“Any time,” Ivy-Z answered. Then she corrected herself. “From now on, every time.”

  28

  “THE PROBLEM,” SAID Laz, “is that the timestreams aren’t physical. They have no real geography.”

  “Oh, is that the problem? Well, now everything is clear,” said Ivy. She yawned.

  “Sorry to be boring,” said Laz.

  “Well it is boring, hours at a time, day after day, brainstorming some of the stupidest ideas ever thought of by a human mind.”

  “I doubt the Guinness Book of World Records would consider us as having fully human minds,” said Laz.

  “Get over it. We’re clones, we’re legally human, we look human, we wear human clothes—”

  “And we look better in them than most actual people,” said Laz.

  “Did you mean me or you?” asked Ivy.

  “I can’t be sure,” he said. “I have never seen you without clothes, so I’m not sure you look best in clothes at all.”

  To Laz’s relief, she did not mention the tiny glimpse he had of her nude form in very bad light in a grow-box in Greensboro. She had held that over his head for a long time, but taunting him about it had apparently lost its appeal for her.

  “You’re all talk, sir,” said Ivy. “Now explain ‘the problem’ to me.”

  “Maybe it’s just the way that we talk about it,” said Laz, “but we say, ‘Why not grab onto the timestream nearer to the bottom,’ or ‘What if we braid the timestreams together.’ ”

  “Those didn’t work,” said Ivy.

  “They couldn’t work,” said Laz, “because even though we talk as if all the timestreams hang from some infinitely high ceiling like stringy Spanish moss, they have no physical reality and that’s just the way we conceive them. We talk about you handing me a timestream but you don’t hand me anything, you cause it to be emphasized in the group of timestreams, and it isn’t highlighted or separated, it just seems to throb.”

  “Throb? Isn’t that physical?”

  “It’s the emphasis, the stress you put on it. I throb inside when you hand it to me, and I accept it by synching up with the throbbing.”

  “So the beat is physically real,” said Ivy.

  “It seems physically real because my body goes into sympathetic vibration—”

  “Your whole body?” asked Ivy.

  Laz thought about it, and realized the vibration he felt seemed to radiate from his crotch. Not his genitals. It just sort of buzzed in his butt. How was he going to explain it?

  “I don’t want to answer that question.”

  “You’re so cute when you blush.”

  “But not particularly manly, right?” said Laz.

  “Do you feel it in your crotch?” asked Ivy.

  “In my butt.”

  “The sensation of selecting a timestream also causes my backside to tingle,” said Ivy.

  “So to summarize our amazing discovery,” said Laz, “the timestreams aren’t things, they aren’t hanging anywhere, we don’t take them and move them around, and when you present me with a timestream you’ve chosen, what we feel is a trembling or vibration—”

  “We’re using a sense that has never been described,” said Ivy, “that may never have been felt before us. I think it matters that in our very different bodies, this trembling heat comes to the same place.”

  “I already had a use for that part of my body,” said Laz.

  Ivy held up her hand. “Enough with anatomical investigation,” she said. “When you accept a timestream from me, is that the step? You just side step by taking it? Or do you accept it and then as a separate action you side step.”

  Laz nodded. “Got to gather more data. It feels like one motion to me because I trust you and I don’t hesitate to use the stream you give me.”

  “I’ll hand you a timestream that doesn’t have us in it,” said Ivy, “but in a place that nobody can see and nothing will hurt us.”

  She did. He felt the normal tingling and he accepted it. Or thought he did.

  “Take it,” she said.

  “I’m trying so hard not to side step at the same time that I can’t do anything.”

  “Then go ahead and side step immediately, but keep track of what it feels like.”

  It was a pretty intense experiment, because first, he had a devilish time distinguishing the acceptance of the emphasized timestream and making the step, though he began to find more clarity with each repetition.

  Then she said, “Laz, try leaving me here. Don’t take me. But please do come back.”

  “I want to take you with me.”

  “But maybe it isn’t good for the experiment. Maybe keeping it to side stepping a single person, you—”

  “Got it,” said Laz.

  But it was still another half hour and they were both exhausted. “I have an idea,” said Ivy. “Let’s nap.”

  “Good plan,” said Laz. “But you were right about transporting only myself. Everything is clearer. Though I feel lonely.”

  They went each to their own bed and slept. Laz didn’t set an alarm; Ivy set one on her watch.

  She ended up waking him when it was getting dark outside. Laz sat up, groggy but eager to get to work. He noticed the sky through his window.

  “Thunderstorm, plus it’s getting close to sundown,” Ivy explained. “And there’s a tornado watch for this area.”

  “Might be a good time to side step somewhere and stay there. Do we get analogous weather in the different timestreams?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  Laz thought for a moment. “Sometimes I side step from sunny to rainy. Sometimes from rain to snow. Sometimes from windy to still.”

  “So… not the same.”

  “But sometimes it’s rain to rain, snow to snow.”

  “The climates are analogous,” said Ivy, “but the weather isn’t.”

  “So wherever we step to, it might be muggy or windy but it might not have tornados. That’ll do.”

