Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

The video had been made under almost comically excessive secrecy. He was taken blindfolded at night to a cabin in the mountains to film a man wearing thin gloves and a ski mask while he slowly and lovingly assembled a bomb to the accompaniment of a synthetic-voice narrative. He hired actors to play the parts of Ranch strategists in what they thought were scripted fictions, then muffled their voices and electronically altered their faces, to protect those strategists even further.

“How many videos did you make?” Tom Navarro asked. “When did you start?”

“We made a lot. How to build a bomb. How to plant it. How to infiltrate a hostile organization. Hiding your faith. Passing yourself off as a godless humanist. I lost count. Maybe one a month for the past year?”

“That’s a lot of work for so little time,” Amy Cho observed.

“No third takes, no re-shoots, no catering,” the defector said with a touch of pride. “It may not be pretty, but it’s efficient. I gave them good value, and I brought their films in under budget.”

“And they dumped you.”

“We had a falling-out, yes.”

Molly checked the transcript on her administrative assistant. “We seem to have skipped over the cause of your dismissal.”

“He was running a porn site,” Tom said. “Anonymously, it goes without saying. The Ranch probably would’ve never found out if he hadn’t gotten the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of their administrators involved.”

The defector glanced at him scornfully. “It was her own idea, made freely and without coercion. It wasn’t exploitative at all.”

“It was a so-called ‘Christian porn site,’ ” Tom explained. “That had to be what made them angriest. They hate those things. They think the very name is rank hypocrisy. Know what? I think they have a point.”

“I’m having trouble picturing such a thing,” Molly said.

“Biblical scenes. Girls in short skirts kneeling in church. The joys of wedded bliss. Saints being flogged and tortured.”

“Those were faked. Do I really have to put up with this?”

“We’re only establishing why they let you go,” Tom said. “I hear the folks at the Ranch are saying some pretty harsh things about you.”

“They should talk. They’re not Christians! Christians are supposed to forgive. I made a mistake and I admitted it. Did they forgive me? After all my work? Like hell they did.”

“Of course, dear,” Amy Cho said. “Tom, you’re not to behave like this.”

Tom turned away from the defector, as if in anger, but really, Molly knew from long experience with him, to hide his smile.

Hours later, the preliminary interview was finally done.

“What a piece of work,” Molly said to her partner afterward, when only the two of them were left in their respective conference rooms. “How much do you think we can get out of him?”

“Well, he doesn’t know a third as much as he thinks he does, and he’ll have to be coddled in order to tell us half of that. The Ranch has been careful to keep him away from their mole, and the only times he’s actually met any of their operatives, they made sure he didn’t learn their identities. On the other hand, he knows exactly what kind of explosives they’ll be using, the type of incident they hope to create, and which scientists are their most likely targets.”

“So he really can be as useful as I think?”

“Oh, yes.”

By the time Molly Gerhard joined the afternoon session, it was almost over. She didn’t mind. She’d heard Leyster—an older Leyster, admittedly—present it several times before. He invariably began by observing that his lecture before this later, better-informed generation should have been titled “A Fossil Speaks.”

Then, after polite laughter, he’d say, “I admit to feeling a little uncomfortable speaking to you. I’ve only been in the field—exposed to the living reality of the Dinosauria—for a little over a year, and everyone here is a full lifetime ahead of me. So much of what I think I know is surely outdated by now! What could I possibly have to contribute to your understanding?”

He’d look down briefly, then, as if in thought. “A few years ago, my time—a few decades in yours—I was involved with what seemed to me the most wonderfully informative fossil anybody had ever found. I’m speaking of the Burning Woman predation site, which I wrote about in a book called The Claws That Grab. Some of you may have read it.” He always looked surprised when they applauded the book. “Uh… Thank you. It seemed to me to provide a perfect test case for calibrating our earlier observations. How close did we come? How short did we fall? We could not, for obvious reasons, hope to locate the original site, but predation was not uncommon in the Mesozoic…”

From which point, he’d get down to specifics about the Burning Woman tracks, what aspects he’d read correctly and which had turned out to be wrong in surprising ways. He was not a brilliant speaker. He fumbled words and dropped sentences and went back and started to re-read them and stopped midway through to apologize. But the students never minded. He knew what they needed to hear. He showed them what it was like to think brilliantly about their discipline.

That lecture always lit a fire in them.

She entered the lecture hall just as the question-and-answer session ended. There was a tremendous roar of applause, and while the front rows converged upon the speaker, the back rows emptied quickly into the hallway outside. There the students clustered into knots, excitedly discussing what they’d just heard.

Molly Gerhard experienced a kind of culture shock, encountering these sober gen-twos after the more freewheeling gen-threes. It was like traveling back to the Victorian era. Port and cigars in the library, and scientists who wore formal clothes to autopsies.

Leyster moved slowly up the aisle, chatting with anyone who approached him. He was back among his own.

Molly’s primary mission today was to make an impression on as many grad students as possible, so that when she popped up in the Mesozoic, it wouldn’t seem suspicious. Somebody would remember meeting her and she wouldn’t be an inexplicably unqualified stranger but, rather, Dick Leyster’s unqualified niece. A clear-cut case of nepotism and not a mystery at all.

She closed her eyes, listening for the loudest voice of the many in the hall. Then she headed straight for the clique of students from which it originated, and waltzed right in.

“—body talks about land bridges,” the speaker was saying. She almost didn’t recognize Salley, who was apparently trying out a new and transient look involving red dye and a razor cut. “That’s because their teachers made such a big deal about the Bering Strait land bridge in grammar school. But land bridges between continents are rare. The more common way of getting around is island hopping.”

“You mean, swimming from island to island?” somebody asked.

“The islands would have to be damned close together for that. No, I’m talking plate tectonics. There are a couple of ways it could happen. You could have a microplate raft off across the ocean. The Baha Southern California microplate is moving up the coast, but if it were heading westward, it would fetch up against Siberia in a few tens of millions of years—these things happen. Or you could have a new island chain formed by a plate margin coming up. The dinos could cross the ocean without even being aware of it.”

“Is this commonly accepted,” Molly asked, “or is it your own theory?”

Salley stopped. “Excuse me. Who did you say you were?”

“Molly Gerhard. I’m Dick Leyster’s niece.”