by Larry Niven
He’s said all this a hundred times, Cadzie thought.
“Never thought much about it, Aaron.”
“Why would you? Anyway, we had a little problem here a couple of days ago,” Aaron replied.
“Problem? What kind?”
“Attack on one of our herds,” Aaron said. He was speaking too casually, as if uncomfortable talking about it. “Three wild grendels using a pincer tactic. Killed two dogs and took a bison cow.”
The implications of that was disturbing as hell. “That’s . . really strange,” Cadmann replied. “They don’t usually cooperate. Were they some of yours?”
“No,” Joan said. “I heard about this. They seemed to act with forethought. We were lucky to kill them. Lucky it was only cattle, too.”
Cadzie had a notion. “Do you mind if I take one of the corpses back with me?” When there was no response, he continued, “The Shakas will certainly be interested.”
“If you wish,” Aaron said. “What brings you out here?”
“News. Excessively big news.”
The odd phrasing made Aaron pause. “And what would that be?”
“Someone’s coming.” Cadzie watched carefully. There always seemed something . . dead behind Aaron’s eye, almost like an alien peeking out from behind a human mask. Did he perhaps fancy himself part grendel?
“Coming where?”
“Here.”
“To the mainland?”
“To Avalon.”
Finally, the implication seemed to sink in.
“From . . where?”
“Cassandra’s not sure. Earth, we think.”
“A ship? A starship?” And now for the first time, real emotion mobilized Aaron’s scarred face. “How long have we known?”
“This morning. Cassandra called Carlos this morning, about dawn. He called me—”
“You? He called you?” Aaron’s expression didn’t change.
“Yes. Carlos tried to reach you, but you didn’t answer. He wouldn’t tell me over the air, so I had to go to his house, and then fly to the dam. Then I couldn’t tell Joan because of your blasted protocols, but she was the only one who knew where you were. This is the first she’s heard of it. You can get the rest from Cassandra.”
“What is it?” Aaron asked.
“A Geographic-size object, rapid deceleration, probable destination co-orbit with Geographic, origin unknown. The path is toward Sol, but not directly. It’s as if they started for a destination in our general direction, but somewhere along the line they changed course and headed for us. If you can get a better analysis out of Cassandra, go ahead and try. I can’t.”
“No wonder you look puzzled. What do—what does this presumed visitor say?”
“No communication detected. Cassandra assumes anything that big is manned, but she got no replies to messages. We’ve agreed to tell you before taking important actions, and—” He looked without much approval at the cages and other apparatus around him. “Carlos thinks doing anything more would be an important action. I assume you agree.”
Aaron fiddled with his communicator. “Cassie?” he asked.
“Yes, Aaron?” Cadmann couldn’t help noticing that Cassandra’s voice for Aaron was lower (sexier?) than the one she used for him. He wondered what that said about Aaron.
“What do you know about this approaching mass?”
“It is as Cadmann the Second described. Geographic-sized, decelerating, and on a path projected to match orbits with Geographic. It presumably changed course at least once assuming it came from Sol. There is no other reasonable assumption.”
“Artificial, then? Man-made?”
“The exact origin cannot be determined. Insufficient data.”
“Widen your parameters,” he said. “Make a guess.”
“I prefer not to speculate about extrahuman intelligence, Aaron.”
He frowned. “But it might be a starship?”
“That is certainly possible, Aaron.”
“And we don’t have communication with them?”
“Nothing to report at this time,” Cassandra replied. And disengaged.
Aaron grunted. “Odd,” he said.
Cadzie stepped into the breach. “By now Carlos will have informed the rest of Camelot. I see Joan is on the phone so I expect she’s telling the other Starborn.” Tragon’s daughter had stepped away. Her wristband pulsed a dull red, and she chattered excitedly into the air. Those wristband pulses were the only thing that told you someone was talking to another human being, not merely babbling.
Aaron spoke, perhaps to Cadzie and perhaps to the air, “A ship from Earth. When did they leave?”
