Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel) (35 page)

But this time, Dawn realized, she felt overwhelming hate. She could even taste it, the bitter tang of revenge. Her heart pumped like thunder. She wanted to stop him, wanted to kill him, knew she had only a few minutes more.

She rushed through the spacecraft toward the rack of weapons and grabbed a shotgun. Then she struck out for the hatch. 

When she reached the door, her thoughts catapulted back to some semblance of logic.
You idiot! What are you going to do with a gun?

Dawn knew she couldn’t harm the Keeper, because he was in possession of Gus’s body. She had to get hold of herself. There was Gus to consider now.

Gus. So brave and true. She was inexorably linked to him as his friend, lover, and future wife.
Oh, Gus!
 

She dropped the gun, letting it clatter to the floor, and stormed from the
Valiant
. She desperately scanned the area and then spotted him near the pines. He stood with his back to her, head hanging down and shoulders rounded, his bearing still and silent. There were empty cages scattered about; it was obvious Kris was right about him releasing the lab specimens. 

For a moment, Dawn stood and stared at the barren cages, wondering about the various escaped species. Birds? Snakes? Turtles? Everything
they’d collected? Weren’t they, along with the ubiquitous mammals, the basic mix of creatures that had survived the K/T? But what did it mean? In the modern world, scientists didn’t have a foolproof explanation as to why some species had become extinct, while others had not. Was this the real reason that, for example, birds had come through the K/T, while pterosaurs had not? Had the crew helped them to survive by keeping them safe within their spaceship? But that would mean this particular time-line had happened at least once before, wouldn’t it? Had time looped around on itself? Were they experiencing a repeat of what had gone on earlier?

This time travel mumbo-jumbo was going to make her scream! Then her gaze locked on the contents of the largest specimen cage. The pregnant
Troodon
waited inside, alert, jumping against the metal sides, her snarls filling the air as if she were anticipating her own release. 

Gus moved. Now he was reaching toward the cage. Then he had his hand on the latch!

This was
the
moment, Dawn realized. Everything depended on it.  Even if time had indeed looped, the
Troodon
hadn’t been released on the last go-around. She saw the dinosauroid in her mind’s eye, now certain it had evolved from the troodontids. 

“Gus, no!” Dawn said in desperation. “Don’t you dare! If you open that cage, it will change everything and we won’t be born!” 

He turned. The face belonged to him, yet Dawn didn’t recognize it. His skin was burned, purple, his features drawn tightly over bone in some areas, yet swollen from trauma in others. His lower eyelids drooped in a terrible parody of a wide-awake expression. Even his eyes looked hideous; dark and lifeless, the pupils dilated as though he were already dead. 

Dawn stared at him in horror. He stared back at her like a zombie. 

“Please, wait,” Dawn said, suddenly feeling helpless. “Please, you must wait.”

And then, there was a change in the strange face, and a slow smile crept over the features. “No – you – wait – Dawn,” the Keeper snapped in that distinctively automatic voice. “You – wait... and see.”

His hand tugged at the cage’s latch. The door opened and the pregnant
Troodon
went loping off into the bush.

Dawn felt herself go weak in the knees. She felt fear mixed with rage, and no hope at all. She had failed! 

Suddenly, Gus collapsed, falling heavily to the ground. Dawn took off running. She reached him just as his eyes flickered back to life.

“Dawn,” he whispered. “Oh, Dawn, forgive me.”

“It’s not your fault.” She held his head in her lap, stroking his hair with unsteady hands, making soothing sounds. Rocking him back and forth, she could feel the life force ebbing from his body.

“I love you,” she cried out to him. “I love you, Gus. Don’t leave me––”

“Dawn Ssstroganoff, let me hold him. Pleassse.”

Dawn jumped. The green-skinned dinosauroid stood not an arm’s length from her and Gus. She gaped, unable to believe.

“Dawn, I can heal him. Pleassse, let me hold him.”

Dawn closed her eyes.
This can’t be real.

“Dawn Ssstroganoff, you mussst put aside your doubts, for I am as real as you and Gusss. You are not dreaming.”

Dawn’s eyes flew open.

“He is dying. Pleassse, let me help him. I know how to sssave him.”

Dawn looked down at Gus. His breathing was shallow, his skin icy-cold.
He
is
dying
, she thought in horror.

“Dawn, trussst me.”

A feeling of hope rose in Dawn as she looked into the dinosauroid’s gentle gaze. She felt an inexplicable bond with the creature. “I do trust you,” she said. “Help him. Gus told me you saved his life in the cave. Do it again.”

