by PAMELA DEAN
Rosemary’s head came up. She looked at Juniper, and so did Gentian.
“You don’t have to work on the time machine if you don’t want to, Junie,” said Rosemary.
Gentian said, “You’ve been dating this guy for how long, and you only just discovered he’s stuffy and overbearing?” This was, in fact, not at all the way Gentian would have described Dominic; whatever was exercising Juniper and Rosemary must have happened before she got up.
“He wasn’t that way on the teen echoes. And he isn’t when he’s being romantic,” said Juniper. “He is when he’s working.”
“It’s just as well to have found out,” said their mother. “Most relationships are about fifteen percent romance and the rest work.”
Their father looked at her.
“Your father and I,” she added, “have gotten the romance up to almost twenty percent by conspiring to baffle our children with quotations.”
“Oh, God, they’re being cute again,” said Juniper, against a chorus of groans from Gentian and Rosemary.
The three of them had not even had to look at one another. Are we romantic, too, then? thought Gentian, and immediately giggled. Her parents laughed too, her father got up to clear the table, and in the resulting discussion of dessert, Dominic was relegated to the sidelines, where, Gentian thought, it would be better to leave him.
It was cloudy that evening, with light snow predicted, so she went back into the attic and practiced her soldering.
Chapter 20
There was a great deal of soldering to do; there was a great deal of carpentry and much arranging of historical items; there was a lot of wiring and fitting together of various objects. The time machine consisted of at least three parts. First, there were the historical objects, what Gentian still liked to call the track and Dominic called the guidance system. Gentian’s father, dragged upstairs one day by Rosemary and Juniper to admire their work, suggested that they put up a sign saying “Quick Museum—Six Hundred Million Years of History in One Hundred Square Feet” and charge admission.
Next, there was a vast tangle of electronic objects crammed into the other finished room. This morass came to include three or four computers, an oscilloscope, a shortwave radio, the old radio Gentian had not carried upstairs, a small home copying machine like the one her father had in his office, and a flatbed scanner. Dominic called the contents of this room the control system. Gentian did most of the work on it, though he directed her. She did not ask anybody up to admire it.
Finally, there was the time machine itself. This was simply a small, light, heavily wired object that fitted over the head; Gentian thought it might originally have been a bicycle helmet. Dominic worked on this himself and did not answer questions about it, in a manner somewhat different from his usual way of not answering anything you said to him. He called the helmet the transporter, and when Juniper and Rosemary made “Star Trek” jokes he looked at them blankly. Once he said, “Such tricks hath strong imagination,” and Rosemary and Juniper fell over laughing. He did not admit that this small thing was the real time machine, the object that would move the person wearing it about in time.
It came to Gentian one cold day as she struggled to fit a second shortwave radio—“That one’s for the past,” Dominic told her when she pointed out that they already had one; “this one will be for the future”—into the little room, that Dominic’s design meant that, whatever the time machine did, only one person could use it to actually go anywhere—or rather, anytime. She did not say anything, but the same idea occurred to Juniper a little while later.
The four of them were together in the cold unfinished attic between their museum room and their control room, working on their separate tasks. There was no longer space to work in either finished room, and finding somewhere to put the various additional objects that Dominic kept providing or having them build was beginning to consume more time than the work itself.
“Hadn’t you better make three or four of those things?” Juniper said to Dominic. “So we can all go?”
“He travels the fastest who travels alone,” said Dominic. He was putting yet more wires on his helmet, and did not even look up.
“So what?” said Juniper. She spoke calmly, but Gentian could see that she was angry already, and expected to be angrier. “If there’s any point to a time machine at all, surely it’s that you have all the time there is?”
“Well, that’s one theory,” said Gentian, who last summer had read every time-travel book and story her parents possessed and had emerged a perfect agnostic on the entire subject. “What’s your theory of time, Dominic?”
“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”
“I should never give you anything to read,” said Juniper. “Be serious for once in your life.”
Gentian looked at her with interest. Dominic was being serious; he had no more sense of humor than Malvolio. It was strange that Juniper couldn’t see this. Did she think all his evasions and quotations were just jokes?
Dominic went on working.
“Dominic,” said Gentian. “Why do you want to build a time machine?”
“Ye Gods,” said Dominic, mildly, “annihilate both space and time, and make two lovers happy.”
Rosemary looked vaguely nauseated. Gentian felt her face grow hot; she looked at Juniper, and saw that Juniper had turned pink herself. He must mean her, thought Gentian, there’s no reason in the world to think he means me.
“Dominic,” said Juniper, still pink but not at all softened as far as Gentian could see, “who is going to get to use that thing? Who is going to do the actual traveling, all fast and alone?”
“I am,” said Dominic.
“I think you’d better reconsider that.”
“Consideration like an angel came,” said Dominic, and then seemed to bring himself up short and start over. He looked away from his helmet and did, in fact, consider Juniper. He said at last, “Words are women, deeds are men.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Juniper. “When you talk more than all three of us put together and we’re doing most of the work.”
