Bones of the Earth

20. Extinction Event

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.

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.

“Thank you,” Tom Navarro said. “That will be all.”

Amy Cho leaned heavily on her cane. Her hip ached. She had put off her operation in order to be here, and now she regretted it. A martyr, however mistaken in his cause, should go sweetly to his fate. He should put his faith and trust in God, and consign everything else to the Devil. He should be an inspiration to the world.

Raymond Bois was a terrible disappointment to her.

She wasn’t as fast as she used to be. The best she could do was a kind of difficult and painful shuffle, no faster than a healthy person’s normal stride. Nonetheless, she hurried to intercept the security people. “Wait!” she demanded. “I have something to say.”

Jimmy Boyle recognized her voice, and stopped for her. Turning, his people held up their sobbing prisoner so she could see him. The camerawoman stepped back to get them both in frame.

Amy Cho had raised her cane wrathfully, as if she were about to bring its knob down upon the young man’s head. “Stop blubbering! Paul was arrested in Antioch and in Ephesus and in Rome and God only knows where else, and yet it only strengthened his faith. He endured persecution. He reveled in his suffering. Can you do less?”

Robo Boy gaped stupidly at her.

She shook her cane furiously. “You have murdered and you have deceived and you have been weak in your faith. You must pray, young man. Pray for forgiveness! Pray for redemption! Pray for the restoration of your faith!”

Amy Cho was a firm believer in the redemptive power of faith. God didn’t require that you read His will correctly in every particular in order to be accepted as His own. She could easily imagine a Crusader and one of Saladin’s knights being welcomed into Heaven together, Christian and Mohammedan both, though they had died at each other’s hands. “Tell me you’ll pray to the Lord, damn you. Tell me you will!”

Raymond Bois straightened in the arms of his captors. He squeezed tight his eyes, and then gave his head a shake to free them of tears.

Then, curtly, he nodded.

Amy Cho stepped aside, and the security people took him away.

Maybe, she reflected, there was hope for him after all. God never gave up on anybody, not even the least of His creations. Nor must she. She would visit Robo Boy in prison. She would explain a few things to him. She would show him where he had gone wrong.

Incarceration could well turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the boy.

Daljit felt as if she were both here and someplace else entirely. Everything was strange to her. She was slowly coming to the realization that she didn’t belong in the modern world anymore. Not that she wanted to go back. Not really. Not yet.

Still… the greatest adventure of her life was over and done for. She had returned from Never-Never Land, from Middle-earth, from El Dorado. The dragons were slain, the treasures dug up and hauled away in wagons, the swords and bright banners packed in trunks and stowed in the attic. Nothing she ever did would ever be as vivid and meaningful again.

She couldn’t help but feel saddened by that.

She had been happy in the Maastrichtian. It had been a lot of work and suffering, sure. But there were satisfactions. Time and again, she had proved her own competence both to herself and to the others.

She might not be the jock Tamara was, but she had good survival skills. She knew how to make seven different kinds of snares and deadfalls. She could catch fish by hook, spear, or by hand. She could skin and butcher a fresh-killed hadrosaur and get away with as much meat as she could carry in less time than it took for the predators to arrive. She might not be the paleontologist Leyster was, but she could identify almost any dinosaur by sight or sound or, in some cases, smell. Most of the herbivores she could identify by flavor. She could pick up a shed tooth and identify not only its former owner, but where it had been in the jaw, and make a few shrewd guesses as to the creature’s age and health.

She could build a house and know it would stand up. She could sing a song in an entertaining manner. She had re-invented the loom, working from half-forgotten memories of a model she had made as a girl, and then she had taught herself and the others how to use it.

More than that, she had gone rafting down the Eden. She had faced down the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. She had tended to a dying woman in her final days and nursed an ailing man back to health. She had known tears and laughter, toil, love, sweat, and danger.

These were the primal satisfactions, the things that made life matter. What did Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century have to offer that could compare with them?

Patrick came up from behind and linked arms with her.

