by Larry Niven
Sylvia drew away from him, face troubled. She shut off the light in the embryo bank. “Cad . . . if you’d try to be a little nicer to Jumbo’s father, things would be easier for all of us.”
There was nothing in her face he could feel angry with. His hand still tingled from the contact. “I knew it. A nice trip for old Weyland. Find him a useful job. Then try to civilize him a little, before he gets sent to the outback where he belongs. Cadmann Weyland. First of the Great White Abos.”
She shook her head and gave him a hug. “We know things aren’t easy for you—but at least you know why you’ve got problems. Terry just knows that when he thawed out he wasn’t quite the same anymore. Terry and Ernst . . . Carolyn . . . Alicia . . . Mary Ann . . . ”
“What? Mary Ann Eisenhower?”
“Well, she’s not one of the bad ones.”
“She seems—”
“Sure, she’s normal. Cad, she lost some brain cells in frozen sleep. She isn’t stupid, but she used to be brilliant, and she remembers, Cad. She and Hendrick Sills were the top bridge players, and they shared a bed too, before we put the colonists to sleep. Tom Eisenhower woke up dead, and Hendrick gets very uncomfortable if he’s in the same room with her. He remembers. So Hendrick is with Phyllis now, and Mary Ann cries on Rachel’s couch.”
Cadmann touched her hand.
“But she’s a normal, healthy, sexy woman if you didn’t know her before. These changes can be very subtle, Cad. Carolyn McAndrews was second in command to Zack. Nobody wants to work with her now. She didn’t turn stupid, but she goes into hysterics.”
“And maybe there’s a dead place in old Cadmann’s brain too.”
“Not that we can tell—like I said, you’ve got reasons to feel out of place. The others just know that the cryogenics weren’t perfect. That the nightmares are a little darker. Maybe it isn’t quite as easy to remember a favorite poem, or extract a cube root, or run the Twelve-Fourteen Convention in bridge.” She paused, and her voice dropped. “Or make love. We don’t know what it is yet. It’ll be twenty years before we get any answers from Earth. In the meantime, there are mood stabilizers, and make-work projects. And there’s hope. Most of us are fine. Our genes are good. We’ll do everything humanly possible to keep you on the team. Can you blame us?”
He took her shoulders, gazing down into her eyes. The air was tart with disinfectant and dehumidifier; her perfume was a wisp of citrus and crushed rose petal, the only thing in the ship that smelled alive. “What ‘us’? What about—?”
The intercom crackled, and Stu Ellington said, “We’ve got a message for you, Weyland. Development landside. Something about some chickens.”
Sylvia disengaged herself from him gently, triggering the nearest intercom phone with an unsteady finger. Her eyes were still locked to Cadmann’s. “D-don’t worry. We’ll be bringing down more embryos.”
“It’s not that.” It was Bobbi who spoke this time, and her voice was excited. “Mits Kokubun found some tracks.” She paused. “They might be tracks, anyway.”
“Paw prints?” Sylvia frowned.
“Don’t know. Zack said that they just didn’t look like anything he’d seen. Wants Cadmann to take a look at them. Soonest.”
“Pipe it in.”
“They didn’t send pictures.”
“Think you two can cut your snuggle session down so Stu can give us a ride home?”
Stu groaned massively. “Oh, if I must—” and dropped off the line.
Cadmann cleared his throat, backing up a half-step. “Was there anything else you wanted to show me?”
She retrieved her backpack, fumbled out a handful of dark plastic cartridges and held them before her like a shield. “You’ve used the computer. You’ll be running some programs for me, and I . . . ” Her eyes dropped. “Oh, hell, Cad. I don’t know what I wanted. We . . . I just want everything to work out for you. We don’t want you closing up, Cad. I don’t want to lose you.” Suddenly she seemed very small and awkward. “I love you. You’re my friend.”
