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  TO LAMONT COLUCCI

  THE MAN WHO LOOKS FOR ALTERNATE FUTURES

  AND WORKS TO BRING THE BETTER ONES TO PASS

  1

  DÉJÀ VU ISN’T just a feeling, some false sense of recognition that your brain randomly obtrudes into your consciousness so you think you’ve already been here, seen this at some forgotten time in the past.

  Sometimes, something happens that really has happened before. Not necessarily down to the last detail. But as Laz lay on his comfortable-but-thin mattress, with low walls on both sides, he recognized that he was in a rapid-growth cloning bed. His genes had once again been used to create an embryo that was speed-grown into a fetus and then into a baby and then into a perfect specimen of seventeen-year-old manhood.

  It could have been worse. This time they could have brought him around as a nine-year-old. Or a ninety-year-old.

  He remembered when he and Ivy were taken to be scanned so that this exact thing could happen if their side-stepping talents were ever needed again.

  What happened this time? What calamity were they needed to solve? Had it turned out that the stray planet Shiva was coming toward the solar system yet again? Did the human race have to find a new Safe Place to which they could migrate and begin again? Or rather, begin again, again, again, since it had already been done twice, first by the original Lazarus Hayerian and his young sidekick, Ivy, and the second time by clone Laz and clone Ivy, so if he and a new Ivy had to save the world, it would be the third time a version of them had done so.

  Laz, he thought. I feel like the Laz that lived alone in some obscure, abandoned city, then revived the only other living clone in the Vivipartum clone orchard, Ivy, and figured out how to open Portals to other timestreams until they found a timestream in which Shiva was not going to wreck the solar system and tip the Earth into the Sun.

  I feel like that Laz, but I am not that Laz. I’m a new copy, replete with his memories and the youthful memories of OrigiLaz, but still not the same person. What am I, Laz-Three?

  It depends on how you count, doesn’t it? he thought. OrigiLaz was never just “Laz” after he became a world-famous scientist that people stupidly thought was a new Newton or a new Einstein. He was just a guy who was born with some kind of impossible psychic gift, the ability to side step from one timestream into another. Then he invented a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo to explain what he already knew how to do. To Laz, right now, lying on this mattress, knowing he was about to begin yet another cloned life, that guy was a fake, a fraud, who relished his fame and lofty status and then, after saving the world (or so he thought), simply side stepped off on his own, abandoning Ivy-O and leaving the world helpless when they discovered that their New Place, the version of Earth where Shiva was not detectable, turned out to be in nearly the same peril, with only a few years of survival—of pioneering and rebuilding on a new and uninhabited wilderness—gained.

  The Laz who had been cloned and united with an Ivy clone of about his own age, that was the real Laz. The baseline. The Laz who, with his Ivy, had found a way to tell when they had randomly happened upon a timestream in which Shiva was found but was not on a destructive course toward Earth’s interstellar neighborhood. That was the baseline Laz, Laz-Zero. The other guy was Doctor Professor Genius Lazarus Hayerian. Not really OrigiLaz. Not Laz at all.

  Which, Laz thought, makes me Laz-One. Not Laz 1.2. Laz-One. He was not going to think of himself as a copy of anybody. He was a person with memories, a person who had loved and been loved, who had done, not science, but the practical pioneering fieldwork that saved the human race for real, not just a fake version like OrigiLaz had done. Though of course, while he remembered doing it, he had not, in this body, done it at all.

  Why have they woken me up like this? he thought. Did Ivy and I fail after all?

  Or is it some completely new crisis? Aliens show up and conquer all the timestreams of Earth, and only in this lab hidden deep in a cavern somewhere did a band of rogue humans discover a way to revive the side steppers, the “Travelers,” as Ivy and he had decided to call themselves, in order to find a timestream in which the aliens never discovered Earth?

