Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  Ornette was pleased, already casting about for the specific spot for the nest. But Orn was more cautious. The experience of his ancestry told him that seemingly ideal locations generally appealed to more than one individual or species. Sometimes a flawed site was actually superior, because of this competitive factor. And he was directly aware of the fate of his parents, who had nested on another apparently ideal island. Orn did not want his own chicks to be orphaned as they hatched.

  The smell of rep was strong here, and there were many droppings. Something used this peninsula regularly but he was unable to identify the particular creature before actually seeing it.

  Ornette, female, had few such compunctions. Defense of the nest was not her primary responsibility; filling it was. She scratched the earth in several areas and fluttered for his attention. This spot? This? Or nearer the water?

  Unable to subdue her enthusiasm without unreasonable gruffness, Orn approved a site beside the inlet. This was atop a large elevated stone, concave above, that he deemed secure from both flood tide and the intrusion of egg-sucking reps and landbound arths. A wingspan across and half that high, it was large enough for a proper nest yet had a sharply defined perimeter. The eggs would be as safe there as anywhere in the open, and of course they would never be left unattended.

  If only he knew what manner of rep frequented this locale. It might be innocuous.

  All afternoon they worked on the nest, foraging amid the pines for needles and cones, and fetching moss for spongy lining. Ornette wove the long stems of shore plants into a great circular pattern and calked the interstices with the clay Orn scooped up from beneath the water. The nest would have to bake for a day in the sun before the padding was installed, and if it rained they would have to repeat the calking and wait again. Orn hoped that such delay would not happen. The nest had to be complete before mating occurred.

  As the sun touched the bright crest of the mountain wall, shapes appeared in the sky. They were the huge gliding forms of the ptera, largest of the flying reps. Orn recognized the creature now, as the visual trigger activated his memory. The trees, the droppings, the odor - this was a nesting site for the enormous gliders.

  The shapes came in, drifting on the rising currents in the atmosphere but steadily approaching the island. Orn stood in the center of the peninsula beside the stoutest tree and made ready for the confrontation that had to come. Ptera generally did not get along well with true birds.

  Three spiraled toward him. Their wings were monstrous: four times Orn's own span. Their heads were large, with long toothless beaks and crests of bone that extended back as a counterbalance. A flap of skin stretched from the crest back above the body, serving as a rudder that oriented each creature into the wind. Their bodies had neither hair nor feathers, but scales as fragile as natal down and hardly more protective.

  Orn continued to watch, remembering more. The ptera, like the other larger flyers among the reps, had tiny legs to which the rear of the wings attached. The tail was so small as be useless. The forelimbs that braced the wings were many times the size of the hind limbs, and the fourth phalange extended half the length of each wing. Ptera, able to glide all day without respite, could not walk on land. There was nothing to fear from this particular species; any individual who tried to attack him in the air would be at a severe disadvantage because Orn could knock it down and kill it while it flopped helplessly on the ground. A ptera could not fly from ground level.

  Orn dropped his fighting stance, though he kept close watch on the visitors. One could never be certain what a rep would do, though the ptera were not notably foolish.

  The three circled overhead, then evidently decided that he was not a threat and swooped at one of the pines leaning over the water. Each passed over a horizontal branch high on the trunk, let down its little legs, caught hold with marvelous accuracy and spun around.

  Then the wings folded and they hung inverted, three suddenly smaller bodies wrapped in folded leather, the downy scales outward. They were well beyond Orn's reach and he,

  effectively, was beyond theirs. Friends the two species not, but coexistence was feasible.

  The mystery of the rep inhabitant had been alleviated. The three ptera combined would mass no more than Orn alone, for they were insubstantial things despite their monstrous wingspan. And if they nighted safely here, so could he.

  Ornette was unconcernedly scooping small fish from the water. She had known it all along.

  They fed together and slept that night beside the half-constructed nest, the head of each tucked under the wing of the other, sharing warmth and love. It rained, forcing them to scramble to shelter the nest with their spread wings, but it was a good night.

  The ptera were not early risers. Long after the birds had foraged for their morning meal, the three reps hung from their branches tightly cloaked. Only when the sun itself touched their bodies did they move, and then stiffly. The scant chill of this valley night was enough to incapacitate these creatures who lacked internal control of their body temperatures. Even the hairy mams were better off than that.

  The nest was baking. For the present, the birds had nothing constructive to do, so they explored the peninsula thoroughly, searching out the best fishing area and the richest infestations of edible arths - and watched the reps.

  The three began to stir more actively as the sunlight heated them. Their heads rotated and the small claws at the break of their wings flexed. They began to flutter gently, opening their membranes to the warmth. Those tremendous wings could trap a large expanse of sunlight, heating the entire system.

