Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  Edgar was recovered enough to take control of the communications. He managed to reestablish a link with Geographic.

  “Robor,” he said. “It looks like the safest way for you to make it down is through the western defile, follow the ridge.” He had collapsed into one of the command chairs. His face was swollen until only one eye was functional. They were running out of time. When this rain stopped, the bees would be back. And back. And back.

  The door to the communications room opened, and Justin, Carlos, and Katya crowded in. They were followed by the others, survivors, looking utterly bedraggled.

  “Robor, this is Shangri-la . . . ”

  Robor was almost two thousand feet above his normal cruising altitude. Here there was no fear of bees, and the skeeter engines roared once again.

  They managed to lash down about half the cargo in the dirigible’s holds before the first of the winds struck them. It grew almost unnoticeably, a slow swell of rhythm, an interruption of the steady burr of the skeeter engines.

  Then the rain hit like a solid wall of air. The stabilizers groaned, and Robor lurched and wobbled as he moved north on his mercy mission. The engines cried out, the wind slamming against him so brutally that it seemed that their entire world was coming to pieces.

  But a kilometer at a time, Robor fought his way down from Deadwood Pass. Robor was coming.

  Justin walked out slowly into the rain, to examine the bodies. He counted a dozen Star Born who hadn’t reached shelter in time. Who hadn’t had Kevlar sacks or Cadzie-blue blankets. What was it with those blankets?

  He kept searching until he found what he was looking for.

  There wasn’t much left, but he recognized the clothes. He would have known her even if there were less left.

  Katya was somewhere behind him. Perhaps she thought of speaking, then thought better of it. Justin knelt in the rain, and took his coat off. Slowly, he draped it over what was left of his sister, his love.

  Then he gathered the bundle of red bones gently into his arms, and carried it out of the rain.

  The weather had died to a slight drizzle when Robor finally appeared. The camp—what was left of it—was almost silent. Sixty-three survivors waited, faces upturned in the rain.

  Robor was moored, and the exodus began. They handed the bodies—what was left of them—hand over hand.

  And when the last of them was aboard, the rain had almost ceased. They could hear the buzz as the bees awakened.

  Sylvia stood beside him, holding his arm. Her son seemed almost like a stranger, so intense was his focus.

  “He’s out there,” Justin said.

  “Who?”

  “Aaron. He’s out there.”

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  Justin shook his head. “He’s not lucky enough to be dead. Yet.” He screamed out of Robor’s door: “I’ll be back, you bastard! I swear to God I’ll be back, and I’ll kill you!”

  She pried him carefully away from the door, and closed it on the camp, the shattered shell of Avalon’s dreams. And then they lifted away.

  The rain started again, and the bees still huddled in the forest, awaiting their time. The chamels had been set free, and were returning to the plains. The horses and other livestock were all dead.

  For a few moments, there was no sound, no movement, and then the mud stirred.

  Aaron Tragon rolled half-free of the mud. His eyes were wild and staring, almost sightless. He wasn’t certain where he was. The chamels had trampled him on their way out, and he was badly concussed. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He had to move. Had to hide. The bees would come back.

  Soon. They would.

  But his eyes wouldn’t focus.

  He flopped over onto his stomach, and tried to crawl away. There was something coming. Death was coming. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t move. But it was there.

  Cadmann. Jessica. Toshiro. More. More. So much death. He hadn’t meant for this. Chaka. Wait, Chaka wasn’t dead. Was he?

  His mind wouldn’t work. So much death. He stood, bent far over around broken ribs. He staggered through the streets of Shangri-la, the camp that he had schemed and stolen and killed to build. It was destroyed. Empty. Robor was retiring in the distance, grinning like some vast grendel, floating away.

  He heard a noise behind him. He was too tired, too confused to turn.

  It was the grendel. The grendel god. He felt a wave of fear, of freedom approaching. His judgment. His salvation. He spread his arms and exposed his throat.

  And then the grendel came to him. And she said Cadmann . . .

  And the grendel took him by the throat, and she said . . . Chaka.

