End of an Era Read online

  Still, dramatic though the mechanism of the Hets’ demise might be, it didn’t really matter what it was. The fact remained that Mars of my time was uninhabitable, what free oxygen there had once been now locked up in the rocks and ice. I still knew next to nothing about Het biology, but if they were comfortable on Earth now, they could probably no more live in the open on the Mars of the future than I could.

  That meant that they’d have to stay on Earth. I could just see them being interviewed on Good Morning America and Canada a.m., or being signed up as spokesthings for some headache pill. Does your head feel like you’ve got one of us crawling around in your brain? Take Excedrin Plus and relax!

  But wait a minute. That wouldn’t work, either. The gravity would be more than twice what they are used to, since sometime between this present and that present Earth’s gravity increases to what I consider normal. Would it be enough to flatten out their jelly bodies, pinning them to the ground? Probably. And even if we did bring forward some of their dinosaur vehicles for them, they would be no good either, not having the musculature to hack a full g. What could the Hets use instead? Dogs? No manipulatory appendages. Apes? Watch the simian-rights lobby after it gets wind of that idea!

  The kilometers added up as I continued my hike. The sky overhead was blue and cloudless, like that of a Toronto summer. The vegetation, though, was decidedly un-Canadian. It was lusher than anything I’d ever seen north of the thirty-fifth parallel: green shot through with a rainbow of flowers. When the insects relented enough for me to hear anything besides their buzzing, I occasionally detected a rustling among the plants. There were small animals about and I saw a great flock of a thousand or more violet pterosaurs at one point, but, as for dinosaurs, no luck.

  God, it was hot out. But no, that couldn’t be the problem. I reminded myself that Torontonians are supposed to be impervious to shifts in temperature. We always blame our discomfort on something else. In winter we say, "It’s not the cold, it’s the wind." In summer our lament becomes, "It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity."

  Well, whether it was temperature or moisture that was at fault I didn’t know, but I was sweating like the proverbial pig. And, indeed, there was a third potential culprit — exertion. I suddenly realized that the ground tilted up at a sharp angle. I must have gained more than thirty meters in elevation already. Although we’d been able to make only rough guesses about what the landscape would be like here in the late Cretaceous, we’d expected a uniformly flat terrain at this particular site. Certainly there was no trace in the geological record of a steep hill.

  I decided to rest upon a boulder. Like everything in this landscape, even this rock teemed with life: it was covered with a blanket of moss so dark green as to be almost black.

  It seemed peaceful here, what with all this unspoiled nature, and yet I knew the peace was illusory, that the wild world was a violent place, a gridiron of mindless brutes fighting a game of kill or be killed in which there were no time-outs, no substitutions, and, in the long run, no way for you or even your species to win.

  But still I felt a strange calmness. There was a simplicity here, a sense of great burdens lifted from my shoulders, a feeling that a yoke that I — and all humankind — had worn throughout our lives was somehow gone. Here, in the innocence of Earth’s youth, there was no unending famine in Ethiopia, with children, in one of anatomy’s cruel jokes, looking potbellied as their guts distended with hunger. There were no race wars in Africa, no burning of synagogues in Winnipeg, no Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta. No poverty in New York City, growing worse year by year, gangs no longer content just to kill their victims, now actually eating them, too. No knife-wielding thugs slashing the throats of cabdrivers in Toronto. No mindbenders starving to death while juice trickled into their brains. No blood washing down the streets of the Holy Land. No threat of nuclear terrorism hanging over all our heads like a glowing sword of Damocles. No murderers. No molesters robbing sons and daughters of their very childhood. No rapists taking with force what should only be given with love.

  No people.

  Not a soul in the world.

  Not a soul…

  An inner voice came to me, rising tenuously from that part of my mind that knew that it normally had to keep such ideas hidden, buried, lest it reveal itself to those who ran the world, those who saw such notions as signs of weakness.

