The Legacy of Heorot
Page 1
Contents
Chapter 1 Camelot
Chapter 2 on the beach
Chapter 3 frozen sleep
Chapter 4 rainy night
Chapter 5 autopsy i
Chapter 6 at thE wire
Chapter 7 the blind
Chapter 8 grendel’s arm
Chapter 9 contact
Chapter 10 nightmare
Chapter 11 eulogy
Chapter 12 dinosaur killer
Chapter 13 homestead
Chapter 14 reunion
Chapter 15 year day
Chapter 16 on the cliff
Chapter 17 rescue
Chapter 18 descent into hell
Chapter 19 grendel’s mother
Chapter 20 autopsy ii
Chapter 21 killing ground
Chapter 22 the last grendel
Chapter 23 mending walls
Chapter 24 remittance man
Chapter 25 life cycle
Chapter 26 gone fishing
Chapter 27 salvage
Chapter 28 marabunta
Chapter 29 holding
Chapter 30 challenge
Chapter 31 grendels in the mist
Chapter 32 the keep
Chapter 33 the last stand
Chapter 34 hunting party
the Legacy
of Heorot
♦
LARRY NIVEN
JERRY POURNELLE
STEVEN BARNES
The Legacy of Heorot
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
BOOK ONE IN THE CLASSIC HEOROT SERIES FROM GENRE LEGENDS LARRY NIVEN, JERRY POURNELLE, AND STEVEN BARNES
The two hundred colonists on board the Geographic have spent a century in cold sleep to arrive here: Avalon, a lush, verdant planet lightyears from Earth. They hope to establish a permanent colony, and Avalon seems the perfect place. And so they set about planting and building.
But their very presence has upset the ecology of Avalon. Soon an implacable predator stalks them, picking them off one by one. In order to defeat this alien enemy, they must reevaluate everything they think they know about Avalon, and uncover the planet's dark secrets.
BAEN BOOKS
by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
Heorot Series
The Legacy of Heorot
Beowulf’s Children (forthcoming)
Starborn and Godsons (forthcoming)
♦
BAEN BOOKS
by Larry Niven
The Man-Kzin Wars Series
created by Larry Niven
The Man-Kzin Wars 25th Anniversary
Man-Kzin Wars XIV
Man-Kzin Wars XV
The Best of All Possible Wars: Best of the Man-Kzin Wars
♦
BAEN BOOKS
by Jerry Pournelle
The Best of Jerry Pournelle (edited by John F. Carr)
Fires of Freedom • Oath of Fealty (with Larry Niven)
Janissaries Series
Lord of Janissaries (with Roland J. Green)
Mamelukes (forthcoming; edited and revised
by David Weber and Phillip Pournelle)
Laurie Jo Hansen Series
Exile—and Glory (omnibus)
the Legacy
of Heorot
♦
LARRY NIVEN
JERRY POURNELLE
STEVEN BARNES
The Legacy of Heorot
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
Song lyrics are from “Serpents Reach” by Don Simpson, copyright © 1985 by Off-Centaur Publications (BMI). Used by permission.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2437-3
eISBN: 978-1-62579-755-1
Cover art by Kurt Miller
Maps by Randy Asplund based on maps by Alexis Walser
First Baen printing, February 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Niven, Larry, author. | Pournelle, Jerry, 1933-2017, author. |
Barnes, Steven, 1952- author.
Title: The legacy of Heorot / by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven
Barnes.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books, [2020] | Series: Heorot series
Identifiers: LCCN 2019046640 | ISBN 9781982124373 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Life on other planets--Fiction. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3564.I9 L4 2020 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046640
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
Jack Cohen is one of the world’s experts on fertility and reproduction. He is also a rabid science fiction fan who—inspired by his knowledge of the queerer forms of earthly life—constantly generates new concepts for aliens. He tends to give his aliens away to whatever science fiction writer is standing nearest.
He was at Larry Niven’s house when he described an African frog with nasty habits.
It’s been a long time, Jack. Thanks for waiting.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are indebted to Meghan Lancaster
for her translation of “I Blas Gogerddan,”
a traditional Welsh song ascribed to “Geiriog.”
We are indebted to Alexis Walser
for her maps of Avalon.
the Legacy
of Heorot
♦
♦ChaptEr 1♦
Camelot
They do not preach that their god will rouse them,
a little before the nuts work loose.
—Kipling, “The Sons of Martha”
“Cadzie! Wait up!”
Cadmann Weyland chuckled to himself and dug his heels into the slope, slowing his descent.
He politely busied himself, adjusting the rangefinder on his camera. After months on Avalon he still found the shadows too sharp and the sunlight too blue, subtle things, noticed only when he used familiar equipment like the camera.
