by Larry Niven
“I pulled myself into that mass at the top and something snapped at my eyes, a claw big enough to take my head off. I reared back and half a dozen claws like big scissors were trying to take my face off, and then there wasn’t anything under me. Next thing I knew I was falling. And I remember the look on Aaron’s face as I dropped past him.
“I landed flat on my back. I couldn’t move anything below my arms. It hurt like I was dying. It felt like I was killing myself to fish out my comm-link card. I was sure it would be broken, but it wasn’t—”
“Edgar! Aaron didn’t call?”
“He called. He called after I did. Maybe he would have anyway. Maybe. But he didn’t until I got mine out and called for Dad.”
“Jesus. That’s awful. But you never told anyone.”
Edgar said, “I told Dad. I don’t know if he believed me.”
“I think he did. He doesn’t like Aaron,” Linda said.
“So I spent a couple of years recovering. Missed out on growing up with the rest of you. Damn near missed out on getting into the Grendel Scouts. It was me who nailed down what’s wrong with the Earth Born. And now I can’t get laid.”
“And you blame that on Aaron?”
“Shouldn’t I? Why are you afraid of him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He reminds me of my father, and that ought to be good. I’m not afraid of Dad, but—Edgar, I don’t know. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Sure. And you’re afraid Aaron’s the father,” Edgar said. “So you don’t want to know.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you didn’t say that.”
“Edgar, has Aaron—has he been tracking my computer accesses?”
She was getting to know that grin. Edgar said, “Linda, he’s tried, but he hasn’t been able to because I blocked access to those files, only it doesn’t look like I did it, it looks like it was the colonel.”
“That was a nice thing to do. You say he has tried to—to track my file accesses? And asked you to help?”
Edgar nodded. “I told him I didn’t have time just then. Then he tried on his own, but I’d been there first.”
“Thank you.” She stood. “I think I better go look at Cadzie, and we’ve got to get ready to go to the mines. Let me think about this. Maybe it really is time to find out, whatever the answer is. Thank you.”
His answering smile caught her turning. His proud smile. “Wups. Edgar?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got your attention now? You listen. You think about what I’m saying. You even work out ways to do things for me.”
Edgar grinned. “Yes, Mom.”
“Edgar, I can remember you losing interest in the middle of saying hello! We used to talk about it, the way you’d get bored and walk off in the middle of something. You’d be off into something else with someone else, programming, going back to the stars, what’s with Earth, mainland ecology. Remember that T-shirt?”
Edgar remembered. Linda had cut a scarlet T-shirt to ribbons, so that it fell like lace across her body, dropping to her upper thighs, concealing and revealing.
She was watching him. “Got your attention, did it? I just had to know I could.”
How would Dad answer? Edgar said, “I hope you sent that to Medical when you were through with it. Useful for restarting a stopped heart.”
“Edgar, is there a girl you could do something for? Something nobody else has thought of?”
His face went slack. She remembered that look: Edgar, withdrawing into his own mind. “Maybe . . . I see what you mean, anyway. Linda? Thanks.”
Justin stopped short of Robor’s top foredeck. The whiff of coffee was faint, but it touched his brain from underneath. It came to Justin that Aaron Tragon was ruining the smell of coffee for him.
Before the grendels came, before the First seeded the rivers with trout and catfish, the First had scattered coffee beans over the mountain ridges. Coffee was easy to grow.
It was a bitch to harvest. Coffee kept the First healthy! They had to hike into the mountains with backpacks or do without. They’d come back with as much as they wanted, plus a little more for trading. That was why Carlos always had coffee, because someone always wanted a table or bureau or carved doorway.
Aaron always had coffee because he sent someone to get it. Justin had done that when he was younger. The backpack groups always had fun, but they carried back smoked bear meat once instead of coffee, on Justin’s suggestion. He hadn’t gone again.
There was an inner circle at Surf’s Up: the coffee drinkers. Some were addicted. Trish and Derik and (oddly) Ruth Moskowitz, and maybe even Jessica, didn’t like the taste. They sipped; they made a cup last all night. If you weren’t in you were out.
