Starborn and Godsons

by Larry Niven

  “Next time try scissors instead of rock.”

  She growled at him, and lowered her voice. “What’s their excuse?” she asked. “Trudy told me last night that there was never any question of her putting on the armor today. What’s up with that?”

  “Charmingly patriarchal,” he said under his breath. “She’s breeding stock. They don’t trust the creches, and are still careful about a new planet. Pretty simple, really.”

  “Pretty stupid,” she said. “They’re acting like men’s lives aren’t as valuable as women’s. Except Stype. I’m afraid to ask about Stype.”

  He was quite sure that wasn’t what she was thinking, but it was the right argument to make. He had no idea how things were done on Earth, but on Avalon, regardless of a social agreement to embrace equality, the quarter-million years of gender roles integrated into every human institution made certain patterns inevitable . . and the Godsons were even further down that road. Rough edges to be smoothed.

  He hoped.

  “Amazing?” Cadzie said. “These suits leave ‘amazing’ in the dust. With the auto-balance, I can’t believe how easy it is.”

  “We have the patterns for you, and the fabricators will gear up in a few days, if you want.”

  “I want. What’s the maximum strength of one of these?”

  “Pick up that rock.”

  “Sounds good.” Conscious that he was now strutting (just a bit) he walked over to a boulder as tall as his waist. It was a quarter-sunken in the ground, and should have required a tractor or mule team to lift. He bent his knees and gripped with gloved fingers. It resisted, and then he was able to really get his legs under him. Grunting with effort, he managed to raise it a few inches. Top that, Peter Parker! He let it thump back down with a satisfying thud.

  “This must weigh a ton,” he panted. “Holy crap. I can feel that. It feels damned heavy. Is it supposed to feel so heavy?”

  “If it didn’t, your proprioceptive systems wouldn’t be engaged. You’re at least three times as strong as the average human being now. How do you like it?”

  He felt his whole body grin. “I like. How tough is the armor?”

  Stype’s arm blurred. She unsnapped her holster, her side-arm blossomed in her hand. Cadzie watched the muzzle level at his face and the world flashed white. Cadzie staggered back, a cry of dismay and shock strangled in his throat . . .

  And then realized that he was just fine. “Holy shit!”

  “That answer your question?” Trudy asked.

  He heard his breath sighing in the faceplate, and felt something odd settle over him, a combination of calm and confidence he could not remember experiencing before. “Damn. I’d say so.”

  “What say we go find some grendels?”

  Skeeter Blue flew west, deeper into the Veldt. Now Cadzie understood why the seats were so wide and spacious: to accommodate a pilot or passenger wearing this amazing armor.

  He flicked a chin switch, opening a radio channel back to camp. “Are you watching this, Toad?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. Cadzie . . be careful, will you? I mean, I thought I wasn’t going to say that, but I don’t know . . .”

  “What?”

  “This situation. I don’t know quite how to say it, but if the Godsons are right, and they’d better be . . for the first time in the history of humans on Avalon . . we are the apex predators.”

  Those words reverberated in Cadzie’s mind. We are the apex predators. The Big Dogs. God. If only Granddad had lived to see this.

  Marco pointed down to the grasslands below them. “There! Is that what I think it is?” They were watching a small wave, perhaps fifteen adolescent grendels running in a rough wedge toward the center of the veldt.

  “Those are grendels, sans speed!” He called out after checking the skeeter’s belly screen. “Young ones, I’d guess only months old.”

  “What are they doing?” Stype asked.

  “Hunting in a pack. We never saw that on the island, but there seems more pack behavior on the continent. Armor or not, I promise you you don’t want to deal with that.”

  “They going after scribes?”

  “My guess is they’ll have to. There are whole ecologies built around and under and over the scribes, and nothing else here but grass.”

  “I thought you said scribes are invulnerable.”

  “Yeah, but those grendels probably don’t know that yet. Can probably smell the meat without understanding the danger. Let’s find a smaller group and get in front of it.”

