3

Ten years later…

Coming inland from the sea, driving north-east from Cape Town on the N1 highway, it took Henry and Jane two hours to drive through the coastal mountains to reach the Karroo itself.

The ride, through mountain passes and the contorted passages through vales of rock, was spectacular. But then the landscape flattened to a desert, populated by what the old Afrikaners called fynbos, a mixed, complex flora of shrubs and bushes. It was spring, here in the southern hemisphere, and the desert — sheltered by its encircling mountains from the acid rain and climate shifts suffered by most of the world’s land masses — was putting on a show, red white and yellow flowers of every shape.

At last, though, even the fynbos submitted to the logic of the climate, and only aloe and cacti relieved the panorama of rocks and sky.

At a village called Touws River — abandoned now — they came upon the first Karroo rocks: squat black mudstones, sitting atop the younger Cape sands. Henry knew that the mudstones had been dumped from icebergs, floating on the surface of the polar ocean that had once covered this land, an ocean four hundred million years gone.

Jane stared out the window, with that mix of patience and intelligent interest that had always characterized her, and the low, smoky sun picked out her old melanoma scars.

Ten years. And still, every day they were granted seemed like a bonus to him, a new gift.

Henry drove on, and the rock grew more complex.

In a lifetime of geology Henry had never been here before, to this high-veldt plateau that covered two-thirds of South Africa. It was a large, empty place, devoid of human history, unpopulated save for a few scattered towns and farms — most of them abandoned now — crossed only by the immense road between Cape Town and Johannesburg. But to geologists and palaeontologists this land of sandstones and shales, piled up into the tablelands the Afrikaners called koppies, was one of the Earth’s greatest storehouses: a thousand-mile slab of sedimentary rock that was the best record on Earth of land-animal evolution.

The Karroo had always been, for Henry, a place for the future, to visit before he got too old, or died. Now he was forty-five, though he felt a lot older, but the future was self-evidently running out.

So here he was, before it was too late.

They stopped near a large koppie, and clambered stiffly out of the car. It was still morning, and the air was blessedly cool; Henry found himself surrounded by cactus and aloe and wild flowers.

Henry and Jane didn’t speak; their routine, working together, was long enough established by now.

Henry shucked off his antique Air Jordan trainers and pulled on his heavy field boots. He smeared sunblock on the exposed flesh of his arms, legs and face. He donned his broad-brimmed hat, pulled on his oxy-resp and dust and humidity filters — his spacesuit, as he thought of it — and he attached his digital Kodak to his chest bracket.

He buckled on the old leather of his field gear and picked up his hammer and chisel, all of it worn smooth by hundreds of days of sun and rain.

The familiar ritual, which for Henry long predated the coming of the Moonseed, was a great comfort to him. It was a prelude to the greatest pleasure of his working life, which was field work. The nature and objectives of the work had changed, but the pleasure he took in it hadn’t.

Jane knew him well enough now to let him be, to relish this moment.

So he walked into the desert, looking for fossils.

The ground was full of so much detail it would be easy to miss the fossils; the trick was to train the eye and brain to filter out the noise and pick out the key signs. But right now, he didn’t know what those signs would be. Bones, of course, but would they be white or black? Crushed or whole? In the sandstone, river bed deposits, or the shale, silt and mud deposited by ancient floods, now metamorphosed to rock?

It took a half-hour before he began to see them: fragments of bone, protruding from the rock. He recorded their location with the Kodak; the camera was tied into the GPS satellites so the location and context of the specimens were stamped on their images. He scooped up the fragments, unceremoniously, and stuffed them in a sample bag.

As the day wore on, and his eye grew practised, he found more impressive samples. Bones of ancient amphibians, two hundred and fifty million years dead. The tiny skeletons of two burrowing proto-mammals, his earliest ancestors, white and delicate, embedded in a dark silty matrix. Here, peering ghoulishly out of a layer of flat sediment, was the skull of a dicynodont, a low-slung, pig-like animal a couple of feet long, covered with fur and sprouting impressive tusks.

He tried to imagine what it must have been like here, a quarter of a billion years ago.

But right now there was no time to study, classify, identify, deduce. For now, all Henry could do was to collect the raw data.

Geology and palaeontology had always been a race against the predations of weathering and human expansion.

As Earth’s upper layers wore away, ancient bones were exposed, removed from their quarter-billion-year storage, and, in a relative flash, eroded or frost-cracked to dust. Humans could only hope to collect a handful of these ancient treasures before they evaporated like dew.

Now, of course, that time pressure had gotten a lot worse.

He came at last to a new layer of rock, a coarse brown sandstone which overlay the black shales below.

The upper bed was almost devoid of fossils.

This layer marked the boundary between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras, a boundary in time marked by the greatest extinction of life in Earth’s history. The ancient spasm of death, recorded in rock, had been obvious to the first modern geologists, the gentlemen-scientists from Edinburgh.

Even now, nobody knew how it had happened. The more famous extinction pulse at the end of the Cretaceous, the one that had killed off the dinosaurs, had attracted a great deal more study, but that event had involved far fewer species. The best explanation was a slow deterioration of the climate, accompanied by a lowering of sea level, that had created conditions inimical to most life existing at the time.

That was plausible. But nobody knew.

The answer was surely embedded in these rocky layers somewhere, in the bones and skulls eroding out of the Karroo. But Henry could grab all the samples he liked; he was sure the answer would never, now, be found.

Henry had grown up believing that the future was, more or less, infinite, and that there would be time — for generations to come, if not for him — to figure out answers to most of the great questions. Earth itself held the clues to the great puzzles of geology and palaeontology, and Earth would always be there…

But the future wasn’t infinite any more, and Earth wasn’t going to last forever.

There just wasn’t time for the slow processes of science to unpick the secrets of Earth’s past. When the evidence was gone, it would be gone forever, and they would never know.

So, here was Henry clambering over the Karroo, grab-bagging bones out of the ground.

Field work was now the only game in town, in all the sciences.

Nobody was doing analytical science any more. The only people working in labs were directing the others, out in the field.

Most of the effort, in fact, was in biology. In what was left of the rain forests, half-trained researchers were wrapping entire giant trees in plastic and drenching them with bug spray, hoovering up the stiff little bodies into nitrogen-cooled collection flasks, for eventual shipping to the great Arks that were flying to the Moon.