The Leagacy of Heorot Read online

  The Leagacy of Heorot

  Larry Niven

  Jerry Pournelle

  Steven Barnes

  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!"

  Cadmann Weyland chuckled to himself and dug his heels into the slope, slowing his descent.

  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.

  Cadmann chuckled inwardly. The Colony's biologist was tough, and as stubborn about admitting fatigue as he. She's also three months pregnant. Won't admit there are real differences between the sexes. So be it.

  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 scanned the valley, gave a sigh of pleasure.

  "Terrific shot, isn't it?" Cadmann's voice, ordinarily a hoarse rumbling sound, was quietly thoughtful. "National Geographic will love it." He squatted next to her. "Are you all right?"

  "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," Cadmann said. But Ernst wasn't crew. He could have slept through, but they had a problem with one bank of frozen embryos and woke him, and he'd solved that, and they'd chilled him again, and then there was another problem—And as good a man as ever lived follows me around to carry samples. Son of a bitch—

  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," Cadmann said, shading his eyes as he gazed up into the eternal clouds at the top. Skis. We didn't bring skis. We have plastics. Carlos can make me a pair of skis.

  Sylvia handed him back his camera. Voice carefully neutral, she said, "You don't have to go to the continent, Cadmann. There's plenty for you to do around the camp."

  "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.

  Cadmann brushed his hand through thick black hair. There was no gray in it, but his face was sun-cured leather. His body was as young as a daily hour of intensive exercise could make it. He could remember when he hadn't needed regular exercise to maintain the natural tone. Now, at the adjusted age of forty-two, he was seriously considering nudging that up to an hour and a half. I'm slowing down, he thought. She's carrying another man's baby, and I'd rather be with her than... Mary Ann Eisenhower? He thought of four or five women who had made their intentions clear. Phyllis McAndrews. Jean Patterson, willowy blond agronomist rumored to give the best massage on the planet. He just wasn't interested. Time wounds all heels. The glands must be drying up.

  Sylvia grinned back. "Only real gentlemen refuse to notice when a lady is slowing them down." Ernst stood carefully out of earshot. His intelligence was gone, but not his manners. She jerked her thumb at the pair of freshly caught silver-and-black torpedo shapes hanging over Ernst's back. Fifteen and twenty pounds, at a guess. One still gaped; the gills still fluttered, too far back on its body... they didn't look that much like earthly salmon, but no other creature of Earth fit either . ...Tell you what. I'll fix dinner tonight. Everybody to the beach for a samlon roast."

  She linked her arm with Cadmann's as they marched down the side of the hill. He grinned maliciously. "Are you sure Terry won't mind that?"

  "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."

  He
looked at her appraisingly. "Which way will you fall?"

  "Hush."

  They laughed. The sun shone more brightly than usual.

  "Golden fields. Silver rivers."

  Cadmann laughed. "I suppose. I see a year-round water supply and fertile croplands."

  "You would."

  Somebody ‘d better.

  The stream flowed past the camp and over the bluff above Miskatonic River, the greatest body of running water on the island. Eight kilometers to the south the grasslands ended in a burnt, blackened semicircle of firebreak and beyond that the crest of giant brambles began. The colonists had chosen a beautiful place to start a new world, lovely enough to make him feel... almost at peace. Times like this confused him. It was a fight not to shut down his thoughts and find some project totally involving, and preferably a little risky.

  Slender fingers dug into his arm. "Hey, big guy. Don't go brooding on me. This was supposed to be our walk day. Stay with me for a while, hmm?" He was still quiet. "Tau Ceti Four. Avalon." She rolled the words over her tongue.

  "It's a good name."

  "But?"

  "Don't know."

  "Not poetic enough?"

  He helped her over a rock. It took effort to focus on the game she was inviting him to play. "I've read poetry—"

  "Kipling." She laughed. "It's all right. I know you're better read than me. And I'll keep your secret. I don't know, Avalon's all right. But there are others. Beautiful, exciting places from history, or legend. Shangri-La, Babylon..."

