Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  There was nothing standard about relationships on Avalon. The naked truth was that, in an almost exclusively heterosexual community, there were more women than men to bond with them. There was also no venereal disease. There was one hundred percent employment. Someone would care for the children, whatever the mother’s interests and temperament. As a result, no woman need consider anything except who might make the most interesting father. There was no stigma at all for the unwed mother.

  But some institutions die hard, and marriage, even such free-form versions of it as existed in Avalon Town, was one of them.

  Cadmann and Sylvia had been friends, perhaps in love but not lovers, when the first grendel attacks shattered the colony’s tranquil life and sent Cadmann off to the Bluff. Mary Ann had gone to him then, and helped build the Keep. It was as much hers as his.

  Cadmann and Mary Ann had been bonded for years before Sylvia, widowed during the Grendel Wars, had joined them. Mostly, it worked. Sometimes wonderfully well. Occasionally it grated . . . usually on Mary Ann, who remembered when she had Cadmann all to herself, when no one else would have wanted him. No one but Sylvia, who was already married, back when monogamy made sense, before the grendels killed so many of the men.

  They were probably two hours from the Bluff, and Mary Ann was getting drowsy. Air travel often did that to her. She leaned against his shoulder, bouncing a little in her shoulder harness. Sylvia looked across at him. Sometimes he wondered exactly what she saw. He knew what he saw in the mirror when he scraped his morning stubble away: a tall, gray old stranger who looked a lot like his own grandfather . . . or Manuel the Redeemer, or any of Cabell’s male characters who were so surprised to find themselves old. Still strong, and unbent, but the hair crept back from his temples now. Both weather and time had creased his skin deeply.

  God. Where had the years gone? When was the last time he had awakened without his back flaming at him? He was . . . he counted rapidly. Sixty-three Earth years old? There was little he could do to avoid the fact that his body was trying to shut down on him. Oh, growth-hormone stimulation, and exercise, and a strict nutritional regimen, and regeneration treatments kept the machine functioning better than he probably deserved, but the aches and pains of a life nowise tame had definitely caught up with him. There were bullet wounds, a bayonet scar . . . even a goddamn crocodile bite.

  All trivial next to the wounds from the Grendel Wars. Bones smashed. The regrown leg. The pale angry tattoo left by serrated grendel teeth. And the memories that would never completely fade.

  And perhaps, after all, it was best that they didn’t. The grendels were gone, but there were other dangers.

  “Good trip,” Sylvia said. She could always sense his mood. She was forty-seven now, still beautiful, although daily exposure to the sun had roughened her skin. The mask of youth was beginning to slip, but in her case that was no tragedy. Disguise your thoughts and inclinations as you may, time eventually reveals your true nature to the world. Sylvia was a loving heart in a lively, quick-spirited physical package, a little shorter than Mary Ann, but stronger. She had borne her late husband Terry one child, Justin, and then another for Cadmann, and her figure was still luscious.

  Mary Ann was Number One Wife—and she relished the distinction. Needed it. There was little in this life for Mary Ann, save being Cadmann Weyland’s woman. Sylvia remained a competent scientist. Mary Ann had ice on her mind. Sometimes she could remember, sometimes there were flashes of brilliance, but sometimes she was lucky to remember the difference between the gametophyte and sporophyte stages of a fern. Once upon a time she had been a brilliant agronomist, but hibernation instability . . . for Mary Ann, the memories of what she had once been were the worst part.

  She was still important as Cadmann Weyland’s Number One Wife, and as the mother of strong and self-reliant children. I make good babies, she told herself, and everyone knew it was true. Over the years that had come to be enough. It had to be.

  Home, Cadmann thought, remembering Sylvia’s attempt at conversation. “I think I want to break out the east wall of the house, expand it again.”

  “You’ve got my permission, God knows.”

  She gazed out the window at the clear sky, and then peered down at the clouds. “So peaceful up here.”

  “I need these trips from time to time. Just get away with my ladies.”

