Ivy looked at him scornfully. “If you start obeying them now, they’ll think they have us under control.”

  “If we cause needless trouble,” said Laz, “then we’re too childish to be of use to them.”

  “Childish,” echoed Ivy softly.

  “Where’s this privacy we’re looking for?” asked Laz.

  “Ivy Downey seems hostile to discussion,” said the other, as-yet-unnamed woman. “Perhaps we should proceed without her.”

  Laz fixed her with an expressionless stare.

  “That’s his stubborn look,” said Ron.

  “We work together,” said Ivy. “Even when one of us is childish.”

  “That would be me,” said Laz. “I should be more careful with my words.”

  “Donatta,” said Ron to the second woman, “you can return to your regular duties.”

  Donatta looked startled and angry, but wordlessly she turned and walked away.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ron to Ivy and Laz. “We are not going to try to manipulate you, certainly not by dividing you. Donatta must have misunderstood the protocols.”

  “Probably,” said Ivy. “Or she floated the trial balloon, we shot it down, it served its purpose, and now she has no reason to remain.”

  “Or that,” said Ron, shrugging. “I only know my own motives, not anybody else’s, and government agencies have no collective motives.”

  Back in their previous life, the Greensboro and searching-for-a-Safe-Place life, Laz had come to really like Ron. To trust him. But that Ron had merely been in charge of observing and enlisting Laz and Ivy. Now, both he and WoJo talked as if they were in charge of everything. Or maybe it was just Ron’s air of command when he dismissed Donatta. He reeked of authority. Laz had never really liked authority.

  But here they were, and in this life they’d have to make the best of the world they found.

  “Privacy?” said Laz.

  They followed Ron as he walked. WoJo was right behind him, never looking back at Laz and Ivy.

  “Are any of the employees here robots?” whispered Ivy. “Maybe early models? Rejects?”

  “If they are, they can hear you whisper,” said Laz.

  “Potted plants can hear you whisper,” said WoJo. “It doesn’t take a Taumaton. Of which I am not one, because there is none extant.”

  “Just what a robot would say,” said Ivy.

  “Ron,” said Laz. “How many years? Where are the—world-finding versions of us? Why are we needed?”

  Ron beckoned them through a door in the same wall they had emerged from, a dozen meters further on. Laz followed him in and looked around. A conference room, lined with wall-sized screens displaying nature scenes from different continents and latitudes of the Old Place.

  “Nostalgia Central?” asked Laz.

  “These are not from the Old Place,” said Ron. “These are from species introduced into various habitats in the Safe Places.”

  “So… not a Safe Place for gazelles,” said Ivy.

  “A habitat approximating the Old Place,” said Ron, “where the animals we saved from the fire can continue their happy lives of eating and being eaten.”

  Ivy sat down in a chair at the end of the long table.

  Laz grinned. “I bet Ron thought that was his chair.”

  “They’re all my chairs,” said Ron. “I’ve had a few promotions.”

  So Laz’s guess had been right. Ron was the boss, and knew his prerogatives. It would take a while to decide whether Laz liked this older, in-charge iteration of Ron. Laz and Ivy had just had a set of memories pumped into their brains, so it was all fresh. Maybe they needed to develop a way of recording personalities and attitudes, so when somebody got power and authority they could get a refresher course on who they really were.

  “Why are we awake?” asked Ivy. “Still having Shiva problems?”

  “No, definitely not,” said WoJo. “The Safe Places are, in fact, safe.”

  “Good to hear it. Back to bed, Laz!” said Ivy cheerfully.

  “What happened to the world-saving versions of us?” asked Laz.

  “They’re still alive, of course,” said Ron. “Twenty or so years older.”

  “And not here in the room with us,” said Laz.

  “They’re not a part of what we’re doing now,” said Ron Smith. His tone was dismissive. As if he was fed up with their predecessors. Or perhaps fed up with this Laz.

  “I want to hear it from them,” said Laz.

