Beowulf's Children

"What's beautiful?" Justin asked.

"The eel! Tell me about it."

"Not much to tell," Jessica said. "It swam up the Amazon this morning, you know, right through the living room—Oh. The Amazon is a stream."

"I've been to your house," Ruth said. "It must have been going to the pools above the Keep."

"Yes, that's right."

"What would it want?" Ruth mused, "There's nothing up there, just glacier."

"Right again. Got to the headwaters and laid eggs."

"Ooh. Wish I'd been there," Ruth said. "It's safe, then?"

"Looks harmless enough. Chaka is looking into it."

"I bet Daddy had a tizzy," Ruth said. "Municipal Standing Order 142." She looked puzzled. "He must have ordered you to kill it, but I can see it's still alive."

"That's right," Jessica said.

"Wish I'd been here," Ruth said again. Her comm card chirped. She lifted it, listened a moment, and said, "Yes, sir. I'll ask him." She smiled uncertainly at Jessica. "Got to ask Chaka something—"

"Right. See you."

Ruth went into the Biomed building. Justin and Jessica looked at each other and gri

"You're unkind," Jessica said, but she laughed. It was easy to laugh at Ruth.

"You're the one who forgot she'd been to the Keep. She was there more than once, actually."

"Years ago," Jessica said. "Look, you decided she couldn't be a Grendel Scout—"

"We all did. You know she'd go straight to Zack if she learned what we do." Justin climbed the ladder to the top of pen number two, and sloshed his hand in the water until Hipshot, the small dark male of the dolphin pair, approached and rubbed against it. He stroked the dolphin carefully. "What do you think, boy? Think you'll give Quanda a tumble?"

Jessica sat next to him. They looked down on Avalon Town.

The main colony boasted almost three hundred separate dwellings now, and another went up every month or so.

A hundred and thirty-seven of the original two hundred remained alive. Most of them lived here, in the expanded grounds of the original encampment. A few had imitated Colonel Cadma

. .

Everything we want to do requires two other things, Jessica thought. And as the First grew older, more and more of the colony's resources went into consumption, things the First Generation wanted, no, needed, leaving less for investment in the future.

I guess we're rich, she thought, recalling Cassandra's images of poverty on Earth. Earth people would call this Paradise. And the First won't last forever. She suppressed that thought as quickly as it came. It seemed ghoulish. We have the skeeters, and we have the comm cards. We all have Cassandra and all the libraries of Old Earth, everything people learned before the First left it behind and brought us here. We ‘re still one community, if you close one eye and squint a little.

One community, but several places to live now. Jessica preferred the original settlement—the nerve center. Surf's Up was lovely and vibrant, with a slight Japanese feel to it, the domain of the Second Generation. The mountain settlement (thirty-five up there now!) was wonderful, with good siding most of the year. In five years there would be hunting—the vegetation was established. Some of the trees were twenty years old, a new forest like nothing ever seen on the planet before. Deer and moose and bear were being released slowly into the fields and meadows. Some would survive; some would thrive. There was general agreement that when the herds were well established they should thaw out some of the frozen wolf embryos and release a pack. Exactly when was argued vigorously, and so far "not yet" won out. That wasn't a question that cut deep between the generations. Not yet. The generation wars were about other things.

There were 280 Second Generation "children," an average of four for every woman who survived the Grendel Wars.

Truly, Jessica thought cynically, an heroic achievement. And of the hundred and fifty female "children," almost half had already had children of their own, an additional seventy progeny, for a total of 480 inhabitants either immigrated or born here on the fourth planet of the star called Tau Ceti. And for all we know, we ‘re the whole universe. I guess that's what really eats at Zack. Dad, too. Where is Earth in all this? She never calls, she never writes...

The sounds and smells of life here were utterly routine now. Cattle grazed, dogs roamed the streets in packs—and not an ill-fed animal in the lot. Half-naked children played in alien dust ten light-years removed from their closest non-Avalonian relations.

Life went on.

The smells and sounds and sights of Camelot weren't very different from those captured in holovids of Earth. Their sun was a little brighter. From what her father said, shadows were sharper and bluer.

But the voracious grendels had so stripped the island that Man found it easy to conquer. Earthworms had defeated the local a

After the Grendel Wars, the Firsts had helped their imported organisms along. You could still get arguments among both Earth Born and Star Born on whether they'd given them too much help in competing with native life, but it was hard to blame those who favored the familiar Earth organisms over Avalon's. "Samlon," the grendel's larval stage, had seemed so harmless, until they changed... who knew what might next grow fangs and claws? So an orgy of slaughter had ensued. The creatures of Earth completely dominated Camelot, this small island corner of Avalon.

Justin stood and stretched lazily. "I'm going to see Carlos. Staying here?"

"Sure." She slipped off her sandals and pants. She wore bright blue underpants, which contrasted beautifully with her long, muscular ta

"You've been reading those tabloids again."

"The twentieth century's highest cultural achievement Seems they spent all their time hunting something called Bigfoot, or triangulating Elvis sightings."

"Who?"

"Mid-twentieth-century pop singer. Died of fame."

"So should we all."

"On this backwater? Not likely."

Jessica vanished back beneath the surface. Quanda came up beneath her. Jessica firmly grabbed a fin, and let Quanda take her for a ride around the tank.