Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “The obvious conclusion is that mainland grendels are considerably more intelligent than our island grendels were. If Camelot ‘normal’ grendels have the intelligence of an Earth tiger, think of those here as tigers with the intelligence of an orangutan.”

  Aaron nodded slowly. “Frightening, but no more than we here had concluded, right?” He looked around the room and got approving nods from many of the Second.

  “Dragons,” Sylvia Weyland muttered.

  “Dragons,” Cadmann repeated. “Chaka, an intelligent grendel is the worst thing I can think of.”

  “Maybe not,” Big Chaka said. “First, though, a theory. Here is a Camelot grendel. Cassandra, my file. Grade Eight Test Twenty-four, please.”

  Laughter rippled among the Second. Grade Eight Test Twenty-four in Big Chaka’s biology class was very familiar to them. The beast floated before them, a composite of many grendels the First had examined after they were torn, charred, and otherwise mangled. This was no holo of a dead beast, but a mere cartoon.

  As Chaka’s hands moved, so moved a white arrowhead floating in midair: the cursor. The Camelot Grendel opened like a puzzle box. The view zoomed in on the grendel’s big blunt head. The head opened.

  The sinuses were large: a grendel’s head was half-hollow. The brain showed convolutions shallower than those of a human brain. There was no corpus callosum connecting left and right lobes, in fact, the grendel brain had no lobes. It was more of a doughnut, and the snorkel ran right through it, sliding freely in its own channel.

  “Now for a mainland grendel. Cassandra, my dissection file, Composite One. This shows features common to the snow grendels we examined.”

  Cassandra had painted parts of the corpse with a lavender tinge.

  “We had to guess at some features due to the damage done when the grendels were killed. But there’s enough.” The snow grendel was longer than the Camelot grendel and about as thick. Its claws were bigger, with two dewclaws that faced forward. Big Chaka pointed those out with the cursor. “Brakes.” He indicated the tail and the downward-hooked barbs: “More brakes. If you’re going to run two hundred klicks an hour on ice, you need that. Trivial stuff, but now note the ventral surface. There’s almost no belly armor. What’s left is these four head-to-tail ridges, more skis than protection.”

  Aaron interrupted, the student asserting his freedom. “I get it. The thing expects to squat in snow and lose heat through the belly.”

  “That’s what we think, but notice that it can’t rear up to fight. Got to charge like a tank, with its head lowered, and butt.” The cursor outlined the misshapen head. “More armor. Like a ram. It’d work better if the head hadn’t been distorted.”

  That head was no cartoon. This was the hologram of a dead grendel’s head.

  Cadmann again. “Chaka, were they all lopsided like that?”

  “We’re lucky to have any kind of answer, the way our kids tore through these things. My son was much embarrassed.”

  Little Chaka said, “I brought back some pieces of skull, but they aren’t big enough to tell. Maybe they’re distorted too—”

  “But there was enough,” his father said. “Quite enough.” The skull opened: a bloody puzzle box.

  The head was half-hollow, as with the Camelot grendel. The right side of the brain was grossly swollen. On that side the sinuses were shrunken and the skull ballooned out. There were thin spots in the massive bone.

  Near the root of the brain on the right side, the midst of the convoluted mass of gray tissue was a tangle of . . . worms.

  Unmistakable.

  “Parasites,” Justin murmured. “Flukes.”

  “We’ve already found six kinds of parasites. Four are types that infest samlon too. Our Grendel Scouts are familiar with those,” Little Chaka said. “Dad—”

  “Yes. This is the interesting one. It has caused localized swelling, and some changes in brain chemistry. We’re still working on those. We’ve already established that there are abnormal levels of the grendel analog of acetylcholines present. Now look here.” The light pointer wavered on an area far from the fluke. “Notice the dendrite structure here. Very dense. Nothing like what you find in uninfected grendels. And here. Here’s an uninfected grendel for comparison.”

  The contrast was dramatic. Where the first grendel brain had a complex web of tissue connecting different parts of the brain, the other was bare.

