Anonymous Rex (31 page)

I am greeted by a chorus of catcalls and groans as the fourteen Southern California representatives from the remaining dinosaur species welcome me back with closed arms. They are fully unguised, and wander around the basement in a state of naked autonomy. Tails bat against one another as they swish freely about the floor, and I’m glad to see that there are no blood marks on the walls—yet. Harold has made a smart move and hung large plastic tarps across the sofas, the chairs, the coffee tables, in order to protect his furniture from stains once the stuff starts flying. And at Council meetings, it will always start flying, sooner or later.

There’s Parsons, the Stegosaur, an accountant for a small firm downtown, and Seligman, the Allosaur rep, a big-shot attorney up in Century City. Oberst, the Iguanodon dentist, gives me a sidelong leer, and the T-Rex, Kurzban, some sort of evolutionary psych professor up at UCLA, chooses to ignore my presence altogether. But not everyone’s a professional—Mrs. Nissenberg, our Coleo rep whose first name I can never remember, is a homemaker and quilter extraordinaire, and Rafael Colon—Hadrosaur—is a hopeless shiftabout who fancies himself an actor because he got a few bit parts back
when
Miami Vice
needed scruffy criminals. And of course, there’s Handleman, the representative for the Procompsognathus population, and a Council meeting wouldn’t be complete without a Compy there to make it all the more excruciating.

“Why you here?” he chirps. “Huh, we kick you out!”

“It really isn’t wise,” mutters Seligman.

The new Raptor representative—Glasser, according to a name tag rudely affixed to his scaled chest, a tallish fellow with a nice tan hide—strolls up and sticks out his hand. “Thanks for screwing up, mate,” he says with a hint of an Australian accent. “No ill will, eh?”

“No worries,” I respond.

But the rest of them are mighty worried, screaming about how I abused their finances, abused their trust, abused the power of the Council for my own selfish motives, and I can’t disagree with any of them. “You’re right,” I say. “All of you, one hundred percent correct.”

But none of them are even willing to listen until Harold brings the full weight of his body and his power to the floor. His tail flops heavily behind him as he walks, and it clips Mrs. Nissenberg across the cheek. She yelps in pain, but nobody seems to notice or care.

“It’s the rules, ladies and gentlemen. The Rules. We live by them here, and even though as individuals some of us choose to ignore them”—sharp glance in my direction—“this group as a whole cannot. If the rules say that the Raptor can stay, then the Raptor can stay.”

Renewed arguments, heated debate, and I put up my hand for silence. I get none, so I shout over them. “Wait! Wait! I don’t want to stay.”

This quiets them down enough for me to issue my ultimatum. “I’ll make you a deal. There’s some information you now have in your possession, and I would like to be here when that information is presented.”

A sharp glance from Harold—he knows what I’m talking about. “When were you going to go over that … stuff?” I ask.

“It’s listed as new business, so … tomorrow sometime.” And this is what they consider an
emergency
meeting.

“How’s this: Get to it now—right now—let me stay here until it’s over—and then I’ll sign the papers, and you never have to see me again.”

“Ever again?” they ask as one.

“Gone like I was a bad dream.”

An electric murmur from the group. Harold asks, “Can we have a minute to think this over?”

“Thirty seconds,” I respond. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

This group couldn’t figure out whether or not to breathe in only thirty seconds let alone process my request, but after a short series of motions and calls to order, my ultimatum is answered. Harold walks to the bottom of the basement stairs and yells up at his loving partner.

“Maria!” And, after a few moments have passed with no response, “MARIA!”

“Yes, Harold?” comes the frightened reply.

“Send down Dr. Solomon.” Harold turns back to the group, addressing us as one.

“Yesterday morning, I got some information I thought the Council might find interesting. Brings up some new questions about an old topic, adds in a twist I’m not quite sure whether or not to believe. I don’t even know all the specifics yet, but we’ll learn them together soon enough.”

“What is it?” squawks Handleman, and we all tell him to shush.

