It walked off her while she was rolling and was several feet away. Fast, unfairly fast! Thick fleshy lips pulled back from daggerlike teeth in a grimace of pleasure. Lovingly it cooed to Sheena.
Sheena was terrified now, but she leaped.
She was in the air when the creature rolled. Its jaws flashed up and locked on her throat, reducing her death scream to no more than a terrified hiss. It drew back into the shadows before she hit the ground.
She lay on her side, struggling weakly to breathe, bubbles of air shining blackly in the moonlight as they pulsed from her throat.
She watched her killer draw close, stared into its eyes, its huge, soft, silver eyes. She whimpered.
It cooed at her, and when Sheena's flanks ceased trembling, came closer and gently licked at the blood oozing from her throat. The creature was hot, like a stove. It turned its back. Sheena felt blades entering her, and then nothing.
Chapter 3
FROZEN SLEEP
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sat by the fire, and talked the night away
Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done
Shouldered his crutch, and show'd how fights were won.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, "The Deserted Village"
Geographic was one of the largest mobile objects created by human engineering. Seen from below as the shuttle rose to meet her, the ship looked like a gigantic flashlight with a silver doorknob attached to the end. The aft end was a ring of laser fusion reactors, a flaring section twice the diameter of the trunk. The trunk, over a hundred and fifty meters in length, was the cylinder that housed the life-support systems and cryogenic suspension facilities. Minerva Two was approaching the fore end: the laboratories and the crew quarters, where Cadmann had spent five waking years of his life. The dock was a conical cagework at the end of a protruding arm, barely visible even this close.
Minerva Two slowed as she rounded the fuel balloon. Bobbi Kanagawa was a cautious pilot. Cadmann's fingers itched and twitched. His touch would have been surer, his approach would have been faster.
But he wasn't flying Minerva Two.
Geographic's fuel balloon was shrunken, spent, and half its original size. Only a breath of gas remained of a half-kilometer sphere of deuterium ice. The Colony could not produce deuterium, not yet. We were Homo interstellar, Cadmann thought. We will be again.
Some of the external paneling had been stripped away from Geographic and shuttled down to Tau Ceti Four for building material. The shuttle maneuvered past a drifting mass. The tightly wrapped cylinder, scores of kilometers of superconducting wire, waited to be loaded in Minerva Two's bay by robot limpet motors. These would become part of the fusion plant. Its completion meant limitless power.
Eventually the Orion craft would be a skeleton, just an orbiting splinter of light in the sky. Perhaps she might survive in smaller form, with most of the life-support cylinder removed: an interplanetary vehicle, a gift of space to grandchildren yet unborn.
Bobbi Kanagawa counted softly to herself as Geographic loomed on the screen, the onboard computer continually checking her approach pattern. "Almost home," she said without looking back at her passengers.
Sylvia reached over and pinched Cadmann's arm. "Are you all right?"
"I've never liked dockings," Cadmann muttered. Geographic was half the sky now; more, as the silver wall of the fuel balloon slid past and the conical cagework opened like a mouth. "And if you're a Freudian, I don't want to hear it."
The shuttle's nose grated along the cagework and nuzzled into the lock at its base: click-thump. Cadmann sighed in relief and released his shoulder straps. Bobbi made her last-minute checks, then swung out of her seat with practiced ease. "All right, folks, this is a two-hour turnaround. Hope you don't need more time." Some of her straight black hair had escaped its binding, and drifted out at disconcerting angles when she moved.
"Two should do it." Sylvia strapped on her backpack.
The door at the rear of the shuttle hissed open, and Stu Ellington's voice chuckled at them from the control module. "It's about time. Swear to God that's just like a woman. Two-tenths of a second late again."
Bobbi glared at the speaker, drumming her fingernails against the console. "Just keep talking, Stu," she said sweetly. "You need all the friends you can get-the last vote was dead even for leaving your worthless carcass up here another month."
"Oops. Tell you what. Drop your friends in the lab, come on up to Command, and we'll discuss my carcass for an hour or so."