  Then, one by one, the reps dropped. The first fell almost to the water before leveling out, then swooped perilously close to the surface. Its wings stretched out so thinly that the sunlight made them translucent, the veins showing dark like the web-work of deciduous leaves. The ptera flapped clumsily, its very bones bending in the desperate effort to gain altitude, and Orn felt a surge of longing. Once his own line had flown, and takeoff had resembled this. He knew the rep had to reach an updraft quickly, for its reserve of energy was small and a descent into the cool water would be fatal.

  It found a favorable air current and fought its way to a safe height. The second ptera dropped, following a similar course. But the third, the largest, did not. The wind had shifted, and that particular corridor to the sky was closed. Anxiously it maneuvered from side to side, but remained too low. The tip of one wing as it banked touched a wave, jerking the creature about. It righted itself, but now was too low even to flap without disaster.

  The drama was not over. Carefully the ptera circled, coasting closer and closer to destruction but never quite touching the sea. It came in toward the island, toward Orn's nest.

  Alarmed, Orn ran to protect their property. But the ptera was only trying to reach land before falling that last bit. It did not succeed. With a sick splash it struck the water, so close to the nest that Orn spread his wings quickly to intercept the flying droplets before they wet the clay and forced the postponement of his nuptial.

  The ptera had reached the shallows, however, swimming ineffectively but determinedly, and was able to struggle the small remaining distance to the shore. Dripping and bedraggled, it climbed to land and lay there for a moment, watching Orn.

  The creature was exhausted, cold and helpless now; it would be easy to kill. It had very nearly killed itself, bouncing over the rocky barrier to the inlet. But Orn, imbued with the romance of his newly completed courtship and sympathetic to a certain extent to the rep's plight, did not attack. Anyway, there was very little good meat on it, and he was not hungry at the moment. Had such a creature fallen near him as he struggled through the desert, it would have been a different matter.

  After a while the ptera pulled itself away from the bank, scraping along on bedraggled, wet, folded wings and weak legs. It was unable to stand or walk, but it could crawl. It seemed surprised that no attack had come, but was not remaining to contemplate the matter. Indeed, Orn was not certai
n he had done the right thing; it went against his nature.

  The ptera scrambled awkwardly to its tree, then hooked its wing claws into the bark. Laboriously it climbed, clinging to the trunk with its wings draped down from the bend, a dripping cape. Only when it reached its branch did it rest again, flopped halfway over the wood with its long heavy head hanging in fatigue.

  At last it assumed the sleeping position, but did not sleep. It walked out from the trunk, sidestepping upside down, until it had good clearance. It spread its wings so that the sun caught them and warmed them and made it entirely dry. Then dropped again.

  This time it completed the maneuver successfully, and disappeared proudly into the sky.

  That day they watched the pteras feeding by swooping low over the waves and scooping small fish into their long bills. Because they did this at high speed and always facing the wind, they were able to touch the water and recover elevation without being immersed and trapped, and the massive rearward bones of their heads balanced the weight of the solid morsels they lifted. It was a graceful operation.

  Orn hardly cared about the life and fate of any given rep, yet in some fashion his act of mercy enhanced his relationship with Ornette. Together they gathered the last of the supplies they required. All day the sun shone without remittance - unusual, for this valley - and by late afternoon they decided the clay was firm enough. They packed in the lining layers and made the nest smooth and comfortable.

  That night they occupied their nest for the first time, snuggled pleasantly together within its bowl. And Ornette presented, and they mated at last, while the three ptera hung silent.

  XII - AQUILON

  She had slept in close proximity to these two men before, both on the planet Nacre and the raft Nacre. She knew them well and loved them both. But now she felt an increasing discomfort, a sense of impropriety. She had almost decided to leave them rather than continue to come between them, back when they had orbited Earth in the quarantine capsule. Events had prevented that, but did not really dispel the mood that had precipitated the decision. For surely she would come between them, and be the cause of sorrow and misfortune, if she remained a member of the party. She felt the female urges within her, compelling her to -

  She peered at the roof of the lean-to, invisible in the darkness but present in her mind's eye, for she had spent hours plaiting it. Yes, she felt compelled - but to what'?

  To choose.

  Aquilon was a woman. She had breasts and they were not simply for appearances; she had thighs and not entirely for walking. She was long past adolescence. But she had not felt the need of the physical male until - that agent Subble had aroused her, somehow, back in her tight Earth apartment, and turned her down. She had never realized before that a man could do that to her, and it had been a shock. When she had had no smile to show the world, she had bypassed social life, of course; but that new smile had seemed to open all the world to her, to lay waste all prior mysteries. Subble had routed that euphoria.

  She had not loved him, those few hours they conversed, but she had felt his controlled masculinity tangibly. He had made her realize that the love she professed for Veg and Cal was an intellectual thing possessing no physical substance; a sympathetic resonance of the love they professed for her. She had never actually imagined herself undertaking a sexual relation with either.

  Subble had been an agent, in more senses than one. He could move with seemingly irresistible speed and force and accuracy, yet hold a difficult pose indefinitely without sagging. He could talk philosophy and he could kill without compunction. He was handsome, yet ruthless even in his kindnesses. He was a body like Veg's, a mind like Gal's. He had understood her.

