Fossil Hunter Read online

  Rodlox bobbed his torso up and down. “I challenge you, Dybo, here and now, in front of these hundred witnesses—

  “I challenge your authority to lead—

  “I challenge your right to the throne—

  “I challenge your very right to be alive.”

  Emperor Dy-Dybo stood motionless, mouth agape.

  Chapter 9

  A Quintaglio’s Diary

  So we children of Afsan and Novato are no longer unique. Emperor Dybo, being of The Family, has, of course, always known who his parents were, but now it seems that he, too, also has living siblings.

  I guess no one had ever noticed the resemblance between Dybo and his brothers and sisters. After all, the apprentice governors are scattered across Land, and I doubt two of them have often been seen side by side. And, of course, Dybo is quite portly, making comparisons between him and the others less obvious.

  I wonder how Dybo is dealing with the knowledge that he has siblings. It’s different for him than it is for me, I’m sure. To begin with, apparently he’s only just discovered this fact (if it is a fact—there seems to be some doubt still). He didn’t grow up with them, doesn’t know them at all, except in a perfunctory and official way. It’s too bad: I’d be grateful to discuss what I’m going through with someone older and more experienced. But my role is minor. The Emperor, I’m sure, would never find time in his day to talk with me.

  Fra’toolar

  Toroca was poised in a little cleft, nine-tenths of the way up the cliff side, working along the Bookmark layer, the chalky seam marking the first rocks containing evidence of life. He kept hoping to unearth one of the shards of the eggs of creation. What a find that would be! An actual shell piece from an egg laid by God! So far, though, he’d found nothing like that. In fact, this layer was remarkably similar to all the layers above it: rich with sea-shells, with bones of fish, and even with occasional pieces of the skeletons of great water serpents, similar to the famed Kal-ta-goot that Afsan had killed aboard the sailing ship Dasheter.

  A great fissure ran through the rocks here, the handiwork of a landquake, no doubt. At this little perch, one could reach into the side of the cliff and simply pull out chunks of rock. The material here, just below the Bookmark layer, was a gray shale. It split cleanly along bedding planes, and Toroca opened slab after slab of it. Every piece was pristine, not marred by the fossils that were shot through the rocks from higher up.

  Toroca whacked the flat end of his hammer against the chisel again, and another slab split cleanly open. Nothing. He tried again with a different piece, a surprisingly heavy piece, but accidentally smashed his thumb instead. Occupational hazard: he didn’t even really feel the pain anymore. He repositioned the chisel and tried once more. This slab, for a change, did not split cleanly. The upper layers started to separate, but ceased to split off about halfway across. Curious. Toroca used his fingers to pry the slab apart. A large hunk snapped off, exposing a small rounded bit of something strange.

  Something blue.

  There were blue gemstones, of course, and a couple of blue minerals, but they were not normally found in downrocks such as these. But this thing, whatever it was, was definitely blue, a light shade, like that of certain wingfinger eggshells.

  There was only a tiny piece of it visible, jutting from the bedding plane. Toroca turned the slab over and positioned his chisel on the opposite side, then tapped his hammer lightly against it. The stone began to split, and once again he pried with his fingers to separate the rock. It took a great effort, but at last the upper layers broke free in sharp-edged flat pieces. He let them slide away, tumbling down the cliff face. There, just about in the middle of the slab, was a blue hemisphere with a diameter the length of Toroca’s longest finger.

  Toroca was normally excited by every discovery, for each new one advanced his knowledge. But with this one, he simply felt puzzled and confused. After all, he had thought these rocks were old, coming from just below the first layer in which remnants of life were found. But this was clearly a manufactured object, meaning that it couldn’t be very old at all: perhaps a few hundred kilodays, although its smooth surface made even that much of a pedigree doubtful.

