Beowulf's Children (22 page)

In a half hour the brew was done, and ladled into bowls. It was an evil-looking mess, filled with fragments of samlon heads and the gutted carcasses now torn into chunks by Katya's bloody knife. The dead worms and corkscrew things were bloated pinkly in death. There were little transparent crabs no bigger than a Biter's fingernail. The base stock was as crimson as tomato soup. It looked filled with insects.

Aaron held the bowl to his lips. The Biters watched him, horribly fascinated.

"Mmmmm," he raised the spoon to his lips. He blew on it. Something thick and wormy flopped over the edge of the broad spoon. He slurped it up as if it were vermicelli, making a smacking sound. "Delicious."

"Dinner," Jessica said, "is served."

THE FIRST CHURCH OF THE GRENDEL

In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed: deliver me in thy righteousness.

Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily; be thou my strong rock, for an house of defense to save me.

For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's sake lead me, and guide me.

Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for thou art my strength.

Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth.

Psalm 31:16

Jessica rose only when she was absolutely certain that the others were asleep. On tiptoes, she crept out of the cave. The soft purring snores of sleeping children surrounded her. She felt a delicious synthesis of maternal concern and utter wickedness.

Aaron waited just outside the cave, and held a finger to his lips.

"Shhh."

Jessica nodded, understanding the need for secrecy. This wasn't for Justin. Not anymore-he had made his choice, and Jessica had made hers. Her heart thudded in her chest as she followed Aaron down the path. They passed a tree, and it wasn't until they had passed that she realized that it wasn't just a shadow, but Trish, dark as the night. A Bottle Baby.

Trish joined them as they moved silently down the trail. Little Chaka and others drifted into their line until there were seven in all. They came to a small clearing near a very shallow running stream.

"Running water," she observed unnecessarily. "Everything I am, and everything I've learned says to stay away from it."

Aaron nodded. "In mortis veritas," he said.

He pulled a stone away from a cairn of fist-sized, smooth rocks. Then all seven of them were rolling away rocks, until they exposed a small kettle wrapped in transparent plastic.

Trish produced a hot plate and a battery cell. Toshiro brought water from the stream, and filled the small kettle.

Jessica's stomach felt light and fluttery. During the day she watched Aaron studying leaves and plants with the intensity of a trained ethnobotanist. She was one of the very few who knew why he studied so intently. Quietly, without drawing any attention to himself, he had collected the plants that he needed.

He had also collected the grendel's liver.

Speed generates enormous heat. The metabolic byproducts would kill the grendel, just as the by-products of combustion will kill a fire. Its liver and bile ducts-or the grendel versions thereof-are awesome. A grendel can eat anything, and survive the products of its own massive oxidation, because of its efficient cooling and detoxification systems.

At thirteen years of age, Aaron had analyzed grendel bile ducts, livers, and other organs of cleansing with a view to psychopharmacology.

At fourteen he had created the Ritual. Since then, he had indoctrinated ten others into the mysteries of grendel flesh.

"The First Church of the Grendel," Jessica had laughed. Aaron had barely smiled.

The kettle was bubbling now, and would soon be ready. He added a few handfuls of mushroom-looking things, and something that looked like a fern. She nervously contributed her own handful, a few leaves pruned from one of Cadmann's living room cacti. Poisonous, yes. But in very precise combination with certain plants, and the liver of a grendel that had died on speed...

She watched the stars. The same, but different stars from those beneath which her ancestors had lived and died, loved and hunted, fought and borne children. But they were her stars. The way to survive is to become one with the environment. The Earth Born still saw Avalon as a place of strangeness, of danger. Every one of them would have to die, the things of Earth would have to die before this planet could be truly conquered. And this ritual, as old as humanity, was the prayer of the hunters and gatherers whose lives were interwoven with the land itself. The Earth Born had come as the Europeans to the new world. Aaron said that they would have to learn the traditions of the Native American peoples in order to survive here. They could not own the land, but they could be a part of it.

