The Palace at Midnight - 1980–82 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  But for me it was a big thing indeed: at that moment short-story writing seemed to me more difficult than writing novels, more difficult than learning Sanskrit, more difficult than winning the Olympic broad-jump. I had promised Bob and Ben that I would write a story, though; and I sat down to try. Though in an earlier phase of my career I had thought nothing of turning out three or four short stories a week, it took me about five working days to get the opening page of this one written satisfactorily, and I assure you that that week was no fun at all. But then, magically, the barriers dissolved, the words began to flow, and in a couple of days toward the end of January, 1980, the rest of the story emerged. “Our Lady of the Sauropods,” I called it, and when Omni published it in the September, 1980 issue, the cover announced, “Robert Silverberg Returns!” I imagined the puzzled readers, who surely were unaware that it was seven years since I had deigned to write short stories, turning to each other and saying, “Why, wherever has he been?”

  ——————

  21 August. 0750 hours. Ten minutes since the module meltdown. I can’t see the wreckage from here, but I can smell it, bitter and sour against the moist tropical air. I’ve found a cleft in the rocks, a kind of shallow cavern, where I’ll be safe from the dinosaurs for a while. It’s shielded by thick clumps of cycads, and in any case it’s too small for the big predators to enter. But sooner or later I’m going to need food, and then what? I have no weapons. How long can one woman last, stranded and more or less helpless, aboard Dino Island, a habitat unit not quite fifteen hundred meters in diameter that she’s sharing with a bunch of active, hungry dinosaurs?

  I keep telling myself that none of this is really happening. Only I can’t quite convince myself of this.

  My escape still has me shaky. I can’t get out of my mind the funny little bubbling sound the tiny powerpak made as it began to overheat. In something like fourteen seconds my lovely mobile module became a charred heap of fused-together junk, taking with it my communicator unit, my food supply, my laser gun, and just about everything else. But for the warning that funny little sound gave me, I’d be so much charred junk, too. Better off that way, most likely.

  When I close my eyes, I imagine I can see Habitat Vronsky floating serenely in orbit a mere one hundred twenty kilometers away. What a beautiful sight! The walls gleaming like platinum, the great mirror collecting sunlight and flashing it into the windows, the agricultural satellites wheeling around it like a dozen tiny moons. I could almost reach out and touch it. Tap on the shielding and murmur, “Help me, come for me, rescue me.” But I might just as well be out beyond Neptune as sitting here in the adjoining Lagrange slot. There’s no way I can call for help. The moment I move outside this protective cleft in the rock I’m at the mercy of my saurians, and their mercy is not likely to be tender.

  Now it’s beginning to rain—artificial, like practically everything else on Dino Island. But it gets you just as wet as the natural kind. And just as clammy. Pfaugh.

  Jesus, what am I going to do?

  0815 hours. The rain is over for now. It’ll come again in six hours. Astonishing how muggy, dank, thick the air is. Simply breathing is hard work, and I feel as though mildew is forming on my lungs. I miss Vronsky’s clear, crisp, everlasting springtime air. On previous trips to Dino Island I never cared about the climate. But of course I was snugly englobed in my mobile unit, a world within a world, self-contained, self-sufficient, isolated from all contact with this place and its creatures. Merely a roving eye, traveling as I pleased, invisible, invulnerable. Can they sniff me in here?

  We don’t think their sense of smell is very acute. And the stink of the burned wreckage dominates the place at the moment. But I must reek with fear signals. I feel calm now, but it was different when I got out of the module. Scattered pheromones all over the place, I bet.

  Commotion in the cycads. Something’s coming in here! Long neck, small birdlike feet, delicate grasping hands. Not to worry. Struthiomimus, is all—dainty dino, fragile, birdlike critter barely two meters high. Liquid golden eyes staring solemnly at me. It swivels its head from side to side, ostrichlike, click-click, as if trying to make up its mind about coming closer to me. Scat! Go peck a stegosaur. Let me alone.

  It withdraws, making little clucking sounds. Closest I’ve ever been to a live dinosaur. Glad it was one of the little ones.

  0900 hours. Getting hungry. What am I going to eat?

