by Jack Dann
How much more thrilling it would be, then, to travel back to the Dream-Time of the Jurassic in quest of the greatest prey of all . . .
It would be thrilling, wouldn't it?
One of the true giants of the field, Brian W. Aldiss has been publishing science fiction for more than a quarter of a century, and has more than two dozen books to his credit. His classic novel The Long Afternoon of Earth won a Hugo Award in 1962. "The Saliva Tree" won a Nebula Award in 1965, and his novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include the acclaimed Helliconia trilogy—Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter,—The Malacia Tapestry, An Island Called Moreau, Frankenstein Unbound, and Cryptozoic. His latest book is the collection Season in Flight. He lives in Oxford, England.
* * *
Claude Ford knew exactly how it was to hunt a brontosaurus. You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse's big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.
But as you, little mammal with opposed digit and .65 self-loading, semi-automatic, dual-barrelled, digitally-computed, telescopically-sighted, rustless, high-powered rifle gripped in your otherwise-defenseless paws, slide along under the bygone willows, what primarily attracts you is the thunder lizard's hide. It gives off a smell as deeply resonant as the bass note of a piano. It makes the elephant's epidermis look like a sheet of crinkled lavatory paper. It is gray as the Viking seas, daft-deep as cathedral foundations. What contact possible to bone could allay the fever of that flesh? Over it scamper—you can see them from here!—the little brown lice that live in those gray walls and canyons, gay as ghosts, cruel as crabs. If one of them jumped on you, it would very likely break your back. And when one of those parasites stops to cock its leg against one of the bronto's vertebrae, you can see it carries in its turn its own crop of easy-livers, each as big as a lobster, for you're near now, oh, so near that you can hear the monster's primitive heart-organ knocking, as the ventricle keeps miraculous time with the auricle.
Time for listening to the oracle is past: you're beyond the stage of omens, you're now headed in for the kill, yours or his; superstition has had its little day for today, from now on only this windy nerve of yours, this shaky conglomeration of muscle entangled untraceably beneath the sweat-shiny carapace of skin, this bloody little urge to slay the dragon, is going to answer all your orisons.
You could shoot now. Just wait till that tiny steamshovel head pauses once again to gulp down a quarryload of bulrushes, and with one inexpressibly vulgar bang you can show the whole indifferent Jurassic world that it's standing looking down the business end of evolution's six-shooter. You know why you pause; that old worm conscience, long as a baseball pitch, long-lived as a tortoise, is at work; through every sense it slides, more monstrous than the serpent. Through the passions: saying, here is a sitting duck, O Englishman! Through the intelligence: whispering that boredom, the kite hawk who never feeds, will settle again when the task is done. Through the nerves: sneering that when the adrenalin currents cease to flow the vomiting begins. Through the maestro behind the retina: plausibly forcing the beauty of the view upon you.
Spare us that poor old slipper-slopper of a word, beauty; holy mom, is this a travelogue, nor are we out of it? "Perched now on this titanic creature's back, we see a round dozen— and, folks, let me stress that round—of gaudily plumaged birds, exhibiting between them all the color you might expect to find on lovely, fabled Copacabana Beach. They're so round because they feed from the droppings that fall from the rich man's table. Watch this lovely shot now! See the bronto's tail lift. . . . Oh, lovely, yep, a couple of hayricks-full at least emerging from his nether end. That sure was a beauty, folks, delivered straight from consumer to consumer. The birds are fighting over it now. Hey, you, there's enough to go round, and anyhow, you 're round enough already. . . . And nothing to do now but hop back up onto the old rump steak and wait for the next round. And now as the sun sinks in the Jurassic west, we say 'Fare well on that diet' . . ."
No, you're procrastinating, and that's a life work. Shoot the beast and put it out of your agony. Taking your courage in your hands, you raise it to shoulder level and squint down its sights. There is a terrible report; you are half stunned. Shakily, you look about you. The monster still munches, relieved to have broken enough wind to unbecalm the Ancient Mariner.
Angered (or is it some subtler emotion?), you now burst from the bushes and confront it, and this exposed condition is typical of the straits into which your consideration for yourself and others continually pitches you. Consideration? Or again something subtler? Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization? But that's a point to deal with later, if there is a later, as these two hog-wallow eyes pupilling you all over from spitting distance tend to dispute. Let it not be by jaws alone, O monster, but also by huge hooves and, if convenient to yourself, by mountainous rollings upon me! Let death be a saga, sagacious, Beowulfate.
