“It is,” said Ron, “unless there’s something you want to tell me.”

  “Railroads,” said Laz. “Writing letters on paper. Rudimentary education. Languages splitting up willy-nilly. What is this, 1840?”

  “We fly across oceans in an hour or so. Transiting suborbital space,” said WoJo. “We’re not paleolithic.”

  “I didn’t mean to give offense,” said Laz.

  “He likes to give offense,” said Ivy.

  “No, that’s your hobby,” said Laz. “I was only saying that pioneering transforms societies. You have to shift your priorities. I’m betting there’s not a lot of middle management these days.”

  “We need to develop more surplus production until we can afford vast numbers of people who are paid to make reports to each other,” said Ron.

  “But nobody’s building pyramids or henges,” said WoJo. “Everybody works for the common good.”

  Ivy laughed. “Come on. They work for money, don’t they? For salaries.”

  “Yes,” said WoJo. “Their productivity and effort are measured, and they are compensated well enough to conduct discretionary spending. Moneys lubricate even pioneering societies.”

  “Will we get a salary?” asked Ivy. “How is our productivity measured?”

  “You won’t lack for money,” said Ron. “But you’ll probably be disappointed at how few places there are to spend it.”

  “And in almost all the societies in all the streams,” said WoJo, “amassing wealth is viewed as disgusting. If you have a surplus, spend it or give it away. I’m sure full-fledged capitalism is already being contemplated here and there, and maybe you two will live to see it fully restored.”

  “I hope not,” said Laz.

  “Why?” asked Ivy. “Are you a secret communist?”

  “You can’t have wealth without something to compare it to, and that’s poverty,” said Laz. “But let’s get to the point here, Ron Smith. Are we citizens or property?”

  “Your predecessors were granted full citizenship,” said WoJo. “All the quarreling today is about the citizenship of Taumatons.”

  “So what side of that argument are you on?” asked Ivy.

  “My personal views are not important enough—”

  “I didn’t mean ‘thou,’ I meant ‘you,’ plural. You-all. Central Time.”

  Ron said, “We don’t take sides. Each nation in each timestream has to make up their own policy.”

  Laz smiled. “But I’m betting that you’ll provide escape Portals for any Taumatons who are being oppressed in any of the nations.”

  Ron thought for a moment. “I suppose that means that we do have a policy—full citizenship for the robots. But we’re not going to try to make anybody agree with us. At least now, when there are so few Taumaton that most people have never seen one.”

  Passing through the Portal took no time—it was a railroad trip, very smooth because the two sides of the Portal were completely congruous, not pulling apart or twisting. Then the flight to Frisco was also brief.

  FriscoPort was well away from the San Andreas Fault, and it took a while for a train to get them around the bay from the port to the hilly city.

  “Why did they settle here in an earthquake zone?” asked Ivy.

  “It’s a mild climate,” said WoJo. “And they’re trying to restore the cable cars.”

  “A decade away, at least,” said Ron.

  “He’s a pessimist,” said WoJo. “There are still a lot of hills here, and the roads are not all paved, so hovercars and bicycles and horses—mules, mostly—are the main transportation once you’re out of downtown. The first cable car line is supposed to transit most of the city by next year.”

  “One line?” asked Laz.

  “Small city,” said WoJo. “But big enough to finance the cable car line from local taxes. There’s small chance of big government money being spent on the small American enclaves.”

  It was mules that pulled the carriage taking the four of them up and down hills until they came to a small village from which you could see out over the distant ocean.

  “Half Moon Bay,” said Ron. “Very scenic, lots of trees, reasonably balanced climate.”

  “But a long way from the city,” said Ivy.

  “You can ask them why they chose to live here,” said WoJo. “I’ve heard a half dozen explanations, but maybe you’ll be better able to decide which ones are true.”

  A waist-high picket fence surrounded a picturesque, wild-looking garden, with tall grasses and thick bushes that allowed anyone who wanted to to approach the house unobserved. Why am I thinking like this is a fortress likely to be assailed? thought Laz.

  Ron pulled a fob from a pocket, pressed a button, and the low gate of the picket fence opened. “This also alerted them inside,” said Ron.

