Robert Sawyer: Just Like Old Times

There! Up ahead! Something moving! Big, whatever it was: an indistinct outline only intermittently visible behind a small knot of fir trees.

A quadruped of some sort, its back to him/it/them.

Ah, there. Turning now. Peripheral vision dissolving into albino nothingness as the rex concentrated on the head.

Three horns.

Triceratops .

Glorious! Cohen had spent hours as a boy pouring over books about dinosaurs, looking for scenes of carnage. No battles were better than those in which Tyrannosaurus rex squared off against Triceratops, a four-footed Mesozoic tank with a trio of horns projecting from its face and a shield of bone rising from the back of its skull to protect the neck.

And yet, the rex marched on.

No, thought Cohen. Turn, damn you! Turn and attack!

Cohen remembered when it had all begun, that fateful day so many years ago, so many years from now. It should have been a routine operation. The patient had supposedly been prepped properly. Cohen brought his scalpel down toward the abdomen, then, with a steady hand, sliced into the skin. The patient gasped. It had been a wonderful sound, a beautiful sound.

Not enough gas. The anesthetist hurried to make an adjustment.

Cohen knew he had to hear that sound again. He had to.

The tyrannosaur continued forward. Cohen couldn’t see its legs, but he could feel them moving. Left, right, up, down.

Attack, you bastard!

Left.

Attack!

Right.

Go after it!

Up.

Go after the Triceratops .

Dow—

The beast hesitated, its left leg still in the air, balancing briefly on one foot.

Attack!

Attack!

And then, at last, the rex changed course. The ceratopsian appeared in the three-dimensional central part of the tyrannosaur’s field of view, like a target at the end of a gun sight.

“Welcome to the Chronotransference Institute. If I can just see your government benefits card, please? Yup, there’s always a last time for everything, heh heh. Now, I’m sure you want an exciting death. The problem is finding somebody interesting who hasn’t been used yet. See, we can only ever superimpose one mind onto a given historical personage. All the really obvious ones have been done already, I’m afraid. We still get about a dozen calls a week asking for Jack Kennedy, but he was one of the first to go, so to speak. If I may make a suggestion, though, we’ve got thousands of Roman legion officers cataloged. Those tend to be very satisfying deaths. How about a nice something from the Gallic Wars?”

The Triceratops looked up, its giant head lifting from the wide flat gunnera leaves it had been chewing on. Now that the rex had focused on the plant-eater, it seemed to commit itself.

The tyrannosaur charged.

The hornface was sideways to the rex. It began to turn, to bring its armored head to bear.

The horizon bounced wildly as the rex ran. Cohen could hear the thing’s heart thundering loudly, rapidly, a barrage of muscular gunfire.

The Triceratops , still completing its turn, opened its parrot-like beak, but no sound came out.

Giant strides closed the distance between the two animals. Cohen felt the rex’s jaws opening wide, wider still, mandibles popping from their sockets.

The jaws slammed shut on the hornface’s back, over the shoulders. Cohen saw two of the rex’s own teeth fly into view, knocked out by the impact.

The taste of hot blood, surging out of the wound …

The rex pulled back for another bite.

The Triceratops finally got its head swung around. It surged forward, the long spear over its left eye piercing into the rex’s leg …

Pain. Exquisite, beautiful pain.

The rex roared. Cohen heard it twice, once reverberating within the animal’s own skull, a second time echoing back from distant hills. A flock of silver-furred pterosaurs took to the air. Cohen saw them fade from view as the dinosaur’s simple mind shut them out of the display. Irrelevant distractions.

The Triceratops pulled back, the horn withdrawing from the rex’s flesh.

Blood, Cohen was delighted to see, still looked red.

“If Judge Hoskins had ordered the electric chair,” said Axworthy, Cohen’s lawyer, “we could have fought that on Charter grounds. Cruel and unusual punishment, and all that. But she’s authorized full access to the chronotransference euthanasia program for you.” Axworthy paused. “She said, bluntly, that she simply wants you dead.”

“How thoughtful of her,” said Cohen.

Axworthy ignored that. “I’m sure I can get you anything you want,” he said. “Who would you like to be transferred into?”

“Not who,” said Cohen. “What.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That damned judge said I was the most cold-blooded killer to stalk the Alberta landscape since Tyrannosaurus rex .” Cohen shook his head. “The idiot. Doesn’t she know dinosaurs were warm-blooded? Anyway, that’s what I want. I want to be transferred into a T. rex .”

“You’re kidding.”

“Kidding is not my forte, John. Killing is. I want to know which was better at it, me or the rex.”

“I don’t even know if they can do that kind of thing,” said Axworthy.

“Find out, damn you. What the hell am I paying you for?”

The rex danced to the side, moving with surprising agility for a creature of its bulk, and once again it brought its terrible jaws down on the ceratopsian’s shoulder. The plant-eater was hemorrhaging at an incredible rate, as though a thousand sacrifices had been performed on the altar of its back.

The Triceratops tried to lunge forward, but it was weakening quickly. The tyrannosaur, crafty in its own way despite its trifling intellect, simply retreated a dozen giant paces. The hornface took one tentative step toward it, and then another, and, with great and ponderous effort, one more. But then the dinosaurian tank teetered and, eyelids slowly closing, collapsed on its side. Cohen was briefly startled, then thrilled, to hear it fall to the ground with a splash—he hadn’t realized just how much blood had poured out of the great rent the rex had made in the beast’s back.

The tyrannosaur moved in, lifting its left leg up and then smashing it down on the Triceratops’s belly, the three sharp toe claws tearing open the thing’s abdomen, entrails spilling out into the harsh sunlight. Cohen thought the rex would let out a victorious roar, but it didn’t. It simply dipped its muzzle into the body cavity, and methodically began yanking out chunks of flesh.

Cohen was disappointed. The battle of the dinosaurs had been fun, the killing had been well engineered, and there had certainly been enough blood, but there was no terror. No sense that the Triceratops had been quivering with fear, no begging for mercy. No feeling of power, of control. Just dumb, mindless brutes moving in ways preprogrammed by their genes.

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

Judge Hoskins looked across the desk in her chambers at the lawyer.

“A Tyrannosaurus , Mr. Axworthy? I was speaking figuratively.”

“I understand that, my lady, but it was an appropriate observation, don’t you think? I’ve contacted the Chronotransference people, who say they can do it, if they have a rex specimen to work from. They have to back-propagate from actual physical material in order to get a temporal fix.”

Judge Hoskins was as unimpressed by scientific babble as she was by legal jargon. “Make your point, Mr. Axworthy.”

“I called the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller and asked them about the Tyrannosaurus fossils available worldwide. Turns out there’s only a handful of complete skeletons, but they were able to provide me with an annotated list, giving as much information as they could about the individual probable causes of death.” He slid a thin plastic printout sheet across the judge’s wide desk.