End of an Era

Countdown: 9

Paleontology has a long history of famous meals. On New Year’s Eve, 1853, Sir Richard Owen hosted a dinner for twenty fossil experts inside a life-size reconstruction of Iguanodon made under his direction by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.

Almost a century later, Russian paleontologists enjoyed a meal of mammoth steaks and the finest vodka after one of the hairy elephants was found frozen in Siberia.

Klicks and I weren’t to be outdone. Late that afternoon we built a fire near the base of the crater upon which the Sternberger was perched and set two choice pachycephalosaurus steaks to cooking.

While the meat was grilling, I went over to check on our Martian hitchhiker. I found some shady ground and set the stasis box down on its side, and, in case the Het wanted something to drink, I placed a bowl of water next to it. Evidently it wasn’t thirsty, since after pulsing its way over to the bowl to see what it contained, it ignored it.

I normally like my meat medium-rare, but we grilled the steaks for a long time, flipping them repeatedly. We wanted to be sure that any parasites and germs had been killed. When it finally came time to eat the meat, I felt a certain reluctance. For one thing, although all modern bird, reptile, and mammal meat is edible by humans, there was always the small chance that dinosaur flesh would prove poisonous. For another, well, it somehow seemed wrong.

As usual, Klicks had no such misgivings. He immediately sliced a piece off and brought it to his mouth.

“How is it?” I asked.

“Different.”

This from the gourmet of Drumheller. Oh, well. Making sure my cup of water was handy, in case I had to wash down some foul taste, I took a tenuous nibble. I’d never eaten reptile before, but I expected it to resemble chicken. It tasted more like roasted almonds. I don’t think I’d ever want to have it again, but it wasn’t bad—just a bit too stringy to be a comfortable chew.

I didn’t know if the Het needed to eat—really, we didn’t know much about them at all—but I took a plate over to it with both some cooked and uncooked pachycephalosaur and a mound of fronds. It ignored these, too, and seemed content just to throb quietly. I couldn’t understand a lifeform that neither drank water nor ate. Although I wasn’t looking forward to seeing other Hets again, I hoped some would come soon and take our reluctant guest off our hands.

It was getting too dark to do any serious exploring, so we just sat around on some bald cypress trunks, letting the meal digest.

“Hey, Brandy,” Klicks said at last.

“Yeah?”

“How do you define gross ignorance?”

“Beats me.”

“One hundred and forty-four Brits.” He flashed a grin.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, rising to the challenge. “What do sugarcane and unwanted pregnancies have in common?”

“Dunno.”

“They both pop up all over Jamaica.”

He laughed out loud. “Good one. Why does King Charles want to abdicate?”

“Too easy. So he can go on welfare like everybody else in England. What has six legs and goes ‘ho-de-do, ho-de-do, ho-de-do’?”

“What?”

“Three Jamaicans running for the elevator.”

Klicks roared. “Well, fuck me,” he said.

I sipped my coffee. “Not while there are still dogs in the street.”

I sighed contentedly. It was like old times. We’d whiled away many an evening in the twenty-odd years we’d known each other telling jokes, slagging each other’s ancestors, and just shooting the bull. We’d shared a lot in that time, and I’d always enjoyed his company. We’d even said, back in the simpler days at university, that we’d never let marriages destroy our friendship. We’d seen too many people drop off the face of the Earth once they’d gotten hitched. No way we were going to let that happen to us. We’d keep in touch, do things together, stay a team. But then reality got in the way. There were precisely three really good jobs for dinosaur specialists in Canada: Chief of the Paleobiology Division at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta. I ended up at the ROM; Klicks at the Tyrrell—with 2,500 kilometers between us. And we each did get married, although Klicks’s union with Carla had lasted less than a year.

Still, we did a better job than most of keeping in touch, of remaining friends. We got together at the annual meetings of the SVP and Klicks always came back to Toronto for his vacations. We were the best of friends until … until … until…

I threw my plate down onto the mud plain, the uneaten portion of my pachycephalosaur steak bouncing onto the dirt.

Klicks looked up. “Brandy?”

But at that moment our campsite exploded in light, then, just as quickly, everything was darkness again. My head snapped up at the sky. Off in the west, a huge spherical object was moving above the trees, its shape visible only as a black nothingness that blocked the stars. Another eye-jabbing flash of brilliance, followed by the black of night, afterimages burning in my retinas. Searching beams, like those from lighthouses, were probing the landscape. Suddenly all the beams converged on the Sternberger, perched high up on the crater wall. Then, as one, they scanned down the mound of earth, past our parked Jeep, and over to Klicks and me and our spluttering fire.

