12

  RON SHOWED UP at six in the morning, which in summer was already light. He politely knocked on the door and waited, even though his hand on the knob would have disabled the locks.

  Both Laz and Ivy came out of their rooms at the same time, Laz in shorts and a T-shirt, Ivy in a robe, her hair wet, as if she had just gotten out of the shower. Laz took note of her with a brief nod, as if they were co-workers both summoned to the boss’s office at the same time. Which was pretty much the situation, though Ron tried to maintain the fiction that they were free agents, not employees and certainly not wholly owned clones.

  Laz was the one who actually opened the door. Of course they knew it was Ron before they heard the knock, since the house had recognized him coming up the walk and announced his name in both their bedrooms. Laz wondered why Ron had come to their house instead of summoning them to his office—was his business so urgent that there wasn’t even time for them to dress and travel into the city? Was it about Laz’s and Ivy’s conversation the night before? Or something completely unrelated?

  “Welcome,” said Laz as he held the door open for Ron to come in.

  “I wish you meant that,” said Ron.

  “So do I,” said Ivy. “But you’re never the bringer of good news.”

  “Come on, Ivy, maybe we won the lottery,” said Laz. “I don’t remember buying a lottery ticket.”

  “There are no legal lotteries in any of the timestreams,” said Ron. “None of them have any currencies robust enough to deal with the pressure of sudden spending bursts, even if people were stupid enough to buy tickets.”

  “People are always stupid enough to spend money they can’t afford in hopes of getting a lot of money they didn’t have to work for,” said Ivy.

  “I’m here,” said Ron, “because I’m concerned about these messages you’ve been getting.”

  “I only got one message,” said Laz.

  “And I didn’t get any,” said Ivy. “Have you forgotten that it’s a different Laz and Ivy involved in the other message? Do you even remember that we’re not the same people?”

  Said Ron, “I can tell you apart, what with the twenty-year age difference.”

  “Since you’ve been listening in, you know that we have no sensible ideas about who left the messages,” said Laz.

  “We don’t know what’s sensible and what isn’t,” said Ivy.

  “May I sit?” asked Ron.

  “Getting old, are you?” asked Ivy.

  Ron didn’t grace this comment with a reply. He sat and crossed one leg over the other thigh, leaning back a little on the sofa.

  Laz sat down opposite him, perching on the edge of the love seat. Ivy sat beside Laz, putting a possessive arm around his waist.

  “I don’t care about your romance,” said Ron. “It’s completely irrelevant except if it interferes with your ability to work together.”

  “Not so far,” said Ivy.

  Ron looked quizzically at Laz.

  “Not so far,” said Laz. Any problems between him and Ivy were nobody else’s business.

  “These messages,” said Ron. “Let me recap what we think you’ve thought of so far. Tell me if this is an accurate representation of your thinking: It’s almost certainly a time traveler. Unless it isn’t.”

  “That’s right,” said Ivy.

  “So unless somebody has invented a time machine,” said Ron, “here is our roster. First and most likely, you or the couple you call the Zees, coming back from some future time to prepare you or keep you safe in order to do some great deeds later.”

  “Great deeds are our stock in trade,” said Laz. “Only we’ve run short on great causes.”

  “You don’t think uncovering a secret time traveler is a great cause?” asked Ron.

  “So far the only people he’s messed with are us,” said Laz.

  “So if it isn’t future you and it isn’t the future Zees,” said Ron, “you think it might be the original Lazarus Hayerian.”

  “We never saw any proof that he was dead. Just gone,” said Ivy.

  “He might have disappeared in pursuit of time travel, and he caught it,” said Ron.

  “That’s one guess,” said Laz.

  “Then there are the remarkable Zee children,” said Ron.

  “Are they remarkable?” asked Ivy.

  “Maybe,” said Ron. “Why else would they keep disappearing? The Zees don’t want us to study them. Even though it’s obvious that we’d never harm or even alienate people with the power to save the world.”

  “Which OrigiLaz and Ivy-O did long ago,” said Ivy, “and Z-Laz and Ivy-Z did more recently. Why does the world keep needing to be saved?”

  “Time travel is worth discovering,” said Ron, “and if somebody’s already doing it, we need to know who, where, and why.”

  “We’re not detectives,” said Ivy. “We have no special abilities in that area.”

  “Maybe the world needs saving from time travelers, or whoever is sending you messages,” said Ron.

  “Maybe, now that humanity has been dispersed among a dozen or so timestreams,” said Laz, “our usefulness is ended, and the world needs to be saved from us.”

  “We evaluate that question from time to time,” said Ron. “So far, we aren’t even close to reaching that conclusion.”

  “When you start getting close to that answer, will you let us be part of the conversation?” asked Laz.

  “Laz,” said Ivy, “you’re forgetting who we are. If they start plotting to eliminate us, you would just switch us into a timestream where they decide to leave us alone.”

  “Why don’t we switch into a timestream where we saved the world—” said Laz, “or, I mean, the Zees saved it—and Ron simply lets us alone?”

  “Because,” said Ivy, “the timestreams where he didn’t reawaken us are completely discombobulated.”

