Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  The dromies scattered.

  There were enough of the creatures to kill Tamara and Leyster both. But they weren’t used to being challenged. Faced with a situation totally outside their experience, they retreated across the clearing and toward the shelter of the woods beyond.

  Tamara hadn’t dared throw her spear while the dromies were on top of Chuck. She threw it now, shifted her second spear to her throwing hand, and threw that as well.

  One spear flew wide. The other caught its target square in the chest.

  At the verge of the clearing, a dromie turned to chatter defiance and was almost hit by a stone Tamara flung. Angry and alarmed, it darted back into the forest. Briefly, the brush was filled with dark shadows milling about in confusion. But when Tamara dashed in under the trees after them, they were nowhere to be found.

  She turned back toward the meadow. “Chuck?”

  * * *

  Chuck had twisted as he fell. His body lay face down under the protomagnolias. Leyster knelt beside it and felt for the pulse, though he knew what he would find. There had been somewhere between six and nine of the little gargoyles, and they’d all gotten in several bites before being chased away. Chuck had been bitten in the legs, arms, and face. His throat had been torn open.

  “He’s dead,” Leyster said softly.

  “Oh… crap!” Tamara turned away and started to cry. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  Leyster started to turn Chuck’s body over. But it didn’t move quite right when he shifted it, and something started to slide loosely from the abdomen. He remembered then how dromies would latch onto their prey with their forelimbs and use those enormous claws on their hindlimbs to eviscerate their victims. Chuck’s abdomen would be ripped open from crotch to rib cage.

  He eased the body back into his original position, and stood.

  Tamara looked stricken. He put his arms around her, and she buried her face in his shoulder. Her back heaved with her sobs. But Leyster found he had no tears in him. Only a dry, miserable pain. Living in the Maastrichtian, with violent death an everyday possibility, had made him harder. Once he would have felt guilty for surviving. He would have blamed himself for his friend’s death, and sought after a reason why he should have been spared when Chuck was not. Now he knew such emotions to be mere self-indulgence. The dromaeosaurs had chosen Chuck because he was last in line. If Leyster had been limping, or Tamara had been having her period, things would have gone differently.

  It was just the way it was.

  In survival training, they’d called it “the buddy system.” To survive an attack, you didn’t have to be faster than the predators—just faster than your buddy. It was a system that served zebras and elands well. But it was hell on human beings.

  Leyster unhooked Chuck’s knapsack, so they could redistribute his things in their two packs. Mastering his revulsion, he went through Chuck’s pockets for things they might yet need. Then he removed Chuck’s shoes and belt. Until they mastered tanning, they couldn’t afford to abandon the least scrap of leather.

  “I found the compass,” Tamara said. Then, when he shook his head in puzzlement, “You dropped it. I picked it up.”

  She held the compass up for him to see, and began crying again.

  “There are plenty of rocks in the stream. We should build Chuck a cairn. Nothing fancy. Just something big enough to keep the dromies off his corpse.”

  Tamara wiped her eyes. “Maybe we should let them have him. That’s not an entirely bad way to dispose of a paleontologist—by feeding him to the dinosaurs.”

  “That might be good for you and me. But Chuck wasn’t a bone man. He was a geologist. He’ll get rocks.”

  * * *

  Leyster wasn’t sure how many miles he and Tamara got under their belts before the night overcame them. Less than they’d planned. More than could be expected. They walked in a kind of daze, tirelessly. Later, he couldn’t remember whether they’d kept an eye out for predators or not.

  Just before turning in, Leyster called Daljit and Jamal. He didn’t want to speak with them at all. He really wasn’t in the mood. But it had to be done. “Listen,” he said. “We had a little setback, so we’ll be later than we were expecting to be. But don’t worry, we’ll be there.”

  “What happened?” Daljit asked. “You didn’t lose the antibiotics, did you?”

  “The antibiotics are fine. We’ll tell you the details when we get there. For now, I just didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Yeah, well, you guys better get here soon. Jamal’s not doing that well. His fever is up, and he’s delirious.”

