Beowulf's Children (40 page)

And that settled that. The weirds did cooperate.

Speed was seeping into Old Grendel's blood despite all she could do. In all her life she'd never seen anything like this. The Cold Ones too could cooperate, it seemed, when there was prey enough to feed all. But against the weirds—

The last of them had fled. The smallest, she hadn't even tried to kill anything. The small Cold One had watched, and now, steaming with speed, was fleeing up toward the highest snowbank on the hill. Toward Old Grendel, buried in snow but for snorkel and eyes.

Old Grendel smashed into her flank, sank teeth just ahead of her hind leg, and ripped flesh away. The snow grendel, turning with the impact, smacked sideways into the snowbank. In a blur of snow she clawed her way out, but Old Grendel was a blurred hot streak, receding.

She went straight downhill in the shadow of a gully. The weirds would not see her. Dying snow grendels and their own wounded would hold their attention. She was running over heaped snow, but the snow stopped at the trees.

Short of that point. Old Grendel turned and rolled. Snow was not enough—she really wanted water—but this would do. She spun across the snow, exhilarated, boiling with speed. Her roll stopped in a snowbank. As the snow began to melt, she looked back for the first time. The snow grendel was far above her. It lurched toward her, on speed but terribly clumsy, spraying blood from her flank.

All grendels had that in common: on speed their hearts churned like the motor wings of an Avalon birdie. They lost blood fast. Old Grendel let the speed seep from her blood. She crawled backward now, over snow that melted at her touch, backward and into the shadowed forest. The snow grendel floundered after her, slowing; obscuring her track.

Would the weirds bother to track the last snow grendel? They might. Weirds left no question unanswered. If they looked, they would not find Old Grendel; only her prey. If they did not, a day from now the snow grendel would make fine eating.

Old Grendel was beginning to believe. God had not trained her parasites. The answer was madder yet.

As meat the weirds were no longer interesting. The weirds had enslaved God. Old Grendel intended to learn how to do that.

CONQUEST

Now what about those incidents in which some person seems to go beyond what we supposed were the normal bounds of endurance, strength, or tolerance of pain? We like to believe this demonstrates that the force of will can overrule the physical laws that govern the world. But a person's ability to persist in circumstances we hadn't thought were tolerable need not indicate anything supernatural. Since our feelings of pain, depression, exhaustion, and discouragement are themselves mere products of our minds' activities—and ones that are engineered to warn us before we reach our ultimate limits—we need no extraordinary power of mind over matter to overcome them. It is merely a matter of finding ways to rearrange our priorities.

In any case what hurts—and even what is "felt" at all—may, in the end, be more dependent on culture than biology. Ask anyone who runs a marathon, or ask your favorite Amazon.

MARVIN MINSKY, The Society of Mind

The storm blew out and the sky cleared. In those two hours Aaron had used the remaining skeeters to round up the male chamels, while Justin established a defensive perimeter complete with motion detectors.

That work kept them busy for hours. When it was over, when the last reluctant chamel was restored to the herd, the Star Born returned to the grim reality of torn, bloody snow, and the tarp-shrouded body of their friend.

Justin knelt beside the tan shroud, brooding. "I know you, Stu. You'd want us to remember that our defenses worked."

Aaron nodded agreement. "When the Earth Born first encountered a grendel, it was a massacre. This was just war. We only lost one of ours."

"One too many." Jessica's left boot toe dug at a bit of dark, gummy snow. The head-shape beneath the tarp was misshapen. Even draped, the body seemed... broken. Shrunken.

"Does anyone want to say something?" Justin asked.

Katya nodded, and bowed her head slightly. "Stu." Her breath plumed from her mouth like a whisper of steam. "You died for me." Justin rose and put his arm around her shoulder. She clung to him.

There was a long pause, everyone expecting someone else to speak first. There was no sound but the wind, the distant skeeters, and the lowing of the chamel herd.

"Do we send him back to Camelot?" Jessica finally asked.