  And then it hit him, causing his heart to flutter. The theory of superposition, carefully worked out by the late Irb-Falpom, might be destroyed by this find. Falpom’s theory had seemed so elegant, so simple: the older rocks were on the bottom. Such a revolution that had made in geology! But Toroca’s survey was the first one extensive enough to really prove or disprove the theory, although it had been accepted as fact for several kilodays now. Everything found to date had seemed to coincide with superposition, but now this, whatever it was, destroyed all that. A theory was only as good as the data that supported it, and superposition couldn’t explain a contemporary artifact buried deep within ancient rock.

  For one brief moment, Toroca thought about tossing aside the find, never showing it to anyone. The theory was so good, after all, and it was the one great claim to fame of his mentor and friend, Falpom. But of course he couldn’t do that. He was a scholar, and this blue dome was a fact, a fact that had to be accounted for.

  It was surprising that the object, whatever it was, had survived burial so well. Regardless of what theory would eventually replace superposition, this blue thingamajig had been here for some time, in these rock layers, with the weight of all the cliff above pressing down on it. That it wasn’t crushed, or even scratched, fascinated Toroca.

  He extended a claw and tapped the hard surface. The thing sounded slightly hollow. Toroca retracted the claw and ran his finger over the object. It was very smooth, but felt warmer than glass. Presumably there was more of it still buried in the slab. Perhaps the object was some sort of game ball.

  Toroca tried to chisel into the rock along another bedding plane, but it didn’t seem to want to split. After several failed attempts, he used the brute-force method. Balancing the slab on another piece of rock, with an edge of the slab overhanging, he pressed down upon the overhang until it broke off, right at the leading edge of the blue object. The object popped out of the matrix and went rolling down the embankment.

  Toroca scrambled down, loose stones clacking together underfoot. It was easy to spot the blue artifact against the brown sandstone. It teetered for a moment at the edge of another fissure. If it fell in there, the object would be lost for good. But it rolled the other way, catching on some jutting layers. Toroca scraped his knees and tail going after it, but finally got close enough to pick it up. It was surprisingly heavy, especially for something that might be hollow.

  It was not a ball.

  Rather it was some sort of complex device. The upper surface was indeed a smooth hemisphere, but the lower half was sculpted in a strange fluid shape, and had a row of hollow blue rings depending from it. The pattern of rings made Toroca think of fingerholes, and indeed, he tried slipping the device onto his left hand—

  —and immediately realized that the rings could not be fingerholes, because there were six of them instead of five.

  Still, if he balled his fist, the device, although apparently not built for a hand as large as his, did seem designed to be worn that way, as a rounded extension of the knuckles. It could have been some kind of inflexible glove, perhaps to protect the fingers when rock climbing, or to prevent one from doing damage with one’s claws. Toroca had heard of unfortunate fellows inflicted with a condition that caused their claws to extend and retract uncontrollably.

  But it couldn’t be that, because of the six fingerholes.

  Unless, of course, it was ambidextrous, designed for use on either hand. The first five holes would be used when worn on the left; the second through sixth holes would be used when worn on the right. But that wouldn’t work; the first and sixth holes were not mirror images of each other. Instead, the holes got progressively bigger.

  What could it be?

  He wiggled his fingers to try to get them to sit better in the rings. His middle finger seemed
to press up and into the hemisphere. Toroca removed the object, turned it over, and looked at the rings. The construction was much more complex than he’d first thought. The rings seemed to contain little movable parts that could push into the main body of the object. The others were clogged with dirt, but the third clicked in and out of its indentation easily. If the device was cleaned, one could probably click each ring up and down separately. Toroca wondered if it was a musical instrument of some sort, but he couldn’t find an aperture either for breathing into or for sound to emerge.

  He knew he’d regret it as the afternoon sun grew hotter, but he used the water in his canteen to wash off the object. Two more of the finger rings loosened up after having been flushed with water; the others seemed permanently seized.

  The material had warmed to be about the same temperature as Toroca’s hand. It definitely wasn’t glass or crystal: there didn’t seem to be any fragility about it. It wasn’t metal either, although it seemed heavier than lead. Not only was the color wrong for metal, it didn’t conduct heat the way metal did, and, despite having been buried, there was no sign of corrosion.

