by Greg Bear
"Good Christ," Shellabarger said under his breath, then grimaced and stumbled to one side as both Ray and Peter bumped into him. Peter landed on his back and Ray dropped on his knees beside him.
A thick yellow tree trunk dropped to the floor of the forest just yards away. Peter pushed himself into a crouch and stared at the trunk in disbelief.
Shellabarger, Anthony, and OBie lay on their stomachs, hands covering their heads. Peter turned in time to see the forktails stumping through the forest, barely four yards behind. One of the fork-tails spotted Peter and veered in his direction.
The tree-trunk shivered and moved again, pulling up long glistening roots. Peter saw thick scales on the trunk, black foliage higher up—
A wickedly curved beak lanced down from the canopy and split the spine of the closest fork-tail like a butcher's cleaver. Peter heard the bones crack and snap and saw the fork-tail fall, a sudden ton of dead meat.
He still could not make sense of what was happening. Another tree moved, and his eyes and brain seemed to focus at once. He looked up—and up—
What caught his eye next in the gloom beneath the canopy was a radiance of brilliant white feathers. Out of the mane of feathers poked a massive head, like the head of a griffin. The wickedly sharp beak plunged again and scissored the side of the second fork-tail. The communisaur fell with a heavy whump and skidded in the litter of the forest floor, snout plowing up a cluster of seedlings.
The fork-tail's head stopped within a foot of Peter's knee. Blood sprayed down on Peter and Ray and the animal's side rose into the air, at least three hundred pounds of meat and bone and hide. Blood fountained from the fork-tail's open thorax. It spasmed and its tail thumped furiously against a tree.
The beak plunged again and again, snatching away more meat and bone. The air filled with the snapping of bones and the leathery wet sound of tearing meat.
Ray took hold of Peter's shoulder and pulled him back. They frog-marched backward several meters, and Peter suddenly made sense of it all.
Dinoshi. The death eagle had crept up to the vicinity of the mound through the forest. Its head reached higher than the canopy when it stood upright, but now it stalked with head and tail at a level, like the venator. Its wicked dark-rimmed green eyes, as big as baseballs, blinked against the spatters of blood from its victims. Itjerked back huge pieces of meat and swallowed them with only two or three knife-whispering chomps of the big serrated teeth behind its beak.
The death eagle lifted to its full height to swallow, its throat expanding alarmingly and feathers sticking out like quills. The head vanished in the canopy and then dropped a few meters. The animal spread its fan of neck feathers and stared down at Anthony and OBie and Shellabarger. The glittering eyes blinked and focused directly on Peter and Ray. Wetherford was nowhere to be seen.
The fork-tails lay dead. The forest was quiet except for the commotion on the communisaur mound.
"We're next," Ray said softly.
"Yeah," Peter said.
The death eagle swung about gracefully between the trees, its huge lean body like smoke; it hardly disturbed the forest at all as it turned, legs swiftly planting themselves beside the fork-tails. It leaned over Peter and Ray, open beak bloody, and cocked its head with a very aquiline expression, intent on these new animals.
"Be still," Peter told Ray. They froze.
"Does it really matter?" Ray asked. His face shone ghostly pale in the forest gloom. Peter thought they both looked dead already. They had been dead ever since they walked across the bridge, just as a mouse is dead the minute a snake swallows it. It still kicks, tries to breathe, maybe it blinks and struggles against the clutching throat muscles, but it's dead, sure as hell.
The death eagle was beautiful. Its eyes and face seemed almost friendly, with that feathery sunburst focusing sound back to its flapless ears, its beady-eyed expression coldly quizzical. Its yellow legs were as big across as trees. The startling fan of feathers spread at least seven feet wide. Standing erect, weighing in at four or five tons, its black crown towered twenty-five feet above the forest floor. The body feathers seemed black as smoke in the gloom, but in the sun they would glitter like jewels, like a peacock's fan. This was swift death wrapped in glory, hypnotic, the kind of death that could enjoy a bath in honey-colored ants, a loony lovely end to everything.
