Bones of the Earth

17. Type Specimen

Ultima Pangaea: Telezoic era. Mesognotic period. Chronic epoch. Epimethean age. 250 My C.E.

Jimmy was the first one out of the time funnel. He glanced around quickly, then moved aside so Griffin and Molly Gerhard could follow. They stepped out onto the sward after him.

It was night.

To one side was a copse of trees with low, tangled limbs—“climbing trees” Jimmy would have called them in his youth. Downslope was a lake. In the sky above its black waters hung a glory of stars. Colored lights rose and sank among them like lanterns.

The clearing was ringed with a dozen palely luminous gates. The funnel stood at its center.

A light breeze ruffled the waters of the lake. Molly Gerhard shivered, and finally spoke. “Which way now?”

Jimmy pointed toward one of the gates, where two dim figures, identical in size and height, waited. He said nothing. A touch of action always made him feel particularly calm and alert afterwards. He didn’t want to spoil that by talking.

The two figures resolved into women at their approach.

“Hello, Griffin,” Salley said.

“Hello, Griffin,” Gertrude said. The moon-shaped scar at the corner of her mouth sailed sardonically upward.

There was a quick exchange of glances in which Jimmy read anger, defiance, hauteur, hurt pride, and astonishment.

Molly Gerhard, who knew the history of that scar on the older woman’s face, gave voice to the last of these. “Tell me this is you from your own future…” (But Salley was already shaking her head dolefully.) “…and not the woman who got us into this mess.”

“She’s—” Salley began.

“I am the original me, and yes, I take full credit for all that’s happened.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Only to small minds,” Gertrude said.

“We can explain,” Salley said.

“I was told that divergent time lines could never meet,” Molly Gerhard said with an edge in her voice. “How can the two of you possibly exist in the same reality?”

Jimmy, watching, had to admire how efficiently she worked. Gerhard invited correction. She wasn’t afraid to sound foolish. And she directed her question at the older woman—Gertrude—while ignoring the younger—Salley. Thus driving the thinnest of wedges between the two and creating a division she might later wish to widen.

“Within your frame of reference, that was true,” Gertrude said. “Things are different on this side of Terminal City. You’ve been there. Surely you understand. Anyone with a modicum of perception would realize that its chief function is to reconcile the products of divergent time lines into a common reality.”

Salley’s eyes flicked toward her, then away.

“To what purpose?” Griffin asked.

“If nothing else, it enables us to meet.” Gertrude turned away. “Let’s go to my place. I’ll explain everything to you there.”

She stepped into the nearest gate and vanished. After the briefest of hesitations, Salley did likewise.

They had no choice but to follow.

Gertrude lived in a floating tower at the center of a ring forest in the Interior Sea. A soft, sultry breeze passed through the open windows, carrying with it the salt smell of the unseen sea. A sliver of new moon hung low in the sky. It had not been visible from the mouth of the time funnel. So Jimmy Boyle knew that the gate had transported them a goodly distance. Not so far, however, that it was not still night.

“Exactly where are we?” Molly Gerhard asked.

Gertrude snapped her fingers, and a map appeared in her hands. She opened it. “This is Ultima Pangaea. Continental drift has joined the scattered continents once more into a single landmass. It is surrounded by a world-spanning ocean and embraces at its heart a solitary inland sea.” She tapped a fingertip where the equator bisected the inland sea. “We’re right here. In a sense, I live at the exact center of the world.”

Of course, Jimmy thought. Where else?

The others were prowling about the room, examining things, opening drawers, displaying a curiosity that Gertrude ignored complacently, though Jimmy would never have allowed it in his digs. “You’ve got quite a few books here,” Griffin observed.

“All mine.”

“She means she wrote them,” Salley said.

“Yes, of course. What else would I mean?”

“What are these creatures?” Molly Gerhard asked.

One wall was nothing but windows. The wall opposite it was taken up by an earth-filled terrarium. A labyrinthine structure of tunnels and dens could be seen through the glass, with pale, hairless animals the size of mice within. “Naked mole birds,” Gertrude said. “They lost their feathers and their endothermy, and acquired a communal social structure. A fascinating case of convergent evolution. Behaviorally, they’re almost identical to naked mole rats. Yet their most recent common ancestor was a pre-Mesozoic creature that looked like a lizard.”