I shielded my eyes from the glare and tried to make out the source of the searchlights. The giant spherical object must have been sixty meters in diameter, floating silently above our heads. As it descended from the sky, the sphere’s color—an uneven mixture of tawny and beige—became visible as the light from its beams reflected back at it from the cracked surface of the mud plain. Dead leaves and loose pieces of dirt swirled upward in a small cyclone directly beneath the lowering sphere.

As it descended, something thick and gray began to ooze from its bottom, a glistening amorphous lump. The lump touched the ground and spread out like a slug’s body as it took the weight of the sphere. There was a brief period while the sphere settled in, the gray foot expanding to form a Poli-Grip seal with the mud plain.

The sphere’s surface seemed to be plated with meter-wide hexagonal scales that had a rough, natural appearance. The whole thing pulsed gently, exposing fibrous pink tissue in the cracks between the scales as it did so. I’d at first assumed that this was one of the Het spaceships we’d seen flying high overhead early this morning, but the sphere seemed to be breathing. A living spaceship? Well, why not?

Suddenly there was a sound from the sphere, a whispering sigh as an opening appeared above its landing foot. A slit was widening, the scales bunching up on either side, as thick vertical lips stretched wide. The interior glowed softly. More of the amorphous gray material pulsed within, but it seemed to be expanding, growing larger. It extruded through the opening, a great wet tongue sticking its way out into the night. Slowly the extension reached the ground. It continued to grow, to lengthen, until it had formed a gently sloping ramp leading from the thick-lipped mouth of the spaceship out onto the mud plain. The tongue stiffened and flattened, then the moisture on its surface seemed to dry as though it had been sucked back into pores.

Nothing happened for several seconds, then a shape appeared at the top of the ramp silhouetted against the glowing mouth. I knew in an instant that what I was seeing was a truly alien form of life. It had two arms and two legs, but they were reversed from the human norm. The legs—the limbs used for locomotion—were attached at the shoulders of the broad torso. They stretched a meter and a half to the ground, ending not in feet but in round pads. The arms—the limbs used for manipulation—were attached at the bottom of the torso, where human hips would be. It was as if this creature’s four-footed ancestors had gained bipedalism by rising up on their knuckles, freeing the rear limbs to dangle freely. No form of life on Earth had ever made that evolutionary choice; this was a true brachiator, a creature that propelled itself using its upper limbs—something that had formed in a different ecosystem.

The brachiator came down the ramp, its giant stride bringing it close to us far more quickly than human steps could have managed. I looked it up and down. The head, if you could call it that, was a broad dome rising directly from the shoulders. There was no neck. Long sausage-shaped eyes seemed to completely encircle the edge of the dome. Each eye had two pupils in it, again, a decidedly nonterrestrial solution to the problem of stereoscopic vision.

The body seemed at first glance to be covered with copper fur, but on closer inspection it was something different: thick spiraling cables of tissue. They overlapped and intertwined in complex patterns, providing not only thermal insulation but also what looked like very sensitive touch sensors.

I focused on the manipulatory appendages, and immediately realized the benefit of having them below and inside the walking limbs, instead of above and exposed as human arms are. These appendages were much more complex than ours. Each seemed to be jointed in four places instead of two and ended in a ring of delicate tentacles surrounding a trio of pincers, each of a different size. One pincer looked like needle-nose pliers, another like a parrot’s beak, the third an open circle like the letter C. Protected, closer in to the body, these manipulators had been able to evolve much more exquisite and widely differentiated structures than had the forelimbs of terrestrial animals. Behind these arms I was shocked to see that there were two smaller, less sophisticated manipulators as well—this beast’s ancestors had had six limbs, not four.

There was a vertical mouth slit about halfway down the brachiator’s broad chest. It fluttered open, but I saw no sign of dentition. Perhaps these beings didn’t play the risky game that so many of Earth’s lifeforms did, trying to use a single orifice for breathing, speaking, and eating. “Where is our brethren?” it asked. The warbling voice, high-pitched, like an adolescent boy’s, was clear and easily understood, although it still had those small gaps between each word that characterized Het speech.

