Bones of the Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  It made him feel vindicated.

  He slid the vision up to the end of the explanation, and then froze time motionless while he wrote and posted a memo. When he unfroze the vision, a second Unchanging came in and said a few words.

  Salley and Molly Gerhard followed it out of the room.

  It was a small act of mercy on his part. The conference would go on for hours, and they were both bored to tears. So he’d arranged for them to be given a small tour.

  * * *

  “Look!” Molly Gerhard said. “Little models of floating towers, like the one we were on.”

  “No.” Salley pulled one from the water, and held it up so the other woman could see the underwater bulb that gave the tower it buoyancy, and the tangle of holdfasts that rendered it stable. “They’re not models. They’re saplings.”

  They were deep in the tangled roots of the Bird Men’s cathedral habitat, and so of course there were many, many pools of water. They were black and still. The air above them smelled of cedar.

  “So you’re saying they grew—”

  A Bird Man burst from the water, neck extended. Molly Gerhard gasped and drew back in alarm. The creature strode from the water, shook itself like a duck, and then disappeared down a corridor.

  The Old Man skipped ahead. Now the two women were high in the crown of the tree. Gold coins of sunlight danced all about them as a light breeze stirred the branches overhead.

  Molly Gerhard wrinkled her nose. “With all their technology, you’d think they’d do better.” There were white-streaked nests all about them, carelessly made things filled with the din of screeching hatchling Bird Men.

  “You have to look at it from their perspective,” Salley said without conviction. Then she shrugged.

  He skipped ahead again.

  Now they were standing on a parapet not far from the top of the trees. The Unchanging gestured to direct their attention outward, toward the horizon. Molly Gerhard turned, laughing, and froze with astonishment and awe. Salley stood silent behind her.

  Impatiently, the Old Man switched his attention back to Griffin and Jimmy. He was not interested in mere wonder. What he cared about was results.

  * * *

  “He says: Yes, we could give you the equipment you request. Yes, you could rescue your friends. Not at the first resilience point. Not at six months. That is on record as not having happened. But at the second resilience point. At two years.

  “But you would not want it.”

  Griffin straightened. Hours had passed. He was visibly weary. “What do you mean? Of course we want the equipment. Thank you. We’ll take it.”

  There was a very long silence.

  “Why wouldn’t we want it?” Jimmy asked.

  Now there came a low growl so uncertain that Griffin could not tell which of the three had made it.

  “He says: You would not want it because the project is over.”

  “What?”

  “He says: The line in which we gave you time travel is being negated.”

  “When?”

  “He says: Immediately after this conversation.”

  * * *

  There was a certain amount of squabbling and logic-chopping following the Bird Men’s revelation, simply because to argue was human. It would do no good. The Old Man skipped over most of it.

  “But what about Gertrude? She’s from another time line, and yet I met her,” Salley was saying when he dropped back into her consciousness. The Old Man had made sure she and Molly both would be back for the end of the discussion. “Surely that proves you can reconcile time lines. So why close down ours? Why can’t you do the same thing—whatever it was—for us?”

  The Bird Man spoke for a long time.

  The Unchanging said, “She says: It was only temporary. Even if it were possible, it would not be possible.”

  “I’m not following this.”

  “She says: The time line that contains our field of study contains us as well. We knew this from the start. We knew that to study you meant that we must ourselves dissolve into timelike loops when the work is done. That is the price. Time travel is not available under any other terms.”

  “Then why?” Jimmy asked. “Why bother at all?”

  The Bird Man jabbed a beak first at Salley and then at Griffin. “She says: They understand.”

  One of the Bird Men turned, and walked to the back of the room. A second followed him. There was a still pool of water there. One after the other, they plunged into it and were gone.

  Before the third could start after them, Griffin said, “Listen to me!”

  It peered at him intently.

  “If it doesn’t matter… If nothing matters… Then give us the machines so we can rescue our friends.”

  The Bird Man and the Unchanging exchanged what sounded like clucks and squawks.

  “She says: Why?”

  “It’s a human thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

  The Bird Man screamed, a noise so loud it made their ears hurt.

  There was a long silence, while the four humans resigned themselves to failure, and then at last the Unchanging spoke. “She says: It shall be done.” It paused. “Also, it has been—” It paused again. “A rare honor. To stand in the presence of a human being. How beautiful you are. How delightful in your curiosity and your courage both.”

  The Bird Man made a rattling sound.

  “She says: You are scientists. She also is a scientist. All her life she has spent trying to understand mammals.”

  A shriek.

  “She says: You are noble creatures. The world is a poorer place without you.”

  The Bird Man unfolded one grotesque forelimb and stretched it across the table. The three fingers on its terrifying hand separated, extended.

  “She says: Can we shake hands?”

  * * *

  The Old Man toyed with the idea of following Griffin’s company on their journey home, and decided against it. He shut down the one vision, and called up another. A window opened on the latter days of the Maastrichtian, a mere hundred and twenty-two million years in his future.

