Bones of the Earth

Without intending to, he was, he realized, playing to her weaknesses. He was giving her a glimpse behind the curtain, where the Wizard of Oz operated the secret machinery that ran the cosmos, and showing her exactly which levers were attached to what pulleys.

“The expedition is lost for good,” he concluded. “The first time, the Unchanging lent us the equipment to pull off a recovery mission. They’ll never do that now.”

He didn’t mention that, according to the final reports, they’d recovered only seven people. That three had died as a result of injuries from the bomb, and two by misadventure thereafter. The sequence in which that had happened had, after all, been sundered from the main time line. In their frame of reference, it didn’t exist.

“All of which assumes that our screwing around isn’t going to destroy the universe,” he added in bitter afterthought.

“I don’t think we need worry about that,” Salley said. “And I doubt the Unchanging are really going to loop back on themselves and decide not to give us time travel. From what I was told, things will go on pretty much as they always have, paradox or no.”

“Told! Who told you that?” He was collected enough now to ask the questions he’d dared not earlier when, in furious silence, he had thrown on his clothes and stormed out of his room. He was collected enough now to listen to her answers. “Who put such a crazy idea into your head?”

“I did.”

“What?”

She laughed a small, self-conscious laugh. “It’s a fu

Griffin at last turned his face up toward Salley. “And you believed her?”

But of course Salley had believed her. The stranger was, after all, herself. What possible motive could she have for deceiving her? So she had agreed to drop out of the expedition, accepted the changed roster sheet, and promised to seduce Griffin after the fund-raiser, make certain he was too tired to see her home to the Carnian that night, and hand him the paper in the morning.

Nobody else who knew Salley at all well would have gone along with a fraction of that. Everyone else knew she was a terrible liar. Only she herself was unaware of how untrustworthy she was.

“It hardly matters how we got here,” Salley said. “What matters is what we do now. I think we should hop up to the future and cut a deal. Everybody makes deals.”

He shook his head. “Time travel was given to us under certain conditions. We’ve violated every rule there is.”

“Okay, so we broke the rules. That’s good! There are no more rules—they’re broken. Anything is possible now. We’ll find a solution. There has to be a solution. There always is.”

“Not in my experience.” They were, he realized, standing on opposite sides of the great divide that separates those who deal with scientific fact and those who deal with the consequences of human actions. Which is to say, those who believe in a rational universe and those who know that, given the existence of human beings, there is no such thing. “You and I belong to entirely different universes, did you know that?”

“Then come join me in mine,” she said gently. “Yours doesn’t work anymore.”

It was true. God knows, it was true. Griffin felt something shift within himself. It was the rebirth not of hope (for he had never truly felt any hope) but of purpose. “Tell me something,” he said. “What were you trying to accomplish? Your other self, I mean. What did she say to you that made you go along with her?”

Incredibly, Salley blushed.

“She told me that I love you.”

When he had finished phrasing the invitations, Griffin glanced at his watch. Two minutes before the hour. He’d hold the meeting in two minutes, then. He filled in the spaces he’d left blank, and slid the papers into his attaché to give to a courier later.

There was a knock on the open door.

“Is it just the three of us, then?” Jimmy asked quietly. He nodded to Salley, and she smiled insincerely back at him.

“I’ve invited one more,” Griffin said. “He ought to be arriving just about… now.”

Jimmy strode in the door. He stopped as he saw himself.

“This isn’t good,” Jimmy said.

His older self looked extremely sad. “I have no memory of this at all. And it’s not the sort of thing I’d forget.”

Leaving unsaid, but understood: You’ve really stepped on your dick this time. Griffin and Jimmy had worked together so long that they no longer had to say such things. Each knew the other well enough to dispense with all but the essentials.

“Have a seat, both of you.” Griffin picked up a piece of chalk. Presentation technology shifted so often in the twenty-first century, from electronic whiteboards to interflats, smartboards and body interpreters, that no one person could manage them all. But everybody knew how to use a blackboard.

He drew three parallel lines. “Okay, these are the pertinent segments of the Maastrichtian, the Turonian, and the Carnian.”

Most of Griffin’s publications were in the field of chronocybernetics. All of them were classified, at varying degrees of hardness. Some of them he suspected only he was cleared to read. But his single most useful contribution to the field was the invention of causal schematics. They were rather like a cross between cladograms and Feynman space-time diagrams, and were used to keep cause-and-effect events from becoming entangled.

Briskly, he overlaid the lines with a series of linked circles representing stable areas of operation. Then he cut through them with branching consequence lines. Completed, the schematic showed a major anomaly nested deep within Salley’s actions. Young Jimmy drew his breath in when he saw that. His older counterpart leaned back, looking sour.

“There’s our problem,” Griffin said. “Comments?”

Jimmy eyed Salley coldly. “How the hell did she get into her own history? We have safeguards in place.”

“She… Okay, let’s call the older vector Gertrude, to avoid confusion. And to remind you,” he said to a glaring Salley, “that she is by no means to be mistaken for yourself. Not any longer. Gertrude would’ve needed All Access clearance. Which is obtainable only from the Old Man. How she managed that, we’ll never know.”

“Couldn’t we—?”

“No. We can’t. Gertrude has disappeared on the far side of the anomaly. Any vector of Salley we could reach would be the linear descendant or predecessor of the one here with us, and completely blameless.”

The older Jimmy cleared his throat. “Are you sure?”

“Exactly what,” Salley said, “are you implying?”

Griffin held up a hand for peace. “It’s a fair question. Yes, I’m sure. Gertrude went to a great deal of effort to deceive Salley. Why? We don’t know, and we can’t even guess at her motives. So let’s not waste time trying.”

“What do we do now?” asked the older Jimmy. His younger self leaned forward.

“Whatever else, we’ve got an expedition to rescue. We need to speak with our sponsors.”

“Not possible. Access to the Unchanging is the military’s bailiwick. Even the Old Man has a tough time getting through to them.”

“Then we’ll have to do an end run. Meet them on their home turf.” He paused significantly. “All of us.”

“It’d be easier,” young Jimmy said, “if you didn’t take her.”

“That’s not up for discussion.” It had been a long time since Griffin had done anything that was out-and-out illegal—he preferred to work within the system. If he was going off-track, he wanted Salley with him, and Jimmy as well. Each was cu