The Legacy of Heorot Read online

  “What’s your point?”

  “I’d just feel a lot better about it if you had a nice healthy interest in one of the other ladies, that’s all.”

  Carlos was loitering nearby, his ear innocently turned in their direction. Cadmann cleared his throat loudly. “Now hear this. Boy, would I like a beer right now.”

  “Con gusto, amigo.” Carlos walked away whistling.

  “Terry, you must know there is nothing between me and your wife. We talk—”

  “A damned lot.”

  Cadmann pointedly eyed the beer in Terry’s hand. “Yes. We talk. And if you talked to Sylvia more, she wouldn’t need a friend so badly.”

  Terry froze. “My relationship with Sylvia is none of your damned business.”

  “You brought it up. Which makes it my business. We talk, and if you’re worried that she looks for more than talk, maybe there’s something else you don’t give her enough of.”

  Terry turned away, walked two steps and turned back. “You really are an asshole, Weyland.” He turned away.

  “Terry.”

  Faulkner stopped. “What?”

  “Did you think that getting Sylvia knocked up as soon as they thawed you out would hang a big ‘hands off’ sign on her?”

  There was a sudden lull in the air around them. Every face near them was carefully, deliberately turned away from the exchange. Cadmann’s face heated, suddenly flushed with blood. Terry’s hands hooked into claws, and his mouth worked silently.

  Too loud! Aw, shit.

  The thin man kicked at the fire, sending a burst of sparks into the air. “You know, Weyland, I don’t really care what went on before I woke up. Because you’re not the big man anymore. You’re not a farmer, you’re not a builder. You’re not even an engineer. You’re just an assistant navigator, and an extremely expendable security arm.” He leaned closer to Cadmann, who lowered his eyelids slightly. “I hear that you want to be part of the mainland expedition I’m putting together. Just watch your step. Be very careful that you don’t suddenly become obsolete. I’d hate to see Colonel Weyland pulling weeds or mucking out the stables to earn his bread.”

  He turned and stalked away.

  Wordlessly, Carlos tossed Cadmann a pouch of beer.

  Cadmann bit it open and took a mouthful of brew, feeling some of the foam running down his chin. Terry grabbed Sylvia by the arm and pulled her aside for a talk. His gestures were violent and jerky, like a puppet with tangled strings. Sylvia’s face was impassive, her answers calm, and finally he quieted.

  The entire beach seemed to heave a sigh of relief, and slowly the music and laughter rose up from a soft burr and swallowed the silence.

  Carlos poked his arm. “He’s wrong about you, isn’t he, amigo? You’ve never made a move on the lovely lady.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Meaning?” Carlos’s dark face was split in a suggestive grin.

  “Meaning that I’m going for a walk.”

  “Have a good walk, amigo! I think I’m going to investigate Carolyn.”

  “She’s a tease.”

  “She’s also depressed. I have just the thing for her.”

  “Your generosity never ceases to amaze me. Bon appétit.” Cadmann moved off down the beach, toward and past the huge beached shuttle. He didn’t stop until he was lost in the shadows. When Marnie’s guitar was no more than broken rhythm against the surf he turned to look at the wavering lights and listen to the sounds down beach. The night wind brought a whiff of seaweed and salt and roast samlon, and the sound of merriment.

  A finger stroked lightly along his spine, and he turned, startled. Mary Ann smiled at him. She was breathing heavily, wet sand splashed along her calves from a jog in the surf. Her eyes were wide and luminously dark. “You’re a strange one,” she said. “You know how I can always find you?”

  “How?” He reached out, lacing his fingers behind her neck. Impossibly, her skin seemed cool and hot at the same time. I don’t want you, he said silently, but I need . . .

  “I just look for where people are having fun, getting together, enjoying themselves and there you are. Cadmann Weyland, off to the side, watching.”

  Go away. Just go away, he thought, drawing her closer. “Watching,” he said. She shivered as he traced a circle under her ear. “I don’t always just watch.” Suddenly, he wanted very, very much to put the lie to her words.