“Before I share this with you, let me say that despite the potential implications this may have, everyone should remain calm, and perhaps we can come to a solution in an appropriate amount of time.” Hah! I’ll be long gone before they’ve even decided the order in which they’ll try to kill one another.

Harold Johnson heads over toward Oberst and Seligman, waddling like an oversized mallard. The two dinos flinch as he approaches, arranging themselves back to back, circling their wagons so as to defend their territory. Shooting the Allosaur and Iguanodon representatives a look of disgust, Johnson pushes past them, making for a file cabinet set beneath a rotted writing desk. I cannot see what he is doing, but I can hear a number of locks clicking open, granting him access to the treasures beyond.

He strides back into the middle of the room, a thick sheaf of papers bound by masses of colored rubber bands tucked beneath his arm. The edges of the individual pages have been singed, some to the point of ash. Black snowflakes flutter to the ground.

“This is only about one percent of the original stash,” says Johnson, holding the bundle aloft for all to see. “The other ninety-nine percent has been lost to us. It burned in a nightclub fire sometime last week. Owner of the club died in the blast.”

“He died?” I blurt out, unable to stop myself.

“This morning,” says Johnson. “I got the call a few hours ago.” I feel an odd sense of loss; though I never knew Burke personally, I have grown to understand the Raptor over these past few days. I have been privy to his likes, his dislikes, his relationships both moral and otherwise. I can only hope that Jaycee Holden has a strong shoulder nearby when she hears the news.

“But these papers”—and Johnson pretentiously waves the packet around like McCarthy holding his blacklist, crisped edges crackling in the air—“these are something altogether more important than any single dinosaur life. They were found in the bottom of a cardboard box that had been tucked away in the nightclub’s storeroom.

“They appear to belong to Dr. Emil Vallardo, the dino geneticist working out of New York. They contain information regarding his … mixing experiments.”

Eureka! I want to shout. That’s why Judith McBride denied ever funding Donovan’s nightclub—it was Vallardo who fronted the money all along! Still, funding a nightclub clear across the country just so you could hide some papers there seems like an awful length to go to in order to protect an experiment that has already been heavily documented by the Councils.

“And this,” Johnson says, holding aloft a small glass vial, his pudgy fingers spreading across the surface, “is what they found in a hidden safe tucked beneath the floorboards.”

Mrs. Nissenberg lifts her head. “What is it?”

Johnson’s voice drops three notches. “This is one of his experiments. This is a mixed embryo.”

Chaos.

“We must disbar him!” screams Oberst.

“You can’t disbar doctors,” says Seligman. “That’s lawyers.”

“We could have his license taken away—”

“The children, what about the children?”

As I lean back in my chair, using my tail as a balancing mechanism,
I tune out all of the commotion around me—the harangues against Vallardo and his corruption of nature, the cries of
what shall become of us, we will all become mongrels
, the gasping and the wheezing and the whimpers over the destruction of our species. And despite my congenital aversion to any type of whining whatsoever, I can’t say that I blame them. The Council members, like all other dinos, are worried. They are worried about unity, they are worried about the conflict of science and nature, and they are worried about what is right and what is wrong in a world in which we must hide ourselves away, in which morals are topsy-turvy and positions can flip-flop from day to day.

Most of all, they are worried that they will lose their identity. But it is pointless to fret in this manner; we lost it a long time ago.

From the staircase, then: A clomp. Two thumps. Pause. A clomp. Two thumps. The sounds of a tired three-legged horse, of a body being dragged down a flight of stairs by reluctant murderers. A clomp. Two thumps.

The pounding is soon accompanied by a voice, insistent, crotchety: “Well? Are you helping or are you not helping?”

Harold bolts up the stairs—Brontos can haul when they need to—and, a minute later, reemerges holding an elderly man in one arm and a walker in the other. “Put me down,” the old man grunts. “I can walk, I can walk. Stairs, no. Floor, yes.”