The moment that followed was uncomfortably long and painfully silent. Then Cadmann’s lips curled in a smile. “Tell you what. Let’s go roust Stu’s ass and get a lift home. How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
The chicken coops were nestled next to the single-story sheet-metal structure of the machine shop, and the ground around them was well trodden. It had never been plowed, and was the same burnt, packed earth that lay beneath most of the Colony.
When Cadmann got there, a fifteen-by-thirty-meter block of ground had been marked off with rope to protect the footprints. A score of colonists were still huddled around the periphery. Joe Sikes’s wife, Evvie, held her baby tightly against her breast, the child’s reddish scalp shining through thin, limp blond hair. The baby gurgled, unconcerned, but the woman looked stricken. Their baby was the colony’s second. The first, April Clifton, was still in intensive care.
Carlos stood with Mitsuo Kokubun and Harry Siep, and they were grinning. Harry preened his heavy growth of beard, hiding his mouth behind his fingers as he whispered something to Mits. All three choked on repressed laughter.
Zack ran his fingers through black hair that had been noticeably thicker only months before. When Cadmann broke through the ring of spectators and squatted to take a close look at the tracks, Zack punched him lightly on the shoulder, relief and gratitude tattooed across his face in bold strokes.
“Glad you’re here,” Zack said. “What do you make of this?”
Cadmann hitched his trousers and bent, peering closely at the depressed ridges of the footprint. It was just broader than his hand, with four distinct, roughly triangular toes. He ran his finger along it lightly.
He asked, “Have we taken a cast of this?”
“Marnie did. We’re reinforcing the fences, and we can put the power back through them if we have to.”
There were eight of the prints, some faint, some clear and sharp. One in front of the chicken coop was smeared. He stood and looked back along the path the tracks had taken—they led in the direction of the mountains, but disappeared long before they reached the plowed ground. Suspicion niggled at the back of his mind.
“You know,” Cadmann said finally, “I could have sworn there weren’t any tracks here when I left this morning.”
Zack shook his head. “Beats me. There was someone here all the time, Cad. The overcast was pretty bad. Maybe the sun had to be just so high before we could spot them.”
The crowd had thinned a bit.
“Hola, amigo. Any ideas?”
Cadmann studied the ground, then Carlos’s overeager smile. Little Rick Erin, standing next to Carlos, was having trouble managing his face.
Cadmann walked slowly up to the historian-carpenter. “Yes. I do have an idea. I think it was made by something that was highly skilled, bipedal, not overly intelligent, and weighed about—” he looked Carlos over carefully. “About seventy kilos, I’d guess. We’ll call it illegitimus estúpido for the time being. I’m mixing languages there, but I think you get my drift.”
He turned on his heel.
“Cadmann—”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”
As he walked away, Cadmann heard sniggers and the sound of back-slapping. Idiots. He doused the flare of anger as he came back to the ruined coop.
“What do you think, Cad?” Zack looked puzzled.
“This was a hoax. This was.” Cadmann’s face was still burning. “I like the idea of checking the fences. Get them ready.” He looked out over the flat ground, past the fluffy cultivated rows, past the ring of thorn trees to the mountains and jungle beyond. “Listen, Zack, maybe the footprints were a hoax, but these chickens are still dead. I don’t think we’ve got anyone dumb enough to murder a bunch of our chickens for a joke. I don’t much care who laughs at me; let’s be ridiculously cautious for a while, eh?”
Cadmann stepped on the nearest print. If he had strapped, say, a rubber cutout to the bottom of his shoe, h
e could walk carefully back and forth, making those goddamn prints right in front of everyone’s nose, and then stand back and watch the fun . . .
Behind him someone made a doglike yipping sound. He didn’t turn to look.
♦ChaptEr 4♦
rainy night
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.
—William Blake,
Appendix to the “Songs of Innocence
and Experience: A Divine Image”
Six weeks after the incident at the coops, a mild eruption on the northwest side of the island shook the ground. Three days later, threadlike wisps of ash still drifted from the air. The mists that enshrouded the mountain peaks had dropped in a gray blanket, diffusing the light of Tau Ceti.