  They say roasted cycad cones aren’t too bad. How about raw ones? So many plants are edible when cooked and poisonous otherwise. I never studied such things in detail. Living in our antiseptic little L5 habitats, we’re not required to be outdoors-wise, after all. Anyway, there’s a fleshy-looking cone on the cycad just in front of the cleft, and it’s got an edible look. Might as well try it raw, because there’s no other way. Rubbing sticks together will get me nowhere.

  Getting the cone off takes some work. Wiggle, twist, snap, tear—there. Not as fleshy as it looks. Chewy, in fact. It’s a little like munching on rubber. Decent flavor, though. And maybe some useful carbohydrate.

  The shuttle isn’t due to pick me up for thirty days. Nobody’s apt to come looking for me, or even think about me, before then. I’m on my own. Nice irony there: I was desperate to get out of Vronsky and escape from all the bickering and maneuvering, the endless meetings and memoranda, the feinting and counterfeinting, all the ugly political crap that scientists indulge in when they turn into administrators. Thirty days of blessed isolation on Dino Island! An end to that constant dull throbbing in my head from the daily infighting with Director Sarber. Pure research again! And then the meltdown, and here I am cowering in the bushes, wondering which comes first, starving or getting gobbled by some cloned tyrannosaur.

  0930 hours. Funny thought just now. Could it have been sabotage?

  Consider. Sarber and I, feuding for weeks over the issue of opening Dino Island to tourists. Crucial staff vote coming up next month. Sarber says we can raise millions a year for expanded studies with a program of guided tours and perhaps some rental of the island to film companies. I say that’s risky for the dinos and for the tourists, destructive of scientific values, a distraction, a sellout. Emotionally the staff’s with me, but Sarber waves figures around, showy fancy income projections, and generally shouts and blusters. Tempers running high, Sarber in lethal fury at being opposed, barely able to hide his loathing for me. Circulating rumors—designed to get back to me—that if I persist in blocking him, he’ll abort my career. Which is malarkey, of course. He may outrank me, but he has no real authority over me. And then his politeness yesterday. (Yesterday? An aeon ago!) Smiling smarmily, telling me he hopes I’ll rethink my position during my observation tour on the island. Wishing me well. Had he gimmicked my powerpak? I guess it isn’t hard, if you know a little engineering, and Sarber does. Some kind of timer set to withdraw the insulator rods? Wouldn’t be any harm to Dino Island itself, just a quick, compact, localized disaster that implodes and melts the unit and its passenger. So sorry, terrible scientific tragedy, what a great loss! And even if by some fluke I got out of the unit in time, my chances of surviving here as a pedestrian for thirty days would be pretty skimpy, right? Right.

  It makes me boil to think that someone would be willing to murder you over a mere policy disagreement. It’s barbaric. Worse than that, it’s tacky.

  1130 hours. I can’t stay crouched in this cleft forever. I’m going to explore Dino Island and see if I can find a better hideout. This one simply isn’t adequate for anything more than short-term huddling. Besides, I’m not as spooked as I was right after the meltdown. I realize now that I’m not going to find a tyrannosaur hiding behind every tree. And even if I do, tyrannosaurs aren’t going to be much interested in scrawny stuff like me.

  Anyway, I’m a quick-witted higher primate. If my humble mammalian ancestors seventy million years ago were able to elude dinosaurs well enough to survive and inherit the earth, I should be able to keep from getting eaten for the next thirty days.
And, with or without my cozy little mobile module, I want to get out into this place, whatever the risks. Nobody’s ever had a chance to interact this closely with the dinos before.

  Good thing I kept this pocket recorder when I jumped from the module. Whether I’m a dino’s dinner or not, I ought to be able to set down some useful observations.

  1830 hours. Twilight is descending now. I am camped near the equator in a lean-to flung together out of tree-fern fronds—a flimsy shelter—but the huge fronds conceal me, and with luck I’ll make it through to morning. That cycad cone doesn’t seem to have poisoned me yet, and I ate another one just now, along with some tender new fiddleheads uncoiling from the heart of a tree fern. Spartan fare, but it gives me the illusion of being fed.

