End of an Era

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Suddenly a burst of blue light appeared in my right eye and then, a second later, in my left. The phosphorescent slime had seeped through my clenched lids and was now sliding around my eyeballs. My lungs were burning with the need to breathe, but I fought the sensation, terrified to open my mouth.

  And then, mercifully, a reprieve was granted — or so I thought. The sickle troodon claws that had been holding my head let go. I waited for the hands to swipe back, julienning my face. Five seconds. Ten. I dared open one eye a slit, then, astonished, popped them both wide. The dinosaur was walking away with docile meter-long strides. It stopped, then turned around, its stiff tail clearing a wide arc. The thing’s cat-like eyes fell on mine, but there was no malice, no frenzy, no cunning in the dull gaze. Every few seconds, the creature shuffled its bird-like feet to keep balanced. I brought my hands to my face to wipe away the blue jelly, but there was nothing there except drying flakes of dinosaur blood, left over from the troodon Klicks had decapitated earlier.

  My lungs were pumping like blowfishes in heat. Indeed, still panicky, I feared I was going to hyperventilate. I fought to bring my breathing under control. I tried to rise to my feet, my one wish being to get out of there as fast as possible, to find some solace from this madness. But instead of obeying my command, my right leg went rigid, the muscles locking like ossified tendons. Then my left leg began flexing at the knee, the foot pivoting at the ankle. I felt as though I was having a seizure. My jaw slammed shut, biting into my tongue, and my eyes pulled in and out of focus. Then my left eye irised wide, the Cretaceous sunlight feeling like a hot lance as it stabbed into my cornea. My heart raced. Suddenly, incongruously, I found I had an erection. And then, just as suddenly, my whole body went limp.

  I caught a glimpse of Klicks, although the image kept blurring and I seemed unable to control the direction in which my eyes looked. The pair of troodons that had pinned him had also backed off and he was thrashing around facedown in the dirt.

  Throughout, my ankle kept swiveling, my foot tracing out a small circle in the air. Such a contrast to the simple hinge of dinosaurian ankles. That didn’t seem to me the sort of thing I should be thinking at a time like this, but before I could wonder about that further, I lost control of my brain. It began running through emotions, feelings, sensations. Incredible trans-orgasmic joy, greater than any sexual pleasure I’d ever dreamed of, as if I’d become a mindbender, with a battery hooked to my pleasure center. No sooner had it started than it was replaced by searing pain, as though my very soul was on fire. Then deep depression — death would be a reprieve. Then giddiness, child-like giggles escaping my throat. Pain again, but of a different sort — a longing for something irretrievably lost. Anger. Love. Hatred, of myself, of everybody else, of nothing at all. A kaleidoscope of feelings, constantly shifting.

  Then memories, as though the pages of my life were blowing in the wind: being intimidated by a bully in public school, him pushing me to the pavement, the skin on my kneecaps shredding, the dust jacket on the picture book Dad had lent me for show-and-tell ripping; my first awkward kiss, dry lips pressing together, then the delightful shock as her tongue pushed into my mouth; having my wisdom teeth removed, the unforgettable cracking sound as the dentist twisted each one free of its socket; the thrill of seeing my name in print on my first published paper, and the subsequent depression when Dr. Bouchard’s scathing letter about it was printed in the journal’s next issue; the sense of loss that just wouldn’t go away when my mother died, with me having left so many things unsaid, undone; the wonder of the first time Tess and I had made love, the two of us melding together into a single being with one breath, one thought.

  And things long forgotten, too: a childhood camping trip in Muskoka; the only time I’d ever been stung by a bee; helping a blind man cross the street when I was four — a street my parents wouldn’t let me cross by myself. Spilling my Super-Size Pepsi at a football game and Dad throwing a fit over it. Humiliations, joys, triumphs, defeats, all jumbled together, fading in and out.

