“Where are we?” Button asked when he awoke.
“When are we?” or “Why are we here?” would have been better questions, but I told Button that we were hiding from the giant piranha lizards that had killed Daddy and Mama. Now, though, we had to get on with our lives.
About then, we looked up and spotted a huge camouflage-striped corythosaur—green, brown, burnt yellow—standing on its hind legs, embracing a nearby fir with its almost graceful arms. With its goosey beak, it was shredding needles, grinding them into meal between the back teeth of both jaws. Behind and beyond it foraged more corythosaurs, the adults nearly thirty feet tall, the kids anywhere from my height to that of small-town lampposts. Some in the hadrosaur herd locomoted like bent-over kangaroos; others had taken the posture of the upright colossus before us.
Button began screaming. When I tried to cover his mouth, he bit me. “They wanna eat us!” he shrieked even louder. “Chad—please, Chad—don’t let them eat me!”
I stuffed the hem of a cotton tunic into Button’s mouth and pinned him down with an elbow the way the T-kings, yesterday, had grounded our folks’ corpses with their claws. I, too, thought we were going to be eaten, even though the creature terrifying Button had to be a vegetarian. It and its cohorts stopped feeding. In chaotic unison, they jogged off through the grove on their back legs, their fat, sturdy, conical tails counterbalancing the weight of their crested skulls.
“They’re gone,” I told Button. “I promise you, they’re gone. Here—eat this.”
I snapped a box of instant rice open under his nose, poured some water into it, and heated the whole shebang with a boil pellet. Sniffling, Button ate. So did I. Thinking, “Safety in numbers,” and setting aside the fact that T-kings probably ate duckbills when they couldn’t find people, I pulled Button up and made him trot along behind me after the corythosaurs.
In a way, it was a relief to be free of the twenty-second century. (And, God forgive me, it was something of a relief to be free of our parents. I hurt for them. I missed them. But the possibilities inherent in the Late Cretaceous, not to mention its dangers, pitfalls, and terrors, seemed crisper and brighter in our folks’ sudden absence.)
The asteroid that hit the Indian Ocean in ’04, gullywashing the Asian subcontinent, Madagascar, and much of East Africa, triggered the tidal waves that drowned so many coastal cities worldwide. It also caused the apocalyptic series of earthquakes that sundered North America along a jagged north-south axis stretching all the way from eastern Louisiana to central Manitoba.
These catastrophic seismic disturbances apparently produced the geologic divide, the Mississippi Valley Time-Slip, fracturing our continent into the ruined Here-and-Now of the eastern seaboard and the anachronistic There-and-Then of western North America. Never mind that the West beyond this discontinuity only existed in fact over sixty-five million years ago. Or that you can no longer visit modern California because California—along with twenty-one other western states and all or most of six western Canadian provinces—has vanished.
It’s crazy, the loss of half a modern continent and of every person living there before the asteroid impact and the earthquakes, but you can’t take a step beyond the divide without employing a discontinuity lock. And when you do cross, you see fossils sprung to life, the offspring of a different geologic period. In Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, it’s much the same—except that the time-slips in those places debouch on other geologic time divisions: the Pleistocene, the Paleocene, the Jurassic, the Silurian, etc.
We’re beginning to find that many parts of the world we used to live in are, temporally speaking, vast subterranean galleries in which our ancestors, or our descendants, stride like kings and we are unwelcome strangers. I survived my time in one such roofless cavern, but even if it meant losing Button to the Late Cretaceous forever, I’d be delighted to see all our world’s cataclysm-spawned discontinuities melt back into normalcy tomorrow …
The corythosaurs were herding. The tribe we’d just met flowed into several other tribes, all moving at a stately clip up through Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the northeastern corner of old British Columbia. Button and I stayed with them because, in our first days beyond the divide, we saw no other human pioneers and believed it would be more fun to travel with some easy-going nonhuman natives than to lay claim to the first plot of likely looking ground we stumbled across.
Besides, I didn’t want to begin farming yet, and the pace set by the duckbills was by no stretch burdensome—fifteen to twenty miles a day, depending on the vegetation available and the foraging styles of the lead males.
