Bones of the Earth

13. Ghost Lineage

Terminal City: Telezoic era. Eognotic period. Afrasia epoch. Orogenian age. 50 My C.E.

Poking about in the bluffs of a stream feeding into the Aegean River, Salley found something interesting. In an eroded cliff face, she had noticed a little syncline of a dark material that looked to be asphaltite. So, of course, she scrambled up to check it out. “Dead oil” often marked a bone-bed. She broke off a bit and sniffed it for kerogens. A green streak of corrosion led her to something small embedded in the rock and just recently exposed to the elements. She opened her knife and began to dig it out, so she could identify it.

It was flat and shaped roughly like a disk. She touched it to her tongue. Copper. A penny, perhaps. Maybe a washer of some kind.

For an instant she felt dizzy with how far she was from home.

The stratum, she realized, was metamorphic macadam, a roadbed that had been squeezed and twisted by the millions-years-long collision of Africa into Europe that had thrown up the mighty Mediterranean Mountains dominating the horizon. Once it would have been thronged with tourists in rental cars and busloads of school children, motor scooters and moving vans, flatbed trucks with tiers of bright new automobiles, sports cars driving far too fast, junkers held together with bailing wire spouting black exhaust and carrying families of refugees from regional brushfire wars into a strange new world.

Now it took a sharp eye and careful analysis to determine that human beings had ever existed at all.

Carefully, she wrapped the bit of metal in her handkerchief. She could examine it more closely later. Then she flipped open her notepad to record the find, only to discover to her intense annoyance that her pen was out of ink.

“Dr. Salley!”

She turned to see who was calling.

It was the Irishman. He stood by the stream, waving for her to come down.

She shook her head and pointed beyond him, to where the stream poured into the Aegean. Several platybelodons were splashing and wallowing in the bright green river. They were wonderful beasts, basal proboscideans with great shovel-jaw tusks, and they clearly loved it here. They scooped up and ate the floating waterbushes with enormous gusto. There were little glints of gold about their necks. “Come on up! Enjoy the view!”

With a wry twist of his mouth, he started up-slope.

Involuntarily, Salley touched her torc. She did not trust Jimmy Boyle. He was all calm and calculation. There was always a hint of coldness to his smile.

“Here you are.” Jimmy plopped down alongside her, and waited to hear what she had to say. Jimmy was patient like that. Jimmy always had all the time in the world.

“Shouldn’t you be with Griffin?”

“I could ask the same of you.” He waited. Then, when she did not respond, he said, “He’s concerned about you. We all are.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Then why aren’t you in Terminal City, helping with negotiations?”

“Because I’m of more use out here.”

“Doing what?”

She shrugged. Down on the river road, a lone Unchanging was guiding a small herd of indricotheres toward their new habitat. Indricotherium was a bland and placid beast, as well as being the largest land mammal ever to exist. It stood fourteen feet high at the shoulder and looked something like a cross between a giraffe, an elephant, and a horse. Salley’s heart soared at the sight of it.

She raised her glasses and stared briefly at the Unchanging, tall and serene, leading the indricotheres.

The Unchanging were beautiful too, in their way. They were thinner than El Greco’s angels, and indistinguishable in their sexlessness. But Salley couldn’t warm to them, the way she could to the beasts of the valley. They were too perfect. They lacked the stench and unpredictability of biological life.

The sun flashed off a gold circlet around one indricothere’s neck, and she put the glasses down.

Again, she touched a hand to her torc.

Jimmy glanced at her shrewdly. “He’s not using the controller, if that’s what’s bothering you,” he said. “That’s just not his style.”

“Don’t talk,” she said, annoyed. “Just listen.”

The first thing that impressed Salley about the Telezoic was how quiet it was. A stunned silence permeated the world, even when the birds were singing and the insects calling to one another across the distances. Something catastrophic had happened to the world within the last few million years. So far as she could tell, all the larger animals were gone. Mammals seemed to be entirely extinct. A thousand noises she was accustomed to were no more.

