Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  It was impossible to imagine a carnivore of equivalent size. Even blue whales, while technically carnivores, were passive filtration feeders. The malevolent Moby Dick had been their little brother. So Justin was probably safe. Probably.

  Still.

  She was irritated. She wanted to be mad at him. He had sided with Cadmann against them, against Aaron, and was a traitor of sorts, dammit. And he wasn’t really her brother, for all the talk about two mothers and a dad. Justin’s father was Terry Faulkner, he wasn’t related to Cadmann at all, and yet he’d sided with the colonel against the Second. She wanted to stay pissed at him, but hated the way her chest hammered in response to the visual input.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit. Only Justin and . . . and Aaron. Only the two of them could drive her this crazy.

  He was twenty feet from the creature now. Its eye, a spheroid four feet across with a black iris, its tiny-seeming eye was on Justin and it just didn’t care. To Jessica he looked so small. She could see his point. He was nothing in comparison to a beast such as this. Why should it pay him any mind whatsoever? And yet . . . and yet . . . Avalon Surprise.

  The pig things snorted and ambled away. They were rooting around in the grass, moving when they had to stay ahead of the Scribe’s long blue lip.

  She brought the skeeter in for a closer look, and the snouter looked up, more alarmed by the whirring, flying thing in the sky than it ever was by Justin’s presence.

  “What are you doing now?” she demanded.

  “Getting closeups for the record. Jess, Chaka is going to absolutely love this! I’m looking at the bones of a grendel’s tail, with a couple of vertebrae still attached. The rest of it could have fallen off years ago. The spikes on the tail are caught between the edges of the plates of the shell. It catches their tail spikes and they can writhe themselves into a coma for all the good it does them. These bones, they’re cracked—”

  “Cassie!” Jessica howled. “Where are your safety overrides?”

  “Working,” Cassandra said, and went silent.

  It came to Jessica that checking all of Cassandra’s protective measures might be the work of months, or lifetimes. “Cancel that last question. You hear me, Cassie?”

  “Canceled. Justin is safe by my current parameters,” Cassandra said. “I have backtracked this creature over the past year. It is not an aggressor. Grendels do not survive in its domain. I find no other local predators thus far.”

  Current parameters. “When were your current safety parameters updated?”

  “Eighty-seven days ago.”

  Three months ago. Edgar had been fiddling with Cassandra, likely at Aaron’s instigation, giving the Second more freedom to explore.

  “Might as well join the madness,” she said, and brought the skeeter down a hundred meters away from the moving mountain. The Scribe didn’t look able to move quickly, but she didn’t want it accidentally changing course and crushing her skeeter.

  She was glad to see Katya up and around and looking so damned chipper. She didn’t completely agree with Justin’s choice of women, but what the hell, she didn’t really have anything to say about it, did she?

  The wind came cleanly through her lungs as she jogged toward them through armpit-high grass. The rapidity of her approach seemed to attract Momma Mountain’s attention, and it turned its eye sluggishly toward her. Taking her time. It was impossible to imagine something like this having any potential for speed.

  Justin was only ten feet away from it, playing his camera over four sets of trapped bones. One was no more than several joints of a grendel’s tailbones. The others were distorted mummies.

  It seemed clear what had happened. Momma Mountain had approached the river to drink. Each grendel in turn, or all together, had made a suicidal charge and gotten stuck. Each had thrashed . . . that one seemed to have actually torn some of the plates loose, but it had done it no good. It hung limply, its bones cracked, as if it had shattered itself in those final convulsions. As if it was too powerful to live.

  The great herbivore’s lip rippled steadily, mowing two-meter-high grass.

  “We have to see what’s going on under there,” Justin said. “Drop a camera—”

  “Harden it,” Jessica said, as if they’d been talking all along. “It’ll get chewed up.”

  “Yeah, hardened, with a light—”

  “A little light. Camera set for low light.”

  “Right, it must be permanent night under there. We don’t want to blind . . . a whole damn ecology under there, I bet. Cassandra, we need that camera. How long to make one up?”

  “That will depend on priorities. The practical answer is that I can fabricate it in Camelot and put it aboard the next supply shuttle.”

  “Tell Edgar.”

  One of the pig things came close, evidently emboldened by the nearness of Momma Mountain. Jessica took a step toward it, and it scampered away.

  Justin’s expression was hard to read. He said, “Watch this.”

  Katya echoed that. “Watch this,” she said, nearly glowing with pleasure as Justin crouched, extending his hand. It held a handful of balled grass. He was very still.

  At first the snouter just stared at him, but then it came close, and then closer, and then she couldn’t believe it, but the thing was eating out of his hand. It had actually begun to lick his hand when it suddenly shook its head, startled at its own boldness, and backed away.

  Justin brushed his hands off on his pants.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “Dunno.”

  “You taste like a meat eater,” Katya said, and licked his ear. He laughed, and put his arm around her.

  Jessica found herself feeling enormously irritated. “Well—is it safe to bring the herd through here?”

  “Safe as houses.”

  “We’ve got a water hole up ahead. Half a day.” She didn’t know why she said the next thing, but she did. “It was mapped as a grendel hole last month. You want to be in on the kill?”