  * * *

  It was the day they had chosen for their harvest festival, and the camp was filled with the smell of a whole young ankylosaur roasting slowly on a spit over a bed of coals.

  Leyster was sitting in the long house scraping swamp tubers and idly watching Nathaniel play with a rattle Patrick had made him. Daljit was plucking a small feathered dino. He glanced at the carcass in her hands and froze. “That’s not a… what is that thing?”

  “It’s just a nothing-special little brush dino. It’ll make a nice side dish.”

  “No, seriously. I don’t recognize it. Is that a new species? Let me see its teeth.”

  “No dissecting dinner!” Katie laughed. She was taking palm leaves from the kettle where they’d been soaking, and wrapping them around the scraped tubers, so they could be baked in the coals. “Keep scraping.”

  “Oh, come on. It has to be gutted anyway. It could be significant.”

  Daljit put the carcass down. “Listen,” she said tensely.

  “I don’t…” Katie said.

  “Shush!”

  From outside, there came the sound of voices. They were not familiar.

  “Oh God, where’s my blouse?” Daljit cried.

  Katie scooped up the baby and ran outside without saying a word.

  Leyster was the second out the door. Daljit came close on his heels, buttoning furiously.

  * * *

  Their rescuers were U.S. military, for the most part, young men with short hair and socially awkward demeanor. But they’d brought along a documentary camerawoman, and she was already moving among the paleontologists, interviewing them.

  “What is the one thing you most regret?” she asked, camera on her shoulder. Several of the tribe hung back shyly, intimidated by the novelty of an unfamiliar face. She pointed her microphone at Jamal. “You?”

  “I guess the thing I most regret is that
we didn’t bring along a botanist. There’s a prejudice in our field in favor of animals, vertebrates in particular, and we certainly paid the price for that. We really could have used somebody who was familiar with the properties of the local plants.”

  “Amen to that!” Katie said fervently. “There must be something around here with tannin in it. Do you have any idea how difficult brain tanning can be? And dyes! Don’t get me started on dyes.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m sorry I never managed to make a decent clay pot,” Daljit said. “The kiln was good. I just couldn’t manage to get the right clay or the right temperature.”

  “You?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t bring along a spare time beacon,” Nils said. Everybody laughed. Then, more seriously, “If I’d known how long I was going to be stuck here, I would’ve brought along a lot more pharmaceuticals. And I would have learned some crafts.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how to make knap flint. Have you ever tried to make a flint knife? It’s not easy!”

  “What,” the woman asked, focusing her camera first on Nathaniel and then panning up to Katie’s face, “is the first thing you plan to get or do when you get back to the present?”

  “I want a steak.”

  “A milkshake!”

  “A cup of tea—with lemon and extra sugar.”

  “A shower! With hot water!”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I’m going to turn off my brain and sit down in front of the television for a week.”

  “I’m going to read a book I’ve never read before.”

  “I’m going to talk to a stranger!”

  Standing apart from the others, Leyster muttered fervently, “I’m going to kill Griffin for putting us through all this. Then, if there’s time, I’ll get Robo Boy as well.”

  But he spoke quietly, to himself. Only the Old Man heard him. And when, a half hour later, the coals soaked with water and the half-roasted ankylosaur laid out for the scavengers, they lined up to step through the gate and out into the Crystal Gateway Marriott, Crystal City, Virginia, only he saw Leyster very carefully pick up a rock and slip it in his pocket.

  * * *

  The Old Man sighed, and opened the file folder on the desk before him. There were eight memos within. He read through them all carefully, then lifted one between thumb and forefinger and tore it in half.

  Things had worked out much better the second time around. There had only been two deaths. He had to admire Leyster for that. The man had done much better with his charges than he had the first time through.

  He regretted Lydia Pell’s death, of course, and that of the young man as well. But what was done was done. Second chances were so rare in this world to be almost miracles.

  He decided to take one last look at Gertrude, solitary and splendid. She was a rara avis, perhaps the rarest in his private aviary of colleagues, and he liked to look in on the old bird from time to time.

  A Lazarus taxon was one that disappeared from the fossil record, as if extinct, only to reappear later, as if rising from the dead. It pleased him to think of Dr. Gertrude Salley as humanity’s own Lazarus taxon. So long as she existed, the human race wasn’t really dead. Occasionally he paid her a visit, just to maintain her tenuous connection with humanity.

  Sometimes they played chess. He always won.

  Thus reminiscing, he opened a window into Gertrude’s tower, where she sat at her writing desk, working. Once, when he had done so, she had sensed his presence (she also had been given extraordinary tools) and, looking him directly in the eye, winked sardonically. Not today, though.

  It was just as well. This was too solemn a day for laughter. This was the day when everything ended.

  * * *

  He signed off on the last of the memos, and dumped them into the tray for outgoing mail. The enterprise was over. As of this instant, he was as good as retired.

  Slowly, he stood. The leather chair creaked as he did so, as if in sympathy for him. His body ached, but such pains came naturally with age. He was used to them.