  Ridiculous, he thought. For all he knew, various nations on one of the timestreams were in a deadly war and one of them captured—kidnapped?—Laz’s and Ivy’s genomes and brain-state recordings in order to take control of events and win their stupid war.

  Well, whoever you are, whatever you think you’re battling about, I am not on your side. I’ll make my own judgment and side step to a reality where there is no war, or where you already lost, and Ivy and I will live there, while you boneheads self-destruct however you choose.

  My, but I’m in an uncooperative mood, thought Laz. But yeah, count on it, I’m Laz-One and I’m going to live and act accordingly. Clones are not slaves, as you’re about to find out.

  Then he thought: Aliens already wiped out the human race, and now the aliens have revived me and Ivy in order to try to learn how to side step by vivisecting our brains.

  Sure, Laz, scare the crap out of yourself even before you’ve eaten enough to produce any crap.

  He opened his eyes.

  There was no transparent lid over his body. Just the ceiling of a dimly lighted room. No LED display beside him, showing his physical status. And instead of being utterly alone, this time there was someone else in the room, and she said, “Took you long enough, Magic Boy. What were you doing, lying there figuring out how to screw things up before you even know what things they want us to do?”

  “Hello, Ivy,” he said. He couldn’t see her yet—she was off to one side. But he didn’t have to see her. He knew already what the expression on her face would be. “I was deciding that I’m Laz-One and the Laz who woke up in Greensboro and clumsily fell in love with you is Laz-Zero, and OrigiLaz isn’t really a Laz at all, he’s Lazarus Hayerian and a complete failure.”

  “So it was your vanity that woke up first,” she said. “No surprise.”

  “My competitiveness. My refusal to be third in line.”

  “Well, that makes all the difference,” said Ivy. “Does that make me Ivy-One, too? I mean, also? As well?”

  “You can be whatever Ivy you want to be,” said Laz.

  “Ivy-Eternal,” she said. “Ivy-All. The-Real-Ivy.”

  “Pick one, and I’ll not only call you that, I’ll believe you deserve it.”

  “It’s a deal, Laz-One. But what I really want to be is Ivy. Just Ivy. Let the other versions have hyphenated names. I’m the only Ivy in my body, just as you’re the only Laz in yours.”

  “Deal,” said Laz. “You’re Ivy, and I’m either Laz or IncredibleGodMan, whichever best suits your image of me.”

  “So, Laz, then,” said Ivy.

  Laz hesitated a moment, knowing he was about to open a can of worms, but he decided that he could cope with worms right now, if that’s how Ivy wanted it. “And I’ll still think of you the way I always have.”

  She waited. But not long. “You made me promise never to say it again.”

  “But I never promised not to think it.”

  “Naked Girl,” she said.

  “So much for not saying it ever again.”

  “You made me say it,” she said.

  “I might have been thinking, ‘Kissy Girl.’ ”

  “But you weren’t,” she said.

  “You are and always were beautiful,” said Laz.

  “In the eyes of a really lonely adolescent boy.”

  “In the view of an extremely observant world-saving Ivy-loving man.” He couldn’t believe he was saying this, right out loud.

  “That wasn’t you,” said Ivy. “That was Laz… what, Zero?”

  “I have all the memories of falling in love with you. All the memories of knowing you to be, not just the most beautiful woman in the ghost town of Greensboro, but the most beautiful, admirable, and desirable woman I would ever know.”

  “I liked the old version of you better,” she said. “He wasn’t so gushy and mushy.”

  “I’m all you’ve got right now. Leave this room, maybe you’ll have more and better choices. But right now, I’m the man who remembers falling in love with you despite both our efforts to forestall it. Why should I pretend I don’t remember, why pretend it wasn’t, in every meaningful sense, me?”

  “At this rate, we’re never going to save the world.”

  “Who says it needs saving?” asked Laz.

  “Why else clone us again?” asked Ivy.

  “What happened to the Laz and Ivy who found the Safe Place? Why did they need to be replaced?”

  “They’ve told me exactly as much as they’ve told you,” said Ivy.