I stood dumbfounded for a moment, then, gathering my wits, said, “This way.” I walked over to where I’d set down the stasis box. My heart skipped a few beats. The mound of Het jelly was gone. We’d be in deep trouble if anything had happened to it. I looked around frantically, but the brachiator had already come over to stand next to me. Fortunately, its many eyes were apparently better suited than my myopic peepers for crepuscular searching. “Ah,” it said. It bent its ambulatory appendages at what would correspond to the knee, lowering its torso to the ground. I saw that there was a smooth area on its back that was free from the coiling body covering, showing a rough gray skin with a pebbly texture. The jelly throbbed quickly over to that spot and began to percolate into the brachiator’s body.

In the short time it took for the jelly to enter, I came to a conclusion about the brachiator. It wasn’t an intelligent form of life. Rather, it must be a domesticated Martian animal. It made sense, of course, that there were creatures on their native world that the jelly beings used for locomotion, for hands, and for eyes. This must have been one of those. Since it had spoken, it must already be occupied by a Het. The Hets had said earlier that they weren’t individuals. I wondered if the two mounds of jelly, the one that had just entered and the one already within the brachiator, would unite into a single entity. I hoped they weren’t mad at us for killing its pachycephalosaur.

“You killed our pachycephalosaur,” said the brachiator at once.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know it was occupied. We just wanted to study its physiology. Please forgive us.”

“Forgive?” The brachiator’s speaking orifice twisted in what must have been a facial expression of some sort. “It was only an animal.”

I’m the one who had slaughtered that unfortunate dinosaur, but somehow the alien’s words struck me as harsher than my actions. “I didn’t want to kill it,” I said. “But we learned much by studying its interior.”

“Of course,” said the Het in that alto voice.

“You came to retrieve your friend?” I said.

“Friend?” echoed the brachiator’s mouth.

“The Het who had been in the pachycephalosaur.”

“Yes, we came to retrieve that one. When it did not return from its mission, we went looking for it. We found the butchered dinosaur and markings in the dirt that we eventually realized must have been made by some sort of vehicle belonging to you. We see now that you did no harm to the Het, but we believe our response was a prudish—a prudent—one.” It had said all that without a pause for breathing. I hadn’t yet found the thing’s respiratory orifices, but I was sure now that they were completely separate from the mouth. The brachiator headed back to the fireside, and I had to jog to keep up with its Goliath strides.

Klicks was on his feet, staring at the brachiator, mouth agape. “My God,” he said slowly. “You really are from somewhere else, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said the Het—the first time I’d heard it manage that word without it trailing off in a reptilian hiss.

Klicks pointed at the brachiator’s wide torso. “And that thing you’re in?”

“A vehicle. Not particularly well suited for this ecosystem—it has trouble extracting nourishment from the plant life here, and finds the sunlight too bright—but, for some application forms, a much more useful creature to inhabit.”

Klicks gestured at the massive sphere behind him. “And that’s one of your spaceships?”

“Yes.”

“It’s alive.”

“Of course.”

“Remarkable.” He shook his head. “I’d give anything to take a spin in one of those.”

The brachiator’s sausage eyes blinked all at once, single lids lifting up from below. “Spin,” it said. “The action of a gaming wheel, no? Or to give events a desired interpretation?”

“No. Spin. A journey, a trip, a ride.”

“Ah,” said the brachiator. “This we can do.”

“Really?” Klicks was practically jumping up and down.

“Now hold on a minute,” I said.

“Seize time? No link.”

“Klicks, we can’t go up in that thing.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Well, look at it. It’s alive, for God’s sake. We’d have to go inside it.”

“Hey, man, if Jonah could hack it in the whale, I’m all set to try my luck in a breathing spaceship. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

I shook my head. “Have you ever noticed how many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities come at the end of a person’s life? Count me out.”

Klicks shrugged. “Fine. But I’m going.” He turned to the brachiator. “Can we do it now?”

“Our business here is concluded. Now is fine.”

Klicks jogged alongside the brachiator, over to the gray tongue entrance-ramp. I cringed as he stepped on it, but, although it yielded slightly, he didn’t seem to stick to it as I was afraid he might. The ship continued to breathe, expanding and contracting slowly. Klicks made it to the top of the ramp before I shouted out, “I’m coming! Wait up!”

I ran up the tongue and into the mouth.