The Old Man and the Pliosaur (Incomplete)

By John Magee

Based on:

Based on From Arctic Soil, Fossils of a Goliath That Ruled the Jurassic Seas from the Tuesday, March 17, 2009, Science Times supplement of The New York Times.

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He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff on Cygnus Five and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unluck, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good ichthyosaurs the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast.

But since the boy was on a different boat, he was not eaten alive when the giant pliosaur rose from the depths and ate the old man and his skiff in a single bite. The boy’s boat was nearby. It made the boy sad to see the splintered remains that were all that left after the leviathan’s jaws close in on the old man.

After the first of the full-grown pliosaurs came to the inside current and ate the old man and his boat, the little boats of the village no longer went out beyond the edge of the harbor. The villagers ate protein cakes from food generators instead of fish. And the boy made a solemn vow to himself and to the old man.

He would one day own a bigger boat.

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The pliosaur attack that wiped out old Santiago and his small wooden skiff was greeted with great joy across most of Cygnus Five. This was not because Cygnus disliked old Santiago. Old Santiago was rather regarded as incidental damage and a light price to pay for the dramatic newsweb coverage of the maturation of the aquatic megafauna that the Cygnus Tourism Development Corporation had been planting in the vast oceans of Cygnus Five for decades.

The arrival of the giant pliosaurs, more than 20 meters long and 50,000 kilograms in mass, was the crowning achievement of a tourist-industry development plan that began shortly after humans had first settled Cygnus Five, a mostly oceanic planet with vast seas of primitive single-celled plankton that were no competition for the vast array of sophisticated aquatic lifeforms that humans brought with them to make Cygnus Five a habitable planet with a breathable atmosphere. While the first century or two of terraforming concentrated on creating a basic biome, the first century or two of economic development on Cygnus Five concentrated on proving that although Cygnus Five was in general a warm and pleasant planet with vast beaches that were unsurpassed in the galaxy for their combination of smooth sand and regular well-formed waves, Cygnus Five also had no economically significant reserves of energy minerals, radioactive elements, rare metals, hydrocarbons, economically productive native genetics (not that much of the original planktonic population remained after the first decade or two), or anything else that gave the capital investment branch of TerrCorp any good reason to believe that they would be able to recoup their initial investment once primary terraforming was complete.

Thus it was that the Cygnus Tourism Development Corporation, a wholly owned subsidy of TerrCorp Primary Terraforming Ltd., was born with one mission: turn this worthless sphere of planktonic soup into a planet whose very name would become a byword for beauty, adventure, relaxation, and a certain sheen of amoral degeneracy that had been proven in studies to offer a return on investment that was 22% more profitable than wholesome family fun. The first step of the plan was implanted with the importation of several tens of thousands of lobster eggs, combined with a slight loosening of Cygnus’s already lax gaming regulations. That plan reached maturity when a giant pliosaur gobbled Old Santiago and his wooden skiff on the same day that The Best Little HooterHouse on Cygnus ™ opened for business with a casino-resort complex so vast that the atoll upon which it sat began to sink into the oceans of Cygnus Five at the rate of three inches per year.

Decades after the boy watched his old friend feed the growing hunger of human tourism, he owned a boat. A much bigger boat.

(End Introduction)