Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  Justin knelt beside the tan shroud, brooding. “I know you, Stu. You’d want us to remember that our defenses worked.”

  Aaron nodded agreement. “When the Earth Born first encountered a grendel, it was a massacre. This was just war. We only lost one of ours.”

  “One too many.” Jessica’s left boot toe dug at a bit of dark, gummy snow. The head-shape beneath the tarp was misshapen. Even draped, the body seemed . . . broken. Shrunken.

  “Does anyone want to say something?” Justin asked.

  Katya nodded, and bowed her head slightly. “Stu.” Her breath plumed from her mouth like a whisper of steam. “You died for me.” Justin rose and put his arm around her shoulder. She clung to him.

  There was a long pause, everyone expecting someone else to speak first. There was no sound but the wind, the distant skeeters, and the lowing of the chamel herd.

  “Do we send him back to Camelot?” Jessica finally asked.

  “No.” Aaron’s reply was unexpectedly fierce. “He came to take the continent. Let him be buried here, where he fell. We’ll mark the spot with stones, and let Cassandra record it. Send him to wind and sky and sun.”

  “But—”

  Aaron wasn’t listening. “His real monument will be at Shangri-la, the place he helped to build. This is our land now. All of this. Not Camelot, not Surf’s Up. This is our land.”

  The midday sun melted enough snow to expose an eviscerated grendel corpse—Stu’s killer. Aaron fired a biotoxin load into it, and it didn’t twitch. Then Skeeter V set down carrying Jasper Doheny and the expedition’s chain saw.

  Chaka moved in with the deadly humming wand. He began his autopsy with a beheading.

  Now he pulled at torn skin, measured teeth and tail, jotting everything down in a little notebook. “You know,” he said quietly, “the interesting thing is that they didn’t just tolerate each other’s presence. That would have been remarkable enough—but they actually seemed to cooperate.”

  “That’s a pretty depressing thought,” Jessica said.

  “Alarming is more like it.” Chaka wiggled the broken jaw, then ran his hands over the misshapen, not quite symmetrical skull. “The ability of grendels to organize . . . at all . . . implies a level of intelligence or social organization which we haven’t experienced before. That’s going to take a lot of thought.”

  Justin squeezed Katya’s hand. She had clung to him almost continuously for the past hour. “What do you suggest?”

  “Let the snow cool the head a bit more, then get it back to Shangri-la and freeze it. Then back to Camelot on the next transport. I want my father’s opinion of the brain.”

  Aaron nodded. “The kind of thing that they’ll love. A puzzle.” He ran a hand over his long face. “I’ve had enough of this place,” he said grimly. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Old Grendel had seen them taking a snow grendel apart, treating each part in some different way. They had eaten none of it. Uneasy, she had moved downhill.

  The snow grendels had frightened the weirds, and they were far too likely to investigate what they feared. Old Grendel didn’t consider it safe to spy on them. She stopped and buried herself above the corpse of the snow grendel she had killed. Watching that should be safe.

  The daughters of God rose into the air and flew east.

  The puzzle beasts moved west in a great mass, with weirds all around them.

  The weirds were going . . . were gone. They hadn’t found the last snow grendel. Old Grendel circled wide, looking for traps and spies. There were several of the little boxes the weirds sometimes posted where the view would serve a spy, and Old Grendel would not pass in front of those.

  Presently she settled in to feed.

  The weirds didn’t know everything. Old Grendel was oddly reassured.

  The herd was moving again, and they were making good time. Justin could see an edge to the plateau. Beyond, never yet seen by the naked eye, was a savannah covering a third of the continent. They were as far as any human had been from Camelot without actually achieving orbit.

  After the skeeters had buzzed in to take away grendels and human casualties, Katya swore that she was steady enough to drive a trike. Twice now she’d spun up next to Justin to blow him kisses. A bandage covered half her face, with a blue slash and stitches underneath, twisting her laugh into something wild.

  She can hardly wait for nightfall, he mused. All of that my hero stuff. Should be . . . interesting.

