14

  NASTY DECLINED IVY’S offer to come home with them, to Laz’s relief. Laz hadn’t been thrilled about the offer—a houseguest meant that you couldn’t be natural in your own home, and Ivy hadn’t even asked Laz what he thought of the idea.

  He didn’t need to worry. Nasty just laughed at Ivy’s offer. “I would instantly be photographed by the people spying on you, and they’d use F–R to find out where I’ve been living and start planning how to spy on me.” Then, apparently realizing how ignorant they must be about contemporary language, she translated. “F–R is ‘facial recognition.’ ”

  “I assumed ‘fat rabbits,’ ” said Ivy. “So, thanks.”

  “I favored ‘final regurgitation,’ ” said Laz.

  “My brother and I like being a brace of secrets—though Ron’s always trying to find out where we are and what names we’re using.”

  “He didn’t guess Chrysanthemum and Nasturtium the moment you chose the names?” asked Ivy.

  “It must be nice to know somebody wants you,” said Laz.

  “If you ever really got away from your keepers,” said Nasty, “they’d want you, too. The only reason they don’t feel any urgency about you is that they already have you, and you’re not offering any serious resistance.”

  Laz saw her point. He also didn’t like the fact that he suspected she was right. Am I owned by Ron? Or at least enough under his influence that he can plan on us as if he owned us?

  “Oh, come on, Laz, don’t feel bad,” said Nasty. “You were woken up to do the job you’re doing, and you must be doing it well, even if you did go off and start trying to set up a network of secret Portals. That’s not a threat to Ron—he wants back doors into everything, and then secret tunnels and access by hot-air balloon. By the way, has anyone passed through a Portal in a balloon?”

  “They still don’t make the passage in airplanes, as you well know, Nasty,” said Ivy. “Why do I keep getting the feeling you’re messing with us?”

  “That’s a question for your shrink, if you have one,” said Nasty.

  “I’m her constant therapist,” said Laz. “I listen, I diagnose, I prescribe, she ignores.”

  Nasty laughed. “She didn’t think you were that funny, Laz, but I enjoyed it.”

  “She’s never liked that joke,” said Laz.

  “So you’ve told it before?” asked Nasty.

  “Often,” said Ivy in a dark tone.

  “Before just now?” asked Laz. “Once.”

  “Hmmm,” murmured Ivy. “Always had problems with arithmetic, this boy. And with memory. Every time he does something, he thinks it’s the first time he’s done it.”

  “So when’s the wedding?” asked Nasty.

  “We haven’t set a date,” said Laz.

  “He hasn’t even bought me a ring,” said Ivy.

  “She refuses the idea of a mature diamond,” said Laz.

  “I want a diamond that still has room to change,” said Ivy.

  “Meaning that she wants coal,” said Laz. “Not anthracite, bituminous. A soft diamond in its adolescence.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t want a cutting from a peat bog.”

  “Baby diamond,” said Laz.

  “Not baby, not adolescent, not fetus, not embryo diamond,” said Nasty. “Are you two so ignorant you don’t know that diamonds don’t go through a coal stage at all, they’re formed deep in the crust or even the mantle, under unimaginable pressure, direct from elemental carbon?”

  “I knew that,” said Ivy. “But I don’t feel the need to be relentlessly accurate all the time.”

  “I had no idea,” said Laz. “Which demonstrates the fact that I don’t give a rat’s ass how diamonds form. She doesn’t want one, and I’m not giving her a completely breakable and crushable coal engagement ring.”

  “Ring shming,” said Nasty. “She wants me to come visit so you can pump me for more information.”

  “We don’t have to do it at our house,” said Ivy. “You could start our education now.”

  “I already did, but Laz doesn’t want to learn from me.”

  “That’s because you flirted with him first,” said Ivy. “Now whenever you talk, the blood rushes out of his brain.”

  “Not much blood in my brain in the first place,” said Laz.

  “So modest,” said Ivy.

  “Kind of disingenuous,” said Nasty. “It’s like he wants us to reassure him that yes, indeed, he could grow up into the smartest scientist in the world.”

