Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

Klicks’s fists were clenching and unclenching like beating hearts. I went to the tap and got him a Dixie cup full of water. He downed it in one gulp. “Mars was left almost completely barren after that uprising,” he said. “Without animal vehicles, the viruses were scattered and lost their capacity for intelligence, although the memories of all this were still stored in their RNA. Earth was left unattended, the gravity-suppressor satellites still running.

“On Mars, something like forty million years—correction: eighty million Earth years—passed before the viral life re-evolved into intelligent creatures, the current Hets. But the Hands had done their job well: the only animal life left on Mars was microscopic.” He shuddered, his shoulders rising and falling with his ragged breath. “The Hets,” he continued, “developed a remarkable bioengineering technology. Viruses, of course, have the innate ability to substitute their genetic material for the native DNA in a cell. Well, the Hets took that a step further. They can selectively substitute nucleotide strings, manufacturing replacement genetic instructions and snipping and splicing at will. They used this ability to directly modify animal DNA. Still, it took them almost fifty million Earth years to evolve new hosts large enough to use as vehicles. But this time out, the Hets resolved to use only biological devices that had to be controlled mentally; never again would they use machines that might be seized by their slaves and used against them.

“At last, intelligence did develop in the natives of Tess.” He was so lost in the story that he wasn’t censoring himself anymore. “The Hets set out to enslave those creatures, too. They returned to Tess in their living spaceships and began a terrible war against the natives, a war that still rages on.”

Klicks was shaking from head to toe, like a man on an adrenaline high, rage coursing through his system. “God, Brandy, I feel like killing—something. Anything. Everything. It’s such a strong urge, such a primal impulse with them. It’s—” He bolted across the room, grabbed a red metal tool chest off the worktable, and heaved it through the air. It smashed against the curving bulkhead, pliers and screwdrivers and wrenches clanging to the floor. Klicks breathed in and out deeply, his eyes closed.

“Miles?”

He looked at me, a hint of calm returning to his face. “God, that felt good.” A pause. “I’m in control now, I think. Do me a favor: don’t ask me any more questions about the Hets. Even the memory of their hatred for life is enough to drive you out of your skull.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve—”

Something funny about the light levels from outside—

I started to turn—

Wham!

The Sternberger shook under a tremendous impact, the hull reverberating, the sound of water in the partially empty tank beneath our feet slapping in a giant wave against one side of the timeship. I staggered, trying to keep my balance. Through the glassteel over the radio console, I could see something dark and gray, like a flying wall, pulling back, farther and farther, bits of sky now visible above it, the brown of the mud plain starting to peek out below it, the gray wall retracting more and more…

A tail. A dinosaur tail. The part that had connected with the timeship was almost twice as high as a man. The tail was flattened from side to side, a giant tapering structure covered with wrinkled gray leather. It was still pulling back and back, until finally the creature it belonged to was fully visible.

A sauropod, a member of that giant quadrupedal group typified by what most people still called Brontosaurus , standing out there on the mud plain, perpendicular to the crater wall, its elongated tail balanced by a similarly long neck rising up and up into the sky, ending in a tiny block-shaped head. In between neck and tail, a vast gray torso like the Goodyear blimp supported by massive column-like legs…

Sauropods were rare in the Upper Cretaceous, and none had ever been found in Alberta—too wet for them, according to one school of thought. Still, at this time there was Alamosaurus in New Mexico, Antarctosaurus , Argyrosaurus , Laplatasaurus , Neuquensaurus , and Titanosaurus in Argentina, and a handful of others in China, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. I supposed that if the Hets needed a living crane, flying one in presented no problem for them. Although they’d been nicknamed thunder lizards, sauropods had massively padded feet. This one, despite its size, had obviously had no trouble sneaking up on us.

The tail had finished pulling back and now was reversing its course, slicing through the air toward us, zooming in to dominate the view out the window—

The first impact clearly had been just a warm-up. Klicks and I went flying when the tail connected with full force. He landed in a heap by his crash couch; I ended up smashing into the washroom door panel. I tried to rise to my feet and looked over at Klicks, who was bracing himself against the fake wood-grain molding around the edges of the radio console. His eyes were closed as he listened to that inner voice once more. “They’re going to take our timeship one way or another,” he said.

A third impact by the sauropod tail again knocked Klicks and me to the floor, something neither of us was in any condition to endure. I put my hand to my face and it came away wet. My nose had started bleeding again. Two more blows from the giant’s tail dislodged the Sternberger from its perch atop the crater wall. I’d thought it had been bad going down that slope in the Jeep, but at least I’d been strapped in and had had the benefits of the vehicle’s shock absorbers. This time, loose pieces of equipment flew around the cabin as our timeship skidded down the crumbling earth. Klicks and I were tossed like rag dolls in a clothes dryer, bruising elbows, banging knees, twisting limbs. The Sternberger finally, mercifully, came to a stop on the mud flat, tilted at a bit of an angle. We staggered to the window.

Dinosaurs were moving in from every direction. A dozen dark red juvenile tyrannosaurs clustered along the shore of the lake, their bird-like feet giving them excellent traction in the mud. Seven triceratops tanks, garish in their blue and orange camouflage, lumbered in to form an arc to the southwest, heads bent low so that their mighty eye horns stuck straight out. Next to them stood the gargantuan gray sauropod with its skyscraper neck and a tail that seemed to go on forever. Thirty or so troodons milled about, hopping from foot to foot, their stiff tails bouncing up and down like conductors’ batons. Goose-stepping in from the west were five giant adult females of the species Tyrannosaurus rex .

Standing behind the others, one duckbill reared up on its hind legs. It was a member of the genus Parasaurolophus , just like the famous specimen we had at the ROM, a meter-long tubular crest extending back from its skull. At first I couldn’t fathom what that cow-like reptile was doing here. I’d imagined the Hets simply raised duckbills in herds to feed the fighting carnivores. But then the hadrosaur let out a series of great reverberating notes, its crest acting like a resonating chamber. The tyrannosaurs dispersed and I realized that the duckbill was calling out the orders of the Het general riding within it, the hadrosaur’s thunderous voice carrying for kilometers.

I looked at our Jeep, over by the western base of the crater wall. The two tires I could see from this angle were completely flat—pierced open, I suspected, by triceratops horns.