Aaron dipped a cup into the brew, and lifted it steaming to his lips.

"To us," he said. "To the children of a new world."

He drank. When he was finished, he passed the cup to the left, and the ritual was repeated, and again, until all of them had downed a mouthful of the sour mash.

It smashed into her gut like napalm. She broke into a sweat, her heartbeat rocketing.

For a few foolish moments she prayed that nothing would happen this time... then her stomach soured, and she knew there was no use in hoping. It had begun.

During the first grendel ceremony, she had vomited. Since then Aaron had incorporated acid neutralizers and buffering agents, and now the entire experience was, at least physically, much milder.

The psychoactive alkaloids were kicking in now. External sounds were fading. It was not that they weren't there, or that she had gone deaf, it was that her focus of attention was so tight now, so utterly complete that it was as if she was staring down a long, long tunnel. There at the far end were the simmering kettle and the fire. And if she turned the focus of her attention on Aaron, she saw Aaron, and only Aaron, and if she looked up at the stars and the night sky, she could focus on any point of light, bring it up bright and tight, a hot little marble that she could almost hold in her hand. Aaron's voice crooned to her, sounding for all the world like the music of those very spheres:

"We are the inheritors of this world. We own all of this, everything that we can see, everything that there is to own. We are the strong ones. The others call us Merry Pranksters. We do what we do to test our power. To ensure that we can control every aspect of this planet. And then we place a clown's face upon our deeds so that the old ones will feel no fear.

"But one day we may have to take other steps. And when we do we will have to act as one mind, as one body. As the inheritors of this world, with no barriers between intent and action. As one mind. As one body..."

She could hear his words, felt them slipping between those bright hot marbles. She was burning up, but sought refuge in the very fire that consumed her. Aaron's hands were on her. And then other hands. And then she was reaching, touching, tasting, consuming and allowing herself to be consumed in the fire raging within her, without her, and in the space between those bright, hot marbles in the sky.

INVISIBLE DEATH

Death hath so many doors to let out life

JOHN FLETCHER, The Custom of the Country

The children and their guardians were not quite alone. Above them was Geographic. In geosynch over Camelot, Geographic maintained a web of satellites across the continent and around the planet, and kept careful track of weather and tidal conditions. Geographic, the largest movable object ever created by man, had carried its cargo of frozen human beings across ten light-years, expending a cubic kilometer of deuterium snowball along the way. The deuterium was exhausted now. Its sleeve was a shrunken silver balloon, the pressure inside barely higher than the vacuum around it.

Geographic could still be moved by smaller steering rockets, but until the deuterium was replaced-if it ever was-she would remain in eternal orbit around Avalon. She was their link to Earth, and the Earth Born insisted that all of their children be taken up. "This is your heritage. You call yourselves Star Born, now see the stars."

A few came back as often as they could. Some of the Second still dreamed of crossing the void between the stars. A few even spoke of returning to Earth. For the most part, though, the children of Earth were rare visitors. Geographic's corridors were empty, cold, and dark, with only a few flickering lights to give any sign that she had once been alive.

In the command center, the duplicate of the ground-based Cassandra system analyzed a planet's worth of data. She filtered it, and relayed down whatever seemed of interest.

Greg Arruda looked up from his novel as the comm light came on.

"Arruda here."

"Zack. How are things?"

"Jesus Christ, Zack, they're the way they were the last time you asked." He looked at the console. "The board's green. No large objects approaching the oasis. Children all accounted for at last head count. Wait one-"

"What?"

"No panic, Zack. Yellow light from one of the close-in satellites. There's a wind coming up. Northwest wind, about thirty knots through the pass."

"Rain? Rain means grendels!"

"Ah... indicators say dry. Way dry, suck the water right out your pores. Zack, for God's sake, you worry too much. Let the kids have some time to themselves. And get to bed! I'll call you if there's anything you need to know."

