Chapter 1

"Am I dead?" SG asked.

The corpulent figure on the alabaster throne frowned. "What is death?" he asked.

Answering a question with a question wasn't very polite, thought SG. But she needed his help, so she decided to answer him.

"Death is the absence of life," she said, like a schoolchild reciting a lesson.

"Nonsense," said the fat man. "Is this dead?" He took a ring from his finger and tossed it to her. It was made of silver, with an emerald the size of a robin's egg.

"No," she said.

"So, it's alive?"

"No."

"Then," said the fat man in a bored and superior tone of voice, "death cannot be merely an absence of life."

SG fell silent for a while.

"Let's start over," she said at last. "I confess I don't have a precise definition of death. But can you tell me whether I am dead?"

"If you were a native-born earthling, we could dispense with all this," he said. "Even the most irreligious earthlings have some sense that finis is not quite finis. But you..." He waved his hand as if trying to brush aside an insect, or an unpleasant thought.

"Am I dead?" she asked again, more loudly than before.

"No," he shouted, half-rising from his throne. "No, you are not dead, as much as I might wish you were. You are in a different dimension, and you have different attributes than you once had, but you are not dead."

SG folded her arms across her chest and felt her bare shoulders. She seemed to be solid, not a mere ghost.

"I know what you're thinking," the fat man said with an exasperated sigh. "You're thinking that you are still a physical, sentient being. Even a sexual one. But I must warn you that things are very different now." He paused, shifted his massive body and farted loudly.

"That crude contraption, Koko, didn't kill you. I'm not sure anything can. But you have taken a new form. What once was matter is now mostly energy. You will discover that you can race far into the future, or into the past. Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to move through space and time at will."

"Are you my guide?" SG asked.

"Good heavens, no," cried the fat man. Then he giggled. "'Good heavens' — now there's an interesting exclamation. Haven't used it in years."

"Well, if you're not my guide, who are you?"

"Oleander, the gatekeeper," he said.

She wondered where the gate was, then noticed for the first time that there were two arched doorways in the curved wall behind the fat man's throne.

"Which is the gate?" she asked.

"Both are gates," he answered. "One will take you back to that stuffy body bag, in that dreary motel room, where you will await the ministrations of your boring cousin."

"And the other?" she asked.

"The other will take you someplace else."

"Yes, but where?"

"Someplace different from that motel," he snapped. "I can't be more specific. The choice is yours."

It wasn't a very hard choice, she thought. Almost anything would be better than having to return to the helpless state she was in, dependent on Kal-El to figure out how to restore her to something resembling a normal life.

"I'll take the gate into the unknown," she said. "Which one is it?

"In such situations, I usually don't offer advice," said the fat man with a sly smile. "But for some reason you provoke in me a feeling of pity. The gate you want is the one on the right."

"Thank you," she said, as she headed for the doorway.

"But wait," he cried. "A gratuity is expected under such circumstances."

"I'm sorry," said SG. "I haven't any money."

"Oh, I have no use for money," he said. "It's your tender flesh I want." At that, his jaws opened obscenely, until his mouth was as wide as SG was tall.

At that moment, a sudden wind pulled her off her feet and carried her past him and through the arched doorway she had chosen.

Her "goodbye" was lost in the rush of air.

SG found herself sitting in a classroom with a dozen other young women and three young men. Pacing up and down in front of the class was a thin, bespectacled man not much older than his students. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt, a sleeveless sweater and khaki pants, and SG thought she had never seen anyone quite so dorky.

"It really is quite beautiful," he was saying. "I wish you could see it. I don't understand why artists — well, some artists — think that beauty is their exclusive domain. The world as revealed through physics, from subatomic particles to the cosmos, is more beautiful by far than anything ever created by painter or sculptor."

"Or poet?" asked a dark-haired girl sitting next to SG. She smiled impishly.

"Yes, more beautiful even than poetry," said the young professor. His face softened for a moment, and he added, "But it really isn't fair for you to bring up poetry, Kathy."

