“And I find myself with no challenges, either; nothing that isn’t dealt with automatically. So I’ve been sort of hoping that you would survive long enough to show up.”
“Of course,” Matt said. “You would know approximately when and where I would appear.”
“Maybe. We knew when and where you would land afteryou took the taxi—that was a daring move, and lucky— but there has been a cultural blackout in New England since 2181, so we couldn’t know whether you’d survived your contact with the Christers.”
“We wouldn’t have . . .” Martha began. “Sorry. Go on.”
“I had pretty sophisticated observation and analysis tools on the lookout for you in the here and now. But they weren’t necessary. When an ancient bottle of MIT wine went up for auction, that was all I needed.”
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Oh, I got the idea a couple of hundred years ago. Then just had to wait and see.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might not wantcompany? Going into the future.”
“You need me. You know where the machine will take you next.”
“The Pacific Ocean.”
“You plan to go there in a bank vault?”
“I can get a metal boat.”
“Yes, and land in the middle of a typhoon and drown in seconds. Or just get lost at sea and dehydrate slowly.” She stood up. “Follow me.”
They went around a pond with luminous fish. “You need to find a backward time machine—both of you—and the only place you’ll find that is in the future. I can take you safely to that future. But then you go back, if you wish, and I go on.”
“All the way?”
“Whatever that means, yes.”
They walked down a flight of stone steps to a basement door. La pushed it open.
In the glare of a brilliant bluish light, a proper time machine. At first it looked like a huge mechanical insect, but that was just an all-terrain transportation system. Carried on top of and in between the four pairs of articulated legs were two containers, each about ten meters long, one with windows.
“Defense!” she said, and the bottom one was bristling with weapons. “Streamline!” The legs folded up around the machine, and a metal sheet slid around to enclose it in a seamless ovoid, which grew swept-back wings.
“I don’t think you could have built this, clever as you are with tools. But you’re going to need it. The jump after the next one will be into outer space.”
“ Maybe. The math is ambiguous.”
“In your time, maybe. No longer. Trust me—you don’t want to go out there in a taxicab or a bank vault.”
“Outer space?” Martha said. “Between the stars?”
“Well, between the planets. Stars come much later.
“I’ve doubled the life-support supplies to accommodate you, Martha. All I personally require is electricity, of course, and information. But I thought Matthew might like some human company.”
“Thank you,” they said simultaneously, and a startled look passed between them.
“Before we go, though, the people—well, callthem people—who helped me design and build this, asked a favor in return. We know so little about everyday life in your worlds—especially yours, Martha—that it would be extremely valuable if you would consent to a day of being interviewed. ”
“I don’t have any problem with that,” Matthew said, and looked into Martha’s silence.
“Is it just answering questions? In my time there were ‘interviews’ that had serious consequences.”
“That’s all you have to do, answer questions. They will measure your reaction to each question as well as record your answer.”
“Lie detecting?” Matt said.
“A little more subtle than that. Truth detecting, I suppose. ”
“Okay,” Matt said. He looked at Martha, and she nodded slowly.
“Good. They’ll be here in the morning, about ten. I’ll meet you for breakfast before that.” She disappeared.
They looked at their reflections in the machine’s mirror skin. “Truth detector,” he said.
“There are things I’d never tell anyone,” Martha confessed. “Do you think they could . . . make me do that?”
“I don’t know. But what difference would it really make? Everyone we ever knew is thousands of years dead.”
“La will know. We have to live with her.”
“Like I say, she’s seen everything. I doubt that you or I have ever done anything that would make her blink.”
She hugged herself. “God’s seen everything, too, in me. So I don’t really have any secrets.” She turned away from the machine. “Go back to the garden?”
It took both of them to pull the heavy door closed. The garden was unchanged, flowers and candles and the slightest breeze.
She sat down in the middle of one of the benches, and Matt sat across from her.
“I was reading about Bathsheba in the Bible,” she said.
“I don’t know the Bible.”
“People didn’t undress in front of each other in your time, did they?”
“Under some circumstances, yes. But not generally.”
“I grew up in a tenement that was very crowded,” she said. “The only privacy anyone had was in the toilet, and you didn’t waste time there, dressing. So people learned not to look? It was the same at the MIT dorm, but of course we were all girls.”
“I understand.”
“So I’m sorry if I was tempting you. I don’t know much about things like that.”
“It’s not a problem. Nothing could be fartherfrom being a problem.” She didn’t react. “So what did Bathsheba do that was so horrible?”
“Well, all she did was take a bath. But King David was looking down from the roof of his castle, and saw her, and summoned her, and they wound up committing adultery, and she got pregnant.
“Her husband, Uriah, was a soldier off fighting in a war. King David didn’t want him coming back to find Bathsheba pregnant, so he ordered Uriah’s commander to put him in a place where he would be killed.”
“That’s pretty low. But all Bathsheba did was take a bath.”
“And commit adultery.”
“Sure, but with the king? What would he have done to her if she’d said no?”
“When we studied that account in school, the teacher said she should have defied him, even it if meant her death. He showed us a picture, by Rembrandt, where she doesn’t look at all unwilling.”
“Well, yeah. Rembrandt was a guy, King David was a guy, your teacher was a guy, and the guys who wrote the Bible were all guys.”
“God wrote the Bible, and He is not a guy.”
“Okay. But Bathsheba was probably just trying not to get her head chopped off. Did her child inherit David’s kingdom?”
“No. The Lord took its life in its first year.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
The irony slid off Martha’s armor. “But then her next son was Solomon, who was an even greater king than David.”
“So God killed the first one because it was conceived in sin.” He shook his head. “But then David had the husband killed, so it wasn’t adultery anymore, and he let that one be king.”
“If you put it that way, it doesn’t sound very good. But the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”
“There’s no mystery. It’s like a big boys’ club! The men get the women and the power, and all the women get is screwed!”
She smiled behind her hand. “I don’t know that word. But I know what you mean by it.”
“None of your teachers ever talked about that?”
“Not yet, nothing specific.” She was serious again. “One of those things we have to put off until after Passage. If you had showed up a month later, I’d know a lot more.”