  “All I want is a bicycle,” Jamal muttered in the background. “Is that too much to ask?”

  “Him and his damned bicycle! I’m going to ring off now. Give my love to Tamara and Chuck, okay?”

  Leyster winced. “Will do.”

  He stowed away the phone and returned to the fire. He hadn’t gone far from it. Just enough that there wouldn’t be any chance of his dropping the phone where it might get scorched.

  “You didn’t tell her?” Tamara said.

  “I couldn’t.” He sat down beside her. “Time enough when we get there. She’s got enough to worry about, as it is.”

  They said nothing for a long while, silently watching the fire burn slowly down to coals. Finally, Tamara said, “I’m going in.”

  “I’ll join you in a bit,” Leyster said. “I want to sit and think for a bit.”

  He sat, listening to the night. The syncopated music of frogs, and the steady pulse of crickets. The lonely cry of the moon-crane. There were other noises mixed in there as well, chuckles and distant warbling cries that might be dinos and might be mammals and might be something else entirely. Ordinarily, he found these sounds comforting.

  Not tonight.

  There were more than three hundred bones in the skeleton of a triceratops, and if they were all dumped in a heap in front of Leyster, he’d be able to assemble them in an afternoon. The sixty-three vertebrae would all be in the proper order, from the syncervical to the final caudal. The elaborate fretwork of the skull would be knit into one complex whole. The feet would be tricky, but he’d sort out the bones of the pes, or hindfeet, into two piles of twenty-four, starting with metatarsals I to V, arranging the phalanges in a formula of 2-3-4-5-0 beneath them, and capping all with an ankle made up of the astragalus, calcaneum, and three distal tarsals. The manus, or front foot, almost simple by contrast, contained five metacarpals, fourteen phalanges arranged in a formula of 2-3-4-3-2, and three carpals—still, it was a rare ability to sort them by sight. Leyster knew his way around a skeleton as well as any man.

  He knew, as well, the biochemical pathways of the creature’s metabolism and catabolism; many of the subtleties of its behavior and temperament; its feeding, fighting, mating, and nurturing strategies; its evolutionary history; and a rough outline of its range and genetic structure. And this was but one of the many dinosaurs (to say nothing of non-dinosaurs) he had studied in depth. He knew everything it was possible to know, with the resources at hand, about the life and death of animals.

  Except, perhaps, the central mystery. All he had were facts, and none of his knowledge was necessary. The bones found their proper order with every triceratops born. The biochemical pathways policed themselves. The animals lived, mated, and died quite successfully without his intervention.

  Chuck was here and he was gone.

  It seemed impossible.

  He didn’t understand it at all.

  The forest was black upon black. It made his sight swim. It made him feel small, just one more transient mote of life moving inexorably toward death.

  For all his knowledge, he knew nothing. For all he had learned, his understanding was nil. He stood at the lightless center of a universe totally devoid of meaning. There were no answers here, no answers within, no answers anywhere.

  He stared off into the darkness. He wanted to walk straight into it and never come back.

  So great was his unhappin
ess at that moment that it seemed to him that the night itself was sobbing. All the bleak forest and starless sky shook with a low, muffled noise that was the perfect embodiment of misery. Then, with a start, he realized that the sound was Tamara weeping softly in the tent.

  She hadn’t gone to sleep after all.

  Well, of course she hadn’t. After what had happened to Chuck, how could she? Even if she hadn’t seen it happen, even if they hadn’t been close, his loss reduced the human population of the world to ten. It was an unparalleled catastrophe. It was cause for terrible grief. Which made it his duty to go into the tent and comfort her.

  His spirit quailed at the thought. I can’t, he thought angrily. I don’t have any comfort in me. There’s nothing here but misery and self-pity. He had no strength at all, no power to endure. He felt that if he took on a single grain more of the world’s pain, it would crush him flat.

  Tamara went on crying.