"No." Aaron's reply was unexpectedly fierce. "He came to take the continent. Let him be buried here, where he fell. We'll mark the spot with stones, and let Cassandra record it. Send him to wind and sky and sun."

"But—"

Aaron wasn't listening. "His real monument will be at Shangri-La, the place he helped to build. This is our land now. All of this. Not Camelot, not Surf's Up. This is our land."

The midday sun melted enough snow to expose an eviscerated grendel corpse—Stu's killer. Aaron fired a biotoxin load into it, and it didn't twitch. Then Skeeter V set down carrying Jasper Doheny and the expedition's chain saw, Chaka moved in with the deadly humming wand. He began his autopsy with a beheading.

Now he pulled at torn skin, measured teeth and tail, jotting everything down in a little notebook. "You know," he said quietly, "the interesting thing is that they didn't just tolerate each other's presence. That would have been remarkable enough—but they actually seemed to cooperate."

"That's a pretty depressing thought," Jessica said.

"Alarming is more like it." Chaka wiggled the broken jaw, then ran his hands over the misshapen, not quite symmetrical skull. "The ability of grendels to organize... at all... implies a level of intelligence or social organization which we haven't experienced before. That's going to take a lot of thought."

Justin squeezed Katya's hand. She had clung to him almost continuously for the past hour. "What do you suggest?"

"Let the snow cool the head a bit more, then get it back to Shangri-La and freeze it. Then back to Camelot on the next transport. I want my father's opinion of the brain."

Aaron nodded. "The kind of thing that they'll love. A puzzle." He ran a hand over his long face. "I've had enough of this place," he said grimly. "Let's get the hell out of here."

Old Grendel had seen them taking a snow grendel apart, treating each part in some different way. They had eaten none of it. Uneasy, she had moved downhill.

The snow grendels had frightened the weirds, and they were far too likely to investigate what they feared. Old Grendel didn't consider it safe to spy on them. She stopped and buried herself above the corpse of the snow grendel she had killed. Watching that should be safe.

The daughters of God rose into the air and flew east.

The puzzle beasts moved west in a great mass, with weirds all around them.

The weirds were going... were gone. They hadn't found the last snow grendel. Old Grendel circled wide, looking for traps and spies. There were several of the little boxes the weirds sometimes posted where the view would serve a spy, and Old Grendel would not pass in front of those.

Presently she settled in to feed.

The weirds didn't know everything. Old Grendel was oddly reassured.

The herd was moving again, and they were making good time. Justin could see an edge to the plateau. Beyond, never yet seen by the naked eye, was a savannah covering a third of the continent. They were as far as any human had been from Camelot without actually achieving orbit.

After the skeeters had buzzed in to take away grendels and human casualties, Katya swore that she was steady enough to drive a trike. Twice now she'd spun up next to Justin to blow him kisses. A bandage covered half her face, with a blue slash and stitches underneath, twisting her laugh into something wild.

She can hardly wait for nightfall, he mused. All of that my hero stuff. Should be... interesting.

He wondered, then, if she'd have nightmares. After what she'd been through, another woman might have been catatonic. But he'd be there to hold her.

Skeeter scouts found the route of descent from the plateau. It was checked first by horseback, and then by chamel. The herd descended a thousand feet to the grasslands. It was flat down there, a vast tabletop that seemed to run forever, brownish green growing gradually greener with the descent. A wide brown river meandered in S curves. Here and there were patches of trees.

The descent took five hours. There was still enough day left to make a few kilometers before camp.

The grass was almost waist high, blue-green, and rich. The trikes plowed furrows in it as they jetted around.

Justin's mare chewed happily at the grass. Analysis had showed it would be digestible; they wouldn't need to bring much animal food in by skeeter. Justin leaned down and plucked a strand, took a tiny bite, and tucked it back between his rear molar and his gum. It chewed sweet-sour, not bad at all.

In the future, this would be cattle country. Trikes zipped about, stopping here and there to make recordings and snip samples for Cassandra to muse over later.

