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.”