by Larry Niven
What are you thinking, Father? She reached out to touch his arm, and felt him take her hand. There was a rough quality to his skin, a masculine smell to him, which was of infinite comfort. His face, so weathered by the elements here, so grooved by care and loss, seemed more angular to her. He didn’t seem old to her now, as he often did. He seemed . . . historical. She almost laughed.
The silence stretched on, long and unnatural. Then Colonel Cadmann Weyland said to her, at last, “You may have done the right thing, but that can’t make up for how it was done. Nothing can.”
“Toshiro?”
“More than that.”
“What could be—more than that?”
“We trusted you, then. When we found we couldn’t, everything changed. Toshiro died because we no longer knew what we could expect from you. From any of you. From him.”
“But he wouldn’t—oh.” She leaned her head against his shoulder.
“I’d have said that about you,” the colonel said. “And did. Toshiro wouldn’t kill Carlos. Jessica wouldn’t—Jessica, I can stand being made to look a fool. Anyone who has to make decisions knows that will happen someday. But—you came into our home and took advantage of your status there. That can’t happen again.”
Her throat tightened.
“But there’s another thing that you need to hear,” he said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. “I’m still your father, and I love you.”
“Really?” She hated the sound of her own voice, the little-girl quality, the needing-Daddy’s-approval quality. There was something there that she hadn’t heard in her own voice for years, and she wasn’t certain if she hadn’t missed it.
“Really,” he said. “I’ll visit you here on the mainland. Both of your mothers will come over. But you’re no longer welcome at the Bluff. Not now. Perhaps, later, after we see what you do with your responsibilities here. Love you get just because you’re my daughter. Trust has to be earned.”
She reached up and kissed his cheek. Started to speak, and he said, “Shhh.”
She nodded, and looked.
“Is everything all right here?” he asked. “Is there anything wrong?”
“What you see is what you get around here, Dad,” she said.
He nodded again, and she wondered what it was that he had almost said, almost commented upon.
“Some of the First will never accept you,” he said. “Will never be able to accept that you have a right to live the lives you want. To accept you as equal partners in this entire venture.”
“What are they saying?” she asked.
“They suggest that you need to create your own society because you can’t get along. That you have an adolescent need to break free, regardless of consequences. It’s not just the First who say it, you know. There are plenty at Surf’s Up—what’s left of Surf’s Up—who’ll say it too.”
A pterodon flew past, close enough that a well-thrown rock would have clipped a wing. Cadmann watched it for a long time.
“The nest,” Jessica said.
He nodded.
“But that was long ago.”
A smile.
“Dad, I’d say the same thing old Hendrick did. I’d tell a child, ‘Don’t touch the eggs. We don’t know what the pterodons will do, but you won’t like it.’ ”
He nodded again and looked away from the pterodon to stare down across the dry rock areas to where the river lay beyond grendel range. It wound off out of sight, an old river running through a long-silted valley, a snakelike, misty ribbon.
“The wells are over there,” Jessica said. “No connection with running water.”
He nodded. “You’ve chosen a good site. I’d say Shangri-la is safe. Unless—”
“Yes?”
He shook his head. “In the military we called it ‘taking counsel from your fears.’ You can get so concerned about what might happen that you can’t do anything.”
“What’s bothering you?”
“Suppose a grendel could control itself. Not go on speed until it got up here. I think one could make it.”
“They don’t, though,” Jessica said. “They didn’t back at the Grendel Scout camp, and that was a much better place for one to do that.”
“I expect you’re right.”
“But we thought of that, too,” she said. “We have motion and IR detectors out there.” She took a deep breath. “You said—we did it the wrong way, but it was the right thing. Did you mean that?”
He laughed. “I think that it’s too damned easy to forget why we came. Lots of reasons, but all of us had a dream. We believed we could make a future.”