  She reached across Mary Ann’s sleeping form, and grasped Cadmann’s shoulder hard. So much unsaid. So much that could never be said.

  Cadmann’s thoughts threatened to drift into another uncomfortable direction, and he focused back on the task of flying. Ahead of them reared a great beveled splay of glacial crust: Clay’s Divide, an eight-mile seismic irregularity in the Isenstine. He grinned, anticipating the moment to come.

  As the skeeter scooted over the gargantuan sheet of rock and ice, Sylvia began to chuckle. Then they both broke out hooting. Mary Ann was awake now, and smiling. The far side of the divide had been carved—by some unknown thermal device—into Avalon’s own Mount Rushmore. Presented for all the world to see were four two-hundred-foot-tall sets of very human buttocks. Anatomical detail was admirably precise. Mount Tushmore was so huge that it had to be seen from at least a kilometer away to be fully appreciated.

  Geographic had spotted it first, almost a year before. The general hilarity and grudging admiration was balanced by alarm. How had they done it? And who? Well, the Merry Pranksters, of course, but who were they? Justin and Jessica knew, Cadmann thought; one or the other of them might actually be a Prankster. But there was no way that the carving of Mount Tushmore could have been anything less than perilous. The danger doubtless added to their pleasure in the deed.

  “If we knew . . . ” he said finally, hovering at approximately anus-level with the second buttock on the left. A flat, petal-shaped protrusion marred the surface just below the right cheek. “. . . whether that was just an irregularity in the rock, or a birthmark, it might be possible to figure out just whose buttocks these were . . . ”

  “But . . . ” Sylvia choked, “and that’s a big but . . . that still wouldn’t establish whether the owner of said birth-marked buttocks was in fact the perpetrator.”

  “How true,” Cadmann said. “It would be just like those rascals to display someone else’s buttocks, just to throw us . . . off the scent. As it were.”

  “Ahem.”

  He spun the skeeter around and headed back north. He pointed his forefinger at Mary Ann, thumb cocked, and Mary Ann said, “I do hate to leave it behind.”

  About fifty miles from the Bluff, Cadmann engaged his communications link. Immediately Cassandra’s familiar voice said, “There are seventeen messages waiting for you, Colonel.”

  He sighed. “Any of them emergency?”

  “In case of an emergency message I would have initiated contact despite your request for isolation,” she chided gently. “You have several priority dispatches, but no emergency.”

  “Hmmm . . . sort and play.”

  There was a beep, and before Cassandra could broadcast an old message, the air crackled. “Dad! Are you there?”

  “Absolutely. Justin?”

  “Glad you’re online.

  “Problems?”

  “We’ve had a little excitement since you left.”

  “Like what?”

  “That would be telling. Why don’t you just fly straight to Aquatics, Dad—and promise me something?”

  “Like what?”

  “That you’ll try to keep an open mind.”

  “You implying I have a problem in that department?”

  “First edition: Oxford-Avalonian Dictionary. Verb: Weylandize. Definition: to render inflexible.

  “Hah hah. Want to give me a hint?”

  “I think not. See you in about twenty minutes. And first-class promise about that open mind, remember?”

  “Remember.”

  Cadmann took himself back offline for a moment. Mary Ann was shaking herself awake. “What was that?”


  “Our eldest boy. He’s got a surprise for me. At Aquatics . . . ” His thumb hovered over the control panel. If he touched the switch again, Cassandra would come back on, and in all probability tell him more about the surprise than he really wanted to hear.

  I’ll let it be a mystery, he thought. All right, Justin, m’boy. Thrill me.

  The skeeter pad was clear as they dropped down toward Aquatics. A small crowd had already gathered around it, with another clutch of curiosity-seekers ringing one of the dolphin pens. Dolphins . . . ? Had Quanda and Hipshot finally made the beast with two backs, or whatever it was that dolphins did? But that wouldn’t be a priority call—

  He hovered for a moment, until the crowd backed farther away. There had only been one skeeter accident on Avalon, but that was enough. A sudden gust of wind, and Harry Siep’s arm was spurting in the dust. Lucky for Harry; it could have been his head, and heads were much more difficult to reattach.