  “That may be the first time I’ve ever heard that word uttered aloud,” said Laz.

  Ron looked worried. “You mean you’ve seen that without you, this whole enterprise fails?”

  “Not at all,” said Ivy. “I can’t see that much farther into the future than Laz. What I can see is that without us, the nations in the different timestreams find excuses to go to war, within the timestream and with other timestreams. To save themselves, nations near the Portals destroy them, so nobody can go from world to world.”

  “That’s going to happen eventually,” said Ron. “As the worlds diverge…”

  “In some of the timestreams, it has already happened,” said Ivy.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” asked Laz.

  “You already saw the danger, and you were constructing alternate Portals,” said Ivy. “Why do you think I encouraged you to do that?”

  “You never said one positive thing about what I was doing,” said Laz.

  “Everything I said and did about it was positive,” said Ivy. “You need to get your memory checked.”

  “Sorry,” said Laz. “I remember you kissed me before I left, and that apparently sucked all the memories out of my brain.”

  “If I had told you what I knew, you’d have thought you were just fulfilling some plan of mine,” said Ivy.

  “Whereas, because of not being told,” said Laz, “I think I’ve been fulfilling some plan of yours.”

  “Stop your useless bickering, children,” said Ron. “Neither of you is really an adult, and you shouldn’t be making world-changing decisions without adult counsel.”

  “Except I’ve been doing it from childhood on,” said Laz, “with no advice from anyone.”

  “Your childhood mischief was not significant to human history,” said Ron, “and besides, you chose a path that wiped out your worst behavior.”

  “It also cost me the best friendship of my life,” said Laz.

  “You still remember that friendship—very clearly,” said Ron. “Steven Weaver is not absent from your memories. You have been deprived of nothing.”

  “Memories that only I have—”

  “Are inevitable products of side stepping,” said Ron. “You always leave some causal chains altered—that’s why you side step. But unlike all the people who aren’t some iteration of Laz Hayerian, you carry your memories with you from one timestream to the next. You can always remember things you saw happen in vanished timestreams.”

  “So does that mean that the only real timestream is the one I’m in?” asked Laz.

  “Let me try to word it the way the philosophers of this branch of metaphysics phrased it to me: ‘Elements of every possible reality exist, once a causal divergence—a fresh timestream—comes into existence. They are undetectable, until a cognizant traveler’—that would be you, Laz—‘passes into a timestream. At that moment, those elements instantly assemble the reality into the present moment, within that causal divergence.’ It sounds like complete bullshit to me, Laz, but all these smart guys nodded wisely while it was being explained.”

  “But they didn’t have a single ‘cognizant traveler’ with them?” asked Ivy.

  “At the time, the only actual Traveler in human history, the man you call OrigiLaz, was believed to be dead,” said Ron, “and the Zees hadn’t been wakened yet. They had to reason from OrigiLaz’s essays, reports, and speculations.”

  “So you have no idea whether any of this is true,” said Ivy.

  “Given the existence of timestream variants,” said Ron, “I don’t know what it would mean for anything to be true or real or existent. They were trying to figure out how the universe could possibly keep track of trillions of different causal divergences. It would take more matter than there is in the universe to have even a fraction of the divergences active at the same time. So they introduced these supposed ‘elements’ as placeholders in all the timestreams, ready to activate the entire reality as needed.”

  “Very clever,” said Ivy, “except they used the word ‘element,’ which already had a scientific meaning, so discussion is bound to get confusing.”

  “What they are really saying,” said Laz, “when you peel away their cute new terms, is that somehow the universe keeps a copy of the outline of each possible reality so it can come into existence when it needs to. That means only a few full sets of matter need to exist at the same time.”

  “Dark matter might really be matter assembled into a causal divergence,” said Ivy, “occupying the same space as the visible universe.”

  “There have been several monographs written on exactly that speculative topic,” said Ron. “Unfortunately, none of them can be tested experimentally.”

  “An entire new universe is constructed every time I side step,” said Laz. It sounded absurd to him.

  “Makes more sense than the idea that an infinite number of alternate universes exist all the time,” said Ivy. “Nature is supposed to be more parsimonious than that.”

  “None of it makes sense,” said Laz. “How does a whole universe know to assemble itself just because I stepped into that string of possibilities? Who spreads the word in less than an instant?”

  “Asking ‘who’ begs the question,” said Ivy. “You’re assuming that it’s some kind of sentient being controlling the process. What if it’s a natural process with no intelligent or deliberate control?”

  “It just happens?” said Laz.

  “I know it sounds stupid, but—”

  “No, Ivy,” said Laz. “I’m paraphrasing this whole speculative story. All that we actually know is that somehow these universes pass into and out of existence—or they all exist at once. And we have no idea at all how it actually happens, or how we step from one stream into another, or what’s actually going on when you hand me a timestream and I take it and side step into it.”

  Ron chuckled. “All that blather that these philosophers and metaphysicists invented says nothing about causality.”

  Ivy was losing patience. “Ron, please, just tell us why you’re here.”

