CHOICES
But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood
It was a beautiful day for a memorial, Justin thought. Tau Ceti shone down on the bluff, on the land that Cadmann Weyland had cleared, planted, tilled by hand . . . on the house that he had built with the sweat of his back.
And if he turned around, Justin could gaze down on the colony itself. See the crosshatch of roads that Cadmann had burned into the ground. The maze of homes he had helped erect. It was a place of love and life, crowded with babies to whom Cadmann Weyland was godfather, or guardian, or honorary uncle.
The Bluff wasn’t crowded. The public funeral had been held a week before. This was just family. Just the kids, and Cadmann’s wives, Katya, and Carlos.
Just the ones who loved the old man—and Jessica.
Jessica.
“We’re here today . . .” He steadied his voice as much as he could. “ . . . to say good-bye to two people we love.” He stopped, dug his hands into his pockets. A sad, crooked smile plucked at his lips. “Isn’t that just the way it is? No matter how much we say to someone while they’re alive, there’s always more to say. That’ s the tragedy of it . . . but that’s the joy, too.”
He looked out at the mourners. They were seated in two rows of folding chairs. Carlos sat next to Sylvia, holding Cadzie, the sleeping child wrapped in a bright blue blanket. Sylvia held Mary Ann’s hand. Mary Ann was pasty-faced, and so grief-stricken that she hardly seemed able to breathe.
“Dad,” Justin said, “I can still talk to you, when I need to. And I will. We all will. Jessica—”
And here his words faded for a minute. There were things that he wanted to say: You made the wrong choice, Jessie. You chose the wrong side. And in the end, you didn’t think fast enough. God. I’ll miss your smile, your laugh. I’ll never forget the one kiss we shared, not even when they put me in the ground next to you. I loved you, Jessie. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a goddamned bit of difference, but I should have told you. Maybe if I had. Maybe if I’d found the right way to say it, you ‘d still be alive . . .
Katya was smiling at him. Katya, who loved him, and wanted to bear his children. Katya, who must never know what his heart had just revealed to him.
Justin realized he had stopped speaking. He felt as if his mouth was packed with cotton. He had to say something. Anything.
Why was life so goddamned hard?
“Jessica,” he lied, his voice breaking, “you were my sister.”
Sylvia found Mary Ann in the master bedroom. In Cadmann’s bedroom. Mary Ann sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. Her hair looked not blond, but white.
“Mary Ann?” she said quietly. “Are you all right?”
Mary Ann looked up slowly. She smiled, a sweet smile, and patted the bed next to her. Even that motion looked tired. Sylvia thought that this was the first time that Mary Ann actually looked old.
“He . . . loved you more, you know,” Mary Ann said.
Sylvia started to speak, to say something reflexively, but Mary Ann shushed her. “No. He was too much of a gentleman to ever break his commitment to me. But he loved you more. If honor hadn’t been the core of that man, he would have left me. But he felt . . . obliged.”
She smiled again. Her cheeks looked waxen. “I let you into my marriage, dear, for him. To hold on to him. If you were here, he wouldn’t have to go to you secretly. He would have done that eventually, you know. And people would have talked. And felt sorry for me. I don’t think that I could have survived that. So I let you in. And he stayed. Because he had no reason to go, don’t you see?”
Sylvia reached out and took her hand. Regretfully, but firmly, Mary Ann pulled it away. “You have a wonderful heart, and you never tried to hurt me.” She paused, then said matter-of-factly, “I’ve never liked you, you know.”
Sylvia waited until the silence grew too painful, then told the truth.
“I know.”
“I’ve thought about asking you to move out. But it wouldn’t be right.”
Sylvia stiffened a bit. “If you want me to go, I will.”
Mary Ann smiled. “I don’t like you, Sylvia. But you have been a sister to me, for years. And you never tried to hurt me. I don’t like you. But I do love you.”
The room was very quiet. Mary Ann leaned forward, and kissed Sylvia’s cheek.
Then she lay back on the bed, in the middle of the bed that she had shared with Cadmann for so many years, in which she had borne him children, and curled up onto her side.
When she spoke, her voice was very, very soft. “I’d like to rest now, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get tired so easily these days.”
Sylvia rose from the bed and walked to the door, pausing to look back. Mary Ann’s eyes were closed. She might have been asleep already, except for the very soft gasping sound she made as she cried out her good-bye to the man she had loved.
