Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “Grendels,” Big Chaka said.

  Aaron nodded with infinite regret. “They boiled up out of the water. Six, seven, eight of them. Little ones, but a flood, once they realized that there was food. Cadmann screamed at me to get back. I ignored him and tried to get to them. There wasn’t enough to hang on to. I shot one with the grendel gun. Cadmann shot two more with his rifle, and then one with his pistol. They got to Chaka first . . . ”

  He buried his head in his hands. “They screamed. They screamed. Oh, God, I never want to hear anything like that again. They were screaming curses, and killing grendels. For every one they killed, two more appeared. And they both slid down into the water, and then there was nothing but blood.

  “I don’t know how long I hung there, watching the water. Then I climbed back up. I was numb.” He held up his hands. They were torn and bloody. “I lost my grip a few times, but I made it back to the top. I’d . . . I’d torn my shirt. Lost my comm-card. By the time I got back to the skeeter, the weather was turning bad. I called in a Mayday. I couldn’t think straight anymore. I flew back.”

  He met Jessica’s eyes. Then Justin’s. Then Big Chaka’s. Jessica moved up to hold him.

  The group was silent. Justin was shaking.

  Big Chaka looked up at the sky. It was massed high with dark, angry clouds. “How long before the storm?”

  Almost in answer, drops began to fall.

  He hung his head. “When it is over, we must go out, and see what we can recover of my son.” He looked at Aaron again. Something—not anger, not grief—stole across his dark face, and then was gone.

  There was pain. Pain in his back, his head, a great tearing, burning ache that threatened to consume all of his thoughts, all of his life. It was just too large, bigger than anything he had ever experienced in his life. More than all of his previous pains combined.

  There was cold. Wet. There was water around him. Near him. Flowing over him.

  Little Chaka awoke.

  Is my back broken? It was a natural question, one that he couldn’t answer at the moment. In his entire universe, nothing existed but agony. Such questions would come later—if there was a later.

  His eyes wouldn’t focus. All he got were patterns of shadow and light.

  What was there to remember? What had happened?

  He remembered . . .

  He remembered.

  Aaron. Oh, God. Aaron had shot him. Was that memory correct? And if it was, why wasn’t he dead?

  He struggled to move. What could move? He remembered a flash of light, the struggle to get his own gun up to the aim, Aaron’s rifle coming up . . .

  No, he was thinking backward, now. From the last thing he remembered to the beginning.

  Calm. Try to remember. Aaron shot him. And then—? And then Cadmann would have shot Aaron. Chaka went quite calm on thinking this. He might be dead. (Was he already dead? Was this what death felt like? Just a slow sinking into the earth? Was there pain and wetness? Certainly he had been shot in the head. Certainly he was dead now.)

  He had no hope of truly being alive . . . did he?

  But he knew that he had been avenged. In fact, if Cadmann had killed Aaron, and if he, Chaka, was still alive (as he began to suspect that he might in fact be), then there was the chance that he would be rescued. Cadmann would burn in hell before he would allow one of his own to—

  Chaka’s eyes finally cleared.

  He managed to catch the whimper in his throat before it escaped, but that didn’t make his world a better a place to be.

  There, in the water before him, was Cadmann.

  He looked so like he always did, except his tanned face seemed pale. Cadmann’s blue-green eyes stared at him, almost as if he were about to speak. Almost. The hole in his throat said that there would never be another word from him. Chaka squeezed his eyes shut. It took all of his strength, but he had to do it. He had no choice. He couldn’t cope with this. It was worse than death.

  He opened his eyes again, praying that it was a hallucination. It could be, couldn’t it? It would change when he opened his eyes again, the way objects in a dream change if you look away and then look back again.

  But Cadmann still floated there. Water flowed over the staring eyes. Cadmann’s mouth was open just a little as if caught in mid-word. Trying to speak, to say one more thing, just one more before silence fell for all time.

  Chaka wept.

