Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  Stark terror. Anger. Fear. And excitement, because if the grendel came and he survived, he would be a man.

  Naked except for the grendel gun, shivering with the cold, Carey took another step toward the water—

  And then the water parted. Something glided from its depths. A black destroyer. A fanged shadow. A thing of terror and appetite, made flesh. It blinked slowly, placidly at the naked creature trembling before it, and took a lazy step.

  Carey shifted his rifle at the first disturbance. The kid was quick. Skinny, but quick. Justin was already sighting—

  Carey screamed, aimed, and fired. The grendel gun bucked, and a splash of Day-Glo orange splayed across the grendel’s snout. The grendel blurred, flying toward Carey at heart-stopping speed. Carey fired again, and shouted, “Oh, sleet!”

  Another long second, and the marrow had to be freezing in his veins. Perhaps the first bitter words of condemnation and a forlorn prayer were beginning to form on his lips . . .

  Then fire flared in the darkness behind the torches. Three shots almost as one. A quarter-second later, a fourth shot. Then the grendel was hit six, seven, eight times, slammed by heavy-caliber slugs that fried its nervous system, turned its assault into a leaping spasm, splashing toward the paralyzed Carey, who seemed to be watching the entire tableau in slow motion.

  He staggered to the left as the grendel thundered to earth. It was on its side, its projected prey forgotten now. Alive, but in an awful agony as its own speed sacs overloaded. A quarter-ton of amphibian death clawed at the ground, screaming, chasing its own tail in diminished circles, tearing up earth and rock and grass there in the half-circle of the firelight, its dying hiss burning their ears . . .

  Steam rose from its body. Its claws and tail trembled, twitched, and were still at last.

  Carey turned back to look at them as they emerged from the shadows. Jessica hung back, her motion sensors wary for additional predators. They were pretty certain about this—only one momma per hole. But grendels had surprised them before.

  Not this time, but it had happened.

  “You . . . bastards,” Carey said. Panting, he flung his rifle down on the ground. Pitiful in his nakedness, he had clearly wet himself, but was unconscious of it.

  “You incredible bastards.” He took another breath, and held it. This was a critical moment. He looked back at the grendel. Justin remembered the first time they had done this, and what the kid had said afterward. There had been no one to do this for him—he was one of the eldest Star Born, and no Earth Born even dreamed that something like the Grendel Run was going on. None of the Earth Born would do something so risky . . . and so much fun.

  But he knew that Carey was looking at them. And the rifles, and then at the grendel. And remembering the incredibly short pause before the grendel was blown back into the water. Less than a second. Time enough to lose control of his bladder. Time enough to feel more naked and defenseless than he had ever imagined a human being could feel. Time enough to experience the incredible precision required by a kill team.

  Carey looked at them and swallowed. He knew somehow that his entire reputation for machismo rested upon what he said next.

  “Well . . . ” He strained to sound casual. He bent, picked up his rifle. He walked toward them until he was standing three feet from Justin. He extended the rifle with his left hand. Justin extended his own right to take it—and Carey hit him, quite hard and very quickly, with his right fist, just under the left ear.

  Justin stumbled back, tripped, and went down.

  Finally, Carey smiled. “That was . . . pretty fair shooting.” He watched Justin carefully.

  Justin pushed himself up to a sitting position. He felt his jaw tenderly. “Got a pretty good right there, kid.” And held up his hand.

  Carey took it and yanked him up, then stood with his legs slightly apart, well balanced. His lopsided grin was challenging. “Hendrick’s a good coach,” he said. Justin nodded. No action. A great sigh seemed to go through them all, a release of tension.

  “You’d have got him, you know,” Justin said. “It was a good hit.”

  “Why the hell do you do that?” Carey asked.

  “It’s fun,” Aaron said.

  Justin frowned. “We had a kid panic once. Nobody got shot, but it was close.”

  “Why paint? Cassandra would know if I hit—oh.”