“What are ideas, then?” said Gentian, unable to resist. “Both? Neither?”
“Look,” said Rosemary, nervously, “I don’t want to travel in time, I just want to hear what happens.”
“You would,” said Juniper. “Well, I assume somebody has to stay here and monitor things. You can do that.”
Rosemary looked alarmed.
Dominic said, “The time on either side of now stands fast.”
They all looked at him. He seemed to make a considerable effort, and said, “The invention is mine; it must be I who test it.”
“Well, it’s nice you don’t mean to use us as guinea pigs,” said Juniper, “but suppose it does work, what then?”
“All who will may come.”
“Why in the world didn’t you say so before?”
“I thought you would sit by the fire and spin.”
Rosemary chortled, “Crosspatch, draw the latch! He’s got you, Junie!”
“That remains to be seen,” said Juniper; and they all went back to work.
“The trouble with Dom,” said Rosemary, at dinner not long after, “is that he wants to have all the fun.”
“That’s said to be nine-tenths of the law of chivalry,” said their father, in a satisfied tone.
“What is?” said Juniper.
“The desire to have all the fun.”
“Are you calling him a gentleman again?” said Gentian.
“Very good,” said her father.
“Gentlemen don’t ask riddles all the time,” said Rosemary.
“Ask him why he asks them; riddle him that,” said their father.
“He says because he can’t remember the answers.”
Their father sat up straight and looked delighted. Their mother said dryly, “Can’t he look them up?”
“He says that’s cheating,” said Juniper.
“I told you he was a
gentlemen,” said their father.
“If you mean he abides by a strict set of arbitrary rules of no use to him or anybody else, you’re right,” said their mother.
Juniper and Rosemary laughed. Gentian sat wondering when they had asked Dominic about his riddles, and how they had gotten answers anything like as straight as those sounded.
The weather continued cloudy. Gentian had plenty to do; she wanted to get the time machine as far along as possible before rehearsals for the play started. It was lucky that school didn’t start again until the eighth of January; most kids had to go back the day after New Year’s. She kept meaning to call Steph and ask her what the play schedule was, but she was too busy filling up the room in her charge with boards and keyboards and computer terminals all wired together just so, in tight bundles of color like a galactic center. She could just as well ask when she saw Steph at school again.
There were a few phone messages from Alma or Erin or Becky, about ice skating or sledding or cookie-baking parties, but she decided she must forgo these usual winter pleasures. Socializing now would, in the end, mean neglecting astronomy later, because there would not be time for the play, the time machine, and astronomy, and astronomy did not include people to whom she had promised help. It was odd to be spending so much time with her sisters and one boy who hardly seemed to notice her at all, instead of her friends who appreciated her, but it was only for a little while. Juniper continued impatient, scornful, and abrasive, as well as taking up as much of Dominic’s attention as she could manage. Rosemary, however, was quiet, cheerful, and hard-working, aside from a tendency to make silly jokes and giggle. Dominic treated them both exactly the same; you could not tell whom he was speaking to unless you could see the conversation.
This was good for Rosemary, Gentian decided. She was being permitted to help with something important and intriguing and grown-up, with her skills appreciated as much as Juniper’s or Gentian’s, and she must be comfortable if she was making those jokes. It was good experience for a shy person, and she wouldn’t get hurt because she had no romantic interest in Dominic and he had none in her.
Junie, on the other hand, could not be having a great deal of fun. Dominic had seemed to have a romantic interest in her, which she had certainly returned, and now he behaved as if she were just another eleven-year-old Girl Scout.
Gentian began to think, after a while, that his manner to her was a little different. He looked at her when he spoke to her, and he often said “Well done,” when he inspected her work. Since she heard Juniper berating him for being unappreciative about once a day, this seemed to mean something. She dwelt on this for a little while, but then she remembered the deluded Malvolio’s saying that Olivia used him with a more exalted respect than anybody else who followed her, and decided to stop thinking about it.
The weather continued cloudy. The attic was cold, but she was used to working in the cold, because of her astronomy. Dominic had rigged up bright lights everywhere, so that the short days and long nights of a Minnesota winter did not slow them down. Gentian was underslept, and her mother kept commenting on it. She did not seem able to understand Gentian’s reassurances that this was temporary, that as soon as vacation was over, Gentian would get more sleep. Her father quoted the poem about burning the candle at both ends. He even asked her if she would like him to speak to Dominic about easing the pace of their project, so that Gentian could blame paternal interference for everything.
They were for some reason sitting on the attic stairs when he said this, and Gentian looked at him in amazement. “I thought you believed in noninterference,” she said.
Her father’s expression moved from sardonic, which their mother said was his default, to rueful. “If I didn’t, wouldn’t I simply speak to Dominic without asking you if you’d like me to first?”
“I guess you would.”
“I could do that if it would be easier.”
“Dad!”
“I’m just trying to match Dominic’s deviousness.”
“Are you trying to warn me about something?”
