ICE ON THEIR MINDS

All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina

Justin chuckled as he headed toward Avalon Town's main street. Jess amused him. Saving the eel was just like her. Had she done it only to antagonize Zack? She usually had several reasons for anything she did.

He swiveled aside to let a stream of half-naked boys and girls playing some spontaneously generated variant of tag scamper past. They giggled and sang, tripped, rolled ignoring their bruised shins and shoulders, and ran out into the fields. The game might progress until midnight, when exhaustion, not security, dictated an end to play. The grendels were dead. The only things that could harm a human child were the dogs, and they wouldn't. Children had never been safer, nor held more precious.

The streets of Camelot were broad and well paved, with private gardens where vegetables and fruits were nurtured into bloom. Intimate hothouses and hobby sheds were tucked along every byway.

Justin's favorite garden was behind Carolyn McAndrews's place. In neat, furrowed rows she cultivated roses, carnations, tulips, and daisies. Within the plastic-sheet walls of her hothouse lived Avalon's greatest-and only-orchid collection. Human shapes moved inside the hothouse: Carolyn herself, followed closely by a small brood of children. She had seven in all, three fast after the Wars, and another four in more leisurely fashion. The latest was barely out of diapers. The oldest two had children of their own. Coleen, the youngest of the first group, still lived at home, but lately she spent most of her time studying. Coleen wanted to go back to the stars.

She'll outgrow that, Justin thought. He had. It wasn't possible, not now, not in Coleen's lifetime. There was just too much to do with this world before they could rebuild and refuel Geographic-and beyond that was the problem no one could solve. Slower-than-light travel meant decades between stars. Stay awake and die of boredom, or go into frozen sleep and risk hibernation instability, ice on my mind. He shuddered.

He saw motion through the plastic, and hurried past. Carolyn McAndrews was coming out of the greenhouse. He was out of sight before she emerged.

Carolyn had been like an aunt to him until he was twelve or so. He had sensed her withdrawal without understanding it. She did well with children, couldn't cope with adults. She was damaged, and knew it.

Hibernation instability if you were polite, ice crystals in the brain if you were accurate, ice on your mind if you were rude, it was all the same thing and it affected all of them. Justin remembered the shock when he'd found it out. He'd been searching through the computer for something else, and found closed files, and-

His parents, Zack, the adults, all damaged, all unwilling to trust their own judgment. How to survive? Think in advance, use collective wisdom. Make rules; talk them through; change them endlessly. In a crisis, follow them blindly.

It wasn't hereditary. Carolyn was right when she said "But I make good babies..." Carolyn and her sister Phyllis-her late sister Phyllis, killed in the final minutes of the Grendel Wars-had gone into cold sleep as a pair of Earth's best and brightest, and wakened with their emotional stability shattered. Others had come out judgment-impaired or simply stupid.

But we don't have ice crystals in our brains, Justin thought. We don't have to make rules and obey them blindly. He'd been shocked when he first realized that. Now they taught it to the Grendel Scouts when they were old enough. The big secret: the adults have ice on their minds.

Every turn through the warren was comfortable to him... in some odd way, too comfortable. Everything on the island was safe, and sometimes it chafed.

In a world of fewer than five hundred people, every detail, every sight, every face becomes tediously familiar, comes entirely too readily to mind. He'd seen the next house uncounted thousands of times. It slid in and out of his mind so effortlessly that it felt like an extension of his own flesh.

The house frame was the same prefabricated rod structure employed by most of the First. Over the years, its exterior had been modified with simulated stone sculpted to imitate rock blasted and hauled from a distant quarry. Some of it was rock blasted and hauled from a distant quarry...

The porch was broad. There was a swinging bench with a striped awning to protect it from the sun. Justin vaulted the fence one-handed, calling "Tio Carlos!" There was no answer by the time he reached the top of the stairs. He poked his head in, and looked around.

He smelled coffee.

This was every bit as much his home as Cadmann's Bluff. He used to spend two or three nights a week here. He was seventeen, eleven Avalon, by the time he moved to Surf's Up. These well-worn stones and boards still smelled like home. At Cadmann's Bluff the smell of coffee was rare; but this house always smelled of coffee.

The taste had shocked Justin the eight-year-old. Jessica and others of the Star Born had acquired the taste, but Justin never had. Coffee was bitter. Still, he loved the smell.

The house was crammed with bric-a-brac carved from stone and thornwood and seashells. Weird sculptures of grendel bone were shelved under a broad window above a row of complex topological puzzles molded of composition plastic. There were hypercubes one disassembled to convert into Klein bottles, and Gordian knots only Cassandra could untie. Every inch of the walls was covered with handcrafted delights. Most of the incredible creative output was the product of one mind, the mind of Carlos Martinez.

On the way out to the workshop, he passed Carlos's bedroom. The bed was wide and spacious and rarely lonely. Justin's "Uncle" Carlos had married only once: he'd gone "down the rapids" with Bobbie Kanagawa. The marriage was six hours of bliss, bloodily annulled by a grendel attack.

Holotape of that awful event was required viewing. The attack patterns had been analyzed endlessly. They'd all heard the lecture, too often.

Carlos had married only once and became a widower the same day, but he had half a dozen acknowledged children. Some lived with him, some with their mothers. He was rumored to have more. You could never be sure who had been in that bed. His gametes get a huge return on investment for making him...

The burr of a high-intensity drill grew louder, more jarring as he approached the high-domed workshop behind the house.

The path between house and workshop was crowded with sculpture. Naked goddesses cavorted with satyrs rendered in volcanic stone. Impressionistic cloud cities carved in some kind of webbed driftwood. The eruption of Vesuvius whittled from an enormous bone flown back from the mainland, years before.

Carlos was an accomplished wood sculptor before he left Earth for Avalon. Over the years he'd gained skills in metalwork, glassblowing, and odd, "found" art. He was, beyond question, Camelot's premier graphic artist. There was probably no single home on Avalon that didn't have a plaque, lamp, sculpture, or doorplate signed with his rakish scrawl.

Katya Martinez opened the workshop door before he could get to it. Her faceplate and baggy coveralls disguised flaming red hair and a flawless body. She was a month younger than Justin's nineteen adjusted Earth years-or about twelve Avalonian cycles. Athletic, which made her attractive in ways that Trish, who lifted weights, never would be.

Katya's mother had died early enough that Justin had no memory of her, but he'd heard her talk about it. Three of the First had died of strokes in the space of four days, and one had been Carlotta Nolan's current love. Ice on their minds: damaged arteries in their brains held for a few years, then tore open. Carlotta had fallen dead during the triple funeral, and that made four.