The Saurian Invasion

By Denn William Quinn

The Saurians are coming!
No, claims Dr. Alistair Truepenny, professor of xenoarchaeology at Winston University, they are already here, and, what’s more, they have been among us for centuries, patiently manipulating us politically, economically, and socially. So says the Codex, an ancient text found by Truepenny in the ruins of an underground labyrinth on the distant world to which he has ventured by way of the wormhole that one day mysteriously opened in his office. The codex, Truepenny asserts, tells the story of a predatory species that, having abandoned their dying world, struck out aggressively across galaxies in search of other worlds to subjugate and other races to dominate. Together with his dashing alter ego Anselm, the cryptic exolinguist Clavdia, his graduate assistant and spiritual advisor Ganesh, and a supporting cast of zany characters, Truepenny, armed with his alarming knowledge, has determined to forewarn the world of the Saurian danger.


But will the world take heed? Or are the Saurians—and his assorted assistants themselves—merely figments of Truepenny’s imagination?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669803669

Denn William Quinn

Denn William Quinn is author of several novels and critical studies in literature. K is a novel in the serio-comic Winston University series, which also includes Restoration Court.

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Copyright © 2022 by Denn William Quinn.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 01/13/2022

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Contents

Labyrinth

A Psycho-Physical Profile of Their World

Who He Was

Who They Were

His Enemies

Something on the Order of a Monumental Breakthrough

Another Day

Roads Not Taken

Their Society

Their Politics

Thresholds

A Sauriformed World

Nemesis

Magic Flight

Into the Darkness

The Artifact

For Jill

without whose loving support and infinite

patience this novel would not have been written

Labyrinth

Forget: the word had been embedded in the notes of the raga conducting him away from his world.

The raga. As he turned corner after corner through the underground labyrinth, the vibrating notes of the music grew distant. The otherworldly measure that seemed peculiarly suited to the distortion of his perception—the lingering twang of each string fingered on the sitar, the hollow puck, puck-puck of the tabla that accompanied the plucking of the strings—was receding and that was cause for some uneasiness.

The raga, to which surreal strain his ear was desperately clinging in his fear of losing it entirely, was his Ariadne’s Thread back to the aperture, the mouth of the wormhole which bored through the fabric of space and time and along which snaky, kaleidoscopic course he had journeyed far from home with racing mind and racing blood to get to where he was.

Where he was had yet no name. It had no location except that it was on the other side, far from his laboratory at the university, and only after the bending and twisting of his assumptions about the laws of physics that regulated the universe did he get there. For several years now he had been returning to it, and by his reckoning, which from the wear and tear of travel was showing signs of deteriorating to the point that at times he was unable to hold a thought, he had made more than a few dozen trips including now this one. Each foray into the labyrinth was like entering a level in a computer game whose traps and wrong turns into blind alleys he had to experience and learn and master if he was to advance to the next level, for movement forward was predicated on his recognition of what obstacles he had previously encountered and his recollection of how he had overcome them.

Appearing in a sinister dance of flickering torchlight and shadow at nearly every turn, like placeholders for that recollection—bookmarks of a sort—strange markings had been carved into the stonewalls of the labyrinth. Where there had been no torches in iron cressets with fire snapping in the draft to light his way, he had inched along, guiding himself with his hand pressed flat against the wall, feeling for the symbols, which in any case he could not interpret, like a blind man who knew no braille reading with his fingers. Mysterious as they were, they were nevertheless the devices by which he measured his progress through the byzantine passageway, for owing to his memory of their curious and unique features and their placement, on each subsequent trip he probed a little deeper a little more quickly than he had ventured on the trip before, which was truncated always by the need to return through the wormhole lest it close on him, with what finality he shuddered to contemplate. With that very thought, he impulsively consulted his timepiece, which he withdrew on its chain from the watch pocket of his pants. A gift to himself in sentimental commemoration of his first exploration of the strange world at the end of the wormhole—To A from A: When Where—it had also its utilitarian value, for, despite the quirky irregularity of its tick, like an injured heart, it served to remind him, as it kept him on task, of the limited time he was allotted in this world.

