by Jack Dann
"Has he lost his wits?" asked someone.
"Great Mystery problems," I said.
"Oh."
Then he stopped. He looked around back and forth. Dust went up all around him, and the fire from the fort became heavy. I saw one of his braids whip in the air behind him.
He dropped down. I thought he was dead. He was obscured by a small bush barely big enough to hide a dog. Then we saw the flash of his shovel moving, the handle end sticking back up in the air like a great tongue.
"Yayyy!" we all yelled.
A few more shots came from the fort, then it was quiet.
Faintly we could hear the sound of the shovel, digging.
By nightfall he had disappeared behind a mound of dirt.
"I'm going down there soon to see if he is all right," said Terrible Wolf.
"Better take him some food and his bow," I said. "The white man might send someone out to try to hurt him."
My grandson was about two bowshots out from the fort but that seemed to worry the soldiers. The white men do not understand things dealing with the Great Mystery. I am sure they thought his digging had something to do with their fort. They were deathly afraid a thirteen-year-old was going to tunnel up under their buildings and kill them all in their sleep. So there was no telling what the soldiers would do.
After pitch dark, Terrible Wolf made his way out toward the sound of the shovel.
"I kept my eyes turned away," said Terrible Wolf later. "When I saw what he was doing."
"Oh," I said, smoking my pipe on the side of the hill away from the fort.
"There were parts of Storm Beasts around there. He was digging among them."
"That is bad," I said. We believe Storm Beasts dash themselves from the sky during rains. They are monsters who live in the heavens with the Thunderbird. They kill themselves with roars which is the thunder, and fall with a flash which is the lightning.
We believe this because you can always find their remains after storms, as they are exposed when the rains carry the earth away. Their bones litter our hunting grounds for miles after the spring rainstorms. We usually go around them, as they are unlucky animals.
"Did he mention Storm Beasts in his vision?" asked Terrible Wolf.
"There was no thunder and lightning in his story," I said.
"Do you think the Great Mystery has driven my son mad?" he asked.
"Let me get a reading on that," I said.
I was beginning to have a few doubts myself.
I performed three ceremonies, each more taxing than the one before it. I was sweating and tired, and my medicine bundle was oily and smelled bad when I finished.
"The Great Mystery is not punishing your son," I said to Terrible Wolf. "But there is magic at work out there, and it's so great I'd rather not be around when it happens."
"But you will."
"Of course I will."
The mound had grown. He was piling it up on the side toward the big dirt road. Occasionally a shovelful of dirt would clear the place he dug. Otherwise, the days were serene.
We could see men moving in the fort. Sometimes one would fire at the place where my grandson dug. Then they even quit doing that.
We settled into a routine. Terrible Wolf would take food and water out to his son at night, and we would watch and wait during the day, in case the soldiers came out for firewood or to harm my grandson. It was not the kind of thing we liked to do.
Terrible Wolf came back one night. He sat down tiredly, put his head between his knees and stared at the ground. I noticed in the moonlight that his moccasins had already started wearing out this early in the summer.
"I did not know one person could move so much dirt," he said.
"Grandfather," someone said, shaking me awake.
"Yes," I said, sitting up on my robe where I had fallen asleep. I rubbed my eyes and sat up. It was some hours before dawn. There was a dull boom far away.
"I need some great medicine worked."
He was streaked with dirt, haggard. His eyes were clouded over with fatigue, barely reflecting the fires on the hill. He was as naked as he had been when he left on his vision quest.
In the distance, I heard another rumble of thunder, and the sky flashed light.
"If a storm is coming, and you are working among Storm Beasts, you are going to need more power than I can ask for. But I will see what I can do."
The first thing I did was to strip off naked and do a protection dance for myself. I am no fool. Then I did a small one for him, because he is so small. I didn't think that would stop the lightning from killing us, anyway. Then I picked up my medicine bundle.
"Have you thought of a name yet, Grandson?" I asked as we walked down the hill. The eastern horizon talked to itself in flashes of light. Great clouds walked toward us across the sky, their tops reaching far out in our direction.
"I am going to be called Green Brother," he said.
"Green Brother is a good name."
The small trees were being whipped about in the rising wind. Dust blew from the big dirt road. I was getting afraid, though my grandson did not know it.
Lightning slammed to the ground behind the white man's fort. Men moved on the walls. Possibly lightning would hit it and burn it to the ground and end all our troubles. I could not be concerned with the soldiers just now.
The pit was before us. Green Brother had dug a rampway down into the place he had scooped out of the ground. It started a long way back, the hole was so deep.
I did not know one person could move so much dirt, either.
"Guide me," I said, closing my eyes. I moved my lips in the death chant. If I saw the spirit animal all at once, it would be easier on me. I would either live or die in that instant.
I felt us go downward into the earthworks. The whistling wind stopped, only dust was blown onto my face from above. I felt my heart pound within my chest. I could not breathe right.
Green Brother turned to me. "It is before you, Grandfather."
"Is it terrible, Grandson?"
"Not after you get used to it."
