Beowulf's Children

But he could still move slowly and smoothly enough to approach animals more closely than Chaka would have believed possible. He was still Avalon's premier zoologist. And he was still Dad.

The birdie watching Big Chaka began vibrating its motor wings. Its foreclaws anchored it to a branch, and the branch began to quiver. A high-pitched whistling whine rose up. The other two birdles stopped eating and began rustling as well. They gripped branches with two forward claws, but the little paddle-shaped wings aft blurred with their vibration. The whine became louder and louder, until the trees rustled with it.

Little Chaka wasn't alarmed, not even when the call was taken up distantly by first one, and then a chorus. Communicating threat? Summoning help?

Big Chaka retreated a foot, and then another foot, and the birdles began to calm again. They returned to their meal. The distant droning died away. Silence returned to the forest.

An almost boyish grin wreathed Big Chaka's face as he slumped back to his son "Not exactly a colony, too much independent action for that. More like small family clusters-maybe three to six. Possibly three sexes, or two fertile and one neuter to watch the nest while the others forage, like Avalon Type Six sea crabs. We'll get samples later."

He linked arms with his son as they walked back uphill. "And you call this Eden?"

Little Chaka nodded. "It's where we take the Grendel Biters. There are things they need to learn about this planet, and this is a good place for it."

"I can hear ru

"Always assume grendels. Trust me. We don't take chances. But there is a good overhang between us and the river here. The clearest path for a grendel to reach us is over a kilometer of bone-dry upgrade. We have motion sensors strung every twenty meters-nothing larger than a Joey can get up here without alerting us, and we have good people on the grendel guns. They're death. It's safe." He frowned. "Of course, we thought Deadwood was safe, too. But nothing bad has ever happened here."

Big Chaka nodded. "Things are changing, though." He squinted up at Tau Ceti, a fuzzy ball through high clouds. "Things are changing." He walked carefully along the path. Every few feet he stopped to inspect a leaf, to study a scavenger insectoid hauling away a carcass five times its size, to scrape away a sample of fungus and deposit it in a glassine envelope. Then he made notes in his log, and photographed the sample lying on the open pages of the logbook, with the place he'd found it as background.

"You know," he said, thoughtfully, "I wish that you could have been on Earth. Then you would understand the wealth spread out in front of you. Everywhere you look, all you have to do is reach out your hand, and there is a new creature, a new plant. Something new, something new." With that faraway expression on his face Little Chaka thought he resembled a wrinkled black Buddha. "Earth had... run out of new."

He smiled crookedly. The smile broadened as he spotted a tiny corkscrew tree growing in the shadow of its parent. "Oh!" he cooed. "A perfect duplicate of its parent-except see, it's a lefty, its trunk spirals in the opposite direction... "

He was that way as they headed back up to the mine, hobbling here and there, studying this, commenting on that-never complaining about the distance or the grade, although some of it must have been exhausting. Chaka's emotions were torn. On the one hand, he was still nervous about the entire area. On the other hand, it was wonderful to see his father every day, exploring with him, and hearing him lecture, just as he had day after wonderful day when he was a child.

They were three kilometers from the mine, far enough around the first bend in the trail that they couldn't be seen. Big Chaka sat down on a rock and loosed one of his shoes.

"Tired, Father?"

"No, I think I have something in my shoe. Son, tell me about this base camp you're setting up."

"Well, it's not so much me setting it up-"

"I know. Aaron seems to be in charge, and I have noticed that he needs no advice from my generation." He inspected the inside of his left shoe. "Of course, he wasn't offered much advice by Colonel Weyland."

"I noticed that."

"You and everyone else." Big Chaka sighed. "Inevitable, I suppose."

"Dad, it's no big deal."

"Not to you. Of course not. But to us—Son, when we first came here we ignored Cadma

"Your talisman," Little Chaka said.

"Talisman, wizard-of course he is none of these things. But I am told you have decided on a location for your base camp. Indulge me by telling me of it."

"Sure. It's something over three hundred and twenty kilometers north of here, in the mountains but there's a large flat area. No big streams but a lot of springs and little streams. The flat is a meadow."

"Yes, I know the area," Big Chaka said.

"Sir?"

"From the maps. It looks dangerous. There is a forest nearby."

"Only a small forest, but it's a forest. Tender leaves. Very edible. Dad, there are Joeys in the rocks, and ground animals in the forest. I don't think a grendel has ever been there."

"It will put you right at the edge of skeeter range."

"Until we get the solar collectors set up," Little Chaka said. "But it faces south, and we've got big rolls of Begley cloth. We'll get it spread out, and there's sunlight most days. It won't be long before we generate enough power to recharge the skeeters there." He rubbed his hands together. "Then we can do some real exploring. Another hundred and fifty kilometers and we're at the edge of the Scribeveldt!"

"That I envy," Big Chaka said.

"Well, you could come with us-"

Big Chaka laughed gently. "You know better. I would not be welcome among your friends." He put his shoe back on and fastened it. "Be careful, son. We don't know what killed Joe Sikes and Linda Weyland, but we are very sure of what killed nearly every one of us during the Grendel Wars. Don't be so concerned about an unknown danger that you ignore a known one.

Now we ought to be getting back-" He stopped to look at a colorful lichen.

"In a moment."

Little Chaka was still a little nervous about these side trips. They were too far from Deadwood's reinforced Kevlar shelters for his comfort. But Big Chaka won that argument, as his father usually did.

On their first day at the mine site, he had wandered far afield, to the very edge of the tree line. "Chaka," he had said. "Look at the density, only five hundred meters from the death site. Nothing has razed this. There are Joeys in the trees, and birdles, and these little insect fellows. Whatever killed Joe and Linda also ate the dogs. Ate all of the organic material in their clothes. It was a freak occurrence. In truth, this is probably the safest place on the planet now-this particular lightning won't strike here again for quite a while." When his son seemed unconvinced, he added, "If you're worried, carry a couple of Cadma

"I'm worried. Grendels can't bite through the Kevlar, but a bite could still crush a bone-"

"You have grendels on the brain. You studied those skeletons as carefully as I did. No pressure had been applied. No broken bones. No tooth marks. Scrapes, yes, something scraped the meat from the bones, but it was small, not the teeth of a grendel. Whatever killed Joe and Linda was no grendel-unless that grendel had cooked them for hours and then sucked the meat off the bones."

Chaka grimaced at his father's morbid imagery. So what was the danger? The Kevlar sacks should theoretically protect from an acid cloud, or... or whatever the hell it was that had killed their friends. The current guess was something biological rather than chemical. A memory stirred in his mind, something from an old science-fiction novel about giant protozoans lurching out of the swamps of Venus to digest unwary space folk. There were movies of large bloodsucking monsters among the stars.