“Explain your project to us.”
Here at last was the core question. The Old Man leaned out of the conversation. What followed was necessary for their understanding. But it was old news to him, and he didn’t care to hear it again.
The Bird Men had given time travel to humanity for one reason: in order to study human beings. The gift enabled them to place the Unchanging, a tool designed to be minimally disruptive, in close proximity to humans, so that it could observe and record their behavior.
But there was a second reason for the gift as well.
The Bird Men wanted to study humans engaged in typical human activity. Their curiosity was broad-ranging, but by logging the comings and goings of the Unchanging, the Old Man had been able to determine that the two activities they considered quintessentially human were bureaucracy and scientific investigation.
Of the two, they were significantly more interested in science. So they had created a controlled situation in which humans might engage in it. They had given them the Mesozoic.
This pleased him almost as much as it had pleased him, as a child, to learn that dolphins genuinely liked people. Human beings could be real jerks. It was encouraging that another species deemed them worth liking. It was reassuring that somebody with nothing at stake believed that finding things out was central to the human enterprise.
It made him feel vindicated.
He slid the vision up to the end of the explanation, and then froze time motionless while he wrote and posted a memo. When he unfroze the vision, a second Unchanging came in and said a few words.
Salley and Molly Gerhard followed it out of the room.
It was a small act of mercy on his part. The conference would go on for hours, and they were both bored to tears. So he’d arranged for them to be given a small tour.
“Look!” Molly Gerhard said. “Little models of floating towers, like the one we were on.”
“No.” Salley pulled one from the water, and held it up so the other woman could see the underwater bulb that gave the tower it buoyancy, and the tangle of holdfasts that rendered it stable. “They’re not models. They’re saplings.”
They were deep in the tangled roots of the Bird Men’s cathedral habitat, and so of course there were many, many pools of water. They were black and still. The air above them smelled of cedar.
“So you’re saying they grew—”
A Bird Man burst from the water, neck extended. Molly Gerhard gasped and drew back in alarm. The creature strode from the water, shook itself like a duck, and then disappeared down a corridor.
The Old Man skipped ahead. Now the two women were high in the crown of the tree. Gold coins of sunlight danced all about them as a light breeze stirred the branches overhead.
Molly Gerhard wrinkled her nose. “With all their technology, you’d think they’d do better.” There were white-streaked nests all about them, carelessly made things filled with the din of screeching hatchling Bird Men.
“You have to look at it from their perspective,” Salley said without conviction. Then she shrugged.
He skipped ahead again.
Now they were standing on a parapet not far from the top of the trees. The Unchanging gestured to direct their attention outward, toward the horizon. Molly Gerhard turned, laughing, and froze with astonishment and awe. Salley stood silent behind her.
Impatiently, the Old Man switched his attention back to Griffin and Jimmy. He was not interested in mere wonder. What he cared about was results.
“He says: Yes, we could give you the equipment you request. Yes, you could rescue your friends. Not at the first resilience point. Not at six months. That is on record as not having happened. But at the second resilience point. At two years.
“But you would not want it.”
Griffin straightened. Hours had passed. He was visibly weary. “What do you mean? Of course we want the equipment. Thank you. We’ll take it.”
There was a very long silence.
“Why wouldn’t we want it?” Jimmy asked.
Now there came a low growl so uncertain that Griffin could not tell which of the three had made it.
“He says: You would not want it because the project is over.”
“What?”
“He says: The line in which we gave you time travel is being negated.”
“When?”
“He says: Immediately after this conversation.”
There was a certain amount of squabbling and logic-chopping following the Bird Men’s revelation, simply because to argue was human. It would do no good. The Old Man skipped over most of it.
“But what about Gertrude? She’s from another time line, and yet I met her,” Salley was saying when he dropped back into her consciousness. The Old Man had made sure she and Molly both would be back for the end of the discussion. “Surely that proves you can reconcile time lines. So why close down ours? Why can’t you do the same thing—whatever it was—for us?”
The Bird Man spoke for a long time.
The Unchanging said, “She says: It was only temporary. Even if it were possible, it would not be possible.”
“I’m not following this.”
“She says: The time line that contains our field of study contains us as well. We knew this from the start. We knew that to study you meant that we must ourselves dissolve into timelike loops when the work is done. That is the price. Time travel is not available under any other terms.”
“Then why?” Jimmy asked. “Why bother at all?”
The Bird Man jabbed a beak first at Salley and then at Griffin. “She says: They understand.”
One of the Bird Men turned, and walked to the back of the room. A second followed him. There was a still pool of water there. One after the other, they plunged into it and were gone.
Before the third could start after them, Griffin said, “Listen to me!”
It peered at him intently.
“If it doesn’t matter… If nothing matters… Then give us the machines so we can rescue our friends.”
The Bird Man and the Unchanging exchanged what sounded like clucks and squawks.
“She says: Why?”
“It’s a human thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
The Bird Man screamed, a noise so loud it made their ears hurt.
There was a long silence, while the four humans resigned themselves to failure, and then at last the Unchanging spoke. “She says: It shall be done.” It paused. “Also, it has been—” It paused again. “A rare honor. To stand in the presence of a human being. How beautiful you are. How delightful in your curiosity and your courage both.”
The Bird Man made a rattling sound.
“She says: You are scientists. She also is a scientist. All her life she has spent trying to understand mammals.”
A shriek.
“She says: You are noble creatures. The world is a poorer place without you.”
The Bird Man unfolded one grotesque forelimb and stretched it across the table. The three fingers on its terrifying hand separated, extended.
“She says: Can we shake hands?”
The Old Man toyed with the idea of following Griffin’s company on their journey home, and decided against it. He shut down the one vision, and called up another. A window opened on the latter days of the Maastrichtian, a mere hundred and twenty-two million years in his future.
It was the day they had chosen for their harvest festival, and the camp was filled with the smell of a whole young ankylosaur roasting slowly on a spit over a bed of coals.
Leyster was sitting in the long house scraping swamp tubers and idly watching Nathaniel play with a rattle Patrick had made him. Daljit was plucking a small feathered dino. He glanced at the carcass in her hands and froze. “That’s not a… what is that thing?”