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Starborn and Godsons
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Table of Contents
Dramatis Personae
Reminiscence on Starborn and Godsons by Larry Niven
My Experience in The Land of Giants by Steven Barnes
Part One Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part Two Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Starborn
& Godsons
♦
LARRY NIVEN
JERRY POURNELLE
STEVEN BARNES
Starborn & Godsons
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes
THE LONG-AWAITED CONCLUSION OF THE HEOROT SERIES FROM GENRE LEGENDS LARRY NIVEN, JERRY POURNELLE, AND STEVEN BARNES
Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named grendels were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon's new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the necessities for life. They would survive.
They would not survive as a spacefaring people.
What they were losing faster than they knew was the ability to get to space. But unbeknownst to the planet-bound humans, something was moving out there in the stars, decelerating at a rate impossible for a natural object. And its destination was Avalon. The most probable origin was Earth's Solar System.
This is a novel of first contact—between the human Starborn and the self-named Godsons who followed on, between the first generation of Avalon born humans and their descendants, and between humans and the almost ineffably alien species native to their new world . . . .
BAEN BOOKS
by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle,
and Steven Barnes
Heorot Series
The Legacy of Heorot
Beowulf’s Children
Starborn and Godsons
BAEN BOOKS by Larry Niven
The Man-Kzin Wars Series
created by Larry Niven
The Man-Kzin Wars 25th Anniversary
Man-Kzin Wars XIV
Man-Kzin Wars XV
The Best of All Possible Wars: Best of the Man-Kzin Wars
BAEN BOOKS by Jerry Pournelle
The Best of Jerry Pournelle (edited by John F. Carr)
Fires of Freedom • Oath of Fealty (with Larry Niven)
Janissaries Series
Lord of Janissaries (with Roland J. Green)
Mamelukes (forthcoming; edited and revised
by David Weber and Phillip Pournelle)
Laurie Jo Hansen Series
Exile—and Glory (omnibus)
Starborn
& Godsons
♦
LARRY NIVEN
JERRY POURNELLE
STEVEN BARNES
Starborn and Godsons
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
Introduction copyright © April 2020 by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2448-9
eISBN: 978-1-62579-760-5
Cover art by Kurt Miller
Maps on pages xxiii, xxiv, and xxv by Randy Asplund
Maps on pages xix, xx, xxi, and xxii by Randy Asplund based on maps by Alexis Walser
First printing, April 2020
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Niven, Larry, author. | Pournelle, Jerry, 1933-2017, author. |
Barnes, Steven, 1952- author.
Title: Starborn and godsons / Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes.
Description: Riverdale : Baen Books, [2020] | Series: Heorot series
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054178 | ISBN 9781982124489 (hardcover)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3564.I9 S72 2020 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054178
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
He that hath a Gospel
To loose upon Mankind,
Though he serve it utterly—
Body, soul and mind—
Though he go to Calvary
Daily for its gain—
It is His Disciple Shall make his labour vain.
—Kipling “The Disciple”
We surviving authors are pleased to dedicate this book
to our lost member, Dr. Jerry Pournelle.
