When Gentian woke up at one in the afternoon, with Maria Mitchell sitting on her chest and suggesting that she might want to get up now and throw this damp catnip mouse around the room, or possibly move her feet under the covers to be chased, or maybe just get up and let the cat out to find her own entertainment, she could hear voices and thumpings in the front part of the attic.
She sat up, rubbing her eyes. She could feel her hair sticking straight up all over her head. She wondered how long she would have to grow it before it would stop doing that. She reached to pet Maria Mitchell, but Murr jumped off the bed and made for the door, complaining. Gentian went to let her out, and encountered Rosemary, in paint-stained jeans and T-shirt, toiling up the last few steps with a huge box in her arms.
“What’s in there?” said Gentian.
“Rocks,” said Rosemary, puffing, and let the box fall to the hallway floor with a resounding crash.
“Very funny.”
“It is rocks. It’s fossils. Dominic says we have to get the oldest things we can find and start with those, and then we have to have something from any historical period we want to visit, so the time machine will have something to resonate with.”
“What if something’s a forgery?” Gentian grinned. “You could have a sideline testing stuff; it’d be better than carbon-14 dating.”
“Aren’t you helping, then?”
“Yes, I am, but I reserve the right to make fun of anything that strikes me that way.” Gentian’s mother had said this when she helped Juniper paint her sunroom purple.
“I don’t think Dominic likes being laughed at. Junie laughed at him for wearing that big black silk shirt when he was going to be doing carpentry in a rustic attic, and he said, ‘Nature never wears a mean appearance, ’ in a very snotty way.” She rubbed at an especially involved paint spot on her shirt, and looked morose.
“Never mind, Rosie,” said Gentian. “I’ll wear an appearance as mean as yours, as soon as I’ve had a bath.”
Rosemary picked up her box again and staggered past the bathroom. Gentian opened the attic door for her, shut it smartly before Maria Mitchell could slip in, and went into the bathroom, with Murr managing to be both before and behind her, purring and demanding furiously.
Gentian filled up her food bowl, turned on both of the bathtub faucets, and started to drag her sweatshirt over her head. She stopped with one arm entangled and hastily shut the door. She was not accustomed to having people wandering around the attic without her permission. Come to think of it, hadn’t Dominic said she could have control over when anybody was there working on the time machine? She would have to talk to him.
Maria Mitchell emerged from her corner, stalked to the door with her tail erect, and pawed at it.
“I’m sorry,” said Gentian. “You can stay in, or you can go out.”
Murr lay down against the bottom of the door, the tip of her tail flopping about as if, her father always said, it possessed independent life, and heaved a long weary-sounding sigh.
Gentian removed the ping-pong ball from the rapidly rising water in the tub, dried it on her sweatpants, and tossed it at Maria Mitchell, but Maria Mitchell only turned her head in the other direction with great deliberation, and then looked meaningfully at the doorknob.
“You’re going to hate this project, aren’t you?” said Gentian, grabbing her lavender soap from the sink and climbing into the bathtub.
Maria Mitchell leapt onto the curved slippery side of the tub and balanced there delicately, looking censorious. “Maybe if you were to sleep quietly in a corner, or only play with the things we give you, you could watch,” said Gentian, scrubbing her feet vigorously. Bathing was actually nice once you got to it, but it took such a lot of time, and you had to do it either in the morning when you were rushed and sleepy or else during stargazing time. They should let you have your bath at school, during study period; but they wouldn’t, they’d only let you shower after Gym, and the showers were fairly disgusting. Most people avoided them altogether.
Gentian jerked the plug out of the drain and climbed out of the tub. Maria Mitchell leapt into the sink and began biting at that plug. Gentian decided not to notice. She wrapped herself in her large towel with the solar system on it, reached for the doorknob, and stopped. She was accustomed to just walking across the hall to her room in a towel, but now not only her sisters but Dominic were flitting around out there. She looked dubiously at her discarded sweats. She couldn’t remember how many nights she’d slept in them, but it was probably about a month’s worth; these were the green ones, and she was pretty sure that she hadn’t had the purple ones on since well before Christmas. There was no point in wasting being clean by putting them back on.
