Beowulf's Children Part 45

"So? A camel is a horse designed by committee. There is a difference between the clumsy elegance of the human body and the sophisticated, intellectual choices made by a committee of experts deciding which endocrinological experiences are good for baby. They tried to round out the experience. This mood swing was inappropriate, that o.r.g.a.s.mic response pattern was a biochemical form of child abuse, a mother experiencing anger is damaging her child. The liberals swung the profile one way, the conservatives another. Too many morphemes. Too much adrenaline. Chill those kiddies out."

"Ouch."

"Hindsight. But the program may have been too bland. Didn't place enough of an imprint on the children, leaving them a little too vulnerable to their environment."

"What happened on Earth?"

"Not much. A statistically significant increase in emotional problems among those children. A slight indication of an increase in sociopathy. But remember something-each and every one of those children was in a loving home, one where the parents had waited for years to have a child. They had far more love and attention than average. It is interesting to note what might have happened if such children had been placed into average home situations."

Cadmann still didn't turn. "What about ours?"

"There was nothing about that from Earth-we thought that giving them love would counteract any potential problems."

The image of Aaron continued to age. From time to time the program would lock on a particular sequence. Aaron climbing a mountain. Young Aaron kicking a soccer ball. Aaron visiting Edgar in traction. Aaron debating. Aaron defeating Edgar in debate. Aaron teaching a cla.s.s in woodcraft to a group of Biters. Aaron hiking, moving quickly past a not yet injured Edgar Sikes. They were surrounded by a universe of Aaron Tragons.

Rachael said, "It worked-in general. Quite well in some cases."

"For instance?"

Zack leaned forward. "Children from genetic groups conditioned for group raising of children. Little Chaka, from New Guinea, for instance. Tos.h.i.+ro Tanaka. But I know Rachael worried about Aaron, and Trish Chance, and a few others."

"Everyone in the colony partic.i.p.ated in the nurseries back then," Rachael said.

"I remember, " Sylvia said. "That was a real labor of love."

"When the children were older, they were shared by the colony as well. On through their teens. Every one of them had a dozen parents, every colonist had a dozen children. This was one of the reasons that the s.e.xual freedom in the colony was so fluid."

"Well," Cadmann said, "we didn't take any diseases."

"True," Rachael said. "But the other idea was that all pregnancies were desirable. If a particular mother or father didn't want to have the child at that time, the fetus could be removed and frozen, or carried to term in a host uterus, or an artificial womb. They could be thawed when the mother or father was ready for the responsibility, or adopted by a particular set of partners-"

"Or they could be adopted into the general colony. We tried that far more often than they were adopted by specific parents," said Carolyn. "I did what I could to . . . " She trailed off.

Rachael sighed, and removed her gla.s.ses, rubbing her temples hard. "You asked me yesterday to look into Aaron. I have. I wish I'd done it sooner, before Ruth got so involved. I found some things which disturb me."

Cadmann asked, "What kind of things?"

On the holostage Aaron had grown older. Aaron and virtually every woman of his generation, at one time or another. Aaron on the mainland, one of a troop of Grendel Scouts led by Carlotta Nolan and Cadmann Weyland.

"He has great leaders.h.i.+p potential, but . . . "

"But?"

Rachael said, "If the combination of ectogynic origin and lack of specific bonding and imprinting hit anyone hardest, it was Aaron Tragon. I think that he has bonded not to the members of the colony, but to the dream of colonization itself."

"What's wrong with that?" Sylvia asked.

Aaron's image, larger than life, stared down at them, immense, serious, intent.

"I don't mean that he has an idealistic view of what this colony should be. I don't mean that he has the kind of gung-ho conquer-the-universe att.i.tude that we had to have to get onto Geographic in the first place. I mean literally that dream itself, the dream of spreading across the mainland, the planet. The entire Tau Ceti system itself. Of Mankind taking the stars and remaking them to Aaron's wishes. That dream is his mother and father, his reason for being. That dream was what this was all about, remember?"

"I . . . remember." Cadmann was thoughtful. "But his debates . . . sometimes they seem almost conservative. Back to nature? Live-with-the-planet sort of speeches."

"Well, I don't think he wants to strip-mine the planet. He wants to people the planet. Our technology is advanced enough to live in harmony with Avalon-there is no need to produce more children than Avalon can handle."

