by Larry Niven
A protracted groan issued from the tent behind her, and she turned to watch Cadmann elbow himself clumsily out past the flaps.
He glared at her, rubbing granular sleep from the corners of his eyes, and grunted, "What the hell are you doing here?"
She didn't let him see her flinch. "Cooking breakfast." She stirred the eggs and crumbled in another pinch of dried bacon crisps. Tweedledum, the male, crept up within a meter of the fire, drooling. Cadmann shooshed him away and crawled up closer, shouldering Mary Ann gently aside. His bloodshot eyes narrowed with interest. He started to say something, then caught her smiling at him and turned it into a yawn, scratching himself crudely. Mary Ann caught an awesome whiff of morning breath.
Both of Cadmann's big hands went to his head. "God, that hurt."
"You earned it. You finished off the vodka last night."
"No," he croaked, genuine distress in his voice. His voice sounded as if something small and struggling were trapped in his larynx. Cadmann backed into his tent, and emerged holding his canteen. He waggled it in one hand, grinning through a week's worth of beard at the answering swish. "Hair of the dog."
He tossed it back, guzzling with short, choppy movements of his Adam's apple. Why do you do this to yourself? Doesn't matter. You'll have to stop now.
He tossed the canteen to the side to clank noisily against a pile of rocks. The dogs attacked him simultaneously from either side, yipping at him to play with them or feed them or any one of a hundred other doggy concerns.
Cadmann wrestled with them for a tolerant moment, then shoved both away and glared at them nastily. "If you don't shut the hell up, I am going to shoot you both. I am going to line you up and shoot you both with the same goddamn bullet. Do you understand me?"
They arfed and snapped playfully at each other's tails and ears.
Cadmann stretched, naked but for a baggy pair of shorts. His muscular arms were only fractionally better tanned than his chest. He's lost weight. The wounds, and then the drinking—
Mary Ann stopped stirring the eggs as the first curl of smoke wafted up from the pan.
"What in the hell is that mess?"
"Call it an Avalon omelet. It's our breakfast," she said.
He thrust a fork into the pan, probing, and snapped at her, "How much of it is poison?"
She took the fork and shoveled a bite into her own mouth, glaring right back.
"Half, eh? Well, I'm tough. I can handle that." He tried to sit in a gracefully cross-legged position, but finally just sort of collapsed into a heap. "My head."
"Your breath. Here. Eat."
Cadmann took the fork back and scraped half the contents of the pan onto a plate. The suspicion in his eyes faded after the first bite. "Damn, this isn't half—"
At the first sign of her smile he shut up and hunched over the pan, sulking as he ate.
Mary Ann poured reconstituted nonfat milk and sipped contentedly. It was startlingly clean, and aerated, filled with tiny, needlelike ice crystals from the snowmelt stream that ran near Cadmann's campsite. Drunk. Hurt. Mad. And he's still picked a better place than Zack ever did...
She squinted across the fire at Cadmann. Time? Yes, while the hangover lasts. "You can forget about me going back to the Colony. I'm staying. You can carry me down, but I'll just climb back. If you want to break both of my legs, that might stop me, but I wouldn't bet on it."
"You are going," he said. He ate the last forkful of the eggs, squinted at her and belched with satisfaction. "Right after lunch."
"Keep the head down." One of Cadmann's broad hands clamped onto the back of her neck as they crouched behind an outcropping of rock near the eastern edge of the mesa. "Damn hangfires—"
Brapp!! The sound was not as loud as Mary Ann expected, but she heard it as much with her body as her ears. The shaped engineering charge rent the mountainside. Rock chips and clots of dirt flew in all directions. A gout of dust and powdered earth mushroomed into the sky. Crouching next to her, Cadmann grinned. "Fun, eh?"
She bobbed her head nervously. "Finest kind."
His hands were gentle as he helped her to her feet. Shielding his eyes against the dust, he surveyed his handiwork.
