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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."
    "Sixty … five … million … years," said the thing. It paused, then hawked blood onto the ground again. "What you say difficult to comprehend."
    "Nevertheless, it’s true," I said. For some reason, I took a perverse pleasure in impressing the thing. "I realize