Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “Have you ever wondered,” the Old Man asked, “where time travel came from?”

  Carefully, she said, “Of course I have.”

  “Richard Leyster told me once that the technology couldn’t possibly be of human origin. Nobody could build a time machine with today’s physics, he said, or with any imaginable extension of it. It won’t be feasible for at least a million years.

  “As usual, his estimate was correct but conservative. In point of fact, time travel won’t be invented for another forty-nine-point-six million years.”

  “Sir?” His words didn’t make sense to her. She couldn’t parse them out.

  “What I’m telling you now is a government secret: Time travel is not a human invention. It is a gift from the Unchanging. And the Unchanging are not human.”

  “Then… what are they?”

  “If you ever need to know, you’ll be told. The operant fact is that the technology is on loan. As is ever the case with such gifts, there are a few strings. One of which is that we’re not allowed to meddle with causality.”

  “Why?” Molly asked.

  “I don’t know. The physicists—some of them—tell me that if even one observed event were undone, all of time and existence would start to unravel. Not just the future, but the past as well, so that we’d be destabilizing all of existence, from alpha to omega, the Big Bang to the Cold Dark. Other physicists tell me no such thing, of course. The truth? The truth is that the Unchanging don’t want us to do it.

  “They’ve told us that if we ever violate their directives, they’ll go back to the instant before giving us time travel, and withhold the offer. Think about that! Everything we’ve done and labored for these many years will come to nothing. Our lives, our experiences will dissolve into timelike loops and futility. The project will have never been.

  “Now. You’ve met these people—the paleontologists. If you told them that the price of time travel was five deaths, what would they say? Would they think the price was too high?”

  His face grew uncertain in her eyes. She squeezed them tight shut for the briefest instant. When she opened them again, she felt compelled to stand and turn away from him. On the wall was a photograph. It had been taken at the opening of the dinosaur compound in the National Zoo, and showed Griffin and the then-Speaker of the House stagily pulling opposite ends of a T. rex wishbone. She stared at their stiff poses, their insincere grins.

  “I won’t be a part of it. You cannot make me responsible for those deaths.”

  “You already are.”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “You remember that week you spent at Survival Station? Tom told you to make sure that Robo Boy heard that Leyster and Salley would be leading the first Baseline expedition. Tom got his directions from Jimmy, who was acting in response to a memo that Griffin should be writing up right now. You’ve already played your part.”

  The Old Man spread his hands. “Can you go back and undo everything you did and said back then? Well, no more can I undo these five deaths.”

  “I’ll quit anyway! I won’t be used like this!”

  “Then twenty people die.” Griffin smiled sadly and spread his hands. “This is not a threat. Later in life, you’ll happen to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Resign now, and you won’t be there. Twenty people will die. Because you quit.”

  Molly squeezed her eyes tight, against her tears. “You are an evil, evil man,” she said.

  He made a warm, ambiguous sound that might have been a chuckle. “I know, dear. Believe me, I know.”

  10. Sexual Display

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

  They buried Lydia Pell on a fern-covered knoll above Hell Creek. There was some argument over what religion she was, because she had once jokingly referred to herself as a “heretic Taoist.” But then Katie went through her effects and found a pocket New Testament and a pendant cross made from three square-cut carpenter’s nails, and that pretty well settled it that she was a Christian.

  While those who had kept the night watch over her corpse slept, Leyster spent the morning searching Gillian’s Bible for an appropriate passage. He’d considered “There were giants in the Earth,” or the verse about Leviathan. But such attempts to fit in a reference to dinosaurs made him feel as if he were cheapening the grandeur and meaning of Lydia Pell’s life by reducing it to the circumstances of her death. So in the end he settled for the Twenty-Third Psalm.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” he began. “I shall not want.” There were no sheep anywhere in the world, nor would there be for many tens of millions of years. Yet still, the words seemed appropriate. There was comfort in them.

  The day was wet and miserable, but the rain was light and did not interfere with the ceremony. For most of the afternoon, everybody glumly carried stones from the creek to raise a small cairn over her grave, in order to keep scavengers away from her body. Just as they finished, the sun came out again.

  Lai-tsz raised her head. “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear that?”

  A distant murmurous sound rose up from the far side of the river. It sounded a little like geese honking.

  All in a group they hurried up to the top of the hollow, where a gap in the trees afforded a partial view of the valley. There they saw that the land beyond the River Styx was in motion. Tamara scrambled up a tree and shouted down, “The herds are flooding in! They’re coming from all directions. More from the west than the east, though. I see hadrosaurs of some sort, and triceratopses too.”

  “I didn’t bring my cameras!” wailed Patrick.

  Tamara called down from the top of the tree, “Now they’re crossing the river! Holy cow. It’s incredible. They’re putting up so much mist you can’t see the half of them.”

  Several others went swarming up the trees to see for themselves.

  “Can you give us an estimate of their numbers?” Leyster shouted up.

  “No way! I keep losing sight of them among the trees. Or in the water. But there must be hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.”

  “Hundreds of hadrosaurs, or hundreds of triceratopses?”

  “Both!”

  “What are they doing on this side?”

