Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

Leyster turned, puzzled. “What?”

“In sixty seconds, an explosive charge will destroy the time beacon. Please stand clear so you won’t be hurt.”

It was Robo Boy’s voice.

The surreal intrusion of someone he knew to be millions of years distant bewildered Leyster for an instant. He watched, uncomprehending, as Lydia Pell tore at one of the pallets like a terrier, wildly throwing packs and boxes aside. She emerged with the time beacon.

“You have fifty seconds.”

The voice came from the beacon itself.

There was a Swiss Army knife in Pell’s hand. She shoved a blade into the seam of the beacon’s casing and twisted, breaking it open.

“You have forty seconds.”

The top half of the beacon went flying away. She reached down into the bottom half.

To Leyster’s eye, there was nothing to differentiate one part of the beacon’s innards from another. It was all chips, transistors, and multicolored wiring. But Lydia Pell clearly knew what she was looking for. She’d been an officer in the U.S. Navy before going for her postgraduate degree, he knew. Hadn’t somebody said something about her having been in demolitions?

“You have thirty seconds. Please take this warning seriously.”

She wrenched something free. The bottom half of the beacon fell to the ground.

Lydia Pell turned away from the others, and shouted over her shoulder, “Everybody get down! I’m going to throw—”

“You have twenty seconds,” the device said.

Then it went off in her hands.

Gillian was saying something, but Leyster couldn’t tell what. His ears rang terribly from the explosion. He couldn’t hear a thing.

He was the first to reach Lydia Pell’s body.

The terrible thing was that she wasn’t dead. Her face was gray and streaked with blood. One hand had been almost blown away, and the other was hanging by a shred of flesh. What remained of her blouse was darkening to crimson. But she wasn’t dead.

Leyster whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Lydia’s wrist, above the exposed bone. I’m going to have nightmares about this, he thought as he pulled it tight. I’ll never be able to get these images out of my mind. To the far side of the body, Gillian was making a tourniquet for the other arm.

Small fragments of the bomb specked Lydia Pell’s face. One larger shard had torn quite a gouge in her cheek. A little higher and she would have lost an eye. Daljit knelt by her head and, bending low, began daintily extracting the fragments with a pair of tweezers.

Keep calm, Leyster thought. There would be trauma. There might be concussion. There was always shock. Keep her warm. Elevate the feet. Check for other wounds. Don’t panic.

It took a while to stop the bleeding. But they did. Then they cushioned her head, and elevated her feet. They cleaned and bandaged her wounds. They made up a cot, and eased her onto it. Twelve willing hands gently carried the cot into a tent.

By the time Leyster could hear again, there was nothing more to do for her.

A light drizzle was falling.

Leyster slogged uphill, following what he sincerely hoped was an abandoned dromaeosaur trail. Lai-tsz trudged along behind him. At first they had talked about the paucity of local fauna, and why, in the week since the titanosaurs had left, they had not seen any dinosaurs. Then, as Smoke Hollow fell behind them, and they were confident they would not be overheard, their talk turned to more serious matters.

“Can the time beacon be repaired?” Leyster asked.

“God only knows.”

“You’re the only one here with any substantive knowledge of electronics.”

“Substantive! I’ve torn apart a few computers, patched together a couple of motherboards, hyper-configged a new device or two. There’s a big distance between that and repairing something that was probably built a thousand years in the future. In our home future, I mean. Sometime after the Third Millennium.”

“So you’re saying… what? Tell me you’re not saying that you can’t fix it.”

“I’m saying I don’t know. I’ll do my best. But Pell ripped the hell out of the innards, getting that bomb out. Even if I can fix it, it’ll take time.”

“Listen,” Leyster said. “If anybody asks, tell them you’ve got a handle on it. Say it’ll take you a week or two, a month at the outside. I don’t want the crew fixating on the possibility that we might be stranded here permanently. Morale is bad enough as it is.”

Lai-tsz made a short, sharp sound midway between a laugh and a snort. “I’ll say! Everybody’s at each other’s throats. Nils and Chuck almost got into a fight this morning over whose turn it was to take the dishes down to the stream and wash them. Gillian isn’t speaking to Tamara, Matthew isn’t speaking to Katie, and Daljit isn’t speaking to anyone. And of course Jamal is being a real jerk. About the only stable ones left are thee and me, and sometimes I have my doubts about thee.” She waited a beat, then said in a small voice, “Hey, come on. That was a joke. You were supposed to laugh.”

“It’s Lydia Pell,” Leyster said seriously. “If only she wouldn’t make those noises. If only she wouldn’t scream. She’s using up our morphine fast, and that’s not good either. Sometimes I think it would be best for all of us if she just…”

They walked on in silence for a while. Then Lai-tsz said, “So tell me something, Richard. Are we stranded here for the rest of our lives?”

Leyster blew out his cheeks, said, “Well, unless you can fix that beacon or somebody comes to rescue us… yeah, we are.”

“What are the chances of somebody coming to rescue us?”

“If they were going to rescue us, they’d‘ve done it already. They would’ve popped up while the smoke was still in the air. Lydia Pell would be in a hospital now, with one hand reattached, and doctors working to grow a new hand to replace the other.”

“Ah,” Lai-tsz said, and nothing more.

They came to a branching in the path.

“This is where we part ways,” Lai-tsz said. “There’s a gingko grove to the east that’s shedding fruit. I’ll have a knapsack full of pits when you get back. You can help me shell them.”

“Watch out for dromies.”

“Hey, no problem. You should see me climb a tree.”

“Um… dromaeosaurs can climb too. Rather well, in fact.”

She dismissed his worries with a wave of her hand. “Say hello to the Purgatory shrews for me.”

Leyster distractedly climbed the rest of the way up to Barren Ridge alone. He’d brought another day’s worth of samples to place before the Purgatorius colony there. He called them Purgatory shrews, though of course they weren’t shrews but ancestral primates. Still, they sure looked like shrews. And considering their insectivorous teeth, they had surprisingly catholic tastes. They liked almost everything he offered them.

He made the long trek from Smoke Hollow to Barren Ridge every other day to set out a new selection of roots, barks, and funguses at the foot of their favored tree. Purgatory shrews had the closest thing to human metabolisms of anything in the Mesozoic, and he figured that anything they ate would be safe enough for him to try.

Meat wasn’t a problem. The team gigged frogs, snagged turtles, dug freshwater clams, caught fish, and even trapped a few large lizards; there was no shortage of edible flesh. What they would need most when their supplies ran out were fruits and greens.

The red bark was gone, and so were four of the tubers. A fifth, greenish one hadn’t been touched at all. Leyster made a mental note to avoid it in the future.

He laid out his new samples, then turned and looked out over the valley.