End of an Era

Before I could reply, the three troodons stepped forward, not menacingly, really, but they did manage in short order to form the vertices of an equilateral triangle, with Klicks and me at the center. Klicks nodded toward the dense undergrowth, a mixture of ferns, red flowers, and cycads. There, sticking up, was the barrel of his elephant gun, quite out of reach. "Enough said by me," rasped the reptile, now standing so close that I could feel its hot, moist breath on my face and smell the stench of its last meal. "You speak now. Who you?"

It was insanity, this being questioned by a baby-talking dinosaur. But I couldn’t think of any reason not to answer its question. I pointed at Klicks, but wondered if the hand gesture would have any meaning to the beast. "This is Professor Miles Jordan," I said, "and my name is Dr. Brandon Thackeray." The troodon tilted its head in a way that looked like human puzzlement. It didn’t say anything, though, so I added, "I’m Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum. Miles is Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and he also teaches at the University of Alberta."

The reptilian head weaved at the end of that long neck. "Some words link," it said in its harsh voice. "Some not." I could hear an undercurrent of clicking as it spoke, the sound of its pointed teeth touching as its mouth made the unaccustomed movements. It paused again, then asked, "What is name?"

"I just told you. Brandon Thackeray." Then, after a moment, I added, for no good reason, "My friends call me Brandy."

"No. No. What is name?" It tilted its head again, in that puzzled gesture. Then it brightened. "Ah, word missing — indefinite article, yess? What is a name?’"

"What do you mean, what is a name? You asked me what my name was."

Klicks touched my shoulder. "No. What it asked was, ‘Who you?’ That’s not necessarily the same question."

I realized that Klicks was right. "Oh. I see. Well, a name is … it’s, uh, a—"

Klicks chimed in. "A name is a symbol, a unique identifying word, that can be rendered either with sound or with written markings. It’s used to distinguish one individual from another."

Clever bastard. How did he think up such a good definition so quickly? But the troodon made that puzzled face again. " ‘Individual,’ say you? Still not link. No matter. Where you from?"

Well, what do I tell this thing? That I’m a time traveler from the future? If it doesn’t understand name, it’s not going to understand that. "I’m from Toronto. That’s a city" — I looked up at the sun to get my bearings, then pointed east — "about twenty-five hundred kilometers that way."

"What kilometer?"

"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."