Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  The psychoactive alkaloids were kicking in now. External sounds were fading. It was not that they weren’t there, or that she had gone deaf, it was that her focus of attention was so tight now, so utterly complete that it was as if she was staring down a long, long tunnel. There at the far end were the simmering kettle and the fire. And if she turned the focus of her attention on Aaron, she saw Aaron, and only Aaron, and if she looked up at the stars and the night sky, she could focus on any point of light, bring it up bright and tight, a hot little marble that she could almost hold in her hand. Aaron’s voice crooned to her, sounding for all the world like the music of those very spheres:

  “We are the inheritors of this world. We own all of this, everything that we can see, everything that there is to own. We are the strong ones. The others call us Merry Pranksters. We do what we do to test our power. To ensure that we can control every aspect of this planet. And then we place a clown’s face upon our deeds so that the old ones will feel no fear.

  “But one day we may have to take other steps. And when we do we will have to act as one mind, as one body. As the inheritors of this world, with no barriers between intent and action. As one mind. As one body . . . ”

  She could hear his words, felt them slipping between those bright hot marbles. She was burning up, but sought refuge in the very fire that consumed her. Aaron’s hands were on her. And then other hands. And then she was reaching, touching, tasting, consuming and allowing herself to be consumed in the fire raging within her, without her, and in the space between those bright, hot marbles in the sky.

  ♦ ChaptEr 11 ♦

  invisible death

  Death hath so many doors to let out life

  —John Fletcher, The Custom of the Country

  The children and their guardians were not quite alone. Above them was Geographic. In geosynch over Camelot, Geographic maintained a web of satellites across the continent and around the planet, and kept careful track of weather and tidal conditions. Geographic, the largest movable object ever created by man, had carried its cargo of frozen human beings across ten light-years, expending a cubic kilometer of deuterium snowball along the way. The deuterium was exhausted now. Its sleeve was a shrunken silver balloon, the pressure inside barely higher than the vacuum around it.

  Geographic could still be moved by smaller steering rockets, but until the deuterium was replaced—if it ever was—she would remain in eternal orbit around Avalon. She was their link to Earth, and the Earth Born insisted that all of their children be taken up. “This is your heritage. You call yourselves Star Born, now see the stars.”

  A few came back as often as they could. Some of the Second still dreamed of crossing the void between the stars. A few even spoke of returning to Earth. For the most part, though, the children of Earth were rare visitors. Geographic’s corridors were empty, cold, and dark, with only a few flickering lights to give any sign that she had once been alive.

  In the command center, the duplicate of the ground-based Cassandra system analyzed a planet’s worth of data. She filtered it, and relayed down whatever seemed of interest.

  Greg Arruda looked up from his novel as the comm light came on. “Arruda here.”

  “Zack. How are things?”

  “Jesus Christ, Zack, they’re the way they were the last time you asked.” He looked at the console. “The board’s green. No large objects approaching the oasis. Children all accounted for at last head count. Wait one—”

  “What?”

  “No panic, Zack. Yellow light from one of the close-in satellites. There’s a wind coming up. Northwest wind, about thirty knots through the pass.”

  “Rain? Rain means grendels!”

  “Ah . . . indicators say dry. Way dry, suck the water right out your pores. Zack, for God’s sake, you worry too much. Let the kids have some time to themselves. And get to bed! I’ll call you if there’s anything you need to know.”

  “Yeah, Greg, I know you think I’m a fussy old woman—hell, you were there, you remember grendels.”

  “No, they slipped my mind for a good twenty seconds there. Zack, get to sleep.”

  Linda woke as Cadzie shifted in his blanket to search for a nipple. Half-asleep, she cooed to him and peeled back her blouse. Drowsily suspended between dream and reality, she didn’t really wake up until Cadzie was sated. The morning was still dark. Light would creep across the glade in another twenty minutes.

  Joe was still asleep, his strong, broad back to her. The regular rise and fall of his breathing was absurdly comforting.