It was several weeks before we realized that the corythosaurs, along with six or seven other species of duckbill and a few distant groups of horned dinosaurs, were migrating. We supposed—well, I supposed, Button being little more than a dumbstruck set of eyes, ears, and boyish tropisms—only that they were eating their way through the evergreens, magnolias, and cycad shrubs along routes well-worn by earlier foragers.
Where, I wondered, were our human predecessors? The time-slip locks at St. Joseph and other sites along the divide had been open two full years, ever since Tharpleton and Sykora’s development of cost-effective discontinuity gates. To date, over 100,000 people had reputedly used them. So where was everyone? A few, like our parents, had met untimely deaths. Others had made the crossing elsewhere. Still others had headed straight for the Great Inland Sea—to trap pelicanlike pterosaurs, train them on leads, and send them out over the waters as captive fishers. It beat farming, said some returning pioneers, and the westerly salt breezes were always lovely. In any event, Button and I trailed our duckbills a month before happening upon another human being.
How did we become members of the corythosaur family? Well, we stayed on the lumbering creatures’ trail every day and bedded down near them every night. At first, sighting us, the largest males—like four-legged, thirty-foot-tall woodwinds—would blow panicky bassoon notes through the tubes winding from their nostrils through the mazelike hollows in their mohawk crests. These musical alarms echoed back and forth among the tribe, alerting not only our family but also every other nearby clan of hadrosaurs to a possible danger. Initially, this was flattering, but, later, simply frustrating.
Button got tired of dogging the corythosaurs. They stank, he said, “like the snake house in the St. Louis Zoo.” He griped about all the mushy green hadrosaur paddies along our route. He said that the insects bumbling in clouds around the duckbills—gnats, flies, a few waspish pollinators—were better at “poking our hides than theirs.” He whined that we couldn’t “become duckbills because we don’t eat what they eat.” And he was right. We were living on T-rations, tiny rodentlike mammals that I caught when they were most sluggish, and the pulpy berries of strange shrubs. We often had tight stomachs, loose bowels, borderline dehydration.
But I kept Button going by ignoring his gripes, by seeing to it that he ate, and by carrying him on my shoulders. Weirdly, it was after hoisting him onto my shoulders that the duckbills stopped running from us at first sight. By that trick, we ceased being two bipedal strangers and became a single honorary hadrosaur.
When he sat on my shoulders, Button’s dilapidated St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap gave us both the crest and the bill we needed to pass as one of their youngsters. Then, in fact, the corythosaurs let us travel at the heart of their group, with all the other juveniles. There, we were relatively secure from the flesh-eaters—T. rex, Daspletosaurus, and Albertosaurus—that would track us through the Dakota flood plains or try to intercept us in the lush Canadian woods.
The corythosaurs did a lot of noisy bassooning. They did it to warn of predators, to let the members of other duckbill clans—Parasaurolophus, Hypacrosaurus, Maiasaura, etc.—know of their nearness (probably to keep them from trespassing on their foraging grounds), and to chase off rival duckbills or timid carnivores.
Button and I took part in some of these performances with our wooden harmonicas. I’d
sound a few notes, echoing the call of an upright male in a register too high to make the imitation precisely accurate, and Button would blow an impromptu score of discordant notes that, totally silencing our duckbill kin, would drift across the landscape like the piping of a drunken demigod.
Anyway, by the time we had hiked almost five hundred miles, we were adopted members of the family. Or, rather, one adopted member when Button rode my shoulders, but tolerated hangers-on when he didn’t. Trapping small mammals, picking berries, and digging up tubers that we could clean and eat (our T-rations ran out on the twenty-seventh day), we scurried about under the duckbills’ feet, but made ourselves such fixtures in their lives that none of the creatures had any apparent wish to run us off.
Thus, we came to recognize individuals, and Button—when I asked him to name the creatures—gave most of them the names of his favorite anserine or ducky characters: Daffy, Mother Goose, Howard, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Scrooge McDuckbill. Adult females, because of their bulk, got monikers like Bertha, Mama Mountain, Beverly Big, Hulga, and Quaker Queen. (I helped with some of these.) We spent the better parts of three days baptizing our corythosaurs. Button had such a good time that he wanted me to help him come up with last names, too. I protested that we’d never be able to remember them all. When Button began to sulk, I told him to do the stupid naming himself.