  Maybe even a loner, the traitor in Cadzie’s mind whispered. Why take chances? He flew in an expanding spiral, until they found a group of three, heading southwest, on a line that would intersect with the first group, probably at the vertex of a fat, juicy young scribe. Good luck with that.

  “We can try these,” he said, and took the skeeter two kilometers ahead of them, settled to the ground. He looked soberly at Joanie. Chose a private channel for her. “Listen,” he said. “These might be miracle machines. But I’d like you to hang back in Grendel Scout mode. You sit on those reflexes until you see what’s happening. Then if you see the need, you use the grendel guns.”

  “All right, but next time you back me up.”

  “With pleasure.”

  He, Stype and Marco hopped out, while Joanie mounted a heavy-duty grendel gun on the door frame.

  “How do we do this?” Marco asked. His voice finally sounded a little stressed. Good. He was human after all. Stype displayed no emotion at all.

  “How far out are they, Toad?”

  “Half a kilometer. You’ve got about two minutes.”

  “You seeing this?”

  “From a safe distance, yes. And I hope you’re sure about this, because we have heat signatures coming your way.”

  “Fast?” Stype asked. “This ‘speed’ stuff?”

  “No,” Toad replied. “Not yet. Slow. I’d call it hunting mode.”

  “They are stalking.”

  “There’s something odd about this, though. You need to be aware.”

  “What are you seeing?” Cadzie asked.

  “Slightly different behavior. They seem to be, well, triangulating on you.”

  “We haven’t seen that before. Not much.” Damn it, the nervousness was leaking into his voice as well.

  “Maybe they are part of Aaron’s group?”

  “This far out? No way.”

  “Wild grendels?” Trudy asked. “That sounds right.”

  “How do you explain that behavior?”

  “Shit happens.”

  Stype raised her hand. “You ready?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You’d better be.”

  They released the goat from its crate and pounded its stake into the ground. The poor thing was bleating and bucking. It tested the air, perhaps able to smell what was coming, just as its approaching killers could smell goat. “Sorry, fella,” Cadzie murmured. “It’s a good cause.” And to be sure, he drew his knife along its side, drawing blood.

  There are lines once crossed which cannot be uncrossed. He could see the screens in his helmet, note the approach of the heat signatures. There was no way to get the goat and three human beings back into the skeeters before the grendels reached them. The goat, at least, was doomed.

  And if the humans tried to prevent that death, the weapons and armament had better be perfect, or they were dead, too.

  “Will that be enough to attract these things?” Trudy asked.

  “Blood does it, yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it be kinder to just kill that poor goat?”

  “But less effective. Grendels will scavenge when hungry, but they seem to actually enjoy the hunt.”

  “So do I,” Stype growled. That wasn’t fear. That was readiness. Marco was quiet. Watchful? Or nervous?

  Cadzie had a sudden, powerful urge. “Damn it, I think I have to pee.”

  He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but Trudy’s voice answered in his ear.
He detected no hint of mockery. “The diaper is built in. Be my guest.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Was this really happening? More to the point, had he actually volunteered for this?

  “Cadzie, we have movement.”

  “I’ll just bet we have.”

  “Are you all right down there?”

  “I think we’ve got company.”

  Cadzie’s chest felt pumped full of hot liquid, every breath a strained effort. “Joanie!” he said. “I give you control of my suit for the first two seconds after the grendels appear. Override my reactions.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He was sure. Years of operant conditioning had burned a conditioned response until it was equal to the basic programming ingrained by millions of years of evolution: a flinch in reaction to loud noises and falling and . . grendels.

  And out of the grass stalked three creatures from his deepest nightmares. And regardless of conscious thought, Cadzie’s entire body moved. His right arm tried to grab the holstered handgun at his hip with a motion so fast and violent that when the armor resisted it he felt the protesting tendons and ligaments at elbow and shoulder scream in agony.

