He shook his head, and all was normal again. A perfectly harmless eel swished angrily through the water. Harmless. Captured.
Swish, swish.
"So why has it come back?"
"To breed," someone said.
"What Colonel Weyland meant was why now?" Chaka said. "And we don't know."
Cadmann turned to stare northward toward the mainland.
"Dad, we'll have to go," Jessica said.
He nodded. The eel would start that debate again. It was time for a full-dress expedition to the mainland, had been for years. He'd always known they would have to go there.
Someday. He had no taste for it. After the Grendel Wars, he had thought he wanted that, and had made two trips to the mainland, the second shorter than the first. He had bagged a grendel with the new grendel guns, and been holo'ed grinning next to his prize.
But something had altered within him, some subtle tidal change in his bones.
If there was anything he needed to prove about himself, he would prove it here, on the island. And if there was anything that he needed to know about grendels, he would allow others to learn it for him.
He lived with awful, bloody dreams in which all of their efforts had meant nothing. In his sleeping mind, rapacious demons had rolled over the colony like a red tide, killing everything, everyone. The few dozen survivors stranded up in Geographic could hear the screams, and see the blood, but they couldn't come down. Couldn't ever come down. And stayed up there until they slowly ran out of food... and water... and air.
Waking, he would shrug away the dreams. He didn't want to know how narrowly sanity had been preserved. And when he thought about going back to the mainland, he wondered what would happen if another grendel ever touched him. He wondered if he could take it. If his sanity would hold.
He didn't ever want to find out.
"... Zack," Justin said, pulling him out of his reverie.
"Zack?"
"Wants to kill it. And the eggs."
He felt an instantaneous, visceral flash of agreement, followed swiftly by the voice of reason. "As long as it's not dangerous that's not his decision to make," Cadmann said. He pointed to the tank cover. "Your idea?"
Jessica looked sheepish. "Zack ordered a cover."
"Good."
She hesitated. "We didn't put it on, until the eel tried to escape.
Took three of us with poles to keep it in. Then we put up the cover."
"Not when Zack told you to?"
"No, sir."
"He had the authority to order that. Do you dispute it?"
"No, Dad, it just seemed-"
Cadmann shook his head. "Jessica, we've been through this before. Zack is chairman and governor, and we don't lightly disobey him."
"You did. You rebelled-"
"Exactly," Cadmann said. "I rebelled. Some things are important enough for that. But you don't do it lightly! I take it your researchers found the cover inconvenient—" She looked at her feet.
"So you ignored a valid order because it wasn't convenient. Do I have to say anything else?"
"No, sir. But he wanted to kill it, too! And we found it at the Bluff, not down here!"
"And at the Bluff you and your brother had every right to do what you thought right," Cadmann said wearily. "Not here."
"It'll go to a vote," Jessica said. "Can we rely on you?"
"To approve keeping it alive? Yes." He thought for a moment. "That's not all that will go to a vote. The next question will be about the mainland, you know. We need that major expedition. Not just quick trips to initiate Grendel Scouts, a study expedition... "
"Yes," Justin said. "Joe Sikes thinks so too. Something's going wrong with the mining robots."
Something in Justin's tone made Cadmann frown. "Eh?"
"Don't know. Joe thinks it's Star Born. But it's not, it's another Avalon surprise."
Cadmann nodded. "And the ecology returns to Camelot. The wind blows from the north part of the year. God knows what may get rafted over here. We have to know what else may come."
"Avalonian homing pigeons," Justin offered. Jessica looked pained. "And no grendels here to eat them. We're likely to be up to our clavicles in something."
"There haven't been for twenty years," Jessica offered.
"There weren't any eels for twenty years, either," Justin said.
Cadmann frowned. "Good point. And the ecology is returning. Not just the eel. Why now?" He nodded in submission. "I suppose there will need to be... some kind of expedition."
"We can plan it on the next Grendel Scout outing," Justin said.
"Safety-"
Justin grinned. "We can work that out, Dad. We can work it all out. We just want to know that, if it comes to a fight, you'll be on our side."
Cadmann hesitated.
"Or at least not against us," Jessica added swiftly.
Cadmann considered them both. The fear was in him, dammit, not in them. Fear would be a horrible legacy to bestow upon his children. And-it was their world, more and more it was their world. They hadn't asked to be born here.
Cadmann often wondered what the children-the Star Born-thought about that. Did they resent being born here, denied the heritage of Earth? Earth, the solar system, crowded, teeming with humanity, and with the crowding came rules, rules, rules-He had come here to escape the rules. And now they had rules because they couldn't trust their own damaged brains.
And it's their world, not ours.
"Open mind," he said. "I'm already bound, right, Justin?"
Chapter 5
THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
God bless the King, I mean the Faith's Defender;
God bless-no harm in blessing-the Pretender;
But who Pretender is, or who is King,
God bless us all-that's quite another thing.
JOHN BYROM, to an officer in the Army
The debate was already in full swing as Cadmann entered the town hall. The hall fairly shimmered with the aromas of the communal meaclass="underline" mutton and turkey, bakery smells, mustard greens, and steamed corn fresh from the fields. It was a laughing, murmuring, jostling family chaos. Three hundred, nearly every Earth Born, most of the Star Born, all of the Grendel Scouts, many children. There were tables and seats for more than seven hundred, and that was a reminder of what population they had expected to have before the grendels nearly destroyed them.
The tables were tiered in amphitheater rows beneath the corrugated roof, grouped around a central stage. And on that stage a tall, stocky, golden young man stood at the podium, commanding their attention by his words and stance and very being. His voice was a master orator's. Every word from the thin, sensuous mouth cut as precisely as a razor. He was Cadmann's height, and beautifully muscled. A shock of flaxen hair fell to his shoulders. His eyes were a startling blue-green, electric in their intensity. Tau Ceti had burnt his eyebrows so blond they were almost white.
The young man's cheeks were healthfully hollow, his every motion perfectly judged as he emphasized his major points. Almost every sentence was punctuated by a cheer from the Surf's Up contingent, come inland for the weekly debate.
Aaron Tragon. Star Born indeed.
Cadmann listened distractedly as he found his way to the table reserved for him by Carlos and Angelica, the thin dark surgeon who was Carlos's most recent companion.
"-ladies in the audience will agree that the automatic tendency of most males is to assume a power structure which escalates from woman to man to God Almighty. This, at any rate, was the most frequent view of the nineteenth century-"