Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  Jamal was still a little weak from the aftereffects of his fever. But his broken leg had begun to knit over the weeks that it had taken to build the raft. He was looking forward to the day when the splint came off. There were times, in fact, when he insisted that his leg was already healed, and the thing could be removed immediately. But Daljit refused to allow it. “After everything I put up with, watching over you,” she said, “I am not taking any chances of a repeat performance. I am not going to be Florence fucking Nightingale ever again. Got that?”

  They had considered other means of returning home, but settled on the raft as being the safest method of transporting Jamal. It broke Leyster’s heart to cut up an entire coil of rope to lash the logs together, but there was no helping it. Tamara christened it the John Ostrom, after the man who had established dinosaurs as active creatures and the ancestors of birds, and she stuck an upright stick with a handful of bright dinosaur feathers tied to its tip between the logs at the bow for luck.

  Their trip began early in the morning, when they loaded all their possessions onto the raft, loosed the moorings, and used long poles to push it out into the river. Water birds were diving for fish in the smooth brown water. They exploded into the air at the raft’s approach.

  Tamara stood at the stern manning the sweep, and Leyster squatted a few paces fore of her with a weighted line. Periodically he took a reading. The Eden was muddy, wide, and slow, which meant that it was also shallow in spots, and they were constantly in danger of running aground. Daljit and Jamal were both sunbathing at the front of the raft.

  Leyster was thinking about the infrasound paper and idly admiring the sculptural beauty of their bodies, when a pterosaur’s shadow touched the raft, then soared toward shore.

  He turned quickly, and caught the briefest flash of the animal disappearing behind a massive bank of willows, into a rookery that he could hear but not see. In that lucid instant, everything came together for him.

  Interspecific infrasound communication in a late Maastrichtian community of predator and prey species

  “Okay, I’m ready to start composing the paper,” Leyster announced.

  Composition was, of necessity, a mental exercise. Of all their dwindling resources, the rarest and most valued was paper. They had communalized all notebooks and passed an iron law that nothing could be written in any of them without the consent of all.

  As a result, Leyster had had to train his memory so he could compose their scientific papers in his head, recite them to the tribe to get their feedback, and then, only when all objections had been dealt with, transcribe the words in his tiniest, neatest hand.

  “What’s the title?” Tamara asked. Daljit and Jamal sat up to hear.

  He told them.

  “Not very catchy, is it?” Jamal said.

  “It’s not supposed to be catchy. It’s supposed to convey information in as clear and specific a fashion as possible.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Oh, Jamal just wants it to be commercial,” Daljit said. “So he can license the gaming rights and market a set of plastic action figures to Burger King.”

  Jamal flushed. “I withdraw my objection.”

  She gave him a squeeze. “I’m just teasing you, sweetie-pie. I know you’re not like that anymore.” Then, as an afterthought, she said to Leyster, “You’re not going to include Chuck’s goofball notion, are you?”

  “I might.”

  “Refresh my memory,” Jamal said. “Exactly what was his theory again?”

  “To begin with, he posited that since the major dinosaurs are capable of hearing infrasound, they would also be able to hear the mountains shifting and the continents moving underfoot. That movement is so slight and regular that they could then orient themselves by it. It would provide a sonic compass for their migrations—they’d simply head toward where the world sounded right to them.

  “Now, when the Chicxulub impactor struck the Earth, it would have set up reverberations that lasted for years. That’s elementary. Major earthquakes do that all the time.

  “But Chuck speculated that, since the impact was so much greater than any earthquake, dinosaurs would then be deafened to the steady noises that tell them where they are. They wouldn’t know where to go for the migrations. He further speculated that the noise might be great enough that they would no longer be able to communicate. Thus rendering their feeding strategies useless.

  “Their very strengths would then be turned against themselves. Over adapted as they are, they could not survive the difficult times after the disaster. Less specialized taxons like crocodiles and birds manage to survive into the new era simply because they are less specialized. They could adapt, where non-avian dinosaurs could not.”

  Jamal shook his head. “Chuck was a sweet guy, but his theory is full of it.”

  “It is not!” Tamara said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s not falsifiable, to begin with. There’s no way you can test it.”

  “That’s not—”

  Leyster turned away from the others and returned his attention to the mountainous forests gliding by. The voices faded to a background murmur in his mind. Ahead, a grandfatherly old tanglewood tree stretched arthritic limbs out over the water. As they passed it, tree-divers—crocs no larger than his hand, with iridescent membranes stretched between their front and hind feet—rained down into the river. They launched themselves from the limbs, glided downbank in twisty aerial paths, and plunged into the water with a soft noise.

  Plop. Plop. Ploplop. Plop. Ploploploploplop. Plop.

  It was a rich world, filled with fascinating creatures he would never have time enough even to begin to study. Leyster sighed, and let his mind wander freely over the data they had gathered so far.

  The central fact of their discovery came first. They had observed and then confirmed by instrumentation that several different species of dinosaur “spoke” to each other by means of infrasound. Rather than enumerate all the species they had documented as communicating in this manner, he synopsised them as “several major dinosaur groups.” The species involved could be mentioned when he came to specific interactions, and this way was more concise.

