Beowulf's Children
Chapter 23

CONQUEST

    Now what about those incidents in which some person seems to go beyond what we supposed were the normal bounds of endurance, strength, or tolerance of pain? We like to believe this demonstrates that the force of will can overrule the physical laws that govern the world. But a person's ability to persist in circumstances we hadn't thought were tolerable need not indicate anything supernatural. Since our feelings of pain, depression, exhaustion, and discouragement are themselves mere products of our minds' activities--and ones that are engineered to warn us before we reach our ultimate limits--we need no extraordinary power of mind over matter to overcome them. It is merely a matter of finding ways to rearrange our priorities.
    In any case what hurts--and even what is "felt" at all--may, in the end, be more dependent on culture than biology. Ask anyone who runs a marathon, or ask your favorite Amazon.
-MARVIN MINSKY, The Society of Mind

    The storm blew out and the sky cleared. In those two hours Aaron had used the remaining skeeters to round up the male chamels, while Justin established a defensive perimeter complete with motion detectors.
    That work kept them busy for hours. When it was over, when the last reluctant chamel was restored to the herd, the Star Born returned to the grim reality of torn, bloody snow, and the tarp-shrouded body of their friend.
    Justin knelt beside the tan shroud, brooding. "I know you, Stu. You'd want us to remember that our defenses worked."
    Aaron nodded agreement. "When the Earth Born first encountered a grendel, it was a massacre. This was just war. We only lost one of ours."
    "One too many." Jessica's left boot toe dug at a bit of dark, gummy snow. The head-shape beneath the tarp was misshapen. Even draped, the body seemed . . . broken. Shrunken.
    "Does anyone want to say something?" Justin asked.
    Katya nodded, and bowed her head slightly. "Stu." Her breath plumed from her mouth like a whisper of steam. "You died for me." Justin rose and put his arm around her shoulder. She clung to him.
    There was a long pause, everyone expecting someone else to speak first. There was no sound but the wind, the distant skeeters, and the lowing of the chamel herd.
    "Do we send him back to Camelot?" Jessica finally asked.
    "No." Aaron's reply was unexpectedly fierce. "He came to take the continent. Let him be buried here, where he fell. We'll mark the spot with stones, and let Cassandra record it. Send him to wind and sky and sun." 
    "But--"
    Aaron wasn't listening. "His real monument will be at Shangri-La, the place he helped to build. This is our land now. All of this. Not Camelot, not Surf's Up. This is our land."

    The midday sun melted enough snow to expose an eviscerated grendel corpse--Stu's killer. Aaron fired a biotoxin load into it, and it didn't twitch. Then Skeeter V set down carrying Jasper Doheny and the expedition's chain saw, Chaka moved in with the deadly humming wand. He began his autopsy with a beheading.
    Now he pulled at torn skin, measured teeth and tail, jotting everything down in a little notebook. "You know," he said quietly, "the interesting thing is that they didn't just tolerate each other's presence. That would have been remarkable enough--but they actually seemed to cooperate." 
    "That's a pretty depressing thought," Jessica said.
    "Alarming is more like it." Chaka wiggled the broken jaw, then ran his hands over the misshapen, not quite symmetrical skull. "The ability of grendels to organize . . . at all . . . implies a level of intelligence or social organization which we haven't experienced before. That's going to take a lot of thought."
    Justin squeezed Katya's hand. She had clung to him almost continuously for the past hour. "What do you suggest?"
    "Let the snow cool the head a bit more, then get it back to Shangri-La and freeze it. Then back to Camelot on the next transport. I want my father's opinion of the brain." 
    Aaron nodded. "The kind of thing that they'll love. A puzzle." He ran a hand over his long face. "I've had enough of this place," he said grimly. "Let's get the hell out of here."

    Old Grendel had seen them taking a snow grendel apart, treating each part in some different way. They had eaten none of it. Uneasy, she had moved downhill.
