Beowulf's Children Part 38

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 gra.s.slands. 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. a.n.a.lysis 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 Ca.s.sandra 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 Ca.s.sandra 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 gra.s.s, and there was a bug-like thing crawling around it.

"What is it, Ca.s.sandra?"

"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. "Ca.s.sandra, 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 h.e.l.l. So fast that . . .

"Ca.s.sandra." 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, "Ca.s.sandra, give us a local scan for grendels."

All of Ca.s.sandra'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 Ca.s.sandra's "large animal"?

Justin popped the clutch and headed out toward the site, south-southwest. The gra.s.s grew higher than his head. He tried to keep one eye ahead and one for the little holostage where Ca.s.sandra 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.

He could see pterodons circling overhead . . . and nothing ahead. He was seeing through a curtain of gra.s.s. Then he wasn't, because they'd driven out of the gra.s.s into a neatly cut lawn. He grinned, speeding up, enjoying the view. High gra.s.s to left and right. Still he saw nothing of a mystery creature, until Katya spoke.

"We're looking at the aft end. Justin, we've found the Scribe!"

Scribe? Perspective came. It was almost half the horizon, a geographical feature moving slowly away from them. It was camouflaged, but that wasn't it. He hadn't seen it because it was too big!

Katya was laughing at him. He'd gasped like a dying man. Justin said, "Ca.s.sandra, sanity check. Could this be the Scribe? The thing that draws paths we see from orbit?"

"It leaves a path identical to the Scribe tracks," the computer said.

"Absent conflicting data this is a valid conclusion."

They moved closer. No sign of eyes, this side of the beast. Not much detail at all, just the edge of a tremendous sh.e.l.l, the color of bare earth, moving slowly away.

It didn't waddle. It cruised. In its wake the gra.s.s stood a few inches high, dotted with truncated haystacks two feet tall. Droppings?

Something like a tremendous flattened crab slid up to one of the heaps, moving no faster than the Scribe itself, and over it without a pause. A juvenile?

Talking to himself, talking for Ca.s.sandra's records, Justin drove the trike into the gra.s.s again. Three pterodons were circling high above him. He rode half-blind through the prairie gra.s.s, swinging wide around the now invisible beast. "Don't want to startle it," he told Katya, and was suddenly whooping.

A small fist whacked him between the shoulders. "What?"

He could hardly speak for laughter. "Pictured it rearing up. Pawing the air. Don't mind me."

He must be far ahead of it now. There was a stand of horsemane trees, uphill. He pulled the trike into their shade, turned off the engine, and waited. The pterodons were still with him. A fourth came to join them. One peeled off and flew toward the Scribe.

A thing that size . . . it wouldn't try to plow trees under, would it?

They were on a slight rise, three kilometers ahead of the chamel herd. Down below them, now more than two hundred meters away, was the largest creature that Justin had ever seen in his life. A crab . . . clearly derived from a crab sh.e.l.l, like the Avalon crabs, like the fixed-wing birds. But you could build a city on its back! Or a village anyway . . .

In fact, a pterodon was landing on its back to join more than two dozen others. Five merged circles, a communal nest, sprawled along the front of the sh.e.l.l.

A deep blue line ran across the front of the Scribe at the level of the gra.s.s. It seemed to ripple. Lips, or just a lower lip . . . maybe.

Otherwise nothing about the beast was in motion. It slid along like a raft on a wide river. Any motion must be taking place beneath the sh.e.l.l. Others of its kind, Avalon crabs and bugs and birds, made do with four motive limbs and endless ingenuity in the shapes of their sh.e.l.ls.

Katya rose from her seat, lifted a pair of war specs, and gave a low whistle. She nudged him, and pa.s.sed them over.

The beast was even more impressive when seen through the gla.s.ses. As large as-"Ca.s.sandra, is this the largest animal we know of?"

"Negative. The blue whale is larger. This is comparable in size to the largest of the herbivorous dinosaurs."

"Thank you." The edge of the sh.e.l.l dipped to become skids or skis. A half-dozen snouters grazed placidly along one flank. The beast was as large as half the main colony, and flat. It must have nearly the ma.s.s of a blue whale, but it was flatter, and wider than it was long.

