Bones of the Earth (29 page)

“You cannot pass without authorization.”

“You're not listening!”

“You cannot pass without authorization.”

Salley seized the iron gate of the nearest funnel entrance. It crashed open. She stepped within, turned to face forward.

“Wait!” Molly cried after her. “Where are you going?”

“Someplace more interesting than this.” Salley waggled her fingers. “Toodles.”

The gate slammed shut.

“Damn,” Molly Gerhard said.

Whatever it was that had just happened, she
knew
that Griffin was going to be pissed.

Griffin stood out front of his cottage, staring at a smoldering trash fire. There were charred box springs at its center. Molly Gerhard recognized the stench of burning mattress stuffing. Beside her, Jimmy wrinkled up his nose.

Griffin did not look up at their approach. “She's gone,” he said.

“I know,” Molly Gerhard said. “I was just at the time funnel. I saw her leave.”

Griffin grunted.

“Maybe she'll come back,” Jimmy suggested. “Women have been known to change their minds.”

“She's not coming back. I've been through two divorces. I know the signs.”

Griffin was holding his wrist in one hand. Slowly, he forced the hand open and moved it away, so he could stare down at his watch. By the look on his face, it told him nothing.

“Well?” he said at last.

Molly, unsure what he wanted, didn't respond.

“Where did she go? Why did she go there? What does she know that we don't?”

“I really don't—”

Jimmy squinted up at the sun. “It's too hot out here for this kind of conversation,” he said. “Let's go inside.”

They talked in the village pub. It was, Jimmy had firmly pointed out to them, not a reproduction of a real pub, but rather a reproduction of an American imitation of one. Molly Gerhard didn't care. She'd been in phonier. At least this one didn't have cardboard leprechauns taped to the mirrors.

Griffin sat hunched over the bar. He looked like he could use a drink. She'd heard he had a problem there. In all her years working for him, she'd never actually seen Griffin with an alcoholic beverage in his hand. That could just be discretion, though.

She sat at a table, and Jimmy lounged by the window.

It seemed to Molly Gerhard that Salley would be pleased by how she dominated their thoughts in her absence, as she never had while she was here. She was one of those people who discredited their own ideas by the force with which they argued them. With her gone, they were able to give her speculations the serious consideration they deserved. They were able to admit that she might well be right.

“Salley's the key to everything,” Molly said.

“How so?” Jimmy asked coolly.

“She's figured it all out. Exactly what's going on. Why we haven't gotten anywhere in our negotiations. Everything.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Yes. She as good as said so any number of times.”

Griffin sighed, straightened, turned.
Tick-tock
, Molly thought. Like a machine resuming its function. This was one of the reasons she was leaving for the private sector. She didn't like what manipulating destiny did to people, how it coarsened them. He took up the reins of the discussion. “We're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's begin by establishing the precise order of events.”

Griffin got the ball rolling by telling how he had come back to the village from yet another futile and unproductive meeting with the Unchanging to find both Salley and his All Access pass gone. Then Molly Gerhard related how she'd been conned into leading Salley to the time funnel. “I didn't see what harm she could do,” she said shamefacedly. “I honestly didn't think she was that devious.”

“Where did she go?” Griffin said.

“I don't know. Forward, presumably.” With the AA pass, she could have gone anywhere. But if she had returned to the Cenozoic or Mesozoic, her return would have been logged into the system. “If she'd gone back, the Old Man would be here now. Since he's not …” She shrugged.

“How far forward?”

“I don't know.”

“Could you identify the exact entrance to the funnel she used?” Jimmy asked.

She closed her eyes, thought. “Yes.”

“Then we can follow her.”

“What? How?”

“Let's just say we have our ways. Technically speaking, I'm not even supposed to know about them.”

“No, you're not.” Griffin glowered at his subordinate. Then, to Molly: “Why would she go forward? What's she trying to accomplish?”

“Hard to say. But she's headed all the way to the end of the line. To the
real
source of time travel. Sometime many, many millions of years beyond Terminal City.”

“She told you this?”

“Not directly. She tried not to say anything. But that's not easy for her. She was dropping hints constantly.”

“That's true,” Jimmy said. “She was bubbling over with things unsaid.”

“After a while, I gave up on trying to get a straight answer out of her, and just began assembling her pronouncements. I've been sorting through them in my mind, and I think I've put them into some sort of order.”

“Go on,” Griffin said.

“She kept referring to how quiet it was. How clean and unspoiled. She talked about how much she wanted to get out into the local ecosystem, but she never said a word about the fact that there don't appear to be any large animals in it. It suggests she didn't want us to realize that we're in the aftermath of a major extinction event.”

“She said something to me about how quiet it was,” Jimmy said. “I didn't think it meant anything.”

Molly Gerhard reminded herself that she couldn't expect Jimmy to be of much use here. This wasn't his arena of action. “It means everything,” she said. “To begin with, there hasn't been the time for the adaptive radiation of species.”

Jimmy cleared his throat. “You're losing me,”

“Evolution,” Griffin said, taking control again, “is not like an arrow, with a fish crawling out of the water at one end and a white male in a business suit on the other. It is a radiation in all directions, provided only that there is room to evolve in the indicated direction.

“Usually, there isn't. In a healthy ecosystem, all niches are filled. A desert mouse wanders into the grasslands and finds there are field mice there already. It can't harvest the grass seed as efficiently as they can, or dodge the local owls and foxes as well. So it's either driven back into the desert, or it dies.

“After a major extinction event, however, there are empty niches everywhere, devoid of predators or competition. So elements of a single species can radiate out in several directions to fill them. They get larger, they get smaller, they climb trees. Before you know it, there are mice the size of gophers, mice the size of hippopotami, otter mice, bison mice, with sabre-tooth mice and grizzly mice to prey on them.