  What about God? said the voice. What role did he play in all this? Was there even a God? Klicks said no, of course. An easy enough decision, logically arrived at, based on science and reason. But I could never be so sure. I’d never allowed myself to truly believe, and yet I’d never been able to close my mind to the possibility, to the hope, that in fact the lives of us little people did, in reality, amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

  I’d never prayed in my life — not seriously anyway. With six billion other souls to worry about, why should God care about the concerns of one Brandon Thackeray, a fellow who had a roof over his head, plenty to eat, and a good job? But now, in this world devoid of people, perhaps, just perhaps, it was a good time to bend God’s ear. Who knows? I might even get his full and undivided attention.

  But … but … but … this was silly. Besides, I really didn’t know how to pray. No one had ever taught me. My father is a Presbyterian. He’d had an antique prayer rug by his bed, but I never knew whether he used it. When I was little I sometimes heard mumbling coming from his room as he got ready for bed. But my father often mumbled under his breath. Or else, he would grumble, and my world would shake.

  My mother had been a Unitarian. I had gone to their Sunday school for five years as a child, if you can call a series of field trips that started from the North York YMCA a Sunday school. They used to take us for walks by the Don River, and I got soakers. All that I learned about God was that if you wanted to get closer to him, you’d probably end up with wet socks. Once, when I was an adult, an acquaintance had asked me what Unitarians believed in, I didn’t have a clue; I had to look it up in an encyclopedia.

  Well, perhaps the form of the prayer didn’t matter. Did I have to speak out loud? Or was God a telepath, plucking thoughts from our heads? Upon reflection, I hoped the latter was not the case.

  I reached up to my lapel, thumbed the MicroCam off, then cleared my throat. "God," I said quietly, feeling sure that although perhaps the words had to be spoken, there was no reason to think the Good Lord was hard of hearing. I was silent for several seconds, listening to the word echo in my head. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. But then again, I knew I’d never forgive myself for not trying if I didn’t take advantage of this unique opportunity. "God," I said again. And then, at a loss for what should come next, "It’s me, Brandy Thackeray."

  I was quiet for a few seconds more, but this time it was because I was listening intently, both within and without, for any acknowledgment that my words were being heard. Nothing. Of course.

  And yet I felt as if a gate within me had burst open. "I’m so confused," I said into the wind. "I — I’ve tried to live a good life. I really have. I’ve made mistakes, but—"

  I paused, embarrassed by this babbling start, then began again. "I can’t fathom why my life is falling apart. My father is dying the kind of death we all hope to be spared. He was a good man. Oh, I know he cheated on his taxes and maybe even on his wife, and he hit her once, but only just that once, but now you’re punishing him in a way that seems cruel."

  Insects buzzed; foliage rustled in the breeze.

  "I’m suffering right along with him. He wants me to release him from all that, to let him die peacefully, quietly, with a modicum of dignity. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong here. Can’t you take him? Can’t you let him die quickly instead of robbing him of his strength but leaving his mind to feel pain, to suffer? Can’t you — won’t you — relieve me of having to make this decision? And will you forgive me if I can’t find the strength within myself to choose?"

  I was suddenly aware that my face
was wet, but it felt good, oh so good, to get this off my chest. "And, as if that wasn’t enough to put me through, now you’ve taken Tess from me, too. I love her. She was my life, my whole existence. I can’t seem to find the energy to go on by myself anymore. I want her back so very much. Is Klicks a better son to you than I? He seems so … so shallow, so unthinking. Is that what you want from your children?"

  The word "children" triggered a thought in my mind. God’s putative son, Jesus, wouldn’t be born for almost 65 million

  years. Did God know how the future would go? Or did the Huang Effect supersede even his omniscience? Should I tell him what would happen to his beloved Jesus? Or was he aware already? Was it inevitable that humans would reject his son? I opened my mouth to speak, but then closed it and said nothing.

  A twig cracked and my heart jumped. For one horrible instant I thought that Klicks had followed me, had overheard me, had seen me making a bloody fool of myself. I looked into the forest but couldn’t see anything unusual. Clearing my mind, I quickly rose to my feet, brushed pieces of moss off my bum, and headed forward.

