Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  Toshiro wasn’t the laughing funster now. Not the talented guitarist, nor the avid surfer, or careful lover. When he donned that white uniform, something else came out. Maybe he was channeling a sixteenth-century samurai. Or Thomas DeTorquemada. One of those fun guys.

  No mirth shone in Toshiro’s eyes, but finally he acknowledged Edgar’s suffering. Toshiro softened his voice momentarily. “Do you feel the similarity between this and the yoga Tree Pose?”

  Edgar’s whole body trembled. Why was this so damned hard? Bruce Lee made it look easy. He was drowning in a sea of lactic acid. “I, uh . . . I have to stand on one leg?”

  “That’s the obvious answer. Look deeper.”

  The room was spinning. This asshole wasn’t going to let him put his foot down until he answered! He was going to fall, crack his head, and his brains would run out on the mat. Maybe then the Shogun of Suffering would be satisfied. Edgar almost smiled to himself, appreciating the alliteration.

  Wait. Suddenly, he had the answer. “Balance,” he gasped. “I have to concentrate on the same place in my body, you know, at my navel.”

  “Just below your navel, and three inches in. The center of mass. In Japanese, hara. In Sanscrit, Manipura. All right, bring your foot down slowly.”

  Edgar nearly collapsed, almost didn’t hear the polite applause from the side of the gym. He turned and saw Trish. She was dressed in a tan leotard that revealed the curves and angles of that magnificent body more than simply nudity ever could. What was she doing here? Was she here to watch him make a fool of himself? This was only his tenth lesson. It wasn’t fair!

  Toshiro seemed to read Edgar’s mind. “Trish asked if she could join us today. It’s her fourth lesson. She’s having some trouble with her stances.”

  Trouble? Trish? Hard to believe.

  She smiled at him. He wasn’t certain, but it might have been the first time he had ever seen it up close. Even when stern, she was just drop-dead gorgeous. But her smile was sort of sweet and disarmingly girlish. “Do you mind?”

  “Well, ah—”

  “I thought it might be a good idea for her to see a student who is better than she is, but not so much better that it is discouraging,” Toshiro said quietly.

  I’m better than she is? At something physical?

  Suddenly, and quiet dramatically, all of the fatigue flitted away on wings of testosterone. He felt an inch taller, and his muscles—flabby and girded with fat though they were—were suddenly steel bands. Well, rubber bands. But bands nonetheless.

  She stood by his side. Taller than he by an inch, and devastatingly feminine for all of the muscle now clearly revealed to view.

  “Today you learn to teach what you know,” Toshiro said. “Let her take her stance, and you make the corrections.”

  “Would you?” she asked. There was no mockery in her voice, but some part of him still just couldn’t believe it.

  “Zenkutsu-dachi!” Toshiro barked. Trish bent her front knee, and leaned forward, straightening her rear leg. She wobbled badly.

  “Oh,” Edgar said, and just like that his mind slipped into analytic mode. “I see the problem. Your knee is leaning past your toes. And your hips are twisted wrong, see . . . ?

  Toshiro nodded approval.

  The shower beat down on Edgar’s back like a rain of needles, sluicing the sweat and dust from his body. It felt terrific. It just might have been the first time he had ever actually felt good after a workout. Before this, karate sessions functioned mainly to assuage guilt.

  With the second half of the day’s lesson devoted to teaching Trish, her wide, liquid-brown, humbly grateful eyes following his every move, he had actually gotten out of his head and done well! Maybe his punches and kicks weren’t like Toshiro’s—blur-fast and savagely precise—but at least they were correct. And Trish liked what she saw. He could tell. A karate man knows these things.

  “Toshiro?” he said dreamily, working the soap into his pudgy sides.

  Toshiro was rinsing. He was smooth-muscled, his body like a swimmer’s. Hard, flat plates rounded by a thin fat padding. For a startling moment Edgar realized that he could have a body like that.

  Wow.

  “Yes, Edgar?”

  “I really did all right today, didn’t I?”

  “You did fine.” Toshiro grinned at him. “I think that Trish would agree with that. Don’t you?”

