Beowulf's Children Part 36

Weirds. The more she saw, the less she knew. The little flyers were not daughters of G.o.d. Rigid creatures with wings so fast they blurred to invisibility, they resembled the ubiquitous pattern of the Avalon crab, though G.o.d looked nothing like that at all. G.o.d was slow and wingless. She floated like a bubble, a bubble that changed its appearance, attempting to hide itself like a puzzle beast. G.o.d couldn't move without the little flyers to push. G.o.d had a true daughter, a smaller floating thing pushed by one little flyer.

There was cooperation here, as among beaver grendels and other species too. Was it possible that G.o.d had tamed, enslaved her own parasites?

And the little prey? The weirds rode G.o.d's little flying symbiotes like an infestation. Old Grendel knew about symbiotes and parasites. Some tiny life forms would weaken or kill a creature; some would make it stronger. She had wondered if there was a symbiote that would open a grendel's mind . . . but it would be too small to see.

Old Grendel had followed the weirds hundreds of kilometers. She lost nothing in so doing. The river-laced meadows that had been her kingdom for most of her life were one vast swamp now. For two years, ever since the sunlight took on that spooky tinge, the rainfall had been increasing. The dammed lakes overflowed; water covered the flats. Old Grendel had left the southland to her daughters, and good luck to them. She would follow the weirds, upstream.

One branch of the river came near their primary nest, the heights where G.o.d customarily dwelt. The main river branch ran here, where Little G.o.d carried supplies that fed the weirds.

From the moment her mind opened. Old Grendel had known how much more there was to know. There was this about the weirds: no other grendel, no other kind of grendel had studied them like she had. When Old Grendel understood the weirds, they would be her prey alone.

The wind had picked up, and was already blowing the first small flakes their way. The chill was noticeable despite their cheery campfire. "Chamels should be all right." Chaka had slipped into a fur-lined jacket. "We've observed them as high as ten thousand feet, and at temperatures ten degrees lower than anything we're likely to get tonight."

"Good." Justin said, "There was something about that calf, and the way it looked at me. I'd never seen that in one of them before."

"Well? What do you think?"

"I think that there was somebody home. Dog-smart, maybe. I don't know. I liked it. And the way the mother nipped at me, and then seemed to understand what I was doing. I can't help the feeling that it was aware. A little. More than those males we had back at Camelot."

Skeeters had whirled in and out for the last hour. Supplies arrived from Shangri-La. All but a dozen of the herders took the opportunity to go back to the base camp for a shower and a night's sleep.

Jessica came into the firelight with her arm around Aaron. The giant's laughter boomed loudly enough to fill the entire territory. He had won. The First had lost. He sat at the fireside, and lifted his voice against the driving snow. His voice was baritone, and easily penetrated the driving wind: .

"In fourteen hundred ninety-two This gob from old I-taly Was wan'dring through the streets of Spain A-selling hot tamal-e . . . "

Everybody knew the words, and began to sing along with the refrain: .

"He knew the world was round-o His beard hung to the ground-o, That navigating, copulating, Son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h Colombo . . . "

Justin was quiet, but Jessica caught his eye. They shared a smile, and at her urging, he joined in.

"He met the Queen of Spain and said: Just give me ships and cargo And hang me up until I'm dead If I don't bring back Chicago,'

He knew the world was round-o . . . "

Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. He leaned back and looked up at the stars, at the constellations.

"Still pretty much the same as they were for my great-grandmother," Katya murmured.

"Yep. Ten light-years doesn't go as far as it used to."

"For forty days and forty nights They sailed the broad Atlantic Colombo and his lousy crew For want of a screw were frantic . . . "

Katya was working her hands under his clothes, giggling breathily. It was getting harder to concentrate on the song.

Why qualify that, Justin thought in a happy daze. Truth was, it was just plain getting harder.

"They spied a wh.o.r.e upon the sh.o.r.e And off went coats and collars In fifteen minutes by the clock She made ten million dollars . . ."

By the end of the song (in which Christopher Columbus returned to the Old World with an impressive a.s.sortment of New World microorganisms), Justin and Katya had retired to their sleeping bag. He protested that he was actually much too sleepy to be of any service to her. Her clever sculptor's hands soon made a liar of him. Within a few minutes, he found himself rolling on a warm and familiar tide, one that swept him slowly to the peak, and then dropped him swiftly, but gently, into the fires below.

And finally he lay at the edge of sleep, enfolded in Katya's arms. He murmured, "Thank you, ma'am," into the hollow of her throat.

"You're welcome, sir," she chuckled dreamily, and somehow managed to effect a curtsy right there in the sleeping bag.

