“Remember the ad campaign,” Jank said to nobody particularly, “when Antarctica finally got opened up?” I could tell from King’s expression that he’d never imagined any connection between himself and Antarctica. “Yesterday’s land of perpetual ice and snow, today’s treasure chest of mineral wealth. My favorite was, What good is it to the penguins? Succinct. Punchy.” He looked around at all our faces. “I’m willing to bet there’s this bright entrepreneur somewhere who’s seen pictures of the Silurian sea, how beautiful and serene it looks. He has a brainstorm. A luxury hotel in the prehistoric past! The Silurian Arms! Next thing you know, there’s this whole big ad campaign pitched to assholes with money they don’t know how to spend. The ads say crap like, Come back, come home, to a quiet and unspoiled world. Dine at Chez Paleozoic, gourmet cuisine from then to now.”
King had sat back in his seat and folded his arms while Jank talked. Now he said, “You may have missed your true calling.” He grinned to show that he really was trying to be a sport. “You’d have been an ace adman.”
“No, I was born with a soul,” and Jank grinned, too, like a carnivore. “About this luxury hotel. Hotels mean earth-moving equipment, mean draining all those smelly bayous. There’d have to be golf courses, too. Rich assholes can’t live without golf. Golf courses mean landscaping Paleozoic Appalachia to resemble Palm Beach. There’d have to be colored people to work as caddies and groundskeepers and do all the crap jobs, and poor neighborhoods for them to go home to at night. And golf courses mean effluent runoff, and particularly they mean grass, which as Westerman will tell you is a flowering plant, not due to appear until half past the Cenozoic. Someone decides club mosses are boring and a few palm trees wouldn’t hurt. So-called sportsman won’t get much of a kick out of little jawless fish, hey, this is prehistory, let’s liven it up! Bio-concoct some big placoderms like Dunkleosteus, maybe even some plesiosaurs. Or just import bass. Earth history’s going to get really twisted when all the little improvements take hold here.”
King raised a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Sounds pretty farfetched to me. This is what’s real. On the other side of the hole is an exhausted planet with nine billion people on it. On this side is a whole untouched planet.”
“It’s the same planet,” Jank said. “Let Northemico go mine the moon instead, it’s already dead.”
“Too dead,” said King, “and too far away. The Paleozoic’s alive, and it’s here. Are you going to sit there and tell me we should let our whole civilization run down so a few thousand folks here can go on admiring the place’s natural splendors? Face facts. The thing’s inevitable. When a thing’s inevitable, the best you can do is accept it and try to find the good in it.”
“Yeah.” Jank pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Just look where accepting the inevitable has got us so far.”
I stood up, too. The buzz the first drink had given me was long gone; a second drink hadn’t brought it back. Rubenstein, who had sat fuming with his cards fanned in his hand throughout Jank and King’s set-to, cursed and flung down a full house.
Jank and I wove our way among the tents and down to the beach. I was past being ready for bed, but felt he needed me to stay with him. “Well,” I said, “he’s right about one thing. The Silurian Arms does sound pretty farfetched.”
“Like twenty-first-century America would have to De La Cerda’s damn Indians? They never expected to get overtaken by events, either. People never do, and yet they always are. All of us here are going to be overtaken by events any day now. Any moment. We can’t outrun them, can’t duck them.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Then we face a choice between, I guess, becoming some sort of revolutionaries or goddamn acquiescing in another Antarctica. Put that in your book, Kev.”
“I guess,” I said, “we’ll all just acquiesce. What else could we do, really?”
“Toss certain parties through the hole and then wreck the jump station.”
I looked at him unhappily. We weren’t just talking about golf courses in the Paleozoic now. “They’d just open up another hole.”
“You don’t just ‘open up’ another hole. You have to find one and then widen it. They could look for a long, long time. Even if they found one they could use, the odds against it being one that would bring them right back here are billions, trillions to one. Even if they didn’t miss by much, they could miss by five or ten million years.”
