She didn’t answer. Instead she turned to Reel Guy. “Who is in charge of this migration?”

  “Nobody,” said Reel Guy. “We greeted this lad, we did what he asked, now we have a Portal to take us to freedom and safety, and a spare. Nobody needs to be in charge. People come because they want to. All we had to do was spread the word that a door had opened into a better world.”

  “You show them the door,” said Ivy, “and they’ll freely walk through it.”

  “As I was telling your boyfriend,” said Reel Guy. “We know what needs doing, and we do it.”

  Laz didn’t remember him saying anything like that, but maybe Laz hadn’t been paying attention.

  After a while, well after midnight, Laz talked to the old man who had first greeted him. “It seems that this flood of people has no end.”

  “It will end. Soon,” the old man said.

  “Before dawn?”

  “Within the hour,” said the old man.

  “How do you know?”

  “Scouts go up and down the line, counting. Haven’t you seen them?”

  “It’s nighttime,” said Laz. “Everybody’s wearing dark clothes. I can’t see anybody until they’re maybe five meters away.”

  “Maybe the True People will be as blind as you.”

  “True People?” asked Laz.

  “What they call themselves. We Evezzu are the Armenians, and they are the True People.”

  “What will happen to them when you’re all gone?”

  The old man smiled. “They won’t have us telling them how to do things. Or designing sewers and water purification and electric generators. They will be free of us. Then they’ll find out just how much we ‘Armenians’ did to sustain them.”

  “What if they invite you back?”

  “I know I wouldn’t go,” said the old man. “They already massacred hundreds of us who were just going about our duties. They know how easy it is to kill us.”

  Laz heard the sound of a helicopter in the distance. “A chopper.”

  “Yes,” said the old man.

  “Does this mean they’ve spotted us?” asked Laz.

  “It’s a very dark night, only a sliver of Moon. Maybe not.”

  The chopper came closer. It was shining a light down at the ground, but the beam moved from side to side. If they knew an exodus was going on, they would have trained their light on the stream of people.

  As the chopper came near, the people in the long column moved swiftly under the cover of the trees—though they kept moving toward the Portal.

  Reel Guy came up to Laz. “A single column will take too long. I think it’s time for me to lead people from the middle of the column to the other Portal.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  Reel Guy took off at a swift jog along the well-trodden path.

  Ivy came up to Laz. “A second Portal was a good idea,” she said. “I’m glad you thought of it.”

  “It was my job,” said Laz. “To prepare for things that might go wrong.”

  “Just because it’s somebody’s job doesn’t mean they’re going to do it well. Or at all. You did it very well.”

  Laz couldn’t help but feel the burn of pride at the praise. Along with gratitude that Ivy had actually seen something admirable about him.

  “Our faces might catch the light from the chopper if we stay out here in the open,” said Ivy.

  “You go to the main Portal and see to dismantling it so they can’t follow us through,” said Laz. “I’ll go to the emergency Portal and help clear up that path.”

  “Very biblical,” said Ivy. “You opened up the Red Sea and the Hebrews crossed on dry land. But when Pharaoh’s chariots tried to follow, the waters closed over them, and the children of Israel were safe.”

  “I’m no Moses.”

  “They didn’t need a Moses,” said Ivy. “They needed a Portal.”

  The chopper guys must have seen something, because ten minutes later, four more choppers approached.

  “Run!” the old man shouted.

  “Run!” shouted Ivy to the last stragglers.

  At Laz’s station, the last people had already passed through when they heard the new choppers. Reel Guy cut the strings, gathered them up, and pulled his way along them until he disappeared, not into darkness, but into the oblivion of another timestream.

  Laz trotted back to the first Portal. Ivy was helping gather crying children along between the chains. In the bedlam of running for the Portal, some families had become separated. Ivy scouted to make sure she had found every child.

  Not far off, the choppers emitted the chug chug chug of heavy projectile weapons. They were strafing, but with shells that exploded. If anyone had still been on the road, the carnage would have been hideous.

  But nobody died.

  The old man and his friends were last to go, following between the chains. Ivy and Laz waited until the chains began to be pulled through from the other side. In a few minutes, the Portal was gone.

  The choppers either landed or the men jumped out, because now they could hear machine guns being fired on the ground. Maybe they thought there were still refugees running through the woods. Maybe they were frustrated that they had missed their prey, and fired off their weapons to pretend that they were doing something.

  A couple of the soldiers approached the head of the trail. They spotted Laz and Ivy easily and ran toward them, shouting, but in a language neither of them understood.

  Laz reached out a hand. Ivy took it. “We don’t have to hold hands, you remember,” said Laz.

  “I like it better this way,” said Ivy.

  Laz side stepped and they were in Central Time, where thousands of refugees milled around, waiting for the next round of buses. Families were trying to reunite, and often succeeding, quite noisily. Several mothers came to Ivy to thank her for bringing their stray child through the Portal. Ivy smiled and accepted their thanks graciously. Her people skills were better than Laz’s, even though she could also be a complete harridan when she felt like it. Still, he couldn’t help but admire her.

