Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “Are you coming, sir?”

  “In a minute, Jimmy. You go ahead. I’ll be right with you.”

  He waited until the animal had been successfully caged, and then approached the young woman. “That was a fine job you did this morning, leading the tour group.”

  “Uh… thank you, sir.”

  “I am not without influence. I want you to know that I’m going to recommend you for a promotion to full-time public relations. There are no guarantees, of course. But if you persevere, I can see you heading up the entire department in not that many years.” The woman stared at him in bafflement. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Keep up the good work. We’re proud of you.”

  Then he strode off, careful not to look back. In his mind, he could see her turning to the nearest bystander, and asking Who was that? He could see her eyes widen with horror at the answer.

  Sometimes in order to achieve any good whatsoever, you simply had to lie to people.

  Griffin hated that too.

  4. Cuckoo’s Nest

  Bohemia Station: Mesozoic era. Jurassic period. Malm epoch. Tithonian age. 150 My B.C.E.

  Salley awoke to the sound of camptosaurs singing.

  She sighed and stretched out on her cot, one arm brushing against the mosquito netting, but did not get up. Salley never awoke easily. Not even on a day like today.

  A day when she intended to change the world.

  Nobody knew why camptosaurs sang. Salley thought it was out of joy, pure and simple. But that was going to be hard to prove. So she had other theories as well, some published and others she had simply made known. She had learned at an early age that it was not how often you were wrong that counted in science, but how often you were right. One startling hit covered a multitude of bad guesses.

  So she had also posited that camptosaurs sang as a means of keeping the herd together. That their song was simply phatic noise, a way of reassuring each other that everything was okay. That by announcing their numbers, they warned predators away—be off, sirrah, we are too many for you! That they were comparing the taste and savor of the vegetation.

  Honest to God, though, it sounded to her like joy.

  Outside, an internal combustion engine roared to life. Two people walked past her tent, sleepily arguing the phylogenetic position of segnosaurs. Somebody rang the breakfast bell. Like a slumbering beast, the camp stirred lazily and shook itself out of its drowse.

  Salley turned over on her stomach, reached under the netting, and felt around on the floor for her clothes. She really ought to do some picking up while the day was young—the tent would be hot as an oven by noon, and by the time it cooled down she expected to be long gone. But the way she saw it, you only had so much organization in your life. You had to choose: Invest it in your research, or fritter it away on housework.

  Her socks were clean enough to wear for a second day, which seemed to her a particularly good omen.

  * * *

  The mess tent was filling up with chatter and coffee fumes. Salley snagged a tray and stood in line for sausages and grits.

  She chose an empty table in an obscure corner of the dining tarp, half hoping Monk Kavanagh would sleep late and she could have some privacy for a change. But no such luck. She’d barely begun eating when he slid onto the bench beside her and flicked on his recorder.

  The historian was a bald and hulking old man with a pink face as soft and crinkled as tissue paper and a tidy white mustache. He greeted her with an obnoxious little smirk that was evidently meant to be endearing. “You look like you’ve had a rough night.”

  “Being in the field is a lot like Girl Scout camp. Except Girl Scouts usually don’t have next-door neighbors who like to invite their boyfriends into their tents and have screaming orgasms into the small hours of the morning.”

  “Oh? Anybody of note?”

  Salley shut her eyes and took a long sip of coffee. “Okay, where was I?”

  “You’d just been asked to leave the university.”

  “God! What a fucking mess. Do we really have to talk about that?”

  “Well, it’s part of our history, after all.”

  Four years ago, Salley had been caught up in an intellectual-theft scandal that almost destroyed her career. She had been sleeping with her advisor, a man better known for his fieldwork than his teaching skills, and some of his ideas found their way into one of her papers.

  “Didn’t he go over the paper first?”

  “Of course he did. We went over it together, discussing the issues, and he went off on one of his rants. That’s when he mentioned his ideas and their application to what I was saying. He as good as told me to use them.”

