by Larry Niven
“Sushi.” She’d sliced up a foot-long samlon and started on another, nibbling as she worked. “Have some.”
“The rest of the Colony gets to eat too. Them’s the rules.”
She sighed. The nightmare was still graven in her face, still caused her to wake at night, moaning for Jon. But they were helping each other heal. This wasn’t a perfect world, but together they could make it a good one.
“Hendrick, dear, half the Colony is here. Are they supposed to look at all this and salivate? Look, Skeeter One’s already off, and they’re piling fish in Skeeter Three as fast as it comes in. We’re saving none of it for the damn pterodons.”
Hendrick thumbed his comcard. “Skeeter One, air conditioning?”
“It’s on. We’re freezing. Don’t be such a nitpicker, Hendrick!”
The Skeeters would have their air conditioning on max to keep the samlon fresh: a nice example of Avalon’s mix of high technology, low, and none. Hendrick tapped again. “Joe. You set up downstream?”
“Sure am. Somebody bring me lunch?”
“We’ll think about it.”
“Do more than think, or else if I see a grendel I’ll cheer her on!”
“Okay, okay, Ida’s made you some sushi.”
Not that there was much chance of a grendel. The pools downstream had all been cleaned out. One hundred days had passed since the battles. Grendels had established territories and fought to keep them. Like Siamese fighting fish: one grendel to a pool. But unlike the fish who fought only until one retreated, if one grendel intruded on another’s territory the result was one dead grendel and one well fed.
This one must have been well fed. There was plenty of samlon here. A good find. No fear that all the meat would be eaten here—as long as the pterodons could be kept under control.
The air stank of speed soup, and recorders on the boats were playing the recording Stu had made during the final attack. Screams of grendel-challenge and grendel-death ravaged the air. The flying appetites hovered, shrieking their anger, afraid to come down.
It was good that they didn’t have to use bullets on the pterodons. Too few bullets now. When humans were finished here, the pterodons could have the grendel’s corpse. Hendrick himself had tried to eat grendel meat—starvation was much to be preferred. Skeeter Three lifted away, carrying tonight’s feast.
Sylvia used an optical pen to underline one of the passages in the old report Terry had written. It felt a little odd to play back Cassandra’s old files. Old notes on the expedition to the mainland, back when all the grendels were gone from Avalon and everything was wonderful. Good stuff. We can do it almost the way Terry outlined it—and then a brief, sad flash: Terry . . .
“It isn’t fair,” Carolyn said.
Mary Ann looked up from changing diapers. “What isn’t fair?”
“You’ve got men. You monopolize them.”
“Foo,” Marnie said. “You can’t blame me if Jerry prefers my bod to yours.”
“Plus the fact that you’ll give him pure holy hell for weeks,” Mary Ann said. Her voice was strained through diaper pins.
“And if I seduce Cadmann?” Carolyn asked.
“I’ll kill you.” Mary Ann finished her diaper job. “Now, if you want to marry him—”
“What?” Carolyn was jolted.
“I could use a junior wife,” Mary Ann said. Her eyes took on a dreamy look. Then the smile vanished. “Sylvia—”
“It’s all right,” Sylvia said. Terry, you bastard, you could have relieved me of that promise. You could have. “What’s the matter, Carolyn? Don’t want to join the commune?”
“Meow,” Mary Ann said.
“Sorry. But not very. Look, we have five monogamous marriages plus chaos. There’s no point in being delicate about it. Especially among ourselves.” Five monogamous marriages, except I could make that four plus another bigamy, and Mary Ann wouldn’t mind, and Terry, Terry, you could have said something noble! You muffed your line—
“We’re getting off the subject,” Marnie said. “Carolyn, this next broadcast is probably our last chance to change anything back in Sol system. By the time they get this message, it will have been twenty years since their interstellar program was proxmired. They’re probably bored to tears, ready to hang on our every word. Did we survive the grendels? The suspense must be killing them.
“This isn’t just for the Geographic Society. The whole solar system will be listening! Billions of people who watched while they didn’t build the interstellar ships will be still alive. A little nostalgic. Getting older, wondering where the excitement went. So we want to make all our points while we’ve got them hooked! Sylvia, what have you got onscreen?”
