Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  This, at least, was the gist of the diffuse array of thoughts Orn had as he climbed the slope.

  He returned to the descending river and the volcanic soil, because these were now familiar. Familiarity was life to him. There was danger from the heated earth and the rumbling mountain, but this known hazard militated against unknown hazards. The volcanic threat applied to all creatures, particularly the reps, and the environment was in fact more hostile to them than to him. He would utilize it until a larger area had been properly scouted.

  He encountered no more of the large reps, though his sensitive eyes and nose picked up their profuse traces. There were numbers of them, mostly young, but these hid from him. The valley was not really more crowded than the surrounding areas beyond the badlands; it merely seemed that way because its denizens tended to be larger and more familiar. There were small mams in far greater abundance in the north country, while the huge reps were comparatively sparse. A few crocs, a few snakes. What had happened, there?

  He dined on fish again, and splashed the clear water over his feathers, refreshing them. Time had passed, and now it was afternoon. He began to search for an appropriate lodging for the night. He preferred not to roost directly on the ground, but an ascent into a tree was impractical, here where the trees were stunted and scarce. Possibly a good thicket of dioms -

  This was a serious matter, and Orn undertook his search carefully. He was looking for a permanent roost - one he could depend on during the entire period of his stay within this valley. Later he might develop other roosts, so that he could canvass more distant sections of the valley without having to make a long trek back; but this first refuge was essential.

  The sun dipped toward the far side, making the range there thrust up in silhouette, and the clouds became pink. But still he had not found a suitable spot.

  The ground was becoming warm again, signal of another subterranean furnace ahead, or at least a vent from the depths. It was as though the entire range were riddled with hot conduits. Orn became nervous, reminded again of what could happen in such terrain. He did not think of it at other times; the immediacy, as always, conjured the painful image. Yet he felt there was a certain security in water. Though the river channel might shift, it was protection against actual fire.

  Accordingly, he followed an offshoot of the stream up toward its snowy source. He could, if necessary, spend this night in the coldest heights. The reps certainly would not be there. But this would not be comfortable, and it was too far away from the valley proper to be convenient as a regular thing.

  He came across a waterfall, as the sun touched the far mountains. The brook passed over an outcropping of hard rock, forming a pool above and another below, and splayed in a shallow falling sheet between the two. The drop was somewhat more than Orn's standing height, but the force of the water was not great.

  He recognized the construction. Behind such a sheet of water would be a concavity, where the less durable substrata melted away in the course of millennia. This was the way, in the life cycle of rivers. Sometimes there was space enough underneath for a large bird to roost.

  Orn braced himself and poked his beak into the waterfall. The cold water split, and his head went on through. There was space - but no adequate footing. In an emergency he might grasp one slanting ridge of rock with one foot, and hang on to the carved backwall with his beak, but certainly not by preference. This was not his roost.

  Then something activated every perception and conjured a barrage of images, one tumbling over the other in unique confusion. Orn snapped back his head and stood rocking in the spuming water, sorting it out while his wings fluttered spasmodically.

  The thing he had been unknowingly searching for - the nameless mission - the object of his quest -

  Excitement! For he had seen the traces of a prior occupant of the emergency roost. The scrape of claw, the mark of beak -

  The unmistakable spoor of another bird of his species. Another 'Orn' - his own age, and female.

  X - VEG

  It was a truly awesome range: scarred volcanic cones set almost adjacent to each other to form a wall, seemingly solid, extending right into the sea. The ambient fumes suggested that the volcanic activity continued beneath the water, too, and there were very few fish.

  'I don't understand this,' Cal lamented. 'This should be about where Baja California terminates, or will terminate, on our globe. This formation, to put it euphemistically, is atypical.'

  Veg maneuvered the Nacre into deep water, unconcerned with that aspect. He could see why the mantas hadn't fooled with this section; it was a real wasteland.

  The mountains were followed by much more active cones. An almost impenetrable fog of gas and floating ash obscured I portions of the shore. After that came desert, rent by jagged in

  rifts. They drew the raft in only enough to view the desolation under strange foul clouds, and did not touch land.

  At one point the wind reversed, pushing the Nacre far out to sea before he could angle it back. The smell was appalling. They had to tie shirts over their heads to keep the stinging particles out of eyes and lungs. The four mantas huddled inside the cabin, no more comfortable, though of course they did not need to breathe.

  After days and nights of this another range appeared, even more massive and imposing than the first. Its oceanic barriers extended far out, becoming mighty reefs with jigsaw-puzzle elevations poking through the surface. It was as though grotesque statues stood upon the water, mocking Jesus Christ.

  Twice the Nacre was snagged, forcing them to disembark and struggle waist-deep in the gritty fluid to free it. But there were some few fish here, and corals, and crabs, and barnacles. To their dismay, they had to wear shoes in the water, for the fish had teeth and the crabs pincers, and the coral was sharp.

  'But where there's life, there's hope,' Aquilon said. Veg didn't think it was funny, but agreed that some sea life was better than none, for things must be about to ease up.

