by Larry Niven
“Bastards.”
Rick’s eyes gleamed.
Cadmann hawked and spit down into the whirlpool of motion. “Carlos. Get me out of here. I have work to do.”
Carlos spun them around and headed toward the swollen silhouette of Mucking Great Mountain.
♦ChaptEr 31♦
grendels in the mist
When a strong man armed keepeth his palace,
his goods are in peace.
But when a stronger than he shall come upon him,
and overcome him,
he taketh from him all his armor wherein he trusted,
and divideth his spoils.
—Luke 11:21−22
Mary Ann watched the sun rise behind a roiling mountain of storm. The dark had shown her nothing of what was happening down there. Neither did the light.
She heard slow thumping behind her.
Hendrick was on crutches. One leg was encased in a balloon cast while the ruined calf muscle regenerated. He was awkward on the crutches, and tired, too.
“I thought we sent you to bed,” he said.
Mary Ann shook her head. “You sent me to rest.”
“You resting?”
“Yes. How’s Terry?”
“In place. We perched him on that big rock you call Snail Head. You can see him from here.”
She looked. Yes, a shadow-man sat on a big white boulder, rifle in his lap, legs in a wide V. She turned back to the clouds.
The covered veranda had become the fire-control area. It had a wonderful field of view, but hers from below the veranda was almost as good. She could see along the winding silver ribbon of Amazon Creek as far as the edge of the bluff, and beyond to the sea of storm.
Half a dozen colonists were digging up mines, altering them and burying them again. The mines had been set to be harmless to a dog, death to an adult grendel. Now they must be reset, and the dogs penned up, kept out of the field.
The dogs didn’t like that at all. She could hear their protests from inside the house. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were teaching their litter brothers and companions how to howl.
Another Skeeter was landing above the house. “I’ll take it,” Hendrick said. She heard him thumping away.
“I’ll show them,” she said, but he was already going, and she didn’t insist. It was her house. Her house, but she was tired. She should be in bed.
Hendrick and Jerry and others were running the defenses, enlarging the privy, caring for the livestock. Other voices maintained communications with Geographic, the Minervas, the Skeeters. But when a Skeeter load came in, room had to be found for the refugees.
The living-room floor, with the small stream running right down the middle, was the men’s bedroom. No other room was that size, so women were bunking in smaller clumps. Newcomers had to be shown everything. “We have to ration. Talk to Cadmann if that’s a problem for you. You don’t raid the kitchen. Sorry. The privy is down through the minefield. Follow the marks. We made maps and copied them and they’re on every wall. Wash up in the big tubs outside. The water comes in from upstream above the house. It’s cold but it’s safe.
“The only hot water is in the kitchen and the main bathroom, and there really isn’t much of it because the heaters were designed for just two people. Sorry. We don’t have energy to spare. Not for heat, not for lights. Sorry. There’s soap, but there isn’t much, and we’re saving some for the medical people. Sorry.”
Sorry. She was getting very tired of using that word.
It seemed that nobody but Mary Ann could find anything. Hendrick had found her in the kitchen finding utensils for the cooks. They had ordered her to bed, and seen her to her door before Terry went on duty.
Her bed was big. They’d moved it into a storage room; the bed nearly filled it. At least she was alone. Few of her guests could say as much. She had the bed to herself because Cadmann was down there in the mist surrounded by grendels, with the outer fence ruined and rain about to short out the inner. And she stood below the veranda, watching the clouds.
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 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 Ragnarök 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 c
olt 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 face, 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 cover-up.’ ”
“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.