It looked as if a hillside had come loose from the ground and was plodding through the swamp. Mottled mud brown, olive green, and gray, a fifteen-foot-high mass of living scale-covered flesh pushed through the dense foliage and into the clear area of the swamp where the green-scummed water flowed sluggishly.
And I almost laughed. It had a broad flat shout, like a duck’s bill. The curvature of its mouth gave it a silly-looking grin permanently built into its face, like an idiotic cartoon character.
No matter the expression on its face, though, the dinosaur was cautiously looking around before it came further out into the open. It reared up on its hind legs, taller than the branch on which we hid, and looked around, sniffing like the huffing of a steam locomotive. Its feet were more like hooves than clawed fighting weapons. Its yellow-eyed gaze swept past the tree where Anya and I were clinging.
With a snort like the air brakes of a diesel bus, the duckbill dropped down to all fours and emerged fully into the lethargic stream. It was some thirty feet long from its snout to the tip of its tail. And it was not alone.
There was a whole procession of duckbilled dinosaurs, a parade of forty-two of them by my count. With massive dignity they plodded along the swampy stream, sinking knee deep in the muddy water with each ponderous step.
We watched, fascinated, as the dinosaurs marched down the stream and slowly disappeared into the tangled foliage of the swamp.
“Dinosaurs,” Anya said, once they were out of sight and the forest’s insects had resumed their chirruping. There was wonder in her voice, and not a little awe.
“We’re in the Cretaceous,” I told her. “Dinosaurs rule the world here.”
“Where do you think they were heading? It looked like a purposeful migration—”
Again she stopped short, held her breath. All the sounds of the forest had stopped once again.
I was still lying prone on the broad tree branch. Anya flattened out once again behind me. We could hear nothing; somehow that bothered me more than the splashing sounds the duckbills had made.
The foliage parted not more than thirty yards from where we were hiding and the most hideous creature I have ever seen emerged from the greenery. An enormous massive head, almost five feet long from snout to base, most of it a gaping mouth armed with teeth the size of sabers. Angry little eyes that somehow looked almost intelligent, like the eyes of a hunting tiger or a killer whale.
It pushed slowly, cautiously into the sluggish stream that the duckbills had used as a highway only a minute earlier.
Tyrannosaurus rex. No doubt of it. Tremendous size, dwarfing Set’s fighting carnosaurs that we had seen in Paradise. Withered vestigial forelegs hanging uselessly on its chest. It reared up to its full height, taller than all but the biggest trees, and seemed to peer in the direction that the duckbills had gone. Then it stepped out into the muddy stream on two powerful hind legs, its heavy tail held straight out as if to balance the enormous weight of that fearsome head.
I could feel the terrified tension in Anya’s body, pressing against mine. I myself was as rigid as a frightened mouse confronted by a lion. The tyrannosaur loomed over us, its scales striped jungle green and dark gray. Its feet bore claws bigger and sharper than reapers’ scythes.
Slowly, stealthily, it moved upstream in the tracks of the duckbills. Just when I was about to breathe again, a second tyrannosaur pushed through the foliage as silently and carefully as the first. And then a third.
Anya nudged me with an elbow and, turning my head slightly, I saw two more of the enormous brutes emerging from the tangled trees on the other side of us.
They were hunting in a team. Stalking the duckbills with the care and coordination of a pack of wolves.
They passed us by. If they saw us or sensed us in any way, they gave no indication of it. I had always pictured the tyrannosaurus as a brainless ravening killing machine, snapping at any piece of meat it came across, regardless of its size, regardless of whether the tyrant was hungry or not.
Obviously that was not the case. These brutes possessed some intelligence, enough to work cooperatively in tracking down the duckbills.
“Let’s follow them,” Anya said eagerly after the last of them had disappeared into the reeds and giant swaying ferns that closed off our view of the waterway.
I must have looked at her as if she were crazy.
“We can stay a good distance away,” she added, her lips curving slightly at the expression on my face.
“I have the impression,” I replied slowly, “that they can run a good deal faster than we can. And I don’t see a tree for us to climb that’s tall enough to get away from them.”
“But they’re after the duckbills, not us. They wouldn’t even recognize us as meat.”
I shook my head. Brave I may be, but not foolhardy. Anya was as eager as a huntress on the trail of her prey, avid to follow the tyrannosaurs as closely as possible. I feared those monstrous brutes, feared that they would swiftly make us the hunted instead of the hunters.
“We have no weapons, nothing to defend ourselves with,” I said. Then I added, “Besides, I’m still weak from…”
Her face went from smug superiority to regretful apology in the flash of instant. “I forgot! Oh, Orion, I’m such a fool… forgive me… I should have remembered…”
I stopped her babbling with a kiss. She smiled and, still looking shamefaced, told me to wait for her while she found something for us to eat. Then she scampered down the tree trunk and headed off across the mossy muddy swampland.
I lay on my back as the sun filtered down through the leaves. A tiny gray furred thing raced across a branch slightly above me, ran down the tree’s trunk to the branch where I lay, and stared at me for half a moment, beady eyes black and shining, long hairless tail twitching nervously. It made no sound at all.
I said to it, “Greetings, fellow mammal. For all I know, you are the grandfather to us all.”
It dashed back up the trunk and disappeared in the leafy branches above me.
Clasping my hands behind my head, I waited for Anya to return. She had escaped the core-tap pit by reverting to her true form of pure energy, absorbing the heat that had been roasting our flesh, using Set’s own warping device to fling us into this time and place. And reconstructing herself back into human form, unscratched and even newly clothed in the bargain.
An ancient aphorism came unbidden to my mind: Rank hath its privileges. A goddess, a highly advanced creature evolved from human stock but so far beyond humanity that she had no need of a physical body—that kind of creature could happily go thrashing through a Cretaceous landscape after a pack of tyrannosaurs. Death meant nothing to her.
It was different for me. I have died and been returned to life many times. But only when the Creators willed it. I am their creature, they created me. I am fully human, fully mortal. I have no way of knowing if my death will be final or not, no way of assuring myself that I will be rescued from permanent oblivion and brought to life once more.
The Buddhists would teach, millions of years ahead, that all living creatures are bound up on the great wheel of life, dying and being reincarnated over and over again. The only way out of this constant cycle of pain is to achieve nirvana, total oblivion, escape from the world as complete and final as falling into a black hole and disappearing from the universe forever.
I did not want nirvana. I had not given up all my desires. I loved a goddess and I desperately wanted her to love me. She said she did, but in those awful timeless moments when she left me falling down that endless burning pit, I realized all over again that she is not human, not the way I am, despite her outward appearance.