Bones of the Earth

19. Lazarus Taxon

Carnival Station: Mesozoic era. Jurassic period. Dogger epoch. Aalenian age. 177 My B.C.E.

The Old Man sat in a dark room, alone.

The world outside was arguably the most interesting time in all the Mesozoic, an age when dinosaurs were challenged from a surprising direction, almost lost their place in the ecosystem, and then successfully fought their way back to dominance again. He did not give it a thought. All his attention was focused on the visions he called up, one after another, in the air before him. He had been given tools that were inexplicable in their effects. The one he was using now enabled him to eavesdrop on select events that were, to him, of particular interest. It was like owning God’s own television set. So far as he knew, he was the only human being who had one.

Half a billion years in his future, Griffin and company were finally about to meet their sponsors. They stepped through a gate and onto the same grassy sward where they had first set foot in the Epimethean.

He leaned forward, and all his surroundings vanished as his identity dissolved into theirs.

Jimmy’s “climbing trees” were further from the gates than any of the party had thought. The tangle was as tall as a cathedral, and as complexly buttressed. The closer they got, the more elaborately structured it appeared, and the less like anything they had ever seen before.

The Unchanging led the company into the shelter of the trees. They walked down twisty pathways into ever-deepening shadows. There were rustling noises and furtive movements all about them. A great many living things dwelled here.

“I can’t decide if this is natural or artificial,” Molly Gerhard said, gesturing toward a splay of branches that spiraled up one trunk like a staircase. Water dripped down from above to fill a basin that grew out from another trunk, level with her chin. A drinking fountain for very tall children? “Or whether that’s even a valid distinction here.”

“What’s that smell?” Jimmy asked.

The tree was permeated with a sweet and sick-ish stench, reminiscent of theropod hatchlings before they’ve lost their down, of maple syrup on sweaty flesh, of zoo cages never perfectly cleaned. It was an uneasy-making smell.

Something dropped from an opening above, and stood before them for the briefest of moments.

It was humanoid only by the most generous reading of the term: bipedal, upright, with two arms, a trunk, and a head, all in the right places. But the arms folded oddly, the trunk canted forward, the legs were too short, and the head was beaked.

It favored them with an outraged stare, stamped its spurred feet, and screeched. Then it was gone.

“Dear God!” Molly Gerhard gasped.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Avihomo sapiens,” Salley said. “The second intelligent species ever to arise on this planet. Gertrude calls them Bird Men.”

“Birds,” Griffin said flatly. “They’re descended from birds?”

“Yes. I’m afraid we mammals have been relegated to the evolutionary fringes once again.”

The Unchanging gestured toward an arched cleft. “This way,” it said.

They stepped through and the tree opened up. Branches intertwined overhead to create a high ceiling. Soft globes of light floated among them, gently illuminating the space below. At the center of the room was a table. Behind it, their hosts stood waiting.

There were three Bird Men, ungainly and proud. The least of them was half again as tall as the humans. They were covered with fine black feathers that rose to a spiky crest at the backs of their commodious skulls. Their beaks were white as sun-bleached bone. Their eyes were stark red.

Their arms, scrawny and oddly jointed, were much like those of mantises but with the long hands bent downward. They were nothing like wings; their kind had clearly lost the ability to fly long ages ago. It seemed to more than one of the party a sacrifice much greater than that made by their own ancestral hominids when they descended from the trees.

One of the Bird Men shook its head rapidly, then made a low, chuckling noise.

“I will translate,” the Unchanging said.

The Bird Men’s faces were unreadable; they displayed no visible sign of emotion save for the fast sudden movements of their heads. The one which had spoken before made a brief warbling sound.

“He says: We know why you are here. We know what you want.”

Griffin cleared his throat. “Well?”

“He says: No.”

“No?” Griffin said. “What do you mean, no?”

There was a prolonged exchange between the Unchanging and its masters. Then it said, “He says: No means no. No. You cannot have what you came here for.”

Griffin sucked in his cheeks, thinking. Then he said, “Perhaps we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

The Old Man leaned back in his chair with a wry smile of appreciation. This was an elementary tactic of bureaucratic infighting: When somebody won’t give you what you want, pretend you think he simply doesn’t understand what you’re asking for, go back to the beginning of your argument, and go over every aspect of your case again in excruciating detail. Then repeat. It was trial by boredom: Sooner or later, somebody would give in.

