Of Man And Manta - Ox Part 45

The water was warm! It should have been chill, even frozen!

Struck by inspiration, she charged upstream. The stream banks formed into a kind of chasm, warm at the base. And the stream became hot, hurting her feet. Finally, she came to its origin: a cave.

Here was salvation! She plunged inside, basking in its hot interior. The dinosaur could not enter!

She removed her clothing and washed herself in the bathtub-temperature water. Sheer luxury!

But now she was stuck here, for Tyrann lay in wait outside, his nose right up against the mouth of the cave. She would have to climb over that nose to escape -- and she was hardly ready to risk that yet!

She lay down on a convenient ledge to sleep. But now the horror of Cal's death returned to her full force. When she closed her eyes she saw the monstrously gaping jaws, the bloodstained teeth; when she opened them, she still saw that vision of savagery. And the tiny-seeming body, tossed up the way a mouse was tossed by a cat, broken, dismembered, spraying out red...

"Cal! Cal! she cried in anguish. "Why didn't I show my love before you died?"

She tried to pray: "G.o.d give him back to me, and I'll never let him go!" But it was no good, for she did not believe in any G.o.d, and if she had believed, she knew it would have been wrong to offer to make a deal.

She slept and woke and slept again fitfully. The night seemed to endure for an eternity. She was hungry, but there was little except heat-resistant lichen growing near the mouth of the cave: no fit diet. So she drank hot water, pretending it was soup, and deceived her stomach. Then she was roused, near dawn, by a presence. Someone was in the cave with her. She lay still, frightened yet hopeful. It could only be Veg -- but how had he gotten past Tyrann? And why had the mantas guided him here when her business with the dinosaur was not yet finished?

For a moment the figure stood in the wan light of the entrance. Suddenly she recognized the silhouette. "Cal!" she cried. "I thought you were dead!" He turned, obviously startled, seeing her. His vision had always been sharper than hers, especially in poor light. "I escaped, thanks to this convenient cave," he said as though it were a routine matter.

"So did I," she said, bathed in a compelling sensation of deja vu, of having been in this situation before. How could she have missed seeing Cal earlier? And who -- or what -- had Tyrann actually eaten? She had been so sure --

"Why did you come?" he asked.

"I love you," she said simply. And, suffused by her breathless relief, she remembered her attempted bargain with G.o.d and her overwhelming love for this man. She went to him, and took him in her arms, pressing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his body, kissing his mouth, embracing him so tightly her own arms hurt.

He responded with astonishing vigor. No further word was spoken. They fell into the hot water, and laughed foolishly together, and kissed and kissed again, mouth on mouth, mouth on breast, splashing water like two children playing in the tub.

So they made love again and again, as long as the flesh would bear. Perhaps the hot water was a tonic, recharging their bodies rapidly. They slept embraced half out of the water, woke and loved again, and slept, on and on in endless and often painful delight.

Another quake came, a terrible one, frightening them, so they clasped each other and let the rocking mountain provide their motion for them: a wild and violent climax, as though they were rocking the mountain with the force of their ardor. Night came, and still they played.

But in the morning she woke, and he was gone, inexplicably. Alarmed, she searched the entire cave as far back as the heat permitted but found no sign. It was as though he had never been.

She took her courage in both hands, dressed, and edged out into the dawn beyond Tyrann's nose. It was cold here, and light snow powdered the dinosaur's back. Tyrann was asleep, and surely he would die, for the chill would inevitably seep into his body and keep him moribund until the end. She had won, after all; in fact, she could probably have left long ago.

There were no human prints. If Cal had come this way, it must have been hours ago, before it grew cool enough for the snow to stay. Yet she had thought he was with her until recently.

She moved on down the little canyon toward the warmth of the valley, following the trail they had left as well as she could: mainly the scuff marks and claw indentations of the carnosaur's feet that showed because they had in their fashion changed the lay of the land.

She came to the place where she had thought Cal died. There she found one of his shoes, with the foot and part of the leg protruding. Flesh and bone and tendon, jaggedly severed by the crunch of the huge teeth of Tyrann.

There was no question of authenticity. Cal had indeed died here two days ago: the ants were hard at work.

Yet she had made love to Cal a day and night. Had it been a phantom, born of her grief, her futile longing? She touched her body here and there, feeling the abrasions of violent lovemaking. Could she have done all that to herself in an orgy of compensation for what she had never done during Cal's life? Her mind must have been temporarily deranged, for here was reality: a worn shoe with the stump of the leg.

She buried the foot and saved the shoe.

Now the mantas came: Circe and Star. Veg was all right, they reported; he had tried to come to help her when the mantas informed him but had been shaken up by the second quake and stranded on a rock in the bay. The birds had lost their eggs in that same quake and had to flee their nest, but both Orn and Ornette survived. The third quake had sundered their island and stirred up the water predators again.

"They lost their eggs..." Aquilon repeated, feeling a pang akin to that of her loss of Cal, one grief merging with the other.

