* * *

  Their walk to the bus was uneventful and they did not converse. The bus was too crowded and noisy to talk so they didn’t try. Today a couple of people on the bus recognized them—or, rather, recognized the Zees, because the online pictures of them had been taken at about the ages Laz and Ivy were now.

  Laz thought of side stepping to a timestream where they were not recognized, but then decided not to. There was no way of knowing whether side stepping affected the whole world or just a bubble around Laz. And he didn’t want to create havoc for people he didn’t know existed and who would never blame him. Irresponsible. And unnecessary.

  Most of my side stepping all my life has been to create petty advantages or eliminate minor nuisances. Only a few times did it matter to anyone. Not even to me. Getting my teacher to change her opinion of my answer on an essay test, changing a B to a B+. Which had no effect on my final course grade and no effect on my life, but if I had talked to her and persuaded her to see the merit in my answer, I might have gained a skill and she would have been a better teacher. Which she needed. Instead I found a timestream where she had already decided my answer was acceptable. So I learned nothing, she learned nothing. Story of my life.

  By now, walking from the bus to their house, they could speak—but at first, it wasn’t about the meeting with Ron.

  “You have that look that you get when you’re beating yourself up about something,” said Ivy.

  “That’s—I don’t have a ‘look,’ that’s just crap psychology.”

  “Quite possibly,” said Ivy. “I’ve been wrong before. But you have that look. So without knowing the topic of your self-disgust, I will remind you that you are a good, kind person who goes to great lengths to undo his mistakes that cause harm. You have often chosen to side step, not just for your own benefit, but for the benefit of others, including dogs—”

  “That was Z-Laz,” said Laz.

  “If you remember it…”

  “Ivy, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but it’s not necessary. Yes, at the exact moment you saw me with ‘that face,’ I was in fact deploring my worthlessness. And by reminding me of what I already knew—that I have sometimes used my talent to do good things for the world—”

  “Such as saving it,” said Ivy. “Billions of people.”

  “We found the timestreams—”

  “You found the timestreams,” said Ivy.

  “Everything good that I did, I did with you, with your help and your… guidance. You guided me. Thank you.”

  “It hurts, doesn’t it,” said Ivy, “to find out that despite all your hopes and dreams and plans, you’re playing a secondary role in your own life.”

  Laz was stung by this, but he knew the sting came from its truthfulness.

  “Laz,” said Ivy, “I feel like that all the time.”

  It took only a moment for him to realize what she was saying. “Ivy, I’m not the star of your life.”

  “And I’m not the star of yours,” she answered. “We’re co-stars.”

  “We’re being seriously overpaid,” said Laz. “Since in effect we have all the money in the world.”

  “Considerably less. Our tastes are modest. I don’t like caviar—”

  “And I’ve never tried it.”

  “If you like the fedor and flavor of undercooked old dead fish—”

  “You’ve actually tasted that?”

  “I had a high school friend whose mother was taking a sushi-making class and she put on a dinner for us.”

  Laz laughed. “Obviously you recovered.”

  “I’m very smell-sensitive,” said Ivy. “I found out that I can never eat the seaweed crap they wrap it all in, I can never eat the caviar on top, I don’t like the horseradish they pretend is wasabi, and if I ever have sushi again, it will be done by a pro in a ten-star restaurant.”

  “Michelin stars never went up that high.”

  “Then I won’t be eating sushi any time soon.”

  “So our diet in Greensboro wasn’t the worst stuff you ever ate.”

  “I’ll take cooked and bland tuna over rancid and decomposing raw tuna any day.”

  “Ivy, you’re the star of my life,” said Laz. “And I’m glad of it.”

  “Well, I don’t like having you as the star of mine,” said Ivy, “because my ego needs are off the charts.”

  Laz chuckled. “Well, now, that’s the keenest insight I’ve ever had into the behavior of Ivy-O in the few years we’ve known her.”