Molly Gerhard stared with undisguised loathing at the pallid creatures, climbing clumsily over one another, some few scrabbling at the dirt with needlelike talons and tiny beaks. “Why would you have such things?”

“For their inherent interest.”

“They have inherent interest?”

Gertrude snorted. “Bloodedness has always been the paleontologist’s Afghanistan,” she said. “Any number of scientists have marched off boldly to determine whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded, and lost themselves in a wilderness of definitions. It turns out that bloodedness is not so simple as it looks from the outside. It’s not a single thing, but several families of strategies.

“Body temperature can be either constant or variant, regulated internally or externally, and in service to a high resting metabolism or a low one. Maintaining a constant body temperature is called homeothermy. Variant temperature, usually close to the variation in ambient temperature, is poikilothermy. Internally regulated temperature is called endothermy. Externally regulated temperature is called ectothermy. An animal whose resting metabolism remains at a high level is tachymetabolic. One whose resting metabolism slows to a low level of activity is brady metabolic.

“Got that? Good.

“Now, a ‘warm-blooded’ animal is generally homeothermic, endothermic, and tachymetabolic, where a ‘cold-blooded’ one is poikilothermic, ectothermic, and barymetabolic. The naked mole bird, however, is homeothermic, ectothermic, and tachymetabolic. Is it cold-blooded? There are insects whose body temperatures, at rest, reflect the ambient temperature, but whose wing muscles raise their temperatures much higher than that during flight. They’re poikilothermic, endothermic, and brady metabolic. Warm-blooded or coldblooded? How about hibernating mammals? Homeothermic, ectothermic, brady metabolic. Do they shift between bloodednesses?

“Moreover, when you begin to look into the mechanisms of all these things, you’ll realize that I’ve been oversimplifying furiously. It’s all a lot more complicated than I’ve made it sound.

“So I’ve decided to take a whack at straightening the whole mess out.”

All the while she talked, Jimmy noted, Salley stood to the far side of the room, sad-eyed and silent. She had only spoken the once, and then without addressing anybody directly. Nor had she looked at Griffin, save casually and fleetingly.

Well, that was easy enough to decipher. It was a terrible blessing she’d been given, to see herself the way everybody else did. He imagined it was humbling. What Jimmy couldn’t figure out was why Gertrude was being so talkative.

Griffin listened silently, head down, flipping through book after book. “Leather bound,” he said, when Gertrude wound down at last. “Steel engravings. You’re certainly being treated well. And this place of yours. Do all the inhabitants of this era live in towers like this?”

“Some do. Most don’t.”

“Then you’re being indulged,” Molly Gerhard said. “Why? By whom?”

“Our sponsors. I cut them a deal.”

“What for what?” Molly asked crisply.

“You already know what I got: permission to change my personal past. Otherwise you wouldn’t be talking with me now. My life here is not what I bought, but rather the price I paid. I serve easy masters. They allow me to engage in activities I find rewarding—research, mostly—and in return I remain available for examination, should any questions about human beings arise.”

“Yes, but what do you do?” Molly Gerhard insisted.

“I’m the type specimen for Homo sapiens.‘’‘’

Jimmy made a face, and Griffin explained: “When Linnaeus first set up his system of binomial nomenclature, he defined species with an abstract type—a written description of their features. So he felt free to replace his specimens with superior examples. But, as always, mistakes were made. Which occasionally led to the absurdity of a species being represented by a sample from another species entirely.

“So nowadays, when a species is described, it’s done from an individual organism, called the type specimen, which is carefully collected and preserved, and then referred to whenever there’s any question as to the taxon’s attributes.”

“I’m not sure I…”

“You can think of Dr. Salley as being the physical definition of humanity. She is the yardstick by which all human beings are measured.”

“Wait.” Jimmy spoke at last, and as he did so felt that fine top-of-the-world mood collapse to nothing within him. Back to the workaday world again. “You mean to say that my humanity is judged by how closely I resemble her?”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Gertrude asked.

It was a question that required a day’s response or none at all. “Maybe it’s time you told us why we’re here,” Griffin suggested.

“First a drink,” Gertrude said. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”

She poured them glasses of a clear and refreshing fluid. A moment before, Jimmy had been thinking that Griffin and Molly Gerhard looked tired and ready for sleep. But after that drink, they brightened right up. He himself felt ready to climb mountains. He couldn’t help thinking that a case of the stuff would make a fine souvenir to bring home.

