Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

“We’ve looked,” Davenport said. “Enough dinosaurs survived the Event to repopulate the Earth with their kind within the millennium. Yet ten years later, there were only a fraction of the number of those that survived, and in a century, they were extinct. Why? Other animals adapted. Hell, there were dinosaurs that adapted—the birds. Why didn’t the rest? Non-avian dinosaurs had already survived the worst of it. Why couldn’t they adapt?”

Robo Boy leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. This was a trick he had learned in school. It made him look engrossed in the subject and allowed his mind the freedom to wander.

He shut out the speaker’s voice. Directly behind him, Leyster was murmuring something to the woman beside him, a gloss on what Davenport had just said. Robo Boy shut him out too.

He sank into the blissful silence of his own thoughts.

He despised the scientists for their constant inquisitive chatter, the way they leapt freely from possibility to possibility, postulating, positing, and speculating, with never an assurance that truth lay truly underfoot, unchanging, solid, inviolate. He could not live that way. If he were to admit, however briefly, that their tentative and provisional way might be valid, all certainty would dissolve within him, leaving nothing but chaos and the Pit. Stranding him in that emotional anomie he had inhabited before his Third Birth as a Midnight Christian. So he held them at an ironic distance. He spoke to them as from behind a mask—the mask of the worthless man he had been. In this way his old life had some value. It moved his new life closer to its validation.

Briefly, he thought about the time he had caught a glimpse of an angel. Then he wondered exactly when and where they might be—where they really were, as opposed to the party line of their atheistic humanist leaders. By his best guess, Robo Boy figured they were roughly six thousand years in the past, sometime between the Fall and the Flood. Physically, the camp lay somewhere east of Eden, in a land without flowers.

How astonishing to be alive in the time of the Patriarchs!

Sodom and Gomorrah were still thriving cities. Giants walked the Earth. Somewhere, Methuselah was living out his thousand years. Tubal-Cain was inventing metallurgy. The young Noah, perhaps, was seeking out a virtuous woman to be his wife. He felt blessed to be alive at such a time, and he thanked God for this blessing, and for the events that had brought him here.

It was a book that had changed his life, and a single sentence within that book which had done the work. The book was Darwin Antichrist, which he had bought to laugh at, and the sentence was, “If time travel is real, then why haven’t we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?”

If time travel is real—

It had never occurred to him to doubt the consensus version of reality before that very instant. And once he began to doubt it, layer upon layer of the humanist fallacy started to peel away, until all the world was dark and empty and held together only by an incomprehensible network of conspiracies.

–then why haven’t we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?

Of course! He closed his eyes, blind as Paul on the road to Damascus, his mind racing ahead of the page, anticipating the arguments that would lead him through the labyrinth of his meaningless existence and out into the light.

Toward God.

He had never thought much of God before. A white-haired old man on a throne in the clouds, hung up on the Sunday school blackboard, that was it. Now he realized God as something more subtle than that, an all-justifying power that entered into his heart and mind and skin like liquid lightning and made him impervious to scorn and error alike.

He did not ask why an all-loving God would create a false fossil record in order to deceive men and lead them away from the revealed truth. Robo Boy simply accepted it.

After his conversion, he had moved from organization to organization, always finding them lacking in commitment and zeal. At last, though, he had discovered deep creationism and the Thrice-Born Brotherhood: born once in the flesh, again in Christ, and a third time as warriors. They understood that defending God sometimes required extreme methods. They had opened his eyes. Under their tutelage, he’d proudly abandoned the conventional prayer-at-bedtime and church-on-Sunday beliefs he had been brought up in for a life of urgent commitment.

Before his conversion, the temptation to sin was omnipresent. He was weak. He lusted after women in his heart. Now, believing in prophecy and the inherent Tightness of his vow of chastity, he was born again and yet again.

The strictness of his conviction and righteousness made it his duty to convict those non-believers still mired in disbelief, in skepticism, in the Darwinian heresy. Few of them realized how badly they needed saving. But he was on a rescue mission, and where the fate of the world was at stake, it hardly mattered what became of a few souls. Or their bodies.

Davenport stopped speaking. Somebody began to clap, and then the others joined in.

Nobody applauded as loudly as he did.

The next day’s schedule had him working the time funnel in heavy rotation. First the juvenile gojirasaur was shipped forward as a present to the People’s Paleozoological Garden in Beijing. The famous Dr. Wu himself brought a crew of wranglers, lean young grad students who squatted on their heels when they ate their lunches out of cardboard containers with chopsticks, and joked casually among themselves as they worked under his stern eye.

Leyster emerged from his obsessive checking and re-checking of the Baseline Project’s provisions to shake the great man’s hand, and receive a few words of recognition in exchange. Then the camp director showed up, and the three of them solemnly examined the caged gojirasaur while the wranglers stood back in silent witness to this moment of shared celebrity.

The theropod itself was a beautiful creature. Its skin was leaf-green, mottled with splotches of yellow. Even its eyes—alert and quietly watchful—were yellow. There was little room for it to move within the cage, and so it stood still. There was a tense menace to its calm, though. Once, a wrangler placed a hand carelessly upon the cage, and the gojirasaur almost bit off her fingers. She danced backwards from its snapping teeth while her peers laughed.

Then they slid iron bars through the underside of the cage and hoisted it inside the time funnel. The Chinese delegation placed themselves carefully within as well, and Robo Boy checked off their names and threw the switch.

They were gone.

Ten minutes later the buzzer sounded, and he had to muscle out two pallets of supplies: toilet paper, restaurant-size tins of food, brush hooks, shotgun shells, a remote-operated hovercam, canvas shower-bags, powdered soap, fungicide cream, tampons, a banjo, and a bundle of scientific journals. Nothing either interesting or unusual. But everything had to be accounted for, recorded, and stowed away.

At last Leyster’s people began to arrive for the Baseline Project expedition. They trickled in by twos and threes, laughing and chatting, and they all got in the way of Robo Boy’s re-packing of the pallets that Leyster had torn apart to make sure nothing had been left out. Several greeted him by name.

He spoke curtly when he could not avoid speaking at all. Only rarely did he look up from his clipboard. Robo Boy had a reputation for surliness, and it helped keep people at a distance.

Which was useful. Nobody was looking at him when he placed the time beacon carefully atop the third pallet, and lashed it tight with nylon cord. Nobody saw how nervous he was.

Ready hands helped him slide the pallet into the cage. He backed out, mumbling, “Okay, it’s all yours.”