Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  The guide was a grad student, of course; otherwise she wouldn’t‘ve been stuck with the tour. Griffin made a mental note to find out her name and check her file. She had a real talent for this kind of blarney and was young and foolish enough not to keep that fact a secret. At this rate, she would find herself doing more and more public relations until by incremental degrees she was squeezed out of real paleobiology entirely. Griffin had seen it happen before. Something similar had happened to him.

  The platform began emptying around him. Griffin leaned back into the wind and closed his eyes. His original thought had been to borrow a land rover and drive it west, through the Lost Expedition Foothills and beyond, into the Rockies. Or maybe he could take a jetcopter to Beringia and then backpack north. Or else commandeer a research boat out on the Western Interior or the Tethys. He could do some diving among the clam reefs, maybe even troll for sea monsters. He had months of accumulated vacation leave that he could dip into.

  He stood without moving, savoring the sweetness of marsh and flowering brushwood wafted upslope by the gentle east wind.

  Then he realized there was somebody standing at his shoulder.

  He turned, and there was Jimmy Boyle, sleepy eyes and all.

  “Good to have you back again, sir.”

  “Jimmy,” he said, “since when has it been policy to let creationists come through on our VIP tours?”

  “She’s just a sympathizer, sir,” Jimmy Boyle said. “The type who goes to church on Sunday, takes her minister’s word for what the Bible does and doesn’t say, and would be shocked if you told her he was an ignorant wanker who couldn’t find his willie if he used both hands. Harmless, really.”

  “Harmless.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s harmless at all. People spout this nonsense and it spreads. It metastasises. Damp down a tumor here with carefully ordered arguments, and it sprouts up in a dozen new places. It’s easy for them; they can just make up their facts.”

  Jimmy said nothing.

  “What I found most depressing was that not one of the crowd of august decision-makers in the tour thought there was anything outrageous about her questions. They stood there, nodding and smiling, as if it were perfectly reasonable to be doubting evolution with dinosaurs all around them.”

  “Well, they’re from the 2040s, after all, sir. You know what it’s like then.”

  Griffin turned to face west. The mountains, he thought. Definitely the mountains. There were critters out there that no man had ever seen, even after all these decades. The mountain packies hadn’t been adequately studied; he could get a paper or two out of it. He’d bring along his rod and reel and catch a few sabre-tooth salmon. It would be fun.

  At last his underling’s silence had gone on too long for him to ignore. “All right, Jimmy,” he said. “What is it? Why were you waiting for me?”

  “The Old Man was here.”

  “Oh, Christ.” In Griffin’s experience, it was always bad news when the Old Man was involved. A funding crisis in the 2090s. A memo from a hundred million years upstream. A rumble of displeasure from the Unchanging. “What is it this time?”

  “He said you’d be coming here, and that there was something I should show you.”

  * * *

  They stood staring down at a wooden crate lying atop a long table in the only conference room in the world. There were five of them: Griffin, Jimmy, the security team of Molly Gerhard and Tom Navarro, and Amy Cho, an academic kept on retainer for exactly such incidents.

  “Who do you think it’s meant to be?” Griffin asked.

  “Adam would be my guess, sir. But I’ll defer to Miss Cho on this one.”

  Amy Cho was a heavy matriarch of a woman, who gripped the knob of her cane with gnarled and overlapping hands. “Adam, yes. He’s certainly the most totemic choice. Myself, I’d throw in a brass dagger and an iron ring, and attribute the thing to Tubal-Cain. The first metal smith. Son of Lamech. But any nameless peasant drudge would suffice, so long as he died in the Flood.” She smiled humorlessly. “Even a woman would do.”

  It was a human skeleton, and it was beautiful. The light sent prismatic smears of color dancing across the stone surfaces sticking out of the packing pellets.

  “What’s it made of? Opal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It must have cost a god-damned fortune.”

  “That it must, sir.”

  There were many ways to make a fossil. Not all of them were honest. This one had begun as a human skeleton. Somebody had buried it in silt within a pressurized low-temperature water oven of the sort that forgers called a “permineralizer.”

  The device had several functions. First, it served as an incubator for bacteria living inside the bones themselves. Gently it encouraged them to grow and form biofilms—cooperative structures in the shapes of pipes and channels that brought water and oxygen to every part of the bone, and carried away the waste products. Then it fed them a slow but steady trickle of highly mineralized water. Forgers usually favored calcites and siderites to produce the characteristic pale or red-black luster of common fossils. But in this case, they had gone with silicates to achieve the sort of pre-Reformation splendor that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Vatican.

  Warm and coddled inside their box, the bacteria happily ate, drank, and multiplied, until no organics at all remained in the bone. Then they died. Each one left in its place a tiny lump of minerals, taken in with the water they consumed but of no metabolic use to them whatsoever, and thus discarded.

  In this way microscopic creatures excreted perfect replicas of the bones of a creature millions of times their size.

  “Walk me through this one,” Griffin said. “Exactly what were they planning to do with this thing?”

