Starfire

by Charles Sheffield

  Nick looked again. The eyes were large, but black and expressionless as a fish's eye. The hide was gray and thick, scaly except for a softer patch on the front of the neck where the skin formed a pouch like a heavy dewlap. The color there heightened to a warm beige. The forelimbs, in contrast to the heavy hind limbs, appeared weak and useless and too short to grasp or hold a prey. The animals, squatting back on their haunches, were clearly and comfortably bipedal, certainly meat-eaters, and definitely dinosaurs.

  The shock of recognition was so great that Nick had been oblivious to everything else. Now he could recognize the scale of what he saw. The dead animal they were eating was a fat rabbit, fully half as big as the beasts around it. And as Rolfe said, the plants were the key to sizing other objects. The ferns in the background loomed over the rover, but the rover rolfes were only a couple of feet high, designed to wriggle their way easily through the jungle.

  The minidinosaurs gave the new arrival one quick inspection, growled, and went back to their feeding.

  "T. rex stock, of course," Gordy said. "But I mixed in a fair amount of DNA from their own ancestors. You know, the early dinosaurs and most of the late ones weren't particularly big. The ones we're looking at are less than three feet tall."

  "You don't build—full-sized ones. Do you?"

  "Not anymore. Of course, I did it years ago. Everybody wants to do a T. rex for starters. I mean, it's so famous you more or less have to try."

  "You failed?"

  "Oh, no. The genoforming was no problem—it's actually more difficult to create dwarf variations, like these, because you have to change the proportions from the original."

  Nick examined the animals in the holographic display more closely. The midget dinosaurs had massive hind limbs and a thick tail, slightly out of proportion to their size. They also moved a little clumsily—but each of those needle teeth was close to an inch long.

  "They look pretty dangerous to me."

  "No more so than a dog of the same size, and not nearly as intelligent. Each one of these weighs about thirty-five pounds, though there are a few larger sizes in the habitat—up to a hundred pounds. Mind you, I'm not saying they aren't dangerous at all. Even with these minisaurs, you wouldn't want to go alone into the habitat without a weapon. They're not pack animals, and they don't hunt in groups, but they'll gang up to make a kill. Two or three might easily bring down a human."

  "What do they eat?" The rabbit had been dismembered and little of it remained.

  "Ah, now that's a curious fact. They'll eat most things if they have to, amphibians and reptiles and other dinosaurs. But given a choice, they seem to prefer mammals. It makes you wonder if that reflects some ancient struggle. You know, we usually think of the mammals as coming after the dinosaurs had died off, but there were mammals—small ones—long before that. One old theory was that early mammals did in the dinosaurs, by eating their eggs. And maybe a preference for mammalian meat is an evolutionary survival mechanism for the dinosaurs."

  "Would a dinosaur eat a human?"

  "I don't know, but I don't see why not. We'd make a good meal for a pack of minisaurs. Of course, for a full-sized allosaur or tyrannosaur a human wouldn't be more than an appetizer. Do you realize how much it takes to feed a full-grown T. rex ? Or a big herbivore, like a titanosaur? I tried it. This whole habitat can support only a handful of large plant-eaters—and they crap like you wouldn't believe. The tyrannosaurs were even worse; I had to keep importing meat from outside. That screws up the whole idea of a self-supporting habitat. It just wasn't worth it, and I went to the miniature forms. I found that I can do the experiments I'm interested in just as well with them."

  "Which are?" Nick could imagine some pretty unpleasant possibilities, none of which seemed beyond Gordy's limits.

  "Answering what-if questions. Nature was unkind to the dinosaurs. They existed in the same era as the mammals, but I don't think the two forms ever had a real head-to-head competition. All the mammals were small when the asteroid hit Chicxulub and the dinosaurs became extinct. Flying reptiles went away at the same time, but I've not done any work with them yet. What I have done, though, is absolutely fascinating. It's getting too dark to track in the habitat with visible light. Later we'll watch the nocturnal forms, but meanwhile let me show you some of my results."

