by Larry Niven
They’ll call it the new world. They always do, but it’s as old as Earth, and we’ve taken it as we took the Earth.
Good day for this. Beside him, Carlos Martinez nodded solemnly: the role of video host suited him to the hilt. “I just can’t believe how much progress you’ve made in the past five months.”
“It’s been a lot of work, but given enough time and manpower, almost anything is possible—”
“Hold it, Cad,” Sylvia called from the hillside above them. “The field of focus is off.”
“Can’t have that. Casa Weyland is the star of the show.”
Cadmann swallowed his irritation while Carlos climbed up to help Sylvia fiddle with her video pack.
Building a documentary had sounded great ten light-years ago. It was fair enough. Building an interstellar starship had put the Geographic Society massively in debt. They were entitled to know the results. They would learn from the first expedition’s mistakes. Sales to Sol system’s twelve billion would help to finance a second expedition.
In practice, the running documentary had become a pain in the ass. Cadmann might have given the whole thing a pass but for the chance to see his two friends.
He looked back down the hill, out over Cadmann’s Bluff, down to where Mary Ann sat holding Sylvia’s seven-week-old son. She waved one of Justin’s chubby hands at them, and some of his irritation dissolved. Three months of pregnancy remained to her, and it warmed him to have a preview of his future family. Mary Ann’s fringe of pale golden hair riffled in the mild salt breeze. She hugged their surrogate child while Tweedledee sat contentedly at her side. The sprawling silver ribbon of the Miskatonic split the valley behind and below her.
His crops were coming up in rows of green and yellow now, and the cages rustled with Joes. He was proud of what he had wrested from the soil, but his true joy was the spreading infrastructure of his homestead.
Hendrick Sills, Gregory Clifton and two former members of his kill team were immediately below him, deepening the boxlike foundation of his house. The original structure had been expanded east and west, but building farther back into the hill added the possibility of clerestories—staggered, louvered roofs that allowed greater view, greater access for light.
The effort would have exhausted a lone man. In the three and a half months since the death of the sixth grendel, the Colony had demonstrated its gratitude in the only way it knew how: by contributing time and labor. So the earth was broken, rocks moved and walls raised, floors and ceilings extended.
Cadmann’s Bluff had become the showpiece of Tau Ceti Four.
Carlos clumped back down the mountainside. “All right. Repitan, por favor.”
“Hold it, Carlos, just hold it. This is getting old real quick.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Sylvia chided. “The view is beautiful. I’ve got the house, the bluff, the Colony, the northern mountains and the tips of the mainland peaks. Do you have any idea how rare it is for a hundred kilometers of mist to burn away?”
“That’s a once-in-a-lifetime shot, compadre. Our sponsors expect it. National Geographic wants us to show Earth’s land-starved masses the joys of homesteading in the stars—”
“There goes the local neighborhood.”
“—and one of its joys is the chance to become a hero, like Avalon’s greatest citizen, Cadmann Weyland, sometimes yclept Beowulf.”
Sylvia whistled her approval.
Cadmann laughed disgustedly. “All right, all right. Get the rest of your damned footage and let’s quit.”
“Deal.”
The camera ran. Carlos declaimed. They walked the perimeter of the cleared rectangle that would one day be the greenhouse. They skirted a new excavation to the northeast.
“And here,” Carlos continued theatrically, “will one day reside the finest wine cellar on Camelot. Stored on board Geographic are frozen cuttings from some of California’s finest vineyards. Someday, when the basic crops have stabilized, it may be time to start less . . . vital foodstuffs.” He cleared his throat. “Purely for medicinal purposes, of course.”
“Carlos, don’t you know that grapes can be eaten straight?”
“No hablo Inglés.”
They walked down the narrow path beside the house, past the massive boulder rigged as a deadfall, set to crush anything trying to force its way uphill. Cadmann winced as Carlos pretended to lean against it. Sylvia circled to get a better view. “This is probably an unnecessary precaution. The grendels are dead, slain by Colonel Cadmann Weyland. Even so, our Cadmann is a cautious fellow.”
