CALYPSO'S CAVE
Daughter of Titans,
She Who Conceals All Knowledge
is Calypso’s name.
Pushing through the undergrowth in their haste, Karil and Slava nearly fell into the nest. At the bottom of a pit in the sand lay three leathery eggs of enormous size--some already cracked--and three newly hatched tyrannosaurs--spindly-legged, round-bellied, with enormous heads and already vicious-looking teeth. They grunted ferociously as they butted and bit each other.
"Ugliest goddamn babies I ever saw," Karil said. "Come on. It gave us a surprise; maybe it'll put her off guard." He dragged Slava into the foliage.
In a moment, Madame Feronia appeared on the trail, moving cautiously, eyes darting, finger on the trigger of her rifle. She nearly stumbled into the pit herself and stood for a moment, gazing down at the bizarre nestlings. Karil crept out of concealment behind her back. His foot came down on a dried stick. At the sound of the crack, he leapt forward, but before his hands could seize the weapon, she whirled and brought the
butt across the side of his head. He toppled into the pit, unconscious, and rolled to a stop against one of the eggs.
"That was a lucky break," Madame Feronia said. She turned to see Slava coming for her, swung the laser in the girl's direction and fired. The beam flashed into the ground before Slava's feet, and she stopped.
"Stay right where you are, Girl," Madame Feronia said. "You think I haven't seen you training with Loris? I'm not letting you within reach if I can help it." She gestured up the hill with the muzzle. "That way. Move."
Slava glanced down at Karil's unconscious figure in the pit.
"Forget him. I've got no time to waste on him."
"We can't leave him there! The mother may be..."
"You're wasting time. If Kesho wasn't able to stop her, Loris will be after us any minute. God damn it, move!" She squeezed the trigger.
Slava gasped in pain, glanced down to see a rent in her clothing, a frightful burn-mark across her hip.
"I mean it, Girl. You can be useful to me alive, but if you're going to be too much trouble, I'll kill you right now."
Slava could not believe that anyone could beat Loris in a fair fight. Kesho, she guessed, would fight fair. Soon, Loris would be tracking them, and she would find Karil. In any event, Slava herself could not get him out--the pit was too deep. Reluctantly, she turned and began to climb the hill. Madame Feronia followed at a safe distance.
***
Loris and Kesho circled in the hot sun, their bodies glistening with sweat, their gaze locked on each other's faces. An observer might have thought it some graceful ballet without music.
Suddenly there was a blur of movement--a limb extended, a swift blow as swiftly blocked, a series of counterblows, a body dropping to the ground, rolling away and leaping to its feet again, and then they circled once more, perhaps a little more cautiously.
Loris had learned that Kesho's height, though it gave him greater reach, had its drawbacks. He was superbly trained and in marvellous condition, but he lacked Loris' own fluid grace and speed. Like most men, he relied too much on upper-body strength, and like most who served aboard ships with artificial gravity, he had not spent enough time in zero-gee to be as dexterous with his feet as with his hands.
If he gave her an opening, Loris could use the strength in her hips, her lower centre of gravity, and the suppleness of her lower limbs to catch him off balance. But she would have to avoid those long arms and the powerful shoulders behind them.
For his part, Kesho now understood what a superb killing machine Loris really was. Beneath the flawless brown skin and flowing curves were muscles like iron, and her graceful dancer's movements revealed a perfect sense of balance. The breasts heaving with exertion, the nipples erect with excitement, the perfect curve of hips and thighs were a distraction, and Kesho was willing to believe that many men had succumbed to that distraction to their sorrow. He would not under-estimate her again.
They circled one another.
Suddenly Kesho made his move. He was a tornado of flying limbs and Loris fell back before him. It was all she could do to block his moves and avoid the deadly blows, until one caught her on the side of the ribcage before she could do more than soften the blow with a side-step. She felt something crack, blocked out the pain, tried to concentrate on her task.
Her foot caught on something in the grass as she danced back, and for an instant she was off-balance. Kesho was learning fast: as if in slow-motion, she saw him shift his weight, saw his foot on its way to her throat.