  “Sure.” He kissed Katya briefly. “Katya—you take the trike, I’m going for a little skeeter ride.”

  Katya looked at Jessica, smiled, then pulled Justin around for a real honey of a kiss, long and deep and sincere as hell.

  Jessica decided that she definitely didn’t like Katya.

  The long, low sweep of the hills tilted and tilted again as the skeeter bobbed on the air currents, carrying Justin and Jessica to the east.

  “Well,” Jessica said finally, after about five minutes of silence. “It certainly seems as if the two of you are getting along well.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to be a sex object around here. Jess, how about calling them ‘Harvester’ instead of ‘Scribe’? Now we know what it is.”

  She grinned mildly, her hands tight on the control. A flicker of evil intent tickled the back of Justin’s mind, and he decided to push onward. “I think maybe she’s feeling her age. You know, some women feel that if they haven’t had a child by twenty, they’re missing out somehow. Ridiculous, of course.”

  She glanced at him as if to say: Do you think it’s going to be that easy, bud?

  “Personally, I think that a woman’s got until at least twenty-five. What about you and Aaron?”

  She snorted. “Oh, you know better than that—”

  “Well, you wouldn’t even have to carry the child yourself. You could donate an egg, and he could donate a sperm—I assume it would only take one, I mean, as staggeringly virile as Aaron is . . . ”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “But Geographic has everything that you’d need . . . ”

  They were passing a stand of trees, and coming up a river that ran into a lake. It was a sparkling ribbon of blue beneath them, girded around with trees. She hovered, and Cassandra produced maps to show where grendel-sized heat sources had been spotted during earlier flybys, but they only confirmed what her father’s training and Jessica’s imagination were painting.

  Open water equals death.


  Jessica had grown quiet. The skeeter’s steady hum was the only sound. They were alone up there, hovering above the grendels.

  “Cassandra,” she said quietly. “Shut down.”

  The privacy circuit, inviolate in the camp, went into effect. No one could hear them, no one could eavesdrop on them. The circuit was dead.

  Jessica put the skeeter on autopilot. They were alone in the universe. She turned toward him. “We really haven’t talked much since . . . that night, Justin,” she said.

  “Been busy. Everything happened so fast.”

  “But we didn’t talk about how we felt. We always used to talk about that. I miss those talks.”

  He tried to smile, but it flickered out. “You don’t need my approval. Never did.”

  “No. But I need you. Dad won’t talk to me. Even when we tested the shelters, he barely spoke to me.”

  “Jess, you betrayed him twice in his own home! When Trish yelled for Dad’s head, you were sitting next to Trish, not Dad. You won’t be back until somebody’s funeral!”

  Her cheeks flamed. She wouldn’t look at him.

  “So you can’t go home again. The question is, can we get him to talk to you? Over a comm-card, or in the meeting hall? And that’s a maybe. He was suffering after Toshiro—after he killed Toshiro.”

  “We all were.”

  “Was Aaron? I didn’t see it.”

  “How could you say that?” Her cheeks reddened. She had to remember that this flight, this conversation, was her idea. “Toshiro was one of Aaron’s closest friends.”

  He said carefully, “Sometimes I think that Aaron doesn’t have any friends.”

  “How could you say that? You’ve always been his friend.”

  “Have I?” he asked, softly. “Look at what happened. Dad is stalemated. The First don’t give us orders anymore. We can have anything we want as long as we carry those damn blankets everywhere. All because Dad shot Toshiro.”

  “You have a point?”

  “I’ve spent too many nights thinking about this,” Justin said. He hadn’t told anyone this, not even Katya, and it suddenly felt like he’d been carrying a live grenade in his chest. “There wasn’t any way Aaron could lose! The plan was to take Robor to the mainland. If nobody comes after us, we win. But suppose someone comes. Suppose Dad and Carlos die at sea because Aaron’s left orders not to do any rescue work, or suppose Carlos drops dead because Toshiro fires a lightning bolt through him. It’s hardball then, with Aaron in charge of a war. If Dad or Carlos kill someone, Aaron gets the moral high ground. Even if Dad forces Robor back to Camelot, Aaron gets what he wants. It’s a cause, then, and the First would have to start talking again, and Aaron is one fine debater.”

  “How could you say that? How can you think it?” she whispered again, astounded.

  “All right. Answer me a question: would you have a bottle baby? Would you take your egg and someone else’s sperm, and raise it in one of the incubators?”

  “Of course . . . ”

  “Then why haven’t you?”

  “I have had eggs removed,” she said, suddenly bitter. “In the case of my death, my percentage of the wealth will go to raising my child. I have listed possible donors—”

  She looked away from him suddenly, and her cheeks flushed again. Suddenly, wildly, Justin wondered if his was one of the names on the list. “But as long as I’m alive, that’s something I would like to try on my own. Someday. Not now.”

  “Not now,” he echoed.

  “No.” She combed her hair with her fingers. “Justin, what this is all about is the chance to declare a truce. What do you say?”

