Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  Whatever the source, she was a bitch on wheels today.

  Waving a hand at the gray, unornamented walls, Salley resumed an earlier monolog: “All this I understand. It’s as plain as the interior of a wasp’s nest, and as functional too. Nothing but what’s needed. The inside is everything it ought to be. What baffles me is why the exterior is covered with gold.” She spoke the final word with distaste, as if the conventional beauty of the substance offended her esthetic sense.

  “I think—”

  “Please don’t.” Salley strode straight ahead, trailing a hand lightly against the passing wall.

  To Molly Gerhard’s uneducated eye the walls looked to be concrete. But, no, Salley had said, they were made of fine-grained coral, most likely grown in slabs for that exact purpose. They passed open doorways through which might be glimpsed a Victorian fernery, or a barrel-vaulted hall crammed with subway cars and garden gnomes, or perhaps one holding endless rows of filing cabinets whose opened drawers would reveal thousands of neatly-organized salad forks. She knew because Salley darted in and opened several.

  It was easily the strangest structure Molly Gerhard had ever been in, less a city than some mad collector’s wet dream of a private museum.

  “I think,” she repeated, “that there could well be a functional purpose for the gold.” Her father was an electrical engineer, and she had inherited much of her logical sense from him. “Gold is an excellent conductor. The river flowing through the city must set up an enormous static charge. Maybe the entire structure acts as a passive electric generator. If so, they could get all the energy they needed, just by tapping the shell.”

  “Huh,” Salley said flatly. “Fancy that. You’re not as brain-dead as you look.”

  Molly Gerhard bit her tongue. Salley knew something. She was determined to find out what.

  Five Unchanging passed them without word or a glance. One held a large red fungus in a bell jar. Another cradled a piece of Etruscan sculpture in its arms. Two more effortlessly carried a red-and-white Indian motorcycle between them—a 1946 Chief, by the looks of it. The last held a mahogany-and-brass gramophone. Nothing she ever saw came from her future. There were systems in place, they’d been assured, to prevent that from happening.

  Salley sniffed loudly as the Unchanging passed. “Smell that?”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right, dear,” Molly Gerhard said, “I give up. You win. I’m not as smart as you are, I admit it.” She felt an urge to slap the woman. “This I-know-a-secret act is getting old. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re trying to say?”

  “The data are laid out before you,” Salley said complacently. “The rest is left as an exercise for the student.”

  The corridor twisted and then split in two. Thinking murderous thoughts, Molly Gerhard chose the wider corridor, leading downward.

  * * *

  The deeper they went, the more Unchanging they saw. They were as indistinguishable as worker bees. All were clad in identical robes, like those worn by Buddhist monks, but white rather than orange. In the dim light, they seemed to glow.

  “They do look extraordinarily like people, don’t they?” Salley said abruptly.

  “Um… yes. Of course.” She had been thinking that they looked as beautiful and impersonal as angels. Griffin, who was raised a Catholic, had made that comparison. Molly was a Baptist, however. She thought the Unchanging were creepy. Their lack of suspicion annoyed her. They were all patience and predetermination. So far as she could tell, they had no curiosity whatsoever. “I mean, they must be mammals, right? They’re obviously related to people. Somehow.” She hesitated. “Aren’t they?”

  “How many of them do you think there are?”

  “Here in the City? Maybe a hundred thousand? Two?”

  “That’s just a frazz on the high side.” Salley was openly smirking now. “In my humble opinion.”

  They came to a five-way splitting of the corridor that didn’t look familiar. Molly Gerhard paused to work it out. Two of the corridors were too narrow for the kind of traffic that the time funnel generated. A third led upward. She listened to the fourth: Silence. Down the fifth, she could hear the scuff of footsteps.

  That was the one.

  “You’re not going to explain yourself, are you?” she said when they were underway again. “You’re just going to keep making cryptic little comments and laughing at me when I can’t decipher them.”

  “Yep.”

  “I begin to see why so many people find you irritating.”

  Salley stopped. “Irritating?” she said. “Just what do you mean by that?”

  Another Unchanging emerged from the darkness, leading something that was Percheron-tall, fifteen feet long, and obviously a predator. It was black-lipped, hyena-ugly, and possessed of the longest jaw, sharpest teeth, and pig-stupidest eyes Molly had ever seen in her life. That great head rolled around to look down at her as it went by, and she shrank back against the wall.

  In a flash of fear, she saw herself as that thing saw her: as meat. To it, she was nothing but a small monkey, two bites and gone, something it would gladly have snatched up and eaten if it hadn’t been controlled by its torc.

  The acrid stench of it lingered in its wake.

  “My God!” she gasped. “What was that?”

  “Andrewsarchus,” Salley said impatiently. “Late Eocene, from Mongolia. The largest known terrestrial carnivorous mammal. It could eat lions for breakfast.” She gazed solemnly after it. “Wasn’t it lovely?”

  “That’s… one term for it.” Repulsive son-of-a-sea-cook being another. Then, figuring Salley was now in as good a mood as she was ever going to be, she said, “What you want me to see—is it something about the Unchanging?”

