Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “That’s the key, then?”

  “A killer specimen. You got it.”

  The trail twisted, and there ahead of them was the blind. The walls were made of small tree trunks lashed together, and the roof was thatched with cycad leaves. It sat at the edge of the woods, overlooking a browse plain that had recently been eaten clear by sauropods and now held only low vegetation. “Last man-made structure for 7,900 miles,” Salley said. “Lydia built it herself with a hatchet and a ball of twine.”

  * * *

  Lydia Pell was sitting in her blind, knitting and reading a book propped up on the shelf beneath the window slit. She put down her knitting and turned off the book when they came in. Salley introduced her to Monk, and then said, “Tell him what you’re up to here.”

  Lydia was round-faced and plump, in a middle-aged way. She opened up two camp chairs for her guests, and said, “Well, it’s quite a story. I was making my rounds and, among other things, I had in mind to check up on a widow fisher whose nest I had found, when—”

  “Widow fisher?” Monk asked.

  “Eogripeus hoffmannii. It means ‘dawn-fisher.’ Named after Phil Hoffmann because it was one of his students who identified it as a basal spinosaur, maybe even the node taxon for the clade.” She put a finger to her chin and smiled so he would understand that the student was herself. “A great big thing with a narrow little snout like a crocodile’s. Out in the field, we just call them fishers. This particular fisher was a widow because her mate had been eaten by allosaurs a couple of days before.”

  “Ahh. I see. Go on.”

  “Well, anyway, I spotted an allosaur behaving oddly. I thought at first she was injured because she was moving so awkwardly. Like this.” She stood up and leaned forward, arms tucked up and butt thrust out backward, and made a few comically clumsy steps. “I quickly realized that what I had here was a gravid allosaur—one that was heavy with eggs. But what made her movements so strange wasn’t the fact that she was pregnant, but that she was peering around like this.” She swung her head back and forth, in a furtive and guilty manner. “Believe it or not, she was sneaking around!”

  Salley laughed and, after an instant’s hesitation, so did Monk.

  “Well, exactly. An eleven-meter-long carnivore trying to look inconspicuous is one funny sight. But also an interesting one. Just what was she up to? Why was she sniffing and searching around like that?

  “It turned out she was looking for the fisher’s nest. When she found it, I thought she would eat the eggs—which would’ve been intriguing in itself—but instead, she squatted down over them and with surprising delicacy deposited one egg of her own. And then she left.”

  “Nest parasitism?” Monk asked.

  “Yes. Just like a cuckoo. I picked out a good site, built this blind, and hunkered down to observe.”

  “Show him the nest,” Salley suggested.

  Obligingly, Lydia Pell handed Monk her binoculars. “Straight out,” she said, “where the land begins to rise. You see that little stand of cycads? Good. Right in the middle of it, there’s a darker green spot, and that’s the widow. Can you make her out?”

  “No.”

  “Be patient. Keep looking.”

  “I don’t… whoah! She just sat up.” A bright streak of blue rose up from the cycads—the silvery underbelly of the fisher. She craned her neck to its utmost, peering anxiously into the woods. Then, with a clumsy surge, she stood. Her narrow snout turned one way and then the other. “What’s she doing?”

  “She’s looking around for her mate. A fisher is not a brilliant animal, I’m afraid. Just look at those big-mama hips! All butt and no brain.”

  “Her back blends in with the shrubs perfectly.” He returned the glasses. “But why is her belly that color?”

  “A fisher spends a lot of its time crouching over the water,” Salley said promptly. “The light belly makes it less noticeable to the fish.” To Lydia Pell, she said, “Tell him the rest of your story.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, eventually her eggs hatched. The poor widow had to go fishing to feed her hatchlings, and that meant leaving them alone several times a day. Life is not easy for a single mom. Still, it was convenient for me. I was able to monitor the nest on a daily basis.

  “The allosaur hatched a good two days later than the others. It was a little bigger than its siblings, and it seemed to me—though I wasn’t close enough to be sure—that it got more than its share of fish.

  “The next day, there was one fewer hatchling in the nest.”

