"Touches down?"
"Plants, soil samples, plant some seismic detectors, hell, we can do some serious work!"
Aaron swept Jessica up in his arms and smooched. When he set her down she gave him her very smokiest gaze, linked her arms around his neck, and drew him close for some very serious kissing, her hips rolling against him in a clear "all systems go" alert. Justin couldn't seem to look away. When they broke, she reached out and licked the underside of Aaron's upper lip. Onlookers might as well have been on Isenstine.
Aaron turned and leered at the rest of them. " ‘Scuse us," he said. His great, corded arms lined around her waist. He exhaled and lifted her onto his shoulders so that her belly button was inches from his nose.
Jessica giggled "Don't you dare bite-" and then uttered a shocked and somewhat dreamy "Oh!!?" as he began walking backward to his hut.
With a brief and bleary cheer, the rest of them returned to their party.
There was something in Justin that felt... out of place. He walked down to the water's edge and stood alone to watch the moonglade dancing in the surf. Aaron was brilliant, handsome, athletic. And wrong for Jessica. He was sure of that, utterly certain, but for no reason he knew. It was just wrong-somehow. Justin didn't much appreciate the thoughts and feelings nipping around the edges of his mind.
Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist.
"What're you thinking?"
North of them, two days across a warm gray sea, was the continent. He hoped it was far enough away. He wanted to be with Jessica, but if she and Aaron were going to be together... maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for him to be there.
He could hardly tell Katya-
"What if," she said, her sharp little teeth gnawing at his ear, "I took you back to my hut, and made violent love to you?"
"I'd consider that a right friendly thing to do," he said. A file flashed through his mind, all of Katya's preferences and pungencies, all of the ways she moved and whispered, her small guidances and encouragements and the many happy little bits of erotic filigree she superimposed upon a very basic act.
He hadn't really made up his mind, but she'd gone a good distance toward making it up for him. She took his hand and led it along a row of wooden huts built back from the waterline. They were lashed together with rope and stilted against the seasonal rising of the tides.
The wood was a bamboo-like shoot transplanted from south of Isenstine a decade before. The south had less direct access to water-and therefore grendels hadn't razed it so thoroughly. The bamboo-like shoots were delicious for their first two years, and then hardened into something light and strong, almost ideal for building of houses or boats. The second-to-last house in the row was Katya's. She held the door open and beckoned him in.
Social interactions were an ongoing experiment on Avalon. Pregnancy was no issue: all children were welcome. Those who chose not to become pregnant could do so with near hundred-percent certainty, and if they missed, the fetuses could be removed to an artificial womb more safely and painlessly than any therapeutic abortion in the twentieth century. So Cassandra had told them; but it had never been tested. The social pressure to have children was high, and so far every girl who became pregnant had become a mother.
There was no venereal disease. Those life-forms had been left behind on Earth. The threats that had shaped human sexual mores for much longer than human history were missing on Avalon. In a very real sense, all Avalon was one family.
There in the shadowed confines of Katya's shack, she stripped off her clothes and stood, naked, challenging Justin with the cant of her hips. Her black hair fell softly to the tips of her shoulders. Her body was full, and ripe, and lovely.
Moonlight slanted in through the blinds, throwing bars across her as she walked to him. With many little kisses and whispered endearments, she began the process of seduction.
Jessica...
The thought flitted across his mind, then was gone. A sudden fierceness took him. He gathered her up in one arm and flung her back upon her bed, a pile of undulating artificial fur that purred as their weight sank upon it.
Distantly came the roar of the surf. Wave crests scattered the light of a single full moon, and bathed their bodies in pale light as they made love... or something like love... on that bed.
And as he threw his head back, panting as Katya's fingers kneaded his flesh, he stared mindlessly at the window. The moon was adrift. That was Nimue, the smaller, closer moon. You could tell time by Merlin; it crossed the sky every six days. Nimue moved too fast for telling time.