He had spent many hundreds of hours of his life locked in exactly such combat with a counterpart from DOD or GAO, slamming heads together like two bull pachycephalosaurs.

It wouldn’t work this time, though. The Bird Men were simply too far divergent from the human genome. They were immune to primate psychology. They didn’t even understand how it worked.

He delicately slid the time forward an hour, and leaned back into the narrative.

“He says: That is what we did. It can be traced in time as a four-dimensional spiral. Was there an alternative? No. We could have done otherwise, but we decided not to.”

“What,” Salley said, “the fuck does that mean?”

Griffin made a hushing gesture. “Can you clarify?”

One of the Bird Men, the tallest, slammed a hand down on the table with emphatic violence.

“She says: Why are we discussing this when otherwise, we are not discussing this?”

The humans exchanged glances. “Perhaps,” Griffin said, “you are suggesting that there is no such thing as free will?”

The Bird Men clustered, heads darting so emphatically that it seemed miraculous that none of them was stabbed by their slashing beaks.

“They say: It is free, yes. But is it will?”

That small part of the Old Man that remained himself while he was immersed in the experience, felt an old and familiar exasperation. If a lion could talk, Wittgenstein said, we couldn’t understand it. It was true. He had dealt with the Bird Men countless times, and their thoughts were not like human thoughts. They did not translate well. Perhaps they could not be translated at all.

The Unchanging were merely obstinate and maddeningly unimaginative. The Bird Men processed information in a manner completely alien to human thought. Only rarely was there true understanding between the two species.

There was a knock on the door. Jimmy stuck his head in. “Sir?”

He withdrew from the experience. “What is it?”

“You asked me to tell you when we had Robo Boy’s confession.”

“Well, it hardly matters now. Did he name his superiors?”

“Oh, yes. He sang like a canary, sir. He sang like Enrico fucking Caruso. We’ve been in contact with the FBI. They say it won’t be any trouble getting the warrants.”

“That’s something, I suppose.” He waved Jimmy out of the room and slid the time forward another hour.

The humans were sitting on chairs now. They had finally thought to ask for them. All of them but Griffin looked annoyed and resentful. Only he had enough experience hiding both anger and humiliation to hold himself with aplomb.

“Explain your project to us.”

Here at last was the core question. The Old Man leaned out of the conversation. What followed was necessary for their understanding. But it was old news to him, and he didn’t care to hear it again.

The Bird Men had given time travel to humanity for one reason: in order to study human beings. The gift enabled them to place the Unchanging, a tool designed to be minimally disruptive, in close proximity to humans, so that it could observe and record their behavior.

But there was a second reason for the gift as well.

The Bird Men wanted to study humans engaged in typical human activity. Their curiosity was broad-ranging, but by logging the comings and goings of the Unchanging, the Old Man had been able to determine that the two activities they considered quintessentially human were bureaucracy and scientific investigation.

Of the two, they were significantly more interested in science. So they had created a controlled situation in which humans might engage in it. They had given them the Mesozoic.

This pleased him almost as much as it had pleased him, as a child, to learn that dolphins genuinely liked people. Human beings could be real jerks. It was encouraging that another species deemed them worth liking. It was reassuring that somebody with nothing at stake believed that finding things out was central to the human enterprise.

It made him feel vindicated.

He slid the vision up to the end of the explanation, and then froze time motionless while he wrote and posted a memo. When he unfroze the vision, a second Unchanging came in and said a few words.

Salley and Molly Gerhard followed it out of the room.

It was a small act of mercy on his part. The conference would go on for hours, and they were both bored to tears. So he’d arranged for them to be given a small tour.

“Look!” Molly Gerhard said. “Little models of floating towers, like the one we were on.”

“No.” Salley pulled one from the water, and held it up so the other woman could see the underwater bulb that gave the tower it buoyancy, and the tangle of holdfasts that rendered it stable. “They’re not models. They’re saplings.”

They were deep in the tangled roots of the Bird Men’s cathedral habitat, and so of course there were many, many pools of water. They were black and still. The air above them smelled of cedar.

“So you’re saying they grew—”

A Bird Man burst from the water, neck extended. Molly Gerhard gasped and drew back in alarm. The creature strode from the water, shook itself like a duck, and then disappeared down a corridor.