  Laz didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “You’re a scryer, right? So what is Mum?”

  “An autumn flower,” said Nasty. “And lazy. I call him Cushion Mum, after one of the planting beds in Mother’s garden.”

  “She gardens?” asked Ivy, surprised.

  “Only when she and Father are fighting,” said Nasty.

  Ivy and Laz glanced at each other, then glanced away.

  “They never raise their voices,” said Nasty. “Mum and I never knew they were fighting until Mother went out to work in the garden.”

  “What did your father do?” asked Laz.

  “I never had a clue what he was doing. There were a lot of formulas and equations on scraps of paper that he never looked at after he’d written them. Time on the computer, but Mum and I could never locate where he stored anything so we couldn’t break in and read it. As far as I knew, Father was retired.”

  Laz shook his head. “It sounds like he’s trying to figure out what OrigiLaz did so he can start to measure up to his achievements.”

  “Waste of time,” said Ivy. “All you Lazzes probably didn’t do any real science anyway. After all, you started out knowing that you could side step. The rest was just a smokescreen to pretend it was scientific instead of instinctual.”

  “Probably,” said Laz. “OrigiLaz was probably as dimwitted as I am.”

  “Wow,” said Nasty. “You two fight exactly like Mother and Father.”

  “Him, passive-aggressive,” said Ivy. “More likely to hide than to fight.”

  “Her, just aggressive,” said Laz. “Relentlessly keeping the argument going even after it stops being fun.”

  “You not only don’t know each other, you don’t even know yourselves,” said Nasty.

  “Careful, girl, we only just met,” said Ivy. “We are not your parents, even though we have the same genes.”

  “And the same memories, the same voices, the same abrasiveness and tenderness, it’s really quite sweet,” said Nasty.

  “So you think you know who we’re going to grow up to be,” said Ivy.

  “I’ll be content if I can grow up alive,” said Laz.

  Nasty hooted. “If you aren’t alive, you don’t grow at all.”

  Ivy shook her head. “Nasty, Laz knows that. He was baiting me.”

  “And I bit,” said Nasty. “You’re right, I don’t know you. My parents had a testing period where they got to know and trust each other.”

  “Along with four feral dogs,” said Ivy.

  “We remember every day of that time,” said Laz.

  “But you didn’t really do any of those things,” said Nasty.

  “Ivy and I have already agreed,” said Laz, “that if we remember doing it, we did it.”

  “You can agree that you play ping-pong with neutrinos, too, but it doesn’t make it true,” said Nasty.

  “Now she’s going to teach us about truth,” said Ivy to Laz.

  “She might as well,” said Laz. “Nobody else has been able to come up with a definition that holds up for half a day.”

  Ivy, predictably, went on the attack. In her sweetest voice, she asked Nasty, “Do you remember learning to walk?”

  “I remember being bad at walking,” said Nasty. “Does that count?”

  “That’s something you remember doing,” said Ivy.

  “Yes, but I also really did it,” said Nasty.

  “Do you still walk that way?” asked Ivy.

  “I’ve gotten a little better,” said Nasty. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”

  “Of course you do,” said Ivy. “You are your mother’s baby girl.”

  Nasty recited as if reading from a nonexistent textbook. “I remember being a toddler, but it wasn’t the same body I’m using now, all the cells have been replaced, so I have no physical memory of toddling in this body, but still I remember doing it.”

  “So you know that you did it, even though you weren’t in this exact body,” said Ivy.

  Nasty said nothing.

  Ivy looked at Laz. “I beat her, and you didn’t.”

  “If I delegated the actual conduct of the battle to you, it doesn’t mean I don’t partake in the victory,” said Laz.

  Nasty looked genuinely annoyed. “You really think you out-thought me?”

  “You really think we didn’t?” asked Laz. And before Ivy could interrupt, he said, “And by ‘we’ of course you know I mean Ivy, my angel, the dazzling coal-black jewel of my heart.”