Except along the Aegean River, of course. Here, the Unchanging had imported great numbers of uintatheres, dinohyuses, giant sloths… a parade of whimsical creatures making up a sort of “greatest hits” selection of the Age of Mammals. With a few unexplained exceptions (such as her beloved platybelodons, which ranged freely up and down the river), the animals each had their own territory, sorted roughly in order of appearance, so that a trip downriver was like a journey through time. Salley had backpacked two days down the river road, past the glyptodons and megatheres of the Pleistocene, the gracile kyptocerases of the Pliocene, the shansitheres of the Miocene, all the way into the Oligocene with its brontopses and indricotheres, before running low on food and turning back.

“I’m not hearing anything,” Jimmy said.

“You hear everything. You just don’t know what it means.”

She wasn’t sure how far back in time the stock went. Did it end after dwindling into the insignificant mammals—not a one of them larger than a badger—that crossed over the K-T boundary into the early Paleocene, where their betters could not, and so inherited the Earth? Or was there then a sudden irruption of dinosaurs? She knew which she would choose. But even on short acquaintance, she was certain that the Unchanging did not reason the way she did.

“It makes you think,” Jimmy said. “All those millions of years those brutes were extinct, and now they’re alive again.”

“Hell of a ghost lineage,” Salley agreed.

Jimmy cocked his head. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

“Sometimes you’ll have a line that disappears from the fossil record for millions of years, and then pops up again in an entirely new era. During the interval, it looks to be extinct. But then an animal that’s clearly its descendant pops up again in a distant age. They’re obviously related, so we infer a succession of generations between them. That’s a ghost lineage.”

“Doctor,” Jimmy said, “I’ll be frank. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell you’d be much use to us. But Griffin thinks very highly of you, and wants you with him in Terminal City. It puts him off his stride that you’re not.”

“If it’s that important to him, why didn’t he mention it last night? We slept in the same bed.”

Jimmy looked away. “He’s not exactly rational when it comes to you.”

“So. This little discussion wasn’t his idea, was it?”

“A man thinks with his dick,” Jimmy said, embarrassed. “That’s why his friends have to look out for him.”

Salley stood. “If Griffin wants me, he can always reel me in.” She touched the torc again.

Jimmy stood as well, slapping at his trousers. “He doesn’t play that kind of game, Dr. Salley. Honestly, he doesn’t.”

“Oh, wait. Before you go,” she said. “Lend me your pen. Mine is out of ink.”

Jimmy hesitated. “It belonged to my father.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll give it back to you.”

With obvious reluctance, he undipped it from his pocket and handed it over. It was a Mont Blanc. “I’d be sorry to see anything happen to it,” he said.

“I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

When Jimmy was gone, Salley climbed back down to the stream. She’d intended to head upslope, toward the foothills of the Mediterraneans, but something about the day, the heat, the slant of the afternoon light, sapped her will. She found a fruit-maple tree that looked like it needed her to sit underneath it, and so she did.

Leaning back against the tree but not in its shade, half-drowsing in the dusty sunlight, Salley closed her eyes. She resurrected a fantasy of the sort she had long ago learned not to be ashamed of but to accept as a natural part of the complex workings of the human mind.

In her fantasy, she was working a cliff face in the badlands of Patagonia, delicately picking out the intact skull of a giganotosaur a good third again larger than had ever been found before. Which would catapult Giganotosaurus past its rivals and establish it, once and for all, as the largest land predator the world had ever known. Simultaneously, she was speaking via satellite uplink to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, for whose annual meeting in Denver she had been unwilling to abandon this astonishing find. And, of course, because the fossil was a complete and utter refutation of all his theories, she had Leyster kneeling before her—bound, blindfolded, and naked.

The SVP had just awarded her the Romer-Simpson medal, and she was making her acceptance speech.

In her fantasy, she was wearing a wide denim skirt instead of her usual jeans. With one hand, she pulled the skirt up above her knees. Then she seized Leyster by the hair and forced his head between her legs. She wasn’t wearing any panties.

“Lick me,” she whispered harshly in a moment when her speech was interrupted by spontaneous applause. Then, cunningly, “If you do a good enough job, I might let you go.”

Which was a lie, but she wanted him to do his damnedest to please her.

