End of an Era

I felt slightly dazed. "That’s mind-boggling. It’s like — like…"

"It’s like we’re our own God," said Dr. Huang. "We created ourselves in our own image."

"Then what about the Sternberger?"

"You’ve read the diary. You know what that other version of you does in the end."

"Yes, but—"

"Don’t you see?" she said. "The Sternberger mission was only one of many instances in which time travel was used to set things right. The flow of events requires periodic adjustment. That’s chaos theory for you: you can’t accurately predict the development of any complex system. Therefore, you can’t just create life and leave it to evolve on its own. Every once in a while you have to give it a push in the direction you want it to go."

"So — so you’re saying that someone determined that the timeline had to be altered in order to give rise to us?"

"That’s right," she said.

"But the time-traveling Brandy wrote that he could hunt dinosaurs, or do anything else, with impunity — that any changes he made wouldn’t matter."

"I’m sure he believed that — he had to, of course, or he never would have done the things that needed doing. It was crucial that he believe that lie. But he was wrong. There was a mathematical string between the Sternberger in the past and the launch point in the present. The changes he made did indeed work their way up that string, altering the timeline as they did so, rewriting the last sixty-five million years of Earth’s history, making our world possible. By the time the string had been hauled all the way back to 2013, the conditions that had given rise to the Sternberger had been eliminated, and our version of the timeline existed instead."

I sagged against the padded back of the steno chair. "Wow."

"Wow, indeed."

"And the other you who invented the time machine?"

She looked down. "I’m clever, but not that clever. I think it was more likely that its birth was induced."

"Induced?"

"Made to happen. The technique must have somehow been given to me from the future, perhaps by little clues or experiments that went a seemingly serendipitous way."

"But why you? Why now?"

"Well, here near the beginning of the twenty-first century we’re probably at the very earliest point in human history at which a time machine could be built, the very earliest that the technology existed to put the parts together, even if we couldn’t really understand the theory behind those parts. In fact, it was necessary that we not fully understand it, that the time-traveling Brandy believe that he’d spin off a new timeline, which he would then abandon, rather than actually change the one and only real timeline."

"So you don’t know how to make a time machine anymore."

"No. But there was one. It did exist. The Sternberger did go back into the past, did change the course of prehistory in such a way as to make our present existence possible."

"But then what happened to that other Brandy? That other you?"

"They existed long enough to make a midstream correction, to steer the timeline in the way it was meant to go."

"Meant to go? Meant to go by — by the powers that be?"

She nodded. "By what we will become. By God. Call it what you will."

My head was swimming. "I still don’t get it."

"Don’t you? The trip by the Sternberger was necessary to adjust things, but it also means that there’s no way another time-travel mission from this present to that part of the past could ever be made to happen again. Once the correction had been made, once the temporal surgery had been performed, the — the incision, shall we call it? — the incision would be sutured up, to prevent any further tampering, lest the correction be undone." She sounded wistful. "I can’t ever build another time machine, and you can’t ever travel in time again. The universe would conspire to prevent it."

"Conspire? How?" And then it hit me. "Oh my God. Oh, Ching-Mei, I’m sorry. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry."

She looked up, a tightly controlled expression on her face. "So am I." She shook her head slowly, and we both pretended not to notice the single teardrop that fell onto the desk. "At least Dr. Almi was killed quickly in that earthquake." We sat in silence for a long, long moment. "I wish," she said very softly, "that that had been what had happened to me."

Countdown: 5

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

—Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychoanalyst (1856–1939)

My Radio Shack homing device guided me through the Mesozoic heat back toward the Sternberger, an arrowhead on the unit’s LCD showing the direction from which it was receiving radio beeps. It wasn’t taking me along the same route I’d used going out, meaning, I guess, that I hadn’t ambled in a straight line. No matter. I didn’t mind cutting through the forest, since the shade shielded me from the inferno of the late-afternoon sun.