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.Anything that swims.The dolphins have been sharing.”“Has Big Chaka looked at this yet?”“He’ll fly in from the coast this evening,” Jessica said.“Little Chaka’s run a simulation.”“And?”Little Chaka spoke from just behind him.The voice was always deep and resonant, and a little surprising because it came from slightly above him.Only two people in the world were taller than Cadmann.“It lived in the Deeps,” Chaka said, “and came upstream to lay eggs.”“It eats fish.Land animals too?”“If it could swallow them whole.It’s not built to carve out steaks.But I think we’re seeing it at the end of its life cycle.This is an old creature.What passes for a liver is operating at maybe fifty percent.I think it will be dead in a year.Have to ask Father, of course.”“Could it have had legs early in its cycle?”“Interesting idea, but Cassandra says no.The eggs are almost mature-”“Eggs?”“Yes, we’ve got samples.What she’s producing are thousands of little eely things that look just like Mama.No sign of legs.I think that Mama Eel is primarily aquatic, and can survive out of the water just long enough to get back upstream.She really prefers salt water to fresh.No sign of speed sacs or anything like them.This is a pretty standard animal.Not a lot of surprises.”Cadmann heard Chaka’s voice as if it came from the bottom of a rain barrel.A sudden wave of fatigue washed over him, hot and clammy, transmuting his limbs to lead.In his suddenly blurred vision, the thing in the water began to transmute.It grew legs, and its tail fattened.It reared up out of the tank with its huge, savagely powerful teeth drizzling blood, and snapped down just inches from his foot, and-He shook his head, and all was normal again.A perfectly harmless eel swished angrily through the water.Harmless.Captured.Swish, swish.“So why has it come back?”“To breed,” someone said.“What Colonel Weyland meant was why now?” Chaka said.“And we don’t know.”Cadmann turned to stare northward toward the mainland.“Dad, we’ll have to go,” Jessica said.He nodded.The eel would start that debate again.It was time for a full-dress expedition to the mainland, had been for years.He’d always known they would have to go there.Someday.He had no taste for it.After the Grendel Wars, he had thought he wanted that, and had made two trips to the mainland, the second shorter than the first.He had bagged a grendel with the new grendel guns, and been holo’ed grinning next to his prize.But something had altered within him, some subtle tidal change in his bones.If there was anything he needed to prove about himself, he would prove it here, on the island.And if there was anything that he needed to know about grendels, he would allow others to learn it for him.He lived with awful, bloody dreams in which all of their efforts had meant nothing.In his sleeping mind, rapacious demons had rolled over the colony like a red tide, killing everything, everyone.The few dozen survivors stranded up in Geographic could hear the screams, and see the blood, but they couldn’t come down.Couldn’t ever come down.And stayed up there until they slowly ran out of food.and water.and air.Waking, he would shrug away the dreams.He didn’t want to know how narrowly sanity had been preserved.And when he thought about going back to the mainland, he wondered what would happen if another grendel ever touched him.He wondered if he could take it.If his sanity would hold.He didn’t ever want to find out.“.Zack,” Justin said, pulling him out of his reverie.“Zack?”“Wants to kill it.And the eggs.”He felt an instantaneous, visceral flash of agreement, followed swiftly by the voice of reason.“As long as it’s not dangerous that’s not his decision to make,” Cadmann said.He pointed to the tank cover.“Your idea?”Jessica looked sheepish.“Zack ordered a cover.”“Good.”She hesitated.“We didn’t put it on, until the eel tried to escape.Took three of us with poles to keep it in.Then we put up the cover.”“Not when Zack told you to?”“No, sir.”“He had the authority to order that.Do you dispute it?”“No, Dad, it just seemed-”Cadmann shook his head.“Jessica, we’ve been through this before.Zack is chairman and governor, and we don’t lightly disobey him.”“You did.You rebelled-”“Exactly,” Cadmann said.“I rebelled.Some things are important enough for that.But you don’t do it lightly! I take it your researchers found the cover inconvenient—” She looked at her feet.“So you ignored a valid order because it wasn’t convenient.Do I have to say anything else?”“No, sir.But he wanted to kill it, too! And we found it at the Bluff, not down here!”“And at the Bluff you and your brother had every right to do what you thought right,” Cadmann said wearily.“Not here.”“It’ll go to a vote,” Jessica said.“Can we rely on you?”“To approve keeping it alive? Yes.” He thought for a moment.“That’s not all that will go to a vote.The next question will be about the mainland, you know.We need that major expedition.Not just quick trips to initiate Grendel Scouts, a study expedition.““Yes,” Justin said.“Joe Sikes thinks so too.Something’s going wrong with the mining robots.”Something in Justin’s tone made Cadmann frown.“Eh?”“Don’t know.Joe thinks it’s Star Born.But it’s not, it’s another Avalon surprise.”Cadmann nodded.“And the ecology returns to Camelot.The wind blows from the north part of the year.God knows what may get rafted over here.We have to know what else may come.”“Avalonian homing pigeons,” Justin offered.Jessica looked pained.“And no grendels here to eat them.We’re likely to be up to our clavicles in something.”“There haven’t been for twenty years,” Jessica offered.“There weren’t any eels for twenty years, either,” Justin said.Cadmann frowned.“Good point.And the ecology is returning.Not just the eel.Why now?” He nodded in submission.“I suppose there will need to be.some kind of expedition.”“We can plan it on the next Grendel Scout outing,” Justin said.“Safety-”Justin grinned.“We can work that out, Dad.We can work it all out.We just want to know that, if it comes to a fight, you’ll be on our side.”Cadmann hesitated.“Or at least not against us,” Jessica added swiftly.Cadmann considered them both.The fear was in him, dammit, not in them.Fear would be a horrible legacy to bestow upon his children.And-it was their world, more and more it was their world.They hadn’t asked to be born here.Cadmann often wondered what the children-the Star Born-thought about that.Did they resent being born here, denied the heritage of Earth? Earth, the solar system, crowded, teeming with humanity, and with the crowding came rules, rules, rules-He had come here to escape the rules.And now they had rules because they couldn’t trust their own damaged brains.And it’s their world, not ours.“Open mind,” he said
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