Using tweezers - carefully, carefully - George held up a tiny scrap of something black. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
She looked closely. ‘Umm … a tooth?’
He gazed at his prize proudly. ‘Joan, this isn’t just a tooth. I think it’s a Purgatorius tooth.’
‘Say what?’
‘Purgatorius. A dinosaur-era mammal. Found it right under the boundary clay.’
‘You can tell all that from a tooth?’
‘Sure. I mean, look at this thing. It’s a precise piece of dental engineering, already the result of a hundred and fifty million years of evolution. It’s all connected, you see. If you’re a mammal you have specialised teeth so you can shear your food more rapidly - and so you can fuel a faster metabolism. But you can only have teeth like this if your mother produces milk, so you don’t need to be born with your final set of teeth; the specialist tools can grow in place later. Didn’t you ever wonder why you had milk teeth?’
She tried to keep interested, out of politeness. But there was something about the blackened, tiny tooth that Joan found disturbing.
Consider her ammonite shell. It had been trapped in a limestone coffin for maybe seventy million years - an unimaginable amount of time - and for what? Had whole lineages of ammonites flourished and died, with nobody around even to see what was going on, just so a kid like her could dig out a desk ornament? And, in another seventy million years, would her skull and kneecaps and whatever else be likewise dug up and marvelled over by uncomprehending eyes?
Maybe it was that unwelcome perspective, the pitiless depths of time, that had turned her off science. If life was so brief and meaningless, who wanted to know?
Her father, a twentieth-century rationalist stiff, hated her to talk like that. He hadn’t brought her out here for her head to turn to mush, he would say.
She tried to express what she was feeling. ‘Dad - what’s the point?’ She compared her ammonite’s robust beauty to the ugly shard of enamel in her father’s tweezers. ‘It’s all dead and gone. Maybe the past has no use unless it’s beautiful.’
He looked pained. ‘Now, honey - how can you say that? A lot of people are going to care a great deal about this find of mine. You know why? Because it’s a primate. Primate bones are hard to find, Joan - because most primates, for most of their history, have spent their lives climbing trees, and forests don’t make good fossils. And Purgatorius here is maybe the first of the line.’
‘An ancestor?’
‘Honey, this little scrap could be all that’s left of the most remote ancestor of you and me - and everybody alive - and the chimps and gorillas and lemurs. Not only that, she, or her family, survived the comet impact that destroyed the dinos …’
Joan held up her hands. ‘All right, I’m impressed. What did she look like?’
‘She?’
Joan thought that over. ‘Yes, she.’
‘Okay. Umm - what do you think she looked like?’
‘Something like a monkey?’
‘More like a rat - but much smaller, shrew-size, with a bushy tail. But Purgatorius was still a primate - I mean, already a primate. The forest is a hazardous world where you have to be able to spot which branch to jump to next, and judge your jump right, and grab hold of it - without fail, every time. It makes for grasping hands, sharp eyes, a large, fuel-hungry brain …’
Joan rubbed her nose. ‘One of these days you’ll find something really sexy in the boundary clay.’
He pulled a face. ‘Oh, like a bullet?’
‘Dad …’
‘Dad can I go now? Okay. Go play with the T. rex bone.’
She turned and ran.
He called after her, ‘But just think - Purgatorius might have lived like a squirrel, but she saw T. rex in the flesh, all five tons of flesh, in fact … Hey! You forgot your ammonite.’
But Joan wasn’t listening.
Because outside the tent, the Silver Woman was waiting again.
This time Joan was able to walk right up to her. She looked like a chimp, an upright chimp. Her face was like a chimp’s too, hairy, with flattened nostrils, and a brain pan small enough for Joan to have cupped in one hand. But she had on that shining coverall, and an array of some kind of tools at her belt.
Oddly, Joan wasn’t afraid. ‘Tell me who you are,’ she said.
The Silver Woman didn’t reply.
‘What do you want?’
The Silver Woman opened her mouth with a popping sound, as if she wasn’t used to speaking aloud. ‘The tooth-schh,’ she said at last, indistinctly.
Joan frowned. ‘The tooth? The Purgatorius tooth? Why?’
‘A … treash-ure.’ The word took some saying.
‘You want me to help you?’ She tried to think it through. ‘You want me to steal a damn tooth from my father and give it to you? Why should I?’
The woman shrugged, her narrow shoulders working. Joan saw how slack her skin was, as if she had no fat on her body.
‘Tell me who you are,’ Joan demanded again.
‘You know,’ the woman whispered.
And she disappeared again.
George Useb’s instinct about Rabaul had been right.
The millions who had been killed during the eruption and its immediate aftermath were only the first.
The volcano’s lingering legacy did most of the damage - specifically, the vast volumes of material it had injected into the upper air.
It had rained, and rained, and rained, all over the world, for weeks.
After the rain, as the sky ran dry, came the drought.
As the disaster became planet-wide, cholera, measles, typhus and dysentery epidemics broke out on a massive scale. Huge refugee flows washed back and forth. Medical and relief infrastructures were totally overwhelmed, and in many areas political administration quickly disintegrated.
