(eng) Michael Swanwick by Bones of the Earth (retail)

Author:Bones of the Earth (retail) [Earth, Bones of the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Chalk Talk

Xanadu Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Gallic epoch. Turonian age. 95 My B.C.E.

The meeting room was built into a cliff overlooking the Tethys Sea. Ordinarily the view through the glass wall was enough to fill the soul and elevate the spirit, and even at the exorbitant rates charged for its use, the room was booked solid for every clear day until its scheduled demolition. Today, however, the weather was dreary. A dull rain spattered against the windows and turned the ocean water gray.

Griffin sat in a leather conference chair, thinking about chalk.

It was only vertebrate chauvinism that made people think dinosaurs were the most important living things of their time. From the mid-Cretaceous onward, one of the most significant and varied families of organisms on Earth was the calcareous algae. Though microscopically small, these spherical plants had armored themselves with ornately structured overlapping calcium plates. The warm seas contained galaxies of calcareous algae, living uneventful lives and shedding their cunning little shields when they died.

The exoskeletal debris from the algae and other nannoplankton, both vegetal and animal, was constantly filtering down through the water, an eternal snowfall that deposited as much as six inches of finely-grained chalk on the ocean floor in a thousand years. The white cliffs of Dover were the patient work of billions of generations of tiny creatures leading orderly and bourgeois lives. Hopscotch diagrams and sidewalk artists’ naive copies of The Last Supper, grammar school sentence diagrams and physicists’ equations, the sure kiss of a pool stick against a cue ball, the frictionless grip of a gymnast’s hands upon the high bar, all depended on the anonymous contributions of these placid beings.

Griffin often meditated upon this. The thought that such transient lives served the diverse purposes of a higher order of life pleased him. He wondered sometimes if the human race would leave behind a legacy half so enduring. Such thoughts calmed him, usually.

Not today.

Today, everything was fucked. Griffin had come at last, as he’d always known he would, to a dead end. The fairy castle he had built out of playing cards and hope was trembling in the breeze. Any second now, it would collapse. Everything he’d worked for, the sacrifices he’d made, the hard and sometimes cruel decisions that had been forced on him—all was come to futility. Everything was fucked and done for.

The door opened and closed behind him. He did not need to look to know that Salley had entered the room. She came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. Briefly, she kneaded the muscles. They were stiff and knotted.

“All right,” she said. “What is it?”

There were so many responses he could have made. Almost at random, he said, “I’ve never hit a woman.” He could see her ghostly reflection in the window wall, tall and regal as a queen. Below her he was slumped in his leather armchair like a defeated king waiting for the barbarians to arrive. Their eyes met in the glass. “Today, I almost hit you.

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