Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  If time travel is real—

  It had never occurred to him to doubt the consensus version of reality before that very instant. And once he began to doubt it, layer upon layer of the humanist fallacy started to peel away, until all the world was dark and empty and held together only by an incomprehensible network of conspiracies.

  –then why haven’t we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?

  Of course! He closed his eyes, blind as Paul on the road to Damascus, his mind racing ahead of the page, anticipating the arguments that would lead him through the labyrinth of his meaningless existence and out into the light.

  Toward God.

  He had never thought much of God before. A white-haired old man on a throne in the clouds, hung up on the Sunday school blackboard, that was it. Now he realized God as something more subtle than that, an all-justifying power that entered into his heart and mind and skin like liquid lightning and made him impervious to scorn and error alike.

  He did not ask why an all-loving God would create a false fossil record in order to deceive men and lead them away from the revealed truth. Robo Boy simply accepted it.

  After his conversion, he had moved from organization to organization, always finding them lacking in commitment and zeal. At last, though, he had discovered deep creationism and the Thrice-Born Brotherhood: born once in the flesh, again in Christ, and a third time as warriors. They understood that defending God sometimes required extreme methods. They had opened his eyes. Under their tutelage, he’d proudly abandoned the conventional prayer-at-bedtime and church-on-Sunday beliefs he had been brought up in for a life of urgent commitment.

  Before his conversion, the temptation to sin was omnipresent. He was weak. He lusted after women in his heart. Now, believing in prophecy and the inherent Tightness of his vow of chastity, he was born again and yet again.

  The strictness of his conviction and righteousness made it his duty to convict those non-believers still mired in disbelief, in skepticism, in the Darwinian heresy. Few of them realized how badly they needed saving. But he was on a rescue mission, and where the fate of the world was at stake, it hardly mattered what became of a few souls. Or their bodies.

  Davenport stopped speaking. Somebody began to clap, and then the others joined in.

  Nobody applauded as loudly as he did.

  * * *

  The next day’s schedule had him working the time funnel in heavy rotation. First the juvenile gojirasaur was shipped forward as a present to the People’s Paleozoological Garden in Beijing. The famous Dr. Wu himself brought a crew of wranglers, lean young grad students who squatted on their heels when they ate their lunches out of cardboard containers with chopsticks, and joked casually among themselves as they worked under his stern eye.

  Leyster emerged from his obsessive checking and re-checking of the Baseline Project’s provisions to shake the great man’s hand, and receive a few words of recognition in exchange. Then the camp director showed up, and the three of them solemnly examined the caged gojirasaur while the wranglers stood back in silent witness to this moment of shared celebrity.

  The theropod itself was a beautiful creature. Its skin was leaf-green, mottled with splotches of yellow. Even its eyes—alert and quietly watchful—were yellow. There was little room for it to move within the cage, and so it stood still. There was a tense menace to its calm, though. Once, a wrangler placed a hand carelessly upon the cage, and the gojirasaur almost bit off her fingers. She danced backwards from its snapping teeth while her peers laughed.

  Then they slid iron bars through the underside of the cage and hoisted it inside the time funnel. The Chinese delegation placed themselves carefully within as well, and Robo Boy checked off their names and threw the switch.

  They were gone.

  Ten minutes later the buzzer sounded, and he had to muscle out two pallets of supplies: toilet paper, restaurant-size tins of food, brush hooks, shotgun shells, a remote-operated hovercam, canvas shower-bags, powdered soap, fungicide cream, tampons, a banjo, and a bundle of scientific journals. Nothing either interesting or unusual. But everything had to be accounted for, recorded, and stowed away.

  At last Leyster’s people began to arrive for the Baseline Project expedition. They trickled in by twos and threes, laughing and chatting, and they all got in the way of Robo Boy’s re-packing of the pallets that Leyster had torn apart to make sure nothing had been left out. Several greeted him by name.