  “I can’t tell before we go what the weather is, beyond pounding rain. I can sense that.”

  “Better than I can do,” said Laz. “But I should take you with me.”

  “How would that help?” asked Ivy. “It didn’t before.”

  “I don’t mean, take you on every side step, I mean, we both go to a place without a tornado watch, and then I do my side stepping, alone, from there.”

  A tornado did touch down near their house while they were away, practicing, but when they side stepped home, the house was still standing, though a few plants had been torn out and a neighbor’s house had lost its roof when a tree toppled into it.

  “Sucks to be them,” said Laz softly.

  “Laz,” said Ivy. “Was anybody hurt?”

  “How would I know?”

  “By examining up the timestream,” said Ivy. “Their baby was rushed to the hospital.”

  Laz nodded solemnly. “That’s bad.”

  “Laz,” said Ivy, “can we side step to a timestream where the tree didn’t fall on the house?”

  Laz laughed. “I was standing here like a civilian, thinking, that’s so sad, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Side step so we can live in the version of this timestream in which the tornado didn’t do so much damage.”

  “Find it and I’ll take us there.”

  “No,” said Ivy. “You look, too. You need to extend your sense of the streams to be more like mine.”

  “I’m content for you to be better than me.”

  “So what happens when I’m maimed and dying, and I can’t give you the timestream where I’m fine? Who’s going to locate it then?”

  Laz nodded and searched very quickly. Tornados were so whimsical that no two timestreams were identical. Laz picked one that seemed right.

  “Why not go for one where their roof stays on, too?” asked Ivy.

  “So show me that one,” said Laz.

  “Do your own homework, Dim,” she said.

  He found a timestream like the one she described, and brought her with him when he side stepped.

  The house across the street was fine. No problems. The tornado had knocked down the same tree, but it had fallen harmlessly onto a space between two houses and injured nobody but, perhaps, some squirrels.

  “No, Dim,” said Ivy. “The squirrels were all blown out of the tree before the tornado sucked it out of the ground.”

  “Seems hard on the squirrels,” said Laz.

  “Don’t use your stepping to try to save squirrels. Maybe they lived through it. Or if they didn’t, wherever their furry little corpses landed they’ll provide food for worms that will become wonderful houseflies someday.”

  “You really make me see the positive side of life, my love,” said Laz.

  “The glass is half full, but the water is toxic,” said Ivy.

  “That’s my girl,” said Laz.

  They worked some more, and they both thought they had made progress, getting what Laz and Ivy did together under their deliberate control. They realized that what they had done before was crude, like throwing beanbags onto a two-by-four. Well, no—that would require dexterity. It was more like throwing beanbags at a barn door. You hit the big target every time, but with no control over where on the door it would strike.

  Now they were getting some finesse, and Laz could tell almost perfectly when he held the timestream, and then could delay, while holding it, until he wanted to side step.

  “How does it feel while you’re holding it?” asked Ivy.

  “Very… distracting. The buzzing, the trembling. I’m eager to side step because that’s what gives me relief. But it’s not painful. Just distracting.”

  “Okay, my wise and wonderful celibate lover,” said Ivy. “While you’re holding the stream, can you do anything else with it?”

  That was the million-dollar question. “I’ve never been very good at—”

  She interrupted him. “The timestream. While you’re holding it.”

  And that turned out to be a week of trying different things. It really mattered what metaphor he was thinking of, because he needed his body to be able to do things it was never designed to do. Like trying to wiggle your ears when you’ve never learned how.

  Am I supposed to climb up the timestream? Or reel it in to pick a different spot on it? He tried to bring off both motions, but he had no idea how to do it, what with the timestreams being completely insubstantial and impossible to grasp in any physical way.

  They tried so many ideas. But the metaphor that finally helped him was to clench his thigh muscles together as if he were doing a rope climb up the timestream and the rope was between his legs. Then, still holding tight with his thighs, Laz felt himself take the stream into his chest, neck, and head, and with his mind, cause the timestream to move incrementally up or down inside his body.

  And when he came out of it, when he completed his side step at last, it was half an hour after he had begun the trial. Ivy was sitting on the couch with the television on.

  She saw him and jumped to her feet, ran to him, hugged him. “I’m so glad you’re back!”

  “How long was it?” he asked.

  “You stepped about a half hour into the future.”

  “Felt like no time at all to me,” said Laz.

  “You just vanished,” said Ivy. “I thought I had lost you the way Mother Ivy lost the Professor.” Ivy led him to the couch. “Tell me what you actually did.”

  So he did. He had to explain some bits several times, and then she finally said, “I want to try.”

  “It’s like I only moved the timestream an inch,” he told her.

  “I’ll be careful. I’ll move it less than an inch.”

  “And pull it up from below,” said Laz. “You’re not actually climbing, because ‘up’ is the past and down is the future.”

  “Then I should try the past,” said Ivy.

  “I know you won’t,” said Laz.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because you haven’t already arrived here from the future.”

  Ivy winced. “I’ve been calling the wrong person Dim,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “There’s nobody in this house deserves to be called Dim.”

