Their computers were torn apart, the hard drives stomped, the monitors broken or bent. And Laz’s bedroom was also trashed. Not only was his bed upended, but also his bedsheets were torn, his clothes were on the floor or draped on the open window, and everything in his bathroom had been dumped into the toilet. His tub was full of dog feces and gravel.

  Laz felt a surge of anger, but it was quickly replaced by complete puzzlement. Who would be this angry? It’s not as if they owned anything worth stealing. Almost everything was issued by Ron’s office, the International Portal Commission. Everything in their house was generic and functional and normal-looking. Besides, it didn’t look like anything was missing. This wasn’t about theft, it was about harming Laz and Ivy.

  Except that Ivy’s bedroom was untouched. Pristine.

  No, not completely. A transparent negligee was spread out on her bed.

  “I take it that’s not yours,” said Laz.

  “It is now, apparently,” said Ivy.

  “Somebody really doesn’t like me,” said Laz.

  “Are you sure?” asked Ivy. “If I ever wear that thing, who do you think will be the only guy who gets to see it?”

  “Until then, I suppose I’ll see that in my dreams.”

  “Your lonely, frustrated dreams,” said Ivy.

  “Ivy, I wouldn’t bother having those dreams if I was lonely and frustrated in them.”

  Ivy rolled her eyes.

  But there were more important things to talk about.

  “Ivy,” said Laz, “I think I might be able to decode this home invasion.”

  “Obviously,” said Ivy. “You’ve been playing around and somebody resents your sleeping with his wife.”

  “I haven’t been cuckolding anybody.”

  “Who did this, then?” asked Ivy.

  “I think it was a jealous brother.”

  Ivy looked puzzled, and then it dawned on her. “Mum,” she said.

  “Who else?” asked Laz.

  “But you and Nasty only met today,” said Ivy.

  “You thought we were flirting, though we were not, and so maybe he saw the same thing and reached the same conclusion,” said Laz.

  “Are you suggesting that Nasty and her own brother are—”

  “Not incestuous, give your mind a bath, young lady. He’s just very possessive. Very determined that she not get involved with a fly-by-night clone like me.”

  “Is he so stupid that he thinks something like this will actually influence your behavior?”

  “Well, I’m not going to date his sister, so he wins on points, I guess.”

  “Were you thinking of dating Nasty?” asked Ivy.

  “Never crossed my mind, especially considering I’m engaged to be married to the most amazing—”

  “I know you weren’t flirting with her,” said Ivy. “But she was definitely flirting with you. And that’s what worries him.”

  “He could have trashed his sister’s bedroom,” said Laz.

  “If he even knows where it is,” said Ivy. “Didn’t their mother say they go to school a long way apart?”

  “If she told us the truth about anything,” said Laz.

  “I think we’ve had a visit from Chrysanthemum, anyway,” said Ivy.

  “I don’t like calling him Mum, since he’s an asshole,” said Laz.

  “Jealousy makes people do unusual things,” said Ivy.

  “I think he’s always been a tantrum-thrower,” said Laz. “A complete brat. I’m going to call him Mumbo, as in Mumbo-Jumbo.”

  “I think I like that name better,” said Ivy. It will piss Nasty off, though, if we disrespect her brother.”

  Laz shook his head. “I can live with that. She’ll eventually get used to hearing her ridiculous brother referred to by that name.”

  “You can be so petty,” said Ivy. “Petty and unforgiving.”

  “Not compared to Mumbo, I’m not,” said Laz.

  “He’s probably still here, invisible and spying on us,” said Ivy.

  “So please don’t put that on,” said Laz, pointing to the negligee. “Yet.”

  “Not yet,” said Ivy, in a tone of voice that suggested she was considering whether she minded the idea of Mumbo watching her.

  “I want to talk to him. Any idea how I can make friends with him?”

  “You can’t,” said Ivy. “Just clean up your room. He’ll probably watch you do it, just to enjoy how much he discommoded you.”

  “Can’t we get the landlord to clean up the bathtub and clear out the toilet?”