  Her eyes reflected the glowing surf. When she spoke again, her voice was husky. “Well, I tell you what. Why don’t you show me what you do when you’re not just watching?” She linked her arms around his neck.

  He didn’t know whom he needed to convince more, himself or Mary Ann, but there are times when twin aims share a single purpose, like twin moons casting a single shadow.

  She took his hand and led him away from the campfires, toward warmth.

  Something was ahead of her. Sheena strained to reach it. A shadow bigger than herself, it seemed to move in jumps, waiting until she was almost on top of it, then streaking away into the dark, cutting behind the animal cages, across the stream, into the cultivated ground.

  Sheena yipped in confusion, disbelieving what she had seen. Machines moved that quickly, but not animals. She sniffed the ground. The new smell was already faint, so fast had it moved, but there was no mistaking it. Wet and warm, and unlike men or calves or chickens or anything in the compound: the stink of it was a mortal insult! She streaked after it, splashing through the icy water, shaking her fur before continuing on into the dark.

  She was beyond the plowed area, into the zone filled with burnt crumbled tree stumps and sprigs of tough grass just now puffing up through the blackened crust of the earth. Where was it? Clouds were moving across the smaller moon, and Sheena sniffed the ground again, purring low in her throat.

  The cloud cover parted for a moment.

  There on the hillock, black with lunar highlights, sat something inexplicable. A thousand generations of instincts couldn’t identify it. Big. Not man. No ancestor had hunted this thing, none had fled and lived to remember. Her cortex knew what it was not, but could not say what it was.

  Unknown. A threat. It might harm man or man’s children. Kill!

  The thing cocked its head sideways and cooed.

  The sounds were disturbing. What had ever sounded like that? Where were the men? Sheena’s ears flattened back against her head. This was not a dog’s job. There were no men here. Sheena leaped to do battle.

  One moment it was there, and Sheena’s teeth were snapping at its neck. Her teeth closed on nothing. It receded like a cloud-shadow beneath the moon, and returned as fast, and now it was on Sheena’s back. Its cold, broad feet clamped around her middle with sudden, terrifying strength. Sheena’s ribs sagged inward. She snarled her agony and rolled to mash the thing from her back.

  It walked off her while she was rolling and was several feet away. Fast, unfairly fast! Thick fleshy lips pulled back from daggerlike teeth in a grimace of pleasure. Lovingly it cooed to Sheena.

  Sheena was terrified now, but she leaped.

  She was in the air when the creature rolled. Its jaws flashed up and locked on her throat, reducing her death scream to no more than a terrified hiss. It drew back into the shadows before she hit the ground.

  She lay on her side, struggling weakly to breathe, bubbles of air shining blackly in the moonlight as they pulsed from her throat.

  She watched her killer draw close, stared into its eyes, its huge, soft, silver eyes. She whimpered.

  It cooed at her, and when Sheena’s flanks ceased trembling, came closer and gently licked at the blood oozing from her throat. The creature was hot, like a stove. It turned its back. Sheena felt blades entering her, and then nothing.

  ♦ChaptEr 3♦

  frozen sleep

  The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,

  Sat by the fire, and talked the night away

  Wept o’er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done

  Shouldered his crutch, and show’d ho
w fights were won.

  —Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village”

  Geographic was one of the largest mobile objects ever created by human engineering. Seen from below as the shuttle rose to meet her, the ship looked like a gigantic flashlight with a silver doorknob attached to the end. The aft end was a ring of laser fusion reactors, a flaring section twice the diameter of the trunk. The trunk, over a hundred and fifty meters in length, was the cylinder that housed the life-support systems and cryogenic suspension facilities. Minerva Two was approaching the fore end: the laboratories and the crew quarters, where Cadmann had spent five waking years of his life. The dock was a conical cagework at the end of a protruding arm, barely visible even this close.

  Minerva Two slowed as she rounded the fuel balloon. Bobbi Kanagawa was a cautious pilot. Cadmann’s fingers itched and twitched. His touch would have been surer, his approach would have been faster.

  But he wasn’t flying Minerva Two.

