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"Shezro with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick
"Shezro with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick
Schezro with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick
A keyboardist was playing a selection of Scarlotti’s harpsichord sonatas, brief pieces one to three minutes long,
very complex and refined, while the Hadrosaurus herd streamed by the window. There were hundreds of the
brutes, kicking up dust and honking that lovely flattened near-musical note they make. It was a spectacular
sight.
But the hors d’oeuvres had just arrived: plesiosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga smeared over sliced maiasaur egg,
little slivers of roast dodo on toast, a dozen delicacies more. So a stampede of common-as-dirt herbivores just
couldn’t compete.
Nobody was paying much attention.
Except for the kid. He was glued to the window, staring with an intensity remarkable even for a boy his age. I
figured him to be about ten years old.
Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, I went over to stand next to him. "Enjoying yourself, son?"
Without looking up, the kid said, "What do you think spooked them? Was it a—?" Then he saw the wranglers in
their jeeps and his face fell. "Oh."
"We had to cheat a little to give the diners something to see." I gestured with the wine glass past the herd,
toward the distant woods. "But there are plenty of predators lurking out there—troodons, dromaeosaurs . . .
even old Satan."
He looked up at me in silent question.
"Satan is our nickname for an injured old bull rex that’s been hanging around the station for about a month,
raiding our garbage dump."
It was the wrong thing to say. The kid looked devastated. T. rex a scavenger! Say it ain’t so!
"A tyrannosaur is an advantageous hunter," I said, "like a lion. When it chances upon something convenient,
believe you me, it’ll attack. And when a tyrannosaur is hurting, like old Satan is—well, that’s about as savage
and dangerous as any animal can be. It’ll kill even when it’s not hungry."
That satisfied him. "Good," he said. "I’m glad."
In companionable silence, we stared into the woods together, looking for moving shadows. Then the chime
sounded for dinner to begin, and I sent the kid back to his table. The last hadrosaurs were gone by then.
He went with transparent reluctance.
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"Shezro with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick
The Cretaceous Ball was our big fund-raiser, a hundred thousand dollars a seat, and in addition to the silent
auction before the meal and the dancing afterward, everybody who bought an entire table for six was entitled to
their very own paleontologist as a kind of party favor.
I used to be a paleontologist myself, before I was promoted. Now I patrolled the room in tux and cummerbund,
making sure everything was running smoothly.
Waiters slipped in and out of existence. You’d see them hurry behind the screen hiding the entrance to the time
funnel and then pop out immediately on the other side, carrying heavily laden trays. Styracosaurus medallions
in mastodon mozzarella for those who liked red meat. Archaeopteryx almondine for those who preferred white.
Raddichio and fennel for the vegetarians.
All to the accompaniment of music, pleasant chitchat, and the best view in the universe.
Donald Hawkins had been assigned to the kid’s table—the de Cherville Family. According to the seating plan
the heavy, phlegmatic man was Gerard, the money-making paterfamilias . The woman beside him was Danielle,
once his trophy wife, now aging gracefully. Beside them were two guests—the Cadigans—who looked a little
overwhelmed by everything and were probably a favored employee and spouse. They didn’t say much. A sullen
daughter, Melusine, in a little black dress that casually displayed her perfect breasts. She looked bored and
restless—trouble incarnate. And there was the kid, given name Philippe.
I kept a close eye on them because of Hawkins. He was new, and I wasn’t expecting him to last long. But he
charmed everyone at the table. Young, handsome, polite—he had it all. I noticed how Melusine slouched back
in her chair, studying him through dark eyelashes, saying nothing. Hawkins, responding to something young
Philippe had said, flashed a boyish, devil-may-care grin. I could feel the heat of the kid’s hero-worship from
across the room.
Then my silent beeper went off, and I had to duck out of the late Cretaceous and back into the kitchen, Home
Base, year 2140.
There was a Time Safety Officer waiting for me. The main duty of a TSO is to make sure that no time
paradoxes occur, so that the Unchanging wouldn’t take our time privileges away from us. Most people think that
time travel was invented recently, and by human beings. That’s because our sponsors don’t want their
presence advertised.
In the kitchen, everyone was in an uproar. One of the waiters was leaning, spraddle-legged and arms wide
against the table, and another was lying on the floor clutching what looked to be a broken arm. The TSO
covered them both with a gun.
The good news was that the Old Man wasn’t there. If it had been something big and hairy—a Creationist bomb,
or a message from a million years upline—he would have been.
When I showed up, everybody began talking at once.
"I didn’t do noth ing, man, this bastard—"
"—guilty of a Class Six violation—
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"Shezro with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick
"—broke my fucking arm, man. He threw me to the ground!"
"—work to do. Get them out of my kitchen!"
It turned out to be a simple case of note-passing. One of the waiters had, in his old age, conspired with another
recruited from a later period to slip a list of hot investments to his younger self. Enough to make them both
multibillionaires. We had surveillance devices planted in the kitchen, and a TSO saw the paper change hands.
Now the perps were denying everything.
It wouldn’t have worked anyway. The authorities keep strict tabs on the historical record. Wealth on the order of
what they had planned would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
I fired both waiters, called the police to take them away, routed a call for two replacements several hours into
the local past, and had them briefed and on duty without any lapse in service. Then I took the TSO aside and
bawled him out good for calling me back real-time, instead of sending a memo back to me three days ago.
Once something has happened, though, that’s it. I’d been called, so I had to handle it in person.
It was your standard security glitch. No big deal.
