“Like hell. It’s nothing but a plain everyday miracle we survived. You could just as well say I slammed you against a mountain, but didn’t manage to kill you.”
What a conversation to have with his hand in her crotch.
“Either way, you got me here.” Peg wore an impish grin. Putting her hands on his cheeks, she kissed him again. “Ever since I was a girl hunting up fossils, I dreamed of coming here. I worked and bled until I was the best young Ph.D. in the field. But none of that mattered, until you picked me. Jake Bento did that. No one else.”
“You knew that I picked you?”
“Of course.” She caressed his chest with short graceful strokes.
“When you submit a proposal, it’s essential to know who will judge it. If I can diagnose the personal life of a dead reptile from a shed tooth, I can certainly find out how FTL passes on its projects. To get here, I had to interest the right person.”
“Me?”
“You, or someone like you. It was not hard to figure out what you’d want.”
“I’ll be fucked.”
“First, we have to see how much I remember from comparative biology.” Her hand slid between his hips. “So this is what the adult male organ feels like. I haven’t held a penis since playing sex therapist in kindergarten. But that one was not so big and active.”
Flattered, Jake felt himself respond.
“Oh look, an erection,” she murmured. “This is fun!”
Her hips moved. Her breath came quicker. “You know, we could have done this that first night, after seeing the triceratops herd. But you crawled off to your cabin. I was too shy to go knocking on your door, making you think I was desperate.”
Shy? At that point-instant, Jake knew it was never going to be easy with Peg. But there was no way he was going to stop—the woman was a prize, with more angles than a dodecahedron. He did his best to start slowly. It was her first time.
He’d barely got going, when her eyes went wide. “Oh my, the cabin’s shaking.”
“It only feels that way.” Jake was hitting his stride.
“No,” she insisted, sitting bolt upright at the risk of giving him a hernia. “The whole tree is moving.”
Jake felt it too. The cabin shook like it was getting set to fall again.
Seizing her recorder, she squirmed over to the window. “Jake, come look, it’s a sauropod!” She lay there, aiming the recorder. “An Alamosaurus! I can almost count the teeth.”
Jake saw the beast’s head from where he lay, framed by Peg and the window. It was stripping greenery off a pine branch with short cylindrical teeth. One eye looked in at him.
Peg was not returning anytime soon, so he crawled over to be with her. No denying it. Alamosaurus was tremendous, a titanosaur in more than name. The head wasn’t much larger than a horse’s, but it was attached to a great wrinkled neck reaching far down into the foliage. The sauropod had half its thirty-ton bulk in the air, holding the sequoia with huge forelimbs.
Like all dinosaurs, it had that ancient, lord-of-creation look. Of course, sauropods were old, unbelievably ancient. They had seen continents separate and seas dry up, turning to shale and sandstone. The little protolemurs in the trees would come down, lose their tails, learn to walk upright and to build star ships, but they still would not be as old as late Cretaceous sauropods.
Magnificent. Inspired by the sauropod, Jake ran his hands over Peg’s hips, starting again where they had left off.
She set her recorder down, rolling over to face him, eyes gleaming. “Do it. But quietly. Don’t disturb the dinosaur.”
He cocked his head toward the pine boughs and inflated furniture. “We can be more private and comfortable.”
“No,” she shook her head violently. “I want to see the sauropod. It’ll be absolutely essential. I’ve waited all my life for this.”
Whatever gets you going. At least Jake did not have to worry about being essential. Alamosaurus had seen to that.
###
He salvaged every necessity they could realistically carry—medikits, microstove, sleeping bags, and some provisions—using a winch and cables to lower them to the ground. Peg studied titanosaurs, tropical birds, small mammals, and the refinements of heterosex. Given the need for caution, and frequent fucking, it took Jake five days to get them down out of the tree.
Then they headed north, through the foothills of the proto-Rockies.
It took more than five months to walk back to Hell Creek, recording, collecting samples, sleeping in trees, living on whatever the medikits identified as edible. Jake could not imagine a more complete honeymoon.
Then it was over. They stood beside the same billabong they had begun at six months before, taking last looks at the Uppermost Cretaceous—Peg could barely stand to let it go.