Sylvia closed the door behind her, and sagged against it, exhausted. She wanted to cry, but the tears just hadn’t come, as if fatigue were mourning enough. Somewhere within her there must have tears for Cadmann, and for Jessica, for Mary Ann, and for herself. But they eluded her. Now she fought to find the place within her that held tears for Aaron, the son she had never held.
She could not find them.
She had never told him, and now she never could. And almost no one knew the truth. Certainly Aaron had not. But Sylvia knew. And her mother’s heart knew that her love might have gentled him, nurtured him, even as her rational mind begged her not to carry that weight into her life. It was too much for one woman to bear.
What would Cadmann want?
I want you to live, he said in a voice so clear he might have been standing beside her. Death comes soon enough. Live, my love, and be a comfort to Mary Ann. Live, and know I loved you more than I could ever say. I only hope you knew.
“I knew,” she whispered. “I always knew.”
Edgar led them into the kitchen/computer room. He felt them stop in the doorway, and turned to watch their reaction.
They had walked into an Avalon beehive.
Cassandra and the Chakas had constructed it in one-to-one scale. The hologram space was much larger than the kitchen itself. They had set off their insecticide bombs, they had placed their cameras, set off their monotone sirens, and recorded the sonics passing through the nest, all before the final swarming. Between the computer imaging and the fiber-optic cameras, they had managed to map virtually the entire bee colony.
It was like a volcano, with branching side pockets and rooms for the infants, breeding grounds, and a huge queen chamber. The creatures lay dead in heaps of thousands.
For that instant they were stopped by the wonder of it. Then Edgar’s family pushed in behind him.
Edgar moved to the keyboard.
Ruth was just behind him, chin on his shoulder. Her body was starting to swell in earnest. Her father was trying to peer between them without getting too friendly with Edgar himself. Her mother Rachael hung back a little: Zack must be feeling claustrophobic too. And Trish was on the other side of Edgar, in contact along his whole left flank, and damn, it was hard to concentrate.
He felt barely able to move. His home had seemed big enough, too big even, when it was Edgar alone.
But his fingers remembered. The bee nest faded. Then the holostage ran through a rapid sequence of scenes while Edgar played tour guide.
“Shangri-La is essentially dead,” Edgar said. “The instruments we left there make it a test case for what’s happening to the continent.
“Not a living plant anywhere. The crops are gone right down to the dirt. You don’t see any bees now, but any time something living comes in range, the bees boil out and strip it.
“This is of interest, though. Something big—grendel-sized—pushed in the door to that storehouse. Inside—” Dammit, he’d forgotten the code.
Trish reached past him and tapped. The screen went dark, nearly. “The lights are burned out,” she said.
“Yeah, but look around. Near the back, a lot of cans are missing, and soft drinks too. That’s a hot plate over here, and whoever was using it kept the area clean. He’s gone now, I think. Aaron.”
Zack said, “It may be you’ve got Aaron on the brain, Edgar. All three of you.”
Zack, Rachael, Ruth, Edgar, Trish. They had to be together, but it was awkward. They kept adjusting their positions. Edgar could talk to Trish, Ruth could talk to her lover and her mother, Zack could talk to Rachael, and if Zack wanted to know about mainland conditions he had to talk to his son-in-law.
“I was never sure,” Edgar said. “I told myself he set me up to fall out of that tree, but I was never sure until he killed Colonel Weyland. Now I want his blood.”
Ruth said nothing.
Trish asked, “Uncle Zack? Don’t you want Aaron dead?”
Zack said, “What are things like elsewhere?”
Bracketed between Ruth and Trish . . . he’d had daydreams like this, sandwished, but he’d never dreamed of parents-in-law present. Edgar wondered if Trish was enjoying this. He was just glad he’d cleaned the place up.
He tapped and the view jumped. “That was a chain of grendel lakes, dammed lakes, when we planted the camera.” The lakes were a wide muddy river now. Edgar’s cursor indicated a distant dust devil dancing through stripped trees. “Bees,” he said. “There aren’t any more grendels here. Some samlon, maybe, but as soon as they come on land, sszzz. Even the beaver grendels must be eating their young now. It’s the only way a grendel can stay alive while these death winds are blowing. And that is how Avalon evolution set you up, Zack.”
He tapped again. Now the view looked across sparse, tall grass, with water gleaming in the distance. “Any idea where you are?”
“The Scribeveldt,” Zack said.
