Draggo tried to laugh archly, but the laughter got stuck in his pylorus. He had a sudden, spasmic urge to run out of the cryo-dome and into the otherwilds — where there weren’t any telemembranes, or taxes, or synthetic pleasure proteins. Was escape possible?
Xyxyva was out there somewhere, possibly waiting for him, possibly not: her xxanda dampened by the noonday heat, her proud, heaving üvvübras alive to the tiniest ripple in the palpitating vacüum of—
“Where does this go?” Ewa cut in, resting her palm against the door to Orson’s cubby.
“Nowhere, really — it’s nothing. Nothing’s in there, I mean. Just a desk.”
She looked at him slyly. “Just a desk, huh?”
Orson had taken to thinking of his writing room as inhabiting its own discrete dimension, and of its door as an interdimensional portal, only selectively permeable, like the magic pools in The Magician’s Nephew. It was easy to think of his cubby that way, since no other member of the household ever went there; and it was important to think of it that way, since its contents were extremely classified. His journals were in there, for starters, and certain sketches he’d made of Lucille Ball and Betty Grable that were not meant for public consumption; not to mention the first eleven pages of his soon-to-be-immortal masterwork, Expressway to the Past. And now Ewa Ruszczyk — of all the people in the chronoverse — was tugging at the handle of its door. His hand shot forward of its own accord and closed around her wrist.
“It’s a transdimensional portal, Ewa, and it’s highly unstable. If you cross it, I can’t guarantee that you won’t be ripped into a million—”
When she pulled her hand free and jerked the door open it almost came as a relief. She was standing in the classic gunslinger stance now — feet apart, hands at the ready — and watching him to see what he’d do next. She leaned forward without warning and gave him a kiss, then pulled away to study his reaction. A pearl of drool clung brightly to her downy Polish chin.
“What’s in there,” she purred, “that you’re trying to hide?”
He’d already thought of a plausible answer, already taken in breath, when a sound from the cubby made them both turn their heads. The door blocked his view but not Ewa’s. The sound came again just as her mouth fell open, as though she herself were making it — but by then Orson had identified its source. It was the sound of papers being shuffled at his desk.
“You must be Ewa!” came a voice. “What a very nice suprise. I’m Orson’s sister.”
Ewa brought a hand up to her mouth and gave a nod. Orson mustered his courage and took a step forward, resigned to the inevitable. But the inevitable was not what he encountered.
Enzian sat at his desk with a look of calm forbearance on her face, a willingness to interrupt important work, if only for a moment. The manuscript of Expressway to the Past lay spread out before her, all eleven pages in a row; she was wearing the Pendleton shirt she’d bought for him at Hanukkah — an aubergine-and-yellow “shadow plaid”—with the sleeves rolled up, the way he liked to wear them. She had on his wristwatch, as well, and some boxers of his that rode up at her hips. Her feet made fan-shaped dust marks on the floor.
“Enzie,” Orson croaked.
“There you are, Peanut,” she said, keeping her eyes on Ewa.
“Enzie, what are you doing?”
“This is quite promising.” She took up the topmost page and squinted at it through her reading glasses. “Too Asimov-ish for my taste — but it’s your story, after all, not mine. The way you tweak the Dunne-Dodgson Postulate to allow for chrononavigation is original, to say the least.” Her eyes brightened. “I almost think you might be on to something.”
“Thank you,” my father said faintly. It was all he could do not to look at her feet, or at her thighs, or at all the other parts of her he’d never glimpsed before. Her pose put him in mind of a soft-focus photograph, neatly torn from a magazine, that Norm the beatnik carried in his wallet. He felt queasy again. The Pendleton shirt wasn’t even buttoned.
“I appreciated your description of the Nameless Planet, too. Weak gravitation might well have that effect on vegetation.” She gave Ewa a wink. “Best of all, there’s not a trace of Patent Clerk — ism anywhere.”
“Enzie—”
“How are you going to work the Accidents in?”
“I’m not going to work the Accidents in.”
Her smile drifted subtly out of alignment. It hadn’t been the most convincing of smiles to begin with.
“Not work them in? What do you mean by that?”
“I mean what I said.”
Orson had known for some time that his sisters’ enthusiasm for his stories was directly proportional to the prominence of time travel in them — and he’d been willing to oblige, at least up to a point, since the twins were all the audience he had. That confrontation in his cubby, however, was the true zero-hour of my father’s career, and not just because he’d decided, for the first time in his life, to stand his ground. As he watched Enzian’s angular features reconfigure themselves, he was struck by an unprecedented feeling: the conviction that he was right and she was wrong. Everything about her was wrong, he realized, from her superior air to her goose-pimpled thighs to her uninvited presence in his room. His surprise gave way to anger as he watched her, then to something akin to contempt. Ewa played a role in this, of course, but by that point she was almost incidental. Orson’s and his sisters’ agendas had parted ways, quite possibly forever. In a heartbeat he’d become a different person.
“You’ve been using me, Enzie.”
“Using you? What on earth—”
“You’ve been making guesses about the Accidents — guesses, hypotheses, whatever you want to call them — and getting me to turn them into stories. Don’t try to deny it.”
“I haven’t the slightest intention of—”
“But I don’t want to do that anymore, you understand? I want to use my own ideas, Enzie, not yours. I’m not like you and Genny — not in that way, at least.” He took in a breath. “To start off with, I haven’t got the Syndrome.”
“Of course you do, Peanut,” Enzian said softly.
Orson flinched as if she’d slapped him. “I’m not a goddamn peanut,” he hissed. “I’ve got better things to do than help you with your guesses about time.”
She was quiet a moment. “What could possibly be better?”
“None of your business.”
“Orson, please—”
“Come on, Ewa. Let’s get out of here.”
But Ewa, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be found.
* * *
Kaspar noticed that a change had occurred in his house, but he had only the murkiest idea of what it was: he’d been a noncombatant for too long. Enzian evaded his questions, Gentian seemed to know less than he did, and Orson had locked himself away and spoke to no one. My grandfather had long since reconciled himself to the irrelevance of age — he’d practically rushed forward to meet it — so this latest failure came as no surprise. One night after dinner, however, two weeks into this brittle new epoch, Enzian astonished him by coming into the parlor and perching close beside him on the sofa, as she’d done on rainy afternoons when she was small.
“Papa,” she said in German, “I have something to discuss.”