Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

The Old Man looked up from his work. It was uncanny how much he looked like Griffin while somehow feeling like a completely different person. More solitary, in a wolfish sort of way. More deeply scarred.

The fingertips of one hand lightly stroked the skull he kept on his desk. Involuntarily, she remembered the half-facetious rumor that it was a trophy from a hated enemy he had somehow defeated. “Come in,” he said. “Close the door, have a seat. I’ve been expecting you.”

She obeyed.

It was like entering an ogre’s den. Thick curtains kept out the sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture held a clutter of mementos and framed photographs. He even had an Quetzalcoatlus skull propped up in the corner. It was as if he dwelt within his own hindbrain.

“Sir, I—”

He held up a hand. “I know why you’re here. Give me credit for—” He stifled a yawn. “Give me that much credit, anyway. You’re hoping that age has mellowed me. But if it hasn’t, you think you’re prepared to quit.

“Alas, it simply isn’t that easy. Your Griffin made the decisions he did because I told him to. He didn’t like it any more than you do. But he understood the necessity.”

Molly’s heart sank. She prided herself on being able to see deeper into a face than most, but the man was unreadable. He might be a saint or a devil. She honestly couldn’t tell which. Looking into his eyes was like staring down a lightless road at midnight. There was no telling what might be down there. Those eyes had seen things she could not imagine.

She took a deep breath. “Then I’m afraid I must tender my resignation. Effective immediately.”

“Let me show you something.”

The Old Man removed a sheet of paper from a drawer. “This is a copy, of course. I just returned from a ceremony where you were presented the original.” He slid it across the table to her.

It was a citation. The date had been blacked out, as had most of the text. But her name, in black Gothic letters was at the top, and several phrases remained. “For Exceptional Valor” was one.

“I can’t tell you what you did—what you’re going to do—and I can’t tell you when you’ll do it. But twenty people are alive because of your future actions. You got into security because you wanted to make a difference, right? Well, I just saw an old woman kiss your hand and thank you for saving the life of her son. You were embarrassed, but you were also pleased. You told me that that one instant justified your entire life.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Of course you do.” He took the paper from her hands and returned it to his drawer. “You simply can’t imagine what I could possibly say to keep you on board.”

“No. I can’t.”

He looked at her with a strange glitter in his eye. He likes this, Molly thought. Corruption was the final pleasure of men such as he. Her original mission was lost. Now she wanted only to escape his presence before he managed to drag her down into the mire of complicity and guilt with him. She simply wanted to get out of this room unsoiled.

“Have you ever wondered,” the Old Man asked, “where time travel came from?”

Carefully, she said, “Of course I have.”

“Richard Leyster told me once that the technology couldn’t possibly be of human origin. Nobody could build a time machine with today’s physics, he said, or with any imaginable extension of it. It won’t be feasible for at least a million years.

“As usual, his estimate was correct but conservative. In point of fact, time travel won’t be invented for another forty-nine-point-six million years.”

“Sir?” His words didn’t make sense to her. She couldn’t parse them out.

“What I’m telling you now is a government secret: Time travel is not a human invention. It is a gift from the Unchanging. And the Unchanging are not human.”

“Then… what are they?”

“If you ever need to know, you’ll be told. The operant fact is that the technology is on loan. As is ever the case with such gifts, there are a few strings. One of which is that we’re not allowed to meddle with causality.”

“Why?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know. The physicists—some of them—tell me that if even one observed event were undone, all of time and existence would start to unravel. Not just the future, but the past as well, so that we’d be destabilizing all of existence, from alpha to omega, the Big Bang to the Cold Dark. Other physicists tell me no such thing, of course. The truth? The truth is that the Unchanging don’t want us to do it.

“They’ve told us that if we ever violate their directives, they’ll go back to the instant before giving us time travel, and withhold the offer. Think about that! Everything we’ve done and labored for these many years will come to nothing. Our lives, our experiences will dissolve into timelike loops and futility. The project will have never been.

“Now. You’ve met these people—the paleontologists. If you told them that the price of time travel was five deaths, what would they say? Would they think the price was too high?”

His face grew uncertain in her eyes. She squeezed them tight shut for the briefest instant. When she opened them again, she felt compelled to stand and turn away from him. On the wall was a photograph. It had been taken at the opening of the dinosaur compound in the National Zoo, and showed Griffin and the then-Speaker of the House stagily pulling opposite ends of a T. rex wishbone. She stared at their stiff poses, their insincere grins.

“I won’t be a part of it. You cannot make me responsible for those deaths.”

“You already are.”

She shook her head. “What?”

“You remember that week you spent at Survival Station? Tom told you to make sure that Robo Boy heard that Leyster and Salley would be leading the first Baseline expedition. Tom got his directions from Jimmy, who was acting in response to a memo that Griffin should be writing up right now. You’ve already played your part.”

The Old Man spread his hands. “Can you go back and undo everything you did and said back then? Well, no more can I undo these five deaths.”

“I’ll quit anyway! I won’t be used like this!”

“Then twenty people die.” Griffin smiled sadly and spread his hands. “This is not a threat. Later in life, you’ll happen to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Resign now, and you won’t be there. Twenty people will die. Because you quit.”

Molly squeezed her eyes tight, against her tears. “You are an evil, evil man,” she said.

He made a warm, ambiguous sound that might have been a chuckle. “I know, dear. Believe me, I know.”

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.CE.

They buried Lydia Pell on a fern-covered knoll above Hell Creek. There was some argument over what religion she was, because she had once jokingly referred to herself as a “heretic Taoist.” But then Katie went through her effects and found a pocket New Testament and a pendant cross made from three square-cut carpenter’s nails, and that pretty well settled it that she was a Christian.

While those who had kept the night watch over her corpse slept, Leyster spent the morning searching Gillian’s Bible for an appropriate passage. He’d considered “There were giants in the Earth,” or the verse about Leviathan. But such attempts to fit in a reference to dinosaurs made him feel as if he were cheapening the grandeur and meaning of Lydia Pell’s life by reducing it to the circumstances of her death. So in the end he settled for the Twenty-Third Psalm.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he began. “I shall not want.” There were no sheep anywhere in the world, nor would there be for many tens of millions of years. Yet still, the words seemed appropriate. There was comfort in them.