Beowulf's Children

"No!" he said fiercely. "You don't understand. The children of our bodies, yes, but we can have perfect children. Perfect. They can have everything, every advantage. We can control their nutrients, their prenatal education... everything."

His whisper was harsh, and his hands grew stronger upon her arms. "We can have a dozen, a hundred children at a time, and seed this entire continent with them."

Her hand stroked his cheek. From the dark of her hindbrain she felt the hope rising. "But we don't have to do that. I'd be happy—"

"No!" And her hand froze where it was. "My children will be perfect." He blinked, and then smiled, almost shyly. "At least, as perfect as we can make them."

Permission. She didn't have to be pregnant. Swollen, clumsy, imprisoned... But a tiny part of her had awakened, and was watching him, sensing something wrong.

He babbled on. "They will be our children. And they will own this land. You ask me if I love you. Can I come any closer than that? Do those words mean anything to you? Anything at all?" His weight was on her, and Jessica tried to fight. No. She wasn't ready emotionally. There was too much...

Truth?

In the air between them. She needed a moment to prepare herself, to slip back into the comfortable shell of sensuality she understood so well, nurtured by Sir John Woodruff and the Perfumed Garden, and the Quodoshka and the manuals of Taoist sexuality, and the erotic works of a world left far behind. But this moment wasn't one of the complex, artistically perfect couplings she had known with Aaron Tragon. This was something too damned similar to rape. She could call out, and it would stop—but so would any link between them. His was a need so deep that it burned. The hands on her, the mouth upon her, the thighs, hot and hard, that forced her legs open were somehow vulnerably, endearingly clumsy.

This wasn't the man she knew and loved. This was almost a boy, a boy who needed something that she couldn't quite bring herself to give.

And so he took it.

And took it.

And she pushed at him, and tore at him, and came to the edge, but didn't quite call out for help. And Aaron held her more tightly than he ever had, more insistently, his body one driving urgency.

He arched, and flushed, his face suffused with a kind of ecstatic, incandescent madness, his eyes, looking off to the horizon as he spasmed, seeing... what? What world of spires and mazes? What cities and glorious constructions of the far future? What world-girdling belt of roads and skyways that he might never live to see, but which children unborn might inherit?

Or did he see something else? His god, the grendel, perched upon a kill, perhaps his own torn corpse? And was this moment, and all of the other moments that they had had together, nothing but a means of slaving that moment off, of giving it some kind of meaning?

Did Aaron and her father share the same nightmare?

And was that why she loved them both?

Aaron collapsed atop her. His breath was hot and sweet, his hands curled up around her shoulders, his face tucked into her breast, his breath hot against her. She stroked his head and whispered to him, and knew that something had changed between them. She wasn't certain what, or what it would cost them. She knew only that there would be a cost, as certainly as Tau Ceti rose and set upon both Man and Grendel.

Chapter 25

ASIA MINOR

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear, your true love's coming,

That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further pretty sweeting,

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? ‘tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter.

What's to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth-Night

They were calling the Scribebeast "Asia."

"It's not that big," Jessica giggled, but Ruth's name stuck anyway.

Aaron had made time and commandeered the NickNack, and all to come see Asia. He'd brought Ruth Moskowitz and both of their chamels. Justin wondered what Jessica thought of that. He hadn't seen her in two days.

Ruth and Aaron rode Zwieback and Silver along the Scribe's long blue lip. One great eye was tracking them.

"Not there," Justin said into the comm card. "Aaron, see me? I'm on the rise east of you, with four tall horsemane trees behind me. Asia will go around the trees. You'll get a great view of the life-forms on her back... "

Why bother? They were halting now, both chamels, much too close to one of the great eyes. He hadn't really expected Aaron to take suggestions.

Anyway, were they really in danger? Asia flowed like a continent across the sava

Even the chamels didn't seem nervous. One great eye gazed upon them, and that would have had Justin twitchy. Ruth gaped in delight and awe.

That didn't surprise Justin. But Aaron was doing that too: mouth open, face empty. Had any human being ever seen him like this? He suddenly turned Zwieback and trotted toward the hill. Ruth followed, belatedly.

Over the next hour most of the survey team gathered on the hill, skeeter, trikes, and all, to watch the passing of Asia.

The trees were festooned with wet blue blankets.

The Earth Born insisted that Cadzie-blue blankets must go everywhere humans went on the continent. It was nearly their only demand, and not so onerous as all that; but the blankets didn't arrive clean. Mothers borrowed them first. Babies lived in them for a few days. The Earth Born never had to wash their baby blankets; they just sent them to the mainland.

And the survey team had finally had it with the smell. They'd been washing blankets in what had been a grendel lake and was now a samlon reservoir. Clean blankets would dry while Asia passed.

Pterodons were wheeling above the Scribe; more held station above the watching humans. Ruth presently said, "Justin? The birds?"

"I pointed them out to Little Chaka. Then I had to listen to him lecture."

"They're eyes for the Scribe!"

"That's what Chaka thinks. The Harvester can't see through grass, but she can look up and see where the pterodons are. Early-warning system. If something came right at an eye she'd see it when it got close... what the hell would she do then, dodge? For that matter, what would a Scribe be afraid of?"

"A cliff?" Ruth glanced sideways at Aaron, but he maintained his silence. "She'd see a cliff before she went over. And the pterodons would show her where water was, wouldn't they? Where there's water, there's carrion. Where there are grendels, they'd fly higher."

"I don't think Asia gives an icy damn about grendels," Aaron said. "Ruth, a million years from now we still won't have found a bigger land beast."

"Breeding," Ruth said.

Justin frowned the question.

"How do Scribes find each other?"

"Maybe they're hermaphrodites."

Ruth shook her head. "Maybe, but—"

"Or maybe baby Scribe beasts are the males," Aaron said. "That's how grendels work it."

Jessica remembered what it had cost the First to learn that samlon were not only immature grendels, but were all males. They became females when they made the transformation from a fishlike swimmer that lived largely on pond scum to the adult amphibious omnivore.