Fossil Hunter qa-2

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Pal-Cadool had survived a mass dagamant once before; he’d been in the central square, then, as now, an aide to Afsan, when thee imperial forces and the Lubalites had skirmished all those kilodays ago. Cadool had seen the signs leading up to the current explosion and had taken pains to keep himself stuffed with food, the torpor that follows eating helping both to curb the hunting reflex and to make one less irritable, less territorial. He had no idea where Afsan was. His first thought was to try to find the savant, but he realized that heading into the mob would be a fatal mistake — if not fatal for himself, fatal for those he would encounter: the euphoria of a filled stomach could only counteract so much external stimulus. He ran for the stockyards, his giant stride — Novato did not call him Cadly without good reason — covering the many blocks quickly.

  The stockyards, at the southern edge of Capital City, near places of business but away from any residential quarters, corralled a small herd of shovelmouths. Shovelers spent most of their time on all fours, but could rise up and even walk around on their hind legs if the mood struck them. They all had the wide, flat prows covered with bony sheaths that gave these animals their name. On the tops of their skulls, most kinds of shovelmouth had a different, distinctive hollow crest of bone.

  Many types were present in the stockyard, milling about, eating cones from the thick stands of trees that lined the yard’s periphery, nipping the grasses, or just sunning themselves beneath the purple sky.

  The entire stockyard was surrounded by stone fencing, except for one wide, wrought-iron gate. Cadool lifted the bolt that held the gate shut and pushed his shoulder against the rusting metal bars to open it. They left a flaking orange mark on his sash.

  The shovelers gave no sign of interest. Cadool shouted out to them, "Come on, come on!" But shovelers made deafening calls by pumping air through their head crests. The comparatively quiet shouting of Cadool wasn’t enough to get their attention.

  Cadool had been a butcher before he’d become Afsan’s assistant. Indeed, he’d apprenticed here, at this very stockyard, before being assigned to the smaller imperial yard adjacent to the palace. He entered the yard, placed his palms flat against the sides of his muzzle to restrict the airflow, and whistled twice, while stomping his long legs into the ground.

  Still no response from the beasts.

  Cadool hurried far into the stockyard, approaching a shoveler with a semicircular crest. The creature, standing passively on all fours, was about three times as long as Cadool was tall, with a rough hide covered with a matrix of little conical bumps. Cadool slapped its rump as hard as he could. The creature didn’t budge, but it did swing its supple neck around to look at him sideways.

  "Come on!" said Cadool. "The gate’s open. Go!"

  He whacked it again on the rump. The shoveler’s belly expanded as it took in breath, then its wide-brimmed mouth opened, and Cadool was blasted by a call like thunder and a rock slide and giant waves slapping against a ship’s hull all rolled into one. Cadool staggered back, covering his earholes. Nearby, another shoveler, this one with a tubular crest sticking out of the back of its skull, lifted its head from the grass and also regarded Cadool.

  He was trained in the art of animal handling, but it was a hot day, the tiny, white sun beating down. This beast seemed completely uninterested in heeding Cadool’s wishes. But perhaps that other one…

  Cadool hurried over to the tube-crested shoveler and gave it slap on the flank. This one seemed a little less recalcitrant. It turned halfway around and was now facing toward the open gate…

  …which, Cadool suddenly realized, meant it couldn’t see the gate at all, since the beast’s eyes faced to the side. Cadool danced to the left and the head tracked him, the long cylindrical crest cutting a swath through the air as it did so.

  And, finally, the stupid animal caught sight of the open gate. This one, at least, was interested in escaping. It began a slow march toward the opening. Time was of the essence, and Cadool couldn’t countenance such an indolent pace. He shouted at the creature and pounded it again and again on its flank. Finally it began to gallop, and, a moment later, it made a different, deeper, more resonant call than the one the other shoveler had pumped out earlier.

  Another shoveler reared up on its hind legs to see what was going on, then, almost at once, it dropped back to a quadruped stance and began to charge after the tube-head. Two more quickly joined in, each making its resounding call. Three adults and a juvenile, all with double-spiked crests, began to run for the gate too.