  “Good Lord,” Sylvia said. “I should have noticed—look at the bare one there. Doesn’t it look as if that structure there was just made to have something wrap around it? Chaka, is that possible?”

  “Is coevolution possible? Of course.”

  Katya giggled. “Could that fluke be, well, a fluke?”

  “It could be, but I doubt that. We have examined three other parasitized grendels, and have found similar changes in them.”

  “And these are grendels which behaved abnormally?” Cadmann asked.

  Chaka nodded. “We believe that the parasite might be interacting in a symbiotic manner, stimulating brain growth, promoting a higher order of intelligence. It’s not an unmixed blessing though. One of those grendels must have been dying. The brain case was filled and the skull was being torn apart from internal pressure.”“

  “So they have to be infected young?” Cadmann said.

  “Just so, when the skull is still soft, still growing.”

  “Coevolution,” Sylvia said. “Tens of thousands of years—”

  “Or longer.”

  “Or longer. We never found any of those flukes in island grendels. Did we? Cassandra, grendel history. Gross anatomy. Abnormalities in brain structures of island grendels?”

  “One with what appeared to be cancerous growth. Nothing else,” the computer said.

  “So, no flukes on Camelot,” Sylvia said. “Are they common over here?”

  Big Chaka waved again and the river fork appeared in relief. “Here,” Big Chaka said, holding his voice steady against age, “the beaver grendels. They’re not hunters. They’re fisher folk. They’re also cooperative, and a lot more intelligent than the grendels on Camelot were. That much is certain.” He paused, and smiled thinly. “And this afternoon we found the same parasites in their waters.” He displayed the image. The parasites were flattened ovals, something like a tapeworm. A ruler appeared beside one of the flukes: ten centimeters.

  “The waters north of here swarm with them. We don’t know what this means. Maybe something very bad. Maybe good. An intelligent grendel might learn that attacking humans means death. Such creatures can be taught. An intelligent grendel is also one which can travel further from its home waters without burning to death.”

  “Every silver lining has a cloud . . . ” someone said.

  “We will continue to look into this as we evaluate your new data.”

  “What about the bees?” Aaron called. “You said earlier today this might involve bees. I’ve been wondering how?”

  “Patience,” Chaka said. “I’m only now forming a theory. Note we have an abnormal grendel. We thought we understood grendels, and now it turns out we don’t.”

  The cursor flicked, and the dissected grendel disappeared. Now they were looking at a delta-wing crab twice as large as a watermelon: a magnified “Avalon bee.”

  Big Chaka said, “Now, the bees are a problem of an entirely different order. They aren’t really bees, of course. They’re a flying version of the Avalon crab. They are highly organized. Some varieties are carnivorous.”

  Sylvia exclaimed, “Oh, don’t tell us they’re parasitized too!”

  Chaka Senior smiled thinly. “No. I wouldn’t do that. But they certainly have a level of organization that wouldn’t embarrass any terrestrial bee colony. And that may be enough. Intelligence need not be the product of a single brain. A colony can behave intelligently.”

  He paused for a moment. “Indeed, in many ways you and I are colonies of dissimilar cells, and our—minds—may be the products of a number of independent actors. So may
it be with infected grendels—and with bee colonies as well.”

  “Minsky,” Little Chaka muttered. “A society of minds.”

  “You said a problem of a different order,” Cadmann said. “What did you mean?”

  “I think it is now clear that these are the creatures which killed Joe and Linda Sikes.”

  There was a general murmur, and Justin saw Edgar Sikes’s head come up. Edgar’s fingernails must have been digging holes in the wooden table.

  “Please explain,” Cadmann said.

  “Look at this,” Little Chaka said, and the cursor danced over the image. It didn’t look like a terrestrial bee at all. “A tough shell that sprouts fixed wings for gliding. Motor wings aft. The forelimbs are modified as claws. The key was my son’s recording of this activity.” The cursor moved again, and now there were animated holograms of a swarm of the beelike creatures feeding on a dead grendel. With the grendel to give perspective, they could now see that the “bees” were actually the size of Sylvia’s palm, plum-sized, five to seven centimeters across: much bigger than the thumb-sized leaf cutters around Paradise. “They scavenge on grendels.”