Guided and protected by the mantas, she rejoined Veg and the Orn-birds. A month pa.s.sed, an instant and an eternity for both people, sharing their awful grief. The phantom Cal did not reappear -- but Aquilon had continuing cause to wonder, for she had no period. Veg had not touched her -- not that way. Only in futile comfort had he put his arm about her.

In three months she knew she was pregnant. Yet there was no way -- except that day and night in the cave. On occasion, she returned to it, past the frozen hulk of Tyrann at the entrance, but she never found anything. She had made love to a phantom -- and she carried the phantom's child.

Veg shouldered more of the burden of survival as her condition progressed. The two sapient birds also helped, guarding her as she slept, bringing her delicacies such as small freshly slaughtered reptiles. She learned to eat them, and Veg understood: to survive in nature, one had to live nature's way. She was a vegetarian no longer.

"Also," she explained with a certain difficulty, "it's Cal's baby. I have to live this way." She was not certain he would see the logic of that, or if there were any logic in it, but it was the way she felt. Her intake nourished Cal's baby; Cal's standards governed. Had it been Veg's baby...

"I loved him, too," Veg said, and that sufficed. He was not jealous of his friend -- only glad that even this much remained of Cal. She had never told him the details of the conception, letting him a.s.sume it was before the dinosaur chase began. There had, after all, been opportunity.

"After this one is born, the next must be yours," she said. "I love you, too, -- and this would be necessary for survival of our species even if I did not."

"Yeah," he said a bit wryly. "I'm glad you had the sense to go with him first. If he had to die, that was the way to do it."

In civilization, among normal people, this would have been unreal. Here, with Veg, it was only common sense. Veg had always wanted what was best for his friend Cal, and it was a compliment to her that he felt she had been worthy.

"We argued about whether man should colonize," she said. "We were wrong, both sides. We a.s.sumed it had to be all Earth or nothing. Now we know that there was a middle ground. This ground: just a few people, blending into the Cretaceous enclave, cutting our little niche without destroying any other creature's niche. If we had realized that before, Cal might not have felt compelled to match Tyrann, and they both would be alive today."

"Yeah," he said, and turned away.

The baby was birthed without difficulty, as though nature had compensated her by making natural birth easy. There was pain, but she hardly cared. Veg helped, and so did the birds: They made a fine soft nest for the infant. She named him Cave.

If her relation with the birds had been close, it was closer now. They nested, for their season had come 'round again. Aquilon would leave baby Cave in the nest with the eggs, and Ornette would sit on them all protectively. Aquilon took her turns guarding the eggs while the birds hunted. They were an extended family.

When Cave was three months old, and Aquilon was just considering inviting Veg to father a sibling, disaster struck. Agents from Earth appeared. Concerned by the nonreport from the advance party -- Cal, Veg, and Aquilon -- the authorities had followed up with a more reliable mission.

The mantas spotted them first: a prefabricated ship coming in past the islands of Silly and Cherybdis. Three agents, one of whom was female.

Veg made a wheeled cart with a loose harness that either bird could draw, and set a nest in it. This made the family mobile -- for there was no stationary place safe from agents. One manta was designated for each adult ent.i.ty: Hex went with Veg, Circe with Aquilon, Diam with Orn, and Star with Ornette. Their function was to give advance warning when any agent was near any of the others, so that person could flee. There was to be no direct contact with any agent unless the nest was in danger. With luck, they would be able to stay clear until the agents left.

It was not to be. The agents were not merely surveying the land, they were after the people, too. The agents quickly ascertained the presence of a baby, and this seemed to surprise them. Hex, in hiding as two of them examined the deserted nest site, picked up some of their dialogue and reported on it: "Cooperation with tame birds I can understand, though they've really gone primitive," the male said. "But a human baby? There wasn't time!"

"She must have been pregnant before leaving Earth," the female said. "Then birthed it prematurely."

Aquilon was in turn amazed. "How long do they think human gestation is? Two years? Cave was full-term!"

But the riddle of the agents' confusion had to wait. There was no question that the agents intended to take the trio and the baby captive for return to Earth -- they apparently did not know that Cal was gone -- and this could not be permitted.

One would have thought the home team had the advantage: two human beings toughened by a year among the dinosaurs, two fighting birds, and four mantas -- the most efficient predators known to man. But there were three eggs and a baby to protect -- and the three agents were equipped with Earth's technology. In one sense, the contest of champions Cal had visualized was to be joined again -- but this time the weapons were different. One agent could wipe out one tyrannosaurus with one shot. Cal could have directed an efficient program of opposition -- but Cal was gone. The agents were stronger, faster, and better armed than Veg and Aquilon.

"We've got to get out of here," Veg said. "They're canva.s.sing this whole valley and the neighboring ones. They know we're here, somewhere, and they're drawing in the net. They'd probably have picked us up by now if they'd located Cal; they must figure he's hiding."

"Even now, he's helping us, then," she said, nodding. "And if we leave, what happens to the dinosaurs?"

"Earth will wipe them out, or put them in zoos, same thing," he said glumly. "We've had our problems with the reps, but it's their world, and they have a right to live, too. But we've been over this; we can't kill the agents. Even if we had the weapons, we couldn't do it. We'd be murderers."

"If we could stop the agents from returning to their base..."