  And then -

  Images that weren’t mine; memories that weren’t my own. Sensations beyond senses. Weird, false-color views. Tints without names. Bright heat. Dark cold. The loudness of blue. The gentle susurration of yellow. A long sandy beach, running to a too-near horizon. A cool sea that I somehow knew was salt-free and shallow, waves lapping against the sandy shore heard not with ears but as vibrations throughout my entire body. My lower surface tasting the sweet flavor of rust. Differing electric potentials in the sand making sounds like Ping-Pong balls bouncing across a table. An easy sense that north was that way.

  And more -

  A pleasing awareness of thousands of others calling out to me and me calling back, gentle greetings carried on something more attenuated than the wind. A feeling of belonging like I’d never had before, of being part of a greater whole, a community, a gestalt, going on and on and on, living forever. I felt my individuality, my identity, slipping away, evaporating in the cool sunlight. I had no name, no face. I was them and they were me. We were one.

  Slam! Back to the past. Yorkview Public School. Miss Cohen’s class, her mane of gold hair fascinating me in a way I didn’t then understand. What did I learn in school today? Facts, figures, tables — rote memorization, harder to dredge up as the years go by, but never totally forgotten. A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. I before E except after C. Nouns are people, places, or things. Verbs are action words. A bomb in a bull. Abombinabull. Abominable! I run. You run. He runs. We run. You run. They run. See Spot run! A is for apple. B is for ball. Adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs, advertisers modify the truth. Don’t split infinitives. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow … Avoid cliches like the plague. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name … A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject. Alpha, beta, gamma — no, irrelevant. A, B, C…

  And then, at last, it was over. My brain came back under my control slowly, numbly, like regaining use of a limb that had fallen asleep. I opened my eyes. I was flat on my back, a black cloud of tiny insects buzzing above my face. I tried to lift my head, but failed. In this reduced gravity, even weakened by a fight, I should still be able to do that. I contracted the muscles in my neck again. This time my head did rise from the dirt, but it had taken an extra effort to get it moving, as though … as though it had acquired some additional mass.

  Klicks had also finished his bout. He had already regained a sitting position, his head propped up by arms resting on his bent knees. I sat up, too. After a moment, though, I felt something in my mouth like warm, wet cotton. Soon my mouth was full of sickly sweet jelly. I bent my head and opened wide, letting it ooze from between my lips. Klicks, too, looked as though he was throwing up blue Jell-O.

  The stuff I was ejecting collected into a rounded mass on the ground in front of me, somehow the brown earth failing to stick to it. I had an urge to stomp on it, to bury it, to do anything to destroy the damned thing, but before I could act, a troodon walked over to it. The beast tipped its lean body down, the rigid tail sticking in the air like a car aerial. It laid its head on the ground next to the gelatinous lump, then closed its giant eyes. The jelly throbbed and pulsed its way, like a sky-blue amoeba, onto the dinosaur’s snout and settled into its head by percolating through the reptile’s leathery skin. Over by Klicks, a second troodon was likewise being entered.

  I’d avoided the word, revulsed by the very idea, but the blue thing was undoubtedly a creature. Although I knew consciously that it was gone from me now, my body evidently wanted to be sure. I doubled over, my stomach muscles knotting, and racked with convulsions as vomit — what little was left of my last meal back in the future — burned its way up my throat and out onto the fertile Cretaceous soil.

  After I’d stopped retching, I wiped my face with my sleeve and turned to face the troodons. The two that had been assimilating the jelly things h
ad straightened and were now shrugging their shoulders. One threw back its curving neck and let loose a bleat; the other stamped its feet a few times. I had a brief picture of my father, back when he was well, stretching into his old cardigan after supper, trying to get it to sit comfortably. The third troodon hopped over to stand near the other two.

  I looked at Klicks, raising my eyebrows questioningly.

  "I’m okay," he said. "You?"

  I nodded. There we stood, face-to-snout with three crafty hunters. Shafts of sunlight pierced the leafy canopy over our heads, throwing the tableau into stark relief. We both knew the futility of attempting to outrun creatures that were mostly leg. "Let’s try backing away slowly," said Klicks casually, presumably hoping a soothing tone wouldn’t alarm the beasts. "I think I can find the elephant gun."

