Beowulf's Children
Chapter 28

TITHE

An honest God is the noblest work of man.
-ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL, Gods, Part I

    "Home tomorrow," Justin said. Aaron nodded, and accepted a cup of coffee from him. The valley was swollen with mist, and it rolled across them almost sleepily. 
    Justin had taken the early-morning shift.
    Aaron sipped at the coffee. "We're going through the main valley. We have a couple of choices there, you know." 
    Justin nodded. "Here be grendels. They're too far from the main camp to do us any great harm." 
    "But the herd will come close enough for trouble." 
    "I say we take the long way around." Justin scratched in the dust with his toe. Trees, hills, a stream. "If we take the southern route, we can avoid the problem." 
    "We do, on the other hand, have to ford the stream. No choice about that."
    Grendels were death in the water. The smartest thing to do was to kill everything grendel-sized before the eventuality even arose.
    "So," said Aaron. "What do you think?" 
    "This planet was here before we came, and it will be here after we're gone. I don't think we can kill everything we don't like. There has to be another way, and I want to find it."
    "I agree." Aaron marked a position upstream from the fording spot. "What say we seed the water with a freshly slaughtered steer? Draw the grendels up. We won't get them from further down--that's another grendel's territory, and there is plenty of food. Grendels don't fight unless they have to . . . especially the mainland varieties." 
    "What do you mean?"
    Aaron was thoughtful. "We never really studied grendel interactions, grendel behavior, beyond basic hunt and attack patterns. But doesn't it seem that these grendels can actually think? Plan? Observe? They're intelligent--much more than the First told us. They were here long before we were. I think that one day we may be able to communicate with them . . ." He stopped, and laughed. "Just dreaming, I guess. Let's get on with the day, huh?"
    What was it with Aaron and grendels? It gave Justin goose bumps. Aaron was sheer death in the grendel-shooting games, as if the cartoon grendels saw Aaron and just fell over.

    Old Grendel slept.
    The prey that lived in the lake would feed her until the end of things. She had eaten well the previous day, and in these times of long sleeps and quiet days, a single major feeding could last her ten to fifteen days before hunger grew unendurable.
    She occasionally roused from dream, disturbed by the daughters of God flying overhead. Their hum was the sound of the Death Wind. It frightened her down to her core, made her hunker down into the water and watch, just watch.
    Change was in the air. The light was hallucinatory; everything felt evanescent, transitory, tissue-thin. She sniffed the thousand scents of lesser life forms preparing themselves for the end of everything. Some began a madness of breeding; some avoided breeding entirely; some changed color or shape, or migrated, or entered a sleep from which even a grendel could not rouse them.
    You couldn't think, couldn't plan for the end of everything. But, drowsily, Old Grendel was trying . . . when the smell of blood snapped her fully awake.
    Three times within the past several days, she had followed such a scent. Each time she'd found a dead puzzle beast floating, in still water. After she had allowed it to ripen for a day or two, it tasted just fine. Last time, when she returned to her favorite resting spot, she noticed that large numbers of animals had passed her way: many puzzle beasts, a few of the two-legged weirds.
    The weirds flew through the air in humming flyers, the daughters of God. They walked; or they ran almost as fast as a sister on speed, riding strange shells that smelled of tar and lightning. They combined too many different smells in one. They didn't eat their own young. She knew this because she had come close enough to their nests to watch them.
    She had tested their defenses. They knew where she was before she could smell them. If she came close enough to make out distinct aspects of their behavior, they became alarmed. Twice they sent flying things in pursuit. But when she retreated, they did not attempt to engage.
    She found their roles of combat not entirely dissimilar to her own. They could move fast. They were hunters. They hoarded their young.
    Could they be a kind of grendel? There were builder grendels, and the great flat unmoving grendels of the north, and the snow grendels she'd had to fight twice in her life, and the kind that laid her swimmers in a stranger's pond . . .
    In her youth, Old Grendel had wandered far during the rainy seasons. Wanderlust and curiosity were somehow linked to the days when her head had nearly burst. When the pain faded it left behind a new clarity. She began to see ways that the world fit together. She developed a hunger of a different kind, that pulled her toward the blurry edges of the pattern that was the world.
    She followed the water.
    When she found water already stocked with one of her own kind, she fought. But if the taste in the water was alien . . . Two dissimilar grendels could share the same water. They snarled and snapped at each other, but managed somehow to keep the terrible speed under control. They could tolerate each other's presence, if each knew that to begin was to end.
    The weirds, now. Were they some new kind of grendel?
    The smell of blood from upstream was strong; but Old Grendel moved downstream by a little, away from the blood. She coated herself with mud, and burrowed deep. She extended her snorkel to breathe. And she waited, and watched.

