IGMS Issue 38

by IGMS

  In Talapathas, a town that was little more than a stock-buying station and a pair of saloons, the pickings were even slimmer than average. We set up at a table in the back of the larger saloon, and spent a day and a half looking at nothing. A pair of natives brought the carved-down remains of a brace-wing's forelimb, and were deeply offended when we didn't want to pay them twice what it was worth. Other than that, there were unrecognizable bone fragments, a chambered swimmer's shell, and some rocks that weren't even close to being fossils.

  We were about ready to pack things up when the rancher came in, carrying an old coffee-can, half filled with cotton wadding. He eased the tooth out, and we all perked up. This was something worthwhile, at last.

  "Broad toothed coffin-mouth?" asked Renner, who had the worst view.

  "Don't think so," I said, passing it over to Corder. "It's coming out, to the side, and I've never seen a coffin-mouth with --"

  "This is something new," said Corder. His eyes were closed, and the tooth was resting on his finger-tips. "Not a coffin-mouth. Something much smaller, maybe five feet tall."

  "Five feet!" said Renner. Corder was a good enough necromancer that we couldn't argue with what the bone had told him, but it was a little much to choke down. "That tooth's more than half a foot long itself."

  "We got a lot of teeth like that," said the rancher, who had been watching us bemusedly. "Bones, also. In the rocks that wash down out of the High Malafan during the spring flooding."

  That was almost as interesting as the tooth. The most common fossil-bearing rocks in the old border region are limestones and shales, with most of the shales producing finds that predate terrestrial vertebrates. The High Malafan was a largely unexplored patch of badlands, and according to the cursory pre-war survey, the underlying geology of the area was almost entirely sandstone and shale. If it was as rich in fossils as the rancher was suggesting, that was an entirely unrecorded period in the history of the region.

  We spent the rest of that month poking around the edges of the High Malafan, and decided to attempt a more thorough investigation of those badlands on the basis of what we found. It took some back-and-forth with Halbston before the museum agreed with my assessment, but once that was settled we were jouncing out along ranch trails in a pair of surplus army jeeps loaded down with picks, hammers, tanks of clean water and gasoline, and all the other necessities for a month of field work.

  The High Malafan is a region nearly twelve hundred square miles in area, with very little in the way of roads. State Road 279 marks the northern edge, and aside from that, there are a few rancher's tracks, which peter out once they reach the badlands proper. Our only option was to follow one of the dry watercourses, which was taking a very real risk if we happened to get caught in a flash-flood. The finds from around the region were good enough that we brought along a high-powered radio to track the weather service warnings, and hoped for the best.

  Almost as soon as we left the ranches of the Tiqueron valley, fossil remains were plentiful and immediately apparent. There was a nearly complete coiling serpent skeleton up on one of the hillsides; while we didn't have the resources to extract a skeleton more than fifty feet long, it was certainly an arresting sight. The deeper we went into the High Malafan, the more concentrated the surface finds became, enough to make it clear that we'd never be able to finish a complete survey of the region, not with two hundred men and fifty years.

  Not that we were discouraged by that plenty.

  As soon as we found a clear patch of high ground, we made our camp and got to work. Some of the bones were sound enough to simply be packed away, but most of the remains were extremely brittle, and required careful treatment with consolidant before they could be lifted safely. Unfortunately, Corder smoked incessantly. He had to stay close to quiet the ghosts of the dinosaurs we were excavating, and there were a couple of times I was sure he'd go up in a blast of combustible vapor from our aerosol sprayer.

  If it had been anyone else, I would have taken a stronger line about his cigarette habit, but it's not easy to find a necromancer with a genuine interest in paleontology, let alone one who was as expert as Corder. Most expeditions rely on a ghostfinder and some prepared wards, but that wouldn't have done much good in the High Malafan; it was as haunted a region as any I've ever seen.