“Which means,” I said, “they don’t play golf in the Silurian, they play it in the Ordovician or the Devonian.”
“At least they couldn’t mess up the Silurian. You can’t save everything, you save what you can.”
“Jank, the whole crew on the ship is Navy Reserve. They’d never throw in with mutineers. And you know that mutiny is what you’re talking about.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Yeah, hell, I know.”
“Plus, the ship’s not self-sustaining, and what is there to eat here? Trilobites, seaweed, bony fish Vick says taste like salt and mud. At least at your luxury hotel we could get a decent meal, and a drink besides.”
He seemed unable to decide how much of what I said was serious and how much was meant to be funny. After a moment, he gave me a comradely punch on the arm and said, “Meet you on the jetty tomorrow A.M.” He walked away, and I quickly lost sight of him in the gloom.
In the morning, it took a handful of aspirin to ease my aching head and three cups of burnt-tasting black coffee to get my eyes ungummed. The one other late-breakfaster was Rubenstein, who pointedly passed my table to sit at another one and hissed, by way of saying good morning, “A full house!”
I found Jank and Vick on the jetty, and King, too, all of them with masks and flippers in their hands. I hesitated when I saw King. He was an annoyance to Jank, but for me he was definitely shaping up as a rival. I was wearing faded cut-offs and suddenly became very conscious of the contrast provided by his sculpted thighs and calves and my scrawny knobby old-man’s sticks. Vick, however, didn’t recoil in horror when she looked at me, and I was further emboldened when she gave me a smile and a come-on shake of the head that a plaster saint couldn’t have resisted. There is no way, I told myself, I’m not going into the water if King does.
Still, as Jank was getting me equipped, I said in an undertone, “What’s he doing here?”
Jank shrugged helplessly. “He found out somehow and asked Vick if he could come along.”
“You want to drown him?”
“Maybe something will eat him.”
The four of us waded out until we had to swim, then swam out to where the water was six or seven meters deep. Sea and sky were warm, calm, and very clear. It was another perfect day in a ten-million-year summer.
The bottom reminded me of a NatGeo holo. Reef life only looks disorganized. Elsewhere in the world, coral polyps may already have been great, slow, patient architects, building barrier reefs the size of California; here, they were putting up lumpish, honeycombed bungalows. We passed over successive crescent-shaped zones dominated by gastropods, scalloped brachiopods, pink flower-like crinoids. In each zone, particular types of straight-shelled and slim tusk-shaped nautiloids jetted about above the bottom, looking like octopi in party hats. At their passing, particular types of elongate burrower disappeared under the sand with a minimum of fuss, and one or another variety of pillbug-shaped trilobite stopped grazing and dodged among the seaweed. The trilobites ranged from the fingernail- to the cracker-sized. There were prickly echinoderms, vase-shaped sponges, and limy stands of worm tubes. The first time I had ever seen any of these creatures, in clear, calf-deep water at low tide, with Cardwell standing beside me and pointing them out, I’d been disappointed. There’s nothing strange about them, I’d thought, they’re just these inoffensive little marine animals, going about their business. In spite of myself, I had, like King after me, expected more in the way of red-mawed ferocity, or of glandular imbalance, at the very least. None of these creatures was longer than my forearm. Mo
st were smaller than my fingers.
This wasn’t a scary sea by later standards. Most of the marine life that was equipped to bite hugged the bottom, where the food was, and, consequently, where the eating occurred. On dives, you stayed off the bottom and always scrupulously observed the rule against touching anything unfamiliar unless Jank or one of the other marine specialists handed it to you. We glided as huge, remote, and inaccessible as planets above the world of burrowers and scurriers. Only a few of the nautiloids seemed to notice, and all they did was track us as we passed overhead. Halfway through the Paleozoic Era, there was already that unnerving gleam of intelligence in cephalopod eyes. I glanced over my shoulder to see how my companions were doing and saw King watching, not the sea bottom, but Vick’s. The headheld—I hadn’t seen him without it since he donned it aboard the ship—made him look as if he were wearing an echinoderm for a cap.
