Alternate Gerrolds (12 page)

But Kafka wasn’t finished. “Your way is just a possible way of being, Sigmund—but it isn’t the only way! The difference between you and me is that because I know the bindings of my language, I also know my freedom within those bindings! You have been focusing on the bindings, you old asshole,
not the freedom.”

Freud was shuddering now, impaled on Kafka’s impeccable truths. He trembled uncontrollably on the patterned rug, sick and despairing at the chaotic darkness gathering around him. The broken shards of his shattered paradigm had sliced his soul mercilessly, leaving the poor defeated man twitching in the growing puddles of his own terminal
Weltschmerz
. “Forgive me, please. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Kafka knelt to the floor, gathered Freud up in his arms, held him gently, cradling him like a child. He placed one soft hand on the old man’s forehead. “It’s all right now, Siggie,” he soothed. “It’s all over. You can stop. You can rest.”

Freud looked up into Kafka’s calm expression, questioning, hoping. He saw only kindness in the superhero’s eyes. Reassured, he let himself
relax; he allowed peace to flood throughout his body. All stiffness fled. Sigmund Freud rested securely in Franz Kafka’s arms. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

“No,” said Kafka. “On the contrary. It is
I
who should thank
you
.” And with that he plunged his needle-sharp teeth into Sigmund Freud’s pale exposed neck, ripping it open. He bent his head and fed ferociously. The hot rush of blood slaked his incredible thirst, and he moaned in delirious ecstasy.

Triumph was delicious.

“DADDY! THE TYRANNOSAUR is loose again! He jumped the fence.”

Jonathan Filltree replied with a single word, one which he didn’t want his eight-year-old daughter to hear. He punched the
save
key on his keyboard, kicked back his chair and headed toward the basement stairs with obvious annoyance. He resented these constant interruptions in the flow of his work.

“Hurry, Daddy!” Jill shouted again from the basement door. “He’s chasing the stegosaurs! He’s gonna get Steggy!”

“I warned you this was going to happen—” Filltree said angrily, grabbing the long-handled net off the wall. “No! Wait here,” he snapped.

“That’s not fair!” cried Jill, following him down the bare wooden stairs. “I didn’t know he was going to get this big!”

“He’s a meat-eater. The stegosaurs and the apatosaurs and all the others look like lunch to him. Get back upstairs, Jill!”

Filltree stopped at the bottom and looked slowly around the basement that his wife had demanded he convert into a miniature dinosaur kingdom for their spoiled daughter. Hot yellow lights bathed the cellar in a prehistoric ambience. A carboniferous smell permeated everything. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. For some reason, it was worse than usual.

The immediate problem was obvious. Most of the six-inch stegosaurs
had retreated to the high slopes that butted up against the north wall, where they milled about nervously. Their bright yellow and orange colors made them easy to see. Quickly, he counted. All three of the calves and their mother were okay; so were the other two females; but they were all cheeping in distress. He spotted Fred and Cyril, but Steggy was not with the others. The two remaining males were emitting rasping peeps of agitation; and they kept making angry charging motions downslope.

Filltree followed the direction of their agitation. “Damn!” he said, spotting the two-foot-high tyrannosaur. Rex was ripping long strips of flesh off the side of the fallen Steggy and gulping them hungrily down. Already he was streaked with blood. His long tail lashed furiously in the air, acting as a counterweight as he bent to his kill. He ripped and tore, then rose up on his haunches, glancing around quickly and checking for danger with sharp bird-like motions. He jerked his head upward to gulp the latest bloody gobbet deeper into his mouth, then gulped a second time to swallow it. He grunted and roared, then lowered his whole body forward to again bury his muzzle deep in gore.

“Oh, Daddy! He’s killed Steggy!”

“I told you to wait upstairs! A tyrannosaur can be dangerous when he’s feeding!”

“But he’s killed Steggy—!”

