Chapter 10

Serenity – Year 27.32.15

The thick mane of blue and gold feathers tingled along the back of Gwark's sinuous neck. What was that noise? Were the eggs in the incubator hatching ahead of time? Gwark wasn't sure he was quite ready to be a father again so soon.

He turned his head away from the screen of runic characters he'd been reading and focused his huge eyes on the corner of the room where the incubator stood just by the connubial bed he shared with Duwinki, his wife of many decades. What he saw reassured and alarmed him in equal measure.

No, it wasn't his eggs hatching. Both of them were resting where they'd been so carefully laid when Duwinki gave birth just two days earlier. But a grotesque sight was crackling its scales and wriggling about on the wooden floor. It was a kind of arthropod, but not one that currently existed in the forests or plains of the Solar System. It was many times larger and most resembled those terrestrial beings that dominated the world in the Silurian period and known only from fossils. It thrashed around in distress and then, with no warning and leaving no evidence that it had ever been there, it vanished.

Whatever it might be, Gwark was sure that this strange arthropod was just one of those peculiar Apparitions that were so much more in evidence this close to the Anomaly. It wasn't the first he'd seen in the last few days, but it was the closest he'd ever been to one. They were real and solid for at least the time they were present, but they never persisted long enough to be analysed in detail. Now they were present for significantly longer periods of time. One had persisted in the ship's farm for well over ninety seconds, but by good fortune this monstrous thecodont disappeared before it could cause damage. The domestic sauropods grazing there were dismayed by its presence and threatened to stampede. Although the space ship was large and spacious, a wild herd of ten metre high sauropods would have caused untold havoc.

The space ship, whose name could most nearly be translated as Serenity, was almost the size of an orbital colony and had to be as it had been home to a crew of scientists and navigators for over fifty years since its launch from the Kuiper Belt. It was set on a course to investigate the Anomaly whose presence troubled all the Solar System's intelligent species.

There were representatives from all the technologically advanced species on the ship. This was not an unprecedented cooperation, but it was still rather unusual. They were all theropods, except for a species of hadrosaur and a rather less intelligent species of flightless bird. Gwark was a feathered theropod and proud to belong to the most ancient civilised species in the Solar System whose origins could be dated back many millions of years. The rational beings of this version of the Solar System had never known a mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. Like all theropods, Gwark was more a carnivore than an omnivore though he did have a craving for succulent fruit.

None of the intelligent dinosaur species were as sociable as the mammals that dominated other parallel universes and were therefore less prone to the internecine conflicts and intolerance that marred mammalian history. On the other hand, their civilisation's progress had been significantly less rapid. The events that hastened their history, such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, happened steadily and gradually.

The peace that was all their society had ever known was reinforced by a philosophy and culture which emphasised co-existence and stability. The literature and art of Gwark's civilisation didn't revel in warfare, heroism or danger. Instead it tended towards the reflective and meditative. A typical myth or legend expounded a moral message that prized wisdom and sagacity over violent conflict resolution. Whether their society lacked as a result, neither Gwark nor any other intelligent species in their Solar System could ever know. It had in any case resulted in a remarkably harmonious and crime-free society.

There had been periods of relatively rapid progress in dinosaurian civilisation. The colonisation of the Solar System, generally a leisurely process, was a response to the encroaching glaciers that had enveloped much of the Northern Hemisphere. This event that had begun several hundreds of thousands of years earlier motivated Gwark's ancestors and the other intelligent theropod species to cooperate on what was then an unprecedented scale to ensure that civilisations already millions of years old would continue to survive.

And now a similar crisis stirred the Solar System's community. It was haste indeed that persuaded the disparate species to cooperate on this hugely expensive mission—of which Gwark was now a part—to intercept the Anomaly. In Gwark's world, expense couldn't be measured in monetary units. There had never been a capitalist society as understood by the mammals of some other universes, but there were measurements of economic activity that approximated to the same concept.

The door to Gwark's room opened and Duwinki entered. It couldn't be anyone else. No one but Gwark would enter the connubial bedroom. Theropods were jealous of their personal space and never shared it with anyone not in their immediate family. It was only when seeking a mate, which was a long drawn-out process, that a male theropod would ever welcome the company of someone not already very well known to him.

