The Legacy of Heorot (22 page)

Mary Ann stopped the tractor by the machine shops and dismounted with Cadmann's assistance. She melted into his hands with a calculatedly sensuous grace that put him on guard.

What was she projecting? She was using that "forced float" that insecure women use when...

When presenting themselves before a rival.

Sylvia.

She wore her lab smock, which was freshly pressed and looked like nothing so much as a maternity gown. And a maternity gown that she wouldn't be wearing much longer. She waddled a bit when she walked, and was carrying the baby low in her belly.

She smiled at him, at them both, and there was something very like a wall of glass between her emotions and the smile.

Her pageboy haircut was a little longer than the last time he had seen her, and needed a trim around the edges. She held out her hands to him, then, not quite smoothly, shifted positions to offer them to Mary Ann first. "Mary Ann. You look wonderful."

"So do you. I'm hoping to get some of that glow pretty soon now."

"You mean... ?"

"Yep."

Sylvia hugged Mary Ann hard, then held her hands out to Cadmann. He took them, fighting to follow her lead, to maintain the distance between them. Some sense of proportion was called for here, but the instant he touched her skin, something inside him melted. He ached for her.

"Cadmann." Her mouth tweaked in an attempt at a casual smile. "Is Mary Ann right? You haven't been shooting blanks?"

"Nope, someone slipped a live round in there. At least, that's what we're hoping. At least, that's what we came down to find out." He hesitated. "Would you take care of my lady for me?"

"You know it." There were tiny moist jewels forming at the corners of her eyes, and she squeezed his hand. "Hey, big man—are we going to be seeing more of you? I'm going to be losing a passenger in a month."

It had to be his imagination, but her hands suddenly flushed with warmth. He released them, embarrassed by the strength of his reaction. "I wouldn't miss it. As soon as you're in labor, I'll head back down. Promise. Aside from that... I've got livestock now, and crops. I just don't know."

She nodded, unwilling to pressure him. "Listen... I'll take Mary Ann for a full checkup. Stay for dinner?"

"Count on it."

Mary Ann hugged Cadmann and planted a long, proprietary kiss on his mouth, pressing herself against him, to the appreciative guffaws of the crowd.

Then she and Sylvia linked arms and marched off together.

Cadmann shifted his pack around until the pain in his ribs eased (and a fresh ache started in the bone of his right hip). He continued on into the camp. A zigzag walkway through the minefield was painted bright green, and he followed it, noting the guns placed to cover that path. He nodded approval.

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 still 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?"