Dancing in Dreamtime (34 page)

She had met him six years earlier, when he approached her at a VIVA conference with a song sparrow in his hands, inviting her to hold it. Even without his rangy good looks, his passion for
birds would have attracted her. Since childhood, she had yearned for companions who shared her gift—or affliction—of sensing biological fields. Oh, to meet a St. Francis, Thoreau, Leopold, or Carson! Such people, uncommon at any time, were exceedingly rare in her own age, when humans lived inside the Enclosure, never leaving the network of travel tubes and domed cities, wandering among their own artifacts like joy-seekers lost in a labyrinth of mirrors.

So when LaForest invited her to hold the tiny sparrow, his face aglow, Keeva had felt a tremor of recognition. Soon they were members of the same Project VIVA team, then survey partners, and eventually lovers. His bio-sense proved to be weaker than hers, but his reasoning was more powerful. Their complementary skills made them a brilliant survey team—Keeva locating the organisms, LaForest fitting them into the scheme of near-galaxy life. In their first five years together, they produced bio-maps for seven E-type planets. By the time video arrived from drones sent to Aton-17, showing skies filled with bird-like creatures, she and LaForest were in a position to choose their own survey locations, and of course they chose to go investigate these flying wonders.

This was the dream, she knew, that sustained him through the arduous training for Project VIVA and the ordeal of warp-jump, this dream of finding, somewhere among the millions of E-type planets in the Milky Way, creatures analogous to the avifauna that once flourished on Earth. Now he had found not merely analogies but exact matches.

LaForest gently placed the last of the captured birds in a mist cage. Bending near, he made cooing sounds, more like a doting father-bird than a sober scientist. “So now we have two mysteries,” he said.

“How they got here and—what?”

“Why they all belong to species that are extinct on Earth.”

She contemplated the rainbow of birds. “
All
of them?”

He nodded. “Every last one. Extinguished.”

“How long ago?”

“Most of them since 2020. A few earlier.”

She bent over the warbling turquoise bit of fluff which LaForest had identified as an indigo bunting. It was like a bright scrap torn from the enormous predator that had killed the swan. “When did this one disappear?”

“Around 2050.”

“And this one?” She pointed to a small, streaked bird with a cocked tail and down-curved beak.

“Yucatan wren, last sighted in Mexico about 2040, soon after Enclosure.”

Keeva gazed at the chittering, posturing, preening birds. Who, seeing such beauty, could bear to have it erased? Had her ancestors ever imagined it this concretely—a chorus of vibrant, singing creatures banished forever?

“Of course,” LaForest mused, “our sample may be skewed. We may have stumbled onto the only pocket of birds on the planet. Or there may be hundreds of other species that are nothing like Earth's.” He smoothed his beard with fingers and thumb. “We've got to find out how they blundered into these familiar shapes.”

“Life doesn't
blunder
,” she said. “These aren't accidents.”

“You think some deity collected them on Earth and planted them here?”

“Of course not,” she said defensively. “It's just a feeling I get from the birds, a note common to all of them.”

“A feeling—”

“Something familiar, something I've picked up before—”

“On Earth?”

“I'm not sure where.” Eyes closed, tracing the energy field radiating from the caged birds, she tried to name that elusive overtone.

Each morning the survey teams set out in their shuttles to study the planet. They found bizarre vegetation, colonies of clicking bugs, legless ground-wrigglers, inflated water-skimmers—nothing even faintly earthlike, except for birds, and birds they found everywhere. Some they netted, but most they merely scanned, for the ship was soon crowded with specimens.

Even the most improbable of the birds—ones with bills like hatchets, wattles bright as neon signs, feathers in more zany colors than a clown's wardrobe—proved to be identical with species that had once flourished on Earth but were now extinct: whooping cranes, emus, auks, an array of hummingbirds, three kinds of eagle, nine owls, leggy herons, bald vultures. Born into the desolate age of the Enclosure that followed the Great Extinction, Keeva found it hard to imagine her home planet had ever held such bounty.

Here on Aton-17, birds appeared to occupy the top of the food chain. The lattice-work forests abounded with small creatures, none of them quick or powerful enough to prey on adult birds, but perhaps they kept the avian population in check by raiding nests.

For the next few days, nobody sighted the menacing raptors. Every time she glanced at the sky, Keeva nerved herself for that huge silhouette and its blast of hunger. Then one afternoon, as she and LaForest were returning to the ship with a cargo of birds,
a wide-winged shape glided onto the shuttle screen, wheeling overhead.

“Uh, oh,” she said.

“What's the matter?” said LaForest.

Before she could answer, the creature dove. Keeva threw the craft into a roll but could not evade the raptor, which slammed into the shuttle. The captive birds screeched. Keeva jounced in her harness, clinging to the joystick. There was a scrabbling sound, talons raking metal, wings buffeting the roof. She fired a mild voltage through the hull, but the jostling continued. She upped the voltage. A crested head loomed in front of her and hammered on the cockpit window. Finally she amped the charge to maximum and the raptor loosed a piercing shriek and spiraled up and away.

