Dawann took a few moments to divulge the highlights of the transmissions of the soul-catcher. But she didn’t tell them everything. There was one secret she wouldn’t share with anyone, ever.
She closed her eyes, recalling how for a brief time, the soul-catcher had worked differently, transporting her, or so it seemed, back to Cretaceous Earth. She had entered Human Dawn so completely, she could see everything through her eyes, hear all of her inner thoughts, feel exactly what she was feeling, touch what she touched. It had happened the first time Human Dawn had sexual intercourse with Gus, and the experience was so profound it made Dawann understand true love, human love, so different from anything she had previously known. She had become so much a part of Human Dawn it seemed to rob her of the memories of that special night.
Incredibly, Dawann thought, they became mine and mine alone. I stole her soul.
But how? I don’t understand how it could have happened. After all, I was just watching her experiences, wasn’t I?
“Your Highness?”
She turned toward Fey, thrusting her doubts aside. There was still so much to do.
Dawann walked toward the slick-shaft, then motioned her friends forward, anxious to leave. “I shall travel to Shurrr, to the rainforest of Sagamish, and I must leave today.”
Fey and Eshlish exchanged startled looks and then Fey said, “One of the hunta bird transmissions came back a short while ago. It was from the third door. We saw the mud tribe of the Sagamish basin. They live only a few kilokecs from our lab.”
Dawann flashed her teeth, mimicking a human smile. “The lab where the Lex clone lives?”
The others watched her curiously.
“Yes,” Fey said in a low voice.
Throwing her head back, Dawann gave a good imitation of a laugh. “Good. You see, I know Lex is the key.”
“The key?” Eshlish asked her.
“Yes,” Dawann said. “Tasha saw him – I’m convinced of it. After the real Lex died, she spotted the Lex clone outside the lander. It had to be him. Could it mean the clone and I go there, but that we don’t succeed in changing the past?” She nodded, realizing she was acting so thoroughly human now she was causing the other saurians to shiver. “Yes,” she went on, answering her own question. “I have to believe it does.”
“What will you do now, Your Highness?” Fey asked.
“I must first read the message on the plaque, especially the words scratched on the back.”
“My plaque? The one I found on Shurrr?”
“Yes,” Dawann said. “It could hold clues as to how I should proceed. Then I’ll find the Lex clone, because together we’ll travel to the past.”
“You really mean to do this?” Fey asked.
“Of course. Human Dawn awaits me there. So do Gus, Tasha, Kris, and all the rest of the crew. I must do what Dawn asked me to do.”
“And what was that?”
Dawann-dracon looked directly into Fey’s intelligent, soulful eyes. “It’s quite simple, really,” she said. “She asked me to try again.”
Epilogue
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.
~William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra
I am !Oshch !Bo’ool !pa-Keer. No one calls me by that name now. It is a secret, an ancient wisp of memory known only to me, for I am the Keeper of All Knowledge.
I have been mistaken for a god, but in truth I am not; I am as mortal as you and your kin. Despite my name, I do not understand everything, but I thirst for wisdom and knowledge. Perhaps, someday, I will find the answers to the unanswerable. For the moment, however, I continue to search for the truth. What distant spark created the cosmic birth event, which your scientists call the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago? Why does sentient life exist in nature, and what is its true purpose, if any? When all the stars cease to fuse and burn themselves out – some one quadrillion years from now – what will happen to this universe? If there is sentient life then, how will it survive? Will those beings find a way to travel en mass to another universe? And if they don’t leave, how will they survive what is coming next; the inevitable decay of the matter that built stars, planets, and life – the destruction of all protons?
I have lived for a long time, far longer than the entire history of your species, Homo sapiens sapiens. I will die someday; alas, I know not when. Even I cannot see into the future. The veil that separates me from things to come is as impenetrable as the origin of our own universe.
But I do possess powers you might consider magical. I now exist in an alternate universe, created by my manipulation of space-time. I took a great risk in doing this, for I did not know if my plan would work. And yet, somehow, it did succeed; the course of evolution on Earth was altered, and I now share my existence with the saurians. In your universe, I was already dead when your human astronauts found me. My mind survived, however, trapped in a planet-wide web of molecular microlattices, my thoughts still sentient and questing, but beyond the hope of ever being truly alive.