Justin had dropped out. Others haunted the fringes, trying to find lives, but always ready to display a cup of coffee.
Coffee smelled like dominance games. Justin was beginning to flinch at it.
Aaron squeezed his shoulder and slipped past him, and Justin realized he was blocking a door. He shrugged and followed.
The hum of the skeeters could be felt through the floor of Robor; but even more clearly through the Plexiglas windows at the bow. Jessica stood just behind several of the Scouts. They crowded against the windows, and fought for a place at the front. Palms and faces pressed against the Plexiglas. Morning mist shrouded the sea below them. The loom at the eastern horizon was more blue than the rosy-fingered dawn images of Earth poetry.
They expected landfall about dawn, and the candidate Scouts had been awakened early for their first look—real sight, not virtual—of the mainland they’d heard about all their lives.
She sipped her coffee from a hand-fired cup sculpted with a grendel tail as handle. This wasn’t the instant stuff that her parents had drunk for the first ten years on Avalon. Coffee took some getting used to. The first beans had been harvested and ground, the first cups served, when she was just nine years old. She still remembered Cadmann’s expression as he took the first sip, as if a rare and delicate mystery had suddenly been revealed to him. And her own first bitter sip, which she had spit out into the saucer.
Aaron had persuaded her to try it again, years later.
She felt large, strong hands clasping her shoulders, and shivered a little at the touch. Those hands were so strong and so gentle, when they wanted to be. They were always commanding, but usually gentle as well. She kissed the fingertips, and said, “G’morning, Aaron. Sleep well?”
“Like a baby,” he said. He picked up a broad-based conical cup and sipped as he peered out into the mist. The foredeck, one of the two upper above the cargo hold, was crafted of polished waxwood. This dark, smooth timber was one of the odd strains to be found south of the Isenstine. Carlos considered it a finer grain than teak, and thought that they could get a good trade going with Earth . . . if Earth was still there, he had added soberly.
A gust rolled Robor to port. The guidance computer noticed and the skeeter engines made their correction. The ship righted quickly, but the Grendel Biters ooh’d and ahh’d and pretended to lurch this way and that.
“Look,” Aaron said, squeezing her shoulder. “Sunrise.”
It wasn’t, really. It was a false dawn, the first rosy blush of Tau Ceti along the eastern horizon. The glow would fade, then minutes later grow stronger, leading into the light of day.
Some of the other Second were in the lounge, and the rest of the Grendel Scouts were pouring in. The window was floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, curving slightly outward, made of plastic strong enough to take an elephant’s charge. The kids could lean against it all they wanted.
Jessica undogged a deck chair and moved it closer. “Sit a spell.”
“Sure.” Aaron dogged the chair to the deck. He sprawled out, relaxed.
Jessica watched him lazily. He was so relaxed about everything that he did, and so totally committed at the same time. If he sat, he was . . . just sitting. If he spoke before an audience, he was just speaking. If h
e climbed or surfed, he was just climbing or surfing. And if he was making love, he was doing that and nothing else. It was a relief. Every part of him seemed congruent with the others. Unfragmented. Whole. And when he wanted something? But that kind of ruthlessness was natural to someone so purposeful.
Was she in love with him? She wondered that herself, and hoped that the answer was yes. Her hand stole into his, and he clasped it.
A sliver of Tau Ceti had crept above the horizon now, and the reflected radiance pierced the mainland’s cloud cover. The clouds were blue-black atop and silver beneath. All the passengers were awake now. Nobody wanted to miss the first general outing in over a year, and for most of the Grendel Scouts this was their first trip ever.
Justin brought up a chair and dogged it down. “How many candidates do you think we have?”
“For a chicken run?”
He nodded.
“Six are old enough.”
“Think we can find a grendel for them?”
Nasty chuckle. “Not one for each, but we can sure run a lottery.”
“Extra safety, okay? Lay an extra rifle on,” Aaron said thoughtfully. Jessica examined him. Aaron Tragon was not usually the man who spoke for caution.
