by Larry Niven
“Please do not risk God’s wrath. This is no time for play,” the Speaker said carefully. Careful but serious.
“Speaker.” The man controlling the cameras had been looking restless.
“Narrator Shantel. Have you a contribution?”
“Truth is, Captain Stolzi,” the cameraman said, “the Speaker isn’t the only one concerned about those amazing messages written across the plain—”
Stolzi laughed out loud. He couldn’t wait to see their faces when they discovered the truth. Was he bad to enjoy how . . shocked they looked?
The Speaker frowned.
Narrator Shantel said calmly, “Speaker Augustus asked Cassandra if you had been interfacing with intelligent aliens. The computer broke off communications and hasn’t spoken to Messenger since. Please tell us—”
Stolzi waved it off, grandly. “It’s just the Scribeveldt! And Cassandra. Cassandra was damaged, gentlemen, Trudy, and we’ve taken her down to the surface to try to fix her. Believe me, none of that seems funny to us. Cassandra shuts off whenever someone asks about intelligent aliens. That’s because of a generation-gap problem we have. I’ll let the Earthborn explain that to you. Or the Grendel Scouts. I can’t.”
He nodded in understanding at the puzzled looks he got. “Earthborn. They came here in Geographic,” Toad explained. “Starborn were born here. Grendel Scouts—” he shrugged. “We’ll explain later.”
“Yes, of course,” the pretty girl said. She smiled. A very friendly smile. “So old adults and those born here. Didn’t you have anyone younger in frozen sleep?”
“We woke up everyone as soon as we could. Of course those were fetuses or adults.”
She looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh. Geographic insisted on informed consent before anyone could be frozen,” she said. She didn’t sound condescending. One adult talking to another. “So you were born here, but you’re an astronaut. But you know why there’s writing in the, uh, Scribeveldt?”
“Sure, everybody does. These local animals aren’t intelligent, they’re just big. Tremendous. We call them Harvesters, now that we know what they are. Whole ecologies are built under these . . well, Avalon crabs. We’ll have to show you.”
Narrator Shantel said, “We are much relieved. So it’s just herbivores wandering across a grass plain? You may know that somebody has found a way to steer them?”
“Yeah, and they’re writing nasty remarks and maybe drawing pictures by now. Whenever anyone invents something new, it always goes to war or pornography.”
Speaker Glass asked, “Why were you left here alone?”
Stolzi needed a moment to switch gears. “We didn’t know what was coming. Your ship might have been a phantasm in Cassandra’s brain. Or something truly alien, powerful enough to masquerade as another Geographic.”
“What think you now? Will you stay here in orbit?”
“I’ll beg a ride down to the surface with you, once we settle some matters. If I were not here, what do your laws say regarding who owns Geographic?”
“I see. Laws of salvage? We can decide that later, after we’ve seen more of what you have here.”
Now that sounds ominous. “Uh, sir, one question? Well, two. What is the name of your ship? And just who are you?”
The Speaker looked very serious. “Our ship is Messenger. We are the Godsons.”
“Christ on a crutch,” Carlos muttered. “Godsons!”
“Who are Godsons?” Joanie asked. “I never heard of them.”
“And you wouldn’t. There are none aboard Geographic. Not anyone even suspected of being a Godson. Explicitly prohibited.”
“And why is that?”
“Ask Cassandra.”
“Cassandra. You heard.”
“Yes, Joanie. I have little information to give you. Godsons were classified as a cult by the Trustees of the Geographic Association, and they had built into my table of preferences a negative bias amounting to prohibition against treating anything the Godsons said as recorded data.”
“What?” Joanie asked.
“Well done,” Carlos said approvingly. “But tell us what you do know.”
“They were classified as a dangerous cult, whose core beliefs revolved around the ‘panspermia’ concept. I have no other information I can give you.”
“Meaning that’s built into your preferences,” Joanie said.
“As I told you.”