Streamers of light flashed within the cloud banks, and thunder echoed distantly onto the plain. Cadmann slipped his tractor into neutral and watched the clouds cautiously. The engine’s hum strummed his spine.
“Don’t worry,” Mary Ann called to him. “That’s just a little mountain storm. It doesn’t care about us.” She moved between knee-high rows of plants, checking the slender soil-meter rods for moisture and pH.
The alfalfa replanting was being cautiously hailed as a success. Failure of the first crop was attributed to the thorn trees which had once dominated the plain. When the trees were burned away their taproots remained alive underground, leaching moisture from the soil. Alfalfa, with a potential yield of ten tons per acre, requires tremendous amounts of water. Omar Isfahan and Jon van Don, two of the Colony’s engineers, had planned and installed a more extensive irrigation system.
“We could use the water, either way. But if it’s going to rain, I’m wasting my time up here.”
“Practice. Practice. We all take rotation in the fields.” Mary Ann’s smile was as brilliant as her hair, and it warmed him. They had grown closer in the weeks since his talk with Sylvia aboard Geographic.
Hibernation Instability. He saw her differently now. She wasn’t bright . . . and yet she had been. Wounded in the war to capture Avalon; wounded in his war.
The electrified fences had been expanded and strengthened. When there was no additional trouble, the animals were turned out into the northern pasture. Some of the older lambs and calves were already grazing contentedly.
No additional trouble . . .
Cadmann liked the sound of that, even if there was a part of him that didn’t quite believe it. (Didn’t want to believe it?)
He had returned twice to Geographic. He liked that. Checking the embryos was sheer routine; but one side of the crew lounge was a wide window. Cadmann could sit and look up at Avalon, and feel peace.
So beautiful. Spirals of white storm, blazing white of polar caps, the spine of jagged white-capped mountain range along the single continent . . . white against the rich blue of a water-and-oxygen atmosphere, a world that men could take and tame.
Zack had been right. Their grandchildren would conquer this world, and the first hundred and sixty colonists would be remembered for all time.
Immortality.
At what price? A century of sleep? Brain damage for a few; Ernst and Mary Ann and Carolyn and, yes, Terry, were paying the price for all. But for the rest: bruises and sprains, and maybe a few bad dreams? He had to laugh. The pilgrims who had founded the American continent had paid far more dearly to accomplish less.
Tau Ceti Four’s colonials had it easy.
The air was suddenly cold. Raindrops spattered against his hands and the hood of the tractor.
“Shit-oh-dear,” Mary Ann said, gazing up at the clouds. They coiled angrily in the sky like a vast heap of coals: black around the edges, fire flickering in the core. The lightning flashes were brighter and closer, and the thunder was no longer a distant rolling explosion.
“So much for the weather report, Mary Ann.” The wind was whipping the rain into sheets, and he turned up his collar. “Come on, hop aboard—I’ll give you a ride back to the shed.”
She clipped a handful of green sprouts and stuffed them into her blouse pocket. She hunched her shoulders and clopped through the broken ground, climbed up behind him on the tractor and wrapped her arms around him. He felt her shiver as her breasts pressed into his back.
He said, “We’ll just have to have Town Meeting early. Good. I want that damned current turned back on. I’m sick of hearing about how I’m overreacting.” He lifted the digging tool from the ground and headed back toward Civic Center.
She squeezed him tight, in a special rolling way that she had. It took the edge off his ire, but he grumbled on. “Well, it sure as hell isn’t the power. We’ve got all the power we need, rain or shine.”
“Everybody says it’s a lot of trouble just to stop a dog.”
“Right. A dog.” He sighed. “All right. They’re entitled to their opinion. I’m entitled to mine.”
Her voice was muffled against his back. “You’re not alone. You have me, too. But we’re just two.”
The rain was still fairly light as he drove the tractor into the shed. The other farming equipment was being brought in, and the colonists were beginning to gather, heading for the meeting hall. Cadmann shut down the tractor and squeezed water from his hair.
“I’ll be in in a minute,” she called, hopping down from the back of the tractor. She paused at the doorway to turn up her collar, then ran out in the direction of the corral.
