Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  Justin had viewed holograms from Hawaii; Malibu, California; Australia; and other places supposed to have the best surf action on Earth. In Justin’s expert opinion, Camelot Island beat them all. The water was cool but not cold, the waves rolled forever, and the surfing season lasted all year long.

  Someone was riding his board in with a torch held aloft in one hand . . . no, now that he saw it more clearly, there were three of them, carrying horsemane gum torches that silvered the entire wave crest. Two girls and a guy, and one girl was Katya Martinez, lookin’ good.

  Sand whipped in all directions as Justin touched the skeeter down. He dismounted and ran to the open barbecue pit, kicked off his shoes, and did a kind of victory dance, screaming, “We’re going over, troops!”

  They howled like mad dogs, and Little Chaka hurled a beer pod. It slapped Justin just above his heart. It stung, but the pod didn’t break.

  He grabbed a lady and got a long wet kiss, and then grabbed another one and did it even better, then plopped down in the sand and popped the beer open. Derik Crisp spread big beefy hands. “So?”

  “So the mining machinery is down. Great timing. They’ve got to go over.”

  “Great timing.” Derik grinned. “So how’d you do it?”

  “Me? No,” Justin protested. “Hey, that’d be real sabotage, nasty stuff.”

  “Sure,” Derik said. “Sure.” He was still grinning, but he read Justin’s irritation. “Does this have to be real? Nobody had to blow anything up. Just tell Cassandra to make pictures.”

  Justin said, “I never thought of that. Who could do that?”

  “Edgar,” someone yelled.

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Depends on what he’s offered,” Little Chaka said. Jessica had come running out of the communications room in time to hear them. “You don’t really think it’s the computer, do you, Justin? Whoever did it would have to be good, really good; they’d have to fool Linda and Joe—” She cut herself off.

  “Yep,” Derik said. “Edgar Sikes could sure as hell do it.”

  “And no one else,” Jessica said. “Gee, Linda’s got enough generation problems without that.” She shook her head. “And I saw Linda’s files; sure, if anyone can fake it Edgar could have, but I just don’t believe it.” She looked accusingly at Justin. “The explosions were real; now, how did they happen?”

  “Sheesh! Why me?”

  “Why Edgar?” Jessica demanded. “Same reason. Who else could it be? Who could have done Mount Tushmore?”

  “You wrong me,” Justin said, but he had trouble hiding the pride in his voice.

  “Aaron,” Derik said. “Aaron Tragon could have done it.”

  Jessica nodded vigorously, and a lot of Justin’s pride faded.

  “I’m going to call them,” Derik said suddenly.

  “Hey now, wait—”

  “No, just to talk to Linda. See if she knows anything.” Derik went to put through the call.

  Derik and Linda had been a thing, once, for about ten days. Calling her right now might cause Joe Sikes to shove his phone down his throat. Jessica would have stopped him . . . but others were gathering around them now. “What’s the word?” someone called.

  “We’re going,” Jessica answered. “Not just the chicken run for the candidate Scouts.”

  The light from the screen had been a view of the mining site on the mainland. Now it was Linda Weyland standing fourteen meters tall, holding four meters of baby Cadzie under one arm. Jessica couldn’t hear her or Derik.

  Aaron Tragon waded out of the water carrying a sand-colored writhing shape. The thing wrestled with him, but he had it by the blades. He dropped it onto the grill and went for a towel.

  The crab struggled as it cooked. It was a Camelot sea crab. They’d found more than twenty variations already, all with a bifurcated shell and four mobile limbs, but—“This one’s new,” Chaka said.

  “Study it quick,” Aaron suggested.

  There would be no rescuing the beast. Chaka knelt above the fire pit, one hand bladed below his eyes to shield them from the heat. He watched the crab move, noting the play of the joints. The crab had two wide fins for swimming, and the shell had expanded into a big aerodynamic plate. The forelimbs were agile little spears now trying to fight the fire. The armored wrist/elbow joints were almost human in their agility.

