Beowulf's Children (37 page)

Died for...

She sloshed her coffee down on the ground, and stood. "Let's get a good night's sleep tonight, and get started early."

"Aye."

"Aye."

The fences, the generators, the shelters, and a cache of weapons would be left behind. Eventually, there would be supply stations all over the southern tip of the continent. Forty-eight hours of juice in the fences, and enough weapons to make a hell of a stand before help arrived, with help never more than twelve hours away.

She high-fived Chaka. "Good job."

He grinned broadly. Chaka was just happy to be totally swamped with specimens. He wandered off to search for new fronds to tag.

Jessica and Justin remained by the fireside. Silences between them were strained these days, ever since... what had happened. But that was the chance they had taken. If anything he seemed more uncomfortable about it than she did. And that, she decided, was appropriate.

"Looking forward to the week?"

"We'll see a lot of territory," he said.

"Good find," she said. "The females make good meat, and are decent beasts of burden. The males are as fast as racehorses. Good stock.

"Imagine a hunt," she said. "Some kind of camo shirts and pants, and riding one of these beauties. Sneak up on anything."

"I've thought about it for weeks." Justin stretched. "Well, I think it's that time. Big day tomorrow."

"Big day."

He left without a backward glance. Jessica hunched her knees and stared into the fire. For all of her life she had treasured countless long, intimate conversations with Justin. She missed them more than she could have dreamed.

And yet... what she had done... what they had done was right. The only thing she regretted was Toshiro. He of the gifted hands and strong, golden body...

He had made his choice. As Justin had made his.

As her father had made his. And the colony theirs.

The fire crackled, grew higher and warmer, and then slowly began to die. It was well after midnight before she felt sleepiness to match her fatigue.

Justin woke at the stirring of the horses. For a bare moment he was disoriented, unable to remember where he was. In his father's house? He sat up in his bedroll and washed his face from a canteen. On the mainland every camp away from a base would be a dry camp. Tau Ceti was showing a bare sliver of red to the east, and the air was pleasantly chill. The prairie was silent, and the creatures that took the place of insects on Avalon were quiet.

The path ahead was clear. Three days' ride to the foot of the mountains, some through grendel country, but they had the technology to deal with those. Grendels wouldn't dictate their route. "First one up makes breakfast," someone called. Justin grinned and poured powdered eggs and water into a pan. Others were stirring. Chaka came over to watch the dawn with him. "Morning, cowboy."

"Yippie-yi-o-tie-yay," Justin said.

"Do you see any problems in working with Jessica for the next three days?"

Justin glared at him.

"I know that there have been some—"

Justin interrupted him. "Listen. She made her choice. It wasn't totally right—but it wasn't totally wrong, either. I made my choice. We have problems. But she's still my..."

He thought about it. A dozen possibilities flashed through his mind.

"Family," he decided. "She's my family. We'll work it out."

An hour later a skeeter buzzed in from the south. Justin frowned when he saw Aaron climb out of the cabin. He felt a flash of unreasoning dislike, even hatred burning at the back of his brain.

Aaron. Everything that is good here would have happened anyway. Eventually. And everything bad—you brought. You always knew how to make the games come out your way, didn't you?

Jessica, still tousled but beautiful, went to meet him. Aaron embraced her, then cast a radiant smile in Justin's direction. "Top of the morning, sir."

"Love sleeping on the ground," he said. Aaron roared as if it was the funniest thing that he'd ever heard, and slapped Justin's shoulder. "All ready to go?"

There was a chorus of ayes.

I'm not being fair, Justin thought. Sour grapes. Selfish. And part of his mind whispered. You could have been the leader if you ‘d wanted to be. But you wouldn't do it, and now Aaron has that and Jessica too.

NickNack was already out of sight. Skeeters went along to assist in herding the chamels. Two hundred chamels, and ten horsemen to keep them under control. Shock prods and tranquilizers for the uncooperative.

Aaron grinned widely. "Head ‘em up! Move ‘em out!" he shouted.

