“ ‘Fecis’?” asked Laz.

  “It’s the name he chose. Bad Latin—the singular of feces is feces. Like the plural of deer is deer, and fish is fish. But the Romans got it wrong. It should have been fecis, so now it is.”

  “And he picked that name for himself,” said Ivy.

  “He picked an English name for me,” said Nasty. “And it wasn’t something cute like ‘poop’ or ‘turd.’ ”

  “Those are cute?” asked Ivy.

  “Pile and dump and heap and vomit and crap and whatever forms a deposit on the ground,” said Nasty. “He thought we needed to link ourselves with the end product of mammalian life, the turd. Our whole existence, he says, is devoted to producing poo. Even our DNA exists only to create more sources of poo.”

  Laz shook his head. “Nasty,” he said, “if you didn’t send those messages backward in time, how could you write them while we were standing right there?”

  “Extrapolate, laddie,” said Nasty. “If we didn’t send the one to my parents, why would you think we sent the other ones?”

  “If it wasn’t you,” said Laz, “with your ability to disappear, then who was it?”

  “Someone else with the ability to disappear,” said Ivy. “It’s obvious, Dim.”

  “ ‘Someone else’ is not an answer,” said Laz. “It’s what you say when you have no answer.”

  “Exactly,” said Nasty. “Someone else. I thought you ought to know, because I think you stopped searching or thinking once you came to believe that the messages were from us.”

  “I never stop thinking,” said Ivy.

  “Good for you,” said Laz. “What has your incessant thought led you to understand?”

  “That someone else left the messages.”

  “How very nonspecific of you,” said Laz.

  “Have you got bitter about it, Dim?” asked Ivy. “About my ability to outthink you?”

  Laz sat down beside Nasty. “It was him, wasn’t it. OrigiLaz.”

  Nasty shrugged. “Fecis and I don’t know. But he’s our best guess. Either that or there’s another time-manipulating son-of-a-bitch who isn’t connected to us at all, but tries to help us.”

  “How many of us are there?” asked Ivy.

  “Three scryers, all named Ivy,” said Nasty. “Three steppers named Laz, one of them missing. Fecis and me, though we have no idea what to call ourselves.”

  “Strobers,” said Laz.

  “Eight that we know of,” said Ivy.

  “And one mystery player whose abilities we can’t yet guess at,” said Nasty. “It might be OrigiLaz, come back from… wherever he went.”

  “It has the virtue of parsimony,” said Ivy. “We don’t have to add any new players to the game.”

  “Why hasn’t he shown up and introduced himself?” asked Laz. “If he’s learned how to do new stuff, why not come and teach his clones?”

  “I bet you didn’t understand me,” said Nasty. “I don’t know.”

  “I understood you,” said Laz, “but if you were thinking it might be OrigiLaz, you have to have been thinking about what he’s doing and how.”

  “Speculation,” said Nasty. “Worthless.”

  “When it’s all we’ve got,” said Ivy, “even guessing has value.”

  “All the same guesses you already had when you thought it was us,” said Nasty. “A time traveler who sees the future and sends messages back to us. Somebody who strobes but can pick up sticks and write things while strobing.”

  “You can’t do that, then,” said Laz.

  “We’ve tried picking things up at different levels of strobing. But we can’t hold anything until we stop strobing completely.”

  Ivy sighed. “So what you came to tell us today, is nothing.”

  “I came to tell you everything—of our deception, of our ignorance of who wrote your messages, and my hope that like everything else in our collective story, it has something to do with the flow of causality and time,” said Nasty.

  “And… Fecis? Did he consent to your coming?” asked Laz.

  “I don’t report to my brother, and he does not report to me,” said Nasty.

  “Does Ivy-O know that it might be OrigiLaz, back again from his wandering?” asked Ivy.

  “What she knows, only she knows,” said Nasty. “Maybe she fears it’s only wishful thinking on her part. Maybe she fears it isn’t, that he has returned but cloaked in vast powers that he can only barely control. Maybe he’s the end of the world. Maybe he’s what the purpose of the world was from the beginning. Maybe he’s been visiting her on the sly for decades.”