“Well, I’m sorry. There’s nothing to do now but wait until he finishes and goes torpid.” Filltree put the net down, leaning it against the edge of the table. The entire room was filled with an elaborate waist-high miniature landscape, through which an improbable mix of Cretaceous and Jurassic creatures prowled. The glass fences at the edges of the tables were all at least thirty-six inches high and mildly electrified to keep the various creatures safely enclosed. Until they’d added Rex to the huge terrarium, they’d had one of the finest collections in Westchester, with over a hundred dinos prowling through the miniature forests. And every spring, the new births among the various herbivores usually added five to ten adorable little calves to their herds.

Now, the ranks of their menagerie had been reduced to only a few light-footed stegosaurs, some lumbering apatosaurs, two armored anklosaurs, the belligerent triceratops herd and the chirruping hadrosaurs. Most of those had survived only because their favorite grazing grounds were at one end of the huge U-shaped environment, and Rex’s
corral was all the way around at the opposite end. Rex wandered around the herbivore grounds only until he found something to attack. Like most of the mini-dinos, Rex didn’t have a lot of gray matter to work with; he almost always attacked the first moving object he saw. In the six months since his installation in what Filltree had once believed was a secure corral, Rex had more than decimated the population of the Pleasant Avenue Dinosaur Zoo. He was now escaping regularly once or twice a week.

Slowly, Filltree worked his way around the table to the corral, examining all the fences carefully to see where and how the tyrannosaur might have broken through the barriers. He had thought for sure that the thirty-inch high rock-surfaced polyfoam bricks he had installed last week would finally keep the carnivore from escaping again to terrorize the more placid herbivores. Obviously, he had been wrong.

Filltree frowned as he studied the thick blockade. It had not been broken through in any place, nor had the tyrant-lizard dug a hole underneath it. The rocks were not chewed, but they were badly scratched in several places. Filltree leaned across the table for a closer look. “Mm,” he said.

“What is it, Daddy? Tell me!” Jill demanded impatiently.

He pointed. The sides and tops of the bricks were sharply gouged. Rex had leapt up onto the top of the wall, surveyed the opposite side, and leapt down to feed. Judging from the numerous marks carved into the surface, today’s outing was clearly not the first. “See. Rex can leap the fence. And that probably explains the mysterious disappearance of the last coelophysis too. This is getting ridiculous Jill. I can’t afford this anymore. We going to have to find a new home for Rex.”

“Daddy, no!” Jill became immediately belligerent. “Rexie is part of our family!”

“Rexie is eating up all the other dinosaurs, Jill. That’s not very family-like.”

“We can buy new ones.”

“No, we can’t. Dinosaurs cost money, and I’m not buying any new animals until we get rid of him. I’m sorry, kiddo; but I told you this wasn’t going to work.”

“Daddy, pleeeaase—! Rexie is my favorite!”

Jonathan Filltree took his daughter by the hand and led her back around to where Rexie was still gorging himself on the now unrecognizable
remains of the much smaller stegosaur. “Look, Jill. This is going to keep happening, sweetheart. Rexie is getting too big for us to keep. It’s all that fresh beef that you and Mommy keep feeding him. Remember what the dinosaur-doctor said? It accelerates his growth. But you didn’t listen. Now, none of the other dinosaurs can escape him or even fight back. It isn’t fair to them. And it isn’t fair to Rexie either to keep him in a place where he won’t be happy.”

That last part was a complete fabrication on his part, and Filltree knew it even as he spoke it. If Rexie was capable of happiness, then he was probably very happy to be living in a place where he was the only carnivore and all of the prey animals were too small to resist his attacks. According to the genetic specifications, however, Rexie and the other mini-dinosaurs would have had to borrow the synapses necessary to complete a thought. Calling them stupid would have been a compliment.

“But—but, you can’t! He’ll miss me!”

