Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “Those are our children. They can take that land. Not us. We deserve to stay here. And they had to show us. They had to force the issue, because God knows that we never would have.”

  She had managed to extract a stick from the blue ball, and it was delicately balanced. So far so good . . .

  “What did you want to talk about, Cadmann?”

  “Aaron.” He spoke the two syllables flatly. “Aaron bothers me.”

  “Aaron,” she said. The blue ball fell and cracked. A chick emerged, grew to adulthood, flew to the floating nest of sticks and laid a blue egg.

  Rachael asked, “Why?”

  “I talked with Justin about that before they left. I’ve talked to everyone that I could, except you. And now I have to do that. Something is wrong. He was the author of a situation.”

  “Yes?”

  “When he took Robor, there was no way for him to lose. I don’t mean lose the dirigible, I mean . . . he thought more deeply into this than any of us did, understood in advance every move that we could make, and probably had a way to counter it. At the end, half of humankind would be on the mainland and all under his command.”

  “And you’re feeling intimidated?”

  Cadmann shook his head. “He wins. But only if he’s ready to sacrifice . . . well, a scapegoat to be named at a later date. I mean, Toshiro was his friend, and his death just played right into the scenario. Anyone could have died in that slot. Not just one, but several.”

  Rachael sat back. The blue ball slipped free of its final constraint, and spun happily in the air before her.

  “Cadmann—what are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying, I’m asking. Is there something wrong with Aaron?”

  “Your wife thinks so.”

  “And Joe and Linda did,” Cadmann said. “Not many more. You don’t, do you?”

  “No.” A long pause. “What is it you suspect?”

  “I keep wondering if there might not be some connection to the artificial wombs. To the way they were raised.”

  “You’re worried about some super-sociopathic patterns?”

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded small, even to him.

  She was studying him, he thought. Afraid of him. “Cadmann—you were in combat. Didn’t you have to face the reality that some of your men would die in a military action?”

  “Of course.”

  “Couldn’t Aaron see it that way?”

  He frowned. “I suppose. You know, I never thought about it that way.”

  “We don’t call you a sociopath just because you’re capable of taking casualties to further a cause.”

  “You don’t now,” Cadmann said. “But I recall when that’s precisely what you called me, and for precisely that reason.”

  “Cadmann—”

  His smile was thin, and he spoke each word slowly and distinctly. “You’ve kept records on every one of us. From the very beginning, on Earth, when we were chosen, to the discovery of hibernation instability, to where everyone thought I murdered Ernst—”

  “Cadmann—”

  He brought his face closer to hers. His expression of cynical amusement hadn’t changed. “And you decided I was crazy. Right there in the clinic, you staked me out for the grendel.”

  “We didn’t know about grendels!”

  “But I did, and I told you.”

  “Cadmann, that was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah. And I can never, will never forget that night.” He straightened and smiled, this time more genuine, but still very distant. “Want to talk about nightmares?” He sat carefully, his eyes never leaving hers. “All right, let’s talk nightmares. I’m the only one on this planet who has ever come face-to-face with one of those things and survived. Close enough to kiss it. Close enough to have all the time I needed to imagine it tearing me apart. I have dreamed of it killing and eating me ten thousand times. Unless I completely overestimate you, you’ve talked to Sylvia and Mary Ann about me, just as I’ve talked to you about Mary Ann. And it’s all gone into Cassandra.”

  Rachael sat pointedly silent.

  “I want the files on Aaron.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Look, we both know he’ll do nearly anything—maybe not nearly—to reach his goals. So I want to know more about what those goals are. What’s he really up to?”

  She shrugged. “You’re the security chief. Tell Cassandra it’s an emergency.”

  “I thought of that,” Cadmann said. “I probably can bully Cassandra into giving me your files. I’d rather do it officially with your cooperation.” His calm slipped a little. “Please. My son and daughter are over there. The children of the women I love most in this world.” He dropped his head. “Mary Ann is just holding on, you know? And she’s shut me out . . . ”

  “Excuse me?”

  Cadmann looked out of the window, across the fields, to the biology building, up to the stone stack of Mucking Great Mountain, where the pterodons wheeled in eternal mist.

  “We haven’t been man and wife since the day Toshiro died. She just pushed me toward Sylvia.”

  He paused, as if waiting for Rachael to say something. The silence stretched almost another minute.

  “I thought once . . . that what I wanted was Sylvia. But not like this. Mary Ann gave her love to me. And now she can’t let me in.” He lowered his voice. “There’s something about her now. Something . . . translucent. It is as if I can see light through her. As if she barely wants to be here anymore. Like she’s not even certain why she is holding on.”

  “And you think you can help her?”

  He nodded.

  “By showing her she was right,” Rachael suggested. “Aaron is a monster, and only she knew.”

  Cadmann looked up. “I hadn’t thought of it in—”

  “Ruth’s pregnant.”

  “You’ve talked to her? Good. I worried about . . . that. How long?”

  “Two months, she thinks. Cadmann, I’m not supposed to ferret out all your secrets. There has to be privacy. I haven’t—Aaron could keep his secrets, but now he’s probed my daughter! I’ll look. Maybe I’ll tell you what I find, and maybe I won’t.”