  “So?”

  “So . . . so if a grendel dies, burns itself up with speed, it isn’t going to completely expend the oxidizer. The scavenger which eats grendels is going to have to develop a mechanism for metabolizing speed.”

  “Good Lord,” Sylvia said.

  Big Chaka slipped his glasses off, and polished them carefully. “What we think is that the bees . . . or whatever we decide to call them . . . are an order of necrophage flying pseudocrustacea. They like grendels for food, and either scavenge them, or trap and kill a grendel who can’t get to water. Further, I believe that they’ve done it for millions of years, long enough to have either evolved a means either to produce speed themselves, or to store it. Store it and use it.”

  “Bees on speed,” Cadmann said slowly. “Carnivorous bees on speed. Christ on a crutch.”

  “What in hell is a bee?” Hal Preston asked.

  “Come on, you know,” Katya said. “There are hives of them out by the berry farms. Bees, you know, they fly and if you get too close to the hive they sting? You need them to fertilize fruit trees—”

  “Here!” Edgar Sikes cut in impatiently. Among the holograms around Big Chaka appeared another: a Terrestrial flying insect as big as a dog. “Dr. Mubutu, you had to have some reason for calling them bees? And it sure wasn’t the way they’re built.”

  “No, it was the way they build,” Big Chaka said. “Earthly bees make elaborate nests. They collect nectar from local plants and use it to make stuff they can store. They’re stratified into castes, with a queen to lay all the eggs and drones to fertilize her and myriads of workers. Well, we know that these Avalon bees are stratified, though we don’t have details yet. We’ve only studied the leaf-eating bees, but their nests are like underground cities. Edgar, they even have the bee trick of using antibiotics. Do you remember that?”

  Trish touched Edgar’s elbow; he bit back a venomous answer. “’Fraid not, Doctor.”

  “Honey would rot if bees couldn’t mix the nectar with an antibiotic. Some Terrestrial bees even make their honey from carrion. Most Avalon bees make their honey from leaves, but they have their own antibiotic, and again, they can use it to preserve meat.”

  Edgar sat down abruptly. He looked gray. He’d be seeing the same images that were running behind Justin’s own eyes. Linda Weyland and Joe Sikes thrashing within a dark fog; red-and-white bones falling to the ground; a fading buzz-saw sound as the black fog blows clear. Ten thousand flecks of human flesh flow into the ground to become dark incorruptible pools of viscous fluid . . .

  Whispered conversations buzzed around him. Justin noticed Jessica staring at the holograms, frowning at what she had heard. Then, tentatively, she raised her hand. “Chaka. If we assume that the bees have been around for, say, a million years . . . mightn’t that explain what happened to our mining apparatus?”

  The room was dead silent.

  Aaron was the first to speak. “Freeze me alive! You’ve hit it! Fossilized bees in the coal? The speed might act like flecks of dynamite under circumstances like that—”

  Suddenly the entire room was vibrant with discussion. Aaron stood in the middle of it. “I think that this is cause for celebration,” he said.

  “Why is that? These bees—”

  “Don’t you see? I think that we are entitled to an apology. For months, one ugly question has hovered over the entire colony: who sabotaged the mines?

  “And there was a second question: who or what killed Linda and Joe? Now we’ve answered both questions. The bees came through the pass—Cassandra, what were the weather conditions at Deadwood Pass when Joe and Linda were killed?”

  “A hot dry sirocco wind blowing from the western high desert.”

  “Sure,” Aaron said. “And that’s what did it. The wind picked up a swarm, blew them across the desert and over the pass. Linda and Joe had the bad fortune to be in the way. They were stripped to the bone in minutes by starving, disoriented necrophage bees.”

  Sylvia looked devastated. “We were so careful.”