  Blackness came for him.

  He didn’t know how long he was unconscious. He woke to a nightmare. He felt it moving through the water. He couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes.

  It was there in the water with him.

  A grendel. He felt the heat wash from its body, could hear its sinuous splashing. It looked as big as a house.

  Coming to consciousness meant returning to the house of pain. Chaka yearned for death. This was the passage. This was crossing over into the other world, a world without pain. A world where Cadmann awaited him, watched him now. Be brave, my friend. Don’t fear the dark . . .

  He heard the breathing, and then no breathing, just a hissing gurgle. He opened his eyes. No grendel . . .

  At first his astonishment surprised even him. What in the hell was going on? Then he saw the snorkel. It barely crested the surface of the water, Cadzie blue. The grendel herself was a shadow beneath the surface. Just barely beneath the surface. Watching him.

  Even in the midst of nightmare, the biologist in Little Chaka was intrigued. This was the first grendel snorkel anyone had seen on the mainland. The water was so damned shallow. So why did the bitch even bother? She couldn’t have been stalking him. She couldn’t have had any reason to hide from him, God knew. So what in the world . . . ?

  A splash in the water near her, and suddenly something flapped in her teeth. God. A samlon. Her head came up out of the water just a little, and he could see that the samlon’s legs were too well formed. It was almost that time. Now that he became aware of it, he realized that the water was filled with these shapes. Dozens . . . hundreds of samlon.

  Why didn’t she just eat him? Was she saving him for her progeny? Was she a fat, overstuffed old bitch who wanted a special treat for her darl—

  Sudden pain ignited in the right leg. With the dregs of his strength Chaka craned his neck, watched the head of something black and clawed emerge from the water, watched it wriggling as it savaged his thigh.

  He thought that no fear remained in him. He was wrong.

  Chaka tried to scream. Somehow, being devoured by a pack of infants was infinitely more frightening than a single grendel’s fangs. This . . . nibbling would go on and on and on.

  His shriek sounded like the cry of a child’s doll.

  The water thrashed, and suddenly the half-samlon was up in the air, in the mouth of the grendel, bitten in half—and spit out.

  She looked at him again. What in the hell was this?

  Three weirds. One dead, one fled, one dying.

  The weird who had spared Old Grendel’s life . . . what reward would Strongest One expect or accept? That one who would teach Old Grendel how to shape the magic that would hold the universe prisoner, to enslave God and God’s daughters . . . that one lay dead in the water, its life’s blood spreading through the lake, to summon Old Grendel’s daughters.

  The one who had killed Strongest One, that was Strongest One now. If Old Grendel could reach her as she fled . . . . what would she do? Work out her rage on the weird who was the ruin of all her ambitions? Or force that one to serve her, teach her? It didn’t matter. That one was beyond Old Grendel’s reach.

  The third lay helpless and wounded. In minutes, it would be eaten by her own children. She had to make a decision, and quickly.

  She looked up at the darkening sky. Felt the fat droplets splattering against her. The world was drowning, the Death Wind would have the land, and no time remained.

  She turned her back to the man. She thrashed her tail, and carefully hooked it through the outer layer of skin, the loose, half
-shed skin that all of the weirds seemed to like. The weird thrashed and fought and she thought for a moment: What to do?

  Yes. She knew now.

  She dove beneath the water, hauling the weird with her.

  Rachael Moskowitz didn’t turn as her husband entered Avalon Town’s main mess hall and wrapped his arms around her waist. None of the First spoke. The news from the mainland, the word of sudden savage death, had hit them hard.

  And now this: on the communal vidscreen, Geographic beamed them an image of the storm descending on Shangri-la. Camelot had been lashed by rain for almost a week, but that was only the fringe of the storm that would cross Shangri-la.

  “How did she take it?” Rachael said. “How is Mary Ann?”

  “Mickey told her, personally,” he said softly, pressing his lips against her ear.

