Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “What do you think?” he asked into his mike.

  Jessica answered from her vantage point in the skeeter above. “I think that the grendel who owns the water hole got into a fight for supremacy. It must have been something to see.”

  “All right. Hit it.”

  She brought the skeeter in to five meters above the water and dropped a wad of cotton scented with speed. Alien speed, guaranteed to make a grendel crazy.

  Justin watched. The skeeter throbbed. The water lapped at the edge of the pool.

  And nothing else.

  “Try it again,” he whispered, and she did. Splash. And then nothing.

  The sound of his own breathing grew almost unendurably loud. There was something wrong here.

  He stood. Justin tucked his war specs away, and approached cautiously. “Keep scanning for infrared. No grendel sign?”

  “None,” she said. “We’ve scanned that water hole. There are samlon there, but no adult.”

  “Then the old adult was killed. How long ago?” He examined the corpse. It was torn and flattened, but he noted some fluttery motion around the edges. He backed up, then tore a branch from a nearby tree to use as a lever. He lifted the grendel’s jaw. “Scavengers,” he said. “Like the one I saw earlier. Bugs.”

  “They’re not bugs,” Jessica said.

  “I know, they’re obviously related to crabs like half the life on this planet.” One of the scavengers flew up as he exposed it. The motor wings buzzed violently. It circled his head, then settled again. “Jessica, this carcass is just seething with these things. Cassandra, are you recording?”

  “Affirmative. This is a new life-form.”

  “I’ll get a sample.” Justin lowered the grendel to the ground and took out a collection box. The grendel’s hollow eye sockets stared at him. A beetle emerged from the left socket and flew away to the south with a harsh burring sound.

  The chamels had been watered and grazed, and were settled down for the night. Tents had blossomed around the water hole, and a defensive perimeter was established.

  Aaron was off at the other fire with some of the kaffeeklatsch, and Jessica felt glad of it. Her reconnection with Justin was still fragile, still needed time to cement—but there might not be time after all. Katya snuggled up to him. Jessica tried not to feel anything, but she couldn’t help watching. The two seemed to have settled into a rhythm. There were subtle turnings when either of them moved, subtle responses of body language when either spoke. They were more than lovers. Quietly and without fanfare, Justin and Katya had become a couple.

  The firelight danced across them, as Jessica sipped her hot cocoa. At the second fire, there was singing, and Aaron’s strong voice rose above the sound of the guitar.

  Justin looked up at Jessica as she left the fireside, and smiled. He was happy. They were brother and sister again. There was no reason for the odd sadness that she felt. Perhaps it was the loss of Stu. That had to be it.

  “I’m going over to the singing,” she said. “I don’t think that I’ll be missed too much.”

  Katya’s head was against Justin, and she grinned up. “You and Aaron have a good evening, you hear?”

  Jessica nodded.

  Only thirty feet of space separated the two fires, and in crossing she passed the chamel pen. One of them nuzzled up against the wire that confined them. The wire carried a light charge. If pressure was applied, the charge grew stronger. The fence was portable, and bundled to swing beneath a skeeter.

  The chamel nuzzled at her. She stopped to stroke its long, delicate neck.

  She looked back at her unbrother. Justin and Katya. A good couple. Katya was quieter. She would bond more quickly. The two of them would probably start making fat babies. That would be a good thing. Justin needed to be a parent. He wasn’t like her, not at all.

  She looked over to where Aaron was strumming his guitar, head tilted back in song. He was golden, Apollonian. Her head swam at the thought of him. He was so strong. So perfect. He made her ache. Just listening to his laugh, watching the way his head rolled back when he sang, when he tossed his hair . . . she wanted him inside her, she wanted to feel the enormous power of his body, to feel the fire that drove him igniting her.

  But when she looked at Justin and Katya, she saw a gentle thing, a softness. Not at all like the driving hunger that she felt from Aaron. Jessica went and sat next to Aaron. After a while, she laughed, and sang along.

  They made love, and as usual, it was perfect. Perfect. Her body had exploded more times than she could count. As usual. The perfection of their union was . . . almost predictable. As if he had direct access to her nervous system.

  If anything was missing, it was the experience of exploration. With Toshiro there had been a constant unfolding that was lacking with Aaron.

  “What are you thinking?” Aaron whispered.

  Jessica felt the hard flat plates of his stomach muscles against her back. His left arm circled her waist. His right thumb made slow lazy circles around her right nipple. Waves of pleasure washed through her. “Don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t . . . that.”

  The pressure stopped. “Okay.” He paused. She felt his heart beat against her back, strong and slow. “What are you thinking?”

  “That I feel more connected to the dream than I do to you, Aaron.”

  “Is that so bad? I read somewhere that love isn’t two people looking at each other. It’s two people looking in the same direction.”

  She had to smile. “I read that, too. But sometimes, sometimes we have to look at each other, too.”

  He rolled her over, and gazed directly into her eyes. “You don’t think that I look at you?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I’ve gone along with everything that you wanted. And I’ve given you everything that I have to give. I betrayed my father for you.” Oh, God, it was true. It wasn’t true until she said it. “I need to know how you feel. About us.”

