the snow grendels popped up?"

"Yeah."

"That's a kicky notion. Snow grendels were bad enough without coffee nerves. So, have you told your parents?"

"About what?"

"About the plans for a coffee crop," Edgar said gently.

Ruth looked up, smiling bravely. "About the baby, you mean. No. I haven't told them."

"How long since you last talked to them?"

"None of your business."

"Right." Edgar plucked the two cups out of her hand. "Come with me."

He walked away without looking back. Ruth dithered, then followed. Followed him into the big tent that belonged to Edgar and a junkyard of computer equipment, and the little cappuccino device that had been with him since the magic hurricane.

He made cappuccino in silence save for the earsplitting shriek of steam jetting into milk. Ruth took the cup from him and said, "I'm sorry. I don't mean to shut you up."

"Okay. When?"

"Once since we got the go-ahead to come here. I couldn't stay in Camelot, Edgar. The way they looked at me! But Aaron took me with him—this far—and it wasn't that I wasn't taking Mom's calls, it was just I was always somewhere else. I talked to her once. A month ago. But Dad never calls. He talks to Aaron and says to say hi."

"You could call."

"I should call. I know I should call."

"Better talk to your mother first. Colony psychiatrist, she'll have a good idea how your dad will take it."

She nodded. "I should call."

"Take your coffee with you."

She didn't move. She sipped, not looking at him. He asked, "You don't want me listening, do you?"

She considered. She said, "Yes."

DEMONS

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

SIGMUND FREUD, Complete Psychological Works

Cadmann Weyland slammed his fist down on the table next to the chair. Coffee splashed on his pants and the rug. Rachael, Zack's wife and the colony psychologist, shook her head ruefully. "Cadmann—all the way from Fafnir Ridge to end up on my throw rug? What a waste!"

Cadmann dropped six paper napkins on the spreading stain and put his foot on the napkins. "I'm sorry. I really am. Rachael, I just don't feel right. I haven't for months."

"Years," she said quietly. "Almost a century now."

He didn't turn to look at her.

"None of us have really been ourselves since we left Earth, If we didn't have hibernation instability, we worried because we might. And if we managed to convince ourselves that we didn't, then we had to worry about everyone else. We had to change the entire design of the colony to provide failsafe mechanisms. Backups to backups, in case somebody, somewhere ended up with an ice crystal we didn't count on."

"We did a good job," Cadmann said.

"And then the children were growing up," she continued. She was playing with a desk hologram. It rotated in front of her, a puzzle consisting of a blue globe and wires and a box of sticks. When she touched a piece it flashed. When she moved her finger to another location, the piece moved with her. She made a mistake, and the blue globe fell to the ground and shattered. It re-formed in the air above the desk, and she continued.

"We passed our fears to our children. But they were ours, not theirs."

"Not all of them," Cadmann said.

"The nightmares?"

He nodded. "We never talk about them, not really, but the children know that their parents wake up screaming. They know."

"But you're not dreaming of grendels now, are you?"

A professional question, and he answered as a patient.

"No. I dream of the night up on that dirigible. When Toshiro climbed up behind me. When I turned, and fired." His eyes were tired, and his voice. He felt as old as God. "But I dream Toshiro is a grendel. He's about to eat Ernst. Nobody sees it but me."

"They had no right to take the dirigible."

"Well, no, but by their lights they did, Rachael. They could even believe they had a duty. We denied them the right. And we had no justification for that. Not really. They are what we used to be!" He threw his head back and laughed bitterly. "God, I remember what it was to be their age. Young and dumb and full of cum. Ready for anything, and eager to handle it. That was what we were! What we all were! And what did we turn them into? Pranksters. Carving buttocks onto ice cliffs. Hacking into Cassandra. Flare-surfing off the coast. We gave them no useful place to put their courage. We called them cowards and weaklings. And they know it's something wrong with us."

"Cadmann... "

He spun. "Did you see the attack on the mesa? Did you see Cassandra's playback? Six grendels. Six adult grendels, and the kids took them. One boy died. One grendel got away. Completely hostile weather conditions, a new attack pattern. One loss." The pride in his voice was something that she hadn't heard in him since the night on the dirigible, and she let him go on.

"Those are our children. They can take that land. Not us. We deserve to stay here. And they had to show us. They had to force the issue, because God knows that we never would have."

She had managed to extract a stick from the blue ball, and it was delicately balanced. So far so good...

"What did you want to talk about, Cadmann?"

"Aaron." He spoke the two syllables flatly. "Aaron bothers me."

"Aaron," she said. The blue ball fell and cracked. A chick emerged, grew to adulthood, flew to the floating nest of sticks and laid a blue egg.

Rachael asked, "Why?"

"I talked with Justin about that before they left. I've talked to everyone that I could, except you. And now I have to do that. Something is wrong. He was the author of a situation."

"Yes?"

"When he took Robor, there was no way for him to lose. I don't mean lose the dirigible, I mean... he thought more deeply into this than any of us did, understood in advance every move that we could make, and probably had a way to counter it. At the end half of humankind would be on the mainland, and all under his command."

"And you're feeling intimidated?"

Cadmann shook his head. "He wins. But only if he's ready to sacrifice... well, a scapegoat to be named at a later date. I mean, Toshiro was his friend, and his death just played right into the scenario. Anyone could have died in that slot. Not just one, but several."

Rachael sat back. The blue ball slipped free of its final constraint, and spun happily in the air before her.

"Cadmann—what are you saying?"

"I'm not saying. I'm asking. Is there something wrong with Aaron?"

"Your wife thinks so."

"And Joe and Linda did," Cadmann said. "Not many more. You don't, do you?"

"No." A long pause. "What is it you suspect?"

