by Larry Niven
Yet love to wander in that golden maze.
—John Dryden, “Rival Ladies”
Sylvia touched her lips to Justin’s brow. She savored his baby smell of powder and clean linen. Her hands were cold, and she was careful not to touch him as she tucked the edges of the blanket around him. Seven weeks old today. I should remind Terry.
Justin had begun to lose the newborn’s wrinkly look, to cease being a generic baby and take on a personality of his own. He could focus his eyes, reach and grab with coordination, make sounds that often seemed appropriate to the situation. Terry had read Kistakovsy’s classic revisions of the Gesell studies and pronounced Justin well ahead of normal development.
Those things mattered, but there was a way that they didn’t. Genius or idiot, she loved the tiny, helpless child as she had never loved anything in her life, as if he were still a part of her own body.
Plastic stars and pterodons dangled above his crib. They would circle at the slightest touch of a breeze. For now, they, like Justin, were still.
Terry was in the front room clearing away the debris of the evening meal.
Her hands shook. She couldn’t let Terry see that. She forced herself to calm down, and thrust them beneath her arms until they started to feel warm.
Terry stacked the last dishes in the cabinet beneath the sink. One hand gripping the wheelchair arm, muscles in his arm and back standing prominent as he leaned far forward to reach. Done, and he smiled in satisfaction. His wheelchair purred as he glided it over to her. “Justin asleep?”
“For now,” she said, honestly relieved. She waved at the sink area. “You’re getting good at that. Making order out of chaos.”
“Yeah. What I am, I’m good at. I never had arms this strong. Which reminds me—”
“The expedition.”
“Yeah. Time to turn the plans over to Zack. It could be five or ten years before anyone actually goes to the mainland, but hell, our resources won’t have changed much. The plans’ll still be good. I’m afraid to tell Cadmann. He’d want to go now.”
“Yeah . . . I’ve expressed enough milk to keep Justin happy if he wakes up. I’ll only be gone a couple of hours.” She stretched, forcing a mild yawn. “We have to get the tapes edited and off. We’re overdue on our broadcast.”
“You’ve been busy,” Terry said. His face, always slender, seemed unhealthily gaunt despite his smile. She knelt by the wheelchair.
“You’ll be all right?”
“Oh, I’m fine.” His quick smile faded slightly, and he was looking past her. His gaze lingered on diplomas and plaques, a photo album, a pair of crystal goblets: the things they had brought from Earth.
“What are you thinking of, love?”
His smile saddened. “It’s been a long time since you’ve called me that.”
“I’ve thought of it every day.”
“Have you?”
“Yes, of course—”
“You can’t know how much I want to believe that. It’s a trite old story, isn’t it? Arranged marriage that results in love. Love on one side, anyway.”
“Terry—”
“And then I found it was mutual. Marry, then fall in love. It really works. It wouldn’t surprise our Hindu friends. They’ve known it all along. Go get your work done and ask Carlos to drop around once in a while. I don’t see him enough.”
She slipped on her shawl. It was a web of gold and umber yarn, every strand turned by the hand of her mother, over a century before. Its touch stimulated tactile memories: warmth, closeness, softness. It was one of her little pieces of home.
The click as the door latched behind her was uncomfortably loud.
After a few days of clear weather, the fog had descended upon Avalon with a vengeance, thicker and soupier than any night since the first grendel assault. It penetrated through the shawl as if she were naked, chilled right to the bone.
The searchlights atop the guard towers rotated tirelessly. Their beams stabbed out through the mist like silver fingers. The fog dampened sound as it did vision. After a few steps she looked back toward her house and her child and her husband. All were gone, vanished into the mist.
She drew the shawl tighter across her shoulders, and went on.
The electronics shack was in the rear of the camp, perched on the edge of the bluff. A single line of light burned through the shades. She paused a moment, listening to the muted rush of the Miskatonic, then rapped once and entered.
