The Leagacy of Heorot

by Larry Niven

  Damn you, Cadmann. You didn't have to be there.

  Maybe he did. Maybe we had to try to defend the Colony, and if we lost the Colony, and he wasn't there, he'd blame himself forever. But damn him, he didn't have to be the last man out. Let someone else be a hero. For once.

  The diverted stream ran into and through the house, across the veranda, down a series of small falls, and rejoined the Amazon lower down. It was no more than knee-deep anywhere. The Amazon might have been armpit deep in spots. Running a stream through the house sounded so good, she'd clapped her hands when Cadmann suggested it. He'd half remembered something, an American architect, and she'd told him! Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was called "Falling Water" and was his best work, and she'd remembered it, and Cadmann built it for her. They'd even planned to stock it with samlon.

  The Minerva roared out of the clouds at a forty-five-degree angle. Mary Ann held her breath as she watched the craft accelerate. She'd heard the panic in Marty's voice. And Cadmann had seemed desperate when Marty wanted to take off during the long night. The Minerva rose higher, if you crash, it serves you right. There was a puff of fog as it went supersonic... a change in the wake as the nuclear scramjet came on... a belated roar.

  No explosion. No grendels in the intakes after all. And the Minerva was gone.

  No power now, no fences. He had to come out now. Should have left when the Minerva did. Before the Minerva. He should be here now. Where are you, big guy--?

  The clouds stirred and she saw the Skeeter emerge.

  She climbed up to the veranda. She asked the first person she saw, "Is he alive?"

  It was Joe Sikes. "I've got Carlos. He says they lost Greg. Nobody else."

  "Greg..." She shook her head. She couldn't say. Good. Greg. Lost how? His new wife was in Minerva. Who? All she could remember was Alicia. Alicia and the baby. So much death. The new name was gone. Doesn't matter.

  She'll know soon enough. "It's over then. Thank God." She went off to bed.

  Carolyn watched the sun rise below. Noon yesterday she had ridden out of the closing mist, moving southwest, uphill and toward the glacier, riding until nightfall. She'd led the horses all night. It was a mistake. While trudging uphill and trying to report her position she'd dropped the comcard and stepped on it. The horse she led stepped on it as well. Now it didn't work. No one knew where she was. Maybe they'd send a Skeeter to look for her. Maybe they wouldn't. She couldn't go back to the Colony—

  Southwest and uphill. He's said southwest and uphill. They'd look for her there, and it was the safest place she could find.

  Again the sun rose in blue brilliance, but today it rose over a sea of mist. Clouds had rolled in from the sea; they covered the Colony like a lid, with a great contoured thunderhead for a handle.

  Carolyn and the horses were well to the north and west of Cadmann's feudal stronghold, and that, too, was hidden.

  The land had flattened out like a tilted table. A line of horses trotted uphill with White Lightnin' at their head.

  The horses were all yearlings or younger. Even White Lightnin' wasn't all that big; but Carolyn was small. The horse carried her easily.

  She fumed as she rode. They didn't want me with them! Cadmann Weyland is off fighting Ragnarok with his picked crew, and I'm not in it. They wanted Phyllis, perfect Phyllis, but not me. Not worth fighting with, not worth fighting for—Yet she wasn't truly unhappy with Cadmann's decision. Where would she have wanted to be? At the Colony, waiting for the grendels to swarm? Aboard Geographic while the air grew stale and the Minervas failed to arrive? She had quite another reason for her anger.

  Anger held back the fear.

  Carolyn had never been on a horse until long after she reached Avalon.

  She'd tended the colts, and grown used to them, and learned that they were skittish, balky, untrustworthy. If Carolyn lost control of herself, if she screamed at a colt or swatted it, it remembered; it shied from her next time. She had learned to control herself around horses.

  Around people... well, people were more complex, and they talked to each other. Word had spread.

  Once she had known how to steer people where she wanted them. Once she had been Zack's second in command. Without Rachel behind him, Zack would have been working for Carolyn! Though he would still have been part of Geographic's crew, the best of the best.

  Hibernation Instability had merely touched Carolyn, but it had left Zack alone.

