It was a rich world, filled with fascinating creatures he would never have time enough even to begin to study. Leyster sighed, and let his mind wander freely over the data they had gathered so far.
The central fact of their discovery came first. They had observed and then confirmed by instrumentation that several different species of dinosaur “spoke” to each other by means of infrasound. Rather than enumerate all the species they had documented as communicating in this manner, he synopsised them as “several major dinosaur groups.” The species involved could be mentioned when he came to specific interactions, and this way was more concise.
The dirty little secret of scientific journals was that not only did they not pay for the papers they printed, the authors had to pay them a fixed rate of so much per page. Not that money alone could get you into a serious journal; you still had to write a paper that would get past peer review and impress the editors enough to want it. But, particularly if you were just starting out, you might delay publication of some papers for years, while waiting for your financial situation to clear up.
The system, for all its faults, did have one positive effect, though: It kept the papers terse. The irony was that now, when the economics of scientific journals was irrelevant, the limits of his ability to memorize text imposed an equally strict need for economy.
When he was satisfied with the wording, he announced that he’d come up with the first section of the paper, and recited it aloud. The others abandoned their argument to consider it.
“That should be ‘field observations’ rather than ‘observations in the field,’ ” Daljit said. “It’s shorter.”
“Good thought. I’ll change it.”
“Why ‘major dinosaur groups?’ ” Jamal asked. “Why not simply ‘dinosaurs?’ ”
“Because we don’t know that all dinosaurs engage in the behavior. In fact, we’re pretty certain that some—birds—don’t.”
“Point taken.”
The phone rang.
“Yes?” Tamara said. “It’s Gillian,” she told them. Then, to Gillian, “Leyster’s working on the paper. Yes, already. Well, obviously he thought we had enough data. What? No! Well, it’s about time. Hey, everybody! Lai-tsz’s gone into labor!”
“She has?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Outstanding!”
“They’re all happy and everybody sends their love. When did it start? Uh-huh. How’s she doing? Well, of course.” She was silent for a bit, then said, “Okay, I’ll ask him.”
She turned to Leyster. “Gillian wants to know if you’re going to use Chuck’s theory.”
The raft lurched. “Oh, cripes!” Daljit said. “Who’s navigating?”
It took them over an hour to get the raft off the sand bar, and it was dirty and difficult work doing so. They all had to climb into the water (except Jamal, who stayed aboard and fretted) so the raft would ride higher in the water, and then wrangle it over toward deeper water.
Dirty and tired, and yet exhilarated by their eventual success, they shucked off their clothes and spread them out to dry. Daljit bullied them into raising poles at the rear and lashing a canvas to them to make a canopy to keep from getting sunburned.
They were amiably finishing up their comments on the opening of the paper—it was the simplest part, and there was the least room for disagreements of interpretation—when Tamara suddenly held a hand up and said, “Shhh!”
“What is it?” Leyster whispered.
She pointed to the left bank. A Stygivenator molari was walking briskly downriver along its margin, moving at a speed that kept it parallel to them. Every now and then it would glance over at them, its eyes bright and avaricious.
Leyster shivered involuntarily. A stygivenator was one of the larger predators, as large as a juvenile tyrannosaur but with the reflexes of an adult predator.
“What’s it doing?” Jamal asked quietly.
“Pacing us,” Leyster whispered back. Fortunately, most theropods were lousy swimmers.
“So what should we do about that?”
“Keep quiet, and be very careful not to let the raft drift too close to it.”
Then the river bent, and they all had to frantically man the poles to keep the raft from running aground. The forest thickened at the bend, and the trees hung far out over the water, forcing the stygivenator inland. By the time they’d regained the center of the river, it was gone.
There were termite mounds on the right-hand side of the Eden—a metropolis of them. On the left, Leyster saw a marsh hopper prying open a freshwater clam with its tiny claws and furred paws. Suddenly a troodon that neither Leyster nor the marsh hopper had suspected was lurking there, snapped up the small mammal. It shook its head twice to snap the marsh hopper’s spine, then lifted its neck and swallowed down the unfortunate animal whole.
While it was thus occupied, the stygivenator emerged from the wood, moving at top speed. Its jaws closed upon the troodon before the smaller predator knew what was happening. One crunch, and the bugger was dead.
It was an incredibly violent era, sustained only by the enormous number of offspring almost everything here produced. Which was what made it so astonishing that so many did reach adulthood. The network of interspecific cooperation—the tyrannosaur as farmer—resulted in a staggering efficiency, which allowed a greater population of the largest life forms than would otherwise be possible.
He couldn’t help thinking again of Salley’s talk, so long ago and so far in the future, when she had said that ceratopsians were farmed by their predators. He smiled. It was so typical of her to impress him with his own work. In some ways she was not a very good scientist: impatient with data, too ready to leap to conclusions, apt to judge an idea not by its merits but by its sheer niftiness.
But paleontology needed her, as leavening if nothing else. Science needed leapers as well as plodders, visionaries as well as detectives.
She was a kite. She needed only the most tenuous connection with the ground in order to fly, a sure string of logic with a reliable hand at the end of it to make sure she didn’t take a nosedive straight into the ground. More than anything he wished he could be the hand at the end of her kite string.
Watching the banks flow by, he slid off into a reverie. He didn’t notice when Jamal took the lead away from him, and moved to the bow to take readings. He didn’t notice how careful the others were to avoid disturbing him.
The cycle began with the spring migrations, when flights of tyrannosaurs, living off their winter fat, spread across the land looking for territory to establish. These were the breeding males. The females followed at a more leisurely pace, sparing themselves the initial hardship, and arriving well-fed and ready to breed.
The Lord of the Valley (they could identify him by his scars) returned to claim the previous year’s territory and, because he was experienced and in his prime, faced only a few challenges from younger males. He paced off the perimeter of his valley, singing, both to warn away competitors and to call in the titanosaurs.
The titanosaurs, those vast eating machines, drifted slowly through the valley, guided by its resident tyrannosaur toward the most productive areas. They stripped vast swaths of the upper-story vegetation, splintered trees, and enabled a bloom of understory vegetation. Now and then, the females deposited hundreds of eggs in a subsoil clutch before wandering away and forgetting about them entirely.
When the titanosaurs finally left, the understory was flourishing and the tyrannosaur was free at last to call in the herds of hadrosaurs and triceratopses.
Leyster held the whole in his mind now; he set about to boil it all down to the least number of words.