Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “Anything new?” she asked. She ducked her head to fit into the low-ceilinged room. She watched the computers and screens as Linda pored over them, completely absorbed.

  “Ah . . . nothing. Everything is just fine. We’ll be at the site in less than an hour. Check there first, and then we can look back and check the others.”

  “Any additional information?”

  “Not sabotage.”

  “Why?” she asked, trying to keep the relief from her voice.

  “The vibration signature. It’s more like black powder than any of our standard blasting compounds. If somebody was going to booby-trap our mining equipment, they wouldn’t use some kind of unstable low-yield compound. They’d use something concentrated, neat, reliable. That’s what I’m thinking. This is just weird.”

  Jessica laid a hand on her shoulder. “Oh well. You’ll have your chance to inspect things close up in . . . ”

  “Thirty-seven minutes,” Linda said.

  “Then we’re over Grendel Valley. Aaron should be thrilled.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 8 ♦

  the grendel god

  God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,

  And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,

  A gauntlet with a gift in ’t.

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

  Old Grendel was hunting. She lay covered in mud under a mash of water and rotting vegetation. The river lay almost half a mile behind her, but the ground was soft. She’d burrowed her way up from the river over many days, clawing through the dirt, allowing the water to follow her. And here, so far from moving water that her prey must consider themselves safe, she waited.

  One was nearby. Large enough to last for three days, becoming truly sweet only on the last day. A snouted thing with hoofs and big ears and large eyes. The snout quested about, testing.

  Ah, gently, gently. If the wind shifted in the wrong direction, then Snouter would scent, and Snouter was fast enough to lead a merry chase. But not fast enough to evade Old Grendel, no, not even in these days of sluggish blood, of slow heats and rapid cooling. Old Grendel still had speed.

  Old Grendel had murky memories of her youth, when she had first emerged from the water, a dim-brained beast, before a sickness caught in the high water had opened her eyes. To the degree that she was capable of such things, she felt an almost reverential awe toward those high waters. Something there made her itch, made her head hurt until she thought she would die of the pain. She could do little but wallow in her agony, unable even to hunt effectively. Even the depths of cool water helped little. But when the pain receded . . .

  She could see differently. She didn’t know how else to think it. In her youth, Old Grendel had seen the world in basic gradients of scent and taste, of need and satiation. Her life cycled: hunger forced speed, speed created heat, heat forced her back to water. But after the change, after the swelling of her head, and the pain . . . She’d come out of it mad with hunger, too weak to fight the lake monster, until the patterns showed her what to do. Then she was the lake monster, and there was prey everywhere, everywhere she hadn’t looked. Hunting was easier. She used speed less often. Fights for territory became less bloody. She saw everything more clearly, and understood what she saw.

  In those days, she had been sleek and as fast as rainfire. She was absolute death, the empress of her domain. She had given life to a hundred thousand children, and perhaps ten had survived to maturity. Those she had driven upstream to the heights, when she could. Two had tried to return, to challenge their mother on her own ground.

  Those, she gutted without mercy, the killing flare in her head and in her body stronger than thought or reason, stronger by far than any rudimentary maternal instinct.

  Those had been good days, and perhaps her greater intelligence was a curse. She was not what she had been, and she knew it. No longer so fast, so strong. Her wounds no longer healed as swiftly.

  For any creature unaware enough to be caught within her kill radius, she was a flash of teeth and claw and pebble-textured black armor and spiked tail. Sixteen feet long and a quarter-ton of instant murder.

  But speed drained out of her more quickly these days, and the generated heat stayed longer. She was afraid to go as far from water as once she had.

  There were advantages to the Change. A grendel ahunt is a grendel whose mind is lost to speed. There is no thought, only action. Chase and fight and kill, a race against the heat inside; get the prey to water, and feed. Years ago the sight of prey would madden her, would drive all caution away. It was sometimes so now, but not so often. She could think ahead, imagine the consequences of actions.

  In sane moments, she wondered if the tree-dwellers knew this. These wretched creatures would lure a desperately hungry grendel far from water. They darted high up into one of the thorn trees when the grendel blurred toward them, leaped from tree to tree when the grendel tore down the tree trunk.

  Old Grendel remembered that she had almost died. The creatures had led her from one tree to another until she’d nearly cooked herself. She’d be chasing one and it was gone, and here was another, out of reach and sluggishly making for another tree, and the hunger and killing urge were so terribly strong. And another farther on—

  She’d found the control to make for water before it was too late, before her internal organs roasted with the heat of her own speed. Behind her, scores of the creatures were suddenly chattering at her from every tree and tuft of grass. Long-legged and long-armed furry things made of crunchy red meat screamed their mockery. In saner memory she could see the length of their teeth . . . could see that they were also, in their strange way, hunting.

  She’d stayed clear of the forest from then on. Years later, she had seen hunter-climbers feasting on a dead grendel who had been lured too far from water and cooked in its own heat. Not of her kind, that grendel. The naked red bones of its huge shoulders and forearms named it: it was of the kind that built dams. She chased the hunter-things away and ate the corpse of the dam builder.