Instead of fighting to regain her balance, she allowed herself to fall--indeed hastened her fall by shifting her weight back. The foot slashed by, missing her jaw by millimetres, and the inertia of the blow threw Kesho himself off-balance. He struggled to regain his balance, and in the process, his head came forward over her, reducing his height by a good half metre. It was her opening.
It was clear to her that Kesho had never fought a woman before and expected her to fight like a man. She had taught this trick to Johanna, to Terry, even little Chi-Chi Li. Loris's first trainer, when she was fifteen taught her: When a man sees a woman on her back, on the ground, he thinks she has already lost, but her most powerful weapon is still in play.
She hit the ground, rolled back on her shoulders, lifted her hips, and kicked with all her might. The heel of her foot struck the underside of his jaw, where a rope would snap a hanged man's neck.
There was a crack and Kesho's head jerked back as his jaw struck his brain. Loris continued her backward somersault and was on her feet again. Kesho looked at her with an almost comical expression of surprise on his face. Then he fell slowly to his knees and toppled forward.
Loris relaxed enough to wince at the pain in her side and looked down at him.
"I'm sorry, Captain," she said. "But you left me no choice. In your own way, you’re just as crazy as your mistress." She turned and raced after Karil and Slava.
***
When Karil came to, he found himself lying in the bottom of the pit, half-buried in sand beneath a pile of stinking eggshells. He tossed the shells aside and crawled out of the sand.
A pair of newborn tyrannosaurs stopped biting each other and regarded him quizzically. The one on top grunted at him and whipped its tail. The other scrambled to its feet and they advanced upon him.
They were no more than a meter tall, but their oversized jaws were already armed with teeth like pocket-knife blades.
Karil kicked the first in the stomach, thrusting it back against the other. They fell in a heap together and went back to biting each other and growling furiously.
"Sorry," Karil said, "I've got no time to play."
He tried to scramble up the side of the pit, but his feet could find no purchase in the cascading sand, and he fell back again. After a few more tries, he realized the gravity of his situation.
The pit had been dug this way to keep the hatchlings from wandering away, but it was just as effective a trap for Karil. There had been three unhatched eggs and three young saurians before; now there were two young and a pile of shells. While Karil had been lying there, the rest of the eggs had hatched and the shells had been kicked aside, burying him. While he lay hidden, the mother had come and removed most of her brood. Karil shuddered to think of it.
He had seen crocodiles do the same, of course, taking their newly hatched young in their jaws and removing them to a safer hiding-place. He could use a safer hiding place himself.
Suddenly the young tyrannosaurs began grunting furiously. Karil dove into the sand and covered himself with shell-fragments, drenching his body with foul-smelling albumin in the process, but hardly caring.
There was a hiss like a leaking airlock, and the ground shook beneath him. The babies continued to grunt madly. The hiss came closer until it seemed to sound in his very ear. He felt the heat of the sky diminish as a great shadow fell over him. One young tyrannosaur stopped grunting and the other's grunts faded away as the sunlight returned.
He dared to peek over the edge of a shell.
There she was in the flesh--Tyrannosaura Regina. Even with her back turned, she was a terrifying sight. A great splay foot, a leg broadening from an almost delicate ankle to a thigh of massive proportions that reached halfway up her body. The tail tapering to a point, lashing from side to side and raising clouds of dust. The enormous body bearing ridiculously tiny forelimbs and supporting atop a neck like a tree-trunk an oversized head that was nothing but eyes and mouth.
She turned first one way and then the other, presenting her profile. In her cavernous maw, peeking out between serrated teeth like a row of steak-knives, was the now tiny-looking baby saurian, nodding its head and grunting furiously. The purpose of that grunt, as in crocodiles, Karil realized, was to remind the mother that it was her offspring in her mouth, not dinner.
For just a moment the great creature looked about, lashing her tail, and then strode away with incredible steps, making the earth tremble beneath her.
"Merciful Allah!" The last baby looked at him and grunted. "I hope your mother can count," Karil said.