Someone answered, "Rawhide!"

The chamel pen was made of nylon netting strung from poles. Two electric lines kept both chamels and predators away from it. Chaka opened the gate as Justin mounted a roan mare from the remount pool. They call it the ramada, he thought. The word, like most everything else they knew about cattle drives, came from recordings of Earth television shows.

Aaron stood in his stirrups. "All right, we have thirty klicks that's never been explored on foot," he shouted. "The skeeters will scout it for us, but stay in threes! Stay together, stay alive. Nobody gets hurt, right? All right, let's move."

"Heeyah!" Katya had ducked under the pen's netting. She waved her arms and shouted to drive the chamels out.

The males moved with light, birdlike fast-twitch motion, scenting the air and looking for an opportunity to escape. One made a dash eastward. Justin kicked at his horse and again wished for spurs. They weren't needed, but there was something about boots and spurs. He laughed and dashed after the stray, caught up and swatted it with a stun wand. The effect was astonishing. It dropped exactly where it was, quivered, and changed colors twice. Its huge eyes blinked three times, and an enormous tear rolled out of one. Then it scrabbled up onto its haunches, and it looked at him accusingly, as if to say, "You beast!"

He prodded it back toward the herd. It returned slowly, damn near dusting itself off first, its dignity untouched. It humphed like a society matron.

Jessica reined up next to him. "Shut your mouth," she said. "You'll draw flies. Well. You certainly made a fan there, didn't you?"

He rolled his eyes, chucked his mount, and kept them moving.

Tau Ceti rose steadily in the sky, but the air remained cool. They were close to the equator, but heading into the high country, and this was winter in Avalon's northern hemisphere. In summer the high desert might be a blasted heath, but it was tolerable for now.

In fact, it was downright pleasant. There were vast beds of poppy-like flowers, and twice he hopped off his mount to snag samples for Cassandra's information banks. Her major task was cataloging and analysis of all data on mainland animal, vegetable, and mineral forms.

This is the way to tame a continent. You have to let it take its crack at you. Some die and merge with the new world. More are born to take their part of the future.

But all this would have happened, in time. Toshiro died because Aaron was in a hurry.

The way was lazy and long, the sun and the dust and the cool breezes were intoxicants. The chamels sang songs of sadness and loss. He tried to whistle their repetitive rhythm.

Chaka rode up next to him. He rode double with Wendy Powers, who often shared his bed.

"This is the life, eh?"

"No worries, if that's what you mean."

"Right. Hakuna matata," Chaka said.

They rode together for a while, in silence. The chamels lowed and sang. The rumble of their hooves on the hard-packed dirt was a music all its own.

Wendy shaded her eyes with one hand, and with the other pointed at an irregular mound, man-high, a hundred meters to the north. "Another one of those bug hills," she said.

Chaka nodded. "I've counted a dozen so far. Little flying crab things.

Industrious buggers. God, Dad would love it out here. So much to see."

They passed another klick or so before Wendy spoke again.

"Do you ever wonder what's happening on Earth?"

"Sure. I guess. No way to know, though."

"They just forgot about us. That's what I think."

"Probably a bookkeeping error," said Justin.

Chaka snorted and pulled his horse away. Before he did, Wendy swung athletically onto Justin's mount, and wrapped her powerful arms around his waist.

They rode silently for a while, and then she said, "Just like Clint Eastwood in Rawhide."

"Yeah. But the Indians didn't eat you."

"You wouldn't know that from watching the movies, that's for sure."

She was quiet for a while, and then said, "When are you and Jessica going to forgive each other?"

"Taking up Julia Hortha's habits?"

"No, I'm really worried about you two. And don't change the subject."

He shook his head. "She made a fool out of my father. And then made him a killer. Not easy for him to forget something like that."

"Not easy," she repeated. "But hasn't there been enough trouble?"

"Are you trying to make peace?"

She kissed his ear, and blew in it warmly. "Would you accept a peace offering?"

"How do you spell that?"

