Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “Why on earth would you schedule two separate groups for the same time?”

  Molly Gerhard shrugged. “Probably because this is when the university let us have the buildings. But it could just as well be simply because that’s what we did. A lot of the system runs on predestination.”

  Leyster grunted.

  “For the colloquium, all that’s expected of you is to mingle with the kids. Larry”—that was the driver—“will be on hand to make sure nobody tells you anything you shouldn’t know. I expect you’ll find the gen-three group pretty interesting. They’re the first to be recruited knowing that time travel exists. They grew up with titanosaurs on TV and ceratopsians in the zoos.”

  “Well, let’s get it over with.”

  The generation-three recruits had taken over a student lounge, and were sprawled over the couches or sitting cross-legged on the floor with the television at their center of focus. In one corner, a live archaeopteryx was shackled to a segment of log by a short length of chain.

  Leyster paused in the doorway. “Those are going to be vertebrate paleontologists?”

  “What did you expect? They’re most of them from the 2040s, after all.”

  “What’s that they’re watching?”

  “Nobody told you? Today’s July 17, 2034.” If there was an Independence Day for paleontologists, it was today. This was when Salley held her famous press conference, announcing—as if it were her right—the existence of time travel. After today, paleontologists could publish their work, talk about it in public, show footage of a juvenile triceratops being mobbed by dromaeosaurs, sign movie contracts, make public appeals for funding, become media stars. Today was when a quiet and rather dry science, whose practitioners had once been slandered by a physicist as “less scientists than stamp collectors,” went Hollywood.

  Before Leyster could react to the news, two of the group’s lecturers saw him and hurried forward with outstretched arms. He faded into their handshakes. Molly turned her back on him, hit her mark, and begin working the room.

  * * *

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

  “I’m Tamara. He’s Caligula.” The girl pulled a dead rat out of a paper bag and dangled it over the archie. With a shriek, the little horror leaped for it. “You one of our merry little crew?”

  “No, I don’t have the educational background, I’m afraid. Though sometimes I think maybe I’d like to get a job with you guys. If something turns up.”

  “If you’re Leyster’s niece, I guess it will. Hey, Jamal! Say hello to Leyster’s niece.”

  Jamal sat precariously balanced in a stuffed chair with one broken leg. “Hello to Leyster’s niece.” He leaned forward, hand extended, and the chair overtoppled forward, to be stopped by an agile little hop of his foot and a grin that was equal parts cocky and shy. “So the prim in the ugly clothes is Leyster? Go figure.”

  “Jamal has an MBA in dinosaur merchandising. We’re pretty sure he’s the first.”

  “Is there money in dino merchandising?”

  “You’d be surprised. Let’s say you’ve got a new critter—something glam, a giant European carnivore, let’s say. You’ve got three resources you can sell. First the name. Euroraptor westinghousei for a modest sponsorship, Exxonraptor europensis for the big bucks. Then there’s the copyrightable likeness, including film, photos, and little plastic toys. Finally and most valuable of the lot, there’s the public focus on your beastie—all that interest and attention which can be used to subtly rub the sponsor’s name in the public’s face. But you’ve got to move fast. You want to have the package on the corporate desk before word hits the street. That rush of media attention is extremely ephemeral.”

  “Jamal’s going to be a billionaire.”

  “You bet I am. You just watch me, girl.”

  “Who else is here?” Molly Gerhard asked Tamara. “Introduce me around.”

  “Well, I don’t know most of them. But, lessee, there’s Manuel. Sylvia. The tall, weedy one is Nils. Gillian Harrowsmith. Lai-tsz. Over there in the corner is Robo Boy.”

  “Robo Boy?”

  “Raymond Bois. If you knew him, you’d understand. Jason, with his back to us. Allis—”

  “Shhh!” Jamal said. “It’s coming on.”

  There was a fast round of shushings, while on the screen a camera focused on the empty lobby of the Geographic building. Molly Gerhard recalled hearing that Salley had chosen the site because she knew an administrator there who’d let her have it on short notice. She hadn’t told him how big an event it would be, of course. A narrator was saying something, but there was still too much chatter to hear.

  “Here she comes!” somebody shouted.

  “God, this takes me back.”

  “Hush up, I want to listen.”

  There were whistles and hoots as Salley hit the screen. To Molly’s eye, she was dressed almost self-parodically, safari jacket over white blouse, Aussie hat at a jaunty angle; still, on camera it looked good. She was carrying a wire cage, draped in cloth.

  “Look at how much make-up she’s wearing!”

  “She’s cute. In a twenty-years-out-of-date kind of way.”

  “Turn it up!” Somebody touched the controls and Salley’s voice filled the room:

  –for coming here. It is my extreme pleasure to be able to announce a development of the utmost importance to science.

  The moment was coming up fast. Smiling, she bent to remove the cloth from the cage, and one of the girls squealed, “Oh my God, she’s wearing a push-up bra!”

  “Is she really? She isn’t really.”

  “Trust me on this one, sweetie.”

  But first, I must show you my very special friend. She was born one hundred fifty million years ago, and she’s still only a hatchling.”