“Come on,” he said. “This poor, deluded fool is my editor”—the man smiled and nodded—“and, being pig-ignorant of the drinking habits of paleontologists, he has rashly promised to buy us all the beer we want. There’s an Orioles game going on right now, and he tells me the bar has a wide-screen TV with state-of-the-art speakers. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

She let herself be led away. “Do they have baskets of those little pretzels?” she asked anxiously. “It’s not really a proper game without them.”

“Not to worry,” the editor said soothingly, “If they don’t, we can always send out for some.”

Leyster had spotted Griffin standing against the far wall of the auditorium, and automatically taken the stone out of his pocket. Now, unobtrusively, he put it back. Whatever inchoate plan he might have had for vengeance had disappeared in an instant. He was in a different world now. That wasn’t how things were done here.

There were people everywhere about him, hands grabbing at him, voices making demands on his attention. It was hard sorting them all out. Somebody thrust a pen and an open copy of Science at him, and it was only after several had been signed and snatched away that it registered on him that he was autographing copies of the infrasound paper.

He needed air.

“Excuse me,” he said, moving toward the hall. “Excuse me, please. Excuse me.” He’d always hated crowds; how had he gotten away from them in the past? “I need to use the men’s room.”

“End of the hall to the left,” somebody said.

“Thanks.”

He fled.

There were people in the hall too, though not nearly so many as in the ballroom. Most were strangers. One, however, he recognized.

Salley.

He walked straight toward her, heart pounding, not knowing what he was going to do when he arrived. She stared at him, her eyes stricken, fearful, like a sacrifice waiting for the knife, or a woman who knows that someone is about to hit her.

Wordlessly, he took her hand and led her away.

They went into a blind fuck on the floor of the hotel room, just inside the door. It was fast and hard, and when they were done, their clothes were in tatters and Leyster realized that the door was not entirely closed. He kicked it shut, and in so doing found that he still had his shoes on.

So they untangled themselves and began removing those items of clothing that had been pushed out of the way rather than removed or (in some cases) ripped to shreds. “My poor blouse,” Salley said. She wriggled out of the panties that Leyster, too impatient to wait, had ripped down the crotch. “I’ll have to send out for new clothes.”

“Don’t do it for my sake,” Leyster said. “I like you just fine the way you are.”

“Beast,” she said lovingly. “Brute.” She picked up the complimentary newspaper they’d kicked aside on their way in, and aimed a swat at his head.

Leyster wrestled the paper from her hand, kissed her, kissed her again, kissed her a third time. Then he glanced at the paper and burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“The date. It’s only been five days since the first time I was here. That first conference after I was recruited, when Griffin explained about time travel.” He stood. “You gave the keynote address. Of course, you were older then.”

“Hey. Where are you going?”

“To do the other thing I’ve been thinking about every day of my life for the past two-and-a-half years.”

Leyster ran a bath, while Salley pretended to sulk. Then, as he lay soaking, she climbed in after him. By the time they were done screwing, there was more water on the floor than in the tub. After which, they dried each other off with the thick hotel towels, and finally made it all the way to the bed.

There, at last, they made love.

Afterwards, Leyster said, “Now I feel complete. All my life, I’ve had a kind of tension. A feeling that there was something I really ought to be doing but wasn’t. Now… well. I guess I’m finally happy.”

Salley smiled lazily. “You were waiting for me, dear heart. You and I were fated to be together from the beginning of time, and now here we are.”

“That’s a pretty thought. But I don’t believe in fate.”

“I do. I’m a Presbyterian. Predestination is dogmatic.”

He looked at her curiously. “I didn’t know you were religious.”

“Well, I don’t knock on people’s doors and give them pamphlets, if that’s what you mean. But, yeah, I take my faith pretty seriously. Is that a problem?”

“No, no, of course not.” He took her hand, kissed the knuckles one by one. “Nothing about you is a problem for me.”

She drew her hand away. “There’s something you have to know. I’ve been putting off telling you. But now it’s time.”

Leyster listened patiently, while Salley told him about the Bird Men’s decision, and all that had led up to it. When she was done at last, she said, “You don’t look surprised.”