  “Yes, she’s me without any stabilizing influence in her life. See what I’m missing out on, because of your influence?”

  “Ivy, we undid Mumbo’s destruction and maybe his destructiveness as well,” said Laz. “We’ve now found out that nobody we know sent us the messages, and that nobody but a side stepper or a strober could have left those messages.”

  “And we don’t know if those messages were meant to control us and the Zees, or to save us from some dire fate,” said Ivy.

  “So are we investigating our own guardian angels?” asked Laz.

  “If I have one,” said Ivy, “she’s lazy.”

  “I don’t think you have anything to complain about. Besides, how would clones get guardian angels? How would clones get souls?”

  “Who says we have such weightless things?” asked Ivy.

  “Somebody sent us messages. Somebody knew exactly where I’d be on a trackless mountainside and was there to scratch a message, and even I didn’t know where I was going that day.”

  “We’re back to a time traveler,” said Ivy.

  “I think we have to rethink the impossibility of it,” said Laz.

  “The message-writer knows what we and the Zees will do before we do it. Before we know we’re going to do it.”

  “But what’s his agenda?” asked Laz. “He could go back in time and change anything, but he changes us?”

  “Is he preventing us from causing harm?” asked Ivy.

  “He certainly didn’t try to stop the Zees from saving the world after the New Place turned out to be a bad deal,” said Laz. “So it’s not like he thinks we’re a totally negative influence on history.”

  “I’m glad he’s in favor of our allowing the human species to continue.”

  They were still standing on the front porch. Laz sat down on the top step and looked up and down the street. Not heavily trafficked—at this time of day, few pedestrians, few neighbors working their gardens. The bus ran only on request, though it covered the same route every time. During the day, privacy was nearly perfect.

  Except Nasty or Mumbo or both could be watching them, or hiding to listen to their conversation. If Laz went looking for them, they’d just disappear, dematerialize so he could walk right through them in their hiding place without ever knowing. Or the two strobers might have decided he and Ivy knew too much and had to die—and there’d be no preventing them.

  Mumbo and Nasty would never have needed to leave messages. Why did he think it might have been them? Once they showed up and started talking, it was clear they had no problem dealing with people. If they had a message, they would never scratch notes in the dirt, and besides, the earliest message was to the Zees, which got them to stop working with Ron before their children were even teenagers. It was ludicrous to think that Nasty and Mumbo could have had anything to do with the message their parents got.

  “I think,” said Ivy, “that we went down the rabbit hole with Mumbo and Nasty because their powers were so astonishing that we wanted a reason to explore them.”

  “I hate psychology.”

  “Aside from all the made-up nonsense in the early days, Laz, the key insight of psychology was that people do things for reasons they don’t understand. But it’s not the devil taking possession of them, and it’s not an angel urging them to be brave, to do right. It’s their own selves, unconsciously assessing things better than their conscious minds possibly could.”

  “How?” asked Laz. “Since you’re the mind reader.”

  “Don’t I wish,” said Ivy. “Except your mind. I never want to read yours.”

  “Don’t want to explore all my lustful thoughts?”

  “Don’t want to know why you resist them so faithfully.”

  “Ivy, you were making a point. I asked you how people’s unconscious minds can make better decisions than their conscious minds can make. That seems counterintuitive.”

  “More data,” said Ivy.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Laz.

  “The unconscious mind has more data. And sorts it out better. It knows everything the conscious mind knows. But it also knows the things that never reached the conscious mind. Like other people’s body language, so you have a hunch about what they’re thinking but you don’t know why, except it turns out to be right.”

  “That happens to me, like, never,” said Laz.

  “Happens to everybody all the time. Your unconscious mind is making decisions that your conscious mind never hears about, it just obeys, and to you it seems like you thought of something to do and you did it. Nothing deep and mysterious.”

  “So our unconscious mind makes a lot of observations we’re not aware of,” said Laz.

  “You knew that, of course. You’ve read books.”