  Cadmann stood up. “Thank you,” he said, and walked out the door before he could say more.

  Rachael Moskowitz sat behind her desk.

  Her body felt tired, but her mind was very much alive.

  Of all the Earth Born who had been frozen at Hecate Town on the Earth’s Moon, stacked aboard Geographic, thawed and refrozen for tasks aboard Geographic during their trip across ten light-years and two hundred years of time, and finally thawed for the last time on Avalon’s alien soil . . . only Rachael Moskowitz knew herself undamaged. Only Rachael could know that. And that was both a blessing and a curse.

  She wasn’t certain about Cadmann. What he had been through was traumatic, but it was long ago. A man like that ought to have put it out of his life, but he hadn’t. None of them had really been able to put the Grendel Wars behind them.

  “Cassandra,” she said. “Aaron Tragon. Psychological evaluation file.”

  Cadmann took the skeeter up and into Mucking Great Mountain, toward the fortress that, years before, had been Mankind’s only bastion against the grendels.

  Now it was vines and crops, pens for those animals of Earth and Avalon that could exist side by side. The mountain stream brought ice-cold water into their home, and nurtured their fields. Then it joined the Miskatonic, to bring life to the entire valley.

  He spiraled the skeeter down to the landing pad with hardly a bump. Sylvia joined him at the pad, her golden hair flowing behind her. She looked like an angel.

  She kissed him lightly. Before Cadmann could ask the question, Sylvia said, “She’s sleeping.”

  He nodded. He slipped his arm around her waist, and they walked into the house together, through the fragrant living room.

  In the center of the house was the common bathroom, with the big triangular tub and the ste
am-shower.

  Once upon a time he might have had daydreams . . . two women that he loved, both married to him . . . it was easy to let erotic fantasies run wild. But it had never really worked out like that.

  In the second and third year of their three-way relationship, there had been some gentle explorations of the sensual potential. Massaging, and group dancing, and even sleeping three in a bed on cold nights. But it became clear that this was happening out of Mary Ann’s attempt to be what she thought he wanted in a wife, and not from any urge on her part. And so he had called a halt to it.

  There were more occasions, once on Christmas, and once on his fiftieth birthday, when he found himself bedded by both of his beloved. But they were tolerating each other’s presence; there was no genuine joy in the intimacy. And knowing that Mary Ann would do almost anything to keep her man happy, he began to see it as a variety of child abuse.

  The three of them kept separate bedrooms, and there was a gentle ebb and flow of interest between them. He would visit their rooms, or they his, and the spontaneity of it consisted of offerings and acceptance or rejection earlier in the day. That situation had continued for years.

  Within the last four months, Mary Ann had lost all interest in lovemaking.

  Sylvia ran her fingers through Cadmann’s hair, and gazed at a scar just at the hairline, a faded, faint white line just barely visible to her eyes against the fringe of gray and black. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this scar before.”

  She was close to him, the slowly ebbing heat of her still warming him, as it always did. In every way she was a comfort. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “Right here.” She brushed it, and then blew a little warm air along it, ruffling his hair. “I can’t imagine why I never saw it before . . . ”

  “There’s a first time for everything. That one is a memento from Zimbabwe. Shrapnel. My hair hid it. Until recently.”

  She sighed and cuddled closer. “Oh well, the women in my family go for that increasingly high-forehead look.”

  “Hah hah.”

  “No . . . really. You lucked out.”

  They were quiet then again. The twin moons were both high, and their light silvered the bedposts.

  “What did Rachael have to say?”

  “She’ll look.” He traced a line along Sylvia’s neck, and then clasped her shoulder firmly. He kissed it. “I wanted to thank you for how you’ve been with . . . Mary Ann,” he said.

  She pooh-poohed him. “For what? I haven’t done anything.”

  “I know that you look at it that way. That’s one of the reasons that I love you.”

  “Just one of them, though.”

  “Just one.”

  They lay quietly together, and listened to the sound of the Amazon, and the cooing of the Joeys. Clouds drifting in from the east. Later, they would obscure the moon, but not now.

  “Are you thinking about the kids?”

  He nodded his head. “And about myself. About who I was, when I started this trip.”

  “The journey here?” she said, knowing that wasn’t what he meant.

  “No. The whole thing. Is that a sign of getting old?”

  “What?”

  He laughed at himself. “Not asking complete questions. Wishing that there was someone who could read your mind.”

  “No, that’s infantile behavior.” She bit his chest lightly, nibbling with sharp teeth.

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “What I meant was that I think back over my life. Everyone I know is dead, or here on Avalon. Ghosts.”

  “It doesn’t help that they’ve never contacted us,” she said.

  “Never. Not for eighteen years. Christ. What happened back there?”

  “I can feed the files in. Want to see them?”

  “Christ. It’s been so long. Sure. Go ahead.”

  Cadmann sat up. He turned a physical switch that gave the computer access to his private bedroom, and said, “Cassandra.”

