Tales of Old Earth (18 page)

“Come to get your revenge, have you?” George muttered. “Going to defend the honor of your kind by gnawing on my bones?”

But there was no radio anywhere near to receive his words, and even if the protorat could have heard them, it wouldn't've understood. In any event, it did not move. Its chest trembled with panicky breath and its dread-filled eyes jerked every time George shifted his gaze, but otherwise it was motionless.

“Well, you're in luck,” George continued. “I'm trapped, I'm in pain, and I don't think I'm ever going to get out of here.” Those marcasite eyes jerked again, and George scowled. “Why are you still here? If you're so afraid of me, why haven't you run?”

He focused all his attention on the beast and discovered what he had missed before: That its tail was caught between two logs. It was as trapped as he was.

There was irony here, if he only knew how to read it. Here he was, the biggest, meanest bruiser ever to walk the Earth—helpless. He was as irrevocably trapped as the weak, fearful creature quivering before him. They were one in their dilemma.

Well, these past few months excepted, when
hadn't
he been trapped? Caught up in his work, entangled in a marriage that had slowly turned grey and joyless, sandbagged by a detective with a camera in a hotel room in Albany and subsequently shafted in the divorce settlement, and finally, at age seventy-two, painted into a corner by his firm's mandatory retirement policy.

And what did he have to show for it all?

Now that he was going to die, what was he leaving behind? One very wealthy ex, three kids who didn't particularly care for him (not that he blamed them), and four of the sweetest grandchildren anybody had ever laid eyes on. The grandchildren, anyway, were good. The rest was not.

He'd made a pot of money over a long lifetime running with the wolves in the financial markets, and spent it all on a much shorter lifetime running with the giganotosaurs in the wild. And in the end everybody—humans and dinosaurs alike—he'd trusted had turned on him.

It only confirmed what he'd learned long ago. There was no loyalty in this world. Every man lived alone, and he died alone as well. That was simply the way it was.

Something squeaked.

It was a very small sound, but it brought his attention back, with a start, to the trapped protorat.

The animal's tail was caught in the junction of two logs, the uppermost of which also lay across the top of his own head and shoulder. He could not hope to free himself from the woodpile. But if he summoned all his strength, he could shift the logs a little. Not enough to do him any good. But maybe enough to free the terrified mammal.

“I
could
do it,” George said, “but I'm not going to. If I have to die, then so do you.”

The protorat stared at him uncomprehendingly, still afraid.

For a long moment he said nothing.

Then:

“All right, you sonofabitch,” he rumbled, “live.”

He heaved his shoulder and the logs parted for an instant, freeing the protorat's tail.

In a flash, it was gone.

“Didn't even … stay around long enough to say … thanks, did you?” George said. This last, pointless expenditure of energy had just about used him up. He didn't have any more reserves of strength to draw on. “Your descendants … are going to be … just like you.”

Still—and inexplicably, for what use was a protorat's life to anyone, even itself?—it made him feel better knowing that if he had to die, he could at least postpone the experience for something else.

Just as his eyes were closing for what he was convinced was the last time, he heard a throbbing noise, like the warm and beating heart of the world opening to him, to share with him some desperately important revelation. Lying with his face half in the water, he listened. And in the instant before the darkness closed around him, he penetrated the secret of that sound, and knew it for what it was:

A helicopter.

Greyness wrapped itself about him then, like a thick wool blanket, and he fell into a troubled, painful sleep. Once he heard somebody say, “Oh, man, this is going to take a
lot
of antibiotics,” and then no more.

“Well, if it isn't Peter Pan!”

“Dr. Alvarez,” George mumbled. He did not meet her eyes. “And Dr. Delgado, too. It's good to see you.”

“You're lucky we've been monitoring your vital signs,” Alvarez said. “Otherwise, you'd be dead.”

“I know,” George said meekly. Then, “You … had a chip in me? You knew where I was all the time?”

“It was in your contract. Surely you read it through.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember now.” George was hanging from the center of the barn in a kind of makeshift sling-and-traction arrangement. One leg was plastered into a cast. There were bandages everywhere, and wide strips of tape wrapped tightly around his chest. He'd been told some ribs were broken.

“So what happened?”

“My queens attacked me.” George felt a great emptiness, a bottomless sense of betrayal. “For no reason! One minute everything was great, the next minute—
bam!
Dr. Alvarez, why did they do that? Why?”

“Your queens were in heat when you met them. Giganotosaurs, like every other theropod we know of, are only periodically interested in sex. Once the mating season was over they weren't interested in having you around anymore. You can't blame them for this—male giganotosaurs will eat their young if given the chance. We would have told you this, if you'd only listened.”

“Oh.”

He'd been a fool. Vast landscapes of his self-delusion opened up before him. Tears filled his great eyes. He hadn't known that dinosaurs could cry.

Dr. Alvarez snorted disdainfully. “This is what you wanted, Mr. Weskowski—nature red in fang and claw, right? Only, in reality life in the wild is usually solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

He made an unhappy noise in his throat.

But now Dr. Delgado stepped forward. “Please, Maria,” he said admonishingly. “You're not helping. Go away.” And to George: “I want to read something to you. I got this out of the library when I heard you were being airlifted back to the station. It's from a sermon by John Donne, and I think you're capable of understanding it now.” He got out a small brown leather-jacketed book from his pocket, adjusted his glasses, smoothed down his mustache with two nervous strokes of a long, lean finger, and began to read:

“No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

He looked up again, a serious expression on his narrow intellectual face. “You tried to declare independence from humanity, and for several reasons it didn't work. Some of these reasons are pragmatic—access to decent medical care being one of them. Others, though, are matters of the soul. You never
were
a giganotosaur, you know. Only a man riding on top of one.”