But it was wearying. So when I went back down the funnel to Hilltop Station, I set the time for a couple hours
after I had left. I arrived just as the tables were being cleared for desert and coffee.
Somebody handed me a microphone, and I tapped it twice, for attention. I was standing before the window, a
spectacular sunset to my back.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "let me again welcome you to the late Cretaceous. This is the final research
station before the Age of Mammals. Don’t worry, though—the meteor that put a final end to the dinosaurs is still
several thousand years in the future!" I paused for laughter, then continued.
"If you’ll look outside, you’ll see Jean, our dino wrangler, setting up a scent lure. Jean, wave for our diners."
Jean was fiddling with a short tripod. She waved cheerily, then bent back to work. With her blond ponytail and
khaki shorts, she looked to be just your basic science babe. But Jean was slated to become one of the top
saurian behaviorists in the world, and knew it too. Despite our best efforts, gossip slips through.
Now Jean backed up toward the station doors, unreeling fuse wire as she went. The windows were all on the
second floor. The doors, on the ground floor, were all armored.
"Jean will be ducking inside for this demonstration," I said. "You wouldn’t want to be outside unprotected when
the lure goes off."
"What’s in it?" somebody called out.
"Triceratops blood. We’re hoping to call in a predator—maybe even the king of predators, Tyrannosaurus rex
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"Shezro with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick
himself." There was an appreciative murmur from the diners. Everybody here had heard of T. rex . He had real
star power. I switched easily into lecture mode. "If you dissect a tyrannosaur, you’ll see that it has an extremely
large olfactory lobe—larger in proportion to the rest of its brain than that of any other animal except the turkey
vulture. Rex can sniff his prey"—carrion, usually, but I didn’t say that—"from miles away. Watch."
The lure went off with a pop and a puff of pink mist.
I glanced over at the de Cherville table, and saw Melusine slip one foot out of her pump and run it up Hawkins’
trouser leg. He colored.
Her father didn’t notice. Her mother—her step -mother, more likely—did, but didn’t care. To her, this was simply
what women did. I couldn’t help but notice what good legs Melusine had.
"This will take a few minutes. While we’re waiting, I direct your attention to Chef Rupert’s excellent pastries."
I faded back to polite applause, and began the round of table hopping. A joke here, a word of praise there. It’s
banana oil makes the world go round.
When I got to the de Chervilles, Hawkins’ face was white.
"Sir!" He shot to his feet. "A word with you."
He almost dragged me away from the table.
When we were in private, he was so upset he was stuttering. "Th-that young woman, w-wants me t-to . . ."
"I know what she wants," I said coolly. "She’s of legal age—make your own decision."
"You don’t understand! I can’t possibly go back to that table." Hawkins was genuinely anguished. I thought at
first that he’d been hearing rumors, dark hints about his future career. Somehow, though, that didn’t smell right.
There was something else going on here.
"All right," I said. "Slip out now. But I don’t like secrets. Record a full explanation and leave it in my office. No
evasions, understand?"
"Yes, sir." A look of relief spread itself across his handsome young face. "Thank you, sir."
He started to leave.
"Oh, and one more thing," I said casually, hating myself. "Don’t go anywhere near your tent until the fund
raiser’s broken up."
The de Chervilles weren’t exactly thrilled when I told them that Hawkins had taken ill, and I’d be taking his
place. But then I took a tyrannosaur tooth from my pocket and gave it to Philippe. It was just a shed—rexes
drop a lot of teeth—but no need to mention that.
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"Shezro with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick
"It looks sharp," Mrs. de Cherville said, with a touch of alarm.
"Serrated, too. You might want to ask your mother if you can use it for a knife, next time you have steak," I
suggested.
Which won him over completely. Kids are fickle. Philippe immediately forgot all about Hawkins.
Melusine, however, did not. Eyes flashing with anger, she stood, throwing her napkin to the floor. "I want to
know," she began, "just what you think you’re—"
Fortunately, that was when Satan arrived.
The tyrannosaur came running up the hillside at a speed you’d have to be an experienced paleontologist to
know was less than optimal. Even a dying T. rex moves fast .
People gasped.
I took the microphone out of my pocket, and moved quickly to the front of the room. "Folks, we just got lucky. I’d
like to inform those of you with tables by the window that the glass is rated at twenty tons per square inch.
You’re in no danger whatsoever. But you are in for quite a show. Those who are in the rear might want to get a
little closer."
Young Philippe was off like a shot.
The creature was almost to us. "A tyrannosaur has a hyperacute sense of smell," I reminded them. "When it
scents blood, its brain is overwhelmed. It goes into a feeding frenzy."
A few droplets of blood had spattered the window. Seeing us through the glass, Satan leaped and tried to
smash through it.
Whoomp! The glass boomed and shivered with the impact. There were shrieks and screams from the diners,
and several people started to their feet.
At my signal, the string quartet took up their instruments again, and began to play while Satan leaped and tore
and snarled, a perfect avatar of rage and fury. They chose the scherzo from Shostakovich’s piano quintet.
Scherzos are supposed to be funny, but most have a whirlwind, uninhibited quality that makes them particularly
appropriate to nightmares and the madness of predatory dinosaurs.
Whoomp! That mighty head struck the window again and again. For a long time, Satan kept on frenziedly
slashing at the window with its jaws, leaving long scratches in the glass.
Philippe pressed his body against the window with all his strength, trying to minimize the distance between
himself and savage dino death. Shrieking with joyous laughter when that killer mouth tried to snatch him up. I
felt for the kid, wanting to get as close to the action as he could. I could identify.
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