  They spun down into a perfect landing. Mary Ann threw aside her blanket, and stretched like a big chubby blonde cat as the rotors began to slow. Before Cadmann could open the door, Jessica was there, golden and radiant, flinging it aside to buss him soundly.

  Seeing her made him sigh. She possessed all of her mother’s beauty, and she didn’t have ice on her mind. “Daddy,” she whispered in his ear, as intimate as a lover, “we’ve really got something.”

  He stepped down from the skeeter, and was immediately awash in comments from the rest of the crowd. He waved an awkward hello. As always, he had the sense that the group was waiting for something. Some proclamation, some reaction from him. They hung on his words as if his opinion meant more than all the rest of theirs combined. It was this as much as anything that created his intermittent need to escape, to be off in the south hunting, or fishing, or collecting plants. On such trips he turned his goddamned tracer off. Nothing but an emergency message was authorized to break through. Zack had “tested” that precisely once. No one else even tried.

  Cadmann helped Mary Ann down, and she immediately turned to hug Jessica. Occasionally, he suspected that there was some communication between mother and daughter from which he was utterly excluded, some dark and intimate female understanding.

  At the moment, Jessica was all showboat, twinkly and vibrating with secret knowledge, hugging Sylvia to give both mothers equal attention, then linking arms with Cadmann. Without another word, she marched the three of them into the Aquatics building.

  Justin opened the door for them.

  Cadmann entered, and held his breath.

  “Jesus Christ . . . ” he started. He was frozen, felt the chill right down to his heels. The beast reminded him of a moray, in some ways . . . but it was a good deal larger. “You dredge this out of the Deeps?”

  “Damn near grabbed it out of your living room, Dad,” Jessica said. Justin quickly recounted their adventure. Cadmann stared at Sylvia and then at Mary Ann. He excused himself brusquely and went outside to break through the ring of observers surrounding the dolphin tank. He needed a look at the beast itself.

  A large yellowish plastic bubble framed the tank, and several wet oily splotches on the inside suggested that the eel had attempted escape. It glided through the water, swishing hard from side to side, around and around endlessly, expending vast energy. Jessica and Justin appeared behind him.

  “Does it eat?”

  “Sure does. Anything that swims. The dolphins have been sharing.”

  “Has Big Chaka looked at this yet?”

  “He’ll fly in from the coast this evening,” Jessica said. “Little Chaka’s run a simulation.”

  And?”

  Little Chaka spoke from just behind him. The voice was always deep and resonant, and a little surprising because it came from slightly above him. Only two people in the world were taller than Cadmann. “It lived in the Deeps,” Chaka said, “and came upstream to lay eggs.”

  “It eats fish. Land animals too?”

  “If it could swallow them whole. It’s not built to carve out steaks. But I think we’re seeing it at the end of its life-cycle. This is an old creature. What passes for a liver is operating at maybe fifty percent. I think it will be dead in a year. Have to ask Father, of course.”

  “Could it have had legs early in its cycle?”

  “Interesting idea, but Cassandra says no. The eggs are almost mature—”

  “Eggs?”

  “Yes, we’ve got samples. What she’s producing are thousands of little eely things that look just like Mama. No sign of legs. I think that Mama Eel is primarily aquatic, and can survive out of the water just long enough to get back upstream. She really prefers salt water to fresh. No sign of speed sacs or anything like them. This is a pretty standard animal. Not a lot of surprises.”

  Cadmann heard Chaka’s voice as if it came from the bottom of a rain barrel. A sudden wave of fatigue washed over him, hot and clammy, transmuting his limbs to lead. In his suddenly blurred vision, the thing in the water began to transmute. It grew legs, and its tail fattened. It reared up out of the tank with its huge, savagely powerful teeth drizzling blood, and snapped down just inches from his foot, and—

  He shook his head, and all was normal again. A perfectly harmless eel swished angrily through the water. Harmless. Captured.

  Swish, swish.

