The Leagacy of Heorot

The searchlights atop the guard towers rotated tirelessly. Their beams stabbed out through the mist like silver fingers. The fog dampened sound as it did vision. After a few steps she looked back toward her house and her child and her husband. All were gone, vanished into the mist.

She drew the shawl tighter across her shoulders, and went on.

The electronics shack was in the rear of the camp, perched on the edge of the bluff. A single line of light burned through the shades. She paused a moment, listening to the muted rush of the Miskatonic, then rapped once and entered.

Carlos sat at the editing bench, absorbed in his work. She shut and latched the door.

"How is it going?"

"Just waiting for you, senora."

The shack seemed warmer than the house she had left behind. Terribly warm. Even with Carlos on the far side of the room, with the holo stage between them, he was stiflingly close.

"Coffee?"

"Maybe later."

"Let me know. We've got most of the video portion together. Just need you to look over your notes again. Take another look at the footage we did from the autopsy and the summation. Anything left to say? This is the last chance before we send it off."

Sylvia doffed her shawl and sat, enjoying her ease of movement. A month and a half before, she'd had to use her arms just to sit down. There's the miracle fat cure. Lose twenty-six pounds in twenty-four hours. Have a baby. Her joints no longer hurt, and her muscles were alive. She walked and moved like a new woman. Her body was ready for anything. Especially...

Oh, God... I hope I'm doing the right thing.

She focused on the holo, took a hand remote and fast-sca

She flashed through the images and text, fighting to concentrate, almost overcome by the essential maleness of Carlos. She glanced over at him. He leaned back and sipped from his mug. She was dying to know what was on his mind. Why didn't he touch her? Or at least say something?

An image from the most recent Town Hall appeared. She remembered this vividly: the debate on whether to unfreeze the remaining embryos.

Zack, for the first time since Ernst's death, seemed rested and totally controlled. "The vote is close to even on this point, and I don't want to make a judgment until more of us agree. Final arguments?"

Terry appeared, and her heart leaped. In close-up it was easy to forget that he was crippled. "Cadma

There was scattered laughter. "I think that Cadma

Everyone laughed, sort of, but the vote that followed showed that Terry had made his point. Only a third of the remaining embryos would be thawed and revived.

She felt pride for Terry at that, pride that made some of her other thoughts dark and dirty. For a few seconds she considered simply telling Carlos that everything was fine, and leaving the shack while there was still time.

But this did have to be reviewed. She thumbed the scan into play. Images whizzed by, and through their transparency, she watched Carlos at his console. In one instant he seemed frighteningly strong and competent, and in the next like a little boy who needed comfort.

My body can't make up its mind!

She stopped the tape of her own image, part of a roundtable discussion of grendels that had been held three weeks before.

"—salt water isn't toxic to grendels," Marnie maintained. Sylvia had grown so used to Marnie's speech that she never noticed the lisp except in a tape. "Monsters can't drink salt water, but it won't kill them. I'd say that it irritates their nasal passages, and that is about all—" Sylvia froze the picture.

"I want a note here."

"Then slip it in. Tracks siete and nueve are free."

"Thanks. Subnote to preceding: Freshwater status of grendels established by evaluating salt content of tissues. Cross-reference autopsy."

Carlos nodded. "Everyone in the Colony has had a chance to add their own comments on Grendel."

"What was yours?"

"I think the bitch was smart enough to build a raft and float over from the mainland. I wouldn't put anything at all past them."

"That may be giving them too much credit."

"Better too much than too little."

Sylvia sca

"I guess that's it," she said quietly.

Carlos nodded, and saved it. The computer silently sorted the notes and compressed the megabytes of data for transmission to Geographic in the morning. From there, it would be broadcast to Earth. Ten years later the data would arrive, for the edification and entertainment of the home worlds.

Once again the chill touched her, and she started to stand.

Carlos turned from the console and faced her. "I know, chiquita," he said. "Writing letters, sending messages, knowing that no one who ever knew me, ever touched me, will see them. No one to care. Strangers seeing pictures of strangers, and no one to care." Suddenly he was terribly close to her. His breath was warm, and smelled of coffee. "There used to be someone to care, you see? Someone who saw something beside the jokes, but I let her down."

Sylvia reached up to touch his face, to run her hand over the stubble on his chin. Her nerves jumped at the contact.

To love, honor, and obey. To cleave only unto...

"Anyone but Cadma

Oh, God, it's been so long, so damned long.

"I care, Carlos."

He looked at her hard, with the begi

"You idiot. I don't respect you now."

"Fair enough." He leaned forward that last few inches, and she backed away as his lips touched hers, then pressed against him, crushed her lips against him. Unfettered at last, all of the repressed feelings of the past months burned their way to the surface.

They stepped away from each other. Carlos squeezed her shoulders once, then turned off the equipment and the lights. He latched the door behind them, and together they set off through the fog for the warmth of his house. Within a few steps, the communications shack had joined the rest of the camp in the mist.

It seemed that there was nothing in the world but the two of them, doing the best they could do to find a path through the dark and the cold.

"I always wondered what your bed was like." Sylvia giggled.

"You had but to ask," Carlos said gravely. "Move a bit, will you? Your lovely bosoms are squashing me."

Sylvia razzed him, and rolled off enough for Carlos to reach the bedstand. He felt among the empty beerskins for a full pouch, ah-hahed, and handed one to her.

The bed in question was a shell suspended like a hammock above the ground. Every attempt to extricate herself was a hazard, every movement during a delirious hour of lovemaking was enough to have both of them giggling like naughty children.

They swung there in a slight stupor induced by beer and afterglow.

She gave the pouch back to him and then snatched it away, dribbling foam over his chest and then kissing it off. He wrestled her to the bottom again, and she felt the heat flare in his body, triggering an immediate reply in her own. She wrapped her arms around him, then pulled the blankets over both their heads.