  “Are you getting the idea,” said Ivy, “that time travel really is possible?”

  “No!” shouted a man.

  They turned at once and saw a much older version of Laz standing near the front door.

  “I think it’s the Professor,” said Ivy.

  “ ‘No’ what?” Laz asked their visitor. The Professor.

  “I was afraid of this,” said the Professor. “I… please don’t take any more time trips. The one you just did, it was still safe, but it’s not very far before you get to the terrible place.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Where you can’t stop moving up and down,” said the Professor. “Where you can’t get off.”

  “You’re certainly off now,” said Ivy.

  “Because I’m here.”

  “In our house?”

  “In the place in the timestreams where I actually belong. Where I would be if I hadn’t time traveled.”

  “So you can stay here?”

  “For a while. It isn’t exact. I’m always a little bit off and the time starts to slide away and then I’m gone.”

  “Then let’s use the time we have,” said Ivy.

  “You look thin,” said Laz. “I’ve never been that thin.”

  “I don’t get many chances to stop long enough to eat. I live by stealing food from kitchens or bakeries as I’m passing through. I can pause long enough to grab a bagel or a scone.”

  “Man shall not live by bread alone,” intoned Ivy.

  “I’m making you a sandwich. Am I correct in thinking that your favorite is tuna salad with mustard?” said Laz.

  “On pumpernickel,” said the Professor.

  “We don’t have any in the house.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t like it yet when I was your age.”

  Laz busied himself mixing up mayonnaise with canned tuna.

  Meanwhile, Ivy was grilling the Professor on what they might do to help him get off the conveyor belt of time travel. He had no ideas.

  “If you get torn away from us,” Ivy asked, “can you get back here?”

  “Yes,” said the Professor. “But the fine tuning is hard. I think I’m coming right back here, but it’s a week later than I thought. Or a month.”

  “We’ll be patient,” said Ivy.

  “I won’t!” said Laz, putting the finished sandwiches in a paper bag. “I can’t believe you haven’t asked him yet! Professor, did you scratch out the messages we found? The warnings?”

  The Professor looked puzzled. “Messages?”

  29

  LAZ AND IVY told the Professor about the messages, and why they thought it might have been him writing them.

  “Why wouldn’t I have just told you to your face?” asked the Professor. “I tracked your jumping between timestreams, but you were more accomplished than I ever was. And I was shy about exposing my weaknesses to you. I know you both call yourselves Laz, but I haven’t used that name since high school.”

  “What name did you use?” asked Ivy.

  “Doctor Hayerian. Professor Hayerian.”

  “Straight from high school?”

  “Yes,” said the Professor. “College only took me a few minutes one afternoon.”

  “Cute,” said Ivy, “and not true. Can we get to something serious here?”

  “Don’t travel in time,” said the Professor. “There’s nothing to gain, and you can lose your life. I’m not dead, but what I’ve been doing is not living.”

  “Rules,” said Laz. “Time travel rules, we need them. Paradoxes, like, don’t meet yourself in the past. Or the future.”

  “Well, meeting a clone isn’t meeting myself, is it, Laz,” said the Professor.

  “What happens if you do it?” asked Laz. “Meet yourself?”

  “How would I know?” asked the Prof. “I was not trying to kill myself.”

  “Kill yourself?” said Ivy.

  “The math I was working on before I had Ivy—my Ivy—”

  “We call her Mother Ivy,” said Laz.

  “She’s not my mother,” said the Prof.

  “It’s an honorific,” said Ivy. “But you won’t be seeing her, will you?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Prof. “Are you planning on her visiting? How far away does she live?”

  “Too far,” said Laz. “Why would meeting yourself in some other time kill you?”

  “The universe stretches itself pretty far just to let the atoms and molecules in my body exist in two places at the same time. So when I pass through times in my own life, I cause waves to form arcs between my two bodies, the one that I’m traveling in, and, you know, the old one.”

  “They aren’t the same molecules,” said Laz. “Your body changes out all the molecules every five years. Seven years, right, Ivy?”

  “That’s a rule of thumb,” said Ivy. “How would anybody do the science on that? Who takes a roll call of the individual molecules? It’s an estimate.”

  “When you die,” said the Prof, “I estimate that three percent of your molecules are the same ones you had by age ten. Younger than that, you’re still assembling your body for the first time. When you’re twenty, five percent the same. If those molecules come close to their time-traveling doppelganger—”

  “Boom?” asked Ivy.

  “That would be dramatic. I just think that there’s a gradual annihilation of all those molecule pairs until they disappear. Do you think you could survive the disappearance of five percent of your substance?”

  “I’ve never had to diet,” said Ivy.

  “I know—knew—some women who would have wanted to kill you for saying that,” said the Prof.

  “So you stay away from yourself,” said Laz. “Stay out of your hometown, and like that.”

  “That’s the odd thing,” said the Prof. “I don’t make even the slightest effort to avoid it, not consciously. I’ve been in the same town with myself, but never in the same place. I’m not sure how big a ‘place’ is in that equation, but it’s less than a mile and more than a kilometer. Not that the universe cares about our units of measure.”