"Well, I don't think he wants to strip-mine the planet. He wants to people the planet. Our technology is advanced enough to live in harmony with Avalon—there is no need to produce more children than Avalon can handle."
"And second?"
"I think that Aaron Tragon stopped showing us his true face a long time ago."
The image of Aaron at twelve appeared, duplicated itself along the walls.
Rachel looked from one image to another and sighed. "Aaron believes that the original colonists have abandoned the dream. Betrayed it. I think he is internally rather than externally motivated. I think that he might have little true contact with anyone. I think that Aaron's sense of love has only to do with goal accomplishment."
Carolyn smiled, a flash of what she must have been like a hundred years ago. "Of course that goes beyond sociobiology."
"A little. But none of that makes him dangerous," Rachel said. "Or does it? And my daughter is in love with him, and pregnant by him, and sometimes I can't remember I'm a psychiatrist."
Carolyn put her arm around Rachel. They stood together and looked at the Aaron images.
Cadmann shook his head. "What disturbs me is the entire dirigible incident. He had us. From the first moment to the last. We were set up beautifully. But there was something so... so utterly cold-blooded about it that... "
"That what?"
"That it makes me wonder who Aaron Tragon really is. Who's really alive behind his eyes."
"You ought to know if anyone does."
"Me? Why?"
"Because he probably bonded more to you than anyone else. It's clear he thinks of you as his father."
"I—" Cadmann hesitated. "I was going to say I hadn't known that, but I suppose I did. He was always finding reasons to go places with us, and it wasn't just that Justin and Jessica were his friends. But I don't know who's in there, Rachael."
"I've told you most of what there is to know."
"No," Cadmann said. "Who were his parents?"
Rachael looked uncomfortable. "All right. It's not as if it was actually security sealed. It was more a general colonial agreement. I guess I just feel uncomfortable. It was under my own code—that was why you couldn't access it." She cleared her throat. "The father was from Earth. A Swedish mathematician of Russian extraction named Koskov."
Cadmann seemed to relax, Carlos noticed. As if he had expected—and feared—another revelation altogether. "And the mother?"
Rachael looked at Sylvia. Sylvia colored, and the psychologist nodded.
"That's right," she said. "Aaron Tragon is your son. It was your egg."
"Justin's half-brother," Cadmann said quietly.
"Yes. If there had been any danger of Aaron relating to one of his sisters, I would have said something. I keep track of such things... but it never came up. Jessica isn't his biological sister any more than Justin is."
Sylvia was very quiet, still, her mind off in some unreachable place.
"Aaron and Justin."
"What do we do now?" Rachael asked.
"I think we go to the mainland. On the next dirigible."
Sylvia curled onto her side, still floating an inch or so off the chair. "I never held him," she said quietly. "I never told him that he was mine, that I would watch him and care for him. That he was the most beautiful thing in the world. The most precious child in existence."
"Probably no one did," Rachael said. "We should have done that. Aaron, and thirty others. Belonging to no one but each other. No wonder they started their cult. They had to belong somewhere."
"Who is living in there?" Cadmann asked.
"I think that we need to find out," Carlos said. "I think that we need to find out now."
Chapter 28
TITHE
An honest God is the noblest work of man.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL, Gods, Part I
"Home tomorrow," Justin said. Aaron nodded, and accepted a cup of coffee from him. The valley was swollen with mist, and it rolled across them almost sleepily.
Justin had taken the early-morning shift.
Aaron sipped at the coffee. "We're going through the main valley. We have a couple of choices there, you know."
Justin nodded. "Here be grendels. They're too far from the main camp to do us any great harm."
"But the herd will come close enough for trouble."
"I say we take the long way around." Justin scratched in the dust with his toe. Trees, hills, a stream. "If we take the southern route, we can avoid the problem."
"We do, on the other hand, have to ford the stream. No choice about that."
Grendels were death in the water. The smartest thing to do was to kill everything grendel-sized before the eventuality even arose.
"So," said Aaron. "What do you think?"
"This planet was here before we came, and it will be here after we're gone. I don't think we can kill everything we don't like. There has to be another way, and I want to find it."
"I agree." Aaron marked a position upstream from the fording spot. "What say we seed the water with a freshly slaughtered steer? Draw the grendels up. We won't get them from further down—that's another grendel's territory, and there is plenty of food. Grendels don't fight unless they have to... especially the mainland varieties."
"What do you mean?"
Aaron was thoughtful. "We never really studied grendel interactions, grendel behavior, beyond basic hunt and attack patterns. But doesn't it seem that these grendels can actually think? Plan? Observe? They're intelligent—much more than the First told us. They were here long before we were. I think that one day we may be able to communicate with them...." He stopped, and laughed. "Just dreaming, I guess. Let's get on with the day, huh?"
What was it with Aaron and grendels? It gave Justin goose bumps. Aaron was sheer death in the grendel-shooting games, as if the cartoon grendels saw Aaron and just fell over.
Old Grendel slept.
The prey that lived in the lake would feed her until the end of things. She had eaten well the previous day, and in these times of long sleeps and quiet days, a single major feeding could last her ten to fifteen days before hunger grew unendurable.
She occasionally roused from dream, disturbed by the daughters of God flying overhead. Their hum was the sound of the Death Wind. It frightened her down to her core, made her hunker down into the water and watch, just watch.
Change was in the air. The light was hallucinatory; everything felt evanescent, transitory, tissue-thin. She sniffed the thousand scents of lesser life forms preparing themselves for the end of everything. Some began a madness of breeding; some avoided breeding entirely; some changed color or shape, or migrated, or entered a sleep from which even a grendel could not rouse them.
You couldn't think, couldn't plan for the end of everything. But, drowsily, Old Grendel was trying... when the smell of blood snapped her fully awake.
Three times within the past several days, she had followed such a scent. Each time she'd found a dead puzzle beast floating, in still water. After she had allowed it to ripen for a day or two, it tasted just fine. Last time, when she returned to her favorite resting spot, she noticed that large numbers of animals had passed her way: many puzzle beasts, a few of the two-legged weirds.
The weirds flew through the air in humming flyers, the daughters of God. They walked; or they ran almost as fast as a sister on speed, riding strange shells that smelled of tar and lightning. They combined too many different smells in one. They didn't eat their own young. She knew this because she had come close enough to their nests to watch them.