“I will try.” The dinosauroid’s inner eyelids flickered as she moved in beside Dawn. “Pleassse, let me hold him.”

Dawn’s fingers tightened on Gus’s arm, before she relinquished her hold on him, before she gave him up to... her.

The dinosauroid placed something in her mouth, chewed, then leaned over and pressed herself to Gus, lips to lips, heart to heart. 

Dawn sat there, feeling helpless and desperate.
This has got to work
.

At that precise moment, she heard Gus cough. The dinosauroid cradled him now, rocking him the same way Dawn had done only moments before. 

“Will he make it?” Dawn asked.

“Yesss, put away your fear, for he will live,” the dinosauroid said, “but it is too late really, much too late. I am sssorry, for I could not ssstop the Keeper.” 

Dawn reached out, touching the dinosauroid’s smooth, cool skin, stroking her arm. The creature nodded, then relinquished Gus, letting her take him back. 

When Dawn saw how the skin on his face had started to heal, she drew in a deep breath and then exhaled in relief. “Oh, thank you,” she said. “I love him so.”

“I love Gusss, too.”

The dinosauroid’s voice was suddenly faint to Dawn’s ears. To her surprise, her vision blurred, as though reality had begun to fade away. “What’s happening?” she asked, looking around in confusion.  

“I am not certain, Dawn.”

“I have to know – tell me... who are you?”

“I am you.”

“How is that possible?”

“The Keeper created me. He took the record of your brain waves and implanted it into thisss body. At first, my mind wasss like that of a newborn’s, and it took me a long time to regain my memories, the memories of
your
life. Like your Ssstroganoff ancessstor, your sssoul wasss ssstolen.” The dinosauroid touched herself on the chest. “I have your mind, your thoughts and memories. I
am
you. In your language, I would be called Dragon Dawn.” 

Dawn felt tears spilling down her cheeks. Gus’s body already felt insubstantial, like he was melting away. 

The dinosauroid gazed at Dawn. Her eyes too looked dewy and sorrowful. “I am sssorry. I traveled back in time, but I wasss too late to sssave thisss universsse.” She glanced at Gus. “I wished to make things right. You and Gusss were to be the future, not me,” she shook her head, “not me.”

Dawn felt dizzy. A gray curtain, as fine as gauze, rose before her eyes.
No!
she thought wildly.
This can’t be the end.
 

And then, incongruously, incredibly, she found herself recalling Shakespeare’s poignant words, the ones she’d recited at Lex’s funeral:
We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep
.

Of course
. She kissed Gus, feeling the sweet warmth of his lips, the tender touch. “Sleep, my love. Sleep – for now.” 

Yes, for now
.

Dawn held him, guarding the fragile hope of life resurrected, something to cling to, however impossible it seemed.
I will find you, Gus
, she thought, nurturing the expectation of seeing him once more and loving him again. 

We will be together once more.  Somehow. Whatever it takes. 

“Remember me,” she whispered to him.

Straining to see past the misty air, she took a last look at his cherished face, healed now and, to her mind, even more handsome than before, and then she said, “Dragon Dawn, don’t give up. There is a way to save us.”

“How?” The question was as soft as a whisper, coming from a long way off.

And then, with her last gasp, Dawn drew upon all of her remaining strength and said through the dimming fog, “You must try again.”

Chapter 27

Half to forget the wandering and the pain,

Half to remember days that have gone by,

And dream and dream that I am home again!

~James Elroy Flecker,
Brumana

Dawann-dracon closed her eyes and breathed. She was back now, her mind in the present. She looked at the soul-catching monolith, at the tiny, dust-filled room lying far beneath He Who Watches.

And she remembered now, remembered how it started. Her mind drifted back as she closed her eyes. Days ago, it seemed, she had awakened after a long sleep. Everything seemed familiar, and yet...

She let her thoughts return to that moment in her bed-nest chamber. She saw herself glance at her right hand. At the finely shaped claws. At her three long, elegant, green fingers. And then, she was running her hand along the top of her feathered head.

With a vague sense of loss, she recalled wondering what had changed as she rose from her bed-nest, went to the window, and gazed upon the landscape of the red planet. Dusk had settled deeply over the land. The great volcano, He Who Watches, stood on the far horizon, so huge and enchanting, so compelling a presence, as to fill the entire vista with a lush blackness. 