Banditry and war followed. Scrappy, multi-polar conflict broke out across much of Africa, South America and Asia. The last United Nations-hosted summit conference ended in a mass assassination. And so on.
And in all this - as radiation flooded the air, as the fires burned around the planet, as the sun failed to shine - the world’s ecosystem, already under pressure, began to implode.
And humans discovered conclusively at last that they were still, after all, just animals embedded in an ecosystem.
It wasn’t Rabaul. That wasn’t the cause. That was just the final straw. Everything had been stretched to breaking point anyhow. It wasn’t even bad luck. If it hadn’t been Rabaul it would have been another volcano, or a quake or an asteroid, or some damn thing.
It was turning out to be remarkably easy for a world to end.
The oviraptor came to an opening in the loose rubble and volcanic stones. She could see nothing, but her sensitive hearing and sense of smell told her that here was a cave. She could make a nest, if she could find pine needles or dead fern fronds or other debris …
But the cave smelled odd: of something alive, something warm. This was no cave but a burrow. And whatever had dug it out was here, at the back of the little tunnel. She could sense it, a quivering mass of flesh, shivering as she was.
The chicks, climbing up behind her, smelled it too. They started to screech their hunger.
She didn’t recognise the smell; evidently this burrower’s upland range didn’t overlap her lowland home. She had no clear idea of what it was, how big it was, how well it could defend itself. But it didn’t matter: right now she had no choice.
She hurled herself forward, deep into the cave, mouth agape. Suddenly she felt better than she had done for days. She was, after all, a raptor; this was what she did.
The segnosaur fought back, as best he could.
He was actually larger than the raptor that attacked him. He had an awkward, sprawling body with wide hind feet, but his neck was long, his head small, like an ostrich’s, his beak toothless, his arms short. His best weapons were his powerful hands, which were equipped with long, straight
claws. These were hands designed for digging.
The segnosaur was one of the few species of dinosaur that constructed burrows. His deep, complex network of tunnels had enabled him to live out the horrific events of the extinction. Many of his kind, in fact, still survived across the continent, in mountain localities like this.
But the world still contained many hungry carnivores, and a dwindling food supply. One by one the segnosaur’s kind were being hunted down, no matter how deep their caves, a final saurian population steadily wiped out by increasingly desperate predators.
And so it was now. The segnosaur actually managed to lay a hand on the oviraptor, laying open her back with a raked digging claw. But he was no match for this ferocious, expert killer.
She laid open his belly.
The segnosaur felt his guts spill on the ground he had scraped out so carefully, could feel the cold that invaded him. He lived long enough to feel the raptor chicks’ small teeth bite into his liver.
By evening, most of the casuals had upped and gone.
The sky that night was huge and crammed with stars. The Milky Way, a side-on view of a giant spiral galaxy, was a highway across the night.
Joan lay on her back, gazing up, imagining the rocky Earth had vanished, the strata and their cargo of fossils and all, and that she was adrift in space.
In the twenty-first century you couldn’t go anywhere to escape the traces of mankind. The lake she could hear lapping gently was artificial; all the land around here was fenced-off rangeland. A couple of centuries ago there would have been huge herds of antelope and buffalo where now only crickets chirped. But if she tried, under this huge sky, she could imagine she really had been cast back into the past, a time before people had begun to rebuild the Earth.
She wondered if Purgatorius would have seen the same stars. Had they swum about the sky, across sixty-five million years? Did the Galaxy itself turn, like some huge pinwheel in the night?
… the Silver Woman was standing over her. Joan saw she wore a necklace, strung with what looked like fossils: bits of tiny, perfect skulls, jawbones, pelvises.
Joan sat up. ‘Tell me who you are.’
‘You know.’
And Joan, her scalp crawling, thought she did.
But if you’re here, she thought, that means today is the forty-ninth day.
‘What are you doing? Taking elephants? Hunting whales? Looking for artworks to save, books, sculptures…’
The Silver Woman said only, ‘Tooth-shsh.’
Joan felt anger build. ‘Are you a time traveller? Are you a ghost? Are you real? How did I know about you? Have you gone back into the past to set me up for this meeting? That’s what time travellers do, isn’t it? Have you been messing with time, messing with my life, fucking with my head?’
The Silver Woman wouldn’t reply to any of this.
Joan gave in to her rage and fear. ‘I won’t help you steal from my father. I don’t care where you’re from. Get away! Get away!’ And she picked up badlands rocks, big handfuls of them, and hurled them at the Silver Woman until she disappeared again.
A flaring, high above, caught her eye.
There were lights in the sky. Not stars, not planes, not satellites. Lights that flared and died. Silent, remote explosions, all around the sky’s equator.
It had been hard for the mother oviraptor.
The prey species were all gone now. The last dinosaurs were destroying each other, in battles as savage as any in their long age.
At last the oviraptor’s chicks, starving, had fallen on each other. The stronger three had ganged up on the weakest. And then, with a grisly logic, two had turned on one.
In the end - to her shame, her horror, violating all her mothering instincts - the oviraptor herself had devoured the last of her chicks.
And now, though she did not know it, she was the last of her kind.
But still she starved.