  WoJo added, “They don’t like surprise visits.”

  Which implied that there had been surprise visits and objections had been made. Or else they kept side stepping till they found a timestream in which Ron and his people didn’t drop in unannounced.

  The path through the garden was brick; flagstones led into one section of the garden, a grassy path into another. Nothing was straight, and the curves weren’t regular. Somebody didn’t like symmetry.

  The door to the house opened as they approached. Automatic? No, Ivy-Zero immediately stepped out to greet them on the porch. Laz thought, Still beautiful, after two decades. Then he thought, I like my Ivy better. Maybe because Ivy-Z was a little slower, maybe a little sadder. Most famous woman in eight worlds, but things aren’t completely right for her.

  Maybe us coming, that might be what’s wrong right now.

  Ivy-Z greeted them warmly enough and ushered them in. Zero-Laz was sitting on a simple divan—just a wooden frame and what looked like a duvet draped over the back and covering the seat. Deliberate choice, or were plush overstuffed couches not a thing yet?

  “I wish we could say we’re glad to meet you,” said Z-Laz.

  Laz winced. That was unfriendly, and he and Ivy hadn’t even said anything rude yet.

  “Please imagine that we all side stepped together,” said Ivy-Z, “to a timestream where Laz greeted you courteously. Or at least apologized immediately after his unfriendly greeting.”

  “You can’t side step to timestreams that don’t exist,” said Zero-Laz. “I don’t know why Ron brought you here.”

  “Ron didn’t want to,” said Laz. “We insisted.”

  “Why?” asked Z-Laz.

  “Why did you insist on meeting Ivy-O when you first started out looking for a Safe Place?” asked Ivy.

  The two Zees looked at each other, and Ivy-Z said, “Touché.”

  Laz started the explanation. “We just wanted to hear, from you, why you stopped side stepping for the government.”

  “And if you knew of any reason why we shouldn’t make Portals for them,” added Ivy.

  “I can think of a hundred reasons for you not to,” said Z-Laz, “but Ron would hate that conversation, and besides, none of them would come close to our real reason for retiring.”

  “Which is?” asked Ron.

  The Zees ignored him, like an impertinent toddler. “Let’s just say,” said Ivy-Z to the two of them, “that our reasons were sufficient to justify—no, to require our work stoppage—but we have no intention of revealing the reason to anybody in any timestream ever.”

  “Emphatic,” said Ivy.

  Ivy-Z smiled. “The ‘any timestream ever’ was for Ron, since we keep hoping he’ll give up trying.”

  “I’m glad to know you’re alive,” said Laz. “And that you aren’t being punished for your… work stoppage, was it?”

  “Ron doesn’t punish people,” said WoJo, speaking up for the first time inside the house.

  “The Interplanetary Portal Commission doesn’t have authority even to arrest people in any nation on any Earth,” said Ron. “We never asked for that authority, because we don’t want any government to feel like we’re threatening their sovereignty. If anybody needs to be arrested, it’s up to the individual nation to do it according to their laws.”

  “And behead and dismember as they see fit,” said Laz.

  “Ah,” said Z-Laz. “You’re talking about the Hadarli problem.”

  “Oddly enough, the Hadarlis call it the Lekyo problem,” said WoJo.

  “While it’s actually an Evezzu problem,” said Ron, “and they feel as oppressed by the Lekyoi as by the Hadarli.”

  “Never heard of the Evezzu,” said Laz.

  “Even the Evezzu have never heard of the Evezzu,” said Ron, “because they’ve been ignored ever since the breakup of the British Empire. But interworld affairs don’t concern the Rescuers, as they’re called in several of the timestreams.”

  “We found the Safe Place timestreams,” said Z-Laz. “Anybody could have done it.”

  They all laughed or chuckled at that.

  “As I recall it,” said Ivy, “your real discovery was a method of avoiding the difficulty of not knowing which timestreams weren’t threatened by Shiva.”

  “You’d recall it better than we do,” said Ivy-Zero. “For you it was a few weeks ago. For us, twenty-two years, I believe.”

