The Leagacy of Heorot

Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes

The Leagacy of Heorot

Thou must now look to the needs of the nation;

Here dwell I no longer for Destiny calleth me!

Bid thou my warriors after my funeral pyre

Build me a burial-cairn high on the sea-cliff's head;

So that the wayfarers Beowulf's Barrow

Henceforth shall name it.

Thou art the last of all the kindred of Wagmund!

Wyrd has swept all my kin all the brave chiefs away!

Now I must follow them!

Beowulf, King of the Geats

Chapter 1

CAMELOT

They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the nuts work loose.

KIPLING, "The Sons of Martha"

"Cadzie! Wait up!"

Cadma

He politely busied himself, adjusting the rangefinder on his camera. After months on Avalon he still found the shadows too sharp and the sunlight too blue, subtle things, noticed only when he used familiar equipment like the camera.

The Colony sprang into high relief, and the recorder in his backpack vibrated noiselessly to make a holotape recording of the network of buildings and plowed fields and animal pens that stretched out in the valley below. The Colony was ten kilometers farther on, but the electronically enhanced lenses brought its low buildings close enough to touch.

The image jolted as Sylvia slid into him. She caught herself with a palm against his back. "Ouch. Sorry."

"Here." He handed her the camera. "See what we've built." She gratefully accepted the excuse to rest. Her short brown hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, and her freckled cheeks were flushed.

Six miles, downhill, and Sylvia was tiring. In the last hour she'd found a dozen reasons to stop. Stones in her walking shoes. Burs inside her blouse.

Cadma

Ernst loped down the slope. A brace of the large silver fishlike creatures the Colony had dubbed "samlon" slapped against his muscular back. His grin split his broad face from ear to jug ear. "Tiring out, Sylvia! You ought to work out! Exercise! I can show you."

Sylvia laughed. "Not right now, thanks, Ernst."

"Later."

Poor bastard. Ernst Cohen had been the solar system's leading authority on reproductive biology, and brighter than hell. You could watch it at cocktail parties: everyone else talking, and suddenly Ernst would say maybe two sentences, and half the room would go silent as the rest of them digested the implications. That was ten light-years ago. Ernst had come out of frozen sleep with the mind of a child.

Sylvia sca

"Terrific shot, isn't it?" Cadma

"Just fine," she murmured. She turned, warming him with her smile.

"But I'll be happy to get back home."

She was almost twenty years younger than he. Sylvia was all quick wit and golden eyes that glowed with life above a galaxy of freckles. Her pregnancy changed nothing. It was wonderful, it was frustrating: being with her made him forget the years and the aches. It's the eyes. She's plain except for the eyes. God help me.

The pass they traversed was at the base of the tallest mountain on the island. The highest of its double peaks was just above thirty-two hundred meters. Both were shrouded with mist. The delicate bat shapes of the pterodons glided in and out of the cloud cover with barely a flutter of their membranous wings. Ernst stared up at them, his face a mask of puzzled concentration. What would Dr. Ernst Cohen have made of them? They aren't really pterodons. There are other oddities. He'd have loved it here—

"They woke him twice," Sylvia said. "Maybe if they'd just left him cold—"

"We did need him. We did," Cadma

A square kilometer of plastic-coated solar cells glittered silver on the hills above the Colony. Today's sunshine meant independence from the fission power plants of the landers. An actual fusion plant would be constructed within the next four months. Then the Colony would be fully established, and the spread of man across the face of Tau Ceti Four could really begin.

Across Camelot, anyway. Eighty kilometers of stormy ocean separated the island from the mainland. A New Guinea-sized island was quite ambitious enough for humankind's first interstellar colony. Zack had known what he was doing. Isolate the problems...

So where were the problems?

"Snow up there," Cadma

Sylvia handed him back his camera. Voice carefully neutral, she said, "You don't have to go to the continent, Cadma

"Nothing that any other able body couldn't do."

"You're not a geologist. You'd be doing grunt work anyway." She looked down at him, sighed in exasperation and gave him her hand for balance as he stood. "Do you just want to go hunting dinosaurs?"

"Sure! What boy doesn't want to bag a brontosaurus?" He slipped the camera back into its holster at his side. "Sometimes I wish we'd brought fetuses for a kodiak, or a few mountain lions..."

He was smiling as he said it, but Sylvia wondered.

Cadma

Sylvia gri

She linked her arm with Cadma

"Oh, come now. I'm just a poor pregnant lady biologist who appreciates the presence of a strong man—and Terry's known you for years."

"I may not be as safe as you think."

She snorted. "Fat chance. When I'm sure you want my body and not my mind, I'll faint."