  “Why do you imagine they would want to meet you?” asked WoJo.

  “I don’t care if they want to meet us,” said Laz. “I’m not going to believe what you tell us about them.”

  “Neither of us are,” said Ivy. “Face to face, right away.”

  “Hiding things from us only makes us more stubborn,” added Laz.

  Ron smiled. “Do you think we need you to tell us how stubborn you are?” He spoke more softly. “You’re here because your predecessors are refusing to do their simple, easy, harmless, routine work.”

  “I bet they have their reasons,” said Ivy.

  “Which we want to hear only from them,” said Laz.

  * * *

  It was not a simple thing to visit Zero-Laz and Ivy-Zero. They were not living in the same timestream that held the Interplanetary Portal Commission. Ron actually had to look up their current address and then send a text to make sure they were at home and willing to receive visitors.

  “Yes, they’ll see you,” said Ron.

  “How far is it?” asked Ivy.

  “The Portal we need is not nearby,” said WoJo. “We’ll have to take a flight there, and then the train from the airport to the Portal.”

  “Why not just let Laz here side step us to their world?” asked Ivy.

  Silence.

  “They don’t have a directory for side steppers,” said Laz. “Right? You don’t know how to describe their world so we can step there.”

  WoJo smiled wanly. “Until today, the only people who could make use of such a directory were the ones who opened all the Portals. They know where everything is.”

  “And they couldn’t just come here and take us there?” asked Ivy.

  “It’s better to observe the formalities,” said Ron.

  “They don’t side step much these days,” said WoJo.

  “No problema,” said Laz. “We don’t mind getting a tour of this world.”

  “Is this the first Safe Place they identified?” asked Ivy.

  “I don’t know,” said WoJo. “We try not to think of the worlds with ordinal numbers. They were all discovered in the same week. First and second don’t matter. Nor does latest. Particularly since there’s serious talk of needing several more worlds. Maybe ten. Maybe a dozen.”

  “In twenty years, there’s already conflict?” asked Laz. “You have to have more rooms to send the quarrelsome children to?”

  “Some of the groups that didn’t have enough numbers to warrant getting a continent to themselves have now procreated themselves into contention,” said Ron.

  “And most of the groups have degrouped,” said WoJo.

  “Or hypergrouped,” said Ron. “During our few years in the New Place, a lot of the old boundaries became…”

  “Permeable,” suggested WoJo. “People migrated out of their original ethnic community and joined others that they liked better.”

  “So the groups aren’t homogeneous anymore,” said Ron. “Except the most fanatical separatists, but they mostly keep to themselves.”

  “Lots of race mixing now,” said WoJo.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Ivy.

  “Envy, grudges, vindictiveness, feuds, vendettas, land grabs, bigotry, poverty, ignorance, stupidity—these were not caused by racial divisions,” said Ron. “They were caused by humans trying to get along in close proximity to other humans.”

  WoJo took up the story. “Newcomers into an ethnic space pick up all the hatreds and grudges that the original group had. So they have made plenty of new enemies, nemeses, rivals, oppressions—”

  “We get it,” said Ivy.

  “Nobody has created a utopia,” said Laz.

  “Here, on Central Time, we’re maintaining peace,” said Ron.

  “By force?” asked Ivy, ever the one to latch onto the worst possibilities.

  “By a generous and cooperative spirit among all the ethnicities of this timestream,” said WoJo, a little prickly about this topic, apparently.

  Ron shook his head. “We’ve got as many idiots and clowns here as anywhere else. They just haven’t been put in charge.”

  “But there have been wars in other timestreams,” said Ivy.

  “Flare-ups of violence,” said Ron.

  “Skirmishes and raids,” said WoJo.

  “In other words, wars that aren’t over yet,” said Ivy.

  Ron raised a hand slightly, to forestall WoJo’s reaction. “WoJo, Ivy doesn’t just call a spade a spade. She calls it an inefficient, time-wasting failure of design for earth removal.”

