The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Mostly, she blamed the mammals. She watched herself watching her talons dry in the sun and all the news washed over her—a litany of chaos, lies, and despair. Am I the only one who can’t tell them apart, she wondered. For a while she had thought, O.K., the new game, and she had tried to keep up with all the varieties: lemurs, lorises, shrews, some of them swinging and some of them climbing but really all the same—the chattering, the placentas, the four-chambered hearts. She could never flash on this sleeping thing they did. What was it? A counter to that restless scheming and humping all day long? They were everywhere on the West Coast now, with their fuzzy little coats, and their big night-seeing eyes, and the thumbs. Those opposable thumbs! Her group, out on the beach, used to have such contempt for the mammals, the way they scurried around on the floor. “Hey, squashed another furball,” Stego would say, stamping down with his beautiful, muscular, to-die-for back foot when they were all in a circle, weekending around La Brea, flowered out, and he wouldn’t even bother to look back and see what kind he had put out of its nipple-sucking misery. To imagine these things taking over the Coast. No way on earth. Not in a million years.

Which is about what it had taken. She knew what they said about her—that it was the flowers, as simple as that. Yeah, right. As though she hadn’t always had this spiritual striving to get out-of-bodied on the whole incredible scene and view it from high up. From a safe distance, whatever that was. No, it was the mammals who had driven her away. Creatures that young weren’t as spiritual as her crowd had been. Creatures that young were afraid to be alone—they eschewed eccentricity. It was all part of the larger picture: the diminished vision, the bankrupt dreams.

None of it had ever been about continental domination or territory, not for her, anyway—she was always telling that to the other big lizards. The territorialism, the bellowing around the tar pits, the aggressive predation—that hadn’t meant anything at all to her. It had been another game for her, a spiritual game—that old notion, held over from her infancy, that if she moved fast enough she would survive extinction. That they would all survive extinction. “Hell of a belief for a cold-blooded creature,” Stego had said, squinting at her with his funny little double-lidded eyes. Which was true, God knows. There was always something cosmic about Stego. Maybe a little too cosmic. She blamed him a lot, too.

The game, the way she had learned it, had been species extension. How long have you been on earth? How long can you stay here? Macho boy-lizard penis-extension stuff, O.K., but she had been the first girl lizard in it. They had dreams, her kind: they saw the world as a majestic, single-file parade of major creatures—creatures who took millions of years of development, classic creatures. Now, with the mammals in charge, there was nothing worth a second look; it was all just spinoffs and syndication. “Speciation”—that was their code word for it, meaning just more mammals with minor, half-assed spins on the same basic, dumb, low-budget, tree-climbing, milk-sucking idea. Branching. Variation. Scads of shrewlike creatures running around humping, producing their own sequels.

The boasting! “See that four-footed feline?’' you could hear them saying to each other down there in the valley. “Give him a development deal and a few thousand generations, and, I promise you, you’re looking at a major, major predator.” Some of her old group had “adapted”—that was their word for it. Take the twelve-step program, be a good lizard, begin to change: in a few generations your scales become feathers, and your ten rows of razor teeth a dainty little beak, and off you go, flying to your new little nest. But then what were you? Who were you? One more cunning little creature with a development deal and a “niche” in the “ecology.” When you used to rule the earth.

One of the lemurs had explained the new deal-making to her, working his thumbs like mad. (Nervous, they were always so nervous around her. It was that spiritual thing she still had, she guessed.) “Punctuated equilibrium,” that was the jargon for it. Wait around, make variations, keep the bottom line low. Then, when there’s a crack in the old order, grab your chance. “You get in on the back end, and then you have moments. Adapt or die, baby.” Then he had given her a lecture on what makes a great species, a hit species. As though her kind hadn’t been walking the earth for—oh, what was it, sixty million years? Fifty million years? The flowers cut down on your memory. “It’s adaptability that matters,” he said. A few years later, that sucker got blown away by one of the last remaining pterodactyls with night vision. Adapt or die. Right.

“Too dumb to taste the bitterness.” That was what she knew the furballs told each other under their breaths, exchanging those wizened, knowing little toothy grins. Seeing her kind reeling around with that wild blissed-out look you got after a really righteous flower. Hey, that’s right, furball. Ever felt a thousand flowers exploding like pinwheels inside your consciousness, rushing down there to the brain at the base of your spine and letting loose?

Dumb, her kind were dumb. “Stego’s got a brain the size of a walnut, in the base of his spine.” “The bronto’s got a brain the size of a navel orange.” As if their cranial capacity weren’t exactly right for animals of their size. And they had no idea what a joy it had once been—the heaven-shaking sound as we met to intertwine necks and pound the ground and roar. Hey, ever wonder why they called us thunder lizards? We ruled the effing earth.