  Ron smiled. “The old nations are breaking down. The new cobbled-together groupings are tearing themselves apart. My guess is that in the next fifty years, each timestream will have as many separate nations as there were on Old Earth.”

  “Fair guess,” said Laz.

  “It’s already happening. In two timestreams they’re already halfway there, and several nations in each timestream are starting up an arms industry and we’re about to ban the transportation of weapons of any kind through Portals. It’s going to slow down traffic through the Portals, because our inspections will be thorough. And it’s a matter of time before the nations that happen to be on either end of each Portal impose their own inspections, even if the people are headed for a different nation.”

  “Logjams and lots of shouting,” said Ivy.

  “Everybody’s going to want their own Portal, at least to Central Time,” said Ron. “Except for those that want Portals to every timestream except Central Time.”

  “I grew up on Pacific Time,” said Laz, “but nobody took that name for their timestream.”

  “But at least there’s a timestream called California,” said Ivy.

  “In which there is no place named California,” said Laz.

  “Naming has been quarrelsome enough, when there was nothing at stake. But controlling the Portals has the potential of starting wars—and also of losing contact with one or more timestreams.” Ron fanned out his hands. “Anything about Portals is going to involve you, whether you like it or not.”

  “I don’t want to open up a whole lot of new Portals to all the different nations,” said Laz. “Nobody could control all those Portals.”

  “We agree,” said Ron. “We don’t want to open even one new public Portal—if we open one, dozens of other places will want their own connections, and they’ll fight about it.”

  “Then how will we be involved?”

  “Every nation knows who makes the Portals,” said Ron. “If one group or another can get control of one of the two Lazzes, they might be able to persuade you to create one of their most-coveted Portals. At the very least, they would stop you from opening Portals for anybody else, including Central Time.”

  “Don’t they know that we can simply side step to a stream where they didn’t succeed in capturing us?” said Laz.

  “That’s why we’re expecting them to try to kidnap one of the Ivys,” said Ron. “Or all of them.”

  “Do they think they could control Laz by threatening me?” asked Ivy.

  “Of course they do,” said Ron.

  “And it would work,” said Laz.

  “How gallant of you,” said Ivy drily.

  “What matters is that somebody’s going to think it will work,” said Ron. “So that’s why you’re going to be under observation at all times.”

  Ivy laughed. “Weren’t we already?”

  “Not just electronic observation,” said Ron. “A couple of visible bodyguards whenever you go somewhere, and a few dozen others with various armaments hovering nearby.”

  “Let me guess,” said Laz. “If it looks like some clowns are going to succeed in kidnapping any of us, these ‘hovering observers’ will have instructions to kill us rather than let us be taken.”

  “No one has even proposed such a policy,” said Ron.

  “Decisions like that aren’t made at your level,” said Laz. “Some military or security officer way down the chain will let that policy be known without actually giving the order. Everybody will be able to deny giving any such order.”

  “Come on,” said Ivy. “How do you give the order without giving an order?”

  “ ‘All right, men. It’ll be a disaster if any government gets away with any of these Portal-making people. It would be better if they died than to have them under the control of any nation.’ And then—separate conversation, same people—‘You’ll have to make your own judgment calls on the fly. We’re not going to turn you over to a bunch of lawyers to have them second-guess what you decided in the heat of the moment.’ ”

  “Oh,” said Ivy. “Permission and encouragement, without spelling it out.” She turned to Ron. “Do soldiers and cops really do sneaky things like that?”

  “If they’re caught doing it,” said Ron, “there are career-wrecking consequences.”

  “But we’d still be dead,” said Ivy.

  “We’ll just side step,” said Laz.

  “If you know they’ve got me,” said Ivy.

  “I will never leave your side,” said Laz.

  “So they’ll set up to grab me in the bathroom,” said Ivy.

  “I’ll be in there with you.”

  “In a pig’s eye,” said Ivy.

  “In there,” said Laz. “With you.”

  “Not happening.”

  “I’ll just side step to the timestream where you give me permission.”

  “No such timestream will ever exist,” said Ivy.

  “Then we’ll die,” said Laz.

  “We’ll make sure it never comes down to that,” said Ron. “However, we have to maintain observation capability in your bathrooms.”

  “Maybe you weren’t paying attention,” said Ivy. “We were talking about getting killed by your people. Kidnappers would have no motive to kill us.”

  “To deprive any other nation of getting control of you,” said Ron.

  “All of this is very far-fetched,” said Laz. “But if anybody knows how often far-fetched things occur, it’s us.”

  “Did you come to ask our permission?” asked Ivy.

  “I came here to inform you of what’s going to happen, and why. Please don’t try to evade the bodyguards. They really are for your protection.”

  “And since we’ll always be a highly visible group,” said Laz, “wherever we go, we’ll be obvious targets.”

  “We have statistics on that,” said Ron. “The odds are ninety to ten that visible bodyguards will make you safer.”

  “Unless our kidnappers happen to not be dumb,” said Laz.

  “In case it mattered,” said Ron, “and just for the entertainment value, if we asked for your consent, what would your answer be?”

  Instantly, they answered.

  “Yes,” said Laz.

  “Not a chance,” said Ivy.