Fossil Hunter

by Robert J. Sawyer

  There was now just a semi-ten of paces between him and the vanguard diver. Other divers were watching with perhaps growing interest, but no real sign of concern. Suddenly Toroca got the feeling that perhaps he was being set up. The long forward-facing tunnel of his snow jacket kept his muzzle warm at the expense of eliminating peripheral vision. Toroca swung his head in a wide arc and then turned around, almost slipping on the ice as he did so, to check behind him. Nothing, except Babnol, looking as surprised as Toroca felt.

  In some ways, it didn’t seem sporting. Toroca was no fan of the hunt, but he understood that part of the excitement was the pursuit. He’d never had an animal walk up to him before. For one brief moment he thought that perhaps this meant the diver wasn’t an animal. But that was silly. Besides, the diver had a tiny head, and the pointed projection off the top, apparently counterbalancing the beak, seemed to be a rudder-like crest, not an enlarged braincase.

  That the animal was completely without fear was puzzling. And yet, it had never seen a Quintaglio before (and really wasn’t seeing one now, Toroca thought, since the thick winter vestments hid all of Toroca’s body except for the tip of his face). Perhaps the beasts had no predators here. Certainly that would explain their vast numbers.

  Toroca took another step forward and was now close enough to the diver to touch it. Its little streamlined body was covered with short silver fur that seemed to glisten, as though slicked down with oil. He could see it breathing in and out, its rounded torso expanding and contracting. Although walking seemed to be something of an effort for it, the diver had by no means been really exerting itself. The fast pace of its breathing therefore must mean that it was indeed warm-blooded, something the insulating fur had suggested anyway.

  Toroca simply wanted a specimen for study, of course. He reached down with both arms and, using a scalpel, its metal bitterly cold, its surface frosted, he slit the diver’s throat.

  As soon as the knife touched its skin, the diver let out a call like wooden boards clacking together. That evidently meant something to the other divers, because they started making the same call.

  The tableau held for several beats, the only sound the washboard calls of the divers, the only movement their pointed beaks and the flow of blood onto the ice from the dead diver, the red liquid already thick and sluggish in the cold.

  And then, as one, the thousands upon thousands of divers moved.

  And Toroca suddenly realized that he hadn’t thought things through as well as he should have…

  For the divers, rather than running away from him and Babnol, were waddling as fast as they could toward him, ragged-edged beaks snapping open and closed.

  Toroca wheeled around and began to hurry across the ice, his wide shoes slipping and sliding as he did so. He threw his momentum forward, lifting his tail to balance himself, still clutching the dead diver in his left hand. It wouldn’t do to fall down here, for the little silver creatures would be all over him, and although individually they were no match for a grown Quintaglio, thousands of them swarming over his body was probably an ignominious way to die…

  But his footing held, as did Babnol’s, and soon it became apparent even to the divers that the Quintaglios were going to easily outdistance them. The silver creatures quit their running, although their wood-on-wood calls persisted for some time.

  Keenir was rowing the shore boat toward Toroca and Babnol, trying to hasten their rendezvous. The two surveyors made it aboard…

  …and realized that the divers were doing just what their name implied: diving into the icy water and paddling like silver meteors beneath the surface toward the little wooden boat. Keenir was already rowing like a demon, and Toroca and Babnol found their oars as well, but the boat was not nearly as maneuverable or fast as the divers. Looking over the gunwales, Toroca could see hundreds of them swarming beneath the gray, chilled surface.

  The boat buffeted as beaks beat against the underside of its hull. The clattering of the impacts was deafening. Toroca pulled his oar from the water and smashed it against the surface with a great splashing sound. That startled the divers, and their assault of beaks stopped—but only briefly. Soon it renewed in earnest. The boat was rocking enough that Toroca feared it would capsize. He thought for an instant of throwing back the dead diver, in hopes that that might appease its avengers.

  Toroca and Babnol smashed their paddles into the surface again, and this time, against his intentions, Toroca felt his oar connect with something hard and pointed. He imagined he had just brained a diver.

