The Bones of Zora - Plot and Storyline

Plot and Storyline

Fergus Reith, prime Terran tour guide on the planet Krishna, finds himself between tours and on a somewhat different job, working with Aristide Marot, a French paleontologist out to unravel the mysteries of Krishnan vertebrate evolution. Marot is particularly interested in the era when life first emerged from the seas; as Krishna’s surface is mostly land and its bodies of water are separated from each other, he theorizes the planet’s animal species could have multiple origins.

Fergus guides Marot to the most promising fossil-bearing site, near the town of Kubyab on the banks of the upper Zora River in the Dashtate of Chilihagh. There they find a rival, Marot’s competitor Warren Foltz, who is fanatically attached to a rival theory and is not averse to destroying contrary evidence. Moreover, Foltz is being assisted by xenologist Alicia Dyckman, to whom Fergus had formerly been wed in a stormy marriage culminating in divorce. The cause was Alicia’s contentious and overbearing personality; convinced she always knew best, she had interfered with Fergus’s tours to the point that he had finally barred her from participating.

Miserable, at an emotional low ebb, and exploited by Foltz, Alicia now regrets having left Fergus, but their jobs keep them in continued opposition. Reith’s scientific adventure is thus beset by skullduggery, violence, and tempestuous personal relations. Blessed with beginner’s luck, he actually discovers a fossil supporting Marot’s theory, which Foltz endeavors to hijack and break up.

Various complications ensue; Fergus and Alicia are brought back together by their mutual passion for each other and enmity with Foltz, only to be alienated again due to Alicia’s extreme behavior. Ultimately Fergus decides with regret it would be disastrous to take her back, and she leaves Krishna heartbroken, hoping to find treatment for her personality disorders on Earth.

The Bones of Zora is unique among the later Krishna novels in its inclusion of a non-Krishnan extraterrestrial, a reptilian native of the planet Osiris. While such aliens were fairly common in the earliest of de Camp’s Krishna books, his later works usually focus on Terrans and Krishnans only.