Beowulf's Children

And hang me up until I'm dead

If I don't bring back Chicago,'

He knew the world was round-o... "

Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. He leaned back and looked up at the stars, at the constellations.

"Still pretty much the same as they were for my great-grandmother," Katya murmured.

"Yep. Ten light-years doesn't go as far as it used to."

"For forty days and forty nights

They sailed the broad Atlantic

Colombo and his lousy crew

For want of a screw were frantic... "

Katya was working her hands under his clothes, giggling breathily. It was getting harder to concentrate on the song.

Why qualify that, Justin thought in a happy daze. Truth was, it was just plain getting harder.

"They spied a whore upon the shore

And off went coats and collars

In fifteen minutes by the clock

She made ten million dollars..."

By the end of the song (in which Christopher Columbus returned to the Old World with an impressive assortment of New World microorganisms), Justin and Katya had retired to their sleeping bag. He protested that he was actually much too sleepy to be of any service to her. Her clever sculptor's hands soon made a liar of him. Within a few minutes, he found himself rolling on a warm and familiar tide, one that swept him slowly to the peak, and then dropped him swiftly, but gently, into the fires below.

And finally he lay at the edge of sleep, enfolded in Katya's arms. He murmured, "Thank you, ma'am," into the hollow of her throat.

"You're welcome, sir," she chuckled dreamily, and somehow managed to effect a curtsy right there in the sleeping bag.

She said something after that, something about wondering if there wasn't a river the two of them could find, here, on the mainland. He gave her some kind of answer... river equals grendels, you little idiot.... And the next thing he knew he was dreaming of childhood, of games with Jessica and Aaron and Chaka.

Games that Aaron always seemed to win.

Chapter 22

GHOSTS AND WEIRDS

Take, for instance, a twig and a pillar, or the ugly person and the great beauty, and all the strange and monstrous transformations. These are all leveled together by Tao. Division is the same as creation; creation is the same as destruction.

CHUANG-TZU, On Leveling All Things

Downslope, motion in the falling snow. Old Grendel held her breathing slow and even. The snow was melting on her. She was cold, and that was a rare thing. But if speed flowed in her arteries now, she would die.

Again, the flurries rippled. Old Grendel raged. The weirds were hers.

But she was alone, she had always been alone, it was the way of her kind.

She could do nothing but observe. There were grendels in the snow.

The snow grendel waited with her sisters. The fires within them were banked and cooled by a mantle of snow, so that the smells of courage and danger were faint. Cold One knew there was meat hereabouts. She knew it by its smell.

These were the ones who could vanish. A puzzle beast could stand only a speed-sprint away, meat for the taking, and be gone in the next instant, neither seen nor smelled. But puzzle beasts could be taken if the wind was in your face.

Ordinarily she didn't like sisters nearby. But puzzle beasts would feed all, and in fact her sisters gave her a better chance in the hunt. While the prey scattered, fleeing the others, she could lie in wait and pick one off. She'd done it in the past.

Puzzle beasts, and something else: she could smell them too. The weirds were here. The world was turning weird, and these were part of the weirdness. They too were chameleons of sorts: they tottered on two legs, but they could change their skins, and they could ride floating or flying things, or puzzle beasts, or creatures as fast as grendels on speed, that smelled of tar. Caution.

Slowly, she inched forward.

Justin came awake in two stages. In the first stage he was halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and still aware of his dreams. He dreamed of dancing fire, and of snow smothering the flame.

Then the dying flame began to whi

He popped awake almost instantly, his hand curled around the grendel gun at his side. "Get the skeeters up," he yelled. Katya was dressing and rolling out of the sleeping bag at the same time, out of the tent in less than ten seconds.

He crawled out and sca

His collar beeped. Cassandra. "Five grendel-sized masses moving toward the camp. Alert."

He slipped on his war specs. Cassandra automatically gave him thermal and starlight scope. Nothing. A mantle of snow covered the ground, and more drifted from the sky. Was there really anything out there? Dammit, they were fifteen klicks from open water...

The chamels ran in circles. When they got to the edge of the pen their electronic collars gave them pain for their efforts—but the pain was nothing compared with the terror. They screamed. Their hooves threw up small bits of snow.

Snow.

Freeze me blind. "Cassandra," he whispered. "I want a weather report."

"Mild storm front moving in from the north."

"Where is the largest body of water south of us?"

"A lake approximately twenty kilometers south."

"General comm circuit. Everyone, up and at ‘em! Grendels coming. The wind has carried our scent and the storm has let them get here. Grendels in the snow! General alert!"

"Right," someone answered.

"Perimeter defense," Justin said. "War specs on thermal. Auditory updates to everyone else, on the minute. We better use local nodes—don't risk bouncing the signal topside in this weather."

More information, but less computing power for resolution. It would probably balance out.

"Get our best pilots up. Katya, get airborne." She was a superb pilot.

This would be her most severe test.

He checked the charge on his grendel gun. She wasn't the only one who would be tested today.

Jessica pulled the chamel pup back into the herd, got it to huddle against one of the females. Her war specs revealed four heat-shapes crouching in the outer darkness. They were waiting. Cooperating? Or did they merely tolerate each other when there was meat to share? The chamel scent was strong enough to attract every grendel from here to the river. End it now.

She touched her collar. "I don't want to wait for them," she said.

"This thing will get out of control. I say that we go find them."

"I like that idea," Aaron said. "Skeeter One, Skeeter Six. Let's go hunting."

Justin adjusted his war specs. They were synchronized with the rifle sights—making not quite a smart gun, but close to it. Visual, enhanced infrared, and motion-sensor data was coordinated with the rifle in overlapping lines of pale green and red. When the images aligned he had a lock. And the grendel was moving.

There! Grendel flash, alignment—

It ran straight at him, faster than he'd believed possible, faster even than the grendel images in their computer training classes, faster than a living thing could move, and it was coming for him, hot death on the move.