And so in his fear of losing entirely the thread of music, he was like a man afraid of drowning, who, holding his breath for a deep dive underwater, must not only allow for the seconds he could manage without breathing on his descent but must save precious breath to cover the return ascent as well. Here seconds were more than minutes. Were it not that the mouth of the wormhole itself shifted to accommodate his memory, as it were, each visit opening not far from the site that marked the extent of his previous penetration; and were it not for the symbols, his recognition of which enabled him on successive penetrations to pick up his place where on the last trip he had been forced to leave off, he would have been doomed to cover the same ground, the same swampy length of the same swampy passage, to limit himself to the same depth of understanding. As if reminding himself of significant passages in a text, but more to make doubly sure of a safe return by leaving a trail of inedible crumbs, he affixed to chinks in the wall beneath these symbols colorful post-its, rolled into tubes like he might roll a cigarette and angled either left or right to guide him out of the swamp.

Swamp. His advance was impeded by other obstacles than time.

With one labored lift of his foot after another along the mucky floor of the corridor, the mud sucked at his boots, hindering him. On his first reconnaissance some years ago, the wormhole had deposited him in the dizzy midst of a desolate landscape. Disoriented—and not a little frightened—he had not stepped far from the opening. Instead, with heightened senses attuned to its unique features, he measured, by counting in thousandths, the duration of its stability. After some time reorienting himself on his second trip, he had struck out in no particular direction following what then had seemed to be the path of least resistance. He picked his way around massive boulders and between jagged outcroppings of ledge through what initially appeared to be a valley with severely eroded sides but which after some distance narrowed first into a canyon with steep walls and then constricted further to a deep ravine. Numerous shriveled gulches and gullies—he explored them all as far as seemed reasonable—branched left and right off the ravine, the many tributaries of an ancient river that he imagined must now look on high like clefts in the brittle lithosphere of this desiccated world, a ceramic plate in the hand of its Baker spidered by cracks. In the differing shades of stain that striated the rocky banks of the riverbed he read with an experienced eye a tale of withering climate change that had presided over the evaporation of the water in stages across time of that once mighty river. As if in desperation to avoid the fate ordained it, the river had sought the underworld. It was underground that he first realized the labyrinthine nature of the riverbed, for along its netherworldly course, it increasingly showed signs of artificial enhancement and sophisticated design until quite clearly skillful hands and devious minds could be recognized to have transformed the river course into the network of blind passageways through which he had been wandering for the past several trips. It was not unusual, he knew, for civilizations to construct elaborate defenses like labyrinths around an important center to prevent profanation of a space made sacred by the holy objects preserved there or to impede access to royal apartments to which bunkers presumably Power retreated in times of imminent danger. That similar defensive strategies should suggest themselves to alien civilizations, he had little doubt. He believed that some artifact of great importance must await him at the heart of the labyrinth, one whose value would compensate him for the struggle to reach it, for the going here was becoming more complicated by a sudden—and, he suspected, intentional—multiplication of passages. It heartened him to think that he might be drawing nearer to discovering what those ancient architects had gone to great lengths to conceal.

Unlike those first reaches of ravine he had explored on the surface of this world when he had not yet fathomed the labyrinthine nature of the structure, these passageways underground were pitched downward, as if not content with merely finding relief from the surface, the riverbed was plunging deeper and deeper into forgetfulness of it. While still dusty at its first entrance to the underworld and continuing bone dry for long stretches where the roof overhead became great slabs of stone and no longer a ceiling pierced by a tangle of ancient hairy roots preserved in something like clay nor the metallic sky of the surface, here the ground had softened noticeably and had grown distinctly marshy underfoot, which concerned him not a little. For had the plane of the floor declined at any steeper angle, he might have slipped, fallen, and slid on his backside who could say how far in the slurry, the detritus of a once thriving biomass teeming in foregone days with life. The air too—near the mouth hot and dry—had turned unexpectedly steamy, riding a tropical draft. In fact, it had grown heavy and oppressive and, in a word, Jurassic. At the touch of its clammy hands on the back of his neck, he shivered. Where the dampness at the root of it all had its source—and where the current of air—was difficult to say now that he had been steadily descending for some time: whether springs oozing up from beneath him or water weeping down the walls from above, the last feeble vestiges of the once great river. Whenever he thought he heard, however faintly, the drip of water echoing from its entombment deep within the rock, he stopped and sounded the walls—knock, knock-knock—with his blackthorn cane, without which he felt disarmed and insecure and not fully outfitted. It was as necessary an accoutrement of his expeditions as his trousers, his shirt, his hat, his sleeveless black leather duster, in which, though it was unfastened and its long panels fell open with his every stride, he was sweltering. Adding to his ordeal was the rucksack strapped to his back like the weight of the world: Jason, with an old lady on his back—Christopher, an infant—fording a stream. For reassurance of a sort, he clasped his Christopher medal, apotropaic luck charm of a man—maybe real, maybe not—for whom, unsainted and defrocked as he may have been, he harbored a sympathy, an affinity. His khaki bush shirt was saturated with perspiration—across his chest, down his back along his spine, under his arms. His fedora—brown, high-crowned and wide-brimmed—around the inner leather band was likewise soaked, and when with hat in hand he swept his bare arm over his brow to wipe away the sweat dripping from his hair, he only made matters worse.

