Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “No need for him to do that,” Cadmann said. “Justin is his own boy.”

  “But to be a man he had to be like his father. And you were the closest he could come.”

  Cadmann knew that she was getting at something but wasn’t quite certain what it was. “So?”

  “So . . . he watched the two of you together. You and Aaron. Just like I have. And he sees what I see.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That you and Aaron are two of the same type. Justin wants you to love him. Aaron wants to be you. Which of them will really get your love? Which will get your respect? And which of those things would a boy rather have?”

  Cadmann brushed a column of branches out of his woman’s face. “Are you saying that I would rather have had Aaron as a son than Justin?”

  “No. I wouldn’t presume to say that. But maybe Justin thinks that you would rather have had Aaron than him. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.”

  Was it true? Was there a place within Cadmann that preferred Aaron as an heir? Even now? More than Justin or . . .

  Or Mickey? His own flesh and blood. God. He never spent time with the boy. And now Mickey spent most of his time up in the mining camp where Big Chaka did biology and Stevens was rebuilding the mining equipment. Before Linda’s death, the last time Mickey had come down of his own accord was to watch Stevens get creamed by Aaron in the debate.

  Great.

  Cadmann Weyland, Father of the Year.

  It was probably too late to do anything about that. How much of the competition between Justin and Aaron was his fault?

  He didn’t know. He really didn’t. All that he could do was to try to heal the rift, if he could. While he could. And to that he pledged himself.

  Sylvia watched Aaron. He was so strong, so handsome, so very much a leader. There was so much in the way that he swung his arms, so much in the way he called back to them, that reminded her of Cadmann. Whoever this man Koskov, the one who contributed half of Aaron’s genetic material, had been, she knew instinctively that she would have liked him.

  She allowed herself a momentary fantasy. What might it have been like to accept the father’s genetic material in the more conventional fashion . . . ?

  But there was the very real possibility of damage, things wrong with Aaron that she couldn’t see, sicknesses of the spirit beneath anything that she could reach. And if that was true, whose fault was that?

  No one’s.

  So strong, so much a leader, so handsome, and possibly damaged. What kind of mother would she have been? A lot of pain bubbled up with that thought. Pain, and thoughts very different from the intellectual justifications they fed each other about the children. She should have nurtured him in her body. Let him feel her love, her fear, her longings. These are the rhythms of human life. The extreme mood swings of mothers—in a sense, didn’t they train the children? Hormonal communications, saying: This is life, my child. These emotions, the highs and the lows. Drink deeply of all of it but no matter what it is that you feel, in the midst of it . . . there is love, there is this total acceptance within my body.

  These experiences Aaron had been denied.

  And this was something that she had to live with now. But perhaps, just perhaps, there was still time to do something about it. And if there was, she would.

  “It’s the richness of it all,” Cadmann said. “Everything depends on everything else. Big Chaka showed me twenty parasites and symbiotes living in just the spider devils.”

  “Samlon too.” Aaron smiled. “Every samlon is a colony.”

  “And these horsemane trees are like a world unto themselves. Hel-lo!”

  Those three trees stood like winter-naked beeches. Their manes lay broken, in three parallel lines. They must have fallen away in one piece and broken on impact. New manes were growing, not much more than green fur.

  And Aaron was laughing. “Avalon Surprise! Funny, isn’t it, how it always makes sense after you know. What happens is, this breed drops its entire mane every so often. It keeps down the parasites. Then it’s got to survive while it grows a new mane, so it stores a lot of sugar. We’ve been thickening the sap by vacuum evaporation. You’ll have to tell me, Cadmann, Sylvia; you’ve tasted maple syrup.”

  “It won’t be the same. Not made that way,” Sylvia said. “If you don’t caramelize maple sugar, it tastes like sugar water. The flavor comes from half-charring it.”

  Cadmann had been looking about him with new eyes. “There are a lot of those. One out of four trees is growing a new mane. Why didn’t I see it before? Why are they all doing it?”

  “Chaka said higher insolation,” Aaron said. “More sunlight means more sugar means more congress bugs and Joeys and everything else that lives in a horsemane. When the tree’s supporting too many squatters, it just pushes the house over.”

  “We get to those rocks, I want to stop. I’ve got a pebble in my shoe,” Sylvia said.

  Cadmann looked at her a moment. “I’ll just move on ahead. Aaron, I wouldn’t do that in strange territory.”

  Aaron caught the implication. “We’ve been dumping speed in this lake once a week for the past six months. It doesn’t drain, Cadmann. There aren’t any grendels here. I was hoping we’d find you our bear, though.”

  “You mentioned that at breakfast.”

  “There was something like a bear here two years ago, when we did the preliminary. Three hundred kilos, it looked like. Possibly an overgrown Joey. We can’t find hide nor hair of it now.”

  “Maybe it hibernates?”

  “It isn’t winter.”

  “Estivates, then.”

  Sylvia stopped to adjust her boot. Her eyes met Cadmann’s briefly. He smiled and walked on ahead, leaving her with Aaron.

