Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “Yes, we did. All the ground was trampled into mud. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “I’d rather lose all four shotguns than a single Swiss Army knife,” Jamal observed. He turned to Leyster. “Still, that trike wasn’t supposed to charge like that. Our instructor told us she’d frightened off ceratopsians herself, dozens of times. Why didn’t it run?”

  Leyster shrugged. “Back in grad school, Dr. Schmura used to say, ‘The organism is always right.’ Living things don’t always do what they’re supposed to. Some days sand fleas eat medusae and minnows attack sharks. When that happens, your job is to take good notes and hope that someday you’ll be able to make sense out of it.”

  Hours passed as they quietly talked. It had been so long since they’d all been friends. Nobody wanted it to end.

  “Hey, look what I found,” Chuck said. He darted into a shadowy corner, and wrestled the skull of a juvenile triceratops into the center of the room. “I found it bleaching in the sun. You wouldn’t believe how much work it was to drag it up here.”

  “Why on earth would you bother?” Tamara asked.

  Chuck shrugged. “I always wanted one of these things. Now I have it.” He lifted it up and held it before him, waggling it from side to side, as if it were in heat and courting a mate.

  “What’s that sound it made, again?”

  “Gronk!”

  “More like grawwnk! With a little glissando on the awwnk.”

  Chuck, who had early on assumed for himself the role of group clown, began to sing, “…darling, ‘cause when you’re near me…”

  Katie picked up the tune, singing, “I’m in the… mooood… for love!”

  Joke made, Chuck stopped. But Katie went on singing and, one by one, the others joined all in, singing the old romantic standard. Then, when that was done, they sang “Stormy Weather,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

  Then Chuck, squatting behind the triceratops skull, began beating its frill with the flats of his hands, as if he were playing bongos. In a high, clear falsetto, he began to sing

  In the ‘zoic, the Mesozoic,

  The T. rex sleeps tonight…

  And Tamara added

  In the mud of the Maas-tricht-i-an,

  The shotgun rusts tonight.

  Everyone else joined in on the doo-wop harmonies, singing

  Ohhhh weeeeee weeeeee oh wim oh wey

  Ohhhh weeeeee weeeeee oh wim oh wey and

  A-weema-weh, a-weemah-weh, a-weema-weh, a-weemeh-weh

  A-weema-weh, a-weemah-weh, a-weema-weh,

  a-weemeh-weh

  until the music filled the long house like a living spirit. Outside, the night was dark and filled with the furtive scurrying of small mammals. Within, there was the warmth of friendship and good times. People traded off verses, making them up extempore, so that when Daljit sang

  Why don’t you get a job with Mobil?

  I hear that they pay well.

  Lai-tsz replied

  They’ve got great health care and pension plans,

  Their profit sharing’s swell.

  Then, after the break, Chuck threw out

  That’s too risky, no I’ll get tenure

  With my new Ph.D.

  And Tamara responded with

  And if triceratops don’t gore me,

  I’ll have job security!

  They all collapsed, laughing, on the floor. It took them a few minutes to catch their breaths afterwards.

  Leyster was about to suggest another song when suddenly Katie threw her blouse in the air. Patrick cheered and clapped, and then, as if that had been a prearranged signal, everybody was shucking clothes, struggling free of trousers, frantically untying bootlaces.

  Leyster opened his mouth to say something.

  But Tamara, sitting beside him, touched his arm and said in a voice so soft that only he could hear, “Please. Don’t spoil it.”

  For an instant, Leyster did not know how to respond. Then he began to unbutton his shirt. By the time he had it off, somebody had already undone his fly and was tugging down his trousers. He kissed Gillian long and hard, and she pressed his hand between her legs. She was already moist. He slid a finger deep inside her.

  It was strange, strange, to be so intimate so suddenly with somebody he’d never romanced.

