Bones of the Earth (25 page)

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 kerpgens. 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 upslope.

Involuntarily, Salley touched her tore. 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 tore.

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 unclipped 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.