“Fitfully,” said Laz. “Every time I woke up, I felt stupider and stupider for the idiotic things I said to her.”

  “Apparently you and she share that assessment of your decision to break up with her.”

  “No! That’s not what I intended at all!” said Laz.

  “Really? What did you intend?” asked the robot.

  “I wanted us to fall in love the way we did the first time, gradually, coming to know each other as strangers and then friends.”

  “Not possible,” said the robot. “She remembers you too well to pretend to be a stranger again.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know what she told me.”

  “So I’m really conversing with her, is that it?”

  “Not at all. You’re conversing with me, a fairly competent roboticist, and I’m relaying to you what she said to me and then authorized me to pass on to you.”

  “So she said other things that you’re not telling me,” said Laz.

  “Please recognize the limits of my nonphotographic memory,” said MIT.

  “Please recognize the limits of my nonelastic patience,” said Laz, trying to sound unemotional and contained.

  MIT held out her arms and, unable to resist that all-too-human gesture, Laz stepped into her embrace, laid his head on her shoulder, and wept.

  “Now now,” said MIT. “Now now.”

  Laz pulled himself together long enough to ask, “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Those are generalized comfort words. I had a mother. That’s what she said when I cried.”

  “So you’re mothering me,” said Laz.

  “Yes,” said MIT. “That falls within my assignment. I’ll get academic credit for this, since it’s not irrelevant to programming a robot to simulate and respond to human emotions.”

  “I think you should be flunked,” said Laz.

  “You cried on my shoulder, was that not proof of my effectiveness?”

  “Every word you say sounds like you memorized it from a flash card,” said Laz.

  “And what would be wrong with that, if I had done so?”

  “It’s not working,” said Laz.

  “Are you still crying on my shoulder?” asked MIT.

  “I stopped because your mechanistic response to me was so infuriating.”

  “So my words and actions got you to start crying in my motherly embrace, and then to overwhelm your sorrow and regret with anger—at me.”

  “Well, I’m calm now,” said Laz. “Not angry, not grieving.”

  “Let me put this kindly: bullshit,” said MIT. “You’re still on the edge of tears, and you’re still wishing I were a man so you could punch me.”

  “If you want your Taumaton to avoid getting decked, or shot, you’ll program it never to talk like you.”

  “Thanks for the feedback. I’m guessing that since ‘now now’ only made you angry, I’d do just as poorly with ‘there there.’ ”

  “You can put that on a flash card.”

  MIT’s hands, still wrapped around him, began stroking his back, not lightly enough to tickle, not strongly enough to become a massage. “Think of other things,” said the MIT student. She pressed herself to him more closely, held him more tightly. He could feel her breasts now, pressing against his chest. He realized that her hands were touching him erotically—still on his back, but the exact amount of pressure to assert physical affection.

  He started to pull away. “No,” he said.

  She did not let go of him. Instead, now that he had pulled back a little, she reached up one hand and tipped his head downward toward her face and kissed him, gently, firmly, her tongue tasting his lips, and he felt his body respond to this erotic gambit.

  “No,” he said fiercely. “Are you a trollop now? Is that part of your study?”

  “Ron Smith instructed me to see if I could take your mind off of Ivy.”

  “It didn’t work,” said Laz. “Because she’s the only one I want doing to me whatever it is you’re doing to me.”

  “When I program Taumaton, I will make sure it behaves exactly as I have just behaved.”

  Laz tore himself away from her, which took so much force that he lost his balance and fell back onto the floor.

  She stood over him. “Here’s my real assignment,” she said. “To see if I could get you to side step away from me.”

  “This was a test to see if I’d side step?” Laz said, incredulous.

  “Unfortunately, we still don’t know whether you can. And if you can’t, you’re no good to Central Time as a Portal-maker.”

  “And that’s why I don’t want to try,” said Laz.

  “Because you don’t want to help us after all,” said MIT.

  “Because I don’t know if I can, and I don’t want to find out that I can’t.” Laz was on the verge of tears again.

  “Is that also the reason why you have pulled away from Ivy?” asked MIT. “Because that sounds plausible. If you can’t side step, you don’t want her to despise you. So you’ve been preemptively trying to lose her love for you before that test happens.”

  “Physics, that’s what robotics is about, right?”

  “Robotics is about everything. We’ve abandoned the ridiculous idea of true artificial intelligence, but we need our simulations to be at least as effective as an ordinary human being. I think I’ve dealt with you rather better than average.”

  “Do you expect me to congratulate you on the excellence of your manipulation?”

  “Aren’t you glad that my assignment wasn’t to get you to fall in love with me?”

  Laz fell silent. Could she have done it? She had made a decent start of it when he was in her embrace. What if she had made him believe she was sincere? Could she have made him want to be disloyal to Ivy? What was this young woman?

  Smarter than me, thought Laz. OrigiLaz was reputed to be one of the smartest scientists in human history, but if I have his genes and his are no better than mine, we’ve just been bested by a robotics grad student.

