Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

A bald old man with a flamboyant white mustache hobbled forward and, with the utmost respect, took the notebooks from Leyster’s hands. Then, with sudden flair, he raised them high over his head, grinning.

The applause redoubled.

Tamara was clutching her spear tightly in one hand, blinking at the flashing cameras and feeling disoriented, when she was suddenly overcome with the awareness of how bad she must smell. She looked around the ballroom, and then at the spear, and in a fit of revulsion, said, “Somebody take this thing away from me.”

A dozen hands reached for it. “We’d like to include this in one of our displays, if you’d allow us,” a woman said. A lifetime ago, Tamara had known her. Linda Deck, was that her name? Something like that. From the Smithsonian. “And… maybe your necklace?”

Tamara touched the tooth that Patrick had pierced for a length of cord and scrimshawed with a rather good likeness of the photo of her standing triumphant above the juvenile tranny. She flashed her teeth, and in a low, intense voice, said, “Over my dead body.”

The woman took a step back in alarm, and in a moment of sudden empathy Tamara realized just how fierce they had all become. “Hey, never mind me,” she said, as kindly as she could. “Just point me toward a shower and three bars of soap, and I’ll be fine.”

“We’ve booked a room for you.” The woman handed her a key card. “We booked rooms for everybody. There’s fresh clothes in there, too. Things you picked out for yourself next week.”

“Thanks,” Tamara said. “Keep the spear.”

Patrick carried his photo disks, wrapped with obsessive care in scraps of their softest troodon leather, in both hands. All the storage space on them had been used, and much of it had been overwritten three to seventeen times. A man in a suit started to take them away from him and then, when he yanked his arms away, laughed and said, “Now, is that any way to treat your editor?”

“What?”

The man took the disks and gave him a presentation copy of the book that would be made from them. Disbelieving, Patrick leafed through it. Ankylosaurs wallowed in the river mud. A tyrannosaur looked up suspiciously from its kill, blood streaming from open jaws. Pterosaurs skimmed low over the silvery surface of a lake. An unlucky dromaeosaur was caught in the act of being trampled under the feet of a charging triceratops.

He looked up from a photograph of titanosaurs at dusk. “This was printed too dark. You can’t make out the details.”

“Now, Patrick, we’ve already been through all—” The editor stopped. “At any rate, I’ve been through all that already, and I’m not really anxious to go over it again, particularly on a Sunday. Tomorrow morning you can drop by my office and start raising hell over color values. You’ll come over to my side by the end.” Then, ignoring Patrick’s obstinate look, “Let me buy you a drink. I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you’ve had a beer.”

Lai-tsz had been worried that her son would be frightened by the flash cameras, the noise, and the pervasive unfamiliarity of an age dominated by humans and their technology. She held Nathaniel in her arms, watching him crane about, those big brown eyes drinking everything in with calm intelligence. Then somebody stepped forward with a bouquet of Mylar balloons, and presented them to her.

Nathaniel laughed and crowed at the sight of them.

The modern world didn’t faze him a bit.

She was completely involved in her son’s wonderment when a tall and lanky young man walked up to her and said, “Hi, Mom.”

He enfolded the astonished Lai-tsz in his arms and kissed her on the forehead. “My little mother,” he said fondly. Then, “Hey, is this me?” He scooped up Nathaniel and hoisted him into the air, the both of them laughing. “I sure was a cute little fellow, wasn’t I?”

Jamal was luxuriating in the simple privilege of being home again, when a woman presented him with her business card. “I was told you’d be the one to speak to,” she said. “You fellows have lived through an extraordinary adventure, and I think it only fair to warn you that the buzzards will be circling soon. You need representation.”

“Representation?” he said blankly.

“An agent. You’ve got an incredibly valuable story here. Don’t throw it away on the first media offer you get.”

A minute ago, he had been thinking how strange it would be to inhabit a commercial universe once more, and how lacking in the requisite skills he would be. Now, in an instant, they all came flooding back.

The first thing to do was to establish Nathaniel as a member of the expedition, and set up a trust fund to handle his share of the income. That way, if everybody got weird later on, the expense of his upbringing wouldn’t all fall on Lai-tsz. Come what may, his education would be taken care of.

That presupposed, of course, that they maximized income now, while public interest was at its greatest.

He took the woman’s arm. “Let’s talk numbers, shall we?”

Katie and Nils seized a quiet moment and slipped away from the others, out into the hallway, to talk.

“It’s kind of the end of an era, isn’t it?” Nils said.

“Yeah. Were you listening to that woman who was with Jamal? She was saying something about making a movie out of what happened to us.”

“Well, if there’s a movie, I guess there’s parts that’ll have to be left out.”

“You mean, uh…?” She blushed ever so slightly.

“Yeah.” He dug a toe awkwardly into the carpet. “I guess that’s another thing that’s come to an end. I mean, I can’t imagine us all renting a big suite of rooms and…”

“No.”

“It would be tacky. Like those swingers’ clubs they had back in the last century.”

“Yes.”

“But you know…” He took a deep breath, and finally met her eyes. “Just because everybody else is breaking up doesn’t mean that we… That you and I…”

It took them some time, and a great many words more. But they finally arrived at the understanding they had each known all along they would.

Raymond Bois, standing in the crowd, realized suddenly that there were security people standing to either side of him. He took a step backwards, and bumped into somebody. The Irishman put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Steady there, son.”

The man’s grip was firm to the point of being painful. Raymond Bois looked wildly beyond him, and there was somebody who could only be Molly Gerhard, though she looked decades older than she had the last time he’d seen her.

“Good to see you, Robo Boy,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

Her eyes were like flint.

Gillian and Matthew were hustled away from the others by a quiet-voiced security officer, who identified himself as Tom Navarro. “This will only take a moment,” he said. “We need you to make an identification. We have reason to believe that the terrorist who planted the bomb that killed Lydia Pell is present in this room. If you would be so kind as to take a quick glance around—”

He stopped, placing them directly in front of Raymond Bois.

“My God,” Gillian said. “That’s him!”

“It’s Robo Boy!” Matthew said. He was dimly aware that a woman with a digicam was filming them, but paid her no mind. “He’s the one! He left a message, we all saw it, we’ll all of us testify to that. I—”

But already, as if all that were needed was their nod, Robo Boy was being taken away, kicking and struggling, by the security people. “It wasn’t me!” he cried in a panicked voice. “I didn’t do anything!” He tried to bite one of them, and was punched in the stomach. He doubled over in pain, weeping, as they half-carried him rapidly toward the door. The camerawoman scuttled along, focused tight on his face.