Starborn and Godsons

by Larry Niven

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Human waves. They wanted to turn world opinion against the Pan Africans, headlines about starving refugees slaughtered by U.N. troops, etc. Cadmann’s people fought like their backs were against a cliff. They held their line and were relieved just in time. Together with the reinforcements they were eventually relieved. They broke the attack, but I think he was . . disgusted by the politics that created the slaughter. The story is that that led to his seeking a place on Geographic.”

  Cadzie thought, hard. “You know . . my uncle Carlos has a recurring dream about fighting a wave of grendels in a place that sounds just like Ngorongoro.”

  “That’s odd,” the Major said.

  “Not if my grandfather told him about his experiences.”

  The Russian nodded. “Then it would make sense, yes. Your grandfather was a fine man.”

  “He wanted to start over.”

  “Yes. He didn’t sign up for slaughter. He wanted to protect.”

  “And you fought in the same theater?”

  “I did.”

  “What happened?” Cadzie asked. “I mean, the war?”

  “There was a negotiated truce,” Tsiolkovskii said. “Between nationals and corporates. Both sides lost, both sides won. The battles on Earth are more legal and political than military now. That was one of the last great ones.”

  “What did you do in the war?”

  “Got blown to hell,” he said with a bitter chuckle. “Before that happened, I did my part. But I was . . almost killed. They gave me a choice of being crippled, or being frozen until the medical technology matured. They estimated ten years, and a cost of twenty million dollars.”

  “That’s a lot, right?”

  “More than a decommissioned military was prepared to pay,” Tsiolkovskii said.

  “So . . you seem fine. More than fine. What happened?”

  “The Godsons. They had brought some of their technology into an experimental program at West Point when I was doing an instructor stint there, and I’d said good things about them. They remembered, and asked if I would be willing to accept their help in exchange for service.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “Absolutely. I would be whole again . . and useful. A new adventure. Your grandfather would have understood.”

  “I think he’d have jumped at it.”

  “How did he die?” Tsiolkovskii asked, genuinely curious.

  “Some kind of fight with the man I was accused of killing, Aaron Tragon. Aaron was absolved. I was never satisfied with the verdict.”

  “But you didn’t kill him?”

  “No. Do you believe me?”

  Tsiolkovskii shrugged. “Not before. Now, I would. We might not get out of here. Not much reason to lie.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  Stype said, “Then this is pretty much a clusterfuck, isn’t it?” Cadmann looked around. He’d thought she was asleep.

  Tsiolkovskii ran a hand through his mane of thinning hair. An old lion, but still a lion. “It is hard . . to say how wrong we were. I suppose its a little late for words to mean much.”

  “Yeah. It is. Listen,” Stype said. “I don’t feel like a warrior right now. If we hadn’t hounded and hared you, this wouldn’t be happening. If we hadn’t let our Great Mission blind us to the smaller things . . .”

  “But it did.”

  Tsiolkovskii’s face darkened. “Officers cannot claim to have merely been following orders. I didn’t have the information I needed.”

  “You trusted us,” Stype said.

  “There’s that stuff the road to hell is paved with.”

  “The ‘good intentions’ thing,” Cadzie said.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “But it did,” Tsiolkovskii said. “Listen: we’re going to get the hell out of here.”

  There was a shout from the others, and Cadzie was called over to a spot under the open roof. Greg Lindsey waved down at him.

  “The help is on its way. ETA fifteen minutes. We can start pulling people up, but we need a rear-guard. What do you want me to do?”

  So Lindsey was taking orders from him now? There were two basic questions: did he want the strength of armor at the top pulling people? Or on the ground protecting them?

  “Stay up there, Greg. And start hauling.”

  Greg lowered ropes with loops for feet at the bottom. “Alright!” Cadzie yelled. “Strap the injured on, and then the youngest!” They sorted themselves out, and soon their unseen rescuers began to haul people up.