  “So why has it come back?”

  “To breed,” someone said.

  “What Colonel Weyland meant was why now?” Chaka said. “And we don’t know.”

  Cadmann turned to stare northward toward the mainland.

  “Dad, we’ll have to go,” Jessica said.

  He nodded. The eel would start that debate again. It was time for a full-dress expedition to the mainland, had been for years. He’d always known they would have to go there.

  Someday. He had no taste for it. After the Grendel Wars, he had thought he wanted that, and had made two trips to the mainland, the second shorter than the first. He had bagged a grendel with the new grendel guns, and been holo’ed grinning next to his prize.

  But something had altered within him, some subtle tidal change in his bones.

  If there was anything he needed to prove about himself, he would prove it here, on the island. And if there was anything that he needed to know about grendels, he would allow others to learn it for him.

  He lived with awful, bloody dreams in which all of their efforts had meant nothing. In his sleeping mind, rapacious demons had rolled over the colony like a red tide, killing everything, everyone. The few dozen survivors stranded up in Geographic could hear the screams, and see the blood, but they couldn’t come down. Couldn’t ever come down. And stayed up there until they slowly ran out of food . . . and water . . . and air.

  Waking, he would shrug away the dreams. He didn’t want to know how narrowly sanity had been preserved. And when he thought about going back to the mainland, he wondered what would happen if another grendel ever touched him. He wondered if he could take it. If his sanity would hold.

  He didn’t ever want to find out.

  “. . . Zack,” Justin said, pulling him out of his reverie.

  “Zack?”

  “Wants to kill it. And the eggs.”

  He felt an instantaneous, visceral flash of agreement, followed swiftly by the voice of reason. “As long as it’s not dangerous, that’s not his decision to make,” Cadmann said. He pointed to the tank cover. “Your idea?”

  Jessica looked sheepish. “Zack ordered a cover.”

  “Good.”

  She hesitated. “We didn’t put it on, until the eel tried to escape. Took three of us with poles to keep it in. Then we put up the cover.”

  “Not when Zack told you to?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He had the authority to order that. You dispute it?”

  “No, Dad, it just seemed—”

  Cadmann shook his head. “Jessica, we’ve been through this before. Zack is chairman and governor, and we don’t lightly disobey him.”

 
“You did. You rebelled—”

  “Exactly,” Cadmann said. “I rebelled. Some things are important enough for that. But you don’t do it lightly! I take it your researchers found the cover inconvenient—”

  She looked at her feet.

  “So you ignored a valid order because it wasn’t convenient. Do I have to say anything else?”

  “No, sir. But he wanted to kill it, too! And we found it at the Bluff, not down here!”

  “And at the Bluff, you and your brother had every right to do what you thought right,” Cadmann said wearily. “Not here.”

  “It’ll go to a vote,” Jessica said. “Can we rely on you?”

  “To approve keeping it alive? Yes.” He thought for a moment. “That’s not all that will go to a vote. The next question will be about the mainland, you know. We need that major expedition. Not just quick trips to initiate Grendel Scouts, a study expedition . . . ”

  “Yes,” Justin said. “Joe Sikes thinks so, too; something’s going wrong with the mining robots.”

  Something in Justin’s tone made Cadmann frown. “Eh?”

  “Don’t know. Joe thinks it’s Star Born. But it’s not, it’s another Avalon surprise.”

  Cadmann nodded. “And the ecology returns to Camelot. The wind blows from the north part of the year. God knows what may get rafted over here. We have to know what else may come.”

  “Avalonian homing pigeons,” Justin offered. Jessica looked pained. “And no grendels here to eat them. We’re likely to be up to our clavicles in something.”

  “There haven’t been for twenty years,” Jessica offered.

  “There weren’t any eels for twenty years, either,” Justin said.

  Cadmann frowned. “Good point. And the ecology is returning. Not just the eel. Why now?” He nodded in submission. “I suppose there will need to be . . . some kind of expedition.”

  “We can plan it on the next Grendel Scout outing,” Justin said.