Free Pandemonium by Warren Fahy

isn’t foxfire,” Nell protested. “Foxfire is blue or green. This is more like … rainbowfire .”
    “That is an excellent name for it, Nell!” Maxim approved.
    “Is it edible?” Otto asked, triggering laughs around the table.
    “Oh, yes!” Maxim relished a bite of the lightly seared mushrooms, which glowed orange and pink on his fork; then he sipped some champagne. “And quite delicious.” Maxim raised his left arm.
    Some of his men now carried forward three tall boxlike objects covered in black cloth and set them in a row on the far side of the banquet table. “I would like you all to tell me everything you know about what I show you next.”
    The men pulled off the shroud from the first box and revealed an acrylic aquarium half-filled with water. Maxim’s guests rose and gathered around as they noticed living things inside the aquarium.
    “Whoa!” Otto said, laughing. A fluorescent sea spider hunted what looked like swimming snails swishing above it. “No freaking way!” Otto exclaimed.
    “Ammonites?” Geoffrey gasped.
    The scientists peered with open mouths at the miniature ram’s horn coils that jetted through the water like tiny nautiluses.
    “They have been extinct for sixty-five million years!” Katsuyuki cried.
    “No, Dr. Fujima,” said Maxim.
    Geoffrey broke into a wide grin. “You found them here?”
    “Yes!” said Dimitri.
    “Please, tell me about them, Geoffrey,” Maxim said.
    Waiters served them another round of hors d’oeuvres: ammonite escargot.
    “There was a time when they ruled the seas, reaching ten feet across,” Geoffrey said. “The Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, named them after examining their fossils near Pompeii and noted their resemblance to the ram horns worn by the Egyptian god Amon. You know, the one King Tut was named after? But this is impossible.…”
    “Amen,” said Otto.
    “Don’t laugh,” Nell said. “But we probably adopted that word from the tradition of invoking Amon in prayers.”
    Maxim laughed. “Go on.”
    “Some think these creatures may have plowed across the sea’s surface like Jet Skis, hunting with heads and arms like armored squid,” Geoffrey said.
    “Well, they were right, Geoffrey,” Maxim said. “I’ve seen them do it.”
    “Do you know how huge a discovery this is?” Katsuyuki said, his hands shaking. “It’s a miracle!” Otto gave him a high five.
    “How do they taste?” Maxim asked.
    “We’re eating them?” Nell asked.
    “Oishii!” Katsuyuki nodded, elated. “Delicious.”
    “Chewy,” Otto said, laughing.
    “And that’s a sea spider,” Geoffrey said, pointing at the multicolored eight-legged creature that reached its impossibly long, folding arms out to the racing ammonites. “One of the strangest crustaceans. This one’s really colorful! They seem to be a branch that split off from all other arthropods about half a billion years ago…”
    “Some think they actually are arachnids—before they evolved for land,” Otto said.
    “That’s debatable, Doctor,” said Katsuyuki, admiring the specimen.
    “It’s still a cool theory,” Otto said. “What’s in this one?”
    An attendant pulled the shroud from the next tank, which was dry. Inside, yellow and orange animals that glowed circled round and round on the bottom.
    “Gammarids?” Geoffrey suggested, looking into the dry aquarium.
    “Yes,” agreed Dimitri. “Some kind of amphipod, like gammarids, we think. We call them gammies.”
    “But adapted for land?” Geoffrey said. “With only eight legs?”
    “Look at the spikes on their backs,” Nell said. “They look like aetosaurs!”
    “What are aetosaurs, Nell?” Maxim asked, leaning back in his chair and watching the scientists as waiters served another round of appetizers and replenished their champagne.
    “One of my favorite dinosaurs, with spikes on its back pointing to each side.”
    “It’s thought that gammarids may have evolved in Lake Baikal or the Caspian Sea, which