The Colony sprang into high relief, and the recorder in his backpack vibrated noiselessly to make a holotape recording of the network of buildings and plowed fields and animal pens that stretched out in the valley below. The Colony was ten kilometers farther on, but the electronically enhanced lenses brought its low buildings close enough to touch.
The image jolted as Sylvia slid into him. She caught herself with a palm against his back. “Ouch. Sorry.”
“Here.” He handed her the camera. “See what we’ve built.” She gratefully accepted the excuse to rest. Her short brown hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, and her freckled cheeks were flushed.
Six miles, downhill, and Sylvia was tiring. In the last hour she’d found a dozen reasons to stop. Stones in her walking shoes. Burs inside her blouse.
Cadmann chuckled inwardly. The Colony’s biologist was tough, and as stubborn about admitting fatigue as he. She’s also three months pregnant. Won’t admit there are real differences between the sexes. So be it.
Ernst
loped down the slope. A brace of the large silver fishlike creatures the Colony had dubbed “samlon” slapped against his muscular back. His grin split his broad face from ear to jug ear. “Tiring out, Sylvia! You ought to work out! Exercise! I can show you.”
Sylvia laughed. “Not right now, thanks, Ernst.”
“Later.”
Poor bastard. Ernst Cohen had been the solar system’s leading authority on reproductive biology, and brighter than hell. You could watch it at cocktail parties: everyone else talking, and suddenly Ernst would say maybe two sentences, and half the room would go silent as the rest of them digested the implications. That was ten lightyears ago. Ernst had come out of frozen sleep with the mind of a child.
Sylvia scanned the valley, gave a sigh of pleasure.
“Terrific shot, isn’t it?” Cadmann’s voice, ordinarily a hoarse rumbling sound, was quietly thoughtful. “National Geographic will love it.” He squatted next to her. “Are you all right?”
“Just fine,” she murmured. She turned, warming him with her smile. “But I’ll be happy to get back home.”
She was almost twenty years younger than he. Sylvia was all quick wit and golden eyes that glowed with life above a galaxy of freckles. Her pregnancy changed nothing. It was wonderful, it was frustrating: being with her made him forget the years and the aches. It’s the eyes. She’s plain except for the eyes. God help me.
The pass they traversed was at the base of the tallest mountain on the island. The highest of its double peaks was just above thirty-two hundred meters. Both were shrouded with mist. The delicate bat shapes of the pterodons glided in and out of the cloud cover with barely a flutter of their membranous wings. Ernst stared up at them, his face a mask of puzzled concentration. What would Dr. Ernst Cohen have made of them? They aren’t really pterodons. There are other oddities. He’d have loved it here—
“They woke him twice,” Sylvia said. “Maybe if they’d just left him cold—”
“We did need him. We did,” Cadmann said. But Ernst wasn’t crew. He could have slept through, but they had a problem with one bank of frozen embryos and woke him, and he’d solved that, and they’d chilled him again, and then there was another problem—And as good a man as ever lived follows me around to carry samples. Son of a bitch—
A square kilometer of plastic-coated solar cells glittered silver on the hills above the Colony. Today’s sunshine meant independence from the fission power plants of the landers. An actual fusion plant would be constructed within the next four months. Then the Colony would be fully established, and the spread of man across the face of Tau Ceti Four could really begin.
—Across Camelot, anyway. Eighty kilometers of stormy ocean separated the island from the mainland. A New Guinea-sized island was quite ambitious enough for humankind’s first interstellar colony. Zack had known what he was doing. Isolate the problems . . .
So where were the problems?
“Snow up there,” Cadmann said, shading his eyes as he gazed up into the eternal clouds at the top. Skis. We didn’t bring skis. We have plastics. Carlos can make me a pair of skis.
Sylvia handed him back his camera. Voice carefully neutral, she said, “You don’t have to go to the continent, Cadmann. There’s plenty for you to do around the camp.”
“Nothing that any other able body couldn’t do.”
“You’re not a geologist. You’d be doing grunt work anyway.” She looked down at him, sighed in exasperation and gave him her hand for balance as he stood. “Do you just want to go hunting dinosaurs?”
“Sure! What boy doesn’t want to bag a brontosaurus?” He slipped the camera back into its holster at his side. “Sometimes I wish we’d brought fetuses for a Kodiak, or a few mountain lions . . . ”
He was smiling as he said it, but Sylvia wondered.