In answer, it tried to bite him playfully. But Karil's hide was not that of a tyrannosaur, and he fought it off with growing desperation while he tried to climb the shifting sands once more.
When the baby left off snapping at his kicking heels and began to grunt again, Karil once more buried himself in sand and shells. The procedure repeated itself--the blood curdling hiss, the monstrous shadow and seismic tread, the diminishing grunts of the transported baby.
Karil gave up trying to climb the slope. He buried his body in sand, leaving only his face exposed, and covering that carefully with a nearly intact shell. The smell of the albumin dripping on his face was unpleasant, but he hardly noticed. He lay there, frankly cowering.
In a moment he felt the ground shaking once again and heard that nightmare hiss. There was an eternity of silence, and then a movement beside him. The shell was nosed aside, and he stared into the tyrannosaur's open maw.
He could have reached between the jagged, yellow teeth as if through a picket fence and touched the mattress-sized tongue, but with its eyes on the side of its head, it could not see him. He grabbed the shell and plopped it down over his face again.
The tyrannosaur's enormous snout plunged into the sand and rooted Karil out of his hiding place. He stared directly into the saurian's eye--larger than his own head--and saw it delicately flowered with cataracts. The creature was nearly blind. It was only the albumin scent that was telling her there was another baby to be collected.
To a carrion-eater, he supposed, eyesight was not as important as the sense of smell, and this one was obviously successful enough to survive and breed. Though every instinct in his mammalian brain shouted at Karil to scream and run, he willed himself to remain absolutely still. The snout descended and nostrils into which he could have thrust his head moved snuffling over his albumin-sticky body. Then the jaws opened again.
He stared down the black gullet--a tunnel into which his whole body might slide as effortlessly as an oyster down a gourmet's throat, and from which an unimaginable carnivorous stench rushed like a wind from Hell--and he did the only thing he could do.
He grunted.
"Hunh!" he said. "Hunh! Hunh!"
He continued to grunt insanely as the jaws closed delicately upon him, the teeth stopping centimetres from slicing him in half, then tossed him up and deeper into the mouth, to get a better grip. It took a monumental effort of will on Karil's part not to scream his head off.
He felt himself being lifted into the air, and though half of him wanted to cheer for joy and the other half to shriek in terror, he only grunted. He peered out through the portcullis of teeth and saw the ground far below. The monster stopped and listened. It lashed its tail and turned its head from side to side. Karil grunted, almost sobbing with fear. A hiss like that of a broken boiler rolled over him, along with another mind-numbing blast of Cretaceous halitosis.
Loris appeared around a bend in the trail. She looked up at him with open mouth and shock-widened eyes, rooted to the spot.
"Hunh!" Karil said to her. "Hunh! Hunh!"
The tyrannosaur took one ten-meter step toward her, hesitated, then turned away. It had more important matters on its mind than food; it had to get this last, obviously frightened, baby to a safer nest.
Loris picked up a stone and hurled it with all her might. It bounced off the tyrannosaur's thick hide. The creature turned toward her and hissed again. She responded with another rock, which did as little damage as the first. The tyrannosaur ignored her, turned and strode away.
"Hey, you stupid..." Loris raced after the departing saurian, snatched up a fallen branch and began to belabour the creature's ankle with blows. It turned toward her, opened its jaws, and bellowed like a bull croc. Loris tripped and fell under the onslaught of its hot breath. She lay there, staring up with shock into the cavernous mouth.
Karil bailed out, dropped to the ground, and rolled to his feet. He grabbed Loris' arm and yanked her up. She shook off her paralysis and ran.
The tyrannosaur set off after them, covering the ground with amazing speed, in hot pursuit of the thieving mammal that had run off with her precious offspring. Karil and Loris ran as they had never run before.
"The trees," Karil said.
Loris nodded, stumbling with exhaustion and the pain of her cracked rib. Before them was a stand of magnolia grown up around a stream from the mountainside. With the monster on their heels, they plunged into the thicket, fell in the stream, splashed to their feet and ran on.