“Of course not. I’ve known from the beginning that none of this was possible. The numbers never did add up on the whole time travel thing. Maybe the others could kid themselves about it. Not me.”

“Then why did you go along with it? Why didn’t you just refuse to play?”

“And miss out on seeing dinosaurs?” He laughed. “I’ve lived my life as I wanted, I’ve gotten answers to questions I thought I’d never know, and now I’ve had your love and known your body. Why should I want more? Why should I…say. Whose room is this, anyway? Yours or mine?”

“It’s yours.”

“Then my things should be in here somewhere, right?” He began opening drawers, rummaging through piles of clothes. “And if my things are here, then there ought to be… Aha! Here it is!”

An opened drawer yielded up his volume of the collected Shakespeare. He picked it up, leafed rapidly through its pages. “This is from The Tempest.”

He read:

He put down the book. “That pretty much says it for me.”

Salley smiled again, not at all lazily. “Come here, you. We’ve got things to do before we fall asleep.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Not long. A few hours, subjective time.”

“Time enough.”

Griffin stayed after everybody else to see the rescue team off through the gate. Immediately after which, because the team had already returned safely with the lost expedition, the soldiers in the support crew began dismantling the equipment.

It was all over.

He had decided at the last minute not to say anything about the Bird Men’s decision to the returning paleontologists. What could they do with their remaining time better than what they were doing now? They were all happy. Let them be happy.

Their generous patrons from Ultima Pangaea had granted him the boon of one last passage through time. He went to the front entrance, and found a limo waiting there for him.

It was time for his final trip to the Pentagon.

Griffin stepped out of the time funnel into a station that had been officially decommissioned the day before. He walked through the silent building and out the door. It was a bright, foggy morning. He could hear dinosaurs singing to one another. In the distance he saw the gray outlines of apatosaurs gently steaming in the mist.

His responsibilities were over now. He had fought the good fight. He had lost. Any second now, he fully expected to be weighed down with the crushing awareness of defeat. Yet, oddly enough, it did not come.

Instead, a great surge of glad emotion rose up within him. God, but he loved the Mesozoic! Particularly here and now. He couldn’t think of a time and place he’d rather be.

Griffin was staring out into the dazzling fog when he heard footsteps. He did not turn. He knew who it had to be.

The Old Man came up behind him, and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“You’ve done a good job,” he said. “Nobody could have done better.”

“Thank you,” Griffin said. “Now tell me that there was some point to all of this. Tell me I haven’t spent all my adult life knocking myself out for nothing.”

For a long moment he thought he would get no response. Then the Old Man said, “Imagine that you’ve been imprisoned, either justly or injustly, it makes no difference, for the rest of your life. You’ve been locked in a small room with one tiny barred window. You can’t see much—maybe a bit of sky, that’s all.

“But one day a bird comes to the window with a bit of straw in its beak. The next thing you know, it and its mate have built a nest right there in your window. Now, there are any number of ways you could respond to this. You could capture the birds and attempt to train them. You could steal their eggs to vary your diet. You could even kill them and smash their nest to punish them for being free when you’re not. It’s all a matter of temperament.

“What would you do?”

“I’d… study them. I’d try to learn everything I could about them. How they mate, what they eat, their resting metabolism, the developmental patterns of their young.”

“If you’re never going to get out of that cell, then what the hell good does your study do?”

“I don’t have an answer for that. Except that I’d still like to know. Just for its own sake.”

“Knowing is better than ignorance,” the Old Man said.

Griffin weighed the statement judiciously, nodded. “That’s true. But is it enough?”

“To justify your life?” The Old Man was silent for a while. Then he said, “I can’t speak for anybody else. But for me personally, life doesn’t need justification. It just is. And as long as I’m here, I want to know… simply to know. Yes, I honestly believe that’s enough.”

“How much time do we have left?” Griffin asked.

The Old Man cleared his throat. “I don’t think that question has any meaning.”

“I suppose that’s so.” He looked down at his watch without seeing it. Carefully, he removed it from his wrist and slipped it into a pocket.

“It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes,” he answered himself. “Yes, it is. If we’ve ever had a nicer, I can’t remember when.”