“Terry’s mainland expedition. We’ll send them that, of course. Adventure calls, even on Avalon! We’re short one Skeeter now, and the mission has changed a little because we’re hungry. We’ll want to anchor a Minerva in a bay, then take the Skeeters halfway up some mountain, above where the grendels can reach. Collect some Joes, if nothing else, and reseed the island.”
“Any way we can put visuals in that lecture?”
“Visuals of what? They’ve seen the equipment. We’ve improved the orbital maps. I guess we can put in Joes . . . ”
“Summon up those notes for the broadcast.”
“Yeah.” Sylvia tapped. She read off the list:
“Full details on grendel attack. Bored on Earth? Come to romantic Avalon and find adventure. Emphasize that we won. We control the grendels. Nail it down by showing us hunting out a grendel pond. I sent Sikes down with a camera; he’ll get that today.
“De-emphasize hunger. De-emphasize fatalities. But we can talk about the taste of local life, Joes and samlon. We can’t show another harvest because nothing’s come up yet—”
“They’ve seen a harvest,” Marnie said.
“Joes are cute,” Mary Ann said. “Don’t say we eat them . . . ”
“I suppose. Anyway—set ’em up for the foray to the mainland. I’ll bet my ass we find something weird and interesting there. What eats grendels?”
“Shudder,” Carolyn said, and she did shudder. Sylvia chose not to notice. For a moment Carolyn was somewhere else. For a few seconds, she wasn’t Carolyn; she was Phyllis, dying under the claws of a grendel.
Rachel had worked especially hard with Carolyn. They had all worked to pull her back into the community, caring for her as they never had when her twin was alive. She needed them now, probably more than any of them could understand.
“We can’t avoid it,” Sylvia said, deliberately raising her voice to cut into Carolyn’s train of thought. “We have to tell Earth how many of us died, but we can just send a bald list. And we’ll give ’em a list of what we need. It’s short. Ruined equipment. They’re bound to have fancier computers than Cassandra. We lost some life-forms too. I want just enough of a list to let them know visitors would be welcome.
“But we have to hammer hard on how we beat the grendels. We took on one and two and six and then ten thousand, and we’re mopping them up in detail. Carolyn, you have to tell your story for the broadcast back to Earth!”
“That’s what Carlos says,” Carolyn admitted. “But damn all, I don’t want to.”
“Why not?” Marnie asked.
Carolyn looked down at her hands. She was sliding away again, and Mary Ann caught it. “We care. Earth will care.” She lowered her voice. “And Phyllis would be so proud of you. I bet she is, anyway.”
Carolyn’s smile was weak. “It was such a little story compared to the last stand at Cadmann’s Bluff.”
Sylvia shook her head violently. “Jeez, here Marnie and I are all jealous of you—”
“Jealous?”
“Sure. We were up there in Geographic, all safe, and you were out slaying grendels!”
“You don’t mean that. You’re just being—”
“I was never more serious.”
“But Mary Ann—”
“You saved the horses,” Marnie said. �
��Which is a very lot more than I did. Tell them a story, Carolyn! It’s not little, it’s compact! Tell—tell us. Now. Then it’ll be easier when you tell it for Earth.”
“Yes, yes, tell us,” Mary Ann said.
Carolyn looked at them, realized that they meant it and that they understood. “All right,” she began tentatively. “Did I tell you I gave them names?”
“Yeah,” Marnie said. “Cassandra record.”
“No!” Carolyn protested.
“Cassandra. Record. File as dry run.” Marnie grinned. “Surely you don’t think of Cassie as an eavesdropper? She’s your friend too.”
“Yeah. Yes, I guess so.” Carolyn straightened in her chair. “I named them all. I named the first one after Charlie Manson.” Suddenly Carolyn was grinning like a grendel. She had presence. She’d been on camera before. “Charlie must have been suffering from Hibernation Instability. He came at me through water, dragging half a horse! I just stood up from behind a rock and shot him.
