Lost Worlds Short Stories Page 2

  I found no difficulty in these perceptions, no incongruity, and flowed with them. The night air on my face was overlaid with the impressions of the place into which I looked, and part of me was excited as I had never been before. Was this the sense of place I had sought all my life? The genius loci of the ancient highlands? If so, I was privileged to be given this glimpse into rampant life bereft of humankind.

  The human condition styles all it does not understand, all beyond its control, as terrible, and nature has been the terror of the human race since the first moment someone was able to conceive of him or herself as somehow different from the living world. How much more at peace, I thought, are peoples for whom nature is their lived reality, rather than the concrete streets through which no green can grow. Which is the more monstrous, nature rampant or nature suppressed?

  Some fascinating, almost addictive property of this new perception held my attention, kept me focused so I neither drifted into sleep nor back awake, but remained tightly attuned to this conduit into the unseen secrets of the peaks. So bound was I to the vision, nothing could jar me from it, and my amazement was an entirely personal wonder when the dinosaurs appeared from the black shadows before me.

  They were small, dog-sized, swift-running bipeds in a large social pack which streamed through the silver-blue night in a cascade of pattering footfalls, pausing at times with bird-like grace to crop the ferns, their great binocular eyes bright as they scanned all about for danger. Now I understood the calls out there in the dark, the bellows and trombone-like notes of massive iguanodonts, and the guttural sounds of things more malevolent. The pack of ornithopods milled around me, oblivious, it seemed, and I observed them for some time, amazed at the dexterity of their grasping fore-paws; but eventually an alarm cry from a lookout sent the whole pack scurrying into the deep shadows of the denser woods in a few heartbeats and I waited with bated breath for what had startled them.

  Heavy footfalls came softly on the breeze and before I was truly ready for the encounter a great shape moved, treeferns swayed and parted, and a brutal head was thrust into the glade, followed by a tremendous S-curve neck and barrel chest. Clawed feet carried the beast with the grace of a dancer, it paused on one foot to scent the air before moving on cautiously. This was a late-surviving polar allosaur – I reminded myself Australia lay at the south pole in Cretaceous times – and the top predator of these woodlands. What a magnificent creature, was my impression, my heart racing to see this lost giant, but it raced for different reasons when I realised this one was aware of me. It stood rock-still and stared, nostrils flared as it scented the night air, and those eyes, staring from under flared ridges of bony scales, looked right into me.

  Can I die here? Was my sudden thought, a desperate flailing to remember this was first cousin to a dream, I sat on a rock in the 21st century and all I perceived was long gone. Surely, it must be so. Yet the allosaur looked across ten meters of moonlit glade with unerring accuracy, and let out a deep rumble from parted jaws, lowering its head as if to my own level. Then, one careful step at a time, the dinosaur came closer. I sat rigid with fear, feeling the earth tremble under me as tons of animal approached, and closed my nose to the beast’s strong smell as the head, larger than a horse’s, came town and the bird-like eyes looked into my soul.

  How long this moment lasted I did not know, my fear at first costing me the nuances of the encounter. But at last I sensed the great predator was not viewing me as prey, and I relaxed. I took in the moonlight in the huge eyes, their pupils wide open, and the delicate traceries of fine scales around them. Bright colours patterned the hide of the neck arch and a dappled pattern, reminding me of tiger stripes, ran down the back; this was an ambush predator of the woodland, and perfectly adapted to its environment.

  But after a while I realised I was not only seeing the beast, I was seeing myself, as if from the beast’s perspective. This strange inversion let me see myself as a small and peculiar creature in this world, and I had pity for my own ineffectual nature. I could not survive here, and though the dinosaur had no intelligence of an order we would recognize, I was overwhelmed with the impression the creature understood me in strange, deep ways, and judged me – judged me irrelevant. To be dismissed was a salutary shock, but it is no denigration to feel small before time and life.

