Beowulf's Children by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes Read Free Book Online

alive. Most of them lived here, in the expanded grounds of the original encampment. A few had imitated Colonel Cadmann Weyland and built permanent dwellings elsewhere on the island. More had hunting lodges and second homes near the snows. The fishing colony at Surf's Up was the unofficial domain of the Star Born, not quite a separate city, not quite permanent, a perpetual summer camp linked to the main colony by skeeters. If the comm cards were the nervous system of the colony, the skeeter autogyros, built on Earth and assembled on Avalon, were its blood vessels. There were never enough skeeters. Building more would require fuel cells, and fuel cells required palladium and platinum for catalysts; those required mines and prospecting, which required access to the mainland, but the skeeters didn't have enough range for routine operations to the mainland, and there wasn't any facility there to recharge their fuel cells anyway. But if we had a power station and more fuel cells that could be charging over there.
    . .
     
    Everything we want to do requires two other things, Jessica thought. And as the First grew older, more and more of the colony's resources went into consumption, things the First Generation wanted, no, needed, leaving less for investment in the future.
    I guess we're rich, she thought, recalling Cassandra's images of poverty on Earth. Earth people would call this Paradise. And the First won't last forever. She suppressed that thought as quickly as it came. It seemed ghoulish. We have the skeeters, and we have the comm cards. We all have Cassandra and all the libraries of Old Earth, everything people learned before the First left it behind and brought us here. We ‘re still one community, if you close one eye and squint a little.
    One community, but several places to live now. Jessica preferred the original settlement—the nerve center. Surf's Up was lovely and vibrant, with a slight Japanese feel to it, the domain of the Second Generation. The mountain settlement (thirty-five up there now!) was wonderful, with good siding most of the year. In five years there would be hunting—the vegetation was established. Some of the trees were twenty years old, a new forest like nothing ever seen on the planet before. Deer and moose and bear were being released slowly into the fields and meadows. Some would survive; some would thrive. There was general agreement that when the herds were well established they should thaw out some of the frozen wolf embryos and release a pack. Exactly when was argued vigorously, and so far "not yet" won out. That wasn't a question that cut deep between the generations. Not yet. The generation wars were about other things.
    There were 280 Second Generation "children," an average of four for every woman who survived the Grendel Wars.
    Truly, Jessica thought cynically, an heroic achievement. And of the hundred and fifty female "children," almost half had already had children of their own, an additional seventy progeny, for a total of 480 inhabitants either immigrated or born here on the fourth planet of the star called Tau Ceti. And for all we know, we ‘re the whole universe. I guess that's what really eats at Zack. Dad, too. Where is Earth in all this? She never calls, she never writes...
    The sounds and smells of life here were utterly routine now. Cattle grazed, dogs roamed the streets in packs—and not an ill-fed animal in the lot. Half-naked children played in alien dust ten light-years removed from their closest non-Avalonian relations.
    Life went on.
    The smells and sounds and sights of Camelot weren't very different from those captured in holovids of Earth. Their sun was a little brighter. From what her father said, shadows were sharper and bluer.
    But the voracious grendels had so stripped the island that Man found it easy to conquer. Earthworms had defeated the local annelids for mastery of the soil. Earth crickets chirped at night. Crows had been seen to attack lower-level pterodon