The Leagacy of Heorot Page 17

  None of the children were walking yet. We'll have to fence off the minefield when they get older. And—No! Not my department!

  He grinned when a small pink face passed him carried in a papooseka backpack.

  What the hell. He didn't have to live here to love those little faces. It wasn't the children's fault that their parents were idiots. Dammit, these were his children too.

  The veterinary lab had been repaired. Its side was a mass of patches welded in great discolored blotches at the corners. The structural damage to the quad had been repaired. Nothing could hide the scorch marks, but there were strings of colored ribbon wired up around the edges, and the beginning of a banner painted in bright orange and green.

  In the center of the quad was something new that glistened in the morning light. Cadmann bent to read it. Set into the concrete was a metal tablet, tinted to look like brass, that said simply:

  "Day 295, Year One. REMEMBER." Following those words in a silent tribute were etched thirteen names. He traced them with his fingers. Alicia: gone. Barney, Jon, Evvie Sikes: gone.

  Jesus.

  "I didn't know what else to do," Zack said behind him, and Cad turned to greet him, clasped his hands strongly.

  Zack didn't look tired—he looked hard and wiry and serious. He had trimmed his mustache short, and there was a partially healed burn scar along the inside of his forearm. "We were wrong—you were right. I'm sorrier than I can say."

  "Don't bother being sorry. Just don't let it happen again."

  Zack took Cadmann by the arm. "Come on. Let me show you Monster

  Watch."

  "The mine field—"

  "We turn it on at night."

  "And new fences along the gorge. I like it."

  "You'll like it better."

  Zack held the door of the com shack open as Cadmann shucked his backpack. Pain eased in ribs and hip.

  Two extra screens had been mounted in the room, and there was a cot in the corner that looked recently used. Andy, the big man from Engineering, sat in a swivel chair, his dark face speckled with crawling dots of reflected light. He distractedly waved a hand in greeting.

  One of the six flat video screens was dark, but three others viewed the Colony from varying local angles, and two scanned their island from the geosynchronous satellites.

  "We've got the ocean-observation program going—this is the long view. We're also analyzing weather patterns to attempt to build up a model. But we've got optical and infrared sensors working. We should be able to track anything man-size moving close to the surface. If the computer scans an object moving in our direction, it'll call our attention to it."

  The picture abruptly changed to a high-altitude view of the ocean itself. Endless gentle white waves rolled in from the west. The ocean seemed deeply and peacefully azure. The illusion was one of guileless transparency. Of an ocean without secrets, welcoming their inspection, soothing away their fears.

  "The ocean lies," Cadmann muttered.

  "What?"

  "I was just wondering if anything has surfaced yet."

  "Nothing notable. Not so far." The screen flickered again, and a roughly fish-shaped outline flashed darkly across the display. A wave of liquid crystals, and the silhouette became an animation. A statistical table ran its estimate column along the edge.

  Andy watched the figures hawkishly, then relaxed. "Twenty meters along the side, surfacing fifty kilometers east of Landing Beach. Totally aquatic, Zack—I've seen these before. They don't pose a threat to anything on the land."

  Zack traced a finger across the image. "Keep me posted. We can't have damage to one of the Minervas." To Cadmann: "We can get a lot more precise than that."

  "I was just about to ask—but you've made a good start."

  "We need more, a lot more. All the intelligence that we can gather."

  He paused a careful moment, then asked, "What can you report from the highlands?"

  "That's what I was hoping to talk to you about. Mary Ann and I have kept journals. I have skins from six different small animals, and botanical samples. I want to trade my knowledge of the island for other services. I'll map the interior, let you know anything that I find. In exchange, I want medicine and more vitamins. Mary Ann said Avalonian soil doesn't have the right mineral balance."

  The computer zoned up on another large, shadowy form. This one was smaller than the first, but was tracked moving in toward the island. It broke the surface of the water for a moment, cresting, then dived deeply. The video image was lost.