She said something after that, something about wondering if there wasn't a river the two of them could find, here, on the mainland. He gave her some kind of answer . . . river equals grendels, you little idiot . . . And the next thing he knew he was dreaming of childhood, of games with Jessica and Aaron and Chaka.

Games that Aaron always seemed to win.

Chapter 22.

GHOSTS AND WEIRDS.

Take, for instance, a twig and a pillar, or the ugly person and the great beauty, and all the strange and monstrous transformations. These are all leveled together by Tao. Division is the same as creation; creation is the same as destruction.

CHUANG-TZU, On Leveling All Things

Downslope, motion in the falling snow. Old Grendel held her breathing slow and even. The snow was melting on her. She was cold, and that was a rare thing. But if speed flowed in her arteries now, she would die.

Again, the flurries rippled. Old Grendel raged. The weirds were hers.

But she was alone, she had always been alone, it was the way of her kind.

She could do nothing but observe. There were grendels in the snow.

The snow grendel waited with her sisters. The fires within them were banked and cooled by a mantle of snow, so that the smells of courage and danger were faint. Cold One knew there was meat hereabouts. She knew it by its smell.

These were the ones who could vanish. A puzzle beast could stand only a speed-sprint away, meat for the taking, and be gone in the next instant, neither seen nor smelled. But puzzle beasts could be taken if the wind was in your face.

Ordinarily she didn't like sisters nearby. But puzzle beasts would feed all, and in fact her sisters gave her a better chance in the hunt. While the prey scattered, fleeing the others, she could lie in wait and pick one off. She'd done it in the past.

Puzzle beasts, and something else: she could smell them too. The weirds were here. The world was turning weird, and these were part of the weirdness. They too were chameleons of sorts: they tottered on two legs, but they could change their skins, and they could ride floating or flying things, or puzzle beasts, or creatures as fast as grendels on speed, that smelled of tar. Caution.

Slowly, she inched forward.

Justin came awake in two stages. In the first stage he was halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and still aware of his dreams. He dreamed of dancing fire, and of snow smothering the flame.

Then the dying flame began to whinny, sounding much like a chamel. A chamel terrified almost to death.

He popped awake almost instantly, his hand curled around the grendel gun at his side. "Get the skeeters up," he yelled. Katya was dressing and rolling out of the sleeping bag at the same time, out of the tent in less than ten seconds.

He crawled out and scanned the chamels. Whatever had frightened them was still in the outer darkness, far enough away that it hadn't triggered the movement sensors, but they still whinnied in terror.

His collar beeped. Ca.s.sandra. "Five grendel-sized ma.s.ses moving toward the camp. Alert."

He slipped on his war specs. Ca.s.sandra automatically gave him thermal and starlight scope. Nothing. A mantle of snow covered the ground, and more drifted from the sky. Was there really anything out there? Dammit, they were fifteen klicks from open water . . .

The chamels ran in circles. When they got to the edge of the pen their electronic collars gave them pain for their efforts-but the pain was nothing compared with the terror. They screamed. Their hooves threw up small bits of snow.

Snow.

Freeze me blind. "Ca.s.sandra," he whispered. "I want a weather report."

"Mild storm front moving in from the north."

"Where is the largest body of water south of us?"

"A lake approximately twenty kilometers south."

"General comm circuit. Everyone, up and at 'em! Grendels coming. The wind has carried our scent and the storm has let them get here. Grendels in the snow! General alert!"

"Right," someone answered.

"Perimeter defense," Justin said. "War specs on thermal. Auditory updates to everyone else, on the minute. We better use local nodes-don't risk bouncing the signal topside in this weather."

More information, but less computing power for resolution. It would probably balance out.

"Get our best pilots up. Katya, get airborne." She was a superb pilot.

This would be her most severe test.

He checked the charge on his grendel gun. She wasn't the only one who would be tested today.

Jessica pulled the chamel pup back into the herd, got it to huddle against one of the females. Her war specs revealed four heat-shapes crouching in the outer darkness. They were waiting. Cooperating? Or did they merely tolerate each other when there was meat to share? The chamel scent was strong enough to attract every grendel from here to the river. End it now.

She touched her collar. "I don't want to wait for them," she said.

"This thing will get out of control. I say that we go find them."

"I like that idea," Aaron said. "Skeeter One, Skeeter Six. Let's go hunting."

Justin adjusted his war specs. They were synchronized with the rifle sights-making not quite a smart gun, but close to it. Visual, enhanced infrared, and motion-sensor data was coordinated with the rifle in overlapping lines of pale green and red. When the images aligned he had a lock. And the grendel was moving.

There! Grendel flash, alignment- It ran straight at him, faster than he'd believed possible, faster even than the grendel images in their computer training cla.s.ses, faster than a living thing could move, and it was coming for him, hot death on the move.

