“You know your own circumstances. Maybe together we can come up with something.” He looked off to the east. “Your ship is an old-fashioned fighter, Sumi class, and its communication system has safeguards that prevented it from telling me much. I know you came from Middle Finger via the Aleph-10 collapsar. The ship also knows you, and it, were somewhere else before, but it can’t say where.”
“We were in the middle of nowhere,” I said, “a tenth of a light-year from Middle Finger. We’d taken a converted cruiser and were headed out twenty thousand light-years–”
“I remember that from the Tree. I thought the request was denied.”
“We sort of hijacked it,” Marygay said.
Einstein nodded. “Some people suggested you might. That they should have let you go ahead with it, to prevent violence.”
“One of me was killed,” said the Tauran.
There was an uncomfortable silence. The Omni said something in Tauran, and Antres replied, “True.”
“We’d gone about a tenth of a light-year, when the antimatter fueling the cruiser suddenly evaporated.”
“Evaporated? Do you have a scientific explanation for that?” Einstein grew a third eye and blinked it.
“No. The ship suggested ‘transient-barrier virtual particle substitution,’ but as far as I could find out, it doesn’t apply. Anyhow, we limped back to Middle Finger in these converted Sumi fighters, and found everybody gone. It turns out that if you make corrections for relativistic simultaneity, they disappeared the same time our antimatter did.
“We assumed that our being off Middle Finger had saved us. But it happened here, too.”
He stroked his huge moustache. “Perhaps you caused it.”
“What?”
“You just posited the argument yourself. If two improbable things happen simultaneously, they must be related. Maybe one caused the other.”
“No. If putting a bunch of people in a starship and accelerating caused impossible things to happen, we would have noticed long ago.”
“But you weren’t going anywhere. Except the future.”
“I don’t think the universe cares about our intent.”
Einstein laughed. “That’s your belief system again. You just used the word `impossible’ to describe events you know did happen.”
Cat was amused. “You have to admit he has a point.”
“Okay. But the other anomaly is that you guys are still here, when all the humans and Taurans disappeared. So maybe you caused it.”
He changed into a huge Indian brave, I suppose a Timucuan, scarred with elaborate tattoos, impressively naked, smelling like a wet goat. “That’s more like it. Though I’ll ask the others about virtual particle transient barrier, whatever. Some of them know science.”
“Can you talk to them now, like telepathy?” Cat asked.
“No, not unless they’re in my line of sight. The way I talked to your ship. We used to just call each other up, but most of the systems are failing. We leave messages on the Tree now.”
“We ought to check the Tree again ourselves,” the sheriff said, “Antres and I”
“Especially the Tauran Tree,” the brave said. “We can tap it, but a lot of it is confusing.”
“I’m afraid much of it is confusing to me as well,” Antres said. “I’m from Tsogot. We’re in contact with Earth, or were in contact, but our cultures have been diverging for centuries.”
“That might be useful.” The brave changed into a kindly-looking old man. “A doubly alien perspective.” He produced a blue package of cigarettes and lit one, wrapped in yellow paper, which smelled even more noxious than the one before. I sorted through grandfatherly images and came up with Walt Disney.
“Why are so many of your images from the twentieth century?” I asked. “Are you reading our minds, Marygay and me?”
“No, I can’t do that. I just like the period–end of innocence, before the Forever War. Everything got kind of complicated after that.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette and closed his eyes, evidently savoring it. “Then it got too simple, if you ask me. We were all sort of waiting for this Man thing to run its course.”
“It survived so long because it worked,” the sheriff said mildly.
“Termite colonies work,” Disney said. “They don’t produce interesting conversation.” To Antres: “You Taurans got a lot more done, or at least more interesting things, before you had a group mind. I went to Tsogot once, as a xenosociologist, and studied your history.”