“Dad—”
“Yeah, I know. You do too. And the ones we left behind thought we were crazy, just like some think that about you. Jess, what’s done is done. You’re here, you’ve got a dream. You have to follow it, just as we did.”
“I don’t think I ever heard you talk this way before.”
“Sure you did, you just weren’t ready to listen yet.” He looked out at the distant, mist-shrouded peaks, and stretched elaborately.
“Want to climb them?”
“Reading my mind without permission again? We left a lot behind, you know. Not like you, here. We really left. We’d never go home, and there wasn’t much chance anyone we’d ever known would join us.”
“And no one has—”
“And no one has,” Cadmann said. “And we wish we knew why, but we don’t. Jess, some of the good-byes we had to say were pretty bitter, you know. But they were good-byes. Once Geographic boosted out, we were all there was and all there would be. We had to trust each other. Really trust, with our lives, later with our families. That trust was broken, once—”
“I know. Zack thought you might have killed your friend—”
“Not just Zack. Everyone.” He paused to stare into the distance, and she knew that he was once again strapped to a table, drugged and helpless as the grendel toyed with him. It had happened many times before, but now Jessica felt as if he was someone she didn’t know at all. He was angry, hurt, disappointed . . . and yet somehow, under and aside of all of that, there was still profound hope, and a level of trust that she wasn’t certain she deserved. It hurt to look at him, and she opted to change the subject. “Are you ever sorry that you came?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not me. There weren’t any wars. I have no political savvy. I wasn’t going anywhere in the UN military bureaucracy.”
“And what about your marriage?” she asked carefully.
Her father looked at her, smiled sadly, and lowered his eyes. “Sienna made her choice,” he said. “I was the first to cheat. I was married to my job. It took me everywhere. I was never faithful to her. She knew it. I knew it. I thought that somehow . . . somehow we’d survive.”
“Did you love her?”
“Very much.”
“As much as you love Mom?”
For a moment she wasn’t certain that he would answer; then he said, “Yes.”
“As much as you love Sylvia?”
He looked at her sharply, and she didn’t look away. He smiled, and the smile wavered and was gone. “No,” he said. She nodded. He put his arm around her. “And not as much as I love you, either.”
She leaned her head against him. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did I do wrong, Daddy?” Knowing that for her, the Stronghold was now on another planet.
“We all do, sometimes,” he said. “But very few of us have the chance to do something great, to make up for it. You kids have that chance. I expect to watch you soar.” She nodded silently. And together, they watched Tau Ceti dip toward the mountains, and darkness fall across the land.
Old Grendel waited, and saw God return to the flat above the river. She wanted a closer look, but there were too many of the weirds, and they were alert. They had strung metal lace for barriers. She had seen animals touch those fences and recoil as if bitten or burned. She didn’t understand such things, but was prepared to learn quickly.
She might be ab
le to approach them from the rear. And dimly, she remembered a path.
She wriggled backward, retreating from her position. Careful. There wasn’t enough water to cool her if her body went on speed. She had territory to cover.
♦ ChaptEr 31 ♦
firecrackers
Nature is but a name for an effect
Whose cause is God.
—William Cowper, The Task
Cadmann woke before dawn. The rooms in the Visitors’ Quarters were plain and bare: cots, sleeping bags and nightstand, bath facilities down the hall. When he came back from the toilet he wasn’t sleepy. His backpack stood against one wall and for a moment he thought of getting out his mini-stove to make coffee, but decided against it. The stove’s roar would wake Sylvia.
He dressed quietly and went to the mess hall to find coffee. The main room had an eastern view and he left the lights low, and scanned the horizon for the first sign of sunrise.
“Hello.”
Cadmann turned to greet Big Chaka. “You have trouble sleeping, too?”
“No, but I went to bed early,” Chaka said.
“We all did. I’ve found coffee makings. Want some?”
“Please.”
“Like old times. We don’t go camping much now.”
“Not since the children grew up,” Chaka agreed.