  And of course Phyllis. Nothing ever stuck to Phyllis. She had Hendrick, she could have had Cadmann, everybody knew it. Phyllis could fall into a mountain of horse manure and come out with roses in her hair.

  I'm still smart. Smarter than she is! But I get scared. And that thought was frightening too. She took deep breaths and looked back—

  The mist was coming after her in a cloud like a breaking wave, and there were grendels in the mist. She could see lightning flashes in the tops of the clouds. Rain. The grendels love it. Maybe they won't come out.

  The Colony might have vanished already in a sea of ravening miniature grendels. For all Carolyn could tell, the only earthly life on Avalon was herself and twenty horses. She found herself hoping with savage fervor that that irresponsible butterfly Carlos had made her pregnant before Sylvia took him.

  The Geographic Society sent no woman who didn't want babies, she thought. I'm locked into that. Preprogrammed. Hibernation Instability should have taken that too.

  Thus far she had avoided water. She couldn't do that forever. Horses could go a long way without food, but not without water. It shouldn't be a problem. She was taking them toward the glacier that ran down the slope of Mucking Great Mountain. There would be streams and springs.

  She looked down toward the edge of cloud...

  She knew what it was as she reached for the binocular case. She was almost relieved. At this distance it looked like a black tadpole. Through the binoculars there was not much more detail: a mini-grendel, plump and streamlined, moving on quick, stubby legs. A meter long, she thought; not one of the big ones. Eyes. Watching her. How well could it see? It looked at her—

  Binoculars. They're lenses. The lenses in the dead grendels are strange. Distortable. Big. It could be seeing me as well as I see it.

  "Charlie," she said, as if naming a thing were the same as understanding it, controlling it. Her lips twitched toward a snarl. She lifted the harpoon gun high in the air. "Charlie, is it too late to negotiate?" The grendel watched.

  She decided (working against her own well-understood tendency to hysteria) that there was no point in urging the horses to greater speed. Moving uphill, that trot was all they could manage. They hadn't smelled anything yet.

  The grendel seemed in no hurry.

  It was out of the rain, with no water immediately ahead. There was every chance that it would give up.

  She had been given a harpoon gun and four explosive harpoons. There were boulders on the plain, some huge. Carolyn thought of climbing a rock, sending the horses ahead, waiting for the grendel to pass. Her mind worked well enough unless she was pushed. But... to wait and wait, while the grendel watched her and considered... she would crack. She knew it.

  Keep the horses moving. See what happened.

  Mary Ann popped awake, and sat upright in bed. Noise in the corridor.

  The glow of her comcard on the stand told her that more than an hour had passed.

  She put on a robe and stepped into the corridor.

  Cadmann and Hendrick were receding. Mary Ann shouted. "Cadmann!"

  He turned as she hurried toward him. Blood all over his coveralls.

  Blood on his boots. Thin crescents of blood tracked on her floor.

  He was still talking as she ran to him. "Not much power in the Skeeters. We need another way to shoot that juice. Catapults? Crossbows. A good steel-spring crossbow, designed for range—"

  "Right," Hendrick said. "We can get Sikes on it. He did wizard's work on the spear guns."

  There was fatigue in deep lines across his fa
ce, and a smell, an alien smell that stirred hair on the back of her neck even as she hugged him. She hugged him harder for that, to feel his ribs sag inward, to know that she had Cadmann despite what her senses told her: she held a ghost, an alien impostor...

  He hugged her back with too little strength. "That's it for your peignoir, love," he said. "It's not my blood, though. You're smelling speed sacs from umpty-dozen grendels."

  "Speed sacs. Grendels?"

  "I had to chop them up myself. Nobody else to do it," Cadmann told her.

  "Oh."

  Hendrick said, "I'll clean him and return him. He has to sleep. You hold him down. Go back in the room and pass me the robe out. Cad, I'll start a team grinding up grendel sacs—"

  "Put ‘em in gloves and coveralls—"

  "I heard you the first time. All clothes go in a separate pile. Mary Ann, the robe goes too. If grendels get close enough to smell the speed extract, we want nobody in that robe."