My nerve failed then.
"Turn me away from it," I said. "The magic will be better if I am not used to it."
"There," he said, turning me.
I opened my eyes. The sides of the hole slanted down around me. The rampway went up from where I stood. A flash of lightning threw a horrible shadow on the ground before me. I felt the dead presence of the thing behind me.
"Make magic with it, Grandfather," said Green Brother.
"Is it upright? Are its legs and arms free? Will it step on us?"
"It is only bones, but they are iron. It is upright though curled toward us as if falling. Its body is stuck in the rock beneath us. I could not cut it away with the shovel."
"It is well you didn't. It might have fallen on you, and I would not know your new name." I wiped my brow. "This is going to be tough. What do you wish it to do?"
Green Brother looked up behind me. He smiled. "I want it to walk up this ramp and then across the big dirt road and into the fort."
"That would probably impress the white men," I said.
Thunder smashed outside the pit with a white flash. It unsettled me mightily. A few drops of rain hit my head. Soon the storm would open up. Perhaps more of the Storm Beasts would fall on us and kill us.
"Stand back," I said. "I need lots of room."
"Is there anything I can do?" asked my grandson Green Brother. "I feel kinship with this beast. I was this beast in my vision."
"If it moves," I said, "you can do anything you want."
I spread the things from my medicine bundle before me. It would take them all. I wished I had more sacred things. I had never tried anything so powerful before.
I called on the Great Mystery and reminded him that I was small before the storm, as are all men and women. I asked that he remember the things our people had done in gratitude for his blessings, and thanked him for the many times he had wrestled death for me.
As I paused for breath I heard the first gunshot. Then the warning cry from our people that meant the soldiers were coming from the fort.
"Sing your death song, Green Brother," I said. "I will try to finish this."
I had left my shotgun up on the hill because I did not like to carry it in a storm. Years ago I had seen a man melted to his rifle where he sat. It had not been pretty.
The storm crashed about us. There was a sound of firing, and hooves drummed near.
"Hurry, Grandfather!" said Green Brother. "Hurry!"
I was calling on the spirit of the Storm Beast to help us. I was really inspired, since it was no longer just my people, it was Green Brother and I who were in trouble. A gun fired from the dirt up near the mound from the pit, and voices called. The wind howled and roared. The sky danced with light and noise.
A bullet whipped into the ground near me. I closed my eyes tight. I heard men at the top of the ramp, nervous laughter.
"Thing!" I yelled, opening my eyes and dancing around. "Thing! Come alive! Come alive!"
A great bolt of lightning hit just outside the pit.
I saw many things at once:
I saw six soldiers on foot halfway down the ramp. Some were crouched down, rifles ahead of them. Two were upright, guns pointing toward me.
I saw Green Brother near me, head up, the shovel drawn back in his arms, ready to swing at the soldiers on the ramp.
I saw the shadow of the thing behind me on the ground.
It moved. It may have been only shadows from a different lightning flash.
I saw two of the soldiers jerk. I saw their hearts stop working in their chests. I saw six sets of eyes go wide as the doorknobs on the white man's houses. The eyes of the two men who died fell away to each side. The others disappeared backwards up the ramp.
Thunder crashed on top of us.
I turned and looked up at the thing behind me.
I wet myself all over my legs and fell forward into the soft ground.
Rain was falling in torrents, pushing at my face and eyes. I sat up. Water was running down into the pit. Green Brother lay sprawled across from me, his head bleeding where he had fallen against the shovel.
I went to him after retrieving my medicine bag. Strangely there was no more thunder and lightning, just the rain.
I took the rifles from the two dead men and put them over one shoulder. I picked up Green Brother and walked up the muddy ramp. I did not look back. I did not care if the other soldiers were still there or not.
It was very calm under the cold rain.
Soon after the white men left and we burned down the fort again. After the snows melted the next spring, we signed another treaty, and a Doctor of Bones came out from the Great River Potomac to see the field of Storm Beasts.
He and Green Brother spent much time at the pit and all around there. Then men and a wagon came and took all the Storm Beasts away. The Doctor of Bones said Green Brother's vision animal was called in the white man's language Tyrannosaurus rex. He said this one was splendid.
Green Brother asked to go back East with the doctor and to learn more about all the spirit animals he had seen.
So he is at the university, and I miss him greatly. We are peaceful here now, and get our coffee and cattle and flour every month, and things are very boring.
Before he left, Green Brother said his spirit animal had been like the long-tailed yellow and brown lizard, only much bigger and much more fierce.
I am a simple man, and I am ignorant of many white men's things. But I do know one truth, and as long as there is a blue sky above me, and the Great Mystery smiles, I know this. That thing I saw that night in the pit was no lizard.
Please turn me toward the sun so I can smoke.
