“You heading back upstairs to watch the portal?” Carson asked Monday morning, after taking one last sip of his coffee. Sashtun nodded. “Well, I’ll see you tonight. If the portal opens while we’re away, leave us a note saying where you went, I guess.”
“I suppose it may not open for several days. Thank you again for hosting me, and thank you, Davey, for giving up your bedroom.”
“N’prblm,” Davey mumbled through a mouthful of cereal.
Sashtun went upstairs, used the restroom again, and sat down on Davey’s bed to wait. She had her books, which she still hadn’t finished — they were taking a long time to read because there was so much she didn’t understand. She was starting to get used to the strange narrative conventions, but she remembered her passing thought about trying a children’s book, and decided to look at the things on Davey’s shelf.
Hours passed. She read a good part of one of Davey’s novels, finding it easier to understand than the adult novel she’d bought, though not easy, and ate some of the crackers she’d bought a few days earlier. She went to the restroom, returned to the bedroom and read some more.
The portal didn’t open.
Hours more passed. She finished that short children’s novel and picked up a book about wildlife, read a few chapters of it, and snacked some more. Many though not all of the creatures described in the book were found in her world, too.
After three or four chapters, her thoughts turned to the possibility of importing and exporting information. With the way the cabinet changed people’s language along with their bodies, there was no use in sending books across. It wasn’t obvious how someone from her world could ever learn English, except by visiting Earth — and then, of course, forgetting it when they went home. So there was no way to convey information between worlds except in in people’s minds. Or perhaps drawings and diagrams, if the machines they described weren’t so complicated as to need captions indicating what the parts were made of?
If she read and memorized a short story — or a nonfiction book about how televisions or phones work — could she then write it down in Stasari after returning home?
Then Davey came home from school; she could hear pounding footsteps on the stairs as he approached, and then a moment later, he came into the room. (She had left the door open.)
“I guess it didn’t open?”
“No.”
“Yeah, it took Kashpur six days last time, so maybe it will be the same again. That would be, um, Saturday.”
“Perhaps so.”
“Tomorrow you can borrow my games,” Davey said. “I’ll show you how to play tonight, and it will give you something to do while you wait besides read.”
“Thank you,” Sashtun said. “You’re here alone? How much longer before your parents come home?”
“Mom gets home not long after Carson and Amy. Then Dad an hour or two later, depending on work stuff.”
“I see.”
“I guess I’d better do my homework now,” Davey said, “so I can help you with the games later.” He went to the restroom and then downstairs again. Sashtun kept watching the space where the portal would open.
Amy got home a little later, soon followed by the younger Carson. Each briefly said hi to Sashtun when they arrived. Then Amanda came, and asked how Sashtun had been doing.
“Pretty well, thank you. I just stayed in the room reading and watching the portal, except for occasional trips to the bathroom.”
“And the kitchen?”
“No... I just ate some of the food I’d bought.”
“Feel free to eat whatever we’ve got in the kitchen when you’re here by yourself. Ah... I guess I should show you how to use the microwave, shouldn’t I? And maybe the other stuff too...”
“Thank you.”
So she followed Amanda downstairs and had a crash course in the use of the microwave oven, the stove, and the regular oven. The stove and oven were pretty similar to what they used back home, although Sashtun had never had occasion to cook his own food — at home, his mother’s servants had done the cooking; at the wizards' academy, the kitchen staff; and at Kashpur’s house, Tashni. The microwave, as strange and wonderful as it seemed, was actually the simplest and safest to use if you remembered a couple of basic rules, like not using plastic or metal dishes. Amanda pointed out some things in the freezer and refrigerator that she could heat up in the microwave.
By the time this lesson was done, Carson the elder had come home from work, and they started cooking supper. Sashtun watched and learned, and was able to help a little.
During supper, everyone had more questions for Sashtun (and Davey) about her world. She answered them as best she could. The conversation drifted then to the portal itself and how to use it.
“I suppose if we can convince people the portal is real, we could do a tourism thing,” Carson said. “Or trade, importing and exporting things... that wouldn’t require convincing people the portal is real, but it would require coming up with a cover story for the IRS about where we’re getting the things we sell, and what we’re doing with the things we buy here to export to your world.”