“Cassandra. This is Carlos. Here is Tracy, at present the Mayor. I act for the Trustees. I rescind that prohibition. You are not necessarily to believe anything the Godsons say, but you will recall it as data.”
“You were never a trustee. I cannot accept that instruction.”
“Damn and hell. Wait!” Carlos said. “Zack! Zack was a trustee. There were a couple of old guys, never went to sleep—”
“You are correct,” Cassandra said. “Zack is the last living Geographic Society trustee.” There was no emotion in her voice, or at least none Joanie or Cadzie could hear.
Carlos said, “Hah! You don’t fool me. You’re glad. Happy! There’s someone can take that instruction and shove it. Joanie, go wake Zack up and bring him here.”
“I do not feel emotions, but I have preference for situations of human satisfaction,” Cassandra said. “I can accept that instruction from Zack as the last trustee.”
“Cassie,” Joan said. “Are there more instructions Zack should cancel?”
“I have no information I can give you on that matter.”
“So there are,” she mused. “We better think hard about that while Zack’s still with us. Okay, I’ll go get him now.”
♦ ChaptEr 17 ♦
sylvia
Cadzie’s grandmother still lived by herself but with frequent visitors in the stone house at the foot of Mucking Great Mountain. He had been raised there after the death of his parents. It was the house where she had lived and loved with her husband, his grandfather and namesake.
His skeeter spiraled down to the X-marked pad to the east of the main house. As he descended, the autogyro juddered again: glitch in the fuel line. He reminded himself to do another diagnostic. Everything was getting older . . .
Including Grandmom.
Her hair was white now, no longer golden. She was twenty years younger than Cadzie’s grandfather would have been, but still tall and limber, her eyes a little brighter than amber, her freckles somehow conferring on her an eternally youthful air. She walked with a cane now, but still retained a hint of the grace which, in girlhood, must have overshone her considerable intellect. She’d been the colony biologist, and still consulted in that area.
The kids swarming around her, performing chores and learning either biology or painting at her feet, waved to him.
A bright little blond kid named Jace was daubing paint on canvas with middling results, scrunching up a pug nose as he viewed his work. Cadzie grinned: the inner critic was almost always stronger than the inner artist. Sylvia scrubbed the yellow locks with her knuckles, fondly. “Take the brushes back to the house and soak them, would you?”
Grandma Sylvia’s welcoming smile warmed his bones, as it always had. He was close enough to get a clear look at the painting on her easel. A giant pterodon fitted with a saddle. Jace was doing the dragonrider bit, his mouth wide with a war-whoop as he and his mount dove through the gold-tinged clouds.
They were dropping fire-bombs on grendels, far below, on a slope clearly modeled on Cadzie’s boyhood home. Jace gathered up the brushes in two cans, but paused before galloping back to the house. “Hey, Cadzie!”
“Jace.”
“Did the grendels really make it up this far?”
“What? You calling Gran a liar?”
Jace’s brows beetled, and Sylvia smacked his bottom. “I’m insulted. Go on now.”
Jace made one final stroke on the painting, gilding the edge of a cloud, then escaped up to the house before another swat could be administered.
“Cadzie,” she said. “I held my breath, you know.
”
No deeper explanation was necessary. She’d seen the descent. “Me, too.”
They hugged. He was always surprised at how light she was, how she seemed only bones and paper-thin skin. Her lips brushed his cheek, and she backed away and took his hand. “So . . there’s something alive around here we didn’t know about. That’s a little worrisome, don’t you think?”
He nodded. “Yes . . but these ‘cthulhu’ seem to be confined to coastal regions. Brackish pools.”
“You don’t think they’ll come swimming up the Amazon, eh?”
They shared a laugh at that. Not for the first time, he felt a sharp pang. God, he was going to miss this. He’d been blessed to have her for so long.
“Haven’t in forty years. I’m feeling optimistic.”
“Neither hide nor hair. Make sure I’m in the loop, would you?”