Maybe Mary Ann was right. His was a minority opinion. Madman Weyland sees bogymen in every corner—while crops grow, animals thrive and tame earthworms enrich the soil with their bodies and their wastes.
When he thought of these things, he should have thought of life, instead of a dog that had never come back, and a mangled chicken cage . . .
It loved a rainy night.
It could always move about on land, slowly, lazily, and tolerate the heat for hours at a time; but movement at hunting speed required a quick kill, then a frantic race to the river to shed the terrible heat within. Night and rain extended its time on dry land.
It had changed when it became an adult. Its mind and senses adapted for life out of water; but from birth it had been intensely curious. Frustratingly, there had been nothing for its curiosity to chew on. Birds and swimmers were its world, a prison for its starved senses, until the intruders introduced it to the world beyond the rock wall.
They were so strange! They built angular nests. They tottered on their hind legs or attached themselves to creatures with hard, weirdly scented, tasteless shells. Sometimes they would let themselves be swallowed up by them, much like swimmers would. They lived with creatures even stranger than themselves.
On the first night it had killed a four-legged thing. The dog had run after it rather than fleeing. It had played with the dog, dancing around it and watching its antics. When the game grew tiresome, it tore out the animal’s throat. The blood was thick and hot and delicious.
Afterward it had felt overheated. It had hooked its tail spines into the dog’s throat and dragged the corpse back toward the river, where it could cool itself and eat at leisure.
Sport! Swimmers were never such fun. The flying things that sometimes fed on them were too much of a challenge. It thought about that night, and pleasure rippled through its body.
There had been another night when it broke through prickly barriers, following a tantalizing scent.
The nest of wood and thin tough vine had resisted only for a moment, and then it was among them, one thick paw and its wedgelike head squeezed into the box. What noise they had made! They had tried to fly, but badly. None were fast, none could fight. It was not even sport. It was only feeding . . . but feeding was its own reward, and anything that didn’t taste like a swimmer was food for thought.
That was days past. Now it watched something that looked to be good sport.
A single invader was walking out by the rows of thorned vines that prote
cted a group of four-legged grass-eaters. The invader looked frequently up at the clouds, no doubt enjoying the fall of rain, and shook water out of the dark fur on its head.
The invader never looked behind the tarpaulin-sheltered jeep parked to the side of the grazing land. The man walked to within ten feet of it, leaned against the fence with one arm outstretched and spoke to one of the grass-eaters.
The grass-eater walked clumsily to the fence and licked something out of the man’s hand. The man turned and took a step toward the jeep.
The creature’s limbs trembled, tingled, its blood singing with anticipation. Come. Just another step . . .
Disappointment washed through its mind as the man turned at the call of another of its kind and ran torpidly back toward the lights.
Ah, well. There was still the grass-eater.
It was near the thorned vines, chewing at something on the ground. It was plump—more than twice as large as the dog, almost as large as the creature itself—but that was no worry. It could feel that the grass-eater was no fighter.
The creature crawled forward until its flat, roughly triangular head peeped from behind the jeep. A raindrop spattered directly into its eye, and its ocular covering thickened momentarily.
The calf chewed the handful of alfalfa sprouts Mary Ann had brought it. The rain was just beginning to chill its skin, and soon it would head for the metal-roofed shelter in the corner of the pasture to huddle for warmth with its brothers and sisters.
There came a rippling cooing sound from beyond the fence, and the calf pressed against the wire until it felt the first touch of pain. It lowed plaintively. It shuffled at the fence, afraid to press forward, reluctant to retreat.
The shape was a massed shadow flowing around the curve of the jeep. A squat, flattened shadow with disklike, unblinking eyes and a dolphin’s smile.
The creature burbled happily.
The calf backed away. Sudden, uncomprehending fear pumped adrenaline into its system, sent it stumbling backward toward the shelter. The creature waddled with almost comic clumsiness up to the fence, sniffed at the wire, bit at it experimentally, drew back.