Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “Compadre, that implies a lot of bees.”

  “You know it, Colonel.”

  “Okay, we’ll come look.” He glanced at Aaron . . . but Aaron didn’t try to interrupt, and this wouldn’t be Cadmann Weyland’s first siege. “We need poison gas . . . wouldn’t it be nice if they had a ton of cyanide sitting in a warehouse?”

  No cyanide, but we do have some good insecticides,” Aaron said. “You insisted. Remember? Do you think we will need them?”

  “Probably not. Carlos, don’t get too damn close to that nest. Bees protect their hives, and Avalon bees have a similar lifestyle.”

  “It’s very likely they will,” Sylvia said. “There would be strong evolutionary pressure to do that. Carlos, he’s right, be careful.”

  “You know it.”

  “Here,” Carlos called. “Follow the coffee smell.”

  Carlos had a full campfire going, with long sticks poking out of it, and a coffeepot braced on the sticks. Pouring, he said, “I thought I might want a torch right handy. Those bees are like little flying firecrackers, don’t you think? Your people used to celebrate the Fourth of July that way, before the Green laws got so anal retentive.”

  Cadmann sipped, looking down through war specs.

  The bees were big enough to see as individuals, even from here, from a hundred and twenty meters away and uphill. There were thousands. The nest . . . hard to tell where it ended; the edges faded out into low bushes and tall swamp grass.

  Magnify. “There are several varieties,” Cadmann said. “Most are under ten centimeters across, but there are larger ones too.”

  “Possibly soldiers,” Sylvia said. “Terrestrial ants and termites develop lots of different forms. I never heard of bees doing that, but I don’t suppose there’s any reason they couldn’t.” She moved up beside him and adjusted her war specs. Then she shuddered. “They don’t look dangerous.”

  “Even so, I would not care to go down there and dig up the nest,” Carlos said.

  Cadmann continued to study the valley. “There doesn’t seem to be much that’s moving down there,” he said. “Except for the bees.”

  Aaron fished out his comm-card. “Aaron here. Who’s on duty?”

  “Trish Chance.”

  “Trish, we need things to happen fast.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “There are a lot of these things here. They don’t look dangerous, but how would we know? Look to the arsenal. Flamethrowers need to be charged up. Think about anything else we can use. And what skeeters do we have?” Aaron demanded.

  “Three charged up. One out. It’s been cloudy, and the batteries—”

  “Right. Okay, hang on to one for equipment. Cassandra, what small mesh nets are available?”

  “Four of the twenty-meter nets, one damaged. The others would not hold a creature of the size described.”

  “Thank you. Trish, get somebody to bring out those nets. Cassandra, please keep available a current display of nest locations as they are reported.”

  “Done. Ask for NESTMAP.”

  “Nestmap, please,” Cadmann said.

  His war specs dimmed, and when he looked out into space he could now see a projection of the valley. A blinking net of bright lines surrounded an irregular mass that looked vaguely like an African termite nest. Dimmer lines indicated areas where more nests were suspected.

  “Thank you. Enough.”

  The image faded. Aaron still asked questions and gave orders. Doing as well as I would, and he knows what’s here. He’d have been a good officer back when we had wars.

  Three skeeters rose from Shangri-la. A fourth, not yet in, would take off as soon as various factions could agree as to what should go aboard.

  “I just want to be sure we learn everything we can from here,” Cadmann said.

  “We have to take it to the bees sometime,” Aaron said.

  “I know. Cassandra, is there any way we can get an ultrasound map of the inside of that thing? Before we open it up?”

  Carlos said, “Cad, I’ll go off down the ridge if you’ll give me the war specs. Give Cassandra a view from some other directions.”

  Cadmann pulled the specs off his tired eyes and handed them over. “Have you got a flashlight?”

  “I do,” Katya said.

  Sylvia said, “Want some company? Yes, Cad, I have a flashlight.”

  As the three receded, Aaron said, “They must find this stuff pretty dull.”

  They hate arguments, Cadmann thought. “I love it myself,” he said. “Planning a siege. Aaron—”

  “I’d go in now.”