She put her ear to the door and listened, but Maria Mitchell set up such a complaint that a herd of rhinos could have gone by in the hallway and you wouldn’t have heard them.
“Well,” said Gentian, “maybe he’ll be more embarrassed than I am.”
The hall was empty, and from the front attic came the sounds of hammering. Gentian walked sedately across the hall to her doorway. Murr immediately lay down in it, so that she could not shut the door. Gentian shut it most of the way and got dressed in a hurry, choosing her most raggedy jeans and the shirt in which she had helped her mother stain and varnish the bannisters of the main stairway. She brushed her hair until it more or less lay down, put on her old sneakers with the holes, and marched into the front attic. Maria Mitchell ran ahead of her and disappeared into the finished room where she had found the old catnip mouse.
Dominic and Rosemary and Juniper were in the other finished room. They had already built a structure out of two-by-sixes, rather like an openwork bookcase, that covered two walls. Rosemary was handing Dominic rocks from her box, and he was examining them and placing them on the shelves. Juniper was sitting on the floor, in a large denim skirt and a T-shirt of surpassing whiteness and tightness, her hair bound up in a green scarf, measuring bits of wood with a tape measure and scowling.
They were all absorbed. The shelves looked makeshift, the fossils shabby; it was more like children playing museum than a scientific project. And how scientific was it, truly, to say that the time machine had to resonate with various objects from different periods of history? Gentian thought of her telescope just a room away; the new color filters and eyepiece; her resolution to learn more mathematics, to time transits of features on Jupiter and Saturn. She shifted her feet. She was in a play already, too.
Dominic looked up, and smiled right into her eyes. “Ah,” he said. “The star for which all evening waits.”
Rosemary looked resigned; Juniper shot Gentian a glance of immense vitriol. Oh, fine, thought Gentian, glaring back at her, you don’t like the way Dominic is behaving, so you get mad at me.
Dominic stood up and came across the room to her, holding out his left hand. Gentian found herself reacting just as Maria Mitchell would to the advances of a stranger: she moved a little out of the way and created a diversion. Murr would usually pounce on something invisible; Gentian said, “So what’s the plan?”
Dominic, for no reason Gentian could see, looked at Juniper, who said impatiently, “This is the prehistoric room; we have to set up this stuff and label it all. Then we’ll set up a timeline for history, and when that’s all done we start building the time machine.”
“What does it do, travel around on a little track until it comes to the age it wants to resonate with?”
Rosemary giggled. Juniper looked at Dominic. Dominic contemplated her for several seconds in what looked to Gentian like mutual commiseration; then he said to Gentian, “Time, which is the author of authors, bears away all things. Time the destroyer is time the preserver. Physical space and time are the absolute stupidity of the universe. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars— pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.”
“You know,” said Gentian, though he might only have paused for breath, “I really don’t think you can explain how to build a time machine just by being poetic.”
“The way is the way,” said Dominic.
“Yes,” said Gentian, forging ahead grimly, and feeling as if she were spitting tobacco juice over the edge of a box at the opera, “and one of the things we said about the way we’d do this was that I got to decide when people were up here working. I have to live and work right next door, and you woke me up this morning.”
“It was afternoon already,” said Rosemary, who was still sorting rocks.
“That isn’t the point. Did we or did we not agree that I got to decide?”
“Dominic said you would,” said Juniper, “but I don’t remember agreeing.”
“I wouldn’t have said you could use the attic if he hadn’t said I could decide when. So. Check the schedule with me in the future, all right?”
Rosemary giggled. “We can’t do that until the time machine is built, can we?”
Gentian suppressed a sharp reply; Rosie’s silly jokes ought to be encouraged, and she wasn’t the one who had been duplicitous.
She smiled at Rosemary briefly and then looked back at Dominic. “All right?”
“To do a great right, do a little wrong,” said Dominic, amiably.
“If you don’t give me a straight answer, we can all just pack up this stuff and take it back to your house.”