  Toroca extended a fingerclaw again and tapped the surface. There was definitely a hollow space within. He brought the object up to his earhole and shook it. No rattling; nothing was loose. He drew his fingerclaw across the curve of the hemisphere, first gently, then applying great pressure. Not a scratch. The thing was dirty, but otherwise completely undamaged. Toroca had no idea how old the object was: it looked freshly made, but he knew that no one besides his surveyors and the recently arrived Pack Derrilo had been in this remote part of Land for ages. And yet, it had to be recent: it was so smooth and lacked the ornate adornments found on artifacts from an earlier age.

  Or did it have to be recent?

  The stratigraphy of the rocks said no. They said it was ancient, predating all life.

  Yet it was clearly manufactured.

  Or was it? It bore no cartouches, no glyphs. There were only a couple of simple geometric markings on the underside of it. Could it be a fancy shell? Many of them were made of a lustrous material that looked manufactured.

  He tried to scratch it again. Nothing. Well, it was hollow; if it was a shell, there might be some sign within of the creature that had inhabited it.

  He balanced the object on a rock, held it firmly with his right and brought down the pointed end of his hammer with his left. The hammer bounced right back up, almost hitting Toroca in the muzzle. He tried again, smashing harder. Nothing—not the slightest crack or scratch. He tried a third time, pounding the hammer with all his might. The point simply skidded across the curving surface, and Toroca pitched forward, losing his balance.

  He scrambled for purchase and steadied himself. He’d been so wrapped up in the puzzling object, he’d all but forgotten he was still way up the side of a cliff. He moved back up the precipice a bit until he found a place with firmer footing.

  The object was amazing. Toroca was a geologist; he knew about forged metals and alloys and every type of mineral and volcanic glass. There was nothing—nothing—like this material.

  Who could have built such a thing?

  And when?

  The builder—or, at least, the thing that it had been built for—apparently had six fingers, not five.

  Six.

  Toroca was wearing a geologist’s sash, with pockets running up its entire length. One of them contained his kit of ten numbered mineralogical samples used for determining the relative hardness of materials. He fished it out.

  The softest specimen, number 1, was a piece of graphite. The hardest, number 10, was a brilliant diamond crystal. During field-work, an unknown specimen would be rubbed against the samples in turn. The specimen would scratch some of the lower-numbered samples, meaning it was harder than those, but would be scratched by all the remaining higher-numbered samples. A piece of cinnabar, for instance, would scratch graphite (#1) and gypsum (#2) but would be scratched by a piece of copper (#3), meaning that cinnabar had a hardness rating of 2 and a bit. The hardness value was often diagnostic, distinguishing, for instance, pyrite from gold.

  There was a rectangular projection on the undersurface of the artifact, just past the last of the six finger rings. The blue material was obviously very hard, so he decided to skip samples 1 through 6. He started with number 7, a common hexagonal quartz crystal. Holding the quartz piece firmly, he dragged it across one of the pointed corners of the rectangular projection. White powder appeared at the corner’s vertex. Powdered quartz; the blue stuff was harder than the seventh sample.

  He tried the same thing with sample number 8. Yellow powder collected on the point, and a short straight scratch appeared in the sample crystal. Harder than topaz. Sample number 9 was a star sapphire, a worthless specimen damaged by a lapidary. Toroca pressed it hard against the blue point on the surface of the object and worked the gem back and forth. When he pulled it away, he could see a deep scratch marring the six-pointed star image across the stone’s face.

  Hard, indeed. He got out his final sample. The diamond glinted in the bright sunlight. This, at least, should scratch the strange object. Toroca grunted. A part of him would take a perverse pleasure in blemishing the blue surface.

  He worked the diamond back and forth across a corner point of the rectangular projection, making five or six good, firm scrapes. He then pulled the diamond away. White dust covered the point. He rubbed his finger over the tip to clear it away.

