Owen's mother might never have spoken his father's name in front of him, but Owen knew who he was all the same. When he was in first grade he'd gone and found his birth certificate. Under father, typed up neatly, was the name: Alan Grant.
Later on, he'd looked him up on the internet. There were a lot of Alan Grants but only one who was a famous dinosaur bone digger upper. Later on, Owen learned that the correct term was paleontologist, but that wasn't for a long time. Not until fifth grade, when his science class did a big study on dinosaurs.
Only a couple years later, what came to be known as the San Diego Incident occurred, where that T-Rex ran rampant through the city, and it was revealed that Ian Malcolm, the famous crazy math guy who'd claimed that some big company had bought an island and was cloning dinosaurs on it, was proven to have been telling the truth all along. And suddenly that crazy story that Owen had read about his father having survived attacks from real life T-Rexes and velociraptors wasn't just a story anymore, it was real, and Owen didn't know what to think, because from the way Malcolm told it, Alan Grant was a hero who risked his life to save two kids, but Mom always told him his father hated kids.
He just didn't know what to think.
His curiosity got the better of him, and he started reading more and more, always at the library computer, never where his mom might find out, but over time, he started to get a more complete picture of what kind of man his father is. It clashed violently with how his mom always made him sound, but there it is. And he knew from experience that not everything his mother told him was 100 percent true.
When Owen was in high school, he met Alan Grant for the first time, unbeknownst to either his mother or his father. Grant was lecturing at a nearby college and Mom was working most of the weekend, so Owen seized his chance.
And despite how ambiguous his feelings about Alan Grant as a person were, he found himself spellbound by the lecture Grant gave, about velociraptor intelligence, and vocalization, and how raptors might very well have become the dominant life form on the planet if not for whatever events that caused their species to die out.
Apparently he was the only one interested in the lecture itself. At the end, when Grant took questions, nearly every hand in the audience was raised, but when Grant told everyone who only wanted to ask questions about Jurassic Park or the San Diego Incident to put their hands down, Owen's was the only one that remained in the air.
"Yes, young man in the Firefly quote shirt," said Alan, causing Owen to glance down at the stegosaurus and T-Rex shirt he was wearing, then back at his father.
"There's no way you could read the stegosaurus's speech bubble from all the way up there," he said with a raised eyebrow.
Alan's smile was warm and tolerant. "No. But I'm familiar with the quote."
"You like Firefly?"
"I haven't actually watched the series, but people insist on quoting the dinosaur part to me so much, I finally made one of my grad students explain it to me. He has that shirt too," Alan said. "Did you have a question about the lecture?"
Owen blushed, embarrassed to have gotten off track in front of so many people. And uncomfortable with having such a casual, friendly interaction with his father like he'd just done.
"I – er, you said. I mean –" Owen grimaced.
"Easy, son," Alan said, making Owen automatically stiffen. "No need to be nervous."
Self loathing sprang up Owen. What was he doing, babbling in front of Alan Grant, like an idiot? Owen Grady did not babble or stutter. He could BS his way through being called on by any teacher. Why was he suddenly losing all his poise now?
He took a deep breath and a moment to steady himself, then he asked the question that had been on his mind throughout the lecture. Well, one of many questions that had been on his mind.
"When you say that raptors were capable of sophisticated vocalization, do you mean to say that something like a spoken language would have been possible for them?"
"That is exactly what I mean to say," Grant told him.
"What level of sophistication do you theorize they would have been capable of?" Owen wanted to know. "Are we talking about something like dogs, where it's pretty much instinctual, you know, warning growls, submissive whines, sharp barks, and the like, or frequency modulated whistles and burst-pulse sounds, like a dolphin?"
"There's no reason why either of those categories should be mutually exclusive, Mr . . ." Grant trailed off, prompting him for a name.
Owen hesitated just a moment before answering. Honestly. And watching like a hawk to see what his father's reaction would be.
"Owen. I mean Grady. I'm Owen Grady."
Alan nodded and gave him an easy smile, giving absolutely zero indication that the name was at all significant to him, and reconfirming what Owen had come to believe: that Alan Grant wasn't aware of his existence. "There's no reason why either of those categories should be mutually exclusive, Owen," Alan said. "In fact, it would make more sense for the velociraptor language to be something closer to a combination of the two than either one alone. They were very instinctual creatures, so it would make sense that much of their meaning would have been communicated through tone, in growls and snarls that, to an outsider, would only sound ferocious, but to a member of the pack, would hold greater meaning. But, given the wide range of sounds their larynxes should have been able to make, considering the size of their vocal chambers, it is very likely that raptors expanded their range of sounds to a language more like a dolphin's or even a bird's."
"But if that was the case, would they be capable of working with, say, another pack of velociraptors? If their communication was actually a language and not just instinctual, then wouldn't it have to be learned? And wouldn't that isolate different populations of raptors?"
"Possibly," Alan agreed, "and this is still all speculation, but the language barrier could very well have been overcome by different raptor groups by observation and mimicry. Their brains were large enough to enable problem solving, after all."
"Yes, but if that's the case, would it be possible for another dinosaur, say something like an achillobator to figure out what they were saying and manage to be accepted into the pack?" Owen wanted to know.
"Well, an achillobator is considerably larger than a velociraptor, even if they are related –"
"Not specifically an achillobator. Any other dinosaur, if it managed to decode the velociraptor language, and was a capable, competent hunter. Your whole premise is based around velociraptor intelligence. What I'm wondering is, could another apex predator, who spoke the language, be integrated into the pack? Would the velociraptors be smart enough to see the potential benefits of co-opting another predator?"
Grant took a moment to think this over. "It is possible, though I can't say with any certainty how likely it is, considering that velociraptors would instinctively think of anything that wasn't a raptor as either prey or a threat. But by speaking the raptor language, another dinosaur very well might give a raptor enough pause to avoid becoming its next meal. Of course, there exists the problem of how another dinosaur would manage to learn the raptor language, since that would most likely require close proximity to them in the first place. And the fact that they wouldn't have had the vocal capabilities of using that language. So, in short, it's possible, but not likely. Thank you for your question. Are there any others?"
Grant looked over the auditorium. So did Owen. When no one else raised a hand, he raised his again.
"Yes, Owen? Another question?" Grant said with a tolerant smile.
"From what I've read, there seem to be two schools of thought about velociraptor family groups. Some paleontologists think they raised their young, but most think they abandoned them. If their parents abandoned them, doesn't that mean that everything they learned, they learned by themselves? And doesn't that cut down on the complexity of their language, since there's a big difference between learning a language and having to make one up?"
Rather than look annoyed, like Owen expected him to, Grant actually looked pleased by the question. And Owen wasn't quite sure how it happened, but the next thing he knew, he was having lunch with Alan Grant, and his grad student, Billy Brennan.
And it pissed Owen off but he found himself liking Grant. The man was kind, and funny, and seemed like everything Owen had always wanted in a father. So many times during that meal, he almost blurted out who he was, but fear always held him back, sometimes right at the last second.
"You're biking home?" Alan asked, after the meal came to a close and they walked out of the university's cafeteria, and Owen walked over to the bike rack. "You live in town?"
"No. Two towns over," Owen said.
"No kidding? And you biked all this way just to come to my lecture?"
Owen shrugged, embarrassed.
Alan smiled warmly.
"We can give you a ride home," Billy said. "There's enough room in the back for your bike."
"No!" Owen said quickly, too quickly. He struggled to recover. "My mom, she doesn't know I came."
"Oh," Alan said knowingly. But he didn't know the half of it. And he wouldn't for another decade.