Cryptozoic! Read online

  Not speaking, they moved forward, full of the sense of disorientation that always followed mind-travel. There was no rational way of knowing whereabouts or whenabouts on Earth they were; yet an irrational part of the undermind knew, and would gradually come through with the information. It, after all, had brought them here, and presumably for purposes of its own.

  They were in the foot-hills of mountains on which jungle rioted. Halfway up the mountain slopes, the clouds licked away everything from sight. All was still; the foliage about them seemed frozen in a long Mesozoic hush.

  "We'd better move down into the plain," Bush said. "This is the place we want, I think. I have friends here, the Borrows."

  "They live here, you mean?"

  "They run a store. Roger Borrow used to be an artist. His wife's nice."

  "Will I like them?"

  "I shouldn't think so."

  He started walking. Not knowing clearly what he felt about Ann, be thought that presenting her to Roger and Ver might cement a relationship he did not want. Ann watched him for a while and then followed. The Jurassic was about the most boring place to be alone in ever devised.

  With their packs on their backs, they spent most of the day climbing downwards. It was not easy because they could never see their footholds; they were walled off completely from the reality all round them. They were spectres, unable to alter by the slightest degree the humblest appurtenances of this world -- unable to kick the smallest pebble out of the way -- unless it was that by haunting it they altered the charisma of the place. Only the air-leakers gave them some slight bond with actuality, by drawing their air requirements through the invisible wall of time-entropy about them. The level of the generalized floor on which they trod was sometimes below the "present" level of the ground, so that they trudged along up to their spectral knees in the dirt; or at another time they appeared to be stepping on air.

  In the forest, they were able to walk straight through the trees. But an occasional tree would stop them; they felt it as a marshmallowy presence and had to go round it; for its lifespan would be long enough -- it would survive the hazards of life long enough -- to create a shadowy obstruction in their path.

  When sunset was drawing near, Bush stopped and pitched his tent, pumping until it struggled into position. He and the girl ate together, and then he washed himself rather ostentatiously as they prepared for sleep.

  "Don't you ever wash?" he asked.

  "Sometimes. I suppose you wash to please yourself?"

  "Who else?"

  "I stay grubby to please myself."

  "It must be some sort of neurosis."

  "Yes. Probably it's because it always annoys clean blighters like you."

  He sat down by her and looked into her face. "You really want to annoy people, do you? Why? Is it because you think it's good for them? Or good for you?"

  "Maybe it's because I've given up hoping to please them."

  "I've always thought people were on the whole pathetically easy to please." Later, when he recalled that fragment of conversation, he was annoyed that he had not paid more attention to her remark; undoubtedly it offered an insight into Ann's behavior, and perhaps a clue as to how she could best be treated. But by that time he had come to the conclusion that for all her prickliness she was a girl one could genuinely converse with -- and she was gone.

  He was wrong in any case to challenge her after she had gone through a tiring day so uncomplainingly; even the Dark Woman had faded off duty.

  He woke next morning to find Ann still asleep, and staggered out to look at the dawn. It was like a dream to climb from bed and find the great overloaded landscape outside; but the dream was capable of sustaining itself for millions of years. A million years . . . perhaps by a scale of values of which mankind might one day be master, a million years would be seen as more meaningless, more of a trifle, than a second. In the same way, not one of these dawns could have as much effect on him as the most insignificant remark Ann might drop.

  As they were packing up to move on, she asked him again if he was going to do a groupage of her. Bush was glad of even uninformed interest in his work.

  "I'm looking for something new to do. I'm at a block -- it's a familiar thing for creative artists. Suddenly human consciousness is lumbered with this entirely new time structure, and I want to reflect it as best I can in my creative work -- without just doing an illustration, if you understand. But I can't begin, can't begin to begin."

  "Are you going to do a groupage of me?"

  "I just told you: no. Groupages aren't portraits of particular people."

  "They're abstracts, I gather?"

  "You don't know J. M. W. Turner's work, do you? Ever since his day -- he was an early Victorian -- we've had technical ways of reproducing the forms of nature. Abstracts reproduce forms of ideas; and, for all our computers, only man can make abstracts."

  "I love computer-pictures."

  "I hate them. My spatial-kinetic groupages try to . . . oh, identify the spirit of a moment, an age. Sometimes, I used to work in mirror-glass -- then everyone saw a SKG differently, with fragments of their own features lurking over it. That's the way we see the universe. There's no such thing as an objective view of the universe -- ever think of that? Our features look back at us from every quarter."

  "Are you, religious, Bush?"

  He shook his head and stood up slowly, looking away from her. "I wish I were religious. My father, he's a dentist, he's a religious man. . . . Yet sometimes, when I was successful, when the ideas were really pouring out of my fingers, doing my best SKGs, I knew I had a bit of God in me."

