Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “That’s not true, and you know it. I fight with Stu Ellington all the time. Well, almost all the time.” She smiled at him, and patted his cheek. “If you’re interested, you know where to find me, tonight,” she said.

  She hopped off the back of his horse, and trotted effortlessly back to where one of the trikes was rounding up a stray female.

  Justin hunched forward into his saddle. There was some truth in what Wendy said. There had to be a way of putting things back together. If he didn’t see it at the moment, it might still be real.

  Jessica nodded hello as he pulled up to the rear of the herd.

  “Nice country.” He felt cautious, and guilty about the caution.

  “Beautiful.” No other words followed.

  “Jessica,” he said—

  There was a security buzz on his collar, and he cursed. “Yes, Cassandra?”

  “Weather reports have shifted. There is now a sixty-percent probability that heavy fog will shroud your intended camp site.”

  “Is that right? Damn. What would you expect the temperature to be?”

  “As low as fifty degrees.”

  “How close is the nearest running water?”

  “Twelve klicks.”

  Twelve klicks. Too damned close for comfort. Pity—they had chosen a beautiful site, near one of the wells. Shower facilities had already been erected, but . . .

  Safety before comfort. We need a different route.

  Even as he thought it, Aaron’s voice was in his ear. “You heard Cassandra,” Aaron said. “We should change course. Those in favor of taking the Mesa route please signify.”

  “Aye . . . ”

  “Aye . . . ”

  “Aye,” said Justin.

  “Motion carried unanimously. Let’s do it. Skeeters Two and Six—start flying in supplies.”

  The air grew chill. The chamels labored upward. The fliers scouted, ahead, then came back to lift trikes up to the top of the plateau. Two stayed, two others came down the trail they were climbing. Chaka and Derik pulled up next to Justin and revved their trikes. “How’s it going?” Derik yelled. He held out a stick of beef jerky.

  Justin said, “Nominal,” and bit off a chunk. The chamels struggled up the boulder-strewn path. Their hides were a dusty gray now. It was beautiful to watch them change. They were like terrestrial chameleons with a touch of . . . well, of speed. Everything on this planet was sped up just a touch. Magical. The pace was fast. The trick was to keep pace, to think, to move, to feel just as quickly.

  Aaron was right about that. They had to match the rhythms of the planet. Trying to impose Earth’s rhythms was a losing proposition. They should stop counting in Earth years . . . though the change would be a major hassle.

  One of the young chamels stumbled, its long and deceptively delicate leg turning badly. It slid back a few feet, and could have fallen. Justin was off his horse in a moment, and behind it just a moment before its own mother got there.

  He felt a horseshoe ridge of hard flat bone close on his shoulder, hard.

  Chaka came in with the shock prod, and Justin said, “No!” and met her eyes squarely, and kept pushing. She backed away, put her great head behind her child’s butt, and pushed.

  Together, they got the calf up the defile. She sniffed around her child, and the bruised leg, and seemed satisfied. She eyed Justin suspiciously, got between Justin and her offspring, but somehow . . . somehow seemed less hostile now.

  “Trying to gain their trust?” Derik asked. “I suspect that’s a waste of time. They’re just meat, right?”

  “Not so sure,” Justin said. “There are lots of creatures we can use for meat. I think that these things are pretty smart, and they’ve got a hell of a natural advantage. How about hunting? Ever think of that?”

  “Hunting. On a big chameleon?” Derik liked it.

  The mesa’s top was hard and flat. The trail lay across it for nearly a hundred kilometers before dropping into lowlands again. Grendel country. They would skirt the river that carved that valley, then climb back again to the base camp Aaron had named Shangri-la. Exploring, Justin said aloud.

  The northern wind whistled. Something hit his face. Cold rain, he thought, then corrected himself. Sleet.

