Starborn and Godsons

by Larry Niven

  Cadmann Sikes, generally known as “Cadzie,” had only gotten to bed an hour earlier, returning to his cabin in the mountains south of the main colony following a three-day hike in the dense forest further toward the setting sun. The communicators woven into his collars and necklaces were always in the default “on” position, as they were for most colonists. They could be turned off for privacy of course, and then only Cassandra could find you . . unless you disconnected the power or left them at home.

  It was hard to get permanently lost on Avalon.

  Cadzie was twenty-eight Earth years, an intermediate age, born on Avalon after the Grendel Wars to Joe Sikes, an Earthborn, and his wife Linda, a daughter of the colony’s de facto leader, his own namesake. His parents had been killed by speed-enhanced “bees” on the mainland in his infancy. His revered grandfather had been killed before Cadzie could know him but he was well aware of the original Cadmann’s position, and he knew that many expected him to grow into his image as potential leader. It showed in the training he had received since he was less than ten years old, a broad introduction to almost everything that was going on, encouragement to dig just a little deeper, work just some little harder, gentle reminders that his grandfather had saved the colony and one day it might be his turn to do the same. He was not sure he wanted that responsibility—or rather, he had doubts about his ability, or for that matter the need for anyone to be the leader, or why anyone would want to be.

  He was tall, with hair the color of fire glimpsed through smoke. His wiry frame was as lean as the rockclimber he had been since childhood, and this planet was his home. Ninety-five percent of the surface remained a mystery, and while ugly surprises always remained a possibility, humanity had overcome all the most pressing threats. There was more to life than mere survival.

  “Unka,” he groaned. “Up early?”

  “Yes. And I’m going to be up late, too.” Uncle Carlos looked tired. It was difficult to acknowledge, but Cadzie’s second-favorite member of the colony had gotten old, his coffee-colored scalp barely covered by thinning hair. Old, or well on his way. Oh, well, it happened to everyone lucky enough to survive, he supposed.

  “Something big?”

  “It doesn’t get bigger,” Carlos said.

  That response banished fatigue. “Gramma’s all right?” he asked quickly.

  “Both are fine. It’s not that kind of news.”

  “So tell me.”

  Carlos clucked reluctantly. “I can’t. We have a formal chain of information flow, Cadzie. I have to tell Aaron first. And Aaron zapped his chip. He’s off the grid.”

  “Sounds like him,” Cadzie said, relentless now. “What is it?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I can find him. But you’re going to tell me what this is about.”

  “Not over the radio,” Carlos said. “This has to be secure. Come here and see me. If you’ll be my personal envoy, I’ll share the information.” Muy mysterioso.

  Cadzie rubbed his stubbled chin. What could be so important? Surely his honorary uncle could set up firewalls on Cassandra to protect the line . . but no, Cass had been in decline for at least a decade, and she was riddled with hacks. Every kid in the colony made his bones penetrating her security. It was a joke.

  “You’re killing me.”

  “And?”

  “And . . I’ll be there in an hour.” Cadzie groaned, then killed the link and searched beside and under his bed for his muddy boots.

  Everything creaked. Hadn’t he been able to climb all day and party all night, not so long ago?

  Hell, he was getting old, too.

  ♦ ChaptEr 2 ♦

  the dam

  Just three hours later, Cadzie was gliding above a white-capped eastern sea, navigating 300 kilometers to the mainland in Blue Three, his favorite autogyro. What Uncle Carlos had shared with him sent his head buzzing hotter than the 100-hp engine blurring the rotors. He was so lost in thought that he barely noticed when the engine began to sputter.

  “Damn!” A quick check of the panel right above eye level indicated sixty percent pressure in the fuel line. He adjusted the liquid hydrogen flow, pushing it up to the red line to pressure past the obstruction. It was dangerous, flirting with overload, but he would rather blow a housing later than risk crash-landing in the ocean now. He was equipped to deal with anything the land had to offer, but some of the inhabitants of the deep seas remained a lethal mystery.

  Fortunately, that seemed to do it. After another few minutes he felt he had things under control and backed off on the pressure, and ten minutes after that, he sighted the saw-toothed coastal mountains and breathed a sigh of relief.

  He touched the control panel. “Horseshoe Landing, this is Blue Three, Cadmann Sikes.”

  No answer. He was about to call again when he heard, “Horseshoe Landing here. Go ahead, Cadzie.”

  Cadzie thought he recognized the voice but he wasn’t certain. Didn’t matter. “Sikes here with message for Joanie. Landing in five minutes.”

  By formal agreement, priority knowledge must be shared between the different branches of the increasingly splintered colony. No one was really “in charge” of the human beings on Tau Ceti IV, but there were recognized group leaders who had to be the first to know about important matters. Carlos learned things first because that’s who the AI they called Cassandra told them to. According to all accounts, Carlos had once been a self-indulgent man, only recently trying to live up to his role as de facto head of the colony centered on Camelot Island, but he was the closest thing to a leader they had.