Dominic looked first taken aback and then very much as if he were angry, but while he was ruffling through whatever box of quotations it was that he kept in his mind, Juniper jumped up and stamped over to them. “For heaven’s sake!” she said. “What a spoiled brat. All right, we’ll consult you; we’ll make out a schedule and follow it until Doomsday. All right?”
“The moist star,” said Dominic, favoring Gentian with a charming smile, “upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands, was sick almost to Doomsday with eclipse.”
“All right?” said Juniper, dangerously.
“Felicity or doom?” said Dominic.
“Oh, felicity, for heaven’s sake. Gentian, are you satisfied?”
“For the moment,” said Gentian, borrowing a line from their mother.
“Eternity was in that moment,” said Dominic.
“These,” said Juniper, quoting Hamlet with great impatience, “are but wild and whirling words, my lord.”
“Oh, fine, now you’re doing it,” said Gentian.
Dominic, however, did not quote the next line and apologize, which Gentian thought he very well ought to have. He said, “These words are not mine.”
“So we’ve gathered,” said Gentian, borrowing another line from her mother. What she was going to say next was rude, but she said it anyway. “Look, Junie, he can hardly come up here unless one of us lets him in, so as long as you and Rosie agree to consult me, it should be all right.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Juniper. “Well, then, Your Majesty, may we work here until suppertime?”
Gentian bit the inside of her cheek until she could simply reply, “Sure. What should I do?”
“Ask Dominic,” said Juniper, and she went back to her measuring tape.
Gentian was so fed up with asking Dominic anything that she almost gave up right there. But then she looked at Rosemary, who seemed to be enjoying herself; and at Juniper, who was stiff and bristly with annoyance, and thought, I won’t quit before she does. She looked at Dominic, who had been leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets ever since Junie told him he was speaking wild and whirling words.
“What should I do?” she said.
“Here you and I stand in our degree,” said Dominic. “What do you mean to do?”
Black your eye? thought Gentian, but that was just exasperation. She was never tempted to hit people; she was tempted to make cutting remarks or to go off quietly and just show them what idiots they were. Was Dominic an idiot? What was he? What did she mean to do? He was looking at her unblinkingly, and whatever her father might have said about black hair and blue eyes and lips as red as wine, his eyes were quite black enough already.
What did she mean to do? To fare boldly forth into physics and mathematics. To live on the moon and look at the stars. To look out and away, as far as she could, as far as there was to look, to the place where space curved back on itself and there was no farther. To tell Becky everything about it, in case she wanted to make it into poetry. To read all of Becky’s poetry, so that she would give the subjective as well as the objective its due.
What, then, was she doing in this attic? One-upping Juniper, taking care of Rosemary, trying to pluck out the heart of Dominic’s mystery, to make him look straight at her and say something he had thought up himself? To flirt with him in whatever way she might find to do that? To find out what was in his head? All right, she thought, yes, all of that. But still: what if he wanted to build a model railroad? Would you be up here helping? No. It’s the time machine. What if he can build one? What if we help him do it?
How could he? He was a boy, her own age, possibly a genius of some kind but just as possibly so far out on the curve of eccentricity that he might be mentally ill; what could he know, how could he have learned enough to do this? Then again, look at what Maria Mitchell the astronomer had done with almost no formal education and a two-inch telescope. Gentian walked past Dominic to the shelves of fossils, and picked up the first one. Rosemary had labeled them in her round, careful printing. She was in the habit of dotting her i’s with little hearts—Gentian had used stars at the same age—but she did not do it here.
The fossils were exceptionally delicate, complete, and clear, and the rock they were embedded in was crystalline, full of depths, colored green and purple and orange and red and yellow. If the Museum Company were selling these, they would make them into bookends and charge hundreds of dollars for them. The one she had picked up was a fernlike frond in clear greenish rock; it looked like an underwater plant, almost as if it were moving in small currents. “Carboniferous,” said Rosemary’s writing. “Three hundred million years.”
The one after that she did not recognize. “Sea lily (Crinoidea),” said the label. Embedded in translucent orange, it had a cluster of thin rootlike tendrils at the bottom, a long leafless segmented stalk, like an earthworm, and a bulging head rather more like a lily bulb than the lily itself. Gentian thought it was probably a sessile animal, but it might be a plant. “Cambrian—570 to 500 million years.”