  Well, let her! Maybe it was selfish of him, but he wasn’t going to subject himself to anything more. He couldn’t! What did she expect of him? Tears were running down his cheeks, and he despised himself for them. What a fucking hypocrite he was! Of all the people there ever were, he was the last one that anybody would turn to for solace.

  Still, Tamara did not stop crying.

  You have to go in, he told himself. He couldn’t go in.

  He went in.

  17. Type Specimen

  Ultima Pangaea: Telezoic era. Mesognotic period. Chronic epoch. Epimethean age. 250 My C.E.

  Jimmy was the first one out of the time funnel. He glanced around quickly, then moved aside so Griffin and Molly Gerhard could follow. They stepped out onto the sward after him.

  It was night.

  To one side was a copse of trees with low, tangled limbs—“climbing trees” Jimmy would have called them in his youth. Downslope was a lake. In the sky above its black waters hung a glory of stars. Colored lights rose and sank among them like lanterns.

  The clearing was ringed with a dozen palely luminous gates. The funnel stood at its center.

  A light breeze ruffled the waters of the lake. Molly Gerhard shivered, and finally spoke. “Which way now?”

  Jimmy pointed toward one of the gates, where two dim figures, identical in size and height, waited. He said nothing. A touch of action always made him feel particularly calm and alert afterwards. He didn’t want to spoil that by talking.

  The two figures resolved into women at their approach.

  “Hello, Griffin,” Salley said.

  “Hello, Griffin,” Gertrude said. The moon-shaped scar at the corner of her mouth sailed sardonically upward.

  There was a quick exchange of glances in which Jimmy read anger, defiance, hauteur, hurt pride, and astonishment.

  Molly Gerhard, who knew the history of that scar on the older woman’s face, gave voice to the last of these. “Tell me this is you from your own future…” (But Salley was already shaking her head dolefully.) “…and not the woman who got us into this mess.”

  “She’s—” Salley began.

  “I am the original me, and yes, I take full credit for all that’s happened.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Only to small minds,” Gertrude said.

  “We can explain,” Salley said.

  “I was told that divergent time lines could never meet,” Molly Gerhard said with an edge in her voice. “How can the two of you possibly exist in the same reality?”

  Jimmy, watching, had to admire how efficiently she worked. Gerhard invited correction. She wasn’t afraid to sound foolish. And she directed her question at the older woman—Gertrude—while ignoring the younger—Salley. Thus driving the thinnest of wedges between the two and creating a division she might later wish to widen.

  “Within your frame of reference, that was true,” Gertrude said. “Things are different on this side of Terminal City. You’ve been there. Surely you understand. Anyone with a modicum of perception would realize that its chief function is to reconcile the products of divergent time lines into a common reality.”

  Salley’s eyes flicked toward her, then away.

  “To what purpose?” Griffin asked.

  “If nothing else, it enables us to meet.” Gertrude turned away. “Let’s go to my place. I’ll explain everything to you there.”

  She stepped into the nearest gate and vanished. After the briefest of hesitations, Salley did likewise.

  * * *

  They had no choice but to follow.

  Gertrude lived in a floating tower at the center of a ring forest in the Interior Sea. A soft, sultry breeze passed through the open windows, carrying with it the salt smell of the unseen sea. A sliver of new moon hung low in the sky. It had not been visible from the mouth of the time funnel. So Jimmy Boyle knew that the gate had transported them a goodly distance. Not so far, however, that it was not still night.

  “Exactly where are we?” Molly Gerhard asked.

  Gertrude snapped her fingers, and a map appeared in her hands. She opened it. “This is Ultima Pangaea. Continental drift has joined the scattered continents once more into a single landmass. It is surrounded by a world-spanning ocean and embraces at its heart a solitary inland sea.” She tapped a fingertip where the equator bisected the inland sea. “We’re right here. In a sense, I live at the exact center of the world.”

  Of course, Jimmy thought. Where else?