  He opened his eyes, about to say something, though he still had no idea what, when he realized that she had left.

  Laz fought down the mad impulse to follow her and apologize for rebuffing her. But he realized that she was so detached and manipulative that he couldn’t possibly have hurt her feelings. Her smug superiority in bragging that she could have made him love her was so annoying and offensive that, compared to her, he had nothing to apologize for.

  No, the person he wanted to apologize to was Ivy, and she wasn’t here.

  Could I side step to a reality where I acted only on my feelings for Ivy, and not at all on my fear that we were really just machines for acting out implanted memories and desires? Or was MIT right, and my real fear was that I couldn’t side step, that this time cloning hadn’t brought OrigiLaz’s abilities along with his memories.

  What am I afraid of? he asked himself. Either I can side step or I can’t. He imagined himself side stepping into a timeline very close to this one. And he imagined that when he entered the body of the Laz Hayerian who lived in that timestream, he would find himself naked on the floor with MIT, trying to enrobe her entirely with his body, because in this reality it was her assignment to make him fall in love with her and betray Ivy.

  Not going to side step right now. Soon. I know I can still do it. I catch glimpses of other timestreams, I can go to that place—or get to that inner state—where I can sense all the nearby timestreams, and range further and further through them.

  If I wanted to, I could take any one of these timestreams and step into it.

  What if I took four at once? Could I? Would it tear me into quarters? Blow me to smithereens? Blow up all four versions of myself in the other timestreams? Or maybe enter into only one, as if I had taken that timestream and no others?

  If I haven’t side stepped since I woke up, why am I fantasizing about doing even more extravagantly impossible things?

  Why hadn’t he side stepped as soon as he understood just how much he had hurt Ivy? That would show how much he regretted what he had said, wouldn’t it? She would know he had stepped, and she would understand the change, even if it didn’t erase his words from last night.

  “But I’m done with that,” whispered Laz. No more side stepping to evade the consequences of his own bad decisions. He could open passages between timestreams to save other people, to avoid planetary disasters, but no more hiding from his own responsibility.

  He hurt Ivy, and he would live with that and try to make this timestream lead to healing between them. And if that never happened, then this selfish rift he’d created between them was what he deserved.

  “Losing her is what I deserve,” he murmured. “I made my bed and I will toss and turn and writhe in it, perpetually lonely and filled with regret.”

  My self-pity really knows no bounds, thought Laz. I’m trying to make a tragedy out of stupid mistakes. I don’t deserve some epic in which my fatal flaw undoes me.

  “Ivy, I’m so sorry,” he said. “If you know what I’m feeling, I’m sorry, I was wrong. I love you.”

  If she sensed what he was feeling, she gave him no sign. She could have pushed toward him a timestream in which he hadn’t said any of that nonsense to her—there were so many streams in which he had not made those stupid choices. It might signal to him that she forgave him, or could forgive him eventually.

  But there was no timestream entering his mind, offering itself to him as a gift from her.

  She’s asleep. She didn’t sleep last night, he told himself. She can’t offer me a conciliatory timestream in her sleep.

  He got up from the floor of the corridor and made his way downstairs to the café, where an entire breakfast buffet had been laid out for him and him alone—no other tenants were vying with him for the food on plates and in bowls. A cook took his order for an omelet, which he then changed to scrambled eggs, and changed again to a raw egg smashed on his head.

  “That’s not a dish we offer here,” said the cook. “I can bring you a raw egg, but you’ll have to smash it on your head yourself.”

  4

  “SO YOU MANAGED to break up with her within a week of waking,” said Ron, mildly.

  “I couldn’t break up with her, we had only just met,” said Laz.

  “Oh, I see. Existential ramifications. Epistemological uncertainty.”

  “I don’t expect you to agree with my reasoning.”

  “ ‘Reasoning’ implies a rational process,” said Ron.

  “I don’t even agree with my own reasoning. But I can’t refute it, either. I, this version of Laz, and this version of Ivy, only just woke up and haven’t had any kind of relationship at all, except a hangover from implanted memories.”

  “Yes, so Ivy told me,” said Ron.

  “Has everybody seen her but me?”

  “She knows where you are,” said Ron. “If you can stop your navel-gazing and self-destruction, she’s ready to go to work as soon as you give the word.”

  “How can I give the word when she isn’t nearby to hear me?”

  “Here’s where we stand,” said Ron. “Ivy says she doesn’t have to be anywhere near you, physically, in order to pass timestreams to you.”

  “I don’t know how she thinks she knows that, since we were never far apart before.”

  “If she’s wrong, then we’ll find that out,” said Ron. “What matters to me is that we have an emergency refugee problem in one timestream.”

  “Yes, the minority population that wants to be independent of the majority, but the rulers won’t let the minority anywhere near the Portal to other streams.”

  “So you were listening,” said Ron. “What we need is for you to open a Portal from here—or anywhere, really—to connect with the area in that timestream where the refugees are gathered. Then we can evacuate them, hopefully under cover of night.”