  The radio crackled. Nasal voice. “Come on, Cadzie. Spill. What’s the big secret?”

  “Not this time. This one is for Aaron.” He had to see Aaron Tragon, and see him directly. The notion of talking to the man who had murdered his grandfather always tightened his stomach, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  Horseshoe Dam was designed along the same basic lines as the one at Earth’s Niagara Falls in the northeastern United States, but about half the size and capacity. Cassandra and the Earthborn who had been to Niagara said so; the Starborn didn’t care.

  Cadzie had observed every step in its construction, and it was an awe-inspiring sight. Ten thousand tons of crushed rock rendered to concrete poured over a steel frame, the steel smelted from iron ore dug out of the Snowcone Mountains a hundred and fifty miles northeast. It had taken ten years to build it, but within months it would come online for the very first time.

  And its power would be the heart of the mainland colony, once it rooted fully and began to spread its tendrils. All the power they would need for a generation without functional Minerva engines or any of the slowly failing fusion systems. It was a major step toward independence from nuclear technology with minimum effects on the Avalon ecology, and had been agreed to by nearly everyone.

  He buzzed Horseshoe, and then settled down onto the X-marked landing pad, just south of the roaring, churning maelstrom of the falls.

  The sun had crested the eastern horizon less than an hour ago, but the mini-colony was already alive. A real contrast with Surf’s Up, where it was unusual to hear a human voice much before noon.

  A dark-haired, light-skinned man a year or two younger than Cadzie came out of the ops shack, and began tethering the autogyro without being asked.

  Cadzie got out to assist. “Where’s Joan?”

  The Starborn, a bulky tech-head nicknamed “Toad,” helped him down from the Skeeter. Cadzie could never remember the real name. Martin? Marvin? His last name was Stolzi. He possessed a broad, rubbery frame that was deceptively athletic: he could dog-paddle for hours. In addition to being a jack-of-all-technical-trades, Marvin was certainly the best Minerva—astronautic—pilot still active, and probably would soon be the only one. Few born on Avalon had much interest in going to space. It used too many resources, and there was too much to do here below.

  Stolzi was the exception. “Toad” popped up anywhere in the colony there was an interesting
problem to solve, but he had never lost his sense of wonder about space. Probably inherited it, Cadzie thought.

  Toad jerked his thumb toward the top of the concrete tower a hundred meters north. “She’s in the control room.” Nasal voice: the guy on the call.

  Cadzie started the long climb up the concrete steps. One day, they’d have an elevator, but no hurries; they didn’t need elevators for those born on Avalon, and they didn’t need Earthborn in their power room. This project was all Starborn; no Earthborn had participated in it. Cadzie felt a twinge of pride as he viewed the Kong-size curved concrete wall.

  We built this! Of course, his part in the project had mostly been designing its sewage works. But that was a vital activity even if no one else wanted to do it,

  The tonnage of water cascading across the dam’s lip was an ear-numbing thunderstorm. He climbed scaffolding and steps slashed into the cliff face until he reached a steel door leading him into the rock itself. The air within was moist, bracing, prickled his skin. Echoes shivered the air, the rock walls were slimed with condensation.

  He climbed two flights to reach the control room overlooking the waterfall. The woman engaged with the main control panel was tall and broad-shouldered, a golden mixture of Aaron Tragon’s Nordic genes and something more Mediterranean. Sun-bronzed, she moved with what Little Shaka had once referred to as “an explosive delicacy.” She was Joan Tragon, and since her childhood they had never encountered each other without tension.

  A hearing board had ruled Aaron “Not At Fault” in Cadmann Weyland’s death, and the colony accepted that in a vote that wasn’t even close, a vote in which Cadzie had been far too young to cast a ballot. All the same, Aaron was responsible for Cadmann’s death. Cadzie had never been able to put aside the fact that jolly Joanie was the killer’s daughter.

  When she turned, her emerald eyes narrowed. Joan had been one of the regulars hanging around Cadmann’s Bluff as a child, greedily devouring Sylvia’s wisdom or Mary Ann’s ice-cactus cookies. So familiar she was almost a stepsister. But despite his two grandmothers’ urging to forgive her parentage, he had never fully warmed to her. As a natural consequence Joan was equally wary of him.

  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 an
d 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?”

  “Do you like samlon?” Aaron asked.

  “What? Well, yes, of course,” Cadzie said.

  “And what are samlon?”

  “The juvenile form of grendels—oh.”

  “Easy to forget, isn’t it? Back on the island, we farm samlon by caging some grendels as they grow to adolescence, let them lay and fertilize eggs, and kill them before they can kill us. Hard to be herders when you kill off your breeding stock every generation. Better to tame them. And the continent’s big and there are grendels everywhere there’s fresh water linked by streams. We have to live with them; don’t you think it’s a good idea to understand them better?” Aaron spoke in easy tones. Soothing. Almost hypnotic. His grendel-taming voice.