Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

“I was running inventory.” He waved his clipboard at the shelves.

“Can it be done another time?”

“Yes.”

“Then leave.”

Robo Boy put the flimsies of his time transit report form into an envelope pre-stamped TTR(TR3/Carnian) and stuck it into the outgoing mailbox. He took his slicker off its hook.

The Irishman leaned back against the shelves, arms folded, and stared at Robo Boy speculatively.

A stab of fear shot through him. He’d been found out! But no, if he had, they’d have arrested him long ago. He assumed the stubborn look his mother had always called his “pig face” and went out into the rain, letting the door slam behind him.

He didn’t look back, but he knew from experience that the Irishman’s attention had already shifted away from him. He had that effect on people. They thought he was a jerk.

He knew how to act like a jerk because he used to be one.

“Hey, Robo Boy,” somebody said in a friendly way. A girl matched strides with him. It was Leyster’s cousin, Molly. She wore a transparent hooded slicker over basic paleo-drag: khaki shorts, blouse, and a battered hat.

“My name is Raymond,” he said stiffly. “I don’t know why everybody persists in calling me by that ridiculous nickname.”

“I dunno. It suits you. Listen, I wanted to ask your advice about getting a job.”

“My advice? Nobody asks for my advice.”

“Well, everybody says you’ve had more transfers than anyone, so I figured you’d know the ropes. Hey, have you heard the rumors?”

“What rumors?”

“About Leyster and Salley and the Baseline Project.”

Molly was, in Robo Boy’s estimation, as harmless as anyone could be, a chatterbox and a bit of an airhead and not much else. Still, he didn’t want her to know how interested he might be in the Baseline Project. So he sighed in a way that he knew from experience girls didn’t like, and waved a hand at the mud and tents and spare utilitarian structures of the camp, and said, “Tell me something. Why would you want a job in a place like this?”

“I just love dinosaurs, I guess.”

“Then you’re in the wrong place. The Carnian is—” They’d come to the cook tent. It was where he’d been headed all along. “Look, why don’t we go inside and discuss it there?”

Molly smiled brightly. “Okay!” She led the way in.

Robo Boy followed, scowling down at her ass. Molly had curly red hair. He thought she wasn’t wearing a bra, but she wore her blouse so loosely he couldn’t be sure.

“The Carnian is a lousy place to look for dinosaurs,” he explained over a cup of tea. “That’s one reason everyone is so worked up over the gojirasaur—they’re rare. All the action here is in synapsids and non-dinosaurian archosaurs. They’re the ones who are busily speciating and competing for dominance of the community. The early dinosaurs are just bit players. But a funny thing is about to happen. The synapsids are going to take a major hit in the evolutionary sweepstakes. Most lines will die out completely. The only ones that’ll survive into the Jurassic are mammals, and then only because they colonized the small-animal niche. Which is where they’ll be stuck until the end of the Mesozoic and the onset of the Cenozoic. Following this so far?”

Molly nodded.

“Okay, now the non-dino archosaurs also suffer a reduction in diversity. But among the archosaurs is a group called the pseudosuchians, and their descendants include all the crocodilians. So they do pretty well. And dinosaurs come up winners. From the Triassic on, the Mesozoic belongs to them.

“But it’s important to understand that whatever favored dinos was opportunistic, not competitive.”

“Which means?”

“It means they didn’t supplant their rivals because they were inherently superior. Some of those archosaur groups are as hot-blooded as any dino. But the volcanic event that opened up the Atlantic Ocean changed the environment in ways that favored dinosaurs over their rivals. They just got lucky.”

He folded his arms smugly.

It was a good performance. He’d rattled off the lies as if he meant them, pedantically and with just the right touch of condescension. It astonished him how carefully Molly listened.

But then she said, “So do you think I could get a job in supplies, like you? I mean, it looks pretty simple. You just move things around with a fork lift, right?”

“No, I do not.” He didn’t have to fake his irritation. “They use fork lifts at the far end, where there’s plenty of electrical energy. I use a hand truck.” Supplies were shipped down the funnel in bundles lashed to pallets, and thus he measured the work in pallets. Three pallets was a light day, and ten was more work than he could do without help. “Everything gets loaded and unloaded by hand.”

“Cool. So how did you get your position in the first place?”

“I was transferred.”

It was easy to get transfers if you were a hard worker and willing to take on the grunt jobs nobody else wanted. Robo Boy was careful to make himself unpopular so that when he applied for a transfer, nobody ever made a strong effort to keep him. He had wandered from job to job, seemingly aimlessly, until he ended up deep in the Triassic, with complete control over the supplies and shipping, and, not coincidentally, one nexus of the time funnel.

“Well, how did you get your first gig?”

“I started out with a masters in geology. I got really good grades. I wrote my thesis on some stratigraphic problems that the people here were interested in.”

“That doesn’t sound like a terribly viable option for me,” Molly said.

“No, it doesn’t. Now what’s all this about Leyster and Salley?” He crossed his arms and leaned back, masking his interest with a skeptical expression.

Molly flashed that brainless smile of hers. “They’re going to be working on the Baseline Project. Together. If you can imagine that.”

“I find that hard to—wait a minute. That’s supposed to be a gen-three project.”

“Griffin’s promoting them both. At least that’s the offer he’s putting on the table. But can you picture either of them turning him down? Leyster’s pre-2034, so he’ll have to be shifted forward in time. But that’s not much of a sacrifice for him. Most of his friends are in paleontology, and I’m the only one in the family he’s actually close to.”

“I can’t picture those two working together. Who gets to be the boss?”

“Neither. Both. One’s in charge of the camp, and the other’s in charge of specimen collection. Lucky for them, they’ll be bossing around a batch of grad students so green they won’t have any idea what a fucked-up arrangement that is.”

“Huh,” Robo Boy said.

Briefly, he wondered how Molly had come into possession of such juicy inside dirt. Surely not from the notoriously close-mouthed Leyster. Did she have contacts in Administration?

He would have liked to ask her. But that wouldn’t be in character.

That was on Tuesday. Three days later a big rhynchosaur roast was held to celebrate the end of survival training. Everybody had too much beer, and then they built a campfire to sit around, though the nights never really got cold enough to need it. Leyster got up and made a little speech, and then introduced their guest-lecturer.

Sylvia Davenport was a generation-three researcher from Ring Station, located a hundred years into the aftermath. She stood by the campfire and talked to the new recruits about the K-T extinctions. Robo Boy listened scornfully from the shadows.

The upper Triassic was buggy and humid. The survival camp was, anyway, and he didn’t really care what it was like elsewhere. He never left the camp on expeditions or field trips, but stayed at home always, operating the commissary.