  It was said that Cassandra should be allowed to see everything at all times, that her security was absolute. Cadmann had to laugh. There was no electronic security in a world that contained an Edgar Sikes. There were only mechanical barriers.

  “Please play back the most recent communiqué from Earth.”

  “Loading now, Cadmann,” she said.

  The wall in front of them dissolved.

  There was a blast of music, and then a sound of laughter. The words a message from earth floated there in neon, garish red.

  And there followed a kaleidoscope of images:

  Art exhibits in Milan. Starvation in Beirut. The inauguration of the United Nations Presidium. Images of sports. A string of faces, name-dropping at grendel speed. A play with a London background. Some chitchat from the outer-system colonies.

  Each of these could be expanded upon and investigated, and they had been, endlessly. The play was detective fiction with missing clues. The inauguration might be fiction too, given that the Secretary-General was a dead ringer for the sixties’ Richard Nixon. Ballet in lunar gravity had become a strange new sport. Even the familiar sports events followed complex new rules, never described. The sound bites were no more interesting than the photo opportunities.

  Ultimately, there was just nothing there.

  It was like the Encyclopedia Britannica as designed by social scientists. There was emotion, but no real information. And the emotional inference was a culture so fatuously delighted with itself that it was blind to the efforts of unspeakably vast and numerous generations of men to get them there.

  Sylvia toyed with the images, trying to find something new. Stopping and moving forward, and stopping again, and finding nothing. Nothing at all.

  And then a human shape walked through the dancing light.

  What Cadmann had taken for another image from the Earth message was his wife.

  Mary Ann was naked, her head down as if she were sleepwalking, her swollen, ungainly limbs more pitiful when not covered by well-cut cloth. She raised her face, and stared at them, and the impression of near sleepwalking was still strong. “I . . . I heard music,” she said. “Sounds. Street sounds.”

  Cadmann reached out and turned the video down. There was a little-girl quality to Mary Ann’s voice that he recognized. She came and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the images. She pointed into the midst of them, an image of the Canadian Rockies.

  “I’ve been there,” she said. “I grew up not too far from there.”

  Cadmann and Sylvia were silent.

  “I’d like to see them again one day,” she said, and then waited. There was no comment from either of them, and Mary Ann suddenly seemed to understand what she had said, and her hand went over her mouth.

  “Oops. I guess I can’t do that, can I?”

  “We could go virtual,” Sylvia said softly.

  Mary Ann nodded. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much,” she said. And she curled up at the edge of the bed like a cat, watching the images playing in the air in front of her.

  Cadmann said nothing, watching Mary Ann. She didn’t move again, didn’t speak, but her eyes were open. And she just watched.

  And finally, Sylvia’s hand stole into his, and they watched until, at some point, he fell asleep.

  Dawn came slowly to Camelot. There was no excitement, just another day, one of an endless stream of days. There would be a single difference, perhaps. Robor was anchored over the main aerospaceport, shadowing it, and was being loaded now.

  Zack oversaw the loading, although the kids from the eastern encampment were actually in charge. It was, as were most things dealing with the mainland expedition, a joint venture.

  Rachael approached him. “Zack,” she said, “Cadmann made a rather unusual request. He wants to look at Aaron’s records.”

  Zack’s round, sallow face grooved with thought. “Is he all right?”

  She evaded. “He’s concerned about the dirigible incident.”
>
  “He’s not making any trivial request, love. What’s itching him?”

  “Well. The entire ectogynic issue.”

  “We went over all of that a long time ago.”

  “And we don’t talk about it much anymore. I know.”

  Zack walked unsteadily over to a tree stump and sat, resting his hands on his knees. He drew a large red bandanna from his pocket, and wiped it across his face with a hand that trembled.

  “I think that Carlos is taking the Minerva up to the Orion today. We want to check the main systems. Why don’t you invite Cadmann along, and we’ll have a place to talk.”

  She nodded her head.

  ♦ ChaptEr 27 ♦

  geographic

  Pretty joy!

  Sweet joy but two days old,

  Sweet joy I call thee:

  Thou dost smile,

  I sing the while

  Sweet joy befall thee.

  —William Blake, Infant Joy

  The Minervas were the fusion-powered landing craft brought from Sol system. Once on the ground they had served as primary power plants until the mines had produced enough materials for the fabrication of the solar-collector material known as Begley cloth. One Minerva died in the Grendel Wars. The others were used to visit the ship that had brought the children of Earth to their new world: the Geographic.

  Late in the morning, Cadmann skeetered in with Sylvia. “Mickey’s up at the house with Mary Ann,” he said quietly.

  “How is she doing?”

  Cadmann’s face was dark. “Not well. Worse than I expected. It is as if something was just taken right out of her. Linda’s death was a near final thing, and then the business with Toshiro—that was a last straw of some kind. I can’t say that I don’t understand it. I just regret it. Regret everything.”

  Zack nodded.

  He helped Sylvia out of the skeeter.

  Cadmann went to Carlos. “Hola.” Carlos smiled at him lazily, stretched a little, and nodded his head. “A good day for hiking, eh?”

  “A very good one.”