Tales of Old Earth (17 page)

“Too bad,” George said complacently. “Looks to me like you negotiated yourself a raw deal.”

“We negotiated in good faith, Mr. Weskowski.”

“You forgot to make it enforceable. You forgot to come up with a way to make Mr.
Giganotosaurus
give a damn.”

He winked and was gone.

Time passed—a season, perhaps less. A cloudy day came when George was ambling moodily across the prairie, moving from stream to stream, watering hole to watering hole, just to see what terror he could stir up among the herbivores. He was feeling rather lonely. More and more, of late, he was feeling lonely. He was contemplating returning to the station, just to see how things were going. He wasn't about to give up his freedom and go to work for them, of course. But he'd learned a lot about being a giganotosaur. Maybe he could barter a bit of information in exchange for some companionship.

It was precisely then that he experienced something unlike anything he had ever felt before.

One instant, everything was normal, and the next all was changed, changed absolutely. He smelled something! His head whipped around, seemingly of its own volition. Something alluring.

Without understanding why, George found himself running.

What's happening to me? he wondered. His mind felt dazed and confused, helplessly out of control, and at the same time strangely joyous. But the body knew what it wanted, and it knew, too, what to do.

He crashed through the thin fringe of cycads along a stream, and splashed through the water and up the other bank. Leafy branches whipped away from his enormous body, and then he was face to face with the source of his new emotions:

It was another giganotosaur.

But this one was a female, a queen. He could tell by her scent. And she was waiting for him.

He could tell that by her scent too.

Their eyes locked. Mincingly, with coquettish little steps, the queen turned away from him, lowering her head, and raising her tail. Her eyes never left his.

He would have thought that the bulge where the top of his skull had been removed and replaced with a ceramic cap to protect his human forebrain would have made him unattractive to a female giganotosaur. Particularly since the skin that had been force-grown over it was still new and pinkish. But it was obvious that this queen thought him a wholly proper giganotosaur.

She raised her head and made a warbling noise.

George felt a strange surging sensation down below, in his cloaca and penile nubs. Distantly, the human part of him felt a kind of repulsed horror. This is bestiality, it babbled, it's sinful, it's wrong, it's disgusting. But that was mere intellectualization. Waves of chemicals swept up from the brain stem and overwhelmed his thoughts, tumbling and drowning them in wild tides of a lust more pure and primitive than anything he'd ever felt before.

He made a deep sound in the back of his throat.

She answered him.

He moved toward her.

She did not retreat.

They screwed right there in the open. The mechanics of it were awkward. They involved him getting alongside her and slowly forcing her to the ground, and then throwing one leg over her stiff tail, while she twisted around toward him, so their private parts could connect. It wasn't easy. But connect they did, and with a roar of triumph he entered her.

It didn't last nearly as long as human sex did. Once they had forced their cloacae together, the act was half-done. But the experience was beyond words. It was the apotheosis of physical contact, all need and urgent selfishness, with not a thought for the pleasure or comfort of his partner. It was rutting, pure and simple.

And it felt great.

Once, the queen moved as if to disengage. Quick as a flash, he seized her throat with his sharp-taloned little arms—now he knew what they were good for!—and didn't let go until he'd gotten everything he wanted out of her.

I have another data point for you, Dr. Alvarez, he thought fleetingly. Dino sex is terrific sex. He'd been to Thailand and he'd been to the Philippines, and wherever he'd gone, he'd bought the best. This was better.

Afterwards he lay sprawled on his back in the ferns, one foot dangling up in the air, like a tabby rolling in a catnip patch. Maybe I'll get a bumper sticker made up and stick it on my ass, he thought:
Giganotosaurs Do It With Genitalia Bigger Than Your Entire Body
.

He had his eyes closed and was savoring the heat of the sun on their lids when something thumped on the ground beside him.

George opened his eyes. It was a juvenile sauropod leg, torn from a carcass that was, by the smell of it, still reasonably fresh. Above it loomed his queen. Obviously a girl who knew how to take care of her guy.