  Rachael nodded. “That was probably best.”

  “He said she’s all right. Just all right. Wants her children around her.”

  “Ruth,” Rachael murmured. “God. We need to get through to Ruth.”

  Zack stiffened a little. Ruth had betrayed them. But . . . but she was their only child, and it was time to forget such things. “We’ll patch through. The important thing is Robor, and Robor is safe at the mine. We can be sure of that. Cadmann made sure of that.”

  They were quiet for a moment, watching the colored swirl that represented vast masses of warm and cold air fighting above the mainland.

  Rachael shook her head slowly. “Cadmann. Somehow . . . I always thought he was immortal.”

  “He never did,” Zack said. “That’s one mistake he never made.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 39 ♦

  bees

  Let Justice be done,’ though the world perish.

  —Emperor Ferdinand I

  Little Chaka awoke from a dream of drowning, and found himself vomiting water. He felt only confusion, and pain, and the savage certainty that he had gone beyond agony into death, beyond death into hell.

  When the sick ended, he rolled over onto his side, not opening his eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to want to look at the surroundings. The ground beneath him was rock, not the mud and silt of a riverbank. Distantly, water trickled into water. More distant still was another sound, a steady, drumming vibration.

  He opened his eyes. There was nothing to see. He wasn’t certain his eyes had opened at all.

  But he’d moved, he could move his left leg and left arm. He told himself very firmly not to reach up and touch his head. He got his elbow under him, his knee, then his other knee, which felt limp and dead. He slipped, and almost went over the edge of a rock shelf, into water.

  Water again? Where the hell was he? His left hand touched something cold and scaly. His fingers felt it, and he knew immediately what, it was. A dead samlon. He could feel the scales, the fins now fully developed into legs. The teeth. Tiny spikes budding on the tail. Something had bitten it, its flesh torn and . . .

  Something.

  He stopped, quite still, and listened again. Out in the water. Something was moving. There came a sound. Not water sounds dripping from the rocks. Not the beat of his heart, or the thunder of his breathing.

  The grendel. The beast that had brought him here, unharmed. Which had left a dead samlon for him.

  Food?

  What the hell?

  He was so weak. So weak. Impossibly, the darkness spun. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Lights appeared in the darkness, and then he was gone, wondering only at the very last if he would ever wake up again.

  The sky opened, gushing with rain and lightning as if it had saved it all up since Avalon was new. On Camelot the waves pounded the already drowned Surf’s Up, demolished it, drove its pilings into splinters and changed the very shape of the land.

  The storm moved across the continent like a malevolent amoeboid monster. It hit Shangri-la like a bomb. The Second draped tarps across the unfinished buildings that composed half the camp, protecting the naked wood from the savage downpour. Then they took to their shelters, huddled together, and listened to the rain. They thought of the swelling rivers. Grendels would be out tonight, but there would be no scent in rain such as this. And so they were safe.

  But quiet. Their mourning penetrated to the very roots of the colony. They had never known a moment as black as this.

  Aaron sat near the fireplace in the main hall, his long arms wrapped around his knees. He looked out at the rain and said very little, as if words would somehow cheapen his misery. His eyes were red-rimmed.

  The rain had hammered at them for twenty hours already, as savage as a hail of ball bearings.

  They came and they went, but Aaron stayed where he was. Jessica was usually by his side. She needed the touch as much as he did, but it was hours before he could let himself be comforted. When he finally leaned his great head against her chest, and held her, and at last slept, Jessica felt her own grief at last. Bleakly, she wondered how it would feel when its full impact finally struck her. For now there was the rain, and the watch for grendels in the rain. She left Aaron asleep and peered through the window at the mess hall. She knew that Justin was there, and she needed to talk to him more than she could say.

  She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder, but it was only Trish. “Go on,” she said quietly. “I’ll watch things over here.”

