Opalescence Read online

  Opalescence

  The Middle Miocene Play of Color

  By Ron Rayborne

  Edited by Lynn Steiner

  Illustrations by Rod Rayborne

  and

  Marianne Collins

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 Ron Rayborne

  License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ——————

  For Ruddy

  ——————

  While the author has endeavored to be thorough

  and accurate regarding life and conditions during

  the Miocene, this work is one interpretation. Thus,

  it is possible that errors have crept in. Additionally,

  due to scanty data, and in an effort to recreate that

  long bygone world, certain scenarios are envisaged.

  These imaginings and errors are solely those

  of the author. The use of material from others

  does not imply endorsement of the ideas herein.

  “For obvious reasons none of the Miocene ecosystems examined in this study has been directly observed by ecologists, nor will they ever be barring the unlikely invention of a time machine.” ~ Functional Convergence of Ecosystems: Evidence from Body Mass Distributions of North American Late Miocene Mammal Faunas. W. David Lambert

  “Lasting for millions of years, the mid-Miocene must have seemed a kind of endless summer.” ~ Neptune’s Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas. David Rains Wallace

  “I am Miochin, the Summer Spirit, and in my home corn grows and flowers bloom all year long.” ~ A Story of the Laguna & Acoma People of New Mexico's Pueblos

  “If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.” ~ The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. 2000. Thomas Berry

  “There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” ~ Lord Byron

  “May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” ~ Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Miocene Horses

  Miocene California

  Quotations

  Credits

  Prologue

  “Everything is hard-edged and gray. There is no light. No color. It clangs painfully, and drones dully. The heartbeat of the world is slowing. Slowing. What do you do when there’s nothing left? What do you do when every resource on earth has been exhausted? When water, air, and food must evermore be recycled to use? What do you do when earthly beauty has become a distant memory, relegated to myth? When official liars deny that it ever even existed? When it becomes a crime to measure one world against the other, the other being our ‘wonderful’ modern era? When all that remains, after eons of evolution, of the bold struggle to adapt and survive is ... people? What do you do when there is nothing left? Nothing but anger and sadness. The heartbeat of the world is slowing, slowing. Soon, it will stop.”

  Tom Pine read the words of his wife. He’d found them when he decided one day to look through her things. Her “effects.” It had been almost four weeks since she’d left. Left on the highly classified mission, which had been put upon her by nameless, featureless Blacksuits.

  The Blacksuits were the only visible representation of the government most people ever saw. When you did see them, you looked the other way. Never look a Blacksuit in the eye. Some people wondered if they were even human; they seemed almost to glide over the ground. Clones they were, of course, human, but humans which had been engineered for their intelligence, their loyalty, their discretion, and their cold-blooded ruthlessness. When summoned by a Blacksuit, one did not argue, one did not question. One obeyed. There were stories about the few who did and did not. Unpleasant stories. The stuff bad dreams are made of.

  They simply showed up one night, wordlessly showing Tom a photograph of his wife, Julie. When she noticed, Julie came to the door, lightly touching Tom’s arm.

  “What...” he asked, not completing the sentence, apprehension rising in his throat.

  “I have to talk with these gentlemen a moment, honey,” she replied, looking earnestly in his eyes. Tom tried to decipher the look. Was she asking for his help? Should he leap into action and aid her getaway? Instead he stood there, rigid, tight, muscles ready, yet waiting uncertainly for something more definitive.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Julie said, “I’ll just be a moment.”

  “Fine,” said Tom, but he remained where he was. Then one of the Blacksuits who had been looking at Julie slowly turned his head toward Tom. That turning, mouth set in a hard line, dark glasses reflecting light in his eyes, seemed gauged to inspire fear, like an ominous creature that has suddenly noticed its prey. It didn’t work. Tom, though apprehensive, did not look away.

  “Please, Tom!” Julie blurted, voice now quavering. She never called him by this, his first name, unless she was serious. She wanted him elsewhere. Hesitating, weighing possible options, Tom decided to step back. “Thank you,” Julie mouthed.

  She turned around to look at the Suits. While one of them spoke to her in a voice too low for him to make out, lips barely moving, the other continued to look at Tom. They spoke for only a minute or two. Toward the end, he too looked in Tom’s direction and said something further. Julie spoke reassuringly to them and smiled. Then they were gone. She closed the door, and for a moment they stood in silence, saying nothing.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he had demanded after Julie said that the Suits had met her at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum where she served as Under-Curator. She worked below Richard Burns, doing the major work of assignation, writing papers, caring for the exhibits, meeting with people. The work that Burns despised. Lately, though, there was something else, Tom noticed. She had become simultaneously more somber, and more ... excited. Something was amiss.