  It wasn't just the fading ghosts which our excavations stirred up that were a problem. Ghosts of natives and borderers stalked those hills and canyons, as well as ghosts of countless animals, some of which have been extinct since before the continent was settled. I saw the spectral remains of ground sloths and of armadillos larger than our jeeps nosing around the wards that Corder planted.

  Which isn't the only reason that I didn't object to strongly about Corder and his nicotine habit. The museum had funded this expedition partially because of several experiments that Corder had proposed. When we found a pair of complete skeletons of the sickle-toothed dinosaurs that had brought us to the region, it seemed as good a time as any to try one of them.

  The skeletons were laid one atop the other in a matrix of fine-grained yellow sandstone; at a guess, they had drowned in the same flood.

  We extracted the upper skeleton, laid it out as best we could down in the watercourse, and waited until high noon, to avoid interference with local spirits. Corder drew a circle around the skeleton, and got to work. Renner was in charge of the movie camera, while I held a shotgun loaded with fossil gravel and bone powder, in case things went awry.

  While I had been working in the field for some years, recreations of this sort are attempted so rarely that I had never had the opportunity to witness one myself. They require untouched remains, and a profoundly skilled necromancer, neither of which are in any great supply, and which are found in conjunction even less frequently. Despite my concerns about Corder's smoking, he was as good a necromancer as any I've ever met; just a few seconds after he poured out the pigeon blood and completed the circle, the bones of the sickle-tooth whitened until they gleamed, and gradually gathered sinew and muscle from the dust around them. The skin came in as well, first in patches, and then a complete coat. Finally, a crest of feathers came in at the back of the dinosaur's head and along its legs.

  For a moment, it lay there, and I thought of going to Corder, and congratulating him on his success, when the dinosaur's eyes opened. Corder had told us that this was possible, which was part of the reason why I had my shotgun ready, but I hadn't actually expected an animal dead for more than one hundred and twenty million years to be revivable. I readied the gun and waited as the dinosaur scrabbled up to its feet.

  As Corder had predicted from the tooth, it stood a hair over five feet tall, with those hook-shaped incisors jutting out and to the side of its mouth. It was a light, gracile creature, but it seemed uncertain of its footing, staggering and scratching at the dirt where it had risen, blinking fully nictitating membranes.

  Just then a jackrabbit, unnerved by these proceedings, broke cover. The dinosaur's head swiveled, it tensed, and then it was off, legs churning up clouds of dust.

  I had the gun up to my shoulder, but held off from firing. It wasn't threatening any of us, and Renner was still filming; that film would be worth everything the expedition had cost, and more -- it would answer questions it would take a generation of looking at bones to even ask.

  The rabbit bounded from side to side, and the dinosaur followed, its head staying perfectly straight, despite the contortions of the chase, almost as though it had a gyroscopic stabilizer. Then it was upon the rabbit, just as it crossed the patch of dirt where it had first been raised. It caught it with one of its feet. The head stabbed down, the tooth went through the animal's neck, killed it instantly. It tore off a bite, tossed its head back to gulp it down, and Corder's spell collapsed. The dinosaur was bone for just a moment, and then it was nothing but dust.

  Almost as soon as that dust had settled, both Corder and I rushed over to Renner, to make sure that the film was properly sealed, and then we spent the re
st of the afternoon arguing about what we had seen.

  I thought that the feathered crest was used for stabilization, and we debated the extent to which that was possible. None of us had gotten a good view of the kill, but judging by the remains of the jackrabbit, it had been killed by a single tooth. If the hook-tooth's usual prey was about the size of the rabbit, which seemed a fair assumption given how expertly it had dispatched the one it had flushed from cover, perhaps the second tooth was a reserve, to keep it from starving if something happened to its preferred tooth.

  Renner wasn't convinced that the hook-tooth was primarily a hunter of small animals. His theory was that it was better suited for hunting large prey, perhaps even the ten or fifteen ton monsters with whom it shared the fern prairies. In the course of the hunt, the dinosaur took a powerful leap to keep the rabbit from getting to cover. As Renner saw it, that's what the hook-tooth's legs were best at -- they could leap up on a larger dinosaur, and use the reach of those teeth to stab at vulnerable points. It was an interesting idea, but we weren't likely to be able to test it; there was some talk of bringing out a cow or a horse the next time Corder tried another revivification, but if the High Malafan had been good country for cattle, any fossils we could reach would already have been harvested.

