“Suppose you’re right. Suppose I was afraid that if I had any competition for her regard, I would lose, and I’d deserve to lose. Suppose that led me to say all those stupid things that were the opposite of what I wanted—I wanted her—but I didn’t want her to love me out of habit or some sense of obligation because of our time as our Greensboro selves. I wanted to know that she really preferred me.”

  “As you said, stupid. But setting the business with Ivy aside, why haven’t you side stepped? Is there something else?”

  At that thought, Laz did side step. A baby easy step because he moved into a timestream where he already was. Only instead of sitting down next to Ron, he had remained standing and was pacing back and forth—while they had still said pretty much the same things.

  “All right,” said Laz. “I did it.”

  “Did what?” asked Ron.

  “I side stepped from a stream where I sat down on the bench next to you, and came here, where I remained standing.”

  “You’re giving me a crook in my neck, and your constant pacing makes me feel like I’m watching tennis,” said Ron.

  “You wanted me to side step, and I stepped. I can still do it.” Laz sat down next to Ron. “Is this better?”

  “I’m glad you stepped. And as far as we know, you didn’t kill babies in the Oregon woods.”

  “Is there still an Oregon?” asked Laz. “I mean, in the North American stream. Did they keep the old names?”

  “Some. And some of the same boundaries. But they revised others.”

  “Same constitution? Senate, House, president, Supreme Court?”

  “Same,” said Ron. “And also completely different. Laz, are you thinking of going back to being American?”

  “I never stopped.”

  “Your predecessors did. At first. The one place they adamantly did not want to live was the restored America. They said they didn’t want to be celebrities, even though they’re celebrities anyway, everywhere, in all the worlds.”

  “I get it,” said Laz. “Does that mean that we are celebrities, too?”

  “You’re twenty years younger. You weren’t recognized anywhere when we went to visit your predecessors.”

  “You kept us mostly in enclosed compartments,” said Laz.

  “Just in case,” said Ron.

  “I wouldn’t deserve celebrity. I didn’t save the world.”

  “But you remember saving it,” said Ron.

  “I think that by the classical definition, that makes me bonkers. Some people think they’re Napoleon, some that they’re Teddy Roosevelt, and I happen to think I’m Laz Hayerian.”

  Ron only smiled. “Laz, are you ready to give it a test run? Using a timestream Ivy gives to you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But only between known worlds. I don’t want to get lost the way OrigiLaz did.”

  5

  THEY FLEW TO the southern part of Africa, which in this timestream was only sparsely settled. Ron and Laz got in a hoverjeep and the driver took them out into wild country—no roads, no buildings. “In case you’re wondering,” said Ron, “we carry plenty of water with us.”

  “Glad to hear it. Any lions we might run into?”

  “They haven’t been imported into timestream Six yet. We probably won’t bring in carnivores until the herbivores have time to build up large herds. There are elephants and rhinos thriving north of here, and hippos in the watercourses, so it’s not all pleasant company for wandering humans. But they stay out of the farmland, mostly, and the elephants all have their tusks.”

  “No poachers in timestream Six,” said Laz.

  “There’s no market for ivory in this timestream. Or for rhino horns. The cultures that still crave the stuff are in other timestreams. We, however, have safe elephants. And rhinos. At least while we still remember the bad old days.”

  Laz thought about this. Some timestreams with safe elephants and rhinos, others where they might not be so lucky. Maybe this would turn into a vast experiment in planetary biota management. He’d have to keep that in mind when he decided where to live.

  They stopped in a sheltered glen. The driver stayed in the jeep. Laz and Ron both drank from the tepid water in the keg in the back, then walked into a copse of trees. A big white X had been marked out on the ground with river stones, and that’s where Ron led him.

  “Buried treasure?” asked Laz.

  “The exact place where we need you to emerge in the other timestream,” said Ron. “You have to memorize the location so you can come through here when you return.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  Ron shook his head. “If you get caught, you’re a stupid white kid who snuck through a Portal. If I get caught, I’m a Portalist who is interfering in the politics of a timestream where I was not invited.”

  “White kid. So in the target timestream, Africa is black?”

  “In places,” said Ron. “Though not half so populated as in the Old Place. A lot of people who had lived in poverty and oppression wanted to be anywhere but the punishing climate they grew up in.”

  “Humans bring their own poverty with them,” said Laz.

  “It wasn’t worth arguing about. There are several major homelands for former Africans, mostly sorted out by language. The old colonial names didn’t always come with them—there’s no such thing as Nigeria or Kenya on their maps, and I can’t keep all the new geographies straight. I just know that this is where the refugees were forced to gather.”

  “They speak English?” asked Laz.

  “It’s the common language of the educated, the way Latin used to be in Europe. You’ll be able to understand them, and they can understand you. The strongest groups here are Hadarli and Tesseran. The Hadarli speak English because their homeland had been colonized by the British.”

  Laz used his knowledge of geography. “Tessera was in a French colony.”