"I keep wondering if there might not be some connection to the artificial wombs. To the way they were raised."

"You're worried about some supersociopathic patterns?"

"Yes," he said, and his voice sounded small, even to him.

She was studying him, he thought. Afraid of him. "Cadmann—you were in combat. Didn't you have to face the reality that some of your men would die in a military action?"

"Of course."

"Couldn't Aaron see it that way?"

He frowned. "I suppose. You know, I never thought about it that way."

"We don't call you a sociopath just because you're capable of taking casualties to further a cause."

"You don't now," Cadmann said. "But I recall when that's precisely what you called me, and for precisely that reason."

"Cadmann—"

His smile was thin, and he spoke each word slowly and distinctly.

"You've kept records on every one of us. From the very beginning, on Earth, when we were chosen, to the discovery of hibernation instability, to where everyone thought I murdered Ernst—"

"Cadmann—"

He brought his face closer to hers. His expression of cynical amusement hadn't changed. "And you decided I was crazy. Right there in the clinic, you staked me out for the grendel."

"We didn't know about grendels!"

"But I did, and I told you."

"Cadmann, that was a long time ago."

"Yeah. And I can never, will never forget that night." He straightened and smiled, this time more genuine, but still very distant. "Want to talk about nightmares?" He sat carefully, his eyes never leaving hers. "All right, let's talk nightmares. I'm the only one on this planet who has ever come face-to-face with one of those things and survived. Close enough to kiss it. Close enough to have all the time I needed to imagine it tearing me apart. I have dreamed of it killing and eating me ten thousand times. Unless I completely overestimate you, you've talked to Sylvia and Mary Ann about me, just as I've talked to you about Mary Ann. And it's all gone into Cassandra."

Rachael sat pointedly silent.

"I want the files on Aaron."

"For what purpose?"

"I don't know, exactly. Look, we both know he'll do nearly anything—maybe not nearly—to reach his goals. So I want to know more about what those goals are. What's he really up to?"

She shrugged. "You're the security chief. Tell Cassandra it's an emergency."

"I thought of that," Cadmann said. "I probably can bully Cassandra into giving me your files. I'd rather do it officially with your cooperation." His calm slipped a little. "Please. My son and daughter are over there. The children of the women I love most in this world." He dropped his head. "Mary Ann is just holding on, you know? And she's shut me out... "

"Excuse me?"

Cadmann looked out of the window, across the fields, to the biology building, up to the stone stack of Mucking Great Mountain, where the pterodons wheeled in eternal mist.

"We haven't been man and wife since the day Toshiro died. She just pushed me toward Sylvia."

He paused, as if waiting for Rachael to say something. The silence stretched almost another minute.

"I thought once... that what I wanted was Sylvia. But not like this. Mary Ann gave her love to me. And now she can't let me in." He lowered his voice. "There's something about her now. Something... translucent. It is as if I can see light through her. As if she barely wants to be here anymore. Like she's not even certain why she is holding on."

"And you think you can help her?"

He nodded.

"By showing her she was right," Rachael suggested. "Aaron is a monster, and only she knew."

Cadmann looked up. "I hadn't thought of it in—"

"Ruth's pregnant."

"You've talked to her? Good. I worried about... that. How long?"

"Two months, she thinks. Cadmann, I'm not supposed to ferret out all your secrets. There has to be privacy. I haven't—Aaron could keep his secrets, but now he's probed my daughter! I'll look. Maybe I'll tell you what I find, and maybe I won't."

Cadmann stood up. "Thank you," he said, and walked out the door before he could say more.

Rachael Moskowitz sat behind her desk.

Her body felt tired, but her mind was very much alive.

Of all the Earth Born who had been frozen at Hecate Town on the Earth's Moon, stacked aboard Geographic, thawed and refrozen for tasks aboard Geographic during their trip across ten light-years and two hundred years of time, and finally thawed for the last time on Avalon's alien soil... only Rachael Moskowitz knew herself undamaged. Only Rachael could know that. And that was both a blessing and a curse.

She wasn't certain about Cadmann. What he had been through was traumatic, but it was long ago. A man like that ought to have put it out of his life, but he hadn't. None of them had really been able to put the Grendel Wars behind them.

"Cassandra," she said. "Aaron Tragon. Psychological evaluation file."

Cadmann took the skeeter up and into Mucking Great Mountain, toward the fortress that, years before, had been Mankind's only bastion against the grendels.

Now it was vines and crops, pens for those animals of Earth and Avalon that could exist side by side. The mountain stream brought ice-cold water into their home, and nurtured their fields. Then it joined the Miskatonic, to bring life to the entire valley.

He spiraled the skeeter down to the landing pad with hardly a bump. Sylvia joined him at the pad, her golden hair flowing behind her. She looked like an angel.

She kissed him lightly. Before Cadmann could ask the question, Sylvia said, "She's sleeping."

He nodded. He slipped his arm around her waist, and they walked into the house together, through the fragrant living room.

In the center of the house was the common bathroom, with the big triangular tub and the steam-shower.

Once upon a time he might have had daydreams... two women that he loved, both married to him... it was easy to let erotic fantasies run wild. But it had never really worked out like that.

In the second and third year of their three-way relationship, there had been some gentle explorations of the sensual potential. Massaging, and group dancing, and even sleeping three in a bed on cold nights. But it became clear that this was happening out of Mary Ann's attempt to be what she thought he wanted in a wife, and not from any urge on her part. And so he had called a halt to it.

There were more occasions, once on Christmas, and once on his fiftieth birthday, when he found himself bedded by both of his beloved. But they were tolerating each other's presence; there was no genuine joy in the intimacy. And knowing that Mary Ann would do almost anything to keep her man happy, he began to see it as a variety of child abuse.