  Then Patrick murmured something which might have been, “Excuse me,” and Gillian was guiding Patrick’s head down where Leyster’s hand had been. Tamara’s mouth closed over the head of his cock, and he gasped softly. Beside him, Katie thrust her breast into his mouth.

  His mouth caressed her nipple. It tasted so sweet.

  Then things got confused. Confused and wonderful.

  * * *

  At breakfast the next morning, Leyster watched the subtle dance of small, shy smiles and light, fleeting touches that passed through the group. It astonished him. He’d awakened feeling ashamed and remorseful about what he’d done. Even though he’d never been a particularly religious person, it felt wrong, a violation of the way things should be.

  The others clearly didn’t feel that at all. Well, they were grad students. They were young. Their sexuality was still new to them, and malleable. They were open to new possibilities in a way that he, though almost of an age with them, could never be.

  Still, it was important not to let his embarrassment show. They had finally made peace, and peace was precious. He must pretend to be as happy as they.

  Sometimes deceit was the best policy.

  So when Daljit squeezed his shoulder, Leyster gently leaned back against her for an instant. When Nils placed his hand on Katie’s, Leyster briefly put his hand atop both of theirs. He stayed silent, and smiled, and was particularly careful not to flinch away from anyone’s glance. He waited.

  Until at last the psychologically right moment was come.

  Mentally, he took a deep breath. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking about this whole leadership thing.”

  Several people stiffened. Jamal said, “Well, see, I didn’t mean to…” His voice dwindled off.

  “It’s not like that. This isn’t about who gets to lead. I just don’t see why we need a leader at all.” They were all watching him intently, unblinkingly. “When this was an expedition, sure, we needed somebody to divvy up chores and keep everyone on task. But things are different now. And, well, there are only eleven of us. Why shouldn’t we just get together—like we are right now—and decide things as they come up?”

  “Majority vote, you mean?” Lai-tsz asked.

  “No. I don’t think we should do anything unless everybody agrees on it. No dissenters, no abstentions.”

  “Can that work?” somebody asked.

  “A friend of mine did some linguistic work with the Lakota Sioux,” Daljit said. “She told me they were fiends for consensus. If they had a meeting to write up a press release, they insisted that everybody agree on the size of the envelopes and the color of the paper before they’d say a word about the actual content. My friend said it drove outsiders nuts. But it worked. She said that in the long run there was a lot less conflict that way.”

  “That’s a lot of talking,” Patrick said dubiously.

  “Well, we’ve got a lot of time,” Daljit said.

  “I’m willing to cut down on my TV watching, if that’s what it takes,” Chuck offered.

  A chuckle went around the circle.

  Eventually, they adopted the motion by consensus. Then they moved on to the chores schedule. Grievances were aired, compromises proposed, and adjustments made. At last Jamal slapped his hands together and said, “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve got work to do. So if there isn’t anything else on the agenda…”

  “There’s just one more thing,” Leyster said. “I think we should be doing some real science. We’ve gotten so caught up in survival that we’ve forgotten why we’re here. We came to do research. I think we should.”

  There was an instant’s astonished silence. Then—
r />   “Well, I was wondering when somebody would say that!”

  “About time, too.”

  “I would’ve said it myself, but—”

  “Okay,” Tamara said. “We’re all agreed. Fine. So how do we do this? What are we looking for?”

  Everybody turned to Leyster.

  He coughed, embarrassed. The authority of superior knowledge was different in kind from the authority of assumed power. Still, he felt a little awkward assuming it.

  “That’s not how it works,” he said. “Konrad Lorenz didn’t say to himself, ‘I’m going to discover imprinting in baby ducks’ and set out to gather evidence. He very carefully gathered data and studied it until it told him something. That’s what we’re going to do. Observe, record, discuss, analyze. Sooner or later, we’ll learn something.”

  Patrick grinned slyly. “Yeah, but there’s got to be stuff we’re hoping, somewhere in the backs of our heads, to find out.”