Cadmann brushed his hand through thick black hair. There was no gray in it, but his face was sun-cured leather. His body was as young as a daily hour of intensive exercise could make it. He could remember when he hadn’t needed regular exercise to maintain the natural tone. Now, at the adjusted age of forty-two, he was seriously considering nudging that up to an hour and a half. I’m slowing down, he thought. She’s carrying another man’s baby, and I’d rather be with her than . . . Mary Ann Eisenhower? He thought of four or five women who had made their intentions clear. Phyllis McAndrews. Jean Patterson, willowy blond agronomist rumored to give the best massage on the planet. He just wasn’t interested. Time wounds all heels. The glands must be drying up.
Sylvia grinned back. “Only real gentlemen refuse to notice when a lady is slowing them down.” Ernst stood carefully out of earshot. His intelligence was gone, but not his manners. She jerked her thumb at the pair of freshly caught silver-and-black torpedo shapes hanging over Ernst’s back. Fifteen and twenty pounds, at a guess. One still gaped; the gills still fluttered, too far back on its body . . . they didn’t look that much like earthly salmon, but no other creature of Earth fit either . . . “Tell you what. I’ll fix dinner tonight. Everybody to the beach for a samlon roast.”
She linked her arm with Cadmann’s as they marched down the side of the hill. He grinned maliciously. “Are you sure Terry won’t mind that?”
“Oh, come now. I’m just a poor pregnant lady biologist who appreciates the presence of a strong man—and Terry’s known you for years.”
“I may not be as safe as you think.”
She snorted. “Fat chance. When I’m sure you want my body and not my mind, I’ll faint.”
He looked at her appraisingly. “Which way will you fall?”
“Hush.”
They laughed. The sun shone more brightly than usual.
“Golden fields. Silver rivers.”
Cadmann laughed. “I suppose. I see a year-round water supply and fertile croplands.”
“You would.”
Somebody’d better.
The stream flowed past the camp and over the bluff above Miskatonic River, the greatest body of running water on the island. Eight kilometers to the south the grasslands ended in a burnt, blackened semicircle of firebreak and beyond that the crest of giant brambles began. The colonists had chosen a beautiful place to start a new world, lovely enough to make him feel . . . almost at peace. Times like this confused him. It was a fight not to shut down his thoughts and find some project totally involving, and preferably a little risky.
Slender fingers dug into his arm. “Hey, big guy. Don’t go brooding on me. This was supposed to be our walk day. Stay with me for a while, hmm?” He was still quiet. “Tau Ceti Four. Avalon.” She rolled the words over her tongue.
“It’s a good name.”
“But?”
“Don’t know.”
“Not poetic enough?”
He helped her over a rock. It took effort to focus on the game she was inviting him to play. “I’ve read poetry—”
“Kipling.” She laughed. “It’s all right. I know you’re better read than me. And I’ll keep your secret. I don’t know, Avalon’s all right. But there are others. Beautiful, exciting places from history, or legend. Shangri-La, Babylon . . . ”
“Xanadu?”
“Sure. Pellinore.”
He shook his head. “You must mean Pellucidar. Pellinore was a king. One of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.”
“Well . . . maybe so. But I don’t mean Pellucidar, either. There aren’t really any predators on the island. Except for the turkeys and other critters we’ve seeded, there just isn’t a damn thing bigger than an insect. Even the plant life. Low grass and thorn trees. It’s like a blank slate. Or a park. Cadmann—”
He asked, “Does that bother you?”
“Well, the worst we can do is mess up one island. It isn’t like we’d turned all those Earth creatures loose on the mainland.”
“I meant too perfect. Why do you care?”
“Well—”
Ernst ran up, pointing. “Birds. Big Birds.” Two of the fan-winged shapes swooped past. Cadmann watched as
they circled out over the plain, then vanished in the mist that reached halfway down the face of Mucking Great Mountain. “Nest there?” Ernst asked. “Why there?” He frowned again.
“See? We do have company.”
“The pterodons? They’re way more frightened of us than we are of them. And the biggest of them is hardly strong enough to carry off a good-sized samlon, let alone a sheep.”
“How about a baby?” he asked.
She took it seriously. “I don’t think so. To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen anything much bigger than a sea gull, and that bothers me. The ecology is just too damned simple. Take out the pterodons and all you’ve got is small insects and these big local fish.”
“The samlon.”
“Of course they aren’t really fish. What with the trout and the catfish and the turkeys, we’ve added more animals than we found. Spooky.” Sylvia turned thoughtful as they picked their way down a steep slope. “You know, there’s something funny about the pterodons.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, remember the one we saw hunting samlon in the pool?”
“Sure. Reminded me of albatross in the South Pacific.” Sailing aboard Ariadne with a fair wind north, a million years—no, not a million years, but a lot more than a million miles ago. With luck we’ll build schooners here before I’m dead.
“Didn’t that look funny to you? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it reminded me of an old Walt Disney nature film, with the action run in reverse, to be comical.”