  “I wouldn’t even try to take out a wasp’s nest at night.”

  “They’ll be torpid,” Aaron said.

  “We’ll wait,” Cadmann said.

  Unsettling shadows fell through the valley. To Cadmann’s tired eyes, the bees were no longer visible as bees, only as swirls of motion. There were more now, streaming back into their nest.

  Pterodons, much bigger, still wheeled in sunlight. “Those must stick to the heights,” Aaron speculated.

  Sylvia said, “And fall to the bees when they get old and sick.” She shivered. Cadmann fished a windbreaker out of his pack and helped her into it.

  Bigger pterodons yet were converging above. These pterodons had never seen skeeters, and the sight gave them fits. One skeeter wheeled off and began to circle the valley. Three more followed each other down to Beehive Peak.

  They unloaded tents and safety domes and crates of electronic gear, as well as tanks of insecticide. He watched a grinning fifteen-year-old lugging a box of thermite grenades.

  He was a little alarmed to see someone as young as Carey Lou this close to danger, but he kept his mouth shut. He’d just have to try to ensure that danger was kept to a minimum.

  “Everybody carries a safety sack!” he bawled, and there were no disagreements. If Carey Lou dropped his for even a second, he would tan his hide!

  His comm-card was talking: Trish. “Dammit, I say we attack it tonight. They won’t he as active.”

  “You heard Colonel Weyland,” Carlos said. “We can’t see well, we don’t know what we’re up against. It’s insane not to wait for daylight—”

  “All right. Let’s say we wait for daylight,” Evan Castaneda said reasonably. “What then? We don’t have enough poison to take out one of those things. I think we should postpone the whole thing, go back and cook up about a hundred gallons of nerve gas—”

  “We need to study them—”

  “We’ll study their corpses! These things killed Linda! And Joe—”

  “Ah, I think—” Aaron tried to say.

  Carey Lou broke in, his thin, reedy voice excited. “Wait a minute. We learned it in school, we used Foo Foo gas on a grendel twenty years ago. Like napalm, right? We can hit ’em with that, like in the movie Them. Drive ’em down into the nest, pump more in the top, and just cook the sonsabitches!”

  The group fell silent, awed by the purity of their youngest member’s bloodlust. Aaron’s face had darkened.

  “We appreciate your sentiments,” Cadmann said reasonably. “But try to watch the language.”

  “‘Oh, yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  The last skeeter settled near the others. Little Chaka eeled out, turned to help Big Chaka. “There is,” said Big Chaka, “definitely another nest at the north end of this valley. Maybe three or four.”

  “Damn,” Cadmann said. “Cassandra, get together with the Chakas and make some maps. We don’t want to rile more than one nest at a time. Trish, you still on? How close are we to having those nets? I want to look them over.”

  “Listen,” Big Chaka began. “About your assault. Have you considered—”

  “Freeze it. Consider this,” Aaron snarled. He had a thermite grenade in hand, and twisted it atop his grendel gun.

  Cadmann said, “Hey, kid—”

  Aaron fired downslope.

  His war specs spoke to Carlos in Cadmann’s voice. “Carlos! Katya!
Get hack here fast! Get to the skeeters!

  “We’re nearly back. What—”

  Katya gaped down at the mound, her jaw dropping.

  “Aaron fired an incendiary into the nest!”

  “What? Why?”

  Answer came there none. It was the kind of question that can cause strokes.

  The beehive’s peak erupted like a volcano. Puffs of flame, first, and then swarming points. Thousands of points of fire streaked away like rapid-fire tracer bullets, and exploded in tiny flashes.

  Other parts of the mound erupted too. (Katya was sprinting, but Carlos couldn’t do that and watch too. Cassandra’s record depended on his war specs.) The peak of the beehive was one hundred twenty meters distant, but the hive had more exits, more showing every second as fireballs followed by swarms of tracers. One source was only fifty meters downslope, and that next was closer yet.

  The terror wasn’t the flaming bees, Carlos realized. Those made a hell of a light show, dying in vengeance for Linda Weyland and Joe Sikes. Carlos shifted his war specs to infrared.