Environmental conditions alone did not explain the discomfort he felt in pressing forward. There was something creaturely about this world. It spooked him. A consciousness other than his own, aware of him, watching him, kept pace with his every pace, an unseen presence that as yet seemed not to have come to any decisive opinion concerning him but with unhurried deliberation had been revolving in its mind an appropriate response to him ever since his first appearance months ago. On its stony surface, one that seemed covered in scaly plates, the world presented an arid, unimpassioned personality, a stark and sterile façade. As much as it seemed that it might ignore his presence, it instead slyly mocked his innocence and his gullibility, his readiness to accept it at face value as a world that would yield nothing to examination; and with politic indifference it watched him narrowly. It was like a dragon drowsing at the mouth of its lair, seemingly urged by his presence to little else than mild curiosity, a lazy and unthreatened lift of its head in acknowledgment of his inconsequence, the morsel that has strayed within the grasp of a serpent which has already eaten its fill for the next number of years. It was a world that when confronted with his repeated visits grew wary of his intention, as if it had something to hide. When on his third expedition he discovered the underground network of passages, it assumed a passive aggressive response to his persistence, and through its seeming incuriosity about him and its deference to his intrepid determination, by such nonobstruction, it encouraged his access to the labyrinth, in which like structures universally familiar to man across all ages the inquisitive went to lose themselves and the resolute died a mad death.

But here, here in the belly of the beast, a different personality permeated the passageway. It arose from more than just suspicion—it unnerved him—the eerie sensation of the other presence, and worse than the fear of discovering in the blur of a sudden turn that his was not the only shadow on the wall was his dread of what demonic shape it should take. He sensed it floating before him, leading him, trailing behind him, brooding above him, below him, around and around him. It was probing him, examining him, with surgical precision in the sharp squint of its eyes cutting aside the superficial layers, the protective layers, the public self—explorer, academic, hunter after knowledge, after renown and other treasures; and uncovering the softened nature of the man underneath—apprehensive, flawed, limited, exposed. He himself, ironically enough, was like a scientific instrument for the purposes of laying open essential matter, a smart scalpel that senses what it probes, making speculative incisions in the scaly rind of the beast, exposing its mysterious pulpy inner mass to scrutiny.

However, that essential nature at each turn seemed to elude him, leading him to second-guess his every choice of passage up to this point. It was hard work, link by link decoupling the chain of cause and effect, of decision and consequence, redetermining that which was determined, and by a trick of mind revisiting individual choices he had made as if magically undoing outcomes could lead to the remission of error, could reverse fate, reset reality itself. He was dizzied by considering the possibility inherent in infinite regression. It was a calculus that tasked the mind as much as it overwhelmed the soul; for in seeking the one action insusceptible to inevitability, the one instance of will ungoverned by prior election, not predestined, he was in effect testing all his assumptions about himself and perhaps the very premise of his purpose. And as for purpose—it all came down to whether the labyrinth would give up its secrets, yield the artifact, the hope of discovering which object, whatever it would prove to be, sustained him. It sustained him even when on the verge of despair, one faulty calculation, one wrong turn, as it were, away from surrendering to mediocrity—a sin of omission the soul could not expunge but by a calculus every bit as convoluted and intimidating as that which now tried his faculty for parsing reality. Truth, observable and non-observable, appeared like the dragon lying apart from its fen, its lethal snout concealed snugly in the folds of its spiny tail in the way that intent is obscured by the twists and turns of legalese, and meaning, by the studied ambiguity of political rhetoric, is disingenuously adapted for survival outside its context.

Nasty.