  “More incoming natives. Those wrists. You can’t help wondering if something’s waking them all up at once,” Chaka said. “I want the shells.”

  Another skeeter touched down neatly next to Justin’s, and Stu Ellington hopped out. Six more came over the mountains in tight formation. Two carried firewood. One brought food from the main encampment. The others brought passengers, and the party grew until it seemed that the beach would sink under their weight.

  Aaron Tragon strode among them, and slipped one brawny arm around Jessica’s waist. “Well, now,” he said merrily, “I think we can call that a major victory.”

  “Let’s take a look at Dad’s plans first,” Jessica said. “And then we can decide how much victory we’ve got.” She was about to pull free, reflexively. Justin saw her decide: she leaned back against him. They had been casual lovers for nearly a year now. Casual: Justin had never seen Jessica change a plan to be with Aaron. Or any other man. Sometimes he wondered—

  Justin felt someone kneading his shoulders. He looked around just enough to catch a glimpse of dark hair. Long. Wavy. A face not pretty, but made beautiful by devastating eyes. Eyes to drown in, to die for. Katya. He reached back and grabbed her, pulling her close to him, and craned around to gnaw on her neck.

  She was dripping wet and cold as death, and their torsos touched from ankles to eyebrows. A wave of cold washed through him, and he couldn’t seem to control it. It had been a long time, and he was surprised by the strength of his reaction.

  One of the other kids said: “So—who’s going over?”

  Derik turned the volume up and Linda’s voice blasted over the beach. “We are! Joe and Cadzie and me, we’re going in first.”

  Justin, not quite watching Jessica over Katya’s shoulder, saw sudden shock instantly swallowed.

  They’d spoken once, when an older friend was seven months pregnant, and Jessica had remembered this—

  The adults around her were half a dozen fully pregnant women, her mother included. Jessica had been five or six, pretending to play, but listening. And the women must have been locked in a dominance game, detailing their prenatal discomfiture. Little Jessica had listened in awe and horror, stupefied by the realization that she would one day be slow, and fat, and vulnerable just like the big ones, the adults . . .

  Funny she’d remembered at all. Maybe it had happened only in Jessica’s imagination. It was a story she’d told Justin when she was twelve, when an older friend was pregnant. For an instant, now, Justin saw Linda as her sister did. Trapped.

  The baby Cadzie was holding her prisoner. Before his birth she was already imprisoned, heavy and slow. Now she couldn’t even attend a beach party. Now she was burdened by what Cadzie needed: milk, diapers, the cobalt blue blanket, the bassinet, the conversations that wouldn’t happen because everyone wanted to talk about the baby instead: the distractions.

  A cacophony of voices was rising. “I want to go.” “Me too.” “Hey, who’s better at making a camp than me?”

  “Room for a lot of us,” Justin said. “We can take, what, twenty Scouts and fifteen Seconds. And the candidates, but they come back with Linda and Joe. Still, we could really do it up right: set up primary base on the Mesa, and a secondary down at Heorot. Do a little . . . fishing.”

  Jessica got into the spirit of it instantly. “Take two of the skeeters and survey—”

  “Get the initial surveys from orbit. Let Dad spot two or three likely areas—”

  Aaron was into it now. “Listen—we only need three skeeters to move the blimp, but four is safer. We can set up crisscrossing fire zones for the one that touches down.”

&n
bsp; “Touches down?”

  “Plants, soil samples, plant some seismic detectors, hell, we can do some serious work!”

  Aaron swept Jessica up in his arms and smooched. When he set her down she gave him her very smokiest gaze, linked her arms around his neck, and drew him close for some very serious kissing, her hips rolling against him in a clear “all systems go” alert. Justin couldn’t seem to look away. When they broke, she reached out and licked the underside of Aaron’s upper lip. Onlookers might as well have been on Isenstine.

  Aaron turned and leered at the rest of them. “ ’Scuse us,” he said. His great, corded arms lined around her waist. He exhaled and lifted her onto his shoulders so that her belly button was inches from his nose.

