Free Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

note?”
    Salley shut her eyes and took a long sip of coffee. “Okay, where was I?”
    â€œYou’d just been asked to leave the university.”
    â€œGod! What a fucking mess. Do we really have to talk about that?”
    â€œWell, it’s part of our history, after all.”
    Four years ago, Salley had been caught up in an intellectual-theft scandal that almost destroyed her career. She had been sleeping with her advisor, a man better known for his fieldwork than his teaching skills, and some of his ideas found their way into one of her papers.
    â€œDidn’t he go over the paper first?”
    â€œOf course he did. We went over it together, discussing the issues, and he went off on one his rants. That’s when he mentioned his ideas and their application to what I was saying. He as good as told me to use them.”
    â€œThere’s a story that you two were in bed together when he went over the paper.”
    â€œOh yeah. You’d have to know Timmy to understand. He said that sex helped to focus him. I know how stupid that sounds. But I was infatuated. I thought he was a cross between Charles Darwin and Jesus of Nazareth.”
    Monk nodded encouragingly.
    â€œI had no idea I was doing anything wrong. The notion that ideas could belong to people was—I thought that the truth belonged to everybody. And I honestly did try to show him the final draft. He just waved it off. He said he trusted me. The bastard.”
    â€œYou were asked to leave, and then the next semester you popped up at Yale. How did that happen?”
    â€œI went to see the department head, and cried until he agreed to call in a favor.” She shoved a sausage in her mouth and chewed it to nothing. “It was the single most humiliating experience in my life.”
    â€œThat would have been Dr. Martelli, I believe.”
    â€œI swore to myself then and there that I’d never cry in public or sleep with another paleontologist again, so long as I lived. And I haven’t.”
    â€œWell, you’re young. Martelli was one of your on-line mentors, wasn’t he?”
    â€œEverybody was. I mean, not to be immodest, but when I was a teenager, I was everybody’s favorite wannabe. God bless the Web. I was in correspondence with half the vertebrate paleontologists in the world.”
    â€œHere. Look this over.” Monk placed a sheet of paper by her plate. “Tell me if I got anything wrong.”
    Salley shifted the spoon to her left hand so she could keep on eating, picked up the paper, and read:
    Everyone who knew her agreed that Gertrude “gave good daughter.” Except, of course, her own parents. At age five she took a pair of shears to the family Atlas and made silhouette dinosaurs. That same year she told her mother she wanted to marry a stegosaur when she grew up. At age seven she threw a fit when her parents wouldn’t take her to China to dig for fossils for summer vacation. It was a relief to them when, in junior high, she discovered the listservs on the Web and jumped in with both feet, asking naive questions and posing wild hypotheses. One of these—her notion that dinosaurs were secondarily flightless — she wrote up and submitted to the scientific journals when she was fifteen. To her outrage, it was not accepted. By then she was the indulged and spoiled daughter to a generation of paleontologists. At eighteen she was accepted by the University of Chicago. At twenty-one she was involved in a serious academic scandal. At twenty-three she was briefly famous when she announced her discovery of a “feathered pseudosuchian” fossil. Though initially accepted by the popular press, it was met with skepticism in the scientific community. At age twenty-four she met and took an instant dislike to Richard Leyster. At twenty-five her “pseudosuchian” had been widely discredited, the paper she published criticizing Leyster’s work, though