Quarter of a mile distant is the sound of a dozen hippos springing boisterously in gymslips from the ancestral mud, and next second a walloping great tail as long as Sunday and as thick as Saturday night comes slicing over your head. You duck as duck you must, but the beast missed you anyway because it so happens that its coordination is no better than yours would be if you had to wave the Woolworth Building at a tarsier. This done, it seems to feel it has done its duty by itself. It forgets you. You just wish you could forget yourself as easily; that was, after all, the reason you had to come the long way here. Get Away from It All, said the time travel brochure, which meant for you getting away from Claude Ford, a husbandman as futile as his name with a terrible wife called Maude. Maude and Claude Ford. Who could not adjust to themselves, to each other, or to the world they were born in. It was the best reason in the as-it-is-at-present-constituted world for coming back here to shoot giant saurians—if you were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man's cerebral vortex.
You try and stop your silly, slobbering thoughts, but they have never really stopped since the coca-collaborating days of your growing up; God, if adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it! Slightly, it steadies you to look again on the enormous bulk of this tyrant vegetarian into whose presence you charged with such a mixed death-life wish, charged with all the emotion the human orga(ni)sm is capable of. This time the bogeyman is real, Claude, just as you wanted it to be, and this time you really have to face up to it before it turns and faces you again. And so again you lift Ole Equalizer, waiting till you can spot the vulnerable spot.
The bright birds sway, the lice scamper like dogs, the marsh groans, as bronto sways over and sends his little cranium snaking down under the bile-bright water in a forage for roughage. You watch this; you have never been so jittery before in all your jittered life, and you are counting on this catharsis wringing the last drop of acid fear out of your system for ever. OK, you keep saying to yourself insanely over and over, your million-dollar, twenty-second century education going for nothing, OK, OK. And as you say it for the umpteenth time, the crazy head comes back out of the water like a renegade express and gazes in your directi
on.
Grazes in your direction. For as the champing jaw with its big blunt molars like concrete posts works up and down, you see the swamp water course out over rimless lips, lipless rims, splashing your feet and sousing the ground. Reed and root, stalk and stem, leaf and loam, all are intermittently visible in that masticating maw and, struggling, straggling or tossed among them, minnows, tiny crustaceans, frogs—all destined in that awful, jawfull movement to turn into bowel movement. And as the glump-glump-glumping takes place, above it the slime-resistant eyes again survey you.
These beasts live up to two hundred years, says the time travel brochure, and this beast has obviously tried to live up to that, for its gaze is centuries old, full of decades upon decades of wallowing in its heavyweight thoughtlessness until it has grown wise on twitterpatedness. For you it is like looking into a disturbing misty pool; it gives you a psychic shock, you fire off both barrels at your own reflection. Bang-gang, the dum-dums, big as paw-paws, go.
With no indecision, those century-old lights, dim and sacred, go out. These cloisters are closed till Judgment Day. Your reflection is torn and bloodied from them for ever. Over their ravaged panes nictitating membranes slide slowly upwards, like dirty sheets covering a cadaver. The jaw continues to munch slowly, as slowly the head sinks down. Slowly, a squeeze of cold reptile blood toothpastes down the wrinkled flank of one cheek. Everything is slow, a creepy Secondary Era slowness like the drip of water, and you know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heartbreaking than Time to stage it all in.
Never mind! Quaff down your beakers, lords, Claude Ford has slain a harmless creature. Long live Claude the Clawed!
You watch breathless as the head touches the ground, the long laugh of neck touches the ground, the jaws close for good. You watch and wait for something else to happen, but nothing ever does. Nothing ever would. You could stand here watching for a hundred and fifty million years, Lord Claude, and nothing would ever happen here again. Gradually your bronto's mighty carcass, picked loving clean by predators, woiild sink into the slime, carried by its own weight deeper; then the waters would rise, and old Conqueror Sea come in with the leisurely air of a cardsharp dealing the boys a bad hand. Silt and sediment would filter down over the mighty grave, a slow rain with centuries to rain in. Old bronto's bed might be raised up and then down again perhaps half a dozen times, gently enough not to disturb him, although by now the sedimentary rocks would be forming thick around him. Finally, when he was wrapped in a tomb finer than any Indian rajah ever boasted, the powers of the Earth would raise him high on their shoulders until, sleeping still, bronto would lie in a brow of the Rockies high above the waters of the Pacific. But little any of that would count with you, Claude the Sword; once the midget maggot of life is dead in the creature's skull, the rest is no concern of yours.
You have no emotion now. You are just faintly put out. You expected dramatic thrashing of the ground, or bellowing; on the other hand, you are glad the thing did not appear to suffer. You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men, squeamish. You tuck the gun under your arm and walk round the dinosaur to view your victory.
You prowl past the ungainly hooves, round the septic white of the cliff of belly, beyond the glistening and how-thought-provoking cavern of the cloaca, finally posing beneath the switch-back sweep of tail-to-rump. Now your disappointment is as crisp and obvious as a visiting card: the giant is not half as big as you thought it was. It is not one half as large, for example, as the image of you and Maude is in your mind. Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contraterrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo fumblingly fearful id!
