The well had been poisoned. “Cadzie. Hello.” She handed him a hard hat. “Put this on. I’m surprised they let you come up without one. A rule, here.”
Cadzie examined the helmet sourly. Joanie was wearing one like it, but painted silver. The one she had handed him was white. They were both made of well-dried bamboozle, a native plant homologous to bamboo, and if he’d been feeling generous he would have congratulated her on the workmanship. “Whose rule?”
“Ours. We built the dam, we make the rules.”
“I suppose.” The headband inside was adjustable, made of some kind of leather. It fit well enough when he tried it on.
“Now, what brings you to my little neck of the world?”
There was no point in starting a dispute over whose dam it was. Actually, Cadzie thought, we probably wouldn’t have it if she hadn’t done most of the bossing, as well as wheedling for materials. Nobody else had wanted it built as badly as she had.
“Have to talk to your dad.” That last word soured his tongue.
She frowned slightly. “What about?”
“It’s important,” he said, then added, warmed by an admittedly childish spark of satisfaction, “and private.”
She rolled her shoulders, flexing a lot of very useful, agile muscle. He had refereed one of her challenge matches, and pound for pound she could take all the women and probably eighty percent of Avalon’s men.
“Tell me, I’ll tell him.”
“Not this time. Rules. Where is he?”
She made some kind of small adjustment on the panel. “Last ping he was on the plain, maybe thirty klicks from here. Won’t tell me, huh?”
“No . . but there are no rules that say you can’t be there when I tell him.” Why bother frustrating her curiosity?
It wasn’t Joanie’s fault that her father had gotten away with murder. “Want to come along?”
Her glare was all the reply he needed. Of course, Cadzie thought. She won’t even tell me where he is unless she can come along. Couldn’t blame her, really. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to turn the cameras on, either.
♦ ChaptEr 3 ♦
aaron
For a moment, as she was getting into the passenger seat, Cadzie was tempted to make Joanie trade her hard hat for a leather flying helmet, but that would have been childish.
Satisfying, though.
The flying helmets weren’t really all that practical, and much of the time were stashed unworn beneath the seat. Instead, he asked, “Who made the hard hats, anyway?”
“Toad, of course. I think Evie Queen helped.”
“Good workmanship.” He rapped his knuckles against it. “Carlos has a couple, but they’re hard plastic.”
“Sure. That’s the model for these. We thought we needed some, but we don’t have much plastic fabrication, so Toad made them out of bamboozle. Works pretty good.”
“Oh.” Cadzie started the motors, checked the battery power levels. “Charged up pretty well. Good local power. Uh—where’d Uncle Carlos get his?”
She grinned enthusiastically. “High wattage chargers. Power from the Minervas. And he printed his, back before the grendels wrecked the 3D printers.”
“Oh. Yeah. I should have thought of that.” Lots of stuff like that, finely crafted plastic. He sometimes wondered what it must have been like when you could just print yourself a copy of—well, to hear Unka Carlos tell it, damn near anything. One day they’d have that capability again, but just now they couldn’t even make a lot of raw plastics. He’d been told why, but he hadn’t listened very hard. No point in studying problems you couldn’t do anything about. “Stand by. Here we go.”
The two-seated electric blue autogyro flashed over the fifty klicks between the dam and the eastern edge of Zack’s Plain in a little over twenty minutes. Joan and Cadzie could see the skeletal clamshell of the containment cage even from two kilometers out, bars of steel and bamboozle arced over a concrete pond. And within it, human shapes: first one and then another. Five humans. And . . one grendel.
Blue Three settled to the ground.
His stomach clenched as he stepped down. Cadzie had seen pictures of Aaron Tragon in his prime, of course: a blond Tarzan. But the colony’s original rebel was scarred now, blind in his left eye from an Avalon “bee” on speed, the same creatures that had killed Cadzie’s parents. Without the shelter of a blue blanket, Cadzie would have been rendered to bones as well. Most considered Aaron half-crazed. Only another nutcase would consider a long-time obsession anything but madness.
And madness, he supposed, was its own special chamber of hell.
“Bamboozle” (or sometimes “shamboo”) were grasses native to the highlands, flexible when green and hard as iron when dry. The giant cage with shamboo bars surrounded an artificial pond, and there in that place, Aaron and his acolytes were doing something that no one believed could be done: they were taming grendels.
Cadzie had seen vids of lion tamers in circuses on Earth, and been thrilled at the images of mighty predators leaping through fiery hoops and holding their mouths wide to receive a trusting head. But watching Aaron and his acolytes attempting something even vaguely similar with five meters of demireptile was disturbing.
The grendel squatted, warily, a quarter-ton of coiled lethality. It snapped the bison meat out of the air so fast it seemed a magic trick. He noticed that at least one human being locked eyes with the creature at all times. And that the grendel wore a neck collar with a fist-sized metal pod just behind the curve of the skull.
It studied the humans with a predator’s expert evaluation. Were they threat? Lunch? Tribe? Once it turned to snap at its female trainer, a short blond woman named Josie. Then it jerked back. Electric charge from a capacitor pod, he figured. Smart.
Aaron was always a shock to the senses: Scarred and crippled, face splotched with unblocked sun and wind-burned, with pale scars where uglier things had been frozen away. He crouched, eye to eye with the grendel. They stared at each other, for a long long moment . . and then the grendel turned away, thick barbed tail thrashing. With a flourish, Aaron removed himself from the cage, and a sigh of relief was heard by all.
He embraced his daughter Joan warmly. Cadzie noticed that her response was more restrained. Despite his scars and splotches, it was hard to think of Aaron being old enough to be Joan’s father.
“How’s Cerberus?” she asked.
The grendel’s head snapped around when she spoke that name, and it cocked its head, regarding her with what might have been curiosity. Not exactly intelligence, but certainly awareness.
“Recognizing her name. She’s learned some of what Kali knew, but Kali was brighter, I think. She found me. I do miss Old Grendel.” Joanie lifted her cheek to be kissed. Only then did Aaron seem to notice her companion.
“A guest,” Aaron said, and extended his hand.
“Cadzie.”
“I hate that,” he replied, and gave the proffered flat, hard hand a single up-and-down shake.
Aaron smiled lopsidedly, the only smile he had. “You love it. What brings you over here?”
“Maybe I just want to watch the show,” Cadzie said, hoping that the nervousness he felt around grendels didn’t show in his face. “Why the hell are you taking risks like this?”