All it had to do—
Dinoshi dropped its head with a quick jerk and its sunburst of feathers quivered. It scrutinized Peter and Ray from just a couple of yards, feathers rustling stiffly. It was listening to their breathing, to their heartbeats, and it was very interested, but uncertain what to do next.
The death eagle switched its gaze to the three prone men before it—OBie, Peter's father, and Shellabarger. None of them moved; all kept their hands over their heads and necks, like prisoners. For Peter, time moved like cold syrup. Sweat crawled down his forehead in honey-thick rivulets and dripped from his brows. He heard nothing. Sound in the forest seemed muffled, suffocated.
Then the death eagle shifted its weight and sticks snapped beneath its huge talons. Dinoshi lifted one leg and slapped its foot down on the broken-backed fork-tail. Bones crunched beneath the avisaur's weight and blood oozed from the forktail's mouth, along with a ghastly groan.
The death eagle raised its head and swung toward the mound. The noise of the communisaurs—raucous skirling, scrabbling claws—returned to Peter's sphere of awareness and he wondered why he had not heard it earlier.
The death eagle dropped its head, its Elizabethan feather gorget dished forward to gather sound from the mound. It leveled its back and took a step away from the dead fork-tails, away from the frozen humans. Its glittering eyes seemed to see sights in another universe, one no longer occupied by Peter and his companions.
The death eagle stalked silently east through the trees. Dinoshi had more familiar prey in mind, abundant, unaware prey that it had doubtless eaten often before and found tasty. They were not going to die—not yet.
Only at the last minute did it leap, crashing through the thicket into the clearing. From Peter's vantage, he could see only broken pieces of the destruction, but this was more than enough. The death eagle's cry cracked the air into painful pieces. The communisaurs tried to defend themselves, but with their fortress-home already violated by blasts of dynamite, they had little or no protection.
Through the screen of trunks and creepers and leaves, Peter saw Dinoshi's talons kick in the mud walls. Gray bodies rushed out in a flood, sacrificing themselves for the good of the hive. Blood spattered against the mound. With lightning-swift flicks of the griffin's head, bodies large and small flew about like stuffed animals on the bed of an angry child.
Wetherford sneaked up behind them. "God help me, I've wet my pants," he said to Ray and Peter. "We had best move our asses before Herr Totenadler decides we taste good after all."
Anthony got to his feet first, hugged Peter with painful strength, then helped OBie. The older man's face was dreadfully pale and his arms shook. He clutched his shoulder and grimaced at a sharp pain. "I'm all right," he said as Shellabarger got to his feet. The trainer rearranged the bandage on his head, but the cloth's slip had revealed a deep blood-caked crease in his scalp.
Ray went to OBie and once again lent his arm for support.
"The only place a big seaplane can touch down is the south-central lake," OBie said, voice shaky. Anthony nodded agreement.
"It saw us and waggled its wings," Peter said.
"How do we know it's going to touch down?" Anthony asked.
"Call it a hunch," OBie said. "A PBY doesn't come cheap, and there aren't any local planes of that type. Someone's behind it—someone who doesn't give a damn what the Army or any tinhorn dictator says." He drew himself up and squared his shoulders, but his face was still white with pain. "The lake's about eight or ten miles from here. Maybe we'll meet somebody halfway—guns, food, medicine . . ."
"We can't go back," Shellabarger said. He waved his arms decisively and
commanded, "Move!" and they walked north.
The death eagle's screams and the sounds of dying communisaurs echoed behind them.
Chapter Twelve
They walked through a stretch of dense forest north of the mound and east of the ant field. Hiking for the rest of the afternoon in weary single-file, they stopped by a narrow, deep creek and drank, then picked clusters of hard purple berries and ate what they could of the raw fruit. OBie pointed out trees filled with another spiky fruit and they ate some of those, but Shellabarger, ever the expert on the diets of creatures away from home, warned that too much wouldn't do them any good. "We need meat," he said, and he and Wetherford walked ahead while the others rested.
Anthony sat beside Peter on a fallen log. Something was bothering him, but for the time being he was keeping himself in check—waiting, Peter thought, for when they were alone. Peter could always feel a good fatherly bawling-out when it was coming. Sometimes it took days to emerge into the open—a delay he always hated.