  Laz shrugged. “I believe you’ve told us what you know.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ivy.

  “Enough unfounded accusations,” said Laz.

  “Our previous accusations, Dim, all turned out to be founded,” said Ivy.

  “I think she’s being honest with us. She’s told what she knows.” Laz looked at Ivy, daring her to contradict him.

  For once, she didn’t.

  He wanted to say, Every time you call me Dim it stabs me in the heart.

  He wanted to say, Whatever OrigiLaz has learned to do, I can learn to do. Just help me.

  He wanted to say, Can’t we be married and have babies and get out of this situation where we are all that holds the worlds together?

  He said none of that. Not in front of his niece Nasty. His pain and pride and hunger must remain inside himself, or somebody could use it to manipulate him. Ivy could use it that way.

  “Is there any chance we could speak to OrigiLaz by leaving him a note?” asked Ivy.

  “If it’s OrigiLaz, he could definitely read a note,” said Nasty. “Because they don’t give tenure to illiterates.”

  “Do you think he watches over us?” asked Laz.

  “He was watching over you at those Portals you were making, Laz,” said Ivy. “At least someone was. To leave you those messages.”

  “Whoever it was knew my name,” said Laz.

  “Do you think he haunts those places?” asked Ivy. “That you should go back there to make contact with him?”

  Nasty chuckled. “And when you find him, what will that accomplish? Hugs and kisses all around? If he wanted to be seen, if he could be seen, you’d have seen him already, wouldn’t you?”

  “That’s just ridiculous,” said Ivy, with her usual tact. “We didn’t see you because you didn’t want us to. As soon as you wanted us to, we did. Why would he be any different?”

  “Why is he hiding?” asked Nasty.

  “Why were you hiding?” demanded Ivy.

  “Our parents taught us to hide. And when I discovered strobing, making us invisible—”

  “You were doing it from infancy,” said Laz. “Your mother told us. Hard to discipline children who can disappear whenever they want.”

  “I mean when I understood what I was doing,” said Nasty. “And I told… Fecis, and he mastered the control of it, and then we could hide wherever we were.”

  “Hide from what?” asked Ivy.

  “All the attention,” said Nasty. “Like they got after discovering the great timestreams that safely contain the human race. Big things were expected from their children. People speculated, when it became known that we existed. Godlike powers. The ability to destroy Shiva with our thoughts. Or pull the original Earth back from the Sun and return there.”

  “No one in their right mind wants to return there,” said Laz. “We’ve got room to grow. If we all went back to Earth, there are already too many of us. And too many new quarrels and divisions. Which of the groups of Nigerians would get Nigeria?” asked Laz. “When there’s only one Palestine, who gets it, the Jews or the Arabs? Who gets Mecca? Who gets to control the Ganges? The Nile? What if all the Netherlander dikes had been breached so the Netherlands barely exists?”

  “All right,” said Nasty. “I didn’t say I believed what they were saying. And of course we can’t go back to the original Earth. Please don’t think you need to explain the obvious.”

  “I guess that if you didn’t write them,” said Laz, “you can’t tell us what those messages were given to us to prevent.”

  “Nasty,” said Ivy. “Is Fecis—a name I love for him—still going to mess with us?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? Just be grateful that he doesn’t like to repeat himself. Though he does try to escalate.”

  Laz laughed. “So it will never be the same assault again, but it’s definitely going to be worse.”

  “Here’s some good advice for you,” said Nasty. “Keep looking for OrigiLaz, or whoever your message writer really was. He’ll pop up sometime, because I think he craves center stage.”

  Ivy shook her head. “How do we even start looking for a person who may be dead or invisible or living in the future or the past?”

  “You pick one of those possibilities,” said Nasty, “and you think of experiments which, if they fail, would mean that the postulate is wrong.”