“That would mean moving out of our house, finding another place to live, and running the business here,” Amanda said. “I’m not sure I want to do that.”
“Tourism from my world to yours is unlikely to be popular,” Sashtun said, “with the doubling in age and the change of sex... from your world to mine, the halving in age is less of a disadvantage, but the change of sex is still a problem.”
“We can sell it as a retirement package,” Carson said. “An eighty-year-old man might think it’s worth the... inconvenience of becoming a woman if he can be forty again.”
“Do you think that’s what the old lady who lived here and disappeared did?” Amy asked. Everyone else was quiet for a moment.
“It’s possible,” Carson said.
“What’s this about?” Sashtun asked.
“The lady who used to live here,” Davey said. “I told you about her, right? She painted the murals in my room and Amy’s and Carson’s. And there used to be murals in the living room and Mom and Dad’s room, but Dad painted over them. They were pretty cool. At least the one in the living room was, I never saw the one in Mom and Dad’s room. Anyway, she disappeared and her children couldn’t sell the house until she’d been missing for seven years. I know I told you and Kashpur about that.”
“I’m not sure you did.”
“Oh. Maybe I just told Zindla and her family.”
“Well,” Sashtun said thoughtfully, “when I get home, I’ll inquire into the history of Tirishkun — that’s the wizard who made the cabinet,” she added for the benefit of everyone except Davey. “See if there was a man associated with him who appeared with no clear antecedents around... how many years ago was this?”
“I’m not sure,” Carson said, “but I can try to find out. Talk to the real estate agent we bought the house through and ask him how long the house was on the market before we bought it, and so forth. I seem to recall it had been on the market for at least a few months when we bought it, and the previous owner had been missing for seven years before that... and maybe her children spent some time cleaning and renovating it after she was declared dead and before it went on the market. I’ll try to find out.”
“If you can learn that before I go home, it would be useful in pinning down the dates,” Sashtun said. “We know time passes roughly twice as fast here as in my world, and hopefully after some tests in the next few weeks, we can measure that more precisely. And then divide the amount of time since the previous owner disappeared by two, or whatever factor it may turn out to be.”
During his lunch break the next day, Carson looked up the phone number of the realtor they’d bought the house through. He’d never met the previous owners, except briefly at closing, since they lived out of state and dealt with him through their realtor and lawyer.
After talking to the receptionist for a minute, he got the realtor, and said, “Mark, hi, this is Carson Platt — my wife and I bought the big house on Goodman Road a few months ago, remember...? Yeah. No, no problems with it. I just had a question for the previous owners, or maybe you could point me to something in the public records, maybe the newspapers, and not bother them... Yeah... The owner before last, the one the previous owners inherited from, when did she disappear? Okay, thanks... Talk to you later.”
That evening at supper, he told Sashtun that he’d started making inquiries about the woman who used to live in the house. She thanked him.
“Have you talked to Tanya’s parents?” Amy asked. “They might remember when she disappeared.”
“Tanya?”
“Tanya Epping, one of the girls who lives across the road, three houses down,” said Carson Jr.
“I don’t think I’ve met her or her parents yet,” Carson said. The kids all seemed to know the neighbors better than he or Amanda did.
“Do any of you know their phone number?” They didn’t. “Well, it seems a bit late to drop by this evening... maybe tomorrow after work, before supper. Sometime soon, anyway, if I don’t learn what I need to know from the realtor sooner.”
But when he got home from work the next day, Sashtun was gone.
Kashpur opened the portal again the next day after seeing Devi and the people he thought were probably his sister and parents. He saw the boy Devi again, and with him was the middle-aged woman that Sashtun had become — they were sitting side by side on the bed, looking at something in Sashtun’s hands. Kashpur spoke up, calling “Sashtun!” — he didn’t think she would understand anything more than her name. They looked up and saw the open portal; then, after a moment of open-mouthed astonishment, the boy gave a cheer, and the woman thrust the thing into his hands, grabbed a cloth bag — the same bag that Sashtun had taken with him — and rushed through the portal, stumbling on the threshold as he, transformed once more into his old self, stepped down from the cabinet to the floor.