The computer whispered in his ear. "I see an odd flower. Turn to the left again, please."

He did, and couldn't see what Cassandra was talking about. But, "There we are. Would you get one of those, please?"

The herd was behind him, and if the computer wanted something, he was going to have to get it now, before hooves and teeth destroyed it.

The flower was in the middle of a patch of blue grass, and there was a bug-like thing crawling around it.

"What is it, Cassandra?"

"Closer... "

He got closer, and suddenly saw something of real interest.

The beetle was tearing at a fibrous bulb on the plant The bulb, on the other hand, seemed to be made of an interwoven web of fibers... and some of the plant's fleshy leaves was composed almost exclusively of those fibers, but pointed skyward.

A tiny lizard-like thing, not much larger than the tearing insect, climbed the stalk and attacked the leaf. Almost immediately, the leaf began to change color, from fleshy red to blue, oozing a blue exudate.

The lizard-like thing tried to escape, but the exudate had it caught. The fibers stirred. They wound about the lizard, catching it tight. The lizard's struggles slowly bowed the plant, and the leaf bent and turned upside down.

Fascinated by the process, which had taken no more than five minutes, Justin took another look at the beetle, still working hard at the other leaf. It was in there now, and it was... eating something.

"Wow," he said. "Cassandra, what do you see?"

"A microecology that needs study," she said calmly.

"I see a scavenger hijacking a flesh-eating plant," Justin said for the record. "Pretty sneaky, I'd say."

"Sample, please."

Justin shook the plant, and the little bug suddenly noticed him. It turned—and spread disproportionately large jaws. It couldn't have been larger than his thumb, but the wings trebled its size. It shot off toward the horizon so fast it nearly disappeared.

Faster than hell. So fast that...

"Cassandra." He didn't like the stress in his voice. "Was that bug on speed?"

"It is possible," the computer said. It sounded like an admission.

"I believe we have found another speed-using species. Correlations?

Conclusions?"

"Observed data indicate this is a scavenger. No other conclusions valid with existing data."

That made him feel a little more comfortable, but not much. He summoned a trike to take the specimens.

"Skeeter reports a large animal in your vicinity, south-southwest of you, Katya."

He and Katya putted along in the two-seater trike. The loss of Stu weighed on all of them, but especially Katya. She had clocked over a thousand hours with him in that skeeter. It had to hurt.

Her night had been filled with bad dreams. This morning she didn't remember. She was brisk and perky, as if she'd slept better than Justin.

They had buried Stu where he fell. They all wanted some kind of ceremony, but Aaron didn't agree. "We will remember him at Shangri-La," he said. Stu was a Bottle Baby, never adopted. No relatives among the First. Aaron and the others were the only family Stu had, and they let Aaron speak for them...

Now they were taking back the trophy, their only intact grendel head.

A poor trade.

He found his hand creeping to cover hers. She widened her fingers to accept his. The small motion seemed somehow more intimate than the times she had welcomed him into her body. Her eyes, golden with flecks of green, sparkled at him. The bandage was still in place.

"Let's take a look," she said.

Justin said, "Cassandra, give us a local scan for grendels."

All of Cassandra's considerable eyes and ears were suddenly concentrated on the area. A relief map glowed on the hologram stage, blank at first, filling in rapidly.

There were no grendel-bearing water sources short of the river thirty-five klicks away.

They would avoid the river. The herd would water tomorrow. Their skeeters would have plenty of time to clear out the water hole before the herd arrived. Now, where was Cassandra's "large animal"?

Justin popped the clutch and headed out toward the site, south-southwest. The grass grew higher than his head. He tried to keep one eye ahead and one for the little holostage where Cassandra had given them a skeeter's-eye hologram.

It showed a cleanly geometric trapezoid, pale brown on a baize background. An Avalon crab, Justin thought, seen from nearly overhead. Where were the legs? They must be underneath. That looked like tufts of hair along the edges. And he ought to be getting close.