  Monk whistled.

  “Cain-and-Abel syndrome, exactly right! Every day since, there’s been one fewer fisher hatchling. Like clockwork, one fewer every day. Now there’s only the one overfed allosaur chick and still the poor misguided widow fisher keeps bringing it fish. How long will the hatchling keep working this scam? Will the widow ever wise up? It’s quite a soap opera, you’ve got to admit.”

  “How much longer does it have to run?”

  “Well, fisher chicks normally leave the nest three weeks after they hatch, so not very long I expect. Unfortunately, I’m expected to be back at Columbia tomorrow, prepping for this year’s classes. Which is why I asked Salley to take over here for me.”

  Monk looked sharply at Salley. She said, “You’d think it would be just as easy to return you to the opening of the school year two weeks from now as it is today.”

  “That’s exactly what I said. But would they do it for me? No. Bureaucrats! ‘One day home time for every day deep time. No exceptions.’ ”

  “I hate that kind of thinking. I hate dishonesty. I hate deception. Most of all, I hate secrecy. If I were in your position, I’d hunker down and make them drag me away.”

  “Well, that’s you, isn’t it, Salley? Not all of us are such terrible rebels. My things are packed and waiting by the time funnel. This time tomorrow I’ll be facing a campus full of freshly-scrubbed, vacuous young faces. I—well! No use dragging things out. It’s time I left.” She slapped her knees and stood.

  They followed her outside.

  “Have I left anything? Hat, water bottle… You can have the camp chairs. I see you’re collecting archies again. Jorgenson doesn’t appreciate you, Salley.”

  “Is there anything I need to know?”

  “The widow leaves her nest three or four times a day. Wait until she’s out of sight—you’ll have at least twenty minutes before she returns. You only need to check on the nest once a day, I expect. When the allosaur leaves, write up your notes and ship them forward. I’ll see you get second credit on the paper.”

  “I look forward to it,” Salley said.

  Lydia Pell gave Salley a quick hug. “I’m so grateful,” she said. “This work means so much to me, and I wouldn’t trust it to anyone else.”

  At last, she left.

  “Okay,” Salley sighed. “Now we wait. Switch on your machine. We might as well make the most of it.”

  * * *

  Hours passed. The interview droned on.

  “Where did you find the fossil in the first place?”

  “I acquired it at a mineral and fossil shop. On the drive home from a summer dig. I stopped off in—well, never mind where—and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. Naomi was an amateur fossil hunter, and she asked me to identify a batch of specimens she’d picked up, and this was among them. I asked where she’d acquired it, and she got out the maps, and promised to lead me to the spot in the spring.”

  “You told her how valuable it was, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “But she just gave it to you, anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must’ve hit it off pretty well.”

  They’d set up business at a table in the enclosed porch in back of the shop—Naomi lived in back and upstairs of the store—going through shoe boxes and coffee-cans of fossils, and slabs of rock wrapped in newspaper. After two hours, with almost everything classified, Salley leaned back in her chair and, staring through the scr
eens, saw a few cottonwoods, a car up on cinder blocks, and the empty gravel parking lot behind a shabby roadhouse some distance down the highway.

  Naomi returned from the kitchen with a teapot, and saw her glance. “Not much to look at, I’m afraid,” she said. “It gets pretty lonely out here sometimes.”

  “I’ll bet.” Salley held a rock up to the light and put it down with the other miscellaneous crocodilian scutes. “How’d you get stuck here?”

  “Oh, well, you know.” Naomi wore a sleeveless top and a loose skirt that brushed against her ankles. She was a lean woman with sharp features, angular and nervous, with large brown eyes. “See, I bought this place with a friend, but she…”

  Salley unwrapped one final slab. She took one look, drew in her breath, and stopped listening.

  The bones had fossilized in a disarticulated jumble, and then been further damaged by Naomi’s clumsy extraction. But they were still readable. One fragmentary ulna was broken open, revealing a hollow interior. The skull had held together better than might be expected, and showed avian hallmarks in lateral aspect, including what might be a modified diapsid condition. There was a fragment of jaw nearby with distinctly unavian teeth.