“I was on the original Baseline expedition,” Gertrude said. “Terrible though it is to say, even with the deaths, I was happy. I had dinosaurs. I had Leyster. I had everything. If I hadn’t alienated Leyster, I could have stayed in the Maastrichtian forever.”

“How did you alienate him?” Molly Gerhard asked.

“I was a fool.”

When the bomb went off, Gertrude was engaged in folding up the rocket launcher. Birds were chirping in the trees, and she was marveling at how familiar-yet-strange their song sounded. Like birds everywhere, and yet oddly scored. None of the cries of this age were known to her yet. But they were obviously as sophisticated as those of modern birds, sixty-five million years hence. Music, it seemed, was basic. It arose first among the small, feathered but flightless dinosaurs. The oviraptor had a pretty song.

Then came the explosion.

She ran through the smoke and confusion, and found three bodies lying on the ground: Chuck, Daljit, and Tamara. Two of them were already dead. The third, Daljit, had lost most of an arm.

Leyster was already kneeling at her side, making a tourniquet.

Gertrude ran to get the med kit. She flipped an ampule of morphine into a syringe, found a vein, and shot the painkiller into Daljit’s good arm.

The others were milling about uncertainly, hovering over the bodies, asking each other what they should do. Gertrude looked up, and snapped, “Don’t just stand there! Pitch a tent. Make up a bed for Daljit. Clear away these bodies. Somebody check and see how much of our supplies have been destroyed. Jesus fucking Christ! Do I have to do everything myself?”

The students scattered in purposeful action. Helping Leyster try to staunch the flow of blood, Gertrude felt a small twinge of satisfaction. Work was the best thing for them, she knew.

Work would keep them all alive.

Daljit’s injuries were too extensive to be successfully treated in the field. She died that night.

They buried her body next to the others with a minimum of ceremony. The graves were positioned away from the camp, to avoid drawing in predators, as well as for reasons of morale.

Then, to keep the crew from dwelling on their loss, Gertrude set them to building log cabins for everyone. There was some grumbling because hers and Leyster’s was bigger than the others. But they were a couple by then—they slept together for the first time the night of the disaster—and naturally they needed the room.

It was not difficult keeping everybody busy. There was more than enough work that needed doing, if they were to survive. The trick was to provide everybody with a sense of purpose. With so much equipment destroyed by the bomb, they couldn’t hope to perform a fraction of the research they’d originally intended. Still, they could do some. At her instigation, Leyster built a blind on Barren Ridge where they could observe the tyrannosaur nest.

She and Leyster, being the best qualified, traded off on the tranny watch. Sometimes, as a reward for good work, she let one of the others assist.

Jamal came to Gertrude one day when she was in the blind. She was watching Boris and Bela, the runts of the clutch, mock-battling one another, snapping at each other’s snouts until one of them got a purchase and they rolled over and over, kicking with their feet like kittens. “Fishing good?” she asked, without putting down the binoculars.

Young tyrannosaurs were a hoot to watch. They were curious about everything. A shiny pebble, a lizard they had never seen before, a mangled wrist-watch hung from a limb in a place where Gertrude knew they would confront it—any novelty was a toy and a diversion to them. They would cock their heads and stare at it with their glittery little eyes. Then they would kick at it with one taloned foot, if it were on the ground, and bump it with their heads if it were higher. Sooner or later, they’d try to eat it. Immature trannies would put anything in their mouths. They lost a lot of teeth that way.

Adults were different: surly, aloof. They reacted to anything new in their environment with disdain and suspicion. Their behavior was rigidly set. They avoided novelty in all its forms.

“Look,” Jamal said. “Everybody’s a little concerned about the way things are going.”

She lowered the glasses. “We’re alive. We have food. What’s to complain about?”

“To put it bluntly, we do all the work, while you two get to sit around all day and make observations.”

“You’re grad students, for pity’s sake. What else do you expect?”

“We’re working our butts off. You should too.”

What really irked her was the unfairness of his accusation. She and Leyster each worked twice as hard as any of the rest of them. But she bit down on her anger. “Leyster and I are the only fully trained researchers here.”

“Just who are we doing all this research for? The beacon’s smashed. We’re never going home. Who’s ever going to read our findings?”

“We’re scientists. If we don’t do any research, then why are we even here?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Jamal said grimly.

He turned and strode away.

