But she could not cope, not anymore.
She had always been the weakest of her brood. She would not even have survived the first days after her hatching if not for the chance decimation of her siblings by a roaming marsupial predator. She had grown to overcome her physical weakness, and had become an effective hunter. But in a dark part of her mind she had always remained the weakest, robbed of food by her siblings, even eyed as a cannibalistic snack.
Add to that a slow poisoning by the fumes and dust of the volcanoes in the west. Add to that an awareness of her own aging. Add to that the hammer blow of her lost brood. She hadn’t been able to get Purga’s scent out of her head.
It had not been hard to pursue that scent out of her home range, across the floodplain to the ocean shore, and now to this new place where the scent of Purga was strong.
Wounding Tooth stood still and silent. The burrow, her nose told her, was right under her feet. She bent and pressed one side of her head against the ground. But she heard nothing. The primates were very still.
So she waited, through the long hours, as the sun rose higher on this last day, as the comet light grew subtly brighter. She did not even flinch when meteors flared overhead.
If she had known about the giganotosaur that watched her she would not have cared. Even if she could have understood the meaning of the comet light, she would not have cared. Let her have Purga; that was all.
It was a peculiar irony that her high intelligence had brought Wounding Tooth to this. She was one of the few dinosaur types smart enough to have gone insane.
It was not yet dark. Purga could tell that from the glint of light at the rough portal to the burrow. But what was day, what was night in these strange times?
After several nights bathed in comet light, she was exhausted, fractious, hungry — and so was her mate, Third, and her two surviving pups. The pups were just about large enough to hunt for themselves now, and therefore dangerous. If there was not enough food, the family, pent up in this burrow, might turn on one another.
The imperatives slid through her mind, and a new decision was reached. She would have to go out, even if the time felt wrong, even if the land was flooded with light. Hesitantly she moved toward the burrow entrance.
Once outside, she stopped to listen. She could hear no earth-shaking footsteps. She stepped forward, muzzle twitching, whiskers exploring.
The light was strong, strange. In the sky cometary matter continued to fall, streaking across the dome of the sky like silent fireworks. It was extraordinary, somehow compelling — too remote to be frightening.
An immense cage plunged out of the sky. She scrabbled back toward the burrow. But those great hands were faster, thick ropy muscles pulling the fingers closed around her.
And now she faced a picket fence of teeth, hundreds of them, a tremendous face, reptilian eyes as big as her head. A giant mouth opened, and Purga smelled meat.
The dinosaur’s face, with its great, thin-skinned snout, had none of the muscular mobility of Purga’s. Wounding Tooth’s head was rigid, expressionless, like a robot’s. But though she could not show it, all of Wounding Tooth’s being was focused on the tiny warm mammal in her grip.
Her limbs pinned against her belly, Purga stopped struggling.
Oddly, Purga, in this ultimate moment, knew a certain peace that Wounding Tooth would have envied. Purga was already in her middle age, already slowing in her movements and thought. And she had, after all, achieved as much as a creature like her could have hoped for. She had produced young. Even encased in the troodon’s cold reptilian grip, she could smell her young on her own fur. In her way she was content. She would die — here and now, in heartbeats — but the species would go on.
But something moved beyond the troodon’s bulky body, something even more massive, a gliding mountain, utterly silent.
The troodon was unbelievably careless. Giant didn’t care why. And he didn’t care about the warm scrap she held in her hands.
His attack was fast, silent, and utterly savage, a single bite to her neck. Wounding Tooth had time for a moment of shock, of unbelievable pain — and then, as whiteness enfolded her, a peculiar relief.
Her hands opened. A ball of fur tumbled through the air.
Before Wounding Tooth’s body fell Giant had renewed his attack. Briskly he slit open the belly cavity and began pulling out entrails. He expelled their contents by shaking them from side to side; bloody, half-digested food showered the area.
Soon his two brothers came racing across the clearing. Giganotosaurs hunted together, but their society was fragile at the best of times. Giant knew he couldn’t defend his kill, but he was determined not to lose it all. Even as he chewed on the liver of Wounding Tooth, he turned to kick and bite.
Purga found herself on the ground. Above her, mountains battled with ferocious savagery. A rain of blood and saliva fell all around her. She had no idea what had happened. She had been ready for death. Now here she was in the dirt, free again.
And the light in the sky grew stranger yet.
The comet nucleus could have passed through the volume of space occupied by Earth in just ten minutes.
In the great boiling it had endured the comet had lost a great deal of mass, but not a catastrophic amount. If it had been able to complete its skim around the sun, it would have soared back out to the cometary cloud, quickly cooling, the lovely coma and tail dispersing into the dark, to resume its aeonic dreaming.
If.
