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“I agree. I totally agree.”

“Well, you ought to change, too. You don’t mind my saying so?”

“No, no, that’s … fine.” It did pose a tactical problem, which showed no immediate sign of going away. He solved the problem by grabbing clothes at random and changing with his back to her. She probably didn’t see anything, but then she probably wasn’t looking.

The valet had shown them where to go when they were ready, a parlor room at the end of their corridor.

It looked old and French, delicate ornate furniture, ancient oil paintings on fabric-covered walls. La was softly playing on a harpsichord when they walked in.

“Welcome.” She stood up and gestured to where three chairs were arranged around a glass-topped table with a tea service and a plate of cookies and petits fours.

Matt moved the teapot to one side and lifted out the machine. “I take it that even now, you don’t have one of these.” La sat down staring at it, and shook her head. “And you don’t know how it works?”

“How? No,” she said. “It’s been clear for more than a thousand years why your machine works. But knowing why isn’t the same as knowing how. Knowing that E = mc2 doesn’t mean you can take some kitchen appliance and turn it into a nuclear weapon.”

“So why does it work?”

“The part that’s broken is the graviton generator. But it’s not broken in four-dimensional space-time. That’s why they could build a thousand copies of the machine and never duplicate its effect.

“In ‘our’ space-time, as we affectionately call it, the calibrator works perfectly. One puny graviton per photon. But in some dimension five or higher, it spews out a torrent of gravitons.” She leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “How can I put this in a way you can understand?”

Matt was growing excited. “I think I know what you’re getting at!”

She nodded. “In your primitive terms—they still used string theory?”

“Go on, yes?”

“In that way of thinking, our space-time continuum is a four-dimensional brane floating through a larger ten- or eleven-dimensional universe—”

“Wait,” Martha pleaded, “I don’t understand. A floating brain?”

Matt spelled the word. “It’s short for ‘membrane.’ ”

“They couldn’t just say membrane?”

“ ‘Membrane’ means something else. A brane is like … it’s like a reality. Like we live in one four-dimensional reality, but there could be countless others.”

“But where would you put them? Where could they be?”

“They’re inside a larger brane. Five or six or more dimensions. ”

“What would that look like?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know. We can only perceive four dimensions.” She nodded slowly, lips pursed.

“All right,” La said. “As Matt said, there are countless other four-dimensional branes, but what’s important are the five-dimensional ones that can be made to envelop ours. Your broken graviton generator attracted one of these beasts and apparently made a permanent connection. Permanent from our point of view. Instantaneous, hardly noticeable, in five dimensions.”

“But in ours,” Matt said, “it makes a closed timelike curve?”

“In a way. But that would only make a time machine that went backward in time. Yours moves forward, faster and faster. Something in that five-dimensional brane is connected to a huge singularity in our brane: the heat death of the universe. The end of time.”

“The End Times,” Martha whispered.

“It’s more than ten to the thousandth power years in the future. The stars die, the black holes evaporate, and finally everything stops moving.”

“I want to go find out whether I can die.” La’s smile was almost a leer. “I think we can help each other.”

16

After tea, they took the machine downstairs, to a room that functioned as a kind of laboratory. It was austere, evenly lit from glowing walls and ceiling, with a series of identical tables numbered one through ten. Matt, following orders, set the machine on each table for a minute or two while La stared at it without expression. Then she would nod and drift on to the next one.

At the end, she nodded, and then shook her head. “I have to share this with some others. Why don’t you two get some rest?

“You can go anywhere in the place. If you’re lost or want something, just ask for help. Out loud.” She disappeared.

Matt put the machine back into the bag and wouldn’t let Martha carry it. “Look. I’m not a professor here, and you’re not a graduate assistant. We’re just time travelers, both of us unimaginably far from home.”

“But …”

“You know the term ‘stranger in a strange land’?”

She nodded. “Exodus 2:22. That’s how Moses described himself.”

“And that’s what we are; that’s the largest thing we have in common. Though the ‘lands’ we came from are also strange to one another, still, this is the one we’re stuck in. Together.”

“I don’t know. I have to think about that, Professor.”

He sighed. “Matthew, or Matt. Please? ‘Professor’ makes me feel old.”

“Only when I say it?”

“Oh … maybe. Matthew?”

“I’ll call you Matthew if you let me carry the bag.”

He handed it to her. “Let’s go find a view. It must be close to sunset.”

They walked down the corridor until it ran into a wall, and then followed the wall until it led to an outside door, which opened easily to a parapet that went out about a meter and a half into pure sky—no protective railing.

“It’s gorgeous,” Matt said. The mountains were crimson and orange in the setting sun, with purple shadows deepening to indigo. The shadow of the palace’s pinnacle was a narrow, straight slash.

He stepped out. “Professor! Don’t … Matt!” He held a hand out and it hit an invisible, marshmallow-soft wall.

“It’s safe. There’s a pressor field.” To demonstrate, he folded his arms and dropped back against it, which made her gasp.

She put her hands over her eyes. “Please don’t.”

“Okay.” He angled forward and held out a hand to her. “Let’s go find that sunset.” She did take his hand and followed him around the parapet, staying close to the wall.

The sunset was a brilliant wash of color, deep red merging into salmon and an improbable yellow with a breath of green, fading into blue. Inky blue overhead, with a few pale stars.

She stared wide-eyed, her lips slightly parted. Matt noted that her eyes were gray, and she was about as pretty a girl as he had ever stood this close to, even with the small scar. He was still holding her hand.

She let go and touched her sternum. “Sweet Jesus,” she breathed. “My heart is going so fast!”

“Mine, too,” Matt said, though it wasn’t all geology and altitude.

“Maybe … we should go in. This is wonderful. But I feel almost like I’m going to faint.”

“The air is a little thin,” he said, sidling around her and taking her hand again. “Go back the same way?”

“Please.” They picked their way around, Matt walking slowly and thinking furiously.

She’s not a young girl, he told himself, in spite of her lack of experience and information. She’s almost as old as Kara was when they broke up a couple of months or millenniums ago.

But you can’t talk yourself out of the truth that she is a child, when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex. Don’t press her; don’t take advantage. Be a man.

Unfortunately, “be a man” was also the counsel the rest of his body was giving.

What if they never did get back to their own times? As they moved on into the future, and people became more and more strange, they would be the only potential partners for one another on the planet.