Salley stared down into her lap. She said nothing.
The sun was coming up over the ring forest. At Gertrude’s invitation, they all went out onto the balcony.
The ring forest was a circle of green a mile across with open water at its center. It smelled as different from the forests Jimmy knew as an oak forest smelled different from a pine forest. Birds nested in the branches and fish swam among the roots. There were ponds and lakes within the forest, natural openings above which ternlike birds hovered and struck, sending up sharp white spikes of water as they penetrated the surface.
“This is lovely,” Molly Gerhard said.
Gertrude nodded and, without a grain of irony, said, “You’re welcome.”
Jimmy Boyle remembered how, in an earlier age, Salley had gone on and on about the waterbushes and what a significant ecological development they were. He wondered if these things were their descendants. He supposed they were.
“The forests cover all the continental shallows,” Gertrude said. “These trees are adapted for deeper water. Their holdfasts can’t reach the ocean floor, so they serve as sea-anchors. They entangle, and form a rich variety of habitats sheltering many distinct species.”
As she spoke, Griffin and Salley slipped away. They stood apart from the others, quietly talking. Jimmy positioned himself so he could unobtrusively eavesdrop, while still seeming to be listening to Gertrude.
“How long have you been here,” Griffin asked, “with her?”
“One month.”
“It must have been difficult.”
Salley moved a little closer to him. “You have no idea,” she said angrily. “That has to be the single most arrogant and self-centered and… and manipulative creature in existence.”
Griffin smiled sadly. “You haven’t met the Old Man yet.”
“Oh God,” Salley said. “I am so ashamed.”
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of something you did not do,” Griffin said.
“But I am! I am! How could I not be, knowing that she’s me?”
Suddenly Salley was crying. Griffin placed his arms around her, comfortingly, and she let him.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I swore to myself that I’d never let you touch me again, and yet here I am, clinging to you.”
“Yeah,” Griffin said. “Funny.”
“I can’t keep a single god-damned resolution I make,” she said bitterly. “Not to save my life.”
Jimmy moved away. There was nothing more to be learned here.
Gertrude was still talking, of course.
“Did you ever notice,” she said, “how all the stations are set at the end of an age? Just before a major extinction event? Did you ever wonder why the station in Washington should be different?”
“Biologically speaking,” Jimmy said, “our home age is in the middle of one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the planet. Even if not a single species more died off after our time, it would still be one of the Big Six.” He’d been around scientists long enough to have picked up that much, anyway.
“Perhaps,” Gertrude said. “Yet look around you. We’re extinct, humanity, I mean, and have been so for a long, long time.”
“How?” Molly Gerhard whispered. “How did we die off?”
“That,” Gertrude said firmly, “I’ll leave as an exercise for the student.”
There was an odd look on her face, triumphant and yet yearning. She was lonely, Jimmy realized. The old thing had been living here in splendid isolation so long she’d almost forgotten how to get along with other human beings. But she still felt the lack of their company.
He felt terribly sorry for her. But at the same time, he didn’t feel called upon to do anything about it. That wasn’t part of his job.
A chime sounded.
“What was that?” Molly Gerhard asked.
“It’s time,” Gertrude said, “to meet our sponsors.”
The gate was located in a small room at the center of Gertrude’s tower. Now a door opened, and one of the Unchanging emerged. “We have come,” it said, “to take you to the meeting.” To Gertrude: “Not you.” To the others: “Now.”
18. Peer Review
The raft trip down the Eden was slow and languid. They were not disturbed once by crocodilians, though they saw many. And because the migrations were not entirely over yet and the river meandered through more varied terrain than existed back in Happy Valley, Leyster was able to add several rare dinosaurs to his life list. He got clear sightings of betrachovenators, cryptoceratops, fubarodons, and jabberwockies. Once he even saw a Cthuluraptor imperator in all its terrifying splendor. They were species he had never seriously hoped to see, and it put him in a good mood.
Jamal was still a little weak from the aftereffects of his fever. But his broken leg had begun to knit over the weeks that it had taken to build the raft. He was looking forward to the day when the splint came off. There were times, in fact, when he insisted that his leg was already healed, and the thing could be removed immediately. But Daljit refused to allow it. “After everything I put up with, watching over you,” she said, “I am not taking any chances of a repeat performance. I am not going to be Florence fucking Nightingale ever again. Got that?”
They had considered other means of returning home, but settled on the raft as being the safest method of transporting Jamal. It broke Leyster’s heart to cut up an entire coil of rope to lash the logs together, but there was no helping it. Tamara christened it the John Ostrom, after the man who had established dinosaurs as active creatures and the ancestors of birds, and she stuck an upright stick with a handful of bright dinosaur feathers tied to its tip between the logs at the bow for luck.
Their trip began early in the morning, when they loaded all their possessions onto the raft, loosed the moorings, and used long poles to push it out into the river. Water birds were diving for fish in the smooth brown water. They exploded into the air at the raft’s approach.
Tamara stood at the stern manning the sweep, and Leyster squatted a few paces fore of her with a weighted line. Periodically he took a reading. The Eden was muddy, wide, and slow, which meant that it was also shallow in spots, and they were constantly in danger of running aground. Daljit and Jamal were both sunbathing at the front of the raft.
Leyster was thinking about the infrasound paper and idly admiring the sculptural beauty of their bodies, when a pterosaur’s shadow touched the raft, then soared toward shore.
He turned quickly, and caught the briefest flash of the animal disappearing behind a massive bank of willows, into a rookery that he could hear but not see. In that lucid instant, everything came together for him.