  His vision collapsed to a tunnel, focused entirely on the first grendel. Vision went red, and then black . . and then red . . and then came back to normal as the conditioned response faded.

  He panted. Dear God that was intense! That response had never, ever been triggered in the wild. Aaron’s tame beasts didn’t trigger the same response, and he wasn’t sure why. But as the roar of the adrenaline faded, and sanity returned, for the very first time he had consciously experienced the full power of the programming designed to save their lives. He shivered, as the hormonal heat receded, leaving him feeling cold and sick. And then that died away as well . . .

  And his breathing normalized. According to the clock display built into the armor only seconds had passed, but it felt like months.

  “Are you all right?” Joanie asked. If she’d been watching his biometrics, she must have had quite a show.

  Hopefully, no one else had noticed, and he managed to focus on what was going on right here, right now.

  A hundred meters away, the grendels still crouched, watching them. Almost as if they had been waiting for him to lock eyes before acting, they began to move. They crept in like cautious wolves, creatures faced by something they had never seen before, that none of their kind had ever seen before. Trespassers from some strange realm completely off their genetic maps.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “It’s a little late now.”

  “By the Provider,” Marco whispered. “I didn’t realize that they were so . . .”

  “So grendel?”

  “Quiet!” Stype snapped. Nerves? Or something else?

  They crouched, squatting in the crushed grass, thick barbed tails thrashing slowly, back and forth and back and forth. At a distance, the grendels examined the newcomers. Three humans. Three demi-reptiles.

  “They’ve never seen anything like us.”

  “It’s possible they’ve never seen a human being at all. Ain’t that many of us.”

  “Let’s hope there aren’t about to be three less.”

  “All right—what do I do now?” Cadzie asked.

  “Fight or die,” Stype said.

  The grendels blurred and came straight at them. The machine pistol built into Marco’s suit spit fire and one of the three was stitched with machine gun rounds.

  Cadzie couldn’t think, all he could do was move. The grendel was on him, its barbed tail and nails scrabbling at his armor, scratching and scraping and peeling away paint. He could smell its breath through the gaps in the faceplate, a musky, meaty stench. Hot!

  He collapsed within himself, all of the ego and confidence in his technology melting away, revealed for the fraud it was. All his courage, fraud. His Grendel Scout reflexes peeled away to reveal a frightened little monkey trembling at the center of a mass of ruined conditioning.

  And that, curiously, saved him. Because the ape knew how to fight. Even if it was futile, it might not have had the slightest idea of guns and bombs and scans, but teeth and claws it fully grasped. Survival it understood.

  And that tied directly into what the shrimp suits were designed to do. His hands grasped with strength no anthropoid had ever known, with speed that augmented his natural motion until it was almost the equal of the single-response Grendel Scout “flash” reaction. His armored fingers dug into the creature that had dared to challenge him, his augmented arms held it out and punched and punched and . . .

  And then the red tide receded, and Cadzie found himself standing, panting, gloved hands smeared with gore, the ground around him plowed and furrowed, three dead pseudoreptiles lying about them.

  No . . two dead, one mortally wounded, attempting to drag itself away, webbed intestines trailing behind in a faint red mist.

  Somewhere, someone was chanting: “Holy hell. Holy hell . . .” Over and over, again and again.

  Oh, shit. It was him. He was ashamed . . then realized that Marco had flipped open his face plate, and was doubled over, hands braced on his blood-spattered knees, puking up his breakfast. Even the stoic Major Stype was gulping air, face drained of color.

  Good. Grendel-shock was no personal weakness. He almost grinned.

  Joan’s voice crackled in his ear. “Shit, Cadzie! I can’t believe that!” She changed channels. “Toad, did you get that?”

  “Upoading to Cassandra. Holy shit, Cadz.”

  Skeeter Blue was hovering in. When it landed, their human expressions were awe-struck.

  And there was an earthquake. A big one . . .

