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?”
“It’s just a nothing-special little brush dino. It’ll make a nice side dish.”
“No, seriously. I don’t recognize it. Is that a new species? Let me see its teeth.”
“No dissecting dinner!” Katie laughed. She was taking palm leaves from the kettle where they’d been soaking, and wrapping them around the scraped tubers, so they could be baked in the coals. “Keep scraping.”
“Oh, come on. It has to be gutted anyway. It could be significant.”
Daljit put the carcass down. “Listen,” she said tensely.
“I don’t…” Katie said.
“Shush!”
From outside, there came the sound of voices. They were not familiar.
“Oh God, where’s my blouse?” Daljit cried.
Katie scooped up the baby and ran outside without saying a word.
Leyster was the second out the door. Daljit came close on his heels, buttoning furiously.
Their rescuers were U.S. military, for the most part, young men with short hair and socially awkward demeanor. But they’d brought along a documentary camerawoman, and she was already moving among the paleontologists, interviewing them.
“What is the one thing you most regret?” she asked, camera on her shoulder. Several of the tribe hung back
