Living memory, p.6
Living Memory, page 6
With a straight pick, he started to pry at the fissure, using a small hammer to tap lightly on the pick and dislodge small shards. After several attempts, he felt the pick give and slide inside. Afraid he might have damaged the fossil, he drew back, and a thin green liquid bubbled out from where he had pierced it.
Kit leaned in, astonished. What was it? Sixty-six million year old swamp water? But still liquid? That was impossible. Then the smell reached him. Sickly sweet and decaying, with a hint of petroleum. It reached up his sinuses and took hold, filling him with a sudden and uncontrollable terror. This smell meant danger in a way his animal brain seemed to comprehend at once, before his conscious mind had time to process the sensation. It meant menace and pursuit and rending teeth and fire and imminent death.
He stumbled backward, gasping for breath, his body telling him to flee. He tripped over an empty box and landed hard on his backside. Above him loomed a giant brown bird. But no, not a bird. Its plumage, talons, and furtive movements were birdlike, but its arms ended in hands and claws, and its long jaw bristled with needle-sharp teeth. Its body was covered with protofeathers, the filament-like precursors to the feathers of modern birds. He knew it was the maniraptor, even as his brain shouted that this was impossible. It darted its head forward as if it might attack. Kit shrieked and scrambled backward.
It had to be some kind of hallucinogen. The creature wasn’t actually there; something had caused his brain to transform the long-dead fossil on the table into the illusion of a living, breathing dinosaur. Still, the overwhelming sense of terror kept him crawling backward until he hit the wall. He cried out, certain to his bones that he was about to be torn limb from limb. It was the reflex of quarry cornered by a predator. He looked up from the floor into its cold yellow eyes and knew he would die.
Abruptly, the vision changed. He was outside, high on a bare hill at night, still looking up. The chemistry classroom was gone. A vast array of stars blanketed the open sky. Kit had learned the constellations as a boy, but he saw none of the familiar shapes. Around him on the hill, in every direction, stood more of the brown feathered maniraptors, all of them gazing up at the sky. Hundreds of them, standing motionless. They seemed to be arranged in some kind of pattern, each standing an equal distance away from those closest, as if preparing for a dance. Kit realized with a start that he was one of the maniraptors, with his own place on the hill among the others.
The vision vanished. He sat shaking on the floor of the classroom, the dinosaurs and the hillside and the sky all gone.
He tried to get a grip on himself. Think rationally.
What could have caused such a thing? The most straightforward answer was that whatever chemical had been trapped in the rock fissure had a powerful hallucinogenic effect, and his brain had concocted the things that he saw. Nothing more than a drug-induced dream. The power and vividness of the vision made him want to question that hypothesis, but he knew such experiences could feel quite real. Perhaps some kind of fungus had wormed its way into a crack in the rock, and had fermented over time to produce a potent cocktail.
He thought of the murdered smuggler and the fossil apparently abandoned in haste. Could this hallucinogen have been what they were after? Regardless, he had to report to the lieutenant what he had discovered.
◆◆◆
When Somjai came back into the room, he was accompanied by six other men. Three wore uniforms of the Royal Thai Army, like most of the men he’d seen at the complex. The other three wore uniforms he didn’t recognize, a brilliant white instead of olive, with epaulets and badges of rank. Somjai introduced them as members of the Weapons Research division. “The colonel will join us shortly,” Somjai said.
They stood in the small classroom, not speaking, for five minutes that seemed like an hour. Finally, the door opened to admit an older, bespectacled man who, despite a bald head and a face wrinkled with age, held himself rigidly erect and wore a proud frown. His white uniform shirt was perfectly pressed and practically glowed. The other men saluted him sharply, using the new Thai military salute invented by King Vajiralongkorn.
Kit pressed his hands together and bowed low. “Respected colonel,” he said.
The colonel’s expression didn’t change, but his gaze impaled Kit in place. “Tell me,” he said.