  No, that was just him, again. The world wheeled, and he fought to keep his eggs and mutton in their place.

  “Get me . . .” He gasped once he’d regained a bit of composure. “Get me out of here. Peel me out of this thing . . .”

  The Godsons had set up defensive perimeters, checking for heat signatures, and nodded assent: it was safe.

  One he’d thought dead was trying to crawl away with a broken back. Marco put a bullet into its brain.

  Cadzie watched, numb. He couldn’t feel his mouth move, but heard himself say: “And the goat. Get the goat.”

  The upper part of the armor stripped away, Cadzie staggered over to the place where they had staked the goat. It wasn’t bleating. Wasn’t moving. Seemed as much in shock as he should have been.

  Cadzie rubbed its head, and slowly, it stopped trembling and began to respond. “You, little friend, are the luckiest goat that ever lived.” Fervently, he wished that he could simply tear off his suit. He wanted to feel something warm, and alive. Feel a beating heart against his chest. Even a goat.

  Especially this goat.

  “A new pet,” Joanie said.

  Cadzie collapsed to his knees. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat Unka Carlos’ cabrito again. I’ve looked at life from both sides now. I dub thee Billy the Kid.”

  “Cute. Let’s go home.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 25 ♦

  retrospect

  Cadmann’s Bluff was Cadzie’s second home, and he knew that soon it would feel much less that way. His grandmother was noticeably weaker today, walked as if her joints were nerve-bundles rubbing against each other with every step. Had she always seemed to catch her breath when standing or sitting? Perhaps he was merely seeing her with clearer eyes.

  “You took a terrible chance,” Sylvia said. She was simultaneously working on her latest canvas and watching her new house guest: Billy the Kid. The luckiest goat in the world was nosing around her vegetable garden. Cadzie had promised to build a fence, and knew he’d have to make good on that promise, or Sylvia might try out some new recipes.

  “It was worth it. Mom, you don’t know what it was like.”

  “I’ve seen the video,” she said, adding a dab of color to her canvas.

  “Not the same thing.”

  “Then tell me.”

  He paused, thinking. “I was
n’t alive for the Grendel Wars. And I can’t say I know what that was like. We have the videos, and I suppose we understand it that way.” Another dab. “We thought we’d all die,” she said.

  “Yes. I’m not saying what happened to us was as bad. Or worse. But it was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “You had another . . frame of reference. You remember Earth. A place where there were no speed monsters. Where it was so boring you traveled across the stars to find adventure.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that.” Her chuckle was directed at the canvas.

  “But close enough?”

  “All right,” she said. “Close enough.”

  “We . . grew up in the shadow of those gargoyles. They are . . were our boogeymen. There hasn’t been a day I’ve not thought about them. You created an entire clan to program us, implant programs in our unconscious to keep us alive. The nightmares . . .”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked tired. “We just wanted to keep you alive.”

  “And we love you for that. But what you don’t see is that all my life, there’s been a small, frightened place inside me. That little core of my humanity you programmed from the cradle to be ready to kill or die. It was for my good . . for our own good . . but it was in there, and it poisoned me, just a little.”

  “Cadzie . . .” she began.

  He raised his hand, begging room to finish his thoughts. “It’s okay. It’s all changed. For the first time in my life . . I’m not afraid of grendels. I went face to face with one . . hell, toe to toe. And tore it to pieces.” He paused, mentally chewing at something. And then came to a decision. “There’s something I’ve never told you.”

  “What?”

  “I dream about grendels. A lot of Scouts do. Sometimes we shoot them in time. Sometimes not.”

  “Dear God.” She almost dropped her brush.

  He barely noticed, already switching out of emotions and into a logical mode. “I think it’s part of some mental subroutine designed to keep our hindbrains sharp.”

  “Cadzie, we never . . .”

  “Gramma . . last night I dreamed about a grendel. I fought it with my bare hands. Strangled it. And won.”

  She went very still. “And that made a difference?”