Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  ♦ ChaptEr 20 ♦

  scribeveldt

  and eden hill

  All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

  all chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

  all discord, harmony not understood;

  all partial evil, universal good.

  —Alexander Pope

  Three Months Later . . .

  Little Chaka watched as his father took another careful step toward the winged creatures they called birdies. Cane first, then left foot, then right—all slow and smooth and deliberate.

  Three birdies clustered about a low bush whose persimmon-sized fruit had turned from blue to red within the last two days. Only then did they begin to attract the flying Crustacea. With the deepening of summer, bushes and leaves, plants and grasses all through the forests were changing color, ripening, exploding into a thousand hues of gold and red, and deep, fertile green. Horsemane trees infested with a hundred varieties of parasite and symbiote blossomed as if offering welcome to a hundred more.

  The largest birdie—a big purple flying wing with spiffy little white wing tips—swiveled an independent eye toward Big Chaka, now only a dozen meters away. Big Chaka was a small man, barely cresting five feet in his tallest years. Time had crowded, shrunken, grayed him, spotted his dark face. His close-cropped, tightly coiled hair receded from his temples, and he needed corrective lenses to read and a cane to walk. A small, unwieldy pot belly swelled the front of his shirts, and his hands trembled when he wrote in the journals he had kept for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

  But he could still move slowly and smoothly enough to approach animals more closely than Chaka would have believed possible. He was still Avalon’s premier zoologist. And he was still Dad.

  The birdie watching Big Chaka began vibrating its motor wings. Its foreclaws anchored it to a branch, and the branch began to quiver. A high-pitched whistling whine rose up. The other two birdies stopped eating and began rustling as well. They gripped branches with two forward claws, but the little paddle-shaped wings aft blurred with their vibration. The whine became louder and louder, until the trees rustled with it.

  Little Chaka wasn’t alarmed, not even when the call was taken up distantly by first one, and then a chorus. Communicating threat? Summoning help?

  Big Chaka retreated a foot, and then another foot, and the birdies began to calm again. They returned to their meal. The distant droning died away. Silence returned to the forest.

  An almost boyish grin wreathed Big Chaka’s face as he stumped back to his son. “Not exactly a colony, too much independent action for that. More like small family clusters—maybe three to six. Possibly three sexes, or two fertile and one neuter to watch the nest while the others forage, like Avalon Type Six sea crabs. We’ll get samples later.”

  He linked arms with his son as they walked back uphill. “And you call this Eden?”

  Little Chaka nodded. “It’s where we take the Grendel Biters. There are things they need to learn about this planet, and this is a good place for it.”

  “I can hear running water. Are there grendels?”

  “Always assume grendels. Trust me. We don’t take chances. But there is a good overhang between us and the river here. The clearest path for a grendel to reach us is over a kilometer of bone-dry upgrade. We have motion sensors strung every twenty meters—nothing larger than a Joey can get up here without alerting us, and we have good people on the grendel guns. They’re death. It’s safe.” He frowned. “Of, course, we thought Deadwood was safe, too. But nothing bad has ever happened here.”

  Big Chaka nodded. “Things are changing, though.” He squinted up at Tau Ceti, a fuzzy ball through high clouds. “Things are changing.” He walked carefully along the path. Every few feet he stopped to inspect a leaf, to study a scavenger insectoid hauling away a carcass five times its size, to scrape away a sample of fungus and deposit it in a glassine envelope. Then he made notes in his log, and photographed the sample lying on the open pages of the logbook, with the place he’d found it as background.

  “You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “I wish that you could have been on Earth. Then you would understand the wealth spread out in front of you. Everywhere you look, all you have to do is reach out your hand, and there is a new creature, a new plant. Something new, something new.” With that faraway expression on his face, Little Chaka thought he resembled a wrinkled black Buddha. “Earth had . . . run out of new.”

  He smiled crookedly. The smile broadened as he spotted a tiny corkscrew tree growing in the shadow of its parent.