    The snow grendels had frightened the weirds, and they were far too likely to investigate what they feared. Old Grendel didn't consider it safe to spy on them. She stopped and buried herself above the corpse of the snow grendel she had killed. Watching that should be safe.
    The daughters of God rose into the air and flew east.
    The puzzle beasts moved west in a great mass, with weirds all around them.
    The weirds were going . . . were gone. They hadn't found the last snow grendel. Old Grendel circled wide, looking for traps and spies. There were several of the little boxes the weirds sometimes posted where the view would serve a spy, and Old Grendel would not pass in front of those. 
    Presently she settled in to feed.
    The weirds didn't know everything. Old Grendel was oddly reassured.

    The herd was moving again, and they were making good time. Justin could see an edge to the plateau. Beyond, never yet seen by the naked eye, was a savannah covering a third of the continent. They were as far as any human had been from Camelot without actually achieving orbit.
    After the skeeters had buzzed in to take away grendels and human casualties, Katya swore that she was steady enough to drive a trike. Twice now she'd spun up next to Justin to blow him kisses. A bandage covered half her face, with a blue slash and stitches underneath, twisting her laugh into something wild.
    She can hardly wait for nightfall, he mused. All of that my hero stuff. Should be . . . interesting.
    He wondered, then, if she'd have nightmares. After what she'd been through, another woman might have been catatonic. But he'd be there to hold her.
    Skeeter scouts found the route of descent from the plateau. It was checked first by horseback, and then by chamel. The herd descended a thousand feet to the grasslands. It was flat down there, a vast tabletop that seemed to run forever, brownish green growing gradually greener with the descent. A wide brown river meandered in S curves. Here and there were patches of trees.
    The descent took five hours. There was still enough day left to make a few kilometers before camp.
    The grass was almost waist high, blue-green, and rich. The trikes plowed furrows in it as they jetted around.
    Justin's mare chewed happily at the grass. Analysis had showed it would be digestible; they wouldn't need to bring much animal food in by skeeter. Justin leaned down and plucked a strand, took a tiny bite, and tucked it back between his rear molar and his gum. It chewed sweet-sour, not bad at all.
    In the future, this would be cattle country. Trikes zipped about, stopping here and there to make recordings and snip samples for Cassandra to muse over later.
    The computer whispered in his ear. "I see an odd flower. Turn to the left again, please."
    He did, and couldn't see what Cassandra was talking about. But, "There we are. Would you get one of those, please?"
    The herd was behind him, and if the computer wanted something, he was going to have to get it now, before hooves and teeth destroyed it.
    The flower was in the middle of a patch of blue grass, and there was a bug-like thing crawling around it. 
    "What is it, Cassandra?" 
    "Closer . . . "
    He got closer, and suddenly saw something of real interest.
    The beetle was tearing at a fibrous bulb on the plant The bulb, on the other hand, seemed to be made of an interwoven web of fibers . . . and some of the plant's fleshy leaves was composed almost exclusively of those fibers, but pointed skyward.
    A tiny lizard-like thing, not much larger than the tearing insect, climbed the stalk and attacked the leaf. Almost immediately, the leaf began to change color, from fleshy red to blue, oozing a blue exudate.
    The lizard-like thing tried to escape, but the exudate had it caught. The fibers stirred. They wound about the lizard, catching it tight. The lizard's struggles slowly bowed the plant, and the leaf bent and turned upside down.
    Fascinated by the process, which had taken no more than five minutes, Justin took another look at the beetle, still working hard at the other leaf. It was in there now, and it was . . . eating something.
    "Wow," he said. "Cassandra, what do you see?" 
    "A microecology that needs study," she said calmly.
    "I see a scavenger hijacking a flesh-eating plant," Justin said for the record. "Pretty sneaky, I'd say."
    "Sample, please."
    Justin shook the plant, and the little bug suddenly noticed him. It turned--and spread disproportionately large jaws. It couldn't have been larger than his thumb, but the wings trebled its size. It shot off toward the horizon so fast it nearly disappeared.