Then a bell went off in a hallway, and the students started gathering their books and papers.

"Read Chapter 3," said the professor, "and try your hand at the problems on the website. I know none of you are math majors, but they really aren't that difficult."

He stuffed papers into a battered leather briefcase as the students filed out. When he looked up, he saw SG.

"You're new, aren't you?" he asked.

"I guess so," she said.

He reached back into the briefcase and pulled out a sheet.

"What's your name?"

She wasn't sure how to answer. Finally, she decided that what had been good enough for Marston was good enough for whatever college she now found herself in.

"Sallie. Sallie Gale."

"Sallie Gale, huh?" he said. He looked down the class roll. "Uh, let's see — Finney, Flannigan, Grabowski. Well, it seems you're not on the list. Do you have your class schedule?"

"Not with me," she said, which was technically truthful.

"Okay," he said with a shrug. "Well, welcome aboard. You've missed two classes, but I think you can catch up. Just bring your schedule with you to class on Friday."

Suddenly, he seemed to see her for the first time. He gave her the kind of look she was very familiar with, then he blushed and fiddled with his briefcase.

"See you Friday," he said, then he hurried away.

SG smiled at his awkwardness. There was something rather charming about him.

In the hall, students were heading to their next classes. They weren't dressed the way they had been in 1956 or '73. Some of the boys wore T-shirts, baggy pants and baseball caps turned backwards, but others were dressed in jeans and shirts with collars. The girls mostly wore jeans, too, but there was less conformity than she remembered from her last two exposures to college life.

She looked down at her own clothes. Short khaki skirt, white tennis shoes, loose silk blouse with a big floral pattern. She wondered who chose them. The ring Oleander had given her hung on a silver chain between her breasts.

"Hi." It was Kathy, the girl who had sat beside her in class. "What do you think of him?"

"Who?" SG asked.

"Dr. Kase, of course. I think there's something so-o-o-o sexy about him. And we're so lucky. I mean how many students get to take a physics course from someone on the ten-most-promising-scientists-in-America list? And we aren't even science majors."

She paused and looked at SG with sudden alarm. "You aren't majoring in math or physics, are you?"

"No," said SG.

"Oh, thank goodness. They said this was a physics-for-dummies course, just for humanities majors. You know, to promote cross-cultural understanding and all that."

"Right," said SG, who had no idea what Kathy was talking about.

The two young women walked slowly toward the big door that led out into the quadrangle.

"What's your next class?" Kathy asked.

"I don't have one," said SG.

"Good. Let's go get a Coke."

SG decided to stick with Sallie Gale as her name. It was innocuous and all-American. She added that she was a transfer student from Marston College, which was true, in a way. Kathy had never heard of Marston.

"What dorm are you in?" she asked.

SG thought quickly. "Well, I don't have a room yet. Admissions and housing didn't communicate. I mean, they cashed my check, but things are sort of screwed up."

Kathy rolled her eyes. "Yeah, it's amazing. All these geniuses on the faculty, and they can't get a simple housing application straight. Well, you can spend at least tonight with me. My roommate barely checked in before she had to go back home. Her father had a heart attack. I guess it was when he opened the tuition bill."

"You're very generous," SG said. And very pretty, she thought.

After dinner, they watched television in Kathy's dorm room. SG had seen color TV before, but never a picture so clear. And she was astounded by the kind of shows on the air: comedies about gay men living with young women, jokes about the size of breasts and penises, crime dramas with the kind of language she had been taught to shun.

"They can say things like that?" she asked, when a street punk told a cop to "fuck off."

Kathy looked at her in surprise. "Of course they can. You haven't been watching much television, have you?"

"No. Or reading the newspaper much, either," said SG, hoping to preemptively explain any inappropriate references or questions that might pop up in her conversation.

