Bones of the Earth (6 page)

Leyster read the abstract, disbelieving, and as he read, the room grew unsteady around him. There was a roaring noise in his ears, as if all the universe were laughing at him.

“That paper is the single most virulent refutation of your book ever printed. And the woman who wrote it almost got to screw you twice. You can open the door now, Jimmy.”

Leyster made no move toward the doorway. “You're letting me off with a warning. Why didn't you do that with the Metzgers?”

“The—?”

“Husband-wife team, attempted causal violation,” the security man said quickly. “Captured 2012, convicted in 2022, released in 2030.”

Griffin seized his wrist and stared down at it, hard. “The world is not a fair place, Mr. Leyster.” He looked up again. “We did it the way we did because according to the records, that's the way we did it. The rules against paradox bind us as tightly as they do you.”

3

Lagerstätten

Hilltop Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 67 My B.C.E.

Griffin went straight from the orientation lecture to the Mesozoic. The phoniness of the thing, the charade of shaking hands with himself in particular, had depressed him. He needed to refuel. So, opting to avoid the snares and responsibilities of booking travel through his office, he took a local forward thirty years, and used his clout to slip into a VIP tour group headed for the deep past.

They emerged from the funnel and out into the rich air and hot sun of the late Cretaceous. Dinosaurs still walked the Earth, though they wouldn't for long, and shallow seas so moderated the climate that even the poles were free of ice. Not counting Tent City, where the researchers slept, there were only thirty-seven structures in all the world where one could honestly claim to be indoors.

He was home.

His fellow excursionists were the usual mix of predator capitalists, over-affluent politicians, and decorated heroes of genocidal wars, with a North American admiral and her loud wife thrown in for good measure. Griffin disappeared into the group and let it carry him along. He had the gift for being unobtrusive, when he wanted.

Their guide was what the loud American had, in a sarcastic aside, called “your basic science babe,” blond and fetching in khaki shorts, linen blouse, and white cowboy hat. One had to look hard to see that she was actually rather plain. A couple of the gents, smiling secret fantasies at her backside, preferred not to look that hard. Griffin emerged from private thoughts to discover that she was talking.

“… first thing that people ask is ‘Where are the dinosaurs?'” She smiled dazzlingly and swept out an arm. “Well, they're all around you … the
birds!
”

In his weary state, the group seemed to Griffin like a cheapjack tourist construction made of bamboo, bright paper, and string, with a crank to turn that would jolt the two-dimensional cutout people into a crude semblance of human life. The guide gave the crank a turn and it chuckled, peered about hopefully, lifted a camera and then decided not to shoot.

“Yes, birds are indeed dinosaurs. Technically speaking, they're derived theropods, and thus they are distantly related to
Tyrannosaurus rex
, and kissing cousins to the dromaeosaurids. Even the birds back home in the twenty-first century are dinosaurs. But the behavior of Mesozoic birds is strikingly different from that of modern birds, and many have toothed beaks. Oh, look! There's a Quetzalcoatlus!”

Crank.

Hands lifted to shade eyes, mouths gaped to let
oohs
and
ohs
escape, the camera swung up and went
whirr.
The girl stood smiling and silent until their reactions had played out, then said, “Now, please follow me up to the top of the observation platform.”

Obediently, they shuffled after her, so many celebredons following in the wake of a lithe young nobodysaurus that the least of them could buy and sell by the job lot. Yet such was the power of organizational structure that they meekly did as she directed.

“But when can we see
real
dinosaurs?” somebody asked.

“We'll be able to see non-avian dinosaurs through field glasses from the top of the tower,” the guide said pleasantly. “There's also a photo safari arranged for those of you who want to get up close and personal with the animals.”

Hilltop Station was situated atop a volcanic plug, steep enough on three sides to keep off everything but the swarms of midges and mosquitos that rose from the southwestern swamps every evening at sundown. The fourth side sloped gently downward to the flood plain, where most of their research took place. From the top of the observation platform, it was possible to see over the rooftops to the horizon in every direction.