  He thought about it. There were so many things that he wanted to talk about. But all of them faded into insignificance when compared with what really mattered—his relationship with Jessica. Here, with the two of them, it seemed more important still.

  “Truce,” he said. And held out his hand. Hers was firm, and dry, and warm.

  ♦ ChaptEr 24 ♦

  mistress

  What we call a mind is nothing

  but a heap or collection of different perceptions,

  united together by certain relations and suppos’d, tho’ falsely,

  to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity.

  —David Hume

  The builders lived in groups of six to eight, rarely more than ten. The lake was their world, and the lake was of their own making. They were fast and black and muscular. They could strip a tree in minutes to create new timber for their constructions.

  They were still slow in comparison with the other, the queen who lived downstream from them.

  Sometimes the queen came for the prey in the lake. Sometimes for the swimmers themselves, the young builders.

  Once, many Turnings before, one of their number had challenged the queen for supremacy.

  The queen had become a whirlwind of death. So had the builder and two of her siblings. The fight was vicious. It tore a hole in the dam itself, so that water and precious food slopped over into the river below. But when the right was over, the three were dead.

  The queen was barely wounded. The survivors tasted her anger in the water, the speed, the urge to kill them all. Most of them were on shore now, braving other danger so that the queen would not taste them in the water; but she could see them. Somehow she withheld the death that was hers to give.

  No one had challenged her since.

  Now she was back.

  She swam upstream as she had before, crawling over the dam, never straying onto land. They smelled her in the water. The water carried a scratching sound, not loud, but audible everywhere in the lake, and every builder’s nose and eyes broke surface. They saw the great wedge-shaped head emerge with something alive in her mouth.

  The queen had come.

  What the queen was doing was part of a pattern warped out of true. The light was turning weird. Something tremendous had been floating in the sky for days, never responding to challenge, nor interacting at all. The wrongness in the world encroached on the lake itself. They could taste changes in the water and air, changes that rang down in their bones.

  The queen knew it too. She had made four trips in as many turnings of the sun, and each time she had carried a similar burden.

  Not for an instant did they forget the queen’s blinding speed. She moved slowly, carefully, and the builders watched with respect.

  Between the queen’s teeth she held a live swimmer. Not one of the queen’s own children—but another builder child, from another stream and another lake.

  She had brought three of these, tired and feeble but alive. One had died from the distance the queen had carried it between water holes, and damage from the great, serrated teeth.

  The queen set the newcomer in the water. It floated for a moment, then began to twitch its tail, then to move.

  And the builders slowly, carefully approached it. It began to swim. They nudged it along. The other young butted it, but the builders were a friendly clan. Even during the best of times there would have been no challenge.

  Change was coming. They must keep to the water, for the Death Wind seemed to be everywhere these days. The builders were distracted; they would not challenge the queen’s guest.

  The queen slipped into the water, gliding like death. She vanished beneath its surface, and came up with one of the lens-crabs that lived in the builder-made pond, a prey-creature. It flipped and flashed just once.

  The queen moved like the owner of all creation, smoothly through the water, along the length and breadth of the lake. The very Lady of the Lake.

  “Did you see that?” Justin said, astonished.

  “Would have been hard to miss. Cassandra?”

  “I have recorded all of it.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Please narrow your question.”

  “I seem to be looking at some kind of grendel social interaction,” Justin said. “I know that’s ridiculous, but there it is.”


  Jessica nodded. “The grendel brought those others—those huge hands! They must be specialized to the task of building dams—”

  “Beaver grendels—”

  “Brought them a sacrifice. I thought that it was food of some kind. Apparently it wasn’t. The beavers gathered around and helped to guide the baby—that’s almost certainly what it was—around in the pond until it could swim by itself.”

  “Grendels cooperating in a snowstorm. Grendels carrying the young of other grendels in their mouths. What in the hell were our parents dealing with on Camelot?”

  Jessica’s right eyebrow went up. “Retarded grendels?”

  “Right. So what do we do? We can destroy this entire ecology—”

  “Not on your life.”

  Jessica took them up another two hundred feet. “Cassandra. Route a message to Shangri-la and Camelot. I want an alternate path. This is the first such ecology we’ve found, and I want to preserve it.”

  “Checking now,” Cassandra said.

  Jessica raised her right eyebrow again. “Do you have any objections to that?”

  “No, I’m with you,” Justin said.

  “I was wondering if you thought that it was a little flaky. You know, grendel cult and all of that?”

  Justin was looking down out of the side of the skeeter, at the shimmering water hole far beneath them. Within it, there was a world that none of them had ever known.

  “No. Whatever is going on there, it would be an absolute sin to destroy it.”

  Jessica twinkled, and squeezed his hand. For the first time in months, he felt that they were operating on the same frequency. She nodded her head happily. “Thank you,” she said. And then, impulsively, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  His cheek burned, and he wasn’t completely certain that he understood why.

  Cassandra said, “Your alternate path is approved. You will head west by fifteen degrees—”

  The second water hole was smaller. They’d found a grendel carcass lying seven meters away from the water’s edge. They’d left it untouched. Justin lay thirty meters farther out, flat on his stomach behind a bush, and examined the scene through war specs.