Bones of the Earth (33 page)

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 ever 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 jabberwockias. 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.

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 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. Overadapted 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.