  “Well, obviously, there’s always the problem of why the dinosaurs died out.”

  “Whopping big rock. Tidal waves, firestorms, nuclear winter, no food. End of story.”

  “Crocodiles survived. Some of them were enormous. Birds survived, and cladistically speaking, they are dinosaurs. What made the non-avian dinosaurs so vulnerable to the K-T disaster? I can’t help suspecting that it’s related to the fact that during the last several million years of the Mesozoic, dinosaurs underwent a radical loss of diversity.”

  “There’s plenty of dinos out there!” Katie objected.

  “Lots of individuals. But compared to the old days, only a fraction the number of species. Leaving those that remain particularly susceptible to environmental change.”

  “I really can’t see that,” Patrick said. “They’re so robust. They’re so perfectly adapted to their environment.”

  “Maybe too well adapted. The species that die out are those that adapt themselves so perfectly to a specific niche that they can’t survive if that niche suddenly changes or ceases to be. That’s why so many species went extinct in the twentieth century, even though the kind of indiscriminate slaughter of animals that hunters engaged in during the nineteenth had pretty much ceased. When humans destroyed their habitat, they had nowhere to go.”

  * * *

  They talked until noon. They could afford to. The long house was built, and they had enough food stored up for a week, even without dipping into the freeze-dried stuff. More, these were still students, however far they might be from a university. They needed the reassurance of learning, the familiar cadences of lecture and debate, to restore their sense of normality.

  Finally, though, somebody realized that it was time for lunch and the dishes hadn’t been washed, and everybody scattered to their assigned cooking and setup chores.

  Tamara lingered behind, to have a quiet word with Leyster.

  “Well, my hat’s off to you. You pulled us all together. I really didn’t think you could do it.”

  Leyster took her hand, gently kissed one knuckle, and did not let it go. He felt like a fraud. He had become a paleontologist at least in part because he found dinosaurs comprehensible in a way that people were not. It was a terrible thing to be so deceitful. “I think last night had a lot to do with it.”

  “Last night was nice.” She smiled, and he fleetingly wondered if it was possible she was putting on an act too. Then rejected the thought as paranoia. “But it just happened. This morning was premeditated.”

  “Maybe just a little,” he admitted. “The problem was that when all you’re trying to do is survive, the universe seems a cold and hostile place. We needed a purpose. To distract us from our awareness of being a single spark of human warmth in an infinite expanse of silence. One small candle in the infinite night of being.”

  “Do you really think science is purpose enough?”

  “Yes, I do. I always have. Maybe it’s because I was a lonely kid, and there were times when learning things was all that kept me going. The search for truth is not an unworthy reason to keep going.”

  “You make it sound so arbitrary.”

  “Maybe it is. Yet I persist in believing that knowledge is better than ignorance.” He was silent for a moment. “I was in Uppsala, Sweden, once. In the floor of the Domkyrka, the Cathedral, there, I found Linnaeus’s gravestone.”

  “Carl Linnaeus, you mean? The inventor of binomial nomenclature?”

  “Yeah. It was a fine-grained gray stone with two fossil belemnites swimming across its surface, like pale comets. Linnaeus didn’t even know what fossils were. During his lifetime, Voltaire quite seriously suggested they were the petrified remains of pilgrims’ lunches. But there they were, like guardians assigned him by Nature in gratitude for his work.” He let go of her hand. “Why should I find that comforting? Yet I do.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Leyster stayed behind to work on the smokehouse, while Katie took a party out to make the first observations. They were all laughing and chattering, as they left, as cheerful as children and as heedless of the danger. Watching them, Leyster felt the same sickening fear for them that he imagined a parent must experience the first time a child is allowed to leave the house by itself.

  He wanted so hard to protect them, and knew he could not. They were all buoyed up by what had happened last night. But all their confidence, all their joy, would not be enough to keep them safe. They would have to be continually on their guard. In this world, the night might belong to mammals, but dinosaurs ruled the day.