“Yup. On the back of a Scribe. Katya set a skeeter down on Asia’s back and left a camera.”
“Huh,” said Zack. He watched for few seconds. “Is that a pterodon nest?”
“More like six, but I haven’t seen a pterodon since I started monitoring this. Then again, Asia has been easing her way toward the river. As long as the Scribes don’t all go down to the river at once, the pterodons can commute. Asia will get her pterodons back when she leaves.”
“Edgar, is that guesswork?”
“Pretty much.”
Trish asked, “How close do the Scribes get to water? You still get pictures from orbit—”
“The paths still avoid each other. I think they don’t want to mate.
There are bees everywhere. They don’t bother the Scribes much—”
“You can’t go back to Shangri-La,” Zack said. “Tell you what, Edgar. Work up a scenario. Your next colony on the mainland is in the Scribeveldt.”
Edgar turned to see if his lover’s father was serious. From many objections he picked one at random. “It’s out of Robor’s range. We’d have to set up staging points—”
“Fine. In a couple of years your first staging point can be the minehead, or Shangri-La. You left supplies in both places, and—”
Trish burst out laughing. Her hand closed hard on Edgar’s shoulder and shook gently. “Soft One, how can you not love it? We’ll put little tent-towns on the knolls. They’re not big, but the Scribes go around them and the grendels can’t reach them—”
Edgar was studying Zack. He’d never seen the old man smiling like that. A mad smile. “Zack, didn’t you use to be way conservative?”
“Sure. A little stodgy, maybe? Just do the best plan you can, Edgar.
If it looks crazy we won’t do it.”
Ice on his mind. But—Rachael and Ruth changed glances, a secret look Edgar knew he’d better learn to interpret.
Rachael Moskowitz didn’t have ice on her mind. And she’d supported Zack in power since before Edgar Sikes was born. But Zack kept making mistakes . . . well, one mistake, one backbreaker of a mistake, and ever since then—
Ever since then, every time he was challenged, Zack backed down. That was the problem, that was why his brain seemed riddled with ice crystals. He’d withdrawn his objections to the mainland colony. Was he regretting that now?
“Hell, we can live on the Scribes’ backs!” Trish crowed. Zack nodded, just listening as she babbled. Trish loved the Scribeveldt colony. When Trish fell in love with an idea, she fell hard. She’d do most of Edgar’s work for him. But had he, had they all totally misunderstood the First?
Edgar burst out, “Zack! What was it with those freezing blankets?”
They all looked at him as if he were crazy. Zack told him, “We kind of don’t like that word.”
“I kind of don’t like f-f-soggy mysteries. Zack, you, the First were always so sure it was Cadzie blue that saved the baby. Why? I mean it’s a neat answer, it turns out to be the color-coding for poison—”
“Elegant,” Zack said. “You learned that word from the math classes, didn’t you? Any solution that elegant has to be right. Except when it isn’t.” The old man laughed.
“Zack, Cadzie blue is darker than the color coding for poison.”
“Is it really?”
“You saw it. Everyone on Camelot got videotapes of Asia through the war specs. We sent you photos. Aaron cut a great swath of Asia’s lip and laid it across all those blankets. It’s too pale.” And why was he devilling an old man with ice on his mind? Edgar saw Ruth and Rachael listening and was embarrassed.
But Zack said, “Ah.”
“What?”
“Edgar, when you get old enough, you get a feel for patterns. Being smart doesn’t do it. Only experience works. That pattern-sense was all we had. What you just said, nobody had said that before, just that way, to me.
“Stretch a piece of Scribe’s lip in sunlight, it’s too pale. Take pictures with a flash camera, it’s too pale. Watch a Scribe through war specs, and by the time Cassandra gets through with the pictures—”
“It’s too pale. Ice me down now, Lord.”
“See, Edgar, the Scribe’s lip is always underneath that overhang of shell, always in shadow. The bees see it as darker. Aaron took it into daylight—”
“And the flash on the camera lights it up, and Cassandra thoughtfully corrected the color for us, but I can check that part right now, Zack. Cassandra!”
The reconquest of the mainland was two years in the planning.
The Scribeveldt had been too wet for going on two years. Vast patches of grass had died. The Scribes were fewer, perhaps because they had stopped breeding; but some of those camouflaged trapezoids didn’t move. The camera on Asia’s back had rolled past one huge empty shell.
Now the Veldt was drying off, grass was spreading again, and the paths Cassandra could see from orbit were forming knots.