  With a flourish, she whipped away the cloth.

  As one, the students cheered.

  A baby allosaur looked up, blinking and confused, at the camera. Its eyes were large and green. Because it was young, its snout was still short. But when it opened its mouth, it revealed a murderous array of knife-sharp teeth. Except for its face and claws, it was covered with soft, downy white feathers.

  It was mesmerizing. It short-circuited every instinctive reaction Molly had.

  But she wasn’t here to watch TV.

  Molly drew back a little, alertly watching the interactions between students, noting who hung together, and which individuals sat adamantly alone. Filing away everything for future reference. Generation three was the single most likely source group for their mole—recruited from a period when the existence of researchers in the Mesozoic was open knowledge but still new enough to be shocking to the radical fundamentalists. Not that she believed her target would be unveiled that easily. She was only establishing a presence today. Still, every little bit helped.

  No, just the Mesozoic. Nothing closer. Nothing further away.

  She noticed how Leyster leaned forward in his chair and stared at Salley, frowning and unblinking. One of his colleagues touched his sleeve, and he shook it off impatiently. The poor bastard really had it bad.

  I don’t know why. You’ll have to ask the physicists. I’m just a dino girl.

  Applause and whoops of laughter.

  Something beeped. Her administrative assistant, in phone mode. She stepped out into the hallway to take the call. It was Tom Navarro.

  “I’m in California with Amy Cho,” he said. “Grab a conference room—we’ve hit the jackpot. We’ve been approached by a defector from Holy Redeemer Ranch.”

  “Holy shit. But wait. I can’t get away from this until it’s over—it would draw too much attention to me. Can you stall him for half an hour or so?”

  “No problem, we’ll just let him stew. The flesh comes off the bone so much easier that way.”

  * * *

  She slipped back into the lounge to find that the press conference was over. The students were Monday-morning quarterbacking Salley’s performance.

&
nbsp; “Very shrewd indeed,” the weedy one said. Nils, loosely aligned with Manuel and Katie, though there seemed to be something going on between him and Caligula’s Tamara.

  “If she’s so shrewd, why doesn’t she copyright the hatchling? All those plush allosaurs with felt teeth and fake feathers. It makes my teeth ache to think how much she’s missing out on.” Jamal, self-centered and opportunistic, though everybody seemed to like him—Gillian in particular. “I had a doll like that when I was little.”

  “She’s not a natural blond, is she?”

  “According to Kavanaugh’s book, she is.” Tamara dangled another rat over her archaeopteryx.

  Caligula snatched the rat and flung it down to the floor. Then he stood on the creature’s head with one foot, and tore messily at its stomach with his beak.

  Jamal grimaced down at it. “Oh God. Oh, gross. Rat innards all over the carpet again.”

  * * *

  The teleconference room was a good sixty years old and timelessly bland, though the equipment itself was contemporary. Molly double-checked that the camera was off-line, and then turned on the video wall.

  The defector was sitting bitterly in a chair behind a conference table, staring straight ahead of himself at nothing. He rarely blinked.

  “When will Griffin be here?” he asked peevishly. He was dressed entirely in black, and had cultivated a small, devilish goatee. All in all, he was the single most Satanic-looking individual Molly Gerhard had ever seen. She was surprised he wasn’t wearing an inverted crucifix on a chain around his neck.

  Tom Navarro, sitting to the man’s left, put down some papers and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Just be patient.”

  On the defector’s right, Amy Cho sat smiling down at the top of her cane, tightly clutched by those pale, blue-veined hands. Without looking up, she made a comforting, clucking noise.

  The defector scowled.

  Okay, kiddies, Molly thought. It’s show time!

  She dimmed the lights to give her an indistinct background, put her administrative assistant on the table before her, and switched it to steno mode. Then she snapped on the camera. “All right,” she said. “What do you have for me?”

  “Who’s this?” the defector demanded. “I was supposed to talk to Griffin. Why isn’t he here?”

  She’d wondered that herself. “I am Mr. Griffin’s associate,” she said emotionlessly. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here at this time. But anything you can tell him, you can tell me.”

  “This is bullshit! I came here in good faith and you—”

  “We have yet to establish that you have anything worth hearing,” Tom Navarro said. “The burden of proof is on you.”

  “That’s bullshit too! How could I even know about your operation if it weren’t riddled with double agents? Your press conference announcing time travel is going on right now! I didn’t come here to be treated like a child!”

  “You’re absolutely right, dear,” Amy Cho said. “But you’re here now, and you have a message that needs to be heard. So why don’t you just tell us it? We’d all be delighted to listen.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right! But no more of this good-cop bad-cop routine, okay? I expect you to keep this guy muzzled.” This last was directed at Molly.

  Bingo! she thought. He’d accepted her authority. Their little psychodrama was now firmly on course. But she was careful not to let her elation show. Outwardly, she allowed herself only the smallest of nods. “Go on.”

  “Okay, I stared work at the Ranch four years ago—”

  “From the beginning, please,” Molly Gerhard said. “So we have a more complete picture.”

  The defector grimaced and began again.