  Without waiting for my answer, he took a small step backward, then another. I sure as hell didn’t want to be left there alone, so I followed suit. The troodons seemed content to watch us go, for they just stood there, shifting their weight between their left feet and their right.

  We made it perhaps eight or nine meters back when the one in the middle opened its mouth. The jaw worked up and down and a raspy sound issued from the beast’s throat. Despite my urge to get out of there, I was fascinated and stopped backing. The creature produced a low grumbling, followed by a few piercing cries like those made by hawks on a hot summer’s day. I marveled at its vocal range. It then started puffing the long cheeks of its angular snout, producing explosive p sounds. Was this a mating call? Perhaps, for a ruby-colored dewlap beneath the thing’s throat inflated with each puff.

  Klicks had noticed my dallying. "Come on, Brandy," he said, a nonthreatening lilt to his voice, but still retaining a certain quiet edge conveying the message "Don’t be a fool."

  "Let’s get out of here."

  "Wait up."

  It was an expression from my youth. To an adult, "wait up" means to refrain from going to bed until someone returns home, but to a child, especially one who was a bit on the pudgy side, as I had been, "wait up" was the plaintive call made to friends who were running faster than he could. Only one problem here. I hadn’t said those words and neither had Klicks. They had come, hoarse and booming, as though from a person who had been deaf since birth, from the carnivorous mouth of the middle troodon.

  Impossible. Coincidence. I must have heard it wrong. I mean, get real.

  But Klicks had stopped backing, too, his mouth agape. "Brandy — ?"

  Everything I knew about troodon came rushing back in a flood of memory. First described by Leidy in 1856, based on fossil teeth from the Judith River formation of Montana. Back in 1987, Phil Currie proved that troodon was the same as Stenonychosaurus, whose particulars were first published in 1932 by Sternberg, the man after whom we had named our timeship. I’d only been a kid at the time, but I remember the big fuss the media had made over the suggestion by Dale Russell, then of the Canadian Museum of Nature, that, had the dinosaurs not died out, stenonychosaurus-troodon might have eventually evolved into intelligent human-like "dinosauroids" who would have become the lords of creation. Russell even had a life-size sculpture made of his proposed reptile-person, a fully erect tailless biped with a braincase as big as a large grapefruit, three long surgeon-like fingers on each hand, and an incongruous-looking navel. Photos of it had appeared in Time and Omni.

  Could troodon have been more advanced by the final days of the Cretaceous than anyone had previously thought? Could an elite few dinosaurs have had spoken language? Were they on the way to civilization, only to have their tenure on the planet cut short by some catastrophe? For me, a lifelong lover of dinosaurs, the idea was compelling. I wanted it to be true, but I knew in my bones that even the best of the terrible lizards, although not as desperately stupid as once thought, was still no better endowed mentally than a shrew or a bird.

  A bird! Of course! Simple mimicry. Parrots do it. So do mynahs. We knew that birds were closely related to dinosaurs. Granted, our feathered friends hadn’t shared a common ancestor with troodon since the avian line split from the coelurosaurians in the mid-Jurassic, 100 million years before the time I was in now. Still, troodon was remarkably bird-like, with its keen binocular vision, quick movements, and three-toed feet. That’s it, of course. It must have heard me call "Wait up!" to Klicks and simply imitated the sound.

  Except.

  Except that I hadn’t called "wait up" or anything else to Klicks. And Klicks hadn’t said anything remotely like that to me.

  I must have heard wrong. I must have.

  "Wait up. Stop. Stop. Wait up."

  Oh, shit…

  Klicks recovered his wits faster than I did. "Yes?" he said, astonished.

  "Yess. Stop. Go not. Wait up. Stop. Yess. Stop."

  What do you say to a dinosaur? "Who are you?" asked Klicks.

  "Pals. We pals. You pals. Eat an ant and I’ll be your best friend. Pals. Palsy-walsy."

  "I don’t fucking believe this," said Klicks.

