by Larry Niven
“Of course.”
He sighed. “That explains it, then.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Explains what?” Them’s fightin’ words . . .
How to phrase this? He decided on a tactful approach. “You were raised to conquer the galaxy. That’s kinda eighteenth-century Manifest Destiny ‘brave the frontier’ stuff. Hey,” he said. “I’m not criticizing. I can empathize. But for most of human history we needed every human being to do all he could, or the tribe suffered. All of our associations of ‘good’ with ‘productive’ arises from this. The growing welfare state was part of this, and it was resisted even when we had sufficient wealth as a culture. It took generations.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?”
“Depends on what you think human beings are. What’s the Godson perspective?”
She relaxed. Finally, she was back on familiar doctrinal ground, and confident. “We’re made for expansion. Discovery. The God Knot—”
Cadzie held his breath. Hadn’t Joanie said something about an odd turn of phrase? ‘THE God Knot’ was a different implication from the one she’d assumed. Be careful . . .
Softly softly catchee monkey . . .
“That’s important to you, the God Knot.”
She nodded, looked around. Lowered her voice. “We don’t talk about it to outsiders. Not much.”
“How about curious new friends, who just want to understand?”
He watched her make a decision of some kind.
“Well . . do you know what panspermia is?”
Boom. Sylvia’s voice in his mind. “Sure. That life didn’t begin on Earth. Started somewhere else. Some very smart people believe that.”
She smiled. “Yes. Very. Well . . it had to begin somewhere. Some central seed.”
“Like the singularity that exploded in the Big Bang?”
She was happy with him. Was obviously thinking he’s quick! “Yes. Just like that. Only this is where all life began.”
“Could it be the same point as the Big Bang?” Damn, now he was inside her argument, actually trying to understand.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does. Maybe.”
“But you want to control the galaxy so that Mankind can find this ‘God Knot’ place? What happens when you find it?”
“Everything,” she said, voice dreamy. “The next step in human evolution, maybe.”
He was a little stunned. What an amazing vision, what a reason to conquer the stars. It made a kind of sense, if you accepted the initial premise. The rest . . all followed. To evolve, we had to find the place where life began. To do that, we had to control the galaxy. To do that, every generation had to push forward, and forward . . .
“Protestant work ethic to the nth. Pilgrim’s Progress. I get it. What you need to understand about us is that you’re seeing Maslow’s Hierarchy in action. If you have the basics taken care of, most will start asking the next questions, and find something useful to do.”
“Like . . surf?”
“Or teach surfing.”
“Or sleep in the sun.” He suspected she thought him slightly mad.
“Kinda sorta, yes.” And that was where they left it, but Cadzie knew there would be more to say. Eventually she’d catch Piccolo cleaning up Surf’s Up’s garbage . . .
Trudy had been open, but now he could feel her closing up again. He’d pushed too hard, she’d gone too far. He needed to give her room.
He excused himself and wandered over to where Toad was checking his grendel gun. “Problem?”
“Ah . . I think it threw a little to the left. Just checking things out.”
Cadzie threw him a beer pod. “Catch.”
Toad snatched it from the air. “Thank you, sir.”
Cadzie leaned against the fence, looking down on Toad, whose rifle was disassembled on a blanket before him.
“So . . what do you think?” He gestured at the gathering.
“About our guests?”
Cadzie nodded. “You’ve been watching. Everything. Wanted your unfiltered opinion.”
Toad levered himself up from the ground, and slouched against the wooden fence at Cadzie’s side. Sipped from his pod. “I’ve probably spent more time around them than anyone.”
“You met them first.”
“They’re . . true believers. The leaders are scary competent. Pleasant, sociable, but make no mistake about that—part of the politeness is programmed.”
“Smart?”
“Yeah. Smart.” He smiled. “Probably not as smart as us, on average, but the leaders are very bright. Marco is . . charismatic. Clever. Not exactly a genius. But they’ve said things that make me suspect that those million eggs they’re carrying weren’t a matter of the best and brightest.”
“No?”
“Nope. It was finances and politics. This is how they funded the trip. Followers paid a hundred thousand dollars minimum each to send a fertilized egg. They raised billions like that, and that selected for being fanatical believers, a bit gullible, not necessarily ‘smart.’”
“But the two are not mutually exclusive.”
“Yeah, but the Venn diagram looks more like an ‘eight’ than a pair of concentric circles.”
“What do you think they think of us? Really?”
Another smile. “They like us. They were happy to see us, very happy. But they wonder why we haven’t made more babies. Why we haven’t spread more thoroughly over the mainland. They also think we’re primitive. I can tell. They’re polite about that, but it oozes out. I’ll bet their private conversations are polite, but not tremendously respectful.”
“Primitive. How?”
“Man, you should see their tech. The fabricators alone made me drool. They gave us one, and the patterns to make more. In a week, we’ll have three of them. The tech is changing everything. Our world will never be the same.”
“I believe it. Anything else?”
“They are suspicious of Cassandra. Cassie broke communications, didn’t tell us what was coming until it was unavoidable. We haven’t told them why she was crippled, so they look at her original specs—which were public record—as opposed to performance, and assume we didn’t take good care of her.”
