Reaching the door that had belonged to Nick, she knocked. "Arden?" A minute. "Arden?" she whispered. The panel beside the heavy gothic door slid open.
"Come in," he said, examining her face, "what's wrong?"
"Have you ever read Jorge Borges?" she whispered again, eyes still shining.
"Would you like some tea?" he countered. Indeed, sunlight streamed in the high, narrow window above the stone room, and a rather absurd sundial in the beam proclaimed it to be four o'clock, time for tea. "Neil, two cups of chai, if you please." He offered her a Swedish chair that looked rather as if it had come from Ikea, and said, "Now, who is this Jorge, anyone I've met?"
"He's this post-modern 20th century writer from Argentina, and now I understand this whole thing about the multiverse, that's why I'm so excited." Kata ran her fingers through Arden's thick hair. "I don't do this very often, but sometimes I just get drunk on words."
Arden looked at her bemusedly, and put a teacup in her hand. "What is it you didn't understand about the multiverse?" His instinctive reactions to calm her down and draw her out would not, he reflected, have occurred to him in his former generation. How well could I have known her then, as self-absorbed as I was? How well did I know anyone?
Kata was rattling on, albeit somewhat slower, and the mad light was gone from her eyes. "In this story, 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' he explains how every decision made leaves two possibilities at least unexplored and the world is filled with ghosts of those other possibilities. The path forks for every decision made and not made. It all makes sense to me."
"You mean you didn't know that? Alternate universes consist exactly of that."
"Well, no one told me. I was just told that I was now a CIA agent, and to believe my eyes, which I couldn't possibly do."
Arden elected to change the subject. "Did you read it in Spanish?"
"Oh no, I don't know Spanish... that is, was it in Spanish?" She puzzled for a moment. She looked up at him. "Good lord. That's not possible. It must be the babel fish."
But babel fish only work for interpreting brain waves from one individual to another," he pointed out. "I've been wondering about that for a while, actually. Try taking out your babel fish."
"Why? Do you think it's psychosomatic?" She slowly shook the fish out of her ear. "Nyeh comprovies. You je spekke na?"
Arden looked into her eyes and repeated something, which mutated through degrees in her ears from "Shosovai" to "Concentrate."
"Wait! I understand!"
"I knew you could. I knew it." Her green eyes filled with tears.
"How could you know?" she whispered.
Their faces were close, so close as to feel body warth.
The moment clung like a vine between them. He caught his breath, and she leaned forward. Drunk on words, he thought, as the tremble of her lips touched his. Her robe slipped from one shoulder. His hands, smooth from the recent regeneration, touched her heated ivory skin.
"Nick..." she muttered. He didn't respond. "Oh," she drew back a bit. "I'm sorry, Arden."
Arden looked almost angry for a moment. Then he took her hand. "Anakata, we both know I'm not the same. But why did you come here if you didn't want to see me?" A flash of emotion crossed his face. I still love you, he thought.
"Because...because I thought you'd understand... I knew you better than anyone else here." She stopped shot and stood up. Anything else she could say would sound like schmaltz from a bad Queen song. "Because I want to know you."
He let out his breath. "Even if I'm not Nick?"
"Yes."
He stood before her and embraced her, and she was glad he was not as tall as Nick had been.
"Mmm. I want you."
"I know." She laughed.
"SINNERS! REPENT!" roared Brian, as he burst in through the door, to the sound of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus sung by Guns n Roses.
They sprang apart. "Why Brian. Uh. How nice of you to drop by," snarled Arden.