“Everything is breeding like mad,” Edgar told the colonists in the assembly hall, and the greater number who were only in virtual attendance. “I can’t see any reason not to begin the conquest of the mainland with the Scribeveldt. And I see no reason not to go now.”
And the questions began.
“We’ll establish dumps at Shangri-La and Eden both. They’re close together, they can serve as alternate routes. We don’t want any cities there the next time Tau Ceti goes into maximum, but they’re safe now.”
And continued.
“Sure, grendels. We’ll want to stay clear of the river, but we can run pipes . . .
“There’s no trace of bees, anywhere we’ve got cameras. Nobody thinks they’re extinct, but they must have died back . . .
“Before we build anything permanent in the Scribeveldt, we’ve prepared some hardened cameras. I want to know what lives under the Scribes . . .
“Aaron? Well, something raided the stores at Shangri-La until they were almost gone. That was a year ago. Your guess . . .
“The blankets? Yeah, Uncle Zack figured that out two years ago, and he was right. Zack, you want to explain that? Remember to talk slow for these people.”
EPILOGUE
THE SHAMAH
TWO YEARS LATER
Chaka scanned the bluff, finding no evidence of a grendel presence.
“We’re clear,” he said. With Trish and Carey Lou watching shotgun, he rappelled down the side of the cliff into the water. The samlon were young. There would only be one grendel in this area, and that one was . . . well, curious.
They searched much of the day, and it was Chaka who found it, and called Justin.
A human skull, cracked and chewed, but human.
Justin took it from Chaka gently. He folded it to his chest and sank to his knees in the water, eyes half-closing. No one spoke. After almost a minute he slipped it lovingly into a plastic bag. Before Tau Ceti slipped below the horizon, they found part of a pelvis, and a few more bones, and that was all. Justin looked around the river, and then said, “All right. Let’s go.”
Chaka nodded, and they rode the winch up the cliff face, and didn’t say anything more until they reached the skeeter.
Sylvia met them back at the camp. She was grayer now, but just as tall, her face more stem. Since Mary Ann’s death a year before, she was, more than any other woman in the camp, the Matriarch. She had slipped into that role unwillingly, but with authority.
Carlos stood behind her, his left hand resting lightly on her shoulder.
It was almost dark, and the evening wind plucked at the edges of her coat as she waited for them to disembark. Justin stopped two feet away from her, his hands filled with the remains of his father, her husband, a plastic bag wrapped in black cloth.
Sylvia took the bag as if it were made of spun glass. “We’ll bury him on the Bluff,” she said.
Carlos nodded. “Exactly what he would have wanted.” He squeezed her shoulder. “I have an urn,” he said quietly. “I have worked on it for a year. I would like to show it to you.”
Suddenly, her eyes burned. Sylvia closed her eyes hard. Now was not the time. Later perhaps. Now she would be strong for Carlos, as he had been strong for her. They had almost lost equally. Not quite. But almost.
“There is only one more thing to do, then I can go home,” Little Chaka said. Big Chaka was back on Camelot Island, too infirm for travel now. He spent most of the time at Surf’s Up, puttering, writing his memoirs and training the two new dolphins. Little Chaka didn’t really like being away from his father for extended periods.
Edgar and Ruth were beside them. Scully followed her with a tight fist on her skirt. Ruth’s son, and Edgar’s. The genetics might have been Aaron’s but Edgar had been there to help deliver Scully. As far as he was concerned, he was the father.
“How do we go about this?” Edgar said.
“We are going to find a skeleton, or we are going to find Aaron,” Justin said. “One or the other. But I want to know that he is dead. It ends.”
Chaka cocked his rifle. “It ends.”
They searched all that day, and into the night, and found no trace. They knew Aaron had survived the bees. The storehouse in Shangri-La had been raided regularly for canned goods. But though they scoured by skeeter and by foot, with Cassandra’s eyes and with hunting dogs, over swamp, Veldt, mountain, and river, of Aaron himself there was no trace.
On the third day, just as the hunting parties were quitting for the day, dogs barked and guards yelled at the southern end of the camp.
Two figures approached a rebuilt section of fence. One was human. One definitely was not.
Justin was barely aware of Chaka and Trish at his side, Sylvia behind him, as he ran to the fence. With every step, the hated face and form of his enemy grew clearer. All the world seemed to focus down to this one man, his entire life to this single moment.