  He was a film maker. After graduating from London University in 2023, he’d returned to the States and the usual round of rejection and menial industry jobs an aspirant director could expect, before drifting into Christian video. He’d had some success with Sunday school tapes and inspirational packages for aspirant missionaries. He specialized in morality tales of people rescued from drugs, alcohol, and situation ethics by a strict literal reading of the Bible. He was always careful to have those transforming passages read aloud by a stern father-figure, who could then explain what they meant. He was particularly proud of that touch.

  He’d had success, but no money. Religious producers were notoriously miserly, slow to pay off a contract and quick to point out the spiritual benefits of poverty and hard work.

  Nor was there recognition to be had. The Jew-dominated secular film industry, of course, paid no attention to fundamentalist films. None of his work was reviewed, listed, or even noted in their cinematography journals. Awards? Forget it.

  So when he was approached by one of the Ranch’s recruiters, he listened. The money wasn’t great, they told him, but it was reliable. He’d be doing important work. He’d have his own studio.

  The Ranch started him out with a documentary of an expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Six weeks in Armenia, sleeping in tents and coddling the inflated egos of self-styled archaeologists who didn’t even know that the mountain’s name dated back not to the Flood but to a prestige-seeking Christian monarch in the fourth century A.D. After that, he made a series of training films showing how to forge fossils. Then revisionist biographies of Darwin and Huxley identifying them as Freemasons and hinting at incest and murder. He admitted that these were speculations.

  “Didn’t that bother you?” Tom Navarro asked abruptly.

  “Didn’t what bother me?”

  “Slandering Darwin and Huxley. They, neither of them, did any of the terrible things you claim.”

  “They could have. Without God, all things are possible. They were both atheists. Why shouldn’t they do whatever evil things entered into their heads?”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “But they could have.”

  “If we can keep to the topic—” Molly said crisply. Amy Cho, sputtering with indignation, looked like she was about to take her cane to Tom. To the defector, Molly said, “Please continue.”

  “Yes.” The defector placed his hands together, as if in prayer, bowed his head over them, and then looked up through his dark eyebrows at her. He looked like a second-rate stage magician building up suspense for his next illusion. “As you say.”

  Finally, they trusted him enough to let him film a demolitions expert assembling a bomb.

  “Who was he?” Tom wanted to know.

  “I have no idea. They brought him in. I filmed him. End of story.”

  The video had been made under almost comically excessive secrecy. He was taken blindfolded at night to a cabin in the mountains to film a man wearing thin gloves and a ski mask while he slowly and lovingly assembled a bomb to the accompaniment of a synthetic-voice narrative. He hired actors to play the parts of Ranch strategists in what they thought were scripted fictions, then muffled their voices and electronically altered their faces, to protect those strategists even further.

  “How many videos did you make?” Tom Navarro asked. “When did you start?”

  “We made a lot. How to build a bomb. How to plant it. How to infiltrate a hostile organization. Hiding your faith. Passing yourself off as a godless humanist. I lost count. Maybe one a month for the past year?”

  “That’s a lot of work for so little time,” Amy Cho observed.

  “No third takes, no re-shoots, no catering,” the defector said with a touch of pride. “It may not be pretty, but it’s efficient. I gave them good value, and I brought their films in under budget.”

  “And they dumped you.”

  “We had a falling-out, yes.”

  Molly checked the transcript on her administrative assistant. “We seem to have skipped over the cause of your dismissal.”

  “He was running a porn site,” Tom said. “Anonymously, it goes without saying. The Ranch probably would’ve never found out if he hadn’t gotten the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of their administrators i
nvolved.”

  The defector glanced at him scornfully. “It was her own idea, made freely and without coercion. It wasn’t exploitative at all.”

  “It was a so-called ‘Christian porn site,’ ” Tom explained. “That had to be what made them angriest. They hate those things. They think the very name is rank hypocrisy. Know what? I think they have a point.”

  “I’m having trouble picturing such a thing,” Molly said.

  “Biblical scenes. Girls in short skirts kneeling in church. The joys of wedded bliss. Saints being flogged and tortured.”

  “Those were faked. Do I really have to put up with this?”

  “We’re only establishing why they let you go,” Tom said. “I hear the folks at the Ranch are saying some pretty harsh things about you.”

  “They should talk. They’re not Christians! Christians are supposed to forgive. I made a mistake and I admitted it. Did they forgive me? After all my work? Like hell they did.”

  “Of course, dear,” Amy Cho said. “Tom, you’re not to behave like this.”

  Tom turned away from the defector, as if in anger, but really, Molly knew from long experience with him, to hide his smile.

  * * *

  Hours later, the preliminary interview was finally done.

  “What a piece of work,” Molly said to her partner afterward, when only the two of them were left in their respective conference rooms. “How much do you think we can get out of him?”

  “Well, he doesn’t know a third as much as he thinks he does, and he’ll have to be coddled in order to tell us half of that. The Ranch has been careful to keep him away from their mole, and the only times he’s actually met any of their operatives, they made sure he didn’t learn their identities. On the other hand, he knows exactly what kind of explosives they’ll be using, the type of incident they hope to create, and which scientists are their most likely targets.”