After that realization, it was a small step to letting the big dinosaurs sometimes sit in on a game. Although their card sense needed training, the tyrannosaurs were naturals, and first-class competitors. They learned rapidly, though they had to be trained not to open four-card majors, a trait which seemed almost like an inherited predisposition. (And also to not trump their partner’s ace. Something wrong in the genetic material, embedded in the DNA, no doubt, accounted for these small faults. But this was soon corrected by training.)
The tyrannosaurs proved not only adept at bridge, but to have a strong natural propensity for it. They took to it by the thousands, and then by the millions. As Russians play chess, so tyrannosaurs played bridge. It became their national sport almost at once.
Soon the tyrannosaurs couldn’t be bothered to go out and kill creatures for their living. “Just send something in,” they told the Arcturans. They hired some of the smaller card-positive reptiles to forage for them, rewarding them with scraps of information as to the best strategies in playing hearts, although they wouldn’t pass on their bridge secrets for anything.
It was at this time that the first of earth’s industries was begun. This was creating tables and chairs for tyrannosaurs to play bridge at. Typically, these were made of stone, since woodworking equipment hadn’t been invented yet. You could get tables in limestone, basalt, granite, or a variety of other nice stones. Special chairs for tyrannosaurs to sit in were also an early industry. These came in two models—tail up and tail down. They were made by the subhuman Arcturan servant class, whose knowledge of this craft has persisted to the present day. It culminated in our present line of office furniture.
During those first years of card-playing, tyrannosaurus gaming skills advanced rapidly. In the beginning there were only a scattering of Junior Masters. But after less than a decade there were a thousand Life Masters in what would become North America alone. The tyrannosaurs engaged in bridge tournaments with the Arcturans and proved themselves more than a match for their far-traveling friends.
Encouraged by their first big wins, which took place at the town of Neanderthal in what would someday be Germany, they entered the next galaxywide competition and placed a very respectable third against all contestants. At the first opportunity, the tyrannosaurs decided to pursue their luck to the limit, and went to the first great all-cosmos tournament held near Deneb. There they came away with a first prize.
The tyrannosaurs were on their way to becoming the bridge champions of the universe. Unfortunately, upon returning to Earth, they inadvertently brought with them some gas-producing bacteria from Deneb that festered and grew and multiplied in the low, dark, dim places of Earth. Great clouds of the stuff came forth, and so came to an end the Age of the Reptiles.
Nothing was ever found of the playing cards of the Tyrannosaurs, because these were made of water-soluble material and did not survive the various floods that swept the Earth. Scientists are still looking for the primitive scorecards which were made of sheets of limestone with the numbers of the games scratched on them. We still have hopes of finding these things. And this is the story of what the tyrannosaurs did with their tiny forearms.
As for the stegosaurs, these big lumbering creatures with their armored and plated backs came into existence with two brains, one in the cranium, in the normal position, and the other in the back of the body, between the hips, some twenty or thirty feet away from the head. At first it was impossible to tell what this hindbrain, as it was called, was for. Nature never makes a mistake, but sometimes her purposes are a little obscure. And so it was initially with the stegosaurs’ two brains. Early on the stegosaurus simply used its second brain as a kind of storage device for memories that it didn’t want to lose but didn’t need immediately on tap in the limited capacity of its forebrain. Here it stored old songs, rarely-used phone numbers, and recipes for special holiday foods.
It seemed pretty natural after a while for the stegosaurs to use their hindbrains as places to register information about what was going on around them, i.e., in the area of the hips and tail. It was, after all, quite a distance between the rear of a stegosaur and its front. Sometimes there could be quite a difference in what was going on in the two areas.
The hindbrain let the stegosaur know when its rear quarters were in water, for example, or on fire, without bothering the forebrain about it, since the forebrain had more than enough to keep it occupied, the Pleistocene being the sort of place it was.
The hindbrain became an important survival instrument. It was useful for finding dry, clean quarters to sleep in at night, because the forebrain had so much on its mind that it never got around to thinking about things like that. There were always new things appearing before a stegosaur’s eyes, and these needed thinking about. But who was there to think about the hindquarters and what they were up to? The hindbrain served this purpose admirably.
The hindbrain early became aware of its own value and started to resent being called “hindbrain.” It found the term deprecating and patronizing.
Since the hindbrain was involved in where the creature had just been, it became a specialist in memory and contemplation of the past. When combined with writing skills, the hindbrains of stegosaurs became Earth’s first essayists.
These writings of the stegosaurs were the earliest flowering of nostalgic writing on the face of the Earth. The stegosaurs were the first writers with a sense of the past, of where they had come from.
The stegosaurs didn’t do their own inscribing, of course. Their forepaws were not well adapted for this. Instead they enlisted certain small, agile lizards to do their writing for them. These were the amanuensoids, also known as the secretary reptiles. No one knows what the secretary reptiles got out of it, but they served an important function in the diffusion of dinosaur culture.