  Chilled water was splashing everywhere. Toroca could feel the arm of his jacket stiffening as it began to freeze up, presumably soaked on the outside.

  Fortunately, though, the divers didn’t have the energy or attention span to keep at it. After a short period of time, they stopped their attack and swam off beneath the cold surface. Looking back, Toroca could see them clambering up onto the ice, shaking their little bodies violently to fling off water droplets.

  The three of them continued to row out toward the Dasheter. Toroca glanced down at the corpse of the diver, with its pointed head and funny little claws along its flippers. It was an odd anatomical mix, and yet, somehow, it was strangely familiar.

  He looked forward to getting back aboard ship and studying the body in detail.

  Chapter 20

  Capital City: the Plaza of Belkom

  The tip of Afsan’s tail beat up and down impatiently. It wasn’t like Haldan to be late. They had arranged to meet here, in the Plaza of Belkom, at the fourth daytenth, and Afsan had arrived in plenty of time to hear the four bells from the Hall of Worship. But those bells had rung long ago and still Haldan hadn’t shown up.

  Cork was growing restive. Afsan could feel the lizard’s thick tail slapping against his legs. Gork had been trained to do that when they were stationary so that Afsan would know precisely where the lizard was, lest he start to walk and trip over it. But when impatient, Gork’s slapping would become more frequent, and it had now reached a violent rhythm. Afsan stooped over and stroked the beast’s flank.

  Afsan and his daughter had agreed to meet here simply to spare Afsan the difficulty of negotiating his way without a guide down the bending corridors of her apartment building.

  “What do you think, Gork?” said Afsan. “Think we can find her?” He’d been to his daughter’s home often enough that he thought he knew the way. “Let’s try.” He pulled up on Gork’s harness and pointed his arm in the direction he wanted to go. Gork let out a pleased grunt of acknowledgment and they set out.

  Although Gork did a fine job keeping Afsan from stepping in front of caravans or walking off a cliff, Afsan still used his cane to feel the terrain in front of him, so as to keep his footing sure. The original stick that Pal-Cadool had first fashioned for him had been lost kilodays ago in the great landquake. This intricately carved pole had been a gift long ago from mariner Var-Keenir, who had used it himself while his tail, chomped off by the great serpent Kal-ta-goot, had been regenerating.

  Gork and Afsan made slow but steady progress. At one point, Afsan heard the clacking of claws on stone paving and asked the unknown passerby to confirm that he was going in the right direction. At last they entered the lobby of Haldan’s building, Afsan recognizing the way the ticks of his cane echoed off the stone walls. Gork seemed to remember the place too, for it picked up the pace a bit as they headed down the correct corridor, which made the traditional zigzag bends that kept other users out of sight. Afsan tucked his cane under his arm and held one hand out toward the wall, letting it bounce lightly off the wooden jambs as he counted doorways.

  He tugged on Gork’s harness to stop the animal. “It’s this one,” he said. With a little groping, he found the brass signaling plate next to the door and drummed his claws on it. There was no answer. Afsan leaned in toward the wood and ran his hand over the cartouche carved into it, confirming that these were indeed the symbols associated with his daughter, a naturalist who studied animal populations
. “Haldan,” he called out, “it’s me, Afsan.”

  Still no answer.

  He bent to stroke Gork’s side again. “She must have been detained,” he said soothingly. “Well, she’s bound to come here sooner or later. Shall we go in and sit down?”

  Gork hissed softly. Afsan reached down, operated the brass bar that controlled the door mechanism, and stepped into the room. He left the door open so that Haldan would see him as soon as she approached: bad things could happen when one Quintaglio startled another in what might be construed as a territorial invasion.

  As soon as they were fully within the room, Gork began to hiss violently. “What is it?” said Afsan, crouching next to the beast. But then Afsan himself smelled it: fresh meat, the gentle tinge of blood in the air.

