It seemed likely that McInturff would order me killed on the spot, but maybe the presence of so many other men, not all of them as indifferent to judicial process as he, kept him from it. After finishing their egg collecting, they tied my hands at the small of my back, guyed my head erect with a lizard-skin cord knotted to my bindings, and made me walk, dragging behind an ankylosaur travois loaded with egg sacks and another hammocking Easley’s corpse.
At a village on the Great Inland Sea. I was locked for at least a week in a tool shed with a dirt floor. Through the holes in its roof, I could sometimes see gulls and pteranodons wheeling.
I had lost my parents, I had lost Button, I had lost our family of hadrosaurs. It seemed clear that McInturff and his egg-hunting cohorts would either hang me from a willow tree or paddle me out to sea and toss me overboard to the archaic fishes or ichthyosaurs that yet remained. I was almost resigned to dying, but I missed Button and feared that, only eight years old, he wouldn’t last too long among the harried duckbills.
The last night I spent in the tool shed, I heard a harmonica playing at some distance inland and knew that Button was trying to tell me hello, or good-bye, or possibly, “It’s all right, brother, I’m still alive.” The music ceased quickly, making me doubt I’d really heard it, then played again a little nearer, reconvincing me of Button’s well-being, and stopped forever a moment or so later. Button himself made no appearance, but I was glad of that because the villagers would have captured him and sent him back through a discontinuity lock to the Here-and-Now.
That, you see, is what they did to me. The sheriff of Glasgow, the fishing settlement where I was confined, knew a disaffected family who had applied for repatriation. He shipped me with them, trussed like a slave, when they made their journey back toward the Mississippi Valley Time-Slip, just across from St. Jo, Missouri, and the unappealing year known as 2111 A.D. Actually, because of a fast-forward screw-up of some esoteric sort, we recrossed in 2114. Once back, I was tried for Easley’s murder in Springfield, found guilty of it on the basis of affidavits from McInturff and several upright egg raiders, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. I have just finished serving that sentence.
From the new accounts that sometimes slip back through, Button grew up with the Corythosauri. Over there, he’s still with them, living off the land and avoiding human contact. It’s rumored that, at nineteen, he managed to kill Duckbill Jay McInturff and to catch in deadfalls some of McInturff’s idiot henchmen. (God forgive me, I hope he did.)
Because of my murder conviction, I’m ineligible to recross, but more and more people in our desolate century use the locks every year, whether a gate to the Late Cretaceous or a portal on another continent to a wholly different geologic or historical time. This tropism to presumably greener stomping grounds reminds me of the herding and migrating instincts of the dinosaurs with whom Button and I lived so many “years” ago. And with whom Button, of course, is probably living yet.
One gate, I’m told, a discontinuity lock in Siberia, debouches on an epoch in which humanity has been extinct for several million years. I’d like to use that lock and see the curious species that have either outlived us or evolved in our absence. Maybe I will. A document given me on leaving prison notes that this Siberian lock is the only one I am now eligible to use. Tomorrow, then, I intend to put in an application.
ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY
R. Garcia y Robertson
Here’s another fast-paced and compelling story by R. Garcia y Robertson, whose “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” appeared earlier in this anthology. In this one he keeps us safely in the present—or is it safe? And is the dead past really all that safely dead . . . ?
* * *
Like the marks of a great three-toed bird the dinosaur tracks ran right down the old dead river bed; deep prints of a hunting carnosaur, cut crisply into the hardened mud. Casting caution aside, the scientist crouched down, running her excited fingers over the tracks. Fused metatarsals gave the huge beast that birdlike strut. Carol felt the print and pictured an animal that she had known only from books. The stiff print from the fused foot made identification easy—order Saurischia, suborder Theropoda, family Ceratosauridae, and genus Ceratosaurus—a strong, tall killing machine.
Morning light streamed through high canopy and lower foliage, picking out the next print. Estimating stride length, Carol decided she was on the trail of an adult, well over twenty-five feet from stiff tail to shearing teeth. In her mind Carol captured the entire creature; long tail, powerful hind limbs, and a thick neck supporting a massive head, bladelike horn and heavy brow ridges.