Nothing is left to you now but to slink back to your timemobile with a belly full of anticlimax. See, the bright dung-consuming birds have already cottoned on to the true state of affairs; one by one, they gather up their hunched wings and fly disconsolately off across the swamp to other hosts. They know when a good thing turns bad, and do not wait for the vultures to drive them off; all hope abandon, ye who entrail here. You also turn away.
You turn, but you pause. Nothing is left but to go back, no, but 2181 a.d. is not just the home date; it is Maude. It is Claude. It is the whole awful, hopeless, endless business of trying to adjust to an overcomplex environment, of trying to turn yourself into a cog. Your escape from it into the Grand Simplicities of the Jurassic, to quote the brochure again, was only a partial escape, now over.
So you pause, and as you pause, something lands socko on your back, pitching you face forward into tasty mud. You struggle and scream as lobster claws tear at your neck and throat. You try to pick up the rifle but cannot, so in agony you roll over, and next second the crab-thing is greedying it on your chest. You wrench at its shell, but it giggles and pecks your fingers off. You forgot when you killed the bronto that its parasites would leave it, and that to a little shrimp like you they would be a deal more dangerous than their host.
You do your best, kicking for at least three minutes. By the end of that time there is a whole pack of the creatures on you. Already they are picking your carcass loving clean. You're going to like it up there on top of the Rockies; you won't feel a thing.
Green Brother
by
Howard Waldrop
So widespread is the image of the dragon—dragon-like creatures appear in just about every mythology in the world— and so powerful the emotions that it evokes that Dr. Carl Sagan, among others, has suggested that dragons are actually racial memory of dinosaurs, left over from the days when our remote ancestors were tiny tree-dwelling insectivores who cowered in shivering terror whenever one of the immense flesh-eaters like Tyrannosaurus Rex came crashing through the forest.
Whatever the truth of this, the archtype of the dinosaur is in our blood, and still prowls awesomely through our dreams, where it can be encountered, and evoked, and sometimes put to use—even if we don't quite know what it is . . .
Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story "The Ugly Chickens" won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in two collections: Howard Who? and All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and more collections are in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel Them Bones, and, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, The Texas-Israeli War: 1999. Another solo novel, A Dozen Tough Jobs, has just been released. Waldrop lives in Austin, Texas.
* * *
I am talking now about the time Red Cloud was fighting the Yellowlegs about the dirt road they put through our lands.
That started the last winter the Yellowlegs were beating the Grey White Men far to the east. We did not understand why they wanted to kill each other, but we did not mind so long as they left us alone.
I am Seldom Blanket. In those days I was a big medicine chief of my people. I would not have been down there in all the fighting with the soldiers if it had not been that my two sons-in-law wanted to go with the others. I don't give much of a damn for most of the rest of my people, but I did like my two daughters and the men who married them.
So early that spring we moved our lodges up to the places where the rest of the Lakota were camped, and we did the medicine dances and the younger men went off to fight the soldiers in their fort on the great dirt road.
I was in camp most of the time, though I would occasionally go up and watch the shooting and killing. Sometimes the war parties brought back one of our men, and we sang the death songs and wept. Sometimes we heard they caught a few of the soldiers and had fun with them and then killed them. It wasn't really a war at that time. We were just showing them how annoyed we were.
They had had a big meeting some years before, with representatives of the Great White Father, and we had all touched the pen, and got nice gifts and had a big supper. Then they brought us a lot of blankets and hardtack and beads. Then the
y built a road through our best hunting lands.
The road had filled up with wagons and the people who came through let us know they did not like us. They were afraid, too, so soon the soldiers came out while we were in the winter hunting grounds to the south and built a big wooden fort. It was there when our first scouts came back north. Also the soldiers were shooting the buffalo for their livers.
Red Cloud, the big talker for our people, went to the big fort and asked the main soldier there if they were going to move before it got cold again. The man said no.
They sent a man from the East who told Red Cloud that he had agreed to the building of the fort and the road.
Red Cloud said he didn't remember the subject ever coming up.
So they sent more white people to see Red Cloud.
"We ate real good for a week," he said to the Council, "but I don't think any one of them ever spoke from his heart the whole time." He said the white men complained that they were fighting with each other now over the Black White Men and needed the big dirt road.
Red Cloud told them the big wooden building was an eyesore in the Great Mystery's vision, and the dirt road was making the buffalo skittish and could they please move them both.
They said no, and waved the piece of paper around. So Red Cloud and a few hundred warriors went out one night and burned the fort down.
Then the white men rebuilt it two winters ago. Now everybody was in on the fight. My sons-in-law were gone most of the time, except when they brought food back, and I was much in the company of older men, and women and children. It is pleasant occasionally to do this. It gives a man perspective.
The favorite of my grandchildren was then called Fall Colt, but that would change soon, as he was nearing his thirteenth birthday. He was a fast learner and picked up on the wisdom that I gave him very quickly. I could tell he wanted to be out there with the men fighting around the fort, but he was as yet too young.