  Subble had died, making any consummation with him, however theoretical, a waste of emotional effort. Of course there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of agents virtually identical to him, and, designed to be exactly that, computerized. But it had not been the assembly-line physique and mind that made the connection between him and her; it had been their mutual experience. The Subble was gone forever; the close resemblance of other agents was irrelevant.

  That threw her back into the trio - with a difference. It had taken her this long to realize it.

  But what to do about it?

  She fell asleep without an answer. Her dreams, however, were not of love; they were of Brachiosaunis.

  The explorations of the next week banished any doubt they might have entertained about the nature of this region. They had struck paleontologic gold. This was a thorough Cretaceous enclave in the Paleocene world. The full spectrum of the golden age of reptiles was present - a vast pyramid of ecology, with inordinately plentiful small forms, largely mammalian, and lesser numbers of larger, dominant reptiles. Here, in fact, there were dinosaurs.

  Ten miles up the shore, northwest from their camp ('There's nothing so permanent as a temporary camp,' Cal remarked, and smiled for some obscure reason), the ocean inlet became the delta of a southbound river. It was evident that the towering mountain chain had once enclosed a salt-water bay some forty miles across and sixty miles long, but almost all of it had been filled in by the rich silt and debris of the river to form a tremendous warm swamp. Its center was a freshwater lake, swollen daily by ungentle rain, overgrown by soft vegetation, while its fringe rose up into the foothills of the giants. All of it was tropically warm, near sea level, the nights dropping down to a temperature of about 65° F., the days rising to 85° F., with the predominating level toward the higher end of that scale.

  In the direct sun it was much hotter, of course. At midday hardly a reptile moved. They were all hiding in whatever shade was available, predator and prey together. Aquilon had forgotten how much reptiles liked to rest.

  The corner of the delta nearest them was the sporting place of several families of duckbill dinosaurs. Cal insisted on using the proper classification terms - the 'family' being ranked below 'order' and above 'genus' - and of course the reptiles did not have families in the social sense. But they did associate in small or large groups, except for the carnivores, and Aquilon preferred to anthropomorphize to that extent.

  In the liquid portion of the swamp a lone Brachiosaurus browsed, perhaps the same one they had encountered so awkwardly upon their arrival. It consumed anything soft that grew within range of its neck, and once she saw it scoop up a fair-sized rock. Cal had abated her astonishment: it developed that such reptiles normally swallowed rocks to aid in their digestion of sturdier morsels. Long periods of stasis were required while the voluminous and tough material being processed was crushed and gradually assimilated; this was one reason, he

  explained, why mammals and birds were far more mobile than reptiles on a twenty-four-hour basis. Superior digestion eliminated that torpor. She decided that she'd feel torpid too if she had to let rocks roll around in her stomach.

  Sometimes the sauropod disappeared entirely, and she presumed it was taking a nap under the surface. It was an air breather, but probably it could hold its breath for a long time without particular discomfort, much as a whale did - or would do, tens of millions of years hence.

  Across the bay near the eastern mountains were more duckbills, these ones grotesquely crested; she meant to have a closer look at them in due course. And in the plainlike reaches between slush and mountain, where fern trees and cycads were particularly lush, were herds of Triceratops, plus scattered Atikylosauruses, both armored reptiles of considerable mass. Truly, it was a paradise of paleontology.

  And Cal, the paleontologist, was becoming more and more depressed. She found this hard to understand. Cal had a pessimistic view of life, but there was always sound reason behind his attitudes. If only he would explain what was bothering him!

  Meanwhile, she drew a map and filled in all the details observed and conjectured to date. She put in the volcanic mountains, and Scylla and Charybdis, and their camping place. She marked a dotted line to show their route of entry. Perhaps this could serve as an adjunct to Cal's eventual report.


  They found a better location about twenty-five miles north and made a second, more permanent camp beside a streamlet coursing down from the western range. She updated her map accordingly. There was a pleasant waterfall nearby, and hilly ground that seemed to be secure from the plains-dwelling armored dinosaurs, and the air was cooler here. She liked it very well. Veg, exploring indefatigably, said there was a snowy pass through the range at the head of the stream, and some hot areas of ground: even the silent volcanoes were far from defunct.

  There was danger here, certainly; there were savage predators larger than any existing on Earth before or after, though she had seen only their tracks so far. But danger was not objectionable per se, so long as one did not push one's luck. This was a visit in history, in historical geology, an experience like none possible to any home-bound person. So very like Earth...-

  Like Earth? It was Earth, according to Cal, though he hadn't spoken on that topic in the past month. She kept forgetting that. Perhaps it was because she thought of Paleo as a world in its own right; or maybe she simply could not assimilate the notion that something she might do here could change her own world, perhaps even eliminate the human species and extinguish her too. Then she could not come here, because she didn't exist, so no change would be made after all...