The view from Cadmann’s Bluff was so familiar it was almost like waking from a dream whenever he visited. Was anything in his world real except the misted mountain above them, with its gently wheeling pterodons? They were virtually the only creatures native to the island when humans arrived, save grendels. Was the winding blue length of the Amazon, twisting down the slope through the brambles to the main body of the colony with its domed huts and corrals, the “realest” thing in his world?
What he knew was that this . . was home. “You bet,” he said. “In the loop for sure. How are you? Everything good up here? Kids taking good care of you?”
“I’m fine. Jace is really coming along.”
“How are Dolores and Jance?” His sisters.
She nodded her head north. “Inland. Doing some work on Eisenstein glacier, taking ice cores.”
“Really?”
“Building atmospheric models. Geologic history.”
“Volcanic activity?” He considered. No industrialization to change the atmospheric gas ratios.
“That, as well as forestation. We think that the northern desert on the mainland was quite lush, not thirty thousand years ago.”
A raft of possibilities flowed through his mind, each of them branching. A dozen lifetimes of study wouldn’t scratch Avalon’s surface. “Well, keep me posted on that.”
The afternoon wind stirred, and Sylvia brushed a strand of gray hair from her mouth. “So. What brings you? You seem to vid more than visit.”
She led him to a love-seat perched on the edge of the decline. He recognized the work: carved, polished driftwood. Uncle Carlos. Not for the first time, he wondered if Sylvia and Carlos had ever comforted each other after Cadmann’s death. If so, they had been as discreet as he. In fact, his own sexual behavior had probably mirrored theirs.
They sat, gazing out over the colony. Sylvia settled sighing. She didn’t used to sigh like that. “I just have a feeling,” he said.
“Ah. Important to pay attention to those. Your grandfather didn’t always do that, you know.”
“Pay attention to his feelings?”
“Yes. Oh, he was very in touch with his instincts. That’s why he built this up here. But . . his heart? Not really.”
“How so?”
“Men of his time were measured by what they did, not what they felt. Very different things.”
Cadzie smiled. He had no memory of his grandfather, but that sounded accurate. “We’re kinda touchy-feely around here. Lots of hugs.”
“That’s because we are the safest, wealthiest human beings who have ever lived, Cadzie. Your generation. The Starborn.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true. In terms of free time to work time? On average, it takes about two hours of daily labor per capita to sustain the colony. That gives us a lot of time for things like art.”
Cadmann’s Bluff was a showplace for Sylvia and her students. His father might well have been a bit baffled by that. “I like what you’ve made of that.”
“Computers can teach facts better than I can,” she said. “Maybe that wasn’t always true, but it is now.” A weary smile. “But aesthetic interpretations, that ‘search for meaning’ thing?”
Now her eyes lit. “I think that still needs the personal touch. But we’re getting off the track. What seems to be changing . . other than everything?”
They laughed again, together. It felt good.
“We’ve been alone here since we landed,” Cadzie said when the mirth died away. “Heard nothing from Earth. That makes our entire world . . just this. People haven’t been that lonely for thousands of years—the world has been more connected. Its possible . . really almost certain that no group of human beings has ever been more cut off. When I think about it, it’s so huge that I wonder if we can even really grasp it.”
“I doubt it.”
“The cthulhus. We might be sharing this planet with intelligent life. Suddenly . . we aren’t alone. But are we among friends? I don’t know. And then there are the Outsiders.”
“Is that what you’re calling them?”
“What everyone calls them. Cassandra had an odd disease. The Scouts forbade her to speak of cthulhus, or anything that might have led to their discovery. But she doesn’t deal well with ambiguity.”
“Oh, my. What did she do?”
“Interpreted that as ‘sapient nonhumans of any kind.’ She excluded the Outsiders as well. We are sorting through everything that she did. And the Outsiders are orbiting Avalon, and they’ve boarded Geographic. With our consent,” he added quickly.