  There were things that hunted grendels, just as she hunted them. But what worked with a young grendel failed against Old Grendel. She had eaten hunter-climbers and found their flesh delicious; but then almost anything was delicious, even swimmers, even her own swimmers. Since the Change she was vaguely aware that while all food was good, some was better. Meat was better than plants, walkers better than swimmers, alien swimmers better than her own. It had always been so, but she hadn’t known it.

  Now Old Grendel was slow. Still a blur, but a slow blur, if you like. She would wait for Snouter to get closer . . .

  The snouter stopped, turned, looked up nervously. It made a flabby wet sneezy bray and turned again, bending almost double, and bolted into the trees.

  Old Grendel was too surprised at the sound in the sky to give chase. The sound made her uneasy and reminded her of the Death Wind, but it was not the same.

  It came from the south, filling the sky, shadowing the land. Red and green. Unimaginably huge fangs. Terror on a scale she had never known filled her body, her heart. It was a grendel of cosmic size. It was God. It blotted out the sun, its giant lips grinning at her, challenging her.

  She tried to disappear into the mud. If this thing, this colossus wanted her territory, there would be nothing for her to do but die.

  But she would fight! She had to fight! It came straight at her, looming like a mountain, moving not much quicker, and she felt the speed course through her body, preparing her for action.

  The speed roared through her like a flame, and she couldn’t move. She couldn’t see how to reach the beast! Slow, slow, it didn’t have to be a new breed of grendel. Was it challenger or meat? How to reach it? Fire roared along her veins and her mind was shutting down. That rock? No, that somewhat more distant log—

  She lurched from the mud. Mud splashed across startled snouters. Instinctively, she smashed one with her tail, curling it so that the creature wasn’t hooked and caught. It screamed
and lurched away, but Old Grendel ignored it and flashed onward. In seconds she reached the low end of a tree that had fallen across a white boulder. For another second she was clawing her way to a stop, skidding in a curve along the mud, while the snouters scattered in all directions. She reached the naked roots and blurred up the log and launched herself, and tried to take her bearings as she flew. The God of Grendels was too big to miss.

  She had never seen anything so large in flight. Certainly she had no practice targeting such. She was falling below it. It was as if she’d jumped at a moon! Her claws were ready, she had one last surprise for the beast when it turned to snap her up . . . she’d be no more than a mouthful, but she would burn its mouth . . .

  She smacked down into an inch of shallow water over soft mud. Impact knocked her dizzy, but she clawed for leverage and skimmed a tight curve, knees and ankles buckling, across the mud for a hundred feet, then burrowed.

  She was two hundred feet from where she had been, buried snout-deep in moist dirt, motionless, with only her snorkel raised. The heat was leaking from her, the fatigue too, but too slowly. At this moment the God of Grendels could have her for a snouter. Where was it? She lifted an eye.

  It was behind her. Above and behind, moving away.

  It was leaving! She had driven it away! She had defended her territory—

  But as, pain-filled, she crawled back to the river, the image of the hideous thing filled her mind. At some time in her long, long life, she had seen something like it before.

  Much farther away. It had flown. Its markings had been different, then, not a grendel at all—a black back, pale belly, enormous eyes—but it might be of the same species. It had moved the same, sounded the same. It too had been vast, larger than a whole brood of adult grendels. Bigger than a cloud. She could not begin to comprehend its meaning.

  She had done a dangerous thing. The huge-eyed nightmare was going where she could not, where no rivers ran, and where jungles and hunter-climbers did. But she’d followed a rare rainstorm uphill, and kept moving after it was gone, up the slope of a nearby mountain.

  That was not long after the Change. With her new sight she’d felt that she could do anything. She had reached the peak of the mountain and placed herself above that thing, in time to see it sink down to kiss the earth.

  Three smaller flying things had left it. God’s swimmers? Much smaller creatures had swarmed below it. Parasites, she surmised, seeking to spread their kind. But though they showed only as dots, she could guess their size. They never went on speed for as long as she watched. Slow, stupid: not grendels, but prey.

  Then she’d crawled back down to water. Never a drop of rain came to cool her. She was ravenous every step of the way, and she had never gone on speed. If she had, she would have died.

  Now this, the Grendel God. If it was prey, it would feed all the grendels beneath the sky.

  She’d been hungry before, she was ravenous now. New prey. New tastes. New games to lose and win, new blood to wet her snout.

  New, new, new.

  If Old Grendel had been able to clarify her concept of a god, she would have prayed to it. The spawn of grendels were so small, not even a mouthful. One of those two-legged things would feed her beyond her capacity. She would bury it in the mud for a day, or two, or three, until it grew sweet. Until the water bugs came and ate its eyes into raw wet sockets, and the tissues bloated with nectar. Then she would feast.

  The first tinglings of speed, urgent and warm, began to stir her. She clamped her mind down. She was already too close to being burned out. They could hunt her, this New Meat, this spawn of the Grendel God. They were slow, and clumsy, but . . . experience tried to warn her of danger.

  All creatures make mistakes.

  Hunter-climbers made mistakes. She had cracked their bones with her teeth, and savored the sweetness within.