  Countdown: 6

  The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

  —Henri Bergson, French philosopher (1859–1941)

  The sun was sliding slowly down the bowl of the sky. My watch still showed modern Alberta time, but it looked to be about 3:30 p.m. My nose was a bit stuffed, perhaps from crying but just as likely from the pollens. Little golden motes and things like dandelion seeds danced in the air all about me. I saw a small tortoise at one point, pushing itself with splayed, wrinkly limbs across my path. It seemed ironic that such a humble creature would survive the coming changes that would kill every last one of the magnificent dinosaurs. Like Aesop’s fable: slow and steady wins the race.

  Suddenly the ground dropped away. I was at the lip of a sheer precipice of crumbling reddish-brown earth, a saw-toothed row of various hardwood stumps lining its edge. Without any warning, I’d come across a valley, perhaps a kilometer long and half that in width. It looked like an open-pit mine, gouged out of the Earth, an incongruous landscape wound amidst the unspoiled wilderness.

  And it was full of dinosaurs.

  It was a paleontologist’s dream, or most other people’s nightmare. Two — no, three Triceratopses. An equal number of small tyrannosaurs, and one monster even bigger than the T. rex Klicks and I had seen yesterday afternoon. A herd of ostrich-like ornithomimids. Four duck-billed hadrosaurs.

  Two of the hadrosaurs looked to be the genus Edmontosaurus, the quintessential duckbill, with the keratin sheaths at the fronts on their shovel-like prows looking like black lipstick. The other pair of duckbills had head crests, a rare occurrence this late in the Cretaceous. These crests were unlike any I had seen before: one tubular projection going straight up, another, longer one, parallel to the animal’s back. Three of the four hadrosaurs were walking away from me on splayed feet and mitten-like hands, their thick, flattened tails held stiffly above the ground, great bellies swinging back and forth like pendulums. The fourth, one of the edmontosaurs, had risen on its hind legs and was dully surveying its surroundings.

  Dancing around the valley were several dozen troodons. About two-thirds of them were the same bright green as the ones we’d met earlier, but the rest were smaller and more brown in color. Males, probably. A group of them — three males and two females — galloped toward the valley’s far wall, their clawed bird-feet kicking up small clouds of dust. They covered the five hundred meters in a time short enough to make even an Olympic gold medalist seem like a slowpoke. Their goal was a cluster of stationary objects that I hadn’t noticed before: three giant tawny spheres, a trio of those strange breathing Martian spaceships resting on their amorphous slug feet.

  Where my wits had been for the last few minutes I didn’t know, but they finally came home to roost. I realized that I was inadvertently spying on an encampment of the Hets. If I was going to do that, I figured I’d better not be seen. I dropped to my belly, the buzz of insects abating for a moment as the confused creatures were left in a cloud around where my head had been.

  Christ, my MicroCam! The thing was still off. I fumbled for the switch, then lifted the cheesecloth to wipe sweat from my brow. It was as hot as hell out here. I propped my binoculars in front of my face, resting their weight on my elbows, and twiddled with the knob to bring one of the Het ships into focus. It was indeed the same type of vehicle Klicks and I had ridden in last night: sixty meters across, covered with hexagonal scales, pulsing with respiration.

  A plaintive cry split the air, a throaty dirge that seemed to tremble with an equal mixture of pain and sadness. I scanned the valley. A huge, blood-red tyrannosaur was squatting in the sand. A thick yellowish-white sausage dropped from between its legs and I realized that it — she — was laying eggs. No sooner had the soft-shelled package rolled onto the earth than a wiry troodon darted between her massive thighs and scooped it up, running with it up the broad tongue and into the vertical mouth slit of one of the spherical ships.

  The hapless tyrannosaur was probably under Het control — I doubted any beast would otherwise lay eggs out in the open like that. But despite the Martian within, it let out another heart-wrenching yell, the cry of a mother who had just lost her child — a stronger display of maternal love than I ever thought I’d see from a Mesozoic carnivore. A few minutes later, with visible effort, it squeezed out another egg. This one was also promptly seized in the opposable digits of a troodon and whisked into the spaceship. I commiserated with the giant reptile. To have something you loved snatched away hurt, I knew, more than any physical injury…

  I shook my head, trying to fling the tormenting thoughts out of my skull. The movement startled the insects that had landed on the cheesecloth around my pith helmet into buzzing flight.

