Beowulf's Children (9 page)

"Give me a vegetation map," Justin said.

Cassandra displayed some of the vegetation to be found in the area. "He brought back some Avalon succulents last time. Does that narrow things?"

Cassandra searched, and came up with a twenty-square-mile sprawl that met all of the conditions.

"Not bad," Justin said. "Look for heat sources." Four little pulses of red appeared. "Volcanic, on a cycle?"

"I've got a better idea," Edgar replied. "Cassandra-when was the last routine scan?"

Her familiar voice was warm and cool. "Eighteen hours ago, at the present level of magnification."

"Nighttime. Give me a thermal scan. Compare it to the chart we just made... and compare it again to... say, anything before three days ago, back to a month."

Edgar turned to Justin. "Does that about cover it? When was the last time your dad was out?"

"About two months."

"Good enough. So all we should have out there are some geysers, and maybe another hunter. Not likely in that little area, but maybe. Exclude all of that, and we'll have his campfire... "

"He likes wood-burning stoves," Justin said suddenly. "He's got a cabin, but it'll have a chimney."

"And... bingo."

They were looking directly down at a mass of trees near the eastern edge of Isenstine glacier. "Camouflaged," Edgar mused. "You could skeeter right over and never see it. That fire is stone dead now."

"Dad would put the fire out. He's very serious about that kind of thing."

"So. Time for the stove to cool. Figure he left five hours ago... "

Edgar rolled his eyes up, and thought. "With refueling... the skeeters make about a hundred and eighty kilometers tops... he should be right about..." He poked his finger at the map. "Here. Give or take fifty kilometers or so."

He grinned up at Justin. "Betcha," he said, and went for magnification. Geographic wasn't in position, but he diverted one of the weather satellites to optical mode. Cassandra kept cleaning up the image, searching for something moving against a white background...

They went in through the mountains, and past the savage crevasses of Isenstine Glacier. Justin could almost feel the cold.

And there it was, a flickering shadow. A red circle enclosed it and Cassandra zoomed in to show something that looked like a brine shrimp larva skittering across a pond. It was there one moment, gone the next. But Cassandra was on its track, now, locked on, and Cadmann was caught.

It was Skeeter II, its silver-blue length magnified by satellite optics. The view was from not quite overhead. It was a tiny bit of metal and plastic, a thing of Man flying across an impersonal wasteland. It carried plant samples and three of the human beings Justin Faulkner loved most in all the world.

"He'll need to make one more fuel stop," Edgar said. He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his seat. His round face wore a smile of enormous self-satisfaction. "But that won't take fifteen minutes. This close to home he'll probably want to push it. I'd set ETA at about three hours."

"Edgar... " Justin grinned. "Sometimes... "

"I know," Edgar said. "Sometimes I amaze even me."

"Three hours before he shows... " Justin glanced at his watch. "I want to get at him with a full report before anyone else can tell him what's happened." He squeezed Edgar's shoulder. "Thanks a lot, Edgar."

"First choice. Stringfish."

"You got it."

Justin ran out of the communications room, ideas and thoughts of saltwater eels swimming dizzily in his head.

MOUNT TUSHMORE

To compare

Great things with small...

JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

The eastern wind turned unexpectedly fierce, burning right through the furs surrounding Cadmann Weyland's face, numbing him to the bone. It had swept across two hundred miles of Isenstine Glacier, picking up speed and dropping in temperature as it came. He shaded his face and cursed as he hauled the replacement battery across the intervening few meters between the fuel dump and Skeeter II.

Mary Ann remained in the cockpit, her cowled face visible through the powdered flurries. She would wait there until the last minute before jumping out to lend a hand. She had always hated the cold.

Sylvia, on the other hand, loved it. She was locking up the foamed plastic dump shed, motions brisk and merry. "That was the last one!" she called over the wind. "We'll have to restock before we take our next run!" Then she crunched across the ice to help with the pushing.

Mary Ann climbed out of the skeeter when they were about ten feet away, and opened the battery bay. She was reluctant, but deft, and had the old trunk-sized cartridge out in about fifteen seconds. It didn't require three of them to lock the new battery into place, but it was good to have the extra hands: unsnap the used-up power cell, swing it to the side, swing new unit into place, snap on connections, slide in, lock down.