"And second?"

"I think that Aaron Tragon stopped showing us his true face a long time ago."

The image of Aaron at twelve appeared, duplicated itself along the walls.

Rachel looked from one image to another and sighed. "Aaron believes that the original colonists have abandoned the dream. Betrayed it. I think he is internally rather than externally motivated. I think that he might have little true contact with anyone. I think that Aaron's sense of love has only to do with goal accomplishment."

Carolyn smiled, a flash of what she must have been like a hundred years ago. "Of course that goes beyond sociobiology."

"A little. But none of that makes him dangerous," Rachel said. "Or does it? And my daughter is in love with him, and pregnant by him, and sometimes I can't remember I'm a psychiatrist."

Carolyn put her arm around Rachel. They stood together and looked at the Aaron images.

Cadmann shook his head. "What disturbs me is the entire dirigible incident. He had us. From the first moment to the last. We were set up beautifully. But there was something so . . . so utterly cold-blooded about it that . . . "

"That what?"

"That it makes me wonder who Aaron Tragon really is. Who's really alive behind his eyes."

"You ought to know if anyone does."

"Me? Why?"

"Because he probably bonded more to you than anyone else. It's clear he thinks of you as his father."

"I-" Cadmann hesitated. "I was going to say I hadn't known that, but I suppose I did. He was always finding reasons to go places with us, and it wasn't just that Justin and Jessica were his friends. But I don't know who's in there, Rachael."

"I've told you most of what there is to know."

"No," Cadmann said. "Who were his parents?"

Rachael looked uncomfortable. "All right. It's not as if it was actually security sealed. It was more a general colonial agreement. I guess I just feel uncomfortable. It was under my own code-that was why you couldn't access it." She cleared her throat. "The father was from Earth. A Swedish mathematician of Russian extraction named Koskov."

Cadmann seemed to relax, Carlos noticed. As if he had expected-and feared-another revelation altogether. "And the mother?"

Rachael looked at Sylvia. Sylvia colored, and the psychologist nodded.

"That's right," she said. "Aaron Tragon is your son. It was your egg."

"Justin's half-brother," Cadmann said quietly.

"Yes. If there had been any danger of Aaron relating to one of his sisters, I would have said something. I keep track of such things . . . but it never came up. Jessica isn't his biological sister any more than Justin is."

Sylvia was very quiet, still, her mind off in some unreachable place.

"Aaron and Justin."

"What do we do now?" Rachael asked.

"I think we go to the mainland. On the next dirigible."

Sylvia curled onto her side, still floating an inch or so off the chair. "I never held him," she said quietly. "I never told him that he was mine, that I would watch him and care for him. That he was the most beautiful thing in the world. The most precious child in existence."

"Probably no one did," Rachael said. "We should have done that. Aaron, and thirty others. Belonging to no one but each other. No wonder they started their cult. They had to belong somewhere."

"Who is living in there?" Cadmann asked.

"I think that we need to find out," Carlos said. "I think that we need to find out now."

Chapter 28.

t.i.tHE.

An honest G.o.d is the n.o.blest work of man.

ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL, G.o.ds, Part I

"Home tomorrow," Justin said. Aaron nodded, and accepted a cup of coffee from him. The valley was swollen with mist, and it rolled across them almost sleepily.

Justin had taken the early-morning s.h.i.+ft.

Aaron sipped at the coffee. "We're going through the main valley. We have a couple of choices there, you know."

Justin nodded. "Here be grendels. They're too far from the main camp to do us any great harm."

"But the herd will come close enough for trouble."

"I say we take the long way around." Justin scratched in the dust with his toe. Trees, hills, a stream. "If we take the southern route, we can avoid the problem."

"We do, on the other hand, have to ford the stream. No choice about that."

Grendels were death in the water. The smartest thing to do was to kill everything grendel-sized before the eventuality even arose.

"So," said Aaron. "What do you think?"

"This planet was here before we came, and it will be here after we're gone. I don't think we can kill everything we don't like. There has to be another way, and I want to find it."

"I agree." Aaron marked a position upstream from the fording spot. "What say we seed the water with a freshly slaughtered steer? Draw the grendels up. We won't get them from further down-that's another grendel's territory, and there is plenty of food. Grendels don't fight unless they have to . . . especially the mainland varieties."

