“Your Laz is trying to do the same thing and it’s going to take years of practice,” said Ivy-Z. “At first you overcook, then you undercook. But he’s young, he’ll learn, and he won’t have any problems in the end.”

  Laz wanted to ask, what does a griddle of fish have to do with anything? But of course it was a metaphor. Laz was trying to recover OrigiLaz’s work with time travel, without the twenty-plus years of experience OrigiLaz brought to the problem. But unlike OrigiLaz, he had worked with a much more involved Ivy, and he could work on the problem knowing that time travel was possible. Maybe.

  She says I won’t have any problems in the end. Frying fish or discovering time travel—or exposing whatever nonsense Mumbo was up to? What business was it of hers?

  But it was her business. He was the junior apprentice at everything—the Zees had been at this a lot longer. They had raised children. They knew things he could barely imagine. They had lived and he had just been planted and grown in a box, with unearned memories poured into his brain. He knew pretty much nothing, and expected himself to be ready to learn everything.

  He needed to check his dignity at the door—nobody was going to soften things to spare his feelings. Either he was what he hoped to be, or he wasn’t. He’d find out at exactly the same time everybody else would. No place to hide if he was a complete bust.

  “Do you mind if I go back in time and ask your son about how he does time travel?”

  “By all means, do it,” said Ivy-Z. “If you show up before you were decanted from your coffin, he’ll know you already have traveled in time, and therefore he’ll talk with you candidly about time travel.”

  “The time paradoxes don’t work that way,” said Ivy, deliberately being literal, refusing to get his irony. “You can’t use time travel to go back and find out how to do time travel.”

  “Says you,” said Laz.

  “Says the universe,” said Ivy. “But I don’t trust either of you.”

  16

  AT LEAST FOR the next few weeks, their schedule would be free. No bands of refugees to save. Laz took a few of Ron’s goons—actually nice guys who could probably tear Laz in half with their bare hands—to the place where he had built an expertly hidden Portal to another timestream. By mere chance—or unconscious wisdom—Laz had picked the very timestream where he had built the temporary Portals to allow the Evezzu to escape into Central Time. But none of that happened near Puget Sound.

  In Ron’s office, each timestream had been given a number, but Laz, whose memory was excellent, could not remember which timestream was which. And it was hard for anyone living in a timestream to think of it as anything other than “Earth,” which, in every case, it was. When you woke up in the morning, you didn’t think, “Six has lovely weather in this octant.”

  Their national names made much more sense to them. Whether their nation was identified by an old Earth name—Tessera, Malaya, Papua, Taiwan, Poland—it never had the old borders, was almost never racially uniform, and sometimes had no cultural element from the Old Place. Tessera was not reestablished in the middle of the desert, but on the old Loire River in the Brittany region of the old France. They called their whole timestream Tessera, though nobody else in the timestream did. Khotto, the name of their old capital, was given to the new one, which was located where Nantes had been in the Old Place. Patriotic Tesserans called it Khotto, a lot of outsiders called it Nantes, and middle-of-the-roaders called it Kho-nan.

  Laz’s secret Portal was in the rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula in what was Washington State in the Old Place. In Six, or Tessera World, the peninsula was inhabited primarily by bears and raccoons, though a human village was on the shores of Puget Sound, where the ferry stop once was. And would be again, if enough people filled in the former Seattle and Tacoma area and a ferry was likely to be profitable. North America was far outside Tessera’s zone of influence, and the secret Portal was in what used to be Hoquiam, Washington.

  Ron’s guys kept saying things like, “gonna be a helluva winter around here” and “some kind of permanent shelter” and “has to have a real lock on it.” So the secret Portal was probably going to get a lot of use and the clandestine operatives would have a permanent station where they would probably have a landline telephone and cable. It would probably be the most widely known secret in the timestream.

  But Ron’s people weren’t fighting a war, so it hardly mattered if the presence of observers became well known. In fact, it might help keep some of the governments—particularly Navarre—from becoming too belligerent or domineering. Or polluting. Or careless of the survival of species from the Old Place and of local species, too. Trying not to repeat all the mistakes of the old world.

  Laz was glad that setting up the station wasn’t his job. Let them work it all out. As long as they knew how to get back to the Portal, his job was done.

  Except that Laz had to make sure they didn’t form an easily followed path. If anybody hostile to Central Time followed such a path, they could unmake the Portal by simply untying the ropes and tossing them into the Portal. Ditto with any path they might make on the Central Time side. Central Time’s enemies weren’t confined to Europe in timestream Six.

  After guiding one or two of the guys on several return trips, Laz told them they didn’t need him anymore. He was going home.

  Laz was in the business of secret-Portal-making. The failure of the “secret” part was not of his doing. So Laz would open Portals and Ron would set up stations in various places around the worlds, and Laz felt like he would be doing something real. Grownup work. The weight of the world on my shoulders, he thought. And instead of feeling burdensome, it made him kind of happy. He had a job that at least a few people thought might matter. A job with, for lack of a better word, meaning.