  “And you have a lot of better things to remember since saving the human race,” said Laz.

  Z-Laz looked at him sharply. Ivy-Z, anticipating some outburst, perhaps, spoke before he could. “Definitely,” she said. “Marrying, having children, that’s what human life is all about. Perpetuating the DNA. That’s as important to saving the human race as not getting burnt up when Earth plunges into the Sun.”

  “In point of fact,” said Z-Laz, “tidal forces would have torn Earth into fragments before it actually passed into the Sun.”

  “He’s taken some science classes,” said Ivy-Z.

  Zero-Laz rolled his eyes.

  “I’ve got a nice plate of sandwiches in the fridge,” said Ivy-Z, “because traveling always makes me hungry, so I figured—”

  “Me too,” said Ivy. “Let me help?” she asked.

  “No, no,” said Ivy-Z. “Everything’s already done, I’m just bringing it in.”

  “Let me guess,” said Laz. “Tuna salad sandwiches?”

  “With Duke’s mayonnaise instead of Hellmann’s,” said Ivy-Z. She walked into the kitchen.

  “Tuna?” asked Laz. “Really?”

  “We introduced game fish to the oceans almost as soon as humans got to this timestream,” said Zero-Laz.

  “No sharks or orcas, though,” said WoJo. “Had to give the prey animals time to build up enough of a population to support the top predators.”

  “Pinnipeds, dolphins, whales,” said Zero-Laz. “There’s still debate about whether to introduce shark-kind to this timestream.”

  “Line fishing began about five years ago,” said WoJo, “and we’ve had canned tuna in our grocery stores several times a year ever since.”

  “It tastes way better than the decade-old tuna in the Harris Teeter in Greensboro,” said Zero-Laz. “And it has actual nutrients.”

  Laz could see that Ivy was starting to get up—no doubt to go into the kitchen to help Ivy-Z, since it was obviously taking more time than just getting a plate out of the fridge. At that moment Ivy-Z came in carrying a large platter stacked with sandwich quarters. Ivy remained seated.

  Laz saw yellow on one of the sandwiches. “Mustard?” he asked.

  “French’s began production as soon as the first crop of mustard was ready,” said Ivy-Z. “The American Restoration generously allows us to buy a small shipment twice a year.”

  “So which ones have mustard, and—”

  “Half and half,” said Ivy-Z, “since Ivy and I don’t actually like mustard, especially on tuna salad sandwiches.”

  Zero-Laz added, drily, “If you can’t tell a sandwich with mustard from one without, you don’t deserve to eat any.”

  Laz recognized that, not as something he would say, but rather as something his dad would have said. So in twenty years, he would be talking more like his father.

  But it was time to start finding out the things that mattered. “Twenty years since you had your brains scanned. A lot must have happened since then. Married with children?” asked Laz.

  The two Zeroes nodded, but it seemed to Laz they were a little reluctant.

  “Are they at school?” asked Ivy.

  “They’re off with some friends in the city,” said Ivy-Zero.

  “You didn’t want us to meet them,” said Laz.

  “We thought it might be confusing to them,” said Ivy-Zero.

  Laz scoffed at that. “Your kids can see who their parents are, can’t they? We don’t all look that much alike.”

  “We don’t look all that different, either,” said Zero-Laz.

  Ivy chuckled. “They don’t want us to know whether or not they can see timestreams or side step.”

  Silence in the room.

  “We don’t even know,” said Zero-Laz, sounding resigned. “Before they were born, we decided not to tell them about what we can do. That we created the Portals, for instance.”

  “We didn’t want them to be ashamed if they turned out not to have these… powers of ours,” said Ivy-Zero.

  “What you didn’t want,” said Laz, “is for some government to co-opt them to do Portal maintenance.”

  “Is that why you went on strike?” asked Ivy.

  “There’s no way they could have these powers and you not know it,” said Laz. “Your Ivy would know every time they side stepped.”

  “Would I?” asked Ivy-Zero. “How many children have you had?”

  “Let’s not get combative,” said Zero-Laz. “Our kids are more important to us than anything. More than Portals, more than saving some beleaguered nation.”