Kit paused. What was the Army’s interest in all this? Why were they even here? Why were three members of Weapons Research here to listen to what he had found? Could he trust them? At some level, he had little choice, but he found that he did trust them. He was proud of his country and their armed forces. Proud of their heritage and traditions. His people were followers of the Middle Way, not warmongers like the Americans or the Chinese. He would do all he could to assist them and ask nothing in return.
He explained as best he could what he had found and what he had experienced. The three weapons specialists took notes on small pads of paper, though Kit couldn’t imagine what their interest was or what they were writing down.
“It goes without saying that this requires more study—much more study,” Kit said. “We need to understand how old the substance is, and how it formed. If it has truly lasted since the Cretaceous period…”
“You have worked with a team of Americans,” the colonel said. His voice was scratchy and soft. “Those Americans are here, now, in a nearby room. Do you feel their expertise would be valuable?”
Kit blinked. “They’re here? Samira and Bethany and the others?”
“For the moment. They are being detained for questioning before they are deported.”
He considered. Would their expertise be valuable? Of course it would. He needed colleagues to help him understand this problem, not soldiers and weapons experts. He needed kindred minds to test his ideas and help him come to grips with this world-shattering new discovery. This was a job for scientists. He wanted to say, yes! Yes, bring them in! But if the Americans came in, they would take over. It would become their project, their research. They would bring it home to the United States, to their well-stocked labs and huge grants, and use the influence of their wealth and power to rob Thailand of her history.
“No,” he said. “To understand this mystery, I need the help of paleontologists and geologists and experts of every kind, but I don’t need the Americans. Do we not have education in Thailand? Do we not have the best minds in the world? No. Give me the experts and the tools to do the job, but send the Americans away. We don’t need them.”
The colonel nodded, and for the first time the hint of a smile touched his fierce frown. “You shall have your experts and tools,” he said. “Just tell me what you require.”
◆◆◆
After they took his list, they left Kit alone in the room with his thoughts. The view of the unfamiliar night sky in his hallucination still stuck in his mind. It had been so detailed. A brilliant spread of millions of stars, unspoiled by modern light. The surrounding foliage had been from the Cretaceous period: ferns covering the ground, and in the distance around the hill, gingkos, palms, and the tall, bare stalks of monkey puzzle trees. Of course, Kit knew what foliage would have grown in the late Cretaceous, so it wasn’t unreasonable that he would hallucinate it accurately. But the sky…
He had to do it again. Foolish, probably, to intentionally breathe a substance he couldn’t identify, but it hadn’t hurt him the first time, had it? A little fear, perhaps, but no real harm. He couldn’t analyze something scientifically with only one data point.
Carefully, Kit scraped again at the same fissure and put his face close, breathing deeply of the resulting fumes. Once again, the maniraptor appeared, beautiful and lethal and as seemingly as real as the rest of the lab. The terror hit him, too, but he resisted it this time, standing his ground, though his heart raced and his legs shook. The same hilltop presented itself to him, but this time he paid particular attention to the stars. He concentrated on two memorable clusters, trying to burn their arrangement into his memory. More quickly than he expected, the vision faded.
The moment it did, he pulled out his phone and started hunting. He remembered a website that some enterprising astronomers had put together with an interactive star chart. The site made use of the ultra-accurate star positional data produced by the Gaia space observatory to predict how the night sky would look millions of years into the past and future. After some searching, he found it and started playing with the tool, traveling back in time toward the Cretaceous period some sixty-six million years ago. As he watched, the stars orbited the galactic center in chaotic patterns, and the Earth traveled a quarter of the way around the Milky Way, utterly transforming the familiar constellations.