Cadmann raised his hand in protest. “Carlos, you’ve got to stop this. I don’t like being painted as Beowulf. I just did what had to be done. I can’t encourage this. I’m not interested in running for God.”
“This isn’t reality. This is theater.”
“If it was only going to be seen throughout the solar system, fine. But you’re going to show it down in the Colony, too. It’s not good for them, it’s not good for me.”
Cadmann left them and followed Tweedledum downhill. He knew that the colonists just wanted to thank him, and yet somehow it all seemed meaningless.
Sure, you saved the Colony. Right. But Ernst is dead, and he was the only one you were really responsible for, dammit.
He stopped down by the Dopey Joe cages. Their flock had grown to twenty, and Carlos had created a modular cage design for Mary Ann, simple to build or expand, easy to clean. Cadmann was happy with the new model, and the sight of it eased his annoyance. He put on another smile for the cameras.
Just a few more minutes of this nonsense.
Mary Ann was suddenly beside him, holding Justin as if he were their own child. They’d love this image back on Earth. He leaned over and kissed her warmly. “Feeding time for our flock?”
“Just about. Justin is a nice baby,” she whispered, “but ours is going to be much prettier.”
“Hush.” Cadmann grinned as Carlos and Sylvia caught up with them. He slipped a glove on, lifted a handful of green fodder into the slit at the top of Missy’s cage.
He raised his voice as Sylvia focused. “And these little darlings are called ‘Dopey Joes,’ the only indigenous mammalians found on Camelot so far. They may hold the key to a treasure trove of—ow!”
Missy snapped her sharp little teeth into his glove, and Cadmann struggled to twist it free without breaking her furry neck.
“Bad girl.” Sylvia laughed. “No dessert for you. You can’t just eat the meat and ignore your vegetables—”
“Hah, hah. Funny lady. That’s it, I’m through.” He pulled off his glove and threw it at Carlos, who caught it and thoughtfully examined the rip in the fingertip.
“Not exactly sheep, are they, Señora Weyland?”
“Baa-baa.” Mary Ann took Justin to Sylvia. “Unhook that camera and give it to Carlos. Will you take Justin? I want to talk to Cadmann.”
There was a quick, clumsy exchange of burdens, and Mary Ann hooked her arm through Cadmann’s.
“Carlos and Sylvie staying for dinner?” she asked. He heard her distantly, but gazed up at the expanded house, strong and solid in the warm Avalonian sunlight.
Up at the top of the hill, Gregory Clifton’s bronzed, corded body arched, swinging a pick to break up resistant soil.
As with Carlos, the violent action and backbreaking labor of the past months had burned out Greg’s hatred and healed his emotional wounds. Cadmann found it easy to respect that response, that need.
“Are Carlos and Sylvia staying?”
“Sure.”
Mary Ann took his hand and led him to the edge of the bluff. They looked down over the valley. They had done so very much, and given time would do more. He didn’t have to close his eyes to visualize the march of humanity across the valley, the slow spread of their cities. His grandchildren might live to see a city of a hundred thousand where once only jungle had sprawled.
But false heroes wouldn’t help. Especially if they were used as a blind for guilt
and uncertainty.
“I’m worried, too,” Mary Ann said quietly.
“I’m sorry. Am I upsetting you? It’s nothing, really.”
“You have your reasons, I have mine.” He held her tummy and frowned. “I think you think I’m a little crazy.”
“Pregnant women are supposed to be a little crazy. What’s my excuse?”
“Don’t need an excuse, you’ve got reasons, silly. I just know that something still bothers me about . . . Cad, I look around and the picture’s wrong.”
“It’s an alien planet. Didn’t anyone tell you? Two moons, bluer sunlight, critters and plants straight out of Oz—”
Sylvia moved up beside her, cradling Justin in her arms. His hair was pale straw, and he seemed to fit comfortably into a shoulder harness. He nursed contentedly at one discreetly covered nipple. “I know what you mean,” she said. “We’re still working on the corpses. I don’t understand enough about grendels yet. I’d give anything to have one alive. If we’d known that they could burn themselves up like that, we might have cooled the last one off with water.”