Kneeling on the exposed riverbed, Carol felt a vibration in the air, a chill underneath the morning heat. The yellow dust around her was disturbed and broken. Here was a killer that hunted in packs, so why was it stalking alone? Was it old or ill? Where was the great beast headed? Carol tried to tell from the tracks. Feeling the nearest print she found the outer edge deeper and broken down. Here the monster turned a bit, craning its neck to one side. Carol had never seen a dinosaur duck like that, but she had seen birds in the wild leave the same mark when they made a ducking and turning motion. She inspected the next print. Now the toes dug into the stone. Spotting something, the carnosaur shifted its weight forward, leaning on its toes, getting ready to run.
There Carol stopped. She could follow the dinosaur no further; not until workmen broke up the remaining rocks covering the old stream bed. The fossil footprints vanished under a short shelf of more recent marine sediment. She straightened up slowly, and early morning nausea crept over her. She would rest, maybe even sleep, and come back when the work gang had exposed more of the footprints. Perhaps then Carol would know where the Ceratosaurus had gone.
###
Dividing the vegetation with its flat horn, the carnosaur poked its head through the tangle at the river’s edge, finding an especially broad clearing beside the shrinking stream. A centuries old sequoia had come crashing down along the bank, its shallow roots undermined by ground water. The fall of that forest titan had taken the smaller trees with it. Since that time the stream had sunk further, uncovering wide mud flats, while fast growing things had filled the clearing. A low green carpet of ferns and horsetails was broken by an occasional barrel-shaped cycadophyte with bright flowers and a rich crown of long tough leaves.
Humming insects droned in the hot still air. Wherever there was a break in the canopy insects came down to feed on the decay. Little animals would lurk in the thin boundary between undergrowth and mud flats, drawn by the insects and the need to drink. Right now the carnosaur’s prey might be there, panting in the heat.
Nothing stirred. Except for the drumming of its huge heart and rumblings in its belly the carnosaur kept completely still. Only its head poked into the clearing. Too old to hunt with the pack, the crafty beast lived on carrion and small prey. There was not a whiff of carrion in the morning air and the old carnosaur had not eaten. The smallest bit of flesh and blood would be welcomed by its starved belly.
A faint shiver ran through the leaves of a cycadophyte. Something small hid at the edge of the mud flats. The ceratosaur decided to cut a diagonal across the clearing, an indirect approach, tempting its prey into false and fatal movement. Breaking cover, the huge carnivore strutted upstream on three-toed feet, cutting its victim off from the tree line. Turning in the mud, the carnosaur dug in its toes.
###
In the same part of the forest, a hundred and twenty million years away, Carol bent over a low patch of herbs. Bird song filtered through jungle canopy, so different from the Upper Jurassic foliage. The sequoias had all fallen, leaving not a forest of titans, but a lush barrens supporting few creatures bigger than a songbird.
The land had both fallen and risen during the last hundred thousand millennia. The sinking Jurassic plain had become a shallow sea bottom, and then been thrust back up by volcanism. Green folds of highland forest hugged a spine of smoking mountains, peaks standing in solid
blue waves where the sea had been. Only the ferns remained the same, unchanged by the ages but hidden by a riot of newer broad-leafed undergrowth. For a blink of time this jungle had been plantation land. When the bottom fell out of the coffee market the wilds began reclaiming their own. Vines and weeds fought for air and light, crowding the coffee bushes and climbing the tall shade trees. In places this undergrowth had been cut back to make room for banana trees and maize fields, but each tiny open space was enclosed in a great green wall.
While the work gang uncovered more Ceratosaurus tracks Carol was finding wild raspberry. She had spent almost all her life far from a pharmacy, in jungles stocked with fever and primitive sanitation. Herbal remedies had been her first medicines, and forty years later she fell back on them. Flows of mud had submerged the dirt road and landing strip. There would be no hospital, no flying doctor here. The nearest village had nothing to offer but chronic dysentery and an aged midwife. The midwife had given Carol the unicorn root in her pocket. Carol half-trusted the herb to be pure, but the root had brought on strange dreams.