  “Oh, yes.” Again, that superior look. “It took me a while, but I’ve finally got them figured out. I know what they are now. And if you’re a patient little girl for just a few minutes more, I’ll prove it, okay?” The corridor ended in a cavernous darkness. “Hey, is this the place?”

  * * *

  They’d reached the heart of Terminal City.

  Here, deep below the river, were the endless arrays of openings that served as the confluence of every branch of the time funnel in existence. Here, she could feel the power that the city contained, the living pulse so low and deep that the world hummed to its vibration. Gates crashed open and shut in the darkness as the Unchanging came and went. The din was astonishing.

  Salley inhaled deeply. “Now this is more like it!”

  Everything that had come through this dull granite-and-brushed-steel space had left its trace: Fusel oil and forsythia. Creosote and brine. Uin-tatherium dung and primate musk. Salley was waving another clue under her nose. Of all things that had passed this way, only the Unchanging had no smell.

  It was obviously significant. But of what, she had no idea.

  They stood at the end of the hallway, just outside the open space. The nearest funnel was only a few steps distant. The way to it was blocked by a single Unchanging. It studied them alertly, incuriously.

  There were many entrances, but only theirs was guarded. To Molly, who had put in decades working the predestination game, this was a far more effective deterrent than any show of force would be. Its mere presence said that they had no chance of getting past it.

  “Okay,” she said. “This is as far as we can go. What was it you wanted to show me?”

  “This.” Salley reached up to her neck and then dumped something in Molly Gerhard’s hands. Her mutilated torc. Molly looked up just in time to see Salley flash a piece of paper at the Unchanging guard and stride past it.

  “Hey!” Molly Gerhard started after her.

  But her way was barred by the Unchanging. “You cannot pass without authorization,” it said.

  “That woman has no right to use the time funnel,” she said quickly. “You’ve got to stop her.”

  “You cannot pass without proper authoriza
tion.”

  “But she doesn’t have proper authorization! Whatever she showed you was either forged or stolen.” Briefly, she considered trying to shove her way past. Then she remembered how easily the two Unchanging had carried that cruiser motorcycle between them, and decided it was wiser not to try.

  “You cannot pass without authorization.”

  “You’re not listening!”

  “You cannot pass without authorization.”

  Salley seized the iron gate of the nearest funnel entrance. It crashed open. She stepped within, turned to face forward.

  “Wait!” Molly cried after her. “Where are you going?”

  “Someplace more interesting than this.” Salley waggled her fingers. “Toodles.”

  The gate slammed shut.

  “Damn,” Molly Gerhard said.

  Whatever it was that had just happened, she knew that Griffin was going to be pissed.

  * * *

  Griffin stood out front of his cottage, staring at a smoldering trash fire. There were charred box springs at its center. Molly Gerhard recognized the stench of burning mattress stuffing. Beside her, Jimmy wrinkled up his nose.

  Griffin did not look up at their approach. “She’s gone,” he said.

  “I know,” Molly Gerhard said. “I was just at the time funnel. I saw her leave.”

  Griffin grunted.

  “Maybe she’ll come back,” Jimmy suggested. “Women have been known to change their minds.”

  “She’s not coming back. I’ve been through two divorces. I know the signs.”

  Griffin was holding his wrist in one hand. Slowly, he forced the hand open and moved it away, so he could stare down at his watch. By the look on his face, it told him nothing.

  “Well?” he said at last.

  Molly, unsure what he wanted, didn’t respond.

  “Where did she go? Why did she go there? What does she know that we don’t?”

  “I really don’t—”

  Jimmy squinted up at the sun. “It’s too hot out here for this kind of conversation,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

  * * *

  They talked in the village pub. It was, Jimmy had firmly pointed out to them, not a reproduction of a real pub, but rather a reproduction of an American imitation of one. Molly Gerhard didn’t care. She’d been in phonier. At least this one didn’t have cardboard leprechauns taped to the mirrors.

  Griffin sat hunched over the bar. He looked like he could use a drink. She’d heard he had a problem there. In all her years working for him, she’d never actually seen Griffin with an alcoholic beverage in his hand. That could just be discretion, though.

  She sat at a table, and Jimmy lounged by the window.

  It seemed to Molly Gerhard that Salley would be pleased by how she dominated their thoughts in her absence, as she never had while she was here. She was one of those people who discredited their own ideas by the force with which they argued them. With her gone, they were able to give her speculations the serious consideration they deserved. They were able to admit that she might well be right.

  “Salley’s the key to everything,” Molly said.

  “How so?” Jimmy asked coolly.

  “She’s figured it all out. Exactly what’s going on. Why we haven’t gotten anywhere in our negotiations. Everything.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. She as good as said so any number of times.”

  Griffin sighed, straightened, turned. Tick-tock, Molly thought. Like a machine resuming its function. This was one of the reasons she was leaving for the private sector. She didn’t like what manipulating destiny did to people, how it coarsened them. He took up the reins of the discussion. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin by establishing the precise order of events.”

