by Jean Rabe
“How did you get through?” her sister demanded. “I gave Jacobsen a huge bribe not to let you.”
“You miserable waste of skin!” Lorraine snarled, feeling her blood pressure rise. She felt behind her and straightened out the net, which was hanging askew. “I am here to see Mother, and you can’t stop me.”
She shouldered Marguerite aside and headed toward the vertical sliver of daylight that must indicate a door.
“I was here first! You’re not getting ahead of me!”
Marguerite pushed back, raking her clawlike nails over the back of Lorraine’s hand. When they burst out into the bright Milanese sunshine, Lorraine could see that it was bleeding.
“Oh, how I hate you!” Lorraine shrieked, wrapping the ornamental frill of lace around her hand.
Suddenly, she became aware that many pairs of eyes were upon them. Men in simple linen shirts over hose and filthy shoes pushing wheelbarrows. Men in gorgeous padded doublets with exaggerated codpieces sticking out just below the hem. Women whose undergowns were tied at the throat as hers, but with the drawstring so loose that their breasts were almost completely on display over pieced bodices that were for support much more than for show. Women in carts and carriages wearing veils or holding up fans on sticks or seated under sunshades to protect themselves from the blazing light, possibly with a tiny live monkey curled around their necks or with a bird on a perch attached to the frame of their conveyance. She and Marguerite were providing free midday entertainment to their fellow passersby.
Lorraine drew herself up. “I am going to see Mother. Whether you do or not is of no concern to me.”
Jacobsen had promised a guide. She looked around the crowded street. She didn’t expect someone to be standing there holding up a sign, but who was it? Jacobsen assured her he would be easy to spot.
Suddenly, a very dark-skinned African boy in a glorious cloth-of-gold turban, an embroidered tunic, and bare feet skipped out of a storefront and came to bow to them.
“Signorina Corvana?” His diction was crisp but flavored with an exotic accent.
“Yes?” she and Marguerite chorused.
“My name is Iskander. I am here to take you to Signora Genevieve.” He grinned at them, showing perfectly even, white teeth. “This way.” He turned and began to thread his way along the crowded stone street.
“He looks as if he had orthodontia,” Marguerite murmured.
“Three years’ worth,” the boy agreed amiably. When they blinked in surprise, he grinned again. “I am a graduate student at Stanford. My real name is Arthur Struthers. This is my summer job, tour guide in Renaissance Milan, in the service of my lord the duke Ludovico il Moro. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
It was. Lorraine’s first glimpse of another time and space should have been thrilling beyond words. How wrong it seemed that she had her entire mind upon the woman striding at her side, who had beaten her into the world by a mere thirteen months, and who had stolen all the attention from their mother ever since. She tried to pull her soul out of the quagmire of resentment and enjoy her surroundings. The stench was impossible to ignore, but so were the colors, made even more brilliant by the sun. Flowers bloomed in impossible hues. The people around them were as vivid, arrayed like so many exotic butterflies in silks, brocades, and linen. She, who had lived most of her life among the muted palette of northern California and spent much of her time bent over a microscope, found it exotic and wonderful. The clothing Jacobsen’s employees had furnished her repelled dirt and insects, so minor discomforts were kept at bay. Thousands of humans, many more than she was comfortable rubbing elbows with, crowded the street, shouting to friends, hawking their goods, pushing barrows toward some distant market, all adding to the rainbow palette. The bowl of the sky, an expanse of purest turquoise, was decorated with a few fluffy white clouds. The city was like a master’s painting crossed with a Where’s Waldo poster. Why was Genevieve here? Why didn’t she want to go somewhere more comfortable, where the streets didn’t stink?
“Graduate student?” Marguerite asked. “One of Mother’s graduate students?”
The young man nodded. “Yes. I am on independent study now that she has retired. Officially. But she is still my faculty adviser.” The blinding grin took them off guard again. “Here we are.”