  “At least Ron woke us up at pretty much the same time.”

  “It would have been the same time, if you hadn’t been such a slugabed.” But as she said this, the mockery in her voice was softened by her walking up to him and stroking his cheek with the fingers of her left hand.

  “See,” said Laz, “touching me is not a good way to discourage me from desiring you.”

  “I kno
w,” said Ivy. “But you do understand, whatever Ivy-Zero and Zero-Laz did after our brain states were recorded, in this body I’m still a blushing virgin.”

  Laz grinned in embarrassment. “I don’t know if my plumbing even works.”

  “Get up and get moving, cowboy,” said Ivy.

  “Cowboy?”

  “Squirrel-tamer. Bear-dodger. Dog-stoner.”

  “Tuna-can-opener,” said Laz.

  “Do you find that you miss the delicate cuisine of our Greensboro days?” asked Ivy.

  Standing now, Laz reached out and drew her close and kissed her, quite earnestly.

  She returned the kiss. “So it’s Kissy Girl you wanted after all,” said Ivy.

  “Kissy Girl, Naked Girl, Hellish Brat Girl, I want the whole package,” said Laz.

  “So we’re skipping the wooing dance now, is that it?” she asked.

  “We’re not skipping anything,” said Laz. “We already did all the dances.”

  “We remember doing them, but in these bodies the only thing we’ve done is this one half-assed kiss,” said Ivy.

  Laz took a couple of steps back and regarded her from head to foot. “We’re both in much better shape than we were after a year of half starving on ancient nutrient-depleted canned food.”

  “I wonder,” said Ivy, “if we’re dead. The prior us. The Zeroes.”

  That brought the conversation to a halt. Laz immediately knew that she was right. That would be a perfectly sensible reason to waken these clone-bodies. The previous Laz and Ivy must be dead. Even if humanity only needed a few Portals here and there, they’d have to get a new Laz and Ivy to perform routine maintenance.

  Laz stepped to her, took her in his arms again. She did not resist. “Nothing can kill us, right?” said Laz, thinking: In the face of any peril, we will simply side step.

  “Old age?” asked Ivy.

  “Probably. Or a devastating explosion that leaves us in smithereens.”

  “You know,” said Ivy, “if we leave this room, there might be someone who can tell us why we’re alive.”

  Laz let her out of his embrace and took her hand as they walked to the double doors that were either a huge closet or the main egress from this room.

  * * *

  It was not like Vivipartum—doors leading to corridors leading to doors, to stairs, to elevators, to big empty rooms, to stripped-down offices, to a parking lot with a few somewhat useful corpses.

  This time, when the doors opened there was a busy office, with people at desks doing things with or without computers. There were no windows, but that was New Place architecture, which had been transplanted to the Safe Place—if those were still the names people used. Buildings were underground, either because of excavation or piling up mounds of soil planted with ground cover and bushes and, at the edges, trees. One vast park—with here and there a slash in the earth revealing the entrance to a hidden building.

  There were no windows, so this wasn’t an entrance.

  A pretty young woman at a desk looked up at them and smiled. “We’re so glad you could be with us.”

  Laz couldn’t help but smile back—it was a reflex response to such warm good cheer.

  Ivy was not dazzled. “Who’s the ‘us’ you’re glad we’re with?”

  “The Interplanetary Portal Commission,” she said.

  “How did we come to be guests in this little motel of yours?” Ivy asked, in a voice that was not trying to hide her scorn.

  “I told them that we should have some kind of explanation printed out for you to read before you left the room,” said the young woman.

  “Do you have a name?” asked Laz.

  The young woman smiled. “I do,” she said.

  “Am I allowed to know it?” asked Laz. “Or even, perhaps, say it?”

  A momentary hesitation. “She can tell us, but then she’d have to kill us,” said Ivy.

  “Oh, I could never cause harm to the two of you! We all owe our lives to you!”