  “Ah, hungry, are you?” said Afsan to the lizard, scratching its neck gently. “Well, perhaps Haldan won’t mind if I give you a gobbet.” Afsan flared his nostrils. The inviting smell was coming from across the room. He paused for a moment, recalling the arrangement of furniture from the last time he’d been here, then let go of Gork’s harness and, guiding himself with his cane, began toward the source of the smell. It was slightly unusual; Afsan could normally recognize any type of meat by a single whiff, but this one, although not completely unfamiliar, was something he couldn’t immediately place.

  He remembered there being a table against a wall at the point the smell was coming from, but it wasn’t a table Haldan normally would use for food. Rather, it was more of a work space. As Afsan got closer, the smell of blood became more pronounced. Unusual, he thought, since she’d hardly have killed or butchered something right in her own home, and any haunch brought from the market would have been well-drained.

  Afsan felt a slapping against his legs. Gork had come alongside. The lizard was hissing loudly, almost spitting—a strange, unpleasant sound, one Afsan had never heard his companion make before.

  He arrived at the table and bent from the waist, one arm outstretched to feel. At once he connected with something large and wet. He yanked his hand away, brought his fingers to his nostrils, inhaled the blood.

  He reached down again, tentatively, and felt the object. It was warm. Heavy. Rounded. Covered with rough skin. He ran his fingertips over it. No scales, no scutes, just rough hide. Except here—little raised dots. Strange…they seemed to form a pattern.

  A tattoo. A hunting tattoo.

  Afsan staggered back, leaning against his tail.

  It was a head. A Quintaglio head.

  Sleeping, then, surely—

  But it was wet. Wet with blood.

  Afsan struggled to control the fear rising within him, and leaned in closer. He touched the back of the head, ran his fingers lightly down the bulbous braincase, over the thick neck muscles, their corded construction obvious even through the skin, and onto the broad shoulders.

  The torso did not rise and fall with breathing.

  He slid his hand around the shoulder, feeling the articulation between it and the upper arm.

  Suddenly his hand was wet again. Just as suddenly, his fingers were inside—there was a fleshy shelf, and he felt soft tissue.

  The mouth? Surely not so soon. And yet, it gaped like a toothless maw. Afsan’s heart pounded as he moved his hand along the soft, slippery surface, farther and farther and even farther still…

  The throat had been slit wide open across its entire breadth. The head was propped forward, the length of its muzzle resting against the tabletop, leaving the cut yawning wide. As he touched it, the delicate balance was disturbed and the body slumped farther forward, the severed carotid arteries, too thick to simply crust over, spilling a torrent of new blood over Afsan’s hand and arm.

  Revolted, Afsan yanked his arm away, but he realized, almost as an afterthought, that there had been no signs of the remains of a dewlap sack around the cut. A female.

  He used his other hand—the dry one—to feel the leather of the sash crossing over the female’s chest. It was stiff with drying blood, but he easily found what he’d been afraid to find, the sculpted metal pin of a naturalist. It was Haldan.

  Afsan reached out to the table to steady himself and felt his own hand slice open. He pulled it back instantly. The cut wasn’t very deep, but it stung. His claws, unnoticed, had extended on their own. Afsan tapped them against the wooden tabletop and found many sharp flat pieces of broken glass.

  Afsan became aware of a sound: Gork lapping at the blood that had spilled on the floor. He groped for the lizard’s harness and yanked the beast away from the body.

  For a moment, Afsan thought to run, to try to find help, but his mental picture of the room dissolved into a swirling nothingness, a panicked abyss. He forced himself to think, to reason. Any attempt at hurrying would just result in him tripping. If he could just—

  But reason lasted only a few fleeting moments and without further thought, Afsan found himself leaning back on his tail and yelling and yelling and yelling until, after an eternity, help finally arrived.

  Chapter 21

  The Dasheter

  In his cabin, the one that had been his father’s all those kilodays ago, Toroca examined the body of the diver by lamplight, the flame dancing to and fro as the Dasheter pitched on the waves.

