Beowulf's Children (18 page)

She had done a dangerous thing. The huge-eyed nightmare was going where she could not, where no rivers ran, and where jungles and hunter-climbers did. But she'd followed a rare rainstorm uphill, and kept moving after it was gone, up the slope of a nearby mountain.

That was not long after the Change. With her new sight she'd felt that she could do anything. She had reached the peak of the mountain and placed herself above that thing, in time to see it sink down to kiss the earth.

Three smaller flying things had left it. God's swimmers? Much smaller creatures had swarmed below it. Parasites, she surmised, seeking to spread their kind. But though they showed only as dots, she could guess their size. They never went on speed for as long as she watched. Slow, stupid: not grendels, but prey.

Then she'd crawled back down to water. Never a drop of rain came to cool her. She was ravenous every step of the way, and she had never gone on speed. If she had, she would have died.

Now this, the Grendel God. If it was prey, it would feed all the grendels beneath the sky.

She'd been hungry before, she was ravenous now. New prey. New tastes.

New games to lose and win, new blood to wet her snout.

New, new, new.

If Old Grendel had been able to clarify her concept of a god, she would have prayed to it. The spawn of grendels were so small, not even a mouthful. One of those two-legged things would feed her beyond her capacity. She would bury it in the mud for a day, or two, or three, until it grew sweet. Until the water bugs came and ate its eyes into raw wet sockets, and the tissues bloated with nectar. Then she would feast.

The first tinglings of speed, urgent and warm, began to stir her. She clamped her mind down. She was already too close to being burned out. They could hunt her, this New Meat, this spawn of the Grendel God. They were slow, and clumsy, but... experience tried to warn her of danger.

All creatures make mistakes.

Hunter-climbers made mistakes. She had cracked their bones with her teeth, and savored the sweetness within.

She wiggled back toward the river, a few inches at a time. God floated toward the Cloud Mountain, where it began to descend. Where the first huge-eyed Great Flyer had descended. No rivers ran near there. Too far. Always too far, up the rocky slopes where she could go when there was enough rain, but that happened seldom.

But all things were prey to a grendel, and all things must spawn. Its spawn would come down to water. If she could not eat the great flying creature, then she would eat its spawn.

"Deadwood Pass," Jessica said. The roboticized mining camp was located on a half-mile-wide mountain pass. To the east the land fell away steeply across rocky ground to the Grendel Valley River some called the Styx four thousand feet down and five miles away. The west side of the pass was less steep, falling a thousand feet to a high desert in a mile of boulder-strewn cliff slopes. The pass was bounded by steeply rising slopes to north and south. When the First found this area ten Avalon years before, a stream had run down from the northern peak. It wasn't a large stream, but it was enough to worry the First. They had changed its course with dynamite. Where once it flowed down to the pass and then westward into the desert, now it veered to the east and fell over a series of cliffs to make spectacular waterfalls. They had installed sluice gates so that water could still be diverted to run in the old stream when Deadwood Pass was occupied.

Water meant grendels. When grendels hunted they went on speed. It made them incredibly fast, but it also generated heat. A grendel too far from water could cook itself. They had never seen a grendel more than two kilometers from water except in rainstorms.

Joe Sikes examined the area below with binoculars. "Base, this is Sikes. I have examined the pass and I confirm no change in water levels," he said formally.

"Roger, Joe Sikes," Zack's voice said. "Geographic confirms no cloud formations, no rain expected, all water levels at or below normal in all directions from Deadwood. You are cleared to approach."

"Bring her down," Sikes called. He continued to look through the binoculars, sweeping his view up and down both sides of the pass, then up and down the sharply rising peaks bounding it. "Jess, Linda, please confirm this, I see nothing." He handed the binoculars to Jessica.

She made a cursory examination and saw Sikes grimace in disapproval. All right, I'll play your game. She looked again, this time sweeping the glasses slowly from the western desert up to the pass, across and down to the eastern valley floor. "Joeys," she said. "I see three Joeys about fifty yards north in the shade of the solar conversion cloth. Otherwise nothing."