  Laz immediately began thinking of what could go wrong. “Under cover of night means you expect the overlords to try to interfere with the evacuation.”

  “The departure of this highly productive and creative minority will be economically detrimental to the oppressors.”

  “This sounds like the book of Exodus,” said Laz. “Am I supposed to show up and start chanting, ‘Let my people go’?”

  “We’re past that stage. All you’re there for is the parting of the Red Sea.”

  “The new Portal.”

  “And if the overlords try to follow them, we need you to detach the Portal, to erase it.”

  Laz shook his head. “So your supposedly impartial ubergovernment will reveal itself as taking sides against one party in this dispute.”

  “Yes,” said Ron. “Totally against our policy. But it’s also against our policy for one group to effectively enslave another.”

  “And Zero-Laz and Ivy-Zero refused to help.”

  “Not because we were breaking the policy. They think we should make ourselves into a kind of federal government that trumps the decisions of any local government in any timestream.”

  “And, in effect, that’s what you’re doing. So why wouldn’t they help?”

  “Their motives have nothing to do with you,” said Ron.

  “We share the same genes, the same faces, the same memories,” said Laz. “Presumably the same motives.”

  “If that were true, my young friend, you would have accepted the memory of you and Ivy being in love. And you refused.”

  “Because I’m stupid,” said Laz. “What if I can’t make the Portal?”

  “Are you going on strike, too?” asked Ron.

  “Absolutely not,” said Laz. “You kindly brought me into existence in order to accomplish tasks for you, and this certainly seems like a worthy one. But since waking, I haven’t side stepped, not even once.”

  “You need a warm-up step?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then do it.”

  Laz stood there, trying to understand why he was so reluctant.

  “I thought it was a reflex for you. In Greensboro you came out of the box side stepping. Or so you said.”

  “What if I side step and it breaks something. What if I choose a new timestream and something from this timestream is lost and I never know about it so we never get it back?”

  “It wouldn’t be worth doing if there weren’t consequences,” said Ron.

  “And when I side step in this timestream, does it affect any other timestream? All of them? Or only this one? What if I get us out of sync with all the others?”

  “When your predecessors created Portals between all the timestreams, we discovered that as long as the Portal was there, we didn’t get out of sync,” said Ron. “Whether all the streams changed when one did, we can’t be sure. How would we detect any changes, since after you side step the new reality has always been that way?”

  “So we just blunder around, making who knows how many mistakes, suffering who knows how many losses, in order to accomplish the one big change you want.”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “Collateral damage isn’t a concern.”

  “Of course it is. But nobody will ever know about it except the two of you. The four of you. The five. The Travelers, the ones who side step or see the timestreams.”

  “So what people don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “It’ll hurt some, help others. Or maybe the other timestreams don’t change when you side step in one of them. Your donor was considered supremely intelligent, but so was Freud, and all his ‘science’ was just smoke.”

  “Like mine.”

  “Like I don’t know. When you side stepped, you—your Greensboro versions—found time streams without Shiva. We all remember because at the time, we were all living in the New Place. Then we all had to make the migration. You aren’t the only ones who remember.”

  “Except we usually are,” said Laz.

  “What are you so damned afraid of?” demanded Ron.

  Laz had no answer. He wanted to shout at him that he wasn’t afraid of anything, that part of being an adult is anticipating things that might go wrong. But before he spoke he realized that anticipating things that might go wrong is fear.

  He’d gotten up from his waking table feeling perfectly all right. Cheerful, confident. Finding Ivy there with him had made him happy. They’d settled right in with their old relationship. He didn’t side step because everything was going fine.

  Then they’d walked out of that room and into the large room where Ms. MIT had greeted them and a whole bunch of people were busy doing whatever people in a bureaucracy do. And that was when he’d begun to feel this dread. Something would go wrong. This wasn’t right this time.

  Had it been right when he was completely alone in Greensboro? Why was he more afraid now than he had been then?

  Ron sat down on a bench. Laz sat beside him. He had that old childhood feeling: I’m in trouble now. But he always waited till he found out what he was in trouble for, before he side stepped to avoid having done whatever it was.

  “Laz,” said Ron. “I want you to consider one possibility. One source of your fear.”

  “Dread.”

  “Panic. Angst. Hesitation.”

  “What’s this source?” asked Laz.

  “When you met Ivy in Greensboro, you had been alone for months. She was rude and you bantered and quarreled, but you had no one but each other, and you fell in love.”

  “Stumbled into love.”

  “Love, with the only other person in your world.”

  “Don’t forget Harris Teeter Man,”

  “Let’s do forget him,” said Ron. “Ivy had no other man in her life but you. Then in the New Place, you were a famous team. And when she wasn’t physically with you at the Portals, she was alone in your house, away from the other men. Now there are lots of men, everywhere. And she’s pretty enough to turn a few heads. You have potential rivals.”

  Laz had never thought of that, and therefore felt stupid. “Is she dating somebody?”

  “She’s been awake for a week, mostly dealing with bureaucrats and old coots like me,” said Ron. “Give her some credit.”