  And winding through the matrix, like a halo around the mangled remains, was a dark feather trace.

  “Where did this come from?” she asked, hiding her excitement.

  “Up Copperhead Creek, there’s a Triassic outcropping. It’s one of my favorite fossiling sites. I could take you there, if you like.”

  Salley, bent low over the fossil, said, “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

  “You would? You can? Really?” Naomi set down her cup so rapidly that Salley jumped at the sound. She looked up, expecting to see it shatter.

  Their eyes met.

  Naomi blushed, and turned away in confusion.

  My God, Salley thought. She’s flirting. With me. Well, that explained those big, googly eyes. That explained her nervousness. That explained any number of odd things she’d said.

  In a sudden flash of insight, then, she saw exactly how it must be for Naomi. This poor, lonely woman. Still carrying a torch for the friend who’d saddled her with this business, and then left. And now a hotshot young vertebrate paleontologist comes breezing through her life, bronze-skinned and windblown from a summer spent digging up Elasmosaurus skeletons, with a rusted-out old Ford Windstar crammed with fossils and a head full of sacred lore. Small wonder she’d be infatuated.

  This kind of empathy was not typical of Salley, and she resented experiencing it now. It made her want to do something for the poor cow. It almost made her wish she were the type who’d feel obliged to give the woman a mercy fuck on the way out.

  But she wasn’t. And what a mess that would be if she were. Salley didn’t believe in an irrational emotional life—not since that mess with Timmy. She firmly believed that if everyone were ruled by self-interest, there’d be a lot less human misery in the world.

  “I have to be back at Yale by Tuesday,” she said carefully.

  “Oh.” Naomi stared down at her hands, clasped about the tea cup.

  “Still… maybe this spring?” Despising herself, she looked the woman direct in her eyes and smiled. “I bet it’s lovely out here in the springtime.”

  Those eyes lit up with hope. Next time, they said, she would surely be bolder, braver, able to seize the opportunity. “Of course,” she said. “I’ve got camping equipment, a tent. We could spend a few days.”

  “Good. I’d like that.” Standing, Salley reached out and squeezed Naomi’s hand. The woman actually shivered. Oh God, Salley thought, you’ve got it bad. She picked up the fossil.

  Casually, she said, “Mind if I borrow this? I’ll return it next time I’m through.”

  * * *

  None of which she told Monk, of course. He’d‘ve put it in his book—and where was the science in that?

  There was a sudden flash of blue on the far side of the browse plain. “Whoops, there she goes!” Salley waited until the fisher had disappeared into the forest, and grabbed the carrier. “Come on!”

  They ran across the browse plain.

  The nest was a shallow depression scratched in the dirt and ringed with the dead leaves and forest litter with which the fisher had covered the eggs while they were hatching. A flattened area beside it was where she had rested while shading her children from the sun and protecting them from predators.

  In the center was the allosaur.

  The hatchling was appalling and adorable all at once. Looking at it, one saw first the downy white fluffy that covered its body and then those large and liquid eyes. Then, with a shreep like a giant’s fingernails scraping slate, that horror of a mouth opened to reveal its needle-sharp teeth. It was an ugly little brute, and at the same time as cuddly as a children’s toy.

  She leaned over the nest to admire the appalling creature. “Watch this,” she said to Monk. “Here’s how you handle an allosaur hatchling.”

  She fluttered one hand in front of the creature, and when it lunged forward, snapping, whipped it away. Her other hand swooped down to nab it behind the neck.

  Deftly, she popped it into the carrier, and snapped shut the door.

  “You’re just going to take it? I thought—”

  She turned on him, sternly. “Okay, Kavanagh. I’ve shown you my dirty laundry, I’ve answered every question you could think of, down to the color of my pubic hair. I haven’t held back a thing. Now it’s payback time. How are we going to do this?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’ll bring the carrier with me—I’m rated to bring back living specimens to any time period after 2034. In transit, we swap ID cards—they don’t check them as closely when you’re returning from deep time—and I’ll hand off the specimen to you. You get off at 2034. I’ll go on to your originally planned time.”

