Michael Swanwick: Scherzo with Tyrannosaur

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.

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 afterwards, 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.

Michael Swanwick: Sleep of Reason

Midway in life's journey, a man who might have been Dante or might have been Goya himself (on this the record is not clear) went astray and found himself alone in a dark wood. Never saw he so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Alas for him that he was an artist, and susceptible to such influences. Alas for us all that he fell asleep!

The Noösphere is the ocean of thought within which we all live, dream, make love, and sometimes aspire. It is purified by reason. It is polluted by war and madness. And, like a river so badly polluted it catches fire, the Noösphere in times of war and madness can be a dangerous thing.

In a time of war and madness, the man who might well have been Goya fell asleep, and his dreams caught fire. They congealed and took form and entered the physical world. As cats and owls and bats and less wholesome creatures, winged, furred and fanged, they leaped into the night, and filled the skies with their keening presence.

One flew off with a child's jacket. Another swooped down and bit a hole in the lord mayor's ear. A third put on a uniform and led the French armies into Russia.

A thousand ills poured from the dreamer's troubled sleep. The Siege of Leningrad and the Trail of Tears. Andersonville and total warfare. The Paraguayan War, the Taiping Rebellion, the Bataan Death March. Pol Pot, Baba Yar, Jack the Ripper. Mercury poisoning, thalidomide babies, mustard gas and trench warfare. Lynchings. Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black 47. September Eleventh. The Rape of Nanking, the occupation of Tibet, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Stalin and Beria and the Soviet Terror and the relocations and the gulags. Krystalnacht, and then the camps: Chelmo, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Maidenek — the names roll by like cattle cars in an endless train. The Jewish Holocaust, the Native American Holocaust, the Romani Holocaust, the Armenian Holocaust… Why go on?

Michael Swanwick: The Dead

Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bussed our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless; their hands and faces so white as to be faintly luminous in the hushed light. I thought it in bad taste, but «This is Manhattan,» Courtney said. «A certain studied offensiveness is fashionable here.»

The blond brought menus and waited for our order.

We both ordered pheasant. «An excellent choice,» the boy said in a clear, emotionless voice. He went away and came back a minute later with the freshly strangled birds, holding them up for our approval. He couldn't have been more than eleven when he died and his skin was of that sort connoisseurs call «milk glass,» smooth, without blemish, and all but translucent. He must have cost a fortune.

As the boy was turning away, I impulsively touched his shoulder. He turned back. «What's your name, son?» I asked.

«Timothy.» He might have been telling me the sp'ecialit'e de maison . The boy waited a breath to see if more was expected of him, then left.

Courtney gazed after him. «How lovely he would look,» she murmured, «nude. Standing in the moonlight by a cliff. Definitely a cliff. Perhaps the very one where he met his death.»