♦ DramatiS pErSOnaE ♦
EARTHBORN (1st Generation)
Zack Moskowitz—Former mayor; last surviving Geographic Society trustee
Rachel Moskowitz—Former first lady
“Big” Shaka—Colony’s head biologist
Carlos Martinez—Artist
Twyla—Psychologist, Carlos’ girlfriend
Sylvia—Biologist, Cadmann Weyland’s surviving widow
Cassandra—Main AI computer on Avalon; in orbit aboard Geographic
Mason Stolzi—Last living trained astronaut among the Earthborn
STARBORN (2nd and 3rd Generation)
“Little” Shaka—Foster son of “Big” Shaka
Cadmann Sikes (“Cadzie”)—Grandson of Cadmann Weyland, and heir apparent; technically third generation, and former Grendel Scout
Aaron Tragon—First of the “bottl
e babies” (creche children) and thus first Starborn; titular Leader of the Starborn
Trevanian—Comm shack
Hal and Towner—Mappers who discover Cthulhu corpse
Marvin Kyle “Toad” Stolzi—Minerva pilot; “the last astronaut”
Tracy Martinez—Carlos’s daughter
Scott Martinez—Carlos’s son
Stanfield “Piccolo” Corning—second born on Avalon; surfing instructor, former miner
Nnedi Okan
Joanie Tragon—Daughter of Aaron; raised by Cadmann’s widows
Jaxxon Tuinukuafe—Artist, Jason’s older brother
Jason Tuinukuafe—Engineer, Jaxxon’s younger brother
Evie Queen—Artist
Thor—Joanie’s boyfriend
Mei Ling—Joanie’s rival for Thor; geologist
Collie Baxter—Engineer
GODSONS
Narrator Marco Shantel—Former tri-d star
Major Gloria Stype—Security officer
First Speaker Augustus Glass
Channing Newsome “The Prophet”
Gertrude Hendricksen—Generally called Trudy
Captain Sven Meadows—Senior military line officer awakened before arrival in orbit around Tau Ceti; 32 years old and only awake a few weeks before rendezvous; Golden Viking; lover of Gloria Stype
Chief Engineer Jorge Daytona
Sargent Greg Lindsey
Corporal Carvey
Ship’s Captain Arnold Tolliver—Originally captain of Messenger
Dr. Mandel—First Speaker’s private physician
Dr. Charlotte Martine—Biologist and medical officer
Sargent Kanazawa
Colonel Anton Tsiolkovskii
Reminiscence on
Starborn and Godsons
by Larry Niven
♦ ♦ ♦
The Heorot trilogy started with an African frog with nasty habits. Jack Cohen told several writers about it. I’ve had correspondence with the man who actually did the research; his problem was getting anyone to believe him.
The frog lives in a very simple ecology. There’s moss; there’re frogs; and there’re tadpoles. The tadpoles eat the moss. When they grow bigger, the frogs eat them. Some survive to become frogs and continue the species. We moved them to an alien planet and made some changes.
This third volume of the Heorot series will be the last.
Jerry Pournelle and I conceived The Legacy of Heorot hoping to generate a Nebula Award winner. Hence the pretentious title, naming the hall invaded by Grendel in the Beowulf saga. We intended a novella: there’s fewer sales at that length, hence reduced competition. Our menace, the grendels, would resemble a horror from EC Comics from our childhood. That decided, we set forth to build the SF field’s most realistic colony story. Bring enough people. Use an established concept for an interstellar spacecraft. Inhabit an island to confine the new world’s surprises to a minimum.
For a year or two it was just talk and notes and ideas. No text. We got impatient. We decided to invite a guy I’d written with, Steven Barnes, into the mix.
That was brilliant. Steven was perfect. He’s wonderful at writing horror. We were all a lot younger, and Steven in his twenties was the perfect student. He listened. He worked. He needed the training. He didn’t freak out when we tore his text up and rewrote it. Jerry and I got into lecturing him and each other. We talked it all over, and as we did, the story grew to novel length.
Steven admits: once he got involved, The Legacy of Heorot was always going to be a novel. He wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to learn.
When a story is finished, we don’t stop thinking about it. Most writers are like that, I believe. That’s how sequels are born.
Jerry and I used to drink as we generated stories. When he had to give that up, we hiked instead, and Steven often joined us. After publication we found ourselves frantic to explore Avalon’s mainland, barely glimpsed in Heorot.
Beowulf’s Children was written in much the same fashion as Heorot. We were all noticeably older. Somewhere in there I’d told Steven he was no longer a student, but that didn’t matter; all three of us had the habit of lecturing each other. We invited a fourth lecturer into the mix: we paid Jack Cohen travel expenses and a flat fee to help us design an ecology for the Avalon mainland.
Jack Cohen was a world-class expert on fertility in all creatures, and in a host of other disciplines. He was a lifelong science fiction fan. He sometimes did flat fee work for science fiction writers; he did that to rationalize Anne McCaffrey’s dragons. For us he designed the Avalon crab template, with an aerodynamic shell and four varied claws. We used it throughout, from seafood to bees to birdles to the Scribes, the vast creatures that leave tracks visible from orbit, which we never quite described in Heorot.