  “You’re right,” said Ivy. “That’s a job that definitely requires somebody who’s getting paid to do it.”

  “Or we could move,” said Laz. “It’s not like we have a lot of stuff to box up and deliver to our next domicile.”

  “I’m not moving,” said Ivy.

  “Yeah, your room’s okay.”

  15

  THIS TIME LAZ and Ivy encountered Ivy-Z in her garden. When she looked up to see them, they were only about three meters away. She sighed. “You couldn’t find my children? Well, that’s hardly a surprise, if they don’t want to be found.”

  Ivy answered softly. “They found us. Your daughter is calling herself Nasty, for Nasturtium.”

  “They’re back to flowers?” asked Ivy-Z. “Well, it’s not the worst kind of name. The three months we had to call him Piss and her Urine were just disgusting, but they wouldn’t answer to anything else.”

  “So they honored the kidneys,” said Laz.

  “Can you sit in dirt? What about on grass? Come sit here and let’s talk.”

  “What are you doing out here in the garden?” asked Laz.

  “I had a couple of iris plants that had propagated so much they were choking themselves. I had to dig them up and divide them and replant them. There were so lovely last year. This next year they might erupt in completely glorious rapture, or they might pout because I split them, and so they’ll give off the shaggiest, saddest blooms.”

  “Temperamental? Volatile?” asked Laz.

  “Irises can be resentful,” said Ivy-Z. “They take things too personally. But it does no good to explain things, when they don’t want to understand.”

  Ivy seemed to regard this as a challenge. “Is it one of your powers, then, to speak to plants?”

  “Not a power, just a habit,” said Ivy-Z. “I know irises don’t have anything recognizable as a brain, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a soul.”

  “But you speak for them,” said Ivy. “You know what they want to say.”

  “I understand them in human language, because I’m a human, not a flower,” said Ivy-Z. “They don’t think in language, but they understand feelings and intentions when I talk to them. They tolerate my dividing them because they know I mean them no ill. Do they understand what would happen if I didn’t divide them? I have no idea.”

  “So you’re like the ladies with lapdogs who pretend they’re having conversations with their toy pugglewogs or whatever they’re called.”

  “Ivy,” said Laz, cautioningly.

  “Puddleglums,” said Ivy

  Laz rolled his eyes and looked away.

  “Oh, Laz,” said Ivy-Z, “I am in an excellent position to know that Ivy means no harm. Like the irises, she’s trying to understand at a level deeper than language.”

  “I’m not sure I find the comparison flattering,” said Ivy.

  “You should,” said Ivy-Z. “Irises are without guile.”

  “That’s a virtue?” asked Ivy.

  “Look at the three of us,” said Ivy-Z. “My husband and I are withholding our help, our labor—”

  “You’re on strike,” said Laz.

  “Withholding our labor,” said Ivy-Z. “And you and Ivy, you’re investigating things that neither I nor Ron the Great want you to investigate.”

  “Namely your children,” said Ivy.

  “That’s correct,” said Ivy-Z.

  “Your son is calling himself Chrysanthemum,” said Laz.

  “Only because he likes to hear his sister call him Mum,” said Ivy-Z. “He’s a brat. He lives on mischief.”

  “We’re here because of that,” said Laz.

  “Oh, no,” said Ivy-Z. “What did he—”

  “Trashed our house, my bedroom, but he did nothing to Ivy’s.”

  “Well of course not, your Ivy reminds him of me. He would never harm me.”

  “Well, he left me a particularly revealing—”

  “Disgusting,” said Laz.

  “You were not disgusted,” said Ivy. “An item of lingerie.”

  Ivy-Z raised her eyebrows. “Did it fit?”

  “I haven’t tried it on! He might have been right there in the room, watching.”

  Ivy-Z understood. “Oh, you think he can strobe like… Nasty?”

  “Strobe?”

  “I can’t do it, I can only describe it as my beloved daughter tried to explain it to me. She says it’s like she unglues herself from the normal passage of time, disconnecting for a tiny fraction of a second and skipping ahead and connecting again. She says it was horrible when she was a baby, because she couldn’t control it and she couldn’t come out of it, except when she fell asleep.”