    Faster than hell. So fast that . . . 
    "Cassandra." He didn't like the stress in his voice. "Was that bug on speed?"
    "It is possible," the computer said. It sounded like an admission.
    "I believe we have found another speed-using species. Correlations? Conclusions?"
    "Observed data indicate this is a scavenger. No other conclusions valid with existing data."
    That made him feel a little more comfortable, but not much. He summoned a trike to take the specimens.

    "Skeeter reports a large animal in your vicinity, south-southwest of you, Katya."
    He and Katya putted along in the two-seater trike. The loss of Stu weighed on all of them, but especially Katya. She had clocked over a thousand hours with him in that skeeter. It had to hurt.
    Her night had been filled with bad dreams. This morning she didn't remember. She was brisk and perky, as if she'd slept better than Justin.
    They had buried Stu where he fell. They all wanted some kind of ceremony, but Aaron didn't agree. "We will remember him at Shangri-La," he said. Stu was a Bottle Baby, never adopted. No relatives among the First. Aaron and the others were the only family Stu had, and they let Aaron speak for them . . .
    Now they were taking back the trophy, their only intact grendel head. A poor trade.
    He found his hand creeping to cover hers. She widened her fingers to accept his. The small motion seemed somehow more intimate than the times she had welcomed him into her body. Her eyes, golden with flecks of green, sparkled at him. The bandage was still in place.
    "Let's take a look," she said.
    Justin said, "Cassandra, give us a local scan for grendels."
    All of Cassandra's considerable eyes and ears were suddenly concentrated on the area. A relief map glowed on the hologram stage, blank at first, filling in rapidly.
    There were no grendel-bearing water sources short of the river thirty-five klicks away.
    They would avoid the river. The herd would water tomorrow. Their skeeters would have plenty of time to clear out the water hole before the herd arrived. Now, where was Cassandra's "large animal"?
    Justin popped the clutch and headed out toward the site, south-southwest. The grass grew higher than his head. He tried to keep one eye ahead and one for the little holostage where Cassandra had given them a skeeter's-eye hologram.
    It showed a cleanly geometric trapezoid, pale brown on a baize background. An Avalon crab, Justin thought, seen from nearly overhead. Where were the legs? They must be underneath. That looked like tufts of hair along the edges. And he ought to be getting close.
    He could see pterodons circling overhead . . . and nothing ahead. He was seeing through a curtain of grass. Then he wasn't, because they'd driven out of the grass into a neatly cut lawn. He grinned, speeding up, enjoying the view. High grass to left and right. Still he saw nothing of a mystery creature, until Katya spoke.
    "We're looking at the aft end. Justin, we've found the Scribe!"
    Scribe? Perspective came. It was almost half the horizon, a geographical feature moving slowly away from them. It was camouflaged, but that wasn't it. He hadn't seen it because it was too big!
    Katya was laughing at him. He'd gasped like a dying man. Justin said, "Cassandra, sanity check. Could this be the Scribe? The thing that draws paths we see from orbit?" 
    "It leaves a path identical to the Scribe tracks," the computer said. "Absent conflicting data this is a valid conclusion."
    They moved closer. No sign of eyes, this side of the beast. Not much detail at all, just the edge of a tremendous shell, the color of bare earth, moving slowly away.
    It didn't waddle. It cruised. In its wake the grass stood a few inches high, dotted with truncated haystacks two feet tall. Droppings?
    Something like a tremendous flattened crab slid up to one of the heaps, moving no faster than the Scribe itself, and over it without a pause. A juvenile?
    Talking to himself, talking for Cassandra's records, Justin drove the trike into the grass again. Three pterodons were circling high above him. He rode half-blind through the prairie grass, swinging wide around the now invisible beast. "Don't want to startle it," he told Katya, and was suddenly whooping.
    A small fist whacked him between the shoulders. "What?"