  "We need you, Cad. We have to assume that the thing we killed was one of a set. If there's more than one, then there's lots. We're not slowing down expansion. We can't. I swear that this colony is going to be a city one day. But we have to be more cautious. You're best qualified to check our defense plans and suggest alternatives. If you don't want to stay here, I won't try to change your mind. We need a test outbacker. Someone to give us an idea of how an individual family would fare in the south country beyond Mucking Great. Someone is going to do it eventually, and no one is better suited than you. What do you say—be our guinea pig?"

  "I already am that. But outback guinea pig sounds better than hermit."

  "Same situation, different definition."

  Cadmann's face split in a grin. "Bureaucrats. Damned if you can't take misanthropy and turn it into a virtue."

  "Damned straight." A huge weight seemed to have been lifted from Zack. The creases in his forehead vanished, and he sighed deeply. "Oh. Cad, will you take back some tools to take rock cores? We're hoping we'll find an iridium layer."

  "Iridium?"

  "Maybe not iridium, but something widespread, with the makeup of an asteroid. Evidence of a Dinosaur Killer. Something that simplified the ecology."

  "Huh. Maybe. What about the monster itself? That thing sure didn't act like a carrion eater, and what else would have survived an asteroid strike? Have you finished the analysis of the corpse?"

  "Oh, sure, corpse. Well, we lost a lot of equipment in the fire. Some we repaired, some we worked around, but... anyway, Greg cremated too much of the monster. You can hardly blame him, but we've been analyzing charcoal! What we get is a picture of something that has a cell structure similar to the samlon or pterodons. Closer to the samlon; pterodons have a lot more quick-twitch muscle fiber. We'll be interested in looking at your samples. Half a dozen? Damn. You've found more in seven weeks than we did in the year we've been down. You probably want to talk to Sylvia about that."

  Cadmann just watched the screen for a while longer, and then nodded.

  He turned and left the room. Zack followed him out.

  The sun was high, and Cadmann shielded his eyes with one hand. Workers hustled around the quad. They were setting tables and stringing an orange-and-green banner along the west edge of the courtyard—

  "Celebration?"

  "Sure—anniversary of Waking Day. Don't you remember?"

  "I guess that I reckon time in terms of Landing Day."

  "Most of them weren't even awake when we were down here. They outnumber us, Cadmann."

  "I guess they do at that." He stretched and picked up his backpack from the com-shack stoop. "Where's Sylvia? I guess we should talk."

  The creature hovered in the air above the holo stage, only a fourth its actual size, but still too vivid for Cadmann's taste. He could almost smell its wet lizard stench, feel its heat, see Ernst's blood drizzling out of its mouth.

  Marnie said, "The creature is amphibian, and the major speculation is that it swam over from the mainland or that it was carried by driftwood."

  Cadmann repressed a shudder and forced his mind back into the discussion. "Fifty miles! That's a long swim. Why are you so sure it's not native to the island?"

  "Not enough food. Not enough variety of food for a sound ecological base. Not enough of them, either. A stable population needs numbers. Any pair of anything produces one pair that survives to breed, on average." Sylvia shut down the projector, but the thing st
ill hovered before his mind's eye.

  Marnie was examining a Joe carcass. It lay in the middle of a dissection tray, its fur lusterless and limp. She flipped it over on its back, and pressured the paws, hawing as the dark little claws slid out. "You say that you're domesticating these?" Marnie's lisp was still a bit jarring to Cadmann, but she was so totally unselfconscious of it that he felt momentary shame.

  "Raising them, at least. It's Mary Ann's project. You'd need a lot of furs to make a bed cover. They're not all that sweet-tempered. Something like a mink. Anyway, it's something else that's bothering Mary Ann."

  "She told me."

  With the gleaming tip of a scalpel, Marnie drew a line down the middle of the dead Joe's pink, furred belly, then gingerly peeled away a layer of skin to inspect a fatty layer beneath.

  Sylvia sat on a stool with her knees pulled up flush with her swollen stomach. She looked like a pregnant elf perched on a mushroom.

