Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  Jimmy made a face, and Griffin explained: “When Linnaeus first set up his system of binomial nomenclature, he defined species with an abstract type—a written description of their features. So he felt free to replace his specimens with superior examples. But, as always, mistakes were made. Which occasionally led to the absurdity of a species being represented by a sample from another species entirely.

  “So nowadays, when a species is described, it’s done from an individual organism, called the type specimen, which is carefully collected and preserved, and then referred to whenever there’s any question as to the taxon’s attributes.”

  “I’m not sure I…”

  “You can think of Dr. Salley as being the physical definition of humanity. She is the yardstick by which all human beings are measured.”

  “Wait.” Jimmy spoke at last, and as he did so felt that fine top-of-the-world mood collapse to nothing within him. Back to the workaday world again. “You mean to say that my humanity is judged by how closely I resemble her?”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Gertrude asked.

  It was a question that required a day’s response or none at all. “Maybe it’s time you told us why we’re here,” Griffin suggested.

  “First a drink,” Gertrude said. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”

  She poured them glasses of a clear and refreshing fluid. A moment before, Jimmy had been thinking that Griffin and Molly Gerhard looked tired and ready for sleep. But after that drink, they brightened right up. He himself felt ready to climb mountains. He couldn’t help thinking that a case of the stuff would make a fine souvenir to bring home.

  “I was on the original Baseline expedition,” Gertrude said. “Terrible though it is to say, even with the deaths, I was happy. I had dinosaurs. I had Leyster. I had everything. If I hadn’t alienated Leyster, I could have stayed in the Maastrichtian forever.”

  “How did you alienate him?” Molly Gerhard asked.

  “I was a fool.”

  * * *

  When the bomb went off, Gertrude was engaged in folding up the rocket launcher. Birds were chirping in the trees, and she was marveling at how familiar-yet-strange their song sounded. Like birds everywhere, and yet oddly scored. None of the cries of this age were known to her yet. But they were obviously as sophisticated as those of modern birds, sixty-five million years hence. Music, it seemed, was basic. It arose first among the small, feathered but flightless dinosaurs. The oviraptor had a pretty song.

  Then came the explosion.

  She ran through the smoke and confusion, and found three bodies lying on the ground: Chuck, Daljit, and Tamara. Two of them were already dead. The third, Daljit, had lost most of an arm.

  Leyster was already kneeling at her side, making a tourniquet.

  Gertrude ran to get the med kit. She flipped an ampule of morphine into a syringe, found a vein, and shot the painkiller into Daljit’s good arm.

  The others were milling about uncertainly, hovering over the bodies, asking each other what they should do. Gertrude looked up, and snapped, “Don’t just stand there! Pitch a tent. Make up a bed for Daljit. Clear away these bodies. Somebody check and see how much of our supplies have been destroyed. Jesus fucking Christ! Do I have to do everything myself?”

  The students scattered in purposeful action. Helping Leyster try to staunch the flow of blood, Gertrude felt a small twinge of satisfaction. Work was the best thing for them, she knew.

  Work would keep them all alive.

  * * *

  Daljit’s injuries were too extensive to be successfully treated in the field. She died that night.

  They buried her body next to the others with a minimum of ceremony. The graves were positioned away from the camp, to avoid drawing in predators, as well as for reasons of morale.

  Then, to keep the crew from dwelling on their loss, Gertrude set them to building log cabins for everyone. There was some grumbling because hers and Leyster’s was bigger than the others. But they were a couple by then—they slept together for the first time the night of the disaster—and naturally they needed the room.

  It was not difficult keeping everybody busy. There was more than enough work that needed doing, if they were to survive. The trick was to provide everybody with a sense of purpose. With so much equipment destroyed by the bomb, they couldn’t hope to perform a fraction of the research they’d originally intended. Still, they could do some. At her instigation, Leyster built a blind on Barren Ridge where they could observe the tyrannosaur nest.

  She and Leyster, being the best qualified, traded off on the tranny watch. Sometimes, as a reward for good work, she let one of the others assist.

  Jamal came to Gertrude one day when she was in the blind. She was watching Boris and Bela, the runts of the clutch, mock-battling one another, snapping at each other’s snouts until one of them got a purchase and they rolled over and over, kicking with their feet like kittens. “Fishing good?” she asked, without putting down the binoculars.

  Young tyrannosaurs were a hoot to watch. They were curious about everything. A shiny pebble, a lizard they had never seen before, a mangled wrist-watch hung from a limb in a place where Gertrude knew they would confront it—any novelty was a toy and a diversion to them. They would cock their heads and stare at it with their glittery little eyes. Then they would kick at it with one taloned foot, if it were on the ground, and bump it with their heads if it were higher. Sooner or later, they’d try to eat it. Immature trannies would put anything in their mouths. They lost a lot of teeth that way.

  Adults were different: surly, aloof. They reacted to anything new in their environment with disdain and suspicion. Their behavior was rigidly set. They avoided novelty in all its forms.

  “Look,” Jamal said. “Everybody’s a little concerned about the way things are going.”

  She lowered the glasses. “We’re alive. We have food. What’s to complain about?”

