Beowulf's Children (46 page)

The three of them kept separate bedrooms, and there was a gentle ebb and flow of interest between them. He would visit their rooms, or they his, and the spontaneity of it consisted of offerings and acceptance or rejection earlier in the day. That situation had continued for years.

Within the last four months, Mary Ann had lost all interest in lovemaking.

Sylvia ran her fingers through Cadmann's hair, and gazed at a scar just at the hairline, a faded, faint white line just barely visible to her eyes against the fringe of gray and black. "I don't think I've ever seen this scar before."

She was close to him, the slowly ebbing heat of her still warming him, as it always did. In every way she was a comfort. "I'm not sure," he said.

"Right here." She brushed it, and then blew a little warm air along it, ruffling his hair. "I can't imagine why I never saw it before... "

"There's a first time for everything. That one is a memento from Zimbabwe. Shrapnel. My hair hid it. Until recently."

She sighed and cuddled closer. "Oh well, the women in my family go for that increasingly high-forehead look."

"Hah hah."

"No... really. You lucked out."

They were quiet then again. The twin moons were both high, and their, light silvered the bedposts.

"What did Rachael have to say?"

"She'll look." He traced a line along Sylvia's neck, and then clasped her shoulder firmly. He kissed it. "I wanted to thank you for how you've been with... Mary Ann." he said.

She pooh-poohed him. "For what? I haven't done anything."

"I know that you look at it that way. That's one of the reasons that I love you."

"Just one of them, though."

"Just one."

They lay quietly together, and listened to the sound of the Amazon, and the cooing of the Joeys. Clouds drifting in from the east. Later, they would obscure the moon, but not now.

"Are you thinking about the kids?"

He nodded his head. "And about myself. About who I was, when I started this trip."

"The journey here?" she said, knowing that wasn't what he meant.

"No. The whole thing. Is that a sign of getting old?"

"What?"

He laughed at himself. "Not asking complete questions. Wishing that there was someone who could read your mind."

"No, that's infantile behavior." She bit his chest lightly, nibbling with sharp teeth.

"Well, that's a relief."

"I'll bet."

"What I meant was that I think back over my life. Everyone I know is dead, or here on Avalon. Ghosts."

"It doesn't help that they've never contacted us," she said.

"Never. Not for eighteen years. Christ. What happened back there?"

"I can feed the files in. Want to see them?"

"Christ. It's been so long. Sure. Go ahead."

Cadmann sat up. He turned a physical switch that gave the computer access to his private bedroom, and said, "Cassandra."

It was said that Cassandra should be allowed to see everything at all times, that her security was absolute. Cadmann had to laugh. There was no electronic security in a world that contained an Edgar Sikes. There were only mechanical barriers.

"Please play back the most recent communique from Earth."

"Loading now, Cadmann," she said.

The wall in front of them dissolved.

There was a blast of music, and then a sound of laughter. The words A MESSAGE FROM EARTH floated there in neon, garish red.

And there followed a kaleidoscope of images:

Art exhibits in Milan. Starvation in Beirut. The inauguration of the United Nations Presidium. Images of sports. A string of faces, name-dropping at grendel speed. A play with a London background. Some chitchat from the outer-system colonies.

Each of these could be expanded upon and investigated, and they had been, endlessly. The play was detective fiction with missing clues. The inauguration might be fiction too, given that the Secretary-General was a dead ringer for the sixties' Richard Nixon. Ballet in lunar gravity had become a strange new sport. Even the familiar sports events followed complex new rules, never described. The sound bites were no more interesting than the photo opportunities.

Ultimately, there was just nothing there.

It was like the Encyclopaedia Britannica as designed by social scientists. There was emotion, but no real information. And the emotional inference was a culture so fatuously delighted with itself that it was blind to the efforts of unspeakably vast and numerous generations of men to get them there.

Sylvia toyed with the images, trying to find something new. Stopping and moving forward, and stopping again, and finding nothing. Nothing at all.

And then a human shape walked through the dancing light.

What Cadmann had taken for another image from the Earth message was his wife.

Mary Ann was naked, her head down as if she were sleepwalking, her swollen, ungainly limbs more pitiful when not covered by well-cut cloth. She raised her face, and stared at them, and the impression of near sleepwalking was still strong. "I... I heard music," she said. "Sounds. Street sounds."

Cadmann reached out and turned the video down. There was a little-girl quality to Mary Ann's voice that he recognized. She came and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the images. She pointed into the midst of them, an image of the Canadian Rockies.

"I've been there," she said. "I grew up not too far from there."

Cadmann and Sylvia were silent.

"I'd like to see them again one day," she said, and then waited. There was no comment from either of them, and Mary Ann suddenly seemed to understand what she had said, and her hand went over her mouth.

"Oops. I guess I can't do that, can I?"

"We could go virtual," Sylvia said softly.

Mary Ann nodded. "I'd like that. I'd like that very much," she said. And she curled up at the edge of the bed like a cat, watching the images playing in the air in front of her.

Cadmann said nothing, watching Mary Ann. She didn't move again, didn't speak, but her eyes were open. And she just watched.

And finally, Sylvia's hand stole into his, and they watched until, at some point, he fell asleep.

Dawn came slowly to Camelot. There was no excitement, just another day, one of an endless stream of days. There would be a single difference, perhaps. Robor was anchored over the main aerospaceport, shadowing it, and was being loaded now.

Zack oversaw the loading, although the kids from the eastern encampment were actually in charge. It was, as were most things dealing with the mainland expedition, a joint venture.

Rachael approached him. "Zack," she said, "Cadmann made a rather unusual request. He wants to look at Aaron's records."

Zack's round, sallow face grooved with thought. "Is he all right?"