Carlos sat at the editing bench, absorbed in his work. She shut and latched the door.
“How is it going?”
“Just waiting for you, Señora.”
The shack seemed warmer than the house she had left behind. Terribly warm. Even with Carlos on the far side of the room, with the holostage between them, he was stiflingly close.
“Coffee?”
“Maybe later.”
“Let me know. We’ve got most of the video portion together. Just need you to look over your notes again. Take another look at the footage we did from the autopsy and the summation. Anything left to say? This is the last chance before we send it off.”
Sylvia doffed her shawl and sat, enjoying her ease of movement. A month and a half before, she’d had to use her arms just to sit down. There’s the miracle fat cure. Lose twenty-six pounds in twenty-four hours. Have a baby. Her joints no longer hurt, and her muscles were alive. She walked and moved like a new woman. Her body was ready for anything. Especially . . .
Oh, God . . . I hope I’m doing the right thing.
She focused on the holo, took a hand remote and fast-scanned. “This material on the increasing samlon size should be cross-referenced with their eating pattern. Joes and samlon are vegetarians, pterodons and grendels are carnivores. Good.”
She flashed through the images and text, fighting to concentrate, almost overcome by the essential maleness of Carlos. She glanced over at him. He leaned back and sipped from his mug. She was dying to know what was on his mind. Why didn’t he touch her? Or at least say something?
An image from the most recent Town Hall appeared. She remembered this vividly: the debate on whether to unfreeze the remaining embryos.
Zack, for the first time since Ernst’s death, seemed rested and totally controlled. “The vote is close to even on this point, and I don’t want to make a judgment until more of us agree. Final arguments?”
Terry appeared, and her heart leaped. In closeup, it was easy to forget that he was crippled. “Cadmann isn’t here to argue his own point,” Terry began, “but I’ll take the opposing view anyway.”
There was scattered laughter. “I think that Cadmann is, as usual, being a conservative old maid. Avalon is safe at last. Let’s put all of our eggs in one big basket. The odds are good; let’s gamble with our children’s lives. What the hell!” He paused; he was smiling, sort of. “The last time I said anything like this was the last time I ever stood up. And thirteen of us died.”
Everyone laughed, sort of, but the vote that followed showed that Terry had made his point. Only a third of the remaining embryos would be thawed and revived.
She felt pride for Terry at that, pride that made some of her other thoughts dark and dirty. For a few seconds, she considered simply telling Carlos that everything was fine, and leaving the shack while there was still time.
But this did have to be reviewed. She thumbed the scan into play. Images whizzed by, and through their transparency, she watched Carlos at his console. In one instant, he seemed frighteningly strong and competent, and in the next like a little boy who needed comfort.
My body can’t make up its mind!
She stopped the tape of her own image, part of a roundtable discussion of grendels that had been held three weeks before.
“—salt water isn’t toxic to grendels,” Marnie maintained. Sylvia had grown so used to Marnie’s speech that she never noticed the lisp except in a tape. “Monsters can’t drink saltwater, but it won’t kill them. I’d say that it irritates their nasal passages
, and that is about all—”
Sylvia froze the picture. “I want a note here.”
“Then slip it in. Tracks siete and nueve are free.”
“Thanks. Subnote to preceding: freshwater status of grendels established by evaluating salt content of tissues. Cross-reference autopsy.”
Carlos nodded. “Everyone in the Colony has had a chance to add their own comments on Grendel.”
“What was yours?”
“I think the bitch was smart enough to build a raft and float over from the mainland. I wouldn’t put anything at all past them.”
“That may be giving them too much credit.”
“Better too much than too little.”
Sylvia scanned through the rest of the tape, then signed off.
“I guess that’s it,” she said quietly.
Carlos nodded, and saved it. The computer silently sorted the notes and compressed the megabytes of data for transmission to Geographic in the morning. From there, it would be broadcast to Earth. Ten years later, the data would arrive for the edification and entertainment of the home worlds.