Anyway, we wound up with three McDuckbills, some O’Mallards, a Gooseley, and a covey of Smiths: Daffy Smith, Mama Mountain Smith, Hulga Smith, etc. If, that is, I remember the baptisms correctly. On the other hand, how could I forget any aspect of the most vivid period of my life?
About a month into our trek, we ran into Duckbill Jay Chatillon and Bonehead Brett Hopkins, self-proclaimed “dinosaur men,” hunters who traded “lizard beef” and “’gator skins”—welcome supplements to a marine-based economy—to the people in the fishing villages along the northern coastal arc of the Great Inland Sea.
We ran into them because they leapt from the forest through which we were hiking and filled Dewey O’Mallard, a lissome juvenile, with handmade arrows. They shot their arrows, fletched with Hesperornis feathers, from polished bows fashioned from centrosaur ribs and strung with rodent gut. The other duckbills yodeled in dismay, reared, thrashed their tails, and trotted off bipedally in twelve different directions at once. I’d been walking four or five animals behind Dewey, with Button on my shoulders, and when Dewey trumpeted and fell, causing general panic, I simply froze.
The dinosaur men emerged from their natural blinds to butcher Dewey. When they saw Button and me, they started. Then they began asking questions. I took Button, now crying hysterically, from my shoulders. He spat at the men and ran off into the woods. I would have chased him, but the shorter of the two men caught my arm and squeezed it threateningly.
I spent that night with the two dinosaur men. They made camp near Dewey’s corpse, tying me to a cycad with a rope of hand-woven horsetail fibers. Why were they doing that? Why weren’t they helping me find Button? As they field-dressed Dewey, I shouted, “Button, come back!” realizing, even as I yelled, that it would be stupid for him to return to the uncertain situation he had instinctively fled. I shut up.
Chatillon and Hopkins, who had politely introduced themselves, built a fire and roasted over it a white-skinned portion of their kill. They tried to get me to eat with them, but I refused, not because I wasn’t hungry or despised dinosaur flesh, but because Button and I had named Dewey. How could I turn cannibal?
Despite their Wild West nicknames, Duckbill Jay and Bonehead Brett weren’t uneducated yahoos. (To receive permission to use a discontinuity lock, you couldn’t be.) But they had separated themselves from other pioneers, dressed up in spiked nodosaurhide vests, duckbill-skin leggings, and opossum-belly moccasins, and begun a two-man trading company inspired by North America’s rugged trappers of the early 1800s. Playing these parts, they had come to believe that a selfish lawlessness was their birthright.
Unable to coax me to eat, Chatillon, a slender, sandy-haired man with a splotchy beard, and Hopkins, a simian gnome with a high, domed forehead, tried to talk me into joining them. They could use another set of hands, and I’d learn to make arrows, shoot a bow, skin heterodontosaurs, butcher duckbills, and sew “fine lizardly duds”—if I let them teach me. They’d also help me find Button so that he, too, could benefit from their woodsy self-improvement program.
I talked to the hunters, without agreeing to this proposal. So they began to ignore me. Hopkins left the clearing and returned a little later with a half-grown panoplosaur to which was rigged a travois. On this sled, they piled the hide, bones, and butchered flesh of Dewey, after conscientiously treating the meat with sea salt. Then they ambled over to the cycad to which I was bound.
“Any idea where those flute-crests of yours happen to be going, Master Gregson?” Chatillon said.
“No, sir.”
“Four months from now, the middle of June, they’ll hit the Arctic rim, the shore of what Holocene-huggers used to call the Beaufort Sea.”
“Holocene-huggers?”
“Stay-at-homes,” Hopkins said. “Baseline-lubbers.”
“You want to traipse eighteen hundred more miles, kid? That’s what’s in store for you.”
“Why?” I said. “Why do they go there?”
“It’s a duckbill rookery,” Chatillon said. “A breeding site. Quite a ways to go to watch a bunch of lizards screw.”