Now she faced something new. A biped, with bits of bone at its neck. Fur that was moonlight silver. Raising something towards her.
Something that spat light.
She couldn’t have gone on much longer anyhow. It had taken all her strength just to keep upright, to keep lifting her legs out of the snow. She didn’t fight, threaten, try to flee. She just stood there.
There was an instant of almost welcome heat.
Suppose I threw you back down the strata, back into time, her father had once said. After just a hundred thousand years you’d lose that nice high forehead of yours. Your upright-walker legs would be gone after three or four million years, because you’d be spending most of your time on all fours, like the chimps. You’d grow your tail back after twenty-five million years. After thirty-five million you’d lose the last of your ape features, like your teeth: after that you’d be a monkey, child. And then you’d keep on shrinking. Forty million years deep you’d look something like a lemur. And eventually—
Eventually, she would be a little ratty thing, peering up as dinosaurs danced under swimming stars.
There was a sound of thunder. It was as if great feet were stamping down on the fossil-laden bedrock, somewhere beyond the horizon.
Fear brushed her mind. She had bitched about her isolation. But she had always been safe with her father, here in her rocky cocoon.
The Silver Woman appeared again. She stood there, under the wheeling stars, looking at Joan.
Joan blurted, ‘Take me with you.’
The Silver Woman said, ‘Already enough-ghgh - of you.’ And she vanished.
Joan got up off the ground and ran to the warm tent, an island of light amongst the pale silhouettes of the rock formations, where her father waited for her.
The stomping grew louder, as if some fiery beast was approaching.
Stephen Baxter has degrees in mathematics, from Cambridge University, and engineering, from Southampton University. He worked as a teacher of maths and physics, and in 1991 he applied to become a cosmonaut on the Mir space station. His first professionally published story appeared in 1987 and he has been a full-time author since 1995. His books have been published in many different languages, and he is a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, Germany’s Kurd Lasswitz Award and Japan’s Seiun Award. He has also been nominated for several others, including the Arthur C. Clarke, the Hugo and the Locus awards. The author of more than a hundred science fiction short stories, Baxter’s novel Voyage was dramatised for BBC Radio in 1999 and his novel Timelike Infinity and story ‘Pilot’ are both in development as feature films. His latest novel is Evolution, from Gollancz. ‘This story is a spin-off of my research for a novel on human evolution,’ he reveals. ‘I remembered Ray Bradbury’s famous old story ‘A Sound of Thunder’, in which dinosaur hunters cause a tiny change in the past that makes ripples through history. But I realised that we know there was one day where you could go back to hunt dinosaurs and make no difference at all…’
<
There Lies the Danger…
BASIL COPPER
I
As Joshua Arkwright sat at the typewriter in his study one bright April day he was in reflective mood. One of the world’s most successful novelists, he had achieved much in his long and vigorous life. He had published over one hundred books in his lifetime, many of which had been acclaimed as classics, but now, at eighty-five, he was aware of his waning powers. It was not that he had a morbid fear of death, but he knew that he had many more fine works of fiction to give the world and, not for the first time, he regretted the inevitable approach of mortality.
He had, in fact, written a number of works which touched on the subject and he eagerly devoured medical journals which contained articles on efforts currently being made by scientists in the study of prolonging life. He had been particularly interested in recent newspaper reports on experiments being done by Professor Conrad Voss in Switzerland, which were apparently yielding remarkable results. On impulse, he had ask
ed his secretary to contact Voss, and now he was impatiently awaiting a reply to his queries.
He was interrupted by a deferential tapping at his study door and the somewhat flushed face of Yvonne appeared.
‘Professor Voss is calling. I will put him through.’
Arkwright nodded, without a flicker of emotion on his face, though his pulse was a little erratic as he picked up the telephone.
‘Voss here. Many thanks for your enquiries.’ The voice was low and modulated and he spoke perfect English.
‘I am grateful for your call, Professor. You know my age, of course.’
There was a muffled chuckle from the other end of the wire.
‘Naturally, my good sir. I keep an extensive reference library here and I have long been an admirer of your works.’
Arkwright felt a wave of gratification sweeping over him.
‘And I have followed your own career with interest, Professor. My questions stem from the fact that I feel I have a good deal yet to give the world, but time is pressing and my powers - physical, of course, not imaginative - are waning. I have excellent medical advice, but it seems to me that no one has ever approached the reported success of your experiments … I could come over if you thought there was a possibility …’
‘Certainly. And I could accommodate you in my private quarters. A social visit to all intents and purposes. And strictly no publicity.’
‘Naturally, Professor. And I will have the necessary arrangements put in hand immediately. I cannot get away at once, but shall we say in a week’s time? On the fifteenth, if that would be convenient for you?’
‘Admirable, Mr Arkwright. If you let me know the flight time, I will have you met at the airport at Geneva.’
When Arkwright put the receiver down he sat for a long time staring out of the window, not seeing the landscaped gardens below, but with many strange thoughts whirling through his brain. But the die was cast and what could he lose? For Voss had experimented not only on animals, but on human beings, with astonishing results, if the reports in the leading British and Continental medical journals were anything to go by. He picked up the extension and asked Yvonne to come in immediately.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 9