  Rolfe stood up and did something invisible at the console, then moved back to stand directly in front of the ten-foot holograph. The natural light had faded to a deeper gloom, and Gordy Rolfe became a small, dark figure, hopping about against the background of the three-dimensional display. When he spoke again, his voice matched the animation of his manner.

  "Fourteen years ago I set up my first full-scale simulation. The habitat was self-contained and isolated except for the water supply and simulated solar radiation. I put in a mixture of plants from today and those found in this region a hundred million years ago—see, I didn't want to tilt the odds one way or the other. I put in floor and ceiling sensors that can identify, track, and inventory every animal species, so there would be a continuous census of habitat contents. And I seeded the habitat like this."

  A big group of animals stood frozen in holographic relief. Nick recognized four large meat-eating dinosaurs, which he thought from their size were Allosaurus. They, together with four lumbering specimens of Diplodocus, dwarfed everything else in the holo frame.

  Gordy moved around on the edge of the holograph. "This is shown at one-quarter scale, but everything I put into the habitat was full-sized. See, here are the big modern predators—I chose tigers, because they function better than lions in a jungle environment. I didn't want to use zoo specimens, they might be bred for docility, so I went to the Indian genome bank for original DNA templates. And here are hypsilophodons—small, fast herbivores, according to the books, but these seem more like omnivores, they'll eat anything. And here's a bunch of little saurischian plant-eaters, and these are wolves—no, I'm wrong, they're hyenas—and if you look at the bottom, we have the smallest forms, shrews and mice and some of the saurornithoids that are not much bigger."

  Nick was listening, but with only half his attention. While Gordy Rolfe spoke with such enthusiasm about his simulation, the rover rolfe was still out in the real habitat. So were the meat-eating minisaurs. It was too dark to see anything, but the rover's audio system was working. Unpleasant crunching sounds were interrupted by grunts and snorts and once by a startled, high-pitched squeal.

  "Release them into the habitat all at once," Rolfe went on. He waved his short arms. With a little imagination, the stooped, big-headed form silhouetted against the display could itself be one of the dwarf meat-eaters. "Provide water and light in realistic weather patterns, stay away, and see what happens. I did that, not once, but many times, and I let nature take its course. Do you know what happened, every single time?"

  Nick was thinking of other things. He and Gordy Rolfe had formed their alliance because they needed each other to achieve a common goal: a world crippled by a space shield that would be only partially effective in deflecting the coming particle storm. The weak and the foolish would die, but Nick had his own personal hideaways dug deep beneath New Rio and the mountains of the Canadian Rockies. He did not begrudge Gordy Rolfe his secret headquarters. And beyond the particle storm lay the real goal, of ultimate personal power unimagined by most humans.

  But the alliance carried its own price. Rolfe now held the stronger position. It was in part the power of a man indifferent to public opinion and support, versus one like Nick, who occupied a public and highly visible position.

  There was also another, more important, difference between them. If you want to understand a man, find out what he does for recreation. Nick pursued men and women as well as power. Gordy was above—or below— the passions of the flesh. Gordy played God, and he was, in Nick's opinion, becoming steadily more deranged. The lack of personal ties decreased his vulnerability and increased his megalomania.

  "Did you hear me, Lopez?" Rolfe came closer
, into the more brightly lit area beyond the holograph display. "Do you know what happens when I seed the habitat with a variety of forms, dinosaurs and mammals, and let it run?"

  "No. What happens?" Nick's skin prickled with apprehension. The circular wall of the room seemed closer. He imagined he could smell a rank odor from the jungle beyond.

  "The end mix of species in the habitat is different each time, depending on starting conditions and on random variations in food supply and weather." Rolfe moved to stand next to where Nick was sitting. His head was level with Nick's and he leaned close, gray eyes glittering with excitement behind the big lenses. "Sometimes the dinosaurs seem to have the upper hand, sometimes the mammals win out. But in every case, the small mammals do well. They never become extinct, and they always increase in numbers. Do you hear me, Lopez? Not big mammals. Small mammals win out, every time."

