Beowulf's Children

There was a general murmur, and Justin saw Edgar Sikes's head come up.

Edgar's fingernails must have been digging holes in the wooden table.

"Please explain," Cadma

"Look at this," Little Chaka said, and the cursor danced over the image. It didn't look like a terrestrial bee at all. "A tough shell that sprouts fixed wings for gliding. Motor wings aft. The forelimbs are modified as claws. The key was my son's recording of this activity." The cursor moved again, and now there were animated holograms of a swarm of the bee-like creatures feeding on a dead grendel. With the grendel to give perspective they could now see that the "bees" were actually the size of Sylvia's palm, plum-sized, five to seven centimeters across: much bigger than the thumb-sized leaf cutters around Paradise. "They scavenge on grendels."

"So?"

"So... so if a grendel dies, burns itself up with speed, it isn't going to completely expend the oxidizer. The scavenger which eats grendels is going to have to develop a mechanism for metabolizing speed."

"Good Lord," Sylvia said.

Big Chaka slipped his glasses off, and polished them carefully. "What we think is that the bees... or whatever we decide to call them... are an order of necrophage flying pseudocrustacea. They like grendels for food, and either scavenge them, or trap and kill a grendel who can't get to water. Further, I believe that they've done it for millions of years, long enough to have either evolved a means either to produce speed themselves, or to store it. Store it and use it."

"Bees on speed," Cadma

Christ on a crutch."

"What in hell is a bee?" Hal Preston asked.

"Come on, you know," Katya said. "There are hives of them out by the berry farms. Bees, you know, they fly and if you get too close to the hive they sting? You need them to fertilize fruit trees—"

"Here!" Edgar Sikes cut in impatiently. Among the holograms around Big Chaka appeared another: a Terrestrial flying insect as big as a dog. "Dr. Mubutu, you had to have some reason for calling them bees? And it sure wasn't the way they're built."

"No, it was the way they build," Big Chaka said. "Earthly bees make elaborate nests. They collect nectar from local plants and use it to make stuff they can store, They're stratified into castes, with a queen to lay all the eggs and drones to fertilize her and myriads of workers. Well, we know that these Avalon bees are stratified, though we don't have details yet. We've only studied the leaf-eating bees, but their nests are like underground cities. Edgar, they even have the bee trick of using antibiotics. Do you remember that?"

Trish touched Edgar's elbow; he bit back a venomous answer. " ‘Fraid not. Doctor."

"Honey would rot if bees couldn't mix the nectar with an antibiotic. Some Terrestrial bees even make their honey from carrion. Most Avalon bees make their honey from leaves, but they have their own antibiotic, and again, they can use it to preserve meat."

Edgar sat down abruptly. He looked gray. He'd be seeing the same images that were ru

Whispered conversations buzzed around him. Justin noticed Jessica staring at the holograms, frowning at what she had heard. Then, tentatively, she raised her hand. "Chaka. If we assume that the bees have been around for, say, a million years... mightn't that explain what happened to our mining apparatus?"

The room was dead silent.

Aaron was the first to speak. "Freeze me alive! You've hit it!

Fossilized bees in the coal? The speed might act like flecks of dynamite under circumstances like that—"

Suddenly the entire room was vibrant with discussion. Aaron stood in the middle of it. "I think that this is cause for celebration," he said.

"Why is that? These bees—"

"Don't you see? I think that we are entitled to an apology. For months, one ugly question has hovered over the entire colony: Who sabotaged the mines?

"And there was a second question: Who or what killed Linda and Joe? Now we've answered both questions. The bees came through the pass—Cassandra, what were the weather conditions at Deadwood Pass when Joe and Linda were killed?"

"A hot dry sirocco wind blowing from the western high desert."

"Sure," Aaron said. "And that's what did it. The wind picked up a swarm, blew them across the desert and over the pass. Linda and Joe had the bad fortune to be in the way. They were stripped to the bone in minutes by starving, disoriented necrophage bees."

Sylvia looked devastated. "We were so careful."

"Careful to avoid the Avalon ecology rather than understand it," Cadma

"What?"

"Eden Oasis. Just luck the wind didn't blow that way while it was full of Grendel Scouts! The worst of it is, I knew all along the only real safety was in understanding what we faced, and I didn't do anything about it."

"I didn't want you killed by the dragon," Sylvia whispered.

"We all thought the same thing, amigo," Carlos said. "We did." He gestured toward Aaron and the others. "They had a different view."

"But you do see the danger?" Big Chaka said carefully.

Aaron nodded. "It's a real danger, but being eaten by bees is no worse than being stung to death by a colony of them back on Earth. Individually, they are probably pretty harmless, and anyway they generally stay in the lowlands where we don't go. In some circumstance that we don't completely understand, they swarm and can reach highlands like Deadwood Pass. Fine. We will study them, and become aware of them. We can build shelters. And now, more than anything else we need to find out—why did Cadzie Weyland survive?"

There rose a buzz of speculation. Big Chaka cleared his throat. "We need to learn more about bees."

"So let's go on a bee hunt!" Carlos cried. "Katya and I know where to start in the morning."

"Not alone, though," Aaron said.

"We will not leave the safe area—"

"I'm afraid there is no safe area," Aaron said. "Not since we saw the grendel this afternoon. Chaka, just how could a grendel be there?"

Little Chaka shook his head. "I have no idea. I would have taken a mighty oath that there was, there could be, no grendel there."

"Avalon Surprise," Sylvia said.

Chapter 36

BEE HUNT

Li

The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia

Cadma

She reached across the table to take his hand. "It wasn't your fault, you know."