  Cadool suddenly realized he was very much in trouble.

  The shovelmouths were stampeding. Clouds of dust were swirling into the sky.

  It was, more or less, what he’d wanted, but he hadn’t planned on being in the way. They would trample him as though he were a shrub. He moved quickly, his long gait coming to his aid again, and with a smooth motion, hauled himself up on the back of the shovelmouth with the semicircular crest that he’d originally approached. The creature seemed startled, but Cadool moved his hands quickly to the sides of its neck, soothing it in the traditional way employed by animal handlers. Even over the pounding of feet around him, Cadool could hear a faint whistling with each of his shovelmouth’s breaths as air moved through the curving passages of its crest. He pushed his feet against the shoveler’s hide, taking care that the bony spurs on his heels did not pierce the rough skin. This shoveler, at last, was spurred into motion, galloping toward the open gate, Cadool holding on to the base of its neck tightly.

  The ride was rough, and Cadool’s full stomach threatened to heave, but soon he and his impromptu mount were out of the stockyard and heading down the streets of Capital City.

  Pandemonium. Quintaglios shouting, individuals running back and forth, tails flying. Over there, two females locked in a death struggle, muzzles bright red with blood. To Cadool’s right, a male’s corpse, the neck ripped wide open, a vast puddle of blood spilling away from the wound. Ahead, a juvenile, still many kilodays shy of his first hunt, leaping through the air, claws extended, landing on the back of an older fellow in a merchant’s sash, the force of the impact driving them both down onto the paving stones.

  He heard no voices, only guttural screams, animal wails, and the ululations of the stampeding shovelmouths, five or six beasts in front of Cadool’s own, several tens more bringing up the rear.

  "Kalahatch!" shouted Cadool, as loud as he could, again and again, desperate to be heard over the din. "Kalahatch! Kalahatch!"

  It was an ancient cry, a traditional call to the hunt. The animal beneath him bucked, as if it knew what the word meant. Cadool moved his hands so and the beast’s back stopped snapping up and down.

  The pounding of shoveler feet and their deafening calls were enough to break a few of the Quintaglios out of the blood rage. In front of a shop he was passing, one fellow pushed aside the female he’d been grappling with and looked up. Cadool turned to him and shouted imploringly, "Kalahatch!"

  The fellow looked indecisive for an instant, then charged toward the nearest shovelmouth, one of the rare ones with a crest like two crescent moons. He leapt onto the shoveler’s side and brought his jaws together in a great scooping bite. The female he’d been fighting charged after him, as if to tear him apart, but then with a visible effort of will at the last instant she changed her course and also leapt onto the shoveler, chomping into its meaty rump.

  Cadool was carried farther down the street. He continued his hunting cry. Ahead, right in the middle of the road, was a ball of green arms and legs and tails — perhaps six or seven Quintaglios locked in mortal combat.

  Cadool jabbed his feet into his shoveler’s side, this time toes in, deliberately piercing the hide. The tube-crester pumped out an anguished cry, splitting the air like all the thunder of a storm discharged with a single blast. Heads appeared from the ball of limbs, slick all over with blood. "Kalahatch!" shouted Cadool.

  Three individuals disentangled themselves from the ball; the rest, dead, dying, or dazed, didn
’t get out of the way in time and were trampled by the stampede. But the ones who had escaped ran to the sides of the road, ensconcing themselves in recessed doorways, letting part of the shovelmouth herd thunder by. Cadool looked back long enough to see two of them leap onto shovelers. The third, a male apparently more injured than Cadool had first thought, collapsed slowly to the paving stones as the rest of the herbivores pounded on.

  Cadool continued into the center of town. He was having about a three-quarters success rate at getting the crazed Quintaglio to switch from killing each other to hunting the shovelers. As for the rest, there was nothing he could do.