  Edgar’s face felt hotter than the water beating against it. He thought about Trish again, and realized that he’d better change the subject before his body reacted too obviously.

  “You figured out the karate stuff from the tapes, right?”

  “Your dad was a help—he’d studied a long time ago. But mostly from the pictures.” Toshiro’s face was a little dreamy and distant. “Some of it was difficult, but I had balance from surfing. The stances you just do until your legs get so tired that the only way to keep erect is to do them correctly. Then you experiment. I mean, they had thermographs and electromyographs of these old karate masters going through their moves, so you can make pretty good guesses about what was going on under their uniforms, but finally you just have to make guesses.”

  “I think you did pretty well.”

  “I wish they had recorded the Grandmaster, Mas Oyama, in his prime. He could kill bulls with his bare hands.”

  “No.” His mind swam. Edgar Sikes, bull-killer. Master of Men.

  Toshiro turned off his shower and toweled vigorously.

  Edgar followed him. “You know, you’re really smart.”

  Toshiro shrugged. “You’re the computer whiz.”

  “But I never realized all the intelligence that goes into learning to use your body. I mean the yoga, and the surfing, and the karate . . . it’s physical smarts, but it’s intelligence. You must be as smart as Aaron is. Like Trish is as strong as he is.”

  Toshiro looked at him, a touch of reserve leashing the energy in the black eyes. “So?”

  “So why do you both follow him? He calls the shots, doesn’t he?”

  Toshiro paused, and Edgar thought that he saw the muscles along his jaw bunching tightly. Then his friend and teacher relaxed. “I guess I’m a little like Justin,” he said. “Neither of us wants to be a leader. Justin doesn’t think anybody has to be leader. I’m realistic, but it won’t be me. Give me the sand, and the sun. And time to work on the old Samurai stuff. Hai!”

  Toshiro’s left foot whipped up and at Edgar’s jaw. That wasn’t full speed . . . Edgar was thinking and then realized that he had blocked it, automatically, with his right hand.

  Toshiro smiled. “Some must be students. Otherwise there could be no teachers. Who wants to live in such a world?”

  ♦ ChaptEr 16 ♦

  three seductions

  The surest way to prevent seditions

  (if the times do bear it) is to take away the matter of them.

  —Francis Bacon, Essays

  Weeks passed, and a semblance of normality returned to the colony. The Star Born mostly brooded at Surf’s Up and avoided interacting with the Earth Born. Justin stayed at the Bluff. When Jessica came home from Surf’s Up, she rarely spoke to her parents, although Cadmann tried to reach out to her.

  Then, on a day when Geographic’s satellites warned that storm clouds were sweeping in from the mainland, Jessica called her father to ask if she could come for dinner.

  There was no mention of any of the unpleasantness during the call. In fact, there had been little public protest of Zack’s proclamation. And that, in itself, should have warned them.

  Ruth Moskowitz adjusted her chamel’s harness for a little more give around the shoulders. The beast’s name was Tarzan. All six of the tamed chamels were males. The females were too large and irritable to domesticate, and they’d only captured one before the expeditions into the forests northeast of Deadwood Pass had ceased.

  Male chamels were horse-size and had the exaggerated grace of a praying mantis. They were intelligent and fast, with excellent pack instincts. Only
three of them were really tamed, but there was every evidence that Tarzan and the other two might be just the first of thousands. There were some very special reasons why tamed chamels might be ideal hunting mounts.

  Ruth had never seen a kangaroo, although the Chakas were thinking of developing one from the fertilized ova banks, but Tarzan reminded her of those in Cassandra’s pictures. Tarzan looked like a kangaroo with feathery antennae and stronger forelegs. He was tan with a greenish tinge, but his back was changing color even now to match Ruth’s blue denim outfit.

  Tarzan balanced himself on his strong hind legs and reached around to snap at her irritably. She tugged her reins expertly, and spurred him with heels to the ribs. He whistled in exasperation and galloped around the corral for the fiftieth time that day.