  “It’s hard to tell. Milling about, mostly. Some of the hadrosaurs appear to be breaking into smaller groups. The triceratopses are clustering.”

  “So what do you think—are these guys migrating?”

  “Actually, it looks like they’re moving in to stay.”

  “They couldn’t have chosen a better time for it,” Katie commented. “All this young growth, freshly fertilized with titanosaur dung—it’s herbivore heaven here.”

  “Damn.” Leyster thought for a moment, then said, “I want to go down by the river and get a closer look at them.” He was understating the case drastically. He had to go take a closer look. “Who here wants to go with me?”

  Tamara swung down out of her tree so fast Leyster worried she would fall, singing, “Me! Me! Me!”

  “Some of us should stay here,” Jamal said dubiously. “To look after the camp. Also we’ve still got the walls to put up.”

  “Come with us,” Leyster said quietly. “Nobody can say you haven’t done your share of the work.”

  Jamal hesitated, then shook his head. “No, really. How can I expect anybody else to work, if I’m not willing to work myself?”

  * * *

  The party he put together was, to Leyster’s profound disappointment, made up mostly of the food-gatherers and Daljit. Of the house-builders, only Patrick, loaded down with his cameras, broke ranks.

  They moved cautiously, single file, like a jungle combat squad out of the twentieth century. Lai-tsz went first, toting one of the expedition’s four shotguns. Leyster doubted it would do much good in a confrontation with a full-sized dinosaur, but the idea was that the noise would frighten a predator away.

  He sincerely hoped that was true.


  They were deep into the valley flatlands before they spotted their first dinos—a clutch of hadrosaurs delicately grazing on the tender young shoots that grew thickly along the verges of the creek.

  As one, all binoculars went up.

  The animals paid them no attention. Every now and then one would bob up on its two hind feet and look around warily, then dip back down again. Briefly, the startling orange markings on either side of its head would erupt into the air like a burst of flame, before disappearing again into the new growth. There was always at least one keeping watch.

  “What are they?” Daljit asked quietly. “I mean, I know they’re hadrosaurs, but what kind?”

  Hadrosaurs, or duckbilled dinosaurs, made up a very large family grouping indeed, including dozens of known species spread throughout the Late Cretaceous. To call something a hadrosaur was like declaring a particular mammal was a feline without specifying whether it was a leopard or a house cat.

  “Well, keep in mind that I’m a bone man at heart,” Leyster said. “I’d have a much easier time if there weren’t all that skin and muscle in the way.” What he really needed was a Peterson’s Field Guide to the Late Maastrichtian Megafauna, with diagnostic illustrations and little black lines pointing to all the field-marks. “Still, check out those heads. They’re definitely hadrosaurines—the non-crested duckbills. And from the elongation and width of the snouts I’d have to say they were Anatotitan. What species of anatotitan, though, I don’t know.”

  “They sure are active buggers,” Daljit said. “Look at them bob up and down.”

  Crouching, they crept closer. Anatotitans were herbivores, of course. But they were also enormous. An animal half as big as a bus didn’t have to be a carnivore to be dangerous.

  They got within thirty yards before some unseen signal passed among the animals and, as one, they rose to their hind legs and moved swiftly away. They did not run, exactly, but their bounding gait was so quick that they were, nevertheless, gone in a moment.

  “Come on,” Leyster said. “Let’s—”

  Tamara was tugging at his sleeve. “Look!”

  He looked back where she pointed.

  The Lord of the Valley came striding upriver. Leyster recognized the tyrannosaur by its markings. It was his old acquaintance and none other.

  The most dangerous predator the world had ever known glided swiftly through the low growth with a dreamlike lack of haste. His pace was unrushed, and yet his legs were so long, he moved with astonishing speed.

  Silent as a shark, he strode after the fleeing anatotitans. He didn’t even give the researchers a glance as he passed by.

  “Holy shit,” Patrick said flatly.

  “Come on.” Leyster gestured. “We’ve got a lot of land to cover. Let’s get moving.”

  They headed west, parallel to the sluggish River Styx, being careful to keep to the forest side of the herds.

  As they traveled, Leyster told the others something about hadrosaurs. They knew already that hadrosaurs were the most diverse and abundant group of large vertebrates in the northern hemisphere during the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, and that they were the last major group of ornithopods to evolve in the Mesozoic. But he wanted them to understand that in many ways hadrosaurs were a blueprint for the dinosaurs of their future. That they were so well adapted to such a variety of ecosystems that if it hadn’t been for the K-T event, their descendants might well have survived into modern times.

  “So what makes them so special?” Patrick asked. “They sure don’t look like much. Why should they dominate the ecology?”

  “Maybe because they’re ideal tyrannosaur chow,” Tamara said suddenly. “Look at ‘em. Almost but not quite as big as a tyrannosaur, no armor or weaponry to speak of, and that great big fleshy neck just perfect for biting. One good chomp, and down it goes! If I were a rex, I’d take good care of these critters.”

  Patrick scowled. “No, seriously.”