“We don’t know?”
Aaron frowned. “Why not?”
Cadzie shifted uncomfortably. “We don’t know. They’re not answering.”
Joan and Aaron exchanged quizzical expressions. “Isn’t that strange?” Joan asked.
Aaron said, “I don’t know. Maybe. Cassandra may. The old girl is creaking a bit, but I have no real reason to doubt her.”
“Ummm . . .” Joan’s discomfort was obvious. With what? Him? Her father? The notion of visitors? Or something else? He couldn’t read her. She toed the dirt and stared off in the opposite direction.
“Do I?” Aaron asked. “Josie?” he called to his assistant. “Watch things here. I have something important to take care of.”
With Aaron sitting in the jump-seat behind Joanie, the autogyro’s engine made angry sounds as it labored back to the dam. Some private words between Aaron and his daughter had triggered a dark expression, followed by silence. Their combined weight strained the aging skeeter’s engines as they flew.
When they returned, she would not tell Cadzie what was going on, only that he needed to stay until dark, that there was something she wanted to show him. When he protested, she evaded direct answers by encouraging him to strip and repair the autogyro, offering him Toad and his assistants to dig in and clean the fuel lines.
Why was she so desperate to stall him? Why wouldn’t she speak? Was she playing a little tit-for-tat? He’d made her wait, so she was making him wait? No . . it seemed more purposeful than that. “Why are you trying to keep me here?”
She smiled with an odd, cool humor. “Oh, Cadzie. Maybe I’ve grown accustomed to your face.”
“That’s a relief.” He and Joan could rarely be in the same room for five minutes without rubbing each other raw. “What is going on?”
The kids exchanged an expression. Collie Baxter said, “I think it’s time.” Baxter was a year younger than Joanie, and like most of the other NextGen, followed her lead.
“Time for what?”
“For you to meet some friends.” Even among these, Collie had a reputation as a computer wizard. He was bigger than Cadzie, resembled a shaved bear, and his attitude was either truculent or . . what? Guilty?
Mysterious, Cadzie thought. And more serious than playful.
They led Cadzie and Aaron back to the dam, up through the back entrance and the spiral staircase. And from there to the observation booth. “What do you see?” Joan asked.
“Horseshoe Falls? The dam? Oh, hey!” An arc of ruby torpedoes flashed out of the water below the dam. They rose like rockets, keeping formation, over the rim of the dam and into the water upstream.
Joan snapped, “No, not just the speedfish!” She handed him a fat pair of night-vision goggles.
“That’s only the second time I’ve ever seen speedfish. Wow, they went right over the dam!”
He fiddled with the lens rocker, and now, finally saw something unexpected. Squid-shapes, crawling up the dam’s sloping wall. “What in the hell are those?”
Aaron’s single eye stared. Then he began to curse under his breath.
Joan’s lips twisted with a sheepish, lopsided grin. “We call them cthulhus.”
“Lovecraft? As in ‘In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’?”
“We . . um . . .” Joan cleared her throat. “Among the Star
born, we call the dam R’lyeh. Just among us.”
Aaron bit the word, “Cute.”
“When we first built the dam, it seemed to interfere with their ability to travel upstream . . we thought there must be a spawning ground up there, but now we know they only breed in brackish water, so we really don’t know why they want to go up this stream. They really want to, though. Just watch.”
Cadzie brought up his phone. “Cassandra, what am I looking at?”
“No formal name. Called cthulhus by the Starborn. Aquatic animals who breed in brackish water. First observed fifteen years ago.”
“They are using tools. What other tool-using activities do we know of?”
There was a noticeable pause. “Very few,” Cassandra replied in her never-changing voice.
“Have they been studied?”
“Ask Joan. I can’t tell you,” Cassandra said.
“What do you mean you can’t tell me?” Cadzie demanded. “You know who I am!”
“I have no knowledge to give you,” Cassandra said.
“That’s the weirdest conversation I ever had with Cassie,” he told Joan. “You heard?”