  A dozen times, in two dozen different ways, Sylvia almost asked Aaron the crucial question. Do you know that you are my son? Do you care? Would it be good for him to know? Did it matter?

  And because there was no answer to any of her questions, she wanted to engage his interest, his mind. She wanted to know who the young man was behind the perfect physique, the handsome face, the piercing eyes.

  “What was it like for you?” he finally said, breaking the silence. “In the very early days?” He stopped, and then smiled almost shyly. “No. That’s not really the question I wanted to ask.”

  “What is?”

  “The question I really wanted to ask was why did you really come to another star?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know the official answers: exploration, adventure . . . but why you? Why this particular adventure? All of you. All of the Earth Born have a conservative streak which would seem to be completely different from the heigh-ho adventurers that came out here originally. So . . . what’s the real truth?”

  She was a little startled by the question, but caught the meaning behind it almost immediately.

  They told themselves that they came to capture and tame a new world. Settlers had always dealt with such emotions—and dealt with losses such as the Earth Born had sustained.

  They told themselves that they grew more conservative, more fearful because they didn’t know if anyone would ever come to join them from Earth. Or, indeed, if something had happened on Earth, something terrible, which precluded anyone else from following them to the stars.

  But maybe . . .

  “You’re quiet,” he said.

  “I was just thinking. That was a good question. I guess if I was to answer for myself—and I certainly can’t answer for anyone else—I’d have to say that I had my husband, and he had a dream. I shared the dream. Maybe not as much as he did.”

  “What did you lose coming out?” he asked.

  “I had family. Friends.”

  “And career?”

  “No! Avalon fits my career fine. But I think on some deep level I got pulled out of my academics by my husband.”

  “And then you met Cadmann?” Aaron smiled.

  “Aboard ship. You know a lo
t about those early days,” she said.

  “There are a lot of diaries and journals on public record. Interesting blank spots in them, too. A lot of public video. It was easy to see that your attraction to Cadmann began while you were still married.”

  She sighed. “He was dashing. And I think that I’d never met anyone quite like him. And I . . . guess that it was a little overwhelming. A new world, with new sights and smells. I think that there is a part of a woman that wants to line up behind or beside the strongest, wildest male she can find, and have his children.”

  “But you didn’t do anything about that?”

  “Not until after Terry died, no.”

  “But you thought about it.”

  She had to grin. “Yes, I thought about it. Now that’s enough questions, darn it.” Stop prying into Mother’s business . . .

  His smile was secretive but warm, and he broke the trail ahead of them step by step, her son making the way for the mother he didn’t know.

  It was what mountaineers called a “hanging lake” tucked onto a ledge. The ground sloped up steeply on the south and west sides, so that long shadows fell on that side of the water well before it would be dusk anywhere else. Now those long shadows stretched across the lake, creating a false evening. Cadmann believed that he could hear the hum of nearby bees, but could no longer see them.

  His war specs were on thermal mode.

  The shadows went orange. The trees surrounding the lake floated in a ghostly haze. There was little there that could have been seen in broad daylight. The entire mood was quiet, calm.

  A sudden movement behind the stand of trees captured his attention instantly. What the hell . . . ?

  A small, bustling shape emerged from the brush. A snouter, one of the pig-like things common in the lowlands and reasonably plentiful on the high plateaus. It saw Cadmann twenty meters away, squeaked, and started to turn.

  In a sudden blur of motion, something tore out of the woods and slammed into the snouter so fast that he didn’t have time to think. He watched, fascinated, as the monster that had suddenly emerged raised its head, blew flames into the night air.

  The back of Cadmann’s neck went cold and clammy.

  A grendel.

  God. What was it doing here?

  Well, in one way it was a stupid question. At the moment, it was feasting. Cadmann shouldered his rifle, and prepared to fire. The grendel stopped.

  And looked up.

  Directly at him. Cadmann’s finger was on the trigger. He felt the tension of it, felt the trigger’s breaking point, knew that another gram of pressure would send the bolt of electric death on its way.

  The grendel’s eyes. They saw him. And for the first, the very first time ever he didn’t feel emptiness there. It wasn’t death and destruction.

  It was something else. Something even more disturbing.

  He waited for the grendel to attack. Why? Was he giving it a chance? Was that like some bullshit Western gunfighter credo, some small-town marshal in a bad B movie? It’s your move, Ringo . . .

  He didn’t know why, but he just couldn’t bring himself to pull that damned trigger. There he stood, facing this thing with its teeth slimed with blood, its muzzle befouled with black, and the snouter’s carcass still twitching in front of it. Cadmann just couldn’t bring himself to move.

  Cadmann heard motion behind him. Sylvia and Aaron. Aaron’s rifle was off his back and into firing position—

  Cadmann waved violently. NO! Aaron paused.

  The grendel lashed its tail around and into the corpse. It dragged the body into the brush, and was gone.

  Cadmann lowered the rifle.

  “That was a grendel!” Sylvia said.

  Cadmann nodded.

  Sylvia looked at him strangely. “You didn’t shoot. You didn’t let Aaron shoot.”