  Suddenly the street widened into a large square, dotted with the red-spattered bodies of the dead or dying. Entering the square from the opposite direction was another cluster of shovelmouths. Quintaglios were attacking them, purging their rage through the hunt, coming together in the hunt, cooperating for the hunt…

  But how? Where were these other shovelers coming from?

  And then Cadool saw. Dybo, the Emperor himself, riding atop a shovelmouth with an orange-and-blue-striped hide, one of the imported Arj’toolar beasts kept in the private imperial stockyard. Dybo, unaggressive to the point of docility, thought to be the weakest of his mother’s hatchlings, all but immune, apparently, to the clouds of pheromones drenching every corner of the Capital. Dybo, risking his life to quell the madness in his people.

  Cadool saluted the Emperor, and Dybo waved back. The tide was turning, the madness abating, the population releasing its bloodlust. Shovelers fell to the paving, and Quintaglios feasted together, their mode shifting from violence to the torpor brought by full bellies.

  Many had died, but most had survived — this time. But Cadool knew this was only a temporary reprieve.

  Next time, they might not be so lucky.

  *40*

  Fra’toolar

  The first thing Toroca heard was a voice.

  "What happened?"

  It was Delplas. Toroca tried to rise, but made a small groan instead. "My head hurts."

  "You banged it when you collapsed," said Delplas. "What happened?"

  Toroca opened his eyes. It was dark; eight moons moved overhead. "When that inner door opened, I got this gush of air in my face. It was stale, musty. It smelled wrong. Then I collapsed."

  "Something funny about the air," said Greeblo. "Your lamp went out, too."

  "How long have I been unconscious?"

  "Not too long," said Delplas. "About a daytenth."

  Toroca sighed. "It’s night. Let’s wait until morning to let some decent air get into that thing, then head back inside."

  "Aye," said Delplas. "You’re probably right."

  It was even-night, the night most people didn’t sleep — everyone was back on normal schedules. Toroca lay on his belly, eyes turned up, watching the stars careen across the bowl of the sky.

  As soon as the sun was up, Toroca squeezed into the tiny room with doors at either end. The outer door was still jammed half-open: the inner wasn’t yet quite open all the way. Toroca had succumbed to the bad air before he’d slid the panel all the way to the left side. He sniffed warily. Everything smelled fine now. He pulled the inner door all the way aside and stepped through, into the interior of the object, whatever it was, the spluttering flame from a hand-held lantern illuminating his way.

  He was in a long gently curving corridor, running parallel to the outer wall of the object. Toroca was immediately startled by how straight the corridor was. Most Quintaglio corridors twisted and turned, so as to keep other users of them out of sight. There was a standard walking pace for corridors: as long as you moved along at that pace, you could walk the length of most hallways without ever seeing another individual, even if the hallway was actually in heavy use.

  "Well?" called Delplas from outside.

  "It seems all right," replied Toroca, his voice echoing a bit. "Come along."

  Toroca stepped about ten paces down the corridor. He could hear Delplas making her way through the strange double-doored room.

  The light from two lanterns — Toroca’s and Delplas’s — cast weird shadows on the blue walls. The object, like everything on Land, had been rocked over time by landquakes, and its floors were canted at an angle. Thick black dust had accumulated along the downslope side of the corridors. Toroca thought perhaps it was the remnant of some fabric covering that had decayed over time, although why one would put tapestries on the floor was beyond him.

  They passed their first room. It contained blobs of corroded metal; perhaps once they had been furniture. None of the rooms seemed to have doors, just open archways. That made even more peculiar the strange double-doored room they had first come through. Littering the floor were artifacts similar to the one Toroca had originally found and clumps of rusted material, presumably artifacts made of less-stem stuff that had corroded.

  Toroca and Delplas continued along, ten or so paces between them. The next room they passed also contained corroded metal, and the one after that, nothing at all, except intricate metal panels — perhaps art of some kind? — embedded in the walls. Toroca leaned in to examine one of the panels. It was perforated with many tiny holes in regular patterns, and most of the holes were covered with bits of colored glass or crystal. Little geometric shapes were etched into parts of the panels.