  “As a baby?” said Laz.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Laz,” said Ivy-Z. “You were side stepping from the moment you were born. You know it—whenever you wanted your parents to do something for you, you’d side step to a timestream where they were already doing it.”

  Laz nodded.

  “And my daughter, by whatever name, skips in and out of time, at first like a skipping stone—in, out, in, out—but eventually like a strobe light. Movies,” said Ivy-Z. “They show one frame at a time, but rapidly, so our brain can supply a continuous story of what’s going on. They tried sixteen frames a second, but the movements were jerky. Then twenty frames a second, and it smoothed it. So eventually Nasty got control and she could strobe at about twenty frames a second. So she always seems to be there, but in fact she isn’t.”

  “She can’t stop strobing?”

  “When she strobes, she’s not actually living at the rate of one second per second. More like twenty one-thousandths of a second per second. She’s never very long in one moment till she’s off to the next. So, in effect, by now she’s about five years younger than her chronological age.”

  “So she’s time traveling,” said Ivy.

  “In the same direction as everyone else,” said Ivy-Z. “She hates being invisible, but it’s her only real talent, apart from a bit of scrying.”

  “How is she invisible?” asked Laz.

  “When she’s strobing at about once per second, you can’t see her. At once every ten seconds, it’s as if she weren’t there at all.” Ivy-Z shook her head. “My Laz and I worked so hard to help her understand what was happening, though we could only tell her our best guesses. She got control of it. But when she’s strobing very briefly in time, you can walk right through her and it doesn’t even tickle—her or you.”

  “When she’s coming out of it,” said Ivy, “she becomes tangible before she becomes visible.”

  “You tripped over her?” asked Ivy-Z. “We kept thinking we’d kill her by stepping on her in one stage of insubstantiality or another. But she was—rubbery. She bounced right back.” Ivy-Z laughed. “That was our joke. We had a rubber daughter, damage-proof. What other parents could say that?”

  “So she’s not a time traveler,” said Laz.

  “She can move faster and slower in time, or by strobing she can move faster or slower through our time,” said Ivy-Z. “When they were children, it was a challenge, it was terrifying, but we kept all of this from Ron at Central Time because he always thinks he has things figured out long before he really does.”

  Laz nodded. That was Ron. So sure of things, when things were completely out of his control. And sometimes out of everybody’s control.

  “So she could sneak in and materialize just long enough to scratch out a message and then disappear again,” said Laz.

  “She has never told me the rules,” said Ivy-Z. “What she can pick up and use while at some level of strobing. For all I know, she could have written the message while strobing—invisible but not intangible.”

  Ivy was curious about something else. “And Mumbo can do all this, too?”

  Ivy-Z raised an eyebrow. “Mumbo?”

  “We didn’t like calling him Mum. He’s not my mother.”

  “Well, it’s not as if it’ll still be his name next month. And if he hears ‘Mumbo’ he might change even earlier.”

  “Does he do the same… strobing thing?” Ivy was not going to let this go.

  “My Laz and I aren’t sure what Mum does. He has his own plans and priorities.”

  “Does he side step?” asked Ivy.

  “Would I know if he did?” asked Ivy-Z. “Does anybody know, except the side stepper?”

  “The scryer knows,” said Ivy.

  “No,” said Ivy-Z. “You know the timestreams you pass to him, and you know which one he uses. But what if he scans the timestreams, ignoring all of yours?”

  “I never ignore Ivy,” said Laz. “And she never ignores me.”

  “It sounds like you think she sees all Portals that open,” said Ivy-Z. “But your Ivy doesn’t know where they go, even if she knows they exist. You’re the one who realizes them, it’s you—the stepper—who makes the leap.”

  “Too much power for one person,” said Laz. “And too much ignorance.”

  “And thank God you had it—or rather, my Laz had it, because we found true Portals without Shiva on a collision course with Earth.”

  “And without humans already in it, the Earth even before dinosaurs,” said Laz.