  "Xanadu?"

  "Sure. Pellinore."

  He shook his head. "You must mean Pellucidar. Pellinore was a king.

  One of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table."

  "Well... maybe so. But I don't mean Pellucidar, either. There aren't really any predators on the island. Except for the turkeys and other critters we've seeded, there just isn't a damn thing bigger than an insect. Even the plant life. Low grass and thorn trees. It's like a blank slate. Or a park. Cadmann—"

  He asked, "Does that bother you?"

  "Well, the worst we can do is mess up one island. It isn't like we'd turned all those Earth creatures loose on the mainland."

  "I meant too perfect. Why do you care?"

  "Well—"

  Ernst ran up, pointing. "Birds. Big Birds." Two of the fan-winged shapes swooped past. Cadmann watched as they circled out over the plain, then vanished in the mist that reached halfway down the face of Mucking Great Mountain. "Nest there?" Ernst asked. "Why there?" He frowned again.

  "See? We do have company."

  "The pterodons? They're way more frightened of us than we are of them.

  And the biggest of them is hardly strong enough to carry off a good-sized samlon, let alone a sheep."

  "How about a baby?" he asked.

  She took it seriously. "I don't think so. To tell you the truth, I haven't seen anything much bigger than a sea gull, and that bothers me. The ecology is just too damned simple. Take out the pterodons and all you've got is small insects and these big local fish."

  "The samlon."

  "Of course they aren't really fish. What with the trout and the catfish and the turkeys, we've added more animals than we found. Spooky." Sylvia turned thoughtful as they picked their way down a steep slope. "You know, there's something funny about the pterodons."

  "What's that?"

  "Well, remember the one we saw hunting samlon in the pool?"

  "Sure. Reminded me of albatross in the South Pacific." Sailing aboard

  Ariadne with a fair wind north, a million years—no, not a million years, but a lot more than a million miles ago. With luck we'll build schooners here before I'm dead.

  "Didn't that look funny to you? I can't quite put my finger on it, but it reminded me of an old Walt Disney nature film, with the action run in reverse, to be comical."

  "Reverse?"

  "A bird hits the water hard and fast, makes its grab, then takes off at its leisure. That bird hit the water slow and took off fast, almost as if..." She frowned, shaking her head like someone trying to rattle cobwebs off a thought. "Never mind, I'm trying to force something."

  "Or see something that isn't there. You'd love to put some mystery into this system."

  "How'd you get to know me so well?"

  "I always understand other men's women."

  "Ah."

  Without warning Cadmann began to run, pulling Sylvia down the last twenty meters of slope. She skidded on her heels to slow herself, nonplused but exhilarated by his sudden burst of energy.

  He glanced back and realized that Ernst was running too. Ernst looked frightened. "Hold up," Cadmann said. He called, "Ernst! It's okay, Ernst. We're just running for fun. Want to race?"

  Ernst's brow cleared; his run slowed. "Race. Sure, Cadmann. Start even?"

  They lined up, gave Sylvia a hundred meters of head start, and ran.

  Even this far out from the camp, there was a blackened strip of road for them to follow. It was brittle and glassy.

  "Your road," Ernst shouted. "Yours."

  "Sure." It was. The last time they really needed me. Ernst led with the weed burner, a converted military flame-thrower. Cadmann had driven the bulldozer, wishing all along that there had been enough fuel to use a landing craft. That would have made a road! Hover across the ground on the Minerva, fuse the rock forever—Even so, he felt pride when he scanned the kilometers of dark ribbon he had created with his own sweat and skill. He bent to look closer at the surface of the road. A few tiny bluish sprigs were nosing their way out of the ground.

  Sylvia came up puffing. "Maybe we should sow the ground with salt before you make your next pass."

  "I'm not even sure it matters. Not much of the heavy machinery comes out this far."