  At last they spied deep water - but had virtually to portage across a final band of shallows. The solid raft, even without their weight or that of the mantas, projected too far down to make navigation easy, and it was crushingly heavy to haul about by hand. The palm wood had become waterlogged, making it worse. Veg had to dive under and remove the keel, and even so the raft caught on every conceivable piece of reef. He braced his feet against the rocklike coral foundation and hauled on the front rope, while Cal and Aquilon pried with poles.

  Busy as he was, he couldn't help noticing Aquilon's anatomy as she strained at the raft. Her shapely legs were bare from the water level up to her brief shorts, and her midriff was open too. Her bossom flexed as her arms moved, each breast a live thing straining at the halter. Her blonde hair was tied back, but several major strands had pulled away and now whipped across her face erratically.

  Ah, she was lovely now - far more so than when she had affected nudity that one time just after they landed. Clothes made the woman, not the man, for they supported and concealed and enhanced and made mysteries where mysteries belonged. Not that she was unattractive, nude; oh no! But now - now he felt like charging through the water, sweeping her up entire, and -

  And nothing. With Aquilon it had to be voluntary - even in his fancy. The mere touch of her fingers on his arm meant more than the definitive embrace of any woman he had known before. Her smile gave him a shortness of breath, though he had loved her long before he had seen her smile. Even that time on planet Nacre, when she had made that shocking expression, as though the muscles of her face were connected up the wrong way - even then, his horror had been because he cared. In fact, it hardly seemed that there could have been a time when -

  The raft broke away from whatever submarine object had held it, and Veg stumbled forward into deep water. He let go the rope and clamped his mouth and eyes shut as he hit. The warm bath tugged at his clothing, and trapped air hauled him Immediately back to the surface before bursting out of his shirt in an embarrassing bubble.

&nbs
p; For an instant his eyes opened under water. It was clear, here.

  A gigantic fish was coming at him. It resembled a sword-fish, but it had a fin on its back like that of a shark and its eyes were each as big as a human head. The creature was well over twenty feet long, sleek, swift, and strong.

  Veg propelled himself out of the depths and onto the reef in a manner he could never afterward recall. He stood at the brink, dumbly pointing.

  The fish broke surface and leaped partially into the air, its tremendous nose-spine opening to fevealmany small teeth. Vapor spouted from a blowhole over the eyes.

  'That's no porpoise!' Aquilon exclaimed, amazed.

  Cal stood open-mouthed. Veg had never seen the little man so surprised.

  The creature departed as rapidly as it had come, never bothering to attack. Veg's knees felt weak. That dinnerplate eye! 'Never saw a fish like that before,' he said shakily,

  'Fish?' Cal was coming out of his daze.

  'Didn't you see it? With the beak and the -'

  'That was Ichthyosaurus' Cal said, as though it were marvelously significant.

  Now Aquilon began to react. 'The reptile?'

  The reptile.

  Veg decided there was something he was missing, but he waited until the Nacre had been reloaded and they were on their way again before challenging it.

  The treacherous reefs enclosed a moderately shallow ocean basin about thirty miles across. Into this projected two large islands separated from each other by a one-mile channel. They were mountainous; ugly black cones rammed into the sky from each, and yellow-brown vapor trailed from one.

  'Scylla and Charybdis,' Aquilon murmured. 'Let's go around.'

  Veg obligingly angled north so as to pass Scylla on the western shore, heading in toward land. His keel, replaced, was not properly firm, but the weather in this cove was gentle and he had no trouble. About three miles separated the island from land, and on both sides were small white beaches backed by tangled jungle. Nearest to the water were tall tree-ferns, but inland, up the mountain slopes, he could make out the solid green of stands of pine and fir. There was a light haze, and every so often he sneezed.

  'Heavy pollen in the air,' Cal explained.

  'Now that we're on the subject,' Veg said, 'what's wrong with that fish being a reptile?'

  Aquilon looked at Cal. 'He just won that bet about the dinosaurs, though he doesn't know it!'

  'I did?' Veg asked. 'All I saw was a big-eyed fish, dark gray with a light-gray belly and a snout that almost rammed me. And you -'

  Cal looked serious. 'Nevertheless, its presence forces us into a considerable reappraisal.'

  'Funniest looking dino I ever saw! How long did you say they've been dead?'

  Aquilon reached up to ruffle his matted hair. She, at least, was at ease. 'Extinct is the word, not dead. And it's been about seventy million years, on Earth. The dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous.'

  'So they've been gone five million years, here - and we haven't seen one yet, and maybe we won't unless we go back into the Bodacious.'

  'Cretaceous,' Cal said, missing the outlandish joke - another sign that the man had been badly shaken up. 'The name comes from the Latin word Greta, meaning chalk. So it's the chalk

  age. Chalky limestones such as the White Cliffs of Dover -

  'So the dinosaurs were full of chalk,' Veg said, wondering how far to take this game. Used it in their big bones, I guess.'

  'I'm afraid that's not quite it. The chalk came from the compacted skeletons of billions of single-celled animals, the Foraminifera, who lived in the shallow seas. But such animal chalk deposits are hardly more than an episode in the seventy-million-year period of the Cretaceous.'

