The next question was unspoken. Did you ever wonder who your parents were? If either or both of them were here on Avalon? Did you overlook into the faces of the Earth Born, and wonder if one of us was The One? Did you ever look at me and wonder, Aaron? Did you ever cry at night because no one would take the final responsibility for you? No one would give the final damn?

But she couldn't ask those questions. Not yet. Maybe later. Later, when she had the opportunity to get him by himself. Later, when maybe they could both get a little drunk. That might be the best choice after all. It might be the only choice.

There were more bees here.

Cadmann adjusted his binoculars, and watched as a cloud of Avalon insects fed on the corpse of some kind of marsupial. "What do you think?" he asked Aaron. "Did the bees attack it?"

"We've never seen attack behavior from Avalon bees," Aaron said irritably. "Scavenging, yes, a lot of that. I would bet you that poor critter fell out of the tree and broke its neck. The body began to decompose, and the scent attracted the bees. I don't think those are killers."

There was a steady line of bees arriving, eating, circling in a little lazy pattern abuzz with other bees (as if they were having a little community hoe-down, Cadmann thought), then heading back off into the distance.

"Cassandra, note the direction of the bee travel."

"Noted. Combined with data supplied by Carlos it is now reasonable to conclude that the nest is some twelve kilometers to your northeast."

"Probability?" Cadmann asked automatically.

"Numerical estimate impossible."

"That's interesting," Cadmann said. "Your fuzzy-logic program used to give numerical estimates. What happened?"

"My exactness criteria were changed."

"Oh? By whom?"

"I do not know," Cassandra said.

"Edgar," Cadmann muttered. "One of these days I'll kill him, so help me—You said data supplied by Carlos. He's found bees too?"

"Affirmative."

"How far is this lake now?" Cadmann asked.

Aaron said, "Maybe another hour. Mostly level from here."

"And downhill coming back," Cadmann said. "Okay. I wouldn't want to miss Chaka's lecture. I—think it may be important."

"What about the bees?" Sylvia asked. "Chaka seemed very interested in them."

Cadmann nodded. "He sure did. But they'll keep until tomorrow. Here, need a hand over that rock?"

"Yes, thank you. It's strange," she said. "It's hard to believe he's the same boy you used to take on Grendel Scout overnighters. Eight years old? Nine?"

"When what?"

"The swimming competition. Remember that?"

"Where Justin nearly drowned?"

She nodded her head. "He always pushed himself so hard against Aaron."

"No need for him to do that," Cadmann said. "Justin is his own boy."

"But to be a man he had to be like his father. And you were the closest he could come."

Cadmann knew that she was getting at something but wasn't quite certain what it was. "So?"

"So... he watched the two of you together. You and Aaron. Just like I have. And he sees what I see."

"And what is that?"

"That you and Aaron are two of the same type. Justin wants you to love him. Aaron wants to be you. Which of them will really get your love? Which will get your respect? And which of those things would a boy rather have?"

Cadmann brushed a column of branches out of his woman's face. "Are you saying that I would rather have had Aaron as a son than Justin?"

"No. I wouldn't presume to say that. But maybe Justin thinks that you would rather have had Aaron than him. And sometimes, that's all it takes."

Was it true? Was there a place within Cadmann that preferred Aaron as an heir? Even now? More than Justin or...

Or Mickey? His own flesh and blood. God. He never spent time with the boy. And now Mickey spent most of his time up in the mining camp where Big Chaka did biology and Stevens was rebuilding the mining equipment. Before Linda's death, the last time Mickey had come down of his own accord was to watch Stevens get creamed by Aaron in the debate.

Great.

Cadmann Weyland, Father of the Year.

It was probably too late to do anything about that. How much of the competition between Justin and Aaron was his fault?

He didn't know. He really didn't. All that he could do was to try to heal the rift, if he could. While he could. And to that he pledged himself.

Sylvia watched Aaron. He was so strong, so handsome, so very much a leader. There was so much in the way that he swung his arms, so much in the way he called back to them, that reminded her of Cadmann. Whoever this man Koskov, the one who contributed half of Aaron's genetic material, had been, she knew instinctively that she would have liked him.

She allowed herself a momentary fantasy. What might it have been like to accept the father's genetic material in the more conventional fashion .

...

But there was the very real possibility of damage, things wrong with Aaron that she couldn't see, sicknesses of the spirit beneath anything that she could reach. And if that was true, whose fault was that?

No one's.

So strong, so much a leader, so handsome, and possibly damaged. What kind of mother would she have been? A lot of pain bubbled up with that thought. Pain, and thoughts very different from the intellectual justifications they fed each other about the children. She should have nurtured him in her body. Let him feel her love, her fear, her longings. These are the rhythms of human life. The extreme mood swings of mothers—in a sense, didn't they train the children? Hormonal communications, saying: This is life, my child. These emotions, the highs and the lows. Drink deeply of all of it but no matter what it is that you feel, in the midst of it... there is love, there is this total acceptance within my body.

These experiences Aaron had been denied.

And this was something that she had to live with now. But perhaps, just perhaps, there was still time to do something about it. And if there was, she would.

"It's the richness of it all," Cadmann said. "Everything depends on everything else. Big Chaka showed me twenty parasites and symbiotes living in just the spider devils."

"Samlon too." Aaron smiled. "Every samlon is a colony."

"And these horsemane trees are like a world unto themselves. Hel-lo!"

Those three trees stood like winter-naked beeches. Their manes lay broken, in three parallel lines. They must have fallen away in one piece and broken on impact. New manes were growing, not much more than green fur.

And Aaron was laughing. "Avalon Surprise! Funny, isn't it, how it always makes sense after you know. What happens is, this breed drops its entire mane every so often. It keeps down the parasites. Then it's got to survive while it grows a new mane, so it stores a lot of sugar. We've been thickening the sap by vacuum evaporation. You'll have to tell me, Cadmann, Sylvia; you've tasted maple syrup."

"It won't be the same. Not made that way," Sylvia said. "If you don't caramelize maple sugar, it tastes like sugar water. The flavor comes from half-charring it."

Cadmann had been looking about him with new eyes. "There are a lot of those. One out of four trees is growing a new mane. Why didn't I see it before? Why are they all doing it?"

"Chaka said higher insolation," Aaron said. "More sunlight means more sugar means more congress bugs and Joeys and everything else that lives in a horsemane. When the tree's supporting too many squatters, it just pushes the house over."

"We get to those rocks, I want to stop. I've got a pebble in my shoe," Sylvia said.

Cadmann looked at her a moment. "I'll just move on ahead. Aaron, I wouldn't do that in strange territory."