Medusa's Web by Tim Powers Read Free Book Online Page A

they were to be put to some extra trouble, namely making up the beds in their old rooms here. You were entirely cordial, smiling—‘Scott, come in out of the rain.’” He slid a paper out from under one of the pebbles. “You don’t mind if I—?”
    She waved the back of her hand at him. “I’ve been four years off them. Yesterday was a—”
    â€œFluke,” suggested Claimayne. “An aftershock, a late postcoital shiver.”
    â€œYou’re a filthy old pig.”
    â€œAnd you’ve got another . . . fluke, coming, day after tomorrow—right?—so you can come back to yesterday and be their chum .”
    â€œGo to hell.”
    Claimayne smiled. “Salomé, unfold this spider for me, that I may look at it in your hand!”
    â€œFuck you, Tetrarch.”
    Claimayne laughed softly and opened the paper and stared at it.
    Ariel watched his bland face lose all expression as he closed his eyes; he inhaled sharply and his hands gripped the edges of the table as if he were afraid his wheelchair were tipping over; for a full minute neither of them spoke, and finally he sighed and opened his eyes. He focused them on his hands and the table and Ariel in slow succession, and then out across the lawn, and finally he nodded.
    The crumpled paper was still in his hand, and he rolled it between his fingers. “Do you”—he paused to clear his throat—“have a lighter?”
    â€œNo. I quit smoking too, you recall.”
    â€œWise, wise.” He dipped the rolled paper into his coffee, held it there a moment, then lifted it out, squeezed it into a ball, and tossed it into his mouth. “No possible future point for that one, you see,” he said after he’d swallowed it and shuddered a bit.
    â€œI should have burned the one I looked at yesterday, as soon as I came down from it. I still could burn it, without looking at it again, never let it have a future point.”
    Claimayne’s shoulders twitched in the beginning of a shrug, then slumped. “You’d still have said what you said, somehow.”
    Ariel eyed the remaining slips of paper under the pebbles on the table, then resolutely looked away. Softly she asked, “Why do we do it?”
    â€œYou remember.”
    â€œNot in words.”
    â€œIt’s a gap in continuity, time stops, and we’re not—we don’t have any identity.” His smile now seemed forced, and there was a misting of sweat on his smooth forehead.
    She shook her head. “For no more than a couple of minutes, at most! And then we’re—right the hell back where we were before.”
    â€œAs our clocks reckon it, sure. As a bystander would reckon it. But that gap—ah, Ariel, that gap is infinite! Our departure and return are two points very close together in time, but remember that there’s an infinity between any two points.”
    The creaking of the house stopped, and the balcony shifted under their chairs; then the faint squeaks and prolonged groans began again.
    Ariel was on her feet and stepping into the doorway. She grabbed the handles of Claimayne’s wheelchair, but he slapped at the hand he could reach.
    â€œThe house isn’t going to collapse, my dear. Stop shaking me and sit down.”
    â€œMaybe not, but the balcony’s going to fall off!”
    Claimayne grinned at her. “Impossible! If it did, we’d be killed,and then who would look at your spider from yesterday, and retroactively welcome Arthur’s children? As long as you don’t consummate that exchange, don’t do the after, you’re immortal, right?”
    Ariel edged cautiously out onto the balcony again and slowly resumed her seat. “No,” she said, “you were right, I’d still have said what I said.” She touched the balcony rail. “This place is collapsing. Little by little.”
    â€œWell—you may be right, at that.”