  It took a while, but Toroca finally noticed the roofs. The ceilings of the corridor and rooms weren’t made of the same blue material. Rather, they seemed to be covered over with translucent glass. In several places, the glass was broken. Looking closely at a large piece that had fallen to the floor, Toroca saw that it wasn’t really glass. It was a softer material, waxier, and when he looked at it edge-on, it was white, rather than the dark green or blue of glass seen thus. He also found he could flex the material slightly.

  Toroca looked up to where the piece of milky material had fallen from. Recessed in the roof were long orange tubes, and those, mostly cracked and shattered, did look as though they were made from real glass.

  It was one of those sudden flashes of insight. Toroca suddenly realized what was missing from the walls — hooks to hang lanterns on, candle holders, anything to hold a light source. The translucent roof, and the strange tubes behind, must have provided light, somehow. Perhaps the tubes were optical conduits, something like Novato’s far-seers, channeling light from outside. Perhaps.

  The next room they came upon was a complete surprise. Toroca motioned for Delplas to come stand relatively near him. "What do you make of that?" said Toroca.

  Jutting from the walls of the room were pallets, each one about twice as long as it was wide, covered with a pile of decayed material that might at one time have been fabric. There were a total of twelve pallets, three at about Toroca’s knee-level on each side of the room, and three more above these at his shoulder-level. The upper pallets had strange ladder-like affairs leading up so them, except that the ladders were really two narrow ladders paired side by side, with a handspan’s gap between them. Toroca couldn’t fathom what the use of such ladders would be; they were almost what one might imagine for a Quintaglio who wanted to climb backward and needed a slot for his or her tail.

  "They’re beds," said Delplas at last, gesturing at the pallets.

  Beds. Most Quintaglios slept on the floor, but such things were used in hospitals or in the homes of the very old to bring bodies up to a comfortable level for doctors to work on. But in all his life, Toroca had never seen a room with more than one bed in it.

  "That would mean twelve people slept in this room at once," said Toroca. "That’s not possible. No one could stand such close quarters for any length of time." And, when the words were out, Toroca realized how true they were — even for him, even free of territoriality, the idea of sleeping with eleven others was completely beyond his ken.

  "They do look like beds, though, don’t they?" persisted Delplas.

  Toroca thought about that. "Yes. Yes, they do." He shuddered as a thought occurred to him. Yes, this
vast object was miraculous, but he’d still retained the thought, the six-fingered handgrip of the original artifact not withstanding, that it was of Quintaglio manufacture. After all, who else could have possibly built it? But this room — this room was no room a Quintaglio would ever use. And those straight corridors — hallways no Quintaglio would feel comfortable walking in except when completely alone. Someone else — something else — had built this.

  What, wondered Toroca, did the builders look like?

  With the outer door jammed partially closed, poor Greeblo still couldn’t get inside the great blue structure. Her job became cataloging the markings on its vast curving surface. Meanwhile, Toroca organized the other six surveyors into three interior-exploration teams. Because of the poor air circulation within the massive structure, each team had only a single lamp.

  Toroca and Delplas constituted one such team. It was hard on Delplas, since Toroca carried the lamp and territoriality tended to make her lag behind in the dark. The blue structure was huge, and it was frustrating not to be able to get a really good look at its interior. Toroca’s lamp flame lit only a small area. The rest faded away into eerie darkness.

  The inner walls were all made of the same blue material as the outer shell. Toroca tried to find seams indicating where two sheets of the blue stuff had been joined, but he couldn’t. It was almost as if the whole vast structure was one continuous piece, like blown glass.

  Suddenly something occurred to Toroca. "It’s not a sailing ship," he said, turning around to face Delplas, who cast a giant dancing shadow on the wall behind her in the swaying light of Toroca’s lamp.

  "Oh?" she replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "I agree it doesn’t look like any ship I’ve ever seen before, but well, it is streamlined on the outside, and it has a ship-like quality about it."

  "Think about the Dasheter." he said. "Do you remember the doorways?"