“Why?”
“Nothing goes wrong. Not now. We’re about to get everything that we want.” Unspoken: a permanent base on the mainland, manned by the Second. The beginning of a new colony.
Even more unspoken: the real colony. If Aaron had his way, he would lead that colony. He would set the artificial wombs aboard Geographic pumping out a hundred children a month, and found a nation before he died. He would make the original landing little more than a footnote in the history of Avalon.
And why not? They were here to conquer a world.
The clouds were shot through with gold and silver now and the mist was beginning to burn away. On the horizon, perhaps twenty miles distant, was the mainland. The pilots had timed it beautifully. The Scouts began to applaud and hoot and stamp their feet.
The mainland was green and lush. The mist seemed almost to change color there ahead of them, coiling and snaking around the bay that opened before them. They watched the water—dark gray foaming to blue, waves rolling in toward a rocky coastline broken by irregular reefs. The mist was heavy, oily, oozed from the ground like smoke and hovered close to it.
Jessica’s heartbeat sped up, and a light sour sensation of pleasure begin to boil in her stomach. This was only her sixth trip to the mainland.
The observation deck was getting crowded now. Carey Lou had drawn breakfast lots the night before. He served her a tray of scrambled eggs and sliced fruit. Jessica sipped and chewed and sighed, and felt that all was right with the world.
Once of the first things that anyone noticed about the mainland was that it was more lush by far than Camelot Island . . . as if all the grendels had disappeared, but of course they hadn’t. Still, farther north on the vast prairie they called the Scribeveldt, Geographic had seen beasts large enough to give a grendel pause. Geographic’s cameras showed tracks tens of kilometers long, pale lines scrawled across the vast green-brown prairie. They crossed and curved elegantly, as if some entity were trying to write messages for the stars. It was natural to call the entities Scribes, though seen from orbit they were only squarish blobs at the track endpoints, prairie-colored and nearly featureless. Scribes had to be herbivorous; but everything beyond that was speculation.
There was a forest at the edge of the Scribeveldt, and sometimes Cassandra saw, or thought she saw, fairly large animals in herds. No one had ever seen a herd of grendels, and the only thing that ate grendels was other grendels. Robor rose to cross a ridge of splintered rock crested with dense green and green-blue foliage. The ridge looked like the bottom row of a skull’s teeth. Just beyond it the rock dropped away into a dense green carpel of valley. An old river fed by snows on mountains far to the north snaked lazily along the valley floor until it cut through the ridge to the ocean.
“Grendel hunting grounds,” Aaron said. The candidate Scouts stared down at the swamps and forests. “We stay out of there.”
At the side of a pond beneath, a herd of something vaguely resembling a cross between a horse and a pig drank nervously. Robor was only about sixty feet up now, barely ten feet higher than the tree line, so that the Scouts could see more clearly.
With a sudden, violent splash, something exploded from the water, so fast that their eyes could hardly follow what happened next. One of the beasts at the edge of the water was bowled backward, smashed flat by the awesome velocity. Probably dead that instant. The other animals fled in all directions, in a sort of galloping waddle.
But that wasn’t what captured their interest. That wasn’t what caught every eye in the lounge. No one seemed to breathe. Heartbeats may have frozen still.
There, perched above the torn and bloodied body of the pig creature . . .
Was a grendel.
A voice came over the speaker in the lounge. “Grendel kill,” Linda said from the control room. “We have just seen a grendel kill.” The clear curving outer wall clouded, and a video window opened up on its right side. The death scene was replayed for them in slow motion.
The camera brought them in close. The herd of pig-beasts drank slowly and carefully. Three stood guard above the bank while the herd went down to the water, just a few at a time, in a clumsy, laughable waddle. Then, in slow motion now, the pond’s surface bulged, broke, and four meters of black death exploded from the depths.
Jessica whispered, “Oh God,” just as stunned as anyone else in the room. It was impossible not to be impressed by this creature, the most savage predator that mankind had ever faced.