Bobbi's pale cheeks reddened. She ran her hand over her hair, discovering the flyaway strands. "I... uh, well-" she looked at Sylvia, who winked sagely. "I'll see you in a month, huh?" She scurried to be the first through the hatch.
She disappeared down a narrow connective hallway as Sylvia led Cadmann to the central corridor and back to the biolab section. Cadmann clucked in puritan disgust. "Sex. I remember sex. Highly overrated."
"Great attitude for a biologist."
"Just a Bachelor's, and it was marine biology," he sniffed. "Fish are damned civilized about it. She lays ‘em, and he swims over ‘em."
"You're a romantic, that's what you are." Sylvia worked her way along the handrails gingerly and seemed ill at ease. "All this time," she said, so softly that he wondered if she had intended for him to hear.
"What?"
"After all this time, I still get a little claustrophobic in here."
She laughed uneasily.
"You're not the only one." He slammed the flat of his palm against one of the steel-and-plastic panels that lined Geographic. The vibration thrummed along the hexagonal corridor, damping out before it reached the first corner. "This place was home and prison to all of us for a long time. Some of the colonists won't come back up at all."
"It doesn't make sense, really. Just forget it."
He leaned up behind her and whispered in her ear. "It's return-to-the-tomb syndrome." A Karloffian leer lurked just behind his solemn expression. "All of us spent at least a hundred and five years asleep in a little coffin-shaped box, awakened from the dead by a trickle of electricity through our brains."
"Lovely. We'll put you in charge of bedtime stories. I'll manage the sedative concession."
The door to the biolab was sealed to protect both the life within and the crew without. Some of the substances and microscopic life forms were extremely vulnerable, and others extremely dangerous. Sylvia punched in her four-digit personal code, and the door opened inward. In case of a loss of atmosphere in the main section of the ship, air pressure alone would keep the door sealed. "We'll have this reprogrammed to admit you."
The lights came up automatically as the door closed behind them. The room was the second-largest on Geographic. Its floor space was crowded with medical and analytical equipment, its walls completely lined with cryogenic vaults. There were hundreds of the dark plastic rectangles, and they held the future of Tau Ceti Four.
Sylvia sighed, shucked her backpack onto a wall hanger and pulled herself over to a rack of Velcro slippers. She handed him a pair. "One size fits all."
"I was hoping for something in a wing tip."
She led him to the nearest bank of cases. "Look," she said contentedly, triggering one of the dark panels into translucence. Within, barely discernible as canine, were dozens of dog embryos. Their dark eyes were filmed with transparent lids, tiny naked paws drawn up to their gauzy bodies in peaceful cryosleep. Each hung in its individual sack, connected by its umbilical to an artificial placenta.
"So." She studied the temperature and pressure gauges on the door of a sealed cabinet, nodded and opened it. "Alfalfa seeds. Check. Swiss chard. Check. Tomatoes. Check." She closed the cabinet. "Now for the embryos. The carriers are in that case over there. Inflate three for me, will you?"
"Sure."
She busied herself at the cryosleep carrier console.
"You don't trust the computer?" Cadmann asked.
"Not anymore. Not since Ernst. Not since eight of us never woke up. Barney says it's fine, but I'm a woman of little faith these days."
"Good thinking."
She typed in the last commands. "There. So we lost one of the dogs.
We've got over a hundred more."
"And thousands of chickens, I suppose?" His voice was too flat, too distanced from his feelings.
"Look, Cad-I don't care what anyone says, it's not your fault. Sheena got loose a week ago. So-she came back last night and broke into one of the chicken cages. Fine. We'll either catch her or kill her. Nothing to worry about."
He heard her words, but his mind was still on the chicken cage as they had found it that morning, its wire mesh ripped out and mangled, the wooden frame shattered, blood and feathers and little clotted chunks of raw chicken littering the ground like the aftermath of a ghoulish picnic.
"That is what you're worried about, isn't it?"
Annoyed with himself, Cadmann derailed the morbid train of thought.
"Sure. That's it."