Mary Ann shut the unit, puffed a breath of condensation, and said, "Let's get out of here!"

They piled into the autogyro's passenger cab. Cadmann was on pilot's position on the right, Mary Ann in the middle. Sylvia on the extreme left was last in, and slammed the door behind her. Mary Ann cranked the air blower up to a toasty pitch.

Cadmann watched the wind gauge to get a feel for the gusts. He couldn't take off if they continued to build. The gusts punched at the little gyro, rocking it, but not so hard now. Curtains of powdered snow danced across the glacier in front of them in a somberly beautiful winter ballet.

Mary Ann interrupted his thoughts with a plaintive "Can we get out of here? Please?" She hated that little-girl petulance quality in her voice, but it was there too often. She closed her eyes and hunched forward to catch a little more of the hot air. Cadmann caught Sylvia's eye. She winked at him, and put an arm around Mary Ann to help warm her. Even with the thirty pounds she'd gained since their second child, Mary Ann possessed little tolerance for cold weather, but despite her discomfort she rarely let Cadmann and Sylvia go on these trips without her.

There were times when Mary Ann couldn't accept comforting from Sylvia, when any gesture of kindness or warmth triggered a burst of resentment. This wasn't one of them. They pushed tight against each other. Sylvia tucked a thermal blanket around them both. Sylvia's teeth were chattering, but she still managed to smile.

"Cad?" she said. "If you don't get this thing into the air, we may walk home."

He nodded without speaking, still trying to read the gusts. He patched into Cassandra on a secure line, and got a quick weather feed: no sign of the quick, violent storms that made traversing Isenstine so hazardous. This was just bad wind, not likely to get much worse. Carefully he engaged the engines, satisfied with the steady hum as the new fuel cell sparked to life. Nose and top and tail rotors spun into blurred motion one at a time, whipping more snow from the ground. He engaged the de-icers and the wiper blades.

"All right. Buckle in," he said unnecessarily. He was almost embarrassed to say that to adults. It was just a habit he had gotten into, three kids ago. The kids were pretty much grown now, but the reflex remained.

The skeeter leaned forward against the wind and began to scoot along the ice. Then, nose-heavy, it lifted from the ground, spun a quarter-turn as a gust punched them, and rose into the sky.

Mary Ann poked her head out from under the blanket and breathed a sigh of relief. "Bet it's calmer up about two thousand feet," she said.

"Bet you're right," he said. His hands were locked surely on the controls now. At eighteen hundred feet they hit low cloud cover, rocked for fifteen seconds, and then climbed up into relative stillness.

Tau Ceti transmuted the clouds into banks of gold-white fluff. The air was crisp and clear. The window didn't quite seal on his side, and a bright, Arctic thread of air whistled through, stinging and invigorating.

This was good, one of those moments that made the rest of it all worthwhile. He felt the calm descend upon Sylvia and Mary Ann as well. Here, floating above the clouds, there seemed to be no troubles. Tau Ceti IV was a world of wonders, a calm and nurturing land which would feed and shelter their grandchildren as graciously as it served them. This was a time when he could forget the internecine conflicts within the colony, and the occasional friction between Mary Ann and Sylvia.

There had been less of that for the past year. He thought... he hoped... they had weathered the last true storm in their triad. There were too few Western precedents for three-way relationships.

There was nothing standard about relationships on Avalon. The naked truth was that, in an almost exclusively heterosexual community, there were more women than men to bond with them. There was also no venereal disease. There was one hundred percent employment. Someone would care for the children, whatever the mother's interests and temperament. As a result, no woman need consider anything except who might make the most interesting father. There was no stigma at all for the unwed mother.

But some institutions die hard, and marriage, even such free-form versions of it as existed in Avalon Town, was one of them.

Cadmann and Sylvia had been friends, perhaps in love but not lovers, when the first grendel attacks shattered the colony's tranquil life and sent Cadmann off to the Bluff. Mary Ann had gone to him then, and helped build the Keep. It was as much hers as his.