  11. Chalk Talk

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

  The meeting room was built into a cliff overlooking the Tethys Sea. Ordinarily the view through the glass wall was enough to fill the soul and elevate the spirit, and even at the exorbitant rates charged for its use, the room was booked solid for every clear day until its scheduled demolition. Today, however, the weather was dreary. A dull rain spattered against the windows and turned the ocean water gray.

  Griffin sat in a leather conference chair, thinking about chalk.

  It was only vertebrate chauvinism that made people think dinosaurs were the most important living things of their time. From the mid-Cretaceous onward, one of the most significant and varied families of organisms on Earth was the calcareous algae. Though microscopically small, these spherical plants had armored themselves with ornately structured overlapping calcium plates. The warm seas contained galaxies of calcareous algae, living uneventful lives and shedding their cunning little shields when they died.

  The exoskeletal debris from the algae and other nannoplankton, both vegetal and animal, was constantly filtering down through the water, an eternal snowfall that deposited as much as six inches of finely-grained chalk on the ocean floor in a thousand years. The white cliffs of Dover were the patient work of billions of generations of tiny creatures leading orderly and bourgeois lives. Hopscotch diagrams and sidewalk artists’ naive copies of The Last Supper, grammar school sentence diagrams and physicists’ equations, the sure kiss of a pool stick against a cue ball, the frictionless grip of a gymnast’s hands upon the high bar, all depended on the anonymous contributions of these placid beings.

  Griffin often meditated upon this. The thought that such transient lives served the diverse purposes of a higher order of life pleased him. He wondered sometimes if the human race would leave behind a legacy half so enduring. Such thoughts calmed him, usually.

  Not today.

  Today, everything was fucked. Griffin had come at last, as he’d always known he would, to a dead end. The fairy castle he had built out of playing cards and hope was trembling in the breeze. Any second now, it would collapse. Everything he’d worked for, the sacrifices he’d made, the hard and sometimes cruel decisions that had been forced on him—all was come to futility. Everything was fucked and done for.

  The door opened and closed behind him. He did not need to look to know that Salley had entered the room. She came up behind him and pl
aced her hands on his shoulders. Briefly, she kneaded the muscles. They were stiff and knotted.

  “All right,” she said. “What is it?”

  There were so many responses he could have made. Almost at random, he said, “I’ve never hit a woman.” He could see her ghostly reflection in the window wall, tall and regal as a queen. Below her he was slumped in his leather armchair like a defeated king waiting for the barbarians to arrive. Their eyes met in the glass. “Today, I almost hit you.”

  “Tell me why.”

  * * *

  Griffin had been away from Salley for a week when he finally returned to his room in Xanadu. But for her, it had only been a half hour. He knew because, as he always did in such cases, he’d written himself a memo.

  His plan was simply to say a quiet goodbye. Salley was scheduled to leave on the Baseline Project expedition in the morning. Knowing what hardships she would face, and how long it would be before her rescue, he wanted to say something that would linger. Something that would, on reflection, offer her a touch of secret hope when it looked like she was stranded forever.

  But when he’d tried saying the carefully composed words, she’d stopped his mouth with kisses. She’d hooked a leg behind him and shoved him on the chest, tumbling him down on the bed. Then she took his shirt in both hands and pulled, scattering buttons in all directions. What happened then should have been every bit as much fun as he’d had the first time with her.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  It made him feel guilty. There was no use denying that. But what choice did he have? Anything else would only have been that much crueler for her. So he was using her. So what? It hadn’t been his decision. She’d seduced him, for Christ’s sake! It would be different if it had been the other way around. But he wasn’t going to carry the can for a situation that was entirely of her own making.

  Griffin had been married before, both times to women who ended up making him feel confused and defensive. Women who introduced chaos and emotion into what should have been an orderly existence. Women toward whom—it could not be denied—his feelings were mixed, even now.