  Jessica giggled, “Don’t you dare bite—” and then uttered a shocked and somewhat dreamy, “Oh!!?” as he began walking backward to his hut.

  With a brief and bleary cheer, the rest of them returned to their party.

  There was something in Justin that felt . . . out of place. He walked down to the water’s edge and stood alone to watch the moonglade dancing in the surf. Aaron was brilliant, handsome, athletic. And wrong for Jessica. He was sure of that, utterly certain, but for no reason he knew. It was just wrong—somehow. Justin didn’t much appreciate the thoughts and feelings nipping around the edges of his mind.

  Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. “What’re you thinking?”

  North of them, two days across a warm gray sea, was the continent. He hoped it was far enough away. He wanted to be with Jessica, but if she and Aaron were going to be together . . . maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea for him to be there.

  He could hardly tell Katya—

  “What if,” she said, her sharp little teeth gnawing at his ear, “I took you back to my hut, and made violent love to you?”

  “I’d consider that a right friendly thing to do,” he said. A file flashed through his mind, all of Katya’s preferences and pungencies, all of the ways she moved and whispered, her small guidances and encouragements and the many happy little bits of erotic filigree she superimposed upon a very basic act.

  He hadn’t really made up his mind, but she’d gone a good distance toward making it up for him. She took his hand and led it along a row of wooden huts built back from the waterline. They were lashed together with rope and stilted against the seasonal rising of the tides.

  The wood was a bamboo-like shoot transplanted from south of Isenstine a decade before. The south had less direct access to water—and therefore grendels hadn’t razed it so thoroughly. The bamboo-like shoots were delicious for their first two years, and then hardened into something light and strong, almost ideal for building of houses or boats. The second-to-last house in the row was Katya’s. She held the door open and beckoned him in.

  Social interactions were an ongoing experiment on Avalon. Pregnancy was no issue: all children were welcome. Those who chose not to become pregnant could do so with near hundred-percent certainty, and if they missed, the fetuses could be removed to an artificial womb more safely and painlessly than any therapeutic abortion in the twentieth century. So Cassandra had told them; but it had never been tested. The social pressure to have children was high, and so far every girl who became pregnant had become a mother.

  There was no venereal disease. Those life-forms had been left behind on Earth. The threats that had shaped human sexual mores for much longer than human history were missing on Avalon. In a very real sense, all Avalon was one family.

  There in the shadowed confines of Katya’s shack, she stripped off her clothes and stood, naked, challenging Justin with the cant of her hips. Her black hair fell softly to the tips of her shoulders. Her body was full, and ripe, and lovely.

  Moonlight slanted in through the blinds, throwing bars across her as she walked to him. With many little kisses and whispered endearments, she began the process of seduction.

  Jessica . . .

  The thought flitted across his mind, then was gone. A sudden fierceness took him. He gathered her up in one arm and flung her back upon her bed, a pile of undulating artificial fur that purred as their weight sank upon it.

  Distantly came the roar of the surf. Wave crests scattered the light of a single full moon, and bathed their bodies in pale light as they made love . . . or something like love . . . on that bed.

  And as he threw his head back, panting as Katya’s fingers kneaded his flesh, he stared mindlessly at the window. The moon was adrift. That was Nimue, the smaller, closer moon. You could tell time by Merlin; it crossed the sky every six days. Nimue moved too fast for telling time.

  The moon looked back at him and it wasn’t quite round. It wasn’t the moon that Justin’s distant ancestors bayed at, beating drums and singing songs, holding their newborn infants high to bathe in its light, for a thousand generations before the birth of civilization. Although it was the only sky he had ever seen . . .

  It was alien to him.

  There is a rhythm between human beings, as well. As steady and strong as a heartbeat is the rhythm that men and women find with one another.

  And in a social service so willingly and pleasurably provided, in this brief mingling of flesh and fluids, this joining of warm moist membranes in the service of health and convenience . . .

  There is a moment, near the peak of it all, when logic falls away, and breath grows sharp, when the eyes meet, and you can see through each other, through all the little social barriers . . .