  "In general," Marnie continued, pinning the flap of skin back, "we don't know a hell of a lot more now than we... should have known before. Built for speed. Incredibly strong. The thickness of the bones gives it enormous leverage. The skin is like armor plating. My point is that as underprepared as we were, we were very lucky." Some silent message passed between Marnie and Sylvia, and Marnie slid the dissection tray into a refrigerator.

  "I told Jerry I'd meet him at the breeding pond," she said, smiling shyly. "I'll see you both later." She slipped quietly from the room, leaving Cadmann and Sylvia alone.

  They stared carefully at the empty stage, and silence hung in the room.

  "Cad..." she began.

  He leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms, eyes thoughtfully half-lidded. "You know, it gets so damned quiet up there in the mountain. Sometimes, when the air is really still, and the dogs are asleep by what's left of the fire, I look down from the mountain, and I can just hear sounds from the Colony. Machinery. Maybe singing. Maybe the mill. Maybe animal sounds. It sounds warm, and so damned far away." He looked at her. She was close enough to touch, but he didn't. "It feels like everything is getting farther all the time."

  "I miss you, Cadmann. I didn't know how much I would."

  "Yeah. How is Mary Ann?"

  "Knocked righteously up. You did a good job there. Three weeks pregnant, and she's healthy as a horse, and I'll bet it's a boy."

  "What do you mean, ‘you bet'? Isn't there a test or something?"

  "Spoilsport. Half the fun is the speculation. She almost glows. She's so in love with you, Cadmann. So..."

  Cadmann watched the slow rise and fall of Sylvia's belly. "Do you suppose that she'll be as beautiful as you are?"

  "All pregnant women are beautiful. And think that they're ugly. Didn't you know that?"

  Cadmann turned, staring out into the wall as though there were answers scrawled on the far side. "I'm changing, Sylvia. I can feel it. It's this planet. There are so few of us, and we know nothing about this place. When Mary Ann said that she was pregnant, I was happy... but it was different. I have a daughter—you didn't know that, did you?"

  Sylvia looked at him, startled. "No—it isn't on any of the records."

  He grinned. "You've been spying on me."

  She reached out and took his hand. Her thumb rubbed the soft webbing between his knuckles. "I missed you too, big man."

  "I was only about eighteen. Elva was twenty-four, and wanted the kid. Wanted to have it by herself. Picked me. Said that she thought I would probably make pretty good basic daddy material."

  "I'd say she was right."

  "I only know she had it, Sylvia. And on the little girl's third birthday, Elva sent me a holo. That was it—she didn't want to be bothered with a husband."

  "Would you have married her?"

  "I suppose so. And resented the hell out of her."

  "There you go."

  "But still, to know. To know that you have a child somewhere. Learning to walk and talk and swim and read, and everything else, and you're not there. It's a little crazy-making. Anyway, that's just background."

  "What's the payoff?" Her hand closed gently on his. So warm.

  "That I was shocked at how hard it hit me. The thought that Mary Ann is the mother of my child. It doesn't matter how much or how little I love her. What matters is that she's going to be the mother of my child."

  "I see." Sylvia released his hand and stood up. "Well, that's what she's going to be, all right, and if preliminary workup indicates anything, she's going to be a damned healthy one. Take care of her, Cadmann. She really cares for you."

  "I know." Sylvia moved a step back, just out of touching range. "I love you," he said quietly. "I wish that it meant something."

  "Shh," she whispered. "We don't just belong to ourselves, Cadmann. This isn't an ordinary situation, and we're not ordinary people. It's wonderful, and it's terrible, and it makes me feel old sometimes. But it's what I chose when I came here, and I can't back out now."

  "And if it was different?"

  "Then... it would be different. Lay off."

  "All right." The moment was past, and he let the atmosphere lighten again.

  "Waking Day is day after tomorrow. Won't you stay?"

  "So that's why Zack loaned me a Skeeter. It's a conspiracy. We'll be back. Right now, I think that I need to be alone. With Mary Ann."