The Old Man skipped ahead. Now the two women were high in the crown of the tree. Gold coins of sunlight danced all about them as a light breeze stirred the branches overhead.

Molly Gerhard wrinkled her nose. “With all their technology, you’d think they’d do better.” There were white-streaked nests all about them, carelessly made things filled with the din of screeching hatchling Bird Men.

“You have to look at it from their perspective,” Salley said without conviction. Then she shrugged.

He skipped ahead again.

Now they were standing on a parapet not far from the top of the trees. The Unchanging gestured to direct their attention outward, toward the horizon. Molly Gerhard turned, laughing, and froze with astonishment and awe. Salley stood silent behind her.

Impatiently, the Old Man switched his attention back to Griffin and Jimmy. He was not interested in mere wonder. What he cared about was results.

“He says: Yes, we could give you the equipment you request. Yes, you could rescue your friends. Not at the first resilience point. Not at six months. That is on record as not having happened. But at the second resilience point. At two years.

“But you would not want it.”

Griffin straightened. Hours had passed. He was visibly weary. “What do you mean? Of course we want the equipment. Thank you. We’ll take it.”

There was a very long silence.

“Why wouldn’t we want it?” Jimmy asked.

Now there came a low growl so uncertain that Griffin could not tell which of the three had made it.

“He says: You would not want it because the project is over.”

“What?”

“He says: The line in which we gave you time travel is being negated.”

“When?”

“He says: Immediately after this conversation.”

There was a certain amount of squabbling and logic-chopping following the Bird Men’s revelation, simply because to argue was human. It would do no good. The Old Man skipped over most of it.

“But what about Gertrude? She’s from another time line, and yet I met her,” Salley was saying when he dropped back into her consciousness. The Old Man had made sure she and Molly both would be back for the end of the discussion. “Surely that proves you can reconcile time lines. So why close down ours? Why can’t you do the same thing—whatever it was—for us?”

The Bird Man spoke for a long time.

The Unchanging said, “She says: It was only temporary. Even if it were possible, it would not be possible.”

“I’m not following this.”

“She says: The time line that contains our field of study contains us as well. We knew this from the start. We knew that to study you meant that we must ourselves dissolve into timelike loops when the work is done. That is the price. Time travel is not available under any other terms.”

“Then why?” Jimmy asked. “Why bother at all?”

The Bird Man jabbed a beak first at Salley and then at Griffin. “She says: They understand.”

One of the Bird Men turned, and walked to the back of the room. A second followed him. There was a still pool of water there. One after the other, they plunged into it and were gone.

Before the third could start after them, Griffin said, “Listen to me!”

It peered at him intently.

“If it doesn’t matter… If nothing matters… Then give us the machines so we can rescue our friends.”

The Bird Man and the Unchanging exchanged what sounded like clucks and squawks.

“She says: Why?”

“It’s a human thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

The Bird Man screamed, a noise so loud it made their ears hurt.

There was a long silence, while the four humans resigned themselves to failure, and then at last the Unchanging spoke. “She says: It shall be done.” It paused. “Also, it has been—” It paused again. “A rare honor. To stand in the presence of a human being. How beautiful you are. How delightful in your curiosity and your courage both.”

The Bird Man made a rattling sound.

“She says: You are scientists. She also is a scientist. All her life she has spent trying to understand mammals.”

A shriek.

“She says: You are noble creatures. The world is a poorer place without you.”

The Bird Man unfolded one grotesque forelimb and stretched it across the table. The three fingers on its terrifying hand separated, extended.

“She says: Can we shake hands?”

The Old Man toyed with the idea of following Griffin’s company on their journey home, and decided against it. He shut down the one vision, and called up another. A window opened on the latter days of the Maastrichtian, a mere hundred and twenty-two million years in his future.

It was the day they had chosen for their harvest festival, and the camp was filled with the smell of a whole young ankylosaur roasting slowly on a spit over a bed of coals.

Leyster was sitting in the long house scraping swamp tubers and idly watching Nathaniel play with a rattle Patrick had made him. Daljit was plucking a small feathered dino. He glanced at the carcass in her hands and froze. “That’s not a… what is that thing?”

“It’s just a nothing-special little brush dino. It’ll make a nice side dish.”

“No, seriously. I don’t recognize it. Is that a new species? Let me see its teeth.”