  “They’re our kids,” said Ivy-Zero.

  “We aren’t here to take them away,” said Ivy. “We’re not a threat to them.”

  “Probably not,” said Zero-Laz. “But not certainly not.”

  “Before the kids were born,” said Ivy-Zero, “we could side step to fix anything we thought was bad or wrong.”

  “But we realized as soon as they were born that I could never side step again,” said Zero-Laz. “See, I could step into any timestream that included me. But we have no idea whether we have these kids in any other timestream. Kids, sure, but these kids? Before I side stepped I tried to detect them in the target timestream but I could only find myself and Ivy. I might be stepping into a world where we were childless, or had four children, or a couple of different children.”

  “Babies’ DNA is a variable,” said Ivy-Zero. “Who knows how many different children we might have in the other timestreams.”

  Laz and Ivy looked at each other. “I wish OrigiLaz were here,” said Ivy. “Maybe he has some math on the probabilities.”

  “We have the math,” said Ivy-Zero. “We’ve been farming and prospecting, but we’ve also been studying. We’re not going to make a move where there is any chance that we’ll lose these kids.”

  “So you went on strike,” said Ivy.

  “We explained all this to Ron,” said Ivy-Zero. “But of course he left it up to us to explain it.”

  “He wanted us to hear your side first,” said Ivy.

  “Don’t defend Ron,” said Zero-Laz. “He doesn’t care about us, and we don’t have to care about him.”

  “He thought losing our children,” said Ivy-Zero, “if it happened, would be worth the sacrifice as long as we kept the Portals active.”

  Another silence.

  Laz made the last connection. “You’re afraid that when we side step, it might endanger your children, too.”

  The silence returned, only now it was much heavier, thicker. Darker.

  “You don’t want us to do it,” said Ivy.

  “We don’t want you to do it from here,” said Ivy-Zero. “From our timestream.” She hesitated, as if she was afraid to say what she was about to say. “To be clear. We don’t want you to come back here ever again, for any reason.”

  “You can side step from any other timestream,” said Zero-Laz. “Since we and our kids won’t be in that timestream, it won’t affect us. We know that much—when you step from other timestreams, it affects only the timestream you’re in.”

  “So I guess my plan for us to get together to play pinochle or bridge is out the window,” said Laz.

  “That was never an option,” said Zero-Laz. “Ivy cheats.”

  Ivy-Zero looked askance at him. “That’s what losers always say.”

  * * *

  It was Ivy who decided when the visit was over. Laz didn’t disagree when Ivy rose to her feet and shook hands with the Zees. Laz followed suit, and it was surprising how quickly they were on the other side of a closed door. None of the chitchat that made his parents’ goodbyes with guests take approximately forever.

  The tuna sandwiches were all they had been served, which was fine with Laz. He remembered eating Southern California cuisine, which was kind of wonderful, with infinite variety. And then the food they made do with in Greensboro—canned tuna, Spam, mandarin oranges, old canned noodles, plastic bottles of V8 fusion drinks, and the occasional ripe fruit during the brief fruiting seasons. All the scavenged canned and bottled stuff was so nutritionally deficient they nearly starved, but starving made everything taste better.

  Whatever their older counterparts might have served them for a full meal would have been fresher and better than anything they’d eaten together in their Greensboro days. But nowhere near as good as what Laz remembered growing up with.

  Except that this Laz had never tasted Southern California cuisine, not even the worst sludge from bad taco stands, and he had never actually eaten the nutrient-deficient cuisine of Greensboro grocery stores. Because Laz, Laz-One himself, had only been spawned a few days ago and had eaten only the generic food they served in the city where Ron’s offices were located.

  Ivy said, once they were back in the carriage, “I don’t know about you, but my bullshit alarm went off a couple of times.”

  “I wonder if our alarms went off at the same things,” said Laz.

  Ron said nothing. WoJo seemed to want to say even less, looking away.

  “That crap about being afraid to lose their children,” said Ivy. “They’re already school-age. The Zeroes could side step into any viable timestream and come home to find their children perfectly fine in the exact timestream they left from.”