  Halfway through the evacuation the rock began to shift . . and grendels streamed through, answering the unspoken question: how badly did their inhuman enemies want their flesh? Apparently, quite badly.

  But this time, something new happened. The frantic humans who fled toward the walls were hunted down and killed; but the humans who fled back into the water found allies. Sleek tentacled creatures which had the ability to shock the demireptiles into overdriven frenzy, such that they foamed the water, snapping at their own tails and everything around them, until they died.

  Some grendels converged on the cthulhu, and several were torn trunk from tentacle. But the creatures fought a rearguard action alongside Colonel Anton Tsiolkovskii and the last two armored men.

  Tsiolkovskii had never been in a battle like this. No human had. And that meant no one had, ever. His two remaining armored men acted like human tanks, fighting with augmented strength and armor-piercing shells.

  Humans and aliens together, against something lethal to both.

  The water boiled with speed. The air reeked of blood and fear.

  Despite the miracle of cthulhus fighting for their new human allies, they were pushed back and then farther back. The rear-guard action slowly pushed them toward the wall. The only thing that kept them alive was the icy floor which denied the grendels any purchase. The grendels couldn’t control their actions, and under other circumstances the blurring, snapping monstrosities cannoning about would have been almost comical.

  No one laughed.

  Humans dangled from ropes as grendels snapped below. Those who could climb did so. The others prayed to be hauled up.

  The Godson armor was no longer considered invulnerable, but remained a miracle, the two men at the bottom emptying their magazines into the grendel horde.

  Cadzie, the Russian, Joanie and Major Stype were the last ones remaining on the ground. They saw the two armored men go down beneath a tide of grendels, shredded out of the armor as if dropped into the gears of a living machine. But they had served a mighty purpose: the last of the injured had ascended.

  Four ropes, four survivors: they began to climb. Below them, the cthulhus abandoned the fight, ceased functioning as a living wall and melted back into the cleared water.

  Joanie climbed as fast as she could, but the trials of the last days, the last terrible hours and minutes, had finally emptied her reserves. Her arms and shoulders were exhausted. She didn’t notice the rope swinging next to her until she felt something strike her side, and turned to see that it was Stype. Stype, conciliatory Stype, who hadn’t been quite so forgiving after all.

  Stype’s face was twisted into a rictus of sheer rage.

  “Major Stype! Stand down!” Tsiolkovskii roared from above them. Stype ignored him. Joanie saw in that moment that nothing would save her but herself, Stype coming after her, looking for this one final chance to kill the woman who had killed her love.

  Joanie saw the knife Stype had slipped from its sheath, held in her right hand as she had twisted the rope around her left wrist, twined it around her left ankle for support as she swung. Slashing at Joanie, slashing at the rope, at anything she could reach. Joanie twisted with all the power in her core, and instead of climbing, spun around Stype, arcing away and then back in fast, feet first, smashing Stype in the face.

  Stype slackened with shock and lost her grip. If she had dropped her knife and grabbed the rope with her right hand she wouldn’t have fall
en over backwards, feet still tangled in the rope, screaming, face now within snapping distance of a leaping grendel. What followed concluded with merciful speed. Joanie shuddered, then climbed.

  ♦ ChaptEr 63 ♦

  aftermath

  By the time the last three survivors reached the surface, rescue skeeters buzzed and bent grass and chased away harvesters. They bore armed men and engineers. The injured were already being evacuated, and Godsons who had never faced a grendel were taking command and giving orders to everyone but Anton Tsiolkovskii.

  Within another half hour, most of the dust had settled and the worst of the wounded gone. Cadzie found the Russian sitting and watching the action from a folding camp chair, surrounded by the surviving Godson troops. The Russian was wrapped in a greatcoat that made him look a little like an oversized Napoleon. He nodded greeting and shooed one of his men away from a spot beside him.

  Cadzie hunkered down. Part of his mind was trying to calm himself, sort through the horror of the last hours, knowing that new nightmares were on the horizon.