  “Flash storm,” Evan said in his earphone. Justin could hear the burr of Evan’s skeeter in the background. “Just like the ones up on Isenstine. Secondary camp is only five klicks. We’re already setting up. You’ll be here in an hour, I reckon.”

  “Sounds good.” Prefab corrals, fire, chuck wagon. This was the life.

  The daughters of God, two of them, settled on the mesa.

  Old Grendel watched from below, from the shade of a deep forest, fifteen kilometers from open water. The weirds had veered away from the river. They never came very close to open water.

  Yet they needed water. A tiny rivulet trickled from the heights. It wouldn’t cool Old Grendel on the naked rock slopes; but there would be water on the mesa, enough if she was careful. She sniffed snow on the wind.

  Many nights ago the weirds had come down from their heights. Two or three tens of them had surrounded and killed one of Old Grendel’s daughters. If those were prey, they didn’t know it yet.

  The river crabs were long gone, the local hunter-climbers had learned to ignore her, and Old Grendel was hungry. If she couldn’t find prey in a day or so, she would have to attack the weirds.

  They were an awkward long way away, but the hill above them showed trees; it would likely have water, and cover for Old Grendel. Water or no, with the coming snow to cool her she could get above them. It looked like she could hit and run. Creep close. Seek out a loner. Go on speed, hook the loner with her tail, drag her to the cliff and let her roll while Old Grendel moved straight down into the stream.

  Then watch. No need to go back right away. Would the loner call for help? Would she live long enough to do that? Would help come? What would they do? She was as interested in that as in a quick meal.

  Weirds. The more she saw, the less she knew. The little flyers were not daughters of God. Rigid creatures with wings so fast they blurred to invisibility, they resembled the ubiquitous pattern of the Avalon crab, though God looked nothing like that at all. God was slow and wingless. She floated like a bubble, a bubble that changed its appearance, attempting to hide itself like a puzzle beast. God couldn’t move without the little flyers to push. God had a true daughter, a smaller floating thing pushed by one little flyer.

  There was cooperation here, as among beaver grendels and other species too. Was it possible that God had tamed, enslaved her own parasites?

  And the little prey? The weirds rode God’s little flying symbiotes like an infestation. Old Grendel knew about symbiotes and parasites. Some tiny life-forms would weaken or kill a creature; some would make it stronger. She had wondered if there was a symbiote that would open a grendel’s mind . . . but it would be too small to see.

  Old Grendel had followed the weirds hundreds of kilometers. She lost nothing in so doing. The river-laced meadows that had been her kingdom for most of her life were one vast swamp now. For two years, ever since the sunlight took on that spooky tinge, the rainfall had been increasing. The dammed lakes overflowed; water covered the flats. Old Grendel had left the southland to her daughters, and good luck to them. She would follow the weirds, upstream.

  One branch of the river came near their primary nest, the heights where God customarily dwelt. The main river branch ran here, where Little God carried supplies that fed the weirds.

  From the moment her mind opened, Old Grendel had known how much more there was to know. There was this about the weirds: no other grendel, no other kind of grendel had studied them like she had. When Old Grendel understood the weirds, they would be her prey alone.

  The wind had picked up, and was already blowing the first small flakes their way. The chill was noticeable despite their cheery campfire. “Chamels should be all right.” Chaka had slipped into a fur-lined jacket. “We’ve observed them as
high as ten thousand feet, and at temperatures ten degrees lower than anything we’re likely to get tonight.”

  “Good.” Justin said, “There was something about that calf, and the way it looked at me. I’d never seen that in one of them before.”

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think that there was somebody home. Dog-smart, maybe. I don’t know. I liked it. And the way the mother nipped at me, and then seemed to understand what I was doing. I can’t help the feeling that it was aware. A little. More than those males we had back at Camelot.”

  Skeeters had whirled in and out for the last hour. Supplies arrived from Shangri-la. All but a dozen of the herders took the opportunity to go back to the base camp for a shower and a night’s sleep.