  And the grendel devoured him, saying . . . Jessica.

  And in the grendel, he saw her heart, and the heartbeat, saying . . . Toshiro.

  And he passed into darkness and into death, and the grendel spake unto him, and she said . . .

  Aaron.

  We are one . . .

  ♦ ChaptEr 41 ♦

  choices

  —But there’s a tree, of many, one,

  A single field which I have looked upon,

  Both of them speak of something that is gone:

  The pansy at my feet

  Doth the same tale repeat:

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  —William Wordsworth,

  Intimations of Immortality from

  Recollections of Early Childhood

  It was a beautiful day for a memorial, Justin thought. Tau Ceti shone down on the bluff, on the land that Cadmann Weyland had cleared, planted, tilled by hand . . . on the house that he had built with the sweat of his back.

  And if he turned around, Justin could gaze down on the colony itself. See the Crosshatch of roads that Cadmann had burned into the ground. The maze of homes he had helped erect. It was a place of love and life, crowded with babies to whom Cadmann Weyland was godfather, or guardian, or honorary uncle.

  The Bluff wasn’t crowded. The public funeral had been held a week before. This was just family. Just the kids, and Cadmann’s wives, Katya, and Carlos.

  Just the ones who loved the old man—and Jessica.

  Jessica.

  “We’re here today . . . ” He steadied his voice as much as he could. “. . . to say good-bye to two people we love.” He stopped, dug his hands into his pockets. A sad, crooked smile plucked at his lips. “Isn’t that just the way it is? No matter how much we say to someone while they’re alive, there’s always more to say. That’s the tragedy of it . . . but that’s the joy, too.”

  He looked out at the mourners. They were seated in two rows of folding chairs. Carlos sat next to Sylvia, holding Cadzie, the sleeping child wrapped in a bright blue blanket. Sylvia held Mary Ann’s hand. Mary Ann was pasty-faced, and so grief-stricken that she hardly seemed able to breathe.

  “Dad,” Justin said, “I can still talk to you, when I need to. And I will. We all will. Jessica—”

  And here his words faded for a minute. There were things that he wanted to say: You made the wrong choice, Jessie. You chose the wrong side. And in the end, you didn’t think fast enough. God. I’ll miss your smile, your laugh. I’ll never forget the one kiss we shared, not even when they put me in the ground next to you. I loved you, Jessie. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a goddamned bit of difference, but I should have told you. Maybe if I had. Maybe if I’d found the right way to say it, you’d still be alive . . .

  Katya was smiling at him. Katya, who loved him, and wanted to bear his children. Katya, who must never know what his heart had just revealed to him.

  Justin realized he had stopped speaking. He felt as if his mouth was packed with cotton. He had to say something. Anything.

  Why was life so goddamned hard?

  “Jessica,” he lied, his voice breaking, “you were my sister.”

  Sylvia found Mary Ann in the master bedroom. In Cadmann’s bedroom. Mary Ann sat on the edge of the bed, staring at
the wall. Her hair looked not blonde, but white.

  “Mary Ann?” she said quietly. “Are you all right?”

  Mary Ann looked up slowly. She smiled, a sweet smile, and patted the bed next to her. Even that motion looked tired. Sylvia thought that this was the first time that Mary Ann actually looked old.

  “He . . . loved you more, you know,” Mary Ann said.

  Sylvia started to speak, to say something reflexively, but Mary Ann shushed her. “No. He was too much of a gentleman to ever break his commitment to me. But he loved you more. If honor hadn’t been the core of that man, he would have left me. But he felt . . . obliged.”

  She smiled again. Her cheeks looked waxen. “I let you into my marriage, dear, for him. To hold on to him. If you were here, he wouldn’t have to go to you secretly. He would have done that eventually, you know. And people would have talked. And felt sorry for me. I don’t think that I could have survived that. So I let you in. And he stayed. Because he had no reason to go, don’t you see?”

  Sylvia reached out and took her hand. Regretfully, but firmly, Mary Ann pulled it away. “You have a wonderful heart, and you never tried to hurt me.” She paused, then said matter-of-factly, “I’ve never liked you, you know.”