  “Seriously?” Leyster said, “They’re generalists, like we are. You’ll notice that humans don’t have many specialized adaptations either. No armor, no horns, no claws. But we can find a way to get along wherever we find ourselves. Same thing with hadrosaurs. They—”

  “Shush!” Lai-tsz said. “I hear something. Up ahead.”

  A lone triceratops poked its head out of the distant wood. Cautiously, it eased out into the open. It ambled a short way into the meadow, then stopped. That massive head swung to one side, and then to the other, as it searched for enemies. Finally, convinced there were none, it grunted three times.

  A pause. Then a second triceratops emerged from the woods. A third. A fourth. A ragged line of the brutes flowed out of the woods and into the ferns and flowers. Their frills were all as bright as butterflies, dominated by two black-rimmed orange circles, like great eyes.

  “Triceratops herds have leaders!” Nils said. “Just like cattle.”

  “We can’t conclude that yet,” Leyster cautioned. “It looks good, but it’ll take long and careful observation to make sure that what we think we’re seeing is actually so.”

  “Look at those frills! Sexual display, you think?”

  “Got to be.”

  Lai-tsz put down her glasses and, pointing at the leader, asked, “What’s that swelling?”

  The creature’s face looked puffy. Twin nasal sacs to either side of its central horn were inflated like the cheeks of a bullfrog. Suddenly they deflated. Gronk!

  Everybody laughed. Tamara fell over, whooping. “Oh God, can you believe it? What a noise! It sounds like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.”

  The triceratops pawed the earth.

  Lai-tsz and Nils made shushing noises at Tamara. “Quiet! It’s doing something.” Patrick darted off to the side, camera out, looking for a good angle.

  The animal’s face pouches were inflating again. It took several deep, gulping breaths, shaking its head as it did so. “What do you think it’s doing?” Lai-tsz asked Leyster.

  “I don’t know. It looks kind of like it’s reinflating—”

  Gronk!

  Tamara clapped a hand over her mouth, cutting off a high-pitched laughter in mid-shriek.

  “Look over there,” Nils said. “Somebody else wants to get into the act.” A second triceratops was approaching the first, slowly and meaningfully. “Intraspecific aggression, do you think? Dominance display? Are they going to fight?”

  The first triceratops had his nasal sacs half inflated again. The second stopped within charging distance of him and then bowed its head. Slowly, ponderously, it rolled over onto its side.

  “I don’t think so,” Leyster said wryly. “It looks more like a mating display.”

  “It’s a girl!” Tamara cried.

  Gronk!

  Lying on the ground, one rear leg raised in the air, the female shivered.

  “She’s mesmerized!”

  “C’mere, big boy.”

  “Oh, mamma. You know you want me.”

  With unhurried dignity, the male maneuvered himself alongside the female, one foreleg to either side of her tail. It paused then, seemingly baffled. The female made a plaintive sound, and he took a step backward, then another forward, trying to get himself into position. That didn’t work either. But on his third attempt, he finally got their bellies properly aligned and slowly eased himself downward.

  “Man, oh, man,” Patrick muttered. “These shots are going to be great.”

  Ponderously, the two triceratopses began to mate.

  * * *

  It was sunset when they finally got back to camp and discovered that Jamal’s crew had moved the contents of two of the tents into the long house, and lashed the tents’ canvases to the frame to make walls. So up the slope they went, to share what they’d seen.

  The interior of the long house was bright with artificial light. It looked infinitely welcoming. Of course, their flashlights, even with the solar rechargers, would only last so long. All the more reason to use them now. Brandish ye flashli
ghts while ye may, Leyster thought. Old Time is still a-flying.

  “Take your shoes off!” Katie called cheerfully as they entered. “There’s a space for them by the door.”

  The interior was fragrant with the smell of ferns, which had been brought in by the armload and dumped over the floor, and with turtle soup, simmering in a kettle over the fire outside. Leyster and the others came in and sat.

  “Welcome the intrepid dino hunters!” Chuck declared. “You’re just in time for supper. Come in, sit down, tell us everything.”

  While Chuck distributed bowls and Katie ladled soup, Patrick passed around his camera, showing off a sequence of his best shots.

  “What are these two doing?” Gillian asked incredulously when she saw the first picture of the two triceratops.

  “Exactly what you think they’re doing,” Patrick said.

  “The filthy things!” Gillian wagged a finger reprovingly. “Naughty-naughty.”

  “Dino porn. This stuff would be so marketable,” Jamal mourned.

  “But who would buy it?” Chuck asked. “I don’t see much of a market.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s sex, it’s funny, and it’s something you haven’t seen before. It creates its own market. Why, the calendars alone…”

  Everybody laughed. Jamal flushed, then ducked his head and grinned ruefully. “Well, it would!”

  They continued the discussion through dinner. “So you lost the shotgun?” Matthew asked when they told the story of being scattered by the post-coital triceratops.

  “I was caught by surprise!” Lai-tsz said. “We all were. But, damn it, they told us in survival training that the noise of a shotgun blast would scare off anything. So when I shot the gun off in the air, I wasn’t expecting the thing to charge! It came barreling down on us, and we all just ran. If it had been a little faster, it would’ve gotten me.” She shook her head. “There was definitely something wrong with that animal.”

  “Did you go back and look for the gun?”