  Geographic’s fuel balloon was shrunken, spent, and half its original size. Only a breath of gas remained of a half-kilometer sphere of deuterium ice. The Colony could not produce deuterium, not yet. We were Homo interstellar, Cadmann thought. We will be again.

  Some of the external paneling had been stripped away from Geographic and shuttled down to Tau Ceti Four for building material. The shuttle maneuvered past a drifting mass. The tightly wrapped cylinder, scores of kilometers of superconducting wire, waited to be loaded in Minerva Two’s bay by robot limpet motors. These would become part of the fusion plant. Its completion meant limitless power.

  Eventually the Orion craft would be a skeleton, just an orbiting splinter of light in the sky. Perhaps she might survive in smaller form, with most of the life-support cylinder removed: an interplanetary vehicle, a gift of space to grandchildren yet unborn.

  Bobbi Kanagawa counted softly to herself as Geographic loomed on the screen, the onboard computer continually checking her approach pattern. “Almost home,” she said without looking back at her passengers.

  Sylvia reached over and pinched Cadmann’s arm. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve never liked dockings,” Cadmann muttered. Geographic was half the sky now; more, as the silver wall of the fuel balloon slid past and the conical cagework opened like a mouth. “And if you’re a Freudian, I don’t want to hear it.”

  The shuttle’s nose grated along the cagework and nuzzled into the lock at its base: click-thump. Cadmann sighed in relief and released his shoulder straps. Bobbi made her last-minute checks, then swung out of her seat with practiced ease. “All right, folks, this is a two-hour turnaround. Hope you don’t need more time.” Some of her straight black hair had escaped its binding, and drifted out at disconcerting angles when she moved.

  “Two should do it.” Sylvia strapped on her backpack.

  The door at the rear of the shuttle hissed open, and Stu Ellington’s voice chuckled at them from the control module. “It’s about time. Swear to God that’s just like a woman. Two-tenths of a second late again.”

  Bobbi glared at the speaker, drumming her fingernails against the console. “Just keep talking, Stu,” she said sweetly. “You need all the friends you can get—the last vote was dead even for leaving your worthless carcass up here another month.”

  “Oops. Tell you what. Drop your friends in the lab, come on up to Command, and we’ll discuss my carcass for an hour or so.”

  Bobbi’s pale cheeks reddened. She ran her hand over her hair, discovering the flyaway strands. “I . . . uh, well—” she looked at Sylvia, who winked sagely. “I’ll see you in a month, huh?” She scurried to be the first through the hatch.

  She disappeared down a narrow connective hallway as Sylvia led Cadmann to the central corridor and back to the biolab section. Cadmann clucked in puritan disgust. “Sex. I remember sex. Highly overrated.”

  “Great attitude for a biologist.”

  “Just a Bachelor’s, and it was marine biology,” he sniffed. “Fish are damned civilized about it. She lays ’em, and he swims over ’em.”

  “You’re a romantic, that’s what you are.” Sylvia worked her way along the handrails gingerly and seemed ill at ease. “All this time,” she said, so softly that he wondered if she had intended for him to hear.

  “What?”

  “After all this time, I still get a little claustrophobic in here.” She laughed uneasily.

  “You’re not the only one.” He slammed the flat of his palm against one of the steel-and-plastic panels that lined Geographic. The vibration thrummed along the hexagonal corridor, damping out before it reached the first corner. “This place was home and prison to all of us for a long time. Some of the colonists won’t come back up at all.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, really. Just forget it.”

  He leaned up behind her and whispered in her ear. “It’s return-to-the-tomb syndrome.” A Karloffian leer lurked just behind his solemn expression. “All of us spent at least a hundred and five years asleep in a little coffin-shaped box, awakened from the dead by a trickle of electricity through our brains.”

  “Lovely. We’ll put you in charge of bedtime stories. I’ll manage the sedative concession.”

  The door to the biolab was sealed to protect both the life within and the crew without. Some of the substances and microscopic life-forms were extremely vulnerable, and others extremely dangerous. Sylvia punched in her four-digit personal code, and the door opened inward. In case of a loss of atmosphere in the main section of the ship, air pressure alone would keep the door sealed. “We’ll have this reprogrammed to admit you.”

