Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  For a long moment, Jimmy said nothing. Then he nodded. “All right. One last run.”

  He got up slowly, and left without so much as a word or a glance to Salley. As if she weren’t present.

  When he was gone, Salley said, “Did he die?”

  “Did who die?”

  “The man in the bar. The drunk.”

  He could see by her expression that she hadn’t thought the story was very funny. He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We never checked.”

  * * *

  A minute later, young Jimmy was back, wearing a different set of clothes. He dollied in a large wooden packing crate, and showed them how it opened up. “This is how you’ll be traveling,” he told Salley. “Nothing fancy. We went for simplicity here. Padded on the inside. This little shelf acts as a seat. Hand grips here and here. And this clip holds a flashlight, in case you want to bring a book.”

  There was a bold orange-and-black sticker on the side reading THIS END UP, and another reading DANGER: OMNIVORE.

  “I don’t understand,” Salley said. “Why would I have to go in a crate?”

  “I’m afraid you won’t like the answer,” Griffin said uncomfortably.

  “Don’t tell me what I will or won’t like.”

  “You see,” Jimmy said, “we anticipated that something of this sort might come up and so we made preparations. There’s a rider on the Old Man’s clearance that allows me to be brought along as muscle. You, however, were not anticipated. There’s simply no way you could possibly accompany us as a member of the security team.”

  Griffin wanted to tell Jimmy to moderate his manner. Salley had been simmering for a while now. She was ready to cause a scene. Griffin had enough experience with women to know this. But, though he mellowed in later life, Jimmy in his younger days was every bit as hard to handle as Salley herself.

  “So?” Salley said.

  That sharkish grin again. A jaunty nod toward the box. He was a sadistic little shit, was Jimmy, at this age. “So you’ll be traveling as a biological specimen.”

  12. Nesting Behavior

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

  The anatotitans were nesting on Egg Island. A mating pair of ankylosaurs was grumpily fossicking about in the shrubs along the river. And Her Ladyship was having a difficult time controlling her rambunctious young. They were at an age when they kept wandering away from the encampment, and she had to keep shooing them back.

  Juvenile tyrannosaurs, unlike their aloof elders, were fiercely curious beings. They examined everything they saw, and attacked anything that moved. The mortality rate among juveniles was extremely high, but those who survived into adulthood were cagy and experienced creatures.

  Jamal had built an observation platform high in the trees above Smoke Hollow, and another on Barren Ridge. Between them, it was possible to get a good overview of everything that happened in the valley. The Barren Ridge platform was the better of the two, however, because it afforded an excellent view of the tyrannosaur camp.

  It was Leyster’s turn on the Barren Ridge watch that day. Branches of the tree shook and rattled as Katie swung her way up to him. She popped over the edge of the platform and handed him a fried fish wrapped in leaves.

  “Morning, dear. I brought you lunch.” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “How are the children?”

  “See for yourself.” He handed her the binoculars. “She’s lost another one. Scarface.”

  There were sixteen tyrannosaur juveniles remaining out of the original twenty, and they were all ugly as gargoyles. They were only two meters tall, and still young enough that their molt wasn’t complete yet. Splotchy patches of hairy gray feathers clung here and there on all of them, looking for all the world like fungus infections.

  “Here comes the breadwinner,” Katie said.

  The Lord of the Valley clambered awkwardly over the log-and-brushwood barrier he and his mate had shoved into a ring around the encampment. A bloody edmontosaur haunch dangled from his mouth.

  The juveniles came running up to him, squawking with excitement. Avidly, they jumped (jumping was one thing an adult, with all that weight, could not do) and snapped at the meat.

  With a grunt, the Lord let it drop to the ground.

  The juveniles swarmed over the haunch, tearing at it so savagely their snouts were spattered with blood. Slasher got in the way of Adolf, and got her tail bitten for doing so. She squealed like a pig, then scrambled back to the meat, roughly shoving Attila and Lizzy Borden out of her way.