    Chaka brought Skeeter II low in over the river thirty clicks south of Shangri-La. There was a grendel there, but no point in killing it. An empty ecological niche would merely attract a younger, faster monster. So he let sleeping grendels lie, and so far the arrangement had been a good one.
    Three times before, they had lured the grendel upstream with a slaughtered carcass. They had watched via camera. The first time she had dragged the meat back to her lair. Unsatisfactory. So they'd chained the meat to the ground. The grendel had to devour it there, and she did, after examining the area.
    And the third time they had taken their herd across in safety, because the grendel was busy eating. They had, in a matter of speaking, tithed to the grendel god. Aaron had insisted on it, and Chaka liked it as well.
    Today Chaka swept the river with his glasses, and saw nothing.
    "This is Skeeter Two. We have no contact at all." 
    "None?"
    "Nothing grendel-sized is moving. No heat source. I don't like it." 
    "And the river is running with blood, isn't it?" 
    "The ox was alive when we chained it in the river. We numbed it, sliced it, and let it bleed to death. I'm telling you, it should have done the job." 
    "Wait ten minutes," Aaron said.
    Chaka wheeled around. This was a good life. There was beauty, and endless discovery and growth. But it required vigilance. His life had always required vigilance. Since the first time that he had become aware of the difference between himself and the other children, he had been vigilant.
    Since the first time that he had formed the union with Aaron and Trish and the others, he had been vigilant. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Who said that? His father?
    He pulled his mind back to the task at hand.
    Chaka had been adopted, mentored by Big Chaka. Big Chaka was from America. Little Chaka's seed had come from New Guinea. Still, there was a connection, and it wasn't the odd African name. Chaka smiled to think of it, and looked forward to the visit from the mainland, for the sloping shadow of the big dirigible, and the cargo and people she would bring.
    He checked all of his meters. "Cassandra?" 
    "Negative, Chaka," she said.
    Damn. There was just nothing warm and willing to move down there. At least--nothing that could be lured by blood. He had long thought that grendels were more intelligent than anyone gave them credit for.
    "All right," he said finally. "Let's dump speed." 
    One of the other skeeters dropped speed pellets into the water. They dissolved almost instantly. The water seethed with scent.
    "Let's see," Chaka said.

    Old Grendel was in agony. The smells of blood and speed were overwhelming. She wanted to meet these strange creatures on their own ground, to learn.
    There was so much that was new about them.
    But she couldn't do that. Her whole self wanted to attack. If she came near them, she would tear them to pieces, or they would kill her. She would learn nothing. All she could do was fight against her own deepest instincts, feel the speed boiling within her, and lie buried in the mud and the silt and wait.
    And dream.
    She remembered a time when she had no dreams.
    She remembered when the world had become so strange. When the colors and shapes and smells became patterns. Agony came with the change. She had suffered for a full cycle of seasons, and there were times when she was so sick and crazed that she completely forgot what it had ever been to feel well and whole. And then . . . and then her head felt heavy. Swollen. On the far side of agony came an awareness, a newness.
    That was when she began to remember things. To think of the images that came at night, and wonder where they stopped and the world of food and fear began.
    That was when she found she could tell the speed to stop, to go away. When she began to master the hidden essence of herself. That was the beginning of everything.
    She knew that something had happened. And she knew that she wanted to pass this something on, a gift for her own young.
    Perhaps once a year, she would chase down one of her own swimmers. Quite a chase it would be, too. How was a swimmer to know that the ballistic shape swooping through the water didn't mean to eat it? Every similar memory ended in water clouded with gore. But once a year the jaws would close more gently.
    A swimmer could survive out of the water for almost an hour, and she moved carefully through the dusk, briskly, but never hitting speed. If its skin grew too dry, she would vomit a little water over it to keep it comfortable, and continue.
    The water tasted different to her here. When she came here, it felt better. And when she brought some of her young, when she made certain that they lingered in this watery place, it felt best of all.
    And some of those swimmers that she brought to this place felt the same strange call.
    One had died. Her head swelled, as with her sisters before her, but the pain never dwindled, and her thin scream stopped only with death. She was too old. Old Grendel decided. The bones in her head had gone rigid, and expansion below the skull had split it. Old Grendel didn't make that mistake again.
    The ones who had not been to the headwater smelled different. They were stupid. They would challenge her for territory when they were not a third her size, when they hadn't even fully grown into speed. She tore them to pieces without a second thought.
    The favored ones: she watched them grow, and presently chased them down the river. Most she never saw again.
    But sometimes . . . when the weather was dry and the water levels dropped, when there weren't any ponds or marshes to support them, some of them came back to challenge her.
    She remembered killing many--but allowing others to flee back downriver. She didn't know what happened to them, didn't really think about it in the way that a human being might understand memories, but she felt a distaste for killing them. Ordinarily, in killing there was pleasure.

    The water was buzzing against her skin, pounding in her ears. Old Grendel came back to herself in a flash of terror. Then she recognized the vibration of approaching hooves.
    The water was running clean, the taste of speed was fading. She sensed that first. Then she retracted her snorkel, and slowed her fire so that her oxygen would last longer.
    The hoofbeats were upriver from her. She could hear everything. The smell reached her a few moments later. Puzzle beasts, the ones who could change their look and scent. A herd of them! She loved the taste of their meat, and the joy of solving the puzzle they posed; for the world was a pattern, and puzzle beasts could hide within it.
    Again, her juices began to flow. It was almost too good to believe, too good to allow to pass.
    But she could smell more than a score of weirds. Weirds were dangerous. She could hear it coming, rumble-roar-splash, and she smelled a stink of lightning and heat and volcanic chemicals: one of the dead things, the shells that the weirds grew so that they could run on speed.
    The herd pounded through the river, until the thunder of hooves diminished. Then Old Grendel slowly, cautiously raised her head from the water, and looked. They were moving away, to the east, toward the larger encampment.
    She could get closer, and would. The sun was past its zenith. The day was cooling. She could make it to another spring, one which she had discovered on a foray in the rain. It was a long way from her native grounds.