Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “So he really can be as useful as I think?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  * * *

  By the time Molly Gerhard joined the afternoon session, it was almost over. She didn’t mind. She’d heard Leyster—an older Leyster, admittedly—present it several times before. He invariably began by observing that his lecture before this later, better-informed generation should have been titled “A Fossil Speaks.”

  Then, after polite laughter, he’d say, “I admit to feeling a little uncomfortable speaking to you. I’ve only been in the field—exposed to the living reality of the Dinosauria—for a little over a year, and everyone here is a full lifetime ahead of me. So much of what I think I know is surely outdated by now! What could I possibly have to contribute to your understanding?”

  He’d look down briefly, then, as if in thought. “A few years ago, my time—a few decades in yours—I was involved with what seemed to me the most wonderfully informative fossil anybody had ever found. I’m speaking of the Burning Woman predation site, which I wrote about in a book called The Claws That Grab. Some of you may have read it.” He always looked surprised when they applauded the book. “Uh… Thank you. It seemed to me to provide a perfect test case for calibrating our earlier observations. How close did we come? How short did we fall? We could not, for obvious reasons, hope to locate the original site, but predation was not uncommon in the Mesozoic…”

  From which point, he’d get down to specifics about the Burning Woman tracks, what aspects he’d read correctly and which had turned out to be wrong in surprising ways. He was not a brilliant speaker. He fumbled words and dropped sentences and went back and started to re-read them and stopped midway through to apologize. But the students never minded. He knew what they needed to hear. He showed them what it was like to think brilliantly about their discipline.

  That lecture always lit a fire in them.

  She entered the lecture hall just as the question-and-answer session ended. There was a tremendous roar of applause, and while the front rows converged upon the speaker, the back rows emptied quickly into the hallway outside. There the students clustered into knots, excitedly discussing what they’d just heard.

  Molly Gerhard experienced a kind of culture shock, encountering these sober gen-twos after the more freewheeling gen-threes. It was like traveling back to the Victorian era. Port and cigars in the library, and scientists who wore formal clothes to autopsies.

  Leyster moved slowly up the aisle, chatting with anyone who approached him. He was back among his own.

  * * *

  Molly’s primary mission today was to make an impression on as many grad students as possible, so that when she popped up in the Mesozoic, it wouldn’t seem suspicious. Somebody would remember meeting her and she wouldn’t be an inexplicably unqualified stranger but, rather, Dick Leyster’s unqualified niece. A clear-cut case of nepotism and not a mystery at all.

  She closed her eyes, listening for the loudest voice of the many in the hall. Then she headed straight for the clique of students from which it originated, and waltzed right in.

  “—body talks about land bridges,” the speaker was saying. She almost didn’t recognize Salley, who was apparently trying out a new and transient look involving red dye and a razor cut. “That’s because their teachers made such a big deal about the Bering Strait land bridge in grammar school. But land bridges between continents are rare. The more common way of getting around is island hopping.”

  “You mean, swimming from island to island?” somebody asked.

  “The islands would have to be damned close together for that. No, I’m talking plate tectonics. There are a couple of ways it could happen. You could have a microplate raft off across the ocean. The Baha Southern California microplate is moving up the coast, but if it were heading westward, it would fetch up against Siberia in a few tens of millions of years—these things happen. Or you could have a new island chain formed by a plate margin coming up. The dinos could cross the ocean without even being aware of it.”

  “Is this commonly accepted,” Molly asked, “or is it your own theory?”

  Salley stopped. “Excuse me. Who did you say you were?”

  “Molly Gerhard. I’m Dick Leyster’s niece.”

  “Wait. You know Leyster? Personally.”

  “Well, I should, he’s—”

  Taking Molly’s elbow, Salley steered herself away from the others, leaving the conversation unfinished. “What’s he like?”

  “Um… stern, a little shy, kind of internal, you know?”