  “To put it bluntly, we do all the work, while you two get to sit around all day and make observations.”

  “You’re grad students, for pity’s sake. What else do you expect?”

  “We’re working our butts off. You should too.”

  What really irked her was the unfairness of his accusation. She and Leyster each worked twice as hard as any of the rest of them. But she bit down on her anger. “Leyster and I are the only fully trained researchers here.”

  “Just who are we doing all this research for? The beacon’s smashed. We’re never going home. Who’s ever going to read our findings?”

  “We’re scientists. If we don’t do any research, then why are we even here?”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Jamal said grimly.

  He turned and strode away.

  * * *

  That night, she told Leyster about the encounter. Leyster looked drawn and pale. His responsibilities were wearing him down. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he has a point.”

  “No, he does not! He’s just an ambitious young beta male with delusions of alphahood. He wants power and double rations, is all. This whole thing stinks of primate politics.”

  “Yes, but maybe we should—”

  She silenced his mouth with kisses. Then they made love. Leyster was not at his best that night, and immediately afterwards he fell into an exhausted slumber. But he really did love her. That sort of thing was impossible to fake.

  A week later, Jamal walked away from the camp, taking half the expedition with him.

  Only Lai-tsz, Gillian, and Patrick stayed. Katie, Nils, and Matthew went with Jamal. With them went all the supplies they could carry.

  Their departure doubled the work load for everyone. Two camps needed two people to cook, two people to wash the dishes, twice the labor to make two of anything that was needed. They had to put off building the smokehouse indefinitely, though that would have saved them enormous labor in the long run by making it possible to store meat for more than a day at a time. It was insanely inefficient.

  They
gave up the tyrannosaur blind, of course. They had to. Science had become a luxury.

  The dissidents didn’t go far. They came back periodically, angry and sheepish, looking for tools or supplies they hadn’t thought to bring along.

  “The axes stay,” Gertrude said the first time it happened. She figured the worse their privation, the sooner they’d come limping home. “They’re not private property. They were bought for the expedition with public funds.”

  But Leyster, blind to the larger picture, said, “Of course you can have an axe, and anything else you need. We’re not enemies, you know. We’re all in this together.” He still had notions of winning them over with kindness.

  He was unworldly, was the problem. He was too good for his own good.

  * * *

  Things went from bad to worse. Gillian left them for the dissidents. Then, two months after the rift, Nils died in some kind of accident. The rebel camp didn’t want to talk about it, so Gertrude never did find out the details. But they all got together for his funeral.

  It was a tense encounter. The groups didn’t mingle, but stood a way apart from each other. When Gertrude managed to get Katie aside and tried to talk her into coming back, she’d burst into tears. “Jamal wouldn’t like it,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what he’s like when he’s angry.”

  It was classic cult behavior: the charismatic leader whose word was law, the unreasoning obedience, the pervasive fear. Leyster wouldn’t listen, but Gertrude grew convinced that Jamal was holding the others against their will, keeping them bound to him by psychological means.

  Five months after the accident, they were barely managing to hang on. They’d all lost a lot of weight. Leyster in particular had deteriorated badly. He never smiled or joked anymore, and he sometimes went for days without speaking. It hurt Gertrude’s heart to see him so diminished.

  Then, six months less one day after the bomb, Patrick was killed, mobbed by a pack of small theropods while he was digging for turtle eggs.

  He wouldn’t have died if they’d been able to spare somebody with a spear and a sack of rocks to watch his back.

  So, over the course of a long and sleepless night, Gertrude decided to take action.

  The dissidents had built a trench latrine just far away enough from the new camp that they wouldn’t be bothered by the flies and odors. Bright and early the next morning, Gertrude found a hiding place by the path leading to the latrine and settled down to wait.

  First Katie walked up the path and back. Then Matthew. Jamal was third.

  His face darkened when she stepped out in front of him. “What do you want?”

  “I brought you a shovel.”

  She swung it at him as hard as she could.

  A look of profound surprise overcame Jamal. He didn’t even think to duck away from the blow. The blade of the shovel slammed against his shoulder and then, glancingly, the side of his head.

  He staggered. She swept the shovel around again, at the back of his knees.

  He fell.

  “No, wait,” he said weakly from the ground. He held one hand up in supplication. “For pity’s sake, don’t.”

  “Damn you!” Gertrude said. “You took everything that was good and fine and fucked it up. You filthy, ignorant son of a bitch.” She was crying so hard she could barely see, and the corner of her mouth was bleeding. In all her wild swinging, she’d managed to cut herself with her ring. “Die, you bastard.”

  She raised the shovel in both hands, blade pointed at his throat. She had thought it would be difficult, but now that she came to it, she was so filled with rage that it was not difficult at all. It was the easiest thing in the world.

  “Jamal!” somebody shouted joyfully. The voice came from behind her, from the new camp.

  It was Leyster. He was running up the path, waving his arms.

  “We’ve been rescued!” he shouted. “They’re here! We…”

  He saw her standing over Jamal, shovel raised, and came to a dead stop.

  * * *

  The story ended.