“It was that hot?”
Sylvia laughed. “It cooked itself.”
“Heat. Fire,” Mary Ann muttered.
“What?”
Mary Ann cuddled close to Cadmann. “I remember . . . I did a summer of study in the forests in Wyoming. And they told us about fires. It all seems like a million years ago.” Cadmann hugged her comfortingly as she searched her memory, struggling to make the unlikely connection. “They told us about what happens in fall. Then, a forest fire that seems to be out can smolder under a mat of leaves. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. But it’s spreading underneath. It can surround you. And then suddenly break up to the surface, and whoosh!”
“Shh . . . ”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered. “I’m so glad you’re mine. Don’t let anything happen to you, Cadmann. I’m not sure I’d know how to go on. I’m not sure I’d want to.”
He was aware that Carlos and Sylvia were nearby, watching, and was also aware when they turned away to give the two of them privacy. For a moment, Cadmann and Mary Ann were in their own secret world of warmth and familiar smells.
“Come on,” he said soothingly. “Let’s get dinner started for our crew.”
The evening’s meal was a simple affair, an open-air picnic around a roaring campfire. Decent-sized catfish and a huge samlon from the nets were the main course, cooked into a casserole with long-grain brown rice from the hydroponics garden down at the Colony. Carlos and Sylvia and Hendrick’s four-man work team joined them.
Cadmann watched Mary Ann pick over her food. She had a strong appetite for rice and catfish, but couldn’t bring herself to eat samlon. “More for the rest of us,” he had teased her at first, but her glum smile told him that the joke had died.
Her eyes scanned from the edge of the bluff to the notebook at her side. From there to the Joe cages. Tonight, the furry creatures chewed frantically at the wire and threw themselves against the wooden walls of their prisons.
Carlos watched them for a while. “The natives are restless. Do they think they’re going to be dessert?” A branch popped on the campfire, and a cloud of sparks and oily smoke drifted up.
The night was a continuation of the phenomenally clear afternoon. A faint salt breeze from the ocean five miles west made the air clean and crisp. The twin moons were bright and unshrouded.
It should have been a night for laughter and song, but Cadmann felt another of his morose moods fall over him like a blanket. He couldn’t seem to fight it.
Carlos tickled Justin, held the child for a few minutes, while Sylvia fed herself. The three of them seemed pretty damned comfortable together, and for a moment Cadmann indulged in pointless speculation.
Then Mary Ann took his hand and placed it over her swollen stomach, smiling wistfully as their unborn child thumped and bumped. “Floop floop.”
“Kid’s doing a half-gainer in there.”
“He loves you already, you know.”
There was more sadness than joy in that conversation, and he didn’t know why, didn’t know how to deal with it. Crest of the Angeles Mountains. Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley spreading to opposite sides of a veranda. Carpets of light. Never again in my lifetime. Win something, lose something . . .
Hendrick Sills watched the four of them ruminatively. With his short, square-cut beard he looked every bit the Freudian analyst. “What’s all the moping about?” he finally demanded. “We got a cracking good day’s work under our belts.”
“True enough,” Greg said. His calm oval face was painted with the firelight. It was growing more difficult to remember him in that other time, on that other night, spewing jellied gasoline, the glow of madness in his eyes.
Carlos rose from the fireside. “I think that it’s time for Sylvia and me to head back down.”
“You could spend the—no, there’s Justin.”
Sylvia hugged Cadmann briefly. “Walk us to the Skeeter?”
“Sure. Mary Ann?”
“I’m a little tired. You go ahead.”
He pushed himself up, helped Sylvia to her feet. As they moved away toward the eastern edge of the bluff, Hendrick’s rough voice broke into song:
Banish the use of the four-letter words
Whose meanings are never obscure
The Angles, the Saxons, those hardy old birds,
Were vulgar, obscene, and impure.