Behind them, the tyrannosaur crashed into the foliage. Young trees gave way and it pressed through, but bigger trees blocked its path. It thrashed for a moment amid a rain of magnolia blossoms, hissing with frustration, and then turned away as if nothing had happened and strode off toward its new nest.
Karil and Loris stood bent over against a tree-trunk, panting, unable to speak. Finally, Loris gained control over her breathing, straightened up, and looked at Karil. She burst into uncontrollable laughter and collapsed, rolling on the ground in mirth.
"I don't—-pant!--see what's so--pant!--damn funny."
Loris managed to control her laughter long enough to say, "You had to be there, Karil," and then exploded into mirth again.
Finally, she lay groaning. "Oh God, I think Kesho broke one of my ribs."
"Well, there's nothing like laughter for a broken rib, is there?"
She reached out and touched him. "I'm sorry, Karil, but you should have seen yourself. Hunh! Hunh!" She collapsed again.
Suddenly Karil saw it that way himself and they were both helpless, falling over each other beneath the trees. When they had finally been reduced to the occasional chortle, Loris suddenly sat up and looked about.
"Where the hell is Slava?"
"I don't know. I think Madame Feronia took her."
"Oh, Hell! Come on, can you pick up the trail?"
"I'll try."
They made their way to the abandoned nest, found footprints in the mud, and followed the women's trail up the hill.
***
The projector building was built into the mountainside like a Medieval fortress. Erosion had carved away the rock about it until only the impervious material of the structure itself remained. Karil and Loris climbed to its base and gazed upward. Glass-sheer walls rose to a broad terrace above, where the projector-dome stood silhouetted against the sky like a ruined mosque. Loris, who knew something about ship-grade materials, ran her fingers over the gleaming metal wall and was impressed.
"They couldn't have climbed that wall, that's for sure," Loris mused.
"Look." Karil had found an entrance; a stream had cut a ravine along the foundation, exposing a drain-opening in the base.
"Rainwater runoff from the terrace," Loris said. "I don't know how the builders got in and out, but if Slava and Feronia went into the mountain it must have been through here."
Karil bent down and examined the muddy bank of the stream. "There it is. Those are Feronia's footprints, and Slava's. She stumbled here, put down her hand."
"Leaving us a sign."
"I think so. And then there's all these dinosaur prints."
"You're right. What would you say? A couple of meters tall? Bipedal?"
"Herbivores, at least. These claws are for running, not for attacking. They've been going in and out of this drain-tunnel for a long time."
"Maybe they hide from predators in there."
Karil and Loris crept into the opening and splashed forward until the rainwater culvert opened onto what appeared to be a maintenance tunnel of some sort. The passage led them deeper into the mountain, their way illuminated by the occasional functioning ceiling panel.
They heard the patter of footsteps coming toward them out of a side-tunnel, and instinctively reached for weapons they did not have. A man-sized dinosaur emerged from the tunnel and blinked in surprise at seeing them, its nictitating eyelid sliding sideways over its large, intelligent eyes. It made a clicking sound that was either an exclamation of surprise or a greeting of some sort.
"That's the little shit who stole our lasers," Loris said.
"No, it's a different one. Same species. Maybe the Keeper uses them to run the place."
"Hey, you, come back here!"
The creature had turned and waddled away, clicking vociferously, almost as if it was inviting--or daring--them to follow. Karil and Loris pelted down the tunnel in pursuit.
It turned and clicked excitedly. A light appeared around a turn and in a moment, they found themselves emerging onto a ledge that circled a seemingly bottomless shaft. Blinding light poured downward into the depths of the mountain from a vast array of mirrors and prisms above--obviously the workings of the projector. They stared at the colossal machinery, feeling like clock-tower mice.
There were several openings onto the ledge and for a moment they were undecided about which way to continue, until Loris' sharp eye spotted something. She crept along the ledge, bent down near one of the openings and picked up a small object. Karil joined her and she dropped a pebble into his hand.
"Slava's leaving us a trail."
"When she stumbled back there, she picked up a handful of stones."
"Clever little thing!"