For a second time, George's eyes filled with tears.

“Well, Mr. Weskowski,” Delgado said. “Are you ready to rejoin the human race?”

It was a bright Cretaceous morn.

Claw-winged archaeopteryxes were singing in the trees. The gently mournful cry of the rebbachisaur sounded over the prairie. Dawn mice were scuttling furtively about, harvesting seed from the flowering plants that flourished in the shade of the woods. George ignored them. He stood waiting, as still and motionless as a billboard.

He'd been working for weeks following a small herd of titanosaurs, studying their behavior, their eating patterns, their rudimentary social structure. He could do that, for his smell was familiar and unthreatening to the titanosaurs, where that of humans was not. Every night, after they'd bedded down, he'd transmitted his findings back to Old Patagonia Station.

An engine sounded in the distance.

This was not the first, but only the most recent of many such studies. He'd proven himself time after time as a capable and hard-working researcher. Now he was waiting for his reward.

The engine noise grew steadily louder. It peaked and crescendoed. Almost here. George found himself trembling with excitement.

A jeep came up over the rise, and slowed to a noisy stop. Alvarez was in the driver's seat. She cut the engine and slammed open a door. “Everybody out!” she shouted.

The children came tumbling out of the jeep, laughing and shouting. They fell silent when they saw George.

He stretched out his arms toward them. “Come on, kids!” he cried joyfully. “Let Grampa give you a ride on his back!”

9

Wild Minds

I met her at a businesspersons' orgy in London. The room was in the back of a pub that was all brass and beveled glass, nostalgia and dark oak. The doorkeeper hesitated when it saw how many times I'd attended in the last month. But then I suggested it scroll up my travel schedule, and it saw that I wasn't acting out a sex-addiction script, but properly maintaining my forebrain and hindbrain balances. So it let me in.

Inside, the light was dimly textured and occasionally mirrored. Friendly hands helped me off with my clothing. “I'm Thorn,” I murmured, and “Annalouise … Enoch … Abdul … Magdalena … Claire,” those nearest quietly replied. Time passed.

I noticed Hellene not because she was beautiful—who pays attention to beauty, after the first hour?—but because it took her so long to find release. By the time she was done, there was a whole new crowd; only she and I remained of all who had been in the room when I entered.

In the halfway room, we talked.

“My assemblers and sorters got into a hierarchic conflict,” I told her. “Too many new faces, too many interchangeable cities.”

She nodded. “I've been under a lot of stress myself. My neural mediator has become unreliable. And since I'm scheduled for an upgrade, it's not worth it running a purge. I had to offline the mediator, and take the week off from work.”

“What do you do?” I asked. I'd already spotted her as being optimized.

She worked in human resources, she said. When I heard that, I asked, “Is there any hope for people like me? Those who won't accept optimization, I mean.”

“Wild minds?” Hellene looked thoughtful. “Five years ago I'd've said no, open-and-shut, end of story. Period. Zero rez. Today, though …”

“Yes?”

“I don't know,” she said in an anguished voice. “I simply don't know.”

I could sense something significant occurring within myself, intuit some emotional sea-change organizing itself deep on the unseen levels—the planners building new concept-language, the shunts and blocks being rearranged. Of course I had no way of knowing what it was. I hadn't been optimized. Still—

“Can I walk you home?” I asked.

She looked at me for a long and silent second. “I live in Prague.”

“Oh.”

“We could go to your place, if it's not too far.”

We took the hypermetro to Glasgow. Got off at the Queen Street Station and walked up to my flat in Renfrew Street. We talked a little on the train, but Hellene fell silent when we hit the street.

They don't like the old places, the new people, cluttered with seedy pubs and street corner hangouts, the niches where shabby men sit slumped over their whisky in paper bags, the balconies from which old women watch over the street. It unnerves them, this stench of accommodation and human dirt. It frightens them that it works so well, when it so obviously shouldn't.

“You're a Catholic,” she said.

She was looking at my icon, a molecular reproduction of Ad Reinhardt's “For T.M.” It's one of his black paintings, his first, and modestly small. At first it seems unvaryingly colorless; you have to stare at it for some time to see the subtle differences in the black, the thick cross that quarters and dominates that small lightless universe. He painted it for Thomas Merton, who was a monk.

My copy is a duplicate as exact as human technology can make it; more exact than human perception can distinguish. I use it as a focus for meditation. Opposite it is a Charles Rennie MacIntosh chair, high-backed. An original because it was made to his directions. Sometimes I'll sit in the one and stare at the other, thinking about distinctions, authenticity, and duplicity.

“You wouldn't need meditation if you were optimized.”

“No. But the Church considers it a mortal sin, you see.”

“The Church can't possibly approve of your attending orgies.”

“Oh. Well. It's winked at.” I shrugged. “As long as you go to confession before you take Communion …”

“What do you see when you meditate?”

“Sometimes I see comfort there; other times I see suffering.”

“I don't like ambiguity. It's an artifact of the old world.” She turned away from the picture. She had those chill Scandinavian features that don't show emotions well. She was beautiful, I realized with a mental start. And, almost at the same instant but twice as startling, I realized that she reminded me of Sophia.

Out of nowhere, without transition, Hellene said, “I must return to Prague. I haven't seen my children in two weeks.”

“They'll be glad to see you.”

“Glad? I doubt it. No more than I will be to see them,” she said in the manner of one totally unable to lie to herself. “I've spun off three partials that they like considerably more than they do me. And I signed them up with Sterling International for full optimization when they were eight.”

I said nothing.

“Do you think that makes me a bad mother?”

“I wanted children, too,” I said. “But it didn't work out.”