  But . . these demons would find a man who remembered he was a human animal, capable of baring his teeth.

  A deep grinding voice interrupted his thoughts. “We will need to lie about what happened,” the Russian said.

  “Why?” Cadzie asked.

  “Because the men who were not here, who did not see, will kill you, regardless of why it happened,” Tsiolkovskii said this without emotion. “The Godson troops must never know how many of us died at your hands. The flying things that ate our men . . .”

  “Bees,” Cadzie said. “We call them bees.”

  “They don’t sting? They bite?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bees, at least, can be a misadventure.” His men nodded. All had seen what he had seen, knew what he knew, and had accepted him as their natural leader.

  The others, the new ones, had no idea at all.

  Together in silence, the two men watched the coming and going of rescuers and engineers for a time. The alien city would have to be cleansed of grendels. Gas perhaps? Or would that risk the lives of their new allies? Smarter men and women than he would work that out. But eventually the depths would be explored, mapped. Perhaps repaired. There was much to do, and despite his soul-crushing fatigue, Cadzie realized that he was damned well going to be a part of that.

  Like his grandfather would have been.

  “I can live with that,” Cadzie replied.

  It took four days to convene a hybrid Godson-Avalonian panel. Most of the central colony was present in the main dining hall, and the proceedings beamed to every settlement on the planet.

  The Speaker’s hologram seemed simultaneously grave and relieved. “Cadmann Weyland Sikes, you are declared not guilty. And this panel apologizes to you for all that has happened. What we see is that communication between human beings united in general intent can still go so very wrong. But you and your people bridged communication between species.”

  The Speaker spoke on. “We, the Godsons, think of ourselves as great communicators. We were wrong. We thought that humanity was the only group worth saving. What we saw was an alien species, for reasons we do not understand, willing to die to protect us, protect our children . . .” He stopped, overwhelmed by emotion.

  Sylvia, a living presence in the main dining hall, seemed tired but intense. Zack’s death had awakened her from a long emotional slumber: the colony needed her. “We do not understand their motivations. But a species who treats our children as their own is worthy of respect, study. Friendship.”

  “Agreed,” the Speaker said. “We will continue to the stars. But we will also create a colony here, on the mainland, and with your permission a smaller settlement here on the island where we might retreat in emergency. This is a large planet, and we would like to share the responsibility of taming it.”

  Tsiolkovskii stood, thick fingers balled almost to fists, scarred knuckles resting on the table before him. “I request permission to remain here. I believe that the risk of another stint of freezing outweighs the benefits of my participation in the establishment of our new colony.”

  The Speaker looked like a man who had expected a gutpunch but was still dismayed by its impact. A man who knew that he had no real leverage to stop Tsiolkovskii from leaving them . . completely. This was a moment requiring real wisdom.

  “I believe . . .” he said carefully, “that the contingent of Godsons we leave here will need . . guidance.” He paused. “I believe you are not the only member of our inner circle who has made this decision.” It was clear that the Speaker was having a difficult time framing his thoughts. “Marco? You wanted to speak.”

  Marco stood. Beside him, Joanie sat straight and alert, her bruised face no longer swollen, but still a bit discolored. A souvenir of her conflict with the late, enraged Major Stype. Marco bowed slightly to the Speaker, and then to the survivors and colonists. His normal theatricality had returned, lending him gravity. “Humans have always been interested in strangeness, in alien modes of thought. We are hunters. In order to stalk prey, we need to learn how these other life-forms think and plan.

  “Human beings have evolved as communicators. We teach our children. We coddle our elderly and listen to their stories. Men and women learn to talk to each other. We tamed dogs and horses. We keep pets. We talk to strangers, we trade, we make treaties. We lie.

  “The cthulhus also have learned to talk to dolphins and men. Even so, they can’t travel with us. They’re linked to one environment. Most of the galaxy’s creatures may be chained to some pocket environment, like most of the species of Earth.