They entered the tunnel and followed it into the mountainside, the saurian tagging along behind. After a few meters the light from the projector-shaft behind was too dim to light their way, and the ceiling-panels of this particular passage were in bad repair, so Loris switched on her belt-torch and they went on in a pool of light, surrounded by blackness.
"How are they finding their way?" Karil asked. "Feronia and Slava, I mean."
"Maybe the Keeper is guiding them."
"Maybe the Keeper knows exactly where we are and what we're doing at every goddamn moment."
"She hasn't stopped us."
"She hasn't helped us much either, that I can see. She did nothing to defend us from the predators or from Feronia. I can't help thinking we're almost beneath her notice."
“That might explain why she didn’t seem to care a lot about us attacking the dinosaurs. Or Feronia. We just don’t matter much.”
The passage opened onto a vast, cool chamber, and they stepped out into centimetre-deep dust. Loris' torch-beam, playing along the floor before them, found two sets of footprints. They followed. If the narrow tunnel behind them had been eerie, this colossal open space in total blackness was even more so. Suddenly Loris stopped short. Karil nearly collided with her.
The torch-beam flashed up and illuminated a huge black object. For an instant it looked like some armour-plated dinosaur, its eyes reflecting the torchlight, but then they realized it was some sort of monstrous machine with sensor-plates on its forward end. It was covered with dust, but its contours were vaguely visible, reminding Karil of a Martian sand-crawler.
"You know what this is?" he said. "It's a cleaning-robot."
"Well, if it is, it's been out of order for a hell of a long time."
Judging by the tracks, Slava and Madame Feronia had paused to examine it as well, then moved on. Karil and Loris followed their trail, until suddenly Loris stopped again. She flashed her torch upward and Karil gasped.
The wall before them--more like a precipice in fact--was covered with a vast mural. It was a map of Earth, but an Earth that man had never seen. North America was divided by ocean from the arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and joined to Europe through Greenland. Eurasia was completely separated from Africa by another great sea. Central America did not exist, except as a chain of islands. India was an island off the coast of Africa, and the Himalayas were missing. They stared in shock as Loris played her torch over the surface.
"That's Earth in the Cretaceous, I assume."
"I guess so."
They went on and found light pouring from another room. Slava and Feronia must have been drawn to it as well, for the tracks led that way. The light came from panels in the ceiling--some burning low, others burned out entirely, but many still functioning. The room was filled with eggs--thousands of leathery, reptilian eggs arranged in neat rows, precisely sorted by size and colour.
"Now we know what happened to the dinosaurs," Loris said. "They were collected to death."
"No, they're artificial," Karil told her. He had approached one to examine it more closely. He touched it and jumped back as its shell became transparent, revealing an embryo inside.
"The damn thing spoke to me."
Loris came up beside him and touched it. She heard a sort of warbling, clicking speech, and various parts of the embryo glowed from within.
The dinosaur had entered behind them. Karil turned to him. "Can you understand this speech?"
It clicked excitedly.
"I guess so. He could probably teach it to us." Karil set off down the row, touching each egg as he passed, then made a ninety-degree turn and touched a series of eggs in that direction.
"This is amazing," he called out. "Along this axis you can see an individual embryo developing, and along this one you can see one species diverging from another."
"Really?" Loris duplicated his experiment. The row she picked was all ceratops; she could see them sprouting one, two, three horns, watched them trying on various forms of armoured headgear. "It's a museum, that's what it is."
Karil had already moved on to the next room. She heard him cry out in alarm and pounded after him. He stood in obvious awe before a colossal skeleton. The room was filled with them.
"I thought the Terran Museum of Natural History was something," Loris said, "but this..."
"That's not the half of it. Step over there."
"What?"
"A beam of light between those sensors. Break it."
Loris stepped forward and watched in astonishment as the Tyrannosaurus skeleton before her took on flesh. She saw muscles growing on the bones, viscera taking shape within its body cavities, huge heart and veins and tiny brain and complex nervous system branching out, finally flesh and skin spreading over the surface until an incredibly realistic Tyrannosaur glared down at her. She stepped back and watched it being stripped down to skeleton again.