She was glad to find wild raspberry, tubus strigosus; long used by local Indians to combat nausea, and as a uterine tonic. This double purpose was significant, since Carol knew that her particular morning sickness was early pregnancy. Carol even knew precisely how pregnant she was. The baby could only be the result of a single bout of unsafe sex the night she left New York. Could she call it a baby? Carol was a scientist, and knew life came in stages. What was in her would hardly look human under a dissecting scope.
Had she not been leaving New York the baby would never have happened. Carol wished she had the charm or beauty to keep men. The prospect of flying off always gave her courage. Leaving town, the States, and phone service, said “No complications” loud and clear. So now she was alone, far from civilization, with the ultimate complication. A biologist will tell you that the chances of two humans conceiving in a single night are low, but a paleontologist lives by much more minute odds. A fossil is far rarer than conception. Multitudes live and die, never leaving their mark on a rock. Finding a sharp set of Ceratosaurus prints so far south was a major discovery, a missing link between Mesoamerican shale and the Morrison Formation of the northern plains.
Standing among the green growing things, with new life growing inside her, Carol still felt very alone. In the summer the forest teemed with Ivy League students, young graduate anthropologists imitating the Indians and despising the Spanish-speaking middle class. By now they had flown back to their upper class homes and fall semesters. The autumn rains had come, drowning the roads in mud, swamping the dirt airfield, stranding Carol among the Indians. Even when the students were there Carol had felt cut off. She was a generation ahead of them and a working scientist, a bottom of the heap paleontologist, turning over rocks in the wilds and trading her findings for modest grants. Each year it became harder, competing with younger fossil hunters equipped with echo amplifiers and electronic strata maps.
Carol had only wits and experience, and that bit of clairvoyance that lets a good bone hunter see through the rocks into ages past. Trained intuition told her she was close to a big bone bed. She had seen only tracks, but marks in the mud convinced her that there had been surface pools and plenty of ground water. Downstream she guessed there had been quicksand. There she expected to find the soft spots where bones collected from carcasses washed down by floods, or thirsty creatures caught in the mud. Carol had seen such bone reefs, but never found one all her own. Now she needed such a find desperately, to justify this trip into the jungle, to pay for the baby.
Training, wit, and intuition had not prepared Carol for a baby. A forty-year-old only child, she never had children, sisters, brothers, nor nieces and nephews. Her own childhood had been among strangers. Carol’s parents had been anthropologists, studying and living with little known peoples on three continents. Carol had worn loincloth diapers and run barefoot with village children. Her baby talk had been a mix of forgotten tongues. The languages kept changing, but she was always the different one, the one with white skin. Even when she was old enough for boarding school in the States, she was still the stranger, the one who did not know the pop stars and could only swear in Swahili. Carol never had her parents’ way with people, so she turned her attention to old bones and life long ago turned to stone.
Now she was no longer the barefoot little white girl running through the jungle. Walking made her weary. After a life on her feet it seemed unfair that her steps should now come harder. With unicorn root in her pocket and raspberry leaves for her tea she headed back to her tent, skirting around the dig. Noon was not far off, and the Indians clearing marine sediment from the Mesozoic riverbed would be working slower. Carol would spare them the worry of having their gringa boss watching over them. In solitude she brewed her herbs, then tried to make up the sleep that she had lost to strange dreams and morning sickness.
###
The dream started in amniotic darkness. Carol felt herself shrinking into her abdomen, lying curled within herself listening to the sea surge of her own bloodstream. After many ages a spark of light shone in the distance. The spark grew, fueled by the heat of a young sun. Air came thick and went into her lungs and daylight blazed over a primeval forest bounded by a shrinking river with a wide muddy bed. Tall palms shaded the far bank, and a row of young sequoias towered nearer at hand. Heavy air buzzed with insects, but there were no birds in this forest to scold the hunter and warn the hunted. A web of tiny trails disappeared between the trees. Thirsty heat tugged Carol towards the stream, but fear fought with the urge.