Cadzie flinched a bit.
“Sorry about that,” Toad said, looking a bit sheepish.
“You were part of it?”
A regretful nod. “In the sense that I kept my mouth shut, yeah. Before my time, most of it. I mean, I used her for navigation, so I knew she wasn’t dysfunctional. Not totally, anyway. We have to make some decisions now.”
“What kind?”
“Well . . there’s gonna be a shitload of information once she talks to the Godson computer, completes diagnostics, maybe upgrades. We’re going to be flooded with it. More than we can handle. But . . I don’t think we want to interface with the Godson machine completely. Would tell them too much about our internal politics, while theirs are still kinda mysterious.”
“So they think we’re lazy, and a little stupid, and poor. Wow.”
“And from their perspective, maybe we are.”
“About to get poorer, or richer? I mean, we built a trade economy based on the idea of plenty . . but also with minimal tech. They have a scarcity mindset, but all the goodies anyone could want. I’m sorry, but if there is a natural resource in short supply, they’re going to end up with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Take my Uncle Carlos. He’s created a life where he earns luxuries with his carvings. What happens when fabricators can make anything he can?”
Toad took another swig. “I’d assume that they can’t fully imitate the materials, and the fabricators can’t create an original work without a human guide. Practical value goes out the window, replaced by rarity value.”
“Let’s hope so. I mean, I read about poverty in the old days on Earth, but I never thought of myself as poor. A little late to start.”
As always, in time day surrendered to nigh
t, Avalon’s sun dying and birthing a billion stars. The kids and young adults had gathered around campfires.
Marco was a natural magnet, and drew every eye and ear when he spoke. The current discussion around him was about the huge creatures on the veldt.
“—And the scribes? We saw them before we entered your system. I mean, we saw ‘writing.’”
Joanie leaned in. “Must have freaked you a bit.”
Marco twinkled at her. “So . . it’s mating patterns?”
“Absolutely. Every species has them, you know.”
A wink. “I’ve heard.”
Joanie broke eye contact. “So . . they’re pretty solitary most of the year, but in mating season start following each others’ pheromone trails. The female senses the curve of the male’s path, cuts across it to shorten the arc until she’s close enough to either get ahead of him or wait for the wind to shift to release her own. Then she drops behind. He releases a sperm packet, she glides over it, and that’s romance.”
“I like our way better,” he said.
Entering the dolphin pen was easy for cthulhus. The maze of fencing wasn’t complicated even to a dolphin; it must be meant to stop lesser minds, the predators of the deep ocean. Whast and Insel came alone tonight; the rest of the school maintained a loose link through the magnetic mind.
Dolphins were hard to talk to. Whast could manage some of the wheeping noises, but he couldn’t tell the animated torpedoes apart. He just broadcast:
*Unschoolmates, the walkers are active tonight.*
One of the torpedoes answered. *We perceive this. The walkers have multiplied.*
*We perceive that they too use fire.*
*Yes, for similar purpose, to smelt their food.*
*For nothing else?*
*They do not tell us. They do not speak well. We see nothing of their inland uses for fire, but we see their toys. The latest walkers have new toys.*
*We too made wonderful toys, made using fire. Now all is forgotten.*
One of the dolphins whistled, *Itchy/Irritating. We cannot grasp the best of their toys with anything but our tongues and teeth. You jets can grasp, but you have forgotten.* The next whistle and wiggle was rude.
Whast said, *They hide a tremendous moving mass of magnets behind a wall. Magnets are spiritually important.*
*They hide us behind a maze. Walls are their skill.*
*The maze will not stop you. Come, explore. We will guard you in the deep beyond. The eaters will not harm you.*
*We know the walkers better. We wait for their guidance.*
♦ ChaptEr 22 ♦
on the veldt
Cadzie loved the controls of Red One, one of the Godsons’ new autogyros. Their own skeeters were being refurbished, and after completion would probably make the mainland trip just fine . . but there was something to be said for shaking the dust out of new equipment. Maybe in the early days on Avalon their own machines had handled this well, but not in his lifetime, at least not since he’d been flying. This was heaven. His three passengers didn’t know the difference, but he was glorying in not having to keep half his attention on keeping up with the newly unfreighted Godson Skeeter Blue, even though it was a next-gen version of the utility craft.
He banked over the main colony, feeling a slight sense of unease push back against the simple pleasure of flight. This wasn’t a trip to Horseshoe Falls, or even to Aaron’s encampment. This was the Veldt, hours deeper into the continent than he had been in a decade.
Grendel country.
Home of the only creatures on the planet that gave humans nightmares. Creatures so fierce that the only Avalonian life that could stand before them were the titanic, armored scribes. And other grendels, of course. Even with all their firepower, and his new and uber-confident companions, Cadmann Sikes was ill at ease.
They circled above the Godson’s encampment. Two dozen buildings had been erected. Living quarters, dining hall, storage sheds . . and a building with a stylized cross and circle above its door.
Cadzie looked thoughtful. “The church is one of the very first things you built,” he said to Marco. The former actor was actually good company, and a raconteur.
“It is the center of our world,” he said. No theatricality to this statement. “It’s why we came.”