  He wondered, then, if she’d have nightmares. After what she’d been through, another woman might have been catatonic. But he’d be there to hold her.

  Skeeter scouts found the route of descent from the plateau. It was checked first by horseback, and then by chamel. The herd descended a thousand feet to the grasslands. It was flat down there, a vast tabletop that seemed to run forever, brownish green growing gradually greener with the descent. A wide brown river meandered in S curves. Here and there were patches of trees.

  The descent took five hours. There was still enough day left to make a few kilometers before camp.

  The grass was almost waist high, blue-green, and rich. The trikes plowed furrows in it as they jetted around.

  Justin’s mare chewed happily at the grass. Analysis had showed it would be digestible; they wouldn’t need to bring much animal food in by skeeter. Justin leaned down and plucked a strand, took a tiny bite, and tucked it back between his rear molar and his gum. It chewed sweet-sour, not bad at all.

  In the future, this would be cattle country. Trikes zipped about, stopping here and there to make recordings and snip samples for Cassandra to muse over later.

  The computer whispered in his ear. “I see an odd flower. Turn to the left again, please.”

  He did, and couldn’t see what Cassandra was talking about. But, “There we are. Would you get one of those, please?”

  The herd was behind him, and if the computer wanted something, he was going to have to get it now, before hooves and teeth destroyed it.

  The flower was in the middle of a patch of blue grass, and there was a bug-like thing crawling around it.

  “What is it, Cassandra?”

  “Closer . . . ”

  He got closer, and suddenly saw something of real interest.

  The beetle was tearing at a fibrous bulb on the plant. The bulb, on the other hand, seemed to be made of an interwoven web of fibers . . . and some of the plant’s fleshy leaves was composed almost exclusively of those fibers, but pointed skyward.

  A tiny lizard-like thing, not much larger than the tearing insect, climbed the stalk and attacked the leaf. Almost immediately, the leaf began to change color, from fleshy red to blue, oozing a blue exudate.

  The lizard-like thing tried to escape, but the exudate had it caught. The fibers stirred. They wound about the lizard, catching it tight. The lizard’s struggles slowly bowed the plant, and the leaf bent and turned upside down.

  Fascinated by the process, which had taken no more than five minutes, Justin took another look at the beetle, still working hard at the other leaf. It was in there now, and it was . . . eating something.

  “Wow,” he said. “Cassandra, what do you see?”

  “A microecology that needs study,” she said calmly.

  “I see a scavenger hijacking a flesh-eating plant,” Justin said for the record. “Pretty sneaky, I’d say.”

  “Sample, please.”

  Justin shook the plant, and the little bug suddenly noticed him. It turned—and spread disproportionately large jaws. It couldn’t have been larger than his thumb, but the wings trebled its size. It shot off toward the horizon so fast it nearly disappeared.

  Faster than hell. So fast that . . .

  “Cassandra.” He didn’t like the stress in his voice. “Was that bug on speed?”

  “It is possible,” the computer said. It sounded like an admission.

  “I believe we have found another speed-using species. Correlations? Conclusions?”

  “Observed dat
a indicate this is a scavenger. No other conclusions valid with existing data.”

  That made him feel a little more comfortable, but not much. He summoned a trike to take the specimens.

  “Skeeter reports a large animal in your vicinity, south-southwest of you, Katya.”

  He and Katya putted along in the two-seater trike. The loss of Stu weighed on all of them, but especially Katya. She had clocked over a thousand hours with him in that skeeter. It had to hurt.

  Her night had been filled with bad dreams. This morning she didn’t remember. She was brisk and perky, as if she’d slept better than Justin.

  They had buried Stu where he fell. They all wanted some kind of ceremony, but Aaron didn’t agree. “We will remember him at Shangri-la,” he said. Stu was a Bottle Baby, never adopted. No relatives among the First. Aaron and the others were the only family Stu had, and they let Aaron speak for them . . .

  Now they were taking back the trophy, their only intact grendel head. A poor trade.