  The lights came up automatically as the door closed behind them. The room was the second largest on Geographic. Its floor space was crowded with medical and analytical equipment, its walls completely lined with cryogenic vaults. There were hundreds of the dark plastic rectangles, and they held the future of Tau Ceti Four.

  Sylvia sighed, shucked her backpack onto a wall hanger and pulled herself over to a rack of Velcro slippers. She handed him a pair. “One size fits all.”

  “I was hoping for something in a wing tip.”

  She led him to the nearest bank of cases. “Look,” she said contentedly, triggering one of the dark panels into translucence. Within, barely discernible as canine, were dozens of dog embryos. Their dark eyes were filmed with transparent lids, tiny naked paws drawn up to their gauzy bodies in peaceful cryosleep. Each hung in its individual sack, connected by its umbilical to an artificial placenta.

  “So.” She studied the temperature and pressure gauges on the door of a sealed cabinet, nodded and opened it. “Alfalfa seeds. Check. Swiss chard. Check. Tomatoes. Check.” She closed the cabinet. “Now for the embryos. The carriers are in that case over there. Inflate three for me, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  She busied herself at the cryosleep carrier console.

  “You don’t trust the computer?” Cadmann asked.

  “Not anymore. Not since Ernst. Not since eight of us never woke up. Barney says it’s fine, but I’m a woman of little faith these days.”

  “Good thinking.”

  She typed in the last commands. “There. So we lost one of the dogs. We’ve got over a hundred more.”

  “And thousands of chickens, I suppose?” His voice was too flat, too distanced from his feelings.

  “Look, Cad—I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not your fault. Sheena got loose a week ago. So—she came back last night and broke into one of the chicken cages. Fine. We’ll either catch her or kill her. Nothing to worry about.”

  He heard her words, but his mind was still on the chicken cage as they had found it that morning, its wire mesh ripped out and mangled, the wooden frame shattered, blood and feathers and little clotted chunks of raw chicken littering the ground like the aftermath of a ghoulish picnic.

  “That is what you’re worried about, isn’t it?”

  Annoyed with himself, Cadmann derailed the morbid train of thought. “Sure. That’s it.�
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  Although he had worked the biolab before, she gave him the grand tour. There was a complete assortment of dairy and work animals, as well as millions of earthworms, ladybugs and “friendly” insect eggs. “We have to have quadruplication of any needed form. There are going to be failures,” Sylvia said bluntly. “The alfalfa crop, for instance. We don’t know why yet.” Her eyes glittered, and the sudden determination in her face cubed her attractiveness. Cadmann’s chest tightened.

  “But I guarantee you we’ll know. And soon. We’re going to lose more animals, and we’ve got to be ready for that, too. That’s where you’ll come in. Routine checks, Cad—any emergencies, and we’ll hustle up Marnie or her husband, Jerry. We’ve got to be ready for anything.”

  She darkened the panels and took his hand, leading him to the other side of the room. The vaults were identical to those opposite, but he could feel her increased excitement. “Look,” she whispered, and illumined the panels. “Our children.”

  They hung in rows, lost in endless dream. (Cadmann was startled at the thought. Were there dreams in cryosleep? The neurologists said no, but his memory said yes. Perhaps it was only that before the drugs took hold and the blood chilled there was one final thought that remained locked in a frozen brain, a thought that unthawed along with the body. Just a wisp of dream at the beginning of sleep and one at the end, linked by decades of silence and darkness.)

  One of Sylvia’s hands strayed unconsciously to her own belly, its roundness barely noticeable beneath her jumpsuit.

  There were hundreds of the embryos, frozen at ten weeks of age. They were thumb-sized and milky pale, heads as large as their bodies, with their fluid-filled amniotic sacs billowing about them.

  Cadmann came up close to the glass, counting the tiny fingers and toes, gazing at the gently lowered eyelids, the amber umbilicals attached to artificial placentas.

  “They’re all perfect,” Sylvia said. “Every one of them certified perfect, genetically and structurally.”

  His breath had fogged the glass. He patted her stomach. “Not like Jumbo here, who has to take his chances.”