Страница 41 из 67
Nevertheless, they walked with a caution grown natural through long use. If the past year had taught them nothing else, it was that nothing was to be taken for granted.
As they walked, they talked quietly. This was the one aspect of their stranding that Leyster genuinely appreciated. It was like a never-ending seminar. Being a teacher wasn’t a matter of handing knowledge down from Parnassus to the groundlings below. You learned from your students, from their questions and speculations, and sometimes even their misunderstandings. And this crew was sharp. He’d learned a lot from them.
“Does it seem to anybody else,” Tamara asked, “that there’s an awful lot of biomass tied up in the megafauna here? I mean, not only are there a lot of species in the valley, but there are a lot more individuals than you’d expect.”
“Yeah!” Patrick said. “How can the land support them all? They must be feeding at a startling level of efficiency. They’re constantly chomping down the new growth, and yet they never overgraze. How do they do that?”
“Sometimes small groups leave,” Leyster pointed out. “We’ve seen them do that.”
“Yes, and always just enough to keep things balanced here. That’s spooky,” Tamara said. “How do dim-brained animals like dinosaurs keep those kinds of balances, when real smart animals like human beings can’t?”
“I du
“Don’t get me wrong,” Tamara said. “But it seems like you say that a lot.”
“Well, if suffering is the essence of the human condition, then the essence of the scientific condition must be ignorance.” Leyster shrugged. “Any ecosystem is a dance of needs, a complex balancing of hungers. When all we had to work with was fossils, what we needed was to find more and better fossils. Now all we have to do is make more and better observations. You guys don’t appreciate how easy you have it.” A mosquito bit him on the arm. He slapped at it and said, “Hey, we’re almost there.”
They dug for tubers until their packs were full and their arms were sore. Then they took a break before heading back. Lying with his head against a log, watching dragonflies noisily mating in the air while Tamara plaited white blossoms into her hair, Leyster decided he was as close to happy as he had ever been.
Tamara and Patrick were lazily, reflexively, arguing about the function of the tyra
Leyster was about to weigh in with his own opinion when the phone rang.
“I’ve got it,” Tamara said. She unzipped a pocket on her knapsack, and removed the carefully-swaddled device. Painstakingly, she unwrapped it. Then, walking a little distance away for privacy, she hit the talk button.
Leyster stood. He needed to take a leak. “Back in a minute,” he said.
When Leyster returned, Patrick and Tamara were gri
“Lai-tsz just made an a
“What?! Pregnant? How?”
Patrick snorted and raised a sardonic eyebrow. Tamara looked impatient. “How do you think?”
Leyster sat down on the log. “God, I can’t believe this. Wasn’t she supposed to be on some kind of birth control?” He knew for a fact that she was. He’d seen her medical records. All the women in the party were on long-term birth control, the kind that took medical intervention to undo. “Who’s the fath—?” He stopped. “I’m sorry, that’s a really dumb question.”
“Yes, it is,” Tamara said. “You’re all the father. Everybody’s responsible. We’re all its parents.”
“You don’t sound very happy about the news,” Patrick said carefully.
“Happy? You expect me to be happy? Has anybody given any thought to what kind of life we can provide for this kid?”
“We haven’t had the—”
“With eleven parents, it’s a pretty sure thing she’ll be pampered and spoiled,” Tamara said. “Big deal. Kids are resilient.”
“How about when she hits adolescence?”
Nobody said anything.
“Imagine being a teenage girl in a world full of nothing but your parents. No girlfriends. Nobody to confide in. No boyfriends, no dating, no high school prom. This is going to be one screwed-up child. When her sex drive kicks in, she’s going to want to take part in our little physical therapy sessions. What do we tell her then?”
“I really don’t think that—” Patrick began.
“Either we say yes or we tell her she can’t. I don’t know which is going to twist her around more.”
“And I don’t know why you’re being so unpleasant,” Tamara said.
“Okay, she gets through adolescence. Somehow. Now she’s an adult. She’s young and full of beans in a camp full of elders who are starting to slow down. Everything she wants to do is just a little too wild, a little too fast, a little too much for everyone else. Majority rule, of course. She’s outvoted every time.
“Meanwhile, we keep on getting older. More and more of the work of caring for the rest of us falls upon her. She resents it, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Where else can she go? So she drudges away, surly and unhappy. Until finally we begin to die off.
“At first, it’s going to be a relief for her. She’ll feel guilty about that, of course. It’ll warp her even more. But she’s still human. She’ll be happy to see us go. But then as, one by one, the human world gets smaller, she’ll slowly begin to realize exactly how lonely she’s going to get. Until that bright day dawns when she’s the last woman on Earth. Think about that! The last woman on Earth. Perfectly, absolutely, and abjectly alone. With maybe twenty years more left to live.
“Tell me this: Just how sane do you think she’ll be by then? Just how human?”
Patrick slowly sucked in the air between his teeth. “Well, but… what’s the alternative?”
“I’m afraid Lai-tsz’s going to have to—”
To Leyster’s absolute astonishment, Tamara balled up her fist, and hit him in the stomach. Hard.
He doubled over.
She stood over him, her face white with anger, and said, “That’s not an alternative! And if it were, it wouldn’t be your choice to make. ‘Wasn’t she supposed to be on some kind of birth control?’ Jesus Christ, didn’t you give ten seconds thought before sticking your dick into her? There’s no form of birth control that works every time—women always have to take that into account, so why can’t men?”
She snatched up her knapsack and spear.
“Anyway,” she said over her shoulder, “the odds are that we’ll all be dead in five years. So it doesn’t really matter in the first place!”
She strode angrily away.
“Whew!” Patrick smiled embarrassedly. “That was brutal. Even if—forgive me for saying this—some of it was deserved.” He helped Leyster stand up. “You okay?”
Leyster just shook his head.
So they weren’t as careful as they usually were on the trip home. Tamara led, walking fast and staring straight ahead of herself until she was a small figure far ahead of them. Leyster and Patrick followed as best they could.
They walked along the river until they came to Hell Creek, and then turned inland. Leyster was idly watching some faraway troodons cracking open mussels when Patrick said, “Uh oh.”
“What?” Leyster turned and saw a juvenile tyra