Beowulf's Children (42 page)

Jessica decided that she definitely didn't like Katya.

The long, low sweep of the hills tilted and tilted again as the skeeter bobbed on the air currents, carrying Justin and Jessica to the east.

"Well," Jessica said finally, after about five minutes of silence. "It certainly seems as if the two of you are getting along well."

"Well, somebody's got to be a sex object around here. Jess, how about calling them ‘Harvester' instead of ‘Scribe'? Now we know what it is."

She grinned mildly, her hands tight on the control. A flicker of evil intent tickled the back of Justin's mind, and he decided to push onward. "I think maybe she's feeling her age. You know, some women feel that if they haven't had a child by twenty, they're missing out somehow. Ridiculous, of course."

She glanced at him as if to say: Do you think it's going to be that easy, bud?

"Personally, I think that a woman's got until at least twenty-five. What about you and Aaron?"

She snorted. "Oh, you know better than that—"

"Well, you wouldn't even have to carry the child yourself. You could donate an egg, and he could donate a sperm—I assume it would only take one, I mean, as staggeringly virile as Aaron is... "

"Oh, shut up."

"But Geographic has everything that you'd need..."

They were passing a stand of trees, and coming up a river that ran into a lake. It was a sparkling ribbon of blue beneath them, girded around with trees. She hovered, and Cassandra produced maps to show where grendel-sized heat sources had been spotted during earlier flybys, but they only confirmed what her father's training and Jessica's imagination were painting.

Open water equals death.

Jessica had grown quiet. The skeeter's steady hum was the only sound.

They were alone up there, hovering above the grendels.

"Cassandra," she said quietly. "Shut down."

The privacy circuit, inviolate in the camp, went into effect. No one could hear them, no one could eavesdrop on them. The circuit was dead.

Jessica put the skeeter on autopilot. They were alone in the universe. She turned toward him. "We really haven't talked much since... that night, Justin," she said.

"Been busy. Everything happened so fast."

"But we didn't talk about how we felt. We always used to talk about that. I miss those talks."

He tried to smile, but it flickered out. "You don't need my approval.

Never did."

"No. But I need you. Dad won't talk to me. Even when we tested the shelters, he barely spoke to me."

"Jess, you betrayed him twice in his own home! When Trish yelled for Dad's head, you were sitting next to Trish, not Dad. You won't be back until somebody's funeral!"

Her cheeks flamed. She wouldn't look at him

"So you can't go home again. The question is, can we get him to talk to you? Over a comm card, or in the meeting hall? And that's a maybe. He was suffering after Toshiro—after he killed Toshiro."

"We all were."

"Was Aaron? I didn't see it."

"How could you say that?" Her cheeks reddened. She had to remember that this flight, this conversation, was her idea. "Toshiro was one of Aaron's closest friends."

He said carefully, "Sometimes I think that Aaron doesn't have any friends."

"How could you say that? You've always been his friend."

"Have I?" he asked, softly. "Look at what happened. Dad is stalemated—The First don't give us orders anymore. We can have anything we want as long as we carry those damn blankets everywhere. All because Dad shot Toshiro."

"You have a point?"

"I've spent too many nights thinking about this," Justin said. He hadn't told anyone this, not even Katya, and it suddenly felt like he'd been carrying a live grenade in his chest. "There wasn't any way Aaron could lose! The plan was to take Robor to the mainland. If nobody comes after us, we win. But suppose someone comes. Suppose Dad and Carlos die at sea because Aaron's left orders not to do any rescue work, or suppose Carlos drops dead because Toshiro fires a lightning bolt through him. It's hardball then, with Aaron in charge of a war. If Dad or Carlos kill someone, Aaron gets the moral high ground. Even if Dad forces Robor back to Camelot, Aaron gets what he wants. It's a cause, then, and the First would have to start talking again, and Aaron is one fine debater."

"How could you say that? How can you think it?" she whispered again, astounded.