  He spoke curtly when he could not avoid speaking at all. Only rarely did he look up from his clipboard. Robo Boy had a reputation for surliness, and it helped keep people at a distance.

  Which was useful. Nobody was looking at him when he placed the time beacon carefully atop the third pallet, and lashed it tight with nylon cord. Nobody saw how nervous he was.

  Ready hands helped him slide the pallet into the cage. He backed out, mumbling, “Okay, it’s all yours.”

  “All right, gang, let’s move ‘em out!” Leyster shouted, and bounded inside. “Richard Leyster, present and accounted for,” he told Robo Boy.

  Robo Boy checked off their names, one by one, as they crowded into the cage. Somebody made a joke about stuffing college students into a telephone booth, and somebody else said, “Better than stuffing them into a tyrannosaur!” and they all laughed. He was careful not to make eye contact with anybody. He was afraid of what they might see in him if he did.

  “That’s everyone. You may fire when ready, Gridley,” Leyster said.

  “Wait a minute,” Robo Boy said. “Where’s Salley?”

  “She’s not on this expedition.”

  “Of course she is,” Robo Boy said irritably. “I saw her name on the roster yesterday.”

  “Change of plans. Lydia Pell’s taking her place.”

  Robo Boy stared dumbstruck at the roster, and for the first time looked at the dozen names as a whole. Salley’s was not among them. Lydia Pell’s was. It was a perverse miracle, a Satanic impossibility.

  Fear clutched his heart. It was a trap! Molly must have fed him her information in order to force his hand. He saw that now. He’d believed her, and made his move prematurely, and was caught. In a second, Griffin’s uniformed goons would come pouring into the room to seize him.

  “Urn… We’re ready if you are,” Leyster said.

  He placed a hand on the switch, knowing how useless the gesture was.

  He pulled.

  They all went away.

  For a long, silent minute, Robo Boy waited. He hoped it was the old Irishman who would come for him. He’d heard the young version was pretty brutal. They said he liked to break bones.

  But nobody came into the room. The change in the roster hadn’t been a trap, after all, but only the gnostic and unfathomable workings of Griffin’s bureaucracy.

  Which meant—he could hardly believe it—that he had succeeded! He might not have bagged Salley, but he’d gotten Leyster and eleven others, and that would have consequences back home in the present. They couldn’t hush this one up! There would be hearings. With luck, they would expose time travel and Darwinism for the diabolically-inspired lies they were.

  He had struck a blow for God. Now they could arrest him, torture him, kill him, and it wouldn’t matter. He would die a martyr. Heaven, which would never have received him in his old, sinful state, was open to him at last. He was finally, truly, saved.

  He leaned back against the wall, breathing shallowly.

  * * *

  Not long after, he heard a wolf-whistle outside.

  “Oh, baby!” somebody cried happily. “I think I’m in love.”

  “You wish.”

  Salley swept into the room. She wore a red silk evening gown, and her hair was piled up elaborately on her head. Silver raptor teeth dangled from her earlobes.

  “I have to be in Xanadu Station for a fund-raiser,” she said, handing him a transit form. “Fire up your machine and send me forward.”

  His heart was still pounding like a jackhammer.
But Robo Boy put on his pig face and went over the form slowly and carefully. Everything was in order.

  Best to play it bland.

  “I thought you were supposed to be on the Baseline Project expedition,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, plans change,” Salley said carelessly. She stepped into the cage. The gate slammed shut. Automatically, he double-checked the authorization codes, did a visual confirmation of Salley’s identity, and pulled the switch.

  She was gone.

  Thirty seconds later, Salley walked into the room again. She was a good twenty years older than the Gertrude Salley who had just left, and there was a small, moon-shaped scar by the corner of her mouth.

  “Hey!” he said, genuinely shocked. “You can’t be here! That’s against the rules!”

  “And you care about the rules one fuck of a lot, don’t you, Robo Boy?” the woman said. Her eyes burned with wrath.

  He shrank away from her. He couldn’t help it.