Systems check was a snap. He hardly had any equipment left. The missing shock-rifle no longer stood out in his report; it was nearly swallowed by bigger calamities, showing that it never pays to worry early. He saw a feud ahead with FTL. He had lost the reactor. He had crashed Challenger. Worst of all, he had hardly done half the assignment. Aside from the duckbills of Alabama, they had recorded nothing outside of Asiamerica. South America, Africa, India, and Australia-Antarctica were as mysterious as ever. The only fuck ups he had not committed were calling in a STOP team, or losing his client.
But after five months in the foothills of the Rockies, their recorders could not hold a byte more of data. They were carrying an incalculable treasure. Highland species. Scores of new genera. Gene samples. Tissue cultures. DNA scans. Humanity’s first look at the Mesozoic.
Fuck it. If FTL did not treat them like returning heroes, they would start their own agency. Call it Time Tours. Clients would climb all over them.
And he had added nicely to his artifact collection, finding another shed tooth, and a huge Quetzalcoatlus claw. Peg wanted to bring an egg. But she would have had to sit on it all the way home. The incubator chamber had gone down with the reactor, and they were headed into winter.
Sweating, bundled up in spare clothing, Peg was finally overdressed. Jake cleared his head for the most dangerous part of the return. Riding a tropical hurricane was nothing compared to doing the blind drunkard’s walk through a newly opened portal.
He engaged his navmatrix. The billabong, the flowering trees, the proto-birds—everything vanished.
Space-time blew about him, a near infinite number of point-instants thrown together by the anomaly. This time he was not lugging the reactor. The compweb beneath his scalp produced just enough drag to act as an anchor. He searched for the faint stirrings in the vortex that pointed to the far end of the anomaly. Luckily, he had been through this portal once already. His navmatrix projected a wispy gold filament—the path he had made on his first passage.
Each correct movement made the next one easier. Each mistake meant a possible portal skip to an unintended point-instant, the vast majority of which were in intergalactic vacuum.
He did not know they had made it until he saw snow-covered badlands and felt the howling Montana wind. “Light My Fire” throbbed in his microamps.
Four Hunkpapa warriors were sitting waiting by a fire, wrapped in buffalo robes. Wearing fur caps and winter leggings made from Mackinaw blankets, they gave Jake and Peg the flinty looks that passed for Lakota greetings. Their names were Swift Cloud, Bear Ribs, High Bear, and Sitting Bull, the Medicine Man and Strong Heart Chief. With the Hunkpapas was a forlorn, light-skinned Assiniboin boy called Little Hohe. Hohe was the Lakota name for Assiniboins. The Hunkpapas had killed Little Hohe’s family, and were taking him home for adoption.
It was no longer the Mesozoic. Jake recognized the year Minniconjous called The Winter When Ten Crows Were Killed.
As Jake and Peg appeared out of the frigid air, Sitting Bull started to repack his redstone pipe—a sign that guests had arrived. “I see you, He-Who-Walks-Through-Winters.”
“I see you, Sitting Bull.” Jake knew sign language, and was fully program
med for Lakota. Peg had to make do with French.
“You have been gone long in the Spirit World, He-Who-Walks?”
Jake folded his legs and sat down across the fire from the Strong Heart Chief, settling naturally into a lotus pose Peg had taught him. “For me it has been six moons, maybe seven.”
Sitting Bull’s face crinkled up into a smile. “For us it has been only as long as it takes to light and smoke a pipe.”
Jake made a sign that meant, “Marvelous are the ways of the Great Medicine.” Lateral drift had deposited them a few minutes further along the time stream. Which was normal. You never came back to the exact same point-instant.
“Your Walking-Wagon did not come back with you,” Sitting Bull observed.
“My Walking-Wagon went south.” Jake smashed his hands together to describe the wreck of the reactor.
“It is good we have Hohe horses.” Sitting Bull indicated a string of stolen ponies. He lit the pipe from the fire—offering a smoke to Grandmother Earth, Grandfather Sky, the Four Winds, and then to Jake.
Jake smoked, spreading out the gifts he had been gathering. Swift Cloud, Bear Ribs, and High Bear got shed tyrannosaurid teeth. He gave Silting Bull the big Quetzalcoatlus claw. Little Hohe got only a few proto-bird feathers from Peg, but then, Sitting Bull had already given the boy his life.