  “So how did you wind up here?” Molly Gerhard asked.

  “I put together a few rumors, and figured it out that whoever was in charge was headquartered in the very far future. So I stole Griffin’s access card—”

  “How?”

  “It wasn’t difficult.” She glanced knowingly at Griffin. “I stole his card and took the funnel as far into the future as I could go. Then I cut a deal with the folks here.”

  “Just who are ‘the folks here’? What are they like?”

  “All in good time. It’s easier to show than to explain. Wait a couple of hours and I’ll arrange an introduction.”

  “There’s one thing that makes no sense to me,” Griffin said, leaning forward. “What’s in it for you? When you changed your past, you also cut yourself free from it. Why did you do it?”

  Gertrude lifted her head and stared down her nose at Griffin. Like a bird, Jimmy thought. Very much like a bird. “I wanted Leyster,” she said. “I decided that if I couldn’t have him in one time line, I’d have him in another.”

  She turned toward Salley, who seemed to shrink from her gaze. “I did it for you,” Gertrude said triumphantly. “I did it all for you.”

  Salley stared down into her lap. She said nothing.

  * * *

  The sun was coming up over the ring forest. At Gertrude’s invitation, they all went out onto the balcony.

  The ring forest was a circle of green a mile across with open water at its center. It smelled as different from the forests Jimmy knew as an oak forest smelled different from a pine forest. Birds nested in the branches and fish swam among the roots. There were ponds and lakes within the forest, natural openings above which ternlike birds hovered and struck, sending up sharp white spikes of water as they penetrated the surface.

  “This is lovely,” Molly Gerhard said.

  Gertrude nodded and, without a grain of irony, said, “You’re welcome.”

  Jimmy Boyle remembered how, in an earlier age, Salley had gone on and on about the waterbushes and what a significant ecological development they were. He wondered if these things were their descendants. He supposed they were.

  “The forests cover all the continental shallows,” Gertrude said. “These trees are adapted for deeper water. Their holdfasts can’t reach the ocean floor, so they serve as sea-anchors. They entangle, and form a rich variety of habitats sheltering many distinct species.”

  As she spoke, Griffin and Salley slipped away. They stood apart from the others, quietly talking. Jimmy positioned himself so he could unobtrusively eavesdrop, while still seeming to be listening to Gertrude.

  “How long have you been here,” Griffin asked, “with her?”

  “One month.”

  “It must have been difficult.”

  Salley moved a little closer to him. “You have no idea,” she said angrily. “That has to be the single most arrogant and self-centered and… and manipulative creature in existence.”

  Griffin smiled sadly. “You haven’t met the Old Man yet.”

  “Oh God,” Salley said. “I am so ashamed.”

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed of something you did not do,” Griffin said.

  “But I am! I am! How could I not be, knowing that she’s me?”

  Suddenly Salley was crying. Griffin placed his arms around her, comfortingly, and she let him.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “I swore to myself that I’d never let you touch me again, and yet here I am, clinging to you.”

  “Yeah,” Griffin said. “Funny.”

  “I can’t keep a single god-damned resolution I make,” she said bitterly. “Not to save my life.”

  Jimmy moved away. There was nothing more to be learned here.

  * * *

  Gertrude was still talking, of course.

  “Did you ever notice,” she said, “how all the stations are set at the end of an age? Just before a major extinction event? Did you eve
r wonder why the station in Washington should be different?”

  “Biologically speaking,” Jimmy said, “our home age is in the middle of one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the planet. Even if not a single species more died off after our time, it would still be one of the Big Six.” He’d been around scientists long enough to have picked up that much, anyway.

  “Perhaps,” Gertrude said. “Yet look around you. We’re extinct, humanity, I mean, and have been so for a long, long time.”

  “How?” Molly Gerhard whispered. “How did we die off?”

  “That,” Gertrude said firmly, “I’ll leave as an exercise for the student.”

  There was an odd look on her face, triumphant and yet yearning. She was lonely, Jimmy realized. The old thing had been living here in splendid isolation so long she’d almost forgotten how to get along with other human beings. But she still felt the lack of their company.

  He felt terribly sorry for her. But at the same time, he didn’t feel called upon to do anything about it. That wasn’t part of his job.

  * * *

  A chime sounded.

  “What was that?” Molly Gerhard asked.

  “It’s time,” Gertrude said, “to meet our sponsors.”

  The gate was located in a small room at the center of Gertrude’s tower. Now a door opened, and one of the Unchanging emerged. “We have come,” it said, “to take you to the meeting.” To Gertrude: “Not you.” To the others: “Now.”

  18. Peer Review

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

  The raft trip down the Eden was slow and languid. They were not disturbed once by crocodilians, though they saw many. And because the migrations were not entirely over yet and the river meandered through more varied terrain than existed back in Happy Valley, Leyster was able to add several rare dinosaurs to his life list. He got clear sightings of betrachovenators, cryptoceratops, fubarodons, and jabberwockies. Once he even saw a Cthuluraptor imperator in all its terrifying splendor. They were species he had never seriously hoped to see, and it put him in a good mood.