The mammals, really, had driven her to the flowers. She remembers the first time the weird-looking lizard with the crooked grin and all the plates up and down his muscular back showed her how to extract the pollen. “Don’t suck it so hard,” he said softly. “Hold the pollen in your teeth and let it out slowly through your nose.” Hey, just a minute, plate-face. Who do you think you’re dealing with here? But she went along with him anyway. Oh, baaaby, baaaby. She even wondered briefly if this was going to be the Big One. The Ultimate. Death. Extinction. The Fate of all Living Things. But it had kept on and on, like a glimpse of eternity held in your hand.

Yeah, right. Too dumb to taste the bitterness.

She had taken a meeting with one of them in the middle of her most intense period. Her high period. One of the little thumbsters she had seen once or twice around the flower beds at La Brea back when it was still thrilling to be young and twenty feet high and cold-blooded and living in California. She was burning the residue from one of those big sunflowers, angiospermed-out, when this primate from the old days comes to call, running up the side of a palm tree and nestling by her ear. “Hey, my lady,” he says, panting the way they do.

“Hey, furball,” she said. “Long time no speak.” A put-down once. Now you could call them hairball, fuzzette, body heat. They didn’t care. They had the upper hand.

“Yeah, well, not because your name doesn’t come up from time to time among us all.” (Right—as in, That bitch still alive?) “I’ll get right to the point.” Busy, busy little mammal. Places to go, other mammals to hump. She hears that now they’re starting to do it face to face. Yuck. “Listen, down there on the floor a lot of us are asking, ‘Is this really a happy lady?’ And I’m hearing—what I’m hearing is no, not really. So a lot of us were thinking, What about a partnership? A startup situation. You know, coproduction. You dominate the high ground, we take the jungle floor. Hey—you’ll still be an independent entity, only within this larger entity. Together we could dominate this continent for a major, major time frame.”

She nods slowly. She shows more enthusiasm for this concept than she really feels. What they want is she should sell out everything her kind had believed in for millennia—sell out her birthright—and she isn’t even supposed to feel the pain. Isn’t even supposed to recognize that there is any pain, just one entity within a larger entity. This was the new epoch for you: absolute corruption without a single identifiable moment of compromise.

“Yeah, what do you take out of the front end?” she asks, shutting her first, translucent lids. Which always freaks them out, the mammals—that tearlike, semi-opaque lid dropping down in the middle of their pitch. Hey, they think, the panic growing in their heaving little chests. She could turn. One bite from those monster jaws and I’m an article in Natural History.

“There’s just one condition,” the furball says, scampering back down the branch. “Just don’t embarrass us in public, you know.” That injured innocence all of them have. He laughs. Looks more feral than ever. Jagged, yellowing teeth emphasizing all the molelike aspects of his demeanor. Chewing on sugarcane, probably. She recalled what Stego had said when they first started noticing them. “No matter how big the cranial capacity, remember what they were when they started out. Moles. You can’t let them ever forget it.”

But she just goes on with her flower. “Hey, you want some?” She offers to blow some pollen his way. The perfect hostess.

Oh, that sends the little fucker scurrying. “Hey, no. I mean—you know, it tastes . . . ” He cuts himself off. Blushing, the way they do—all the hot blood pumping up in their arteries toward their lying little faces.

She blames her mother, too. She had always made her think that it could just go on. Her mother had forced all this girl-lizard thing on her—this dainty, chewing-the-palm-leaves thing. And when she was young, and lit by some inner ambition, she played along with it. But her mother had screwed her up in her relationships with all the other women. So was it any surprise that the last straw for her had been when the furball pointed out that little dopey simian swinging its arms, and said, “See that one? Lucy, they call her. Unlimited potential. Give her a thousand generations, she’ll be walking erect, using tools, making deals. She could become the hottest thing on earth since—well, since you, my lady.” That had cut it. Another woman, like herself. Thanks, Mom.

So head south, young female. The babe from the Antarctic Commission said that they were desperate for production, for any kind of creatures at all, and with the land bridge it was just a couple of long days’ walks away. She had taken the plate-back along with her, for the sex mostly, though he was good company in a kind of lowriding, grungeball way. There would be plenty of empty space down there, and no mammals, just a lot of weird, retro-looking birds. Black and white, all black and white—kind of an art-house look, she guessed.

On the way south, she lies under the stars, awake in the middle of the night, unable to think anything but “I am going to die, he is going to die.” Staring numbly at the stars, knowing that she is but a speck of sand under the fingernail of a larger being who is but a speck of sand under the fingernail of a larger being. Et cetera, et cetera, as they used to say when things just went on forever and her kind ruled the earth. Old plate-back tosses and turns while she looks at the stars. He hasn’t eaten all day.

They were in business together. Go out, get some out-of-country money. Maybe those penguins liked basic action-adventure, monosyllable grunt stuff. That was usually big in the foreign markets—a couple of monster lizards writhing around and biting at each other. O.K., she could do that. Hey, she was adapting, wasn’t she? She had been clean for a couple of weeks, and they were in business together. Plate-back rolls over, his stomach grumbles, and she almost likes him. Hey, they have a working relationship, they have an understanding, they have a deal. You could live with it. Just don’t ask why.