There: eyes. Justin had thought they'd be higher. They were bedded in the long blue lips, too low to give the Scribe a decent view. He zoomed on one eye, and it was looking back, examining Justin and Katya, utterly unconcerned.

It wasn't until Justin focused the lenses more carefully that he saw what Katya was excited about.

There were grendels hanging from the sh.e.l.l. Two . . . no, three distorted grendel-shapes hung from the front and side of the sh.e.l.l, like, hanks of hair. Mummies, not quite skeletons, but long dead, he judged.

Katya was saying, "Looks slow. Let's lake a closer look."

The Scribe continued on its placid way as they approached. Five pterodons rose to circle above them. Snouters scurried away around the curve of the stupendous beast. They didn't seem terribly worried. The little Scribe, if that was what it was, hadn't been afraid either. But those dried corpses were grendels!

"Ca.s.sandra," Justin said, "backtrack."

The trike's little holostage sprouted a relief map of the locality. Ca.s.sandra recreated the beast's path as it meandered among similar paths in the gra.s.slands. There were other curves and loops of lighter gra.s.s on the flat prairie background, and they crossed only rarely.

"How close does it get to running water?" he asked, but he saw the answer as he spoke: the path dipped to touch the river, and lingered there.

Ca.s.sandra said, "Quite close, and frequently. The path often parallels waterways."

"Does it enter known grendel territory?"

"Affirmative."

"Thank you," Justin said. "Hallelujah."

"There are things that aren't afraid of grendels," Katya said.

"Obviously. Not this creature, not its young. Not the pterodons nesting on its back."

"And the snouters?"

"Don't know. Maybe they stay on the veldt when Momma Scribe drinks."

Justin stood up on the seat of the trike to watch the creature. It drifted like an island, placid and unconcerned, as if it had never been threatened in its life. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine what could harm such a beast.

He raised the binoculars and focused on one of the mummified grendels.

The four mummies looked about the same state, the same age. That might have been a coordinated attack, for all the good it had done them. Each was hanging by its tail.

"Its defenses seem to be pa.s.sive," he said. "Its sheer size, and something about the sh.e.l.l that traps grendels."

Katya asked, "Some sort of mucilage?"

"More like Velcro. Maybe. I want to see." He levered himself off the trike and walked through the high gra.s.s toward the Scribe. He pulled his microphone aside and told Katya, "You could put a castle on this thing. Come, I will make you Queen of the Scribeveldt."

The sh.e.l.l was all pentagonal plates, like shields a couple of feet across. Shields, and white tails hanging between the edges, here and there. Bones?

Cadmann had spoken of Roman army shields: the warriors held them in a closed array, each warrior's shield guarding the man next to him, in the days of swords and spears. Roman shields would trap enemy spears . . . like Velcro he'd been right about that.

Katya said, "Not a castle. Tents. A pavilion, a summer palace. The serfs will have to wear special shoes."

"Yeah, wouldn't want to hurt the sh.e.l.l."

He was vaguely aware of a skeeter's buzz, far-off and insignificant, and almost didn't register it until he heard the voice in his earphone. "What in the h.e.l.l are you doing?" Jessica asked.

"I'm getting closer," he said. "This thing could care less about me."

"You don't know that." Her voice was irritated.

"It's good to know somebody cares," he said.

Jessica brought the skeeter closer and watched Justin and Katya approach the mountainous Scribe. The lawn behind it stretched to the horizon. It was easy to imagine such a herbivore trolling the entire continent, perhaps looking for a mate, collecting a herd of animals who hid beneath its sh.e.l.l for safety.

It was impossible to imagine a carnivore of equivalent size. Even blue whales, while technically carnivores, were pa.s.sive filtration feeders. The malevolent Moby d.i.c.k had been their little brother. So Justin was probably safe. Probably.

Still.

She was irritated. She wanted to be mad at him. He had sided with Cadmann against them, against Aaron, and was a traitor of sorts, dammit. And he wasn't really her brother, for all the talk about two mothers and a dad. Justin's father was Terry Faulkner, he wasn't related to Cadmann at all, and yet he'd sided with the colonel against the Second. She wanted to stay p.i.s.sed at him, but hated the way her chest hammered in response to the visual input.

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Only Justin and . . . and Aaron. Only the two of them could drive her this crazy.