Страница 51 из 67
“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. Sitzflesk, 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 ru
“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 gri
“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 ca
“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 a
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 ru
“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 fu