  Griffin got the ball rolling by telling how he had come back to the village from yet another futile and unproductive meeting with the Unchanging to find both Salley and his All Access pass gone. Then Molly Gerhard related how she’d been conned into leading Salley to the time funnel. “I didn’t see what harm she could do,” she said shamefacedly. “I honestly didn’t think she was that devious.”

  “Where did she go?” Griffin said.

  “I don’t know. Forward, presumably.” With the AA pass, she could have gone anywhere. But if she had returned to the Cenozoic or Mesozoic, her return would have been logged into the system. “If she’d gone back, the Old Man would be here now. Since he’s not…” She shrugged.

  “How far forward?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could you identify the exact entrance to the funnel she used?” Jimmy asked.

  She closed her eyes, thought. “Yes.”

  “Then we can follow her.”

  “What? How?”

  “Let’s just say we have our ways. Technically speaking, I’m not even supposed to know about them.”

  “No, you’re not.” Griffin glowered at his subordinate. Then, to Molly: “Why would she go forward? What’s she trying to accomplish?”

  “Hard to say. But she’s headed all the way to the end of the line. To the real source of time travel. Sometime many, many millions of years beyond Terminal City.”

  “She told you this?”

  “Not directly. She tried not to say anything. But that’s not easy for her. She was dropping hints constantly.”

  “That’s true,” Jimmy said. “She was bubbling over with things unsaid.”

  “After a while, I gave up on trying to get a straight answer out of her, and just began assembling her pronouncements. I’ve been sorting through them in my mind, and I think I’ve put them into some sort of order.”

  “Go on,” Griffin said.

  “She kept referring to how quiet it was. How clean and unspoiled. She talked about how much she wanted to get out into the local ecosystem, but she never said a word about the fact that there don’t appear to be any large animals in it. It suggests she didn’t want us to realize that we’re in the aftermath of a major extinction event.”

  “She said something to me about how quiet it was,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t think it meant anything.”

  Molly Gerhard reminded herself that she couldn’t expect Jimmy to be of much use here. This wasn’t his arena of action. “It means everything,” she said. “To begin with, there hasn’t been the time for the adaptive radiation of species.”

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “You’re losing me,”

  “Evolution,” Griffin said, taking control again, “is not like an arrow, with a fish crawling out of the water at one end and a white male in a business suit on the other. It is a radiation in all directions, provided only that there is room to evolve in the indicated direction.

  “Usually, there isn’t. In a healthy ecosystem, all niches are filled. A desert mouse wanders into the grasslands and finds there are field mice there already. It can’t harvest the grass seed as efficiently as they can, or dodge the local owls and foxes as well. So it’s either driven back into the desert, or it dies.

  “After a major extinction event, however, there are empty niches everywhere, devoid of predators or competition. So elements of a single species can radiate out in several directions to fill them. They get larger, they get smaller, they climb trees. Before you know it, there are mice the size of gophers, mice the size of hippopotami, otter mice, bison mice, with sabre-tooth mice and grizzly mice to prey on them.

  “It’s a fast process. It only takes ten million years or so for the niches to fill up again. So the fact that they haven’t, means we’re in the aftermath of a major extinction event. Which means that this can’t be the Unchanging’s home time.” He scowled. “I should have seen it myself. I would have, if I hadn’t been so tied up in negotiations.”

  “Okay,” Molly said. “So we’re all agreed that this isn’t the Unchanging’s original time period?”

  “What is it, then?” Jimmy asked.

  “It’s a quarantine station for animals being transshipped f
orward, and a holding space for items they’ve acquired and only occasionally need to refer to.”

  “Hold on. If they’re our descendants, why couldn’t they have simply survived the extinction event?”

  “Salley said that they weren’t people.”

  “They look like people.”

  “Salley said that too. She also made a big deal about how they didn’t smell. She said it often enough that I finally asked myself what kind of animal doesn’t have a smell.” She paused, half expecting Jimmy to make a wisecrack. He did not.

  “Well?” Griffin said.

  “An artificial one. The Unchanging approached us with time travel in one hand, and a list of restrictions in the other. Naturally, we assumed it came from them.”

  “Christ on a crutch!” Jimmy said suddenly. “Will you look at this fucker?”

  She turned. Jimmy was staring out the window at a grotesque, long-jawed giant of a predator that was padding slowly down the river road.

  “I saw that same creature inside Terminal City! It scared the daylights out of me.”

  “It’s only an Andrewsarchus,” Griffin said irritably. “So it’s big! Something has to be. There’s really no reason to make such a fuss over it. Sit down, Jimmy. In a chair, with your back to the window.”

  Meekly, Jimmy obeyed.

  “Continue,” Griffin said to Molly.

  “That’s pretty much it. But it explains why they’re all of a height and a size and an appearance. Why they have no genetic variety at all. Why they look so pleasing to the eye. They were simply created for a job—dealing with us. And it explains why the negotiations have gotten nowhere. We’ve been talking to the wrong folks. The Unchanging aren’t our sponsors. They’re just our sponsors’ tools.”

  For an instant, no one spoke. Then Griffin said, “We need to talk with the Unchanging.”

  The door opened.

  An Unchanging walked in. “You require me,” it said. “I am here.”

  “Yes,” Griffin said. “But what use are you?”