"All right. Answer me a question: Would you have a bottle baby? Would you take your egg and someone else's sperm, and raise it in one of the incubators?"

"Of course..."

"Then why haven't you?"

"I have had eggs removed," she said, suddenly bitter. "In the case of my death, my percentage of the wealth will go to raising my child. I have listed possible donors—"

She looked away from him suddenly, and her cheeks flushed again.

Suddenly, wildly, Justin wondered if his was one of the names on the list.

"But as long as I'm alive, that's something I would like to try on my own.

Someday. Not now."

"Not now," he echoed.

"No." She combed her hair with her fingers. "Justin, what this is all about is the chance to declare a truce. What do you say?"

He thought about it. There were so many things that he wanted to talk about. But all of them faded into insignificance when compared with what really mattered—his relationship with Jessica. Here, with the two of them, it seemed more important still.

"Truce," he said. And held out his hand. Hers was firm, and dry, and warm.

MISTRESS

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and suppos'd, tho' falsely, to be endow'd with a perfect simplicity and identity.

DAVID HUME

The builders lived in groups of six to eight, rarely more than ten. The lake was their world, and the lake was of their own making. They were fast and black and muscular. They could strip a tree in minutes to create new timber for their constructions.

They were still slow in comparison with the other, the queen who lived downstream from them.

Sometimes the queen came for the prey in the lake. Sometimes for the swimmers themselves, the young builders.

Once, many Turnings before, one of their number had challenged the queen for supremacy.

The queen had become a whirlwind of death. So had the builder and two of her siblings. The fight was vicious. It tore a hole in the dam itself, so that water and precious food slopped over into the river below. But when the fight was over, the three were dead.

The queen was barely wounded. The survivors tasted her anger in the water, the speed, the urge to kill them all. Most of them were on shore now, braving other danger so that the queen would not taste them in the water, but she could see them. Somehow she withheld the death that was hers to give.

No one had challenged her since.

Now she was back.

She swam upstream as she had before, crawling over the dam, never straying onto land. They smelled her in the water. The water carried a scratching sound, not loud, but audible everywhere in the lake, and every builder's nose and eyes broke surface. They saw the great wedge-shaped head emerge with something alive in her mouth.

The queen had come.

What the queen was doing was part of a pattern warped out of true. The light was turning weird. Something tremendous had been floating in the sky for days, never responding to challenge, nor interacting at all. The wrongness in the world encroached on the lake itself. They could taste changes in the water and air, changes that rang down in their bones.

The queen knew it too. She had made four trips in as many turnings of the sun, and each time she had carried a similar burden.

Not for an instant did they forget the queen's blinding speed. She moved slowly, carefully, and the builders watched with respect.

Between the queen's teeth she held a live swimmer. Not one of the queen's own children—but another builder child, from another stream and another lake.

She had brought three of these, tired and feeble but alive. One had died from the distance the queen had carried it between water holes, and damage from the great, serrated teeth.

The queen set the newcomer in the water. It floated for a moment, then began to twitch its tail, then to move.

And the builders slowly, carefully approached it. It began to swim. They nudged it along. The other young butted it, but the builders were a friendly clan. Even during the best of times there would have been no challenge.

Change was coming. They must keep to the water, for the Death Wind seemed to be everywhere these days. The builders were distracted; they would not challenge the queen's guest.

The queen slipped into the water, gliding like death. She vanished beneath its surface, and came up with one of the lens-crabs that lived in the builder-made pond, a prey-creature. It flipped and flashed just once.

The queen moved like the owner of all creation, smoothly through the water, along the length and breadth of the lake. The very Lady of the Lake.

"Did you see that?" Justin said, astonished.

"Would have been hard to miss. Cassandra?"

"I have recorded all of it."

"What do you make of it?"

"Please narrow your question."

"I seem to be looking at some kind of grendel social interaction," Justin said. "I know that's ridiculous, but there it is."