“I’m trying to find out what you want.”
“So you can give it to me, or so you can take it away?”
“That would depend on what it was, wouldn’t it?”
“I want to help Dominic build his time machine.”
“How likely do you think it is that he actually can build one that works?”
“It’s not just him.”
“How likely do you think it is that an eleven-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old, and Dominic actually can build one that works?”
“Maria Mitchell discovered the first telescopic comet when she was—”
“True for you. And,” her father said thoughtfully, looking over her head at one of the gouges in the plaster they had made bringing Gentian’s desk up long ago, “it’s a truism in the history of science that many of the most innovative discoveries, especially in mathematics and physics, are made by people in their twenties. Newton and Einstein are commonly cited. But they still had ten or so years on you four.”
“I don’t really know enough about it to be able to tell,” said Gentian. “And Dominic doesn’t talk about it. I’m not necessarily expecting it to work. So I’m not courting disappointment,” she concluded; this was something both parents were always worried their daughters would do.
“I wonder if that’s true,” said her father, vaguely. “Courtship being what it is.”
“I really won’t mind if it doesn’t work,” said Gentian, sticking firmly to the time machine and refusing to discuss courtship. “I’ll just be very interested in everybody’s reactions.”
This caused her father to stop looking vague. “What about your sisters? Do they expect it to work?”
“I think Rosie must, because otherwise she wouldn’t work so hard. She doesn’t like Dominic.”
“And why are you and Junie working so hard?”
“Junie does like him.”
“And?”
“I think he might like me.”
“And?”
“I think a very good way to get to know somebody is to work on a complicated project with him.”
“I advise less complication and more sleep,” said her father, and, to her relief, stood up.
Gentian did slip out once or twice to peer through gaps in the clouds at anything that offered itself. The only really notable thing she saw in these excursions was a bit of the constellation of Serpens, including R Serpentis, one of the few long-period red variable stars that one could make anything of in a small telescope. It showed somewhat redder than usual that night, so she lingered over it. When the clouds thinned and broke up, she looked for and found M16, a widely scattered star cluster enveloped by a diffuse nebula. In Gentian’s telescope it looked like an open cluster of twenty or so stars. Gentian ritually found the little double star at the edge, just to make sure that she was where she thought she was, and then settled in to see the nebulosity. It revealed itself gradually as a faint light behind the stars; she could not, tonight, see folds or whorls, just that faint shining. She liked it because it was a young cluster, full to bursting of O- and B-type giant stars and dotted with the dark globules of still-condensing gasses. Photographs showed it to be far more spectacular than her telescope could, but one day she would look at it with a 200-inch telescope, and then she would know it. Gentian looked until the wind got up and blew a new set of clouds across the sky.
“I’ve been looking at the Serpent’s Head,” she said to Dominic when she returned.
“The serpent, subtlest beast of all the field.”
“M16’s not very subtle, as globular clusters go.”
The weather continued cloudy. Day or night, the attic was brighter than the outdoors. The tight and intricate tangle in Gentian’s finished room grew and spilled outward into the unfinished part of the attic, like the arms of a spiral nebula reaching far into the darkness. Dominic would periodically come in and power up more of what she
had built, until the room filled with a pervasive hum. It masked his conversations with her sisters, and even their footsteps and the pounding and hammering they were still doing. But one day, lying underneath a stack of boards to make another connection Dominic thought was needed, she could hear somebody yelling.
It was Rosemary, resurrecting the skills she had had as a three-year-old. “I am going winter camping. I am going winter camping. I am going winter camping. And I’m not coming back up here, ever.”
Gentian wriggled backwards out of her cave and stood up as far as she could and proceeded towards the door, stepping carefully over half-assembled circuits and yet another keyboard. As she came into the unfinished part of the attic, where dust motes circled in the blaze of artificial light, Dominic said, “A sad tale’s best for winter.”
“A lot you know about the Girl Scouts,” snarled Rosemary.
“Good heavens,” said Juniper, appearing in the doorway of the museum room, “let the child go camping if she wants to.”
“I am not a child.”
“You put soft pillows under my head,” said Dominic.
“How many times do I have to tell you, I did not!” cried Rosemary. “You’re just like a broken record. You never change.”
“Change lobsters, and retire in the same order.”
“I am retiring,” said Rosemary. “No, I’m not. I’m going on strike. Juniper, Gentian, you come too.”
Gentian looked at Juniper.
“He’s a jerk!” cried Rosemary. “He’s an idiot. He won’t let us do anything but drudge.”
“You go winter camping,” said Gentian carefully, “and we’ll talk about it when you get back.”
“You,” said Rosemary, “are full of hormones. I’m never going to grow up, no matter what I have to do.” She ripped the bandanna from her head, flung it in Dominic’s direction, and marched out of the attic, shutting the door behind her with a bang that shivered the dust motes sideways and made something slide, tinkling a little, in the museum room.
“You know, Gentian,” said Juniper after a moment, “Dominic and I can manage on our own.”