  Meanwhile, Ivy didn’t even question him about his activities with and for Ron. She didn’t really need to. She could sense the Portals he opened so when he came home each night she would already know where he had side stepped, where Portals were being held open, and how much work was being done by passing people and materials through the Portals.

  Ivy and Laz mostly talked about what Ivy was learning in school. They were both busy, both proud of what they were doing. But Laz was prouder of her, actually—she was getting top marks in the physics program at MIT, which had been fully set up in a version of Massachusetts that went by the name Massachusetts but had no Boston—just Cambridge and Amherst and a town called Providence.

  Ivy went through a Portal every day, getting to and from school. At first, it was the main Portal between timestreams, located in what had once been the site of Staunton, Virginia. But this required Ivy to take a plane ride from the Portal airport to MIT and back again every day. It wasn’t a commonly used route. Ron had seen to it that the airline added a second flight each day so that Ivy could get home every night. It was expensive… for somebody. Because Ron made sure that Ivy never saw any kind of bill for her ridiculously expensive college education.

  After the second week commuting like that, Ivy hated the time it burned every day. Yes, she studied on the flights. Yes, she never had to drive herself anywhere, because Ron provided a chauffeur who did not bother her with a lot of chitchat while she studied and wrote papers on a laptop that was set up on a specially designed custom-made desktop that swung into place when she needed to write or do correspondence in the limo. It was perfect, except that she hated living so far from campus, cut off from the student life there.

  “So you want to leave me,” said Laz, smiling a little to let her know he wasn’t really interpreting things that way.

  “You know I don’t want anything of the kind,” said Ivy. “But you could live anywhere and do your work. Why not Cambridge?”

  “Or you could move into student housing and have yourself a college education, complete with beer and drugs and idiotic philosophies and a whole bunch of irresponsible sex.”

  “You sound a little bitter about something that hasn’t happened and will certainly never happen,” said Ivy.

  “We’re grownups, we supervise the connections between the worlds, but you want a degree in physics? Why, to teach college?” Laz wanted to stop himself from goading her—he was proud that she was achieving so much in her schooling.

  “I’m trying to understand the work that we’re doing,” said Ivy. “That you’re doing.”

  “Nobody understands it,” said Laz, “so who’s going to teach you?”

  “You and I will take over the research when it gets beyond anything the faculty can understand.”

  “It’s already beyond that,” said Laz.

  “I’m going to get this degree,” said Ivy. “I want to be involved in campus life instead of always on a plane or in a car.”

  “Why not ask Ron to move the entire faculty of MIT here?” asked Laz. “And all the students?”

  “Just for me? Are you insane?” asked Ivy.

  “So the second flight between Staunton and Cambridge every day isn’t insane?” asked Laz.

  “Yes, it is,” said Ivy. “That’s why I want it to end.”

  “So you’re dropping out of the program,” said Laz. He knew he sounded hopeful, but he really wanted her to stay in it. If for no other reason than because she loved it.

  “You absolutely refuse to move to Cambridge,” said Ivy.

  “I don’t belong with a bunch of academics and pointy-headed engineers,” said Laz. “I’m not a student anymore.”

  “So we know where I stand on your chart of priorities.”

  “I could say exactly the same thing,” said Laz.

  “But I’m pursuing a degree—”

  “A completely meaningless credential given what you can already do,” said Laz. “Who’s going to give you a degree in scrying? Or, to give it an appropriately unmemorable scientific name, Temporiverine Manipulation and Observation?”

  “Is that the official name now?”

  “It is if we tell them that it is,” said Laz. “Their studies are completely dependent upon what we’re already doing.”

  “But we don’t know what we’re doing,” said Ivy.

  “And yet it still gets done,” he said.

  They glared at each other, half seriously, across the dining table.

  “I have an idea,” said Laz.

  “Other than making me drop out of school without a degree?”

  “Degree degree degree,” said Laz. “I hereby grant you a Grandmaster Doctorate of Temporiverine Manipulation. A GDTM.”

  “Grandmaster is not an academic rank,” said Ivy.

  “That’s why I have the authority to bestow it,” said Laz.

  “Was that your great idea?” asked Ivy.

  “I didn’t say it was great, and you’re the one who seems to think a degree is necessary. As necessary as a third lung attached to your butt.”

  “That’s not where I would have it attached.”

  “Think of it as a portable whoopee cushion,” said Laz. “Do you want to hear my real idea?”

  “I always want to hear whatever it is that you want to tell me,” said Ivy, rather primly.

  “Why don’t we just make a private Portal from a point near your campus to the same point in Central Time? You’d still have to travel to and from that private Portal, but that could be a forty-minute drive—twenty, if Ron finds the funds to clear us a road. You can have your student housing as long as I can visit whenever I want, and you can keep your room with me for times when you’re sick of the childish behavior of college students.”

  “MIT is a very serious school,” said Ivy

  “So none of those engineers ever gets laid or drunk or high?”

  Ivy looked at him scornfully.

  Laz smiled and continued with his bargaining. “Come back home here for any reason, whenever you want. I won’t interpret it as a failure in your educational plan. I won’t suggest you drop out of school. Whenever I miss you too much, I’ll come and bother you while you’re studying.”