  “There’s no reason to think other species have evolved to communicate as well as we have. The human race may be destined as ambassadors to the rest of the galaxy.”

  The Speaker’s mouth was a thin line; his eyes were squinted half shut. Marco didn’t notice. He finished, “We did not light the torch.”

  “And we will not see the bonfire,” said several scores of Godsons, men and women. “To Man’s destiny.”

  The Speaker said, “Narrator, please see me on my private line.”

  Marco was still filming several hours later. He finally got to see Joan after nightfall.

  “Speaker Gus is kicking me off the ship,” he said. “We’re not going to Hypereden.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He doesn’t like my attitude. The Godsons are sent to conquer, not to be ambassadors to a thousand other species. Also I’ve interrupted him too often. And if I can’t go, you’re off too. What I want to know is, will you go over the rapids with me anyway?”

  She hugged him. “Idiot. You never got it. I spent weeks in free fall, and I hate it. I’m terrified of cold sleep. I don’t want ice on my mind. I’m so glad, so glad you’re staying.”

  “Good. Good. And I asked for cameras, and I got them. I’ll be filming your history as you make it.”

  Dinner conversation on Cadmann’s Bluff was a celebration as well as somewhat . . elegiac. Sylvia and Rachel and Carlos served, while Cadzie, Trudy, Joanie and Marco were on tap to clean up.

  Tsiolkovskii sat by the fire, speaking of Peruvian cave-diving to Carlos’ daughter Tracey. He had butchered the meat personally, and his duties were done for the day.

  No one had ever seen such a clean, powerful killing stroke, decapitating the beast before it knew it was dead.

  If the pungent aroma of goat ragout disturbed Billy the Kid’s appetite, however, he gave no sign. That lucky creature nibbled and wandered where he willed, safe from man or beast on a tamed subcontinent, a talisman for life.

  Zack and the other honored dead had been consigned to the soil. The Godsons, settled onto their third of the island, had performed their own ceremonies over what corpses had been recovered, and gotten on with the business of colonizing the galaxy, their industry sprouting up like mushrooms. Replicators had been replicated until half the homes had a miniature, and every shop a full-sized system.

  Camelot was reborn. />
  The dinner was also a good-bye party for Toad Stolzi.

  “What made you decide to leave?” Cadzie asked.

  He shrugged. “I was raised to be a pilot,” he said. “I’m not afraid of cold sleep. I figure if I lose twenty I.Q. points I’ll finally fit in with the rest of you.” Laughter.

  He raised his hand, suddenly more serious. “Really . . I just can’t resist. I can be what our grandparents were. A real spaceman.”

  His father Mason squeezed his shoulder. His hand trembled with age, his voice with emotion. “I’d say I’ll miss you, but all I can think is how proud of you I am.”

  They toasted the beloved living, and the honored dead.

  Just outside their northern window Billy the Kid brayed, as if he knew a friend was departing.

  A year later.

  Messenger was under point four gravity of thrust, the most it could manage with a full fuel balloon. The Speaker enjoyed that sensation immensely. On our way. He stretched in his great chair and released the pause button. “Carlos, we’ve been sending you what we learn of Tau Ceti’s solar system. Of course you had records from your own arrival, but we have more detail. The fifth planet, Shalott, is the only world of which we’ll see a close approach. We’ve seen details of two dozen moons, of which Bree may be worth exploring, even terraforming one day. As for the Kuiper Belt, we’ll know more in a few months, but it looks as rich as Sol System’s.

  “Thank you for the hundred Starchildren you’ve added to our passenger list. We know you’ll treat our hundred well. They’ll add to your genetic variety, and God knows you needed that after the Grendel Wars, and the quarrel, for that matter.”

  The Speaker coughed, then continued. “You twenty-six who remained on Avalon, Godspeed! Your mission hasn’t changed. You are still Godsons. As ex-narrator Marco Shantel pointed out before he left the ship, planets must be conquered one bite at a time. Live your lives to make your descendants proud.”