He started at the beginning of the Cretaceous and stepped his way forward in five million year jumps. He didn’t know what time of night or season it had been, so he had to search each version of the sky in its entirety, a tedious activity, especially on his phone. He almost gave up halfway through—how could he expect to find the stars from a hallucination? He didn’t know when this maniraptor had lived, even to within a few million years, and it took only thousands of years to visibly change the alignment of stars. The website couldn’t even be entirely accurate that far back—the galaxy was a chaotic system, very sensitive to the accuracy of initial conditions. Millions of years was enough time for old stars to die and new ones to form.
But part of what made Kit well-suited to his profession was an inability to give up on a task, however tedious, until he had exhausted it completely. He concentrated on finding the first star cluster he had memorized: four particularly bright stars standing in a line, like Orion’s belt with one extra star. The fact that he was on his phone meant he could only look at a small portion of sky at a time, but he persisted, his mind settling into the routine.
He almost didn’t recognize it when he finally found it. He had reached the end of the Cretaceous and thus the end of his search, sixty-six million and forty-three thousand years ago. The date of the Chicxulub asteroid impact that had killed eighty percent of life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs. The arrangement was upside-down on his phone from how he had seen it in the sky, but once he recognized it, there was no mistake. His four bright stars, arranged in a neat line, the second a little raised and brighter than the others and the fourth a little farther away.
He searched for the other cluster and found that one, too, slightly different than he remembered, but still recognizable. Was it possible that he’d remembered those arrangements from the first time he used the website, years earlier, and had incorporated them into his hallucination? Not likely. Not possible at all, really. But if not, that meant something even more unbelievable: that the scene he had witnessed in his hallucination was real. Those dinosaurs had actually stood on that hill, looking up at the stars. Which meant it wasn’t a hallucination at all.
Kit put the phone down, breathing hard. Maybe he was just going mad. But he didn’t think so. He couldn’t prove it through any traditional means, but he now believed in what he had seen. Wherever that hilltop was, those maniraptors had been there. Whether intentionally or not, the event had been recorded and somehow played back to his mind all this time later. And thanks to the stars, he now knew with pinpoint accuracy when they had lived. And in all likelihood, how they had died.
Chapter 6
Northeast Thailand
66 million years ago
Easy Prey tried to concentrate, but the music made it hard. The sweet-smelling love songs his coworkers preferred left an acid taste in the back of his throat. He would have used a portable facemask for his own music—Prey liked his songs pungent, with a little more rhythmic savagery in them—but Sharp Salt, his boss, had strictly forbidden personal music organisms. Ruins team unity, she said.
The data blurred a little in his nostrils. Prey hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and the scent flows of astronomical data required close attention to understand properly. Normally, he was up to the task, but today, he just wanted to go home to his nest and sleep. He wondered if he was coming down with something.
He would never complain, though, no matter how bad he felt. This was a good job for a male, especially one of his caste, and he didn’t want to lose it. Even for his gender, he was small, with drab plumage and a tiny wingspan. Nobody chose him for breeding. Only a mind for mathematics had set him apart and earned him a job in the sciences, surrounded by females. If he made the smallest slip, he would confirm their expectations and find himself doing manual labor for a living, like so many males his age.
A new smell cut through the music. Sharp Salt was coming.
His coworkers stepped down from their perches, capping their data flows and smoothing down their plumage. Prey had to hop down from his, which had been made for a female, and was thus too high for him to step comfortably off. The only other male in the room, Crushed Neck, began exuding sexual pheromones, a little too obviously. The females made a point of ignoring him.
Sharp Salt burst into the room along with a wash of her commanding presence. The scent filled Prey with feelings of love and devotion and duty, even though he hated her. When she was nearby, he could never disobey her. The urge to please was too strong. Anything she asked of him, he would do without question, except maybe commit suicide, and even that would take monumental willpower to resist.
Sharp Salt’s full name was Sharp Salt of Ocean Spray Thrown by Morning Breakers. For a female from a prestigious Ocean roost to hold such a low leadership posting meant she must have angered someone powerful. Which perhaps explained why she was so unpleasant to those who worked for her.