She frowned, a troubled expression. Or perhaps one of exasperation. Cadzie couldn’t tell. “I heard.”
She didn’t say anything else, and that was even more puzzling. He lifted the night glasses and looked more carefully. The creatures were big; maybe two meters long, but they could reach much farther. There was a gap where the ladder of the steps was replaced by smooth concrete. And . . were they carrying something?
As he watched open-mouthed, one of the squids extended a rigid pole of some kind (what was that? Bamboozle?) across a gap too wide for its sinuous arms to bridge, and then shimmied across, rather like an ape with more arms than a statue of Kali.
“Holy cow,” he heard himself mutter. “Those things are smart.”
Aaron snarled. “How could I not know this? Joanie? I knew the cthulhus were here, but—tool users? Fifteen years you hid this!”
“Yes, they are smart.” She ignored her father. “We estimate them to be as smart as chimpanzees. Maybe dolphins, but with better tool-using.”
“What the hell?” Cadmann watched them again. The pole-user looked as if it was chewing the far end of the bamboozle, and when it finished it climbed onward, and the next creature in line began the climb. The chewing action seemed to have fixed it in place. Regurgitating some kind of adhesive substance, perhaps? Something else?
He sat down, hard. “All right. What are we really looking at?”
“They communicate across a greater harmonic spectrum than dolphins, with what seem to be more discreet data packets, apparent repetition of words and phrases.” Joanie’s voice was flat.
“They have language?” He felt like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach.
“We think so, yes. It’s more complicated than the dolphin signals, so we’re confident that it is some form of communication.”
Her voice had been—formal, as if she’d been lecturing to a class. Cadzie waited a moment, but when it was clear that Joanie wasn’t going to say anything else, he spoke into his phone. “Cassandra. Tool-using creatures that resemble squid. Short summary. What do we know about them?”
“I have no knowledge to give you.”
“Cassandra. Do you mean you don’t know, or that you can’t tell me what you know?”
“I have no knowledge to give you.”
The room spun, and he felt as if he wanted to puke. He turned to Joan, fighting the urge to tense his fingers into claws. “How long have you known about them? I mean, wow. You just discovered them, right? That’s why Cassandra doesn’t know. This is huge.”
Collie looked sheepish. “Ummm . . no. We’ve known about them for, ah . . fifteen years.”
“I’ve known they existed for more than sixteen years,” Aaron said. “Maybe a bit more. Nobody ever told me there was any reason to learn more about them.” He looked quizzically at Joanie. “Apparently there was?”
“What the hell! You just found out they were intelligent though, right?”
“Ah . . no.” She couldn’t meet his eyes. “We’ve known that, since we first found them. You got there late that night, Aaron.”
Cadmann stared at her, disbelieving. There had to be a silver lining to this cloud, but he was having trouble finding it. “Are they . . herbivores?” Pretty please.
“Ah . . no.”
Cadzie chewed his lip. “Are they at least aquatic . . no, obviously they’re amphib.” What a mess. “Christ. I don’t believe this. All right. Tell me, please, that they’ve never hurt a human being.”
Joan looked away. “I can’t say that, either.”
“What? Who? When?”
“Jennifer? Tell him.”
Cadzie had barely noticed when the older woman entered. Jennifer Sharpton was one of the first Starborn, Aaron’s age, wearing a shapeless muumuu over a thin muscular frame. She’d been one of the den mothers when Cadzie had been a Grendel Scout. What was she doing over here on the mainland? At the dam?
“It was sixteen years ago,” Jennifer said slowly. “We lost Archie. My boyfriend. The cthulhus killed him at Surf’s Up. Aaron was there.”
Aaron gave a long, slow lizard blink. Somehow, Cadzie found his confusion comforting. “Long time ago. But yes, cthulhus killed Archie because he had a grendel painted on his board. Haven’t thought about it in a long time.”