  “There’s a story that you two were in bed together when he went over the paper.”

  “Oh yeah. You’d have to know Timmy to understand. He said that sex helped to focus him. I know how stupid that sounds. But I was infatuated. I thought he was a cross between Charles Darwin and Jesus of Nazareth.”

  Monk nodded encouragingly.

  “I had no idea I was doing anything wrong. The notion that ideas could belong to people was—I thought that the truth belonged to everybody. And I honestly did try to show him the final draft. He just waved it off. He said he trusted me. The bastard.”

  “You were asked to leave, and then the next semester you popped up at Yale. How did that happen?”

  “I went to see the department head, and cried until he agreed to call in a favor.” She shoved a sausage in her mouth and chewed it to nothing. “It was the single most humiliating experience in my life.”

  “That would have been Dr. Martelli, I believe.”

  “I swore to myself then and there that I’d never cry in public or sleep with another paleontologist again, so long as I lived. And I haven’t.”

  “Well, you’re young. Martelli was one of your on-line mentors, wasn’t he?”

  “Everybody was. I mean, not to be immodest, but when I was a teenager, I was everybody’s favorite wannabe. God bless the Web. I was in correspondence with half the vertebrate paleontologists in the world.”

  “Here. Look this over.” Monk placed a sheet of paper by her plate. “Tell me if I got anything wrong.”

  Salley shifted the spoon to her left hand so she could keep on eating, picked up the paper, and read:

  Everyone who knew her agreed that Gertrude “gave good daughter.” Except, of course, her own parents. At age five she took a pair of shears to the family Atlas and made silhouette dinosaurs. That same year she told her mother she wanted to marry a stegosaur when she grew up. At age seven she threw a fit when her parents wouldn’t take her to China to dig for fossils for summer vacation. It was a relief to them when, in junior high, she discovered the listservs on the Web and jumped in with both feet, asking naive questions and posing wild hypotheses. One of these—her notion that dinosaurs were secondarily flightless—she wrote up and submitted to the scientific journals when she was fifteen. To her outrage, it was not accepted. By then she was the indulged and spoiled daughter to a generation of paleontologists. At eighteen she was accepted by the University of Chicago. At twenty-one she was involved in a serious academic scandal. At twenty-three she was briefly famous when she announced her discovery of a “feathered pseudosuchian” fossil. Though initially accepted by the popular press, it was met with skepticism in the scientific community. At age twenty-four she met and took an instant dislike to Richard Leyster. At twenty-five her “pseudosuchian” had been widely discredited, the paper she published criticizing Leyster’s work, though controversial, was not highly regarded, and Gertrude, no longer the youngest dinosaur expert in existence, was staring hard into the abyss of failure.

  Salley mopped up the last of her grits with a bit of toast, and returned the paper. “I never use my given name. I’d prefer you called me Salley, okay?”

  “Ah.” He made a note on the paper. “Anything else?”

  “Monk, are you going to have any actual science in your book?
”

  “Science? It’s all science.”

  “What I’ve seen so far is just chitchat and gossip.” She finished her coffee and picked up her tray. “Come on. I’ve got something to pick up over to the animal colony, and then I’ll show you some real research. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  * * *

  The animal colony was a windowless prefab with corrugated metal walls and a noisy air-handling system. “We call this Bird Valhalla,” Salley said. She opened the door, and the warm scent of bird droppings touched their faces. “Looks like the 4-H poultry shed at the state fair, doesn’t it?”

  Archies screamed and lashed the bars of their cages with clawed wings as the door slammed shut. They were boldly patterned birds with long feathered tails, vicious little teeth, and dispositions to match. Their plumage was orange and brown and red.

  An absorbed-looking young man put down a sack marked Archaeopteryx Chow, turned, and blinked with surprise to see them there. “Hey, Salley.”

  “Monk, this is Raymond. Raymond, Monk—he’s writing a book about Bohemia Station.”