Linda took the glasses and looked again. "Confirm, normal, three Joeys," she said formally, then laughed. "It must be safe if the Joeys are out like that."

"Roger," Zack's voice said. "All right, you're cleared to land. Keep us posted, and stay in touch, and we'll keep an eye on you. "

Winds constantly blew across the pass, sometimes from the west, more often from the ocean to the southeast. The small flat area of the pass was smoothed by the constant wind. Now that the stream was diverted there was little green, just short brown and purple grass, and twisted brown bushes. The area was ugly enough, but it did hold a permanent mainland base: a square shelter to hold batteries and fuel cells, a hut good for overnight, packed with emergency supplies and technical equipment; and of course the mine itself. The north slopes above the pass were covered with solar-electric conversion material woven into the flexible sheets called Begley cloth.

Jessica took back the binoculars and examined Deadwood Pass. The first thing she saw was a tubular frame geodesic dome crouching like a spider above a great dark hole in the earth. Usually steam would be gushing from the hole. Today there wasn't even a wisp of vapor. The problem wasn't here. They already knew that. They'd find the primary damage twenty feet away, in the refining apparatus.

Linda had the controls while Joe gave instructions. They were both very relaxed, very professional. Jessica remembered Linda demonstrating the same kind of intense interest observing transplanted silkworms munching transplanted mulberry leaves.

Cadzie was in a corner, sleeping. Jessica walked wide around his bassinet. He didn't seem to slow Linda down very much, or else she never showed it. She only had to plan for him... but how did she learn?

The refining station was just below them through the huge windows, but they spared it not a glance. They were studying its innards on two of the viewers. One was a demonstration view—Jessica had to watch for a minute before she understood—a cartoon of the station working normally.

The little mining drones churned up the soft coal, and a conveyor belt moved it, a chunk at a time, up and over to the refinery. The prefabricated refinery processed the crumbly stuff, turning it into thick dark bricks of protoplastic, the fodder of their building and pharmaceuticals industry. Jessica recognized this sequence: it was a classroom film.

The other showed the refinery setup dead and mangled. Track had lurched out of one of several tunnels, had lifted and twisted the casing of the refinery system. The damaged casing was smoke-blackened across that side. Damage inside could not be seen. Ore had piled high before the system's rudimentary intelligence shut it down.

Joe said, "I'll kiss the ass of the nerd who's good enough to be sending us that!" and added as an afterthought, "Unless it's Edgar."

A real bomb, Jessica thought. Low-yield explosive. Wrecked equipment had forced an expedition.

The eel, too, had forced an expedition to the mainland. Interesting coincidence? Jessica shook her head. No one would do that.

"Touchdown in about nine minutes," Linda said.

Jessica groped in her pocket, began pulling on tough, light gloves.

"I'm ready: Eager, and willing."

"That's what all the boys say." Linda examined her big sister craftily. "You'll probably cut out after an hour or so."

"Ask Joe."

Were Joe's ears turning pink? He said, "Security check, Jess. Make sure the perimeters are secure, and none of the movement sensors have picked up anything. Then we can let the kids down."

"And get them out of my hair. We've got work to do," Linda said.

Jessica scrunched her nose at Linda, and paused to say "goo" to little Cadzie. "Pete Detrich," she said. "You were dating him for a while last spring... "

Linda straightened her back proudly. "I'm not telling, and that's that."

"All right, all right..."

Jessica paused at the door, and then said back over her shoulder—"Zack Moskowitz."

"Hah! His mustache tickles."

Without admitting defeat, Jessica affected a slouch, leaving the room.

Jessica climbed down a narrow spiral staircase into the cargo bay. It was vast and almost empty now, thrumming with engine vibration as they neared the ground. There were six great bay doors of molded high-impact plastic. Four were already open. She took a door next to Justin, who already had the cable attached to his belt-buckle carabiner.

"Race you!" he said merrily.

"What stakes?"

"You make pan biscuits tonight."

"Fine—or you hunt up tubers."

"You're on."