But cherish the use of the weaseling phrase
That never quite says what you mean
You’d better be known for your hypocrite ways
Than as vulgar, impure and obscene . . .
Another breeze stirred the foot-tall rows of corn as they walked. Cadmann found himself humming with the song, and he linked arms with his two friends.
“It’s not so bad, is it, Cadzie?”
“It’s like Carlos said a couple of months ago: ‘It’s been a whole lot worse.’” He dug at the ground with the toe of his boot, making a mental note to get some of the soil lichens started soon. “I just wanted to have this to get away from everything, and I seem to have brought a bit of the Colony up here with me.”
“You can’t get away from—” Sylvia started to say, but Carlos quieted her.
“Amigo, if you really don’t want us up here, any of us, just say the word. We love you. We’re grateful to you. We’re still embarrassed about the . . . fiasco. Hendrick, Greg, the others, they’re just responding to you the way men have responded to leaders since Alley Oop.”
“I never wanted to be a leader.”
“Some of us don’t have choices. Just let them do a little more work—hell, you can use it, you know that’s the truth—and then send them back. You’ll be alone, and Greg will have had his therapy.”
It was true, all true, but dammit, why was it so hard for a man to just be alone?
When Nature is calling, plain speaking is out
When the ladies, God bless ’em, are milling about;
You may wee-wee, make water or empty the glass
You can powder your nose, even Johnny can pass.
Shake the dew off the lily, see a man about a dog
When everyone’s drunk, it’s condensing the fog.
But please to remember if you would know bliss
That only in Shakespeare do characters—
“What the hell. Hendrick’s right. It’s been a good day. Listen, you two have a safe flight back. I’m going to go sing dirty ditties.”
He shook Carlos’s hand, kissed Justin and helped Sylvia buckle herself in.
Then Cadmann stood back, shielding his eyes as Carlos expertly lifted the Skeeter from the ground and spun it up into the sky. His friend flashed the landing lights in farewell and vanished over the lip of the plateau.
Feeling unseasonably warm, Cadmann walked back to the fireside, voice already rising in the next bawdy verse.
“I think he’s going to make it,” Carlos
said.
“I never really doubted it.” Sylvia looked at him. “How about you? I haven’t really seen the old Carlos much lately.”
“Has he been missed?”
“Muchly. Avalon’s unmarried lovelies mourn almost nightly.”
Carlos skimmed the Skeeter sideways, riding out a gust of wind. “What, in formal ceremonies? Perhaps it is time I began making my rounds again.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “Only the unmarried ones?”
“Discretion, Carlos. Please.”
“I’m nothing if not discreet.” Carlos could have begun the descent then, but he kept the Skeeter hovering. “And what about you?” he asked soberly. “Terry’s problem is hardly a secret. I know how you and Cadmann feel about each other . . . ”
“I promised Terry. Anyone but Cadmann.” She sighed. “I couldn’t anyway. It would destroy Mary Ann. Cadzie and I just . . . had bad timing.”
Slowly, Carlos began to dip toward the landing pad. He chose his next words carefully. “And where does that leave Señora Faulkner?”
Her answering voice was small. “Looking for a friend?”
Carlos reached out his hand, covering hers. Her fingers seemed so small, so warm. “Since Bobbi, I think that is what has stopped me. I haven’t been looking for a relationship. Or just palomita. I think I, too, need a friend. Perhaps . . . ”
“. . .we could both stop looking?” Sylvia squeezed Carlos’s fingers, then pulled away and hugged Justin to her.
I hope so, Carlos said to himself, surprised by the intensity of his response. Warmth and cheerfully lecherous optimism spread through him like a brushfire. He hummed happily as he brought the Skeeter in for a landing.
♦ChaptEr 24♦
remittance man
I strongly wish for what I faintly hope;
Like the daydreams of melancholy men,
I think and think in things impossible,