The moon looked back at him and it wasn't quite round. It wasn't the moon that Justin's distant ancestors bayed at, beating drums and singing songs, holding their newborn infants high to bathe in its light, for a thousand generations before the birth of civilization. Although it was the only sky he had ever seen...
It was alien to him.
There is a rhythm between human beings, as well. As steady and strong as a heartbeat is the rhythm that men and women find with one another.
And in a social service so willingly and pleasurably provided, in this brief mingling of flesh and fluids, this joining of warm moist membranes in the service of health and convenience...
There is a moment, near the peak of it all, when logic falls away, and breath grows sharp, when the eyes meet, and you can see through each other, through all the little social barriers...
Down, down to the place where a bit of hindbrain still thinks that this is about something.
Isn't this about making babies, it whispers.
Isn't this the continuation of life? And aren't children vulnerable things, helpless before the cold and the predators? And isn't this act really about the rest of your life? And your children's lives? And your children's children's... ?
Isn't there a part, a place, a tiny, lone voice somewhere deep inside that asks if this couldn't, shouldn't, can't mean something more? That looks into the eyes of each and every partner, and asks, in its own way .
. .
Are you the one?
"Carolyn was taking care of me, not Mom. Mom wouldn't let anyone touch her. I saw her stop crying, and then she toppled out of the chair. A bunch of the grown-ups picked her up and ran her into the hospital, and I don't know what happened after that." Katya stirred in his arms. "I wasn't alone after that. They moved me right into Dad's place."
"I spent a lot of time there too."
"I remember."
"You were hell's wrath with a grendel gun." She'd beaten him in the exercises, Justin remembered. "Did Carlos start you early?"
She laughed. "Yeah."
"That outhouse we all built when we were, what, twelve?"
"About then. Geometry lessons," Katya said.
"Don't remember what we had in school that year, but that's how I learned carpentry. Katya, I must be slow of thought. Why did anyone want a classic outhouse?"
"Hendrick took a skeeter and lofted it to a peak in the mountains. Coffee pickers use it. There's not another outhouse in the universe with a view like that."
"What did it feel like? I grew up with two mothers-"
"I had a great many," Katya murmured. "Not just Dad's guests. Mary Ann and Sylvia, Carolyn, Rachael Moskowitz. Dad would skeeter off to find special rock, wood, crystals, bones; or he didn't want me underneath when he was welding. It must have been like that for the Bottle Babies, don't you think?"
"You're not like them."
"No." Katya shuddered. Why did she do that? But her drowsy voice trailed off.
He turned onto his side. She snuggled up behind him, his buttocks tucked against the furred thatch of her groin, her hand reaching around to cup the recent instrument of her pleasure.
They had never spoken of a future together.
The moon was looking Justin in the face. Not Man's moon. He listened to the surf. His surf, but not his ancestors'. Shorter, quicker waves striking with more force in the stronger gravity...
But moon and surf belonged to his children, and his children's children, for generations to come.
The act of love so recently performed there, in that bed, carried its own rhythm, born in the eternal search for the Now. The search to end the lonely "I." The endless search, conducted eternally, by every human being, throughout each isolated lifetime.
That rhythm was perhaps the only thing born of earth remaining to them. And when those rhythms changed to match the moons and tides of Avalon...
As perhaps they had already begun to do...
What then would remain of them?
Jessica... he thought one last time. Before his thoughts devolved to mist, and sleep claimed him.
When Justin woke, Katya was gone. He could hear sounds of construction on the beach. He showered in cold water, pulled his pants on, and wandered out.
The vast Chinese-dragon shape of Robor was undergoing a full diagnostic over the Surf's Up beach. The hundreds of separate, flame-and heatproof hydrogen pods providing her lift were individually listed for leaks, and superstructure was inspected...
Robor was as large as a football field and as tall as a twelve-story building, the largest vehicle on Avalon. He could lift forty tons of cargo. The Minerva shuttles could land anywhere near a water source (although the discovery of Grendels had made that a nervous proposition), and also travel to orbit. The skeeters had more versatility and speed and maneuverability, but minuscule range. Only Robor could travel to the mainland and bring back the booty.
