With a sudden stab of loss, Listener hurled her spear into the ocean. It disappeared into the water’s glimmering mass.
CHAPTER 3
The Devil’s Tail
North America. Circa 65 million years before present.
I
Once interplanetary impacts had been constructive, a force for good.
Earth had formed close to the brightening sun. Water and other volatiles had quickly boiled away, leaving the young world an empty theater of rock. But the comets, falling in from the outer system, delivered substances that had coalesced in that cooler region: especially the water that would fill Earth’s oceans, and compounds of carbon, whose chain-based chemistry would lie at the heart of all life. Earth settled down to a long chemical age in which complex organic molecules were manufactured in the mindless churning of the new oceans. It was a long prelude to life. It would not have come about without the comets.
But now the time of the impacts was done, so it seemed. In the new solar system, the remaining planets and moons followed nearly circular orbits, like a vast piece of clockwork. Any objects following more disorderly paths had mostly been removed.
Mostly.
The thing that now came out of the dark, its surface of dirty slush sputtering in the sun’s heat, was like a memory of Earth’s traumatic formation.
Or a bad dream.
In human times, the Yucatan Peninsula was a tongue of land that pushed north out of Mexico into the gulf. On the peninsula’s northern coast there was a small fishing harbor called Puerto Chicxulub (Chic-shoe-lube). It was an unprepossessing place, a limestone plain littered with sinkholes and freshwater springs, agave plantations, and brush.
Sixty-five million years before that, in the moist age of the dinosaurs, this place was ocean floor. The plains of the Gulf of Mexico were flooded up to the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The shallow Yucatan Peninsula itself lay under nearly a hundred meters of water. The sediments that would later form Cuba and Haiti were part of the deep seafloor, yet to be lifted by fault movements to the surface.
In an age dominated by warm shallow seas, drowned Chicxulub was an unremarkable place. But it was here that a world would end.
Chicxulub is a Mayan word, an ancient word coined by a lost people. Later, when the Mayans were gone, nobody would know for sure how it translated. Local legend said it meant the Devil’s Tail.
In its last moments the comet flew in from the southeast, passing over the Atlantic and South America.
II
In bright, shallow waters the huge ammonite cruised.
This sea-bottom hunter, the size of a tractor tire, looked something like a giant snail, with an elaborately curved spiral shell from which arms and a head protruded cautiously. As it had grown, it had extended its shell’s spiral structure, gradually moving from one chamber outwards to the next; now the linked, abandoned chambers were used for buoyancy and control.
The ammonite moved with surprising grace, its upright spiral cutting through the waters. And it scanned its surroundings with wide intelligent eyes.
The sunlit sea was crowded, translucent, full of rich plankton. Some of the creatures here — oysters, clams, many species of fish — would have been familiar to humans. But others would not: there were many ancient species of squid, the ammonite itself — and, dimly visible as shadows passing through the blue reaches of the deeper ocean — giant marine reptiles, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, the dolphins and whales of the age.
As the daylight gathered, more of the ammonite’s kind were rising, to hang like bells in the translucent water.
But the ammonite spotted movement on the seabed. It descended quickly, sensory tentacles pushing out of its shell. By sight and feel it quickly determined that the scuttling, burrowing thing in the gritty sand was a crab. More arms slid out of the shell and wrapped around the crustacean, tiny hooks on each arm helping to secure their grip. The crab was pulled easily away from the soft seabed. A heavy birdlike beak protruded, and the ammonite bit through the crab’s shell, between its eyes. It injected digestive juices into the shell, and began to suck out the resulting soup.
As particles of meat diffused in the water, more ammonites came sliding in.
But the ammonite with the crab saw a shadow moving above, a shadow with a snout and fins, silently sliding, rapidly resolving. It was an elasmosaur; a marine reptile, a kind of plesiosaur with an immensely long neck. Abandoning its kill, the ammonite ducked into its shell. The opening in the shell was immediately sealed off with a heavy cap of hardened tissue.
The elasmosaur fell on the ammonite, pushed its shell over, and clamped its powerful jaws around the narrowest part of the spiral. But it could not break through. After breaking a cluster of teeth, the elasmosaur dropped the shell, letting it drift back to the ocean floor. Frustration and pain seethed in its one-dimensional awareness.
The ammonite had endured violent shaking, but it was safe in its armored home.
But one immature ammonite had not been so wary. It tried to flee, its jets pushing it this way and that.
The elasmosaur took its consolation kill well. Its teeth sliced expertly across the spiral shell at the place where the body was attached to the inner surface. Then it shook the shell hard until the ammonite, still alive, tumbled out into the water, naked for the first time in its life. The fish-lizard took its prize in a single gulp.
Now the elasmosaur spotted a cloud in the water. It plunged in without hesitating.
The cloud was a shoal of belemnites, thousands strong. The little squid had gathered for protection, and their defensive systems, of sentries and ink and shimmying, deceptive movements, were usually effective even against predators as fast as this elasmosaur. But they had been caught out by this creature’s angry lunge. They darted away, venting ink furiously at the immense invader, or even leaping out of the ocean altogether and into the comet-bright air. Still, hundreds of them died: each a pinpoint of awareness, each of them in its way unrepeatable and unique.
Meanwhile, cautiously, the crab-killer ammonite had opened its shell once more. A tube of muscle protruded from the opening, and a high-pressure stream of water pulsed out, jetting the ammonite up and into the blue waters. It had lost the crab. But no matter. There was always another kill to make.
So it went. It was a time of savage predation, in the sea as on land. Mollusks hunted ammonites, boring through shells, poisoning prey animals, and firing deadly darts. In response, bivalves had learned to bury themselves deep in sediment, or had evolved spines and massive shells to deter attackers. Limpets and barnacles had forsaken the deep sea, colonizing shallow environments on the shore where only the most determined of hunters could reach them.
Meanwhile, the seas teemed with predatory reptiles. Carnivorous turtles and long-necked plesiosaurs fed on fishes and ammonites — as did pterosaurs, flying reptiles who had learned to dive for the riches of the ocean. And huge, heavy-jawed pliosaurs preyed on the predators. Measuring some twenty-five meters long, with jaws alone some three meters long, their sole stratagem to rip and shake their prey apart, the pliosaurs were the largest carnivores in the history of the planet.
The rich Cretaceous oceans teemed, enacting a three-dimensional ballet of hunter and hunted, of life and death. It had been so for tens of millions of years. But now a bright light was building above the glimmering surface of the ocean, as if the sun were falling from the sky.