Leyster was shockingly erect. She could tell by the earnest and enthusiastic way he ran his tongue up and down her cleft. By the small noises he made as he nuzzled and kissed her until she was moist and wide. By the barely-controlled ardor with which he licked and played with her clit.

But as he labored (and she spoke, to thunderous approval), the quality of his lovemaking changed profoundly. It became gentler, more lingering… romantic, even. This was—in her fantasy, she could tell—no longer an act of lust but one of love. In the heat of the act he had, all against his will, fallen in love with her. Inwardly he raged against it. But he was helpless before his desire, unable to resist the flood of his own consuming passion.

It was at that moment that she reached orgasm.

At the same time that she came in her fantasy, Salley grabbed the soft inner parts of her thighs—it was a point of pride with her never to touch her private parts at such moments—and squeezed as hard as she could, digging in with her nails until pain became pleasure and pleasure became release.

Afterwards, she leaned back, thinking about Griffin. She was aware of the irony of including Richard Leyster in her fantasies. But she didn’t feel that this was in any way being unfaithful to Griffin. Just because you loved somebody didn’t mean you had to fantasize about him.

She did love him. Salley inevitably fell for every man she had sex with. It was, she supposed, a genetic predisposition hardwired into her personality. But, still, the thought that this time was for real and forever was inherently odd.

Why him?

Griffin was such a strange man to fall for! She knew the smell of his cologne, and that he invariably wore Argyle socks (she had never before been involved with a man who even knew what Argyle socks were) and a hundred other things about him as well. She knew that the awful watch he wore was a Rolex Milgauss, self-winding, anti-magnetic, and originally designed to sell to nuclear power plant engineers. But she didn’t really know him at all. His inner essence was still a mystery.

When Gertrude had popped into her life like a demented fairy godmother, she’d said, “Trust me. This is the one. He’s everything you want. A week from now, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without him.”

But a week had gone by, and more than a week, and it was like every other relationship she’d ever been in. She was as confused as ever.

True love sure didn’t feel anything like she’d thought it would.

Not half an hour later, Molly Gerhard strolled casually out of the forest. Salley trusted Molly-the-Spook even less than she did Jimmy. Molly came in under your radar. She was such a pleasant woman, so patient and understanding. So easy to talk to. She was the kind of person you wanted for a friend, someone to confide in and share all your innermost thoughts with.

“So,” Molly Gerhard said. “How’s it going?” She’d put on a few pounds from her early days, and that only made her seem that much more comfortable and trustworthy. “I ran into Jimmy just now. Wow, is he looking sour. You really put a bee in his ear.”

“If we’re going to talk, let’s not pretend you just happened to wander by, okay?”

Molly Gerhard grinned. “Can’t put anything over on you, can I? Jimmy thought maybe you’d be a little more comfortable talking things over with me.”

“Just us gals, huh?”

“Jimmy can be a real jerk,” Molly Gerhard said. “Griffin too. I know I’m not supposed to talk about my boss like that.”

“Not unless you want to establish rapport with his girlfriend, no.”

“But we really do need to talk. Come back to the village. I’ll make you a pot of tea.”

“I was going to go upstream and…” Salley began. But suddenly she didn’t want any such thing. “Oh, all right.”

So far as Salley knew, nobody had bothered to give the village a name. It was a scattering of cottages with thatched roofs, indoor plumbing, and several appliances she couldn’t figure out. She’d seen motels that were bigger. “We have conferences here sometimes,” Griffin had explained.

“How come I’ve never heard of this?” she’d asked.

“They’re for government types—planners, bureaucrats, politicians. Not paleontologists.”

“Why is that?”

“To be perfectly frank, you’re not important enough.”

Upriver from the village loomed Terminal City, looking for all the world like a cliff of solid gold. When first she’d seen it from a distance, she’d thought it was two sea stacks miraculously stranded far inland, separated by a razor-straight line of sky and river. The color, she’d assumed, was reflection from the setting sun. Then that it was a structure built in imitation of eroded geological forms, rather like one of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures, only of yellow bricks.

But no. It really was made of gold.

“You know what?” Molly Gerhard said, breaking into her thoughts. “This would be the perfect place for a honeymoon.”

