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.
“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.