“… and if any of you have questions, I'd be only too happy to answer them.”

“What about the theory of evolution?”

Griffin leaned against the rail, savoring the light breeze that pushed back against him. The sky was thronged with birds, semibirds, and pterosaurs: The Mesozoic truly was the first great age of flight. He stared out over the flood plain, with its scattered stands of ancestral sycamore and gum, metasequoia and cypress. Winding rivers shone like silver, dwindling to threads as they reached for the thin blue line along the horizon that was the Western Interior Seaway.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have they proved the theory of evolution yet?” It was the American wife, of course. “Or is it still just a theory?”

Someone poked Griffin with a pair of binoculars, but he waved them away. He didn't need optics to know the dinosaurs were there. There would be ankylosaurs browsing on the berry bushes along the river banks, and herds of triceratopses speckling the flowered plains. Anatotitans ambled between copses of dromaeosaur-haunted poplar or stripped the leaves from cycads and dawn beeches. Lambeosaurs foraged in the swamps. There were mangroves along the seashore, where troodons hunted small arboreal mammals, and—invisible from here—deltas at the mouths of the rivers, where edmontosaurs built their communal nests, safe from the land-bound tyrannosaurs.

“A theory,” said the guide, “is the best available explanation, satisfying all known facts, of a phenomenon. Evolution has held up to two hundred years of rigorous questioning, in which scientists have come up with enormous amounts of information supporting it, and not one shred of disproof. In the paleontological community, it is universally accepted as true.”

“But you don't have a complete record of one of these creatures changing from one thing into another! Why is that?”

“That's a very good question,” the guide said, though Griffin knew that it was anything but. “And to answer it, I'll have to teach you a German word,
lagerstätten.
That's quite a mouthful, isn't it? It means ‘mother lode.'” She had modulated her chirpy delivery into a practiced sincerity that Griffin found almost equally grating.

“Before time travel, we had to rely on the fossil record, which is extraordinarily patchy. So few fossils are formed, and of these so few survive erosion, and of those, so very few are found! But occasionally, paleontologists stumbled upon
lagerstätten
, fossil deposits of extraordinary richness and completeness. These deposits were like snapshots, giving us a very good idea of what life was like for an extremely brief period of time. But a find like the Solnhofen limestone or the Burgess shale was incredibly rare, and great periods of time were hidden from us.”

“But not now,” the American said.

“So you would think. But there are only a dozen or so stations like this one scattered through the 175 million years of the Mesozoic. So that the stations themselves are essentially
lagerstätten
—fabulously rich sources of knowledge, separated by gulfs of time so vast that we'll never fill in all the blank spots, try though we might.”

The American nodded to herself. “So it will never be proved.”

“Anybody can deny anything. But there's good news! One of our long-term projects is to make a series of brief forays into the time between stations, sampling twenty to thirty species once every hundred thousand years. The genetic baselines we establish will be the equivalent of taking a photograph of a rosebud once a minute in order to create a film of it blossoming. Which should be enough, I would think, to convince even the most hard-headed skeptic. That's a lot of work, though, and the results won't be in for quite a while. So we'll just have to wait.” Her smile bloomed again, like a time-lapsed flower. “Are there any further questions? No? Well, then, next on our …”

The guide was a grad student, of course; otherwise she wouldn't've been stuck with the tour. Griffin made a mental note to find out her name and check her file. She had a real talent for this kind of blarney and was young and foolish enough not to keep that fact a secret. At this rate, she would find herself doing more and more public relations until by incremental degrees she was squeezed out of real paleobiology entirely. Griffin had seen it happen before. Something similar had happened to him.

The platform began emptying around him. Griffin leaned back into the wind and closed his eyes. His original thought had been to borrow a land rover and drive it west, through the Lost Expedition Foothills and beyond, into the Rockies. Or maybe he could take a jetcopter to Beringia and then backpack north. Or else commandeer a research boat out on the Western Interior or the Tethys. He could do some diving among the clam reefs, maybe even troll for sea monsters. He had months of accumulated vacation leave that he could dip into.