  “Heh. Cassandra doesn’t know about this. Jesus, can you imagine what Zack would do?”

  They all laughed.

  “So who panicked?”

  Justin looked at him and shook his head.

  “Edgar,” Aaron said.

  Carey smiled knowingly.

  “Got the grendel, though,” Justin said.

  Carey coughed politely. “Who’s got my clothes? My nuts are freezing.”

  Heather sashayed out of the dark. “Here’s a blanket,” she said sweetly. The blanket was wrapped around her. When she opened it, there was nothing underneath but Heather.

  Carey swallowed hard. It wasn’t certain, but the good bet was that Carey was still a virgin. Well, this evening would see the end of that onerous burden.

  Heather wrapped the blanket around the both of them, and Carey became very, very involved in a kiss. Amid the general cheering, the two of them retreated from the firelight.

  Aaron grinned. “Today I am a man,” he said.

  “Indeed. Now. Jessica—any other ghoulies about?”

  “No grendel-sized heat sources. Let’s harvest some samlon.”

  By the time they got back to Heorot, Tau Ceti was rising over the mountains.

  Mercifully, the day was set for lazing and play. Carey Lou managed to stagger to his tent and collapse. Or at least they assumed that he was collapsing. Heather was with him, and the more Justin thought about it, the more he was convinced that a fourteen-year-old libido just might be impervious to fatigue, fear, and a thorough workout by the (rumor had it) inexhaustible Miss McKennie.

  Ah, youth.

  The day passed quickly, samples were gathered and catalogued, lessons on wildlife and herbology were taught by the elder Scouts, and a considerable amount of skinny-dipping, impromptu tree-climbing competitions, and general hell-raising continued through the day.

  When evening finally fell again, there was a pleasant air of fatigue settling over the camp. They had shared two extremely alive days. Carey had also learned that three other Biters had suffered as he had. He was a member of a fraternity now, and he was already relishing the thought of passing that favor to one of the younger kids in a few years. Say, his younger brother Patrick . . .

  The cook fires were burning, and soon dinner would be prepared. But there was another question still on the Biters’ minds, and they had pestered their elders all day long.

  Finally, Aaron sat them down, not a shred of playfulness in his attitude.

  “All right,” he said. “There’s something serious we need to talk about tonight. Tonight, it’s time that you learned things.”

  “About our parents?” Sharon asked.

  “Things about your parents. And grandparents. There are reasons why they didn’t come over here. Why we’re the ones.”

  “Why?”

  Justin and Jessica looked at each other nervously; then Justin said, “When you freeze something that has water in it, you get ice crystals. They thought that they had whipped the problems, but something went wrong. They froze the crew of Geographic. They woke them up in shifts for various duties around the ship, crossing from Sol to Tau Ceti. And there were problems.”

  “Problems?” Carey asked.

  “Yes. When you freeze people for a hundred years and then wake them up, chances are you’ve formed some ice crystals in their brains. Wake them twice, you get more crystals. Crystals rupture cells, mess it up in—” He tapped his skull. “—here.”

  “What did it do?”

  “A lot of our parents aren’t as smart as they used to be. They get emotional problems, too. Coordination. Early strokes. Just pla
in stupidity. At first it didn’t really matter. They were still smarter than most people they’d known, and they’d chosen the island because it was safe. No problems to face, nothing they couldn’t deal with. Even then, they got in the habit of talking things over, being sure they weren’t doing something stupid—”

  “Rules,” Sharon McAndrews said.

  “Rules,” Justin agreed. “And that was good enough for a while. There weren’t any real dangers here, none that they knew about anyway. Then, the first grendel came. They didn’t understand. They had rules, and they stuck to the rules, and it didn’t work, but Colonel Weyland helped them and they defeated the first grendels. They went hunting, and when they thought they had killed all the grendels, they hadn’t. You know about that. What you don’t know is how bad it shook them. After the Grendel Wars, they stopped trusting themselves and they stopped trusting each other. They didn’t work well together when the grendels popped up, and that’s one of the reasons that our parents are so afraid of them now.”