Jessica nodded. "The grendel brought those others—those huge hands!

They must be specialized to the task of building dams—"

"Beaver grendels—"

"Brought them a sacrifice. I thought that it was food of some kind. Apparently it wasn't. The beavers gathered around and helped to guide the baby—that's almost certainly what it was—around in the pond until it could swim by itself."

"Grendels cooperating in a snowstorm. Grendels carrying the young of other grendels in their mouths. What in the hell were our parents dealing with on Camelot?"

Jessica's right eyebrow went up. "Retarded grendels?"

"Right. So what do we do? We can destroy this entire ecology—"

"Not on your life."

Jessica took them up another two hundred feet. "Cassandra. Route a message to Shangri-La and Camelot. I want an alternate path. This is the first such ecology we've found, and I want to preserve it."

"Checking now," Cassandra said.

Jessica raised her right eyebrow again. "Do you have any objections to that?"

"No, I'm with you," Justin said.

"I was wondering if you thought that it was a little flaky. You know, grendel cult and all of that?"

Justin was looking down out of the side of the skeeter, at the shimmering water hole far beneath them. Within it, there was a world that none of them had ever known.

"No. Whatever is going on there, it would be an absolute sin to destroy it."

Jessica twinkled, and squeezed his hand. For the first time in months, he felt that they were operating on the same frequency. She nodded her head happily. "Thank you," she said. And then, impulsively, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

His cheek burned, and he wasn't completely certain that he understood why.

Cassandra said, "Your alternate path is approved. You will head west by fifteen degrees—"

The second water hole was smaller. They'd found a grendel carcass lying seven meters away from the water's edge. They'd left it untouched. Justin lay thirty meters farther out, flat on his stomach behind a bush, and examined the scene through war specs.

"What do you think?" he asked into his mike.

Jessica answered from her vantage point in the skeeter above. "I think that the grendel who owns the water hole got into a fight for supremacy. It must have been something to see."

"All right. Hit it."

She brought the skeeter in to five meters above the water and dropped a wad of cotton scented with speed. Alien speed, guaranteed to make a grendel crazy.

Justin watched. The skeeter throbbed. The water lapped at the edge of the pool.

And nothing else.

"Try it again," he whispered, and she did. Splash. And then nothing.

The sound of his own breathing grew almost unendurably loud. There was something wrong here.

He stood. Justin tucked his war specs away, and approached cautiously.

"Keep scanning for infrared. No grendel sign?"

"None," she said, "We've scanned that water hole. There are samlon there, but no adult."

"Then the old adult was killed. How long ago?"

He examined the corpse. It was torn and flattened, but he noted some fluttery motion around the edges. He backed up, then tore a branch from a nearby tree to use as a lever. He lifted the grendel's jaw. "Scavengers," he said. "Like the one I saw earlier. Bugs."

"They're not bugs," Jessica said.

"I know, they're obviously related to crabs like half the life on this planet." One of the scavengers flew up as he exposed it. The motor wings buzzed violently. It circled his head, then settled again. "Jessica, this carcass is just seething with these things. Cassandra, are you recording?"

"Affirmative. This is a new life-form."

"I'll get a sample." Justin lowered the grendel to the ground and took out a collection box. The grendel's hollow eye sockets stared at him. A beetle emerged from the left socket and flew away to the south with a harsh burring sound.

The chamels had been watered and grazed, and were settled down for the night. Tents had blossomed around the water hole, and a defensive perimeter was established.

Aaron was off at the other fire with some of the kaffeeklatsch, and Jessica felt glad of it. Her reconnection with Justin was still fragile, still needed time to cement—but there might not be time after all. Katya snuggled up to him. Jessica tried not to feel anything, but she couldn't help watching. The two seemed to have settled into a rhythm. There were subtle turnings when either of them moved, subtle responses of body language when either spoke. They were more than lovers. Quietly and without fanfare, Justin and Katya had become a couple.