  As if in explanation to my subconscious, I perceived a flurry, a cascade, of mental images, the days and nights, the epochs, of existence here, the pageant of life enacting the great dance of death. The seasons flowed by, the continents drifted and fractured, the beasts warred, migrated and brought forth the eggs of a million generations – endlessly, beneath the cooling sun as this land slid ever closer to the pole and these forests became frost-locked for the deepest months of winter. Then the ornithopod packs hibernated in the deepest woods, sharing body heat, the life of the rivers lay locked in stasis, and the greater beasts walked north along the shores and rivers. Treeferns and cycads were rimed with white cloaks of frost and all life bowed to the cold.

  The sun crossed the sky through a billion days and nights, time passed in an avalanche that left me shaking, drenched with the mental impression of the uncountable lives expressed in this arena, and whose stamp, impression, signature, remained upon the land if one knew how to look, to listen, properly. It was too much for me to take in, a panorama too wide, an epic too vast, and I mentally flung up a hand to shield my eyes, but to no avail, the world spoke to my innermost being and would not be denied. Here is your grail, it seemed to say, this is what you crave, feast upon the river of time and never forget…Never forget…

  The experience flowed through me, the ages passed like rushing rapids, my whole being was illuminated as if from within and I could only ride the sensations, uncomprehending, still studied inscrutably by the great allosaur that stood silently before me, head low to stare into my eyes.

  And at last, when I felt I could take no more, my senses dulled, my nerve endings numbed by the dizzying vista revealed to me, the beast opened wide its jaws and bellowed, a sound to wake the dead, filling the highlands with reverberations, overlapping echoes, and shushing the small creatures of the night to silence.

  I dare not open my eyes as I felt the hot, stinking breath in my face, but the sudden chill of night air replaced the feeling and my abused synapses found themselves resting in simple, quiet darkness. I sat upon a rock in a softly humming night, and smelled the ancient woods, and when I opened my eyes the familiar old moon rode over the trees, waning a few days beyond full.

  But one thing remained to my wide-open senses, and I was neither surprised nor afraid when the outline of the allosaur moved before me, almost solid, almost transparent, those scales, scutes and glittering eyes so vividly outlined in the silver-blue night. The beast stood a while, tail twitching, nostrils flaring, then turned and passed with silent grace into the trees and faded from my world.

  * * *

  I staggered back to my car through the moonlight more in shock than sobriety. My mind was still desperately trying to process the deluge of imagery, the exposure to the ancient past which seemed recorded in the living world, in the rock of the land, and it was all I could do to steady my breathing and follow my GPS on my phone back through the woodland. I fought for mental balance as I went, and at times leaned against a tree to pant, willing myself to stay conscious, as if I could go out in a dead faint at any time. My fear was losing all touch with the world as I knew it, being precipitated headlong into the bottomless gulf of the ages and never finding my way back.

  For what it was worth, I returned to my 4WD by moonlight and flashlight without incident. I checked myself and my pack over for unwelcome bugs or spiders, then unlocked with a blip from the lights and sank into the comfort of the artificial. The door shut out the night and I drank from my water bottle, stilled my trembling hands, and at last scrubbed them hard over my face.

  I had my answer, it seemed, and I must make sense of it, but a
bruptly my fear was that the memories would fade, and I knew I must write it all down as soon as possible. Driving while so preoccupied would be a challenge and I was in no hurry to go, but sat and stared off through the dark at the moon on the forest canopy, and knew I was deeply, profoundly changed. I left this mountain a different man – or perhaps having woken to the man I always was, or needed to be.

  What did it mean, if the spirit of the land had whispered to me? Revealed to me the secrets it had always held so tightly from mortal gaze? Long meditation was needed to put any sense to the vista of titans which had passed my waking eyes, and I looked back for a long while at the dreaming forests. I did not know where this would take me, or if such communion would ever be granted me a second time, but I appreciated the gift down deep where the soul dwells and knew I was indelibly marked by it, to see through the human world as never before to nature beneath the surface… And never again will I look on Whitehead’s classic painting without seeing the denizens of the Cretaceous woods race through the dappled shade, and remembering the ghostly allosaur in the moonlight.