Salley snorted.

“Wrong thing to say, huh?” Molly Gerhard said quietly.

“There’s my cottage. Let’s go in. I’ll make the tea.”

Salley had just put the kettle on when she heard a familiar noise outside. She hurried to the ice box. “Here. Watch this,” she said, and went to the back door with a cabbage in each hand.

Something big was moving out in the bushes. She underhanded the cabbages lightly in that direction. Molly Gerhard came up behind her and waited.

They didn’t have to wait long before a glyptodon came lumbering out of the underbrush and onto the lawn.

Glyptodons were charming creatures, as armored as a turtle and as large as a Volkswagen. Their backs were covered with a pebbled shell that looked like a bowl turned upside down. They had matching armored yarmulkas atop their heads.

“Now that,” Molly Gerhard said, “is one ugly critter.”

“Are you nuts? It’s gorgeous.”

The glyptodon slowly approached the cabbages and examined them critically. Then it crunched first one and then the other in its beaked mouth, tossing its head as it ate. After which, it waddled away again. They were grouchy creatures, glyptodons were. They reminded her a lot of ankylosaurs.

And a little of Griffin.

The water was ready then, so she poured two cups and carried them to the kitchen table. “So,” she said. “How are the talks?”

Molly Gerhard looked discouraged. “They talk. But they won’t negotiate.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“How so?” Molly Gerhard leaned forward. “What have you figured out?”

“Nothing you wouldn’t have learned if you’d been paying attention.”

“What? What? Tell me.”

Salley sipped her tea, and said nothing.

Molly Gerhard changed tactics. “Listen to me. We’re running out of time. Our operational schedules are divided into cells, with an administrative intercept point for each one. We’re in a Priority D era, so the op-cell we have to work with is eight days long. Are you with me so far?”

“I loathe bureaucratic jargon. Give it to me in English.”

“We’ve been here six days. Two more, and the Old Man finds us and shuts us down. Come with me to Terminal City. Help us find an answer.”

“There’s nothing to be learned there.”

“And there is out here?”

“Yes,” Salley said. “Have you taken a close look at the waterbushes?”

“Those things that clog the river? No.”

“I have. They’re an entirely new plant form. I think they’re derived from kelp, believe it or not. Forget about the glyptodons. Waterbushes are much more important.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Let me put it this way. The biggest difference between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic is not the absence of dinosaurs, but the presence of grass. Grass changed everything. It has amazing powers of recovery, which made large-scale grazing possible for the first time. Which in turn made animals like bisons and water buffalos possible. And therefore made predators like lions and tigers possible. Theoretically, birds could have evolved to fill the niches their bigger cousins vacated. How come mammals managed to make an end run around birds? Grass! It changed the rules. It made it impossible for the dinosaurs to come back.”

“Oh-kaay. I think I’m following this. So what’s the application to our present situation?”

“The waterbushes are something new. They change the rules. I want to see what they’ve made of the local ecosystem.”

“It’s a pretty dull ecosystem, I gather,” Molly Gerhard said. “Lots of drab little birds. A few lizards, and I think I saw some crawdads. I don’t see why you’d care, when you’ve got all these terrific mammals to look at. You’ve never seen them before, right? I’d think you’d be excited.”

“I was, at first. But there’s no context. It’s like going to the fucking zoo. You see an elephant, some kangaroos, and a pond full of penguins and try to figure out what kind of ecosystem produced them. You know nothing about their behavior. You know nothing about what they’re like in the wild. I want to see the Telezoic. I want to muck about in a functioning wilderness.”

She did not tell Molly, but it was immediately obvious to her that this could not possibly be the Unchanging’s home time. The environment was simply not damaged enough to be home to a technologically advanced civilization. Even if they’d reached a stage where they could restore the damaged biota, resurrect extinct plants and animals, recreate the delicate webs of interdependence, there was no way they could undo the physical damage—the mountains leveled, the minerals redistributed, pit mines dug deep into the earth.

There was no way they would.

“Well,” Molly Gerhard said, “if you want to go look, why don’t you?”

Salley lifted her chin, to make her torc more prominent.

