Free Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick Page A

controversial, was not highly regarded, and Gertrude, no longer the youngest dinosaur expert in existence, was staring hard into the abyss of failure.
    Salley mopped up the last of her grits with a bit of toast, and returned the paper. “I never use my given name. I’d prefer you called me Salley, okay?”
    â€œAh.” He made a note on the paper. “Anything else?”
    â€œMonk, are you going to have any actual science in your book?”
    â€œScience? It’s all science.”
    â€œWhat I’ve seen so far is just chitchat and gossip.” She finished her coffee and picked up her tray. “Come on. I’ve got something to pick up over to the animal colony, and then I’ll show you some real research. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
    The animal colony was a windowless prefab with corrugated metal walls and a noisy air-handling system. “We call this Bird Valhalla,” Salley said. She opened the door, and the warm scent of bird droppings touched their faces. “Looks like the 4-H poultry shed at the state fair, doesn’t it?”
    Archies screamed and lashed the bars of their cages with clawed wings as the door slammed shut. They were boldly patterned birds with long feathered tails, vicious little teeth, and dispositions to match. Their plumage was orange and brown and red.
    An absorbed-looking young man put down a sack marked Archaeopteryx Chow , turned, and blinked with surprise to see them there. “Hey, Salley.”
    â€œMonk, this is Raymond. Raymond, Monk—he’s writing a book about Bohemia Station.”
    â€œOh, yeah? He should’ve been here yesterday. We pumped the hall full of tiny helium-filled bubbles, and flew a couple of archies down it, so we could photograph the vortices of their flight. Got some nice shots. National Geographic quality. Not that we’re allowed to submit anything to a public forum.”
    â€œLet me guess—they were all continuous vortexes, right?”
    â€œUh … yeah.”
    â€œSo you’ve just proved that an archie can fly fast, but not slow. Brilliant. It would’ve taken me ten seconds of direct observation to tell you the same thing.”
    Birds, with the exception of hummingbirds, which flew unlike anything else, had only two modes of flight—slow and bat-out-of-hell fast. The slow mode left pairs of loop-shaped whorls in the air behind them, while the disturbance of the fast mode was continuous. Slow flight was the more difficult mode to achieve, a refinement of primal flight that wouldn’t appear for tens of millions of years yet.
    â€œIt was Dr. Jorgenson’s experiment. I just helped run it.” To Monk, he said, “If you’re writing a book, that means you’re from later in the century than we are. How long do we have to wait before we can publish our work?”
    â€œI’m really not allowed to say.”
    â€œThis idiot secrecy really screws up everything,” Raymond said sullenly. “You can’t do decent science when you can’t publish. That’s all fucked up. We had a group from the Royal Tyrrell through here last week, and they’d never even heard of our work. What kind of peer review is that? It’s nuts.”
    Monk smirked. “I agree with you completely. If it were up to me—”
    â€œMuch as I enjoy listening to you guys whinge,” Salley said, “Lydia Pell’s expecting me to spell her at the blind. You want me to pick up another archie while we’re there?”
    â€œUh … yeah, thanks. We can always use more. Jorgenson keeps letting ours go.”
    â€œYou got it.” She snagged an animal carrier and turned to leave. “Come on, Monk. Let’s go look at the wildlife.”
    It was a glorious day to be trudging along the dunes. The sky was purest blue and a light breeze came off the Tethys Sea. Every now and then an archie would burst screaming out of the shrubbery