The door of the wide, white stucco-covered house had no portico to protect one from the elements, but opened into a small but gracious hall with polished wood floors and frescoed walls. The cherubim that beckoned to visitors weren’t as simpering and overornamented as many putti that Lorraine had seen in contemporary paintings. She tried to identify the style, but the name escaped her.
Iskander bowed and strode into the burgeoning crowd, leaving them on the stoop. A plump female servant in white apron and tightly-wound headcloth led them down the narrow hallway toward the rear of the house. She opened a door and stood aside. A wave of noise from within all but knocked the two women backward. The sounds of a woodwind and a stringed instrument warred with voices.
The room was filled with people. Men and a few women in smocks sat at easels, trays of color at their elbows. A few men, ranging in age from late twenties to perhaps fifty, linen coifs covering their sweating heads, painted faces of near-photographic quality onto wooden panels on which only a few dark lines suggested the landscaping and buildings that would soon surround them. Those details were being added to other panels by younger artists in their early teens to early twenties. Others, mostly youngsters, some very small, ground the colors in mortars held between their outspread legs as they sat on the floor. The delicacy of their task did not cut down at all on holding conversations with their fellows. A large sheet of paper had been tacked to one wall so that Lorraine could see that all the pieces in the room were intended to be part of a single installation, possibly an altar-piece. In the corner, a pair of musicians in rolled hats and hose strummed and tootled, unperturbed by the seeming chaos around them. More noise filtered in from outside, through enormous windows flanked by wide-flung wooden shutters. Around the walls stood sturdy machinery of iron and bronze. Lorraine could identify the small forge and anvils, but she could not have guessed at the purpose of the standing metal plate with holes of ever decreasing size drilled in it or the odd frame that resembled a loom without a shuttle.
One of the older women, wearing a linen veil on her graying brown hair and an enveloping ecru pinafore over a gown made of good ochre-colored brocade, brush raised, glanced up at the opening of the door. Her cheeks widened in a grin. She put down her brush and rushed to embrace them.
“You found me!” she cried. “So the clues weren’t too difficult?”
“Mother!” Lorraine exclaimed. “Wait, you left those notes on purpose?”
Genevieve Corana smiled. “Of course I did. I wanted to see you.”
“You did?” She pointed at Marguerite. “Then she needs to go back home. Right now. I have no intention of letting her ruin . . .”
“Me ruin? What makes you think I want to be here with you, you wet blanket! I left home on the twenty-fifth of July.”
“Well, I left on the twentieth!”
“How did we get here at the same time?” Marguerite demanded. “When I get my hands on that Jacobsen . . .”
“Silence!” Genevieve roared. There was no mistaking a genuine teacher voice, or the cold glare that went with it. Lorraine and Marguerite quieted like guilty pupils. The rest of the room fell silent as well. “We will speak in my private study. There will be no more uproar. Have respect! Do you understand?”
Subdued, the sisters followed their mother through a wooden doorway. A playful frieze around the frame depicted demons dancing as though the portal led to hell.
Genevieve shut the door and leaned over to fling open the shuttered window in the dim room.
“You will not upset the atelier again,” she hissed. “There are too many ears listening. You can cause untold trouble. Didn’t Rolf’s assistants give you the entire safety briefing?”
Reduced to children again, the sisters surveyed the hems of their elegant dresses.
“Yes.”
“And you signed the waiver saying that you understood? And what the legal penalties are for disobeying them?”
“Yes.”
“But Mother!” Marguerite wailed. “You disappeared without telling us where you were going.”
Genevieve waved away the protest. “I messaged you both. I told you I was retiring. I said I was going somewhere I enjoyed, and I wanted you to be happy for me. I planned to let you know more in time. I had to establish myself first. It’s taken a few years, but things are going well. You arrived here at the same time because I wanted to see both of you. I am glad you are here, darlings. We’re going to have such a nice time.”
“A few years?” Lorraine asked. “But you’ve only been gone since June.”
“Linear time does not apply in this process, darling. You know that. I told Rolf that when you came looking for me, 1494 was the earliest that he could let you through.”
