Read Online Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson by Greg Bear, Gardner Dozois - Free Book Online Page A

even closer than before to dear Holger . Theodo heard it whether she said it or not. He made a small noise down deep in his chest. She ignored it; she’d square things with him later. Meanwhile . . . “The world wags as it wags, not always as we wish it would. We move on. We change.” She waved at the impatiently waiting Einhard, Nithard, and Alianna. Alianna waved back.
    “Yeah. Right.” Holger’s forced smile likely masked tears. “Only I didn’t, did I? I spent all those years wandering from one world to the next, or else in some of the places between them all. I was going to get back here, and nothing was gonna stop me no matter what. And I don’t think I ever once stopped to wonder what in blazes you’d be doing. You were—”
    “In amber in your mind?” Alianora suggested. She had a bauble from Theodo, a tear of the sun with a tiny ant trapped inside forever.
    “Yes!” Agreement exploded out of Holger. “That’s it. That’s just it! And a whole fat lot of good seeing it now does me.”
    “Well, I am glad you came again,” Alianora said: one more thing she would have to set right with Theodo. But it was so, even if not the way Holger would have wanted. Like anyone else, she had her own measure of vanity.
    Nithard aimed a rather predatory grin at them. “Well, what were the lot of you going on about where we couldn’t hearken?”
    Deadpan, Holger answered, “What a rotten bunch of brats your mother’s gone and raised—what else?”
    Alianora’s second son opened his mouth, then wisely closed it again without saying anything more. Some scrapes you not only couldn’t win, you only made yourself look sillier when you tried. He at least had the sense to see as much.
    Alianna, now . . . Alianna batted her eyes at Holger and murmured, “Now, good sir knight, you don’t mean that of me?” in tones that should have been sinful if anyone but their intended victim heard them—and were bound to be sinful if he alone did.
    But Holger just threw back his head and laughed. All right, he’d been besotted for a little while, likely as much for what he remembered as for what he saw. As with any other man of his years, though, it was more his imagination that kindled than aught else.
    “You ought to go wash your mouth out with beer, young lady,” he said. “And if that doesn’t work, somebody needs to turn you over his knee and paddle you.”
    Alianna gaped. Then she looked miffed, as any witch might when one of her spells fell to pieces instead of working the magic she had in mind. And then, after a few tense heartbeats, she laughed, too: she was good-natured-Alianora’s good-natured daughter. If she didn’t quite know yet how to keep a man three times her age inflamed, then she didn’t, that was all. Just as well, too , Alianora thought.
    “I hope you’ll go on with your tales, Sir Holger,” Theodo said. “They do make the time spin by.” He said nothing, now, of not aiming them all at Alianna.
    “I can do that,” Holger said, but not before he held out the stoup once more to Alianora. “Will you give me a refill first?”
    “Surely,” she replied. “And after another tale or two, I think we shall pause to sup.”
    He sniffed and nodded. “Sounds like a plan. It’s starting to smell mighty good.”
    He’d always been full of such small bits of praise, thrown out not for the sake of flattery or seduction but simply because that was his way. It was, Alianora thought with a twisted smile of her own, one of the things that marked him as a man from another world.
    After she brought Holger the mug, she went back inside and fed the hearthfire a little more wood to keep the pease porridge above it bubbling. She tasted the porridge with a wooden spoon. In went a pinch of salt and a dash more fennel, but only a dash. It was getting there.
    Outside, her husband and her children broke into guffaws at something Holger said. Theodo wouldn’t have laughed unless the big man from another world