  They made a good team. They worked together well, and they played together well. And love was . . . every bit as good. It felt whole, healing. She could easily imagine being with this man for the rest of her life. As soon as she could be away from Cadzie for a day or two, she was going to take Joe down the Miskatonic, in the wedding ritual as old as Camelot himself. All the way down to the ocean, there would be camping, and cuddling, and long, slow, warm lovemaking, and it would be . . . wondrous.

  She wrapped the infant in a blue blanket, covering all but his nose. She opened the door of the dirigible, and stretched in the breeze. She felt utterly content.

  Joe had come up silently behind her and was kissing the back of her neck. Dawn was coming in now, darkness already giving way to a warm, silvery glow. The air was no longer still. Ginger and Toffee, the twin golden retrievers, were still asleep, curled up next to each other near the dead fire. There were buzzing sounds and distant calls of pterodons, and even more distant hisses, calls of the monkey-things and the imitative calls of the big spider devil that hunted them.

  She turned and kissed Joe. His morning breath was sour but not unpleasant. She handed Cadzie over, patted Joe on his rump, and went to wash and dress, girding her mind for the day’s business.

  By the time Linda climbed down from Robor, Joe was already roughhousing with Ginger, pretending to bite her throat, growling and barking at her. He gathered up Cadzie and gave Linda a minty kiss. The two of them crossed the glade, dogs nipping at their heels. She never noticed that all the creature sounds of Avalon had gone away.

  The machinery within the corrugated refinery shack was burnt and twisted and scummed with pink fire foam. Linda placed her drowsy son just outside the shack, in the waxing sunlight. Ginger curled up next to Cadzie like a big cat. Dog warmth, and the heat of his blue thermal blanket, would keep the boy comfortable until Tau Ceti climbed a little higher.

  Joe was still examining the equipment when she returned. He looked utterly disgusted. “Morning light doesn’t improve it much, does it?”

  “Not a bit. Let’s go ahead and make the report.” She touched her collar. “This is Linda Weyland at station three. Who’s on duty?”

  A second or two of silence, and then they got their reply. “Edgar here. Hi Dad, Linda. Nobody else around yet. Ready to report?”

  Joe sighed. “Frankly, I think that we should trash it and rebuild.”

  “Except that it might happen again.” Edgar said.

  “There’s that. Edgar—”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Oh hell, of course you don’t know anything you’re not telling us,” Joe said.

  “They don’t tell me everything,” Edgar said. “Aaron doesn’t much care for me, and the others—do you still think it’s sabotage?”

  “No,” Joe said carefully. “I’ll say that for the record. After examining the damage here at the minehead, it is my considered opinion that we don’t have the foggiest notion what happened. It’s another goddamn Avalon Surprise.”

  The wall shuddered as the wind howled against the shack. “Bloody hell, that wind’s come up strong,” Joe said.

  Linda stepped out to fold the blanket over Cadzie’s face.

  “Sorry, Edgar,” she said. “We’re picking up a little wind here.”

  “What?”

  “Wind.”

  “Roger, we see that. There’s a storm coming southeast over the mountains. Dry wind, no danger from grendels, but i
s Robor secure?”

  “Very.”

  Ginger growled, coming to point. She looked off toward the west. Toffee was fifteen feet away, staring in the same direction. They began to bark, yapping against the growing wind. A dry wind, hot. It dried her skin faster than she could sweat.

  “Joe? That wind is really coming up. Double-check the moorings, will you? And get a wind warning clown to Heorot.”

  Joe dropped a length of singed tubing, and grunted in disgust. “You know that they’re offline. We can get them in an emergency, but that’s about it.”

  “All right—well, I hope they’ve got the skeeter sheltered.”

  “You know Justin. But I’ll go make a check.”

  Linda kissed Joe, and he looked almost surprised. “I’m just going to Robor,” he murmured against her lips.

  “Do I need a reason these days?” she asked.

  “Never.” He kissed her again, and started off across the glade.

  “Will you guys stop the mush?” Edgar said disgustedly.

  “No respect,” Linda clucked. “Remember—I’m going to be your mother one day soon.”

