Beowulf's Children

There was a numb sensation in his chest, something spreading as if he had been struck there. He wanted to scream, to foam, to throw something . ...o do anything but sit here and wait. Wait as they received sketchy video broadcasts of skeeters relaying children back to the Robor. Wait, and pray to a half-forgotten God. "Not everything on this freezing planet is a grendel," Cadma

Hendrick grabbed his arm. "What in the hell are you talking about?"

"We've been afraid of grendels," Cadma

Have they gathered her bones? he asked himself. God. I hope they gathered her bones. But of course they would. Jessica would insist and Aaron would have done it. Thank God Aaron was there.

He felt numb. Doors were slamming in his mind, and behind them raged fear and grief.

If he wasn't careful, a door might creak open. Behind one of them was Linda's birth. Such a small, wrinkled, bulbous thing she had been. And his first touch, his first scent of her... she would have been a breech birth, but for the prenatal diagnostics, and God...

He slammed that door in his mind, and the one with invisible grendels behind it too. Pure horror fantasy. You'd have to be crazy... Came up, hearing the hubbub in the room...

... and then sank down again, fighting as his eyes grew hot, and then flooded, all of his efforts to keep his tears under control as futile as their attempts to tame this fucking planet.

It was no good. None of it was any good, and he had to leave the control room, which had grown crowded.

The news had to have reached every corner of the camp by now. Razelle Weyland would be flying in from the lumber preserves, and her brother Michael from over at the slope camp. People were looking at him with an emotion in their faces that he had never seen there before: Pity. Shock. They wanted to touch him, to comfort him, but with every step he felt the shields sliding down, even as the shields around his heart crumbled.

The images were coming so fast, too fast, as if there were twenty years of tension, twenty years of fear stored up inside of him, and now that it had clawed free and claimed his youngest, there was nothing to hold back the pain anymore, and then...

He saw her, ru

He held out his hands to her, stretched out his arms. Stretched his arms across the table, his fists closed hard on the edge, his good ear pressed flat against wood, eyelids like tiny fists closed hard around red-hot embers.

The trip back to the island was subdued. The children were wrapped in blankets. Some of them cried. All knew, by now, what had happened to Linda and Joe.

Jessica came to sit next to him. Justin looked at her, and she felt the oddest sensation from him. Almost as if he were a stranger, rather than her brother. His eyes weren't hot, or cold. They were just eyes. Black holes, gathering data.

Justin's hand strayed over and over again to his pistol, palm resting on it as if death might follow them into the air, come aboard Robor and follow them back to Camelot.

"Where were you?" he asked quietly.

"You know where," she said.

"Pranksters," he said.

"Justin-even if I had been there, right there, I couldn't have done anything."

"Of course."

"Justin-she was my sister too! Don't shut me out. Please."

"She shouldn't have been there alone."

"She was not alone. She was with Joe!"

"You're right. You're right." He wiped his hand over his face. And for the first time that she could remember, Jessica hadn't the slightest idea what was going on behind her brother's eyes. Was he blaming her? Himself? Imagining what he was going to say to Father? Was he thinking of the bones in the hold, all that remained of their baby sister?

She reached out to him, touched him gently on his shoulder, and was absurdly happy when he didn't brush her hand away.

Aaron came up behind her. "Jessica," he said, "I need to talk to you."

She was torn between Justin and Aaron for a moment. Then she smiled almost apologetically, and said, "I'll be right back."

Justin's gaze slid coldly from Jessica to Aaron and back again, and then he nodded, so shallowly that it was almost no motion at all. And then, in some way that she couldn't completely explain, Jessica knew what Justin was thinking.

And feeling.

She knew it, but couldn't quite make the thought rise up to consciousness. That might have hurt a little too much.

The entire colony was on the beach as Robor floated into the bay. Cadma

Perhaps Death is aboard the Robor, he could almost hear them thinking. It was what he wondered. It was the fear that had lurked just beneath the surface of their loves and growths and actions, every day for twenty years. And now it had come home to roost.

The air was filled with the ocean's steady, rolling roar, the crackle of the radios, and no other sound at all. Then they heard the purr of skeeter engines. Out of the fog loomed Robor, like some great mythical beast bearing its dreadful, beloved cargo. Its gigantic red lips glistened in the mist. As soon as the lines dropped, colonists chased after them to tie them to the docking loops.

The mood was dark, probably the worse he had seen since...

Remember Ernst, Cadma

His memory didn't want to go over it again. And over it, and over it.

Someone yelled an instant before one of the docking lines slapped across his face, smashing his head back. His hands flew up to fend off the blow. His hands clasped the flagging rope as he pulled. His hands and shoulders ached. As Stevens and Carlos lent their weight to his line he reached up a trembling hand to feel his right cheek. His fingers came away bloody, and he said something ugly.

Robor touched down. The rampway opened.

Chapter 14

THE TRIAL

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

JOHN BROWN, Last Statement

There had never been much need for a formal courtroom. Most problems were handled in a counselor's office. Really severe cases, such as the time years before when Harlan Masters tried to horsewhip Carlos, were decided in the council meeting room off the main assembly hall.

It wasn't a very large room. Seven First Generation, four men and three women, sat at a di

"Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

She couldn't even tell who had asked that. Probably her father. No one had slept for almost forty-eight hours, so that all the voices sounded alike, unbearably weary. The forensic reports, diagnostics on the mining apparatus, the computerized clarification of the death scene, depositions from each Biter and Scout... all of these had taken their toll.