Aaron walked with the help of a crutch. His right leg looked as if it had been broken and badly set. His once beautiful face was scarred and puckered with pink weals. His left eye was glazed and sightless.
The grendel . . . God, the grendel . . . walked alongside him.
Without thinking, Justin raised his rifle. Chaka pushed it aside.
“Wait,” he said breathlessly. “Wait.”
Aaron turned and spoke to the grendel in a clear, commanding voice:
“Stay.”
And it did. It squatted, waiting. A whisper ran through those assembled. There was just no believing this.
“Aaron Tragon. I arrest you for murder—”
Aaron laughed in his face.
“That is so like you, Justin,” he said in his calmest, clearest voice.
“Trying to arrest someone who isn’t here.”
Justin was dumbstruck. “What? What are you trying to pull now?
Whatever it is—”
“Aaron is dead,” Aaron said. “Dead. Aaron is eaten.” He smiled, and looked out at them as if what he had said made sense. Just exactly as if it had made sense. Justin wanted to laugh. But couldn’t. And didn’t like that at all.
Aaron looked at them as if they were his dearest friends, long-lost kin with whom be longed to share a deep and precious secret. It was damned strange. “I can give to you what you have always wanted,” he said confidently.
Trish finally spoke. “And what the hell is that?”
“Peace,” he said. “Peace with the beasts.” He turned. “Come,” he said.
And the grendel came, and sat by him. It made that cooing sound.
“Yes,” Aaron said to it. “They are afraid. You are afraid. It is a place of fear.”
Justin’s head spun. Hatred and confusion and a strange excitement so intense it felt like nausea welled up strongly enough to cause vertigo. He turned to Chaka. “He’s crazy. Just plain nuts!”
Chaka said, “Are you sure? And what difference does it make? Can you talk to grendels?”
Trish’s arm trembled. Her rifle went up, but Chaka’s hand closed on the barrel. “No!” Chaka said. “You have no right. If anyone has the right, it is Justin.” He paused, that confusion entering his voice as if it were an emotional virus. “Justin—what do you say?”
Justin could barely move, couldn’t think. An intelligent grendel. And a human being who could communicate with it. What would his father have given for this? He could blow this insane bastard’s head off right now-
And betray everything that Cadmann had lived for.
“Goddammit, kill him!” Trish screamed. “Don’t you realize it’s just another of his con games? If you let him live, he’ll own this planet in ten years!”
Aaron’s smile was fond, but remote, the thin smile of one who sees more than anyone else and knows he will never be understood. “Trish, no one owns this planet,” he said. “Neither human nor grendel. And least of all the man who was Aaron Tragon. But together . . . “
Nightmare, Justin thought. What would Colonel Weyland have done? We think we know so much more than they do, but—”Keep him safe,” Justin said. “We need to ask Zack.”
Trish and Edgar took Aaron’s arms and led him away. He halted them when he came to Sylvia, and they stood and waited for him as if he were still the master. “I am sorry for what Aaron did,” he said. “You will want to know that Cadmann died well.” He nodded to his guards and limped away.
Sylvia watched as the procession receded. Her shoulders slumped. Suddenly, unbidden and unstoppably, the tears she had not cried for two years streamed down her cheeks in a cleansing torrent. As if a dam within her had suddenly given way. As if in some manner she didn’t understand, Aaron Tragon had given her the greatest gift of her life.
Chaka gingerly approached the grendel and knelt by it. She watched him in return. Amazed at his own daring, he actually reached out and ran his fingers over her pebbled skin, felt the living fire within, and marveled. “It is you, isn’t it, Old Girl? Name of God,” he whispered. “What are we going to do with you?”
Old Grendel felt peaceful. Working together, she and the Strongest Weird had survived the bad times. Now the dark one she had saved before would stand between her and the others. Would protect her as she had protected him.
This was strangeness. But these weirds worked together like dam builders. She knew things. Could show them, perhaps. And as she grew older, and not so able to hunt, perhaps they would help her in turn.
She wondered about the Strongest Weird. For two years they had lived together, and she had begun to understand some of the weird’s sounds. The world of vocal communication was another explosion of strangeness. She wondered what they would do with that one. Strongest Weird was a God of some kind. Perhaps they were all Strongest Weird’s children.
She didn’t know. But the Death Wind was dwindling. More bad times would come, but they would find something new in the world.
Grendels. Weirds. Together.
THE END