Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a god-damned filthy thing to do.”

  “From my perspective, it was a god-damned filthy thing to do. You’ll do it, though. I’m sure of that much.”

  Griffin stared long and hard into the Old Man’s eyes.

  Those eyes fascinated and repulsed Griffin. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime’s accumulation of wrinkles. He’d been working with the Old Man since he was first recruited for the project, and they were still a mystery to him, absolutely opaque. They made him feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.

  He hadn’t touched his bourbon yet. But when he reached for it, the Old Man took the glass and poured it back into the decanter. He capped it and put it back in the cabinet. “You don’t need that stuff.”

  “You’ve been drinking it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a lot older than you are.”

  Griffin wasn’t sure how old the Old Man was. There were longevity treatments available for those who played the game, and the Old Man had been playing this lousy game so long he practically ran it. All Griffin knew for sure was that he and the Old Man were one and the same person.

  Overcome with loathing, Griffin said, “You know, I could slit my wrists tonight, and then where would you be?”

  That hit home. For a long moment the Old Man did not speak. Possibly he was thinking of the consequences of such a major paradox. It would bring their sponsors down on them like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively. Everything connected with it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Xanadu and a score of other research stations up and down the Mesozoic would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of hundreds of scientists would vanish from human knowing. Everything Griffin had spent his life working to accomplish would be undone.

  He didn’t know that he’d regret that.

  “Listen,” the Old Man said at last. “You remember that day in the Peabody?”

  “You know I do.”

  “I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart—all your heart—that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. That some things could never be.”

  Griffin said nothing.

  “God hands you a miracle,” the Old Man said, “you don’t throw it back in his face.”

  Then he left.

  Griffin remained.

  Thinking of the Old Man’s eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn’t tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, Griffin still couldn’t tell if those were the eyes of a saint or those of the most evil man in the world.

  Griffin thought of those eyes.

  His own eyes.

  Loathing himself, he set to work.

  7. Protective Coloration

  Survival Station: Mesozoic era. Triassic period. Tr3 epoch. Camianage. 225 My B.C.E.

  The important thing was to maintain a scientific frame of mind. He was being tested. When Griffin popped out of the time funnel early, with his Irish shadow in tow, Robo Boy knew exactly how to act and what to say.

  “They trapped a dwarf coelophysid in the highlands the other day.” He accepted their credentials through the slot in the cage door and carefully compared the photos against their faces. “Everybody was all excited.” He checked their names against the schedule on his clipboard. “It was less than two feet long.” He ran the papers through a text verifier, waited for the light to flash green. “They’re calling it Nanogojirasaurus.” The light flashed. “But Maria thinks it’s just a juvenile.”

  He unlocked the heavy, iron-barred door and they stepped out of the cage. A monotonous rain was drumming on the supply room’s roof. The shelves were thronged with boxes and bundles. A single lightbulb overhead filled the empty spaces between them with shadows and mystery.

  “Why aren’t the chairs set up yet?” Griffin asked. He clamped a hand over his wrist, glared down at it, and said, “I can’t spare much time. I’m only stopping over on my way to the Induan.”

  “You weren’t supposed to arrive for another two hours,” Robo Boy pointed out.

  The Irishman took the clipboard from his hands, scribbled out what Robo Boy had written, and wrote a later time above it. “Sometimes things don’t happen exactly when it says they did in the record. It’s a security measure.”

  The buzzer sounded, announcing another arrival.

  With a heavy iron clank, a new car filled the cage. Robo Boy snatched back his clipboard.

  Salley stepped out of the cage.

  “They trapped a dwarf coelophysid in the highlands the other day,” he said, holding out his hand for the woman’s credentials. “Everybody was all excited.”

  “It was a juvenile,” Salley said. “I read Maria Caporelli’s paper about it. I’m gen-two, remember?” To Griffin, she said, “Can’t you cut through all of this bureaucratic rigamarole for me?”

  “Of course.” Griffin nodded to the Irishman, who leaned forward and threw the latch. Salley stepped out into the room.

  “Hey!” Robo Boy objected. But the Irishman clapped a hand on his shoulder and quietly said, “Let me give you a wee bit of advice, son. Don’t try so hard. You’ll get a lot further in life if you cut people a little slack.”

  Robo Boy flushed and retreated, as he always did, into his work. First he set up four chairs. Then the folding table. Finally, glasses and a pitcher of water that had been chilled by keeping the jerrycan right next to the cage.

  Meetings were held in the storage room because it was so much cooler than outside. The time funnel acted as a heat sink, sucking warmth from the ambient air and re-radiating it out into the darkness between stations. Nobody knew exactly where the heat went. The funnel itself had been mathematically modeled as a multidimensional crack in time, and no one had yet figured out a way to probe beyond its walls.

  While Griffin neatly positioned papers across the tabletop and Salley poured herself a glass of water, Robo Boy returned the jerrycan to its place beside the time beacon. The beacon was an integral part of the funnel mechanism, anchoring the funnel to this particular instant. Without it, they would be unfindable, an infinitesimally small instant of duration in the shoreless ocean of time. Occasionally he thought how easy it would be to smash the beacon and maroon them all. Always he was stopped by the thought of spending the rest of his life with Darwinian atheists.