Yet, I knew I had a chance to live again with the help of the saurians. And how, you might ask, did I believe there was a possibility they could evolve in the alternate universe? It was a simple extrapolation based on the facts of life; that evolutionary complexity increases as geological time goes on, as does brain-body ratio. If the right kinds of dinosaurs could outlast the devastation of the K/T cometary crash, then it might be only a matter of time before one species rose to intelligence.
If I did succeed in changing the course of evolution on the Earth, I realized I would have a good chance of saving myself. I understood that if the dinosaurs – particularly the small, bipedal, intelligent troodontids – survived, they would evolve to sentience more swiftly than the ancient mammals that gave rise to your human ancestors. The Troodon dinosaurs had a head start on the road to intelligence, when compared to any contemporary Late Cretaceous mammalian species.
And if these intelligent dinosaurs subsequently developed space travel and then journeyed to Mars, perhaps they could find me before my physical body had died. Knowing that my death throes would take millennia, a window of opportunity for my revivification would be open to the saurian race. It was a window I had to make every effort to create; in your universe, space-faring humanity missed the time of my death by hundreds of thousands of years.
To my past self, my dying self, I sent an account of what was to be. It was a complete recording of my thoughts, to be incorporated into my past mind when the time was right. And, of course, it included the memory transcripts of Dawn Stroganoff, the essence of her soul, for she was the first human to communicate with me in the universe where I had died. This record was like a message in a bottle, thrown into the flotsam of ages past. For me, it was a spark of hope traveling backward through the immense void of time.
And then, to my relief and profound delight, my grand experiment succeeded, for my dying self found the message. My thoughts were incorporated into my counterpart’s mind; I became a part of my past self then and prepared for the arrival of my saviors, the saurians. It did not take long – perhaps ten thousand of your years – yet I was near death when the saurian astronauts finally found me, an ancient wreck filled with mutated, age-damaged DNA.
I gave myself up to them at that point, submitting to their bold and painful experiments, and their scientists restored me to health. Because of their skills, I will live for eons, longer than any other being of my species, perhaps for another hundred million of your Earth years, maybe much more.
Certainly it will be long enough to watch my kindred spirits, the saurians, voyage to distant suns. Perhaps, I will go with them on their journeys. After all, as you say, I now have all the time in the world.
You might wonder what is out there in the far-flung, starry archipelagos scattered across outer space. It is a place of great splendor and of deepest, blackest terror. You would find incredible creatures there, comparable to your mythological angels and demons – and everything in bet
ween. I have encountered many intelligent species during my lifetime and have seen countless technological civilizations rise, endure for a time, and then perish among the stars.
I am !Oshch !Bo’ool !pa-Keer. And I am old, so very old.
I am not the longest-lived creature in the universe, however. There are beings whose existence is the stuff of legend, the first sentient beings of our universe, whose civilization dawned some eight billion years ago. The Old Ones arose after supernovas created complex atoms, such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. They evolved from biological processes similar to the ones that occurred on Earth. On countless planets, organic compounds – brought in by the rich fruit of icy cometary matter – have sparked life.
But the Old Ones have existed for untold eons longer than your species, or mine. They have gone beyond natural biological laws and have found a way to shed their physical bodies. Now they move like specters through the cosmos, undetectable and wraithlike, noncorporeal beings that have evolved into creatures of pure energy not bound by the structure of space-time. The only traces of their former presence are the wormholes pulled from the quantum foam of space-time and hidden within the farthest reaches of the cosmos. These are the remnants of experiments conducted eons ago, when the Old Ones were still mortal.
And who in truth are these makers of wormholes? I must confess – I know not. They are like gods to me, for I believe they have found the answers to the deepest mysteries of life.
Over time, one of my most cherished goals has been to contact the Old Ones. But, alas, they live beyond my reach, moving at the speed of light as they tend to their own ambitions, lost among the stars.
Still, I do possess something that was theirs. One of their wormholes exists on the planet you call Mars. Perhaps one billion years old, it was found by my species long ago and used for a time to explore the cosmos. But deactivation was necessary when we discovered that an alien race, the rapacious silicon life-forms called the Evil Ones, had used wormholes to travel through parts of our galaxy, conquering and exterminating all carbon-based life in their path. Then a cursed saurian scientist, a rebel named Eshlish-dracon, opened the wormhole again. Despite the implicit dangers, especially if the Evil Ones use it to gain access to our quadrant of the galaxy, I intend to risk its reactivation, employing it for my own purposes, at least for a time.
