Sky Terminus was enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in Vickie’s dream. I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by then, but her eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest in a baby-sling.
Whatever held the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the glittering, brilliantly articulated ships that rose and descended from all parts. Strange cargoes were unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.
“I’m not as excited by all this as I would’ve been when I was younger,” Victoria murmured. “But somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?”
I began to say something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes. Stiffening, she stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see. There was no emotion in her face whatsoever.
“Vickie?” I said.
Slowly, she tumbled to the ground.
It was then, while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came walking up to me.
In my imagination I’d run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag behind, I stumbled off the train, toward him. He made no move to escape. I flipped open my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with my good hand, and fired.
Now, though …
He looked sadly down at Victoria’s body and put an arm around my shoulders.
“God,” he said, “don’t they just break your heart?”
I stayed on a month at the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died without offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the grasshopper seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright meteoric line down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a struck sulfur match.
He’d been a good man, with a wicked sense of humor that never came from my side of the family.
So now I wander the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain unchanged. Where things haven’t gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they have I unleash disease.
I go where I go and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me, and like a harvester I mow them down. Sometimes—not often—I go off by myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming stars.
I am Death and this is my story.
8
Riding the Giganotosaur
“How does it feel?”
“It feels great!”
The physical therapist lifted one of George Weskowski’s arms and flexed it, to check its range of motion. It took all of her strength to do so, even though George wasn’t resisting. She frowned. “No need to roar,” she chided.
“Sorry.”
“There’s a transmitter chip connected to your speech centers. Just subvocalize, and I can pick up what you’re saying on this radio. Tell me how your head feels.”
He considered. “Fine. Just fine.”
“No aches, itches, irritation around the sutures?”
“No.”
“Dizziness, nausea, hallucinations, phantom sounds or smells, mood swings, loss of appetite?”
“I could eat a horse!”
The therapist held up a mirror. “Now look at yourself.”
His skin was green, mottled with yellow, and covered with pebbly scales. His eyes were small, beady, homicidal. His arms, massive compared to what he had once possessed but puny compared to the rest of his new body, ended in three scimitar-taloned fingers. His legs were enormous. So was his tail. Opening his mouth revealed a murderous array of razor-sharp teeth.
“Oh yes,” he cried rapturously. “Yes, oh my goodness, yes, absolutely, yes, yes.”
“You like it?”
“It’s everything I ever dreamed of being.”
“The appearance doesn’t bother you?”
“I look terrific!”
He did, too. Giganotosaurus was the biggest, baddest predator ever to walk the Earth—larger, heavier, and more fearsome even than the old record-holder, Tyrannosaurus rex. “The king is dead,” George whispered to himself. “Long live the king.”
“What was that?”
“I said I’m eager to begin therapy, Dr. Alvarez.”
“Good. Then let’s try standing up.”
This, however, was nowhere near so satisfactory. George lurched eagerly to his knees and promptly overbalanced. He leaned against the side of the barn, making the wood creak, to ease his descent to the straw-covered ground. “Damn!”
“Careful—you weigh over eight tons now. And your leg bones are hollow—like a bird’s. You could easily break one doing that.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Good. Now your problem is that you’re pushing it. It’s only your forebrain we’ve grafted atop the existing brain, remember, and it isn’t familiar with the body. However, the hindbrain knows what to do. All the motor skills are already fully functional. Don’t intellectualize. Just picture what you want. The original brain has no defenses against you; it accepts your thoughts as its own. What you have to do is learn to ride it.”
“I’ll try,” he said humbly.
“Excellent. We’ll begin by …”
Six hours later, George was walking easily around and around the corral. He had even essayed a few brief sprints, with varied results. As he walked, he breathed deeply of the Cretaceous air, savoring the intoxicating mix of greenery and resins, the dark, heady undersmell of decay.
Old Patagonia Station was located on a flood plain, with a fern prairie to one side, and a forest of towering conifers to the other. There was a stream nearby—he could smell it—and the glint of a lake far off in the distance. It was a fresh, wondrous, unexplored world, and he was anxious to be off and into it.
“When can I begin field work?” he asked.
Dr. Alvarez pursed her lips. “You’re still recovering from the surgery. We won’t be making that decision for a few weeks.”
“But …” He waved a futile little paw outward, toward the lands that stretched to a misty blue horizon and beyond, unspoiled, virginal, his for the taking. He’d have to travel clear around the world to encounter a man-made structure. All the way back to the time station and its out-buildings behind him—and once they were gone, there wouldn’t be anything more like them for another ninety million years. “I thought I could get in some hunting before nightfall.”
“That reminds me.” The therapist went back into the barn and returned, dragging a heavy sack behind her. With a grunt, she hoisted it up and emptied it into a trough.
“What’s that?”
“A specially-formulated blend of protein, roughage, and vitamins. The wranglers call it dino chow.” She paused. “That’s our little joke.”
