Nyla laughed too. For the same reason. At the notion of me being too excitingly troublesome for anyone. "Well, you are a sweet man, Nicky," she acknowledged.
"Dominic."
"Dominic, then."
"So that's what about Greta. What about Moe?"
She gave me a startled, almost angry look. "That ape? What the fuck do you think I am, Ni—Dominic?" Then she tasted her stew and mellowed. "Anyway," she said, "he's gone gay. He and the other two Moes—they found each other, all three of them, and they'd never been gay before, but— I guess they couldn't resist having lovers who knew all about them. I mean, you know, knew exactly what everything would feel like." She hesitated, looking at me. "Do you know what I'm saying? I mean, knowing exactly how to do, well, everything, so that—"
"I know what you mean," I said firmly. "What about it?"
"You mean, what about getting married?" She ate industriously for a moment, frowning. She was frowning over the idea, not the stew, which was perfect—I thought I'd try to get the recipe to take back to our own cooks. She finished the last spoonful and looked around for coffee. I waved to the waiter to make it come.
"Well," she said doubtfully, "it's always nice to be asked."
"I did ask. Now what happens is, you answer."
"I know that, Dom," she said. "I'm trying. Only I'm not sure about— Well, what about me? I'm not exactly what you could call a virgin bride, you know, and no offense, uh, Dominic, but you always struck me as a pretty tight-ass type about that kind of thing."
I said, "Nyla, we've both got some kind of a past that doesn't do us a lot of credit. As you say, no offense. You were as mean as a snake. I was a wimp. Past tense, Nyla. We didn't have to be that way— no, wait a minute," I said, as the waiter brought the coffee and the check, "I want to say this just right. Let me start over. In a way, we did have to be what we were, because of the world we lived in. 'Have to' might be too strong, because some of it was our fault—we took easy ways. There were better ways, even in our own time. But it wasn't all our fault, and we could have been a lot better. Look at our duplicates! The senator, and the scientist, and Nyla Bowquist. We could have been like them! And we still can be, honey."
I hadn't planned to use that word. I'd thought it, but it just slipped out without my intending it. She heard it. I could see her examining the taste of it in her mouth, a new flavor. It didn't seem to repel her. I hurried on: "The senator's running the administration of the whole west side of this city now. Nyla's pregnant. They had to change their lives. We can change ours."
She sipped the coffee, studying me over the rim of the cup. "That's what you're talking about, isn't it, Dom? Not just marriage but kids? A little house in the country, with roses growing over the veranda and hot coffee among the flowers every morning?"
I grinned. "I can't promise the coffee, because the consort isn't that rich yet. But the rest of it—yes. Even the roses, if you like roses."
She weakened. I could see her weakening. "Shit," she said, "I love roses."
"Does that mean yes or no?" I pressed.
"Well, there's no law says we can't try it," she said. She put down her cup and looked at me. "So, yes. Do you want to kiss your fiancee?"
"You bet I do," I said with a grin, and I did. It was the first time I had ever kissed her. She tasted of coffee, and rabbit stew, and herself, and it was a great combination. "So then," I said, settling back in my chair, "we'd better get a move on. You'll have to get your things, and tell the people at the museum that you quit. Say two hours for that. That gives us about another hour or two to maybe shop for anything you think you'll need in California before the blimp takes off. We can get the captain to marry us on the way."
She had picked up her coffee cup again, and she actually spilled some of it. "Jesus, Dom," she said, looking as though she were just finding out what she was getting herself into, "you do move a greased streak when you want to. Is that legal?"
"Honey," I said, on purpose this time, "it just might be that you've kind of missed the point of what's happening here. It's a new life. We don't have to worry about what's legal in stuff like this. There are too many different kinds of rules, back in all the places we all came from, so we just make it up as we go along. And that's exactly what's the best thing of all about it."
So a few hours later we were well and truly married, and we proved it to each other in the little crew bunks of the blimp, somewhere over New Jersey. And over Pennsylvania, and probably over Ohio, though we weren't checking geography at the time. We might have proved it again over somewhere around Indiana if Mary Wodczek, who had said the vows for us as soon as we took off the night before, hadn't decorously knocked at the door with coffee and orange juice and toast. "I thought you might like some breakfast," she said, smiling at the newlyweds. It was a kindly thought. Kindly she disappeared again at once.
And a while after that we were sitting propped up in the narrow bed, with our arms around each other and feeling pretty good in the gentle sway of the blimp, when Nyla said, "Dominic? You know, I'm not sure I'd really go back now even if somebody offered it to me."
"Me too," I said, nuzzling her neck.
She pressed her cheek against me absently. "That's funny, though. All the time I was working in the museum I was just praying for a miracle. I had all these fantasies about how great it would be if I could return for a heroine's welcome, or something— But it would really be the same place, wouldn't it? And this is all different and, honestly, I don't think I'd mind if we were stuck here forever."
"That's good," I said, kissing her warm, damp armpit, "although I don't guarantee that it's true. About being stuck here forever, I mean."
She pressed back, then sat up straight, looking down at me with an uncertain smile, as though she suspected there was a joke in there somewhere but hadn't located it yet. "What do you mean? They said they were closing all the portals permanently!"
"And so they have, hon," I conceded. "That might not matter. Listen, the shower here is pretty small, but I bet the two of us could fit in—"
"In a minute, boy! Tell me what you mean!"
I leaned over her to take a swig of cooling coffee from my cup. "I just mean that these big-time people are only human, hon. They aren't gods. I don't doubt they've closed all the portals, not counting some electronic peepholes, because they can't stand what would happen if ballistic recoil got out of hand."
"Well, then?"
I said, "It may not be up to them. See, they were the first to get the portal. They located maybe thirty or forty other times that either had it, or might get it pretty soon, but that's only twenty or thirty. How big a fraction is thirty divided by infinity, Nyla?"
"Don't pull mathematics on me, Dom!"
"It's not mathematics, it's just sense. It's October 1983, right? Not just here. For everybody. They're not ahead of us. They just got lucky fifty or a hundred years ago. But it's October 1983 for an infinite number of parallel times. Not just them. Not just us. All the times, and time is a-marching on in all of them. Maybe right this second, in some time nobody yet has ever even peeped, somebody like me, or you, is just making the breakthrough. And maybe there are four or five others that haven't got quite that far yet but they're on the trail. By Christmas there could be a dozen times with paratime capacity—and maybe twenty-five or thirty more in January and in February . . . and next year, and the year after—"