“It's a fast process. It only takes ten million years or so for the niches to fill up again. So the fact that they haven't, means we're in the aftermath of a major extinction event. Which means that this can't be the Unchanging's home time.” He scowled. “I should have seen it myself. I would have, if I hadn't been so tied up in negotiations.”

“Okay,” Molly said. “So we're all agreed that this isn't the Unchanging's original time period?”

“What is it, then?” Jimmy asked.

“It's a quarantine station for animals being transshipped forward, and a holding space for items they've acquired and only occasionally need to refer to.”

“Hold on. If they're our descendants, why couldn't they have simply survived the extinction event?”

“Salley said that they weren't people.”

“They look like people.”

“Salley said that too. She also made a big deal about how they didn't smell. She said it often enough that I finally asked myself what kind of animal doesn't have a smell.” She paused, half expecting Jimmy to make a wisecrack. He did not.

“Well?” Griffin said.

“An artificial one. The Unchanging approached us with time travel in one hand, and a list of restrictions in the other. Naturally, we assumed it came from them.”

“Christ on a crutch!” Jimmy said suddenly. “Will you look at this fucker?”

She turned. Jimmy was staring out the window at a grotesque, long-jawed giant of a predator that was padding slowly down the river road.

“I saw that same creature inside Terminal City! It scared the daylights out of me.”

“It's only an
Andrewsarchus
,” Griffin said irritably. “So it's big! Something has to be. There's really no reason to make such a fuss over it. Sit down, Jimmy. In a chair, with your back to the window.”

Meekly, Jimmy obeyed.

“Continue,” Griffin said to Molly.

“That's pretty much it. But it explains why they're all of a height and a size and an appearance. Why they have no genetic variety at all. Why they look so pleasing to the eye. They were simply created for a job—dealing with us. And it explains why the negotiations have gotten nowhere. We've been talking to the wrong folks. The Unchanging aren't our sponsors. They're just our sponsors' tools.”

For an instant, no one spoke. Then Griffin said, “We need to talk with the Unchanging.”

The door opened.

An Unchanging walked in. “You require me,” it said. “I am here.”

“Yes,” Griffin said. “But what use are you?”

It regarded him with polite, bland patience. Molly Gerhard recalled that Griffin had once told her that one of his chief tools was boredom.
Sitzflesh
, he said, was even more important to a bureaucrat than it was to a chess player. Many a concession had been made by a negotiator who simply couldn't face running through the same excruciating drivel for the seventeenth time. Yet he had never been able to out-sit an Unchanging. He could not match their perfect lack of expectation. He could not rattle them, nor insult them. They never displayed emotion.

“We've been discussing you,” Griffin said. “It has been suggested that this is not your proper time.”

“I am here. Time is always proper.”

Griffin grinned. He was a warrior, Molly Gerhard realized, and this was his field of combat. However discouraged he might have been mere minutes ago, the possibility of victory exalted him. “It has been suggested that you are an artificial construct. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“How were you made?” Molly Gerhard asked.

“I was grown from human genetic material, suitably altered for the purposes to which I am put.”

“Who made you?”

“I am not authorized to tell you that.”

“Then we must talk to those who made you.”

“I cannot authorize that.”

“Who can?”

“I am not authorized to tell you that.”

Tick-tock
, she thought again, her suspicions confirmed. The Unchanging was just another machine. Nothing more. Nothing less. They could stay here forever arguing with the thing, and not make a single inch's headway.

Griffin, unfortunately, was a battler. It took three hours' repetitive argument for him to give in.

“Can anything at all be resolved through you?” he finally asked. “Have you the authority to make decisions without precedent? Can you, under
any
conditions, send us forward on your own cognizance?”

“No.”

Griffin looked disgusted. “Then leave.”

It turned to go. Suddenly, Molly remembered another of Salley's hints. “Tell me something,” she said. “Exactly how many of you are there?”

It paused. “One.”

“No, not you personally. I mean of the Unchanging. How many Unchanging are there in Terminal City? How many are there in the world at any given time? How many exist if you add up every one of the Unchanging no matter what era in time it inhabits?”

“One,” it said. “I am all there is. I perform all tasks, fulfill all functions, suffice for all that must be done. Only me. One.”

When the Unchanging was gone, Molly Gerhard said, “Yikes.”

“What annoys me,” Griffin said, “is the very real possibility that the Pentagon has had this information all along, but didn't deem it important that we share in it.”

Jimmy scratched his head. “Let me get this straight. There's only one of them.”

“Yes. One single individual, looped through time a thousand, a million, however many times it takes to do all the tasks that need doing.”

“Like that old notion that there was only one single subatomic particle running from one end of time to the other and back, over and over, until it's woven an entire universe out of itself?”

“Yes.”

Jimmy stood, scraping his chair back on the floor. “Then I know what to do. Gather up everything you want to take with you. We're leaving.”

When they came to the center of Terminal City and saw the guard waiting for them, Griffin said mildly, “I hope that whatever you plan doesn't require our getting past the Unchanging. Without my pass, we won't be allowed anywhere near the funnel.”

Molly Gerhard felt a sudden chill. Without access to the funnel, they had no way go get home. “Ever?” she asked.

“Now don't you worry one least bit,” Jimmy said. “Let me show you how we handle problems like this back in Belfast.”

Unhurriedly, but not slowly either, he walked up to the Unchanging on duty before the cavern's entrance. “Excuse me just a sec,” he said. “I have something here that—”

He was alongside the Unchanging now. His hand came out of his pocket and moved with uncanny speed toward the being's back. Then he stepped away.

There was surprisingly little blood. Just a spreading crimson stain on the robe where the knife hilt stuck out of the Unchanging's back.