    He could hardly speak for laughter. "Pictured it rearing up. Pawing the air. Don't mind me."
    He must be far ahead of it now. There was a stand of horsemane trees, uphill. He pulled the trike into their shade, turned off the engine, and waited. The pterodons were still with him. A fourth came to join them. One peeled off and flew toward the Scribe.
    A thing that size . . . it wouldn't try to plow trees under, would it?
    They were on a slight rise, three kilometers ahead of the chamel herd. Down below them, now more than two hundred meters away, was the largest creature that Justin had ever seen in his life. A crab . . . clearly derived from a crab shell, like the Avalon crabs, like the fixed-wing birds. But you could build a city on its back! Or a village anyway . . .
    In fact, a pterodon was landing on its back to join more than two dozen others. Five merged circles, a communal nest, sprawled along the front of the shell.
    A deep blue line ran across the front of the Scribe at the level of the grass. It seemed to ripple. Lips, or just a lower lip . . . maybe.
    Otherwise nothing about the beast was in motion. It slid along like a raft on a wide river. Any motion must be taking place beneath the shell. Others of its kind, Avalon crabs and bugs and birds, made do with four motive limbs and endless ingenuity in the shapes of their shells.
    Katya rose from her seat, lifted a pair of war specs, and gave a low whistle. She nudged him, and passed them over.
    The beast was even more impressive when seen through the glasses. As large as--"Cassandra, is this the largest animal we know of?"
    "Negative. The blue whale is larger. This is comparable in size to the largest of the herbivorous dinosaurs." 
    "Thank you." The edge of the shell dipped to become skids or skis. A half-dozen snouters grazed placidly along one flank. The beast was as large as half the main colony, and flat. It must have nearly the mass of a blue whale, but it was flatter, and wider than it was long.
    There: eyes. Justin had thought they'd be higher. They were bedded in the long blue lips, too low to give the Scribe a decent view. He zoomed on one eye, and it was looking back, examining Justin and Katya, utterly unconcerned.
    It wasn't until Justin focused the lenses more carefully that he saw what Katya was excited about.
    There were grendels hanging from the shell. Two . . . no, three distorted grendel-shapes hung from the front and side of the shell, like, hanks of hair. Mummies, not quite skeletons, but long dead, he judged.
    Katya was saying, "Looks slow. Let's lake a closer look."
    The Scribe continued on its placid way as they approached. Five pterodons rose to circle above them. Snouters scurried away around the curve of the stupendous beast. They didn't seem terribly worried. The little Scribe, if that was what it was, hadn't been afraid either. But those dried corpses were grendels!
    "Cassandra," Justin said, "backtrack."
    The trike's little holostage sprouted a relief map of the locality. Cassandra recreated the beast's path as it meandered among similar paths in the grasslands. There were other curves and loops of lighter grass on the flat prairie background, and they crossed only rarely.
    "How close does it get to running water?" he asked, but he saw the answer as he spoke: the path dipped to touch the river, and lingered there.
    Cassandra said, "Quite close, and frequently. The path often parallels waterways." 
    "Does it enter known grendel territory?" 
    "Affirmative." 
    "Thank you," Justin said. "Hallelujah."
    "There are things that aren't afraid of grendels," Katya said.
    "Obviously. Not this creature, not its young. Not the pterodons nesting on its back." 
    "And the snouters?"
    "Don't know. Maybe they stay on the veldt when Momma Scribe drinks."
    Justin stood up on the seat of the trike to watch the creature. It drifted like an island, placid and unconcerned, as if it had never been threatened in its life. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine what could harm such a beast.
    He raised the binoculars and focused on one of the mummified grendels.
    The four mummies looked about the same state, the same age. That might have been a coordinated attack, for all the good it had done them. Each was hanging by its tail.
    "Its defenses seem to be passive," he said. "Its sheer size, and something about the shell that traps grendels." 
    Katya asked, "Some sort of mucilage?"