  He found his hand creeping to cover hers. She widened her fingers to accept his. The small motion seemed somehow more intimate than the times she had welcomed him into her body. Her eyes, golden with flecks of green, sparkled at him. The bandage was still in place.

  “Let’s take a look,” she said.

  Justin said, “Cassandra, give us a local scan for grendels.”

  All of Cassandra’s considerable eyes and ears were suddenly concentrated on the area. A relief map glowed on the hologram stage, blank at first, filling in rapidly.

  There were no grendel-bearing water sources short of the river thirty-five klicks away.

  They would avoid the river. The herd would water tomorrow. Their skeeters would have plenty of time to clear out the water hole before the herd arrived. Now, where was Cassandra’s “large animal”?

  Justin popped the clutch and headed out toward the site, south-southwest. The grass grew higher than his head. He tried to keep one eye ahead and one for the little holostage where Cassandra had given them a skeeter’s-eye hologram.

  It showed a cleanly geometric trapezoid, pale brown on a baize background. An Avalon crab, Justin thought, seen from nearly overhead. Where were the legs? They must be underneath. That looked like tufts of hair along the edges. And he ought to be getting close.

  He could see pterodons circling overhead . . . and nothing ahead. He was seeing through a curtain of grass. Then he wasn’t, because they’d driven out of the grass into a neatly cut lawn. He grinned, speeding up, enjoying the view. High grass to left and right. Still he saw nothing of a mystery creature, until Katya spoke.

  “We’re looking at the aft end. Justin, we’ve found the Scribe!”

  Scribe? Perspective came. It was almost half the horizon, a geographical feature moving slowly away from them. It was camouflaged, but that wasn’t it. He hadn’t seen it because it was too big!

  Katya was laughing at him. He’d gasped like a dying man. Justin said, “Cassandra, sanity check. Could this be the Scribe? The thing that draws paths we see from orbit?”

  “It leaves a path identical to the Scribe tracks,” the computer said. “Absent conflicting data this is a valid conclusion.”

  They moved closer. No sign of eyes, this side of the beast.

  Not much detail at all, just the edge of a tremendous shell, the color of bare earth, moving slowly away.

  It didn’t waddle. It cruised. In its wake the grass stood a few inches high, dotted with truncated haystacks two feet tall. Droppings?

  Something like a tremendous flattened crab slid up to one of the heaps, moving no faster than the Scribe itself, and over it without a pause. A juvenile?

  Talking to himself, talking for Cassandra’s records, Justin drove the trike into the grass again. Three pterodons were circling high above him. He rode half-blind through the prairie grass, swinging wide around the now invisible beast. “Don’t want to startle it,” he told Katya, and was suddenly whooping.

  A small fist whacked him between the shoulders. “What?”

  He could hardly speak for laughter. “Pictured it rearing up. Pawing the air. Don’t mind me.”

  He must be far ahead of it now. There was a stand of horsemane trees, uphill. He pulled the trike into their shade, turned off the engine, and waited. The pterodons were still with him. A fourth came to join them. One peeled off and flew toward the Scribe.

  A thing that size . . . it wouldn’t try to plow trees under, would it?

  They were on a slight rise, three kilometers ahead of the chamel herd. Down below them, now more than two hundred meters away, was the largest creature that Justin had ever seen in his life. A crab . . . clearly derived from a crab shell, like the Avalon crabs, like the fixed-wing birds. But you could build a city on its back! Or a village anyway . . .

  In fact, a pterodon was landing on its back to join more than two dozen others. Five merged circles, a communal nest, sprawled along the front of the shell.

  A deep blue line ran across the front of the Scribe at the level of the grass. It seemed to ripple. Lips, or just a lower lip . . . maybe.

  Otherwise nothing about the beast was in motion. It slid along like a raft on a wide river. Any motion must be taking place beneath the shell. Others of its kind, Avalon crabs and bugs and birds, made do with four motive limbs and endless ingenuity in the shapes of their shells.