  Down, down to the place where a bit of hindbrain still thinks that this is about something.

  Isn’t this about making babies, it whispers.

  Isn’t this the continuation of life? And aren’t children vulnerable things, helpless before the cold and the predators? And isn’t this act really about the rest of your life? And your children’s lives? And your children’s children’s . . . ?

  Isn’t there a part, a place, a tiny, lone voice somewhere deep inside that asks if this couldn’t, shouldn’t, can’t mean something more? That looks into the eyes of each and every partner, and asks, in its own way . . .

  Are you the one?

  “Carolyn was taking care of me, not Mom. Mom wouldn’t let anyone touch her. I saw her stop crying, and then she toppled out of the chair. A bunch of the grown-ups picked her up and ran her into the hospital, and I don’t know what happened after that.” Katya stirred in his arms. “I wasn’t alone after that. They moved me right into Dad’s place.”

  “I spent a lot of time there too.”

  “I remember.”

  “You were hell’s wrath with a grendel gun.” She’d beaten him in the exercises, Justin remembered. “Did Carlos start you early?”

  She laughed. “Yeah.”

  “That outhouse we all built when we were, what, twelve?”

  “About then. Geometry lessons,” Katya said.

  “Don’t remember what we had in school that year, but that’s how I learned carpentry. Katya, I must be slow of thought. Why did anyone want a classic outhouse?”

  “Hendrick took a skeeter and lofted it to a peak in the mountains. Coffee pickers use it. There’s not another outhouse in the universe with a view like that.”

  “What did it feel like? I grew up with two mothers—”

  “I had a great many,” Katya murmured. “Not just Dad’s guests. Mary Ann and Sylvia, Carolyn, Rachael Moskowitz. Dad would skeeter off to find special rock, wood, crystals, bones; or he didn’t want me underneath when he was welding. It must have been like that for the Bottle Babies, don’t you think?”

  “You’re not like them.”

  “No.” Katya shuddered. Why did she do that? But her drowsy voice trailed off.

  He turned onto his side. She snuggled up behind him, his buttocks tucked against the furred thatch of her groin, her hand reaching around to cup the recent instrument of her pleasure.

  They had never spoken of a future together.

  The moon was looking Justin in the face. Not Man�
�s moon. He listened to the surf. His surf, but not his ancestors’. Shorter, quicker waves striking with more force in the stronger gravity . . .

  But moon and surf belonged to his children, and his children’s children, for generations to come.

  The act of love so recently performed there, in that bed, carried its own rhythm, born in the eternal search for the Now. The search to end the lonely “I.” The endless search, conducted eternally, by every human being, throughout each isolated lifetime.

  That rhythm was perhaps the only thing born of earth remaining to them. And when those rhythms changed to match the moons and tides of Avalon . . .

  As perhaps they had already begun to do . . .

  What then would remain of them?

  Jessica . . . he thought one last time. Before his thoughts devolved to mist, and sleep claimed him.

  When Justin woke, Katya was gone. He could hear sounds of construction on the beach. He showered in cold water, pulled his pants on, and wandered out.

  The vast Chinese-dragon shape of Robor was undergoing a full diagnostic over the Surf’s Up beach. The hundreds of separate, flame- and heatproof hydrogen pods providing him lift were individually listed for leaks, and superstructure was inspected . . .

  Robor was as large as a football field and as tall as a twelve-story building, the largest vehicle on Avalon. He could lift forty tons of cargo. The Minerva shuttles could land anywhere near a water source (although the discovery of grendels had made that a nervous proposition), and also travel to orbit. The skeeters had more versatility and speed and maneuverability, but minuscule range. Only Robor could travel to the mainland and bring back the booty.

  Robor was constructed mostly of molded plastics. The satellites that originally surveyed Avalon had revealed oil in large quantities. When Geographic took its hundred-year jaunt across the sky at one-tenth light speed, she brought with her three prefabricated factories to manufacture the kind of high-tensile plastics that only zero-gee processing made possible.