She evaded. "He's concerned about the dirigible incident."

"He's not making any trivial request, love. What's itching him?"

"Well. The entire ectogynic issue."

"We went over all of that a long time ago."

"And we don't talk about it much anymore. I know."

Zack walked unsteadily over to a tree stump and sat, resting his hands on his knees. He drew a large red bandanna from his pocket, and wiped it across his face with a hand that trembled.

"I think that Carlos is taking the Minerva up to the Orion today. We want to check the main systems. Why don't you invite Cadmann along, and we'll have a place to talk."

She nodded her head.

GEOGRAPHIC

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy but two days old,

Sweet joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while

Sweet joy befall thee.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Infant Joy

The Minervas were the fusion-powered landing craft brought from Sol system. Once on the ground they had served as primary power plants until the mines had produced enough materials for the fabrication of the solar-collector material known as Begley cloth. One Minerva died in the Grendel Wars. The others were used to visit the ship that had brought the children of Earth to their new world: the Geographic.

Late in the morning, Cadmann skeetered in with Sylvia. "Mickey's up at the house with Mary Ann," he said quietly.

"How is she doing?"

Cadmann's face was dark. "Not well. Worse than I expected. It is as if something was just taken right out of her. Linda's death was a near final thing, and then the business with Toshiro—that was a last straw of some kind. I can't say that I don't understand it. I just regret it. Regret everything."

Zack nodded.

He helped Sylvia out of the skeeter.

Cadmann went to Carlos. "Hola." Carlos smiled at him lazily, stretched a little, and nodded his head. "A good day for hiking, eh?"

"A very good one."

The Minerva was a 160-foot long delta-winged aero-spaceplane. Its dock was the artificial lake northeast of the colony, but it could land on any body of water. The Minerva's power plants would dissociate lake water into hydrogen and oxygen to use as fuel. Together they had made almost four hundred round-trips to the Orion craft.

That couldn't last. All of the original equipment from Earth was aging fast. One day another Minerva would fail. When the last Minerva failed, as it must, the human race on Avalon would be grounded until they could build an industrial base capable of taking Mankind back to the stars. Depending on priorities, that might take a hundred years. Knowledge alone wasn't enough. Spacecraft require specialized equipment.

They strapped themselves into the worn seats. There had been fifty, but now there were only nine. The others had been removed: more cargo space and less weight.

Carlos watched his friend ease into the pilot seat. The position was more symbolic than real: Minerva was controlled by a computer. And that's the way it is, Carlos thought. We sit at the controls, but we don't run the colony anymore. I wonder if Cadmann feels that way. Probably not. Cadmann was a strange one. He was bothered, he was troubled, but as long as there was a definite purpose to his life, he moved with all of the old intention and force. It had grown harder over the years to find a purpose to animate him, to give him a sense of meaning and potential contribution, but he still felt needed.

Or had until the Robor incident. Now, there seemed no way to console him. The death of one of the children... There was no word for the sense of loss. And Carlos, for all of the years of knowing Cadmann, couldn't say that he understood the workings of his friend's mind.

"Cassandra. System check."

Cassandra slowed her processes down to give Carlos a system-by-system check of all of the component parts of the Minerva. She stopped in the middle to flash a schematic, saying, "I have identified a burn-through spot in the right rear attitude cluster. I would suggest repair during the next maintenance cycle."

"Is it safe for today?"

"Yes. Fractional chance of failure, and two backup systems."

"All right. Power up sequence. Destination, dock with Geographic."

"Two hundred and nine seconds to liftoff," Cassandra said. Lights flashed on the control board. "Ground tests complete. Engine ignition in one hundred and seventy seconds." They waited. Then pumps whined, and they felt the steady roar as the engines lit.

"Power-up complete," Cassandra announced. "All systems go."

"Take us up."

"Thirty-five seconds to liftoff," Cassandra said.

They waited again; then they felt the first motion. The Minerva slid across the water faster and faster, and suddenly they were aloft. The nose tilted up until it was almost vertical. Clouds broke across the nose; then the sky was baby blue, gradually darkening. The roar seemed to originate inside him, shaking and stirring him, giving him a wild and joyous sense of freedom unmatched by anything else in his world. He loved it.

His weight eased. A whisper of thrust continued: though the oxygen and hydrogen tanks were empty, the fusion plant remained. With that he could reach the planets. Once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere.

He glimpsed Geographic twinkling ahead.

"Docking sequence initiated," Cassandra said.

Carlos unlocked his chair and spun it sixty degrees around. Cadmann was resting with his eyes closed. Sylvia's hand rested softly in his. Zack was engrossed in a holo data-management module display, probably some inventory list that needed to be vetted for the hundredth time.

They needed someone like Zack. Thank God it didn't have to be Carlos Martinez! That, Carlos decided, would have been a genuine waste. But someone needed to put tomorrow on an even par with today.

He, Carlos, enjoyed the present far too much.

Geographic was nearly history's largest work of man (the Zuider Zee still held the record) and was certainly and by far the largest movable object. Though a mere skeleton of its former size and mass, it was still impressive as hell. Cadmann could remember the young man he had been, flying up from Buenos Aires to Geographic for the first time, one of a shuttle group of twelve. The first inspection of a genuine interstellar spacecraft was so different from the simulator sessions they had all suffered through.

It had been the culmination of a dream, a grand adventure at the end of a lifetime of adventures, something so beautiful, so rife with possibility...

It was too big. And it was going to take them someplace too far, and take entirely too long to do it—and they had worked to be there. If they had had regrets it was far too late to voice them by the time they were aboard.

"I was thinking..." Cadmann said. "Why did we come out here?"

"What are you talking about?"