An indifferent breeze blew down from the mountains behind them. Not warming, not cooling, just enough to ruffle the grass of the main compound, a slight ruffling of the grass in the glare of the safety floodlamps. There was a hint of light in the eastern sky. Cadmann and Chaka sat by the big window and waited for Tau Ceti to rise. There had been many times like this over the years, times to sit and think, to watch, to ruminate. Finally, the first hint of light was golden blush above the mountains. Big Chaka sighed with pleasure.
“So,” Cadmann said finally. “What do you think?”
“The children have done well,” he said. “They have built a real community here.”
“Yes. I’m impressed.”
“And none too soon, I think. Avalon hasn’t even begun to share her secrets,” Chaka’s voice was utterly content.
“This is what you came for, isn’t it?”
“If you’re an exobiologist, you go where the exobiology is,” he said reasonably. “You know, we’re probably the most interesting life-form on this planet.”
“How so?”
“We should really study ourselves. Every single one of us came here because we had nothing—or not enough to hold us on Earth. I find that fairly telling, don’t you?”
“You lost your family, didn’t you?” Cadmann asked quietly.
“Yes.” Chaka’s toe drew a lazy circle on the wooden floor beneath him. “It was my fault. Food poisoning, in the middle Amazon. My family and I were there for the year conducting piranha research. There was a village celebration. They used some canned food they got from a trader.”
His face tightened, but his voice was still steady. “Half the village died before we could get medical help. My wife and my daughter were among them.”
“A good reason to get away.”
Chaka took another deep sip. “I think that we had all just about used Earth up. I think that we all told ourselves different stories about it, but there were reasons. You were put out to pasture. Carlos is the remittance man of all time.”
Cadmann grinned. “Isn’t that the truth?” He was quiet for a moment. “How did you come to adopt Little Chaka?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I never asked. One day we just noticed that he wasn’t rotating out of your house.”
“An accident, really.” Chaka said. “We just gravitated toward each other. You know . . . it’s odd, but Little Chaka might have been better suited to ectogynic birth than any of the other children.”
“How so?”
“Well, he was New Guinea stock. I know that . . . I peeked. But he’s huge at least partially because his parents received such fine nutrition. His father had a literary scholarship to Harvard. One of the cultural outreach programs. His mother was from Papua—a first-generation immigrant, and a national-caliber runner. Sprinted her way to a degree in poli-sci. Both descended from people used to group parenting . . . as opposed to the nuclear family. Do you see where I’m heading?”
“I think so . . . ” Cadmann mused.
“Most of the Bottle Babies are of northern European stock. A thousand generations of nuclear family. Which they were denied here on Avalon. And Little Chaka, who has the best resistance to that particular loneliness, had in some ways the most support.”
“So you’re saying he’s not like the rest of them?”
“It’s possible. He seems to have come out pretty well, don’t you think?”
Cadmann thought of a question he had never asked. “What was your name before you changed it?”
“Denzel Washington.” They both exploded with laughter. When they died down again, the first morning shadows streaked the ground outside. “When I was in college, it was quite fashionable to take African names. Who the hell knows about my real ancestry? It’s all too mixed up. So I just latched on to a Zulu name, and ran with it. And I was young enough to choose the name of a warrior king.”
Cadmann laughed with deep satisfaction. “A New Guinea Islander and a Chicago exobiologist both named after a Zulu war chief. That’s rich.”
The mess hall door opened, and Aaron and Little Chaka came in. Aaron paused in the doorway. The sky outside was just light enough to provide a background, and Aaron seemed huge, intimidatingly large. That was certainly an illusion, but . . .
Cadmann levered himself to his feet, consciously standing erect. Aaron was no taller than he, but was . . . larger. More full of life. Cadmann felt old. A baton was changing hands here, and it was impossible to mistake it, or mistake the implication.
Jessica came in behind Aaron. “Hi, Dad.”