  “You’re still in college, aren’t you,” said Laz.

  “You’re younger than I am!” retorted Nasty.

  “I only meant that you still remember things like the scientific method and other philosophies.” Laz smiled. “I meant no disrespect, woman who strobes and can put a stone inside my body right where my heart used to be.”

  “I’m never going to use strobing to kill somebody,” said Nasty.

  Ivy pointed at Laz. “Before we start looking for an invisible man—”

  “Or a nonexistent one,” said Laz.

  “Maybe we should get Nasty to give us a few lessons in strobing,” said Ivy.

  “And you’ll give me lessons in—”

  “Scrying?” said Ivy. “Why don’t we take cooking lessons, too?”

  “I vote for figure drawing,” said Laz.

  “If you want to try to strobe, I can try to help you figure out whether you can strobe, and maybe even how. It takes a lot of concentration to get to a level of transparency that means you’re strobing.”

  “Would you do it naked,” asked Laz, “so I can draw you for figure drawing class?”

  “You have exactly the same genes as my father,” said Nasty. “So no, you aren’t going to see me naked or draw me naked or walk in on me in the shower. Is that clear?”

  “I was joking,” said Laz to Ivy.

  “So was Mumbo in my bed that morning,” said Ivy.

  “Just leave another note for me when you make up your mind about strobing lessons, fully dressed. And think of a private place to do this.” Nasty got up from the couch and headed for the door. “Thanks for not being mad at me for what I did. It was before I knew you were really on my side.”

  Laz didn’t bother correcting her. He and Ivy didn’t have a side, and therefore were not on hers.

  When Nasty was out the door, Laz turned to Ivy. “How long do you think she’ll stay friendly with us?”

  “I’m not sure she’s friendly now,” said Ivy.

  Laz led the way to his bedroom. As he was dropping his daytime clothes into two piles in front of the closet, he said, “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “What, using your floor as a laundry hamper?” asked Ivy.

  “That’s working fine,” said Laz. “I don’t think she can teach us to strobe.”

  “I don’t either,” said Ivy.

  “But we have to try, don’t we?” said Laz.

  “Just in case,” said Ivy.

  24

  THE NEXT MORNING, after another fine night of tossing and turning while trying to make mental diagrams of causality in a universe with an endlessly mutable past, Laz and Ivy sat down for breakfast.

  “Am I really supposed to believe,” asked Laz, “that entire new universes are created out of nothing every time people make choices that change the chain of causality on one little planet in an obscure solar system out on an unimportant galactic arm?”

  “You’re not supposed to believe anything,” said Ivy. “Believe what you believe is believable. Why are you complaining to me?”

  “I’m not complaining about you. I’m just having a hard time imagining that we live in such a hodgepodge of a universe. We are wasting muons and bosons and other particles at a prodigious rate, not because there need to be new copies of uninhabited planets, but because some butterfly in Fiji moved too slowly and got eaten by a frog. Assuming they have frogs in Fiji.”

  “Google it,” said Ivy.

  “Do you think that anything Nasty told us is, like, true?”

  “She didn’t tell us anything except that she didn’t leave us any messages.”

  “So the only reliable message we got from the Wonder Twins was Mumbo’s solo turn as the naked guy in your bed?” asked Laz.

  “Dim, I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “Suppose OrigiLaz disappeared because he wanted to swing among the timestreams like a trapeze artist, going backward and forward in time. And suppose we come to understand how he did it. Why would time travel be worth giving up our normal lives in our own time and disappearing?”

  “Maybe that’s what OrigiLaz meant when he gave you the message ‘Laz No.’ ”

  “Don’t follow him into time travel?”

  “It isn’t worth it,” said Ivy. “Don’t jump into the time-traveling boat because it will never bring you close enough to shore for you to jump out and swim home.”

  “So time travel is a boat, and time travelers are not acrobats. I’ll accept your analogies—not that you know any more than I do.”