She watched the ancient summit for a long time. And then she turned and caught a mercurial blue planet, a dot flickering in the night.

Shurrr
. For some reason, she wished to go there, to the Whispering World. She felt drawn to it, as if it were in truth her long-lost home. 

She leaned forward and pressed her face to the glass. Tugging on the very edge of consciousness, a distant summons filled her heart with mysterious yearnings of another place and time.

But how could that be? She was, after all, Dawann-dracon, chief consort of the Lord Keeper, master of the twin worlds of Moozrab and Shurrr. 

She had always lived on Moozrab, hadn’t she? All her life, she had served her lord and master, while dwelling in his grand palace.

She turned, puzzled, and glanced back at her bedchamber.
What has happened to me
? she asked herself
. Why do I feel so different now?

And then, dimly, from faraway, a pair of strange words blazed forth in her mind.

Gus
.
Lex
. 

She felt her pulse quicken.
Gus? Lex?
They were unlike any words she had ever heard before.

Perhaps.

***

“Dawann!” “Your Royal Highness!” “Are you all right, my dear?” 

Dawann’s eyes opened wide as a trio of voices called out to her. Eshlish shook her gently, gazing searchingly into her eyes. She looked beyond the old scientist’s face. Fey stood there. And Tima, too.

“Your Highness, are you all right?” Eshlish asked. “We opened the slick-shaft a few moments ago. We came as soon as we could. It took my engineers nearly the entire day to repair the shaft. I am sorry. Please, forgive me. Forgive all of us.”

“Oh, Holy She-Mother! My dearest girl, we were so worried about you,” Tima cried. 

Dawann rose from the nano-chair, reached out, and embraced her fellow saurians, human-style. “I’m fine,” she reassured them. 

“What happened here?” Fey asked as she touched her claws to the surface of the monolith.

Dawann took a few moments to divulge the highlights of the transmissions of the soul-catcher. But she didn’t tell them everything. There was one secret she wouldn’t share with anyone, ever.

She closed her eyes, recalling how for a brief time, the soul-catcher had worked differently, transporting her, or so it seemed, back to Cretaceous Earth. She had entered Human Dawn so completely, she could see everything through her eyes, hear all of her inner thoughts, feel exactly what she was feeling, touch what she touched. It had happened the first time Human Dawn had sexual intercourse with Gus, and the experience was so profound it made Dawann understand true love, human love, so different from anything she had previously known. She had become so much a part of Human Dawn it seemed to rob her of the memories of that special night. 

Incredibly
, Dawann thought,
they became mine and mine alone. I stole her soul
.

But how? I don’t understand how it could have happened. After all, I was just watching her experiences, wasn’t I?

“Your Highness?”

She turned toward Fey, thrusting her doubts aside. There was still so much to do.

Dawann walked toward the slick-shaft, then motioned her friends forward, anxious to leave. “I shall travel to Shurrr, to the rainforest of Sagamish, and I must leave today.”   

Fey and Eshlish exchanged startled looks and then Fey said, “One of the hunta bird transmissions came back a short while ago. It was from the third door. We saw the mud tribe of the Sagamish basin. They live only a few kilokecs from our lab.”

Dawann flashed her teeth, mimicking a human smile. “The lab where the Lex clone lives?”

The others watched her curiously.

“Yes,” Fey said in a low voice.

Throwing her head back, Dawann gave a good imitation of a laugh. “Good. You see, I know Lex is the key.”

“The key?” Eshlish asked her.

“Yes,” Dawann said. “Tasha saw him – I’m convinced of it. After the real Lex died, she spotted the Lex clone outside the lander. It had to be him. Could it mean the clone and I go there, but that we don’t succeed in changing the past?” She nodded, realizing she was acting so thoroughly human now she was causing the other saurians to shiver. “Yes,” she went on, answering her own question. “I have to believe it does.” 

“What will you do now, Your Highness?” Fey asked.

“I must first read the message on the plaque, especially the words scratched on the back.”

“My plaque? The one I found on Shurrr?” 

“Yes,” Dawann said. “It could hold clues as to how I should proceed. Then I’ll find the Lex clone, because together we’ll travel to the past.”

“You really mean to do this?” Fey asked.

“Of course. Human Dawn awaits me there. So do Gus, Tasha, Kris, and all the rest of the crew. I must do what Dawn asked me to do.”

“And what was that?”

Dawann-dracon looked directly into Fey’s intelligent, soulful eyes. “It’s quite simple, really,” she said. “She asked me to try again.”