End of an Era

by Robert J. Sawyer

"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."

  "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 str
eaked across the sky. At the least, they were aircraft, but I knew in an instant that they were much more than that.

  Spaceships.

  "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.

  —Denis Diderot, French philosopher (1713-1784)

  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 Dragons of the North: The Dinosaurs of Canada. In preparing the manuscript for that book, I got sick of all the italics. See, Linnaeus established that biological naming would be in Latin, and non-English words are usually italicized in modern typesetting. Plus, Linnaeus said the genus part of the name should always be capitalized: Tyrannosaurus rex. Since there are no common English names for individual types of dinosaurs, popular books on the subject have slavishly followed this convention so that almost every tenth word is italicized or capitalized, bullying the reader’s eye.

  I’d taken some flak from my colleagues for it, but in Dragons of the North I chucked out that convention. The first time I mentioned some Mesozoic critter, I’d use the Linnaean standard, but thereafter I’d treated the name as if it were a common English term, just like "cat" or "dog," uncapitalized and unitalicized. Well, whoever had cobbled together this bogus diary had copied at least that much of my style.

  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 Roget’s Thesaurus loaded onto my optical drive.

  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 Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics, co-authored with one G. C. Mackenzie, published by Simon Fraser University Press in 2003.

  The link was to the listing on Chapters.ca, which contained a review taken from Quill Quire (a publication I’d always liked, since it had been very kind to my Dragons of the North): "Mackenzie and Huang, both high-energy researchers at Vancouver’s TRIUMF, have put together a dry account of current…"

  That was a decade ago. Still, it was worth a shot. I activated my PicturePhone and asked for directory assistance. "Vancouver, please," I said to the perky computer-generated face that appeared on my screen. "TRIUMF. T-R-I-U-M-F."

  The image recited the phone number while simultaneously displaying it on my screen. The museum didn’t allow us to use the call-completion feature, since it cost an extra seventy-five cents, so I jotted the number down on a Post-it note, then dictated it back into the phone. After two rings, a man with what might have been a Pakistani accent answered. "Good morning; bonjour. TRIUMF."

  "Hello," I said, surprising myself at how nervous I sounded. "Ching-Mei Huang, please."

  "Dr. Huang is unavailable right now," he said. "Would you like to leave a message?"

  "Yes," I said. "Yes, indeed."

  Ching-Mei Huang failed to return the three messages I left for her at TRIUMF, but I finally weaseled her unlisted home number out of somebody who answered the phone late one evening. My palms were sweating as I spoke the string of digits to my phone. Christ, I hadn’t been this nervous since the first time I’d called Tess and asked for a date.

  Toronto was 3,300 kilometers from Vancouver; it was a little after ten in the evening my time, which meant it would be just after seven on the west coast. The phone rang three times before the round Bell Canada logo did its usual self-indulgent backflip off the screen. But instead of Dr. Huang’s face, all I got was this graphic:

  Audio Only Available

  Then, thinned by what sounded like fear — the distance shouldn’t have affected the quality at all, of course — a voice made its way across the continent to me. "Hello?"

  "Hello," I replied. "May I please speak to Ching-Mei Huang?"

  A pause. Finally: "Who’s calling?"

  "My name is Brandon Thackeray. I’m with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto."

  "I’m not interested in becoming a member. Good-bye."

  "Wait. I’m not from the membership department. I’m a vertebrate paleontologist."

  "A vert — ? How did you get this number?"

  "Then you are Dr. Huang?"

  "Yes, I am she. How did you get my number?"

  I tried to sound jaunty. "It wasn’t easy, believe me."

  "This number is unlisted for a purpose. Please leave me alone."

  I put as much reassuring warmth as I could into my voice. "You certainly keep a low profile," I said with a laugh.

  "That’s no concern of yours." A
pause, while we both tried to assess who should speak next. Finally, quietly, she said, "My phone says you’re calling from area code 905. That’s not Toronto."

  "No, it’s Mississauga, where I live. Just outside of Toronto."

  I heard a sharp exhalation of breath. "And you’re not on a mobile phone, right? So you’re not here in Vancouver?" Her voice brightened slightly, but she still seemed shaken, nervous — hardly the kind of speech I would have thought anyone would have characterized as "precise." What was it the diary had said? Measured, monotonal, clicking over the consonants like a series of circuit breakers. That description seemed to belong to a completely different person.

  "Do you have a PicturePhone, Dr. Huang? Could we switch to visual?"

  "No."

  Did that mean, No, I don’t have a PicPhone, or No, I won’t turn on its camera? "Uh, fine," I said at last. "That’s fine." Suddenly I didn’t know how to continue. What I wanted to ask her about seemed so incredible, so inconceivable. If this was a practical joke, there’s only one person who could have done it: Klicks, now living in Toronto for his sabbatical. I’d kill him if this wasn’t for real. "I’ve been trying to track you down for some time, Dr. Huang. There’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you."

  She still sounded edgy. "Oh, very well. But please be brief."

  "Of course. Do you happen to know Miles Jordan?"

  "I knew a Susan Jordan once."

  "No, that wouldn’t be any relation of his. Miles is another paleontologist. He’s with the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drum-heller, Alberta."

  "A great museum," she said absently. "But what has this got to do with me?"

  "Does the word ‘stasis’ mean anything to you?"

  "It’s Greek for standstill. What do I win?"

  "And that’s all it means to you?"

  "Mr. Thackeray, I value my privacy greatly. I don’t wish to seem rude, but I am uncomfortable on the phone."

  I mustered my courage. "All right, Dr. Huang. I put it to you: are you, or were you, doing experiments involving the cessation of the passage of time — a process you referred to as stasis?"

  "Where did you get that notion?"