Anthony rubbed his finger along a series of deep furrows chewed out of the log. "Some of Sammy's cousins might have done this," he said. Peter pulled up a patch of bark. A few thumb-sized yellow grubs crawled beneath, black heads rising indignantly at the glare.
"Yum," Peter said, thinking of Billie's comment on his dream.
Anthony looked down on the larvae with a furrowed brow. He plucked up one of the grubs, examined it, suddenly narrowed his eyes as if daring Peter to do something, then popped it in his mouth and chewed quickly. He swallowed and his face shifted expressions with comic swiftness. "I ate it," he said.
"Tastes like butter, does it?" OBie asked from where he and Ray sat, a few meters along the log.
"Tastes like bug," Anthony said.
"Better cooked, but we don't have a fire," OBie said.
"It's all right raw," Anthony said, but he did not appear convinced. "Your turn," he told Peter, a little too sharply.
Peter smiled suavely, picked up the second grub, and swiftly bit and swallowed. He wasn't going to be outdone by his father, not this time, not in this way. "Nutty," he said.
Ray stepped forward, bent to examine the revealed larvae, and stood again with hands on hips. "I've eaten raw lizard. I can eat anything." He picked up the grub and lifted it to his mouth, then stopped.
"He who hesitates is lost," Anthony suggested.
Ray ate the grub. "Tastes bitter," he said, and looked back at OBie.
"Meat and potatoes," OBie said, shaking his head. "Strictly meat and potatoes."
Wetherford and Shellabarger returned just before dusk, empty-handed. "The river's in a deep gully right to the edge of the plateau," Wetherford said. "Shoots out into space for about half a mile straight down. No place to stop and drink along the way."
"There's a flat grassland about two miles north," Shellabarger said. "According to the old maps, it stretches from the south-central lake to the plateau's eastern edge. We can make better time if we cross the plain. Of course, we'll also expose ourselves to more danger."
Wetherford put on a fatalistic face and shrugged. "Nothing we haven't faced already," he said.
"The grassland is where Jimmie Angel came down in '35," OBie said. "We might find his aircraft."
"There's five or six crash sites up here," Wetherford said. "Hotshots from the mining companies always want to take their girlfriends over the tepuis. One went down on El Grande last year."
"If that bush pilot sees us on the plain," Shellabarger said, "he might decide to land and rescue us, dictator or no. There's bound to be reward money."
Wetherford pursed his lips. "Not bloody likely. The Army has slammed the gate hard on El Grande. No pilot wants to be clapped in irons."
"It's the PBY or nothing," OBie said.
"I wouldn't put too much faith in your producers in New York, either," Wetherford said.
OBie lifted his eyebrows and rubbed his arm: each to his own comforts.
They spent a hungry but dry night beneath the forest canopy, listening to the passage of monkey-sized animals through the trees and the gentle cheeping of small night birds. Anthony found more grubs in the morning, and this time OBie ate several. They washed away the experience with slices of half green spiky fruit. Peter had a stomachache throughout the morning.
They emerged from the forest onto the grassland at noon. Shellabarger kept his rifle ready as they waded through the hip-high green grass. In boggy swales, the grass sometimes grew over their heads, topped with feathery fronds that swayed and rustled in the steady northerly breeze.
After two miles, they sat beneath the spreading boughs of a thick, gnarly-trunked tree none of them could identify. Its leaves formed tight curls in shadow, but spread into six- or seven-lobed fans in sunlight. Dozens of the same kind of trees dotted the grassland.
Peter watched Anthony carefully. Today, he seemed perfectly calm, the storm clouds gone.
After a brief doze, they continued. According to Wetherford's watch, they encountered their first herd of sauropods at one o'clock, browsing among the broad-leaf trees: imposing saltasaurs, the biggest almost forty feet long, with serpentine necks and tails and spike-armored backs. The herd numbered about twenty, and half grown young stayed close to the center.
"Not many of these left now," Shellabarger said. "They're ancient beasts, like Sammy's kind. The death eagles are going to have them all in a few decades. The lycos don't mess with them."