That night, she told Leyster about the encounter. Leyster looked drawn and pale. His responsibilities were wearing him down. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he has a point.”

“No, he does not! He’s just an ambitious young beta male with delusions of alphahood. He wants power and double rations, is all. This whole thing stinks of primate politics.”

“Yes, but maybe we should—”

She silenced his mouth with kisses. Then they made love. Leyster was not at his best that night, and immediately afterwards he fell into an exhausted slumber. But he really did love her. That sort of thing was impossible to fake.

A week later, Jamal walked away from the camp, taking half the expedition with him.

Only Lai-tsz, Gillian, and Patrick stayed. Katie, Nils, and Matthew went with Jamal. With them went all the supplies they could carry.

Their departure doubled the work load for everyone. Two camps needed two people to cook, two people to wash the dishes, twice the labor to make two of anything that was needed. They had to put off building the smokehouse indefinitely, though that would have saved them enormous labor in the long run by making it possible to store meat for more than a day at a time. It was insanely inefficient.

They gave up the tyrannosaur blind, of course. They had to. Science had become a luxury.

The dissidents didn’t go far. They came back periodically, angry and sheepish, looking for tools or supplies they hadn’t thought to bring along.

“The axes stay,” Gertrude said the first time it happened. She figured the worse their privation, the sooner they’d come limping home. “They’re not private property. They were bought for the expedition with public funds.”

But Leyster, blind to the larger picture, said, “Of course you can have an axe, and anything else you need. We’re not enemies, you know. We’re all in this together.” He still had notions of winning them over with kindness.

He was unworldly, was the problem. He was too good for his own good.

Things went from bad to worse. Gillian left them for the dissidents. Then, two months after the rift, Nils died in some kind of accident. The rebel camp didn’t want to talk about it, so Gertrude never did find out the details. But they all got together for his funeral.

It was a tense encounter. The groups didn’t mingle, but stood a way apart from each other. When Gertrude managed to get Katie aside and tried to talk her into coming back, she’d burst into tears. “Jamal wouldn’t like it,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what he’s like when he’s angry.”

It was classic cult behavior: the charismatic leader whose word was law, the unreasoning obedience, the pervasive fear. Leyster wouldn’t listen, but Gertrude grew convinced that Jamal was holding the others against their will, keeping them bound to him by psychological means.

Five months after the accident, they were barely managing to hang on. They’d all lost a lot of weight. Leyster in particular had deteriorated badly. He never smiled or joked anymore, and he sometimes went for days without speaking. It hurt Gertrude’s heart to see him so diminished.

Then, six months less one day after the bomb, Patrick was killed, mobbed by a pack of small theropods while he was digging for turtle eggs.

He wouldn’t have died if they’d been able to spare somebody with a spear and a sack of rocks to watch his back.

So, over the course of a long and sleepless night, Gertrude decided to take action.

The dissidents had built a trench latrine just far away enough from the new camp that they wouldn’t be bothered by the flies and odors. Bright and early the next morning, Gertrude found a hiding place by the path leading to the latrine and settled down to wait.

First Katie walked up the path and back. Then Matthew. Jamal was third.

His face darkened when she stepped out in front of him. “What do you want?”

“I brought you a shovel.”

She swung it at him as hard as she could.

A look of profound surprise overcame Jamal. He didn’t even think to duck away from the blow. The blade of the shovel slammed against his shoulder and then, glancingly, the side of his head.

He staggered. She swept the shovel around again, at the back of his knees.

He fell.

“No, wait,” he said weakly from the ground. He held one hand up in supplication. “For pity’s sake, don’t.”

“Damn you!” Gertrude said. “You took everything that was good and fine and fucked it up. You filthy, ignorant son of a bitch.” She was crying so hard she could barely see, and the corner of her mouth was bleeding. In all her wild swinging, she’d managed to cut herself with her ring. “Die, you bastard.”

She raised the shovel in both hands, blade pointed at his throat. She had thought it would be difficult, but now that she came to it, she was so filled with rage that it was not difficult at all. It was the easiest thing in the world.

“Jamal!” somebody shouted joyfully. The voice came from behind her, from the new camp.

It was Leyster. He was running up the path, waving his arms.

“We’ve been rescued!” he shouted. “They’re here! We…”

He saw her standing over Jamal, shovel raised, and came to a dead stop.

The story ended.

“So how did you wind up here?” Molly Gerhard asked.