  That did it. The thing launched into George Carlin’s list of the seven words you never used to be able to say on TV. The troodon’s speech was still difficult to understand, though. Indeed, it would have been incomprehensible if it weren’t for the fact that it put a brief pause between each word, the obscenities coming out like the sputters of a dying muffler.

  "How can a dinosaur talk?" I said at last, to Klicks really, but the damned reptile answered anyway.

  "With great difficulty," the troddon rasped, and then, as if to prove its point, it arched its neck and hawked up a ball of spit. The gob landed on some rocks at the base of a bald cypress trunk. It was shot through with blood. The effort of speaking must be tearing up the creature’s throat.

  That the beast could speak made no sense, and yet the words, although not clear, were unmistakable. I shook my head in wonder, then realized what was doubly incredible was not just that the dinosaur was speaking, but that it was speaking English.

  Now, in retrospect, it seems obvious that it wasn’t the dinosaur talking. Not really. It was just a marionette for the blue jelly thing inside it. I’d had a hard enough time accepting that some weird slime had crawled into my head. The thought that the stuff had been an intelligent creature was something my mind refused to accept, until Klicks said it out loud. "It’s not the troodon, dammit. It’s the slime-thingy inside it."

  The talking dinosaur clucked like a chicken, then said, "Yess. Slime-thingy me. Not dinosaur. Dinosaur dumb-dumb. Slime-thingy smarty-pants."

  "That one must have learned English from you," said Klicks.

  "Huh? Why?"

  "Well, for one thing, it sure didn’t get phrases like ‘palsy-walsy’ and ‘smarty-pants’ from me. And for another, it’s got your snooty Upper Canada College accent."

  I thought about that. It didn’t sound to me like it had any accent at all, but then again it certainly didn’t have a Jamaican accent, which is what Klicks spoke with.

  Before I could reply, the three troodons stepped forward, not menacingly, really, but they did manage in short order to form the vertices of an equilateral triangle, with Klicks and me at the center. Klicks nodded toward the dense undergrowth, a mixture of ferns, red flowers, and cycads. There, sticking up, was the barrel of his elephant gun, quite out of reach. "Enough said by me," rasped the reptile, now standing so close that I could feel its hot, moist breath on my face and smell the stench of its last meal. "You speak now. Who you?"

  It was insanity, this being questioned by a baby-talking dinosaur. But I couldn’t think of any reason not to answer its question. I pointed at Klicks, but wondered if the hand gesture would have any meaning to the beast. "This is Professor Miles Jordan," I said, "and my name is Dr. Brandon Thackeray." The troodon tilted its head in a way that looked like human puzzlement. It didn’t say anything, though, so I added, "I’m Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum. Miles is Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and he also teaches at the U
niversity of Alberta."

  The reptilian head weaved at the end of that long neck. "Some words link," it said in its harsh voice. "Some not." I could hear an undercurrent of clicking as it spoke, the sound of its pointed teeth touching as its mouth made the unaccustomed movements. It paused again, then asked, "What is name?"

  "I just told you. Brandon Thackeray." Then, after a moment, I added, for no good reason, "My friends call me Brandy."

  "No. No. What is name?" It tilted its head again, in that puzzled gesture. Then it brightened. "Ah, word missing — indefinite article, yess? What is a name?’"

  "What do you mean, what is a name? You asked me what my name was."

  Klicks touched my shoulder. "No. What it asked was, ‘Who you?’ That’s not necessarily the same question."

  I realized that Klicks was right. "Oh. I see. Well, a name is … it’s, uh, a—"

  Klicks chimed in. "A name is a symbol, a unique identifying word, that can be rendered either with sound or with written markings. It’s used to distinguish one individual from another."

  Clever bastard. How did he think up such a good definition so quickly? But the troodon made that puzzled face again. " ‘Individual,’ say you? Still not link. No matter. Where you from?"

  Well, what do I tell this thing? That I’m a time traveler from the future? If it doesn’t understand name, it’s not going to understand that. "I’m from Toronto. That’s a city" — I looked up at the sun to get my bearings, then pointed east — "about twenty-five hundred kilometers that way."

  "What kilometer?"