  She had trouble extracting information from that. They aren't crazy. Am I that stupid? She nodded. Went back in. Took off the robe. Passed it through the nearly closed door. Went back to bed, naked, pulled up the covers and was gone.

  She woke when the bed shook. When she found the strength to rise up on an elbow, Cadmann seemed already asleep. His mouth was open, his beard was four days old, and he looked worse than he'd ever looked with a mere hangover. He was clean, though.

  And alive, despite appearances, and safe.

  She rolled off her elbow and let her eyes close. The thought of demanding her marital rights came from a long way away and receded at once. He needed sleep. She needed sleep. I need sleep, he needs sleep, all God's—

  Some indeterminate time later, she must have changed her mind. Or he did. Or—"Watergate," she murmured as they lay in each other's arms, both half conscious and receding.

  "You've got the damndest information-retrieval system," he said. "Why Watergate?"

  "Can't remember. Oh. Old scandal. They taught us in history class. Who ordered the cover-up? One of the defendants said, ‘Nobody ever suggested that there would not be a coverup.' "

  "So?"

  "If neither of us says, ‘Let's not make love—‘ "

  "Gotcha. Go to sleep."

  "Charlie" was among the oldest of grendels, and she was just turning female. What had been a double layer of cells along her abdominal wall now held tiny eggs ready to be fertilized. The sensation of internal change was minor compared to what she had experienced in the past two days.

  Her siblings had been part of the environment, like the water. Now they were death and life. She had won two fights before the scent of something different lured her uphill, away from water.

  There had been no fights since. Her chewed foreleg had nearly healed.

  Water called her, but water would have siblings in and around it. She was content while the rain fell. There was growing hunger; but she followed the smell of meat in motion, a scent quite alien to that of grendel flesh. Sometimes there were thick stalks to chew. They were not satisfying. She needed meat...

  A grendel would eat almost anything rather than a samlon or another grendel. Grendels fought when they must—and when grendels were everywhere, they must fight—but what they wanted was more like—like...

  There had been no image until she left the fog. Then: they were there. A score of alien creatures, far upslope, each bigger than anything her belly could hold. The most distant was misshapen, or carried a parasite. She found herself locking eyes with... with something like the creature that had spat fire at a dozen of her siblings and started a battle that she had only barely escaped.

  Meat and danger: death and life. She put that one, the creature on the lead horse, in the same class as her siblings. But her hunger was growing.

  Mary Ann awoke slowly. Eyes still closed, she reached out, snuggled back, tried to find Cadmann's warm body. Nothing was there. It was time, then. She sat up and blinked into the darkness, then rolled out of bed.

  The silence was around her while she slipped on a clean robe. It was uncannily quiet. No dogs, no human voices. She didn't hear the thump of a hammer or the sound of a Skeeter rotor. If she listened hard she could hear the whisper of the wind. Nothing else.

  Mary Ann padded the few feet down the hall to the living room. Four men were asleep on the floor. Two sat wrapped in blankets, half asleep as they sipped coffee. Stu hefted his cup and broke the spell. "G'morning."

  From the light filtering in from the clerestories she judged it to be just past noon, perhaps one o'clock. "It's not morning."

  "That's all you know. Until I've had coffee it's always morning."

  Me too. She went to the kitchen and poured a cup. It was only lukewarm. She didn't bother to heat it. This wasn't to save energy. Gas might be short, but there was enough for that. Instead she took the lukewarm coffee to the shower room.

  No time. No time. A clock in her head ticked on, driving her to a terrible, baseless sense of urgency.

  She showered carefully. Thoughts tumbled through her mind in no order at all. Details of the shower system: water diverted from the stream, funneled through fifty meters of narrowing pipe to build pressure; through a maze of pipes exposed to the south for heat; into the house. Water cascading down the small branch of the stream, to run through the living room. Then back into the Amazon. Cad had the damndest sense of humor. Amazon: a creek barely deep enough to swim in in the swiftest pools. There was a place where the water ran fast, between two boulders, and you had to fight your way up to it, and there was a seat there in the water where you could sit and let cool water rush past you.

