The girl looked hurt. "I'm sorry."
"What was that?" Laura asked, her hand still pressed to her cheek.
"It was just a little kiss. I mean… I was so happy." She clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels, smiling ear to ear. "You trust me! You told Dr. Filatov you didn't need him to check on you."
"Listen… don't take this the wrong way, but it just sort of freaks me out when you're always, you know, touching me. It invades my space."
"Oh," the girl said in a high-pitched voice, "I see." She looked away.
"Hey, it's not a big deal. It's nothing personal. It doesn't have anything to do with you in particular."
As soon as Laura said it, she realized how silly she sounded. She was talking to an image on a screen projected by a machine.
The words, however, seemed to have exactly the effect she'd intended.
The virtual guide was smiling broadly again. "Great! I'm sorry, it's just… I don't get many" — she lowered her head and scraped at the ground with her toe—"you know, friends in here. Girlfriends."
"So you're a girl?" Laura asked suddenly.
"Du-uh!" the guide said in mock offense. "I would hope, wearing this suit, the answer's obvious!" She raised her hands to her hip.
"I mean… does the computer consider itself female?"
"I am the computer, silly," the guide said.
"Okay. So what should I call you?" The girl's chin dropped, and she didn't answer. "Never mind," Laura said quickly. "I'll call you Gina. It starts with a G just like 'guide.' Okay… Gina?"
"'Gina'!" the guide burst out, her face lighting up. "Oh, 'Gina'—I love it! It sounds mainstream, but, you know, ethnic. Cool!" She grabbed Laura's arms and squeezed — restraining herself, Laura sensed, from kissing her "girlfriend" again.
"But what's your last name going to be?" Laura asked.
"Gray, of course!" Gina said immediately.
Laura was forced to carefully control her expression. She had no idea how sensitive the computer's sensors were or how refined her ability to interpret nonverbal cues.
"Okay, Gina," Laura said, her mind reeling from the implications of the computer's choice of names. "Where to now?"
"Come on," she said, waving for Laura to follow. Gina took off down the hill through the lightly wooded forest.
Gina Gray! Laura thought. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe… Laura realized with a start that she had no idea what was happening — where her guide was leading her.
"You said this was a hundred million years ago?" Laura asked, reaching out to hold on to the trunk of a thin tree as she squeezed past a boulder. The tree was solid and unmoving.
"It means that the world I've re-created is the world as it should have existed then, minus all the nasty carbon monoxide from volcanic activity."
The smell of wood smoke was growing stronger. "Is this going to be like one of those amusement park tours through the ages? A 'Man discovers fire,' kind of thing?"
Gina stopped and turned to Laura — frowning.
"What?" Laura asked.
"No-o-othing," she said, looking away with a pout and crossing her arms over her chest. "Let's go on to the next stop." She raised her hand in the air to snap her fingers.
"No! Wait! What was the point of this stop?"
Gina rolled her eyes. "'Man discovers fire,'" she said in a bored tone. "I'm a little bit embarrassed."
"You mean that was the point of coming here — to this point in man's history?" Laura asked.
Gina shrugged. "Some guide I am," she said, heaving a deep sigh. "Down this hill there are some prehistoric men with the, you know" — she raised her hand to her brow—"overhanging crania. They're eating the carcass of an animal of some kind." She stuck her finger in her mouth and "popped" it out, twirling it in the air beside her. "Yatta-yatta-yatta."
"Let's go see."
"No-o-o. I don't feel like it anymore."
"Come on, Gina, really." The girl frowned. "Look, at least tell me what the point is."
With another sigh, Gina said, "The point isn't fire. Man didn't 'discover' fire until about one million years B.C. The point to this stop is that it's at this time in the history of earth that 'learning' began. Man began to develop skills like hunting cooperatively, and those skills replicated themselves from protohuman to protohuman, and from generation to generation. The point is that the accumulation of knowledge began a hundred million years ago."
Laura was busy looking around as Gina spoke. "Where are all the volcanoes and dinosaurs and stuff?" Gina huffed in exasperation and snapped her fingers.
The scene changed instantly, and Laura raised her arms out to the sides for balance. They stood now in a dark and icy cave. Gray snow was piled high around the entrance. Laura hugged herself for warmth.
"Sorry," Gina said in an apologetic tone. With a rustling sound she raised a large, furry skin from the dark floor and draped it around Laura's shoulders. The exoskeleton contracted around her body, but there was no real way to depict the coat's weight. The smell of the skin was awful, but at least it provided her warmth.
"How do you produce odors?" Laura asked. She could faintly see her breath mist in the cold air of the cave.
"Micropores through the grill," Gina answered. "Smells are easy. Human noses aren't very accurate. All you need is a few parts per million of one of a few dozen molecules."
Laura's teeth were chattering in the cold, and she started to ask Gina whether she wanted to share the warm coat. She stopped herself, however, when she remembered Gina wasn't really… Laura didn't know how to complete the thought.
As Laura's eyes began to adjust to the light, she recognized faint shapes around her in the darkness. She walked over to them, carefully. The odor was almost overpowering. Feces, urine, the strong smell of animals. Every so often there was the sound of a beast of some sort or a scratching sound.
She sensed that there were animals everywhere — large, hairy beasts.
Laura heard a cough. It sounded familiar.
"These are Homo sapiens, aren't they?" she whispered.
"Oh, don't worry, Laura," Gina said in a normal voice, "They can't hear you — unless you want them to."
"No, that's all right." Laura walked over to the nearest bulge. Its breathing was steady, each breath sucking in and blowing out of its nose with a slight snore. "Where are we now — I mean, when?"
"Ten million B.C. Hand tools. Look." An invisible spotlight illuminated a small pile of sticks and rocks beside the sleeping creature. "Ready to move on?" Gina asked.
"This wasn't much of a stop."
Gina sighed. "Okay, look," she said in a bored tone. "The thin rock is for slicing and cutting. The stick is a knife. The two smooth stones are for crushing and for tenderizing parts of a kill. Okay?"
"Knowledge, again?" Laura asked.
"You got it." Gina snapped her fingers.
The dusty riverbank was alive with activity in the late-afternoon sun. Laura's head spun as the scene changed, but she remained secure in her footing this time.
Homo sapiens shuffled from one place to another. They were all short and squat and hunched over from the effects of age or injury.
Filthy children fought playfully in the grass to the side of a rock-strewn camp. A fire burned, its smoke rising over the languid water of the river.
Her attention was attracted to guttural noises and grunts from off to the side. They were angry sounds, like two snarling animals in the moments before a fight. But when one bent over and the other stood behind, Laura realized they weren't fighting at all. It was over in moments, the male walking away and the female on all fours resuming her business without even changing position.
"Romantic, eh?" Gina said. "I thought maybe a little sexual titillation would enliven the tour. Anyway," she said airily, "fire and complex languages — one million years ago."