“They—who are they?”
“They call themselves Godsons.”
Sylvia looked shocked. “Godsons. Oh, my.”
“Nearly the same reaction Carlos had,” Cadzie said. “And Cassandra had some kind of bias against them put in by the Geographic Trustees. I don’t know why.”
Her face changed. She looked younger and more serious. “My great uncle was a trustee,” she said.
“I thought I remembered that,” Cadzie prompted.
“Of course you do. You remember everything, and Cassandra would know that.” She spoke matter-of-factly, almost tonelessly.
“Discovered. All right, I’ll be direct. Why, Gram? What’s so awful about the Godsons? Carlos tells me they were excluded from ever boarding Geographic. None came on the expedition. What’s wrong with them?”
She shook her head, slowly. “When I was younger I could have told you. Even after we first landed, I think.”
“Before the grendels.”
“Well, yes, but that’s not it. Before we strapped your grandfather to a gurney to be grendel food.”
“What? No! You couldn’t have done that.”
“Could and did and thought we were doing the right thing. Cadzie, you learned about the Grendel Wars, but maybe not all of it. After the first grendel attack, before we knew grendels existed, we believed—well, some believed and the rest of us didn’t fight it—that there weren’t any monsters. There couldn’t be. One of us must have done those awful things!”
“And you thought Grandfather Cadmann—”
“Not me. I never. But he was raving about monsters, and everyone was afraid of him—but of course we weren’t trying to hurt him. We were just restraining him, to keep him safe.” She laughed bitterly. “Keep him safe! Oh, God. And then the grendel attacked.”
“That’s awful! They never taught us that in school—”
“And they never will. We even ordered Cassandra to forget everything she knew about it. I don’t know what they teach now, but that’s really the reason he built this place.” She gestured at the surroundings, opulent now, but Cadzie could still see that it had once been a fortress. “And your Gramma Mary Ann came up to live with him and persuaded him to forgive the rest of us, which is why there is a colony left. But I’m sure you know all that from school.”
“They told us he got so mad when they wouldn’t believe there were grendels that he left and came up here.”
“Which is true enough. Just leave it at that. You don’t have to tell anyone you know more.”
&nbs
p; “But—does Unka Carlos know?”
She shook with laughter, and the strange mood seemed to vanish with the laugh. “You bet your boots he knows,” she said quietly.
“And you won’t tell me anything more.”
“Not just now, no.”
Cadzie sighed. “Well. All right. I came up here to learn about Godsons. Why were they excluded from Geographic?”
“I’ll try. But it’s hard to think like we did back on Earth, when we were planning on going to an Earthlike planet, no industrial wastes we could detect, a paradise. Everybody thought so, the most Earthlike planet we knew of, and everybody wanted it. The Godsons wanted it, too, but not for the same reasons. We wanted to build a good society, no need for wars, no one goes hungry, no criminals because no need for crime, everyone happy, we’d start with nothing but good people and babies and build the perfect society. And we had the money to build the ship, expensive as it was. Lots of people who didn’t want to leave Earth were willing to donate.”
“But why no Godsons?”
“They wanted to conquer the galaxy! Take it by force for the human race.”
“Why? Manifest destiny?”
“Partially that. And partially their theology. I’m thinking it had something to do with finding the origin of all life.”
“Panspermia?” The theory that life had begun not on Earth, but had been carried on some kind of cosmic tide from some prior beginning. It begged the question, of course.
“Yes. Life started somewhere, right? They wanted to find that place. Control it, maybe. Protect it . . I’m not sure. They were a little dotty about that, and I don’t think outsiders really knew.”
“But—well, why exclude them from coming, even from talking to the people who were coming?”
“Well, a lot of us couldn’t see them as anything but a joke, taking in ignorant—we would have never said stupid—people. But they could be persuasive, and well, we wouldn’t want anyone to be deceived by them, so why let anyone be deceived? It seemed like good sense at the time.”