  “Sweet of you to remember,” said Ivy. “That’s only about half of what I called a shovel the first time you handed it to me—”

  “So we have ancient rivalries from the Old Place,” said WoJo, “now being acted out by nations or tribes that do not resemble the original combatants in any way.”

  “And a few would-be Napoleons or Genghis Khans—pick your empire builder—have decided that in their timestream, at least, perfect unity is the goal,” said Ron. “Presided over by the ambitious conqueror. While we scramble to find ways to keep refugees from the conquered lands alive and safe.”

  “A couple of the refugee groups have even gone so far,” said WoJo, “as to threaten terrorism to speed up the process.”

  “Threaten?” asked Ivy.

  “Blowing up a couple of empty buildings,” said WoJo. “Announcing their intention to blow up the most-used Portal on the world they were trying to get away from.”

  “Did you catch the bombers?” asked Laz.

  “Yes,” said Ron. “Well, not we—the authorities in their nation.”

  “What happened?” asked Laz. “To the terrorists?”

  “In one situation, the bombers were beheaded,” said WoJo. “With deliberate inefficiency. Even though nobody died in the explosions. And the ones who threatened to break the Portal, they each lost their choice of a hand or a foot.”

  “Pretty ruthless justice,” said Ivy.

  “Lowest crime rate on all the worlds,” said Ron. “And we here in Central Time don’t have any authority to interfere, anyway.”

  Laz made a mental note: Officially, the Interplanetary Portal Commission. But in practical terms, Central Time.

  “The brutality of the punishments, not the terrorism,” said WoJo, “prompted the approval of their petition to separate. They’re planning to bring the heads, hands, and feet to bury in their new homeland.”

  “I’d say, ‘That’s nice,’ but the whole thing is pretty awful,” said Ivy.

  “I hope you didn’t imagine that the twenty-first-century billions who migrated to the Safe Places were going to be a superior grade of human being,” said WoJo. “Things are only going to get worse.”

  “Because your predecessors are not willing to open any new Portals,” said Ron. “For reasons they might explain to you, if they feel like it.”

  “So those people have to stay on that brutal world?”

  “Just a continent,” said Ron, “and they’re under the protection of an international force now, which will keep out the local authorities—and keep any would-be terrorists from getting out.”

  “They’ve been sequestered there for the past three years,” said WoJo. “They’re getting impatient.”

  “So you woke us up,” said Ivy. “To open Portals to new worlds.”

  “We’re hoping that you’ll have no objection to helping us,” said WoJo. “Nobody else can.”

  “So we’re not being sent to persuade our predecessors to get back to work,” said Laz.

  “We’re strikebreakers,” said Ivy. “Scabs.”

  “You’re Travelers,” said Ron, “and we hope you’ll help the human race avoid a round of genocidal wars and brutal repressions.”

  “So we’re beneficent scabs,” said Ivy.

  “We’ll do it, of course,” said Laz.

  “We haven’t heard what Ivy-Zero and Zero-Laz have to say,” said Ivy.

  Silence.

  “You do understand,” said Ron, “that you’re free to be persuaded by them to join their strike. But we’ll just have to grow another pair of clones, and this time refuse to allow them to talk to you or your predecessors.”

  “You’re going to get your way,” said Laz.

  “No matter what,” said Ivy.

  “We think our plan is far more humane than any other that’s been proposed,” said WoJo. “But yes, we will get the job done. We hope you’ll freely join with us in saving a lot of innocent people.”

  “How many new continents and timestreams are you going to need?” asked Laz. “Maybe five this go-round—but in a year, ten years, how many more?”

  “Is there a maximum number?” asked Ivy.

  “It takes a lot of machinery and material to sustain a Portal in good working order,” said Ron. “And the manufacturing capacity of most of the worlds is not capable of equipping new Portals.”

  “So we’re here to establish as many Portals as you can configure,” said Laz. “And then what? Back in the box?”

  “You go back to private life,” said WoJo.

