"Just about. Justin is a nice baby," she whispered, "but ours is going to be much prettier."

"Hush." Cadmann grinned as Carlos and Sylvia caught up with them. He slipped a glove on, lifted a handful of green fodder into the slit at the top of Missy's cage.

He raised his voice as Sylvia focused. "And these little darlings are called ‘Dopey Joes,' the only indigenous mammalians found on Camelot so far. They may hold the key to a treasure trove of—ow!"

Missy snapped her sharp little teeth into his glove, and Cadmann struggled to twist it free without breaking her furry neck.

"Bad girl." Sylvia laughed. "No dessert for you. You can't just eat the meat and ignore your vegetables—"

"Hah hah. Funny lady. That's it. I'm through." He pulled off his glove and threw it at Carlos, who caught it and thoughtfully examined the rip in the fingertip.

"Not exactly sheep, are they, Senora Weyland?"

"Baa baa." Mary Ann took Justin to Sylvia. "Unhook that camera and give it to Carlos. Will you take Justin? I want to talk to Cadmann."

There was a quick, clumsy exchange of burdens, and Mary Ann hooked her arm through Cadmann's.

"Carlos and Sylvia staying for dinner?" she asked. He heard her distantly, but gazed up at the expanded house, strong and solid in the warm Avalonian sunlight.

Up at the top of the hill, Gregory Clifton's bronzed, corded body arched, swinging a pick to break up resistant soil.

As with Carlos, the violent action and backbreaking labor of the pasts months had burned out Greg's hatred and healed his emotional wounds. Cadmann found it easy to respect that response, that need.

"Are Carlos and Sylvia staying?"

"Sure."

Mary Ann took his hand and led him to the edge of the bluff. They looked down over the valley. They had done so very much, and given time would do more. He didn't have to close his eyes to visualize the march of humanity across the valley, the slow spread of their cities. His grandchildren might live to see a city of a hundred thousand where once only jungle had sprawled.

But false heroes wouldn't help. Especially if they were used as a blind for guilt and uncertainty.

"I'm worried too," Mary Ann said quietly.

"I'm sorry. Am I upsetting you? It's nothing, really."

"You have your reasons, I have mine." He held her tummy and frowned.

"I think you think I'm a little crazy."

"Pregnant women are supposed to be a little crazy. What's my excuse?"

"Don't need an excuse, you've got reasons, silly. I just know that something still bothers me about... Cad, I look around and the picture's wrong,"

"It's an alien planet. Didn't anyone tell you? Two moons, bluer sunlight, critters and plants straight out of Oz—"

Sylvia moved up beside her, cradling Justin in her arms. His hair was pale straw, and he seemed to fit comfortably into a shoulder harness. He nursed contentedly at one discreetly covered nipple. "I know what you mean," she said. "We're still working on the corpses. I don't understand enough about grendels yet. I'd give anything to have one alive. If we'd known that they could burn themselves up like that, we might have cooled the last one off with water."

"It was that hot?"

Sylvia laughed. "It cooked itself."

"Heat. Fire," Mary Ann muttered.

"What?"

Mary Ann cuddled close to Cadmann. "I remember... I did a summer of study in the forests in Wyoming. And they told us about fires. It all seems like a million years ago." Cadmann hugged her comfortingly as she searched her memory, struggling to make the unlikely connection. "They told us about what happens in fall. Then, a forest fire that seems to be out can smolder under a mat of leaves. You can't see it. You can't smell it. But it's spreading underneath. It can surround you. And then suddenly break up to the surface, and whoosh!"

"Shh... "

"I'm so glad you're here," she whispered. "I'm so glad you're mine. Don't let anything happen to you, Cadmann. I'm not sure I'd know how to go on. I'm not sure I'd want to."

He was aware that Carlos and Sylvia were nearby, watching, and was also aware when they turned away to give the two of them privacy. For a moment Cadmann and Mary Ann were in their own secret world of warmth and familiar smells.

"Come on," he said soothingly. "Let's get dinner started for our crew."

The evening's meal was a simple affair, an open-air picnic around a roaring campfire. Decent-sized catfish and a huge samlon from the nets were the main course, cooked into a casserole with long-grain brown rice from the hydroponics garden down at the Colony. Carlos and Sylvia and Hendrick's four-man work team joined them.

Cadmann watched Mary Ann pick over her food. She had a strong appetite for rice and catfish, but couldn't bring herself to eat samlon. "More for the rest of us," he had teased her at first, but her glum smile told him that the joke had died.

Her eyes scanned from the edge of the bluff to the notebook at her side. From there to the Joe cages. Tonight the furry creatures chewed frantically at the wire and threw themselves against the wooden walls of their prisons.

Carlos watched them for a while. "The natives are restless. Do they think they're going to be dessert?" A branch popped on the campfire, and a cloud of sparks and oily smoke drifted up.

The night was a continuation of the phenomenally clear afternoon. A faint salt breeze from the ocean five miles west made the air clean and crisp. The twin moons were bright and unshrouded.

It should have been a night for laughter and song, but Cadmann felt another of his morose moods fall over him like a blanket. He couldn't seem to fight it.

Carlos tickled Justin, held the child for a few minutes, while Sylvia fed herself. The three of them seemed pretty damned comfortable together, and for a moment Cadmann indulged in pointless speculation.

Then Mary Ann took his hand and placed it over her swollen stomach, smiling wistfully as their unborn child thumped and bumped. "Floop floop."

"Kid's doing a half gainer in there."

"He loves you already, you know."

There was more sadness than joy in that conversation, and he didn't know why, didn't know how to deal with it. Crest of the Angeles Mountains. Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley spreading to opposite sides of a veranda. Carpets of light. Never again in my lifetime. Win something, lose something...

Hendrick Sills watched the four of them ruminatively. With his short, square-cut beard he looked every bit the Freudian analyst. "What's all the moping about?" he finally demanded. "We got a cracking good day's work under our belts."

"True enough," Greg said. His calm oval face was painted with the firelight. It was growing more difficult to remember him in that other time, on that other night, spewing jellied gasoline, the glow of madness in his eyes.

Carlos rose from the fireside. "I think that it's time for Sylvia and me to head back down."

"You could spend the—no, there's Justin."

Sylvia hugged Cadmann briefly. "Walk us to the Skeeter?"

"Sure. Mary Ann?"

"I'm a little tired. You go ahead."

He pushed himself up, helped Sylvia to her feet. As they moved away toward the eastern edge of the bluff, Hendrick's rough voice broke into song:

Banish the use of the four-letter words

Whose meanings are never obscure

The Angles, the Saxons, those hardy old birds,

Were vulgar, obscene, and impure.

But cherish the use of the weaseling phrase

That never quite says what you mean

You'd better be known for your hypocrite ways

Than as vulgar, impure and obscene...

Another breeze stirred the foot-tall rows of corn as they walked. Cadmann found himself humming with the song, and he linked arms with his two friends.