  “Not enough of them, apparently,” said Laz.

  “Laz, even though you punched Mumbo, you didn’t know how it would affect him.”

  “He was softer than I thought.”

  “Your fist went deeper than you thought. Our messenger, why didn’t he warn you? Or warn Mumbo? He must have seen what happened, he must have—”

  “Ivy,” said Laz, “why would he have been watching us during that time?”

  Ivy shrugged. “Well, that would explain why he didn’t prevent it.”

  “Or because of our talents, and your creativity, nothing really bad came out of it so he didn’t feel a need to prevent it.”

  “We don’t know what rules he’s bound by. How well he can control his journeys up and down time.” Ivy put her hand on Laz’s knee. “We don’t know his capabilities except he can write messages, and he has foreknowledge of things nobody could know.”

  “And we don’t know his motives, what he’s trying to achieve, and how we play into his plans.”

  “He might be done with us,” said Ivy, “for all we know. He did all that he intends to do with us, and it’s done, and he has no further interest in us.”

  Laz said, “But you don’t believe that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  “No,” said Ivy.

  “You don’t believe it because I don’t believe it. He wanted to establish a relationship with us, build up our trust. Has it worked?”

  Ivy shrugged. “I’m not dreading an encounter with him. I’m not fearful of what he’ll do to us.”

  “That’s something. He’s partway there.”

  “Or she?” asked Ivy.

  “Come on,” said Laz. “You know it’s a he.”

  “Women can’t scratch messages? Can’t figure out time travel?”

  “We know that the time traveler, if he exists at all, is my original. Lazarus Hayerian, who took off decades ago, leaving his Ivy to bear the brunt of suspicion about whether she killed him or deliberately lost him.”

  “They weren’t in love,” said Ivy.

  “Agreed,” said Laz. “So you know that I would never abandon you.”

  “Unless you had no choice,” said Ivy.

  “I would never—”

  “If I was hit by a bus,” said Ivy, “I’d be gone. If you had a piano land on your head, you’d be gone.”

  “Why are we both going to have slapstick deaths?” asked Laz.

  “Just thinking up examples of how we might abandon each other,” said Ivy.

  “With our talents, I think you could dodge a bus,” said Laz.

  “And no piano would ever land on you,” said Ivy.

  “It would never dare,” said Laz.

  “So maybe our messenger, our guardian angel, is your original,” said Ivy.

  “I’m his clone, but I am nothing to him, he’s not my anything.”

  “Possibly true. Certainly Ivy-O has wasted no love on me,” said Ivy.

  “How can we get him to talk to us?” asked Laz.

  “Messages?”

  “That works for getting new books from Ron’s team,” said Laz. “But we don’t know when or where he’ll come by.”

  “How old do you think he is?” asked Ivy.

  “When was he born?”

  “If he cut himself off from time, is he in some kind of limbo where time doesn’t—”

  “Ivy,” said Laz. “It has been an exact number of years since he disappeared, I don’t remember how long, but since that time an exact number of seconds has elapsed. He may not be tied to any one timestream now, but his body is still ticking away the seconds, the heartbeats, the friction within joints, the weakening of his senses—he is getting old at exactly the same rate he would have if he had stayed with Ivy-O all along.”

  “You’re saying that time travel doesn’t mean you don’t carry time around with you,” said Ivy. “Inside our bodies, we still have a clock… that’s winding down.”

  “That makes sense to me,” said Laz. “But I know of no way to verify it except to meet OrigiLaz.”

  “That’s our priority now, isn’t it?”

  “Since we’re human and we have to do something, and Disneyland hasn’t been rebuilt here—”

  “Yet,” said Ivy. “There’ll be at least one in every timestream.”

  “We have to do something, we’re not going to pass the time at a carnival or a movie house, so we might as well be figuring out some way to contact OrigiLaz.”

  “I agree. But we still don’t have any better ideas about where to begin,” said Ivy.