Directly below us, the free-swimmers suddenly executed hard turns and rocketed away with their delicate pale tentacles fluttering behind. That spooked the more alert bottom-dwellers, and the nimbler of these made for cover among the corals. An instant later, something moved angularly across the feeding ground. It had many variously sized and shaped appendages sticking out from under its streamlined headpiece, which was adorned with two blister-like eyes as purposeful-looking as radar housings on fighter aircraft. One set of long appendages resembled nothing so much as vise-grips, another looked like sculls, and several short bristly pairs between the two were expressly for locomotion. The flattened body behind the head was divided into a dozen segments; the tail ended in an awl-like spike. The animal tore straight into a hapless trilobite. The vise-grips went to work, raising a swirl of mud and wreaking fearful havoc—the trilobite flew apart at the joints.
All of us remembered at the same moment that we occasionally had to bob up for air. We broke the surface together, and King spat out his mouthpiece and yelled, “What the hell is it?”
“Eurypterid!” Jank told him.
“Sea scorpion!” I put in.
We went back under. Below our waving flippers, the eurypterid swept bits of butchered trilobite under the front edge of its head. The victim’s survivors had quit the area as fast as their zillions of tiny legs could carry them, or had wedged themselves into crevices in the coral. Only some cephalopods warily hovered close by, tasting blood.
The eurypterid ate as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Maybe it really didn’t. It was the biggest animal I had seen in all the time I’d sojourned here, and even I knew a thing or two about its tribe. Eurypterids—the term “sea scorpion” was misleading; the animals’ closest relatives were horseshoe crabs—were the biggest arthropods of all time. The biggest ever found, Pterygotus, was two meters long, almost three with its main claws outstretched. The one before us measured only about half that, but we maintained our distance, and I personally would’ve preferred the view from a strong glass-bottomed boat.
The thing finished its repast and half-scuttered, half-swam into a dark space beneath a coral shelf. Jank signaled to King and me to stay where we were, and then he and Vick went down to where they could peer under the shelf. I was relieved when they kicked away and rose, and grateful, too. I was becoming fatigued. We swam until we could wade, then splashed toward the jetty. I noticed that I was going in faster than I had gone out, impelled, no doubt, by that silly fear some people have of getting a leg laid open by a flick of a marine monster’s spiky tail. Unmindful of me, Jank and Vick were talking breathlessly of eurypterid body parts, the chelicerae and the telson, the prosoma this, the ophisthosoma that. King kept abreast of them, not so much listening to what they said as simply watching them say it. That damned headheld.
We flopped panting onto the rocks, and Jank grinned at me and said, “I spent a whole year at Stinktown trying to study big live eurypterids close-up. Came away with almost nothing to show for it except a scar this long.” He held up his forefinger and thumb to show me how long.
“How do you mean,” said King, “close-up?”
Jank’s grin shrank to a smile, but he was too excited, he couldn’t keep himself from answering, he’d have answered a blood enemy’s questions about his specialty right then. “I tried nets and lobster pots. The varmints busted the lobster pots to pieces with their tails. I got this smallish one in a nylon net, almost a baby to the one we just saw, and had it half over the gunwale when it became annoyed and started taking the boat apart. It sideswiped me on its way back into the water.”
“So, what, you just dived and looked at them?”
Jank shook his head. “Not at Stinktown. The water’s too muddy. It would’ve been like diving in chocolate milk. With the possibility of blundering into a power saw thrown in.”
“Well, I take it back,” King said happily, “I really thought this place was empty,” and he got up and strolled away.
“Empty,” Jank breathed, “Jesus!” I tried to gauge Vick’s reaction, but she was busy with her mask and flippers and didn’t look up.