"Yeah. Greg, I know you think I'm a fussy old woman-hell, you were there, you remember grendels."

"No, they slipped my mind for a good twenty seconds there. Zack, get to sleep."

Linda woke as Cadzie shifted in his blanket to search for a nipple. Half-asleep she cooed to him, and peeled back her blouse. Drowsily suspended between dream and reality, she didn't really wake up until Cadzie was sated. The morning was still dark. Light would creep across the glade in another twenty minutes.

Joe was still asleep, his strong, broad back to her. The regular rise and fall of his breathing was absurdly comforting.

They made a good team. They worked together well, and they played together well. And love was... every bit as good. It felt whole, healing. She could easily imagine being with this man for the rest of her life. As soon as she could be away from Cadzie for a day or two, she was going to take Joe down the Miskatonic, in the wedding ritual as old as Camelot himself. All the way down to the ocean, there would be camping, and cuddling, and long, slow, warm lovemaking, and it would be... wondrous.

She wrapped the infant in a blue blanket, covering all but his nose. She opened the door of the dirigible, and stretched in the breeze. She felt utterly content.

Joe had come up silently behind her and was kissing the back of her neck. Dawn was coming in now, darkness already giving way to a warm, silvery glow. The air was no longer still. Ginger and Toffee, the twin golden retrievers, were still asleep, curled up next to each other near the dead fire. There were buzzing sounds and distant calls of pterodons, and even more distant hisses, calls of the monkey-things and the imitative calls of the big spider devil that hunted them.

She turned and kissed Joe. His morning breath was sour but not unpleasant. She handed Cadzie over, patted Joe on his rump, and went to wash and dress, girding her mind for the day's business.

By the time Linda climbed down from Robor, Joe was already roughhousing with Ginger, pretending to bite her throat, growling and barking at her. He gathered up Cadzie and gave Linda a minty kiss. The two of them crossed the glade, dogs nipping at their heels. She never noticed that all the creature sounds of Avalon had gone away.

The machinery within the corrugated refinery shack was burnt and twisted and scummed with pink fire foam. Linda placed her drowsy son just outside the shack, in the waxing sunlight. Ginger curled up next to Cadzie like a big cat. Dog warmth, and the heat of his blue thermal blanket, would keep the boy comfortable until Tau Ceti climbed a little higher.

Joe was still examining the equipment when she returned. He looked utterly disgusted. "Morning light doesn't improve it much, does it?"

"Not a bit. Let's go ahead and make the report." She touched her collar. "This is Linda Weyland, at station three. Who's on duty?"

A second or two of silence, and then they got their reply. "Edgar here. Hi Dad, Linda. Nobody else around yet. Ready to report?"

Joe sighed. "Frankly, I think that we should trash it and rebuild."

"Except that it might happen again," Edgar said.

"There's that. Edgar-"

"Yes, sir?"

"Oh hell, of course you don't know anything you're not telling us," Joe said.

"They don't tell me everything," Edgar said. "Aaron doesn't much care for me, and the others-do you still think it's sabotage?"

"No," Joe said carefully. "I'll say that for the record. After examining the damage here at the minehead, it is my considered opinion that we don't have the foggiest notion what happened. It's another goddam Avalon Surprise."

The wall shuddered as the wind howled against the shack. "Bloody hell, that wind's come up strong," Joe said.

Linda stepped out to fold the blanket over Cadzie's face.

"Sorry, Edgar," she said. "We're picking up a little wind here."

"What?"

"Wind."

"Roger, we see that. There's a storm coming southeast over the mountains. Dry wind, no danger from grendels, but is Robor secure?"

"Very."

Ginger growled, coming to point. She looked off toward the west. Toffee was fifteen feet away, staring in the same direction. They began to bark, yapping against the growing wind. A dry wind, hot. It dried her skin faster than she could sweat.