  He took her hand, and placed it between his legs. Immediately, he began to stiffen.

  She gave him a light squeeze. “Not that. Not . . . just that. I know we turn each other on. That’s easy for us.”

  “Love, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She snuggled her head into the crook of his shoulder, saying to herself, as loudly as she dared, Yes, love. Call it love. Please, call it love.

  He pulled up the blanket, tucking it under her chin, and sat up effortlessly. She could almost hear the gears grinding within his mind. His eyes stared out at the mountains on the horizon, and the stars above them, and she imagined that he could count them all.

  “I’ve given you more than I’ve given anyone, Jessica.”

  “I know,” she said. “Am I asking for too much?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “But you might be asking the wrong person.” There was something that she had never heard in his voice before. A moment of self-doubt?

  “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask,” she said. “Was it hard for you? As a child. Not having any one family?”

  Suddenly, his lips curled in a merry smile, and she knew, knew, that his next response would be prefabricated, that the moment of truth had evaporated. “It was rough sometimes, but the roughest part was not knowing which family to stay with on a particular night. Every door was open,” he said, and laughed. “They were all my family.” And he laughed again.

  The doors were open, to come in or to go out. But anyplace you can walk away from isn’t home. You didn’t have a home. Flit from one family to another, never deal with anything you didn’t want to deal with. “Weren’t you afraid that someday there wouldn’t be a door open?”

  “No. Why? I didn’t do anything wrong, I was always who they wanted me to be.” He turned and kissed her, more softly than she could ever remember. His perfect hair glowed in the moonlight, his mouth gentle upon hers. “This is our land, Jessica,” he said. “We fought for it, and we are the ones to tame it.�
��

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “Our children will own this land.”

  His hands were soft on her arms, but she didn’t try to squirm away from him. Somehow, she knew that it would be useless. His eyes trapped hers, and something within them terrified her.

  “Our children. Yours and mine.”

  He’d said it. Suddenly, thoughts, feelings, sensations that she had never allowed herself to feel began to blossom within her, and she could feel it, feel where a child of Aaron’s might grow within her, a void that opened like an awakening eye. Yes.

  “Yes,” she said. “I would love to carry your child.”

  “No!” he said fiercely. “You don’t understand. The children of our bodies, yes, but we can have perfect children. Perfect. They can have everything, every advantage. We can control their nutrients, their prenatal education . . . everything.”

  His whisper was harsh, and his hands grew stronger upon her arms. “We can have a dozen, a hundred children at a time, and seed this entire continent with them.”

  Her hand stroked his cheek. From the dark of her hindbrain she felt the hope rising. “But we don’t have to do that. I’d be happy—”

  “No!” And her hand froze where it was. “My children will be perfect.” He blinked, and then smiled, almost shyly. “At least, as perfect as we can make them.”

  Permission. She didn’t have to be pregnant. Swollen, clumsy, imprisoned . . . But a tiny part of her had awakened, and was watching him, sensing something wrong.

  He babbled on. “They will be our children. And they will own this land. You ask me if I love you. Can I come any closer than that? Do those words mean anything to you? Anything at all?” His weight was on her, and Jessica tried to fight. No. She wasn’t ready emotionally. There was too much . . .

  Truth?

  In the air between them. She needed a moment to prepare herself, to slip back into the comfortable shell of sensuality she understood so well, nurtured by Sir John Woodruff and the Perfumed Garden, and the Quodoshka and the manuals of Taoist sexuality, and the erotic works of a world left far behind. But this moment wasn’t one of the complex, artistically perfect couplings she had known with Aaron Tragon. This was something too damned similar to rape. She could call out, and it would stop—but so would any link between them. His was a need so deep that it burned. The hands on her, the mouth upon her, the thighs, hot and hard, that forced her legs open were somehow vulnerably, endearingly clumsy.

  This wasn’t the man she knew and loved. This was almost a boy, a boy who needed something that she couldn’t quite bring herself to give.

  And so he took it.

  And took it.

  And she pushed at him, and tore at him, and came to the edge, but didn’t quite call out for help. And Aaron held her more tightly than he ever had, more insistently, his body one driving urgency.

  He arched, and flushed, his face suffused with a kind of ecstatic, incandescent madness, his eyes, looking off to the horizon as he spasmed, seeing . . . what? What world of spires and mazes? What cities and glorious constructions of the far future? What world-girdling belt of roads and skyways that he might never live to see, but which children unborn might inherit?

  Or did he see something else? His god, the grendel, perched upon a kill, perhaps his own torn corpse? And was this moment, and all of the other moments that they had had together, nothing but a means of staving that moment off, of giving it some kind of meaning?

  Did Aaron and her father share the same nightmare?

  And was that why she loved them both?

  Aaron collapsed atop her. His breath was hot and sweet, his hands curled up around her shoulders, his face tucked into her breast, his breath hot against her. She stroked his head and whispered to him, and knew that something had changed between them. She wasn’t certain what, or what it would cost them. She knew only that there would be a cost, as certainly as Tau Ceti rose and set upon both Man and Grendel.