  “Not ‘before’ dinosaurs, because there’s nothing inevitable about dinosaurs. This world might never have them—now that we’re here, it almost certainly won’t, since we’re going to be setting out big cats and wolves, hyenas and vipers, and early proto-dinosaurs would have been no match for them.”

  “Tyrannosaurs wouldn’t even consider them a good lunch,” said Laz.

  “You don’t get tyrannosaurs if their ancestors are all torn apart by dogs,” said Ivy-Z.

  “So we skip over a hundred million years of evolution,” said Laz.

  “Evolution isn’t on a clock. Like every other process, it’s contingent,” said Ivy-Z. “But you children know this.”

  “Why do you think we do?” asked Ivy.

  “Because I knew it when I was younger than you,” said Ivy-Z.

  Laz could feel the tension rising between the two Ivys, but what Laz worried about was how this whole encounter would make his Ivy feel in the aftermath. In her life—that is, since waking up on the table in the Central Time timestream—Ivy had rarely faced opposition from somebody who believed herself to be Ivy’s superior. Only Ivy-O and now Ivy-Z. And since this contest was, in a sense, with her own older self, who shared many of her memories, a lot was at stake.

  Then again, with so much unknown science going down, a lot was at stake even if the two Ivys were as harmonious as happy twins.

  Laz could feel Ivy’s temper spill over. She wasn’t going to be deferent. Laz knew it before she spoke—it was going to be a demand.

  “What is Mum’s power?” asked Ivy. She didn’t raise her voice, she lowered it. Laz knew that tone.

  “I told you, I don’t—”

  Ivy waved away her words as if they were fruit flies. “What can he do,” said Ivy, “besides tear up bedrooms and leave ridiculous pajamas for underage girls?”

  “You’re not underage,” said Ivy-Z. “You want to know, does he strobe like Nasty? She knows, because they tell each other everything, always have. But do they tell us? Their mere parents?”

  Laz knew this answer wouldn’t satisfy Ivy, but he could feel her controlling herself. She did it by turning to Laz.

  “We can never have children, Laz,” said Ivy. “It turns parents into whiners.”

  It was time for Laz to cool things down. To Ivy-Z he said, “You honestly don’t know what your son can do?”

  “She knows,” grumbled Ivy.

  “How do you know I know?” asked Ivy-Z, looking amused.

  “Because you know what he did as a baby,” said Ivy.

  Laz realized that this was a very good point. Of course, Ivy-Z would be ready to cope with this. Whichever Ivy you were dealing with, she would have an answer.

  “Well, there’s the problem,” said Ivy-Z. “We think he side stepped a few times, but we can’t be sure. Maybe he strobed, because sometimes he seemed to appear out of nowhere. Or maybe he’s just a consummate prankster who never lets on that he’s playing with you. We never saw him levitate or fly, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility.”

  Laz smiled, leaned in, getting to the point. “Does he move forward or backward in time?”

  He expected a glib answer, but instead Ivy-Z seemed to be thinking back. Trying to remember Mum as a baby? Or trying to think of the right lie to tell?

  While she was thinking, the front door opened and Z-Laz came out of the house and approached them. “We never caught an older version of him conversing with a younger one, if that proves anything,” said Z-Laz.

  “Hi, world-saver,” said Ivy.

  “But you considered the possibility that your son could…” asked Laz.

  “That he might be a junior time traveler?” said Zero-Laz. “Of course we considered it, since it’s what OrigiLaz was working on just before he disappeared. He knew it was not possible, but Ivy-O insisted that he was working on it, or skirting around it very closely. Still. Impossible.”

  “You can’t prove that something is impossible,” said Laz. “You can only prove that this or that approach didn’t work. Yet.”

  “Very old-school sciencey,” said Ivy-Z. “My Laz has given me the same lecture several times.”

  “And you paid no attention,” said Z-Laz.

  “Well of course not,” said Laz. “Instructions are for people who have no idea what they’re doing,”

  “Ivy,” said Ivy-Z, “my Laz likes to fry fish on a griddle.”

  “Fry fish on a griddle, fry fish on a griddle,” said Ivy. “It’s a tongue twister.”