  “That is not an edifying sight,” Katie said. “How can you watch that and eat at the same time?”

  Leyster dug into the fish with relish. Now that their supply of freeze-dried was gone, they were largely reliant on what they could catch or trap, and as a result there were times when they did not eat well at all. It made him appreciate the times when they did. “Hunger is an excellent sauce.”

  Privately, though, the sight of those little horrors feeding always made him glad there was a ravine between him and them.

  Without putting the binoculars down, Katie said, “You know what I’ve always wondered?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t dinosaurs have external ears? Ears are ever so handy. It seems like they’d be much easier to evolve than, say, beaks. Or wings. So why don’t the kids down there have great big floppy elephant ears?”

  “Good question. I don’t know. Here’s another. Where do the dinosaurs go when they’re not here? One day they’re everywhere. Then, a morning later, you wake up and they’re nowhere to be seen. Four months after that, you find a tyrannosaur pacing off the valley, and next thing you know, they’re back. We’re going to have to follow the herds next rainy season. Physically, I mean.”

  They’d tried monitoring the migrations over the satellite downlink during the previous winter. But the Ptolemy system was designed primarily for mapping. Its resolution was poor, and, worse, it couldn’t see through clouds. Which were, unfortunately, quite common in the rainy season. They’d been able to track only a general trend inland, where the herds dispersed and effectively disappeared from the screen.

  Leyster yearned with all his heart to follow them. In the rainy season only the smaller dinosaurs—the feathered dinosaurs—remained to chastise the frogs, mammals, fish, and lizards. The river plain grew lush and thick as a jungle, but to Leyster it felt empty and soulless without the larger dinos. “We’ll never understand these guys until we understand the patterns of their migration. Finding out has got to be our first order of business.”

  “Our second, actually. Chuck says we need veggies, so you’ve been drafted to lead an expedition to gather marsh tubers.”

  “Me! Why me? I was going to spend today making twine and re-reading Much Ado About Nothing.‘’ He gestured toward the basket full of fiber and his volume of collected Shakespeare, lying beside the field observations notebook.

  Katie smiled sweetly. “You’re the one who found the tubers. Nobody else knows where they are.” She moved the books to her side, and the basket to her lap. “I’ll be happy to take over for you here, however.”

  * * *

  Leyster recruited Patrick and Tamara to accompany him to Skeeter Marsh. Despite his grousing, he was glad to be going. It wasn’t the lazy, productive day he’d planned, but food gathering was easy work, and entailed a long and pleasant walk through countryside he loved. It was even possible they’d spot something new in dinosaurian behavior.

  Since they’d used up their shotgun shells long ago, he and Patrick carried clubs (in Leyster’s case the shovel; in Patrick’s an otherwise-useless gun) to protect themselves against chance attacks from dromaeosaurs. Dromies were the only carnivores so little reliant on smell that they’d attack a human being under normal circumstances. The stench of cookfire smoke that permeated their hair and clothing and skin protected them from pretty much everything else. Except the crocodiles, and those tended to sta
y by the water.

  Tamara, of course, carried her spear. She had spent months during the rainy season laboriously grinding the head from an iron flange that had originally been a piece of bracing for their supplies. Then she had set the leaf-shaped product into a seasoned hardwood haft with a resin glue, and wrapped it tight with hadrosaur tendon.

  The result was a murderous-looking weapon they all called “Tamara’s Folly.”

  She carried it everywhere and worked on her throwing skills for at least an hour every day. She said it made her feel safe.

  Nevertheless, they walked with a caution grown natural through long use. If the past year had taught them nothing else, it was that nothing was to be taken for granted.

  As they walked, they talked quietly. This was the one aspect of their stranding that Leyster genuinely appreciated. It was like a never-ending seminar. Being a teacher wasn’t a matter of handing knowledge down from Parnassus to the groundlings below. You learned from your students, from their questions and speculations, and sometimes even their misunderstandings. And this crew was sharp. He’d learned a lot from them.