  “Oh!” he cooed. “A perfect duplicate of its parent—except see, it’s a lefty, its trunk spirals in the opposite direction . . . ”

  He was that way as they headed back up to the mine, hobbling here and there, studying this, commenting on that—never complaining about the distance or the grade, although some of it must have been exhausting. Chaka’s emotions were torn. On the one hand, he was still nervous about the entire area. On the other hand, it was wonderful to see his father every day, exploring with him, and hearing him lecture, just as he had day after wonderful day when he was a child.

  They were three kilometers from the mine, far enough around the first bend in the trail that they couldn’t be seen. Big Chaka sat down on a rock and loosed one of his shoes.

  “Tired, Father?”

  “No, I think I have something in my shoe. Son, tell me about this base camp you’re setting up.”

  “Well, it’s not so much me setting it up—”

  “I know. Aaron seems to be in charge, and I have noticed that he needs no advice from my generation.” He inspected the inside of his left shoe. “Of course, he wasn’t offered much advice by Colonel Weyland.”

  “I noticed that.”

  “You and everyone else.” Big Chaka sighed. “Inevitable, I suppose.”

  “Dad, it’s no big deal.”

  “Not to you. Of course not. But to us—Son, when we first came here we ignored Cadmann Weyland’s warnings, and we were very nearly wiped out. Since then we’ve got in the habit of consulting him.”

  “Your talisman,” Little Chaka said.

  “Talisman, wizard—of course he is none of these things. But I am told you have decided on a location for your base camp. Indulge me by telling me of it.”

  “Sure. It’s something over three hundred and twenty kilometers north of here, in the mountains but there’s a large flat area. No big streams but a lot of springs and little streams. The flat is a meadow.”

  “Yes, I know the area,” Big Chaka said.

  “Sir?”

  “From the maps. It looks dangerous. There is a forest nearby.”

  “Only a small forest, but it’s a forest. Tender leaves. Very edible. Dad, there are Joeys in the rocks, and ground animals in the forest. I don’t think a grendel has ever been there.”

  “It will put you right at the edge of skeeter range.”

  “Until we get the solar collectors set up,” Little Chaka said. “But it faces south, and we’ve got big rolls of Begley cloth. We’ll get it spread out, and there’s sunlight most days. It won’t be long before we generate enough power to recharge the skeeters there.” He rubbed his hands together. “Then we can do some real exploring. Another hundred and fifty kilometers and we’re at the edge of the Scribeveldt!”

  “That I envy,” Big Chaka said.

  “Well, you could come with us—”

  Big Chaka laughed gently. “You know better. I would not be welcome among your friends.” He put his shoe back on and fastened it. “Be careful, son. We don’t know what killed Joe Sikes and Linda Weyland, but we are very sure of what killed nearly every one of us during the Grendel Wars. Don’t be so concerned about an unknown danger that you ignore a known one. Now we ought to be getting back—” He stopped to look at a colorful lichen. “In a moment.”

  Little Chaka was still a little nervous about these side trips. They were too far from Deadwood’s reinforced Kevlar shelters for his
comfort. But Big Chaka won that argument, as his father usually did.

  On their first day at the mine site, he had wandered far afield, to the very edge of the tree line. “Chaka,” he had said. “Look at the density, only five hundred meters from the death site. Nothing has razed this. There are Joeys in the trees, and birdies, and these little insect fellows. Whatever killed Joe and Linda also ate the dogs. Ate all of the organic material in their clothes. It was a freak occurrence. In truth, this is probably the safest place on the planet now—this particular lightning won’t strike here again for quite a while.” When his son seemed unconvinced, he added, “If you’re worried, carry a couple of Cadmann’s survival sacks with you.”

  “I’m worried. Grendels can’t bite through the Kevlar, but a bite could still crush a bone—”

  “You have grendels on the brain. You studied those skeletons as carefully as I did. No pressure had been applied. No broken bones. No tooth marks. Scrapes, yes, something scraped the meat from the bones, but it was small, not the teeth of a grendel. Whatever killed Joe and Linda was no grendel—unless that grendel had cooked them for hours and then sucked the meat off the bones.”

