by Greg Bear
The hunter lifted his rifle, peered down the sights, and took a long time to aim, wriggling his butt and jiggling the barrel up and down. The struthio stepped forward and just as deftly pulled the gun from the hunter's grasp, broke it in half, and tossed it aside. The hunter leaped into the air, arms and legs akimbo, and fled. Dip followed with casual swiftness, head and neck bobbing, eyeing the audience in the bleachers.
As the hunter and struthio circled, a third clown rolled a popcorn cart into the ring. The hunter stopped, bought a bag of popcorn, and began to eat as the struthio caught up. Dip squawked harshly and the hunter turned and trembled, shaking popcorn all over. The struthio pecked eagerly at the fallen kernels. The hunter mouthed a white-rimmed O of surprise and offered the long-necked animal the bag, leering knowingly at the audience. The struthio stuck his head in the bag— and the clown shoved the bag higher with a flourish. The bag stuck. Dip shook his head from side to side (but did not pull the bag away with his claws) and made more squawking sounds. The audience roared with laughter.
The hunter was taking aim with the recovered, reassembled gun when the dragon clown sneaked up from behind and gave him a sound kick in the pants. The gun went off with a loud bang, shooting powdery white smoke and more popcorn. The struthio jumped and shook the bag loose, then chased all three clowns offstage. The lights dimmed.
The audience laughed and applauded, but Peter wriggled on the bench restlessly. He was waiting for the real show to begin. He didn't think dinosaurs were anything to laugh at.
Anthony stood just outside the center ring, camera in hand, waiting to snap a good picture of the action.
Flagg the ringmaster returned to the center ring and the lights narrowed to intense white circles around him and the open door of the cage. Dip chased the hunter clown around the perimeter outside the ring. As the hunter passed, Peter saw with some surprise that it was Shellabarger.
"You!" Flagg shouted. "You left this door open! Somebody could get hurt! We're going to have really big animals in this cage!"
Ashamed, the hunter sidled up to the cage door, big shoes slapping, but before he could close it, the struthio pushed it shut. At the clang of steel meeting steel, the hunter jumped and shivered all over, nerves clearly shot, and the struthio nudged him none too gently out of the ring.
"Well, we 've finally had enough of that," the ringmaster said, and Peter agreed.
"The drama of life on Earth," the ringmaster said, "is full of surprises. Beginning thousands of years ago, we found the mysterious bones of extinct animals, turned to rock in the soil— and we tried to piece together the history of what Earth was like, millions of years before humans walked the planet. We were even more surprised to discover living examples and close relatives of these extinct animals in South America. But the greatest surprise of all was that we could communicate with these animals, train them, make them our companions—and in some cases, our implacable foes. What could be more surprising than the mystery of ancient life meeting modern man . . . Ladies and gentlemen, Lothar Gluck presents . . . THE CAVALCADE OF LIFE IN TIME!"
The runways to the now-empty cages pulled back.
Ray Harryhausen leaned over and whispered to Peter, "Not the way I'd run this railroad."
"What would you do?" Peter asked.
"Bring out the big animals right away. Show the danger," Harryhausen said. "Tell a story that makes some sort of sense. Then have an elephant fight a venator." He grinned mischievously.
Three beautiful dapple gray horses ran around the ring. The struthio Dip ran after them, followed by his mate, Casso. In turn, the man and woman who had been riding joined the procession around all three rings. The man was dressed in a sleek white outfit, and the woman in a tight glittering ruby red suit, arms and legs bare and holes cut out of her midriff and back. Peter instantly fell in love with her.
Next came the ankylosaur, Sheila, a huge, lumbering presence that immediately drew enthusiastic ohs and ahs from the crowd. The horses passed her on each side, and the struthios leaped up and over her, deftly avoiding the spikes along her back. The crowd applauded wildly.
Harryhausen approved of the spectacle. "Much better," he said.
Now two elephants joined the procession, and the animals and man and woman ran around the rings and passed the lumbering ankylosaur twice. The struthios paused, then stepped back and forth in perfect synchronization, as if dancing. The ankylosaur stopped dead, seeming as stubborn as a mule, and
Shellabarger appeared, holding a rod with a blunt steel hook.
