Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

“Wait. You know Leyster? Personally.”

“Well, I should, he’s—”

Taking Molly’s elbow, Salley steered herself away from the others, leaving the conversation unfinished. “What’s he like?”

“Um… stern, a little shy, kind of internal, you know?”

“I’m not interested in that kind of cult-of-personality crap,” Salley said impatiently. “Tell me what he’s like as a researcher.”

“Well, I’m not a paleontologist myself—”

“I can tell.” Salley dropped her arm as Leyster’s group moved past them. Abandoning Molly, she went hurrying after.

In Just a Dino Girl, Monk Kavanaugh had written of this very lecture that “Salley sat in the back row, enraptured. There was so much going on in Leyster’s brain! She knew there were things he suspected, or speculated, or intuited, that he was not about to say aloud because he could not prove them. She wanted to pry these secret possibilities out of him. She wanted to see him fly.”

By sheer luck, Molly had chanced upon a moment that was famous in paleontological gossip. She decided to tag along. She had never seen anything happen that would later wind up in a book.

She caught up just as Salley held up a battered, much-read copy of Leyster’s book and asked for his autograph. She saw Leyster’s modest smile, the way his hand dipped automatically into a pocket for his pen. “It’s not really very good,” he said. “It was the best I could do, given what we knew then, but so much of what we knew then was wrong.”

Then, overriding her polite protests, he asked, “Do you want it inscribed? Yes? How should I make it out?”

“To G. S. Salley. I don’t use my—”

“You!” He slammed the book shut and shoved it back into her hands. “Can’t I get rid of you?”

He turned his back on her, and strode away. Molly, watching, saw Salley’s look of bewilderment harden into anger. Then she too spun around, and stormed off in the opposite direction.

Just a Dino Girl also told how Salley, returning to her own time, would condense Leyster’s talk into a tightly-argued critique of his original work and submit it for publication to a geosciences journal. By luck, nobody involved in the peer review was in on the secret of time travel or, if they were, had heard Leyster’s lecture. She was careful not to use any information that wasn’t available in her own time, and so avoided the wrath of Griffin’s people. The paper, when it came out, did much to augment her professional luster and to diminish Leyster’s as well.

Molly had less than an hour before she had to escort Leyster back to D.C. She filled it as well as she could.

On the way to the limo, they turned a corner and almost walked into Salley. Leyster turned his head away. Salley’s face went white.

You’ve given her a knife, Molly thought. Then you spat in her face, and dared her to use it. That would be bad enough. But now you’ve turned your back on her. As if she were harmless.

Leyster really was a royal screw-up. But Molly didn’t say that. Nor did she tell him that he was a primary target of the Ranch’s terrorists. Molly never said anything without a definite end in mind.

Xanadu Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Gallic epoch. Turonian age. 95 My B.C.E.

Tom and Molly’s report lay unread on Griffin’s desk, the first of fifteen such from the team he’d assembled to deal with the creation terrorist threat. All fifteen were from different times, and they were all marked Urgent. He wasn’t sure yet which he would read, and in what order. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know.

The mere fact of opening a report had an almost metaphysical dimension. It collapsed the infinite range of possibilities that might yet be into a single unalterable account of what was. It turned the future into the past. It traded the lively play of free will for the iron shackles of determinism.

Sometimes ignorance was your only friend.

“Sir?” It was Jimmy Boyle. “The Undersea Ball is about to begin.”

Griffin hated fund-raisers. But it was his misfortune to be good at this sort of thing. “Is my tux in fashion?” he asked. “Exactly when is this lot from, anyway?”

“The 2090s, sir. Your suit is twenty years out of date, the same as everyone else’s. You’ll fit right in.”

“You haven’t seen the Old Man snooping around, have you?”

“Are you expecting him?”

“Good Lord, I hope not. But I’ve got a feeling about tonight. Something bad is going to happen. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if this weren’t the night that the Unchanging finally decided to revoke our time travel privileges.”

Jimmy’s habitually sad face twisted into a homely smile. “You just don’t like formal affairs.” The older Jimmy got, the more comforting his presence was. He was close to retirement age now, ripe with wisdom, and, through experience, grown almost infinitely tolerant. “You always talk like this before one.”

“That’s true enough. Do you have my cheat sheet?”

Wordlessly, Jimmy handed it over.

Griffin turned his back on the reports, leaving them all unread. But as he did, his arm swung up and without thinking he glanced down at his watch: 8:10 P.M. personal time. 3:17 P.M. local time.

It was his own private superstition that as long as he didn’t know what time it was, things were still fluid enough for him to maintain some semblance of control over events. It seemed a poor omen to start the evening with this small defeat.

The view from Xanadu was like none other in the Mesozoic. Griffin knew. He’d been everywhere, from the lush green stillness of the Induan era at its outset to the desolation of Ring Station, a hundred years into the aftermath of the Chicxulub impactor strike that ended it. Xanadu was special.

Sunk in the shallow waters of the Tethys Sea, Xanadu was a bubble of blue-green glass anchored and buttressed by rudist reefs that twenty-second-century biotechnicians had shaped and trained to their purposes. From the outside, it looked like a Japanese fishing float partially encrusted in barnacles. Within, one stood bathed in shifting, watery light and immersed in a wealth of life.

It was altogether beautiful.

A pianist played Cole Porter in the background. Guests were arriving, being shown to their tables, politely considering the ocean around them, the giant strands of seaweed, the swarms of ammonites, the jewellike teleosts in rich profusion.

But then an armada of waiters swept into the room, trays held high, bringing in the hors d’oeuvres; pliosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga caviar smeared over sliced hesperornis egg, grilled and shredded enigmasaur on toast, a dozen delicacies more.

It was like a conjuring trick. Attention shifted and in an instant nobody was looking out at the wonder surrounding them.

Except for one. A thirteen-year-old girl stood by the window, drinking it all in. She had a pocket guide and, now and then when something flashed by, she’d hold it up quickly to catch the image and get an ID. As Griffin watched, a twenty-foot-long fish swam slowly up and eyed her malevolently through the glass.

It was ugly as sin. Sharp teeth jutted out between enormous lips of a mouth that thrust sharply downward. Those teeth, that mouth, and its unblinking, indignant gaze gave the fish a pugnacious appearance. But either the guide wasn’t working properly, or she couldn’t get the right angle, because whenever the girl looked down at it, her eyes flashed with annoyance and she held it up again.

Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, Griffin strolled over to her side. “Xiphactinus audax,” he said. “Commonly known as the bulldog fish. For obvious reasons.”