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Still, Tamara did not stop crying.
You have to go in, he told himself. He couldn’t go in.
He went in.
17. Type Specimen
Ultima Pangaea: Telezoic era. Mesognotic period. Chronic epoch. Epimethean age. 250 My C.E.
Jimmy was the first one out of the time fu
It was night.
To one side was a copse of trees with low, tangled limbs—“climbing trees” Jimmy would have called them in his youth. Downslope was a lake. In the sky above its black waters hung a glory of stars. Colored lights rose and sank among them like lanterns.
The clearing was ringed with a dozen palely luminous gates. The fu
A light breeze ruffled the waters of the lake. Molly Gerhard shivered, and finally spoke. “Which way now?”
Jimmy pointed toward one of the gates, where two dim figures, identical in size and height, waited. He said nothing. A touch of action always made him feel particularly calm and alert afterwards. He didn’t want to spoil that by talking.
The two figures resolved into women at their approach.
“Hello, Griffin,” Salley said.
“Hello, Griffin,” Gertrude said. The moon-shaped scar at the corner of her mouth sailed sardonically upward.
There was a quick exchange of glances in which Jimmy read anger, defiance, hauteur, hurt pride, and astonishment.
Molly Gerhard, who knew the history of that scar on the older woman’s face, gave voice to the last of these. “Tell me this is you from your own future…” (But Salley was already shaking her head dolefully.) “…and not the woman who got us into this mess.”
“She’s—” Salley began.
“I am the original me, and yes, I take full credit for all that’s happened.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Only to small minds,” Gertrude said.
“We can explain,” Salley said.
“I was told that divergent time lines could never meet,” Molly Gerhard said with an edge in her voice. “How can the two of you possibly exist in the same reality?”
Jimmy, watching, had to admire how efficiently she worked. Gerhard invited correction. She wasn’t afraid to sound foolish. And she directed her question at the older woman—Gertrude—while ignoring the younger—Salley. Thus driving the thi
“Within your frame of reference, that was true,” Gertrude said. “Things are different on this side of Terminal City. You’ve been there. Surely you understand. Anyone with a modicum of perception would realize that its chief function is to reconcile the products of divergent time lines into a common reality.”
Salley’s eyes flicked toward her, then away.
“To what purpose?” Griffin asked.
“If nothing else, it enables us to meet.” Gertrude turned away. “Let’s go to my place. I’ll explain everything to you there.”
She stepped into the nearest gate and vanished. After the briefest of hesitations, Salley did likewise.
They had no choice but to follow.
Gertrude lived in a floating tower at the center of a ring forest in the Interior Sea. A soft, sultry breeze passed through the open windows, carrying with it the salt smell of the unseen sea. A sliver of new moon hung low in the sky. It had not been visible from the mouth of the time fu
“Exactly where are we?” Molly Gerhard asked.
Gertrude snapped her fingers, and a map appeared in her hands. She opened it. “This is Ultima Pangaea. Continental drift has joined the scattered continents once more into a single landmass. It is surrounded by a world-spa
Of course, Jimmy thought. Where else?
The others were prowling about the room, examining things, opening drawers, displaying a curiosity that Gertrude ignored complacently, though Jimmy would never have allowed it in his digs. “You’ve got quite a few books here,” Griffin observed.
“All mine.”
“She means she wrote them,” Salley said.
“Yes, of course. What else would I mean?”
“What are these creatures?” Molly Gerhard asked.
One wall was nothing but windows. The wall opposite it was taken up by an earth-filled terrarium. A labyrinthine structure of tu
Molly Gerhard stared with undisguised loathing at the pallid creatures, climbing clumsily over one another, some few scrabbling at the dirt with needlelike talons and tiny beaks. “Why would you have such things?”
“For their inherent interest.”
“They have inherent interest?”
Gertrude snorted. “Bloodedness has always been the paleontologist’s Afghanistan,” she said. “Any number of scientists have marched off boldly to determine whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded, and lost themselves in a wilderness of definitions. It turns out that bloodedness is not so simple as it looks from the outside. It’s not a single thing, but several families of strategies.
“Body temperature can be either constant or variant, regulated internally or externally, and in service to a high resting metabolism or a low one. Maintaining a constant body temperature is called homeothermy. Variant temperature, usually close to the variation in ambient temperature, is poikilothermy. Internally regulated temperature is called endothermy. Externally regulated temperature is called ectothermy. An animal whose resting metabolism remains at a high level is tachymetabolic. One whose resting metabolism slows to a low level of activity is brady metabolic.
“Got that? Good.
“Now, a ‘warm-blooded’ animal is generally homeothermic, endothermic, and tachymetabolic, where a ‘cold-blooded’ one is poikilothermic, ectothermic, and barymetabolic. The naked mole bird, however, is homeothermic, ectothermic, and tachymetabolic. Is it cold-blooded? There are insects whose body temperatures, at rest, reflect the ambient temperature, but whose wing muscles raise their temperatures much higher than that during flight. They’re poikilothermic, endothermic, and brady metabolic. Warm-blooded or coldblooded? How about hibernating mammals? Homeothermic, ectothermic, brady metabolic. Do they shift between bloodednesses?
“Moreover, when you begin to look into the mechanisms of all these things, you’ll realize that I’ve been oversimplifying furiously. It’s all a lot more complicated than I’ve made it sound.
“So I’ve decided to take a whack at straightening the whole mess out.”
All the while she talked, Jimmy noted, Salley stood to the far side of the room, sad-eyed and silent. She had only spoken the once, and then without addressing anybody directly. Nor had she looked at Griffin, save casually and fleetingly.
Well, that was easy enough to decipher. It was a terrible blessing she’d been given, to see herself the way everybody else did. He imagined it was humbling. What Jimmy couldn’t figure out was why Gertrude was being so talkative.
Griffin listened silently, head down, flipping through book after book. “Leather bound,” he said, when Gertrude wound down at last. “Steel engravings. You’re certainly being treated well. And this place of yours. Do all the inhabitants of this era live in towers like this?”