Then she saw it. Hanging as still as the air, half-hidden by the pines, a boney head protruded into the clearing. From behind that hideous mask a sharp eye fixed on her. Frozen in her dream she watched the head and horned snout come forward out of the forest. A powerful neck and thick shoulders followed; heavy thighs pushed the plants aside, trodding down horsetails and snapping young trees. This walking tower reached the mud bank, then turned toward her, faster than she thought something so large could move.
Frightened, Carol became aware of her small body. Her oversized eyes seemed at proper height because she was crouching atop a four-foot cycadophyte. Clawed fingers held her there, and a thin tail steadied her. The stiff hairs on her back bristled in terror. The carnivore came one stride closer and Carol was fleeing, leaping off her perch and running blindly along the riverbank.
###
Dust motes danced in shafts of sunlight above the dank dirt floor. The closeness inside the midwife’s shed was stifling. An iron roof trapped the tropic heat even in late September, while chinks in the packing crate walls let in light but not a breath of air. The old midwife sat cross-legged in one dark corner looking lean and withered, her shrunken eyes fierce and hollow. She listened while Carol recounted her dream.
“I discovered that I was a tiny furry animal, hunted by this huge beast. I ran, or tried to run. My legs moved, but the soft mud sucked at my feet. I awoke in a cold sweat despite the noontime sun.” Carol stopped and stared at the packed earth, not wanting to look at the haggard woman, tasting the sickly sweetness of waking all over again.
The crone in the corner stirred her tea with a stick. “Women with child have strong dreams. There is more to this or you would not have come back to me.”
Tracing a slow line in the oily dirt, Carol continued, “Yes, there is more. I returned to the dig and ordered them to clear away the rock in the direction that the monster was turning. Right where I had been in the dream, between the hunter and the river, we found the tracks of a small mammal. Stamped on top of them were more of the carnosaur’s tracks.” She shook herself. “How could I have known just what the thing was chasing?”
“How could you have known?” The midwife returned the question to the scientist, bright little eyes peering out from wrinkled flesh.
Carol drew a second line in the dirt, exactly across the first. “The dream began with the baby inside me. I was seeing things thr
ough the baby’s eyes. Was there something in the unicorn root you gave me, something that would cause dreams?” Her hands went into her pockets, searching for the unicorn root.
The crone made a flat motion that meant “no.” She followed the motion with more words. “The unicorn root is pure, but I said a prayer over it. You are old to be having a first child. You came to me afraid. I prayed that you would come closer to the child within you, and know whether the baby is well.”
Hands still in her jeans, the scientist looked up from her pattern in the dust, staring back at the tiny bright eyes. “But I dreamed about a little animal long ago.”
“The baby inside you is a little animal, a creature still growing. After giving goldenseal I have seen babies that never became human. They came out as worms, or salamanders, or little animals with big eyes and a tail.”
Carol let go of the unicorn root, brought her hand from her pocket and brushed out the pattern in the dirt. “Nonsense, this is an animal of long ago, ages ago. It has been gone so long that the mud has turned to stone.”
The crone shook her head. “We all come from ages past, and a little bit is passed on with each generation.”
Carol cursed the rains and mud that sealed her off from civilized contact, and civilized medicine. “Oh yes, microscopic bits of material are passed on, but not memories.”
Laughter rippled through the hut, sharp but soft, like a rippling shroud. “What do you know of memory? You have writing and recording machines to remember for you. You have forgotten memory. I carry the memories of generations in my head. I remember my mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother. I can tell you the tales of the Temple Builders, and of the time when the Black Robes first came out of the forest. Even in you, memory is not dead. Your baby knows neither machines nor paper, and remembers for you. How else could you know that the little animal’s tracks would be by the stream?”
Dinosaurs II Page 19
