Beowulf's Children

The hum of the skeeters could be felt through the floor of Robor, but even more clearly through the Plexiglas windows at the bow. Jessica stood just behind several of the Scouts. They crowded against the windows, and fought for a place at the front. Palms and faces pressed against the Plexiglas. Morning mist shrouded the sea below them. The loom at the eastern horizon was more blue than the rosy-fingered dawn images of Earth poetry.

They expected landfall about dawn, and the candidate Scouts had been awakened early for their first look—real sight, not virtual—of the mainland they'd heard about all their lives.

She sipped her coffee from a hand-fired cup sculpted with a grendel tail as handle. This wasn't the instant stuff that her parents had drunk for the first ten years on Avalon. Coffee took some getting used to. The first beans had been harvested and ground, the first cups served, when she was just nine years old. She still remembered Cadma

Aaron had persuaded her to try it again, years later.

She felt large, strong hands clasping her shoulders, and shivered a little at the touch. Those hands were so strong and so gentle, when they wanted to be. They were always commanding, but usually gentle as well. She kissed the fingertips, and said, "G'moming, Aaron. Sleep well?"

"Like a baby," he said. He picked up a broad-based conical cup and sipped as he peered out into the mist. The foredeck, one of the two upper above the cargo hold, was crafted of polished waxwood. This dark, smooth timber was one of the odd strains to be found south of the Isenstine. Carlos considered it a finer grain than teak, and thought that they could get a good trade going with Earth... if Earth was still there, he had added soberly.

A gust rolled Robor to port. The guidance computer noticed and the skeeter engines made their correction. The ship righted quickly, but the Grendel Biters ooh'd and ahh'd and pretended to lurch this way and that.

"Look," Aaron said, squeezing her shoulder. "Sunrise."

It wasn't, really. It was a false dawn, the first rosy blush of Tau Ceti along the eastern horizon. The glow would fade, then minutes later grow stronger, leading into the light of day.

Some of the other Second were in the lounge, and the rest of the Grendel Scouts were pouring in. The window was floor to ceiling and wall to wall, curving slightly outward, made of plastic strong enough to take an elephant's charge. The kids could lean against it all they wanted.

Jessica undogged a deck chair and moved it closer. "Sit a spell."

"Sure." Aaron dogged the chair to the deck. He sprawled out, relaxed.

Jessica watched him lazily. He was so relaxed about everything that he did, and so totally committed at the same time. If he sat, he was... just sitting. If he spoke before an audience, he was just speaking. If he climbed or surfed, he was just climbing or surfing. And if he was making love, he was doing that and nothing else. It was a relief. Every part of him seemed congruent with the others. Unfragmented. Whole. And when he wanted something? But that kind of ruthlessness was natural to someone so purposeful.

Was she in love with him? She wondered that herself, and hoped that the answer was yes. Her hand stole into his, and he clasped it.

A sliver of Tau Ceti had crept above the horizon now, and the reflected radiance pierced the mainland's cloud cover. The clouds were blue-black atop and silver beneath. All the passengers were awake now. Nobody wanted to miss the first general outing in over a year, and for most of the Grendel Scouts this was their first trip ever.

Justin brought up a chair and dogged it down. "How many candidates do you think we have?"

"For a chicken run?"

He nodded.

"Six are old enough."

"Think we can find a grendel for them?"

Nasty chuckle. "Not one for each, but we can sure run a lottery."

"Extra safety, okay? Lay an extra rifle on," Aaron said thoughtfully. Jessica examined him. Aaron Tragon was not usually the man who spoke for caution.

"Why?"

"Nothing goes wrong. Not now. We're about to get everything that we want." Unspoken: a permanent base on the mainland, ma

Even more unspoken: the real colony. If Aaron had his way, he would lead that colony. He would set the artificial wombs aboard Geographic pumping out a hundred children a month, and found a nation before he died. He would make the original landing little more than a footnote in the history of Avalon.

And why not? They were here to conquer a world.

The clouds were shot through with gold and silver now, and the mist was begi

The mainland was green and lush. The mist seemed almost to change color there ahead of them, coiling and snaking around the bay that opened before them. They watched the water—dark gray foaming to blue, waves rolling in toward a rocky coastline broken by irregular reefs. The mist was heavy, oily, oozed from the ground like smoke and hovered close to it.

Jessica's heartbeat sped up, and a light sour sensation of pleasure begin to boil in her stomach. This was only her sixth trip to the mainland.

The observation deck was getting crowded now. Carey Lou had drawn breakfast lots the night before. He served her a tray of scrambled eggs and sliced fruit. Jessica sipped and chewed and sighed, and felt that all was right with the world.

One of the first things that anyone noticed about the mainland was that it was more lush by far than Camelot Island... as if all the grendels had disappeared, but of course they hadn't. Still, farther north on the vast prairie they called the Scribeveldt, Geographic had seen beasts large enough to give a grendel pause. Geographic's cameras showed tracks tens of kilometers long, pale lines scrawled across the vast green-brown prairie. They crossed and curved elegantly, as if some entity were trying to write messages for the stars. It was natural to call the entities Scribes, though seen from orbit they were only squarish blobs at the track endpoints, prairie-colored and nearly featureless. Scribes had to be herbivorous, but everything beyond that was speculation.

There was a forest at the edge of the Scribeveldt, and sometimes Cassandra saw, or thought she saw, fairly large animals in herds. No one had ever seen a herd of grendels, and the only thing that ate grendels was other grendels. Robor rose to cross a ridge of splintered rock crested with dense green and green-blue foliage. The ridge looked like the bottom row of a skull's teeth. Just beyond it the rock dropped away into a dense green carpet of valley. An old river fed by snows on mountains far to the north snaked lazily along the valley floor until it cut through the ridge to the ocean.

"Grendel hunting grounds," Aaron said. The candidate Scouts stared down at the swamps and forests. "We stay out of there."

At the side of a pond beneath, a herd of something vaguely resembling a cross between a horse and a pig drank nervously. Robor was only about sixty feet up now, barely ten feet higher than the tree line, so that the Scouts could see more clearly.

With a sudden, violent splash, something exploded from the water, so fast that their eyes could hardly follow what happened next. One of the beasts at the edge of the water was bowled backward, smashed flat by the awesome velocity. Probably dead that instant. The other animals fled in all directions, in a sort of galloping waddle.