  Doubt touched Salley then, and she said, “It sounds pretty touch-and-go to me. You’re sure this will work?”

  “In my time-frame—it already has.”

  Fierce elation filled her, like liquid fire, and she blurted out, “You know! You know what I’m going to do, don’t you?”

  That irritating little smirk again. “My dear young lady. Why do you think I’m here in the first place?”

  5. Island Hopping

  College Park, Maryland: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2034 C.E.

  Richard Leyster returned from the Triassic sunburned, windswept, and in a foul mood. All the way to the University of Maryland, he stared sullenly at the passing traffic. It was only as the driver pulled into the ring campus that he roused himself to ask, “Have you ever noticed how many limos there are in the D.C. area with tinted windows?”

  “Ambassadors from central Africa. Assistant Deputy Secretaries of HUD. Lobbyists with delusions of importance,” Molly Gerhard said casually. She had observed the same thing herself, and didn’t want Leyster to move on to the next questions: How many time travelers were there loose in the world? From when? For what purposes? It didn’t do to ask because Griffin wouldn’t tell, and once you became sensitized to the possibilities, paranoia invariably followed. Molly had a mild case of it herself.

  To distract him, she said, “You’ve been staring out the window as if you found the modern world horrifying. Having trouble readjusting?”

  “I’d forgotten how muggy the summers here could be. And the puddles. They’re everywhere. Water that sits on the ground and doesn’t evaporate. It feels unnatural.”

  “Well, we just had a rainstorm.”

  “The midcontinental deserts of Pangaea are the bleakest, emptiest, driest land anybody’s ever seen. There are cycads adapted for the conditions, and they’re these leafless, leathery-black stumps sticking up out of nothing but rocks and red sand. That’s all.

  “But every so often, a storm cloud manages to penetrate to the supercontinental interior. Rain pours down on the sand and washes through the gullies, and the instant it stops, the desert comes to life. I
almost said ‘blooms,’ but of course it doesn’t bloom. Flowering plants don’t appear until the late Cretaceous. But that doesn’t matter. The cycads put out leaves. Desert ferns appear—ephemeral things, like nothing living today. The air is suddenly full of coelurosauravids.”

  “What are those?”

  “Primitive diapsids with ribs that stick way out to either side, supporting a flap of skin. They scuttle up the cycads and launch themselves from the tops, little stiff-winged gliders. I’ve seen them as thick as mayflies.

  “Burrowers emerge from the sand—horn-beaked eosuchians the size of your hand. They frolic and mate in lakes a mile wide and an inch deep, so many that they lash the water to a froth. There’s something with a head like a block of wood that’s not quite a proper turtle yet, with the plates of its shell still unfused, and yet with its own clunky kind of charm. It’s a day of carnival, all bright colors and music, flight and feeding and dropping seeds and depositing eggs. And then, just as suddenly as it began, it’s all over, and you’d swear there was no life anywhere this side of the horizon.

  “It’s a beauty like nobody has ever seen.”

  “Wow.”

  “You bet wow. And I got dragged away from there to—” Leyster caught himself. “Well, it’s not your fault, I suppose. You’re just one of Griffin’s creatures. What’s my schedule?”

  The driver parked the limo in one of the student lots and hurried around to open Leyster’s door. An undistinguished brick building squatted behind some low bushes nearby. Save for the remnants of the old Agricultural College, the campus dated back to the 1960s and it looked it. As they walked across the lot, Molly flicked open her administrative assistant and began to read.

  Leyster was first scheduled to meet informally with an honors colloquium of generation-three grad students. Then there was tea with the head of the Department of Geology. After which he’d give a formal talk to a gathering of generation-two recruits. “Both groups are still time virgins,” Molly said. “The gen-two kids have been brought forward from the recent past, and the gen-three guys were shipped back from the near future. But none of them have been to the Mesozoic yet. So they’re all pretty excited. Oh, and neither batch is supposed to know about the other.”