“Thanks for bringing us coffee,” Aaron said. “Any left in the pot?”
“Sure,” Cadmann said. “What’s the schedule for the day?”
“We thought we’d show you around,” Aaron said. “There’s a grendel lake down at the river forks thirty klicks south of here. It looks like the grendels cooperate in maintaining dams. Like Earth beavers.”
“I would certainly like to see that,” Big Chaka said. “I want to give my report on the snow grendels—”
“Yeah, what did you find?” Aaron asked. “We paid high for that head.”
“I believe my findings are significant,” Big Chaka said. “Possibly even worth that price. But I would like to observe the beaver dam before I draw my final conclusions. Has anyone taken water samples from that beaver’s lake?”
“No, that would be dangerous,” Little Chaka said. “Is it important?”
“It may be.”
“Well, we can try,” Little Chaka said. “But first you should see them. They’ll be most active just about lunch time. We’ll go look, and you can give your lecture at dinner time.”
“Good.”
Cadmann said, “Sylvia complained about lack of exercise last night. She may not want to spend the day in a skeeter looking at grendels.”
“That’s all right,” Aaron said. “There’s lots around here to look at. But that dam is in grendel country, rules say to take two skeeters. Jess, how about you and Justin go as backup for the Chakas. Cadmann, if Sylvia doesn’t want to go to the grendel dam, we can hike up to the lake this afternoon.”
“Lake?” Cadmann asked. “How far is this lake?”
“About ten kilometers,” Aaron said. “Don’t worry, it’s not a grendel lake.”
“We thought that about half the lakes on Camelot Island,” Big Chaka said. “But there was always a grendel. Always.”
“Not here, though,” Little Chaka said. “Guaranteed. No grendel, no samlon, and plenty of other wildlife around the lake. Snouters. And some spider devils.” He grinned. “We caught you some alive, but you killed them.”
&nbs
p; “They certainly died,” Big Chaka said. “Something missing in the artificial ecology we set up for them. Possibly we didn’t give them enough meat, or the wrong kind. We’ll have to set up cameras to observe them in the wild.”
“Sure,” Little Chaka said. “One of these days.”
“You don’t sound very interested.”
Little Chaka shrugged. “Dad, there’s so much to learn here, and those are just bigger editions of the clothesline Joeys we have back at Eden Oasis. We’ve watched those for years.”
Jessica came over. “The ones at Eden are interesting, though. Their mating rituals are a little odd—I wonder if these do the same things?”
“Carnivorous Joeys?” Cadmann asked. “I guess I haven’t been following this.”
“Well, they’re related to Joeys,” Big Chaka said. “Some structural differences; but yes, they’re Joeys.”
Jessica nodded. “The ones at Eden use those webs to catch the local equivalent of bees and insects. And birdies. I’ve seen them catch birdies.”
“But these are larger and go after bigger prey,” Aaron said. “Their bite is poisonous.”
“Not quite,” Big Chaka said. “That turned out to be a symbiotic bacterium that lives in their mouths.”
“I wonder if they’re related to the bear?” Little Chaka said.
“Bears? Son, you haven’t told me about bears.”
“We’ve never seen one, Dad. Not up close. Cassandra caught a film of a herd of chamels kicking a critter that was maybe a meter and half long, but it was in the forest and we didn’t see the end of the fight. We think they killed it.”
“It was about the size of an Earth black bear, so we called it a bear,” Jessica said. “But they must be rare. We’ve never found one.”
“They can’t be all that rare,” Aaron said. “They influenced the behavior patterns of the chamels. But we sure can’t find one anywhere.”
“Little herbivorous Joeys,” Big Chaka mused. “On Camelot and on the mainland. Then at Eden there are larger clothesline Joeys that string out sticky ropes and catch bees and birdies to eat. Here there are even larger spider devil Joeys that can eat a small snouter. And now there’s a bear? Is it related to the Joeys too?”