The third detonation of the day completed a hole in the granite face twenty meters above the mesa. It looked very like the opening excavation of a mine. Shelf-like slabs of rock jutted out from the earth, their ends shattered by the concussion.
"I'm not sure I understand why you don't just build on the flat."
"Weren't you in the camp?" She heard the sarcasm change to something else. He stared at her. "Mary Ann—" His voice softened. "Yeah. Well, there are monsters here."
"I know that."
"So we—I—don't want to be on the flat. Also, I want the flatland for farming—if I decide to stay, all of the farmland will be worth its acreage in gold foil. Second, drainage—if I build underground on the hillside, rain and snowmelt will run right off, if I build my roof right. Third, view. From where we'll... I'll be, I'll have the best damn view that ever was. Right down on their heads. And fourth, I want us to be unreachable. One path, and it twists, and I'll guard it. I won't be on some tabletop watching one of those come at me at ninety miles an hour."
She saw it now, and her ears burned. My God, of course not! Why didn't I see... the way he looked at me? Oh. "It was a stupid question, wasn't it?"
"Uh—"
"Cadmann, I know. I can accept it. But—well, sometimes it hurts."
His hand moved to touch hers, then drew back. She held her breath. He turned away to survey his work, then turned back, a deeply satisfied smile creasing his face. "There are more reasons, but those will do for the moment." He looked at her sharply. "Nobody's asking you to live in it. Or to stay here."
"I'm staying." She stood on her tiptoes and locked her arms around his neck. "I love you, Cadmann. I lost too much coming to Avalon. I'm not losing you, too."
He reached back to unfasten her fingers from the back of his neck, but she clung too tightly, and finally he just met her eyes squarely.
"You do things my way," he said. "If you don't like it, go home. Down there, things can be whatever way people decide by vote that they should be. This is not a democracy. Up here I'm the bottom line."
"Male chauvinist," she said, kissing him lightly.
"I'm a ma chauvinist. I'd probably be the same way if I was a woman. I just want to get this straight before we... start anything."
"I love you," she repeated. The rock dust at the corner of her eyes was slightly muddied. "Love, honor and obey. Isn't that what women used to promise? I will, you know."
He gave her a hard, brief hug. "Then let's get started."
"Aye, aye, sir. What first?"
"Defenses. Notice anything about the—our—house site?"
"Many things."
"Boulder. That one."
"Big."
"And it will roll, once I dig it out. So I dig. Put chocks under it first. Levers on the chocks. Anyone wants to come up the path without permission—"
"Any one?"
"Or any thing. If it comes up and we don't like it, we roll the boulder down."
"I'm for that. What next?"
"Terrace down the hill. Vegetable garden. Divert some water from the
Amazon to keep the vegetables happy, and us too. Then finish the house. I have to finish the excavation by hand to make sure that I have the dimensions that I want. Then I level the floor and set the corner posts. That will take about three weeks."
She smiled uneasily. "Three weeks. Cadmann, how long are you planning to stay up here?"
It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it instantly. "Until I'm finished. Until I feel like going the hell back down. And the instant you don't like it up here, go."
Cadmann tore her hands loose from around his neck and without another word opened the box of tools and building supplies that he had skeetered up from the camp.
He was still limping.
A tireless machine, made o
f polished hickory and leather. That's what
Cadmann seemed to her. For all his injuries and his age, he worked on and on when she was exhausted, when the youngest, strongest men in the Colony would have collapsed and begged for rest.
He worked eight hours a day, digging, shoring, piling... building ridges of earth that would later become garden or upper patio. No effort was lost. He never hauled any dirt or stone uphill. He built on the hill and he planned carefully, and every wheelbarrow of earth and rock moved downhill to the growing garden structure.
In some ways the excavation was beginning to look like a smallish swimming pool, with the deep end—nine feet deep—at the lowest part, and the shallow higher. He cut deep "steps" into the hill above the excavation, so that the entire cavity measured five meters along the bottom edge and twelve meters along each side.