  “I’m not interested in that kind of cult-of-personality crap,” Salley said impatiently. “Tell me what he’s like as a researcher.”

  “Well, I’m not a paleontologist myself—”

  “I can tell.” Salley dropped her arm as Leyster’s group moved past them. Abandoning Molly, she went hurrying after.

  In Just a Dino Girl, Monk Kavanaugh had written of this very lecture that “Salley sat in the back row, enraptured. There was so much going on in Leyster’s brain! She knew there were things he suspected, or speculated, or intuited, that he was not about to say aloud because he could not prove them. She wanted to pry these secret possibilities out of him. She wanted to see him fly.”

  By sheer luck, Molly had chanced upon a moment that was famous in paleontological gossip. She decided to tag along. She had never seen anything happen that would later wind up in a book.

  She caught up just as Salley held up a battered, much-read copy of Leyster’s book and asked for his autograph. She saw Leyster’s modest smile, the way his hand dipped automatically into a pocket for his pen. “It’s not really very good,” he said. “It was the best I could do, given what we knew then, but so much of what we knew then was wrong.”

  Then, overriding her polite protests, he asked, “Do you want it inscribed? Yes? How should I make it out?”

  “To G. S. Salley. I don’t use my—”

  “You!” He slammed the book shut and shoved it back into her hands. “Can’t I get rid of you?”

  He turned his back on her, and strode away. Molly, watching, saw Salley’s look of bewilderment harden into anger. Then she too spun around, and stormed off in the opposite direction.

  Just a Dino Girl also told how Salley, returning to her own time, would condense Leyster’s talk into a tightly-argued critique of his original work and submit it for publication to a geosciences journal. By luck, nobody involved in the peer review was in on the secret of time travel or, if they were, had heard Leyster’s lecture. She was careful not to use any information that wasn’t available in her own time, and so avoided the wrath of Griffin’s people. The paper, when it came out, did much to augment her professional luster and to diminish Leyster’s as well.

  Molly had less than an hour before she had to escort Leyster back to D.C. She filled it as well as she could.

  On the way to the limo, they turned a corner and almost walked into Salley. Leyster turned his head away. Salley’s face went white.

  You’ve given her a knife, Molly thought. Then you spat in her face, and dared her to use it. That would be bad enough. But now you’ve turned your back on her. As if she were harmless.

  Leyster really was a royal screw-up. But Molly didn’t say that. Nor did she tell him that he was a primary target of the Ranch’s terrorists. Molly never said anything without a definite end in mind.

  6. Feeding Strategies

  Xanadu Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Gallic epoch. Turonian age. 95 My B.C.E.

  Tom and Molly’s report lay unread on Griffin’s desk, the first of fifteen such from the team he’d assembled to deal with the creation terrorist threat. All fifteen were from different times, and they were all marked Urgent. He wasn’t sure yet which he would read, and in what order. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know.

  The mere fact of opening a report had an almost metaphysical dimension. It collapsed the infinite range of possibilities that might yet be into a single unalterable account of
what was. It turned the future into the past. It traded the lively play of free will for the iron shackles of determinism.

  Sometimes ignorance was your only friend.

  “Sir?” It was Jimmy Boyle. “The Undersea Ball is about to begin.”

  Griffin hated fund-raisers. But it was his misfortune to be good at this sort of thing. “Is my tux in fashion?” he asked. “Exactly when is this lot from, anyway?”

  “The 2090s, sir. Your suit is twenty years out of date, the same as everyone else’s. You’ll fit right in.”

  “You haven’t seen the Old Man snooping around, have you?”

  “Are you expecting him?”

  “Good Lord, I hope not. But I’ve got a feeling about tonight. Something bad is going to happen. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if this weren’t the night that the Unchanging finally decided to revoke our time travel privileges.”

  Jimmy’s habitually sad face twisted into a homely smile. “You just don’t like formal affairs.” The older Jimmy got, the more comforting his presence was. He was close to retirement age now, ripe with wisdom, and, through experience, grown almost infinitely tolerant. “You always talk like this before one.”