“This is Dr. Otto Solomon,” Johnson says, “a partner of Vallardo’s from many, many years ago, and I think he may be able to shed a little light on the issue.” The doctor—a Hadrosaur, if the scent hits me right—is still guised up in his human costume, and he’s a curious little thing. Accent like an SS commandant, five feet high, face like a shar-pei, hair follicles clutching at the scalp, scrabbling for purchase but fighting a losing battle. It’s a wonderful approximation of human deterioration, and I can’t help but marvel at his choice of costume; I can only hope that when I reach his age I have the guts to so accurately depict my own physical decrepitude.

“What are you staring at?” he asks, and I chuckle, sorry for whomever he has caught in midgaze. “I said what are you staring at, Raptor?”

“Me?” Whoops.

“Are you done staring?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes … Doctor?”

“That is more like it.” Dr. Solomon snatches his walker from Johnson and gallops into the center of our circle—clop thump thump clop thump thump—zipping along with surprising speed for a dino of his age and infirmities.

“Before I give you my analysis of the situation,” he says, each word a clipped command of Teutonic control, “is there anyone who has something important to say? Something that cannot wait?”

No hands are raised.

“Good,” says Solomon. “Then you will kindly remember to shut up while I am speaking. I do not answer questions until I am done, and I do not entertain speculation at any time.”

Again, we agree to his demand. Dr. Solomon pulls himself erect, stares each of us in the eye one by one, working the room. He begins with a short discussion of creation, of the primordial ooze and the single-celled organisms that had nothing better to do with their time than swim around, mutate, and divide. We work our way into early forms of multicellular life before the doctor starts babbling on about DNA, genetic codes, and long-strand proteins.

After nearly thirty minutes have gone by, during which time Mrs. Nissenberg has to poke me with her knitting needle just to keep me from falling asleep, I raise my hand high and ask, “Is there a layman’s explanation for this?”

The doctor doesn’t even glance over; he ignores me and continues with his speech. “… and so, with the ribosomes taking up the available material …”

But I’m determined to get to the bottom of this before dinner. “Excuse me, Dr. Solomon, but what does any of this have to do with Vallardo’s papers?”

The doctor thunks over toward me, eyes blazing. “You want it so easy,” he says. “All your generation, you want it now, you want it on a platter. You don’t want to have to think about the answer—you want others to do the work for you. Is that it? Is that what you’re looking for?”

“That’s the situation in a nutshell, Doc.” I look around the room,
and the feeling, it seems, is mutual. “Now can you fork it over, please?”

Solomon sighs, shaking his head in pity for us poor unlearned masses. “Dr. Vallardo’s papers, along with the once-frozen embryo inside that vial, indicate an experiment in cross-species mating,” he says plainly.

“We already knew that!” cries Johnson. “We’ve known that for six months now.”

“Six months!” yelps Handleman, anxious to exercise his vocal cords. “Six months!”

The others join in the harangue, blasting Solomon for wasting a half hour of our time on scientific fiddle-faddle, but the doctor claps his hands three times—smack smack smack—and comfortably commands silence in the basement once more.

“If you would stop your yapping,” he says, each word tinged with ice, “maybe you would be able to listen to me as well as hear me. Listen. Dr. Vallardo has long been engaged in cross-race mating. But this is not what I just told you.”

Handleman again—“Six months!”

“What I said,” Solomon continues, “is that all of this evidence, if I am reading it correctly, show that he has begun experiments in cross-
species
mating.”

“Cross-species?” Colon repeats, unsure of the term’s definition.

“Like what?” Oberst asks.

Colon steps up. “Like a … like a dog and a cat?”

“Or a mouse and a chicken?” asks Mrs. Nissenberg.

“A donkey and a fish!” yells Kurzban.

But I understand it all now, the whole thing, the big picture, the kit, the kaboodle, and motives to boot. Well, most of it, anyway. I step up.

“How about the mating of a dinosaur and a human?” I ask, already knowing I’ve got this one dead to rights. “Is that what Dr. Vallardo’s been working on?”

Solomon smiles, a slow, wry grin he casually tosses in my direction. “See,” he says, “some of you do know how to listen.”