  “Does it seem to anybody else,” Tamara asked, “that there’s an awful lot of biomass tied up in the megafauna here? I mean, not only are there a lot of species in the valley, but there are a lot more individuals than you’d expect.”

  “Yeah!” Patrick said. “How can the land support them all? They must be feeding at a startling level of efficiency. They’re constantly chomping down the new growth, and yet they never overgraze. How do they do that?”

  “Sometimes small groups leave,” Leyster pointed out. “We’ve seen them do that.”

  “Yes, and always just enough to keep things balanced here. That’s spooky,” Tamara said. “How do dim-brained animals like dinosaurs keep those kinds of balances, when real smart animals like human beings can’t?”

  “I dunno,” Leyster said.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Tamara said. “But it seems like you say that a lot.”

  “Well, if suffering is the essence of the human condition, then the essence of the scientific condition must be ignorance.” Leyster shrugged. “Any ecosystem is a dance of needs, a complex balancing of hungers. When all we had to work with was fossils, what we needed was to find more and better fossils. Now all we have to do is make more and better observations. You guys don’t appreciate how easy you have it.” A mosquito bit him on the arm. He slapped at it and said, “Hey, we’re almost there.”

  They dug for tubers until their packs were full and their arms were sore. Then they took a break before heading back. Lying with his head against a log, watching dragonflies noisily mating in the air while Tamara plaited white blossoms into her hair, Leyster decided he was as close to happy as he had ever been.

  Tamara and Patrick were lazily, reflexively, arguing about the function of the tyrannosaurs’ tiny little two-fingered arms. Patrick had footage of Her Ladyship fussing over her dried mud mound of a nest and delicately turning over the eggs with them, and felt that settled it. Tamara held that that was only an incidental function, and was convinced that their primary use was as signaling devices for sexual display: I’m ready to mate. Or else: I’m not in the mood.

  Leyster was about to weigh in with his own opinion when the phone rang.

  “I’ve got it,” Tamara said. She unzipped a pocket on her knapsack, and removed the carefully-swaddled device. Painstakingly, she unwrapped it. Then, walking a little distance away for privacy, she hit the talk button.

  Leyster stood. He needed to take a leak. “Back in a minute,” he said.

  * * *

  When Leyster returned, Patrick and Tamara were grinning ear to ear. “Well,” he said. “Good news?”

  “Lai-tsz just made an announcement,” Patrick said. “She was going to wait until tonight when everyone was there, but then somebody said something and she just blurted it out. She’s pregnant.”

  “What?! Pregnant? How?”

  Patrick snorted and raised a sardonic eyebrow. Tamara looked impatient. “How do you think?”

  Leyster sat down on the log. “God, I can’t believe this. Wasn’t she supposed to be on some kind of birth control?” He knew for a fact that she was. He’d seen her medical records. All the women in the party were on long-term birth control, the kind that took medical intervention to undo. “Who’s the fath—?” He stopped. “I’m sorry, that’s a really dumb question.”

  “Yes, it is,” Tamara said. “You’re all the father. Everybody’s responsible. We’re all its parents.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about the news,” Patrick said carefully.

  “Happy? You expect me to be happy? Has anybody given any thought to what kind of life we can provide for this kid?”

  “We haven’t had the—”

  “With eleven parents, it’s a pretty sure thing she’ll be pampered and spoiled,” Tamara said. “Big deal. Kids are resilient.”

  “How about when she hits adolescence?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Imagine being a teenage girl in a world full of nothing but your parents. No girlfriends. Nobody to confide in. No boyfriends, no dating, no high school prom. This is going to be one screwed-up child. When her sex drive kicks in, she’s going to want to take part in our little physical therapy sessions. What do we tell her then?”

  “I really don’t think that—” Patrick began.

  “Either we say yes or we tell her she can’t. I don’t know which is going to twist her around more.”

