End of an Era

question.”

I realized that Klicks was right. “Oh. I see. Well, a name is … it’s, uh, a—”

Klicks chimed in. “A name is a symbol, a unique identifying word, that can be rendered either with sound or with written markings. It’s used to distinguish one individual from another.”

Clever bastard. How did he think up such a good definition so quickly? But the troodon made that puzzled face again. “ ‘Individual,’ say you? Still not link. No matter. Where you from?”

Well, what do I tell this thing? That I’m a time traveler from the future? If it doesn’t understand name, it’s not going to understand that. “I’m from Toronto. That’s a city'—I looked up at the sun to get my bearings, then pointed east—'about twenty-five hundred kilometers that way.”

“What kilometer?”

“It’s—” I looked at Klicks and resolved to do as good a job as he had at making things explicit. “It’s a unit of linear measure. One kilometer is a thousand meters, and a meter is'—I held up my hands—'this much.”

“And what is city?”

“Ah, a city is, um, well, you could say it’s the nesting place for herds of my kind. A collection of buildings, of artificial shelters.”

“Buildings?”

“Yes. A building is—”

“Know do we. But no buildings here. No others of your kind, either, that we have seen.”

Klicks’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know what a building is?”

The troodon looked at him as though he were an idiot. “He just told us.”

“But it sounded like you already knew—”

“We did know.”

“But then'—he spread his hands imploringly—'how did you know?”

“Do you have buildings?” I said.

“We don’t,” replied the troodon, with an odd emphasis on the pronoun. Then all three of them moved in closer to us. The leader—the one doing all the talking, anyway—reached out with its five- centimeter claws and slowly brushed some dirt from my shirt. This one seemed to have a diamond-shaped patch of slightly yellowish skin on its muzzle, halfway between its giant eyes and the tip of its elongated snout. “No cities here,” Diamond-snout said. “Will ask again. Where you from?”

I glanced at Klicks. He shrugged. “I am from a city called Toronto,” I said at last, “but from a different time. We come from the future.”

There was silence for a full minute, broken only by the buzz of insects and the occasional pipping call of a bird or pterosaur. Finally, slowly, the dinosaur spoke. Instead of answering with the disbelief a human might express, its tone was measured and calculating. “From how far in the future?”

“Sixty-five million years,” Klicks said, “plus or minus about three hundred million.”

“Sixty-five million—” said Diamond-snout. It paused as if digesting this. “A year is the time it takes for—what words to use?—for this planet to make one elliptical path—ah, one orbit, yess?—one orbit around the sun?”

“That’s right,” I said, surprised. “You know about orbits?”

The creature ignored my question. “A million is a number in … in base-ten counting? Ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten, yess?”

“Was that five ‘times tens’?” I said. “Yes, that’s a million.”

“Sixty … five … million … years,” said the thing. It paused, then hawked blood onto the ground again. “What you say difficult to comprehend.”

“Nevertheless, it’s true,” I said. For some reason, I took a perverse pleasure in impressing the thing. “I realize sixty-odd million years is an impossibly long time to conceive of.”

“We conceive it; we remember a time twice as long ago,” the troodon said.

“My God. You remember, what, a hundred and thirty million years ago?”

“Intriguing that you own a god,” said Diamond-snout.

I shook my head. “You’ve got a history of a hundred and thirty million years?” Dating back from here at the end of the Cretaceous, that would be around the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

“History?” said the troodon.

“Continuous written record,” said Klicks. He paused for a moment, I guess realizing that the jelly creatures couldn’t possibly have writing as we know it, since they didn’t have hands. “Or a continuous record of the past in some other form.”

“No,” said the troodon, “we do not that have.”

“But you just said you remembered a time a hundred and thirty million years ago,” said Klicks, frustration in his voice.

“We do—”

“So how can you—”

“But we not aware that time travel is possible,” said Diamond-snout, overtop of Klicks. “Last night, that black and white disk that crashed into the ground. That was your vehicle for time displacement?”

“The Sternberger, yes,” said Klicks. “Its technical name is a Huang temporal phase-shift habitat module, but the press just calls it a time machine.”

“A time machine?” The reptilian head bobbed. “That phrase appeals. Tell how it works.”

Klicks appeared irritated. “Look,” he said. “We know nothing about you. You’ve crawled around in our heads. What the hell are you?”

For the first time, I noticed the way the troodon blinked, an odd gesture in which it closed its left eye, opened it, then briefly closed its right. “We entered you only to absorb your language,” Diamond-snout said. “Did no harm, yess?”

“Well—”

“We could enter you again to absorb additional information. But time-consuming process. Clumsy. Language center obvious in brain structure. Much mass devoted to it. Specific memories much harder to faucet. Faucet? No, to tap. Easier you tell us.”

“But we could communicate better if we knew more about you,” I said. “Surely you can see that a common set of references would make it simpler.”

“Yess. See that and raise you—No, just see that. Common reference points. Links. Very well. Ask questions.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Who are you?”

“I am me,” the reptile said.

“Great,” muttered Klicks.

“Unsatisfactory response?” asked the theropod. “I am this one. No name. Name not link.”

“You’re a single entity,” I said, “but you don’t have a name of your own. Is that it?”

“It is that.”

“How do you tell yourself from others of your own kind?” I asked.

“Others?”

“You know: different individuals. One of you is inside this troodon; another is inside that one. How do you distinguish yourselves?”

“I here. Other is there. Easy as 3.1415.”

Klicks hooted.

“What are you?” I asked, annoyed at Klicks.

“No link.”

“You are an invertebrate.”

“Invertebrate: animal without a backbone, yess?”

“Yes. What are your relatives?”

“Time and space.”

“No, no. I—Damn. I want to know what you are, what you evolved from. You’re unlike any form of life I’ve seen before.”