When he was through with the morning's work, Cadmann stretched and took off with Tweedledee to check the traps. (Mary Ann had found another difference between the twins. Tweedledee's right ear was a bit—or, more precisely, a bite—short, a souvenir of a kennel brawl that had become serious.)
And here she was able to accompany him, learning to set the wire spring traps that Cadmann set for the slow, almost friendly mammaloids that Cadmann called "Dopey Joes." He said it was a literary reference.
At first she was able to do little but help him haul dirt, and cook the meals and clean the camp. But it was too easy for her to remember a time when she had been one of the most competent women on the expedition, and there was no way that she could remain satisfied with this new role.
She learned to set snares. Nets in the stream that ran past the site of the house from the heights of Mucking Great Mountain, a tiny ice-melt stream Cadmann had named the Amazon. With a large-mouthed basket in one hand and Tweedledee's leash in the other, she explored the mountain, learning the paths and the patches of sliding rock. And it was among them that she found Missy.
The snares were set near any of the half dozen or so bushes and plants that showed the characteristic gnawed parallel toothmarks. One patch of plants interested her. They were green and broad-leaved, with thick yellow veins branching from a central stem. The flowers were delicate pink with tiny red berries clustered in the center. None of its flowers were chewed or gnawed, but the roots and leaves were the favorite food of some local creature. When she took a closer look at the flowers, she noted a dusting of dried insect segments, and more dead, delicately winged husks on the ground beneath the blossoms. The word "poison" flashed through her mind, and she was pleased with herself for making the connection.
Something was rustling behind the bush, and she carefully pulled the branches aside.
There, its neck caught in a chew-proof nylon spring loop, was eighteen inches of furred frustration. The Joe had huge orange eyes almost too large for its face. The eyes were imploring, terrified, confused. They reminded her of... what was it?
What... ?
She stomped her foot in frustration and forgot about it. The creature was in one of the snares, bleeding from the throat, twisting and spitting at her. Tweedledee barked, and the little Joe almost broke its own neck trying to escape.
She poked it into the basket and then cut it lose from the snare. It chattered at her. "Well, Missy," Mary Ann said. "Can't blame you for being upset."
Tarsier. That was the word she had searched for. An equatorial primate, the owner of the largest eyes of any mammal. Found in the forests of Malaysia and the Philippines.
She laughed in relief. It was still there. Some of the information was still in her mind, she just couldn't call it up on command as once she had. Maybe she could restructure the way she thought...
She shook the cage and held it up close to her face. "Are you a good-luck charm, Missy?"
Missy spat at her and tried to hide in a corner of the basket. She was more slender than a tarsier, almost like a thick, furred lizard. She lay on her back, claws out and scrabbling blindly.
On their way back down, Tweedledee suddenly strained at the leash, tugging so hard that Mary almost dropped the basket. Tweedledee yipped hysterically, struggling to climb up into the rocks. Missy went absolutely apeshit, squealing and clawing in the wire cage.
"'Dee Dee, get back here!" Mary Ann yelled, suddenly suspicious. Reluctantly, the shepherd came back down, tail folded contritely between her legs. Mary Ann wound the leash tightly around a rock, then climbed up and took a closer look, Missy chattering more loudly.
Her ears were rewarded before her eyes. She heard a thin, mewling sound that reminded her of nothing so much as the cry of kittens starving for milk. There were six of them, curled up around each other like a tangle of hairy rope. They were just babies, barely able to wiggle. One lay still; it seemed dead. The others looked up at her with curiosity untainted by fear.
Mary Ann glanced from the wire cage to the babies, and sudden inspiration struck.
Missy was climbing up the sides of the basket, and Mary Ann thumped her back down, throwing handfuls of avalonia grass and leaves into the cage until the bottom was completely matted.
Then she carried the basket up the defile to the rocks. Missy chattered even more frantically now. Down below her, Tweedledee leaped and danced, yipping enthusiastically.