Cadmann and Mary Ann had been bonded for years before Sylvia, widowed during the Grendel Wars, had joined them. Mostly, it worked. Sometimes wonderfully well. Occasionally it grated... usually on Mary Ann, who remembered when she had Cadmann all to herself, when no one else would have wanted him. No one but Sylvia, who was already married, back when monogamy made sense, before the grendels killed so many of the men.

They were probably two hours from the Bluff, and Mary Ann was getting drowsy. Air travel often did that to her. She leaned against his shoulder, bouncing a little in her shoulder harness. Sylvia looked across at him. Sometimes he wondered exactly what she saw. He knew what he saw in the mirror when he scraped his morning stubble away: a tall, gray old stranger who looked a lot like his own grandfather... or Manuel the Redeemer, or any of Cabell's male characters who were so surprised to find themselves old. Still strong, and unbent, but the hair crept back from his temples now. Both weather and time had creased his skin deeply.

God. Where had the years gone? When was the last time he had awakened without his back flaming at him? He was... he counted rapidly. Sixty-three Earth years old? There was little he could do to avoid the fact that his body was trying to shut down on him. Oh, growth-hormone stimulation, and exercise, and a strict nutritional regimen, and regeneration treatments kept the machine functioning better than he probably deserved, but the aches and pains of a life nowise tame had definitely caught up with him. There were bullet wounds, a bayonet scar . ...ven a goddamn crocodile bite.

All trivial next to the wounds from the Grendel Wars. Bones smashed. The regrown leg. The pale angry tattoo left by serrated grendel teeth. And the memories that would never completely fade.

And perhaps, after all, it was best that they didn't. The grendels were gone, but there were other dangers.

"Good trip," Sylvia said. She could always sense his mood. She was forty-seven now, still beautiful, although daily exposure to the sun had roughened her skin. The mask of youth was beginning to slip, but in her case that was no tragedy. Disguise your thoughts and inclinations as you may, time eventually reveals your true nature to the world. Sylvia was a loving heart in a lively, quick-spirited physical package, a little shorter than Mary Ann, but stronger. She had borne her late husband Terry one child, Justin, and then another for Cadmann, and her figure was still luscious.

Mary Ann was Number One Wife-and she relished the distinction. Needed it. There was little in this life for Mary Ann, save being Cadmann Weyland's woman. Sylvia remained a competent scientist. Mary Ann had ice on her mind. Sometimes she could remember, sometimes there were flashes of brilliance, but sometimes she was lucky to remember the difference between the gametophyte and sporophyte stages of a fern. Once upon a time she had been a brilliant agronomist, but hibernation instability... for Mary Ann, the memories of what she had once been were the worst part.

She was still important as Cadmann Weyland's Number One Wife, and as the mother of strong and self-reliant children. I make good babies, she told herself, and everyone knew it was true. Over the years that had come to be enough. It had to be.

Home, Cadmann thought, remembering Sylvia's attempt at conversation.

"I think I want to break out the east wall of the house, expand it again."

"You've got my permission, God knows."

She gazed out the window at the clear sky, and then peered down at the clouds. "So peaceful up here."

"I need these trips from time to time. Just get away with my ladies."

She reached across Mary Ann's sleeping form, and grasped Cadmann's shoulder hard. So much unsaid. So much that could never be said.

Cadmann's thoughts threatened to drift into another uncomfortable direction, and he focused back on the task of flying. Ahead of them reared a great beveled splay of glacial crust: Clay's Divide, an eight-mile seismic irregularity in the Isenstine. He grinned, anticipating the moment to come.

As the skeeter scooted over the gargantuan sheet of rock and ice, Sylvia began to chuckle. Then they both broke out hooting. Mary Ann was awake now, and smiling. The far side of the divide had been carved-by some unknown thermal device-into Avalon's own Mount Rushmore. Presented for all the world to see were four two-hundred-foot-tall sets of very human buttocks. Anatomical detail was admirably precise. Mount Tushmore was so huge that it had to be seen from at least a kilometer away to be fully appreciated.