He poked the ankylosaur and urged her into the center ring. She lifted her feet, gave a deep-throated quavering cry, like a gigantic baby, and twitched the massive bony tip of her tail, as if to warn against these indignities. But in she went, and came to a stop between the cages. The struthios ended their dance. They leaped as one into the ring onto the ankylosaur's broad armored back and stood blinking and pirouetting prettily.
Shellabarger locked a big iron ring and short anchored chain around the ankylosaur's tail, just above the ball of bone, and returned to the perimeter. The man and woman mounted the horses and the horses broke into a canter around the center ring. The woman got to her feet, arms out, and on the second horse the man also stood. The struthios swung their heads around, craned their necks, leaped down from Sheila's back, and ran after the horses.
"Watch this," Harryhausen said.
"You've seen it before?" Peter asked.
"Of course!" Harryhausen said. "Wouldn't miss it for anything. It's been a few years, though."
"I thought you didn't like it!"
Harryhausen scoffed. "I love this show. I'd just do it differently."
The struthios caught up with the horses and riders and both riders leaped onto one horse, just as Dip bounded up a ramp onto the back of the abandoned horse. The horse whinnied and shook its head but kept to its course. The woman climbed onto the man's back, and with hands clenched, he hoisted her onto his shoulders.
The audience applauded loudly, and the procession—man and woman on one horse, Dip riding the second, and his mate Casso following—circled the ring and the cages quickly.
Lights switched on and burned bright circles in the outer rings, showing more clowns juggling, and the horses returned to the side tent, followed by the unmounted struthio. Roustabouts rolled the runways out again and connected them with loud clangs to the cages in the center ring.
From the opposite side tent came a sound like a huge hoarse wolf howling. The lights briefly played on the opening to the tent, but nothing was there. The ringmaster shouted for someone to watch the cages.
"This is more like it," Harryhausen enthused, grinning broadly. Peter wondered if something had gone wrong.
All the lights in the tent went out. The hoarse roar sounded again. Peter's neck hair prickled.
The ringmaster's voice boomed out in the dark.
"From earliest times, life has hungered after life, and animals have become mortal enemies. We shudder to think of becoming food—all our lives, all our memories, reduced to lunch or dinner—how horrible! Yet in nature, we are all food eventually . . . That is the rule."
Again the roar, fierce yet almost plaintive.
"Hunger and death . . . The predator . . . and its prey!"
The lights came on again, dazzling Peter's eyes. In the center ring, two large animals faced each other with thick iron bars between—Sammy the
Centrosaurus, whom they had met earlier, and something large and beautiful and nightmarish, a sleek brown and yellow demon with flashing emerald eyes, marked along its sides by slashes of white. It stood on two tensed legs, muscles corded beneath smooth scaled flesh. Its three-toed feet scratched the dirt beneath the iron cage, reminding Peter of a monstrous chicken. The beast's long tail swished back and forth stiffly, its tip slapping the bars behind, making the entire cage shudder. Along its neck and over its head rose two ridges of long, stiff, flat scales tipped with red, as if dipped in blood. Two long arms stretched from its tr
unk, ending in three expressive curling dactyls with black scimitar claws.
Peter stared at the beast's snout and jaws and wanted to run. The crowd seemed to feel the same way—he could smell the tension in the air and heard their abrupt gasps, even from those who had seen this animal before. Harryhausen dug his fingers into the bench seat. From where they sat, fifteen yards away, Peter could smell the rich iguana-parrot scent and something sharper, described so vividly in Challenger and Doyle's book that he could recall the words now:
It was the odor of a killing thing that wanted our blood, our meat, our bones; less a flow of atoms through the still air than a spiritual miasma, a sickly breath out of the rotting tropical regions of Hell. . .
The pictures he had seen could conjure bad dreams, but none did the animal justice. For the first time in his young life, Peter felt distinctly mortal and unsure of where he stood in the great scheme of things, or whether indeed he even liked that scheme.