  In the evening mists I observe a brachiosaur, half-grown but already colossal, munching in the treetops. A gloomy-looking triceratops stands nearby and several of the ostrichlike struthiomimids scamper busily in the underbrush, hunting I know not what. No sign of tyrannosaurs all day. There aren’t many of them here, anyway, and I hope they’re all sleeping off huge feasts somewhere in the other hemisphere.

  What a fantastic place this is!

  I don’t feel tired. I don’t even feel frightened—just a little wary.

  I feel exhilarated, as a matter of fact.

  Here I sit, peering out between fern fronds at a scene out of the dawn of time. All that’s missing is a pterosaur or two flapping overhead, but we haven’t brought those back yet. The mournful snufflings of the huge brachiosaur carry clearly even in the heavy air. The struthiomimids are making sweet honking sounds. Night is falling swiftly and the great shapes out there take on dreamlike primordial wonder.

  What a brilliant idea it was to put all the Olsen-process dinosaur reconstructs aboard a little L5 habitat of their very own and turn them loose to re-create the Mesozoic! After that unfortunate San Diego event with the tyrannosaur it became politically unfeasible to keep them anywhere on earth, I know, but, even so, this is a better scheme. In just a little more than seven years Dino Island has taken on an altogether convincing illusion of reality. Things grow so fast in this lush, steamy, high-CO2 tropical atmosphere! Of course we haven’t been able to duplicate the real Mesozoic flora, but we’ve done all right using botanical survivors, cycads and tree ferns and horsetails and palms and ginkgos and auracarias, and thick carpets of mosses and selaginellas and liverworts covering the ground. Everything has blended and merged and run amok. It’s hard now to recall the bare and unnatural look of the island when we first laid it out. Now it’s a seamless tapestry in green and brown, a dense jungle broken only by streams, lakes, and meadows, encapsulated in spherical metal walls some five kilometers in circumference.

  And the animals, the wonderful, fantastic, grotesque animals.

  We don’t pretend that the real Mesozoic ever held any such mix of fauna as I’ve seen today, stegosaurs and corythosaurs side by side, a triceratops sourly glaring at a brachiosaur, struthiomimus contemporary with iguanodon, a wild unscientific jumble of Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, a hundred million years of the dinosaur reign scrambled together. We take what we can get. Olsen-process reconstructs require sufficient fossil DNA to permit the computer synthesis, and we’ve been able to find that in only some twenty species so far. The wonder is that we’ve accomplished even that much: to replicate the complete DNA molecule from battered and sketchy genetic information millions of years old, to carry out the intricate implants in reptilian host ova, to see the embryos through to self-sustaining levels. The only word that applies is miraculous. If our dinos come from eras millions of years apart, so be it: we do our best. If we have no pterosaur and no allosaur and no archaeopteryx, so be it: we may have them yet. What we already have is plenty to work with. Someday there may be separate Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous satellite habitats, but none of us will live to see that, I suspect.

  Total darkness now. Mysterious screechings and hissings out there. This afternoon, as I moved cautiously but in delight from the wreckage site up near the rotation axis to my present equatorial camp, sometimes coming within fifty or a hundred meters of living dinos, I felt a kind of ecstasy. Now my fears are returning, and my anger at this stupid marooning. I imagine clutching claws reaching for me, terrible jaws yawning above me.

  I don’t think I’ll get much sleep tonight.

  22 August. 0600 hours. Rosy-fingered dawn comes to Dino Island, and I’m still alive. Not a great night’s sleep, but I must have had some, because I can remember fragments of dreams. About dinosaurs, naturally. Sitting in little groups, some playing pinochle and some knitting sweaters. And choral singing, a dinosaur rendition of The Messiah or Beethoven’s Ninth I don’t remember which. I think I’m going nuts.

  I feel alert, inquisitive, and hungry. Especially hungry. I know we’ve stocked this place with frogs and turtles and other small-size anachronisms to provide a balanced diet for the big critters. Today I’ll have to snare some for myself, grisly though I find the prospect of eating raw frog’s legs.

  I don’t bother getting dressed anymore. With rain showers programmed to fall four times a day, it’s better to go naked anyway. Mother Eve of the Mesozoic, that’s me! And without my soggy tunic I find that I don’t mind the greenhouse atmosphere of the habitat half as much as I did.