  ♦ ChaptEr 25 ♦

  asia minor

  O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O, stay and hear, your true love’s coming,

  That can sing both high and low.

  Trip no further pretty sweeting,

  Journeys end in lovers meeting,

  Every wise man’s son doth know.

  What is love? ’tis not hereafter;

  Present mirth hath present laughter.

  What’s to come is still unsure:

  In delay there lies no plenty;

  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  —William Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night

  They were calling the Scribebeast “Asia.”

  “It’s not that big,” Jessica giggled, but Ruth’s name stuck anyway.

  Aaron had made time and commandeered the NickNack, and all to come see Asia. He’d brought Ruth Moskowitz and both of their chamels. Justin wondered what Jessica thought of that. He hadn’t seen her in two days.

  Ruth and Aaron rode Zwieback and Silver along the Scribe’s long blue lip. One great eye was tracking them.

  “Not there,” Justin said into the comm-card. “Aaron, see me? I’m on the rise east of you, with four tall horsemane trees behind me. Asia will go around the trees. You’ll get a great view of the life-forms on her back . . . ”

  Why bother? They were halting now, both chamels, much too close to one of the great eyes. He hadn’t really expected Aaron to take suggestions.

  Anyway, were they really in danger? Asia flowed like a continent across the savannah. Or like a crippled old woman; you could observe motion. Justin sighed and raised his war specs. He and Ruth would get here eventually. It was nearly lunchtime, and their lunch was on its way, packed in the belly of a skeeter.

  Even the chamels didn’t seem nervous. One great eye gazed upon them, and that would have had Justin twitchy. Ruth gaped in delight and awe.

  That didn’t surprise Justin. But Aaron was doing that too: mouth open, face empty. Had any human being ever seen him like this? He suddenly turned Zwieback and trotted toward the hill. Ruth followed, belatedly.

  Over the next hour most of the survey team gathered on the hill, skeeter, trikes, and all, to watch the passing of Asia.

  The trees were festooned with wet blue blankets.

  The Earth Born insisted that Cadzie-blue blankets must go everywhere humans went on the continent. It was nearly their only demand, and not so onerous as all that; but the blankets didn’t arrive clean. Mothers borrowed them first. Babies lived in them for a few days. The Earth Born never had to wash their baby blankets; they just sent them to the mainland.

  And the survey team had finally had it with the smell. They’d been washing blankets in what had been a grendel lake and was now a samlon reservoir. Clean blankets would dry while Asia passed.

  Pterodons were wheeling above the Scribe; more held station above the watching humans. Ruth presently said, “Justin? The birds?”

  “I pointed them out to Little Chaka. Then I had to listen to him lecture.”

  “They’re eyes for the Scribe!”

  “That’s what Chaka thinks. The Harvester can’t see through grass, but she can look up and see where the pterodons are. Early-warning system. If something came right at an eye she’d see it when it got close . . . what the hell would she do then, dodge? For that matter, what would a Scribe be afraid of?”

  “A cliff?” Ruth glanced sideways at Aaron, but he maintained his silence. “She’d see a cliff before she went over. And the pterodons would show her where water was, wouldn’t they? Where there’s water, there’s carrion. Where there are grendels, they’d fly higher.”

  “I don’t think Asia gives an icy damn about grendels,” Aaron said. “Ruth, a million years from now we still won’t have found a bigger land beast.”

  “Breeding,” Ruth said.

  Justin frowned the question.

  “How do Scribes find each other?”

  “Ma
ybe they’re hermaphrodites.”

  Ruth shook her head. “Maybe, but—”

  “Or maybe baby Scribe beasts are the males,” Aaron said. “That’s how grendels work it.”

  Jessica remembered what it had cost the First to learn that samlon were not only immature grendels, but were all males. They became females when they made the transformation from a fishlike swimmer that lived largely on pond scum to the adult amphibious omnivore.

  “But think, the paths cross,” Ruth said.

  “Or used to cross,” Justin said thoughtfully. “Cassandra, consider the Scribe beasts. Is it likely that the crossing patterns of their paths is random?”

  “There is negligible probability that the crossings were caused by random walks,” Cassandra said. “I record seven cases in which the paths altered to approach each other. This is from records of past decades. At present the probability that the paths will cross is under ten percent.”

  “They’re avoiding each other now?”

  “It would so appear.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Justin said. “First they cross, now they don’t. I betcha Ruth is right: the pterodons guide them, and now they’re steering them away from each other.”

  “Why would that be?” Aaron demanded.

  “Avalon Surprise!” Ruth shouted in glee. “Actually, I think it’s got something to do with Edgar’s variable star. The weather’s changing, and the Scribes—”

  Aaron wasn’t listening. He was staring out at the Scribe beast.

  Justin joined the group who were loading food on the tables. Cold snouter meat, turkey and turkey eggs, vegetables and heads of lettuce from Camelot. The mainland crops weren’t in yet. A glass cauldron of water was beginning to boil. Katya and Little Chaka zipped open a bag that held water and three wriggling samlon, and tilted them into the pot. Chaka chopped rapidly with his wand of a chain saw at a stack of root vegetables, then threw them in in handfuls.

  Aaron said, long and low, “Wow!”