  Jessica nodded her thanks, and hugged her friend. Was Trish her friend? God, what a thought. What was everything, what the hell did it all mean? Toshiro dead. Joe and Linda dead. Stu dead. Now Chaka and her father dead. Why? Because Aaron had wanted to . . .

  No. She couldn’t allow herself to stumble down that road. Aaron would have saved them, if he could. Aaron was sorriest of all about everything that had happened. Aaron would have died to save Cadmann, or Chaka. Hadn’t he said so? Didn’t she know it?

  Then why did she want to die?

  She covered her head and went out into the storm.

  Upstream of the base camp, the beaver grendels were in a panic. The river had swelled to twice its ordinary flow, and it hammered at them, drove at their nests and dams with a ferocity they had never experienced . . . but which something deep within them recognized.

  Some knowing beyond their dim consciousness.

  This is the time . . . this is the time . . .

  So they fought to repair, and failed. And when the dams burst some were swept away and dashed against rocks. Others climbed blindly out of the ponds that had swollen to angry, storm-tossed lakes, seeking refuge from the tree trunks and jagged chunks of detritus that dashed them. Chunks of dams from their cousins farther north, chunks of their own dams. Blindly, they fought, but it was no use. And as the rains intensified, as the storms grew greater through the night and into the next day, the work that they and their ancestors had labored over for decades would be swept away as well.

  Jessica found Justin in the mess hall, looking out of the window. Katya was at his side. Jessica felt a twinge, but there was nothing to be done. She had made her choice, long ago.

  Katya pulled at Justin’s arm as Jessica entered. He got up and kissed Katya’s hand, crossed to Jessica, and hugged her.

  God, it felt good. That hug was like physical nourishment. She just wanted to stay in his arms, and feel his heart beat against her, and feel that her entire life wasn’t falling apart, that the tears streaming down her face would stop one day. That there was enough love in all the world to make everything right.

  “Have you talked to Mary Ann?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Not yet. I talked with Mickey—he’s the one who broke the news. I just can’t talk about it over holo, Justin. I can’t.”

  He nodded understanding. “I know. It was awful telling Sylvia. Jesus.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “Well. They’re busy up at the mine. There’s a thousand things to do to get Robor lashed up and into the lee. It’s safe—Dad made sure of that. It would be safe even against a worse storm than this. But it keeps her busy, and I g
uess that that is a good idea.”

  She nodded, and backed away from him. She smelled coffee. “That smells good,” she said.

  “My manners.”

  God, how was he holding up so well? She knew how close he and Cadmann were. In some ways, terrible ways, closer than she had been.

  Her heart broke again. Carlos brought her a cup of coffee, thrust it into her hands. “Your mothers, both of them, are very strong. If they weren’t, they couldn’t have survived this place. None of us could have. The weak did not make the trip. Those unsure of their strength took refuge in the HI.”

  Jessica stared. “Carlos? What does that mean?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say that I think HI was a convenient out for those who couldn’t cope. Just work the garden. Raise children.”

  “Make sculptures?”

  He smiled. “We all have our little refuges.”

  They paused, listening to the rain hammer against the walls, the ceiling. A steady, arrhythmic thrumming. According to Geographic, the first wave of rain would die away by morning. There would be peace, followed by more rain, in waves, for at least a week. And beyond that week, another storm front, and then yet another. They could wait it out. It was what they were here for.

  “When the sky clears,” Carlos said, “I’ll take a skeeter up in the mountains. To the coordinates Aaron gave us. I will find your father’s bones, I think.” He sipped at his coffee. There was something in his eyes that she couldn’t quite read. “His comm-card was still broadcasting. I will find his bones. I believe that I owe your father that much.”

  Then he closed his eyes, and drank, and didn’t say another word for the rest of the night.

  The merciless torrent tore the beaver dams into splinters, and the rivers swelled, changed course, flooded across the plains. Flash floods and waterspouts raged, whirled, tore the sky ever more brutally, made it bleed,