Flagg the ringmaster had worked with this animal for two decades, yet did not approach the cage any closer than he had to. His voice, admirably enough, lost none of its sureness as he announced, "Altovenator ferox, the ferocious hunter on high, by no means the largest of the predators of ancient times . . . and by no means the smallest . . . See how he observes what might be a week-long feast, a plant-eating Centrosaurus. The swift and hungry meets the slow and armored, and who can say how the match would end? As meat-eaters, where do your sympathies lie?"
Peter measured the venator using the ringmaster as reference. Fourteen feet high, when reared back he scraped the upper bars of the cage. Peter's eye swept from tip of snout, past gaping mouth, vibrating wattle pendulous from its neck, green eyes ringed with vivid blue, a surprisingly narrow and swift-looking trunk still as thick as a bull in the middle, past broad haunch and along the stiffened tail like a partly frozen snake . . . Twenty-four feet long. The venator was deeply irritated to be among all these people, in plain view of a prey that could never be brought down.
"And now . . . a man who has spent most of his life hunting and training dinosaurs, who knows more about these incredible animals than any man on Earth! Ladies and gentlemen, our supreme Master of Beasts, Vincent Shellabarger!"
Shellabarger entered the ring in splendid tailored khaki jodhpurs and dark brown coat, with a flat-brimmed campaign hat. This time he carried only a short whip. The ringmaster backed out of the ring and Shellabarger stepped into the spotlight.
"Behold the venator," he said, pronouncing it veh-NAY-tor. "Its scientific name speaks for itself. It is the hunter. We've worked together for thirty years now and I have a healthy respect for him—but he has no respect for me at all.
" Smell the promise of death in the air! Hang on to your children, feel your legs tense with terror! The venator is a killer from a special world, not a world frozen in time, filled with throwbacks and sluggish lizards, as we once imagined dinosaurs to be, but a living and fertile and vital world that can support even such a swift, a ruthless, a ravenous and intelligent hunter as this. I introduce you to Dagger, the name we have given to him."
Shellabarger approached the cage. He turned and glared judgmentally at the audience. "Do you expect a show of animals jumping through hoops and sitting on boxes, batting at my puny whip? Dagger the venator recognizes no master, refuses to be trained, waits only for the day—perhaps not far off— when he will escape his cage and hunt again, with a top speed of twenty-four miles an hour—faster than you or I can run— across the cloud-shadowed grassland and cool rain forests of El Grande, all that he loves and knows, all that he desires . . .
"Except perhaps to sink his jaws into me, to crack my head like an egg!"
The crowd sucked in its breath disapprovingly. Peter gulped, looked around for his father and found him with camera practically glued to his face, standing in shadows less than ten feet from the cage. Much too close, Peter thought.
"We can well believe that Dagger wants to take revenge for his capture, his imprisonment—for all these long years away from the clouds and forests of El Grande."
Shellabarger strode across the ring to the cage containing Sammy the centrosaur and opened the broad, high door. The centrosaur trotted through the door, swinging his head slowly from side to side as he approached Shellabarger. Sammy lifted his beaked snout and squalled his disapproval at being once again placed so near the venator. Shellabarger tapped the long forward-curved nose horn with the stock of his whip, and Sammy turned toward him, mouth open. The trainer shoved something from his pocket into Sammy's mouth, and the centrosaur closed his eyes in ecstasy, lifted his snout, and gave a nasal bullish snort.
"Sammy has learned to live among us and accept our generosity. But in a dinosaur's life, as in the lives of men, there are stages, and the time has come for endings. Never again will these animals perform for the simple pleasure of a human audience."
A rustling sound from outside the ring attracted Peter's attention. Three brilliantly plumed birds the size of turkeys, with long feathered tails, flapped across the ring. One landed on the centrosaur's frill, the other on his nose. Sammy did not seem to mind. The birds spread their wings two yards wide, twisted their heads, and opened their mouths to reveal rows of small white teeth. These were the famous toothed birds, Peter realized, smallest of the avisaurs, unique to the tepuis, the only ones of their kind in captivity. Red and green, with shiny black backs and white-fringed black tails, these descendants of Archaeopteryx, christened Eoavis by Maple White, plucked treats from Shellabarger's fingers and lifted their fleshy feathered tails.