Then he looked beyond her, and rolled over and up on his feet in astonishment. There were two more giganotosaurs standing behind her!

They were both female as well.

George smiled inwardly. Take a number, ladies, he thought, and we'll see what I can do.

Thus began the best period of his life. The queens filled his days with sex and companionship, hunting with him when he felt the urge, and hunting
for
him when he did not. The vague notion he had been incubating of returning to Old Patagonia Station faded to nothing, like the mists that dissolved each morning with the rising of the Mesozoic sun.

The world was his. He filled it. It existed for him and him alone. He inhabited it in all its aspects.

In George's universe, all that mattered was him and his three queens. They were his posse. They were the street gang he'd never belonged to as a kid. They were the outlaws he'd always wanted be one of, but never dared approach. They were the bad boys, the bullies, the kids from the wrong side of the track, whose lives had always looked so alluring and dangerous from the vantage point of his staid middle-class upbringing. They took what they wanted, fucked whom they wished, did whatever entered their heads, and never asked anyone for permission or forgiveness.

Eat. Fuck. Kill. It was a relationship he could understand. It was life pared down to its essence. And—for a while—life was good.

Then, one day, they turned on him.

It caught him by surprise. The queens had been moody and restless all morning, but what of that? They were dinosaurs. They were carnivores. They were
supposed
to have an attitude.

He was stalking in the lead position when one of his queens, the largest of the three and the one he had known first (Eve, he had named her, and the other two were Slut and Scarface, though they would none of them ever know it), lengthened her stride and came up alongside him. He didn't turn to look. There was an australotopsian up ahead—he could smell the fragile life within it, warm and appetizing—and George was hungry. All his attention was focused on his unwary prey.

The queen matched strides with him. Her head twisted to face his.

Suddenly, without warning, she lunged. Her great jaws came crunching down on the side of his face. Those nightmare teeth pierced skin and flesh in a dozen places and, with a hideous grating noise, ground against the bones of his jaw and skull.

Jesus fucking Christ—that
hurt!
The pain was blinding. George jerked away, feeling his tough skin rip like paper as the queen's teeth slid free from his face. She lunged at him again.

He veered clumsily away, only to find that Scarface had come up on his other side, blood-lust in her eyes. Then Slut screamed behind him, and he knew that he had neither friend nor ally in all the world.

He ran.

Blind with panic, he fled. Like furies, the queens pursued him across the rolling prairie. He let them chase him where they would, turning aside when a lake loomed up before him, and then up along a creek that fed into that lake. A stand of cycads forced him into the water, splashing frantically up the sandy stream bed, and then he had neither time nor the presence of mind to climb out. He had no choice but to go upstream, away from the lake.

They hunted him as a team—one queen on each bank, and Eve noisily splashing in the stream behind him.

The banks rose to either side, which was all to the good, for it meant that only the one queen was an immediate danger to him. But sooner or later the stream would narrow, which was disastrous, for he knew that if ever Scarface and Slut got into a position to jump on him from above, they would do it.

He had seen them practice such hunting maneuvers before.

He ran in abject terror, leaping the fallen logs that formed dams and bridges across the water, slipping on the layers of wet leaves that gathered at the bottom of the creek's still pools, stumbling on sudden changes in texture of the creek bed. How many times had he run down game with them in this exact same manner? A dozen? A hundred? It hardly mattered.

Now it was his turn.

Ravening, the giganotosaurs harried him up the stream.

So this is what terror feels like, he thought crazily. The water smashed underfoot and branches whipped his face. His legs ached and his lungs burned, and yet the queens—who could have been no less exhausted—did not fall back. They could smell his blood, and having smelled blood were mad for the kill. They screamed like harpies.