She unlatched and flung her door open. The breeze ruffled her hair, cooled her face. They were fifty feet above the low, bluish grass. Even from here it looked scraggly, surviving where the heavier brush had died for lack of moisture. She tied the line through her carabiner and braced it at her hip, right hand taking the high grip, and threw the rest of the line out over the side. Before it had completely unreeled she launched herself. She looked back up, shadowed by Robor's bulk, its Chinese-dragon facade dropping away from her toward the morning sky, and laughed.

She hadn't been the first out. That was Aaron, as usual, his hours of mountain climbing serving him well. But Justin was coming down fast, and then Katya and Trish and Toshiro, the six of them like a small colony of spiders spiraling to earth. The ropes still dangled sixteen feet above the ground when Aaron reached the bottom of his line. He paused a fatal instant, and she paused watching him, and Justin snapped free and dropped the rest of the way down, hitting and rolling like a paratrooper. He came back to his feet lightly, sporting a bruised face, a shoulder stained with dirt, and a grin of evil triumphant.

Jessica didn't jump. The five of them jumping in concert could wobble Robor's descent.

When it finally came within reach Justin grabbed his line and anchored it to one of the steel loops set into the ground. Katya was next down. She grunted, trying to get her cable into a ring. It wouldn't quite reach as a gust of wind took Robor sideways a few feet. Aaron grabbed the end of his line with his left hand and stretched out to grasp a steel ring with his right. His mouth gaped into an O of strain, and she heard his shoulders creak. But will and muscle and a shift of wind brought the line close enough to the ring for him to attach the mooring clip, and from there on it was easy.

Robor's undercarriage brushed the ground, and secondary lines tied it into place. As Justin walked past her, Jessica slapped him a casual high-five.

"Let's take a look at the processor," he said. She nodded.

The flat was four hundred meters across, rocky and mostly barren. Up a short incline was a second terrace. They scrambled up the lip of the rise, and paused. Geodesic dome. A dozen yards away, a corrugated shed housed the automated processor. Other than those, nothing for two hundred meters in either direction. Nothing... then a rise of mountain, crested with bushes with purple-green, roughly triangular leaves. The dirt beneath their feet was scarred, tread-marked where mini-tractors had carried their loads of plastic bricks back to Robor.

Ordinarily the mining equipment, sheltered beneath its dome of pipes, churned merrily away. But all was silent now.

Jessica turned and looked below her. Robor's dragon shape stirred in the wind, seemed almost to breathe. Its red and green stubby wings struggled to break from bondage. The lower cargo doors were opening, ramps descending. One of the mini-tractors was exiting smoothly.

Below Robor, and beyond, stretched Grendel Valley. Green, wild, twisted with vegetation. And through the very middle of it ran a river. The Styx. Death.

Higher up were plateaus where children of Earth could play. North and east she could see three mountain ranges. The farthest high peaks were lost in the mist. In winter even the lowest would be snow-crested, but today the air was warm and moist, the light and heat of Tau Ceti steady upon them.

Pterodons glided silkily through the peaks, more plentiful here than on Camelot. On the island they ate fish, or darted into the isolated horsemane trees to snatch eggs from a variety of Avalon crab that lived in their tops. She could see other birdlike things. Huge insects, perhaps, dragonflyish things that darted. At half a kilometer she couldn't make out details.

The air was heavy, moist and... well, green.

It smelled alive. It buzzed and hummed and crackled. The very sounds here were different, a low, heavy thrum of life. The area immediately surrounding the Styx was relatively clear, but back a kilometer or so the forest began in earnest, dense enough to satisfy any dreams of childhood discovery.

Joe Sikes trudged up the hill while Linda followed with the tractor.

Cadzie, stretching and looking about, bounced in a sling across her chest.

"What's the schedule?" she asked Joe when he was close enough.

Joe was laughing. "Jess, Chaka just went past me with a kind of a glass shell on his back. It must weigh a tonne. He looks like a giant turtle!"

"It's just the cook pot, Joe."

"He could get something a lot lighter. Is he just showing off his muscles?"