Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

It was the day they had chosen for their harvest festival, and the camp was filled with the smell of a whole young ankylosaur roasting slowly on a spit over a bed of coals.

Leyster was sitting in the long house scraping swamp tubers and idly watching Nathaniel play with a rattle Patrick had made him. Daljit was plucking a small feathered dino. He glanced at the carcass in her hands and froze. “That’s not a… what is that thing?”

“It’s just a nothing-special little brush dino. It’ll make a nice side dish.”

“No, seriously. I don’t recognize it. Is that a new species? Let me see its teeth.”

“No dissecting dinner!” Katie laughed. She was taking palm leaves from the kettle where they’d been soaking, and wrapping them around the scraped tubers, so they could be baked in the coals. “Keep scraping.”

“Oh, come on. It has to be gutted anyway. It could be significant.”

Daljit put the carcass down. “Listen,” she said tensely.

“I don’t…” Katie said.

“Shush!”

From outside, there came the sound of voices. They were not familiar.

“Oh God, where’s my blouse?” Daljit cried.

Katie scooped up the baby and ran outside without saying a word.

Leyster was the second out the door. Daljit came close on his heels, buttoning furiously.

Their rescuers were U.S. military, for the most part, young men with short hair and socially awkward demeanor. But they’d brought along a documentary camerawoman, and she was already moving among the paleontologists, interviewing them.

“What is the one thing you most regret?” she asked, camera on her shoulder. Several of the tribe hung back shyly, intimidated by the novelty of an unfamiliar face. She pointed her microphone at Jamal. “You?”

“I guess the thing I most regret is that we didn’t bring along a botanist. There’s a prejudice in our field in favor of animals, vertebrates in particular, and we certainly paid the price for that. We really could have used somebody who was familiar with the properties of the local plants.”

“Amen to that!” Katie said fervently. “There must be something around here with tannin in it. Do you have any idea how difficult brain tanning can be? And dyes! Don’t get me started on dyes.”

“And you?”

“I’m sorry I never managed to make a decent clay pot,” Daljit said. “The kiln was good. I just couldn’t manage to get the right clay or the right temperature.”

“You?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring along a spare time beacon,” Nils said. Everybody laughed. Then, more seriously, “If I’d known how long I was going to be stuck here, I would’ve brought along a lot more pharmaceuticals. And I would have learned some crafts.”

“Like what?”

“Like how to make knap flint. Have you ever tried to make a flint knife? It’s not easy!”

“What,” the woman asked, focusing her camera first on Nathaniel and then panning up to Katie’s face, “is the first thing you plan to get or do when you get back to the present?”

“I want a steak.”

“A milkshake!”

“A cup of tea—with lemon and extra sugar.”

“A shower! With hot water!”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m going to turn off my brain and sit down in front of the television for a week.”

“I’m going to read a book I’ve never read before.”

“I’m going to talk to a stranger!”

Standing apart from the others, Leyster muttered fervently, “I’m going to kill Griffin for putting us through all this. Then, if there’s time, I’ll get Robo Boy as well.”

But he spoke quietly, to himself. Only the Old Man heard him. And when, a half hour later, the coals soaked with water and the half-roasted ankylosaur laid out for the scavengers, they lined up to step through the gate and out into the Crystal Gateway Marriott, Crystal City, Virginia, only he saw Leyster very carefully pick up a rock and slip it in his pocket.

The Old Man sighed, and opened the file folder on the desk before him. There were eight memos within. He read through them all carefully, then lifted one between thumb and forefinger and tore it in half.

Things had worked out much better the second time around. There had only been two deaths. He had to admire Leyster for that. The man had done much better with his charges than he had the first time through.

He regretted Lydia Pell’s death, of course, and that of the young man as well. But what was done was done. Second chances were so rare in this world to be almost miracles.

He decided to take one last look at Gertrude, solitary and splendid. She was a rara avis, perhaps the rarest in his private aviary of colleagues, and he liked to look in on the old bird from time to time.

A Lazarus taxon was one that disappeared from the fossil record, as if extinct, only to reappear later, as if rising from the dead. It pleased him to think of Dr. Gertrude Salley as humanity’s own Lazarus taxon. So long as she existed, the human race wasn’t really dead. Occasionally he paid her a visit, just to maintain her tenuous connection with humanity.

Sometimes they played chess. He always won.

Thus reminiscing, he opened a window into Gertrude’s tower, where she sat at her writing desk, working. Once, when he had done so, she had sensed his presence (she also had been given extraordinary tools) and, looking him directly in the eye, winked sardonically. Not today, though.

It was just as well. This was too solemn a day for laughter. This was the day when everything ended.

He signed off on the last of the memos, and dumped them into the tray for outgoing mail. The enterprise was over. As of this instant, he was as good as retired.

Slowly, he stood. The leather chair creaked as he did so, as if in sympathy for him. His body ached, but such pains came naturally with age. He was used to them.

There was only one thing left to be done.

Crystal City. Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.

If the story could be said to have any end at all, then it ended on a bright spring day in Crystal City at the Crystal Gateway Marriott when some two hundred paleontologists gathered by invitation in the ballroom to watch army personnel assemble machinery unlike anything any of them had ever seen before and open a temporary gate through time.

“Stand back, please,” an officer said. There was some shuffling about, but nobody moved away. “Please! Gentlemen. Ladies.” He was clearly unused to dealing with civilians, and his urgings had little effect. Finally, exasperated, he turned to his second-in-command and muttered, “Oh, the fuck with it. Throw the goddamned switch.”

The switch was thrown.

Something hummed.

There was a flat metal plate on the floor, connected by thick cables to the alien equipment. The air above it puckered, crinkled, gleamed. A flat, circular area filled with sunshine as it opened into a brighter reality. The scientists squinted and shaded their eyes with their hands, straining to get a good look at what was happening.

“I think I see—” somebody began, and was silenced by a chorus of shushings.

Through that glowing disk stepped, one by one, the survivors of the stranded expedition. Leyster came first, scowling and clutching their field notes, and Tamara after him, with her spear. Jamal burst into a smile as he saw everybody waiting for them. Then came Lai-tsz, looking anxious, with Nathaniel on her shoulder, and after her Patrick, Daljit, and all the rest.

Somebody began to applaud softly.

Everyone joined in. A roar like surf filled the ballroom.