  Corder was troubled by the way the dinosaur had stood, at first, and by its scrabblings in the dust. "I don't know," he said. The hook-tooth had killed the jackrabbit in the same spot, and Corder squatted down over the little patch of sand and dried blood, lightly touched one of the claw-marks. "There's a meaning there, but, hell. It's not like I don't know the language; it's like I don't understand the concept of speech." Whatever it was, he didn't catch it then, or on any of the other ten times he went back to see that patch of dirt.

  Even though Corder wasn't one to brag, he had to admit that the revivification was a terrific achievement. Ghosts are insubstantial things, with the details coming as much from the viewers' minds as from the spirit. This had been a dinosaur made flesh, with real muscle moving under real skin, and we had it on film.

  We had brought along a pony keg of beer as part of our provisions, and we had a fair portion of that during our celebrations. More than we should have, certainly.

  When I woke the next morning, Corder was dead, stabbed through the throat.

  He had been sleeping out under the stars, next to one of the jeeps, and the sandstone was brown with blood when we woke. I was out of my tent at about the same time as Renner, and we both ran over to where Corder lay. It was just the three of us, out in the wilderness, but we had been working together long enough that I didn't have the slightest suspicion that Renner would have done something like that. The first thing that he said when he saw what had happened was, "Irreconcilables?"

  "Could be," I replied. Those Auslanders and natives who didn't accept the Acts of Union had taken that name, and were still committing atrocities along the old border and elsewhere. The High Malafan was wild enough country to make a good refuge, and we had been sleeping soundly enough to make good targets.

  I knelt beside Corder, and tried to make sense of the wound. The stab was deep enough that it had exposed two of his cervical vertebrae, and while I wasn't an expert, it looked like it had been a single stroke. My military service had been mostly uneventful, but I had been in a skirmish or two. I had seen death before. Never someone I had known as well as Corder. The creases of his face were relaxed in death, and just looking at his face and ignoring anything else, I might have thought he was sleeping.

  "The other fossil skeleton is gone," said Renner.

  "What the devil?" I asked, getting up. He was right. There had been a second dinosaur underneath the one we had extracted for Corder, and now there wasn't. I looked for tool marks near where it had lain, and couldn't find anything. No pick marks, no chisel marks, nothing. The bones had been lifted with only minimal disturbance to the matrix around them.

  I shook my head. "I don't understand this," I said. "But we have to get Corder buried." Ghost can be bad trouble, and a necromancer's ghost is a fearful thing. While Corder had been reasonably well disposed towards us during his life, I didn't want to risk any hidden hostility coming out now that he was dead. The natural thing to do was cremation, but there was going to be an investigation, and if the corpse wasn't there to tell its story to the state necromancers, it'd look bad for us.

  "Buried?" asked Renner. "Where?"

  He had a point; we had camped on a rock outcropping, and we didn't have the time to chip a grave out of the solid stone. "The river bed," I said.

  "But --" started Renner.

  "But we don't have anywhere else, and I don't want to stay out here without a necromancer."

  We dug the grave for Corder in the hardpan river bed, and laid in fossil powder over his head, heart, and liver. When we were done, a series of ghost bellows from over the next rise reminded us just how vulnerable we were without Corder, so we packed up what remained of our camp, and headed back to civilization.

  We tried to head back to civilization, anyway.

  The shallow canyons of the High Malafan made a maze that had seemed simple enough going in, but which proved surprisingly complicated to escape. After a full day of travel without making obvious progress, we found what felt like a downward slope, and figured we'd follow that out to the farms of the Tiqueron valley.

  The hills seemed to smooth out as we went, but we didn't see any of the landmarks of the Tiqueron, or any sign of human habitation. When we stopped for a bit of lunch, Renner was distracted by some of the vegetation that marked the edge of the watercourse.