"Any way you want."

He laughed.

"You know," she said, "I'm not that different from you. You have a foster father, who you love. I love a dream—that's what I have instead of a family."

"The whole colony is your family," he said gently.

"That's the same as having no family at all. Aaron is my family. Aaron's dream. If mistakes were made, they were made on all sides. We've got to let them go."

"You guys. In some ways, you Bottle Babies seem like... one big body with two dozen legs and a dozen heads. Sometimes it seems as if you don't care about anything but each other."

"That's not true, and you know it. I fight with Stu Ellington all the time. Well, almost all the time." She smiled at him, and patted his cheek. "If you're interested, you know where to find me, tonight," she said.

She hopped off the back of his horse, and trotted effortlessly back to where one of the trikes was rounding up a stray female.

Justin hunched forward into his saddle. There was some truth in what Wendy said. There had to be a way of putting things back together. If he didn't see it at the moment, it might still be real.

Jessica nodded hello as he pulled up to the rear of the herd.

"Nice country." He felt cautious, and guilty about the caution.

"Beautiful." No other words followed.

"Jessica," he said—

There was a security buzz on his collar, and he cursed. "Yes, Cassandra?"

"Weather reports have shifted. There is now a sixty percent probability that heavy fog will shroud your intended camp site."

"Is that right? Damn. What would you expect the temperature to be?"

"As low as fifty degrees."

"How close is the nearest running water?"

"Twelve klicks."

Twelve klicks. Too damned close for comfort. Pity—they had chosen a beautiful site, near one of the wells. Shower facilities had already been erected, but...

Safety before comfort. We need a different route.

Even as he thought it, Aaron's voice was in his ear. "You heard Cassandra," Aaron said. "We should change course. Those in favor of taking the Mesa route please signify."

"Aye... "

"Aye... "

"Aye," said Justin.

"Motion carried unanimously. Let's do it. Skeeters Two and Six—start flying in supplies."

The air grew chill. The chamels labored upward. The fliers scouted ahead, then came back to lift trikes up to the top of the plateau. Two stayed, two others came down the trail they were climbing. Chaka and Derik pulled up next to Justin and revved their trikes. "How's it going?" Derik yelled. He held out a stick of beef jerky.

Justin said, "Nominal," and bit off a chunk. The chamels struggled up the boulder-strewn path. Their hides were a dusty gray now. It was beautiful to watch them change. They were like terrestrial chameleons with a touch of... well, of speed. Everything on this planet was sped up just a touch. Magical. The pace was fast. The trick was to keep pace, to think, to move, to feel just as quickly.

Aaron was right about that. They had to match the rhythms of the planet. Trying to impose Earth's rhythms was a losing proposition. They should stop counting in Earth years... though the change would be a major hassle.

One of the young chamels stumbled, its long and deceptively delicate leg turning badly. It slid back a few feet, and could have fallen. Justin was off his horse in a moment, and behind it just a moment before its own mother got there.

He felt a horseshoe ridge of hard flat bone close on his shoulder, hard.

Chaka came in with the shock prod, and Justin said "No!" and met her eyes squarely, and kept pushing. She backed away, put her great head behind her child's butt, and pushed.

Together, they got the calf up the defile. She sniffed around her child, and the bruised leg, and seemed satisfied. She eyed Justin suspiciously, got between Justin and her offspring, but somehow... somehow seemed less hostile now.

"Trying to gain their trust?" Derik asked. "I suspect that's a waste of time. They're just meat, right?"

"Not so sure," Justin said. "There are lots of creatures we can use for meat. I think that these things are pretty smart, and they've got a hell of a natural advantage. How about hunting? Ever think of that?"

"Hunting. On a big chameleon?" Derik liked it.

The mesa's top was hard and flat. The trail lay across it for nearly a hundred kilometers before dropping into lowlands again. Grendel country. They would skirt the river that carved that valley, then climb back again to the base camp Aaron had named Shangri-La. Exploring, Justin said aloud.