Beowulf's Children

Aaron nodded slowly. "Frightening, but no more than we here had concluded, right?" He looked around the room and got approving nods from many of the Second.

"Dragons," Sylvia Weyland muttered.

"Dragons," Cadma

"Maybe not," Big Chaka said. "First, though, a theory. Here is a Camelot grendel. Cassandra, my file, Grade Eight Test Twenty-four, please."

Laughter rippled among the Second. Grade Eight Test Twenty-four in Big Chaka's biology class was very familiar to them. "The beast floated before them, a composite of many grendels the First had examined after they were torn, charred, and otherwise mangled. This was no holo of a dead beast, but a mere cartoon.

As Chaka's hands moved, so moved a white arrowhead floating in midair: the cursor. The Camelot grendel opened like a puzzle box. The view zoomed in on the grendel's big blunt head. The head opened.

The sinuses were large: a grendel's head was half-hollow. The brain showed convolutions shallower than those of a human brain. There was no corpus callosum co

"Now for a mainland grendel. Cassandra, my dissection file, Composite One. This shows features common to the snow grendels we examined."

Cassandra had painted parts of the corpse with a lavender tinge.

"We had to guess at some features due to the damage done when the grendels were killed. But there's enough." The snow grendel was longer than the Camelot grendel and about as thick. Its claws were bigger, with two dewclaws that faced forward. Big Chaka pointed those out with the cursor. "Brakes." He indicated the tail and the downward-hooked barbs:

"More brakes. If you're going to run two hundred klicks an hour on ice, you need that. Trivial stuff, but now note the ventral surface. There's almost no belly armor. What's left is these four head-to-tail ridges, more skis than protection."

Aaron interrupted: the student asserting his freedom. "I get it. The thing expects to squat in snow and lose heat through the belly."

"That's what we think, but notice that it can't rear up to fight. Got to charge like a tank, with its head lowered, and butt." The cursor outlined the misshapen head. "More armor. Like a ram. It'd work better if the head hadn't been distorted."

That head was no cartoon. This was the hologram of a dead grendel's head.

Cadma

"We're lucky to have any kind of answer, the way our kids tore through these things. My son was much embarrassed."

Little Chaka said, "I brought back some pieces of skull, but they aren't big enough to tell. Maybe they're distorted too—"

"But there was enough," his father said. "Quite enough." The skull opened: a bloody puzzle box.

The head was half-hollow, as with the Camelot grendel. The right side of the brain was grossly swollen. On that side the sinuses were shrunken and the skull ballooned out. There were thin spots in the massive bone.

Near the root of the brain on the right side, the midst of the convoluted mass of gray tissue was a tangle of... worms.

Unmistakable.

"Parasites," Justin murmured. "Flukes."

"We've already found six kinds of parasites. Four are types that infest samlon too. Our Grendel Scouts are familiar with those," Little Chaka said. "Dad—"

"Yes. This is the interesting one. It has caused localized swelling, and some changes in brain chemistry. We're still working on those. We've already established that there are abnormal levels of the grendel analog of acetylcholines present. Now look here." The light pointer wavered on an area far from the fluke. "Notice the dendrite structure here. Very dense. Nothing like what you find in uninfected grendels. And here. Here's an uninfected grendel for comparison."

The contrast was dramatic. Where the first grendel brain had a complex web of tissue co

"Good Lord," Sylvia said. "I should have noticed—look at the bare one there. Doesn't it look as if that structure there was just made to have something wrap around it? Chaka, is that possible?"

"Is coevolution possible? Of course."

Katya giggled. "Could that fluke be, well, a fluke?"

"It could be, but I doubt that. We have examined three other parasitized grendels, and have found similar changes in them."

"And these are grendels which behaved abnormally?" Cadma

Chaka nodded. "We believe that the parasite might be interacting in a symbiotic ma

"So they have to be infected young?" Cadma

"Just so, when the skull is still soft, still growing."

"Coevolution," Sylvia said. "Tens of thousands of years—"

"Or longer."

"Or longer. We never found any of those flukes in island grendels. Did we? Cassandra, grendel history. Gross anatomy. Abnormalities in brain structures of island grendels?"

"One with what appeared to be cancerous growth. Nothing else," the computer said.

"So, no flukes on Camelot," Sylvia said. "Are they common over here?"

Big Chaka waved again and the river fork appeared in relief. "Here," Big Chaka said, holding his voice steady against age, "the beaver grendels. They're not hunters. They're fisher folk. They're also cooperative, and a lot more intelligent than the grendels on Camelot were. That much is certain." He paused, and smiled thinly. "And this afternoon we found the same parasites in their waters." He displayed the image. The parasites were flattened ovals, something like a tapeworm. A ruler appeared beside one of the flukes: ten centimeters.

"The waters north of here swarm with them. We don't know what this means. Maybe something very bad. Maybe good. An intelligent grendel might learn that attacking humans means death. Such creatures can be taught. An intelligent grendel is also one which can travel further from its home waters without burning to death."

"Every silver lining has a cloud... " someone said.

"We will continue to look into this as we evaluate your new data."

"What about the bees?" Aaron called. "You said earlier today this might involve bees. I've been wondering how?"

"Patience," Chaka said. "I'm only now forming a theory. Note we have an abnormal grendel. We thought we understood grendels, and now it turns out we don't."

The cursor flicked, and the dissected grendel disappeared. Now they were looking at a delta-wing crab twice as large as a watermelon: a magnified "Avalon bee."

Big Chaka said, "Now, the bees are a problem of an entirely different order. They aren't really bees, of course. They're a flying version of the Avalon crab. They are highly organized. Some varieties are carnivorous."

Sylvia exclaimed, "Oh, don't tell us they're parasitized too!"

Chaka Senior smiled thinly. "No. I wouldn't do that. But they certainly have a level of organization that wouldn't embarrass any terrestrial bee colony. And that may be enough. Intelligence need not be the product of a single brain. A colony can behave intelligently."

He paused for a moment. "Indeed, in many ways you and I are colonies of dissimilar cells, and our—minds—may be the products of a number of independent actors. So may it be with infected grendels—and with bee colonies as well."

"Minsky," Little Chaka muttered. "A society of minds."

"You said a problem of a different order," Cadma

"I think it is now clear that these are the creatures which killed Joe and Linda Sikes."