  The others were prowling about the room, examining things, opening drawers, displaying a curiosity that Gertrude ignored complacently, though Jimmy would never have allowed it in his digs. “You’ve got quite a few books here,” Griffin observed.

  “All mine.”

  “She means she wrote them,” Salley said.

  “Yes, of course. What else would I mean?”

  “What are these creatures?” Molly Gerhard asked.

  One wall was nothing but windows. The wall opposite it was taken up by an earth-filled terrarium. A labyrinthine structure of tunnels and dens could be seen through the glass, with pale, hairless animals the size of mice within. “Naked mole birds,” Gertrude said. “They lost their feathers and their endothermy, and acquired a communal social structure. A fascinating case of convergent evolution. Behaviorally, they’re almost identical to naked mole rats. Yet their most recent common ancestor was a pre-Mesozoic creature that looked like a lizard.”

  Molly Gerhard stared with undisguised loathing at the pallid creatures, climbing clumsily over one another, some few scrabbling at the dirt with needlelike talons and tiny beaks. “Why would you have such things?”

  “For their inherent interest.”

  “They have inherent interest?”

  Gertrude snorted. “Bloodedness has always been the paleontologist’s Afghanistan,” she said. “Any number of scientists have marched off boldly to determine whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded, and lost themselves in a wilderness of definitions. It turns out that bloodedness is not so simple as it looks from the outside. It’s not a single thing, but several families of strategies.

  “Body temperature can be either constant or variant, regulated internally or externally, and in service to a high resting metabolism or a low one. Maintaining a constant body temperature is called homeothermy. Variant temperature, usually close to the variation in ambient temperature, is poikilothermy. Internally regulated temperature is called endothermy. Externally regulated temperature is called ectothermy. An animal whose resting metabolism remains at a high level is tachymetabolic. One whose resting metabolism slows to a low level of activity is brady metabolic.

  “Got that? Good.

  “Now, a ‘warm-blooded’ animal is generally homeothermic, endothermic, and tachymetabolic, where a ‘cold-blooded’ one is poikilothermic, ectothermic, and barymetabolic. The naked mole bird, however, is homeothermic, ectothermic, and tachymetabolic. Is it cold-blooded? There are insects whose body temperatures, at rest, reflect the ambient temperature, but whose wing muscles raise their temperatu
res much higher than that during flight. They’re poikilothermic, endothermic, and brady metabolic. Warm-blooded or coldblooded? How about hibernating mammals? Homeothermic, ectothermic, brady metabolic. Do they shift between bloodednesses?

  “Moreover, when you begin to look into the mechanisms of all these things, you’ll realize that I’ve been oversimplifying furiously. It’s all a lot more complicated than I’ve made it sound.

  “So I’ve decided to take a whack at straightening the whole mess out.”

  All the while she talked, Jimmy noted, Salley stood to the far side of the room, sad-eyed and silent. She had only spoken the once, and then without addressing anybody directly. Nor had she looked at Griffin, save casually and fleetingly.

  Well, that was easy enough to decipher. It was a terrible blessing she’d been given, to see herself the way everybody else did. He imagined it was humbling. What Jimmy couldn’t figure out was why Gertrude was being so talkative.

  Griffin listened silently, head down, flipping through book after book. “Leather bound,” he said, when Gertrude wound down at last. “Steel engravings. You’re certainly being treated well. And this place of yours. Do all the inhabitants of this era live in towers like this?”

  “Some do. Most don’t.”

  “Then you’re being indulged,” Molly Gerhard said. “Why? By whom?”

  “Our sponsors. I cut them a deal.”

  “What for what?” Molly asked crisply.

  “You already know what I got: permission to change my personal past. Otherwise you wouldn’t be talking with me now. My life here is not what I bought, but rather the price I paid. I serve easy masters. They allow me to engage in activities I find rewarding—research, mostly—and in return I remain available for examination, should any questions about human beings arise.”

  “Yes, but what do you do?” Molly Gerhard insisted.

  “I’m the type specimen for Homo sapiens.‘’‘’