It made no sense, damn it. It wasn't rational! What did the bitches want from him? If they meant to drive him away—then, yes, he would go, and happily, and never once look back, damn them. They didn't need to keep chasing him! But if they were hungry, there was a world full of game that could be run down with a fraction the effort they were expending now. Anyway, he was a carnivore—no animal killed a carnivore for food unless it was literally starving. His flesh simply wouldn't taste good!

It didn't make sense. It just wasn't fair.

Why couldn't they see that?

Coming around a curve he saw that the stream ahead ran straight and true, and for an instant his heart lifted, for he dared hope that he could put on a burst of speed here that would discourage and leave behind his pursuers. But then he raised his sight to the next bend, and all hope died within him.

A great mound of dead trees and branches, twice his height, clogged the bed there. The shallow stream as it was now could never have held such a load. This tangle had been deposited here by a spring flood that had swollen the creek far beyond its present banks, and then, subsiding, left its burden of debris behind.

There was no way around the thing—not without climbing up into the waiting jaws of either Scarface or Slut.

He would have to climb over it.

It was not at all certain that he
could
climb over it, though. The near uselessness of his tiny forelimbs would make it extremely difficult. As would the three raging queens snapping at his heels, ready to leap upon him should he fall. There had to be some alternative.

Frantically he wracked his brain. Wildly, he looked around for some way—any way!—out of this predicament.

There was none.

So when he came to the tangle, he tried to run straight up it. His tremendous foot landed solid on one of the logs. He twisted his body and leaped for a second. That seized, he leaned his body forward, chest sliding against the branches, and surged upward. His feet scrabbled for purchase. He was now his own height above the streambed, and still climbing. He tried to fight his way yet higher.

And failed.

A log rolled under his feet, and simultaneously Eve arrived at the log jam to find him out of her reach. Furiously she rammed her head into the tangle like a powerful hammer. The combination of his weight and her force set everything into motion.

The other two queens, meanwhile, had jumped down from the bank and were trying to reach him from either side. Screaming in rage, they leaped upon the overtoppling deadwood, splintering branches and further destabilizing the entire mass.

All the world shifted underfoot. George fell over backwards, and the pile on top of him. Logs tumbled and rolled over onto his chest.

A roaring confusion of noise filled his ears. He felt a leg
snap
between two tree trunks.

Through a haze of pain, he saw logs settling down over him.

The queens had leaped away when the deadwood began to slide. Now they returned to see if they could get at him. Once! Twice! Three times they rammed their massive heads against the pile, trying to force a way to George's still body.

They could not. George was pinned down at the bottom of the pile, and no application of giganotosaur strength would suffice to dig him free. He was there permanently.

Finally, they left him for dead.

He was not dead, though. He only wished he were. Lying half in and half out of the water, with the crushing weight of the logs pressing down upon him, George rested his head against the cool, cool mud, and prayed for an end to his pain.

It did not come.

After a time he noticed a protorat staring at him from deep within the tangled wood, its eyes glittery with terror. Looking back, he remembered a time not many days ago when for amusement he had stood spraddle-legged and motionless for almost an hour by the burrow of one of this creature's small mammalian kinsfolk. Waiting … waiting with dinosaur patience for the beastie to emerge, blinking and optimistic, into the dawn of an age that would soon, within another few tens of millions of years, end with the extinction of the dinosaurs and the opportunistic rise of this insignificant vermin's offspring.

His patience had been rewarded. At last the creature had come forth, a small, hairy, and undistinguished animal, and quite possibly the direct ancestor of Man.

The timid little thing reared up on its hind legs directly in front of George's stupendous body. Wee ancestor, George thought, you've just won the grand prize in the Evolution's Clearing House Sweepstakes. When I and my kind are gone, your descendants will get to rule everything.

Then he had pissed on it.

How many gallons of urine had he drenched the little bastard with? Impossible to say. It was a lot, anyway. Battered and hysterical, the mammal had fled back into the ground. George had roared with laughter then, over and over, startling and confusing his queens and shocking the prairie into fearful silence.