“As are you.”
I shook my head. “I’m not too dissimilar from the dinosaur you are now inhabiting.”
“Dinosaur is efficient creature. Strong. Keen senses. Yours are dull by comparison.”
“Yes,” I said, irritated. For years, I’d explained to people that dinosaurs weren’t the sluggish, stupid creatures so often portrayed in cartoons, but somehow I didn’t enjoy hearing the same sentiments expressed by a reptilian mouth. “But we are more similar than different. Each of us is bipedal—that means we each have two legs—”
“Bipedal links.”
“And we each have two arms, two eyes, two nostrils. Our left sides are nearly perfect mirror images of our right sides—”
“Bisexual symmetry.”
“Bilateral symmetry,” I corrected. “Clearly, the dinosaur and I are related—share a common ancestor. My kind did evolve from ancient reptiles, but there are other creatures about, tiny mammals, that are even more closely related to us. But you—I’ve studied the history of life since it began. I don’t know of anything similar to you.”
“Its body is completely soft,” said Klicks. “Creatures like that might go undetected in the fossil record.”
I turned to him. “But intelligent life arising millions of years before the first human? It’s incredible. It’s almost as if—”
I’d like to claim that I was about to state the correct conclusion, that at that instant I had pieced together the puzzle and had realized what was going on. But my next words were drowned out by a great roaring clap, like thunder, followed by several bellowing dinosaur calls and the cries of flying things startled into flight. I recognized the noise, for my home was due south of Pearson International Airport and, despite the complaints from me and my neighbors, it had become part of the background of our day-to-day lives ever since Transport Canada had approved inland supersonic flights of the Orient Express jetliners. High overhead, three tawny spheres moving at perhaps Mach 2 or 3 streaked across the sky. At the least, they were aircraft, but I knew in an instant that they were much more than that.
“You under a misapprehension operate,” said Diamond-snout once the sky had stopped rumbling. “We are not from this planet.”
Klicks was flabbergasted, which pleased me no end. “Then where?” I said.
“From—home world. Name I not find in your memories. It’s—”
“Is it in this solar system?” I asked.
“Yess.”
“Mercury?”
“Quicksilver? No.”
“Venus?”
“No.”
“Not Earth. Mars?”
“Mars—ah, Mars! Fourth from sun. Yess. Mars is home.”
“Martians!” said Klicks. “Actual fucking Martians. Who’d believe it?”
Diamond-snout fixed Klicks with a steady gaze. “I would,” it said, absolutely deadpan.
Boundary Layer
I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.
The traveler’s diary—the one that purported to tell the story of a trip back to the end of the Mesozoic Era— had to be a fake, of course. It had to be. Oh, it superficially resembled my writing style. In fact, whoever had put it together had obviously read my book
I’d taken some flak from my colleagues for it, but in
Although I never used it, my palmtop had come bundled with a grammar-checking program. I had my diary from last year still stored on the Toshiba’s built-in optical wafer, so I called that up alongside the fake traveler’s diary. With each document in a separate window, I let the grammar checker run a stylistic comparison between them. The program produced a dozen charts—including “Flesch-Kincaid grade level,” “average number of words per sentence,” and “average number of sentences per paragraph.” The conclusion was inescapable: both diaries, mine and the supposed time traveler’s, were in almost identical styles.
The grammar checker had a feature that I’d never before found a use for: the ability to output an alphabetized list of all the words in a document. I had it do that for both diaries, then filtered and piped between the two lists until I had a new file containing only the words in the traveler’s diary that did not appear in my own diary from last year. I thought perhaps the forger would have tripped up by using words that weren’t part of my vocabulary.
I scanned down the list. There were a lot of words, including “archaeopteryx” and “hawked,” but almost all were ones I could see myself using. There were one or two—such as “firmament'—that didn’t sound like me at all, but, then again, I did have
No, it was clear. Without one of those new Japanese AI style replicators, and access to a lot of my writings in a machine-readable form, there’s only one person who could have written this time-traveler’s diary.
Me.
If the diary was genuine, then so likely were the people named in it. And the person who seemed to be in charge of all this nonsense was one Ching-Mei Huang.
I sat at my battered old desk at the ROM—it dated back to Gordon Edmund’s days as curator—and spoke to my desk terminal. “Default search engine,” I said. “Boolean: Huang AND Ching-Mei.”
“Please spell both search terms,” said the computer.
I did so, and my screen instantly filled with references. There were at least three Ching-Mei Huangs in the world: one seemed to be a leading expert on the potato-chip industry. Another was an authority on Sino-American relations. And the third—
The third was clearly my woman: a physicist, judging by the titles of the papers she’d authored, and…
Well, I had to read that one: “Professors Arrested in Campus Melee.” “Show me number seventeen,” I said.
A Canadian Press wire-service story from 18 November 1988 appeared. A Ching-Mei Huang, then a nontenured professor, was one of six faculty members arrested at Dalhousie University in Halifax during a protest over cutbacks in research funding. The article said she’d broken the shin of one of the campus police officers. Feisty woman.
“Back,” I said. The hit list returned to my screen. I kept scanning the results—and then I smiled. Apparently, like me, she’d also written a popular book, something called
The link was to the listing on Chapters.ca, which contained a review taken from