  “I was never more than a mile away since you got to Africa,” said Ivy. “I wanted to be where I could help if you needed me. You did fine without me, but this was too exciting for me to want to miss it.”

  “I always need you,” said Laz.

  “Ron told me that you’re afraid that in these crowded worlds, I’ll find a guy I like better than you.”

  Laz cursed Ron under his breath.

  “You don’t need to worry,” said Ivy. “I don’t even like you all that much. There must be thousands of guys I would like better than you.”

  Laz had no idea how to respond to that.

  “But you’re the only one who could possibly like me,” Ivy said. “So, you know, beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “I’m sorry for all the stupid stuff I—”

  “Of course you are,” said Ivy. “You’re actually a pretty smart guy, when you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot.”

  “Friends?” asked Laz.

  “Heavens no,” said Ivy. “We were never friends.”

  “What were we, then?”

  “We were being speed-grown in our boxes,” said Ivy. “We were nothing till they poured memories into our heads.”

  “What are we now, then?” asked Laz.

  “I guess we’ll just have to work that out between us,” said Ivy.

  6

  LAZ SAT ON his porch, on the second step up from the ground, his legs crossed. He could hear Ivy come out of the front door and sit on the top step of the stairs from the porch down to the sidewalk. “So here we are,” she said, “living in the same house again.”

  “Different house, different us, but yes, here we are.”

  “And at the moment, Ron doesn’t have any work for us to do.”

  “Are we unemployed or merely idle?” asked Laz.

  “Idle. Indentured servants are never unemployed.”

  “So we’re free to amuse ourselves,” said Laz.

  “Depending on what amusements you had in mind.”

  “There are no theme parks yet in any of the timestreams, so that’s out,” said Laz. “And playgrounds are kind of juvenile for people our age. Though I still think it’s fun to swing.”

  “So few amusements, so much time,” said Ivy.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Laz. Then he waited for the smart retort.

  Here it came. “Is that the best amusement you could come up with?”

  He gave her a terse laugh out of courtesy, but then came to the point. “The timestreams we leave behind,” he said. “All those people still on Earth when Shiva came, who boiled or burned on their way to the Sun.”

  “If they actually existed,” said Ivy.

  “Exactly my question,” said Laz. “According to Schrödinger, or his cat, or Heisenberg, or somebody, we don’t know how much our observation and our side stepping affects each timestream we’re in. We’re not constantly meeting up with copies of ourselves, who side stepped the moment after we did, and on and on. We don’t know if they’re Travelers or are as trapped in their timestream as anybody else.”

  “True. So we always leave a hostage behind us.”

  “Not when we side step into a stream where we didn’t already exist. Then we actually go there, leaving nothing behind.”

  “I know that.”

  “But right now we have a whole bunch of timestreams linked by Portals that we made—well, that Z-Laz and Ivy-Z made—and they’re all continuing to exist whether we’re in those timestreams or not.”

  “Get to your question, please,” said Ivy.

  “Did Ron hire you to be my mean schoolteacher?” he asked.

  “I’m impatient,” said Ivy. “Live with it.”

  “My question has been: Do the timestreams we step into already exist, before we take hold of them, or are they only potential streams of causality, which only take form when and because we entered them?”

  “When we look up and down a stream before stepping, you’re wondering if we’re only sensing potential existence?”

  “Or something in between. It’s all metaphysics and impossible for us to test.”

  “Einstein did fine with thought experiments about light-speed effects, using trains.”

  “Take another look at me. Not Einstein.”

  Ivy laughed. “OrigiLaz was ranked above Einstein in the public mind, back where I grew up.”

  “Still not Einstein. Or OrigiLaz either. So I have no confidence in my speculations. But still, if the timestreams we locate have only potential existence, and by stepping into them we make the whole timestream real, what happens when we side step out? Does it all vanish and become mere potential again?”

  “You’re trying to decide if we consigned billions to burn in the Sun by not opening Portals for all of them to escape somewhere,” said Ivy.

  “I’m wishing that I knew that I didn’t have all those deaths on my conscience.”

  “You should have no deaths on your conscience,” said Ivy. “You didn’t put Shiva on its various courses, you only opened Portals to find a place where Shiva wasn’t. You saved everybody that you could—or rather, Z-Laz did.”

  “I inherited his conscience,” said Laz.

  “Fortunately, I never had one,” said Ivy.

  Laz decided not to call bullshit and get into a pointless mock argument about whether Ivy had any virtues or not. “So you think I should be as untroubled by abandoned timestreams as you are.”

  “I think you should think of the evidence that we do have,” said Ivy. “We’ve left behind dozens—scores—of versions of ourselves that we stepped into and then out of, right? Presumably, they all had exactly the same capabilities that we do. But as you already pointed out, we haven’t encountered any of them side stepping into streams that we occupy. We haven’t felt them take possession of our bodies, bringing a new bunch of memories with them from their previous timestream. If they actually existed, why would they not side step to where they knew we were?”

  “So you think that proves they don’t exist after we leave.”

  “I think they potentially exist, and if we went back into them we’d get their memories of what would probably have happened while we were away,” said Ivy.