  "I understand." She held out her hands to him, and he took them. She was so close, and so achingly far away.

  "Goodbye, Sylvia."

  "Goodbye, Cad."

  He bent and touched her lips with his, barely repressing an urge to taste more deeply, knowing that here, in the shadowed clinic, she would have resisted for only a moment, and then held him, even with the swell of another man's child between their bodies.

  We're not ordinary people...

  Cadmann turned and left.

  Mary Ann was outside, waiting for him, and he was suddenly very happy that he hadn't given in to that impulse. He was able to meet her eyes squarely and to hold her.

  Please. Let me learn to love her. God knows I need to.

  But for now, the light in her eyes was enough love for the both of them, and together they headed for the Skeeter pad.

  Mama had never toured the island. The others of her kind did not like visitors. The map in Mama's mind was not made up of distances, but of the changing taste of the river.

  The pond reeked of samlon blood when Mama departed. She staggered with the fullness of her belly. Three days later she was hungry but hopeful. Four mud-sucking alien fish had fallen foul of her. There would be more.

  The water ran clean again. Mama understood that lesson. She had tasted the burnt meat of her daughter in the water; but the decaying corpse was gone almost immediately. Whatever killed her daughter had eaten the corpse.

  Once she was able to streak off the edge of a low bluff and catch a flyer rising from below. She caught another hovering just above the water. The flyers weren't timid enough here between territories. She fed when she could. If her enemy were to find her half starved, her body might betray her, holding her slow while her enemy boiled with speed. If she did not find enough food she would turn back.

  She moved cautiously, in fear of ambush. For long stretches she paralleled the river, moving among rocks or trees or other cover where she could find it, returning to the river only when she must.

  None of this was carefully thought out. Mama was not sapient. Emotions ran through her blood like vectors, and she followed the vector sum. Anger against the creature who killed her daughter. Hunger: the richly, interestingly populated territory upstream. Curiosity: the urge to learn and explore. Lust: the urge to mate with a gene pattern other than her own. And fear, always fear.

  She moved slowly enough to learn the terrain as she traveled. Rocks, plains, grassland; a waterfall to be circled. She found fish of interesting flavor before she would have had to turn back.

  Farther upstream, things began to turn weird. There were intermittent droning sounds. Chemical ta
stes in the water and smells on the wind: tar and hot metal and burning, unfamiliar plants, pulverized wood. Her progress slowed even farther. She kept to rocky terrain or crawled along the bottom where the river ran deep and fast. Sounds of an alien environment might cover her enemy's approach. Her enemy must come. She would find Mama; she could be watching her now; she would come like a meteor across terrain she knew like the inside of her mouth. Mama's life would depend on also knowing the terrain.

  There was a cliff of hard rock, and softer rock below, and caverns the river had chewed below the waterline. One of the caverns became her base. Life was plentiful, foraging was easy; she might wait here for the enemy, for a time.

  She found things pecking on dry ground. They tried to run (badly), they tried to fly (badly). She ate them all. There were bones all through the meat, and half of it was indigestible feathery stuff.

  On another day she saw something far bigger flying too far away to smell. It veered away before she could study it. If she could catch something like that, the meat would surely sustain her until her quarry must come to deal with an invader.

  The next day something came at her across the water.

  Chapter 15

  YEAR DAY

  The hour when you go to learn that all is vain

  And this Hope sows when Love shall never reap.

  DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, "The House of Life

  By ten in the morning, the small white disk of Tau Ceti had burned the eternal mist into fluffy white clouds that drifted across the startlingly blue sky like flocks of sheep.

  It was appropriate, almost as though their sun were cooperating with the festivities, had offered them the first vivid day of the year.

  In the ribboned and bannered quad beneath that hard, clear sky, a dozen food and drink booths had been erected, and from them curled the sweet aromas of half a dozen international cuisines. The stands were all but deserted now, most of the colonists drawn by the sound and movement within the dining hall.

  Spring had come to Avalon.

  "Allemande left to your corner gal—"