Blunt snout. Crocodile armor. Spiked tail. It emerged at rocket speed, and the pig-thing died snorting water and blood. Its body deformed as the grendel struck it. It tumbled back, plowing up dust and grass. The computer, enhancing some kind of wide-angle holo view, kept right with it. Another, wider-screen angle, still in slow motion, showed that the other animals broke and headed for cover almost instantly, running fast but at normal animal pace. No animals save grendels had ever been observed moving on speed.
Grendel teeth had torn its victim’s belly and rib cage open. Blood spurted, covering the grendel’s snout. It burrowed its teeth into the wound, head deep. It ripped out a mouthful of viscera before looking around, and then up, directly at Robor.
It opened its mouth, and closed it in that disorienting holographic slow motion. Blood and saliva drooled away from the daggerlike teeth, droplets running down as it screamed challenge at them.
Was it the sound of the skeeter engines? Their aerial bulk? The grendel’s eyes locked with them, as if uncertain of Robor’s distance. As if it thought they might challenge it for the meat.
It screamed a scream that they couldn’t hear. Then it turned, and hooked its spiked tail into the carcass. Its tail differed from pictures of the Avalon grendels, with one big, gaudy hook almost underneath, and the shattered scar where a matching hook had been.
The pig’s bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Its feet still trembled a bit. Just a twitch, now. The grendel dragged it back, down into the water.
And the moment after it sank, the recording played again at normal speed. The pig-things approached the shore; one darted in to drink; death smashed into it and tore it apart. Jessica flinched violently.
“Jesus,” Aaron said. “I love those damned things.”
She looked at him, and for a moment, felt something akin to jealousy. Love hadn’t been too strong a word. His eyes burned. The grendels represented something . . . raw power, absolute single-mindedness . . . naked ferocity?
Some quality or gestalt that Aaron Tragon respected.
Admired.
Loved.
She had never been certain that he loved her. But she could never doubt that he loved grendels. Loved hunting and killing them, likely enough. But loved them. More, probably, than he loved anything else in the world.
&n
bsp; How very odd to feel jealous of a monster. But Aaron can’t really love grendels! I couldn’t love a man who—
There was more to see: plains that sloped away from the mountains. Get a kilometer or so from running water and you saw lush vegetation and more animal life. There were creatures that looked reptilian—nothing too large, but several packs of animals that momentarily darkened the plain, then broke and ran at the first touch of Robor’s shadow.
Here, the brush thickened to jungle density. Her heart leapt. There had been virtually no exploration of the mainland forests. Almost no categorization of flora or fauna. Little mapping, save by satellite. Except for territory immediately surrounding the mining concerns, there had been precious little of anything.
And now . . . a lot of that was going to change.
Lunch came and went before they caught sight of their destination. It emerged from a smoky haze, mist so thick it was almost like volcanic ash. The mountain was bare and weathered, curved and hollowed, spotted here and there with patches of green until it resembled a mossy skull.
Pterodons arced gracefully through the heights: a touch of something familiar, thank God.
Jessica’s hands moved by themselves, checking her rucksack, as she gazed out. This land, this whole land, was theirs for the taking . . .
It seemed that Aaron was reading her mind. “They don’t want it,” he said, shaking his head as if in amazement. His strong, sure fingers dug into her shoulders. It hurt, just a little bit.
That was like Aaron. He hurt, a little. It was difficult for him to remember just how strong he was. So strong, so. smart . . . so sure of himself. It was no wonder that she was in love with him. His air of remoteness only increased the temptation, and the value of the prize.
The burr of the skeeter engines grew throaty. The floor vibrated beneath her feet as Robor took an eastern heading, sliding along a table of mountains. It was the warm season, and everything was green and brown and yellow-blue. Later in the year, there would be snow. Farther inland there were higher ranges, but here, barely two hundred miles from the coast, was a rich supply of ore. Robor passed over the first mining camp. Jessica wandered up to the control center, where Linda and Joe were reviewing telemetric reports from the site.