Marygay was sitting up now. “What’s happening?” she said, in a voice so tight it cracked.
It sat down cross-legged in front of us. “You’re a scientist.”
“Max?”
“I don’t have a name. You’re a scientist.”
“You’re the nameless?”
He waved that away. “William Mandella. You are a scientist.”
“Trained as one. Science teacher, now.”
“But you understand the nature of research. You understand what an experiment is.”
“Of course.”
The Omni had come over to join us. He nodded toward the black woman. “Then she was pretty close to the truth.”
“The experiment’s over?” she said. “And you’re cleaning up?”
He shook his head slowly. “How can I put it? First the mice you’re examining escape the cage. Then they understand what’s happening to them. Then they demand to talk to the experimenter.”
“If it were me,” I said, “I’d talk to the mice.”
“Yes, that’s what a human would do.” He looked around, with a vaguely annoyed expression.
“So talk,” Marygay said.
He looked at her for a long moment. “When you were a little girl, you wet the bed. Your parents wouldn’t let you go to camp until you stopped.”
“I’d forgotten that.”
“I don’t forget.” He turned to me. “Why don’t you like lima beans?”
I drew a blank. “We don’t have lima beans on Middle Finger. I don’t even remember what they taste like.”
“When you were three Earth years old, you stuck a dry lima bean up your nose. Trying to get it out, you pushed it farther up. Your mother finally figured out what you were crying about, and her ministrations made it worse. It began to swell, with the moisture. She took you to the commune’s holistic healer, and he made it worse still. By the time they got you to a hospital, they had to put you to sleep to extract it, and you had sinus problems for some time.”
“You did that?”
“I watched it. I set up the initial conditions, a long time before you were born, so, in a way, yes, I did. Every sparrow that falls, I hear the thump, and the thump never surprises me.”
“Sparrows?”
“Never mind.” He made a small dismissive shrug. “The experiment’s over. I’m leaving.”
“Leaving?”
He stood up. “This galaxy.” There was an explosion of soil, and the feet we’d buried flew back to where Anita had been standing when she died. Bits of flesh and bone and a mist of red sucked through the air toward the ghastly remnants, and began to reconstruct her. Ten feet away, Cat’s body was reassembling itself from the air.
“I don’t guess I need to straighten up,” he said; it said. “I’ll just leave you on your own. Check back in a million years or so.”
“Just us?” Marygay said. “You killed ten billion people and Taurans, and now you’re handing five empty planets over to us?”
“Six,” it said, “and they’re not empty. The people and Taurans aren’t dead. Just put away.”
“Put away?” I said. “Where did you put them?”
It smiled at me like someone holding back a punch line. “How much space, how much volume, do you think it takes to store ten billion people?”
“God, I don’t know. A big island?”
“One and a third cubic miles. They’re all stacked in Carlsbad Caverns. And now they’re awake, and cold and naked and hungry.” It looked at its watch. “Guess I could leave them some food.”
“Middle Finger?” I said. “They’re alive, too?”
“In a grain elevator in Vendler,” it said. “They’re really cold. I’ll do something for them. Have done.”
“You do things faster than the speed of light?”
“Sure. That’s just one of the constraints I put on the experiment.” It scratched its chin. “Think I’ll leave it. Otherwise you’d be all over the place.”
“The Moon and Mars? Heaven and Kysos?”
It nodded. “Mostly cold and hungry. Hot and hungry on Heaven. But they’ll all probably find some food before they’re reduced to eating one another.”
It looked at Marygay and me. “You two are special, since nobody else remembers as far back as you do. It amused me to construct your situation.
“But to me, time is like a table, or a floor. I can walk back to the Big Bang, or forward to the heat death of the universe. Life and death are reversible conditions. Trivial ones, to me. As you have seen here.”