  “Well, first they’d bury it, sir. Likely they’ve identified a fossil bed in the late twenty-first century that was laid down right about now. Couldn’t say where that would be.”

  “Holy Redeemer Ranch,” Amy Cho said. “They train their own paleontologists there. Last year they graduated six Ph.D.s in Deluge Biology. They excavated quite a nice Chasmosaurus skeleton, and then ground it to powder in the hope that they would get variant radiometric readings from different portions of the same bones, thus disproving traditional dating methods.” She hobbled over to a chair, and slowly began to sit. Jimmy hurried to offer her a hand. “They didn’t. Which is why they never published their findings.”

  Seated at last, she added, “I went to a prayer breakfast there once. Had a lovely time.”

  “What I want to know,” Molly Gerhard said, “is what possible good this would do them.” Molly was the younger of the security officers, a redhead, all but quivering for action. Tom Navarro was a bland and burly man, and clearly the mentor of the team. He was the falconer, and she the hawk he flew from his hand. “They plant some bones. So what?”

  “It is the Grail,” Amy Cho said, “of creation science. Actual human bones fossilized in situ within rock strata previously documented by geologists as being tens of millions of years old. In their frame of reference, of course, these sediments were laid down about 4,500 years ago, and the dinos are merely animals that drowned during the Flood. So if a human skeleton is found among the dinosaurs, that’s incontrovertible proof that they’re right and we’re wrong.”

  “It could be a scientist,” Molly said dubiously. “Wandered away from his camp and met a mishap.”

  “Billions and billions of dinosaurs to produce just a few thousand fossils, while a solitary lost scientist is fossilized and recovered ages later? Nobody’s going to buy that,” Tom said gently. “I wouldn’t.”

  Griffin felt an overwhelming urge to check the time, and clamped a hand over his watch so that when he looked, as he inevitably must, he wouldn’t see the dial. It didn’t pay to give in to these impulses. He knew that from long experience.

  He looked up. “How long was it in storage before it was found?”

  “Six
months.”

  “Then whoever was supposed to retrieve it, didn’t.”

  “Likely he got scared off. Something happened to make him think we were watching for him,” Jimmy said. “Or her,” he amended when Amy Cho scowled. “I would, however, like to draw your attention to a particularly clever little bit of business. Notice the label.”

  Those on the right side of the crate moved closer to look. Molly walked around to join them.

  “ ‘Martin Marietta,’ ” Griffin read aloud. “ ‘Ptolemy Surveyor Launch System Tripod. Caution: To Be Operated By Trained Personnel Only.’ ”

  “The Ptolemy is an orbital surveying system. It can be launched in the field by just three people: two to carry the rocket, and a third to set up the tripod. One of the first things we do when we establish a baseline station is send up a satellite to make maps. Thing is, it was a very good system in its time, but that time is past.”

  “Refresh my memory. What’s our sister date back home?”

  “2048, sir.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway.” For Griffin, the great operational divide was not between the human era and the Mesozoic, but between those times with a home date prior to 2034, when time travel was a secret, and those after, when it was common knowledge. He never liked working pre-2034 dates. He hated secrecy.

  “We advanced to Mercator-class mapping satellites in late 2047. So the labeling on this crate was particularly good. It was something just obsolete enough that nobody would use it, but not so far out of date they’d be surprised it was shipped through. Cunning stuff, methinks.”

  “Thank you, Jimmy. Does anybody have anything more?” Griffin waited. “All right, then, let’s put it together. We’ve got a box of sacred bones, somebody who knows which nondescript patch of land here-and-now is going to be fossil-rich sandstone at Holy Redeemer Ranch sixty-seven million years in the future, and the very specific knowledge that a Martin Marietta Ptolemy launch system was newly obsolete. All of which adds up to—what?”

  “It means we’ve got a creationist mole among our people,” Molly said.

  “A deep creationist!” Cho thumped her cane for emphasis. “Not a garden-or-common-or-everyday creationist, but a deep creationist.”

  “What’s the difference, then?”

  “They’re the ones who believe in violence. They’re the ones who kill people.”

  There was a moment’s silence as they all absorbed this information.

  “What options are open to us?” Griffin asked at last. “Can we go back and intercept this thing when it’s delivered? Most importantly, can we capture the mole before he does something else?”

  “There haven’t been any disappearances or unexplained absences in the last six months among the scientists, sir. Which is where our mole would be nestled. So no, we can’t.”

  Molly glanced quickly at Tom and said, “I’ve gone over the records. There’s nothing on who delivered this crate, when it arrived, who signed for it. It simply shows up on the inventory one day. And we know that something frightened off our mole.”

  “Have you gone through everything?”

  “Yes, sir, I have. There’s a great deal of silence surrounding the arrival of the crate. Somebody—and I have every reason to believe it’s us—has gone to a lot of trouble to create that silence.”

  “Is it a big enough silence to inject an operation into? Realistically speaking, is there enough space there for us to operate a sting?”

  Everybody leaned ever so slightly forward to hear Molly’s answer. Eyes gleamed. Even Amy Cho showed a feral flash of teeth.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure of it.”