  At the mention of God, they both became self-conscious. As he helped Ann up, Bush said in curt, workaday tones, "So you don't know Turner's work?"

  That closed the subject.

  Not until the afternoon, as they were coming down onto the plains, did they see the first creatures of the plains, sporting in a valley. Instinct asserting itself, Bush's impulse was to watch them from behind a tree. Then he recalled they were less than ghosts to these bulky creatures, and walked out into the open towards them. Ann followed.

  Eighteen stegosauri seemed to fill the small valley. The male was a giant, perhaps twenty feet long and round as a barrel, his spiky armor making him appear much larger than he was. The chunky plates along his backbone were a dull slaty green, but much of his body armor was a livid orange. He tore at foliage with his jaws, but perpetually kept his beady eyes alert for danger.

  He had two females with him. They were smaller than he, and more lightly armored. One in particular was prettily marked, the plates of her spine being almost the same light yellow as her underbelly.

  About the stegosauri frisked their young. Bush and Ann walked among them, absolutely immune. There were fifteen of them, and obviously not many weeks hatched. Unencumbered as yet by more than the lightest vestige of armor, they skipped about their mothers like lambs, often standing on their tall bind legs, sometimes jumping over their parents' wickedly spiked tails.

  The two humans stood in the middle of the herd, watching the antics of the young reptiles.

  "Maybe that's why these things became extinct," Ann said. "The young ones all got hooked on jumping their mothers' tails and spiked themselves to death!"

  "It's as good as any other theory to date."

  Only then did he notice the intruder, although the old man stegosaur had been backing about puffily for some while. From a nearby thicket, another animal was watching the scene. Bush took Ann's arm and directed her attention to the spot. As he did so, the bushes parted and another stegosaurus emerged. This was a male, smaller and presumably younger than the leader of the herd, his tail swishing from side to side.

  The females and the young paid only the most cursory attention to the intruder; the females continued to munch, the youngsters to play. The leader immediately charged forward to deal with the intruder; he was being challenged for possession of the herd.

  Traveling smartly towards each othe
r, the two males hit, shoulder to shoulder. To the humans, it was entirely soundless. The great beasts stood there absorbing the shock, and then slowly pressed forward until they were side by side, one facing one way, one the other. They began to heave at each other, using their tails for leverage but never as weapons. Their mouths opened. They displayed little sharp teeth. Still the females and their young showed no interest in what was happening.

  The males strained and struggled, their legs bowed until their ungainly bodies almost touched the ground. The older animal was winning by sheer weight. Suddenly, the intruder was forced to take a step backwards. The leader nearly fell onto him. They stood apart. For a moment, the intruder looked back at the females, his mouth hanging open. Then he lumbered off into the nearby thicket and was not seen again.

  After a few snorts of triumph, the leader of the little herd returned to his females. They looked up, then resumed their placid munching.

  "A lot they care what happens to him!" Bush said.

  "They've probably learned by now that there's not much to choose between one male and another."

  He looked sharply at her. She was grinning. He softened, and smiled back.

  When they climbed out of the far end of the valley, they had a wide panorama of the plains with a river meandering through them. Great forests started again a mile or two away. Close at hand, situated on a long outcrop of rock, was the Borrows' tent, and other signs of human habitation.

  "At least we can get a drink," Ann said as they approached the motley collection of tents.

  "You go ahead. I want to stay here for a while and think." Bush still had his head stuffed full of dinosaurs. They disturbed him. Morally? Two men disputing over women rarely showed as little vindictiveness as those great armored vegetarians. Aesthetically? Who could say what beauty was, except from his own standpoint? In any case, that great spinal column, rising to its highest point over the pelvis and then dying away in the spiked tail, had its own unassailable logic. Intellectually? He thought of Lenny, and then diverted his attention back to the sportive reptilian young, so full of wit in their movements.

  He squatted on the spongy floor, which here corresponded almost exactly with a boulder, and watched Ann walking away from him. He overcame an impulse to pluck a nearby leaf and chew it; vegetation here was unpluckable by any ghostly fingers.

  One of the most curious effects of mind-travel was the diminution of light suffered by anyone out of their proper time. Only a few yards away, Ann was already in deep shadow, and the Borrows' bar, although white-painted, was even gloomier. But there were other shades here that added not merely gloom but horror to the scene. Borrow had chosen what was evidently a popular site. Future generations of mind-travelers would also congregate here; it would become a town -- perhaps the first Jurassic town. The signs of its future success were all round. Spectral figures of future buildings and people could be seen, drabber and mistier as they were further in the future.

  Bush was sitting close to a building very much superior to the tents of his own generation. By its degree of slaty shade, so transparent that he could see the unkempt landscape through it, he judged it to emanate from a time perhaps a century or more ahead of his own. Those future beings had solved many of the problems that in these early days of mind-travel seemed utterly baffling: for instance, the transportation of heavy materials and the installation of electric plants. The future had moved in to live in style in the remote past; Bush's present could do no more than camp like savages here. They would also have solved the problem of sewage; his generation was leaving its excreta strewn from the Pleistocene to the Cambrian without the hope or excuse that it would ever turn into coprolites.

