The Legacy of Heorot (35 page)

"Some almond-eyed lovely. I'd wager."

"You lose."

"Ooh. Guess what the stakes were. Claim your prize, you terrible man."

"Insatiable woman. Let me catch my breath. Where was I?" He ran his finger slowly down her back, then kissed her as softly and sincerely as she had ever been kissed in her life. "Oh, yes. Why was I in Beijing?" He laughed. "My family estate is in Patagonia, Argentina. We have fairly extensive holdings, actually. We raised shorthorn and Hereford, and Corriedale sheep. Very old family."

"Your whimsy certainly isn't high Spanish."

"Hell, half the time we spoke English. My mother was Canadian. I picked up colloquial Spanish in Mexico, in prep school and college. There was this little problem back home with a young lady. Her eyes, were, I recall, almond. The vegetable analogy unfortunately extended to her tummy, which was beginning to look like a casaba."

She felt a cold flash. "And you left—"

"No," he said quietly. "I didn't really love her, but I would have done the honorable thing. My father got there first, with checkbook in hand. She was poor, you see, and Papa wasn't having any of it. She went to visit untraceable cousins in Santiago del Estero, and I went north."

She relaxed again. "Where you stayed out of trouble, I hope."

"Hardly. I seem to have this talent."

"Mmmm. I've noticed."

"I was nothing but an embarrassment to my family. I can laugh about it now, but I really made a mess of things. I drank and gambled and wenched, and had the bad grace to stay in the top ten percent of my class. My father bought me out of one fix after another. Finally I got the royal invitation to get the hell off the continent. Live in Asia, drawing generous funds from the Bank of Hong Kong, or live penniless in the Americas. Being sensible, I opted for the mysterious East."

"A remittance man."

"Exactly. Want to know something?"

"What?"

"I'm half sure that my father bribed someone to get me my berth on

Geographic. I don't think China was far enough away."

"Not a chance. You earned every mile. Your father must have been an interesting man."

"Aristocrat to the hilt. Used to retell Grandfather's war stories with relish. It was ‘when the peons revolted' this, and ‘in the fall of 1998' that, and firing squads and torched villages, and Indians dragged out of the jungle by their necks. He had holos of stacks of heads..."

He fell silent, and she didn't disturb his trance. At last he emerged. "To him it was all ‘us' and ‘them.' We had the land, they wanted it. As simple as that. I told him I hated that life, that I'd never be a part of it. And here I am. Watching the herds." Carlos chuckled darkly. "And fighting the natives, for that matter. Enough of that. How about some more of this?"

Sylvia looked to the clock on the wall. It was three in the morning.

"No. I think that I had better go."

"When will... oh, nuts. Chula mia, it sounds ridiculous, I mean, it's hard to have someone here that I care about, and not know when I'll be able to be with her again."

"I don't know yet. I'm just glad we had tonight."

"As am I. Take care, chiquita."

She kissed him again and then rolled carefully out of the hammock. She took a thorough shower, then slipped her clothes back on and left. Carlos was already asleep.

The fog had cleared some. Morning was still hours away, but she felt lighter, and warmer. Most importantly, she knew that she could face Terry with a clear conscience. What had happened between her and Carlos had nothing to do with her marriage, or her love for Terry.

But even if it had...

LIFE CYCLE

And now the matchless deed's achieved,

Determined, dared, and done!

CHRISTOPHER SMART, "Song to David"

Mary Ann pushed Cadmann away. "I can do it myself. I'm having a baby, not an operation." Clumsily, she pulled her legs up onto the delivery table.

Cadmann hovered nervously. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Fine, darling. You look a little sick, though."

"I just hate leaving the important things to someone else."

"Trust me." She inhaled harshly, then released the breath as a contraction wracked her body. "Not much—uhhh—longer now."

Jerry patted her stomach comfortingly. "Just a few minutes, little soldier. We're almost ready for you."

"It's all right." She fought to stabilize her breathing, felt her pelvis stretch painfully, then release. She gasped for breath. "Ten light-years from home and—" she labored for another breath—"we still don't have a better way to do this."