  The point was undamaged.

  He looked at the diamond.

  A deep scratch had been cut into it.

  Harder than specimen #10.

  Harder than the hardest-known substance.

  Harder than diamond.

  Toroca almost lost his footing again.

  Chapter 10

  Musings of The Watcher

  The Jijaki did not react the way I had expected.

  What do I know of psychology—especially the psychology of primitive races? I’d been alone for eons.

  Although I could always observe them, the Jijaki became most accessible to me once they started broadcasting electromagnetic signals. It took me several of their years to sort through the vast amount of material that leaked from their world, but without a key I could not unlock their language. And then, at last, a key was laid before me. One of their audiovisual programs was an educational series aimed at young Jijaki—the demographics of those on it were highly skewed from the population norm, concentrating on juvenile forms. Much of it was presented in two-dimensional animation, and a great deal was, I eventually realized, song, although Jijaki singing, made by holding the manipulators at the end of the trunk over the triangular breathing holes while breath was forced out, was not sufficiently complex to really interest me.

  The program, identified as Kijititatak Gikta at the start of each installment, was broadcast once each planetary day, except that every fourth day was skipped. Each installment lasted a fraction under one-twentieth of one day. The program provided the rudimentary sort of introduction I needed to at last decipher the language of their broadcasts (or at least one of their languages, for the form used seemed to vary with geographic location on the planet), introducing not only the characters of the Jijaki alphabet but also the sounds associated with each character, and giving pictorial representations of the objects that individual words described.

  The direct approach seemed the best. I manipulated hydrogen gas in the space between the Jijak star and its nearest neighbor, blocked out portions with streamers of dark matter, and arranged for the whole thing to glow. On Kijititatak Gikta there was an animated character apparently named Tilk. Tilk was bright pink in color, unlike the muted opalescence of real Jijaki, and had eye stalks that could extend to enormous distances and waggle about in wild patterns. No such creature actually existed in the fauna of this world, as far as I could tell. In any event, Tilk began each of his appearances on the show with a simple, apparently colloquial greeting. I lit up those same words in the sky:
“Howdy, girls and boys and little neuters!”

  The words were invisible to those on the surface. But I knew the Jijaki had optical telescopes, so I waited patiently for my greeting to be found. The planet completed about three-quarters of an orbit before it was, and then suddenly the broadcasts were full of it. They even interrupted Kijititatak Gikta for an announcement about my greeting.

  It became apparent that the Jijaki thought this was a deliberate trick on the part of one of their own, but astronomers across their planet soon confirmed that the words were really there, floating in space, Jijaki had only just begun sub-orbital flights, so they knew there was no way any of their people could have been responsible.

  Suddenly all broadcasts, except for a furtive few, stopped. I was shocked. It seemed the Jijaki had figured out that I’d been listening in, and wanted nothing to do with me.

  To have waited since the dawn of the universe for these creatures to emerge, and then to be shunned—it was more than I could bear. For a brief time, I thought to hurtle asteroids at their world, for it was only because of my intervention that they existed at all. But that thought passed, and instead I formulated another sentence. It took me close to a Jijaki year to do it, and doing it that quickly taxed my powers to the utmost. “Please talk to me,” was all I said.

  And, at last, they did. The broadcasts resumed, with major transmitters on all landmasses sending up a message. Most replied in the same language form I had used, but a few, apparently partisans of another form, and feeling it deserved equal consideration, replied in one of the geographic variants. “Who are you?” they said.

  I told them. Reaction was mixed, and it took me some time to figure it all out. One broadcast frequency was given over to what I eventually realized was a religion, in worship of me. Others engaged me in dialog, showing me how to send visual signals in a more efficient method, using a simple binary code that I could blink out much more quickly than I could form letters in the sky. Eventually the normal cacophony of broadcasts resumed, including even Kijititatak Gikta. Within a short time, the general populace had largely lost interest in me.