  Why am I thinking this?

  We were going to put samlon there. She shuddered, and not just with the cold, though the water was cold.

  She relished the cold while she scrubbed. The last vestiges of fatigue washed away with the lathered water. Still she rubbed her skin until it burned, and rubbed between the toes, in and behind her ears, scrubbing away ectoplasmic filth. She wanted to be clean, and didn't know why.

  She toweled and dressed. Only then did she go out to the veranda.

  Hendrick and Jerry were half asleep in front of the communications console. Joe Sikes sat on the low wall at the veranda edge and stared downhill through binoculars. Tension and fear showed in the set of his shoulders.

  Joe Sikes. He had been a quieter, deeper man since Evvie's death, but she still didn't like him. He'd been friendly, more than friendly. Before Cadmann, he was always a willing bed partner. Never more, but it was good to have someone you could just crook a finger at. She could lose herself in him and forget that she was no longer Professor Eisenhower, nothing more than a brain-damaged brood mare. Then one night she'd heard him talk about her.

  Boo! She didn't dare say it. "Hello."

  Sikes spasmed, then whirled around. "Oh. Hi."

  She didn't laugh out loud.

  Jerry sat up fully. "Hello."

  "The quiet woke me," Mary Ann said. The sun was just about overhead.

  "What's going on?"

  "Not much," Jerry said. "Beautiful day up here, but you can see that.

  Geographic's trying to get us some information, but so far nothing you wouldn't expect. IR doesn't go through fog—uh—"

  "I understand. They can't tell what's happening below that." She pointed to the mushroom lid that sat above the Colony site.

  "I know this much. They're not coming out of it," Jerry said. He found an empty cup on the console table and stooped to rinse it in the stream that cut across the veranda. Then he filled it with coffee from a thermos and thrust it at her. He refilled his own. "Cadmann said you'd be up by now."

  "Where is he?" The coffee was bitterly strong, and hot. She treasured each sip.

  Jerry shrugged. "Moving fast. Looking for new things to worry about.

  What'd you expect?"

  "I expect we'd all be dead without him."

  "Me too," Jerry said cheerfully. "He's making the rounds."

  The gr
ound fell away sharply below the veranda. Below the veranda were two more levels, bedrooms and storage. Then the ground sloped away again. "We put the house on the military crest," Cadmann had said. The phrase meant nothing to her. She didn't think it ever would have.

  The minefield began a hundred meters below. Off to her left ran the little ridge that separated the Amazon from the smaller branch that flowed through the house. Halfway down that ridge, between the house and the uphill edge of the minefield, was a tall boulder. Snail Head. Terry's Rock. Something colorful fluttered atop that rock.

  She walked downhill. The sound of the stream pulled her, called to her, and she followed it. She slipped off her shoes and walked barefoot through the shallows.

  Terry's silhouette still showed atop the glacier rock. She didn't see his chair. He must have left it at the base; Hendrick and Terry's own strong arms would have lifted him onto the peak.

  She called. "Terry!"

  "Hi. Sunrise was beautiful. I hope to God you slept through it."

  "Oh, yeah. Anything?"

  "Hendrick brought me breakfast. Biggest event of the day so far.

  Cadmann's down there somewhere along the Amazon."

  Nowhere did she see Cadmann. She went back up toward the veranda, then stopped to look back.

  Something lay beside the stream, about where the minefield ended. Wasn't that clothing? She strained to see. A body? She ran up to the veranda, sloshing coffee, and found Jerry. "Is someone out there?"

  He laughed softly. "Laundry. The stuff Ricky and Phyllis wore when they chopped up the gland sacs, and Cadmann's clothes, and your robe. They all stink of speed. I hope you took a damned good shower. If a grendel gets a whiff of you... "

  That was why. She clapped her hands happily. "You don't have to worry." She closed her eyes and forced herself to remember. "The speed stuff. They've already made everything up?"

  Jerry pointed up past the veranda, where Stu now lounged near the makeshift Skeeter pad. "We have two tanks of stuff that will drive any red-blooded grendel into hysterics. Bank on it."