She stopped.
There was an envelope on the dresser. Funny she hadn’t seen it before. She picked it up. Something was written on it, in her own hand.
It was addressed to her.
14. Intraspecific Communication
Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.
With dreamlike slowness, the great beasts browsed in the moonlight.
Oneirosaurus was the last and largest of the supersauropods. It was a late, final flowering of the Titanosaurinae, rare as rare, and a creature that all logic said properly belonged not in the late Cretaceous, but in the Jurassic, when giant sauropods were common. To see one was to refuse to believe it existed. To see five scattered across the river valley, as now, eating the jungle down to stubble, was a privilege Leyster knew he would cherish for the rest of his life.
Alone of all the creatures in the valley, Oneirosaurus never slept. It couldn’t afford to. It had to keep eating, moving its little head steadily, monotonously, from side to side until all the vegetation within reach was gone, and then taking a ponderous step or two forward to repeat the process. All day and all night it did this, just to keep alive.
It was not much of a life, but one they seemed dimly to enjoy. And it was one that could last for centuries. Leyster had heard rumors that individuals had been identified as being over five hundred years old.
Wonderful as those giant gray shadow-beasts were to look at, though, he knew that Lai-tsz hadn’t brought him out here for esthetic reasons. She was a pragmatist. Her mind just didn’t work that way.
“So what is it that you wanted me to see?” he asked.
“Not to see. To hear. To feel.”
“Then what—?”
“Shhh. Wait.”
She wrapped her arms protectively around her swollen belly, and stared out over the land. Prospect Bluff had a view second only to Barren Ridge—and no carnivores nested here. A touch of wind blew her hair forward, and she raised her chin slightly, as if to meet it.
Leyster found himself wishing he had the skill to paint in oils, so he could capture her as she was then, with the land a symphony of grays behind her, and the River Styx a gleam of silver meandering through it. There was something heroic about a pregnant woman. She carried all the hopes and fears of a new life within her body. Nobody could deny that she was engaged in serious business.
After a while, Lai-tsz made a face and said, “Little Turok is active tonight.”
“Have you decided on a name yet?”
“For the English name, I’m leaning toward Emily if it’s a girl, and Nathaniel if it’s a boy. For the Chinese—there! Listen!”
At first, Leyster heard nothing. He turned to Lai-tsz to say so, but something about her stance, the way she held her head, told him that she, at least could hear something. Whatever it was, though, had to be subtle and extremely easy to miss.
He willed himself perfectly still. He quieted all conscious thought.
He waited.
Slowly he became aware of a low, pervasive rumbling, like the inaudible undertones produced by the deepest pipes of a church organ. He felt more than heard it, in his chest and the pit of his stomach, a sound so deep into the bass that he had to wonder if he were fantasizing it.
“I…hear it, I think. Something. But what is it?”
Lai-tsz shivered in a kind of ecstasy. “Infrasound.”
“What?”
“I didn’t want to say anything before I got independent confirmation that there really is something there. They’re speaking to each other infrasonically—with sound waves of such low frequency that you and I can’t actually hear them.”
“My God,” Leyster said. “You mean they’re communicating with each other?”
“With each other, with oneirosaurs outside the valley—who knows? Infrasound can travel for miles. They could be speaking with kin beyond the horizon. Elephants use infrasound to communicate with each other over huge distances.”
“How did you discover this?”
“It’s Turok’s discovery, actually. The little floater grows very still whenever the oneirosaurs speak. Child-to-be would be bouncing around actively, and then suddenly stop, listening. After a while, I made the connection. Whenever Turok got still like that, there’d be an oneirosaur in sight. Either that, or else a tyrannosaur.”
“Tyrannosaurs, too?”
“Yes, I really do think so.”
Leyster laughed from sheer joy. “This is wonderful! You’ve made an incredible discovery.” He seized her hand and kissed it fervently. If it hadn’t been for young Turok, he would have picked her up and whirled her around in the air. “This is… it’s important!”
“Yes. I know,” Lai-tsz said complacently. Leyster understood that she was every bit as pleased as he was. She just didn’t like to show it.
For a time, they stared after the oneirosaurs determinedly eating their way up the valley, sharing the moment without speaking. The moon shone down hazily through a sky strewn with wisps of cloud. There would be rain in the morning, and re-growth would begin. When the lesser herbivores returned, there would be new food in plenty for them.
“It’s really quite marvelous,” Leyster said at last, “how everything fits together. The oneirosaurs level and fertilize the valley just at the right time to maximize growth. And then they move on, rather than staying and monopolizing the limited resources.”
“The herds should be returning soon.”
“Yes.”
“It’s funny, though, how the first animals to return from the migrations were the tyrannosaurs. Followed so closely by the oneirosaurs. It’s almost as if the one were leading the other.”
Leyster was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t really believe that, though.”
“I don’t know. They both employ infrasound. It’s quite possible there’s interspecific as well as intraspecific communication going on. It’s something we really ought to look into.”
“How could we check? Could you build a device of some kind?”
“Oh, yeah, easily. We’ve got a couple of recorders, and all I’d have to do is speed up the playback to bring the ultrasonics up into audibility.”
“You’d have to take time away from trying to repair the time beacon, though.”
She threw him an odd look. “Oh, Richard,” she said, as if it were a negligible thing. “I thought you knew. I gave up on that a long time ago.”
To his amazement, he discovered that she was right. He knew she’d given up on their ever returning to their own time. He’d known it for months.
Finally, though, it was time to go home. They picked their way gingerly downslope and through the woods, guided by the fitful glimmer of one of their two remaining flashlights. Since Chuck had lost the third, two weeks ago, the flashlights had been put on the proscribed list of equipment that was never to leave the camp. But Lai-tsz’s condition superceded all rules. Leyster held the flashlight for her, walking half a step ahead and to the side, to make sure the way was safe.
“I miss Daljit and Jamal,” Lai-tsz said.
“They call every day.”
“It’s not the same.”
For the end of the rainy season, Daljit and Jamal had determined to go inland to meet the migrating herds partway home, make a count of their numbers, and possibly gain some insight into their behavior. They would have liked to follow the migrating herds out at the beginning of the season and back again in the spring, but everybody agreed there simply weren’t the resources yet to make that plan practical. So they’d compromised.
The Styx was tributary to the Eden River, which flowed through the Faraways (hardly mountains, but more than hills) at Water Gap. There, on an elevated spot above the migration trails Jamal and Daljit had set up their camp.