With a stricken expression, Molly reached out to touch Salley’s arm. “Oh, Salley. You don’t really think…”

“Yes. I do.”

The crate had been humiliating enough.

But when she’d emerged from it into Terminal City, Salley wasn’t expecting to be put on a leash. The Unchanging, however, were astonishingly literal-minded. They had fit the torc around Salley’s neck, and given Griffin the controller. He’d slipped it into his pocket. “I promise you,” he’d said, as soon as the Unchanging were out of earshot, “I will never use it.”

She stuck out her hand. “Fork it over, and I’ll make damned sure you won’t.”

Griffin looked pained. “I can’t do that. They’d know.”

“You like this!” Salley spat. “You’re enjoying it.”

“Of course I’m not.”

Arguing, they’d stepped through a transport gate and into the village.

They’d patched things up that night, and slept together, and even made love. But it still rankled. So, after a day’s unhappy thought, she’d gone walkabout.

The mammals were delightful. She had to admit that. What she had originally thought a game preserve, but eventually concluded must be a quarantine area or holding pens for transshipment, was stocked with marvels. The kyptocerases alone—primitive, deerlike ungulates with two horns over their eyes and another pair on their noses—were well worth price of admission. She broke out laughing every time she saw one. They might have been invented by Dr. Seuss.

But whenever she’d started to wander away from the river, something had drawn her back. She’d get bored, or tired, or distracted. A pattern began to emerge. So she started observing the animals themselves, to see how their torcs kept them in their designated areas.

And found that whenever they reached the limits of their range, they’d grow bored, or tired, or distracted, and turn back. Once or twice, she noticed them grow randy and amble off in search of a mate. Never outward. Always inward.

“Stop beating up on yourself, Salley,” Molly Gerhard said. “Word of honor, Griffin isn’t using the controller. Look. I don’t even particularly like the man. But I swear to you, he wouldn’t do that.”

Salley was a romantic. It almost went without saying. Any person who squandered all her life and intellect on an underpaid career laboriously grinding fossils out of rocks just because these stones had once been the bones of an animal that millions of years ago had kicked Mesozoic butt was of necessity a romantic. It went with the territory. It was why so many paleontologists wore funny hats.

She wanted to believe Molly Gerhard.

But she wasn’t about to turn off her brain to do so.

So, after she’d gotten rid of the woman, Salley went back to her creek and as far up it as she could before feeling so tired and weary that she simply couldn’t go one step further. It was a bright little glen with ferns around the edges, and a clear mossy space under the trees she’d almost reached twice before, but never set foot upon.

She took Jimmy’s Mont Blanc out of her pocket.

Then she threw it gently ahead of her, onto a soft patch of moss. It glinted, bright and golden, in the sunlight.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to walk ahead and pick it up. Yet she did not. Go get it, she thought. Jimmy will be pissed if you lose it. It’s important to him. Walk over and pick it up.

But she didn’t. She simply didn’t want to. No matter how important the pen was, she wasn’t about to go after it.

Which was how she knew for sure that Griffin really was controlling her.

On her way back to her cottage, she picked up an axe from the tool shed by the woodpile. Then she went into the bedroom she and Griffin had shared and turned the bed into a pile of kindling. After which she dragged the mattress outside, piled the broken bedframe atop it, and doused it with cooking oil.

Then she set it afire.

She wasn’t sure who she was angrier at—Griffin or herself. Griffin had lied to and betrayed her. Gertrude, on the other hand, had as good as made a whore of her. No man who was so afraid of what she might do that he’d use a device to control her could possibly be the great love of her life. She couldn’t love such a man.

She couldn’t even respect him.

Why wasn’t the bastard here, so she could take this axe to him? It was typical of Griffin that when the time came to take the heat, he was nowhere to be found.

Gertrude too, for that matter.

Seething, she went into the bedroom to pack her few possessions into the travel case. Then she had to get this monstrosity off her neck. There had to be a metal saw or some bolt cutters around here somewhere. She’d…

She stopped.

There was an envelope on the dresser. Funny she hadn’t seen it before. She picked it up. Something was written on it, in her own hand.

It was addressed to her.