  “How long are we going to talk around the things that matter?” asked Ivy.

  Laz realized she was right, and cut to the chase. “Nasty,” said Laz. “When you time travel, do you just grab the timethread in a different place?”

  “Can’t. Be. Done,” said Nasty, as if to a very forgetful child.

  Laz went on. “Our thinking about the timestream threads may be metaphorical, but why did we come up with the same metaphor? Strings coming down from some invisible ceiling in clumps of closely related timestreams?”

  “We all see the same thing,” said Nasty. “Scryers and steppers, the same internal symbols.”

  “So… can we control where on the thread we grasp it and step in?” asked Laz.

  “I have no idea,” said Nasty. “I don’t side step, remember?”

  “You know and we know that you long since learned how to side step,” said Ivy. “We really want to learn true things from you.”

  “How can I give you what I don’t have?” asked Nasty. “Listen, you two, you’re trying so hard to trick me or trap me into giving you the secrets I know, but I don’t have any secrets.”

  Laz saw that Ivy was looking at Nasty with disgust. “We saw you materialize, girl,” said Ivy. “I tripped over you before you were even visible. You know something that we don’t know.”

  “Anybody can do what I was doing,” said Nasty. “It’s not an instinct, it’s learned. An acquired skill.”

  “If anybody can learn it,” said Ivy, “will you teach us?”

  “And set loose a whole bunch of invisible people in the world? It’s bad enough I exist, but if there were a lot of others like me, nobody would ever feel really alone,” said Nasty.

  “ ‘Lonely no more,’ ” said Ivy, quoting something. Laz didn’t care what. He just wanted to learn how to be invisible when he wanted to.

  “Well,” said Nasty, “since I won’t be joining you on your homeward journey, let me bid you adieu.” Whereupon she disappeared.

  “I wonder if an electronic tracker would still work to locate her when she does that,” said Ivy.

  “I wonder why her clothes disappear with her. And reappear with her.”

  “So much more fun if she always arrived naked,” said Ivy, scornfully.

  “The physics would make more sense,” said Laz. “Just trying to think like a scientist.”

  “Nothing makes sense, especially not the physics,” said Ivy.

  “I don’t believe her—that this disappearing act is entirely learned. I think it’s part of the gifts we have, only we haven’t discovered it yet.”

  “Who knows if anything she says is true?” said Ivy. “She’s messing with us.”

  “So… definitely her mother’s child.”

  “Go bite the head off a toad.”

  “Poor toad,” said Laz.

  “Okay, bite the ass off a toad,” said Ivy. “She can follow us undetected if she wants. She’s a scryer, she knows where we side step to.”

  “And she can materialize enough to scratch a message in the dirt—”

  “Without making a sound,” said Ivy.

  “Something I don’t think you’ve ever attempted,” said Laz.

  “I attempt silence all the time. But then you say something that makes it impossible not to speak up.”

  “Ivy,” said Laz. “We’re out of our depth. The Zee family is ridiculously far ahead of us. And the more we learn, the more Ron finds out because he’s monitoring us.”

  “With electronic implants embedded in our butts, I’m sure,” said Ivy.

  “Or somewhere,” said Laz.

  “Did you see a timestream where she stays and teaches us more?”

  “She was gone in all of them,” said Laz. “At least as far as I could tell. You’re the scryer.”

  “I think she made up that word so she can enjoy our gullibility every time we use it,” said Ivy.

  “It’s a good word anyway,” said Laz, “and we needed one to describe what you do.”

  “I was fine with ‘pure genius,’ ” said Ivy.

  “So do I go back to opening secret Portals?” asked Laz.

  “I think you should try out for an amateur theatrical,” said Ivy. “Not Macbeth, you’re too kind. Not Lear, you’re too young. Not Iago, because you can’t keep a secret.”

  Laz was kind of enjoying this catalogue of Shakespearean roles he was unsuited for. “Romeo?” he asked.

  “Not unless I’m your Juliet,” said Ivy.

  “You do remember they end up killing themselves,” said Laz.