  “Hey. You know, one of a mother’s duties is to find mates for her offspring.”

  “I told you what to do about that problem.”

  “Sure. I’ll keep trying. Linda, Dad says it wasn’t sabotage. You agree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say that again?”

  “Yes! I agree it was not sabotage. Edgar, that wind is really howling now, it’s getting hard to hear.” She put her hand across her nose in a vain attempt to filter the dust. “It’s as if the coal had little flecks of dynamite—” She stopped. Some creature was howling in torment.

  “What’s that?” Edgar shouted.

  “I don’t know—” Across the clearing, the dogs were leaping and biting—at the dust. Joe slapped at his chest and neck and face. At first she thought it some kind of joke . . . some kind of crazy dance.

  The wind was stronger now, driving a wall of dust before it. She coughed and stepped out of the shelter, trying to see more clearly. Her smile was dead on her lips, her laughing questions stillborn in her throat. “Joe . . . ”

  And then she screamed.

  “Linda? Dad?” Edgar’s voice sounded urgent. “Alert! All stations alert! Base Two is in trouble!”

  She was blind before she quite realized that she was in trouble. Agony shrieked in her eye sockets, and she slapped her hands up to cover them. Blood slicked her palms, she felt the hollows where her eyes should have been, and the backs of her hands were being shredded.

  The world was consumed with agony. The wind roared in her ears. She had time to scream, “Joe!” and then the pain was at her lips, her tongue, and she was gagging on blood. Some mass staggered into her, and she knew it was Joe, darling Joe, loving Joe, groaning like a thing that had never known human consciousness. The dogs’ barking had transformed into an endless, pain-racked howl.

  In Camelot, bedroom alarms shrieked, and the streets were filled with sprinting bare feet. Hastily armed grendel guns pointed in all directions, and found nothing. There was no threat to be seen.

  By now the image from Satellite 16 was being piped through Geographic, enhanced, and relayed to Camelot’s communications center. The image was expanded again, and then again, until it seemed the scene was no more than a hundred yards distant . . . but it was all a blur, just textures shifting through fog.

  Hendrick Sills was first into the center. “What’s the alarm, Edgar?”

  There was panic in Edgar’s voice. “I thought it was a dust storm! They come through there regular, no problem, but the dogs started barking and Linda was screaming and now I can’t hear anything, and I can’t see anything, and my God!”

  “Get hold of yourself,” Zack said. “Dust storm. Rain?”

  “No, no rain, it’s a dry, hot wind, sirocco wind. Stronger than they usually get, but—Zack, I can’t hear anything. They were screaming, and now they don’t answer! What do I do?”

  “Keep watching. Can you zoom in?”

  “Trying. There, the dust is thinning out—” The image focused. Edgar’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, my God.” Two human shapes and a dog shape were writhing on the ground. “Dad! Linda!”

  The wind howled, and under the wind they could hear a baby’s wail. The image cleared for an instant. Shapes thrashed, slowed, then faded into a fog of blowing dust. Someone muttered a prayer; then the room was still. Half a world away, two people that they knew and loved were dying in agony, and there was nothing that they could do to help.

  Linda was beyond pain. She felt her eyes eaten away, the flesh etched from her bones.

  With the very last strength in her body, her blood-slicked fingers closed on Joe’s misshapen, lifeless hand. And her last thought was Cadzie . . .

  She heard her baby crying, crying, crying . . .

  And then there was nothing at all.

  ♦ ChaptEr 12 ♦

  paradise lost

  Nature is usually wrong.

  —James Abbott McNeill Whistler,

  Ten O’Clock

  Jessica snuggled next to Aaron in their sleeping bag. She was only half-awake until the whitter of skeeter blades roused her from her reverie.

  She had barely wedged her eyes open in time to see it thump to ground, landing too damn fast. Justin leapt out, and ran toward them. “Emergency, dammit!” he screamed. He was bare-chested, wearing only briefs. A surge of adrenaline whiplashed her into wakefulness. Aaron was already scrambling to his feet.

