Mandy wanted to be sure. “I hope you won’t mind my asking, but are you sure you saw me?”

“I’m sure.”

“What was I wearing?”

Doris didn’t appreciate that question either. “You want to test me, fine. You were wearing a blue pantsuit with gold embroidery and a white blouse … and you had a hula hoop in your hand. I was about to run you off the floor. It’s against casino policy for performers to be prancing around out there. Vahidi knows that. You ought to know that.”

Wow. Then it really happened.Mandy, in some form or other, was really there. “I didn’t see what happened to you.”

“Did I come from the stairs or the elevators?”

Don’t answer, experience told her. She sat there.

Doris leaned forward. “It’s okay. You’re not in trouble, all right? I’m not going to fire you even though I could. I just want to be clear on what happened so everybody else can be clear on what happened so we can clear this whole mess up. Now … it was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one who ran into me. Be honest.”

Oh-oh.Mandy held her peace, smiled awkwardly. “You think I ran into you?”

Doris tried to wave away the awkwardness. “It’s not, I’m not trying to assign blame here, I’m just trying to clear the innocent, you see what I’m saying?”

Yes, Mandy knew what Doris was saying, but she also knew what Doris was thinking. She could feel the ache of a moral twist, but whatever she was walking into, it was time to back out. “About what time was that?”

Doris actually rolled her eyes. “Why does it matter? I saw you, I know you saw me.” Mandy waited for an answer. “Elevenish. I was squeezing in a meeting before lunch.”

“I could not have run into you.”

Doris raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“I was auditioning for Mr. Vahidi in the Prospector’s Lounge at the time, and my manager, Seamus Downey, was there as well. They can tell you, they can tell anybody that’s where I was.”

“But I saw you out on the floor!”

“Did anyone else?”

Doris had to work up an answer. “Of course, lots of people!”

“Then why ask me?”

“I wanted to hear you say it.”

Mandy shrugged apologetically. “I couldn’t have been on the casino floor because I was in the lounge, and I wouldn’t have gone out on the casino floor anyway because it’s against hotel policy and it’s against the law; I’m underage. Wish I could help you, but … sorry.”

Doris was turning to stone, getting a cold, adversarial look in her eyes. “I am going to fight this, you can be sure of that. I was hoping I could keep you out of trouble.”

Mandy figured it out even as she said it, and her own brazenness amazed her. “Well, I can’t testify to something I couldn’t possibly have been involved in, and just as you’ve told me, Mr. Vahidi likes my work, the Orpheus and I have a good relationship, and you’ve been given notice. Pardon the Vegas terminology, but I think it’s worth a gamble.” She rose. “Thank you so much for the coffee. Hope you get to feeling better.”

For bureaucratic, security, or just plain calendar reasons, Parmenter said he would meet with Dane again the following Sunday, an agonizing stretch of time. Considering how many people he could spill something to and how many ways he could do something unwise if he stayed in Vegas, Dane decided not to trust his own fortitude and fled back to the ranch. At least there he could pace, agonize, sort out, shout out, have heated debates with the walls when he wasn’t bouncing off them, and still keep everything to himself.

As it turned out, working was better than pacing, so he cleaned up the barn and shop and shoveled snow. He carried on heated debates with God and the forest while snowshoeing in the hills. He thought he might paint the stage, but he couldn’t go near it. He couldn’t bear to visit the closet, so he relocated most of his clothes. He managed to put some of Mandy’s pictures back in their places around the house, but only those taken in the years when she was more the woman than the girl. Somehow those memories stood apart and above the ones broken.

He journaled on his computer, sometimes typing, much of the time thinking, remembering, and simply trying to understand; he never could.

The next Sunday afternoon he was back in Las Vegas and met with Parmenter in the alley behind Fong Fong’s, a multigeneration Chinese restaurant with tattered curtains, worn furniture, pull-chain toilets, and food that kept the place busy and customers on a waiting list. He and the scientist sat on empty, overturned five-gallon buckets in front of the restaurant’s Dumpster, speaking in secretive tones and eating lunch from little white boxes.

Dane swallowed some rice and chow mein. “I don’t know how I or any man could sort out the feelings I should have. I’m in love with her, I always have been, always will be.”

Parmenter nodded. “Still feeling disdain for me and what we’ve done?”

“You did save her life.”

Parmenter took a moment to bite and chew. “All we did was defer her death. Beyond that, we can’t be certain of anything.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

Parmenter didn’t take a bite. He just took a long moment to answer. “That’s why we’re talking.”

Dane set his little white box aside, out of mind.

“I need you to understand the whole issue of control. When we lost Mandy, we lost control. You know how astronomers discover planets around distant stars?”

“Tell me.”

“They can’t see the planets, but a planet orbiting around a star exerts a gravitational pull on it that makes the star wobble. From the size and speed of the wobble, astronomers can calculate the size of the planet and the size of its orbit.

“Now, Mandy is like one of those planets. A normal reversion of a few minutes or a few hours produces minuscule shifts in time and gravity. Any gravitational influence coming back is measurable, but it doesn’t affect anything. Mandy, now she’s different. She was reverted forty years and several hundred miles, which put a really big bend in the universe and gave her incredible leverage in time and gravity. She’s like a very large planet making its parent star wobble—in this case, the Machine. The Machine’s following her, it’s wobbling back and forth in time, changing its own settings and parameters, its own power levels, everything, to keep in sync with whatever she’s doing. The tail’s wagging the dog. We can monitor the readings and try to decipher what we’re seeing, but as long as she’s replicating multiple Mandys on multiple timelines, moving across different timelines and spatial dimensions, dipping into and out of this time and then another, encroaching on other timelines and generating security breaches … we can’t control anything. The best I could do last week was a tiny demonstration with a toy block, and only because Mandy was inactive at the time.”

Dane smiled and even took interest in his sweet and sour spare ribs. “So Mandy’s in charge.”

Parmenter took another bite to correspond with Dane’s. After a measured moment, he spoke again. “And that teaches us an important lesson about omnipotence and how we don’t really have it, much as we want it.

“For one thing—and this may sound unscientific, but hey, I can read the wobbles—we reverted all of Mandy’s atoms and molecules, but we didn’t touch her soul. She’s still there, the real her, somewhere outside space and time and gravity, and if I may take a stab, I think that part of her knows who she is, it’s compelling her to find out, and it won’t rest until she does.”

Dane was suddenly unaware of his spare ribs; he wasn’t even aware he was sitting in the alley behind Fong Fong’s. His heart and mind were back in the snowy woods where he had wandered for hours, in the shop and barn where he labored half-mindedly, in his kitchen nook where he sat before his computer but could find so few thoughts, so few words because he could not find understanding, that one missing key to it all. He’d come so close so many times, but denied it, barred it from his thinking as hopeful, sentimental, and foolish. Now Parmenter, the supposedly materialistic scientist, was handing it to him.