All might have been well with this development and this division of labor between the stegosaurus’ two brains. But unfortunately the hindbrain began to develop a sense of ego, and to take umbrage at the idea of being always considered hindmost. It insisted that there was a purely arbitrary definition of meaning between front and back. The hindbrain insisted that the back could lead just as well as the front. In fact, the hindbrain preached a doctrine known as Positive Retrogressionism. It was aided in this by the development of rudimentary visual apparatus in the monsters’ buttocks. These were of soft tissue and have not survived in fossil form.
Soon an impasse was reached in stegosaur psychology. Every stegosaur was a split being with two egos, one in the head and one in the ass.
The situation became acute. No progress could be made. Locomotion in any direction became impossible. These vast reptiles could be seen lying on rocks arguing with themselves.
“Let’s go forward.”
“No, backward.”
“Where do you think you’re taking us?”
“Just shut up, it’ll be fine.”
“No, I need to have my say.”
“We can’t go on this way.”
“Exactly what I’m saying.”
And so on.
Tedious, heartbreaking conversations, during which time the poor creatures often starved to death. Before a solution could be found, the dissemination of bacterial gases from Deneb wiped out the entire dinosaur race. Ironically, this occurred just before Nature had time to make its next logical development—a third brain for the stegosaur.
This third brain was already developing in the mid-spine. There is no telling how far the stegosaurus might have come if this had had a chance to come to fruition.
DIAGHILEV PLAYS RIVERWORLD
I will skip the beginning, senors, of how it all began for me, since it begins the same for everyone who finds himself reborn in this place they call Riverworld. All of us begin naked and hairless, lying on short grass near the bank of an interminable river. Close at hand, attached to the wrist by a short strap, is the implement they have named the grail: a cylindrical object with recesses inside. It is a magical food provid
er. When put into one of the depressions in the great gray stones they call grailstones, at certain times, accompanied by a devilish discharge of blue electricity and a booming noise like a sudden storm in high mountains, it becomes filled up with food and drink, and with the narcotic they call dreamgum, and with spirits, too, and sometimes wine, and nearly always tobacco.
When I came back to life, the first thing I thought of was my death on that gray morning in 1587, sitting in my chamber in Salamanca, with the weariness coming over me, and the sudden weakness in the veins that told me the end was at hand. I had little chance to recommend my soul to God. I didn’t think much about it, to tell the truth, because for one who has lived his life as a conquistador and companion of the Pizarro brothers in the new world of the Indies, it doesn’t do to think too much about whether one has lived a good life or not. We Spaniards of the Conquest set ourselves to do a certain thing and we didn’t much care how we went about it. Life was cheap in those days and in that place, our own as well as everyone else’s. We lived by the sword and died by it, and I for one had been surprised to find myself a survivor of those hectic days, to discover that I had lived long enough to grow gray hairs and to die in bed in the university city of Salamanca, the place where I had taken my arts degree so many years before. I remember thinking, as the priest bent over me and the pain and lassitude seized me, “Well, let’s make an end of it.” But I could never have guessed that this land of Riverworld lay beyond.
In those first days, on the banks of that great river, I learned, along with others newly reborn, the use of the grails, and a little about the conditions of life in this place. Later I found that I had been singularly fortunate in the gradual manner of my introduction to this world, reborn in a quiet fold of the Riverbank claimed by no one, an equal among others recently reborn like themselves, and equally ignorant.
My companions in those first days after rebirth were mercenary soldiers from the Free Companies, which had done such notable deeds in Italy in their time. They were a collection of English and German men-at-arms, not a Spaniard among them. We conversed in a mixture of Spanish, French, Italian, and a little Catalan. It was not too difficult to exchange our thoughts, which were rudimentary. As usual in such places, there were some who had been born a day or a week before the others, and they showed us how the grails worked. And so we talked and speculated about our lot in Riverworld, and tried to decide what to do with ourselves.
The decision was soon made for us. Not long after my rebirth, a group of about fifty men came marching along the banks of the river toward us. We saw at once that they were armed, and we were all too aware that we were not. We had found nothing to fight with in this uncanny place, not even sticks and stones. So we huddled together and tried to look formidable despite our nakedness, and waited to see what the newcomers intended.
They marched in good order, forty or fifty hard-looking men armed with wooden staves and odd-looking swords that we later learned were fashioned from fish bones. They had armor made from the tough dried hide of some species of great fish that lurked in the River’s depths. The foremost among them was more splendidly attired than his fellows and wore an insignia in his fishscale helmet. He asked to speak to our commander.
We hadn’t concerned ourselves with such matters up to now. Our novel surroundings had taken up all our attention. Since I was the most familiar with the newcomers’ language, which was Latin, and which I had studied during my year at the University of Salamanca, it fell to me to be the spokesman.
“Who are you people?” I asked, deciding to take a bold line.
“We are Roman soldiers of the Flaminia Legion,” the officer replied. “I am Rufus Severus, and I have been elected tribune to represent these men. Now, who are you?”