  There was only one thing left to be done.

  20. Extinction Event

  Crystal City. Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.

  If the story could be said to have any end at all, then it ended on a bright spring day in Crystal City at the Crystal Gateway Marriott when some two hundred paleontologists gathered by invitation in the ballroom to watch army personnel assemble machinery unlike anything any of them had ever seen before and open a temporary gate through time.

  “Stand back, please,” an officer said. There was some shuffling about, but nobody moved away. “Please! Gentlemen. Ladies.” He was clearly unused to dealing with civilians, and his urgings had little effect. Finally, exasperated, he turned to his second-in-command and muttered, “Oh, the fuck with it. Throw the goddamned switch.”

  The switch was thrown.

  Something hummed.

  There was a flat metal plate on the floor, connected by thick cables to the alien equipment. The air above it puckered, crinkled, gleamed. A flat, circular area filled with sunshine as it opened into a brighter reality. The scientists squinted and shaded their eyes with their hands, straining to get a good look at what was happening.

  “I think I see—” somebody began, and was silenced by a chorus of shushings.

  Through that glowing disk stepped, one by one, the survivors of the stranded expedition. Leyster came first, scowling and clutching their field notes, and Tamara after him, with her spear. Jamal burst into a smile as he saw everybody waiting for them. Then came Lai-tsz, looking anxious, with Nathaniel on her shoulder, and after her Patrick, Daljit, and all the rest.

  Somebody began to applaud softly.

  Everyone joined in. A roar like surf filled the ballroom.

  A bald old man with a flamboyant white mustache hobbled forward and, with the utmost respect, took the notebooks from Leyster’s hands. Then, with sudden flair, he raised them high over his head, grinning.

  The applause redoubled.

  * * *

  Tamara was clutching her spear tightly in one hand, blinking at the flashing cameras and feeling disoriented, when she was suddenly overcome with the awareness of how bad she must smell. She looked around the ballroom, and then at the spear, and in a fit of revulsion, said, “Somebody take this thing away from me.”

  A dozen hands reached for it. “We’d like to include this in one of our displays, if you’d allow us,” a woman said. A lifetime ago, Tamara had known her. Linda Deck, was that her name? Something like that. From the Smithsonian. “And… maybe your necklace?”

  Tamara touched the tooth that Patrick had pierced for a length of cord and scrimshawed with a rather good likeness of the photo of her standing triumphant above the juvenile tranny. She flashed her teeth, and in a low, intense voice, said, “Over my dead body.”

  The woman took a step back in alarm, and in a moment of sudden empathy Tamara realized just how fierce they had all become. “Hey, never mind me,” she said, as kindly as she could. “Just point me toward a shower and three bars of soap, and I’ll be fine.”

  “We’ve booked a room for you.” The woman handed her a key card. “We booked rooms for everybody. There’s fresh clothes in there, too. Things you picked out for yourself next week.”

  “Thanks,” Tamara said. “Keep the spear.”

  * * *

  Patrick carried his photo disks, wrapped with obsessive care in scraps of their softest troodon leather, in both hands. All the storage space on them had been used, and much of it had been overwritten three to seventeen times. A man in a suit started to take them away from him and then, when he yanked his arms away, laughed and said, “Now, is that any way to treat your editor?”

  “What?”

  The man took the disks and gave him a presentation copy of the book that would be made from them. Disbelieving, Patrick leafed through it. Ankylosaurs wallowed in the river mud
. A tyrannosaur looked up suspiciously from its kill, blood streaming from open jaws. Pterosaurs skimmed low over the silvery surface of a lake. An unlucky dromaeosaur was caught in the act of being trampled under the feet of a charging triceratops.

  He looked up from a photograph of titanosaurs at dusk. “This was printed too dark. You can’t make out the details.”

  “Now, Patrick, we’ve already been through all—” The editor stopped. “At any rate, I’ve been through all that already, and I’m not really anxious to go over it again, particularly on a Sunday. Tomorrow morning you can drop by my office and start raising hell over color values. You’ll come over to my side by the end.” Then, ignoring Patrick’s obstinate look, “Let me buy you a drink. I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you’ve had a beer.”

  * * *

  Lai-tsz had been worried that her son would be frightened by the flash cameras, the noise, and the pervasive unfamiliarity of an age dominated by humans and their technology. She held Nathaniel in her arms, watching him crane about, those big brown eyes drinking everything in with calm intelligence. Then somebody stepped forward with a bouquet of Mylar balloons, and presented them to her.

  Nathaniel laughed and crowed at the sight of them.

  The modern world didn’t faze him a bit.

  She was completely involved in her son’s wonderment when a tall and lanky young man walked up to her and said, “Hi, Mom.”

  He enfolded the astonished Lai-tsz in his arms and kissed her on the forehead. “My little mother,” he said fondly. Then, “Hey, is this me?” He scooped up Nathaniel and hoisted him into the air, the both of them laughing. “I sure was a cute little fellow, wasn’t I?”