  “Oh, yeah? He should’ve been here yesterday. We pumped the hall full of tiny helium-filled bubbles, and flew a couple of archies down it, so we could photograph the vortices of their flight. Got some nice shots. National Geographic quality. Not that we’re allowed to submit anything to a public forum.”

  “Let me guess—they were all continuous vortexes, right?”

  “Uh… yeah.”

  “So you’ve just proved that an archie can fly fast, but not slow. Brilliant. It would’ve taken me ten seconds of direct observation to tell you the same thing.”

  Birds, with the exception of hummingbirds, which flew unlike anything else, had only two modes of flight—slow and bat-out-of-hell fast. The slow mode left pairs of loop-shaped whorls in the air behind them, while the disturbance of the fast mode was continuous. Slow flight was the more difficult mode to achieve, a refinement of primal flight that wouldn’t appear for tens of millions of years yet.

  “It was Dr. Jorgenson’s experiment. I just helped run it.” To Monk, he said, “If you’re writing a book, that means you’re from later in the century than we are. How long do we have to wait before we can publish our work?”

  “I’m really not allowed to say.”

  “This idiot secrecy really screws up everything,” Raymond said sullenly. “You can’t do decent science when you can’t publish. That’s all fucked up. We had a group from the Royal Tyrrell through here last week, and they’d never even heard of our work. What kind of peer review is that? It’s nuts.”

  Monk smirked. “I agree with you completely. If it were up to me—”

  “Much as I enjoy listening to you guys whine,” Salley said, “Lydia Pell’s expecting me to spell her at the blind. You want me to pick up another archie while we’re there?”

  “Uh… yeah, thanks. We can always use more. Jorgenson keeps letting ours go.”

  “You got it.” She snagged an animal carrier and turned to leave. “Come on, Monk. Let’s go look at the wildlife.”

  * * *

  It was a glorious day to be trudging along the dunes. The sky was purest blue and a light breeze came off the Tethys Sea. Every now and then an archie would burst screaming out of the shrubbery at the edge of the trees and flap wildly away, low over the sand. An archaeopteryx rarely flew higher than the treetops. The upper air still belonged to pterosaurs.

  Occasionally they flushed a small feathered runner of one variety or another from the brush, but these were rarer. Once they saw two sandpeepers—small compsognathids, not much larger than crows—fighting over a scrap of rotting meat on the beach.

  Salley pointed them out. “Dinos. Small. No feathers. What does that tell you?”

  “There are lots of feathered dinosaurs. Even you won’t deny that.”

  “All birds have feathers. But only some dinosaurs. That’s because feathers are a primitive condition for the ancestors of dinosaurs and birds. Birds kept the feathers, dinosaurs mostly lost ‘em.”

  “Secondary featherlessness?” He laughed. “Is this anything like your secondarily flightless Apatosaurus?”

  “Cut me some slack—I was fifteen when I wrote that paper suggesting that dinosaurs were descended from volant reptiles.”

  “But they’ve gone back to the Triassic, and nobody’s found a living specimen of your hypothetical ancestor. How do you explain that?”

  “Tell me something, Monk. How many important scientists—important ones—do you think made it to the senior prom?”

  “I honestly can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”

  “Hardly any. Here’s something I’ve observed—the most popular kids in high school never become much of anything. They peak in their senior year. It’s the dweebs, geeks, and misfits, the fringe types, the loners, who grow up to be Elvis Presley or Richard Feynman or Georgia O’Keeffe. And, similarly, it isn’t the successful organisms that evolve into totally new forms. The successful organisms stay where they are, growing more and more perfectly adapted to their ecological niche until something shakes that niche and they all die. It’s the fringe types that suddenly come up out of nowhere to fill the world with herds of triceratopses.”