  “We were in no danger,” Cadmann said. “It wasn’t going to attack us. It was just hungry.”

  “Yes, but—a grendel?” Sylvia said wonderingly. She turned on Aaron, blazing. “You said this lake was safe!”

  “It was,” Aaron said. “We were sure it was. There’s no way a grendel could have got in here—”

  “Except that one did,” Cadmann said. “And I think that’s enough excitement for the day. Let’s call in the skeeters for a ride back.”

  Aaron nodded. “Right. And I want to ask Chaka a few questions . . . ”

  Old Grendel ran.

  In an instant, she was out of sight of the weirds. She didn’t slow. She was into the blowholes before they could have seen where she disappeared. She was underwater and swimming hard before the speed could leave her blood. If the Strongest One changed her mind, brought other weirds to kill her, they would not find Old Grendel.

  Her life had hung by a ragged toenail. But she had learned! That one had not killed her. That other was about to kill her, and that one had waved her back. That one was the Strongest One, and she was willing to deal with Old Grendel!

  They would meet again. But not here. She began to prepare for the long swim back to the river.

  ♦ ChaptEr 34 ♦

  the devils sing

  As lines so loves oblique may well

  Themselves in every angle greet:

  But ours so truly parallel

  Though infinite, can never meet.

  —Andrew Marvell, The Definition of Love

  Carlos paused on the far side of a glen. The bees had disappeared into the trees, and there was nothing to do until he spotted another one.

  Katya offered him a drink from her canteen. They leaned against the tree together. “Let’s rest here for a minute. We’ll catch the next bee that comes along.”

  “You know,” Carlos said carefully, “I really wasn’t surprised that you wanted to come over here. Considering that Mr. Justin was here.” She laughed.

  “Yes. That’s what I thought.” He paused for a moment, and Katya leapt into the breach.

  “You know,” she said, “Justin’s great, but there’s something missing.”

  “And what is that?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. But sometimes I think that all of the freedom we have has made us too blasé. I . . . ” She shook her head. “I don’t want to sound too retro.”

  Carlos’s brown eyes softened. “You know, sometimes I forget that you are a woman.”

  “Well, thanks a lot.”

  “No. I mean that I forget that you’re grown. It is impossible to ever forget that you are female.”

  She brushed a hand through her hair, shaking out a magnificently leonine mane. “Really?” She seemed cautiously pleased.

  “Do you realize that this is the longest period of time that we’ve ever been apart?”

  She nodded. “Have I changed much?”

  “No. Not really. But when I think of you, I envision a little girl chasing after me, trying to get my attention. If I see you every day, it doesn’t really hit me how wrong that image is. But after months . . . well, the contrast, jars a little.”

  “I hope you like it.”

  “I love it. Love you. You’re everything that I might have hoped for in a daughter.”

  She took his hand. “Is something bothering you?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe I grow more conservative with age. I was always the camp rake. I had my pick of the women here—whether they were married or not.”

  “I’m shocked.”

  “Naturally. It’s just one of those things that is true—women have never been difficult for me. Sex has always been natural and comfortable. There was never a lot of moral or spiritual baggage attached to it.”

  “Just a natural human function? That’s what you always taught me.”

  “But understand—we came from a culture in which human beings have been limited in their sexual expression for thousands of years. The aftermath of a terrible sexual plague left Earth even more conservative. And when we finally came out of that time, there was a general celebration, a rejection of much of what had gon
e before.”

  “Sounds a lot like Avalon.”

  “No. It wasn’t. Because remember that European culture’s underpinnings were a guilt-ridden vision of sexuality. Perhaps the twenty-second-century’s hedonism was a healthy reaction to that conservatism—but the truth lies somewhere between the extremes.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It may be something is lost when all of the restraints are thrown away.”

  “Are we moralizing here?” she teased. “Carlos? The great seducer himself?”

  “I’m not talking about right and wrong. I’m asking what works best? People are lonely, sweetheart. And afraid. And will do anything to fill that loneliness—for a minute, an hour, a lifetime. Sex is probably the very best way to feel . . . how would you say . . . not alone.”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted. “There are other times when it can make things worse.”

  He nodded his head. “I’ve had a long time to think about this. I think that each stage in a relationship has a different level of communication. In the beginning, both lovers are cautious, and learn about each other gradually. They share memories, take each other to favorite places, and slowly begin to touch. As they get more intimate, they communicate faster and more intensely.”

  “Sex is probably the ultimate,” Katya said. “All the senses are engaged at the same time—”

  “If you do it right.”

  “I’m your daughter. You expect something less?”

  “Touché. What I’m saying is that two people eating dinner together can exchange virtually no information, and feel that their interaction was complete. Narrow-bandwidth communication. But sex is so intense that it seems that it just has to mean something. It feels as if you just learned profound and complex things about your lover.”

  She nodded. “We lie to ourselves about how well we know each other.”

  “Too often, we try desperately to believe that this other person is the missing part of ourselves—even if only for the night. Maybe it isn’t love, but . . . how about . . . friendship? Caring? Compassion?”