For now—of course, it could not have fallen out any other way, could it have?—a fork in the labyrinth. It was as if his thoughts were not his alone, as if all his faculties had been laid bare to perusal by a mind stronger, more incisive than his, a sentient something, probing in him the complex of thoughts and sensations to discover in what part of his psyche he was most susceptible to suggestion, least resistant to manipulation. The irony of it all was not lost on him, nor the paradox: the explorer of a labyrinth which resembled his own maze of mind explored in turn by an unseen, unknown entity that possessed either a perverse sense of humor identical to self-deprecation, or a contempt for him commensurate with self-loathing that was downright nasty.

And—but of course—a new symbol was incised in the pillar of stone between the openings, the septum dividing the nostrils of the beast. He traced the engraving with his fingertips. It was a spherical indentation with horizontal parallel lines protruding from it on the left. In the bowl of the depression, he could identify in apparently random relation to one another a number of raised bumps. In an eerie way it put him in mind of the symbol, at first puzzling to him, for electrical outlets liberally marked on the blueprint for the renovation of his office at the university, one over which he had pored some days ago—or maybe it was just hours ago; or maybe he had yet to see the blueprint and this was merely a premonition of what he was about to discover on it.

Suddenly, with unexpected urgency, a hundred other things clamored for his attention. Papers. Had he finished grading them? The lecture. Had he given it yet? The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new department. Had it already occurred? Days ago. Months ago. Years ago maybe. Had he attended? Had he spoken? To what effect? And afterward—or beforehand—who expected what of him and why? How had he responded, if yet at all he had responded, there and then? Wherever. Whenever. Maybe it was indeed many years ago and his work had long been finished, his findings long made known, the artifact long ago identified and recovered, and this—this moment—a flashback, an old memory for some reason re-experienced, a moment only remembered because its intensity had so deeply inscribed itself on his senses that they could not forget the visceral rush of whatever rush it was, maybe the thrill of anticipation, maybe triumph, maybe terror. The present moment, if it was the present, required his full concentration, an effort of will to clear his mind of the thoughts of his own world that with busy insistence, though fragmented and disjointed, had crowded with him through the wormhole to this one: the personal anxieties; the felt betrayals; the disparagements of his ideas, of his theories; the frustration of his ideals; the pursuit of answers confounded by bureaucracy; his professional disappointment; his ethical quandaries; his isolation; his disillusionment; his melancholy—emotions all mixed, jumbled together, a tangle of interlaced feelings, conscious and unconscious; of responses, autonomic, conditioned, improvised. A world view raveled in a knot so involved, so tightly wound as to leave one at a loss as to how he should begin to disentangle it. A conception of the self, an image root-bound and restricted such that it was prevented in its attempt to grow, to spread, to thrive.

And here he was now: wherever; whenever; vaguely confronted by the dilemma of still another choice and still another outcome sprouting options peculiar to itself. How much deeper did the passageway dive? What if he committed himself to the wrong passageway? When would the error of his choice reveal itself? How much time could he afford to expend in error? What was his remaining capacity for futility? Did he have the grace to disregard ridicule and envy and the strength to retain his dignity in the face of the world’s contumely? Did he have breath enough to continue?

And what had become of the music?

The raga?

He listened in a panic for the music. It came to him faintly. For suspended beats of his heart, he could not be sure he heard it at all. He fumbled for his timepiece, and with blood pounding through him, he whirled away from the fork. He hastened to retrace his steps along the passageway, but as a man hastens in a dream, with heavy legs he could only with great labor lift off the spongy floor. He groped for the symbols and the post-its at this turn and that, afraid that without either he might not be able to remember precisely the reversal of the earlier sequence—right, right, then left, right, left, left again—until once more the music sounded clearly, crisply in his ear as if it surrounded him, until the rising volume dominated all other sound, even the maddening plop, plop-plop of the hidden water, now distant and disappearing; and he gave himself up to listening to it, abandoning all contemplation about the strange world at the end of the wormhole, the better to hear the music speak its own strange speech.

And the voice of the raga enveloped him, cocooning his faculties in its safe advice, bringing him home with an embedded word: Remember.