  Sylvia waited until the silence grew too painful, then told the truth. “I know.”

  “I’ve thought about asking you to move out. But it wouldn’t be right.”

  Sylvia stiffened a bit. “If you want me to go, I will.”

  Mary Ann smiled. “I don’t like you, Sylvia. But you have been a sister to me, for years. And you never tried to hurt me. I don’t like you. But I do love you.”

  The room was very quiet. Mary Ann leaned forward and kissed Sylvia’s cheek.

  Then she lay back on the bed, in the middle of the bed that she had shared with Cadmann for so many years, in which she had borne him children, and curled up onto her side.

  When she spoke, her voice was very, very soft. “I’d like to rest now, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get tired so easily these days.”

  Sylvia rose from the bed and walked to the door, pausing to look back. Mary Ann’s eyes were closed. She might have been asleep already, except for the very soft gasping sound she made as she cried out her good-bye to the man she had loved.

  Sylvia closed the door behind her, and sagged against it, exhausted. She wanted to cry, but the tears just hadn’t come, as if fatigue were mourning enough. Somewhere within her there must have tears for Cadmann, for Jessica, for Mary Ann, and for herself. But they eluded her. Now she fought to find the place within her that held tears for Aaron, the son she had never held.

  She could not find them.

  She had never told him, and now she never could. And almost no one knew the truth. Certainly, Aaron had not. But Sylvia knew. And her mother’s heart knew that her love might have gentled him, nurtured him, even as her rational mind begged her not to carry that weight into her life. It was too much for one woman to bear.

  What would Cadmann want?

  I want you to live, he said in a voice so clear he might have been standing beside her. Death comes soon enough. Live, my love, and be a comfort to Mary Ann. Live, and know I loved you more than I could ever say. I only hope you knew.

  “I knew,” she whispered. “I always knew.”

  Edgar led them into the kitchen/computer room. He felt them stop in the doorway, and turned to watch their reaction.

  They had walked into an Avalon beehive.

  Cassandra and the Chakas had constructed it in one-to-one scale. The hologram space was much larger than the kitchen itself. They had set off their insecticide bombs, they had placed their cameras, set off their monotone sirens, and recorded the sonics passing through the nest, all before the final swarming. Between the computer imaging and the fiber-optic cameras, they had managed to map virtually the entire bee colony.

  It was like a volcano, with branching side pockets and rooms for the infants, breeding grounds, and a huge queen chamber. The creatures lay dead in heaps of thousands.

  For that instant, they were stopped by the wonder of it. Then Edgar’s family pushed in behind him.

  Edgar moved to the keyboard.

  Ruth was just behind him, chin on his shoulder. Her body was starting to swell in earnest. Her father was trying to peer between them without getting too friendly with Edgar himself. Her mother, Rachael, hung back a little; Zack must be feeling claustrophobic too. And Trish was on the other side of Edgar, in contact along his whole left flank, and damn, it was hard to concentrate.

  He felt barely able to move. His home had seemed big enough, too big even, when it was Edgar alone.

  But his fingers remembered. The bee nest faded. Then the holostage ran through a rapid sequence of scenes while Edgar played tour guide.

  “Shangri-la is essentially dead,” Edgar said. “The instruments we left there make it a test case for what’s happening to the continent.

  “Not a living plant anywhere. The crops are gone right down to the dirt. You don’t see any bees now, but any time something living comes in range, the bees boil out and strip it.

  “This is of interest, though. Something big—grendel-sized—pushed in the door to that storehouse. Inside—” Dammit, he’d forgotten the code.

  Trish reached past him and tapped. The screen went dark, nearly. “The lights are burned out,” she said.

  “Yeah, but look around. Near the back, a lot of cans are missing, and soft drinks too. That’s a hot plate over here, and whoever was using it kept the area clean. He’s gone now, I think. Aaron.”

  Zack said, “It may be you’ve got Aaron on the brain, Edgar. All three of you.”