She turned to speak to Karil, but he was gone again.
"Just like a goddamn kid in the funhouse," she muttered, and followed. He was waiting by a doorway with a grin on his face.
"What have you found now?"
His grin widened. "The Library." He stepped aside and, with a deep bow, ushered her through the door.
She found herself on a balcony overlooking what appeared to be a canyon crisscrossed with natural bridges. In the scattered beams from a few functional lamps in a ceiling far overhead, the cleft descended deep into the mountain, and the walls towered above her. Lining the canyon were monolithic structures like city apartment blocks, stretching in neat rows into the distance. In place of windows, there were cubicles not unlike the viewing rooms of a modern library.
"How do you know they're not sleeping-compartments or something?"
"I don't know. The minute I saw it, I thought--library."
"Then where are the books?"
"Let's find out."
Slava's and Madame Feronia's tracks led helpfully along the balcony and across a bridge. Like all the ledges they had seen, there was no railing, and Loris' heart was in her mouth as she followed Karil across the slender span. He stepped into an aisle between stacks and froze in place, as if electrocuted.
"Damn!" Ignoring the danger, Loris raced across the bridge to his side. He turned to face her, eyes wide, mouth open in shock. She grabbed him and shook him.
"Karil! What is it?"
He looked into her eyes for a moment, and then, with a beatific smile, took her hand and drew her behind him down the aisle.
Loris felt a thrill, like the touch of static electricity on her scalp. She heard a voice speaking nonsense syllables and saw an alien landscape spread out before her--a sea of cloud that sparkled with rainbows, a pillar that shimmered like molten glass, a sky adorned with an arch of rings from horizon to horizon, casting shadows on the clouds. The image was translucent; through it she could see Karil's ecstatic face, or her own hand held up before her eyes.
"That's not Saturn, is it?"
"No, it's another world. Orbiting a different sun."
Karil drew her on another step. She saw what she guessed to be the view inside the molten-glass pillar. The walls heaved and reflected light in shimmering patterns. Winged creatures spiralled up and down like birds in the eye of a hurricane, and there was a sound like whale-song, or wind-chimes. An object that might have been an elevator-car of some sort, or a globe of flaming mercury, plummeted through the spiral of winged bodies with a dopplering hiss.
"Let me see," Karil said. "A private world, the most powerful animals ever created, Tarzan's house, two beautiful women to share it with, and the greatest library in the universe. What else have you got for me?"
Loris took another step and cried out in surprise as a living creature took shape before her. It was vaguely humanoid, yet reptilian, with a large skull, huge snakelike eyes--mounted forward on its face for binocular vision--a short snout with a weak chin and a slit mouth--which could not, she guessed, contain teeth--a thin and mobile neck with a dewlap, and pterosaur-like wings folded about its small body like an opera-cape. With the free fingers of its winged forelimb, it gestured in something like sign-language. Then it nodded and blinked--sideways like a lizard.
"They're saurian. That's why they were so concerned about our dinosaurs. And they have wings. That's why the ledges have no railings, and the doorways are so wide."
Another step. A group of the creatures was playing in a kind of spherical zero-gee stadium. They flew in spiral patterns, tossing among themselves an object that looked like a dead, furry animal. They caught it with folded wings and curved bodies as a bat would catch an insect on the wing, snatched it with taloned hind-limbs, and tossed it to a team-member. The spectators hung in a sphere about them, their bodies linked together like army ants on bivouac. When a catcher missed, one of the spectators would field the object and take his place.
"What are these things we're seeing?" Loris wondered.
"Book-covers, I think. You walk down the aisles through a mental field of some sort until you find the subject you want, and then you climb into one of these chambers to study it in depth. That's my guess, at least."
"I suppose these chambers are sound-proof. And thought proof. Christ, can't you see them swarming over these stacks like bees on a honeycomb? I suppose there ought to be a catalogue or a master-file of some sort, somewhere."