Cadzie wheeled out, headed east. “I’ve heard different stories about that. What’s yours?”
“What do you know about us?” Marco asked.
Cadzie shrugged. “Not that much, really. Since we found out about you, I’ve researched it a little.”
“And?”
“When my grandparents left Earth, the Godsons were, well, thought of as sort of eccentric. A crossbreeding of Abrahamic religions, with a dollop of zen and some other stuff.”
“Eccentric,” Marco chuckled. “That’s a tactfully chosen word.”
“I try.”
Marco pointed down at a cleared space, foundations laid but no walls in place yet. “Over there—we’ll put the nursery. Creches. Before long we’ll have children everywhere. It feels like forever since I’ve seen a boy chasing after a girl. It should feel like just last week . . but it doesn’t. Strange. The sound of laughter. This is a good world, I think.”
“So what happened? On Earth?” Cadzie said it casually, but that really was the question in all their minds. What had happened on Earth since their parents and grandparents left?
“We were crowded out. When the early Mormons wanted a place to make their own, they could go to the frontier. We wanted to raise our children as we wished, according to our beliefs . . but had to do it while living among unbelievers.”
Sort of the way some of the Starborn had chosen to head over to the continent. And pretty much stay there. “That had to rankle. Here, if you don’t like us, you can choose a million other places to be.”
“Exactly, but we didn’t intend to come here. Probably the captain did, but he didn’t tell anyone that. We were going to be the only settlers on a brand new world.” Some of the brush had been cleared below. A near square kilometer burned away by Minerva engines. High-tech swidden agriculture.
“So what happened?”
“Nobody really knows, but once we heard your message, the captain decided to change course.”
Understandable, Cadzie thought. “No. I mean back on Earth before you left.”
“Well, if you can’t beat the man, you become the man. We were a wealthy order, and began to insinuate ourselves into politics, industry . . anything that would give advantage. Influenced elections—all legally, of course, but it got frightening to the small-minded.”
“I can believe that.” That’s what he said. But he was thinking that there was probably a little more to the story.
“Things came to a head when we actually took over a few small countries in the Pacific Islands, and Southeast Asia. Actually had a seat on the Global Commission. That rankled, and there were real threats. And then came a solution.”
Cadzie chuckled. “Go west, young Godsons?”
Marco seemed to get the 19th-century reference, and Cadzie took pleasure in that. With his supernaturally good looks and ceramic white teeth, it was good to see a brain lived in that head. A consistently pleasant surprise. “Pretty much. Someone studied us enough to know that we embrace the idea that the stars are mankind’s destiny. And helped us reach for them.”
“And here you are.”
“And here we are. But we’re not a burden, and we didn’t come emptyhanded.”
“Quite the opposite. You have skills, and genetic diversity, and 3D printers. You came bearing gifts.”
Something about what he’d said tweaked Marco a bit. The former star changed the subject. “These . . ‘grendels’ almost tore you apart. They did that much damage, and you never saw it coming?”
“No. We had one man who saw it.”
“Your grandfather, right? Cadmann Weyland?” An answering nod. “I think I would have liked him.”
“I think you could have played h
im.” Standing on a box, Cadzie thought.
“Did you know him?”
Cadzie sighed. “Only by reputation.”
The flight from mainland to colony generally required forty minutes. The new, and newly refurbished skeeters made the trip in a little less than half an hour.
“No question about it,” Cadzie said. “The new machines are better.”
“Those spare parts are coming in useful, are they?” Marco asked.
“Very,” Joan said from the back seat.
Skeeter Blue, flying in parallel forty meters away, had a trickier time of it: suspended beneath the autogyro by an unbreakable nylon tether was a wooden crate holding something heavy.
“I’ve never actually flown one of these,” Marco said.
Cadzie could see it now: Marco heroically piloting a skeeter on the new planet, his faithful drone hovering just behind. And above. And beneath, getting shots that would thrill audiences around the . . around . . .
Well, would look great on movie night at the colony.
“Not even on Earth? That’s a surprise.”
“They fly themselves. There are traffic laws.”
They traveled faster than the waves beneath them, and by five minutes after he first sighted land, they were over a rocky beach about twenty klicks south of Horseshoe falls. He had been grateful to head directly for a landing pad the last time they were here. This time, his skeeter was so stable that he took them for a tour of the dam, collecting the appropriate “ooh”s and “aah”s before heading inland.
♦ ChaptEr 23 ♦
scribes
The taste of the morning’s coffee was still on his lips when Joan said, “Cassandra gives us grendel heat signatures thirty klicks out.”
Marco took his drone sphere out of its pouch, checked its power reading. “That’s the plain, right?”
“That’s right,” Cadzie replied. Marco flicked a switch on the drone, and a strip around its equator began to spin. Wings emerged, and it rose to hover above his palm. When he held it outside the skeeter, the drone took off, tracking them in to capture swooping, dramatic shots.
Before they reached the plain the two skeeters had to glide through valleys and along mountain crags, disturbing web-winged demireptiles who wheeled skawing in indignation and then curiosity. “Those are the same critters we have on Camelot, aren’t they?”
