Chapter 35
AUTOPSY
Deduction is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Sign of Four
Justin limped into the recreation hall, and received a brief round of applause and a kiss from Jessica. It was sisterly, not at all like the kiss they had shared not three hours before, but a sparkle in her eyes that told him that she hadn't forgotten.
Katya took his arm and hugged him. "I hope that your backside is healing."
"You have plans for that?"
"Indeed." She did not look at Jessica.
"So just what did happen?" Cadmann demanded. "How did you get caught by spider devils without communications?"
Justin shook his head. "Duh. We'd been swimming, got in a race, and weren't looking where we were going. Just horseplay."
"It's not a grendel zone," Jessica said. "That's a safe area—"
"No longer," Aaron said. "Chaka, we saw a grendel in the north lake. A grendel."
Little Chaka looked puzzled. "How did a grendel get there?"
"And well may you ask." Aaron's voice was icily correct. "As I recall, you were the one who assured us a grendel could never get into that lake."
"I did," Chaka admitted. "And I still don't know how. What happened?"
Aaron started to tell him. Silence fell around him. As his hands waved and his voice rose and fell, Justin found himself grinning. Cadmann Weyland, face-to-face with a grendel... but the danger was as nothing next to Aaron's massive embarrassment.
Aaron broke off. "Well, however it got there, the whole area has to be reclassified as grendel country. New rules for visiting it. In effect now. Everyone agree?"
There was a murmur of approval.
"That may not be the only surprise today," Big Chaka said.
Cadmann turned to him with a frown. "Good news or bad news?"
"Listen and decide for yourself," Chaka said enigmatically.
"Yes, well, we should get started," Aaron said. "Hell of a thing about those spider devils, Justin. Hell of a thing." His expression was unreadable.
Cadmann hugged Justin and Jessica, and they sat together, the five of them: Cadmann, Sylvia, Jessica... just like a family again... but Aaron sat on the other side of Jessica.
What would have happened if the web hadn't interrupted them? What did he want to happen?
"We're ready when you are. Dr. Chaka," Aaron said.
The room fell quiet. Justin grinned as he noted another table. Big Chaka, Little Chaka, Trish Chance, Edgar Sikes, Ruth Moskowitz. Interesting family grouping there—and Big Chaka climbed up to the holostage.
He said (his voice resonant and musical, in teacher mode), "There is much to cover, but let's begin with grendels. You have all seen that grendels on this continent, especially in this area, don't act the way grendels did on Camelot Island. There was the incident today, Aaron, a grendel that did not attack you on sight. There are the dam builders, who certainly cooperate. And the snow grendels, who seem to hunt as a pack. And your other reports. I have examined every mainland grendel observation Cassandra knows of, and I can only conclude that mainland grendels are not the mindless killers our experiences on Camelot suggested. Grendels here—some of them, at least—cooperate on dams, and hunt in groups. They show a rudimentary sense of planning. Possibly time-binding—that is, they pass on knowledge to the next generation.
"The obvious conclusion is that mainland grendels are considerably more intelligent than our island grendels were. If Camelot ‘normal' grendels have the intelligence of an Earth tiger, think of those here as tigers with the intelligence of an orangutan."
Aaron nodded slowly. "Frightening, but no more than we here had concluded, right?" He looked around the room and got approving nods from many of the Second.
"Dragons," Sylvia Weyland muttered.
"Dragons," Cadmann repeated. "Chaka, an intelligent grendel is the worst thing I can think of."
"Maybe not," Big Chaka said. "First, though, a theory. Here is a Camelot grendel. Cassandra, my file, Grade Eight Test Twenty-four, please."
Laughter rippled among the Second. Grade Eight Test Twenty-four in Big Chaka's biology class was very familiar to them. "The beast floated before them, a composite of many grendels the First had examined after they were torn, charred, and otherwise mangled. This was no holo of a dead beast, but a mere cartoon.
As Chaka's hands moved, so moved a white arrowhead floating in midair: the cursor. The Camelot grendel opened like a puzzle box. The view zoomed in on the grendel's big blunt head. The head opened.
The sinuses were large: a grendel's head was half-hollow. The brain showed convolutions shallower than those of a human brain. There was no corpus callosum connecting left and right lobes, in fact, the grendel brain had no lobes. It was more of a doughnut, and the snorkel ran right through it, sliding freely in its own channel.
"Now for a mainland grendel. Cassandra, my dissection file, Composite One. This shows features common to the snow grendels we examined."
Cassandra had painted parts of the corpse with a lavender tinge.
"We had to guess at some features due to the damage done when the grendels were killed. But there's enough." The snow grendel was longer than the Camelot grendel and about as thick. Its claws were bigger, with two dewclaws that faced forward. Big Chaka pointed those out with the cursor. "Brakes." He indicated the tail and the downward-hooked barbs:
"More brakes. If you're going to run two hundred klicks an hour on ice, you need that. Trivial stuff, but now note the ventral surface. There's almost no belly armor. What's left is these four head-to-tail ridges, more skis than protection."
Aaron interrupted: the student asserting his freedom. "I get it. The thing expects to squat in snow and lose heat through the belly."
"That's what we think, but notice that it can't rear up to fight. Got to charge like a tank, with its head lowered, and butt." The cursor outlined the misshapen head. "More armor. Like a ram. It'd work better if the head hadn't been distorted."
That head was no cartoon. This was the hologram of a dead grendel's head.
Cadmann again. "Chaka, were they all lopsided like that?"
"We're lucky to have any kind of answer, the way our kids tore through these things. My son was much embarrassed."
Little Chaka said, "I brought back some pieces of skull, but they aren't big enough to tell. Maybe they're distorted too—"
"But there was enough," his father said. "Quite enough." The skull opened: a bloody puzzle box.
The head was half-hollow, as with the Camelot grendel. The right side of the brain was grossly swollen. On that side the sinuses were shrunken and the skull ballooned out. There were thin spots in the massive bone.
Near the root of the brain on the right side, the midst of the convoluted mass of gray tissue was a tangle of... worms.
Unmistakable.
"Parasites," Justin murmured. "Flukes."
"We've already found six kinds of parasites. Four are types that infest samlon too. Our Grendel Scouts are familiar with those," Little Chaka said. "Dad—"
"Yes. This is the interesting one. It has caused localized swelling, and some changes in brain chemistry. We're still working on those. We've already established that there are abnormal levels of the grendel analog of acetylcholines present. Now look here." The light pointer wavered on an area far from the fluke. "Notice the dendrite structure here. Very dense. Nothing like what you find in uninfected grendels. And here. Here's an uninfected grendel for comparison."