  Out to see what I can find.

  The dinosaurs are up and about already, the big herbivores munching away, the carnivores doing their stalking. All of them have such huge appetites that they can’t wait for the sun to come up. In the bad old days when the dinos were thought to be reptiles, of course, we’d have expected them to sit there like lumps until daylight got their body temperatures up to functional levels. But one of the great joys of the reconstruct project was the vindication of the notion that dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals, active and quick and pretty damned intelligent. No sluggardly crocodilians these! Would that they were, if only for my survival’s sake.

  1130 hour. A busy morning. My first encounter with a major predator.

  There are nine tyrannosaurs on the island, including three born in the past eighteen months. (That gives us an optimum predator-to-prey ratio. If the tyrannosaurs keep reproducing and don’t start eating each other, we’ll have to begin thinning them out. One of the problems with a closed ecology—natural checks and balances don’t fully apply.) Sooner or later I was bound to encounter one, but I had hoped it would be later.

  I was hunting frogs at the edge of Cope Lake. A ticklish business: calls for agility, cunning, quick reflexes. I remember the technique from my girlhood—the cupped hand, the lightning pounce—but somehow it’s become a lot harder in the last twenty years. Superior frogs these days, I suppose. There I was kneeling in the mud, swooping, missing, swooping, missing; some vast sauropod snoozing in the lake, probably our diplodocus; a corythosaur browsing in a stand of gingko trees, quite delicately nipping off the foul-smelling yellow fruits. Swoop. Miss. Swoop. Miss. Such intense concentration on my task that old T. rex could have tiptoed right up behind me, and I’d never have noticed. But then I felt a subtle something, a change in the air, maybe, a barely perceptible shift in dynamics. I glanced up and saw the corythosaur rearing on its hind legs, looking around uneasily, pulling deep sniffs into that fantastically elaborate bony crest that houses its early-warning system. Carnivore alert! The corythosaur obviously smelled something wicked this way coming, for it swung around between two big ginkgos and started to go galumphing away. Too late. The treetops parted, giant boughs toppled, and out of the forest came our original tyrannosaur, the pigeon-toed one we call Belshazzar, moving in its heavy, clumsy waddle, ponderous legs working hard, tail absurdly swinging from side to side. I slithered into the lake and scrunched down as deep as I could go in the warm, oozing mud. The corythosaur had no place to slither. Unarmed, unarmored, it could only make great bleating sounds, terror mingled with defiance, as the killer bore down on it.

  I had to watch. I had never actually seen a kill before.
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br />   In a graceless but wondrously effective way the tyrannosaur dug its hind claws into the ground, pivoted astonishingly, and, using its massive tail as a counterweight, moved in a ninety-degree arc to knock the corythosaur down with a stupendous sidewise swat of its huge head. I hadn’t been expecting that. The corythosaur dropped and lay on its side, snorting in pain and feebly waving its limbs. Now came the coup de grace with hind legs, and then the rending and tearing, the jaws and the tiny arms at last coming into play. Burrowing chin-deep in the mud, I watched in awe and weird fascination. There are those among us who argue that the carnivores ought to be segregated—put on their own island—that it is folly to allow reconstructs created with such effort to be casually butchered this way. Perhaps in the beginning that made sense, but not now, not when natural increase is rapidly filling the island with young dinos. If we are to learn anything about these animals, it will only be by reproducing as closely as possible their original living conditions. Besides, would it not be a cruel mockery to feed our tyrannosaurs on hamburger and herring?

  The killer fed for more than an hour. At the end came a scary moment: Belshazzar, blood-smeared and bloated, hauled himself ponderously down to the edge of the lake for a drink. He stood no more than ten meters from me. I did my most convincing imitation of a rotting log, but the tyrannosaur, although it did seem to study me with a beady eye, had no further appetite. For a long while after he departed I stayed buried in the mud, fearing he might come back for dessert. And eventually there was another crashing and bashing in the forest—not Belshazzar this time, though, but a younger one with a gimpy arm. It uttered a sort of whinnying sound and went to work on the corythosaur carcass. No surprise: we already knew that tyrannosaurs had no prejudices against carrion.