  The diver was an exquisite animal, about the length of Toroca’s arm and covered in fine silver fur. At first he didn’t know what to make of it. Fur was sometimes seen on certain plants, especially fungi and molds, and on the bodies of those flying reptiles known as wingfingers. Toroca had never heard of any land-dwelling or aquatic creature having it. Yet this one did: a good, thick coat of the stuff. He stroked it, saw that it had a nap, saw how it appeared to change color from a dark silver to almost white depending on which way the individual strands were deployed. It had an oddly revolting feel, this fur: thousands upon thousands of tiny fibers, moving back and forth almost like plants swaying in a breeze. He had to fight down the sensation that the filaments might pierce his skin, or fly loose to enter his nostrils or eyes. That the fur was oily just made the sensation even more unpleasant.

  Although the body covering was disgusting, the creature’s head was fascinating. As he’d observed on the ice, it tapered to a pointed, toothed beak. Counterbalancing the beak was a long crest off the back of the skull, pointed in the opposite direction.

  The diver had flippers held, in death, tightly against its side. Rigor hadn’t set in yet, although everything was a bit stiff in these cold temperatures. Toroca gently pulled the left flipper away from the body. He was surprised to find that it was rigid only along its leading edge. The rest of the flipper consisted of a thick mass of tissue, but seemed to be completely unreinforced by bone. In the middle of the flipper’s leading edge were three small red claws.

  That was unusual. Five was the normal number of digits, of course. Some creatures, Quintaglios and blackdeaths among them, had fewer on their feet, and blackdeaths had only two on their hands. But three on the forelimbs was a rare number. Toroca took out his scalpel and sliced into the flipper, gently exposing the inner flesh.

  Dark blood spilled out onto the worktable. He carved further into the flipper and saw that it was well padded with yellow fat. But it was the leading edge that he really wanted to see. He made an incision along the entire length of the flipper’s anterior margin, then used his hands to pull back the clammy flesh. It took a little twisting and yanking, but he soon had the bones that made up the front of the flipper exposed.

  From the shoulder to the claws, there were two long bones, obviously the humerus and the radius—the upper and lower arm bones. At the end of the radius, there were the phalangeal bones of the three red-clawed fingers that protruded from the flipper, and then running along the remaining length of the flipper, from this tiny hand to its outermost tip, four long bones.

  Four extraordinarily long phalangeal bones.

  The bones of a fourth, vastly extended finger.

  It was the same structure as in a wingfinger’s wing, the
structure that gave those flying reptiles their name.

  Toroca rolled the corpse over and pressed his own fingers into the corpse’s belly. They came up against a hard plate of bone.

  A breast plate.

  Suddenly the head crest made sense. Just like those in some flying reptiles.

  This beast was a wingfinger.

  A water-going wingfinger.

  A wingfinger that swam through the cold waters the way its equatorial cousins flew through the air.

  Toroca staggered back on his tail, the lamp flickering, the timbers of the ship groaning.

  How does a wingfinger come to be a swimmer? How does a flyer take to the water?

  What caprice of God was this?

  Chapter 22

  Capital City: Haldan’s apartment

  Var-Gathgol, the undertaker, felt out of his depth. It was bad enough that blind Afsan was here. Senior palace officials always were difficult to deal with. But now the Emperor himself had arrived. Gathgol had no idea how to behave in front of such important people.

  Dybo was standing near Afsan—altogether too near, really; such easy proximity was uncomfortable even to watch. Gathgol had hoped to simply slip in, bundle up the body, and take it away in the wagon he had left outside the apartment block. But someone—Gathgol thought perhaps it was the building’s administrator—had told him not to touch the corpse.

  It was, indeed, an unusual set of circumstances.

  Suddenly Gathgol felt a frightened rippling at the tips of his fingers. The Emperor himself was gesturing at him. At first Gathgol froze, but the waving of the Emperor’s arm became impatient and that spurred him into motion. He hurried across the room, taking care to avoid the pieces of broken glass on the floor.

  “You’re the undertaker?” said the Emperor.

  Gathgol bowed rapidly. “Yes, umm, Your, Your…”

  “Luminance,” said Dybo absently.