Sharp Salt struck the music organism with her foot, silencing it. Prey winced. Those organisms were delicate. Too fierce a blow could break internal vessels, causing it to bruise and ultimately souring the music. Not that Prey would have minded if she just killed the thing outright.
As the music dissipated, Sharp Salt snapped her jaws and bared a row of needle-sharp teeth. Almost immediately, an intense message scent filled Prey’s nostrils, riding on the scent of Sharp Salt’s presence. “I have exciting news for all of you,” the message said. “Our laboratory will be visited tomorrow by distinguished leader Lush Warmth of Ocean Thermals after Rain. She has heard of your good work and wishes to breathe it in for herself.”
Prey’s coworkers erupted into a babble of squawks, the news surprising enough to make them forget their manners and voice their reactions instead of using scent alone. A wave of presence from Sharp Salt silenced them.
“Prey?” Sharp Salt said, using the shortest possible scent marker.
Prey’s full name was Sweet Blood of Easy Prey Just After Slaughter. It was a common and forgettable name for a male. Prey wondered if his mother had actually liked it or if, in her disappointment at his gender, she had chosen the first name that occurred to her.
Prey cowered. “Yes, revered Sharp Salt of Ocean Spray Thrown by Morning Breakers?”“Collate our most recent findings and prepare a presentation for the leader by tomorrow morning.
Prey bobbed his head in acquiescence. The job would take him all night, and Sharp Salt would be unlikely to acknowledge his hand in it to the leader. Still, she had chosen him for the job, which meant that, despite her prejudices, Sharp Salt recognized his talent. He wished that talent could serve his own advancement instead of her petty self-aggrandizement, but that was like wishing for the moon. He was a male, and males didn’t rise to positions of leadership. He was lucky not to be inseminating livestock or massaging flesh into organisms in a factory somewhere.
Sharp Salt blasted a wave of sexual domination that left Prey reeling, but of course it wasn’t intended for him. Crushed Neck trotted meekly out the door after her, bobbing his head and nuzzling her wing feathers. He was an admirable physical specimen, nearly as big as the females, with a brilliant red scent receptor standing out over a strong jaw. Prey suspected it was why he’d been hired. Given the quality of his work, it certainly didn’t seem to be his knowledge of astrophysics.
Prey jumped back to his perch and clenched his teeth until the feeling of sexual desire had passed. No one ever wanted him for sex. His female coworkers would likely go to the breeding grounds after work and pick out a mating partner, but Prey had long since given up visiting such places. The embarrassment of being overlooked night after night left him feeling ashamed and lonely, so he spent his evenings studying astronomy, or else working late in the lab.
◆◆◆
A few hours later, Prey was alone. Now that everyone else had gone, he could switch from visual mode to a full olfactory connection with the network. It took more concentration to explore the data by smell alone, but he found that the visual representations—just summaries of the scent data—tended to disguise important details and assume away outliers. A direct connection to the Ductwork served him better.
He opened a valve, and a rich melange of aromas flooded into his face. This was the Ductwork, a continuous airflow pumped through the complex of buildings that allowed computational collaboration on a large scale. Many of the big Houses performed large scale computation, but it usually meant putting hundreds or thousands of individuals into a single room or field. Females of different ranks dominated sub-groups and coordinated data flow, and at the bottom of the hierarchy, males performed the actual computations. The duration of the computation was limited by the time the males could reasonably keep working without sleep or food. With the females dominating them, that was a long time, but there were still limits.
The Ductwork was a new concept: a decentralized network that allowed computing to continue indefinitely, with shifts of males and females contributing their minds to the whole and then dropping out again. As long as they kept a minimum threshold of contributors, it didn’t matter who was connected, as long as the dominating females at the top who drove the process maintained a clear purpose from shift to shift. The concept was gaining popularity, but as far as Prey knew, their House was the only one to implement it to this degree, allowing connections from anywhere in the whole complex of buildings.
