Beowulf's Children

The descent took five hours. There was still enough day left to make a few kilometers before camp.

The grass was almost waist high, blue-green, and rich. The trikes plowed furrows in it as they jetted around.

Justin's mare chewed happily at the grass. Analysis had showed it would be digestible; they wouldn't need to bring much animal food in by skeeter. Justin leaned down and plucked a strand, took a tiny bite, and tucked it back between his rear molar and his gum. It chewed sweet-sour, not bad at all.

In the future, this would be cattle country. Trikes zipped about, stopping here and there to make recordings and snip samples for Cassandra to muse over later.

The computer whispered in his ear. "I see an odd flower. Turn to the left again, please."

He did, and couldn't see what Cassandra was talking about. But, "There we are. Would you get one of those, please?"

The herd was behind him, and if the computer wanted something, he was going to have to get it now, before hooves and teeth destroyed it.

The flower was in the middle of a patch of blue grass, and there was a bug-like thing crawling around it.

"What is it, Cassandra?"

"Closer... "

He got closer, and suddenly saw something of real interest.

The beetle was tearing at a fibrous bulb on the plant The bulb, on the other hand, seemed to be made of an interwoven web of fibers... and some of the plant's fleshy leaves was composed almost exclusively of those fibers, but pointed skyward.

A tiny lizard-like thing, not much larger than the tearing insect, climbed the stalk and attacked the leaf. Almost immediately, the leaf began to change color, from fleshy red to blue, oozing a blue exudate.

The lizard-like thing tried to escape, but the exudate had it caught. The fibers stirred. They wound about the lizard, catching it tight. The lizard's struggles slowly bowed the plant, and the leaf bent and turned upside down.

Fascinated by the process, which had taken no more than five minutes, Justin took another look at the beetle, still working hard at the other leaf. It was in there now, and it was... eating something.

"Wow," he said. "Cassandra, what do you see?"

"A microecology that needs study," she said calmly.

"I see a scavenger hijacking a flesh-eating plant," Justin said for the record. "Pretty sneaky, I'd say."

"Sample, please."

Justin shook the plant, and the little bug suddenly noticed him. It turned—and spread disproportionately large jaws. It couldn't have been larger than his thumb, but the wings trebled its size. It shot off toward the horizon so fast it nearly disappeared.

Faster than hell. So fast that...

"Cassandra." He didn't like the stress in his voice. "Was that bug on speed?"

"It is possible," the computer said. It sounded like an admission.

"I believe we have found another speed-using species. Correlations?

Conclusions?"

"Observed data indicate this is a scavenger. No other conclusions valid with existing data."

That made him feel a little more comfortable, but not much. He summoned a trike to take the specimens.

"Skeeter reports a large animal in your vicinity, south-southwest of you, Katya."

He and Katya putted along in the two-seater trike. The loss of Stu weighed on all of them, but especially Katya. She had clocked over a thousand hours with him in that skeeter. It had to hurt.

Her night had been filled with bad dreams. This morning she didn't remember. She was brisk and perky, as if she'd slept better than Justin.

They had buried Stu where he fell. They all wanted some kind of ceremony, but Aaron didn't agree. "We will remember him at Shangri-La," he said. Stu was a Bottle Baby, never adopted. No relatives among the First. Aaron and the others were the only family Stu had, and they let Aaron speak for them...

Now they were taking back the trophy, their only intact grendel head.

A poor trade.

He found his hand creeping to cover hers. She widened her fingers to accept his. The small motion seemed somehow more intimate than the times she had welcomed him into her body. Her eyes, golden with flecks of green, sparkled at him. The bandage was still in place.

"Let's take a look," she said.

Justin said, "Cassandra, give us a local scan for grendels."

All of Cassandra's considerable eyes and ears were suddenly concentrated on the area. A relief map glowed on the hologram stage, blank at first, filling in rapidly.

There were no grendel-bearing water sources short of the river thirty-five klicks away.

They would avoid the river. The herd would water tomorrow. Their skeeters would have plenty of time to clear out the water hole before the herd arrived. Now, where was Cassandra's "large animal"?

Justin popped the clutch and headed out toward the site, south-southwest. The grass grew higher than his head. He tried to keep one eye ahead and one for the little holostage where Cassandra had given them a skeeter's-eye hologram.

It showed a cleanly geometric trapezoid, pale brown on a baize background. An Avalon crab, Justin thought, seen from nearly overhead. Where were the legs? They must be underneath. That looked like tufts of hair along the edges. And he ought to be getting close.

He could see pterodons circling overhead... and nothing ahead. He was seeing through a curtain of grass. Then he wasn't, because they'd driven out of the grass into a neatly cut lawn. He gri

"We're looking at the aft end. Justin, we've found the Scribe!"

Scribe? Perspective came. It was almost half the horizon, a geographical feature moving slowly away from them. It was camouflaged, but that wasn't it. He hadn't seen it because it was too big!

Katya was laughing at him. He'd gasped like a dying man. Justin said, "Cassandra, sanity check. Could this be the Scribe? The thing that draws paths we see from orbit?"

"It leaves a path identical to the Scribe tracks," the computer said.

"Absent conflicting data this is a valid conclusion."

They moved closer. No sign of eyes, this side of the beast. Not much detail at all, just the edge of a tremendous shell, the color of bare earth, moving slowly away.

It didn't waddle. It cruised. In its wake the grass stood a few inches high, dotted with truncated haystacks two feet tall. Droppings?

Something like a tremendous flattened crab slid up to one of the heaps, moving no faster than the Scribe itself, and over it without a pause. A juvenile?

Talking to himself, talking for Cassandra's records, Justin drove the trike into the grass again. Three pterodons were circling high above him. He rode half-blind through the prairie grass, swinging wide around the now invisible beast. "Don't want to startle it," he told Katya, and was suddenly whooping.

A small fist whacked him between the shoulders. "What?"

He could hardly speak for laughter. "Pictured it rearing up. Pawing the air. Don't mind me."

He must be far ahead of it now. There was a stand of horsemane trees, uphill. He pulled the trike into their shade, turned off the engine, and waited. The pterodons were still with him. A fourth came to join them. One peeled off and flew toward the Scribe.

A thing that size... it wouldn't try to plow trees under, would it?

They were on a slight rise, three kilometers ahead of the chamel herd. Down below them, now more than two hundred meters away, was the largest creature that Justin had ever seen in his life. A crab... clearly derived from a crab shell, like the Avalon crabs, like the fixed-wing birds. But you could build a city on its back! Or a village anyway...

In fact, a pterodon was landing on its back to join more than two dozen others. Five merged circles, a communal nest, sprawled along the front of the shell.