  Tom knew Julie better, he felt, than she knew herself. Her moments of joy when they were together. The moments of despondency when she became depressed over the state of the world. Yet, sometimes s
he looked at him wordlessly, her eyes very far away, and he had no clue what she was thinking. Once, drunk, she spoke words of heresy, and he quickly intercepted, clamping a hand over her mouth and clearing his throat. She laughed. It was well known that not just in public places, not just along the streets and squares, but even private homes were bugged. Harmful thoughts had to be pulled out by the root before they could take hold, even in the mind of the doubter. Otherwise, like a contagion, they could infect and spread, endangering the entire system. One minded one’s thoughts. Even Julie’s hard earned status as Under-Curator wouldn’t save her if word got out that she was having misgivings.

  No, for this was the Glorious Age of Man. A new era. When we’d finally achieved separation from “dirty nature”, had finally conquered it. The old book spoke of having “in subjection the fish of the sea, the flying creatures of the air, and every living thing that moved upon the earth.” In the Twenty-First century, that happy time became a happy reality with the extermination of the last “wild beast.”

  It began in earnest with a new policy of “land cleansing.” The time had finally come, we’d decided, to evict the “squatters”, non-human species who, by their very existence, had been wantonly wasting human resources for so long. Thus, great hunting parties were launched the world over and every wild beast found, slaughtered.

  It had taken millennia, even longer. Our slow, inexorable, relentless thrust into all of nature’s secret places, every hidden corner of the planet, humanizing it, making it safe for us. And when at last it was over, that day was one of gleeful celebration across the world and even declared a global holiday. The “Great Awakening.” True, some used to believe that such a goal, the elimination of wilderness and its wild inhabitants, would be a mistake, a travesty in fact, that it would mark the beginning of the end, but their minority of voices were drowned out by the corporatists. Tom remembered Derek Black’s famous line, “Now we are free, free to be what we are, free to be Man!”, followed by thunderous applause, a tremendous uproar of cheering which could be replayed at any time with the push of a button.

  Chapter 1

  Deep underground, the Institute de Physica in southern California, an ultra secret government facility, was alive with activity. Very few were aware of its existence, even in official administration circles.

  After the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, made its astonishing finding some decades back, hundreds of acres of National Forest land were purchased. Then began the arduous task of tunnel digging, twenty miles long. To minimize space, it was carved in the shape of a giant spiral. The new collider cost a staggering amount of money, the diversion of revenues for such a large non-GDP item even leading to a mini recession. When it was completed, it was given the name Temporal Transporter (TT).

  Then came a long dry spell. What worked well on paper and seemingly in small experiments failed to work when the TT was completed. Anger and disappointment at the scandal was high among the élite, and the project was all but mothballed, only a skeleton crew of physicists and technicians remaining.

  Suddenly, it happened. It all began with a routine run. Having loaded their atomic bullet, a three-man tech crew aimed and fired. They realized that something was awry when only a nanosecond later the two-inch thick titanium walls surrounding the target room buckled like a plastic bottle with the air sucked out. Then, just as suddenly, with a loud outward rush of air which threw the team to the ground, the target chamber was inexplicably filled with the impossible: the snapped off stump of a conifer, shrubbery, grass, rocks and dirt. That chunk of expensive equipment which had been there just before was gone, simply gone. Alarms rang out and lights flashed. The overhead sprinklers came on.

  Scrambling to his feet, one of the three white smocked workers, Longerman, ran to a panel and slammed on a toggle. “Alert. Alert. Code Red in the Target Room. Repeat, Code Red in the Target Room!”

  “Cut that siren!” Rondle, another of the workers, yelled, “and that damn water, there’s no fire in here!” Seconds later, all was calm again, and a strange quiet fell while the crew gathered themselves, brushing lapels, straightening glasses and picking up clipboards. A dusty sort of haze floated in the air, obscuring their view. The mood had changed in Observation, from one of slightly bored surveillance just moments before, to stunned silence.

  Finally, Jeff Flanitz, crew lead, asked in a voice so small only he heard it, “What just happened?” There was no reply.

  As Longerman squinted, trying to penetrate the dust, something small and fast suddenly collided with his legs, then ran between them. He jumped, half landing on a toppled chair and, ungracefully, fell again.

