"So I spent a couple of years recovering. Missed out on growing up with the rest of you. Damn near missed out on getting into the Grendel Scouts. It was me who nailed down what's wrong with the Earth Born. And now I can't get laid."
"And you blame that on Aaron?"
"Shouldn't I? Why are you afraid of him?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. He reminds me of my father, and that ought to be good. I'm not afraid of Dad, but—Edgar, I don't know. Let's leave it at that."
"Sure. And you're afraid Aaron's the father," Edgar said. "So you don't want to know."
"I didn't say that."
"No, you didn't say that."
"Edgar, has Aaron—has he been tracking my computer accesses?"
She was getting to know that grin. Edgar said, "Linda, he's tried, but he hasn't been able to, because I blocked access to those files, only it doesn't look like I did it, it looks like it was the colonel."
"That was a nice thing to do. You say he has tried to—to track my file accesses? And asked you to help?"
Edgar nodded. "I told him I didn't have time just then. Then he tried on his own, but I'd been there first."
"Thank you." She stood. "I think I better go look at Cadzie, and we've got to get ready to go to the mines. Let me think about this. Maybe it really is time to find out, whatever the answer is. Thank you."
His answering smile caught her turning. His proud smile. "Wups.
Edgar?"
"Yeah?"
"I've got your attention now? You listen. You think about what I'm saying. You even work out ways to do things for me."
Edgar grinned. "Yes, Mom."
"Edgar, I can remember you losing interest in the middle of saying hello! We used to talk about it, the way you'd get bored and walk off in the middle of something. You'd be off into something else with someone else, programming, going back to the stars, what's with Earth, mainland ecology. Remember that T-shirt?"
Edgar remembered. Linda had cut a scarlet T-shirt to ribbons, so that it fell like lace across her body, dropping to her upper thighs, concealing and revealing.
She was watching him. "Got your attention, did it? I just had to know I could."
How would Dad answer? Edgar said, "I hope you sent that to Medical when you were through with it. Useful for restarting a stopped heart."
"Edgar, is there a girl you could do something for? Something nobody else has thought of?"
His face went slack. She remembered that look: Edgar, withdrawing into his own mind. "Maybe... I see what you mean, anyway. Linda? Thanks."
Justin stopped short of Robor's top foredeck. The whiff of coffee was faint, but it touched his brain from underneath. It came to Justin that Aaron Tragon was ruining the smell of coffee for him.
Before the grendels came, before the First seeded the rivers with trout and catfish, the First had scattered coffee beans over the mountain ridges. Coffee was easy to grow. It was a bitch to harvest. Coffee kept the First healthy! They had to hike into the mountains with backpacks or do without. They'd come back with as much as they wanted, plus a little more for trading. That was why Carlos always had coffee, because someone always wanted a table or bureau or carved doorway.
Aaron always had coffee because he sent someone to get it. Justin had done that when he was younger. The backpack groups always had fun, but they carried back smoked bear meat once instead of coffee, on Justin's suggestion. He hadn't gone again.
There was an inner circle at Surf's Up: the coffee drinkers. Some were addicted. Trish and Derik and (oddly) Ruth Moskowitz, and maybe even Jessica, didn't like the taste. They sipped; they made a cup last all night. If you weren't in you were out.
Justin had dropped out. Others haunted the fringes, trying to find lives, but always ready to display a cup of coffee.
Coffee smelled like dominance games. Justin was beginning to flinch at it.
Aaron squeezed his shoulder and slipped past him, and Justin realized he was blocking a door. He shrugged and followed.
The hum of the skeeters could be felt through the floor of Robor, but even more clearly through the Plexiglas windows at the bow. Jessica stood just behind several of the Scouts. They crowded against the windows, and fought for a place at the front. Palms and faces pressed against the Plexiglas. Morning mist shrouded the sea below them. The loom at the eastern horizon was more blue than the rosy-fingered dawn images of Earth poetry.
They expected landfall about dawn, and the candidate Scouts had been awakened early for their first look—real sight, not virtual—of the mainland they'd heard about all their lives.
She sipped her coffee from a hand-fired cup sculpted with a grendel tail as handle. This wasn't the instant stuff that her parents had drunk for the first ten years on Avalon. Coffee took some getting used to. The first beans had been harvested and ground, the first cups served, when she was just nine years old. She still remembered Cadmann's expression as he took the first sip, as if a rare and delicate mystery had suddenly been revealed to him. And her own first bitter sip, which she had spit out into the saucer.
Aaron had persuaded her to try it again, years later.
She felt large, strong hands clasping her shoulders, and shivered a little at the touch. Those hands were so strong and so gentle, when they wanted to be. They were always commanding, but usually gentle as well. She kissed the fingertips, and said, "G'moming, Aaron. Sleep well?"
"Like a baby," he said. He picked up a broad-based conical cup and sipped as he peered out into the mist. The foredeck, one of the two upper above the cargo hold, was crafted of polished waxwood. This dark, smooth timber was one of the odd strains to be found south of the Isenstine. Carlos considered it a finer grain than teak, and thought that they could get a good trade going with Earth... if Earth was still there, he had added soberly.
A gust rolled Robor to port. The guidance computer noticed and the skeeter engines made their correction. The ship righted quickly, but the Grendel Biters ooh'd and ahh'd and pretended to lurch this way and that.
"Look," Aaron said, squeezing her shoulder. "Sunrise."
It wasn't, really. It was a false dawn, the first rosy blush of Tau Ceti along the eastern horizon. The glow would fade, then minutes later grow stronger, leading into the light of day.
Some of the other Second were in the lounge, and the rest of the Grendel Scouts were pouring in. The window was floor to ceiling and wall to wall, curving slightly outward, made of plastic strong enough to take an elephant's charge. The kids could lean against it all they wanted.
Jessica undogged a deck chair and moved it closer. "Sit a spell."
"Sure." Aaron dogged the chair to the deck. He sprawled out, relaxed.
Jessica watched him lazily. He was so relaxed about everything that he did, and so totally committed at the same time. If he sat, he was... just sitting. If he spoke before an audience, he was just speaking. If he climbed or surfed, he was just climbing or surfing. And if he was making love, he was doing that and nothing else. It was a relief. Every part of him seemed congruent with the others. Unfragmented. Whole. And when he wanted something? But that kind of ruthlessness was natural to someone so purposeful.
Was she in love with him? She wondered that herself, and hoped that the answer was yes. Her hand stole into his, and he clasped it.
A sliver of Tau Ceti had crept above the horizon now, and the reflected radiance pierced the mainland's cloud cover. The clouds were blue-black atop and silver beneath. All the passengers were awake now. Nobody wanted to miss the first general outing in over a year, and for most of the Grendel Scouts this was their first trip ever.