Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

Griffin took his seat.

Griffin was a fast reader. Still, it took him over an hour to absorb everything. When he was done, he covered his eyes with his hands. “You want me to use Leyster and Salley as bait.”

“Yes.”

“Knowing what will happen to them.”

“Yes.”

“You’re prepared to let people die.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a god-damned filthy thing to do.”

“From my perspective, it was a god-damned filthy thing to do. You’ll do it, though. I’m sure of that much.”

Griffin stared long and hard into the Old Man’s eyes.

Those eyes fascinated and repulsed Griffin. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime’s accumulation of wrinkles. He’d been working with the Old Man since he was first recruited for the project, and they were still a mystery to him, absolutely opaque. They made him feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.

He hadn’t touched his bourbon yet. But when he reached for it, the Old Man took the glass and poured it back into the decanter. He capped it and put it back in the cabinet. “You don’t need that stuff.”

“You’ve been drinking it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a lot older than you are.”

Griffin wasn’t sure how old the Old Man was. There were longevity treatments available for those who played the game, and the Old Man had been playing this lousy game so long he practically ran it. All Griffin knew for sure was that he and the Old Man were one and the same person.

Overcome with loathing, Griffin said, “You know, I could slit my wrists tonight, and then where would you be?”

That hit home. For a long moment the Old Man did not speak. Possibly he was thinking of the consequences of such a major paradox. It would bring their sponsors down on them like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively. Everything connected with it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Xanadu and a score of other research stations up and down the Mesozoic would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of hundreds of scientists would vanish from human knowing. Everything Griffin had spent his life working to accomplish would be undone.

He didn’t know that he’d regret that.

“Listen,” the Old Man said at last. “You remember that day in the Peabody?”

“You know I do.”

“I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart—all your heart—that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. That some things could never be.”

Griffin said nothing.

“God hands you a miracle,” the Old Man said, “you don’t throw it back in his face.”

Then he left.

Griffin remained.

Thinking of the Old Man’s eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn’t tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, Griffin still couldn’t tell if those were the eyes of a saint or those of the most evil man in the world.

Griffin thought of those eyes.

His own eyes.

Loathing himself, he set to work.

Survival Station: Mesozoic era. Triassic period. Tr3 epoch. Camianage. 225 My B.C.E.

The important thing was to maintain a scientific frame of mind. He was being tested. When Griffin popped out of the time funnel early, with his Irish shadow in tow, Robo Boy knew exactly how to act and what to say.

“They trapped a dwarf coelophysid in the highlands the other day.” He accepted their credentials through the slot in the cage door and carefully compared the photos against their faces. “Everybody was all excited.” He checked their names against the schedule on his clipboard. “It was less than two feet long.” He ran the papers through a text verifier, waited for the light to flash green. “They’re calling it Nanogojirasaurus.” The light flashed. “But Maria thinks it’s just a juvenile.”

He unlocked the heavy, iron-barred door and they stepped out of the cage. A monotonous rain was drumming on the supply room’s roof. The shelves were thronged with boxes and bundles. A single lightbulb overhead filled the empty spaces between them with shadows and mystery.

“Why aren’t the chairs set up yet?” Griffin asked. He clamped a hand over his wrist, glared down at it, and said, “I can’t spare much time. I’m only stopping over on my way to the Induan.”

“You weren’t supposed to arrive for another two hours,” Robo Boy pointed out.

The Irishman took the clipboard from his hands, scribbled out what Robo Boy had written, and wrote a later time above it. “Sometimes things don’t happen exactly when it says they did in the record. It’s a security measure.”

The buzzer sounded, announcing another arrival.

With a heavy iron clank, a new car filled the cage. Robo Boy snatched back his clipboard.

Salley stepped out of the cage.

“They trapped a dwarf coelophysid in the highlands the other day,” he said, holding out his hand for the woman’s credentials. “Everybody was all excited.”

“It was a juvenile,” Salley said. “I read Maria Caporelli’s paper about it. I’m gen-two, remember?” To Griffin, she said, “Can’t you cut through all of this bureaucratic rigamarole for me?”

“Of course.” Griffin nodded to the Irishman, who leaned forward and threw the latch. Salley stepped out into the room.

“Hey!” Robo Boy objected. But the Irishman clapped a hand on his shoulder and quietly said, “Let me give you a wee bit of advice, son. Don’t try so hard. You’ll get a lot further in life if you cut people a little slack.”

Robo Boy flushed and retreated, as he always did, into his work. First he set up four chairs. Then the folding table. Finally, glasses and a pitcher of water that had been chilled by keeping the jerrycan right next to the cage.

Meetings were held in the storage room because it was so much cooler than outside. The time funnel acted as a heat sink, sucking warmth from the ambient air and re-radiating it out into the darkness between stations. Nobody knew exactly where the heat went. The funnel itself had been mathematically modeled as a multidimensional crack in time, and no one had yet figured out a way to probe beyond its walls.

While Griffin neatly positioned papers across the tabletop and Salley poured herself a glass of water, Robo Boy returned the jerrycan to its place beside the time beacon. The beacon was an integral part of the funnel mechanism, anchoring the funnel to this particular instant. Without it, they would be unfindable, an infinitesimally small instant of duration in the shoreless ocean of time. Occasionally he thought how easy it would be to smash the beacon and maroon them all. Always he was stopped by the thought of spending the rest of his life with Darwinian atheists.

The door outside slammed open.

“Hello?” Somebody stood blinking in the steaming wash of hot and humid air. “Anybody here?”

Leyster stepped into the room.

He closed the door behind him, and hung up his slicker on a peg alongside it. Then he turned and saw Salley.

“Hello, Leyster.” A tentative smile, there and gone. She looked quickly away. Leyster, in his turn, muttered something polite and scraped up a chair.

Was it as obvious to everyone else, Robo Boy wondered? The way the two of them were so painfully conscious of each other? How their gazes danced about the room, toward and away from each other, without ever actually connecting? Surely they were all aware of it, whether they acknowledged it or not.

“You two know each other,” Griffin said. “There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. However, I’m sure you’ll agree that the Baseline Project is important enough to set aside whatever personal—” He stopped, and said to Robo Boy, “Why are you still here?”