“That left three grendels after me and two harpoons to my name. I started being careful, but I was in a hurry too. I got the horses as far as the base of the glacier. By then I could see that the grendels had reached Charlie and what was left of Shank’s Mare. One of them was too chicken to get close. That was Mareta—”
Sylvia shuddered. Teheran. The whole city. Omar lost cousins. Well, Mareta Lupoff certainly got the world’s attention—
“—but Mareta stayed behind and ate the leavings when the other two went on. I kept going up the glacier, leaving the horses behind. I was fifty meters up when Khadafi went on speed and came for me. She hit ice. It surprised her, but she kept coming, legs churning, ice flying, getting slower and slower as the ice got steeper. She was running in place when I shot her.
“I thought I was in a good place, then, so I stayed. Nothing to eat, but plenty of water. Mareta and the Ayatollah stared at me for a while, but neither of them wanted to try it. I was almost hoping one would. But not both.
“After a while, Joe Sikes found me. We managed to take ten of the horses down. The rest are still up there with two grendels. There’s not much point in going after Mareta and the Ayatollah.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Sylvia said. “There have to be lots of grendels in the hills, but they’ll never lay fertile eggs. The samlon are the males. They have to come down for that.”
“So. That’s what happened,” Carolyn said. “It was scary enough, but . . . it felt so damned good to sh-shoot those things I was so scared of.”
“Cassandra end file,” Marnie said.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Mary Ann said. “A really good story.”
“You? You killed a dozen with your bare hands—”
Mary Ann laughed. “I don’t know who you listen to.”
“And anyway, they won’t give me my job back.”
“No, they won’t,” Sylvia said. “Would you put Mary Ann in charge of anything?”
Carolyn gulped and was silent.
“I wouldn’t,” Mary Ann said. “I know I’m still smart, but there are things I don’t know that I’m supposed to. I don’t trust me.”
“Cadmann does,” Carolyn said.
“He trusts my instincts.” Mary Ann kissed Jessica’s ear.
“Besides, he’s in love,” Sylvia said. “Now. Let’s solve Carolyn’s problem.”
“Look, it’s a simple situation,” Marnie said. “You want a baby. We all do. We have to. Genetic programming, Colony in danger, instinct and heredity and common sense all say we get pregnant and have babies.” She patted her six-month bulge. “Babies need fathers. Some of us have husbands, but there are more women than men.”
“Which makes Carlos happy enough,” Carolyn said. “Only—”
“He’s responsible enough,” Mary Ann said complacently.
Marnie giggled. “Godfather to half the unborn kids here. Well, maybe not half. Look, Carolyn, you’re not in love with anyone. Right? Right. You want a man of your own, but you’re not going to get one. There aren’t enough to go around.”
And even if there were, you’d last about a year, Sylvia thought. She knew that wasn’t fair: Carolyn had been married for nine years to a hydraulics engineer who hadn’t survived frozen sleep. But she’s such a bitch, and maybe that’s Hibernation Instability, and maybe she just had a bloody saint for a husband.
“So,” Marnie continued, “you have some choices. You can try to seduce one of the seriously married men and hope that either his wife doesn’t find out or that she won’t kill you if she does.” When Carolyn tried to say something, Marnie held up her hand. “There’s celibacy. Doesn’t appeal to you? Don’t blame you. Choice three. Get in on one of the orgies, and have group sponsorship of your kid. Maybe you don’t like that much, either. Choice four. Choose a father, have him provide you with a sperm sample. It’s easy: he produces a rubber balloon, he and his wife make whoopie. You take your teaspoon of baby syrup and do-it-yourself.
“Or. Final choice. Sleep with anyone you want to, but get pregnant from the sperm banks. Anonymous father. Nobody to be jealous, in case romance blooms later.”
The father doesn’t have to be anonymous. Sylvia felt herself blush. They don’t know. Cadmann doesn’t even know. Terry, Terry, I kept the goddamn promise, Terry. I didn’t sleep with him . . .
Mary Ann sat on the low wall, looking downhill.
She needed no binoculars to see that the new Colony was a fortress. Curved concrete walls surrounded the living areas. Fences and minefields enclosed the croplands. Inside the compound were naked scars, remains of the grendel attacks, but most of those were being built upon or plowed over. In a year there would be no traces.