Filltree sighed with exhaustion. He already knew how this argument was going to end. Jill would go to Mommy, and Mommy would promise to talk to Daddy. And then Mommy would sulk for two weeks because Daddy wanted her to break a promise to their darling little girl. And finally, he’d give in just to get a little peace and quiet again so he could get some work done. But he had to try anyway. He dropped to one knee in front of his daughter and put his hands on her shoulders. “We’ll find a good place for him, Jilly, I promise.” And even as he said it, he knew it was a promise he’d never be able to keep.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to sell Rex. He’d seen the ads in the Recycler. There was no market for tyrant-lizards anymore—of any size. And Rexie was more than two feet high, and rapidly approaching the legal maximum of thirty-six inches. Rexie required ten pounds of fresh meat a week; he’d only eat dry kibble when the alternative was starvation. They still had half a bag of Purina Dinosaur Chow left from when they’d first bought him. The dinosaur would go for almost a week without eating before he’d touch the stuff, and even then he’d only pick at it.

Nor did Filltree think he’d even be able to give the creature away. The zoo didn’t want any more tyrannosaurs, of
any
size. They were expensive to feed and they already had over a hundred of the little monsters, spitting and hissing and roaring—and occasionally devouring the smaller of their brethren.

At one time it had been fashionable to own your own miniature T. Rex; but the fad had passed, the tyrant-lizards had literally outgrown their welcome, the price of meat had risen again (due to the Brazilian droughts), and a lot of people—wearying of the smells and the bother—had finally dropped their pets off at the zoo or turned them over to the animal shelters. Because they were protected under the Artificial Species Act, the cost of putting a mini-dino down was almost prohibitive. Some thoughtless individuals had tried abandoning their hungry dinosaurs in the wild, not realizing that the animals were genetically traceable. The fines, according to the newspaper reports, had been astonishing.

“I promise you, Jilly, we’ll find a place for Rexie where he’ll be happy and we can visit him every week, okay?”

Jill shook his hands off, folded her arms in front of her, and turned away. “No!” she decided. “You’re not giving Rexie away! He’s my dinosaur. I picked him out and you said I could have him.”

Filltree gave up. He turned back to the diorama. Rexie had stopped gorging himself and was now standing torpidly near his kill. Filltree grabbed the metal-mesh net and quickly brought it down over the dinosaur. Rexie struggled in the mesh, but not wildly. Filltree had learned a long time ago to wait until the tyrant-king had finished eating before trying to return him to his corral. He swung the net across the table, taking care to hold the dinosaur well away from him and as high as he could. Jill tried to reach up to grab the handle of the net, and instinctively he yanked it up out of her reach—but for just a moment, the temptation flickered across his mind to let her actually grab Rexie. Then he’d see how much she loved the little monster.

But ... if he did, he’d never hear the end of it, he knew that—and besides, there was the danger that the mini-dino might actually do some serious damage. So he ignored Jill’s yelps of protest and returned Rexie to his own kingdom. Temporarily at least. Then he went back and scooped up the bloody remains of poor Steggy and wordlessly tossed that into Rexie’s domain as well.

“Aren’t we going to have a funeral for Steggy?”

“No, we’re not. We’ve had enough funerals. All it does is annoy the tyrannosaur. Let Rexie have his meal. It’ll keep him from jumping the fence for another week or two. Maybe. I hope. Come on. I told you to stay upstairs. And you didn’t listen. Just for that, no dessert—”

“I’m gonna tell Mommy!”

“You do that,” he sighed tiredly, following her up the stairs—realizing that of all the animals in the house, the one he resented most was the one who was supposed to know better. She was eight and a half years old—at that age, they were supposed to be almost human, weren’t they? He felt exhausted. He knew he wasn’t going to get any more work done today. Not after Jilly finished crying to Mommy about Daddy threatening to get rid of poor little Rexie. “Rexie didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” he mimed to himself. “He was hungry because Daddy forgot to feed him last night.”