  “Two decades ago, when I was young and innocent, I was made co-head of the first Baseline Project expedition. It was a simple but important gig. Starting at a hundred thousand years before the end of the Cretaceous, we were going to perform a series of mapping, recording, and sampling functions. Atmosphere, mean global temperature, gene specimens from select species. Then we’d hop back a million years and do it all over again. Seven weeks to do the Maastrichtian. Another five to cover the top third of the Campanian. Am I boring you, Robo Boy?”

  “I—I know all this.”

  “I’m sure you do. But something happened. There was an explosive device among our supplies. People died. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  She curled her lip scornfully. “Yeah, I didn’t think you did.”

  Then she spun on her heel and strode to the time funnel. She stepped into the cage, and pulled the door shut.

  “You’re not going anywhere! I’m calling Griffin. You’re in big trouble now.”

  The woman took a plastic card from her purse and touched it to an inside wall. “Good-bye, Robo Boy,” she said, “you little shit.”

  The car went away, and with it Salley.

  The very first thing he had been told, when they trained him to operate the time funnel, was that under no conditions could the car be launched without his pulling the switch. It had never occurred to him that they would lie about such a thing.

  Evidently they had.

  For a long time he stood perfectly motionless. Thinking.

  But finding no answers.

  The important thing was to remain scientific. He must assume the language, behavior, and even the thought-patterns of his enemy. He must never let down his guard. He was a warrior. He was Thrice-Born. He was being tested.

  His name was Raymond Bois. The girls all called him Robo Boy. He never could figure out why.

  8. Hell Creek

  Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

  They tumbled out of a hole in time into a bright, blue-skyed day, whooping with excitement. The team had been deposited on a gentle rise above a small, meandering stream, which the students inevitably decided to name Hell Creek, after the famous fossil-bearing formation.

  Leyster consulted with Lydia Pell, and they agreed to let the group skylark for a bit before putting them to work. It was their first time in the Maastrichtian, after all. It was their first time in the field and on their own. They needed to gape and stare, to point wonderingly at the distant herd of titanosaurs that was browsing its way across the valley, to breathe deep of the fragrant air and do handstands and peer under logs and flip over rocks just to see what was underneath.

  Then, when Pell judged they’d let off enough steam, Leyster said, “Okay, let’s get these things unpacked and sorted out.” He waved an arm toward a stony bluff above Hell Creek. “We’ll pitch our tents over there.”

  Everybody leapt to work. Jamal pulled the Ptolemy rocket launcher from the first pallet. “When do we send up the surveyor satellite?”

  “No time like the present,” Leyster said. He ran a thumb down his mental list of who’d had what training. “You and Lai-tsz take it off a safe distance. Nils can carry the tripod.”

  “Who gets to push the button?”

  Leyster grinned. “Paper-scissors-rock works best for that kind of decision.”

  Twenty minutes later, the surveyor went up. Everybody stopped whatever they were doing to gawk as the dazzling pinprick of light curved up into the sky, tracing a thin line of smoke behind it.

  “You have just launched the missile,” a priggish voice said, a little too loudly. “Its electromagnetic signature has been picked up by a detector wired to this recording.”

  Leyster turned, puzzled. “What?”

  “In sixty seconds, an explosive charge will destroy the time beacon. Please stand clear so you won’t be hurt.”

  It was Robo Boy’s voice.

  The surreal intrusion of someone he knew to be millions of years distant bewildered Leyster for an instant. He watched, uncomprehending, as Lydia Pell tore at one of the pallets like a terrier, wildly throwing packs and boxes aside. She emerged with the time beacon.

  “You have fifty seconds.”

  The voice came from the beacon itself.

  There was a Swiss Army knife in Pell’s hand. She shoved a blade into the seam of the beacon’s casing and twisted, breaking it open.

  “You have forty seconds.”

  The top half of the beacon went flying away. She reached down into the bottom half.