“I put together a few rumors, and figured it out that whoever was in charge was headquartered in the very far future. So I stole Griffin’s access card—”

“How?”

“It wasn’t difficult.” She glanced knowingly at Griffin. “I stole his card and took the funnel as far into the future as I could go. Then I cut a deal with the folks here.”

“Just who are ‘the folks here’? What are they like?”

“All in good time. It’s easier to show than to explain. Wait a couple of hours and I’ll arrange an introduction.”

“There’s one thing that makes no sense to me,” Griffin said, leaning forward. “What’s in it for you? When you changed your past, you also cut yourself free from it. Why did you do it?”

Gertrude lifted her head and stared down her nose at Griffin. Like a bird, Jimmy thought. Very much like a bird. “I wanted Leyster,” she said. “I decided that if I couldn’t have him in one time line, I’d have him in another.”

She turned toward Salley, who seemed to shrink from her gaze. “I did it for you,” Gertrude said triumphantly. “I did it all for you.”

Salley stared down into her lap. She said nothing.

The sun was coming up over the ring forest. At Gertrude’s invitation, they all went out onto the balcony.

The ring forest was a circle of green a mile across with open water at its center. It smelled as different from the forests Jimmy knew as an oak forest smelled different from a pine forest. Birds nested in the branches and fish swam among the roots. There were ponds and lakes within the forest, natural openings above which ternlike birds hovered and struck, sending up sharp white spikes of water as they penetrated the surface.

“This is lovely,” Molly Gerhard said.

Gertrude nodded and, without a grain of irony, said, “You’re welcome.”

Jimmy Boyle remembered how, in an earlier age, Salley had gone on and on about the waterbushes and what a significant ecological development they were. He wondered if these things were their descendants. He supposed they were.

“The forests cover all the continental shallows,” Gertrude said. “These trees are adapted for deeper water. Their holdfasts can’t reach the ocean floor, so they serve as sea-anchors. They entangle, and form a rich variety of habitats sheltering many distinct species.”

As she spoke, Griffin and Salley slipped away. They stood apart from the others, quietly talking. Jimmy positioned himself so he could unobtrusively eavesdrop, while still seeming to be listening to Gertrude.

“How long have you been here,” Griffin asked, “with her?”

“One month.”

“It must have been difficult.”

Salley moved a little closer to him. “You have no idea,” she said angrily. “That has to be the single most arrogant and self-centered and… and manipulative creature in existence.”

Griffin smiled sadly. “You haven’t met the Old Man yet.”

“Oh God,” Salley said. “I am so ashamed.”

“You shouldn’t be ashamed of something you did not do,” Griffin said.

“But I am! I am! How could I not be, knowing that she’s me?”

Suddenly Salley was crying. Griffin placed his arms around her, comfortingly, and she let him.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I swore to myself that I’d never let you touch me again, and yet here I am, clinging to you.”

“Yeah,” Griffin said. “Funny.”

“I can’t keep a single god-damned resolution I make,” she said bitterly. “Not to save my life.”

Jimmy moved away. There was nothing more to be learned here.

Gertrude was still talking, of course.

“Did you ever notice,” she said, “how all the stations are set at the end of an age? Just before a major extinction event? Did you ever wonder why the station in Washington should be different?”

“Biologically speaking,” Jimmy said, “our home age is in the middle of one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the planet. Even if not a single species more died off after our time, it would still be one of the Big Six.” He’d been around scientists long enough to have picked up that much, anyway.

“Perhaps,” Gertrude said. “Yet look around you. We’re extinct, humanity, I mean, and have been so for a long, long time.”

“How?” Molly Gerhard whispered. “How did we die off?”

“That,” Gertrude said firmly, “I’ll leave as an exercise for the student.”

There was an odd look on her face, triumphant and yet yearning. She was lonely, Jimmy realized. The old thing had been living here in splendid isolation so long she’d almost forgotten how to get along with other human beings. But she still felt the lack of their company.

He felt terribly sorry for her. But at the same time, he didn’t feel called upon to do anything about it. That wasn’t part of his job.

A chime sounded.

“What was that?” Molly Gerhard asked.

“It’s time,” Gertrude said, “to meet our sponsors.”

The gate was located in a small room at the center of Gertrude’s tower. Now a door opened, and one of the Unchanging emerged. “We have come,” it said, “to take you to the meeting.” To Gertrude: “Not you.” To the others: “Now.”