Beowulf's Children Part 39

He was twenty feet from the creature now. Its eye, a spheroid four feet across with a black iris, its tiny-seeming eye was on Justin and it just didn't care. To Jessica he looked so small. She could see his point. He was nothing in comparison to a beast such as this. Why should it pay him any mind whatsoever? And yet . . . and yet . . . Avalon Surprise.

The pig things snorted and ambled away. They were rooting around in the gra.s.s, moving when they had to stay ahead of the Scribe's long blue lip.

She brought the skeeter in for a closer look, and the snouter looked up, more alarmed by the whirring, flying thing in the sky than it ever was by Justin's presence.

"What are you doing now?" she demanded.

"Getting close-ups for the record. Jess, Chaka is going to absolutely love this! I'm looking at the bones of a grendel's tail, with a couple of vertebrae still attached. The rest of it could have fallen off years ago.

The spikes on the tail are caught between the edges of the plates of the sh.e.l.l. It catches their tail spikes and they can writhe themselves into a coma for all the good it does them. These bones, they're cracked-"

"Ca.s.sie!" Jessica howled. "Where are your safety overrides?"

"Working," Ca.s.sandra said, and went silent.

It came to Jessica that checking all of Ca.s.sandra's protective measures might be the work of months, or lifetimes. "Cancel that last question. You hear me, Ca.s.sie?"

"Canceled. Justin is safe by my current parameters," Ca.s.sandra said. "I have backtracked this creature over the past year. It is not an aggressor. Grendels do not survive in its domain. I find no other local predators thus far."

Current parameters. "When were your current safety parameters updated?"

"Eighty-seven days ago."

Three months ago. Edgar had been fiddling with Ca.s.sandra, likely at Aaron's instigation, giving the Second more freedom to explore.

"Might as well join the madness," she said, and brought the skeeter down a hundred meters away from the moving mountain. The Scribe didn't look able to move quickly, but she didn't want it accidentally changing course and crus.h.i.+ng her skeeter.

She was glad to see Katya up and around and looking so d.a.m.ned chipper. She didn't completely agree with Justin's choice of women, but what the h.e.l.l, she didn't really have anything to say about it, did she?

The wind came cleanly through her lungs as she jogged toward them through armpit-high gra.s.s. The rapidity of her approach seemed to attract Momma Mountain's attention, and it turned its eye sluggishly toward her. Taking her time. It was impossible to imagine something like this having any potential for speed.

Justin was only ten feet away from it, playing his camera over four sets of trapped bones. One was no more than several joints of a grendel's tailbones. The others were distorted mummies.

It seemed clear what had happened. Momma Mountain had approached the river to drink. Each grendel in turn, or all together, had made a suicidal charge and gotten stuck. Each had thrashed . . . that one seemed to have actually torn some of the plates loose, but it had done it no good. It hung limply, its bones cracked, as if it had shattered itself in those final convulsions. As if it was too powerful to live.

The great herbivore's lip rippled steadily, mowing two-meter-high gra.s.s.

"We have to see what's going on under there," Justin said. "Drop a camera-"

"Harden it," Jessica said, as if they'd been talking all along. "It'll get chewed up."

"Yeah, hardened, with a light-"

"A little light. Camera set for low light."

"Right, it must be permanent night under there. We don't want to blind . . . a whole d.a.m.n ecology under there, I bet. Ca.s.sandra, we need that camera. How long to make one up?"

"That will depend on priorities. The practical answer is that I can fabricate it in Camelot and put it aboard the next supply shuttle."

"Tell Edgar."

One of the pig things came close, evidently emboldened by the nearness of Momma Mountain. Jessica took a step toward it, and it scampered away.

Justin's expression was hard to read. He said, "Watch this."

Katya echoed that. "Watch this," she said, nearly glowing with pleasure as Justin crouched, extending his hand. It held a handful of balled gra.s.s. He was very still.

At first the snouter just stared at him, but then it came close, and then closer, and then she couldn't believe it, but the thing was eating out of his hand. It had actually begun to lick his hand when it suddenly shook its head, startled at its own boldness, and backed away.

Justin brushed his hands off on his pants.

"What was that all about?" she asked.

"Dunno."

"You taste like a meat eater," Katya said, and licked his ear. He laughed, and put his arm around her.

Jessica found herself feeling enormously irritated. "Well-is it safe to bring the herd through here?"

"Safe as houses."

"We've got a water hole up ahead. Half a day." She didn't know why she said the next thing, but she did. "It was mapped as a grendel hole last month. You want to be in on the kill?"

"Sure." He kissed Katya briefly. "Katya-you take the trike, I'm going for a little skeeter ride."

Katya looked at Jessica, smiled, then pulled Justin around for a real honey of a kiss, long and deep and sincere as h.e.l.l.

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 s.e.x 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sing 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 Ca.s.sandra 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.

"Ca.s.sandra," 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 Tos.h.i.+ro-after he killed Tos.h.i.+ro."

"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. "Tos.h.i.+ro 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 d.a.m.n blankets everywhere. All because Dad shot Tos.h.i.+ro."

"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 n.o.body 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 Tos.h.i.+ro 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 relations.h.i.+p 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.

Chapter 24.

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 ident.i.ty.

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 sh.o.r.e 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.