"Well, maybe the Keeper is not just the zoo-keeper, but the book-keeper. Let's see if we can find her." Karil dragged Loris down the aisle. Swiftly, images darted through their minds. There were stars--blue, red, white, and yellow. There were planets--icy, rocky, gaseous, with and without moons, bands, rings, and seas. There were forests of strange plants, sea-creatures as weird and diverse as those on Earth, armoured amphibians, diaphanous jellies adrift in cloudscapes, multi-legged and segmented creatures crawling in red sands, huge worms wriggling in methane slush. There were cities long-dead in blasted landscapes, vast structures orbiting in space.
Karil skidded to a halt and Loris collided with him. They saw a huge structure like a surrealist castle floating above the Cretaceous Earth, surrounded by lesser ships in bewildering variety. It made their flesh crawl.
They moved on. Image followed image. The interior of the ship--tiers and terraces and vast open spaces, winged creatures flitting everywhere. A zoom over Earth's surface, dinosaurs raising their great heads in fright, stampeding, herded like cattle. A pterosaur of some sort crying harshly in fear as aliens examined it, trying to communicate. The same creature being released again over Cretaceous forest.
There were aliens in a theatre observing some holographic animation--polar caps spreading over Earth's surface, dinosaurs dying, huge piles of decaying flesh. A dozen aliens debating. The surface of Mars, with torrents of lava flowing from the volcanoes of Tharsis, the landscape shuddering with quakes, the Mariner Valley subsiding, vast rivers of mud flowing out onto the Margaritifer Plain. More shots of the council debating, wings flapping in gesticulatory speech. The surface of Venus, where a great project was underway, machines the size of cities crawling over the lowlands, the surface boiling beneath power-beams, arches and tunnels and huge caverns, more machines being lowered into pits as winged aliens circled under a domed roof like seagulls about a fishing-trawler.
"That's why they built it here instead of Earth or Mars," Karil said.
"What do you mean?"
"The greenhouse effect stabilizes temperatures. Compared to Earth or Mars, Venus hasn't changed much in 65 million years."
"So why not build in orbit, where macro-structures belong?"
"I guess these guys could pretty well afford to ignore gravity. Besides, you can't hide in orbit."
"Hide from who? Us?"
"Who knows. Maybe. Maybe they're waiting for us to die out, so they can give Earth back to the dinosaurs."
"Looks to me like they could have hastened that process any time they wanted."
The images vanished and they found themselves at the end of the stacks, on a balcony overlooking what appeared to be a catalogue or reference area--a vast, terraced amphitheatre like the pit of Dante's Hell. Their dinosaur companion clicked at them, turned on its slim heels, and trotted away down the passageway, having apparently accomplished its mission. The ceiling vaulted far overhead, where shafts of light from huge windows descended through a maze of balconies and catwalks to illuminate two tiny figures in the pit below.
Madame Feronia stood with laser-rifle in hand, pointing it toward Slava's back. They stood facing a huge archway at the far end of the room. As Karil and Loris watched in horror, a huge tyrannosaur strode in through the archway and turned toward them. Karil and Loris reacted instantly in a co-ordinated attack, with no consultation between them. Karil leaped from the balcony, struck the floor and rolled, Loris doing the same immediately behind him. She winced involuntarily at the pain in her ribs as she rolled to her feet, then thrust the pain into the corner of her mind and took her cues from Karil.
He would obviously head directly for Slava. Loris pounded after him, but in the direction of Madame Feronia, just as the woman pushed Slava toward the approaching tyrannosaur and turned to run, her rifle still in her hands. The great beast strode toward them across the floor of the chamber as Slava fell at its feet.
Karil snatched up Slava in his arms and turned on his heel, just as Loris reached Feronia. She yanked the rifle from the woman's arms and shoved her aside, then put the weapon to her shoulder and drew a bead on the tyrannosaur's great head.
She did not pull the trigger. Instead, she placed the weapon on the ground, just as Karil stopped in his stride, set Slava on her feet and returned. Madame Feronia approached in silence and the four of them stood calmly, looking up into the tyrannosaur's huge, but intelligent, eyes. Karil could feel its delicate, calming touch in his mind—-almost, he thought, like Atalanta’s voice.