  Zack, Rachael, Ruth, Edgar, Trish. They had to be together, but it was awkward. They kept adjusting their positions. Edgar could talk to Trish, Ruth could talk to her lover and her mother, Zack could talk to Rachael, and if Zack wanted to know about mainland conditions, he had to talk to his son-in-law.

  “I was never sure,” Edgar said. “I told myself he set me up to fall out of that tree, but I was never sure until he killed Colonel Weyland. Now I want his blood.”

  Ruth said nothing.

  Edgar turned to see if his lover’s father was serious. From many objections, he picked one at random. “It’s out of Robor’s range. We’d have to set up staging points—”

  “Fine. In a couple of years, your first staging point can be the minehead, or Shangri-la. You left supplies in both places, and—”

  Trish burst out laughing. Her hand closed hard on Edgar’s shoulder and shook gently. “Soft One, how can you not love it? We’ll put little tent-towns on the knolls. They’re not big, but the Scribes go around them and the grendels can’t reach them—”

  Edgar was studying Zack. He’d never seen the old man smiling like that. A mad smile. “Zack, didn’t you use to be way conservative?”

  “Sure. A little stodgy, maybe? Just do the best plan you can, Edgar. If it looks crazy we won’t do it.”

  Ice on his mind. But—Rachael and Ruth changed glances, a secret look Edgar knew he’d better learn to interpret.

  Rachael Moskowitz didn’t have ice on her mind. And she’d supported Zack in power since before Edgar Sikes was born. But Zack kept making mistakes . . . well, one mistake, one backbreaker of a mistake, and ever since then—

  Ever since then, every time he was challenged, Zack backed down. That was the problem, that was why his brain seemed riddled with ice crystals. He’d withdrawn his objections to the mainland colony. Was he regretting that now?

  “Hell, we can live on the Scribes’ backs!” Trish crowed. Zack nodded, just listening as she babbled. Trish loved the Scribeveldt colony. When Trish fell in love with an idea, she fell hard. She’d do most of Edgar’s work for him. But had he, had they all totally misunderstood the First?

  Edgar burst out, “Zack! What was it with those freezing blankets?”

  They all looked at him as if he were crazy. Zack told him, “We ki
nd of don’t like that word.”

  “I kind of don’t like f-f-soggy mysteries. Zack, you, the First were always so sure it was Cadzie blue that saved the baby. Why? I mean it’s a neat answer, it turns out to be the color-coding for poison—”

  “Elegant,” Zack said. “You learned that word from the math classes, didn’t you? Any solution that elegant has to be right. Except when it isn’t.” The old man laughed.

  “Zack, Cadzie blue is darker than the color coding for poison.”

  “Is it really?”

  “You saw it. Everyone on Camelot got videotapes of Asia through the war specs. We sent you photos. Aaron cut a great swath of Asia’s lip and laid it across all those blankets. It’s too pale.” And why was he devilling an old man with ice on his mind? Edgar saw Ruth and Rachael listening and was embarrassed.

  But Zack said, “Ah.”

  “What?”

  “Edgar, when you get old enough, you get a feel for patterns. Being smart doesn’t do it. Only experience works. That pattern-sense was all we had. What you just said, nobody had said that before, just that way, to me.

  “Stretch a piece of Scribe’s lip in sunlight, it’s too pale. Take pictures with a flash camera, it’s too pale. Watch a Scribe through war specs, and by the time Cassandra gets through with the pictures—”

  “It’s too pale. Ice me down now, Lord.”

  “See, Edgar, the Scribe’s lip is always underneath that overhang of shell, always in shadow. The bees see it as darker. Aaron took it into daylight—”

  “And the flash on the camera lights it up, and Cassandra thoughtfully corrected the color for us, but I can check that part right now, Zack. Cassandra!”

  The reconquest of the mainland was two years in the planning.

  The Scribeveldt had been too wet for going on two years. Vast patches of grass had died. The Scribes were fewer, perhaps because they had stopped breeding; but some of those camouflaged trapezoids didn’t move. The camera on Asia’s back had rolled past one huge empty shell.