Mary Ann braced herself between the rocks, thankful now for hours of jogging, because her calves were starting to burn from all the climbing. She reached down into the crevice and gently drew up one of the Joe kittens. It struggled and bit her hand—a scratch, hardly enough to break the skin. Mary Ann set the fur ball back down and pulled her jacket sleeve down over her hand in a makeshift glove. This time she couldn't feel the teeth at all when she transferred the second Joe into the basket.
Mary Ann had to knock Missy down from the side of the cage again, and then a third time when she tried to bite through the jacket. When the first baby was deposited in the cage. Missy scampered around and around in a furry flash before finally slowing down. She sniffed at her child, then licked, and finally wound herself around the kitten, enveloping it.
One at a time, Mary Ann transplanted the Joes to the cage. Then she trundled it back down to Tweedledee.
The mother chattered up at-her vilely, then continued to tie her children into a ball for maximum warmth and protection. Mary Ann looked at the last small, sad body down in the crevice, and shook her head.
"Time to head back to camp. Dee," she said, unleashing the dog. She stood with small fists on hips, looking around the area. What did these things eat? The adults, anyway? The Joes looked close enough to mammalian; there would be some sort of milk gland for the young.
There were several types of plants: a kind of lichen or moss seemed to be breaking down some of the rocks, and a viny thing that resembled a colony of long-legged spiders. It grew out of the rocks in symbiotic relationship with the moss. There were shrubs up here, and flowering plants, which she had noticed from the helicopter.
Which would the Joe family prefer? She took a chance: the broadleafed plant that had concealed the snare. She tore loose a cluster of red berries and dropped them into the cage.
Nothing. Momma Joe ignored them.
Still following the hunch, she tore loose a clutch of leaves, sorted through them for the tenderest, and dropped them in.
Missy sprang on them. After careful sniffing, she began to chew.
Well, that answered that.
Feeling absurdly proud of herself, Mary Ann carried the cage back down to the camp.
The sun was unusually warm, and the air sweet, and her mind was already buzzing with ideas for cages.
There was something... something bothering her about the enclave she had found. What was it? It was beautiful. More beautiful, more lush, than anything she had seen down on the flatlands.
Down on the flatlands there was little in the way of tender shrubs.
Only the gnarled thorn bushes seemed to thrive down there.
More variation of plant life at a higher altitude? And come to think of
it, animal life, too. That implied something, but what? What? Her mind wasn't quite clear enough, and she cursed softly.
Damn it. Why wouldn't it come into focus? Suddenly all the pleasure she had felt disappeared in a welter of frustration. Why wouldn't her mind work for her?
Hibernation Instability. There. Say it. Accept it. Don't try to pretend that it didn't affect you, as some of the others do. Don't try to pretend you still have capacities that have fled. That kind of egotistical nonsense gets you laughed at or killed. Work within your limits, and learn the steps you always pitied ‘tweens for having to take.
Where a Bright can lead, a ‘Tween can follow. There used to be such smugness in that saying. A genius can take huge leaps, wearing intuitive seven-league boots. Then a corps of engineers and technicians can turn the theories into inventions and principles. A competently trained repairman can fix something that it took a genius to devise in the first place.
I lost my seven-league boots. But the germ plasm is still mine! We can make good kids...
All right. There was something wrong here. But if she had the time and the patience, she could reconstruct the thought processes that once came to her so easily. And it was important for her to reconstruct these. Very important.
With the basket in hand, she traveled back down the hill.
Mary Ann found it amazing.
In three weeks, using a constant, unvarying work schedule, Cadmann had carved the patio and shoring, tamped down the floor of his new house and covered it with layers of polyethylene sheeting. He had set the corner posts using the lightweight foam-steel braces ferried down from the zerograv smelting facility aboard Geographic, and lined the walls with more of the polyethylene.
The roof girders and additional support beams were finally in place. Cadmann disassembled their tent and laid it across the top in a makeshift roof, and they spent their first night in the new home. The northern wall was earth, but the southern, uphill side was open to the broad, high steps that Cadmann had cut into the mountainside.
