Jonathan loosed another dove, and Hollis began unscrewing a thermos.

“I’ve prepared us a little treat,” she announced. “The last of the coffee.”

Jonathan raised a hand and tried to wave her off.

“Come on.”

He refused to take the cup.

“You’ve got to keep up your strength.”

“No.”

“You’ve got to go on.”

He turned away from her.

“For the love of God, Jonathan!”

“No coffee,” he said, making two fists and raising them. And then, as he thought of the Titanic fossilizing now under a hundred meters of mud, he fixed onto an echo from the past and decided to sting Hollis with the very words Mrs. Astor had used when Edith Russell offered her coffee and God’s blessings aboard the rescue ship Carpathia.

“No coffee,” Jonathan said in unison with the past. “No God, either. God went down with the Titanic.”

9

Thriller

For as long as civilization had existed, children had brought home family pets that ended up in the care of parents. Not that Isak really minded the responsibility. He had always enjoyed the long walks through the Ceran forests with his son’s beloved minisaur. Steven had been nearly five years old when the first dwarfed and brainboosted apatosaur pups, with a guaranteed cockatoo-equivalent IQ of ninety, hit the market; and because every child also developed, sooner or later, a puzzling and totally instinctive love of dinosaurs, it was preordained that minisaurs would become the pet craze of the twenty-first century.

Apatosaurs, it turned out, preferred a diet rich in alkaloid-laced flowers, which in allosaur and tyrannosaur times must have made their flesh utterly distasteful, if not downright poisonous. A pattern of warning colors alternating from orange to black and yellow, displayed on its hide like the stripes of a Bengal tiger, made apatosaurus the most beautiful of the cloned saurians. By the late twentieth century, snippets of DNA preserved in everything from skin in the mouths of amber-embedded horseflies to mummified dinosaur femur bones had begun to dethrone diamonds as the world’s most resilient and valuable form of carbon. Though the saurians themselves had vanished by the billions, a few grams of well-preserved tissue had managed to pass their genetic blueprints across oceans of time like bits of gossip passed over a backyard fence. Putting such genetic gossip to good use had to await the development of equipment able to scan DNA molecules without breaking them apart or wresting them from their stony matrix. With such grace did corporate paleontologists redefine both extinction and death, by reconstructing genetic codes in computers, then sequencing entire symphonies written on DNA and performed by protein.

Once computers and scanners had become sufficiently advanced, the sequencing was fairly straightforward. The single tissue sample from which all living apatosaurs were derived, discovered in the jaws of a ninety-five-million-year-old fly from New Jersey, contained thousands of preserved cells—thousands of copies of the genetic blueprints necessary for constructing an identical twin of the insect’s last meal. All of the copies had been damaged by the radioactive decay of carbon-14, potas-sium-40, and even the occasional cosmic ray; but even this turned out to be a relatively simple technological hurdle, not much unlike the one encountered by archaeologists who had come upon multiple copies of the Book of Isaiah, every one of them scattered in pieces and mostly missing, among the Dead Sea Scrolls. In both cases, a program for “matching and patching” missing segments—for building a single composite “text” from a collection of partly damaged copies—had solved the problem.