  “And I don’t know why you’re being so unpleasant,” Tamara said.

  “Okay, she gets through adolescence. Somehow. Now she’s an adult. She’s young and full of beans in a camp full of elders who are starting to slow down. Everything she wants to do is just a little too wild, a little too fast, a little too much for everyone else. Majority rule, of course. She’s outvoted every time.

  “Meanwhile, we keep on getting older. More and more of the work of caring for the rest of us falls upon her. She resents it, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Where else can she go? So she drudges away, surly and unhappy. Until finally we begin to die off.

  “At first, it’s going to be a relief for her. She’ll feel guilty about that, of course. It’ll warp her even more. But she’s still human. She’ll be happy to see us go. But then as, one by one, the human world gets smaller, she’ll slowly begin to realize exactly how lonely she’s going to get. Until that bright day dawns when she’s the last woman on Earth. Think about that! The last woman on Earth. Perfectly, absolutely, and abjectly alone. With maybe twenty years more left to live.

  “Tell me this: Just how sane do you think she’ll be by then? Just how human?”

  Patrick slowly sucked in the air between his teeth. “Well, but… what’s the alternative?”

  “I’m afraid Lai-tsz’s going to have to—”

  To Leyster’s absolute astonishment, Tamara balled up her fist, and hit him in the stomach. Hard.

  He doubled over.

  She stood over him, her face white with anger, and said, “That’s not an alternative! And if it were, it wouldn’t be your choice to make. ‘Wasn’t she supposed to be on some kind of birth control?’ Jesus Christ, didn’t you give ten seconds thought before sticking your dick into her? There’s no form of birth control that works every time—women always have to take that into account, so why can’t men?”

  She snatched up her knapsack and spear.

  “Anyway,” she said over her shoulder, “the odds are that we’ll all be dead in five years. So it doesn’t really matter in the first place!”

  She strode angrily away.

  “Whew!” Patrick smiled embarrassedly. “That was brutal. Even if—forgive me for saying this—some of it was deserved.” He helped Leyster stand up. “You okay?”

  Leyster just shook his head.

  * * *

  So they weren’t as careful as they usually were on the trip home. Tamara led, walking fast and staring strai
ght ahead of herself until she was a small figure far ahead of them. Leyster and Patrick followed as best they could.

  They walked along the river until they came to Hell Creek, and then turned inland. Leyster was idly watching some faraway troodons cracking open mussels when Patrick said, “Uh oh.”

  “What?” Leyster turned and saw a juvenile tyrannosaur—it was Scarface, the one that had wandered away that morning—standing almost motionless in the distance. Only its head moved.

  It was tracking Tamara.

  “Tamara!” Patrick bellowed, and gestured widely toward the tyrannosaur.

  Tamara spun, saw the predator, and then looked wildly about for a place to flee. The land by the river was flat and almost featureless. There were not many natural sanctuaries or hiding places here.

  “Thorns! Thorns!” Patrick shouted. He waved both hands upward and then forward, pointing to a distant thicket of thorn trees. If Tamara could reach them, there was a chance she could burrow deep into the center of the tangle, where the young tyrannosaur with its relatively thin hide would not care to follow.

  All in one motion, Tamara shed her knapsack and began to run.

  Scarface leapt forward, after her.

  Tamara had always been a jock. She ran like a sprinter, knees high, her spear flashing up and down with her arms.

  She was running, but not fast enough. The juvenile was coming straight toward her. And it was a lot faster than she could ever hope to be.

  She couldn’t possibly reach the thorn trees in time.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  As if from a great distance, Leyster saw himself race forward to place himself between her and Scarface. It was an instinctive action, one totally beyond his control. He was shocked to realize what he was doing.

  When a tyrannosaur charged, he knew, it locked its attention entirely upon its desired prey. The anatotitans might scatter in a dozen directions, but it couldn’t be distracted because it only wanted that hadrosaur which it had fixed upon. Not that one but this one. Nothing else would do.