  The dirty little secret of scientific journals was that not only did they not pay for the papers they printed, the authors had to pay them a fixed rate of so much per page. Not that money alone could get you into a serious journal; you still had to write a paper that would get past peer review and impress the editors enough to want it. But, particularly if you were just starting out, you might delay publication of some papers for years, while waiting for your financial situation to clear up.

  The system, for all its faults, did have one positive effect, though: It kept the papers terse. The irony was that now, when the economics of scientific journals was irrelevant, the limits of his ability to memorize text imposed an equally strict need for economy.

  * * *

  When he was satisfied with the wording, he announced that he’d come up with the first section of the paper, and recited it aloud. The others abandoned their argument to consider it.

  “That should be ‘field observations’ rather than ‘observations in the field,’ ” Daljit said. “It’s shorter.”

  “Good thought. I’ll change it.”

  “Why ‘major dinosaur groups?’ ” Jamal asked. “Why not simply ‘dinosaurs?’ ”

  “Because we don’t know that all dinosaurs engage in the behavior. In fact, we’re pretty certain that some—birds—don’t.”

  “Point taken.”

  The phone rang.

  “Yes?” Tamara said. “It’s Gillian,” she told them. Then, to Gillian, “Leyster’s working on the paper. Yes, already. Well, obviously he thought we had enough data. What? No! Well, it’s about time. Hey, everybody! Lai-tsz’s gone into labor!”

  “She has?”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Outstanding!”

  “They’re all happy and everybody sends their love. When di
d it start? Uh-huh. How’s she doing? Well, of course.” She was silent for a bit, then said, “Okay, I’ll ask him.”

  She turned to Leyster. “Gillian wants to know if you’re going to use Chuck’s theory.”

  The raft lurched. “Oh, cripes!” Daljit said. “Who’s navigating?”

  * * *

  It took them over an hour to get the raft off the sand bar, and it was dirty and difficult work doing so. They all had to climb into the water (except Jamal, who stayed aboard and fretted) so the raft would ride higher in the water, and then wrangle it over toward deeper water.

  Dirty and tired, and yet exhilarated by their eventual success, they shucked off their clothes and spread them out to dry. Daljit bullied them into raising poles at the rear and lashing a canvas to them to make a canopy to keep from getting sunburned.

  They were amiably finishing up their comments on the opening of the paper—it was the simplest part, and there was the least room for disagreements of interpretation—when Tamara suddenly held a hand up and said, “Shhh!”

  “What is it?” Leyster whispered.

  She pointed to the left bank. A Stygivenator molari was walking briskly downriver along its margin, moving at a speed that kept it parallel to them. Every now and then it would glance over at them, its eyes bright and avaricious.

  Leyster shivered involuntarily. A stygivenator was one of the larger predators, as large as a juvenile tyrannosaur but with the reflexes of an adult predator.

  “What’s it doing?” Jamal asked quietly.

  “Pacing us,” Leyster whispered back. Fortunately, most theropods were lousy swimmers.

  “So what should we do about that?”

  “Keep quiet, and be very careful not to let the raft drift too close to it.”

  Then the river bent, and they all had to frantically man the poles to keep the raft from running aground. The forest thickened at the bend, and the trees hung far out over the water, forcing the stygivenator inland. By the time they’d regained the center of the river, it was gone.

  There were termite mounds on the right-hand side of the Eden—a metropolis of them. On the left, Leyster saw a marsh hopper prying open a freshwater clam with its tiny claws and furred paws. Suddenly a troodon that neither Leyster nor the marsh hopper had suspected was lurking there, snapped up the small mammal. It shook its head twice to snap the marsh hopper’s spine, then lifted its neck and swallowed down the unfortunate animal whole.

  While it was thus occupied, the stygivenator emerged from the wood, moving at top speed. Its jaws closed upon the troodon before the smaller predator knew what was happening. One crunch, and the bugger was dead.

  It was an incredibly violent era, sustained only by the enormous number of offspring almost everything here produced. Which was what made it so astonishing that so many did reach adulthood. The network of interspecific cooperation—the tyrannosaur as farmer—resulted in a staggering efficiency, which allowed a greater population of the largest life forms than would otherwise be possible.

  He couldn’t help thinking again of Salley’s talk, so long ago and so far in the future, when she had said that ceratopsians were farmed by their predators. He smiled. It was so typical of her to impress him with his own work. In some ways she was not a very good scientist: impatient with data, too ready to leap to conclusions, apt to judge an idea not by its merits but by its sheer niftiness.

  But paleontology needed her, as leavening if nothing else. Science needed leapers as well as plodders, visionaries as well as detectives.

  She was a kite. She needed only the most tenuous connection with the ground in order to fly, a sure string of logic with a reliable hand at the end of it to make sure she didn’t take a nosedive straight into the ground. More than anything he wished he could be the hand at the end of her kite string.