  Nick was six feet five inches tall. Presumably he did not qualify as a small mammal. Rolfe, stretched up to his full height in elevator shoes, was perhaps five feet two. Yet he was talking down to Nick—and loving it.

  Nick nodded. "I take your point. That's very interesting."

  There was one particular small mammal that he would like to see extinct. Not yet, though. This was a necessary partnership. He and Gordy Rolfe needed what only the other could provide: technological wizardry and industrial power from Gordy and the Argos Group, political savvy and clout from Nick and the WPF. The world's greatest inventor and entrepreneur, teamed with the world's savviest politician: a marriage made in heaven.

  But in the long run? That was different. Nick knew very well that he and Gordy were two people as different as you could get, drawn together only by a shared desire for power and wealth. Somewhere in the undefined future, on an Earth ravaged by the particle storm, only one of the two would survive.

  The competition between small and large mammals had yet to be decided.

  10

  From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

  I am not one to derogate the efforts of others, but Seth Parsigian's "solution" to my problems of acrophobia and agoraphobia was at first sight absurd beyond words.

  "You imagine," I said to him, "that I will sit here in the castle, while you and your associates wander Sky City and send me such facts and scenes as your Baker Street Irregulars deem important; and that I will then, like some improbable Mycroft, sit in my armchair and deduce from those rags and tatters of information the identity of the killer. Your faith in my powers would be touching, were it not so improbable."

  He scowled at me out of the screen; one-way video, of course, since I permit no outgoing images from Otranto Castle. Seth was annoyed with me, and not without reason. If it be true that there is an appropriate era and place for every person, then Seth Parsigian would have fitted well into the Victorian London of Sherlock Holmes to which I had just made reference. He was not, of course, a model for the most famous midnight wanderer of those fog-shrouded streets. I myself, in many people's minds, form a far better match for Whitechapel Jack. Seth, however, had well-developed powers of observation and self-preservation that made him far more than a casual onlooker. What he would see and report from Sky City would doubtless be useful and probably necessary.

  It would not, however, be sufficient. Three days of hard effort on my part had brought me no closer to our murderer. The crucial touching of like minds that Seth had hoped for when he came to see me had not occurred, and it seemed clear that progress through that avenue was unlikely.

  I had no other suggestions; Seth, however, did.

  "You got it wrong," he said. "Nobody but me's gonna be involved with you in this. An' I'm not gonna do all the work wanderin' round Sky City while you sit there laughin' an' scratchin'. You'll be right there with me."

  "Impossible. I thought I had made it abundantly clear—"

  "Be there as much as you want, an' as much as you can stand. An' still be safe at home if it gets too sticky. See this?" He held up a shapeless bundle of mauve and pink. "I'll wear it. Opens up to look like an ordinary jacket, but it's an RV jacket—for remote viewin', it's got sensors all over it. I send you the receivin' equipment, audio and video feeds in an RV helmet; then anythin' I see, you see. Anythin' I hear, you hear. Realistic, just like bein' there in person."

  "If realism is your goal, I suspect that I will be unable to function. Full telepresence is no more tolerable to me than physical presence."

  Seth offered a grin of irritating condescension. "You'll be fine, Doc. I'll arrange it so you get your place overlaid on the Sky City scene. You control the mix, how much you see of what I'm seein', how much you get of where you are. If things are tough for you to take, no problem. You just tone it down for a while."

  "But where you go is as important as what you see. Suppose you visit locations in Sky City that I believe to be of no more value than random wanderings?"

  "Won't happen. You'll have contact with me. Don't sit there scowlin'." How did he know my expression when I was feeding to him a voice-only signal? "We do it the same way we're doin' it now. I don't need to see your mug—in fact, I'd just as soon not—but you can talk to me and steer me anyplace you think I need to go."

