Robert Sawyer - Fossil Hunter

Not a word.

Toroca was pacing the decks of the Dasheter again, his theory bothering him.

Yes, evolution explained the bizarre wingfinger-derived life-forms of the south pole. Yes, the mechanism of natural selection could account for their strange adaptations to the aquatic, fish-laden environment there.

But so what?

What relevance did evolution have to life back on Land?

He’d seen in the fossils of the Bookmark layer that all forms of life had emerged simultaneously: reptiles and fish and amphibians and wingfingers. All of them appeared at once.

Evolution had nothing to do with, oh, say, with a fish spontaneously developing a novelty that allowed it to survive for a short time out of water, and that trait being concentrated over the generations, to, for the sake of a wild example, give rise to amphibians.

Oh, it made sense that it could have happened that way, but that’s not the way it did. Fish and amphibians appeared simultaneously in the fossil record. Evolution had nothing to do with their arrival.

Arrival. Oddly appropriate, that word.

Toroca slapped the deck in frustration. He’d figure it out eventually. He knew he would.

And he knew something else, too: that this, not some silly feat of hunting, was what he owed to his father.

Once again it was Biltog who was doing the watch in the lookout’s bucket.

And once again, he let out a shout of “Land ho!”

But this time it was land indeed, not a frozen waste of ice and snow. In fact, it was Land—the word written as a left-facing glyph, instead of a right-facing one, referring specifically to the vast equatorial mass upon which the Fifty Packs roamed.

The Dasheter ’s sails snapped in the steady east-west wind. Toroca reflected briefly that he’d gotten used to that sound, and to the groaning of the ship’s timber, and the scraping of claws on wooden decks, and the slapping of waves against the hull. He was so used to them, in fact, that he barely heard them anymore, but thought that their absence might be almost deafening for his first few days back on solid ground.

Although they had departed from Fra’toolar, they were returning to Capital province, at least for a few days, so that they could take on supplies, and so that Toroca could have meetings with the leader of The Family—a left-facing glyph again—and with members of his own family.

The Dasheter continued in toward the shore, the rocky cliffs of Capital province, similar to although not as spectacular as those along the coast of Fra’toolar, towering up ahead of them, and, in the background, the ragged cones of the Ch’mar volcanoes.

The docks were approaching with visible speed.

The Dasheter was singing out its identification call: five loud bells and two deafening drumbeats, then the same sounds again, but softer. Then loudly again, then another soft iteration, over and over as the mighty vessel slipped in next to a vacant pier.

Home , thought Toroca.

Home at last.

In this universe, intelligent life perhaps needed more of a hand than I’d been providing so far. At least, that’s what the Jijaki aboard the arks told me. They had learned to peer intently into the structures of things and could see the intertwining double spiral of the acid molecule that controlled life.

Of the dinosaurs that had existed on the Crucible, there had been several kinds with potential. The Jijaki had particularly liked one smallish type that was bipedal, with a horizontally held torso balanced by a stiff whip of a tail. It had giant yellow eyes with overlapping fields of vision and three-fingered hands each with an opposable digit. I agreed these beings had possibilities and had ordered them shifted to another, less-promising target world. I was dubious of their chances, though, because their numbers were already in sharp decline on the Crucible, hinting that they weren’t as ideally suited for the road to sentience as they appeared at first glance.

No, the dinosaurs I had favored most, partly because they’d already had a long and successful history as a group, were tyrannosaurs. large, slope-backed carnivores with great heads and giant teeth. Only one problem, for almost the entire lifetime of this group, their forelimbs had been diminishing until now they were withered and all but useless, with just two clawed fingers on the end of each hand.

The Jijaki read the genetic code of these creatures and found the instructions that had originally produced a third and fourth finger, instructions that now were turned off in the early stages of embryonic development. On some of the individuals being transplanted, the Jijaki edited out the termination sequence.

Jijaki had six little tentacles on the inner surface of each of their cup-shaped manipulators. They believed, therefore, that six was the optimal number of digits. It took much searching, but they finally found buried in the tyrannosaurs’ genetic code the long-dormant instruction for the lost fifth finger that their quadrupedal ancestors had possessed. The Jijaki reactivated that as well. They wanted to go further, adding code for a sixth finger, but I forbade that.

Five, and enough time, should be sufficient.

The Dasheter had only just docked at Capital City when Toroca was told about the death of his sister Haldan and his brother Yabool. All other concerns—even unpacking the specimens he had carefully collected in the Antarctic—were put aside, and he immediately set out for Prath.

Prath, a half-day’s march southwest of the Capital, was the place of the dead. Here the ground was made up of the tops of lava columns. But the life had gone out of the once-liquid stone, and instead of glowing red, the rock was cool and black. The tops of the columns were each not much bigger than Toroca’s foot. They were polygonal, with straight vertical sides. Most were six-sided, though a few were pentagons and some were squares. Each was a slightly different height from those adjacent to it. In places, one low hexagon of basalt was surrounded by six taller ones, and the declivity had filled with rainwater.

At the southern periphery of the field, the columns rose high into the sky, and their bases were littered with the black rubble of pieces that had broken free and crashed down.

At some places, scraggly green and brown vegetation poked through, growing up from cracks between adjacent polygons. Many of the stone columns were covered with lichens, pale blue and pale green and pale pink.

Haldan’s body was long gone, dragged away by some predator in the night, no doubt.

Yabool’s body had been brought here two days ago.

Wingfingers circled overhead.

They would have their chance, as would the four-footed scavenger lizards that skittered over the black stones. A hunter was part of the food cycle, and Yabool’s body would be given back to the environment.

But not yet. Not until all those who wished to had had the chance to say goodbye.

Toroca moved along the rocks, carefully picking the appropriate stones to step upon. It was difficult terrain, but the people of Capital City had used Prath as a funereal site for generations. Even the body of Larsk had been laid out here.

Toroca was not too surprised to find that someone was already standing over the body. He used his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. Why, it was Dynax, one of his two remaining sisters. She must have come in from Chu’toolar upon hearing the news.

The basalt plain dipped so that Toroca was looking down upon his sister and the body of his brother from a slight elevation. Dynax’s back was to him, but her unique brown and blue sash, combining the disciplines of hamrak and delbarn, made her easy to identify. Yabool’s body was wrapped tightly in thunderbeast hide, keeping out insects and predators until the five days of mourning were over.