“But an artist studio?” Marguerite asked. “You’re a scientist.”
Genevieve smiled. “They’re not such different disciplines. Especially not here, not now. I’m happy here. The others think I am a noblewoman’s daughter who became an abbess and decided to retire from the church. They’re a little scandalized by that, but it made them accept me as a scholar, if not a good Catholic. I have formed warm friendships with wonderful women, and a few men, too. This is a marvelous place. I hope you’ll come to love it as much as I do. I bought an annual timeshare of two weeks from Rolf for you to use. If you two can behave yourselves in my home.”
Lorraine surveyed the room. A layer of dust stood on the windowsills and anywhere there were not piles of parchments heaped upon trestle tables, stools, and rolled up in cylinders on shelves. Mother had always been so neat. The furnishings, too, were rough and broad in design.
“This is a man’s room,” she said.
“Yes,” Genevieve said, with a broad smirk. “I found the man of my dreams. This is his studio.”
“A man?” Lorraine felt her heart constrict with fury. “Time’s not linear, but you couldn’t spend a single day to tell us your plans before you disappeared?”
Genevieve tucked her arms into her sleeves, an unconscious gesture, but a new one to Lorraine. It must have been something she had adopted in her pose as a former religieuse. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. My duties were done. You two were well on your way. You are both grown up, with your own careers and families. I couldn’t wait to get back here. To him. To the life we had together. It was all I could think about.”
Marguerite’s face had gone red, too. “Mother, that’s ridiculous. You’re in your sixties!”
“Hardly doddering old age. Nothing’s stopped working yet except for my childbearing equipment, and frankly, I’m glad to be done with that. What is it you want of me?” Genevieve asked, with a frown. “Did you expect to find me warehoused somewhere, slowly moldering away, pining for you as you seem to be pining for me?”
“No!” Lorraine protested immediately, but she was too much of a scientist herself not to analyze her mother’s words for the germ of truth. “I suppose I thought you would always be there. For us. For me. I thought that once you retired you might be able to spend more time with us.”
Genevieve raised an eyebrow. “Did I say you were grown up?”
Lorraine felt her cheeks burn. “I am! But it feels as if all the time we ever had from you was stolen from your other projects.”
Her hurt words won a contrite look from Genevieve. “For that I am sorry. I do love you both with all my heart. I knew I didn’t hack it well as a wife. I must not have been much of a mother, either. When the five-year contract with your father was up, we just let it lapse. You know we never held any rancor for one another. I was just not good at being married. Well, to your father,” she added with a shrug. “I tried to give you happy childhoods. You had all my love and attention.”
“Bull. That went to your classified programs,” Marguerite snapped. “Those got all your attention.”
“They were profitable enough to put you through college and graduate school,” Genevieve said, defensively. “You didn’t reject the benefits. My technological research enriched the lives of thousands of students and will continue to benefit humanity for a long time.” She fought visibly for control and smiled at them. “I haven’t stopped working. Come and see what we have been doing.”
She took a heap of the parchments from the table and set them on the floor. From the collection on the shelves, she took one that was bound with a ring of bronze and spread it out. A pair of spindles topped with spheres shot lightning at one another around a filigree cage in which rotated a cosmos of stars. Fine, delicate handwriting surrounded the images. Formulae that Lorraine, a biologist, did not recognize, were written in neat blocks. To her surprise, she realized the letters and numbers were all backward.
“This is the original design for the Timeshares generator,” Genevieve said. “I believe it is elegant in its simplicity, to clone a phrase. It uses far less power than the first time-travel engines, and is far more accurate, thanks to quantum entanglement.” She paused to regard the perfection of the fine lines. “It looks so primitive now, but it has passed through over three hundred modifications to get to the final design. This one.” She took another huge sheet from the pile and placed it next to the first on the sanded board. “I had thirty-nine physicists working on the project over twelve years, but the final design came from here. How delighted we were when the beta tests came back perfect eighty-three out of a hundred tries. You cannot ask for better results. Oh, here’s something new we’ve been working on. It’s a geothermal storage facility for residential complexes.”