"Well, there's a Caesarean—"

"Invented in B.C. times for God's sa—ugh!" The pain stabbed again, increasing in intensity and frequency. She gripped Cadmann's hand hard as Jerry seated her on the delivery table. She settled down into the saddle at the edge that would allow her to sit up and push, with gravity assisting her pelvic muscles.

"Now breathe."

All of Mary Ann's world contracted to a pinpoint centered on the ripple of pain that started deep inside her, then blossomed as her hips stretched to make room for the new life. The feeling intensified until it was neither agony or pleasure but merely sensation—

Dimly she heard Jerry say, "Cadmann, get the hell out of here."

"But—"

"But what? Get lost. Colonel, This is probably the only place on Avalon that you aren't needed."

"Mary Ann—"

"Go, stupid," she managed to say before another wave of pain hit her. Then another, and a third that broke like a receding wave, leaving her exhausted upon the shore.

"Breathe!" Marnie urged, and wiped Mary Ann's forehead. The pain was deep and vast, but not like a pain that would mean she was hurt. Her body was built for this. There was a burning, stretching sensation that receded and then strengthened, and she wanted to scream—

"Breathe!" With a start, she realized that she had literally forgotten to inhale. Everything vanished from her universe but the killing pressure in her abdomen, the sensation of a new life struggling through the darkness.

The light separated into coherent dots, floated away. Then they weren't dots at all.

They looked like tiny fish.

Samlon?

She almost laughed. What a time to think about—

"Breathe!"

This time the sensation was strong, almost like being pulled inside out, a long, shudderingly exquisite moment beyond time. The breaths and the minutes blurred, each a discrete entity, each forgotten as soon as it was gone. Consciousness fogged. How could she stretch so, without tearing? She would die. She would faint. The moment would never end, would go on and on—

A terrified Joe swam through the darkness, followed and swallowed by a larger something, just a shadowy glass fish shape, a samlon shape, swallowed in turn by something else, larger and more voracious. A grendel swallowed them both. It looked at her with blazing diamond eyes, challenging her. It fluxed like something out of an M.C. Escher painting, and was swallowed in turn by a mere samlon, but the legs of the grendel burst through its body, its teeth pierced through, so that as she watched, as she screamed, the samlon became—

"Breathe!"

"Push!"

The fragile hallucination vanished, wavered like steam above a hot spring and was gone, and there was only the reality of breathing. She held and pushed with the strong lower abdominal muscles.

There was a shared exclamation of relief in the room, and suddenly the stretching relaxed, the burning cooled. The pain was over. An unbelievably powerful wave of physical relief swept through her.

A sensation, cool, moist, rough terry cloth against her face.

A sound: a baby... her baby, crying.

Her vision was still blurry, but she saw Marnie cleanse a squiggling red-skinned thing that wailed like a siren, and Mary Ann's heart melted.

She closed her eyes again, and a moment later Jerry pressed a warm bundle into her arms. Its face was still daubed with blood and fluid, its eyes shut tightly against the strange and terrible world it had suddenly been thrust into. Its hands, just the size of walnuts, were fisted tightly.

And Marnie whispered, "It's a girl."

She tried to speak, to say. Thank you for my daughter, or anything at all. Nothing emerged but tears.

Just north of the Colony the Miskatonic had been dammed. The new lake rippled blue in the hazy light of Tau Ceti. A half mile across the lake the water spilled over a dam. When engineering completed the new construction, power would flow from a hydroelectric plant.

The dam. The solar cells. The fusion plant. Together they would make the colonists the wealthiest human beings in the history of mankind. They would have energy, and land, and the lessons of three hundred years of industrial Earth to guide them. A few more years, and wealth untold...

"I love it," Cadmann said, looking out over their artificial lake. "Hendrick has created a miracle. It's the only lake on the island fit to swim in."

Sylvia nodded. She shielded her eyes as she peered down the asphalt shoreline.