    "More like Velcro. Maybe. I want to see." He levered himself off the trike and walked through the high grass toward the Scribe. He pulled his microphone aside and told Katya, "You could put a castle on this thing. Come, I will make you Queen of the Scribeveldt."
    The shell was all pentagonal plates, like shields a couple of feet across. Shields, and white tails hanging between the edges, here and there. Bones?
    Cadmann had spoken of Roman army shields: the warriors held them in a closed array, each warrior's shield guarding the man next to him, in the days of swords and spears. Roman shields would trap enemy spears . . . like Velcro he'd been right about that.
    Katya said, "Not a castle. Tents. A pavilion, a summer palace. The serfs will have to wear special shoes." 
    "Yeah, wouldn't want to hurt the shell."
    He was vaguely aware of a skeeter's buzz, far-off and insignificant, and almost didn't register it until he heard the voice in his earphone. "What in the hell are you doing?" Jessica asked.
    "I'm getting closer," he said. "This thing could care less about me." 
    "You don't know that." Her voice was irritated. 
    "It's good to know somebody cares," he said.

    Jessica brought the skeeter closer and watched Justin and Katya approach the mountainous Scribe. The lawn behind it stretched to the horizon. It was easy to imagine such a herbivore trolling the entire continent, perhaps looking for a mate, collecting a herd of animals who hid beneath its shell for safety.
    It was impossible to imagine a carnivore of equivalent size. Even blue whales, while technically carnivores, were passive filtration feeders. The malevolent Moby Dick had been their little brother. So Justin was probably safe. Probably.
    Still.
    She was irritated. She wanted to be mad at him. He had sided with Cadmann against them, against Aaron, and was a traitor of sorts, dammit. And he wasn't really her brother, for all the talk about two mothers and a dad. Justin's father was Terry Faulkner, he wasn't related to Cadmann at all, and yet he'd sided with the colonel against the Second. She wanted to stay pissed at him, but hated the way her chest hammered in response to the visual input.
    Dammit, dammit, dammit. Only Justin and . . . and Aaron. Only the two of them could drive her this crazy.
    He was twenty feet from the creature now. Its eye, a spheroid four feet across with a black iris, its tiny-seeming eye was on Justin and it just didn't care. To Jessica he looked so small. She could see his point. He was nothing in comparison to a beast such as this. Why should it pay him any mind whatsoever? And yet . . . and yet . . . Avalon Surprise.
    The pig things snorted and ambled away. They were rooting around in the grass, moving when they had to stay ahead of the Scribe's long blue lip.
    She brought the skeeter in for a closer look, and the snouter looked up, more alarmed by the whirring, flying thing in the sky than it ever was by Justin's presence. 
    "What are you doing now?" she demanded.
    "Getting close-ups for the record. Jess, Chaka is going to absolutely love this! I'm looking at the bones of a grendel's tail, with a couple of vertebrae still attached. The rest of it could have fallen off years ago. The spikes on the tail are caught between the edges of the plates of the shell. It catches their tail spikes and they can writhe themselves into a coma for all the good it does them. These bones, they're cracked--"
    "Cassie!" Jessica howled. "Where are your safety overrides?" 
    "Working," Cassandra said, and went silent.
    It came to Jessica that checking all of Cassandra's protective measures might be the work of months, or lifetimes. "Cancel that last question. You hear me, Cassie?" 
    "Canceled. Justin is safe by my current parameters," Cassandra said. "I have backtracked this creature over the past year. It is not an aggressor. Grendels do not survive in its domain. I find no other local predators thus far." 
    Current parameters. "When were your current safety parameters updated?" 
    "Eighty-seven days ago."
    Three months ago. Edgar had been fiddling with Cassandra, likely at Aaron's instigation, giving the Second more freedom to explore.
    "Might as well join the madness," she said, and brought the skeeter down a hundred meters away from the moving mountain. The Scribe didn't look able to move quickly, but she didn't want it accidentally changing course and crushing her skeeter.