  From the future building, people were leaning. So faintly were they drawn on the air, it was impossible to be sure if they were men or women. He had that disturbing feeling that their eyes were slightly brighter than they should be. They could see him no better than be could see them, but the sensation of being overlooked was uncomfortable. Bush turned his gaze away towards the plain, only to realize how covered it was with the misty obstructions of future time. Two faint phantasms of men walked through him, deep in conversation, not a decibel of which leaked through the time-entropy barrier to him. He had already noticed that his shadow woman was near him again; how did she feel about Ann? Ghost though she was, she would have feelings, there in her stifling future. The whole of space-time was becoming stuffed with human feelings. Briefly, he thought again of Monet. The old boy was right to concentrate on water lilies; they might overgrow their pond, but you never caught them swarming over the bank and the nearby trees as well.

  He recalled Borrow had been a painter, back in their youth. Borrow would be a good man to talk to. Borrow was hard-hearted, but he could sometimes make you laugh.

  As he got up and strolled towards his friend's establishment, he saw that Borrow had very much improved the amenities. There were three tents instead of the pair there had been, and two of them were considerable in size. One was a sort of general store-cum-trading post, one was a bar, one was a cafe. Over them all, Borrow and his wife had hoisted a great sign: THE AMNIOTE EGG.

  Behind the tents, before them, amid them, were other collections of buildings in strange styles of architecture, some of them also called THE AMNIOTE EGG, all of them in various degrees of shadow, according to their degrees of futurity. It had been the presence of these shadows, so clearly omens of success, that had encouraged the Borrows to set up business in the first place; they were flourishing on the paradox.

  "Two amniote eggs and chips," Bush said, as he pushed his way into the cafe.

  Ver was behind the counter. Her hair was greyer than Bush remembered it; she would be about fifty. She smiled her old smile and came out from behind the counter to shake Bush's hand. He noted that her hand felt glassy; they had not mind-traveled back from the same year; the same effect made her face greyer, shadier, than it really was. Even her voice came muted, drained away by the slight time-barrier. He knew that the food and drink, when he took it, would have the same "glassy" quality and digest slowly.

  They chaffed each other affectionately, and Bush said the old place was clearly making Ver's fortune.

  "Bet you don't even know what an amniote egg is," Ver said. Her parents had christened her Verbena, but she preferred the contraction.

  "It means big business to you, doesn't it?"

  "We're keeping body and soul together. And you, Eddie? Your body looks all right -- how's the soul doing?"

  "Still getting trouble from it." He had known this woman well in the days when he and Borrow were struggling painters, before mind-travel, had even slept with her once or twice before Roger had become seriously interested. It all seemed a long while ago -- about a hundred and thirty million years ago, or ahead, whichever it was. Sometimes past and future became confused and seemed to flow in opposite directions to normal. "Don't seem to get as many signals from it as I used to, but those that do come through are mainly bad."

  "Can't they operate?"

  "Doc says it's incurable." It was marvelous how he could talk so trivially to her about such momentous things. "Talking of incurables, how's Roger?"

  "He's okay. You'll find him out back. You doing any grouping nowadays, Eddie?"

  "Well -- I'm just in a sort of transition stage. I'm -- hell, no, Ver, I'm absolutely lost at the moment." He might as well tell her an approximation of the truth; she was the only woman who asked about his work because she actually cared what he did.

  "Lost periods are sometimes necessary. You're doing nothing?"

  "Did a couple of paintings last time I was in 2090. Just to pass the time. Structuring time, psychologists call it. There's a theory that man's biggest problem is structuring time. All wars are merely part-solutions to the problem."

  "The Hundred Years War would rate as quite a success in that case."

  "Yep. It puts all art, all music, all literature, into that same category. All time-passers, Lear , 'The St. Matthew P
assion,' 'Guernica,' 'Sinning in the City.'"

  "The difference is one of degree, presumably."

  "It's the degrees I'm up against right now."

  They exchanged smiles. He pressed into the back to find Borrow. For the first time -- or had he felt the same thing before and forgotten it? -- he thought that Ver was more interesting than her husband.

  Borrow was pottering about outside in the grey daylight. Like his wife, he was inclining to stoutness, but he still dressed as immaculately as ever, with the old hint of the dandy about him. He straightened as Bush came across to him and held out a hand.

  "Haven't seen you in a million years, Eddie. How's life? Do you still hold the record for low-distance mind-travel?"

  "As far as I know, Roger. How're you doing?"

  "What's the nearest year to home you ever reached?"

  "There were men about." He did not get the drift of, or see the necessity for, his friend's question.