"Pretty little cousins of Stratoraptor," Harryhausen said. "What I'd give to see one of those! Biggest bird that ever lived . . ."
Peter nodded, but without conviction.
"All that these animals have taught us," Shellabarger went on, "all that we have learned of the true nature of the past, we owe to a fluke of nature unparalleled in Earth's history: the Grand Tepui. Because of the majestic isolation of this mighty plateau, we can observe directly the evolution of reptilian lizard into dinosaur, dinosaur into bird, bird into the tiniest and most beautiful of jewels, as well as into the fiercest predators of all, the Totenadlers or death eagles sacred to the Pepon and Camaracota Indians . . . Only on the Grand Tepui. Compare the venator to this fabled and seldom-seen beast, never captured . . . imagine the animal that made the brave, foolhardy, and indomitable Professor Challenger wish he had neverbeenborn . . ."
Peter made the comparison. Dagger the venator looked fierce enough.
The toothed birds flapped their wings and leaped a short distance from Sammy's nose to the outspread and gloved hands of the trainer.
Flagg the ringmaster returned. In the outer rings, Peter saw, clowns and roustabouts were making preparations for another act. Dagger turned restlessly in his cage, stiff tail banging the bars, eyes sweeping the crowd. The venator opened his mouth, showing his crimson tongue and rows of wicked serrated teeth. The beast's throat pulsed and for a moment, Peter thought the venator had picked him out of the crowd personally. The beast cocked his massive sleek head to one side, spotlight glinting from his eyes and scales, as if asking Peter a question: Are you as strong and savage as I?
Then Dagger gave a hideous screech, followed by a thuttering bellow like a roaring lion trying to drown out a diesel truck. He lifted his head and clawed wildly at the cage, lifting first one leg, then the other. He leaned back on his tail, braced his head against the rear of the cage, balanced for a second, then marched his clawed feet up the bars, kicking at them like a furious cat. Both legs flexed against the bars, claws curling, as if trying to push the cage down. Then the venator's tail gave way and he fell ponderously on one side and lay there for a moment, chest heaving.
As Dagger rolled over and pushed himself up with slender but strong forelimbs, Shellabarger quickly guided Sammy back into the second cage. The Centrosaurus went all too willingly, and thumped down the caged runway out of the spotlights, out of sight, into the side tent.
&nbs
p; The ringmaster took over as Shellabarger approached the venator cage.
"Ladies and gentlemen, observe the fury of raw nature!" Flagg called. The venator's screeches and banging almost drowned him out, but couldn't hide the quaver in his voice.
Shellabarger seemed to have suddenly lost interest in the audience. He circled the cage with chin in hand, studying this new problem intently.
Anthony stood outside the ring, camera poised, observing the situation calmly. Peter knew his father was waiting for a key shot, a frozen fraction of time that summed the relationship between the trainer and his beast. Peter hoped that shot wouldn't include somebody being eaten.
Shellabarger suddenly kicked the cage with all his might. The venator started back and pulled his jaw into his neck and chest. Then he thrust his head and neck forward with the speed of a striking snake and the heavy jaws whacked shut like clapped two-by-fours just a couple of yards from Shellabarger's head. Shellabarger held his ground and the venator swung around again, tail slamming the cage's bars like a giant's stick against a picket fence.
Shellabarger turned halfway like a bullfighter tempting a charge and the venator swiveled with blinding speed, driving up against the cage, cramming the side of his head against the bars and pushing his forelimbs between, clawed dactyls spread. The beast made no sound this time but a grunt of expelled air.
The cage swayed a few inches toward Shellabarger, and the audience rose as one, ready to escape. Indeed, several men had already taken to their heels and were rushing for the exits.
Shellabarger's arm narrowly escaped a swipe from Dagger's left claw. The breeze from the beast's arm wafted the campaign hat from the trainer's head and sent it falling toward the sawdust.
Shellabarger stepped away from the cage slowly and deliberately, bent to pick up the hat, and turned to face the venator, this time from a safer distance. The dinosaur fell back and the cage swung upright with squeals of scraping metal.