  “And French was their lingua franca,” said Ron. “But the world was running on English when Shiva was noticed—airports, airplanes, ships at sea, they all had to know English. The language of commerce. So most Europeans are reasonably fluent in English, and a lot of them also wanted to live in Africa, where you don’t have to deal with ice and snow in the winter. There are a lot of English speakers in Tessera and in Hadarli.”

  “It’s a good thing that the only active side stepper in the world speaks a useful language. What if I had been Finnish? Or Basque?”

  “Please don’t side step to a timestream where that turns out to be true.”

  Laz laughed, but then reassured him. “There’s no going back in search of timestreams from the Old Place. All we have now are the timestreams in the Safe Place, without Shiva, without human settlements before we arrived. So Ivy and I can’t do much damage, I think.”

  Ron pulled a phone-like thing out of his pocket and pressed a spot on the screen. “That’ll tell Ivy that you’re ready.”

  Almost at once, Laz felt or saw or whatever it was a single timestream. There was no array of timestreams, of course, because this destination was known. Laz didn’t examine the timestream in any way—he immediately took hold of it in his mind and he was there.

  Similar vegetation, because the lie of the land determined which kinds of trees and bushes and grasses grew in each econiche. Ron wasn’t with him and there wasn’t a stony white X on the ground. But several adult Africans emerged from a clump of tall grasses and beckoned him to come out of the trees.

  Laz obeyed, of course, trusting that these were from among the oppressed refugees and not the Hadarli or Tesserans, the putative oppressors.

  When Laz came close enough, an old man stepped forward and embraced him. “I greet you and thank you,” he said. “I do not need to know your name because you were never here. You will not know our individual names either. But we are mostly from the Evezzu people.”

  “Fine,” said Laz. “Look, we’ve established that this is the right place, so I need to go back and start linking a new Portal here.”

  “Yes, very businesslike, and Ron told us to make sure we had plenty of very stout twine.”

  One of the other men came forward with a large reel of brown string. “Shall I hold one end?” he asked.

  Laz shook his head. “We’ll tie it to a tree. So it won’t move. In fact, we’ll tie several strings to several trees. A good length is twenty meters.”

  “The other world is so close?” asked the older man.

  “All the worlds are so close,” said Laz. “As far as I know, all the worlds are right on top of each other, sharing the same space.”

  The Africans looked at each other and nodded wisely. “So the philosophers are saying, and now we know it’s true,” said the man with the twine. He was holding the reel by its hub and other men measured out twenty meters and cut, twenty meters and cut. When a dozen strings were in hand, Laz pronounced them sufficient. Then he led them back into the trees.

  He had to track his own footsteps in the grassy soil to find the exact spot. He had memorized it when he arrived, but it wasn’t recognizable till he stood where he had stood before. He pointed to several slender but sturdy trees, and the men tied the strings firmly, then gathered the free ends, brought them to Laz, and laid them in his hand.

  He gripped them tightly.

  He did not have to wait for Ivy to give him his destination. He knew the timestream he had come from. He took hold of it and side stepped.

  Ron was standing there with the driver. Laz held up the strings. “We need to tie them to nearby trees. Saplings are better than mature trees—that’s good.” It took only a few minutes for all the strings to be firmly tied.

  “So if you follow the string,” said Laz, “you can come through this Portal.”

  “No,” said Ron. “I’m not setting foot in that timestream.”

  “Fine,” said Laz. “But we need to firm up this connection. Chains at least. Some kind of road, right?”

  “No road,” said Ron. “Everybody’s coming through on foot.”

  “And then they just walk to the coast and swim somewhere?” asked Laz.

  Ron pointed toward the jeep and Laz saw through the trees that a half dozen buses were parked there now. “They walk through the Portal, then they ride from here.”

  “How many people are coming through? Are those all the buses you have?”

  “They’re all the buses that can park here. As soon as they’re gone, more will come in.”

  “But how many refugees do you expect?” asked Laz.

  “There hasn’t been a census. The Hadarli government refused to admit the Evezzu existed as a genuine ethnic group, so the official number is zero.”

  “Statistical genocide,” said Laz.

  “If you deny they exist, then nobody can prove you killed them all. We have food and shelter and water a click or two from here, a temporary camp.”

  “Toilets too, I hope,” said Laz.

  Ron grinned. “We actually thought of that ourselves, because, you know, everybody pees and poops. Elephants, mice, lizards, fish, flies, humans. Birds do them together.”

  “Got it,” said Laz.

  “It’s dusk now,” said Ron. “We’ll get some heavy chains pulled through to secure the connection and provide a visible corridor for them to stay inside of. And lights—on our side of the Portal only. We don’t want to provide an easy target for strafing.”

  “Really?” asked Laz. “It’s that violent?”

  “There have already been massacres. The Hadarli are chosen by God, so they’re entitled to blow away their enemies like chaff.”

  “Did God tell them to kill their enemies?” asked Laz.

  “They pick their own enemies, and they figure God will go along.”

  “You don’t know how many are coming. Some of the Evezzu might decide to stay?” asked Laz, incredulous that anybody could be so self-destructive.

  “Maybe they hope that when there are fewer of them, the Hadarli won’t be so resentful and the persecution will stop.”

  “Haven’t they read any history?” asked Laz.