A Psycho-Physical Profile of Their World

Theirs is a dim and arid and uncompromising world. The filtered light of their sun strains through dense layers of cloud, whose variegated striations in metallic shades of blue and gray resemble slate or shale that has been scuffed and scarred. Like privileged opinion the justifiable nature of whose origin, to say nothing of its rationale, is unsearchable, whose purpose is impenetrable, that through a process impervious to question has become institutionalized as policy, the crinkled sky, even where its scratches and wounds have scabbed over, looks to have been embossed, fixed in place with something like an official seal. And so unlike sunlight that illuminates, that brightens, many another world and that may sustain metaphors for what is luminous and admirable in the myriad undertakings and accomplishments of those worlds, here daylight is only vaguely realized. It is a brittle conception whose potential to supply analogy for what is positive, for what is praiseworthy, is compromised by the peremptory interdiction of hostile conditions. As a consequence, it has evolved instead into a figure for insubstantiality, superficiality, ineptitude, and inutility, and by transference into tropes for that which is vain and frivolous and feeble, eliciting in the rhetorical service of each such pathetic instance responses ranging from passing disdain to enduring contempt.

The salient features of certain other phenomena of this world, however, were imbued with a figurative power from which might be abstracted ideas of excellence and virtue. For example, from the unvarying landscape one might adduce the existence of certain incontestable physical laws such as a motion in nature toward expressing itself with coherent simplicity in a finite number of singular shapes or constructions compounded of essential elements arranged in predictable patterns. Such a law, which by the preponderance of repeated demonstrations of its effect as evidence must appear to even the casual observer as universally applicable, might serve to confirm him—should he require confirmation—in the belief that his world appears to replicate in microcosm, perhaps in permutations of infinite regression, a macrocosmic order. From convictions less general than these, the nomothetic intellect has legislated imperatives and verities and absolutes, which may in turn lend their dogmatic force to the manifestation of habits and expressions of perspective that valorize symmetry and conformity in all things big and small, concrete and abstract. It is further probable that such laws should ground ideologies determining policy and practice in a range of enterprises, whether political, social, or economic, but not religious, for religion—and prayer and faith, unless it was faith in oneself or faith in the wisdom of process—was categorically denied having any efficacy of the sort routinely accorded many another project of the rational mind. Like mythology, to which class of fanciful conception it was assigned, religion furnished a library of images that one could consult to animate or decorate or elucidate, as by way of profitable example, one’s thought as it was unfolded in speech or writing.

Without the illusion of religion to distract them, therefore, and given the circumstances of an environment that inhibited self-regard, it should come as no surprise that over time the inhabitants of this world evolved a rhetoric of accommodation with the uncooperative and unrelenting facts of existence. The depressing effect of any inimical condition that disparaged their sense of entitlement and threatened their sense of purpose could be mitigated in this way by persuading oneself of its irrelevance. In effect, accommodation was a neo-mammalian expedient developed in intellectualized response to increasing sociopolitical complications in existence that required ever more sophisticated strategies of survival. Through the psychological reinforcement it provided, it enhanced the visceral reptilian drives that under primitive conditions sufficed alone to support the continuation of one’s being. Assisted by enabling interpretations of those unrelenting facts and conditions, this resourceful race—for they as readily accounted themselves a race as they anointed themselves an enfranchised species—adapted themselves to necessity. As they mastered the art of self-appeasement through a shrewd use of pretext and the application of a determined heuristic that validated and legitimated knowledge and experience acquired by them, the one through favored modes of inquiry, the other through privileged models of behavior, they crafted a complex, sophisticated apologia for the arrogance with which they exalted themselves above other sentient species of the cosmos. And Evolution, acknowledging the felicitous alliance of reptilian and neo-mammalian efforts at preservation in response to an adverse environment, with an accommodation of its own and in an expression of symmetry in appreciation of the ingenuity of it all, rewarded them with a physical appearance partaking ambiguously of both natures, reptile and mammal. They were cold-blooded in both senses of the expression.

Theirs was a self-determined teleology—the endgame of this lizard folk. They lifted their voices in prayer to no Setebos that they could not envision serving their interests. Science served them. Technology served them. Social psychology served them very well. Having no gods but these, the inhabitants of this world ritualized the pursuit of result, which they quantified and qualified and analyzed and evaluated; and in proportion as it yielded advantage to them, the hierarchs among them endorsed its truth. In this way, one might say, against the potentially demoralizing facts of existence the inhabitants of this world industriously asserted themselves with defiant practicality, which made them a pragmatic race but not a poetic one.

The immediate facts of existence discouraged the exercise of the imaginative faculties as nonutilitarian—dreamy, unconstructive applications of intellect that diverted one from the functional expression of self. Out of civility, they suppressed a keenly felt antipathy toward anyone of their kind who obstinately aspired to be an anachronism, as they interpreted it. They listened with genial forbearance but pity to the voices that in something of a defensive whine advocated for poetics, a term which was understood to comprehend all the arts but also