  Tears of the Gods

  Sarah L. Byrne

  Legend had it that the blue rain was the tears of the gods, though just why gods would weep in blue no one could quite explain. Modern science said the odd meteorological phenomenon was simply a matter of copper sulphate, spores from the blue copper-feeding algae in the deep vents forced into the atmosphere by volcanic activity. Gita knew differently. Opening the door of her house at the patter of the heavy drops on the titanium roof – how did it manage to even sound so blue? – she held out a hand and let the liquid pool in her palm.

  What the blue rain really meant was change.

  Gita’s hand started to itch. Back inside, she held it under the cold tap, washing off the residue of the rain before her skin began to blister from the contact with the irritant. The first time she’d seen the corrosive blue rain had been more than ten years since, when she first arrived. She and Silvia, assigned Survey work as a couple for the first time, and who cared if it was some backwater planet, not exactly a career-boosting move? It had come again the day the shuttle had arrived to take Silv away for the last time. The relentless blue rain beating futile on its impassive grey hull, and Gita’s dreams trampled in the dust. When the blue rain had come for the third time, she’d made the decision to leave the city, with its bright lights and protective dome, and volunteered for this lonely post. Just her in a little house in the desert outside the city boundaries.

  Change meant a number of things to a woman past forty, even aside from the obvious one. But one thing you knew about change by this age was that it was inevitable. It came like the blue rain whether you liked it or not or just hadn’t made your mind up yet. So Gita wasn’t surprised when her door buzzer sounded, though she jumped at the sudden noise all the same.

  When did I get so used to silence?

  Gita slid the door open to reveal a familiar figure, foot already tapping with impatience. Min. Standing there lithe and long-legged in her black leather-look protective gear, the usual energy was visibly humming through her every muscle. Min bounded into the porch, bringing the wet-sand smell of desert rain with her, then tugged off her soft helmet-hood so her short ash-blond hair stood up spikily, grinned at Gita and flashed her a wink.

  “What’s new, gorgeous?”

  Min: Survey project manager, one-woman whirlwind of unstoppable energy, old friend.

  Some things, at least, did not change.

  “Don’t flirt with me,” Gita said sourly, as Min stripped off the rest of her outer layers and discarded them on the porch floor. “We both know you don’t mean it.”

  “Might do,” Min said, though she did at least look slightly shame-faced. In the soft light of the interior, she looked Gita up and down. Gita knew she was taking in every detail: the old flannel pyjamas, the streaks of grey in the unbrushed dark hair that tumbled to her shoulders. Min herself looked fantastic as always, even standing in her socks, all wiry grace and boyish charm.

  “How’ve you been?” she asked at last.

  “Fine,” Gita said. “At least I am as long as people don’t keep coming here bothering me.”

  Min raised an eyebrow.

  “Might do you good to be bothered a bit more,” she observed. “You’re getting a bit…odd. Out here all on your own. People are starting to talk.”

  “I’ve always been odd,” Gita said. “I just don’t bother hiding it anymore.”

  “All the same.” Min brushed this off. “I haven’t forgotten you exist, and the Survey hasn’t either. We’ve got a job for you.”

  Change. There it was, then. There was no avoiding it.

  * * *

  The sun blazed down hot on the desert trail, and Gita sweated in her weather-resistant trousers and jacket. She’d left off the headgear and filter-mask at least – she wasn’t worried about rain any time soon, with a sky as clear as this – and the rest of the team had followed her lead and done the same. Gita paused to catch her breath for a moment, to push the damp strands of hair off her forehead. The trail was too steep and narrow now for wheeled transport. Where they were going, the only way was by foot.