  To Leyster’s eye, there was nothing to differentiate one part of the beacon’s innards from another. It was all chips, transistors, and multicolored wiring. But Lydia Pell clearly knew what she was looking for. She’d been an officer in the U.S. Navy before going for her postgraduate degree, he knew. Hadn’t somebody said something about her having been in demolitions?

  “You have thirty seconds. Please take this warning seriously.”

  She wrenched something free. The bottom half of the beacon fell to the ground.

  Lydia Pell turned away from the others, and shouted over her shoulder, “Everybody get down! I’m going to throw—”

  “You have twenty seconds,” the device said.

  Then it went off in her hands.

  * * *

  Gillian was saying something, but Leyster couldn’t tell what. His ears rang terribly from the explosion. He couldn’t hear a thing.

  He was the first to reach Lydia Pell’s body.

  The terrible thing was that she wasn’t dead. Her face was gray and streaked with blood. One hand had been almost blown away, and the other was hanging by a shred of flesh. What remained of her blouse was darkening to crimson. But she wasn’t dead.

  Leyster whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Lydia’s wrist, above the exposed bone. I’m going to have nightmares about this, he thought as he pulled it tight. I’ll never be able to get these images out of my mind. To the far side of the body, Gillian was making a tourniquet for the other arm.

  Small fragments of the bomb specked Lydia Pell’s face. One larger shard had torn quite a gouge in her cheek. A little higher and she would have lost an eye. Daljit knelt by her head and, bending low, began daintily extracting the fragments with a pair of tweezers.

  Keep calm, Leyster thought. There would be trauma. There might be concussion. There was always shock. Keep her warm. Elevate the feet. Check for other wounds. Don’t panic.

  It took a while to stop the bleeding. But they did. Then they cushioned her head, and elevated her feet. They cleaned and bandaged her wounds. They made up a cot, and eased her onto it. Twelve willing hands gently carried the cot into a tent.

  By the time Leyster could hear again, there was nothing more to do for her.

  * * *

  A light drizzle was falling.

  Leyster slogged uphill, following what he sincerely hoped was an aban
doned dromaeosaur trail. Lai-tsz trudged along behind him. At first they had talked about the paucity of local fauna, and why, in the week since the titanosaurs had left, they had not seen any dinosaurs. Then, as Smoke Hollow fell behind them, and they were confident they would not be overheard, their talk turned to more serious matters.

  “Can the time beacon be repaired?” Leyster asked.

  “God only knows.”

  “You’re the only one here with any substantive knowledge of electronics.”

  “Substantive! I’ve torn apart a few computers, patched together a couple of motherboards, hyper-configged a new device or two. There’s a big distance between that and repairing something that was probably built a thousand years in the future. In our home future, I mean. Sometime after the Third Millennium.”

  “So you’re saying… what? Tell me you’re not saying that you can’t fix it.”

  “I’m saying I don’t know. I’ll do my best. But Pell ripped the hell out of the innards, getting that bomb out. Even if I can fix it, it’ll take time.”

  “Listen,” Leyster said. “If anybody asks, tell them you’ve got a handle on it. Say it’ll take you a week or two, a month at the outside. I don’t want the crew fixating on the possibility that we might be stranded here permanently. Morale is bad enough as it is.”

  Lai-tsz made a short, sharp sound midway between a laugh and a snort. “I’ll say! Everybody’s at each other’s throats. Nils and Chuck almost got into a fight this morning over whose turn it was to take the dishes down to the stream and wash them. Gillian isn’t speaking to Tamara, Matthew isn’t speaking to Katie, and Daljit isn’t speaking to anyone. And of course Jamal is being a real jerk. About the only stable ones left are thee and me, and sometimes I have my doubts about thee.” She waited a beat, then said in a small voice, “Hey, come on. That was a joke. You were supposed to laugh.”

  “It’s Lydia Pell,” Leyster said seriously. “If only she wouldn’t make those noises. If only she wouldn’t scream. She’s using up our morphine fast, and that’s not good either. Sometimes I think it would be best for all of us if she just…”