“You expect me to eat kibble?” he asked, horrified.
The prairie to one side of Old Patagonia Station had been browsed clear by the migratory herds of titanosaurs, rebbachisaurs, and andesaurs that dominated the local ecology. The forest, though, with its close-thronged trees, presented the colossal herbivores with an impenetrable barrier. They could feed on the leaves at its border, but nothing more. The interior was forbidden them.
But not George.
Large as he was, he was slim enough to slip between the trees—just.
He ran, leaped over the fence with a bound, and was gone into the woods. It was a beautiful, sunshiny day, and his greenish-yellow skin blended with the foliage perfectly.
That evening he made his first kill.
He experienced his new life in three distinct phases. There was the initial heady rush of freedom, when he ran as far and fast as his powerful new body would take him, wild with animal joy. Then he settled down into a happy daze. No more bosses! No more networking, no more memos, no more meetings! He’d never see the inside of an office again, sweat out another cold sell, face down another IRS audit. He sauntered along aimlessly, occasionally letting out a roar, just to watch the bright flocks of birds
with taloned wings take flight in fear. This phase lasted him about an hour.
Then his stomach rumbled, and suddenly he discovered what a frustrating time and place the Patagonian Cretaceous could be.
The problem was that he hadn’t the slightest idea of how to hunt, and he was too impatient to simply sit back and let the giganotosaur’s old brain take over.
He tried. Twice he saw herbivores in the distance, and his body trembled with blood-lust and began striding toward them. But then—he couldn’t help it—he’d bellowed with hunger and bravado, and charged. Each time, the creatures spooked and ran, too fast for him to catch up with them. Those suckers could move! They ran a lot faster than anything that size had any right to run.
He, in turn, was a sprinter—capable of the short, shocking dash that could do the job if he were close enough to overtake his target in the first mad rush of his attack. Before the creature could get its unwieldy bulk moving. Then, briefly, he was the fastest animal in existence. But he could only maintain that insane spurt of speed for a few minutes. More than that, his energy would give out, and his prey would escape every time.
So he realized he would have to stalk the brutes.
Running lightly along the fringe between forest and prairie, George saw in the distance a number of black specks. As he came closer, the specks resolved themselves into long-necked giants feeding upon the tall trees at the edge of the prairie.
Titanosaurs. They were immense things, averaging some twenty-five to thirty meters in length. It was hard to see how they managed to eat enough to keep such tremendous bodies fed. Even a small one would rot long before George could eat it all.
Slyly, he slipped into the forest.
With a stealthy ease that both pleased and astonished him, he sped quietly between the dark trees. It was a climax forest, so there was plenty of room between the trunks. The ground was covered with a litter of decomposing leaves, which deadened the sound of his footfalls. He was able to get so close to the titanosaurs that he could hear them chomping down on leaves and branches, and smell the stinking mounds of dung they left behind.
Cautiously, he drew closer.
Slanting rays of dusty yellow sunshine pierced the green canopy overhead and descended like beams of grace to its dark floor. Birds with toothed beaks flitted through the beams, like painted angels briefly glimpsed in the glory of early morning. George waited for his eyes to adapt, then crept into the new growth at the verge of the forest. He looked up at the nearest titanosaur. Its neck stretched up into the trees, taller than any giraffe’s.
God, he thought. Look at the size of that monster.
For an instant—only an instant—his spirit quailed. Then he gathered all his strength and, with a scream, ran straight at the nearest giant, intending to leap up at its soft, undefended throat, and tear it open.
But it didn’t quite work out that way.
The instant the titanosaur became aware of him, it shifted its weight onto its hind legs and wheeled about. That slender, endless tail came slashing around like a whip, straight at George.
For an instant he could not think. His mind went completely blank with astonishment.
That instant was the saving of him.
While George was mentally paralyzed, his giganotosaur reflexes took over, skidding his body to a stop, ducking frantically down, and scrabbling desperately with legs and stubby little arms to get away from the gigantic sauropod.
The tail came crashing down and dealt him a glancing blow. He received the merest fraction of its force, but that was enough. It knocked him over and sent him tumbling back into the small trees and cycads at the verge of the forest. And it stung. It stung like blue blazes.
By the time George had gathered himself together and stood again, aching but unbroken, the titanosaur was gone. It had ambled away, further down the forest line, and its fellows with it, to look for some food that wasn’t infested with impertinent little predators.
George burned with humiliation.
This wasn’t what he’d paid for. This wasn’t what he’d spent a lifetime slaving away in the financial markets in order to buy. He’d wanted to be a carnivore, goddamnit, a killer in fact as well as in spirit. The ball-busting and competitor-breaking aspects of the business world had their satisfactions. But he’d wanted to experience competition in its purest form, murderous and merciless, as Nature had intended.