  “I hope they’ll all come,” said Ron. “But people still get to make their own choices, even when we think we know what’s best for them.”

  “And what stops the Hadarli from also coming through the Portal?”

  “The Hadarli don’t border on the main Portal—Tessera occupied that free territory as soon as they got their army trained. Tessera won’t let any of the Evezzu through there, because they don’t let anything or anybody from outside Tessera get through.

  “So wouldn’t other countries in Six want a separate Portal?” asked Laz.

  “Tessera would just take control of their end of that Portal, too,” said Ron. “And the Interplanetary Portal Commission doesn’t have the resources to maintain the Tesseran Portal and this one, too. So there’s no economic, political, or military reason for this new Portal to continue to exist after the emigration of the Evezzu.”

  “Can the Evezzu all come through in one night?” asked Laz.

  “Why don’t you go through your little Portal here and ask them?”

  Finally Laz realized: Ron needed Laz to do the reconnaissance. No. More than that. He needed Laz to make sure everything went well on the other side of the Portal. Not that Laz would be in charge—these people could govern themselves. He needed to make sure they didn’t get cut off from the Portal. And if they did, he had to make another Portal on the fly.

  The time to prepare alternatives was not when they were needed, but before. Now.

  Laz returned to Six with the last of the heavy chains. It took a bit of looking, as people streamed past him to get to the Portal, but he found the guy with the reel of string. “Can you measure me out ten more of those strings?”

  The reel guy looked at him oddly. “The Portal’s finished.”

  “Help me do this and you’ll understand,” said Laz.

  So while others shepherded crowds of people through the new Portal, Laz and Reel Guy took ten new lengths of string and tied them to trees about a hundred meters away from the Portal. There was too much forest for anybody at one Portal to see people at the other. Then Laz carried the ends through to the other timestream and found bushes that would do well enough. “A second Portal. To bring through twice as many?” asked Reel Guy.

  “The people are making a path so broad and clear that a blind helicopter pilot could follow it. So if the Hadarli see that path with people rushing along, they’ll know you’re making your escape. Will they permit that?”

  “They will not,” said Reel Guy.

  “You know where these strings are. You know where this Portal is. If there’s an attack, get the people off the road, into the trees, and then lead them here.”

  “Maybe they won’t notice us. This is a very obscure part of our land.”

  “What they’re going to notice is a bunch of empty houses, and they’ll wonder where the people went in the middle of the night. Are you plotting a revolt? Have you armed yourself?”

  “We can’t arm ourselves, the Tesseran Portal Authority won’t allow weapons to pass. And we’re not violent people. Not likely to revolt.”

  “You know that. I know that. But these are violent people who know they’ve done things to deserve and provoke revenge. They fear that you’ll do what they would do.”

  “How do you know this?” asked Reel Guy.

  “I’ve read a lot of history,” said Laz. “Persecutors always assume that their victims are at least as bad as they are, with the same level of cruelty. Whatever they were planning to do to you, they believe you are planning to do it to them.”

  Reel Guy nodded. “I saw a boy come out of the trees this afternoon, but now I know that you are really an old man.”

  “I’m more of a cynical young one,” said Laz. “When you get the last people through this Portal—if it comes to that—then cut the strings on this side, grab hold of one or two, and follow them to the other world. Then gather up all the strings, cut the rest of them, and pull your end out of the Portal, so they can’t follow them through.”

  “Where will you be?” asked Reel Guy.

  “What I’ll be is a pretty famous face, who makes Portals between worlds. That will make me a target. But I don’t need a Portal. I can get to the other side from anywhere.”

  Reel Guy grinned. “You know what? The Hadarli call us Armenians. Worst thing they could think of to call us.”

  “The Armenians were slaughtered by foreign overlords who wanted to kill them all,” said Laz.

  “We speak English better than the Hadarli and way better than the Tesserans, we went to university, we read and write. We tried to start schools, to keep records, to design a financial system. But they said we were being just like the white colonials, taking charge of everything and thinking we were smarter than everybody.”

  “Were you?”

  “We were better educated than any other group,” said Reel Guy. “And the people from other races gravitated to us. Right now I’m tying strings around trees, but with peace and the right equipment, I could go back to microbiology and prepare the people for whatever diseases we carried with us from the Old Place, plus trying to anticipate pathogens native to this timestream.”

  “All I’ve got is the strings,” said Laz. “I’m not educated.”

  “But they will still know that you are famous.” Reel Guy grinned. “Your ignorance of science will not keep you safe.”

  Laz had to grin back at him. “Let’s head back to the exodus.”

  As they went, they broke a few branches to clear the way, so Reel Guy could easily lead people back to the second Portal.

  When Laz and Reel Guy got back to the entrance to the main Portal, Ivy was waiting for them.

  “Oh, good, you have a date,” said Reel Guy.

  “She found this Portal for me,” said Laz. “Then I opened it.” He walked up to Ivy and started to tell her about the emergency Portal they had just made, but she cut him off, saying, “You can’t open a Portal without my being aware of it. I saw what you were doing and I came to help.”

  “You must have already been in Africa.”