  “At least they didn’t kill each other,” said Ivy.

  “I’ve talked myself into needing to pee,” said Laz. “You’ll excuse me?”

  “I’ll go the other direction,” said Ivy. “Even though we know that the Zee children can spy on us whenever they want.”

  “I’m betting they micturate pretty much the way we do,” said Laz.

  “ ‘Micturate,’ ” said Ivy. “Show-off.”

  “You understood me. Why not use that perfectly fine word?”

  “Go piss your brains out,” said Ivy. “That’s a word with a biblical pedigree.”

  They left the clearing in opposite directions, did their business, and came back. Laz thought: We have lived together so long that we’ve lost most of the embarrassment people have. It’s okay to know about each other’s bodily functions, and we’re also not curious about them. We’re just used to each other. Is that good, going into a marriage? Or does it make marriage almost redundant, except for the sex thing and the distribution of property if we break up?

  They walked back down in near silence, only talking when they needed to in order to stay on the right path. Laz saw that Ivy’s memory of the way down was as good as his, almost. She warned him about straying about as often as he warned her. Sometimes she even walked in front, and Laz had to be careful to keep watching where he was going, because she kept drawing his eye, not in a lustful way—well, mostly not—but because there was nothing more important in his life than this girl, this woman. Why had he thought his love for her was just an artificial construct pumped into his head by the cloning machinery? It was a natural construct—a good reproduction of real memories that were now his memories. That had always been his memories.

  Sometimes he even got emotional, on that walk back down to the pickup point, looking at her, remembering things they had experienced together. That walk to Burlington, pulling or pushing a cart. The way she trusted him to know about foraging for food and raiding the stores for clothing and tools, the way she sometimes didn’t take over because she was sure she knew better. He realized that it was hard for her to rely on somebody else, that he had earned her trust and kept on earning it because it didn’t occur to him to let her down in any way. Yes, they bantered all the time, sniping at each other, sometimes flirting. But the thought of not seeing her again grieved him, even though there was no chance of that happening. It wasn’t that she belonged to him—she didn’t belong to anybody but herself. It was that he belonged to her, and liked, needed to belong to her in order to be happy, in order to be himself.

  When they got down to where the taxi from the airport would pick them up, he slipped his arm around her waist and she melted a little bit against him, accepting his touch, his embrace. A kind of closeness he never had with his parents or friends. With no girl, because he could never get that close to anybody but Stever, and there was no touching between the two of them, except for horseplay and mock anger.

  Ivy was the only person Laz had ever really wanted to be that close to, and here she was, accepting, reciprocating. Was it possible that somehow she loved him as much as he loved her? He couldn’t really believe such a thing was possible.

  They talked about mundane things on the quick flight, and got home to the house they shared only a little while after dark. He held her hand up the walkway to the front door.

  Which was slightly ajar.

  It’s not as if anybody bothered locking doors most of the time. Who was there to keep out? In the business of rebuilding civilization, there wasn’t a lot of time for tourism. People weren’t really creating a new world, just trying to recreate some version of the old one. They still had picture books and videos that showed all the famously beautiful scenery of the Old Place, and all the great cities and quaint villages if they wanted nostalgia. If they traveled in this timestream, Central Time, they could see that nothing was really being built like it was, nor was any intriguing new architectural style developing. Maybe in other places, and even here, eventually, but for now, there was no impetus for tourism. It was rare to find a stranger in town, let alone in this neighborhood of widely separated houses and grassy streets. And who would come to their house and just walk in?

  Ron’s people went wherever they wanted, but they were usually discreet about it. They would never have left the door ajar.

  Why would anybody leave such an obvious sign of intrusion?

  Laz pushed open the door and led the way inside.

  All the furniture—not that there was a lot of it—had been upended and thrown here and there. Everything was out of the cupboards, but now Laz’s insistence on buying nondestructible dishware was vindicated, since not a thing was broken. The food that used to be in the fridge was almost certainly inedible now, on the floor in a welter of broken jars and empty cartons.