“Or,” Hopkins said, “you could link up with some boneheads in the Yukon and tail them across the land bridge into Old Mongolia.”
“Where are we now?” I asked.
“Montana,” Chatillon said. “If Montana existed.”
“Its relative vicinity,” Hopkins said. “Given tectonic drift, beaucoups of climatic changes, and the passage of several million years.”
I had no idea what to reply. The dinosaur men put out their fire, lay down under the chaotically arrayed stars, drifted off to sleep. Or so I thought. For, shortly after lying down, Chatillon and Hopkins arose again, walked over, unbound my hands, and, in the alien woods, far from any human settlement, took turns poking my backside. I repeatedly cried out, but my tormentors only laughed. When dawn came, they debated whether to kill me or leave me tied up for a passing carnivore. They decided that the second option would free them of guilt and give a human-size predator—a dromoaeosaur or a stenonychosaur—several hours of amusing exercise.
“Wish you’d change your mind,” Bonehead Brett Hopkins said. He prodded the sleepy panoplosaur out of its doze.
“Yeah, Master Gregson,” Duckbill Jay Chatillon said. “We could make good use of you.”
Guffawing, they left. The woods moved with a hundred balmy winds. A half-hour after the dinosaur men had vanished, Button came running into the clearing to untie me.
It took us most of the day, but using the telltale spoors of shredded vegetation and sour-smelling corythosaur paddies, we tracked our family—Scrooge McDuckbill, Mama Mountain Smith, etc.—to a clearing in the Montana forest. There we tried to rejoin them. But our arrival spooked them, and it was two more days, Button on my shoulders like a tiny maharajah, before we could catch up again, reconvince the duckbills of our harmlessness, and resume our communal trek northwestward.
Long-distance dinosaurs, I reflected. We’re going to walk all the way to the Arctic rim with them. Why?
Because the Gregsons had always been loners, because I had good reason not to trust any of the human beings over here, and because we had already forged a workable bond with our “flute crests.” Besides, I didn’t want to homestead, and there was no one around—close to hand, anyway—to tell us we couldn’t attempt anything we damned well pleased.
So Button and I traveled on foot all the way to a beautiful peninsula on the Beaufort Sea, where we heard the duckbills bassoon their melancholy love songs and watched hundreds of giant lizards of several different species languidly screw. The males’ upright bodies struggled athwart the females’ crouc
hing forms, while the tribes’ befuddled juveniles looked on almost as gaped-beaked as Button and I. The skies were bluer than blue, the breezes were softer than mammal fur, and the orgasmic bleats of some of the lovesick duckbills were like thunder claps.
Button was dumbstruck, fascinated.
“Sex education,” I told him. “Pay attention. Better this way than a few others I can think of.”
The males in the mild Arctic forests blew rousing solos and showed off their crests. Those with the deepest voices and the most elaborate skull ornaments were the busiest, reproductively speaking, but there were so many dinosaurs in the rim woods, foraging and colliding, that in less than a month Button and I could see through the shredded gaps as if a defoliant had been applied. We saw boneheads—macho pachycephalosaurs half the size of our duckbills—banging their helmeted-looking skulls in forest sections already wholly stripped of undergrowth. The clangor was spooky, as were the combatants’ strategic bellows.
Button and I stayed out of the way, fishing off the coast, gathering berries, trapping muskratlike creatures on the banks of muddy inlets, and keeping a lookout for the human hunters that prowled the edges of the herbivore breeding grounds. We did well staying clear of godzillas like T. rex and the daspletosaurs, but, more than once, we narrowly avoided being kicked to tatters by an eleven-foot-tall midnight skulker called—I’ve since learned—Dromiceiomimus. Resembling a cross between an ostrich and a chameleon, this beast could run like the anchor on a relay team. And so Button and I began weaving tree platforms and shinnying upstairs to sleep out of harm’s way.
Sexed out and hungry for fresh vegetation, our corythosaur clan stayed in its breeding haunts only until late July, at which time Scrooge McDuckbill, Daffy Smith, and Donald Gooseley led the group southeastward. Button and I, more comfortable with these lummoxy herbivores than apart from them, tagged along again.
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 21