  The probability that the scheme would succeed seemed vanishingly small. The chance that Seth would drop his idea without trying it was, unfortunately, even less.

  As James Russell Lowell remarks, it is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

  "Very well," I said. "If you think the matter is worth the effort, send me the receiving equipment. Before we try it in practice there must be a test to see if the idea is workable."

  I broke the connection, and pondered the problem of metaphorical outer garments.

  * * *

  The round-trip signal travel time from Earth to Sky City in its geosynchronous orbit is about one-fourth of a second. Seth proposed to accommodate this in Earth-bound tests of our communication system via a built-in electronic delay. It was similar to that employed when the question was first raised of customer acceptance of signals sent through geosynchronous satellites, and although I had not seen details of those century-old experiments I had little doubt that we would rapidly make the necessary mental adjustment.

  Far more difficult was the question of my environment. Unlike Seth, who would operate wholly in Sky City, I would perforce be obliged to function in Otranto Castle, while at the same time following events several tens of thousands of kilometers away. I needed to provide a test under difficult local circumstances.

  The children inadvertently cooperated in providing this. They had been unusually lively for the past few days, perhaps a consequence of my own distraction and decreased attention.

  The receiving equipment compounded rather than eased the problem. The controller was small and fitted easily into my right hand, but the RV helmet, large and black with prominent silver eyes, felt heavy and looked uncomfortable. With a little juggling and much more misgivings I fitted it on over my head.

  That action did not pass unobserved. I rarely regret my decision to perform minor genetic modification of my darlings, giving each of them increased stamina, better health, higher intelligence, abundant energy, and lessened need for sleep. Notice, however, the adverb rarely.

  When I was ready to test the helmet it was early evening for Seth, but past midnight for us in Ireland. Crystal and Lucy-Mary were perhaps the liveliest and most inquisitive, not to say troublesome, of the seven-year-olds, and they should have been in bed hours ago. But they entered my study just as I donned the helmet and moved the controller to a midrange setting. I saw Seth's offices, located at the Argos Group headquarters in Houston, Texas. I also saw, overlaid on that image, two gray ghostlike outlines. When I adjusted to receive a heavier component of the local scene, the gray figures turned into Crystal and Lucy-Mary. They walked over to me and stood giggling and nudging each other.

  "Can you see me?" said Seth's voice.

  "Yes. B
ut wait one moment. I must attend to something here." I turned off the audio feed. "Girls, you are not a part of this activity. Please leave."

  "What activity?" Lucy-Mary said.

  Crystal added, "If there is any activity, we must be part of it because there's no one else here. Do you know what you look like? You look like a human being with a fly's head."

  "That particular conceit lost its novelty long before you or even I was born. This helmet provides a communication capability, and I am in fact engaged in a meeting. Or I will be, as soon as you leave."

  "Can't we stay and listen?" asked Crystal.

  "You may not. Please leave—now."

  They did so, reluctantly. I saw Lucy-Mary's curious final glance at the RV helmet, and I made a mental note to hide it safely away when it was not in use. I could imagine Seth receiving a call from one of my darlings, and enthusiasm was not on the candidate list of his reactions.

  "What was all that about?" he asked as soon as we were once more in contact.

  "A little local interference. We can anticipate such things from time to time."

  "You really got eighteen of 'em in that castle?" Seth's ability to infer what he could neither see nor hear was uncanny. "All them young girls. I don't know how you stand it. They'd drive me dotty in a week. But I guess it don't matter for you, you were crazy before."

  "Far be it from me to interrupt your valuable insights into my past and present mental condition, but may we return to the subject of the equipment test? I am restoring a full visual feed to you and minimizing my local inputs."

  "All right. What do you see?"

  I was rapidly adapting to the quarter-second delay between each statement that we made. However, illogical as it sounds, it had not occurred to me that the visual feeds would be subject to the same hiatus. I found myself waiting impatiently for the field of view to change.

  "I see an office wall," I said.

  "So do I. I'm standin' right in front of it."