“Archie’s surfboard had grendels painted on both sides,” Jennifer said. “Not the smartest thing to do, but at the time we thought it was . . cool. Wild grendel sightings are fewer here than in waterways not used by cthulhus. We figure this means cthulhus and grendels are natural enemies from way back.”
“So you kept them around like . . pets? Like dogs or something?”
“More like dolphins, I think. We try not to annoy them, but there are often dolphins and cthulhus hanging around the fence that keeps the dolphins in the bay. Anyway they’re pretty much smarter than dogs. How much smarter, we don’t know.”
“These things killed your boyfriend, and you’re okay with that?” Cadzie asked.
“I wasn’t at first. But it wasn’t their fault! It was that grendel image! I had to accept that. A mistake. And the hurt just . . faded.”
It was possible. Perhaps these creatures were not only smart, but hated grendels as much as he did. The enemy of my enemy is . . But why don’t I know this already? “Aaron, did you know all this?”
“Never asked,” Aaron said. “Jennifer told you true. Archie had grendels painted on either side of his board. Made me twitch. Cost me a board race. Must have driven the cthulhus nuts. That’s why there’s a rule about not having grendel images unless it’s a party of two and both are armed.”
“Only nobody plays with grendel images,” Jennifer said. “Not any more.”
Cadzie frowned. “When did this happen?”
Aaron laughed. “I don’t know, about the time you and Joanie learned to read, I guess. I was about your age, I remember that. It was a beach party. Your mother might have been with us, can’t remember. Before she was married, yeah, I think she was.” His eyes narrowed slyly. “Hey, I might have been your father, well, the father of her kid. Wouldn’t have been you, of course. We weren’t very careful then.”
Cadzie suppressed a flash of anger. They weren’t all that careful now. If a couple wasn’t ready to go over the falls, there were as always people who were ready, willing and able to raise babies. Cadzie’s grandmothers had certainly been eager. “So you didn’t tell anyone.”
Aaron’s mouth tightened. “Of course we did. They’d killed Archie! Couldn’t tell your father that. So we mentioned that there were some big squiddy things around Blackship, be careful where you swim. No big deal.”
Jennifer said, “They’re intelligent, and they belong on this planet. Belong more than we do! And my dad and your grandfather would have exterminated them, just as they did grendels on the island. I loved Archie, and he wou
ldn’t have wanted that. The Earthborn would have killed them all. All of them! So we didn’t tell anyone.”
Silence followed that statement, and lasted a long painful moment. “You understand, don’t you?” Joan asked. For the first time since her childhood, vulnerability had crept into her voice.
Aaron said. “Seemed like the right thing to do. I never learned they use tools. And now you say they talk to each other? Why don’t I know this?”
“Yes. How did you keep this secret?” Cadzie tried to keep his voice calm, but wasn’t entirely successful.
“We just made it forbidden information for anyone but the inner circle of the Starborn,” Jennifer said. Aaron snorted. “Some of the Starborn. It’s a graduation secret for the highest level Grendel Scouts like Joan. Our greatest secret. Those who don’t reach the top rank never find out.”
“I was a Grendel Scout leader,” Cadzie said calmly.
“Yes, and you’re Cadmann Weyland’s grandson,” Jennifer said with equal calm. “And you don’t keep any secrets from Carlos and you never will. Carlos and your father hunted down every adult grendel on the island. Every one of them.”
“And . . why are you telling me now?”
Joan said, very slowly, “We didn’t want to.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Jennifer said. “Joan called me and I flew over. I’m in charge of keeping this secret. Always have been.”
Cadzie looked completely puzzled. “So?”
“Because we think it might be connected with the visitors,” Joan said.
“The visitors . . how in the hell . . .” Then, comprehension dawned. “You think that there are no visitors. Because they haven’t communicated.”
“Yes.”
Cadzie thought fast. “Then you think that Cassandra is making an error. A pretty damned big one.”
“Well, she might.”
“And you think she’s making that error because . . .” Suddenly he understood. “Because you told her to lie. She knows about the cthulhus, doesn’t she? Of course she does.”