  They settled down on the couch, as Laz flipped through channels with the TV muted. There were even more channels available than the cable or satellite or streaming systems offered back in the Old Place, but they all seemed to be reruns of movies from as far back as the early 1930s and TV shows from as far back as the early 1950s. Why wasn’t anybody making new shows and movies? Except for news programs, nothing was fresh. Is this time travel? We’re living in the past because nobody’s creating any new fictional worlds for us to escape into?

  “Laz,” said Ivy.

  He stopped flipping and looked at her. She didn’t call him Dim, so maybe she had something to say that wouldn’t make him seethe or brood.

  “I want to try time travel.”

  “Because you want me to disappear and never come back, like OrigiLaz did to Ivy-O?”

  “I think I might like to travel in time myself.”

  Laz thought about that for a few moments. “If it can be done, I have little doubt that you can do it.”

  “But?” asked Ivy.

  “But why?” asked Laz. “What are you going to accomplish by going into the past? Is there something you want to change? Even if we could undo some hideous atrocity—Columbus bringing Afrasian diseases into the Americas, Hitler’s holocaust, or some other monstrous thing—how could we control or even predict all the other changes that would come about? Maybe stopping one bad thing will cause a dozen worse things later on.”

  “I don’t want to change anything. If there’s anything rational about this universe, it shouldn’t be possible to change anything prior to our own origin, because it would cause us not to be born—not that we were born—I was speaking of OrigiLaz and Ivy-O, but if I remember it—”

  “Ivy, we’ve hashed this out before, and every time we discuss it, it makes me stupider.”

  “Laz, I don’t have any purpose in time traveling, I just want to perform a harmless little experiment to see if I can do it.”

  “You keep saying ‘I,’ my love, as if you plan to make the trip alone instead of handing our destination to me so I can go with you.”

  “It won’t be a side step, Laz. It’ll be a step forward or back. How can I hand that to you?”

  “The way you handed me the Portal to a distant location.”

  “It was only a few hundred meters away,” said Ivy.

  “Okay, a Portal to a nearby location that wasn’t the one we stepped from.”

  Ivy buried her face in her hands. “Do you think there’s some purpose for us to even exist?”

  “We make our own purposes.”

  “Yada yada, hunna munna,” said Ivy. “This extravagantly wasteful universe. Why do timestream-steppers and timestream-scryers exist at all? Why was OrigiLaz born with this amazing ability, why was Ivy-O born with a complementary talent, and now we’re the second pair of clones—”

  “That we know of.”

  “The second pair of clones who have a chance to change the world because we weren’t discarded in the box. Don’t try to throw up roadblocks, this conversation matters.”

  “I know it matters,” said Laz. “But so do all the assumptions we make that we don’t have any evidence for.”

  “Like you never make any unwarranted assumptions.”

  “Here’s a doozy, I think,” said Laz. “What if the first Laz and Ivy were born to get the human race from the Old Place to the New Place.”

  “And then the first pair of clones to get the human species from the New Place to the Safe Place, and to open the safe timestreams,” said Ivy.

  “And then us,” said Laz. “The ones with no purpose at all except to help an empire maintain control.”

  “Nothing like us has ever existed before.”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “And maybe after Nasty and Fecis there’ll be nobody who inherits any unusual powers.”

  “That’s exactly how I’m thinking,” said Laz. “We’re an anomaly. What brought us into being at exactly the first time in the history of the human race that our complete extinction was not just possible but unavoidable?”

  “You’re saying God? Made us to save humanity?”

  “Maybe the human race could sense the coming doom and, just when it was needed, exuded the kinds of anomalous people with just the right talents to save them all.”

  “Us all,” said Ivy. “We’re part of the human race, too.”

  “But are we?” asked Laz. “We’re something different and new.”

  At that moment he saw Mumbo seep into existence behind Ivy. Standing there as naked as before, with a stupid grin on his face.

  Laz already had a plan for this moment. He stuck out his hand and walked toward Mumbo, saying, “Greetings, nephew.”