But Kathy wasn't interested in conversation, or television. She had been sitting in a second-hand armchair, while SG was stretched out on the floor. Now Kathy joined her. They lay on their sides, face to face, their heads propped up on their hands. Kathy leaned forward and brushed her lips against SG's.

"Do you like that?" she asked.

SG answered by rolling Kathy onto her back and kissing her passionately. In seconds, they were tearing off their clothes.

Kathy was an expert lover, with a gift for sensual teasing that SG found irresistible. When she licked SG's pussy, it was like a concert pianist playing a charming, childish ditty.

After three orgasms, SG decided to return the favor. She slid her tongue down Kathy's belly and into her crotch. And suddenly, she saw — knew, experienced — the last time Kathy had made love. She felt the sensations Kathy had felt, heard the voice of the man who was on top of her, smelled his body.

She sat up.

"What happened?" Kathy asked. "What's the matter?"

"I don't know," said SG, her face registering her confusion. "It was as though... I can't explain it. I saw you with a boy. I felt it. I felt him on top of you... of me. His name was Eric and he had a tattoo of a horned toad on his left shoulder."

"How the hell do you know about Eric?" Kathy demanded. "What kind of game is this?"

"It's not a game. When I began licking your clitoris, I suddenly tapped into something. Your memory. Your experiences."

Kathy was on her feet, furious.

"Get out of here," she shouted. "Get out."

SG dressed quickly. She felt devastated. But she hadn't meant any harm.

"Is Eric fucking you, too?" Kathy asked coldly as SG prepared to leave.

"I've never met Eric," SG said. "Please, do one thing for me. Think of a number while I'm kissing you. A big number, too big to guess."

Kathy looked at her with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.

"You pull this stunt and you want to kiss me?"

"Please," said SG.

They stood far enough that they had to lean forward to kiss. Neither girl touched the other, except for their lips.

Then SG pulled away and said softly, "Fifty-three thousand, two hundred and eleven."

"Holy shit!" Kathy said.

This must be one of the "different attributes" the gatekeeper had mentioned, SG thought. She now had a talent for reading other people's minds through sexual contact. So far, it had worked with oral-genital contact and mouth-to-mouth. She wondered if there were other possibilities.

She and Kathy spent the night exploring. SG learned much about her attractive host. And Kathy learned that this strange and lovely blonde was a sexual superstar.

SG had decided, even before she and Kathy finally fell asleep, that what worked with Kathy was worth trying on Professor Kase. She didn't know why Fate had brought her to this college campus, but she was certain it involved learning about space and time. And the dorky professor was the one to teach her — not slowly and tediously in the classroom, but in an orgasmic flash.

She didn't waste time. The next morning, she went to the administration building and found Dr. Kase's schedule. He would be free that afternoon from 2 o'clock on.

At 2:15, she went to his office. She had bought a special T-shirt from the shop in the student union building, and she wore it under her silk blouse.

She knocked at his door.

"Come in," he called. He sounded irritated.

She opened the door and faced an office with a very bad case of clutter. Books and notebooks were scattered everywhere. One wall consisted of a shiny white board covered with equations written with a black marker.

Kase himself was sitting in an old-fashioned swivel chair with a book and a calculator in his lap.

He looked over his glasses at SG. He gave no sign that he recognized her.

"Can I help you?" he asked, in a tone of voice that said, "Can you disappear quickly?"

"I want to learn everything you know about the relationship between time and space," SG said. "I want to know about time travel."

Kase sighed. "Time travel is impossible," he said. "Teaching you everything I know about time and space may be possible, but I really haven't the time." He smiled in spite of himself. No time to teach about time.

"Okay," said SG, pulling off her blouse to reveal a T-shirt, several sizes too small, with a picture of Einstein and his iconic equation: E=mc². "Let's skip the teaching and get to what I'm really here for. I want to have sex with you. Here. Now."

Kase put the book and calculator on his desk.

"You must really be desperate for a good grade, because I'm not exactly the studly type," he said. "What's worse, I have ethics. I don't fuck students. I don't trade A's for sex."