  Chaka grimaced at his father’s morbid imagery. So what was the danger? The Kevlar sacks should theoretically protect from an acid cloud, or . . . or whatever the hell it was that had killed their friends. The current guess was something biological rather than chemical. A memory stirred in his mind, something from an old science-fiction novel about giant protozoans lurching out of the swamps of Venus to digest unwary space folk. There were movies of large blood-sucking monsters among the stars.

  He didn’t really believe that, but invisible death had eaten two members of his family under Cassandra’s very nose, and the only clue was traces of speed on the bones. Speed meant grendels, but how? A fascinating puzzle, if only it hadn’t been real.

  They made good time the rest of the way back to the mine. His father accepted little help, even when sweat beaded his brow and the breath whistled in his throat. Long before dusk they found themselves hiking up the final approach. The hum of machinery was clear at half a kilometer—repair and restoration were well underway. A thin stream of smoke and screams of tortured metal told that some large piece of equipment was being ripped out and refitted. His father was blowing a little on the upslope, but Chaka had released his son’s arm and was stalking bravely up the side of the hill. Little Chaka was bouncing like a balloon. Free at last! He had forgotten what it felt like to climb around in the mountains without that damned cook pot on his back.

  Sylvia Weyland waved her arms as they came up over the rise. Smelting metal was a sharp tang in their noses. Cranes and scaffolding hovered about the new mine shack. A dozen workers bustled about, carrying, loading, crafting. A new and stronger shed was being erected, and Sylvia, biologist turned engineer, was the week’s gang chief, and would rotate back to the mainland with the arrival of Robor.

  “How was the walk?” she yelled.

  “Great!” They were a little closer now, and voices could be dropped. Sylvia looked tired and a little sweaty, but satisfied. She and her crew worked fast. Two new steel frames had been fitted into place on the structure that would house permanent, grendel-proof shelters for mines and miners. Atop it was an antenna to serve as a backup relay for communications between the mainland and the base camp Aaron called Shangri-la, now under construction three hundred and twenty kilometers away.

  “I’m not seeing as much of the local biology as I’d like,” Big Chaka complained as she approached him for a hug. “My son is just too protective. I’m not a child.”

  “We’re just taking the mountain back,” Sylvia said. “Our resources are still split. Let’s just say that we’ll all feel a lot better when you’ve categorized more of the life around here, but there are unavoidable risks attached. You’re the only father Little Chaka has; is it surprising he’s a bit”—she grinned—“possessive?”

  His father looked up at Little Chaka owlishly. “It wasn’t so many years ago that I carried you up into the highlands on my shoulders. Now, you could carry me, and with less effort.” Then he smiled. “I suppose that every man wants his son to grow up. Mine just grew up a little further than most.”

  Little Chaka glowed with pride, touched with only the slightest tinge of sadness. He was just beginning to really understand that one day his father would no longer be there to talk to, to share with.

  But until that time, he could give thanks that they had had so much time together. That they had been able to share so much.

  The Robor misadventure had not damaged their relationship beyond repair. He wasn’t certain how he would have withstood that. Even now, there was a slow coiling of anger and resentment and self-contempt surrounding the whole issue. Self-contempt for allowing himself to be talked into it. Resentment toward Aaron Tragon. Anger, unresolved and smoldering, over the death of Toshiro.

  But if his relationship with his father had been damaged . . .

  He didn’t want to think about that. He would have felt far more self-contempt. Far more resentment.

  Far more anger toward Aaron.

  He wondered, somewhat darkly, what he might have done about that. But he had to get back to Shangri-la and plan the expedition to the Scribeveldt, and there was no time at all for such thoughts.