  "Pig apple?" I asked, coming over to see what he had found.

  "Not hardly," he said, passing over a flower that he had cut.

  I looked, and he was right. It was nothing like a pig apple. There wasn't any distinction between the sepals and the petals, and it had a strange, musky fragrance.

  "Some sort of magnolia?" Renner asked.

  Of the three of us, Corder was the only one who could pass as a botanist. He'd have loved that find. We had been running scared all day, and I hadn't really had a chance to let things sink in. I missed him, then.

  I shook my head. "Could be a relative of the magnolias," I said. "It's not in any field guide for the border that I've seen. May as well record and log it, now that we're out here."

  Renner got to work at that, and I started poking around the other plants I could see. There was none of the characteristic vegetation of the border badlands; no crown-of-thorns, no whisperweed, no blue roses. There weren't even any grasses; just Renner's magnolia, and woody fern bushes. It was odd, and things only got odder the further we went.

  After a time, there was water in the water course, though it was well out of season. We were forced to leave it, and shepherd the jeeps along on its verge; by this time, the stark cuts of the badlands had become rolling hills covered in red-green ferns. There wasn't any birdsong, either, but there was a constant insectile buzz, and an occasional distant booming that I couldn't recognize at all.

  I signaled to Renner to stop, and we agreed that we had to turn back; without magical aid, it was too risky to explore somewhere as strange as the valley we had found.

  However, despite the fact that we had reversed our course, we didn't seem able to leave the valley; the stream we had followed down turned into something else when we tried to follow it back out. It was wider, muddier, and it didn't take long before we were under a canopy of tall pines.

  We parked the jeeps where the stream met a shallow, vegetation choked lake.

  "What the hell is this, Doctor Hapt?" asked Renner as he got out of his jeep.

  I shook my head. "A relict forest?" I suggested. The pines looked primitive enough, and while I wasn't a botanist, I had seen those needles before, caught in layers of slate.

  "It can't --" he started, and then froze in place. Slowly, he pointed out to the lake, where something I had taken for a sunken log lay between patches of weeds. As we stood there, the lo
g blinked an eye and submerged.

  "That," said Renner, "was a coiling serpent. A live coiling serpent."

  I couldn't deny it; the shape of the head, the flash of scales as it pulled back into the deeper water.

  "Whatever's going on," said Renner, "I have to film this."

  I couldn't argue with that, either.

  While Renner busied himself with the movie equipment, I got out the radio, and fiddled with it, getting nothing more than the occasional blast of static.

  Something that looked like a hornfrill was drinking at the other side of the lake. It took fright at the static and crashed off into the forest with a series of mournful hoots, and Renner looked up from his camera to give me a disgusted look.

  "Just checking on when we are," I said, with a shrug. "Didn't get any good information."

  "When we are?" asked Renner.

  "Seems a reasonable question," I replied, nodding out towards a pair of brightly colored pterosaurs which had started chasing each other out over the lake. Renner's attention was instantly riveted. So was mine, for that matter. They looked to be something from the Sterson's lock-beak family, but I couldn't recognize the species. They were less agile in the air than birds, but agile enough to catch the large, slow moving dragonflies that hovered over the swamp.

  With a start, I caught myself, and got to work setting up camp. The sun would be setting in less than an hour, and we were somewhere strange enough that it seemed worth taking precautions.

  The ground was so muddy that it took most of that time to get the jeeps arranged to allow a space between them to set up our tent; not the most comfortable way to sleep, but it would block us from the view of most predators.

  When I was done, the light had gone, so Renner joined me for a dinner of tinned beans.

  Because it was a clear night, I was able to get a good look at the stars, and that answered one of my questions. The constellations were the same as those I had memorized in the scouts, and the same ones that had looked down on us during our excursion out into the High Malafan. If we were the ones who were out of our proper time, the stars would not yet have moved to their accustomed places in the sky.