  The door outside slammed open.

  “Hello?” Somebody stood blinking in the steaming wash of hot and humid air. “Anybody here?”

  Leyster stepped into the room.

  He closed the door behind him, and hung up his slicker on a peg alongside it. Then he turned and saw Salley.

  “Hello, Leyster.” A tentative smile, there and gone. She looked quickly away. Leyster, in his turn, muttered something polite and scraped up a chair.

  Was it as obvious to everyone else, Robo Boy wondered? The way the two of them were so painfully conscious of each other? How their gazes danced about the room, toward and away from each other, without ever actually connecting? Surely they were all aware of it, whether they acknowledged it or not.

  “You two know each other,” Griffin said. “There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. However, I’m sure you’ll agree that the Baseline Project is important enough to set aside whatever personal—” He stopped, and said to Robo Boy, “Why are you still here?”

  “I was running inventory.” He waved his clipboard at the shelves.

  “Can it be done another time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then leave.”

  Robo Boy put the flimsies of his time transit report form into an envelope pre-stamped TTR(TR3/Carnian) and stuck it into the outgoing mailbox. He took his slicker off its hook.

  The Irishman leaned back against the shelves, arms folded, and stared at Robo
Boy speculatively.

  A stab of fear shot through him. He’d been found out! But no, if he had, they’d have arrested him long ago. He assumed the stubborn look his mother had always called his “pig face” and went out into the rain, letting the door slam behind him.

  He didn’t look back, but he knew from experience that the Irishman’s attention had already shifted away from him. He had that effect on people. They thought he was a jerk.

  He knew how to act like a jerk because he used to be one.

  * * *

  “Hey, Robo Boy,” somebody said in a friendly way. A girl matched strides with him. It was Leyster’s cousin, Molly. She wore a transparent hooded slicker over basic paleo-drag: khaki shorts, blouse, and a battered hat.

  “My name is Raymond,” he said stiffly. “I don’t know why everybody persists in calling me by that ridiculous nickname.”

  “I dunno. It suits you. Listen, I wanted to ask your advice about getting a job.”

  “My advice? Nobody asks for my advice.”

  “Well, everybody says you’ve had more transfers than anyone, so I figured you’d know the ropes. Hey, have you heard the rumors?”

  “What rumors?”

  “About Leyster and Salley and the Baseline Project.”

  Molly was, in Robo Boy’s estimation, as harmless as anyone could be, a chatterbox and a bit of an airhead and not much else. Still, he didn’t want her to know how interested he might be in the Baseline Project. So he sighed in a way that he knew from experience girls didn’t like, and waved a hand at the mud and tents and spare utilitarian structures of the camp, and said, “Tell me something. Why would you want a job in a place like this?”

  “I just love dinosaurs, I guess.”

  “Then you’re in the wrong place. The Carnian is—” They’d come to the cook tent. It was where he’d been headed all along. “Look, why don’t we go inside and discuss it there?”

  Molly smiled brightly. “Okay!” She led the way in.

  Robo Boy followed, scowling down at her ass. Molly had curly red hair. He thought she wasn’t wearing a bra, but she wore her blouse so loosely he couldn’t be sure.

  * * *

  “The Carnian is a lousy place to look for dinosaurs,” he explained over a cup of tea. “That’s one reason everyone is so worked up over the gojirasaur—they’re rare. All the action here is in synapsids and non-dinosaurian archosaurs. They’re the ones who are busily speciating and competing for dominance of the community. The early dinosaurs are just bit players. But a funny thing is about to happen. The synapsids are going to take a major hit in the evolutionary sweepstakes. Most lines will die out completely. The only ones that’ll survive into the Jurassic are mammals, and then only because they colonized the small-animal niche. Which is where they’ll be stuck until the end of the Mesozoic and the onset of the Cenozoic. Following this so far?”

  Molly nodded.

  “Okay, now the non-dino archosaurs also suffer a reduction in diversity. But among the archosaurs is a group called the pseudosuchians, and their descendants include all the crocodilians. So they do pretty well. And dinosaurs come up winners. From the Triassic on, the Mesozoic belongs to them.

  “But it’s important to understand that whatever favored dinos was opportunistic, not competitive.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means they didn’t supplant their rivals because they were inherently superior. Some of those archosaur groups are as hot-blooded as any dino. But the volcanic event that opened up the Atlantic Ocean changed the environment in ways that favored dinosaurs over their rivals. They just got lucky.”

  He folded his arms smugly.

  It was a good performance. He’d rattled off the lies as if he meant them, pedantically and with just the right touch of condescension. It astonished him how carefully Molly listened.

  But then she said, “So do you think I could get a job in supplies, like you? I mean, it looks pretty simple. You just move things around with a fork lift, right?”