It belongs to me. It is mine!
I am !Oshch !Bo’ool !pa-Keer. I am the Keeper of All Knowledge, the Master of the Wormhole, and the last of my kind. I am old, so very old, but because of the saurians, I will live for ages more. In that regard, I am above other mortal beings.
I am higher than high. In truth, I hope someday to find the key to immortality. Perhaps then, I will take my place among the gods.
But first, I must stop Dawann-dracon. I must put a halt to her plans.
Author’s note
During the course of my research for Dragon Dawn, I discovered two eminent scientists, Carl Sagan and Dale Russell, had also speculated that had the K/T Event not occurred, dinosaurs might have evolved into intelligent beings.
Dr. Sagan, in his 1977 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Dragons of Eden, thought that perhaps small, intelligent dinosaurs called Sauronithoides had the potential for self-awareness. And, in the late 1980s, the paleontologist Dr. Dale Russell, in his book An Odyssey in Time – The Dinosaurs of North America, believed the extremely smart Troodon dinosaurs were the best candidates for the ancestors of sentient saurians, whom he called the dinosauroids.
I am also indebted to the work of Donald Brownlee, professor of astronomy, and Peter Ward, professor of biology and earth and space sciences, both of the University of Washington, for their wonderful books of popular science, most especially Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, and its hypothesis regarding the possible rarity of aliens with faces or body plans like ours – the aliens of my beloved Star Trek to be enjoyed, but taken with the proverbial grain of salt!
And who can forget the groundbreaking research of the many scientists who had the courage and foresight to think outside the box, changing the way we view dinosaurs, the calamitous end of the Cretaceous, or the potential for life on other planets and moons. They include John Ostrom, Walter Alvarez, Luis Alvarez, Bob Bakker, Jack Horner, Mary Schweitzer, Sankar Chatterjee, J. Brad Dalton, Jacob Vinther, Michael Benton, Gene Shoemaker, Gilbert Levin (who has never retreated in his assertion the Viking landers found life on Mars in the late 1970s), and the unsung geophysicist, Glen Penfield, who along with Alan Hildebrand discovered the Chicxulub Crater.
Finally, in an amazing bit of research, the paleobotanist Jack Wolfe pinpointed the time of year of the K/T impact. Wolfe discovered that fossils of water lilies and lotus plants had been blooming then. It looks as if the vegetation froze after the impact, most likely from the effects of a nuclear winter-type scenario. Since fossil evidence indicates the plants did not live long enough to bear fruit, Dr. Wolfe believes the K/T Event happened in June, around the time of my story.
About the Author
Deborah O’Neill Cordes is a screenwriter and novelist of speculative and historical fiction. Her childhood was divided between big city and small town America; in the summer before sixth grade her family moved from Staten Island, New York to Flagstaff, Arizona. Both of her home towns nurtured her love of science and history. Afternoons spent fossil hunting on the Staten Island shore gave way to exploring Northern Arizona’s ancient ruins. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in zoology, magna cum laude, from Northern Arizona University. Just three credits shy of a double major in zoology and history, she decided to graduate on time and pursue history as a vocation by getting a master’s degree with thesis, also from NAU. After teaching secondary school for fourteen years, she turned to writing full-time. She is also a dedicated genealogist; the surnames Stroganoff and Granberg having been the last names of two of her ancestral lineages.
In addition to Dragon Dawn, Deborah is the co-author of the Morgan O’Neill time travel novels, which she writes with Cary Morgan Frates. Several of Deborah’s works have been optioned by Hollywood, while many others are award winners, garnering finalist placements in the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference Literary Contest, semi-finalist wins in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, and the Metro Goldwyn Mayer finalist award in the Seattle International Film Festival’s Perfect Pitch Forum.
She resides in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two West Highland White Terriers, who, alas, are precocious terriers and therefore never white.
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Deborah O’Neill Cordes at:
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Please visit Morgan O’Neill at:
http://www.morganoneill.com/
Copyright © 2014 by Deborah O'Neill Cordes
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