  “Bother me?”

  “You know,” said Laz. “Pulling your hair, blowing spitwads through a straw, setting off stink bombs—the kind of thing Stever and I used to do.”

  “In junior high,” said Ivy.

  “Just because you’re growing up doesn’t mean I have to, does it?” asked Laz.

  Ivy clearly had a sharp retort in mind, but she stopped herself from saying it. “Can’t we make a secret Portal that goes to the campus from here?”

  Laz stopped and thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how we’d even try. The timestreams have always been tied to the location we’re at when we side step.”

  “When you side step,” she corrected him.

  “But wherever we are, the timestreams are there with us. The same timestreams.”

  Ivy shrugged. “It’s not like we can tag them to be sure they’re the same.”

  “Maybe if we close our eyes and wish real hard,” said Laz, “we can come out of the side step in a different geographical location. Of our choosing.”

  “Now you’re making it sound silly.”

  “It is silly, but we already do it all the time,” said Laz. “What with the motion of the Earth around the Sun, the rotation of Earth, and the movement of the whole solar system through the galaxy, and our galaxy among the other galaxies, plus the expanding universe rushing everything away from everything else—”

  “We always side step to a place that is a different absolute location from the one we left,” Ivy said. “I think I’ll bring this up with my professors. Nobody has talked about the physical displacement involved in every side step.”

  “I think we have our work cut out for us,” said Laz.

  “What do I have to do with it?” asked Ivy. “You’re the side stepper. Just step a little farther to the side.”

  “I could just stumble and wind up on a different continent in the target timestream.”

  Ivy smiled. “So it won’t be that easy.”

  “Here’s what will make it easy,” said Laz. “You’ll figure out how to make the timestream you’ve chosen reach a different point in space, and then you pass it to me and I step.”

  “So I do all the heavy lifting,” said Ivy.

  “You always do,” said Laz. “I was born with the skill to do the easy part.”

  “You weren’t born,” said Ivy.

  “You know what I meant.”

  “So I grab one of the inhabited timestreams here—”

  “Might as well pick the timestream that already has MIT in it,” said Laz.

  “And even though I’m grabbing it from here, I make it take us to Cambridge.”

  “That was my idea,” said Laz.

  “This causes a twist in the timestream,” said Ivy, “so we don’t know where it’ll end up. So when you side step, you’ll take us to cold hard space somewhere between Earth and the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.”

  “And then I’ll side step our corpses right back here for Ron and his boys to deal with,” said Laz.

  “He’ll have no choice but to bring out another copy of us,” said Ivy.

  “So before we try this, I recommend that we have them record our brain states,” said Laz.

  “And I’ll write down this theory we’re going to try out,” said Ivy.

  “So the next copies of OrigiLaz and Ivy-O will have a real knowledge of what we were trying to do when we screwed up and died.”

  “But… what if I do my job properly and nobody dies? And our new Portal reaches to Cambridge, and I can walk to and from school every day?”

  “Then no matter how we eventually die,” said Laz, “our memories will still be carried on. The things we accomplished, the things we thought of.”

  “The strange messages that Nasty wants us to think she left for us.”

  “You think she didn’t?” asked Laz.

  “I don’t think she knows how to talk without lying,” said Ivy.

  “And yet, my darling, you have not caught her lying about anything.”

  “My job description doesn’t include catching liars.”

  Setting up the brain scans was simpler than they expected. Ron just smiled and said, “I was about to ask you to do that anyway, now that we have the equipment ready to roll.”

  “Roll?” asked Ivy.

  “Figure of speech,” said Ron. “I think we should do it every, what, six months? Six weeks?”

  “I think now is a good time,” said Laz. “And then, at some later date, we and you will agree that it’s a good time again.”

  “Sorry,” said Ron. “I forgot that you thrive on chaos.”

  “So did I,” said Laz. “My memory is so confused sometimes.”

  “I get the joke,” said Ron.

  “So do I,” said Ivy. “Such as it was.”

  “I’m becoming obvious?” Laz mock slapped his forehead. “What’s wrong with me?”

  After they did the scans and Ron verified that the recordings were in order, Laz and Ivy began planning their first experiments.

  “I don’t think we should start with Cambridge,” said Laz.

  “I don’t think we should step between timelines,” said Ivy.

  “But that’s what we do,” said Laz. “That’s the point.”

  “Geographical dislocation first,” said Ivy. “Then a combination of temporiverine and georiverine transference.”

  “You’re so sexy when you talk Academese.”

  “It’s not Academese,” said Ivy. “You made up those words.”

  “But I made them up in mockery of Academese. Yet it’s Academese, too.”

  “So if I make fun of you in a Portuguese accent, my mockery will count as Portuguese?”

  “Portuguese is a real language,” said Laz.

  “So is Academese,” said Ivy. “But I’m glad you think I’m sexy when I speak it.”

  “Of course, you’re also sexy when you don’t say anything at all,” said Laz.

  “You make a girl’s heart flutter,” said Ivy. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to wrap my head around the idea of taking the timestream we’re actually in, splitting it, and making it come out in a different place from where we go in.”