Lightning

couldn't have seemed more wondrous. The cars! Cars everywhere — and so many of them German, which seemed to indicate a certain forgiveness for the war, acceptance of the new Germany, and I was moved by that.'

'We have a Mercedes,' Chris said. 'It's neat, but I like the Jeep better.'

'The cars,' Stefan said, 'the styles, the amazing advancements everywhere: digital watches, home computers, videotape recorders for watching movies in your own living room! Even after five days of my visit had passed, I was in a state of pleasant shock, and looked forward each morning to new wonders. On the sixth day, as I passed a bookstore in Westwood, I saw a line of people waiting to have copies of a novel signed by the author. I went inside to browse and to see what kind of book was so popular, to help me a bit in understanding American society. And there you were, Laura, at a table piled with copies of your third novel and your first major success, Ledges.'

Laura leaned forward, as if puzzlement were a force drawing her to the edge of her chair. 'Ledges? But I've never written a book with that title.'

Again, Chris understood. 'That was a book you wrote in the life you would've lived if Mr. Krieger hadn't meddled in it.'

'You were twenty-nine years old when I saw you for the first time at that book-signing party in Westwood,' Stefan said. 'You were in a wheelchair because your legs were twisted, useless. Your left arm was partly paralyzed, as well.'

'Crippled?' Chris said. 'Mom was crippled?'

Laura was literally on the edge of her chair now, for though what her guardian said seemed too fantastic to be believed, she sensed that it was true. On a deep level even more primitive than instinct, she perceived a rightness to the image of herself in a wheelchair, her legs useless and wasted; perhaps what she apprehended was the faint echo of destiny thwarted.

'You'd been that way since birth,' Stefan said.

'Why?'

'I only learned that much later, after conducting much research into your life. The doctor who had delivered you in Denver, Colorado, in 1955—Markwell was his name — had been an alcoholic. Yours was a difficult birth anyway—'

'My mother died delivering me.'

'Yes, in that reality she died too. But in that reality Markwell botched the delivery, and you received a spinal injury that crippled you for life.'

A shudder passed through her. As if to prove to herself that she had indeed escaped the life that fate had originally planned for her, she got up and walked to the window, using her legs, her undamaged and blessedly useful legs.

To Chris, Stefan said, 'That day I saw her in the wheelchair, your mother was so beautiful. Oh, so very beautiful. Her face, of course, was the same as it is now. But it wasn't the face alone that made her beautiful. There was such an aura of courage about her, and she was in such good humor in spite of her handicaps. Each person who came to her with Ledges was sent away not only with a signature but with a laugh. In spite of being condemned to a life in a wheelchair, your mother was so amusing, lighthearted. I watched from a distance and was charmed and profoundly moved, as I'd never been before.'

'She's great,' Chris said. 'Nothing scares my mom.'

'Everything scares your mom,' Laura said. 'This whole crazy conversation is scaring your mom half to death.'

'You never run from anything or hide,' Chris said, turning to look at her. He blushed; a boy his age was supposed to be cool, at a stage where he was beginning to wonder if he was not infinitely wiser than his mother. In an ordinary relationship, such expressions of admiration for one's mother seldom were expressed so directly short of the child's fortieth birthday or the mother's death, whichever came first. 'Maybe you're afraid, but you never act afraid.'

She had learned young that those who showed fear were seen as easy targets.

'I bought a copy of Ledges that day,' Stefan said, 'and took it back to the hotel where I was staying. I read it overnight, and it was so beautiful that in places I wept… and so amusing that in other places I laughed out loud. The next day I got your other two books, Silverlock and Fields of Night, which were as fine, as moving, as the book that made you famous, Ledges.'

It was strange to listen to favorable reviews of books that in this life she had never written. But she was less concerned about learning the storylines of those novels than hearing the answer to a chilling question that had just occurred to her: 'In this life I was meant to live, in this other 1984… was I married?'

'No.'

'But I'd met Danny and—'

'No. You had never met Danny. You had never married.'

'I'd never been born!' Chris said.

Stefan said, 'All of those things happened because I went back to Denver, Colorado, in 1955, and prevented Dr. Markwell from delivering you. The doctor who took Markwell's place couldn't save your mother, but he brought you into the world whole and sound. And everything in your life changed from that point on. It was your past that I was changing, yes, but it was my future, therefore flexible. And thank God for that peculiarity of time travel, for otherwise I wouldn't have been able to save you from a life as a paraplegic.'

The wind gusted, and another barrage of rain rattled against the window at which Laura stood.

She was plagued again by the feeling that the room in which she stood, the earth on which it was built, and the universe in which it turned were as insubstantial as smoke, subject to sudden change.

'I monitored your life thereafter,' Stefan said. 'Between mid-January of '44 and mid-March, I made over thirty secret jaunts to see how you were getting along. On the fourth of those trips, when I went to 1964, I discovered you had been dead for one year, you and your father, killed by that junkie who had held up the grocery store. So I journeyed to 1963 and killed him before he could kill you.'

'Junkie?' Chris said, baffled.

'I'll tell you about it later, honey.'

Stefan said, 'And until that night that Kokoschka showed up on that mountain road, I was pretty successful, I think, at making your life easier and better. Yet my interference did not deprive you of your art or result in books that were any less beautiful than the ones that you'd written in that other life. Different books but not lesser ones, books in the same voice, in fact, that you write in now.'

Feeling weak-kneed, Laura returned to her chair. 'But why? Why did you go to such great lengths to improve my life?'

Stefan Krieger looked at Chris, then at her, then closed his eyes when he finally spoke. 'After seeing you in that wheelchair, signing copies of Ledges, and after reading your books, I fell in love with you… deeply in love with you.'

Chris squirmed in his chair, obviously embarrassed to hear such feelings expressed when the object of affection was his own mother.

'Your mind was even more beautiful than your face,' Stefan said softly. His eyes were still closed. 'I fell in love with your great courage, perhaps because real courage was something I'd seen none of in my own world of strutting, uniformed fanatics. They committed atrocities in the name of the people and called that courage. They were willing to die for a twisted totalitarian ideal, and they called that courage when it was really stupidity, insanity. And I fell in love with your dignity, for I had none of my own, no self-respect like that I saw shining in you. I fell in love with your compassion, which was so rich a part of your books, for in my world I had seen little compassion. I fell in love, Laura, and realized that I could do for you what all men would do for those they loved if they had the power of gods: I did my best to spare you the worst that fate had planned for you.'

He opened his eyes at last.

They were a beautiful blue. And tortured.

She was immeasurably grateful to him. She did not love him in return, for she hardly knew him. But in stating the depth of his love, a passion that had caused him to transform her destiny and that had driven him to sail across vast tides of time to be with her, he had to some degree restored the magical aura in which she had once viewed him. Again he seemed larger than life, a demigod if not a god, elevated from mere mortal status by the