I don’t remember who invented the Avalon carnivore bees—the ones who eat grendels and use their speed to move like little bullets.
I do remember fighting to persuade my collaborators that our character Aaron could shoot a man who knew too much, if he pretended to be shooting at the grendel who was trying to rescue him. We had to put a character onstage to knock the gun out of his hands.
The book was published as Beowulf’s Children in the United States, and as The Dragons of Heorot in Britain.
On our hikes we argued about the fate of the citizens of Avalon. We were pretty much agreed that civilization there was doomed. The Grendel War had done too much damage. The younger Avalonians, the Starborn, weren’t making new tools. Their orbital ship was deteriorating, along with the ship’s computer.
Jerry wanted to write a romance. We wrote a novelette set between the first two books, “The Secret of Black Ship Island,” and sold it on the Internet. Here a new life form was born, the Cthulhus.
And eventually we found a way to rescue the Godsons, the youngest generation of Avalonians.
But by then Jerry had developed a tumor in his brain. They had to burn it out with converging lasers. Afterward it developed that Jerry couldn’t write any more. He could dream, he could plan, he could interact and criticize when we spun our dreams, but sitting down to write became impossible.
We worked in Jerry’s living room, spinning plot lines and redirecting them, generating characters and interactions, making underground maps. We kept Jack Cohen involved, using Skype to link England and California, but Jack had become ill too.
Jerry had a stroke. We kept working. He was recovering.
He died in his sleep in September 2017, a few days after attending Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia.
Starborn and Godsons was nearly finished by then, and fully plotted to the end. Steven and I wrapped it up over a few months.
It’s Jerry Pournelle’s last novel. Jack Cohen has passed on. Steven and I are at work on other projects.
Based on today’s physics, with no outrageous new discoveries, we believe the Heorot series is a fully reasonable approach to the settling of other planets. We’d love to live long enough to see it happen.
—Larry Niven
August 15, 2019
My Experience in
The Land of Giants
by Steven Barnes
♦ ♦ ♦
I had written several novels with Larry Niven when he and his partner, Jerry Pournelle, asked me if I’d be interested in the idea of a novella. I listened, and thought it was appropriately brilliant, given the guys who had generated it. I also knew something else: they had just come off a run on the New York Times bestseller list, and this was one hell of an opportunity for me.
Multiple purposes, all dovetailing.
The most obvious career possibility was a chance to stand on their shoulders, use their lightning as my own. Another is that Jerry as an individual was, at that time, arguably the smartest human being I’d ever met, more than a little intimidating, and I wanted to see what it was like to interact with that mind more closely. And the third is that together, Larry and Jerry were an extraordinary team. I was dying to know what it was li
ke to interact with the two of them at the same time.
So . . I dreamed and figured and came up with a reasonable way that a short idea could turn into a full novel, pitched it, and the game was afoot. A couple of times a week, for over a year, I would travel to Larry or Jerry’s house (usually Jerry, I recall—he had the better designed workspace for collaboration), take notes, discuss the story, and then go away and write. I brought the text back on disk or paper, and then the fun really began.
You see . . Jerry enjoyed teaching and lecturing, but also just a bit of terrorizing. And I was intimidated half to death. I’m not sure how many human beings have ever had the experience of having two world-class authors, one on either side of the room, tearing up their writing simultaneously. Larry would do it with relative compassion, but Jerry was having entirely too much fun.
“Ah, we’re murdering Barnes’ precious prose,” he’d cackle, bent over his typewriter. “Barnes, was your mother frightened by a gerund??”
Ah, memories. There were times it was so brutal I drove home crying. But I wouldn’t quit: I knew that if I could hang in there, I’d learn lessons no school in the world could teach me. I also knew Jerry suffered fools less gladly than anyone I’d ever met. His pressure wasn’t contempt. That was respect. If he hadn’t respected me, I wouldn’t have been in that room. He was lobbing balls at me, and expected that I’d eventually start lobbing them back.