Two vehicles came toward them at high speed. On the straight flat road they moved faster than the designers had expected, or wanted. Mary Ann and Terry were racing motorized wheelchairs. Mary Ann was a meter ahead. Avalon's newest mother didn't need the chair, but it was fun to be babied.

Cadmann seemed more at peace with the Colony since Jessica's birth. His hair was a little grayer than it had been a year ago, but he stood taller, leaner, an animate extension of this hard and beautiful land. He gazed out over the lake, to where the iron peaks of the northern mountains rose up and tickled the clouds.

"Our work is never going to be finished," he said confidently. "Think of what we found lurking in our little corner of this planet."

"Terry's worked out plans for an expedition to the mainland."

"We should go as soon as we finish some of the other work. There's a lot to catch up on."

Her eyes searched the sky, "God, I feel so tied to this planet now. I wouldn't want to leave. I really wouldn't."

There was a shout from the edge of the lake. Mary Ann had pulled ahead of Terry.

"It's all right, isn't it?" Cadmann asked. "About us. About them."

"Absolutely."

"I look at Mary Ann. I think about Jessie, a bit of me that will go on after I'm gone. Everything just seems a lot righter. And she gave me that gift."

"I'm glad that we're friends."

"We couldn't be anything else, Sylvia."

She jumped: a shock wave as loud and sudden as a clap of thunder reverberated across the plain.

Mary Ann shrieked and pointed up into the sky. Cadmann whipped his binoculars up. "There she is. Don't you just love rocket ships? Bring her down, Stu!"

Sylvia spotted a thread of vapor trail as the Minerva began its descent. Now its shape could be seen: bastard birth of airplane and insurance building, the blunt bucket of a craft that had brought them down a precious few at a time, and delivered them to Avalon without an injury or mishap.

It hit the lake and skimmed across it like a drop of water on a white-hot plate. It had almost reached shore before its wings touched the glistening blue surface. Then clouds of steam rose up with a roar like a muted waterfall. It maneuvered the rest of the way in short bursts.

"This is your package, isn't it, Sylvie?"

"The very. Nat Geo gave me an early Christmas this year."

The Minerva thumped into the dock, rotated and locked in. After a moment the hatch opened, and Hendrick Sills climbed out. "Bumpy ride this time. We may have a storm coming in."

"Well, let's get the mail in."

Mary Ann and Terry pulled up to the dock.

"I win!!"

"She cheated."

Cadmann glared at them fiercely. "All right. What have you two been talking about?"

"Oh, about the same stuff as you and Sylvia."

"Then our relationship is doomed." Cadmann jumped up on the landing platform and helped Hendrick down. Stu emerged after. He carried a sealed metal box.

"We've got the goods here," Stu announced. "But hardier and more patient souls than I are going to have to download and sort them out."

"You don't look happy," Cadmann said.

"Maybe I'm not," Stu said.

"With good reason." Carolyn McAndrews came out of the hatch, followed by her sister Phyllis. Carolyn's face was tight with rage. "They proxmired the e-Eridani expedition."

"What?" Cadmann demanded.

"They canceled the e-Eridani ship," Phyllis said gently. "And all the others. There aren't any more interstellar flights."

"All true," Stu said. "Maybe our pictures weren't pretty enough—"

"That news is ten years old!" Mary Ann said. "Nothing we sent to Earth could have got there in time to make any difference!"

Carolyn glared angrily at Mary Ann. "We know." Her eyes softened. "He was joking, Mary Ann. Not a very good joke."

"We're all there is," Terry said. He looked down at his wheelchair. "Pretty heavy responsibility. I guess I'm glad we didn't know before we'd killed off the grendels. When too much depends on me, I always get stage fright."

Sylvia kept a greedy eye on the computer disk. "We're still here. And you're carrying a year's worth of news, and a complete encyclopedia update. With all of the data lost in the attack, this is what I've been looking for, and to hell with the proxmires."

"What is it? Just what are you looking for?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "I can feel things, patterns, trying to make connections in my head. Computers are good at that. We'll see what happens."

"Yeah. Well, you've got your mail." Hendrick lifted a box and carried it down to the pier's end.