  “So when we side step, we call whole universes into being, and then extinguish them when we go.”

  “It does make us sound ridiculously powerful, doesn’t it,” said Ivy.

  Laz thought for a minute longer, and Ivy waited. “So let’s say all those timestreams actually exist, whether we visit them or not. All those universes. They occupy the same space and time as all the other nearby timestreams, but they all have their full complement of quintillions of atoms assembled into molecules and star systems and novas and supernovas and neutron stars and black holes. A huge amount of matter and energy in every single one of them. So why did they all start coming into existence? Where did all the new matter and energy come from every time a timestream branches off?”

  Ivy hummed a little. “That’s a serious question. Because if we aren’t causing whole timestreams to become real, something else is causing them all to become real right from the start. So much creation of matter and energy out of… nothing.”

  “Parsimony requires us to believe that most of them don’t exist and never existed, they only have the potential to exist,” said Laz. “Our presence as observers causes them to pop into being, into substance, and then our absence causes them to revert back to mere potential.”

  “So it was only potential beings that fell into the Sun and vanished.”

  “Not real ones, living through the experience of a terrifying death.”

  “That’s more comfortable to believe in,” said Ivy. “Except for one problem.”

  Laz waited for her to explain.

  She didn’t.

  “Do I have to beg you to complete your thought?”

  “I wasn’t sure you were awake.”

  He decided not to accept her offer of a quarrel about nothing. “What’s the one problem?”

  “All these timestreams that make up the Safe Place. We’ve got the human race spread out on many different but identical continents, and they’re already falling out of contact with each other, or deliberately isolating themselves. If timestreams vanish when we’re not there, how do those persist as realities and not just potential?”

  “The Portals?” It was all Laz could think of at the moment.

  Ivy extrapolated from his question. “Maybe the Portals make them observable to people from other timestreams. Maybe that keeps them all in tangible existence.”

  Laz nodded. “Maybe. It makes as much sense or maybe more sense than trillions of different universes all with their own supply of atoms and energy.”

  “But Laz,” said Ivy, “they’re already withdrawing from each other, resisting Ron’s attempt at a central government. How long before they cut off the Portals that link them to the rest? If we’re not there when they cut themselves off, do they wink out of existence?”

  “If they do, at least it’s a painless end,” said Laz.

  “It means that a huge portion of the human race is de-saved,” said Ivy. “It means our work—our predecessors’ work—is undone.”

  “Partly.”

  “So only the timestream that has Z-Laz and Ivy-Z continues to exist, plus whichever one you’re in and if he ever comes back, OrigiLaz. How do we decide which timestreams to sustain by our presence?”

  “Maybe Ron could bring out enough copies of us to have us in every timestream.”

  “Or maybe nothing disappears just because we’re not there,” said Ivy. “Maybe we are not the center of the universe.”

  “Come on, be serious,” said Laz. “Of course we are.”

  “What if they all exist all the time, and we’re worrying about nothing.”

  “Except why the universe is so profligate with matter and energy,” said Laz.

  “A question,” said Ivy, “but not a problem. If it’s true, that’s just how things are and we can leave it to scientists or philosophers to figure out how it’s done.”

  “Or theologians,” said Laz.

  “Maybe each timestream has its own God, too,” said Ivy.

  “If it’s all being made on the fly by one or more creators,” said Laz, “what did they make us for?”

  “To find a safe place to escape from Shiva?” said Ivy.

  “And what if there are countless other sentient species on different planets in each timestream. Are they also branching off timestreams of their own?” said Laz. “Chaos.”

  “No point in speculating about creators,” said Ivy. “We need to figure out what can be known, not try to outguess the motives of all-powerful beings.”

  Laz stood up from the steps and faced her. “Ivy, I think we have to take the best hypothesis. The parsimonious one. Nothing exists when we’re not there, it’s just potential that becomes real as soon as we arrive. The timestreams that make up the Safe Place all stay in existence because of the Portals—because they’re still tied to the same reality. But inevitably, those Portals are going to break or be broken, and if we’re not there, that timestream will revert to mere potential again.”

  “Guesses within guesses,” said Ivy.

  “Best we can do, isn’t it?” asked Laz.

  “Maybe. Best so far, anyway,” said Ivy.

  “So if the Portals are the reason all the timestreams continue to exist as real places with real people, and if those Portals can be disrupted and disappear, what can we do about it?” said Laz.

  “You’re saying that like a teacher who already knows the answer but wants the class to guess it.”

  “Exactly,” said Laz. “You’re the smartest kid in class. What’s the answer?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “I’m not the equal of Laz Hayerian,” she said. “Never was, never could be.”

  “Most of the time you’re smarter than me,” said Laz. “Do you want me to tell you my idea? Or do you want to come up with your best plan and see if they’re compatible?”

  “I’ll try,” said Ivy. “Just sitting here, just now, the only idea that comes to mind is that we could make a bunch of secret Portals, like the ones you made during that rescue operation. Portals that are unknown to anybody in either of the linked timestreams, except us. But the connections will be enough to keep all the timestreams in linked existence. And when we need to, we can lead people through our secret Portals. If we need to.”