  “No, I do not.” He didn’t have to fake his irritation. “They use fork lifts at the far end, where there’s plenty of electrical energy. I use a hand truck.” Supplies were shipped down the funnel in bundles lashed to pallets, and thus he measured the work in pallets. Three pallets was a light day, and ten was more work than he could do without help. “Everything gets loaded and unloaded by hand.”

  “Cool. So how did you get your position in the first place?”

  “I was transferred.”

  It was easy to get transfers if you were a hard worker and willing to take on the grunt jobs nobody else wanted. Robo Boy was careful to make himself unpopular so that when he applied for a transfer, nobody ever made a strong effort to keep him. He had wandered from job to job, seemingly aimlessly, until he ended up deep in the Triassic, with complete control over the supplies and shipping, and, not coincidentally, one nexus of the time funnel.

  “Well, how did you get your first gig?”

  “I started out with a masters in geology. I got really good grades. I wrote my thesis on some stratigraphic problems that the people here were interested in.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a terribly viable option for me,” Molly said.

  “No, it doesn’t. Now what’s all this about Leyster and Salley?” He crossed his arms and leaned back, masking his interest with a skeptical expression.

  Molly flashed that brainless smile of hers. “They’re going to be working on the Baseline Project. Together. If you can imagine that.”

  “I find that hard to—wait a minute. That’s supposed to be a gen-three project.”

  “Griffin’s promoting them both. At least that’s the offer he’s putting on the table. But can you picture either of them turning him down? Leyster’s pre-2034, so he’ll have to be shifted forward in time. But that’s not much of a sacrifice for him. Most of his friends are in paleontology, and I’m the only one in the family he’s actually close to.”

  “I can’t picture those two working together. Who gets to be the boss?”

  “Neither. Both. One’s in charge of the camp, and the other’s in charge of specimen collection. Lucky for them, they’ll be bossing around a batch of grad students so green they won’t have any idea what a fucked-up arrangement that is.”

  “Huh,” Robo Boy said.

  Briefly, he wondered how Molly had come into possession of such juicy inside dirt. Surely not from the notoriously close-mouthed Leyster. Did she have contacts in Administration?

  He would have liked to ask her. But that wouldn’t be in character.

  * * *

  That was on Tuesday. Three days later a big rhynchosaur roast was held to celebrate the end of survival training. Everybody had too much beer, and then they built a campfire to sit around, though the nights never really got cold enough to need it. Leyster got up and made a little speech, and then introduced their guest-lecturer.

  Sylvia Davenport was a generation-three researcher from Ring Station, located a hundred years into the aftermath. She stood by the campfire and talked to the new recruits about the K-T extinctions. Robo Boy listened scornfully from the shadows.

  The upper Triassic was buggy and humid. The survival camp was, anyway, and he didn’t really care what it was like elsewhere. He never left the camp on expeditions or field trips, but stayed at home always, operating the commissary.

  “We’ve looked,” Davenport said. “Enough dinosaurs survived the Event to repopulate the Earth with their kind within the millennium. Yet ten years later, there were only a fraction of the number of those that survived, and in a century, they were extinct. Why? Other animals adapted. Hell, there were dinosaurs that adapted—the birds. Why didn’t the rest? Non-avian dinosaurs had already survived the worst of it. Why couldn’t they adapt?”

  Robo Boy leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. This was a trick he had learned in school. It made him look engrossed in the subject and allowed his mind the freedom to wander.

  He shut out the speake
r’s voice. Directly behind him, Leyster was murmuring something to the woman beside him, a gloss on what Davenport had just said. Robo Boy shut him out too.

  He sank into the blissful silence of his own thoughts.

  He despised the scientists for their constant inquisitive chatter, the way they leapt freely from possibility to possibility, postulating, positing, and speculating, with never an assurance that truth lay truly underfoot, unchanging, solid, inviolate. He could not live that way. If he were to admit, however briefly, that their tentative and provisional way might be valid, all certainty would dissolve within him, leaving nothing but chaos and the Pit. Stranding him in that emotional anomie he had inhabited before his Third Birth as a Midnight Christian. So he held them at an ironic distance. He spoke to them as from behind a mask—the mask of the worthless man he had been. In this way his old life had some value. It moved his new life closer to its validation.

  Briefly, he thought about the time he had caught a glimpse of an angel. Then he wondered exactly when and where they might be—where they really were, as opposed to the party line of their atheistic humanist leaders. By his best guess, Robo Boy figured they were roughly six thousand years in the past, sometime between the Fall and the Flood. Physically, the camp lay somewhere east of Eden, in a land without flowers.

  How astonishing to be alive in the time of the Patriarchs!

  Sodom and Gomorrah were still thriving cities. Giants walked the Earth. Somewhere, Methuselah was living out his thousand years. Tubal-Cain was inventing metallurgy. The young Noah, perhaps, was seeking out a virtuous woman to be his wife. He felt blessed to be alive at such a time, and he thanked God for this blessing, and for the events that had brought him here.

  It was a book that had changed his life, and a single sentence within that book which had done the work. The book was Darwin Antichrist, which he had bought to laugh at, and the sentence was, “If time travel is real, then why haven’t we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?”