  Jessica came into the firelight with her arm around Aaron. The giant’s laughter boomed loudly enough to fill the entire territory. He had won. The First had lost. He sat at the fireside, and lifted his voice against the driving snow. His voice was baritone, and easily penetrated the driving wind:

  “In fourteen hundred ninety-two

  This gob from old I-taly

  Was wan’dring through the streets of Spain

  A-selling hot tamal-e . . . ”

  Everybody knew the words, and began to sing along with the refrain:

  “He knew the world was round-o

  His beard hung to the ground-o,

  That navigating, copulating,

  Son-of-a-bitch Colombo . . . ”

  Justin was quiet, but Jessica caught his eye. They shared a smile, and at her urging, he joined in.

  “He met the Queen of Spain and said:

  Just give me ships and cargo

  And hang me up until I’m dead

  If I don’t bring back Chicago,’

  He knew the world was round-o . . . ”

  Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. He leaned back and looked up at the stars, at the constellations.

  “Still pretty much the same as they were for my great-grandmother,” Katya murmured.

  “Yep. Ten light-years doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  “For forty days and forty nights

  They sailed the broad Atlantic

  Colombo and his lousy crew

  For want of a screw were frantic . . . ”

  Katya was working her hands under his clothes, giggling breathily. It was getting harder to concentrate on the song.

  Why qualify that, Justin thought in a happy daze. Truth was, it was just plain getting harder.

  “They spied a whore upon the shore

  And off went coats and collars

  In fifteen minutes by’ the clock

  She made ten million dollars . . . ”

  By the end of the song (in which Christopher Columbus returned to the Old World with an impressive assortment of New World microorganisms), Justin and Katya had retired to their sleeping bag. He protested that he was actually much too sleepy to be of any service to her. Her clever sculptor’s hands soon made a liar of him. Within a few minutes, he found himself rolling on a warm and familiar tide, one that swept him slowly to the peak, and then dropped him swiftly, but gently, into the fires below.

  And finally he lay at the edge of sleep, enfolded in Katya’s arms. He murmured, “Thank you, ma’am,” into the hollow of her throat.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” she chuckled dreamily, and somehow managed to effect a curtsy right there in the sleeping bag.

  She said something after that, something about wondering if there wasn’t a river the two of them could find, here, on the mainland. He gave her some kind of answer . . . river equals grendels, you little idiot . . . And the next thing he knew he was dreaming of childhood, of games with Jessica and Aaron and Chaka.

  Games that Aaron always seemed to win.

  ♦ ChaptEr 22 ♦

  ghosts and weirds

  Take, for instance, a twig and a pillar,

  or the ugly person and the great beauty,

  and all the strange and monstrous transformations.

  These are all leveled together by Tao.

  Division is the same as creation;

  creation is the same as destruction.

  —Chuang-Tzu, On Leveling All Things

  Downslope, motion in the falling snow. Old Grendel held her breathing slow and even. The snow was melting on her. She was cold, and that was a rare thing. But if speed flowed in her arteries now, she would die.

  Again, the flurries rippled. Old Grendel raged. The weirds were hers. But she was alone, she had always been alone, it was the way of her kind. She could do nothing but observe. There were grendels in the snow.

  The snow grendel waited with her sisters. The fires within them were banked and cooled by a mantle of snow, so that the smells of courage and danger were faint. Cold One knew there was meat hereabouts. She knew it by its smell.

  These were the ones who could vanish. A puzzle beast could stand only a speed-sprint away, meat for the taking, and be gone in the next instant; neither seen nor smelled. But puzzle beasts could be taken if the wind was in your face.

  Ordinarily, she didn’t like sisters nearby. But puzzle beasts would feed all, and in fact her sisters gave her a better chance, in the hunt. While the prey scattered, fleeing the others, she could lie in wait and pick one off. She’d done it in the past.