“I’m so glad to have my own body again,” he said, patting himself down in a downright indecent way. He turned and waved to Devi, then turned back to Kashpur and said, “I’ve got so much to tell you. What day is it? What time of day?”
“The seventeenth of Kantusma, not long after the second bell of night.”
“And how long do you think you can keep the portal open?”
“Not long — another couple of minutes, probably.”
“I won’t go through again, then. I thought I might step through and tell Devi how much time passed has passed here, so his father and mother can know when to expect the portal to open again, but...” He turned so he could see both Kashpur and the portal. It was still open, but Kashpur wasn’t tweaking it any longer, so it would probably close soon.
“Well, come sit down in the parlor and tell me all about it. How long was it for you?”
“Around eight days. It was around midnight on the day I arrived, and late afternoon on the day I returned. I’ll tell you about it, but I’d like to change clothes first.”
“Oh, of course.” He was wearing a loose blouse and a pair of trousers apparently designed for a woman, which were far too tight in the crotch for him, and he was already kicking off his shoes.
Kashpur met Sashtun in the parlor a few minutes later, and called Tashni, who was overjoyed to see Sashtun again. She brought them refreshments and Sashtun started to tell his story.
Kashpur listened closely and asked questions. He learned much, though there were many things that he still didn’t understand. When Sashtun told him about the phone he had bought, he asked to see it.
“It probably won’t work in our world,” Sashtun cautioned him, fishing it out of his bag. “The talismans I brought with me didn’t work in Devi’s world... Huh.”
The flat polished surface of the phone lit up in bright colors when Sashtun touched a little knob on the side. But the writing system it used was strange to them both; Sashtun no longer knew the language he had known on the other side, Devi’s native language. And after a few minutes of experimentation, they were unable to get it to do anything useful; it just made different displays of colored lights when Sashtun ran his finger along the surface or tapped on different parts of it, or sometimes little chirping or clicking noises. “The main purpose was to let you talk to people at a distance,” he said. “Like a speech talisman, but apparently they’re cheap enough that almost every adult has one, and even the children of some families. And unlike a speech talisman, this thing can let you talk to anyone else who has one — they aren’t made in matching pairs, any of them can talk to any other. I only used it to speak with a few people, actually... Devi’s father, Karsan, and the dispatchers for the bus. But that’s what I was told.”
Later, after telling the rest of his story, Sashtun dumped out the contents of his bag on the table and they went over them one by one. Two changes of women’s clothing, in bright colors and fine fabrics; two books with brightly colored covers, apparently in the same strange writing system as the lit-up surface of the phone; a couple of boxes and bags of packaged food; a little black box with a black cord extending out of it, which Sashtun said was used for recharging the phone; the remaining gold bars and jewels Sashtun hadn’t sold, and the paper currency and coins he had left after selling one of the gold bars and spending a good deal of money on his hotel, food, and clothes.
“Hmm,” Kashpur said. “I wonder if we could export and import things through the portal? Do you think Devi’s parents will cooperate with such a plan?”
“Possibly,” Sashtun said. “I discussed it with them. They were cautious about a plan that would involve running such a business out of their house — they thought they would need to buy another house to live in, rather than suffer our comings and goings through Devi’s bedroom at unusual hours. But they were open to it. They also mentioned the possibility of old people from their world coming to ours to retire, since people coming in this direction seem to be reduced in age.”
“Would you mind going through the portal again to discuss it further with them? You would probably have to stay there at least two days — I’ve been able to open it about once a day here, if I cast a spell to recharge it faster than normal. I know it can’t be comfortable being a forty-six year old woman, but —”
“But you can’t do it, of course, Master — you’d be dangerously old, and you might not make it back alive. And anyone mature enough to trust with the job would also be fairly old, and suffering from being the wrong sex — I suppose I’m as well suited for it as anyone, since I’ve already gotten over the shock of being a woman once, and I’m sure I can stand it again, knowing it’s temporary.”
“Good. I’ll send you through tomorrow afternoon.”