  Veg remained solemn. 'On Earth, maybe. But this isn't Earth.'

  'But it is,' Aquilon murmured. 'Paleocene Earth. Dawn of the age of mammals.'

  'I know what mammals are,' he said, looking at her bosom.

  'Mammaries,' she said, correcting him without embarrassment. 'Typical of the mammals.'

  'Whose distinguishing trait is - hair,' Cal added, suppressing a smile.

  Veg let that pass, seeing that Cal had gotten over his disturbance. 'So if there are dinosaurs, this would be Greta instead of Paleo. Now how about this famous fish?'

  'Cal just explained,' Aquilon said. 'It's not a fish. It's Ichthyosaurus - a swimming reptile. Its ancestors walked on land, and it breathes air.'

  'Same as a crocodile. What does that prove?'

  Call took over. 'Ichthyosaurus is a member of class Reptilia, order Ichthyosauria - the swimming reptiles. It is not considered to be a dinosaur. The dinosaurs are actually a popular composite of two reptilian orders, the Saurischia and the Omithischia, respectively "lizard-hips" and "bird-hips". They were primarily land or swamp dwellers.'

  'Somewhere in there I think you brushed near my question. Icky is not a dinosaur, just as I thought. Good. So now tell me why you figure it's so significant, this fish-reptile. What's it got to do with dinosaurs?'

  'He's got you there,' Aquilon said to Cal.

  'They were contemporaneous phenomena. The Cretaceous was the zenith of the reptilian rathation. Almost all the lines flourished then - and almost all died out before the Paleocene. The Ichthyosaurus passed before a number of the land-dwelling forms, so -'

  'So if- Ichy's still here, so are the dinos,' Veg said. 'Now make the connection. It is like a dinosaur poking his snout over the hill.'

  'Of course that doesn't necessarily follow-'

  'Oh, no, I'm happy to have it follow. Serves you right.'

  'But you see, this is the Paleocene,' Cal said. 'The ocean fauna, and everything we have observed on land - the evolution of the other species is cumulatively definitive. Dinosaurs have no place here, no place at all, unless -'

  'Unless?' Veg and Aquilon were both curious.

  'Unless there is an enclave. An isolated carryover of the Cretaceous fauna - doomed to extinction, but surviving the demise of its age by a few million years. Those sea reptiles that fed on fish or belemnites might endure, such as the particular ichthyosaur we encountered, but not those specializing in ammonites. Though why there should be no fossil record -'

  'It could have happened on Earth,' Aquilon said. 'We might yet discover a submerged bed of fossils that proved -'

  'Down!' Veg whispered ferociously.

  They obeyed immediately, cutting off the conversation. In silence they followed his gaze.

  They had been rounding the green bend of the island Scylla, Veg now poling the craft along. Standing, he had the best view, and so had seen it first - but it made them all flinch. In the silence one of the mantas poked around the shady side of the cabin: Hex, getting his own eyeful.

  It was a tremendous serpentine neck, seeming at first to be truncated just short of the head. The column projected fifteen feet from the water and was barely a hundred feet from the raft. It was smooth and round and gently tapering - and as Veg examined it more closely, he found that it terminated in a head hardly larger than the neck's smallest diameter. An eye was half hidden under a kind of fleshy crest, and beyond that was a rounded, wrinkled snout. Despite the small appearance of the head, he judged that the jaw was a good two feet long. That creature could, Veg reflected, finish a man in just about three bites lengthwise.

  Plumes of vapor formed above the crest, signifying the location of nostrils, and now Veg could hear its heavy-bellows breathing. There had to be a lot more body out of sight beneath the water, for he could make out no expansion and contraction of the visible portion as the air rushed in and out. As they watched, the minuscule head dipped in toward the land, to take a swipe at floating foliage there. The teeth were pegs that clamped rather than cut or chewed. The creature either hadn't noticed them, or it considered them to be beneath notice.

  Veg poled the Nacre quietly backward. Slowly they rounded the turn of Scylla, passing out of sight of the monster, as it lifted its head high to swallow.

  That is the biggest snake I
ever heard of,' Veg announced when they had achieved the limited safety of distance.

  'No snake could lift its head like that, that far.' Aquilon said, obviously shaken. 'Not unless it were over two hundred feet long - and that's unlikely. I think that's some other swimming reptile. There was one with a long neck, wasn't there, Cal?'

  Cal smiled with some obscure satisfaction. 'Yes there was, 'Aquilon. Some types of plesiosaurus. But such a creature could hardly stand still in the water like that, and would not feed on watercress. This is a reptile of quite a different nature - a true dinosaur, in fact. We saw only a tiny portion of it.'

  Aquilon stood up straight. 'Of course! The thunder lizard - Brontosaurus!'

  'No. Not quite. The head does not conform. The brontosaur's nostrils were at the apex, and I doubt that many survived much beyond the Jurassic. This would be its later cousin, the largest of them all: Brachiosaurus.'