Once again, the chill touched her, and she started to stand.
Carlos turned from the console and faced her. “I know, Chiquita,” he said. “Writing letters, sending messages, knowing that no one who ever knew me, ever touched me, will see them. No one to care. Strangers seeing pictures of strangers, and no one to care.” Suddenly, he was terribly close to her. His breath was warm, and smelled of coffee. “There used to be someone to care, you see? Someone who saw something beside the jokes, but I let her down.”
Sylvia reached up to touch his face, to run her hand over the stubble on his chin. Her nerves jumped at the contact.
To love, honor, and obey. To cleave only unto . . .
Anyone but Cadmann—
Oh, God, it’s been so long, so damned long.
“I care, Carlos.”
He looked at her hard, with the beginning of something like tears in his eyes. Then his mouth became a fine line, and he said, “I don’t know about this. Will you still respect me mañana?”
“You idiot. I don’t respect you now.”
“Fair enough.” He leaned forward the last few inches, and she backed away as his lips touched hers, then pressed against him, crushed her lips against him. Unfettered at last, all of the repressed feelings of the past months burned their way to the surface.
They stepped away from each other. Carlos squeezed her shoulders once, then turned off the equipment and the lights. He latched the door behind them, and together they set off through the fog for the warmth of his house. Within a few steps, the communications shack had joined the rest of the camp in the mist.
It seemed that there was nothing in the world but the two of them, doing the best they could do to find a path through the dark and the cold.
“I always wondered what your bed was like,” Sylvia giggled.
“You had but to ask,” Carlos said gravely. “Move a bit, will you? Your lovely bosoms are squashing me.”
Sylvia razzed him, and rolled off enough for Carlos to reach the bedstand. He felt among the empty beerskins for a full pouch, ah-hahed, and handed one to her.
The bed in question was a shell suspended like a hammock above the ground. Every attempt to extricate herself was a hazard, every movement during a delirious hour of lovemaking was enough to have both of them giggling like naughty children.
They swung there in a slight stupor induced by beer and afterglow.
She gave the pouch back to him and then snatched it away, dribbling foam over his chest and then kissing it off. He wrestled her to the bottom again, and she felt the heat flare in his body, triggering an immediate reply in her own. She wrapped her arms around him, then pulled the blankets over both their heads.
Later, much later, it seemed, Sylvia and Carlos had exhausted the heat. They lay holding each other.
Is this what we really craved? Not the blaze, but the gentle warmth afterward, the peace you can only share with one who has walked the fire with you?
She played with the tight, dark curls of hair on his chest. “How did you end up at another star, Carlos? Not the stuff we all said back on Earth at the group-compatibility workshops.”
“Great, weren’t they? Jesucristo, the lies that were told that month.”
“We all wanted to come pretty bad. Nobody was going to say anything to queer their chances.”
“The truth.” He sighed. With her face against his chest, she felt, more than heard, his heartbeat. It was strong, and slowing now. He had been as hungry for her as she had been for him. Or for someone.
God, this wasn’t the time for thoughts like that. She shunted them back into her head and enjoyed the glow.
“How did I get here? Well, in therapy, you might remember when I said I’d been called back from Beijing where I was doing research on the T’ang Dynasty.”
“You say that as if it isn’t true.”
“Oh, it’s true all right. I had another reason for being in Asia for six years.”
“Some almond-eyed lovely, I’d wager.”
“You lose.”
“Ooh. Guess what the stakes were. Claim your prize, you terrible man.”
“Insatiable woman. Let me catch my breath. Where was I?” He ran his finger slowly down her back, then kissed her as softly and sincerely as she had ever been kissed in her life. “Oh, yes. Why was I in Beijing?” He laughed. “My family estate is in Patagonia, Argentina. We have fairly extensive holdings, actually. We raised shorthorn and Hereford, and Corriedale sheep. Very old family.”