  “You want to stop for a break?” Ed asked, beside her. Kind young Ed. New-qualified and on the way up, and solicitous of her as if she was his own old grandma.

  “Not at all.”

  Gita took a sip of water from her drink tube and forced herself onwards. She was awkwardly aware of being the oldest person on this trek, among all the keen young things, all temporary placements. No one came out here any more unless they needed a bit of exoplanet experience to advance their careers, and had to take what they could get. She felt heavy, and not just the way her muscles were softened from inactivity, or the couple of extra middle-aged pounds around her middle.

  “You’re the most senior microbiologist out here,” Min had argued, as Gita resisted her efforts to prise her out of the comfortable hole her quiet little life had become. “You’re wasted doing weather observations, that stuff should have been automated years ago, anyway. We need you on this.”

  Gita strongly suspected there was no such urgent need. Sure, the volcanic clefts were finally officially safe to access, now sufficient time had passed since any activity other than a bit of odd-coloured rain. And someone might as well have a look around, bring back some samples for analysis. But this had the flavour of one of Min’s for-your-own-good social engineering moves. Especially when Gita had hesitated, and that little crease had appeared between Min’s eyebrows, concern and sympathy and more than a little admonishment.

  “She’s been gone a long time, Gita. Life goes on, you know.”

  So it did. So here she was, heading for the mountains, the weird scooped-out shapes of them on the horizon, eroded by the abrasive rainfall, no sky-scraping peaks here. But except for that, it could almost be back on Earth somewhere. Morocco maybe, the Atlas mountains. Silv would have liked it out here.

  * * *

  The first pioneers in this part of space, a hundred years back, had called it the planet of the gods. Since then it had acquired a serial number but no better name.

  It was an ironic usage now, of course, because what a godforsaken place it was these days, now the Survey and the terraforming projects had moved onto the bigger and better worlds in the system. Even the bright-lights frontier-town city under the dome was fading, businesses leaving and families packing up. But people had seen things. The people who’d been here before the Survey with its safety protocols had come along and put restrictions on wandering into the remote places. They’d seen things, or said they had; things that became a kind of legend. You could still find their accounts cached somewhere on the old internet if you looked: accounts of ethereal things that materialised out of nowhere and drifted in the wind, and some had said the planet must have its own gods. Others said it was heatstroke or dehydration or whateve
r it was they were smoking back then, and that you-see-what-you-want-to-see. And they were probably right. But still.

  Gita liked to think the gods wept for Silv. Someone had to. Gita was worn dry by the years, by solitude. Someone had to remember her; Gita struggled to picture her face sometimes. Like now, lying awake in her narrow single tent, as the chatter and giggles of her young companions finally quietened, giving way to the weight of the desert-silent night.

  It had been cancer, and not one of the curable ones. Not one of the slow-moving chronic types, manageable if you didn’t mind taking so many pills a day you rattled when you walked. It had been the kind that tore through you silent as a scream in space and by the time you suspected that niggling ache in your back, that odd nausea – not pregnant, are you? Hah, chance’d be a fine thing, spawn of the gods, hey? – might be anything more than one-of-those-things, it was too late, far too late to even talk about treatment.

  Silv hadn’t wanted to go off-planet. She’d loved this place, even though the medical facilities were basic. If there’s nothing they can do anyway…

  The transfer shuttle she’d finally agreed to had come too late for her, and the cold silent burden it carried away to the mainland – for freezing, for shipping back to her family, her legal next-of-kin – had not really even been Silv anymore. Gita could have made a fuss about the legal thing, about Silv’s wishes, how she’d wanted to be buried – I was her family too, you know I was – but she had no stomach for that fight. She could have gone along, taken compassionate leave: Min had in fact stopped just short of ordering her onto the shuttle. But the real Silv was still here. The memory of her was right here, where the gods themselves wept their corrosive blue tears because she was gone. That funny, gentle, gorgeous woman who’d loved this place and wanted to grow old here. She was gone.