Robor was constructed mostly of molded plastics. The satellites that originally surveyed Avalon had revealed oil in large quantities. When Geographic took its hundred-year jaunt across the sky at one-tenth light speed, she brought with her three prefabricated factories to manufacture the kind of high-tensile plastics that only zero-gee processing made possible.
Robor had no independent motors. Instead, three skeeters were anchored to the upper frame in triangular formation, and hooked into the dirigible's main bank of batteries and Begley-cloth solar collectors. Their engines became Robor's engines.
Robor was a favorite target of the Merry Pranksters. He had been painted with huge cartoon-whale eyes, been transformed into a gargantuan eighteenth-century Venetian gondola, and had once been transformed by a half ton of lightweight building foam into a remarkably lifelike phallus. When Little Chaka pointed out that Robor couldn't lift in that state, the decorations disappeared quick, but the dirigible's pronoun remained he.
His most recent incarnation was more innocuous, colorful... and oddly appropriate.
In red and green and electric blue, with snaky white mustache and huge, crimson-lipped leer, Robor was currently the living image of a Ming-dynasty dragon god.
The dragon hovered above the colony of Surf's Up, and in his shadow a working celebration of a kind was under way.
Justin spotted Cadmann's broad shoulders and graying hair through the crowd, and sought him out.
"Morning, father figure." He grinned. They shared a hug. "I wasn't expecting to see you."
"We're putting a rush on it. I think the eel in the Amazon and the bomb in the mine shook some of us up just because they came so close together. Inquiring minds want to know. Like, why now?"
"Just a moment, Dad." Justin shouted to Toshiro Tanaka. "Hey, Toshiro-san, can you go over this checklist and make sure we're not forgetting something? Thanks, owe you one. Dad, what's the report from Geographic?"
"Weather's fine," Cadmann said. "They're doing a critter check on the highlands and Xanadu, nothing so far. I take it you're going on this trip?"
"Sure, I'm in charge of the candidate Scouts-after all, their overnighter was kind of disrupted by all of this."
Justin led Cadmann to the main hall. Surf's Up's meeting hall was a 1960s Hollywood set decorator's fantasy of a South Seas beach hut, built of thornwood and foamed plastic struts. The roof would have been convincing, but the fronds were all from one mold, all identical.
Cadmann spread a roll of paper out on the table. "I think better on paper," he said, but he had computer files as well. "Cassandra, give me last night's notes, construction mode, freelance."
He spread out the paper. "Here," he pointed, "is the mainland. Eight hundred miles from here, and a good two days by Robor. You'll have some decent wind behind you. Coming back will be slower, but you can charge up off the mine's collectors."
"We'll hook up for recharging as soon as we land."
A small crowd had gathered to listen. Aaron slipped through the press. When he stood beside Cadmann they were almost exactly shoulder to shoulder. Aaron was larger, but time has a tempering effect available from no other source. Aaron Tragon might be a Cadmann Weyland one day. He wasn't yet.
"Yes, there's plenty of charge," Linda said from the door. "The mine hasn't used any for a while. Hi, Dad."
Cadmann looked a little startled. "You certainly made good time," he said.
She colored a little. "Take after my dad, I guess."
Justin grinned to himself. Stu Ellington held the record for speed through that pass. She'd have been taking it easy with Cadzie aboard. Justin had already put money on her for the next Landing Day race.
Little Cad was nursing, or sleeping, or both. The cloth covering Linda's bosom made it difficult to tell which. "Dad, we've found two more maybe-type explosions in the mine record."
"Grendel guano! Are the dates significant?"
She stared. Cadmann said, "I meant, did they happen when someone might have wanted-skip it. Tell me more."
"Recent explosions, twenty weeks ago and fourteen. Low energy, like gunpowder again, way tamer than dynamite. But they didn't happen where boring was going on, they happened in the secondary processors. That machinery is very forgiving, and it just went on chugging."