  Katya rose from her seat, lifted a pair of war specs, and gave a low whistle. She nudged him, and passed them over.

  The beast was even more impressive when seen through the glasses. As large as—“Cassandra, is this the largest animal we know of?”

  “Negative. The blue whale is larger. This is comparable in size to the largest of the herbivorous dinosaurs.”

  “Thank you.” The edge of the shell dipped to become skids or skis. A half-dozen snouters grazed placidly along one flank. The beast was as large as half the main colony, and flat. It must have nearly the mass of a blue whale, but it was flatter, and wider than it was long.

  There: eyes. Justin had thought they’d be higher. They were bedded in the long blue lips, too low to give the Scribe a decent view. He zoomed on one eye, and it was looking back, examining Justin and Katya, utterly unconcerned.

  It wasn’t until Justin focused the lenses more carefully that he saw what Katya was excited about.

  There were grendels hanging from the shell. Two . . . no, three distorted grendel shapes hung from the front and side of the shell, like hanks of hair. Mummies, not quite skeletons, but long dead, he judged.

  Katya was saying, “Looks slow. Let’s take a closer look.”

  The Scribe continued on its placid way as they approached. Five pterodons rose to circle above them. Snouters scurried away around the curve of the stupendous beast. They didn’t seem terribly worried. The little Scribe, if that was what it was, hadn’t been afraid either. But those dried corpses were grendels!

  “Cassandra,” Justin said, “backtrack.”

  The trike’s little holostage sprouted a relief map of the locality. Cassandra recreated the beast’s path as it meandered among similar paths in the grasslands. There were other curves and loops of lighter grass on the flat prairie background, and they crossed only rarely.

  “How close does it get to running water?” he asked, but he saw the answer as he spoke: the path dipped to touch the river, and lingered there.

  Cassandra said, “Quite close, and frequently. The path often parallels waterways.”

  “Does it enter known grendel territory?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Thank you,” Justin said. “Hallelujah.”

  “There are things that aren’t afraid of grendels;” Katya said.

  “Obviously. Not this creature, not its young. Not the pterodons nesting on its back.”

  “And the snouters?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe they stay on the veldt when Momma Scribe drinks.”

  Justin stood up on the seat of the trike to watch the creature. It drifted like an is
land, placid and unconcerned, as if it had never been threatened in its life. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine what could harm such a beast.

  He raised the binoculars and focused on one of the mummified grendels.

  The four mummies looked about the same state, the same age. That might have been a coordinated attack, for all the good it had done them. Each was hanging by its tail.

  “Its defenses seem to be passive,” he said. “Its sheer size, and something about the shell that traps grendels.”

  Katya asked, “Some sort of mucilage?”

  “More like Velcro. Maybe. I want to see.” He levered himself off the trike and walked through the high grass toward the Scribe. He pulled his microphone aside and told Katya, “You could put a castle on this thing. Come, I will make you Queen of the Scribeveldt.”

  The shell was all pentagonal plates, like shields a couple of feet across. Shields, and white tails hanging between the edges, here and there. Bones?

  Cadmann had spoken of Roman army shields: the warriors held them in a closed array, each warrior’s shield guarding the man next to him, in the days of swords and spears. Roman shields would trap enemy spears . . . like Velcro, he’d been right about that.

  Katya said, “Not a castle. Tents. A pavilion, a summer palace. The serfs will have to wear special shoes.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t want to hurt the shell.”

  He was vaguely aware of a skeeter’s buzz, far off and insignificant, and almost didn’t register it until he heard the voice in his earphone. “What in the hell are you doing?” Jessica asked.

  “I’m getting closer,” he said. “This thing could care less about me.”

  “You don’t know that.” Her voice was irritated.

  “It’s good to know somebody cares,” he said.

  Jessica brought the skeeter closer and watched Justin and Katya approach the mountainous Scribe. The lawn behind it stretched to the horizon. It was easy to imagine such an herbivore trolling the entire continent, perhaps looking for a mate, collecting a herd of animals who hid beneath its shell for safety.