"What do you mean?"

Aaron was thoughtful. "We never really studied grendel interactions, grendel behavior, beyond basic hunt and attack patterns. But doesn't it seem that these grendels can actually think? Plan? Observe? They're intelligent-much more than the First told us. They were here long before we were. I think that one day we may be able to communicate with them . . ." He stopped, and laughed. "Just dreaming, I guess. Let's get on with the day, huh?"

What was it with Aaron and grendels? It gave Justin goose b.u.mps. Aaron was sheer death in the grendel-shooting games, as if the cartoon grendels saw Aaron and just fell over.

Old Grendel slept.

The prey that lived in the lake would feed her until the end of things. She had eaten well the previous day, and in these times of long sleeps and quiet days, a single major feeding could last her ten to fifteen days before hunger grew unendurable.

She occasionally roused from dream, disturbed by the daughters of G.o.d flying overhead. Their hum was the sound of the Death Wind. It frightened her down to her core, made her hunker down into the water and watch, just watch.

Change was in the air. The light was hallucinatory; everything felt evanescent, transitory, tissue-thin. She sniffed the thousand scents of lesser life forms preparing themselves for the end of everything. Some began a madness of breeding; some avoided breeding entirely; some changed color or shape, or migrated, or entered a sleep from which even a grendel could not rouse them.

You couldn't think, couldn't plan for the end of everything. But, drowsily, Old Grendel was trying . . . when the smell of blood snapped her fully awake.

Three times within the past several days, she had followed such a scent. Each time she'd found a dead puzzle beast floating, in still water. After she had allowed it to ripen for a day or two, it tasted just fine. Last time, when she returned to her favorite resting spot, she noticed that large numbers of animals had pa.s.sed her way: many puzzle beasts, a few of the two-legged weirds.

The weirds flew through the air in humming flyers, the daughters of G.o.d. They walked; or they ran almost as fast as a sister on speed, riding strange sh.e.l.ls that smelled of tar and lightning. They combined too many different smells in one. They didn't eat their own young. She knew this because she had come close enough to their nests to watch them.

She had tested their defenses. They knew where she was before she could smell them. If she came close enough to make out distinct aspects of their behavior, they became alarmed. Twice they sent flying things in pursuit. But when she retreated, they did not attempt to engage.

She found their roles of combat not entirely dissimilar to her own.

They could move fast. They were hunters. They h.o.a.rded their young.

Could they be a kind of grendel? There were builder grendels, and the great flat unmoving grendels of the north, and the snow grendels she'd had to fight twice in her life, and the kind that laid her swimmers in a stranger's pond . . .

In her youth, Old Grendel had wandered far during the rainy seasons. Wanderl.u.s.t and curiosity were somehow linked to the days when her head had nearly burst. When the pain faded it left behind a new clarity. She began to see ways that the world fit together. She developed a hunger of a different kind, that pulled her toward the blurry edges of the pattern that was the world.

She followed the water.

When she found water already stocked with one of her own kind, she fought. But if the taste in the water was alien . . . Two dissimilar grendels could share the same water. They snarled and snapped at each other, but managed somehow to keep the terrible speed under control. They could tolerate each other's presence, if each knew that to begin was to end.

The weirds, now. Were they some new kind of grendel?

The smell of blood from upstream was strong; but Old Grendel moved downstream by a little, away from the blood. She coated herself with mud, and burrowed deep. She extended her snorkel to breathe. And she waited, and watched.

Chaka brought Skeeter II low in over the river thirty clicks south of Shangri-La. There was a grendel there, but no point in killing it. An empty ecological niche would merely attract a younger, faster monster. So he let sleeping grendels lie, and so far the arrangement had been a good one.

Three times before, they had lured the grendel upstream with a slaughtered carca.s.s. They had watched via camera. The first time she had dragged the meat back to her lair. Unsatisfactory. So they'd chained the meat to the ground. The grendel had to devour it there, and she did, after examining the area.

And the third time they had taken their herd across in safety, because the grendel was busy eating. They had, in a matter of speaking, t.i.thed to the grendel G.o.d. Aaron had insisted on it, and Chaka liked it as well.

Today Chaka swept the river with his gla.s.ses, and saw nothing.