If he hadn't been prepared for it, if he hadn't trained for it in computer simulations a thousand times, he would have been caught flat-footed. d.a.m.n but it moved fast, and straight for him. Every instinct told him to run- The sights were aligned. He fired. The capacitor dart, traveling at twice the speed of sound, hit the grendel and dumped its juice. The grendel's nervous system flashed, and its brain was a char, even though its legs carried it on into the herd. Physics supersedes biology. The chamels scattered, but inertia carried the grendel into the herd, and one chamel went down under its bulk. Even in death the grendel closed its jaws on the chamel's throat. The other chamels ran until their collars brought them to a halt. They bleated their terror.

"They're coming in!" Derik screamed. His sleeping bag was next to Justin's, and now he was standing just to Justin's left. "Here they come!"

The snow spumed up in crisscrossing lines. Grendel flash. At least six. Justin sighted, locked, fired-a clean miss. He blinked and the grendel was a hundred meters closer, nearly atop him. Lock! He fired again, and Derik fired also. One of the darts struck the grendel dead into its throat. It ran on toward them. Physics supersedes biology- Justin rolled one way and Derik the other. The grendel plowed through the center, right where he had lain. Its legs scrabbled in the air as it made a terrible pierced-boiler squawking sound.

A skeeter flashed down from above. Aaron was belted into the doorway, and had mounted a gun there. Armor-piercing rounds st.i.tched across the snow, then along a grendel from tail to head. Blood sprayed the snow. Everyone expected a second grendel to attack the wounded one. They had seen that in recordings made in the Grendel Wars. A grendel was wounded and the others turned on it, sometimes generating a frenzy. It didn't happen here. The other grendels charged onward.

Hungry, Justin thought. Hungry, and wary, and they cooperate! The snow keeps them cooled off, and they cooperate.

Christ.

Skeeter VI. Katya's voice. "Grendel flash south-southwest."

"Targeting?"

"Negative."

"Jessica? Can you engage?"

"I've got it."

Justin had never been happier to hear her voice. She was to the south. He and Derik had the east, Chaka the north. Who was to the west? He didn't know. Nothing I can do anyway. Hold my sector, and hope the others hold theirs. This is what Dad meant about the First. They had to trust each other- Skeeter II buzzed close overhead. Katya's voice: "We've lost visual. We've got Ca.s.sandra reconstructing our infrared images. The storm is interfering with transmissions. I'm not sure our onboards-"

There was a moment in which the sound rose to a crackle, and then it died out. Dammit. Justin heard it overhead, coming in too low. The snow increased, another flurry driving itself against him, and he cursed. He couldn't see anything.

The earphones crackled again. "Trying to see-"

And then- Stu leaned out the door of Skeeter II. Too much was happening too quickly to let him keep the whole camp under observation. He wasn't worried. They had grendel guns far better than the ones the Earth Born used to win the Grendel Wars, and the Star Born were better trained, had better reflexes than the First. They'd rehea.r.s.ed this in simulation, skeeters and Ca.s.sandra and the gunners operating together to bring maximum firepower to bear.

That was in simulation, but this was different. Here the weather kept Ca.s.sandra blind, and he was nearly so, and his heart pounded and he sometimes forgot to breathe. He peered into the snow, but he couldn't see clearly.

"Stu, where the h.e.l.l are they?" Justin's voice yammered in his earpiece.

"Bring it down a little closer," he told Katya. "Justin needs help."

"Right," she said. "Uh-I can't-"

"Yes?" he shouted.

"Nothing. I'll get in closer."

The meat milled right in front of Cold One, but the stink of death was in the air, and an alien chemical reek. There was much that she didn't understand here.

She bucked and snapped at a sister next to her, receiving a warning snap in return. It might have turned into a death match then and there, but for the meat-so much!--and for another thing. Others of her kind, others of her own brood had died here, and the stench of speed and grendel blood filled the air.

The air was filled with smoke and thunder as her sister burst open, spewing blood and bone and shredded flesh and speed. Something like blind panic hit her. She couldn't begin to comprehend what had just happened, but she had once seen the sky flash with light, rainfire, and that light climb down from the clouds to strike a tree. The tree had burst into flame.

And this was something close to that. The meat! The meat! So much of it. Yet the world was turning upside down, and she smelled death in every wind. The world was changing. h.e.l.l was coming, and any strange thing might be worth her life.

Like this: looming abruptly out of the sky was a burring thing that Cold One had only glimpsed between flurries, a birdie big enough to eat grendels, its wings invisible on speed. It swung down, then drew back as if suddenly aware that it had come too close to earth. A threat! A challenge!

Speed flooded through her body. A grendel would attack what it feared.