Although he had worked the biolab before, she gave him the grand tour. There was a complete assortment of dairy and work animals, as well as millions of earthworms, ladybugs and "friendly" insect eggs. "We have to have quadruplication of any needed form. There are going to be failures," Sylvia said bluntly. "The alfalfa crop, for instance. We don't know why yet." Her eyes glittered, and the sudden determination in her face cubed her attractiveness. Cadmann's chest tightened.
"But I guarantee you we'll know. And soon. We're going to lose more animals, and we've got to be ready for that, too. That's where you'll come in. Routine checks. Cad-any emergencies, and we'll hustle up Marnie or her husband, Jerry. We've got to be ready for anything."
She darkened the panels and took his hand, leading him to the other side of the room. The vaults were identical to those opposite, but he could feel her increased excitement. "Look," she whispered, and illumined the panels. "Our children."
They hung in rows, lost in endless dream. (Cadmann was startled at the thought. Were there dreams in cryosleep? The neurologists said no, but his memory said yes. Perhaps it was only that before the drugs took hold and the blood chilled there was one final thought that remained locked in a frozen brain, a thought that unthawed along with the body. Just a wisp of dream at the beginning of sleep and one at the end, linked by decades of silence and darkness.)
One of Sylvia's hands strayed unconsciously to her own belly, its roundness barely noticeable beneath her jumpsuit.
There were hundreds of the embryos, frozen at ten weeks of age. They were thumb-sized and milky pale, heads as large as their bodies, with their fluid-filled amniotic sacs billowing about them.
Cadmann came up close to the glass, counting the tiny fingers and toes, gazing at the gently lowered eyelids, the amber umbilicals attached to artificial placentas.
"They're all perfect," Sylvia said. "Every one of them certified perfect, genetically and structurally."
His breath had fogged the glass. He patted her stomach. "Not like Jumbo here, who has to take his chances."
Sylvia drew away from him, face troubled. She shut off the light in the embryo bank. "Cad... if you'd try to be a little nicer to Jumbo's father, things would be easier for all of us."
There was nothing in her face he could feel angry with. His hand still tingled from the contact. "I knew it. A nice trip for old Weyland. Find him a useful job. Then try to civilize him a little, before he gets sent to the outback where he belongs. Cadmann Weyland. First of the Great White Abos."
She shook her head and gave him a hug. "We know things aren't easy for you-but at least you know why you've got problems. Terry just knows that when he thawed out he wasn't quite the same anymore. Terry and Ernst... Carolyn... Alicia... Mary Ann..."
"What? Mary Ann Eisenhower?"
"Well, she's not one of the bad ones."
"She seems-"
"Sure, she's normal. Cad, she lost some brain cells in frozen sleep.
She isn't stupid, but she used to be brilliant, and she remembers, Cad. She and Hendrick Sills were the top bridge players, and they shared a bed too, before we put the colonists to sleep. Tom Eisenhower woke up dead, and Hendrick gets very uncomfortable if he's in the same room with her. He remembers. So Hendrick is with Phyllis now, and Mary Ann cries on Rachel's couch."
Cadmann touched her hand.
"But she's a normal, healthy, sexy woman if you didn't know her before. These changes can be very subtle, Cad. Carolyn McAndrews was second in command to Zack. Nobody wants to work with her now. She didn't turn stupid, but she goes into hysterics."
"And maybe there's a dead place in old Cadmann's brain too."
"Not that we can tell-like I said, you've got reasons to feel out of place. The others just know that the cryogenics weren't perfect. That the nightmares are a little darker. Maybe it isn't quite as easy to remember a favorite poem, or extract a cube root, or run the Twelve-Fourteen Convention in bridge." She paused, and her voice dropped. "Or make love. We don't know what it is yet. It'll be twenty years before we get any answers from Earth. In the meantime, there are mood stabilizers, and make-work projects. And there's hope. Most of us are fine. Our genes are good. We'll do everything humanly possible to keep you on the team. Can you blame us?"
He took her shoulders, gazing down into her eyes. The air was tart with disinfectant and dehumidifier; her perfume was a wisp of citrus and crushed rose petal, the only thing in the ship that smelled alive. "What 'us'? What about-?"
The intercom crackled, and Stu Ellington said, "We've got a message for you, Weyland. Development landside. Something about some chickens."