It was obvious to him now that no predator, not even the mighty giganotosaur, was meant to prey upon the giant sauropods. They were protected by their size, their bulk, their mass. It had been folly to think he could hunt down and kill a titanosaur.
This was a disappointment, but one he would have to live with. He was just going to have to scale down his expectations a bit. Someday, perhaps, he would know enough to take out one of those big bastards. But in the meantime, he had to get himself fed.
While he was preoccupied with his thoughts, the giganotosaur had gotten itself up and crept back to the verge of the forest. It found a place where it could crouch, hidden by the new growth, and there it waited.
By the time George was able to focus outward again, his body had found what it wanted for supper.
He didn’t know what the creature was called. It was small for a dinosaur, about the size of a large boar, and went about on four legs, rooting in the dirt among the ferns and low bushes of the prairie.
George watched it, motionless, from the edge of the forest. His binocular vision was excellent—better than what his human eyes had enjoyed for a decade. His body knew what to do. It quivered with tension, anxious to attack. But he held it back, with forced patience. He wanted his first kill to be a clean one.
The creature moved a little closer to him, a little further away, a little closer again. It was oblivious to his presence.
Finally, he let slip the leash. His body charged forward, almost silently, head low and close to the ground. The creature looked up, saw him, and squealed. But before it could turn and run, he was upon it. His massive jaws closed upon its neck with a snap. Blood spurted, warm and sticky. He shook his head twice, to snap the beast’s spine. And it was dead.
He crunched it down to nothing in a matter of minutes.
Afterwards, he sought out a stream and drank until his thirst was slaked. The water was warm and brown. It tasted great.
When he’d had his fill, he lay on his stomach in the ferns above the bank. Dragonflies came and hovered in the air before him like small helicopters.
He stared dreamily out into the western sky, where the setting sun was painting the clouds gold and orange and red, and took stock. Since this morning he had experienced pride, anger, gluttony, and—now—sloth. Four of the seven deadly sins in the course of a few hours.
By God, that was the way to spend a day.
This was the life for a man.
They caught up with him a week later. He was tearing away great hunks of flesh from the side of an australotopsian he had killed, when he heard the growl of an internal combustion engine in the distance. He ignored it, crunching ribs and pushing his muzzle into the cavity thus opened in search of the heart.
He liked the heart best. It made him feel more of a predator to eat an animal’s heart while it was still warm. How many times had he wished he could do this to one of his competitors? Countless times. Now he could.
The Land Rover pulled up. Two figures got out.
“Having fun?”
George lifted his head from his prey. His muzzle was wet with blood. His eyes, surely, glittered with the savage joy of the kill. He knew that he must look the perfect image of Satanic fury. He grinned.
“I sure am, Dr. Alvarez.”
The man standing behind Alvarez involuntarily drew back a step. But she stood her ground. “Well, fun time’s over. You’ve got work to do. I’ve come to take you back to the station.”
He’d noticed the trailer behind the Land Rover, and suspected what it was for. But the australotops was the biggest thing he had killed so far,
and he was glad to have witnesses.
“I’ve got an idea of how a giganotosaur could take out a titanosaur, doctor. If I were to charge it from the side, leap up, and then cling to it with my forearms—they’re certainly strong enough; I could use them like grappling hooks—then I could kick quite a gash into its side with my powerful hind limbs. All I’d have to do then is drop off and follow the titanosaur from a safe distance. Even if it didn’t die from loss of blood, the wound would be sure to get infected. Voila—a year’s supply of hamburger!”
“Mr. Weskowski, nobody is interested in what hunting strategies a dinosaur with a human brain could come up with. We want to learn what hunting strategies it has. We want to learn how a giganotosaur really operates. And for that, we need you to come back, cooperate, and apply yourself to your studies.”
George threw his head back and laughed. His auditors put their hands over their ears.
“Let me talk to him,” the man said then. He was a slender little fellow, with a thin mustache.
“And who are you?” George asked. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“My name is Ramon Delgado. I’m a doctor of paleontological transition psychology.”
“I don’t need a psychologist. Especially one with a specialty so new that I’m its only possible subject.”
“Mr. Weskowski, please listen to me. You’ve gone directly from an aged, cancer-ridden body to one that’s strong and extremely physical—it makes sense that you’d feel a certain exuberance. A sense of personal invulnerability. But you can’t simply break all ties with humankind. Strong as you are, big as you are, you can’t exist on your own.”
“When I was a kid,” George said, “the Speaker of the House was a man named Newt Gingrich. This was back in the United States, you understand, and at that time the Speaker of the House was an extremely powerful man.
“Now, old Newt decided he wanted something to brighten up his office. So he strolled over to the Smithsonian, picked out a Tyrannosaurus rex skull from their collection, and took it with him. Oh boy, how the curators hated him for that! But there was nothing they could do about it. Because he had the power. And they were just a bunch of scientists.”
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