Fossil Hunter (2 page)

Read Fossil Hunter Online

Authors: Robert J Sawyer

BOOK: Fossil Hunter
12.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
They wouldn’t last much longer. Delplas had rolled onto her belly, just in time to avoid Spalton’s scooping bite, and she’d smashed him in the side of the head, right over his earhole, with a vicious swipe of her tail. Spalton now had tumbled onto his side, muzzle hitting the wet sand hard. Delplas pushed up with her arms, regaining her feet, and once again her jaws opened wide, wider still, the sharp white teeth slick with crimson, her dexterous neck bending down, muscles bulging, readying for the kill…
“No!”
shouted Toroca, finally reaching them, the sands beneath them already a slurry of quartz grains and blood. Delplas looked up. She seemed momentarily confused, startled for an instant out of the madness of dagamant, but then she turned back to the prone Spalton, her jaws gaping…
Toroca reached out, grabbed her shoulder.
“Stop it!”
The touch shocked her — he could see her inner lids flutter across her obsidian black eyes. He yanked her aside, and brought his other arm up to her other shoulder, shaking her violently. “Stop it!”
Her jaws were still split wide, her whole muzzle a killing maw filled with white daggers. She faced Toroca and turned her head sideways, ready now to bite down on his muzzle or neck, tearing him open…
“No!”
shouted Toroca.
Behind them, Spalton was getting up. His left arm hung loosely from his shoulder, half-severed by one of Delplas’s great bites. He opened his jaws, ready to take out Delplas from behind, but then he staggered from side to side, and his jaw went slack, half closing, his eyelids likewise shutting partway, and he fell onto his side in a heap behind Delplas.
Delplas, oblivious to all this, snapped her jaws shut, but Toroca did the unthinkable in a territorial battle. He stepped backward, dancing out of her way. Her massive head failing to connect, she lost balance and tipped way, way forward. Toroca moved in from the side. He interlocked the fingers of his hands to form a massive club, like the tail knob of an armorback, and pounded down on her shoulders. She lost her footing and slammed down onto the sand. Overhead, the wingfinger let out a shriek, but the only sound Delplas made was a soft oomph.
Toroca leapt onto her back, pinning her. He was taking a big chance that Spalton wouldn’t recover enough to attack him from behind, but he couldn’t let them fight like this.
Delplas tried to push up off the beach, but she was near exhaustion. Toroca continued to hold her down. He couldn’t release her, not until he was sure the madness had passed. At last she spoke, her voice hoarse. “How…”
Come on, Delplas
, Toroca thought.
Give me a coherent sentence. Let it be over.
“How,” she began again, and a moment later, the rest of it came, “did you do that?” He got off her. She tried to rise, but was too tired or too injured to do so. Her inner eyelids were fluttering in astonishment, but as Toroca moved away from her, he saw her claws slip back into their sheaths.
“How did you do that?” she said again.
He moved over to Spalton, still lying on his side, the vessels in his arm having mostly sealed, but some blood still seeping out. His breathing was shallow but even, the respiration of unconsciousness, not the frantic gulping of air that comes with the territorial madness of
dagamant
.
“How?” said Delplas again, still too weak to get up. “How did you avoid getting drawn into the territorial battle? How could you
touch
me without your claws coming out?”
Toroca bent over to minister to Spalton’s wounds. He’d kept it a secret this long; he had no intention of offering an explanation now.
*2*
Musings of The Watcher
Universes come and go.
I am the sole survivor of the previous cycle of creation, of the universe that existed prior to this one. My body had ceased to have material substance countless millennia before the end of the old universe, but with forethought and determination and not a small amount of luck my consciousness managed to survive reasonably intact through that universe’s contraction into a cosmic egg and the subsequent Big Bang that gave rise to this latest iteration of everything.
It had been an impudent move, for who has the right to outlast the universe? And my impudence, apparently, was to be punished.
I thought I had ended up in hell.
The universe I had evolved in was quite unlike this new one. Mine had teemed with life. Physical laws were different, making almost every world fecund. Innumerable biologies and countless sentient forms arose.