  I forced my attention onto one of the triceratopses. Charles R. Knight, the father of scientific dinosaur illustration, always painted triceratops so that it resembled a tank. Like many paleontologists, I first became interested in dinosaurs as a child, seeing Knight’s century-old paintings in a book. It was uncanny how much three-horned-face looked like Knight’s renditions of him: quadrupedal, that great bony frill with a fluted rim around the thick neck, two massive white horns sticking straight out above the beady eyes, a third, shorter horn projecting from above the parrot-like beak. But the beast had adornments that had been unknown in Knight’s time, since all he’d had to go by were heavily eroded specimens. Tiny horns pointed downward from the corners of the skull over the jaw hinges, more tiny horns aimed backward from where the eye horns met the bony frill. The perimeter of the frill was lined with squat triangular spikes, giving it a chainsaw edge. The beast measured a good six meters in length from the tips of its eye horns to the end of its stubby tail. But whereas Knight’s triceratopses had plain dun-colored skin, this one’s leather hide was greenish blue dappled with large orange splotches. The design reminded me of — what? Camouflage? Not in that garish color scheme, but the pattern was right.

  Suddenly the triceratops I was looking at moved out of my binoculars’ field of vision. By the time I had refocused on it, it had turned around so that it was facing the other way, its left side to me instead of its right. I put the binoculars down and saw that the two other horned-faces were falling in beside this one, their array of facial armament pointing forward like jousters’ lances. One of the beasts was pawing the ground with its stubby foreleg, looking for all the world like a bull about to charge.

  I glanced toward the far end of the valley and my jaw dropped. Three mechanical tanks, each one just a tad smaller than the horned dinosaurs, had appeared near the Het ships. Flat, beetle-shaped, they were painted in a cool aquamarine shot through with veins of red, a color scheme very close to that worn by the triceratopses. On a tank, this surely was camouflage, meaning — meaning what?

  Each tank sported a tapering crystal tube, presumably a gun, mounted on a hemi
spherical turret. The tanks must have come from within the ships, for all three of the pulsing spheres now had their thick-lipped mouths open and their gray access tongues stretched out to the ground.

  These tanks were the first machines I’d seen with the Hets, and they seemed incongruous with the living spaceships and dinosaur vehicles, almost as if they belonged to some other alien technology. That impression was reinforced as I noticed that one of the tanks had an open door on its curving side. Although the door measured about two meters by one, the right proportions to comfortably allow a Het riding inside its trusty troodon or brachiator to enter, it was oriented the wrong way, with the long axis parallel to the ground. There was another door just inside the first, forming an airlock-like chamber.

  The triceratopses now stood one hundred meters from the tanks, as if waiting for some signal. Many of the other dinosaurs had walked to the near end of the valley, except for poor old mother tyrannosaur. She was flopped on her belly near the spaceships, apparently too tired to move.

  It soon became apparent which of the beasts were currently Het-ridden. The trio of small tyrannosaurs stood in rapt attention, as did the giant female T. rex. Perhaps these great theropods were too dangerous to ever let run free. By contrast, the placid hadrosaurs seemed to be unoccupied. One was defecating. Another had ambled off and was using its shovel-like bill to sift through the dirt of the valley floor, apparently looking for roots. About half of the ornithomimids, looking like plucked ostriches, were likely hosting Hets, for they were looking intently at the tableau of tanks and triceratopses. The other half were busy grooming themselves or each other. As for the troodons, most had their bright eyes riveted to the scene in front of them.

  Everyone was clearly waiting for somebody to make the first move. The anticipation — of what, I still did not know — was palpable, and I found myself holding my breath. Seconds passed, the buzz of insects in my ears like the drone of an electric motor.