  There was silence. Justin could see it: they were trying to find a lie in the story. But there were too many clues. They knew, they had always known. There was something wrong with Mom, with Dad. With Uncle. They had always known, but never had a label.

  Now they did.

  “Ice on his mind,” Carey Lou said. “I’ve heard that, but nobody would tell me what it meant—”

  “And my mother slapped me when I said it to her,” Sharon said.

  “Christ,” Carey Lou said. “What can we do?”

  “Love them,” Jessica said. “They’re doing the best they can. That’s what we expect of you. Just love them, but do your own thinking. Including about their rules. That’s why they make rules. They don’t trust their own thoughts, not when they act alone. So they try to get a collective judgment on everything that can happen, and make that a rule, and then they follow the rules no matter what.”

  “Ice on their minds,” Carey Lou said again, slowly. “Son of a bitch!”

  Aaron and Trish carried a pole across their shoulders, with a dozen netted samlon suspended from it. They were singing some kind of hunting song or working song . . . “Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to hunt I go” . . . making up verses as they approached the campfire.

  Water was already simmering and bubbling in the glass cauldron. Potatoes and onions had been brought over from Camelot, but there was more: mainland bulbs and leaves known to be edible and tasty. Some of the brighter Scouts noticed how flashlights had been focused into the cauldron, so that the vegetables could be seen dancing around in the roiling water.

  There was an air of excitement, and someone ooh’d as Justin produced a wicked-looking knife and sliced the heads off the samlon.

  “Look at their eyes,” he said. “But for us, they would have been grendels one day, and hunted us. We killed them first. What eats grendels?” he asked. “We eat grendels.”

  They were as tense as an audience awaiting a magic trick. Justin figured that that was pretty close to accurate.

  His blood-smeared hands gathered the beheaded samlon up and carried them to the pot, dropping them into the water.

  The water foamed with blood.

  “Watch,” Justin said, “watch and see . . . ”

  Those first few trips, the Scouts had been crawling all over each other to watch and see, to look down into an inadequate aluminum pot. Once Ansel Stevens fell in and scalded his whole arm. Once there was a full riot. The pots kept getting bigger, but the Scouts still missed most of the action, until Chaka got big enough to carry this mucking great glass cauldron. And now everyone could see it all.

  The three gallons of water in the pot churned. The samlon sank, and then churned up to the surface again, in a curious and disquieting imitation of life.

  Something was happening. The flesh of the samlon split, and wormlike things boiled out. Scores of them. Hundreds. Pale, fleshy things churning and dying in the boiling water, turning the clear bubbling broth into a kind of thick gumbo . . . or jambalaya.

  The Biters pulled back, choking. There rose from the red kettle a stench of blood.

  And in a disturbing way . . . it was a good smell. Like last night’s savory aroma, only stronger.

  Justin and Aaron and Katya and Jessica and the other Second watched ghoulishly. The children stared at the kettle, sniffed at it. One of them fled to the entrance of the cave and vomited.

  In a half-hour the brew was done, and ladled into bowls. It was an evil-looking mess, filled with fragments of samlon heads and the gutted carcasses now torn into chunks by Katya’s bloody knife. The dead worms and corkscrew things were bloated pinkly in death. There were little transparent crabs no bigger than a Biter’s fingernail. The base stock was as crimson as tomato soup. It looked filled with insects.

  Aaron held the bowl to his lips. The Biters watched him, horribly fascinated.

  “Mmmmm,” he raised the spoon to his lips. He blew on it. Something thick and wormy flopped over the edge of the broad spoon. He slurped it up as if it were vermicelli, making a smacking sound. “Delicious.”

  “Dinner,” Jessica said, “is served.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 10 ♦

  the first church of the grendel

  In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed:

  deliver me in thy righteousness.

  Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily;

  be thou my strong rock, for an house of defence to save me.

  For thou art my rock and my fortress;

  therefore for thy name’s sake lead me, and guide me.

  Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me:

  for thou art my strength.

  Into thine hand I commit my spirit:

  thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth.

  —Psalm 31:16

  Jessica rose only when she was absolutely certain that the others were asleep. On tiptoes, she crept out of the cave. The soft purring snores of sleeping children surrounded her. She felt a delicious synthesis of maternal concern and utter wickedness.

  Aaron waited just outside the cave, and held a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  Jessica nodded, understanding the need for secrecy. This wasn’t for Justin. Not anymore—he had made his choice, and Jessica had made hers. Her heart thudded in her chest as she followed Aaron down the path. They passed a tree, and it wasn’t until they had passed that she realized that it wasn’t just a shadow, but Trish, dark as the night. A Bottle Baby.

  Trish joined them as they moved silently down the trail.

  Little Chaka and others drifted into their line until there were seven in all. They came to a small clearing near a very shallow running stream.

  “Running water,” she observed unnecessarily. “Everything I am, and everything I’ve learned says to stay away from it.”

  Aaron nodded. “In mortis Veritas,” he said.

  He pulled a stone away from a cairn of fist-sized, smooth rocks. Then all seven of them were rolling away rocks, until they exposed a small kettle wrapped in transparent plastic.

  Trish produced a hot plate and a battery cell. Toshiro brought water from the stream, and filled the small kettle.

  Jessica’s stomach felt light and fluttery. During the day she watched Aaron studying leaves and plants with the intensity of a trained ethnobotanist. She was one of the very few who knew why he studied so intently. Quietly, without drawing any attention to himself, he had collected the plants that he needed.

  He had also collected the grendel’s liver.

  Speed generates enormous heat. The metabolic by-products would kill the grendel, just as the by-products of combustion will kill a fire. Its liver and bile ducts—or the grendel versions thereof—are awesome. A grendel can eat anything and survive the products of its own massive oxidation because of its efficient cooling and detoxification systems.

  At thirteen years of age, Aaron had analyzed grendel bile ducts, livers, and other organs of cleansing with a view to psychophar
macology.

  At fourteen he had created the Ritual. Since then, he had indoctrinated ten others into the mysteries of grendel flesh.

  “The First Church of the Grendel,” Jessica had laughed. Aaron had barely smiled.

  The kettle was bubbling now, and would soon be ready. He added a few handfuls of mushroom-looking things, and something that looked like a fern. She nervously contributed her own handful, a few leaves pruned from one of Cadmann’s living-room cacti. Poisonous, yes. But in very precise combination with certain plants, and the liver of a grendel that had died on speed . . .

  She watched the stars. The same, but different stars from those beneath which her ancestors had lived and died, loved and hunted, fought and borne children. But they were her stars. The way to survive is to become one with the environment. The Earth Born still saw Avalon as a place of strangeness, of danger. Every one of them would have to die, the things of Earth would have to die before this planet could be truly conquered. And this ritual, as old as humanity, was the prayer of the hunters and gatherers whose lives were interwoven with the land itself. The Earth Born had come as the Europeans to the new world. Aaron said that they would have to learn the traditions of the Native American peoples in order to survive here. They could not own the land, but they could be a part of it.

  Aaron dipped a cup into the brew, and lifted it steaming to his lips. “To us,” he said. “To the children of a new world.”

  He drank. When he was finished, he passed the cup to the left, and the ritual was repeated, and again, until all of them had downed a mouthful of the sour mash.

  It smashed into her gut like napalm. She broke into a sweat, her heartbeat rocketing.

  For a few foolish moments, she prayed that nothing would happen this time . . . then her stomach soured, and she knew there was no use in hoping. It had begun.

  During the first grendel ceremony, she had vomited. Since then, Aaron had incorporated acid neutralizers and buffering agents, and now the entire experience was, at least physically, much milder.