“We are new in this place,” I told him. “We are fighting men and we have no leader, though I, Rodrigo Isasaga, am spokesman by default, as I have more of your language than the others. We are awaiting information as to what our possibilities are.”
“You should be glad you ran into me,” Rufus said. “You look like a good enough group of men. But you are under several severe handicaps. First, you do not speak the language of this place, which is called Norse, though I understand it is a corrupted and simplified version. I advise you to learn it as quickly as possible. Second, you are masterless men in a place where the strong quickly enslave the weak. There are many here in the settlements along the River who will be happy to bind you and make you serve them. They will take most of the food and all of the drink from your grails, and leave you only enough to live on half-starved. I suggest that you join my legion until such time as you can provide for yourselves.”
“You are about fifty men,” I said. “That is not a very strong army.”
“No, it is not,” Rufus agreed. “But we are disciplined, and we have the advantage of having known each other in our former life. That is a rare circumstance in this place.”
I thanked him for his information and asked permission to discuss what he had said with my men. Then I told my companions of the Free Companies what I had learned. They decided to a man to join up with Rufus. I decided to also. Not that I was much taken with the Roman. But it seemed best to belong to something until I had some idea of conditions in this place.
So we fell in with Rufus and his soldiers. There were a dozen of us. The Romans had a few spare cudgels, which they let us use. And we marched on, traveling up-River.
I spent several days with this Roman army and learned that they had little more idea of what they were doing than we had. A lucky turn of fortune had caused them to be all reborn together. Rufus was the ranking officer. Seeing the conditions, he had quickly organized them and found what weapons he could for them. They soon saw that it was dog-eat-dog in this place. They decided to march, one direction being as good as another. They hoped to find other legionnaires, perhaps a whole Roman City, or, failing that, a Gaullish town, for some of them were Romans from that country.
And so our first days passed, during that march along the flat Riverbank, and we passed people from many different civilizations.
That was a pleasant stroll, senors, even though the Roman soldiers set a good pace. Our route lay along the left bank of the great river that dominated this world. It reminded me of the Amazon, where I had the honor of serving under don Francisco de Orellana, whose presence I sorely missed now. But there was no real resemblance between the two rivers. The Amazon was a world of riotous jungle vegetation. Once in it, it had seemed more like a sea than a river. It had been difficult to get to either bank, since it was so overgrown. Our river, by contrast, was an orderly sort of place, running between flatland on either side. A mile or so back of this flatland were hills, and they soon gave way to towering cliffs, the highest I have ever seen, and I have seen the Alps in France.
As I say, it was at first almost a stroll rather than a route march, because we were not encumbered with belongings. Provisions could be had every evening, and water was always close at hand. Our grail cups were light. We also carried some towels along with us, which had appeared beside us at our birth. They served as clothing and bedding. The Romans had even joined some of them together by their magnetic strips, to provide themselves with something like togas. Other towels served as knapsacks, and by tearing strips from them (with difficulty, for they were of extremely tough material), they were able to fasten these objects to their bodies, a practice that we copied.
Spaced along the Riverbank were the great gray grailstones, where we were able to stop and reprovision. Of people we saw but a few at first. This was a deserted stretch of the River. We were on the march almost a week before we ran into groups of any size. And then we were taken by surprise, because they were not European, but Chinese.
We first saw the Orientals at dawn of the eighteenth day of our march. They were a group of twenty or so. They had tied back their dark hair with cloth headbands. They were armed with weapons such as those the Romans possessed. Their faces were flat, and o
f a yellowish hue, much as Messer Marco Polo had described them in his account of his travels.
We stopped and tried to talk with them. Several of them had some measure of Italian, and we learned that they were servants of Kublai Khan, who had built a fortified town nearby. We were told that the great khan welcomed strangers, because he liked to hear about the habits and customs of men from far places. The Romans had not heard of him, since he came long after their time. But I was able to tell them that the Great Khan was the head of an empire larger than that of Rome.
I also questioned the Chinese as to the whereabouts of Marco Polo, but they had no knowledge of him. We talked it over among ourselves and decided to go with the Chinese to their camp.
Xanadu was a large bamboo village set on the plain and surrounded by a wall made of branches from the limbs of the great trees that grow in the hills nearby. The place was very orderly, with carefully stamped-out dirt passageways, and houses built of bamboo. The Orientals had wrought cleverly. Their city looked like a prosperous place.
We were brought to see the Great Khan almost immediately. Kublai Khan was not Chinese himself, as I learned, but Mongol. He was an individual of middle size, rather plump, with a flat round face and a dignified expression. Speaking for my fellows of the Free Companies, I told him where we came from and what had befallen us. Kublai said he had been born into Riverworld like the rest of us, but some years earlier, and, seeing the social disorder into which everyone was born, sought to impose some structure on political institutions. Chinese and Mongolians had rallied to his banners, and so far things had gone well for his state.
He was disappointed that we had no goods to sell or trade, but told us we were free to continue on our journey, or to stay as long as we pleased. In either case, we were free to use the grailstones that were scattered across his territory, as long as we did so in an orderly manner.
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