    She was glad to see Katya up and around and looking so damned chipper. She didn't completely agree with Justin's choice of women, but what the hell, she didn't really have anything to say about it, did she?
    The wind came cleanly through her lungs as she jogged toward them through armpit-high grass. The rapidity of her approach seemed to attract Momma Mountain's attention, and it turned its eye sluggishly toward her. Taking her time. It was impossible to imagine something like this having any potential for speed.
    Justin was only ten feet away from it, playing his camera over four sets of trapped bones. One was no more than several joints of a grendel's tailbones. The others were distorted mummies.
    It seemed clear what had happened. Momma Mountain had approached the river to drink. Each grendel in turn, or all together, had made a suicidal charge and gotten stuck. Each had thrashed . . . that one seemed to have actually torn some of the plates loose, but it had done it no good. It hung limply, its bones cracked, as if it had shattered itself in those final convulsions. As if it was too powerful to live.
    The great herbivore's lip rippled steadily, mowing two-meter-high grass.
    "We have to see what's going on under there," Justin said. "Drop a camera--"
    "Harden it," Jessica said, as if they'd been talking all along. "It'll get chewed up." 
    "Yeah, hardened, with a light--" 
    "A little light. Camera set for low light."
    "Right, it must be permanent night under there. We don't want to blind . . . a whole damn ecology under there, I bet. Cassandra, we need that camera. How long to make one up?" 
    "That will depend on priorities. The practical answer is that I can fabricate it in Camelot and put it aboard the next supply shuttle." 
    "Tell Edgar."
    One of the pig things came close, evidently emboldened by the nearness of Momma Mountain. Jessica took a step toward it, and it scampered away.
    Justin's expression was hard to read. He said, "Watch this."
    Katya echoed that. "Watch this," she said, nearly glowing with pleasure as Justin crouched, extending his hand. It held a handful of balled grass. He was very still.
    At first the snouter just stared at him, but then it came close, and then closer, and then she couldn't believe it, but the thing was eating out of his hand. It had actually begun to lick his hand when it suddenly shook its head, startled at its own boldness, and backed away. 
    Justin brushed his hands off on his pants. 
    "What was that all about?" she asked. 
    "Dunno."
    "You taste like a meat eater," Katya said, and licked his ear. He laughed, and put his arm around her.
    Jessica found herself feeling enormously irritated. "Well--is it safe to bring the herd through here?" 
    "Safe as houses."
    "We've got a water hole up ahead. Half a day." She didn't know why she said the next thing, but she did. "It was mapped as a grendel hole last month. You want to be in on the kill?"
    "Sure." He kissed Katya briefly. "Katya--you take the trike, I'm going for a little skeeter ride."
    Katya looked at Jessica, smiled, then pulled Justin around for a real honey of a kiss, long and deep and sincere as hell.
    Jessica decided that she definitely didn't like Katya.

    The long, low sweep of the hills tilted and tilted again as the skeeter bobbed on the air currents, carrying Justin and Jessica to the east.
    "Well," Jessica said finally, after about five minutes of silence. "It certainly seems as if the two of you are getting along well."
    "Well, somebody's got to be a sex object around here. Jess, how about calling them 'Harvester' instead of 'Scribe'? Now we know what it is."
    She grinned mildly, her hands tight on the control. A flicker of evil intent tickled the back of Justin's mind, and he decided to push onward. "I think maybe she's feeling her age. You know, some women feel that if they haven't had a child by twenty, they're missing out somehow. Ridiculous, of course."
    She glanced at him as if to say: Do you think it's going to be that easy, bud?
    "Personally, I think that a woman's got until at least twenty-five. What about you and Aaron?" 
    She snorted. "Oh, you know better than that--" 
    "Well, you wouldn't even have to carry the child yourself. You could donate an egg, and he could donate a sperm--I assume it would only take one, I mean, as staggeringly virile as Aaron is . . . " 
    "Oh, shut up." 
