Robert Sawyer: End of an Era

As the seven hunters made their way closer to us, I saw through the binoculars that their bloody coloring wasn’t just a trick of the twilight. They really were dark reddish brown, their skin a tightly packed matrix of round beads like Indian corn. Beneath each massive mandible a loose sack of skin, perhaps a dewlap, waggled back and forth. Their tiny double-clawed forearms, looking withered and useless, bounced like drumsticks against their massive guts.

When the reptiles got within thirty meters of us, they broke formation. The lead tyrannosaur headed to our right. The next went to our left, and so on, alternating, except for the last of the procession, who just stopped where it was, the tip of its tail swishing back and forth.

The beasts who had been near the front of the caravan tried to continue around back, but they seemed flummoxed by the crater wall upon which we were perched. One of them attempted scaling the steep sides, but its tiny forearms were useless for gaining purchase. The tyrannosaurs, now simply black shadows moving against the night, regarded us. They were apparently trying to make sense out of the squat metal disk that had invaded their stomping ground.

After a few minutes, the one who had tried to climb the wall backed off about twenty-five meters. It growled, a low, resonant thrumming, then ran forward, its legs pumping up and down like pistons. The creature’s momentum, two tons of angry inertia, carried it up the crater wall toward us. The mass of blood-colored flesh hit hard, right in front of my face, the impact causing the Sternberger to teeter backward. The glassteel of the window deformed where the creature had hit, losing some of its transparency. The massive warty head, jaws snapping like castanets, tried to lock onto our hull. Serrated teeth, many of them fifteen centimeters long, scraped the glassteel with a sound like a dentist’s drill. Several, presumably the ones that had been ready to shed anyway, popped from their sockets and went flying. Finally, unable to find anything to hold onto, the tyrannosaur slipped backward, stumbling down the crumbling crater wall to join its kin.

Then, just as they had come, they left, marching in single file back into the night, the pounding of their footfalls continuing long after they had faded from view. Overhead, in a sky clearer and blacker than any known to Earth after the Industrial Revolution, the Milky Way shone like a river of diamonds.

Well, what were we to do? I mean, we’d only woken up four hours before; it was hardly time to go to bed. I was too excited to sleep, anyway. I felt light on my feet, almost giddy. After the tyrannosaurs had left, it was so dark that Klicks had turned on the overhead fluorescents. But after a few moments I asked him if he’d mind if I turned them off.

“Ready for beddy-bye so soon?” he said.

“I just want to look at the stars.”

He grunted, but hit the switch himself. It took a while for my eyes to readjust, but soon the heavens were visible to me in all their splendor. In the southwest was a point of light brighter than all others. I thought I knew what it was and fumbled for my 7 x 50s, bringing the dual eyepieces to my face. Yes, the four Galilean satellites were visible, three on the left and one off to the right. The Galilean satellites? Strictly speaking, I was now the first person to see Jupiter’s four largest moons. Maybe we should start calling them the Thackerayan satellites.

The rest of the sky was a mishmash. We’d gone back far enough in time that, even at their indolent pace, the stars had completely reconfigured themselves. None of the familiar constellations were visible. Knowing where the sun had set and where Jupiter was, I extrapolated the ecliptic. Scanning its length, I looked for Jupiter’s siblings.

Venus would have dominated the sky had she been visible. Mars, too, should have been obvious because of its reddish glow. There was a colored point of light about thirty degrees above the horizon, but if anything it was more green than red. Another point shone higher up in the sky—Saturn, perhaps? I brought my binoculars up to check. I couldn’t make out the rings, but that didn’t prove anything. Even Hubble couldn’t see them when they were edge-on.

I lowered the field glasses and simply drank in the night. And, as always of late, my mind wandered to Klicks and Tess.

We hadn’t had much to say to each other lately, Klicks and me. It’s not that there wasn’t a lot I wanted to ask him. I wanted to know how Tess was doing, how their relationship was going, whether they were planning to move in together, how often they—well, a whole bunch of things that weren’t any of my damned business, but that I wondered about anyway.

Klicks and I had been friends, dammit. Good friends. He’d been teaching assistant for Bernstein when I was doing my undergrad at U of T. We’d gotten along great and kept in touch after I’d left for Berkeley to do my graduate work. Years later, when I married Tess in that sprawling ceremony her parents had insisted on, it seemed natural to ask Klicks to be my best man.

May the best man win.

I don’t know if it was just holding in my anger that made me feel congested or whether we’d actually been breathing inside this cramped tin can long enough for the air to begin to run out. Either way, it seemed awfully stuffy. “We’d better open the vents,” I said.

Klicks grunted assent, and we each took hold of one of the red wheels that worked the louvers around the upper edge of the curving outer wall. My ears popped as pressure equalized. Cloying pollens wafted in and I was grateful I’d taken a Seldane before the Throwback.

The night was alive with weird insect sounds: zippings and chirpings and tick-tick-tickings and low, throbbing hums. There was wire mesh over the vents to keep the insects out, but I cringed at the thought of having to face the clouds of prehistoric bugs tomorrow.

“The moon’s coming up,” said Klicks. I turned and looked out the window. Fat and amber, waxing, about three-quarters full, the moon’s pitted face reflected in the still waters of the lake to our south.

“Christ, look at that,” exclaimed Klicks. It took me a moment to figure out exactly what was wrong with the moon’s face. It had turned so that a good part of what was the backside in modern times was clearly visible. I could see some of what must have been Mare Moscoviense on the eastern limb. Librations do let us see a bit of the backside in the twenty-first century, but Moscoviense started at around 140 degrees east latitude, way around back. My first thought was that the moon must not yet be tidally locked, but I rejected that; its orbit was too close for it to be anything but. No, more likely this was the one side that faced Mesozoic Earth. I wondered what had caused Luna to twist in its orbit between now and my time.

“It looks small,” said Klicks.

I thought about that. The moon did indeed seem smaller than normal. That was funny, since we’d assumed it would actually be closer to the Earth now, orbiting objects having a tendency to spiral away slowly over millennia. Still, the moon’s apparent size normally changes by about thirty percent as it moves from perigee to apogee, but most people never notice that; the human eye is notoriously inaccurate at gauging such things. Still, the moon did look small.

Through the binoculars I could see other evidence that this was indeed a younger Luna. I looked at where Giordano Bruno should have been. Normally, that crater is right on the limb of the full moon, but here it should have been well in from the edge of the disk. As I suspected, its series of 500-kilometer-long rays was nowhere to be found. Five British monks in a.d. 1178, their faces tipped toward the heavens, had actually seen the meteor impact that had made that crater.