  Watching the banks flow by, he slid off into a reverie. He didn’t notice when Jamal took the lead away from him, and moved to the bow to take readings. He didn’t notice how careful the others were to avoid disturbing him.

  * * *

  The cycle began with the spring migrations, when flights of tyrannosaurs, living off their winter fat, spread across the land looking for territory to establish. These were the breeding males. The females followed at a more leisurely pace, sparing themselves the initial hardship, and arriving well-fed and ready to breed.

  The Lord of the Valley (they could identify him by his scars) returned to claim the previous year’s territory and, because he was experienced and in his prime, faced only a few challenges from younger males. He paced off the perimeter of his valley, singing, both to warn away competitors and to call in the titanosaurs.

  The titanosaurs, those vast eating machines, drifted slowly through the valley, guided by its resident tyrannosaur toward the most productive areas. They stripped vast swaths of the upper-story vegetation, splintered trees, and enabled a bloom of understory vegetation. Now and then, the females deposited hundreds of eggs in a subsoil clutch before wandering away and forgetting about them entirely.

  When the titanosaurs finally left, the understory was flourishing and the tyrannosaur was free at last to call in the herds of hadrosaurs and triceratopses.

  Leyster held the whole in his mind now; he set about to boil it all down to the least number of words.

  * * *

  “Biocybernetic…” said Daljit. “Is there such a word?”

  “There is now.”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  “Actually,” Jamal said, “The word cybernetic refers to feedback loops occurring not only in machines but also in and between living organisms. So there’s really no need for the neologism.”

  Leyster blushed. It had been a long time since he’d been caught out in a mistake of terminology. “I’ll change it.”

  “What I want to know,” Tamara said, “is why you don’t mention the incident Katie and Nils saw. With the troodons.”

  Katie and Nils had reported seeing a small flock of troodons actively drive some hadrosaurs away from a titanosaur nesting site. The savage little beasts, they reported, had rousted hadrosaurs ten times their size. They concluded that it had been done to protect the eggs.

  “Its meaning is ambiguous,” Leyster said.

  “Not to Katie and Nils.”

  “Also, it only happened the once.”

  “That anybody saw.”

  Judiciously, Jamal said, “When you report the behavior, you say, ‘It is possible that…’ Where’s the problem?”

  “I hate to include speculation in a scientific paper.”

  There was a brief silence. “So,” Tamara said. “I guess that means you’re not going to include Chuck’s speculation?”

  “I didn’t say that. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  * * *

  While Leyster thought about the paper and Daljit manned the sweep, Tamara trailed a fishing line, and caught a tiger-striped catfish. Jamal cleaned and gutted it, and they had sushi for dinner.

  As they ate, they discussed the section of the paper which Leyster was working on. Here he got into more problematic behaviors.

  The herds of hadrosaurs and triceratopses moved continually up and down the valley, feeding. Lai-tsz, whose ear for the sped-up recordings was better than the others, was able to establish that when the local vegetation was in danger of being overgrazed, the Lord or his Lady would seek out greener areas, and call the herds to them. Leyster had been skeptical of this at first, but then Lai-tsz had repeatedly demonstrated her ability to predict when the herds would disappear from established territory, and where they would go, based on the recordings. So he’d had to admit it was so.

  He planned to cite this as an example of “ranching” behavior.

  “Exactly what is the difference,” Daljit asked, “between domestication and ranching?”

  “Domestication is the process whereby the predator species have rendered the prey species docile to their will.”

  “Are you even sure they are domesti
cated?”

  “Several times we’ve seen the Lord of the Valley approach a herd, of various species, singing. They huddle, with the young in the center. He walks around and around them. They turn to face him, cluster tighter, jostle each other. Tighter, closer, more assertive, until one individual gets expelled from the pack. Always the oldest, or weakest, or sickest. His Lordship surges forward, and—snap!—it’s dead. Thirty minutes, start to finish.” Leyster grinned. “Beats hunting, doesn’t it?”

  “Okay, and ranching?”

  “Ranching is the set of behaviors by which it cares for the herds—moving them between pastures, keeping away rival predators, and so on.”

  “Well, you’ll have to make sure that’s spelled out clearly in the paper.”

  “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”

  * * *

  They tied up for the night to a sandbar island overgrown by a snarl of young tanglewoods. Tamara waded ashore and chopped clear a section of the island to make a fire. She began to brew them some sassafras tea.

  The phone rang.

  “I’m not here,” Leyster said. “If anybody asks, I’m at a meeting and you don’t know when I’ll be back in the office.”

  Daljit picked it up. She listened briefly, then put her hand over the receiver. “It’s a boy!” she shouted.

  Whoops and cheers.

  Leyster took the phone. “So, does he look like anyone in particular?” he asked. Feeling a strange mixture of hope and apprehension.

  “What does it matter?” Katie said. “We all love the little brat. You will too, as soon as you see him.”

  “I know it doesn’t matter, I’m just curious. Come on, you’d ask the same question yourself, if you weren’t there.”