For days, weeks, the great comet had worked its way across the sky — but slowly, its hour-by-hour motion imperceptible to any creature who glanced up at it, uncomprehending. But now the bright-glowing head was
All across the daylit side of the planet, silence fell. Around the drying lakes the crowding duckbills looked up. Raptors ceased their stalking and pursuit, just for a moment, their clever brains struggling to interpret this unprecedented spectacle. Birds and pterosaurs flew from their nests and roosting places, already startled by a threat they could not understand, seeking the comfort of the air.
Even the warring giganotosaurs paused in their brutal feeding.
Purga bolted for the darkness of her burrow. The disembodied head of the troodon fell behind her, lodging in the burrow’s entrance, following Purga with a grotesque, empty stare as the light continued to shift.
CHAPTER 2
The Hunters of Pangaea
Eighty million years before Purga was born, an ornitholestes stalked through the dense Jurassic forest, hunting diplodocus.
This ornith was an active, carnivorous dinosaur. She was about the height of an adult human, but her lithe body was less than half the weight. She had powerful hind legs, a long, balancing tail, and sharp conical teeth. She was coated in brown, downy feathers, a useful camouflage in the forest fringes where her kind had evolved as hunters of carrion and eggs. She was like a large, sparsely feathered bird.
But her forehead might almost have been human, with a high skullcap that sat incongruously over a sharp, almost crocodilian face. Around her waist was a belt and a coiled whip. In her long, grasping hands she carried a tool, a kind of spear.
And she had a name. It would have translated as something like Listener — for, although she was yet young, it had already become clear that her hearing was exceptional.
Listener was a dinosaur: a big-brained dinosaur who made tools and who had a name.
For all their destructiveness, the great herds of duckbills and armored dinosaurs of Purga’s day were but a memory of the giants of the past. In the Jurassic era had walked the greatest land animals that had ever lived. And they had been stalked by hunters with poison-tipped spears.
Listener and her mate slid silently through the green shade of the forest fringe, moving with an unspoken coordination that made them look like two halves of a single creature. For generations, reaching back to the red-tinged mindlessness of their ancestors, this species of carnivore had hunted in mating pairs, and so they did now.
The forest of this age was dominated by tall araucaria and ginkgoes. In the open spaces there was a ground cover of ground ferns, saplings, and pineapple-shrub cycadeoids. But there were no flowering plants. This was a rather drab, unfinished-looking world, a world of gray-green and brown, a world without color, through which the hunters stalked.
Listener was first to hear the approach of the diplo herd. She felt it as a gentle thrumming in her bones. She immediately dropped to the ground, scraping away ferns and conifer needles, and pressed her head against the compacted soil.
The noise was a deep rumble, like a remote earthquake. These were the deepest voices of the diplos — what Listener thought of as belly-voices, a low-frequency contact rumble that could carry for kilometers. The diplo herd must have abandoned the grove where it had spent the chill night, those long hours of truce when hunters and hunted alike slid into dreamless immobility. It was when the diplos moved that you had a chance to harass the herd, perhaps to pick off a vulnerable youngster or invalid.
Listener’s mate was called Stego, for he was stubborn, as hard to deflect from his course as a mighty — but notoriously tiny-brained — stegosaur. He asked,
Hunting carnivores were accustomed to working silently. So their language was a composite of soft clicks, hand signals, and a ducking body posture — no facial expressions, for the faces of these orniths were as rigid as any dinosaur’s.
As they approached the herd, the noise of the great animals’ belly-voices became obvious. It made the very ground shake: The languid fronds of ferns vibrated, and dust danced up, as if in anticipation. And soon the orniths could hear the footfalls of the mighty animals, tremendous, remote impacts that sounded like boulders tumbling down a hillside.
The orniths reached the very edge of the forest. And there, before them, was the herd.
When diplodocus walked, it was as if the landscape were shifting, as if the hills had been uprooted and were moving liquidly over the land. A human observer might have found it difficult to comprehend what she saw. The
The largest of this forty-strong herd was an immense cow, a diplo matriarch who had been the center of this herd for over a century. She was fully thirty meters long, five meters tall at the hips, and she weighed twenty tons — but then even the youngsters of the herd, some as young as ten years old, were more massive than the largest African elephant. The matriarch walked with her immense neck and tail held almost horizontal, running parallel to the ground for tens of meters. The weight of her immense gut was supported by her mighty hips and broad, elephantine legs. Thick ropelike ligaments ran up her neck, over her back, and along her tail, all supported in canals along the top of her backbone. The weight of her neck and tail tensed the ligaments over her neck, thereby balancing the weight of her torso. Thus she was constructed like a biological suspension bridge.
The matriarch’s head looked almost absurdly small, as if it belonged to another animal entirely. Nevertheless this was the conduit through which all her food had to pass. She fed constantly;
