Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

The Old Man shook his head. “Read the report. Then play it the way it’s written.”

Reluctantly, Griffin opened the folder. He turned the cover page, folded it flat, and began to read.

Halfway down the first page, he stopped.

“You’ve made a mistake here. I wasn’t supposed to see the list of casualties.”

“That was deliberate. I felt you were ready.”

“Damn you,” Griffin said vehemently. He could see no operational or administrative reason why he should know this information. Only malice could account for its disclosure. “Why implicate me in this? There’s a big difference between sending people into a dangerous situation, and sending them out to die.”

“Not so big as you might think.”

“It’s murder, plain and simple.”

The Old Man said nothing to this, nor did Griffin expect him to. He slowly read through to the very end of the report, sighed, and said, “So that’s why Leyster hates me. God help me. If I’d known, I would’ve been easier on the poor bastard.”

“These things happen.”

“Because we allow them to!”

“They happen because they happen. We dare not interfere. Don’t pretend you don’t know why.”

To this, Griffin had no reply.

The Old Man went to the window and adjusted the blinds. Griffin winced as the late afternoon sun hit his eyes. Outside, a land rover had arrived and was surrounded by enthusiastic grad students. He gestured with his still-untouched glass. “Look at them. So young and full of energy. Not a one of them has the faintest notion how contingent their universe is.”

He twisted the blinds shut again, leaving Griffin dazzled and blinded. “They’re all going to die. Sooner or later. Everyone dies.”

“But not because of me. Damn it, I won’t do it! I’ll tear the whole rotten system apart with my bare hands first. I swear I will!”

But it was empty bluster, and they both knew it.

“Everybody dies. So much of growing up consists of coming to grips with this fact.” The Old Man again put down his glass and opened his attaché. This time he emerged with a brown paper bag, which he upended over the desk. The object it contained rolled noisily out. “This is for you.”

It was a human skull.

The skull had not been long in the ground—a few decades at most. A patch of fine green moss discolored one cheek. There were fillings in the teeth.

Griffin’s mouth went dry. “Whose is it?”

“Whose do you think?” The Old Man crumpled up the bag and stuffed it in a pocket. Then he drank down the bourbon he’d been holding all this while, abandoned the glass, and turned to leave. At the door, he paused and said, “Memento mori. Remember you must die.”

He closed the door quietly behind him, leaving Griffin staring, horrified, at the skull the Old Man had given him.

His own.

Crossing the compound toward the building housing the time funnel, Griffin saw the young paleontologist who had been his guide that morning, helping move a newly-captured velociraptor from the land rover to one of the outdoor pens in the rear of the animal colony. He stopped to watch. She was one of three who had choke-sticks looped around its throat. It struggled ferociously, but could not reach any of them with its wickedly sharp claws. A wrangler stood by with an electric rifle in case it broke loose.

She was glowing with sweat and exertion, and grinning like a madwoman. It was obvious to Griffin that this was the single finest moment of her life to date.

“Are you coming, sir?”

“In a minute, Jimmy. You go ahead. I’ll be right with you.”

He waited until the animal had been successfully caged, and then approached the young woman. “That was a fine job you did this morning, leading the tour group.”

“Uh… thank you, sir.”

“I am not without influence. I want you to know that I’m going to recommend you for a promotion to full-time public relations. There are no guarantees, of course. But if you persevere, I can see you heading up the entire department in not that many years.” The woman stared at him in bafflement. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Keep up the good work. We’re proud of you.”

Then he strode off, careful not to look back. In his mind, he could see her turning to the nearest bystander, and asking Who was that? He could see her eyes widen with horror at the answer.

Sometimes in order to achieve any good whatsoever, you simply had to lie to people.

Griffin hated that too.

Bohemia Station: Mesozoic era. Jurassic period. Malm epoch. Tithonian age. 150 My B.C.E.

Salley awoke to the sound of camptosaurs singing.

She sighed and stretched out on her cot, one arm brushing against the mosquito netting, but did not get up. Salley never awoke easily. Not even on a day like today.

A day when she intended to change the world.

Nobody knew why camptosaurs sang. Salley thought it was out of joy, pure and simple. But that was going to be hard to prove. So she had other theories as well, some published and others she had simply made known. She had learned at an early age that it was not how often you were wrong that counted in science, but how often you were right. One startling hit covered a multitude of bad guesses.

So she had also posited that camptosaurs sang as a means of keeping the herd together. That their song was simply phatic noise, a way of reassuring each other that everything was okay. That by announcing their numbers, they warned predators away—be off, sirrah, we are too many for you! That they were comparing the taste and savor of the vegetation.

Honest to God, though, it sounded to her like joy.

Outside, an internal combustion engine roared to life. Two people walked past her tent, sleepily arguing the phylogenetic position of segnosaurs. Somebody rang the breakfast bell. Like a slumbering beast, the camp stirred lazily and shook itself out of its drowse.

Salley turned over on her stomach, reached under the netting, and felt around on the floor for her clothes. She really ought to do some picking up while the day was young—the tent would be hot as an oven by noon, and by the time it cooled down she expected to be long gone. But the way she saw it, you only had so much organization in your life. You had to choose: Invest it in your research, or fritter it away on housework.

Her socks were clean enough to wear for a second day, which seemed to her a particularly good omen.

The mess tent was filling up with chatter and coffee fumes. Salley snagged a tray and stood in line for sausages and grits.

She chose an empty table in an obscure corner of the dining tarp, half hoping Monk Kavanagh would sleep late and she could have some privacy for a change. But no such luck. She’d barely begun eating when he slid onto the bench beside her and flicked on his recorder.

The historian was a bald and hulking old man with a pink face as soft and crinkled as tissue paper and a tidy white mustache. He greeted her with an obnoxious little smirk that was evidently meant to be endearing. “You look like you’ve had a rough night.”

“Being in the field is a lot like Girl Scout camp. Except Girl Scouts usually don’t have next-door neighbors who like to invite their boyfriends into their tents and have screaming orgasms into the small hours of the morning.”

“Oh? Anybody of note?”

Salley shut her eyes and took a long sip of coffee. “Okay, where was I?”

“You’d just been asked to leave the university.”

“God! What a fucking mess. Do we really have to talk about that?”

“Well, it’s part of our history, after all.”

Four years ago, Salley had been caught up in an intellectual-theft scandal that almost destroyed her career. She had been sleeping with her advisor, a man better known for his fieldwork than his teaching skills, and some of his ideas found their way into one of her papers.