  Thin clouds of dust raised by the tractors puffed like tiny fires in the distant fields. The crops had been established. Now they must be expanded. Prepare the ground for new crop tests, lay away grain and seeds against the possibility of a bad year.

  The Colony was a success. Zack Moscowitz—administrator, all-around good guy, everybody loves Zack—Zack had done it. The Colony was a success, and nothing short of disaster could stop its expansion across the island and eventually over all of Tau Ceti Four.

  Agriculture. Food, vitamins, some comforts. We have those, and now comes prospecting. Iron ore had been discovered on the island itself, and the orbiting laboratory had found what looked very much like a deposit of pitchblende. It was deep in the interior of the continent, across thousands of kilometers of ocean and through badlands—but it was there.

  Iron and uranium. The foundations of empire. "The sons of Martha."

  "Eh?" Sylvia giggled.

  "Kipling. Sorry. Politicians are the sons of Mary. Then there are the others, the ones who keep civilization going. ‘They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose—‘ Oh, never mind."

  Today seemed more tolerable, more like the First Days, when Cadmann and Sylvia and the other First Ones thundered down from the heavens in their winged landing craft. All the gliding characteristics of a brick. We left a line of fire and thunder that circled the sky. A hundred and fifty colonists waited in orbit, cold as corpses and no more active, while we scanned a strange planet from end to end, and chose the place to set our city, and set our feet in the rock of this world.

  The National Geographic Society's probes told a lot. Tau Ceti Four had oxygen and water and nitrogen. The planet was cooler than Earth, so the temperate zones were smaller, but a lot of the planet was livable. They'd known there would be plants, and guessed at animals. Humans could live there—or could they? Probably, but the only certainty would come when people tried it.

  Civilization on Earth was rich, comfortable, satisfying; and crowded, and dull. Forty million university graduates had volunteered for the expedition. The first winnowing had eliminated compulsive volunteers, flakes whose horoscopes had told them to find a different sky, candidates with allergies or o
ther handicaps, geniuses who couldn't tolerate cramped conditions or human company or people who gave orders... Perhaps a hundred thousand had been seriously considered; and two hundred had set forth to conquer Tau Ceti Four. Eight had died along the way.

  No world would ever be tamed by robots. It took men, crossing space, some awake, some chilled, a hundred years across space—The early days were good days. We were comrades in an untamed land.

  Then we found Paradise, and they don't need me at all. They need Sylvia. They need the engineers, and the tractor drivers, and, God help us, the administrators and bean counters, but never a soldier.

  Sheep and calves roamed the pastures now. Colts grazed. Soon the camp would be full of children, alive with their happy wet smells and sounds; and what need had those for Colonel Cadmann Weyland, United Nations Peacekeeping Force (Ret.)?

  Animals... a distant lowing snapped Cadmann out of his reverie. They were nearing the rows of moist, furrowed earth. Other crews had burnt the ground, spitting jellied fuel from backpack flame-throwers to clear the soil of underbrush without glazing it into slag. The charred dirt had long since been plowed under to prepare for seeding. The ground was very fertile, needing only minor nitrate supplementation to provide a healthy medium for their crops.

  In the distance one of the farmers slowed his tractor to wave to them, and Ernst lifted two samlon in triumphant greeting. Further ahead Cadmann knew that there were colts and calves, still far too young to manage the plows that would be fashioned for them. It was an unusual combination—a meld of high technology and muscle-intensive agriculture. In an emergency, the Colony could fall back on the most ancient and reliable means of production.

  There were rows of wheat and spinach and soybeans, and in the mist-filtered glare of Tau Ceti their leaves and stalks glistened healthily. At the base of the rows ran the irrigation ditches, fed by the stream that passed under the low bridge just ahead, flowing past the camp and over the edge of the bluff to join the Miskatonic River.

  The sounds of the main camp drifted to them. The hum of light machinery, the crackle of laughter and the whining burr of saws and lathes working wood and metal.