    "But Geographic has everything that you'd need . . ." 
    They were passing a stand of trees, and coming up a river that ran into a lake. It was a sparkling ribbon of blue beneath them, girded around with trees. She hovered, and Cassandra produced maps to show where grendel-sized heat sources had been spotted during earlier flybys, but they only confirmed what her father's training and Jessica's imagination were painting.
    Open water equals death.
    Jessica had grown quiet. The skeeter's steady hum was the only sound. They were alone up there, hovering above the grendels.
    "Cassandra," she said quietly. "Shut down." 
    The privacy circuit, inviolate in the camp, went into effect. No one could hear them, no one could eavesdrop on them. The circuit was dead.
    Jessica put the skeeter on autopilot. They were alone in the universe. She turned toward him. "We really haven't talked much since . . . that night, Justin," she said. 
    "Been busy. Everything happened so fast." 
    "But we didn't talk about how we felt. We always used to talk about that. I miss those talks."
    He tried to smile, but it flickered out. "You don't need my approval. Never did."
    "No. But I need you. Dad won't talk to me. Even when we tested the shelters, he barely spoke to me." 
    "Jess, you betrayed him twice in his own home! When Trish yelled for Dad's head, you were sitting next to Trish, not Dad. You won't be back until somebody's funeral!" 
    Her cheeks flamed. She wouldn't look at him
    "So you can't go home again. The question is, can we get him to talk to you? Over a comm card, or in the meeting hall? And that's a maybe. He was suffering after Toshiro--after he killed Toshiro." 
    "We all were." 
    "Was Aaron? I didn't see it."
    "How could you say that?" Her cheeks reddened. She had to remember that this flight, this conversation, was her idea. "Toshiro was one of Aaron's closest friends." 
    He said carefully, "Sometimes I think that Aaron doesn't have any friends."
    "How could you say that? You've always been his friend."
    "Have I?" he asked, softly. "Look at what happened. Dad is stalemated--The First don't give us orders anymore. We can have anything we want as long as we carry those damn blankets everywhere. All because Dad shot Toshiro." 
    "You have a point?"
    "I've spent too many nights thinking about this," Justin said. He hadn't told anyone this, not even Katya, and it suddenly felt like he'd been carrying a live grenade in his chest. "There wasn't any way Aaron could lose! The plan was to take Robor to the mainland. If nobody comes after us, we win. But suppose someone comes. Suppose Dad and Carlos die at sea because Aaron's left orders not to do any rescue work, or suppose Carlos drops dead because Toshiro fires a lightning bolt through him. It's hardball then, with Aaron in charge of a war. If Dad or Carlos kill someone, Aaron gets the moral high ground. Even if Dad forces Robor back to Camelot, Aaron gets what he wants. It's a cause, then, and the First would have to start talking again, and Aaron is one fine debater."
    "How could you say that? How can you think it?" she whispered again, astounded.
    "All right. Answer me a question: Would you have a bottle baby? Would you take your egg and someone else's sperm, and raise it in one of the incubators?" 
    "Of course . . ." 
    "Then why haven't you?" 
    "I have had eggs removed," she said, suddenly bitter. "In the case of my death, my percentage of the wealth will go to raising my child. I have listed possible donors--" 
    She looked away from him suddenly, and her cheeks flushed again. Suddenly, wildly, Justin wondered if his was one of the names on the list. "But as long as I'm alive, that's something I would like to try on my own. Someday. Not now." 
    "Not now," he echoed.
    "No." She combed her hair with her fingers. "Justin, what this is all about is the chance to declare a truce. What do you say?"
    He thought about it. There were so many things that he wanted to talk about. But all of them faded into insignificance when compared with what really mattered--his relationship with Jessica. Here, with the two of them, it seemed more important still.
    "Truce," he said. And held out his hand. Hers was firm, and dry, and warm.