  The room that had been 12’ X 12’ now more closely resembled some old, disheveled diorama. On top of that, a rank odor filled their nostrils.

  Three months later, a secret meeting was called for those scientists who had been part of the experiment, along with others from around the world who it was deemed would have a special interest in it. Scattered throughout the crowd, though, were many unknown faces. But if a look of deep concern alone was enough for a pass into this learned assembly, then they certainly fit in.

  It was “Old Man” Joseph Edwards, assistant director of the complex, who briefed the gathering. He spent the first ten minutes summarizing the experiment that day, a basic procedure with which he was sure most everyone was acquainted, but he trudged on for the record. Some were fidgeting. Well, if the strangers can’t understand the technical jargon, or the math involved, he thought, that’s their problem.

  “Getting that out of the way,” continued Edwards, “let me cut to the chase. Certain, er, rumors, have been floating around regarding the events of 12, September. Sensational stories of bizarre effects, et cetera, et cetera.” He paused, looking around the hall. With this statement, a look of relief was beginning to soften the tension on the faces of some in the room. Other expressions, however, tightened. The scientists. They would be disappointed to learn that it was all merely hearsay. The former group he put down as government men, those sent to find out if the discovery might somehow pose a threat to the stability of the regime. None of those invited knew for sure what was up, just that it was some significant breakthrough.

  “Rumors, gentlemen,” Edwards said, “sometimes turn out to be correct.” There was a reversal of expressions, he noted with an inward laugh. “My friends, what I am about to tell you must remain, for the time being at least, strictly confidential.” He knew that such an admonition would mean nothing to the G-men. “It is vital that you exercise extreme discretion from this point on.” Another pause, then, “There has indeed been a very strange effect. A, uh, corollary, or side effect, if you will, to the test that we ran in September.”

  Among those in attendance was Julie Pine of the LA Natural History Museum. She, too, was interested in learning what this was all about, but did not know why she’d been invited. Every now and then she noticed Edwards gaze at her, holding her return gaze, and it made her uncomfortable.

  “To make a long story short, while testing a hypothesis of Gerald Gray from MIT,” Edwards gestured toward a young man with thick spectacles and a shock of equally thick hair in the front row, then broke off. “As some of you know, Gerald has been working on a contribution to the Grand Unified Theory, and making fine progress, I might add.”

  Julie looked toward the scientist he referred to; he sat impassive, as if it were someone else Edwards was talking about. “Anyway, this happened. Dan...” he said, nodding at Longerman, who stood near a large video screen mounted on the wall behind him. Longerman reached over and touched an LCD switch, causing the screen to lighten, and the recording from the wall-mounted camera in Observation to play. Only a few moments were necessary to show that an anomalous event had in truth occurred. When the unusual contents of the test room became obvious after the filters kicked in and cleared the air, gasps of excitement arose, Julie Pine’s perhaps being the more notable.

  “The HELL?!” she exclaimed, standing up suddenly.
Edwards looked at her.

  “Yes, Dr. Pine, did you have something to say?”

  “Well, that can’t be!” she answered, waving a hand at the screen, “It’s ... impossible!”

  “Would you care to elaborate, Doctor?”

  Julie flushed, suddenly aware of herself. “I’m sorry. It’s just, well ... excuse me,” she said, as she made her way around the knees of those seated near her. Walking to the screen, she asked, “Could you wind that back up a bit?”

  “Certainly.” Edwards gestured to Longerman who, using a remote, backed the video up about a minute, then replayed it.

  Julie waited, then said, “STOP.” Longerman did. There, amid the rubble, scampering atop a rock, was a smallish, spotted, weasely looking animal with a fluffy, striped tail.

  “Sthenictis!” Julie said definitively.

  “Erm,” Longerman intoned, clearing his throat and looking displeased. “A stinking skunk,” someone chuckled.

  Julie looked at him wonderingly. “Well, yes and no. Sthenictis were actually members of the weasel family, which included skunks. But the first real skunks that we know of didn’t arrive until around nine to nine and a half million years ago with Martinogale faulli, before...” she trailed off, “uh, but how...” It still had not settled on her what must have taken place here. She was still waiting for the logical explanation.

  “Dr. Pine, perhaps you’d be more interested in the actual specimen?” Edwards asked innocently.

  Julie frowned. “Um...” she answered awkwardly. “Yes?” What is going on? she wondered, brows furrowed, a feeling of confusion coming over her.