But this current universe is brutally harsh. I found myself apparently alone in it. I’d expected that, of course, at first. After all, life surely would take some time to arise. But the universe expanded and cooled and galaxies formed and spun through dozens of rotation, and still no life emerged.
I spread myself thin, examining billions of galaxies, scanning each star for planets. On those rare occasions that I did find planets, I scrutinized each for signs of life, or even hints that life might someday develop.
Nothing.
For eighty percent of the present age of this universe I looked and looked and looked, disappointed at every turn.
Hell, indeed. I thought perhaps I would go mad; think perhaps that I did.
But then, at long, long last, in a mid-sized spiral galaxy, on the inner edge of one arm, I found a remarkable yellow star. At that time, it had a cometary halo, an asteroid belt, and eight planets — although it looked as though the outermost of these would eventually lose its large moon to a wildly eccentric orbit of its own.
The third planet was just the right distance from its sun to have substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface. And it had a giant moon — indeed, the pair was a freak double world. Tides from that moon pulled water on and off coastal clays, alternately exposing them to and shielding them from the sun’s radiation.
And from these, and a thousand other factors that had come together in just the right way, life had arisen.
A Crucible — of all the worlds in all the galaxies in this vast and infertile cycle of creation, I had found a single Crucible of life.
It soon became apparent that the Crucible was destined to be a battleground. Many creatures would arise, but only a few would survive. This was as much a world of death as of life.
At the outset, it was clear that amino acids would form the basis for biology here. But amino acids come in two orientations, left-handed and right-handed. Separate forms of life — true self-replicating strains — began using each orientation, but it was soon obvious that only the left-handed ones would survive.
All the universe except this one orb was vacant. I couldn’t let one of the two life-paths be snuffed out so early on. I had to find a way to save the right-handed forms, to … to … to transplant them somewhere else.
But how? I had an intellect that could span the galaxies, but I had no way to exert physical force. Unless — unless I adopted a body for myself.
The universe was permeated by dark matter, indeed, such matter comprised most of its bulk. Its presence was what guaranteed that this universe, like those before it, would eventually stop expanding and contract down, down, down into a primordial atom from which the next cycle would burst forth.
Dark matter is everywhere, both in intergalactic space and wending its way through the galaxies themselves. It made the ideal medium for one such as me. I joined with dense streamers of it that stretched through space near the Crucible’s sun. The union gave me mass and, therefore, a subtle but inexorable gravitational influence.
The Crucible’s solar system was still young. Although most of the planetesimals had been swept up already by the orbiting worlds, enough debris still littered the system to make impacts commonplace. When a piece of stone or metal slammed into the Crucible, it was not unusual for hunks of the Crucible planet itself to be tossed up with sufficient force to reach escape velocity.
At this early stage of development, life on the Crucible was little more than hardy chemicals and self-replicating crystals of acid. From those pieces of the planet that had been thrown into space, I selected the ones containing a preponderance of the right-handed acid forms. Exerting my gravitational influence, I sent tnem on a long, gentle voyage to another star where a planet awaited covered with oceans of sterile water. Only a small fraction of the amino acids would survive the long voyage — mostly those buried deep within the ejecta — but it would be enough, I hoped, to establish a second living world, tnis one for right-handed amino forms.
The process had begun. This universe may have only given rise to life in one place, but I would see to it that as much of the potential of that life would be realized across as many worlds as possible.
*3*
Fra’toolar
Toroca, who had recently become leader of the Geological Survey of Land at the young age of sixteen kilodays, knew he was different.
In part, it was because he actually knew who his parents were, something almost no other Quintaglio did. Toroca’s father was the blind sage Sal-Afsan. Seventeen kilodays ago, Afsan had sailed around the world aboard the mighty vessel
Dasheter
, had gazed upon what was called the Face of God, and had determined that it was, in fact, not the countenance of the creator at all, but rather the giant banded planet around which the tiny moon they lived on orbited.
