Leyster recruited Patrick and Tamara to accompany him to Skeeter Marsh. Despite his grousing, he was glad to be going. It wasn’t the lazy, productive day he’d planned, but food gathering was easy work, and entailed a long and pleasant walk through countryside he loved. It was even possible they’d spot something new in dinosaurian behavior.
Since they’d used up their shotgun shells long ago, he and Patrick carried clubs (in Leyster’s case the shovel; in Patrick’s an otherwise-useless gun) to protect themselves against chance attacks from dromaeosaurs. Dromies were the only carnivores so little reliant on smell that they’d attack a human being under normal circumstances. The stench of cookfire smoke that permeated their hair and clothing and skin protected them from pretty much everything else. Except the crocodiles, and those tended to stay by the water.
Tamara, of course, carried her spear. She had spent months during the rainy season laboriously grinding the head from an iron flange that had originally been a piece of bracing for their supplies. Then she had set the leaf-shaped product into a seasoned hardwood haft with a resin glue, and wrapped it tight with hadrosaur tendon.
The result was a murderous-looking weapon they all called “Tamara’s Folly.”
She carried it everywhere and worked on her throwing skills for at least an hour every day. She said it made her feel safe.
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 dunno,” Leyster said.
“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 tyrannosaurs’ tiny little two- fingered arms. Patrick had footage of Her Ladyship fussing over her dried mud mound of a nest and delicately turning over the eggs with them, and felt that settled it. Tamara held that that was only an incidental function, and was convinced that their primary use was as signaling devices for sexual display: I’m ready to mate. Or else: I’m not in the mood.
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 grinning ear to ear. “Well,” he said. “Good news?”
“Lai-tsz just made an announcement,” Patrick said. “She was going to wait until tonight when everyone was there, but then somebody said something and she just blurted it out. She’s pregnant.”
“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
“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
