Evolution

Only the warm oxygen-laden air of the late Cretaceous would allow such immense, delicate creatures to escape from gravity’s clutches, and never again would there be a gene bank like the pterosaur’s to supply raw material for similar evolutionary experiments. Never again would any creature fill this particular ecological niche, and in the future windblown insects would sail in peace.

And human paleontologists, piecing together this remote era from fragments of bone and fossilized plant, would learn little of the true giants. Most pterosaur bones found would be of marine and lakeland species, because that was where fossils were most easily preserved. By comparison the creatures that dominated the roof of the world, the upland areas and mountaintops, left few traces, for their habitats were subject to ferocious uplift and erosion. The highest mountains of the human era, the Himalayas, did not even exist in the Cretaceous.

The fossil record was patchy and selective. All through time there had been monsters and wonders that no human being would ever know had existed — like this immense flyer.

With the most delicate of touches from his immense extended forefingers the whale banked his wings and soared toward a particularly rich layer of aerial plankton.

The cruel night was not yet done with Purga.

Despite the loss of Second, she continued to forage. There was no choice. Death was common; life continued. There was no time to grieve.

But when she returned to her burrow a small, narrow face came pushing out of the dark toward her, a twitching, mobile snout, bright black eyes, quivering whiskers: one of her kind, another male.

She hissed and backed out of the burrow entrance. She could smell blood. The blood of her pups.

It had happened again. Without hesitation Purga launched herself at the male. But he was fat and strong — evidently a good forager — and he pushed her away easily.

In despair she ran out into the dangerous dawn, where mountainous dinosaurs were starting to stir, the air resonating to the first long-distance calls of the hadrosaurs. She made for an old fern she knew, around whose roots the ground was dry and crumbling. Quickly she dug herself in, ignoring the moist squirms of the worms and beetles. Once she was safe in her cocoon of soil she lay there trembling, trying to shut out of her head the dread stink of her pups’ blood.

The strange male, on discovering Purga’s scent marks — the scent of a fertile female — had followed them back to the burrow, carefully covering over her marks with his own in order to hide her from any other males.

When he had entered the burrow the pups had clustered around the stranger, his same-species smell overwhelming his warning aura of not-of-my-family. He could smell from the traces of fur and dung that a healthy, fertile female lived here. The female was of use to him, but not the pups. They did not smell of him; they were nothing to do with him. Without them, the female would have that much more incentive to raise the litter he would give her.

For the male, it was all utterly logical. The two larger pups had mouthed his belly, seeking milk, even as the male had consumed their younger sister.

The night after that the male found her again, having tracked her scent. He still stank of her dead babies, of the lost part of her. She fought him off savagely.

It took her two more nights before she accepted his courtship. Soon her body would begin to incubate his young.

It was hard.

It was life.

It would have been of no consolation to Purga to know that this brutal landscape, which had swallowed up two of her broods, would soon be overwhelmed by a wave of suffering and death to dwarf anything she had endured.

IV

Earth was now inside the comet’s swelling coma, the loose cloud of gases that swathed the nucleus itself.

All over the night side of Earth the tail could be seen stretching away from the sun. It was as if the planet had drifted into a sparkling tunnel. The sky glittered with meteors, tiny bits of comet falling harmlessly into the high atmosphere, creating a light show glimpsed by uncaring dinosaurs.

But the comet’s nucleus was bigger than any meteor. It moved at twenty kilometers per second, at interplanetary speeds. It had already crossed the orbit of the Moon.

From where it would take just five more hours to reach Earth.

All night long, the birds and pterosaurs sang their confusion; during the day, they slumped with exhaustion. There was no room in their neural programming for a new light in the sky, and they were disturbed at a deep cellular level. In the shallow seas, too, the unending light had disturbed the plankton and larger creatures like crab and shrimp; the cynical hunters of the reef fed well.