  “You owe your lives,” said Ivy, “to a couple of people who looked like us and have the same names. But we haven’t saved anybody from anything. We were recently manufactured and just woke up.”

  “Oh, they didn’t manufacture you,” said the young woman. “You were gestated and incubated and—”

  “And quick-grown and memory-implanted,” said Laz. “Your name?”

  “My name is completely unimportant,” she said. “I’m just a grad student who was doing such unimportant work that they thought they could spare me to sit at this desk for a couple of hours and wait for you two to emerge from the waking tables.”

  “A grad student in what?” asked Laz.

  “I’m at MIT. The new campus, obviously. I work in robotics. We make the Taumaton.”

  Laz thought: Taumaton. Automaton. “You aren’t possibly an automaton yourself?”

  She rose from her chair. “I work with designing and programming the next generation Taumaton, but I don’t know why you would accuse me of being a robot myself.”

  “I didn’t accuse anybody,” said Laz. “I thought the idea of a highly realistic android robot was really cool.”

  “Well… thanks,” said the MIT grad student.

  “How many of the people around this office are Taumatons?” he asked.

  “Taumaton is the brand name, but we haven’t actually sold any of them. If somebody applies for one, then we program the machine to know ideas and skills appropriate to the job they’re being used for.”

  Laz raised his eyebrows.

  “They are not made to be bed companions,” said the grad student. “But Taumaton can deal with hazardous products and it could, conceivably, go into space without needing life support beyond a sandwich.”

  “Sounds kind of exciting,” said Laz. “Still doesn’t tell me why you won’t mention your name.”

  “I was told not to.”

  “Why would somebody tell you that?”

  “Ask him yourself.” She pointed behind him.

  Two stern-looking women and an old man walked in toward Laz and Ivy.

  “She’s a serious student, Laz, not somebody to flirt with,” said Ivy softly.

  “I wasn’t flirting.” Then Laz realized that the old man was Ron Smith, the liaison officer who had worked with them—no, with their predecessors—in search of the Safe Place. “Hi, Ron,” said Laz. “It’s been a while.”

  “No time at all for you,” said Ron. “But yes, a couple of decades for me.”

  “Why are we awake?” asked Ivy. Yeah, thought Laz. She didn’t have much small talk in her.

  “Come with us and let’s sit down and have this conversation in privacy,” said one of the stern-looking women.

  Laz looked at her without expression. “Are you going to refuse to tell us your name, too?”

  “I’m an actual human being,” said the woman. “My name is WoJo. Hwang WoJo.

  “Is this a Chinese colony?” asked Ivy.

  “No, no, this is the capital district,” said WoJo. “We’re operating in the timestream we call Central Time, but we draw our staff from all the nations in all the timestreams. Please come and sit with us in privacy.”

  “The girl who greeted us, the MIT grad student—”

  “She’s very proud of that,” said one of the women. “Perhaps mentions it too much.”

  “She’s working on robots,” said Laz.

  “We know,” replied the same woman. “She’s actually very important to the Taumaton project. She’s clearing up a few flaws that have set back manufacturing for the past year.”

  “If Taumaton had been ready on schedule last year, the person greeting you would have been a Taumaton,” said Ron. “We would use them instead of actual cyber-engineers for boring jobs like sitting and watching the door for you to come out.”

  “She was pretty,” said Laz. “Will Taumaton be pretty?”

  “Does this room already smell of pheromones and lust?” asked Ivy.

  “Yes,” said Laz. “Overwhelmed by the musky odor of impertinence and snot.”

  Ron shook his head. “A couple of decades of sleep didn’t stop the bickering, I see.”

  “We didn’t sleep for decades,” said Ivy sharply. “We were newly commissioned by the Interplanetary Portal Commission.”

  “Please, can we discuss this privately?” WoJo insisted.

  Laz could see that almost everybody in the place was watching them—only a few still had their eyes on their work. “Probably a good idea,” he said.