Toroca’s mother, equally renowned, was Wab-Novato, inventor of the far-seer which had aided Afsan in his research. Novato and Afsan together had taken the truth about the Face of God one step further, determining that their world orbited much too closely to the Face to be stable, and that it would disintegrate in only a few hundred kilodays into a ring of rubble, just like those around the neighboring planets of Kevpel and Bripel. Shortly after Toroca had hatched, Emperor Dybo had named Novato director of the exodus project: the all-consuming effort to get the Quintaglio people off their world prior to its destruction.
Yes, knowing who his parents were was a difference, but it wasn’t the major one.
Toroca also had brothers and sisters. Since the dawn of time, the bloodpriests had devoured seven out of every eight hatchlings, leaving only the fastest one alive. But Toroca’s father, Afsan, had been taken to be The One foretold by Lubal — the hunter who would lead the Quintaglios on the greatest hunt of all. And the bloodpriests, an order closely allied with the Lubalites, made a special dispensation for the children of The One, allowing all eight of them to live.
Knowing his parents; knowing his siblings: these indeed made Toroca different.
But beyond that, he was different in a more fundamental way, different to the core of his being.
A crowded street. A room with ten or more people in it. A ship full of other travelers. None of it bothered him. If another Quintaglio accidentally stepped on his tail, Toroca’s claws remained sheathed. When from his vantage point high up the cliffs of Fra’toolar he’d seen Delplas and Spalton bobbing up and down from the waist on the verge of
dagamant
, Toroca had felt no need to reply in kind, had no difficulty turning away from the sight as he scaled his way down the cliff. Indeed, he’d been able to rush into the battle and literally pull them apart, all the while keeping his claws sheathed, his rationality at the fore.
Toroca seemed to lack the instinct for territoriality, lack the urge that drove other Quintaglios apart.
He’d never told anyone. Never said a word. It was liberating, this difference. Empowering.
And more than just a little bit frightening.
Toroca had left the other surveyors back at the great cliffs on the storm-swept coast, looking for any fossils at all from below the Bookmark layer, and cataloging the myriad forms they found above it. Rather than talk at length about how he’d managed to intervene rationally in the territorial battle between Delplas and Spalton, he’d simply left, hiking north toward the port town of Otok. This trip had been planned for some time, after all, and it afforded an ideal excuse to avoid conversation on this topic. It was a three-day hike into the town, where he was to rendezvous with Dak-Forgool, an eminent geologist from Arj’toolar newly assigned to the Geological Survey.
Otok was a pleasant enough little town. It consisted mostly of amorphous adobe buildings, the kind easily repairable after a landquake. The streets were simply dirt, pounded down by the caravans of hornfaces. The town square, the only part paved with cobblestones, contained only two statues: there was one of God, Her arms ending in stumps below Her shoulders, and another of Dy-Dybo, the Emperor, who in naked white marble looked even rounder and fatter than he did in the flesh.
Toroca had arranged to meet this Forgool at the foot of Dybo’s statue. He was looking forward to the encounter; Forgool had written much of value about the erosion of uprocks into downrocks. Toroca glanced at the sun, tiny, blazingly white, sliding down the purple bowl of the sky. It looked to be about the fourth daytenth, but…
Bells from the Hall of Worship. One. Two. Three. Four. Yes, Toroca was bang on time. But where was Forgool?
Toroca was wearing his geologist’s sash — he’d brought along needle and gut ties and had sewn the two ripped pockets during a break in his long hike. A geologist’s sash was quite distinctive, what with its twelve pockets running down its length. Forgool should recognize it immediately, and therefore have no trouble spotting Toroca, standing now in the considerable shade afforded by the statue of Dybo.
Toroca scanned the square. It was almost empty, of course. He saw one old Quintaglio crossing from the right, his tail dragging across the stones. A younger Quintaglio approaching from the left changed course to give the oldster wide clearance, and she nodded territorial concession at him as she did so.

Other books

Love and Food by Prince, K.L.
A Matter of Marriage by Lesley Jorgensen
HotTango by Sidney Bristol
Cop Town by Karin Slaughter
Promise by Dani Wyatt
Los tres impostores by Arthur Machen