  She wiggled back toward the river, a few inches at a time. God floated toward the Cloud Mountain, where it began to descend. Where the first huge-eyed Great Flyer had descended. No rivers ran near there. Too far. Always too far, up the rocky slopes where she could go when there was enough rain, but that happened seldom.

  But all things were prey to a grendel, and all things must spawn. Its spawn would come down to water. If she could not eat the great flying creature, then she would eat its spawn.

  “Deadwood Pass,” Jessica said. The roboticized mining camp was located on a half-mile-wide mountain pass. To the east the land fell away steeply across rocky ground to the Grendel Valley River some called the Styx four thousand feet down and five miles away. The west side of the pass was less steep, falling a thousand feet to a high desert in a mile of boulder-strewn cliff slopes. The pass was bounded by steeply rising slopes to north and south. When the First found this area ten Avalon years before, a stream had run down from the northern peak. It wasn’t a large stream, but it was enough to worry the First. They had changed its course with dynamite. Where once it flowed down to the pass and then westward into the desert, now it veered to the east and fell over a series of cliffs to make spectacular waterfalls. They had installed sluice gates so that water could still be diverted to run in the old stream when Deadwood Pass was occupied.

  Water meant grendels. When grendels hunted they went on speed. It made them incredibly fast, but it also generated heat. A grendel too far from water could cook itself. They had never seen a grendel more than two kilometers from water except in rainstorms.

  Joe Sikes examined the area below with binoculars. “Base, this is Sikes. I have examined the pass and I confirm no change in water levels,” he said formally.

  “Roger, Joe Sikes,” Zack’s voice said. “Geographic confirms no cloud formations, no rain expected, all water levels at or below normal in all directions from Deadwood. You are cleared to approach.”

  “Bring her down,” Sikes called. He continued to look through the binoculars, sweeping his view up and down both sides of the pass, then up and down the sharply rising peaks bounding it. “Jess, Linda, please confirm this, I see nothing.” He handed the binoculars to Jessica.

  She made a cursory examination and saw Sikes grimace in disapproval. All right, I’ll play your game. She looked again, this time sweeping the glasses slowly from the western desert up to the pass, across and down to the eastern valley floor. “Joeys,” she said. “I see three Joeys about fifty yards north in the shade of the solar conversion cloth. Otherwise nothing.”

  Linda took the glasses and looked again. “Confirm, normal, three Joeys,” she said formally, then laughed. “It must be safe if the Joeys are out like that.”

  “Roger,” Zack’s voice said. “All right, you’re cleared to land. Keep us posted, and stay in touch, and we’ll keep an eye on you.”

  Winds constantly blew across the pass, sometimes from the west, more often from the ocean to the southeast. The small flat area of the pass was smoothed by the constant wind. Now that the stream was diverted there was little green, just short brown and purple grass, and twisted brown bushes. The area was ugly enough, but it did hold a permanent mainland base: a square shelter to hold batteries and fuel cells, a hut good for overnight, packed with emergency supplies and technical equipment; and of course the mine itself. The north slopes above the pass were covered with solar-electric conversion material woven into the flexible sheets called Begley cloth.

  Jessica took back the binoculars and examined Deadwood Pass. The first thing she saw was a tubular frame geodesic dome crouching like a spider above a great dark hole in the earth. Usually steam would be gushing from the hole. Today there wasn’t even a wisp of vapor. The problem wasn’t here. They already knew that. They’d find the primary damage twenty feet away, in the refining apparatus.

  Linda had the controls while Joe gave instructions. They were both very relaxed, very professional. Jessica remembered Linda demonstrating the same kind of intense interest observing transplanted silkworms munching transplanted mulberry leaves.

  Cadzie was in a corner, sleeping. Jes
sica walked wide around his bassinet. He didn’t seem to slow Linda down very much, or else she never showed it. She only had to plan for him . . . but how did she learn?

  The refining station was just below them through the huge windows, but they spared it not a glance. They were studying its innards on two of the viewers. One was a demonstration view—Jessica had to watch for a minute before she understood—a cartoon of the station working normally.

  The little mining drones churned up the soft coal, and a conveyor belt moved it, a chunk at a time, up and over to the refinery. The prefabricated refinery processed the crumbly stuff, turning it into thick dark bricks of protoplastic, the fodder of their building and pharmaceuticals industry. Jessica recognized this sequence: it was a classroom film.

  The other showed the refinery setup dead and mangled. Track had lurched out of one of several tunnels, had lifted and twisted the casing of the refinery system. The damaged casing was smoke-blackened across that side. Damage inside could not be seen. Ore had piled high before the system’s rudimentary intelligence shut it down.

  Joe said, “I’ll kiss the ass of the nerd who’s good enough to be sending us that!” and added as an afterthought, “Unless it’s Edgar.”

  A real bomb, Jessica thought. Low-yield explosive. Wrecked equipment had forced an expedition.

  The eel, too, had forced an expedition to the mainland. Interesting coincidence? Jessica shook her head. No one would do that.

  “Touchdown in about nine minutes,” Linda said.

  Jessica groped in her pocket, began pulling on tough, light gloves. “I’m ready. Eager, and willing.”