“Your whimsy certainly isn’t high Spanish.”
“Hell, half the time we spoke English. My mother was Canadian. I picked up colloquial Spanish in Mexico, in prep school and college. There was this little problem back home with a young lady. Her eyes, were, I recall, almond. The vegetable analogy unfortunately extended to her tummy, which was beginning to look like a casaba.”
She felt a cold flash. “And you left—”
“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t really love her, but I would have done the honorable thing. My father got there first, with checkbook in hand. She was poor, you see, and Papa wasn’t having any of it. She went to visit untraceable cousins in Santiago del Estero, and I went north.”
She relaxed again. “Where you stayed out of trouble, I hope.”
“Hardly. I seem to have this talent.”
“Mmmm. I’ve noticed.”
“I was nothing but an embarrassment to my family. I can laugh about it now, but I really made a mess of things. I drank and gambled and wenched, and had the bad grace to stay in the top ten percent of my class. My father bought me out of one fix after another. Finally, I got the royal invitation to get the hell off the continent. Live in Asia, drawing generous funds from the Bank of Hong Kong, or live penniless in the Americas. Being sensible, I opted for the mysterious East.”
“A remittance man.”
“Exactly. Want to know something?”
“What?”
“I’m half-sure that my father bribed someone to get me my berth on Geographic. I don’t think China was far enough away.”
“Not a chance. You earned every mile. Your father must have been an interesting man.”
“Aristocrat to the hilt. Used to retell Grandfather’s war stories with relish. It was ‘when the peons revolted’ this, and ‘in the fall of 1998’ that, and firing squads and torched villages, and Indians dragged out of the jungle by their necks. He had holos of stacks of heads . . . ”
He fell silent, and she didn’t disturb his trance. At last he emerged. “To him it was all ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We had the land, they wanted it. As simple as that. I told him I hated that life, that I’d never be a part of it. And here I am. Watching the herds.” Carlos chuckled darkly. “And fighting the natives, for that matter. Enough of that. How about some more of this?”
Sylvia looked to the clock on the wall. It was three in the morning. “No. I t
hink that I had better go.”
“When will . . . oh, nuts. Chula mía, it sounds ridiculous, I mean, it’s hard to have someone here that I care about, and not know when I’ll be able to be with her again.”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just glad we had tonight.”
“As am I. Take care, Chiquita.”
She kissed him again and then rolled carefully out of the hammock. She took a thorough shower, then slipped her clothes back on and left. Carlos was already asleep.
The fog had cleared some. Morning was still hours away, but she felt lighter, and warmer. Most importantly, she knew that she could face Terry with a clear conscience. What had happened between her and Carlos had nothing to do with her marriage, or her love for Terry.
But even if it had . . .
♦ChaptEr 25♦
life cycle
And now the matchless deed’s achieved,
Determined, dared, and done!
—Christopher Smart, “A Song to David”
Mary Ann pushed Cadmann away. “I can do it myself. I’m having a baby, not an operation.” Clumsily, she pulled her legs up onto the delivery table.
Cadmann hovered nervously. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Fine, darling. You look a little sick, though.”
“I just hate leaving the important things to someone else.”
“Trust me.” She inhaled harshly, then released the breath as a contraction wracked her body. “Not much—uhhh—longer now.”
Jerry patted her stomach comfortingly. “Just a few minutes, little soldier. We’re almost ready for you.”
“It’s all right.” She fought to stabilize her breathing, felt her pelvis stretch painfully, then release. She gasped for breath. “Ten light-years from home and—” she labored for another breath—“we still don’t have a better way to do this.”
“Well, there’s a Caesarean—”
“Invented in B.C. times for God’s sa—ugh!” The pain stabbed again, increasing in intensity and frequency. She gripped Cadmann’s hand hard as Jerry seated her on the delivery table. She settled down into the saddle at the edge that would allow her to sit up and push, with gravity assisting her pelvic muscles.