We were celebrities at suppertime. As happens with marine life that gets away, the eurypterid grew larger and more fearsome with each telling, until I capped matters by describing it as having been big enough to gut an orca and likening it to a lawn mower as it ripped through mats of hapless bottom-feeders. Spirits remained high as everyone collected on the beach afterward. Cardwell was having to put up with a lot of heckling and did so calmly, like Leonardo’s man who knows the truth and doesn’t have to shout. King kept circling him. Arty shot, I thought, and sort of happened upon Vick among the rocks at the base of the jetty. Before I could say a word to her, however, somebody on the beach shouted, “They’re here!”
A foaming wave cast up a dozen glistening shoe-sized lumps almost at my feet. The next wave brought another dozen, and the one after that, scores, hundreds. I heard Cardwell give a whoop—it was more of a bellow, actually—and my first thought was that the sound would scare away the creatures we had gathered to watch. Then I remembered that eardrums, too, were on the list of the yet-to-be. Cardwell rose to his full height and spread his arms in welcome, and from around him came applause and a ragged chorus of male and female voices, “Ta dah!” and one lone smart-aleck’s demand, “Yeah, but what’s your next trick going to be?” Everybody stood up and began moving noisily back and forth along the tide line. Almost at once I found King tagging along with Vick and me, but for at least a little while I didn’t care. It was showtime.
Within twenty minutes, there were thousands of trilobites on the beach, females with males in tow. The females half-buried themselves in wet sand and dumped their eggs while the males released sperm. It doesn’t sound like anything you’d want to lose your head about, but trilobite males were as eager as males of any species—some females had three or four suitors tagging after them—and there were hazards such as never spiced up human procreation.
Sometimes a trilobite was overturned. It would kick a bit with its legs, then contract the muscles running along its back, roll itself into a ball, and let the next wave draw it into deeper water—where it was at considerable risk from cephalopods and other predators. The press of bodies behind pushed some overturned trilobites too far onto land for waves to pull them back. Vick picked up one of these and showed me the paired, jointed legs. King leaned in between us to capture the moment for posterity. Vick turned and lightly chucked the animal back into the water, and then several more after it. Otherwise, they’d have still been on the beach, dying, when the sun rose. King stayed with us and managed to stay with her in particular. I was thinking about chucking him into the water when he asked her, “Why do you throw them back in? What about natural selection and all that?”
“What about it?” she said. “It’s getting on toward the Devonian Period. Trilobites are on their way out anyway.”
“Then why…?”
I stopped, picked up a stranded animal, made an underhand toss seaward. After a moment, King did the same. Vick looked pleased with both of us, which of
course only half-pleased me. I wondered how to get him to go be in somebody else’s face for a while. God sent somebody—who, I didn’t see and didn’t care—to snag him by the arm and direct his attention to an especially frenzied or imaginative expression of arthropod passion. I offered up a prayer of thanks, motioned Vick to come with me, offered up more thanks when she did. We strolled for a bit, saying nothing, then climbed onto the jetty. The chip player was in my pocket, loaded with a sampler program. We looked at the moon and the sea and listened first to a Tommy Dorsey rendition of “Moonlight in Vermont” and next to a “Moonglow” by one of Benny Goodman’s combos. She sighed. What a little moonlight can do.
At length, she said, “Can you dance to this music?”
My heart raced. I had picked out these tracks myself, with serious kootchiness in mind. June moon spoon. I said, “Millions did.”
“No, can you dance to it?”
“I do what people’ve always done. I fake it. If all you want to do is hold on to somebody and move in time with the music, it’s easy.” I opened my arms. After a moment, she came into them. “Okay, now put your left hand on my shoulder. I hold you lightly at the waist. Now put the edge of your right foot against the inside of my left foot, and the inside of your left foot against the outside of my right foot.”
“This is already starting to get complicated,” but she leaned away from me and looked down to position her feet. “Tab A into slot A. Tab B into slot B. Got it.”
“Don’t press your feet against mine so tightly. Maintain the contact lightly. Relax, stay loose.”
She shifted on her feet and leaned back in against me. I was happier for that.
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 67