  All right, so Camelot had gotten nervous. This wasn’t the first time the Star Born had taken themselves offline. She knew that they’d catch hell for that one day, and just maybe that day had come . . .

  She struggled her clothes on, and hopped out toward the skeeter. Sprawled around the dead fire, the other Pranksters were hauling themselves toward consciousness.

  “What’s the problem?”

  Justin looked pale. “Edgar rang through. He was online with Linda and Joe. They got cut off. Move it!”

  The piled into the skeeter. Aaron had time to yell, “Trouble at Deadwood!” to Toshiro, who was up and pulling on a knit shirt. “We’re going up. Get back to camp and watch the Scouts. Set a defensive perimeter. Keep them back in the cave. Interlocking fields of fire and no mistakes.”

  “Got it.”

  Jessica buckled in. “Any sounds, messages, images at all?” she asked.

  “Screams,” Justin said tightly. “Just screams.”

  “Anything on the motion sensors? The thermals?”

  Unbidden, Edgar’s voice came over the radio. “Nothing. We’ve got Sat Twelve locked on, and I don’t see anything. I think they’re dead.”

  They rose up out of the glade, in toward Heorot. There they dropped down for a moment. Jessica and Aaron took the other skeeter, and she had them airborne in fifteen seconds. Their ascending spiral twisted the glade, the valley, and the surrounding mountains into a dizzying whirl.

  No one spoke as the skeeters leveled out and dove, crossing the two kilometers to the camp in about ninety seconds. Robor’s Chinese-dragon shape leered up at them, its red fringes rippling slowly in the wind.

  There was nothing. Nothing . . .

  And then Jessica whispered, “Oh dear God.” Bones. Human bones. Animal bones. Aaron said, “I see three skeletons. Two human. One canine.” His voice still held a machine precision. He was speaking for Cassandra, for Edgar back at Camelot. For whoever might have tapped into the line, and was now sick with concern.

  Her mind reeled. Grief and fear and raw hatred boiled within her like lava. Her vision clouded. She gripped the handbar in front of her as if a moment’s loss of concentration would tumble her off the edge of the world.

  Justin’s voice was arctic. “What do you see on the movement sensors? Any thermal flares?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” Aaron agreed.

  Justin’s voice was labored. He sounded like some k
ind of animal straining in a trap. “I don’t see any sign of the baby. Of Cadzie.”

  A trapdoor opened in the back of her mind. She felt herself slide a little ways down, then clawed her way back up. What waited at the bottom of that pit bore fangs and claws, and was ravenously hungry.

  “No sign. Not yet.” And what she didn’t say, what she couldn’t say, was Cadzie is barely a mouthful for a grendel.

  They hovered almost directly over the glade. Skeletons. The mining dome. A dozen yards distant, the refinery shack. The dirigible. And that was all.

  Aaron snapped out the trance first. “Cassandra, replay Sat Twelve, during or just prior to the incident.”

  Jessica slipped on a pair of goggles, and watched while the images played. Running, struggling. A dusty windstorm. Death.

  Bones.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Jessica muttered. “That was no grendel.”

  “It wasn’t anything.” Aaron was shaken. “It was invisible.”

  Camelot was awake, and gathering in the main hall.

  Carlos tore at a scrap of ragged flesh at the corner of his thumb. The satellite feed kept playing it over and over again, enhanced with thermals, to full magnification, giving the illusion that the couple was no more than a hundred meters away.

  Impossibly far away. A world away.

  Justin’s voice came over the speaker. “This is Skeeter Two. We are holding at seventy feet. We see skeletons. There’s nothing alive down there that we can see. Nothing we can do to help them. Need instructions.”

  Zack touched his collar. “Moskowitz. Did you say skeletons?”

  “Yes, sir. Two human skeletons. One canine,” Aaron said.

  Zack was unnaturally calm. “We copy that. Skeletons. Satellite inspection detects nothing.”

  “Motion sensors detect nothing,” Aaron said. “And we see nothing—wait one. There is a small skeleton in the rocks about twenty meters above the camp.”