  The firepuffs were almost blinding. But there they were, the bees that weren’t burning, flying in all directions, tens of thousands of bits of red-hot shrapnel looking for any enemy at all. A thousand abruptly converged in the air like an explosion in reverse, and that poor bloody pterodon wouldn’t reach the ground as anything but bones. Carlos broke into a run, watching his feet and to hell with Cassandra, there were cameras on the skeeters.

  Aaron was grinning like a grendel. “It didn’t take all that diddling around! All it takes is one incendiary round per beehive! Flying firecrackers, Carlos said—”

  Cadmann boosted Sylvia into one of the skeeters and pulled himself after. “Start the motor on idle.”

  “Trish, no problems?” He laughed at his buzzing comm-card, Trish attempting to chew him out. “Right. Cadmann, there’s a time to just do something. There’s another nest confirmed, right? So when we go after that one tomorrow, we’ll know a lot more about beehives than we knew ten minutes ago. Here comes Katya.”

  With Katya were both Chakas, looking madder than hell. Aaron’s buoyant mood began to deflate.

  Big Chaka’s voice was tight and angry. “What in the hell was that all about?”

  Aaron explained. “I was getting revenge for Linda and Joe, and killing about ten thousand dangerous animals. And I’m going to kill fifty thousand more tomorrow, right, Cadmann?”

  Cadmann was watching the Chakas. “I don’t think they agree.”

  Little Chaka looked at Aaron with open irritation. “If this planet has taught us anything, it’s the danger of mindlessly throwing an ecology out of balance. Under normal circumstances, these things don’t hurt human beings. But guess what? Two klicks from the north end of this valley is a river. For twenty klicks east and west, we have had unusually low grendel sightings. Doesn’t that suggest something?”

  Aaron looked as if he wanted to choke. “Suggest what?”

  Little Chaka’s voice was infuriatingly reasonable. “I think that the show is over for the evening. Let’s go back to Shangri-la. We can go bee hunting again tomorrow, but this time, let’s go to find things out. We can always kill them.”

  “They’re the enemy,” Aaron said.

  “They may well be,” Big Chaka said. “But they are also a largely unknown enemy.”

  “What my father is saying,” Little Chaka continued, “is that we don’t know enough, and until we do, leave the bees alone.”

  Aaron met Little Chaka’s gaze for a blistering ten seconds; then something shifted between them, and Aaron was the one to nod acquiescence. “All right,” he said finally. “All right.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 37 ♦

  thunder

  The best of men cannot suspend their fate;

  The good die early, and the bad die late.

  —Daniel Defoe

  Edgar looked up from his computer screen to find Trish glowering at him. He said, “I take it you got my note.”

  “Note. Yeah, note, I got your fucking note.”

  “Gotcha! Hey, I didn’t intend it to make you that angry. I have to go back to the island. They need me. Ruth needs me.”

  “Ruth Moskowitz is lame. What has she got that can even hold your attention?”

  “Trish, look up a name. Pygmalion.”

  Trish sipped past the white foam on her cup. Toshiro had taught her calm. “Who was Pygmalion?”

  “Greek sculptor. Made a statue of a woman, then fell in love with her. The gods brought her to life to stop his whining. Trish, what did you see in a lame like me?”

  “Power, dammit, Edgar! I saw you make a hurricane!”

  “You were already in my pants.”

  “Yeah. Well. Aaron needed you. Not just the hurricane, he needed you to shut up about how bad the weather’s getting. Otherwise, the Star Born might wait it out before they came back here. So he told me to distract you.”

  “Distract,” Edgar said.

  “Well, I don’t think he . . . hah. He’d dumped me for Jessica, but he never stops screwing any woman. I was ticked. How I distracted you was the last thing he expected. After Toshiro died, he hinted that I could kind of let you alone.”

  Edgar grinned. “Do you mean to say we’ve been cheating on Aaron?”

  “Yeah. Pygmalion, huh?”