  “Well, that’s one way of looking…”

  “The first feathered animal, whatever it was, was small and obscure. It developed something that gave it a very slight edge in a very marginal niche, and then it stayed in the shadows for a long time. Until God rolled the dice again, and scrambled all the niches. Dinosaurs were like that, back in the Triassic—just one nerdy group of archosaurs out of many, and far from the most successful one. My feathered pseudosuchian, too.

  “Those guys back in the Triassic are looking in all the obvious places. Wrong. If I ever get the goddamned bureaucracy to post me back that far, you can bet I’ll be poking around behind the bleachers and out on the fire escape.”

  Monk shook his head admiringly. “You never give up, do you?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Admit it. The evidence so far is all against you. Odds are, you’re completely wrong.”

  “Wait and see, Monk. Wait and see.”

  From ahead, where the dunes gave way to salt marshes, came the low warbling sound that a camptosaur herd makes when something spooks it.

  Monk shivered and glanced nervously inland, where the brush gave way to scrub pines. “It’s not dangerous out here, I hope?”

  Camptosaurs were skittish beasts, as likely to be frightened by their own imaginations as by a carnivore. But Salley felt no obligation to spell things out to Monk. “You’re not much of a field man, are you?” she said amiably.

  They walked on in silence for a time. The trail across the dunes was faint, but definite. In all the world, only humans made trails like that, running parallel to the seashore. Salley thought of all the human trails the researchers had made, radiating out in a dwindling fan from Bohemia Station. It got her to thinking about dino trails. There were thousands of them in the brush. If they could be mapped and classified by user species, what a wealth of behavioral information it would reveal! Too much and too tedious work for her to do by herself, of course. But if she could get a couple of grad students assigned to her…

  “At age twenty-three, you were almost famous.”

  “Huh? Oh. Yes.”

  “Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”

  “Well, I had the fossil, and nobody would even look at it. So I decided to do an end-run around the process. I spent a day calling up every major news outlet in the hemisphere and saying, ‘This is Dr. G. C. Salley, of Yale University. I’m calling to announce an extraordinary discovery.’ Then I’d very carefully explain to them that since the last quarter of the twentieth century it has been generally accepted by the scientific community that birds were directly descended from dinosaurs and that therefore dinosaurs were no longer extinct. You have to spell things out for the press—you can’t rely on them to know even the simple
st things.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I explained about my fossil. I told them that this meant that birds were not descended from dinosaurs, but from animals that existed before dinosaurs evolved. That birds were at best a sister clade to dinosaurs. And I capped it by declaring, ‘Dinosaurs are extinct again!’ They ate it up and licked the spoon afterwards.”

  The musky smells of the dunes, with their hints of cinnamon and bayberry, took on a darker tinge of sulfur and rotting vegetation. They’d come to the edge of the salt marsh. The trail divided here into two barely-visible tracks, one leading into the marsh and one into the woods. “We head inland here.”

  Cycads and low conifers rose up to either side of the trail. They passed into green shadow, walking single file and listening for predators.

  Salley wondered how much it would cost to put a Global Positioning System in place. Then anytime a researcher used an animal trail, it could be automatically tracked and recorded, and dumped in a database for analysis back in the twenty-first century. The only trouble would be how to identify which individual trails were made by which animals. But that was grad student work again, and it was easier to get grad students when you didn’t have to arrange funding to take them out into the field.

  “How would you handle it today?” Monk asked abruptly.

  “Handle what?”

  “Your feathered fossil. If you had it to do all over again.”

  She pretended to think, briefly, though she’d gone over the scenario in her mind so many times it almost felt as though it had already happened. “Well, today I’ve still got a touch of residual fame, so I’d call a press conference instead of working the phones. I’d get myself all glammed up to help ensure they gave the story some coverage. And this time I’d make sure I had a real good specimen. The one I had was too fragmented. They said it was a mosaic of different species jumbled together. They said the feather trace was just dendrites. I should’ve gone back out and dug until I found something complete. Something flashy. Something that nobody could deny.”