Beowulf's Children

"It was along time ago, Carolyn, and you had your own children to take care of. I can't blame you for putting them first."

"Did I? I suppose I did," Carolyn said. "It comes of-of living alone.

Trish, I think you've fallen into a-well, a kind of role."

"A role?" Trish was genuinely puzzled. "What kind of role?"

"You and Edgar. And before that, Derik, and Terry-you were their first, sort of the Initiator."

Trish giggled. "I guess I kind of fell into that, yes. Edgar too." Her smile went exotic and mysterious. She assumed a thick and flagrantly faux accent. "I like to teach the young ones zee arts of love."

She laughed, then let it die when Carolyn didn't join in. "I did that, Trish. I slept with any man who didn't have a partner. None who did, at least not that I knew of, but a lot of men. And look what it got me."

Trish shrugged, genuinely missing the point.

"I'm alone, Trish."

"What do you mean, alone? Everybody likes you." Nobody listens to you, she thought, but who would? Smile and smile-"You're one of the heroes of the Grendel Wars. Carolyn and the horses."

"Trish, every man would sleep with me, but none of them wanted to take me down the rapids. Now I'm getting old, and no one wants to live with me."

Sudden understanding. She must think she's my mother. "Oh, that.

That's not what I'm looking for, Carolyn."

Carolyn grasped her arm. Trish looked at the hand, and decided to let it remain there.

"Trish, it's a bad thing to be alone. Don't you want to belong to someone? To have someone who belongs to you? You have nothing but casual relationships-"

She laughed in Carolyn's face. "In a world with less than five hundred people, there is no such thing as a casual relationship. We're all family."

"Imagine yourself alone, with no defenders, at my age," said Carolyn.

Trish was incredulous. "Defenders? Defend from what? Do you think I'm going to starve in the snow without a man to protect me? Nobody starves on Avalon. Nobody goes without. And I'm tougher than I look, lady. I'm stronger than, almost any man here-and men aren't any better at hunting, or producing, or anything else than women are. Didn't you get the word? There was this thing called the Industrial Revolution. That made us equals, that and Zack Moskowitz's grendel guns. And then there was birth control. Maybe your mother forgot to mention it to you."

Carolyn smiled, not a thin smile but with genuine warmth. "You might be surprised at what my mother taught me. And Trish, dear, my sister and I did win places on this expedition, and we didn't owe a damn thing to any man for that, either!"

"That's the spirit. I have to go now."

"No, wait, this is important. Trish-it's a terrible thing to be alone-"

"It's also a terrible thing to have ice on your mind," Trish said, and made as if to leave. Carolyn blocked her path, but Trish knew that she had scored a direct hit, and for the first time felt a tiny trace of remorse. She wiped it from her mind. Who gave her the right to lecture me on morals?

"I don't seem to be explaining this very well," Carolyn said. "I know they call me a hysteric, but there's more to this than you think." Carolyn struggled for words. "Sometimes hysterics has nothing to do with ice crystals in the brain."

Change in conversational direction, or change in tactics? "Sure, you can be scared into it. What was it that got you, Carolyn? Grendel fever? Seems to have done it for everyone else."

"No, not grendels. That was awful, but... it was earlier, Trish. When Ernst came out of cold sleep and he was a m-moron, and he barely remembered m-me. And old friends were dropping dead all around me. It turned out half of us were damaged and we couldn't be sure of the rest.... It was Hibernation Instability. Ice on our minds, we said. We were trying to be polite!" Her eyes defocused, as if she had forgotten she was talking to another person. "We were trying to be polite..."

Trish had heard it before, too many times. This wasn't insulting, it was pitiful, and just plain boring. "Excuse me, Carolyn," she pushed past the older woman. "I'm almost sure I have something to do, somewhere else."

"I'm trying to help you," Carolyn said. "You're playing with something you don't understand."

"And you do?"

"I understand more than you do."

"Carolyn, I doubt that."

"I know you do. When I was your age I was sure I knew everything, too."

"And you didn't?"

"Of course not."

"But that was back on Earth. I've watched some of the old Earth dramas. I once did sixty hours straight of ‘General Hospital'! That was Earth, Carolyn, and this is Avalon, and life isn't like that anymore!"

Carolyn laughed. "It never was like that, but never mind. Trish, I know this much. Men and women don't see sex the same way, and that's wired into our brains. It's not something you can ignore just because you want to. Trish, I know."

"Then I guess I'll just have to find out, won't I? Excuse me-" She brushed past and walked at a fast pace, too fast for Carolyn to catch up without ru

Behind her Carolyn was still talking to herself. "We'd jumped light-years between stars, the whole universe was ours for the taking, and it was all going wrong. Ice on our minds..."

"More greens?" Mary A

She served her family, bustling about as if work were the only thing that stood between herself and damnation. The very constancy of her motion was an irritant to Jessica. "Mom," she said. "Please. Let me help you."

Mary A

Cadma

"I was in the Arboretum earlier," Cadma

Jessica shrugged.

"Do you know anything about that?"

"Not particularly." She avoided his eyes.

"I've been told that a powerful hallucinogen can be produced from its leaves."

"Really?"

"Yes. Katya said that once. I believe that Aaron is the real expert."

Justin felt his stomach knot. The subject had been approached from a dozen different directions over the past weeks.

Sylvia was very quiet. Mary A

After steaming wedges of French apple pie, Jessica excused herself, and went into the guest bathroom.

"It's been good to have you here," Cadma

"That goes for both of us," Sylvia said. She paused. "Has it put any strain... ?"

Justin gave a long, sour exhalation. "Surf's Up is pretty well split right now," he said. "Aaron's kaffeeklatsch has pulled pretty tight. A lot of grumbling."

"They'll get over it," Cadma

"They think I'm consorting with the enemy."

Cadma

"Everyone makes his own choices," Cadma

"Except in the sense that Aaron suggested: we didn't decide to come here, and there's no place for us to go. So John Locke's implicit social contract doesn't really apply to us, does it?"