Gentian laid the lily down and picked up a flat dark-red oblong with a trilobite in it. It looked three-dimensional, as if the entire creature were embedded there like a fly in amber. The trilobite, freed from its rocky nest, would have huddled into the palm of her hand like Duane’s hamsters. “Paleozoic—570 to 280 million years” said Rosemary’s label.
The next one was an ammonite, in pale blue stone. Gentian’s eye followed its spiral inwards, tighter and tighter, further and further, as she would follow the structure of a galaxy outwards.
“Those were once called snake-stones,” said Dominic.
“Devonian to Cretaceous, 395 to 136 million years” said Rosemary’s note. When the ammonite was alive, the light now reaching earth from the Coma Galaxy Cluster was just starting on its journey.
The next one was yellow, too yellow to be amber. “Opabinia,” said the label. “Cambrian—530 million years.” The animal was about two inches long. It was segmented, and the segments of its body turned down, like overlapping kernels of corn, but the three segments of its tail stuck rakishly upward. It had five eyes, two in front and three behind, on a head like an overgrown corn segment. And most delightfully of all, it had a long trunk or nozzle with a claw on the end, so that for just a moment it looked like somebody in mirror shades smoking a cigar.
The last one was white, a long oval enclosing a huddled featherless bird—no, not a bird, for it had a long curled tail like a lizard. “Embryonic dinosaur (hypsilophondontid) near hatching age. Cretaceous, 145 million to 60 million years.” We could go there, thought Gentian, we could see them hatch. This one never had, but when its mother laid that egg, the light from the Ringtail Galaxy, in the Corona Borealis, was a third of its way to Earth.
It was the other end of the telescope. There was astronomy in everything.
“Show me the next piece of work,” she said to Dominic.
And Dominic took her into the other finished room and taught her how to solder. Maria Mitchell crouched in the corner until he left and then hissed and growled and batted at Gentian’s arm until she had to be picked up and put back into Gentian’s bedroom lest she be soldered herself. Gentian could still hear her making long, threatening wails from time to time. The solder must smell awful to her.
“My cat hates this,” she said.
“She’ll love you more when all is said and done,” said Dominic.
“When the soldering’s done, more like,” said Gentian.
Dominic left at sunset, having provided enough instructions that he probably would not need to come back for a week. Gentian wondered if he planned to stay away and let them do all the work. She didn’t intend to, unless it turned out to be unexpectedly interesting, and she doubted Juniper would either. Rosemary was very dogged, but she probably wouldn’t continue all by herself.
At dinner, their father asked how the project was coming.
“We got a lot done,” said Rosemary, rapidly picking the cucumber and green pepper out of her salad and piling it at the side of her plate. “But I don’t think Dominic is a very good manager. He doesn’t explain things very well and then he gets mad if you don’t do them right.”
“He’s a wimp,” said Juniper, scowling. “He snapped at me for saying—”
“Don’t say it again, or somebody else will snap at you,” said her mother.
“It wasn’t anything you can’t hear at school every single day. Even Rosie wasn’t embarrassed.”
“Well, honey,” said her father, “they say the devil’s a gentleman, you know.”
“They say sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you, too,” said Juniper.
“They say red sky at morning, sailor’s warning,” said Rosemary.
“Well, Gentian?” said her father. “Would you like to add a non sequitur? We all know your mother doesn’t approve of them.”
“Birds in their little nests agree,” said Gentian’s mother, passing him the butter.
They were being romantic again. Gentian supposed it was better than fighting like Steph’s parents or apparently ignoring one another like Becky’s, but they did not have to look quite so pleased with themselves.
“There’s glory for you,” she said, helping herself to the rejected vegetables from Rosemary’s salad.
“I don’t want a nice knockdown argument,” said Juniper. “I just want to be able to talk however I like in my own house.”
“You can’t do that anyway,” said her mother.
“I can with my peers, at least. Dominic is stuffy and overbearing.”
“You don’t have to invite him back,” said her father. “Though it sounds like a job removing all those objects from the attic. I can help, if you like.”
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.