  The Scribeveldt was a vast oval of highland plain that began at the foothills three hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of Shangri-la Base Camp, and stretched for over two thousand kilometers to the north and east from there. A long, sluggish river that someone had dubbed the Zambezi ran from north to south a little to the west of the plain’s center line. It was a river with few tributaries, and effectively divided the Scribeveldt into two unequal portions. Both parts of the veldt were covered by thick grassy stalks that grew up to waist height and were sometimes covered with tiny yellow flowers.

  It was called the Scribeveldt because when they first examined it from orbit it appeared to be covered with cursive alien script written in broad lines with faded ink, close-mowed curving stripes that approached each other, merged, then diverged. They had to be animal tracks. For the past year the trails had hardly come together at all, as if they were deliberately avoiding each other.

  The Scribeveldt ended in a forest that covered the foothills. A few year-round streams ran through the forest, none more than a few inches deep. The Scribeveldt and forest had been examined from orbit for years, and one thing was certain; there were a number of animals on the veldt and within the forest, but except for a narrow band near the big river, there were no grendels.

  The hunting blind was at the edge of the forest. Jessica quietly pushed aside a wisp of brush that obscured her view and peered out at the peaceful herd of chamels grazing quietly a half-kilometer away. Her war specs magnified them until they seemed close enough to touch.

  One of the male chamels raised its head and looked right at her. Clever little sucker, aren’t you? You can’t see me or hear me. Do you smell me?

  He had a gazelle’s grace and the thin, sensitive neck of a giraffe. His feathery-gray, insectile antenna trembled in the still air, sniffing. Would it alert the other eleven? Human beings were new to the mainland, but chamels often reacted with fear-and-flight response to any new stimulus. So far neither the males nor the heavy, rhino-like females nor the three St. Bernard-sized “pups” had panicked.

  Jessica lay in her blind pit as Cassandra analyzed the image in the war specs and bounced data to Shangri-la one hundred and fifty kilometers away.

  “Do we want it?” she whispered.

  “I’m drooling.” Chaka’s voice was eager. He was in one of the other blinds, probably out of direct sight of the herd, but his war specs could display Cassandra’s downlink. “Protective coloration’s almost perfect.”

  Jessica checked: naked eye, war specs, then naked eye again. Damned good. What did the chamels do? Scan the environment with their noses, and adjust the protective coloration for a potential predator�
�s perspective? The creatures were less conspicuous than their own shadows, a perfect predator-proofing strategy.

  Strange, Jessica thought. We aren’t just thinking about grendels any longer. There are other things out there. We’ve got to lose a whole generation’s worth of bogeybeast stories, or we’ll never survive.

  “These are winners. Fast, and strong, and senses are sharp. Hungry, too. Haven’t stopped munching leaves since they arrived.”

  Chaka’s voice was thoughtful. “The trick will be keeping the herd together. We want to protect the family dynamics, if we can.”

  “Cassandra,” Jessica whispered. “Note the brush, and the type and quantity and maturity of the leaves being eaten. Special note of the grazing patterns of the little ones.”

  They’d had to add modules to Cassandra in order to keep up with the flow of data. That had sparked yet one more debate: should their computer power be used for information processing or manufacturing? It was settled only when Zack took the side of the Second. “We can live without more consumer goods, but we can’t live without knowledge,” he’d said, surprising many of the Second. Everything was so new, so rife with possibilities and problems. Love her as they might—Avalon had little tolerance for errors.

  Aaron’s voice: “The net is ready. Repeat. The net is ready.”

  She grinned. This was going to be fun. A week of preparation. And now . . .

  “On my count,” she said. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”

  Four balloon-tired dirt trikes exploded from meticulously constructed blind pits. The twelve chamels whipped about, startled and outraged to find they weren’t Avalon’s only masters of camouflage.

  The beasts took off toward the east. Jessica revved her trike, hit a mound of earth, and exploded up into the air. She slammed down with a spine-jarring bounce. The roar of the hydrogen engines, the exhilaration of the chase, her own adrenal flush all dizzied her deliciously.