  * * *

  When they had finished making plans and all had been given their orders, Griffin dismissed them and went to his office. No matter where or when Griffin found himself, his office always looked the same. He insisted upon it. Desk here and liquor cabinet there. Active memos in the top left hand drawer in order of issuance. Backup documentation one drawer down. Forms, letterhead, and a ream of cream-colored heavy bond at the bottom. From the Triassic to the Holocene, from Pangaea through the breakup of the supercontinent into what eventually became the modern configuration of continents, he liked to find his pencils sharp and where he expected them to be.

  It had been a good day’s work. Briefly, he felt content. Then he read halfway down the first of the active memos, and his stomach soured.

  It was a schedule for a series of lectures in which generation-one celebrities visited generation-two and generation-three research stations to lecture young scientists on the history of their field. He always scanned these carefully because the temptation for a researcher to pass information back to a formative idol was so great.

  The third lecturer listed was Richard Leyster.

  Among those slated to attend was Gertrude Salley.

  He slammed open a drawer, drew out a sheet of letterhead, and began drafting a memo. To all concerned: The third lecture on the attached sheet has been permanently canceled. All care will be taken henceforth that Salley and Leyster are not to be given the opportunity to…

  The door opened and closed behind him. The room filled with a familiar presence.

  “Don’t stand up,” the Old Man said.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  The Old Man walked over to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a shot of bourbon. He raised it to his nose and sniffed, but did not drink.

  Then he picked up the memo Griffin had been working on, and tore it in half.

  Griffin closed his eyes. “Why?”

  “You’ve been listening to rumors again.” The Old Man dropped the torn halves on the desk. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to keep those two apart.”

  “So I pay attention to rumors. I’m just playing the edges. If I want to get anything accomplished, I’ve got to play the edges. What other chance have I got?”

  “There are no edges here.” The Old Man put down his glass to remove a folder from his attache. “Here’s the report on the probe you’ve set into motion today. It doesn’t catch your mole. He has to expose himself. You’ll have to let him act out his intentions.”

  “Don’t tell me any more. Leave me room to maneuver.”

  The Old Man shook his head. “Read the report. Then play it the way it’s written.”

  Reluctantly, Griffin opened the folder. He turned the cover page, folded it flat, and began to read.

  Halfway down the first page, he stopped.

  “You’ve made a mistake here. I wasn’t supposed to see the list of casualties.”

  “That was deliberate. I felt you were ready.”

  “Damn you,” Griffin said vehemently. He could see no operational or administrative reason why he should know this information. Only malice could account for its disclosure. “Why implicate me in this? There’s a big difference between sending people into a dangerous situation, and sending them out to die.”

  “Not so big as you might think.”

  “It’s murder, plain and simple.”

  The Old Man said nothing to this, nor did Griffin expect him to. He slowly read through to the very end of the report, sighed, and said, “So that’s why Leyster hates me. God help me. If I’d known, I would’ve been easier on the poor bastard.”

  “These things happen.”

  “Because we allow them to!”

  “They happen because they happen. We dare not interfere. Don’t pretend you don’t know why.”

  To this, Griffin had no reply.

  The Old Man went to the window and adjusted the blinds. Griffin winced as the late afternoon sun hit his eyes. Outside, a land rover had arrived and was surrounded by enthusiastic grad students. He gestured with his still-untouched glass. “Look at them. So young and full of energy. Not a one of them has the faintest notion how contingent their universe is.”

  He twisted the blinds shut again, leaving Griffin dazzled and blinded. “They’re all going to die. Sooner or later. Everyone dies.”
<
br />   “But not because of me. Damn it, I won’t do it! I’ll tear the whole rotten system apart with my bare hands first. I swear I will!”

  But it was empty bluster, and they both knew it.

  “Everybody dies. So much of growing up consists of coming to grips with this fact.” The Old Man again put down his glass and opened his attache. This time he emerged with a brown paper bag, which he upended over the desk. The object it contained rolled noisily out. “This is for you.”

  It was a human skull.

  The skull had not been long in the ground—a few decades at most. A patch of fine green moss discolored one cheek. There were fillings in the teeth.

  Griffin’s mouth went dry. “Whose is it?”

  “Whose do you think?” The Old Man crumpled up the bag and stuffed it in a pocket. Then he drank down the bourbon he’d been holding all this while, abandoned the glass, and turned to leave. At the door, he paused and said, “Memento mori. Remember you must die.”

  He closed the door quietly behind him, leaving Griffin staring, horrified, at the skull the Old Man had given him.

  His own.

  * * *

  Crossing the compound toward the building housing the time funnel, Griffin saw the young paleontologist who had been his guide that morning, helping move a newly-captured velociraptor from the land rover to one of the outdoor pens in the rear of the animal colony. He stopped to watch. She was one of three who had choke-sticks looped around its throat. It struggled ferociously, but could not reach any of them with its wickedly sharp claws. A wrangler stood by with an electric rifle in case it broke loose.

  She was glowing with sweat and exertion, and grinning like a madwoman. It was obvious to Griffin that this was the single finest moment of her life to date.