Peter watched the graceful browsers work over a forty-foot-high tree. They pulled and chewed the leaves and branches with the steady deliberation of hungry caterpillars. In a few hours, judging from the condition of trees nearby, they would leave it a denuded skeleton.
"Worse than elephants," Shellabarger said. "Things have to grow fast around here just to keep up."
Peter thought of the death eagles and venators and the animals they preyed upon, and the delicate balances between plants and animals. He wasn't just a city boy anymore. Kahu Hidi was creeping into his personality.
They resumed their walk.
Anthony kept close to Peter. They veered off ten or fifteen yards from the broken line of their companions. Peter kept his eyes on the horizon, trying to see any hunting animals before they saw him—and also to avoid provoking his father. Despite the earlier calm, perhaps because of it, he knew that the storm was about to break.
Anthony stepped ahead of him, head lowered. "I thought you were dead," he said.
Peter smiled nervously. "I was sure you were—" he began.
"You ran away."
"I did not," Peter said.
"You knew we should have stayed together, but you ran."
Peter faced his father, stunned by this. "I was chased by an animal," he said.
Anthony dismissed this with a wave of his hand. "You should have done everything you could to stay with us. Together, we had a much better chance."
"I tried to find you."
"That was a little too late, wasn't it?" Anthony said, his face very dark.
"I did not run away," Peter said again. They stood in the tall grass, less than two feet from each other. All else seemed to fade. Anthony stared at him with eyes like coals—accusing, furious.
"Christ, I've never . . . felt so miserable in my entire life. I thought I'd lost you—but you, my son . . . seeing you run."
"You think I'm a coward?" Peter demanded. This was something he would not take even from his own father.
"Actions, my lad," Anthony growled. "Louder than any words."
Peter felt the tears welling up, the helpless rage he always felt when confronting this force of nature who happened to be his father, this unreasonable and unpredictable man who walked like a cheetah and carved rude poems on the wall and got drunk just when things might be getting dangerous and attracted all the beautiful women in the world—and who stuck with none of them. Peter held back the tears but not the ill-chosen words, meant to sting his father—just as his mother would have stung him. "I thought you were dead. You didn't come a
nd find me!"
"We looked all over hell for you."
"Billie found me. You could have!"
"I certainly tried," Anthony said, a little of the glow fading from his eyes. But now it was Peter's turn for the rage to peak.
"You always think I'm a coward," he said, his voice low. "You always expect more from me. And no matter what I do, I always disappoint you. How long have you been waiting to drag me into some awful adventure, just to make me prove myself to you?"
"That's a lie," Anthony said. "You wanted this as much as I did."
"I am not a liar, and I am not a coward!" Peter shouted. "Damn you, I am as good as you, but . . ." He did not know how to say what needed to be said: in his mind, the words appeared, I am not you. I am not like you. But all he could manage was to shake his head, hold up his fist, and shout, "I survived! I didn't die! And I did not run because I was afraid!"
Anthony held out his hand to touch Peter, and his eyes were flat now, listless, drained. "Peter, I'm—"
Suddenly there was OBie weighing in, standing with feet spread beside them and poking at Anthony's shoulder. "Pardon an old man for butting into a family affair, but leave the boy alone! My God, man, he's a fine boy!"
Anthony retreated but OBie stayed with him, poking, poking.
"You don't know what it's like not having so fine a boy! Why, if I could go back, if I could take away the years and have my own son here, with me—"
"I'm sorry," Anthony said. "I couldn't stand the thought of losing him. It's been eating at me."
OBie stood with his chest rising and falling, his cheeks apple-red, finger still extended. The finger curled now, less accusing. "He's a strong and brave boy and he did what he had to. No blaming him, and no blaming yourself. We're all in this. We're all men. It shouldn't turn sour this way."
"You're right," Anthony said. He raised his hands, placating. "I was way off base."
Peter saw his father was about to apologize, but his own heat was still too intense to allow that. He stalked away through the grass. Ray watched him, sad and silent, and Shellabarger stood facing north, away from the scene. Wetherford plucked at a thick blade of grass.