“How beautiful,” Lorraine said, examining the plans. “The rendering is perfect. They look almost like drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Of course they look like Leonardo drawings, my dear,” Genevieve said. “He drew them.”
Before either of them could sputter out a two-syllable expletive of disbelief, the door opened.
“Belladonna,” said the tall man. He removed a dark blue rolled velvet hat and cast it aside. He rumpled up the linen cap underneath, tousling locks of lank red hair. His beard was sandier in hue than his hair, shot full of silver threads, especially at the corners of his mouth. Genevieve held out her hands to him, and he embraced her warmly. “His grace sends to you his compliments, for what they are worth. Somehow he has heard of the new cannon I designed, and wants it for himself. His wish, of course, is my command, though I must warn my lord de Medici such a thing may be done.” He bowed to the sisters. “My ladies, I am remiss in not greeting such distinguished visitors. I am Leonardo. I welcome you to my home and workshop.”
“My love, these are my daughters,” Genevieve said. “Marguerite and Lorraine.”
Lorraine wondered if she should curtsey. All her briefings on the culture of the time fled from her mind like the vestiges of grade school Latin. His eyes, deep blue, fixed upon hers. She was caught in their infinite depths, and she nearly gasped. The power of his intelligence and personality were in that gaze.
“I should have seen by the echo of her beauty in your visages,” he said, his eyes twinkling at them. Lorraine knew that she would never forget that moment.
Genevieve helped settle him in the broad chair at the table and rearranged the big parchment sheets, rolling up the old plans and putting them away. Her business-like movements snapped Lorraine out of her entrancement. “I’ll leave you to your work, my love. I will have Casperina bring you wine and food. The girls have traveled far and need to rest.” She took their hands firmly. Lorraine snapped out of her trance. “I will show you to your rooms. They’re on the third floor. I hope you won’t mind, but the house is full at the moment.”
The girls followed her up a flight of stairs. Even the beauty of the carving of the newel posts and stair risers couldn’t conceal how narrow they wer
e. At the top of the last flight, a slim corridor led to paneled doors of golden wood.
“Mother, how could you involve someone from the past in your classified work?” Marguerite hissed. “He knows about the Timeshares project! What about the noninterference pact that we had to sign?”
“That you had to sign,” Genevieve corrected her. “Leonardo helped me design the system. I had run into walls again and again, where I just could not make the process work. I needed someone who was not confined to modern thinking about the technology. I read the letter he wrote to the Duke of Milan, and realized that Leonardo was the one I needed. I came here to watch him, and discovered he was watching me. His powers of observation surpass those of anyone else I have ever met, anywhere.” She blushed. Lorraine was shocked. “As your great-grandmother used to say so colorfully, ‘chicks dig smart guys.’ We fell in love. He has other women here and there, but he comes back to me. We bond over science, and that I share with no other woman. I am satisfied.”
“But, he’s an old man,” Marguerite said.
“And I’m an old woman. But he’s only forty-two. That’s the way people age here in the Renaissance. He looks much older, and I come from a time in which nutrition and better care make me fortunate enough to look younger. But we weren’t always old. And,” she added with a wicked twinkle in her eyes, “for some things it really doesn’t matter.”
“Mother!” Lorraine exclaimed, aghast.
Genevieve laughed. She opened two doors. The sun fell on a bed, washstand, and chair in each room. “I’ll have to lend you clean clothes, since you didn’t bring luggage, but we’re all close to the same size. Thank heavens for strong genetics. The timeshare is only for two weeks, but I have so much to show you. His grace has asked to meet you. It’s a great honor. Dinner is in two hours. Iskander will take you on a tour of the city.”
Once Marguerite had closed the door, Lorraine tried to draw Genevieve into her guest room. “Mother, please, can’t we talk?”