  “Careful to avoid the Avalon ecology rather than understand it,” Cadmann said. “And that one falls right into my lap. I thought we could do it. I thought Deadwood Pass was safe. Oh, Lord!”

  “What?”

  “Eden Oasis. Just luck the wind didn’t blow that way while it was full of Grendel Scouts! The worst of it is, I knew all along the only real safety was in understanding what we faced, and I didn’t do anything about it.”

  “I didn’t want you killed by the dragon,” Sylvia whispered.

  “We all thought the same thing, amigo,” Carlos said.

  “We did.” He gestured toward Aaron and the others. “They had a different view.”

  “But you do see the danger?” Big Chaka said carefully.

  Aaron nodded. “It’s a real danger, but being eaten by bees is no worse than being stung to death by a colony of them back on Earth. Individually, they are probably pretty harmless, and anyway they generally stay in the lowlands where we don’t go. In some circumstance that we don’t completely understand, they swarm and can reach highlands like Deadwood Pass. Fine. We will study them, and become aware of them. We can build shelters. And now, more than anything else we need to find out—why did Cadzie Weyland survive?”

  There rose a buzz of speculation. Big Chaka cleared his throat. “We need to learn more about bees.”

  “So let’s go on a bee hunt!” Carlos cried. “Katya and I know where to start in the morning.”

  “Not alone, though,” Aaron said.

  “We will not leave the safe area—”

  “I’m afraid there is no safe area,” Aaron said. “Not since we saw the grendel this afternoon. Chaka, just how could a grendel be there?”

  Little Chaka shook his head. “I have no idea. I would have taken a mighty oath that there was, there could be, no grendel there.”

  “Avalon Surprise,” Sylvia said.

  ♦ ChaptEr 36 ♦

  bee hunt

  Linnaeus, Carolus, 1707–78, Swedish botanist and taxonomist, considered the founder of the binomial system of nomenclature and the originator of modern scientific classification of plants and animals. In Systema naturae (1735) and Genera plantarum (1737), he presented his classification system, which remains the basis for modern taxonomy. His more than one hundred eighty works also include Species plantarum (1753), books on the flora of Lapland and Sweden, and the Genera morborum (1763), a classification of diseases.

  —The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia

  Cadmann watched the skeeters take off, then returned to the dining hall to rejoin Sylvia. “Bees,” he said. “I can’t get over it We were so bloody careful! Divert the streams, build grendel-proof shelters. Satellite observations. Nothing could get to Deadwood Pass—how could we know a swarm of Avalon bees would blow over that pass?”

  She reached ac
ross the table to take his hand. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

  “The hell it wasn’t. We had all the clues, explosions in the mines, and instead of coming over here to look for the real cause we wondered how the Pranksters could have done it.”

  “More my fault than yours, then,” Sylvia said. “I’m the biologist. And I never guessed. Cadmann, stop blaming yourself.”

  “Sure.”

  The comm-card chirped.

  “Cadmann here.”

  “Amigo, we have it.”

  “The nest?”

  “A nest, certainly.”

  “How big is it? How close are you?”

  “I’m looking into a long valley,” Carlos said. “I’d see more from a peak—Cassandra, that peak—Cad, the valley runs northeast from here, with a meadow down the center. The peak, call that Spyglass Hill for reference, is at the southeast end, forty-three kilometers distance bearing two-sixty-five degrees from Shangri-la. It’s a long flat valley nestled in between ridges. There’s a shallow stream. No indication of grendels. Let me say that again, no indication of grendels.”

  “There wasn’t any indication of grendels at the lake up there either,” Cadmann muttered.

  “I have not forgotten that. The nest is below the peak. It’s the size of a hill, a lumpy hill with no sharp edges to it, ten meters at the tallest. It’s big, I make it ninety meters by a hundred and eighty. I’ll make my way to the top of Spyglass and get a better measure, but it’s big. Cad, it might not be the only nest. We’ve all converged on this valley, six search parties following bees, and we all ended here.”