  Puzzle beasts, and something else: she could smell them too. The weirds were here. The world was turning weird, and these were part of the weirdness. They too were chameleons of sorts: they tottered on two legs, but they could change their skins, and they could ride floating or flying things, or puzzle beasts, or creatures as fast as grendels on speed, that smelled of tar. Caution.

  Slowly, she inched forward.

  Justin came awake in two stages. In the first stage, he was halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and still aware of his dreams. He dreamed of dancing fire, and of snow smothering the flame.

  Then the dying flame began to whinny, sounding much like a chamel. A chamel terrified almost to death.

  He popped awake almost instantly, his hand curled around the grendel gun at his side. “Get the skeeters up,” he yelled. Katya was dressing and rolling out of the sleeping bag at the same time, out of the tent in less than ten seconds.

  He crawled out and scanned the chamels. Whatever had frightened them was still in the outer darkness, far enough away that it hadn’t triggered the movement sensors, but they still whinnied in terror.

  His collar beeped. Cassandra. “Five grendel-sized masses moving toward the camp. Alert.”

  He slipped on his war specs. Cassandra automatically gave him thermal and starlight scope. Nothing. A mantle of snow covered the ground, and more drifted from the sky. Was there really anything out there? Dammit, they were fifteen klicks from open water . . .

  The chamels ran in circles. When they got to the edge of the pen, their electronic collars gave them pain for their efforts—but the pain was nothing compared with the terror.

  They screamed. Their hooves threw up small bits of snow.

  Snow.

  Freeze me blind. “Cassandra,” he whispered. “I want a weather report.”

  “Mild storm front moving in from the north.”

  “Where is the largest body of water south of us?”

  “A lake approximately twenty kilometers south.”

  “General comm circuit. Everyone, up and at ’em! Grendels coming. The wind has carried our scent and the storm has let them get here. Grendels in the snow! General alert!”

  “Right,” someone answered.

  “Perimeter defense,” Justin said. “War specs on thermal. Auditory updates to everyone else, on the minute. We better use local nodes—don’t risk bouncing the signal topside in this weather.”

  More information, but less computing power for resolution. It would probably balance out.

  “Get our best pilots up. Katya, get airborne.” She was a superb pilot. This would be her most severe test.

 
He checked the charge on his grendel gun. She wasn’t the only one who would be tested today.

  Jessica pulled the chamel pup back into the herd, got it to huddle against one of the females. Her war specs revealed four heat-shapes crouching in the outer darkness. They were waiting. Cooperating? Or did they merely tolerate each other when there was meat to share? The chamel scent was strong enough to attract every grendel from here to the river. End it now.

  She touched her collar. “I don’t want to wait for them,” she said. “This thing will get out of control. I say that we go find them.”

  “I like that idea,” Aaron said. “Skeeter One, Skeeter Six. Let’s go hunting.”

  Justin adjusted his war specs. They were synchronized with the rifle sights—making not quite a smart gun, but close to it. Visual, enhanced infrared, and motion-sensor data was coordinated with the rifle in overlapping lines of pale green and red. When the images aligned he had a lock. And the grendel was moving.

  There! Grendel flash, alignment—

  It ran straight at him, faster than he’d believed possible, faster even than the grendel images in their computer training classes, faster than a living thing could move, and it was coming for him, hot death on the move.

  If he hadn’t been prepared for it, if he hadn’t trained for it in computer simulations a thousand times, he would have been caught flat-footed. Damn but it moved fast, and straight for him. Every instinct told him to run—

  The sights were aligned. He fired. The capacitor dart, traveling at twice the speed of sound, hit the grendel and dumped its juice. The grendel’s nervous system flashed, and its brain was a char, even though its legs carried it on into the herd. Physics supersedes biology. The chamels scattered, but inertia carried the grendel into the herd, and one chamel went down under its bulk. Even in death, the grendel closed its jaws on the chamel’s throat. The other chamels ran until their collars brought them to a halt. They bleated their terror.