Hatching Season
by
Harry Turtledove
Science fiction is a field known for sudden rises to prominence, so it's not really surprising to look around and see how far Harry Turtledove has come, and how fast. In a handful of years (writing both as Turtledove and as Eric G. Iverson), he has become a regular in Analog, Amazing, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as selling to markets such as Fantasy Book, Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Universe. Although his reputation to date rests mainly on two popular series of magazine stories, he is also starting to make his mark at longer lengths. A novel called Agent of Byzantium appeared in 1987, and a tetrology called The Videssos Cycle will be appearing one volume at a time over the next few years. His most recent book is the novel A Different Flesh. A native Californian, Turtledove has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from U.C.L.A., and has published a scholarly translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle. He lives in Canoga Park, California, with his wife and two small daughters.
Here he suggests that some things cross the seemingly unbridgeable barriers between species all too easily—and perhaps it s just as well.
* * *
The Montana Rockies reared against the western horizon, a purple-black jumble of stone. The breeze came from the east. It carried a spicy, resinous conifer tang and, more faintly, the smell of the sea.
From her blind in the center of a clump of cycads, Paula Shaffer watched the hadrosaurs foraging by the river. Not many people, she thought with a touch of pique, remembered the big, ungainly duckbills when they heard the word "dinosaur." The bizarrely horned ceratopsians and savage tyrannosaurs were the ones that sprang to mind, just as "mammal" was more likely to call up the image of a tiger or a giraffe than that of a cow.
Yet there are a lot more cows than tigers or giraffes, and the hadrosaurs were among the most successful dinosaurs of the Cretaceous. And so they would remain for another ten million years, until the asteroid strike that would turn the world's climate upside down and bring all the dinosaurs to an end.
Besides which, Paula's dissertation was on hadrosaur behaviour. The beasts were not dramatic, but she found them fascinating. A good thing, too; her grant only gave her two weeks of fieldwork. She was just thankful she had arrived in the middle of hatching season. That was pure luck. The time probe couldn't pick out a specific season, or a specific year either.
Something bit her on the ankle: a dinosaur tick. She exclaimed in disgust and popped the tick into an ampule of formaldehyde so she could take it uptime with her. It had already begun letting go when she grabbed it. The warm blood she shared with its usual hosts had drawn it, but she did not taste right. An eon of evolution saw to that.
"And I'm not one damn bit sorry, either," Paula muttered, slapping a Band-aid on the oozing puncture.
While she was taking care of herself, a hadrosaur ambled over to browse on the palmlike leaves of one of the cycads around her. Even though it walked—waddled, really—with a pronounced forward stoop, it still stood a meter and a half taller than she did; it was about seven meters long. If it decided to go through the stand of cycads instead of around, all she could do was dodge.
It showed no intention of that, though, as it happily munched away. The small, flat teeth inside the duckbill made a grinding noise rather like that of an enormous peppermill. Paula giggled. " 'It's rumblings abdominal are simply phenomenal,' " she said into the recorder, quoting the only limerick both funny and clean ever written.
The hadrosaur had a cool, almost pleasant odor, not quite like any she knew in her own time—strange plants in the diet and strange pheromones, she thought. The beast did a good job of denuding the cycads before it moved on to look for more food. Like an elephant, it spent a lot of time eating.
It paused, grunted, and lifted its tail, leaving a large dropping behind as it waddled on. Only a specialist could have told the flies buzzing around the turd from their modern equivalents. Along with roaches, they had found their niche early and prospered in it.
That was depressing to
dwell on. Only time-travelers, Paula thought, really realized what a mayfly man was on the face of the Earth . . . and no one came back from the Cretaceous without a new perspective on the permanence of his works.
With an effort of will, she put aside her gloom. Before she started this fieldwork, her chairman had warned her she would be her own worst enemy here. "It always happens that way," he said. "You'll be the only thinking being on the planet. Sometimes I think that's too large a burden to put on anyone."
"Yes, Professor Musson," she had said dutifully, wishing he wouldn't turn mystical like that. Now she saw he had been speaking from experience.
The hadrosaur grunted again, a welcome distraction. It bent to uproot a large fern, and then another close by. Instead of eating them, though, it left them in its mouth as it walked purposefully downstream.
Excitement ran through Paula. She rolled up the green nylon mesh under which she had hidden, stuffed it into her backpack. Then she emerged from the cycads to follow the dinosaur.
It looked back at her suspiciously. It had no innate fear of man, of course, but many small, carnivorous dinosaurs were bipeds; it might have perceived her as one of those. She ducked behind the trunk of a cypress. Being without any memory to speak of, the hadrosaur forgot her as soon as she was no longer visible.
She trotted after it; even the waddle of a seven-meter beast is a long way from slow. From time to time her hadrosaur exchanged moans and hoots with others of the herd it was passing. She recognized the calls as mere acknowledgment signals, but kept her recorder going nonetheless. Someone had recently done work on hadrosaur calls in New Mexico; it might be worthwhile finding out if the "dialects" differed from North to South.
A hypsilophodont flashed by her, squeaking in terror. The little dinosaur ran on its hind legs, but it was a vegetarian; speed was its only defense. It was going flat out, its long tail stiff behind it to serve as a counterpoise to the weight of its trunk.