Keeva pulled the shuttle out of its dive. The birds cowered in their cages. LaForest looked stricken.

“Whew,” she said. “You all right?”

Between gasps, he muttered, “Now I know how the swans felt.”

The following day, Tishi beamed a breathless call from the nearby canyon where she and Gomez were surveying. “One of those raptors is prowling around upstairs,” she told Keeva, who was in the ship logging data. “I think it's measuring us for supper.”

“You'd only make a couple of mouthfuls,” Keeva said.

“Don't joke. You should see this thing.”

“I've seen one. Listen, you two get in your shuttle and put a scan on it. We'll fly over there and dart that bruiser.”

“Too bad we can't just
kill
it.”

“Now, now. Remember the code. Get under cover and sit tight.”

Keeva had to wake LaForest, who was bone-weary from hours of wading in marshes and climbing pseudo-trees. When he understood what they were going after, he came swiftly alert.

In a few minutes they were nearing the canyon, and could see the other shuttle, sleek and fan-shaped like a stingray, with Tishi and Gomez inside. The raptor circled above, wings motionless for long spells, then it flapped languidly, swiveling its great crested head. Its hunger made Keeva throb. The wheeling flight left a burning afterimage in her mind. Whatever it was, it clearly ruled these skies.

“Some kind of dinosaur,” LaForest murmured, glassing the beast. “Early in the transition to birds. No sign of feathers. Wings covered by membrane. Scaly legs.”

“I'll try to get close enough for a dart,” said Keeva. “You figure the dose.”

While they spoke, the hunter pumped its wings and climbed rapidly.

Focusing the scanner through the cockpit window, LaForest said, “Don't lose it. I'd love to get some DNA. But I need at least a clear scan.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Keeva donned the guide-helmet, so she could steer with her eyes. The predator's hunger drowned out all other sensations. Finger poised on the throttle, she warned, “Hold on.”

The shuttle rose swiftly to pursue the soaring hulk. Its long tapering wings stroked the air. Suddenly it banked, and plunged toward the canyon. Keeva watched it steadily, and the shuttle rode the beam of her sight, diving with giddy speed. The raptor leveled
out a few meters above the canyon floor and raced between the sandy walls. Then it swerved up a side canyon, the great wings nearly raking stone, and with a sickening tilt the shuttle hurtled after, down ever narrower gulches. Keeva was scarcely breathing. The hunt possessed her. Suddenly a bluff loomed ahead, the raptor swooped up and over, Keeva jerked her gaze after it, and the shuttle, lurching, barely cleared the stone rim. In the few seconds it took the craft to right itself, the raptor escaped.

Keeva spun the shuttle, searching the sky. She wanted to chase down that beast, pounce on it, tear it apart, her training forgotten in a rush of adrenalin.

Beside her in the cockpit, LaForest wheezed, “Enough.”

She was shaking. “It can't have gone far.”

“No, please, let it go. I got a good scan.”

She forced her eyes away from the arid landscape, toward her partner. His face was drained, skin drawn tight.

“I never saw you so fierce before,” he said. “It was like blood lust.”

She released a long breath, pulled off the guide-helmet, shook her hair loose. “I never felt a bio-field like that before. It was monstrous, ancient, like some primordial enemy.”

The scanner identified the creature as
Quetzalcoatlus alleni
, a pterosaur from the Cretaceous, with a wingspan up to twelve meters, best known from fossils discovered in the 2020s.

The raptor's aura still haunted Keeva as she roamed among the mist cages feeding and watering birds. The air was thick with trilling. The flood of sensations made her dizzy. That familiar
overtone, part of a melody she could not quite remember, played above the roar.

Tishi and Gomez were hunched over microscopes, examining plants. LaForest was analyzing scans of
Q. alleni
. The skeletal view glimmered on the screen when Minsk and Wodo trooped into the lab with their day's catch of birds and data.

Keeva groaned. “Where are we going to put more birds?”

“Hang them from the ceiling,” answered Wodo cheerfully. Gesturing at the screen, he said, “We saw four of your raptors flying down the coast.”

“Keeva and I saw two on our way back to the ship,” LaForest said.

“I wonder how many of those brutes there are,” said Minsk.

“I'm waiting for an answer to that,” LaForest replied. He had fed to the drones orbiting Aton-17 information on the pterosaur's wingspan, flight pattern, and infrared print, enough metrics to distinguish it from other avifauna. Now he keyed in a request for a global census. A schematic of the planet flashed onto the screen, and black dots began appearing, each one marking the position of a giant raptor. Eventually, skeins of dots encircled the globe, sweeping along coasts and mountain ranges, all converging on a volcanic island near the equator.

“There are
thousands
,” Tishi breathed.

LaForest scratched his beard. “Why the devil are they congregating?”

Keeva imagined that fearsome gathering. “We stirred them up, and they're swarming like bees when you disturb a hive.”