Everyone was pleased by the presents from the Spirit World, saying they were Sha-sha, which meant, “very red.” Excellent. Sitting Bull added, “Will He-Who-Walks and Red Woman come back with us to the camp circle?”
“You betcha,” Jake accepted. The Hunkpapa laughed aloud. “You betcha,” was Sitting Bull’s favorite Americanism.
Jake helped Peg onto a stolen pony. The nearest nineteenth-century portal was well to the south, but Sitting Bull’s good will made them welcome in lodge circles as far as Paha Sapa, the Black Hills that sit at the Center of the World. He and Sitting Bull had always gotten on well, and seemed to be getting along even better now that Peg accompanied him. Sitting Bull liked to have striking women in camp, and had given Peg the name Red Woman—after his own first wife, who had also gone into the Spirit World.
Handing Peg her drag rope, Jake thought how remarkable Sitting Bull’s taste in women was. Peg was sha-sha, very red, very excellent.
“We’re in,” he grinned. “Play our cards right, and Sitting Bull will throw us a wedding!” He-Who-Walks-Through-Winters and Red Woman rode off across the white landscape into the Winter When Ten Crows Were Killed.
All in all, Jake could not call it a bad run . . .
THE ODD OLD BIRD
Avram Davidson
For many years, the late Avram Davidson was one of the most eloquent and individual voices in SF and fantasy, and there were few writers in any literary field who could match his wit, erudition, or the stylish elegance of his prose. During his long career, Davidson won the Hugo, the Edgar, and the World Fantasy awards, and his short work was assembled in landmark collections such as The Best of Avram Davidson, Or All the Seas with Oysters, The Redward Edward Papers, and Collected Fantasies. His novels include the renowned The Phoenix and the Mirror, Masters of the Maze, Rogue Dragon, Peregrine: Primus, Rork!, Clash of Star Kings, and Vergil in Averno. His most recent books are a novel in collaboration with Grania Davis, Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, the marvelous collection The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy (one of the best collections of the decade), and a posthumously released collection of his erudite and witty essays, Adventures in Unhistory.
Here he gives us an affectionate, eccentric, and tasty look at a very odd old bird . . .
* * *
“But why a canal?”
“Cheaper, more, and better victuals.”
“Oh.”
Prince Roldran Vlox (to cut his titles quite short, and never mind about his being a Von Stuart y Fitz-Guelf) had “just dropped in” to talk to Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy about the Proposed Canal connecting the Ister and the Danube . . . there were, in fact, several proposed canals and each one contained several sub-propositions: should it go right through the entirely Vlox-held Fens (“The Mud,” it was fondly called . . . “Roldry Mud,” the prince sometimes called himself)? should it go rather to the right or rather to the left? should it perhaps not go exactly “through” them at all, but use their surplusage of waters for feeder systems? and—or—on the one hand This, on the other hand That—
“What’s that new picture over on the wall, Engly?” Guest asked suddenly. Host began to explain. “Ah,” said Guest, “one of those funny French knick-knacks, eh? Always got some funny knick-knacks . . . The British for sport, the French for fun . . .” Still the guestly eyes considered the picture over on the wall. “That’s a damned funny picture . . . it’s all funny little speckles . . .”
“Why, Roldry, you are right. What good eyes you have.”
Promptly: “Don’t soil them by a lot of reading, is why. Lots of chaps want to know about a book, ‘Is it spicy?’ Some want to know, ‘Is it got lots of facts?’ What I want to know is only, ‘Has it got big print?’ Shan’t risk spoiling my eyes and having to wear a monocle. One has to be a hunter, first, you know.” He made no further reference to the fact that his host himself sometimes wore a monocle.
Eszterhazy returned to the matter of canals: “Here is a sketch of a proposed catchment basin—Yes, Lemkotch?”
“Lord Grumpkin!” said the Day Porter.