He stood without moving, savoring the sweetness of marsh and flowering brushwood wafted upslope by the gentle east wind.

Then he realized there was somebody standing at his shoulder.

He turned, and there was Jimmy Boyle, sleepy eyes and all.

“Good to have you back again, sir.”

“Jimmy,” he said, “since when has it been policy to let creationists come through on our VIP tours?”

“She's just a sympathizer, sir,” Jimmy Boyle said. “The type who goes to church on Sunday, takes her minister's word for what the Bible does and doesn't say, and would be shocked if you told her he was an ignorant wanker who couldn't find his willie if he used both hands. Harmless, really.”

“Harmless.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I don't think it's harmless at all. People spout this nonsense and it spreads. It metastasises. Damp down a tumor here with carefully ordered arguments, and it sprouts up in a dozen new places. It's easy for them; they can just make up their facts.”

Jimmy said nothing.

“What I found most depressing was that not one of the crowd of august decision-makers in the tour thought there was anything outrageous about her questions. They stood there, nodding and smiling, as if it were perfectly reasonable to be doubting evolution with dinosaurs all around them.”

“Well, they're from the 2040s, after all, sir. You know what it's like then.”

Griffin turned to face west. The mountains, he thought. Definitely the mountains. There were critters out there that no man had ever seen, even after all these decades. The mountain packies hadn't been adequately studied; he could get a paper or two out of it. He'd bring along his rod and reel and catch a few sabre-tooth salmon. It would be fun.

At last his underling's silence had gone on too long for him to ignore. “All right, Jimmy,” he said. “What is it? Why were you waiting for me?”

“The Old Man was here.”

“Oh, Christ.” In Griffin's experience, it was always bad news when the Old Man was involved. A funding crisis in the 2090s. A memo from a hundred million years upstream. A rumble of displeasure from the Unchanging. “What is it this time?”

“He said you'd be coming here, and that there was something I should show you.”

They stood staring down at a wooden crate lying atop a long table in the only conference room in the world. There were five of them: Griffin, Jimmy, the security team of Molly Gerhard and Tom Navarro, and Amy Cho, an academic kept on retainer for exactly such incidents.

“Who do you think it's meant to be?” Griffin asked.

“Adam would be my guess, sir. But I'll defer to Miss Cho on this one.”

Amy Cho was a heavy matriarch of a woman, who gripped the knob of her cane with gnarled and overlapping hands. “Adam, yes. He's certainly the most totemic choice. Myself, I'd throw in a brass dagger and an iron ring, and attribute the thing to Tubal-Cain. The first metal smith. Son of Lamech. But any nameless peasant drudge would suffice, so long as he died in the Flood.” She smiled humorlessly. “Even a woman would do.”

It was a human skeleton, and it was beautiful. The light sent prismatic smears of color dancing across the stone surfaces sticking out of the packing pellets.

“What's it made of? Opal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It must have cost a god-damned fortune.”

“That it must, sir.”

There were many ways to make a fossil. Not all of them were honest. This one had begun as a human skeleton. Somebody had buried it in silt within a pressurized low-temperature water oven of the sort that forgers called a “permineralizer.”

The device had several functions. First, it served as an incubator for bacteria living inside the bones themselves. Gently it encouraged them to grow and form biofilms—cooperative structures in the shapes of pipes and channels that brought water and oxygen to every part of the bone, and carried away the waste products. Then it fed them a slow but steady trickle of highly mineralized water. Forgers usually favored calcites and siderites to produce the characteristic pale or red-black luster of common fossils. But in this case, they had gone with silicates to achieve the sort of pre-Reformation splendor that wouldn't have looked out of place in the Vatican.

Warm and coddled inside their box, the bacteria happily ate, drank, and multiplied, until no organics at all remained in the bone. Then they died. Each one left in its place a tiny lump of minerals, taken in with the water they consumed but of no metabolic use to them whatsoever, and thus discarded.