  “That’s true enough. Do you have my cheat sheet?”

  Wordlessly, Jimmy handed it over.

  Griffin turned his back on the reports, leaving them all unread. But as he did, his arm swung up and without thinking he glanced down at his watch: 8:10 P.M. personal time. 3:17 P.M. local time.

  It was his own private superstition that as long as he didn’t know what time it was, things were still fluid enough for him to maintain some semblance of control over events. It seemed a poor omen to start the evening with this small defeat.

  The view from Xanadu was like none other in the Mesozoic. Griffin knew. He’d been everywhere, from the lush green stillness of the Induan era at its outset to the desolation of Ring Station, a hundred years into the aftermath of the Chicxulub impactor strike that ended it. Xanadu was special.

  Sunk in the shallow waters of the Tethys Sea, Xanadu was a bubble of blue-green glass anchored and buttressed by rudist reefs that twenty-second-century biotechnicians had shaped and trained to their purposes. From the outside, it looked like a Japanese fishing float partially encrusted in barnacles. Within, one stood bathed in shifting, watery light and immersed in a wealth of life.

  It was altogether beautiful.

  A pianist played Cole Porter in the background. Guests were arriving, being shown to their tables, politely considering the ocean around them, the giant strands of seaweed, the swarms of ammonites, the jewellike teleosts in rich profusion.

  But then an armada of waiters swept into the room, trays held high, bringing in the hors d’oeuvres; pliosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga caviar smeared over sliced hesperornis egg, grilled and shredded enigmasaur on toast, a dozen delicacies more.

  It was like a conjuring trick. Attention shifted and in an instant nobody was looking out at the wonder surrounding them.

  Except for one. A thirteen-year-old girl stood by the window, drinking it all in. She had a pocket guide and, now and then when something flashed by, she’d hold it up quickly to catch the image and get an ID. As Griffin watched, a twenty-foot-long fish swam slowly up and eyed her malevolently through the glass.

  It was ugly as sin. Sharp teeth jutted out between enormous lips of a mouth that thrust sharply downward. Those teeth, that mouth, and its unblinking, indignant gaze gave the fish a pugnacious appearance. But either the guide wasn’t working properly, or she couldn’t get the right angle, because whenever the girl looked down at it, her eyes flashed with annoyance and she held it up again.

  Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, Griffin strolled over to her side. “Xiphactinus audax,” he said. “Commonly known as the bulldog fish. For obvious reasons.”

  “Thank you,” she said solemnly. “It’s a predator, isn’t it?”

  “With those teeth? You bet. Xiphactinus is unusual in that, unlike a shark, it swallows its prey whole. The fish go down alive and struggling.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a very good feeding strategy, does it? How do they keep their prey from damaging them?”

  “Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they choke on something they swallowed, and then they die. The bulldog fish is not a perfect predator. Still, enough survive to keep the species going.”

  With a sudden flick of its fins, the bulldog fish was gone. The girl turned to face him for the first time.

  He offered his hand. “My name’s Griffin.”

  They shook. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Griffin. My name is Esme Borst-Campbell. Are you a paleontologist?”

  “I used to be, but I got promoted. Now I’m just a bureaucratic functionary.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointedly. “I was hoping you’d be sitting at our table.”

  “I’m honored that you’d want me there.” Tickets to the Ball went for a hundred thousand dollars a seat, figured at year 2010 values, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterwards, those who bought an entire table for six—as the Borst-Campbells had—were given their very own paleontologist, as a sort of party favor.

  “I’m just afraid that I’ll be stuck with somebody boring who’ll want to talk about dinosaurs all evening.” She managed to invest the word with an immense amount of scorn.

  “You don’t like dinosaurs?”