"You won't believe what I've just seen!" exclaimed Gwark to his wife, after they affectionately nuzzled each other.

In fact, Duwinki had no difficulty in believing her husband. She'd also seen several of these strange Apparitions in the last few days though it horrified her that this one had come so close to her incubating eggs. What if the arthropod had an appetite for them? However impermanent these anomalies were, they persisted long enough to cause significant damage. There had been several occasions when their presence was sufficiently disruptive to cause death and destruction. A hadrosaur suffered a very painful death when a curious worm-like object manifested itself inside her stomach. On another occasion an infestation of nanobots consumed the contents of four adjacent rooms until they too suddenly vanished leaving behind nothing but a strange void. The sauropod herds were constantly on edge when confronted by things they had no ability to understand.

"I do hope this Anomaly is benign," said Duwinki nervously. "It would be terrible if it had evil intention."

"That's what we're here to discover," Gwark consoled his wife, but betrayed his anxiety by twitching the long feathered tail that was nearly a third of his entire length. "But it's believed that this Anomaly isn't an intelligent phenomenon at all. The main worry is that it is growing at such an alarming rate. If it does turn out to be a malign force then maybe this will be the trigger that finally persuades our civilisation to colonise other solar systems."

"There would have to be a very good argument for that," said Duwinki. "Fifty years travel from home to here is quite enough. What would it be like for many generations to have to live and die before we arrived at even the next nearest solar system? There's a lot of empty space between us and Proxima Centauri. And there's nothing to welcome us when we arrive."

Although Duwinki and Gwark spent most of their waking life in their chambers, where they also meditated and conducted scientific research, they occasionally ventured into the space ship beyond. This was not for socialising, which was something only the hadrosaurs were prone to do, but simply to enjoy their walks together through the forests and grasslands that occupied more than two-thirds of the habitable space. Such exercise was important, although their extensive suite was fitted with gym equipment and, of course, provided them with the privacy to enjoy sex with one another which they would do almost incessantly when Duwinki was at the most active point of her oestrogen cycle (which was almost exactly tuned to Gwark's own sexual cycle).

Before they left their suite, the two theropods checked that the incubator's monitoring equipment was in good working order. They wanted to be there when their eggs hatched so that they could properly imprint on their children who their parents were. Although there were a couple more days until the hatching was expected, even in the modern age this was always a rough approximation.

Gwark and Duwinki emerged from their suite on the seventh level which, like all homes, was just below floor level. In their society, ground level was kept clear of obstacles that could get in the way of the lumbering ceratopsians, ankylosaurs and iguanodons that wandered freely about the ship and whose presence was chiefly to provide fresh meat for the various species of hungry theropod. The level of the ship where the couple lived was host to a mix of forest and grassland, interspersed by lakes where plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs swam. Pterosaurs and birds roosted in the trees in the company of a few small mammals and ornithopods. Like all space ships and colonies, the landscape resembled that of the Earth to which the dinosaurian civilisation was still very much attached.

Other intelligent theropods and a few hadrosaurs also wandered about the landscape, either singly or in couples. When they passed other strollers Gwark and Duwinki observed polite convention by studiously ignoring them.

Nobody on the ship wore clothes. This would be absurd on beings already well blessed with a thick covering of feathers sported by all but the hadrosaurs. Compared to the mammals that scurried in the undergrowth, the couple were large but not nearly as much as the tyrannosaurs and allosaurs confined to the wildlife reserves. Gwark and Duwinki were just over four metres long and over three metres tall when they stood upright. Normally they walked at an oblique angle to the ground with their weight balanced by long feathered tails.

Their excursion was to the lake on the sixteenth level where they could watch the long-necked elasmosaurs frolic in the water, accompanied by soaring pterosaurs chasing after fish and the occasional larger plesiosaur. This lake served both as a fish farm and as a reservoir for the fresh water that was required for the daily bathing ritual that kept the residents' feathers in good condition.

Even by the waters of the lake, the married couple were reminded that they were in a space ship and not a colony. Huge screens hovered above the ground at periodic intervals and frequently had to dodge out of the way of the more clumsy large fauna. These provided information about where the space ship was in relation to the Anomaly and how far it was from the ecliptic. It also screened panoramic views of the empty space outside the ship.