  She wove him in between carefully spaced stakes, wheeled him, jumped him first over a low gate and then over one three feet in height. They were into high golden grass now, and Tarzan’s coat was turning to gold.

  Chamels jumped oddly. They would hit the ground, sink, seem to pause for an instant, and then unwind from that deep crouch and spring into the air as if from a standing position. Their hind legs were so powerful that they landed with no shock at all. She loved Tarzan, and everything about training him.

  She and Tarzan were getting into a rhythm now, speeding around the quarter-mile perimeter exhilaratingly fast, occasionally dipping into the center of the pen to try weaving and jumping maneuvers.

  She was so caught up in her work that at first she did not notice a flat, regular clapping sound. Flushed and sweating, she turned in the saddle to see Aaron Tragon, mounted on a gray horse, just the other side of the gate. “Bravo,” he said, striking his palms together.

  She smiled shyly and trotted Tarzan over to him. Aaron’s horse was a mare, a quarter horse named Zodiac with a raucous disposition. The mare tossed her mottled head and eyed Tarzan suspiciously. Horses and chamels existed in an uneasy truce at best.

  “You’re really bringing him along,” Aaron said. His golden hair was tied back in a ponytail, and he wore a loose buccaneer-style shirt cut almost to the navel, crisscrossed with leather thongs. His lips were half-opened in a lazy smile.

  “What brings you out this way?” Ruth asked. “I thought you were out at Surf’s Up.”

  “Man does not live by wave alone,” he laughed.

  “So what brings you here?”

  He looked at her for about thirty seconds without speaking, and Ruth felt her cheeks start to burn. She had to look away.

  “To tell you the truth, I just wanted to ask you on a picnic.”

  She snapped her head up. Her throat felt constricted. “Me?”

  “Sure. We had a great catch last week, and we’ve smoked it. I made fresh bread last night, and I have enough sandwiches for a small army. You look hungry enough for a division.”

  She felt her heart speed up; had the terrible, crazy thought that she must be dreaming. She felt as if she were falling down a deep well, and made a powerful effort of will to bring herself up sharp.

  “Well?” he asked. There was a world of insinuation in his question. His eyes twinkled. “I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll race you to the grove.”

  “Winner?” she asked.

  “Takes all,” he answered, and her cheeks burned again.

  Edgar Sikes slept alone in his room off the main communications center. He had another domicile, out at Surf’s Up, but spent little time there. Most of his personal possessions—such as they were—were here in his little cubbyhole. It was cluttered and overstuffed. He rarely had visitors. Most of the time he was in the computer center, or in his room reading. He’d been reading a James Bond metabook when he went to sleep.

  Something hit his door three times, hard enough to rattle it. He sat up with visions of SMERSH assassins dancing through his head.

  Trish Chance was an impressive sight. Five foot ten of brown-skinned feminine muscle, her body was almost—but not quite—a parody of the female form. When he opened the door she brushed past him, buttocks sliding pleasantly past his, as if she were dancing with an inexpert partner. She turned as if posing. The muscles in her arms and shoulders shifted and separated like the coils of a spring.

  In the crowded environs of this room, she was damned near overpowering. The only girl who had shared a bed with Edgar Sikes, once and nevermore. She smiled at him, and closed the door behind her.

  She wore a formfitting pair of black denims, and a white ruffled shirt so tight across the chest that her breasts threatened to explode through the cloth. She smiled at him, lips curling up at the corners like those of a jungle cat who has spotted something extremely edible.

  Edgar’s throat tightened until he could barely swallow. “Ah—hi Trish,” he said, startled by his own daring. Why was she looking at him like that?

  She crossed the room to sit beside him on his narrow cot. It creaked at their combined weight. He sat too, and her thigh was only an inch from his. She wore some kind of sweet, musky oiled essence. Her skin had a soft, almost golden sheen in the dim light.

  Trish was part of Aaron’s inner circle. What was she doing here? “Is there something I can . . . do for you?”

  In answer, she leaned forward. What happened next was so shocking, and so powerful, that when she finally pulled back it took almost a full minute for his brain to get back into gear. He had never been kissed like that. His experience with kissing—or anything else to do with women—was scant. Yet and still he would have wagered either kidney that no more thorough a kiss had ever been given—or gratefully received—in the history of the universe.

