The Old Man sat in a dark room, alone.
The world outside was arguably the most interesting time in all the Mesozoic, an age when dinosaurs were challenged from a surprising direction, almost lost their place in the ecosystem, and then successfully fought their way back to dominance again. He did not give it a thought. All his attention was focused on the visions he called up, one after another, in the air before him. He had been given tools that were inexplicable in their effects. The one he was using now enabled him to eavesdrop on select events that were, to him, of particular interest. It was like owning God’s own television set. So far as he knew, he was the only human being who had one.
Half a billion years in his future, Griffin and company were finally about to meet their sponsors. They stepped through a gate and onto the same grassy sward where they had first set foot in the Epimethean.
He leaned forward, and all his surroundings vanished as his identity dissolved into theirs.
Jimmy’s “climbing trees” were further from the gates than any of the party had thought. The tangle was as tall as a cathedral, and as complexly buttressed. The closer they got, the more elaborately structured it appeared, and the less like anything they had ever seen before.
The Unchanging led the company into the shelter of the trees. They walked down twisty pathways into ever-deepening shadows. There were rustling noises and furtive movements all about them. A great many living things dwelled here.
“I can’t decide if this is natural or artificial,” Molly Gerhard said, gesturing toward a splay of branches that spiraled up one trunk like a staircase. Water dripped down from above to fill a basin that grew out from another trunk, level with her chin. A drinking fountain for very tall children? “Or whether that’s even a valid distinction here.”
“What’s that smell?” Jimmy asked.
The tree was permeated with a sweet and sick-ish stench, reminiscent of theropod hatchlings before they’ve lost their down, of maple syrup on sweaty flesh, of zoo cages never perfectly cleaned. It was an uneasy-making smell.
Something dropped from an opening above, and stood before them for the briefest of moments.
It was humanoid only by the most generous reading of the term: bipedal, upright, with two arms, a trunk, and a head, all in the right places. But the arms folded oddly, the trunk canted forward, the legs were too short, and the head was beaked.
It favored them with an outraged stare, stamped its spurred feet, and screeched. Then it was gone.
“Dear God!” Molly Gerhard gasped.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Avihomo sapiens,” Salley said. “The second intelligent species ever to arise on this planet. Gertrude calls them Bird Men.”
“Birds,” Griffin said flatly. “They’re descended from birds?”
“Yes. I’m afraid we mammals have been relegated to the evolutionary fringes once again.”
The Unchanging gestured toward an arched cleft. “This way,” it said.
They stepped through and the tree opened up. Branches intertwined overhead to create a high ceiling. Soft globes of light floated among them, gently illuminating the space below. At the center of the room was a table. Behind it, their hosts stood waiting.
There were three Bird Men, ungainly and proud. The least of them was half again as tall as the humans. They were covered with fine black feathers that rose to a spiky crest at the backs of their commodious skulls. Their beaks were white as sun-bleached bone. Their eyes were stark red.
Their arms, scrawny and oddly jointed, were much like those of mantises but with the long hands bent downward. They were nothing like wings; their kind had clearly lost the ability to fly long ages ago. It seemed to more than one of the party a sacrifice much greater than that made by their own ancestral hominids when they descended from the trees.
One of the Bird Men shook its head rapidly, then made a low, chuckling noise.
“I will translate,” the Unchanging said.
The Bird Men’s faces were unreadable; they displayed no visible sign of emotion save for the fast sudden movements of their heads. The one which had spoken before made a brief warbling sound.
“He says: We know why you are here. We know what you want.”
Griffin cleared his throat. “Well?”
“He says: No.”
“No?” Griffin said. “What do you mean, no?”
There was a prolonged exchange between the Unchanging and its masters. Then it said, “He says: No means no. No. You cannot have what you came here for.”
Griffin sucked in his cheeks, thinking. Then he said, “Perhaps we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”
The Old Man leaned back in his chair with a wry smile of appreciation. This was an elementary tactic of bureaucratic infighting: When somebody won’t give you what you want, pretend you think he simply doesn’t understand what you’re asking for, go back to the beginning of your argument, and go over every aspect of your case again in excruciating detail. Then repeat. It was trial by boredom: Sooner or later, somebody would give in.
He had spent many hundreds of hours of his life locked in exactly such combat with a counterpart from DOD or GAO, slamming heads together like two bull pachycephalosaurs.
It wouldn’t work this time, though. The Bird Men were simply too far divergent from the human genome. They were immune to primate psychology. They didn’t even understand how it worked.
He delicately slid the time forward an hour, and leaned back into the narrative.
“He says: That is what we did. It can be traced in time as a four-dimensional spiral. Was there an alternative? No. We could have done otherwise, but we decided not to.”
“What,” Salley said, “the fuck does that mean?”
Griffin made a hushing gesture. “Can you clarify?”
One of the Bird Men, the tallest, slammed a hand down on the table with emphatic violence.
“She says: Why are we discussing this when otherwise, we are not discussing this?”
The humans exchanged glances. “Perhaps,” Griffin said, “you are suggesting that there is no such thing as free will?”
The Bird Men clustered, heads darting so emphatically that it seemed miraculous that none of them was stabbed by their slashing beaks.
“They say: It is free, yes. But is it will?”
That small part of the Old Man that remained himself while he was immersed in the experience, felt an old and familiar exasperation. If a lion could talk, Wittgenstein said, we couldn’t understand it. It was true. He had dealt with the Bird Men countless times, and their thoughts were not like human thoughts. They did not translate well. Perhaps they could not be translated at all.
The Unchanging were merely obstinate and maddeningly unimaginative. The Bird Men processed information in a manner completely alien to human thought. Only rarely was there true understanding between the two species.
There was a knock on the door. Jimmy stuck his head in. “Sir?”
He withdrew from the experience. “What is it?”
“You asked me to tell you when we had Robo Boy’s confession.”
“Well, it hardly matters now. Did he name his superiors?”
“Oh, yes. He sang like a canary, sir. He sang like Enrico fucking Caruso. We’ve been in contact with the FBI. They say it won’t be any trouble getting the warrants.”
“That’s something, I suppose.” He waved Jimmy out of the room and slid the time forward another hour.
The humans were sitting on chairs now. They had finally thought to ask for them. All of them but Griffin looked annoyed and resentful. Only he had enough experience hiding both anger and humiliation to hold himself with aplomb.