Beowulf's Children

"I have had eggs removed," she said, suddenly bitter. "In the case of my death, my percentage of the wealth will go to raising my child. I have listed possible donors—"

She looked away from him suddenly, and her cheeks flushed again.

Suddenly, wildly, Justin wondered if his was one of the names on the list.

"But as long as I'm alive, that's something I would like to try on my own.

Someday. Not now."

"Not now," he echoed.

"No." She combed her hair with her fingers. "Justin, what this is all about is the chance to declare a truce. What do you say?"

He thought about it. There were so many things that he wanted to talk about. But all of them faded into insignificance when compared with what really mattered—his relationship with Jessica. Here, with the two of them, it seemed more important still.

"Truce," he said. And held out his hand. Hers was firm, and dry, and warm.

Chapter 24

MISTRESS

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and suppos'd, tho' falsely, to be endow'd with a perfect simplicity and identity.

DAVID HUME

The builders lived in groups of six to eight, rarely more than ten. The lake was their world, and the lake was of their own making. They were fast and black and muscular. They could strip a tree in minutes to create new timber for their constructions.

They were still slow in comparison with the other, the queen who lived downstream from them.

Sometimes the queen came for the prey in the lake. Sometimes for the swimmers themselves, the young builders.

Once, many Turnings before, one of their number had challenged the queen for supremacy.

The queen had become a whirlwind of death. So had the builder and two of her siblings. The fight was vicious. It tore a hole in the dam itself, so that water and precious food slopped over into the river below. But when the fight was over, the three were dead.

The queen was barely wounded. The survivors tasted her anger in the water, the speed, the urge to kill them all. Most of them were on shore now, braving other danger so that the queen would not taste them in the water, but she could see them. Somehow she withheld the death that was hers to give.

No one had challenged her since.

Now she was back.

She swam upstream as she had before, crawling over the dam, never straying onto land. They smelled her in the water. The water carried a scratching sound, not loud, but audible everywhere in the lake, and every builder's nose and eyes broke surface. They saw the great wedge-shaped head emerge with something alive in her mouth.

The queen had come.

What the queen was doing was part of a pattern warped out of true. The light was turning weird. Something tremendous had been floating in the sky for days, never responding to challenge, nor interacting at all. The wrongness in the world encroached on the lake itself. They could taste changes in the water and air, changes that rang down in their bones.

The queen knew it too. She had made four trips in as many turnings of the sun, and each time she had carried a similar burden.

Not for an instant did they forget the queen's blinding speed. She moved slowly, carefully, and the builders watched with respect.

Between the queen's teeth she held a live swimmer. Not one of the queen's own children—but another builder child, from another stream and another lake.

She had brought three of these, tired and feeble but alive. One had died from the distance the queen had carried it between water holes, and damage from the great, serrated teeth.

The queen set the newcomer in the water. It floated for a moment, then began to twitch its tail, then to move.

And the builders slowly, carefully approached it. It began to swim. They nudged it along. The other young butted it, but the builders were a friendly clan. Even during the best of times there would have been no challenge.

Change was coming. They must keep to the water, for the Death Wind seemed to be everywhere these days. The builders were distracted; they would not challenge the queen's guest.

The queen slipped into the water, gliding like death. She vanished beneath its surface, and came up with one of the lens-crabs that lived in the builder-made pond, a prey-creature. It flipped and flashed just once.

The queen moved like the owner of all creation, smoothly through the water, along the length and breadth of the lake. The very Lady of the Lake.

"Did you see that?" Justin said, astonished.

"Would have been hard to miss. Cassandra?"

"I have recorded all of it."

"What do you make of it?"

"Please narrow your question."

"I seem to be looking at some kind of grendel social interaction," Justin said. "I know that's ridiculous, but there it is."

Jessica nodded. "The grendel brought those others—those huge hands!

They must be specialized to the task of building dams—"

"Beaver grendels—"

"Brought them a sacrifice. I thought that it was food of some kind. Apparently it wasn't. The beavers gathered around and helped to guide the baby—that's almost certainly what it was—around in the pond until it could swim by itself."

"Grendels cooperating in a snowstorm. Grendels carrying the young of other grendels in their mouths. What in the hell were our parents dealing with on Camelot?"

Jessica's right eyebrow went up. "Retarded grendels?"

"Right. So what do we do? We can destroy this entire ecology—"

"Not on your life."

Jessica took them up another two hundred feet. "Cassandra. Route a message to Shangri-La and Camelot. I want an alternate path. This is the first such ecology we've found, and I want to preserve it."

"Checking now," Cassandra said.

Jessica raised her right eyebrow again. "Do you have any objections to that?"

"No, I'm with you," Justin said.

"I was wondering if you thought that it was a little flaky. You know, grendel cult and all of that?"

Justin was looking down out of the side of the skeeter, at the shimmering water hole far beneath them. Within it, there was a world that none of them had ever known.

"No. Whatever is going on there, it would be an absolute sin to destroy it."

Jessica twinkled, and squeezed his hand. For the first time in months, he felt that they were operating on the same frequency. She nodded her head happily. "Thank you," she said. And then, impulsively, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

His cheek burned, and he wasn't completely certain that he understood why.

Cassandra said, "Your alternate path is approved. You will head west by fifteen degrees—"

The second water hole was smaller. They'd found a grendel carcass lying seven meters away from the water's edge. They'd left it untouched. Justin lay thirty meters farther out, flat on his stomach behind a bush, and examined the scene through war specs.

"What do you think?" he asked into his mike.

Jessica answered from her vantage point in the skeeter above. "I think that the grendel who owns the water hole got into a fight for supremacy. It must have been something to see."

"All right. Hit it."

She brought the skeeter in to five meters above the water and dropped a wad of cotton scented with speed. Alien speed, guaranteed to make a grendel crazy.

Justin watched. The skeeter throbbed. The water lapped at the edge of the pool.

And nothing else.

"Try it again," he whispered, and she did. Splash. And then nothing.

The sound of his own breathing grew almost unendurably loud. There was something wrong here.