The Legacy of Heorot (23 page)

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 tastes 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.

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—"

Zack wore a blindingly bright pair of red suspenders over hand-stitched overalls. A fiddle was tucked tightly under his chin, and Cadmann was damned if he didn't actually coax music from it. Zack was playing the hayseed image to the hilt as he stomped and sang on the low stage, guiding the flux and flow of the square dancers with a theatrically midwestern twang in his voice. His voice was flat but lively: the colonists followed his lead in an explosion of joyous energy.

The music itself was an odd mixture of synthesizer keyboard, traditional woodwind and string. Some of the instruments had been shipped aboard Geographic, justified as vital cultural treasures. Some had been cobbled together after landing.

And now all promenade,

A-with that sweet corner maid,

Singing "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny Oh..."

Cadmann leaned against the wall, halfway through his third mug of beer. The last cold knot of tension in his stomach was coming unsnarled; his head began to buzz politely. He hated lines. He had waited until the music blared from the hall and the dancers returned to their marks before tapping the cold kegs of beer.

On the far side of the crowd Mary Ann danced, swirling her bangled green skirt, throwing her head back to laugh deeply. The smooth white expanse of her throat flashed above a red kerchief. She caught Cadmann's eye and crooked a challenging finger, blowing him a kiss, silently mouthing Come on before Elliot Falkland caught her hands and swung her around to the opposite corner of her square.

Cadmann stretched. Tight spots, wounds not quite healed? Yeah, he could find the pain in chest and left arm and hip and knee, if he needed an excuse not to dance. It was more fun to watch.

Carlos bowed out of the dance, pecking Ida van Don on the cheek as he released her hands. She looked around uncertainly, with almost a touch of panic, then spotted Omar's huge frame and pulled him from his seat, tugging him into the patterned chaos, whooping with glee. The glee was not entirely spontaneous. Her smile seemed too rigid. Cadmann wondered if her dreams still rang with Jon's dying screams.

Carlos mopped sweat from his dark brow, fanned the dark circles staining the armpits of his red flannel shirt. "Ah, amigo. I am getting old. The senoritas are too much for me."

"Then don't get married."

"Vertical and horizontal dancing are much different." He smiled evilly. "Bobbi lets me lead." He took a sip of Cadmann's beer, smacked approvingly and drew himself a glass. He downed a third of the mug before coming up for air. He followed Cadmann's gaze to Mary Ann. "Your senorita—she also likes the dance, yes?" He paused, considering. "I think one can tell much from the way a woman moves to music. The hips, the hands, the way she holds—"

"Don't you think about anything but sex?"

"Life is short. One must find one's great gift, and practice it—how do you say?--assiduously."

Cadmann sputtered out a noseful of suds.

Together they strolled around the outside to the quad, where Bobbi Kanagawa worked at a food booth. Her long black hair twisted and pinned beneath a white paper cap, Bobbi was oblivious to the music piped out from the hall and didn't notice her fiance's approach.

With a long, thin knife, she carefully pared strips from one of three samlon on her cutting board. Movements almost mechanically precise, she sliced those strips into thinner pieces, then positioned them atop formed and pressed blocks of rice.

Although not in full production yet, the rice fields were healthy enough for Zack to authorize the release of some of the grain stored aboard Geographic.

Carlos leaned across the counter and kissed her wetly. Startled at first, she smooched back, then rubbed noses with him. "Leave me alone for fifteen minutes, then do with me what you will."

"I'll hold you to that, chiquita."

"You had better." She squeezed his hands, and there was enough heat in her emerald eyes to scorch stone. That's what it would take to nail Carlos... "I'm taking you down the rapids, mister."

Carlos grabbed a strip of samlon before she could protest and popped it into his mouth. Bobbi waved her knife at him as he skated away, chortling over his mouthful.

"What a woman. Don't you think we'll make beautiful babies?"

Cadmann reflected for a moment. "The loveliest woman I ever knew was half Japanese and half Jamaican. Assuming the kids take after their mother, they've got a chance."

The square dance ended with cheers and a thunderous round of applause, and the hall emptied into the quad.

Mary Ann worked her way to him through the press, holding a foaming mug. She panted, face glowing and sticky with perspiration. "Cad, you're such a stick. Why won't you dance?"

"War wound. Both legs blown off. Medics screwed up, sewed two left feet on."

She stuck her tongue out.

"Look on the bright side: somewhere out there is a guy with two right feet, killing ‘em at the Waldorf."

"You're just ashamed of me. You don't want anyone to see us together."

Carlos nodded sagely. "It is true. Many times he has told of how he likes to hide you away in the dark, covering you with his own body if need be—"

"Carlos—"

Martinez took the hint. "I've got to get ready for the rapids."

"Turning into a tradition, isn't it?"

"Around here, anything that happens twice is a tradition."

Carlos disappeared into the crowd.

The day just felt so damn good.

Contests and exhibitions had been running since breakfast. Cadmann had watched the archery and wrestling, cheering but not competing. Soon would begin the three-day boat race between the honeymooning couples. That he would enjoy! Then the dance contest... silliness, that was really all it was, but he had to admit that he was catching the bug.

True, he was pleasantly drunk. (Who had brewed the beer? If he could work out a private deal with that worthy—say, fresh melon cactus every month in exchange for a keg?) He felt more comfortable around the camp than he had in months. But something was pulling him back from wholehearted participation. A voice that was weakening by the minute. Or the mug. Whatever.

He politely squelched a burp.

Watching Mary Ann dance was good for him. He hadn't had a chance to really compare her with the other women.

There was no question that they were a couple: she had fixed the judges, bribed his cornermen and K.O.'d him before he even knew the fight was on. But it warmed him to feel a healthy physical tug when a twirl or gust of wind raised her skirts. Her hard work up at Cadmann's Bluff had trimmed away fat and added healthy muscle. The pregnancy didn't show yet, but there was something special about her. She did glow...

She squashed her lips against his in a beery kiss. "Cad—when are you going to—" her face changed in the middle of the question, became more mischievous—"dance with me?"