  “We’ve had no private life,” said Ivy.

  “I mean,” said WoJo, “you live however and wherever you wish, but we hope that you’ll remain on call to restore broken connections or open new ones.”

  “As long as we both shall live,” said Ivy.

  “You’ll have the best health care,” WoJo assured her.

  “It’s an old ritual phrase,” explained Laz. “We come from another century. At least, our memories do.”

  2

  THEY WERE WITHIN the boundaries of the old United States, but the Portal to the world where Zero-Laz and Ivy-Zero lived was in Australia. The flight was shorter than Laz expected, though Ivy assured him that since he had been a child, airplanes had changed. They now left the atmosphere, then reentered and landed at one of the shuttleports. Less than an hour and a half from DallasPort to PortAdelaide.

  “So they live in Australia in their timestream?” asked Ivy.

  “There is no world in which Australia is a particularly productive and comfortable land,” said WoJo. “But the Adelaide Portal gets us to their timestream… and then we fly again.”

  “So they live in America?” asked Ivy.

  “In their timestream, there is no America,” said Ron. “The North American continent exists, of course, but this is an Indonesian world. The western hemisphere was settled by non-Muslim Indonesians and Timorese, while the eastern hemisphere is dominated by many nations of Muslim Indonesians and Malaysians.”

  “And they’re all getting along?” asked Laz.

  “Better than some. It’s a peaceful timestream, which I think is why Laz and Ivy chose it.”

  “They speak Bahasa Indonesia?” asked Ivy.

  “I don’t know if they’ve bothered,” said WoJo. “They live in an American enclave, the San Francisco Bay area, where everybody speaks a version of English.”

  “Which version?”

  “Their version,” said Ron. “Languages are shifting like crazy. Squads of linguists pass through Portals constantly, recording and transcribing changes. They’ll never keep up—every isolated settlement is developing their own dialect.”

  “They call their dialect Frisco,” said WoJo. “The linguists call it Peninsular American.”

  “Will we understand them?” asked Ivy.

  “Your counterparts are still genetically and linguistically you,” said WoJo. “They can speak the local accent well enough, but they haven’t forgotten how you speak.”

  Laz chuckled. “San Francisco,” he said. “When you said ‘Frisco’ I flashed on my visit to the Golden Gate Bridge and crossing the Bay Bridge. And Alcatraz.”

  “Nobody’s planning to rebuild them here,” said Ron. “In the American timestream, there are elaborate plans for reconstructing landmark buildings all over the old homeland. I suspect Mount Rushmore will be the last they complete, and by the time they do it, nobody will remember who those old presidents were.”

  “Aren’t they teaching history?” asked Laz.

  “These are pioneer worlds,” said WoJo. “Some people do study at university and learn all kinds of history and literature, not to mention science and engineering, but most people are tied to making the land productive enough to support the population boom that’s already underway. Building railroads to transport foodstuffs and other goods across continents, yes, and aqueducts and reservoirs where they’re needed. Still, farming is the root of everything. We train adequate engineers in most of the timestreams, and excellent ones at the top schools. Mathematicians, physicists, zoologists, botanists, surgeons, economists, statisticians. But for most people, reading and arithmetic are all they need from their schooling.”

  Ron smiled wanly. “The higher culture isn’t lost, but it doesn’t belong to the common people anymore. That’s why the languages are all changing. They don’t live by the alphabet anymore. The children are taught, and some become readers, but I believe when I last checked, just under a thousand new works of fiction have been produced since the migration.”

  “A thousand a year,” said Laz. “Still more than I can keep up with.”

  WoJo laughed softly. “Nobody sells enough copies to live from their writing.”

  “And it isn’t a thousand a year. That’s the total for the past twenty years,” said Ron. “Including all languages. All published electronically.”

  “What, there’s no paper?” asked Ivy.

  “Paper is used to make boxes,” said WoJo. “And to print instruction manuals. And to write letters.”

  “And they said time travel was impossible,” said Laz.