  “It’s rather a boy thing, isn’t it? Killer monsters with dagger teeth, creatures so big they could crush people underfoot. What I like about marine biology is how connected everything is. Biology and botany, vertebrates and invertebrates, chemistry and physics, behaviorism and ecology, geology and tidal mechanics—all the sciences come together in the ocean. Visibly. No matter what you’re interested in, you can study it here.”

  “And what are you interested in?”

  “Everything!” Esme blurted. Then, embarrassed, “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, you were right to say that.” It ranked, in Griffin’s estimation, among the best things he had ever heard anybody say. “But about your problem. Let me see.” He glanced at his cheat sheet. The first item on it, printed in his own neat hand, read Esme—Richard L. “You’re in luck. You have Dr. Leyster. The two of you will get along just fine.”

  “He doesn’t like dinosaurs?”

  “Well, he does, but I’ll tell you what to do.”

  “What?”

  “When you’re introduced, look him in the eye and tell him you think dinosaur paleontology is inferior to paleoichthyology.”

  “Won’t that offend him?”

  “He’ll be intrigued. He’s a scientist—he’ll want to know why. And he’s a natural teacher—by the time you’re done telling him, he’ll be itching to encourage your interest. Once he’s started talking about paleomarine life, you won’t be able to shut him up.”

  Skeptically, Esme said, “Will that work?”

  “Trust me, I know the man.” Griffin gestured with his glass toward the distant kelp forest. “Now look out there, where the water gets murky. See where the shadows seem to be moving? Those are plesiosaurs, feeding on shrimp. Every now and then, if you watch, you’ll see one lazily loop up to the surface for air, and back down for more food.”

  In companionable silence, they stared into the depths together, watching the shadows move. Eventually it was time for him to give the opening address, and Griffin sent the child back to her table. The plesiosaurs were gone by then.

  * * *

  Somebody handed him a microphone, and he tapped it twice for attention. He was standing before the window with a galaxy of ammonites to his back, shells flashing as they jetted swiftly by, too many to count.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “let me welcome you to the Turonian Age—the time when clams ruled the seas!” He paused for polite laughter, then continued.

  “Believe it or not, despite all the wondrous creatures that surround us—the p
lesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and giant sharks—the primary purpose of Xanadu Station is to study the rudist clams that make up the reefs surrounding us.

  “Why? Because these creatures achieved something remarkable and then mysteriously lost it. Rudist clams began as simple burrowers. But then they learned how to join together in colonies and form reefs. Their shells are corrugated with little bubbles, so it took them less time than other shellfish to lay down calcium. Because they grew fast, they quickly came to dominate the ocean ecosphere. Yet shortly before the end of the Cretaceous, for reasons we do not yet understand, they went extinct. It was only because of this that corals were later able to learn the same trick and filled the reef-building niche, where they remain into the modern age. We cannot explain why this happened. We’re here to find out.”

  He paused, and flashed a sincere grin. “But that’s not to say you have to spend the evening watching clams! We have a lot of marine life scheduled for you tonight, beginning with a pair of mosasaurs that should be closing in on us right… about… now!”

  The lights dimmed. Now the tables were illumined only by what sunlight found its way down through the water. Griffin lit up his microphone, swept it around to draw everyone’s eyes, and pointed it straight outward. Softly, he said, “Here they come.”

  From the depths of the kelp forest, two mosasaurs swam straight toward the station. They were thirty-five feet long, demon lizard-fish with nightmare-toothed jaws and dark, sardonic eyes.

  They were terrifying.

  Even from the safe confines of the station, they were horrific things to see descend upon you. Diners stirred uneasily. Chairs scraped against the floor.

  But the mosasaurs were safely under control. In a little room not far away, two wranglers sat, joysticks in hand, controlling the creatures. Biochip interfaces had been planted deep in the reptiles’ brains, so that the wranglers could see through their eyes and move their bodies as easily as their own. This pair were their primary herding tools, used daily, and through practice grown assured and responsive.