Mits and Stu had found a grendel. Hah! Now that Cadmann and Zack and Rachel understood them, grendels were less a danger than a resource. With grendels came samlon, and feasting.
It wasn’t always easy to remember. Grendels laid eggs, which hatched into samlon. But samlon were male grendels. They ate pond slime. Adult samlon were female grendels, and they ate everything, but if there wasn’t anything else they ate samlon. If they could force grendels to eat all the samlon, there just wouldn’t be any more grendels. So there had to be nothing else to eat in the streams and rivers.
And when she asked why they couldn’t plant more catfish in the streams, that’s what they told her.
I’m sure it all makes sense. But I used to like catfish.
The mist was light enough today for her to make out the rows of crops, the animal pens where the horses and young cattle grazed. The Colony was to be rebuilt, and that was fine; but Cadmann would never live there. This is his home. Our home. Cadmann’s Bluff. She patted Jessica. Our home, and yours. We live in the high places.
She turned as the rhythmic thump of Cadmann’s jog-stride became louder. He was stripped to the waist, and his muscular body gleamed with sweat. He no longer winced when his left leg hit the ground.
The artificial limb was sound enough, strong enough for him to take his laps around the plateau. Tweedledum ran with him, gently urging him with tail-wagging enthusiasm.
One day. Someday, he’ll trust them enough to go to the new hospital and let them grow him a new leg. Someday.
A thought came up unbidden. When he’s whole again, he won’t need me. But he’s never needed me, not really. Maybe all I have is promises. His promises have to be enough.
She heard the burr of the Skeeter before it rose into view.
It juddered up over the western lip of the plateau, spun once and touched down on the concrete landing pad Hendrick had installed a week before. Cadmann jogged in place for a minute, then wiped his face and walked over.
Sylvia climbed out of the cabin, then lifted Justin out and set him on the ground. The toddler wobbled, then caught his balance and ran to them.
Mary Ann saw a flash of sadness in Cadmann’s eyes, immediately masked. He hugged Justin fiercely.
“Amigo,” Carlos said, and embraced Cadmann. “The leg is working well?”
>
“Oh, for a widget. I’ll get it regrown when they get the hospital running. We’ll have that expedition yet. But tonight—you came to give us a ride?”
“But of course!”
Sylvia held Justin’s hand. Her slender figure was slightly swollen with yet more life. Carlos’s child? Sylvia had never said, but Mary Ann thought so.
Cadmann’s eye found the swelling, and he smiled. “You better take good care of that, now.”
She rubbed her tummy affectionately. “Boy or girl, I’m naming it Terry.”
Carlos nodded approval.
Sylvia looked to Cadmann and waited.
“Terry. Right.”
“Right,” she said. She smiled and suddenly reached up to pull the combs from her hair. It tumbled down, much longer than it had ever been before.
Would look great spread out on a pillow. Mary Ann smiled softly. That would turn Cadmann on, and—Her thoughts were a jumble. I love Cadmann and I love Sylvia, and Cadmann loves Sylvia, but Sylvia won’t sleep with Cadmann, and I’m glad she won’t but I wish she would so he can stop wanting to and this is silly.
There were new lines on Sylvia’s face. She’s still beautiful. Cadmann will never get over her. And so what? He’s mine. Not hers. Mine.
“You’ve done a lot of work here,” Sylvia said. She swept her hand in a broad arc to indicate the new walls, Joe cages, cattle pens, fortifications, even a new deadfall: he’d found a building-sized rock, higher up, and dug under it, and laid a new minefield below it. She put her hand on Mary Ann’s shoulder and smiled wryly. “Well, lady, you won the grand prize.”
Mary Ann tried to smile but couldn’t. “Sylvia—Oh dammit, what can I say? I’d never be jealous of you!”
“I think I believe you. Doesn’t matter. Mary Ann, don’t you understand? The man adores you! Oh, sure, get him drunk enough and he’ll probably try to seduce a grendel—but he won’t make them any promises.”
“Hey,” Cadmann said.