  He leaned forward urgently, hands questing for something to hold on to—preferably Trish’s extraordinary breasts. She held him away gently but firmly. In that instant, he verified what he had always suspected—that Trish was much stronger than he. Why didn’t that make him less a man?

  Because his masculinity was so painfully self-evident that it could have withstood anything short of a hurricane without withering noticeably; and because Trish was saying, “You’re going to get everything that you want—and more.” Her hand slid between his legs. She started a silky stroking movement.

  He whined. He hated to hear the sound of it coming from his own throat, but undeniably, there it was. Oh, God—he hoped he didn’t start to whimper and beg.

  “Please . . .” he whimpered. Maybe strong women liked whimpering. He was in a state to try anything. Dammit, she wouldn’t let him any closer. If she kept stroking like that, in another moment it wasn’t going to make any differ—

  She stopped, fingertips still touching. He felt like a violin string in the last moments of a Vivaldi concerto. A weird notion danced through his head: that Trish in his room was some last legacy from what he could not cease to remember as a neat array of clean bones . . . from the woman who would have been his father’s wife. For just this once, for Linda, he would believe in life after death.

  “First,” she said softly. “First I need to know what kind of man you are.”

  “Whatever kind you want,” he said, and believed he meant it.

  “I want to know,” she said, and her eyes bored into him. “I want to know if you’re the kind who believes in revenge.”

  He withered. She couldn’t know why; and he was thinking again. Not Linda. Aaron must have sent her; nothing else could have. And Edgar Sikes did believe in revenge.

  Oh God. Her hand felt so good. She smelled so good. It had been so long. He pulled back a little to see her face.

  “Yes,” he said. On Aaron Tragon!

  “Good,” she said, and began to unbutton her blouse. “There’s something that Aaron wants you to do.”

  “Aaron . . . ?” he asked inanely. But then she had bent him back flat on the bed, and her hands were unbuckling his belt with practiced precision, and her left nipple was in his mouth. And all he could think of was: I’ll believe in the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny, or Dianetics . . . but not in Aaron Tragon. But Trish, T
rish, you don’t have to know that! Not ever.

  She knew it. Ruth could see that Aaron was reigning Zodiac back, letting her win. Chamels weren’t quite as fast as horses, and Aaron was a fine horseman, but by the time they were halfway across the plowed field, she knew that she was going to win.

  She knew it. Knew it! Well, whatever his little joke was, she was going to get full measure of satisfaction from her victory. She’d make him take her to one of the notorious Surf’s Up bashes, that’s what she’d do. She would arrive with him, on his arm—

  “Hiyahhh!” She looked around, and saw that Aaron had suddenly stopped playing, he was letting Zodiac have her way, and the mare was charging powerfully, head down, feet digging into the soil and ripping up great clots of earth, Aaron bent into the saddle, urging the quarter horse on and on.

  Ruth heard a little yip of fright escape her throat. For a time, Tarzan kept his lead, and then Aaron slipped past her just as they entered the shadow of the grove, and she had lost.

  She reared Tarzan around, and brought him to a halt. One thing at least—chamels could change direction or stop faster than horses. She slipped down his back and patted his muzzle, calming him, stroked the great, trembling hind legs. Tarzan stretched and folded down into a sitting position. Where shadows dappled his back, his color had begun to change.

  Aaron returned on foot, leading Zodiac by the reins.

  “You know,” he said, “I think that chamels will actually be better for hunting than horses. They’re more flexible in the brush.”

  “And almost as fast on the straight,” she said.

  He was very close to her. God, her whole body was shaking. She wasn’t certain that they had ever been this close together. Not alone, anyway. He was breathing very hard, and sweating. His sweat smelled very . . . male.

  “So,” she said, a little frightened by her own daring. “Exactly what reward do you claim?”

  He leaned nearer until she thought that he was going to kiss her. She moistened her lips, and tilted her face up, and when his face was only an inch away, he said: “I want you to serve the food.”