There followed a rather short man of full figure, with a ruddy, shiny, cheerful face. There followed also a brief clarification, by Lemkotch’s employer, of the proper way to refer to Professor Johanno Blumpkinn, the Imperial Geologist; there followed, also, an expression on the Porter’s face, indicative of his being at all times Doctor (of Medicine, Law, Music, Philosophy, Science, and Letters) Eszterhazy’s loyal and obedient servant and all them words were not for an ignorant fellow like him (the day porter) to make heads or tails of; after which he bowed his usual brief, stiff bob and withdrew. He left behind him a slight savor of rough rum, rough tobacco, rough manhood, and rough soap . . . even if not quite enough rough soap to erase the savor of the others. The room also smelled of the unbleached beeswax with which they had been rubbing—polishing, if you like—the furniture’s mahogany; of Prince Vlox, which some compared to that of a musty wolf (not perhaps to his face, though); of Eszterhazy himself (Pears soap and just a little bay rum) and of Professor Blumpkinn (Jenkinson’s Gentleman’s Cologne: more than just a little). Plus some Habana segars supplied by the old firm of Freibourg and Treyer in the Haymarket—London was a long way from Bella, capital of the Triple Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania (fourth-largest empire in Europe) but so was Habana, for that matter. “Gentlemen, you have met, I believe,” Eszterhazy said, anyway adding, “Prince Vlox, Professor Blumpkinn.”
Further adding, “I am sorry that my servant did not get your name right, Han.”
Blumpkinn waved his hand. “Calling me by the old-fashioned word for the smallest coin in his native province really helps me to remember a proper value of my own worth—Ah. Canal plans. I hope that when the excavations are in progress you will be sure to keep me in mind if any interesting fossils turn up.” It was not sure that Prince Vlox would be able to identify an interesting fossil if one hit him in the hough or bit him on the buttock, but Eszterhazy gave a serious nod. He knew how such things were to be done. Offer a small gift for reporting the discovery of “any of them funny elf-stone things as the old witch-women used to use”—they used to use them for anything from dropped stomach to teaching a damned good lesson to husbands with wandering eyes: but now all that had gone out of fashion—should certainly result in the reporting of enough interesting fossils, uninteresting fossils, and, indeed, non-fossils, to provide copingstones for the entire length of the Proposed Canal . . . if ever there was actually a canal . . .
“And speaking of which,” said Blumpkinn, and took two large sheets out between covers large enough to have contained the Elephant Folios, “I have brought you, Doctor ’
Bert, as I had promised, the proof-sheets of the new photo-zinco impressions of the Archaeopteryx, showing far greater detail than was previously available . . . you see . . .”
Doctor ’Bert did indeed now thrust in his monocle and scanned the sheets, said that he saw. Prince Vlox glanced, glanced away, rested a more interested glance at the funny French knick-knack picture . . . men, women, water, grass, children, women, women . . . all indeed composed of multitudes of tiny dots, speckles, . . . points, if you liked . . . a matter easily noticeable if you were up close, or had a hunter’s eye.
“Yes, here are the independent fingers and claws, the separate and unfused metacarpals, the unbirdlike caudal appendage, all the ribs non-unciate and thin, neither birdlike nor very reptilian, the thin coracoid, the centra free as far as the sacrum, and the very long tail . . .” His voice quite died away to a murmur, Professor Blumpkinn, perhaps thinking that it was not polite to lose the attention of the other guest, said, “This, you see, Prince Vlox, is the famous Archaeopteryx, hundreds of millions of years old, which the sensational press has rather inadequately described as the so-called ‘no-longer-missing-link’ between reptiles and birds . . . observe the sharp teeth and the feather . . . this other one unfortunately has no head . . . and this one—”
Here Prince Vlox, perhaps not an omnivorous student of paleontology, said, “Yes. Seen it.”
“Ah . . . was that in London? or Berlin?”
“Never been in either place.”
Blumpkinn gaped. Recovered himself. Looked, first amused, then sarcastic, then polite. Eszterhazy slowly looked up. “What do you mean, then, Roldry, ‘seen it’? What—?”
Prince Vlox repeated, with a slight emphasis, that he had seen it. And he bulged his eyes and stared, as though to emphasize the full meaning of the verb, to see.
“What do you—Ah . . . ‘Seen it,’ seen it when, seen it where?”
“On our land. Forget just when. What do you mean, ‘Am I sure?’ I don’t need a monocle to look at things. Why shouldn’t I be sure? What about it?”
Dinosaurs II Page 10