“No dissecting dinner!” Katie laughed. She was taking palm leaves from the kettle where they’d been soaking, and wrapping them around the scraped tubers, so they could be baked in the coals. “Keep scraping.”

“Oh, come on. It has to be gutted anyway. It could be significant.”

Daljit put the carcass down. “Listen,” she said tensely.

“I don’t…” Katie said.

“Shush!”

From outside, there came the sound of voices. They were not familiar.

“Oh God, where’s my blouse?” Daljit cried.

Katie scooped up the baby and ran outside without saying a word.

Leyster was the second out the door. Daljit came close on his heels, buttoning furiously.

Their rescuers were U.S. military, for the most part, young men with short hair and socially awkward demeanor. But they’d brought along a documentary camerawoman, and she was already moving among the paleontologists, interviewing them.

“What is the one thing you most regret?” she asked, camera on her shoulder. Several of the tribe hung back shyly, intimidated by the novelty of an unfamiliar face. She pointed her microphone at Jamal. “You?”

“I guess the thing I most regret is that we didn’t bring along a botanist. There’s a prejudice in our field in favor of animals, vertebrates in particular, and we certainly paid the price for that. We really could have used somebody who was familiar with the properties of the local plants.”

“Amen to that!” Katie said fervently. “There must be something around here with tannin in it. Do you have any idea how difficult brain tanning can be? And dyes! Don’t get me started on dyes.”

“And you?”

“I’m sorry I never managed to make a decent clay pot,” Daljit said. “The kiln was good. I just couldn’t manage to get the right clay or the right temperature.”

“You?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring along a spare time beacon,” Nils said. Everybody laughed. Then, more seriously, “If I’d known how long I was going to be stuck here, I would’ve brought along a lot more pharmaceuticals. And I would have learned some crafts.”

“Like what?”

“Like how to make knap flint. Have you ever tried to make a flint knife? It’s not easy!”

“What,” the woman asked, focusing her camera first on Nathaniel and then panning up to Katie’s face, “is the first thing you plan to get or do when you get back to the present?”

“I want a steak.”

“A milkshake!”

“A cup of tea—with lemon and extra sugar.”

“A shower! With hot water!”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m going to turn off my brain and sit down in front of the television for a week.”

“I’m going to read a book I’ve never read before.”

“I’m going to talk to a stranger!”

Standing apart from the others, Leyster muttered fervently, “I’m going to kill Griffin for putting us through all this. Then, if there’s time, I’ll get Robo Boy as well.”

But he spoke quietly, to himself. Only the Old Man heard him. And when, a half hour later, the coals soaked with water and the half-roasted ankylosaur laid out for the scavengers, they lined up to step through the gate and out into the Crystal Gateway Marriott, Crystal City, Virginia, only he saw Leyster very carefully pick up a rock and slip it in his pocket.

The Old Man sighed, and opened the file folder on the desk before him. There were eight memos within. He read through them all carefully, then lifted one between thumb and forefinger and tore it in half.

Things had worked out much better the second time around. There had only been two deaths. He had to admire Leyster for that. The man had done much better with his charges than he had the first time through.

He regretted Lydia Pell’s death, of course, and that of the young man as well. But what was done was done. Second chances were so rare in this world to be almost miracles.

He decided to take one last look at Gertrude, solitary and splendid. She was a rara avis, perhaps the rarest in his private aviary of colleagues, and he liked to look in on the old bird from time to time.

A Lazarus taxon was one that disappeared from the fossil record, as if extinct, only to reappear later, as if rising from the dead. It pleased him to think of Dr. Gertrude Salley as humanity’s own Lazarus taxon. So long as she existed, the human race wasn’t really dead. Occasionally he paid her a visit, just to maintain her tenuous connection with humanity.

Sometimes they played chess. He always won.

Thus reminiscing, he opened a window into Gertrude’s tower, where she sat at her writing desk, working. Once, when he had done so, she had sensed his presence (she also had been given extraordinary tools) and, looking him directly in the eye, winked sardonically. Not today, though.

It was just as well. This was too solemn a day for laughter. This was the day when everything ended.

He signed off on the last of the memos, and dumped them into the tray for outgoing mail. The enterprise was over. As of this instant, he was as good as retired.

Slowly, he stood. The leather chair creaked as he did so, as if in sympathy for him. His body ached, but such pains came naturally with age. He was used to them.

There was only one thing left to be done.