  “Maybe he already began the contact. Maybe instead of a dirt epistle, Ivy-O got a visit from the man himself.”

  “If she hasn’t told us before,” said Ivy, “why would she tell us now?”

  “Or maybe he contacted the Zees, or just one of them. Maybe they’ve seen him, and that’s the real reason why they retired from helping Ron. It might have taken more than an anonymous note in the dirt to get them to go on strike.”

  “So you think we should start by questioning all the principals, to see who’s been holding out on us,” said Ivy.

  “If anyone.”

  “Right,” said Ivy.

  “This is just a guess,” said Laz, “but not a stupid one. Even if it’s wrong, it’s not stupid.”

  Ivy smiled and patted his shoulder reassuringly. Her sarcasm could be infuriating.

  27

  AFTER THEY VISITED with the other Laz and Ivy, and with Ivy-O, they began to think that maybe it had been a stupid idea. The reason they’d never told anybody about their contact with OrigiLaz, all three insisted, again, was that it had never happened. If OrigiLaz had been the one leaving messages, that’s as much contact as he wanted. Or maybe he had limitations so he couldn’t.

  If he could make personal contact with people in this timestream, in these timestreams, then he’d have to be a complete turd not to make contact with Ivy-O and ease her mind. But the very fact that her mind was never at ease made it pretty clear that there had been no reassuring contact.

  The only good thing about interviewing—no, visiting and chatting with—Ivy-O was that Laz finally had the gumption to ask about her puzzling behavior in all the timestreams they had visited together, searching for one that did not have Shiva in it. When they opened a Portal and the technicians came through to search the sky, Laz would help them awhile, then explore a little, his mind always full of thoughts and plans and fears and loneliness. But Ivy-O would walk around examining plants, and now and then she’d pull a leaf or two from a plant and put it in her pocket.

  “What were those leaves for?” Laz asked her.

  Ivy-O looked at Ivy. “Don’t you know?”

  Ivy smiled wanly. “Mother Ivy, I have never understood anything you did.”

  Ivy-O pretended to glare at Laz. “Why haven’t you been calling me Mother Ivy all this time? That’s far better than Ivy-O, which makes me feel as if I’m trapped in a sea shanty.”

  “Dodging my question, I see,” said Laz. “I’ll happily call you Mother Ivy if you’ll just tell me the truth without my having to beg.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” said Ivy-O, “I’ve never told you the truth.”

  That statement lingered in the silence it caused.

  Ivy-O finally spoke again. “I haven’t lied to you, either. It’s just that ‘truth’ is very large, far larger than language, big as that is. I don’t know how to put all that’s in my mind and heart into words, and so I don’t. I tell you only what I know how to say.”

  “Very mystical,” said Ivy. Laz could tell she had tried to keep snottiness and sarcasm out of her voice, and almost succeeded.

  “It is mystical,” said Ivy-O. “As I’m heading toward being old, I’m less and less sure of things I used to be certain of. I gave up religion long ago, but now it’s creeping back. No matter how often I stomp on it, like an infestation of cockroaches there are three to take the place of every one I kill.”

  “Is there one religion you favor?” asked Ivy. She seemed genuinely curious.

  “I have narrowed it down considerably, thank you for asking. I have decided that I believe in God, in a deistic way. And in a monotheistic way. Don’t care about his or her gender, if he has any, but I think of him as he and figure she won’t be offended if I guessed wrong.”

  “A monotheist and a deist,” said Ivy. “I’m not mocking when I say that that’s an awful lot of progress.”

  “I don’t even know how I reached those conclusions. Maybe it’s some remnant of the Judeo-Christian worldview.”

  “Mother Ivy,” said Ivy, “that is exactly the conclusion I reached when I was eleven and I’ve held on to ever since.”

  Ivy-O looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Really?” she asked. “I didn’t remember. Why did it all feel so new when I realized it?”

  For a moment, nobody had an answer.