  “Yeah. You shaped me, Trish. Then you kind of lost interest because I didn’t need you quite so much—”

  “—And you’ll drop Ruth!” Trish wrapped her hand around his wrist as he was about to speak. “When you’ve really put her back together, you’ll know it. You’ll lose interest. Then come brag to me, Soft One. I may have sculpted some Scouts by then, but I’m always open to a brag.”

  Perhaps a dozen pairs of human feet had passed this way before them; not enough to actually create a path, but enough for the broken twigs and turned earth to mark the way easily. Aaron or Little Chaka led, Cadmann in the middle or taking the rear.

  Again, this was disorienting. How many times had he broken trail for these boys, while they tromped loyally behind? Too many to count.

  He watched Chaka. The big shoulders, the broad hips worked steadily as they climbed the path. He felt perfectly comfortable with Little Chaka. He had seen Chaka angry, sad, happy . . . in the full spectrum of human emotion.

  He watched Aaron more carefully. More carefully now than ever. Aaron was getting everything he had wanted.

  True, it had cost Toshiro his life, and almost torn the colony apart, but Aaron had what he wanted. There was something vastly self-satisfied and relaxed about him, similar to the attitude of a man who has just enjoyed really great sex. And for Aaron, perhaps that analogy wasn’t wholly inappropriate.

  Aaron whistled tunelessly as he led. There was something about him, something not quite . . . connected to the ground that he trod. Above it all. That was Aaron. Above it all.

  And in that moment, for reasons that Cadmann couldn’t be quite certain of, he knew that Aaron had indeed seen all sides of the Robor incident before it ever happened. Knew that Aaron realized that death was the probable outcome. There was no way to prove it, but Aaron had used them all, all of the stresses, all of the arguments, all of the efforts.

  From the very beginning, it wouldn’t have mattered how things turned out. No matter what happened, Aaron Tragon was going to win.

  Eventually, Aaron’s will and most secret plans would control the colony. The foundation of Camelot was the group efforts of a hundred and seventy people, based on principles voted and designed before they ever left Earth. But here . . .

  Like it or not, the entire colony would be the outgrowth of one man’s personality. One increasingly disturbing man.

  He watched Aaron. Step after step. As perfect as a machine. His body perfect. His mind as remote and inaccessible as the farthest misty peaks of Avalon.

  By the time they stopped for lunch, Cadmann’s mood had burned away with the early haze.

  They sat on an overhang looking down
on Shangri-la a thousand feet below and twenty kilometers distant. The domes and rectangles of the camp stretched out beneath him.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Aaron said comfortably.

  “I was thinking about the early days,” Cadmann replied. “God, it seems so long ago now.”

  Off in the distance, a pterodon swooped down after a birdie. The birdies were known to invade pterodon territory. Birdies were herbivorous, and the pterodons carnivorous, but the birdies spoiled hunting, scared away prey. So mated pterodon pairs swooped and squawked, gained altitude and buzz-bombed the giant beetles, driving them away. The efforts were never effective beyond a day or so. Birdies were tenacious.

  Aaron watched him, an indefinable sadness in his eyes. “What happened, Cadmann?” he said at last. “I remember you, back in the old days. You were full of fire. You’re not old. But you’re starting to think you are.”

  Cadmann laughed. “Older than you think, boy.” Aaron was right. There was something different about his attitude. He was thinking of everything in the past. Looking back like . . . an old man. Christ When had that happened?

  “It was Robor,” he said finally. “It was getting there too late. It was killing Toshiro.”

  Chaka tried to interrupt, but Cadmann shushed him. “I’m not interested in technicalities, Chaka. It shouldn’t have happened. And it’s also the physical pain. I hurt myself up there. I still feel it. I’m just not the man I used to be.”

  Aaron gazed at him, and for a moment . . . just a moment, for the first time in Aaron’s adult life, Cadmann had the very distinct feeling that something had really registered in there. Something had been touched emotionally. There was no joy, no triumph in Aaron’s face.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Aaron said. “I never intended that to happen.”

  I may have intended to rip the colony apart. I may have intended to steal an invaluable piece of property. I may have not given a damn if one of my friends died—or you died; Cadmann, but I never intended to break you. That I would not have done.